by Howard, Bob
She picked up where the news had ended and found she was watching something that wasn’t being broadcast from a studio. It was an old man who said he was broadcasting from some kind of bunker out west. He said it used to be a Minuteman Missile silo, and that the government had turned it into a shelter for him.
“How nice of them,” she said.
Janice didn’t believe a word of it, but it was entertaining. The man claimed there were other shelters like his around the country, and that some people would survive the apocalypse because they had planned for it.
The man would have been right at home pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans. Wool cap, 1970s’ style CPO coat, and gray beard, talking crazy, but entertaining.
The man said he had an internet connection that was letting him get some news out of England. There had been some skirmishes between the Royal Navy and the Russians. Apparently the Russians had tried to grab a little extra territory during the apocalypse, and enough ships had left port without the infected on board for England to put up a good defense of their homeland.
The man would have been doing himself a favor if he had proven he had the Internet by putting his computer in front of the camera, but he explained something about not being able to synchronize the computer screen with the TV camera.
“Yeah, right. Give me some more excuses.”
Eventually the man said he was losing his Internet connections, but he wanted to share the last bit of news that he had, and ironically it made a believer out of her.
“Yesterday, I was able to log into the website where I do all of my shopping, so I ordered a few things. Before the connections started dropping this morning, the website said that my order had shipped.”
The man started laughing, and once he got going, he couldn’t stop. His last few seconds of broadcasting was an attempt to say he hoped he could get back on the air and let everyone know if his order was delivered, but he was pretty sure that he would get a message that his order was still on the way, but it was delayed.
Janice laughed with him. He might be bug-eyed and crazy, but he was entertaining. After he went off the air, the DVR continued to run. From time to time a bulletin would appear on the screen. She didn’t know who was sending them, but she assumed they were from different government entities because they were generally tips about how to avoid getting infected. Eventually the messages stopped, and the recording on the DVR came to an end.
“Well, I guess I need to get a hobby.”
Janice didn’t think she could watch movies to pass the time, but she didn’t rule it out. She sat and watched the snow on the TV screen for a few minutes before she remembered the security cameras. As if she had just realized her favorite show had already started, she jumped up and practically ran to the table where she had found the monitor.
The screen lit up with the same grid of views she had seen before, but the light was brighter outside, and she could make out more details. She leaned closer and tried her best to find something new. It was like going to the mailbox and finding nothing. Not even junk mail. She remembered many times that she had swept her hands around inside her mailbox even though she could see it was empty.
She mentally swept across the screens a second time, and she pictured herself doing nothing for the rest of her life except watching movies, cooking, cleaning, and checking the security screens. Of course there was sleeping and grooming, but this was getting more and more like prison.
Janice found herself getting emotionally upset about the prospect of living for years in a place where she had everything except something to alleviate the boredom, and that made her wonder about her new home. The more she thought about it, the more she felt like there was something odd about it.
“Why didn’t someone come here after the apocalypse began? If we had known about this place, we would have.”
She said it out loud, and hearing her own voice again made her understand what was really bothering her. This was like finding the winning lottery ticket when you had never played the lottery in your life. The odds of winning were already astronomical, but winning by finding the ticket would be somewhere around impossible.
The answer came to her as a list. Someone tried to come here and didn’t make it. Someone came here already and died afterward. She thought about the rifles and the odd streaks that were most likely blood. Someone came here and left. Someone came here and is still here.
That last item on the list made her get goosebumps, and she turned to see if someone was behind her. All she could imagine was that there were cameras just like the ones she had been using every time she checked the computer monitor. She faced it again, this time searching the views for signs of life. There were thirty little TV screens arranged in neat rows, but nothing was moving on any of them.
“That’s a lot of cameras,” she said. “What am I missing?”
Her eyes wandered around the room, and she saw the one thing she had come to ignore wherever she saw it. There was a telephone in the kitchen on the wall, but there weren’t any in the rooms, and there wasn’t another one in the big commons area. That meant it was for internal communications only.
“Communications to where?”
She felt dense when it came to her, and she couldn’t help wondering if David would have figured it out first.
“This place must have a control room somewhere, but it isn’t one of the views on that screen.”
Janice was on her feet without even thinking about it, and she didn’t know what to expect when she put the phone to her ear. The dial tone hummed just like any she had heard in her life before cell phones came along. It was amazing how an entire generation had never used telephones with a dial on it, but everyone still used the same terminology.
“Dial the number still meant to call someone even when the dial was gone, so what’s the first thing I hear on this phone? A dial tone.”
