by Howard, Bob
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Maybank Oil Rig
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
BURIED FOR NOW
BOB HOWARD
Copyright © 2019 Bob Howard
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-945754-34-0
Cover art by Lorena Martin of Premade Ebook Covers
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my wife, Dawn. She continues to be the rock that is the foundation for my life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I think every contemporary author has at least once hoped someone famous would contact them and express an interest in their work, and while I don’t dwell on it, I have at times wished for that email or social media message. Over the last three years I’ve heard from so many people who have wanted to say something to me about the impact I’ve had on their lives. Honestly, I didn’t expect that. Did I hope to get good feedback? Was I happy when my books reached the top ten on the bestseller list? Of course, but what I didn’t expect was the emails from people who gain some measure of hope, joy, or comfort from escaping into my fiction. I’ve heard many times from readers who were in the hospital, and my books helped them pass the time. I heard from a nice lady who was hoping I would write another book in the series because her father enjoyed my books so much. He was a Korean War veteran who had lived a rich and fulfilling life, yet there was room in his life for my books. That made a real difference to me.
The email that made the biggest difference to me last year was from Tim Moriarty. He signed up at my website, and I took a few minutes to send him an email thanking him for reading my books. He answered with an email that meant the world to me. He said his youngest son, Teddy, also enjoys my books. He told me that they race to see who can finish first, and then they spend some time talking about the book. He said his son is sixteen, and then he thanked me for getting his son to read. I believe his parenting plays a bigger part in his son reading, but I was humbled that he had given me some credit. My thanks to both Tim and Teddy for allowing my books to be part of their time together, and I hope to hear they enjoyed Buried for Now.
I always like to give credit to the people who help me get the book done once it’s written. My wife Dawn reads for content, enjoyment, storyline consistency, and understanding of descriptions. Her suggestions are invaluable. My son Drew has shown he has a good eye for finding those elusive little typos, and his grammar skills are impeccable. I know he was stunned when he found a double negative. I know I was. My daughter Julie continues to play a big part in motivating me to write. It’s nice to know she can take the credit for getting me started in the first place. Six books later, I haven’t forgotten. Gary Graham, an old friend from almost forty years ago, found me last year. He has been proofreading for me this time, and I remembered why we were such good friends when we were younger. His memory for details and trivia makes me wonder where and when he had the time to learn what he knows.
Lorena Martin of Premade Ebook Covers continues to be my first choice for the cover. If you would like to contact her, you can get her information from my website. Best practice dictates that contact information not be placed here, but don’t worry. We’re both easy to find, plus I can shamelessly invite you to my personal website.
I hope you enjoy the book!
CHAPTER ONE
Maybank
Beginning of the Decline
Daniel Maybank stood at the highest platform on the oil rig. From there he could turn in a complete circle and see the horizon in every direction. Ever since the first news reports started broadcasting about an infection that made people turn into cannibals, he had alternated between the television screens, the internet, the helicopter landing pad, and hundreds of last minute system checks. The Gulf was calm and as flat as glass in every direction, and there was nothing but blue sky above.
He searched the horizon and didn’t see a single dot protruding above the straight line separating the water from the sky. If things were as bad as he was hearing, there should be someone, anyone trying to escape the carnage. Enough time had gone by for people to begin showing up, and from what he was seeing on the news broadcasts, the marinas had no shortage of people pushing their boats away from their slips.
“Where are they?” he mouthed the words without making a sound. He had noticed he was having entire conversations like that even when he made one of his rare trips to the mainland. He knew it was because the trips had become exactly that. They were less and less frequent until he couldn’t stand to be around crowds. He thought it was something that old people preferred whether they lived on the mainland or on an oil rig, but he was glad he had a choice to be so far out in the Gulf.
Maybank had rolled out of bed just before sunrise without an alarm clock and immediately went to his favorite place to enjoy his morning coffee.
That was another characteristic of old men as far as he knew. They didn’t need to sleep the day away, and he was glad for it. His favorite place was an observation deck that faced directly to the east. He had an unblemished view of the sun as it appeared on the horizon. At first it was a faint, purple glow. Then it was brighter shades of orange and yellow just before it exploded into view. He never got tired of seeing its arrival, just as he was always there to see its departure to the west. As far as he was concerned, sunrise and sunset were the only times of day that mattered. Everything in between was just daylight or darkness.
