“Well, nobody can say we aren’t getting our omega-3s! Hope someone finds a forgotten warehouse full of Charmin here in the next few days,” Billy said. The change in diet and lack of sanitation had been taking its toll on everyone. “We’re running low at the house.”
“I can have one of my patrols drop a pack or two off. There are certain high peaks of power that I have ascended to recently,” Stone laughed. Without zombies trying to gnaw on his arms for a few days, he was almost likable.
“You can come on by tonight if you are free, we’ll set an extra place at the table,” Mack interjected.
Billy almost had a twinge of jealously.
“Ah kept the best fish for yourself, eh?” Stone said.
“No, using the last of the meat in the deepfreeze. The generator is low on propane so we are emptying to freezer out in preparation for the end of electricity. Tonight is pot-roast and the last of the potatoes,” Billy explained.
Stone nodded in agreement. “It’s a date. Where and what time?”
“Our house is the last on the right before the Fort. Seven o’clock.”
“Deal.”
“Bring toilet paper,” Billy said. He was not smiling.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 23
Gulf Shores, City Hall
“You have to be shitting me,” Reynolds asked the 3-Blind-Mice. The Air Force Major was rapidly losing her faith in the new chain of command.
The ‘3-Blind-Mice’ was the term of endearment for the three highest-ranking recalled retired officers. All had been full-bird colonels of one sort or another. The group was forged as young officers in Vietnam and all had multiple stories about South East Asia. One was an academy ringknocker and mentioned it every chance he could, as if you could possibly miss the giant gold service academy ring on his old withered claw. The youngest of the colonels had last been on active duty during Reganomics. They, by rights, were the head of the military establishment on the island and they decided to rule by council.
“Barring communication with your unit being re-established, we have decided to leave you in place as the overall tactical command of the forces on the island. We will standby in an advisory capacity and will focus on strategic planning while George Meaux will continue as civilian administrator until local elections can be held for a new City Council,” the Ringknocker said, a perfectly trimmed Q-tip bright white moustache adorning his lip.
“With all due respect sir, what does that mean?” Reynolds asked, shooing a fly away from her face.
“You have demonstrated solid performance as a joint operations commander in the past week and you will continue to do so. Captain Stone will continue in his role as ground forces commander, Coast Guard Lieutenant Jarvis as naval forces commander, and both will answer to you— who in turn will submit reports to our S-3 section here,” the Ringknocker continued.
“You have an S-3 section?” Reynolds asked. Her jaw was hurting from the clenching and grinding of her teeth.
“Yes, Colonel Maythers is S-3 over Operations; Colonel Blakledge is S-4 over Logistics. I, as the most senior due to time in grade and being a regular, am assuming the roles of S-1 and S-2 as well as the overall unit commander of the Council,” he said.
“You can’t be serious,” Reynolds said. She had been living in her flight suit for two weeks and was not feeling any of this.
“This is a classic counter-insurgency operation Major. Clear-Hold-Build formula, just like the case studies in the COIN Field Manual. Clear the area, hold it against attack, and rebuild a force strong enough to keep it secure. Once you do that, we move into SWET operations. The first four things we have to do —after getting rid of the zombies and bodies, is set up sewer, water, electric and trash collection in that order of priority. All this, along with establishing communication with the mainland, is going to be your mission,” the Ringknocker elaborated as if reading from a textbook. He had the air of a college professor who had not been allowed to retire.
“Sir, with all due respect, I have every intention of leaving this island in the next day or so. I agreed to help while the council was setting up, but I need to return to my unit. I have orders that supersede your own. I have intel that has to get back to senior command,” Reynolds pulled her trump card.
“What the Colonel is trying to say, my dear,” interrupted the S-3, with all of the quiet, sad indignity of a Wal-Mart door greeter, “is that the Council cannot replace you. You have fallen as a round peg into a round hole, and no other pegs are available to take your place.”
“But, sir, my unit…”
“Is probably wiped out Major,” the Ringknocker pointed out flatly, his grey eyes cold and clear.
“Be that as it may I need to return to my base.”
“It’s not possible. You said yourself in your debrief that Eglin was over-run before you even came here. We have had no communication with any military units outside of this island and have to face the fact that we may be all that is left of the US military,” the third colonel spoke up.
Reynolds sat there in silence. The three superannuated colonels across from her at the table began packing up to leave. Finally, they walked away discussing the coming fish soup for lunch.
“Remember Major, the test of character is not hanging in there when you see light at the end of the tunnel, but in the performance of duty when no light is coming, “ the elderly Ringknocker said as he walked past her out of the room.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 24
Gulf Shores Alabama, five miles outside of town down Condo Row.
Spud had built an empire. The day after they closed the bridge, he slinked through town back to his mom’s house. His brother Lance had never made it home that day. His mother’s body, he was told later by an acquaintance on the body snatcher crew, was found a few blocks away under a pile of corpses. This left him alone in the world and he packed a duffle bag then went out into the brave new world to reinvent his life.
