Cat had gotten out of the truck and was standing in the front yard of their house, looking out over the back yard and into Mobile Bay beyond it. The vacant ferry dock lay empty and the attendants, who normally hovered there, were gone.
“Mr. Ed,” Cat asked, “did the ferry stop running? What happened to the two boys that worked here?”
The old man shook his head again.
“They cast off for the other side of the Bay at Dauphin Island yesterday afternoon and those two fellas left on it. A coast guard boat came along last night and shined a light on the empty dock but kept going. I couldn’t tell you anything else,” Ed related.
“The last thing I got was a Tweet saying they were coming back here from Dauphin Island. That was last night and I haven’t got anything through since then,” the girl said, looking past the house at the dock.
“How did you get along last night?” Billy asked as Cat walked away.
“The two rangers that live at the Fort shut it down tight and came out here to turn folks away. We had some folks down here throwing a fit to get off the island, and they told them to wait for the ferry. Eventually we had about fifty cars here waiting for that damned thing.”
“Wow, things get ugly?” Billy asked.
“Oh yes. About two in the morning, a couple maniacs wandered up and tried to attack people sleeping in their cars. It didn’t work out too good for them,” Ed said gesturing with his chin towards the highway marker for the ferry across the street. Three lumps wrapped in area rugs were arranged neatly in the sandy grass.
“There was a lot of that in town last night. We shut the bridge down after dark,” Billy said. He could feel the weight of his .38 grown heavy in his pants pocket as he thought of it.
Ed exchanged a look with him and nodded knowingly.
“Well, it’s to be expected. First time I fired a gun since 1945, but then as now, it was for the right reasons,” the old man explained. “We tried to contact the Sheriff and then the city police by phone but we don’t have any service out here now.”
“There is a lot of that going on, too,” Billy said as he walked into his darkened house. He turned on a hurricane lantern that sat upon the entryway table and looked up at the photograph on the wall there. One was of Wyatt and his soccer team from last spring.
From the frame of the photograph stared his son’s face, and next to him was the girl with pigtails from the school.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 21
Dauphin Island SAR Station
The Fish Hawk maneuvered alongside the dock at station. The crew of the cutter was on deck in full Kevlar vests and helmets, and every member was armed. Both of the ship’s Mark II heavy machine guns were loaded and trained out, one to port covering the station, the other to starboard covering the open water.
“Holy shit, Skipper,” Hoffman said through his moustache.
Jarvis looked out through the windows of the small cutter’s bridge at the remains of the station. The two-story concrete station house, built to withstand hurricane-force coastal winds and storm surge, was pockmarked with a number of small arms bullet holes. Its roof had collapsed and smoke tendrils rose from its blown-out windows.
A 45-foot response boat was overturned with its green scum bottom exposed to the sunlight. The wake of the Fish Hawk slapped against the vessel as she moved closer. An empty orange lifejacket with Coast Guard stenciled across the back in reflective paint floated near the craft.
“Looks like someone crashed the gate, sir,” Myers, the 18-year old seaman on the port Mark II called back over the 1JP sound powered phone connection as he trained his weapon on the station.
Jarvis picked up a pair of binoculars and glassed the site. The high-speed security fence around the station was intact except around the gate. There, a dump truck had been run through the fence and crashed into the station itself. A number of bodies radiated from the truck in all directions. Some wore blue coast guard uniforms. The station’s radio tower hung detached at an odd angle from the side of the burned building.
“That explains why we haven’t been able to raise them on the radio all morning, Skipper,” Hoffman, pointed out.
“Hail the station,” Jarvis said, still examining the station through the binos.
Jarvis surmised that the entrance had been where the majority of the fighting had been, then at some point the infected had taken over the station and Coasties on the outside had taken the building under fire. How the small boat had overturned, and the station burned remained a mystery. The station’s second boat was missing.
“Attention, Coast Guard Dauphin Island, this is the Cutter Fish Hawk, show yourself, or call on channel 16 if possible,” Hoffman spoke into the microphone, his words booming out of the cutter’s loudhailer and over the station.
The Chief repeated his call four times to no response.
“Try to call Sector New Orleans and Station Gulfport, Chief. Maybe the Senior Chief is out there somewhere in the station’s other 45,” Jarvis instructed. He turned to the Cook who was filling in on the helm. “Bring the boat around and head back to Gulf Shores for now.”
“Skipper, aren’t we going ashore?” Hoffman asked.
“No, we can’t risk it. The Senior Chief had twenty guys here and if they couldn’t hold this place, what can a small boat team do?” Jarvis explained, placing the binos back in their holder and stepping to the chart plotter.
“Fuck it, sir, let’s grease these bastards,” Hoffman said. Jarvis did not respond and only locked his jaw. Now was not the time to light into the Chief in front of the other enlisted men on the boat.
“I’ve got movement about 70-degrees off t he bow, sir. Behind the station house,” the machine gunner on deck called over the intercom circuit.
Jarvis picked up the binos again and trained them on the area in question. Shadows obscured by the morning sun moved into view through the parking lot. A group of a dozen shambled into view slowly.
