"Alcatraz" (A Post-Apocalypse Story)

[Alice2015]

Alcatraz:
New Beginnings

(A Post-Apocalypse Story)

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Beverly Thomas
42 years old
5'8", 125#; 34B-24-34

Alice Thomas
22 years old
5'6", 115#; 34C-22-34

(OOC: We always use 2024 because the days of the week are the same as 2019.)


3 December 2024 -- Tuesday

It's like something out of a bad SyFy movie.

That was the thought on Beverly Thomas's mind as she looked out upon the madness and turmoil taking over the city of San Francisco. She'd arrived at Candy Baron on Pier 39 (GML) at 4am, just as she had every weekday for the past 7 years, and begin prepping the day's fresh batches of sweet treats when her phone, her laptop, her desktop computer, and even the shop's landline phone went crazy with Emergency Broadcast System alerts.

The CDC and Governor both were ordering that all people shelter indoors. An unknown, highly virulent, and fast acting virus was sweeping across the Bay Area. Beverly kept working, believing that the Government was overreacting and she needed to be ready for the day's tourists.

But she became seriously concerned with a combination of the local AM radio station's reports and more EBS messages reported that a rabies-like disease was causing people to go mad, attack other people, and eat on them like cannibals!

Just before 7am, Beverly's daughter, Alice -- who worked at and was supposed to be staying inside of a nearby convenience store -- knocked frantically at Candy Baron's front door. Once inside, she spoke about her morning manager, "He was freaking out, going into convulsions … I called 9-1-1 but got put on hold … then, he just went stiff and silent on the floor for a couple of minutes … and then he leaped up and killed a customer! Mom, he bit him in the neck and … oh God, there was blood every where, and I just ran away … ran here. Mom, there're dead people all over the streets and pier. And people are eating them. Eating them!"

Beverly calmed her daughter, then set about securing the store. They lowered the metal, anti-looter grill shutters behind the windows and doors, then moved away from the store's most vulnerable section to the kitchen in the back of the shop. They monitored the situation using the shop's computers and their own smart phones; neither of them wanted to see what was happening outside with their own eyes, but occasionally -- when rapidly moving footsteps or screams were heard outside -- they simply couldn't resist looking to see what was happening.

It was all horrific, whether live or not.

They had both been texting or otherwise messaging with a multitude of real life friends, family, and social media contacts throughout the day. As time passed, most of those people stopped returning messages. Two people they knew -- Madras and Connor -- who worked on the pier -- were also hiding in their places of business. Around 4pm, the women lost contact with the last of four locally residing relatives. It was very likely that they were the only members of their family still left alive.

Night fell. They made beds using the pads from the guest bench and table clothes. It was a hard night; occasionally screams or unexplainable crashes or explosions awoke one or both of them.

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4 December 2024 -- Wednesday

The second day wasn't much different from the first. Every couple of hours or so, rapidly moving footsteps could be heard on the wooden boardwalk beyond the windows. The only new news was from government internet sites: most of the internet had been shut down to reserve band width to official sites or some hooey like that, and the radio was nothing but dead air and static.

The pair learned a lot over the next hours from the limited amount of information, though: the cause of the mayhem was a disease thought to be caused by an unexpected reaction between two very popular vaccines, this year's flu immunization and ACV, the anti-cancer vaccine that had begun mass distribution in 2021. Millions of people had had the latter over the last 3 years, and shots of the former had begun just 2 months ago.

No one in the Government, the CDC, or the medical field in whole had ever even dreamed that something like this could happen. The two drugs were interacting to cause rabies-like symptoms, the result of which was that millions of affected people were attacking, killing, and eating millions of unaffected people.

Beverly and Alice spent the day in the kitchen just listening to the news and hoping that the government and military would gain control of the situation. But as the day went on, they would only learn that the military and government agencies had been the first to gain access to both ACV and the new flu vaccine; both organizations had collapsed almost entirely

The disease they were calling Super Rabies was everywhere, and there simply was no stopping it.

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5 December 2024 -- Thursday

Alice awoke with a start to loud sounds and sat up from her makeshift bed to find her mother rolling a 6 foot tall metal shelving rack to the middle of the kitchen floor.

"Help me with this," Beverly told her daughter. She directed her to lock the wheels and support it while she climbed it. When Alice asked why the hell she was climbing it, Beverly pointed to the roof access hatch that the maintenance guys occasionally used to service the ventilation system and said, "I'm gonna take a look."

Alice thought that was insane, but Beverly pointed out that they hadn't heard any cannibals on the roof, so it should be safe. Her daughter didn't like this, but soon enough, Beverly was climbing from a prep island to the top of the rack, cracking open the hatch, peeking out, and then ascending up through it onto the roof.

"What do you see?" a nervous Alice asked.

"You should come up and look for yourself," her mother said.

It took a full three minutes for Alice to get up the courage, but soon enough she was standing by her mother's side, looking out upon their city. It was an awful scene: there were at least 20 dead, partially eaten bodies littering the pavement and boardwalks of the pier; an equal number of fires raged in various parts of the Bay Area from unknown causes that were surely directly or indirectly associated to what was being called the Super Rabies Outbreak; the skies above were vacant of aircraft; the bridges within view were packed with cars yet none of them were moving; and Alice -- a true city girl who rarely visited the peaceful countryside -- was creeped out by an eerie quiet that had settled over the city.

Alice noticed that her mother's gaze had been set on something to the northwest for a long moment. "You have that crazy idea look on your face."

"I have an idea," Beverly confirmed with a devilish smirk. "Whaddaya see out there?"

"Alcatraz," Alice said after she realized specifically what her mother had been eying. "And...?"

"It's a perfect place for us to get away from all this madness, from these cannibals," Beverly continued. When Alice laughed, she told her, "It's an island. It's isolated. There is no residential population out there, which means no rabid people."

"What about tourists?" Alice challenged. "What if the tour boat took some..."

"Not a chance," Beverly interrupted. "Tours to the island were suspended last week for some upkeep and upgrades that weren't supposed to even start until day after tomorrow. 'Cept for the 24/7 security guys, there shouldn't be anyone out there, and I'm willing to bet that they got into their little motor boat and skedaddled home to their families as soon as this shit hit the fan."

Just about then, a scream sounded from some where on the pier. Alice couldn't help but move closer to the edge of the building to look, just in time to see a pair of cannibals take down a women. They bit and ripped at her while she screamed in terror and agony; they continued to ravage her after she'd gone silent, torn to death.

"And how do we get past that?" Alice asked. "And what do we eat when we get out there?"

Beverly answered the second question first, "We pillage Pier 39's businesses for food and other things we need."

"And how do we not get eaten by those things?"

"You text your friend Kevin."

Alice's eyes widened in surprise. "Kevin? How do you know about Kevin?"

"I was reading your texts over your shoulder yesterday," Beverly admitted. After her daughter finished pitching a fit, Beverly explained, "He likes you … he wants you--"

"Mother!" Alice said before blushing a fiery red.

"--and if you tell him he can have you," Beverly continued without hesitation, "I am sure he will go out of his way -- even put himself in danger -- to rescue you."

Alice laughed in amazement at her mother. "Maybe you should let him fuck you!"

"I will," Beverly said, again displaying no hesitation. "If you can get him to come get us and our food and water and whatever we want to take to a boat, I'll let him fuck me any which way he wants, as many times as he wants, sweetie."

They stared at each other for a moment with Alice unsure of whether her mother was being serious or simply exaggerating her willingness with regards to seeing the two of them safe. Beverly continued, "Sweetie … if we stay here, we're gonna die. We can't survive on fudge and caramel corn forever. We'll either run out of food for ourselves or become food for some cannibal."

She pointed toward Alcatraz. "Remember that show we watched on History last month? The island has solar panels for electrical power on sunny days, a diesel generator for when there is no sun on foggy days or at night, a rain water catch and filter system. There's lots of space on which we can grow a garden or raise stock animals--"

"A garden? Farm animals?" Alice cut in with shock. "How long do you think we're gonna be out there?"

"Sweetie, we could be out there for the rest of our lives, for all we know. This … this thing that's happening to the city … to the country, to the world. This isn't some hiccup in the history of civilization. This is the apocalypse. This is the end of life as we know it."

Alice's eyes suddenly glazed over. She hadn't cried yet, but now -- as she moved to clutch her arms around her mother's body -- she did, sobbing. They held each other for a long moment before Alice pulled back.

"What am I supposed to say to him?" she asked about Kevin.

"He has guns," Beverly reminded her daughter, continuing, "And access to a delivery van. He told you he'd been planning on just driving off into the sunrise, 'cept that all the roads were jammed with abandoned cars, yes?"

Alice nodded, and Beverly continued, "Tell him that if he can get here and help us, we have a safe place to go."

"Do I tell him that--"

"No!" Beverly cut in, knowing what her daughter was going to ask. "No. You tell him we have access to food, water, and more, as well as a great place to hide, but that we need him, his guns, and his truck."

