“I'm Liam, and this is Victoria.”
Oh man! I should have used fake names.
The captain seemed to appraise him once more, but gave him no clues as to his conclusion. Instead, to Blue he said, “All right, girl. We'll go north. But if one of them things gets aboard, they better earn their keep.” To Liam, he only said, “The name is Jam. Go sit down.”
Evidently manners were a forgotten art on the water.
4
The boat, dubbed Lucy's Football, cleared the moorings and the captain seemed to take it slow while he went over some gauges inside the enclosed work area he had in the middle of the boat. There was no room to sit in the front, and Liam wasn't invited into the enclosed cabin, so he chose to stand in the back of the boat. He hung on to a tie-down just outside the plexiglass windows of the captain's area. Blue remained inside with the captain, leaving him alone with Victoria.
She stood next to him at first, but the captain came out and yelled at them to split up so they weren't both on the same side. “You're weighing us down on the starboard,” he said in a loud, gruff voice.
Victoria stood on the opposite side, facing Liam. “Are we gonna have fun, or what?” she asked with a big smile.
“Always something to do in the Zombie Apocalypse.”
He knew they were going on a dangerous journey, but he couldn't help him but try to take the edge of their nerves by trying to be funny.
“Yarg! You young whipper-snappers are jammin' me garbage scow. Your whale of girl be weighing us down!” He pretended he was smoking a pipe as he spoke, and he and Victoria both laughed. Already thinking of what to say next, he turned to see a motion in the window next to his head. The captain was scowling at him. Liam froze where he was, hand up to his mouth and all.
The captain cracked open the small door. “These walls be not soundproof.” Far from being a good-humored response, his face displayed real disgust, seemingly out of proportion to Liam's antics. He slammed the door shut once more.
He was still frozen with his hand at his mouth. He swiveled his eyes just to confirm the captain was looking away, and then he pretended to take one final pull on his imaginary pipe before putting it away. The dual outboard motors throttled up and they both had to hang on as the boat accelerated into the huge waterway.
The most prominent feature of this part of the river was the number of barges. The entire shore was lined with them. As they cleared the other ships near the dock where they launched, the river was almost solid with the rust-red and dull grey shipping barges common on the big rivers of the Midwest. Either every barge captain for a thousand miles decided to dock here, or these people collected barges like trophies. It made for a jaw-dropping introduction to the journey.
The boat raced out into the middle of the channel, heading for a large bridge crossing the Ohio. He'd seen it while in the town up on the levee. It was graced with metallic girders and was painted an ancient sea gray. As they closed the distance, he could see a few people walking the roadway up there, but there were no vehicles in sight. Above it, there were huge sea birds darting in and out of massive nests placed on top.
The far side of the river looked like a popular gravel bar during a college fraternity float trip. Hundreds of barges had been run up onto the shore to keep them from floating away. The only thing he didn't see were coeds dancing up on the mud banks next to their boats. Instead, there were serious-looking men tying off huge ropes or driving excavating equipment to make more room for more barges. Several dredging barges were pulling silt and mud from the riverbed to improve the clearance of the towboats pushing their cargo into parking spaces.
He wanted to ask the captain what all this was about, but he also wanted to keep his mouth shut. As they went under the bridge, he began to understand the scale of the whole operation. The Mississippi river joined with the Ohio at a great junction and full and empty barges were parked over every square inch of that intersection. There were more tows pushing barges in ones and twos as they came off the Mississippi. They pushed them into the parking lot on the Ohio side.
Liam couldn't see any pattern to their machinations. From water level, all he could see was the sides of barges almost 360 degrees around him. Barges were twenty deep on each side of the river.
“Amazing, isn't it?” Victoria spoke loud enough to be heard over the motors.
“What do you think it's all for?” he retorted. It looked like a massive recovery operation, though he wondered what was inside all the thousands of holds. When he was at the top of the Arch, he watched a barge pass by laden with infected souls standing around like they were on a sunset cruise. Did they end up here?
Then he thought of all the barges which broke through the blockade of debris back up in St. Louis.
“Hey, do you think Duchesne's body is here somewhere?”
“Oh. I hope not.”
The man had been killed by a barge. It would be fitting if he did end up here.
The Mississippi wasn't quite as filled with barges. They seemed to be using the Ohio side as the corral for all the loose livestock. However, as they sailed along for a few minutes, it became clear there was a complex operation on this river too. They'd seen it from up on the levee the day before.
On the right, there was a long, thin island covered with trees. There was a narrow strip of water between the island and the shore, which Liam imagined was the pit lane of a race track. It was filled with the metal barge cargo haulers. When they reached the far end, Liam was impressed with the recovery operation guiding rogue barges to the safety of the small passage. A few pleasure boats drifted down the river too, and the smaller tows pounced on them like herding sheepdogs. The larger tugs waited nearby for larger runaways. Others worked their captured boats into the pit area as he watched.
He counted at least ten tugboats operating in the waters near the mouth of the recovery zone. About half of those were the larger tugs designed to push heavy loads on the riverways. There was clearly still a lot of loose boats floating from the north if that many boats were still netting them.
