by Bob Howard
The Chief could see something beyond the park that looked familiar, and he felt like he had come full circle. If he was right, it was a place he had seen before but from the other side. It was the Charleston cruise ship terminal where the Atlantic Spirit had been docked during the outbreak of the infection. If he was correct, the cable laying barge would be at anchor just up ahead and to the left down Laurens Street. It would be great to see it still there, but he knew they wouldn’t be able to get it under way and past Fort Sumter.
For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of thinking about his friends who had hopefully gone into the tunnel on Morris Island. He also hoped they had gone ahead to Fort Sumter and found that the new inhabitants of the fort hadn’t discovered the shelter. If that was true, the Chief didn’t doubt that they would find a way to liberate the fort as they had planned. With Kathy leading them, they could be a dangerous group of people.
When they reached the corner of Concord and Laurens Street, there was a nice little hiding spot among some trees where they were able to plan their next move. They were also able to see the docks at the end of Laurens Street, and the cable laying barge was still there.
“That was half of the plan right there, Allison.”
“What do you mean, Chief?”
“Well, if the cable laying barge was gone, all of this would have been for nothing,” he said.
Allison looked like she was thinking it over for a second, and she said, “I hate to tell you this, Chief, but we lost the plane, and getting that boat back to Mud Island is going to be a tough job if that jerk that shot us down is still out there.”
“I have a score to settle with him, Allison. If he’s still out there, I’m going to make him sorry for what he did. I liked that plane.”
Allison got a chance to see the side of the Chief she had been missing all along, because for a moment he had her going. He had fooled her by reacting the way most people would have, but when she looked at his face more closely she saw the faintest of grins at the corners of his mouth.
“Chief,” she said, “were you just pulling my leg?”
The grin spread a little wider.
“What makes you think that, Allison?”
“You know what I mean, Chief. You’re not the kind of person who would go looking for revenge.”
“You figured me out, Allison. The fact is, we can get another plane, and those guys in the boat will probably be crab food within a year. You ready to get moving again?”
She nodded, and he pointed at the huge paved areas south of Laurens Street. There were burned out trucks and cars everywhere, but he didn’t see any infected moving around between them.
“We’re going to cross that mess until we get past the cruise ship terminal. There were a lot of people here when the attacks started, and a lot of people tried to escape through here, but it wasn’t really a populated area. Most of the infected would have found a way to walk into the water by now, so it shouldn’t get bad until we reach Market Street.” He left off the part about expecting Market Street to be crowded with the infected.
CHAPTER SIX
Plan B
Not much had gone the way I had expected on this trip. Plan A was totally changed when the Chief left with Allison, and Plan B was still lacking answers. I could tell Kathy was still holding out hope that the Chief was alive. I’m sure she was including Allison in those hopes, but if she had to pick one who she thought would survive, it would be the Chief. He was just wired that way.
We watched the people who were living in the fort above us, and they were not the kind of people who should survive, but sometimes the ones who just take what they want are the ones who do survive. After watching for a while, we decided there was no clear purpose to much of what they did with their time. Most of them just laid around all afternoon. Some of them got into fights for no reason at all, and some of them just sat around talking.
We had managed to get another camera to rotate far enough to show a view of the long dock where tour boats tied up when they came out to the fort. There was a large number of boats there now, but we had watched as several had pulled away after the plane crashed. We assumed they had decided it was worth investigating. Some returned a couple of hours later with nothing to show for the trip. There had been some arm waving by one guy who we thought might be in charge.
Another camera angle had revealed more cages with prisoners. We tried to work out a plan that would include their rescue, but there were just too many people with guns up there. The best idea we could come up with was to wait until dark, sneak out and kill as many as we could, and then retreat back into our shelter.
More than once we talked about what we were forced to become in order to survive. We had all killed, for lack of a better term, the infected dead, but killing a living person was something new. The problem was that they stood between us and getting the cable laying barge back to Mud Island. They also stood between us and knowing for sure if the Chief and Allison were still alive.
As the afternoon passed, it became more and more obvious that the only answer was to find a way to kill all of them. We decided to take a break from watching their moronic behavior and find something to eat. We also still needed to find the hidden entrance to the shelter that would allow access to the surface.
The food was easy enough to take care of. There was a tremendous supply of flash frozen foods and MRE’s. Over our meal we talked about how we could take the fort, and I suggested it would be great if we could just ask them to leave. Of course all three of them voted that I could be the one to go ask them, but Kathy stopped in mid-sentence.
“Wait a minute, Eddie. I think you might be onto something. What if we can find a way to make them want to leave?”
Tom and Bus looked at each other to see if either had understood what I had said that made Kathy think there was a way to make them want to leave. The blank looks told them they were both clueless so they looked at me for an answer. I was just as clueless.
