Convoy 19: A Zombie Novel

by Mark Rivett

  “A million in the city. Three million metropolitan.” Carl watched Pam, Miguel, and Private MacAfee scramble into the nearest Humvee. He punched the communications link on his helmet. “Check if you’re in a car!”

  Seven “checks” came back. Carl loved every member of his team, but was particularly relieved to hear the voices of Pam and Miguel.

  “Anyone else?” Carl waited a few more seconds. “Okay, Pam and Miguel, bulldoze us out of this nightmare. We’ll take up the rear.”

  Sergeant Quinn’s Humvee exploded through a pile of writhing bodies with a crash of gore and limbs. Some persistent corpses tried to hang on, but were thrown off as it sped forward. Civilians attempted to grab hold of the convoy vehicles as they escaped. Those who managed to find purchase were dragged for a while before losing their grip or torn away by the hungry dead.

  Carl followed his team. As he went, the mounted gunner spun around and continued spraying into the densely packed mass of ghouls.

  A few moments passed, and the unmistakable sound of helicopter blades rumbled in behind them.

  “We’re clear, air support. Party’s all yours.” Pamela’s voice cracked through the headsets.

  “Copy that, 19.” The relaxed voice came back.

  Carl watched in his rear view mirror. The mayhem in the street behind him vanished in a thunder of fire and smoke, as missiles made contact with their targets. Civilians, undead, and vehicles were obliterated in a cleansing aerial bombardment.

  “Armor’s on the way, 19.” The same pilot’s voice assured them. “It’ll be clear by the time you come back through.”

  The sight of the Black-hawk helicopters cleaning up the perimeter vanished in the distance. The military would have the street reopened in a few hours, but the undead that had survived would disintegrate back into the city to wander around looking for new prey.

  “Sound off.” Pam ordered, and the voices of Carl, Miguel, and five others came back.

  “Shit – so we lost seven,” Carl responded. “Okay, we have three Humvees, three drivers, three gunners, and two comms. On my mark, we stop, reorganize crews, and get going. Middle car goes without a comm… don’t get lost. Everyone ready?” Carl paused for a few seconds. “Mark!” The three vehicles screeched to a halt, and the soldiers poured out. Pam, Miguel, and Carl, were reunited in the lead Humvee. Sergeant Quinn, Specialist MacAfee, and Private Barona took up the rear. Private Richards and Sergeant Ornstein took the middle car.

  Convoy 19 sat in the street for a moment, collecting itself. They had only been stopped for a few precious seconds when the lurking shadows began to roam into view. Their hollow moans carried on the wind and echoed through the streets and alleys.

  The mission had just cost seven lives, and it had barely begun.

  Chapter 9

  The gray corridors of the USS Ronal Reagan were crowded by sailors rushing to and from their battle stations, but Dr. Damico felt alone. Step by step, Henry made his way to his living quarters. His mind was in a fog after six grueling hours in the hospital. The adrenaline had left his system, and exhaustion was beginning to hit him. Sleep would have been welcome, but—tired as he was—he felt the insomnia creeping over him. The pressure of his responsibilities as Secretary of Health and Human Services began to worm its way into his mind.

  He arrived at his stateroom, glanced up to ensure he was in the right place, turned the door handle, and stepped inside the cramped living space.

  “Good morning.” Tracy Gowda sat hovering over her laptop at Dr. Damico’s desk. Boxes containing file folders had been piled high over every possible surface, and only a narrow path—barely wide enough for her wheelchair—ran from the door to the desk. Of the two fluorescent lights that lit the cabin, one had stopped working. The other cast the room in a gentle yellow hue that reminded Henry of a dingy bar.

  “Good… morning…” Henry answered back confused, before realizing that technically it was early morning. The Mexican attack had begun late at night and time had flown while he was working in triage.

  Tracy wheeled herself around and punched a few keys on a second laptop that sat behind her. “You’ll want to take a look at the documents that I’m sending to you. Admiral McMillan needs your report ASAP.”

