The Infected Dead (Book 2): Survive For Now (15 page)

He made it to the plane and didn’t see any signs that someone was inside the houseboat, so he slipped quickly into the cockpit of the plane. Before he started working on the wires, he crawled into the back of the plane and watched the houseboat from the rear window. That was when he saw the faint glow of a cigarette and a shadow pass over a window heading in the direction of the front of the houseboat. It was positioned facing out to sea, and a dark figure walked out onto the sundeck on the bow with a flashlight. He blinked the light a few times in the direction of the corvette, and a few moments later there was a return signal. The Chief counted three flashes from each light.

The Chief checked his watch to see what time it was. If he was right, the Russian would be checking in with his crew on the ship every fifteen or thirty minutes. If he was really lucky, it would be an hour. He decided he would fix the plane first and then deal with the Russian, but he would have to keep an eye out for the next signal so he would know the intervals. He hoped it was at least thirty minutes so they would have time to get the plane most of the way around the island after he disposed of the guard, but thirty minutes would be cutting it really close. He also hoped Tom and Kathy didn’t show up before the next signal was given. If it was an hour between signals, there was at least a chance of that happening.

At fifteen minutes the Chief was in position to see the fore deck of the houseboat again, and no one came outside to give the signal. He quickly crawled back under the controls of the de Havilland DHC-3 Otter and connected the remaining wires. He didn’t need to test them because he knew he had it right. Now he just needed to be in position to take out the Russian as soon as he made the next signal.

With time to spare, the Chief stayed low and slipped from inside the plane down the full length of the dock to the door of the houseboat. He was counting on it being locked, but he had gotten the key from Ed before they started their escape. He eased the key into the lock and turned it just far enough to unlock it without opening the door. If the guard found it was unlocked he would probably think he had just left it like that since it was still shut. At least that’s what he hoped.

At forty-five minutes there was no signal, and the Chief started getting a little nervous. He kept glancing into the darkness of the waterway behind the island hoping he would see Tom and Kathy before the guard saw them. He knew they would stay quiet, but he wanted to be sure. If they saw him down against the side of the houseboat by the door, they were smart enough not to keep coming, but he didn’t know what the guy inside was doing. If he was watching out the back window he still might not be able to see them in the darkness, but if he did see them, it would be a race to get rid of the guard and out to the open water in the plane before the next signal was due.

Just before an hour had passed the Chief felt movement inside the house boat. He had his back firmly against the outside wall, and he felt it shift downward as the guard passed by behind him. There was a very slight sound from the metal joints, but it was barely audible above the sound of the water lapping against the side of the houseboat and the big twin outboard that was tied up behind the plane.

The Chief moved closer to the door just in case it opened, but the guard kept going toward the bow. He listened carefully for the sound of him reaching the sun deck, then he moved just far enough out from his hiding spot to be able to see the corvette. After several long seconds he saw the corvette flash its light, and he knew the guard would be going back aft again.

He timed it perfectly. As the guard walked by the door, he yanked it open and grabbed the surprised Russian before he could even guess what was happening. Chief Joshua Barnes was a kind and gentle man, but he was also powerful. His massive fist hit the man in his left eye, and he slumped to the floor. He dragged him further inside and used a roll of electrician’s tape to tie him up. He didn’t see the need to kill him because they would be long gone before he came to. As insurance he found the flashlight and took it and the man’s rifle with him as he left the houseboat.

He was back at the plane ready to cast off the moorings when he heard movement out on the water. Tom and Kathy slowly materialized from the darkness, and he gave them just a short flash from the light. The Chief took a long coil of rope and went out onto the open dock in front of the plane. With a slight turn at the waist he heaved the rope through the air and across the Boston Whaler. Kathy grabbed the rope and tied it across two stern cleats. The Chief tied the other end to a towing hook just under the propeller housing and waved for them to reverse direction.

Kathy and Tom put their backs into the hard work of moving the boat back in the other direction, and as soon as the boat began to turn, the Chief gave the plane a hard shove and got it moving away from the dock. He flashed the light at them, and saw both of them look back.

In a low voice he said, “I’m drifting faster than you. Let me catch up.”

The plane glided easily across the surface of the water and caught the current. When he was closer he said, “Trade places with me, Kathy.”

Kathy was more than happy to let the Chief take over for her. She jumped across to a pontoon and grabbed a wing strut. The Chief said as he went by, “We have less than an hour to be out of here, and there’s no time to explain why.”

Kathy gave him a nod as he jumped over to the boat. Her job was just to use a pole to steer the plane and to give them just a little push now and then. The current had picked up a bit, and so had their speed. Going out was definitely easier than going in to the plane.

