by Howard, Bob
“You’re going to need to bring a really big flyswatter with you,” he said. “The bugs are everywhere out here.”
Neither of them were bothering to use radio protocols because it would make them sound too professional. If someone was listening and they followed protocols, it would give them the clue that the Mud Island group was organized and knowledgeable instead of the amateurs they had been less than a year ago. Tom’s message accomplished two things. It told her they had unwelcome guests on the island, and if they were listening, they would think he was outside with them instead of inside the island.
“We’ll keep that in mind, Tom. Advise when you can if the bug problem gets worse.”
What Kathy wanted to say to Tom was that she was sorry she had just run off after the Chief, but that would take too much explanation. Besides, if Tom had talked with Captain Miller, he would already know where they were going.
What Tom wanted to say to Kathy was that he was mad at her for putting her life at risk by leaving the shelter without him, but he was being forced into staying calm, and that was making him less mad at her with each passing minute.
Instead of saying he was mad he said, “Have a safe trip.”
Kathy knew they would be out of radio range eventually, but the Beaver could stay in radio contact until then if she wanted. She just couldn’t bring herself to stay on the radio with Tom because she knew she had hurt him. She wanted to tell him not to worry, but that was pretty lame when she considered they were flying closer to the nuclear reactor that had released some deadly radiation, and the surrounding area would be swarming with the infected dead.
The Chief helped her out by taking the microphone from her hand and hanging it on its hook. There wasn’t much sense in giving away too much information when they didn’t know what it was they were missing back at Mud Island.
The first thing they had to do was find Hampton, then they had to figure out a way to pick him up. All the Chief could hope for was that Hampton was near a body of water where he could land. He didn’t know if he would be hoping for too much by wanting to just land and pick him up, but the Chief was sure he would be pressing his luck by also hoping that the radioactive fallout wasn’t drifting over Hampton’s location yet. Then there were the infected dead to consider. How many would be in the area was anyone’s guess, but if someone was shooting guns in the area, it would be crowded.
They flew in silence for a few minutes, but it dawned on Kathy that the Chief always had a plan. As a matter of fact, he always had at least two plans. That must have been why he waited until morning to tell them he was leaving. He took at least one night to think about what he was going to do.
The Chief felt like someone was staring at him and looked over at Kathy. Her long blond hair and naturally good looks made men underestimate her, but the Chief had not been one of those men to make that mistake.
“You figured it out already?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “but I’m beginning to. Is there some reason why we had to go quickly besides the fact that it’s hard to survive almost anywhere for very long?”
“When we talked with Captain Miller about that guy Maybank, the one riding out the end of the world on an oil rig, he said that tropical storm was going to make landfall somewhere close to the Florida panhandle.”
“Is that bad for us?” she asked.
“It would be for Hampton or anyone else in the Charlotte area,” he said. “A storm coming in from the south would push the radiation from the Oconee Nuclear Plant in that direction. As a matter of fact, it could already be too late. We won’t know until we get a lot closer.”
Kathy dug out a pair of binoculars and started scanning the ground for signs of anything moving. She saw groups of the infected dead walking along roads, and more than once she noticed them doing what they tended to do when there was nothing attracting their attention. At those times they just stood around and stared at nothing in particular.
“I wonder what’s going on back at Mud Island,” she said.
******
It seemed like it had only been minutes since they had watched the Beaver pick up speed as it shot through the northern entrance to the moat and headed for the open sea, but within those few minutes the island had become crowded.
The moat had been a tempting place to hide for a Russian corvette class ship, but they had found it to be a very dangerous place when they had gotten their anchor snagged on a large net that had crossed the moat. The builder of the shelter had two nets stretched across the moat from Mud Island to the mainland to protect the power lines that were running across the floor of the moat. Now those lines had additional protection from the hull of the corvette. They never did find out who had sunk it, but it had gone up in a ball of fire one morning, and it had taken the nets with it.
Once again, the moat had become a place of refuge as a flotilla of private boats in all sizes came around the northern jetty and entered the moat. The lead boat pulled up to the dock, and the Mud Island group watched as they tied up their mooring lines. A steady stream of boats filed in behind it and began filling the moat.
I switched on more cameras, and we saw the moat becoming crowded. The people in the lead boat had already begun inspecting our boat, the houseboat, and the line laying barge. All three were tied up only a matter of feet from where the de Havilland Beaver had been moored just minutes earlier. In an ironic way, the Chief’s sudden departure had saved them from possibly loosing the plane. Judging by the number of people in the flotilla, someone would probably have tried to fly it out of the moat, whether they were pilots or not.
Tom, Jean, Bus, and Molly gathered around me to watch, and we couldn’t help noticing the radiation monitors. We had only gotten a dusting of contamination, but it was enough to kill anyone who stayed exposed. The unseen death was already at work as evidenced by the number of people who looked like they were sick. It was a hot and humid day outside, but people were wrapped in blankets.
