Lucky

by Sage du Toit

  One of the first supply runs they did was to the hospital. Sam had come back after that sick to her stomach. She had never imagined there could be so many dead bodies in one place. But they desperately needed insulin and other medical supplies and they only hoped that it would still be good after all of this time being unrefrigerated. They were very surprised when they arrived at the hospital and discovered that the hospital had also converted all of their major appliances to natural gas. The medical walk-in refrigerator was working and fully stocked. They also had a fully stocked walk-in fridge/freezer in the hospital cafeteria, but some of the refrigerated stuff had already gone bad by that time.

  Maria had managed to get a container sized generator to the Hall and hooked up. They only ran it for limited times though due to the fuel it used. They ran it for four hours at night so everyone could take hot showers and eat dinner in a lighted room, which saved batteries. It also allowed those that wanted to cook small meals in their mini apartments to do so. Sam had cooked a few private dinners for her and Tom and one for a small group of friends. They also ran the generators for 4 hours in the morning so the cleaning and laundry crew could use the washers and dryers. It was a luxury that few people were able to appreciate now days.

  They also used the power for the clinic set up by Jerry and Dr. Vincent. They had rescued the Doctor from his house. He said he had just gotten home from an exhausting week-long shift of 18 hours a night. When he had woken up to a hot house later that day and looked outside and saw the dead bodies in his neighborhood through the window and he had sealed himself in his house and lived in his basement until he heard the loudspeaker.

  Sam spent as much time with Tom as she could, but they each had separate jobs, although sometimes he would accompany her on a supply run if he needed something technical that couldn’t be described easy. At night they usually showered together and often spent the evening just laying around naked together, exploring each other’s bodies, or just talking. Sam loved talking to Tom, they talked about their lives before N-day and their families. She found out Tom had been engaged before N-day, but his fiancé of 4 years had broken it off when she realized that a wedding date wasn’t looking too bright for the future.

  Sam had told Tom about how she had gone to college for two years and then dropped out. She had spent more time partying and boozing it up with friends than studying and realized a little too late that she was wasting her time and her parent’s money. She had actually failed two classes because of missed assignments and too many missed classes. She realized that she just wasn’t mature enough to devote herself to her studies and being away from her strict parents for the first time had gone to her head. Her parents had been so disappointed in her and she in herself that she had dropped out. She told him how she had worked as a dispatcher for the city police for two years after that. Her dad had helped her get the job since he knew all of them and most of them knew her because of her mom and dad both working for other local law enforcement agencies.

  Tom told her he was from a small town in Texas and they soon discovered that his home town was in the next county over from her home town, only about a 45-minute drive between each. He said his mom and dad still lived in the same house he had grown up in, and his brother lived in a house he had built for his family on a corner of their property so he could help them. They had a 425-acre ranch with black Angus cattle and a few other livestock including wild deer. They talked about going back to Texas and checking on their families. Sometimes at night Sam would talk about her family and Tom would hold her as she cried.

  30 October 2020 N-Day + 112 days

  Fort Jackson, SC

  They had managed to rescue 100 more people in the last 60 days. They searched the whole of Fort Jackson and then started searching the town of Columbia. They found a small group in a Hotel right off the base, one they had driven by a few times. The people inside had seen their vehicles and put a help sign up in the windows. Most of the other people were in their homes and another small group in a Red Cross shelter that came out when they heard the loudspeaker.

  John’s wife, Tabitha, had decided to set up a daycare center in one of the conference rooms at Dozier Hall, that way all the parents with kids could be free to work and just a few could watch over the little ones in a safe place. Sam had gotten the task of obtaining the things they needed for the daycare center and she had enjoyed that chore. She had taken her team to Toys R Us and was surprised when she found that no one had looted the place. But then she realized that most of the places raided were probably by the people that had shot at them, they hadn’t run into any other survivor groups.

  When they got to the Toys R Us/Babies R Us, Sam saw that it was a dual store. She found that the doors were unlocked and it looked like the employee’s had tried to make a run for their cars. They had even covered their faces with cloths, but that wasn’t enough to stop the Nerve gas. One person was even in their car with the door open. They went through the first set of doors and into the second, and out of curiosity she took out her chemical tester and checked the air inside of the building. It was perfectly clean. She checked all around and didn’t find any trace. If they had just stayed inside… they would have survived.

  They cleared the building first, that was now part of their standard operating procedure (SOP), they went in like a police force and made sure it was safe and clear first. Then they moved the two big trucks they brought, the big Lowe’s box truck and the 2 ½ ton truck, around to the loading dock in the back. She gave each member of her team a list and they all found hand carts and shopping carts and started filling them up. One of the things they desperately needed was baby food and formula for the women that weren’t breastfeeding their infants and the babies that were just starting to eat solid food. Sam loaded up two shopping carts full of baby food, snacks and formula. She also took all of the diapers and checked the back of the store and took several cases from there as well of food, formula and diapers that were waiting to be stocked.

