The VIC III
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I decided to wait a while before leaving for the day, hoping this downpour would slacken up and it would not be so dangerous going home. I did not count on the parking lot being paved with gravel and dirt, being very new and covering only Louisiana gumbo for substrate. An hour later my car was nearly up to the hubs in water where it was parked and there were precious few islands where one might see the mud that the parking lot was now become. Two hours later and it was clear I was not leaving soon. By early afternoon the parking lot and entry road were a sea of grey gumbo mud and standing water. The trip to the paved road never looked so long. I went back to the double doors overlooking the morgue to watch the rain.
Don, our remaining trailer management fellow, ambled down to the guard shack on the inside gate. He had noticed the booming in the Trailer area. Apparently he enlisted the help of the Federal Police Sergeant, and the Blackwater gate guard to come with him to investigate. In the intensifying rain squall, the sergeant, a blackwater security man and Don climbed into the white and blue police car and drove across the compound to the gate to the trailer parking area. The sergeant stayed in the car as blackwater and Don got out in the deluge to investigate the noises. I can so clearly remember thinking “Boy those guys are going to get SO wet” and watched them go into the trailer area through the internal gate flashlights ticking left-right, left-right.
Gunshots are not as loud outdoors as you might imagine from movies you have seen. They are muffled even more by the rain, thunder and that continuing booming from the trailer area. The first one was so faint I could have missed it but heard something odd and opened the door to listen further and heard the next six in rapid succession. My next impression is of Don running full out coming out of the gate with an oddly lumpy appearance, his flashlight jumping crazily up and down.. even in circles. As he approached the police car something slid down his back and around his legs and down he went.. face first into the goop and directly in front of the Police car. The sergeant to his credit did not hesitate, he was out of the car before Dons’ body hit the mud, weapon at the ready as the last set of gunshots came from the trailer area, two quick ones.. then a final shot. I could hear the sergeant bellowing something but it was faded by the rain. He holstered his weapon and with his bare hands tried to remove the largish lumps from the back of the fallen Don, only to have the first one he touched reverse itself and attach itself to his chest, levitating the two and a half feet from Don’s back to the sergeants chest as if spring-loaded. I could see now the lump had arms of some kind and as the sergeant whirled and fought, I could make out that it appeared to be a torso, a badly decomposed torso in a tux top, the head buried to the eyesockets in the sergeants chest.
This was enough for me. I turned on my heel and sprinted back into the main bullpen in the office area and called loudly if anyone was there. Julia popped her head out of IR and said “Hey Steve!! Whats up?” Again at a run I got to her and took hold of her arm saying “We have to leave now… now…. It is something terrible”…. And tugged with increasing vigor at her arm. People like Julia have been looking at dead bodies for months now, identifying lost folk, sorting the trivia of hundreds of dead people so she is not so easily panicked.
“What? What on earth are you talking about?” She asked.
What came out was simply jibberish I am sure..”Trailers, dead bodies, Don is dead, police are down.. come NOW” and continued to tug away at her arm. Some hero I am, no glib answers only thinly disguised panic.
Julia reversed my course and headed back to the double doors I had been observing from. By the time she got there, with me on her arm blabbering the whole way that it was time to go she peered into the gloom through the torrential rain to the police car and the activities going on there. I noticed immediately one change…. In the gap of the gate stood a solitary figure in black he looked familiar and appeared to be giving silent directions as I could not hear a thing.
“What… IS that?” she asked
“They are all dead” is the answer I supplied…. “and now it is time for us to go NOW.”
Julia still was not moving. “What is on the ground?” “Who is that guy at the gate?” and then slowly the mass on the ground moved. Pieces came off the mound and resolved themselves into body fragments, crawling along in the mud with our building as a destination. At that moment a shambling avalanche of the dead flowed out the gate in the wake of the man in black, pacing towards our building as steady as a metronome.
We Ran.
