by Howard, Bob
The corvette had reached the midpoint in its trip and began to slow its forward speed. All of the external lights went dark, and Jean quickly switched to night vision. She saw the big anchor begin to drop, and then it fell rapidly with great splash. The corvette was at a complete stop as the Zodiacs pulled up along her side, and the armed sailors climbed aboard.
In the stillness that followed the disappearance of the crew into the ship, Jean was able to focus more clearly on the mainland beach. It was more than she had expected. The beach was so crowded with the dead that it could have been Memorial Day weekend at Myrtle Beach or Daytona. The bright lights on the Russian ship had drawn every infected dead for miles, and the moat was going to be full of them
Jean fell asleep on the couch watching the dead walk off of the shore and sink. The last thing she remembered thinking was that it was a good thing they couldn’t swim. Then she had some really pleasant dreams about Eddie, being married, and having their baby. Despite the screwed up state of the world, she felt some measure of happiness.
When Jean awoke, she checked out the view through the camera facing the Russian ship and saw that it was daylight outside. She wondered if Eddie was safe, and of course she included the Chief, Kathy, Tom and Molly in that thought. She wished she could reach them on the radio, but besides not knowing if someone was listening on this end, there was always the possibility of causing problems on their end. Contacting them at the wrong moment could give away their position at a time when they needed to be quiet.
Jean made a quick trip to the bathroom, then to the kitchen to grab something to eat, and then resumed her watch to see what the Russians were doing. The corvette had been pulled by the strong current in the moat, and the anchor chain was stretched tight. There was a group of men standing on the bow above the anchor housing, and they appeared to be having exactly the problem the Chief had anticipated. The anchor had a firm hold on something. The men glanced from time to time in the direction of the beach. Even without being able to hear what was happening, Jean knew from first hand experience that the infected dead on the beach must have been making an incredible amount of noise. Stealth was not their strong point.
Someone on the ship made the decision that they should try to bring in the anchor. The motor on the anchor housing strained against the force that was holding the anchor in place hard enough to pull the ship forward until the bow was directly over the anchor, and the decision makers were all crowded into the bow trying to get a look at something below.
Jean looked at her camera controls and found the zoom function. She enlarged the image of the men, and her opinion was that they didn’t have a clue about what could be hanging onto their anchor so well that they were pulled forward when they tried to raise it in. They were hanging over the side trying to see into the depths, but Jean also knew from experience that they weren’t likely to see it well enough to figure it out. If they were hooked on one of the nets, the sheer weight of the net and that many bodies would most likely be more than the motor could lift. If they were hooked on a power cable, she hoped they couldn’t lift hard enough, or the anchor would cut the power lines to Mud Island.
In the event the power did get cut off, Jean had placed flashlights around the shelter. She knew the battery operated emergency lights were supposed to come on if main power was lost, but she didn’t want to stumble around in the dark if they didn’t work. She knew the shelter well enough to find her way from room to room in total darkness, but it wasn’t first on her list of things she wanted to do.
There was something happening out on the aft deck of the Russian ship, so she used the remote control to adjust the angle of the camera to see more in that direction. It was a clear morning and probably a little cold, but the Russians were used to a climate that was much colder, so they looked energetic and quite comfortable.
She thought of what the Chief said about Buyan-class corvettes being more like boats used for coastal defense and wondered again why she was looking at one sitting behind an island on the coast of South Carolina. It occurred to her that she had seen articles in magazines and on the Internet about foreign navies doing goodwill tours. Our navy had even sailed into Russian ports. She imagined that what had once been a visit in the spirit of building good relations could now be construed as an attempt to capitalize on the broken infrastructure of the United States, and the Russians didn’t know if the US Navy would ask questions first or shoot first. That could be why they needed to hide.
When Jean had a good enough view, she zoomed in a bit more and saw that the Russians were about to have a really bad day. At least six of them were in wetsuits with full SCUBA gear on their backs. They were climbing down to one of the Zodiacs tied alongside, and they were obviously going to take a first hand look at what was hanging onto the anchor. If they were lucky, they would see the problem, slack up on the tension of the anchor chain, and watch the anchor drop free from the net. If they were unlucky, the anchor would need to be untangled. That would mean getting close up and personal with the infected dead that were also caught in the net.
The Zodiac pulled away from the stern and cruised the distance of the ship until it was directly over the anchor line. Jean saw the divers each give a thumbs up as they sat with their backs to the water. One by one they just leaned over backward and let gravity do its job.
Jean thought maybe if they had gone in head first the way the Chief had done, they would have been able to prevent the inevitable. Because the net was directly below them, they entered the water blind to the outstretched arms of the infected dead that were caught in the net close to the surface. Jean couldn’t see them or hear them, but she remembered the video the Chief had made. She could only imagine what the divers saw once they oriented themselves and cleared the bubbles coming from their regulators.
