“Well, you did get shot in the leg,” Anna quipped.
“Seems like that was a year ago.” The SEAL stood upright, panning his eyes in all directions. “I think we lost them, or at least the majority of them.”
“Yeah,” Dallas started, “they’s way back behind us, an’ I think—”
Something exploded from the thickets on the right. It impacted Seyfert, bowling him over and knocking him to the ground. The group was prepared to fight, but the creature kept going, a brown streak through the haze. It had been a large deer, but its passage had been so fast that it hadn’t been possible to tell if it had been male or female.
The SEAL issued a slight groan and lay still. He was on his side and his friends rushed to him, Dallas reaching to turn him over.
“Wait!” Anna hissed. She knelt down next to him and felt his neck, then moved her hands down his ribs. The SEAL gave another involuntary groan but remained motionless. Anna put her pack down next to a semiconscious Seyfert, rummaged through it, and came out with her medic bag. She produced some bandages and antiseptic, applying the cream liberally to a bandage and dabbing Seyfert’s bloody face. He was cut above his right eye and his lip and nose were bleeding. She continued to work on the Navy man as Dallas and Rick surveyed the area.
The fog was lifting, but visibility was still only fifty feet or so.
“That deer musta been runnin’ from sumthin’.”
“Agreed, Hillbilly, but our SEAL looks to be questionable for the remainder of the game. Carrying him is going to be a bitch.”
“Nobody’s fuck’n carrying me.” Seyfert tried to sit up, but Anna stopped him with a hand on his chest.
“Hang on there, soldier. You probably have a concussion.” She flashed a light into his eyes, one at a time. “Is your neck okay?”
Seyfert moved his head and spat some blood onto the ground. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”
“Bullshit. You just got absolutely bundled by that deer. Let me check you out for a sec and then we can move on.”
A lone infected stumbled out of the fog, but it didn’t see the group and moved laterally away from them.
“We don’t have a sec.” Seyfert gently removed Anna’s hand from his chest and sat up. “Fuck.” He touched the back of his hand to his nose and it came away bloody.
“Here, shove this up there and pinch.” Anna handed him a small piece of gauze.
He dabbed his nose then put the gauze up his left nostril. He tried to stand, but a sharp pain in his side stopped him. He uttered an involuntary hiss and Anna looked at him, raising her eyebrows.
“I said I’m good.” He reached up a hand and she helped him up. He rubbed his side.
“Bruised for sure, but I don’t think those ribs are broken. Should be a fun walk to the coast.”
A brief fracas in the lessening mist behind the SEAL and the medic caused them both to spin around. Rick was using the butt of his rifle to finish off a single infected which he had already put on the ground.
“You done screwing around?” he demanded of Seyfert with a smile.
The SEAL shook his head. “No respect.”
Alcatraz, San Francisco
Detective Captain Mike Meara, formerly of the San Francisco Police department, studied the six people sitting around the ancient metal table with him. Tony and Abbey, who had just returned from a run to the mainland to procure supplies sat to his left, as did Mr. Martingale, another survivor. Captain McInerney, captain of the USS Florida and the ranking military officer in the region, sat next to Meara on the right, as did Ali, one of the survivors that had come to Alcatraz in the early days. Meara glanced out the window of the Model Industries building at San Francisco Bay, wishing he could say what needed to be said without causing dissension. He filled his lungs with the salt air from a broken window then released it, returning his gaze to the folks at the table. His eyes roamed over them and settled on the wiry, auburn-haired girl, Ali. She would be the source of his troubles, but they wouldn’t end with her. Several of the survivors in this large room would also balk at what he had to say.
“He’s a murderer,” Meara began and was immediately met with rebuke.
“Seriously?” demanded the red-head. “How many people has he brought or gotten safely to this island? Twenty? Fifty?”
One of the two people who was not seated stepped forward, lifting one piece of paper on a clipboard and looking briefly at what was underneath. “Thirty-eight at last count.”
