by Howard, Bob
In the distance, there was a hotel and the clubhouse where the members would kick back for drinks and talk about investments. It didn’t look like anything had happened here, but plenty of those infected down there in the water had to have been lawyers, stock brokers, and realtors. Something was totally wrong with this scene because when the infection spread, they all wound up in the water. That couldn’t have happened by accident. As a matter of fact, there must have been a large contingent of people who would have thought this was the place to go to be safe. A wall, a gate, surrounded by water, planes, and boats. Those were all good reasons why the average Joes and their families would have loaded up in their cars and tried to come here.
The maintenance building was about a hundred yards from the dock, so all we had to do was stay out in the open in order to see if anything was coming. The infected were too slow to be a problem if any showed up out in the open, so we were more worried that there would be living people with rifles taking aim at us. We stayed close to the water because we knew what the threat was on that side.
Kathy held up her hand for us to all stop, and we immediately began pivoting to our left and right looking for whatever the threat was that she had spotted. It turned out that she had seen something in the grass not far away and wanted to get a closer look. She was poking at it with her boot when we came up behind her and looked down.
“It’s just clothing,” she said, “but it’s the first sign we’ve seen that something happened here.”
“You mean besides all of those people in the water,” I said.
“There is that,” she said, “but it almost feels like everybody went into the water on purpose, maybe to get away from whatever was up here.”
The Chief said, “Okay, let’s keep that in mind. Something was up here that made everybody go to the water for safety, but why couldn’t that have been the infected?”
“I don’t know, Chief. It could have been the infected, and it could have been something else, too,” said Kathy. “Something is making the back of my neck crawl, and I can’t put my finger on it.”
I took another look at the clothes on the ground, and I spotted what was bothering Kathy. Something had eaten whoever had been wearing those clothes. The infected dead would eat their victims, but this victim had been wearing a wide, leather belt, and there were long gouges in the leather. I hadn’t really paid that much attention to the eating habits of the infected, partially because I had been so insulated from the carnage of the first days, but I didn’t think they ate leather belts.
“Are there any other predators around here?” I asked the group.
“I was thinking that while we were flying in the plane,” said Kathy. “I remember thinking that the predators most likely to go after the infected dead were also the predators most likely to go after living people.”
That got everyone’s attention. Tom said, “There are bear, bobcats, and a few mountain lions in this area, but they stay clear of the resort because it’s too much civilization for them. They can stay up on the mountains and go after deer, so they don’t come down here after people. Of course, that was before all the people started going up into their habitats. That many people trying to reach safety by going into the mountains had to drive the game down here.”
“That’s a good theory,” said the Chief, “but I think Kathy is getting at something else. A mountain lion or two wouldn’t have cleared this area so well. Maybe after we check the avionics maintenance building we could take a quick look around.”
Kathy said, “I’d be content to just look around from the air, Chief. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I had a sudden thought, and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. “Chief, I think you’re right about taking a look around. Maybe we should even go up to the hotel.”
“Have you gone crazy, Ed? What could we possibly need from up there?” Kathy gestured toward the massive hotel that dominated the northern end of the peninsula.
“Information,” I said. “We got to see the news when the infection first started to spread, but it never occurred to me that everyone and his brother was probably making videos with their cell phones. If we can find bodies, we might find cell phones.”
“What about those clothes we saw back in the grass?” asked Tom. “Anyone see a cell phone?”
“That’s what I was poking around for, Tom,” answered Kathy, “but I figured the weather would have wrecked it by now. Ed might be right. Any useful information would be on a cell phone that’s been inside since the first day. If the battery power hasn’t bled off, it might be good to know what happened here.”
“Okay,” said the Chief. “If everything goes well at the maintenance building, we can take a quick look, but everyone keep your eyes open.”
It only took a couple of minutes to cover the rest of the distance to the maintenance building, and the area between there and the resort hotel were just as clear and clean as the golf course. The only thing any of us had seen to show there had been anything to worry about was the pile of torn clothing in the grass.
As predicted, on the other side of the building there was a paved driveway that led to a large door. I had expected the door to open like a barn door, but this was like a huge garage. It was a roll-up door without any windows. At the bottom where the door met the ground, there was a padlock slipped through its steel frame, but no one had taken the time to squeeze it together and lock it.
I reached down and pulled the padlock out of its holes, but I didn’t raise the door. “Too easy,” I said. “Any windows we can see in through?”
I had just gotten the question out when something banged against the door from the inside, and the door started to go up a bit. Our mistake was that we backed up from the door and aimed our weapons instead of pushing the door back down and putting the lock back through the holes. By the time we realized the mistake, it was too late, and the Chief yelled for us to run.
