by Howard, Bob
Kathy caught me before I could avoid her.
“Well?”
I tried to play dumb.
“Well, what?”
“What are they saying to each other? I can tell you were close enough to hear.”
I pointed at some bushes and said, “Infected.”
When she turned to see the threat I hurried away.
The Chief carried Iris back over to the others and sat her on the tarp. She insisted that she was okay to walk, but he said Jean would have to discharge her from treatment first.
It was an incredible feeling seeing Iris smile with her eyes on the Chief, but she had strong feelings for all of us. She could tell we were family.
“We’re going to have to move fast,” said the Chief, “that’s why we’re splitting up. Tom, Ed, and Cassandra, you’re with me. Kathy, I need you back here to make sure everybody gets back to the Cormorant after you pick up Bus.”
Kathy only halfheartedly objected to being left behind. As much as she wanted to be there when the Chief and Tom caught Stokes, she knew she was the best one to leave in charge of the safety of the rest of the group. What I couldn’t understand was why I was picked to go along. Cassandra had combat training, so she was a logical choice, and she had maritime experience on the Mercy Mission ship.
Before I could ask the obvious question, the Chief told me my role.
“We don’t know which oil rig we’re going to visit, and we can’t get radio contact to find the one from your uncle’s survivors club, but if by some chance we find it, it won’t hurt to have Titus Rush’s nephew with us.”
The reason was just as obvious as the question. It hadn’t really sunk in that I might meet someone who was in on the shelter construction from the beginning, and I had to admit it was a bit like being told I was about to meet a rock star.
“Time to go, everyone.”
It didn’t take a second invitation from the Chief. We were ready to get out of the sweltering jungle, and there weren’t many hours left in the day. We didn’t want to try to find Stokes on the Gulf of Mexico at night.
We went back to the building where Bus was holed up, and we ran into several small hordes on the way. The noise in the area hadn’t been as loud as it could have been, but the infected seemed to have good hearing, and they were being drawn to the area. After making several detours, we finally got back to the stairs.
“We’ve lost too much time,” said the Chief.
“You go on from here,” said Kathy. “You’ll have the Beaver in the air by the time we get there because Jean’s going to want to examine Bus first.”
The Chief surprised everyone by pulling Iris into his arms and giving her a long kiss. She didn’t resist, and the eye contact they shared in the brief moment before the kiss said all that needed to be said.
When they pulled themselves apart it was only because time was important, but it was going to be a big moment for all of us to see them reunited when we got back, and there wasn’t the slightest bit of doubt in our minds that we would be back.
Those of us going on the plane ran ahead, leaving the others to make sure Iris and Bus were able to travel on foot. It wasn’t far, but they had been through a lot.
We hadn’t bothered to leave anyone on the Cormorant when we scrambled from her deck earlier in the day, but we weren’t worried about it being stolen. It was still docked by the Beaver, and the Chief shouted instructions to us. It was in the right place for us to use its deck to steer the Beaver out of the slip faster.
Cassandra comically hopped into the cockpit to steer while the Chief and I guided the plane out of the slip by pushing on the struts on each side. She quickly hopped back out and helped push it away from the dock. She flashed a frown at me that said to keep it to myself.
Tom caught the wing as it got close to the Cormorant and held it far enough away to keep it from hitting the ship, and we all made the jump onto the floats. I was practically tossed into the passenger door when the Chief landed on the float on the port side. The doors shut all around and the Chief started the engine without bothering with a preflight check.
The roar of the Beaver was deafening, and we all searched for the headsets. Cassandra put them over the Chief’s ears for him because he was too busy getting the plane up to speed for the take off, and he was building speed even in the turns to the mouth of the harbor. The plane lifted into the air, and we were on our way, hoping to find Stokes before he lost himself among the thousands of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
******
Year Three of the Decline
Janice felt like she had fallen down the rabbit hole years ago, and she thought she had lost the capacity to be surprised by anything, but the labels on the walls of the chamber below the strange hatch weren’t handwritten or pasted on the wall. They were engraved signs, professionally made instructions for someone to follow.
She had already reacted out of instinct when she read the first one that said it was the button that would lock the hatch. It seemed like the right thing to do. So she did it. She didn’t know that a nuclear blast could tear off the entire chamber, but the lock would probably stay in place. The next sign said to enter the chute feet first, keep your feet together, and your arms crossed at the chest.
“What chute?”
There was another hatch next to the sign, and when Janice turned in a circle, she saw there was nothing else besides the ladder, the recessed lighting, the instructions, and the hatch. She shrugged her shoulders and opened the hatch. Soft lights illuminated the descent chute, but Janice was not inclined to stick her body in a smooth tunnel that went down at a steep angle just to find out where it went. She closed the door and climbed the ladder to the hatch.
The locking wheel had a small sign on it that read, NO EXIT. Janice climbed back down and pressed the button that she had used to lock the door. Nothing happened.
