by Howard, Bob
“Kathy,” I yelled. “Anything happening over there? We’re pulling him in.”
“Hurry, Ed. Please hurry.” Jean sounded like she was choking on tears.
Kathy’s signal line continued to gradually go out and to the right where the bubbles were coming to the surface.
She yelled, “Should I try to pull him in with the signal line, Ed?”
I didn’t have all the answers. As a matter of fact, I didn’t have any of the answers. The only one of us who knew what was going on down there was the Chief, and this wasn’t part of the plan.
“Wait, Kathy,” screamed Jean, and she began frantically pointing toward the bubbles. “They’re moving faster. I think he’s going for the opposite shore. Let the line play out.”
The air bubbles were definitely moving away faster than before, and the rescue lines were tight but still in front of the dock, not more than ten yards away. Tom started to pull his line harder and was being met with strong resistance.
I said, “Wait a second, Tom.”
He stopped pulling for a moment as I looped my line around a piling on the dock. Then I helped him start to pull in his line.
We had our fears about what would be on the other end of the line when it came to the surface, but we knew it wasn’t going to be the Chief unless something had stolen his breathing gear.
“Kathy, keep to the right,” I said. “Jean, you stay behind us. Whatever it is on the end of this rope, Tom and I are going to tow it to the left and tie it off right behind the plane. Then we’ll get the other line.”
When the water soaked head of an infected dead broke the surface of the moat, it wasn’t really a surprise anymore. I was relieved because it wasn’t hanging onto the Chief, and only he could know how he traded places with this thing. As a matter of fact, there was still one line left to pull in, and the odds were in favor of the Chief having traded places with two of them.
We moved to our left along the dock until we got to the plane. The infected dead was like an anchor because he was so bloated with water, but the line was securely pulling him along.
“Guys,” Jean said, “look at the second line.”
We tied off the line and went back to Jean. The second line had pulled tight in the direction we had dragged the other one.
“It’s following the splashing noise of the first one,” she said.
“Let’s not stop it,” I said. “That first one was heavy, so if this one wants to do some of the work, let him.”
Tom untied the line, and we just followed as it pulled itself along the bottom to where we had tied off the other one. Once we had it tied off, we ran back to where Kathy was handling the signal line.
“The air bubbles have almost reached the other shore,” said Kathy. “What’s he doing?”
The Chief broke the surface just short of the opposite side of the moat not too far from the place where the jetty started. He pulled himself out of the water and sat down in the sand. When he pulled off his mask, he was too far away for us to be sure, but it looked like he was smiling again. He held up his right arm and then gave a tug on the signal line. I couldn’t wait to find out what had happened down there, but the first thing we had to do was get the Chief back on our side of the moat.
Tom cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Can you swim back to us?”
The Chief emphatically moved his head from side to side. He pointed toward the jetty, and it was my guess that he planned to walk back across at low tide. In the meantime, he would need to have us covering him. We hadn’t forgotten that those woods were sometimes crowded with the infected. That was why he had shaken his head from side to side rather than to yell back at us. I was glad we thinned them down by twelve before we moved the houseboat.
“Kathy, you qualified as a sharpshooter, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Sure did, Ed.” She grabbed one of our scoped rifles and ran over to the houseboat. She disappeared through the door and then reappeared as she reached the roof. She didn’t waste time looking for the perfect position and started scanning the treelike behind the Chief.
Chief Joshua Barnes had spent almost his entire life on one type of ship or another, so he trusted the water. He particularly trusted the open sea, and he didn’t trust the woods. You just couldn’t see far enough, but there wasn’t anything wrong with his hearing.
I joined Kathy just in time to see the Chief carrying his gear along the beach, and he was in a big hurry. He had left the signal line behind.
I scanned with my scope where he had been sitting just as the first of the infected came out of the trees. It was stumbling as it tried to get free of the trees and then stepping into the soft sand. It fell down once but went from a crawl to a standing position with determination. I couldn’t hear it from so far away, but I had been close enough to them to know it was undoubtedly making plenty of noise. That would draw more of them in the same direction.
Kathy had also seen it come out of the trees and was sighting in on it. Her first shot dropped it just as the tree line became a target rich environment.
Jean appeared on my left, and Tom was to my right on the other side of Kathy. The four of us started shooting as fast as we could acquire a new target, and the Chief was strapping his tanks back on even as he ran.
I hoped he wasn’t going to try to walk on the jetty because the rocks were far too slippery. The infected couldn’t follow him onto the rocks, but living people were likely to break a leg or worse by trying to walk on them. The Chief had worn diving shoes inside his flippers, but they wouldn’t be much help.
Some of the infected were attracted to the noise of our guns and began turning in our direction. After a few steps, they were falling into the water and sinking out of sight. That thinned the horde down faster, and we were able to focus on the infected that were still following the Chief.
