The Aftermath

by Gary Chesla

  “I’ll try,” Fran said.

  “Be careful and don’t do anything stupid,” Flash said. “I have to get ready to go back and see if our friends left any food for me tonight.

  “You be careful too,” Fran said. “I’ll try to get an early start tomorrow. I should be able to, I doubt I’ll get much sleep in this drain pipe tonight.”

  “You might want to try filling that pouch you made for your dog with sand,” Flash replied. “It might make a good pillow.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Fran replied. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of nights sleeping in drainage ditches,” Flash said. “The last time I slept in a ditch, I filled my underwear with grass to make a pillow.”

  Fran laughed.

  “In time you’ll learn all the little tricks, Newb,” Flash added. “A girl has to do what she has to do to survive.”

  “I hope I’m a fast learner,” Fran replied.

  “Good night, Newb,” Flash said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Flash,” Fran said. “See you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 21

  Granite Mountain July 3rd.

  Chervy had spent most of the morning going over the satellite images and the pictures from last night.

  The visitor had returned again last night, and the men were anxiously studying her movements on the pictures.

  Rogers and Davis sat on each side of Chervy as he ran through the photos, discussing what they saw.

  “She has to be eating as well as we are with how much food she has collected the last few nights,” Davis said. “There is just something about how she moves. She seems smooth and practiced. The last time I saw moves like that, we were on maneuvers out in the desert. You don’t suppose she is military?”

  “Military? Not necessarily, if she has lived this long out there by herself,” Chervy added. “She has to know what she’s doing. I’d like to know how she survived the zombie attack the other night. From what we saw, I’d swear they had her.”

  “Maybe she was just lucky,” Rogers said. “She doesn’t look big enough to have fought off all those infected by herself without a weapon.”

  “Hopefully we will be able to ask her,” Chervy replied. “Right now, our job is to try and locate where she is staying.”

  Chervy brought up the satellite images from last night.

  He clicked through the photos until the blurry green image of the visitor was no longer was visible, then he went back to the last picture that had the green image still on it.

  “If I’m right, this has to be where she is staying,” Chervy said. “I’m guessing that when her body heat signature disappeared, it was because she went into a house or some kind of structure that kept the satellite from picking her up.”

  “Did she go into a building, a cave or just under some brush,” Rogers asked. “I can’t see a thing on that picture.”

  “Finding the answer should be easy,” Chervy replied. “From the top of the picture to the bottom is two miles, it’s a circle with a one-mile radius out from the food drop. The top of the picture is north, the bottom is south. So if I am right, she is staying about one mile north, north east from the food drop.

  Now all we have to do is take a look at a daytime view of that area to see what is there.”

  Chervy tapped on the keyboard to adjust the satellite’s camera and a moment later, a view of the area south west of Stone appeared.

  Chervy slowly zoomed in closer to the area that corresponded with the last visible location of the visitor.

  “So you think she is staying in one of those buildings?” Davis asked.

  “That would be my guess,” Chervy replied.

  On the screen was a picture of three farms houses, each farm had a barn and a few other farm structures.

  The buildings were separated by a number of large fields.

  The fields at one time were either used for planting crops or for keeping livestock, but now they laid dry and barren.

  “How do we determine which building she is staying in?” Rogers asked.

  “I guess we wait for her to come out or we go out and search the buildings,” Chervy replied. “Rogers, go get Doc, what we do next is going to be his call.”

  Rogers got up and went out into the tunnel to find the doctor.

  He and Doc returned a few minutes later.

  Chervy explained to Doc what he had determined.

  “So I asked Rogers to go find you,” Chervy continued. “If I’m right, she is in one of the buildings on one of these three farms. I’m certain she is here, but with the system we’re using, I’m afraid I couldn’t narrow it down any closer than this area. As I see it, we have two options to find her, we can either wait until she come back into view, or we can go out and search the buildings, one by one, until we find her. What do you want to do?”

  “I think we should go out and search the buildings,” Rogers said. “We know she is there now, so I feel we should go out now before we lose her.”

  “I have to agree with Rogers,” Davis said. “If we don’t find her now, it could take us days or weeks, to find her again. That is if we can find her again at all. We’ve been searching the area for weeks and she was right under our noses and we didn’t even know it.”

  “Cherv, what do you think?” Doc asked.

  “I’m not certain, Doc,” Chervy replied. “On one hand, I’m anxious to make contact. But this girl is very good at hiding. If she sees us coming, and based on how she operates, she probably would hear or see us. If that happens, she would hide where we couldn’t find her.

  After we leave, she would probably run, and I don’t like our chances of finding her again.”

  “What’s to say she isn’t going to lay low until dark and then leave the area tonight,” Davis said. “We can try to follow her blurry heat signature, but if you asked me, with our equipment that would be hit or miss at best.”

  Doc thought for a few minutes.

