The Infected Dead (Book 2): Survive For Now (19 page)

On the deck above, the officers who had gathered to watch started shouting toward to crew members who had gathered along the starboard railings. They scattered and immediately began getting a second team into wetsuits. In a matter of minutes they were clambering over the edge of the corvette into the second Zodiac and going to the rescue of their shipmates.

At the bow, one diver had managed to pull himself out of the water and drop into the bottom of the Zodiac. Jean couldn’t see him once he was completely in the boat, but she could see the trail of blood on the black rubber of the Zodiac. A second diver emerged, and he wasn’t in any better shape. He had several tears in his wetsuit, and rivers of blood were running down his back. His diving mask was gone, and when he turned Jean saw deep scratches in his face that rivaled the rips in the wetsuit.

Jean didn’t realize she was crying at first. She felt bad for the Russians and started thinking she should have warned them. She didn’t know how they would have received the warnings. They may have completely ignored them, but she felt awful that all she could do was sit and watch them face such an incredible horror. She wiped at her wet cheeks and wished that she had at least given them an anonymous call and said not to go in the water. They would have been better off just cutting their anchor chain loose and driving back out to sea.

The second Zodiac arrived on the scene as three more of the divers surfaced. The crew of the second boat began pulling them on board. Two of the new group jumped over into the first Zodiac to give aid to their injured shipmates, and two others dove in to retrieve the last member of the original crew. They broke the surface only seconds later with his badly mangled body between them. He looked to Jean like he may still be alive but just barely.

With all six of the original group back in the Zodiacs, they rushed  to get their boats back to the stern of the corvette. Crew members were already lowering stretchers inside wire rescue cages down to the water where they were quickly lifted aboard. Jean knew what they were trying to do. These were friends who had sailed halfway around the world with each other, and they couldn’t just leave them behind. Despite the risks of spreading the infection, they were making the same mistake every hospital in the world had made on the first day of the apocalypse. They were trying to save lives that were already lost, and if they didn’t realize it soon enough, they would all be lost.

Over the next three hours, there was very little activity on the Russian ship. The Zodiacs were hauled onto the stern and washed, but then everyone went inside with the exception of a lone man standing watch. He circled the deck with a pair of binoculars and a long rifle with a scope on it. From time to time he would stop and study something either on the mainland or the island through the binoculars or with the rifle scope, but then he would move on. He almost always stopped when he got to the bow of the ship above the anchor. He would just stare down at the water like he expected to get an answer about what had happened down there.

As that three hours passed, Jean was getting restless. It wasn’t easy for her to sit still not knowing what was happening to her friends, wondering if they made it to Alabama, or if they were even alive. Just the thought was enough to snap her into motion.

She said out loud, “If they make it back in one piece, I’ll be damned if I will let them get their butts blown up by a stupid booby trap.”

Jean wasn’t really a stubborn person. She was more of a determined person. When she decided something was the right thing to do, she was hard to convince otherwise. She couldn’t imagine a scenario where her friends would be forced to come back to the island from the North, but there was one possibility. If they lost the plane but made it back to the coast, they wouldn’t be able to cross from the southern tip of the mainland without a boat. On the northern side, the jetty was repaired, but they could still cross using the sand bar at low tide. If they did, they could all be killed or badly hurt on the dock.

There was also the added advantage that the Russians were busy dealing with their own problems. She didn’t know for sure what was happening out on the ship, but she imagined they were doing everything they could to treat the injuries in the hope that their shipmates would recover. The Chief had said the ship’s compliment couldn’t have been more than fifty-five, and six were likely to die. Everyone was below decks even if they were just hanging around for moral support. All Jean would have to worry about was the guard on the deck, and she was sure the ship was anchored far enough away that they wouldn’t even be able to see the dock on the northern tip of the island.

Jean thought about the advice the Chief was always giving them about having a plan. She also thought about what Uncle Titus had said to Eddie about not leaving the shelter once you were safe inside, but she decided to ignore him because everyone else was outside, too. If they could do it, so could she, and it wasn’t like she was going to go five hundred miles. She was only going a mile out and a mile back.

There were wet suits in all sizes in their supply lockers, but in the end she had to settle for one that would fit a child. She felt more like a fearless warrior going off to battle before getting stuck with a child sized set of armor, but then she reasoned that she would be harder to spot. Besides, the wet suit was for protection against bites and the cold, because she didn’t plan to go into the water. A wet suit alone wasn’t a guarantee against the teeth of the infected dead, as was witnessed by the Russians first hand. She  planned to add a few more layers of protection.

As Jean found combat boots, gloves, a jumpsuit, and a foul weather jacket, she thought about what tools she would need. She could go out there and simply disconnect all of the explosives and allow them to drop into the water. That might be a short term solution, as well as a giveaway that there was someone still on the island even though the Russians had searched for hours after the Chief had tied up one of their sentries.

Her best bet, she reasoned, was to deactivate the booby traps but leave them in place. That meant she would also need some wire and some cutters. She could cut the wires they had stretched across the dock and replace it with dummy wires. She had only seen the wires at night, so she would have to get a look at them when she checked the dock to see if it was all clear.

Jean also remembered that the Chief always said to have a Plan B, but she found out that it was harder to think of why she would need a Plan B without her friends around. She finally concluded that the only other thing to plan for other than the infected and the Russians would be the possibility of not being able to get back to the main entrance of the shelter. If she got stuck outside at night, she could freeze to death, so she needed to add a thermal layer to her clothing and an emergency kit with a foil blanket. Of course, she could always try to make it to the emergency tunnel on the southern tip of the island, but she didn’t want to try to make it there in the dark. If something was preventing her from getting back inside, she didn’t want to reveal the existence of the tunnel by using a flashlight.