The last thing they saw of Cairo was the dredging operation for the anti-zombie ditch. Much of the dirt for the hole was stacked on the south side of that excavation, presumably so the defenders would have clear fields of fire on any zombies that somehow cleared the scorched flatlands to the north and made it into the ditch. If they managed to survive that long, they'd have to climb the formidable southern bank and then continue up the pile itself.
He turned around to see if Victoria was seeing the same thing. “Do you think that ditch will hold off the zombies?” They'd discussed secure bases before, but Liam always referenced his zombie literature when the subject was broached. His research would say there was nowhere on Earth that was safe from the zombies. But he hoped some places were safer than others. Cairo seemed pretty prepared, and he was willing to revise his previous guess that the place would last only two weeks. He allowed they might make it for longer.
When she didn't answer, he turned to face her. “What?”
Victoria looked at him with sadness. She shook her head no. “The zombies will make it in. Maybe one of these barges will tip over and spill hundreds of them onto shore. Maybe just one will float from upstream and shake himself off in town. Maybe one is already there, just waiting for someone to open the wrong door. I just don't think anywhere is going to be safe until every one of those things is dead and buried. Or burned.”
She turned to look out her side of the boat.
His enthusiasm for Cairo's chances waned. The ditch was impressive and the cooperation it took to get it in place was a bright spot in the otherwise blight-stricken world of the plague, but in the end, she was correct. The length it survived was secondary to the fact it would fall.
With her back to him, he spoke, but only to himself. “I think you pulled exactly the right lesson from my books. You didn't even have to read them.”
5
Liam and Victoria got tired of standing in the
hot sun, so they each took a seat on the rear deck, facing each other from opposite sides. They could speak if they needed but, for the most part, they were silent as the boat plowed the waves up the dirty river.
Several times along the way, they'd feel lurches to either side as the boat swerved around and through debris or runaway barges. One item in particular bothered the captain enough to leave his cabin and stand on the back deck as the boat idled. They all stood and watched as a huge tank of some kind floated by.
“It's a propane tank. A big one. A fifty-foot whale!” the captain said. Then he said he'd have to call it in to the teams in Cairo so they didn't miss it.
It gave Liam a narrow window of opportunity to talk to him. “Why are they collecting all that stuff?”
The captain paused, seemed to consider a response, then continued inside. Blue, standing in the doorway, spoke quietly. “They're trying to gather supplies, instead of letting them drain out into the Gulf of Mexico.” She closed the door, choosing to stay inside.
Liam broke the rules. He walked over to Victoria.
“Why do you think she's staying inside with him? Aren't we better company?”
“Well, I am. But you? You did make fun of the captain after all.” She winked at him.
He huffed. “Well you laughed too,” he said with a fake hurt voice. Then he thought better of it and moved back to his side of the boat. There's only one rule when taking a boat ride in the Zombie Apocalypse: don't piss off the captain.
A few hours went by with nothing to do but sit and nod off. The sun was high overhead when the motors' pitch changed and the boat slowed. That got them both off their feet.
The captain piloted the boat into another small side channel off the main river. There were no structures or anything man-made anywhere in sight. Liam's mind was filled with years of video games, movies, and books about dangerous times and dangerous men.
“Is this the part where we get killed? We are about as far away from other people as we can be.” Then, with a fair bit of drama added, “There are to be no witnesses...”
Victoria laughed, but she looked at him with serious eyes. She looked into the cabin to get a sense of what the captain was up to, but the tinting and bright sunlight made that difficult.
All they could do was watch as the channel began to narrow. In a few minutes, they came around a small bend and approached another, larger, boat that was anchored in the middle of the creek or small river they'd been touring.
More thoughts bounced through his head, speaking only of trouble. They could be gun runners, deviant hillbillies, a secretive medical team—it wouldn't be his first, or maybe it was simply the angry sea captain's club.
The motors were a dull hum as the boat drifted twenty or thirty feet from the other.
Panic swept through Liam's over-active brain as he realized his only weapon—his spear—was in the front of the boat. He'd have to pass the captain to get it.
“Or, he tossed it over the side while we weren't looking,” he thought. That would be a hilarious end to his ill-planned mission. “Death by stupidity.”
He moved over to Victoria's side, aware he might be chewed out again. Maybe he would push her overboard so they could swim to safety, though the chance of that succeeding were slim when a motorboat was involved.
A few minutes went by and Liam's fear was being bested by his curiosity. To Victoria, he said, “Either kill us or get on with whatever you're doing.”
Almost as if on cue, the captain came out of his cabin. Blue stood once more at the doorway.
The captain walked up to him, sharing some of his bad breath. “When we pull up alongside them, I need you two to grab the ropes and hold us in place. I want to make this handoff quick.”
“Handoff?”
“You two aren't going to give me trouble, are you?” He reached into a large pocket in his pants. There was something blocky. He started to pull it out.
Liam tried to step backward, but he hit the starboard motor. “We don't want any violence, captain, sir.”
