by Schafer, Jon
Five million in gold stored in the vault of the Garnett Bank could bring out the worst greed in anyone.
Although his initial motivation for coming to his office had been to find sanctuary in a world that was trying to eat itself, he did have a secondary plan that he’d been working on. He had heard through the grapevine that the bank was holding a large amount of gold for a client who transacted foreign land investments. Realizing that the banking system was shutting down across the country, he decided that he had a good chance of grabbing the fortune for himself. He obsessed about the gold and continually planned out the different ways he could steal it until it felt like his head would burst.
For days, Harrison had even walked around with pieces of cloth shoved into his ears so that none of his plans would leak out and be stolen by someone else. His secretary had asked him if he had an ear infection. Fearing that he would be discovered, he fired her. Harrison knew that she had always been suspicious of him and his ideas and that she only wanted him to remove the earplugs so that she could see the knowledge spill out of his head and steal the gold for herself. She was always saying things like, 'Such and such client called, and I need you to sit down with me and update his file', or 'We need to discuss the Japanese banking venture', all tricks to try and lure him into a conversation so it would force him to take out the plugs and reveal himself.
But he was smarter than that.
The nagging worry that his secretary would find out what he was up to plagued Harrison all that day. After considering the situation, he came up with a plan. That evening, he went to her small apartment, and after gaining access by pretending to apologize, offered to reinstate her with a raise. After she accepted, he sat with her and made small talk until he was sure that she was alone. Then he beat her to death with a length of pipe. He left the body lying in the living room, sure that in a world slowly going insane he wouldn’t be connected to the murder. Now his plan was safe, and he could move into his office and lay low.
After waiting days for it to happen, when the power went off it had almost been orgasmic for him. Even though the meddling people from the radio station had shown up, he was able to bluff them into thinking he was happy to have a cop around to protect him. To act slightly crazy had been a spur of the moment idea that had paid off. And while he been really surprised to find an actual Sherriff’s Deputy in the building, he managed to convince them that he was nothing but a slightly eccentric, law abiding citizen who was only worried about protecting his property.
His gold.
When they first discovered him, Harrison had considered killing them, but they were armed, and all he had for a weapon was the pipe he’d used to murder his secretary. He studied the interlopers carefully while he was talking to them but couldn't discern if they were aware of the knowledge he carried in his head. He was relieved when they decided he was no threat. Playing the role of someone meek and humble was, after all, the easiest way to get close to someone and kill them when they weren't looking. And when the power died a few seconds later, he knew it was a sign. This was what he had been waiting for, and everything was now coming together perfectly.
The vault in the bank was secured by a time lock, which was now disengaged, and a magnetic lock that would disengage when the power went out. The first two parts of his plan fell into place without him having to do anything at all. The only thing standing in his way was the combination lock, and that should prove to be only a minor hindrance as he had beaten the numbers out of the bank manager before killing her on the Sunday the dead rose up to walk the Earth. The last thing that could stand in his way was the people who had taken the building as their new home. He found a way around this by avoiding them during the day and only working at night.
In just a few days, he would be inside the bank itself and then the vault. He would steal the gold and hide it in his office. Once this was done, he would glue the piece of glass back in the door so that no one would be the wiser.
Checking his watch, Harrison saw that he had time for a nap before it would be safe to resume his work. After sliding the food tray out into the hall, he stretched out on the carpet with his back against the door and clutched the sharpened screwdriver he used as a glasscutter to his chest. Quickly, he dropped into a dream of running through fields of gold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Clearwater, Florida:
Steve left the station and crossed the hall to the men's room. Standing at the urinal, he was wondering how difficult it would be for Meat to teach Heather how to drive a semi. His thoughts were interrupted by Jonny G banging through the door and positioning himself a few feet to his left.
"We need to talk," Jonny said urgently.
In a slightly condescending tone, Steve replied, "Jonny, the only person I speak to when I have my dick in my hands is the phone sex goddess at the one nine-hundred number I call when I can't get a date for Saturday night. Wait until I'm finished."
Ignoring this, Jonny asked, "What’s up with Heather and Marcia?"
Steve thought about it for a minute and replied, "I've had it in my hand a couple times while I was talking to Heather, but I haven't tried Marcia yet." Raising an eyebrow, he added, "But I'm always willing to experiment."
Jonny gave him a quizzical look and asked, "What are you talking about?"
Steve shook his head and said, "Never mind. So what's the big deal about Heather and Marcia?"
In a rush, Jonny said, "They're being all secretive, and now they're down on the eleventh floor looking through the offices there for something, and I heard them say something about being pregnant or getting pregnant and I'm worried."
Heather had told Steve the night before about her quest, but obviously Marcia had neglected to tell Jonny G. What went on between the G-man and his main squeeze was none of his business, so Steve replied, "I wouldn't worry about it Jonny, it's probably nothing."
"I'm too young to be a dad," Jonny said mournfully.
Steve laughed and said, "Don't worry stud, like I said, it's nothing to be worried about."
