The Infected Dead (Book 6): Buried For Now

by Howard, Bob

  There was one master switch that was intended to begin the lockdown procedures for any disaster. With a simple flip of his hand, walls dropped into place, electrical systems received signals that internally told his system this was not a drill, and the entire oil rig complex went to internal life support. Until he knew whether or not the pandemic was airborne, he would take every precaution he needed to.

  Maybank understood better than some of the survivalists. It was a simple point that Titus had preached to them. One of his favorite expressions was that every oyster would eventually be pried open. Their job was to make it take as long as possible. Maybank didn’t think nuclear devices would be aimed at oil rigs because even the madmen with their fingers on the buttons would need oil after a nuclear war.

  The pandemic scenario wasn’t that simple because viruses tended to go where they wanted to go, especially if they were airborne. His ears popped, telling him there was positive internal air pressure inside the shelter, and the air quality system was already testing the air for pathogens. To some extent the positive pressure would force airborne pathogens to stay outside. He would know within the hour if there was an airborne virus out there. In the meantime, he had his checklist.

  Maybank had designed his shelter with multiple control rooms, each one capable of operating all systems. This one in his living quarters allowed him to keep one eye on the news broadcasts while he checked off the items on the list. He saw that the network was still showing cities in Europe, but the always present ticker tape banner was going by at high speed on the bottom of the screen. It began with The Decline of Man and was displaying the names of cities reporting the outbreaks of violence that included cannibalism. He wondered why they didn’t just say, “Everywhere.”

  That reminded him. Some of the cities on the list had shelters in them. It was probably the oldest technology he had in his shelter, if he didn’t include the electric can opener, but a panel with green lights was disturbing him. They were all still dark. It was way too early to worry about his friends, though, and it could be a simple malfunction.

  Malfunctions were also an inevitable curse according to Titus. He had warned them that malfunctions would be the likely cause for their shelters being penetrated, along with human error, but that didn’t have to be true. Malfunctions didn’t have to be major to be life threatening, and major malfunctions didn’t mean all was lost. That was what crossed Maybank’s mind as he considered why his panel of lights was still dark. A computer monitor at another work station gave him his answer. The satellite feeds were down except for some communications. He had TV, he could talk to people when the time was right, but the satellite feed to the shelter transponder signals wasn’t operating.

  That was a malfunction he could live with. He would eventually make contact with the other shelters, and when he did he could find out which of them were online. He had a momentary thought that maybe Titus had made it to Mud Island in time. Then he remembered that his good friend had died. He had forgotten because he hadn’t been at the funeral. Maybank and all the others had honored his request and stayed at their shelters instead of going to the service. Titus thought it would be the ultimate irony if the world ended while they were away from their shelters for the funeral of a club member.

  When the checklist was done, Maybank made his first trip topside. If a biohazard was detected, he would receive warnings long before it arrived at the oil rig. A string of buoys with air samplers and other monitors attached to them formed an invisible line of defense for the oil rig, and the satellite that relayed that data was functioning well. If the pandemic was an airborne pathogen, he would have at least an hour to get inside even if a brisk wind was pushing it his way.

  There was a light breeze blowing, but it felt good. As a matter of fact it felt so good that he found it hard to believe what he had seen on the news. The solitude of his shelter was one of his reasons for putting it in the deep water of the Gulf, and he was at least going to survive the initial phase of this particular apocalypse, or so it seemed. He let his mind wander as he climbed and thought about how he had come to his decision to put his shelter on an oil rig.

  Maybank loved thinking about that day long ago when they were all so much younger. He had been laughed at when he announced his choice for a government funded shelter, but he seriously doubted the others knew much about oil rigs. He knew that he wanted a semisubmersible rig because everyone thought an oil rig is just one big contraption that sat on top of a well and drilled down through the center. Even Titus didn’t know there were different types of oil rigs.

  After the meeting when he had been nearly laughed out of the room, Titus had approached him and asked for permission to visit the shelter while it was under construction. As the president of their club, and Titus hated being called president, Maybank knew Titus could visit his shelter any time he wanted without asking. So he invited Titus to travel back with him to the Gulf.

  It was Maybank’s turn to laugh when their helicopter descended toward the landing pad. When Titus turned to him with total understanding on his face, Maybank swelled with pride. It clearly wasn’t what Titus had expected.

  The structure was massive, and as Titus would learn on his tour, it was like an iceberg. Even though the visible portion was an impressive sight, almost two-thirds of the rig was under water.

  There were four cylindrical towers that stood straight up from the water almost as is they went all the way to the floor of the Gulf. They were so big that almost everyone made the mistaken assumption about its size when they saw the rig for the first time. Each of the towers was a corner post for the rig, and each served a separate purpose.