Everyone glared at him and he stepped back. “Sorry.”
“Thank you, Weathers,” the red-haired girl said with a slight smile. “Thirty-eight,” she continued. “Thirty-eight people that he not only didn’t kill, but risked his own life to save. Most of them are kids.”
Tony, a former PG&E worker and a hell of a brave man, was another of the people Meara knew would take issue with Meara’s incoming directive. Tony raised his hand. “He saved us, too. He tried to save all of us, but he couldn’t.” Tony sighed. “Ali is right,” he added, smiling at her across the table. “Billy is not a threat.”
“He’s a murderer,” Mike added with emphasis.
Ali, whose personality was as fiery as her ginger locks, was enraged. “So am I if you count those dead bastards! So are you!” She pointed her finger at Meara. “Are you going to tell me you haven’t killed a human being before? Especially since the end of the world?”
“I shot and killed one man in the line of duty twenty years ago. I think about it every damn day. I doubt Billy even knows how many people he’s killed. I doubt he has the capacity to care.”
Ali put her hands on the table. “Yeah, but—”
The police captain held up his hand, forestalling her. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t mean to kill, or if he’s sick and needs help. He’ll kill someone here and that person will turn and kill someone else.” Mike shook his head. “He can’t stay on this island.”
Abbey, a dark-haired athletic woman, piped up. “He said he didn’t do it.” She had said it almost under her breath.
“What?” asked McInerney, captain of the Florida, a nuclear attack submarine anchored to the north of Alcatraz.
Abbey spoke a bit louder, “He said he didn’t kill the dentist. The dentist murdered his sister and Billy went to the dentist’s house to confront him, but the guy was already butchered.”
“Oh, well that changes everything,” Martingale, one of the civilian survivors, said sarcastically. He leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. “If a convicted killer says he didn’t do it, it must be true.”
Neither Meara nor McInerney wanted this man at the meeting, but he had been appointed the civilian liaison to all things military or concerning Alcatraz.
Ali glared at him. “Shut up, asshole. If we want any shit out of you, we’ll squeeze your head.”
Meara sighed again, tasting the salt air once more. “Okay, that’s enough. I’m very sorry, but I just don’t trust Billy. You can’t guarantee me that he won’t hurt anybody here and until you can, I can’t allow him on Alcatraz.”
A young sailor hurried into the room, moving to McInerney, and whispering something to him.
“Confirmed?” asked the captain.
“Aye, sir. We can see them with binoculars. They’re only about three thousand feet southeast of us.”
“Thank you, Warren.” The man backed up a few steps and put his hands behind his back, at parade rest. “Ladies, gentlemen,” McInerney began, “we have some folks in need of assistance. There are some families on the Pampanito that are in trouble.”
Tony looked confused. “What’s a Pampanito?”
“It’s a decommissioned World War Two submarine docked next to Fisherman’s Wharf. There are some people living on it and they’re under siege by the dead. They’ve been breached and there are several dead inside the sub.”
Martingale harrumphed. “I hope you’re not asking any of our civilians to—”
“We’ll handle it,” interrupted McInerney. “It’s a
military situation.”
“I’ll come,” Tony said, raising his hand and looking meekly at Martingale. “I can help.” Martingale glared back.
McInerney stood. “Thank you, Tony, but one of our fire teams will take care of it. I’m sorry, folks, but I need to step away to coordinate. Please continue without me and Weathers will take notes.” The captain strode briskly from the room.
Ali also stood. “I can see where this is going and you don’t need me. I’ll go do something productive.” She stormed away in a different direction than the captain had. Pushing open a broken door, she took a set of metal stairs downward and disappeared from sight.
Meara sighed. He had sighed a lot in the past year or so. He looked at the other man standing at parade rest and nodded toward the now empty chair where McInerney had sat. “Mr. Pitt?”
