“You can’t be serious,” Reynolds said. She had been living in her flight suit for two weeks and was not feeling any of this.
“This is a classic counter-insurgency operation Major.
Clear-Hold-Build
formula, just like the case studies in the COIN Field Manual. Clear the area, hold it against attack, and rebuild a force strong enough to keep it secure. Once you do that, we move into SWET operations. The first four things we have to do —after getting rid of the zombies and bodies, is set up sewer, water, electric and trash collection in that order of priority. All this, along with establishing communication with the mainland, is going to be your mission,” the Ringknocker elaborated as if reading from a textbook. He had the air of a college professor who had not been allowed to retire.
“Sir, with all due respect, I have every intention of leaving this island in the next day or so. I agreed to help while the council was setting up, but I need to return to my unit. I have orders that supersede your own. I have intel that has to get back to senior command,” Reynolds pulled her trump card.
“What the Colonel is trying to say, my dear,” interrupted the S-3, with all of the quiet, sad indignity of a Wal-Mart door greeter, “is that the Council cannot replace you. You have fallen as a round peg into a round hole, and no other pegs are available to take your place.”
“But, sir, my unit…”
“Is probably wiped out Major,” the Ringknocker pointed out flatly, his grey eyes cold and clear.
“Be that as it may I need to return to my base.”
“It’s not possible. You said yourself in your debrief that Eglin was over-run before you even came here. We have had no communication with any military units outside of this island and have to face the fact that we may be all that is left of the US military,” the third colonel spoke up.
Reynolds sat there in silence. The three superannuated colonels across from her at the table began packing up to leave. Finally, they walked away discussing the coming fish soup for lunch.
“Remember Major, the test of character is not hanging in there when you see light at the end of the tunnel, but in the performance of duty when no light is coming, “ the elderly Ringknocker said as he walked past her out of the room.
— | — | —
ChapteR 24
Spud had built an empire. The day after they closed the bridge, he slinked through town back to his mom’s house. His brother Lance had never made it home that day. His mother’s body, he was told later by an acquaintance on the body snatcher crew, was found a few blocks away under a pile of corpses. This left him alone in the world and he packed a duffle bag then went out into the brave new world to reinvent his life.
He made it to Condo Row, the 7-mile strip of hundreds of elevated rentals along Beach Boulevard. With the tourist trade closed down for the winter, these vacation getaways were almost all empty. Spud crept into a three-story rental named
The Clubhouse
with its own private beach, stocked full sized bar, swimming pool, and a dozen bedrooms. Guarded by a weak imitation Kwikset deadbolt, it took all of ten seconds to bump open.
Even though the electricity was off, the place was sweet, and he selected the best bed in the largest room overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. After a few days of holding up, without seeing or hearing any of the recently undead, he began to explore his surroundings. The property management companies stocked most of the better condominiums with basic food items, flashlights, canned drinks, bottled water, and all now priceless commodities. With the inevitable vacuum left after the near-total destruction of the local law enforcement agencies, and the National Guard concentrating on hunting zombies rather than crooks, it was a looter’s wet dream.
It was while looting one of these properties that Spud ran into some burnouts he knew from the small Gulf Shores dope underworld, doing the same thing. The young potheads had never done a day’s worth of work, either honest or dishonest, and were even failing at being looters.
“What the hell are you fools doing?” Spud asked through the broken glass of a sliding patio door, startling the two pot smokers.
“Holy shit, man, I almost crapped my pants,” one of them said with an open energy drink in his hand. Two more cans were visible, poking out of the front pockets of his dirty jeans. His partner, with bags of pretzels in hand, looked ready to spring out of the vandalized condo like a jackrabbit from a hole.
“Look at this friggin’ mess you guys made!” Spud exclaimed.
His only answer was an incredulous sideways face followed by a junkie shrug from the potheads. “Dude, we are starving and there isn’t exactly a grocery store open at the moment.”
Spud shook his head as he placed an index finger to his forehead, “You fools need to think this thing out. There are thousands of rental houses on this strip and they are all empty. If one of the MPs patrol through here and they still look empty, they are going to keep rolling.”
“So?”
“So, kids, if we get in and out of these places quiet as a mouse, and get everything that’s worth taking back to our own little hideout before anyone else thinks about it…”
The two potheads saw the light bulb start to glow and the recognition of Spud’s words sunk in. That is how he got the first of his foot soldiers.
The Clubhouse became a fortress and every day his people would bump into more like-minded and hungry individuals that became fast recruits. Usually it was someone that was known to them, or to a friend of a friend, or a pre-outbreak buddy they had done time with back in County. The rules were simple at first: everybody stole, everybody watched each other’s back for zombies, and everybody tried to act like a ghost whenever a suspicious outsider was spotted. The three simple rules were effective and reliable.
They soon took to calling themselves the ‘Garbage Bag Gang,’ as they were often moving loot around in that, the most readily accessible container of rental condominiums.
Spud would hold instructional classes on how to slip windows, bump deadbolts, shim padlocks and other quiet ways to burgle a residence without being visible from the road. He stressed the fact that they were now a family to the gang every day.
They would enter the elevated condos with garbage bags in their back pockets, fill them with useful items, and drop them out windows to waiting gang members below. The Clubhouse each day would become awash with dozens and eventually hundreds of garbage bags with the days take waiting to be inventoried and sorted. Empty trash bags would be recycled for the next day.
By the end of the week, Spud had to take over the neighboring condos on either side of the Clubhouse as the crews had collected more than a dozen members. He worked out a schedule for guard shifts to stay behind and looting crews to go out on a rotational basis that ensured both the survivability and functionality of the group.
