Flight or Fright Read online

  Just another old fart, self-destructing.

  Except that now I can hear the sounds, too. Sounds that cannot be mistaken for anything else. Now I see strange black shapes in the night sky. Hungry, still unsatiated, coming back for more.

  THE FLYING MACHINE

  RAY BRADBURY

  After an early start writing effective (and sometimes gruesome) short stories of horror, such as “Small Assassin” and “The Emissary,” Ray Bradbury grew to be one of the giants of 20th century fantasy fiction. He wrote one classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and his stories set in Greentown, Illinois, rival those of Sherwood Anderson about Winesburg, Ohio. In this tale, however, Bradbury takes us to ancient China, and clearly delineates the dark side of flight in a mere 1500 words. “Here is a man who has made a certain machine,” the Emperor says, “and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself.” Ambrose Bierce’s flying machine story is ironic; Bradbury’s is allegorical, asking a deceptively simple question: Do we understand the implications of the things we create? Underlying this is another: Once created, can anything be un-created?

  In the year A.D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.

  Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, “Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!”

  “Yes,” said the Emperor, “the air is sweet this morning.”

  “No, no, a miracle!” said the servant, bowing quickly.

  “And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle.”

  “No, no, Your Excellency.”

  “Let me guess then—the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles.”

  “Excellency, a man is flying!”

  “What?” The Emperor stopped his fan.

  “I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a Voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass.”

  “It is early,” said the Emperor, “and you have just wakened from a dream.”

  “It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too.”

  “Sit down with me here,” said the Emperor. “Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight.”

  They drank tea.

  “Please,” said the servant at last, “or he will be gone.”

  The Emperor rose thoughtfully. “Now you may show me what you have seen.”

  They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

  “There!” said the servant.

  The Emperor looked into the sky.

  And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.

  The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning. “I fly, I fly!”

  The servant waved to him. “Yes, yes!”

  The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

  “Tell me,” he said to his servant, “has anyone else seen this flying man?”

  “I am the only one, Excellency,” said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

  The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, “Call him down to me.”

  “Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!” called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.

  The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

  The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.

  “What have you done?” demanded the Emperor.

  “I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency,” replied the man.

  “What have you done?” said the Emperor again.

  “I have just told you!” cried the flier.

  “You have told me nothing at all.” The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

  “Is it not beautiful, Excellency?”

  “Yes, too beautiful.”

  “It is the only one in the world!” smiled the man. “And I am the inventor.”

  “The only one in the world?”

  “I swear it!”

  “Who else knows of this?”

  “No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it.”

  “Well for her, then,” said the Emperor. “Come along.”

  They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.

  The Emperor clapped his hands. “Ho, guards!”

  The guards came running.

  “Hold this man.” The guards seized the flier. “Call the executioner,” said the Emperor.

  “What’s this!” cried the flier, bewildered. “What have I done?” He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.

  “Here is the man who has made a certain machine,” said the Emperor, “and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do.”

  The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.

  “One moment,” said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted his key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.

  The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, the birds sangs in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

  “Is it not beautiful?” said the Emperor. “If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done.”

  “But, oh, Emperor!” pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. “I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning!
And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!”

  “Yes,” said the Emperor sadly, “I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?”

  “Then spare me!”

  “But there are times,” said the Emperor, more sadly still, “when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man.”

  “What man?”

  “Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?” said the Emperor.

  No one moved or said a word.

  “Off with his head,” said the Emperor.

  The executioner whirled his silver ax.

  “Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together,” said the Emperor.

  The servants retreated to obey.

  The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. “Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour.”

  “You are merciful, Emperor.”

  “No, not merciful,” said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb into the sky. “No, only very much bewildered and afraid.” He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. “What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought.”

  He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny faces loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.

  “Oh,” said the Emperor, closing his eyes, “look at the birds, look at the birds!”

  ZOMBIES ON A PLANE

  BEV VINCENT

  Your co-pilot, Bev Vincent, has published over four score short stories and a few books of non-fiction, but this is his only story thus far that involves airplanes. The title was inspired by a certain movie starring Samuel L. Jackson, but you won’t find a single thirteen-lettered epithet in the following tale. Yippee ki-yay!

  The guy wearing the Phish t-shirt told Myles he can fly anything, and if he’s lying they’re all dead. It’s that simple. The guy—Barry, who looks like he’s under thirty—says he trained to be a pilot “over there,” where it all started, but he’s skimpy with the details and it sounds like an idle boast, the kind of line someone trots out in a bar late at night to impress women. If women were still hanging out in bars, that is.

  “A lot of people said the war was a bad idea. I supported it at first,” Barry says with a shrug. “Never figured it would turn out like this.” An understatement if Myles ever heard one.

  Myles met up with this small group of survivors—nineteen in total, counting himself—in the auditorium of an inner city school, a place with strong doors and sturdy locks that provided temporary sanctuary. Once Barry announced he could get them airborne, Myles presented his sketchy plan. Just like that, he became their leader.

