Black Tide Rising - eARC (2 page)

Up on the Roof

Eric Flint

When this old world starts getting me down

And people are just too much for me to face

(Up on the roof)

I climb way up to the top of the stairs

And all my cares just drift right into space

(Up on the roof)

On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be

And there, the world below can’t bother me

—The Drifters (lyrics by Gerry Goffin and Carole King)

1

“Well, that plan just went up in smoke. We waited too long to leave. Now what do we do?” Andrea Kaminski ran fingers through her hair. At the age of sixty-eight, the hair was gray now and a lot shorter, but it was still as thick as it had been when she was a youngster.

Nobody in the living room said anything. As was true of Andy herself, they were all staring at the images on the big plasma TV screen.

Staring at the images—and listening to the sounds.

“
You can easily hear the gunfire,
” said the TV announcer, a middle-aged man by the name of Bob Lubrano. He turned to the younger woman sitting next to him at the long announcers’ desk, who was looking at something out of the view of the audience. “
Can you see anything, Karen?
”

Karen Wakefield shook her head, still not taking her eyes from whatever she was looking at. Another TV monitor, presumably. “
Other than the traffic jam on I-80 which we’re showing our audience, nothing. I’m not sure where that gunfire is coming from.
”

Andy thought calling the scene being shown on the screen a “traffic jam” was like referring to Lake Michigan as a “body of water.” Every single lane on I-80—westbound or eastbound, it didn’t matter—was a solid mass of cars and trucks, not a single one of which was moving at all. There were a few vehicles trying to make their way along the shoulders, but not even many of those—and none of them were moving any faster than a man could walk. On crutches.

The female announcer turned her head back to face the audience. “
The scene is pretty much the same no matter which interstate you look at. Here’s some footage that just came in from I-55 near Willow Springs.
”

The image on the screen changed in detail; but, generically, it was identical. None of the vehicles on the interstate that connected Chicago and St. Louis were moving any faster than the ones on I-80.

“
And here’s what I-90 looks like a little past O’Hare airport.
” Her face twisted into a grimace. “
Or what used to be O’Hare airport, before the plane crashes.”

One of the men in Andy Kaminski’s living room finally provided an answer to her question. That was Federico Rodriguez, who went by the nickname of Freddy.

“Maybe we could hole up in the Carson Pirie Scott building at Woodmar Mall,” he suggested. “The place is built like a fortress. There’s no windows at all and only two entrances. Yeah, sure, they’re pretty big—three or four glass doors, if I remember right.” He waved a big hand toward the street outside. “But I’ve got welding equipment in my truck. We could probably seal the entrances.”

His father Luis perked up a little. “We don’t have to seal it well enough to keep real people out. Just…those things…” He pointed at the screen, which was now showing a scene from the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown area.

The image, like all the previous ones, was being transmitted from a helicopter. No reporters on the ground could have survived more than a minute or two. The whole area was overrun by hundreds—it might easily be thousands—of naked figures.

“Zombies,” Luis concluded. “Whatever you want to call them.”

Freddy’s proposal was tempting. Andy had shopped in that Carson’s building plenty of times and knew it quite well. It
was
built like a fortress, leaving aside the big entrances on the north and south sides of the store. And since they’d torn down the rest of the mall, the building stood by itself. But…

She shook her head. “Guys, we already chewed this over. We can’t take the risk of being inside a building. Whatever this virus is, it’s virulent as all hell. We need to stay outdoors and as far away from other people as we can.”

Luis’ neighbor Pedro Vargas spoke up. “Yeah, fine. That’s why we were planning to drive down to Shawnee National Forest. But like you said—that plan went up in smoke. Wherever we’re going to go, it’s got to be within a few miles of here. We’ll never get any farther than that.”

His Puerto Rican accent was thicker than that of Luis Rodriguez, but his English was fluent. So was Flora Rodriguez’s, when she chimed in.

“There’s no open area worth talking about anywhere in northern Lake County,” she said, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

For the first time since they started watching the TV news, Andy’s husband spoke up.

“Yeah, there is.” Tom’s heavy face twisted into a smile of sorts. “In a manner of speaking. You should head for one of the tank farms.”

