Black Tide Rising - eARC

by John Ringo

  Kaminski nodded. “The Office Depot down on Indianapolis Blvd. If things are too crazy there because it’s pretty close to Meijer’s, then try the OfficeMax across the street. I can’t think of anything over there that’d be drawing much attention right now.”

  “Office supplies?” said their grandson, looking startled.

  Tom chuckled. “Yeah, who’d ever think of looting that in a zombie apocalypse?”

  “So what are we looking for there?” asked Freddy.

  “First of all—these will be heavy and a bitch to load, but we need them—are cases of paper. Each one will hold ten reams and they’re about eighteen by twelve by twelve inches. We want…”

  Tom’s eyes got unfocussed again as he calculated. “At least forty cases. Fifty would be better.”

  Freddy’s eyes were wide. “That many? What the hell for? You’re talking about the better part of a ton.”

  “Sound proofing.”

  “What?”

  “Think it through, Freddy. We’re bringing two generators with us because whatever else we need electricity and when the grid goes down—which it’s bound to sooner or later—the only way to get it is with portable gas generators. They don’t make a whole lot of noise but they do make some, and one thing that’s been established about these zombies is that light and noise attracts them. So we need a way to deaden the sound.”

  Freddy scratched his jaw. “Okay. But…can’t we use something like, I don’t know…”

  “The only way to really deaden noise is with mass, Freddy. The best thing would probably be sheets of dry wall with insulation between them, but we’ve already agreed there’s no way we’ll get into a Lowe’s or Home Depot. The one thing that will do a good job in an office products store is cases of paper. We’ll use them to build a hut for the generators. Then cover it with plastic sheets to keep the rain off. Which is one of the reasons you also need to grab as much bubble wrap as you can find. Big garbage bags, too.”

  Freddy sighed. “Fine. What else?”

  “You know those clear plastic mats they sell to put under a chair so as to protect floors and carpets? Grab as many of those as they’ve got. They’re vinyl and while they probably aren’t as good as rubber mats—”

  “Insulation, I got it. In case of lightning strikes. What else?”

  “Bubble wrap, like I said, all you can find. And tape. We already got a lot of duct tape but we’re going to need more. We weren’t figuring on living on top of a steel floor fifty feet in the air. I don’t know if they’ll have duct tape but for sure they’ll have shipping tape, which is pretty damn good stuff.”

  Jack piped up. “I saw an episode on Mythbusters where the two guys got out of being stranded in a desert just using duct tape and bubble wrap. They made insulated clothes out of it—even made a boat.”

  Tom nodded. “Duct tape is the best evidence there is that God really exists.” He waved his hand. “But you need to get going, Freddy—and so do the rest of us. We’ll meet you down at the tank farm. If the cell phones go out, switch to the walkie-talkies.”

  Freddy left, with her grandson Jack in tow along with Eddie Haywood and Ceyonne Bennett. Andy turned to the people still in the house.

  “Okay, let’s get moving. By now, I think most everything’s already packed except the rubber matting we got downstairs in the exercise room. We’ll need to pull all that up.”

  “On it,” said Latoya, heading for the door to the basement. “Give me a hand, Jayden.” Her daughter followed her. So did Freddy’s wife Victoria.

  Andy looked around. “Is there anything else we’re overlooking?” She waited a few seconds. “No? Okay, then, we’ll leave as soon as we’ve got the mats loaded.”

  2

  They hadn’t gotten four blocks when Andy saw someone she recognized walking down the street ahead. It was one of the waitresses at a nearby diner. When the girl turned her head to look at them Andy saw she’d been crying.

  Andy pulled the truck over. Tom, riding next to her, already had the window down.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” he asked.

  Samantha Crane was short, a bit stocky—and about as pretty as any nineteen-year-old girl Andy had ever met, in a cute streaky-blonde sort of way.

  “My mother,” Sam said. She wiped her runny nose with the back of her hand. “She…she tried to kill me.”

