by Howard, Bob
“Almost on top of Ed when he asked us to check his nine,” she answered.
Kathy had taken the goggles next, and she practically gasped, which wasn’t something she normally did. She was about as cool under fire as anybody could be, but whatever that was on the dock, it really scared her. She gave me a big hug, and that scared me.
“Somebody tell me what we’re looking at up there,” I said. “It’s moving so much I can’t make it out.”
The rest of the group hadn’t been able to see it yet because it was so dark, and they were waiting along with me for one of the others to say something.
The Chief said, “It’s a crab. It must have flipped over on its back when Cassandra shot it.”
“I had a dog smaller than that thing,” said Hampton. His voice sounded almost reverent he was so awestruck.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Colleen. “If that thing had jumped Ed…”
There was no need for her to finish the sentence.
“That explains why I didn’t see it every time I turned to face straight at it. It must’ve moved to its right every time my head turned. It’s not only big, it’s smart.”
There was a flurry of movement and a clacking sound as more dark shapes moved out onto the dock. Some were bigger than the first one. They moved our way at first, found that the mooring lines were gone then moved to the flailing crab on its back. The sound of crab claws breaking another crab was enough to turn my stomach as it dawned on me what that would have felt like.
The Chief said, “Good work. If you hadn’t asked for someone else to check your zone, that thing would have gotten you, but the others would have gotten on board.”
We had drifted out about twenty feet, and we realized that the crabs had moved on. They were climbing over the pile of bodies at the end of the dock like it was a buffet.
“Big rats and now big crabs,” said Sim. “What next?”
******
I never liked that question, “What next?” It didn’t just imply that something else was going to happen. Not to me. To me it meant something was definitely going to happen.
At sunrise we had drifted about twenty yards from shore. We had only left a watch in the wheelhouse, and we all squeezed into the cabin below with the steel door dogged shut. We didn’t know if those big crabs were also good climbers even without the anchor in the water, and we didn’t want to find out the hard way.
The splashing and rocking of the Cormorant would have woken us up even if Tom hadn’t raised the alarm from the wheelhouse. His warning wasn’t what we expected, though. We scrambled out to see what was happening, but we stayed amidships and didn’t go closer to the stern.
Alligators are better climbers than most people realize, and a big one had a firm grip on the stern door. We could see its claws hanging onto the stern railing and most of its head above its claws. Since he was slightly off center, the Cormorant would rock every time it tried to raise a rear leg high enough to get a grip.
Since alligators did their fair share of eliminating the infected, we didn’t want to shoot it. Call it our morning entertainment, but we gave short turns of the screw to get the boat in position at the end of the boat ramp. The crabs hadn’t shown up the night before until after dark, so they had retreated to the water. It was no surprise that more infected were walking up the ramp, and the end of the dock had a large pile of bones where the infected had been. The crabs had feasted on them until there was nothing left. The cycle at the end of the dock would repeat itself every day if there was something to draw the infected out of the water. I didn’t doubt that it happened all day long on the bottom of the river. No wonder the crabs were so big.
The infected didn’t know an alligator from a grasshopper. All they knew was that it was moving. We couldn’t see what was happening below the alligator, but we had a pretty good idea. The infected closed in, they tried to bite the leathery hide, and the alligator took it badly. It let go of the stern rail and dropped into the middle of the boat ramp.
Kathy nudged me and pointed to a spot out in the cove not far from where the ramp entered the water. Several sets of eyes moved in deadly silence straight for the infected. About ten feet behind the eyes there were tails moving from side to side, propelling the alligators toward breakfast, and the one that had tried to climb our stern had been a baby compared to these well fed monsters.
The Chief had taken over in the wheelhouse, and he decided it was time to go. A short burst of forward throttle made us pull away fast enough, and with a clear view of the boat ramp we saw why it would never be safe to stick our feet in the water again. The alligators ran right up the boat ramp and dragged down several of the infected.
“I feel like I’m in an episode of Animal Planet,” said Jean. “Does anyone else feel like we’re in a foreign country? Those were alligators that were bigger than crocodiles.”
“It makes me wonder what else might have evolved by now,” said Colleen.
Kathy said, “Not trying to be too scientific, but it must have something to do with the virus. Normally I would just say the crabs and alligators are being well fed, but that would just cause them to breed a larger population in the area. Why are they also growing bigger?”
The Chief couldn’t hear everything from the wheelhouse, but we were near enough that he picked up some of it, and had the Cormorant cruising so slowly that we weren’t leaving a wake. There were things to watch for in the water that we might have missed when we arrived.
“Which leads to another question,” he called to us. “What else has evolved or changed just because there are so many rotting bodies walking around?”
Jean said, “I’ll leave that one for all of you to figure out. I’m going to make breakfast while I still feel like eating it.”
She ducked down through the cabin hatch just as Tom asked, “Is she pregnant again?”
“Don’t ask Ed,” said Kathy. “The last time everybody else figured it out before him.”
