Chapter Eleven: Hope Restored
"Okay, so what the hell are we supposed to do now?" Ted grumbled as he gazed down at the carnage that had once been the city marina.
The marina had been fenced off during the initial stages of the Infection...once the city-wide quarantine had been declared, the national guard had quickly sealed off the freeway, the interstate, all roads leading out of the city, the subways...and one of the last things they had done was to destroy the marina. Dozens and dozens of boats that were on the docks were all nothing but burnt-out husks. Useless.
And to make matters even worse, the whole place was choked with Infected. The creatures were shuffling about the marina, tripping over piles of rubbish, falling into the water, or just standing aimlessly. The inhuman noises they produced could be clearly heard all the way from the survivors' fire escape hidey-hole.
Jerome Wallace's expression did not change. This wasn't the first time he had been faced with a dead-end situation like this one...but that didn't mean he simply thought everything was going to be okay; far from it. On the contrary, Wallace had a certainty that he would not leave this city alive, and every time he and the other survivors beat the odds, it surprised him even more.
And so, it was not with surprise or anger that the former police sergeant gazed down on the wreckage. It was with calm acceptance...possibly even resignation.
The black police sergeant sighed again and lowered his binoculars, wiping off a speck of gore from the shoulder of his blue police uniform. "Okay..." he murmured. "Okay, this is pretty bad...I'm not gonna lie to y'all, but this is pretty bad..."
"How do we leave the city without these boats?" Lev, the medical intern, asked. "The roads are all out, the subways are either flooded or swarming with Infected, there are no more aerial evac zones...what are we supposed to do now? Walk out of the city? We wouldn't last a day!"
"No goddamn idea," Wallace shrugged, sliding down the brick wall and sitting flat on the metal floor of the fire escape. Lev, Wallace, and Ted were all currently holed up on the fire escape of an apartment complex less than a block away from the marina. The buildings in between them and the marina had all been burned or knocked down, allowing them a clear view of the whole place.
For a while, an uneasy silence settled upon the three survivors as they tried to think of what to do next. Finally, they were all shaken back to reality by a sudden burst of nearby gunfire.
"What the hell?" Wallace grunted, getting back up to his feet. The others hefted their weapons, flicking off safeties-wherever there was gunfire, Infected were never far away. "Where's that coming from?"
"North," Lev pointed away from the marina, back down the way they had come. Sure enough, the inside of the office building that had fallen across the road was lit up with muzzle flashes; sure signs of human life. "Jesus..."
After what felt like a full minute, four people tumbled out of the windows of the collapsed building that Wallace had led his team through, sprinting down the street for all they were worth. Behind them, a roiling sea of Infected roiled out of the windows, hot on the survivors' heels.
"Lev! Lay down some covering fire!" Wallace shouted to the medical intern, who was the one armed with a scoped rifle. "Ted, let's get the bottom ladder lowered!"
The scruffy coalminer followed Wallace down the flights of metal stairs towards street level. When they had climbed up to the top of the fire escape, the first thing they had done before proceeding had been to raise the ladder leading to the first flight of stairs, preventing the Infected from following them. They now raced back down to the bottom of the fire escape so that they could lower the ladder for these new survivors out on the streets.
Wallace and Ted hit the releases and the ladder slid from its groove, shooting downwards until it clanged to a stop around a foot above the asphalt. The sharp, resounding cracks of Lev's rifle echoed off of the ruined buildings as the medical intern took out several of the charging Infected. More gunshots rang out as the four survivors on the ground laid down more fire as they ran towards the fire escape.
"Common! MOVE IT!" Ted was howling at the survivors, gesticulating madly at them as if he could mentally make them run faster.
Wallace could not help but notice something familiar about the lead survivor on the ground, but he had no time to play Guess Who. That lead survivor reached the ladder and jumped up, pulling himself up the rungs. A blond-haired woman dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt and jeans followed close behind the first survivor.
The last two-a younger man, probably around twenty or so, and an older African-American woman-pulled themselves up to the first landing just in the nick of time. By the time Wallace pulled the young man up, the Infected were around two-thirds of the way up the ladder. Wallace blew the head off of the first Infected with a well-aimed shot from his Mossberg, and then stepped aside to allow Ted to clear the ladder with his TDI Vector submachine-gun. After a short burst of the compact weapon, the Infected climbing up the ladder were all taken care of.
Wallace and Ted grasped the top rung of the ladder and heaved, yanking it up one rung at a time. They did this quickly, before any of the oncoming Infected had a chance to climb up. The horde of the creatures-easily over a hundred of them-quickly lost interest in the survivors, who were now out of their reach, and splayed out, wandering aimlessly around the street. Lev still continued to snipe a few of them, but the rest paid no heed.
"Much obliged," the lead survivor thanked Wallace and Ted. "I was sure those things had us, back there."
"Don't mention it," Wallace replied, gazing at the other man. He was a somewhat older, large, well-muscled man with almond-shaped eyes, tanned skin, and short, grayish hair. He looked about as Native American as they came. Now that Wallace had the chance to look at the man properly, he quickly remembered where he had last seen him. "You...you were in that foodstore near General Hospital, right after the Air Force pounded it...Chief; that's what everyone was calling you..." the policeman murmured. "Yeah, I'm sure of it, now."