  “I am leaning towards waiting and watching until we can pinpoint where she is staying,” Doc said. “My first reason is, from what we’ve seen lately, I don’t want you boys running around out there any more than we have to. The air and soil samples you brought back shows that the area is contaminated to a much greater degree than around Granite Mountain. I would suspect that our visitor hasn’t been infected yet because her immune system may have built up a defense against the virus. I find that possibility to be a long shot at best, but until I find evidence to the contrary, this is the most likely explanation.

  Also she appears to very skilled at surviving.

  She may have set traps around where she is staying to alert her if anyone comes around and maybe to disable any intruders.

  I am also concerned that she may be armed.

  She could pick us off as we approached.

  My second reason is that I don’t think our visitor is in any hurry to leave the area. She has accumulated a sizable amount of food, unless something scares her off, I don’t believe she will be willing to leave the food behind and I haven’t seen any evidence that she has a way to take it all with her.

  She has returned for food for three nights in a row. I believe she will return each night as long as we continue to put out food.

  We need to find a way to communicate with her when she comes back to get more food.

  I think we all agree that this could possibly be our final chance to contact a survivor.

  I believe if we go out to search the buildings and we don’t find her, we will scare her away.”

  “We could leave one of our walkie talkie radios at the sight,” Rogers suggested.

  “The problem with that is they only have a range of no more than five miles,” Davis replied. “They wouldn’t work from here all the way out to Stone.”

  “What if we left a walkie talkie with instructions that we would call her tomorrow around noon,” Chervy said and pointed to a spot on the screen. “We could fly out to a place in these hills where she wouldn�
��t see or hear us. She could take the walkie talkie back to where she is staying, where she feels safe, and talk to us.”

  “But you saw how she is able to sort the food from the nonfood items, even in the dark,” Davis said. “She would just leave the radio behind.”

  “Not if we attached it to a food item too tempting to leave behind,” Chervy replied. “In the dark she wouldn’t take the time to remove something attached to it.”

  “Like what?” Rogers asked.

  “I’m sure Reynolds and Connors could cook up something,” Chervy smiled. “Then we wire the radio and a note to the item. She won’t know what it is until she gets it back to where she is staying and has light.”

  “That could work,” Doc nodded. “Let’s give that a try, but in the meantime, we have to have better equipment to communicate here at Granite Mountain. When you get back from the food drop, I want you to remove all the communication equipment from their boxes and identify what we have. There has to be better ways to communicate than what we’re doing.”

  “I agree Doc,” Chervy said. “I’m sorry I haven’t done that yet.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Doc replied. “We’ve been feeling our way through this process. We haven’t been able to look for solutions until we discovered the problem first. Let’s hope that we have time to find a solution to this problem while we have time.”

  “I’ll help identify the equipment as soon as Davis and Rogers return,” Chervy said.

  “For now, I believe the best use of your time is to watch these three farms today,” Doc replied. “If our visitor shows herself, I want to know about it. If the walkie talkie idea doesn’t work, at least we’ll know for sure where she is staying. Then if nothing else presents itself, we can always try to go to that location to talk with her.”

  Reynolds found a canned ham.

  Davis wired a walkie talkie and the note saying that tomorrow at noon, someone would call and would like to speak with the visitor.

  Davis thought that in the dark, the small radio would feel like a security device that many stores attached to merchandise so that no one could just take it and walk out of the store with it.

  Reynolds and Connor prepared another crate of food and attached it to the skids on the drone.

  The canned ham was placed in the crate under the usual supply of blankets and napkins.

  When everything was ready, Davis and Rogers lifted off and began their way to Stone.

  After the drone lifted off, Doc walked with Chervy back into the tunnel.

  They walked together until they reached Chervy’s station.

  “I hope I haven’t screwed up our chances to contact our visitor,” Chervy said.

  “Let it go, Cherv,” Doc smiled. “It would be different if we had been trained on how to do this,” Doc replied. “We’re trying to do the best we can, that’s all we can do. We all felt that we should be trying to find survivors. The best way we could think to do that was by using the satellite because that was what we used back at the base to locate the infected. It was our best option here to find survivors.

  For us, it’s all been trial and error.

  We’ve adapted the best we knew how, since we’re still technically still in the Navy, the blame falls on the commanding officer. Since that’s me, it’s more my fault than it is yours.

  All we can do is try to make do using what we know.

  Overall, I’d would say we aren’t doing too bad.

  Sure we’ve screwed up, but we could be doing a lot worse.

  Without your technical skills, I would be hanging off the side of the mountain looking for survivors with a pair of binoculars.

  Go keep an eye on our visitor and let me know if you see anything.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Chervy replied and went into his computer as Doc continued down the tunnel.

  Chervy sat down at the computer and looked at the screen.

  He began to lean back in his chair, but quickly sat up straight in his chair.

  “Doc,” Chervy yelled. “Come see this.”

