by Howard, Bob
The platform at the top of the Wellbay tower ladder wasn’t large, but it was surrounded by railings to keep clumsy people from falling into the water. A fall that far would more often than not be fatal. The injured man and woman had been left in a reclining position against the railing while the uniformed men gathered around the phone. After Maybank had hung up for a second time, the other two men were trying to get the phone away from the first guy. They apparently had some feelings to share with Maybank.
What drew Maybank’s attention away from the angry men was the injured couple. One moment they were blood soaked and near death, and the next moment they were like a pair of newborn colts trying to get their legs under them. It didn’t escape Maybank’s attention that they weren’t using the railing to pull themselves up the way normal people did. It took them awhile, but they were eventually upright. Upright and moving on shaky legs toward the three uniformed men.
If he had realized what was happening, he wouldn’t have hung up the second time. He would have warned the men. Maybank punched in the number to the phone the man was holding. Nothing happened because they were still fighting for the phone. He heard the busy signal and tried again. Just as he finished entering the number, one of the men turned toward the injured people. He didn’t even have time to react before they fell forward into the private security guards. Maybank felt like he was watching a news broadcast from the night before.
There was hardly room to move in the corner of the platform, and two of them were bitten before they could even start to defend themselves. Blood made the steel deck slippery, and all five of them fell together in a pile.
Maybank had read once that being bitten was very invasive to the victims. There was an element of disbelief that the victims had to deal with before they could react defensively. It was a disbelief that it was really happening. The article he had been reading at the time was about animal bites, and the author actually said the bite victims had to go through the disbelief, but they also had to go through a brief moment where they felt sorry for the animal. Once they reached the moment of sorrow for the animal, they could better defend themselves against further bites.
He remembered that he had more than a little doubt about whether or not the author of the article had ever been bitten because he didn’t think he would feel sorry for the shark that had just removed his leg. Now that he was seeing people actually being bitten and how they reacted, he was inclined to believe the first part, though. From what he could tell by the expressions on their faces, the uniformed security guards couldn’t believe they had been bitten. One was so busy staring at the wound on his wrist that he could have forgotten they were still trying to bite him. Maybank didn’t see sorrow on the man’s face, but he saw plenty of shock.
The third man had managed to keep from being bitten when they all became tangled together, and he rolled away from the pile to get to his feet. He pulled a pistol from its holster and fired four quick shots into the couple. His training had been to shoot center mass, so that was what he did. Two rounds hit the man in the heart, and two rounds hit the woman with the same accuracy.
They fell backward from the impact, and the two uniformed men who had been bitten used the opportunity to put some distance between themselves and their attackers. One of them was bleeding furiously from a deep wound to the upper part of his arm by the armpit. The other was wrapping a rag around his left hand where he used to have a thumb.
Maybank didn’t think the guy with the arm injury would survive more than another fifteen seconds. As part of his preparations for this day, he had done a considerable amount of training in first aid, and he figured there wasn’t much you could do for a big hole in the brachial artery. He watched as the man staggered and then was unable to stay on his feet. A few seconds later he was dead.
The uninjured man lunged across the platform and grabbed the phone that was swinging from its cord. Maybank didn’t know if he should bother to answer because he already knew there was no way he was going to open the shelter for the man. The question was settled for him, and all he could do was grab his phone and say as fast as he could, “Look behind you.”
For a second time the man was trying to push away the injured couple. He knew they should be dead because there were fresh bullet holes where their shredded hearts had been. He knew he couldn’t have missed. Somehow he managed to get each of them in his grip at the same time, and he pushed as hard as he could. They fell on top of his dead comrade and almost comically kept trying to get up by knocking the other down.
The man with the wrapped hand kept his back to the railing and circled around to his friend by the phone. His friend reached out and helped to pull him the last few feet. Even on the monitor Maybank could see them face to face, experiencing the disbelief.
Both of them got their pistols ready as the couple finally became untangled from the deck of the platform, but this time their disbelief had grown because they were watching their dead comrade stand up, too. He was facing away from them as if he was seeing the oil rig for the first time and found it interesting, but then he saw his living friends, and they were far more interesting to him. He turned and joined the other two bleeding corpses as they moved closer to the men huddled by the phone.
The man with the injured hand had lowered his weapon, but the other man raised his and fired three shots, each one to the foreheads of the advancing corpses. He stood with his eyes lowered to the bodies for several minutes then seemed to remember where he was.
He snatched the phone for a third time and dialed the number. When Maybank answered the phone the man didn’t yell, but he still tried to issue orders as if he was in charge. Maybank didn’t know why he said it, and he wasn’t trying to be funny, but before he hung up the phone he said, “Wrong number.” He didn’t know what else to do, but he felt awful.