"What if he has friends that want to go?" Alice asked. "Last he told me, he was with four people. Survivors from his building, I think."

"If he says yes, you let me talk to him," Beverly answered. "Everyone has to have something they can contribute. C'mon, lets get down, and you can text him. We'll get a hold of Madras and Connor, too. I texted them this morning. They're still hiding right where they were yesterday."

The pair headed down into the kitchen again, and while Beverly texted the friends here on the pier, Alice texted her friend who was about 6 blocks to the south in North Beach.


PLEASE, do not post without acceptance to the role play.

 

[Alice2015]

(OOC: I am writing for Kevin in this post, but he is an available character. If no one claims him in a day or two, RobbieRand has agreed to write him. RR is taking some time off.)

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Terri Richards
19 years old
5'4", 101#; 33A-22-32

5 December 2024 -- Thursday -- 9am

As her head bobbed up and down in Kevin's lap, Terri cringed at the sound of a very familiar and hated notification of a text's arrival on the man's phone. Considering she was sucking his cock and he should have been within a minute or so of cumming, she would have assumed he'd let the announcement go. And yet, the fucker reached for his phone and touched the screen to open the message.

She sat up, wiped some spittle off her lips, and stared back at him as he asked with an oblivious tone, "Why'd you stop?"

"Because you're more interested in what Candy Shop Girl has to say than in whether I swallow your jizz, you fuck," she snapped back. As soon as she spoke the words Terri knew she shouldn't have. But it was done. She slid off the bed to search for her clothes as she said in a less harsh but still hurt tone, "Go ahead, take your call."

"It's not a call," he corrected her, "It's just a text."

Terri glared at Kevin, asking, "Seriously, you see a difference at this very moment in time?"

Still nude, she carried all of her clothes out of the bedroom to the adjacent living room. The eyes of the three males there threatened to pop out of their respective skulls, but Terri only ignored them as she began dressing. Once done, she crossed past the men to the kitchen to get some food and a beer.

Leaning back against the counter, Terri contemplated her situation. Before this viral cannibal rabies thing or whatever it was began, she'd only just known Kevin by face, despite them having lived in the same building of just 8 apartments for more than a year. She'd had a boyfriend or two or ten during that time, and as they had pretty much met her financial needs in exchange for her meeting their sexual ones, she'd never had an interest in getting to know Kevin.

But the day of the rise of the cannibals, he'd saved her from a pair of them. She'd shown her gratitude by sucking his cock less than an hour later, and she'd continued to show her gratitude in that and other ways as he'd continued to look out for her as the world around them fell apart.

Many of the residents of their 8 apartment building had fled, hoping to get out of the city before the roads bound up. Terri doubted any of them made it. She didn't really care, though; she had no friends or family of whom to speak or be concerned, and none of her past lovers even bothered to call or text to see if she'd survived.

Once things calmed down in the hallway, Kevin, his roommate Peter, and Terri began clearing the building, as Kevin called it, as if he was from Chicago PD or some other cop show. They killed 4 cannibals and discovered 6 survivors. Together, the entire group of 9 began pillaging the apartments that were unoccupied, by human or creature, sharing the spoils relatively evenly.

And during all that time -- more than 50 times Terri was sure -- some bitch named Alice was persistently texting Kevin. Terri asked about who this woman was; the answer was a vague Just a girl I know who works at the convenience store 'round the corner.

"Why does she keep texting you if she's no one special?" Terry asked at least 3 times.

"She's alive, I'm alive, we're all alive, including you," Kevin had said with a matter of fact tone, as if Alice didn't matter at all. "She just wants to talk to someone, and I think all her friends are dead."

Terri was sure that Kevin wanted this other woman in his bed, which made her wonder what happened to her when Alice took her place. Kevin strolled into the kitchen for a beer -- yeah, it's 9am, so what? -- and tried to sneak a kiss before being rebuffed. He snatched Terri firmly by the wrist and began leading her back to the other room despite her objections.

"We've been invited to leave this dump and go someplace safer, more secure," he told the others. One of the guys asked where and by whom, to which Kevin answered in reverse order, "By a chick I know who says she and her mother have lots of food and a great idea of a safe hiding place … and Alcatraz."

"Alcatraz?" someone asked.

"I think so," Kevin said as he opened his phone to look at the series of texts he'd just received. "She didn't actually say Alcatraz, but it makes sense. She said it was isolated from the city, had electricity, fresh water, and secure buildings in which we can hide if we need. When I asked if she was talking about Alcatraz--"

"We talked about that last night," one of the guys reminded Kevin.

"When I asked, she only said Cannot tell, but you will like it," he read. He looked to the others one after another and explained further, "The deal is this. We use my work truck to rescue them and get them to an undisclosed destination … a boat, obviously … and we all head for that secret island where we're all going to go play house."

"Why don't we go without her," Terri challenged. When Kevin looked her way, she clarified, "If you think it's Alcatraz … and we have all the food we scavenged from the building … why the fuck do we need her?"

Terri knew what the answer was, of course: I want to put my dick in this girl's pussy.

"Because I know Alice and her mother, and they are good people," Kevin began. "They're trapped, they're scared, and they have even more food than we have, which is a good thing. We go get them, pack up our shit, and get to the island."

Alice didn't object but only stared at him for a moment before heading back to the kitchen for yet another beer. Kevin told the three men her now, "Go tell the others what we're doing. Tell them if they want to go, they have an hour to pack their shit."

The trio headed out, each armed with a shotgun. Kevin's main line of business had been selling guns, so he had an abundance -- 22 in total -- of pistols, rifles, and shotguns.

He went to the kitchen, spun Terri to face him, and pressed hard against her as he stole a kiss. Pulling back, he told her softly, "You don't have to come if you don't want. I'll leave your share of the food and a couple of guns with ammo. You should be save."

Terri responded by first glaring, then calling Kevin a dick, then standing on her toes to kiss him before grasping his hand and leading him to the bedroom to finish what had been interrupted earlier.

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6 December 2024 -- Friday -- 5am

Both personal observation and news reports had revealed that the cannibals were practically dormant during the hour before and after sunrise. The decision had been made to perform their little mission this morning.

Of the building's current occupants, 7 were going. Kevin had also contacted Paulie -- a guy in the next building over who had worked with him once upon a time -- and invited him to go along. That man -- twice Kevin's age of 26 -- had six people with him who jumped at the opportunity. The operation seemed easy enough: back the delivery truck up to the side of the apartment house; use an ax they'd found to cut a hole into the top of the truck; load all the resources from the fire escape at the end of the second floor hallway into the truck through the hole; repeat the entire event at the second building; and get down to Pier 39 to rescue the two women and all their own food and stuff.

Things were going perfectly fine, though, a bit slow. The cannibals finally got active again, and soon there were a dozen, then two dozen, the three dozen of them all around the base of the truck. They didn't climb, which was the only reason Kevin had been certain this would work. But as they began clawing at the truck from all sides, they developed a bit of a pattern and the vehicle began rocking back and forth.

Suddenly, one of the guys atop the truck lost his balance and fell over the side, right into the arms of the herd. Within seconds he was being ripped apart and eaten. The rocking ceased, thankfully, but Kevin decided it was time to go. They left a quarter of what had been stacked in the hallway and told Paulie they'd have to come back for him and his group the next morning at sunrise.

The truck surged forward, knocking the cannibals down and away. The crunching sound of bodies beneath the tires nearly made Terri throw up. They raced down the streets for the pier, where they had to thread between abandoned vehicles, even pushing one through the barrier at the pier's edge and into the bay.

But soon enough, they were backing up to the loading dock to which Beverly and Alice could walk via the complex's back hallway without ever going outside.

 

[Alice2015]

5 December 2024 -- Thursday -- 9am
(The previous day)

Alice Thomas pocketed her cell phone and walked back to the kitchen where she found her mother once again cooking. "What are you making?"

"Pancakes," Beverly Thomas answered, tipping the bowl toward her daughter to show the white mixture she was stirring. "You still eat your eggs scrambled, yes?"

"We have eggs?"

"Of course we do, sweetie," Beverly answered. "We have just about everything here that we have in the kitchen at home."

The retail shops down on the San Francisco waterfront -- particularly the food providers -- were famous for cooking, baking, or otherwise preparing their products themselves. The Candy Baron was no different, making 80% of their products from scratch, though, at a small production facility across the Bay in Oakland.

But to reassure the public that she and her employees truly did make the majority of their products themselves, each day Beverly and an assistant -- who hadn't shown up yesterday for obvious reasons -- made three products right here in the kitchen: fudge, brownies, and a small portion of the taffy that filled bins throughout the retail portion of the store.

The kitchen was visible from the street through the big bay windows, and the ventilation system could be diverted to flood the wooden boardwalk with the sweet, tempting scent of the taffy stretching machine or the brownie oven. Beverly had always loved the attention they got from the people on the street. (She hated having to wash the window three times a day from the faces and hands pressed up to it, but hey, that was just something that had to be done.)

