"Stay left of that," Alexei grunted, pointing to the other side of the dust wall.

Zubair already was. The machine rode the shoulder of the storm and stayed ahead of it. Dust fingers reached for the skids and missed.

"Water," Elias said, pointing to the other side.

A river cut the land into a long, dark line.

The banks slumped where floods had eaten them when nobody managed the gates upstream anymore. Rusted farm tools lay half-buried in the bend where the river had turned wrong and taken a field with it.

The water moved slow, thick, like it wasn’t purely water anymore.

"Follow it," Sera suggested.

Zubair nodded and set the helicopter on a low track over the river’s broken spine. Rivers went south. South was the only direction that mattered.

The fuel sight slid lower.

Sera briefly thought about the extra fuel she had stored away in her space, but the problem was that there was no way to refuel while they were still in the air.

They crossed another town.

The one was much bigger compared to the last one.

An old main street with brick fronts facing a courthouse that still had its clock, though the hands had fallen to six and stayed there.

A grocery store with letters missing from its sign. A feed store. A gun shop. The parking lot in front of the grocery was empty. The one in front of the gun shop was not.

Figures moved between the cars.

"What are those?" demanded Elias, leaning forward until the only thing keeping him in the air craft was his harness.

Sera narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side as the sound of moaning penetrated over the beating sound of the motors.

"Stupid zombies," she announced, before looking away. She had seen enough of them in her last life to know that they weren’t any threat.

They were the typical zombies that most people associated with the term.

They walked wrong, their hips loose, their heads forward, their arms dangling at their side. Skin hung in gray strips. Clothes flapped around bones. They turned their faces up at the thump of the rotors and reached for the sound that promised meat.

They were also incredibly easy to kill with a single strike to the head.

Something else moved behind them.

Faster. More sure. The run was almost graceful, too sure of everything around it.

The massive beach ball sized head turned too quickly. Its eyes already tracking the helicopter as it moved overtop of them.

"I thought those were the zombies," Elias said, his voice flat.

"In Country M, they have two classes," shrugged Sera like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Elias’ head whipped around to her, and even Alexei raised an eyebrow.

"Want to elaborate?" asked Zubair, his eyes narrowing as he continued to guide the helicopter.

"A stupid zombie is a stupid zombie," shrugged Sera. "No one knows where they came from, the just appeared at the same time as the mutated zombies. But they are slower, less coordinated, and easier to kill."

"And the mutated zombie?" asked Lachlan.

"Same as back home. A product of the vaccine, impossible to kill without fire, and a general pain in everyone’s ass."

"And there are several below us," Alexei added, watching the shadowed alley mouths where more shapes waited.

Zubair didn’t change course.

They were too far up and moving too fast to matter to anything on the ground.

But he marked the town anyway—the river bent near it, and road signs still stood on the bridge even if no one could read them.

He had nothing to write with and nowhere to write, so he wrote it into the map in his head.

Then there were more fields. Squares and circles. Long straight lines where gravel roads cut the land into a grid.

A wind farm rose out of the haze like a crooked forest.

Dozens of tall white turbines stood with their blades frozen at odd angles.

Some were headless. The nacelles, the large housing on top of the wind turbines, were gone to weather or theft.

Some had fallen, towers snapped and bent.

A few still turned slow, lazy, the bearings complaining in low, grinding voices.

The helicopter slid between two towers and over the shadow of a third. Zubair stayed clear of the blades by instinct even though they barely moved.

Lachlan stared up at the closest, mouth open. "Ugly trees."

"Dead trees," Elias corrected.

They passed a refinery—tall stacks and tanks and pipes in a maze that made no sense from the air.

Rust striped everything.

Two columns leaned toward each other like tired men.

One tank had burst and peeled back like a flower. Nothing burned. Nothing worked. The river ran dark beside it and took the poison away to somewhere else that didn’t matter anymore.

The fuel sight slid lower again.

The needle kissed the red.

Elias looked at Zubair, but he didn’t ask.

The answer sat on the gauge and on the wind and in the weight of the machine.

"Scan," Zubair said.

"Fields. Some flat. Some rough. Irrigation cuts in the west. Cattle ruts in the south. The river has sandbars. We could try those if we have to."

"Power lines?" Alexei asked.

"None," Elias said. "They seem to have all fallen."

"Roads then," Lachlan offered, still grinning because grin was his resting face.

"Not with cars on them," Elias said.

Sera stayed silent. Her hand moved over Luci’s skull in slow, steady arcs.

The wolf’s ears flicked at every change in the rotor note.

A flock of birds lifted all at once from a far field, a black smear ripping itself off the ground.

They turned as one and drew a line across the sky, tight and fast.

The helicopter crossed over them before they reached the river, and the flock wheeled away as if a new mind had told them to do it.

More flocks lifted out of stubble a mile later. Crows. Starlings. Things that were not quite either. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

They rose and settled and rose again, busy with their own wars.

The engine tone shifted.

Not a lot, but it was enough.

Zubair’s eyes cut to the gauge panel and back to the horizon in the same heartbeat.

The needle sat on the red. The reserve had already been eaten by the climb, the crosswind, the grain dust the filters had swallowed.

He didn’t say it. He pitched the nose down a fractional degree and bought himself a minute.

Elias knew anyway. He tightened his harness and checked the lock.

He slid the rifle to the floor and braced it so it would not fly in anyone’s face when the world decided to stop being air and start being ground.

Alexei closed his eyes for half a second and forced the moisture in the air to become smoother where the rotors ate it.

He cooled the engine cowling by a breath so the heat load would not spike. Small things. Enough to buy another thirty seconds.

Lachlan rolled his shoulders and grinned wider. "This will be fun."

Sera scratched Luci once more and then curled her fingers into his ruff so she could hold him steady when the machine chose to stop obeying.

She looked out the window. Picked a field. Picked another in case the first promised something ugly at the edge.

"South by river," Zubair said, half to himself, half to the machine.

He flew it until flying was over.

The engine coughed once and caught again. The rotor drooped a hair. The helicopter said it wanted something that did not exist anymore.

"Now," Elias said.