******
The phone rang for so long that Maybank finally disconnected it. He had things to do, and he wanted to put the entire scene behind him. He knew how it would play out up on the oil rig, and no scenario had a happy ending. If the man somehow managed to be the last one standing, he wasn’t likely to be someone Maybank could ever completely trust. That ship had sailed.
He decided to close off that particular control room until he could get over the events of the day. He was tired already, but he could imagine how it was going to be if the first day had gotten this bad. He didn’t have an appetite yet, but he would have to eat if he was going to stay healthy. He closed the door to the control room and began following a maze of tunnels that connected the various modules of the shelter. Just like the oil rig above, this underwater shelter was divided into watertight sections. Each section could serve as a shelter independent of the other sections if the structure sustained any heavy damage. He sealed each door after passing through until he reached the next control room.
Maybank spun up several computers and began a systems check. He wanted to tune into the news channels, but that would have to wait. He brought up a view of the Wellbay module and saw the two private security guards going up the ladder toward the crew’s living quarters. He knew they would feel better once they saw the food, beds, and shower facilities, but it was only going to last as long as the one man stayed alive. After that, if the uninjured guy survived, it would only be until the supplies ran out, and then he would get desperate.
He tried not to think about it, but his mind kept going back to the question, “What if? What if the guy really was a nice guy? What if he understood why I had hung up? What if I save him? Wouldn’t he be grateful then?”
When he put himself in the shoes of the man outside, he came to the conclusion that the first thing he would do was shoot whoever was inside the shelter. To the security man, Maybank was just some guy with a shelter who was supposed to save him and his clients. He probably didn’t know anything about the shelters, who built them, and who ultimately owned them. In the end, Maybank did his best to put the man out of his mind.
The oil rig shelter wasn
’t like the hotels at Fort Sumter and Columbus. The military hadn’t given up on their concerns about its vulnerability to attacks by foreign navies. More than once he had heard the argument that a nuclear tipped torpedo was all anyone would need, but Maybank stuck to his belief that madmen respected oil above gold. As a result, his shelter wasn’t designated for anyone in the presidential chain of succession. He didn’t know who he was getting, but they weren’t going to need protection from Secret Service Agents.
Titus Rush was given the choice not to play host to anyone, and Maybank didn’t choose an oil rig because it would shorten his guest list, but he was glad that he wouldn’t have some pompous politicians expecting him to fetch for them. The fact that they were arriving with a paramilitary escort concerned him some, and he decided to waste a little time trying to find out who they were. After all, time seemed to be something that wasn’t in short supply.
The second control room was down one level from the first but on the opposite side of the shelter. Each level was air tight and self-contained, which meant part of the shelter could be damaged without effecting the operations of the rest of the shelter. One of the best features was the way the levels were connected. Each level had a separate access to every other level. There were five levels, so that meant a lot of space was given to stairs and ladders, but they did double duty. Supply cabinets lined the stairwells, and even the steps were storage cabinets.
After dropping down one level, Maybank crossed his armory and medical level. If either was needed, he wanted them closer to the main shelter access. Beyond the medical bay he entered his second control room and went straight to his security cameras. Everything needed to power up, but in a matter of seconds he had a camera view of the Wellbay tower and the three bodies that were still in full view.
There was little doubt to him who the important people were even through the blood. They were movie celebrities who had undoubtedly been campaign donors, but there was one thing all of the shelter owners anticipated, and that was uninvited guests who had learned about the shelters from influential friends. There had even been rumors of a blackmarket that sold space in the shelters. Maybank wondered if these two had been buyers, especially since they arrived with belligerent private security.
He had seen the couple in plenty of movies, and he wondered if he would have let them in if they had arrived differently. He put the thought aside because it was all conjecture, and there was no point wasting time on something that wasn’t going to happen. If more celebrities showed up, he would decide then.
A few minutes of scanning the security cameras to locate the two security guards was all he needed. They were in the living quarters above the Wellbay tower. Maybank thought of the quarters as his shelter houseboat. The idea Titus had was adopted by every shelter owner because it made sense. Even the President’s shelter had an elaborate fake shelter between it and the Ohio State University campus. The guards didn’t know where Maybank was, but they wouldn’t suspect he was in an elaborate shelter under the water as long as there were decent accommodations in the oil rig. What saddened him was that one of them had been bitten, and his friend was trying to keep him alive.
“Yep. If I was him, I would hate me, too.”
Now that Maybank was more or less confined to his shelter, he was doing what Titus said would keep him alive. Climbing around the catwalks outside wasn’t part of the survivors club philosophy, which was go to your shelter, shut yourself in, and stay there.
He opened an app on a tablet and made an entry in the journal that resembled a captain’s log with one notable exception. The first entry began with, “Captain’s log, star date 000001.” He described the events of the day and then moved to the next function on the app. He could do a systems check from the bridge, as he often called the control rooms, but there was no better assurance than seeing the systems with your own eyes.