The door was so large and heavy that it operated with counter weights. Once it was started in motion, the weights did all of the work and opened it the rest of the way. The padlock had been holding the door in a down position, because the counter weights put a constant pull on the door……pulling it upward.
We couldn’t go back around the maintenance building because the door would be up too soon, so we all turned and ran as hard as we could toward the hotel. Something was trying desperately to get through the gap at the bottom of the door even before it was high enough. As a matter of fact, the something that was trying to get out was more than one thing.
We were almost to the hotel doors when the maintenance building door was high enough for the occupants to spring out into the light, and there was immediate chaos around the door as the guard dogs sprinted after us. If they had been faster breeds, we wouldn’t have made it to the hotel, but these were the largest Rottweilers I had ever seen, and we had gotten enough of a head start. If we had tried to stand our ground, we would probably have been able to shoot most of them, but there were eight targets. Some would have been on us.
The door we chose was unlocked, and Kathy got there just ahead of Tom. She had her machete in her hand as she went through the door, and I was only vaguely aware that she had taken down the first of a few infected dead that were roaming around. It was a dining area, and it looked like it was occupied by eighteen to twenty of the infected.
All we could do was wade into the room and kill as we went. The Chief got the door shut in time, and the dogs began slamming into it. There was too much glass in this dining area, so it was only going to be a matter of time before they began charging at us through the windows, and they weren't likely to hold. We needed to get to higher ground where we could use our weapons to shoot the dogs and be reasonably safe from the infected dead at the same time.
The Chief, constantly strategizing, yelled at us not to shoot the dogs if they got in and to follow him. There was a staircase in the center of the dining area with infected piled up at the bottom o
f it. He jumped over the reaching infected that were pinned under other bodies and took the winding staircase to the second floor several steps at a time. He used his machete to slice the leg off of an infected dead that was at the top of the stairs and pushed it past us. It tumbled most of the way down the stairs where it joined up with others that had fallen.
There were less infected still in this area of the second floor, probably because they had been falling down the open staircase for so long. We saw that we were in the watering hole of the golf course. There was a huge sign over the bar that said we were in the Cavern Country Club and Resort.
The Chief yelled out his plan quickly, “Everyone keep your eyes out for infected, but Kathy is going to be at the railing as overwatch. When the dogs get in, let them attack the infected before you shoot the dogs. If any of them start coming up the stairs, go ahead and drop them, too. Ed, you’ve got our backs. Find a safe spot behind us where you can see if anything is coming toward us.”
It looked like I had the easy job, but I had to keep my head on a swivel. Besides the bar, there were two long corridors that most likely led to meeting rooms. There were infected dead moving our way from both directions.
The once beautiful bar was a dirty mess. There was dried blood and long decayed bodies everywhere. If there had been a conference in progress in one of the meeting rooms, there could be hundreds of people on this floor alone, but it was more likely that people had begun to evacuate when things got bad. Those who were left here were like Tom and Molly when they got stuck in Myrtle Beach. They had no place to go. These people felt safe at their club, so they chose to go to the bar. The world was going to hell, so the best way to deal with it was over a glass of something strong.
I had a scope on my rifle, so it wasn’t hard to clear the hallways, but it was a real mess at the bottom of the stairs. Kathy was holding her fire because the dogs were throwing themselves against the windows, and it was only a matter of time before they would break through. I made sure there wasn't anything on the second floor that could get to us and took a look over the railing at the dining area. There were well over a hundred of the infected below us and more coming.
I crossed through the bar and pulled the double doors shut to the corridor on the right. Luck was on our side because the doors could be pushed open from our side but had to be pulled from the other side. The infected dead didn’t know the difference between pushing and pulling. As a matter of fact, they only seemed to know about pushing, and within a minute they were pushing from the other side. I took the curtain sashes from the big curtains on the windows that faced the golf course and tied the door handles together.
As I ran by Kathy on my way to the corridor on the left, I raised my voice over the chaos below and said, “We aren’t supposed to be here. We should be dropping Tom off and Molly and flying back to Jean.”
She casually answered, “We’ve got this Ed.”
Kathy glanced over at the Chief and asked, “Think they’re all in at the bottom of the stairs yet, Chief?”
“Yeah, but give it another minute, Kathy,” he answered.
He nudged Tom and motioned for him to follow. They ran over to the bar and started hauling tables and chairs over to the top of the stairs and tossing them into a pile near the bottom. Most of them were landing on top of the infected that were already blocking the stairs, so an impressive barricade was being built.
I finished closing and roping the doors to the second corridor and went back to help when I noticed that nothing was coming down the stairs from above. I went part way up the stairs and saw that someone had come up with the bright idea of having stairs only to the second floor. The next level was nothing but rows of elevator doors on both sides. I imagined there would be emergency stairs, probably at the other ends of the corridors I had closed, but this place was strictly for the really rich and really lazy. They must have been seriously bummed out when this place lost power, and they had to use the emergency stairs.
