by Howard, Bob
There were at least a dozen uniformed security guards escorting them from the basement to the upper floor. They took the stairs because they couldn’t risk the elevator going up to one of the floors that had been compromised. They also only had to go up two floors from the evidence room to the ground floor.
The ground floor had taken on the appearance of a war zone. What had been bright lights, shiny linoleum, clean glass, and modern furniture was now walls, floors, and ceilings filled with bullet holes and painted with blood. There were no bodies, but there were body parts. Grace took in the tragic scene and put two and two together.
“They didn’t figure out that you have to shoot the infected in the head. Everyone that died has already walked out of here because none of them died from head wounds.”
“Why do you know so much about this?” asked Denise. “How come you know that?”
She kept her voice low, just above a whisper.
Dr. Williams didn’t answer. Denise knew she heard her, but Grace was obviously ignoring the question.
The bright, white walls that weren’t splattered with blood stood out in stark contrast to the places where there had been the most shooting, but there weren’t many walls that were completely untouched.
Without glass in some of the windows and doors there was nothing to keep the flies from coming in. Flies can smell meat from over four miles away, and there was plenty of meat and blood spread around the police station. Not all flies can make the four mile trip when they smell meat, but there was no shortage of flies in the immediate area, and the buzzing was almost as sickening as the smell.
Uniformed men went ahead of the small group of civilians to be sure the area outside the doors was safe. One stopped in the doorway and watched his comrades as they spread out in the parking lot. There were gunshots, and everyone instinctively ducked. The man in the doorway went to a knee as he held his palm out toward Dr. Williams signaling her to wait where she was. When he was sure she had obeyed the signal, he put his hand under his rifle to cradle it and took aim. There was a momentary pause before he pulled the trigger.
Phillip was just about to pull Denise back to the evidence room, but the uniformed man motioned rapidly for them to follow him. The sunlight was too bright as they rushed in a huddled group to follow the soldier, or whatever he was. They shielded their eyes against the glare, but when the full impact of the devastation outside came into view, the Corrigans were too stunned to follow Alex and Dr. Williams.
Vehicles had burned, and several were still smoldering. Heat waves shimmered off of scorched, blackened metal and even the melted plastic parts. The inside had smelled of blood, weapons fire, and human excrement. Outside the smell was like an auto salvage yard that had caught fire. Burning fuel, oil, and rubber released a toxic smell that made their eyes water before they even had to pass by the cars that still smoked. Even worse, there was the pervasive smell of cooked meat and scorched hair.
Even if the Corrigans hadn’t stopped, frozen in their tracks, the overwhelming smell would have had the same effect. They didn’t cover their noses and mouths soon enough, and they doubled over from the spasms that hit their stomachs and throats.
Alex covered his mouth and nose with his hand, but Grace hardly noticed the smell. She had spent so much time in labs and autopsy rooms that she had only smelled what she expected to.
Muffled by his hand, Alex sounded like he was speaking in a foreign language, and he regretted even trying to talk in the middle of the stench. As soon as he opened his mouth he felt like he could taste it as well as smell it.
“This is awful. I don’t know how you can even stand to be around this stuff. How can you cut people up for a living?”
If looks could kill, Alex would have been spread around the parking lot in pieces just like dozens of other people.
“You make it sound so gruesome. You do understand it’s a science, right? What I do for a living took years of education and years of practice, so I don’t just cut people up.”
The last few words were said very slowly and had a note of warning to them. Alex didn’t know when to quit.
“You have to admit there must be a little ghoul in you for it not to bother you.”
“I don’t have to admit anything of that sort, and by the way, do you even know the definition of ghoul? I don’t rob graves, and I certainly don’t eat dead people. I have an idea, Alex. Why don’t we leave you here so you can find out what a ghoul really is?”
He didn’t think she was serious, and he missed the gesture Grace made toward one of the armed guards. Two of them closed on him from each side, and he was surprised when they pulled his arms back and slapped handcuffs on his wrists. Before he could protest the treatment, a gag was stuffed in his mouth, and a sack was pulled over his head.
In the middle of the tangle of vehicles in the parking lot, the doors opened on a military style vehicle. The guards virtually tossed Alex inside, and the roughness they showed was a contrast to the courtesy they showed the Corrigans. One of them politely extended his hand to Denise and offered to help her up the high step into the back of the vehicle. She eyed him closely, and he seemed genuine, but she and Phillip were both wondering who these people were that they were so organized and prepared in the face of such a strange disaster.
The ride wasn’t what they considered comfortable. The vehicle’s oversized tires bounced over things in the road, and the driver constantly changed directions. There were no windows they could use to be able to see where they were going or what they were driving through. The fact that they were moving at all was a miracle. Denise and Phillip weren’t so distrusting that they didn’t feel grateful to be alive. What little they had seen before getting inside the personnel carrier convinced them they were far luckier than most people. If someone told them they were the only people alive who had been sitting on the deck of the restaurant where they had eaten the night before, they would have believed it judging by the human remains scattered around the police station parking lot.