Jean said, “When we left Charleston on the cruise liner last year, we didn’t know where we were going. All we knew was that we had to leave, or we would die. The crew of the Atlantic Spirit just took her to sea and figured they would think about where to go after we got away from the mobs of infected dead that were filling the streets. Here we are, after all this time, watching people who are still trying to figure out where to go.”
We all knew exactly what she meant. When the infection started, some people fled to the sea. Some people got into cars and tried to escape to the west, only to run head on into the people who were escaping to the east. No matter which direction you went, you collided with people who were going the other way, and as the living mixed with the dying or the dead, more and more people were bitten.
When I still had the Internet on Mud Island, I wondered about the people who had expected an apocalypse and built the shelters. One online article I read said there were over one hundred thousand shelters in the United States. The real question was how many people reached their shelters after the infection started. The next question was how many of the shelters were secure enough to stop other, more ruthless survivors from taking shelters away from people. Mud Island was safer than most shelters, and we knew there were over thirty more just as good, but the entire population of the country wouldn’t fit in all of them. They had to go somewhere, so they just kept moving and looking for a safe place to be.
Once again we were going to watch as spectators as people tried to survive. We had taken in Tom and Molly, and that was a risk, but there was no way we could help a group this size.
“How many do you think there are?” asked Jean to no one in particular.
“My best guess would be way over five hundred people,” said Bus. “So many of them are sick, though. It may be that they have just been looking for a place to shelter the boats, but I have another suspicion. They may be planning to leave the sick behind as they travel south.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked
&nbs
p; “Look at the beach camera,” said Jean. “I think Bus is right. It looks like they’re taking the sick to the largest stretch of open beach.”
While the apparent leaders of the floating colony of survivors were checking out the houseboat, others were bringing the boats up to the dock and dropping off the sick. They were met by stretcher bearers who would then carry the sick to the beach where they were placed in orderly rows. The beach was filling up fast.
Tom said, “This is going to get ugly in a hurry when they start dying. Haven’t they been out there long enough to know what’s going to happen?”
Apparently they did know. Whether we thought it was cruel or humane, a small group of men and women began moving through the rows of people wrapped in blankets. Each carried a long, slender blade, and one by one they slipped the blades into the soft spot at the base of the skull. One by one the sick became harmless.
Jean steered Molly away just before they started. She had been there to give the same dignity to people who died on the Atlantic Spirit, so she knew what was coming.
“Did you see that?” asked Tom.
Bus and I looked at him to see what he was pointing at on the monitor. There was something moving in the water that was gently washing up onto the sand and then going back in the other direction. We watched the water come up about six feet, and when it withdrew we were shocked to see hundreds of blue crabs left behind. They were climbing over each other as they headed for the rows of people who were lined up along the beach, and those people were still alive.
We had seen the blue crabs clinging to the infected dead more times than we could count, but we had never seen them attack living people. Another difference was the number of crabs and the way they were attacking so aggressively. It hadn’t occurred to me or any of my fellow survivors, but the blue crab population had grown virtually unchecked since the infection had begun. Some people were eating the crabs, but without the former living population actively farming them along the coast, the crabs had multiplied until they were eating more people than the other way around. Now, they were going after the living as well as the dead.
The sick people wrapped in their blankets who were the first to be swarmed by the crabs began screaming and trying to fight them off. The men with the blades instinctively began trying to kick and stomp on the crabs, but the beach was swarming with them.
“When I said this was going to get ugly in a hurry, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” said Tom.
Watching the drama as it unfolded on the beach reminded me of the first days of the apocalypse. I sat by myself watching TV stations broadcasting the onslaught of the infection. There were no more TV broadcasts, but it seemed like everywhere that people had survived, they still managed to be reduced in numbers by the infected dead, radiation, murderous survivors, poisoned food, and now this. Animals were probably attacking everywhere, but now the creatures that once occupied a much lower status on the food chain had moved to the top.
Word reach the flotilla command center quickly, and on one camera view we watched as men organized to fight back. Tom pointed at one man who was strapping on a rig that looked like SCUBA gear, but this one had a rifle attached to it. When they lit the end of it, we knew it wasn’t a rifle. It was a flamethrower.
He led the group back toward the beach, and we followed with every camera we could. The people on the beach were losing the battle against what looked like a solid wall of blue shells. It occurred to me I had also never seen blue crabs get quite that big.
When the flamethrower arrived, the man waved the wand back and forth shooting out a long trail of fire. He ignited everything. The people who had been laid on the beach, the people who were trying to help them, and the crabs all went up in flames and smoke. This group had apparently learned that one man’s bad luck didn’t have to be everyone’s bad luck. By killing everyone, they could stop the crabs quickly, and they wouldn’t have to triage survivors.
