by Bob Howard
“I think we should put an X on the door of each floor, too,” said Perry. “We should put the mark on the door as we go in. That way, the other two can pass right by the floor to the next level.”
“Let’s use the central stairwell. It has a door at each floor,” said Whitney.
When they entered the central stairwell, they each went to the railing and looked down. It seemed to go on forever, and even though there was a light on every level, they couldn’t see the bottom. They went down one flight. Whitney put a big W on the door and looked at the two boys.
“I like that better than an X,” she said.
Sam and Perry halfheartedly smiled at Whitney and then went down to the next level.
“Who gets this one?” asked Sam.
“I’ll take it,” said Perry. “Go on chicken. There’s nothing down there you haven’t seen before.”
Before Sam could put an S on the door, Perry marked it with a big letter P. Sam reluctantly went down the stairs. He could feel the fine hairs on the back of his neck moving on their own. He looked at the door, put an S on it with his marker, and pulled it open.
******
Before the virus began to spread, before the government began to scatter, Harold J. Thornton III was an important man. Over thirty years in the Senate had made him powerful and influential. As the President pro tempore of the United States Senate, he was third in line to the Presidency, and that meant he was so influential he had been given a first class ticket to safety.
Officially the government had called it an extinction level contagion, but since they had a way of saying things in reverse order like Yoda, it was called, “Contagion: Extinction Level,” or CEL for short. In the remaining few days of the government evacuation, they had called it CEL Day, then CEL Day + 1.
On CEL Day, Senator Thornton was at the White House when the first reports started coming in. There were attacks within a block of the place where he and the President were watching TV. A Marine helicopter had landed on the White House lawn for the President and his family within minutes of those reports.
The Secret Service wasn’t going to mess around. They had already shot one infected dead that had walked right up to the east entrance. When they ordered her to stop, she just kept coming toward them. The Agents were trained to shoot for the heart, and they did repeatedly. The shots punched her backwards, and she fell down once, but she got back up and started toward them again. It was a single shot to the head that stopped her, and after that the Agents didn’t bother with the center mass training.
There were also the people who were trying to get away from the infected that were following them through the streets of Washington. When they reached the fence around the White House, it was the symbol of safety. Scores of people jumped over the fence, not running toward the White House, but away from the infected. Training is training, and the agents trained to protect the White House had received training for all out frontal assaults as well as lone gunmen. To them this was just another scenario for which they had trained.
Their shots to the chest were effective. One by one the people who were running across the White House lawn were eliminated until there were only a few late arrivals to deal with. As they were reloading and showing a bit more nerves than they would have expected, one of them noticed the first of them getting up again. They sat dumbfounded and watched as more and more rose to their feet.
Late arrivals jumping over the fence thought they were jumping to safety, and before they could be shot, crowds of previously eliminated threats turned on them. The snipers on the roof of the White House had to shoot the same people all over again, and just as their fellow agents at the east entrance had learned, it took a single shot to the head.
Harold Thornton had watched the shooting through a window as he waited for his ride away from Washington. His normal bearing with his full head of silver hair made him look fit for his years. His height added to the illusion. He had been given word that the Vice President and his family had also been taken to a secure location at a bunker somewhere in upstate New York. He was also told that someone was locating his family, and they would meet him at their secure location.
When Senator Thornton boarded the Marine helicopter he was given the message that his family had been successfully retrieved, and that the President had arrived at his secure location. It was confidential, but he knew it was somewhere near Columbus, Ohio. He figured the President had that arranged from the start since he graduated from "The Ohio State," as he liked to call it.
Senator Thornton was told his helicopter was heading to Charleston, South Carolina. He didn’t know what the shelters were like, but he liked the restaurants in Charleston better than Columbus. It was a Sikorsky UH-60 helicopter, and the flight would be about three hours, so he made himself comfortable.
The helicopter was smaller and less accommodating than one of the big Sea Kings the President and Vice President were traveling in, but it was getting him away from the CEL. An intern had brought him updates until he was ready to leave the White House, and the Senator had secured passage on the military flight for the attractive young lady. She sat across from him in the helicopter, and the Senator thought things could be worse.
The pilot gave them updates from time to time about the spread of CEL. It seemed the entire world was in chaos, and no one even knew where it had started. He wondered if someone had been experimenting with a viral agent, and it had escaped. They weren’t even half way to his secure location when they received a message that every major city in the country had evacuated their mayors. Where they were evacuating to was a good question.
The pilot brought his last message back just minutes before they would arrive. He said they would be landing in a small, secure landing pad, but there had been an accident when another helicopter had landed. The pilot gave him a long list of important people who would arriving at the same secure site. Senator Thornton was surprised at how many people would be there, and who they were.
When the Sikorsky UH-60 dropped toward the landing area, the door opened facing a dark wall that was only a few yards past the range of the spinning rotors of the helicopter. Someone pulled open a door that seemed to be hidden in the wall, and the white light from inside was almost blinding. He climbed out of the helicopter ahead of the young intern and ran for the door, but as he crossed the darkened area between his helicopter and the door, he saw another helicopter laying on its side, and his wife was standing next to it. He could recognize her long red hair anywhere.
