by Howard, Bob
Franco felt the itch on his right leg and absentmindedly scratched at it. Then he felt the sting on the back of the hand he had used to scratch his leg.
They had stopped to rest at a small gas station next to one of the many tidal creeks and were considering the attached convenience store as a possible place to spend the night. Stokes was checking it out for himself while Franco and Turk sat with their backs against the gas pumps. Fire ants have a nasty habit of infesting things that sit still too long on dirt or things like gas pumps that don’t get used. Things like cars, barbecue grills, and lawn mowers are great places to find spiders and ants in South Carolina.
When the ants bit his hand, they got his attention. He slapped at his pants legs trying to brush the ants off. That only irritated the ones that had climbed his boots to the inside of his pants. The bites increased, and he didn’t know why, but he didn’t feel right. He was dizzy. His neck was already swelling, and the pressure on his windpipe was increasing. He couldn’t swallow, and the bites hurt.
He managed to croak out, “Can’t breathe. On fire.”
Turk started laughing as soon as Franco had started jumping around and slapping at his pants. He stopped laughing when he saw that Franco’s neck would have been more at home on the body of a gorilla than it was on a man. Worse, he felt the first ant bites on his own legs.
Not everyone is allergic to ant bites, but they hurt just the same. Turk could only think of one thing, and that was to get the ants off of him and Franco. He grabbed his friend by the arm of his jacket and yanked him in the direction of the small two lane bridge that crossed the tidal creek. He knew the ants could be washed off if he could get there in time, and the cool water would soothe the stinging bites.
When they reached the low concrete wall that ran along both sides of the bridge, Turk shoved Franco over the side into the water. He didn’t hesitate and jumped along with him. They both hit the water and went under. Relief flooded across Turk’s body.
He surfaced and spit out a geyser of the brown water, but it felt so good he started whooping because he knew Franco would be better too. Stokes ran out and followed the sound of the commotion at the bridge. He leaned over and saw Turk, laughing and yelling as if he was at a pool party. It was a stark contrast to Franco who was clutching his neck with both hands. Stokes didn’t have a clue why Franco’s neck was bigger around than one of his legs.
“Franco, what’s wrong with you, stupid?”
Turk yelled something he didn’t understand, but Stokes waved him off and told him he would deal with him in a minute, and while he was at it to shut up.
Stokes turned back to Franco to repeat his question, but Turk yelled something else. This time he understood what Turk said.
“Ripe meat. There’s ripe meat in the water.”
Turk was slapping at the water, but this time he was also kicking his feet to push away from something. He was putting distance between himself and a big brown lump that had surfaced a few feet from the bridge, and just like Stokes he was making sure that he was behind Franco.
Stokes was still confused about why they were in the water in the first place, and he was almost more focused on Franco’s huge neck than he was the fact that there was ripe meat in the water with them. Stokes didn’t understand why Franco was choking himself so hard that his neck was going to explode.
“Franco, I said what’s wrong with you. Let go of your neck and get out of there.”
Franco’s eyes were bulging so far out of his head that he resembled a puffer fish, but there was still a spark of recognition in those big, white orbs because he turned to face the muddy ripe meat that stood up in front of him. The water was only waist deep in places, and the ripe meat was only an arm length away.
Franco had the presence of mind to fall over into the water, but it was much too late. As he did, the ripe meat fell forward and connected its face with Franco’s hip before it disappeared under the water. Turk heard it better than Stokes, but they both learned you could hear someone scream under water if they screamed loud enough.
Turk was sitting in the water almost to the bank, and he started walking like a crab with his hands behind him. When Franco surfaced the ripe meat still had its teeth buried in his hip. He came out of the water screaming and immediately went under again. That made Turk crawl faster without thinking about where he was going.
Stokes could have warned him. From his vantage point above the two men he could see that Turk was backing into the marsh grass where more ripe meat eagerly waited for him with outstretched arms. Stokes just didn’t care enough about other people, and watching the two idiots die was almost entertaining to him.
When Franco didn’t come back up a second time, Turk finally turned to face the direction he had been crawling. The ripe meat in front of him actually scraped dirty fingers across his cheek and drew blood, but it couldn’t get a grip on him.
Turk half crawled and half ran up the bank of the creek and sprawled onto the asphalt road. Stokes walked over and tapped him with a boot.
“Are you bit?”
Turk was gasping for air, partially from fright and partially from ant bites. He wasn’t feeling the effects as bad as Franco, but he had gotten more than his fair share of bites. He rolled to a sitting position and pulled up his pants leg. It was hard to tell one bite from the other. His leg was red and swollen. The clicking noise by his right ear was the sound of a gun being cocked.
“Wait, Stokes. It’s just ant bites.”
Turk’s pleading voice was wasted on Stokes.
“You know I can’t take that chance, Turk.”