I said, “Kathy, I was just kidding. I didn’t seriously think we could ask them to leave.”
“I know,” she said, “and I wasn’t planning on asking them. I said we could make them want to leave. What makes anyone want to leave somewhere these days?”
The three men were being dense, because the only thing I could think of was why we left Mud Island so often, and from the looks on their faces, Tom and Bus weren’t doing any better.
Kathy shook her head and asked, “What’s that thing you said once about being dropped on your head when you were a baby, Eddie?”
The light suddenly went on over my head and I asked, “What would they do if there were infected dead wandering around in the fort? Especially in the middle of the night?”
“They might want to leave,” said Kathy. “It might take a few days, but once we get the ball rolling, we can let them kill each other or leave.”
One thing we had discussed plenty of times was how this whole thing got started in the first place. We knew from my experience that there was a wild attack at a fast food restaurant, but I never assumed it started there. We all had similar experiences in the first few days, and almost every time it was because someone had been bitten by someone who was infected. We all agreed that a bite was the means of transmission, but where did they all come from in the first place.
It was Bus who had the answer for us because his communications network at the beginning had been much better than what the rest of us had. He told us he had received reports from friends who had first hand information about unbitten people coming back from the dead. As crazy as it sounded to us at first, we had to admit, that wasn’t really crazier than coming back from the dead after being bitten. Both were crazy, but we had only seen it happen when people were bitten.
Bus said there was plenty of speculation about how it could happen, but the part that made the most sense was the virus that was causing people to come back from the dead could be transmitted in more than one way. Viruses often mutated to find ot
her methods of transmission. The bite was just proving to be the most lethal way that it was transmitted, and it caused such a destructive infection that it sped up the death of the person who was bitten. Bus pointed out that Jean’s illness after being scratched was a clue that the bite is fatal because the virus is carried by bodily fluids. There were no bodily fluids under the fingernails of the infected dead that scratched Jean, so she just got sick. Since Bus was a doctor, he could explain it in a way that really made sense.
“Do people still salivate after they’re dead, Bus?” asked Kathy.
“The glands that produce saliva stop making it, but there’s going to be saliva in the ducts for a long time after you die,” he said.
“So,” said Tom, “you’re saying it isn’t necessarily the bite that’s killing everyone. The bite is just something that the infected do after they come back to life. And you’re saying anyone that dies is going to have the infection, and when they get back up they’re going to start biting?”
“That’s a fair summary,” said Bus.
Kathy said, “Let me get this straight, Doc. If we sneak up there at night and kill one of them, he would turn into an infected dead and start biting people?”
“Seems to me that we might have a plan B after all,” said Kathy. “We don’t have to kill everyone. We just have to get it started. Now let’s find the door that opens to the surface.”
******
There were two hidden doors leading from the shelter to the surface. Not surprisingly, they were both located in the rooms behind the doors in the corridor that had reminded Bus of the White House. When we looked down the corridor, it just looked like a series of doors, ten on each side. That was why it looked so much like a hotel to me. The surprise was that each room opened into a much larger room, and each of them had ten more doors. When I did the math, it was two hundred rooms.
We were worried at first when we saw so many doors. Some opened into storage rooms, and some into living quarters. I opened one door and found myself in a stairwell that went downward. I didn’t bother to go down because I knew I was just going to find more rooms. It was a maze of doors and rooms, and it could take days to search them all.
Kathy said she was going to go back to the control room to see if she could come up with a floor plan of the shelter. She caught up with the rest of us only thirty minutes later, and she had a printout for each of us.
“Keep these so you don’t get lost,” said Kathy. “The exits go to the surface through secure areas. It looks like there are checkpoints and living quarters for the Secret Service just inside each of the checkpoints.”
We each took one, and we were amazed by the number of rooms. The government apparently thought there would be more time to establish a command and control center in this shelter.
“Why do you suppose they didn’t make it here?” asked Tom.
Bus said, “When the infection started to spread, did you think the stories were true?”
“No, not really,” said Tom. “I kept saying to myself the military would get it all under control. I guess the military kept saying the same thing.”
“Exactly,” said Bus. “And the government thought the military would stop it, too. I can’t say I really blame them, either. Can you imagine if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sat down around a table and one of them suggested they develop an emergency response plan for zombies?”
As soon as Bus said it he regretted it. It made them all think of the Chief. He looked at them in with a helpless expression.
Kathy said, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll go ahead and say it for the Chief, Bus. They aren’t zombies.”
In a weird sort of way it did make me feel better. As the Chief had explained to us numerous times, zombies are under the control of someone, and the infected dead were reanimated by an infectious virus. No one really knew enough about it to say how it worked, but it certainly wasn’t giving someone control over the infected dead.
