by Howard, Bob
The Chief drew a sigh of relief. Ten hours was better than he had hoped for, and the hurricane was also going to bring enough rain into the area to force the fallout to the ground faster. The water table was in serious trouble, and fishing would be a bad idea, but the fallout itself would be spread out over a smaller area.
The Chief typed back to all of them, “Everyone is safe. We copy your message. What is the radiation level in your areas?”
He was relieved to see the answer, “Negligible.” The word appeared on both screens.
The Chief had to know one more thing, and that was what kind of threats could they expect in the area of Mud Island. He wasn’t worried about Fort Sumter because of the sizable force of soldiers under the command of Captain Miller, but if they couldn’t land the plane safely near Mud Island, they would have to be guests at Fort Sumter until they figured out what to do about the threat.
He typed the message, “Surface threat assessment for Mud Island approach.”
The response was not what he hoped for. It just said, “Unfriendly.”
He answered, “Surface assessment for alternate site.”
Fort Sumter responded, “Under control.”
The Chief knew Captain Miller would send men topside to clear the area within the next six hours. He would probably find that someone else had set up an armed camp inside the fort and on board the Cormorant, but his well trained men would deal with both. There had been far less activity in the Charleston harbor since the fallout began. Survivors had become sick and died, while the population of the infected dead flourished.
Another message came from Fort Sumter that the Chief didn’t expect.
“Yorktown questionable for approach.”
The Chief took that to mean it would be safer to approach Fort Sumter from the south, and that wouldn’t be a problem. He just had to figure out what they were going to do about whatever it was that was happening on Mud Island.
******
Kathy and Colleen were making fast progress through the second level of the shelter. It was far more functional than the first level which was geared more towards day time activities and socializing.
They found the living quarters, and they were as well furnished as the rooms had been at Fort Sumter. They were obviously intended for people who were used to living in luxury. Each room had the latest in technology, from the entertainment systems to the computers. Kathy powered on a computer and found they were on a wireless network, and she was shocked when it said she had an Internet connection.
A voice from a speaker near the computer said, “Shut it down, Kathy. IP addresses can still be traced to approximate locations.”
The Chief had seen his own terminal register the IP address as active as soon as Kathy had turned it on. He saw it disconnect, but there was a record that was still displaying that it had come from a location north of Charlotte. What made him feel good about the discovery was the rest of the display. The list had hundreds of locations on it, which meant other survivors had managed to connect to the satellites that still orbited the Earth.
Then came the realization that deflated his discovery. There were plenty of automated signals being sent over a network that was slowly dying. He checked the logs of previous activity and saw they were decreasing in number every day.
Colleen stuck her head through the door of a nearby room and called out to Kathy, “There’s hot water in the bathrooms.”
Kathy had to smile despite herself. She had been spoiled by what they had on Mud Island, but a hot bath or shower had been a rarity for Colleen.
“Okay, you have fifteen minutes. I’ll stand guard for you and give you some answers to your questions at the same time.”
She didn’t have to say it twice. Hampton saw Colleen on a monitor running across a bedroom shedding clothes as she ran. At first he was confused, but then he heard the sound of the water and saw the steam coming through the door.
Kathy got comfortable on a vanity next to a sink and began telling the story of the Mud Island group. She had to give the highlights, but she explained enough in fifteen minutes for Colleen to understand why Hampton thought so highly of them. She updated her on the status of the Oconee Nuclear Plant and told her the Chief was trying to find out how much time they had. When it came to the loss of Allison, she gave the version Tom had been given. Allison died in the plane crash, not after bing bitten by an infected dead the Chief had missed.
When the shower turned off, Colleen only asked Kathy one question.
“Aside from rescuing Hampton, which I’m glad you did, could you tell me again why you guys keep leaving your shelter?”
Kathy said, “Everyone always asks that, but it isn’t enough to just survive. We’ve had to leave to try to fix problems, but the big picture is the shelters. We have to find them, secure them, and then try to populate them. As far as we can tell, the guy in the Gulf of Mexico is the only other shelter builder to survive besides Doctor Bus.”
“And the shelter built by Doctor Bus is empty?” asked Colleen.
“At the time we made the decision to all move to Mud Island together, it was for practical reasons, and there wasn’t a grand plan. That all changed when we secured Fort Sumter and gave it to the US Army,” said Kathy.
Colleen was beginning to see why Hampton wanted to be part of the group with Kathy and the Chief. She was a bit relieved when she heard the story about Tom and Molly joining the group because she had wondered if Hampton had a thing for Kathy. She felt strangely more saddened for the Chief about Allison being killed than for Allison herself, but Colleen knew it was because she wanted Allison out of the way so Kathy could be with Tom.
Hampton kept himself busy at his console by surfing all of the camera views throughout the shelter. It was a convenient way to explore without having to take any risks, and it was faster. He would have preferred to be seeing it for himself, but he had to stand guard for the Chief as he did the things he had to do.