  Dr. Damico had seen his share of workaholics in his life, but none even came close to Tracy. She had been his advisor for four years at his office in San Diego. She had never taken a sick day, personal day, or vacation day in that entire time, and was at her desk every morning before he arrived, and every evening when he left. As far as he could tell, the young professional lived entirely on a diet of coffee and vending machine food. Her understanding of sociology, economics, and international politics, was more than any three Health and Human Services employees combined, and she was immediately perceived as a threat by every rung of the professional ladder. She had been relegated to be his assistant for the entirety of her career, but had never once expressed an interest in advancing upward, despite being vocally disgusted with incompetence at the top. She seemed to exist for no other purpose than to dissect miniscule details of thousand-page reports on obscure topics, and translate them into tidbits of information that Henry found unbelievably helpful. With the rise of the living dead, her encyclopedic knowledge of numbers, statistics, trends, and outcomes, guided him in ways that saved countless lives.

  There was no place to store the piles of paperwork and reports that had accompanied Henry from his mainland workplace. His quarters in the aircraft carrier had doubled as his office since his arrival. Since the reports were here, Tracy had taken to working in his room at all hours. Henry felt as if he should be annoyed by the constant intrusion, but he had come to appreciate Tracy’s dedication. Since he never slept anyway, it seemed pointless to make a fuss.

  Henry squeezed into a narrow space between two boxes on his bed and dug around the mess for his laptop. He rubbed his eyes as the pale blue light of his monitor washed over him. A few moments of silence passed, and he started to digest the information Tracy had sent him.

  “Thank you very much for keeping me on through all of this, Henry.” Tracy reached for a coffee pot that sat atop a jumbled stack of papers and filled her cup as well as a second cup, which she passed to Henry.

  Henry took the coffee. “Thanks? For what?”

  Tracy wheeled her chair around to face him. “If it wasn’t for this job, I wouldn’t be here, on this ship. I’m alive because of you, Henry. This chair wasn’t built for outrunning the living dead, and warships weren’t exactly built for cripples. I realized while you were gone at triage that if things went badly, I might not have an opportunity to express my gratitude.”

  “Tracy, you…”

  “So thank you, Henry. Thank you for saving my life.” Tracy interrupted. “There are four other people in wheelchairs in the entire fleet, and three of them are soldiers who were wounded in the line of duty. Do you know how many blind people we have?”

  “How many?” Henry knew Tracy well enough to see that she was retreating into the comfort and safety of numbers and statistics during an emotional moment.

  “Two,” Tracy said. “There are five deaf people. If you generously guess that there are twice as many disabled in the civilian fleet that means there are fifteen cripples, six blind people, and fifteen deaf people left in the entire West Coast. That’s more than a 99.999 percent mortality rate.”

  “You saved your own life, Tracy.” Henry replied.

  “No…”

  “No, you did…” It was Henry’s turn to interrupt. “All this selecting who joins the fleet and who doesn’t is pretty awful business. It’s unconscionable that we think of people in terms of assets and liabilities, instead of actual people… children.”

  “But we have to…” Tracy started.

  “You are absolutely right, Tracy. It sucks, but we have to select people with skills and qualities that are going to give us the absolute best chance to rebuild civilization. If you’re a bright-eyed teenager who can’t do
much else but play the guitar, the sad facts are that you’re worth less to civilization right now than a seventy-year-old farmer is. Farmer gets to come and teenager has to stay, fend for himself, and stands a really strong chance of joining the walking dead before farmer has a chance to plant his first seed in the ground… if he ever even gets that chance. That’s a terrible, terrible reality.”

  Tracy nodded in agreement.

  “You saved yourself because you are valuable.” Henry continued, knowing that a cold clinical analysis of Tracy would appeal to her practical nature. “You are my assistant, but your knowledge and background makes you one of the keys to our survival. It’s not just that you’ve saved thousands of lives already. It’s that you will continue to save lives in the future. You will be a direct contributor to the survival of the human race. You did that, not me.”

