by Howard, Bob
“This list reads like their backpacks were issued to them before they were dropped off in the field,” said Captain Miller. “What else was unusual?”
“Remember that kid who was found last year who still had a candy bar in his pocket that his mom had given him for his birthday?” asked Jean. “He finally ate it, but when he unwrapped it we learned to check chocolate if any was carried in with survivors. It’s almost always ashy in color or melted into a new shape. It says here they had a fresh candy bar.”
The backpacks had been like most survivors in many ways because things took on a new value when you didn’t know if you would ever need it again. Ziplock bags were precious because they kept things dry, and the match boxes were bagged. There were dry socks that were old and worn, a manual can opener, tweezers, toothbrushes with a partially used tube of toothpaste, and dental floss with a fish hook tied to it. Captain Miller pointed out that it was a nice touch and that it wasn’t the first one he had found in a survivor’s backpack.
Captain Miller held the list at an angle to let the light hit it better.
“There aren’t any notes next to these things. It looks like the pen was running out of ink, and someone made a scribble over here to get more ink to come out, but they didn’t finish. What happened to the containers of powdered milk and the bottles of water?”
Jean turned pale.
“I think someone started to write that it was new. That looks like an ’N’ where the pen ran out of ink.”
All survivors carried water bottles in their backpacks. There was never going to be a shortage of plastic even now that no more of it was being made, but typically it was noted on the inventory sheet that it had been disposed of. The same was true of the powdered milk. The shelter had enough powdered milk to last until the next century, and survivors seldom had enough of it that made it worth keeping, but if it was still in a sealed container, it might have been sent to the supply rooms.
The shelter remained at a complete standstill with one exception. Denise Corrigan was under armed guard in the laundry room, ironically where the Senator had wandered after his death. There was no way she could slip out and escape without being seen because there was a guard at each door. It was a bit hot in the room, but she was sweating more than the other workers. She only hoped Phillip hadn’t done his part of the assignment yet. If he had, then they were as good as dead along with everyone else in the shelter.
******
Chief Barnes knew what effect he had on people when they first saw him, but this one was new. The man who was tossed into the cell with him was fairly large, too, but his reaction was like he had just seen a ghost. He pointed an index finger at the Chief, and then he looked back down the hallway to the steel door to the cell block. For some reason he pointed his finger at the door, but he seemed to be at a loss for words. The Chief decided to help him out by speaking first.
“Joshua Barnes, but my friends call me Chief.”
He held out a large hand to the confused African American by the door.
“Not Clemenza?” the man managed to squeak out in a higher than normal voice.
The Chief had an awful thought and for the first time realized letting someone live might have been a mistake.
“No, but that explains the look on your face. Did you see a big guy out there who looked a little like me?”
“More than a little like you. Are you sure you aren’t brothers?”
“We should be.”
He saw that didn’t help the new guy understand so he added, “We were both Navy SEALs, so we should behave like brothers, but it looks like he was recruited by the other side.”
“Jed Ambrose,” he said as he shook the Chief’s extended hand. “Do you know what’s happening here? I mean, are these people using that thing on the bridge to call those dead things?”
“That’s my best guess, but why they’re doing it, I don’t know. I’ve seen it from above, and if I told you how many of those things are out there, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me. I’ve been on the ground with them, and believe me when I tell you it’s hard to go anywhere around here without running into them. Whatever it is they have in mind, I doubt that they know what they started.”
Something about the way Jed said it made the Chief feel like they weren’t talking about the same thing anymore, and Jed had taken a seat on the bench that ran along one wall and buried his face in his hands.
“You don’t think that barrier on the bridge will hold?” asked the Chief.
Jed didn’t answer immediately, and the Chief was just about to ask him again when Jed said, “What they did to us just wasn’t fair. They had no right. We’ve been doin’ all right on our own, and we were just about to have things better, but they couldn’t leave it alone. I mean, what right do they have to decide who lives and dies?”
“You and family were on this side of the horde?”
“Horde?”
Jed had to think about it a second. Now that he was actually in the place with the people who created that thing on the bridge, he knew that he hadn’t really thought about what he was going to do when he got here. He had killing on his mind. He wanted revenge, but it never occurred to him that the people behind the deaths of everyone in the path of the horde might be hard to beat. Then he remembered.
“You can forget about the horde, man. At least you can see them coming and hit them in the head. You can’t hit no bug in the head.”
The Chief hadn’t been having one of his best days, to say the least. He had fallen for a trap when he got into the back of the BATT-T with his friends, but he wasn’t licking his wounds. It was a smart trap, and he had to hand it to whoever it was who thought of it. When the vehicle stopped next to the aircraft carrier he wasn’t too surprised to find out it was the unknown group from the Yorktown that had captured his friends. How they were treated was going to decide for him how to deal with the people. He didn’t plan to make enemies of them if he didn’t have to. For all he knew, they were just paranoid of him and his friends at Fort Sumter.
