Shelter for Now

by Bob Howard

  Garrett wondered if he should bother to ask Sim where he planned to find a ham, or cloves for that matter, but he decided to just let it go.

  “What happens if we don’t find the controls to that elevator by then?” asked Sim. “Are we going to keep searching for it or head for International Falls like we talked about?”

  “We have plenty of time to decide, Sim. Don’t get too dejected just yet. I know how much you want to get into that elevator and find out where the President went.”

  They stood without speaking for a few minutes, but Garrett was grinning. Sim finally noticed and grinned back, but he waited for Garrett to tell him what was so funny.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to say to the President when we find out where he went to?” asked Garrett.

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to let me wring his neck, but I would like to tell him I won’t be voting for him next time, and by the way, thanks for shutting the door on us once you were safe.”

  “Well, that’s keeping it polite, but we should have plenty of time to think about that, too.”

  Jon’s head appeared from the door they used to get on the roof, and he had an expression on his face that made him seem younger.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Garrett. “You found it.”

  “We think so, but we’re not sure.”

  “Take Sim with you, Jon. He deserves to see it.”

  Sim was all smiles as he followed Jon through the door and then through the ceiling. They still used the shortcuts they had learned above the hallways, and they still hadn’t figured out how to clear the infected out of a couple of places, so they hopped over ductwork and made it to the security hallway as fast as possible.

  “Who found it?” asked Sim.

  “The women,” said Jon.

  “All three of them?”

  Sim was trying to picture all three of the women saying, “I found it. Here it is.”

  “You’ll see in a minute,” Jon laughed.

  They dropped down through the ceiling into the security offices, and Sim tried to spot the women. He heard their voices coming down the hall from the holding cells, so he went in that direction. He found them sitting in one of the cells waiting for him. All three of them pointed at the panel of light switches in the hallway outside the three cells.

  Sim followed their fingers to where they were pointing, and all he saw was a light switch panel that they had checked plenty of times before. They saw his confused expression, but they weren’t going to make it too easy for him. When he interpreted their expressions as playful, he turned back to the switches and studied it.

  A long time ago he had decided that it had to be something that was right in front of their eyes. Something so obvious that they were going right past it.

  Sim frowned at the open panel and saw three rows of wires running along the exposed frame. They came out of the floor, attached to the bottom screw and top screws on the switches, and then traveled upward to the lights in the hallway.

  He didn’t want to give up, and he was just about to ask them what was different about this particular panel when he saw it.

  “Why are there three switches on this panel when there are only two lights in this hallway?” he asked no one in particular.

  Sim reached out to flip the three switches upward, but Jon reached out and stopped him.

  “You don’t want to do that. If there’s power to one of these switches, and the elevator rises out of the floor in the hangar, we want to be there for it.”

  They had become accustomed to the lack of power in the terminal. In the first few weeks they instinctively reached for wall switches to turn on the lights, but after the first time they went down this hallway, there had never been a reason for any of them to go there again. Three empty jail cells with nothing useful inside them wasn’t worth their time. By the time they checked this hallway again, they had stopped automatically flipping light switches up.

  All three of the switches were in the down position, and Sim still didn’t get it.

  “Why do you guys think one of these switches would operate the elevator?”

  “We have a theory,” said Anne. “We can only test part of it, but Jon was only kidding about the elevator rising out of the floor. We think the switch actually just sends power to the elevator. Once it was powered, someone was able to raise the elevator from somewhere else.”

  “Okay,” said Sim, “that’s reasonable.”

  When he thought about it, the theory was huge. As a failsafe against someone randomly opening the elevator, they would have wanted someone to press the up button while within visible proximity, and to keep someone from breaching it, the elevator controls had to be powered from security. The “on” button would also have been somewhere secure where it couldn’t be pressed by just anyone.

  “What makes you think it’s this panel?” he asked the ladies.

  Addison got up and carried a lamp over to the panel. She had cut off the plug and spread the bare wires apart. She let the lamp dangle toward the floor and held it up by the wires.

  “My daddy taught me this,” she said as she held the wires of the lamp up to a wire that ran to the switch on the right.

  Nothing happened, so she moved to the switch in the center. Nothing happened there, either. Addison carefully touched a bare spot on the third switch with one wire from the lamp while she touched the other wire to a ground wire of the first switch.

  The lightbulb in the lamp came on. The third wire had power to it.

  Sim stared into the tiny hole in the frame of the wall where the wire came through along with the others.

  “That means there’s an independent power supply below this room somewhere,” said Sim.

  “I don’t know about you,” said Anne, “but I don’t really feel like beating a hole in the floor.”

  “I agree,” said Garrett. “Besides, all we’re going to find is a low voltage power supply that powers a switch somewhere in the hangar. I’m more inclined to find that switch, but getting into that hangar won’t be too easy now that the snow has melted.”

