by Lee Thomas
We finally had our first freeze in mid-December when the overnight temperature hit 25. All the animals had been put up or at least had access to a warm area inside. Since we did have power, most of those houses had working heaters, as well as the ship, but the barn itself had not been ran with heat yet. Several large space heaters had been set up in it though, so the animals wouldn’t freeze to death while we gathered the supplies needed for a central heat system. The long term plan was also to rig a misting system up by next summer to help them stay cool when it heated back up again. A small water purification plant was located on the base, and we had set people there to maintain it as well try to figure out a way to make it bigger. The base had its own pumping system so we could have running water, and I set our engineers to working out how to connect the city grid to the base grid and block off the rest of the city from what we had secured. Since the wall included quite a bit of city residential area, we had to make sure the area outside of the base itself was connected to us and separated from the rest of the city. They assured me it could be done, and I hoped they were right.
After having a small Christmas celebration, we continued on surviving the winter. The days were staying cold, the nights even worse, but luckily no one had any issues staying warm. The guards on the wall had warm coats and gloves, as well as guard shacks set up with heat. The hunting teams continually brought in fresh meat; mostly deer, but also more exotic animals like lion, bear, and even the occasional wolf. The latter being killed only because they attacked the hunters, but we would be stupid to waste the meat. The infected also posed a problem for the hunters, but the hunting blinds we had acquired helped keep them from sight. Luckily we had not suffered any losses during hunting expeditions as of yet, and I hoped it stayed that way. The wall guards reported a steady stream of contact, and at times it did seem to increase in volume, but we also hadn’t had any major attacks on the wall.
To prevent any wild animals from jumping it, once we started seeing the lions and tigers, we built privacy fencing sections and installed them along the top of the containers. There were already supports for posts installed on them for past use, so we simply used those to put the support posts in and build the fence off that. So far it seemed to be effective, but I don’t think we had really had an animal be determined enough to try it yet, either.
One day in January, I received a page to the bridge, and received an unusual report when I got there. Our radioman, who was monitoring radio transmission, listening for anyone replying to us, or sending out their own signal, heard something. At first he thought it was a hoax, or a recording like ours, but he quickly realized it was actually a response, and paged the OOD for confirmation. They paged me once they realized it was real.
“Report.” I stated as I walked onto the bridge. The watch today was a mix of sailors and civilians, but the command structure I had installed was taking effect very well, so I could dispense with a lot of niceties in a situation like this.
“Sir, Petty Officer Green is on radio duty today, and reported a possible response to our broadcast. I listened as well, and he is correct, it is not a recording, but an actual response. You won’t believe from where, though.” Chief Drummond replied, looking up from his log.
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Chief, spit it out. And please tell me you have already ordered a response team to check it out.” I said.
“I don’t think a response team is appropriate in this situation, sir. The response did not come from stateside, that’s why we paged you. The response was from Ireland.” Chief told me.
“Ireland? And you have confirmed this?” I replied, a little in shock.
“Yes, sir, we have. We have the name of their leader, a Patrick Finnegan, who is waiting to speak with you.” He informed me, pointing towards the radio room. In disbelief I headed into the radio room and took the offered phone receiver from the radioman.
“This is Sheldon Friend, captain and leader of the USS Nimitz group. Who am I speaking with?” I said into the phone, half believing this was a joke.
“My name is Patrick Finnegan, President of Ireland. I understand you are looking for survivors, Mr. Friend?” came a voice with a distinct Irish brogue. I was almost too surprised to reply.
“Yes, we are. I must say, I thought this was a joke being played on me by my crew at first, but you sound like the real deal, Mr. Finnegan. Tell me though, how did you find us?” I asked him.
“Apparently when your people tapped into the communications satellites, they started broadcasting that little snippet of yours even further away than I’m sure you intended. I have many questions, Mr. Friend, starting with how much do you know about the world now? Specifically about how much is left?” he replied.
“Obviously not enough, Mr. Finnegan. We only recently started getting satellite images, and my techs are still gathering them so we can see what is out there. I know that most of North America is vacant now, except for animals and infected. How many people does Ireland have left?” I asked.
“Mr. Friend, we closed our borders when it all went down, so we were untouched. The same with the United Kingdom and Scotland, although they did have a few sneak in before. They contained it well though, and have remained whole since. Italy also closed its borders, and secured the land route through the Alps. You are definitely not alone, Mr. Friend.” He informed me. I wrote a note to the radioman to have a few others paged to the bridge while I was talking to Mr. Finnegan.
“That is good news, Mr. Finnegan. What do you know of the rest of the world?”
“Most other countries stopped responding months ago, and according to our satellite scans there has been large scale fires everywhere we have looked. Large sections of America have been burned, as well as most of Europe and parts of Asia. Japan closed their borders as well, but had several reports of large scale outbreaks about the same time, and they eventually stopped responding altogether. You are the first ones we have heard from anywhere in any of the American continents.”