It would take years to inspect every detail of the shelter, but he also wanted to see the surroundings of the major systems. If moisture was building up in a computer cabinet, he might smell it before the diagnostics detected it. At least he thought he might.
So, he began his inspection tour that would take most of the day. He scheduled his route so he would pass through the galley at supper time. His appetite hadn’t returned yet after the episode on the Wellbay tower, but he knew he needed to get into the habit of eating on a schedule. He had gotten bad about that while living in his topside quarters, often skipping meals in favor of a cold beer and a bag of chips. His excuse then was that he felt like he lived on a tropical island, but that excuse wasn’t going to work anymore. All of the tropical islands were getting lots of visitors right about now, and some of those visitors would be bite victims.
He checked off the armory and the medical bays because he had already passed through them. He would give them each a closer inspection when he returned the next day. The schedule on his calendar app showed he would have target practice just after supper. He hadn’t neglected that training the way he had meals and had become fairly proficient with rifles and handguns, so he had something to look forward to.
A watertight door beyond the control room led to a decontamination chamber. He checked the seals on the doors that went from decontamination into decompression and then the doors to the infirmary. He knew that the path he had taken would lead him in a circle under each of the towers, and once he finished a circle, he would drop down a level to inspect the next compartment.
Almost an hour later he was on the next level down when he heard voices. Chills ran up the back of his neck, and he froze where he was until he realized he was hearing audio from the TV broadcasts. Whoever had gone through this particular area the last time hadn’t bothered to turn off the satellite reception on a TV or seal the watertight door that went into the control room on this level. One more good reason for the visual inspection. It had probably been one of the enlisted personnel who had gotten the job of storing the treasure trove of supplies in the shelter.
That was another reason for this inspection. He needed to see if anything important was missing. More than once the project had uncovered issues with theft of some of the really cool toys they were stocking in the shelters, and Maybank didn’t really blame some of the young kids who were given the jobs. It was preferable to combat duty, but every time they upgraded the technology, they had to break in new people who couldn’t always keep a secret or their hands to themselves.
Maybank recalled one breach at a shelter on the west coast that put the entire project in jeopardy. The shelter was in a hostile environment near the Canadian border. Just like Titus Rush, the shelter owner preferred a small island for his location, but he felt like the cold weather would deter any interest by survivors after an apocalypse.
Someone important who was to be saved by the shelter had told his girlfriend about how they would be safe if there was an apocalypse. When he ended the relationship, a news crew camped outside the hidden entrance to the shelter for two weeks. They never found the entrance, but it was clear that the shelter builders had to find incentives to make people keep the locations secret. For the important people who were to be saved, the penalty for disclosure was loss of that privilege, but just to be safe, they weren’t told the locations in advance. Those who already knew were told the construction had been abandoned at the first location and moved to an undisclosed site.
It was harder to find incentives for the military personnel. The only things they could come up with were higher pay, combat duty transfers, and federal prison. In the end they found that higher pay was usually sufficient as long as they were also told the alternatives.
After stepping through the door and sealing it behind him, Maybank made a mental note that the inspection had not been a waste of time. He congratulated himself for following the rules.
The audio was coming from a computer that also displayed other camera views besides TV broadcasts. One was an outside view of the crew’s quarters. Maybank sat down and guessed that at the mome
nt, the uninjured man was probably trying to assure his friend that he would be fine. Maybank didn’t know how much they knew about what was happening on the mainland, but the man would either lie to his friend, or he didn’t know yet that the bites were fatal. His best chance of survival would be to kill his friend, but there was always the possibility that he was just unable to do what had to be done.
Thinking of the men made Maybank remember why he had let them board the oil rig in the first place. He didn’t know any of them had been bitten. It also reminded him that he had forgotten to close the door behind them, so to speak. He found the right panel and hit the button that retracted the handholds back into their hidden doors on the side of the tower.
He turned off the monitor to conserve power and crossed the control room to the next sealed door. The galley was on the other side, and his appetite had returned. He was also thinking that maybe he would spend two hours in the armory target range instead of one.
CHAPTER SIX
Tidal Creek
Beginning of the Decline
Sarah Beth wanted to stay in the boat for a while longer, but Paul wanted to reach the dock. She couldn’t explain why she felt like it was worse than Paul realized, but whatever was happening, it wasn’t over. Paul kept going on about the authorities, the government, safe zones, the Red Cross, FEMA, and everyone else who would rescue them.
The old couple had disappeared hours ago, but they heard the boom of the rifle a few times. She hadn’t blamed them for going back. It was better than sitting at the end of the long dock. Maybe they were somewhere safe by now, but the boat was at least safe for the time being. She wanted to stay in the boat until one of Paul’s life saving agencies showed up.
