Shelter for Now

by Bob Howard

  The Cormorant began reducing speed as it approached the tracks, and the details of its construction were confusing to the Captain and his men.

  One of his Sergeants asked, “Sir, is that a fixed span, or does it open?”

  “I think it opens, Sarge, but I can’t tell if it slide, rotates, or lifts. The one thing I can tell you for sure is that it’s old. It hasn’t had much maintenance over the last few years.”

  There was one thing about the United States Army that no one could ever say, and that was something needed to be painted. As a matter of fact, the same could be said for all of the US military branches. If it had rust on it, someone needed to paint it.

  The center span of the train tracks at the middle of the Ashley River was in serious need of painting. If not for the occasional patches of gray paint, it was so rusty red that it could have been the surface of Mars.

  “The control house above the tracks is occupied, Captain.”

  When the warning was called out from a spotter in the wheelhouse, several weapons were aimed in that direction. The lethal deck guns trained toward the control house could have shredded it in seconds.

  Captain Miller focused binoculars on the building and saw that there were several windows from which the bridge operator could monitor what was happening below. He could see an uncountable number of infected dead moving past those windows.

  “Everyone stand down. I don’t think Plan B will involve taking control of that structure.”

  He studied the building a bit more just to be sure. It was about the size of a cargo container commonly seen on any interstate highway or stacked on container ships. Its function appeared to be the logical location for the controls that would open the bridge for ship traffic, but the Chief had agreed with the plan not to take the Cormorant further up the river where it would become dangerously shallow.

  ******

  The Chief brought the de Havilland Beaver down to the water directly astern of the Cormorant and began coasting. Captain Miller had already launched a raft and let it trail out behind the ship with a mooring line. As soon as they were close enough Kathy hopped out onto a float and caught the raft. They anchored the plane and then used the raft to board the Cormorant.

  The videos showing the helicopters behind the hangars were good news for the entire mission, but the number of infected dead in the area was bad news. They not only needed to find the best way to get to the Air Force Base, but now they needed to find a way to clear out dozens of infected dead without attracting more into the area.

  That was always the problem. Whenever you would find yourself in a situation where you had to dispose of a large number of the infected, you always had to make noise. When you made noise, more infected would be drawn to the area.

  They watched the videos several times inside the wheelhouse of the Cormorant. Spread out on a table around the phone was a collection of high resolution photographs of the Air Force Base that the Chief had pulled from the seemingly endless supply left behind in the shelter by Uncle Titus.

  “When you guys arrive at the part of the Air Force Base where the helicopters are parked, you’ll have to get rid of the infected, but then you’ll have to get the helicopters operational. You have only a fifty-fifty chance that they are fueled, and even if they are, they have to warm up.”

  “That’s where we’re in luck, Chief. The Navy VH92A should be warmed up just like any other aircraft, but when they decided to buy those things, the short warmup period was a big selling point. System performance is better when you get the engine running a little hot, but these things will at least get us in the air faster than the old Sikorsky models.”

  “Okay, so how can we get you guys in, get the birds started, and get you back out fast enough?”

  “I have an idea,” said Kathy.

  Captain Miller and the Chief were caught off guard by her interruption.

  “Oh, don’t tell me I’m not allowed to play with the big kids,” said Kathy.

  The Captain glanced at the Private who was at the helm, and saw the Chief was searching for a place to hide, too. They had both reacted like a woman couldn’t have solved the problem even though they both had seen Kathy in action. Not to mention the fact that both of them had complete respect for women in charge. The Chief had made that quite clear when he gave the shelter at Lake Norman to Iris Mason.

  They were both trying to hide their embarrassment as they stood back from the maps and photographs to give Kathy some room. Over the next few minutes, she showed them a plan that was so simple that they would never have thought of it. Now all they had to do was get to the Air Force Base.

  Part of Kathy’s plan changed everything else. They weren’t going to go straight to the US Navy VH92A helicopters. That would amount to nothing more than a full frontal assault, and they had told Captain Miller all about how badly that had worked out for a well armed group of survivors near Charlotte. That group killed a lot of the infected, but by the time it was over, so many of the survivors had died that they had replenished the ranks of the infected almost as much.

  Instead, they were going to divide into two groups. One group would be designated as pilots, and the other group was designated as combat. The pilot group needed to go to the farthest opposite corner of the airfield to their original target, Charleston Helicopter Services, and retrieve the executive helicopters they had seen. The rest of the plan was all about diversions. The hardest part was going to be getting the main population of the infected dead to leave the area by the hangars where the VH92A’s were parked.

  They decided they would try for all three of the Navy helicopters because they would have two pilots in each one. Each pair of pilots would need to take two soldiers with them to act as their flight crews, and the two executive helicopters were perfect for that part of the job.

  Captain Miller gathered his men out on the deck of the Cormorant and explained the plan. The men were all excited about seeing a little action after being holed up inside Fort Sumter for so long.

