by Howard, Bob
“She thinks they’re exterminating them,” said Iris.
Captain Miller was speechless for a moment. If it was that simple, the military could do the same thing. They could sit off the coast and draw every infected within range into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico. They could even do it along the Great Lakes and every major river in the country.
“I haven’t been able to explain why they’re doing it by themselves if that’s what you’re wondering, Jim. It would only make sense to me that they would want to use their zombie-whistle from a location that was completely safe and would do the maximum damage to the infected population.”
“You got it right before, Kathy, back on the beach when you said they must’ve realized they would be eliminating the infected, but they would be sacrificing every living person in the path of that horde. I saw it for myself when I followed them down the interstate, and whoever they are, they knew they didn’t have the ability to warn everyone in the area first, so they just went ahead and did it.”
“My God,” said Jim. “The military would have spent a few weeks or months evacuating people in the path, and then we would’ve drawn them through unoccupied areas.”
“Exactly,” said Iris. “That may also explain why they didn’t come to you for help. They knew you would order them to stand down until it was approved up the chain of command.”
The helicopter appeared in their camera view for a few minutes, and they watched its progress as it hovered at the base of the bridge on the Charleston side. Radio communications had been sporadic at best, and Captain Miller even speculated that the signal being sent out to the infected dead was so powerful that it was interfering with their radio signals. The helicopter eventually peeled away from its position and flew in a direct course for the landing area beyond Fort Sumter.
Thirty minutes later the photographs were uploaded into their computer, and even in the darkness, startling images of the bridge were displayed on the wall-sized monitor. Thousands of infected dead were on the bridge already, and the main horde hadn’t even arrived yet. They were laboriously walking up the steep on-ramps and converging before tackling the slope of the main span of the bridge. The helicopter had rotated where it hovered and gotten them a three hundred and sixty degree view of the area, and when it faced north they could see the incredible wall of the infected less than a mile from the exit to the bridge.
“Will the bridge support that much weight?” asked Janice.
The Chief arrived just as the question was asked, and combined with the images on the monitor, he easily guessed what they had been doing.
“I was just about to send for you,” said Captain Miller. “Our resident geniuses figured out why the infected horde is coming to Charleston.”
Tom, Hampton, the Chief, and I had been making plans for the next day when we would take to the air to watch the progress of the horde. We would also be trying to assess how many of the infected would be going into the rivers now that the bridges were either destroyed or open. We had gone to find Captain Miller because we would be using his men and helicopters. Whatever had delayed him from meeting with us, we figured it had to be something important, and the control room would be his likely location.
“Of course they did,” said Tom. “Brains and beauty.”
Normally his comment would have elicited a few remarks back from the ladies, but they were so caught up in their new revelations that they let it pass.
Kathy gave the Chief a quick breakdown of her theory, and his face was like cold stone at the part about the people trapped between the horde and Charleston. Iris had told him what it was like when she had followed the horde. She had told all of us, but at night when they were alone, she had woken up screaming, and each time it was because she had dreamt she was on the wrong side of that mass of evil. If it had been a nightmare to her, we could only imagine what it was like for the people who were in its path.
“It’s too late to help those people now,” he said in a sober voice, “but I think we should treat what those people have done as war crimes.”
Captain Miller said, “I can’t exactly act on behalf of the military. I may be charged with war crimes myself, but in the absence of civil authority, I would support that position, Chief. We can cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Iris was nodding in agreement.
“You’ve got my vote, but like you said, it’s too late to help the victims. We have to let those people play out whatever it is they have in mind. We’re safe out here at Fort Sumter, but I have to wonder if they’ve thought this thing through to a logical conclusion. Are they completely safe?”
“I think they are,” said Hampton. “That bridge is bigger than the one we blew up in Georgetown, and when it was packed with the infected, it would have stood like that until the end of time if we didn’t blow it up. They’ve blocked it well enough to keep anything from crossing it, so I think we’re about to see a spectacular display of the laws of physics.”
“We’ll know at sunrise,” said the Chief. “Which law?”
“The one about an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object.”
The Chief nodded.
“If you’re right, the horde will be forced to spread left and right, and the railings will get packed with the infected. It will take hours for them to get packed tight enough against the railing on the right side to make it buckle, but sooner or later it will break.”
“What about the left side?” I asked. “There’s no pedestrian railing on that side.”
“All guesswork,” said the Chief, “but I think the pileup on that side will get so deep that it will force the infected to fall over the concrete barrier further down the bridge by Charleston. Think of it like this. They get jammed up against the barrier built by Patriots Point under the set of towers closer to Mt Pleasant. The pileup backs all the way past the towers on the Charleston side and then slopes downward. The infected get directed toward the sides because they can’t go uphill at the center. They fall over the concrete barriers, and the pedestrian walkway instantly starts a new parade. Thousands of infected dead march past the jammed up horde until they meet the barrier. That’s when the railing gets tested.”