A rattling at the door of the cell block made the Chief forget for the moment what Jed had said. It still registered, but he thought the man might just be ranting about something that had driven him crazy over the last six years.
For a second time the Chief was amazed that he had never come across Clemenza in the Navy, but in different light he saw the man was much younger than him. He had probably become a SEAL after the Chief had retired. Now he was standing on the other side of the bars, and the Chief didn’t like the way he was flexing his fist.
“Well, can you believe this? What were the odds that we’d see each other again?”
The Chief was never afraid to exchange smart comments, and he always had one ready.
“I would say far better than they would have been if I hadn’t given you a break.”
“We’ll see if we can’t go over that little meeting a second time, old man. The boss wants to see you or we’d be taking care of that question right now. You’re lucky he told me not to hurt you….yet.”
The Chief knew there was a time to fight and a time to get answers, and this was not a time to fight. He walked up to the bars and squeezed both hands through together. Clemenza shook his head but didn’t say anything, so the Chief turned around with his back to the bars and pushed his hands through again. He felt the cuffs close on his wrists.
“You know those things aren’t really necessary as long as you have my friends locked up around here somewhere.”
Clemenza apparently didn’t think much of his bosses because something really amused him.
“You got away with pretending to be me once already. You could walk into the boss’s office and pull it off again. Not gonna happen, Chief.”
Clemenza didn’t bother to put a bag over the Chief’s head. He explained that he didn’t want to spend all day walking him up to officer’s country and having to warn him every time he was ready to trip or bang his head on something. Of c
ourse the Chief thanked him in his most sincere voice.
If nothing else, it was an opportunity for him to learn enough of the ship to think about his escape plan. With a little luck someone would give him an idea of where his friends were so he wouldn’t have to search when he made his break.
People gave them a wide berth as they crossed what had been the main hangar deck of the old warship. Restored aircraft still occupied a corner, but the current occupants of the Yorktown had little if no concern for history, and they had dismantled some of the planes to make space. They had squeezed more people into the ship at the beginning of the infection than they had planned, and most of the hangar deck was partitioned as a huge set of barracks.
When they passed through corridors, people going the other way changed directions when they saw them coming. He couldn’t say he blamed them. Eventually there were less people, and it was quieter, and the Chief knew they were close. A man stepped into their path, and instead of moving out of the way, his mouth broke into a huge smile.
“Well, what do we have here?”
Ted Atwater had always wanted to meet this man. If they hadn’t seen him at a distance, they wouldn’t have believed he was as large as his legends.
“I would shake your hand, Mr. Barnes, if it wasn’t tied behind your back. You deserve some credit for surviving this long without a plan.”
That struck a nerve with the Chief. He believed in plans, but he didn’t believe you could plan for everything. He just didn’t like having this little man who was so obviously a politician acting like he had a better plan. The fact was, they had both survived from the beginning, and the Chief felt like he had done all right. He also didn’t like being called Mr. Barnes.
Atwater opened the door to the stateroom and stepped in ahead of the Chief. Clemenza followed as they walked into the sitting area in front of the big desk. Marshall Sayer leaned back and studied the Chief. Atwater motioned for Clemenza to remove the handcuffs, a move that he clearly disagreed with. He reluctantly gave into the icy glare from both of his superiors, but he was surprised a second time when he was told to wait outside.
The Chief kept his expression neutral and considered the likelihood that there would be an easy escape from this room. His conclusion was that it was more likely to be yet another trap, so he decided it was a time to behave. Besides, he didn’t have to like these people to strike a deal with them.
The Chief rubbed his wrists, and for good measure he gave Clemenza a wink as he was leaving. The look he got back said volumes about what their next fight would be like, if there was one.
Marshall said, “Chief Barnes, welcome to the Yorktown.”
He motioned to one of the chairs while Ted Atwater took the other one.
“I would offer you refreshments, but we are pressed for time and need to get down to business. I understand you still have at least three helicopters at Fort Sumter. I don’t have the luxury of time to beat around the bush, so I’ll just come right out and say it. I need for you to have the helicopters delivered to me immediately.”
The Chief didn’t know why the man was in such a hurry. As a matter of fact, he had expected them to at least entertain him with some kind of agreement or court him to see if he would consider changing sides, but this man was acting like there was a fuse burning somewhere. The man in the other chair still wore the broad smile on his face, but he was so motionless that the Chief felt like the man was afraid of delaying the Chief’s answer.
“The helicopters don’t belong to me, they belong to the Army. Well, one of them kind of belonged to me, but I crashed it.”
Marshall Sayer didn’t show the slightest hesitation when he answered.
“The Army works for me. As the head of the joint agency I control, I carry the rank of General, so I am ordering that they be turned over to me.”
The Chief didn’t have a clue why the man thought he could order Captain Miller to do anything, but something told him he needed answers. Maybe it was because he doubted the man’s sanity.
“I must have missed something, Mr. Sayer, but what agency are you?”
