Dead Calm (30 page)

Although each platoon specialized in its own area,
first platoon in scrounging and second platoon in search and
rescue, both were well schooled in how to move around a structure
suspected of having Z’s in it. While Jones and his people dispersed
and started looking for any sign of survivors, Cage split his
soldiers up into three, three person teams and told them to hold
fast.

After checking the building directory in the lobby,
he sent his first team to the licensing office. Two of the men
carried battery packs in case they found a computer to boot up, as
this would make the job of searching the city records easier. If a
computer couldn't be found that could be brought back to life, the
men would have to search the paper files for people who had
received a permit to install an underground fuel storage tank. This
was not always desirable, since they were usually kept in the
basement. Not that that the dead congregated there and made it more
dangerous: it was more of a psychological thing. Basements were
dark, shadowy places that were cluttered and generally spooky. Once
the files had been sorted, addresses were noted to be checked later
for caches of diesel fuel. Once these were located, a squad,
accompanying a tanker truck equipped with an intake pump, would
swing by within a day to collect the liquid gold.

The job of the second team was to locate and secure
any firearms and ammunition. Cage sent them in the direction of the
Police Station. Finding weapons was secondary since the base had a
well-stocked armory, but ammunition was getting scarce as all
available supplies were being diverted to the units fighting in the
dead cities. Team two would start their search at the Sheriff's
Office, where they would look through the files of all the
registered weapons in the county. The most important on the list
being anything that fired .223 caliber, 7.62mm or 5.56mm. The logic
behind this was, where there were guns, there would be
ammunition.

One of the men on this team also carried breaching
charges, as he was tasked with having to break into the evidence
locker and the armory. The C-4 plastic explosive was strong enough
to take a vault door off its hinges. While it was always nice
finding an armory, most of the men were more interested in what the
evidence locker contained. The wide range of items confiscated by
the police and Sheriff were of such variety that sometimes they
were amazed.

For instance, when the team broke into the evidence
locker in the Russellville Police Station, they came across a
homemade flame thrower that was so well constructed it put their
military issue one to shame. They had tried using it on the Z’s,
but found all it did was create flaming dead things that continued
to walk around as if nothing had happened. It took a few minutes
for the brain to literally boil in their skulls and cause them to
drop. The mobile units were the only ones to use this type of
weapon, since they could torch the dead and keep moving. Major Cage
also knew that the men on this team occasionally grabbed some of
the confiscated marijuana they came across. He looked the other way
at this. He did let it be known in a roundabout way that if they
were to take something heavier, like cocaine or heroin for
instance, they would be shot. So far he’d had no problems.

Team three was designated as general scroungers and
Cage let them go do their thing. Three was led by a Corporal who
seemed to have a knack for finding things. He would study aerial
photos and maps of the neighborhood they planned on searching, and
once he arrived at the designated area, would make a beeline for
what was always a bonanza of supplies. In Russellville, he'd found
numerous tornado shelters stocked with food they used to supplement
what was served in the chow hall. He had even unearthed a hidden
bunker erected by a pre-Dead Day survivalist, which yielded
weapons, ammunition and the 12-gauge shotgun Cage carried as his
primary weapon.

Not expecting to find much there, Cage followed team
two as they headed for the Police Station. He wasn't surprised when
he discovered that all the weapons and ammunition had already been
taken, since whoever had barricaded themselves inside the building
would have picked the area clean. He did, however, find a still
used for making moonshine in the evidence locker. He had his men
pack it up for transportation back to the base.

Thinking about how some of his people smoked pot, he
justified taking the still with the reasoning of each to their own.
No matter where they went to scavenge, the only consistent thing
they found was that the liquor stores were picked clean.
Occasionally, a bottle of booze or a couple cases of beer turned up
while searching a house, but this was rare. Due to this shortage,
it had been over two weeks since he'd had a drink. He was trying to
remember how to prepare corn mash when his radio buzzed.

“We found some live ones, over,” Jones voice crackled
from the speaker.

“Location, over,” Cage asked.

“We’re at the jail. It's right above the Courthouse.
I need your guy who's got the C-4, because they’re locked in the
cell block and no one knows where the key is, over.”

“How many people, over?” Cage asked.

“Twenty to thirty, over,” came Jones's reply.

Twenty to thirty Cage repeated to himself. Where in
the hell am I going to put them?

In the past, S and R had only come across small
numbers of survivors. These people were brought back to the base
where they were fed and treated for any medical problems, usually
malnutrition and dehydration, before being transported to one of
the refugee centers being set up in the Dead Free Zone around Fort
Hood. For their short stay at the base, these refugees were
quartered in two tents that had been put aside for this purpose.
These temporary quarters were in no way large enough to handle
thirty people.

I’ll have to figure something out, he told himself.
He contacted his driver and told him to use the more powerful radio
in the Humvee to contact the base and have two more trucks
dispatched to their location. Escorting the man carrying the C-4,
they cautiously made their way through the building back to the
foyer area. From here they took a hallway leading to the
Courthouse. It was a standing order that they always moved in
groups of two or more. If one of you were bit, your partner was
duty bound to put a bullet in your head.

Nearing the end of the corridor where it branched off
to the right, Cage heard voices coming from around the corner. Not
wanting to get shot, he called out, “Two coming in.”

With the point of aim changed from the center mass of
the body to the center mass of the head, the number of accidental
wounds caused by friendly fire had gone down. Unfortunately, the
number of accidental deaths had gone up because of this, so it was
best to be cautious.

“Advance,” came the immediate reply.

Cage rounded the comer and found two men he
recognized from Jones' platoon standing in front of an open door
leading to a flight of stairs. On seeing their commanding officer,
they both came to attention and started to salute, but Cage waved
them off.

