by Howard, Bob
The men left Maybank standing in the parking lot of the library, and if not for the fact that he didn’t want to die in combat, he would have torn up the card with the phone number on it.
******
By the end of the next day, Maybank knew his life had reached a turning point. He made the call, and he was picked up by a guy in a Volkswagen Beetle. For some reason he had expected a Jeep, but at least his parents weren’t suspicious. He didn’t know why he expected a Jeep, but when they drove up to the front gate of Fort Jackson and asked to climb into an Army Jeep, he had a feeling like he was where he was supposed to be. Then again, in a few weeks he expected to be at the same Army base for basic training.
The meeting room was in a hot, metal building, and everyone was sweating already. Columbia wasn’t the hottest city in the country, but the humidity could kill you. He was surprised to see a General at the podium, and he was eyeballing the long hair in the room like he wanted to personally do the honors with a barber’s clippers.
Maybank tried for the back row again, but Titus motioned for him to take the seat next to him up front.
Without wasting time or words on introductions or greetings, the General asked, “Are we ready to move forward?”
Titus answered without getting up, “We have the number of people you need. We’ll have a list of members for you in a few minutes.”
“Good. Each of your people will be assigned a team of Army engineers and someone who will handle the money. They will meet at the end of next week and travel to their sites to discuss construction. I have ordered them to give you whatever you ask for, but I want to remind you that this is a top secret operation. If even one of you gets the urge to tell someone about it, we’ll scrap the whole thing. Questions?”
“A few of my people have received draft notices. Can we get those taken care of?”
The General had addressed the entire group with a scowl on his face, but when he faced Titus to answer his question, he visibly softened. Maybank could see that the General had a measure of respect for Titus.
“Please indicate next to their names who needs attention, and we’ll code those with a college exemption.”
Maybank still didn’t know what was going on, but he was either going to college, or someone was making it look like he was. Either way, he wasn’t going to die trying to earn his tuition money.
Just as quickly as it had started, the meeting ended. The list was given to the General who passed it to his Orderly, and a whirlwind of processing and paperwork started.
They were escorted through the building, normally used to process new recruits, and one by one their pictures were taken for ID cards. Maybank noticed there were Army barbers standing by next to a row of barber chairs and long mirrors, but their anticipation changed to disappointment when the group was rushed away into the next room.
They didn’t escape the Medics who were standing in pairs ready to give them a series of vaccinations.
“Why do we have to get shots?” Maybank whispered to Titus.
“The Army doesn’t want us to give important people any diseases.”
Maybank wasn’t entirely sure that Titus had given him a straight answer, but he got in line behind him. He was getting out of the draft, and a few shots were a small price to pay.
By the time the processing was done, they were each introduced to their individual “project teams”. Every member of the survivalist club was given five people to work with, and Maybank was taken away to a private room to talk with them. He wasn’t sure of the chain of command. His dad called it “the pecking order”. He felt like he was still a kid, but his team kept calling him Mr. Maybank. He finally asked them to just call him Maybank, and they seemed fine with that. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he put them all at ease because military people tended to refer to each other by their last names.
One of them explained that he would be handling all of the expenses. He would keep track of everything they spent and get approval for whatever he needed. Maybank didn’t ask because he didn’t want to seem dumb, but he didn’t know what the guy was talking about.
The answers began to take shape when the military man started talking. Maybank just sat and listened while the rigid officer told him things as if he had asked questions.
“The location of the shelter will be your choice and yours alone. If you want it somewhere, that’s where we’ll put it.”
Maybank nodded.
“There is no budget, but keep in mind that big ticket items should be requested as early as possible to allow us time to arrange the funds”
Another nod.
“Mr. Rush has already made it clear that technology in the shelters must be upgradeable. When the shelter is finished it will have the latest technology, and it will be upgraded once a year unless there is something that can be incorporated sooner.”
He risked a question.
“What’s the latest technology?”
He thought he had screwed up because the officer stared at him like he didn’t know how to answer.
“Is there a problem?” asked Maybank.
“No, uh.”
The officer let that last partial answer kind of drag out. He thought he was being tested.
“Well, uh Maybank, we don’t have all of the specifications for your technology yet. What do you want in your shelter? You’ll certainly have radar and TV reception. I imagine shortwave radio will be in every shelter. If they ever improve on that, we’ll certainly install it.”
That was when Maybank really started to understand. He was supposed to be telling them what he wanted and where to build it, in which case he didn’t have a clue because he hadn’t thought about it.
“Can you gentlemen excuse me for a minute? I’ll be right back.”
Maybank left the room and went looking for Titus. He finally found him with his group about thirty minutes later. He had a large map rolled out on a table, and Maybank could easily tell who was in charge in his meeting.
Titus saw him coming and intercepted him at the door.
“Why didn’t you tell me what was going on before leaving me alone with them?”
