by Howard, Bob
Every time we move toward a group of the infected with our machetes at the ready, I think about the early days when the Mud Island family was much smaller. Tom’s wife, Allison, had insisted on going with us when we left the shelter and within minutes we were swinging machetes at the infected. Allison had been so scared that she had dropped to the ground. At least that way no one had to worry about cutting her head off.
Since that day we had refined our attacks as a group, and we even practiced forehand and backhand rules. In order to avoid an accidental injury from a machete, the left side of the formation used forehand swings, and the right side used backhand swings. That way we were less likely to hit someone behind us with a follow-through if we missed our target. We also practiced starting our swings without using a pitcher’s windup. No one ever let their blade cross behind their own body.
The Chief and I were in the lead with him on my left. I matched his speed as we moved toward the infected, and since I knew he would be swinging a forehand toward the infected closest to us, I automatically veered to the right. I was grateful to do a backswing because it hurt far less than a forehand. As the first infected went down, the Chief changed course to his left to intercept the next one. The rest of our group followed the person in front of them, and if someone had been watching us from above, they would have thought we moved from side to side like a snake.
We had seen other people attacking the infected, and they always got strung out in a line shoulder to shoulder. Before long the blades would be flying from the left and right, and they were lucky to come away from the fight with all of their own arms still attached. Using our method of attack we drove straight into the middle of the infected that were already on the playing field. There were more in the stands, but we would have plenty of time to deal with them.
A shot rang out behind us just as we were getting into position to dispose of the infected that were falling over the rail on the front row. It was a low wall, so the infected walked into it and immediately did a head first summersault. Their brittle bodies made loud snapping sounds as decayed bones shattered on impact, and the sound of the gunshot was so similar to the breaking bones that we almost didn’t hear it.
We all turned out of reflex. No amount of practice would make us so disciplined that we could forget that three of our family members were left behind in center field. The distraction almost cost us because we had moved too close to the wall to take our eyes away from the infected. They seemed to suddenly pour out of the stands down the third base line. One of the rotting bodies fell in a perfect, rolling dive, and its momentum caused it to fall forward as it came to a standing position like a gymnast. The combined dive, roll, and fall put it within an arm’s reach of the Chief. Its bony, skeletal fingers wrapped around his right forearm, and he reacted with a violent backhand swing.
The Chief wasn’t the kind of soldier to lose his composure or forget the rules. A mental lapse by him was rare, so I was surprised to see that the only thing between me and his incoming machete was the scrawny neck of the infected. The problem was that the weight of the infected was holding his arm down as the machete whistled through the air, and I knew the force behind that swing was going to keep the blade coming across in my direction. The sharpened steel edge hit the fragile neck, and the head disappeared so quickly it might as well have been a baseball sitting on a batting tee. The head disappeared, but the blade kept coming at me.
Hampton saw the same things that I had, but instead of becoming a spectator like me, he reacted. He dove from behind me and hit my legs at the knees. I collapsed under his weight and heard the sound of the machete as it went by.
What happened next was a little confusing to me, but the situation became crystal clear when Kathy snapped out of her loss of composure over Tom being hurt. The last thing any of us had expected was to see our own personal superhero face down in the dirt. Seeing the Chief sprawled on the ground caused us all to freeze for a split second, but then we all moved with purpose. We formed a semi-circle around his prone body and faced outward. Instead of machetes, our rifles were swept from our shoulders, and we began clearing away the infected with abandon.
Kathy had somehow gotten to the middle of the half circle and lifted the Chief’s head from the ground. By the time we had the advance of the infected reduced to random movement in the stands, she had discovered that the Chief had been operating on autopilot. He had a huge lump on the top of his head that he must have gotten in the crash of the helicopter. Iris stopped firing first and helped Kathy to turn him over. I saw that she wasn’t crying, but her face was the same pale, ashen color as the Chief’s. Judging by the color of his skin and the size of the lump on his head, I doubted that he would even remember that he came within inches of decapitating me.
CHAPTER TEN
Chaos
There are times when the best plans just go to pieces. We probably adapt better than most people or we wouldn’t be able to count ourselves among the survivors of the infection. We had lost people along the way, but for the most part those we had seen die were also those who needed the most protection. Alone they couldn’t have survived without the help of the group. It was safe to say that the Chief was one of those survivors who would most likely still be alive even if he had never met any of us. If he had met someone else, they would be his family, but we were the lucky ones. We were here because of him.
I had told myself countless times that I would have survived easily if I had locked myself into my shelter and just stayed there, but when I faced facts, I knew that I would have become starved for the one thing that was missing in the shelter. It was a little light on human companionship. I’ve sometimes wondered how long I could have lasted alone in the shelter, and when I’ve been honest with myself, I lasted as long as I could without people. When the Chief, Kathy, and Jean arrived in their life raft, I was totally glad to see them. I needed them to come along when they did, and if they hadn’t found me, I would have done something dumb like go looking for them. Not them specifically, but someone.