The Chief had exchanged a few more discreet texts with the other shelters about their plans to leave Ambassadors Island, but he also wanted to spend some time reviewing the inventory of the shelter. He hadn’t discovered anything they didn’t have at Mud Island or Fort Sumter with the exception of some really good shortwave equipment. They would need to take that with them to improve their communications.
He also found that there had really been what he would have needed to locate Hampton if they had not been found by him first. There was a closed circuit camera network around Lake Norman that would give anyone a strategic advantage. He flipped from one screen to the next and found that there were signal boosters everywhere. They were battery powered, so they wouldn’t last forever, but apparently there had been very little drainage from the batteries because they had been powered off.
One camera gave him a good view of I-77 where it crossed Lake Norman on a bridge. It was still heavily congested with the infected dead, and it looked like it had been a real battle. The sloped sides of the interstate were covered with bodies, many that were still moving.
“When we get a chance, Hampton, I’d like to hear more about what you guys were trying to accomplish when you met the infected dead horde head on.”
“It wasn’t our finest hour,” said Hampton, “but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Well, like I said, I want the details when we get time. What worked? Why didn’t it work? I have to admit, I’ve wondered if they could be eliminated by force.”
Hampton sighed and said, “At this point, I don’t know how to beat them except one on one.”
“I do have one idea,” answered the Chief, “but we’re in the wrong part of the country to try it.”
“I’m all ears, Chief. We lost a lot of people up on the interstate. Colleen and I saw our chance to break away from the group and took it. I think we saw the writing on the wall a long time before everyone else because we were near the back. The people up front didn’t stand a chance.”
“Winter is
a long way off,” the Chief began, “but maybe we can use the time to get ready. When it freezes, we need to be in position to go hunting.”
“Do they freeze?” asked Hampton.
“I don’t really know. I know it got cold outside our shelter, but we just hunkered down and kept warm. Now that we have a US Army contingent at Fort Sumter, we can go hunting when it gets cold. I figure we can travel north to a colder climate, dispose of a few thousand frozen infected dead, and travel back to our shelters before it gets warm again. Wash, rinse, and repeat the following winter. In between cold seasons we can carefully eliminate the infected around Charleston from a distance with snipers.”
“It sounds like a good plan,” said Hampton, “but what about all the renegades? They seem to be everywhere, and face it, they seem to be a supply source for the infected. We’ve both added to their numbers in the last few days.”
The Chief had to admit, every time they ran into renegade groups, they seemed to leave behind more infected dead. They would need to find a way to negotiate with survivor groups that were willing to cooperate. Some of them were families that were just trying to make it another day. The problem was that they seemed to be outnumbered by the misfits who were enjoying this new world that had less rules.
Hampton thought he saw a shadow in the corner of a room monitor that wasn’t there before, but he wasn’t sure. It was the room next door to the one where Colleen was in the bathroom. He imagined Kathy was standing guard for Colleen, but the cameras didn’t show the insides of the bathrooms.
“Chief, I think something is in the living quarters with the women.”
The Chief was at his side by the time the last word was out of his mouth. They both saw the shadow move, and then an infected dead came into view, followed by two more.
“We’ll never get there in time,” said the Chief. “We have to trust Kathy, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to know they’re coming.”
The Chief tapped the microphone twice, and he was rewarded with the smartest thing Kathy could do. He had to laugh as she gently shut the door and locked it.
“Let’s get down there, Hampton. Watch for the arrows at the turns, and close any open doors we have to pass. I don’t want anything coming out behind us.”
They hurried through the door Kathy had used and started following the arrows to the living quarters. As the Chief had expected, Kathy had made good time checking the rooms, so they had a long way to go. She apparently had seen enough rooms in enough shelters that she didn’t find things as interesting as Colleen would.
They made five turns and closed dozens of doors before they came to the room where they had seen the infected dead on camera. They were up ahead in the corridor and being drawn toward the sounds of Kathy and Colleen one door down, but when Kathy had shut the bathroom door, she and Colleen had both become as still and quiet as possible. When the room went quiet, the infected kept moving toward the door of their room, but they did not move with the same interest they would normally have shown.
“Save your bullets, Hampton. There may be more, and we’d rather not give away our location.”
Three infected dead were no match for the Chief. It reminded him of the night he had to clear a grocery store in downtown Charleston. He had encountered groups of infected in the aisles, and it was easy to make them fall all over each other. This time wasn’t much different. He gave the first one a hard shove back into the other two, and the three went down like bowling pins. It was always that way with the Chief, and Hampton took notes.
The Chief stepped into the pile up and used a long knife to finish each of them. Then he grabbed them by the ankles and dragged them back into the room. When he pulled the door shut, he used his knife to cut a big X on the door.