“Well, if you didn’t shoot yourself in the foot, I had complete faith that you would figure it out fast enough.”
“Why me?” he asked.
“Why you? You mean why did I pick you to join the club? Because you were the only applicant who wasn’t nuts. You were genuinely curious about survival and came into the meeting with no expectations that we were going to save you when the apocalypse hits.”
“Seriously? So, now that I’m a member of the club I get my own shelter, and these guys are going to build it for me?”
Titus leaned in closer and asked, “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Don’t tell anyone. Now get back to your group and design a shelter that can withstand any apocalypse.”
Titus walked away as if this was all normal to him.
“Wait a minute, Mr. Rush. What kind of apocalypse?”
Once he was back with his project team and had a chance to think about the answer he got from Titus, Maybank realized what Titus meant.
He had simply shrugged his shoulders at Maybank and said, “I don’t know. You tell me. Something killed off the dinosaurs.”
******
From that night on, Danny Maybank had watched the news from a different perspective. The Air Force was bombing Vietnam, and almost daily it seemed like someone was coming out with a new movie about the end of the world. His favorite was a movie about an astronaut stranded on another planet where humans were an inferior species to apes, and the apes could even talk. In the end the planet turned out to be Earth in the future, and some kind of apocalypse caused apes to evolve until they passed humans.
Maybank didn’t really care about how the astronaut got to the future. He just cared about the apocalypse that caused monkeys to pass humans on the intelligence ladder. He laid awake at night staring at the ceiling
and tried to picture different scenarios, and his mind kept going back to the list the survivor group had done.
Eventually, he decided that Titus wasn’t really asking him to answer his question that day out at the Army base. He wanted him to be ready for anything, and he came to the conclusion that you couldn’t be ready for everything on the list.
When that happened, he started wondering why he felt like the list had a flaw, and that was what was really keeping him awake at night. Then it came to him. It couldn’t just be a list of possible apocalypses. It had to be a list of likely worldwide catastrophes, and what Titus and the rest of the group didn’t realize was that it could have a totally unbelievable outcome. So, the survivors shouldn’t be working from a list of apocalypses, they should be working from a list of outcomes.
Maybank gave up on sleep. He turned on a lamp and got out a note pad. He wrote everything on the list over again but left space in between each apocalypse. Then he went back and wrote under each one the likely outcomes of the events. He wrote the long term and short term outcomes because the shelters were supposed to last forever. It surprised him how much he was writing and how easy it was to come up with ideas, but hours later he sat back and looked at his work. There was one shocking similarity. No matter what apocalypse he chose, whether it was man-made or an act of God, he had the word “mutation” next to everything.
Maybank laid his head on his pillow with one thought on his mind. The next day he would have to contact Titus Rush and tell him that they needed to design shelters that would protect them from mutation. He woke up eight hours later with his light still on, and he knew for certain where he wanted to build his shelter.
******
If Columbia felt hot and muggy, New Orleans was bound to feel worse, but Maybank couldn’t really tell the difference. The city felt old, and he didn’t know much about it other than what he had learned in high school. When he arrived in the French Quarter, he realized just how little of the history he had retained. There were lots of tourists, and his project team told him to dress like one. He wasn’t sure what that meant, so he picked up a souvenir t-shirt at the airport that had a big picture of Bourbon Street on the back.
His team told him to check in to his hotel and then they would all meet at a local restaurant. The idea was to be inconspicuous, so they would do some of the tourist activities and then drive out to the Coast Guard Base. An Army helicopter would be ready for them to take their first ride out over the Gulf of Mexico.
It wasn’t hard to recognize his group. When he walked into the restaurant, the hostess told him his party was already seated, and then she commented about how popular his shirt was. He didn’t have a clue what she meant until he saw that four of them had bought the same shirt. He wasn’t sure if it was funny or a little scary that they were thinking alike.
Over a meal of crab and crawfish they talked over the choice Maybank had made. Logistically, his shelter wasn’t the hardest one to construct. As a matter of fact, there was an abandoned oil rig that could be easily modified to meet their needs. The well had been capped, which was what they wanted because they didn’t want to complicate things by hiding under a working rig that was actually shipping oil to a refinery.
It was also going to be a much more private project than some of the others. The engineer on the team talked about the nightmare of building a shelter under downtown Columbus, Ohio, and he was glad they wouldn’t be blasting granite from a mountain. He explained that they would build the outside hull of the shelter above the water along with some of the compartments, then they would submerge it and push it into place under the oil rig. All things considered, he seemed excited about it.
The money man was also happy. His projected costs were far lower than several of the shelters. He said they were a fraction of the cost of the Fort Sumter shelter, and the only one that cost less was the location chosen by Titus. If not for the moat around the island, they wouldn’t even be close in cost, but the money man was still very satisfied that the oil rig would be easy to fund.