  Andy hissed in a breath. She liked Sam—but if she’d been bitten by a zombie…

  “Did she bite you? Even get close to you?” asked Tom.

  Sam shook her head. “No. I was coming home from work—Rochelle shut the restaurant down, since there wasn’t any business anyway—when Mom came charging out of the house. She was naked. And screeching like you wouldn’t believe. I took off running and she followed me for a couple of blocks before something distracted her.”

  The girl pointed down the street. “I’m heading for the diner. Rochelle’s planning to just stay there even though it’s closed because…well, she’s got nowhere else to go. I figured I’d join her. Don’t know what else to do.”

  Sam and her mother lived alone. The truth is, the two of them didn’t get along that well, which Andy thought was part of the reason the girl worked so many hours on her job. Rochelle Lewis, the restaurant’s manager, had become something of a surrogate mother for her.

  Andy glanced at Tom. He had that mulish look on his face that she’d come to know very well, having been married to him for damn near half a century.

  She sighed. She had her doubts, because the more people they added the greater the chances became that someone had been infected by the zombie virus. But…

  She pointed with her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the short line of vehicles that had come to a stop behind her. “Come with us. Get in Pedro’s truck. He’s only got his mother with him so there’s room. If need be, put her on your lap. Yarelis doesn’t weigh more than ninety pounds.”

  Sam looked at the pickup. Then, shook her head. “Thanks, Andy. But I can’t leave Rochelle alone. She’s got nobody either since her mom died and she threw out that asshole husband of hers.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “Rochelle’s good people,” he said. “And we got too damn many old farts. Need some more young folks.”

  Rochelle Lewis wasn’t exactly “young.” Andy wasn’t sure of her age but the restaurant manager looked to be somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. But given that their group did have a high percentage of older people—Pedro’s mother was in her eighties—she could see Tom’s point.

  What the hell. She liked Rochelle herself and the idea of leaving the woman all alone in a shuttered restaurant was just…

  Creepy.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll swing by the diner and pick her up too. Now get in. We’re in a hurry.”

  As if to add emphasis to her words, they heard a screech coming from somewhere nearby. Several screeches, in fact. Zombies weren’t exactly pack hunters, but from what she’d seen on the television they did usually come in groups.

  Sam hurried over to Pedro’s truck and the caravan was on its way again.

  Fortunately, the diner didn’t take them very far out of their way. When they pulled up outside, Sam hopped out of the truck and went over to the door and started slapping it with her hand.

  “Open up, Rochelle! Open up!”

  A few seconds later, the door swung open. The African-American woman standing there was not much taller than Sam herself and just about as pretty, although her good looks were more on the elegant side than what you’d call “cute.”

  She seemed a little startled when Sam gave her a fierce hug. Technically, the younger woman was Rochelle’s employee, after all, not a close friend or relative. But within two seconds she was returning the hug.

  Tom leaned out of the window. “Come on, girls! We gotta move. Rochelle, there’s room in the Haywood’s SUV since they just got their daughter with them.”

  Rochelle looked at the vehicle in question, then back at Tom and Andy. “Whe
re y’all going?”

  “Just…call it ‘up on the roof.’ Best place we can think of—and sure as hell a lot better than being holed up by yourself in there.”

  The manager still hesitated. Andy leaned over and shouted past her husband.

  “Damn it, Rochelle—come on! That door you got on the restaurant’s mostly glass. It won’t take zombies more’n a few seconds to smash their way in.”

  After a moment, the woman nodded. “Okay.” She gestured behind her. “Anything in here I should bring with me? The owner’s off visiting his folks in Ohio and he’s a shithead anyway.”

  Apparently, Tom had already been thinking along those lines because his answer came instantly. “Yeah, there is. Grab whatever big knives you got and toss ’em into the biggest pots you got. Then—you’ll need help”—he gestured with a thumb to the vehicles behind them—“because we want all the table cloths you can bring.”

  “Table cloths?” Rochelle frowned, obviously puzzled.

  “Yeah. They’re some kind of plastic, right? We’ll want them to collect rainwater. Ain’t no Artesian wells where we’re going.”