Hoffman knew immediately that they were infected. Some were civilians, one wore a brown sheriff’s deputy uniform, and others had on Coast Guard blue— smeared with blood. They approached the dock and made their way toward the Fish Hawk as she turned 180 degrees to return to Gulf Shores.
Jarvis could just make out the tall figure of the Senior Chief standing bloody and broken in the middle of the group, his empty holster empty at his side.
“Let’s make 20-knots for Gulf Shores,” he instructed the Cook. The Senior Chief grew smaller in the distance, swaying at the end of the stations dock watching the cutter leave through lifeless eyes.
— | — | —
PART II
“I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria…if you look at us objectively. If you were an intelligent life form from another planet, looking down that you wouldn’t see individual people…you would see mold on a sandwich…I think somehow or another that is what we are supposed to do. We’re here to fuck shit up… I think we’re here to eat the sandwich.”
— Joe Rogan
— | — | —
CHAPTER 22
October 21st – Noon, Gulf Shores Town Green
Z+11
Mack stood at the table next to Billy signing up volunteers. Just over a week had passed since the outbreak had hit the island, and things were getting better.
Billy had kept going to the Community Center every morning after the outbreak until eventually he found Wyatt and his new best friend Mack. They were playing checkers with rocks on a checkerboard created from a calendar colored in with a sharpie.
“Can we keep her?” the boy had asked, “She’s homeless.”
A brief introduction and an abbreviated explanation of the past few days’ events all around left the now-unemployed bank teller living in the guest bedroom of Billy’s house. She had lived on the mainland in Robertsdale. According to most accounts, that small town was now firmly part of Zombieville, as the survivors had taken to calling all points north of Gulf Shores.
“So, which committee did you want to help on?” Mack asked an older man who stood there with a cane. He wore a nylon windbreaker for a roller skate business in Michigan over his wife-beater, prickly grey stubble sprouting through sunken cheeks.
“I used to be a sheet metal worker. ‘Tired 21-year ago, but I guess I can help anywhere. My eyes are still good. I just can’t work the burial details,” the man said. Three teeth hung like irregular caramels in his mouth.
After the outbreak, many of the refugees on the island, those displaced from other cities, trapped snowbirds from northern states, and all points north of the bridge sometimes became whoever they wanted to be. Young men who had always been penniless now said they had left huge homes and great jobs behind in the zombie infestation. People trapped in bad marriages that never made it back home to find out what happened to their spouse, simply became single and looking. Some refugees claimed to be lawyers, a few loudly declared themselves as preachers, others who had watched a few episodes of Greys Anatomy to be doctors. These doctors, however, would quietly fade back into the crowd when asked to help at the infirmary.
One heavily accented refugee wearing thick suspenders declared he was a dentist and promptly set up shop in an unused strip mall storefront with a desk chair and a pair of channel locks. For the exchange of a can of beef stew, a piece of jewelry or a case of cola you could have a tooth extracted. Sometimes it was even the right one that was pulled. Anesthetic, in the form of a numbing powder of questionable design, was naturally an extra charge.
“They need help on the Coast Watchers; do you have a pair of binoculars at your house?” Mack asked the man with a smile, already writing his name from his newly made name badge on the clipboard for that group. There was a waterpark on the island that made plastic picture ID cards for season ticket holders. The committee had requisitioned their equipment and stock of 10,000 blank badges to make everyone a new ID. Already people joked that it was the last passport you would ever need.
“So where do I report?” the newest member of the Coast Watchers asked Mack.
“Get with the National Guard here in the morning tomorrow. They are setting it up,” she explained to him.
“And I can still get meals?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, your ID is your ration card,” she explained.
Billy watched the man shuffle off, leaving a funk in his wake. He thought of how great it was to have cleaned his clothes the night before. Once you learn to wash your clothes in a 5-gallon pickle bucket with a squirt of dish soap, stirred with a toilet plunger, you have a new lease on life.
People had survived the outbreak in closets, bathrooms, and sheds. More than one person rode it out hugging the carpet under a bed while zombies ran from room to room destroying their home. In an odd comment on subconscious destructiveness hidden in the human psyche, nicer homes were the most targeted by rampaging infected. The survivors were very much into do-it-yourself zombie survival. The downside was they had a society made up exclusively of post-traumatic stress survivors.
In the eleven days since the outbreak and the isolation of the island, everyone had banded together with a few common needs. Since the island was nominally under martial law and all military retirees were recalled to service, three elderly colonels had come forward to offer their services. These relics were the most senior officers on the island and they immediately appointed the stranded Major Reynolds as operational head of the combined military forces on the island. She in turn appointed the old City Manager, George Meaux, to head the civilian administration.
Reynolds then ordered all food, gas, useable firearms, and ammunition collected from local stores and warehoused to safeguard against looting and hoarding. Stone’s MPs, along with the remaining city and county employees, went about securing these stockpiles. To ensure that everyone who needed the items received them in appropriate quantities, a ration system was set up so that every resident accounted for would be given a daily allotment of food. Everything else was dispersed by waiting list.
