TAGGED: THE APOCALYPSE (18 page)

Now that things were
set up, he would have a harvest every four to six weeks. He started first thing in the morning, and it took him all day. It was a solid harvest, especially with all that had been going on. He hung the harvest up on lines to dry. He showered all the stickiness off of himself and changed his clothes before going out for the regular evening meeting in the tower control room.

“Where is Waldo?” Sven asked Jackie.

“It’s been four days since we’ve seen Dennis or Thompson,” Jackie said.

“Some folks
have been seeing fires at night up the hill. Seems like maybe we should send a team to check what’s up there,” Jeb spoke slowly. Mack and Tiny nodded, suddenly realizing they’d just been nominated.

“We’ll take a look in the morning,”
Jackie said, “on our way out to pick up those dairy cattle.” A herd of dairy cattle had been reported by a new arrival, about ten miles away. They would become a valuable source of meat and milk and cheese. These also would go under Portland Frank’s supervision, with the new guy and his family handling the details, all ultimately under the supervision of Jackie and crew. There wasn’t enough room in the tower for everyone, and no one seemed willing to move back to Building 3 since the events with Dennis. So, the cattle being there should make others comfortable enough to move back over to 3.

“I think
Dennis and Thompson are gone,” Sven said, lighting up his bong.

“Or the infected got them
,” Jeb said, taking a large slug of his home brew, then passing it to his left.

“No
, we would have seen their hairy asses around the compound if the infected got them. They’re either gone or holed up somewhere,” Jackie said, holding out his hand for the bong.

“So, I’ll pop down and call Candy and the girls and the rest up for our little celebration. See who else wants to come…” Sven said
, walking toward the metal door dividing the top of the tower from the bottom. Maybe this was his chance to talk to Eve alone.

The lights dimmed and flickered. “What was that?” Jackie said. The lights returned for
five seconds, then dimmed to only emergency lights on the walls. Alarms began bleating loudly from all over the power plant. A calm, electronic female voice intoned loudly, “Code yellow. Reactor temperatures are rising to dangerous levels. Immediate action required. Code yellow. Reactor temperatures…” The message repeated itself infinitely, never tiring.

The controls in the tower lit up like a Christmas tree. There were lights blinking everywhere.

Jackie
, Sven, Jeb and the boys crowded into the control room in a keystone-cops like jumble. “What’s happening? Why did the lights go out?”

“We are on emergency power only
. The plant automatically shuts down all non-essential power usage,” Brit explained, furiously pushing and flicking buttons, trying to figure out what was wrong.

“Code yellow,” The electronic
female voice calmly intoned, “Reactor temperatures are rising to dangerous levels. Immediate action required.”

“How do we fix it?” Sven asked
, feeling panic rising in his chest. Everything they had worked so hard for could be swept away in a night.

“I don’t know yet. Give me a minute.” Brit hustled around the control room
, ignoring everyone else.

“What do y
ou mean you don’t know?” Jeb asked quietly, almost to himself.

“I had only been here
three months when the infection started. I’m still officially on probation. There’s a lot I don’t know,” Brit said.

“Great! That’s just great!” Mack shook his head and exhaled forcefully.

“How much time do we have?” Jackie grabbed Brits arm and held him in place.

“Not sure. We’re code yellow, not code red. If I don’t fix this code yellow, the crisis will go to code red. At code red, I have
four to eight hours to fix the problem before reactor failure.”

“You mean nuclear meltdown
?” Sven asked, his eyes wide.

“Yes, nuclear meltdown. At that point, the best you can do is get as far away as possible and hope that there is no explosion
.”

“Oh shit…” Sven was looking out at the fence where the floodlights had just clicked off. Already there were
fifteen to twenty infected around the gate. One slipped under the fence on the right side. They had planned to concrete all along the fence to both close and prevent the infected from digging under the fence again, but they hadn’t gotten to it yet. “We have to turn the lights back on! How do we turn the lights back on?”

Everyone turned to Brit, “I can’t. The computer won’t let me. It’s an automatic override of the entire system. We have to correct the code yellow, then we get control back.”

“Everybody strap up. We’re going out there in two minutes,” Jackie ordered. He turned to Brit and got right in his face. “We’re going to take a look at the plant and we’re going to fix this problem now. Understood?”

“Dennis destroyed all the plant manuals, but I kept one and hid it in
Building 3 behind the turbines,” Brit was visibly shaking at the thought of going out among the infected after nightfall. “We have to get to that manual. There are code yellow procedures.”

“
Will that tell us what’s wrong?”

“It…it could be anything. The plant is a very complex piece of machinery. It takes
dozens of people to run this plant normally. I’m just one person.” Brit shook his head hopelessly and began chewing his already chewed nails.

Jackie grabbed Brit by his shoulders and shook him until he held his gaze, “
If you don’t fix this, we’re all dead. Everything we worked for up until now will be gone and we’ll be back out there at the mercy of the infected. We have to fix it. We don’t have a choice.”

When they rushed through the steel door with Brit to the lower tower, it was madness. A bucket brigade had been formed to throw every mattress and every stick of furniture out into the yard. Through the door, he could see men breaking up the furniture and lighting it on fire.

“What are you doing?” Jeb asked.

“Staying inside is a death trap. Out there,” Portland Frank pointed toward the fence, “if you hide in the buildings at night, you’re dead. They climb, they dig, they get in. You can’t keep them out. It’s just a matter of time without electric lights. We had electric lights.”

“So what
- you’re going to burn all the furniture?” Mack asked.

“Yes. We have to get out in the open. Create a circle of fire. They won’t come into the fire
,” Frank said, not pausing from his work.

“They don’t like the fire
, huh?” Jeb said. Then to Tiny he said, “Stay here and do what this man tells you.”

