Eric moved towards the edge of the alcove and began looking around. The plaza across the street was plainly visible in the daylight now. The huge group of Zombies emerging from the Publix clearly indicated that gong there for antibiotics the night before would’ve been suicide. Motioning for Myriah to stay quiet Eric began moving out from the alcove to work his way around the cars parked in front then move around to the back of the building. Myriah had been thinking they could try ducking back into the pharmacy. The problem with that plan would have been trying to get Eric up and over the Red Box quietly. The slightest noise and they’d have been trapped in the pharmacy until the Zombies managed to beat their way in.
Myriah followed Eric. She glanced over at the Publix parking lot and felt her knees almost give out in terror. The parking lot was filled with Zombies roaming around. Several had already wandered out into the street where they were walking around in circles. The ones in the street occasionally freezing to look all around in that crazed manner they had. The stream of Zombies pouring out of the Publix didn’t seem to be slowing down either. Afraid she’d freeze up if she kept looking across the street Myriah forced her eyes to follow Eric. She focused on putting one foot in front of the other as quietly as possible.
They almost made it to the corner of the store without being seen. If they’d made it another two yards, then they could’ve ducked around and quickly disappeared into the woods behind the store. One of the Zombies on the street noticed them though. It noticed the way they walked. Something about the way they held themselves made the Zombie sense they weren’t one of his kind. They were prey. The Zombie screeched and sprinted towards Eric and Myriah. Behind that Zombie the same piercing screech erupted from hundreds of other throats. In a massive stampede the Zombies all turned and ran full force towards Eric and Myriah.
Eric gathered his energy together as best he could to make a run for it. The world quickly started spinning around him. His breathing sounded to him like it was coming from someone else. He wasn’t going to make it. He screamed for Myriah not to look back. She stopped and pulled on his shirt to try and get him to follow her. He pushed her away and screamed at her again to run. Then he turned to face the Zombies streaming towards them. That first Zombie who’d seen them was only yards away at this point. Eric charged at the Zombie with his hammer held high. His goal now to kill as many of them as he could before they devoured him. He’d give Myriah a chance to make it.
Myriah turned and ran. Shame ate at her, but terror was driving her now. She ran like she’d never run before. She ran all out for the chain link fence separating the back strip of the plaza from the wooded area behind them. She rode the wave of the Zombies howls to the top of that fence which she scrambled over way too quickly. Her pants leg stuck on something on the top as she fell over the top of the fence. She jerked at her leg hard and the pants tore. She fell the last foot face first into that pine straw covered pavement and rolled painfully into the woods.
The Zombies hit the fence behind her. The only reason the fence didn’t give right away was the bulk of the Zombies had been sidetracked trying to rip off a tasty chunk of Eric. Tears and sobs racked Myriah’s body as she got to her feet and continued running like a mad woman through the underbrush. The briars and branches ripping at her long hair. How many times had they run like that with Eric leading them through the woods? Who was going to protect them now? He couldn’t just be gone, could he? Heedless of the pain, she ran. Her mind picturing what the Zombies would do to her if they caught her.
She kept running until she popped out of the woods into a subdivision. It was one they’d skirted around when they originally made the trip to the pharmacy. Myriah thought about ducking into one of the houses and waiting for the Zombie herd to move past her. The last thing she wanted to do was run straight back to the lake house with the mass of Zombies on her trail. She also didn’t want to get stuck in a house by herself for weeks either if the Zombies decided to randomly nest wherever she picked.
She ran. She pushed her body to the point where she was seeing black spots floating in front of her eyes. She kept going anyway. When she slowed down, she just saw Eric charging the Zombie horde with that hammer. When she slowed down, she thought about having to tell Caitlyn and the girls that Eric was gone. She’d have to tell them that now they really were on their own. They’d lost Brenda and now they’d lost their only other protector. All because she’d fallen asleep. She should’ve made Eric get up and leave while it was still dark. She never should’ve listened to him. He’d been slurping down pain pills and antibiotics like it was nobody’s business. He’d been deathly sick. Myriah blamed herself for his death. The weight of that guilt was crushing her.
She ran until she just couldn’t physically put one foot in front of the other anymore. She’d lost her pursuers at some point. She could hear them screeching in the background, but it was coming from a few streets over. She’d zig zagged though the subdivision trying to lose them. It must’ve worked. Now she realized she needed to hole up somewhere rather than risk attracting more pursuers. In her present state she didn’t think she’d be able to outrun anybody else. Looking around for a place that she may be able to crash she saw the house she was standing beside had its gate to the backyard open.
Myriah walked through the overgrown front lawn to the side of the house and through the open gate. The backyard was fenced in with a high, white privacy fence. There was a pool full of green water with a moldy, mostly deflated giant donut floatie in the middle of the muck. On the side of the yard adjacent to the pool was a trampoline sitting on top of white river rocks. The grass was knee high with random weeds jutting up even higher. Nothing in the backyard signaled imminent danger to her so she shut and locked the gate behind her. She stood in the tall grass for a few minutes catching her breath.
