The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now (20 page)

I gestured toward Chase, and everyone instinctively looked at him with an accusing look.

“I haven’t been bit,” he said with a little too much defiance.
 

“No one says you have been,” said Kathy, “but ask Olivia. We have to check everyone just in case.”

Olivia took Chase by the shoulders and looked straight into his eyes. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw some attraction Olivia had toward the younger man when she got that close to his face. He was about twenty-five years old, and even though Olivia was ten to fifteen years older than him, he seemed to enjoy her attention.

“Listen to me, Chase,” she said. “These people saved my life, and now they saved yours. They did it because they’re good people, so what more do they need to do before you really begin to trust them?”

Chase looked from one of us to the other, and his defiance melted. He leaned against the smooth wall of the corridor and let himself slide down to the floor. He pulled up the leg of his pants and showed us a nasty raw area that went completely around his ankle.

“Rope burn,” he said. “They tied a rope around my ankle and dragged me behind a boat when they brought me here.”

Doctor Bus got down on the floor and took a closer look.
 

“This should have been treated days ago,” he said, “but it should heal well once I clean it out. It’s not infected yet.”

To show him there were no hard feelings, I offered him a hand to help him get up.

Doctor Bus said, “Let’s get him to the infirmary, but I’m just going to clean the wound. I think a hot bath and some food are what he needs right now.”

Bus and I took Chase from Allison and supported him the rest of the way to the surgical suite. We could see that he was beginning to loosen up around us, but I couldn’t really blame him for wondering if he hadn’t gone from one cage to another. He had seen what Larson and his men had done to the other prisoners, and he had fully expected to be a victim of their treatment, too.

The Chief took Tom aside and whispered a few words. They walked off together with their heads aimed toward the floor. My guess was that he wanted to talk with him about Allison, and it was a conversation that needed to be private.

Kathy and Olivia took another turn in the corridor and headed for the kitchen. I could hear the excitement in Olivia’s voice as she talked about putting together a big meal for the men. Kathy had been around us long enough to know we would eat anything, but Chase was probably who Olivia was trying to impress.

Bus helped Chase up onto an examining table and cut away his jeans with a pair of scissors. The antiseptic he used made Chase wince, but it was obvious that he knew he was being helped, and his attitude toward us began to soften.

“Who are you guys anyway,” he asked, “and where are we?”

“I’m Ed, and this is Doctor Bus,” I said, “and you’re in a bunker under Fort Sumter. A bunker that was supposed to save any high ranking politicians who could reach it in the event of a major disaster. But I don’t think they planned on zombies.”

“They aren’t zombies,” he said. “Zombies are controlled by people. Those things aren’t controlled by anybody.”

Bus and I looked at each other with an expression that asked, “Did I hear him say that?”

“Run that by me again, Chase. Did you just say they aren’t zombies?”

He started to repeat what he had said, but I put up a hand and stopped him.
 

“Never mind,” I said. “You and the Chief are going to get along with each other just fine.”

Over the next hour while I helped Chase get to one of the many private rooms where he could get a hot bath, I learned that he was from Atlanta and had moved to Charleston to go to college. He had seen Olivia around campus, and had a crush on her. He knew she was a lot older than him, but he had been trying to work up the nerve to ask her out when the infection began.

I told him about our group, and in particular about how I had met Jean and knew what it was like to fall head over heals in love with someone in a short time. I told him not to wait until it was too late to let her know how he felt. It was funny, but that simple comment seemed to make us feel like old friends. The defiance and fear out in the corridor when I saw him limping just seemed to melt away.

After his first bath in longer than he could remember, I found Chase a set of coveralls that fit, and he looked like he had always been a member of our group. The supplies in the bunkers were remarkably similar when it came to clothing and weapons, so we stayed with what worked, and the thick denim of the coveralls afforded some small protection from the teeth of the infected dead. Of course I didn't know yet that it had failed Allison.

Where the similarities between the shelters ended was in the quality of the food and other amenities, such as liquor and desserts. By the time Chase and I arrived in the dining hall, Kathy and Olivia had prepared a meal fit for kings. Chase hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks, so hotdogs and hamburgers would have satisfied him, but the deep freeze units in the kitchen had vacuum sealed cuts of beef that thawed quickly in the microwave. Whoever was supposed to stay here was also supposed to eat well. I thought Chase was going to cry when the smells hit him, and the rest of us were also starving.

I noticed that the Chief made sure Tom was sitting next to Kathy, and there seemed to be an agreement not to talk about Allison yet. The last thing the Chief wanted to see was Tom distancing himself from her because he had feelings for Kathy before Allison died. Kathy was being more or less forced into normal behavior by Olivia who couldn’t get enough of having another female around and getting the attention of a handsome younger man. It wasn’t long before the smiles became infectious, and even Tom began to feel the effects of good company.

We told our stories to each other. I told about how I came to have a shelter that was perfect in so many ways, and I explained to Olivia and Chase how Kathy, the Chief, and Jean came into my life.

When we told them about some of our trips away from Mud Island, Olivia asked, “If it’s so safe there, why do you keep leaving?”

“I think we leave Mud Island because surviving isn’t enough,” I said. “Surviving is also fighting back, and it’s also finding a way to make it last. You know, the future isn’t just being alive. It’s knowing that you will still be alive next year and the year after that.”

“Well put,” said the Chief. “This time we need to get power restored to Mud Island, and after that, believe it or not, we have to find another backup system and put it in place. We can’t just go on believing the power supply will last forever.”

