Noticing Michelle’s discomfort, the man said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you but there was blood on your back side and I needed to be sure you weren’t injured there.”
“You all appear to be free of injuries,” the man smiled then turned and gave an order to bring each of their new guests a clean uniform.
“I think you will all be a lot more comfortable after you change into something less bloody,” the man said. “After you get dressed we need to talk.”
“I have a few questions I would like to ask you,” Dave said.
“I’m sure you do as I have some questions for you,” the man replied. “The problem is, I’m a little short on answers.”
Chapter 13
Dave finished putting on his Navy uniform, buttoned his shirt and turned to look at Michelle.
“How does it feel to be joining the Navy?” he smiled as he looked at Michelle who resembled a little kid trying on her father’s clothes that were way too large for her.
“I didn’t join, I was drafted,” Michelle growled.
Dave smiled at her, hoping to help her relax.
“I saw that you passed the physical with flying colors,” Bill chuckled.
Michelle gave him a nasty look that made Bill’s smile quickly disappear.
Dave noticed that the man that had looked them over was watching them.
When he saw Dave look in his direction, the man said, “I would like for you to come over here and have a seat so that we can talk.”
Dave, Michelle and Bill walked over to the other side of the room where the man was sitting on a stack of wooden boxes.
The building they were in was made up of just one large warehouse sized room. By the looks of the interior of the room, it appeared to be some kind of storage building with crates and boxes stacked against the walls, filling most of one side of the building.
There were other crates stacked around that looked like the men had been using them as chairs.
The man pointed to the row of crates in front of him, indicating that this was where he wanted them to sit.
The other two men stood on a stack of crates in front of two narrow horizontal vents that were six feet off the floor.
The men appeared to be intently focused as they looked outside, watching for any signs of movement.
After Dave and the others sat down, Dave said, “I would like to ask you a few questions…..”
But before Dave could complete his sentence, the man interrupted him.
“After you answer some questions for me,” he said. “Why were the three of you on my base?”
“Are you the Captain in charge of the base?” Dave asked.
“My questions first,” the man replied and smiled. “You are on a secure Navy facility without authorization and I want to know why and how you got on base before I answer any of your questions.”
“This base doesn’t look too secure to me,” Bill said.
The man looked at Dave.
“We thought your base would be the safest place to go,” Dave replied.
“How did you get on the base?” the man asked.
“I used wire cutters to cut through the fence by the two main gates,” Dave replied. “After we crawled through, I wired the fence back together.”
“Did you cut through the fence so you could get past the guards without them seeing you?” the man asked.
“We didn’t see any guards,” Dave replied. “In fact, we haven’t seen anyone on this base until we ran into you.”
“No one?” the man asked.
“No one that was still alive,” Dave replied.
“Why is there a submarine on the beach out there?” Bill asked.
The man looked to be in deep thought for a moment.
“It has been one hell of a night,” Dave said. “We were looking for somewhere we could go to get away from the zombies and were hoping to find someone that could tell us what the hell happened. By the looks of what we have seen of your base, I’m sure you understand.”
“You’re in charge of the Kingsland Police Department?” the man asked.
“The night shift, yes,” Dave replied.
“What are the conditions like in Kingsland?” the man asked.
“It was a damn nightmare,” Dave replied “I seriously doubt there is anyone left alive in Kingsland. That’s why we came here looking for help.”
“Shit, I was afraid of that,” the man replied under his breath.
“Afraid of what?” Michelle asked. “If you know what is going on we would appreciate you telling us something.”
“Do you know a man named Tom Jefferies?” Dave asked. “He worked for the Navy and lived over on Sunnyside Drive.”
“In due time,” the man said. “What time last night did things start to happen In Kingsland?”
“Sometime after one o’clock this morning,” Dave replied. “I got a call from 911 Dispatch about a problem over on Sunnyside Drive at the house of a Tom Jefferies.”
“I took the Jeffries call,” Michelle added. “It’s my first day on the job, I’m the new 911 dispatch operator.”
“When I arrived, I found four people had been slaughtered and half eaten,” Dave continued. “I also found a boy that was badly injured, I sent him to the hospital in an ambulance. There were bloody foot prints leading out the back door, but before I could follow them to see where they led, we started getting a flood of other calls up and down Sunnyside Drive that I had to respond to.”
“At an old lady’s house, Dave clubbed one of the zombies over the head and tied him up. I was on the way to the hospital to have him analyzed when he started going crazy. Then the deputy who was in the ambulance with me turned into a zombie and I ended up wrecking my ambulance,” Bill said. “I told Dave they were zombies, but he didn’t want to believe me.”
