Last Stand on Zombie Island (18 page)

“So, which committee did you want to help on?” Mack asked an older man who stood there with a cane. He wore a nylon windbreaker for a roller skate business in Michigan over his wife-beater, prickly grey stubble sprouting through sunken cheeks.

“I used to be a sheet metal worker. ‘Tired 21-year ago, but I guess I can help anywhere. My eyes are still good. I just can’t work the burial details,” the man said. Three teeth hung like irregular caramels in his mouth.

After the outbreak, many of the refugees on the island, those displaced from other cities, trapped snowbirds from northern states, and all points north of the bridge sometimes became whoever they wanted to be. Young men who had always been penniless now said they had left huge homes and great jobs behind in the zombie infestation. People trapped in bad marriages that never made it back home to find out what happened to their spouse, simply became single and looking. Some refugees claimed to be lawyers, a few loudly declared themselves as preachers, others who had watched a few episodes of
Greys Anatomy
to be doctors. These doctors, however, would quietly fade back into the crowd when asked to help at the infirmary.

One heavily accented refugee wearing thick suspenders declared he was a dentist and promptly set up shop in an unused strip mall storefront with a desk chair and a pair of channel locks. For the exchange of a can of beef stew, a piece of jewelry or a case of cola you could have a tooth extracted. Sometimes it was even the right one that was pulled. Anesthetic, in the form of a numbing powder of questionable design, was naturally an extra charge.

“They need help on the Coast Watchers; do you have a pair of binoculars at your house?” Mack asked the man with a smile, already writing his name from his newly made name badge on the clipboard for that group. There was a waterpark on the island that made plastic picture ID cards for season ticket holders. The committee had requisitioned their equipment and stock of 10,000 blank badges to make everyone a new ID. Already people joked that it was the last passport you would ever need.

“So where do I report?” the newest member of the Coast Watchers asked Mack.

“Get with the National Guard here in the morning tomorrow. They are setting it up,” she explained to him.

“And I can still get meals?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, your ID is your ration card,” she explained.

Billy watched the man shuffle off, leaving a funk in his wake. He thought of how great it was to have cleaned his clothes the night before. Once you learn to wash your clothes in a 5-gallon pickle bucket with a squirt of dish soap, stirred with a toilet plunger, you have a new lease on life.

People had survived the outbreak in closets, bathrooms, and sheds. More than one person rode it out hugging the carpet under a bed while zombies ran from room to room destroying their home. In an odd comment on subconscious destructiveness hidden in the human psyche, nicer homes were the most targeted by rampaging infected. The survivors were very much into do-it-yourself zombie survival. The downside was they had a society made up exclusively of post-traumatic stress survivors.

In the eleven days since the outbreak and the isolation of the island, everyone had banded together with a few common needs. Since the island was nominally under martial law and all military retirees were recalled to service, three elderly colonels had come forward to offer their services. These relics were the most senior officers on the island and they immediately appointed the stranded Major Reynolds as operational head of the combined military forces on the island. She in turn appointed the old City Manager, George Meaux, to head the civilian administration.

Reynolds then ordered all food, gas, useable firearms, and ammunition collected from local stores and warehoused to safeguard against looting and hoarding. Stone’s MPs, along with the remaining city and county employees, went about securing these stockpiles. To ensure that everyone who needed the items received them in appropriate quantities, a ration system was set up so that every resident accounted for would be given a daily allotment of food. Everything else was dispersed by waiting list.

However, to get your food, you had to sign up to assist one of the newly created Committees of Public Salvation. No work, no food.

Billy and the remains of the Charter Boat Association formed their own committee. These leather-skinned men watched over the island’s docks, icehouse with generator, bait shop, and the marina’s precious supply of diesel fuel. They rotated who went out every day to search for fish for the population of nearly 1500 remaining residents and refugees.

Other groups were set up to try and get food plots planted before winter in makeshift greenhouses, cook meals in the city park’s large barbeque pit, collect radio equipment for regaining contact with the outside world, getting the sewer system up again, and above all, clearing away the dead.

With tons of rotting corpses, stagnant un-flushed toilets and molding refrigerators all along the length of the island, flies had become the state bird. Millions of them lined the walls and ceilings of every building. Big, blue, horse flies that could cover a dollar coin; small button-sized black flies; fat, thimble-sized green flies; all made for an entomologist’s wet dream. Improvised flytraps became the most popular DIY item in Gulf Shores and a number of designs freely circulated.

Death was a fog over the beach town. The thick, ugly, cloud of decay wafted everywhere. Death has a special smell. Nothing quite smells like it, and everyone that remained alive on the island knew what it was. When the city dump trucks would rattle by with tarps thrown over bodies, they would leave a lingering odor of despair behind that would hang still in the air long after they turned the corner. Volunteer body snatchers with t-shirts and torn bed sheets wrapped over their faces hung from the truck’s sides, but never from the tailgate. The fluid from the corpses ran down the tailgate and fell on the road. A water truck would pass afterward to hose the road down with a solution made from salt water and bleach as fears that the infection was still alive in the trail of black ooze left in the truck’s wake.

No one knew how many had perished in town. The exact number of dead could never be known, hundreds definitely, thousands more than likely. At first, there were notepads for each truck and each crew to write the names and numbers of dead found. However, nobody was much up for writing things down, much less digging through encrusted pockets for wallets in the hope of identifying the dead. As volunteers came and left to perform the ghastly task, things fell by the wayside. It was very much hit-and-miss, with some crews returning with piles of recovered personal effects, others with almost none.

