by Howard, Bob
I pushed myself up against something that had to be a metal wall behind me, but the whole room seemed to bounce at the same time, and my feet left the floor. When I landed, my right knee hit something hard, but my left knee was buried into soft flesh. I heard someone exhale all of their breath and cry out in pain. It was Kathy.
“Kathy,” I yelled, but I was too late. She must have gotten her balance just as I realized who it was, because there was no way for her to stop the head first shoulder tackle that was coming my way. She crashed into my midsection with tremendous force and slammed me against that metal wall behind me. Then I could hear her when she understood who she had just rammed into.
“Oh no, Ed? Is that you?”
All I could manage was a weak, “Uh huh.” I was in a heap on the floor.
“I’m over here,” said Colleen.
“Are you guys done beating up on each other?” That was Hampton’s voice somewhere.
“I owe somebody a knee,” said Cassandra. “Does everybody have a bag over their head?”
There was another big bump that knocked us around on the hard floor.
“I think we’re in an ambulance,” said Kathy.
“Maybe,” said Cassandra, “but this thing rides like one of those personnel carriers we had in the Army.”
******
“Great. I just felt a couple of raindrops.”
Jean held a palm out and checked the clouds above. She instantly had a few heavy drops splash across her hand. The patter of the rain sounded like a whisper coming closer in the grass surrounding them.
“Can anyone see us from the stands or the press boxes?” asked Iris.
She raised her head higher so she could see the rest of the ballpark.
“I don’t think so,” said Jean, “but it always looks better from the low ground than it is. That’s why everyone always tries for the high ground.”
“I get it, but I think we can pull a small tarp tent over us and still be safe. The light’s getting bad, and the tarp is the same color as this grass and small trees. If something or someone doesn’t see us putting it up, I think we’ll be fine.”
A few more heavy raindrops convinced Jean that it wasn’t much of a risk, and she helped Iris tug the tarp out of the canvas bag it had been squeezed into.
“This should help,” said Sim. He crawled out of the deep grass dragging a relatively straight pole. “We can use it as a way to raise the middle of the tarp.”
Working together they managed to get the tarp in place as a makeshift tent over them and their two friends.
Jean said, “I’m worried about how long they’ve been unconscious.”
“Not much else we can do. At least we had enough stuff in our first aid kit to stabilize them. It also didn’t hurt when you found someone had the sense to pack antibiotics and syringes.”
Sim ducked out from under the tarp, and they saw their ceiling sag down slightly. He came back under with them just as quickly.
“What did you do?” asked Iris.
“I put a couple of light branches from a bush on one side. From the press boxes it should look like a big bush. It should also help the rainwater drain off on one side too.”
The Chief let out a low groan, and in the dim light under the tarp they could see he was doing his best to get his elbows into position to push himself up.
“Stay down for a minute, Chief,” said Iris. “If you sit up too fast you might wind up flat on your face. Better to stay on your back until we get you oriented.”
“What… happened? Where… are we?”
He was definitely still groggy, if his voice was any indication. The words were slurred and pauses between words made him sound drunk.
Iris lifted the compress from his head and shone her small flashlight on the lump. It was still ugly, but it wasn’t nearly as big as it had been.
Jean leaned in closer and checked the reactions of his pupils.
“Much better. I think you’re going to be okay. What’s the last thing you remember?”
The Chief reached up with his right hand and gingerly touched the lump on his head.
“How did that get there?”
“You hit your head when we crashed, and somehow you managed to climb a ballpark fence and attack a few of the infected before you got it through your thick skull that you were hurt,” said Jean.
He eyed her suspiciously, as if she was making it up.
Iris leaned in closer.
“Hey, remember me? What’s that last thing you remember.”
“I was trying to make the helicopter hit the top of a black charter bus.”
“Wow,” said Sim with admiration. “You do better on autopilot than a lot of people do on purpose.”
The Chief looked at Sim like he had no clue what he was saying, but then he realized there was someone else lying on the ground next to him. He leaned back away from the prone body as if he was focusing his eyes by moving. That bothered Jean and Iris.
“Tom?”
The Chief tried to stand but understood immediately they were under a tarp. The rain was doing a steady patter on the other side. He moved forward over his friend, forgetting his own injury for a moment.
Jean said, “He’s sedated, Chief. He got a nasty cut on his leg either in the crash or crawling out of the wreckage. We had to sew him up. We think he’s going to be okay, but he lost a lot of blood, and he’s been out for a long time. That part we’re worried about.”
“Crawling out? He wasn’t bitten, was he? I think I remember some infected around the place where we crashed.”
Iris answered gently as she put one hand on his arm, “We don’t know for sure because we didn’t know either of you was hurt until we got inside the ballpark. He was the last one over the fence, and the infected had followed us all the way from the parking lot across the street. He didn’t stay conscious long enough to tell us how it happened.”
“We have to get him back to Fort Sumter.”
When he said it, the Chief realized he was only talking to a few people.
