Last Stand on Zombie Island (22 page)

“Now quit talking shit about the L-T or I’ll fuck your world up and hide your body in the dirty oil tank,” Hoffman said as he stripped the butt of his cigarette and stepped inside the hatch.

“Aye aye, Chief,” the boy said smiling.

Hoffman moved through the hatch and down into the Cook’s gleaming stainless steel galley. The cutter’s two machinists, grimy from their daily work with the boat’s engines and generators, sat at the table in the salon and played chess on a small magnetic board. The Cook stood in his galley and was jotting items down on a steno pad, counting his dwindling inventory.

“We’re gonna have to get some real groceries, Chief, the cupboard is pretty bare,” said the Cook, rubbing his bald head.

Hoffman nodded and looked at the two machinists, “How are we looking on diesel?”

“Down to the last two hundred gallons,” one said without even looking up from the chessboard.

Hoffman nodded and climbed the ladder while looking back at the Cook. “Remind me to kick your nuts later,” he said to the man as he climbed the ladder up into the bridge.

“What the hell did I do?” the Cook asked, pausing on his steno pad.

Hoffman ignored the man as he rose up through the bridge’s floor on the ladder. He found Jarvis, along with the ship’s engineer, who was responsible for all things engine-room related, and the Bosun, who was effectively Hoffman’s understudy. The Engineer was busy working a calculator and jotting down information with the stub of a pencil. The Bosun was busy transmitting on the ship’s RT-2400 HF radio just as they had every hour for the past several days. To conserve radiation being emitted from the device, they only powered up the radar every four hours for a few minutes to get a snap shot of the area out to 12-miles.

The Cutter’s Skipper sat in his chair and glared out of the portside window at the same water they had been watching forever.

“Afternoon, gang,” Hoffman said, his impressive mustache waggling like a furry seabird in flight as he spoke.

The men nodded back and muttered.

“Any luck with the radio calls, Ops?” Hoffman asked the man working the radio set.

“We have been getting something fading in and out,” the Bosun said.

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

This indeed was news. The last radio transmission received from a command element had been more than a week ago. The Skipper had ordered it posted in the galley before it was taken down and filed away in the chart drawer. It was not a warm and fuzzy note.

“What was it?”

“Some distress calls from a cruise ship out of Mobile. They aren’t giving a position but I got it on a radio bearing due south out into the Gulf,” the Bosun said.

“We going out, Skipper?” Hoffman asked Jarvis, who was still scowling out the window. The ebony man was cracking his knuckles loudly.

“No can do. They mentioned infection on board
and
they are dead in the water.”

“We could set up a tow,” Hoffman offered.

“We are a STAN-2600 design, can only tow 200-tons deadweight. We looked up that liner. It’s the
Gulf Mariner
. She goes 73,000 tons so that’s a
big
no-go,” the Engineer said, still working his calculator. “Besides, we have no idea of their location other than a bearing, and don’t have anything that big showing on the scope so it must be way the hell out there.”

“We have been discussing this for a while, Chief. I hate it but there is nothing we can do for them,” Jarvis said.

“But we have them on radio.”

“And you know as well as I do that HF can reach a couple hundred miles with the right situations and we have no fuel to go anywhere. Besides we are under orders to maintain the quarantine on the port so we just sit here until further,” Jarvis spit out.

Hoffman looked around and only got a shrug from the Engineer as the man grabbed his calculator and climbed down into the galley and out of the discussion.

The Chief dug in the chart drawer and pulled out the last official communication they had with the rest of the service. He read it over again. It was as depressing as it was the first time he read it days ago.

USCG NOW CLOSING DOWN CONTINUOUS HF WATCH CEASING ALL OPS IN THE HF BAND. AS WE CONCLUDE OUR WATCH, WE WISH YOU FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS.

With that, they were on their own. The only ship left in the fleet as far as they knew. Hoffman slid the message back into the chart cabinet drawer and stared out the window.

“Well Chief, let’s take the small boat out. I have a meeting ashore with Major Reynolds and the rest of the town apparently,” Jarvis said over his shoulder as he stood up.

The Chief arched an eyebrow, “Meeting, Skipper?”

“Yes, apparently there is a Russian submarine out here somewhere.”

— | — | —

ChapteR 28

The Community Center was standing room only. Most of what was left of town, along with the growing throngs of new arrivals, had gathered for the first town meeting since the outbreak. Nearly a hundred guardsmen, their ranks swelled by new volunteers, lined the exits and milled around the parking lot as a show of force. The new volunteer guardsmen were dressed in a myriad of uniforms but all wore the familiar ‘MP’ brassards on their sleeve as identification. It was the Major’s idea.

Billy and his new extended family leaned on the wall of the center and shared stories with neighbors, former coworkers, and acquaintances that filed past them.

“Looks like we have a good turnout, Major,” George Meaux said to the shorthaired woman as he walked up. He had a worn leather portfolio bulging with papers and looked to have lost twenty pounds in the two weeks since the outbreak. At the base of the stairs to the stage were Reynolds, Stone, Jarvis, and the 3-Blind-Mice exchanging military gossip.

“It’s all yours, sir,” Reynolds said to the red-faced civil servant. The building had been hooked up to the Police Station’s emergency generator. The genny provided enough juice to power the lights and the public address system, but not the air conditioning, and the hall was already starting to smell with the odor of a few hundred unwashed bodies, burping fish soup.

George cleared his voice as he took the stage, walking to the podium in the center. He tapped the microphone and waited for the feedback to whine over the assembled crowd.