  They had fun going through the toys and baby swings and walkers. The problem they had was not taking everything, they just couldn’t fit it! They also took cribs, toddler beds, sheets and baby blankets. Sam and Sally, one of the Rescued mothers, had fun picking out cute blankets and clothes. Every once in a while they would hold something up and say, “Look at this! How cute!” But the whole time they were going as fast as they could to get it all in carts and loaded. The guys were busy getting play equipment and padding for the floors in cute interlocking blocks that would cover the whole area and cushion falls. They got little slides, small chairs and table sets, miniature houses, miniature kitchens with little dishes and ride on toys. Even the guys would call from across the store, “The kids are gonna love this!”

  They packed the box truck up to the top and filled the 2 ½ ton truck with boxes from the back of the warehouse of anything they thought would be useful. She considered getting a sand box for the kids but wasn’t sure how Tabitha would feel about the mess. She checked with her team and made sure they had found everything on the list, plus a few more items. When they got back to Dozier hall and started unloading it in the warehouse tent Tabitha came outside and gushed over each item that came off the truck. They placed the items on pallets and checked them to make sure they hadn’t picked up any contaminates and then wrapped them up in plastic on the pallet. Then one pallet at a time was pushed through the first curtain into the tunnel. They had set up specific steps to be taken to prevent any contaminates being brought into their living space. They wanted to be especially careful with the kids’ stuff.

  Once through the first curtain it was taken by hand operated forklift to the next curtain and it underwent another check, including the bottom of the pallet. If it was clean it was taken through or sprayed with decontaminate spray and dropped at the doors where it could be unloaded and taken inside of the building safely. Tabitha was so anxious to see what they brought that she didn’t consider she would have to go through decontamination to go b
ack inside but as she went through the decontamination trailer with Sam she talked nonstop asking about all the things they brought and she was so excited to get inside and start setting up.

  Sam told her about the sand box and Tabitha said she would probably have her go back and get that later. She was hoping they could set up some type of covered area outside for the kids to play. There had been an old playground right outside and the kids were always wanting to go out there and play and it was hard to get them to understand how dangerous it was. They had finally bulldozed the playground after one kid tried to go outside by himself. Luckily Amy had caught him trying to go out a back door on his own.

  Amy had finally gotten over her desire for Tom and funny enough she was now seeing Leroy, the one who had offered to share a room with her. Sam often found her helping with the kids and sometimes she joined a supply run or rescue team. She hadn’t quite found her niche yet and just went from job to job where they needed her. There weren’t a lot of people like that, most people had settled in to certain jobs and seemed happy with them. But no one was locked into one job. John made it clear that if you were tired of a certain job or wanted to try something different, you just had to made it be known. He encouraged everyone to speak up.

  They hadn’t had any major problems from inside of the group except for a few lover’s quarrels and one love triangle that had woken everyone up one morning with screaming after one boyfriend found his girl in another man’s room. The problem still was that men outnumbered woman 3:1. Sam had seen some men pairing off with each other and there were a few women as well. There were also a few women that hadn’t picked one particular man and was seen coming from a different room almost every night. But everyone accepted it, that was their preference! John had also strongly encouraged people to practice safe sex and to use birth control until they were more settled. One person didn’t head his council however and she ended up pregnant. Word got around that Belinda was pregnant and when John confronted her she said she wasn’t worried about it, she was just going to get it aborted.

  However, when she went to Dr. Vincent he told her hell no. She raved about it in front of everyone so they knew what he said. That same night after she went to him he stood up in front of everyone at their weekly meeting and told them that under no circumstance was he going to do abortions, unless it threatened the baby or mother’s life, or the woman was raped and didn’t want the baby. He said that he happily gave out birth control and condoms and they had plenty of both, so there was no excuse for unplanned pregnancies and in this time, every baby was priceless! He did add that if someone ended up having a baby that they didn’t want it, he was sure someone else would adopt it and there were lots of people that spoke out and said they would adopt.

  The other thing that Dr. Vincent brought up to the group was the health issue of all of the dead bodies everywhere. The bodies had been removed from around their immediate area and buried in a large grave. However, there were stacks in places like the hospitals and stores but not all of those places had open land space big enough to dig large graves. Maria did some searching and found a large diesel operated incinerator on a trailer. It was labeled as use for wildlife disposal, and they felt bad for treating the dead people as animal carcasses, but with so many of them, what choice did they have? Maria had to specially train people to use the incinerator, luckily it only required one operator. The other issue was no one really wanted to be on the disposal crews and some people just didn’t have the stomach for it.