“Where’s everyone else?”
Sim answered for everyone, “We don’t know. They went to clear the rest of the ballpark. Iris and I stayed to provide cover for Jean while she treated you two. We haven’t heard any shots, and they’ve been gone for over two hours.”
The Chief got that look on his face they all recognized. He was mentally walking through the ballpark, visualizing the concourses, the vending areas, the stands. He knew there was far more to a ballpark than what meets the eye. That wasn’t just empty space beneath the bleachers, and the suites were spacious even in minor league parks.
“Two hours,” he repeated. “It could take twice that long if they wanted to be thorough, but they wouldn’t really need to go into some places. It’s not like we were planning on hanging around here longer than we had to.”
Jean didn’t think the Chief was ready to go out on a search and rescue yet, but she had to say it in a way that the Chief wouldn’t just automatically dismiss her.
“There aren’t enough of us to go after them yet. I don’t think we can split up until Tom is able to walk.”
The Chief was visibly recovering, and they could see it. As his senses came back to him, so did his ability to think through the problem.
“The three of you were standing guard over two of us. Now you only have to protect one of us. I’ll be okay out there on my own. Is it dark out there yet?”
The Chief lifted back a corner of the canvas tarp and saw it was twilight, and the steady rain made it seem even later.
“Darkness and bad weather,” he said. “Two of a Navy SEAL’s best friends. You guys stay here. If I don’t come back by tomorrow morning, I want you to assume I won’t be back. Make your way to the city marina and find a boat that will get you back to Fort Sumter. Remember the entrances to the shelter have been sealed, but you know where the cameras are located. Let them see you and then hole up somewhere until they can send a chopper for you. You know
they’re searching for us by now, so they’ll be watching the surface of Fort Sumter.”
“I’m not assuming anything. We can wait here for you to come back,” said Iris.
“You said it yourself. Tom needs real medical care, and it’s going to take all three of you to get him out of here.”
“We could argue the same thing,” said Sim. “We need you to help us get him to a boat.”
“Well, I don’t feel right about the rest of our group being out there overnight, so I’m going after them. Like I said, I should be back before morning. Hang onto this for me.”
The Chief held out his rifle to Iris. She hesitantly took it.
“I’ll want that back from you, so try not to lose it or get any dirt in the barrel.”
The grin on his face was too much for her to resist. She had to give him a grin in return.
“If you don’t come back for it, I might just have to use it to hunt you down.”
“You can do that if I don’t come back, but I’ll see you by tomorrow morning.”
The Chief gave Iris a hug with his big arm wrapped around her neck, hiding their faces from Jean and Sim. The kiss he gave her made her feel limp from head to toe, and she was fairly sure they could tell. When he let her go, it was hard not to fall over even though she was sitting under the low tarp. The Chief gave the others a wink and ducked out into the rain.
******
For a big man, the Chief could move like a ghost. The rain and gloom from the sun setting gave him the cover he needed to be able to reach the stands with confidence that he hadn’t been seen. At the same time, he was acutely aware of every shadow. Where it was when he first saw it, and where it was when he checked it again. His memory for details had been honed over years of training and combat as a Navy SEAL, but he had said many times that enemies were predictable, and the infected dead were not. If one was nearby, you didn’t know what it was going to do.
It was easy for him to find where five people had climbed out of the tall grass into the stands, and he saw they had chosen well. They were able to stay under cover as soon as they were in the seats. When he found their footprints he knew they had picked up moisture and dirt, but he could tell they had also walked through dried blood. Since they weren’t trying to hide their tracks, he wouldn’t subtract any points for being easy to follow. As a matter of fact, he was counting on them being easy to find.
Something caught his eye in the mess of footprints that made him freeze. He went from being cautious to being ready to fight in a split second. There was a pattern to the footprints that told him within reason which set of prints was in the lead, and which set of prints belonged to the person bringing up the rear. There was a footprint that didn’t match the others, and it was on top of the prints he had established as belonging to the last one in line.
He studied the print, and it appeared to have been made with force. The Chief raised his eyes slowly and saw that someone had dropped down from above after his friends had passed by. It didn’t take long to find more prints that followed the first one from above, and he wasn’t sure how many there were.
There was a time to track and a time to follow, and the Chief picked up his speed. There was a place where the tracks went inside the building under the stands, and he hoped they weren’t still inside because it had to be really dark in there. His eyes scouted ahead where he could see fresh tracks at a door that might be where they came back out, and he decided to bypass searching inside the building. If he hadn’t moved to there, he wouldn’t have reached the corner in time to see what was happening up ahead.
He was never one to go around a corner without a quick look, and he wasn’t about to start now. He was tempted to dive on the back of the man closest to him, but his glance around the corner told him that wouldn’t go well for his friends. Uniforms made it easier for him to do a head count in the moment that he had exposed himself, and there were so many that he couldn’t come up with an accurate total.