“I’m more comfortable talking about the previous topic,” I said.
Jean sounded far away, but we all heard her loud and clear when she yelled, “I heard that.”
“Okay, let’s see who can come up with the next evolution,” said Hampton. “I think it’s going to be insects. They feed on the infected. Mosquitos feed on the infected and the living. What if they evolve to carry the virus?”
Colleen was shaking her red hair enough for all of us to notice.
“You don’t think so?” asked Kathy.
“No, just the opposite. They already carry the virus, but something in their digestive system kills the virus or makes it dormant. By the time a mosquito that bit an infected dead gets around to biting a living person, the virus isn’t capable of infecting them.”
That wasn’t the answer any of us had expected, and it was extremely disturbing. If Jean had been topside, maybe she could have given a medical opinion about it. Being a nurse, she had obviously taken her share of classes about infectious diseases and how they spread. Our group expertise was limited to the flu and hand washing.
Cassandra was frowning like she did every time I had talked with her about the doctors on the Mercy Mission hospital ship. They spent weeks bent over their microscopes staring at slides prepared from the blood of the infected, and when they realized people were getting sick after eating meals made from Ghost Crab meat, they wanted to know why the Ghost Crabs didn’t get sick and die, too.
“We had it bad at sea,” said Cassandra. “We had people on board who were bitten when we left port.”
“So did we,” said Kathy, “and their families didn’t tell us until it was too late.”
“We had medicines, research facilities, and doctors who knew research protocols,” continued Cassandra, “but it didn’t do us a lot of good because no one would ever tell the doctors when they were bitten. Then we had contaminated food and rats. I always wondered why the fleas on the rats didn’t spread the infection.”
“Bubonic Plague
or the Black Death,” said the Chief.
He stepped out onto the deck as Tom took over the helm.
“Sailors throughout history worried about rats on their ships because the fleas on the rats carried the plague. From what I understand it’s a bacteria and not a virus.”
“We’ve always gone with the assumption this infection is viral,” said Kathy. “Any chance it’s a bacteria?”
Cassandra shook her head this time.
“The doctors on my ship tried antibiotics, but they knew they wouldn’t work. They said so. They only hoped to stumble across a cure while they studied the virus. They actually thought they were close to a cure, but we’ll never know if it was just wishful thinking.”
“So, putting two and two together,” I said, “if it was a bacteria, we’d be in big trouble because fleas could carry it, and if fleas could carry it, there’s at least some chance that mosquitos could too.”
“I guess the same principle would apply to HIV. I never heard of any studies that said it could be transmitted by insects,” said Kathy. “When I was a police officer, we always worried about direct contact with body fluids like blood, but beyond that I couldn’t have explained why mosquitos or fleas couldn’t carry the virus.”
Jean appeared in the doorway of the cabin while Kathy was talking, and immediately guessed what everyone was concerned about.
“Without trying to deliver a college level lecture about the reasons we don’t have to be afraid of mosquito bites, I’ll just say the virus probably can’t replicate inside mosquitos or fleas because an antigen found in humans is not present in insects. The body of an insect doesn’t have the immune response that ultimately would kill it, such as the fever someone gets after being bitten by the infected dead.”
Hampton said, “I don’t believe it. My biology teacher in high school tried to get that across to our class all year, but we just didn’t get it. Now I understand it completely.”
“We all do,” I said. “Now all she has to do is tell us what will evolve next.”
“Better yet, find a cure,” said the Chief.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fugitive
Year Six of the Decline
Stokes ran into a small group of survivors in Claxton, Georgia. They were cautious around strangers, and Stokes probably would have tried to kill them all if they hadn’t learned what to do when they ran into someone on the road. There were six people in the group, all around the age of thirty, but despite being young, they were experienced.
One thing they never did was let themselves get bunched up in a crowd. They always seemed to be too spread out for Stokes to be able to see them all without turning his head. They also made sure that there was always some distance between them.
Stokes was smart enough to know that he was more at risk than they were, so he decided to move on before they figured out that he wasn’t safe. One man traveling alone meant the man was either good at staying alive or dangerous, and this group would detect which one he was in due time.
His next planned stop was Jesup. It was a town just big enough to possibly have transportation without the risk of going into a big city to find a car. The route he was planning to use was going to take him closer to Tallahassee than he wanted to be, but his only other alternative would be to spend a week or two going around big cities. He was already forced to go through Waycross and Valdosta, but he would stick to back roads as much as possible.
It was almost a confirmation of his belief that he was too lucky to die when he saw the big billboard advertising Honest Bob Horton’s’s Jeep dealership on Hwy 84 near Jesup. He didn’t really expect to find a Jeep at the dealership after over five years of rummaging by scavengers, but it meant there would be Jeeps in the area. All he needed to do was find a rural home where loyal customers of Honest Bob Horton lived. There had to be someone who grew up in the area and only bought from their good friend from high school. Small farms were his best bet.
