Last Stand on Zombie Island (40 page)

“We have aircraft below. Look!” Doug yelled excitedly.

Reynolds shook her head. “That giant helicopter there is a CH-54 Tarhe. The one next to it is an OH-6. They were withdrawn from service just after Vietnam.”

“So, let’s set down and gas them up. You can fly one back and I will follow behind you in the
Depplin
. The coast looks clear enough.”

“Not gonna happen. This is the base museum. Those birds have had their wings clipped. The only way they are going to move is with a crane.”

Doug was quiet while he let it sink in. “Where do you think all the soldiers went?”

She shook her head again but did not answer. It was clear that the base had been evacuated. The fact that there were no signs of a battle meant the troops pulled out rather than fight for the installation. Railway lines led away from the base in all four cardinal directions, but it takes days to load an entire brigade onto trains and ship them somewhere. The fact that, other than the occasional truck or hummer parked here or there, there was not a single vehicle on the mega base spoke volumes about the completeness of the withdrawal.

“What next?” Doug asked.

“Twenty degrees off of compass almost due north. Go ahead and rise back to 2500, full throttle. We are burning daylight.”

Doug complied, pulling back on the lever that controlled the elevator and made the tip of the
Depplin
point to the sky as he increased the rpms on the Geo engine. A few more blasts on the burners kept the taco envelope rigid. As they moved north back along Highway 49, Reynolds had him veer over Interstate 59, which would take them exactly to their next destination at the center of the state in Meridian. Just as they popped over the interstate freeway, they saw the traffic below change from the occasional stalled car to a solid mass of green-grey military vehicles.

For nearly an hour, they passed over the graveyard of a thirty-mile long stalled convoy of hummers, tanks, and trucks wedged together bumper to bumper. Radiating out on both sides of the convoy was scorched earth and grass, drainage culverts full of bodies, and wandering infected. After having descended again to just under a thousand feet to get a closer look, Reynolds could see hundreds of bodies in civilian clothes intermingled with even more bodies wearing the same type of Army uniforms that Stone’s MPs wore in Gulf Shores. It was only occasionally that a staggering infected could be seen. Sadly, it was usually in uniform.

“Looks like one hell of a fight they put up,” Doug’s voice came through the headset over the engine and the wind.

“They bottle-necked and were a sitting duck. Probably should have just stayed back at the base instead of fighting their way through all of this interstate traffic. Must be three hundred vehicles down there.”

“Custer’s last stand type of stuff here.”

They moved on in silence for another hour along I-59 through the charred remnants of the industrial town of Laurel, over rotting acre after acre of chicken farms near Vossberg, and onward towards Meridian. There they saw the tops of oaks and popcorn trees whose yellow and red leaves broke up the green monotony of Southern Mississippi’s pine forests. Un-mowed fields of grass grew next to white-dotted cotton fields and high stalks of corn in the agricultural area. Without farmers to gather the crops, they grew fat and provided fodder for thousands of deer and other ruminant animals.

On the outskirts of Meridian, one of the largest cities in Mississippi was the target of the
Depplin
and her crew, Meridian Naval Air Station. It was used as a training base by the Navy and was also the home of a large wing of Air National Guard refueling aircraft. The 3-Blind-Mice had added it to the flight plan because whenever the bases on the coast would evacuate for a hurricane, they would often send their planes and personnel to Meridian to sit out the storm. It was possible that the base had been the destination of the now-annihilated battalions along I-59 from Camp Shelby.

Reynolds had refused to get her hopes up and she was repaid in kind. Row after row of colorful white and red navy Goshawk training planes sat picture perfect outside hangers that dated back to World War II. Pornographically, a mass of grey skinned infected numbering hundreds if not thousands had taken to attacking the aircraft and demolishing them with their own bloody hands. They crowded the cockpits, hung out of the engine intakes and stood on the wings like an army of ants consuming a squad of captured dragonflies.

