Verge of Extinction (Apex Predator Book 3) (2 page)

Day 35

Sgt Procell looked up at the women hovering over him.  Jen’s mousy-brown hair was pulled tight behind her head in a ponytail.  The look on her face, as she studied his knee was one of worry.  She looked to the other woman.  She was younger than Jen.  Her skin and hair were darker.  Sgt. Procell knew her also.  Her skin color was a shade lighter than most of the people of pure Indian decent.

“How does that feel?”  She asked him.  She spoke with a slight southern drawl.  He was not surprised.  He knew that she was part of the second generation of her family born in Louisiana.

Her expression was not one of worry as much as one gets when trying to solve a puzzle.  Right now, he hated that he was puzzle.

“Still pretty sore,” he announced in his thick Carolina drawl.  Her face began to sour.

“The infection is definitely getting worse,” she said to Jen.  “The antibiotics we have aren’t working as well as I had hoped.”

She and Jen had performed something akin to a medieval torture session on Sgt. Procell the day he was rescued.  They had debrided dead tissue from the wound with scissors that had been sterilized with rubbing alcohol.  After that, the wound was sewn with a straight needle and thread that had been soaking in the same alcohol.  They were only able to give him a small dose of morphine for pain control.  It hadn’t really worked.

“Is it getting worse?” he asked.  She looked at him with a slight smile

“A little,” She answered.  “I think we’ve slowed the infection down, but whatever bug you have trying to grow in your leg is not very susceptible to the Cipro.  We need to find another antibiotic to use.”  He saw the tiniest frown cross her face.  She turned and whispered something to Jen.  He immediately saw the wheels begin turning behind those eyes.  He’d seen that look before too.  She too, was working on solving some unseen puzzle.

Soon, the duo was using scissors to surgically cut two of the stitches holding his wound closed.  Some pressure to the wound with her fingers forced a small amount of foul smelling puss out of the wound.  “For now,” Indira told him.  “We’re going to let it drain.”

She deftly cut a small piece of gauze and twirled it between her fingers.  She then used the end of the scissors to push the twisted gauze into the wound.  He winced in pain as the gauze began to fill the space that was already inflamed and sore from infection.  Jen tied a bandage over the wound, another wince of pain.

Jackson and SSgt Brown helped the soldier to his feet.  Jen could see the big NCO had questions for them.  Instead of asking, he slid Sgt Procell’s right arm over his shoulder, mirroring what Jackson was doing on the left.  The trio exited through a small hatch just below the flying bridge.  Jen watched them sit Sgt Procell in a chair on the aft deck of the 41 foot fishing boat.

Three days ago, the group had been rescued by men and women of the Mississippi River Survivor Rescue Squadron who referred to themselves as the River Rats.  The River Rats were a hodge-podge of military, former military, and commercial boat captains.  Soon after the outbreak, these men and women had occupied several of the barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi.  After securing Pascagoula Island, with its abandoned naval base, they began a concerted effort to locate and rescue survivors.  The leader of the team that had rescued Jen and the rest of the survivors from the roof of an over-run fire station had told her that they had rescued over 100 people from areas bordering the Mississippi River.

He hung his head as he explained that the helicopters they used were actually liberated from Keesler Air Force Base.  Jen knew he must have lost friends and hadn’t asked him to elaborate.  He finally volunteered that about 30 military and ex-military guys had cut through the fence after landing at Back Bay.  Only four pilots and sixteen grunts, as he called them, made it out.  “But,” he said as his smile widened “we did get four Chinooks and they’ve been doing a world of good,” he said with pride.

The helicopter had landed on a river barge in the middle of the Mississippi River.  The barge was traveling south when they landed.  Shortly after landing, they were hustled to the far end of the barge.  Jen had seen several men hurriedly begin fueling the big machine.  Somehow in the confusion, Jackson had become separated from the rest of the survivors.  It wasn’t until after the helicopter had ascended that she realized no one knew where Private Jackson was.

