by Howard, Bob
Doctor Sellers motioned for Doctor Nkrumah to join him as he approached Petty Officer Gibbs.
“We might not find more bite victims in this section,” said Doctor Sellers. “We need to have someone check the roster to see who did not report for inspection.”
Gibbs had kept a close count on the roster as the port section had come through, and she was surprised to find they had all been accounted for. A quick count of the number of people in line to be inspected showed there were four crewmen missing from the starboard section.
“It looks like we’re going to have to do some hunting,” said Gibbs.
Her ponytail bounced as she quickly went around the room picking out a few of her best security officers. Normally she would have left that to the Chief of Security, but when Gibbs had been forced to shoot the bitten crewman, he had done what he was supposed to do and gone to see that the Captain was safe.
Gibbs couldn’t leave her two charges while the inspections were still being done, so she instructed one of her detail to lead the others. Their orders were shoot to kill anyone who refused to be inspected, and they were reminded that it had to be a head shot. It was a grim group of men and women that left in search of their shipmates.
The examinations went ahead without further incidents, but the security detail returned with three of the missing crewmen. Two had been bitten, and the third had flu symptoms. He had decided not to report for the examinations because he was afraid someone would think he was infected. He regretted that decision when he was almost shot by the security detail.
The fourth crewman had been found hiding in one of the vehicles the Mercy Mission ship used to carry medical teams inland, and he was armed. A standoff began, but it didn’t last long. The order had been given to shoot to kill, so the order had been followed. The security detail radioed in to Cassandra that the fourth missing crewman had been shot, and she instructed them to cover the vehicle with a tarp and to paint a biohazard warning on all sides.
As a precaution, the crewman with the flu symptoms was put in a separate isolation ward. Until they were sure about how the infection that caused reanimation of the dead was transmitted, it would be better than having him return to the quarters he shared with two dozen shipmates. The other two bite victims were led away to join the man who had saluted Cassandra, and they cried when they were restrained in their beds.
CHAPTER NINE
Return to Mud Island
The Chief didn’t waste any time swimming back to the plane. The water was a deep green, and he couldn’t see what was below him, but he imagined it wasn’t something he wanted to see with his own eyes.
Thousands of people lived along the banks of Lake Norman, and a large part of the population from Charlotte had evacuated toward the lake. Many had died on land, but countless numbers had either tried to swim to the little islands or had taken boats. Judging by the number of boats that were still tied to their docks, most of the population must have tried to swim.
The last minutes of their lives had been frantic attempts to swim faster than their pursuers, and when most of them did manage to reach the islands, they were stranded without food, fresh water, or shelter, but worst of all with bite victims.
When the Chief climbed onto the passenger side float of the Beaver, he saw that an infected dead was trying to pull itself over the float on the pilot side. It didn’t have the reasoning power to pull itself around or under it, so it just kept trying to go over it. The thing was swallowing so much water as it struggled against the float that it was about to become a moot point, but the Chief didn’t want to stay where he was to watch.
He climbed through the passenger side door and crossed over to the pilot’s seat. The bobbing of the plane in the water shook the infected dead loose from the port side float, and it sank out of sight. The Chief did his preflight checks before climbing back out to stand on the float and retrieve the first anchor. He stowed it before crossing back through the plane to pull in the second anchor. That was when he noticed the sky had darkened toward the south. It was time to get out of the path of the coming storm that would blanket the area with radiation.
He started the engine and let it run until the sound became a smooth roar, then he started driving the plane like a boat. He brought the plane to the tip of the sandbar as slowly as possible. Bumping against it could do just enough damage to keep them from taking off. If that happened, they would only be able to abandon the plane and return to the shelter for what could be years, depending upon the amount of radiation that was dropped over Ambassadors Island.
Kathy hopped from the sandbar onto the float and pulled open the passenger compartment door for Colleen and Hampton. Then she took a couple of steps forward along the float and climbed through the front door into the passenger seat. She was pulling on a headset even before Colleen and Hampton made the jump to the float and climbed inside.
The Chief pointed to the south, and he didn’t need to explain what they were seeing. The sky was as dark as night as the massive storm was moving across Georgia toward the northwest corner of South Carolina.
When the Beaver rotated to point northeast, the sky was so bright that it was hard to believe what was behind them. The Chief knew that direction had the longest stretch of open water the Beaver would need to take off. He powered up, and the plane began to gain enough speed for them to leave Lake Norman behind. As usual, the Chief lifted the plane into the air effortlessly and then banked toward the southeast.
“I want to take one more look at the Oconee Nuclear Power Plant if we can get close enough,” said the Chief. “Kathy, you can start hailing Fort Sumter and Mud Island even though we’re out of range. We need to see if things at home have changed. When you get him on the radio, ask Doctor Bus for radiation readings on the surface.”
Hampton couldn’t believe he was in the air again, and even though he and Colleen had been with the Chief and Kathy on Ambassadors Island, it felt unreal to be heading back to the place where he had lived his entire life.