  One of the huge towers had nothing built on top of it. Maybank explained that it was full of water and simply kept the rig balanced. The Process Module was built on top of the tower to the west, and the giant crane above it was used to offload supplies from the ships that would dock at the rig. The tower forming the next corner could have been straight out of an architect’s nightmare. It was the tower that supported the Living Quarters Module, the Drilling Module, and the Wellbay Module. The whole thing was a monstrosity of metal buildings and pipes that reminded Titus of a house built on a cliff. Their helicopter had landed above it all, and Titus felt like there was no reason for it not to tip over. The last tower was the Power Module, and although it was functional and providing power to the oil rig, the power for the shelter came from below the surface of the water.

  The highest spot on the rig was actually the helicopter landing pad. Maybank reached the top of the ladder and his thoughts came back to the present.

  At the moment he had a deck chair and a cooler of bottled water sitting on the center of the crosshairs painted on the landing pad. If he saw guests arriving by helicopter he would know they were coming long before they could land. If they had the correct codes, he would grab his deck chair and cooler and move to an observation hut at the top of the ladder. If they didn’t have the proper landing codes, he had ways to deal with them.

  The hut was lower than the landing pad and had some nasty surprises built in. From that vantage point he could detonate explosives to destroy invaders. That wouldn’t be his first choice since helicopters and boats were his connection to the mainland.

  His first choice was to do exactly what Titus had said to do. He would drop down through a hatch next to the observation hut above the Quarters Module, which was designed to look like any other living quarters of a semisubmersible oil rig, and then make the long descent through the Wellbay Module. Below the four towers at each corner was the massive submerged hull of the oil rig, but instead of being the flooded ballast compartments that held the rig stationary above the oil well, it was his impenetrable shelter.

  The main entrance to the shelter was in the Wellbay Module, and the door would have been familiar to the members of the survivors club. The emergency exits were located in the Process Module, the Power Module, and the tower section with nothing built above it. Although the tower
s supporting the other modules were all part of the hull, this particular section warranted its own name as the Main Hull because it literally provided the weight needed to keep the entire structure from tipping over. If it was penetrated and lost its ballast, there was an anchor system that would deploy in seconds and take over, but that was just one more redundant system every shelter had. Titus had called it Plan B.

  Maybank walked to the chair and turned it to face north. He got comfortable and brought his binoculars to his eyes.

  ******

  The clear blue sky meant plenty of sunshine, and Maybank pulled the battered baseball cap from his back pocket. That reminded him of something else he had in his other pocket, and he retrieved a piece of paper that had been folded so many times it was ready to separate along the lines. He gently spread it across his lap.

  “Let’s see who won the pool.”

  He had read the paper so many times that he already knew what it said, but it was like winning the World Series. Even though you knew your favorite team had won, you read the sports page just to see it all happen again.

  It was a list of disasters and extinction level events that could happen. It was also the reason for the shelters. It began with nuclear war and was followed by pandemic. The list was used as a guide for building the shelters. If it was on the list, contingencies had to be designed to keep the shelter safe. The disasters were on the left, and they were followed by the odds of each one happening.

  A meteor hitting the Earth came in at about a million to one, and as a joke someone had written below it the odds of winning a Powerball jackpot. That had come years later because there weren’t big lotteries like that when the paper was passed around the room for the first time.

  The military already had their list, but the survivors club was asked to create their own. The expectation was that the collection of unorthodox thinkers would come up with something the military hadn’t considered. When they turned their list over to the military, it was a lot longer than theirs. For some reason, the military minds didn’t even have an invasion by an alien race on the list, but the survivors club had given it a high probability.

  Another cataclysm that the survivors agreed on didn’t even have an official name, so they just called it The End. It was the only apocalypse on the list they couldn’t plan for because they didn’t know what would cause it. Needless to say, it caused real concern for the sponsors of the shelters, not because it couldn’t be prevented, but because it didn’t make sense to them.

  Titus explained it to the officers who sat together in a tight group at a meeting.

  “Imagine this,” he began. “You go to bed tonight, and you aren’t here tomorrow.”

  “You mean I’m dead?” asked a General.

  “No, you just disappeared, and so did everyone else in the world. Organic life ended. Any one of a hundred different things happened during the night that removed the ability for life to exist on Earth. It could be something on this list, but it’s more likely something none of us thought of. Maybe gravity stopped working, or the atmosphere got sucked into outer space, or simply became unbreathable. What we’re saying is the laws of physics aren’t all known yet. Some are theories, and a new one could pop up while you’re comfortable in your bed. That new law may say it’s impossible for life to exist.”

  The General wasn’t entirely sure what to say in response to the explanation, but he hadn’t gotten to his rank by being stupid.

  “Gentlemen, you’re either toying with me, which comes naturally to you, or you’re stating the obvious. We can sit here until the end of the world and add new disasters to this list, and we’ll never think of all of them. So, anything we do think of is fair game and possible. That’s why someone wrote zombie apocalypse on here.”

  Someone behind the General clapped a big hand down on his shoulder and said, “General, you’re officially one of us.”