  “You mean we’re just going to hang out here until next winter?” asked Susan. “You guys are all I have left, but I’m going crazy by then. Get me a shopping cart and just let me wander around the terminal.”

  “It should be cold enough in November, but we won’t be just sitting around until then,” said Garrett. “We’re going to make two sets of plans. One will be how we can get that elevator to come up, but the other will be how to travel across hostile country to Minnesota. We can’t just stroll out the door and go north.”

  Sim added, “Just working on the best bug-out bags is going to be a job. Six months will go by fast enough.”

  ******

  Sim had been right. Time went by fast as they got back into their routines. The snow melted, and they watched as some of the infected struggled to their feet after they thawed out. The survivors all reported the same as they returned from their watches on the roof.

  One night there was a heavy rain followed by a late freeze, and the infected suffered a setback in their thawing process. It gave the survivors a chance to get out and make a mad dash for the hangar one last time. A quick examination of the bodies inside the hangar was reassuring to all of them that there was something to the rectangle that fit seamlessly into the floor, but the hangar didn’t give up any secrets about how to get the elevator to come up.

  If nothing else, the lack of information about the elevator door was the encouragement they needed to prepare better for a long trip to Minnesota, and if by some miracle they figured out the puzzle of the elevator before leaving the safety of the terminal, they could always take their bug-out bags with them.

  After the last thaw, they settled into a routine. Watches were far less boring than they had been in the previous year, and they all found themselves looking forward to their shifts. At least they did until the rain started.

  It wasn’t unusual to see explosions in t
he distance. At first they were assumed to be signs of life, but then they more correctly decided they were signs of human neglect. Natural gas pilot lights were burning everywhere, and with no one around to smell the leaks and no one around to fix them, the explosions were inevitable. Entire neighborhoods were burning down, and all they could do was watch.

  When the rains started the fires didn’t burn as long, but it seemed like there were always pillars of black smoke rising from somewhere no matter which direction they faced.

  It wasn’t easy to stay dry on top of the terminal, so they decided to build small shelters at key locations where they could stand watch without getting soaked. Instead of patrolling in the rain, they strung wires across the roof. The small construction jobs helped to pass a few more days, and they at least felt a sense of purpose. It was sitting around doing nothing that would make time slow down.

  They never saw other people in the area, but Susan had a keen eye and began making a chart of the bodies after she noticed bodies she hadn’t seen before. When she told Garrett what she saw, he decided to schedule two people on watch for extra coverage, but they relaxed again after seeing nothing unusual after a few days. Still, the possibility of other survivors being in the airport gave them a break in their daily routines that served to make time go by faster.

  A new problem arrived with the warm weather, and it gave them more to worry about than other people.

  Susan was updating her body chart, and some were missing. When she used binoculars to get a better view of the tarmac between the terminal and the big hangar, she thought one of the bodies was moving even though its head had been burned until there was nothing left. Then she saw the rat sitting on its shoulder.

  Susan scanned each body one at a time and saw rats were on them all, and as she watched, more were joining the feast.

  It was one of the few times that Susan had felt complete disgust since the nightmare had begun. There were plenty of times when she had felt fear and revulsion, but seeing the rats hungrily feeding on the bodies of the infected was beyond her ability to keep her cool.

  “Garrett, I need you on the roof, now.”

  The power in the plane was still enough to keep the security radios charged, and Susan’s voice carried well enough for Garrett to tell she was just barely holding it together.

  “On my way.”

  Garrett didn’t hesitate on his way to the roof, but he waved at Jon, Mike, and Sim as he dashed for the nearest rope that would take him into the ceiling. They saw his urgency and grabbed weapons as they joined in behind him.

  When they arrived in force, Susan felt better even though they would need flame throwers to stop the number of rats on the tarmac. She couldn’t estimate the number of rats below them, but she was glad she saw them in daylight and not at night.

  “Does anyone know if rats will go after living people?” asked Mike.

  “My guess is only when they run out of dead things and rotting food,” said Sim. “Which leads me to a really logical question. The infected are already dead, and they’re rotting even as they walk around, so are the rats eating them?”

  “There’s the answer to your question,” said Garrett.

  He pointed at a group of infected that was walking along the side of a fuel truck between the terminal and the hangar. Each of the infected had easily reached down and scooped up a rat because there were so many. As soon as they had one squirming in their hands, they were forcing them into their mouths, but from what they could tell, the rats were doing their fair share of biting as they died.

  Even as far away as the roof, they were able to hear the shrieking of the rats that were being eaten. Over the squealing of thousands of rats that were feeding on bodies, the shrieking seemed to excite the mass of gray scavengers. Many of them broke away from the unmoving bodies of the infected and began attacking the infected that were wading into the swarms as if it was ankle deep water.

  The rats climbed the standing infected even as the infected continued to try to eat them. It was a losing battle for anything on two legs.

  “If we were down there in the middle of that,” said Jon, “we wouldn’t last seconds because we can feel pain. The infected are still feeding even as they go down.”

