“So that leaves about 145,000, versus our population of about 2000. We are
only
outnumbered about 70-1,” Billy said with a steady voice.
“Well, that’s the worst case scenario, of course.”
“What’s the best case?”
“We can’t assume that every infected in the county is making their way here. Certainly, some are trapped inside buildings or cars, some are not ambulatory, and some surely wandered off in other directions. With that in mind, we are maybe outnumbered 25-to-1.”
“Those are pretty good odds,” Billy said with as much sarcasm as he could muster.
“50,000 infected headed this way?” Mack asked for clarification.
“Yes.”
Stone whistled. “Mack, can you also ask that anyone who isn’t a fisherman to report at the armory and bring any firearms or ammunition with them. We are going to need them.”
George spoke, “Also, Mack, be sure to announce what is going on but spin it in a way to keep the panic to a minimum. How is your operation going without Doug there flipping switches?”
“It’s okay. I still have the Ham radio guys helping out and a few other volunteers,” she said and slipped Billy a look.
Wyatt had been skipping school every day to hang out at the radio station. He spent sixteen hours a day there monitoring the different bands trying to locate Doug and the Major. Billy had not said anything to the boy about it, chalking it up to a good way for the adolescent to process his grief over Doug’s disappearance.
“Any luck with reaching the outside world?” George asked.
“Most of the Ham radio guys we had been talking to over the past few weeks have faded away. About all we have left is Ike in Florida. The guys are always talking to him,” she said.
“Good, keep it up. Let’s go ahead and start the announcements about everyone reporting to the Armory as soon as you can.”
As the meeting broke up and the attendees filtered out of the room, Trung looked on the verge of tears. Billy tried to get away from him and let him process whatever his issue was by himself, but he was unsuccessful. All it took was a look and the skinny man began talking as he lit a cigarette.
“My uncle was in the South Vietnamese Army in the Easter offensive in 1972. The communists dug up my uncle’s grave and threw his body in the sewers so his ancestors will never find him in heaven.” He took a drag and looked at Billy. “I can’t bury my people at sea. We have to have a home.”
“I know what you mean,” Billy said, patting the man on his bony shoulder as he passed. The afterlife must be a mess these days.
— | — | —
ChapteR 52
November 17, 1100
It had been two days since Mack had begun announcing that all able-bodied men not in the Charterboat Association or on the shrimp boats were to report to the Armory to “prepare to defend the island from an imminent threat.” In that time, some 800 warm bodies had shown up at the facility. Some carried old muzzle-loading rifles, others had golf clubs, chainsaws, fireplace pokers, and double-barreled shotguns not fired in three generations. One even had a samurai sword strapped to his back.
Some of the more elderly, including Billy’s neighbor, who showed up wearing parts of his old WWII uniform, had been sent back home. A group of brooding teenagers more bent on anarchy than anything was also excluded. Those who could barely stand-up, or seemed as if they were having nervous breakdowns, were allowed to leave. The keepers amounted to about 400 new legitimate fighters. Since the supply of spare uniforms was exhausted, the only clothing issued to each militiaman was an armband cut out of ACU cloth material taken from worn-out cammies.
“Candidates for the Order of the Wooden Cross these guys are,” Reid had said when they were done with their picks for the new battalion. Reid and Stone had diluted the MPs among the new intake as a cadre. Each military man assigned as the team leader of a new four or five man group.
With the arms that Stone already had in his arsenal, the new weapons turned over by Jarvis from Pascagoula, and the sporting arms from the camping store in Foley, the force all had a firearm of some sort. With the Horde reported by the latest Rough Riders patrol being only fifteen miles away from the bridge, each team leader only had two days to train their group. Some had been detailed such mindless but important tasks as digging trenches, building explosives, and cleaning bullets and magazines by hand with old socks so that they would feed better.
“I’m not sure I can do this, sir,” Oswald said to Stone.
“Have you ever read about a guy named Heraclitus?” Stone asked the 16-year-old girl. She was trying not to lead a group of four newcomers, the youngest of whom was about ten years older than her.
She shook her head.
“He was a Roman general, one of the better ones. He said, of every one hundred men he had, ten should not even be there, eighty are nothing but targets, and nine are real fighters. Of those nine, one of them is a warrior—and that warrior will bring the others back.”
“Are you saying I’m a warrior?” she asked with a grin.
“Get your people ready, MP. The Horde is in Summerdale now, only 15 miles away. You can expect to be in action in two days,” he said and snapped a salute, which she returned before making a sharp about-face and charging off after her group.
Reid watched her walk away as he petted Jenny on her huge head. “They miss Oswald on the bridge right now big time. That old hippy with the Mosin let one sneak up on him last night and got his face ripped off.”
“Don’t worry, Top, she will be back there in a couple days. We all will. How is it going there today, any sign of an increase in undead traffic yet?”
“They are popping one about every ten minutes or so. That’s a pretty big jump from a few days ago.”
“I guess the faster ones decided to come see the beach, get a good spot picked out before the crowd showed up.”
“Anymore refugees make it through?”
“Tiny and Specialist Wright rode in this morning with the last two survivors that could be found in
Zombieville
. A couple of bearded hombres armed to the teeth. Those two were asking a hundred and one questions, but not offering any info other than that they have been walking here for days. Said they heard the radio station. Offered to help, said they had commo experience. Talking radio-radio-radio. Look like a couple of bikers.”
“Hmmm, we’ll see if Mack can use them. If so, get them assigned to the station and let’s integrate them as best we can. Get Tiny, and the rest of the Rough Riders reassigned to infantry teams. How is the barricade at the bridge coming along?”
