The Infected Dead (Book 2): Survive For Now Read online

  Copyright

  © Survive for Now May 2016

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  For Dawn who works endless hours to market my books with the determination only a spouse can show, Julie who challenges me to write in a way a father cannot ignore, and Drew who motivates me with a son’s pride in the accomplishments of his parents.

  Forward

  Writing is work that can be fun, frustrating, and satisfying. At the end of the day I have found that I throw very little away because it is a creation only a writer can understand. The decisions are usually final because I know why I made them.

  There is still room for discussion and technical advice, and for that I want to thank some collaborators who reached out and offered their advice.

  Jay High, Chief of Police in Jamestown, South Carolina offered me insights about weapons and tactical details, but most importantly he offered point of view. My discussions with him helped me to develop the action. We didn’t agree about everything, but our exchanges were an outlet for me to visualize what I wanted to write. He has also given me direction I will use in the future.

  Samantha Case helped me to remember that sometimes writing the way I talk isn’t always a good idea. As an editor she spotted colloquial expressions that I sometimes wondered if readers would even understand. Editing is tedious work, and I hope she is willing to edit for me as this series continues.

  Jeff Roberts, Fire Marshal, gave me technical advice about the day to day life of a firefighter. I took some liberties with his information because this is a work of fiction. Nonetheless, I was able to see life in a fire station through his eyes.

  My deepest appreciation goes out to my collaborators and to the many readers who contacted me with comments and ideas. Even those critical of my work played a part in the development of this second book.

  Bob Howard

  Chapter 1

  Safe Haven

  When I pulled open the big vault door to the Mud Island shelter, both the father and daughter stared with stunned expressions and wide eyes. No one had been there to see my face when I had opened the door the very first time I had been to Mud Island, but I probably had the same expression.

  I took a moment to myself and went back in time to the day when I had first brought Jean, Kathy, and the Chief to the shelter. We had met offshore, me in my Boston Whaler and the three of them in a raft that seemed much smaller than it was because of the Chief. He was a mountain of a man with the personality of a faithful Irish Setter, and we had all taken an instant liking to each other.

  Pulling open the shelter door for them had been a great moment for me. Seeing the looks on their faces was rewarding. I guess it was like the first time a kid gets to see Disney World, and just like Disney World, the surprises inside the shelter of Mud Island just keep on coming. The entrance is impressive, and the decontamination area gives the feeling of security and safety, but it doesn’t give a clue as to what lays in store beyond that.

  Tom and Molly followed us inside the shelter, but they seemed to huddle closer to each other as if they weren’t sure of what was happening. Tom was tall and kind of rugged looking, but there was something about him that also said he was not the outdoors type. He was athletic, but not due to hardship. It looked like he had been in some kind of training program. Despite the hardships of the previous months of surviving from day to day, he was fairly well groomed. He had managed to shave at some point in the last day, probably after finding the houseboat.

  Tom also looked like he had either scavenged clean clothes for them or was in the habit of finding ways to wash their clothes. The backpacks they had with them were not overstuffed with supplies, so my guess was they were trading old clothes for new whenever possible. He was wearing jeans, work boots, a sweatshirt, and a good winter coat.

  I also figured that Tom’s height and rugged appearance would have been almost imposing if not for a recent weight loss. He wasn’t as big as Chief Barnes who sometimes made me feel like I was in the room with a smiling Grizzly bear, but of the three men inside the shelter, I was definitely the smallest. It made me think all the way back to high school when we would pick football teams in Physical Education class. If I wasn’t picked last, it was always close to it.

  I noticed I wasn’t the only one who was appraising the newcomers. Kathy, our blond and beautiful Charleston City Police Officer, seemed to be a bit taken with Tom. Kathy had been a rookie cop when the dead began trying to bite the living, but her poise and confident personality had made her into a hero when she took singlehanded control of the chaos at the Charleston cruise ship terminal. She’d saved the lives of thousands of people by organizing the defensive stance at the terminal long enough for them to board the cruise ship, Atlantic Spirit, and pull away from the port.

  Now Kathy looked self-conscious about having her hair pulled back in a ponytail, dressed in coveralls, and not wearing makeup. It looked like she was trying to discreetly pull the rubber band out of the ponytail without Tom noticing.

  The fourth member of our family, Jean, was fixated on the little girl. She was studying the child with an adoring look that was lighting up her face like a Christmas tree. Jean was what I would call naturally cute. Maybe she was seeing a connection between the way she probably looked as a child and Molly’s appearance.

  Unlike Kathy, who was tall and athletic, Jean could only reach five feet if she stretched a bit. Even though her dark hair was cut short, it matched the color of Molly’s shoulder length curls so well they could be sisters. I was head over heels in love with Jean almost from the first moment we had met, and the joy on her face as she studied Molly made me love her even more.

  Tom asked, “You people all live in here?”

