by Howard, Bob
“Where are we talking about?” asked Tom.
“We could move to the Everglades,” said Cassandra. “Alligators and Burmese Pythons would keep the infected under control.”
It didn’t take a vote. The way everyone stared at Cassandra was enough to get her to say she was just kidding, and she told us she didn’t want to live anywhere that sold hunting licenses for Pythons.
“Sooner or later, fuel is going to become an issue,” said Kathy. “It’s all fine for us to be hitting Columbus just in case the President has established some command and control from his shelter, but we may be forced to consider the long haul and move to a safer place. We should do it while we have the fuel and supplies.”
None of us wanted to move away from Mud Island, but Kathy had a point. When we did the math, there were a lot of infected to destroy before we would be able to sleep at night. If Cassandra had been right, the numbers calculated by the doctors on her ship were so high that we could destroy the infected every day for the rest of our lives and still not run out of them. Maybe it was going to come down to just trying to survive.
We all went back to our own private thoughts for a second time. The comfortable ride in the executive helicopter made it possible to relax, and I found myself thinking about where we could go if we left Mud Island.
It seemed sort of ironic when it occurred to me that my uncle Titus could have picked anywhere in the country to build his shelter, and we were picking apart his survival plans as if he had been wrong. He had apparently given a lot of thought to his location, and he had been right about choosing Mud Island in many ways, but if his old group was having a meeting today, the topic would be why they hadn’t considered a zombie apocalypse.
My eyes focused on Jean, and I caught her watching me. I realized I was frowning, and she wasn’t the only one who had noticed.
“Busted,” said Jean. “Care to fill us in on what has you acting like someone licked all the red off your candy?”
There wasn’t any sense in hiding it, but I had to get the Chief on board with a little terminology discussion first.
“I was thinking about the end of the world club that Bus and my uncle belonged to. I wish Bus was here so we could ask him if anyone ever brought up the possibility of a zombie apocalypse.”
The Chief visibly shifted in his seat like he wanted to be able to reach me. We had been down this road before, and I stopped him before he got started. We had been friends long enough for him to value my survival skills and quick thinking, even though I did appear to be slow to catch on from time to time.
“Hang on a second, Chief. Hear me out. If the survivors club decided to spend some time talking about what was going to happen, and they probably did, would they have discussed the possibility of reanimated corpses running around trying to eat living people, and what would they have called those corpses?”
No one answered for the Chief, and I thought he was going to disagree at first, but he finally gave in.
“Most people wouldn’t know why they’re not zombies,” he admitted. “Most people would only care that the things are acting like zombies.”
I know I smiled with satisfaction to finally hear the Chief concede the point, but I didn’t feel like rubbing it in.
Tom asked, “So, when they talked about making the shelters and they included the military, they must have had a list of possible reasons to build the shelters, right?”
“That’s what I was thinking about,” I answered. “The list probably had a nuclear attack as the number one item, and a zombie outbreak as the last item.”
“Why the last item?” asked Colleen.
“That’s not a bad question,” I said, “but I can come up with a list of things that would be a lot more likely than zombies.”
The conversation was something we had touched on from time to time, and it was more of a way to make time pass than a way to plan for the future, but seeing the refinery burning had made the future come to us.
We had to face the fact that the infected had started this new world, but it wasn’t over yet. Whether it was a burning refinery, an attack by a foreign enemy, a nuclear plant melting down, a flood, an earthquake, alligators, pythons, or man-eating kudzu, we were going to see new obstacles in our path every day. Even the food supply was tainted because seafood had been taken off the menu.
“I didn’t mean to depress everyone,” I said, “but when Kathy brought up the fact that fuel will become an issue, I started thinking about what’s going to happen next. We haven’t had to face other doomsday scenarios, but the longer this one goes on, the more damage it will do. We have enough supplies to last for our entire lives, but what will we leave behind?”
The conversation hadn’t gone quite the way any of us had planned, and the weight of the topic once again drove the group to silence.
******
Sim decided that his attempt to go home on his own had been a big mistake, but it hadn’t been a waste of time. He knew how the President had escaped from Air Force One, and he could put that information to use. All he had to do was live long enough to get back to his friends at the airport. Maybe then they could figure out how to get into that elevator. They might have to wait until next winter, but that would give them time to plan their attempt. They could also start trying to access the elevator when the infected were mostly frozen instead of thawing out.
That reminded him of something. It was still cold, and the infected were still mostly frozen, but warmer days were about to begin, and that meant there would be more of them to avoid.
It wasn’t as easy as just going back the way he had come, though. There were new obstacles along the way. Pipes had frozen and burst as the cold winter weather seeped into normally heated buildings. Streets flooded until ice formed where the pipes broke, leaving vast lakes of ice under bridges and overpasses on the interstates surrounding Columbus. Once it would thaw, flooding would replace the ice.
