The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One - Yesterday's Gone

  Chapter Two - Fort Sumter

  Chapter Three - Charleston Revisited

  Chapter Four - Fortress

  Chapter Five - City Streets

  Chapter Six - Plan B

  Chapter Seven - Night in The City

  Chapter Eight - Resurrection

  Chapter Nine - Jean & Molly

  Chapter Ten - Chase Kennedy

  Chapter Eleven - Chief Joshua Barnes

  Chapter Twelve - Siege

  Chapter Thirteen - Promises

  Chapter Fourteen - The Mission

  Chapter Fifteen - Very Important People

  Chapter Sixteen - Ashley River

  Chapter Seventeen - Sub-Level Eighteen

  Chapter Eighteen - Old Friends

  Chapter Nineteen - Home

  DIE FOR NOW

  BOB HOWARD

  Copyright © 2016 Bob Howard

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945754-01-2

  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, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Writing each book in this series is like taking a journey, and the journeys are always different. It helps to have a guide. What remains constant is the destination. This book is dedicated to my wife and my guide, Dawn. Without her help, I would never reach my destination.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Yesterday's Gone

  The power grid went down in the middle of the night. We were all asleep, but it was too quiet, and that woke us up just as if someone had turned on the lights and used an air horn. I rolled over onto my back and tried to focus my eyes in the darkness. Jean was already propped up on her elbows trying to figure out what had happened.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  A beam of light was coming down the hall to our left, and it was bobbing up and down. It came into the room, and we could see it was the Chief coming up from the lower levels.

  “Good, you’re both awake,” he said.

  The Chief’s massive body seemed bigger than the door as he came into the room, and his voice was deep with a serious undertone. He was careful not to shine the light in our eyes, and that was no surprise. The Chief would be considerate in that way, no matter what was happening.

  He was a big man, but there wasn’t an ounce of fat on his body. He had never told us his age, but judging by his considerable experience and knowledge, he had to be older than he looked. His full, reddish beard and hair didn’t give any hints because there wasn’t a bit of gray.

  Jean sounded half asleep as she mumbled, “What’s up, Chief?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he answered. “The power is off, and I turned off the emergency generators to conserve fuel until we know what happened outside.”

  There was just enough light in the room from the Chief’s flashlight for me to see Jean’s profile under the sheets. At six months she was definitely showing she was pregnant, but she still looked petite. She had managed to keep the weight under control even though we had no shortage of food in our shelter and too much free time to fill.

  I was amazed by the gradual changes in her body, but I was keenly aware of the quiet determination she showed not to complain about the aches and pains she was having. Jean said it was all about staying part of the team. She had been heard to say more than once she wasn’t going to take a back seat to any of us just because she was going to have a baby.

  Her recovery from the scratch of an infected dead had been slow, and we were always worried it would cause her to lose the baby. Jean had been captured by the crew of a Russian ship while the rest of us had been away on an extended road trip, and when they made the always fatal mistake of trying to treat crewmen who had been bitten, she showed everybody how tough she could be. She had fought her way to the upper level of the ship where we were able to rescue her. Her escape hadn’t been without close calls, though. She was scratched by one of the infected dead, and it had proven to be fairly serious. She had a raging fever for days and was left totally drained and weak after it finally broke.

  I didn’t have to be told to get out of bed and get dressed. I retrieved my own flashlight from the nightstand and clicked it on. The Chief went through the other door on my right that led to the main living areas of the shelter, and I hurried to pull on my clothes.

  The shelter on Mud Island only had one real bedroom so there wasn’t much privacy. It had been given to me and Jean by default when it had been just four of us living in the shelter. The fourth person in our original group of survivors was a former Charleston police officer before the world had given in to a strange infection that had spread death throughout the population. Kathy was an extremely attractive blond, but she could be as deadly as she was beautiful.

  Before I could get my shoes on, she passed through our room followed closely by the rest of the adults in our group. Tom, Allison, and Dr. Bus all said good morning as they went by. Molly, the only child, was probably still asleep.

  Jean was struggling to reach her feet and get into her own shoes. I risked hearing her say she could do it herself and gave her a hand. As soon as we had her shoes tied we followed the others down the corridor that ended at the dining area and kitchen. By the time we got there, the Chief had turned on a few of the battery powered emergency lights and was examining all of the breakers in a hidden panel. The others were waiting for his verdict.

  “Everything’s good in here,” said the Chief. “It has to be a power failure on the mainland. I think we should wait to switch on the emergency generators until after we have to. We all figured this day would come, so let’s start conserving now.”

  The words had barely left the Chief’s mouth when we felt the floor of the kitchen shudder. There was a concussive ‘thump’ from somewhere, and we knew as a group it had to be something that happened outside.

  “Forget conserving,” said the Chief. “We need the cameras on now.”