“I am the director of USAMRIID, and if you don’t give us those helicopters, we’ll be forced to take them.”
There was something about this man that told the Chief that it didn’t matter if he held the rank of General or not, only that he believed he was a General. He also felt like he had just been threatened by a poker player who was holding a royal flush. In other words, if he said he was going to take the helicopters, he had in mind a way to do it.
“You can’t have the helicopters. Final answer.”
The Chief didn’t know Clemenza had come back into the room, so he didn’t have a chance to brace himself against the punch. Added to the effects of the helicopter crash only a couple of days earlier, the punch was enough to knock him out. When he woke up the next time, he didn’t know where he was, only that it was totally dark, and he didn’t have much room to move. There was also the faint smell of diesel fuel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Venom
Contagion Extinction Level - Present Day
The container fort at the State Ports Authority had no reason to feel like they weren’t safe. After six years of resisting every horde to come their way, it didn’t matter that every infected dead on the east coast that was close enough to hear the call was coming this time. Most of them were coming from the other side of the Cooper River, and those that managed to wash up along the docks of the SPA were so water logged they couldn’t stand up. The smell was the part that got to the occupants of the fort.
It had taken over a year for the infected to start arriving in large numbers, and it was another three months before they started washing up along the docks, but the smell didn’t take a day to arrive after the bodies started to pile up. Then there was a day when so many washed up against the docks that they threatened to dam the Wando River where it joined with the Cooper River. The fort sat on a small peninsula where the two rivers met, and as long as the bodies washed by in the Cooper River, it wasn’t a threat to the base. The officers in charge of the Yorktown’s land base were afraid for the first time, because a dam across the Wando River would cause water to flow over the walls of the docks and across the entire camp.
Crews were sent out in rubber hip waders to break up the log jam of bodies, sending them back into the current of the river, but it was clear within a few hours that more bodies were arriving than leaving. The water continued to rise and splash over the concrete platforms where dock workers used to unload the containers, and even though the containers had been stacked end to end around the entire perimeter of the fort that faced the rivers, they weren’t waterproof. Foul smelling water ran under and between the containers across the camp, and hundreds of workers and guards tried to find higher ground.
As the water rose, the bodies of the infected were pushed over the walls and began to pile up against the containers. As bad as the smell had become, everyone was surprised to see the water draining across the camp into the marshes. For some reason the camp wasn’t flooding anymore. It was ironic, but the bodies were stacked so deep against the container wall that they were acting like sand bags. The water rose a few more feet, but the wall of bodies held.
The reprieve was short. The water receded until the camp was dry, but the only warning the people of the SPA got was from the seagulls, and they didn’t understand the message. The seagull population had exploded after the infection, and even though it seemed to have at least leveled off, it had never decreased. If you didn’t wear a hat or a raincoat, you had no one to blame but yourself, but on this day hats and raincoats weren’t enough protection.
The workers in hip waders were standing on top of the containers along the docks using long poles to push bodies far enough away to get caught in the current. When the seagulls began to fall out of the air, the workers were amused at first and stopped to watch. For some reason the birds would land on the bodies and rip away a piece of flesh, rise into
the air, but then fall with flapping wings. The first seagull to fly over the camp before falling, bounced off of an armed guard who immediately started screaming and spinning in circles. He pulled the trigger on his rifle as he spun and sent bursts of bullets into the spectators who had emerged from their tents. Then it seemed like the sky fell in as more and more birds spun in the air and crashed into the camp.
The people in the open were the first to realize what was happening to them because they saw it happening to others before they themselves were hit. When they felt the impact of a bird against their own bodies, they knew that the burning pain that followed was from the hundreds of spiders that seemed to explode like confetti over everything. They screamed, they ran, they fell in the mud, and they even tried to reach the river that was already packed full of bodies.
The people in the tents were fighting over the few hazmat suits that were kept at the fort, and the only person to get inside one in time was shot. People from the outside ran into the tents and collided with the people inside. The collisions threw the tiny spiders on everything, and it wasn’t long before people were running outside to escape.
Groups of people who ran inside the containers and pulled the doors shut sat in the darkness and waited. They could hear the screaming outside and didn’t really understand what was happening until the first screams began inside with them. Unseen in the darkness it was somehow more terrifying, and people who weren’t being bitten were screaming in fear. In their fright they forced the doors open and exposed everyone to the crawling death.
The last people to feel the stinging pain of the spider venom were those who reached the personnel carriers. The vehicles were designed to protect the occupants from short term exposure to gas and smoke, so they were the last safe places to be breached. The people who sealed themselves inside weren’t the trained operators of the vehicles, though, and none of them knew the protocol for making them airtight. They sat and waited for death to come without knowing that it was crawling in through the simplest place. If anyone had started the engines and pressed the one button that controlled air circulation, they could have driven the vehicles away. Eventually the occupants of the BATT-T personnel carriers flung open their doors and rolled out onto the ground.