“Long story short,” Dave said. “I lost three men over on Sunnyside Drive. It was then I decided to go back to the station and call for help. I stopped at the dispatch center first to check on Michelle.
From there I called the State Police and the hospital, both were swamped with their own problems and couldn’t help us.”
“Then the phones stopped working and the zombies broke into our building,” Michelle said. “Dave and I crawled through the vents and jumped out a window to escape.”
“That’s when we came here,” Dave said. “We didn’t know where else to go but thought we could find some help here at the base.”
“They picked me up on the highway on the way here,” Bill added. “It’s been one long crazy night.”
“We thought it would be different when we got to the base,” Dave added, “but it doesn’t look like conditions here are any better. That is the short version of our night, can you help us make some sense out of any of this? Do you know how this started? Was Tom Jefferies involved in any way? What is that sub doing on the beach? Where is everyone? What happened here on the base, it looks like a damn war zone?”
The man held up his hand to stop the rapid flood of questions.
“First of all, my name is Ensign Ken Adams, the two men keeping watch are Seaman Daniels and Seaman Barbus,” Ensign Adams said. “Seaman Barbus is the man that lost his mind and without authorization started shooting at you, attracting all the unwanted attention to our position.”
“I thought they were more mutants coming our way,” Barbus said defensively. “I just got excited and forgot I wasn’t supposed to shoot at them.”
“You’re lucky he is a lousy shot,” Ensign Adams said. If he would have hit one of you, it would have been the first thing he managed to hit all night.”
“Where is everyone else?” Dave asked.
“One of many questions, I’m sure, that I can honestly say that I don’t know the answer,” Adams replied.
“Do you know how the sub ended up on the beach?” Bill asked.
“Again, I can honestly say that I don’t know,” Adams replied. “However, I can tell you that it is not one of ours.”
“But it looks like a Boomer,” Dave said. “We are the only country in the world with a sub like that.”
“If it’s not ours then whose is it?” Bill asked then paused. “I know, you don’t know that answer either.”
“I was told it belongs to the Russians,” Adams answered. “The Russians have been working frantically to upgrade their military equipment and weapons over the last few years. We believe they copied our design as a fast way to upgrade their own ballistic missile submarine fleet.”
“How could you tell, I didn’t see any Russian identification markings on the sub,” Dave asked.
“There are a number of ways, but the most obvious was the uniforms worn by the crew,” Adams replied.
“Do you have any idea how a Russian sub would end up on the beach at the main U.S Ballistic Missile Submarine Base?” Dave asked.
“We know that the Russians have also been experimenting with new weapon types. Hypersonic missiles, under water long range cruise missiles and biological weapons to name a few. Over the last year we have also detected an up tick in the number of Russian subs lurking off our east coast. We believe the sub was carrying some new variant of the pneumonic plague virus with the possible intent of depositing it in the waters off Boston or New York to test it and to create a state of panic that could be blamed on terrorists,” Adams replied. “We believe that before they reached the east coast an accident must have occurred, releasing the virus into the sub.”
“What is a pneumonic plague virus?” Michelle asked.
“It’s a virus that causes paralysis in its victims that can result in the death of the person infected,” Adams replied.
“It’s crazy to think they would have the balls to even think about unleashing something like that on anyone,” Dave said. “How in hell could they think they could possibly get away with something like that?”
“With the current environment in the world where everything is blamed on some terrorist group, and the terrorist groups are more than happy to take credit for any act of violence around the world, maybe they felt they could get away with it,” Adams replied. “All we can do is guess at their reasoning.
It’s a well-known fact that the Russians have been talking about devising an unstoppable weapon that could make the U.S coastlines uninhabitable for decades. With tensions as they are around the world, they might have decided the time was right to attempt it.”
“Do you think this was responsible for turning people into zombies?” Bill asked.
“I do,” Adams replied. “The results were probably not the intended result, but we believe it was responsible for what has happened. It acts just like the regular strain of the virus, causing paralysis and death, but something in the variant that we have never seen before somehow causes a dead body to continue to move and carry out some primeval desire to kill and devour the living. It is one nasty biologically engineered virus.”
“When did this sub run aground here on the base?” Dave asked.
“It was around twenty-two hundred hours last night,” Adams replied. “We had been tracking it for most of the day yesterday as it headed towards the coast, but we expected it to change course at the twelve-mile marker. The Russians are known for playing chicken with our defenses, so we weren’t too concerned at first. We figured they were just testing us like they always do.”
“I’m surprise that you didn’t sink it,” Dave said.
“We considered that, but as it got closer to shore, the Captain contacted Norfolk to discuss the situation and get authorization to sink it if it got closer to our base.
