by Howard, Bob
Keeping low behind cars and trucks, they crept past the groaning crowd of infected that had gone into a dead end formed by wreckage. If one of them found its way back out of the dead end, it would be completely by accident. They watched long enough to see that it was like the crab traps Jed had used to catch blue crabs. The cars were spread out over a wide area but slowly merged into one open lane that passed between them. There were no openings for the infected to stray outside of the lane to go around the roadblock ahead. That single lane gradually narrowed until it was the width of a sidewalk, and the infected continued to walk ahead in single file.
When they came to the two cars that were positioned with a gap between them barely wide enough for the infected to go through one at a time, they bumped into each other from behind, and the infected up front were pushed through. Once past the small gap, the path ahead widened enough for them to walk two abreast, so they picked up speed. With over two dozen of them squeezed into a cul-de-sac, they couldn’t find their way back out, so they bumped against each other, fell down, and generally took on the appearance of a crowd at a heavy metal concert. It wasn’t likely that they would ever find a way out of their trap.
Jed led Mattie through the trees, picking their way carefully past brackish pools of water. By the time Jed remembered what else lived in between those trees, Mattie was surprised by a snake that was upset by the intruders. It didn’t strike, but its sideways motion told Jed it was about to. He snatched Mattie off the ground and rushed forward so fast that he almost walked both of their faces straight through a spider web.
That was enough for Jed. He decided he had to find a place for them to spend the night, and it had to be soon. He angled back toward the interstate and rushed up the shoulder into the open. If there were any infected, he planned to overwhelm them. He was so tired and so stressed from the long day that he almost ignored the truck with the bucket lift on it. The bucket dangled about eighteen or twenty feet in the air, and it wasn’t likely to be capable of operating again, but Jed preferred it that way. As long as he could climb, it would be a perfect place to sleep. It had the added bonus of being a bucket with solid sides instead of rails, so nothing would be able to see them from the ground.
The bucket rocked slightly. Jed held a finger to his lips to keep Mattie from drawing the attention of whatever it was inside the bucket.
He said in a voice just above a whisper, “Somebody’s sleeping in my bed.”
Mattie put a hand over her mouth, and Jed mentally assessed whether or not he could shoot whatever it was in the bucket. He turned in a circle and searched the shoulder of the road for rocks. He picked up a bottle and was ready to throw it when it occurred to him that it would make enough noise to attract attention to their location.
Jed stashed Mattie on top of an SUV where he could keep an eye on her. It was almost under the bucket, but at least he could see her while he was figuring out how to reach the thing. He told her she was the lookout and draped the strap of his binoculars over her head.
He searched the SUV first and then several of the cars nearby. He figured the truck would have been picked over by now, but there were lots of cars to rummage through. He found some interesting but useless stuff, although he scored a cowboy hat that was a great fit. The sun was getting to the back of his neck, so he considered it to be a good find. He put it on and flashed a big smile at Mattie.
In the end, Jed decided he would have to check the truck, and he found what he needed had been there all along. A heavy rope was perfect and a large hammer to put some weight on the end. He tied it in place on the head of the hammer and climbed on top of the cab of the truck. He got his weight centered over his feet and started the hammer swinging in an easy arc at first, but as it picked up speed, he got it above his head until it was pulling on the rope. The rope was too heavy for Jed to play it out as far as he wanted, but he gave it everything he had. As it whistled through the air and came by behind him, he leaned as far as he could to the right and dropped his shoulder like he was throwing an uppercut punch.
Mattie was marveling at Jed’s cowboy hat, but when he showed a talent for using a rope, he might as well have been a real cowboy to her. The hammer disappeared neatly into the bucket, and Mattie clapped her hands together and squealed.
Jed pulled the rope slowly until the hammer appeared at the lip of the bucket. The idea was to make the hammer come over the lip of the bucket from the bottom of the handle. Hopefully, it would fall with the claw facing backward so it would catch on the lip like a grappling hook. It worked like a charm until the bucket tilted much farther than he expected it to. There was something much heavier than the hammer and rope making it lean over.
The contents of the bucket did a somersault in midair and aimed for the top of the SUV where Jed had put Mattie. As it dropped from the bucket, Jed saw that it was an infected dead that was hardly more than bones held together by sinew and its clothes. Jed felt his heart stop, and the words ‘look out’ were stuck inside his speechless mouth. He couldn’t do a thing to stop it from happening. The mouth of the infected was open and seemed to be opening even more as if it knew it was about to bite another victim.
Mattie had grown up with the infected in her life in much the same way that children in Australia had been raised to understand that crocodiles waited in the shallow water. She didn’t try to understand them. She knew that they were just part of life, and even though it was hard for her to accept that her parents had become infected, she had remembered it wouldn’t be the last time it would happen. That didn’t mean she would let it happen to her.
The infected skeleton might have been nothing more than a rotted corpse, but neither Mattie nor Jed could tell. The bucket had moved on its own before, so they expected the worst. Jed couldn’t help, but Mattie knew how to somersault too.
