On the open road – Soren has come through with his assignment and I am en route. Looks like I’m heading south along the coast, but I only have coordinates to get to. He says he will have someone meet me.

I have packed up camp, and begun the journey with food for several days. I’ll be keeping my location secret on the journey for obvious reasons.

My first stop was a gas station. When you need some, it’s good to have several tanks worth on the bike. The pumps never work, no power, but I have the tools to open the underground tanks, and have fashioned a cup to dip in. Don’t know how long the gas will last in these final holdover places. It isn’t like there’s tankers bringing it in anymore. My cup is basically that, a metal dipper that I can attach to a pole to get at the bottom of the tank. Takes forever to get enough out from scraping the bottom of the tank to fill the gas cans, but you get it when you can, and as much as possible no matter how long it may take. I got lucky. Second gas station I stopped at had a tank with a reasonable stock left. Also found some motor oil, and a box of Skittles. Had one pack just for nostalgia, but I’m saving the rest for trading.

My assignment is simple, get to where I’m going, which Soren says is one of his internet restoration projects, and hang around to cover it for a week or two. I think this is more of a vanity assignment for him, but I’ll take it. If that means I don’t have to worry about explosions or Blankenship’s little private hitmen.

Given the time constraints, I’ll be sticking to the freeways. Can be more dangerous, but what isn’t dangerous these days? You just keep going and get the heck away from them when you want to pull off for a break.

-later-

Uneventful drive so far. Evening is coming and I pulled off for dinner. Found a small encampment near where I pulled off, actually and traded two cans of oil for some fresh food. The nice thing about being small and female is I’m not a threat. I thought my credentials would play off well for me in situations like this. Being a reporter means I’m not a threat. So far, most of the people I’ve encountered this way haven’t even heard of the times, and think I’m joking.

One of the campers was named Belinda Ackerman, nee Smith. She looked like if all this hadn’t happened, she’d have been a model, striking eyes, with a tall slender build, but she had a look of being worn and tired. She’d been married, but both her husband and a son had passed of the Flying Pig Flu epidemics of 2010 and 2011. We called it the Flying Pig Flu because it was a hybrid of the Swine Flu and the bird flu, and from the deaths it caused, it really did feel like the end of the world.

She worked in advertising before her son, had a comfortable life. When her son got the flu in the first round, it was days in the hospital before he died. It was uncontrollable, the symptoms overwhelmed his young immune system. The next year, the flu had us figured out, and even the healthy were in danger. When her husband began throwing up, they went straight to the hospital. The staff was overwhelmed with a virus as widespread and contagious. They turned him away, and so did two other emergency rooms. The ability of the health care system was never up to such an onslaught of patients. He died at home despite her best efforts. Why she never got it was a mystery to her, her immune system had never been what she would consider great. It just passed her by.

Eventually she took up with a group that seemed like compassionate people, and she’s been surviving with them ever since. She likens what they do to living like cavemen, hunting and gathering, but they’ll settle soon, start farming, make a community again. That’s their plan. I shared a pack of the Skittles with her.

There were many stories like this that are being lost now. I hope to keep a record of them as I go.

We ate by a campfire, sharing food and stories for the night. In morning I’ll continue on.

This is my formal declaration of an S.O.S. that I doubt many people will be able to do anything about, but at least it’s out there. There are eighteen of us at Entriquillo near the lake. The new camp location we’ve chosen seems secure enough, so I’ve decided to set up a rather permanent base here while we try to figure out what the hell is going on. Where was I? Ah, yes….we took off.

After we were airborne, it was hard to take stock in the situation. If it were only up to me, I would have went straight to Puerto Rico like we were supposed to…but somewhere in the flight, we heard about the flooding on the West Coast, so we decided to make for higher ground. I really wish our military was still making noise on the other end of our radio…it’s too quiet here now. We decided we’d head for Pico Duarte…it’s the highest point on the island, and we figured it was the best chance we had of not getting annihilated by seawater. There was a decent stretch of paved road that we landed on that was near the peak.

When we landed, we attracted a lot of attention to ourselves. There was a crowd near the peak that had flagged us down. Interesting lot of about a hundred or so. The quicker ones got to us first, explaining that they wanted to leave, something I assumed had to do with the flooding we’d heard about mid-flight. Amanda took this time to point out that in the middle of the ‘crowd’, there was a batch of locals with sticks, bats, and farming tools. I thought they were going to try to take the plane by force, but they were facing the other direction…they were fending off a bunch of their sick/dead/re-living peers. It seemed like they had things under control until I realized that there were only ten of them down the hill fighting off the . And only five of them were up with us. Hundred…fifteen…uh oh. Some quick mental math and I suddenly found myself back in the cockpit firing the engines back up. Two of the locals were overwhelmed by them when one of their sticks got stuck jabbed in an eye. I would’ve just dropped it and ran, but then again, I was already in the plane.