The Army officer wasn’t happy. He didn’t fit in with the relaxed atmosphere of the restaurant even with his Bourbon Street t-shirt. He was frowning and sitting stiffly in his chair even though he was an expert when it came to getting the meat out of a crab leg or sucking on the head of a crawfish. Maybank wasn’t too thrilled with the crawfish.
What bothered the officer was his belief that the shelter would be an easy target for his number one theory of an apocalypse. To him it would undoubtedly be a war that led to nuclear escalation and then annihilation. He didn’t think they would need any other theories on the list. When Maybank asked if he didn’t think a pandemic was possible, the officer said a pandemic would cause a war.
They debated the issue through the entire meal, each making some good points about what would cause the end of the world, but the engineer gave them both a surprise.
“I think my shelter could withstand a direct hit from a nuclear weapon,” he said, “even in the water.”
Maybank didn’t believe there would be a nuclear war, but this was good news to him.
“I thought everyone was worried about my choice of location because of a nuclear strike.”
“They are, but this new metal we’re working with is remarkable. As soon as everyone started getting excited about how easy it would be to blow you up, I started working on how to keep it from happening.”
“You have a way to prevent a nuclear war?” asked the officer.
“No, but I never intended to build this thing with flat walls. A big explosion passing through water and hitting a curved wall would give you one helluva ride, but after you’re done getting your brains rattled, it would still be in one piece.”
Neither of them were afraid to argue their beliefs, so the rest of them ate their meals and listened to them fight. The third man in the group was the man who would report directly to the President, and he was wondering if he could get his counterpart on the Columbus project team to trade with him.
Early the next morning they lifted off from the Coast Guard station and flew out to the oil rig. Maybank had to admit, after leaving the Mississippi Delta, the water was much more blue than the South Carolina coast. Everything was new to him, so the ride was over quickly as time seemed to fly by. The landing platform was in need of repair, and everyone was uncomfortable at the sight of so much rust, but the engineer clapped his hands together excitedly.
“This is going to be great.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Nightmare Escape
Six Years After the Decline
Crossing the marshes at night had been every nightmare they had imagined and then some. Molly and Sam had spent days discussing what they would take with them, how they would leave, and most importantly, how they would survive.
Despite the fact that they were behaving more like two star crossed lovers than survivors of an apocalypse, they were light years ahead of the kids they had known in school. They were aware of the dangers outside the safety of the shelters, and they were in their own minds prepared to face those dangers.
They moved fast when they left. They knew the slightest noise or even hesitation would put an end to their plans, and a thousand things could go wrong in the first few hours. They also knew the Chief, or any one of the survivors for that matter, would deduce which way they had gone. It was reasonable to expect that they would be caught, and that expectation was what made them think ahead.
There was no way to hide their tracks and still make good time, so their only hope was that a search party would think they decided to stop at Fort Johnson, either to rest or just take a look around. For that reason, they decided Fort Johnson would be where they would begin moving as fast as they could. Once they made it past the heavily wooded areas they would be in the neighborhoods. From there they would find places to hide during the day and travel at night. They still had to cross several stretches of marshlands that were connected by bridges and highly visible roads. If they knew
the Chief, he would have someone at those locations before the day had gone by.
The marshes were muddy and more than once they were bogged down when one of them would be sucked in all the way to the knees. When that happened, the other would stay where they were. To move meant the possibility of finding another soft spot, and if they were both stuck in the mud, they could die. Their experience with the marshes taught them that the one on dry ground could pull the other one free, but it had to be done before the alligators or the blue crabs heard their efforts to pull themselves out.
Then they had to move even faster in order to be gone before something else arrived. The infected didn’t know to be careful or quiet. If one of them heard the teenagers out on the marshes, they would start their incessant moaning as they stumbled across the mud. Sound carried too well at night, and although they couldn’t always tell where it was coming from, they could hear everything. There were popping noises, cracking of dry brush and branches, and splashes. All of those noises had been part of the marshes for many centuries, but the moaning was relatively new. Regardless, it was more than enough reason to be afraid.
When they saw an alligator moving along the bank of one of the last inlets before reaching dry land, they were sure they would have to turn back. They weren’t sure if the alligator was stalking them or if it had another form of prey in mind. All they knew was that they couldn’t cross that inlet without drawing its attention.
They had just crossed over an island that was covered with trees and had been surprised by the number of infected they had seen, but the tiny island was as loud as a rock concert with all of the popping, cracking, and moaning, and the infected hadn’t seen them. Now the noise was behind them, and the alligator seemed to almost pause to listen.
Molly and Sam lowered themselves to the ground slowly and watched as the dark shape pulled itself out of the inlet and stood as still as a statue. The alligator was facing almost in their direction, but it was waiting for something. It turned toward a splash that came from some place back in the direction from where they had come, and dashed toward it with more agility and speed than they expected.