by Howard, Bob
The door with the mirror on it was partially closed, so she couldn’t see beyond it, and during the last year that had been as good as a death trap. There was usually something behind it. There was a big kitchen with nice appliances, and the dining room table confirmed her fire station theory. It finally came to her that oil rigs were operated by people, and people had to live somewhere.
“But where are the people?”
Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else because her throat was raw from screaming, and it actually hurt to speak.
There was no answer from the other rooms, and the weakness she had felt was leaving with the certainty that she was going to die. David was dead. There was no way to change that, but this was the first time she had been truly alone since they had gotten married. Even when he had gone out to find supplies, she had tagged along and just followed him. He had always been the hunter, and she had just been there for him to take care of.
Janice didn’t grow up in a home where the women needed to know how to kill for food or skin a rabbit. She was more of a Home Shopping Network type person, and she was more in tune with the famous people of the entertainment world than she was with people who could start a campfire without a match or lighter. She could make a gourmet meal with the proper ingredients, but she really couldn’t explain what some of those ingredients were before they were put in seasoning and spice bottles.
She wasn’t as helpless as she had been, though. She wasn’t entirely sure, but it had been close to a year since she heard the screams and saw someone attacking a guest at the check-in counter. When she saw the blood spray across the white shirt on the hotel employee, she had passed out. Nothing made sense after she woke up.
From that day forward she had learned how to cope in a different world. The progress was slow, but it eventually got through her thick head that she would evolve or die. It was probably the day she tried to call her parents that was the turning point in her re-education. It was at least four months after the infected, as the news people called them, began biting people. She had simply snapped, and insisted that David should take her home. She stupidly picked up a phone and dialed her parents. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if she had snapped in private, but she did it as she was following David through a grocery store that smelled like rot. They had made it almost to the door without being detected when she simply turned back the clock a few months. She stood up and announced that she had run out of patience, and it was time to go home.
David had reacted with surprise at first, but then he saw her eyes. They were wet with tears and unfocused as if she was somewhere else. He was a survivor, and he did what needed to be done. A right hook to her glass jaw knocked her out cold. He lifted her over his shoulder and ran.
She didn’t wake up for almost eight full hours, and he was worried that he had injured her, but then it occurred to him that she was getting the best sleep she had gotten in months. He took the chance that she might have a concussion and let her sleep.
When Janice opened her eyes, she was back to reality. Her jaw ached something fierce, and she had a bit of a headache, but she knew who he was and why they were hiding in an RV at a campground.
“Did you hit me?”
“I had to. You were back in high school, and you wanted to call your parents to tell them you were having a lousy time at the prom.”
“Was I that bad?”
“Well, I embellished a little, but you were bad.”
Her image of waking up that day was very similar to the way she woke up against the door inside the crew’s quarters. She didn’t remember sinking to the floor and going to sleep.
She didn’t know she was so tired, and she didn’t know how long she had been asleep, but her rear end felt sore. She must have been there for a long time. There were no windows, so she didn’t know if it was still daylight outside, but reality flooded back over her the same way as it had when David had knocked her out, and she knew things had changed again. For a split second, she felt like picking up the phone and calling her mother.
When her rear end started to get numb, she somehow forced herself to get up. First, she just took her back off of the door. Then she put her feet under her legs and pushed. Her legs had gone to sleep, too. She was forced to stand there with one hand on the door while the circulation came back. There was a lock on the door, and she clicked it to the locked position without giving it much thought.
It was time to explore her new home, but as soon as she had that thought, she collapsed again. She went to the floor and was wracked with sobs that wouldn’t stop. It was the realization again that she was without David. The man that had protected her so well was dead, and for all she knew, it was the day of their first wedding anniversary.
The carpet under her face was wet with tears when she sat up for a second time. This time she was emotionally numb, but her body was a bit more rested. She didn’t know why she expected to find there was water at the kitchen sink, but she walked straight to it and washed her face. Maybe it was because there was electricity.
All she could think as she explored the quarters was how much David would have liked this new place. It was safe, comfortable, and all stocked with supplies. She had water and food, and they had come so close to having it with each other. After all their suffering during the last year, they would have had so much to share, and they were so close.
A long hallway had several bedrooms on each side, and they were nicely furnished with queen sized beds. The pillows on the bed in the first bedroom were inviting, and Janice laid her head down again. She told herself it would just be for a little while.
******
Maybank hadn’t gotten around to finding out why the cameras didn’t work in the crew’s quarters. He wasn’t so sure he would have spied on the woman if they did work, and the only reason he had known they had stopped broadcasting was because that monitor had been on and the picture was gone.