I remember hearing them scream “No en las sombras”…which means “not into…” something. I can’t remember what sombras means, but at the time I thought they were screaming ‘zombies’. It was really eerie hearing them scream like that. Despite the distraction of taking the plane off and the mental translation (and being on a tropical island), their cries for help still gave me the chills. By the time I got the bird off the ground, we had only lost three of the crowd. The silence from the cargo hold was their own homage to their fallen saviors. Not sure if that’s completely true, because I was busy flying a plane off of a mountain highway, but it’s better than the alternative of them being silent because they were dead and getting ready to eat me or something. Luckily this was not the case.

One of the survivors, Miguel Soto, decided to make a trip up to the cockpit. He sat in Robert’s old seat…It still hadn’t hit me that Robert was one of them now. Soto suggested we head North to the airport in Santiago. We cordially shot down his idea and Jack got out the charts to find someplace else with some decent altitude.

We decided to head South to the Baoruco Mountain Range. I didn’t want to land. Who knew the amount of damage that was going to be caused by this supposed flooding. So, I spent five hours practicing the four basics of fixed wing flight. Ascent, Descent, Turns, and Straight & Level Flight. God, I was bored. I always find flying boring when there’s a lack of destination, lack of somewhere to land, or a lack of ability to do power dives.

The Radio wasn’t much help when it came to decision making, so we decided to land on the range near the Haitian border before we were entirely out of fuel. Practical enough for me. 3,000ft is a lot of distance for the ocean to suddenly swoop up and consume us. I felt safe, and that’s all that mattered to me….because I was driving.

We waited on that range for weeks. When we did get a radio transmission, it usually involved something going wrong somewhere  in the rest of the world. I think the worst part about it was the slightly clueless feeling anyone had when they spoke over the radio…almost as if they weren’t sure it was really happening. The weather was quite nice, and the view spectacular. To the south was more of the Caribbean, and on our North side were the mountains we just flew from about 40 miles away. Halfway between us and those mountains, a beautiful lake that shimmered in the sun like nothing else. Even in disaster, I could still find beauty in the world.

The weeks were spent finding new sources of food (couldn’t go eating all of the government issued emergency food for the Puerto Rican Flu survivors…so we only had half) and fighting off the occasional cluster of “Las Sombras” as the locals like to call them. It literally means “the Shadows”, but every time I swear I hear ‘Zombies’. Maybe I’m just paranoid. We stuck close to the plane…emergency situations were inevitable, we just weren’t sure when. It turned out to be last week.

I was tinkering with some of our emergency broadcast technology. I wanted to try and get the internet working and see if there really was any flooding. I could see to the ocean and wasn’t seeing any changes. It was then that I read about the disaster in Washington, the  washing over of LA, and that we actually survived six hurricanes. I found it ironic that the first one this season was named AJ.

It’s time to start my building shift. Between the eighteen of us, we’ve been doing quite well for ourselves. The camp is centered around the plane. We taxied it closer to the lake to get a better view across it. We have one tower up right next to the plane that we use as the camp sentry, and we’re in the process of building more permanent housing, a stock room, and another tower at the edge of the lake. The tents from the plane are great and all, but I’m not a fan of mosquitoes. Or bugs in general.

Most of the locals can speak English, and most of us can speak Spanish, so I suppose that’s good. Soto’s been a big help here. He was an English teacher, so I sort of declared him the go-to guy when anyone really needs anything. And by anyone, I mean me, because I can’t remember a damn thing from the 3 years of high school Spanish I slept through. I can understand a lot more than I thought I remembered, but my head is so messed up with Polish, French, and German that I can’t remember my Spanish anymore. Odd to think that was ten years ago.

Can you tell I’m procrastinating? I really don’t want to go build, but I suppose being late to my own shift  in a system I came up with would be  a bad thing.

More from Camp Calloway when I can find time. I scheduled us to be busy to keep from getting bored.

Semper Paratus

I finally got this damn thing working. My name is Lt. Commander AJ Green. We performed an emergency landing in the Dominican Republic twelve weeks ago in response to a distress call that sounded like a medical outbreak. I was very wrong.

We were flying in an HC-144A from Clearwater, FL to the old Coast Guard Station in Borinquen, Puerto Rico. This was during the brief period of time when the governments were still trying to gain control over the situation. Vaccines were being shipped to combat a virus that was mutating out of control, supplies were being shipped away like candy. We were to transport aid, vaccines, and supplies that were needed to continue the treatment of influenza victims in the Caribbean for the next month.

