by Howard, Bob
Not long after the Everglades we were cruising by Naples when we saw more of the huge crabs. They were dragging an infected across the sand and into the water. Rather than to risk having to stop near one of the major cities like Fort Myers or Tampa, the Chief made the decision to cut our speed way down, and we all started to worry about how we would get back home if the Cormorant needed major repairs.
The Chief called us all together on the aft deck below the wheelhouse. It was comfortable outside, and Cassandra could relay what he was saying to Sim since he had the helm.
“I hope everyone doesn’t mind, but I’ve already made the decision to cut our speed rather than to stop for repairs. I still think we can get to New Orleans around the same time as Stokes unless he found some really good transportation, but if we don’t, I have an idea I should have considered to start with.”
All of us chimed in that the Chief was the boss, and that we would support whatever decision he made. He knew that already, but he was fair about everything. If one of us had a problem with his plans, he really wanted us to say something.
“Finding Stokes was always going to be the hard part, but if he reaches the Gulf before us, it’ll make it easier to find him if he’s on the water.”
“And we’re in an airplane,” Kathy finished for him.
He smiled at her and nodded.
“If we could have gotten on station off the coast of New Orleans before him, all we would have needed to do was turn on our radar and wait for him to come to us. Whatever he would be using to get to the oil rigs, it wouldn’t be fast enough to get by the Cormorant and her machine guns. Now that she’s having problems, we need to get Bus to fly the Beaver down to New Orleans. At our present speed, we should be able to get a message to him, have him hop a ride to Mud Island, and fly to New Orleans. We can meet him at one of the fuel depots marked on our maps.”
The Chief turned to each of us one by one and waited for us to voice an opinion, but none of us disagreed with the idea. It was the most logical thing to do.
He continued, “Once we find Stokes and deal with him, we can find a way to repair the Cormorant, but if anyone wants to hop a ride back to Fort Sumter with Bus, he’s got plenty of room.”
“That’s a noisy ride,” said Kathy. “I think I’ll stick around for the repairs. Besides, we’re still going to see about visiting the oil rig shelter, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Count me in,” I said. “I’d like to meet Maybank and see what else he might be able to tell us about the early days of the shelters. It would be fun to sit down with him and Bus and hear some of their tall tales about my uncle, too.”
Tom had some different feelings about the plans. Because Stokes had almost killed Molly, Tom was going to stay angry until he caught up with Stokes. He was seeing the negative in everything and was looking ahead to other problems with a cynical eye.
“We need to get back to Fort Sumter to head off whatever it is that’s happening over at Patriots Point. I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but it’s pretty clear that their hostile, and they’re organized.”
“You think they have something to do with the increased presence of the infected at Fort Johnson and James Island?” asked the Chief.
“I don’t see how they could, but we might be facing a double threat.”
It was a quiet crowd on the deck of the Cormorant. It was bad enough to watch our cities fall into ruin over the last six years, but now we had a double threat that would prevent us from saving what little bit that we could. If not for the people at Patriots Point, we would have already established a forward base in Charleston. The idea was to take it all back a little at a time. Now we also had to worry about why there were suddenly more infected dead in places where they should have run out of people by now.
The Chief climbed up into the wheelhouse with Sim and contacted Fort Sumter. Captain Miller said things had been quiet at Patriots Point ever since we had hung up our warning sign about having missiles, so he didn’t have a problem with sending a helicopter up the coast to drop Bus off at Mud Island. He said he also liked the idea of having the seaplane with us in case we couldn’t get the Cormorant repaired. It would be a shame if we lost the Coast Guard ship. She had proven to be worth her weight in gold. A few minutes later, Captain Miller reported that Bus was on his way.
Within the hour we had to make another change of plans. We were going to turn northeast at Naples and go straight for New Orleans, but we spotted smoke on the water. It appeared to be a ship on fire, and the black smoke meant its fuel was burning.
As we got closer, the Chief identified the burning ship as an American built destroyer, but it was flying a foreign flag. It took a few minutes, but we found the manual in the wheelhouse that showed all foreign navy flags, and this one was from Chile. We all automatically waited for the Chief to fill in the blanks.
“The US sells or leases ships to friendly countries all the time,” said the Chief. “This one must have been on the wrong side of the Panama Canal when the infection started. Whatever it’s doing here, the fact that it’s on fire is a bad thing. It means someone with a better ship just sank her.”
“What if she’s just being scuttled by an infected crew?” asked Hampton.
“That’s possible, but whatever the reason, we have to give it a wide berth.”
He turned to Sim and told him to steer for the coast of Florida and to hug the coast as closely as possible without running aground. He explained that there was less chance of us catching a torpedo in shallow water.
We moved as close as we could to the coast and found that the water was so blue and clear that we could see the bottom in plenty of places. The big discovery was the numbers of infected we saw that were in various stages of their miserable existence.