After sunrise of this day everything had changed. He was getting his second cup of coffee and thinking about what to have for breakfast when he turned on the television. He did it so absentmindedly that he didn’t even notice there was no volume. He stirred a teaspoon of sugar into the coffee and walked back out to the observation deck.
Half in and half out of his chaise lounge he remembered the TV. He sat his coffee cup on the small table next to the chair and turned in the direction of the TV. If there was something interesting on the screen he would waste the energy to walk to the shelf by the coffee pot where he had put the remote down. He laughed at his own laziness when he considered not walking to a remote instead of walking all the way to the TV the way people used to.
Maybank froze in mid motion. He could see himself reflected in a nearby mirror, and he was amused by the ridiculous pose he was striking. His silver hair was in disarray, and he had a passing memory of a wild eyed scientist in a movie about time travel.
“What did that kid call him, Professor? Yes, that was it.”<
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Maybank had been much younger when that movie was in theaters, but he had watched it here on his oil rig.
Across the main living quarters was a seventy-five inch flatscreen. One of the perks of getting free technology upgrades whenever he wanted. A sound system that would be the envy of any teenager was connected to the TV, but most of the time it was silent. Maybank preferred the sounds of the wind and waves over the strident sounds of human voices, especially on news channels. He could hear the faint rushing sounds of the Gulf of Mexico behind him, but he could imagine the sounds that went along with the images on the large TV screen. He could almost hear the screaming without turning up the volume.
He shook himself out of the trance that felt longer than it probably was and found himself lunging for the remote. The volume popped on as soon as his finger hit the button, and the screaming matched his imagination.
The scene that filled the entire TV was chaos. It was a national twenty-four hour news channel, so he didn’t expect to see a local broadcast. He considered a local broadcast anything that came from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. Texas wasn’t local. The chaos he was watching could have been anywhere, but he was fairly sure it was New York.
Smoke was casting a gray and black shroud over cars, buildings, and people. The people were darting in and out of the smoke.
“That’s not entirely true,” he mouthed. “Some of them aren’t darting. They’re just standing around watching, and when people run into them, they grab the running people and bite them wherever they can.”
Maybank shook his head from side to side. He told himself to shut up and just watch.
Two women were standing next to each other. There was something unnatural about the way they were standing. One of them was leaning to the right and was almost leaning on the other woman. When the smoke cleared away from them, Maybank saw that the woman was missing her right foot from the ankle down. They were oblivious to the smoke that swirled away from them and then back into their faces. It didn’t seem to bother them at all.
“Why should it?” mouthed Maybank. “What’s a little smoke when you’re missing a foot?”
He grimaced at his inability to stop talking to himself, but at the same time he considered the possibility that he might start doing it more often in light of the broadcast he was watching.
A car burst through the smoke and hit the leaning woman head on. The force launched her into the smoke so fast that the yelp that escaped Maybank’s lips was well after she disappeared. The other woman didn’t seem to notice that her friend was hit by a car, but she did notice the man that jumped from the front passenger seat. He fell to the pavement as he tripped over something, and she fell on his back with her teeth bared.
Maybank didn’t understand why she fell, but he was smart enough to understand that she really was biting the side of the man’s head. She lifted her head away from his, ripping off the man’s right ear and a long strip of skin from his hairline to his lips. The man’s pain was undeniable, and his scream rose above the other chaotic sounds in the street. The red blood stood out in stark contrast to the gray and black smoke.
The driver of the car was a woman, and Maybank could see she was turning the wheel and backing away from the place where her companion had jumped from the car. She was paying so little attention to her friend that she didn’t notice someone else had climbed in through the open passenger door. The car backed up, stopped, and then backed away into the smoke. Maybank’s eyes were glued to the spot where it had disappeared, so he was still watching when the car slowly rolled into view for a second time. The driver side door was open, and no one was behind the wheel.
He was still watching the car when it occurred to him there was a voice coming through the speakers. It had been there all along, but he had to mentally tune into what was being said. A reporter in the studio was describing the scene, but the smoke was apparently too boring because he asked someone if they had a better view.
The producer was happy to oblige, and the scene switched to another city. This time the historic landmarks of Washington DC made the scene more recognizable, but there was nothing familiar about a group of people on their knees biting a jerking body that was stretched out on the sidewalk.
The cameraman who was filming the attack was yelling something at a reporter who kept asking him if he was getting the shot. The camera jerked almost as much as the victim on the sidewalk as the cameraman shoved it into the hands of the reporter.
Maybank heard him clearly when he yelled, “You want that shot? Go get it.”