Despite the fact that a flashlight would give away her position, it was still a necessity, but she put a red lens cover on it before using a clip to fasten it to her belt. Jean studied herself in the mirror and thought she looked more like someone’s kid going outside to play in the snow than a commando, but she hoped she wouldn’t run into anyone she needed to impress. For about the tenth time since she decided to do this, she questioned herself, but she kept coming back to that one fear, and that was seeing someone she loved blown to pieces by a bomb. The irony of such a loss was all she could focus on. You survive an apocalypse only to be killed by a bomb. You might as well get run over by a car or die from food poisoning.

The only thing she needed to add was weapons. The Chief had found a couple of silencers in the armory, but they had taken them along on the their trip to Alabama. It wasn’t like they expected her to need them. She rationalized that she should take a gun, but she wouldn’t use it unless there was no other choice. She also figured if she used the gun on the ocean side of the island, she would be able to get back to the entrance to the shelter before the Russians could mobilize. She also slid a machete into a loop on her belt and strapped a knife in a sheath to her leg. Now she looked like a commando.

A quick look at the camera views showed one Russian still walking the decks of the ship but no other activity. Next she adjusted the camera on the dock to locate the trip wires. She zoomed in close and saw that the wires weren’t exactly invisible. They looked like typical strands of copper wire. At night they would be deadly, but if you were looking down in the daylight, they were easy to see. The Russians probably just used what they had, and that was fortunate because copper wire was what Jean also had.

The other camera angles showed no activity on Mud Island. There were still plenty of the infected walking around on the mainland beach, but none had crossed to water to her side. A last look at the ship told her the Russian sentry had taken an interest in teasing the infected by yelling at them. They would walk out into the water and disappear with the current.

Jean said out loud, “Time to stop stalling and do this.”

Before she could lose her nerve, she made her way to the big steel door and unlocked it. A big burst of cold wind hit her in the face, but the sky was clear. She grabbed her supply bag and stepped out, thinking the whole time that this was a stupid idea. She wondered which was closer to the odds of winning the lottery. Losing one of her friends to an explosive strapped to the dock, or her surviving a field trip in a world that had gone to hell. She grinned as she thought to herself, “Don’t blow yourself up on the dock.”

A mile doesn’t really feel that long when you have something to think about the whole time, and she had plenty on her mind. Watching every moving bush, every overgrown path, in front of you, behind you, listening for any sound that didn’t belong on an island on a cold but clear day. Jean heard the sound that didn’t belong before she spotted movement. Where this infected dead had come from she didn’t know. It hadn’t seen her yet, so she had the advantage. She chose the machete because she liked the longer reach. She gripped it in her right hand and began moving forward in a crouch.

Jean could smell the dead flesh on the thing standing with its back to her. She guessed she hadn’t seen it because it was wearing a tan shirt that looked like it was made from the same material as the bushes. It didn’t have any of the usual blue crabs hanging from it, probably because the weather and the water were so cold. She estimated there were only four more long strides before she would be in a position to plant the machete in the back of its head, so she took them quickly.

With her arm in its downswing, a hand grabbed her arm between the elbow and the shoulder, and her prey turned around to face her. She started to yell at the person who owned the hand, and locked eyes with another infected dead that had been standing virtually motionless in the middle of the bushes. It had a strong grip on her arm and had already begun to lower its head for a bite on her upper arm by the shoulder. She felt the pressure from its jaws as the teeth attempted to go through the layers of clothing, but even worse, she was afraid that her own struggles would cause the material to tear.

The infected that she had seen first wasn’t moving as fast as Jean when she was closing the distance to kill it, but it wasn’t having to fight its way free from the grip of something that was trying to eat it. Jean could see it was already opening its mouth in anticipation of the first bite. Everything seemed to slow down, and Jean remembered a discussion she had with the Chief. He had said everything would slow down when you were sure you were going to die, and if you wanted to live, you had to make yourself move faster because time didn’t slow down for whatever was trying to kill you. Jean had asked him if he had ever experienced that feeling, and he had told her too many times.

Jean didn’t have the benefit of past experiences to fall back on, but she made herself move. She let her feet go out from under herself so her weight would pull downward from the infected that was holding her. She heard the material of her foul weather jacket tear, but the feeling of the teeth gripping her was gone, and it wasn’t replaced by cold air. That gave her hope that the material below the jacket wasn’t pierced by the teeth.

As she dropped to the ground, she also reached across her body for the long knife in the leg sheath. The infected had a grip on her arm that was too strong to break loose, but apparently its elbows weren’t what they used to be. The tendons made a loud popping sound as they tore free from their connections. The hand didn’t let go, but Jean found herself below the two infected dead with a forearm dangling from her arm. It seemed to her that she had seen that happen before, but she was too busy to worry about when. She had already found the hilt of her long knife with her left hand and pulled it free as the infected in the tan shirt fell on her.

Jean didn’t let time slow down, and she saw the blade of the knife go upward through the chin of the infected and out through the top of the skull. She didn’t stop to admire her handiwork as she swung the machete hard to her right. It seemed to move slower because of the extra weight of the dead arm that flopped around when she moved, but she was only aiming at the knees. The machete made a satisfying crunching sound as it went through the right leg of the monster that had bitten her.

She wondered if the Chief was right about time not slowing down for the infected, because she was about to kill the one that had bitten her. The severed leg lost its last connection with its former owner and the infected fell over on its right side. Jean let the momentum of her swing and the extra weight of the arm hanging from hers continue in a long arc and brought the machete down just behind the left ear of the second infected dead.