Forcing herself to think of survival instead of about losing Eric she checked the door to the screen porch. It was locked so she took out her knife and cut out a section of the screen. Sticking her hand through the hole she’d made she unlocked the screen door and opened it. She went in and sat down on the patio furniture that was up against the wall. The part of the porch with the expensive looking outdoor furniture was under cover. Underneath the large glass table on the other side of the porch was the carcass of a large dog. It looked like it might have been a husky based on the hair stuck to what was left of it. A line of ants moving in and out connected the dogs corpse with the lawn outside.
Trying to keep her mind off anything and everything she took some time to explore the porch and see if she could get in the house. There was a little refrigerator outside. When she opened it, she found a couple of water bottles. She opened one and downed it in three big gulps. She set the other water bottles on top of the mini fridge to save for later then went to look at the large glass sliders leading into the house. She tried shifting them around on their tracks to get into the house, but they wouldn’t budge. She turned around to grab another water and settle in on the patio furniture to wait out the sun.
Smash! Myriah shrieked and spilled the water all over herself. She jumped up from the couch in horror. A large, old Zombie in a stained pair of yellow boxers had just smashed into the sliding glass door. He was shrieking and smashing himself harder and harder into the glass. The glass vibrating harder every time he pounded his body into it. Myriah grabbed her bag and ran out the screen door. She looped around to the side of the house. Behind her she could hear the loud banging coming from the Zombie inside still trying to get out. She opened the gate to run out and see if she couldn’t find a better place to spend the day.
Chapter 8: Any Port in a Storm
Kyler stepped out of his air-conditioned room to walk down the narrow sidewalk to the briefing he’d been summoned to. The crushed rock sidewalk was lit on both sides by bright red lights. The lights were spaced out all around the paths winding through the sprawling military complex. A year ago, the island had just been a wide spot in the river. Kyler had learned the isl
and had been built by a group of Seabees. The Seabees had ended up here during the turbulent times when the outbreak had been airborne, and everyone had been fighting to survive.
The Seabees were a branch of the military that excelled in construction in war zones. The term Seabees originally came from the acronym ‘CB’ which stood for construction battalion. They’d treated the islands like they would’ve treated any beachhead in an active war zone. Their motto was “We Build. We Fight.” That motto held true when constructing an island to hold off the hordes of infected roaming the land. They fought hard for the raw materials needed to construct what they needed. Most of it was lying around in piles in ship yards and on military bases with the infected standing over it. Some of the materials they’d scavenged from places like Home Depot and Walmart as well. The end result was pretty awesome.
Row upon row of barracks were illuminated by the red glow cast off by the LED lights. Each barracks had a working bathroom. Kyler had spent so much time in the shower someone had actually poked their head in to ask if he was ok. It’d felt so good to have the scalding hot water rinsing the accumulated layers of grossness off his skin. To be able to wrap a towel around himself afterwards and shiver in the cold air of the barracks. There was even a working TV mounted into the wall. It was hooked to a DVD player since Netflix was down for the foreseeable future. Even the emergency broadcast signal had eventually gone off the air.
All the buildings were designed to keep light and sound from escaping them as much as possible. The whole island had been built from the ground up to be exactly what it was. An island in the middle of a raging Zombie apocalypse. Walls were built all around the perimeter of the island to keep any of the Zombies who washed up on the shore from wandering into the housing areas. At night there was only the dull red glow given off above the fortress to give away the location. The HVAC units and other equipment that made noise was mounted in such a way as to make as little noise as possible. Everyone on the island was required to practice strict noise discipline when outside the barracks.
When Kyler and the chief arrived at the dock about three miles upstream from the river, he hadn’t known what to expect really. The chief had been tight lipped about central command this whole time. The chief hadn’t said much at all since they’d jumped the fence with Sean covering their retreat. Kyler wondered how many men had died under his command and if that was what was ripping the man apart. He’d tried to broach the subject on the drive to the dock and gotten a surprisingly introspective response from the salty chief.
“I’ve led men in combat all over the globe. Until a few years ago I’d never lost a single man. I thought when I did lose that single man it was going to rip me apart. It did for a while. The loss of that one man. Since this infection started everyone around me seems to be dropping like flies. I’m just treading water waiting for my number to come up. Until it does, I’m going to just keep doing what I do and hope I’m able to do some good.”
He’d had gone silent after that. Kyler had never heard the man string that many sentences together all at the same time before. Unless you counted when he was yelling at him or one of the other guys. Then he’d gone into very detailed tirades about how much they all sucked and what a waste of his time they were. Kyler knew the flask the chief started sucking out of as soon as they got in the minivan had probably done its part to help loosen his lips. He’d stayed sober enough to give Kyler directions on how to get them to the dock. When they finally got there Kyler had woken him up to get the passwords needed to get them shuffled off to a short line of men waiting for the boat to take them to the island.