This reminded her of one of her dates with David. She hated it, but he really had a good time. They were locked in a room with three other couples that they didn’t know, and they were told they could only leave when they solved the clues that would unlock the door. One of the other women made it worse when she said we had to hurry because she forgot to go to the bathroom.
David was mad because one of the other couples worked on clues together and solved the lock. Despite her protests, he wanted to do it again in a different room.
Now Janice had to solve the clues alone, but down meant water to her. She really didn’t want to survive all this time only to launch herself into the Gulf, and she didn’t think she could get back on the rig once she got off.
She tried the hatch several times, pressed the button several times, and read the chute instructions several times, and it all came back to one thing. The chute was the only way out of the chamber, whether that meant out of the chamber and out of the oil rig, she didn’t know.
Janice opened the door to the chute again and was so angry that she was tempted to go head first, but common sense told her the sign was instructions for safe use of the chute. She grabbed a handle that was on the ceiling of the chute and did a pull up to get her feet inside. It wasn’t too narrow, but it reminded her of what she had felt like when she was inside an MRI machine. It was just narrow enough to make her put her arms where the sign instructed, and there was just enough room for her to pull the door shut before the slope became steep. For some reason, she felt like it was the thing to do, so she shut it behind her.
As soon as she was in position, she felt her ears pop and felt a slight change in air pressure. Now she knew what it felt like to be inside the pneumatic air tube at the bank drive-through.
Her whole body seemed to slip at once, and she felt the urge to spread her feet to use them as brakes, but her memory of a waterslide reminded her that was a bad idea. When she tried to use her feet as breaks she wound up reaching the bottom airborne and unceremoniously landing face first in the pool at the bottom.
Instead, she followed the instructions and thought
about another Olympic event, but she was the bobsled.
It was over before she knew it, and before she could even scream she was slowing to a stop onto an open platform. Next to the platform was a tremendous door that would have been at home on any bank vault, and for some reason, it was open.
It didn’t take her long to accept the fact that she should go inside, but this time she didn’t shut the door. The platform had several other doors around it, and there were two more of the smooth “laundry” chutes that appeared to arrive from other places on the rig. She figured one had to be an exit, but it wouldn’t help much if she locked herself inside of the bank vault.
She stepped across the threshold into the shelter. The lights were on a low level but brightened as she walked in. She jumped because she thought someone had turned them on when she entered, but she didn’t run.
All around her was technology she didn’t understand, and she felt like she was in a science fiction movie. The setting was an alien spacecraft, and she was in the control room. But then she did understand what she was seeing. She suddenly understood, not where she was, but what she was in…or at least she thought she understood. Every oil rig had a control room, and she had found it.
“But why the bank vault door, and where is everybody?”
Her next guess was closer to the mark than she knew.
“A secret government oil rig, but what’s the big secret?”
That made some sense, and it stood to reason that it was military, but she didn’t see anything that resembled military. As far as she knew the military put signs on everything saying who they were, but this was more like NASA. Then she knew she had figured it out. It was NOAA. They studied the oceans, and that’s what all this stuff was for. That made the most sense, but she would be happier if she saw NOAA printed on something.
“Hello?”
Her voice didn’t echo, and there was total quiet.
“Well, I’m here, so I might as well have a look around.”
The door to the next room was also open, and Janice found herself in a kitchen that was similar to the one in the crew quarters. There wasn’t anything remarkable about it, but when she opened the refrigerator, there were leftovers and food that had obviously been made recently. She helped herself to a cold beer and something that tasted like fresh salad. It wasn’t that she didn’t think anybody would mind if she ate their food. It was because she didn’t care if they minded. It had been so long since she had eaten fresh greens that she was sure her digestive system would be wrecked, but she craved a salad the way most people had craved drugs.
The beer was domestic, but after a year of nothing but hard liquor, it was refreshing. Just in case she had missed them, she checked the refrigerator for fresh eggs, but there weren’t any.
“I guess they don’t have any chickens around here.”
Janice took another beer off the shelf and checked the cabinets. Judging by the variety of seasonings and spices, there was a good cook around somewhere.
The next compartment was a recreation center, and it was no surprise that it had the same TV setup. To be sure, she turned it on and saw the same menu of movies. Figuring there would be nothing of interest, she took a few steps toward the next door and then remembered the computer monitor. Since she had found hers, she had no trouble sorting it out from the TV monitors, plus this recreation room was geared more toward one person than several.
She turned the monitor on and saw that it had exactly the same camera views, including the three she had recently moved. That meant someone knew she had moved them, assuming someone was still watching. The fresh food, the open door, and anything else she was about to find all told her someone was there recently. She wondered if this discovery had anything to do with her camera views turning to snow.
