by Howard, Bob
Cassandra had passed them and found the door into the building. She took the stairs to the right three at a time and began yelling that Bus was there almost as soon as she reached the top.
We all had to know that Bus was alive and unhurt, so no one bothered to stay downstairs. We quickly filled the room where Cassandra was helping Bus to a sitting position by the window. He had a big red mat of dried blood on the right side of his head, and Jean examined it first. Bus was trying to say something, but she stopped him.
“Don’t talk until I’ve had a chance to see how bad you’re hurt.”
She was using a small flashlight to see if his pupils were responding.
“You don’t understand,” he said. His throat was dry, and his voice was barely loud enough to hear.
Jean didn’t want to hear it and tried to scold him, but Bus became determined to be heard. He put all of his will into three words.
“He has Iris.”
We moved aside for the Chief. He had just reached the top of the stairs in time to hear Bus give us the bad news, and all of our eyes turned to him.
I could see the pain in Kathy and Jean’s faces, but the cold anger on the Chief’s face was something I would never forget.
Bus said in a weak voice, “He said to tell you something. He said find her if you can.”
Even though it was obvious to all of us, the Chief added, “So he will have time to get away.”
“Did he tell you anything that would help us find her?” asked Kathy.
Jean gave Bus a sip of water, and we could understand him better when he answered.
“He only said we would figure it out.”
“What does that mean?” asked Tom.
He turned toward the Chief, and he could tell by the way the color drained from his face that the Chief knew where to find Iris.
“Is Bus okay to defend himself here?”
Jean immediately protested and said she should stay with him, but the Chief was already moving. He stopped on the stairs and told Jean that Iris made need her more than Bus.
We were all talking at once, but no one was listening to each other. Most of us were asking the Chief where we were going, and he was arguing with Jean about Bus. I could tell that the Chief didn’t want to put his wildest fear into words, so I broke the stalemate for him.
“He buried her, didn’t he?”
Everyone went silent at the same time.
“Where’s the nearest cemetery? Who knows New Orleans well enough to lead the way?” I asked.
“Follow me,” said the Chief.
Jean didn’t have to ask Bus if he would be okay by himself. She knew what he would say. Not only did they need her for her medical skills, they needed every pair of eyes they had if it was going to be anything like finding the kids in the cemetery on James Island. Considering the differences between that cemetery and what they would find in New Orleans, it was going to be a nightmare.
There was plenty of daylight left, but they had no idea how long Iris had been buried. They also didn’t know if Stokes had given her a way to breathe, or if she was injured before she was buried. It he hadn’t at least given her an air tube, she was already dead.
Bus took a couple of guns from us along with extra ammunition and reassured us that he could take care of himself. We added water and some ration packs, and he waved impatiently for us to get going. I heard him whisper something to Jean, and she said something back.
When Jean caught up with me, I didn’t ask, but she read my expression and knew that I was curious.
“He told me that Iris had traveled to Mud Island to find the Chief. She wanted to tell him she was tired of acting like she wasn’t in love with him.”
Both of us knew the Chief felt the same way about Iris, but it wasn’t something he would have talked about. He was quick to tease me about such things, but the Chief was private about his own feelings. It was a double standard, but the Chief wasn’t perfect, and if that was his biggest fault I was willing to let him have a free pass.
We caught up with the rest of the group before they reached the end of the street, and we were relieved to see how close we were to a cemetery. It was possible that he had chosen a different one, but we didn’t have the luxury to start guessing which one to search when time was so critical. Besides, it was a good chance that someone living had been here recently, because there was a crowd of infected dead around the front gate, and the gate was standing open.
Several of the infected saw us at the same time that we saw them, and they filed out into the street. Everyone rushed toward them with their machetes held out in front, and it was only a matter of seconds before we were all inside the cemetery. We closed the gates behind us, but judging by the way the tall grass had been trampled inside, there would be plenty more of the infected wandering around where we couldn’t see them.
Judging by the way we all faced the jungle that had overgrown thousands of gravesites, we were all thinking the same thing. We didn’t know where to start.
In front of us were paths that stretched away in all directions. Some were completely covered in vines and green plants of every kind, but it was hard to tell which were actually paths, and which were only places where the infected had stumbled through, chasing something that had run from them.
The grass was over six feet high where it hadn’t been trampled, and it was hard to walk more than a few feet without tripping on gravestones or vaults. The cemetery had been poorly maintained before the infection, and the neglect had turned it back over to nature quickly.
“This is worse than the swamps around Mud Island,” I said. “Stokes let as many infected inside as he could so we wouldn’t be able to search for Iris.”
Cassandra was the one who seemed to attack the problem with the most focus. She went down on one knee and stared hard at the different paths through the grass. We spread out, instinctively thinking we needed to split up so we could cover more ground.
“Everyone freeze,” she yelled.