Flora frowned at him. “Tank—what? Farms? What are you talking about?”

Unlike Tom, neither of the Rodriguez men nor Pedro had ever worked in an oil refinery or chemical plant. But because of the jobs they’d held, they were all familiar with the facilities. Northwest Indiana was one of the nation’s major industrial centers, concentrated especially in steel making and all types of chemical production.

“He’s talking about those big storage tanks,” said Lujis. “You know—those white cylinders you see all over the place. There’s a huge tank farm not far from here, part of the BP refinery in Whiting.”

“God, no!” said Tom forcefully. “The last place you want to be in a catastrophe is right next to an oil refinery.” He leaned forward in his wheelchair and point at the TV screen.

“That’s what our grandson Jack calls a zombie apocalypse. Give it a few days—hell, give it a few hours, for all I know—and that big refinery less than two miles from here is going to become a catastrophe of its own. I doubt if anybody’s still in control over there and I’m sure and certain they didn’t have time to shut down the refinery properly. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow.”

He swiveled his armchair and rolled to the side window, looking to the southeast. “Go for the tank farm down by Cline Avenue. It’s even bigger—must be a mile long, half a mile wide—and it’s not close to anything dangerous. Get on top of one of the tanks in the middle of the farm. You won’t be visible from the roads and you’ll have a clear line of fire for at least forty or fifty yards in any direction, and hundreds of yards if no other tank’s in the way. For all practical purposes you’ll be on top of a steel castle with sheer walls that no naked mindless zombie can climb. The only access to the roof is a narrow winding staircase. That’s easily defensible anyway, but if it was me I’d cut off the bottom ten or fifteen feet of the staircase with a cutting torch and substitute ladders for that stretch which you can haul up when you’re not using them.”

He wheeled back around to face the room. “Make sure you pick a tank with a fixed roof, though. Some of ’em got floating roofs. You can stand on those, more or less, but there’ll be vapor leakage.”

As he’d talked, Andy’s apprehension had steadily grown. “What’s with this
you-you-you
bullshit, Tom?” she demanded. “You’re coming with us.”

Her husband shook his head. “Get serious, woman.” He gestured with his hands toward what was left of his legs. “I didn’t think I could make it even in the woods, although I was willing to try. How the hell do you think I’m going to get up on top of an oil storage tank? They’re more than fifty feet high. My legs are useless and I weigh close to three hundred pounds. Just go, will you? Face it—I’m done.”

Andy knew there was more at work here than stoic practicality on her husband’s part. Thomas Kaminski had been an outdoorsman and hunter his whole life, until an industrial accident had taken both his legs off at the knees a decade earlier. He still maintained his shooting skills at a firing range and went fishing from time to time, but those activities were a pale shadow of what he’d been accustomed to. He’d been in a state of depression ever since—which now seemed to have become suicidal. There was no way he could survive on his own in the crisis that had engulfed the whole world, and he knew it as well as she did.

“I said, cut the bullshit!” she snapped at him. “We’ll figure out something.”

“Won’t even be that hard,” said Freddy Rodriguez. “You still got plenty of strength in your upper body, Tom—I’ve seen you lift weights so don’t bother arguing about it—and those spiral staircases have solid handrails. I weigh about two hundred and fifty and I’m pretty damn strong, if I say so myself. Between you working your way up on the rail and me hoisting your fat butt, we’ll get you there.”

Pedro Vargas weighed in then—and did it just the right way. “You
got
to come with us, Tom. We need you. You’re the only one of us was a hunter and really knows how to use a rifle. Me and Luis—Freddy, too—we all got guns, sure. But they’re pistols and shotguns.” He nodded his head toward the far wall. “I don’t think Jerry’s got a rifle, either. He’s never gone hunting that I know of.”

Jerry Haywood and his wife Latoya were neighbors who were also planning to come on what they’d all intended to be an expedition into the forested hills in southern Illinois. Jerry was a security guard for one of the nearby casinos and Latoya worked in a factory that manufactured cardboard containers. They were both around Freddy’s age—forty or so—and had two teenage children, a boy and a girl.

As if on cue, the doorbell rang. When Andy’s grandson Jack went to open the door, she could see the Haywood couple standing on the porch beyond, along with their daughter Jayden. All of them looked worried.

