by Howard, Bob
“How is everything back at the moat?” asked the Chief.
We called it the “moat” because it was the first line of defense that protected us from the outside world. The swamps that filled most of the area under the trees were good at slowing down the infected, but the moat was good at completely stopping them. Even the alligators weren’t as good as the moat. While they were busy hauling away one infected, ten more would slip by, only to disappear when they walked into the moat.
Jean said, “Everything checked out fine. There were footprints down by the southern jetty, but they led straight into the water.”
“What’s that smell?” asked Kathy.
They all knew what was causing the smell, but it was her way of joining in on the fun.
“I think that’s my husband,” said Jean. “Well, not actually my husband, but I have a feeling that smell is going to come back home on my husband.”
“I’m glad we got the shower working in the houseboat,” said Colleen.
“I hope everyone’s enjoying themselves,” I said.
I finished my assignment and sealed the bag. For good measure I slipped it inside a second bag. Then I peeled off my gloves and tossed them onto the body of the infected dead. It would be easier to replace them from our supply room than it would be to get the smell out of them.
Jean watched with suspicion as I put the plastic bag in my pocket.
“I hope that doesn’t leak, Eddie.”
There was generally some good natured laughing, but as it died down the Chief asked the women to finish giving their report.
As the weather got gradually cooler, the Chief had started organizing the training exercises, but he also set up a rotation of patrols. While one group was training, the others would be out checking the swamps around Mud Island for signs of either the infected or survivors.
The numbers of infected and living were both decreasing, but there were no guarantees. The infected didn’t migrate, but they did tend to gather together and follow each other. If the footprints by the southern jetty were made by the infected, there were likely to be more of them in the area.
“It was a small group judging by the number of footprints,” said Kathy.
“Did you trace the footprints back to the trees to see if you could tell which direction they had been going?”
The Chief was very curious about any patterns the infected dead might display. The area from Mud Island all the way south to Georgetown was virtually a wasteland now. If anyone had survived within that four hundred square miles, it hadn’t been for long.
We had seen a massive horde walking down Highway 17 toward Georgetown in the early days of the infection, and when the citizens of Georgetown destroyed the bridges over the Waccamaw River and Great Pee Dee River to stop the horde, it caused the infected to spread out in all directions. Those that didn’t get stuck in the mud and swamps or washed away in the rivers had wandered off into the woods. Sometimes they popped out of the trees along the moat and were swept quickly away on the current, but sometimes they just turned around and walked back into the trees.
The Chief and Hampton had followed a group once to see if they could determine any rhyme or reason to the way they wandered, and they had eventually found their way back to Highway 17. We might never know the answer why, but the group had walked out onto the paved surface and turned to the north. It was as if they knew they wouldn’t have any place to go if they went south.
Kathy nodded affirmative to the Chief. She was just as curious as him.
“They came out of the trees from the south. I noticed the prints weren’t very deep even in the soft sand, but they had been made by adult sized feet. My guess would be that they were from infected that had been dead for a long time. They didn’t weigh enough to make normal prints.”
We all knew that emaciated infected dead meant there wasn’t much chance that there were more survivors to the south, but it also meant the infected were going to the north, possibly for the same reason. We had to at least consider that they were going north because there were no living people to prey on to the south.
“Why do they walk into the water?” asked Molly. “Why don’t they just stay on the land?”
Molly had just asked the question we were all trying to answer, and we all hoped the infected weren’t walking into the moat because they somehow knew there were living people on Mud Island.
Tom walked over to his daughter and got down on one knee. He didn’t want her to grow up in a world where most of the human race had been eliminated, but he had to be honest with her because that was the world we were living in.
“We don’t know why they walk into the water, but it’s probably because they don’t know the water is dangerous. They don’t really know anything.”
Molly furrowed her brow as she thought about her father’s answer. Explaining the lack of reasoning ability shown by the infected dead was tough enough when you were talking to an adult. Explaining it to a twelve year old was not impossible, but it was not something you had to do a couple of years ago.
Molly came to her father’s rescue just as he was turning to the rest of us for help.
“Daddy, I think dogs are smarter than the infected.”
Tom was relieved.
“That’s it exactly, Molly. Some animals are smarter than others. People know what will hurt them, and even though dogs are smart, sometimes they do dumb things like run out in the road. The infected won’t even try to move out of the road. We don’t know why they try to hurt people, either.”
“It’s time for us to get back to the shelter,” said the Chief. “If we leave now we should make it back inside before dark.”
Practice had a way of forming habits, and our habit was to do what the Chief said. We gathered our weapons and automatically lined up into two columns with Molly in the middle. Even though we were sure there were no infected nearby, we always assumed there were.
When we walked onto the beach near our dock, the motor of the Boston Whaler was already idling. Hampton waved at us from the boat and watched as we followed the Chief’s training to the letter.
