Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches

by Merritt, R. S.

  Chapter 15: Meanwhile Back at the Base

  LeBron stared intently at the wall of monitors as Blaze and Drew dollied the trussed up infected into the cargo hold of the waiting plane. The Marines not pushing dollies formed a wedge around the cargo bearers to protect them from the random surgers sprinting at them from the woods. LeBron didn’t take a real breath until the plane’s cargo ramp had gone up and his brother was airborne. Leaning back in his chair he took a second to look around the room at the rest of the men. None of them noticed his attention as they were all still focused on the Marines getting back safely to the hangar.

  “They asked for a couple of escorts to go with the plane back to the carrier. They wanted locals with experience in the field. I sent Blaze and your brother instead of you since they were both in the hangar already. I think you’re too good of a resource to risk on a fifty-yard dash through the meat grinder out there.” Special Agent Leander sat down in the swivel chair at the long table next to LeBron.

  “I get it. We’ve all got to do our part right sir?” LeBron said. He hoped his voice didn’t reveal all the emotions he was working on hiding. He was truly alone now on this base. Drew was jetting off to meet up with Yue while he was stuck here. Stuck in a place where the average life expectancy once you went outside rivaled that of a house fly.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure your sister and the rest of them are fine. That ship they’re headed for is a hell of a lot safer than this base. Not that we’re not safe as long as we stay underground and keep the doors locked.” Leander was watching LeBron’s face closely for any reaction.

  “Thanks sir. Yeah, I assume they’ll be fine. Just kind of rough being split up.” LeBron said. His emotions were starting to overflow at this point. He found himself fighting back tears. He really wished Leander would leave him alone. This whole situation was getting incredibly uncomfortable.

  “They’ll be fine. What’s going to become very important very soon is getting our mission moving again. Sitting here buried under metal and dirt we’re safe but we’re not doing anything to help all the people out there who need us. You seem like you’re a couple of steps ahead of the game every time we have a planning session. I want you to keep that up. We’ve got the Marines who just flew in to help out along with a few Seabees mixed in with them. Those guys can fight but more importantly they can weld.” Leander said enthusiastically. LeBron took it that Leander was sold on cobbling together the Mad Max automotive aftermarket assault weapon additions.

  “How do I fit into that? What do you want me to do?” LeBron asked confused. Why was the head of a top-secret military base bothering to talk to him? He was barely old enough to take his driver’s test. Leander was a veteran agent who’d been given guidance and training on carrying out this mission along with the experience he had from similar missions. Not that there was anything that’d really compare to what was going on now.

  “You’ve got field experience. That’s got a ton of value. Those guys who went out the door yesterday with your brother and Blaze. The ones from the hangar. Those guys were all special forces types. They make movies about how bad ass those guys are. Yet at the end of the day after multiple engagements it was your brother and Blaze who were still standing. That’s the value of experience. Your job is to speak up immediately if you see us doing something stupid. We’re here to help save the lives of everybody in this region. I need you to help us do that.” Leander finished.

  “I’m with you sir and happy to help but I still don’t get why you don’t just follow whatever plan you were given?” LeBron asked. He wondered if Leander had given any thought to how he was going to enable a kid like LeBron to have a voice around all of these much older, much more experienced operators. It was one thing to tell him to speak up it was another to give him a platform. Based on the frequency and quantity of dumbass mistakes he kept seeing he’d be able to find out shortly whether they’d really listen to him or not.

  Leander slapped him on the back and walked away to get some coffee and talk to the officers on watch. That left LeBron alone at the monitoring table staring at the closed hangar door and the empty tarmac. The only things to see outside right now were the decomposing bodies of the dead liberally sprinkled around the base. There was a small mountain of bodies in front of the hangar door where a lot of the fighting had taken place. The guys there had been dumping bodies in that location as well. They’d planned on dumping a few gallons of gas on top of the pile and saving a ton of money on cremation expenses. Mount Morbidity had grown so large now that setting fire to it would be a real danger to the hangar.

  Left to his own devices LeBron stared at the screens and began thinking about what their next steps should be. Despite what Leander had just told him he doubted anyone was going to ask him to help plan their operation. If he had a vision in his own head for what it should look like though he could more easily critique whatever plan the rest of them eventually came up with. He needed to keep up the good impression Leander had of him. It was the only thing keeping them from handing him a gun and sending him out on whatever the next suicidal operation they dreamed up was.

  The way LeBron saw it the first thing that had to be established was a safe way to deliver supplies on land. Ideally, they’d just do that via parachute from high flying airplanes. Keeping air strips open for more than a few flights was hard though since the noise and activity invariably attracted a large number of crawlerz. If the surgers would all hurry up and morph into crawlerz that’d solve a ton of tactical challenges. Life would be a lot easier if moving around during the day was pretty much guaranteed to be safe.

