by Bob Howard
There was a concussive explosion near the end of the runway that rocked all of the planes. The plane on the grass came to a stop when the pilot reacted to the fireball in the distance, and he lost their forward motion. The single wheel strut dug into a soft section of wet ground and sank deeper. The front end of the plane dipped lower, and the pilot desperately applied more power, but the rear wheels had too much traction. The front landing gear collapsed under the strain, and the nose of the plane dropped toward the ground. The passengers and crew were still safe from the infected, but they weren’t going anywhere.
In all of the planes the passengers and crews moved to the side of the plane facing the place where smoke and fire engulfed the wreckage of the plane that had just attempted to take off. No one had seen it coming, but the plane had slid sideways over hundreds of bodies at the end of the runway. When the front gear had lifted from the ground, the slide became worse, and they were no longer facing forward when they reached the end of the runway.
Aboard Executive One the flight crew didn’t have hundreds of passengers screaming at them. They were left with their solitude and the certainty that there was nothing they could do to save their own lives, but the pilot had one idea left.
There was just enough room for the 737 to turn and begin slowly moving in the direction of the main terminal.
CHAPTER FIVE
AT SUNRISE THE Chief and Kathy were ready to leave on their brief trip to the Charleston Air Force Base. It had become our practice to all be up before dawn. In part it depended upon how much Josh decided to let us all sleep, but even though we were safe in a shelter where nothing could do us harm, we were anything but soft. We had become as hard as the outside world, and we knew that would keep us alive longer.
It was a group effort getting them ready, and we all had breakfast together before we carried the rest of their gear up to the outer door. A quick check of the security cameras spread around Mud Island showed it was a quiet day outside. It was clear enough for us to see that there were some new tracks in the sand down by the beach, but they appeared to go no further than a few feet inland before turning back toward the water.
The tracks made us decide to send a full patrol with the Chief and Kathy rather than just two extra people, so we all geared up for a trip to the dock. Molly graciously accepted her role as big sister to Josh. She agreed to stay behind with him so Jean could go with us. Jean had been cooped up inside longer than the rest of us and was dying to get some real exercise. The last time Bus had taken a turn watching Josh for us, so Molly didn’t complain. Besides, she would undoubtedly spend most of the time on the radio talking with Sam at Fort Sumter.
Molly had grown a lot in the last six months, and when she turned twelve we had thrown her a big birthday party. She had tested her limits a bit by asking if she could drink with the adults, but her request was met by so many disapproving glares that no one even had to speak for her to know what the answer was. She tried again when she asked if she could go to Fort Sumter to visit with Whitney and Sam, and she added we could let her stay there for a week or two.
It didn’t take a genius to know she was really talking about spending time with Sam. He was close to her age, and every adult in the room knew their hormones were just about to boil over from puppy love. She was forced to concede that the best she could hope for was to visit, but staying for a week or two wasn’t going to happen unless the Army placed her and Sam under a twenty-four hour armed guard.
We all gathered at the main door just as we had in the past, and as soon as it was opened, we went out as if there were infected dead waiting for us on our doorstep. Going out combat ready was what the Chief had called it.
We took up our positions guarding the outside of the door until everyone was clear, and the big door was sealed in place.
I had been through that door dozens of times since the first day, but I never lost my respect for the builders of the shelter. The door was set back in the side of a steep bank of trees, moss, and rocks. It was recessed just enough for it to fit in with the earth that had fallen away from the roots of the trees, and the embankment had been undercut over time by wind, rain, and possibly animals seeking shelter. The back wall of the recessed area was the door, and it was so well disguised by the natural elements found on any barrier island that you could sit in front of it without ever knowing it was a door.
There was a big locking wheel in the middle of the door that blended in with the dried branches and vines growing down through the overhang above. Once you knew it was there, it was easier to see, but to the unsuspecting eye, it was practically invisible.
When I had seen the door the first time, it didn’t seem to be as well hidden, but as time had gone by and our creative minds played with new ideas, we had found more and better ways to camouflage the door.
The entrance was located almost in the center of Mud Island, but the beach side where the door was located was less dense with trees. During the winter months you could see almost all the way to the water. The leaves had been falling for a couple of months, so any infected that might have washed ashore overnight would be visible from a distance.
On the other side of the embankment that hid the door to the shelter, Mud Island was not very hospitable. The gradual rise from the beach side was over twenty feet, but it was too steep to climb from the opposite side. We considered that to be fortunate because we never had anything unexpected dropping in from above.
Whether we headed north or south from the shelter entrance, the terrain was similar. The trees became thicker in both directions, and the island leveled out to only a slightly higher slope at the center. When we had witnessed the migration of infected dead from the beach toward the moat, they had been forced to spread out to get over the middle of the island. A Russian ship had exploded in the moat at a time when the beach had been heavily populated with the infected, and we had watched them being drawn to the sound of the explosion like moths to a flame.