There was one thing different about the next room. It appeared to be someone’s personal living quarters. What bothered her was the smell. The bed was unmade, but the unmistakeable odor of bad hygiene permeated everything. When she thought about it a second, there was something she had missed in the kitchen. The sink was overflowing with dishes. She had been so caught up in the food that she had missed that detail.
Janice backtracked to the kitchen and checked everything from the oven to the top of the dining room table. They all needed to be cleaned. She went back to the bedroom figuring the bathroom should be nearby. She was right, and the bathtub was covered in mildew, as were the showers. Whoever lived here didn’t believe in cleaning up after themselves until it was necessary, like maybe in a year or two.
Her mother always said, “Clean body, clean mind.”
She wondered how clean the mind was of the person who lived here.
Janice picked up her pace and was astonished at the level of sophistication she found in the rooms. There was a medical center that had everything she would have needed to repair her injuries when she had first arrived. She had never used a medical stapler before, but she recognized it when she saw it.
“That would have beat the hell out of stitches,” she thought.
There was an armory that included a shooting range, and she could pick from any kind of weapon she wanted. That was the first time she became aware of the fact that she had lost her rifle somewhere.
“Well, I can remedy that little oversight right now.”
She tested the weight of several different handguns, and selected two. She filled her pockets with magazines and then found another rifle just like the one she had lost. Once again, she wasn’t asking for anything. She was taking it. Whoever lived here had let her live on the edge of starvation and mental stability for over a year, and she wasn’t going to give them her undying gratitude if she ran into them.
When she gave it some thought, she knew it wasn’t if, but when, and the unsanitary living quarters were not a sign that she would be dealing with a sane person.
“So what if I wasn’t making my bed? I was changing the sheets and showering, and I was washing my dishes.”
The lower level of the shelter was down a set of stairs. As far as she could tell by the shape of the rooms, she was inside a circular structure, and she had circumnavigated the upper level. When she went down one flight she found the laundry room, which was much needed but ignored, and a hydroponics lab. Whoever the slob was, he knew how to grow plants because they were doing quite well.
Janice spent almost two hours exploring the rest of the shelter. The food storage areas were beyond description. She had been searching containers for something to replenish her supplies, while someone had been sitting on a grocery store.
“No, more like a food factory,” she said.
She went back to the kitchen and made another big salad. She added canned chicken and ham to it, grabbed another beer, and went back to the room inside the big bank vault door. She got comfortable and waited for someone to come home so she could set a few things straight.
******
Year Six of the Decline
Janice had sat inside the door with her rifle across her lap for hours, but no one had come home. She finally decided to lock the door, but she was pretty sure whoever lived there would know how to unlock it. It was primitive, but she stacked bottles and cans in front of the big door and tied strings to them. If someone opened the door, she would hear them coming. Three years later, the stack was still standing undisturbed.
She had given in and eventually cleaned the bedroom and bathroom. She couldn’t find any air fresheners, so she had washed the walls with the cleansers from the laundry room. It took almost a day to clean the kitchen.
Janice swore that if the owner of the place came home after she had done all the work, they could go live in the crew quarters.
She checked the cameras every day, and nothing ever changed, just as nothing changed when she was watching from the crew quarters. She wondered if the old man she had seen standing over David’s body had anything to do with this place, and she wondered where he had gone. He had probably been someone from the ship, or he had
found his way onto the oil rig. Regardless, she never saw him again.
Settling into a routine inside the shelter was far easier than it had been in the crew quarters because there was enough food to last a lifetime. She had tried to do an inventory, but after reaching a point where she knew it was more than enough for one person. She decided her time could be put to better use, and she went to the hydroponics garden.
Life was good. Almost four years later she was raising something in her garden that was a lot like potatoes, and she had figured out how to grow grains. It was something that grew like rice, but she was able to grind it into flour and make something she called rice bread. Getting it to rise was difficult until she found there was yeast in her dry storage.
There was an exercise room that had been neglected before her, and it stayed neglected for the first year after she had moved in, but along with the rice bread and the other regular meals came a few unwanted pounds and some slack muscles. It was like starting all over again on a new project when she decided to get back in shape. She had to strip down and service some of the equipment, but that would make it even more worth it when she started using the equipment.
Once she had finished that project, there was no excuse to get started on the physical part, but that didn’t mean she didn’t try to find excuses. When she ran out of things that she could say were more important, she started her exercise program, and as most people would admit, it became her passion. The rice bread was her reward for working hard, and besides being happy with her physical appearance, she realized that she was mentally content.
There had been a time when all she could think of was survival. She knew she couldn’t get back to the mainland even if she wanted to go, but if things were as bad as she suspected they were, there was no reason to go back. She didn’t want to leave her glorified mobile home at the top of the oil rig, but all she had up there was a kitchen, a TV set, and the necessities for staying clean. She just didn’t have a food supply that would last. Now she had everything she needed, and she wasn’t even lonely. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt fine by herself.