The first diver resurfaced only seconds after the last diver entered the water, and there was nothing controlled about his arms and legs. They were thrashing wildly in an attempt to get something off of him. He tried to pull himself over the edge of the Zodiac, but slipped back under the surface again. Jean got a brief glimpse of a second diver. She had expected to see an infected dead hanging on to the first diver, but it was a second Russian who was so desperate to escape that he had wrapped his arms around his comrade.
On the deck above, the officers who had gathered to watch started shouting toward to crew members who had gathered along the starboard railings. They scattered and immediately began getting a second team into wetsuits. In a matter of minutes they were clambering over the edge of the corvette into the second Zodiac and going to the rescue of their shipmates.
At the bow, one diver had managed to pull himself out of the water and drop into the bottom of the Zodiac. Jean couldn’t see him once he was completely in the boat, but she could see the trail of blood on the black rubber of the Zodiac. A second diver emerged, and he wasn’t in any better shape. He had several tears in his wetsuit, and rivers of blood were running down his back. His diving mask was gone, and when he turned Jean saw deep scratches in his face that rivaled the rips in the wetsuit.
Jean didn’t realize she was crying at first. She felt bad for the Russians and started thinking she should have warned them. She didn’t know how they would have received the warnings. They may have completely ignored them, but she felt awful that all she could do was sit and watch them face such an incredible horror. She wiped at her wet cheeks and wished that she had at least given them an anonymous call and said not to go in the water. They would have been better off just cutting their anchor chain loose and driving back out to sea.
The second Zodiac arrived on the scene as three more of the divers surfaced. The crew of the second boat began pulling them on board. Two of the new group jumped over into the first Zodiac to give aid to their injured shipmates, and two others dove in to retrieve the last member of the original crew. They broke the surface only seconds later with his badly mangled body between them. He looked to Jean like he may still be alive but jus
t barely.
With all six of the original group back in the Zodiacs, they rushed to get their boats back to the stern of the corvette. Crew members were already lowering stretchers inside wire rescue cages down to the water where they were quickly lifted aboard. Jean knew what they were trying to do. These were friends who had sailed halfway around the world with each other, and they couldn’t just leave them behind. Despite the risks of spreading the infection, they were making the same mistake every hospital in the world had made on the first day of the apocalypse. They were trying to save lives that were already lost, and if they didn’t realize it soon enough, they would all be lost.
Over the next three hours, there was very little activity on the Russian ship. The Zodiacs were hauled onto the stern and washed, but then everyone went inside with the exception of a lone man standing watch. He circled the deck with a pair of binoculars and a long rifle with a scope on it. From time to time he would stop and study something either on the mainland or the island through the binoculars or with the rifle scope, but then he would move on. He almost always stopped when he got to the bow of the ship above the anchor. He would just stare down at the water like he expected to get an answer about what had happened down there.
As that three hours passed, Jean was getting restless. It wasn’t easy for her to sit still not knowing what was happening to her friends, wondering if they made it to Alabama, or if they were even alive. Just the thought was enough to snap her into motion.
She said out loud, “If they make it back in one piece, I’ll be damned if I will let them get their butts blown up by a stupid booby trap.”
Jean wasn’t really a stubborn person. She was more of a determined person. When she decided something was the right thing to do, she was hard to convince otherwise. She couldn’t imagine a scenario where her friends would be forced to come back to the island from the North, but there was one possibility. If they lost the plane but made it back to the coast, they wouldn’t be able to cross from the southern tip of the mainland without a boat. On the northern side, the jetty was repaired, but they could still cross using the sand bar at low tide. If they did, they could all be killed or badly hurt on the dock.
There was also the added advantage that the Russians were busy dealing with their own problems. She didn’t know for sure what was happening out on the ship, but she imagined they were doing everything they could to treat the injuries in the hope that their shipmates would recover. The Chief had said the ship’s compliment couldn’t have been more than fifty-five, and six were likely to die. Everyone was below decks even if they were just hanging around for moral support. All Jean would have to worry about was the guard on the deck, and she was sure the ship was anchored far enough away that they wouldn’t even be able to see the dock on the northern tip of the island.
Jean thought about the advice the Chief was always giving them about having a plan. She also thought about what Uncle Titus had said to Eddie about not leaving the shelter once you were safe inside, but she decided to ignore him because everyone else was outside, too. If they could do it, so could she, and it wasn’t like she was going to go five hundred miles. She was only going a mile out and a mile back.
There were wet suits in all sizes in their supply lockers, but in the end she had to settle for one that would fit a child. She felt more like a fearless warrior going off to battle before getting stuck with a child sized set of armor, but then she reasoned that she would be harder to spot. Besides, the wet suit was for protection against bites and the cold, because she didn’t plan to go into the water. A wet suit alone wasn’t a guarantee against the teeth of the infected dead, as was witnessed by the Russians first hand. She planned to add a few more layers of protection.
As Jean found combat boots, gloves, a jumpsuit, and a foul weather jacket, she thought about what tools she would need. She could go out there and simply disconnect all of the explosives and allow them to drop into the water. That might be a short term solution, as well as a giveaway that there was someone still on the island even though the Russians had searched for hours after the Chief had tied up one of their sentries.