“We have had anyone that can operate a shovel up there making sandbags and laying block. Those engineers from UAB are supervising the crews. The concrete trucks are coming this afternoon after lunch.”
“Remember, we need that wall at least ten feet high. That should channel them into a kill box and we will just mop em up with .50-cal until they run out of bodies to throw at us.”
“That’s the plan. Which is good because I have about five seconds worth of confidence in these militia guys holding the line if we didn’t have that wall.”
“You’ll see. It will be like the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. They held off 70,000 Persians.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t read the book, but I saw that movie. It didn’t work out for the Spartans in the end, did it?” Reid said as he threw a ball out for Jenny and walked after it.
No sooner had the First Sergeant moved off then the tiny female MP, Specialist Wright, popped up and cornered Stone.
“A word, sir?” she asked.
“For you Specialist, of course,” he said as they walked side by side.
“Permission to sign over my team to one of the other MPs and go out on recon with Tiny and the Rough Riders, sir?”
Stone shook his head. “No way, I need you leading four new ass clowns who don’t know which end of a rifle the bullets come out of. Besides, the Rough Riders are history by this time tomorrow.”
“Sir, Sara, Err-Major Reynolds, and I were pretty close. I know how to ride; I have a CRF-motocross at the house that I got when I was in high school.”
Stone knew about the relationship between Wright and Reynolds. It would have never of flown before the outbreak as any sort of fraternization between an officer and enlisted personnel was punishable, but these days everything had been reset. He felt Reynolds pain, Wright was a cute little piece.
“Sir, someone has to have the guts at least try to look for her.”
He waved his hand as if he was swatting a fly. “Turn your team over the Top for reassignment, and report to Tiny. If you get yourself killed out there, it’s on you.”
««—»»
Stone stood on the high glacis in front of Fort Morgan and peered into the moat thirty feet below. He pivoted around and looked at the impressive fortress. Constructed in 1833 to protect Mobile Bay from foreign invasion, it enclosed some eight acres of ground inside its three-story high walls. Each of the five walls in the pentagon-shaped fortification held seven huge casemates and a bastion designed to withstand everything a British fleet could throw at it. With a platoon of motivated soldiers and enough ammo, Stone could die of old age holding the fort from a zombie invasion. Unfortunately, it was at the wrong side of the island, 26-miles down the long narrow beach from the town and the bridge. That did not mean that it was not part of his military plan.
“So you guys rode out the outbreak here?” Stone asked the two cousins who were the caretakers of the fort for the State.
“Yup,” the older one answered. “Just closed all the embrasures, then shut the doors and waited for dawn.”
“The doors are still the original ones?”
“Yes, a set of four doors, one after the other. Each one is four inches thick of cypress, wrapped with lead. Moreover, you’d have to break through each one to get into the grounds. That’s not gonna happen.”
Stone was taking notes. “Show me the armory you told me about.”
The cousins led him down an incredibly narrow staircase that descended into the fort’s parade ground. As he followed the men, he looked around the citadel and noticed the incredible construction from a military point of view. Each of the walls was fifteen feet thick, sandwiched by brick on both sides, with sand and two lead sheets between them. Made obsolete by the end of the 19th century, the massive fortress would suit their needs perfectly if they had to defend it from the latest threat.
The cousins opened a locked steel door and showed Stone into what had formerly been a powder magazine. He felt cool air blow past his face as he walked into the door as if someone has a strong fan on.
“Pretty breezy in here,” he said.
The older cousin nodded. “It’s got a system of ventilation ducts that have bronze covers and slats over them. Designed so that the powder did not sweat, but a spark couldn’t find its way from the outside if the fort was under attack either. Pretty smart.”
“So after nearly two-hundred years the air conditioner still works, eh?”
“That’s not half of it. The toilets are saltwater, and the tides flush them twice a day, every day, like clockwork.”
“Do you guys have water here?”
Again, he nodded. “Yes, there are four in-ground cisterns that collect rainwater. Each one is about the size of a swimming pool.”
Stone stopped as they walked through the maze of tunnels inside the forts magazine and came to rack after rack of muzzle loading rifles. Dating from the Civil War, there seemed to be a hundred of the weapons complete with bayonets, shined up and locked in wooden racks along the wall. Cobwebs and dust covered the actions but the rifles looked as if they were ready to stop a charge at Gettysburg, after a brief cleaning. Another rack held sabers, pikes, and swords.
“Where the hell did all these come from?”
“The former director told me that when the state closed the old Alabama Military Institute back in the 1960s, they found all these in storage there that some accountant had misplaced. They sent a few to museums around the state and sent us the rest for safekeeping. I guess over time they forgot about them again.”
“Do they work?”
“Hell yeah, they work. All we need is powder and bullets.”
“Which you don’t have, right?”
“Well, we have the molds to make bullets if we could just lay hands on some soft lead. The powder on the other hand is going to be an issue. We gave what we had for the cannon salutes to Doug for his limpet mine project.”
Stone was furiously taking notes in his pad, counting rifles as he went.
“Okay, let me work on the powder. I will be sending some people bringing supplies starting tonight. Store them somewhere safe and dry and make sure those cisterns are full of water. Let’s keep this all between us, for now.”
“Will do.”
“And go ahead and start cleaning those rifles.”
««—»»
“So, give me some good news. How do I kill these things that I don’t already know about?” Stone asked Mr. Michaels.
The science teacher sat in his classroom at the high school biology lab and started to draw on a whiteboard as Stone watched.