by Howard, Bob
The woman’s voice was the closest to him, and the Chief didn’t like what he heard. He had been perfectly content with the idea that he and Kathy could help them to survive what he knew was coming their way, but they didn’t sound like they would do the same for him.
“The front gate will be opened in about an hour,” said the female.
A gravel throated male replied, “How many are going?”
“About twenty this time. The community the scouts found is big, but they don’t look like they can handle a real fight. We should be able to take them without losing anybody.”
“You going, and what about that plane that buzzed us a while ago?” asked the gravel voice.
“Sure I’m going. I haven’t had a moving target to shoot since we cleared the island, and I missed my chance with that plane. I need to kill something.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. What if they come back? With you guys raiding that settlement, that won’t leave but six of us back here while you’re gone.”
“You afraid of the meatheads?” she laughed. “Don’t worry about it. If they land, it’ll be like shooting a duck on a pond. You can’t miss a plane sitting on water.”
Before he could answer, the Chief had eased back away from the front of the house and settled in to wait. There was no way to let Kathy know he would make his move in about an hour, but he knew she would stay where she was until the right time.
From where the Chief was hiding, he gauged the position of the sun against a tree, and was sure the hour had passed. He saw three pickup trucks come around the curve of the one road that seemed to circle the island. They stopped in front of the house and waited. A quick look around the corner was all the Chief needed to see they were getting ready to leave. The fourth pickup truck, the one he and Kathy had seen earlier, started its engine and got in line behind the others. The procession pulled away, and the area was quiet again.
If the front gate was only opened for a group to leave and then return, the Chief reasoned that it was guarded but not heavily fortified. He knew he would have to move quickly, but he was also sure the place they were going to raid had to be far enough away from him to have the time he needed. Six was a very manageable number to him.
He moved back along the wall to the place where he had listened to the conversation and looked around the corner. A heavy and greasy looking man was standing with his back to the Chief smoking a cigarette. He had what appeared to be a vintage AK-47 slung over one shoulder. The Chief could smell him from a distance and wondered why anyone didn’t bother to clean himself if he at least had a roof over his head.
The Chief slipped a knife from the waistband of his shorts and stepped up behind the man.
Sometimes you don’t hear anything. You just know someone is there, and the man turned around to find his face level with a huge chest. He looked up at the Chief, and then the lights went out.
The Chief pulled the man into the bushes taking the automatic rifle with him, and then went quietly through the door in the end of the garage. Just as he expected, there were five cars lined up in a row. Four were classics, and the fifth was an SUV. He went to the SUV first and pulled the key out of the ignition. He didn’t want it to leave without him. There was a set of stairs that disappeared to the floor above, and he moved toward them next.
If there really were only six people left to guard the island, he reasoned that two or more would be at the front gate. That meant there would be at least one more in this house and maybe two next door.
There was a landing at the top of the stairs, so the Chief was able to see into the door of the large room above the garage without the lone guard at the window realizing he wasn’t alone. It was still too far away for him to just walk up to the man the way he had outside, so the Chief went down into something close to a sprinter’s stance and charged.
The man at the window felt the floor vibrate and looked at his feet first. That gave the Chief the extra seconds he needed. When the man looked up again, all he saw was something blocking his view and getting closer. When the Chief hit him, the impact made a sickening sound because of the number of bones that broke. He was unconscious but not dead, so the Chief finished it.
He went over to the window and lifted it open. When he leaned out, he saw that the man on watch would have seen him if he had been paying attention earlier. Then again, the greasy guy downstairs may have been on watch when he came over from the island. That would explain why he hadn’t been spotted.
There was a pair of binoculars on the window sill, and the Chief used them to spot Kathy. She had been watching the window, so she moved into view just enough for him to see her without exposing herself to the larger building. Using hand signals they had used before, he signaled that there were two more bad guys, and then there was a signal that she interpreted to mean ten more minutes. She bagged their equipment into a bundle and got ready to go across.
The Chief wasn’t used to making mistakes. He was used to figuring things out and then letting luck be on his side. When his plane was hit by several bullets from a Cuban gunboat, he had crashed into Charleston harbor, and luck had been on his side. He and his passenger, Allison, had both survived the crash. He was still not over the fact that he hadn’t been able to protect Allison until they had escaped from the infested city of Charleston. He couldn’t get past the fact that he had made a mistake that cost Allison her life. Now, he was getting a bad feeling about Ambassadors Island. Something felt wrong.
He went back down the stairs to the first floor of the garage and found the door that connected the garage to the main part of the house. If he was right, there would be two more people in the house, but something was making him feel like he had missed an important detail. He thought to himself that maybe it just wasn’t what he would have done if he was trying to guard the island. Four people at one end and two at the other end just wasn’t enough.