Some were walking on the bottom, their buoyant arms often floating away from their sides. Some were suspended between the bottom and the surface, apparently building up enough body gases from decay to equal their weight. Eventually they would pop to the surface. Plenty of them were in pieces. Body parts were everywhere, and the jaws were usually snapping as if they had something in their field of vision they wanted to bite. That was usually us. They could see us going over them, so the snapping increased.
The most disgusting part of this human debris field was that it was like any garbage dump on the surface. At the garbage dumps there are always plenty of birds and rats crawling over the mountains of garbage searching for food, but out here they weren’t having to search. It was all laid out like a buffet right in front of them. Crabs roamed over all of them, not particular about whether or not they were pieces or whole. Sharks swam through the middle of the floating bodies as if checking for the best selections and suddenly choosing one. With spectacular ferociousness they would charge one and wrap powerful jaws around them. They would speed away with their prize, often leaving a trail of loose pieces that would either fall to the bottom or float to the surface.
Gulls took care of the surface cleaning. The passing of the Cormorant hardly bothered their pursuit of another meal, and we were morbidly amazed when we would see a bird lifting an arm from the surface. Sometimes they were too heavy, and they fell back into the water, but the birds were not deterred. They had others they could manage when something proved to be too much for them to handle.
As morbid as it was, we watched quietly for the most part, but from time to time we reminded ourselves that these had been people in the past, and it could just as easily have been us. We were fortunate, and we needed to remember to have sympathy for the dead, not disgust of them, but disgust of what they had become.
By evening we could see New Orleans in the distance. It resembled Charleston with the darkened buildings under a dense canopy of vegetation. What was being reclaimed in Charleston was being reclaimed ten times faster in New Orleans. Both cities were accustomed to the heat and humidity when they were vibrant tourist centers, but without people they were being taken back by nat
ure.
As we drew closer we saw that New Orleans had paid a high price for being below water level. The levees had been breached, and we could have sailed the Cormorant straight into previously dry, residential parts of the city. Water went into many places that weren’t able to stand up against the undercutting of the currents, and buildings sagged over onto their sides.
The Chief checked the time and asked to no one in particular if anyone had heard Bus check in by radio. We all shook our heads, and we saw the attempt he made to hide his concern when he said it could be anything.
“Bus should already be here, so everyone listen for a hail from him, but whoever has radio duty, please give him a call once every fifteen minutes. We need to know where he landed so we don’t have to search the whole coast for him.”
We all acknowledged the Chief, but there was no escaping the nagging dread of understanding. Some of the reasons why we hadn’t heard from him were bad. As a matter of fact, more of them were bad than good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Reality
Year Two of the Decline
Janice spent the rest of the day cleaning the wounds on her arm and hand. The cut on her hand wasn’t as deep or as ragged as the place on her upper arm where she had stabbed herself, but the numbness worried her. She had seen too many ladders outside to have only one useful hand to climb with.
Her mind drifted back to David every time she was faced with doing something that he had always done. There was no avoiding those things now. She would have to do everything without his help.
When David had put a big gash across his own chest with a piece of sheet metal, she hadn’t been strong enough to stitch it for him. He had asked her to, holding out a curved needle with a long piece of thread dangling from one end. She had looked at the ugly wound and cried, finally shaking her head and telling David she couldn’t do it. She had felt like such a coward.
David had gone through enough that day, and she couldn’t give him the first aid he needed. He had discovered a supply of food that was as good as finding King Solomon’s Mines, but when he tried to drop into the building through a skylight, the roof had collapsed, and the sheet metal ripped him open as he fell by.
Despite the searing pain and so much blood, he had filled several sacks and a backpack with food and come back out through the roof. In the supplies had been a medical kit that had been so complete there were antibiotics, morphine, antiseptics, and a stitching kit. He was worried about tetanus from the metal and hoped to find something he called tetanus immune globulin in the supplies, but that was hoping for too much. His best bet would be to clean and stitch the wound as soon as possible and start taking the antibiotics.
She had let him down. Sitting there in front of a mirror, he had cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide and started from the top. The cut ran from the top of his breastbone to only two inches above his navel. He had to keep stopping to wipe away the blood and then to squeeze the two sides of the cut together at a new spot. He wouldn’t take a morphine shot because he said we might need it for something worse one day.
Janice couldn’t imagine what he would have considered worse, but in her heart she knew he was saving it for her if she ever needed it. Even then, she couldn’t make herself be brave enough to take the needle from him. She could only watch as each time he drew another stitch together, he winced and held his breath. He would let his breath out, rest a moment, and start another stitch. A couple of times he had taken a swallow from a precious bottle of bourbon, but as bad as it was for him, he always offered her some. She didn’t know which was worse, her helplessness or his generosity in the midst of such suffering.
