The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now (13 page)

“That’s Larson,” said Olivia. “He’s the crazy boss of those misfits who had me put in a cage.”
 

She pointed at a monitor, and we saw a group of men walking defiantly through the melee shooting people in the head. There were about eight men in the group, but it was easy to tell who was in charge. He was the one in front, but he had enough people flanking him to keep from being bitten. At least that’s what he thought.

He was leading his band straight toward the dock as if there would be a boat being readied for him. I knew it was going to be worth watching, especially because he didn’t even notice when two of his entourage were taken down from behind.
 

Larson was wearing an ankle length black coat and had long black hair. He looked younger than most of the men, but his ruthless look gave him the appearance of a crazy man with a gun. He kept raising his gun and firing even though some of the people he shot didn’t appear to have been bitten yet. He was oblivious to the fact that more of his men were dead than alive.
 

He only had three men with him when he passed through the entrance of the fort and walked onto the dock. Many of the infected dead had walked over the edge and fallen into the water, and several empty boats with their engines idling had drifted out of reach. He stopped, and for the first time he surveyed the scene as if he was really understanding his predicament. He turned to look at his bodyguards and was visibly shocked to see how many were there. We watched him looking around as if he expected the rest of them to show up at any time.

“This is entertainment,” said Olivia. She looked like she was getting redemption and total satisfaction. “The man’s an animal, and he deserves to go out like one.”

Larson and his three remaining men put their backs together and began shooting outward, but it was too little and too late. The gunfire was attracting the attention of every infected dead in the fort, and they began swarming the dock. The four men shot the infected that were blocking their way toward the end of the dock and began moving in that direction.

From our camera angle we could see that there were no more boats at the end of the dock, but in the dark it must have looked to them like it was their only means of escape because they hurried to get there. Larson pointed at a boat that was idling about ten feet from the dock, and one of his men dove into the water to retrieve it. Halfway there he was pulled under.

As the last of Larson’s men went down, he disappeared under a mass of the infected dead.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” I said, “but I’m eating a bullet if that happens to me.”
 

Our group nodded in agreement, but Olivia said, “Since this all started I’ve heard people say that would be the coward’s way out, but in Larson’s case, he was too big of a coward to even show himself a little mercy.”

Kathy said, “Whatever he did to you, Olivia, it’s over now. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

Kathy started panning the cameras around the fort to see if anyone had managed to survive. We saw plenty of men trying to hide, but that wasn’t working out so well for them. They were all found by the infected sooner or later, and then they too were out searching for victims to bite. Some were jumping over the wall into the shallow water close to the fort, but we were only seeing infected dead inside the walls. Night time in the water of Charleston harbor was not a safe place to be even without the infected dead. We doubted we would see any of the men who escaped trying to get back into the fort. Then we saw the other cages.

“Olivia, how many people were in the cages?” asked Kathy.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but Larson killed most of them just a few hours ago. He just started going around shooting into the cages. I think he killed some in each cage and then let them turn into those monsters so they could attack the others.”

Olivia looked thoughtful for a moment and then giggled.

“That’s kind of what you people just did to him, isn’t it? You used the fort like it was one big cage,” she said.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but she was right. We did do the same thing he did, but we didn’t do it for fun. That at least kept us from feeling like we were the same as him.

Olivia looked at us and realized what she had said, and she immediately felt bad.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I didn’t mean it that way. You people did a good thing. That man was a monster, and if you had come along a day later I wouldn’t be standing here with you. I can’t thank you enough.”

She looked like she was going to cry, both from relief and from thinking she had offended us. She didn’t know us, and she didn’t know if we would think badly of her for comparing us to Larson.

“Olivia,” said Kathy, “we know the difference. Larson put them in those cages in the first place. Then he killed them. We didn’t put Larson and his men in a cage. They even had a chance of escaping if they had cared enough about each other.”

Kathy took Olivia by the hand and said, “Come with me. When was the last time you had a good meal and a bath?” She led her away from the monitors leaving the three of us to watch the rest of the carnage that was taking place above us.

Most of what we were seeing was deep in shadows. There were flood lights around the inside and outside of the fort, but they weren’t on, and they could have been broken or they could have been simply switched off. Whatever the reason for the lights being off, the campfires were beginning to burn out, and the fort was growing too dark to see. We agreed that it was time to call it a day, because Plan B was a tremendous success. The Chief would have been proud of us.

The Chief and Allison didn’t make it too far before they almost got trapped. The parking garage was an open invitation to get off the streets, but the Chief didn’t like the idea of having to go up to get away from the infected when there was bound to be a top floor sooner or later.

It started when they tried to cut across the inside of the parking lot on the first floor. There was a large group of the infected dead that had been unable to find an exit. After bumping into concrete walls and cars for several months, they had done what they tended to do, and that was to stand around waiting for the next thing to draw their attention in a different direction. The sound of Allison landing too hard on the concrete when she climbed the low wall was all they needed.
 

Allison instinctively tried for higher ground and went up one level before the Chief could stop her. He caught up with her, but the ramp behind him was already full of the infected. The Chief looked around and spotted the stairwell in a far corner of the second level. He pulled Allison toward it and whispered to her as they ran that they had to go down and out before they got trapped. They dodged the cars that had been abandoned by their owners when the logjam of cars had become so bad that no one could drive out of the garage.

