by Howard, Bob
“This will do very nicely,” she said, but a dark feeling passed over her, and she moved her eyes from one small screen to the next. Part of her was hoping that one of the cameras would show her David’s body, and another part of her hoped it wouldn’t. If his body was there, she didn’t know if she would ever be able to turn this monitor on again.
She didn’t see anything that resembled the place where she had last seen him, nor did she see an angle of the catwalks below. She experienced a small twinge of guilt at the relief she felt, but if this was to be her window to the outside world, she wanted to see it without being reminded of David by seeing his body.
Janice spent a few minutes studying each small screen but didn’t see anything interesting except for the absence of rats. Either the cameras didn’t cover where the rats were hiding, or they were gone.
There was one view of the ship that they had been following when it collided with the rig, and she leaned closer when she saw movement. A rat ran across the deck of the ship and literally leaped into the air at something out of her view. A moment later an infected dead staggered by with the rat clinging to its stomach. She was sickened by how the rat was digging its teeth into the rotten flesh. She turned away, knowing David had likely suffered as the rats fed on him.
When she turned back to the monitor, the view of the ship was empty, and she hoped it stayed that way. She played with the menu settings for a few minutes and finally stumbled across a list of the views. She found she could select any view to enlarge it, and she could also do it by double-clicking on that view. She enlarged the view that showed the most open sky and left it like that.
There were plenty of things to keep her busy for now, but she decided she needed to heal more than anything, and that meant rest. It would be a good time to watch the news reports on the DVR.
She poured herself another shot glass of bourbon and carried it to the couch, but before sitting down she went back to the bar and got the bottle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Discovery
Year Six of the Decline
Iris had never flown in a de Havilland Beaver, but she was no stranger to the fun of small planes. She watched as Bus expertly pointed the nose of the plane toward the open sea and picked up speed. He had told her it would be noisy and handed her protective gear, but she wanted the full experience and the headset rested on her lap. By the time the plane lifted from the water, the headset was where it was intended to be, and she didn’t know if it was too late to avoid permanent damage to her ears.
Bus teased her by pretending to talk, and when she finally figured out he wasn’t saying anything, her first thought was that this man had spent a lot of time around the Chief.
They reached cruising altitude a few minutes later, and Bus switched their headsets to interior communications. It made them able to speak easier without shouting, and he was curious about this attractive woman who was trying to find the Chief.
He kept glancing over at her startling silver hair and her sculpted features. She probably worried about the small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but Bus thought they gave her character. Being a smart man, he didn’t say that out loud, though.
She had already given him enough information for him to know she was close to being the same age as the Chief, but she was so much like the Chief in the way she carried herself. He was also sure that by the time he got her to New Orleans, Kathy would never forgive him if he hadn’t gotten every detail to pass along to her.
“I’m dying to know how you happen to know Chief Barnes.”
Bus figured it was natural enough that he could be straight with her, and he was grinning from ear to ear when he said it. If he wasn’t blessed with hair to charm the ladies, he did have an infectious smile.
“We were both cruise ship security directors.”
Iris was more like the Chief than Bus knew, and she noticed the smile and how he didn’t beat around the bush.
“I guess we have a couple of hours for me to tell you everything about me, but remember I’ve already met Kathy at Ambassadors Island. Are you going to tell me she didn’t give you the details?”
Bus felt his smile become frozen on his face, and he saw her reaction. She saved him by laughing and telling him that she was teasing him.
“Listen Bus, women sometimes keep things to themselves for their own reasons, and I imagine Kathy picked up on my feelings for the Chief. She knew we would be forced to be apart for several years once we sealed Ambassadors Island against the radiation. She would have played her cards close to the vest about me because she didn’t want to think about how long it would be. Now that the radiation is low enough, and I’m meeting up with the Chief, watch how excited she gets.”
Bus understood, and as a matter of fact, he was likely to have handled it the same way if he had been in Kathy’s shoes. The difference was that Kathy would still have choked him for withholding the information.
“Do we have the radio power to raise the Chief?”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll try anyway.”
Bus turned on the radio and sent out his callsign on several frequencies, but he only got static when he listened.
“We lost contact between Mud Island and Fort Sumter a few days ago, but we haven’t had contact with the shelter on the oil rig in a few years. We don’t know if Maybank had some kind of emergency, or if his radio equipment had problems, but while we’re in New Orleans, we’re going to visit the oil rig and see if he needs a hand. That’s why the Chief needs the plane. We have helicopters that would have been better, but we need to keep them at Fort Sumter for now.”
“You have helicopters? You guys are light years ahead of the rest of civilization.”
“We also have some Army personnel with us. That’s why we’re trying to get the shelters online. Has anyone told you we found the President’s shelter in Ohio?”
