by Bob Howard
“Stay down,” whispered the Chief.
He raised his head only as high as he needed to and pulled it back down just in time as a bright beam of light passed over the pharmacy. He had seen enough to know there were two dummies outside the main windows at the front door. One was tapping on the glass with the barrel of a rifle to see if it would draw any infected dead into the open, and the other was using a big flashlight to scan the interior of the store. The Chief didn’t doubt that they had been the people who had come from Fort Sumter on the boats, but he was amazed they were this dumb.
The tapping changed from a sequence to a hard bang. The Chief looked out again and saw the one who had been tapping the glass was drawing back his rifle and hitting the glass in the same spot. The other idiot was helping his friend by shining his light where the rifle was hitting. Both of them were so intent on what they were doing that they weren’t paying a bit of attention to the shadows moving behind them in the parking lot.
The Chief said, “These guys are either on drugs or they haven’t been on the mainland for a long time. Get ready to move with me.”
They kept low and followed the counter to the pharmacy door. The Chief untied the bungee cords and slowly opened the door. The Chief could see the men clearly from where he and Allison were crouched, and if the one with the flashlight aimed his beam in their direction, they would be like deer stuck in headlights of a car.
The glass started to crack along a curved line, and the sound took on a higher pitch. The Chief knew it would all collapse in a noisy pile at any moment, and he didn’t want to be stuck inside when it did. He grabbed Allison by the hand and together they ran practically right in front of the two men.
The one with the flashlight was so startled he aimed it at the pair as they ran across the store. The second guy didn’t know if he should aim the barrel of the rifle at them or keep hitting the window. What he wound up doing was something in between as he swung the rifle around and hit the window with the metal barrel. The glass rained down with as much noise as the Chief expected, but by that time they were going through the back doors into the loading bay.
The falling glass made the two men instinctively jump back from the window, and the man with the rifle found himself being embraced by an infected dead. He only had a split second to get out one word before the teeth bit into the back of his neck. The one word turned to a scream.
More infected were crowding into the area between the cars and the window, but somehow the other man dodged them and reached the corner of the building. With his flashlight still on, he ran as fast as he could for the back road behind the grocery store and then straight for the parking lot of a restaurant that featured dining along the river. As he crossed the road, Allison and the Chief were climbing through the driver seat of the forklift to go down the steps. The idiot with the flashlight ran right past them without slowing down.
The Chief looked at Allison and said, “He’s going for a boat.”
He didn’t need to tell her what to do, and they both started running behind him.
At one point the man looked back, and he must have thought the infected could run. He saw the Chief and screamed for help just as the Chief hit him with his best diving tackle. Allison ran past them and retrieved the flashlight. She turned it off just as the Chief managed to get the much smaller man beneath him to stop squirming. The Chief also had a big hand firmly clamped over the man’s mouth.
“Shut up,” the Chief said in a low, menacing voice.
The Chief could have sworn the man looked relieved as he went completely limp.
He said, “I’m going to take my hand off of your mouth, and you’re going to tell me where you left your boat. If you say anything else, I’ll snap your neck and leave you here. Do you understand?”
The man could hardly move his head under the weight of the Chief’s hand, but he moved it enough to indicate he understood. The Chief lifted his hand, and the man took in a deep breath of air.
“The restaurant,” he said. “The boat is tied up at the restaurant. There’s a dock on the other side.”
The Chief looked in the direction of the restaurant, and it looked clear of the infected at the moment. He stood up and pulled the man with him. The size difference between the two of them was so incredible that it looked like a man shaking a rag doll. He put the man’s feet on the ground and told him to lead the way but stay quiet. The man nodded, his eyes big and round as he looked at the size of the Chief.
It didn’t take long for the three of them to cross the parking lot to the restaurant. There were a few cars in the lot, but the restaurant must not have been open when everything began to go haywire. They were only about a hundred yards from the cruise ship terminal, and the Chief remembered that this area was a mass of people. Some were screaming as they ran from their attackers. Most ran from one attacker straight into the arms of another. The people who had been in the parking lot of this restaurant were the same people that Kathy was forced to abandon when she organized a blockade of the pier that led to the cruise ship terminal.
The man leading the way reached for the door to the restaurant, but the Chief stopped him.
“Do we have to go inside the restaurant to reach the dock? We can’t go around?” he asked.
The man halfheartedly pointed at the door and said, “It’s the only way.”
“Did you clear it first?” asked the Chief.
The man stared at him as if he didn’t understand for several moments then said, “Sure. Sure we did. There’s nothin’ inside.”
The Chief didn’t have much faith in the man’s ability to clear a room, let alone an entire building, but he didn’t have much choice at the moment. He reached back and gave Allison a reassuring squeeze on her arm then motioned for the man to open the door.
