by Howard, Bob
“I’ve been by myself too long,” he said, “and I’ve been inside too long. If I can go outside, then I should. I can tell when someone is coming from miles away, so I have plenty of time to get back inside.”
Two hours later he was standing in front of the mirror again, and this time his reflection reminded him even more of Titus Rush. He didn’t know why until he remembered his only visit to Mud Island. That was where Titus decided to put his shelter. It was on an island that was surrounded by water just like the oil rig. Titus was coasting a small boat up to the dock and jumped before he should have.
He learned a lot about Titus that day. For one thing, Maybank had always thought of him as larger than life, and larger than life people didn’t get their feet tangled up in ropes and fall overboard. They also didn’t laugh at themselves as hard as he did. It was something that made Maybank love and respect the man even more.
Titus had pulled his wet body up onto the dock and was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up. He laid there on his back with that long wet head of hair covering his face. His beard hid most of it, but the rest of his face was plastered with hair and seaweed. He laughed like that for so long that Maybank thought he had lost his mind.
He finally looked up at Maybank and said, “I think I may have forgotten how to have fun.”
Maybank studied his own soaking wet and frustrated expression and agreed with what Titus had said. Long before the infected dead had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, he had stopped having fun, and along with that loss came the inability to laugh at himself.
His reflection said, “That’s just what you needed. Now laugh about it and learn from it.”
So Maybank laughed. He laughed until his side hurt, and he had to sit down. He couldn’t believe that he had fallen off of his own oil rig. He knew the thing like the back of his hand, and he had done it just like Titus.
“Learn from it,” he said.
He had gone topside through the main entrance, and the first thing he wanted to see for himself was the platform where the fires had been. What he didn’t think about was how much damage the safety railings had taken. It was lucky for him that they were low areas closer to the water. When the railing broke loose from the platform, he instinctively grabbed for the nearest piece of pipe and held on. Too bad it was a piece that wasn’t considered essential to the overall structure, so it snapped loose and went with him.
He dropped about forty feet, just enough distance for him to gain control of his body’s position, and still low enough for the impact not to break bones. He went in feet first with his toes pointed downward. As he drifted toward the surface he told himself that even the Romanian judge would give him a ten for that dive.
The emergency hatches were everywhere if you knew where to look for them, and he didn’t need to climb back up to the catwalks to get inside. He was just glad he didn’t fall from too high or bounce on any catwalks below him. He got his bearings, took a deep breath, and swam to the nearest entrance.
All of the emergency entrances and exits were equipped with airlocks that could be pressurized, but this was one occasion when he didn’t need it. He sealed the hatch behind him and climbed a steel ladder that took him back into the shelter.
After he dried off and changed clothes, he went topside again, but this time he went up with a little more respect for his predicament. He was a survivor, and if he was going to break one of the rules, he was going to be careful about it. He thought about Titus laughing on the dock, but a few minutes later he had been all business. Maybank had a good laugh at his own expense, but from now on he would watch where he put his feet and his hands.
Less than thirty minutes later he was climbing the steps up to the crew’s quarters. The wind and rain had done a lot of housecleaning for him. The big red smears of blood had been washed enough to where it just appeared to be rust. The inside of the quarters was another matter. The guy who had been wounded had bled on a lot of things. Maybank checked the supplies and decided he would spend a little time cleaning up the blood. After a bit of scrubbing, he changed his mind and decided he would drop off a couple cases of food on his next trip topside. If anyone else made it this far, they could clean the place better if they wanted to.
The view from the landing pad was a welcome sight. As far as he could tell it had been almost six months since he had seen the horizon from this high.
There was something wrong with it, though. He steadied his arms on a railing and focused his binoculars. The line where the horizon met the sky was darker than he remembered. It was like someone had taken a black pen and colored it in from left to right.
Maybank wasn’t sure, but he thought an oil spill would make the water darker in appearance, but there weren’t any operating oil rigs between him and the coast of the US. He panned his view left and right to see if he could spot the end of the dark line. He wondered if there had been an oil spill drifting along the coast, and he was just now seeing it for the first time. That would make sense, and it would be an unexpected layer of protection for him. Whatever was happening on the mainland, it would have a harder time getting to him through an oil spill.
He eventually decided he would bring a camera up to get some pictures. He could run them through the computer and enhance the images.
An inspection of the rest of the rig showed what he had expected. The Army Corps of Engineers had built the thing to last, and other than a few scars from the fire, it would do exactly as they intended.
The last stop was the penthouse apartment that he had called home for so many years. It was still as well sealed as he had left it, and he let himself in by activating the hidden combination lock under one of the steps on the last catwalk. It was in a place where someone might look, but even if someone found it, they wouldn’t know how to operate it.
