by Howard, Bob
Then she told them the really good news. There were enough rooms for all of the families with some vacancies left over. She said it was inevitable that their children would grow up in the shelter. There would be marriages, births, and unfortunately deaths, but if they needed the room to expand, it would be available.
“That brings me to the issue of jobs. I’ve already picked my police force. They are people who have experience in the military and security on the cruise ship. We’ll need people to cook, clean, and to operate the critical systems, such as water and electricity. We definitely need to know if anyone has had even basic first aid training so we can set up a hospital.”
“You may have noticed there are stores around the shelter. The builders wanted to create an illusion of normalcy, and we would be crazy to ignore the concept. As a matter of fact, it will keep us from going crazy. I’ll meet with the leaders of the different groups after our friends leave, and we’ll discuss implementation of a system of currency.”
“Now, if there is anyone who would like to leave, please let me know quickly. Our hosts will be departing within the hour. Once the doors are closed behind them, they won’t be opened again. As for those of you who already plan to stay, dinner is served.”
It started with some cheers and random applause, but it spread quickly, and it was aimed at the Mud Island group. They had been skeptical when they had first entered the vault door, but for the first time in a long time, they felt safe. The applause increased when the kitchen doors opened and group members who had volunteered to cook the first meal began setting up a buffet.
“Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention, please?”
The Chief was at the podium with his hand raised, and the room gave him the same respect they showed Iris.
“I know some of you are still skeptical, but trust me. This is all real. You will be safe here, and you would not be safe out there. Now, while your friends are setting up the food, Iris has agreed that it wouldn’t hurt if each of you had one drink at the bar.”
It was only one drink, but it would be the first in a long time any of them had enjoyed without worrying about being attacked, and every adult that could reach the bar was trying to do so. It was good natured, though, and the gratitude was obvious.
“Will you be staying for supper, Chief?” asked Iris.
Kathy, Hampton, and Colleen came up to join them.
“I’m afraid not, Iris. The winds are unpredictable, so we’re going to go while we can. We did a good thing when we decided to take a leap of faith and give you the shelter. It will keep you alive, and it will give us one more outpost of humanity for when we’re ready to start taking the world back.”
“Even without the radiation, do you think we are ever going to see that day, Chief? Do you have a plan?”
“The Chief always has a plan,” said Kathy. “As a matter of fact, he most likely has one or two that he hasn’t shared with me yet.”
The Chief tried to look innocent, something he could never quite accomplish, but it was one of his endearing qualities.
“Winter,” he said. “I think we can at least chip away at the number of infected dead by traveling to frozen climates and eliminating as many as we can. They have to be easy to kill when they’re frozen, but that’s a plan for another time.”
Kathy rolled her eyes.
“Did you just say that?” she asked.
“Say what?”
“Chip away. You said we can chip away at the number. We’re going to use ice picks, too. Right?”
The Chief was trying to look innocent again, but was having a hard time hiding his grin.
Iris came to his rescue by asking if they had everything they needed for the trip back, and he told her they didn’t need much, but they wanted to check in with the others back at Mud Island before leaving. They needed to know what their approach needed to be if the conditions on Mud Island were still “unfriendly”.
“There’s another thing I don’t understand,” said Iris. “How do you plan to get from one end of Ambassadors Island to the other? The place is literally crawling with the infected.”
“You didn’t tell her about the emergency exits?”
Kathy looked a bit sheepish. She had been so caught up with explaining the high tech gear that she had forgotten to tell her that every shelter had back doors.
“Iris, if you check the floor plans for the shelter, you’ll find that there are several ways to leave besides the main vault door,” said the Chief. “One of the exits is located in the middle of a small copse of trees at the southern tip of Ambassadors Island. Kathy and I actually hid in those trees when we first arrived. From what I heard talking to Hampton, he and Colleen hid there, too. That’s the exit we’ll use to leave.”
Kathy added, “There are other exits. Several are located among the houses, and some are inside the houses. I don’t expect those will do you much good. One of the best exits to keep in mind besides the one that we’re going to use is one that comes out on the mainland not far from the end of the bridge. When the day comes to go back outside, that’s going to be one of your best bets. You can check the area around each exit using remote controlled cameras before you go outside.”
“I imagine the emergency exits will be low on our priority list once the radiation begins to fall,” said Iris, “but I’m not complaining. You saved our lives, so you have friends and allies forever. When the time comes to fight back, we’ll be ready.”
******
The walk to the exit from the Ambassadors Island shelter seemed to be over in no time, even though the foursome exchanged handshakes and waves with the new occupants almost every step of the way. They had made a quick stop at the control center and radioed the shelter at Mud Island. The news on their end still wasn’t so good. The squatters were converting the moat into a marina, and there was a tent city on the beach where Captain Miller’s men had camped. They decided they would have to talk through a plan on the way back because they needed to get out of the area soon.
