Gulfport, Mississippi (The Magnolia State), was never a large city, and before the Apocalypse, it rarely appeared in national news. But its residents were proud of their town for three things: the Gulfport Marlins football team, the St. James Fall Festival with its pumpkin patches and hayrides, and for the Naval Construction Battalion Center—home of the Atlantic Fleet Seabees.
The Seabees had been part of the Civil Engineer Corps since the forties. They’d earned the nickname on account of the massive work they did during World War II. They contributed to Japan’s defeat by constructing bases and airstrips on atolls in the Pacific Ocean. After the war, the Seabees expanded. Although its men would never win a shooting contest (most never held a rifle), they could erect infrastructure anywhere in the world.
When the plague broke out, half the base’s personnel were in Afghanistan setting up a supply route to Kabul. A rescue was planned, but with the whole world plunged into chaos, combat units had priority on all flights. The planes that should have rescued them never got off the ground. If any of the corps survived, they were probably lost in the Afghan mountains, dodging the Taliban, the Undead, or both. The other half of the corps was rushed to major US cities to build the Safe Zones. It’s not hard to imagine their sad fate.
When Stan Morgan teamed up with that sleazy preacher on the outskirts of town, only about two dozen soldiers were left on the base in Gulfport, but they had mountains of supplies that had been stockpiled for decades.
Mayor Morgan was stubborn, ambitious, and unfaithful to his wife of twenty years, but he was also sharp as a tack and resourceful. When he returned from the Vietnam War, poor as a church mouse, he saw an opportunity in the emerging real estate market. He founded Morgan Real Estate and within two years became one of Gulfport’s richest citizens.
Like the rest of the country, Stan watched the Undead attack the Safe Zones on CNN. Unlike everyone else, he decided that the best way to protect his town was not to defend it with weapons, but to build a wall around it so high and so strong that no Undead could scale it.
He knew the Seabees had warehouses with thousands of tons of steel and cement just waiting for someone to use them. After Hurricane Katrina, the Seabees’ engineers came up with an ingenious system for building dams with metal rods and modified Portland cement that would keep the rivers from overflowing their banks and flooding fields and towns again. It was called the Mobile Containment Dike Fabrication Unit, but the soldiers baptized it “the Wallshitter.”
The Wallshitter was a monster vehicle that looked like the love child of a dump truck and a locomotive. It could extrude a concrete module ten feet high by eight feet long in fifteen minutes. The best part was that the module came out half-set. In less than twenty-four hours, it dried rock hard, as sturdy as if it’d been there for years. The Gulfport Seabees base had twenty Wallshitters.
Stan’s construction crew had years of experience, so with the help of manuals and the one tech left on the base, they learned how to run those monsters in under six hours. In another six hours, those twenty Wallshitters were at work setting up a steel and concrete perimeter around the entire town. In just seventy-two hours, Gulfport was completely surrounded by an impenetrable concrete wall, ten feet high. It was crude, ugly, and looked like the Berlin Wall’s bastard sister, but it fulfilled Stan Morgan’s objective: to keep the living in and the Undead out.
Besides the Wall, other factors saved Gulfport. For one thing, southern Mississippi was not heavily populated. And although the area was flat, there were swamps so dense even the most determined Undead couldn’t get across them.
Strangärd explained all this to us as the Humvees raced through town. The green flag waving on the hood of the lead vehicle allowed them to ignore traffic lights and speed through crowded intersections. We could hardly believe how quiet and prosperous the town looked. People walked along clean, well-swept streets, stopping to talk, laugh, and joke as if hell had never been unleashed on earth. Shops were open, gardens were well tended, and cafes and restaurants operated normally. Everything was beautiful and perfect. Except for one flaw: there were only white people.
“This is… It looks like…” I stammered, trying to digest the scene.
“Like the set of a TV show? Amazing, isn’t it?” Strangärd said with a half smile. “This was a middle-class town even before the Apocalypse. Most people are retirees, professionals, divorced, or here with their families—and rich. They moved here to escape their stressful lives back in larger cities and were lucky enough to watch the fall of civilization from this side of the Wall.” His grin twisted into a sneer. “In the future, civilization will spring from them. Funny, isn’t it?”
I didn’t see anything funny about it. Kids, adults, and old people alike looked prosperous, healthy, and well fed, light-years from the skinny, impoverished survivors on Tenerife. There were only about thirty thousand people in Gulfport, whereas Tenerife was packed with several million refugees, straining the island’s resources to the limit. Everyone looked relaxed and contented, a far cry from the fatalistic fear we couldn’t shake after months of confronting hunger, destruction, and the Undead. These fine, upstanding people had barricaded themselves inside their Arcadia—the remote refuge Homer describes in the Iliad—while the rest of the planet slid down Satan’s sewer.
“There’s one thing I don’t get. How can such classy people put up with those thugs? They look like ex-cons,” I said, looking over at Malachi Grapes and one of his henchmen sitting in the front seat, enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke.
“They are ex-cons.” Strangärd lowered his voice. “Former inmates at Parchman Farm, maximum security prison for men—Mississippi’s oldest and most notorious prison.”
“How the hell’d they end up here?” Lucia demanded. She was still angry with me, and hadn’t spoken since we got off the ship.
“They were on their way to Biloxi to build housing for the refugees. Due to a clerical error, four buses packed with prisoners ended up in Gulfport. No one knew what to do with them. The bus drivers didn’t give a fuck what happened to them. They just wanted to unload their cargo and get back to the Safe Zone in Biloxi. They locked up the vans, gave the police chief the keys, and ran. The prisoners were closed up in there for twenty-four hours, parked at the port’s loading dock in the hot sun. The Aryan Nations gang outnumbered the other prisoners and were well organized. When the doors opened, they were the only ones left standing.”
“They killed them?” Lucia asked.
Strangärd didn’t answer; he just stared out the window, disgusted.
“That explains how they got here, but not how they became Greene’s soldiers.”
Riding in the lead Humvee, Malachi Grapes puffed on his cigar and a big smile spread across his face. He remembered every little detail of that day.
15
“Guards! Guards! Where the hell are you! It’s a fucking oven in here!”
The prisoners beat on the barrier between the driver’s seat and the rear of the bus. All forty guys shouted, banged on the windows, and cursed a blue streak. They’d been parked in the lot for an entire day. The heat was addling their brains.
For the first few hours, the guards had brought them water and some food, but as the day wore on the situation was growing more and more explosive. One fat, red-faced prisoner had died of a heart attack a few hours before. They’d tossed his body in the rear of the van. The black gangbanger chained to him wasn’t acting so tough anymore. He whined and tugged on the chain that tethered him to the body that was starting to bloat.