The three kids exchanged looks, but the Chief and Kathy both caught the dirty looks Whitney and Sam both gave Perry.
Perry defensively said, "You may have heard something, but you didn't know it was someone alive."
"True," said the Chief, "but if it had been an infected banging around inside the ship, it would have kept banging around. It wouldn't have tried to keep quiet after that."
"Infected? Is that what you call the dead people?" asked Sam.
Kathy said, "That's what they called them on the news when all this started. They said an infection of some kind was spreading around, and not to let one of them bite you, so we started calling them infected, too."
"Do scavengers come around here much?" asked the Chief.
"Aren't you scavengers?" Sam asked accusingly.
"Depends on what you think we are," said the Chief. "If you think scavengers are people who can take you to a safe place, then I guess we're scavengers."
Whitney answered for the group, "We've heard them trying to get in about once a week, but sometimes it's every day and sometimes not for a few weeks. What do you mean that you can take us to a safe place?"
"First," said the Chief, "I'm going to see if I can power this thing up. If I can, it can be handled by one person if they know what they're doing. Next, we're going to make a short trip out to Fort Sumter."
All three of them stood a little straighter and looked like they were cornered.
"You are scavengers," accused Whitney.
Kathy and the Chief both saw their mistake immediately. These kids were especially aware of the people out at Fort Sumter and figured that a ticket to there was a one way trip.
"Hold on a second, kids." Kathy held both hands out showing her palms. "We're not the people you've been seeing from Fort Sumter. Those people are all either dead or gone. I know you don't know us well enough to trust us yet, but do you think we would be standing here talking if we meant to harm you?"
All three of them looked like they were underweight. Sam and Perry looked like they were underweight and generally undersized before the infection began. They were the kind of kids who were bullied at school, and they expected to be bullied every year. They were both fair haired and could use some time in the sun, but that wasn't really an option anymore. Whitney was taller and looked like she might have been either a cheerleader or an athlete in school.
"How old are you guys?" asked Kathy.
Whitney sounded suspicious when she answered, "Why do you want to know?"
"I wanted to make sure you're old enough to learn how to shoot a gun."
That got their attention.
Sam said, "I'm thirteen, he's fourteen, and she's sixteen."
"That's old enough to shoot," said the Chief. "Any guns on this ship."
Still suspicious, they all looked at each other before giving up their secrets.
"Did you just trick us?" asked Whitney.
"I have an idea," said Kathy. "Chief, cover me while I get some stuff from the boat. Whitney, I could use a hand. As a matter of fact, Sam you close the door behind us. The Chief is going to cover us while Whitney and Perry are going to help me get some food out of the boat."
The truth was that Kathy didn't need their help. She just didn't want them to lock the door as soon as she and the Chief went to get them something to eat. They might eventually get them to open the door again, but it would be a big waste of time.
"You're a better shot than me," said the Chief. "You can cover us."
Kathy grinned at the Chief as they went through the door. She could tell he had figured out what she was doing. Besides feeding the three kids, she was making them feel just a little less like victims by giving them something to do.
It took less than five minutes to get to the boat, pass their bags up to Whitney and Perry and then get back inside, but doing it as the serious business that it was made the kids feel important. They were excited when they closed the door behind us and were giving each other high fives.
"Now, let's see what we have in here that you guys can force yourselves to eat."
They all gathered around the small "mess" area next to the galley and took their seats.
Kathy made a show out of selecting from the MRE's they had hurriedly packed when they left Fort Sumter.
"You guys just raise your hands if I call out something you want. I have pepperoni pizza."
Three hands were in the air.
"Well, I guess it's a good thing the Chief likes the pepperoni pizza, because I brought plenty of it."
Kathy showed them how to heat up the MRE's. It didn't look much like pepperoni pizza, but the kids didn't complain. She had second helpings ready at about the same time that they finished the first ones.
"So, who wants to tell me how you three managed to get such a cool place to hide?" asked the Chief.
They kept eating, but they stared at him as if he was speaking a foreign language.
"I'm not sure they say cool anymore, Chief. I think they would say this place is either lit or live."
The Chief looked like he was considering it for a minute, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything but cool.
He snapped his fingers in the air to get their attention and said, "Okay, dirtbags. That's your last free meal if someone doesn't say this is a cool place in three seconds."
All three said it was a cool place, but with full mouths it sounded like it was their turn to speak in a foreign language.
"Okay, that was close enough. Now, do I need to repeat my question?"
"We were in a school tour group," said Sam. "Me and Perry. Whitney came along later. We went to College Park Middle School, and we came down here to meet with some Coast Guard guys for a tour of the ships. There was a much bigger ship here before, but it left. I think the Coast Guard people were trying to keep those dead things from getting on the boat because they were shooting those big guns up front." He pointed in the general direction of the bow.
"What about you, Whitney? How long have you been here?" asked Kathy.
Whitney looked uncomfortable remembering back to when it all started and everything she had been through.
"My parents brought me down here to show me where my dad used to work. He was in the Coast Guard, and he thought maybe I would like to join when I finished high school. He said it would help me build character."
Perry pointed at the Chief and said, "You look like you were in the Coast Guard, but you're too big for this ship."
