Free The Infected Dead (Book 2): Survive For Now by Bob Howard Page B

in here. If nothing else, they are a deterrent to the wrong kind of people trying to get to the dock.”
    Jean said, “Eddy, where’s the cell phone? I want to see what the Chief saw.”
    I dug it out of a zipped pocket on the inside of my coat. No water had gotten into the sandwich bag, so it should be okay. I switched the TV to receive the image from the phone and turned on the video playback mode.
    The first minute or so was the blurred image of the infected dead that was stuck under the houseboat. It was reaching with one hand in the direction of the Chief. The Chief explained that he wanted to be sure that one couldn’t reach him before he went deeper.
    The cell phone rotated back to the left, and the view became murky. There wasn’t much light to begin with, but the depth of the water made everything look black up ahead. The Chief gave a little kick to go deeper and kept the camera aimed down at about a forty-five degree angle. He turned on a flashlight and aimed it in the same direction.
    “This is about when we were playing out your lines slowly,” I said. “We weren’t too worried about what was happening at this point because your bubbles were coming up not far from the lines.”
    Everyone moved in closer to get a better look except the Chief. He knew what was down there, and he knew what was about to happen next. If we hadn’t been packed together so tightly in front of the TV, maybe all of us wouldn’t have screamed when a face appeared right in front of the camera.
    The Chief had shown the presence of mind to keep the camera aimed at the infected for a moment longer before he tucked it into his weight belt. We all looked at him for an explanation because the view was pitch black.
    He said, “The infected was bloated from being in the water a long time, and body gases were probably making it start to float to the surface. It tried to grab me as it floated by. I was just lucky that it didn’t start floating to the surface directly below me. It managed to get a grip on one of the rescue lines, so I unclipped it from my weight belt and managed to loop it around the infected. No sooner had I finished with that one when a second one drifted up from below. I decided it was time to get out of there. I looped my second line around that one and started swimming against the current toward the other side.”
    “Why didn’t you just come back to the surface, Chief?” asked Jean. “You had us scared to death.”
    He reached over and put his arm around Jean’s shoulders and pulled her close as he said, “I only wanted to go down there once, Jean, so I needed a picture of what I saw.”
    “I don’t need a picture that bad,” she answered. “A description will do just fine.” She sounded angrier than she was, but she went ahead and punched the Chief in the chest. I’m not sure he noticed.
    Right on time the camera view got lighter as the Chief had pulled the cell phone out of his weight belt. The view went all over the place but finally settled on something big in the distance. The Chief was swimming almost parallel to something, but he was getting a bit closer at the same time.
    It was a horrifying sight straight out of a nightmare description of the gates of Hell. There was a net stretched across the moat from the island all the way to the other side. It didn’t go all the way to the surface, and its purpose could not have been guessed without a clue from Uncle Titus, but right now it was a body catcher. Sharks had room to go over the net, and when I had gone through the area in the Boston Whaler, I probably had passed over it with at least ten feet of clearance. The infected hadn’t been as lucky.
    The Chief must have stopped moving forward because the camera panned back and forth to take in as much of the scene as possible. There were hundreds of the infected tangled in the net. Most of them were moving, and blue crabs roamed freely over them.
    A large portion of the captured infected dead were