by Howard, Bob
When the monitors came on, Maybank thought there was something wrong with the cameras. Every monitor displayed a dark screen even though they were definitely on. He tried turning them off and then back on again, but there was no change.
He had practiced disaster scenarios with the crew of a submarine, and he recalled they had told him sometimes you wouldn’t know what was happening. Those were the disasters you worried about the most because you couldn’t stop it or protect yourself from it until it revealed itself. If it was something you could control, the longer it took to reveal itself the more damage it could do.
Then there were the things you couldn’t control, and you were possibly going to die without even knowing what was killing you.
Maybank swiveled his chair and furiously switched from one camera to the next. There was brightness on one monitor, and he transferred the feed of that camera over to the monitor directly in front of his chair. The view from the camera showed the surface just above the water, but the swells were traveling away from him.
He watched the swells doing the opposite of what he expected and was totally confused until the next unexpected thing happened. Something drifted across the camera and completely blocked his view.
He resisted the urge to reach up and tap on the monitor. It was a natural impulse, but he knew there wasn’t anything wrong with it. He rotated the camera to try to see around whatever was blocking the view, and for just a moment he could see the swells again. This time there was something riding on the swells, and as he watched something else floated into view.
For a split second he saw the face, and he jumped back from the monitor. A quick glance at another monitor that had brightened a little, and he saw light between two faces. One was quickly replaced by another, and then the entire view was blocked again. He didn’t know why he didn’t recognize it sooner, and maybe it was the beer, but the dead tide had arrived. He just didn’t want to believe that there could be so many bodies that it had moved the shelter, and his mistake had been to turn on the wrong cameras.
That much he could correct, and Maybank switched all of the cameras to an overhead view looking down from the top of the oil rig.
He had expected it to be bad, but even though he had watched the immense floating island of bodies approach for days, seeing it up close was unreal. There were so many bodies that the range of the cameras didn’t show any water. He backed the view away on his highest camera until he could see water in the distance toward the Gulf coast. Rotating the camera to the west he could see that the dead tide was at least twenty miles long. He wasn’t surprised to see the same when he turned it to the east. The dead tide was at least forty miles long and over twenty miles wide.
Bodies had drifted in between all four of his towers, and just as he had expected, they had become snagged on the top of the shelter where the mooring lines were connected. Bodies piled up on bodies until the weight of them had begun to put a strain on the massive cables. Fortunately, the current had continued to pull the tide of bodies around the sides of the oil rig, and most of the pressure was being pulled away from the rig. Some of the bodies from the middle even managed to be carried away with the rest.
Maybank saw he had also anticipated correctly what the rats would do. There were so many of them that they had begun to breed on the massive tide of bodies. Litters of baby rats left their nests in the clothing of the dead and scattered across an endless food supply, but when the bodies became lodged against the towers, some of the rats instinctively started to climb. Despite the fact there was no food supply for them to find on the oil rig, they climbed to get further from the water.
Some of them would eventually reach the crew quarters near the helicopter pad, but Maybank was certain they couldn’t get inside. Even if they did, they would exhaust the food supply in a matter of days and be forced to go back down to the tangle of bodies that were stuck in the middle of the rig. He estimated that there were over a thousand bodies that would remain behind after the dead tide had passed, and that was far too many for him. It would take much longer for the rats to eat their way through that food supply, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“Or maybe there is.”
The plans to the shelter and the oil rig were all on the computer, so Maybank opened an auto cad program and searched for the specs he needed. There they were.
The number one scenario they had planned for was a nuclear war. He opened the file to the scenario and didn’t even need to use the search function to find the table he needed. It was a list of temperatures. The paint would start to crack and peel off as the temperature rose, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that. If his plan worked, it was going to get pretty hot down there. Not as hot as a nuclear war, but hotter than normal.
What he needed to know was whether or not critical systems could handle the heat. His assumption was that anything that could withstand a nuclear explosion could easily withstand a regular fire.
“Maybe not a regular fire,” he said. “It’s going to be a big fire.”
The mooring cables were probably not able to withstand the heat as well as the towers, but the narrow metal bars and grids of the catwalks were his biggest worries. The mooring cables at least had the water to keep them cool.
“Well, I won’t be needing the catwalks if things are as bad on the mainland as they appear to be. Now I just need to figure out what kind of accelerant I could use to make waterlogged bodies burn.”
He didn’t need a degree in physics to know what the risks were. The fire had to be hot enough to keep burning, but a fire that hot could easily find a way to spread across the oil rig. It had occurred to him that the rats would climb higher to get away from the fire, and if the fire didn’t fry all of his external electrical wiring, the rats would eat it in order to survive. Then they would turn on each other, but the damage would already be done.
