Pasha swung them back out from behind the meteorically falling station while the ground came up to meet them. As trees came into view, Reece noticed several streams of tracer rounds being shot at them from along a tree-covered ridge as they hurtled over it. Either the Order had these set up everywhere, or more likely and unfortunately, they had somehow anticipated their trajectory. Luckily, Pasha was able to maneuver the shuttle around the path of large-caliber bullets and they were almost clear.

Unfortunately, a few shots managed to hit their left wing. Smoke began billowing out of the fresh holes in the shuttle as more indicator lights began flashing and beeping madly. Pasha dropped the pitch and the shuttle sunk into the tree line to avoid the continuous line of fire. Trees whipped past the shuttle on either side as they had slowed to just over five hundred kilometers per hour. Now that they could see the ground up close, their velocity filled Reece with anxiety. They needed to slow down substantially before landing or they’d be ripped apart.

Reece tried closing his eyes, but that just made it worse. He re-opened his eyes just in time to see a large pine coming straight at them. Pasha tilted the shuttle and narrowly missed the trunk, clipping some of the big tree’s branches. Once past, he was barely able to stabilize their roll alignment before the tips of smaller pines started slapping at the underbelly of the already damaged shuttle.

Through it all, Pasha started the landing cycle and the shuttle started to slow further as its ailerons created drag and the landing gears started pushing the wheels down. Reece couldn’t tell if they were still on course and Pasha hadn’t said anything either. From what Reece could tell, they were over a forest and it was around twilight. This must have been one of the calculations that Pasha didn’t explain to him. Coming in during twilight would put the sun to their backs and into the eyes of anyone lying in wait for them. He’d have to commend Pasha on his brilliance after they landed.

Just as that thought crossed his mind, Reece noticed that Aika was staring at Pasha and her complexion was white as a cloud. Looking forward, he saw Pasha’s head was lolling about and that the trees had started to hit the bottom of the shuttle. Aika grabbed her flight controls and took over, pulling the shuttle up to level it off. Reece noticed that the landing gear’s indicators were flashing red. He tried resetting them, but nothing happened. They may have been sheared off by the trees. Whatever the case, they weren’t working. Finally, the trees gave way to a large cornfield that was speeding past just below them.

“Pasha’s out!” called out Aika anxiously. “I’m taking her down in this field. I can’t maintain zero roll for long. Brace for impact!”

“Roger that,” returned Reece as he white-knuckled his armrests. “Let’s stick this landing! Once down, we’ll check on Pasha.”

For her part, Aika kept the shuttle steady. Thanks to Pasha’s superb piloting skills, they were still alive and had already slowed down significantly. However, they were still coming in too fast to land on a surface that wasn’t meant to be landed upon. The next few moments were going to be very bumpy. One after another, in rapid succession, Reece could hear the corn cobs begin smacking against the shuttle’s belly as it neared the ground.

Reece felt a jerk as one of the landing gears most likely snapped off. He figured the other one was already almost definitely missing. He thought that was for the best as they needed a flat surface to glide along on and hopefully survive this crash. Reece and his crew were forced violently down into their seats before being thrown forward and back. The shuttle had hit the ground…hard...and bounced... Aika, Pasha, and Reece were jostled around like marionettes. The vicious jarring happened three more times, each slowing the shuttle more and more, and each less intense than the one before it. Finally, the shuttle stayed on the ground and slid along the remainder of the cornfield before dipping and launching itself out of a ditch to smash into a large pile of soft sand and earth.

As the dirt finished raining down and the dust cleared a bit, Reece took a quick look out the cockpit windshield. The dirt pile was in a large clearing that looked to be a quarry of some type. The weight of the shuttle’s back end pulled it down to rest relatively level on the ground. If it wasn’t for all the obvious damage, the landing would have looked just like they had planned it that way.