The phone didn’t have any buttons, and it certainly didn’t have a dial, so she did what people used to do when wall phones were high-tech. She tapped the little thing in the middle of the phone cradle that went up and down as she tapped.
The dial tone disappeared, and on the other end of the line, there was a ring tone. Janice listened to it like she had never heard ringing before, and she held her breath as she waited for someone to answer.
Disappointment wasn’t the right word to describe how she felt when she finally let out her breath. It was worse than all those times right after the infection started. She would see a phone, snatch it from its cradle and listen to the silence on the other end. If she got a dial tone she would frantically dial her parents’ number and listen to the fast paced beeping sound that came through the phone. At first she would get those automated messages that said, “I’m sorry, but your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.” She had broken a lot of phones.
Cell phones were almost as bad because she left voicemail messages for almost a month, until she finally got a message that said the voicemail box was full. Of course it was. She had filled it.
She knew while she was waiting for someone to answer the phone that she was actually thinking she would finally be able to dial her parents again, and this time they would answer.
Janice became acutely aware that she was regressing. David had talked with her about how she had a habit of going back to something that had happened and start going through all of the “what if” scenarios.
“What if we had flown home a day earlier?”
“What if we had waited to go on our honeymoon?”
“What if we had brought my parents along?”
“What if they were safe in some Army base, and they were worried about us?”
In a moment of total frustration, David had screamed, “What if they’re dead?”
He felt bad about it, but she knew it was the truth.
“I’m going to go crazy in here,” she said as she slammed the phone down in its cradle.
Somehow she found herself ba
ck over at the bar again. She was just about to pour another glass of bourbon when it occurred to her that she should ration everything because she couldn’t exactly rely on the resupply ship.
The brown liquor was in her glass without much conscious thought because she had a flash of inspiration. She carried her glass back over to the computer monitor and leaned in toward the little TV screens. She found the one she was searching for and used the mouse to enlarge that one screen.
The ship that was resting against the side of the oil rig was a container ship, and the reason David had steered their boat on a course to intercept it was because there could be food in the containers. He had shouted to her over the roar of their engines that there could be as many as ten thousand containers stacked on the ship, and one of them had to have food.
On her screen she could see the place where the rat had attacked the infected dead that had been a member of the crew. Despite the voracious way the rat had attacked the infected, and even despite the fact they had killed David, Janice felt like there had to be a way to get onto the ship and avoid the rats or at least defend herself against them.
“The rats would go to the deepest, darkest parts of the ship. If I could stay on the main deck and open the containers, I could find supplies without attracting their attention.”
She knew from what she had seen that it was going to be risky, but it was what David would have done. She also knew that she had plenty of time to sort out the details because she had so many supplies already. She could take her time and figure out how David would have done it. In the meantime, she could let her wounds heal, and she could watch the outside views to see if there was anything else to worry about.
Janice picked up a remote and aimed it at the TV. She thumbed through the menu of movies and settled on one that had been a favorite of hers before it came true. The main character woke up in a hospital in London to find an infection had wiped out most of the population. He hooked up with more survivors and managed to stay one step ahead of the infected until they ran into some soldiers that had gone rogue.
Janice hit the stop button and found a sitcom that included the entire series. She pressed the play button for the first episode and went to the kitchen to make some lunch.
“I hate reality TV,” she mumbled.
******
There was something to be said for binge watching a TV series, even if she had seen them before. The familiarity of the actors was comforting. They were friendly faces of people who had been there for her when times were good, and now they were here for her when times were bad. For hours on end she could pretend that everything was fine outside her windowless world. It was something David would have criticized, but Janice told herself she had to heal, and what did it matter if she chose to mentally escape while she healed. At least it was a way of passing the time until she was better.
And she did get better. As the days passed, she went about her routines anticipating the hours she would get to spend in front of the TV.
She cut her stitches out when the skin around the thread began to turn a healthy color, and the scab covering the wound became dry and fell off. She didn’t even notice that she didn’t have to concentrate on left and right movements as she watched the threads pull free in a mirror. She would cut with the scissors and then switch to tweezers to tug on the loose ends. Before she knew it, she was examining a ragged but healed scar. She moved from the wound on her arm to her hand without hesitating.
Now that she was free to move without further damage to her arm, she began exercising. She would have loved some gym equipment, but the men who had stayed here probably got enough exercise out on the rig. She settled for jogging to build up stamina, and it wasn’t hard to find makeshift weights. Once she was sure that she wouldn’t reopen the healed wounds, she started doing pushups. The way she figured it, she had better build up her upper body strength for when she would tackle the container ship.