  Tracy clenched her jaw and nodded again.

  “How many people do we have left counting the civilian fleet?” Henry asked.

  “The reports are still coming in, but we’re around thirty thousand.” Tracy turned back to her computer. “Thirty thousand, six hundred…”

  “If three thousand of those people, just three thousand, survived because of your work on DDC policy, screening, asset management, or convoy logistics…then you are responsible for saving ten percent of the entire fleet.” Henry smiled as he made his point. While Tracy might low-ball her estimates at three-thousand lives saved, she was probably responsible for saving closer to twenty thousand lives in the fleet alone. Furthermore, her work had helped to protect many civilians trapped on land. Their chances were slim, but many were still alive due in large part to her foresight.

  The two sat silently reading their reports until Tracy broke the silence again, “How many are you responsible for then?”

  “Um…” Henry smiled. Tracy was laying a trap. She would take this opportunity to lecture him on safety. Being who he was, he would see the logic in her advice, but he would also ignore it. “A handful, I guess.”

  “Henry, you deal with facts every day to guide assessments that you pass on to the Admiral. If your professional assessment of the number of lives that you’ve saved is merely a ‘handful’, my professional assessment is that your judgment is in serious question, and you may not be fit to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.” Tracy lectured. “This fleet, the DDCs, the convoys…they all exist because of you. Nearly every person living on the west coast is alive today because of you. Evacuation operations on the east coast are modeled after recommendations made by you. Take all that and add to it the fact that you will be responsible for designing the strategy that re-establishes civilization in North America...” She trailed off.

  “I suppose…” Henry began.

  “Henry, you are the most important and influential person in the fleet…possibly the world! You shouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks in triage. You should have Secret Service bodyguards posted around you 24/7.” Tracy tried to put Henry’s work in perspective. She and Henry were crafting the intellectual building blocks that not only kept thousands of people alive, but also gave those people the potential for a future.

  “There aren’t enough guards where we need them.” Henry tried to deflect Tracy’s lecture.

  “You can’t put yourself in dangerous situations, Henry. I’m not going to tell your wife you died doing something stupid.” Tracy made her point.

  Henry didn’t know what to say. He never really thought of himself as particularly influential or important. He had done well in school, had been a good doctor, and had married the love of his life. When he transitioned out of medicine into the Department of Health and Human Services, he saw it as an opportunity to help a larger group of people. However, being dubbed ‘the most important person in the world’ seemed like a stretch.

  “No, Admiral McMillan is the most important person in the fleet. He should have guards. There’s probably someone like him in Europe and Asia, and maybe Africa. Guys like me aren’t nearly as important.” Henry countered.

  “Guys like you tell guys like Admiral McMillan what to do. Guys like the Admiral are important, but guys like you make it so guys like McMillan have something to work toward,” Tracy affirmed.

  “Ah, but people like you, tell people like me, what to tell people like McMillan to do.” Henry smiled back.

  Tracy waved him away and turned back to her laptop. Stillness fell over the room for a bit as Henry’s mind dove back into Tracy’s reports: food shortages, security problems, supply losses. There was never any good news in a report. All Henry could do was manage everything the best that he could.

  “The situation is pretty fucked up out there, isn’t it?” Tracy broke the silence.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think it’s time to pull out? Stop the convoys? Let the DDCs fend for themselves?” Tracy asked, still staring at her laptop.

  Henry chewed his lip before he responded. “There are a lot of people still trapped inside the DDCs. We told them to go there. We said that they were going somewhere safe. We’d be abandoning thousands of people… What’s your data say?”

  Tracy had anticipated Henry’s question and turned her laptop toward Henry. The screen displayed a line graph. The green line was roughly smooth with a gentle downward slope. “This is the aggregate food supplies within the fleet – including whatever the convoys bring in and whatever we’re able to fish out of the ocean. Provided the Mexican military hasn’t destroyed or stolen any of our supplies, this graph is current up to yesterday.”