She was almost in tears as the Helicopter returned an hour later.  Her spirits lifted when she saw Jackson lead SSgt Brown, Theresa, and Ms. Hebert off of the craft and onto the deck.  Her heart skipped a beat as they strode toward her in the fading light.  The group was embraced tightly by not only herself, but also Kerry, Indira and Mike.

None of the others seemed to notice Ms. Hebert.  She stalked away from them and walked quietly to the group of firemen and family members with whom she had spent the better part of a month.  Jen noticed that she was not greeted as warmly by her people.

They had spent the next few days on the barge, eating cold food and watching the helicopter as it flew off in search of other survivors.  It returned several times to disgorge passengers.  The first time it was Sgt Procell who was carried off of the helicopter on a makeshift stretcher. She and Indira had spent a few hours trying hard to save their friend’s life.  To call the conditions primitive would be an understatement.  They were downright archaic.

The second time three survivors walked wearily off of the helicopter.  The group consisted of an older black man, maybe 60, and a pair of pretty young women.  Both women appeared to be in their twenties.  They both looked alike, and Jen thought they looked a bit like the old guy.  Maybe they were his granddaughters she had thought at the time.  Several crew members took the trio to the pilothouse of the barge.  She hadn’t seen them since.

As the second day came to a close, she realized that her group seemed to be larger than most.  The helicopter landed three times that day.  Each time somewhere between four and six people walked off of the aircraft.  Not once in two days on the barge did she see a group larger than six walk down the ramp.

She had pondered that thought for a long time.  She knew there were three helicopters working on the Mississippi River.  If they were having the same luck as this barge was, that meant that only about 15 or 20 survivors a day were coming in.  That really didn’t seem like a lot of people, considering the area they were searching.  She didn’t do the math.  She knew how few survivors there were.  She had cried herself to sleep that night.

The next day, the survivors were transferred to a larger ocean going boat.  This boat had a pilothouse and a flying bridge, an open air bridge.  The captain of the boat, an older man with bad teeth named Sully, stayed to the bridge.  His first mate was a very young man of maybe 18 that the older man constantly referred to as Slim.  The name fit the young man.  He was tall, maybe a little over six feet; Jen didn’t think he weighed more than 150 pounds.

The younger man looked out of place on the boat.  Where Captain Sully acted the part of a salty old sea dog, the young man acted more like a tour guide.  He seemed to be very comfortable getting everyone a place to sit, setting Jen and Indira up with a makeshift sickbay, or getting everyone a canned soda.  He didn’t even talk like a sailor, thought Jen.  He didn’t use nautical terms at all.  To Slim, right was right and left was left.  To Captain Scully, they were starboard and port.

The boat they boarded in the half-dawn had a deck below the main deck where there was a galley and two sleeping births.  Jen and Indira were set up in the pilothouse.  Several people had received injuries during their escape.  The medic from the River Rats had been nice enough to give the two women some medical supplies for the trip.  He told them the trip would take the better part of the day.

She walked out of the pilothouse onto the aft deck.  The other groups had all charged onto the boat and laid claim to the staterooms below decks.  SSgt Brown and Jackson sat beside Sgt Procell.  She recognized the look of worry on SSgt Brown’s face.  She’d seen it before.

Beside Jackson sat Theresa and Kerry.  The two women, girls really, Theresa was 14 and Kerry couldn’t have been much more than 18, had become fairly close.  At least, they seemed closer to each other than they did to others.  The two had both suffered horrible trauma over the last month.  Theresa had seen her entire family slaughtered by the growing zombie hoard.  Her brother Davy had shot himself outside of Jen and Mike’s house in the first few days.

Kerry had suffered a different kind of trauma.  When the group had found her, she and three other people had been holed up inside of a sporting goods store.  Two of her fellow survivors were brothers.  The Adams brothers were pieces of work.  She shook her head.  They had pretty much kidnapped Kerry and her friend Simon.  It was obvious to all involved that the two brothers had raped the girl.  The corners of her lips rose slightly.  Killing those two assholes had actually been one of the good things to come out of this whole zombie apocalypse.