  Maybank remembered the expression on the General’s face, and if he read it correctly, the General was proud to join the club.

  The first dot on the horizon brought Maybank back to the present, and he returned the worn piece of paper to his pocket without checking to see who had won the pool. It was growing fast, and it was only seconds before he could see separation between it and the surface. His first post-apocalyptic contact was an aircraft. It grew fast enough for him to be sure it wasn’t a helicopter, so he doubted it would be a rescue vehicle for important people escaping to his shelter.

  A second dot appeared behind the first just as he was beginning to focus the binoculars enough to make out the outline of a fighter jet. He guessed he had no more than thirty seconds to reach safety.

  He abandoned everything and ran to the escape shaft. The door would shut automatically when his weight passed over a panel a few feet below, and within ten seconds he was sliding through the hatch into the Wellbay Module. It theoretically served as access to the well, but in reality it was the fastest way to enter the shelter.

  He checked his watch and saw he had made it with ten seconds to spare, and if the two jets were going to bomb the rig, they would do plenty of aesthetic damage, but the shelter would still be there. Even if they blew off the tower that served as ballast, the rig might fall over before the anchors could deploy, but it wouldn’t take the shelter with it. The shelter would separate from the oil rig as easily as Titus Rush’s houseboat from Mud Island. It would just appear to be worse.

  Secure in his shelter, Maybank went to the monitor that showed the approaching fighters. They were close enough for him to see they were loaded with munitions, so they had a target in mind. He didn’t have long to wonder if his oil rig was their target as they screamed by at incredible speed.

  On a monitor facing south he watched them fade away but not before they began launching their weapons. Whatever it was they were hitting, it was well beyond the horizon. He didn’t know if he would ever learn what it had been, but a few minutes later they flew by without their payloads.

  There was a thin black line reaching from the horizon upward that resembled a scratch against the glassy blue sky. Maybank opened a log book and noted the times and dates of the events. The length of time that the target burned would give him some idea of what it was they had bombed. Judging by the color of the smoke, he guessed it was a ship. It bloomed like a flower and the black line became thicker.

  Maybank considered his dive to the shelter as the first successful test of the escape system. He had practiced the drill many times, but this was the first time his life could have depended on how well he did. His estimate of thirty seconds could have been wrong, so he was pleased that he had given himself an extra ten seconds by making it to safety in only twenty.

  Only one thing went wrong, and it had to be fixed immediately. There should have been an audible alarm as soon as his radar detected the aircraft. He had made it below in twenty seconds, but if he had been climbing the ladder instead of sitting on the landing pad, he would have arrived at the top as the fighters screamed past.

  The equipment room for the radar system was inside the shelter, and it didn’t take long for him to find the problem. It was as dark as the green lights on the shelter panel. A few simple test inputs proved that the system wasn’t receiving a signal.

  “Great. Malfunction number two.”

  Titus had offered one piece of advice to the entire survivors club, and Maybank could repeat it in his sleep.

  “Once it starts, the best place you can be is inside your shelter. Go there, shut yourself in, and stay there. The only thing you’ll be giving up is sunshine.”

  He had everything inside the shelter that he had up above, and he knew Titus was right, but it felt like he had time before the rest of the world caught up with him. Besides, he really liked watching the sunrises and sunsets, and in the end, he wanted to spend just a little more time up there.

  It didn’t take long for him to make the climb back to the living quarters. He took a few minutes to gather together a few personal effects that
he could have left behind but really wanted. He closed up the quarters just like a shopkeeper at the end of the day, but his security devices were better than most banks. Steel walls slid into place and the twenty foot ladder that went from the lower level up to his home retracted into a hidden recess that closed a door over the opening.

  Sooner or later someone would reach the oil rig. When they did, they would have to figure out how to get from the water up to the modules. There were no visible steel rungs or handrails on any of the towers, not unless he wanted them to be visible, and he certainly didn’t plan to do so.

  Despite the difficulty, someone would figure it out. That was expected. When they did, they would find lots of steel everywhere except one place. There was food, fuel, and most importantly, drinking water in only one place that could be reached by other survivors, and that was the crew quarters above the Wellbay Tower. If everything worked according to plans, the crew quarters would distract survivors from searching for the shelter.

  Maybank spent the rest of the day on the landing platform but saw nothing cross the horizon again. He didn’t doubt that there would be anything different on TV, but that could wait. He wanted to savor the open sky and the smell of the water surrounding him. When the sun dropped below the horizon to the west he decided it was time to go back to the shelter and test the rest of his security system.

  Closing the door to the shelter had a feeling of finality to it. He wasn’t really surprised that no one had arrived on the first day, but he was sure someone was already on the water and headed for the oil rigs. He was concerned about the dignitaries who were assigned to his shelter, though. The topic had been broached many times over the years, and one thing they all had been assured. People would make it to their shelters within the first twenty-four hours. After that, it was likely they weren’t coming.