Thirty minutes after climbing into the personnel carrier they came to a stop, and a man dressed in body armor opened a panel that separated the front seats from the back.
“We’ll be inside the Green Zone in a few minutes. When the door opens, proceed directly to the medical examination area. If you’re bite free, you will be designated as a Survivor, Infection Free, and you will be escorted to the requisition center. Follow the signs that say SIF.”
“How do we know if we’re infection free?” asked Denise. “We weren’t bitten?”
“That’s correct, Ma’am. If you have been bitten, you won’t be designated as a survivor. You will be designated as IDP.”
“IDP,” echoed Denise.
“Infected, Death Pending,” answered the man.
The panel closed, and they waited in silence. Dr. Williams was reading something one of their escorts had given her. Alex was a heap in the corner under his burlap sack, and from time to time they could hear him mumble around the gag in his mouth something about doing as he was told. He sounded like he was praying and making promises. For some reason silence seemed like the right thing to both Phillip and Denise. One of the armed men had ridden in back with them, and he was off somewhere in a world of his own, totally disinterested in anything accept guarding Alex and escorting the Corrigans.
The vehicle rolled forward a few feet and stopped then did it again. They had the impression that they were in a line and moving closer to something.
Outside of the personnel carrier it was a long line of vehicles entering a compound. About forty of the same personnel carriers were passing through the main checkpoint of the Green Zone. They were already inside the Orange Zone which was heavily manned by guards. The Orange Zone wrapped in an arc around Patriots Point, and where there were no guards it was mined with explosive devices that were guaranteed to keep anything from getting in or out of the area. Beyond the Orange Zone on the outside was the Red Zone. The infected still wandered across the Red Zon
e in the direction of the convoy waiting to pass through the inspection area. Snipers were still shooting the infected when they came within a few feet of the end of the line.
Inside past the Orange Zone there was another buffer, but the guards had their rifle straps across their shoulders. Nothing was getting inside the Orange Zone that wasn’t supposed to.
The line moved forward until their personnel carrier was surrounded by guards who slapped their palms against the sides to get them to climb out of the vehicle quickly. When they saw they had startled Dr. Williams, there were hasty apologies as the guards scurried to help her and Denise down from the high vehicle. A golf cart was brought up for her, and she hardly seemed to notice when Phillip and Denise were escorted into a tent. She rode away without saying a word. They received more courtesy than most people because they had come in with Dr. Williams, but after she was whisked away, their treatment became more indifferent as they were put into line with other refugees hoping to be admitted to the Green Zone.
They were helpless when it came to defending themselves from whatever it was that was about to happen, so there was nothing they could do for Alex. He was dragged from the personnel carrier and dropped along the fence to sit next to several other men who were hidden under burlap hoods.
Phillip leaned close to his wife’s ear and whispered, “Are you believing all of this?”
“Who are these people?” she answered.
“That’s what I mean. They aren’t military, but they seem awfully prepared for this.”
“I agree, but there’s too much chaos. It’s like they’re some kind of private army.”
Denise had been an Army brat when she was a child, so she had seen the crisp discipline of an Army base even under bad conditions. The men and women walking around in uniform were probably ex-military, but whoever was in command was more likely to be a civilian.
Shots rang out back at the end of the line of vehicles. Both of them jumped, and Phillip protectively put his body between his wife and the shooting. There were cheers from the Orange Zone because someone had apparently hit their target.
“See what I mean?” she said.
A guard at the entrance to the tent snapped his fingers impatiently, and the Corrigans saw a gap had formed in the line where the people ahead of them had moved forward. They closed the gap, but the man still kept an annoyed expression aimed at them.
“Sorry,” mumbled Phillip as they moved forward into the tent.
Inside there were two rows of tables. Men and women sat at the tables and took down information from refugees who were answering questions. They saw that one row was processing men while the other processed women. The guard at the end of the women’s table motioned for Denise to come forward. Phillip took one step to follow her, but he didn’t get far.
“Hold up. You come over here.”
It was the men’s table, and they didn’t like to be kept waiting.
Over the next fifteen minutes they were both asked a series of questions about who they were, where they were from, what happened to them the night before, and where they had been during the night. The biggest question was whether or not they had been bitten.
Both of them were taken behind curtains where they were told to get undressed. The serious faces of the doctors and nurses waiting to check them for bites left no doubt in their minds that they should comply without question. Denise was a bit shy about the whole thing, but until the night before she had never seen anything like the things she had seen, and this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to her.
Denise and Phillip finished dressing and stepped out of the curtained areas almost at the same time. Just as they saw each other there was some sort of commotion at the entrance of the tent. A man had turned around and attempted to get out of the line, and his movement was seen by the guards immediately. Apparently, he had entered the tent and seen that everyone ahead of him was being checked for bites, and he was nursing a bandaged arm.
