The Infected Dead (Book 6): Buried For Now

by Howard, Bob

  He smiled and didn’t draw a weapon, but Iris thought he didn’t have to when he had a soldier behind him with an M4 aimed at her, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Let me start over again. I’m Doctor Bus. I saw how you handled your sailboat when you brought her in. That was a pretty experienced move you did to tie her off. Normally I would have stayed hidden, and you would never have known I was here, but I’m in somewhat of a hurry. I need to take that plane on a trip.”

  The soldier hadn’t so much as blinked, and her arm was getting tired anyway. She lowered the machete but tried to keep one eye on each of them. The short man was speaking so calmly that she didn’t feel like he was just going to execute her.

  “Are you a friend of Chief Barnes?” she asked.

  The man looked positively happy about the question and his smile became even more broad.

  “I’m beginning to think everyone knows Chief Barnes,” said Bus. “Yes, as a matter of fact he’s a good friend. That’s where I’m going with the seaplane. I’m taking it to him in New Orleans.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  New Orleans

  Year Six of the Decline

  Stokes felt right at home in New Orleans. It was as neglected as any city he had seen but worse than most. What had taken hundreds of years to be constructed by man had taken half a decade to be torn down and reclaimed by nature. Repairs and upgrades to the flood protection systems after hurricane Katrina had helped at first, but as the first year went by, there were more and more failures.

  Without maintenance crews monitoring weak spots and breaches, the levees conceded to the forces of storms and allowed the Mississippi River to enter the streets. Silt collected in the twists and turns of crucial areas and the river became impassable in many places.

  Stokes found the right boat for traveling the flooded streets and began collecting the supplies others wouldn’t have tried to reach. It had a flat bottom, and he used a pole to push himself along the surface. Most streets were under ten or more feet of water, so the ripe meat walking on the bottom couldn’t reach high enough to grab his boat as he passed over them, but they tried. There were thousands of them reaching as high as they could, and he laughed at them.

  One thing about Stokes had never changed. Before the end of civilization he figured anyone who was dead must have been stupid. So what he was seeing under his boat were a lot of stupid people, and he didn’t feel even an ounce of sympathy for the souls that had died horrible deaths. It was what made him feel even smarter.

  He fancied himself to be a modern day version of the early explorers in this territory, and he proclaimed it all as belonging to him. If he found anyone living in this tropical hell, they were living on his property. What they owned was really his, and they would be his servants.

  The downtown streets were so flooded that he could coast up to the second floor balconies of the storefronts, and he was searching for the things he would need to take an oil rig. Most of it was common survival gear, but there were still a few pleasures in life he didn’t want to forget. A supply of cigarettes and liquor were just as essential to him as weapons.

  A few of the windows were shattered, so he assumed other boaters had been through those stores. He was searching for the ones that had a high death rate and high numbers of ripe meat to protect the stores. They were the ones with faces pressed against the glass.

  He came to an intersection and could see a disturbance on the surface where hundreds of hands were reaching from the water. Most were visible from the wrist up. They were swaying with the current in a grotesque dance that almost seemed choreographed. The sun was low in the east and shining on the hands from behind. Stokes didn’t have an artistic bone in his body, but even he recognized the possibility that he was seeing something that may not have been seen by anyone who lived to tell about it. His appreciation for it was short lived because he knew he couldn’t go over those hands.

  The current was pulling him in that direction, so he steered up against a balcony and tied a line to the black iron railing. There were faces against the row of windows in front of him. Most people would have left, but the sight brought a smile to his face. He stepped easily over the railing for a closer look.

  Stokes estimated five or six faces at each of the four windows, so there must have been around two dozen ripe meat inside.

  “There must be something really good in there with ya’ll,” he said and tapped on a window with his knuckles. That caused a frenzy of pushing and shoving inside.

  He stepped back over the railing and loosened his mooring line, allowing himself to drift away by about six or eight feet. Stokes hefted his long pole and punched one end at a pane of glass. He considered himself a bit of an expert at breaking glass windows, if there was such a thing, and he was a little irritated that the pane didn’t crack with the first punch.

  Stokes pulled his mooring line in a couple of feet to get a little bit closer and tied it off again. This time he could put more of his shoulders in the punch, and the glass made a popping sound as it fell away. The rest of the window gave in to the pressure from inside, and the ripe meat spilled over the sill onto the balcony. He adjusted his angle and popped the second window the same way. He let the other two stay because the ripe meat had packed the balcony so tight that no more would fall out until he got them into the water.

  The railing burst from the iron posts that held it in place. It went down on one end as ripe meat fell off of the balcony into the water. The other end of the railing flew up in the air and landed neatly on his flat bottom boat, right over his mooring line. Ironically, the mooring line was tied to one of the posts that stayed anchored to the balcony. The current caught some of the infected at just the right moment, and they were dragged into the part of the railing that had gone into the water first. They either held on or got tangled in the melee of bodies, and the railing wound up making a nice little bridge from the balcony to the boat.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  The infected were barely capable of walking a straight line, so there was no chance of them using the railing to walk aboard the boat, but they certainly could fall onto it, and they could get their legs stuck between the railings. Stokes could see that he was going to have a devil of a time untangling them enough to get the railing off the boat. Normally, he would just back up, and the makeshift bridge would fall, but he couldn’t reach his mooring line under the tangle of bodies.