Her right arm tucked down across her body, and she went head first toward the hood. Her dad had taught her to let her body follow her head and then to look at her feet. She didn’t realize that she would roll so fast because she had learned on flat ground, but by the time she reached the end of the hood, her feet were ahead of her. Mattie let her rear end slide, and she landed neatly on her feet.
Behind her the brittle bones of the infected flew apart with the impact. The clothing that still clung to the wasted frame of the body kept the bones from flying in all directions, but there was nothing to keep the head attached. It bounced like a basketball.
The words managed to finally get past Jed’s lips, not when the infected skeleton fell, but when the head bounced. He saw the angle of the bounce and knew that it was going to follow Mattie.
“Look out for the head,” he yelled.
Mattie knew what she was rolling away from, and another thing she learned in her short life was that the infected kept following you. It never occurred to her that it would only be part of one.
The head made its second bounce on the cracked windshield of the SUV, and the slope of the glass combined with the forward momentum made it spin as it flew toward Mattie. She ducked and heard the loud thump as it met with the fender of another car behind her. Jed was amazed at how well Mattie understood this new world, because it wasn’t enough for her to somersault from the roof of a car, and it wasn’t enough for her to duck when the head bounced by. She also ran.
As soon as she heard the thump behind her she took off for the gap between two cars to her right and was behind one of them before the head came to a stop right where she had been standing. She peered at it around the rear of the car, and Jed stared at it from up above. The empty eye sockets stared back at him as the jaws worked at the air one final time.
“That worked,” said Mattie.
Jed felt like a spectator at some kind of ridiculous competition, and between the two of them, they had scored enough points to win. All he could think of to say that seemed to fit with what Mattie said was something that caused Mattie to get an expression on her face that was out of place on a six year old.
“
Just like I planned it,” said Jed.
During the acrobatics by the infected and the equally impressive moves of the six year old, Jed unconsciously kept his grip on the rope. The bucket was tilted to one side, but it wasn’t moving anymore. It was doubtful that there were any more surprises waiting inside it, but Jed wanted Mattie safe with him before making his next move. He kept tension on the rope but carefully climbed down from the cab into the back of the truck and held out one hand to her. She ran over and took it, and he smoothly lifted her up with him. He pulled her in and gave her a big hug, as much for himself as for her.
The hydraulic arm that lifted the bucket into the air had long ago lost the ability to be raised or lowered. Jed inspected the hoses that supplied the hydraulic pressure and saw the stains where the rubber had aged and cracked. Years of exposure to the harsh southern sunlight and disuse had taken a toll on the entire system. He doubted that there was anything he could fix even though he understood enough about mechanics and hydraulics from working on cars.
Jed guessed the bucket was only about eighteen to twenty feet above the ground, but that was high enough for their purposes. He had seen ‘cherry pickers’ as they were called, that went as high as two hundred feet. Jed was glad he wouldn’t have to climb that high. He tied the end of the rope around Mattie’s waist, and for good measure he also fastened it through his belt. If the hammer came loose from the bucket, she would still be connected to him.
“Do you know how to ride piggy-back?”
Mattie grinned as she circled around behind Jed and stepped onto a toolbox to get a little height before climbing onto Jed’s back. She circled her arms around his neck and held on tightly without putting him in a chokehold.
“Of course you do,” he added.
Jed felt more like himself as he made the climb to the bucket. It seemed like he hadn’t been in control anymore even though he had rescued a little girl from certain death. The weight on his back as he climbed was nothing compared to the weight he felt from losing the colony, but he wanted her weight to replace the other. He couldn’t do anything to change what had happened to his friends at the colony, but he could keep Mattie alive and do whatever he could to get even with whoever it was who had been calling the infected.
When they reached the top of the arm that held the bucket, Jed held Mattie back a moment longer to be sure there were no surprises waiting inside. He was glad he did. There wasn’t another infected, but the last thing Jed wanted to see was another spider. Jed was seriously angry with himself for not thinking of it before carrying Mattie up to the bucket. It wasn’t the messy web of the brown recluse, but all spiders had become offensive to him.
Jed checked the position of the sun and knew he had to deal with the problem quickly. It would be dark in less than a half hour. He restrained himself from using language in front of Mattie that he normally would have used, but he climbed back down to do what he had to do if they were going to be safe by dark.
He untied Mattie and jumped down from the truck. A dry branch with plenty of leaves was all he needed. Jed made the climb a second time, and pushed the branch into the bucket. The last thing he wanted to do was melt the bucket, but he had to create enough smoke to make the spiders evacuate if they didn’t die. For once, he felt like things were going his way. When he held a match to the dry leaves, it blossomed orange for just a moment before it sent up a plume of smoke, but then the flames died down, and the smoke did its job. Strands of filament descended from the bucket as spiders dropped to the ground below. Even from twenty feet above, he saw them running across the roof of the SUV.