It was almost pitch black when they stepped inside. Like most restaurants there was a small area up front where patrons could wait for their table, and off to the right was the totally dark entrance to the bar. The Chief took the flashlight from Allison and shone the beam into the ink black rooms. There were barstools on their sides on the floor, and that meant there had been infected inside the building at some point in time, or that people had rushed around in a panic. When he pointed the flashlight to the left, he saw the main dining area, and it extended all the way to a long wall of windows facing the river.
“The kitchen must be somewhere behind the bar,” he said in a low voice.
But it wasn’t low enough because the groans started as soon as he spoke, and they were coming from somewhere on their right in the totally dark bar.
Allison was the closest one to the safety of the boat, and the Chief pushed her in that direction. He was next, and he followed closely on her heels. The little man had stepped too close to the dark door to the bar, and something was pulling him inside by his shirt sleeve. He was pulling back as hard as he could but kept sliding toward the darkness. When he screamed the Chief looked back, but it was too dark to see what happened. The scream went higher and then just stopped at its peak.
They found themselves on a veranda with tables lined up along a rail. Each table still had a folded umbrella sticking up from the middle as if waiting for the next group of customers to be seated. At the center of the railing was an opening that led to a narrow ramp. It dropped down to a floating dock, and tied to the dock was a fairly decent boat with twin outboard engines. The Chief had a fleeting thought that it was too much boat for the two idiots who had left it there, but with sturdy sea-legs used to the motion of the water, he bounced down the ramp into the boat with a practiced ease.
The ramp was steep, and Allison had a hard time keeping her balance as she followed the Chief. The floating dock at the bottom caused the ramp to rise and fall with swells coming in from the river, and each of her steps was measured as she tried to guess which way it was going to move. The Chief started back across the dock to help her but was only in time to see a hand reach out from under the ramp and pull her by the ank
le hard enough to make her fall head first down the ramp.
Allison started to get up on her own, at first just a little dazed and with a scrape on her right cheek, but the look on her face and the scream that erupted from deep in her soul was unmistakable. The infected that had tripped her was biting into the soft flesh of her calf. It would hurt even if it didn’t break through the thick denim she was wearing, but the sound of her screaming made him expect the worst.
The Chief shoved his knife through the side of the head that was buried against Allison’s leg, and even though it was instantly destroyed, the jaws were still clamped firmly in place. The Chief pulled his knife free and immediately used it to pry the teeth apart. Allison had stopped screaming and was biting down hard on the heavy material of her own sleeve.
When the head dropped away from her leg, the body of the infected rolled out from under the ramp. The Chief knew he had passed right over it, and he had moved much more quickly than Allison. It would have been him face down on the dock if he had not been so sure footed. The infected had probably even reached for him first.
The Chief looked at Allison’s leg and saw the big red patch of blood that had already soaked into the material. Allison didn’t even look back to see how bad it was. She just kept biting down and softly crying.
They both knew what it meant, and as ready as the Chief had been many times to feel the teeth piercing into his own skin, he wasn’t ready to see it happen to someone else…even someone who had been such a spiteful thorn in his side less than a day ago. He started to say something, but he wasn’t able to make the words come out of his mouth.
Allison said, “You have to leave me, Chief. You know what’s going to happen.” She managed to get the words out through gasps of pain and crying.
“How could I face Tom?” asked the Chief. “At least let me get you back to him before the end.”
Allison finally moved from flat on her stomach to face the Chief. She looked down at her leg and stared at it like it had to be a mistake. Like it had to belong to someone else. She shook her head and looked at the Chief.
“We’ve talked about this, Chief. You know what I’m going to become. You have to take care of this for me. You can’t leave me here alive, and you can’t take me back with you. Tom will understand.”
“And how will I face Molly? How will I look at her and not think about it?”
The Chief wasn’t able to cry, but he felt a powerful rage building up inside of him. He wanted to kill every infected dead on the planet. In his mind he was saying to them all, “Bring it on.”
His rage made him begin to move. He still felt helpless because there was nothing he could do to save Allison, but he had to do something, even if it was the very thing they had all talked about. If someone gets bitten, loved ones would try to keep them alive for as long as possible. The desire to keep a loved one alive could be stronger than self-preservation.
The Chief scooped Allison up from the dock and stepped easily over the side rails into the boat. Allison was protesting the entire time, insisting that the Chief should do the right thing.
“Chief, please. You have to do it. If you take me back I’ll be dangerous to all of you, and I don’t want to cause any of you to die.”
The Chief put Allison on a comfortable bench seat that wrapped around the stern and then cast off the lines. He started the powerful twin outboards and pulled away from the dock in a hard turn. He hoped his friends had taken care of business on Fort Sumter because he was going to drive right up to the front door and ring the bell.
The water churned behind the boat as the Chief opened the engines up as far as they would go. It crossed his mind that Allison had stopped arguing. He was glad because he was afraid he would have to tie her up to get her back to Fort Sumter. He looked around and saw that she had passed out and was lying peacefully on the seats.