  What he considered stupid from other people was brilliant when he did it, so nothing he ever did was a mistake. Stokes got comfortable on a deck chair and took aim at the head of the first ripe meat on the railing. The sound of the rifle echoed loudly between the buildings. The intersection of waving infected became a solid mass of hands as others were drawn to the blast.

  Stokes probably would have pushed someone overboard for shooting a gun in the narrow street, but since everything he did was brilliant, he figured it was a good idea to draw the infected into the area before he left.

  The first ripe meat he had shot didn’t fall from the bridge the way he hoped. Instead, it fell face down. A second infected was taking the opportunity to crawl across to the boat over the back of the first one.

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  Stokes pulled the trigger again, and this one fell sideways into the water and disappeared. By the time he had repeated the process, Stokes was thinking it was what he had planned all along.

  Large numbers of the infected had fallen out of the windows and then fallen directly into the water. Stokes watched one that had some kind of backpack on that made him float, and when he passed by on the surface of the water the current grabbed him and sent him straight toward the waving hands.

  Stokes watched with fascination and considerable enjoyment as the ripe meat went straight through the waving hands like a bowling ball through the pins. He laughed out loud and wished he had something he could throw into the water that would float, but that gave him another idea. If he picked up enough speed, he cou
ld drive right through there.

  The last of the ripe meat to fall through the windows had also fallen off the balcony. Stokes used a boathook to clear the bodies out of his way and walked across using the railing. He used the boathook again to dispose of a few more infected that were still trying to come out through the windows, and then he used it to pry open the door.

  This was the store he had been trying to find. He knew it would be here somewhere, but the streets were hard to remember with all of them so flooded. The first floor was completely flooded, and there were two stairwells behind fire doors that would keep him from being disturbed while he picked out his supplies. The first floor had been the showroom of the sporting goods store, and the upper floors were the offices and inventory storerooms.

  It took over an hour, but he eventually had everything he needed to survive a trip out as far as the oil rigs. Now all he had to do was navigate out of the city and find a boat that could get him there, and if he was lucky he would find a few people on the way who would want to have someone like him for a boss.

  What happened in the intersection wasn’t because he had underestimated the ripe meat. There were just more of them than there should have been. At least that was how he saw it.

  When he pushed off from the balcony, he was a little heavier than before, so he drafted deeper. He gave the balcony a hard shove with his pole as soon as his mooring line was off, and he picked up speed. He was surprised that it wasn’t faster. He quickly checked to see if there were any ripe meat clutching the boat and saw none, so he steered closer to the side of the street to be able to reach the buildings with his pole as he went by. He reached out as far as he could and gave himself another push. There was a surge of speed when he drifted back to the center, and he steered toward the side for one last push before reaching the intersection.

  The speed increased again enough to make his body lean to the aft, but the jolt of hitting a traffic light at such a speed almost threw him over the bow. It also caused his boat to go into a tailspin, and he was sideways when he reached the intersection, but that wasn’t the worst thing about to happen.

  From the balcony where he had been docked he hadn’t been able to see the debris that was in the water between all of the waving hands, and the other side of the intersection was completely blocked. His only choice was to attempt a right turn at the intersection.

  If there was such a thing as dumb luck, Stokes got more than his fair share. The hundreds of hands caught the boat in the middle of a spin when it was completely sideways coming into the intersection. It was almost like hitting a cushion because the momentum slowed so smoothly. Then the hands came forward again as they tried to grab the side of the boat. The hands slipped from the hull, and they pushed forward at the same time, causing the boat to go down the street to the right. It quickly gained forward speed and left the intersection behind.

  “Worked just like I thought it would.”

  Stokes gave a wave of appreciation to the hands that seemed to be waving at him and turned toward the bow. In the distance there was something new, and he wasn’t totally sure what it was.

  When he put the binoculars to his eyes he saw it wasn’t something new, just new to him. He was already moving too fast to try another turn at the intersection he was crossing, and using all his strength with the pole he didn’t think he could get turned at the end of the block. His only choice was to be ready for a turn at the street that ran across the front of one of the biggest cemeteries in New Orleans.

  The wall of the cemetery had been restored, and was much taller than it used to be. In an attempt to gain control of the graffiti and vandalism problem and to restore the beautiful burial sites, the city had closed this cemetery to tourists and restored the wall first. The new gates leaked at first, but apparently survivors had retreated to the cemetery and sandbagged the gates from the inside. When the levees failed, the cemetery didn’t flood along with the streets, and the top of the wall was above the water by a few feet.