Janice asked, “And do you have a guess for the strength of that fence? It’s about eight feet tall, but it doesn’t look that strong. I don’t think anyone ever expected it to have thousands of bodies packed against it.”
“Exactly,” answered the Chief. “When it goes down, I expect bodies to fall through the opening for several days.”
The thought was staggering. Sometimes it was hard to remember these were people, and they had to be eliminated, but this was going to be a massive thinning of the infected population. The prospect of how it would change the world gave rise to one more question.
“It’s a sacrifice, isn’t it?” said Kathy. “The few people caught in the path of the horde are being sacrificed for the greater good of the people who survived at Patriots Point.”
I couldn’t help adding, “And arguably anywhere else including us.”
Kathy gave me a withering glare that made me lower my eyes to the floor, but the Chief came to my defense and was quickly seconded by Tom.
“They would use that logic, Ed. As a matter of fact, they’ll want us to thank them when we finally meet.”
“What have we learned from the photographs about the signal they’ve been sending? What did you call it, a zombie-whistle?” asked Captain Miller.
No one missed an opportunity to call them zombies just to get a reaction out of the Chief.
Before the Chief could say they weren’t zombies, Kathy answered by moving a pointer across the screen to the section of the photograph that included the massive V shape at the top of the bridge on the Mt Pleasant side. Even in the darkness they could make out the circular outline of a parabolic dish.
“I want to shoot a missile into that thing just to stop the ringing in my ears,” said Kathy.
The Chief could be unreada
ble in a poker game, but there were times when we could all read his emotions just as if he had them written on his forehead. The anger he was feeling as he stared at that dish was obvious.
“They knew what they were doing when they turned that thing on,” he said. “Look at the size of that thing. A lot of work went into getting that array up there, so they must’ve known they were condemning survivors to death.”
“We have sporadic radio contact with the helicopters,” said a soldier wearing a headset. “It isn’t clear, but it’s good enough to understand. They confirm hundreds of infected in the downtown area are finding their way to the Cooper River and walking right into the water. Folly Beach still has stragglers walking into the ocean at the tip of Morris Island, but it appears the dead population of Folly Beach is almost zero.”
******
There was no reason to expect the infected to be capable of experiencing emotions, but sometimes it was easy to interpret their sounds as pain or their reaching hands as pleading. The overall feeling we got when we studied the pictures of the swarms of infected walking toward the bridge was a projection of how we felt to have that incessant ringing in our ears. It wasn’t drawing us to the bridge the way it was the infected, but now that we knew it was there, it was easy for us to wonder if it was agitating them as much as it was us. Another question came to mind, and that was how much research had been done by someone on the infected to learn that they responded to specific sounds. Whoever was doing the research must have unlimited resources, as well as time and safety.
We all stared into the darkness across the harbor at the black hull of the aircraft carrier. The darkness was symbolic of whatever it was that was going on inside that ship. Someone was conducting experiments that would ultimately benefit mankind and its struggle to survive, but whoever they were, they were doing it at a great expense to humanity.
CHAPTER NINE
Gravity
At sunrise we were ready to fly. We had the Sikorsky packed as full as we could, and the whole ‘Mud Island Family’ was along for the ride. Iris was the newest member, and the only one missing was Bus. Janice had spent so much time alone on the oil rig that she found it difficult to leave the company and safety she found in the shelter, so we understood when she chose to remain at Fort Sumter.
Our first pass over the Arthur Ravenel bridge was in hope of catching a glimpse of our adversaries on the other side of the barrier across the bridge, but whoever they were, they had skillful engineers. The cargo containers that were stacked six rows deep and four rows high formed a precisely made rectangle across the bridge and along the sides back toward Mt. Pleasant. That end of the rectangle was open and the center was clear of vehicles and debris. We could see windows cut in the walls of the containers, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that the inside row all the way around was empty and used as a fort. The remaining containers had most likely been filled with extra weight to keep the infected from pushing them out of the way.
There was no movement on the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge, but the first of the infected had already arrived at the barrier. They were milling around as if they didn’t know what to do next. High above their heads the signal that was calling to them was still sending out whatever it was that they could hear, and now that we knew it was there, we were sure it was causing the incessant ringing in our ears.
We slowly hovered toward the bottom of the bridge to watch the main procession as it arrived. The horde was so densely populated that it tried to spread outward every time that it passed through a choke point. The individual goal of every infected was something invisible that kept pulling them in the same general direction as before, but the pressure to expand was just like water through a garden hose. A ‘spray’ of infected was shoved out of the choke points in a wide pattern. Wherever the horde had also managed to have smaller groups traveling parallel to the main group, the spray of infected sent reinforcements that made those groups swell in size.