Cassandra and Kathy stepped out of the columns and took up positions as a rear guard, watching the trees on all sides to see if we were being followed. The Chief watched with satisfaction, knowing that we were much more disciplined than we had been a year ago.
******
The trip back to Mud Island was much faster now that we were working together as a team rather than a bunch of survivors who happened to get more lucky breaks than we deserved. Even the simple act of docking the boat and getting organized before hiking a mile across our island was done in less time.
The walk through the dense trees along the path back to our shelter door wasn’t something we took for granted. While we were on the mainland practicing our combat skills, something could have washed up on the beach and wandered up into the middle of the island. In the early days of the infection it had been much more common than now, but there were still the occasional strays that came out of nowhere.
There was also a new menace to consider. The population of blue crabs had multiplied during the summer months. There were so many that they had become much more aggressive, targeting fish that were normally too big or too fast to become prey to the bottom feeding crabs. They were also coming further up the beach than before, and we weren’t too surprised when they began foraging in the trees hunting for food. All of us were wearing tough military boots to be sure we weren’t bitten or scratched as we walked through the deep grass.
One of the other natural enemies of the blue crab was the sea gull, but those tables had turned, too. More than once we had seen a gull carrying a blue crab intended to be a meal only to have it work out the other way around.
When we reached the shelter entrance, I dialed in the combination on the lock and swung the huge door open. We all piled inside, and I sealed it behind us. The door wasn’t quite as big as the famous door at the military super shelter named Chey
enne Mountain, but it was as big and thick as the vault door on any bank.
Doctor Bus was waiting for us inside, and as he helped us stow all of our gear, he told us he had some news to report from our friends at Fort Sumter.
Captain Miller and his men were getting ready for their own mission that would have a direct impact on ours. He planned on sending twenty men with us when we traveled north, but they were either going to need to find transportation, or they were going to have to stay behind. Our plane could carry our group, but that was all.
While we were gone, Captain Miller had contacted the Mud Island shelter to let us know that he and his men were starting inland with the hope of reaching the Charleston Air Force Base, and they planned to leave as soon as they could get the Chief to give them some intel about the availability of small planes or helicopters. A quick flyover by the Chief with someone getting some video was all they would need.
They were leaving in advance of us by several days because it could take them a long time to reach the base. It was only thirty miles from Charleston to the Air Force Base, but they didn’t plan to travel by land the entire distance. Instead, they were going to go up the Ashley River on the USCG Cormorant until they reached the train tracks that crossed the river. From there they would go the last few miles by land.
The USCG Cormorant was a Coast Guard ship known as the Marine Protector Class. The Chief had liberated it from the Charleston Coast Guard base and then used it to stop an assault on Fort Sumter by a group of Cuban gunboats. It was later used to transport Captain Miller and about one hundred US Army soldiers from Mud Island to Fort Sumter.
“Radio them back and let them know we can take off at dawn tomorrow morning, Bus. The plane is fueled up and ready to go, so all we need to do is gather up a few things for the trip. I’ll take my usual copilot with me.”
The Chief sensed Kathy would be agreeable to going along, and he saw that she was already packing her gear. She gave him a sideways smile. Words weren’t necessary when it came to who would go with the Chief. If something happened to the plane, we all knew who gave the Chief the best chance of surviving on the ground.
They stowed most of their gear by the entrance to the shelter so they wouldn’t have much to do before leaving in the morning. If all went well, they would be over the Air Force Base and back at Mud Island before noon.
The once quiet shelter had become much more populated than it had been when the infection began. I had been by myself when it started, and it had been too quiet. Now there were nine adults and two children living in the shelter, so it had more of a community feel to it.
When Hampton, Colleen, Cassandra, and the baby arrived, we knew we couldn’t leave things arranged the way they had been. For some reason we could never quite understand, the master bedroom was located in the center of the shelter. Everyone had to pass through the room if they were going up to the kitchen and living room, and they had to do the same to go downstairs to the other bedrooms, armory, sick bay, or anywhere else. We decided that the bathroom in the master bedroom was conveniently located for everyone to share, and we had spent a day relocating to one of the storerooms in a lower level. Supplies that were more commonly used by everyone were moved to the master bedroom.
When we were done and surveyed our new living quarters, we were surprised we hadn’t decided to make the move sooner. We finally had the privacy we had always wanted, and everyone didn’t have to tip toe through the room when Josh was sleeping.
I started to sit down at the big table in the dining area when I noticed everyone else had gathered on the other side of the kitchen. They were huddled together like a crowd waiting for a bus, and they were glancing at me as if I was an infected dead.
There are times when everyone is a little slow to catch on, but I was being particularly dense. I had apparently gotten so used to the smell on my clothes that I had even forgotten about the plastic sandwich bag in my pocket.