By the time he was faced with a decision on where to go, the last of the infected had either been shot or had walked into the water. Through my scope I could see the Chief’s chest was heaving. He was a big, strong guy, but he had just crossed the moat against the current and then jogged down a sandy beach with SCUBA diving gear on his back. Even he would be tired. As I watched, he sat down heavily on the big rock where the jetty began.
Tom was probably the only one of us he could hear over the wind, so he cupped his hands around his mouth again and yelled, “Are you okay?”
The Chief gave us a thumbs up and went back to watching the tree line for more company. Jean wrapped her arms around me and I felt a faint sob as she let go of her pent up fears.
We kept watch over the Chief for the next three hours when we saw the tide was going back out. Before long it had become low enough for him to walk across. It was still hip deep, and the current would have been too much for the average person, but the Chief pushed against it. He kept looking down into the water, keeping his eyes on the bottom. It wasn’t likely that any of the infected would come back out through this end of the moat, but he didn’t want any surprises.
……
There are a lot of words you could look up in the dictionary that mean good things, and you would find a picture of Chief Joshua Barnes next to each of them. As big as a bear, but he had a kind heart and a gentle way about him that made everyone feel like they were protected when he was nearby. Seeing him stranded on the other side of the moat made us feel separated from the safety we were used to feeling. He was under the protection of our rifles, but having his solid personality over there instead of over here with us made us feel like we were the ones who were stranded. Even Tom seemed unnerved by having to wait for the tide to go out.
As we watched the Chief carefully crossing on the sandbar bridge that was forming across the northern entrance of the moat, I thought about what it was like when we first met, what we had been through together, and what it had been like living with him in the shelter.
When the raft that carried the Chief, Jean, and Kathy had appeared out of nowhere, one of my first tho
ughts was how impossible it looked to see a man that big in a raft. His full, reddish beard made him look a bit like a Viking in a tiny ship. When he smiled that first time, I felt like a friend was smiling at me. Of course he had a way of joking with me that always seemed to catch me off guard. It was just his way of enjoying life, not at my expense, but along with me. We may be facing the end of society as we knew it, but he was going to enjoy the company of his friends. Of that I was sure.
In the raft he was still wearing a white uniform from the cruise ship, Atlantic Spirit. His expression sitting in the raft with a long paddle across his lap was a look of amusement, and as much as I tried to find something else that was amusing, I was pretty sure he was amused by the sight of me standing at the stern of my Boston Whaler with a weapon in my hands.
What I learned later was that he wasn’t the kind of person who was amused at someone else’s expense. It was just his way of letting everyone know it was always safe to find enjoyment in the moment, and as amazing as it seemed, he was smiling as he crossed the dangerous gap between the mainland and the dock.
It wasn’t as if the Chief was our leader. It was more like we worked together in everything we did. We had made two trips away from the shelter, and we had been a team each time. If we tried to make the Chief our leader, he probably would have deferred to Kathy, and even though she was an assertive, trained Charleston City Police Officer, she would have deferred to him, not because he was a big man, but because she trusted him.
As the Chief came the last few yards, he pulled his air tanks from his back and easily lifted them up onto the dock. He barely had a chance to stand up straight after pulling himself up onto the dock before both Jean and Kathy had their arms around him. Of course, he looked amused about their concern. He gave them both big hugs, reassured them, and then started to guide them toward me.
“Ed, we need to get back inside and talk about what happened down there.”
Tom came over and joined us. He no doubt felt like an outsider at times, but only because he could see how close we were. When we had the time to tell him about our past adventures, he would really begin to understand just how close people could be.
“Where’s the cellphone, Chief?” I asked.
He handed it over, and I put it in a safe place so nothing could happen to it before we got back inside. The tide was going out, but a strong wind was kicking up, and along with it the rain. Wind and rain could hide the sounds made by the infected, so we gathered up our weapons and other gear and headed back for the shelter.
“Hey, Chief,” I said. “Care to give me a clue about what you saw?”
The Chief laughed as he started for the end of the dock, but this time he didn’t look amused.
“You guys pulled in two lines with two of the infected hooked onto them instead of me. What do you think was down there?”
That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.
With the sun more to the West, the ocean side of Mud Island was all shadows and cold breezes. We were in a hurry to get back because we wanted to see what was on the video, and we also didn’t feel safe. The outside seemed more sinister than I could remember from the past. We made good time, and I dialed in the combination of the door quickly.
Molly was where we had left her, intently listening to the noise in her headphones as she slowly turned the dial. She looked up and gave us a little wave before going back to her work.
I crossed to the sofa and brought up the camera view of the dock to see if we had accomplished what we had set out to do. The screen came to life. Where the houseboat had been there was now a clear view across to the tip of the mainland. There was a horde of infected crowding around the area where the Chief had been sitting, literally too many to count.