“Are you going out there?” The man said to Jeb.

“We have to fix the code yellow. No choice,” Jackie answered.

“Those flashlights are useless. You need torches. Some of the infected will still come after you but the torches will keep most away. Let me fix you up.”

Candy led a group of fifteen women and several young children carried by their mothers, sprinting away into the growing darkness. “Stop! Where are you going?” Sven called after them.

“The
guardhouse. We’re going to lock ourselves into the cells,” Candy called behind her as she ran. Several more joined them, running to catch up, maybe twenty in all.

“Where is Eve?” Sven looked around frantically.

“Here,” she said from steps away.

“Stay in the ring of fire until I return.”
Eve nodded. Sven really wanted to connect with her but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Sven thought that was strange, but there really wasn’t time right now. Sven turned to Tiny, “Make sure nothing happens to her.” Tiny nodded.

“She’s safe with me,”
Portland Frank said.

“The cells in the
guardhouse is not a bad idea, really,” Jeb said thoughtfully.

“It’s safest in the open
,” another man beside Frank said. He was new and Sven had seen them together often recently, but wasn’t sure of the man’s name. “I know it’s counter intuitive. We’re trained to think it’s safer inside. It’s not. The rules have changed. Until I got here, we stayed out in the open and we made fires. They don’t come into the fire. This is the safest place. You all can do what you please. Me and my people we’re making this fire, and one way or another, we’re going to be here in the morning.”

“Make us some torches,” Jackie said.

“When we left a town, every morning we torched all the buildings.” The man continued, “The infected hide out the day in the buildings. This is how you kill them…as much as you
can
kill something that’s already dead.”

Candy began loudly panicking almost the moment the lights went out. “What’s happening? What-The-Fuck-is-Happening?! Will someone please tell me?” Then, when Frank and the other guy started carting all the mattresses and furniture outside into the circle for burning, that’s when she really freaked out. Alexis could already see the infected standing in the deep shadows around Building 3, their weird red eyes shining. The other girls saw them too and that’s when panic set in.

“Lock down the bottom tower
,” Candy ordered.

“It’s not safe in there without the lights
,” Frank said, not pausing from his work. “You’re better off out here.”

Alexis could already hear the howls of the infected
, and the moaning was getting louder as she and twenty other women squeezed themselves into the cell at the bottom of the guardhouse, where Candy had led them. Alexis had already decided that whatever Candy did, she would do the opposite, but her fear won her over when Frank and the other guy lit the furniture ablaze. She just couldn’t see herself out in the open all night with the infected all around her, howling and moaning.

“Move forward!” Alexis pushed against the women in front of her. “I’m not in!”

Then, just as she closed the gate on the cell, the infected got through the shattered metal door to the basement cells. There were three. What looked like a female and two males. The female seemed to be their leader even though she was smaller than the other two. They moved like lightening with their thick manes flowing behind them. Before Alexis could force her way forward into the packed, locked cell, the female had her with it’s claws around her neck, holding her there trapped against the bars and unable to move.

Alexis could feel
the female’s strong claws digging into the soft flesh of her neck and shoulder and she felt something warm running slowly down her arm. She looked down and saw her own blood. The other two had caught the woman next to her and they ripped her open with their claws, ripping at her neck and face with their teeth. The other woman screamed hysterically as they ripped her apart through the bars. Five more beasts heard the screams, and smelling blood crowded through the ruined door into the cell block. Like a pack of ravening wolves, they flung themselves into the fray to get a piece of the bleeding and dying woman next to her.

Alexis wondered why she was not being ripped apart. She thought she would be terrified at her death, but instead she was very calm. She turned toward the beast holding her with it’s claws through the bars. It was the alpha female and it looked
curiously back at her with those intense, weird red eyes. Four others immediately turned toward Alexis awaiting their cue to rip apart their latest victim, but the alpha just watched her. Alexis tried to wiggle subtly out of it’s grip and she felt it flex it’s claws and dig deeper into her flesh. “Owww!” She said.

It opened it’s mouth slightly and it’s eyes
brightened into an almost human expression beneath the feral mask. Was it laughing at her pain? Alexis wondered. It was just holding her there. It seemed to be savoring the moment. “Kill me already, you bitch!” Alexis screamed, and threw a punch through the bars, hitting it square in the nose. It snarled and ripped open Alexis’ left side as it moved to avoid the strike. The others snarled, and two others snapped, biting into her right hand before she could pull it back through the bars, tearing at her flesh. Another bit into her right side, tearing a chunk out of her small spare tire there.

Alexis felt herself getting weaker and weaker as the blood
drained from her body. She imagined that she could feel the infection inside her, clouding her brain and turning her into one of the things outside the bars. The alpha female was saving her from being ripped apart so that she would infect the rest inside the cell. If she was too torn up, then her attack would be less effective.

Alexis again looked into the now narrowed eyes of the alpha female. She was too weak to fight back. The female was calm, simply holding her there as her life ebbed from her. The other infected
snarled and snapped and moaned, fighting amongst each other to lap up the blood,
her
blood, as it fell like raindrops into a puddle at her feet. The hammering of her heart pounded loudly inside her head between her ears. Then, suddenly it stopped. She actually heard her heart stop. The alpha seemed to nod understanding and then she felt like she was floating weightlessly to the floor. She could see the empty shell of her body lying broken in a pool of her own blood on the floor, the infected lapping up her blood, the shattered body of the other girl lay beside her own, nothing more than a pulpy, bloody mass, and the rest of the girls pressed into the back of the cell like sardines in a tin can. All the pain was gone, momentarily, as she floated there. She sensed dark shapes around her and felt a pang of fear.