Everything was where it should be, and he hadn’t thought of it before, but there was a high resolution digital camera feed connected to his control room. He could save himself some time by checking that dark line from the penthouse instead of waiting until he got back to the shelter.
He powered up the computers and brought the image up on the largest monitor. It was a bright day with no clouds, but the dark line didn’t reflect the light. He started scrolling the zoom bar as he panned lower to stay right on the horizon.
“What is that?”
It was expanding almost too slowly to see, but as he stared at it, he could see that it was moving in his direction. It was like a crooked black line that was getting wider and thicker at the same time. When he zoomed closer the details became pixelated, but he let the computer software take over, and gradually some of the details emerged.
Maybank was holding his breath. He didn’t realize he was, but when the first details became too clear to deny, he finally let his breath out slowly. Arms, legs, heads…..bodies, and it was all moving. Not just moving on the surface, not just floating, but moving people as if they were all pushing at each other, trying to get enough room to break free.
He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands as if he needed to clear something out of them. It didn’t do anything for his eyes, but it cleared his head. He remembered that he could take pictures and enhance them. Better yet, he could video everything. He hit all of the right switches and was recording it all to the drives in the underwater shelter. He could examine everything from safety if it turned out to be what he thought it was.
As the image became even clearer, individual bodies began to take shape. It was a massive tangle of bodies, and it was floating away from the mainland, held afloat by the gases building up in the decomposing dead.
Some of the bodies were floating on top of the bloated corpses under them, and Maybank was shocked to see some of them were actually crawling on top of the others. He knew there had to be hundreds of thousands of them, and as he watched the infected tide growing in size, he knew it was coming closer. He also knew why he had to be inside his shelter when the floating horde arrived. There was something else
moving in between the bodies of the infected. At first it looked like body parts just bobbing in and out of view, but then he saw purpose in the movement. The floating graveyard was covered with rats that were feeding on the dead, and rats could manage to climb almost anything.
******
He stopped going topside days before the black tide of bodies reached his oil rig. It was one thing to see it through binoculars or digital photography, but it was another thing altogether to see it with the naked eye. Even without the binoculars, the height of the oil rig was enough for him to see how vast the stain was on the ocean. When he tried to make a journal entry to describe what he was seeing, he struggled with the words. Not how to describe it, but what to call it.
“Is it a floating island of bodies? Is it a killing field? A graveyard?”
He tried so many different things that he realized there was nothing in history that could compare. The floating island of plastic and other garbage in the oceans of the world were bad enough, but a floating, human debris field was beyond a one or two word title.
On his last day watching it approach from the landing pad on the top of the oil rig, he had let the binoculars hang on its strap and just leaned heavily on the railing. The gravity of the number of dead was beyond emotion.
He turned to the left and then the right and then tried to see beyond the bodies toward the coast. He couldn’t see the end of it in any direction, but he was able to make out the details better. He was also starting to understand where they had all come from.
He turned on his audio recorder. He could have done video, but it was enough to know it was being recorded by the computer system in the shelter.
“The bodies will wash up against the rig for days. There are so many that I may even feel some movement inside the shelter. I don’t know how many will get tangled up under the rig, because I just don’t know how deep the bodies are. They’re bound to catch on the moorings that hold the shelter to the frame of the oil rig. It’s time for me to go below and watch from there. I caught a bit of the smell on the breeze a few minutes ago, and I imagine it’s going to get a lot worse. I’ll continue this entry when I get below.”
The monitors were on when Maybank sealed his hatch, so he was able to see details he had seen from above. At that moment he doubted he would ever open the shelter door again.
“I can see details that confirm some things I already knew,” he said after turning on the microphone by the computer.
“They are definitely what the news was calling them back at the beginning. They are all infected dead. Heaven help anyone in that mess who might be alive. They would have to think they’re in Dante’s Hell.”
He switched off the microphone and just stared at the bobbing mass of bodies. Arms and legs aimed freely toward the sky and swayed with the motion of the water and the other bodies around them
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get all poetic. This is supposed to be a journal with observations. I guess I should say there isn’t much chance that anyone is uninfected and alive in all of those bodies. I’ve also been searching for facts that would support the existence of this thing.”
He searched again for the right thing to call it. He didn’t feel like he could keep calling it the floating mass of dead people.
“The dead tide. I’ll call it the dead tide. From what I could find on the Internet, millions of people were bitten in the first day alone, probably billions worldwide. People didn’t all die at the same pace. Some went home to their loved ones, and some went to hospitals. When they died, they were able to bite other people, and from there the death rate became exponential. The question is obvious. How many of them went into the water?”