Spud had taken a page from what he had known in a series of training schools, correctional facilities, and detention centers. The only way to survive if you were not the baddest or meanest guy in the yard was to join a gang. Not wanting to resurrect some other group from memory, he promptly started his own family of thieves bound by oath and pledged to each other.
With the bylaws written on the pad and posted to the wall of the Clubhouse, the group became Spud’s new family. They all swore to it.
— | — | —
ChapteR 25
Wyatt and Mack had set the table while Cat and Billy finished cooking. The sun had grown low on the horizon behind the fort and bathed the period home in long shadows. The propane-fueled generator in the back yard only produced enough juice to power a few lights in the house, the freezer, and a handful of assorted chargers for mp3 players, flashlights, and rechargeable batteries. A VHF radio sat in a cradle on the kitchen counter and the occasional chatter of charter boat captains on the
Mobile Bay jungle drums
filtered through the darkening rooms.
The Gulf Coast was known for hurricanes. That persistent threat caused people to stock up gradually during the winter and spring to put together a stock of non-perishable food in the event of a storm knocking out power for up to a month. This meant that in most permanent homes on the island, there was a pantry with a decent stock of non-perishable food like ramen noodles, canned tuna, peaches, ravioli, as well as paper plates, batteries, paper towels, gallons of water, and plastic utensils.
Billy had stocked a good amount of food but there had been a rash of dinner guests in the last week. Almost every night Ed, the 87-year old orphan next door, joined the table; as did the two stranded park rangers from the fort and, of course, Mack.
When he first met her, she had still been wearing her Orange Coast Bank nametag and he insisted on calling her Ms. Tillman for most of that first week. She was at least ten years Billy’s junior and only about five years older than his own daughter was.
Wyatt had bonded very close to her, while Cat seemed more aloof. Even though she slept in the guest room and devoted most of her time to help organizing committees in town, she was starting to grow on Billy and he imagined Cat could notice it. Billy’s ex-wife, the children’s mother, had been unheard of since the outbreak and her disappearance had been an unspoken issue in the house.
He had begun to feel that Wyatt was holding a grudge against him for going to get Cat first on the day of the outbreak, while the boy had to fend for himself. The only logic in Billy’s defense on the subject was that the high school had been closer to the marina. It was all the logic he felt he would need if the subject was broached. Nevertheless, the gap was there.
Like clockwork, just after sunset, the first dinner guests began to arrive.
“Madame and monsieur,” the confident Ed Wallace said as he took off his fedora and placed it on the key rack by the front door. The fedora, like the judge himself was from another era but somehow still looked as good as its owner did. In his offhand, he extended a quart-sized jar of canned okra in friendship. He placed a canvas toolkit bag on the floor by the table leg.
Mack hugged, kissed the silver fox on the cheek, and welcomed him in. The two could be mistaken for grandfather and daughter to the uninformed. Ed soon took his now traditional seat at the table and James and Albert, the two rangers from the Fort were the next to arrive. The pair of cousins was unlucky enough to live across the bay on Dauphin Island and, following Jarvis’s report on the status of that community, had made the best of their accommodations at the fort.
“What’s for dinner tonight, family?” James asked as he picked the lid off the large pot on the stove and smiled. “Hot damn, I love roast!”
His cousin nodded in agreement, as he washed his hands in the sink. “This stuff is thin but it’s still better than the cistern water and saltwater toilets at the Fort,” he said, rubbing his dirty hands under the tiny stream falling from the faucet. The island still had a trickle of water pressure for running faucets due to deep artesian wells, but the waste plant was offline so nothing could be flushed. The sewer project was one of the most anticipated committees there was.
Fifteen minutes before the officially stated dinnertime, a hummer pulled in off the dark fort road from town and into the driveway. With the closing of a door and the sound of heavy boots on the deck outside, Stone arrived at the house.
“Good evening, folks, somebody here have some pot roast free to a good home?” Stone asked as he stepped in the door.
“Did you bring the toilet paper?” Billy asked without even looking around from the pot on the stove.
««—»»
“That was the best meal I’ve had all week,” Stone said as he pushed his plate away. “We have been alternating MREs and fish soup down at the Armory. Not a lot of fine dining options in Gulf Shores these days.”
“Well that’s the last of the beef. All that’s left is some pork chops, shrimp and fish in the freezer,” Mac said.
The fish comment brought universal grumbles.
“I wasn’t aware the 2nd Infantry was here on the island Captain,” Ed asked Stone unexpectedly.
Stone patted the patch on the sleeve of his uniform. The patch was of a magnificent Native American Plains Indian chief wearing a war bonnet. “It isn’t but I am. It was my unit when I went to Iraq the first time.”
Ed smiled, “It’s good to see old Chief Red Cloud again. Once upon a time, I spent 303 days in combat from Normandy to Czechoslovakia in WWII wearing that same patch. Did some time in hell at a place called the Ardennes. We prayed for Nazi artillery because then you could at least get warm from the burning trees after they exploded. After that, I decided that no matter what happened I would die someplace warm.”
“I know what you mean. Spent a year in Korea when I first went in the military. Coldest place I ever thought of. I was only warm twice in about six months and that was when I was in a hot tub in Seoul,” Stone replied.
“Well, the Army let me go when Truman decided to drop The Bomb and not invade Japan. I got out as a three-striper buck sergeant, so I must say, if I were in uniform then I would have to salute you, Captain. Just glad to see you here.” Ed said.