“Well, Doug, I think we have seen all we need to here. Next turn, due east, let’s start heading back home.”

With that, she felt the wind buffet the
Depplin
as its pilot yawed the rudder and powered into a wide turn away from the Naval Air Station and back into Alabama.

— | — | —

ChapteR 45

Billy walked along the bulkhead that kept his back yard from falling into Mobile Bay with two old five-gallon pickle buckets in each hand. These days, pickle buckets were becoming the all-purpose survival tool along the island. Between carrying water from working wells and faucets, to bathing, holding waste when plumbing had backed up, washing clothes and a dozen other tasks, they were indispensable. Even with the electricity flowing to the island from the offshore windmill, it was enough only to power part of the city itself, with none remaining for the 26-miles of lines outside of town.

One of Billy’s buckets was full, the other empty. The full one was the day’s laundry soaking. The empty one was for dinner.

He set down the full bucket to warm in the sun along the bulkhead and continued alone down its length. Facing the calm Mobile Bay, his backyard had a view across the still water for miles.

Sea smoke, the mist rising from the water because of the different temperatures of water and air, hung low over the bay. The mist settled on the water and obscured anything more than a mile off. For the whole time he had been there, he had rarely looked out over the Bay and not seen a boat. Now it was rare to see anything but the occasional seabird or rolling porpoise fin chasing baitfish in the shallows. All of the normal sounds that you take for granted, air conditioners, cars, etc. were suddenly gone. He had to admit; he did not mind the change too much.

As he walked, he reached down to the edge of the bulkhead and retrieved a blue nylon boat line from the water, letting it run through his hand as he moved. Every fifteen feet his hand caught a lead tied to the line that held a shower curtain ring with the head of a decapitated mullet impaled through the eye socket. Invariably each fish head would have a blue crab holding onto it for dear life. Too selfish to turn the head loose to save their own life, the crabs held on with their claws until Billy shook them into the bucket and threw the lead with the fish head still attached back into the Bay.

Cast netting for mullet for yesterday’s dinner left him a pile of mullet heads, so he found a use for them. He had learned the trick as a kid growing up in Pascagoula, selling the crabs to Bozo’s Seafood for a half-dollar a pop. After the end of his 400-feet of rope and the 25 leads that ran off it, he had 20 nice, fat crabs skittering around in the bottom of the half-full bucket.

The searchlight from the Coast Guard cutter a few hundred yards away sliced through the sea smoke and hit Billy’s eyes. To make no mistake that they were there, the foghorn sounded briefly, scattering a flock of terns parked in the high grass around the bulkhead.

“Dad, they are here,” Cat called from the back porch.

“Yeah, I guess today they are the Crab Cops.”

Billy sighed and picked up the bucket of crabs before walking back towards the house as slow as he could. Standing there on the porch was his daughter in a ratty pair of blue jeans and an old sweatshirt. Her hair was…crazy.

He passed her the bucket to which she only glanced in and rolled her eyes. “Hey, listen. I just wanted to tell you…”

Cat looked at him and her eyes welled up. She nodded her head. “I know,” she said as she hugged him.

“Where is your brother? He still asleep?” Billy asked as he wiped his fishy hands on a towel.

“He’s asleep on the couch. They got the blimp off this morning and he came back home and passed out,” she said and only just briefly hesitated before she asked, “Do we have to go to school today?”

Billy laughed as he walked with her through the house. “No, I guess not, but definitely tomorrow. And don’t give Mack too much shit while I’m gone.”

“You going to check on mom while you are in Biloxi?” Cat asked as he kissed Wyatt on a grimy forehead.

Billy had not even thought of that. His ex-wife had never gotten along that well with him since the move and, other than on visitation hand-off, they rarely spoke. He did not know what to say, and if he did, how to even say it.

Cat shrugged, “It’s ok, don’t worry about it. I know its lame but I called her during the outbreak and left a goodbye message on her voicemail. I didn’t know if she got it or not.”