Iris almost hurt her neck when her head snapped around so she could face Bus.
“Don’t get your hopes up. It’s a long story, but things went wrong there. He didn’t make it. We can fill you in on all the details when we can tell you the whole story, but for now that shelter is sealed and offline.”
Iris turned to her window, and Bus left her alone with her thoughts. It was obvious that she needed to be alone with her thoughts for a minute, but this was also her first time seeing what had happened to the countryside below.
There wasn’t much to see because the landscape had turned so green. Towns and cities came into view, and as the plane passed over them, she saw that vegetation had covered everything in five years.
Entire suburban neighborhoods had burned to the ground. The lawns had grown tall with grass. When the grass died and turned to large patches of overgrown, brown straw, all it took was a lightning strike to get the fires started. In some places it was survivors who were careless with campfires or people who tried to use rusty propane gas grills for heat or cooking. Whatever the causes, there was no one to put out the fires, and people who tried to stop them learned the hard way that the infected were attracted to fire.
Iris was amazed by the devastation, and where cities weren’t destroyed, they had been devoured by nature. That reminded her. She hadn’t seen any infected dead yet.
“Where are all the infected?”
“Good question,” said Bus. “We do reconnaissance when we can, but the last thing we saw was they all seem to be moving toward the coast. We can’t explain why, but we were searching for this guy named Stokes, and we noticed the area had more infected dead wandering around than it used to.”
“Tell me about Stokes. Why would the Chief be so mad at one guy that he would travel around Florida to New Orleans? Did he kill someone?”
“Yes, a young boy who’s been with us for a long time, and he almost killed a girl who has been like my granddaughter. There was another boy that he killed with Sam, and you know the Chief. He took it pretty hard.”
“If the Chief’s protecting you, he would take fa
ilure personally,” said Iris.
“We know from a survivor that Stokes was headed for New Orleans with the idea of reaching an oil rig and using it as a shelter.”
“He knows about the shelters?”
“We don’t know for sure that he knows about the oil rig shelter, but he thinks he can survive on a shelter and plans to set out from New Orleans to find one. The shelter belonging to Maybank is in a direct line with New Orleans, so Stokes would be likely to find it.”
“So the Chief wants to dispose of Stokes and check on Maybank at the same time?”
“That’s the plan. I don’t know if he would be so determined if it hadn’t been one of our kids, but he’s going to catch Stokes if he has to swim to the oil rig.”
Iris knew Bus was right. Chief Joshua Barnes was a man of honor, but getting on his bad side by killing a child would unleash the part of him that would cause fear in anyone with half a brain. She silently hoped she would get to him before he caught up with Stokes. Six years of living with the infected dead must have hardened him, but she hoped it hadn’t taken his soul.
She knew what he was about to do, and she understood why it had to be done, but a part of her worried that either one of two things could happen besides Stokes getting the justice he deserved. The Chief needed to be judge, jury, and executioner, but he needed to do it in a way he could live with afterward. The other thing was that Stokes was that special kind of maniac that somehow caught the Chief off guard and turned the tables. Good men have fallen before to evil men who seemed to have that kind of dumb luck that made them come out on top.
It suddenly occurred to Iris that she had gotten quiet. Bus kept glancing at her with a worried expression.
“I forgot to tell you, I think you’re right that something is drawing the infected toward the coast, but they aren’t taking the shortest routes, and they aren’t taking shortcuts.”
Bus had been worried. Now he was confused.
“What does that mean? I mean, I understand the part about them all going toward the coast, but the rest of it didn’t make sense.”
“They could use roads and highways that go straight to the coast, but they’re gathering together into a massive horde and going toward Charleston. They could go toward Myrtle Beach or Georgetown, but they’re not. Hell, they could use I-95 all the way to Florida, but they’re even coming from that direction to join up with the big horde headed for Charleston.”
“If I remember my South Carolina maps well enough, they’re going to bottleneck on I-26 where the swamps close in on the interstate on both sides,” said Bus.
“Exactly, so that gives us some time to get ready for them. I lost four close friends on this trip from Charlotte to here, but we all agreed the horde was well over a hundred thousand. After that many you can’t even estimate them anymore.”
“We can do some reconnaissance after we get back, but a horde that size could even reach Fort Sumter if enough of them come around the harbor onto James Island.”
Iris laughed a little, but was still a bit grim when she answered the last comment by Bus.
“You need to brush up on your maps just a bit. They will bottleneck, but once they get strung out, imagine a half million or more of them on I-26 reaching all the way from Orangeburg to the Cooper River Bridge. They won’t be able to cross to James Island and come up behind you at Fort Sumter, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the Cooper River and the Ravenel Bridge when that parade arrives.”