  The Chief used the mooring line to bring the de Havilland Beaver in a little closer to the Cormorant, and then the first group of passengers crossed the short distance to the cargo door of the plane. Once everyone was on board, he didn’t waste any time getting the plane in the air. He turned the plane downriver for the take off and then made a sharp turn back in the direction they had come from. The rest of the soldiers cheered when he wagged his wings as he crossed over the USCG Cormorant.

  It didn’t take five minutes to reach their first objective. One single boat ramp with a floating dock on the end was the perfect place to land a seaplane. It stuck out into the Ashley River at the back of a neighborhood and had large mudflats on both sides. Past experience told the Chief that they would be able to back out and regroup if it turned out to be too heavily populated with the infected.

  The Chief expertly turned the plane sideways to the dock, and the first of his passengers were able to jump over from the float and grab the wing to steady the plane. As soon as all six of them were unloaded and had taken up defensive positions, the Chief pulled away from the dock and went back for a second load.

  They left two soldiers with the Cormorant anchored in the middle of the river. Other than the infected occupants of the bridge control house, the area was deserted.

  After three more trips carrying gear and passengers, they had their flight crews totaling twelve men and their combat group of eight people, including Kathy and the Chief. Two of the soldiers designated for combat had gone up the steep ramp from the floating dock and gone ahead to scout the area.

  From the ramp of the floating dock to the place where the dock met dry ground was over fifty yards. As a boat landing on the river it was much longer than what they usually found, so it was safer than most. If they discovered the neighborhood to be heavily populated by the infected, they would be able to retreat to the floating dock and scuttle the ramp. The infected would fall toward them as they mindlessly moved forward, but the ramp was lo
ng enough to create a gap too big for the infected to cross. It would be close, but the dead would fall into the river.

  On a signal from the scouts, both groups moved together up the ramp and ran as quietly as they could until they reached the end of the dock and then spread out in the trees that bordered the neighborhood. They could see from their hiding place that there was a long street lined on one side by apartment buildings and on the other side by more trees.

  “Chief, when you flew over this spot, did you happen to notice what was on the other side of those trees?” asked Captain Miller.

  “More apartments and more trees. We have too far to go for us to do this house by house. We’re going to have about a quarter of a mile to a main road. When we reach that road we have to cross four lanes and a grass median, so we’re going to be visible, but there’s some good news.”

  “Which is what?”

  “If there are any infected dead walking around, they’re probably all on this side of the road. The other side of that four lane highway is nothing but wide open fields at the end of the main runway used by Charleston International Airport.”

  “That’s good news? Why is that good news?”

  The Chief ran one hand across his full beard. He wasn’t so sure the Captain would like his answer.

  “I haven’t seen one of those things that was able to run. Once we get to the end of that road in front of us and then run to the next one, they should all be behind us. All we have to do is stay faster than them.”

  The Captain stared at the Chief for a few moments and then studied the expression on Kathy’s face for a long time. He decided on the spot that he would never play poker with either of them because they both kept their faces totally blank.

  The street in front of them was a two-lane neighborhood road that went straight for a quarter of a mile to the four-lane road they needed to cross. A mailbox in front of a house said it was Great Oak Drive. It could have been any street in any other neighborhood now. Overgrown grass and shrubs made every neighborhood a little more lower class than they really were. This particular neighborhood was somewhere around middle class, but it sat only a little more than a mile from the end of the runway that served the airport and the Air Force Base. That meant property values were never really going to go up, and most of the land surrounding it had remained undeveloped for that same reason.

  From a cluster of trees at the end of Great Oak Drive, the soldiers waited for their two advance scouts to return. Their position was so well concealed that they were able to catch glimpses of the two men from time to time as they left cover to move closer to the four-lane highway. They were equipped with a communications called the H-250/U Handset, so they were able to give reports back to the main group as they moved.

  The H-250/U was considered to be a luxury to the squad of soldiers because they depended upon the continued operation of the military satellites circling the Earth. A couple of years after the infection spread across the country, they weren’t surprised that the satellites were still doing their jobs, but they didn’t take them for granted. They knew that at any time they could go silent. When they did, they would have to rely on old fashioned methods of communication, such as hand signals. Of course, they could also run and yell.

  At the moment the scouts were running, and from what the Captain could tell, they were doing everything they could not to yell. They had reached the four-lane road, but after only a minute of observation they had turned and begun running straight down Great Oak Drive. Apartments and homes they had carefully and quietly passed undetected, they were now running past with total abandon.

  There were no reports coming over the H-250/U, and Captain Miller suspected that the satellites had chosen this moment to fail. Suddenly, heavy winded voices broke through in his headset.

