With that, the crews checked their weapons, radios and equipment one last, quick time and engines started up all along the line. Tiny and three of his motorcycle clan roared out across the bridge to scout out the distance. As briefed, they would stay two miles ahead of the convoy, just inside the range of the cheap-o walkie-talkies, and provide intelligence of what was just down the road.
Everyone was taking pictures in front of everything. Groups of people were always taking pictures with strangers they just met to preserve the moment, ‘just in case something happens.’
Next moved out the alternating gun trucks and hummers, then the empty gas tanker, Stone’s command hummer, and finally the Juggernaut bringing up the rear. The wrecker was something of a mother truck that carried additional equipment, ammunition, water, fuel, tow kits, MRE’s, tires, tools and floor jacks that could be used to change a blown or shot out tire very quickly.
They had gone a mile through the deserted wasteland of blowing trash, burned and abandoned buildings and random clumps of bodies when the first dump truck and hummer peeled off the road to the right. Its target was the parking lot of a strip mall that held Deep South Sporting Goods, a Radio Shack, a hardware store, and a few other small businesses that were still largely intact. These had been scouted out previously and were high on the list.
“Hopefully, this thing won’t turn into an 8-hour long drive-by shooting. Tiny says he has seen minimal activity the past few days,” Stone said to Reid, who was driving the command hummer. A pair of heavily armed MPs sat nervous in the back seats. The last pictures Tiny had shown him of the area they were moving across consisted mainly of Rough Riders posing with a zombie corpse, propped up with a cigarette in the mouth of, and shades covering the eyes of, said zombie corpse.
“Well, it is Friday the 13th. Perfect choice for a convoy sir,” Reid grunted as a response.
The next hummer/dump truck pair peeled to the right in another mile to a bigbox department store. The store had its doors long ago pulled open and its contents scattered and destroyed by looters, swarms of infected, and animals. However, its garden center was still intact and the team sent there had a list of items including seeds, fertilizer, and agricultural hand tools like shovels and hoes that could prove to be the most precious cargo on the convoy’s wish list.
Stone did not have much faith in finding any ammunition there. Some 5,000 weapons were believed to exist on the island. Only about half were in viable calibers and in working condition. Precious few of the island’s weapons had a box or two of tattered ammunition with them, while most had none. This left a great ammo shortage after the outbreak. While there was generally a working modern firearm for almost every man woman and child, most of their owners only had a pocket full of shells if any.
With the advent in the past decade of the efficient Wal-Mart Model of ‘just in time’ inventory system, most of the grocery store and big box shelves were emptied before the lights even went out. The system was set up to automatically order items whenever they were scanned at the point of sale. It prevented large stocks of un-bought merchandise sitting in storerooms. It also caused the replacement stocks to be somewhere between the distribution centers and the stores, doing no good to anyone, by the height of the outbreak.
The third truck and hummer team, made up of Spud’s crew and escorted by a group of the more shady volunteers, stopped abruptly at a strip mall that held a small a pharmacy and liquor store, both with red X’s recently spray painted on them.
The fourth dump truck and its hummer escort turned down a service road behind a chicken place and drove quickly to a small State-run commodities distribution center. The center, in a squat brick building was a mini-warehouse for non-perishable foods and formulae for needy women, infants, and children before the outbreak. Its staff had locked the heavy metal fire doors and vanished, but its food and baby formula was thought to be intact inside.
As they drove through the small towns along the highway, one of the most eerie things was the mass of dogs everywhere. There were strays wandering around, packing up in groups, and reverting to their ancient behavior. There were two types of dog packs. The first was the beggars. They would be a small group of dogs, including a lot of older animals and scrawny thin limping beasts. They would linger around the convoy constantly, trying to get scraps and handouts. They were the ones who had always been and would always be pets. The second group lived in the shadows. They were the wild dogs. They held themselves away from people as much as possible, lurking in the wood line and the burned neighborhoods. Rumors of these packs being as large as 30-40 animals held true.
The reason why it was rumor was that the wild dogs had taken to being nocturnal and hiding from humans. Most were seen around dusk and seemed to be as a rule medium-sized mixes: Chows, shepherds, labs, mutts. You could hear them barking and howling, fighting over scrounged scraps in the night. They were believed to be responsible for the clearing of the bodies that could not be found as well as keeping the cat and rat population down to a manageable level.
“You don’t want to be in this neighborhood after dark,” Reid said as he drove.
Finally, the empty fuel tanker semi-truck, some fifty feet long, stopped with its lights flashing at a small roadside gas station. Its hummer escort came to a halt on the highway next to it and Stone watched with satisfaction as the security team was already fanning out in a tactical formation to watch the area as he passed in his hummer with the Juggernaut wrecker bringing up the rear behind him.
He toggled the small plastic walkie-talkie. “Ok gang, listen up. This is Iron Chef; give me a status report by the numbers from section 1 to 4.”
“Salt 1, Iron Chef. We are picking through what’s left over here. Not a lot of useful stuff. But no Romeo-Alphas around,” came the voice of the MP Corporal that was in charge of the group looting the sporting goods store.
“Iron Chef, Salt 2, report.”