Adding exercise to her daily routine made the days go by faster, and during the entire time she never once saw movement on any of the outside cameras. She watched during the day because there was more light, and she had learned by studying the views at different times of day where the sun was. Once she had that figured out, she was able to put together a puzzle in her mind that resembled the oil rig. She felt like she could visualize where she was in relation to the camera views.
She only watched them at night to try to detect whether or not the rats had returned. She felt like sooner or later she would have to go outside to get a closer look at the ship so she could put together her plan to open the cargo containers.
Janice watched the camera views at places where rats might run past a light, and was relieved after so many nights without seeing a single furry body. Some of the views were darker than others, and she learned not to stare at any of them. If she stared long enough at any given spot, it would start to move. She also learned not to do it when she was tired or had too much to drink for the same reason.
That was why she knew it wasn’t her imagination when she saw the movement. It wasn’t out of the corner of her eyes, and it was deliberate. It stopped for a few moments and then moved out of range, only to reappear in the frame of another camera. It was also too big to be a rat.
Janice held her breath and watched the movement reflect light and then block it out. When it left the view of the camera, she checked the mental map she had created of the oil rig and turned her eyes to the exact camera view where the movement should appear next. It did.
She blinked her eyes and then shut them for just a moment. It was moving closer to her position in the crew quarters. She could tell by the length of the shadows she had seen in each camera view. She sucked in an involuntary gulp of air when she realized that the movement should be very near the last place she had seen David, and she didn’t think before she moved.
She didn’t remember crossing from the table to the door that had been sealed shut for so long that she couldn’t say if it had been weeks or months. It was someone else who was unlocking the door without any thought about taking the rifle with her. It was someone else who went from the brightly lit safety of the crew quarters into the darkness outside.
There was a slight stumble on the steps that led down to the deck, but her legs were strong, and she only needed to hold out one hand to the railing to steady herself before she leaned down toward the next level below. She saw that she was in time to know she had been right. That she had seen the movement outside.
An old man was standing up from a crouched position and doing something with his hands. He had long hair and was slightly slumped at the shoulders, but it was too dark to see him clearly.
He was holding something and turning from side to side at the waist, and she couldn’t understand it at first, but she finally figured out that he was trying to get more light onto whatever it was he was holding.
He eventually mumbled something in frustration and the bright beam of a flashlight lit up the area. At his feet was a scattered corpse wearing jeans and a shirt she recognized too well. The center of the light played across the man’s hands, and she was close enough to see the thumb and forefinger of his left hand as it slid a drivers license from the wallet. David’s wallet. David’s drivers license.
She felt like she had been dreaming when she had run from the crew quarters to the railing of the deck. As she ran back for the safety of the bright light pouring from the door, she knew she wasn’t dreaming. The infected dead don’t go through wallets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Stokes
Year Six of the Decline
The Cormorant limped into what used to be called New Orleans barely making way against the current, and the worst part was that they felt like they were blind and deaf. They couldn’t make contact with Bus to see if he had made it to New Orleans ahead of them, they couldn’t make contact with Maybank on the oil rig, and all they got was static when they tried to reach Fort Sumter. That would be inconvenient when it was time to g
o home, but the Chief had already decided they would send Bus back to get Captain Miller to send the helicopters.
The city was in worse condition than Charleston. The buildings were collapsing under the weight of the water that was soaking into walls and the green plants that covered everything. In most places the vines seemed to grow out of the water and straight to the rooftops.
We were all on deck watching in silence as we coasted into a port that would have been more at home somewhere on the Amazon River. All that was missing was the rain forest, but none of us would have been surprised to see natives watching us from the jungle.
We were being watched, but it wasn’t by natives with face paint and spears. There were infected dead that had long ago given up their efforts to free themselves from the tangled foliage where docks used to be. As we approached, their arms extended toward us, and their groaning sounded more like swamp frogs than the dead. They wouldn’t be a threat to us as long as we gave them room.
We were also being watched by a combination of predators. Eyes coasted through the water just above the surface as alligators positioned themselves at a safe distance from us, but not out of range if they decided we were more defenseless than we appeared to be. A few of them turned away from the new arrivals and returned to their previous attempts to reach the infected that were now reaching for us. Alligators were good climbers when they put their minds to it, and if they were hungry enough, they would eventually snack on the infected dead that were like low hanging fruit.
There were competitors for that food supply, though. Cassandra called out and pointed to a thick patch of jungle above several entangled infected, and we saw the way the vines drooped under the weight of something just passing through. The heavy vines sprung back up to where they had been as something big moved from a rooftop down to the docks.
