by Howard, Bob
A quick check of the floor above and the floor below produced the same results, and two floors below theirs the machine was facing certain death as a bag of chips got hung up. A big guy had it leaning over at a forty-five degree angle and was letting it fall back onto all four legs with a crash. Each time the stubborn bag of chips stayed where it was, but eventually the glass didn’t. When it shattered, people risked their lives by sticking their arms through broken glass. It was Black Friday at a vending machine.
Tom finished showering and toweled off. He was waiting for one of us to say what to do next, but we weren’t exactly survivalists who had the sense to think the simple things through, so we were just sort of stuck where we were.
He said, “I would ask if you guys were satisfied, but I’ve already seen what your sense of humor can do with a question with a double meaning, so I’ll just stick with the obvious and say thanks for the shower, and maybe I could get dressed.”
The Chief and I could be so juvenile sometimes, but we gratefully said together, “Don’t mention it.”
……
I spun the locking mechanism on the circular hatch and led the way through, followed by Tom and then the Chief. Tom had that look of awe on his face again. As we passed through the living room his mouth was hanging open at the sight of the modern comforts and the technology.
“I imagine we looked the same way you do right know when Ed brought us through that hatch the first time,” said the Chief.
Tom looked like he was going to say something, but he closed his mouth and just kept soaking it all in. He was a patient man, and there would be plenty of time for questions.
By the time we gave Tom a clean bill of health and were ready to bring him into the main part of the shelter, Kathy and Jean had Molly sitting at the kitchen table eating a plate of spaghetti and drinking chocolate milk. For a nine-year-old she was doing a pretty good job of not wearing too much spaghetti sauce, but she had a respectable milk mustache. Kathy gave us a discreet thumbs-up and a wink to indicate they had found no bite marks on Molly.
We had given Tom a set of the Navy coveralls we had become accustomed to wearing, and he was overcome with joy to see his daughter shoving in hot food with her feet swinging under her chair. It was the same thing we had seen her doing through the houseboat camera.
Tom risked spaghetti sauce and chocolate on his clean clothes and gave her a big hug. He noticed that she smelled like bubble gum shampoo, and her clothes were brand new. She had on a pair of blue jeans and a tee shirt. The jeans fit well, but the tee shirt was an oversized deep blue shirt that said Go Navy on the front. Seeing his daughter look like a clean and normal child again was almost more than he could stand.
Kathy said, “Have a seat, Tom. Your daughter told us spaghetti and chocolate milk were your favorite.”
“She’s right,” he said, but Kathy saw the slight wrinkle around his eyes at the thought of washing down spaghetti with chocolate milk.
Kathy handed him a bottle of cold beer. “We need to ration the chocolate milk, so this will have to do.”
I don’t know if it was the reprieve from the chocolate milk or the surprise of the cold beer that lit up Tom’s expression, but he twisted off the cap and took a long swallow. He sat down next to his daughter, and I could see something in his expression as he looked at her that said he would sleep better tonight than he had in a long time.
We all took a seat and dished out the spaghetti. I think all of us were dying to hear about what Tom had seen. I was sure he would be surprised when we would get around to telling our stories and that we had left the safety of the shelter, not once but twice.
Tom described those first hectic days as if he was recalling the one nightmare that you remember better than others because you’ve dreamt it over and over again.
He had been playing baseball for the Triple-A club in Myrtle Beach and had a good enough season to hope for a shot at the big leagues next year. That was one dream he wouldn’t get to live in real life.
When the season ended, his wife had sent their daughter from Guntersville, Alabama to spend the winter with him. He explained to us that his wife didn’t want to be a baseball widow, so she had divorced him. He had hoped it would make a difference to her if he made it to the big leagues, but he's hadn’t gotten there fast enough for a second chance with her.
“Were you able to contact her when everything started to happen?” Jean asked.
“We were able to talk for about five minutes before the line went dead, and I never got an answer after that. She said it was all happening there just like it was here on the coast. Guntersville only has about eight thousand people living there……or had, but she said it was really bad.”
Tom stopped talking and ate a bit of his food. Hunger was making him eat, but it was clear that he would have just drank beer if it was up to him. Molly was shoveling in her second helping of spaghetti, and that’s what held him together.
“She said she and some neighbors were going to try to make it to Huntsville because it was a big city, and they have the Marshall Space Flight Center there. She said there were rumors that the Army at Redstone Arsenal and NASA had things under control. It’s only about forty miles, so we figure she had a good chance of making it,” he said.
I traded looks with Kathy, the Chief, and Jean. There would be time to tell him our side of the story, and there was no reason to bring him down. We all gave silent agreement to let him have at least one evening of peace.
Tom reached up and brushed a lock of his sandy brown hair off his forehead. In a different light we could see that his rugged appearance was really his athletic demeanor. I could tell Kathy found him attractive, and Jean probably did too, but I was getting to see another side of Jean that I hadn’t known was there. Up until this night I had always considered her to be just a fun loving free spirit, but now I was getting to see a maternal instinct that could only come out when a child was around. I might not have known about that side of her for a long time if Molly had not appeared in the houseboat.