“Salt 2 here, we are good, sir. Lots of rats everywhere and had to splash a Romeo-Alpha but we are loading what we can,” said the sergeant at the department store with the sound of shovels and rakes rattling into the bed of a steel-boxed dump truck behind him.
“Salt 3, we’re solid, sir. We have located a pallet of Dr. Pepper. I repeat we have the soda secured. Good times.”
Stone looked at Reid who was behind the driver’s seat, his head swiveling left and right looking for threats. “Friggin’ jokers here.”
“Your idea to let them come, Captain,” Reid muttered in reply.
“They scored us the dump trucks. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
The radio crackled again. “Salt 4 here, we are in the building and it’s good. May need assistance,” said the team at the commodities warehouse.
“Roger, everyone. Sugar-1, have you started pumping yet?” Stone asked.
The radio keyed up and the sound of a generator running loud in the background all but muffled the announcement from the tanker truck driver that he had the homemade pump that Doug had built sucking fifty gallons per minute of gasoline from the full ground tanks at the gas station into the empty tanker. According to depth plumbs and scratchpad math, they had estimated that the tanks at the station could have 20,000 gallons of fuel under its parking lot.
At the agreed upon point, the Juggernaut and Stone’s hummer stopped in the middle of Highway 59. They had passed through Foley and Summerdale and sat at the crossroads with Highway 104 surrounded by ancient pecan orchards on both sides. Stone, Reid, the four MPs with them, and the Juggernaut’s driver stood around their silent vehicles and watched in each direction for movement. They were to be the quick response force for the five teams spread out now seven miles behind them and the Rough Riders still two miles down the highway.
After seeing no activity, the wrecker driver left the roadway and started gathering fat pecans that had fallen from the trees. In a half-hour, he had filled a plastic bag with nuts, which he then commenced to crack with a ballpeen hammer and shove in his mouth.
Finally, he and Reid walked slowly out into the grove and stuffed the billowing cargo pockets on their battle uniforms with smooth brown pecans plucked from the tall grass and dry leaves.
“Jenny would love it out here. We should have brought her,” Reid said, bending over by a tree truck to retrieve an especially fat nut.
Stone did not reply but only walked on, dragging his bad leg over the uneven ground in places. He was deep in thought about other times and places. In his mind, he was in a field of mimosa trees along Weeks Bay with a girl he should have asked out, then in a grove of Date palms in Iraq, then by the monument to a tulip tree at Walter Reed on crutches.
Reid pointed to a pecan tree at the end of the field. “That tree about 1500m north…it’s got cancer, see? Tree cancer,” the First Sergeant said. “A tree is all long semi-strait lines, that one has a man-sized rounded cancer at the base of the trunk.”
Stone froze in his tracks and looked at the tree in question. Sure enough, a figure lowly crawled away from it and was swallowed up in the wood line beyond. Stone glassed the spot with his binoculars and saw a small piece of tan plastic with black-stenciled writing glint in the sun briefly.
“Tree cancer that eats MREs,” Stone said as he passed the binos to Reid.
“Baby Jesus on roller skates,” Reid said as he slowly started walking backwards towards the road.
They withdrew from the pecan grove and did not venture back.
In all they sat on the roadside checkpoint for almost three hours, doing radio checks every thirty minutes with the scattered teams to their north and south. The Soda and Salt teams finished with their work and fell back towards the gas station where they reformed a perimeter with the Sugar team who was still slowly syphoning fuel from the ground.
Ever felt funny about using a public toilet? How about trying to pop a squat in an open field while keeping your rifle handy in case some undead prick comes and tries to eat your asshole off? The tactical mindset involved in that is unlike anything you ever had to deal with in your life. It is pretty much unlike anything anyone else has ever had to deal with in their life until then either.
Finally, as the noon sun climbed directly overhead, Stone made a twirling sign in the air with his hand. “Let’s fall back to the station, and wait for Sugar 1 to finish.”
Reid tried to call in the Rough Riders who were operating two miles north of them almost to Robertsdale but got only static. After four more calls and no response, Stone ordered Reid to fall back with the Juggernaut while he and two MPs went forward in the command hummer to see if they could make contact.
The First Sergeant was enlightening Stone with a well-developed vocabulary about his faith in the mission brief when the sound of a single motorcycle approaching at a high rate of speed whined far to the north. The defenders of the roadblock took positions around their vehicles and made ready to defend it from anything that came down the road.
At last, Tiny thundered over the hill in the distance, like a fat tick riding a bottle rocket straight toward them. The man screeched to a halt on his superbike and slid sideways, almost losing his balance. Stone saw that he was not wearing his trademark helmet and his bald head shone in the sun.
“What the hell happened?” Stone asked as Tiny caught his breath and killed his bike.
“We need to move out. Nacho, Fat Pete, and Spyder are gone, man. We ran into the goddamned zombie holocaust up the road, and it’s heading this way.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER 48
2700-feet over Cuba, Alabama
November 13th
Z+34 1500
“Sunset is at 1849. The way I figure it, we should cover the 112 miles from here to Montgomery by then and make the final turn south. With no clouds and the full moon, we should be fine to make the landing back home just before midnight,” Reynolds said as she worked the dividers on the folded up roadmap and looked at her watch.