Stokes pulled the trigger before Turk could plead again. At close range, the bullet threw him over onto his stomach like a rag doll. The leg of his pants was pulled all the way to his knee, and a big swarm of ants was crawling back to the pavement.
Stokes examined the back of the dead man’s leg and watched the ants pouring from the rolled up pants leg.
“Well, what do you know. I was wrong. Sorry Turk.”
Stokes walked onto the bridge to see how Franco was doing and saw several ripe meat standing in the water. Franco was one of them. They were making slow progress up the bank, and Stokes cursed himself for making noise when he shot Turk.
“Where are the gators when you need them? Might as well find another place to spend the night.”
******
Year Six of the Decline
Opening the big door was an event that required a ceremony and much fanfare. Iris wanted her departure to be low key with as little attention as possible. She had made her best effort to convince everyone that the escape hatch at the end of the island was the best bet, but even she knew it wasn’t. Going out that way meant she would still have to cross water, and there was no way to know what was waiting on the bottom of Lake Norman.
She managed to convince some of her biggest supporters to stay behind, though. They were needed if the community was going to continue without her. Besides, they had families to think about.
Two of the couples who didn’t have children asked to go with her, and she felt like their reasons for wanting to leave were good. They told her they had never really adjusted to being underground for so long, but they were smart enough to know it was what had kept them alive. Death from radiation poisoning wasn’t a pretty death.
Another reason they wanted to leave was because they knew something the rest of them didn’t know. They promised they wouldn’t tell the others if Iris wouldn’t take them with her, but they couldn’t promise they wouldn’t leave on their own one day. Iris felt like it was better to have them with her than to go alone, especially since they had a similar goal.
What they knew was the locations of the other shelters, or at least some of them. It wasn’t a secret that could be kept forever because too many of them needed to be involved with the day to day operation of the Ambassadors Island shelter.
Once word got out about other locations, it was more than likely to be a temptation for people
to leave with the idea that a loved one might be at a shelter near to where they had lived. At least a dozen occupants of the Ambassadors Island shelter had lived near Charleston, and from what the Chief had told Iris, the Fort Sumter shelter could hold hundreds of people comfortably, maybe even thousands.
Iris was worried about plenty of things, but one thing that stood out as her biggest worry was how many of them were going to die in the next few months if they set out on their own to find their lost families. In a sense, that’s what she was doing so she couldn’t question the motives of the others.
When she made the formal announcement, she was surprised by how many of them understood why she wanted to leave, but she was more surprised by how many wanted to stay a bit longer or even permanently. They wanted to know what happened to their families, but most knew what they would find.
As many people as possible were crammed onto the platform that spread out in front of the bank vault door that sealed the shelter. The people had left enough room for Iris and the two couples to pass between them, and she had to stop to take one last look at the shelter from the top of the ladder.
It all looked the same as the first time she had seen it, but now it had a familiar, lived in look to it. She could almost reach out and touch the happy times she had shared with the other survivors in those corridors and rooms below. They had been saved by a miracle, but now it was time to go and try to make another one for herself.
There were no more speeches to give. They had all been given the night before at a banquet held in her honor. She had passed the torch, and the new mayor was a widely respected man who would be as kind and gentle with the survivors as she had been.
The door was opened just as the group arrived, and for the first time in years she smelled and tasted the outside air. It was better than she had expected, but it was still bad, almost evil tasting. Even though the sun was bright and a slight breeze was swaying trees in the distance, the quiet of the outside world meant there had been death.
Iris stepped through the open door and squinted against the bright light of the sun. Nothing moved, and there were no remains of humans or animals on the slope that led up to the road above. Her companions followed her out, and they all turned to watch the big door close. The brick covering the door blended back together, and it almost completely disappeared even though they knew it was there.
That was it. Just like that, they were outside and ready to live or die on what was most likely a fool’s errand. They shared a nod of agreement and walked up the slope.
It took several hours just to walk far enough around Lake Norman to a highway that would take them south. The complete absence of infected dead, whether moving or rotting along the road, troubled them all. The radiation would have destroyed millions of them, but it almost seemed like they had fled from the area to escape.
Her companions were George and Sherry Worth and Sora and Yuni Tanaka. Sora and Yuni were born in Tokyo but had come to America to work for an automobile parts manufacturer. The cruise had been their way to celebrate their promotions to work in the South Carolina facility. When the infection broke out, they were still working on their language skills, but living in close proximity to everyone in the shelter had enabled them to master the language.
It had been important for Iris to be aware of detailed information about everyone in the shelter, so she knew they were a relatively young couple. Sora was thirty-two, and his wife was twenty-seven. They had tried to start a family, but the stress they had felt being underground had taken its toll on them. They weren’t surprised that it just didn’t happen.