As many times as he had heard Jean say it, he couldn’t bring himself to just leave Allison, and he couldn’t kill her. Jean had said to the Chief a long time ago that she would end it herself rather than to become one of them.
He remembered how close she had come to being bitten when they had been disposing of a bite victim on the cruise ship. The best thing they could think of to get rid of the people who died was to drop them overboard from a floating dock. As they were about to push a body over the side, it had reached out and grabbed Jean, tearing her sleeve but missing with a bite. Jean told us then that she would have jumped in with the infected dead before she would have gone through the agony of dying and then coming back like that.
He knew Allison felt the same way as Jean, but he was trying to tell himself there had to be another way. There had to be something they had never thought of to save someone after they were bitten.
Away from the shore and in near total darkness, the Chief focused his eyes on the channel while his back was to Allison. In the past there had been harbor lights and the lights from the city itself to guide a boat across the black water. The Yorktown and Patriots Point would be bathing the river with light from the other side, and a boat ran little risk of straying into shallow water.
The Chief had gone so far into his thoughts and the feeling of total desperation that he almost forgot he wasn't alone. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up with the sick realization that Allison was right behind him, and he spun around to defend himself. The move almost made him lose his balance, and the boat turned into its own wake, but Allison was on the bench seat where he had left her. He had become spooked by his own imagination.
Being tired was nothing new to the Chief. He had made a career of pushing himself beyond the limits of normal people, and then he would push himself even harder. But this was different. For the first time he felt mentally and physically like he couldn't take more from the world. He had failed a member of his own group, and he wasn't used to failing.
With his shoulders slightly lower, he turned back to the wheel and brought the boat back on course. He couldn't remember ever being wrong when his senses told him danger was near. He was sure he was going to find Allison dead but coming for him with her teeth bared.
It was while he was readjusting both his course as well as his state of mind that Allison rose on the seat, studied the Chief standing at the wheel, and then pushed herself to a standing position. She had lost a tremendous amount of blood, and her skin was so pale she seemed to give off light in the stern of the boat.
The shell that had been Allison was unsteady with the damaged leg, and a slight course correction and a bump from a small wave was just enough to cause her to fall toward the rail. Uncoordinated hands clutched at a damp metal railing, and Allison was gone. If the Chief or anyone else had been watching, they wouldn't have been entirely sure if it had been a living person or an infected dead that had gone over the side. Even the fact that there was no scream for help was not a clue. Allison wanted to jump from the moving boat and had been waiting for the opportunity as she slipped closer to unconsciousness. She was only vaguely aware that he had turned toward her for a moment, acting as if she was already standing. It was at that moment that the lights had gone out behind her eyes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Resurrection
While Kathy was taking care of Olivia's needs, Tom and Bus decided to try to get some rest. I took the first watch on the monitors and played with the different camera angles. The campfires were all but burned out, but they were still too bright for me to think about switching to night vision. I also explored the other switches and controls until I found the power for the floodlights. I thought about turning them on, but then decided against it. In the absence of the Chief, I wasn't able to decide if it was a good idea or not.
Part of me was saying to leave the lights off in case more of the people from the surface came back. They would see the infected dead and either reclaim control of the fort or they would leave. Another part of me was saying to turn the lights on in case the Chief was alive. If he was looking at the fort and saw the walls blazing
with light, he would know we had taken control. Of course there was another possibility. The light would be easily seen by anyone else who might be watching the harbor.
In the end it was my curiosity that made me hit the switch, and I couldn't have been less prepared for what I saw. There were dozens of infected dead that had given up trying to find more flesh to bite, but when the lights came on, every living being in the fort was immediately exposed. Some ran for the walls and jumped into the water, but most were cornered.
Not far from the cage where we had found Olivia, there was another cage, and the infected dead were gathered around it, reaching through the bars. I couldn't see much of what was happening, but I caught a glimpse of a man in the center of the cage, and he was trying to stay out of the reach of the dead. The cage looked like it would keep the dead from getting in, but the man didn't look like he had an inch to spare in any direction.
I looked around on the control panel where I had found the light switch and found what I was looking for. It was an intercom and it would let me call for the others to come back to the control room. I found the microphone and keyed the switch.
"Kathy, Tom, Bus...if you can hear me, please come back to the control room."
The scene around the cage turned into chaos. The intercom was on the surface as well as inside, and the infected dead went into a frenzy like I hadn't seen since the first day when they had attacked so violently. Some attacked the cage even harder while others broke away from the crowd and tried to find the source of the voice.
Kathy was the first to arrive. Olivia wasn't with her, and I looked past her with a questioning look.
"Olivia was wiped out," she said. "A hot bath and a little bit of warm food was enough to put her to sleep. I doubt that we'll see her again tonight. What's up?"
I gestured at the monitors, and Kathy leaned in for a closer look.
"Let me guess. The intercom system also broadcasts to the surface. Looks like you really got them shook up."