The Chief always looked at home on a ship. When he stood on a deck and watched the rolling swells he looked like he belonged at sea. The comment made him smile at the boy, and all three kids visibly relaxed. He looked big and dangerous until he smiled. Then everyone around him melted.
"I was in the Navy, Perry. After that I was working for a cruise ship company. That's how I met Kathy."
"Are you two married?" asked Sam.
Kathy shook her head and told them that the Chief was married to the sea, that is until things went bad.
"Back to you guys," said Kathy. "So, you were on a field trip, and Whitney, you were here with your folks. You've been here since? That's a long time."
Whitney spoke for the group, "We've seen what happens when one of those sick people bites you. We didn't have any choice. Those Coast Guard guys, Coasties, they took really good care of us, but at the end they had to lock themselves outside because they were bitten. My mom stayed outside with them and helped fight them off at the beginning. My dad tried to get her to stay inside with us, but she said she wanted to be with him."
She told us about that first day when it seemed that you didn't know who was okay and who wasn't. Police came and tried to help. There were firemen, ambulances, and people who just wanted to do whatever they could, but gradually there was no one left that wasn't trying to bite someone else. She saw Sam and Perry's teachers attacking children in there classes, and then the kids were attacking each other.
She said they seemed like they were going to stop the infected people at the gates of the Coast Guard base, but someone inside had been bitten already, and they started biting other people who were inside. Then they had to back up to the ships. One of the ships left with a lot of people on it, but there wasn't room for everyone. They tried to get people onto this ship, but the same thing happened as before. People didn't tell anyone when they got bitten because they didn't want to get left behind, they wound up with a lot of infected people on board.
Whitney told it as if she was talking about someone else. After months of being resigned to this way of life, she had plenty of time to grieve. There was very little emotion in her voice when she talked about those last days when the Coast Guard base had been overrun by the infected. She understood her parents had stayed outside so she live.
She explained when the food started running low, they started going out for supplies and stocked up ahead of time. She said they talked about it after the first time scavengers tried to get in. They agreed they needed plenty of food for those times when they couldn't go out for more. One time the scavengers had camped on top of the Cormorant and tried to wait until the kids came out. They almost ran out of water that time, so they had made sure since then that there was always an emergency supply.
"Have you seen many of the infected in this area?" asked the Chief.
"Not for a long time," said Perry. "Even though Sam and I are just kids, we didn't want Whitney to be the only one who had to go out, and two of us could hunt for stuff faster."
"We've checked the houses for blocks. There were infected in some of them," said Whitney. "We took care of them."
Kathy and the Chief couldn't picture these three kids killing the infected, and their expressions didn't hide their thoughts too well.
Whitney didn't get angry. Being a teenager she always felt like someone was patronizing her, so it almost gave her a feeling of comfort and familiarity.
"We didn't try to stab them in the head, if that's what you're thinking," she said.
Sam said, "No, I'm too short to get most of them in the head, but it's really easy to make them follow you. We just let them out of the houses and then led them down here. When we got them to the dock we just hopped into this rubber boat tied up behind the ship and paddled away from the dock. The dummies would just walk right off the edge and sink."
"I didn't see a rubber boat," said the Chief.
"Scavengers took it," said Sam. "We weren't using it anymore anyway. We went back to the houses after we let everyone out and carried everything back here that we might need."
“Well, we won’t be needing anything from the houses around here,” said Kathy. “If this ship has enough ammunition left, it has everything we need. What do you say, Chief? Can this thing take on those gunboats we saw?”
The Chief had been thinking the same thing since he saw the Cormorant, but he wasn’t so sure. The odds were bad. The Cormorant had size and twin fifty caliber guns, but there were twelve of those gunboats. If they could reduce the number a bit and catch them by surprise, then maybe they had a chance. Of course this wasn’t the first time he was outnumbered and outgunned in his life.
Perry was a typical young teenager, and to young teenagers, there were very few topics that were off limits, including age.
“How old are you?” Perry asked around a mouthful of pizza and gestured toward the Chief.
Kathy grinned. She hadn’t even asked the Chief that. She knew he was around her father’s age, but he carried himself like he was much younger.
The Chief looked like he was having to add up the years, his brow furrowed.
He said, “I asked my dad that same question once. You know what he said?”
“That he wasn’t going to tell you?” said Perry.
“No, but close. He said that was for him to know, and for me to find out. So I said back to him that I was trying to find out.”
Perry said, “You just took away my answer. Does that mean I’m not going to find out?”
“That means I’m not going to tell. If you find out, it’s going to have to be some other way than by asking me.”
Perry was persistent, though, and fairly smart for a kid his age. Kathy was enjoying the exchange, and was privately rooting for the kid. The Chief was as physically fit as any man her age, but she had respected the Chief as her senior since the moment she had met him. Even then she had deferred to his wisdom because his age meant experience. She may have been given a blank check by the cruise ship to organize a way to stop the infection from spreading, but when she was introduced to him, he didn’t seem in the least bit offended that a young woman had been given the responsibility. The only person who had been offended was the ship’s doctor, and he was just an ego with legs.
The next question seemed to surprise the Chief, because his eyes found Perry’s as soon as the words left his mouth.