All of them looked rough. Most of the men were still shaving although a few had started to grow “combat beards.” No one’s field uniform was perfect. Even several of the MPs who had a full set of gear had taken to wearing the random baseball cap, blue jeans or sneakers for comfort. However, everyone was bright-eyed and ready. Every one of them had seen the new combat that the world had become. Everyone was a warrior, from the youngest 15-year-old volunteer with braces on his teeth, to the 70-year-old retiree in faded lima bean utilities.
“At ease,” Stone commanded. This order was followed to the letter, as the string seemed to pop from the formation’s back and the soldiers stood loose and easy.
“Today is November 10th,” Stone began, his voice ringing across the still and silence of ninety uniformed souls. “Do we have any Marines in the formation? A show of hands.”
The soldiers looked around amongst themselves as a dozen hands came up.
Stone nodded approvingly. “Very good, I need you Marines to form up here around this table.”
As the dirty dozen moved forward, led by Tiny, Stone resumed speaking to the crowd. “Today, in 1775 the US Marine Corps was established. I thought it would be fitting to our marine brothers and sisters among us that we celebrate this birthday.”
With that, Reid gestured the marines to lift the sheet from the table, exposing a giant sheet cake, some four feet square complete with frosting. This brought cheers and yells among the assembled formation.
“Colonel, if you would cut the cake please, sir,” Stone said, as the Ringknocker stepped forward, resplendent in his Marine dress blues complete with white cap and Mameluke sword.
The Ringknocker carefully cut the cake with a gentle slice of his glimmering saber, the image of a recruiting commercial. Not a hair or medal out of place. He smoothly set a piece of cake the size of a box of shotgun shells—likely just as edible—on a paper plate.
“Who is the youngest among you?” the Ringknocker said, holding the cake in one hand as he passed his icing covered sword to one of the other Blind Mice.
Oswald stepped forward, “Me, sir, I’m 16. I joined the Marines on the Delayed Entry Program this summer and was supposed to leave for boot in May after I graduate.”
The Ringknocker smiled. “Of course. I graduated from Annapolis in 1967, so I guess that makes me the oldest marine here. In a tradition that has gone on everywhere marines are gathered for decades, even in combat, I, as the oldest marine here, would like to present you the first piece of cake as the youngest marine here. To signify the passing of experience and knowledge from the old to the young of our Corps, and further emphasizing the fact that we care for our young Marines before we look to our own needs,” the man said, his hand shaking slightly as he held the cake out to the young girl.
Oswald took the cake and smiled warmly in return.
The formation cheered and few of the more sentimental in the crowd teared up.
“Don’t worry, there is enough for everyone, and we will all get a swing at it!” Stone called out across the parking lot. “But first, give me your eyes please.”
As the crowd quieted down, the Captain returned to his address, “Today is the Corps birthday. Tomorrow is November 11, Veterans Day. For all veterans everywhere, those here and those no longer with us, we pause tomorrow to think of them. Those that are not here are the lucky. They shall not grow old, as those that are left grow old. Their struggle is over as ours is just beginning. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.
“The ghosts of the dead become a reassuring presence, so the living know that they will not be forgotten. These ghosts also remind us of how often death is right around the corner. To remind you to be ready.”
A few voices called out in agreement in the formation.
Stone paused and continued, “Last Veterans Day, Subway offered to give a free sandwich to every vet. That’s a whole lot to give to those who gave everything. Since there is not a Subway open here, tonight we will have our own party. Tonight we eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we will remember those who have gone on before us and ask for their strength. We start taking the mainland back in three days!”
The formation went nuts.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 43
Doug’s House, Gulf Shores
November 12 08:45am
Z+33
“Your dad is gonna kick my tail when he finds out you skipped school today,” Doug said to Wyatt as the young man finished zip-tying one of the seats down.
“He’ll be fine. I made a deal with my sister for her to cover for me. She is skipping, too.”
“What a couple of smooth criminals Billy Harris has for kids,” Reynolds said as she tightened guide wires over the improvised gondola of the Depplin.
Since the military council had shot her hopes of leaving the island down several days ago, she had gone on a bender. Not even a night of sweet but awkward sex with Specialist Wright had improved her mood for more than a few hours. Afterward, the honeymoon was over quickly as the young woman’s regret set in and she ushered Reynolds out the door of her place. The major lived in a bottle for a day or two after that humiliating experience.
Finally, as she sat in her office contemplating putting a Beretta in her mouth, the Ringknocker walked into the room and announced that they had reconsidered her flight status. She was cleared to take to the sky in the Depplin at her own risk provided she bring the Military Council up to speed on even the smallest details of the current situation in a living will of sorts should misfortune befall the airship.
It was only after she arrived at Doug’s house that she found out that Doug had gone to the council with the help of Mack and flatly refused to build the airship if Reynolds would not be navigating it. She thanked him and felt guilty all at once. As she worked on the contraption up close, however she was feeling that she might have been better off on the ground.