After exiting the bathroom with Jonny in tow, Steve heard Marcia call out to him in a loud voice from down the hall. He turned to find her jogging toward him. His first thought was that something had happened to Heather. He immediately started moving in Marcia's direction, but when he saw the look of joy on the young woman's face, he stopped to wait for her and asked, "What's going on, why all the excitement?"
"You've got to come quick, both of you," she said breathlessly after stopping a few feet away.
Steve's concern rose again at the summons, but before he could put voice to it, Marcia said happily, "We found a little girl. Heather's with her now."
Turning to go back down the hall to the stairs, Marcia said over her shoulder, "She's so cute, you just have to see her. She's been hiding in the building alone this whole time and -." Seeing both men still standing in place, she said, "Well come on, Jonny, don't just stand there, she needs us."
As Marcia disappeared around the corner to the stairs, Steve said to Jonny, "Now you might want to start worrying."
"Why's that?" The intern asked.
"From the look on Marcia's face, I think you did just become a daddy."
They entered the suite of offices on the eleventh floor and found Heather leaning on the edge of a desk, talking softly to a little girl seated in a chair a few feet in front of her. The girl's eyes widened upon seeing Steve and Jonny G walk in, so Heather told the two men, "This is Cindy. She's not supposed to talk to strangers, so you have to introduce yourselves so we can all be friends."
"My name's Steve," Steve said, as he tried to force a smile.
"Hi, I'm Jonny," Jonny added a big smile and a little wave.
In a shy voice, the little girl said, "Pleased to meet you. My name's Cindy."
Heather said to Steve, "We were down here looking around when I found Cindy hiding in the knee space of a desk. She wouldn't talk to strangers so I made friends with her and we had a nice talk. She
just finished telling me how she ended up being here when you came in." Turning back to Cindy, Heather said, "Please show Steve your arm, Cindy. He needs to see your owies too."
Even though the building had lost most of its air conditioning when the power went out, it usually stayed cool except for a few hours around mid-afternoon. It was early in the day, so it was still chilly in the office. Cindy was wearing a long sleeve sweatshirt, which she reluctantly pushed up on her right arm.
When Steve saw what was revealed beneath, his hand flew to the butt of his pistol at his hip. Heather saw this and rapidly shook her head while mouthing the word 'No' at him. Cindy was looking shyly down at the floor, embarrassed by all the attention and missed Steve’s grab for the weapon.
Trying to control his urge to shoot what he perceived as a threat, Steve calmed himself and asked, "How did this happen, Cindy?"
She mumbled something in reply that Steve couldn't understand so Heather helped her out. "Cindy told me that her little brother got bit and got real sick. He bit her, but it wasn't his fault because he was sick." Looking down at the little girl, Heather said, "Right, Cindy?"
She nodded but refused to meet anyone's eyes.
A thousand questions raced through Steve's brain but he had to make sure of one thing before he asked them. "When did this happen, Cindy?"
Holding up her arm to reveal the three, mostly healed, human bite marks that she had shown them, Cindy replied, "It happened a day or two before Halloween. I remember because we had just come back from Tyrone Square Mall. We were out buying costumes and my mommy got into a scuffle with this man in the parking lot, and my brother tried to help. Mommy pushed the man down and we locked ourselves in the car and drove off but Jimmy got hurt."
"Bitten?" Steve asked.
Cindy looked back down at the floor and nodded her head.
Pointing at Cindy's arm, Steve asked, "And Jimmy did this to you?"
Tears sprang to her eyes as Cindy cried out, "He didn't mean to do it. Later that day I went into his room to see if he was all right and he was real sick. He was staggering all around and ..."
Cindy choked up and couldn't finish.
Marcia came forward and knelt by the child, putting her arms around her while telling her it was all right. She shot Steve a dirty look but he didn't notice. His mind was full of thoughts at what they had discovered about Cindy.
Looking at Heather, Steve said in an awestruck voice, "She was bitten over two months ago and she never turned. Everyone turns within a day, most within an hour or less. Since she didn't then that means that she’s –.”
"Immune," Heather finished with a smile.
Steve sat at the head of the table in the conference room, trying to remember the name of the city where the government had set up its research lab to find a cure for the HWNW virus. Six of the other survivors sat patiently as he racked his brain. Mary was absent, claiming that the whole situation was no big deal and none of her concern, and Marcia had taken Cindy clothes shopping, hoping to find something in one of the Galleria shops that would fit the small girl. Cindy had only brought along one extra change of clothes when her father brought her to the bank building and had been alternately washing her outfits in the bathroom sink.
"Russianville?" Steve mumbled to himself.
Jonny G rose and went over to a map of the United States that showed circles drawn around each of the cities where Tom Oliver owned a radio station. Tracing his finger slowly back and forth over the state of Arkansas, he suddenly stopped and asked, "Russellville?"
Snapping his fingers, Steve said, "That's it."
He rose and stood next to Jonny as the others crowded around behind them.
"It’s about halfway between Little Rock and the Oklahoma border," Jonny said, as he pointed to where the city was shown on the map. "That's a hell of a long haul from here."
"We're not going there," Steve said as his eyes dropped to the outline of Florida. "At least not right away. We just need to find a military facility that's up and running where we can make contact with someone in the government."