Tom let out an exclamation of surprise. “That’s right where Molly and I crossed the water and where you crossed today, Chief.” I never realized there were so many of those things out there.
We all gathered around the TV screen and watched, for the moment forgetting about the video and what the Chief had seen below. One by one the infected dead broke away from the horde and tried to cross the water, but they apparently had no depth perception because they couldn’t tell deep water from shallow water. Some went straight into the deep water and sank below the surface, and some stumbled into the shallow water above the sandbar.
The end result was the same because they didn’t tend to walk in a straight line, drawn only in the direction of the last noise they heard. Sooner or later they would lose their forward motion to the current and stray off of the sandbar into deeper water.
Some fell down, got back up, and started walking back in the same direction from which they had come. They would shamble into the other infected dead walking behind them, and the collision would cause two or more to fall into deeper water.
We were fascinated by their inability to reason out that they could cross safely if they stayed on the sandbar, but our fascination was also sheer horror at the number of infected that came out of the trees as the ones in front continued to get washed away.
“What do we do if any of them make it across?” asked Tom.
“The same thing we’ve always done,” said Kathy. “Nothing. They can’t get in here. If nothing else, they are a deterrent to the wrong kind of people trying to get to the dock.”
Jean said, “Eddy, where’s the cell phone? I want to see what the Chief saw.”
I dug it out of a zipped pocket on the inside of my coat. No water had gotten into the sandwich bag, so it should be okay. I switched the TV to receive the image from the phone and turned on the video playback mode.
The first minute or so was the blurred image of the infected dead that was stuck under the houseboat. It was reaching with one hand in the direction of the Chief. The Chief explained that he wanted to be sure that one couldn’t reach him before he went deeper.
The cell phone rotated back to the left, and the view became murky. There wasn’t much light to begin with, but the depth of the water made everything look black up ahead. The Chief gave a little kick to go deeper and kept the camera aimed down at about a forty-five degree angle. He turned on a flashlight and aimed it in the same direction.
“This is about when we were playing out your lines slowly,” I said. “We weren’t too worried about what was happening at this point because your bubbles were coming up not far from the lines.”
Everyone moved in closer to get a better look except the Chief. He knew what was down there, and he knew what was about to happen next. If we hadn’t been packed together so tightly in front of the TV, maybe all of us wouldn’t have screamed when a face appeared right in front of the camera.
The Chief had shown the presence of mind to keep the camera aimed at the infected for a moment longer before he tucked it into his weight belt. We all looked at him for an explanation because the view was pitch black.
He said, “The infected was bloated from being in the water a long time, and body gases were probably making it start to float to the surface. It tried to grab me as it floated by. I was just lucky that it didn’t start floating to the surface directly below me. It managed to get a grip on one of the rescue lines, so I unclipped it from my weight belt and managed to loop it around the infected. No sooner had I finished with that one when a second one drifted up from below. I decided it was time to get out of there. I looped my second line around that one and started swimming against the current toward the other side.”
“Why didn’t you just come back to the surface, Chief?” asked Jean. “You had us scared to death.”
He reached over and put his arm around Jean’s shoulders and pulled her close as he said, “I only wanted to go down there once, Jean, so I needed a picture of what I saw.”
“I don’t need a picture that bad,” she answered. “A description will do just fine.” She sounded angrier than she was, but she went ahead and punched the Chief in the chest. I’m not sure he noticed.
Right on time the camera view got li
ghter as the Chief had pulled the cell phone out of his weight belt. The view went all over the place but finally settled on something big in the distance. The Chief was swimming almost parallel to something, but he was getting a bit closer at the same time.
It was a horrifying sight straight out of a nightmare description of the gates of Hell. There was a net stretched across the moat from the island all the way to the other side. It didn’t go all the way to the surface, and its purpose could not have been guessed without a clue from Uncle Titus, but right now it was a body catcher. Sharks had room to go over the net, and when I had gone through the area in the Boston Whaler, I probably had passed over it with at least ten feet of clearance. The infected hadn’t been as lucky.
The Chief must have stopped moving forward because the camera panned back and forth to take in as much of the scene as possible. There were hundreds of the infected tangled in the net. Most of them were moving, and blue crabs roamed freely over them.
A large portion of the captured infected dead were bloated from their extended stay in the water, and we watched in sick fascination as a body came loose from the net and started drifting toward the surface. When it reached the top of the net, the current caught it and carried over the net and into the darkness beyond.
“You can’t see it,” said the Chief, “but it looked like there was a second net about twenty to forty yards past the first one.”
“What will this mean to us?” I asked. “As long as we stay out of the water we should be okay, right?”
“For now it’s not a problem,” said the Chief, “but if the sandbar gets big enough to stop the flow of water through the moat, it will eventually all collapse to the bottom. How many tons of wet bodies do you figure those nets are holding?” he asked the group.