“Good afternoon, ladies, and gentlemen. For those who do not know me, I am George Meaux, the City Manager. For anyone that needs to see me—my office is across the street at City Hall and my door is as open as I can make it.”

This brought a few low boos and murmurs from the crowd.

George plowed onward like a pro, “We called this meeting to bring everyone as up to date as possible with our current situation, and hopefully we can all get on the same page here.”

He pulled his glasses from the pocket of his stained suit jacket and unfolded them with one hand as he pulled notes from his portfolio with the other.

“First of all, I just want to express my thanks to the city public works department. They have kept the water system up and running, have cleared the streets, and managed to collect most of the victims of the outbreak. If you should come across a victim that has not been picked up, please contact my office and we will take care of the situation. For sanitation reasons, we ask that you not perform any home-burials as we have a very low water table here on the island.

“The next order of business. We are forming a beach patrol to comb the island on both the bay side and gulf side. Captain Stone has detailed a few of his hummers and a number of guardsmen to both ride along and perform foot patrols. They have full law enforcement authority and we expect to have them start these patrols tomorrow.”

“Can these things swim?” a faceless voice called out from the crowd.

This brought a chorus of questions from the crowd; George motioned to the front row of the crowd and waved an overweight young man to come up.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please. Please bring it down so we can get this information out. I would like to introduce Mr. Michaels; he is a biologist who taught science at Gulf Shores High School up until the outbreak. Many of you may remember him as our baseball coach who took us to the 2A finals this last year.”

“Isn’t that your science teacher?” Billy whispered to Cat as the man walked past them to the stage. “The one who had the mask on when I came to get you at school during the outbreak?”

Cat nodded.

As the man lumbered up the stairs, George continued talking, “Mr. Michaels has been helping us by pooling all the research on Disease-K we can come across, so that we have a better idea of what we are dealing with.”

The teacher replaced George at the podium, “As far as the question of if we think the infected can swim, all I can say is that we don’t think so. No one has ever seen an infected victim swimming. It does not appear that they are capable of the complex coordinated muscle movements required to keep afloat and move about in water. This would make sense as most primates—with the exception of humans—can’t even swim.”

The chorus of voices in the meeting ranged from doubtful to hopeful in their vocalizations.

The teacher raised his hands in a calming manner, “It should be stated however, that it is conceivable for one of these infected persons to fall into the water and sink. If carried by the tide and current they could wash up on shore and with that possibility, coupled with the fact that we are not sure if they have to breathe or not, we feel these precautions are in order and hence the reason for the daily beach patrols coupled with other measures.”

“What the heck is Disease-K anyway? I thought zombies were impossible,” a man asked the teacher.

“Well the term
zombie
isn’t actually correct. That is a mythical creature. Our victims seem to have passed clinical death and yet somehow remain animated. The last actual news broadcasts we received mentioned the metabolite Hydroxy-Kryptopyrrole Lactam in the brain of infected victims. High levels of Kryptopyrrole cause extreme stress and psychotic tendencies. Abnormal levels of Kryptopyrrole have been noted in the brain stems of executed psychotic killers for decades. It’s basically liquid crazy, and if you have enough of it in your system it takes all inhibitions away and turns the victim into a rabid beast in a human’s body,” the science teacher explained to the crowd.

It was as much a no-shit statement as anyone could have said. Everyone present had his or her own experience with that fact. Infected children had slaughtered each other, women flayed their husbands, and kindly old grandfathers raped the family dog to death. The most insane perversions had taken place. Destruction took an epic scale. Windows run through, cars overturned, furniture smashed. The infected had attacked everything and everyone around them.

The zombies seemed to want to destroy anything they could get their hands on, not just uninfected humans. One reanimated and immediately took to destroying a brick wall with her bare hands. After a few hours, her fingernails were gone, followed by the fingertips and then the whole fingers. When an MP shot her through the brainpan with a 12-gauge slug the next day she had ground herself down past the elbows. Her bloody stumps no more than exposed pink bone and red-blue muscle wailing away on unharmed Chicago red brick.

“Is there a cure?” a woman yelled to the teacher.

“Nothing that we have been able to research has pointed to a treatment. Some of the symptoms are approaching rabies, others mimic hemorrhagic viruses, and in the end it turns into a degenerative neurological disorder with multiple system atrophy and electric reanimation,” the man announced confidently.

“What the shit does that mean?” the same woman asked.

“It means we are working on it,” the teacher replied bluntly.

George slid into the podium between the microphone and the teacher. “Mr. Michaels is very busy and we will be sure to keep the public aware of his team’s findings and research.” George patted the man on the back and ushered him away from the crowd. “I’d like to move on to the next order of business: Security. For that, I’d like to bring up Major Reynolds of the military council.”

This brought a ragged obligatory applause from the crowd. The Major took the stage and placed both of her hands on the podium before talking. She still wore the same dirty green-gray NOMEX flight suit in which Billy had first seen her.

“The security situation of the island is good from a tactical standpoint. There are only two ways off the island—the Perdido Bay Bridge, which was knocked out by a runaway barge during the outbreak—and the ICW Bridge, which we have secured with the help of the National Guard. The Intracoastal Waterway provides us with a giant moat to the north of the island. Its 200-400 feet wide at its most narrow point and a minimum of 15 feet deep at its most shallow. We are a 26-mile long island unto ourselves right now with no connection to shore and this puts us alone but safe,” Reynolds explained.