I locked doors behind us. There were solid core doors in steel frames on the inside of the building, I always noticed how strong they were. I hoped that they would forever hold out the swarm that I had seen last. When we got to the IT office I stopped. The intervening 150 feet or so caused me to realize I did not feel good about where I might go to or how I might get there. Julia being part of the DMORT team had not been issued a car and while mine was just outside the back door to my office I was not at all sure it would drive across that open morass to the highway and I for sure did not want to get caught out there with these things. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have run like a scalded dog but instead paused long enough to have my options severely limited. When you are in that spot, stupid shit runs through your head…… “I am responsible for these servers and the data on them” “ Where is my rain jacket?”
That useless reverie ended less than ten minutes later when simultaneously the entire building began to reverberate with the steady pounding of BOOM BOOM BOOM on the taught fabric material of the building itself. This drumhead booming came from everywhere. It was then that the thought struck me that they escaped from locked steel and aluminum trailers and this building was only covered in fabric, tough space age fabric but still.. taught fabric. I heard the glass of the back door shatter and in one movement pushed Julia inside the IT office and slammed shut the door auto locking it.
Once inside the office Julia noted sarcastically “So… can you find a smaller hole for us to hide in?” to which I had no answer at all and have never felt so claustrophobic. I reacted.. I pushed the steel sever box up against the door and stuck pieces of cat 5 wire under the casters, essentially welding that heavy thing in place. At that moment the walls began to thump and boom as the walls on the outside of the building had boomed, seems our visitors did not care much about doors, the walls were just drywall and not particularly sturdy. I caught Julia looking overhead.
“Up there!” she whispered and was in motion at the same time. Up on the server and through the acoustic ceiling to the roof supports above she went. I paused long enough to dump the server over on its side, and then using the bundled server interface lines climbed through the ceiling to the supports above spitting out insulation as I went. Once on the support, I cut the cat 5 letting it fall and replaced the ceiling tile. We moved quietly in the gloom toward the warehouse towards the largest open area in the building and away from the claustrophobic office area.
I decided to wait a while before leaving for the day, hoping this downpour would slacken up and it would not be so dangerous going home. I did not count on the parking lot being paved with gravel and dirt, being very new and covering only Louisiana gumbo for substrate. An hour later my car was nearly up to the hubs in water where it was parked and there were precious few islands where one might see the mud that the parking lot was now become. Two hours later and it was clear I was not leaving soon. By early afternoon the parking lot and entry road were a sea of grey gumbo mud and standing water. The trip to the paved road never looked so long. I went back to the double doors overlooking the morgue to watch the rain.
Don, our remaining trailer management fellow, ambled down to the guard shack on the inside gate. He had noticed the booming in the Trailer area. Apparently he enlisted the help of the Federal Police Sergeant, and the Blackwater gate guard to come with him to investigate. In the intensifying rain squall, the sergeant, a blackwater security man and Don climbed into the white and blue police car and drove across the compound to the gate to the trailer parking area. The sergeant stayed in the car as blackwater and Don got out in the deluge to investigate the noises. I can so clearly remember thinking “Boy those guys are going to get SO wet” and watched them go into the trailer area through the internal gate flashlights ticking left-right, left-right.
Gunshots are not as loud outdoors as you might imagine from movies you have seen. They are muffled even more by the rain, thunder and that continuing booming from the trailer area. The first one was so faint I could have missed it but heard something odd and opened the door to listen further and heard the next six in rapid succession. My next impression is of Don running full out coming out of the gate with an oddly lumpy appearance, his flashlight jumping crazily up and down.. even in circles. As he approached the police car something slid down his back and around his legs and down he went.. face first into the goop and directly in front of the Police car. The sergeant to his credit did not hesitate, he was out of the car before Dons’ body hit the mud, weapon at the ready as the last set of gunshots came from the trailer area, two quick ones.. then a final shot. I could hear the sergeant bellowing something but it was faded by the rain. He holstered his weapon and with his bare hands tried to remove the largish lumps from the back of the fallen Don, only to have the first one he touched reverse itself and attach itself to his chest, levitating the two and a half feet from Don’s back to the sergeants chest as if spring-loaded. I could see now the lump had arms of some kind and as the sergeant whirled and fought, I could make out that it appeared to be a torso, a badly decomposed torso in a tux top, the head buried to the eyesockets in the sergeants chest.