Even the Chief stopped in his tracks. He was a born leader with good tracking skills, but right now he wasn’t the most objective person in our group.
Cassandra swept her hand from left to right.
“Count the number of trails and judge how wide they are. Have they been used more than once over a period of time? Were they trails cut by someone who took steps or dragged their feet? Figure out which ones were used by Stokes by finding me a normal footprint.”
The ground was soft, and even the gravel paths gave up their histories where gravel was pushed deeper into the ground because someone wearing boots had stepped on them with his weight instead of shuffling his feet.
We could see she was right as soon as we knew what to look for. There were twelve clear paths that led away from the gate. Six were gravel and had obviously been intended to be walked by visitors to the cemetery. Six were random, and the muddy spots gave a picture of the infected traveling together in groups.
Cassandra pointed at one path.
“He would have used the clearest path first because he wanted to lose himself in the middle of the cemetery as fast as possible. He may also have been carrying her, so his footprints would be deeper.”
She turned to the Chief.
“I heard you say she was tall. Would you guess one hundred and twenty-five pounds?”
The Chief nodded, and Cassandra said, “Anyone see a footprint that could have been made by an aggressive male weighing over three hundred pounds?”
It was like telling us to find the path with the signs and arrows saying, “He went this way.”
Our eyes scanned the ground, and it was only seconds before Sim called out, “I’ve got a winner.”
“Everyone stand perfectly still,” said Cassandra. “Watch for infected while I check it. We don’t want to be thrown off because someone stepped on his footprints.”
She circled Sim and focused on the spot where he pointed at a footprint. She noted which way the toe of the boot was facing and which part of t
he print was deeper. Then she lifted her head to see further down the path.
“Jean and Colleen, you have the smallest feet, so you follow me and give me cover. The guys should follow the other paths and eliminate the infected that are still inside the cemetery, and one last thing. He planned this. That means he was here before and picked a place to bury her. It might be something symbolic or just something that caught his eye, but don’t rule out unique gravestones or vaults.”
I had to admit, Cassandra had galvanized the group. We were a mob when we entered the cemetery. Now I felt like we were part of a rescue squad.
We split up into the groups as she dictated and disappeared into the rows of gravestones, vaults, and jungle. It wasn’t long before I heard my friends making contact. The familiar sounds of machetes hitting their targets and warnings being called out seemed to go on for a long time, but they became more distant from each other as we continued away from our starting point.
I ran into Tom and the Chief as our paths converged into one, and we followed it, realizing that it had to be a group of infected that was being drawn to the sounds made by Cassandra, Jean, and Colleen. We came up behind them just as the ladies had turned to face them.
“This is going to take forever,” said Tom.
He tried to keep the anger out of his voice but it sounded almost as if he was accusing Cassandra of having a bad plan. She was unfazed.
He continued, “I’ve already opened four vaults that had broken locks on them, and he had planted infected dead inside them. How will we know if she’s in a vault or a grave?”
“Here’s where he doubled back and went that way.”
She pointed toward the coast, and we could see a path that took a shortcut to the wall of the cemetery. The Chief didn’t hesitate. He charged down the path and jumped high enough to grip the top and pull himself up onto the wall. He got his balance and faced back our way.
He cupped his hands to his face and yelled, “There was a boat tied up over here, and there’s a clearing behind you.”
He pointed past us, and we followed his hand. There was another path that crossed ours, and the white gravel of a visitor path had muddy footprints on top of the places that had been dragged by the infected.
“It’s worth a shot,” said Cassandra.
We could see that someone had camped in the clearing, and our first impression was that Stokes wouldn’t have been that obvious, but Kathy pointed out Stokes had already shown us he liked to be obvious when he let the Chief spot him in the window. He had also existed under our noses for years by never leaving Fort Johnson.
Our whole group had reached the clearing, and everyone was reading the names on gravestones and vaults. Knowing that Stokes would be drawn to irony, we were sure we would see something familiar, but nothing was ringing a bell. We shouted out the names as we read them to see if anyone had a reaction.
When Jean yelled that she had one named “Stokes” we converged on the spot and started digging, but the ground hadn’t been recently disturbed on the grave.
“I was sure that would be it,” said Jean.
Our adrenaline had shot through the roof at first, but now we were drained as it wore off. The Chief leaned on the Stokes gravestone from behind and tilted his head to one side.
I turned in the direction he was facing. About twenty yards away was a worn marble statue of a tall, slender, angel. She had her left arm extended with the palm facing upward and the fingers pointed straight at the Chief… or straight at the headstone he was leaning on. The right arm was draped gracefully along her right side with her hand pointing downward. She wasn’t exactly pointing, but that’s how Stokes would have seen it.