One such group split away from the main horde at the intersection of the highway with the roads that merged onto the bridge. Just like other major entrances and exits on the interstate, most lanes were heavily littered by rusting vehicles that had become snarled in traffic on those final days and nights. Thousands of people from neighboring cities and towns that shared the escape routes all converged on the spot with the same idea that they would be safe if they could only get onto the other side of the bridge. Most of them would never know that there was nowhere to go that was safe. Even within hours after it had begun, it was over for most people.
The infected swarmed between the rusty cars and collected in the lane that had been cleared by the people at Patriots Point. That gave a path to the leaders of the horde, and they gained some speed. At first it caused them to become slightly more spread out, but their damaged and decaying bodies slowed their progress again, and the slope of the bridge caused the dead up front to be pushed from behind. As they were pushed, hundreds of them were redirected toward the sides of the bridge, and we watched an unexpected development begin. The pedestrian path along the side of the bridge didn’t wait for a backup to force the infected onto it. Instead, a stream of infected veered toward an opening in the concrete barrier and walked unobstructed up the bridge. When that opening in the barrier had been made was a mystery. It was such a subtle change in the landscape that we hadn’t noticed it.
“There goes the neighborhood,” the Chief said over the intercom system.
The largest hordes we had seen since the first day had always been frightening. It would leave me speechless to see hundreds of the infected walking together in a group. I guess the first horde was the one the Chief and I saw walking down the coast from Myrtle Beach toward Georgetown. It was a narrow highway with heavy forests along the way, so it was probably hundreds of infected dead. Then there was the horde we flew over when we ventured away from the shelter for the first time. It was marching toward the Naval Weapons Station as if it knew that was where they would find the largest number of living people. That one was probably a few thousand. The horde by the airport had been a few thousand, but that one was such a close call that I didn’t care how many there were. We were too busy running.
I pictured a crowd of people the same size trying to get a glimpse of a presidential inauguration, and I couldn’t. The horde that arrived on the Ravenel Bridge made Woodstock look like a local church Sunday picnic, and there were people who believed that famous event was over a half million people. The interstate was a solid mass of movement on all lanes, and since the infected were only following the call of the signal being sent from the top of the bridge and not using a map or GPS directions, the surrounding area below the interstate was covered with a drab colored blanket of infected that flowed through every path it could follow.
Infected that had wandered the city streets near the famous military college, the Citadel, were drawn by the same beacon of sound, but only a few would reach their desired goal. If they were near the onramp of the interstate when it started, they joined the parade and found their way to the bridge. Far more crossed Morrison Drive and followed the buildings and fences until they found openings that would let them walk into the Cooper River.
The Chief came over the intercom and said, “Some of them have to be coming from the Ashley River area. That means they ignored the explosions on the bridges in favor of the zombie whistle.”
We all knew what he was doing, but it worked anyway. He got everyone to at least chuckle for a moment. He was serious about what was happening below us, but he was hoping to lighten the mood just a little. There was no way he would ever agree that the infected were zombies, but he had admitted he was amused when he had first heard the beacon referred to as a zombie-whistle.
As if someone had thrown a switch that was guaranteed to change the mood inside the aircraft, something caused a thumping sound on the fuselage of the sleek Sikorsky helicopter. It was only once, which was both good and bad news. One thump meant the possibility of one bullet inst
ead of several. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was never a good idea to be shot down, but there wasn’t a place below us that had ten square feet that wasn’t occupied by the infected. We all went silent and waited for the Chief and Kathy to review all gauges and indicator lights for warnings, and at the same time the Chief put the helicopter into a steep bank away from the area. He had to choose right or left and hope he picked the right one. If there was a shooter below us and the Chief turned the wrong way, we would be more exposed to the next shot.
The Chief chose to bank left and go west toward the Ashley River. It was far less populated with the infected. He leveled out and shook his head in Kathy’s direction. She reported that she saw no warning lights and all checks were normal.
“How stupid can a shooter be to give away his position in the middle of so many infected?” I asked over my headset.
“There’s no scale to measure that much stupidity,” said Jean.
The left turn had brought us back around toward the river as planned, and the Chief turned again to bring us on a course for home, but he descended earlier than we expected and sat the helicopter down just past second base in the minor league baseball stadium. Tall grass was flattened by the burst of wind from the rotors, and we threw open the doors knowing that the Chief had chosen to land for a visual inspection. He would need us outside watching for infected that may have been trapped inside the stadium.
Joe Riley Stadium, or ‘The Joe’ as the locals called it, was a small park, but in its time it had been perfectly located with a view of the Ashley River and the T. Allen Legare Bridge, which was at the moment pointing straight upward where we had put it. The Joe had been a picturesque addition to a quaint city, but the empty seats were littered with remains that told the story of survivors in the early days of the infection. On second thought, if there had been a game in progress when it all started, the litter told a different story. I tried to imagine it as I panned the sights of my rifle across the rows of seats, the dugouts, and the tunnels that led to the concession areas.