The Chief scooped a second helping of spaghetti onto his own plate and added some to Tom’s without asking if he wanted more. The Chief was giving Tom a good reason to stay at the table to answer more questions.
Tom took the hint and told us about those first days of the outbreak and what it was like in the hotel where he had been staying. He said there were people who were literally assaulting the hotel management over things like no room service and no clean towels.
“There were people who just weren’t getting the big picture,” he said.
Kathy and the Chief looked across the table at each other and looked like they might spit out their food because of some shared secret.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
Kathy said, “When we escaped from Charleston on the Atlantic Spirit, we had people on board like that. One guy said it was the worst cruise he had ever been on.”
We all laughed at the absurdity of the man thinking they were on a cruise just because they were on a cruise ship. The same applied to the hotel.
“There’s one big difference between the cruise ship and the hotel,” said Tom. “Were they trying to charge the passengers to be on the cruise ship?”
We were all stunned by the question, but I had to ask anyway. “Are you going to tell us the hotel was still trying to collect money while the infected dead were attacking anything that moved and was still alive?”
“They told me I couldn’t leave without paying my bill, and my car was in their garage. Then they tried to book someone else into my room who could pay with cash. They also increased the cost of the room to about nine hundred dollars a night.”
“What did you do?” asked Jean.
“Well, I don’t think we would have stayed even if the rooms were free. I didn’t like knowing there were hundreds of people in the hotel who were going to be hungry and angry. If they were willing to loot a snack machine, they would be even more desperate in a few days. To make ma
tters worse, there were about twenty hotels all packed into a few blocks. That’s a lot of people without supplies in a very small area. As a matter of fact, that’s probably more people than there are living in Guntersville.”
Around another mouthful of food, Tom explained that they had gone to a suburban area to get away from the congested tourist district. What they found there wasn’t much better. People with enough cash and vehicles that could carry supplies had stripped the stores bare already. Whole neighborhoods looked like they were getting ready for a hurricane. Windows had plywood nailed over them, and it seemed like everyone had a gun.
Tom never thought he would do anything illegal, but it wasn’t long before he had stolen a car and they had begun leap-frogging from one place to the next. He said the gated communities seemed safe at first, but if you could prove you lived there, they would let you in even if you had an obvious bite mark.
Once again my companions and I shared a look of remembrance. The same thing had happened on Kiawah Island south of Charleston. The armed security guards who were paid to protect the lives of the people who lived there felt like they were rescuing their residents, but eventually the attacks began inside their protective boundaries, and the guards found themselves fighting for their own lives.
“We found pockets of people who were kind enough to take us in, but if you hung around too long, you got to see it happen every time. There was just no way to be prepared for the sheer numbers of those things. They would either overrun your defenses, or someone would get bitten and not tell anyone.”
Tom paused for a moment and looked over at Molly. She was contentedly downing her chocolate milk as her father was reliving what it was like to keep her alive. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be so worried for such a long time about someone else. Children would be so helpless to defend themselves. I wondered when Tom had been able to sleep the last time.
“What made you head south when you left Myrtle Beach?” asked the Chief. “We’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a pattern to their movements.”
Tom said, “We didn’t choose south originally. I couldn’t think of where else we should go, so we headed west. I don’t know if I thought we could make it all the way to Guntersville, but that was the direction toward home, so that’s the way we went. We only made it to Conway, though. It seemed like everyone was trying to go straight west, and the infection was moving faster than the people.”
“I think,” Tom continued, “it was like pouring water into a funnel. Thousands of people were trying to squeeze out of Myrtle Beach using one main road, and Conway was like a big dam. People just kept pushing from behind, and what we didn’t know was that the infection was also in front of us. There were people trying to escape toward Myrtle Beach, and we were colliding with them as the infection spread outward. To tell you the truth, I don’t think it would have been any different no matter which way we went.”
“If you were heading west through Conway, how did you wind up directly south of Myrtle Beach?” asked Jean.
Tom answered, “Well, I guess I would have to call it dumb luck. We were stuck on Highway 501 with a few thousand other people as the sun was going down. Everything had come to a complete stop just as it was getting dark, and headlights were coming on. The police were trying to keep everyone moving west without getting all jammed up, and one of them recognized me. A Conway police officer who said he went to all of the games when he wasn’t on duty recognized me and asked for my autograph.”
“I was the same way,” said Kathy. “When I would do traffic duty over by the minor league ballpark in Charleston, I’d watch for the players to leave, and I’d get their autographs. You never knew when one would be famous.”
Tom laughed, “How many asked for your phone number when they gave you an autograph?”
Kathy blushed, which we weren’t used to seeing. She knew she was pretty, but she wasn’t one of those attractive women who had to hear it all the time. If anything, she was a bit self-conscious about her looks.