  The Chief saw the Captain had the same expression he was sure he wore on his own face. Something had two of Captain Miller’s best men running faster than Olympic track stars, and they weren’t even bothering to give a report. Whatever it was they saw, it had to be something they could only describe face to face.

  The squad still had its back to the water, so the escape route wasn’t cut off. There was no need to retreat to the dock until they knew what it was that had the soldiers running like the Devil was chasing them.

  The winded report in their headsets was coming through in clipped phrases. The Chief was sure he heard, “Won’t believe it.” There was also, “God help us.”

  Kathy nudged the Chief and pointed to the end of Great Oak Drive. When he shifted his eyes to where she pointed, he could just make out some motion on the other side of the trees. He focused his binoculars on the spot and could see that there was definitely something moving out on the four-lane highway, but he couldn’t tell exactly what it was.

  The scouts crossed his field of vision, and he also saw that they were drawing the attention of infected dead that didn’t detect them as they went by the first time. They had been so careful and quiet as they moved toward their objective that they had managed to sneak by the infected without being seen. Now that they were running at full speed down the middle of the street, they were also drawing everything out into the open.

  Despite the fact that they definitely had company, there still wasn’t anything obvious that would make them run the way they were, and they quickly outdistanced the shambling newcomers that were walking out onto Great Oak Drive. Even when an infected stepped out from behind a car directly in their path, they didn’t slow down. They didn’t really even pay any attention to it as they swerved around it and kept running.

  When the two scouts dove into the trees where the others were waiting, they both had so much momentum that they slid like baseball players stealing second base.

  Everyone was ready for them to begin giving some kind of report, but they didn’t have to. All they had to do was see what was coming down Great Oak Drive from the direction of the four-lane highway. It was a massive horde of the infected making its turn from the right onto Great Oak Drive.

  “I remember when we saw the same thing on the road near Mud Island,” said the Chief. “That horde stretched for miles.”

  “We didn’t see them from the air,” said Kathy. “Something caused them to come out onto the road after we flew over. If we’re lucky, it’s a smaller horde than it appears to be.”

  One of the two men got his wind back and managed to make a report between big gasps for air. He was in good physical condition just as all of Captain Miller’s men and women were, but the sprint he and his partner had made was worth using a stopwatch for.

  “Captain, we got a good view down that highway, and that’s not something I want to see again. The pavement on both sides of the road and the median were full.”

  “Why didn’t we see them?” asked Kathy.

  The Chief was staring off into space as if he was seeing something but couldn’t quite make out what it was.

  “Kathy, do you remember on the day it all started that there was a reporter from a local station broadcasting from the upper decks of the Atlantic Spirit?”

  “I was a bit too busy to notice, Chief. You remember where I was, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. You were down on the dock doing what you could to keep the infected busy.”

  Kathy gave him a mock frown. There was no doubt in the Chief’s mind that the Atlantic Spirt at least had a fighting chance of saving its passengers because Kathy had taken charge on the big pier that led to the passenger terminal. As a Charleston City Police Officer she had organized the helpless people trying to get into the cruise ship terminal and managed to create a blockade that stopped the horde of infected.

  The Chief went on without skipping a beat.

  “The reporter was receiving updates from the entire Charleston broadcast area, and I heard her say the Red Cross had opened an emergency shelter at the North Charleston Coliseum. It would hold over ten thousand people, but from what we could see downtown, no one was going to shelters. Everyone was tryi
ng to get away.”

  “But some people thought a shelter would be safer, especially people who were already near one,” Kathy finished for him, “and the North Charleston Coliseum would have seemed like a safe shelter because of law enforcement and military support.”

  “How far is that from here?” asked Captain Miller.

  “About two and a half miles,” said Kathy, “but guess where people would have gone if not to the Coliseum. The airport is on the same road as the Coliseum. That road would have been a death trap. People unable to reach the Coliseum would have been trying to come back the other way, but they would have already been boxed in by thousands of people behind them. Some would have tried for the airport on foot while others would have come back to that four-lane highway.”

  Captain Miller checked with his two men and asked, “They saw you?”

  Judging by the number of infected dead blocking the street a quarter of a mile away, the answer was obvious, but knowing for sure would help them to decide what to do next. They either needed to retreat or find a way around that horde. Fighting them wasn’t an option. They could see hundreds of them already on the street and overflowing onto the yards and driveways of homes and apartment complexes, and they didn’t have enough ammunition for that many infected.

  Both of the soldiers nodded emphatically that they had been seen, and they said the wailing and groaning had started immediately.

  Once they started the groaning, all of them had turned their attention in the direction of the two soldiers, and the parade began.

  “Captain, we weren’t even out in the open when they spotted us. There were just so many of them on the road shoulder to shoulder that they were bumping into each other. One of them fell down practically on top of us.”

  “That explains your sudden ability to run faster than a rabbit,” said Captain Miller.

  Kathy groaned.

  “The Chief is rubbing off on you, Captain.”