We had to walk about a mile, and we had worn a path from the door to the northern tip of the island because that was were we docked our plane and our boat. There was also a barge and a houseboat tied to the dock, but they were more of a distraction than they were useful. The houseboat was habitable, and we kept a modest amount of supplies in it. Our hope was that anyone who found the houseboat would think that was all there was to the island, and they wouldn’t follow the path that led into the trees.
Along one side of the dock sat our most prized possession. It was a bright yellow and white seaplane known as a de Havilland Beaver. It was noisy, but it was durable. The Chief was a very skilled pilot, and if these were normal times, he would probably fly the plane every day just for fun.
As soon as we arrived at the dock the Chief stepped onto the wide float and squeezed through the door into the pilot’s seat. I was always amazed at how easily he did it when I considered his size. The door always seemed so much smaller than him.
I pulled open the cargo door and fastened it to a hook on the wing strut so it would stay open. Everyone else who was carrying gear for their trip took turns stepping onto the float and stowing the gear. Kathy gave Tom a hug and kiss then climbed through the cargo door to the other side of the plane.
While we were going through our routine of loading the plane, Cassandra and Hampton cautiously approached the houseboat. It was still tied to the end of the dock where it wouldn’t block our visibility of the jetty that protruded from the mainland.
The jetty was what protected the entrance to the moat that separated Mud Island from the rest of the world. When the houseboat had been tied to the side of the dock and blocking our view of the jetty, something had dislodged one of the massive granite boulders from the jetty, and sand had quickly formed a reef that made a virtual footpath from the mainland to Mud Island.
By moving the houseboat, we were able to see the jetty and the entire houseboat through a hidden camera, and even though we had seen no movement on the camera, Cassandra and Hampton appro
ached it as if it was occupied.
On their signal everyone else made sure they were not inside anyone’s circle of fire when they opened the door. A quick check showed that it was vacant, and we were clear to get the Chief and Kathy on their way. We untied the mooring lines and gave the plane a shove. It turned easily from the dock as the Chief started the incredibly loud engine. He rotated the plane and circled the houseboat as he headed out to sea. A few moments later, and he was lifting the plane into the air and climbing to his cruising altitude.
“If no one has any objections,” said Tom, “I think we should do a patrol of the island while we’re out here. Is everyone wearing thick boots?”
Everyone smiled and gave a thumbs up, but it was no laughing matter anymore. The blue crabs were still around even though the weather had gotten colder. If we were going to patrol the beach, someone was likely to get one hanging onto a boot.
We formed up with Tom in the lead and left the dock in the direction of the beach. It wouldn’t take long for us to walk the two mile stretch along the ocean, and the exercise would do us some good.
******
It had become the Chief’s practice to always take off by going straight out to sea. That way he would be able to gain altitude before coming back toward the mainland. He had taken a bullet twice in our last plane. The first time he managed to land the plane safely, but the second time had been anything but pretty. He and his passenger survived the crash, but the plane had been destroyed.
They passed over the spot where the Mercy Ship had sunk during the summer, and they could just make out the shape of it under the water. Where it sank, the hull was still partially hung up on a reef where it had become a constant reminder of the global scale of the infection. The ship had begun its journey to escape the infection off the coast of Africa and reached its final resting place on the coast of South Carolina.
After making a wide turn and climbing to a safe altitude, the Chief headed inland straight toward their destination. The Charleston Air Force Base was a joint command connected with the US Naval Weapons Station at Goose Creek. In the early days of the onslaught of the infection, the Mud Island survivors had tried to connect with the Navy but found the base was being overrun by the infected dead. They had arrived at the base just as the military was evacuating onto ships.
They had never made a close inspection of the area around the Air Force Base, but the lack of radio contact with anyone in the area had not been encouraging. The base was home to a squadron of the C-17 Globemaster III, the workhorse of the Air Force. They were not the largest transport planes in the world, but they were certainly massive in size.
When the infection became an epidemic, the military would have tried to position its assets around the world as strategically as possible. The Chief speculated that the C-17’s would have been scrambled to the bases in the Middle East to retrieve our troops. They would be needed at home if we were to ever reclaim North America from the infected dead, but he couldn’t imagine how the men and women in the US Armed Forces could be coping with their concerns for their families. The fact that they hadn’t seen the C-17’s in the air over South Carolina in the last year was not a good sign.
When the Chief expressed those feelings to Captain Miller at Fort Sumter, the Captain had given him some reason for hope. Logistically, it would be a monumental task to remove eight to ten thousand troops from Afghanistan alone. Captain Miller explained that the United States had troops in about one hundred and fifty countries, and the total number was over a quarter of a million people. That didn’t include ships at sea.