  He looked around at the sparse surroundings of the entry room and into the adjoining area we called the decontamination room.

  The Chief gave a deep chuckle and said, “Not in here, Tom. You’ll see where in a few minutes.”

  I sealed the big outside door into place and gestured for our new guests to go ahead of us into the next room. They moved hesitantly through the door and Tom studied the room that looked more like a locker room than anything you could live in.

  Uncle Titus, my sometimes crazy survivalist benefactor who had left me this shelter in his will, probably expected this outer room to be needed for decontamination after a nuclear war rather than a zombie apocalypse. That’s why there were showers for washing off after going outside, and special suits with breathing apparatus and radiation monitors attached to them. He also probably considered the possibility of a biological war, but I seriously doubted he gave much thought to zombies.

  “We’ll be going through this room into the main part of the shelter,” said Kathy, “but first we have some unpleasant business to take care of.”

  “Unpleasant business?” asked Tom. “What kind of unpleasant business?” He had one hand loosely hanging near the back of Molly’s head, and he gently drew her closer to his left leg. She sensed his tension and looked up at him with a slightly frightened expression.

  Jean reacted immediately and went down onto one knee in front of her to make eye contact.

  “Don’t be afraid, Sweetie. There’s nothing here that can hurt you,” said Jean.

  Kathy had succeeded in getting the rubber band out of her ponytail, so her long blonde hair had fallen free. The effect on Tom Bergman was obvious because the thought of unpleasant business suddenly didn’t seem
to be making him quite as tense.

  The Chief had been quiet other than his brief response to Tom a minute earlier, and I could tell he was thinking ahead to the same question we had to broach when he, Kathy, and Jean had first floated into the vicinity of my boat while I had been out doing some target practice.

  I had a boat, a shelter, and plenty of guns, but I didn’t know how to shoot, so I had to take the boat far enough from shore to get some target practice where I wouldn’t be heard by the infected dead that were wandering around in the dense coastal trees.

  After a bit of practice with the guns, I found myself facing a raft carrying two attractive women and a mountain of a man who was wearing some kind of uniform. As a matter of fact, so were the women, but the blond was dressed as a cop, and the cute pixie with the dark hair was dressed as a nurse in hospital scrubs.

  We had faced the same unpleasant business at that chance meeting as we were facing now, but with a child and a protective father in the room, it wasn’t going to be quite as funny as it had turned out to be on that day.

  I had asked if any of them had been bitten, and Jean had immediately begun pulling off her clothes to show she was okay. She was completely natural about it, probably because she was a nurse, but I had felt like some kind of pervert. I had stopped her from stripping, which had made me look good in their eyes, but it was still a dumb move in more ways than one. Cute or not, the world had changed, and you couldn’t just take someone’s word that they hadn’t been bitten.

  This time there wouldn’t be any joking about it, and we had to be careful. If Molly had been bitten, Tom was going to protect her. If Tom had been bitten, we were going to be faced with making a very unpleasant decision to go along with the unpleasant business. None of us had thought it through before rushing out to the houseboat and bringing Tom and Molly inside, but if he was hiding a bite from an infected dead, he would become dangerous to us all. The only alternative would be ugly.

  Kathy made firm eye contact with Tom and asked, “Were you or Molly bitten by any of those infected dead out there?”

  Tom understood immediately why we were all watching for his reaction, but that may only have been because he knew the consequences of the wrong answer. He looked from Kathy to the Chief, then toward me and Jean. Out of reflex he pulled his daughter behind him.

  It was the reflexive move that made me realize what he possibly did for a living before the infection had spread like wildfire around the world. Combined with his athletic build, his fast but smooth reflexes made him appear ready to move in any direction in a split second.

  I remembered an interview I had heard on TV when Chipper Jones had retired from baseball, and the reporter asked Derek Jeter to describe Chipper Jones. Jeter had said, “Chipper Jones ‘looks’ like a baseball player.”

  When Jeter said Jones looked like a baseball player, I thought to myself, “Jones and Jeter both ‘look’ like baseball players.”

  It couldn’t hurt to relieve the tension in the room, so I asked, “Tom, were you a pro baseball player before all this craziness started?”

  I saw Jean glance my way with a look of appreciation, and when the Chief and Kathy realized I had easily defused Tom, they gave me the same look. Tom seemed to be looking inward at a distant memory for just a moment, and his shoulders dropped as the tension let go.

  “Yes, I was, Ed. How did you know?”

  “Just a guess,” I answered, “but I’ve always been a real fan of the game. Were you with the Minor League team in Myrtle Beach?”

  Tom looked like he was going to answer, but he stopped and faced Kathy instead.

  “How are we going to do this?” he asked.

  Tom had reasoned that we were going to have to get by this part of surviving every time we met someone new and opened our doors to them, and the only thing to do was get it over with. We would be vulnerable, and it had to be dealt with.