We spoke for a few more minutes about general things, and then agreed to keep in contact. After signing off, I told the ones I had asked for to meet me in the conference room, and a few others paged. I then instructed one the yeoman to have refreshments brought there before heading out of the bridge. The radioman had fresh orders to page me if anyone else made contact, and the OOD made a note of such in the log they still kept.
“Alright people, listen up, we have a new development. We just received a response to our radio transmission. There are apparently more survivors than we thought, although not where we thought.” I started. I passed around copies of the message that the chief had made and then continued, “The response was from the President of Ireland. I spoke with him for a few minutes, and it is legit. He let us know that most of the world as we knew it is gone. Ireland closed their borders when the infection started, and according to him, so did Italy and the United Kingdom along with Scotland. That means four countries with most of their population intact.”
“So we aren’t alone? That’s great news, right?” Dave asked.
“What does that mean for us then? Are they going to help us, or try to take over?” Brandon inquired. Several others began throwing questions at me, talking over each other and to each other, excited about the prospect that we were not alone.
“Listen, everybody, please. I plan on staying on contact with them. For now all we can do is talk to them, find out how they are surviving, how they are keeping the infected at bay. Especially the Italians, they have the entire northern border to secure across the Alps. This could be a very good thing for us, even if we can’t ever get to them.” I replied. I had no intention of using what precious resources we had to sail to Ireland, or Italy. Unless our pilots could fly a jetliner as well and we could acquire one from a nearby airport, there was no way to get there.
The conversation continued for a while longer, but eventually I called the meeting to a halt and sent the others on their way. I informed the bridge to page me if
any other contact was made, and to continue with the recorded message. Over the next few weeks we had received messages from the Irish again, as well as the British, Scots and Italians. We had come to learn that there were small bands of survivors throughout Europe, holed up in old castles and walled cities, struggling to survive as best as they could. It sounded like the ones who opted to stay on the mainland were pretty much back in the middle ages, using swords, armor, and foregoing modern conveniences like electricity.
As winter continued on, we had several small snowstorms roll through, covering the base and the flight deck with a little over three inches of snow. We trudged on, growing vegetables in the hydroponics bays, getting potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and squash to grow without too much difficulty. We also had hanging pots of strawberries that were starting to produce fruit. Our hunting teams started having a harder time finding prey, but they were good and continued to roll in fresh meat.
March finally came around and it started to warm up a bit, melting the remaining snow and warming the ground up. By April we were able to start preparing the ground for crops. The hunters had also managed to find another three cows wandering around, and the chickens and rooster did what they do and made some baby chickens as well as providing eggs. Two more horses also got added to our stable, and one of our machine shop guys got the idea to build a horse cart to help lug supplies around. We also had two men who had studied blacksmithing before and decided to set up a blacksmith shop on the base. They had a small list of things they needed, and our supply teams were able to locate most of them fairly easily. The rest we managed to fabricate and they found a suitable auto garage to set up in. I was excited to see what they could come up with, especially in the way of swords and farm tools.
Oklahoma had bad weather and tornadoes in the spring time, and I kept an eye on the weather out of habit, but luckily our two meteorologists kept us informed of anything worse than a small rain shower headed our way. Since our tech wizards had managed to tap into the satellites, we also had long range weather feeds that they put into their calculations. If we happened to have any hurricanes later this year, hopefully we would have plenty of advanced warning. I felt extremely blessed that we had managed to obtain both the equipment and people who knew how operate it. With all the problems we had, any little thing that went right I counted as a victory.
Someone noticed the day and how it was almost one full year since the infection started. It was discussed whether or not we should celebrate one year of survival, and even though we never made it official, the crew did end up throwing together a small celebration. Time moved on, and we made what life we could, planting and tending crops, tending to the animals, and spreading out from the ship. We continued searching for survivors, gathering any and all supplies we could think of that would potentially be useable, and doing our best to take out as many infected as possible every chance we got.
Summer gave way to fall again, we gained more and more survivors as our radio message was heard and people started taking the risk and flocking our direction. By the time we had our first meager harvest, we had increased our numbers to over one thousand people. I decided to place Dave in charge of operations on the base, including everything from the crops to animals to guard rotation. I also sent Chief Brandon Smith to him to help oversee the security aspect, while Tony took solo control of the shipboard security. A good chunk of the civilians opted to move onto the base, which now included part of the city as well. Even though all of our secured area was part of the city area, we simply referred to it all as the base.