The Senator ran to his wife and didn’t make the connection between the still smoking helicopter and his wife until it was too late. As soon as he reached for her, she reached for him, and the bite on his face felt like fire.
Somehow he found himself inside the white light. He had pushed past the pretty intern and the man who had held open the door for him. Once inside he grabbed the door and pulled it shut behind him. When he locked the door, it sealed so tightly that he couldn’t even hear the helicopter…or the screams. There was a long ladder behind him, and somehow he climbed down to the bottom. Elevators in an area that looked like a hotel lobby stood in a row, and when he blindly stumbled into one, he selected the bottom floor. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
He was dead when he walked out of the elevator. It didn’t matter anymore where he was. Senator Harold J. Thornton III was alone in a shelter where no one else could enter because he had locked the door, and the pilots were never informed of the emergency entrance at the end of Morris Island. The next arrivals didn't have a clear place to land, so they eventually diverted with their important passengers to secondary locations.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ashley River
The Ashley River bridge connecting North Charleston to West Ashley had been built high enough to be no concern to river traffic. As we approached, we could see the logjam of vehicles sitting where they had been left on the bridge, and the occasional infected wandering among them as if looking for their ow
n cars. The scene looked liked so many we had witnessed since the first day, but there were fewer of the infected. That could be explained by the fact that there were fewer people living near the area after those who died in the snarl of traffic had wandered away.
On the night that followed the beginning of the attacks, the cars had backed up on this bridge only because I-26, the main interstate highway through the area, had become a parking lot. Some people went toward the interstate from West Ashley, and some went toward it from North Charleston. Combined with the traffic from downtown Charleston and traffic from Mt. Pleasant, gridlock was inevitable.
We had out of necessity become experts on the local roads and had studied the maps many times. Ironically, no matter which direction you chose, on that night you would have been going toward death, but the best routes out of the area would have been away from the interstate. Even when the State Department of Transportation opened the east bound lanes to west bound traffic to relieve the pressure on the main artery out of Charleston, there were still too many people trying to leave. If not for the shelter at Mud Island, I could have been one of the thousands of people who died on bridges and overpasses.
As we approached the bridge, the usual body drop began, but this one was spread out and random. It wasn’t like the infected knew enough to go to the center span of the bridge and time their jumps with our passing. The only reason there were more on the drawbridges we had already gone under was the metal surface on each bridge. The Chief had speculated that the vibrations from our engines would be stronger there, and the infected would already be congregating on that part of the bridge. Since this bridge was all concrete, it was only the sound of our engines that drew them over the railings, so they were landing far from their targets. Some were landing in the mud flats up to one hundred yards away.
Of course there had to be that one in a million, random chance of catching one of them, and the Cormorant had one impaled on one of its side railings. Tom was forced to put a bullet in its head because it was still snapping its jaws and reaching for him and Chance when they tried to get rid of it.
Once we were clear of the bridge, it was smooth sailing to the marina where it sat in the shadow of I-526, the Mark Clark Expressway. The marina wasn’t large by most standards, but it was large enough for the three seaplanes that were tied up at the last three slips. I knew the Chief had to be excited when he saw them because Bus practically cheered.
"See anything you like?" I asked Bus.
"Take your pick, Ed. Those are three beautiful planes. I'd still pick the de Havilland DHC-3 Otter over them all, but any one of those things would be fun to fly. The one on the right is the older brother of the Otter, and I'll make you a bet that the Chief would pick that one. It's a de Havilland Beaver. Bush pilots and people like the Chief have been known to stand at attention and salute when one passes over."
"What about the other two?"
"The red, white, and blue one is a Cessna 180, and the one in the middle is a Super Cub. That one is on floats, but most of them have a big fat pair of wheels on them, and they can land in some pretty weird places. I've seen pilots put them down on the side of a mountain where there's no airstrip and then take off almost like they're falling off of the mountain."
"You said they would be fun to fly, but which one would you pick for our needs?"
"No doubt about it, Ed. I'm with the Chief. The Beaver needs a little more room to take off than it's younger brother, but it has a big cargo area. It can seat eight people or carry a lot of gear. The main thing is they last. If this one has been relocated from the bush all the way to South Carolina, someone really loved it, and they would have put some money into furnishing it. Our Otter was comfortable, but I'll be surprised if this one isn't a real show piece inside."
I said, "Someone tried to reach that plane to get away from the infected and didn't make it, which means the marina crew would have fueled it up to get it ready if the owner called ahead."
"Good thinking," said Bus. "Don't be surprised if the Chief asks to let him fly it back and asks me to pilot the Cormorant. Let's get me onboard that thing before he has a chance to try."
