“There’s nothing out there, Cap.” Miguel replied. “Our own guys are ready to shoot us. We’re lucky we made it back here alive, let alone with our cars, fuel, guns and ammo… and we ran out of ammo on our way back.”
Sheridan paused for a moment, judging whether to take a hard line or soft approach with this situation. He knew that his crews were barely holding it together… and chose the latter. “Every trip you’ve made is incredibly important. Not just to the people on the ships out there, but to the people trapped in the DDCs. We have to keep the convoys going until we can’t. Do you understand? I realize I’m asking a lot of you, but I don’t think you know how important you are. You are people’s lifeline.”
“When do we leave?” Pam brought the coffee to her lips again. Her hands trembled with anxiety as she held the cup.
“Six hours. Seven and Twelve returned a few hours before you and the maintenance crews will need some time to get the cars back into fighting shape. Get some rest,” Sheridan replied.
“How are the other teams doing, Cap? Do they have it as bad as us?” Miguel asked, hopeful that what they had just experienced was the worst of what they could expect.
Sheridan looked at the group for a minute, judging whether or not to answer that question. After everything his soldiers had been through, he figured he owed it to them. “There are no other convoy teams, Private. There are no more cars, no more crews, not even enough ammunition to stock a second convoy. You are all there is. Seven lost half their team and four Humvees to a civilian ambush. Twelve… most of Twelve just disappeared, separated on the road. Only car three made it back.”
Pam sighed. “Five cars? Us and four other crews…”
“Soldiers,” Captain Sheridan sighed. His military rank gave him authority over his men, but he couldn’t help but feel that his office job separated him from his front-line troops in a way he could never overcome. He could bark orders, intimidate, even threaten Court-Martial, but ultimately, the convoy teams followed orders because they chose to. Appealing to their sense of duty was the only way to motivate the men and women under his command. Historically, soldiers fought for their country, for their family, for freedom, or for pay, but that structure had been consumed by the undead. Now, military rank was a bygone of a forgotten era. Captain Sheridan, for all his training and experience, was no more than a courier ferrying orders from the fleet to his men and women. “You’re the only remaining lifeline anyone in the DDCs has to the fleet. We need you.”
“We’re the last convoy?” Miguel asked, wrapping his head around that notion.
“That’s right, Sergeant,” Sheridan answered. “Convoy Nineteen is the last.”
Chapter 19
Kelly Damico held her breath as she unfolded the metal step stool. The screech of metal brackets on metal legs seemed deafening in the silence. After the stool was in position against the battered door, Kelly paused and listened for activity from the ground floor music store.
The gentle shuffling of the undead within the adjacent room was all she heard. A moan or vicious snarl would have alerted her that she had drawn the attention of the undead, but mercifully, she had not.
Kelly carefully set a clear plastic bin filled with pots, pans, and plates atop the stool. The door latch was splintered to pieces, and it could no longer be secured. If the door was forced open, however, at least she and the group of survivors who resided in the second-floor clinic above would have an alarm of clattering dishware. As long as everyone remained quiet, it would be unlikely that the dull-witted monsters in the neighboring room would notice any activity in the rest of the DDC.
As gently as possible, she added to the pile of debris she had placed at the foot of the door — a couple of dumb bells, a small television with a shattered screen, a vacuum cleaner, and a heap of clothes piled almost to the doorknob. The barricade wouldn’t prevent the undead from barging through the door if they were determined, but it would slow them and prevent some clumsy ghoul from setting off her alarm by accident. She did not want inadvertently to trigger a frenzy of activity that would place everyone on the second floor in jeopardy.
She took a step back and released her breath. The racket of Dr. Thomson’s death and Private Stenson’s escape had the benefit of drawing every walking corpse within the DDC into the music store. While the undead dominated the ground floor, for the moment, they were at least unaware of the living — many of whom were children — just up the stairs. It would take vigilance to keep it that way, but there was no choice. They were trapped.
Kelly turned to Private Stenson, who kept watch at the front of the DDC. Most of the windows had been shattered, but the lot was devoid of undead. The fenced enclosure was also still intact. Ghouls were haplessly wandering about beyond the perimeter, their clumsy forms visible through the ruins of French blinds that hung in tatters on the DDC’s windows.
With cautious and deliberate steps, Kelly and Stenson made their way through the DDC, over the fresh corpses created in the previous night’s carnage, and into the storage closet. The DDC sat in absolute ruin: cots, furniture, and personal effects lay strewn about, covered in gore. The storage closet, however, had remained secure. The food stores within, capable of feeding over seventy refugees, would stretch far longer feeding a couple dozen men, women, and children.
They each grabbed a plastic bin of food and supplies, and tiptoed back out into the clinic. The constant baritone moans of ghouls in the next room and outside obscured the sound of their footsteps. They quietly made their way back to the stairwell before Kelly stopped, set her bin down on the floor, and disappeared back into the storage closet. She reemerged with a bucket of wood stain before picking her bin back up and continuing up the stairs at the back of the room.
A man keeping watch gestured for them to hurry, and the second they were up and out of the stairwell, a dozen people reassembled the barricade they had thrown together the night before. The barrier was useless — perhaps capable of delaying an undead onslaught by a few seconds. The door behind it was less a door and more a tattered and broken strip of splintered wood, but it was all they had. Relocation was not currently an option.
“Okay,” Kelly whispered as the families gathered around intently, “we have enough rations for a few days right now if we stretch. I don’t want to have to go back downstairs for as long as possible. Keep your food on you at all times. If we have to leave here, we’re going to have to do it in a hurry and under uncertain circumstances. Make sure your kids have a couple days’ rations in their survival packs, and don’t forget to keep your water bottles full.”
“We should only run the bathroom faucet at a trickle. The noise of the pipes might…” someone said.
“Good idea… and keep your kids quiet. Talking should be fine, but no screaming or loud crying,” Kelly continued.
“No toilet flushing either. We need to use buckets…” Nicole, a blonde-haired woman who had shown some initiative, suggested.
“Good thinking. Make sure your kids know. Also, we need to start devising a plan if we have to evacuate. I believe we’re safe for the moment, but …” Kelly trailed off, “divide up the food fairly. I’ll be on the roof.”
Kelly left the families to separate the rations as they saw fit. She was in crisis management mode and had to trust that someone would take charge of rationing. There was plenty of food at the moment, but Kelly had figured it was a good idea to give everyone something to focus on. Without Dr. Thomson, guards, or staff, Kelly had realized that she was not only on her own, but she would also need some of her fellow survivors to step up and take charge. Private Stenson, Nicole… it didn’t matter, but she would need someone to rely on. Food rationing seemed like a good first test to identify both natural leaders and anyone who might be a problem.