The Chief suddenly felt like the missing detail was right in front of him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He started to back away from the door so he could signal Kathy to stay where she was, but as he backed away, the door opened. The man that stepped through the door already had his rifle pointed in front of him in the general direction of the Chief, so he needed to react fast.
Training kicked in again, and the Chief was a half second ahead of the man. He brought his left foot up in a kick that deflected the weapon as it fired, and the bullet went into the ceiling of the garage. His right fist hammered into the lower jaw of the man, and he fell into a heap on the floor. There was nothing the Chief could do about the gunshot, so he quickly used his knife to keep the unconscious man from being a problem, and then he ducked behind the nearest car inside the garage.
Kathy heard the gunshot and knew it wasn’t a good sign. The Chief would never give away the element of surprise, much less his position. It could only have been someone shooting at him. The ten minutes weren’t up yet, but her instincts were not cooperative with the idea of sitting still and waiting. She dove into the water and started to swim the short distance from her hiding place to the dock.
When the Chief heard the door open again, he was watching from beneath a deep blue Mercedes. He expected to see feet coming carefully into the garage, and he was hoping it would only be one. The first pair of feet came through the door, and they were closely followed by a second and third pair. Then he saw the detail he had been missing. The feet weren’t moving like an armed man trying to sneak up on someone. They were shuffling and scraping across the floor of the garage. As soon as they were away from the door, three more pairs of feet appeared. There were now six infected dead in the garage with him.
The Chief never doubted he could handle six infected dead, but he knew that somewhere there was a living person who had let them into the garage with him. He began working his way back toward the door that he had used to enter the garage, but he was also sure the way he would do it if he was the guard would be to cover that door. The Chief didn’t have a choice
. The infected were between him and the door to the house, and even if he made it by them, he didn’t know what would be waiting for him inside. At least he felt like he should only be faced with one guard outside, but he also was worried about getting shot.
While the Chief was weighing his options, the guard that had opened the door to allow the infected to enter the garage started circling the front of the house. He knew that someone had taken out at least two of his three friends, and it wasn’t long before he was in a position where he could see the greasy guy that had been guarding the side door to the garage. It was no surprise to him that someone had taken out that idiot, but there was nothing to indicate how many people had gotten by him.
He decided to wait for the meatheads to do their job and flush out whoever was inside the garage. If the intruders didn’t come back out through the side door, he knew they would get a nasty surprise if they tried to go in through the house. He had left at least twelve more meatheads trapped inside the first room, and there were almost as many on the other side of every adjoining door. Whoever was in there would have to deal with about thirty sets of snapping teeth.
The door moved just enough for him to know someone was going to come out. Whoever it was, they were being careful, so they must have guessed the door was being covered by now. The small, dark gap got just a little wider, so he raised his rifle and sighted on the dark line that grew slowly as the door opened. The guard knew it wasn’t likely that someone would come out standing upright, so he waited patiently for the intruder to show himself. Whoever it was, they had to be dangerous if they had taken out three guards.
The Chief didn’t want to just stick his head outside as he eased the door open, but he was running out of options. He had considered opening the door and then sliding under the car parked closest to the door, hoping the infected would be attracted to the daylight outside. When he studied the car he was hiding behind, he decided he didn’t have the time to jack up the car and slide under it. The car hugged the ground so closely he doubted that a kid could slide under it. He also knew that whoever was waiting out there, if there was anyone at all, they might be fooled into shooting one of the infected, but not all of them.
So far the infected hadn’t noticed the door being opened, but the Chief knew they would see it move when he went out, so he couldn’t take his time. He would just have to hope for luck to be on his side as he made a dash for cover. He slipped his fingers back around the lower part of the door and started to pull it open. He heard the infected begin to groan when they saw the shaft of light become wider.
Outside the guard could just make out the shape of someone in the door. As he expected, the shape was lower than a standing position, so he lowered his sights until he was sure he was targeting the head, and his finger began to squeeze the trigger.
He didn’t understand what he was feeling. He only knew that his finger wasn’t squeezing the trigger the way it should. As a matter of fact, for a split second he couldn’t feel the rifle in his hands, and his arms looked like they belonged to someone else because he couldn’t feel them at all. He didn’t know that’s what it feels like when your spinal cord is severed at the neck, and he didn’t know that a knife had gone through his neck until it poked out in front. Then he didn’t know anything at all.
Kathy pulled the blade back out of the man’s neck and then reinserted it a few inches higher. She didn’t know if the Chief would come out shooting, so she ducked down and waited. Only a split second later he dove from the door and rolled into hiding behind a tree. It was fast, but she knew it wouldn’t have been fast enough, and he didn’t have time to pull the door shut behind him.
The first of the infected dead came through the door with the others strung out in a line behind it. Kathy had position and the right angle to the Chief that made her believe he would have time to think before he pulled a trigger, so she calmly step from her hiding place with her machete in clear view.
