Billy coughed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. With so many people in such proximity for a week, everyone was sharing the same mutated cold back and forth. The least common denominator in the fort was the sound of coughing. Everyone had one of their very own.
Wyatt closed his laptop and sighed. “Well that’s it, battery exhausted.”
Without electricity of any kind, the inhabitants of the stronghold were forced to severe the last ties to their computers, MP3s, and other electric doodads. With the exception of the occasional flashlight that still cut through the dark hallways and rooms of the fort, one would think that they were back in the 1830’s when the fort was brand new.
“I can plug it up on the Fooly Involved when we go out fishing tomorrow.”
“That will be awesome.”
“If you want, we can sleep on the boat tonight.”
Wyatt looked away and chewed his lips. “I can stay here. I volunteered to help Mack with the signs.”
Cut off from the rest of the world, the redhead and a few of the other more restless refugees had come up with a plan to erect signs made out of rocks along the top of the fort’s casemates. Rumors were floating around that the Depplin may have still been in the air and was trying to find its way back. The rumors grew to the extent that Reynolds and Doug had made contact with other communities and they were coming to save the day. How can you argue with wild, completely implausible rumors?
“Then I will stay with you. Cat can take the boat out with her friends. I’m sure they would want to get away from here for a little while,” Billy said, peeling shrimp with dirty hands.
She smiled and spoke for the first time that day. “What do you want me to go fishing for?”
“Just troll due south of here in a figure-eight for a couple hours. Throw some spoons and ballyhoo out. Keep the rpms low so you do not use a lot of fuel,” he said.
The thought that he might have to use the 36-foot Hatteras to evacuate his family and a dozen others to Pascagoula was never far from his mind. When the wall fell, more than 200 boats had moored in the shallow water of Navy Cove beside Fort Morgan. That was five days ago and at sunrise on each of those passing days the flotilla was smaller.
It seemed that those who wanted to leave were too ashamed to do it during the day, but as soon as the sun set, engines started and navigational lights would slowly depart the cove. Jarvis, his cutter’s machineguns lost when the wall fell, did not even challenge them anymore.
“Okay, I’ll see who wants to go. We can leave out tonight and be back in the morning. If nothing else it would be worth it just to get to use the head on the boat, the rats are getting worse in the latrine,” Cat said as she hugged Billy and walked off.
He reached out and mussed Wyatt’s shaggy hair. “Well, let’s go work on those signs, eh?”
The boy pushed his paper plate away, packed up his laptop, and fell in step behind Billy. They climbed the narrow staircase forty steps to the top of the casemates and walked out over the surrounding wall of the fort. He saw Theriot and his two marines were standing with binoculars, Civil War-era muskets, and walkie-talkies. Billy assumed they were posted more for appearance’s sake than for anything else.
After falling back to Fort Morgan, their supply of ammunition exhausted, the survivors of the militia took to fighting with one of the few weapons left: vintage and reproduction black powder muzzleloaders. Some were from the fort’s museum; civil war reenactors and primitive deer hunters had used others. Soft lead fishing weights, toothpaste tube liners, pewter figurines, and spools of soldering wire had been melted down in iron skillets over the fire in the fort’s hot shot furnace. A truckload of lead ballast from the old wreck of the schooner Rachel on the beach east of the fort made up the difference. The molten lead was cast into molds the same caliber as the rifles.
They saw a hundred other refugees wandering up and down the grass-covered wall top, doing the most popular new hobby in town. Billy stopped and looked out towards Gulf Shores, 30-feet below him, stretching for as far as you could see, was hundreds of acres of standing room-only zombies, gyrating and screaming at the people above.
Mack was there already and reached out to hold his hand as they watched the scene below.
««—»»
Billy walked alone through the passages of the fort’s powder magazine. Every fifteen feet, a flickering tallow candle would illuminate the tomb-like tunnel matrix. Even though the sun had only just set, the labyrinth was pitch-black save for the long shadows cast by candles. Finally, he came to an open room that held a metal desk, empty gun racks, and a few folding chairs. A huge German Shepherd woofed twice in a low double-tap bark as Billy entered the room but did not stand up.
“Hi there, Gunslinger,” Stone said from his chair. A fat homemade candle flashed in a mason jar on the table in front of him and lit the Captain’s face up in a shadowy glow. The man had his pants off, and was staring down at his legs quietly.
Make that leg.
As Billy stood there, he saw that the MP Captain only had a complete left leg; his right was an obscenely scarred stump that ended just below the knee. Propped against the desk was a well-used prosthetic, wearing a combat boot.
“A one-legged guy walks into a bar…” Stone said, noticing Billy’s stare.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry. It is no big deal. You never think it is going to be you, another statistic. Made me more pissed off than anything else,” he said, rubbing the stump and grimacing.
Billy did not know what to say.
“I was supposed to go in for another surgery next month. Apparently, the bone keeps growing and you have to get it ground down every so often. Guess I’m gonna miss my appointment.”
“Sorry.”
“Forget it. If you say one thing about this to anyone, I will throw you off the roof into the mosh pit out there and sleep like a baby.”