When I got back to Kathy’s side, I let her know we were closed in and safe. She whistled at the Chief who gave her a thumbs-up. I didn’t know what they had cooked up, so I was surprised when Kathy fired a shot at the glass where they dogs were hitting it the most. The bullet had the desired effect as the glass shattered and dropped to the floor.
The dogs flew through the opening in the window and began ripping the infected dead apart. The infected had numbers by far, but they were slow and clumsy. By the time they could react to a dog, they were already being pulled to the floor. The noise level increased as the dogs barked with each attack, running from one body to the next. The infected were making a groaning noise that reminded me of the first days of the spread of the infection, but I had never heard it like this.
At times one of the dogs would let out a yelp when an infected dead would get lucky and its teeth would find flesh, but the yelp would immediately be followed by a renewed fury of snapping and barking as the dogs would get even for being bitten. There were still eight dogs attacking when the horde of infected had been reduced by half, and when one of the dogs finally went down, there were no more than twenty-five still on their feet.
I crossed over to the stairs where the Chief and Tom were keeping their eyes on the barricade. If any of the dogs decided they wanted living flesh, they needed to be dropped fast. We didn’t need to find out what would happen if one of us was bitten by a dog that had just been biting the infected. There really wasn’t much doubt, but we didn’t think we could turn these dogs into pets anyway, and they weren’t going to let us get back to the plane. They were doing us a huge favor, though.
I moved up next to Tom and asked him how he was holding up.
“Worried about Molly,” he said. “She must be wondering why we’ve been gone so long.”
“You’ve taught her the new rules well, Tom. I’m sure she’s okay,” I said.
Tom gave me a slight nod of appreciation, but I could see the worry on his face as he took aim at something below.
“Down to twelve infected,” said Kathy.
One of the dogs looked up and saw her and immediately charged toward the barricade. We were all amazed to see the powerful animal easily clear the tables, chairs, and bodies at the bottom. It had moved so quickly that Kathy never got off a shot, but Tom was ready for it. The dog was almost on him when he pulled the trigger. He didn’t have time to be sure that dog was dead because a second had jumped over the barricade right behind the first. The Chief got that one, and I heard Kathy open fire.
In the end there was one infected dead that was trying to crawl over bodies to reach us. It was almost pathetic to watch the effort it was making when there had been at least a hundred of them when the fight started. The four of us gathered at the railing and looked down at the remaining infected dead. It had been a young woman, and she was wearing the remains of hotel uniform. She had probably been on the staff of waitresses and had been offered some overtime wages to stay and take care of the stranded rich people. Her own family probably never knew what had happened to her, and if they were alive, they were somewhere holding out hope that she was okay too.
The Chief walked over to the bar and looked through the remaining bottles of liquor.
“I can’t believe this,” he said.
He was studying labels with admiration. “I was only hoping to find something decent in their leftovers, but there isn’t anything over here that isn’t the best in its class.”
He set up a row of glasses and poured two fingers of Royal Salute into each of them.
“My friends, that was too close,” he said. “Let’s drink one of these together and then get the hell out of here.”
We each picked up a glass and studied the golden liquid.
“What is this stuff?” asked Kathy.
“In my opinion, this is the best Scotch whiskey in the world, and it probably went for about twenty-five dollars for a glass this size in this bar,” he said.
We all downed our glasses, and even though
I couldn’t tell a good whiskey from a can of Dr. Pepper, I was willing to take the Chief’s word for it.
Kathy said, “Chief, do me a favor and bring back as much of that stuff as you can carry. When we get back to Mud Island I want to get drunk with you on something that tastes this good.”
The Chief wasn’t going to argue with her about it and happily stashed several bottles in the supply bag he had brought along for the spare parts he hoped to find. It was when he remembered why he had the bag with him that he lost the cheerful look he had gotten when drinking the Scotch.
The Chief asked, “Has anyone else wondered how those eight Rottweilers stayed alive in that maintenance building so long?”
Up until this point, I don’t think anyone had time to even consider it. We had been too busy running for our lives and then defending ourselves in the resort bar. When the Chief brought it up, you could tell it scared Tom the most because Molly was only about a hundred yards past that building. He grabbed his rifle and started down the stairs.
“Hold up, Tom,” yelled Kathy. “We have to make sure nothing is still biting down there.”
Kathy caught up with Tom and pulled out her machete. As soon as she moved the first table, hands started reaching for her from the tangled mess. She swung several times, removing hands but looking for the faces that went with the hands. There was such a mixture of bodies that she couldn’t tell the infected dead from the really dead.