  He ran by us in the direction we had all come from, while the rest of us ran for the living room. As soon as the power came on, I had the camera views appearing on the big monitor. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something big was happening out there.

  We had cameras all around the island, and we could use them day or night. They came in really handy when we needed to know if there was trouble nearby.

  The infrared views on the ocean side cameras showed a dark beach with a few of the infected dead lying in the sand. It was odd that none of them were standing, but we watched as they struggled to their feet and began staggering in our direction. All of them started toward the center of the island as if they were being drawn toward something.

  “Why were they on the ground, and why are they all coming toward us?” asked Allison.

  Allison was Tom’s wife, and she was probably the least likely of us all to have survived the infection that had devastated the population of the world. Jean had told me privately that Allison was ‘mousey’ and she would have been killed a long time ago if not for Dr. Bus and his shelter. Dr. Bus had built a shelter like ours, but it was located in the mountains of north Alabama.

  “I don’t know,” said Tom, “but there are only a few things that can attract the infected like that. I wonder if that thump we heard has anything to do with them coming this way.”

  “That thump you heard was a whopping big explosion,�
� said the Chief. We were so intent on what we were seeing on the monitor that we didn’t notice when he came up behind us.

  “Ed,” he continued, “switch the mainland side cameras from infrared to normal vision and then put them on the screen.”

  “It’s pitch black out there, Chief. How are we going to see anything without infrared?” I asked.

  “Unless I miss my guess,” he said, “there will be plenty of light out there. That’s why the infected are all trying to go that way.”

  Even though I wasn’t entirely convinced the Chief was right, I did as he said. The camera views on the mainland side came up on the screen, and they were all much brighter than we expected.

  We had three cameras on the island that faced the mainland. For months, they had given us our best views of the Russian naval vessel that was still parked between Mud Island and the mainland. We called the waterway that ran from the north to the south on the mainland side our ‘moat’. It kept the infected dead, and the unwelcome living, from walking straight over to Mud Island.

  To our surprise, the place where the Russian ship was parked was engulfed in bright light. The Russian ship was burning and beginning to list toward us.

  Kathy leaned in closer toward the screens and said, “Someone bombed the ship. The infected on the ocean side of the island are being drawn toward the light. I wonder who did it.”

  “That’s what I think,” said the Chief, “and one of the first explosions probably damaged the power lines that cross the moat. That kind of firepower had to be military. They either thought the ship was a hostile, or they knew it was a floating deathtrap, so they hit it hard.”

  “And it doesn’t get much worse than that,” I said. “Now we have to go to generator power and hope we can survive off of that.”

  “It’s not all doom and gloom,” said the Chief. “We have enough fuel to last two years if we don’t run too many appliances at the same time. I imagine Uncle Titus planned on living off of seafood when he built this place, but we just have to find another source of food to replace it.”

  Uncle Titus was the relative who had left this shelter to me in his will. He died before the apocalypse he was anticipating, but he gave me a chance to survive. I met the rest of the group by accident, and even though I didn’t know it yet, I had gotten lonely after only a few days. The Chief, Kathy, and Jean had floated up in a raft, and I couldn’t turn them away. That was a good decision because Jean was going to make a father out of me in a few months.

  When Titus built the shelter on Mud Island, he had a waterway dredged between it and the mainland. What had once been a marsh was now a deep river that entered an inlet at the northern tip of the island, and because he had the sense to build a jetty at the entrance, the incoming water picked up speed and became a dangerous moat.

  We had seen plenty of the infected dead walk into the moat and simply disappear. Some of them were washed out through the southern exit past a second jetty, but as we had learned, most were being caught in nets that crossed the moat in two places. Uncle Titus had probably put the nets there to give a small amount of protection to the power lines that came from the mainland to Mud Island. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see fish getting caught in the nets, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of dead people flailing around trying to get loose.

  Just the thought of it gave me the creeps, and for a moment I pictured myself trying to explain it to him.

  I thought, “It’s like this, Uncle Titus. Some kind of infection caused people to come back to life after they died, but instead of acting like people, they started going around biting other people, even their own families. Then they would die from the bites, come back to life, and then they would find someone else to bite. Next thing you know, there’s only a few of us left.”

  “Ed, are you still with us?” asked the Chief.

  I didn’t realize the Chief was still talking to everyone about how we were going to get by this latest crisis.

  “Sorry, Chief. I was just thinking about how my Uncle Titus would react to all of this. If he would have included zombies in his plans, maybe he would have thought of a way for us to clean the nets, and maybe that Russian ship wouldn’t have become a death trap.”

  The Chief frowned at me, but I saw Kathy trying to hide a grin. He hated it when someone called them zombies. He started to say something, but he stopped himself. He was probably going to say he had told me before why they weren’t zombies, but instead he asked, “What did you say?”

  I tried to replay everything in my mind, but all I could think of was Uncle Titus didn’t include zombies in his plans.