When Kathy found the lump on the Chief’s head, she gasped loud enough for all of us to hear. We had been shooting nonstop, and our ears were ringing, but her gasp might as well have been as loud as the shooting. The lump was already changing colors and Jean was breaking out an instant cold pack from the first aid kit. Iris had taken over with Tom, but Jean was already moving back to him.
“Someone keep that compress on the Chief’s head while I take care of Tom,” she said. “How did he even climb over the fence back there, let alone lead the charge against the infected?”
I was the closest to them, so I dropped to my knees and put one hand over the compress. It was cold, and I was grateful for the little things at the moment. Grateful that Jean was a Registered Nurse, and grateful for first aid kits. I could have wished that we hadn’t crashed or that no one had been hurt, but I chose to say a silent prayer of thanks for the fact that we could treat the injuries. Maybe it was my way of hoping that the injuries weren’t worse.
Jean motioned for Kathy to come help her, and Kathy practically jumped to her side. Up until that moment, Kathy had appeared to be unable to move from the spot between the two men that she loved, one as a father and the other as a companion.
“Here, hold this.”
Jean directed Kathy’s hand to the cloth she had pressed against Tom’s leg, and as soon as Kathy put pressure on it, Jean was threading a large, curved needle.
“Is there anything I can do?” asked Iris.
Jean pointed at something in the first aid kit and Iris immediately saw Jean wanted her to sterilize the needle and the wound. Iris poured some alcohol on a sterile gauze pad and passed it to Kathy. She took the gauze and glanced at Tom’s face. Jean was lifting one of his eyelids and shining a small light into his eye. She nodded at Kathy, and Kathy lifted the bloody cloth away, quickly replacing it with the gauze. If Tom had been conscious, he would have reacted.
Iris had sterilized the needle by the time J
ean was ready for it. Jean moved with skilled hands and made the first stitch so quickly that the wound didn’t have a chance to release much blood.
“The wound is a straight line, or close to it,” she said. “It must’ve happened in the crash. If it was a bite, we wouldn’t be able to stitch it so well.”
“It couldn’t be a bite on top of a crash wound, could it?” asked Kathy.
Jean shook her head. “We’ve both seen enough bites to know the difference. You’re just worried. Give Ed a hand with the Chief while Iris and I finish this up.”
Kathy was lost for a moment. She realized she had totally blocked out the fact that the other main man in her life was also unconscious. She gave Jean a weak smile and a quick kiss on the cheek.
When Kathy joined me at the Chief’s side, she wanted to take a look under the cold compress. She winced when she saw it.
“We need to get these two into a safe place. Where do you suppose that would be?” she asked.
I had already been thinking ahead to what we were going to do, and I knew it had to be somewhere that could be totally closed off, but every place I thought of also had the unsavory possibility of being a dead end. Not to mention the fact that the Chief and Tom were two big guys. We were in for some really heavy lifting.
Sim knelt down next to us and cleared his throat.
“When we holed up in the airport we were lucky to have supplies, but the main thing we had was a way to seal ourselves in where the infected couldn’t see us. As long as they couldn’t see us, we were able to spread out through a large part of the airport. Unless we have another rat invasion, this place should be safe, but that means cleaning out anything else that’s moving in the ballpark.”
“I’ll second that,” said Hampton. “We can start a sweep, and then we can stay away from the places where they can see us from the outside. Unless we find a big hole in the walls or fences, we should be able to manage this.”
Hearing Sim and Hampton lay out a strategy was just what Kathy needed. She realized that she knew Joe Riley ballpark better than any of us. As a rookie police officer she had been able to catch a few games when she got off work, but even before that she had been to plenty of games. She had never seen what was hidden behind the dugouts and the locker rooms, and she hadn’t ever gone up into the press boxes and the party suites, but she knew there wasn’t anything complicated about making the place safe.
I said, “If we can close off the locker rooms from the outside, we won’t even have to worry about what’s inside them.”
“If they’re already closed, I can’t think of a good reason to open them,” said Sim. “We sealed a lot of rooms with the dead inside them at the airport. Then when the rats came through they always found a way to get inside the rooms. By the time we came back out of the airplane, the rats had cleared all the rooms for us.”
I think we all thought of the same thing at the same time. There had been a rat invasion in Charleston too. Probably were rat invasions in every city to some extent. Some were worse than others. After the rat population got too large they turned on each other for food, and the balance of nature took over. Then the dead went back to work trying to find more survivors to bite.
“Do you think the rat swarms got to the infected inside the rooms below the stands?” asked Colleen. She had been listening to us while standing guard with Cassandra.
Sim said, “There were infected walking around inside the park.” He gestured toward the stands where we had just shot a few dozen of the infected that had walked toward the sound of gunfire.
“Only one way to find out,” said Kathy. “Sim, would you be okay to stay behind with Jean and Iris?”
Kathy started to add that she hoped he wasn’t insulted, but he stopped her.
“I know, I know. I’m a navigator. Just take care of my lady for me.”