Lt. Jack Solomon and I were assigned two additional crewmen to manage the handling of  medical personnel and supplies.

Ensigns Amanda Briggs and Robert Calloway joined us in the cockpit after strapping in the fourteen relief personnel into the cargo hold with the hummer, the vaccines, all of the electrical equipment that needed replacing on base, and enough emergency rations for a small village to live happily for a few months.

About 30 minutes from our destination, we heard a very unique call for help. Someone on one of the islands we were passing had locked himself in the control room of a military outpost in Haiti. He was screaming (in broken English throughout broken static). The strangest thing I recall hearing was that his father was trying to kill him. Somewhere in there he mentioned his father’s funeral being several weeks ago.

We radioed back and decided that this could have been some new strain of disease in the outbreak that the doctors needed to attend to before it got out of control. We changed course and decided we were going to try to land at the old Cibao Airport in Santiago.

We landed at what was the start of the first of at least three hurricanes that plowed over the airbase. We taxied into the only roofed service hangar and did the only thing we could do in a hurricane. We waited.

A week went by of solid storms. We did our best to keep the hangar doors closed at all times, but mostly we stayed in the plane. The occasional bashing on the outside of the hangar was easier to ignore in the cockpit. The hangar had a bathroom, and the eighteen of us waited out the storms. Apparently the rest of the island wasn’t so lucky.

When we emerged from the hangar, piles of debris were everywhere. Over the course of the next two weeks, half of the island came down with some strange strain of the disease. One of the doctors on board tried to explain it to me, but all I got from the conversation was that it wasn’t swine flu, and it was blown here from another island thanks to the hurricane. Mosquitoes, maybe?

Five of our medical personnel died that week from it. Another eight (including Lt. Soloman and Ensign Calloway) were on death’s doorstep for about a week before a few of them died. Calloway, Jack, and another one of the doctors eventually pulled through, but the other five didn’t make it.  Ensign Briggs and I, with the help of Dr. Gerald Samuel (the only other person in good health), buried the dead outside the airport limits behind the hangar. We really wanted to get out of there, but Calloway and Jack weren’t exactly making a speedy recovery and the doctor didn’t want them to be moved at all. During his copious amounts of free time, Samuel was able to determine that all of the victims had mosquito bites. Very peculiar.

I took one of the luggage go-carts out of the hangar with Amanda, and we drove through the airport looking for a fuel pump or a tanker truck. I didn’t know where we were going next, but I sure as hell wanted a full tank of gas when we left.

That’s when I first saw them. Coming in from the other side of the airport, a small mob of about a dozen locals was shuffling their way towards us. Briggs wanted to speak with them, but I couldn’t help but feel like something was off about them. There was nothing wrong with how they looked, aside from being locals. It’s just that they didn’t move like they were supposed to. It seemed…inhuman…the way they swayed and staggered about while they approached us. It was almost as if they’d forgotten how to walk. I saw a tanker truck and decided we’d make for that instead. Briggs and I ditched the cart and hopped into the truck. There was some debris in the passenger seat (someone left their windows open), but we took off across the tarmac anyways.

We ran into another problem outside the hangar. Those doctors we buried the week before…they were limping around the corner to greet us. Covered in mud, staggering the same way our pursuers were giving chase they were all converging in on us at the hangar.

That was probably not the best time for Robert to come out to investigate the strange knocking noises he was hearing on the hangar walls.  They were on him and dragged him behind the hangar before we had a chance to do anything. I couldn’t see what they were doing to Robert, but no one came out from behind the hangar for quite some time. We capitalized on this window of opportunity to open up the hangar, get the tanker in, and lock it back up before any of them had a chance to come back.

We started fueling and were trying to figure out a destination to get the hell out of there. Briggs suggested Puerto Rico, our original destination. Samuel suggested warning Haiti that there was some sort of epidemic on the island and to close the border. I really should stop listening to doctors.

We managed to get out of there without a scratch.  Apparently they aren’t too bright….didn’t think to use the door in the back of the hangar…they just kept banging on the walls until they saw we were leaving.

As I was setting the plane up for departure, that’s when I saw the rest of them. A giant mob of hundreds…possibly even a thousand or more…feebly approaching from the terminal. The odd thing was, as we were leaving the ground, I swear I saw the shape of a man on top of the control tower, beckoning them in our general direction. I had absolutely no idea what was going on at the time.  Now I know I should have shot the bastard where he stood. Or at least knocked him off the tower.

Damn it…the clouds are rolling in, and I have to get this equipment under some cover before it gets rained on.  I’ll explain more when I can, but I don’t have an awful amount of free time while we’re dealing with these border attacks. There always seem to be more of them after a storm…

Semper Paratus.

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