He wasn’t ready to give up on one of his defenses so quickly. The electrically charged catwalks had served him well, but he doubted it would be the last time he would use them if they were still working after he was done getting rid of the bodies.
In the end, he knew there was no way to set over a thousand bodies on fire and keep them burning long enough to break down the logjam. He had to find a way to get them to untangle from each other and drift away from the oil rig.
“What would Titus do?” he asked himself. “Titus would go out there and untangle them himself if that was the only way to get it done.”
Maybank laughed at himself for having a conversation that included questions and answers, but he found himself actually visualizing what it would be like out there.
“Over a thousand snapping mouths, two thousand grasping hands.”
He leaned back in his chair and noticed for the first time that the swaying had stopped. The monitors showing the east and the west gave him a good view of the bodies on the surface, and each side was a long, sweeping curve. The dead tide was tearing itself away from the oil rig on both sides. The view from the south showed more and more water as the gap between the tide and the rig increased. He switched to the camera view that showed the middle of the rig, and he figured he couldn’t have snagged more infected dead if he had tried to with a net. He got an insane image in his head. He pictured himself wearing SCUBA gear, pulling at the squirming bodies as he yanked them free of the tangled mess one by one.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hopkins on the Lake
Year Six of the Decline
The smell almost arrived before the sound of the horde as it pressed itself into the small gaps between trees. It came on the breeze almost a full day before the first group of them appeared. The dry underbrush was trampled flat with a great cracking and crunching, and trees that had weak spots or damage from lightning and wind were pushed over like they were nothing more than tall pretzels.
The children were too young to remember movies, but their parents remembered the silver screens and what it was like to see herds of elephants
crashing through jungles. Some of them had forgotten about the dinosaur movies that had become so popular before the infected dead had arrived, but now they were being reminded of the scenes when the trees shook just before the monsters charged at their prey.
Even though the sun had only just begun to rise above the horizon, they could see the tops of the trees part and then come back together again. At any moment they expected to see the meat eating dinosaurs charging from the trees, not the slow moving, shifting shapes still too immersed in darkness to see. In a way, the people of the new town of Hopkins on The Lake would have preferred the monsters from thousands of years in the past because a horde large enough to move the big trees of the forest had to be beyond imagination.
From the time they had finished construction of the wooden town until now, they had been under siege. During the day they had seen the infected dead coming toward the dock and had to back away from the land defenses that were supposed to keep the infected from even reaching the lake. They doubled the guard and had every able bodied adult protecting their home. They worked frantically to build up the barricade at the single entrance that led out to their new town, and the guards fought off the infected that made it past the other obstacles. Sharpened trees were driven into the ground at random, and a crew worked full time to remove the bodies that had become impaled. It wasn’t long before they were forced backward onto the dock to help the guards who were continually pushing the infected into the lake.
Pits between the rows of spikes were so full that the infected fell in and were only unable to get out because their legs were so entangled with the other infected. Some sank to the bottoms of the pits, disappearing among the squirming bodies, but eventually the new arrivals simply walked around them, and were joined by others that broke free of the melee in the manmade traps. They continued forward until they were pushed from behind onto the sharpened spikes. It was clear even before today that there was an increase in the number of infected, but scouts that had gone out to see what was happening didn’t return to give their reports.
This was the day they had feared, but they had hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as it was quickly becoming. They gave up their efforts at the end of the dock and raised the drawbridge they had built at the halfway point between land and the town.
When the sun came over the tops of the shaking trees, they could see that the infected had grown in numbers on the other side of the drawbridge, and even though they were walking off the end into the water, there were too many of them for the dock to support the weight. The wooden structure was swaying left and right, and rails were bulging outward. When they broke free, the entire dock seemed to fall over at the same time. Dozens of the infected fell with each other, but the path was cleared for hundreds more behind them. They walked into the water as if the dock was still there.
To the people watching the army of the infected trying to reach them, this was cause for celebration, and they cheered and shouted insults at the heads that bobbed in the water. The celebration was short lived, though. The dead couldn’t reach them on their wooden town, but there was something about the growing numbers that was beyond comprehension. It was gradually dawning on the leaders and the planners in the community that they would never be safe if there were going to be hordes like this one passing through without warning. Yes, they smelled them coming. Yes, they could hear them. But why were there so many?
A hush fell over the people watching from the safety of their railings around the wooden town as the bobbing heads began passing under their homes. Hands reached up and slapped at the wooden walkways around the town and in the gaps between buildings. There were screams from inside the town as people were surprised by the infected that popped up in those gaps and held on for just long enough to reach for the legs of the frightened townspeople. Someone had been too close to the water, and the scream was from pain as teeth found bare skin.