“I’m sorry, baby girl,” he said.

She pressed something into his hand and he looked at it. It was a locket her mother had given her years before and it contained a picture of the two of them, mother and daughter together. “Could you leave this there for her?” she asked.

Billy hugged her again and walked out the front door towards the ferry dock alone. He could see the blue uniformed coastguardsmen tying the bowlines of the cutter to the landing next to the
Fooly Involved
. Billy had moved his boat there from the marina to keep an eye on it. It had seemed a shame to let a 100-foot dock go to waste.

“Gonna leave without saying goodbye?” the redhead asked as he stepped onto the concrete landing. Mack sat on the fighting chair of the
Fooly Involved
, a blanket across her legs and a baseball cap pulled low over her head.

“I figured you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you. I left Cat some crabs for dinner.”

“That’s it? You left Cat some crabs for dinner and you are gone?”

He picked up the duffle bag he had on the deck of the
Fooly Involved
and shouldered the 80-cubic foot scuba tank. “Sorry, they are waiting,” Billy said, gesturing towards two Coasties walking up to them from the cutter.

“You are the most broken man I have ever met,” she said, walking away from him on the dock back towards the house.

The bald headed Cook from the cutter reached out and took the scuba tank off Billy’s hands. “There is only one thing in the world that scares me and that’s redheads,” the Cook said with a laugh.

««—»»

Billy sat alone in the mess area of the
Fish Hawk
, directly under the ship’s bridge, and watched Will Ferrell. More correctly, he watched an SNL collection blue ray disk featuring the brillo-haired comic on the flat screen TV against the wall. The Cook banged away in the galley whipping up some pancakes for Billy and the eight Coasties on the ship.

“Mr. Harris, to the bridge, please,” barked the Cutter’s commander over the ship’s public address system.

Billy picked up his cup of coffee and moved up the ladder well at the end of the mess deck and up into the bridge above. There was no way he was going to abandon a cup of real coffee.

On the bridge was Jarvis peering over a chart and the Cutter’s Bosun at the throttle driving the ship.

“You may want to get suited up, Mr. Harris. We are about five minutes out from the
Pamyat Ilicha
,” Jarvis said.

“Great, it’s what I live for,” Billy said, raising his coffee cup in a toast to announcement. He drained the cup, exited the bridge, and climbed the ladder down to the boat deck below. There, two seamen, wearing lifejackets and pistol belts, were getting the small boat ready to launch.

Billy stripped down to his shorts, sat down on the winch box for the boat, and donned a wetsuit from his bag followed by the buoyancy compressor, fins, tank, and regulator. He fished up his pants from the deck and, before stuffing them into the now empty bag; he pulled out his old .38 and tossed it to one of the seamen.

“Hold on to this for me will ya,” the charterboat owner said as he zipped the bag closed and pushed it to the side.

Jarvis appeared like the proverbial boogeyman, coal black and dead serious in the morning sunlight. He passed the yellow pelican case over to Billy.

“So let me go over this again. The small boat brings me to the amidships of the chicken boat, I go over the side, stick your Tupperware pipe bomb a fathom under water of the plimsoll line, and we beat feet back, right?”

“Right.”

“How do I arm this thing?”

“Don’t worry about that part, the Engineer did it about three minutes ago. You got 57 left,” Jarvis said grimly.

Billy felt the cutter slow and he looked over his shoulder at the streaked rusty freighter a thousand yards away. Without a word, he stood, passed the yellow case to the seaman waiting in the small boat, and then stepped up and over the inflatable wall of the boat, catching his swim fin as he did. Only moments after the cutter stopped, the hydraulic door opened up in the ships stern, and the seaman at the controls of the small boat nodded to the one by the winch. With a pop and a fiberglass-on-metal
zzzzzzp
, the small boat slid down the incline and out into the Gulf of Mexico.