The older, powerfully built man took a seat next to Meara, giving a curt nod. “Thank you.” He hiked his chair in a bit and put his elbows on the table. “I appreciate you all coming to this meeting. The reason I asked you here is simple: Mr. Martingale, you are our liaison between the crew of the Florida and the civilians here. Tony and Abbey, you two are our lead scroungers, and Captain Meara is our civilian leader.” Pitt put his elbows on the table and looked at each person in turn.
“We need to think about securing another location as a larger, more fortified base. I was thinking about Catalina Island eventually. We considered Angel Island and we’re going to set up an outpost on the main Farallon Island, but Catalina is the best option.”
Martingale smiled and raised his eyebrows, looking at Pitt, who did not smile. The grin slowly lost its power and faded, Martingale blinked.
“You’re serious?”
“Yes,” Pitt told him.
“Catalina Island, off of LA? That’s like, four hundred miles from here. You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Forgetting about the monumental task of moving us all there, what if it’s already claimed by other survivors? What if the dead have it?”
Pitt shrugged. “All questions I’ve considered. If the dead have it, we clear it. If there are other survivors, then we integrate.”
“What if they don’t want to integrate?”
“We have a United States attack submarine and three professional fire teams—”
“You mean we take it from them?” interrupted Martingale. “That makes us no better than the gang members that came up from LA!”
Pitt, not used to being interrupted, took a breath. “My suggestion was that we show them how we can help them, not force them into anything. Did we force you to do anything or kill any of you when we came here?”
Martingale shook his head. “I’m still voting no.”
“Shocker there,” Abbey said a bit too loud.
“There won’t be a vote,” Pitt told them. “We will scout the area and after we’re sure it isn’t compromised, we will take anyone who wants to go. If you want to stay here, you are more than welcome. You can shore up the fortifications and go find food, because you won’t be able to grow it here in two years; the soil is bad and getting worse. In addition, as I have previously stated, the structures here are old and in disrepair. Eventually, someone will get hurt. There are two towns on Catalina, with an area of roughly seventy-five square miles and a pre-plague population of less than five thousand. It’s a lot to clear, but we need the space.”
“I’m in,” Tony said.
“Me too,” agreed Abbey.
Corner of Battery and Pacific, San Francisco
“Well, somebody’s in a heap of trouble,” Billy said as he watched a large group of dead try to smash their way through the metal grated windows of a Starbucks. A loud scream rent the air and Billy jumped a bit, looking in all directions. He finally locked his gaze on the thing that was sprinting at him from further down Pacific Avenue. The creature was young, perhaps in her early teens, wearing jeans, yellow sneakers, and a disgusting tank top. She might have been cute before the plague had turned her into a carrier, but now she was horrifying. Half her hair was in a blonde ponytail, the other half had slipped out and was crusted to her face with sweat and blood. Feverish, shaking and coated in gore, this thing had killed recently and was looking to continue her streak by adding Billy to her list of victims.
Billy sighed, aimed down the sight at his target’s chest, and squeezed the trigger on his new weapon.
Nothing happened.
“Uhh…” He pulled the trigger again with the same outcome.
He had time for one more forced “UHHH!” and the thing was on him, slashing with its nails and trying to punch and bite anywhere it could reach. He stretched his right hand for his back sheath to bring his machete around and remembered just a half-second too late that he had left both it and his shotgun sitting on the green diner table with Cyrus and his friends.
The infected girl weighed in at a whopping ninety-five pounds or so, but she was determined to steal Billy’s life away and she punched and kicked him repeatedly as he tried to fight her off. The thing reared its right hand back to rake its claws across Billy’s face, but he shot his left foot out, his sneaker impacting the creature’s right thigh. She stumbled a bit and he thumped her in the face with the butt of his rifle. He heard and saw the bones in her face break and she stumbled back, bleeding.