Cassandra flashed a big smile at Sim. In a firefight there would be no contest as to who I’d rather have by my side. Cassandra had been the only survivor on a ship that was jammed full of the infected. She had to fight the infected and the living at the end. Sim had survived by being smart, but Cassandra had survived by being a warrior.
“Should we move the Chief and Tom out to the center field wall before we go?” I asked.
Everyone was in agreement that the grass had grown tall enough to hide them if they stayed still, so we carefully lifted the Chief’s huge body and carried him to the fence. It took all of us, and we were winded by the time we got back to Tom. Just to make it easier, we all helped to carry him as well. Everyone went to work on some bushes nearby and then dragged the branches into place. Unless they stood up and shouted, it wasn’t likely that any of the infected would wander out and find them.
With our injured friends well hidden, we followed the outfield fence toward the stands in right field. With Cassandra in the lead we climbed over a low wall and began our search for any infected dead that were trapped inside the park.
The place was a mess. There were barricades in places that gave us a good idea of how badly things had gone in the beginning. Not that we didn’t already know, and not that we hadn’t seen the same things in other places, but it was obvious that what had happened in Joe Riley Park had happened a long time ago. The infected we had seen and shot from our position in the outfield were likely to be the only infected we saw unless there were some trapped in the bowels of the stadium.
What bothered us the most about the signs of long ago chaos and death was the signs that the place had never stood a chance to be the refuge it was thought to be. The infection had overwhelmed the hospitals so quickly that people actually tried to retreat to the ballpark. The evidence was the line of ambulances that were backed up against the closest gates. There were walls. There were steel gates in solid steel fences, and they closed against brick walls. There was food, lights, and police protection. We could even imagine how the mayor and his family had rushed up the front steps before the gates were pulled shut. We could see his limousine next to the ambulances, and someone had even taken the time to tape up a makeshift sign on an office door proclaiming it as belonging to the Mayor of Charleston. It was chaos at the start, and it was chaos at the end. Sadly, those two days hadn’t been too far apart.
We searched through several vending areas and found doors that led to restricted areas where fans could never go. We had to use flashlights for far longer than we would have wanted, and everything appeared to move when shadows crept through the rooms. There was that ever present smell from what had happened here a long time ago, but there was that other smell of something that had happened more recently. Patches of dark black blood and blood that was still closer to red.
Even where there hadn’t been death, there was still the rot. The smell of spoiled food and decay was long gone, but now there was the smell that comes from lack of use. Sewer lines poured methanol gas into rooms that had been closed for years, and sometimes it was enough just to pass by rooms and leave them closed. We weren’t staying, we just needed to be sure it was safe until the Chief and Tom were back on their feet.
I think we were all surprised to find how much time had passed when we finally emerged from the interior of the ballpark. It was raining and had been for a while. The gloom made the debris that accumulated over the years look even more sinister.
Kathy held up her hand with the signal for everyone to stop. Cassandra was still in the lead, and it made us all nervous that she wasn’t the one to signal danger. We all stood completely still and just listened. There was nothing. One by one we made eye contact and everyone gave the same slight shake of the head to say we didn’t know what had spooked Kathy.
Cassandra held up one hand to signal move out, but when it was half raised her eyes found something. She kept it half raised and raised her other hand to match it. Kathy was next in line, and her eyes followed Cassandra’s. Her head was tilted back so she was looking at something beyond and above Cassandra. Colleen, Hampton, and I watched her raise her hands. None of us could
see anything ahead in all of the debris, but it was obvious that Cassandra and Kathy were in agreement about surrender.
It wasn’t a loud voice, but it was very clear as it carried through the concession concourse of the ballpark.
“The rest of you need to be as smart as the ladies with their hands up.”
I managed to zero in on the spot where Cassandra had spotted something, and I saw the barrel of a rifle with slight movement behind it. To the left was another rifle. From somewhere behind me there was movement, and I wanted badly to face it rather than to have an infected dump saliva down the back of my shirt before ripping me open. I was almost relieved when I heard a voice come from the spot.
“Don’t turn around. Everyone ease your weapons to the ground then lace your fingers behind your heads.”
Rough hands grabbed me even before I could sit my rifle on the ground, and a sack made of coarse material was pulled over my head. I could see a little light through the material, but only enough to see that we were overwhelmed by a group twice as big as ours. I heard muffled commands and grunts as the others were handled as roughly as me. Someone was kicked, and I was pretty sure Kathy kicked one of them. Then it was quiet.
Several hands lifted me, and I realized I must have been knocked out for at least a few minutes because I didn’t remember my hands being tied behind my back. If I couldn’t feel the hands gripping my skin as well as my clothes, it would have felt like I was floating. Then it was lighter through the material of the cloth until I felt like I was falling. I landed on top of something I recognized as human bodies. I panicked because all I could think was that I had been tossed onto a pile of dead people.
There was a loud sound that had to be doors closing, and then the sound of an engine starting. I felt the body directly under me squirm. All I could think of was getting away from the body I knew must be an infected that was trying to get into position to bite me. The problem was that it could see me but I couldn’t see it.
