Free The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs

said, and shook Derwin’s hand.

Zombie-Killing Drugs Inside
    Moscow - Fifty Feet Over Red Square
    Oleg Aliyev – shitty amateur helicopter pilot, bold slayer of witless Russian farm boys, and architect of the coming genocide of all the world’s dead (he hoped) – had known all along that he would be overflying Moscow, more or less, on this insane journey of his. There was pretty much no way to get from his starting point – the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, at the juncture of Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia – to his final destination of London without doing so. No way other than going way the hell out of his way, which was the last damn thing he wanted to do. No, scratch that – it was the second to last thing he wanted to do.
    The very last thing he wanted to do… was happening right now .
    He was making an emergency landing, in the middle of the night, right in the middle of Red fucking Square.
    Aliyev’s vision shot forward again, up from the map display, as the Eurocopter EC175 violently impacted something – slamming his head forward and bouncing him and the aircraft and his whole tiny falling world ten feet back up into the sky. He had just clipped the edge of one of the buildings that ringed the square.
    But, by whatever miracle, he had cleared it. He was still flying.
    Sort of. Actually, with both engines shut down due to all the fuel leaking out through bullet holes – a going-away present from the last surviving Russian farm boys in that seemingly deserted field he had stupidly set down in – he was autorotating. That is, he was trying to keep the aircraft in the air by using the kinetic energy stored in the rotating blades – at least long enough to make it to the flat, clear landing ground of the darkness-shrouded square.
    Which was now coming up fast – and hard. As he hurtled toward the cobbled ground, battling the controls to keep his autorotation parlor trick working for a few seconds longer, he could see through his NVGs that the square wasn’t quite so clear as it had first appeared. There was debris, wreckage, bodies… and not a few abandoned vehicles. As he flashed over the top of it, he realized one of them was actually a main battle tank. It sat like a bellicose monument to militarism, not far from the edge of the square.
    No huge surprise there, though – the Soviets, and then the Russians, were forever parading their weapons and troops and armor, their super-phallic ballistic missiles on hundred-foot-long carriers, all of it rolling endlessly by in front of the cameras, clearly compensating for something…
    Aliyev tried to snap his mind back to reality – because, one way or another, reality was about to crash straight into him.
    Anyway, tanks or no, the square was still a hell of a lot less lethal a landing zone than the riot of buildings of the Moscow city center, so he’d damn well better make the best of it. Those uneven purple cobblestones were coming up fast in the menacing blackness, and he tried to flare out at the last second to smooth his landing. But, as little as he’d been trained on autorotation, he knew virtually nothing about setting the helo down in that state.
    He just thanked his non-existent God that he was merely suffering a crash-landing, as opposed to a full-blown crash. Touch wood.
    The sleek Eurocopter went in shark-nose-first – but at least into a clear section – and then skidded and careened and shrieked, threatening to come apart and roll over, as the landing gear collapsed underneath it and Aliyev was hurled toward the controls and cockpit glass face first.
    He blacked out while the aircraft was still moving – though it was definitely a ground vehicle now, and almost certainly would be for the duration.
    Grounded – for the rest of time.
    * * *
    When Aliyev came to, he was thrilled to find himself vertical and the helicopter more or less intact around him. The rotors had even stopped spinning. But his NVGs had been knocked off his