Micah never knew how hot it could be in Alabama. He grew up with air conditioning, quickly scurrying from one cool room to another, seeing only the brief interludes of sweltering humidity or occasional long days of yard work. He looked longingly at the useless machines on the side of the gymnasium. The power cut out two weeks ago. The army only fired up the generators for an emergency, and, so far, the heat had been deemed manageable.
One of the northern military groups thought up Project ISER. It was a stretch to still call them all the American military. Without a central command, multiple armies controlled different regions of the US. Sometimes they worked together. Sometimes they didn't. It seemed a stretch to call them armies, too. They all generally agreed on ISER, though, as the best way to preserve humanity after the failure at Chattanooga.
Isolate, Secure, Establish, and Repel. Isolate a population in order to ensure no further contamination. Secure the settlement by constructing a perimeter. Establish the settlement by securing supplies and reinforcing the walls. Repel any infected.
As part of this effort, Micah wound up at his former high school which gave his settlement its name, Briarfield. The school functioned surprisingly well for housing. The classrooms converted easily into small apartments for families, sometimes divided in half or shared between extended family groups.
The school itself provided space and facilities for fifteen hundred students day in and day out. With good old American know-how, the army stretched that to cover forty-five hundred. The settlement incorporated not just the campus, but the surrounding community. Briarfield was an isolated country school, but forty houses and the land were able to be brought in to the settlement without issue. The residents of those houses took in other families, turning single bedrooms into lodging for a family of three or more. The surrounding grounds transformed into whatever was needed. The army provided a large array of tents and other small structures for outdoor kitchens, showers, latrines, triage, and their own outpost centers. Around the larger tents sprung up hundreds of smaller tents, which originally had a great deal of order and design to their layout. Once people started to move in by the hundreds, they transformed these efficient structures into a sprawling mass of confusion and congestion. A full blown refugee camp developed in only a few short days.
Micah considered himself very lucky to be in Briarfield. The military commandeered one of the school buildings as a central command center. As a result, an extra layer of security encircled the campus. The intention was to build multiple walls between each section of the settlement, ultimately expanding further out. The rush of people and the myriad of problems which came with it moved that goal quite far down the list. Still, the campus grounds were well defended by a security fence and an array of military vehicles. This eliminated, or at least severely deterred, a lot of the rampant theft and violence that plagued the camps.
Even ignoring the security, the school provided actual bathrooms and showers with hot water. Much of the school ran off of natural gas which seemed not to be on the ration list. The kitchens were almost fully functional. For the first few days after the power lapsed, everyone ate like kings as all the perishable food was cooked and passed out. The feast quickly turned to famine as rations started. Many worried about the food situation, and the military seemed uneasy about it as well. Estimating the full population of the camps was difficult. At least four thousand lived on the school grounds. Another five thousand crammed into the main camp surrounding the campus. Another thousand or more lived in the outlying houses. Feeding ten thousand people with no new supplies didn't seem possible, but no one wanted to admit it. Some people left, but not many. Inside the fences it was crowded, dirty, and potentially a food scarcity, but outside the walls were the infected.
Micah had followed the early days closely. He, rather proudly, was not one of the deniers. Atlanta collapsed. Memphis and Nashville after that. The fiasco at Mobile finally broke the state into a full panic. The last national scale report he had seen indicated that the infected had overwhelmed the majority of high population cities and followed the flight of people as they tried to escape to the coast or to the mountains. It was a surreal choice to make. Run? Where? The government initially urged everyone to stay in their homes and avoid the infected, but after Chattanooga and military decentralization, the idea of safe zones started to sound appealing. Micah packed a bag and headed over to Briarfield. He settled in and two days passed before the hundreds of refugees from the north and east started to arrive.
After the initial rush, things settled down. People were terrified of the infection getting in during the first weeks, but no one reported anything. The military went out on patrols and every night announced that the surrounding region was still entirely free of the infection. Other survivors gave reports of their journey, indicating that the infected were confined to the major cities and didn't seem to be spreading any further. This reinforced Micah's theory of an intelligence behind the spread of the virus. He'd overheard some of the soldiers talking about "queens" and "alphas" which lined up with things he'd seen on the Internet before everything fell apart, not to mention the reports of Chattanooga. It worried him.
He munched on a bag of mixed nuts he had squirreled away while sitting in the shade and looking down at the camps. Though campfires were supposedly prohibited, he could see dozens of small smoke pillars rising up from all over the camp. The hill on which the school grounds sat wasn't steep, but the lazy slant of the lower Appalachians was considerably noticeable over a decent distance. Micah enjoyed watching the strangely synchronous movements of the people.
"
Heya," said voice from behind him. Micah turned.
"
Afternoon," Micah replied to the soldier. "How's it going?"
The soldier, Jacob, looked around for a moment before dropping to the grass beside Micah. "Another hot fucking day," Jacob said with a sigh. He pulled a canteen up and unscrewed the lid before offering it to Micah. Micah shook his head and indicated a water bottle of his own. "Oh. That come from the taps? You're lucky. We've got people in the camp using the creek water. Most of them aren't boiling it first. A hundred yards upstream we've got jackasses too lazy to go to the latrines, pissing in the creek."
Micah had grown accustomed to these complaints from Jacob. They'd met in the first days of Micah's stay at Briarfield and developed a loose friendship. The soldiers were under orders to remain distant from the populace, for fear of losing the authoritarian control, but Micah was as separate from the camp population as any of the soldiers. "I thought they were rigging up more running water taps?"
Jacob drained his canteen. "We're hitting some problems outside of the fence. County water systems were designed to have X number of people spread out over a whole county. Suddenly, we have a small city pop up out of nowhere. Teams are working as quickly as they can, but our guys are trained with short term solutions. The longer this goes on, the more we have to rely on other ideas. I spent most of the day doing intake interviews with people. I can tell ya, if we ever need to middle manage the shit out of something, we've got that covered. Not so many engineers or plumbers down there, though."
Micah chose his words carefully. He knew that Jacob liked to talk, but too pointed of a question could make the soldier clam up. "I overheard some of the kitchen staff talking today. They said they're bringing in a big shipment tonight." Micah offered the soldier some of the mixed nuts.
Jacob took a greedy handful. "I've heard some chatter about that too. McGill's group. They go pretty close to Huntsville. Not sure what they would bring back though. That's a patrol group, not a supply one. I mean, if they can fit a crate of marshmallows on their transport they do, but that's not their priority. Ammo, most likely. All the gun shops have been cleared out, but they've been hunting down some warehouses."
Micah nodded along. "Any other news from outside? I went down to the camps this morning, talked to a couple from South Carolina. They said it's pretty desolate out there."
Jacob looked warily at the other man on the hilltop. "Happen to catch that couple's name?"
Micah returned a blank stare, "Phillips, maybe. Could have been Ethridge."
The soldier smiled, tight lipped. "No, nothing new from beyond the fences. At least, not that I've heard. The people I talked to today were mostly up from the south. One couple over from Mississippi. They fled Memphis. Lost their twenty year old daughter in the mix. They were on an evacuation bus headed out of the city. One of the big ones, you call 'em alphas, knocked the whole thing over. Husband managed to push his wife out of the emergency exit, but the daughter was trapped underneath a seat. The infected started pouring in the bus, hopping on the first human they could. The father stayed, trying to free his daughter until she started calling to the infected."