He had seen everything outside, but there wouldn’t have been a way for him to change things. He would have electrocuted the rats before the people arrived if he had known in advance what it was going to take to get the job done. He should have been doing it a few times a day until no more fell from their hiding places. That’s what he would have done if he had known what was going to happen, but that was in the past. It was too late now, but what he didn’t do before, he could do now.
He didn’t think the woman was going to take any chances by coming outside, but if she did, he didn’t want to see her swarmed by the ugly creatures. He uncovered the red switch to the electrical circuits and sent voltage along the catwalks and rails. Judging by the amount of smoke that drifted up from burning fur, he was glad he couldn’t smell or hear what was happening out there.
To his surprise, hundreds of rats began falling from the oil rig into the water. He thought he had eliminated them before, but there must have been more safe places for them than he realized.
He also saw one more reason why he should have done it before the container ship had drifted to a stop against the oil rig. All along the side that faced the ship, the rats were jumping to safety before they could be electrocuted. On the ship they would find a new supply of the infected to feed on, and Maybank would be faced with the problem of keeping them from coming back to the oil rig after they were done eating all of them.
He sat back in his chair and shut his eyes. It was something Titus Rush liked to do when he was faced with a problem. If he had the time to think it out, then there must be a solution.
As soon as it crossed his mind that he would think of a solution, he remembered that he had given up when he tried to find a way to get the dead tide to break up and move on. He had time, but he couldn’t do it.
One thing the survivors club had preached was that people would have less problems if they solved them before they happened. The only way to do that was to think of the problems in advance.
“Okay, let’s make a list of all the things I didn’t think of in advance,�
� he said out loud. “Why? Because that would be a longer list than things I did think of in advance.”
“No one had really expected a zombie apocalypse, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have guessed that millions of them would jump into the Gulf of Mexico. Then they would float until they got stuck on my oil rig. Oh, and let’s not forget that they would carry a few thousand rats with them.”
He made it that far and realized there was one thing he did predict in advance, and it was stuck against the side of his oil rig. He predicted that a ship would eventually run into him because ships were supposed to be in the Gulf. As a matter of fact, it was logical to assume another one might come along after this one.
Maybank opened his eyes and stared at the container ship.
“What did I plan to do when I predicted you?” he asked the image on his monitor.
He couldn’t have moved out of the way, and he couldn’t have controlled its course, so it was going to hit his rig no matter what he did.
“So, let’s assume I thought of you in advance. What did I think I could do, sink you?”
Satisfaction made him lean back and shut his eyes again. He knew he couldn’t blow it up because it would be too close to the rig. His shelter could withstand the explosion needed to sink a ship that size, but he couldn’t think of anything he had that could produce an explosion like that. He could, however, scuttle the ship if he could put a hole in the right place.
“It would have to be on the port side,” he said. “That would make her list away from the rig. The weight on her deck would make her roll and capsize without hitting the rig.”
Now that he knew what he wanted to do, he realized he was either totally insane, or he was delusional. There was no way to put a hole in a ship that size without explosives. In the end, he came to the conclusion that the club had been right about thinking of things in advance, and if he had thought this all the way through, he would have armed the oil rig with cruise missiles. Since he didn’t do that, the answer was to live with it parked there, but work on the rat problem.
That was when he remembered. When he told the military he wanted his shelter on an oil rig, he was asked what he would do if the rig was hit by a ship. It was decided that it was likely to happen, but the rig would survive. Someone had mentioned that ships carry rats. No one thought the rats would arrive on an island of dead bodies, but they did think they would arrive on a ship. That’s why there was a large supply of rat poison in one of the supply rooms. It was in liquid form and could be delivered through a sprinkler system. The idea was to rinse every inch of the outside structure. He would start delivering it tomorrow, but before he did, he was going to fry his fair share of them with electricity.
In his many discussions with members of the survivors club, the topic of routine was one of the most popular. It was the closest they came to being philosophical because it was based totally on hypothetical situations. In other words, it was all guesswork. If they didn’t know what type of apocalypse they were facing, they wouldn’t have a clue about what would influence their routines.
Some of the disasters on their list were so bad that they would be forced to get their heads down and keep them down…forever. Others were short term events that would pass in time. He remembered when he was asked to give an example, he suggested conventional war. His theory was that they would simply remain undetected, and his routine would be influenced by how well he hid in plain sight. When the war was over, he would just continue to hide while the world sorted out the mess they had made.
He couldn’t go up to the rig anymore and hang out in his old apartment, but that had always been too risky anyway. If he had known the rats were that aggressive, he would never have gone up there in the first place.
The woman in the crew’s quarters had yet to show her face on the observation deck by the front door, and he didn’t blame her. The rats had been dealt with for the time being, but she didn’t know that. Even so, he did a review of the security videos to see if there had been any activity that hadn’t been detected by the motion sensors.