"How do you know there's even a military or a government left?" Tick-Tock asked.
Sitting back down at the table, Steve replied, "We don't know if they're still around for sure, but the last time I talked to that guy at McDill, before we lost contact with him, he said that the military was starting to deploy so they could begin operations to take back the country."
"Too bad McDill's gone," Heather commented. "We could just hop across the bay."
"Are you sure it's gone?" Brain asked.
Tick-Tock spoke up, "We should be able to reach them with the radio I took out of the hog, but I've tried every frequency and never heard a peep."
To add to the argument that McDill was history, Heather told her story of how she had seen the dead swarming around the fence and onto the air base.
"So where does that leave us?" Meat asked in frustration. "We've found someone who's immune to the HWNW virus and could possibly hold the cure, and we've got nowhere we can take her. I'm not too hot on the idea of making some kind of suicide run to Arkansas though. I doubt we'd even make it out of the city, but... “
Steve held up his hand for Meat to cease talking, "Like I said earlier, we're not going to Arkansas. All we have to do is figure out where the nearest active military base is and bring Cindy there. Some of you have lived in this area for years, so I need you to think of any of the Army, Navy or Marine Corps bases in the area that we can get to."
"The Corps has a base right off the Gandy Bridge. I think they deal with amphibious vehicles." Tick-Tock volunteered.
"Closed in the last round of budget cuts," Heather said. "They moved them over to McDill."
"The Navy's got a couple places in Key West," Tick-Tock then offered. "I was down there once, and the military's got all kind of bases around there. Coast Guard, Navy, even the Air Force is creeping around down there."
Pulling a legal pad toward him, Steve wrote this down and said, "Good, anyone else think of anything?"
"NASA's got that big compound on the East coast by Cocoa Beach," Heather said. "I went over there once to see the shuttle take off."
"Good," Steve said as he wrote it down. More ideas were thrown out, and after fifteen minutes they had a list of seven possible places where they could bring Cindy.
Comparing the list against the map on the wall, Steve noted that two of the bases were too far inland for them to reach. These were crossed off because he knew, from talking to the survivors they were in contact with, that the interstates and secondary roads between cities were impassable. Car wrecks and stalled vehicles blocked most on and off ramps with the resulting traffic jam of abandoned cars backing up for miles. Steve had read on the Internet about the same situation befalling other cities as they went through their death throes. People fleeing from the dead in one city would invariably find the sanctuary they were seeking already overrun or in the final stages of evacuation when they arrived. Even using the hog, it would be too dangerous for them to get as far as Tampa. Although they could use the winch on the front of the vehicle to move most anything in the road that blocked their way, it would mean leaving the safety of the armored car and exposing themselves to attack. They would have to go by water.
"Who knows how to pilot a boat?" He asked.
"How big?" Heather asked.
"One big enough to get us to the NASA facility. We'll shoot for the Navy base in the Keys as our primary landing spot, but if that's gone we might need to go as far as Cocoa Beach. We can't depend on being able to refuel, so the boat has to be able to make it round trip on the gas in its tanks and what we can carry aboard. Just to play it safe though, we might as well say we need to make it all the way to Jacksonville."
Jonny studied the map and whistled, "That's a long haul. You're gonna need a lot of boat to go that far."
"How about a sailboat?" Tick-Tock asked.
This struck everybody as the perfect solution. They wouldn't have to
worry about putting into different docks while searching for fuel, like they would if they took a small power boat, or crashing into those same docks while trying to pilot a bigger ship.
"So you'll drive the boat," Steve said to Tick-Tock, assuming that since he had brought up the idea, he knew how to sail.
"Should be able to," He replied. "I've been reading up on it and it's not too difficult."
"Reading up on it?" Steve asked. "You've never sailed?"
"A small, eighteen foot, single mast, open cockpit when I was a kid," Tick-Tock said.
"How many years ago was that?" Susan asked.
"Twenty or so," Tick-Tock replied. "But it's like riding a bike. We're not sailing the America’s Cup, we're cruising through well-chartered waters from a known point to a known point. It'll be a piece of cake. We won't even have to get far from shore."
After some discussion, the group decided this was their best option. It was agreed that they'd sail with Tick-Tock as the Captain. All that was left were the details.
"How big of a boat do you think we'll need?" Steve asked Tick-Tock.
"How many people are going?" He replied with his own question.
"Cindy of course, you, me and probably Marcia," Steve replied.
"Why Marcia?" Jonny asked defensively.
"To take care of Cindy. I haven't had to deal with a ten year old girl since I was a ten year old boy," Steve replied.
"And then it was just to play doctor," Heather chimed in.
When the laughter died down, Jonny said, "You need to know that Marcia gets seasick. We went out on a fishing charter once and she spent the whole day barfing. Even once she got back on land she was sick for two more days."
The group was quiet for a moment as they took this in.
"I'll go," Susan spoke up. When everyone looked at her she blushed and added, "I have experience with children. I teach part-time at Brentwood Elementary." In a slightly quieter voice she added, "Or I used to teach."