World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

accent. I almost cried and punched him in his thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and said that they work
fast. He shot me a look like I didn’t know what I was talking about. It turned out later that this
wasn’t the rescue team but just a routine air shuttle between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I didn’t
know at that moment, and I didn’t care. I reported to Mets that I got my pickup, that I was safe. I
thanked her for everything she’d done for me, and…and so I wouldn’t really start bawling, I tried
to cover with a joke about finally getting that episode of The View. I never got a response.
She sounds like a hell of a Skywatcher.
She was a hell of a woman.
You said you had your “suspicions” by this point.
No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what goes into wearing those
wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the kind of baseline knowledge of someone who had
to have gone through it herself.
So she was a pilot.
Definitely; not air force—I would have known her—but maybe a squid or a jarhead. They’d lost as
many pilots as the air force on resupply hops like mine, and eight out of ten were never accounted
for. I’m sure that she must have run into a situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her crew, maybe
even blamed herself for it like me. Somehow she managed to find that cabin and spent the rest of
the war as one kick-ass Skywatcher.
That makes sense.
Doesn’t it?
[There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]
What?
They never found her.
No.
Or the cabin.
No.