  “To tell you the truth, Tom, we didn’t give it a lot of thought before we came outside and got you. We had to stop you from eating the seafood because it may be contaminated,” said Kathy.

  “Contaminated? Contaminated by what?” he asked, looking from one of us to the other.

  Jean said, “Let’s be mindful of the little ears in the room. We can explain that to you at a better time, Tom.”

  Everyone looked at Molly at the same time which made her hide behind her dad’s leg. I think the tension had gotten bad enough to make everyone, even her father, forget that we had to remember that some rules still applied in this screwed up world, and one of those rules was to watch your mouth when children were around.

  “So,” said the Chief, “we have to be sure no one is a danger to the others if we are going to bring you in, and we’ve had some unfortunate experiences with parents protecting their children. How do you want us to do this, Tom?”

  Maybe it was asking Tom Bergman how he wanted to deal with the unpleasant business that made the difference to him and everyone else. Telling him or his daughter to strip wasn’t half as funny as it had been when it was contemplated between me and the trio in the raft.

  Tom said, “I still have my dignity, and I’m still modest enough after everything that’s happened to be embarrassed about how this has to be, so I’m not too happy about anybody having to inspect my body.”

  “I’m a nurse,” said Jean, “and I’ve inspected Ed’s body plenty of times.”

  That did the trick. If anyone had been chewing gum, they would have choked on it. Molly didn’t know why all the big people started laughing, but she joined in anyway.

  “Thanks, Jean, but you’re still far too cute for me to be comfortable with that,” he said. “Besides, if I have a bite, you’re all going to want the upper hand, so it has to be him.” He gestured at the Chief who couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable if he had tried,

  The Chief still managed to say, “What, you don’t think I’m cute?” He feigned a hurt look and shifted from one foot to the other.

  This time the laughing was real instead of just being a release of tension, and it was agreed that the ladies would take Molly inside to the master bath where she would get the first hot bubble bath she would have in months. They could use the opportunity to check her for bite marks without her even being aware of what they were doing. It was a relief to see Tom found it immediately agreeable because it probably meant she had not been bitten, or he would have been trying to hide the bite from us.

  Tom pulled Molly out from behind him and handed her over to Kathy and Jean. They each took one of her hands and led her toward the circular hatch that led to the main shelter. Tom watched with wide eyes as they went through the hatch that entered the main part of the shelter and didn’t look at me or the Chief until it had closed behind them. Molly looked back and forth between the two women as they walked away, obviously feeling some comfort in the familiar contact with two mother-figures.

  When they were gone, he looked at us and asked, “How big is this place?”

  “We’ll give you a complete tour after we finish your bubble bath,” said the Chief.

  None of us laughed at first because the Chief always had a way of delivering a line with such a straight face. The thought of us giving Tom a bubble bath was just a little disturbing, but I had to add, “No matter how hard he tries, don’t let him kiss you, Tom. I’ve had to keep an eye on him since the first day he got here.”

  We all broke down laughing again. Tension would wind you up like a spring, and there was nothing like laughing to unwind it.

  The Chief and I talked privately for a moment and agreed that Tom would feel more comfortable if we let him use the shower in the decontamination room to get himself clean. There wasn’t anything we could do about modesty, but we could help with dignity. Tom was used to having teammates around when he showered, so we would try to keep it natural.

  While Tom showered, we unsuccessfully tried to do a discreet survey of his body for bite marks. The Chief and I were like a couple of uncomfortable idiots a
nd we were happy when Tom started talking about what he and Molly had been through.

  Even though we had been back outside of the shelter, risking our lives and ignoring the good advice of the man who had built the whole thing, I asked Tom what it had been like for them when the world ended.

  When Molly and her father, Tom Bergman, had discovered our houseboat parked along our secluded dock, they thought they had reached heaven on Earth. They had been surviving from day to day by staying on the move for a long time. There were some places that were just naturally safer than others, and when they had to move on, they always looked for the ones that had a laundry list of qualities.

  Tom explained to us that he never accepted that any place they ever found could be permanent, even when they had found a well-stocked place a couple of months ago. He said the houseboat was the first place they stayed that he gave more consideration to as a permanent place where they could live, but even it had its drawbacks.

  For a place to be completely safe, their shelter had to protect them from three things. It had to keep the infected dead from getting in, it had to keep the uninfected living from taking what little they had, and it had to withstand the unpredictability of Mother Nature. Tom said when he saw the houseboat, it had only one out of the three things, but that was better than anything they had found so far.

  He said they were in Myrtle Beach when the reports started telling people to stay home, but Tom knew a hotel room on the fourteenth floor wasn’t what anyone in their right mind would call home. He did a quick inventory of the little refrigerator in their room and saw they would last three days at most.

  There was a snack machine in the hallway, but there was already a line of people pumping it full of dollar bills and coins as if the thing was stocked with seven course meals. Tom saw that it would be empty long before he got to the front of the line.