"I thought I recognized you, as well," the Native American man replied. "You were one of the cops who we let in, weren't you?"
"Yeah, that's right. How did you escape without getting bitten?" Wallace asked the man somewhat impatiently.
"I hid in the freezer for eight hours," the man replied nonchalantly. When he noticed the incredulous look on Wallace's face, he quickly added, "Oh, the freezer wasn't actually working; the power had gone out after the hammerdown. I was just hiding inside...I guess the creatures could not sense me in there. Eventually they dispersed and I sneaked out."
"An' who the hell might you three be?" Ted grunted at the other three survivors who Chief had been with. One by one they introduced themselves. The blonde woman's name was Hannah, and she had been an unemployed street artist in the old world. The black woman's name was Trish and she was some sort of banking accountant. The young man's name was Martin; he was some sort of handyman. All of them were armed with what looked like Uzis or some other type of SMG, with the exception of Chief, who held what looked like a Desert Eagle.
"Mind my asking where you managed to find guns like those?" Wallace gestured at the newcomers' weapons.
"Had a little run-in with a street gang," Trish, the black woman, replied. "Bastard thugs took all the food and supplies we had and left us to die. We followed them downtown, and..." she faltered, as if the rest of the story was too painful to recall.
Martin picked up the slack. "They were all slaughtered by some sort of...thing..." the handyman's brow furrowed as he tried to describe it. "It was an Infected...but not. It walked on its fists, not its legs...and it was huge...twice our height, easily. Its whole upper body-chest, arms, shoulders, neck...it was like it had taken a whole swimming pool of steroids. It's muscles were gigantic...those street thugs tried shooting it, but it was practically bulletproof! It tore through those bastards, killed them all in less than a minute."
"It was like a tank..." Chief murmured.
"Yeah, like a tank," Martin echoed, nodding in agreement. "So we wait for it to leave, and then we go in and steal those thugs' weapons from their corpses."
"Sounds like you fellas have had yourselves quite an adventure," Wallace remarked.
"We could have done without," Hannah muttered.
"Yeah, I hear ya," Wallace chuckled. He then extended his hand to the new survivors, introducing himself. "I'm Jerome Wallace, by the way…used to work on the 13th Precinct."
"Good to see some normal sons of bitches out here," Martin grunted, dusting himself off and rising to his feet.
"Ain't that the damn truth," Wallace chuckled in response.
As the newcomers got settled down, catching their breaths and nursing their injuries, Lev came down and helped treat them. "This is kindergartner's play for me," the medical intern said as he disinfected a cut on Hannah's arm.
"So, you men come here looking for a boat?" Chief asked after a few minutes, adequately determining the reason behind the presence of Wallace's group.
"Mm-hm," the officer nodded, leaning back against one of the railings. "We have two more men back at one of the warehouses further on down the riverbank…figured we'd find a boat here, take it back to the warehouse, pick up our friends, and head south for Pittsburgh."
"Pittsburgh?" Chief cocked a curious eyebrow. "What's down there, if you don't mind my asking?"
"According to a radio we picked up, a force of Pennsylvania National Guard are holding out down there," Wallace explained. "If we can make it there before they fall back, we'll be in a much better fix than we're in right now."
"Don't matter none, though," Ted interrupted, his bristly beard twisting in harmony with his grimace. "All the boats here are charcoal. Ain't no way for us to get outta this city."
"Well, don't go and sign our death certificates quite yet," Chief interjected. "Keep them out and handy, sure…just don't sign them yet."
"What, I don't suppose you have a boat in your back pocket?" Wallace gave a resigned chuckle. "Because I don't think-"
"Well I don't know about my back pocket," Chief shrugged. "But the power plant in the industrial strip a mile upriver might."
The officer was instantly curious. "Say what, now?"
"There's a coal power-plant owned by Exelon Power Corporation a mile north of here, right on the bank of the river," Hannah explained. "We just came from there…there's a barge tethered on one of its loading docks. The whole damn place was swarming with Infected, though…we would have gotten slaughtered."
"But if you boys are willing to join us…?" Trish suggested, her voice trailing off.
"You want us to help you bust into a power plant?" Lev took a deep breath. The medical intern was, out of the whole group, the least motivated to head toward a place where lots of Infected were.
Wallace's only outward reaction was to slightly raise one of his eyebrows. A corner of his mouth also flickered in a faint ghost of a smile. "Take ten minutes, everyone, then pack up. We're heading north."
Am I just delaying the inevitable? Well, of course I am; every second we continue to breathe as normal, uninfected citizens of Earth, we are delaying the inevitable. But still…this is the first time we have actually had a chance to get out of this city. When we made for the marina, we did so hoping there was a boat we could find…now, we're heading right into the thick of things again, but this time we know there is a way out.
I just hope all of us make it out. After losing Carson…I don't want to lose another friend.
J. W.