  Launching supply missions from the carrier would make a lot of sense if they could figure out how to keep the carrier stocked with enough supplies for it to work. Since it was nuclear powered it could cruise up and down the coast for the next twenty years without needing to refuel. LeBron made a note to ask how many operating carriers they had that could be used for this. They could stage supplies on islands and have the cargo transferred to the carriers when they were in port. Then the supplies could be flown off of the carriers and air dropped to where they were needed. That made a lot more sense than trying to operate from a base on land. Trying to reliably transport supplies from this base would be pretty rough via trucks. Even if the Seabees did turn them into really cool looking fighting machines.

  Leander made good on his promise as the operations of the day began to wind down. He motioned for LeBron to join him as he and the senior leadership left the operations center to head into a conference room. LeBron took one last hard look at the monitors as the sun set over the installation. He shuddered at the site of the crawlerz swarming the base like a swarm of cockroaches. The crawlerz would spend the night trying to find a chink in the base defenses that’d allow them in. LeBron really hoped they didn’t find one.

  Walking down the hall behind the group of much older men LeBron continued to bounce ideas around in his head. He was trying to think of different ways they could achieve their mission. At the end of the hall they ducked into a conference room that already had a couple of people sitting in it. An audio call had been made to conference in the new guys down in the hangar as well. LeBron sat in a chair in the corner after grabbing one of the boxed-up dinners a man dropped off for them. It was grilled cheese and soup and it was delicious.

  The conversation quickly became centered around how they were going to distribute the supplies in the warehouse most efficiently to survivors. This was leading to a long discussion with the leader of the Seabees who’d come over with the Marines. He was talking about how they could weaponize the vehicles and shore up the cab with welded on metal grills to keep crawlerz out of it.

  “Are you all sure the best use of this base is as a distribution center?” LeBron asked. The question slipped out of his mouth before he’d really intended to say anything. He’d been planning on sitting back and absorbing as much of their plan as he could before interjecting his thoughts. It was just getting a
little frustrating hearing them repeat the same ideas over and over. The ones that were all doomed to fail. They weren’t seeing the forest for the trees as his dad liked to say.

  “What do you mean?” Leander asked in a politely inquisitive way. Everyone else turned to look over at him. The men on the other end of the phone line were silent. They’d either hit the mute button or were sitting around down there staring at the phone waiting for him to speak. Luckily it wasn’t a video conference so the newcomers couldn’t see how young he was. The people who could see him were already familiar with how smart he was. Most of them were eager to hear what he had to say. There were a few who looked irritated to have to take time out of the meeting to listen to someone so young.

  “The mission is to enable the survivors in this region to being retaking the land. Do you really think this one base can function as the sole distribution center to accomplish that? We’re literally covered in crawlerz. More surgers show up here every day. We can’t afford to have trucks coming and going all the time. Not yet. Eventually enough of the surgers may morph into crawlerz that we can travel all we want during the day. We’d just need to make sure we have somewhere safe to rest at night. The trucks provide that security. That’s how the survivors I was travelling with were able to stay alive.” LeBron stopped talking to look around and see if anyone had any questions or wanted to shut him up. Instead of disapproval quite a few of the men were nodding their heads in affirmation. He took that as a positive sign. Leander gave him a look indicating he should continue.

  “We have a safe delivery mechanism for supplies sitting out in the ocean right now. The carrier is nuclear powered so my understanding is it can go up and down the coast without needing to refuel for a couple of decades. Hopefully this doesn’t last that long but those mummies in that tomb in Egypt were a few thousand years old at least. That shows these things don’t die without help. It’d be extremely dangerous and resource intensive for us to distribute supplies from here. Instead I think we should focus on sending out teams to figure out where the survivors actually are. Then we have planes from the carrier airdrop supplies to them. If you come across survivors willing to take orders you bring them back here and they can live in the warehouse.”

  Lebron wanted to keep talking. The more he said things out loud the more his brain was kicking in. He hadn’t really considered bringing the survivors back to the base until he said it out loud. Once he did it made perfect sense. Why transport supplies to whatever hole the survivors managed to hide out in when they could share this massive base with them instead. That’d allow them to utilize the supplies much more efficiently too. Plus, they could take some of the people they brought back and send them out to find more survivors. Eventually they could send them out to loot and farm. They’d just have to wait until the surgers all died out.

  His audience listened attentively while LeBron continued to muse out loud. Realizing he’d been talking for a long time without stopping to ask if anyone had any questions LeBron stopped. He was slightly put off by the way everyone in the room was staring at him. One or two were scoffing at what he’d said but the rest of them looked like they were sold. LeBron thought that they should look convinced since everything he’d just told them made perfect sense.