  Stokes wasn’t the best sailor in the world, but he had enough experience to realize that things were not as bad as they appeared to be. The current that carried him forward would take him to the cemetery, but it wasn’t strong enough to hurt his boat unless he hit it head on. He turned his rudder hard to starboard, and as soon as he was sideways, he brought the rudder amidships and created as much drag as he could.

  He sent a wall of water ahead of him that crested the wall of the cemetery, but there was only a slight jolt as he bumped sideways into the front gates. He stared with satisfaction at the grass and weeds that filled every inch of dry ground between the graves and the vaults.

  “If there’s any ripe meat in there, I’ll be able to see where they are just by following the tall grass they walk through.”

  He scanned the old cemetery for almost an hour using his binoculars. He only found four trails between the rows of burial sites, and they had to be recent because the tall grass was bent over and pushed to the ground.

  At first he considered firing a couple of rounds into the cemetery to draw the ripe meat out into the open. He was just shouldering his rifle when he had another thought that maybe he would be able to use them for something down the road. He didn’t know why, but it felt almost like he was at home, and there were ripe meat wandering around at the cemetery when he had buried those kids. It had a familiar, good feel about it.

  Stokes tied off the boat against the cemetery gates and tossed a rope over the wall. Satisfied that he could climb back up to his boat he went over the wall and slid down into the cemetery. He had the handy boathook with him, and he went down the rows testing the locks and doors on the burial vaults above ground.

  When he found an old lock he used his machete and the boathook to break the lock and pry open the door. A musty smell escaped, and he backed up away from the darkness inside. Then he used his machete to clear away tall grass and vines to create an open area around that vault.

  He climbed on top of a tall memorial to get his bearings so he would remember where this vault was. His run of good luck continued as he saw the grass moving only a few rows past his open vault, and he hurried to the ground so he could greet the new arrival.

  Stokes stood boldly in the open near the front of the vault and watched the ripe meat stagger into view. It groaned when it saw him but didn’t stop moving forward with its arms outstretched toward him.

  “Not so fast, Sparky.”

  Stokes held the boathook out and let the infected walk straight into it. Instead of pushing him away, Stokes redirected his movement toward the open vault. He easily got him to the doorstep and gave a mild shove that sent the creature falling backward.

  “Sorry about the smell,” said Stokes as he closed the door. He slid the broken lock back into place.

  “I’m going to use the honor system with you and not lock the door, so you gotta promise me you won’t try to escape.”

  He laughed at his own joke.

  “I’m really funny. I’ll bet I could’ve made a good living hosting one of those late night shows.”

  When he thought about it for a moment more he asked in a loud voice, “Do you think I’m funny?”

  He was answered by a loud groan from inside the vault, and there was a chorus of groans from a few places around the cemetery.

  “Uh, oh. Better find some more vaults.”

  Over the next hour he repeated his process and had the other three infected in vaults spread out in the cemetery. He had cleared four areas of grass so they were easy to spot when he climbed up to the top of a memorial, and four good measure he cleared one area to use as a campsite. He could use a place that he could come back to where he would feel safe. He surrounded it with steel traps that he had gotten from the sporting goods store. He had planned to use them on an oil rig, but they came in handy here.

  Now all he had to do was find a boat that was capable of reaching the oil rigs out in the Gulf. His flat bottomed boat wouldn’t work for that, but he would be able
to get a lot of things done with it as a backup.

  Stokes judged that there was enough time left in the day for him to start searching for a boat, and his best chance of finding one was with the binoculars. He climbed up onto the wall, and using his pole for balance, he walked along the top of the wall that surrounded the cemetery. He stopped walking when he thought he could see something worth checking in the distance, and he finally saw what he was sure he would find.

  To the south of the cemetery he could see the Mississippi River, and there had to be a marina somewhere between him and the Gulf. Tomorrow he would go toward the river and then follow it until he found a boat that would meet his needs. For tonight, he would pitch a tent and even heat up some food over a camp stove. He went back to the clearing he made and settled in.

  ******

  I had to admit that traveling on the Cormorant had been a welcome change from traveling by helicopter to Ohio. I imagine the weather had something to do with it. It was snowing in Ohio, and if that wasn’t cold enough, we flew up to International Falls, Minnesota. This trip was nothing but sunshine, and the water was so calm that the Cormorant seemed to be gliding across it.

  We started having engine problems again as we cruised up the western side of Florida, and this time we didn’t like the idea of finding a port that had repair facilities. After we stopped the first time we saw too many coastal towns and marinas that were still heavily populated with the infected. We decided that it was a one in a million chance that we would find another repair facility, make the repairs, and not run into serious trouble.

  We still had to pass some major cities, so we could change our minds if there was no other choice, but we saw too many situations happening in broad daylight for us to justify being in port at night. Passing the Everglades we saw alligators fighting over bodies of people. Whether the people had escaped to the Everglades to get away from the infected or the people had washed ashore after dying we would never know for sure. It was likely to be some of both.