There were still some of the men who had the blades that managed to escape the fire and the crabs. They retreated behind the flamethrower where they could stop and inspect their wounds. Each of them had bloody arms and legs from the pincers of the crabs. I didn’t think blue crabs could actually bite people, but they sure could tear the skin with their pincers.
Bus said, “I don’t think things will work out too well for them even though they got out of the way in time. Blood infections can develop from a crab pinch that breaks the skin. Without disinfectant, they can expect to get sick. They also have open wounds with radiation still falling in low doses.”
We didn’t think it could get much worse on the beach, but we were wrong. The flamethrower had done its job stopping the crabs at the beach, but we didn’t expect the people to see it as a windfall. To our surprise, the people appeared with buckets, baskets, and bags to collect the cooked shellfish. Even the men who had been cut by the pincers of the crabs were running around trying to get their share. Some were even eating the meat from the legs as if it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. I was glad Jean had left the room. The thought of eating the blue crabs was one thing that would really make her sick.
As the hours went by, we watched as the boats crowded together in one large mass in the moat, and people from the flotilla set up a picket line of women and children with pointed stakes along the beach. When crabs ventured onto the shore, they were quickly harvested and carried back to the boats. It was risky business to build fires on boats, but they were doing it. Several had big oil drums full of water with fires heating the water, and blue crabs being boiled. Judging by the number of fires and the way the people were eating the crabs, they either didn’t know it would kill them, or they had given up and didn’t care. Hunger can cause people to take their chances, and maybe they didn’t think it was dangerous to everyone.
Some of the boats moved into the area where we knew the oyster beds were the thickest. Men in hip waders stepped into the beds and began digging for the largest oysters. We didn’t know if it was safe to eat the oysters, but there were so many infected dead in the moat that oysters were not on our menu either. Besides the obvious exposure to the decaying bodies in the water, it was also the wrong time of year to harvest oysters. If you lived in the South, then you knew that oysters harvested during the warm months from May through August would make you sick whether they had been around the infected dead or not.
We went about our business in the shelter, but we took turns watching the activities in what had become the Mud Island Marina. No one had much of an appetite, so fresh coffee was kept brewing, and Jean’s bread was available to anyone who needed something light to eat. As the sun started to dip lower in the west, we saw that sick people were again being carried to the beach, but they were being dispatched with dignity before they arrived, and they were placed on a raging bonfire that lit the area well enough for the picket line to continue harvesting the crabs.
Tom came up and sat next to me, and said, “This scenario has probably been played out up and down the coast, and it will continue until the crabs win.”
“Do you think food has become that scarce inland?”
“Sure, and harder to get to. The radiation can’t be just a local phenomenon. If any other untended reactors have leaked, then people are being cut off from food in growing numbers,” said Tom.
“There have to be food processing plants and warehouses,” I said. “People are probably finding them every day. Add to those the number of trucks that were carrying containers of food, and there’s going to be food for a long time.”
“All true, Ed, but there were people working in those food processing plants and those warehouses. By now they’ve tried to return to those places, and they’ve told other people where to look. Those places are either picked clean, or they can’t be reached because of the number of infected dead in the area.”
Jean was listening to us talk, and she sounded like it was depressing her. Her voice was low and she had a flat tone.
“You make it sound pretty bleak, T
om.”
“Sorry, but I think we passed bleak a long time ago. Think of it this way. If you shut your eyes and picture every Walmart you have ever been too, your eyes would be shut for a long time. Now imagine how many other people have been to every one of those same stores. It’s the same thing with every grocery store in the country. The only food supplies that will stay intact are the ones inside the network of shelters.”
Jean looked openly surprised for a moment.
“I can’t believe it, but I forgot about those. I was starting to think about the baby, and I was wondering what we would do without food. As long as we have the other shelters, we won’t run out of anything.”
Bus walked up with a fresh pot of coffee, and we gratefully accepted a refill.
“I wonder if the Chief has considered making a detour to my old shelter while he’s over that way. It would be a good chance to make a supply run,” he said.
“He might consider it,” I said, “but right now I don’t really have a clue about how we can get him and Kathy home again. They may have to hole up at the Guntersville shelter after they find Hampton because one thing is for sure. They can’t land here.”
Molly had eased back into the room and was watching the monitors from behind us. We hadn’t wanted her to see the scene that was unfolding on the beach, but when you came right down to it, she was going to be exposed to the real world whether we liked it or not. She had handled the loss of her mother far better than we had expected, and her birthday was coming up in a few weeks.
Molly said, “Uncle Bus, maybe the Chief and Aunt Kathy will go to one of the other shelters.”
There’s always something funny about the way people look at each other when they’re all surprised. I always think of Eddie Murphy when he looks straight at the camera with that expression that seems to ask if the audience was hearing what his movie character is hearing. The adults all looked at each other that way. Then we looked at Bus.