George and Sherry met inside the shelter. They had been recent additions to the survivor group before being miraculously pulled from the surface into the safety of the underground world. They had formed an instant bond when they met within the first few days inside, but neither was feeling the pull of parenthood. They were close in age to the Tanaka’s and had almost as quickly taken the Asian couple under their wings. It was easy to see they all were in need of friends, and they were a natural fit.
Iris liked the way the four of them moved as they walked down the debris covered road. There was a spring in their steps that couldn’t be measured inside the shelter. It wasn’t that they wanted action, but something had built up inside of them the way it had inside Iris. They all felt the greater purpose they had lacked in the safety of the shelter. They had also kept pace with Iris on the exercise equipment and were four of the most fit people in the shelter. Yuni ran fitness classes as part of her shelter employment, so she could outrun the rest of the group if she had to.
Sora and George had worked on the structural and maintenance teams. There were very few things to fix, but when something heavy needed to be lifted, the two of them were the first in line to help.
All five of them were equipped with M4 carbines and Glock pistols, but they had remembered what the Chief and Kathy had told them about using machetes first if they had a choice. The machetes were all in their hands, and they stayed as far out in the open as possible to be able to see the infected from a longer distance. They were concerned about other survivors, but not deeply worried. The radiation had given people reason enough to stay out of the area.
When they made camp for their first night in the open, they had plenty to talk about. The radiation was gone, but that was all the more reason why there should be at least some infected dead. They had seen a few birds and rats, but there weren’t even any decayed infected. Mostly, there had been nothing but silence.
They felt like it was safe enough to build a fire, and they didn’t know how many evenings they would have like this one. They took advantage of the break while they could.
“I never thought I could go a whole day on the surface without hearing one moan,” said George.
“I’ll be sure to wake you up with a good moan for your turn on watch tonight. You’ll be wide awake in no time,” said Yuni.
“I didn’t say I missed it. I meant why aren’t we hearing any? Where are they?”
“They don’t migrate,” said Iris. “Or do they?”
Everyone was wondering the same thing, and they all seemed to be studying their hands while they waited for someone to come up with the answer.
Sherry said, “One night when I was on watch in the control center, I saw one on a monitor that was being held together by the last bits of tissue. The radiation had eaten away almost everything else and it could hardly move, but it was still trying to go somewhere. Months later I could tell the radiation was dropping because I saw an infected in better condition crossing the same spot. I didn’t think about it at the time, but the last time I was on watch I saw one that was recently bitten. Poor guy didn’t even look dead at first.”
“Imagine surviving this long and then getting bitten,” said Sora.
The gravity of his comment made him say it in a low, almost mournful voice, and serious moments tended to make him revert to his native language. There was something at the end that only Yuni understood, and she nudged him with her elbow.
“My apologies,” he said. “I was just saying we must not let that happen to us, and I believe I may have interrupted Sherry. What happened to the last one you saw?”
Sherry picked up her thought where she had left off.
“He was definitely an infected, but I felt almost like he was going somewhere on purpose. Like he was just passing through.”
“Remember that doctor with the theory about it being a virus that could think?” asked Iris.
She had her rifle unslung and cradled in the bend of her elbow, but she sat down near the camp fire and poured a cup of coffee.
“They called it the thinking virus, didn’t they?” asked Sherry. “That’s what I meant. He was walking as if he knew where he was going. As a matter of fact, I usually call them ‘it’ when I talked about them. That one was walking like he was still alive.”
“Well, they’ve all gone somewhere,” said Iris. “I hope they aren’t going to the sam
e place we are.”
Early the next morning they were on the move again, and it was Sora who pointed out the obvious to the rest of them. They were so intent on where the infected had gone that they hadn’t noticed they were walking on a highway that was virtually cleared of all traffic. The broken down and rusty cars were still there, but they had all been pushed to the side of the road.
Sora jumped up and grabbed the top of the concrete divider in the middle of the interstate. He pulled himself up and balanced himself so he could see both sides.
“You guys should see this.”
The divider was at least eight feet high, and although all of them were capable of climbing it, it was a good way to break a leg.
“Save us the trouble,” said George. “What’s the difference between one side of the road and the other?”
“The other side is one long, solid car wreck,” he answered. “Why are all of the cars pushed out of the way over on our side but not on the other side?”
Iris was tall, so she made it seem easy when she jumped up to where Sora had sat down with his feet hanging over on the other side. She stood up as tall as she could and tried to see what it was like up ahead.
“See anything worth mentioning?” asked Sora.
“Yeah, but you’re not going to like it. Do you see where the concrete divider ends about a mile from here?”
Sora couldn’t see as far as Iris, but when he stood up he could see what she was pointing at. When the concrete divider ended, a wide grass median began, and down the middle was a steel wire cable. The steel wire cable was strong enough to stop a vehicle as it crossed the median, but something had snapped it into big, coiling loops.