“Oh!” Billy blurted and reversed the rifle. He flicked off the safety and aimed at her again. He squeezed the trigger just once, rewarded with the exceptionally earsplitting sound of the rifle bark. The disease-ridden thing grabbed its shoulder as it pitched back, landing on its side, gasping. Then it did something Billy hadn’t seen before: it started crying.
The girl held her ruined face in her hands as she bawled. Blood streamed from between her fingers, running down her arms and splashing her jeans. Her shoulder wound also bled freely and Billy was horrified. He took a step forward then two back when she looked up at him.
Billy had been told by some other survivors that these creatures were totally devoid of emotion, but looking at this thing, he knew that was not true. There was a deep sadness on her face, most of which was lost behind a rictus of infinite hatred. Blood flowed from her broken nose as she tried to stand. She put her hand down on the street to push herself up, but slipped and fell back on her side. She screamed as Runners do and Billy shot her in the face.
“What the heck was—?” he began before he realized the dead were on him. They walked past him and glared at the dead girl. Each of the rotting things glanced at Billy as they moved back to the coffee shop and began to smack on the steel grate once more.
“Well, that sure was interesting.” Billy followed them to the store, stooping down to grab an abandoned tire iron on the way. “Fudge-sickles,” he said when he saw what was coming down the street. Many undead were on the way, attracted by the shots he had fired.
“Got to do this in a jiffy!” He leaned his new rifle against the brick of the coffee shop’s exterior and began to destroy the undead with the angled piece of steel. “Ow,” he grumbled after crushing the fourth skull. On the sixth, his hands stung from the impact.
“OW!”
The remaining dead turned to look at him and he destroyed two more before he wrung his hands out. “Really hurts, you know?” he asked a dead man. Again, the thing stared at him for a moment then went back to pushing its friends to get at the steel-grated windows.
Billy cursed himself a fool, chucked the tire iron away, and pulled the knife he had appropriated from his pursuer earlier. Several of the undead twisted and craned their necks to check out the sound of the metal hitting the pavement and Billy used that time to jab his knife into the eye socket of the nearest infected. It dropped and he moved on.
“Excuse me.” He stabbed another.
“Pardon?” Another.
He repeated this a few times, the knife skidding off of a couple skulls, but eventually, he had destroyed the group of infected in front of the Starbucks.
The other dead had
arrived and they were coming toward him. Billy began to shout.
“Hey! Hey over here, dummies!” He grabbed the rifle, waved his arms, and ran down Battery Street a bit, stooping to retrieve the gore-covered tire iron one more time. “Down here!” He ran down the road a bit more and banged the metal on a blue post box. Maybe two hundred dead were in the area, all of which streamed toward him. When they were close, he walked instead of ran around the corner of a building. They followed him and he threw the tire iron through the side window of a Mazda Miata. Billy was hoping for an alarm, but he didn’t get one. The smashing window was enough for the dead to swarm the car. They flooded past him and began to search the car, the ones in the back jostling for a nonexistent meal.
Billy moved quickly, but he knew if he ran, the dead would follow him. He made it back to the Starbucks and whispered through the grated front door.
“Let me in!”
He tried that and a few other ideas, but either there was nobody in the shop, or they didn’t want to let him in. Billy made a face and moved to the side of the building. It was a few stories high, but the fire escape on the side was out of reach.
“Always with the fire escapes!” bemoaned the young man. He was able to semi-quietly drag a trash receptacle to the side of the building. When he balanced on it, he could just reach the iron ladder. It was difficult to pull himself up, but Billy was young and strong.
He used his elbow to break a window on the second floor and was soon standing in an insurance office. The plague hadn’t reached this workplace. Everything was neat and orderly, with nothing overturned. No papers on the floor, no signs of struggle or the ever-present bloodstains he was used to seeing everywhere else. Billy searched until he found a set of stairs going down and used them to come to a small hallway. The hallway was for deliveries and ended in a roll-down door at one end. Marcom Insurance 201 was on the door he had passed through, with Starbucks 102 listed on the door across from him.
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