The Chief had been trained to detect different types of movement. There was darting movement and careful, deliberate movement. It was Kathy’s careful deliberate movement that gave him the time to think before reacting, and instead of raising the rifle he had acquired in her direction, he pulled out his own knife and moved along with her toward the door.
Kathy used her machete to slice the back of the first infected’s leg right at the knee. It fell over on its side and would be no concern until the rest were dealt with. She let her arm swing with a forehand as soon as it had passed through the leg, and the blade got the second one just below the chin. It fell over backward with the head hanging between its shoulder blades. The Chief stepped in from her right side and used his knife to end the miserable existence of each infected dead as Kathy moved forward. It was over in a matter of seconds.
“Do you know how glad I am to see you?” he said.
“I can imagine,” she said. “How did you wind up in there with those things and a live one out here waiting for you?”
The Chief looked over at the bushes where Kathy had emerged and saw the body of a man, and he was stretched out on top of a scoped hunting rifle.
“I guess I was having a bad day,” said the Chief, “and from the looks of things, it was just about to get a lot worse. I’ll tell you the story when we get a chance to debrief, but for now I think we need to find a safe spot to hide and figure out our next move. Something isn’t right, and I’m beginning to get an idea of what it might be.”
“Give me the highlights, Chief.”
He considered for a moment and knew she was right. What had been tickling at the back of his brain was a warning, and she was better off knowing what it was.
“The shelters always have a plan for the surface, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “The shelter on Mud Island has a dock with a houseboat, Fort Sumter has the fort, Guntersville has a village above it…”
Kathy trailed off as the realization came to her. Ambassadors Island had two dozen houses on the surface above the shelter, and they were unprotected by the walls of a fort or the village above the Guntersville shelter. The shelter on the oil rig had the entire Gulf of Mexico around it, and it was hard as hell to climb even if someone reached it by boat. The Mud Island shelter had a moat on one side that was deep, and the current was so swift that anything that walked into it got sucked out to sea through the southern exit.
From where the Chief and Kathy were standing, they could see there was one road on Ambassadors Island. It ran in a long, ragged oval from one end of the island to the other as it circled past incredibly large and beautiful homes. Both of them wondered what kept the island from being overrun with people who had survived the infection.
“Is there another layer of protection?” asked Kathy.
“There must be, and whatever it is, the people who control this place must know about it if they can go off and leave so few people to guard it.”
“Where did the people go, and that story you were going to tell me later, Chief, could it have anything to do with another layer of protection? That guy was drawing a bead on you, so he must’ve known you were stuck in there with the infected, and that means he knew where you were going to come out.”
The Chief ran a hand across his beard and turned in a circle taking in the view.
Kathy watched him and asked, “Looking for a realtor’s phone number?”
“Cute,” he said. “What do you want to bet every house is occupied by infected dead except the ones where the goons live who control the island?”
Kathy said, “Do the math. Six or ten infected in each house, maybe more depending on how many they caught. At least twenty houses filled with them so anyone who sneaks onto the island gets a nasty surprise. Everywhere a survivor goes, they run into teeth. There are probably between one fifty and two hundred infected inside the houses.”
The Chief said, “Look at the driveways. Almost every car is outside. I’m going to bet the houses the current residents occupy have the cars inside the garages, b
ut they keep some infected in rooms attached to the garages just in case someone gets inside. The rest of the houses probably have the garages packed with the infected.”
Kathy said, “Okay, my estimate might be low. We could be on an island with about three to four hundred infected dead?”
“Or more,” said the Chief.
“We need to move fast, Chief, but I have a problem with our plan.”
The Chief didn’t ask. He just waited for Kathy to tell him.
“So what if we get inside the shelter? So what if we get lucky and actually locate Hampton? If we’re still inside when those people get back, how are we getting back to the plane to go collect Hampton? I know this shelter is going to have escape hatches, but just like Fort Sumter, I’ll bet they pop up right in the middle of a garage packed with the infected.”
It wasn’t like Kathy to whine or even sound negative, but the Chief knew she was right.
“You left off the part about communicating with Hampton. This shelter is supposed to be really equipped with the best technology, but I doubt Hampton got the memo. There’s no way to know what he’s able to do. Hell, he might be able to hear us but not be able to answer, or we might hear him broadcasting, but he might not be able to hear our answer. In other words, we have to try.”
Kathy was stuck for a moment. She might have been right about what she said, but the Chief was right, too. If she had whined as much back when the infected first swept across Charleston, thousands of people would not have even made it as far as they did. Because of her efforts on that first day, thousands had lived, and it was all because she had to at least try.
“Chief, the next time I start crying like a baby, please spank me.”
He looked like he was going to say something but thought better of it. She saw the pause and said, “Don’t say it.”