In normal winters, cars and trucks would drive along salted roads, but now the roads disappeared under snow drifts. Places Sim had crossed getting to downtown Columbus might not be passable anymore, and there were more infected dead in the city where the cold hadn’t been able to get to them. No matter what he decided to do, the infected had steered him away from his original goal. They might do the same thing to him as he tried to go back to the airport.
“Well, I can’t phone it in to the airport,” he said in a low voice.
Sim was standing on the balcony with his back pressed against the sliding glass door. It was dark enough for him to go undetected if he didn’t make too much noise or move too quickly. The concrete floor of the balcony was also covered with ice, and he wondered if he could even make it back to the airport in this weather.
It was bitter cold because the wind whistled across frozen streets and buildings. The only reason he was outside was because he knew he would appreciate his warm room even more when he went back in. The snow had started again, and Sim was actually encouraged when he saw it. Even though he had grown up in the south, he believed it when people told him it could get too cold to snow.
Sim eased the door open just far enough to squeeze back inside, and he wondered again if there was a warmer room in the building. Over the last couple of days he noticed there was less noise in the hallway, and he wondered if the cold had overcome the infected that wandered back and forth.
Earlier thoughts about overcoming the infected outside his door had one major flaw, and Sim had to remind himself to stop thinking like things were normal anywhere. There was less light in the hallway than in his room. He discovered that little problem when he tried to watch one of them go by. He saw a shape, but he couldn’t make out enough detail to tell if it was a new one or the same one that had gone by earlier.
Nonetheless, Sim’s options were all bad. He could climb down and try to forage on his way back to the airport, or he could try to reach the hotel kitchen by using the stairs. The canned foods would still be good, and he could get enoug
h supplies to last until he made it back to his friends.
There was one other thing the hotel would have that Sim wanted, and he felt like crying when he thought about it. Restaurants had cases full of Sterno, and one small can could burn for two hours. That meant heat and coffee. He would settle for tea, but the thought of a hot cup of coffee was almost enough to make him charge out into the hallway.
Sim made his decision on the spot. He had been putting it off and putting it off until he couldn’t stand himself anymore. He was out of food and drinks, and judging by the trickle he was getting from the spigots in the suite, water was about to be a thing of the past.
He found a couple of decent kitchen knives in a drawer, but what he really wanted was a baseball bat. Then he remembered the banner and the poles at the ends.
Sim had learned that the best way to deal with the infected was to outrun them, but when that wasn’t an option, a ball bat or a pipe was the best weapon because they didn’t make as much noise as a gun. A pole was almost as good because you could use them to hold an infected away at a distance or push them over while you ran by. In a narrow hallway, he could have the advantage.
Fifteen minutes of listening at the door of the suite seemed like hours. He sat huddled against the door with a pile of blankets covering him, trying to get warm while he waited. He didn’t know if it would be warmer or colder in the hallway, but his reasoning told him it would be freezing on either side of the door.
If it was freezing in the hallway, the infected would be standing still. He could listen all night, and there wouldn’t be a sound that gave away their position because the infected would be too cold to move.
Sim was surprised to find he had his hand on the doorknob and was turning it very slowly. Judging by the fact that the metal felt warm under his hand, he must have been doing it for longer than he had known. The knob reached the end of its turn, and there was the tiniest of clicks as the latch mechanism was totally freed from the doorjamb. He leaned his weight into the door in case something in the hallway heard that barely audible sound. If something crashed into the door on the other side, he would just let go of the knob, and the door would be locked again.
His hand was sweating, and even though the knob wasn’t slipping in his grip, it felt like it was. There was no groan from the other side of the door and no crashing disappointment, so Sim forced himself to relax just a bit. He leaned his weight away from the door and slowly created a gap by letting the door come with him.
A small window at the end of the hallway was letting some light land on the walls in one direction, but even more light was coming from the left side out of his field of vision. To see down the hallway to his left, he would be forced to open the door further and take a peek around the corner.
He let his eyes adjust to the light down the side where he could already see, and there was a heap of shadow in the left corner below the small window. It was shaped like a pile of clothes, and Sim thought back to his first night in the hotel. He had stared at the poles and the banner in the corner wondering if it was a really tall person for the longest time. Of course his imagination had been working overtime as he tried to find a safe place to rest for a few days.
Sim told himself to expect this shadow to be an infected dead because he knew there was at least one in the hallway. He was at least ten rooms down the hall from the dark heap, and he knew he could get back inside the door if it came for him, so he slowly turned and extended his head through the door only about two inches above the carpet.
At first Sim thought his eyes were playing tricks on him because he didn’t think he was in the last room on the hallway. There was something blocking his field of vision that was so close Sim thought it was a wall. Then he smelled it.
Sim felt his stomach heave a bit, and he fought to keep control. The infected dead had slumped against the wall next to his door. A few inches closer, and it would have been leaning against his door. That click in the lock was nothing compared to an infected falling into the room on top of him.
Sim eased himself back into the room, but he carefully placed a foot in the door as he raised himself to a standing position.