Maybank had a map of the Gulf coast spread across a large table, and he traced his finger along the line from Texas to the tip of Florida. An internet source said there were fourteen million people living on the Gulf coast in 2012. They didn’t all go into the water, but the census only took into consideration the number of people who actually lived on the coast. It didn’t consider how many tourists were visiting Tampa, New Orleans, Pensacola, Galveston, and all the other beaches along the Gulf. There were probably thirty million people on the coast when it started, and there was no such thing as an evacuation.
He pressed the microphone button again.
“Millions of people went into the water along the coast. They were either already dead when they went in or they died when they drowned or were bitten. The news wasn’t clear about whether or not you had to be bitten before you died, but it didn’t really matter. All dead bodies that sink eventually resurface due to expanding gases during decomposition.”
He was trying to sound clinical, but the entire time his voice was shaking and beginning to break. He could see people of all ages in the tangle of bodies, and some of them moved like they were alive.
He decided to leave the recording running, but he couldn’t watch anymore. There was only so much he could take.
The computer room reminded him of the control room in a submarine, so he went to the room he had designed for recreation. If he could ignore what was happening outside for a few minutes, maybe he could even get his appetite back.
It worked to some extent. Because the room was for recreation, the kitchen wasn’t fully stocked with the ingredients he needed to make a home cooked meal, but it had plenty of frozen pizzas and beer. That was probably what he needed right now, and it wasn’t long before the smells of dough baking and pepperoni crisping made his stomach growl. He was on his third beer by then.
He scrolled through the video library on his server and found a movie that he knew was loosely based on a book he had read. He had every movie in his collection that had anything to do with survival. He almost chose the movie about a guy who got stranded on an island for four years, but he wanted something that felt a little less real but also fit with what was happening outside. He settled on the movie about the sole survivor in New York who was trying to find a cure for an infection that turned people into zombies that could run. They only came out in the dark, and they hunted for survivors.
When he thought about it, the similarities between his apocalypse and the one in the movie ended with the infection. Yes, the infected would bite you in both situations, you became one of them if you were bitten, and there was no cure, but he was having problems with some of the details in the movie.
As far as he could tell, the infected in the movie would eat you if they caught you. They wouldn’t feel pain because they were dead, and they could think to some extent. What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was zombies that could run.
“Running zombies,” he said. “That’s against the rules.”
There was also the day and night thing. The sunlight didn’t seem to bother his zombies. The reports he had seen before losing the internet gave him the impression that the infected dead could find you in broad daylight or in a totally dark room.
A timer dinged, and his pizza was done. He would have called it denial if he thought about it, but he had pretty much put the dead tide out of his mind for the time being.
“Would Titus be proud of me for coping so well, or would he be worried that I was in denial?”
It wasn’t difficult for him to answer his own question.
“He would be proud of me because I don’t have an ounce of denial about what’s happening out there.”
He motioned with his head toward the ceiling.
“There just isn’t a thing I can do about it, and I’m hungry.”
There were crumbs left on the pizza pan, and he had washed it down with three more beers. Maybank felt relaxed and something else that he would have called satisfied under normal circumstances. But there was nothing normal about these circumstances. It didn’t take much deep thinking for him to realize his satisfaction was simply the knowledge that they had been right. Titus and everyone in their survivors club had been right, and there were millions of people up there who had been wrong. A bunch of them were floating toward hi
m now.
The swaying woke him up. His half awake half asleep mind told him he was at sea, and he was supposed to be swaying. When he was a little more than half awake, that part of his mind reminded him that the shelter wasn’t supposed to sway. It was supposed to be steady. It was supposed to be as steady as it would be if was sitting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
The lights were programmed to dim when he left a room, so they were still on.
“Maybe six beers were a few too many,” he mumbled.
When he stood up he chose the wrong moment to do it. The whole room moved, and he heard a deep groan as the mooring cables that held the shelter in place were stretched as far as they could go.
Maybank knew every specification of the shelter right down to the sizes of the screws in the walls, and he knew the mooring cables were almost six inches thick. Whatever was pushing on the shelter had to have a lot of force behind it if the cables were going to stretch far enough to move the shelter. The groan meant something was going to give if they stretched much further, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
With his arms stretched out to the sides and his legs spread for balance, he walked carefully to the door to the next compartment. From there he would be able to see what was happening outside.
The lights came up as soon as he stepped through the water tight door. Unlike the other shelters, all of his doors could be closed remotely and were replicas of the doors found on ships. He sealed the door and carefully worked his way into a chair that was fastened to the floor. He had questioned the need for such things when the engineers built his shelter, but one had patiently explained that he thought of the shelter as a ship, and ships didn’t let things like chairs fly around a room full of computers.
The shelter stopped swaying just as he was situated in the chair with a seatbelt on. Now it was vibrating as if it was being pelted by something. He couldn’t hear the shelter being hit, but he could feel it in his feet and as each jolt traveled up through the metal of the chair.