I laughed as I cut across the bow of the Coast Guard ship. As we did, Bus went to the stern and climbed up on the bench seats. He got his feet spread as wide as he could and made sure the Chief could see him from the bridge. Then he very ceremoniously raised his right hand with his palm and fingers as straight and rigid as a board. His elbow was perfectly straight out to the right. I thought he was going to give the Chief a salute, but instead of his hand pointing at the right side of his forehead, the thumb came away from his hand and touched the tip of his nose, the fingers pointed straight upward, and then they began to wiggle at the Chief.
Tom and Chase were on the side rails next to the wheelhouse and could see the gesture. Both were laughing their butts off. I couldn't make out for sure if the Chief was smiling, but I knew he would want the last laugh.
The three machine guns on the bow of the Cormorant had been pointing skyward, but as Bus wiggled his fingers, the guns rotated forward and slowly began to lower toward us. I chose that moments to bring our forward momentum to a rapid stop, and Bus fell backward onto his rear end.
I thought Bus would have a few choice words for me when he got up, but he was laughing too hard. I could also see the Chief better, and he was fully appreciating the moment. Kathy was hanging onto him and was aiming a digital camera at us.
I knew we all needed the release of tension by the time we reached the seaplanes. It was a gamble to come upriver because there were so many pockets of survivors, good and bad. In some ways, we ran as much risk from good people who needed our help as we did from those who would outright kill us to take what they needed.
The saving grace for us was ironically what also damned the people we could have helped. There were larger pockets of the infected dead, and we had the capability to deal with them.
The dock sat straight as an arrow out from the land, and there was a standard boat ramp next to it. The tangle of boats, some burned and on their sides, was a silent testament to the chaos we had seen on boat ramps throughout the Lowcountry, as South Carolinians called it.
Halfway out from land the dock had split into two docks. One came straight out to the planes, and the other went to a second dock that ran parallel to it. There were about two dozen slips for boats. Some were empty, some had sunken boats in them that were still tied to the dock, and only a few had boats still afloat. None were as good as the boat we were using, but they were worth checking for a working radio, the one thing our boat lacked.
Thousands of people had flocked to their marinas in an attempt to escape the infected dead, but too many of the boat ramps were near major highways, and the lucky few who reached their boats were not only attacked by the infected, but by the desperate families who had abandoned their cars on the Mark Clark Expressway. In this case it had been an all out riot, and the boats had been taken, but the planes had survived untouched. There weren't that many people who could fly them, and those who could were somewhere in the mass of victims.
As I docked by the planes, we could see we already had company. Up in the parking area beyond the boat ramp was a large storage facility where people could rent space to keep their boats without having them in the water. On the day of the mass evacuations, it was useless to try to retrieve a boat from storage and then get it to the congested boat ramp, but that didn't mean people weren't going to try. There had been huge crowds inside the storage areas, all of them demanding their boats to be brought out. The owners of the facility were doing their best to accommodate their customers amid threats of lawsuits and lost business, but the reality was that the infection was on its way.
When it arrived, it spread through the screaming crowds who ran for the water. Fuel that was being pumped into the empty tanks of the boats that were brought out of storage was spilling down the parking lot to the boat ramp and the dock. When it ignited, it exploded in a fury th
at spread even to boats that were pulling away to safety. The blaze traveled out the straight dock all the way to where it split to the right but had stopped there.
Our company was coming from the storage area. Some of the infected were charred remains that could walk and still had dangerous teeth. The test of the damage from the fire came when the infected reached the burned section of the dock. We could only hope for once there were a lot of the infected dead, so the damaged dock wouldn't hold up under their weight.
I decided their was only one thing to do, and it was a tactic we had learned way back at the beginning when we had been forced to leave our plane at a private dock after it had been damaged by a bullet.
"Tie off the boat, Bus. I have something to do."
As I said it to Bus, I grabbed my rifle and jumped onto the dock. I ran as fast as I could to get to the place where the burnt portion of the dock began. It crossed my mind that I had really changed in the last year. I had gone from being a video game playing procrastinator, who didn't take life seriously, to being a survivor, and I wasn't going to let these non-survivors stop us from getting what we needed.
I dropped to a knee and took careful aim at the first of the infected dead that was stumbling out onto the dock. I waited until it was on a span roughly midway between pilings before pulling the trigger. The infected fell backward onto the blackened wood exactly where I wanted him to. The second and third infected tripped on the first one and fell over the side. That was fine with me, but I wanted more of them to stay on the dock.
I got my wish on the next three in a row and had a pile of four bodies all stacked on top of each other. The infected trying to get to me from behind them kept falling over into the river and disappearing with the current, but eventually one crawled to the top of the stack. When I shot that one, its weight slumped forward, and I saw the stress on the damaged wood begin to spread.
The section of dock attached at the set of pilings behind the pile up began to crack and separate from the stronger wood. More and more of the infected dead crowded onto that section, pushing each other into the pile and over the side, but eventually there was an ear splitting crack, and the entire section fell into the water. There would be no more company reaching us by walking out on the dock.