  “Which part, Chief? Uncle Titus didn’t think about zombies when he built the shelter?” I asked.

  He shook his head from side to side. “No, Ed, the part about cleaning the nets. Uncle Titus would have thought about fish getting caught in them, and he most likely considered the possibility of an anchor getting caught in the nets or on the power lines. All we have to do is figure out his backup plan.”

  Dr. Bus was listening to what we were saying, and we had forgotten he probably knew more about Uncle Titus and his shelter plans than the rest of us combined. When we looked at him, he was trying to hide a grin, too.

  Jean and Kathy called to us that coffee was ready, and we could all use some to wake up, so we migrated over to the dining area and grabbed a cup. Bus saw we were still looking at him, and he gave in.

  “Okay,” he said. “Uncle Titus talked about redundant systems, and we all started working out plans to install secondary power lines in case the main lines were broken. The problem was we couldn’t think of a backup power line that was any safer than the first unless it was buried, so we decided to just put something temporary in place until we could bury a cable. At the shelter in Guntersville I used a few political connections to arrange a little diversion from some power lines that ran all the way from a hydroelectric plant.”

  We all stared at Bus waiting for him to go on, and when he didn’t, the Chief said, “Bus, if you don’t tell us what the temporary system is, I’m going to make you swim to the mainland with a long extension cord. If you haven’t noticed, there aren’t any power lines closer than Simmonsville, and I think they were blown up.”

  Bus answered, “You’ve got the right idea, Chief, but the extension cord is already on the mainland…or at least close to it. Titus said he was going to put a spare cable under the dock on the mainland. You just have to pull it over from there and plug it in at a special connection near the oyster beds. Once you have it plugged in, you just throw the power switch under the dock, and you’re back in business.”

  Kathy said, “If someone calls me a dumb blonde, I’ll make them hold the targets for me while I practice shooting a bow and arrow, but that must be one big cable. You can’t just go get it and drag it over here.”

  “I was going to say the same thing,” said the Chief. “Except for the part about being a dumb blond.”

  Kathy pretended to be aiming an arrow at the Chief and pulling back on the shaft.

  Bus rubbed his hand across a gray stubble on his chin and said, “Yeah, Titus did mention all he needed was a cable laying boat and he was having a hard time getting one.”

  “So, he never finished his backup plan?” asked Jean. “Where can we get a cable laying boat?”

  The Chief was staring at a spot on the wall and was lost in thought.

  “Chief?” said Jean.

  He looked at each of us one at a time and said, “Why do we have to keep leaving this place?”

  We all knew what he meant. It seemed like we would get to stay safe for a while, but then we would have to leave for some reason that always seemed like a good idea at the time. The last time we almost lost Jean.

  As soon as I looked at her Jean said, “Don’t say it, Eddie. Crazy Russians on wild horses couldn’t drag me out of this shelter. If you haven’t noticed, I’m slightly pregnant.”

  “I wasn’t going to remind you,” I said, �
��at least not yet,” I said in a lower voice.

  “Do you know where to get a cable laying boat?” Kathy asked the Chief.

  The Chief looked like the question was painful because he winced. I had a feeling we weren’t going to be too happy about his answer.

  “I saw one tied to a dock behind the Atlantic Spirit in Charleston harbor, and it was still there when we went back to get the seaplane.”

  Kathy, Jean, and I all got the same pained expression as the Chief, and the rest of the group waited for us to explain it to them.

  The Chief said, “Tom, you already know some of this, but the rest of you don’t. As you know, three of us escaped from Charleston on a cruise ship named the Atlantic Spirit. We found Ed, and he took us in. We got the bright idea to at least try to establish contact with civilization, so we flew the seaplane down to Goose Creek and made contact with the military at the Naval Weapons Station.”

  “They weren’t doing so well,” added Kathy.

  “As a matter of fact,” continued the Chief, “we had it better than they did, but on the way back we had to land the plane and leave it behind. A bullet had clipped a hose in the engine compartment.”

  “But you went back and got the plane,” said Tom. “So, what’s the problem? Why can’t we go down to Charleston harbor and liberate the cable laying boat?”

  Kathy laid a hand on top of Tom’s and said, “Charleston was known around the world as a friendly city, but the harbor isn’t as friendly as it used to be, Tom. The last time we were like sitting ducks to someone who had control of Fort Sumter. We were lucky to get away.”

  Tom didn’t flinch, but Allison did. Jean and I both saw it and exchanged glances. Since our return from Guntersville, Alabama, we had both seen Kathy try to bury the feelings she had for Tom, but this gesture was a slip up on her part. She wasn’t the kind of person to try to break up a marriage, but it was no secret Allison had filed for divorce before the infected dead had changed the world. She pulled her hand back, but I didn’t think it had occurred to her what she had done. Allison was simmering.