The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now (2 page)

We had seen plenty of the infected dead walk into the moat and simply disappear. Some of them were washed out through the southern exit past a second jetty, but as we had learned, most were being caught in nets that crossed the moat in two places. Uncle Titus had probably put the nets there to give a small amount of protection to the power lines that came from the mainland to Mud Island. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see fish getting caught in the nets, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of dead people flailing around trying to get loose.

Just the thought of it gave me the creeps, and for a moment I pictured myself trying to explain it to him.

I thought, “It’s like this, Uncle Titus. Some kind of infection caused people to come back to life after they died, but instead of acting like people, they started going around biting other people, even their own families. Then they would die from the bites, come back to life, and then they would find someone else to bite. Next thing you know, there’s only a few of us left.”

“Ed, are you still with us?” asked the Chief.

I didn’t realize the Chief was still talking to everyone about how we were going to get by this latest crisis.

“Sorry, Chief. I was just thinking about how my Uncle Titus would react to all of this. If he would have included zombies in his plans, maybe he would have thought of a way for us to clean the nets, and maybe that Russian ship wouldn’t have become a death trap.”

The Chief frowned at me, but I saw Kathy trying to hide a grin. He hated it when someone called them zombies. He started to say something, but he stopped himself. He was probably going to say he had told me before why they weren’t zombies, but instead he asked, “What did you say?”

I tried to replay everything in my mind, but all I could think of was Uncle Titus didn’t include zombies in his plans.

“Which part, Chief? Uncle Titus didn’t think about zombies when he built the shelter?” I asked.

He shook his head from side to side. “No, Ed, the part about cleaning the nets. Uncle Titus would have thought about fish getting caught in them, and he most likely considered the possibility of an anchor getting caught in the nets or on the power lines. All we have to do is figure out his backup plan.”

Dr. Bus was listening to what we were saying, and we had forgotten he probably knew more about Uncle Titus and his shelter plans than the rest of us combined. When we looked at him, he was trying to hide a grin, too.
 

Jean and Kathy called to us that coffee was ready, and we could all use some to wake up, so we migrated over to the dining area and grabbed a cup. Bus saw we were still looking at him, and he gave in.

“Okay,” he said. “Uncle Titus talked about redundant systems, and we all started working out plans to install secondary power lines in case the main lines were broken. The problem was we couldn’t think of a backup power line that was any safer than the first unless it was buried, so we decided to just put something temporary in place until we could bury a cable. At the shelter in Guntersville I used a few political connections to arrange a little diversion from some power lines that ran all the way from a hydroelectric plant.”

We all stared at Bus waiting for him to go on, and when he didn’t, the Chief said, “Bus, if you don’t tell us what the temporary system is, I’m going to make you swim to the mainland with a long extension cord. If you haven’t noticed, there aren’t any power lines closer than Simmonsville, and I think they were blown up.”

Bus answered, “You’ve got the right idea, Chief, but the extension cord is already on the mainland…or at least close to it. Titus said he was going to put a spare cable under the dock on the mainland. You just have to pull it over from there and plug it in at a special connection near the oyster beds. Once you have it plugged in, you just throw the power switch under the dock, and you’re back in business.”

Kathy said, “If someone calls me a dumb blonde, I’ll make them hold the targets for me while I practice shooting a bow and arrow, but that must be one big cable. You can’t just go get it and drag it over here.”

“I was going to say the same thing,” said the Chief. “Except for the part about being a dumb blond.”

Kathy pretended to be aiming an arrow at the Chief and pulling back on the shaft.

Bus rubbed his hand across a gray stubble on his chin and said, “Yeah, Titus did mention all he needed was a cable laying boat and he was having a hard time getting one.”

“So, he never finished his backup plan?” asked Jean. “Where can we get a cable laying boat?”

The Chief was staring at a spot on the wall and was lost in thought.
 

“Chief?” said Jean.

He looked at each of us one at a time and said, “Why do we have to keep leaving this place?”

We all knew what he meant. It seemed like we would get to stay safe for a while, but then we would have to leave for some reason that always seemed like a good idea at the time. The last time we almost lost Jean.

As soon as I looked at her Jean said, “Don’t say it, Eddie. Crazy Russians on wild horses couldn’t drag me out of this shelter. If you haven’t noticed, I’m slightly pregnant.”

“I wasn’t going to remind you,” I said, “at least not yet,” I said in a lower voice.

“Do you know where to get a cable laying boat?” Kathy asked the Chief.

The Chief looked like the question was painful because he winced. I had a feeling we weren’t going to be too happy about his answer.

“I saw one tied to a dock behind the Atlantic Spirit in Charleston harbor, and it was still there when we went back to get the seaplane.”

Kathy, Jean, and I all got the same pained expression as the Chief, and the rest of the group waited for us to explain it to them.

The Chief said, “Tom, you already know some of this, but the rest of you don’t. As you know, three of us escaped from Charleston on a cruise ship named the Atlantic Spirit. We found Ed, and he took us in. We got the bright idea to at least try to establish contact with civilization, so we flew the seaplane down to Goose Creek and made contact with the military at the Naval Weapons Station.”

“They weren’t doing so well,” added Kathy.

“As a matter of fact,” continued the Chief, “we had it better than they did, but on the way back we had to land the plane and leave it behind. A bullet had clipped a hose in the engine compartment.”