Beyond the candy ingredients, though, Beverly had always kept makings for creating full meals, too. Cooking was just what Beverly did; it was her life, always had been since she was a girl, and became even more so after a family tragedy demanded she keep her brain consumed with work.

Her husband, Richard Thomas -- no, not the actor -- had had to double the size of the kitchen of the house into which he, his wife, and their two daughters moved 10 years ago. Beverly could easily spend 6 hours a day in the kitchen whipping up this meal or that, this dessert or that, this candy or that. Often, the quantities were too large for the family to consume and ended up going to the neighbors, friends, or even to the soup kitchen a dozen blocks down the street at which Beverly and even her daughters had volunteered some weekends and holidays.

When Richard and Alice's younger sister died in a car crash 8 years ago, Alice's mother drowned her sorrows by easily doubling her time in the kitchen. Soon, she was simply out of control, spending every waking moment with a wooden spoon or spatula in her hand. It got worse when she began spending some of the insurance money in food prep machines, the most expensive being a taffy making machine.

Alice made an off hand remark one day about how Beverly should open a candy store, and before she knew it, her mother had purchased the Candy Baron down on Pier 39 and its production facility across the bay in Oakland. Alice had worked for her mother for the first year, but Beverly had demanded she go out and see how other owners ran their own businesses.

"Learn from the best, learn from the worst," Alice's mother had told her, "then come back here and teach me how to do it right."

Beverly hadn't needed any help learning how to do it right, but Alice had done as her mother wished. It was a good learning experience, being out there in the retail world out from under her protective mother's wing. Alice had only worked part time, though, with Beverly's main interest being in her daughter's continuing education. Beverly herself hadn't gone to college, and she'd demanded since the girls were young that they get degrees.

"Scrambled," Alice told her mother. When Beverly shot her a distracted look, Alice said, "My eggs. Scrambled, with those … what is it you put in them."

"Already got it all, sweetie," Beverly laughed as she showed another bowl filled with ingredients to be mixed with the eggs. "Tell me about your friend's answer ... Kevin."

"He'll do it," Alice said as she toyed with the cell phone in her pocket. "Tomorrow at sunrise."

She explained what Kevin had told her about the cannibals being semi-dormant at dawn, then explained, "It'll be him and about 10 more. Yeah, I know, I was supposed to talk to you first, but he said that if he couldn't bring them, he wouldn't come."

"And is he, sweetie … gonna cum?" Beverly asked with a devilish smirk and a tone that left now doubt that in her mind she wasn't spelling the word c-o-m-e.

"Jesus, mom!" Alice responded, laughing with shock. "You're worse than Cousin Tim, and he's a 13 year old boy who keeps a bottle of hand lotion under his mattress's edge."

Beverly laughed, then attempted to engage her daughter in a conversation about how sex is a natural act and yadda yadda yadda before Alice cut her off and said she didn't want to talk about her sex life with her mother, even if they were both very much adults.

"He might be interested in me, yes," Alice said. When her mother pried and prodded for more, Alice took out her cell phone, tapped, hesitated, and read, "A knight in shining armor expects something from the fairy tale princess he rescues."

Beverly laughed aloud. "I like this guy."

"Well, like I said," Alice mumbled as she pocketed her phone again, "You fuck him."

It wasn't that Alice wasn't interested in a sexual relationship with Kevin or any other appropriate male. It was just that … well … honestly … Alice had begun wondering whether it wasn't a female with whom she wanted to spend time naked, sweaty, and crying out in ecstatic delight. Alice had recently had her first sexual encounter with another woman, and -- while it had been a bit awkward, what with it being the wife of one of her college professors -- she'd very much enjoyed it and wanted to do such things again.

But Alice didn't consider herself a lesbian or bisexual and, honestly, she'd never even considered herself curious about other women. It just … sorta happened. It started, she didn't stop it, and afterwards Alice found herself wanting more.

Oh well, didn't much matter now. There probably wasn't an attractive female left in San Francisco for Alice to covet as a lover, plus she was being rescued by a guy who was expecting that the two of them would become lovers. Alice's lesbian phase had started and ended that one night. Or, so she thought.

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After their late breakfast, Alice and her mother got to the serious and potentially dangerous work. Using metal tubes from disassembled rolling racks and knives from the kitchen, they made spears to protect themselves from the cannibals. Honestly, neither of them thought they could really defend themselves from those flesh eating monsters, but if they hadn't had something deadly in their hands, they likely couldn't have forced themselves out of the shop.

The back door of the kitchen led into the service hallway, which the pair checked out first: no cannibals. They made sure that the hallway wasn't open to the outside, then returned to the Candy Baron. Climbing to the roof again, they made their way to the Players Sports Grill roof hatch, which they forced open. Beverly had feared an alarm might sound but there was nothing more than the pop of the hatch's latch.

"Hello...? Anyone down there?" Beverly called. She tried several times over a two minutes, explaining who she was. "We're coming down into the kitchen. Don't kill us."

Behind her, Alice murmured, "Or eat us."

Getting down into Players wasn't as easy as it had been getting out of Candy Baron, and Beverly very nearly turned her ankle when she suspended herself from the hatch's rim and dropped to the floor. She checked the restaurant for others, found no one, located a ladder in the back room, and helped her daughter down.

They opened the back door, again without an alarm, then began rummaging through the restaurant's inventory. The Grill was a gold mine in food, drink, and alcohol. They found some carts in the restaurant and the back hallway and filled them to overflowing with non-perishables.

"The milk, meat, and stuff in the fridge and freezer can wait until your friend arrives," Beverly told her daughter. When Alice asked what they were to do with perishables once the got to the island, Beverly told her, "We'll eat what we can right away, preserve some of the meat by drying it over a fire, sink some of it in the bay waters … who knows, there's electric out on Alcatraz, so maybe we'll find a fridge or freezer for some of it."

It took them almost eight hours to go through Players's inventory. They could have finished sooner than that, but Beverly wanted to scavenge as much as humanly possible and have it ready to load in an instant. They found most of the food items still in boxes, crates, bags, etc., and what wasn't packaged, they put in large garbage bags. Even the refrigerated items were packed in bags before being put back into the fridges. They would be ready in an instant.

There was more than food, water, and drink, though: first aid kits, any sort of appropriate clothing, other cloth materials that could be used as bedding, various containers for cooking, cleaning, bathing, etc.

"Won't this stuff already on the island?" Alice asked a few times when she saw what her mother was packing up. Her mother told her they couldn't be too safe. At one point, Alice murmured playfully, "Hope we find a condom machine in the men's room."

"Oh! Go check!" her mother responded with all seriousness. "We want to do that before Kevin arrives, you know, just in case he's not interested in you."

They laughed about that together. Despite having a bit of a strange personality and appearance, Alice had never had a problem attracting men, and men had a hard time resisting her when she turned on her charm. Beverly had been depending on that when she suggested her daughter text Kevin for a rescue.

They took a couple of breaks through the day, with Beverly using Players kitchen to cook lavish meals while Alice texted Kevin repeatedly about the preparations being made at both ends of this little operation.

Things were going well, and just after sundown the mother-daughter pair were settling down to their steak and seafood dinner when suddenly the power went off in Players. They looked outside and discovered that the entire pier had gone dark.

"Nothing to worry about," Beverly reassured her daughter. "Text Kevin, tell him what's happened, and remind him about where we're meeting."

Alice went to her phone only to find she had no signal for digital. They'd lost the analog for phone calls yesterday, so suddenly they had no way to communicate with Kevin. "Will he still come?"

"He will, sweeties," Beverly said, grasping her daughter's hand to comfort her. "Nothing to worry about."

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6 December 2024 -- Friday -- 5am

This night was an even harder one that the previous ones. In the dark, it seemed as though every sound might be a cannibal that had found a way inside. But dawn came, and Beverly and Alice were already up and ready.

The back hallway had an actual stairway to the roof, and the day before Beverly had knocked the padlock off so that today they could be up and out to signal Kevin. She began to panic a bit when she saw more than two dozen cannibals hurrying behind the truck at a quick pace. Occasionally, one would try to grab at the sides of the truck, lose its footing, and fall, sometimes being run over by the rear wheels. It was simply horrific.

(GML)

Beverly waved frantically to Kevin behind the wheel to ensure he knew she was there, then waited to see how he was going to deal with this situation.

 

[KingOfNowhere]

OOC -- Thanks, Alice, for hosting my character's pic on your Imgur. I could not access my own pic sharing account (deactivated I guess), and I didn't want to start another one.

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5 December 2024:

Kevin's head was laid back into a stack of pillows as his phone chimed at him. He tensed involuntarily because the young woman he wanted to fuck was texting him as the even younger woman he was currently fucking had his dick in her mouth. He tried to ignore the chime, but his body language gave him away. Terri let his erection pop out of her mouth with a suctioning sound as she sat up.

"Why'd you stop?" he asked.