To save space Doug had the idea to use the lightest and strongest thing he could find as the gondola of the airship; two 35-foot long industrial grade aluminum ladders laid side by side to make a 35x4 platform. With the ladders as a base, two bicycle seats were mounted to the front, one behind the other. Behind the seats followed an eight-foot long 250-gallon propane tank. On the tank were four burners mounted in a cage on top to warm the air inside the huge canvas to lift them through the air. A 13hp leaf blower motor forced air into the canvas and sat along a forty-gallon gasoline bladder. Behind the gas bladder was a 1.3L, 80HP fuel injected, four-cylinder, liquid-cooled Suzuki G13B engine from a Geo Metro coupled with a custom planetary gear reduction unit. On the driveshaft of the motor, hanging out over the end of the ladder, was a polished wooden airplane propeller taken from the wall of a local bar downtown.
Overhead of the platform were rigged two hot air balloons that were cut up and sewn back together in a single upside-down taco shape, 40-feet high and 120-feet long. This produced an amazing 140,000-cubic feet of volume, big enough to fit three Greyhound busses inside. At the end of the bag were a set of four fiberglass homemade rudders and elevators, which would control the craft’s movement in the air.
The whole thing weighed in at 2200 pounds fully loaded, which left just 300 pounds for Reynolds and Doug.
“I still can’t believe this thing is gonna fly,” Wanda said as she inspected the seams that she had sewn over the past few days. The woman and her two sons specialized in sewing car seats, awnings and sails for the local chandler, and they had the skill and knowledge to sew the polyurethane-coated reinforced nylon fabric of the balloon envelope.
“We’ll find out, won’t we,” Doug said as he was busy testing the controls of the rudders and elevators from the pilot’s seat of the gondola platform.
“Can I go next time?” Wyatt asked, digging through a toolbox.
Doug shook his head. “I wish we had the fuel but we just don’t. Captain Stone said this is the last of the available propane on the island, and the unleaded fo
r the engine is harder to come by than the propane. We may just have enough to do this flight just once.”
Reynolds examined the balloon as it lay in the field behind Doug’s house. From the brown autumn grass, she looked to the sky and saw the clear cloudless day stretch from horizon to horizon. The trees moved and sighed gently in the light breeze around the field and she felt the cool wind on her face.
“We need to get to sleep before it gets too late in the day. We leave first thing in the morning,” Reynolds said with a smile. The first one she had in a long time.
— | — | —
PART III
“As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one…biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.”
— W.M. Stanley, in Chemical and Engineering News, December 22, 1947.
— | — | —
CHAPTER 44
Doug’s house, Gulf Shores
November 13 0300
Z+34
Reynolds slept like crap. She made herself lay down in her condominium just after sunset the day previous, but tossed and turned for hours in the dark. Occasionally she would drift off and wake up missing time, but overall sleep eluded her all night. Finally, after six hours of wrestling sheets and comforters she fell out of the bed, put on her cleaned NOMEX flight suit, grabbed her survival vest and crash helmet, and left for Doug’s.
When she got there, she found Doug already setting up the canopy with the help of Wanda’s two grown sons, a few MPs, and the always-present Wyatt.
“Do you even sleep?” Reynolds asked Doug over the sound of the two huge shop fans blowing air into the 140-foot long nylon balloon taco.
He smiled through horribly maintained teeth and a stubbly face. “Not too much. Isn’t this gonna be a blast?” the man said. He was dressed ridiculously. A goatskin-lined leather jacket hung almost to his knees, complemented by fur-topped leather boots, a leather pilot’s helmet, and goggles propped on his dirty hair. He looked as if he robbed a World War I flying ace’s grave.
“Let’s hope it’s pretty uneventful,” she replied. Reynolds reached out with a big green CMU-33/P22P-18 AIRSAVE Survival Vest stuffed with survival gear and handed it to Doug. It was identical to the one she wore. “Here, I brought you something.”
Doug’s eyes lit up as he saw the vest, dripping with doodads, whistles, a radio, and strobe light. “For me?” he asked.
“Yes, it belonged to my co-pilot and he isn’t using it anymore. If we have to ditch out there somewhere it may come in handy.”
He looked as if he was going to hug her but simply smiled and held up a finger. “I have something for you, too,” he said, turning and disappearing into the house. Moments later, he appeared with a cardboard box from which he produced a wool-lined bomber jacket with patches sewn to it. “It was my father’s during Korea. Hold on to it. It is going to be cold up there. Cold as shit.”
She thought about refusing, and then thought again. Within a few minutes, she had her vest donned on top of the jacket around her skinny frame. In her vest and in the bag she carried, she had a set of binoculars from Jarvis, a tactical radio courtesy of Stone, navigational tools and a few candy bars. As she was absorbed with checking her maps and charts folded up in the pockets of the vest and her flight board, Doug and his assembled helpers lit off the four burners on the platform to heat the air in the taco. He had his vest strapped over his coat, hanging off his frame. He was a much smaller man than Major Ketch had been.
Each of the burners was like a mini-solar nova. Producing eighteen-million BTU’s of heat, the burners created a ball of heat that Reynolds could feel on her face like a hot oven from 20 feet away. She dreaded the prospect of sitting directly in front of those burners when the platform was in the air. When they were not blowing a beach ball-sized fireball, the small flicker of pilot light could be seen winking in each of the four burners.