  Doc ran into the bay and looked at Chervy.

  “What’s going on, Cherv?” Doc asked.

  “I think we have our first live look at a survivor in the daylight,” Chervy replied. “I just sat down and looked at my screen when I saw her. She came out of the farmhouse on the left side of the screen.”

  “Can you get us in closer?” Doc asked as he pulled up a chair and sat down next to Chervy.

  Chervy tapped on the keyboard, but the picture on the screen only changed slightly.

  “This is the best I can do,” Chervy replied. “I wonder where she’s going. She has been careful to only go out at night before. Do you think she is leaving?”

  “If she was leaving for good, she would be taking as much food as she could carry,” Doc replied. “I think she is going out for something she needs, maybe to get water. She is carrying something in her hand, it could be a bucket.”

  Chervy adjusted the camera to look further out in the direction the girl was going.

  “I don’t see any water in the direction she is going,” Chervy said. “All there is out that way is sand and brush.”

  “Just stay with her,” Doc said. “It doesn’t look like she is prepared to go very far.”

  They watched her progress for half an hour until Route 84 came into view.

  When she reached Route 84, she walked off the side of the road and dropped down behind some brush.

  “She looks like she is hiding,” Chervy said. “Why would she be doing that? What would she be hiding from?”

  “Maybe she saw this,” Doc said and pointed to the top of the screen.

  “Damn,” Chervy said. “All this time and nothing. Now today we are seeing two survivors at once. Do you think she is staying out of sight so she won’t be seen, or do you think she plans on ambushing that other person when they get closer? Maybe she wants that person’s bicycle, it would make getting around easier?”

  They watched curiously as the person on the bicycle got closer to the visitor.

  A few minutes later, the rider on the bicycle stopped in the middle of the interstate.

  “It’s another girl,” Chervy said. “It looks like she is studying that sign along the road.”

  “Our visitor is on the move,” Doc said.

  The visitor walked up on the road.

  The girl on the bicycle turned as the visitor walked closer.

  The two girls appeared to be waving at each other.

  Then the visitor walked over to the bicycle and the two girls hugged.

  “I think they know each other,” Doc said.

  “If they know each other Doc, how did our visitor know when to leave her hideout and go out to the interstate to meet her friend?” Chervy asked.

  “If I had to guess, I would say that they had arranged the meeting beforehand,” Doc replied.

  “You mean that the two girls were together, but the one on the bicycle went somewhere to get something?” Chervy asked. “But how did our visitor know exactly when to go out to the interstate to meet her friend. It was like she knew exactly when her friend would return.”

  Doc smiled, “They must have a way to communicate.”

  “How?” Chervy asked.

  “I don’t know, but this has to be more than a coincidence,” Doc replied. “If we can determine how they were able to communicate, we may be able to talk to them.”

  “But how?” Chervy asked again.

  “Think, Mr. Chervanek,” Doc said. “What ways are there that two people can talk to each other over great distances? We have obviously been missing something that has been going on right under our noses.”

  Chapter 22

  The Summit near Johnstown. July 3rd

  Tony, Mike and Linda sat on the deck outside the front door and watched as Jamie played with George on the grass right off the deck.

  Jamie and George were playing one of Jamie’s favorite games, dress up George.

  Jamie wo
uld never be able to take a strange cat and do to it the things she did with George.

  Any other cat would consider Jamie’s actions to be threatening and it would probably scratch or bite her in self-defense.

  The only reason Linda could figure that George didn’t get violent, was that George didn’t know any better.

  They had seen an ad in the newspaper from a person in their neighborhood whose cat had just had kittens and they were trying to find them a good home.

  Linda thought it would be a good idea to get Jamie a kitten.

  Mike was against the idea, claiming that Jamie was too young at that time to take care of a kitten.

  Unfortunately for Mike, Jamie walked in on the conversation and before he knew what happened, he found himself outnumbered two to one.

  That evening they went to look at kittens, and out of nine kittens in a box, Jamie selected George.

  Jamie picked George because he was the only kitten acting like an idiot, at least that is how Mike told the story of how they got George.

  George’s first experience with humans was Jamie sharing her dinner with George, then playing dress up.

  Either George thought playing dress up was a normal part of life, or he was willing to put up with anything to get treats.

  Once they arrived at the cabin on the Summit, Linda cut up some old rags so Jamie would have some play outfits for George, and to keep Jamie occupied.

  Today, George looked like the scarecrow from the wizard of Oz or a millionaire’s cat who had fallen on hard times.

  The sight of George dressed in rags only confirmed, in Mike’s mind along with a long list of other things about George, that there was something wrong with that cat.

  But watching Jamie and George play, and discussing George’s need for therapy always took their minds off the problems they faced.

  But today, Jamie and George playing, was just a side show as Tony, Mike and Linda discussed what they had seen over the last few days.