The Chief took the shortest path to get there, and it didn’t escape my attention that he left deep footprints right down the middle of the grave in front of him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Bridge
Year Three of the Decline
Janice began keeping track of time on the morning after she had learned she wasn’t alone on the oil rig. Each day she would go to the security cameras before doing anything else. She studied each frame, each detail, and even made precise notes of the position of everything in the picture. If anything moved, she wanted to know it had.
She also wanted to make her supplies last as long as she could, and one year later she was finally able to see the back wall of the supply room. She estimated that she would have to go out in search of food in another month.
There had been endless nights of doubt. Times when she played out every possibility in her own mind. She wondered if she was being watched the way she was watching the security monitor. She wondered why she wasn’t seeing the old man again. Most of all, she was wondering why the rats hadn’t come back.
Janice imagined herself going over to the ship and finding supplies in the top row of containers, but she also imagined opening a container door only to find the contents infested by an entire year of rat breeding cycles. But if that was possible, she couldn’t imagine why they weren’t also climbing onto the oil rig.
She remembered the way electricity had arced across the metal framework, and rats had fallen to the water with their fur sending up smoke and steam as the bodies disappeared below the surface. She thought about had they been electrocuted and not the old man. She always came back to the question of why the rats were on the ship but not on the oil rig, and where the old man had gone.
That part had been easy to explain away. She decided that he had searched the oil rig for food, and finding none he had gone onto the ship where the rats had gotten him. Imagining the rats killing him didn’t help, because it still didn’t explain why the rats hadn’t come back, and if he had searched the entire oil rig, he would have come knocking on the door of the crew quarters. Too many questions…no answers. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was running out of supplies.
She came to the conclusion that she at least needed to venture outside. After a year of wind and storms, she was sure that there would be nothing left to show David had died on the catwalk below. She would find it difficult to walk past the spot, but it would be worse if he was still there. She decided that she would accomplish two things when she went out the first time.
Before she could cross over to the ship, she had to find the best location. It had to be a place that allowed her to go both ways, and she had to be able to carry back supplies. So, it wouldn’t help to climb out above the ship and drop down to the tops of the containers.
The second thing she had to do was locate the cameras that had been her eyes to the outside world. She wanted to find at least one and try to reorient it so that it was aimed toward the place where she would cross to the ship. If she could watch the spot for a couple of days, she would know if it was safe. If she could find two cameras, she would feel even better.
Once the decision was made, she knew there was no reason to put it off. There were no other options. After checking the security cameras, she got dressed to go outside.
The blue jumpsuit was her best choice. The denim was tough enough for her to be comfortable and safer from the bites of the infected or rats. She hadn’t seen a single infected on the rig, but she knew there was always a chance that someone from the ship had been infected and found their way onto the oil rig. They were just stuck in an area where she didn’t have a camera view.
There were thick gloves in a dresser drawer, and she used duct tape from a repair locker to cover the gap between the gloves and the sleeves. If there were rats, she was going to make it hard for them to bite her.
Janice tucked a long knife from the kitchen into her belt and held the rifle in front of her as she slowly opened the door and breathed in the outside air for the first time in a year. She was almost stunned by how clear and fresh it smelled. She had forgotten it could be like that, and it made her remember standing on the beach on her honeymoon. A wave of sadness rushed over her, and if she had seen the old man or anyone else out on the deck, she probably would
have shot them.
After a few tentative steps, she remembered that she couldn’t leave the door open. She didn’t have a key, so she couldn’t lock it, but she could picture herself hunting down rats if she left it open while she was gone.
Her legs seemed to have a will of their own, and she walked with no more hesitation over to the railing where she could look down at the spot where David had died. She had been right. The weather had scrubbed away any evidence of his death, and it was easier for her to walk by the spot than she had expected. It was like David had never been there. Like he had never happened. Now she had to find the best place to cross over to the ship and change the cameras.
The ship was exactly where she had last seen it. She guessed as much given the lack of change in the camera views. The containers on the top row had slid and rolled like the cars of a railroad train when it jumped the tracks. Some had turned to point directly at the oil rig before beginning to slide, and she was shocked to see several rested with one end on the oil rig catwalks and the other ends on top of the stacks of containers.
“It’s practically a damned bridge,” she said out loud.
It was too good to be true in some ways because it meant the old man had been able to search for supplies through the upper containers. She could see that the twisting and turning when the ship had collided with the oil rig made some of the doors literally pop open, and anything inside would have been exposed to the elements for a year. She hoped those were the containers full of TV sets.
She considered the possibility that other survivors might have also pillaged the containers by now, but even though she had seen no sign of anyone else on the security cameras, she doubted anyone else had reached the rig. From where she was standing, she could see no sign of the mysterious handholds that had been on the towers.
Satisfied with the first results of her sightseeing trip, Janice moved on to the second task. Finding cameras only meant finding the spots she had studied for a year. She climbed from one catwalk to the next, always keeping her eyes at a down angle. She reasoned that the best approach was to go up and around until she saw a spot she recognized below her.