As soon as the shuttle finished settling, Aika and Reece checked on Pasha. The pilot was unconscious and was bleeding profusely from his chest. Aika shook him and he opened his eyes, coughed, and spat blood into his helmet. Aika removed his helmet as Reece removed his own. She took her own helmet off as well in order to better help Pasha. Reece pressed the emergency release button and the damaged canopy popped off the shuttle with a small blasting sound as micro-charges exploded. As designed, they launched it up and away from the rest of the shuttle to crash back down to the ground nearby.

“I told you…*cough*…that I’d get you safely to the ground,” smiled Pasha through bloody teeth as he momentarily came to. “Now, you won’t have to kill me.”

He tried to laugh but just ended up coughing up blood.

“You did, Pasha,” replied Aika as she looked at him through watery eyes. “We’re alive and good and we’re on the surface. You did it just like you said you would. You were amazing!”

“You did really good, brother,” added Reece as he warmly squeezed Pasha’s shoulder and looked to Aika for Pasha’s condition. “Real good.”

Aika just sadly shook her head as her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. Reece pulled himself out of his seat to check on Pasha himself. Looking over Pasha’s shoulder, Reece saw that there was nothing they could do to save their friend. He had a ghastly injury from his belly to the middle of his left breast. It was amazing he was still alive and a legitimate miracle he had managed to pilot the shuttle as long as he had. Pasha’s head lolled to the side as he mumbled something and fumbled for whatever was in reach. What he grasped turned out to be the small sword Reece had made for him.

Reece leaned into Pasha and spoke softly to him as Aika cried nearby. “Thank you, Pasha…for everything. I love you brother.”

Pasha merely looked past Reece as if he couldn’t hear him anymore. At that moment, Reece felt a hand grab him from behind and he turned to see a ghoulish face with reddish teeth leaning in to take a bite out of him. Reece more felt than saw the arm fly past his face to stick a sword through the monster’s face. The monster crumpled and fell back off the shuttle while carrying the small sword with it. Reece looked back to Pasha who was smiling a bloody smile.

“I love…you too, brother…you…too, Aika. That was the…most fun…*cough*…I’ve ever had. Now…time…for a…nap. Thank…uuuuuuhhhh”

Pasha never finished the last sentence as the light left his eyes. His ragged breathing turned into a great long sigh and his body went completely limp.

“Fuck!” screamed Reece in anger and anguish as he punched the back of Pasha’s seat. Remembering the danger, he grabbed one of the spears he had fashioned and took inventory of their surroundings.

Aika stood up and released her twin katanas from their retrofitted clips in the shuttle. As she too scanned the area, she was visibly shaking. Dusk had begun to set in, and they could see movement on the tree-line from across the cornfield.

“What is that?” asked Reece as he tried to prepare his mind for the worst.

“I don’t know, but it looks like there are a lot of them,” Aika replied through clenched teeth. “We need to find higher ground right now. We can try to funnel them to us if they are what I think they are.”

“Agreed,” replied Reece. “Let’s go!”

The two abandoned the shuttle and made their way to the highest rock pile in the quarry. Over ten meters high, it was made from large rocks and chunks of broken asphalt, the remains of an old road. About halfway up, Reece looked back again. The things were within view now and looked like running people. By their inhuman mannerisms, Reece had no doubt they weren’t human anymore.

By the time they were in position, the infected humans were almost upon them. And they were most definitely infected. Some were missing limbs, eyes, scalps, and clothes. Others moaned or growled. Many were covered in dried blood, the brownish-red stains coated most of their lower jaws. It was painfully obvious these had already become cannibals.

“Or maybe not,” thought Reece. “Cannibals eat their own kind. These things weren’t eating each other, and they clearly weren’t human anymore.”

Shaking the thought from his head, Reece noticed things that the infected had in common. Nearly all had rotting grey flesh and dark eyes that betrayed no hint of life or intelligence. Aika and Reece barely had time to take stock of what these creatures were before they were ravenously climbing the rock pile after their prey, them. These infected were quick and hadn’t hesitated like living things normally do before they attacked.