Captain Miller reassured the Chief that not seeing the military didn’t mean they weren’t gathering their forces somewhere. As a matter of fact, his theory was that the US military had found safe haven in a colder climate, such as Greenland, and they were preparing to take back their country.
That feeling of encouragement from Captain Miller wasn’t much for the Chief to lean on, but if he was going to believe in one thing, it would be his faith in his own military training. He had to hang onto the belief that the reason he had survived was the same reason why the US military would also survive.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Kathy.
The Chief snapped out of his private thoughts, and it dawned on him that he had been on autopilot. The same way people had driven to work in the past without remembering the drive, he was so focused on what the military was probably doing that he had been going through his motions as if they were a practiced routine.
“Was I that far gone?”
“Worse. You didn’t even hear me the first time I asked.”
“I was thinking about how this is all going to end one day. Are we going to become extinct, or are we going to fight back and win?”
“We don’t have much choice. We have to fight back, and we have to hope we’re not the only ones who are doing it,” said Kathy.
“Captain Miller’s carrier group screwed up because they underestimated the capability of this infection to escape captivity, and it got them all killed.”
Kathy shook her head.
“It’s more likely that they overestimated their ability to keep it contained. I think that’s less likely to happen again because other squadrons and carrier groups know what happened to them by now. We learn from our mistakes. The infected won’t learn from theirs.”
The Chief was about to admit that Kathy had a point when he saw they were already approaching their destination. The Charleston International Airport was within view, and just beyond it was the Air Force Base.
Their goal was actually next to a private terminal that sat to the east of the Air Force Base not far from the airport. Kathy began scanning with her binoculars trying to locate Charleston Helicopter Services, and hopefully there would be helicopters on their landing areas. The trip would be wasted if they had all flown out of the area.
The building wasn’t hard to spot because the terminal for private jets was the next building to the north. At least six expensive jets were parked by the terminal. One had burned to the ground where it was parked.
Kathy lowered her binoculars just a bit to the south and spotted the helicopters. There were two sitting near the building, but they were executive models that wouldn’t be able to accommodate twenty armed soldiers. That wasn’t good news for the survivors.
“Two executive style helicopters on the landing pads to the right of the building, Chief. They might be four or five passenger models.”
“Not good enough. We need to find the big ones. I had hoped they would have landed up here by the private terminal as a way to get civilians moved to the airport more quickly. Shuttle services would’ve been big on that last day.”
Well over a year later it was still alarming to see so much devastation. The runways were dotted with bodies that had been crushed by the big tires of rolling aircraft, and small fires had burned everywhere. Scorch marks that ended in trails of debris were evidence of how many small planes must have crashed because they couldn’t run over the infected that had crossed the runways.
The terminal gates at the Charleston International Airport were almost all damaged in some way, most likely because planes had pulled away while the flexible gates were still attached to them.
“Time to circle the Air Force Base. Let’s hope for friendly survivors who don’t shoot for fun.”
The Chief cut across the helicopter service building and followed a course roughly parallel to the main runway of the Air Force Base. The base shared the runway with the private terminal, but there was a shorter runway crossing it at an angle. It was used mostly by the smaller private planes, and it had the most debris blocking it from further use.
When the de Havilland Beaver reached the perimeter of the base, the Chief made a wide turn and came back across the roofs of the hangars and maintenance areas at the northern end of the base. If the Air Force had tried to evacuate a combat contingent or establish some sort of command and control center, it would have been fro
m this area. Up ahead he could see where the C-17 Globemasters were usually parked, and the area was clear. If the base had been secured against the infected, there would be about two dozen of the big planes lined up on the tarmac.
A row of aircraft between the hangars caught the Chief’s eye, and he knew they had hit the jackpot. At first glance he wasn’t sure what model helicopters were partially covered by tarps, but then he realized it was because they were new, and he recognized them.
Three had been towed into a secure area between the buildings and camouflaged. They would only need one because each could carry twenty-two men and their gear. The range was five hundred and thirty-nine miles, which was right at the limit the Chief had hoped for.
“Will those do the trick?” asked Kathy.
Before she even asked the question they had sped past the buildings, and the plane climbed into the sky again.
“Get some pictures for me when I make the next pass. If I’m not mistaken, those are Sikorsky helicopters that were just delivered to the Navy within the last year. I read about them not long ago. Their service record isn’t long enough for me to say they’re any good, but they’re new, and they hold enough people. They also come equipped with an optional fuel cell, and if I was buying them for military use, I would have chosen that option.”
They lined the Beaver up to make a pass down the length of the three helicopters, and Kathy leaned over for pictures. She put the setting on video so they could study the results one frame at a time.
When the Chief banked away from the buildings, he checked with Kathy to see what she thought, and she was shaking her head.
“The area around the helicopters was crawling with infected.”