“But you went back and got the plane,” said Tom. “So, what’s the problem? Why can’t we go down to Charleston harbor and liberate the cable laying boat?”

Kathy laid a hand on top of Tom’s and said, “Charleston was known around the world as a friendly city, but the harbor isn’t as friendly as it used to be, Tom. The last time we were like sitting ducks to someone who had control of Fort Sumter. We were lucky to get away.”

Tom didn’t flinch, but Allison did. Jean and I both saw it and exchanged glances. Since our return from Guntersville, Alabama, we had both seen Kathy try to bury the feelings she had for Tom, but this gesture was a slip up on her part. She wasn’t the kind of person to try to break up a marriage, but it was no secret Allison had filed for divorce before the infected dead had changed the world. She pulled her hand back, but I didn’t think it had occurred to her what she had done. Allison was simmering.

The Chief didn’t miss much, but he didn’t let on like he noticed. He went ahead and explained the gravity of the situation to Tom and Bus.

“We could probably get into the harbor and get the cable laying boat under way, but they’re slower than a snail on a hot sticky road. We couldn’t sail it out of the harbor past Fort Sumter, and it would take a lot of fuel to use the route we took the last time. I doubt we would be lucky enough to make it half way.”

“Why can’t we fly in and land close to it, Chief?” I asked. “You could get it under way while Bus flies the Otter back out. The rest of us could come into the harbor from the Stono River and tow you back to Mud Island.”

When we had been fired upon from Fort Sumter, we were forced to travel down the coast to the Stono River. It was a longer trip, but it proved to be a safe back door into the harbor. There would be obstacles, but they weren’t as bad as getting shot at.

The Chief said, “That’s a good idea, Ed, but our boat wouldn’t be my first choice for towing a cable laying boat. I’d prefer a tugboat, but I don’t think we would have a very easy time liberating one of those.”

Dr. Bus asked, “Why don’t we just take control of Fort Sumter?”

No one answered him.

Anyone who knows anything at all about the Civil War knows Fort Sumter was the site of the first real battle. It was a Union garrison built to keep the United States from being invaded by a foreign power the way they had in 1812. Construction began in 1829, and it wasn’t even finished when South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860. In 1861 the Confederate army began shelling the fort and it was captured after only one day. Even though it became a national monument and a famous tourist attraction, very few people knew it was the site of another shelter.

Dr. Bus was on the short list of people who knew about the shelters, and he hadn’t told us yet where the other shelters were located. When we asked him where they were, he just said he would tell us in due time. When asked why he wouldn’t tell us, he said he wanted us to appreciate what we had and not be thinking about the other shelters.

The Chief and I had talked about it several times, and we always came to the same conclusion. Dr. Bus and Uncle Titus were both nuts. They were smart enough to build shelters, but they were nuts.

I asked Dr. Bus once if he knew who built the other shelters, and he just answered, “Of course I do.” He didn’t volunteer to tell me any names, and I knew he wouldn’t tell me if I asked.

This was what Dr. Bus must have meant when he said, “In due time.”
 

“Bus,” said the Chief, “the last time we got a close look at Fort Sumter, we were coasting past it on the Atlantic Spirit. It was populated entirely by the infected dead, and they were walking over the walls trying to reach us. The next time we were in the area, someone took a shot at us from behind those walls. Are you saying whoever that was also has a shelter like ours?”

Before the Chief even finished asking his question, Bus was shaking his head.
 

“No, Chief,” said Bus. “I seriously doubt the shelter was discovered. It couldn’t have been too hard for a boatload of men and women with guns to take the fort away from the infected. After that they would have built a small community just like the village above my shelter, and they would have survived until someone got in who had been bitten. By now they are likely to have suffered the same fate you saw when you flew over Green Cavern.”

“Or they were using the crabs as a food supply,” said Jean. Of everything gross we had seen, that was the one thing that turned her stomach the most.

Kathy asked, “So, you think we could take Fort Sumter to be sure it’s safe to sail the line laying boat past it?”

“Exactly,” he answered. “We take Fort Sumter, gain entry to the shelter, and when the time is right we can commandeer a tugboat. They couldn’t all have made it out of the harbor to safety when the infection spread.”

Tom said, “Chief, you could fly over the harbor and check it out first. If Bus is right, we could pull it off in one day.”

Allison was clearly uncomfortable listening to us talk about going outside, but she was even more uncomfortable watching Kathy and Tom join in on the planning.

“Why do we even have to do this now?” she asked. “I mean, we could wait another year and still have enough supplies to keep us alive. Maybe if we wait, there won’t even be any infected left to worry about.”

The Chief knew Allison was afraid. After what they had all seen, there was plenty of reason for all of them to be afraid. She had lost friends and relatives just like the rest of them, and she only survived because Dr. Bus took her in. We all felt sorry for her because she didn’t seem to have that instinct for survival we all seemed to have. I couldn’t help but think she would have just locked herself inside if she had inherited Mud Island. She would have just locked the doors and lived off of the supplies for the rest of her life.

“Allison, we talked about this before,” said Tom. “If this group was made up of the kind of people who would just bury their heads in the sand, Ed would still be here by himself. At the very least, they wouldn’t have risked their necks to get me back home to you.”