“There were a few times,” she said.
He flashed her a smile before he went on, and I could tell she liked it. She returned the smile but then looked down at her plate.
“The officer saw Molly in the car with me and asked if she was my daughter. When I said she was, he told me to make the next left turn and pull over to the side of the road. He didn’t say why he wanted me to get out of traffic, but he had this really serious look on his face. I could tell he was worried, so I did what he told me to do.”
“What did he want you to do?” I asked.
Tom told us that the officer had come up alongside him in a police cruiser and motioned for him to follow his car. Not knowing what else he should do, he followed the officer as he sped down a dirt road that sloped toward the Waccamaw River.
We were very familiar with the Waccamaw River but further south than Conway. If things had gone as we expected, the bridge over the Waccamaw River where it passed through Georgetown, South Carolina was in the water rather than above it. The mudflats around that bridge were probably packed full of infected dead.
Tom continued without noticing that each of us had retreated into private memories of our attempt to rejoin civilization by flying down to the Naval Weapons Station in Goose Creek. On our way back from there, we had to leave the plane parked at a dock a few miles south of Georgetown because a bullet had clipped a hose in the engine compartment.
The police car Tom was following braked to a hard stop at the bottom of a boat ramp, something else we were familiar with because we had two boats and a seaplane. That wasn’t something everybody could say these days. It also seemed like everywhere we went, we wound up at a dock or a boat landing.
Tom said he expected to see boat owners at the bottom of the ramp, but all of the boats were either military or manned by the police, and there were a lot of them. There was also some serious firepower mounted on the bows of the military boats. The officer he had followed from the crowded highway came over to his window in a rush and told him they had to hurry. He told Tom to leave their luggage in the car.
They had listened to the officer because they didn’t know what else to do, but also because of his sense of urgency. When they got out of the car, Tom saw that the officer kept glancing upward. He followed the officer’s eyes and saw that they had a good view of the bridge over the Waccamaw River.
What he saw made him feel a chill. The bridge was bathed in the bright lights on poles, but there were also hundreds of cars sitting still with their headlights on. Shadows were rushing in and out between the cars, and everything was moving. People seemed to be attacking each other, and the attacks were coming from the other side of the river moving rapidly toward the spot where Tom had pulled out of traffic only a few moments ago. He took Molly’s hand and started to follow the officer to the boats. Like everyone else, he kept glancing up toward the chaos that was moving like a wave from car to car.
As the wave of infected dead moved along the stopped cars, people would try to get out and run, but there were so many infected already mixed in with the living that it was too late to escape. The mob of attacking infected dead and the helpless victims appeared to be moving in a swirling motion, and eventually people began to jump from the bridge. Many of them fell with their attackers still hanging on by their teeth.
The police officers and soldiers in the boats couldn’t do anything to help. Part of the bridge was still over solid land, and it was more merciful than landing in the water because the fall would either kill the people trying to escape, or it would at least knock them unconscious. As much as the police and soldiers wanted to help, they knew that to do so would place everyone in their boats at risk. No one falling was likely to be unbitten, and even if they weren’t, there was no way to sort them from the infected who fell with them, at least not until they hit the ground. The infected would be the first to rise from the ground, and if the shocked people on the boat landing waited long enough, they would see
the victims begin to push themselves into a standing position, too.
Tom scooped Molly into his arms and ran with the police officer to the last of the boats that were casting off from the ramp. It looked to him to be about ten or twelve boats, and each was carrying six or seven heavily armed men and women in uniform. There were no other civilians who had made it to the boats, and Tom felt guilty, but he had to keep his daughter safe. He would deal with the guilt later if he had to deal with it at all.
He handed Molly up to another officer in the boat and then climbed aboard himself. Tom said he was amazed by how calm Molly was. With the exception of her pink sweatshirt, she seemed almost to be a smaller mirror image of the people around her. They were all grim faced, knowing that they could have tried to help the people up on the bridge, but they also knew it was a lost cause. It was worse than a lost cause. It was certain death.
One of the officers raised both hands in the air and waved them across each other. One by one he got the attention of someone in each boat. They, in turn, got the attention of their companions. When everyone was looking in his direction, he spoke just loud enough for them all to hear.
Tom said that he told everyone to stay as quiet as possible. No one was to shoot their weapon unless it was absolutely necessary. He said they were going to go downriver to the South and try to join up with other military and police units that were trying to fortify positions and make a stand against the infected.
His last instructions made Tom realize just how lucky he had been to have the police officer recognize him. He said the man in charge told the others there would be people on the riverbanks wanting to be rescued, and there was no way to know who had been bitten. He told them to keep their boats in the center of the river and to keep plenty of distance between themselves and private docks. There were to be no rescues, and he made sure someone on each boat answered that they understood.
One of the soldiers called out in a low voice and asked what they should do if they encountered other boats with people who were escaping. It was a logical question because there were hundreds of boat owners in the area. Some of them had escaped by water, and many could be seen on the river already.