Last Stand on Zombie Island (9 page)

In quiet Gulf Shores, it was rare to hear sirens, but that day she had heard them nonstop. First coming from one direction and then another. Once she looked out the window just in time to see a line of camouflaged military hummers race past.

The sound of what at first she thought were firecrackers and then realized were gunshots only added to her anxiety.

She looked up from putting her battery back in her smartphone, hoping it would jumpstart its connection, and saw fast movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned and looked towards the street and saw children running past. She was an eternal clock-watcher, and lived her day one sixty-second minute at a time while at work but she did not need the clock to tell her that it was not time for school to be out.

One of the children turned and ran right at her drive-through window. He was a young boy about twelve with a backpack as big as he was. The boy’s face was red from exertion and his long hair and side swept bangs were wet with sweat.

“Help me, let me in, please!” he yelled, sweaty palms flat on the drive through window.

She shook her head and tried to explain that she simply could not.

He pounded on the window and looked frantic.

“Get away from the window or I’m gonna call the cops. You can’t be here. This isn’t funny,” she called out over the intercom, losing her patience.

The boy shook his head and pounded again on the window, his sweaty palms making little wet smudges where they had made contact with the plate glass.

“Please!” he yelled drawing out the end of the word, his voice almost a squeal.

She pressed the duress alarm button under the counter to summon the police to her location within three minutes. Mackenzie did not think that the Justin Bieber gang was robbing her but she knew she did not want to get involved in whatever was going on. The police could sort it out.

“You don’t understand…they are coming for me. They are right behind me,” he continued, dancing around under the drive through canopy waving his arms.

The boy turned and looked over his shoulder with his mouth open. He looked back at her horrified but could not make a sound.

Mackenzie saw three boys explode around the side of the bushes, one tripping over the bush but the other two running right for the sweaty boy. The sweaty boy shrugged off his heavy backpack and threw it at the pair of kids trying to tackle him, knocking them away. This enabled him to take off running again. He made it to the other side of the bank, opposite of Mackenzie where the other teller, absent today, worked an identical drive through window. He pounded again on the glass across from her and implored her to help him.

He kept this up for a good thirty seconds before the three kids who were chasing him found the other side of the bank and he started kicking and pushing them off, running again. The fact that he was slightly larger and looked to be a year or two older made just enough of a difference to be able to slip away from the trio again.

“You kids need to cut this out, the police are coming!” Mackenzie called over the external intercoms, hoping it would end this childhood fight and scare the kids away.

She did not have any kids and was not going to put up with these brats. Finally having enough of it, she pulled open the side door of the bank branch. “Get out of here right now!” she screamed out at the four kids.

The sweaty kid made a beeline for her and ran as hard as he could directly for her and the open door. Before she could close it, he bounded inside and pushed her away, slammed the door closed behind him. Within a second, the sound of the three kids chasing him pounding on the other side of the steel door and scratching at it with their bare fingernails was almost deafening inside the small bank branch.

“Get the hell out of here. You cannot be here. This area is off limits to everyone but bank personnel,” she said to the intruder.

His chest heaved and he fought to catch his breath, collapsing down the inside of the door onto the tile below as he shook his head.

While he did so, she grabbed her keychain and found her small leather-wrapped can of pepper spray hanging from the ring. She pointed it in his general direction while trying to figure out how to use it.

“Look, kid, get out of here or I’m going to use this on you. The police are already on their way. You are in big trouble.”

“Lady,” he heaved, “everyone is in big trouble today.”

Mackenzie sat with her pint-sized intruder for thirty minutes before the three kids outside stopped banging the door. The police response time had come and gone almost a half hour previously with no blue lights or sirens arriving.

“So, now what?” the boy asked.

“Are your friends still out there?”

“They aren’t my friends.”

“What was the deal with them anyway?” she asked.

“I have no idea. All I know is that they canceled school today in second period and made us all line up in the halls outside our classes. Then these two kids busted out of the office attacking and biting everyone. The kids that were bit then flipped out and started attacking other kids. The school nurse and some teachers tried to stop the fights but…” he trailed off and then closed his mouth and looked away from her.

She sat there for a minute and processed how to change the subject. There had been no more traffic in the drive-through. Operations had not called her back. No cops came to the silent alarm. She still could not get any worthwhile signal on her smartphone or complete a call on the landline.

“So what’s your name?” she asked.

“Wyatt.”

“Mine is Mackenzie. Mack for short. How old are you?”

“Twelve, almost thirteen.”

Then more awkward silence. They sat there for nearly an hour with no conversation. What do you talk to a 12-almost-13 year old about, she asked herself.

“Did you have any kids that went to the elementary school?”

She shook her head, “No I don’t have any kids.”

“That’s good. Then at least you didn’t have anyone there you are going to ask me about,” he said with the lack of political correctness that only a 12-year old can have.

“Do you want me to try and call your parents?”

He shook his head. “I already tried from my cellphone at school. I sent them text messages but didn’t get anything back.”

He pulled a phone out of his pocket and held it up, “Still nothing,” he said, showing her.

She knew the feeling. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

He nodded.

They went over her lunch and shared a navel orange and a turkey sandwich. He declined her offer of a fat-free yogurt and she quietly ate it herself.