He knew why, of course. She chastised him for thinking about another woman when he was just minutes away from emptying his balls into the mouth of another. She stood, gathered her clothes, and left while still naked as a jaybird. Sure, give them a show, he thought, knowing that three other guys were sitting in the next room drinking beer and smoking dope that they'd found in another of the building's apartments. Kevin waited until Terri was fully out of sight before he snatched up his phone and read the text from Alice. He smiled wide at her invitation to come rescue her from those fucking things our there eating anyone and everyone caught outside.

He responded to her message, asked some more questions, got his answers, then sent her: A knight in shining armor expects something from the fairy tale princess he rescues.

For months, Kevin had been trying to get into Alice's pants. They'd met at a party down the block, where Kevin had spent almost three hours, off and on, chatting her up with the goal of getting her alone and naked. He thought he'd succeeded when she went off to a dark corner to make out with him, but as Kevin slipped a hand up inside her tee shirt, caressing his way up to an unbridled tit, Alice had suddenly cut him off. Since then, they'd met for coffee several times, had an actual lunch twice, saw a local band with friends and some more making out, and to top it all off met at yet another party where they ended up in a dark corner and, this time, Alice encouraged Kevin to grope her breasts and grind his dick into the cleft between her thighs. But he was still yet to get her naked or get her off.

"Now, maybe," he whispered to himself as he responded to yet another text. He put the phone aside, got dressed, and followed Terri's path to the kitchen. He took a beer from the fridge and took a long swig as he scrutinized the sexy young blonde. He'd met Terri before he'd met Alice what with her living right here in the building. But he'd never had a chance to talk to her. Kevin couldn't remember a time when she hadn't been clinging to some guy or some guy hadn't been clinging to her. He'd honestly thought she was a hooker at first. One of the neighbors told Kevin he wasn't far off, that Terri kept a man around as long as he was paying the bills. As soon as he realized he was being taken for a ride or some better sugar daddy came around, the current man was gone.

Kevin was her current sugar daddy, of course. This time around, though, she wasn't going to so easily discard him. He was essentially the leader of the pack with regards to the guys in the other room. One was a friend who for all their lives had played second to Kevin in any and all issues. Another was a younger cousin who had always looked up to Kevin and, again, would do just about anything he told him to do. The third was a member of Kevin's little cohort of petty criminals. Although neither Terri nor Alice knew it, Kevin's main source of income was -- had been? -- selling guns and drugs to anyone and everyone who needed them. He wasn't a big player, so he'd escaped the attention of both the Authorities and the local gang kingpins. But he'd very generously supported himself on mostly these two forms of business since he was in his late teens.

Terri had very nearly been eaten in a way no man had eaten her before yesterday when the world went to shit. Kevin had heard her racing up the stairs of the apartment building, screaming her lungs out. As she circled the landing below, he was waiting there with a semi-automatic 9mm Beretta. He waited for her to get past him, then unloaded the clip into the skulls of the two cannibals chasing her, presuming that like in all the zombie movies, it took a brain draining bullet to kill them.

Since then, she'd shown her appreciation by cooking in both the kitchen and his bedroom. Terri was a fucking machine in the sack, far more skilled than a 19 year old should be in Kevin's mind. Oh, he wasn't about to complain, of course. He loved sitting back in the bed and watching her go at it. And he wasn't about to quit fucking that mouth and pussy, even if he did get to put his dick inside Alice in the near future. He pressed forward for a kiss and met with some attitude. He pushed forward again, pressing her back to the kitchen counter as he shoved a hand down the front of the gym shorts he'd given her to wear until they got her own clothes from her own apartment.

"Let me in," he whispered as he tried to force his fingers between her clenched thighs. He pushed his mouth to hers again for a kiss and rammed a knee in between her own, to open her thighs. He found warmth and wetness and sunk his middle finger between her labia, manipulating it around for a long moment as he forced kisses on her. After a minute or so, he withdrew his hand, sucked her pussy lube from his finger tip, and told her, "You could always go back to your own apartment."

He didn't give her time to respond. He snatched her wrist and dragged her behind him to the living room where he explained Alice's invitation to them.

"Alcatraz?" someone asked.

He confirmed his suspicions and talked about the pros and cons. Terri challenged Kevin about his need for Alice and her mother, but he countered it sufficiently, he thought. After he explained about how the mother and daughter were just as trapped as they were, he explained, "We need them as much as they need us."

And I want to finally fuck that sexy bitch, Kevin thought to himself. He sent the three men to go tell the plan to the others living in the building. Terri had returned to the kitchen. Kevin went to her again, laid out her choices again, and told her to make a choice. She made it by leading him back to the bedroom to finish his blowjob.

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>​

6 December 2024:

It was still dark out when Kevin quietly made his way out to the truck. There were cannibals out on the street less than 50 feet from either the front door of the apartment building or the truck. But they'd learned that this time of the morning when the light was very low, the cannibals went dormant, as if reptiles who were waiting for the morning sun to warm up their cold blooded bodies. Once safely inside the truck, Kevin backed it up to the building and they began loading it from the second floor fire escape. They took all sorts of things of value from the building, from boxes of food and bottles of water to trash bags of toilet paper rolls and suitcases of appropriate clothing, shoes, and whatnot.

They had planned on stacking twin mattresses, the only size that would fit out the window, atop the truck and roping them down. Kevin found it unlike that there would be such bedding out on Alcatraz. But then the cannibals rocked the truck and one of the guys from the building fell and was killed and eaten. It demoralized and frightened everyone, and Kevin made the decision to get out of there, right then and there. Although it was hard to do it, Kevin left his friend Paulie and Paulie's group of survivors behind.

Kevin fired up the truck and plowed through the cannibals. After losing his friend, he reveled at the sound of skulls and rib cages crushing beneath the truck's tires. Twenty minutes later, after some detours caused by blocked roads, they were at the loading bay behind Pier 39. Kevin had hoped that this segment of the operation was going to be just as easy. It wasn't going to be, as the loading dock was open to the pavement, and there were cannibals chasing after the truck.

Kevin turned the truck with a 5 point maneuver. He cackled as the back and forth movements crushed more of the flesh eaters. From the box of the truck one of the guys was asking him what the fuck he was doing. But when the vehicle finally came to a stop and the front and back corners had blocked the loading dock off from the open areas beyond it, everyone understood. He moved from the cab into the back of the truck, and all inside used a ladder they'd brought with them to get back up on the roof.

"We need to move that dumpster here, to fill the gap," Kevin told the others. As they jumped down to the dock's raised platform, then to the ground, he stood atop the truck and shot cannibals who might be able to get through, until the dumpster was finally blocking the way. When they were finally safe, he called toward the roll up door, "Let's get to work! Daylight's a'wastin'."

 

[Alice2015]

6 December 2024 -- Friday
7am:

With the delivery truck in place and the only vulnerable area blocked by a dumpster, Beverly went to the open door of the roof access and called down, "Open'er up!"

She heard the door rising and went back to the edge to look down upon the men and women stepping out of the truck's already raised roll up door. Most if not all of them were armed, and that made Beverly nervous. She'd prodded her daughter to ask for Kevin's help specifically because he had guns, and he'd also told Alice that he'd already killed at least two Rabids, as she and her daughter had begun calling the cannibals.

If seeing all those guns wasn't enough to cause concern, Beverly suddenly saw many of those guns raise and point toward the building ... toward the roll up door ... toward Alice.

Beverly's first thought, of course, was that Kevin and his goons were hijacking all that she and her daughter had assembled over the past day. Suddenly, she wished she, too, had a gun.

She turned and ran for the stairs, descending them so quickly that she almost didn't feel them beneath her feet. At the bottom, Beverly turned to rush to her daughter ... but froze when she saw a man holding one arm tightly around Alice's midsection while the hand off the other arm held a big knife to her throat.

 

[KingOfNowhere]

As Kevin watched the roll up door at the back of the retail complex rise, more and more of a pair of legs that were surely Alice's began to appear. But he very quickly noticed a second pair of legs that seemed to very much be infringing on the young woman's personal space. He quickly saw what Beverly would see in a moment, a man holding and threatening Alice with a big blade. He whipped his gun up quickly and began moving slowly forward, and to his left and right many of his cohort followed his lead. The man had already had a panicked expression on his face before he saw all the guns, and now that look became even more fear-filled as he began slowly backing deeper into the loading dock.

"Whatcha doin', man?" Kevin asked as he continued moving slower. "Whatcha think you're doing? You don't wanna do this. You don't wanna hurt her. Whatcha want … huh? You gotta want something to be doing this."

The man didn't say anything, instead only pulling a genuinely shocked Alice tighter to him as he continued to back away from all the guns.

"C'mon, man, talk to me, tell me what you want … tell me what you need to put the knife down and let the girl go," Kevin continued, sounding more like a professional crime scene negotiator than a gun and dope dealing thug. "You don't wanna hurt her 'cause if you do, all of my friends and me are gonna riddle you with bullets. You don't wanna be dead anymore than we want to see the girl get hurt, so … talk to me."