The camera was heavy, so the end result was a good shot of the sky. Then there was a view of the retreating cameraman’s back. The reporter kept talking into her microphone as she turned the heavy camera back toward the original subjects of her report, and when she finally got it pointed in their direction, she was surprised to find they were no longer shredding the man on the sidewalk. They were standing in front of her.
Her screams were cut short as the entire group, attackers and victim, fell onto the camera. The picture was a side view of a woman’s foot as it was jerked loosely from side to side. For a brief moment there was a profile of a face, teeth bared and biting into the soft flesh above the back of the ankle.
The studio cut away from Washington, and with a shaking voice the anchor said they were going live to their London correspondent.
“Patrick, this is Diane in Atlanta. Can you describe the scene outside Parliament?”
“It’s incredible chaos in the streets of London, Diane. People have been told to go home and shut their doors. Authorities are saying not to open their doors until public announcements say it’s safe to do so.”
“Are they saying what’s causing this, Patrick? The US government is saying it didn’t start here.”
“Diane, everyone is denying responsibility, but the European networks are calling it The Decline of Man.”
“What does that mean, Patrick?”
“They can’t stop it, Diane.”
Maybank didn’t remember sitting down, and he didn’t remember when the picture on the TV had gone blank. He had a vague recollection of live broadcasts from major cities around the world. Paris, Rome, Moscow, and many more reports came and went. There were so many shots of people being attacked and dismembered that he felt like he had watched a horror movie.
It seemed to take more effort than usual to get up from his chair, but he eventually pushed himself to a standing position. He found that he hadn’t bothered to get dressed, and all he had put in his stomach was coffee. It wasn’t exactly a humorous smile that shaped his mouth when it dawned on him that he had seen plenty of people becoming well fed today. The smile changed to an expression of twisted agony and he felt the knot in his stomach and the burning bile as he vomited on the carpet right in front of him. Maybank’s knees buckled, and he fell on top of the mess he had just made.
He didn’t know if he had blacked out or just blocked everything out, and maybe there wasn’t much difference between the two. He pushed himself up for a second time, and that was when it came to him that this was the day they had planned for. This was the day when the shelters would save a few lives. This would also be the day when people would try to escape to the safety of his oil rig. They wouldn’t know about his shelter, but they would be coming any time now just to be safe on one of the man made steel islands.
From what he had seen on TV, oil rigs were going to be a lot safer than cities, and the irony wasn’t lost on him. Plenty of the people who would think of the oil rigs were the very people who tried to prevent offshore drilling. Regardless of their politics, they would be trying to reach safety now, and so would his designated guests.
Maybank raced into the bedroom and found his pants. It wouldn’t do for him to greet dignitaries in his underwear despite the fact that he would greet them naked if he hadn’t promised Titus Rush that he would behave. He didn’t know who they were, but the promise given to him was that they were worth
keeping alive.
Once he was presentable, he began going through the checklist he had prepared for this day. There were parts of the oil rig that were always in a state of readiness, but some had to go through a series of extra safeguards.
The living quarters were exposed in their present state, but a few simple switches moved to the proper position changed it from a resort home into a fortress.
When the survivors club had asked where he planned to put his shelter, he wasn’t surprised by their reaction. Part of the reason they had formed the club in the first place was to bring likeminded people together to test each other’s ability to survive an apocalypse. That meant critiques, critiques, and more critiques. Their job was to find every reason why their shelter ideas wouldn’t work, and the owner of each shelter had the unenviable task of altering designs based on those critiques. His idea to put a shelter on an oil rig seemed to draw the heaviest amount of criticism.
The hardest apocalypse to survive was a direct hit from a nuclear device. Some of the members of the club considered a nuclear war to be in the top five disasters, so their shelters were hardened until they were likely to accomplish their mission. Mud Island, Fort Sumter, Green Cavern, and the President’s shelter in Columbus, Ohio were the first to come to his mind. He was told that Ambassadors Island was also impervious to a direct hit, but he didn’t have the same faith in the soft strata under a lake that he had in the bedrock around the others. He had visited each shelter, and even though Ambassadors Island had the same metal shell as Mud Island, he felt like an ocean was a better layer of protection than a lake.
Nonetheless, Maybank hoped each of the shelters were online. There hadn’t been a nuclear attack, and it remained to be seen exactly what kind of apocalypse was in progress. Judging by the reports on TV, he was leaning toward the probability of a pandemic, and that meant he had to seal off the shelter and close all areas that were exposed to the air.