He resisted the urge to say sorry again and stood there like a fool.
“I always felt I could give a lot back. That I could help people, and do something noble. I could have taken my degree and gone into an inner city school, or gone on to law school and worked as a public defender. Hell, I could have gone to seminary and saved pagan souls doing mission work. However, the only thing that appealed to me was being a solider.”
Billy just nodded. “I was never really good at school. Always been a hands-on kinda guy.”
Stone looked like he was evaluating him. “What do you want, Gunslinger?”
“To see if there is anything I can do.”
The soldier shook his head. “Just keep ready to bug out if the fort falls. I don’t think it will, but you can never tell on these things. The Yankees took this place in 1864, so lighting may strike twice.”
“Do you really think it will come down to that?”
“Who knows? I lost more than half my people in the retreat down the road from Gulf Shores last week. We literally do not have any ammunition left. I’m down to black powder, muskets, and bayonets.”
“So what is the plan from a military standpoint?”
“Let me give to you the mandatory dead German quote from General Von Clausewitz: ‘The world has a way of undermining complex plans. This is particularly true in fast moving environments. A fast moving environment can evolve more quickly than a complex plan can be adapted to it. By the time you have adapted, the target has changed.’”
Billy shrugged, “What does that mean?”
“It means they have figured us out and trapped us here. Our only hope is to keep morale high enough to outlast them.”
“Morale seems to be okay. Mr. Trung still has all of his people here. Most of the charter guys are here and we are still fishing. We have plenty of food. Most of the town made it out. I’m sure there is some good news.”
“Well, the good news is that we have our first confirmed case of Amoebic dysentery today. Therefore, if the zombies do not get us, at least we can die from our own shit.”
Billy was quiet and they sat in the flickering light for a moment in silence. Finally, Stone broke it.
“All soldiers carry good luck charms. Mine was a man. First Sergeant Reid was the best solider I ever worked with. He was the best we had, and the zombies ate him for lunch. If Reid could not stand a chance—what does that mean for the rest of us?”
“We all do our best. That’s all we can do, Captain. You need to pull it together and do your best. These people depend on you. Reid would kick your ass if he saw you like this.”
Stone looked at him and gave him a grimace. “I should have shot you that day at the school. You are a terrible pain in the ass.”
Billy laughed nervously. “We finished the signs on the top of the casemates.”
“Watch your step up there. The infected made a human pyramid and snatched someone off the top last night. At least that’s the rumor.”
“Holy crap.”
“What do the signs say anyway?”
“Gulf Shores. We are still here.”
“That we are,” Stone smiled as he reached down and petted the German Shepherd that lounged at his foot below.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Captain.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER 56
Fort Morgan, Alabama
November 27 6:50am
Z+48
Billy stretched as he walked out of his new home inside Battery Duportail and felt the early morning sun on his face in the cool autumn morning. He walked stiffly to the west wall of the fort and climbed to the top of the wall. Fort Morgan was at the very end of the island’s point, two of the five walls faced the island directly, the two walls north and south faced the beaches, and the fifth faced only the open water of Mobile Bay. He enjoyed climbing that wall, looking out alone over the cove every morning, and seeing the flotilla of shrimp boats, sailing yachts, and recreational vessels resting on the calm morning water.
When he climbed to the top of the casemates that morning he found not the peaceful solitude that he had discovered over the past week, but instead saw a crowd of a hundred or more spectators looking out at the flotilla.
As he pushed his way to the front of the gawkers, he was relieved to see that the boats were still there. Spread out on the water of Navy Cove and Mobile Bay were scores of white fishing boats, trawlers, and yawls just like every day that week. What were new were the thousands of zombies that stood shoulder to shoulder in the shallow waist-deep water between the boats and the fort. The infected lined the dock and crowded the moorings, alternatively falling down into the water and crawling back up from it. After days of being clear, it looked like the infected had gotten to the point of not being afraid to wade into the water and walk around to the seaside of the fort in the shallows.
Some muttered that Spud and his crew had left a gate open as they slipped away from the Fort and stole a fat two-masted sailboat whose owner had slept inside the citadel. It was interesting that Tiny, what was left of the Rough Riders, and Specialist Wright all had vanished overnight as well.
In the distance, the boats had pulled back into the bay several hundred yards to keep their distance from the Horde of wading infected. All around the flotilla boaters were standing on the decks of the craft evaluating their situation.
Stone was standing there with a set of binoculars, watching the scene from Aquacalypse Now play out. “Morning, Gunslinger,” he said as he saw Billy.
“Give me those,” Billy said as he took the binos from Stone. As he put them to his eyes, he quickly found the Fooly Involved in the distance. It was one of the larger ships closer to the fort. In the deeper water, further out into the bay sat the shrimp boats and the coast guard cutter.
In the top of the Fooly Involved’s tuna tower, he saw Cat bundled up in a blanket, looking back at him through the yellow binos that he had kept up there. On the deck below, a half dozen teenagers looked back to the fort desperately. He waved slowly at her and after a few seconds, she waved back, a look of loss plastered on her face.