The discussion went around the table until it got to Bus. Olivia and Chase were really wrapped up in his story because he was an insider of sorts. Someone had given him the knowledge about the other shelters, and he had shared it all with the Chief. As long as there was another shelter to go to, there would be a place for them to be safe.

“Have you considered giving up on Mud Island and moving to a shelter that hasn’t lost its primary power source?” asked Chase.
 

“It could come to that eventually,” said the Chief. He glanced at me because he knew how much that island meant to me now. “But each shelter has its own positives and negatives. Tom said once that a shelter had to have three qualities.”

Tom was distracted, but he had been listening, and he picked up where the Chief left off.

“It has to be safe from the infected, safe from the living who would want it for themselves, and safe from natural disasters or the elements. You can haul supplies into a shelter until you don’t have room to move, but in the end, it comes down to those three things.”

I added for Tom that he and his daughter moved into the houseboat we had tied to the dock at Mud Island, and he immediately knew it was only safe from the infected, and even the infected could walk right up to the door. It was easy enough to knock them off the dock, but it wasn’t safe to go outside.

“So, Chief, where to from here? Now that you’ve lost your plane, you’re limited to the boat and walking. Walking doesn’t appear to be safe anywhere,” said Chase.

“Flying didn’t turn out to be the safest thing in the long run,” said the Chief.
 

He regretted it as soon as he said it, but at the same time it had to be said. In a world where people were still dying from infectious bites from other people, you couldn’t always be sensitive, even if you tried to be.

Tom looked up from the food he had been just pushing around with his fork and gave the Chief an understanding nod.

He said, “We need to figure out who shot you down, Chief. Whether we go back by boat or by plane, we’re going to be facing some opposition on the water. Have you given any thought to how we’re going to get by them?”

“No, I haven’t really been able to process it, Tom. We still have to get the line laying barge up to Mud Island, and that means we have to tow it. To tow it we need a tugboat that’s completely fueled. That much I think we can handle if we don’t run into more trouble, but nothing seems to come too easy these days.”

“It’s not all on you to figure out,” said Kathy.
 

“I know,” said the Chief, “but it’s in my nature.”

I sensed that the conversation at the table was starting to sound like defeat even though there were two people with us who had every reason to celebrate. To them the world couldn’t have gotten much worse. There wasn’t a need to ask what had been done to them while in captivity. It was enough to know that they were in the hands of madmen and had suffered. Now they were sitting at a dining room table in a shelter that would defy entry and protect them from harm. There was good food in front of them, and judging by the looks on their faces, they were happy.
 

I stood up from my seat and asked everyone for their attention. First I raised my glass and said a toast to the Chief for getting us this far. Then I said a toast to Allison and reminded everyone that this wasn’t a game we were playing, but I had a proposition to make.

Everyone was wondering where I was going with my speech, or if I had gotten myself drunk.

“If we’re going to do more than survive, then let’s take the fight to the infected,” I said. “Let’s do more than just fix the power problem on Mud Island. Let’s get to work on the long term goals. Let’s decide what we’re going to do with the other shelters, get people living in them, and get them organized. Let’s build up the defenses around them and then when we decide to just kick back and let the world go by, let someone else keep the fight going.”

I sat down expecting them to all cheer my little outburst, but everyone just sat there staring at me. Maybe I was drunk, because I was suddenly sure I had just made a total fool of myself. Then they started cheering.

The Chief was the first to speak, and what he said made everyone laugh until they had tears running down their cheeks.

“My friends,” he said, as he rose from his seat at the table, “I believe young Eddie Jackson has just given me the first and biggest wedgie I’ve ever had.”

The idea of anyone giving the Chief a wedgie was right up there with believing in zombies, but the visual image was enough to make everyone stop licking their wounds.

Kathy stood up along with the Chief and raised a glass in my direction.

“To Eddie Jackson, the man who gave the Chief a wedgie and lived to tell about it.”
 

She had downed her fair share of wine and giggled, but with her beautiful blonde hair hanging loose over one shoulder she managed to be the leader we knew she could be.

“Ed has it right,” she said. “I think Doctor Bus would be able to back me up if I said the builders of these shelters had a plan in mind. They weren’t supposed to just survive on their own. They were supposed to be part of a network, and someone needs to get that network up and running.”

Doctor Bus was solemn when he stood. He looked at each of us and raised his glass to everyone at the table one at a time.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I guess I should have been more thoughtful about my peers who built the shelters. I have to admit. I was so caught up in the gravity of this unprecedented world disaster that I forgot that was the original intent of the shelters. We had meetings. We talked about each type of disaster, and we planned for how we would hold on by our fingertips in our own shelters, and then how we would save our country. What none of us expected was this type of disaster. If it is now left to us to begin picking up the pieces, then let’s talk about fixing the power problem on Mud Island, let’s get it done, and then let’s start planning how to get every one of the shelters populated with good people.”

Chase looked around and said, “Wow, you folks have forgotten how to celebrate.”

That earned him a round of laughter and even some applause. It wasn’t like us to sit around licking our wounds, but it had been a busy day. Everyone agreed that it was time to turn in and get some rest, feeling a bit better after Bus had given his speech. He was right. We had to get started with a long range plan, even if it meant going into a city block by block until the infected were cleared, but it logically should begin with the shelters.

Kathy caught Tom by the arm as we drifted away from the table and asked if he could spare her a few minutes to talk. He was reluctant at first, but he gave in when she looked hurt. They headed for one of the exits that would take them to a room that resembled a library. It had big, overstuffed furniture in it and looked like something suitable for long, private talks. That was what they needed.