He made it to Condo Row, the 7-mile strip of hundreds of elevated rentals along Beach Boulevard. With the tourist trade closed down for the winter, these vacation getaways were almost all empty. Spud crept into a three-story rental named The Clubhouse with its own private beach, stocked full sized bar, swimming pool, and a dozen bedrooms. Guarded by a weak imitation Kwikset deadbolt, it took all of ten seconds to bump open.
Even though the electricity was off, the place was sweet, and he selected the best bed in the largest room overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. After a few days of holding up, without seeing or hearing any of the recently undead, he began to explore his surroundings. The property management companies stocked most of the better condominiums with basic food items, flashlights, canned drinks, bottled water, and all now priceless commodities. With the inevitable vacuum left after the near-total destruction of the local law enforcement agencies, and the National Guard concentrating on hunting zombies rather than crooks, it was a looter’s wet dream.
It was while looting one of these properties that Spud ran into some burnouts he knew from the small Gulf Shores dope underworld, doing the same thing. The young potheads had never done a day’s worth of work, either honest or dishonest, and were even failing at being looters.
“What the hell are you fools doing?” Spud asked through the broken glass of a sliding patio door, startling the two pot smokers.
“Holy shit, man, I almost crapped my pants,” one of them said with an open energy drink in his hand. Two more cans were visible, poking out of the front pockets of his dirty jeans. His partner, with bags of pretzels in hand, looked ready to spring out of the vandalized condo like a jackrabbit from a hole.
“Look at this friggin’ mess you guys made!” Spud exclaimed.
His only answer was an incredulous sideways face followed by a junkie shrug from the potheads. “Dude, we are starving and there isn’t exactly a grocery store open at the moment.”
Spud shook his head as he placed an index finger to his forehead, “You foo
ls need to think this thing out. There are thousands of rental houses on this strip and they are all empty. If one of the MPs patrol through here and they still look empty, they are going to keep rolling.”
“So?”
“So, kids, if we get in and out of these places quiet as a mouse, and get everything that’s worth taking back to our own little hideout before anyone else thinks about it…”
The two potheads saw the light bulb start to glow and the recognition of Spud’s words sunk in. That is how he got the first of his foot soldiers.
The Clubhouse became a fortress and every day his people would bump into more like-minded and hungry individuals that became fast recruits. Usually it was someone that was known to them, or to a friend of a friend, or a pre-outbreak buddy they had done time with back in County. The rules were simple at first: everybody stole, everybody watched each other’s back for zombies, and everybody tried to act like a ghost whenever a suspicious outsider was spotted. The three simple rules were effective and reliable.
They soon took to calling themselves the ‘Garbage Bag Gang,’ as they were often moving loot around in that, the most readily accessible container of rental condominiums.
Spud would hold instructional classes on how to slip windows, bump deadbolts, shim padlocks and other quiet ways to burgle a residence without being visible from the road. He stressed the fact that they were now a family to the gang every day.
They would enter the elevated condos with garbage bags in their back pockets, fill them with useful items, and drop them out windows to waiting gang members below. The Clubhouse each day would become awash with dozens and eventually hundreds of garbage bags with the days take waiting to be inventoried and sorted. Empty trash bags would be recycled for the next day.
By the end of the week, Spud had to take over the neighboring condos on either side of the Clubhouse as the crews had collected more than a dozen members. He worked out a schedule for guard shifts to stay behind and looting crews to go out on a rotational basis that ensured both the survivability and functionality of the group.
Spud had taken a page from what he had known in a series of training schools, correctional facilities, and detention centers. The only way to survive if you were not the baddest or meanest guy in the yard was to join a gang. Not wanting to resurrect some other group from memory, he promptly started his own family of thieves bound by oath and pledged to each other.
With the bylaws written on the pad and posted to the wall of the Clubhouse, the group became Spud’s new family. They all swore to it.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 25
Billy’s house, Gulf Shores
Wyatt and Mack had set the table while Cat and Billy finished cooking. The sun had grown low on the horizon behind the fort and bathed the period home in long shadows. The propane-fueled generator in the back yard only produced enough juice to power a few lights in the house, the freezer, and a handful of assorted chargers for mp3 players, flashlights, and rechargeable batteries. A VHF radio sat in a cradle on the kitchen counter and the occasional chatter of charter boat captains on the Mobile Bay jungle drums filtered through the darkening rooms.
The Gulf Coast was known for hurricanes. That persistent threat caused people to stock up gradually during the winter and spring to put together a stock of non-perishable food in the event of a storm knocking out power for up to a month. This meant that in most permanent homes on the island, there was a pantry with a decent stock of non-perishable food like ramen noodles, canned tuna, peaches, ravioli, as well as paper plates, batteries, paper towels, gallons of water, and plastic utensils.
Billy had stocked a good amount of food but there had been a rash of dinner guests in the last week. Almost every night Ed, the 87-year old orphan next door, joined the table; as did the two stranded park rangers from the fort and, of course, Mack.
When he first met her, she had still been wearing her Orange Coast Bank nametag and he insisted on calling her Ms. Tillman for most of that first week. She was at least ten years Billy’s junior and only about five years older than his own daughter was.