The bumping started, and at first it felt like it should. Vibrations due to the collisions between the bodies of the infected and the pilings that supported the town. Vibrations they could accept, but the vibrations became strong enough for people to lose their balance as more and more of the infected managed to grab onto the pilings and the edges of the boards above them.
Everywhere the people could see fingers gripping the gaps between boards and the wider gaps between the buildings. It was a sturdy construction built by men and women who had done construction before the infected had arrived, and it was holding better than many places would, but this was no common horde. This was far more than they ever expected.
Someone finally got the nerve to begin fighting with the fingers reaching up from below. A woman with a hatchet chopped at a row of fingers, and the hand disappeared into the water. Feeling bolder, she singled out another hand and separated it from its owner.
The crowd of people who had been huddling away from the gaps, holding each other and crying came to life. At first it was one by one, and then it was large groups of people who began attacking the hands. There were fingers everywhere, and it became difficult to walk on the wooden planks without slipping on them until someone started going around the walkways pushing a broom in front of them, and slowly a gap appeared in the drifting bodies below Hopkins on The Lake.
They began to cheer again, but this time they were cheering each other on. Yelling and pointing where they saw new fingers appear instead of cowering away from them. When someone pointed, someone near to the fingers would rush forward and neatly slice them off with knives and hatchets.
A hush fell over the people of the town for a second time. This time it wasn’t because of the vibrations. This time it was because the town lurched under their feet. It was like a car suddenly stopping and its occupants continued forward. There was a scream from the back of the town as one of the occupants of that particular walkway was unable to stop their forward motion, and a man fell with his wife when he tried to keep her from going through the railing.
Then it was everyone’s turn to scream as the vehicle that used to be their town began to lean too hard against the pilings that supported it, and the town began to slide across the tops of the poles. It was like they were launching a great ship, and the buildings of the town slid free onto the surface of the water and threw up a huge wave that rushed away in all directions. It had become a tremendous houseboat.
People who stayed on their feet began to climb the walls of the building to reach the rooftops. Hands that reached for them were the hands of their friends, but more than once when someone reached to help a friend it was not who they thought it would be. The people of Hopkins literally stuck their hands into the jaws of death, and only those people who didn’t risk showing compassion reached safety.
The screams died away as people were dragged under and either eaten or drowned. What was left behind was the crying of mothers for their children or children who were unable to stay with their parents when they were pushed upward to safety.
The town of Hopkins on The Lake became quite literally on the lake as it floated away from its pilings. The few people who had managed to reach safety on the rooftops gauged the distance to the shore and hoped their momentum was strong enough for them to make it across that decreasing distance before they stopped moving. Their only hope was to coast to the far end of the lake and then to run when they reached shore.
One of the men yelled to the others that they weren’t going to make it, and he dove into the water to swim ahead of the town. He dove in, but he didn’t come back to the surface. He had forgotten that the infected had been falling into the lake for several hours before the town had slipped free of its pilings, and hundreds of the infected lined the bottom of the lake all the way to shore.
The people cried as they watched the bobbing heads in the water come and go. Some had been neighbors. Some had been family. All the while the horde continued to flow from the trees into the lake, and some of the more calm members of the remaining survivors realized that they were actually gaining speed. I
f the watertight integrity of the buildings held well enough, then they were really going to be pushed to the opposite shoreline. A quick assessment by those who were still not ready to die was enough for them to see that the buildings were closing the distance faster than they were sinking. Even as the momentum slowed when they reached shallow water, they saw that the buildings were going to beach without them having to get into the water to cover the remaining few feet.
Boards were stretched across the rooftops to allow everyone still alive to be able to jump to the beach, but it was almost a fatal flaw in the plan. The side of the drifting town settled deeper as more and more people crossed onto the rooftops to make the jump, and the town began to list and drag across the bottom. Ironically, the infected dead under the town were crushed into the shoreline at the edge of the lake, and the town literally slid across their bodies as if it had been lubricated to do so.
Some of the survivors waited until the town that had become a lifeboat stopped its forward motion, and then they crossed over the rooftops to join the others in their leap to safety. It was a miracle that so many had survived to make the jump, but to the remaining two dozen, they felt like the time to count their blessings would come later. For now, they had to run.
The sun was hardly an hour above the treetops, and the town of Hopkins was on the run for a second time. As they carried the handful of children who had survived, they ran for the trees on the opposite side of the lake. They didn’t have a clue where they were going, but they knew the horde wouldn’t need to stop and rest, so they couldn’t either. One of the men had been a community leader, so when he said they should go west toward I-26, no one disagreed with him. He said that they needed to get to the interstate so they could move faster and out distance the horde that was crossing the lake in pursuit of them.