The burial details would set up in two groups of volunteers. Many signed up each day. One group would dig graves; the second would transport the bodies. At first, they would dig muddy holes; the island’s water table so low that after digging two or three feet into the sandy clay, they would strike water. It was eventually decreed to burn the bodies. The trucks ran, the pyre’s flames lit the night skies for weeks, and ash rained on rooftops and in the tops of the green southern pines.

The best guesstimate was that some 4000 bodies had been collected from the bridge and all along the coast and island. If you did the math, you came to realize that this added up to some 300-tons of human remains. Word got out that if you forced yourself to smile a huge grin, stretching your face to where your lips almost touch your ears, it is physically impossible to throw up. This produced maniacally smiling cleanup crews moving through the island. It hurt to smile.

In the beginning, the groups would treat each body with gentle care but after each volunteer had lugged his tenth or twentieth body a mental disconnect would form and the heavy lifting became a simple task of lugging firewood or luggage. The volunteers would often find a friend, co-worker, or relative in the course of their search. Too often, they would only be able to recognize them from the contents of their wallet after the body had already been thrown on the pile.

Knowing that the blood and tissue of the bodies were infectious, a volunteer with a backpack full of sandwich bags and rubber gloves would place the jewelry and personal effects from the bodies into a bag and seal it closed. In the Community Center, the bags were examined but were not to be opened, nor kept, by anyone.

Once the owner of the bag had been identified, the name and information on the contents were written down and the bag destroyed in a fire made in a 55-gallon drum. The only items that were kept out of the bags were wedding bands as often those items were unique and/or had inscription on them. After a soak in pure bleach, the rings were turned over to anyone that could identify them.

A five-gallon bucket was filled halfway with wedding rings after the first week.

The truth was that the world’s balance had shifted. In modern times, the news always carried the numbers of dead and dying. Now the numbers were so great, it was just easier to count the living and give them a ration card.

“So how’s fishing been there, gunslinger?” Captain Stone asked as he walked up to Billy and Mac’s table.

“Not too bad, the kids and I caught a few hundred white trout last night and some nice tripletails. Filled the coolers up anyway,” Billy said. The fish were small, with few being over two pounds in weight, but he was saving his diesel by staying close to shore. The fall finfish migration was wrapping up offshore and before long he and the rest of the charter men would have to go to deep-water in search of grouper and tuna, and burning irreplaceable fuel.

“Fish soup for lunch again today then I guess?” Stone said with a laugh. The volunteer cooks had soon run out of fishmeal and had taken to alternatively smoking fish on the grill one day then making fish soup, politely referred to as
bouillabaisse
or
croaker gumbo
with whatever ingredients they could muster the next day.
You hook it, we cook it,
was the motto of the volunteer chefs. Yesterday had been smoked mullet, courtesy of a group of charter men from the
Weight in Sea
and the
Steel Hooked
who had spent the day with gillnets in the shallows.

“Well, nobody can say we aren’t getting our omega-3s! Hope someone finds a forgotten warehouse full of Charmin here in the next few days,” Billy said. The change in diet and lack of sanitation had been taking its toll on everyone. “We’re running low at the house.”

“I can have one of my patrols drop a pack or two off. There are certain high peaks of power that I have ascended to recently,” Stone laughed. Without zombies trying to gnaw on his arms for a few days, he was almost likable.

“You can come on by tonight if you are free, we’ll set an extra place at the table,” Mack interjected.

Billy almost had a twinge of jealously.

“Ah kept the best fish for yourself, eh?” Stone said.

“No, using the last of the meat in the deepfreeze. The generator is low on propane so we are emptying to freezer out in preparation for the end of electricity. Tonight is pot-roast and the last of the potatoes,” Billy explained.

Stone nodded in agreement. “It’s a date. Where and what time?”

“Our house is the last on the right before the Fort. Seven o’clock.”

“Deal.”

“Bring toilet paper,” Billy said. He was not smiling.

— | — | —

ChapteR 23

“You have to be shitting me,” Reynolds asked the 3-Blind-Mice. The Air Force Major was rapidly losing her faith in the new chain of command.

The ‘3-Blind-Mice’ was the term of endearment for the three highest-ranking recalled retired officers. All had been full-bird colonels of one sort or another. The group was forged as young officers in Vietnam and all had multiple stories about South East Asia. One was an academy ringknocker and mentioned it every chance he could, as if you could possibly miss the giant gold service academy ring on his old withered claw. The youngest of the colonels had last been on active duty during Reganomics. They, by rights, were the head of the military establishment on the island and they decided to rule by council.

“Barring communication with your unit being re-established, we have decided to leave you in place as the overall tactical command of the forces on the island. We will standby in an advisory capacity and will focus on strategic planning while George Meaux will continue as civilian administrator until local elections can be held for a new City Council,” the Ringknocker said, a perfectly trimmed Q-tip bright white moustache adorning his lip.

“With all due respect sir, what does that mean?” Reynolds asked, shooing a fly away from her face.

“You have demonstrated solid performance as a joint operations commander in the past week and you will continue to do so. Captain Stone will continue in his role as ground forces commander, Coast Guard Lieutenant Jarvis as naval forces commander, and both will answer to you— who in turn will submit reports to our S-3 section here,” the Ringknocker continued.

“You have an S-3 section?” Reynolds asked. Her jaw was hurting from the clenching and grinding of her teeth.

“Yes, Colonel Maythers is S-3 over Operations; Colonel Blakledge is S-4 over Logistics. I, as the most senior due to time in grade and being a regular, am assuming the roles of S-1 and S-2 as well as the overall unit commander of the Council,” he said.