“How many HAZMAT suits do we have back here?” he yelled over the roar of the big engine. The plane had been comfortably refinished inside, but there was no way to eliminate that much sound.
Kathy was busy trying to make radio contact with either Mud Island or Fort Sumter, but the Chief heard the question and held up three fingers.
“It won’t be a problem,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Someone can go into the shelter and bring another one out, or we can have Tom bring some out in a boat. Either way, radiation levels were already dropping due to the rain when we left. The only reason we picked up any radiation was because we stirred it up leaving the shelter.”
“You know I’ve got about a thousand more questions,” yelled Hampton, “and Colleen will have a thousand more.”
The Chief didn’t answer immediately, but a broad smile crossed his face.
“I’ll tell you this much now,” he yelled back, “I want to see how the Oconee Plant looks, and then we’re going to make top speed for the coast. Our shelter is only a few miles north of Georgetown, but the last we heard it had become crowded by survivors. We don’t even know if we can land there.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then we’ll fly down to Fort Sumter. There’s an even bigger shelter there, and it’s occupied by friends of ours.”
“You make friends everywhere you go?” asked Hampton. “You just made a lot of people happy back there on Ambassadors Island.”
“I had a lot of help from my blond friend here, but mostly it’s just being in the right place at the right time.”
The Chief approached the Oconee Nuclear Power plant from the east and saw what he had hoped for. The trees were clearly leaning toward the north as the storm came in from the south. It wasn’t the best news for Iris and her band of survivors, but they would be safe inside their shelter. If they had stayed outside, they would have all died within a few days.
Satisfied that Mud Island had been spared for the time being, the
Chief put the Beaver into a steep bank to the southeast and then leveled out for the flight home. The power plant would continue to leak long after the storm went by, but the worst of the radiation would be local or pushed to the north.
The bad news came only a few minutes later when Kathy managed to finally raise Mud Island by radio. Molly’s voice came through her headset, and the young girl was ecstatic. She dropped all pretense of radio protocol and was shouting. Kathy couldn’t even get her to calm down long enough to find out what was happening back at Mud Island.
******
I heard Molly practically screaming into the microphone as I walked into the living room where the radio was set up. Molly had the headset on, so I couldn’t hear who she was talking to, but judging by her behavior, it had to be our missing friends.
“Uncle Eddy, it’s aunt Kathy,” shrieked Molly.
I had to carefully get Molly to turn the microphone and headset over to me, because I needed to warn the Chief and Kathy that it wasn’t safe to land.
“Mud Island to Beaver. Be advised situation is unfriendly.”
“Where are they?” asked Tom.
Tom and the others were filing into the living room. We had plenty of privacy when we needed it, but our little family was feeling the need to be near each other until our friends were back home.
“I don’t know. Molly just made contact, and I don’t want the current surface inhabitants to guess this is Mud Island.”
So far there had been no indication that the people living in the houseboat or anyone in their armada of smaller boats had a clue that the shelter was on the island, but as I answered Tom, we all saw the door of the houseboat fly open. It was prominently displayed on the main monitor that showed the surface.
A man we all had come to recognize as the leader burst out onto the dock, and his head was rotating left and right as his eyes searched the sky. He canted his head to the left and cupped a hand behind his right ear as if he could hear something but couldn’t identify its source.
“Beaver, you’re noisy,” I said into the microphone.
“Roger, Mud Island.”
We didn’t know if Kathy and the Chief had a visual on the fleet of boats that had filled the moat, but the amount of noise coming from that many boats was probably good cover for the sound of the Beaver. We saw the leader looking at the boat city with open distain as he gave up on the hope of identifying the source of the radio call he had heard and headed back to the open door of the houseboat.
Before he could get back inside to his radio, I keyed the microphone one last time and just said, “Radio silence.”
There were two clicks through my headset, and then it was quiet.
“How do we help them get home?” asked Jean.
“A better question might be how we can get this flotilla of survivors to move on,” I said.
We had all been trying to think of a way to get them motivated to move, but the island had proven to be the safest thing they had found along the coast. Ironically, it was the moat that was making them stay. The infected continued to emerge from the dense trees along the beach of the mainland, but the water was so deep close to shore that they just disappeared from view as soon as they took one step from the beach into the moat.
The people who filled the hundreds of boats were still sick from the radioactive fallout, but they weren’t dying fast enough to be a threat to the living. When they died, they were usually just dumped over the edge of the boat to disappear along with the infected dead, but whenever possible they were carried to the beach on the Atlantic side of the island and used as bait for the blue crabs. It seemed to become everyone else’s good fortune when someone else died.
I had noticed that some of the boats tried to keep themselves separated by a little more distance from the main body of boats, and after a while I began to understand that they were family groups that were trying to protect each other. So, there was dissension among the people of the boat city, but it appeared that open conflict was a fast way to bring on the inevitable.