Wyatt had bonded very close to her, while Cat seemed more aloof. Even though she slept in the guest room and devoted most of her time to help organizing committees in town, she was starting to grow on Billy and he imagined Cat could notice it. Billy’s ex-wife, the children’s mother, had been unheard of since the outbreak and her disappearance had been an unspoken issue in the house.
He had begun to feel that Wyatt was holding a grudge against him for going to get Cat first on the day of the outbreak, while the boy had to fend for himself. The only logic in Billy’s defense on the subject was that the high school had been closer to the marina. It was all the logic he felt he would need if the subject was broached. Nevertheless, the gap was there.
Like clockwork, just after sunset, the first dinner guests began to arrive.
“Madame and monsieur,” the confident Ed Wallace said as he took off his fedora and placed it on the key rack by the front door. The fedora, like the judge himself was from another era but somehow still looked as good as its owner did. In his offhand, he extended a quart-sized jar of canned okra in friendship. He placed a canvas toolkit bag on the floor by the table leg.
Mack hugged, kissed the silver fox on the cheek, and welcomed him in. The two could be mistaken for grandfather and daughter to the uninformed. Ed soon took his now traditional seat at the table and James and Albert, the two rangers from the Fort were the next to arrive. The pair of cousins was unlucky enough to live across the bay on Dauphin Island and, following Jarvis’s report on the status of that community, had made the best of their accommodations at the fort.
“What’s for dinner tonight, family?” James asked as he picked the lid off the large pot on the stove and smiled. “Hot damn, I love roast!”
His cousin nodded in agreement, as he washed his hands in the sink. “This stuff is thin but it’s still better than the cistern water and saltwater toilets at the Fort,” he said, rubbing his dirty hands under the tiny stream falling from the faucet. The island still had a trickle of water pressure for running faucets due to deep artesian wells, but the waste plant was offline so nothing could be flushed. The sewer project was one of the most anticipated committees there was.
Fifteen minutes before the officially stated dinnertime, a hummer pulled in off the dark fort road from town and into the driveway. With the closing of a door and the sound of heavy boots on the deck outside, Stone arrived at the house.
“Good evening, folks, somebody here have some pot roast free to a good home?” Stone asked as he stepped in the door.
“Did you bring the toilet paper?” Billy asked without even looking around from the pot on the stove.
««—»»
“That was the best meal I’ve had all week,” Stone said as he pushed his plate away. “We have been alternating MREs and fish soup down at the Armory. Not a lot of fine dining options in Gulf Shores these days.”
“Well that’s the last of the beef. All that’s left is some pork chops, shrimp and fish in the freezer,” Mac said.
The fish comment brought universal grumbles.
“I wasn’t aware the 2nd Infantry was here on the island Captain,” Ed asked Stone unexpectedly.
Stone patted the patch on the sleeve of his uniform. The patch was of a magnificent Native American Plains Indian chief wearing a war bonnet. “It isn’t but I am. It was my unit when I went to Iraq the first time.”
Ed smiled, “It’s good to see old Chief Red Cloud again. Once upon a time, I spent 303 days in combat from Normandy to Czechoslovakia in WWII wearing that same patch. Did some time in hell at a place called the Ardennes. We prayed for Nazi artillery because then you could at least get warm from the burning trees after they exploded. After that, I decided that no matter what happened I would die someplace warm.”
“I know what you mean. Spent a year in Korea when I first went in the military. Coldest place I ever thought of. I wa
s only warm twice in about six months and that was when I was in a hot tub in Seoul,” Stone replied.
“Well, the Army let me go when Truman decided to drop The Bomb and not invade Japan. I got out as a three-striper buck sergeant, so I must say, if I were in uniform then I would have to salute you, Captain. Just glad to see you here.” Ed said.
“Glad to be seen,” Stone smiled.
“What was it like in Iraq?” Mack asked.
“Most of the time we just sat around bored as hell and then the whole world would just go crazy for a few hours and then you would be bored again.”
“Kind of like Gulf Shores lately,” Cat interjected.
“But with fewer IED’s,” Stone said.
The table laughed at the black humor.
“It’s time for the radio, Dad,” Wyatt said, excusing himself from the table. He walked across the dimly lit dining room to the china cabinet and worked a small portable boom box. From the radio’s antenna, a long piece of coat hanger wrapped in aluminum foil hung. Wyatt had been experimenting with the antenna night after night to try to get a better signal.
When the boy clicked on the power button and turned up the volume, the quiet hiss of static, like a car tire moving on fresh asphalt, filled the room. After about Z+2, during daylight hours there was not a radio station to be found. However, at night, the signals carried further and a few radio stations could be heard. At first, they had found a station fading in briefly from Knoxville playing Italian operas sandwiched in between a monotone announcer reading haikus about the end of the world.
There was a weak signal from an AM talk radio station in Cincinnati that came through just after sunset and would fade away around midnight. They did not have any fresh news but reported on the local weather in Ohio (cold with a chance of riots), and took to reading aloud articles from various newspapers and old magazines they had laying around the station.
Last Stand on Zombie Island Page 14