Kyler had expected a motorboat of some sort to show up for them to pile onto. He’d been wondering how they kept the Zombies from hearing it coming. They’d parked about a mile down the road and walked the rest of the way to the dock to keep any Zombies who may have been attracted to the sound of the engine of the minivan from following them. Instead of a motorboat cruising up to collect them a small barge silently sailed into view as if by magic. Kyler gaped at it trying to figure it out until one of the men standing on the dock told him to look down. Kyler did and saw the thick wire wrapped around the pulley system below. That explained how the barge was moving but not so much what was able to power the barge to move like that.
The power question was answered when the barge took them to the island. The rest of the men on the boat had all been there before. They were all military looking special ops type guys. They tended to take technology and the human condition in stride as they went about their day. Kyler tried to look cool but at the sight of the red glowing fortress rising out of the river in front of him his face revealed his shock. One of the guys laughed quietly at the wonder in Kyler’s voice when he pointed at the submarine docked in the small marina they were headed for. Something clicked in his head and he mentioned to the chief that he bet that’s where all the power was coming from.
“Good guess kid.” The man in charge of guiding the ferry said. Kyler waited to see if the man was going to say anything else, but that seemed to be the end of the commentary. Some of the other guys were talking among themselves but it wasn’t a very sociable group overall. Kyler personally thought they were taking the whole ‘loose lips sink ships’ thing a little too far.
He’d attended a mandatory orientation session his first morning on the island. It made sense to enforce the sessions as there were a lot of things that needed to happen to keep the island humming along in ‘stealth mode’. There were also a lot of things on the island that could kill you if you didn’t stay away from them. Defenses had been setup to ward off the infected when the island was initially set up. Over the last few months they’d started building out more defenses against human enemies as well. The human enemies were the reason for most of the increased security.
One aspect of the island that really struck Kyler was the fact that over half the population were those deemed too fragile to be sent to live in a settlement. These were the people who’d had to shoot their own children to survive. The people who’d suffered such tragic losses that they weren’t able to cope out in the settlements. A lot of them were functional in that they could complete the tasks they were assigned to help with the upkeep of the island. They’d cook and clean and help out in whatever ways they were given but everyone knew to be patient with them if they suddenly just crouched down and lost themselves in their tears.
There was also a stockade. The standard punishment for pretty much everything these days was to be taken out back and shot. It’s not like anyone wanted to feed and support a bunch of criminals and you couldn’t exactly turn them loose either. Banishing someone just meant they’d end up working with one of the enemy factions that were starting to pop up all over the place. Or, they’d pop up as an independent looter or if they weren’t very lucky as a Zombie. The simplest solution to the crimes that people actually got punished for in the apocalypse was death. The concept of what a crime was had shifted dramatically as well.
Taking advantage of others was the big one. Men who raped, murdered or otherwise took advantage of the people of the settlements were typically shot once their guilt was confirmed. The burden of guilt being a couple of eye witnesses and the mayor of that settlement being convinced the person had committed the crime. The execution was normally carried out by the mayor of the settlement. If the mayor didn’t have the stomach for it then the roving patrol would hear the case when they came through and carry out the sentence. The gist of it all was that everyone should be working together to get through this. There wasn’t time to coddle criminals.
The stockade was kept to house prisoners of war. It was used to house the few criminals who committed a crime considered worthy of punishment, but not worthy of death. Occasionally, it housed a Zombie or some specimen the medical team wanted to study. It was also used to house people suspected of possibly being infected until they’d gone through a week’s worth of sitting there proving they weren’t about to turn into a Zombie.
> Otherwise, the orientation session had just been Kyler and one other guy sitting there on plastic chairs drinking bad coffee being told where the mess hall was, how to get food, and all the rules they were expected to follow if they wanted to stay out of the stockade. They’d been assigned their temporary barracks and issued a set of orders for when and where they were supposed to report in for muster. It was all run like a military base. The man he’d been in the orientation session with had been very comfortable in the environment. Kyler himself had been around military guys all his life so he hadn’t been overly put off by it either.
The request to go to one of the tactical barracks so soon after being told to settle in was odd for Kyler. It seemed pretty rushed. Then again, he knew from hanging out with his dad and his dads’ friends that the military was all about hurry up and wait. He couldn’t even begin to count the number of times he’d heard that phrase tossed around when he’d been growing up. He was still a little freaked out opening the door to the tactical barracks to go inside.
This building looked like the barracks on the outside, but the inside had been configured to house multiple conference rooms instead of beds. This was the building the Seabees had envisioned them using to plan how they’d take back the country from the Zombies. Who’d have ever thought that they’d be holding sessions in here to discuss fighting back against other Americans. Kyler studied the map on the wall and figured out he had to walk all the way to the other side of the building for the room he was supposed to be in.
Zombies! (Book 3): Violence Solves Everything Page 8