“How bad is it?” He asked. Even as the words left his
mouth, the smell hit him and he knew.

The first time that he'd gone with second platoon on
an S and R mission to Russellville, they had come across over forty
Z’s surrounding a house that had been built up on six-foot high
stilts. Constructed this way since it was near a small river that
overflowed its banks at least once every few years, instead of
protecting its owners against flooding, its unique architecture now
protected them from the dead besieging it.

Knowing that someone must be alive inside because the
dead didn't congregate in such numbers for carrion, Cage and his
men quickly dispatched the Z’s and called out to those trapped
inside that it was safe to come out. Not receiving an answer, and
not being able to access the front door since the stairs had been
cut away to keep the dead from reaching it, Cage ordered their
transport truck to be pulled up next to the house so they could
stand on the cab and enter that way.

Cage was the first to climb up into the bed of the
truck and before he even crossed its length the stink hit him.
Feces, urine and the underlying stink of dead, rotten meat. When he
pried the front door open with a crowbar, the stench became so
overpowering that he had to retreat all the way back to the ground.
Jones tried to take his place but started vomiting so powerfully he
almost fell off the truck bed.

The rest of the men stood around looking uneasily at
each other as they wondered who would be chosen next. Cage choked
back his dry heaves, wrapped a bandana around his mouth and nose,
and moved forward. Breathing through his mouth and barely able to
stand the smell, he made it to the doorway. Here he stopped long
enough to draw his pistol, turn on his flashlight, and identify
himself. A weak moaning sound came to him from the rear of the
house. Bolstered by the thought of actually being able to save
someone, he pushed the overwhelming smell from his mind and went
inside.

Listening for the moaning sound again, so he could
identify which direction it came and follow it to its source, all
he could hear was a buzzing noise that grew louder the deeper he
went into the house. Following this sound since he had a good idea
of what caused it, he came across a man and a woman in one of the
back bedrooms.

Cage’s mind flashed to pictures he had seen of people
who had been liberated from World War II concentration camps. They
were the only things in his life's experience he could compare to
the sight in front of him.

Two living skeletons covered with open sores lay on
top of a stained mattress in the center of the room. Surrounding
them were dozens of empty cans that had weeks ago held food and had
been literally licked clean. Two plastic jugs, each a quarter full
of rust colored water, sat on the floor. A short distance beyond
these was the picked clean carcasses of what looked to have been
two dogs and the skeletons of a dozen rats. Looking through an open
door leading off of the room to the right, Cage could see inside a
bathroom that seemed to literally swim before his eyes like a
moving shadow. This was where the buzzing sound came from. It was
infested with thousands of flies. Focusing again on the two people
lying on the mattress, he could see that they too were beset by
flies that buzzed around their sores and crawled across their
bodies.

At the same time sickened and mesmerized by the
sight, it took him a minute to come to his senses. Reality struck
him like a pool cue between the eyes. Calling out for his medics to
come inside on the double, he went to open the window to get some
air moving through the room.

As he reached out to move the curtain aside, a barely
audible voice from one of the skeletons said, “No. You'll let them
in,” and then started crying softly as it asked Cage if he was
real.

Two medics showed up and started tending to the
emaciated couple on the bed, so Cage went to search the rest of the
house. He knew what it contained due to the smell that hung in the
air. On the back porch he found it, the bones of a human
skeleton.

Through his disgust, the thought came to him that it
was ironic for people who were trying to keep from getting eaten to
resort to cannibalism.

He pushed down his revulsion as he considered how to
handle the situation.

Charge the couple with murder? That was impossible
since courts, judges and, thank God, lawyers were a thing of the
past. Even if Major Conway convened a court of law at the base,
whatever verdict and punishment they handed down would never be
held up if things ever went back to normal.

Handle it myself? Martial law had been declared, so
he knew he would be entirely justified in meting out punishment for
any crime he came across.

But what would be the punishment?

Death?

Did the people in this house commit murder? As far as
he knew, there hadn't been a situation like this in the history of
the Arkansas National Guard.

He felt relieved when he decided that he would have
the two people transferred back to the base and dump the problem in
Major Conway’s lap. Not only the legal, but also the moral and
ethical aspects of the situation were far beyond his scope. Plus,
underlying this was the question he had to ask himself; what would
I do if I were trapped in this house?

Standing at the bottom of the stairs in the
Clarksville Courthouse, Cage tentatively sniffed the air and was
relieved. While the smell of human feces and urine were thick in
the air, the smell of human meat was not.

One of the soldiers saw him and said, “It’s pretty
bad upstairs, sir. But I don't think they've been eating each
other.”

The second soldier handed over the gas mask that each
of the people on the S and R team carried and added, “You'll need
this though. With no running water...”

The mask wouldn't completely block out the smell, but
it would cut down on it considerably. He took it with a thank
you.

The other soldier handed his to the man accompanying
Cage, and the two started up the stairs.

When he arrived at the jail area, he saw Jones
carrying on a conversation with someone through a steel door.
Noticing his CO, Jones’ voice sounded hollow through his own
gasmask as he said in greeting, “There's a total of twenty-seven,
sir. Physically they're all in good shape. This used to be a civil
defense shelter so they had food and water. Dysentery seems to be
their biggest problem.”

Rapping the steel door with his knuckles, he added,
“Guy that I’ve been talking to told me that one of the cops who
locked down in here with them got infected a couple weeks ago and
started freaking out. Thought the others were gonna kill him when
they found out, which they were. Late that night, he grabbed all
the weapons and forced everybody in here. Left them some food and
water and just wandered off, sir.”