He said, “Never go high unless you have to or if you have an escape route.”

When they reached the stairwell and pulled open the door, they saw they had made another terrible mistake. There were already infected dead on the other side of the door. The Chief put everything he had into pushing the door shut again, which was far more than most men could do, but the weight of the infected had already opened the door too far. He let go of the door, and they fell out in a pile.
 

This time there was no choice but to go up another level, and there were more infected waiting on the third floor. Realizing they couldn’t keep going up until they ran out of places to go, the Chief began checking cars.
 

“What are you looking for, Chief?” Allison wasn’t quite ready to cry, but she sounded like she was ready to panic.
 

“I’m looking for anything with the keys and a forty-eight month battery in it.” The Chief had opened one car’s trunk and snatched up the lug wrench.

“We can’t drive out of here, Chief. There are too many cars blocking the way.” Allison was definitely getting a frantic edge to her voice as the infected were coming down from above and up from below.

The Chief found a white Charger with the doors shut and the keys in the ignition. It was parked along the outside wall of the garage. He called for Allison to catch up with him, and as soon as she arrived, he broke the window on the driver’s side. The car alarm immediately started its ear splitting wail. He shoved the lug wrench through his belt. He was sure it would be the best weapon he would find for a while.

With Allison in tow for a second time in one day, the Chief dragged her away from the Charger toward the center of the garage. He lifted her easily over the railing and practically tossed her down to second level, then he climbed over and jumped. They hid behind the cars parked along the inner row and watched as a steady parade of the infected walked by on their way to the car alarm.
 

“We have to move fast because infected outside the garage are going to be drawn to the sound, too,” he said.

Allison was beginning to catch on to the plan because she turned and checked the first level that was now behind and below her. She didn’t wait for the Chief to toss her over the railing. This time she jumped and moved quickly to hide behind a car. The Chief smiled and followed her.
 

Being back on the first level, the Chief and Allison were able to hop the low wall as far from the exits as they could get. Even as they moved away from the garage they were stunned speechless by the sheer numbers of the infected dead being summoned by the car alarm on the third floor. What had begun as a death trap turned into a way for them to remove large numbers of the infected from their path, but what frightened them was how easy it was to become cornered.
 

They still had most of the peninsular city to cross, and that meant countless streets that were unknown to them. All it would take was to go down the wrong alley and they could find themselves trapped with nowhere to go. When they decided to cut across the garage, they would have been safe if they had run for the other side and jumped over the wall on the ground level. Even Allison's mistake didn't seem like the end of the world, but it certainly could have been.

The Chief had to admit to himself that he was a bit more impressed with Allison since the plane crash, and he had even started to like her more because she was at least trying to act like a survivor, but her blunder when she panicked and ran up the ramp made the Chief wonder if she was capable of consistently making the right decisions.

Over the last six months or so, the Chief had seen good decisions and bad. The worst decisions seemed to be made by people he didn't know. Jean's decision to leave the shelter a few months ago had been a bad one. It nearly cost her life when she was captured by the crew of a Russian ship, but not because they were bad people. It was what they became after the infection had spread through their crew.
 

Even though that was a bad decision, Jean showed she was capable of making sustained good judgement calls, and she survived the ordeal largely on her own. The Chief told himself that he didn't think Allison would have survived the same ordeal, and he wasn't so sure she could survive this one, even with him along to protect her. He decided that the best place for her would be somewhere behind him until they were safe again.

The Chief motioned with a finger to his lips not to speak and then gently guided her into position behind him. She seemed to understand.

The trees along the side of the garage gave them enough cover to make it to the next street, and the infected that were being drawn toward the parking garage were mainly using the paved areas and sidewalks. It wasn't that the infected had the mental powers to stay on the road and then use the entrance of the garage. It was a case of taking the path of least resistance and then banging into things that were in the way until they eventually got around something. The trees surrounding the grassy area next to the parking garage served as a natural barrier that deflected the infected dead back onto the road, and with the exception of a half dozen or so infected that were stuck on a bicycle rack, most of them were past the place where the Chief and Allison had to leave the cover of the trees.
 

For about the hundredth time the Chief checked the position of the sun. He knew it would worry his good friends, who were hopefully in the Fort Sumter shelter by now, but it was looking more and more like they would be spending the night in Charleston. He wondered if it would be possible to find a place that still had some supplies or if they should just settle for something that wasn't a death trap.

On his signal, he and Allison made a run for the other side of the street. Other than the infected that were stuck on the bicycle rack, they seemed to go unnoticed, and that group didn't pose any threat. If anything, they were useful because their groaning was distracting some of the infected toward them.
 

They edged along the wall of a building until they reached an intersection that said they were on East Bay Street. The Chief remembered that East Bay Street was the road that would take them all the way to the Coast Guard base if they took the longer route. It was safer in one way. After reaching White Point Garden, there would be water on one side and buildings on the other. If they got trapped, they could jump over the railing into the water and swim far enough out to be safe. He didn't think Allison would be too happy with getting wet, but the alternative was far less attractive.