His friends were surrounded by uniforms, and the bags over the heads of Kathy, Ed, Hampton, Colleen, and Cassandra meant they wouldn’t be able to help themselves. As quickly as it seemed to happen, it was over just as fast. When he glanced again, he saw the backs of the uniformed men as they rushed his friends blindly down a flight of stairs. A few cautious steps forward, and he was in a position to see them roughly thrown through the open doors of ambulances. When they drove away he saw he had been wrong. They weren’t ambulances. They were BATT-T armored personnel carriers.
******
“Shut up or I’ll put two bags over your heads.”
The male voice didn’t have to sound rough or even mean. The close proximity of it was enough to silence us. I think we all assumed we were in the back of an ambulance or EMS type vehicle, and there was separation between us and our captors. The way we were being tossed around was making us disoriented, and I wasn’t sure where the front of the vehicle was until I heard the voice.
“What do you want with us?” demanded Kathy.
The voice didn’t answer the question, but after several moments of silence a second voice said, “If anyone is more comfortable sitting, there are bench seats along the walls.”
I was leaning against something that didn’t feel like it was a bench seat. That meant I was either up against the back door or against the front seats. I didn’t know which was worse, the possibility of falling out of the back of the bouncing vehicle or being within inches of our captors. I scrambled away from where I was and turned what I thought was sideways. I pushed myself up using just my legs and was surprised that the seat was actually padded.
“Well, I am impressed,” said a sarcastic voice. “They’re all smart enough to choose comfortable over uncomfortable.”
The two voices joined each other in a laugh.
“Where are you taking us?”
No one could say that Kathy would ever give up, but her questions didn’t seem like they were getting a rise out of the unknown men.
I felt a tap against my foot and knew it was someone’s boot. We had collided with each other so much that it could have been random, but we had all learned Morse Code as a survival skill, and the boot tapped out one of our key words. Capitulate.
Sometimes it was too much work to tap out a whole sentence, so we had key words that meant entire paragraphs. The Chief had chosen the key words, and they had to be words that couldn’t easily be mistaken for other words. In this case, capitulate meant that we had no choice but to go along with our captors. We had also agreed that anyone could initiate the keyword messages, and if we were in disagreement about the key word we could tap one word back. Object. The paragraph written for this key word said it wasn’t necessarily a surrender. It was meant to cover situations where we would be more likely to die if we didn’t at least give in for the moment. I didn’t tap back that I objected.
After the key word was given to my left foot, I moved my other foot to the right. I made contact with a solid surface and rubbed against it. As I expected, it had to be the back wall of the vehicle, and thanks to the information provided by one of the men up front, I knew there would likely be someone directly across from me…unless we all tried to sit on the same side, but that would have evoked even more laughter up front.
I slid my foot forward and felt my boot bump into something that immediately moved away from my foot. An instinctive reaction by someone blindfolded. I slid further forward and began tapping as soon as I made contact. The foot stayed close enough this time for me to pass along the message, and there was no objection. For now, it looked like we were going for a ride.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Phillip & Denise
The Corrigans felt at home at Fort Sumter with the exception of a feeling they were being watched. Maybe it was because they were, but it was more likely that they didn’t have experience as spies before they were chosen by the people in charge at Patriots Point. They had heard stories about the radicals at Fort Sumter, and even though they had seen noth
ing to support those stories, they felt like they were being sent into a lion’s den without protection. The Army and the civilians they had met were all so nice, but that’s what they had been told to expect…a total act. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to tell their story about that first day over six years ago.
The nightmare of that long first night seemed like something out of a bad dream, and it had taken its toll, especially on Phillip. So far the worst thing about the people of Fort Sumter was that they were making the Corrigans relive it. Reliving it was making his chest hurt. His heart had pounded wildly that day. More wildly than he believed possible. The shotguns and nine millimeter handguns had made their ears ring for hours, but somehow they had been pushed along with dozens of other people down several flights of stairs until they reached a floor of rooms with prison style doors. There was no choice but to allow themselves to be locked in. They were afraid there would be no one left alive who could let them out, but the people with the keys also had the guns.
With nothing left to do except wait for rescue, they had huddled with the other survivors and shared their experiences of that first day, and they all had the same story. They were going about the day with no clue of what was about to happen. Most of them had watched as their families were slaughtered before their eyes. Some of them had seen their family members doing the killing. One man had been unable to stop sobbing since they had arrived. A witness saw him kill his own wife after he had pulled her off of their two children. Then he was forced to defend himself from the children. No one wanted to hear the rest of the details.
Everyone around them was afraid, but Phillip was deathly pale. His lips were blue, and he was drenched in sweat. Someone said they thought he was having a heart attack, but he thought it couldn’t be. He was only thirty years old and had been in good health. A lady who had been pushed inside with them dug through her pocketbook and pulled out a slender cylinder. Through the ringing in his ears and the pounding of his heart, he heard her say something about him being allergic to something, maybe some kind of shellfish like crab or shrimp. It hadn’t made sense, but whatever it was in that cylinder, it had done the trick.