Her best bet, she reasoned, was to deactivate the booby traps but leave them in place. That meant she would also need some wire and some cutters. She could cut the wires they had stretched across the dock and replace it with dummy wires. She had only seen the wires at night, so she would have to get a look at them when she checked the dock to see if it was all clear.
Jean also remembered that the Chief always said to have a Plan B, but she found out that it was harder to think of why she would need a Plan B without her friends around. She finally concluded that the only other thing to plan for other than the infected and the Russians would be the possibility of not being able to get back to the main entrance of the shelter. If she got stuck outside at night, she could freeze to death, so she needed to add a thermal layer to her clothing and an emergency kit with a foil blanket. Of course, she could always try to make it to the emergency tunnel on the southern tip of the island, but she didn’t want to try to make it there in the dark. If something was preventing her from getting back inside, she didn’t want to reveal the existence of the tunnel by using a flashlight.
Despite the fact that a flashlight would give away her position, it was still a necessity, but she put a red lens cover on it before using a clip to fasten it to her belt. Jean studied herself in the mirror and thought she looked more like someone’s kid going outside to play in the snow than a commando, but she hoped she wouldn’t run into anyone she needed to impress. For about the tenth time since she decided to do this, she questioned herself, but she kept coming back to that one fear, and that was seeing someone she loved blown to pieces by a bomb. The irony of such a loss was all she could focus on. You survive an apocalypse only to be killed by a bomb. You might as well get run over by a car or die from food poisoning.
The only thing she needed to add was weapons. The Chief had found a couple of silencers in the armory, but they had taken them along on the their trip to Alabama. It wasn’t like they expected her to need them. She rationalized that she should take a gun, but she wouldn’t use it unless there was no other choice. She also figured if she used the gun on the ocean side of the island, she would be able to get back to the entrance to the shelter before the Russians could mobilize. She also slid a machete into a loop on her belt and strapped a knife in a sheath to her leg. Now she looked like a commando.
A quick look at the camera views showed one Russian still walking the decks of the ship but no other activity. Next she adjusted the camera on the dock to locate the trip wires. She zoomed in close and saw that the wires weren’t exactly invisible. They looked like typical strands of copper wire. At night they would be deadly, but if you were looking down in the daylight, they were easy to see. The Russians probably just used what they had, and that was fortunate because copper wire was what Jean also had.
The other camera angles showed no activity on Mud Island. There were still plenty of the infected walking around on the mainland beach, but none had crossed to water to her side. A last look at the ship told her the Russian sentry had taken an interest in teasing the infected by yelling at them. They would walk out into the water and disappear with the current.
Jean said out loud, “Time to stop stalling and do this.”
Before she could lose her nerve, she made her way to the big steel door and unlocked it. A big burst of cold wind hit her in the face, but the sky was clear. She grabbed her supply bag and stepped out, thinking the whole time that this was a stupid idea. She wondered which was closer to the odds of winning the lottery. Losing one of her friends to an explosive strapped to the dock, or her surviving a field trip in a world that had gone to hell. She grinned as she thought to herself, “Don’t blow yourself up on the dock.”
A mile doesn’t really feel that long when you have something to think about the whole time, and she had plenty on her mind. Watching every moving bush, every overgrown path, in front
of you, behind you, listening for any sound that didn’t belong on an island on a cold but clear day. Jean heard the sound that didn’t belong before she spotted movement. Where this infected dead had come from she didn’t know. It hadn’t seen her yet, so she had the advantage. She chose the machete because she liked the longer reach. She gripped it in her right hand and began moving forward in a crouch.
Jean could smell the dead flesh on the thing standing with its back to her. She guessed she hadn’t seen it because it was wearing a tan shirt that looked like it was made from the same material as the bushes. It didn’t have any of the usual blue crabs hanging from it, probably because the weather and the water were so cold. She estimated there were only four more long strides before she would be in a position to plant the machete in the back of its head, so she took them quickly.
With her arm in its downswing, a hand grabbed her arm between the elbow and the shoulder, and her prey turned around to face her. She started to yell at the person who owned the hand, and locked eyes with another infected dead that had been standing virtually motionless in the middle of the bushes. It had a strong grip on her arm and had already begun to lower its head for a bite on her upper arm by the shoulder. She felt the pressure from its jaws as the teeth attempted to go through the layers of clothing, but even worse, she was afraid that her own struggles would cause the material to tear.
The infected that she had seen first wasn’t moving as fast as Jean when she was closing the distance to kill it, but it wasn’t having to fight its way free from the grip of something that was trying to eat it. Jean could see it was already opening its mouth in anticipation of the first bite. Everything seemed to slow down, and Jean remembered a discussion she had with the Chief. He had said everything would slow down when you were sure you were going to die, and if you wanted to live, you had to make yourself move faster because time didn’t slow down for whatever was trying to kill you. Jean had asked him if he had ever experienced that feeling, and he had told her too many times.