I stayed on the ship, along with Michelle, Jeff, and most of the sailors. There were other civilians that stayed on board, and sailors that went ashore. Everyone was comfortable as possible in their new roles, the blacksmiths had fully set up their shop and were in as full swing as possible, and the hunters had several places set up where they could be safe from infected, yet still find plenty of animals. The guards had a set, stable schedule and they kept a good watch. Several guard shacks had been set up along the length of it to help keep them out of the weather, as well as store extra ammo nearby in case of emergency. Solar panels had been gathered from houses and anywhere else we could find them, and set up in various areas. Survivors filtered in almost constantly, but it did start to trickle off near the end of the year.
Some of our fishermen asked for, and received, permission to sail further up river to fish, and explore. Staying in radio contact, they made sure we knew where they were at, and they did bring in a decent amount of fish. There had also been a few times they found and saved survivors. By the end of September we had roughly eighteen hundred people now. With our hydroponics going and providing a steady stream of vegetables, and our hunters successfully keeping our meat supply coming in, food was becoming less and less of a problem, even though we never were overflowing with food. Space was not an issue, and neither was finding jobs for any newcomers we had.
We had managed now to fully search every house and building in a full twenty mile radius. We had full stores on things such as sheets, razors, toothpaste, and most toiletries. Toilet paper, on the other hand, was constantly in short supply. I knew hygiene was something that most people were concerned about, and not being able to wipe was something the women in particular would not be happy with. As long as we had running water and power though, people could stay as clean as they wanted. The engineers had even managed, somehow, to block the sewers and water pipes off from the main part of the city and set up a water pumping station to provide running water to the base. The electrical lines had similarly been confined to our area. We had officially become our own private island of civilization amongst the new world of infected.
What truly worried me, however, was the appearance of mutated infected. Like I had seen before, their finger bones protruded from the fingertips and thickened into claws. Their teeth formed into almost all incisors in order to rip and tear, and the mutations seemed to make them faster, and regain some semblance of intelligence, by which they seemed to plan and coordinate with each other. The mutations also seemed to travel in packs, while the other, less evolved infected still milled about on their own. With this discovery, we now classified the infected into two classes: mutants and mindless. After capturing a mutant, and running some basic medical tests on it, it appeared that it was the same infectious virus, but for some reason some of them mutated while others never did. There didn’t seem to be any clear difference between race to account for it, so we simply took it as random. All we knew for sure was that mutants were faster, stronger, and smarter.
We also noted one particularity in the reports of mutant sightings that we tested with the one we captured. Sunlight seemed to bother them, and actually burn their skin at a higher rate than a sunburn would account for. That was a plus in our favor, as we could make sure we were not out at night to lessen our risk of contacting the mutants. Of course, with the appearance of the mutants, our hope diminished that the infected would just die off and we could reclaim the country. It still did not seem transmissible to animals, so our food supply was untouched. There were several times our hunters ran across places that looked like a struggle had taken place, and evidence at those scenes suggested that the mindless or mutants clashed with the wild animals for survival as well.
As fall of 2019 started to roll in, we continued to expand our farming and fishing skills, and while we were never flush with food, no one really went without a meal either. The children had adapted to living in confinement, spacious though it was, and we could almost forget the danger that lurked just outside the wall. With the discovery of a shipping company not too far away, and a barge with almost full fuel tanks, we managed to acquire enough new storage containers to double the height of the wall. By stacking them on top of the current wall, and welding them together, we created a wall almost twenty feet high of solid steel. We kept rolls of barb and razor wire along the top, just in case anything could jump that high, but that was a long shot on the best of days.
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br /> Watch stations were also built into the upper containers with stairs for easy access. That removed the need for the hunting blinds, and still gave the watchers height to see things coming. The mutants had tried attacking the wall before on a few occasions, and it was the fact we saw them coming and could prepare that probably meant the difference between them getting in and us holding them back. Now, with the added height on the wall, there was that much more security and we could relax a little more. The gates continued to be our only weak points in the wall, but they were heavily guarded. We even managed to set up chain link fencing to create a sally port of sorts for the vehicles, just in case one or two got in with the vehicles.
Early November brought us our first snowfall of the season, earlier than we expected by several weeks. It was light, only a small dusting, but it boded ill for the winter. The weather crew kept a sharp eye on it from then on, and made daily reports. Our satellite pictures showed that most of the north was receiving snow already as well, and in some extremely northern areas it was already sticking in what appeared to be decent amounts. We had already harvested our crops for the year, and we had plans in place for the animals, but holding out through that cold a winter with limited supplies was not high on my list of things to do. Fish would still be able to be caught, and the hunters would undoubtedly be able to bring in fresh meat as well, but our vegetable intake would be limited by how good the hydroponics worked. There were several hydroponics bays on board ship, in the old missile storage bays, and they had various vegetables at various stages of growing. Using sunlamps, they could continually grow year round and always have some ready or near ready to eat. There were also a few bays set up on shore in various buildings whose intended purpose no longer was needed in this new world.