This was enough for me. I turned on my heel and sprinted back into the main bullpen in the office area and called loudly if anyone was there. Julia popped her head out of IR and said “Hey Steve!! Whats up?” Again at a run I got to her and took hold of her arm saying “We have to leave now… now…. It is something terrible”…. And tugged with increasing vigor at her arm. People like Julia have been looking at dead bodies for months now, identifying lost folk, sorting the trivia of hundreds of dead people so she is not so easily panicked.
“What? What on earth are you talking about?” She asked.
What came out was simply jibberish I am sure..”Trailers, dead bodies, Don is dead, police are down.. come NOW” and continued to tug away at her arm. Some hero I am, no glib answers only thinly disguised panic.
Julia reversed my course and headed back to the double doors I had been observing from. By the time she got there, with me on her arm blabbering the whole way that it was time to go she peered into the gloom through the torrential rain to the police car and the activities going on there. I noticed immediately one change…. In the gap of the gate stood a solitary figure in black he looked familiar and appeared to be giving silent directions as I could not hear a thing.
“What… IS that?” she asked
“They are all dead” is the answer I supplied…. “and now it is time for us to go NOW.”
Julia still was not moving. “What is on the ground?” “Who is that guy at the gate?” and then slowly the mass on the ground moved. Pieces came off the mound and resolved themselves into body fragments, crawling along in the mud with our building as a destination. At that moment a shambling avalanche of the dead flowed out the gate in the wake of the man in black, pacing towards our building as steady as a metronome.
We Ran.
I locked doors behind us. There were solid core doors in steel frames on the inside of the building, I always noticed how strong they were. I hoped that they would forever hold out the swarm that I had seen last. When we got to the IT office I stopped. The intervening 150 feet or so caused me to realize I did not feel good about where I might go to or how I might get there. Julia being part of the DMORT team had not been issued a car and while mine was just outside the back door to my office I was not at all sure it would drive across that open morass to the highway and I for sure did not want to get caught out there with these things. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have run like a scalded dog but instead paused long enough to have my options severely limited. When you are in that spot, stupid shit runs through your head…… “I am responsible for these servers and the data on them”
That useless reverie ended less than ten minutes later when simultaneously the entire building began to reverberate with the steady pounding of BOOM BOOM BOOM on the taught fabric material of the building itself. This drumhead booming came from everywhere. It was then that the thought struck me that they escaped from locked steel and aluminum trailers and this building was only covered in fabric, tough space age fabric but still.. taught fabric. I heard the glass of the back door shatter and in one movement pushed Julia inside the IT office and slammed shut the door auto locking it.
Once inside the office Julia noted sarcastically “So… can you find a smaller hole for us to hide in?” to which I had no answer at all and have never felt so claustrophobic. I reacted.. I pushed the steel sever box up against the door and stuck pieces of cat 5 wire under the casters, essentially welding that heavy thing in place. At that moment the walls began to thump and boom as the walls on the outside of the building had boomed, seems our visitors did not care much about doors, the walls were just drywall and not particularly sturdy. I caught Julia looking overhead.
“Up there!” she whispered and was in motion at the same time. Up on the server and through the acoustic ceiling to the roof supports above she went. I paused long enough to dump the server over on its side, and then using the bundled server interface lines climbed through the ceiling to the supports above spitting out insulation as I went. Once on the support, I cut the cat 5 letting it fall and replaced the ceiling tile. We moved quietly in the gloom toward the warehouse towards the largest open area in the building and away from the claustrophobic office area.
posted by Steve Morse- Adventures in Disasters at 6:03 PM
1 Comments:
Fascinating, scary and we check every evening to see if you have posted another chapter. Please keep writing!
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