Over in the boat, the Chief told Tom that there had been a guard in the houseboat, and he had signaled the Russian corvette once per hour. Their timing had been good because the Chief had tied up the guard only minutes before they had arrived with the boat, but that meant they were going to have to travel two miles using nothing but the poles and the current.

They would probably get to the mouth of the southern exit to the moat around the same time that the Russian crew was expecting to see another signal from the houseboat. When that signal didn’t come, there would be a few minutes of delay while the Russians decided how to deal with it, and then it would be a race to get the gear into the plane and get the plane into the air.

The Chief felt the current picking up even more than he thought it would, and he realized with a sense of irony that the current was swifter because the jetty had been fixed, and the sandbar wasn’t slowing down the water that was coming into the northern entrance. The plane was gliding over the water so well that it wasn’t putting any drag on the boat, and it even felt like the plane was going to pass the boat a couple of times.

Forty-five minutes later, they rounded the bend and could see the southern jetty. They had fifteen minutes to spare.

Chapter 6

The Mission

It was a long couple of hours since the Chief had gone one way, and the Boston Whaler had gone the other. I had no way of knowing that the Chief was forced to wait for the guard to give his signal. I also didn’t know how well Kathy and Tom had done getting the boat from one end of the island to the other using poles. My biggest worry was that they would cross over the nets and get tangled up in the infected that were stuck in them. After almost two hours, I couldn’t stand to wait in the tunnel any longer, so I quietly pulled myself out of the upper hatch.

The pair of legs that I saw in the darkness couldn’t belong to anyone I knew. The pants were torn and dirty, and the last I had seen of our group, they were all wearing new Navy blue coveralls. It had to be an infected dead, and he was standing just outside the camouflaged tarp that covered our secret garage. I figured I would use my machete to take out his legs at the ankles, and I was just about to swing when a second pair of legs came into view. These were in tattered sorts, and the legs were mostly decayed.

I watched as the legs turned left and right, and when both turned to face away from me at the same time, I stepped out from under the tarp and swung my machete twice. One went down with the first swing, and the other went down with the second. I couldn’t help thinking how much I had changed. When we had been forced to make a mad dash across the beach through a group of the infected, I just aimed and swung. Now I watched for my opening and took it.

I dragged their bodies over to the water and left them where the surf was just reaching them. If the tide came in higher it would carry them out to sea. If not, the crabs that were brave enough to come out in cold weather would be on them in no time.

Just as I finished disposing of the infected, I heard something on the water at the exit to the moat. The Boston Whaler came into view, and the de Havilland DHC-3 Otter was practically on top of it. I saw that the Chief had traded places with Kathy, and he was really digging hard with the pole.

As soon as the boat was beached, he and Tom jumped onto the sand and ran toward the plane. They each grabbed the plane by the wing struts and rotated it onto the sand. I ran back toward the tunnel to get Jean and Molly, and the others didn’t waste any time. Before we could get back they had the gear loaded in the plane.

The Chief, Kathy, and Tom were standing in a tight circle, and Tom scooped Molly up in his arms. Kathy and the Chief blocked Jean and I from getting into the boat, and the Chief said he needed to do one last thing.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Jean, you’re staying here,” said the Chief.

The protest was almost too loud, and the Chief cut her short. Jean said, “I’m pregnant, Chief. I’m not disabled.”

“You can stop arguing before you get started, Jean. Think about it a second. The last time we didn’t know what we were coming back to. This time we’re only going to be gone a day or two, and we’ll know what we’re coming back to if we leave someone behind on the radio. You’re the logical choice.”

The Chief didn’t need to say it twice. He told us we needed to get clear of the island and have the plane in the air within ten minutes, so we didn’t have time to discuss it. Jean needed to get back down through the tunnel, and we needed to see it sealed behind her. Jean wanted desperately to go with us, but she was too smart to deny the logic. If we needed to be warned to stay away, there had to be someone left behind in the shelter. She looked longingly at Molly and defied the Chief just a little by running over and hugging her while she was still in Tom’s arms.

“You be a good girl for your dad, Molly. I already know you’re very brave, and I’m so happy you will be able to go home to your mommy,” she whispered. “I’ll miss you, but I promise we’ll see each other again.”

Molly was crying just a little, but she was used to being strong for grownups. She hugged Jean back and whispered in Jean’s ear that she hoped Jean would have a little girl so she could be a big sister.

Jean gave me a quick kiss. With tears streaming down her cheeks and her hand over her mouth, she ran for the tunnel just as the Chief said that we wouldn’t be leaving if we didn’t do it in the next few seconds.

As much as I wanted to comfort Jean, we didn’t ask why. We just turned the plane around and got into the boat. With three of us digging and pushing with the poles, we were across the moat, around the beached trawler that had crashed ashore on the other side, and heading south along the coast in about four minutes. We didn’t stop there because the further we were from the island when we started the engine on the plane the better.