“Wyatt, hold this while I go check the crown line,” Doug said as he moved around to the top of the taco, which was beginning to inflate and gyrate in the grass. In what seemed like only a few seconds, the balloon was filling with air and beginning to stand up, becoming a massive nylon structure standing slowly into the sky four stories tall.
Doug was back as the balloon lifted its entire canvas off the grass, the side’s slick with reflective dew in the glimmer of flame from the burners. It took shape and filled out as the mad scientist hit the burners a few more short times. The gondola platform — the erector set of ladders, propane tanks, burners, bicycle seats and a car motor — began to sway on the ground, held down by a few ropes.
“Ok, let’s get on,” Doug said, gesturing Reynolds to her seat.
She took the front seat to have the best view of the countryside to navigate as Doug took the back to work the burners, rudders, ropes, and elevators and actually fly the ship. Quickly, she bungee-corded the reloaded M4 she had come to the island with to the ladder platform under her seat and took her place. Even with the addition of the two crewmembers, the Depplin was still gaining lift as the hot air in the envelope reached to the heavens, taking the balloon with it.
“Ok, guys,” said Doug as he worked the levers and gathering the ropes for the vents to the half dozen ground crew. “We are strapped in, preflight is done. Take a line and start the bounce.”
The MPs, Wyatt, and Wanda’s sons each grabbed a rope that held the Depplin staked to the ground. They untied the ropes from the ground anchors and placed a hand each on the ladder.
“Ok, I’ve got the elevators all the way back, start bouncing on three. One…two…three,” Doug said.
The ground crew pushed down on the gondola, sending it to the grass a few feet below and every time it surged back up stronger. On the fifth bounce, the craft hopped into the air and, in just a moment, Reynolds found herself twenty feet in the air, strapped on a bicycle seat that was zip-tied to the end of a ladder.
Doug cranked up the 1.3-liter Geo Metro engine at the other end of the ladder and they moved forward at full throttle. The craft continued rising and Reynolds watched the dark shape of the ground fall away until she could no longer see any of the ground crew’s faces as they moved up and away. The trees, sand dunes, and beaches lost their definition and blurred into dim dark patches of white, green, and blue.
As they rose, she heard Doug’s voice crackle in the earphones insider her helmet. She had given him Ketch’s old flight helmet and he had rigged the intercom into the Depplin’s modest wiring harness. “Looks like it works.”
“Looks like,” she answered. It was going to be a long trip.
««—»»
Sunrise was at 0649 according to the Farmer’s Almanac she had found at City Hall. By that time, she reasoned that they would be just past Fort Morgan and about halfway across the water of Mobile Bay.
Her reasoning had proven correct and as the first rays of sunlight hit the back of her neck, she placed her position at five miles from Dauphin Island. Below them stretched the still waters of Mobile Bay. The only way to calculate how fast they were going was to see how long it took to pass known reference points on the map. She estimated they were making 41-mph. Not bad for a garage-built blimp made in a week. Not bad at all.
The craft however, was far from perfect. Sometimes the winds shifted back and forth which caused the blimp, a giant sail in the sky, to move sideways, tracking a mile to the right for every two miles forward. Doug was working the rudder as hard as he could to correct it, but it was still a battle. They had risen to 2500-feet in altitude, as evidenced by the parachutist’s altimeter that Doug had strapped to his wrist. Even though that figure was relative as the Depplin pitched up and down due to thermals constantly. She had never been on a worse carnival ride.
The low point, however, was Doug’s conversation. They had been airborne for just under an hour and the only time
he shut up was when he lit off the burners occasionally to keep the taco full of hot air.
“If we lose our pressure we will collapse like a limp banana peel,” he had said, each time he did it.
She looked down as they motored over the Mississippi Sound and the sun grew full in the sky behind them. The giant shape of the Depplin’s shadow could be seen on the wave tops below them in the morning light.
Two hours into their flight, near what the map showed to be Petit Bois Island, she spotted an oil slick — a shimmering, reflective, deep black on the water. She peered through the binoculars and could make out bright international orange life vests, pieces of wreckage awash in the waves, and what looked to be plastic inflatable lifeboats.
She called it in to the National Guard’s TOC back at the armory on Gulf Shores. The radio she had normally would reach just thirty miles, but that range was more than doubled due to their elevation above sea level. However, they were already at the edge of even that tether and would spend most of their mission too far away to make radio contact.
They continued onward, pushing across the water of the Mississippi Sound for two more hours, passing over the thousand white doormat-sized islets of the Chandeleur Islands and into the swamps around the village of Yscloskey, Louisiana just after 0900. As they passed over the brown chocolate milk-colored water of the bayou around Lake Borgne, she saw the occasional twinkle of a muzzle flash from small arms fire come up at them from the pine forests. They were much too high for anything fired from a rifle to reach them and she could not hear any outside noise over the hum of the unmuffled Geo engine twenty feet behind her. However, it was encouraging to think that at least some people remained alive down there, even if they liked to take pot shots at passing steampunk blimps.
Last Stand on Zombie Island Page 28