When he got off the phone with Command he told us they said for us to just let it come in,” Adams replied. “A submarine is lethal out in the depths of the ocean, close to shore in shallow waters they are vulnerable and practically defenseless. The Captain said Command thought there was a possibility they were trying to defect, so if that was their intention, we were ordered to let them come in and defect.
We had tried to communicate with the sub but there was no response. We considered the possibility that their communications center had been damaged, possibly during an internal mutiny of some kind. Our sensors told us that all torpedo bays and missile silos were closed so we decided to just monitor its progress. We had our weapons trained on it the entire way in just in case we would notice any signs that they were up to something.
We expected the sub to surface at the entrance to the channel, but instead it came in at full power and ran up on the beach.”
“Do you think that maybe that was their plan the entire time?” Dave asked.
“Possibly,” Adams replied, “but we all know that hind sight is 20-20. We know the Russians had talked about devastating the east coast, but we never expected them to do it by having a sub beach itself on our base.”
“Plausible deniability,” Bill said. “We open the sub and let the virus loose on ourselves and then they could claim it was an accident and put the blame on us.”
Adams nodded, “Anything is possible at this point.”
“What happened after the sub ran a ground?” Dave asked.
“Let me clarify something before we go any further,” Adams replied seriously. “What we are talking about is confidential and considered Top Secret at this time. By this time tomorrow it will probably be common knowledge. In fact, we may be at war by this time tomorrow and the government will want everyone to know why.
If by any chance tomorrow we are still alive and this somehow resolves itself, I will deny ever having said a word about this and I advise you to do the same.
I’m telling you about this now because we may need each other to survive and I feel it only right that you know what we are facing and why. Understand?”
“I just want to go home,” Michelle replied. “I don’t know who I would want to tell anyhow. My parents already think I’m crazy after I called to warn them about zombies.”
“All I care about is getting this under control and returning to life as normal,” Dave said. “Handling those responsible for this disaster is the job of the government. If they stay out of my hair and let me do my job, I have no intention of telling them how to do their job. Besides, I don’t see what good it would do to tell anyone what you told us? All that anyone that is still alive is concerned about right now is finding a way to stay alive.”
“Good,” Adams said. “Then allow me to continue. After the sub grounded itself, the Captain sent a twenty-five man security detail out to try and establish contact. They tried tapping on the hull using Morse Code, but nothing seemed to work.
The Captain was concerned because the sub’s engines were running at full power. He was concerned about a meltdown or an explosion, so he sent a crew out from the repair yard to cut open the hatch to get inside the sub to shut it down and contact the crew to find out what had happened.
It took them until twenty-three hundred hours to cut open the hatch. He sent in a six-man team, they were inside for only a few minutes before we heard gun shots and men screaming.
The men outside tossed in tear gas canisters, put on their gas masks and went in to help the first group.
A few minutes later three men cam back out of the sub, their arms and bodies were torn up and bloody and they were talking out of their heads about being attacked by mutants of some kind.
While the head of the security detail was trying to make sense out of what the three injured men were saying, these bloody mutants started falling out of the hatch like hornets coming out of their nest.
His best estimate was that at least fifty of those mutants crawled out of the sub’s hatch and began to attack his men.”
“You mean zombies?” Bill asked.
“We call them mutants,” Adams continued. “But zombie is also a fitting description.”
Adams then continued, “At first the remaining security detail was ordered to physically subdue the mutants. It was dark and they couldn’t get a good look at what was attacking them. The men were shock
ed to find that the mutants weren’t trying to fight back but were intent on biting them instead. The men were outnumbered five to one and soon found themselves being overwhelmed, bitten and torn apart.
The Captain sent out another security detail when reinforcements were requested.
The second detail responded more forcefully, using their clubs and finally their guns to subdue the mutants.
However, by the time they had things under control, all the men had been bitten or injured in some way.
The Captain declared the area around the sub off limits and he sent out a guard detail to keep an eye on the sub until he could evaluate the situation further.
He ordered the injured men from the security detail to report to the sickbay.
All but a few were treated for minor injuries and sent back to their barracks.
I talked to the doctor briefly afterwards. He said his tests showed the men had somehow come into contact with a new strain of the pneumonic plague, one he had never seen before.
He said he planned on giving everyone on the base a vaccine today as a precaution in case he was right.”
“I know what happened next,” Bill said. “All hell broke loose.”
“Around twenty-four hundred hours I heard men screaming. The injured had turned in their sleep and began attacking everyone in their barracks. With most of the men sleeping and helpless, it was over in minutes.
When the men on duty rushed in to help, they were quickly over whelmed,” Adams said. “Daniels, Barbus and I were doing inventory on a new shipment of cruise missiles here in this building, that is the only reason we are still alive. We tried to go out and help but found it was hopeless and had to retreat back to this building.
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