The group as a whole continued to move deeper into the enclosed loading and work space as Kevin continued to talk. The knife wielding man bumped into one of the stacks of food boxes, nearly falling over. He sidestepped around it, still holding Alice tightly. He looked around himself, as if searching for a way out of the situation, but Kevin's gun toting friends had spread out into a semicircle that prevented escape in any direction. Kevin had closed the distance between himself and the man to maybe 12 feet, and confident that he could put a bullet through the man's forehead from here was contemplating doing just that.

That was when Beverly spoke to the man, calling him by his name, Juan, and begging him not to hurt her daughter. Kevin eased his finger tip away from the trigger to give her a moment to speak to the man, and he was relieved to see her get through to him. The man suddenly began sobbing, and a moment later he tossed the knife to the concrete.

"Guns down, guns down!" Kevin told the others. He stressed it again, and once the barrels began lowering, he looked to the man. He tilted his own gun away and elevated his hands with splayed fingers in somewhat of a surrender gesture. "Juan...? Juan. Look at me. No one's gonna hurt you. I promise you. Isn't that right everyone? No one's gonna hurt Juan."

Kevin again looked around, telling those with their guns still out to either holster them or lower them further. He looked back to the man, whose eyes were filled with tears, and put his pistol in his belt at the small of his back as he moved forward slowly. As he reached his hand out toward Alice, he said, "Juan, everyone put their guns away, because you gave up the knife. Thank you. Now ... can I have the girl? She looks scared. C'mon, man. Let her go, and you and I can sit and talk about this."

It took a long moment of talking to the man, but soon Juan's grip on Alice eased. Once the young woman was away from him, Juan dropped to his knees and burst out in tears, sobbing, "They're dead. They're all dead."

 

[Alice2015]

Beverly's mind was racing with thoughts, most of them about how she was about to lose her daughter for a reason that was even more unbelievable than cannibals eating her. How had they survived this rabid apocalypse thus far, only to have Alice killed by a knife wielding madman.

But as Kevin and his armed posse pushed the man back farther into the warehouse section of the delivery area, Beverly finally caught a clear view of his face.

"Juan … Juan!" she called to him. When he peeked her way, she said with a sweet voice, "Juan … it's me … Beverly … Bev!"

She smiled wider and used the nickname he and some of his friends used for her, "Brownie Bev … remember?"

She looked to Kevin, whose eyes were clearing on the man, his gaze following the sights of his weapon. "Kevin … you're Kevin right...? Kevin, this is Juan. He's a friend, aren't you, Juan."

Juan was one of the local homeless people Beverly regularly fed from meals she cooked at Candy Baron when she was done making candy. She'd even bought him an inexpensive burner phone with prepaid minutes on it so that she could locate him when she had a platter of scrambled eggs or crust-less grilled cheese -- his favorites -- or something else she'd whipped up simply to keep up her skills.

"Juan, you remember Alice, don't you ... my daughter?" Beverly went on, closing on the man just as Kevin was. "She came to the park with me one day ... to bring you food ... she had a cake ... strawberry fudge ... you said it was your favorite."

Beverly literally gave out a gasp of relief as she heard the knife clatter to the floor. Kevin diffused the situation, and as Juan erupted in sobs, Alice gently slipped out of his arms and hurried to her mother.

As she grasped her daughter, Juan dropped to his knees and burst out in tears, sobbing, "They're dead. They're all dead."

"Are you okay, sweetie?" Beverly whispered to her daughter, who was also crying. She kissed Alice's forehead and told her, "I need to talk to Juan, okay?"

When her daughter nodded, Beverly moved slowly up to the sobbing man, knelt near him, and asked, "Who's dead, Juan? Can you tell me?"

It took a long moment to get the story from Juan, and when he got it out, Beverly wasn't surprised: the Rabids had killed most if not all of the homeless in the camp where Juan had recently been living. He told her he'd gotten away and had been hiding in various places ever since. He'd gotten to the pier and under the boardwalk, then up into the loading dock area through an access grate that had fortunately been removed for maintenance that had still been underway when the mayhem began.

He apologized for hurting Alice, and Beverly forgave him. "You were afraid, and you didn't hurt her. Alice, sweetie come here … see Juan … she's not hurt."

Alice was still trembling a bit as she came over to Juan. But she reached a hand out and -- with her mother's help and Kevin's nearby presence -- helped the man to his feet and reassured him that he'd done no harm. Juan chuckled, embarrassed by his emotional outburst and once again apologizing.

"Juan, listen," Beverly began with a soothing, sympathetic tone, "we think we have a safe place where we won't have to be afraid of these people who killed your friends. I want you to come with us. Would you like--"

A female voice cut in with disbelief, "What the fuck, are you kidding?"

Both Beverly and her daughter turned to look at the blonde standing close enough to Kevin to make Alice instantly wonder whether there was something between the two of them. Beverly looked her up and down with an obvious glance before asking with a scrutinizing tone, "And who are you?"

Terri didn't hesitate to move right up against Kevin, slip her hand into the crook of his elbow, and stake her claim. "I'm Kevin's girlfriend."

 

[KingOfNowhere]

Kevin was so relieved to see Juan calmed down and responding to Beverly and Alice. Despite the event, he wasn't surprised when Alice's mother offered the homeless man a place in their group. What did surprise him was Terri's ourburst and her response to the question of who she was.

"I'm Kevin's girlfriend."

He could just imagine the expression on his face as he thought to himself, Well … fuck! He caught Alice's reaction, contemplated how to respond, then simply turned his back to the woman he probably wouldn't be fucking any time soon and began urging backward with gentle force the woman he had been fucking.

Terri objected to the manhandling, albeit relatively casual and polite to how he would have liked to handle her. Kevin growled at Terri just loud enough for her and her alone to hear, "Back the fuck up and turn around and get in the truck before I feed you to those things out there."

That worked, and a moment later the two of them were inside the truck's loading box. Quietly he confessed, "Yes, you were exactly right, I want to fuck Alice. And I'm going to fuck Alice. And you're going to shut your mouth and let me fuck Alice … because if you don't, once of these nights you're going to find yourself on the wrong side a barrier separating the rest of us from those fucking things out there. Do you understand?"


(OOC: PM coming. Read before you post.)

 

[Alice2015]

Kevin might not have wanted her to hear his directing Terri away but Alice heard it plain and clear. "Back the fuck up and turn around and get in the truck before I feed you to those things out there."

There was so much going on around her: a threat and possible knifing averted, Rabid cannibals clammering about the other side of the truck looking to make a meal of the unaffected humans, and a flight of people who were strangers to one another to a distant island where, for all they knew, other humans or even Rabids had beat them.

And yet, the only thing on Alice's mind at the moment was Is Kevin having sex with that girl … and … does that mean he won't be having sex with me?

Suddenly, she regretted having put him off for so long. Alice didn't fully understand why she'd denied Kevin all those times they'd been together. She liked him; he liked her; they were both consenting adults, or would have been had Alice consented.

And now he had a girlfriend?

"Sweetie?"

Alice flinched at the realization that her mother had called her a couple of times if not more. She turned and forced a smile. "Yeah?"

She realized that the others were already assembled around the stacks of goods ready to begin loading. They seemed to be waiting for something, and a moment later when Kevin returned to the group -- without the blonde -- Alice realized that they were awaiting his direction.

They began loading the truck using hand trucks, carts, and simply arm loading and packing. Alice peeked the other girl's direction occasionally, and almost every time the other girl was looking at her as well. She wanted to ask Kevin whether the blonde really was his girlfriend, but she resisted.

"What about the milk and stuff?" she asked her mother when half of what had been on the dock was already in the truck. "Should be start packing it out here?"

Honestly, Alice just needed an excuse to get away from the loading dock. She couldn't take the glances and glares coming not just from Terri and Kevin but even from the other guys who obviously knew more about the situation than she did.

Her mother told Kevin they were heading into Players for the perishables. He sent two guys with them, and Juan joined them, too, begging to make up for what had happened earlier. Just as they'd transported the dry and canned goods, they did the same now with milk, cheeses, vegetables, and more from the bar and grill's refrigerator and freezer.

Beverly and Alice had found some large ice chests -- likely from a recent special event -- which they filled with some ice cream and other frozen foods. They knew they wouldn't stay frozen long, but with the electrical power failing last night, the perishables would go to waste anyway. They had room in the truck, so why not.

"We're taking that, aren't we?" a guy about 25 years of age who'd introduced himself as Skeeter asked.

Beverly followed his pointing finger to see the kegs full of beer from a multitude of Western United States microbrews. She laughed and said, "Fuck yeah."

Skeeter laughed at Beverly's frankness, saying, "I like you. You're cool."

The floor of the truck's cargo area was full after several kegs and a couple of dozen cases of bottled beer were hurriedly packed. Beverly said she needed to make a run to Candy Baron. "Kevin, Alice … Skeeter, you join us, too."

The four of them returned to Beverly's store, where she'd neatly stacked all of the cooking equipment, spices, and other necessities of sanity, as she called them. The other three loaded themselves up and headed for the dock, leaving Beverly alone to look about the business that -- after her daughter -- had been the most important thing in her life since her husband and youngest child's death.