Her eyes drifted to the figure at the very aft of the boat.  He was older than the two girls.  She knew he was in his 30’s.  His shoulder length brown hair, oh she hated that hair, was blowing slightly in the ocean breeze.  She’d been on to him for months to get it cut.  He had wanted it to grow out a little so he could “shape it.”  What the hell did he know about shaping hair?  Now it just looked like a damned rat-tailed mullet.

Mike turned his head.  He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck.  He saw the scowl on her face.  What, he thought, had he done now?  He inadvertently ran his fingers through his shaggy mane of hair.  Oh, that’s it.  She smiled and nodded her head.  Yes, it is too long mister; her unspoken words coming through loud and clear.

She slid into the space between him and the back, what she thought; bulkhead, hull, something else?  Whatever it was, it pressed her closer to him.  She could feel his breathing, the weight of his arm on her shoulder and neck.  She felt comfortable for the first time in what seems like months.

SSgt Brown woke with a start.  Something had changed.  What was it?  It took him a moment to realize the boat they were in was turning.  He looked for the sun.  It was getting low towards the horizon, and was now off of the left side of the boat.  They must be heading north.  He stood and walked to the port side.  He could see land to the northeast of them.  That must be their new home.

An hour later, Sully pulled the boat along side one of the docks on Singing River Island.  There were three other boats tied to the same dock.  All were smaller than the one on which he stood.  He could see a double row chain link fence surrounded most of the island.  He assumed this was the fence line that surrounded what used to be Pascagoula Naval Base.

They had been told that the base was closed several years ago.  They were also told that the only way to the mainland was a bridge that spanned more than a mile over the Gulf of Mexico.  SFC Riddick had told him it was the safest place on the planet.  He sure hoped the grizzled old ranger was right.

A quick glance told him the rest of the group was also asleep.  Jen was softly snoring in Mike’s arms, and Jackson, Theresa, and Kerry had formed a little tripod of bobbing heads.   Even Indira was asleep in the makeshift sickbay.  Sgt Procell was the only other soul awake.  But, SSgt Brown could tell the man had just woken up and seemed to still be groggy.  He merely smiled at the older NCO before nudging the gaggle of young people to his left.

The large man standing before them must have played basketball at some point in his life.  If not, thought Mike, it would have been a waste.  The man must have been six-four.  His hair was silver as the clouds and he spoke with a very thick Cajun accent.  He had introduced himself to the new arrivals simply as the Bishop.  He was an imposing figure.  Mike could see that he wore a pistol in drop-down holster on his left thigh and something that looked like a sword on his right hip.  He looked like a cross between a SWAT team member and a medieval barbarian.

His giant smile suddenly turned into a scowl.  “There are a few rules that need to be addressed before you go any farther,” the man was bellowing.  “One, violence on another person ain’t allowed.  Two, stealin’ ain’t allowed.  Three, hoarding ain’t allowed.  Four, everyone works.  There are a few exceptions to this rule, but I make the exceptions.  Five, in the immortal words of Spock: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  Again, I decide what the needs are.”

Lastly, there is only one punishment.”  He paused for dramatic effect, “banishment.  If you violate the rules, you will be returned, under guard and without supplies, to the mainland.”  His smile returned.  “Now, I understand there are some people that I am to take a special interest in.”  He read off a list of names.  Jen and Indira were the first two names called.  They were followed by Sam Reynolds, SSgt Brown, Sgt Procell, and Jackson.  “Would you folks be so kind as to follow me to my office?  The rest of you please follow Jerry here.  He’ll get you settled in.”

Jen and the rest followed the Bishop as requested.  She thought for a moment about his request.  It most certainly was not a request.  This man did not request anything.  She realized that he barked, and people obeyed.  Her stomach turned, although she was not the least bit hungry.  She noticed Indira had the same worried look on her face.