******
Year Two of the Decline
Janice was stunned to find that there were enough recorded broadcasts on the DVR for her to put together a timeline. A calendar in one of the rooms was over a year old from what she could figure, and if she was right, she had just passed what would have been her first wedding anniversary. David had celebrated it out there while she celebrated it inside the safety of the crew quarters. Part of her knew he would have wanted this for her, and that eased the pain a little.
She wasn’t sure if it was the bourbon that just made her think that last thought about David, but it didn’t really matter. She held a glass of the amber liquid to catch the light from the TV.
“Here’s to you, David. Happy anniversary. You kept me alive for a year. I’m sorry I couldn’t do the same for you.”
She might not have been sure about what the bourbon was doing to her thoughts about David, but she was sure it had helped her watch the news reports. She would have most likely turned them off if not for the numbing effects of the bourbon.
Of course the DVR started at the beginning, and even though she remembered it like it was yesterday, she felt like she owed it to someone to watch the history of the end of the world as it unfolded. She pressed play on the remote and recognized the familiar faces of TV anchors she had watched for years before this recording. They were American faces, but they had adopted the name of the worldwide crisis used by their European counterparts. They were calling it The Decline of Man.
A banner was running across the bottom of the screen that was trying to keep up with the new reports of attacks worldwide. The anchorwoman was talking to four reporters who were in different cities across the country, and their broadcasts were in four separate squares on the screen. Each of them tried to describe the same thing while taking their eyes off their nervous camera crews to point at attacks that were happening far too close for comfort. Screams permeated the sound from each of the squares as the anchor desk switched between them, and the anchorwoman began pleading with all four to seek shelter. She could see that the attackers weren’t going to spare anybody just because they were reporters.
In one square a man walked into the field of vision behind the young girl holding the microphone. Reporters doing remote broadcasts had always endured the antics of people who realized they were on camera. Whether it was rabbit ears behind a reporter’s head or someone dropping their pants, reporters have always had to do retakes. There would be no retake on this one.
The man kept coming, and the cameraman moved to get between the man and the reporter. She was slow to realize what the man was doing, but the cameraman wasn’t. He turned his camera into a weapon, and before the picture was lost, the viewers got a dizzy ride as seen through the lens of a camera being swung like a club.
The camera hit the stumbling, reaching man across the face and sent him flying, but there was only a glimpse of the action before the square went totally blank.
Janice wondered why reporters had been so slow to understand they were in danger, she imagined each of them was thinking they had to get this story.
The first bottle of bourbon was long gone by the time she used the fast forward button on the remote. There was nothing new for a long time, and the anchor people were being replaced by office staff who had never been on camera before. Eventually, the cameraman in the studio was sitting on a stool in front of the camera.
He was explaining that no one else had come into the studio that day, and that the only reason he was there was because he couldn’t leave. He did the best he could to get a camera view of the street outside, but he had been forced to move to a higher floor because those infected people had made it onto the floor below. He said he would stay on the air as long as he could, but he thought he might have to move to the roof soon. He even made a halfhearted joke and said it might be the decline of man, but at least he was on the rise.
There was a brief burst of snow on the screen, then the DVR recording resumed on another channel. Apparently whoever had recorded this broadcast had lost the last channel, searched for another while still recording, then stopped on this new one.
The news anchors were dressed in casual clothes and reading various articles they had gotten from the Internet. Apparently, it had stayed in operation longer than the TV stations could, and as long as there was a server connected somewhere, they could still get information.
According to the female anchor, most places that could still connect to the Internet could only get access to shopping websit
es because their servers were automated.
Janice was a little too far past drunk because this news made her cry, even though she hadn’t cried through the tragic events. For some reason she found it incredibly sad that she could have logged onto her favorite sites and shopped to her heart’s content longer than she had known. As a matter of fact, she thought it would be wild if she could find a computer and do some shopping now.
“Oh, darn. I don’t know the address here.”
She let out a giggle and a hiccup at the same time and then couldn’t stop more of them from coming. She turned off the DVR and laid down on the bench seat where she had stretched out earlier.
Sometime during the night she woke up with a bad headache and remembered she had forgotten to eat before she started drinking and watching the news. She knew she was going to pay for it, but at least she had gotten the rest she knew she needed. She managed to make it to her bed and she figured she could finish watching the recordings while she ate breakfast in the morning. She wolfed down a pack of crackers before she shut off the lights, and she got her second night of deep sleep in a row.
The next morning was a repeat of the previous morning, but she had more black coffee than food. She stared at the bar across the room with the thought of putting an off limits sign on it.
“Just because I can drink any time I want to doesn’t mean I should.”
Her voice sounded raw to her own ears, and she wondered exactly how much crying she had done the day before. She reassured herself that it had been the bourbon, and this time she carried a cup of coffee over to the table and sat it down next to the evil, empty bottle from the night before.