  Andy heard the sound of more screeching. It seemed to be coming from a distance—but no distance was great enough to suit her, in a zombie apocalypse.

  “Do what he says, Rochelle! And please—hurry.”

  * * *

  It seemed to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes before they were on their way again. They’d managed to stuff the Haywood’s SUV with all the table cloths in the restaurant and both Rochelle and Jayden now had big pots on their laps filled with cutting implements. Rochelle had added some ladles also, Andy was glad to see. Men could wax poetically about the wonders of duct tape but any sensible woman knew that a ladle was God’s true gift to humanity.

  Next stop—finally—was the tank farm. It wasn’t more than a couple of miles away now.

  Freddy had quickly figured out that trying to go straight down Indianapolis would be hopeless. The big boulevard had too many places on it where looters would be congregating—and where there were looters, there were bound to be zombies. The huge Cabela’s store just south of I-80 had to be a lunatic bin by now.

  So, he detoured down Kennedy. There were plenty of commercial strips on that street also, but none of the really big stores that would be drawing whole crowds.

  Even then, driving was tricky, between reckless drivers and even more reckless pedestrians—not to mention a zombie here and there. They were the worst, in a way. Naked as they were and unarmed, Freddy wasn’t worried that a zombie could smash into his big commercial van before he got away from them. But what he was worried about was simple contact between a zombie and his vehicle. God forbid he should run over one and have zombie blood splattered all over the underside of the van and its wheels. Freddy wasn’t sure exactly how the zombie virus got transmitted, but he figured zombie bodily fluids were pretty much guaranteed to be a vector.

  So, he had to weave around the zombies—three of them, north of the interstate; thankfully, they got sparse once he crossed I-80—which required some driving that you could either call “artful” or “crazy,” take your pick. Ahead of him, on his motorcycle, Eddie Haywood had to do the same, of course. But dodging zombies on a motorcycle was a piece of cake compared to doing it with a van designed for industrial work.

  They probably couldn’t have avoided one of the zombies at all, except that Freddy had had the foresight to insist that Ceyonne ride with him and Jack instead of behind Eddie on his motorcycle. Neither Ceyonne nor Jack had been happy with the arrangement—Ceyonne because she’d rather have been with her boyfriend and Jack because no fifteen-year-old boy thinks it’s proper for a man to be riding in the middle, dammit—but it put Ceyonne at the passenger’s window.

  With a gun and the temperament to match.

  “Fuck you, asshole!” she’d yelled at the one zombie impossible to dodge. After Freddy brought the van to a screeching halt, Ceyonne hopped out of the vehicle, took a shooter’s stance she’d clearly learned from her father, and brought the zombie down with four shots.

  And then complained about it for the next mile.

  “Dinky little .380,” she groused, as she reloaded. “Took me four rounds. Coulda done it with one—okay, two; Dad trained me to always double-tap—with the nine millimeter. Which is stuck inside Eddie’s saddlebag where it ain’t doing any good at all.”

  Sitting next to her, Jack’s face was even paler than usual. Truth be told, Freddy was a little shocked himself. The girl was only seventeen and he was sure this was the first time in her life she’d ever killed anyone. Yet she seemed no more rattled by what had happened than she would have been by shooing away flies.

  Something in their expressions must have registered on her, because Ceyonne’s expression became half-defensive and half-belligerent. “Look, guys, they ain’t people. They got no brains left—hell, not even as much as a dog or a cat. My Dad told me not to think of ’em as anything except targets.”

  “It’s okay, Ceyonne,” Freddy said, trying for as soothing a tone as he could manage. “I’m just glad you’re along.”

  Which, he realized, was the plain and simple truth. Focus, Freddy. Zombie apocalypse, remember?

  “Yeah, me too,” said Jack.

  * * *

  Cutting the padlock on the gate leading into the tank farm took but a few seconds. Within a minute, the entire caravan was inside the grounds, as Andy looked for the best storage tank she could find.