  The meeting followed the new course that LeBron had set. The men sitting around until late into the evening brainstorming and working on action plans. They were coming up with concrete ideas for building a future. You could almost taste the morale turning positive in the room. For many of the operators in both the rooms LeBron’s inspired monologue had felt like that turning point you sometimes feel in a battle. That point where something clicks. You know you’re going to win. You’ve knocked the enemy on their heels and they’re going down.

  LeBron felt that energy too. He was carried along with it like the rest of them. They huddled around flip charts and maps while less than thirty feet above their heads the crawlerz started digging. The men in the operations center saw what was happening through the CCTV system but weren’t overly concerned. If the crawlerz made it down through the layers of rock and tightly packed dirt they’d be met by the concrete and steel infrastructure of the base. They noted it in their logs and the duty officer made a point to write it on the whiteboard in the items to tell Leander about section.

  LeBron went to sleep that night with a strange mix of hope and despair sloshing around in his head. The hope was from the energy coming off the men when they’d planned the next steps in bringing LeBron’s vision to life. The despair was for his own personal loss. The friends he’d made who were lying dead out in the field. His mom and dad dead and left behind. The loss of his brother and sister weighed the heaviest on him. He hoped what he was doing here would turn out to be powerful enough that he could somehow maneuver it into bringing his family back together sooner rather than later. He couldn’t imagine trying to live out the rest of his life without them by his side.

  Chapter 16: Best Served Cold

  “We’d like you to fill out these forms and then we’ll do a video interview as well. We’re looking to document everything we can. The more data points we have the more we can put together an accurate picture of the epidemic.” The fat man bulging out of his suit rattled off the directions with an air of boredom. Drew had been sent to be interviewed while Blaze was scheduled for the following morning. He was in an area of the ship that’d been turned into a combination science lab and data collection center. In this section of the ship white lab coats were more common than dungarees or camouflage.

  Drew bit back a couple of responses that popped into his head at the annoying air of indifference the scientific slob displayed. He reminded himself that he didn’t know what other people had been through. This man had lost people too. Statistically speaking at this point everyone should have collected a few horrifying stories around what happened to them back on dry land. The exceptions being the sailors on board who’d never even seen the infected yet. Since the carrier had set sail before everything fell apart a lot of the men on board had never experienced any of it personally. It must be hell stuck on board not knowing what happened to your family and friends back on shore.

  Drew spent the next hour filling out the forms. A lot of it was like taking a multiple-choice test. They even had the scantrons there for him to bubble in with a number two pencil. In the end there were a few sections that were more essay like but those were limited. Drew finished and gave the forms back to the man once he returned.

  “Those don’t seem like they’ll do much more than validate what you should already know.” Drew said as he handed over the scantrons.

  “That’s right. We have our working theories about why the infected attack, when they sleep, how they can be killed, how quickly the virus spreads and all of that. We’re trying to quantify that by asking a statistically valid set of witnesses to record their observations. That’s the standard part. Next will be the video interview part. I’ll walk you through an interview that’s designed to get us new data as well as additional validation.” The chubby lab rat answered. His tone was more than a little pompous. The guy must’ve come straight out of an ivory tower to get on the carrier.

  “What have you figured out so far?” Drew asked. He wasn’t really expecting an answer. He was expecting the guy to tell him to wait for the book to come out. He was asked to wait a second while the scientist flipped on the video camera.

  “We’ve actually figured out quite a bit. The main point of this interview is for you to tell us if you’ve seen anything that contradicts our theories. That make sense? If so, would you mind stating your full name and date of birth as well as the city and state you were in when this all started.” The scientist asked leaning forward. He lost the bored look he’d had earlier. He must like doing the interview part. Drew provided the requested information and waited impatiently for the promised answers.

  “Based on interviews and observations we’ve come to the conclusion that the metamorphosis from surger to cr
awler can occur in as quickly as two days or take as long as a few months. This seems to correlate to how many other victims the attacker has bitten. The length of time to transform from a surger to a crawler has gotten steadily longer since patient zero in Egypt. Any of that sound like something you’d like to dispute or back up based on what you’ve personally witnessed?” The scientist asked.

  “No that sounds about right. The surgers are taking forever to transform in some places and it seems to line up with what you just mentioned.” Drew said. He sat back waiting for the next question.

  “There’ve been reports of surgers and crawlerz both displaying signs of intelligence. In most cases it’s been like they’ve acted on muscle memory to open doors or use a hammer or try to drive a car. Have you witnessed anything like that?”

  “I haven’t seen any car driving zombies. I’m pretty sure that’s something I’d remember. Nothing else is coming to mind. They can’t swim. Not sure if you have that documented or not.” Drew said.