Hampton went cautiously into the next room and tapped on the bathroom door. The door opened immediately, but Kathy was poised to strike if necessary. Colleen was dressed and standing off to one side with her knife in case she was needed.
“What happened?” asked Kathy.
“The room next door had three unexpected guests,” said Hampton.
“But we looked in that room,” said Colleen.
The women looked at each other as if to confirm what they were both thinking, and they shared a look of disbelief. Kathy was particularly disturbed because she felt like she could have gotten them killed, but Colleen felt guilty because she had asked for a few minutes of luxury.
They were just about to say something else when the Chief stuck his head in the door.
“No time to worry about what could have happened, ladies. We need to check out the rest of this place and begin working our way back to the plane. We have less than ten hours, but eight is our goal. We’ll do it as a group. There’s an inventory of the entire shelter on the main computer. I found some flash drives and copied it all, so we won’t have to inspect it all like we did at Fort Sumter. All we’re going to do is check all of the rooms for either survivors or infected. If it’s empty, let’s grab the radio gear and head for the plane.”
The shelter was large, but they were done in an hour. They had moved quickly and without much talking, but they were deadly serious. The only time they slowed down was when they came to the armory. Everyone restocked their personal ammunition, and each of them added at least one handgun.
They still had eight hours left when they returned to the control room with MRE’s they had found in a kitchen, and they settled in for a quick meal. It had been a long day, and they hadn’t given much thought to food until they were done searching the shelter. Each of them had something different, and there were the usual jokes about how closely they resembled something other than what the name was.
Kathy tasted hers and made the observation that whatever it was made of, it wasn’t real meat. Then she followed with a second observation that she was going to pretend it was real meat. Otherwise she would keep wondering what it was made of.
The Chief was already opening his second container of sweet and sour chicken when a chime sounded. It was one simple note, soft and clear. They all looked at each other trying to decide where the sound had come from.
“Anyone know where that came from?” asked Kathy.
Colleen pointed with her fork at the main console where the Chief had been talking into the microphone. She was sitting closest to it, so it seemed to come from behind her. The computer monitor had its back to them, so they didn’t see the screen had become illuminated, and a camera view of the outside had activated. The Chief walked around her and looked at it.
“It seems Ambassador Island has visitors, and the current occupants are expressing their desire to have them over for lunch,” he said.
“That’s gross, Chief,” said Kathy, but she had a hard time not laughing. She walked around to get a look at what he was seeing.
The view on the screen was back toward the mainland, and there was a line of men and women with rifles carefully taking aim at the infected dead that had managed to stay on the road without falling into the water. The men and women fired on a command from a tall woman who raised her hand and then let it drop. Every shot hit its mark, and the crowd of infected was far smaller. The arm went up again, and when it dropped, so did the infected dead.
“Gee Chief, if I didn’t know better, I would say that was the female version of you,” said Kathy. “She’s better looking, though.”
The Chief gave her a sideways look that made her focus on her simulated meat again, but she loved the fact that she got him to react at all.
The Chief said, “I’m going to tell her you said she has a beard.”
Kathy faked a shocked expression, and then she finally laughed out loud.
“Look how well organized they are,” said Hampton. He and Colleen had moved to where they could both see the monitor. As he said it, another volley of shots dropped more of the infected, but this time the shooters stood up and advanced together.
Within minutes the bridge was clear, and the shooters were taking aim at the infe
cted dead that were inside the open gates. The Chief rotated a camera located on the mainland behind the firing line, and he got a closer look at the woman who was leading the assault on Ambassadors Island. She wasn’t muscular, but she had a tall, wiry frame that made her athletic enough for track and field or basketball. Her silver hair was long and seemed to shine in the sunlight. He had to admit, he found her to be attractive.
It was her demeanor that really set her apart from the ordinary, and the fact that she was commanding such a well organized group made her even more different. He watched as she advanced with her firing line, and he saw there was a small smile on her face.
Then she did something even more extraordinary. She had the firing line retreat to their original spot. They waited there until the infected dead once again came out through the gates and filled the bridge. Then they went back to work.
Kathy looked over at the Chief and saw him watching the woman closely. He had to be attracted to her, but she knew him well enough to know something else was happening. She could always tell when he was planning something.
The Chief felt her eyes on him and looked her way. He definitely had something going on if he could manage to do it. He motioned to her to join him off in one corner of the room. They had been together long enough that he trusted her opinion. If she said no to his plan, he would listen.
“How can we get her attention without getting shot?”
“I knew it. You’re thinking of giving her the shelter, aren’t you?”
He looked into Kathy’s eyes and said, “It’s a risk, but in ten hours or so they’re all going to die. There’s something different about them. She reminds me of you and even me, both rolled up into one. They could keep clearing the island, and in an hour or so the outside areas will be free of the infected, but then they would have to start working on almost two dozen houses packed with those things. They would probably stop for the night, set guards, and start dying when the fallout arrives.”