Opening a display, she pulled out a flat of brownies, said goodbye for now to her business, and headed for the dock.

She slowed, then stopped as she caught sight of her daughter reaching out to slow Kevin down from the faster moving Skeeter. She inconspicuously stepped out of sight, knowing Alice was wanting a minute to talk to the handsome man.

"I'm fine with all that," Alice said softly, trying to sound sincere about the topic that she knew was as foremost in Kevin's mind as it was in hers. "It's not like we were a couple or anything after all. So … friends then?"

 

[KingOfNowhere]

Kevin couldn't help but note the tension between the two young women. He'd had to deal with such rivalry in the past as he'd almost always been juggling two or three of lovers at the same time since his mid-teens. But it was Alice who spoke of the situation first, telling Kevin she was just fine with being just friends. That was a let down, of course. It was also not the way things were going to go as Kevin wasn't about to pass up play time between Alice's thighs.

"She's not my girlfriend, Alice, believe me," he lied with a tone that was so sincere. "I rescued her from some of those cannibals -- you and your mom, you're calling them Rabids, right? Anyway, I saved her from a couple of them who were about to rip her apart, and she, well, she showed me her gratitude, if you know what I mean. It's not serious, Alice, really. And it's not going to continue once we get out to the island."

He saw the young woman's reaction to that last word and smiled. "Yeah, Alcatraz, it wasn't hard to figure out. It makes total sense. You and your mother, you're smart. Anyway, I mean it. Terri and I aren't together. I want to be with you … together with you."

He turned to face her as they were ever so slowly walking back toward the loading area, pulled her close, and let his body language tell her he wanted to kiss her. If she resisted or rejected him, as had happened so many times for so long, he wouldn't insist as he had with Terri in the kitchen the day before.

"We should finish this up," he said once they separated. He peeked over her shoulder, smiled, and whispered, "Your mother's watching us, by the way."

Kevin squeezed Alice's hands, backed away a couple of steps, turned, and headed off to join the others in finishing the loading. The truck's box was packed waist high with anything and everything the group thought might be useful on the island. Once Beverly and Alice caught up, Kevin got behind the wheel, then looked to his cohort and told them to clear him a path. There were now at least 30 Rabids on the side of the truck opposite the loading dock trying to get to the humans they saw only as food.

Kevin studied the crazed people for a long moment as his gun-toting friends used the ladder to crawl up onto the top of the truck again. They were such a contradiction in his mind. They were hell bent on getting to the unaffected humans. And yet they lacked the common sense hunting strategies to get what they wanted. They didn't climb atop things, such as the front of the truck, then the roof of the truck. (Kevin had had one of him more blood thirsty guys standing guard the entire time they'd been here just in case.) They didn't crawl under the truck either, which seemed such an animalistic thing to do. And weren't they just animals by now? That part of their brain that had once defined these Rabids as humans, was it now destroyed by this reaction between vaccines? No, they just clutched at the truck's flat surfaces and driver side door unable to operate the handle (not that that mattered as it had been locked).

Kevin flinched at the first shot taken from just above and behind him. He didn't notice the effect of that first shot, but the next several shots all had an obvious result. Some of the Rabids dropped straight downward to the ground. Others simple went limp in the crush of other cannibals. Blood splattered onto the passenger side window after one gunpowder blast. Kevin waited until half of the herd was dead before he put the already running truck into drive and pulled away. There was some resistance as the wheels tried to climb over the building pile of bodies before them. Kevin let the rig roll back, then urged it forward again with more acceleration. With a horrific crunching sound, it passed over the Rabids as if they were a biological speed bump, and the vehicle was once again driving the pier's narrow road.

The drive from far north end of Pier 39 east to the south end of Pier 33 wasn't a long one, less than a mile. But it still took them 15 minutes as they weaved through clogged, unmoving traffic, over sidewalk curves, and around souvenir and food stands, all the while shooting a continually growing crowd of Rabids. Kevin could hear the people on the roof laughing and challenging one another, as if they were playing a first person shooter video game, not killing former human beings who they might very well have known at one time. He leaned to his right and looked back into the truck's box, hollering with a serious tone, "This ain't a fucking game! Get serious before another one of you falls off and gets eaten!"

They'd gotten smarter this time around and rigged up some makeshift body harnesses to ensure they didn't lose anyone off the roof this time around. Still, Kevin tried to keep the drive as steady and sure as possible. Soon enough, he was slowly and carefully weaving the truck between a ticket booth, picnic tables, and a variety of other obstacles to back the truck up to the safety barrier at the Alcatraz Tour's ferry site.

"Now comes the tricky part," he told Alice, Beverly, and the others as he climbed from the cab to the box and to the roof. He gave instructions to the others on the roof, checked his own weapons (a pair of pistols and a shotgun) and commanded, "Give'em hell."

More than 40 Rabids were flocking around the front and sides of the truck, but very few of them were in between the two safety barriers that created a somewhat safe path from the end of the truck to the Alcatraz Tours ferry that was docked a couple of hundred feet away. As the others behind him began clearing out the Rabids with a hail of gunfire, Kevin leaped down to the tailgate, then to the ground before sprinting for the boat with Skeeter right on his ass. The pair of them fired their weapons as they went. It reminded Kevin of that scene in his father's favorite movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when the pair of outlaws surged out of that Bolivian bank in an attempt to shoot their way to freedom. Only, in the movie (which some claim was inaccurate about Butch and Sundance's demise), the pair were gunned down by the Bolivian Army. Kevin could only hope that this wouldn't be his and Skeeter's fate as they ran for the boat, shooting at anything that moved.

Miraculously, they made it to the dock's closed gate, climbed over it, and continued to run for the boat. They were careful to clear it of Rabids before setting about their next task: moving the boat to where the truck and its occupants were waiting. Kevin was no stranger to this boat, which was the reason he'd suggested it to Beverly when she'd confirmed her island idea to him. His mother's long time live-in boyfriend, practically Kevin's stepfather, had been one of the boat pilots for more than a decade before he'd died of an Oxycontin overdose New Years Eve. Kevin had often sat in the pilot house with George and had even been allowed to pilot the craft when George wasn't being watched by a Supervisor or Tours Administrator.

Now, Kevin smashed open a locked metal box to retrieve the ignition key and set about getting the engines ready for maneuvering. Skeeter freed the boat from the heavy lines holding it in place, and after a massive cloud of black smoke billowed skyward from the exhaust pipes, Kevin was moving the ferry away from the dock.

It was a slow going process getting the ferry from where it was to where Kevin wanted it, despite the distance being less than 60 yards. But he had to back the vessel into the bay to a point where he could swing it around 180 degrees and then maneuver it in waters that even the most experienced pilots admitted could be hard to navigate. It took a full and very agonizing hour and a half of course corrections and reattempts before the back of the boat edge up close enough to the pier for Skeeter to toss a pair of lines to those cheering him and Kevin onward. A couple of minutes later, the boat was tied up and a pair of shooters guarded a bucket brigade of the others as they transferred the supplies from truck to boat.

Things were going well, but Kevin was becoming concerned. The Rabids continued to arrive on the Pier, and while the barriers kept most of them at a safe distance, his shooters on the truck's roof were warning that they were running out of ammunition knocking down the ones who managed to get onto the people side of the barrier.

"We gotta go, now!" he called to Beverly, who was directing the priorities of unloading from inside the truck. He knew from her expression what was going on in her brain, but he stressed, "Now! We can't hold them off any longer, and if they get through, we're all dead!"

 

[Alice2015]

Alice couldn't help but be tickled when Kevin told her that that other girl, Terri, wasn't his girlfriend. She also couldn't help but wonder whether or not he was lying to her. Kevin's initial reaction to Terri clutching his arm and declaring him hers -- which had been to simply stand there and look guilty as fuck -- wasn't the reaction of a man who hadn't already been wetting his cock in that particular hole.

When he admitted that there had indeed been a little something between them because of Terri's brush with death, she contemplated that there might still be a chance for them.

"Terri and I aren't together. I want to be with you … together with you."

When he leaned in to kiss her, Alice didn't immediately show a positive response; she didn't wet her lips or part them or even purse them to show a desire for his kiss. But as he pulled back, Alice leaned in, took hold of his shirt, and pulled him back for a more romantic embrace and meeting of their mouths that included parted lips and a gentle pressing of one tongue to the other.

"We can talk about this more when we get settle on Alcatraz," she whispered to him before giving him another less passionate but still meaningful kiss. "Until then … maybe … we don't do this anymore."

She released her hold on him and stepped back a bit. When Kevin pointed out that her mother was watching, Alice giggled short and sharp and confessed, "Yeah, I know. I heard her."

Kevin went off to join back in with the work, and a moment later her mother came up to stand beside her. Beverly said with a matter of fact tone, "You know he's fucking Blondie, right?"