Before long they were at a cylindrical stairwell that was encased by the same shiny alloy they had seen in the other shelters. It didn’t look like you could scratch it with a chainsaw. The bottom of the stairwell had a coded door that slid silently out of the way when the Chief punched in the combination.
The surface was about four stories above them, and when they opened the hatch they found it was right near the gear they had left behind before they had slipped into the water and crossed over to the island.
The Chief looked through the trees, and he saw they had left it a real mess. There were infected dead everywhere, and some were walking dangerously close to the edges of docks.
“Heads up, everyone. The sides of this little island are too steep for the infected to climb, but that sandbar behind the island is practically a sidewalk. Keep an eye out for infected that are already in the water.”
Even though they hadn’t been inside the shelter for long, it felt unreal to be back outside where the real dangers were. The three infected that had been inside the shelter had been identified by shelter records as a minimum maintenance crew hired by the builder. How they had become infected would remain a secret forever, but it felt different knowing who they were and that there were no more inside. Outside there were hundreds of them within shouting distance, but they were all unknowns. They were all hostile with only one thing in mind.
When they came out of the trees onto the sandbar, the Chief saw they were right to be worried about the infected in the water. There were more tracks in the soft sand than there should have been, and their raft was gone. Survivors may have discovered it and taken it for themselves, but it seemed more likely that it had been bumped by infected dead until it slid into the water and drifted away on the mild current.
“I never asked you two, but how did you get to Ambassadors Island in the first place? Please tell me you have a boat around here somewhere,” said the Chief.
Colleen turned and pointed back the wa
y they had come.
“First house on the left, Chief. Tied to a dock.”
He studied her expression for a minute then looked at Kathy.
“Oh, no. She’s another Jean.”
Kathy said, “You guys just rode right up to the island and knocked on the door?”
Before they could answer she said, “Never mind, but you guys won’t believe it when we tell you how lucky you were. So, Chief, which one of us is going for a swim?”
The Chief was already starting to walk out on the sandbar. He looked back at Kathy and said, “Unless you’ve suddenly learned how to fly a plane, I think I should go get it. I’ll pick you guys up in a few minutes, but just to be on the safe side, everyone keep your rifles ready and your eyes on the water as I swim. I don’t really want to know if it’s as bad on the bottom of the lake as I think it is.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mercy Mission Ship
While Ed Jackson was standing inside a video game store in Surfside, South Carolina watching the world unravel before his eyes, people across the world were trying to piece together bits of information about what was happening to them. Ed was watching the parking lot of a fast food restaurant where people were attacking other people and biting them. For no apparent reason, people were trying to kill each other, while some were just trying to get away.
The scene shifted from the police trying to control a handful of people who looked more like rabid animals than people, to a scene of rescue. Emergency Medical Technicians who responded to the scene became victims as they tried to help the injured. When it started, there was far less blood on the ground than when it ended. The police were forced to shoot the rabid attackers because they wouldn’t stop. As a matter of fact, it became obvious to everyone that they wouldn’t stay on the ground until they were shot in the head.
The Atlantic Spirit was docked at the Charleston, South Carolina cruise ship terminal and was taking aboard supplies along with the scheduled passengers. Chief Barnes was going about his routine duties supervising several assignments at the same time. Being the senior enlisted crew member carried more responsibility than any officer on board had to shoulder, but the Chief had the shoulders for it. He stood over six and a half feet tall, and was nothing but solid muscle. He was a former Navy SEAL, and he had seen plenty of things in his life that the average person would never see, but from his vantage point on a high deck of the Atlantic Spirit, even he was surprised by the chaos he was watching through binoculars.
The streets of the beautiful old city of Charleston were foreign to him as he watched families dragged to the ground by crowds of people who appeared to be dead themselves. He had seen so much in his life that he was able to understand, no matter how brutal it was, but his mind could not come up with an answer for what he was seeing. They were slow. They moved in groups that seemed to grow in size by the minute. They grabbed anyone who was trying to get away from them and sank their teeth into the flesh of their captives. The Chief couldn’t make sense of it, and he couldn’t hear the screams of the people he was watching, but he could hear closer screams that fit perfectly with what he was seeing at a distance.
It was happening everywhere he looked, and when he looked down toward the parking area of the cruise ship terminal, he saw a police officer who had lost her hat but was running ahead of a group of men pointing at cars and trucks. They were making a blockade along the end of the dock where it met the shoreline, and they were doing a good job of stopping the big groups of the slow moving attackers that were trying to reach the terminal. Below him, Chief Barnes could see that the pier was standing room only as passengers tried to board quickly. None of it made sense.
The medical crew of the Atlantic Spirit was at the bottom of the loading ramp checking for passengers who had been bitten. They had been quick to assess the situation, and they didn’t know why, but they knew once you were bitten you were definitely going to die. They had been given orders by a ship’s doctor who was noticeably absent from the frantic crowd in the medical tent. When asked by one bite victim if there was a doctor on board the ship, a nurse wearing a name tag on her blue scrubs that had JEAN engraved on it almost said no, but she told the worried person she would try to get the doctor to come to the tent. She knew it would be a cold day in hell before he let himself get close to a real illness.