These things seemed single-minded. They went straight for their prey with no thought of themselves or anything else for that matter. It appeared that there were over ten of them climbing up the rocks. As soon as the first one, a greyish rotting female in colorless rags, was within reach, Reece stabbed his spear out and impaled the woman through her sunken right eye. He twisted the spear and yanked it back out, pulling coagulated blood and grey matter out with the weapon.

He repeated the process on an infected man in a sheriff’s uniform who looked almost alive. Both of the zombies fell back into the rest, knocking all the rotting corpses back a moment. Reece had to finally admit upon coming face to face with them, that they were indeed zombies. They were clearly very dead, yet they continued to move and attack. The small undead mob was relentless. The ghouls quickly resumed climbing up his side of the hill.

Aika stood back to back with Reece. She used her katanas with blurring efficiency, lopping the heads off the first two zombies to get close to her. The two chubby zombies were dressed as farmers, their male bodies still dressed in overalls as they fell to the side. They were quickly replaced by three more of the creatures, a beefy male in plaid and two scrawny females in horribly soiled sundresses. These all had the wrinkly grey flesh of the long dead, and they seemed to move a bit more slowly than the first ones to reach Aika’s position.

Three well placed slashes sent them tumbling down the rock pile to crash into others that were climbing up behind them. Meanwhile, Reece had skewered another long-dead male zombie and kicked a fourth grey-skinned female monster back down the rock pile, knocking down those behind her in the process.

The initial ten or so must have just been the closest. There seemed to be no end to them. Reece kept stabbing and Aika kept slashing and the infected bodies started to stack up around them. The rocks were becoming slick with coagulated blood and decaying gore. The remaining zombies started having difficulty crawling up the mass to reach the pair. They were somewhat clumsy and often slipped on the gory rocks.

By now, night had fallen, and they only had a full moon and clear sky to see by. Another calculation Reece would never get the chance to thank Pasha for, they landed on the night of a full moon. The natural light of the night sky allowed them to see well enough to finish off the savage horde that had just attacked them. As they caught their breath, Reece started to get optimistic about their chances. From the direction the zombies had arrived; they heard a horrid gurgling wail. The few remaining stranglers were easily dispatched by the king and queen of the hill as they mentally prepared for whatever new horror the night would bring.

From out of the night, they saw the second full wave approach. These were slower but much larger. Incredibly obese, they were at least three meters tall and horribly mutated. Their stench was even worse than the mess of hacked-up zombies that surrounded the pair. The mutations varied. Some even had extra arms coming out in odd places, but they all had large collars like they were being kept and controlled somehow. The growling and gurgling noises coming from these fat zombies nearly made Reece gag, but the sounds were nothing like what they had heard before.

Two at a time, the obese zombies slowly crawled up after Reece and Aika. Reece jabbed the first one through the eye and spun his spear, quickly dispatching it. They seemed to die the same as the others. He missed slightly on the second spear jab as he slipped in some of the zombies’ spilled blood. Instead, his spear hit the monster’s forehead. Its head was solid, so his spear didn’t penetrate. It moved closer. Too close for his spear to be effective. Kicking it down the hill was also out of the question. The creature was just too big.

“Time to go,” Reece yelled over his shoulder to Aika who was having difficulties of her own. “Come on.”

He leaped down the path created by the one he had dispatched and ran back to the shuttle for the hard drive. Before he got there, he turned to see Aika right behind him. The same zombie that he had speared in the forehead was lumbering up behind her. He moved between her and the thing before jabbing hard at it with his spear. This time he managed to stab it in the eye. He twisted the spear and it fell unmoving to the ground. Finding the creature’s weakness helped them dispatch the others. They kept their distance, taking them on one at a time.

The monsters were unthinking and therefore very predictable for the observant. Within a couple of minutes, they had dispatched over a dozen of the obese zombies. That’s when they heard the gurgling roar again. Only this time, it was just on the other side of their shuttle. The thing came into view. Both Reece and Aika gasped.