The sun was much lower, but Jed had one more chore to take care of. He had seen blankets in a car he had searched. They would be useful to line the inside of the bucket. Otherwise, they were going to be covered in black soot within minutes after climbing into the bucket.
It only took another fifteen minutes to clear the debris out of the bucket and drape the blankets in place. He had to admit, it was going to be one of the safest places he was likely to find if not the most comfortable. He went back for Mattie and carried her up for a second time. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burnt plastic, but the blankets helped some, and a light breeze would make it tolerable.
As they settled down in the cramped space at the bottom of the bucket, Mattie curled up against Jed and went to sleep so quickly that Jed hadn’t even found the best way to get comfortable himself. With walls around him to keep them safe, it didn’t take him long to adjust his long legs and find a way to make it work. The sun dropped below the trees, and Jed drifted off to sleep.
Sometimes silence is louder than noise, and Jed woke with a start. He checked to see if Mattie had been awakened when he jerked, but her breathing was still even. He slid out from under her and eased himself up to the edge of the bucket until he could see the dark shapes of the cars below.
Shadows moved between the cars, and a faint scraping sound like the rustling of paper drifted up to him along with the smell of decay. Jed realized that he hadn’t believed there were more hordes behind them now that the massive horde had been called to Charleston. He should have thought about smaller hordes that had been trapped in places like the wrecked cars a couple of miles back. He didn’t know if they had gotten free from their ‘crab trap’ or if this was a different group. What he did realize was that they would have been done for if they hadn’t gotten off the ground for the night. He stayed where he was until he couldn’t hear the rustling below and then slowly lowered himself into a sitting position for the night.
It was during those long hours that Jed had a revelation. He had been gazing up at the stars and wondering if there were still people up there at the International Space Station. He hadn’t seen anything in the sky for so long that it was hard to believe man had ever been able to break the bonds of gravity. There were people who had claimed to have seen planes and helicopters, but he had never seen them himself. He was willing to believe someone had survived and still had the technology to stay alive, but he had always wondered what kind of people they were.
The revelation came to him when he remembered the booming sounds that rolled like thunder from the direction of Charleston. Someone said they may have been sonic booms from a jet aircraft, and some people thought they were they sounds caused by earthquakes, but most of them, Jed included, thought they were explosions. In the darkness and solitude of the bucket, it came to him that someone was doing something about the infected. He didn’t think it made sense to try to blow them up. That would take a lot of explosives because there was no way to get enough of them into one small area and blow them up. Jed didn’t know what they were blowing up, but it had to have something to do with the infected.
The main thing was that there were people at work trying to take back the world. He wondered if they were the people responsible for the ringing in his ears and for the infected being called to Charleston. If so, maybe they were just trying to do something about the infected, but they were going about it the wrong way. Then came the revelation that maybe there were the people who were calling the infected to Charleston, but the explosions were done by someone else.
“Why should I assume the same people are doing everything?” he asked himself out loud. “Maybe I could get the people with the explosives to blow up the people who called the infected and got the colony killed.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Yorktown
Contagion Extinction Level - Day Three
From the moment Phillip and Denise walked up the ramp and through the big door of the Yorktown they felt like outsiders. It was an odd feeling. They weren’t outside where it was dangerous. They didn’t see crazed people trying to bite other people. They didn’t feel the threat of death, but they also didn’t feel like they were where they were welcome or supposed to be.
There was activity everywhere. Forklifts were carrying crates to and from elevators that descended to lower decks. The strange uniforms outnumbered people in street clothes, and almo
st everyone carried a weapon. The Corrigans didn’t know what to do next.
Behind them the big steel doors were closed, and the wide open area where they stood took on the feel of an underground city with all of the hustle and bustle of traffic and pedestrians. Everyone except Phillip and Denise seemed like they had a job to do or at least knew where they were going.
“They let more of you in?”
It was so noisy that they didn’t know the question was directed at them.
“I said, did someone just let you in from the processing tents?”
The voice came from a matronly woman who had a sour expression on her face. She had her hair pulled back in a tight bun, and she wore a business suit that had been in style around 1950. The appearance of the Corrigans was clearly a problem for her, and at the moment they didn’t feel like being a bother to anyone.
“Well, they could’ve told me. I’ll have to open everything back up and check you in. Names?”
Denise never wanted to wind up like the lady with the sour look on her face, and she had known plenty of women like her in the workplace. She was so used to being pushed around by people in higher positions that she couldn’t resist pushing around everyone else.
“We’re Denise and Phillip Corrigan. We came in with Dr. Williams,” said Denise.
That seemed to stop the woman in her tracks. The difference between the sour expression and the sweet appearance she put on were as much in contrast as night and day.
“Oh, my. If you’re friends of Dr. Williams then I’m sure she will want to know that you’re satisfied with your accommodations. Please follow me.”
The woman spun on her heels and literally scurried away, wanting to make up for the inconveniences endured by friends of Dr. Williams.