“Back to your point,” said Kathy, “if someone had proposed to the President of the United States that the government needed to be prepared to deal with a virus spread by dead people biting healthy people, that person would have found themselves working in a small government office at the South Pole. So, when everything hit the fan, they kept looking at the military expecting them to stop it.”
Bus said, “It’s a time honored tradition in the military that no man will be left behind. It’s not hard to guess what that means. They had wounded men and women who they tried to treat, and that spread the infection behind the military lines.”
“You’re assuming they were able to establish lines of defense that were effective,” I said. “Remember those broadcasts I watched from the shelter? They weren’t able to strike back after they set up their lines of defense. Eventually they were overrun or ran out of supplies. At the very least, they weren’t able to coordinate with other military groups or bases.”
Tom said, “I guess that explains why they didn’t make it to here, but do you think any of the government made it to safety?”
“Certainly,” said Bus. “The President is undoubtedly in a secure location. I wouldn’t be surprised if they moved him from one safe place to another by now.”
“Which brings up an interesting point,” I said. “If this was one of their primary shelters, is the military going to show up here? Better yet, why haven’t they shown up yet?”
The four of us just exchanged looks as the realization dawned on us. This thing had not only crippled our land forces, it had cut deeply into our ability to respond from the sea and the air. Our assets couldn’t keep supply lines open long enough to be able to mount any kind of resistance.
“If it was up to me,” said Kathy, “I wouldn’t even consider moving the President to a ship. After what we saw on the Atlantic Spirit and on the Russian corvette, I don’t think a ship is a safe place to be.”
Kathy said, “I think it’s time for us to stop worrying about why the military couldn’t stop this thing. We still have a goal, and even though it won’t stop the infected dead from running the whole world, it will keep us alive a while longer, and who knows? It may even give us a chance to find out if the Chief survived that crash.”
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked.
Kathy said, “It’s really simple, Eddie. We pop out of the hidden doors and take out a few of them as quietly as we can. We don’t do any head injury. Then we get back into hiding and hope they start biting people before sunrise. If it’s dark enough out there, those guys will be so spooked they’ll be shooting anybody who smiles enough to show teeth.”
That got a laugh out of us, and we could feel the tension dropping as we laid out our plan. We decided to go out in pairs because there were two hidden doors that were also clearly out of the immediate view from the people above. We had also spent a few minutes in front of the video monitors to see if we could tell if the morons were posting watches. We saw that there were only two places we would see people always hanging around, and the only time there were two people at either spot was straight up on the hour. Somebody had a working clock, and those were most likely to be our guards.
The doors to those hidden exits could be reached from escape hatches that went up through steep tunnels. Each tunnel had three ladders down the curved walls, and was about the size of an elevator shaft. When we found the rooms where the tunnels began, we could see that they were intended to get dignitaries in and out quickly. The three ladders would allow for protective forces to be with the VIPs at all times. There was also the same type of harness that was used on rescue helicopters and a line that went up the shaft. If we needed to move fast, that would come in handy. A flashlight up the tunnel revealed that we were about three stories below the surface, and we could see a platform at the top of the ladders. A quick climb to the top was all we needed to see that the doors were nearly vertical, so we could open them and step through instead of having to climb up through them.
The rooms were far enough
from each other that we had to synchronize our watches. I had stopped wearing one, but both Tom and Bus found it harder to break the habit. We decided to go out at 9:15 PM. Sunset would be just after 8:30 PM, and the guard would change at 9:00. The guard going off duty seldom hung around more than a couple of minutes, and it was our guess the guard leaving at 9:00 would be ready to go faster than the ones during the day.
I paired up with Tom, and we started our climb well in advance of the time to go out. The plan was simple. We would quietly go out through the tunnel, come up from behind the guard and bag him. The storeroom held a large quantity of supplies, and there were some really strong plastic bags that would be perfect.
When we had gotten to the part about how we would kill someone, none of us wanted to treat the living the way we had the infected. They were already dead, and even though it wasn’t an easy thing for us to get used to, we had been able to do it because we were forced to. In this case, the guard would start yelling, and then we would have to kill more than one or two people.
That got us around to a variety of suggestions. Cutting their throats was one way to kill them without having them yelling their heads off, but all of us had a problem with that. I guess we were still human after all. Someone suggested hitting them over the head hard enough to knock them out, but no one knew just how hard that had to be. Tom told us that he had seen baseball players hit in the head hard enough to knock them down but not out, and that was with a fastball going over ninety miles per hour.
It was our good doctor who came up with the most humane idea, and Bus said he hated the idea that his medical training was what made him think of it.