  “Will they come for us after the bodies of the infected are all gone?” asked Susan.

  “Rats will turn on each other when the competition for food gets too hard,” said Sim. “I would expect them to take advantage of the opportunity to come after us. We may be forced to move back to the plane.”

  “For how long?” Susan asked with obvious shock.

  “I know it started feeling claustrophobic in there after a while,” said Garrett, “but Sim’s right. We wouldn’t last ten minutes if those things find a way in, but I have an idea. Let’s get inside. You too, Susan. We might not need a watch for a while.”

  On the way back to their shelter in the restaurant they collected the rest of the group, and Garrett explained what he was thinking.

  “The rats are multiplying too fast and there’s no one around to stop them. Two rats can lead to a population of fifteen thousand in one year. That’s if nothing gets in their way. I don’t know how many rats were here before this all started, but I think it was more than two.”

  Sim did some quick math and said, “If there were twenty, and each pair of ten grew to a population of fifteen thousand, that would be one hundred and fifty-thousand rats. Guys, we’re talking about millions of rats. How’re we going to keep millions of rats from getting in?”

  “That’s why we’re moving to the plane, Sim. Rats are omnivores. They’ll eat anything. They’ll eat the coating off of wires if there’s no food around, but since there’s no nutritional value in wires, the population will start self-correcting when they run out of food in a large enough supply. We just have to wait them out.”

  When they got back to their shelter, half of them grabbed their bug-out bags and ran for the passenger bridge still attached to their plane. The rest of them began moving everything edible into the big walk-in freezer. They had emptied it and cleaned it months ago because they knew what it would smell like if they left it stocked.

  Once every box or bag that held food was stashed safely inside the freezer, they began carrying food as fast as they could to the plane. Garrett gave orders as they moved as quickly as possible, and he explained that they would take it all if they had enough time, but if the rats got inside, the nearest person should be sure the freezer is shut.

  They moved a remarkable amount of food before Addison spotted the first rat. Anne heard her yell and closed the freezer door. They all began a final dash carrying one last box. Together as a group they ran down the concourse and through the boarding bridge. As the last one boarded, Anne locked the door, just as she had done for a countless number of flights. The flight crew of Executive One was back where they had started.

  Inside the terminal the rats had found a hallway jammed full of the infected. From there they had moved throughout the building, finding the smallest of cracks to exploit until the inside of the terminal was as covered as the tarmac outside.

  They could smell the food that had been inside the shelter, and they searched around the freezer door in vain. They also began following the scent of the boxes that had been moved to the plane. Frenzied rats bit each other, and the smell of blood from those with wounds caused others to attack them. The population was self-correcting already.

  Inside the safety of Executive One, a few of the crew were curious enough to watch through the small window on the center of the door, but not for long. It would have been a terrible way to die for any of them if they had been caught in the passenger bridge. The carpeted tunnel was about as wide as the lane on a road, but the floor was totally blanketed by the gray and brown swarm that scurried down the hallway.

  Sim said with a slight shiver, “I am one lucky fool.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Garrett.

  “While I was out there freezing my rear end off,
those things were breeding. If I was still out there when they started swarming out to find food, I would have been on their menu.”

  There were nods of agreement all around as they settled in for the siege.

  ******

  November seemed to take longer to arrive once the survivors were confined to a smaller area, but as the time passed the view outside of the plane went through drastic changes. The hungry rats were like efficient eating machines that removed every scrap except bones.

  The first day had been like listening to a storm approach as rats jumped against the door trying to find the food that had been in the tunnel. There was the smell of the humans who had become a food source, as well.

  Above the plane, the rats were dropping from the roof of the terminal onto all of the passenger bridges. The sound of the running and bouncing rodents echoed inside the bridges like rolling thunder. All the crew could do was get comfortable and wait.

  No one spoke as the attack went on for hours. Garrett sat in the familiar and reassuring surroundings of the flight deck. He had made sure the windows were all locked into place, but the furry bodies with black eyes were hanging onto the windows until they were pushed off by larger rats. He kept checking the locks and watching for cracks to appear every time a bigger, heavier rat would land.

  Most of the crew just burrowed down into piles of blankets and tried to block out the noise with earphones or plugs. Sleep eluded all of them for the first few hours, but when enough time passed, they all began drifting off.

  Jon joined Garrett in the flight deck, but neither man spoke. The infection had been bad, and surviving in an airport terminal was a ridiculous way to stay alive, but this was adding insult to injury.

  The runways, taxiways, and grassy areas were all blanketed, and they rippled with movement going out in all directions. It was more like a choppy sea than waves rolling toward the shore.

  The remaining hours of the first day passed by, and when nightfall arrived, even the pilot and copilot became tired enough to sleep. Throughout the night they were awakened when they heard the noise levels increase, but gradually they tuned out the squeals and the thumps. They all fell into a fitful sleep that left them feeling drained.