  Sam volunteered for the disposal crew at the hospital, she had been there already and seen the bodies, she knew how bad it was. They took stacks and stacks of sheets with them and carefully wrapped the bodies in sheets before carrying it out and laying it in the platform for the operator to put it in the machine. They could do 5 bodies max at a time and it took a while before they could load another five. They had eight people on the teams for big jobs. Six people wrapping the bodies and bringing them out, then two people loading them in the incinerator with one of those being the trained operator.

  They utilized a slightly smaller group of six when they went mobile, four people going house to house and wrapping bodies and bringing them out and two people to load the incinerator and move the truck and trailer forward to the next house. This was a really hard job and they never knew what they were going to find in the houses. Often times the teams would come back and you could see the horrors of what they had seen on their faces. Dr. Vincent started doing debriefings with the crews and even dispensed medication when needed to those who had been mentally affected by it. They tried not to send the same people out more than once a week, but after a few times, some of the people became hardened to it and it became easier for all of them over time.

  Sadly, one of their rescue groups had also run into a large group of very bad criminals on the last day of the month. These men were dirty and rough and were in the process of raping a woman they had found hunkered down in a house with her children. Sam hadn’t been with the group that found them, but Barry who had been with Rick, had told them the story. They were out driving through one of the housing areas in Columbia announcing over the loudspeaker that they were there to help. A small child, that they found out later was 6 years old, had come running from the back of a large house and he told them that some bad men were in his house and they were hurting his mommy.

  Rick had placed the child in the truck with Heather, one of the original kitchen workers from the mess hall, and took Barry Sheffield and Peter Donaldson, who were two of the original soldiers, with him. They were armed to the teeth, Tom and John both made sure anyone leaving the area outside of Fort Jackson had enough fire power to protect themselves from any threat. They had M16’s, pistols, flashbang grenades and tear-gas grenades.

  Barry said they snuck around the house where the child came from and found that the back door was open. They could hear men laughing from inside and a woman’s muffled screaming. They peeked in the door and saw four men in the living room. They all had their pants halfway down and one was on top of a woman and he could see a fifth one’s hands that were holding her down. From the back door he could see two children hiding inside of the kitchen island. The idiot rapists luckily hadn’t found the kids. It was two little girls, later they found out ages 4 and 5. The older girl saw them and her eyes got big and Rick put his finger to his lips to tell her to be quiet, then checking that the men were still occupied he motioned for them to come to him. The little girl wouldn’t come out.

  Barry said it took Rick a few minutes and he couldn’t see what he was doing. He thought he might be getting ready to throw a flash grenade but didn’t think he would do that with the kids and woman inside. Finally, Ricks said the kids were going to stay there and they quietly came through the door and hid behind the kitchen counter. He motioned for Barry to take out the guy closest to the kitchen and Peter to take out the guy by the front door on the count of three. He watched the men and the one guy was standing up and the fifth guy had let her go and was moving around to take his place and he quickly counted down to three. All three of them fired, aiming for the heads. Rick fired three successive shots and hit all three of the guys before the first one was down on the ground. Barry and Peter both managed to hit their targets, but Peter’s wasn’t a death shot, it had just grazed the guy on the temple and blew his ear half off.

  They rushed in the room and Rick used plastic zip cuffs on the man that was still alive. He told Barry and Peter that he wanted to interrogate the guy. They gave the woman a blanket and took her into the kitchen with her children. Rick sent Barry and the Peter out to the truck with the woman and the little girls. He told them he wouldn’t be long because he wanted to get the woman back for treatment as soon as possible. Barry said Rick was inside only a few minutes and they heard some muffled screams and then a gunshot.

  The guy had told Rick that he and his buddies came from a prison outside of Columbia. After the electricity went out and most of the prison guards had died t
he electric doors had automatically opened up after two days of no power. He said they had killed the guards that were holed up in the prison cafeteria and taken their gas masks. He said he didn’t know where the rest of the prisoner’s went, he and his group had gone off on their own after the food at the prison ran out. Barry said he wasn’t sure what Rick did to get that information out of the guy and he said he didn’t want to know.

  After that they increased their guards and made everyone aware of the possibility of lose criminals and to take extra care and to always use the buddy system. Sam had wondered if any of the people they had rescued could be ex-cons from the prison. She wasn’t sure but they had all seemed perfectly normal.

  In the good news they had managed to find a greenhouse company right outside of Fort Jackson that had two people alive in one of their greenhouses. They were another indispensable addition to the people in their group. They now had several large greenhouses set up and they even had beehives set up in the greenhouses to help with pollination and it gave them a source of honey as well. The greenhouses were all completely enclosed and interconnected, they also had vents and fans that ran off solar panels.

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  Chapter 16

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  21 December 2020 (Continued)

  Douglasville, GA

  Sam checked her watch and saw the beans had been cooking for an hour. She stirred them and could tell they still had a long way to go. The ambient temperature in the room was very cold, so she reasoned it might even effect how fast the beans cooked. She also had an hour before Mew needed another feeding.