“You don’t know what you are missing…” she joked, finishing the yogurt off, “…tastes just like red velvet cake.”

“I don’t like red velvet cake.”

More silence.

“Where do your parents work?” she asked.

“My dad is a charter boat captain and my mom is a nurse. We live here with him and my mom lives in Biloxi.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Where does your husband work?”

She wrinkled her face, “I’m not married. Don’t even have a boyfriend.”

“I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“Ah ok, well that’s good to know but you aren’t really my type,” she joked.

“The last time I saw her she was being choked by the boys that chased me here,” he said in a quiet voice. “I should have saved her.”

“Don’t say things like that,” she said to the boy.

He started to cry softly. Big tears rolled down his young smooth face.

She instinctively reached out to hug the boy because that is what you are supposed to do, right? She was horrible at this sort of thing and just appeared to be wooden. An hour previous, she had called the cops on this kid and now she was holding him while he cried.

She should have called in sick.

— | — | —

ChapteR 11

George Meaux did not know whether he was going to have a heart attack or a stroke first, but was sure one would finish him off before the next sunrise. He was the city manager for Gulf Shores. There was a mayor but they were for kissing babies and cutting ribbons. Under the City’s form of government, it was George, appointed by and serving at the will of the city council, who carried out the day-to-day operations of the town. George fixed all the problems, smoothed out all of the sore spots and hurt feelings, and made everyone work together by hook or crook. He had spent twenty years doing it for one city or another, the past half dozen of which at Gulf Shores. However, nowhere in his years at Howard University working on a masters in City Planning, did he have a class on how to keep a city together in a pandemic.

“Can we all just quiet down and take this one step at a time?” George said from his seat at the head of the city council’s table.

The town’s police chief, deputy fire chief, and a National Guard Captain sat among the City Council members. Only three of the five Council members had made it to the meeting. The other two council members, along with the fire chief and head of the city’s emergency management department, were missing.

“James, what is the situation with the police department?” George asked the police chief.

The man took a deep breath and looked at George before he spoke. He looked as if he had had his ass kicked personally by Mike Tyson. Not today’s Mike either, but old-school, eat-your-children Mike.

“I’ve got 22 certified officers on the payroll plus 6 investigators. We had five officers on shift this morning and only one of those, the Sergeant, has been located. I have my investigators out in body armor conducting crowd control. There have been reports of looters already. We have called everyone in but few have shown up. I have lost at least two killed already in this…riot. I have never seen anything like this in my 26 years in law enforcement. We need the National Guard in here.”

The National Guard Captain had removed his helmet and it sat on the table next to him but he retained a pair of wraparound sunglasses on his face. Through the short-cut blonde hair on his forehead, an angry pink scar peeked out just above the beginning of his hairline.

“We are assembling at this time,” Captain Stone interjected, “and have already begun operations.”

“What does that entail, Captain?” George asked.

“This was an emergency mobilization with no warning. The 1183rd has an authorized strength of 185 MPs, but since coming back this summer from Iraq our numbers are down in the 160s. About half of those have made it to the armory so far. We have set up our TOC, or Tactical Operations Center, to coordinate all of our communications,” Stone replied.

“When do you think the rest of your soldiers will arrive? Can you get any more units here?” a council member asked.

“It’s hard to say. Many of my people are students in criminal justice programs away at college. The state pays for college if you are in the Guard and most of them live on-campus. Another 30 of my people are police officers from local departments around Mobile and most of them did not make it to the muster. Only about half of the unit actually lives here. It is possible that what we have…may be it,” Stone said.

“What have you been able to accomplish so far?” George asked.

“I have four understrength platoons. One is at the armory to get newly arriving members up to speed, one here on the town green as crowd control, and the last two out augmenting the local police in small teams. There have been a few incidents…”

“His guys went into the elementary school guns blazing,” the police chief interrupted. “They shot one of my cars to shit and almost killed the prisoner inside it.”

“We liberated that school from a mob that was ripping people to pieces with their bare hands. One of my men, Specialist Clinton, was killed there before we opened fire,” Stone said.

“They were children, Captain,” the police chief replied.

“They were Disease-K infected psychopaths and they attacked us. Ever since then, my men have been wearing their pro-masks and we have been calling for support from outside units,” Stone said.

“What about the other units?” George asked.

“As far as that goes, we have only been able to make contact with our battalion headquarters at Fort Whiting. They advise that we are supposed to be getting our ammo draw sometime today, but I haven’t heard anything else since early this morning,” Captain Stone said.

“Your ammo draw?” the police chief asked.

“Yes, the armory here holds all of our weapons, equipment and vehicles, but we don’t store a single round of ammunition there. It’s all at the ammo dump at Fort McClellan,” Stone said

“But that’s on the other side of the state,” George observed.

“Exactly. I have little confidence that the ammo will get here any time soon. On my own, I went to Phil’s Sporting goods before he shut down and bought every round of 12-gauge, 5.56, and 9-millimeter he had with the unit’s credit card. It was only a few cases worth and it’s not going to stretch very far,” Stone said.

The police chief nodded, “I can sympathize. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, too. We were never able to store more than an extra case or two of ammo for contingencies and training,” he said with his arms in the air. “The board has cut every budget I’ve submitted in the past three years!”