Armed men grabbed the man and the trademark burlap bag seemed to come out of nowhere. Not being able to see tended to immobilize people, and it was quickly pulled over his head. He was lifted by his arms and legs and carried past the line of people who silently feared similar treatment. No one else wanted a bag over their head.
Phillip had a better view of the area beyond the inspection curtains, and he saw that the physical examination of the man only lasted a matter of seconds. Instead of coming out the way they had gone in, the man was carried through a door in the back of the tent. Phillip was receiving instructions from a processor at the last station when the guards came through the tent without the bitten man.
The processor pressed the backs of their hands with a rubber ink stamp and pointed at a side flap in the tent. Phillip led Denise through it without hesitation, eager to get away from the uncertainty inside the tent. The flap opened directly in front of a gate where a pair of guards glanced at their hands and then pointed toward a sign with SIF written on it in big letters. They felt some relief for the first time since the night before, and almost broke into a run in the direction indicated by the arrow on the sign.
******
In the initial days of the outbreak, millions of people were displaced, unable to even return to their homes a few miles away. The infection spread so quickly that the first survivors were people who were already at home, and they were smart enough to stay there. What drove many of them from the safety of their homes was the need for medical attention for family members, but no one knew there wasn’t a cure. That knowledge would come later when it was too late.
A small number of people survived because they were in the right place at the right time. Even people who were close to Patriots Point were being slaughtered, so they ran blindly. Without knowing where they were going, some fled toward the maritime museum. They didn’t know what they would find on the old World War II aircraft carrier, but it had to be better than what was happening in the streets. As people died around them, some fell into the safety net under Marshall Sayer.
Marshall Sayer had just enough advance notice to activate his emergency plan, and he flooded the area around Patriots Point with his operatives. Their primary goal was to save him and a small group of his essential personnel. In this case, medical staff were critical to survival, and they were whisked away from their medical centers and research institutes and deposited in locations around Charleston. The most versatile personnel carriers were then dispatched to round them up. Some never made it back, but the huge Stryker vehicles drove over cars and helpless people where they had to, and the overall plan was a success.
A second part of his plan was to gather up as many of the locals as he could without endangering his staff of doctors. He didn’t know that they were dealing with a pathogen as relentless as this one would turn out to be, but he knew his doctors would need a good supply of test subjects. He didn’t think of them as people trying to survive. He thought of them as subjects who ran in the right direction.
That part of the plan worked so well that most of his staff were in place before the Corrigans were processed. As a matter of fact, they were among the last of the civilians to be admitted, and they would have the good fortune to be given jobs instead of becoming test subjects. As they hurried up the ramp into the USS Yorktown, they would have been horrified to see what was happening behind them. They were met by an escort who welcomed them with a smile.
It was only noon when the orders were passed down the line to the processing tents inside the Orange Zone, and the entire screening process came to a halt. Personnel carriers in line at the gate turned around and drove back to the Red Zone. They drove straight through the infected dead that were stumbling along the road toward the sounds of the sharpshooters, and the drivers didn’t try to avoid them. The roads were swept clear for the carriers that followed the ones in front.
The occupants of each vehicle became restless. They couldn’t see where they were going accept for the limited view past the armed men in the
front seats. They begged to know what was happening and why they were turning around, but they got no answers from the men who had seemingly brought them to safety. Now they followed closely behind the vehicles in front of them, and they traveled at a speed that made them sense the urgency.
In a few of the personnel carriers the passengers became defiant, but when they insisted on knowing where they were going, they were quick to obey when the guns were pointed at them. For those who weren’t used to following orders, their behavior was changed as the guns were aimed at their families. In other carriers, the passengers hadn’t given up hope. They believed that they were better off than the unlucky souls outside the vehicles, and they quietly waited for the drivers to take them to a new, safer destination.
Over an hour later the passengers heard gunfire in the distance, and it was obvious that they were driving toward the source. The convoy didn’t slow down as it began weaving through a maze of wrecked cars. They passed a guardhouse that was manned by a large force of men who were busy engaging an unseen enemy. The passengers would have been right to assume they were firing at the infected, but not one of them could have conceived there were so many. The fields and trees around the entrance of the container terminal were flooded with the undead that were drawn toward the activity at the gate.
As the last of the vehicles passed through the opening, a large gate was rolled into place. The shooters withdrew from their positions and hastily joined ranks with a second group of uniformed men who were unloading trucks, setting up a new perimeter inside the original fence.
Marshall Sayer had insisted that contingency plans were needed for the wide variety of catastrophes that could occur. A zombie apocalypse had been a last minute addition to their list, and it turned out to be a good idea. It was only added after one of his spies had uncovered the list that had been used a long time ago by that crazy survivalist group that was being funded by the government to build shelters. He had laughed for hours after reading their list, but it had finally occurred to him the word ‘zombie’ could be used generically to mean any number of things, especially biohazards. Planning for a generic catastrophe was an entertaining endeavor for him, and one of his brainstorming sessions produced the suggestion that two fences were better than one.