The shelter had layers of security and layers of backup systems. The engineers had called them redundant support systems. He wished they had been as diligent when they installed the security cameras in the crew quarters, but it was his understanding that the people who had built his shelter didn’t want anyone spying on them when they went to the quarters for the night. He wasn’t really surprised when they quit working, and he wasn’t able to switch to a backup camera.
The other support systems gave him more than enough to keep him busy. Despite the fact that the shelter had automation that made it futuristic, there were still things that could only bring peace of mind if there were visual inspections. So, the rules had been spelled out at every meeting, and one of them was to inspect your shelter.
Maybank started his morning tour as soon as he finished breakfast, and he could have done it wearing a blindfold. It only took two hours, but every compartment was visually inspected for water leaks and ventilation issues. If he was going to live underwater, he was forced to be sure the water stayed outside, and the air remained breathable.
When he arrived back at the central living quarters, he checked on the woman in the crew quarters. He knew he hadn’t given her much chance to show herself, but there was no indication that she planned to do anything except keep her head down. It was almost as if she had been to the meetings, too.
It was during one of his inspection tours that Maybank thought of a way he could at least tell if she was alive. For all he knew, she could have locked herself in and then died from a rat bite.
He was checking data that monitored his activities, and he ironically laughed at the thought that he already knew what he had done, and all he was doing now was verifying that his systems were operating at peak efficiency. He was checking power usage and could tell from the data that he had used more electricity when he fried bacon for breakfast. He pictured the woman doing the same thing in the kitchen of the crew quarters.
Maybank opened his laptop and then the spreadsheet that showed power usage throughout the oil rig. He saw that the power usage fluctuated in the crew quarters just the way it would if there was someone living there. If she had died, the power usage would be constant. He ran a finger down the column that showed usage per hour, and he saw that there was a spike at about the time he had finished doing his morning inspection. It was only a small spike that meant some lights had been turned on, but it meant she was alive.
A motion sensor beeped, and he looked up just in time to see the woman in the doorway of the crew quarters. She had a very bloody towel around one arm, and she was throwing a rat with the other. He was amazed that a rat could tear someone up that bad, and his heart sank. She was alive for now, but he couldn’t take the chance of making contact with her now that she was likely to be infected.
******
Half awake and half asleep, Janice didn’t know what to do about going outside. She knew she would have to open the door sooner or later, but she was afraid she would find the rats waiting for her. She was also keenly aware of the fact that her husband’s bones were out there somewhere, and she wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing them when she was finally forced to go outside. The thought that they were bones was somehow more comforting than finding a corpse with flesh on it. Whatever was left, she didn’t want it to resemble him.
With her eyes still closed, she thought about the last moment she had seen David. It was when a big rat had bitten his hand. She tried to remember the details of his face better, but it had happened so fast. She tried to recall if he had yelled for her to run. She thought he did, but what she knew for sure was that he had screamed in pain and then become too mad to run. He had attacked instead. He didn’t come pounding on the door, yelling for her to let him in. She knew she had waited for those pleas, but they never came.
When she woke up in the strangely comfortable bed, she didn’t know where she was and had called David’s name before h
er mind gave her back the painful memories. She immediately scrambled backward away from the open bedroom door, dragging the blankets and pillows with her into a heap. She backed completely off of the bed into the corner, breathing heavily and trying to hear through the blood pounding in her ears.
Her long, dark hair was matted across her face and stuck to the dirty streaks on her cheeks. Her jeans and long sleeved pullover shirt were stiff against her body and felt uncomfortable from being out in the saltwater spray, but they still managed to show off her slender body. Over a year of survival hadn’t made her tough and muscular because David had protected her too much. Now she felt even less equipped to face what the world had become.
Janice hid in the corner behind the covers and listened to the silence. There was no pattering of rodent feet on the roof and no scratching inside the walls. She also didn’t hear any of the dreaded groans that would mean instant death, and her sense of smell wasn’t finding the rot that would have made her stay in the corner forever.
She crawled out from under the safety of the blankets being careful not to make any noise, but she noticed the lamp on the nightstand was already on its side. She didn’t think she had heard it fall when she backed into the corner. There was also something brown on the shade that reminded her of the hundreds of old, dried bloodstains she had seen in the last year. What was missing was the copper smell. David had always told her how long ago someone had died. His estimates were based on the color of blood fading from black to brown and whether or not he could still smell the copper odor that was nauseating when the blood was still red or black.
Her eyes instinctively went to the floor searching for footprints. David had also told her there would still be a body anywhere that the dead didn’t get up and walk out of where it died. There wasn’t a body in the bedroom, so it must have walked out of the room.
Janice didn’t know that she was seeing what had been left behind by the security officers when one had been bitten. They had only been in the quarters long enough for the man to die and then attack his friend who had dragged him inside. It was long enough ago for the blood and smell to fade away.