The sun was already getting low on the horizon behind them and the temperature was falling. Reynolds bundled herself in her borrowed coat and went back to shoving her hands deep in her pockets.
For hours, they drifted over the fields of central Alabama. She tried to stay alert and anxious, looking for any moving cars, people walking, or any other signs of life. All she saw was pine trees, the occasional farmhouse, small towns where nothing moved, and wandering animals. Highways had turned to linear parking lots. The world was getting used to the sound of no people in it. Thankfully, Doug had stopped trying to talk to her. The man meant well, Reynolds was sure of that, but he was just so overpowering.
««—»»
The sun had set fully by the time they reached Montgomery, the capital city of Alabama. Most importantly for their trip, it was home to Maxwell Air Force base, which held the headquarters for the Civil Air Patrol, a wing of C-130s, and the Air Force War College.
The base was deserted with no aircraft on its tarmac. Abandoned and as lifeless as the dark side of the moon, it had been the last hope that they would pass over on their scouting mission.
In the cold dark twilight, the Depplin turned south for Gulf Shores again. The moon soon rose big on the horizon. It lit up the sky bright enough for Reynolds to read her map if she held it close enough. Their primary method of navigation was through dead reckoning, where she picked out a landmark below them like a river or town and, figuring their airspeed from their last known location and their direction from the compass, she could work out a position. However, the blimp moved like an unruly sailboat on a wild sea and refused to follow a straight line. She also did not know how fast the winds were that pushed them off course, another wild factor.
With the sunset, she struggled to find features and they hugged rivers as best they could in the crosswind, as she could see the reflection of the moon off their surface like a mirror. She had brought a sextant with her to shoot fixes from the stars around them in the sky but the bright moon and the fact that the Depplin moved irrationally both up and down and side to side meant that it was impossible to use.
“It’s so black down there,” Doug said. “Not a single light anywhere.”
Reynolds agreed as she looked out over the dark carpet of space laid out below them as far as the eye could see. There was definitely no light pollution anymore.
“Is this all that there is now?” Reynolds asked aloud without truly meaning to.
“I know what you mean. I’ve asked myself the same thing.”
Well crap, it looks like we are talking now, she thought. “So, you know about my family; what about yours, Doug? I saw the pictures at your house.”
“She is a good woman. They all moved to Arizona to her parents and I lost contact with them during the first week of the outbreak. They said I was a hoarder and it was the stuff or them. As you can see, I still have the stuff. Hindsight is always 20/20, I guess.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe it is better out in Arizona. Maybe they are okay.”
“That’s why I was so involved with the radio station and then with the Depplin. I thought that somehow…” he trailed.
“I know. Me, too.”
It was awkward talking to Doug as he sat behind her in the dark. With the unseen voice coming over the ear buds in her helmet, it was as if they were on opposite sides of the universe instead of less than a foot apart. Reynolds thought she could make out him crying softly over the drone of the engine.
After several long minutes he said, “You reckon that is the Space Station?”
She peered out to the horizon below them; high above it was a small dim star that looked as if it was moving, too high to be a plane, too big to be a distant planet. She had seen it before, flying in an exercise a few year
s before in the outback of Australia and it looked the same. She never thought she would see it in the sky over Alabama.
“Yes, that’s it. I bet it’s lonely up there, too.”
Doug grunted, “I suppose they are the last humans in space, period.”
“Could be.”
“I guess there will be no more space travel. I watched one of the shuttles at Canaveral once from like 10 miles away, back in the early ’80s. It took forever for the sound to reach us. I was sitting on top of my pawpaw’s van watching…the noise was like a shock wave when it finally hit. An audible earthquake.”
Reynolds remained silent and let the man talk.
“I always wanted to be a pilot,” said Doug. “My dad flew F-86s in the Air Force and I wanted to grow up to do that, too. I just could not pass the physical. Bad eyes. I went to college instead. Spent thirty years of my life working for the phone company and going to school to be an engineer. Four degrees later, I still work for the phone company. Or I guess I did until last month.”
Reynolds sympathized. “Yeah, I was eighteen years in the Air Force. Hell, I was supposed to go on terminal leave next December. Get a six-figure job flying roughnecks to oilrigs. Settle down with some nice young girl.”
Doug laughed. “Why does it say Moose on your helmet?”
She grinned in the darkness. “Wound up with the nickname because when I was 21, I was the smallest pilot in the 71st Rescue Squadron flying Jolly Green Giants in Alaska. The squadron-naming unit made much light of the fact that I slipped in a pile of moose-shit on my first day at the base that they came up with my call sign before the head was gone off the first beer. Been using it ever since.”
“Great story, everyone just calls me Doug.”
“You are a pretty good urban survivor, Just Doug.”
“Hah, I survived years of Y2K scare stories, Deflation in 2003, Inflation since then, The Perfect Storms of 2005, and a decade of reigning fears of Global Warming, $200 Oil, and the Sub-prime Housing Loan Crisis Implosion. And now I’m gonna die due to damn zombies.”
Last Stand on Zombie Island Page 31