However, to get your food, you had to sign up to assist one of the newly created Committees of Public Salvation. No work, no food.
Billy and the remains of the Charter Boat Association formed their own committee. These leather-skinned men watched over the island’s docks, icehouse with generator, bait shop, and the marina’s precious supply of diesel fuel. They rotated who went out every day to search for fish for the population of nearly 1500 remaining residents and refugees.
Other groups were set up to try and get food plots planted before winter in makeshift greenhouses, cook meals in the city park’s large barbeque pit, collect radio equipment for regaining contact with the outside world, getting the sewer system up again, and above all, clearing away the dead.
With tons of rotting corpses, stagnant un-flushed toilets and molding refrigerators all along the length of the island, flies had become the state bird. Millions of them lined the walls and ceilings of every building. Big, blue, horse flies that could cover a dollar coin; small button-sized black flies; fat, thimble-sized green flies; all made for an entomologist’s wet dream. Improvised flytraps became the most popular DIY item in Gulf Shores and a number of designs freely circulated.
Death was a fog over the beach town. The thick, ugly, cloud of decay wafted everywhere. Death has a special smell. Nothing quite smells like it, and everyone that remained alive on the island knew what it was. When the city dump trucks would rattle by with tarps thrown over bodies, they would leave a lingering odor of despair behind that would hang still in the air long after they turned the corner. Volunteer body snatchers with t-shirts and torn bed sheets wrapped over their faces hung from the truck’s sides, but never from the tailgate. The fluid from the corpses ran down the tailgate and fell on the road. A water truck would pass afterward to hose the road down with a solution made from salt water and bleach as fears that the infection was still alive in the trail of black ooze left in the truck’s wake.
No one knew how many had perished in town. The exact number of dead could never be known, hundreds definitely, thousands more than likely. At first, there were notepads for each truck and each crew to write the names and numbers of dead found. However, nobody was much up for writing things down, much less digging through encrusted pockets for wallets in the hope of identifying the dead. As volunteers came and left to perform the ghastly task, things fell by the wayside. It was very much hit-and-miss, with some crews returning with piles of recovered personal effects, others with almost none.
The burial details would set up in two groups of volunteers. Many signed up each day. One group would dig graves; the second would transport the bodies. At first, they would dig muddy holes; the island’s water table so low that after digging two or three feet into the sandy clay, they would strike water. It was eventually decreed to burn the bodies. The trucks ran, the pyre’s flames lit the night skies for weeks, and ash rained on rooftops and in the tops of the green southern pines.
The best guesstimate was that some 4000 bodies had been collected from the bridge and all along the coast and island. If you did the math, you came to realize that this added up to some 300-tons of human remains. Word got out that if you forced yourself to smile a huge grin, stretching your face to where your lips almost touch your ears, it is physically impossible to throw up. This produced maniacally smiling cleanup crews moving through the island. It hurt to smile.
In the beginning, the groups would treat each body with gentle care but after each volunteer had lugged his tenth or twentieth body a mental disconnect would form and the heavy lifting became a simple task of lugging firewood or luggage. The volunteers would often find a friend, co-worker, or relative in the course of their search. Too often, they would only be able to recognize them from the contents of their wallet after the body had already been thrown on the pile.
Knowing that the blood and tissue of the bodies were infectious, a volunteer with a backpack full of sandwich bags and rubber gloves would place the je
welry and personal effects from the bodies into a bag and seal it closed. In the Community Center, the bags were examined but were not to be opened, nor kept, by anyone.
Once the owner of the bag had been identified, the name and information on the contents were written down and the bag destroyed in a fire made in a 55-gallon drum. The only items that were kept out of the bags were wedding bands as often those items were unique and/or had inscription on them. After a soak in pure bleach, the rings were turned over to anyone that could identify them.
A five-gallon bucket was filled halfway with wedding rings after the first week.
The truth was that the world’s balance had shifted. In modern times, the news always carried the numbers of dead and dying. Now the numbers were so great, it was just easier to count the living and give them a ration card.
“So how’s fishing been there, gunslinger?” Captain Stone asked as he walked up to Billy and Mac’s table.
“Not too bad, the kids and I caught a few hundred white trout last night and some nice tripletails. Filled the coolers up anyway,” Billy said. The fish were small, with few being over two pounds in weight, but he was saving his diesel by staying close to shore. The fall finfish migration was wrapping up offshore and before long he and the rest of the charter men would have to go to deep-water in search of grouper and tuna, and burning irreplaceable fuel.
“Fish soup for lunch again today then I guess?” Stone said with a laugh. The volunteer cooks had soon run out of fishmeal and had taken to alternatively smoking fish on the grill one day then making fish soup, politely referred to as bouillabaisse or croaker gumbo with whatever ingredients they could muster the next day. You hook it, we cook it, was the motto of the volunteer chefs. Yesterday had been smoked mullet, courtesy of a group of charter men from the Weight in Sea and the Steel Hooked who had spent the day with gillnets in the shallows.
Last Stand on Zombie Island Page 13