Jean was trying to understand why people were being bitten, but she didn’t have the time to give it much thought. She had been told that the police were trying to blockade the terminal so they could finish boarding and get underway, but it was going to be close.
Not far north of where Ed stood in the video store watching people tear into other people with their teeth while the police were shooting them, Tom and his young daughter Molly had started trying to figure out what to do. Stuck in a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, they seemed only to be able to sit and watch the news on TV as they were told first to go to hospitals if they were bitten, then they were told to stay home. Staying home was fine with Tom, but they didn’t have any supplies. The little refrigerator in their room had a few bottles of water and soda, but the only thing they had plenty of was a supply of tiny bottles of liquor.
Almost as far to the south of Ed Jackson, Chris Hampton watched the news reports and called friends. Georgetown, South Carolina seemed like the perfect place to stay put. Its location on the coast made it a place of refuge for its citizens because they could isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Hampton began organizing friends to close off and defend Georgetown from what he knew was coming. What amazed him the most was the people who left to find relatives up and down the coast. Some headed for Charleston, and some headed for Myrtle Beach or points in between. What worried Hampton the most was the number of people who got into Georgetown before they were able to close the bridges and roads. Any of them could be carrying the infection into their town.
Across the Atlantic along the coast of Africa, a Mercy Mission ship had just left the country of Cameroon. At over sixteen thousand tons and room for a crew of four hundred and fifty, it was the largest civilian hospital ship in the world, and it had been docked at the port of Douala when the attacks began.
For the last year the ship and its volunteer crew of doctors and nurses had been providing medical care to small villages and towns that otherwise would never receive such care. The ship carried an array of vehicles that could transport the medical services to the villages, and when necessary they could bring the villagers back to the ship for treatment and even surgery. The surgical staff was made up of some of the best doctors in the world, and the facilities were modern and well stocked.
When the first reports were radioed in to the ship, the crew didn’t know what to believe. In a land where superstition was more prevalent than a first grade education, they were highly skeptical about the dead coming back to life. The crew believed at least for a short time that the people of Cameroon thought the Mercy Mission ship doctors were resurrecting the dead. They thought that local folklore was just making people believe they could bring the dead back to life.
Doula was the largest city in Cameroon with a population of over two million people, and the crowded streets were ripe for spreading the infection quickly. The first cases appeared in the quarantine areas of the Mercy Mission ship. The patients had been brought back to the ship for treatment because nothing the doctors and nurses did for them brought down their raging fevers. Thinking it might be some form of Ebola they hadn’t seen before, they were quickly quarantined and restrained.
With a large part of the medical staff still ashore, the Mercy Mission ship had prepared for departure after receiving increasingly alarming reports about the attacks throughout the city. They waited as long as they could and were grateful every time they saw another team arrive at the dock, but it quickly became a dangerous place for them to be. Bitten, sick, dying, and the living were all starting to flood the port, so the Mercy Mission ship had to leave before everyone had returned. They were grief stricken by the loss of
each person, but they couldn’t wait any longer. A head count revealed they had lost thirty of their young field doctors and nurses.
Doctor Sellers had been traveling through third world countries giving free medical care for over twenty years, and as the large blue and white Mercy Mission ship drifted away from the dock, he was staggered by the desperation of the people who were jumping into the water, but he was even more amazed by the restrained patients in the quarantine areas.
He was standing by an open door that faced the dock. It looked like the dock was moving away from the ship, but his eyes were glued to the patients who had died and then began trying to pull free from their restraints. One of the restrained patients was a young nurse who had instinctively rushed to help the first of the dead when she thought he had shown signs of recovery. The man had bitten her savagely on the arm as if he was trying to eat her. Doctor Sellers hadn’t seen anything like it in all of his years in medicine.
A Canadian by birth, Doctor Sellers had moved to America to study medicine, but it had never been about the money. It had always been about a higher calling to heal the sick. Now he was watching people die without knowing the cause, and then he was seeing them come back as incoherent cannibals. For the first time in his career, he felt totally helpless.
His eyes were momentarily pulled from the beds to the screaming crowds on the docks. A small military vessel was coasting between the Mercy Mission ship and dock, and the armed soldiers were trying to shoot at the people who were biting the ones who were trying to get away. Doctor Sellers thought about the number of people they had saved in the last year and wondered if he had already seen a larger number of people die in just this one day.
A ship wide announcement pulled him from his thoughts. All medical staff members were to meet in the large conference room to discuss their plans. There was something in the summons about a pandemic, which was the one thing that scared all doctors and nurses who dealt with infectious diseases. He left the quarantine area and pulled off his mask and gloves.
