The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now Read Free Page A

his head.  
    “No, Chief,” said Bus. “I seriously doubt the shelter was discovered. It couldn’t have been too hard for a boatload of men and women with guns to take the fort away from the infected. After that they would have built a small community just like the village above my shelter, and they would have survived until someone got in who had been bitten. By now they are likely to have suffered the same fate you saw when you flew over Green Cavern.”
    “Or they were using the crabs as a food supply,” said Jean. Of everything gross we had seen, that was the one thing that turned her stomach the most.
    Kathy asked, “So, you think we could take Fort Sumter to be sure it’s safe to sail the line laying boat past it?”
    “Exactly,” he answered. “We take Fort Sumter, gain entry to the shelter, and when the time is right we can commandeer a tugboat. They couldn’t all have made it out of the harbor to safety when the infection spread.”
    Tom said, “Chief, you could fly over the harbor and check it out first. If Bus is right, we could pull it off in one day.”
    Allison was clearly uncomfortable listening to us talk about going outside, but she was even more uncomfortable watching Kathy and Tom join in on the planning.
    “Why do we even have to do this now?” she asked. “I mean, we could wait another year and still have enough supplies to keep us alive. Maybe if we wait, there won’t even be any infected left to worry about.”
    The Chief knew Allison was afraid. After what they had all seen, there was plenty of reason for all of them to be afraid. She had lost friends and relatives just like the rest of them, and she only survived because Dr. Bus took her in. We all felt sorry for her because she didn’t seem to have that instinct for survival we all seemed to have. I couldn’t help but think she would have just locked herself inside if she had inherited Mud Island. She would have just locked the doors and lived off of the supplies for the rest of her life.
    “Allison, we talked about this before,” said Tom. “If this group was made up of the kind of people who would just bury their heads in the sand, Ed would still be here by himself. At the very least, they wouldn’t have risked their necks to get me back home to you.”
    Tom reached for Allison’s hand using the same hand Kathy had touched moments before. She folded her arms across her chest and looked at his hand as if it had been contaminated. Tom had experienced her rejection back before the beginning of the infection, and he recognized it again.
    The Chief was clearly uncomfortable with the display of emotions at a time when the group needed to focus on fixing a problem, so he was quick to redirect the discussion.
    “Listen up, folks. We have several things to figure out. We need to know what or who blew up the Russian ship. I don’t like the idea someone even thought it was necessary to blow it up, and we could have used that helicopter. Now that it’s done, we have to get that power line across the moat, and there’s only one way to make that happen.”
    “There is some good news,” I said.
    It wasn’t that my input was usually the best. Kathy and the Chief were the real strategists. In this case it was my choice of words. We could all use some good news.
    Jean put her arm around my waist and said, “We get to do some shopping in Charleston? Uncle Titus didn’t stock the shelter with baby things.” She gave me a smile that could melt me, and I imagined she could have gotten anything out of me with that smile under normal circumstances. I couldn’t even guess how we would have found each other if not for the infected dead, but I liked to think it would have happened.
    I looked at the chief and said, “What do you say, Chief? Any chance we could hit a Walmart while we’re in Charleston?”  
    Jean reached up with one hand, and before I could stop her, she had grabbed a few chest hairs that were above the collar of my tee