After David had used scissors to snip the thread, he covered it all with antiseptic and a bandage. The last thing he did was sort through the antibiotics until he found the one he was looking for. He took one and told her to give him another in four hours if he didn’t wake up on his own. Janice helped him get comfortable, and he had gone to sleep.
Janice nursed him for more than three days before the fever broke, and the whole time all she could think of was how worthless she had been. She couldn’t think of a single excuse for not even trying to do the stitching for him. She could have given him the morphine and let him sleep while she repaired the wound, but now she had to live with the memory of her husband holding out that needle and thread.
Now that memory changed a bit. David was handing her the needle and thread, not for him but for her to stitch herself. David was sitting across the bar from her. He was watching as she got ready to sew herself up. She wasn’t very coordinated with her left hand, and she was having to watch herself do the stitches in a mirror.
“Payback is hell,” she said as she took a long swallow from the bottle of bourbon. “I can’t even use a pair of scissors looking in a mirror. Every time I want to go left, I go right. Every time I want to go right, I go left. This stinks.”
She had just enough bourbon in her to think that was funny, and she giggled. She took aim at the cut on her upper arm with the needle and pushed it in for the first stitch.
It sounded like someone else had screamed, but when she did the tilt of the curved needle that would put the tip where the exit of the stitch should be, she did exactly what she had expected to do using a mirror. She went the wrong way.
Janice sat on the barstool and screamed obscenities at herself until she was crying. She focused on which direction would be correct, and she succeeded in piercing the other side of the cut. On a positive note, she was in so much pain that it couldn’t get worse. She was actually surprised when she made the next entry with the needle because it wasn’t so bad after she had screwed up the second one. This time she went the right way when she crossed back to the other side, and she drew the second stitch tight. As she closed the wound it felt better, and the only thing that made it still hurt was the memory that she couldn’t do it for David.
She eventually reached for the scissors, missed the thread several times by reverting to her reverse mirror problems, and then blindly snipped it off. Bandaging wasn’t so bad, and by the time she was ready to stitch up her hand, she was at least feeling like she was almost done.
Her hand proved to be worse than the upper arm because of the nerves. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed to sting more, maybe because she would hit a numb spot and then surprised herself by crossing into a sensitive area. Since the cut on her hand was smaller, she was surprised for a second time when she realized she was done with the worst part. She swabbed it with antiseptics and placed a fresh bandage on it. It had a dull ache, but overall her arm felt like it wouldn’t fall off.
The bar seemed like a good place to stay if she would have had a bartender who could pour drinks and order food from the kitchen. The thought of a big guy polishing glasses and taking her food order made her giggle again.
“Bartender, gimme another round, and let me have a look at your menu.”
She went to sleep with her right arm curled across the bar and the left side of her head tucked into the curve of her elbow. It never occurred to her that was the best way to keep her arm positioned for a few hours, but it seemed to ease the pain a bit. When she woke up, the kink in her neck didn’t agree, and being right handed, she instinctively reached for her neck with her right hand.
“Ouch.”
Janice studied her arm and saw that she had earned herself some more time among the living, but it all still came back around to David. He was out there somewhere. Dead, she knew that, but this oil rig was her world now, and sooner or later she would have to go out there.
******
Maybank watched the door of the crew quarters while he ate his meals as if it was a television program on at a regularly scheduled time. The monitors were on in the background while he did his routine reviews of the shelter’s systems and while he searched the horizon for new threats.
He watched the drama unfold on the derelict ship that had drifted up against his oil rig, as the rats at first went to the de
epest and darkest parts of the ship to set up house. In a moment of cruel irony, he realized that they had done nothing more than the lady who had ducked inside the crew quarters. He knew that sooner or later the rats and the lady would come back out, but maybe for different reasons.
Inside the big container ship there was undoubtedly a large food supply wandering around in the compartments. After building their new, more secure nests, the rats would start eliminating the infected dead that were below decks. Given time, they would have a few more breeding cycles before they ran out of that food supply. Then they would arrive on the decks of the ship. Maybank decided that would be a good time to put the rat poison at the right locations. The rats would have to cross the poison to get back on the oil rig.
In the meantime, Maybank had let himself become obsessed with the lady in the crew quarters. It was like he was holding an oyster and knew there was a pearl inside. He knew she had been bitten by a rat, and for all he knew, she was dead. If she was dead, she would be wandering around inside the crew quarters and bumping into the furniture. The lamps would all be broken on the floor, and she would be slowly decaying in one room at a time.
His obsession with her started when he pulled up a security video of the day she had arrived. When she appeared on the screen, he froze the image and enlarged it. She was much younger than him, but she was beautiful. Long brown hair spilled over her shoulders, and it was so full that it was almost like it had just been washed. Maybank was seeing her through the lenses of lonely eyes, but it would never occur to him that he had missed other people. If she had been homely, he would have still seen beauty.
