General Creighton Abrams, US Commander in Vietnam The Marines and crew of the Sovereign Spirit made a lot of progress over the next two days. Empty cargo containers were stacked end to end, two layers high, to block every road and bridge leading to the Port of Long Beach. The largest barricade was built across the terminus of the 710 freeway next to the Long Beach Sportfishing dock. At that location a 20 foot wide gap had been left in both the east and westbound lanes of traffic. Big panel trucks were parked across the gaps to act as rolling gates that would allow vehicles to enter or leave the safe haven of the Port. A similar one lane gap between containers was left on the Gerald Desmond Bridge to Terminal Island with a swinging steel gate installed between the containers. A few zombies would probably find a way around these barricades somehow, but the flood of zombies from the mainland had been stemmed. Sweeps by the Marines across the port’s peninsula flushed out and eliminated several hundred more zombies. Volunteers from the ship’s crew were joined by others from the Queen Mary in the job of identifying valuable cargo containers in the port and getting them back to the cruise ship terminal.During the process of wiping out zombies and searching for valuable containers, a total of sixty-seven additional survivors were located and rescued in the Port of Long Beach. Some of them were hiding in warehouse offices, many dying of thirst by the time they were rescued. Eight firemen and two paramedics were rescued from Fire Station 6 next door to the Cruise Ship Terminal. Six truckers were found camped out in the sleeper sections of their truck cabs in the cargo terminals. Twenty-three survivors had been holed up on another container ship in the cargo ship basin. The ship was named the Traveling Trader with a home port of Pusan, South Korea. They had arrived the night before the zombie outbreak and remained in port because they were too low on fuel to consider setting to sea without knowing of another safe harbor close by. Unfortunately, the containers on her decks were full of manufactured consumer products intended for the USA that had not been unloaded before the outbreak. Some of them, like a forty foot container of solar powered patio lights and another one full of hand powered flashlights with built-in multi-band radio receivers, might come in very handy. But the containers full of TVs, microwaves, car accessories, computer parts, video games and cell phones were less likely to be useful to the short term needs of survival. George Hammer used a crane to remove and stack most of the unwanted containers on the dock. Then the surviving crewmembers helped move the ship to the empty section of dock space where the Reliable Burden had been moored. George switched cranes and began loading the rest of the export containers full of food from the dock to the deck of the Traveling Trader. Her crew were quick to plug in the reefer units and everyone hoped that any perishables inside were still salvageable. Luckily, the majority of the containers waiting on the dock were non-refrigerated, or less perishable than meat. Most of these were full of products like rice, soybeans, almonds, and two containers full of California wines. News of the latter lifted everyone’s spirits.Captain Fisher’s patrols, using the Cigarette and Sportfisherman speed boats, had quickly located several fuel barges and tugs used to refuel cargo and passenger ships in the port. There was also a network of fuel pumps in the ship basin, but they were useless without power. George recommended bringing a barge to fuel up the Traveling Trader, but Scott had some reservations.“Hold on a second, George,”