  She picked one right at the center of the facility, which was at least two hundred yards away from the nearest road. It was one of the bigger ones, too, which would give them the most space.

  “Don’t park right next to it,” warned Tom. “Otherwise zombies might climb up on it trying to get to the rood. They won’t manage anyway, but they might wreck the truck and we’ll probably need it again.”

  That seemed good advice—for later. Right now, she wanted to be as close to the base of the staircase as possible. They had a twenty-foot moving truck to unload, along with two pickups and an SUV—and then had to haul everything more than fifty feet up a narrow steel staircase. With, as her husband had pointed out, way too high a percentage of old farts to do the work.

  Not to mention that getting him up there was probably going to be the hardest work of all.

  Tom knew it himself. “Don’t worry about me until Freddy gets here,” he said. “Just get me out of the truck and onto my wheelchair—and hand me the rifle in the case behind the seat. I’ll keep guard while the rest of you do the scut work.”

  It would have been nice if he hadn’t been smiling like a damn cherub when he said it.

  Damn old fart. This was going to be exhausting.

  First, they hauled the tents and tool sheds up to the top. When Andy got to the roof for the first time, she was a little stunned by how big it was. She’d never seen one of these storage tanks from up close before. One hundred and ten feet in diameter doesn’t sound like much until you’re standing on top of it. Whatever concerns she’d had that they might not have enough room vanished instantly. They had about as much in the way of square footage as a fricking mansion—a real one, too, not a McMansion.

  Not so much in the way of furnishings, of course. Still, she was cheered up a lot.

  * * *

  Her good mood faded, as the work progressed and she got more and more tired. The tank, as it turned out, had a functioning crane hoist that was capable of lifting more than a ton. But it couldn’t work that fast and they needed to get everything up on the roof as soon as possible. So while the heaviest items got brought up with the hoist, that still left most of the stuff to be hauled up the old-fashioned way. All sixty-eight of her years were complaining loudly and bitterly, before too long.

  Having a husband who spent his time providing advice—while he was perched on a wheelchair—didn’t improve her mood. The fact that it was mostly good advice didn’t make it any better.

  “Don’
t bother setting up the tents and the tool sheds yet,” Tom said. “No point in it until we’ve got insulation down. Speaking of which”—he pointed to the south—“on the way in, I spotted a big stack of wood pallets over by the asphalt plant. We oughta use them for our base flooring. They’ll not only help insulate against electric currents but they’ll keep us above water when it rains.”

  Andy might have snarled at him, but Luis and Pedro nodded and took off in the now-emptied pickups to get the pallets.

  It was good advice. And so what? Andy knew she loved the old bastard, even if sometimes—like right now—she couldn’t remember why.

  Trying not to curse out loud, she started up the staircase with another load. Maybe she’d get lucky and have a heart attack before she died of exhaustion.

  * * *

  Just as Tom had foreseen, the Office Depot was empty of people. There was a mob across the street looting the Meijer’s store—hypermarket, they were sometimes called. Like a Wal-Mart’s, it combined a supermarket with a cut-rate department store. Filled with stuff that people would need to survive a zombie apocalypse.

  Unlike an office goods store. Quiet as a church mouse.

  Until an alarm went off when they smashed in the door. Freddy was a little concerned, then. Not because the alarm would draw cops—he doubted if any were still on duty besides Ceyonne’s stubborn father—but because it might draw zombies.

  “Ceyonne, you stand guard out here while the three of us gather up the stuff we need. Come on, guys. We may as well start with the cases of paper.”

  As he’d expected, that work was a genuine bitch—and hauling the cases up a fifty-five foot staircase later was going to be even worse. But he was a big, strong man and his two helpers were both good-sized boys and, best of all, teenagers. Use all that energy for something more useful than what teenage boys usually got into.

  Loading fifty cases didn’t really take that long. Tossing in the floor mats took even less. And while it was going to take a bit of time to gather up things such as tape and bubble wrap just because there was a lot of it, the stuff seemed lighter than feathers compared to the paper.