“Guess you should have stayed with your boat last night, Gunslinger,” Stone said as the Ringknocker colonel and a few MPs stood around him in a semicircle.
Billy handed the binos back, “So now what?”
“Looks like we got ourselves a pinball game here,” the Captain said cryptically and walked away with the German Shepherd behind him.
««—»»
The sound of musket fire from the top of the glacis around the fort caused immediate concern in the population huddled around their breakfast of flat flour pancakes in the casemates below. Billy, Wyatt, and a few of the other stranded charterboat captains were assembled near the hotshot furnace making lead musket balls and, even in the blistering heat of the brick oven, the distinctive sound of the firearms made his blood run cold.
He scrambled over the pile of lead ballast, picked up his musket, and made for his spot on the wall. Stone had ordered all men left inside the fort to be armed and assigned a spot on the frontline defenses of the citadel.
Billy and Wyatt’s spot was above the sally port main entrance to the fortress. As they climbed the steps to the roof, the sound of gunfire increased to a crescendo. The acrid white smoke hung in the air with no wind to blow it away. The distinct crack-pause-boom of the muzzleloaders firing filled their ears as they tried to take in the situation. All around them, low-velocity molded lead balls were shot out into the Horde by the barest amount of homemade precious black powder possible. The musket balls flew so slow that they were visible the entire distance of their flight, like great, thick, bumblebees lumbering to their targets. Accuracy was terrible and lucky headshots were the exception rather than the rule.
“Merde alors!” Theriot, the shipwrecked marine yelled at the top of his lungs as his musket blew up in his hands. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, face covered with black soot. Billy laughed as he thought the man looked just like the old cartoons where the duck got his bill blown off with dynamite. The man picked up his shattered musket and used it as a club, smacking the infected hands and the tops of skulls popping up just under his feet in the moat.
The Horde below in the dry ditch had begun piling up on top of itself and the infected swarmed more than twenty feet high all along the wall. Arms and heads popped up from the tangled mob and yearned for the living on the wall above. The scene was reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. The dead yearned to pull the living down into the depths of hell.
“Don’t waste your shot, son,” Billy said to Wyatt, pushing him to the grass of the glacis as he lay down next to him.
Both of their muskets, ancient dark wood and rusty metal manufactured some two centuries before, were already loaded with powder and a musket ball each. As he lay there in the briars and brown November grass, he could feel the cold of the earth below him reach up and chill his bones through his clothes.
“Lay here like this, just like in ‘Scouts, and pick your shot. Aim right for the head. If you can’t see the head, don’t shoot.”
Billy reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of improvised percussion caps. Percussion caps are placed under the hammer of the musket and used to set off the charge inside the chamber that launched the musket ball itself. Inside the fort, they were rare and precious items, made from scratch to use once the factory-made pre-outbreak supply was exhausted.
“Remember to close your eyes just before you shoot,” Billy said as he affixed the small dime-sized pieces of aluminum foil with fine magnesium and black powder mixtures glued to it just under the hammer of the musket. Everyone shied away from using these improvised caps as they created a small smoky explosion directly in the face of the weapon’s user. It forced the rifleman to close his eyes just before he pulled the trigger if they ever wanted to use them again. This, however, did not save the shooter from flash burns on their face, pinhole burns in their clothes and the reek of burned black powder that filled their nose and throat.
The charterboat captain centered the front sight of his relic on a
writhing zombie twenty feet out and ten feet below where he laid. If it had not have been for the close proximity of his target, he doubted he would have had a chance. He squinted his eyes shut, held his breath, and squeezed the trigger. Billy heard the sound of the hammer fall against the chamber, felt the hot flash and flecks of foil on his face, waited the half-second pause before the explosion of the powder rocked the stock back into his shoulder and then opened his eyes.
He saw the lead ball exit the muzzle of his musket three feet in front of him, then seem to hang briefly Wile E. Coyote-style in midair, before it lumbered out and through the hairline of his target. The infected woman slumped forward and rolled down the pile of moaning flesh below him. He was smiling and patting Wyatt on the back as the boy fired his own musket in a flash of smoke and powder.
As they began the long and arduous process of reloading their muskets, the ground below them shook and rumbled like an earthquake. Two huge columns of gray-white smoke billowed up from the moat like a mushroom as a tongue of flame and shrapnel rocked the valley from end to end.
“They set off the flank howitzers!” Wyatt said with a look of wonderment on his face that before the outbreak would have only been caused by a free software upgrade.
Wyatt, Bert, and Ernie had been working on the two guns off and on for the past couple of days. The two 1830s-era 24-pounder howitzers mounted in the flank casemate by the sallyport below them had been designed to envelope any attackers in the moat below in crossfire. Captured after the Civil War, they had survived meltdown in 1940’s scrap drives by being part of a memorial in a northern state. When they returned to Fort Morgan in the 1980s, they were the only functional cannons still at the fort. Packed with two buckets of black powder that had been too coarse to fire in the muskets, the ancient cannons were set to fire a sixty-pound load of rusty bolts, brass padlocks and iron shrapnel collected from around the fort’s grounds.
Last Stand on Zombie Island Page 36