  “We’ll go someplace remote,” he tells those gathered around him, apparently attracted by the aura of confidence he cultivated during thirty years in sales and middle management. “A place where we’ll be safe until all this is over.” No one asks what they’ll do if “this” is never over.

  Heading for the airport seems like their best option. The city’s overrun, much of it on fire, and people are being killed in the streets. Those that aren’t consumed by their attackers get up again a few seconds later to join the ravenous army of the undead. Myles wishes his plan didn’t rely on the unproven skills of a guy who looks like he’s never worked a day in his life.

  But if the others want to treat him like their leader, he’s going to lead, goddammit. Under his direction, they raid the cafeteria for food and the work shed for tools and weapons. Barry also claims he can start the bus parked near the loading dock if they can’t find the keys. Myles doesn’t ask if he learned this trick “over there,” too, but Barry proves up to the task. Maybe there’s hope after all.

  The fuel gauge on the aging school bus registers something less than a quarter of a tank. The last working gas station in the county ran dry six days ago, and the promised supply tankers never showed up. Probably never would. They have enough gas to reach the airport—barely—but if Barry can’t figure out how to get one of the planes going, they’re screwed. Seventeen people follow him and Barry onto the bus like rats after the pied piper.

  The bus is a piece of crap, but it runs, so long as they take it easy. Every time Barry pushes it past fifty kilometers an hour, the engine light comes on, so he eases back on the accelerator. They can’t afford to break down. They haven’t seen many of those abominations outside Halifax, but no place is safe. Those devils can pop up anywhere at any time, and Myles’ group has only knives and axes for weapons. Like gasoline, bullets are a precious and rare commodity.

  Fifty kilometers per hour is fast enough, though. If there’s a plane with enough jet fuel to get them wherever they decide to go, it can wait for them to lumber along the highway. When he was in field sales, before being forced into a desk job, Myles hated the long trek out to Stanfield International, but today he’s happy to put distance between himself and the city.

  There’s no other traffic as far as the eye can see in either direction. They pass stalled vehicles on the side of the road, but when they slow to check if any occupants need help, the bus wheezes, hiccups, and threatens to stall. Barry eases it back up to fifty, the only speed at which it seems content. Myles thinks he sees a head pop up behind the steering wheel of one car after they pass, but he can’t be sure, and it could just as easily be one of them instead of a real person.

  He pushes the fleeting glimpse from his mind. It might have been a trick of the light, after all, and even if it wasn’t, they can’t save everyone—he’s not even sure they can save themselves. Never give up, though, that’s his mantra. His most rewarding sales were the ones where the other person intended to buy from a competitor and Myles won him over with persistence and passion.

  He wonders what will happen after the zombies kill nearly everyone. Will they wander the planet in a futile quest for food until they fall to pieces and writhe on the ground like a child’s toy with failing batteries? Seven billion zombies searching for the few remaining survivors of the human race?

  Then there’s the fact that even if his group escapes, they won’t live forever. They’ll all die eventually, and when they do, the virus—or whatever it is—will bring each of them back as one of those creatures. All they can do is forestall the inevitable and hope that somewhere people are working on a solution. Mankind has survived for thousands of years. This scourge won’t eradicate us, Myles thinks. Someone will find a way to cure this plague. They always do. This belief is what drives him. Otherwise he might as well set himself on fire and be done with it.

  When they reach the airport, Myles tells everyone to hold on tight and orders Barry to crash the bus through the fence that separates the parking lot from the runways. Th
e bus lurches and pulls to one side as the fence wraps itself like chain mail around the bumper and the windshield, but they make it through and onto the tarmac.

  There are several Airbuses and Boeings parked at the terminal, but Barry opts for a commuter jet, big enough to hold them all but small enough that they’ll be able to land it wherever they want, even on a remote airstrip designed for private aircraft. It’s an Embraer ERJ-145 with a range of at least 4000 kilometers, according to Barry. Maybe a little more, since they’ll be flying light. Enough to get them far from here.

  But that’s the catch—where should they go? Barry releases the jet’s door, which drops to reveal a set of stairs. He ducks inside and emerges a few minutes later with a set of navigational maps. Myles spreads them out on a bus seat while Barry and a former taxi driver named Gilbert hotwire a fuel truck and pull it up next to the Embraer’s wing.

  Alfie, who in another life was a financial analyst, leans over the seat back. “How about Alaska?”

  “We can’t get that far. We could make Labrador or northern Ontario.”

  “Too cold,” Terri, the former yoga instructor, says, hugging herself. Myles isn’t surprised. She’s complained about everything since she joined their group.

  “Snow slows them down,” a barber named Phil says.

  Even if that’s true, they have to go someplace where they can survive, perhaps even grow crops. Also a place where they can stay in touch with the rest of the world, so they’ll know when the situation improves. Myles doesn’t share his thought process with the others, though. He doesn’t want them to realize he’s as uncertain as they are.

  “Look,” Emily yells. She’s the youngest of their group, a teenager who has barely said a word since they left the city, concentrating instead on trying to reach someone—anyone—on her iPhone, clicking the keys with her thumbs.