Aerodynamics

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

The plane crashed in 2067, two hundred long years before the night of the living dead. Legend said the crew aboard that plane was the last hope for saving the American Resistance against the warfare of its own government.

The electric grid collapsed a few years before, and whatever was left of the old country was on its own. Many died in the catastrophic glacial storms of the 2030s. Millions starved the next ten years during the Second Dust Bowl. When the last elected President was assassinated while reading to schoolchildren, everything broke apart.

The Second Civil War ensued and battles popped up across the country. The most formidable force was the New American Order. Once officially seceded, Texas renamed itself as they collected their former neighboring states on their mission. In their battle drive north, they were determined to stamp out anyone who wasn’t willing to follow and die upon the crucifix of their crusade.

After Washington DC was overtaken and the White House burned, the dregs of the Resistance took up arms in the greatest hiding place in the world: New York City. They built a fort out of Grand Central Station, and used ancient, battery-operated radios to communicate with the rest of the world. Help us, they cried into the ether. Get us out of this mess!

The EU. The UN. NATO. All longstanding global alignments that held America in high regard shifted drastically. Where there once was tension or care or violence or unity, there now was only apathy. The New USSR only laughed. Mexico finished their Wall and closed their borders. Australia stayed neutral. China, the new world superpower, cut off all trade routes to North America indefinitely.

The Resistance had few allies - England. France. Germany. Even Canada. But it soon became clear that this battle was up to them. As Americans, they must fight for their unalienable right to live in peace.

The Air France flight was on its way to drop aid to the last remaining stronghold at Grand Central Station with supplies - badly needed medicine. Clothing and protective gear. Food. Weapons.

The Resistance rejoiced when a scout spotted the Air France plane on the sunny horizon. Hope rekindled: they believed they could hold out a little longer. They believed they could take back their freedom the same way they did last time: with the aid of their longstanding old friends, the French. They believed this was the beginning of a new age.

But the plane never made it.

The New American Order shot it down. The Canadian supply trains were held up in battlements up North. The British Navy had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. German supplies never made it over the borders of Europe.

Starving, maimed, and desperate, the Resistance had no choice: they sent out the last of their soldiers on a supply run to the crashed plane.

But they ran right into the New American Army’s clutches, and they were slaughtered mercilessly.

The Resistance's Last Leader, Chaka Contrie, spat blood in the face of the corporal who stabbed her. With her final breath, she proclaimed for all to hear that her people would forever walk those hallowed grounds, a testament to the violence that ravaged their once-flourishing city.

Their death knells would echo the ghost of an idea the people here all once shared: The American Dream, which lay to rest with them.

The city eventually held nothing but corpses. The war was won. The New American Order declared Manhattan uninhabitable, and any remaining people were executed or evacuated to the work camps on the outskirts of NYC.

Two hundred years of destitution followed, and a forest sprung up between cracks in the concrete. The Air France sat, a monument to malfeasance, crested and broken upon the New Forest of New York. Long since scavenged for its supplies, the rotting plane’s cabin held only memories.

Not one person alive dared go near the plane. Those in the Resistance who weren’t killed eventually gave up. They fled to Canada, or if they stayed, they hid underground in the subway system. They scavenged for food in the dark of night, living off new mushrooms and old Twinkies. They shook in fear every time Amazon drones flew over the New Forest of New York. They stayed complacent. They wouldn't fight anymore.

They gave up their freedom for an uneasy peace.

While legends of ghosts sprung up around the Air France Cabin, people laughed, but nobody dared confront it. Nobody went near the plane. Nobody stepped foot on the battlefield. The ghosts of the past never got to live beyond the whispered retelling of their stories.

But one night, after two hundred years, the plane's cabin in the woods held a candle in the window.

A shadow stepped into the soft light, taking up arms in that hollowed plane.

Her battle cry echoed across the concrete jungle, awakening the spirits of the dead.

They reached out from under the earth - dust and machine guns, skulls wrapped in tactical gear. The crew of the Air France and the last of the Resistance stood at arms before a formidable phantom, formerly called Chaka Contrie.

"If the living won't learn from the tales of the dead," she proclaimed, "perhaps we'll change their feeble minds."

And the army of ghosts marched on toward freedom.