Read Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile for Free Online

she used her sleeping blanket to get water for the both of them. She had climbed up to the top of the tower from the catwalk on the side at day six, one day after they had run out of their rationed potable water. Somehow, she unscrewed the plug on the top of the tower that was commonly used to test the water inside the tank. Using the blanket, she dipped it down into the tank and was able to get it submerged approximately six inches into the tank without dropping it in. She and Danny had lived off “freshly squeezed Louisiana blanket water” for nearly a month while enduring the endless moans of the dead below. She cried again when she spoke of this.
    Over Hobby, we were in need of fuel. We might have been able to make it back to Hotel 23 on fumes, but I didn’t think it necessary to take the risk. I knew the fuel truck worked, I had used it recently and I knew it had plenty of fuel. The sun was approaching the western horizon as we circled Hobby to take a look. There were undead on the roof adjacent to the shattered terminal window andI did see a few of them on the ground below the roof. Some of them had rendered themselves immobile from the fall. Kinetics is a bitch.
    I landed the aircraft and taxied it dangerously close to the fuel truck and told Dean to stay inside. She didn’t like this idea and wanted to help, but I could see in her eyes that she knew I was right. She wasn’t one hundred percent after starving, baking and freezing for a month on that tower, which is why, despite her high flight hours, I kept my hands on or near the controls the entire time she flew. She may have been a better stick, but she was worn down to the wire.
    Leaving the engine running, as is my standard operating procedure for a situation like this, I made my way to the fuel truck. It wasn’t long before I had the tanks full and the aircraft positioned to take off again. At the hold short line on the Hobby runway I realized that I hadn’t checked in with Hotel 23 for nearly ten hours, nor did I have the headsets tuned to the VHF radio. Dean and I were talking on the way to Hobby and we were out of range of Hotel 23 anyway, so I’d switched the VHF off after taking off from the interstate to avoid the static. Dean was using the copilot’s controls to get the aircraft airborne in the same manner that she had used them to give control inputs to avoid the corpse on last takeoff. I kept my hands on the pilot controls, shadowing her.
    On a side note, as we were taking off and as I began to tune the radios to contact Hotel 23, I noticed a corpse hanging out of the large Boeing aircraft cockpit window that John, Will and I had attempted to explore weeks ago. It was obviously stuck at the waist and I could see its arms moving in a futile attempt to drop itself to the tarmac. All of the recent activity at this airfield must have excited the undead entombed in that large, multi-million-dollar sarcophagus.
    I keyed the microphone: “H23, this is Navy One, over.” John came back. He was borderline frantic. Using the proper radio discipline so as to not reveal any names or locations, he came back. “Navy One, this is H23, we have been trying to reach you for hours. It is not safe to land at H23 at this time.” I asked John what was going on. I was instantly worried that the only enemy more dangerous than the dead was attacking again.
    He came back and told me that there had been a recent influx of undead to the landing area and the area surrounding the back fence and that it would not be safe to land as there were currently over one hundred of them standing where I would be attempting to touch down. I asked him if there was any way he could clear it out, as I was coming back with “one plus two souls onboard.” He replied that it would be too dark to do anything in twenty minutes. I agreed. It would be suicide to go out there at night and attempt to herd them out of the way, and even then there would be no guarantee that it would work. It