"Yes, mother, I know," Alice responded with a bit of a growl. She looked into her mother's eyes and asked wryly, "You still wanna fuck him for me?"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^​

The drive away from Pier 39 was far more scary for Terri than the drive to it had been. There were so many of those Rabids out there this time around, and it seemed as if every minute or so she heard the crunching of one of them beneath the tires of the truck. She feared she would throw up and embarrass herself, but deep breaths through her nose seemed to hold that off.

She was anxious for some fresh air and open sights by the time they got to the tours dock on Pier 33, but Terri found herself stuck inside the closed box of the truck for what seemed like forever as Kevin and Skeeter went to get the boat. Making it even worse was the fact that Alice and her mother were sitting in the enclosed space with her, and Terri had a pretty good idea what they thought about her.

"Gimme that," she commanded one of the guys when he came back down into the truck to retrieve bottles of water for the gunners picking off Rabids from the roof. She waggled her hands for the 9mm Beretta in his hand and when he didn't turn it over, she simply snatched it from him, demanding, "Hold the fuckin' ladder."

"You ain't got what it takes to--" was all the guy got out before Terri pointed the handgun at his nose. He lifted his hands in a mock surrender gesture, then grabbed the ladder, correcting, "Maybe you do, honey. Give it a shot."

Terri ascended the ladder through the ax-chopped hold in the roof, donned one of the safety harnesses they'd made of just rope knotted into loops, and looked around for Kevin. One of the guys pointed to a tour boat out in the bay a hundred yards or so. Her mouth fell open before she asked with shock, "Did they leave us?"

"No, they're turning the boat around," was the answer from one of the shooters. "It's not like parking a Volkswagen bug."

A shot from very near caused Terri to flinch. She watched the other guys for a couple of minutes as they selectively picked off Rabids. The only other female atop the truck, Charlotte -- a former stripper who was half a dozen years older than her -- asked Terri is she knew how to use the 9mm Beretta in her hands. Terri lied with feigned confidence, "Of course I do!"

Charlotte watched in silence as Terri figured out how to disengage the safety, studied the target selection of the others popping Rabids, aimed, tensed with an obviously uncomfortable look, then pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the chamber was empty. Terri stared at the gun for a moment before it was snatched out of her hand's by the big breasted woman who was still very much an erotic, exotic beauty.

Charlotte ran her through ejecting, checking, and reinserting the clip; showed her how to inject the top round into the chamber without getting one's fingers caught in the action; explained how to release the safety -- "I know that," Terri snapped, trying to save face -- and explained that it wasn't necessary to pull the hammer back for the first shot.

"You gotta remember," Charlotte told Terri with a friendly, instructive voice, "Once you take that first shot, it's a lot easier to pull the trigger after that. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot something, otherwise you'll shoot one of us."

"And we'd prefer you didn't do that," one of the guys said before he pointed his own pistol and fired a shot that exploded out the back of a Rabid's skull. He lifted the end of his weapons barrel, blew past it, and said with a smirk, "That's how it done."

Charlotte helped Terri situate herself and the gun, helped her find a target that was pretty much stationary, and told her, "Squeeze softly. Don't--"

The Beretta leaped in the blonde's hands, causing her to shriek just a bit. Out near the steel barrier, a Rabid dropped straight down to the ground. Terri's eyes and mouth were wide open, and she gasped, "I did it! I killed it!"

"Watch the barrel," Charlotte warned as she saw Terri lower the gun, adding, "Finger off the trigger."

They worked together to guard one side of the truck as the guys covered the other three. It quickly became obvious that Terri had a skill for this; with a 12 round clip, she had 10 hits for sure at distances of 12 to 20 feet, dropping at least 6 of the creatures.

Charlotte walked Terri through reloading a clip from a bulk quantity, plastic tub of loose 9mm rounds. It was awkward and only got harder as the spring in the clip was compressed. "Don't bother trying to fill it with 15. 10 is fine and easier."

They filled all of the empty clips sitting in a box on top of the truck, then returned to protecting their zone again. By the time Terri empty four more clips, she was hitting with nearly every shot, though, kill shots were only coming maybe 1 out of 4.

"Catch!" a male voice hollered.

Terri looked toward the water and realized the boat had arrived. Talking about providing protection, Charlotte told the guys, "My girl and I got this. Go!"

After the guys slid to the ground and moved to the left and right, Skeeter threw heavy lines through the air to them. As they tied the flat stern of the boat to the pier, the two female assassins continued to pop Rabids.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^​

"You have no need to go up there, sweetie."

Alice looked to her mom with an expression of despair. She had been able to see Terri through the hole as the girl was getting instruction from the older woman. And she felt as though she, too, should be up there, if for no other reason that to show Kevin that she could be a warrioress like his current lover.

But Alice had never even held a gun before, let alone shot one and certainly not at another human being. Oh, sure, they were madmen now, cannibals, animals, Rabids. But they'd once been people. In most cases, they hadn't yet come to look all hideous and ragged like the undead did on all of those zombie shows; they looked like people, perhaps a bit crazed and angry but still people.

"You have a purpose that doesn't involve a gun and killing," Beverly reassured her daughter. "You'll make your mark in another way, sweetie."

Alice doubted that. What could she do that would be of benefit out there on Alcatraz? Help her mother cook meals? Wash clothes down at the boat dock? Her mother had mentioned growing a garden and raising animals, and Alice had been in college with her aim set on a degree in Sustainable Agriculture. Maybe she would become Farmer Alice rather than just Alice.

She'd been hearing the occasional revving of the approaching boat's motors, and finally she knew they'd arrived when she heard Skeeter holler, "Catch!"

A couple of minutes later, the truck's roll up door rose to flood the box with sunlight. Kevin and Skeeter were pulling a narrow gangway plank from the stern of the boat to the pier, and in an instant the truck was being unloaded while Terri and Charlotte continued shooting Rabids from the roof.

"We gotta go, now!" Alice heard Kevin call "Now! We can't hold them off any longer, and if they get through, we're all dead!"

Alice hadn't even realized that three of the guys had stepped away from cargo transfer to defend the operation as the number of Rabids responding to the boat motors and increasing gunfire drew them to the pier. One of them hollered in Kevin's direction, "Shotgun's empty, boss! We gotta get out of here."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^​

Beverly looked around at the cargo still in the truck and grimaced. They'd intentionally loaded the non-perishables in the front of the box truck hoping that if they couldn't take everything, the stuff left behind would keep.

She hopped down from the vehicle, grabbing a bag of oranges that had spilled out to the ground with one hand as she grabbed her daughter with the other hand. "We're going, c'mon, now."

The two of them hurried to the edge of the pier, climbing over the rail and crossing the gangplank. Suddenly, a blood curdling scream drew Beverly's attention. Behind them, a half dozen unseen Rabids had taken down one of the other women who had tried to retrieve a box of freight.

"Get on the boat! Now!"

Behind her, Beverly could hear three guns unloading rapidly, and as the screams ended she couldn't help but wonder whether the shooters were aiming for the Rabids or for they prey, the latter being a mission of mercy. Aboard, she helped them unhook the gangplank and push it off into the water just as a pair of Rabids were about to run onto it. The pair fell into the water, flailing their arms for a moment as they sank into the bay's water.

The engines of the boat roared, and the craft pulled slowly away from the pier. And moments later, Beverly flopped back into a deck chair, relieved. Back on the pier, Rabids pushed forward through a gap that had opened, arriving at the water's edge and -- like a lemmings tale -- falling over the edge as others pushed up behind them. They were still falling into the bay and sinking out of sight when the boat curled off to the north and passed the end of the pier.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^​

Beverly's gaze had been shifting all about the Bay Area as they motored for Alcatraz, returning occasionally to Pier 39 and the building in which she'd worked for so many years. When they got close to the island, Charlotte came back to the stern to tell Beverly that Kevin wanted to see her.

Standing beside him, she saw the same thing at the tour boat dock that he did: two more boats. They weren't the only ones who had considered Alcatraz a safe place to hide out.

"We still have ammunition for your guns?" she asked softly. When he looked to her, she clarified, "I'm not saying we take the island. We aren't the Marines claiming Guadalcanal. But, whoever it is that's here … they might not want us here."

 

[KingOfNowhere]

"Someone beat us here," Kevin told Beverly when she reached the pilot house. He gestured toward the two boats, one a 40 foot long ketch sail boat, the other a 12 foot long row boat. Again he scoured the island before saying, "I don't see anyone, but I'm willing to bet they see us."

"We still have ammunition for your guns?" Beverly asked softly.

Kevin looked to her with a bit of surprise. Shooting Rabids to save your life was one thing, but shooting other people was a whole different matter all together.

But she clarified, "I'm not saying we take the island. We aren't the Marines claiming Guadalcanal. But, whoever it is that's here … they might not want us here."

"Skeeter!" he called down to the lower deck. When the man appeared, Kevin told him, "I want all the guns loaded and positioned on the port side out of sight. No one brandishes a weapon, got it? However...! I want everyone who knows how to use one standing within reach of one."