“I think I’ll go take a quick shower, and maybe I’ll burn these clothes.”
I eased back out of the seat and headed for the lower levels. By the time I got back, everyone had settled in around the table except Tom and Hampton. It was their turn to cook, and it was a spaghetti night.
The Chief and Kathy were talking about their plans for the next day, and everyone else seemed to be talking at the same time about everything under the sun. I let my eyes wander around the table, and I wondered if anyone else in the world was enjoying supper the way we were.
I saw that Cassandra and Colleen were talking about Hampton as he was busy at the stove. Both were showing their appreciation for a man who knew his way around the kitchen.
When I thought about it for another moment, I remembered that there were at least two more places where people were able to sit down at a table and safely enjoy friendship with a meal, and we were responsible for them being able to do so. The shelter at Fort Sumter had been the safe haven for over one hundred US Army soldiers and a handful of civilians, and the shelter under Ambassadors Island in Lake Norman, North Carolina was populated by close to the same number of people. They were forced to stay inside the shelter for the time being due to radioactivity, but they were safe and probably as content as we were.
All in all, we had been doing a good job striking back against the infection that had left most of the world in ruins and most of the population dead. When I thought about it like that, things were better than they could have been for some of us.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUNRISE OF THE following day didn’t give the Secret Service much hope that it would be a good day. What they hadn’t seen in the darkness of the night before was the devastation on and off of the runway. It was a miracle they had landed two big planes on either of the runways. The number of planes that had run off onto the aprons or into the grass was staggering.
Several planes had landed safely and then pulled off the runways to avoid being hit by other planes. When the pilots of those planes saw Air Force One sitting on a taxiway at the end of the runway, they immediately assumed they would be safe. They powered up their engines and taxied closer.
From Air Force One, the President, the passengers, and the crew all watched in dismay as throngs of the infected dead followed the slowly rolling jet aircraft. From every direction, the infected responded to the noise, and as they gathered around the first plane to start rolling, another pilot got the same idea and began rolling his plane forward, too. Before long, there were six passenger planes moving closer to the President’s plane, and there were at least a thousand infected dead on the tarmac. The crowd appeared to be growing by the minute.
The pilot of Air Force One tried using his radio to get the others to stay where they were, but they wouldn’t listen. At most, there might be an armed Air Marshal on those flights with one weapon. The civilian pilots all knew there would be an arsenal of weapons on Air Force One, and they knew it would take an arsenal to save them. At the very least they expected the President would receive reinforcements, and they hoped any rescue attempt would be extended to them.
An armored personnel carrier of some kind appeared from a distant hangar but directly in the line of sight of Air Force One. The co-pilot saw it emerging from its hiding place, but it was so far away that he wasn’t really sure what it was. He just knew that it was moving at a constant speed straight into the massive crowd of the infected.
The pilot joined the co-pilot and faced where he was pointing. He recognized the vehicle and told the others the Army had arrived.
As it came closer, the vehicle's details were easier to see. It sat high off the ground on eight huge wheels that made it too high for the infected to climb onto. There was a single machine gun mounted on top near a hatch, and they could just make out the man sitting in the opening. He wore a helmet and a reflective visor, but he wasn’t bothering to use the machine gun.
The vehicle rolled through the horde of infected as if they weren’t there. The big tires crushed everything in its path, and everyt
hing that was standing on two feet in between the front tires was either knocked out of the way or swept up underneath the body of the vehicle.
Unlike the Army vehicles used in the Middle East during recent years, this vehicle was not the familiar brown color of desert sand. Instead, it was a deep Army green.
The pilot told the others in the cabin, “That’s a Stryker. Nineteen tons of pure pain to anything in its path. The gun is a M2 .50 caliber machine gun, but I don’t think he plans to shoot his way out of here, or he would have been shooting already.”
The Stryker drove through the growing horde of the infected straight up to the front of Air Force One. It came to a stop just below the nose but not too close for the crew to lose sight of him. The man in the helmet stood up straight and appeared to ignore the crowd that gathered around the vehicle once it came to a stop. There was an other world appearance to the area behind him where the path he had driven was paved with bodies. It left a trail like someone had driven through a cornfield.
The man extended his arms over his head, and the cabin crew saw him lower his hands to cover both ears. Then he held out both hands in fists and started holding out different numbers of fingers.
The crew understood his signal. He was telling them to use their radio to talk with him, and it was not on a channel they normally used.
The co-pilot dialed the radio to the channel indicated by the man and made immediate contact with the Stryker. He listened through his headphones and then gave an affirmative to the Stryker that he understood.
“He wants us to power up and follow him slowly.”
“No problem,” said the pilot. “This was exactly what I was hoping for.”
In the back of Air force One the President felt the vibrations, as did everyone else. They all got out of their seats, hopefully thinking someone might be able to explain why they were moving.