Stokes was still on Hwy 301 when he saw the billboard, and that was perfect for him because he could cut across a few acres of farmland to the south and head straight for Jesup. He saw barns in the distance to the west and took it as a good sign that there would be others to the south. The second farm he spotted had several Jeeps parked between the barn and the main house, and there was a thin trail of smoke coming from a chimney.
“Now that is a good sign indeed,” he muttered.
Stokes considered everything to be fair game, so he thought of those Jeeps as his, and they were parked at his house where someone was cooking over a wood fire. He could smell something like ham or pulled pork, and if that’s what it was, it was his too.
The house sat back from the two lane highway that passed out front protected by a tall fence with a strong gate, and he was coming up from behind it. There were small hills that had something like wheat growing wild on their slopes, but for the most part the property was ringed by trees. A barbed wire fence seemed to connect the wooded places to each other, and a little investigating was all he needed to learn that the fence continued right through the trees. He sat at the edge of one of those wooded areas and watched the house for over an hour before anyone came out the back door.
It was the first time he didn’t feel like things were going totally his way. The man who took the steps from the back porch two at a time was agile and muscular. That didn’t bother Stokes because he was no slouch himself. What bothered him was the camouflaged outfit he was wearing. The man was a hunter, and good hunters could tell whether or not a man was a hunter or prey. One reason there were no ripe meat walking around this place was possibly because of who lived in that house.
The man cut across to the Jeeps and reached inside the passenger window of one. Stokes lifted his binoculars and sighted in on the man as he turned around and headed for a small wooden building. He had a roll of toilet paper in his hand.
Stokes thought about it for a moment. There were times when he talked his way into what he wanted, and there were times when he just went after it. The question was obviously how many more people would be in that house, and how much trouble would he be in if they weren’t talkers.
Most people didn’t live in the same place they did before the epidemic. He was proof of that because he had lived in someone else’s house since it started. That guy who was dressed like a hunter probably took that house from its original owners.
The decision to take what he wanted was made without much deliberation about the consequences. The only thing he had to decide was which gun to use. He had kept the powerful elephant gun he had liberated back at the beginning of the apocalypse, but the weapon had unfortunately been lost when Randal decided to do a little sport shooting at the ripe meat outside the house. He had acquired a sawed off shotgun from Turk when he had died back in South Carolina. It was just right for close targets. From Franco he had liberated a .270 Winchester that was supposed to be right for bringing down the biggest bull elk at long distance.
Stokes lifted his hunting rifle and laid the barrel across a stump. He sighted in on the little outhouse door, and put the crosshairs of the scope in the center about four feet from the bottom. He pulled the trigger without emotion and saw a piece of wood fly off of the door, but instead of watching to see if he had gotten the results he wanted, he rotated and put the sights on the back door of the house as he chambered another round. He was right on time.
Stokes pulled the trigger just as the door flew open, and if he guessed right, there would be two of them coming out the door at the same time. The rifle sent its big bullet through the first man and into the chest of the second. Both flew back into the house in a heap.
He doubted there were only three men in the house, but he was feeling lucky again. No one came through the door of the outhouse, and if there was anyone inside the main house who was alive, they were trying to figure out where the bullet came from. One thing was certain. They knew someone outside wasn’t taking prisoners.
Stokes had time on his side
because he was inside the barbed wire fence. If any ripe meat heard the shots and tried to reach his hiding spot, the fence would cover him on that side. He also had the high ground, so he would be hard to spot. The vehicles were all parked far enough from the door for him to pick off anyone who tried to make a run for it, and he wasn’t stuck inside a house with dead meat sprawled on the floor in the doorway.
One of the two men he had shot was already sitting up, and the second one behind him was trying to do the same.
“Here comes the good part,” said Stokes. He had a toothpick hanging out between his lips, and he used his tongue to pass it from the right side to the left. To him this had always been the most entertaining part of the infection. When friends and relatives had to come to terms with seeing someone turn into ripe meat.
If the people inside the house weren’t smart enough to go out the front door and try to flank him, he figured they weren’t smart enough to live.
The two victims of his second shot were just making it to their feet when the outhouse door flew open, and the first guy fell flat on his face. It didn’t faze him at all, and he awkwardly pushed himself up from the ground. He immediately fell a second time because his pants were still around his ankles. The two in the door were drawn toward him because of the noise, but something crashed inside the house and got their attention. They turned and walked inside while the man in the yard stumbled and stepped on his pants until he got one foot out of them, and he moved toward the steps of the porch. He stepped on the pants again on the stairs and fell face first onto the porch, but that last step managed to accomplish what the first steps hadn’t. The other leg came free, and the pants were left behind.
There were screams before two women fell out the back door and ran straight into the dead meat on the steps. Both had blood running down their arms, and Stokes didn’t need two guesses to know what caused the bleeding. They were moving so fast that the three of them landed in a heap on the ground.