"Yes, boss," Skeeter called up, preparing to turn away. But before he could, Kevin asked him for one more thing. When Skeeter ascended to the pilot house a minute later, he delivered the scoped rifle Kevin had asked for and a mostly empty box of shells. "That's the last of the .30-06 rounds."

Kevin slowed the boat and pulled it up to an empty section of the dock, right behind the sailboat. A couple of his cohort leaped out, secured the lines, then leaped back in as directed to be near both their weapons and cover. Kevin descended to the main deck and gave instructions regarding staying save and presenting the image of a threat.

"Your up … let's go make some friends," he said to Beverly with a bit of humor in his voice. She donned an expression telling him she hadn't expected being the one to go ashore first. He chuckled, reassuring her, "I have always thought that diplomacy should be a woman's game, but … don't worry, I'm going with you."

He stepped behind a bulkhead, checked his 9mm for a full load, removed and discarded the hip holster he had been wearing, and slipped the weapon into the small of his back, outside his shirt for quick removal. Skeeter began to do the same thing, but Kevin told him, "No, you're in the pilot house with the rifle. You're the only person here I know knows how to distance shoot."

Although most of the other didn't know it, Skeeter had grown up in the country in a family of avid game hunters. He'd killed his 10th deer and his 6th elk before he was out of his teens. Kevin handed him one of the six radios that were used by the boat's crew during tours and told him, "You keep your eye out for us, and you listen for my instructions. You don't shoot at someone unless I tell you to shoot at someone, got it...?"

Kevin handed out a radio toward Beverly, adding, "Or she does."

"Someone's coming," a call came from one of the group's members.

Kevin leaned to look and found 3 people descending toward the dock, a woman flanked by two men, both armed with long guns. He looked to Beverly, saying, "You're up, like I said."

 

[Alice2015]

"I have always thought that diplomacy should be a woman's game..."

Beverly couldn't help but smile a bit. She had pretty much the same feeling about women in positions of power, influence, and decision making. But then, she was a female so shouldn't she? She got help clipping the radio to her waist and the headset to her head, duh. She listened to the explanation about how the microphone was live and everyone on a radio -- Kevin, Skeeter, two others who would be near rifles, and of course Beverly -- would be able to hear everything any of them said.

"I understand," she told Kevin when he told all of them no chatter, that they needed to keep the conversation to a minimum. When her daughter gave her a look of concern, Beverly told Alice, "It'll be fine, sweetie. We're just gonna talk to these people. I'll be back in a couple of minutes."

After a little more discussion, she and Kevin headed off the boat and up the dock. They stopped about 20 feet short of the trio, who themselves had stopped at the top of the ramp that led from the dock to the actual island.

"Hello, my name is Beverly--"

"Why are you here?" the woman asked with a rather harsh tone before Beverly could get her surname out.

She studied the woman for a moment, then responded, "We're looking for a safe place to live while this … whatever this is, plays out."

"Find another place to live," the woman said. "You can't stay here."

Beverly glanced between the two men flanking the woman. They were young, perhaps mid-20s, while the woman herself looked to be in her early late-40s, plus or minus half a decade. They had a similar facial appearance and body style, and Beverly couldn't help but believe she was probably related to the two men, most likely their mother or at least their aunt. She would find out soon enough that the first was correct.

With a polite tone -- a diplomatic tone as Kevin would probably call it -- Beverly asked, "Do you mind if I ask why we cannot stay here?"

"There's no food here for you," the woman said without hesitation. Then, possibly thinking that hearing there was limited nourishment available and that these encroachers might try to take what there was by force, the woman added, "There's no food here at all. We've already eaten through what we brought."

Beverly's lips spread in a happy smile. "We have food. We had lots of food."

She glanced toward Kevin and saw in his face that he already knew an offer was coming. To the woman, Beverly said, "If you would let us stay here, we would share our food with you."

Now it was the other woman's turn to study Beverly and her armed escort. She glance back toward the boat, studying it for a moment, too. "I suppose if I say no, you have someone watching me from behind a rifle scope, ready to shoot me when you give the word on them there radios?"

"No, he's been told to shoot you only if you shoot me first."

Beverly believed that full transparency would work better here than dishonesty. She thought she saw the tension level in the faces of the two men rise a bit; they each looked off toward the boat as well, likely wondering where the Over Watch sniper was located.

"We don't want to shoot any of you," Beverly continued, "And I'm hoping … I'm betting with my life, that you don't want to shoot any of us. But as I see it, we have something very important to offer one another. You have the island, and although legally you can't claim it all to yourselves, I respect the fact that you were here before us. We, on the other hand, have food, water, fresh vegetables and fruit … big beautiful steaks and potatoes, too … beer..."

She smiled a bit at that last word, then smiled wider as both of the men behind the woman looked to her with expressions of Really, can I have one? Beverly continued, "You share the island … we share our food. It's a big island. We can live together, or we can live apart."

Beverly studied the woman a moment more, took a cautious couple of steps forward, and offered out her hand. "My name is Beverly … Beverly Thomas. This is my friend, Kevin..."

She was about to give her sidekick's surname and suddenly realized she'd never asked it. She glanced toward him to give him a moment to give the name himself if he wished, then looked back to the woman for her response. A moment passed, then movement took place and the two women were grasping the other's hand.

"Delores McGee," the other woman said. Leaning her head one way, then the other, she said, "My sons, Bradley and James."

"Can I ask..." Beverly began, still holding Delores's hand, "Are there more of you? We noticed two boats at the dock."

Delores politely released Beverly's hand, glanced toward the boat again, then looked back to her partner in diplomacy. "There're six others besides us … three with me from the Marilou--"

Beverly had caught the name painted across the transom of the sailboat and, therefore, knew Delores was referring to the larger of the vessels.

Delores continued, "--and three in the rowboat. We didn't all come here together. The others are Mexicans."

Beverly thought she caught a tinge of racial prejudice in the woman's tone and asked, "Is that a problem for you...? Them being Mexican."

Delores didn't immediately understand what she was being asked, but when she did she laughed with a bit of embarrassment. "No,, oh God know … sorry … I didn't put that well. None of them speak English, none of us speak Spanish. We'd been using Google Translate on our phones, but they all went dead and no one had a charger. Something to recall for the next apocalypse … bring your cell phone charger."

Beverly laughed, confirming Delores's observation and admitting that her own charger was at home, too. "My daughter is an English speaker who is fluent in Spanish."

Delores nodded her approval of that development. She looked to the boat again, then back. "So … you mentioned food?"

"And beer?" one of the boys added with a shy smile.

"Yes, food," Beverly confirmed, and looking to Bradley, the younger of the two sons, said, "and maybe we can wash down our lunch with a beer."

Beverly half turned and invited Delores to follow her with a gestured wave before adding, "Maybe our protectors … and their guns … could wait here for us to return?"

"Mama, I don't think that--" the older son began before being cut off.

"James, you and your brother wait here with … Kevin...?" Delores said with a firm voice. "Why don't you tell him what we've learned about our new home."

And with that, the two women were heading down the dock's inclined walkway. It only took a step or two for Delores to notice the 9mm in Beverly's waistband at the small of her back. She asked, "Just being careful?"

Beverly didn't immediately understand the inquiry but then chuckled and admitted, "I don't know how to use it. I actually brought it for Kevin to use if he found the need."

She smiled back to Delores and said with a sincere tone, "I'm glad he didn't have the need."

Down on the dock, Beverly invited Delores aboard, introduced the woman to the others by first names only as she hadn't learned the surnames of most of them, then escorted her nearer the impressive gathering of resources. You couldn't help but notice the expression of surprise and even joy in the woman's face.

"When was the last time you all ate?" Beverly whispered to Delores, not wanting the others to hear. Delores didn't answer; although Beverly couldn't know this, Delores wasn't really that eager to reveal just how desperate the situation was for her family and their new Latino friends. Beverly opened a bag and pulled out a plastic wrapped cinnamon roll. "We have milk here someplace, too. Alice...?"

As her daughter searched for a case that had bottles of milk, Beverly continued the negotiations. The pair spoke there on the boat for several minutes as Beverly continued to show off some of the nutritional offerings. Item by item, the makings for sandwiches were gathered in a container, and after Delores told her that there was an electric stove top currently keeping one of the room's warm for the prison's new residents, Beverly also collected the fresh ingredients that would improve a large can of tomato soup, as well as some tea, coffee, and hot cocoa.

Soon enough, they were heading back up the ramp: Beverly and Delores side by side, followed by her daughter the translator, two guys carrying the lunch, and -- by her own invitation -- Terri, who was eager to be back at Kevin's side.

"Go get the others, there's work to be done," Delores told her boys when the group was back up on land again. She looked to Alice and said, "If you go with them, they'll introduce you to the Garcia Family."

Alice thanked Delores, then -- after ignoring a glare from her female competition for the man's attention -- casually whispered to Kevin, "Come with me, please. I don't know these people."

"I'll come, too," Terri said without hesitation. Then, ignoring what Kevin had told her back in the truck's box earlier, she stepped up close to him and grasped his hand with an intimate intertwining of fingers. She urged, "Let's go."