The man's hand paused. He looked down at his pocket as if seeing the situation for the first time. He laughed quietly.
Then he pulled out the object. “Reach for the sky,” he said with a raspy voice. The banana rocked in his hand and tilted toward Liam. “I know you two aren't going to give me any trouble at the oxbow gas station, right? Cause if you do—” He pointed the banana and made a “pew pew” sound at both of them.
Liam's heart exited the highway of insane fear and decelerated to the normal operating fear he felt all the time. He'd have to think of a way to stop seeing every situation as a trap designed to capture or kill him. Not everyone in the world could be out to get him.
Just some of them.
The fuel transfer operation proceeded without any kidnappings, shootings, or fights between crews.
Chapter 6: Grandma Dreams of Pink
Grandma watched the refugee kids in the living room of the house. They had managed to spend the entire day with their technological devices—phones, tablets, whatnots—while she did nothing but sit and stare out the window into the lonely town of Cairo. More people were coming in as refugees, she assumed, because they were led to this or that house on the street. A few teens found their way to her house, making her wonder if she'd been placed in the wrong home. She was older than everyone else by 80 or 90 years.
She was refreshed for the middle of the day, but felt the drift toward a nap nonetheless. It was as if her body wanted to turn itself off. Another side effect of aging. Or...
The familiar energy surged through her body. Another dream was coming, and she wondered if it would be as horrible as the last.
In the middle ground between awake and dreaming she was dismayed to see the same girl as before.
I should never have let Liam go with her.
2
Ten days since the sirens.
Saffron slammed the door shut, a second before the first zombie made contact with the glass. She felt the steel vibrate, but could be sure of one thing—there was no way through. Needing confirmation, she turned around to look out the small view port into the near-darkness through the glass. More of the undead were stacking up behind the first. She was breathing as if she'd just finished a race, which wasn't far off the mark. She'd just climbed to the top of the Gateway Arch.
“Thank you guys—” She spread the words around her deep gasps for air.
Unless the zombies could organize themselves and pull the door open, it would be impossible for them to get through. That, at least, was good news. Beyond the first landing, there could possibly be thousands of zombies on the stairs of the north leg of the Arch. Two or three for each of the 1076 steps. The bodies of her fellow survivors were lying on about twenty of them.
“—for getting me to the top.”
The banging and moaning of the zombies faded as she walked the final steps to the summit of the Arch, out of the tram-loading area. The light from the observation area was a powerful magnet, drawing her out of the darkness. Her legs screamed at each of those final steps. She choked back the sadness to stay alert. Even so, her adrenaline ebbed. All she wanted was to lay herself down and go to sleep.
She froze near the top. Ahead, a lone figure; a silhouette staring out the tiny window. Saffron was unable to tell if she was alive or dead. It didn't matter in the end because she had no weapons.
“Hello?”
The woman gave no clue to her condition. Saffron chanced a few more steps up the slanted deck of the topmost segment of the Arch observation platform. The small windows on each side of the walkway gave her enough light to be sure the woman was alive.
“Are you OK?” As she said it she knew it sounded insane. Of course she wasn't. Nobody was.
The woman was dressed in blue jeans and a light t-shirt. She was covered in the detritus of hand-to-hand combat with the plague victims. Saffron looked down at her own clothing. The gray capris had become red with blood splatter. Her button-down
shirt suffered from the same abuse. She unbuttoned it and tossed it back down the canted floor behind her. Her own t-shirt was glowing white compared to the woman's.
She moved behind her, intending to look over the top of the Arch to see into the south leg tram loading area, and was disturbed to see the woman held a pistol at her side. She kept walking to give the woman some room. There was something wrong with her, beyond the background noise of despair and fear everyone shared.
“My name's Saffron. What's yours?”
The woman remained stone-still as she looked down through the observation window. Saffron looked out her own window, thinking of better times when she was here. In normal times, parents would be holding young children as they lay on top of the slanted windows. She leaned down to get a better look.
Outside, she saw…
“It's the end of the world.” The woman spoke in almost a whisper.
“Ain't that the truth.” The lush green grass and remaining trees of the park below clashed profoundly with the dead bodies, surging zombies, and running groups of survivors fighting for an extra minute or two of life. To the west, as far as Saffron could see, crowds of infected crammed the streets of downtown St. Louis—heading to the last people left alive in the city. “But at least they'll die out in the sunshine.”
Saffron turned back to the stranger, and tried to engage her once more. “I'm Saffron.”
After another minute of silence, Saffron brought up the big guns.
“Where did you go to high school?”
The young woman turned to look at her, but remained silent. Saffron took it as a positive sign. “I went to Northwest. You?”
“Where did I go to high school?” It droned out of her, and she seemed to think hard. “I went to Ursuline Academy. I graduated...a few years ago. Why does it matter?”
“I'll tell you why it matters. I know who you are. You think I'm a hillbilly from Jefferson County who shops at Walmart, and I think you're a rich snob from the suburbs who shops at the Galleria? Am I right?”
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 97