  “How long do we have?” Henry drank in the data. His keen mind merged numbers to practical realities and projected outcomes weeks in advance. He already knew what Tracy’s conclusion would be, but wanted to hear her confirm it.

  Tracy pressed a button on her computer. A red line appeared beneath the green line. It too was roughly smooth, but was flat in contrast to the line above it. “This represents the amount of food we need to feed thirty-thousand hungry mouths: Twenty-six tons of food every day. That is almost two hundred tons of food in one week, Henry. Two hundred tons.”

  “How long?” Henry repeated the question.

  “We have about six months. Maybe less, unless the convoys are bringing in twenty-six tons of food along with all the refugees, we’re wasting time. We have to start moving on our game plan, or we won’t have to worry about the undead devouring us…we’ll start devouring each other.” Tracy drove her point home. “Every hour, more than a ton of food vanishes from the fleet.”

  Henry nodded in agreement. There were a million things to account for in the North American evacuation; people, supplies, ammunition…but the constant need to keep the people fed had concerned him and Tracy above all others. There was an old saying that Henry kept in mind whenever he and Tracy came upon the topic of food shortages. ‘There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.’ Hungry people are desperate people. Desperate people are dangerous.

  “Okay, it’s time to move.” Henry nodded.

  “Do you want to see my figures on our fuel situation? I’ve modeled some numbers for what flu season is going to do to the fleet. Oh! Here are some figures on the general population with no valuable skills – mouths we are feeding every day with literally nothing to offer in return,” Tracy continued. She was fascinated by the statistics and research in this apocalypse, but every issue felt like another weight on Henry’s shoulders. “The convoys can’t seem to find any food, but they sure aren’t having any problem finding more hungry mouths.”

  “I think I have enough to present my case to the Admiral. Thank you, Tracy.” Henry rubbed his temples and he stood up.

  He began to gather up some documents for his report to the Admiral. McMillan had stopped asking Henry for documented evidence of his recommendations long ago. Henry had taken that as a sign of trust, but he always felt better with black and white back up on hand. The civilian leadership who often attended the Admiral’s briefings seldom contributed, but they were always the first to c
riticize without offering any helpful alternatives.

  “Convincing the Admiral we have to move will be the easy part. Convincing him of what we need to do about the Mexican military will be a lot more difficult. Can you start making sure I have the info I need to do that?” Henry asked.

  Tracy nodded. “Will do.”

  “Thanks,” Henry replied absent-mindedly. He opened a folder containing a map of every DDC in San Diego and carefully studied it. His eyes drifted to the dot that marked the Tierrasanta DDC where his wife was located.

  He shook his head in disappointment as he fished his phone out of his pocket. He knew it was futile, and the lack of a response from Kelly would only make him feel worse, but he sent the text message anyway. “I Love you. I hope you’re okay.”

  Chapter 10

  Kelly sat on the ground with her back pressed against the stairwell entrance. Her feet slipped and slid on the linoleum, as she struggled to brace herself against the undead horde snarling and screeching on the other side of the door. Dr. Thomson fought alongside Kelly while he looked around for something – anything to use as a barricade.

  Terrified children bawled at the sight of the struggle, but their parents rushed to aid Kelly and Dr. Thomson – the lives of their kids hanging in the balance. A handful of mothers and fathers had their full weight pressed against the door, but still it threatened to give way.

  “What… what do we do?” Kelly gasped over the sound of scraping, splintering, and shrieking.

  Dr. Thomson kept himself propped against the door as he slid downward and reached for the rifle Kelly had dropped. “We have to… we have to lure them away! It won’t hold.”

  “How?”

  Another heavy thud snapped the frame and flung the door open half a foot before it was slammed back shut. The moans and growls intensified. The promise of flesh worked the ghouls into a frenzy. Every moan or bang was a commotion that drew another curious undead monster to investigate and add its strength to the press.