by Howard, Bob
It was pitch black in the stairwell, so the Chief stopped to let his eyes adjust. His night vision was so good that the people who served in the Navy with him laughed when he put on night vision goggles. They said he didn’t need them. While he often felt like that was true, he wished he had some on at the moment.
What he couldn’t see, he would try to hear, so he stood perfectly still and listened. He could hear his heartbeat, so he forced himself to breathe slowly and brought his heart rate down. Stokes had a big head start, so he might already have found a place where he could just crawl in and stay quiet. Of course, that depended on what else was in here with them.
The Chief was able to make out the bulkhead in front of him, and he decided it would be easier for Stokes to go down than up, so he followed the wall to the stairs and knelt at the top. He ran his fingers lightly across the first step down and felt the warm, slippery fluid. It smelled like copper.
The Chief walked down the stairs so softly that he could have walked on toilet paper without tearing it. As he descended he listened for something that would give Stokes away. He remembered that rats were as common as people on ships and thought about what Sim had told them before. The rats had probably turned on each other when their food supply ran low. There could still be some, but the strong smell of ammonia left behind in their urine probably meant there had been thousands at one time.
A slight movement caused just enough sound for him to stop. There was a slight echo, so the Chief knew he was in a large chamber. There was a small squeak to his right that he recognized as a rat, but the groan that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck was an infected. It was below and to his left. The Chief visualized the room and thought about the layout above. This would be a hub with hallways leading off in different directions. Down the stairs would be the way to the hold. Further in would be the crew quarters.
The Chief thought about how Stokes would try to navigate this darkness. Instead of using his ears to judge how far he was from a wall, he would stretch out an arm. Since the center of the hub was to the right, Stokes would have put one hand on the wall to his left and followed it. That meant Stokes went down the first corridor on the left.
The Chief judged the distance to the corridor by remembering how wide the deck had been above, and he made the turn without touching the walls. He heard Stokes try to stifle a sound when something brushed past him, but he was loud enough to give away his position.
At the same time, the Chief felt rather than saw a presence only inches away on his right, and he had no choice. His hand shot out chest high, and he buried it fist deep into the torso of an infected. He closed his hand on something that had to be the ribcage, and he swung his arm forward.
The infected didn’t have a chance to bite him as the entire ribcage ripped loose and flew forward, hitting Stokes in the face. He screamed and began to cry like a child who had just fallen on a playground. When the pasty decayed tissue got into his open mouth he got sick and was doubled over with nausea.
The Chief had no sympathy as he pushed the infected further away and grabbed Stokes by the hair. If there were more infected on this level, they wouldn’t have any trouble finding them, so the Chief moved much faster getting to the stairwell and going up.
Stokes screamed and cried the entire time, but all it did was make the Chief think about how Sam must have screamed until he ran out of air, and how Iris’ fingernails looked when they opened the casket. That gave him an idea.
When they reached the open door onto the deck, Stokes became bold and tried to hit the Chief. The Chief wanted him awake for what he was about to do, so he didn’t hit him back. He just twisted his hair even harder as he dragged him across the deck to the coffin.
With one hand he pulled open the lid, and with the other hand he shoved Stokes down on top of the infected that was trying to get out. He stuffed them both in far enough before he slammed the lid shut, then he sat down on top of it and listened.
The lid shook and he could still hear the screams that were almost loud enough to drown out the hungry groans inside. When it finally stopped, the Chief picked up the coffin, carried it to the railing, and threw it overboard. He waited for it to sink, and then after it sank he waited almost ten minutes before he walked away.
When the Chief walked into the medical bay we knew from his expression that it had been brutal, but Tom had to know for sure. He had to know the man who buried his daughter was dead.
“You caught him?”
“Yes, and he won’t be around to bite anyone, either.”
******
The Chief flew from the oil rig straight to Fort Sumter where the Army medics could take Cassandra and Tom right into the surgical suite. There wasn’t even time to stop in New Orleans to tell the others what had happened, so I took Stokes’ boat back to the Cormorant. I had my hands full with Kathy and Sim when I broke the news to them about Tom and Cassandra being shot. Kathy was quick to pull herself together because Sim was taking it the hardest. I needed her help because Jean was a wreck even though I came back without a scratch.
Bus was sad because no one could explain what had happened to his old friend, Maybank. As far as we knew from Janice, he had survived in the shelter but disappeared sometime in the last six years. She told us she had seen an old man, but it could have been anybody.
The Chief had asked Janice to fly with him so she could take care of the injured pair, and he promised he would fly her back to her shelter as soon as possible.
“Are you kidding?” said Janice. “I never want to see this place again. Can I stay with you guys?”
The Chief had given her one of his patented laughs before giving her a bone crushing hug.
“Consider yourself a member of the family.”
Captain Miller put helicopters in the air within minutes of their arrival, and even though the Cormorant had been our savior more than once, it was time to leave her behind. Maybe we would be able to go back for her someday.
******
Year Six of the Decline
Three Weeks Later
The Chief and Iris were sitting on a blanket on Morris Island, watching the stars climb above the horizon. The stretch of beach by the back entrance to the Fort Sumter shelter was one of the safest places where you could go to be alone, but the Chief was always listening and watching.
Iris leaned into him and asked, “Do you know how many times I wished for this?”
“It was a long time for you to be stuck in Ambassadors Island.”
“I’m talking about before then, too.”
“You wanted this before the infection happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were supposed to want it first.”
She gave him a playful poke in the ribs.
“Besides,” she continued, “if we had gotten together before, then you wouldn’t have been on that cruise ship in Charleston, you wouldn’t have met Ed and learned about the shelters, and we wouldn’t have run into each other in Charlotte.”
“That makes my head hurt,” he said.
They both laughed, and it was nice to be able to smile after what they had been through with Stokes. They kissed and then held each other in silence for a long time.
“How long will it stay like this, Josh?”
“You don’t mean tonight, do you? You mean the whole world…the infection?”
She nodded.
He didn’t answer, and she thought she knew why. She was just about to say it when he stopped her.
“We both know that we’ve already lost. This is the big extinction event everyone talked about before. Whoever it was who called it the decline of man, I think they were right. There are less people on the planet now than there were in the last ice age. I think we’re done, but you and I have no choice. We have to last as long as we can.”
“I’ll settle for that,” she said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Howard (1951-) was born in New Jersey to an Army Sergeant from Ohio and a mother
from Romania. He was moved from one Army base to the next, and before he began high school in Huntsville, Alabama he had lived most of his life overseas in Germany and Okinawa with brief stays in Maryland and North Carolina. He credits his imagination to his exposure to different cultures and environments at an early age. He began reading science fiction and fell in love with post apocalyptic novels. He still has an original copy of the first one he read in 1966, The Furies by Keith Edwards. He joined the Navy after high school and continued to move from one base to another, including a submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland. He eventually stayed in one place when he got stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated with a BS in Psychology from the College of Charleston. He married his wife in 1984 and together they raised a son and a daughter.
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With gratitude,
Bob Howard