“Come on in,” she said.

Jerry started talking before he even got through the door. “You see the news? There’s no way we’re going to get down to Shawnee.”

Behind him, his wife said, “Hell, we ain’t got no chance of getting out of Lake County, much less the whole state of Indiana.”

“Yeah, we saw,” said Freddy. He gestured toward Andy’s husband. “Tom thinks we oughta set up on top of one of the oil storage tanks.”

Jerry stopped abruptly, frowning. “That’s…maybe not a bad idea.”

Latoya was frowning too. “But can we all fit? There’s what? Fifteen of us, right?”

“Probably be more than that,” said her husband. “Assuming our son comes back with his girlfriend and her father. Which I figure he will if Ceyonne’s dad don’t decide to just shoot him instead.”

Andy chuckled. Ceyonne Bennett’s father Jerome was a cop for the city of East Chicago, and while he was generally an even-tempered man he had the same attitude on the subject of
daughter’s boyfriend
that most fathers of seventeen-year-old girls did.

Luis looked at Tom. “So what’s the answer? Can we all fit up there?”

“For Chrissake, there must be at least twenty tanks in that farm,” Tom said. “Even the smaller ones are eighty feet in diameter—and I think most of them are a hundred and ten feet across. Figure out the math.”

Freddy’s business as a mechanical and electrical contractor made him at ease with basic mathematics. It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to come up with the answer. “He’s right. Even an eighty foot diameter tank gives us about five thousand square feet on the roof.” He glanced around Andy and Tom’s house. “This is what? A third of that?”

“We got fourteen hundred square feet on the main floor and another thousand or so in the basement,” said Tom. He’d been a machinist most of his life and he was proficient with numbers himself. “So we’d have twice as much space even on one of the smaller tanks. If we pick one that’s a hundred and ten feet across, we’re looking at…” His eyes got a little unfocused.

Freddy came up with the answer before he did. “Damn near ten thousand square feet.”

Latoya was still frowning. “Yeah, fine—but there’s no
roof.
”

Tom shrugged. “We were planning to live in tents and those two big vinyl tool sheds, weren’t we? What’s the difference if they’re on top of a steel tank instead of dirt and pine needles in a forest?”

“Can’t drive tent stakes into steel,” Jerry pointed out.

“No, you can’t. But we’ve got lots of tape and every kind of glue you can think of.” Tom nodded toward Freddy. “Best thing, though, is just have Freddy weld the stakes to the roof of the tanks.”

Luis Rodriguez looked alarmed. “You want to
weld
stuff to a giant tank full of
gasoline
?”

Freddy smiled. “Relax, Dad. I’ll be using oxy-acetylene, not arc welding. And all I gotta do is tack weld the stakes. We’ll get some strong winds up there in a storm but tornadoes hardly ever come this close to the lake.”

He pursed his lips. “Now that I think about it, though…Tom, what happens in a thunderstorm? Does lightning ever strike those storage tanks?”

“You better believe it does,” said Andy’s husband. “Refinery workers stay the hell off of ’em in a thunderstorm. The tanks do have lightning energy distribution systems—basically, pointed steel rods connected to copper alloy cables running down the sides of the tanks into the ground. To be on the safe side, though, I think we’ll want to also weld on some sort of lightning rod too—better attach it to the staircase—and figure out some sort of insulation to put all the tents on. Rubber matting, if we can scrounge some up—we’ve got some in the basement—and whatever else we can think of. And I’d strongly recommend that in a thunderstorm everybody crowds into the two vinyl sheds and stays out of the tents.”

Pedro made a face. “They’re not that big!” he protested. “Ten by eight feet, that’s all.” Being an electrician, he was just as handy with arithmetic as any of them. “That’s one hundred and sixty square feet—for fifteen or sixteen people.”

“Subtract me,” said Tom. “No way me and the wheelchair will fit. I’ll just have to take my chances in a tent.”

His expression was simultaneously lugubrious and self-satisfied.
Imminent likely doom for the cripple, just as I foretold.

But Andy let it go, for the time being. At least Tom was now agreeing to come with them. Thunderstorms were a problem for another day.