A blood-drenched civilian staggered into view and clumsily grabbed after the kids.
“Hey!” Carl shouted and the monster turned and snarled at him. The creature’s head erupted with a spray of blood before it fell backwards against a cube.
Tears streaked down the children’s faces as they continued toward the convoy team. Carl and Miguel looked at each other as the kids approached. The little girl, the slightly older of the two, whispered: “If we can’t find daddy, we’re supposed to find soldiers.”
Miguel sighed as he took the children’s hands. “I wish I had known before I joined up that Day Care Provider was part of the job description of a United States Soldier.”
“Control, this is Private Grace aboard the Boxer. We have a WD outbreak. Please advise.” Pam spoke calmly into her headset.
Instantly, an answer came back. “Quarantine is now in effect for the Boxer, Specialist Grace. We will be unable to send…”
“Give me that.” The familiar voice of Captain Sheridan interrupted the speaker on the other end of the line. “Specialist Grace, who is with you? What’s the situation?”
“It’s me, Sergeant Ramos and Sergeant First Class Harvey. The situation is pretty fuc… er screwed, sir.” Pam noted the two children as she looked around at her friends. “Things have gotten bad pretty quickly.”
Gunfire and shouting came from somewhere else in the storage bay, but a peculiar calm began to take hold. The majority of civilians had managed to force their way into the rest of the ship, leaving the infected Cube City behind — but many carried the infection with them to every deck.
“Specialist Grace, put Officer Harvey on,” Captain Sheridan ordered.
“Yes sir.” Pam handed the headset to Carl and stood to scan their surroundings.
“This is Officer Harvey…” Carl nodded as he listened to his orders. “Yes sir… yes sir… no sir… yes sir.”
The little girl walked over to Pam. “Can you help me find daddy?”
Pam looked back to Miguel, and shook her head in disbelief. “The more things change… the more they stay the same.”
Carl handed the headset back to Pam. “Okay… there’s a VIP on board. We have to get him, make our way to the Humvees on deck, and a helicopter will take us to the Reagan.”
“Do we know where this guy is?” Miguel asked as he pulled himself to his feet with his crutches.
“Deck three, officer’s quarters, room four. We ready to do this?” Carl glanced down at the children. “You stick close to us no matter what. Understand?”
The children nodded. Miguel and Pam got to their feet, and they began scanning the area for living dead. Growls indicated that they had been spotted, but a few well-placed gunshots put an end to any immediate threat.
“Follow me!” Carl ordered.
Chapter 34
For the first time in too many months, Dr. Henry Damico held his wife. Their warm bodies pressed together, and they both realized how deeply each had missed the other’s touch. The stress of the decisions they had been required to make, the pressure from the military, the threat from the living dead… for a moment, it was all washed away. The gray officer’s quarters Henry had been assigned were cold and dingy, but in this moment, his world was warm and small.
“I love you.” Kelly nestled into her husband’s chest.
“I love you, too.” Henry replied, as he gently hugged Kelly.
For a long while, they lay in silence, reveling in each other’s presence. They had so much to talk about, so much to catch up on… but all they could think about was how grateful they were to be together.
“Is the rest of the world as bad as San Diego?” Kelly eventually broke the silence.
Henry weighed his response carefully before speaking. His wife had seen the horror of a dense population center overrun with the undead firsthand, and it served no purpose to shelter her from the truth. Before they had been separated by their duties, they had shared one another’s counsel on important issues. There was a part of Henry that needed Kelly’s help to bear the burdens he had endured in directing the fleet. Kelly was brilliant, and she had often helped to guide him during his time in the Department of Health and Human Services. Now that he was head of that department, he valued the input of his wife that much more. “It’s worse.”
Kelly nodded in understanding, her dark hair brushing gently against Henry’s neck. “What’s the plan?”
“This fleet is most likely the human race’s only hope. We need to get to the Gulf of Mexico. There hasn’t been any substantial contact with any Caribbean islands in months, and there’s a good chance they are overrun with the undead. We can raid them for food resources or clear them and build civilian settlements while we set up oil refining capability using the rigs on the Gulf Coast. Eventually, we can establish a base of operations on the American mainland. It would be somewhere in Florida or ideally, Louisiana… where we could launch expeditions up the Mississippi River, but…” Henry hesitated, “there’s some resistance to that plan in the government. If it doesn’t fly, I’ll have to think of something else.”
“Why?” Kelly asked. She could feel the tension in Henry’s body as he spoke, and she felt her husband struggling with something.
“There are a lot of good reasons… a large part of the fleet won’t even make it to the Gulf. Once we’re there, we have to figure out how to transform a population that consists largely of business people, lawyers, bankers, service workers, and retailers into farmers, oil refiners, carpenters, and mechanics. We haven’t even begun to see the tip of the iceberg in terms of social challenges — petty crime, organized crime, orphans, PTSD, God, Kelly, the list goes on and on. I don’t even know where to start.” Henry’s mind drifted out of the Nirvana of the moment and back into the challenges he had been wrestling with for months. “I’m not even sure this plan will work, and I have to sit in meetings defending it from the assholes that got us in this fucked up situation in the first place. I mean…” Henry rubbed his temples, “what if I’m wrong?”
Kelly hugged her husband. “What if you’re right?” she tried to reassure him.
“If… if I’m right.” Henry sat up on the bed and put his feet on the cold metal floor. The sheet fell away from his naked back, and his bare skin looked to Kelly as if it had aged twenty years. “Then we have to hit Mexico with nuclear weapons. Their military will dog us at every turn. We have to wipe them off the map if we’re going to be safe. We’re…” Henry sighed as he voiced his darkest fears, “we’re going to kill a lot of innocent people for the crime of living under a shitty government.”
Kelly sat up next to her husband, put her arm around him, and rested her head against his shoulder.
Henry slipped his arm around his wife’s waist. “Damn… if that’s a reason to die, then our heads should be the first on the chopping block.”
“The world’s a really shitty place these days.” Kelly kissed his shoulder and looked up at him. “Is this our only option for survival?”
Henry was silent for a moment. “Yes…” he eventually answered.
“Then I want to live… and so does everyone else in this fleet,” Kelly continued. “We get to live because we have the power to live. Maybe that’s barbaric. Maybe that’s heartless, but there are thousands of people in the fleet who would scorch every inch of the earth if it meant the people they cared about would survive. I want you to live. If this fleet is truly our only hope, then we have to protect it. We have to protect humanity.”
“I love you… so much,” Henry replied after a minute. “This is a really shitty situation.”