He leaned out past the frozen body only inches from his left foot and studied the hallway. He could see the extra light was coming from an alcove a few rooms away. A small sign with an arrow on it said there was an ice machine around the corner, and judging by the light streaming into the hall, a bigger window.
Letting his eyes focus on the shadows further down the hall, he could see nothing that resembled another heap against a wall or door, so it was time to move.
Sim brought the kitchen knife around gripping it with the blade pointing inward. He was vaguely surprised at how noiselessly it penetrated the side of the head and sank all the way in until his fist was against the infected’s temple. He pulled it back out and returned his attention down the hall in time to see the heap of clothes by the window pushing itself stiffly from the floor. It was slow and almost painful to watch.
Sim propped his door open with one of his poles and walked calmly toward the second infected. He held the second pole out in front of himself like a jousting lance and steadily raised the end until it pointed directly at the forehead of the infected. He expected a collision but only got a slight jolt. The skull of the infected seemed to just collapse away.
He had to put his foot on the infected to pull out the pole, and he wiped it clean against the body. The smell in the hallway was getting to him, so he decided he would need to keep going. He retrieved his second pole and a small backpack of useful belongings from his room and went to the stairs. One quick peek was all he needed to know it wasn’t going to be easy. The stairwells were so dark they might as well have been filled with black ink.
Sim mentally kicked himself for not planning what to do in the stairwells, and he came to the conclusion that he hadn’t gotten that desperate yet. Now that he was faced with the problem, and now that he was desperate, the answer didn’t seem so impossible.
When he thought about whether or not there would be any infected dead in the stairwell, he reasoned that they would all be at the bottom, especially after so many months had gone by. After all, there wasn’t anything to keep them from falling down the stairs, and the more decrepit they got, the harder it would be to go up the stairs. His only concern besides darkness was how many would be at the bottom.
Sim dragged the body of the infected dead over to the door. He stopped for a moment and tore one of his room towels into a long strip then tied it around his face. Then he used a second strip to tie the body’s hands and feet together.
“Can’t expect you to roll with your arms and legs flailing all around, and man is this is gonna stink,” he said out loud.
The dry, weather worn clothes of the infected burned easily, but Sim held the matches to several places before he was sure the fire wouldn’t go out too soon. He pushed open the door to the stairwell and gave the body a shove that was hard enough to get it down to the next landing.
Sim followed closely behind and only needed to glance upward once to know he was not being attacked from the floor above. As soon as he arrived on the landing, he grabbed the body and gave it a second shove toward the landing outside the door of the fourth floor. The flames burned just high enough to light the stairwell, and that was fine with Sim. It would be much harder to do if the infected turned into a flaming inferno.
Sim couldn’t believe how well it was working, and he didn’t try to be too cautious. He was already making enough noise to draw out any infected that might have been in the stairwell.
“Whoa,” he yelled as he followed the burning body. “I guess this isn’t what you had in mind when you learned about stop, drop, and roll. I know that’s got to hurt.”
The rolling body went much faster than he expected, and when the body hit the door to the ground floor, Sim was happy to find that there was another set of stairs that went down to the garage level. Groaning came from that level. Sim gave the b
urning body one last shove, and it rolled nicely into the middle of a pile of infected that reached up hopefully toward Sim. He only watched for a moment as they all ignited and burned. Then he ducked quickly into the first floor of the hotel and began working his way toward the kitchen.
The lobby of the hotel wasn’t far away, and Sim spotted a restaurant across from the customer service desk. The tall buildings surrounding the hotel cast shadows that made the lobby appear to be in permanent evening hours, but the atrium skylight over the lobby let enough light in for Sim to be able to tell shadows from the infected. There were unmoving bodies in various states of decay spread around the entire first floor.
He changed directions so many times crossing the lobby that he felt like a football player running with the ball. He had to avoid stepping on the bodies because he didn’t want to fall, but he also had to watch for any infected that might try to grab him as he went by.
The last days of civilization had been bad for Sim and his friends, but he considered himself to be fortunate when he compared everything he had seen to the lobby he had just crossed. Judging from the number of dead bodies, the infected must have swarmed the hotel from all directions. He wondered for a moment why more people hadn’t gotten out of the building, but he saw the answer to that question when he spotted the main entrance.
Revolving doors were hard for some living people to navigate on a good day. With people trying to get inside while others were trying to get out, the door had become jammed in both directions. An infected that was nearly frozen still occupied one of the sections, and it made a feeble attempt to make the door turn when it saw Sim.
Tables and chairs were upended and scattered around the restaurant. Besides the wrecked furniture and bodies, there was evidence that some of the customers had been armed. Bullet holes were everywhere. Some of the tablecloths were heavily burned where candles had been upended. Sim could only imagine the mayhem that must have broken out in the hotel. He thought he remembered something about Ohio having some liberal gun laws. When he thought about it, if he had been eating in this restaurant, he would have been happy if the diners sitting next to him were armed on that particular day.