The Chief kept glancing back in the direction of the corvette. It was at least a couple of miles away, and if they were listening, they would hear the engine start, but they wouldn’t know where the sound was coming from immediately.

“Okay, everybody,” said the Chief. “Get into the plane as fast as you can. Ed, stay with the Whaler long enough to cover it with the tarps and get an anchor down. Try to spot some landmarks so we can find it again.”

Everyone scrambled over to the plane while the Chief helped me get the tarps spread out over the tallest part of the Whaler. It was dark, but I was sure I would be able to find the boat again. There were two trees up on the mainland that were larger than the others and were leaning toward each other. Even in the low light, they seemed to stand out.

I got the anchor into the water and hopped over onto one of the pontoons of the plane. As I did, I saw lights flashing on the bow of the corvette. Before I could even get inside, the Chief started the engine and began to move forward.

“Hang on everyone. I’m going to take off but stay low until I can turn inland. When I go for the trees, it’s going to be a hard right turn, so be ready,” yelled the Chief.

The water was splashing over the pontoons and soaking me as I tried to get into the plane before we were airborne. I didn’t have the urge to be outside when the Chief banked to the right, especially since that was the side I was standing on.

Tom reached out and grabbed me by my belt. He yanked me in hard, but I wasn’t complaining. The wind was beginning to pick up as the Chief increased the throttle, and I had to fight the door to get it closed and latched. Kathy was riding shotgun up front with the Chief, and Molly was in her lap. It seemed like gear was stashed everywhere because we had to load the plane so quickly. I shifted back packs and supplies around until I found a seat behind Kathy and strapped myself in just as the plane started to lay over on one side.

The Chief put us into a steep bank toward the mainland, and I was looking almost straight down at the water through my side window. Over the roar of the engine I heard Molly faintly asking for her daddy and Kathy telling her everything was going to be okay. We passed over water, marshes, and then trees in a matter of seconds as the Chief put distance between us and the Russian ship. I was missing Jean already, but I knew she would not have appreciated the take off any more than I did.

As we flew between big trees, the plane rotated to a more level position and then began to bank to the left. I could tell the Chief was getting us behind trees and down range as quickly as he could, and if he was flying low it was because we were still close enough to the ship for them to shoot us down if they acquired a clear target. I looked out the window and couldn’t believe how low we were. For a moment I wondered if the Chief had forgotten that we didn’t have wheels.

The last turn was a gut wrenching turn back to the right and then again to the left before the Chief finally leveled out. We were at least twenty miles inland before he began gradually increasing altitude, and looking over my shoulder at him I could tell he was beginning to relax a bit.

He smiled at me and asked, “Are you still here? I thought we dumped you off back at the start.”

“I’m still here, Chief,” I said. “By the way, is this your sleeping bag back here? I tossed my cookies in it.”

Despite the tension involved with that take off, everyone was fighting back tears while laughing because Molly asked if she could have some cookies, too. Not to be outdone by me, the Chief said to give Molly some cookies.

We were all quiet for a bit after the fit of laughter, just letting it sink in that we were in the air again, and that we had defied my Uncle Titus one more time.

The man who had left his shelter to me in his will also left messages for me. His number one rule had been not to leave the shelter once the world came to an end. Despite the safety of the shelter which would at least add a few years to our lives, we had acted as if we were staging a prison break and had escaped into the night.

Of course there was the Russian corvette sitting off the coast. If their reason for fixing the jetty was to make the waterway behind the island stay deeper, they must be planning to try to hide their ship. There was no reason to expect them to wait another day, so we had to leave while we could. Once the corvette would be behind the island, there would be no way to for us to fly the plane out of the area without being seen. They could shoot down a seaplane before it even lifted off of the water.

There was also likely to be some drama when the corvette dropped its anchor. One way or the other, it was going to get hung up on something, and they would send divers down to see what they had snagged. I wondered what we would find when we got back.

Kathy turned in her seat and got the Chief’s attention. “What happened back there, Chief? Why the crazy take off?”

The Chief answered her loud enough for all of us to hear, explaining that the guard would be expected to signal the corvette in one hour, and that the hour was up. We were lucky the Russians had made it a one hour interval or we wouldn’t have had enough time to load our gear before flying away.

The plane was gradually climbing higher, and all of us were glued to the windows. It was completely dark as far as we could see, and even though we knew why it was pitch black, it didn’t change our hope that we would see living people below. When entire cities are dark the world looks like a lonely place.

Once we reached our cruising altitude, the Chief told Kathy to check in with Jean and then to start trying to get Bus on the radio. They needed to let them know they were coming and to find a way to get his coordinates without the wrong people getting them, too. He turned in his seat and told Tom that he should be thinking about places he and Allison had been to and maybe they could at least give a vague description of where they should land.