One group used some long poles to push another boat away from them when they had come a little too close for comfort. The response was frighteningly swift. The boat that had encroached on the first group closed the gap quickly, and men jumped across like pirates after the crew of a fat merchant ship.
Within a minute, the family had been killed, and the men who had started the battle were dragging the lifeless bodies into their boats. I was horrified when I saw that no one, not even the children, were spared. Now they not only had bait for the blue crabs, they had another boat.
Of course they were just as likely to turn on each other as they were families, and I was still watching when they started fighting over the boat. Two different groups of people watched as the first groups exterminated each other, and then they happily moved in to take possession of their boats.
So it went from sunrise to sunset, and they still didn’t appear to be inclined to move on.
We considered the possibility that Captain Miller could bring the Cormorant from Fort Sumter to Mud Island. The Coast Guard vessel had proven itself to be quite capable of causing destruction, and it would be devastating to the smaller boats if it entered the moat with its deck guns blazing. The problem was the radioactive fallout. As minimal as it was, they couldn’t risk the lives of any of Captain Miller’s men.
They had also heard the radio broadcast from Fort Sumter when they had informed the Chief and Kathy that Mud Island was unfriendly. Captain Miller had also warned them that there were possibly hostiles on board the Yorktown.
The World War II aircraft carrier sat just far enough from Fort Sumter to keep them from feeling like it was a threat, but if the hostiles saw the Cormorant leave Fort Sumter, it might cause the ship to draw fire from the Yorktown. No one knew the extent of the hostile force’s weaponry, but they didn’t want to find out what they could do the hard way.
Doctor Bus brought everyone back to the present when he asked, “Has anyone looked at the main monitor lately?”
Molly said, “There’s a big ship coming right at us.”
She was right. All of us looked at the view on the monitor that showed the Atlantic Ocean, and there was a big, blue and white ship driving through the waves on a course that appeared to be straight at Mud Island.
I put the camera on zoom, and the markings became just clear enough for Bus to tell us all he thought it might be a hospital ship.
******
The Mercy Mission ship had spent months at sea and had only been resupplied once by a United States Navy carrier group that was headed south. They were not invited to join the group and were not given any information other than to avoid making port in any populated areas.
Captain Abbott had placed the ship on a rationing program as they tried to establish contact with other friendly forces, but European ships were not responding, and they had lost contact with the US forces with whom they had hoped to rendezvous.
There had also been very little contact with the Royal British Navy, but bits and pieces of messages were intercepted that indicated Russian ships were seen trying to make port along the coast of England. It seemed that the Russians were trying to acquire territory while it was unprotected. The British Navy was strangely quiet, but Captain Abbot had been a man of the sea for many years, and he knew they were strategically allowing the Russians to think they were going to grab major ports without opposition. When the infection got on board the Russian ships that were foolish enough to dock in major ports, there would soon be less Russian ships to fight.
What Captain Abbott would never know was that United States Navy fast attack submarines were assisting the Royal Navy and had positioned themselves near those same ports to engage any of the Russian ships that managed to make it back out to sea. Mankind was being pushed to the brink of extinction by the infection, but as Sellers and Nkrumah had predicted, mankind would hurry the process along even more quickly by killing each other.
The carrier g
roup had not been unfriendly. As a matter of fact, they had transferred enough supplies to the Mercy Mission ship to ensure they could avoid a dangerous port for a very long time, but they were on a mission of their own, and they were as concerned as everyone else about having a ship near them that was carrying the infection. They sincerely hoped one of the brilliant doctors on the crew of the Mercy Mission ship would find a cure or even a vaccine to prevent the infection, but they were eager to put as much distance between them and the infected dead that were restrained in the isolation ward.
It had been a difficult trip across the Atlantic with more unexpected deaths. Even though they had done exhaustive inspections for bites, there seemed to be new ways for the infection to get into the crew.
The first outbreak began when Cassandra Gibbs had gone to get a couple hours of much needed sleep. She had pushed herself to the breaking point, worried that something would happen to the doctors while she was away. It seemed like her head had just sunk into her pillow when the screaming started. The fatigue was gone instantly as she strapped on her sidearm and went out into the corridor with the barrel of her M4 leading the way.
“Remember your training,” she thought. “Doors and corners…doors and corners.”
The screaming hadn’t come from far away, and the big smear of blood on the deck was an easy trail to follow. When the trail ended, it began again as footprints, and she reasoned that there were at least six sets of prints. Up ahead she could hear the groaning of the small horde as they moved along the passageway.
At the next corner, Gibbs put her back against the wall and listened. If she was close enough, she could single target fire more accurately with her Glock. The groaning was only about six feet away, so she let the rifle down against the strap and made a smooth transition to the sidearm. She was targeting even as she rounded the corner, and since they were moving away from her, the first three went to the floor before the others even turned around. Three more rounds disposed of them before they had a chance to step in her direction.