by J M Lassen
The sounds in the room had lessened since the dead first began to wake, but only by degree. The dead feet that had been pounding ceaselessly on the metal doors for hours had splintered, and the throats that roared their anger were wearing away. She imagined that if she could survive here long enough that she would see their bodies break down entirely, just like the systems that kept civilization humming seemed about to do. She wasn’t sure that she could get home again even if she wanted to. And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.
She stared at what remained of a man who was willing to die for an ideology. Or, as it turned out, someone who was willing to do something even worse than that, not to die, but to choose a living, mindless death. He and others like him had hoped to bring down the workings of the modern world, but they did no such thing. The zombie plague did what they could not. Yet they still continued, not realizing that their bombs were pointless.
Night fell and morning came again, and there was no change, but then as night fell for the second day, the closed eyes of the terrorist’s head snapped open. In that instant, the sounds from within the refrigerated compartments stopped, as if the dead who were locked away sensed a brother outside who might help them. But no help would be forthcoming, for all the manless head could do was rage.
She looked at her father. He had not responded to the resurrection. She guessed she didn’t really expect him to. That wasn’t what this was about, answers. She dragged her chair forward to sit facing her attacker, who could do nothing but look at her with mindless anger.
“Who are you?” she asked. “How can you keep on doing something like this, knowing what you had to have known?”
It growled at her, grinding its teeth loudly.
“Killing yourself so that you can go to heaven is barbaric enough. But once you knew that all you’d be getting is this, how could you go ahead and do it anyway? The world changed, and you paid it no attention. To choose zombiehood? To make others into zombies? You’re dead forever now. I’m not sure that you were ever really alive to begin with.”
The head howled, pinning her with unblinking eyes.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why you did this.”
She stood up, and took a step closer. As she did, the thing’s nostrils flared. It snapped its teeth, trying to reach her, but the gap between them was infinite.
“You’re not taking a bite out of me. You won’t ever be taking a bite out of anyone. Your death is as over as your life. There’s nothing left for you. So you might as well tell me.”
It rocked back and forth on its severed neck, but could gain no momentum.
“Tell me!” she shouted, and swatted at the head, which flew from the table and bounced several times on the floor, leaving several red splotches. The creatures behind the doors roared. She grabbed the head by its hair and lifted it up to eye level.
“I’ll never know, will I?” she said. “Never.”
Its answers remained the same as before. It was all senseless. She didn’t know whether she could live with that. There seemed little reason to change her earlier plans. She lifted her other hand near to the thing’s mouth. It snapped and snarled so ferociously that a tooth flew from between its lips and bounced off her chest. She could do it. She could do it quickly. One bite, and it would be over. She could no longer have death, but she could have something like it, and in a senseless universe, that would have to do.
But behind the head was her father, lying there quietly, speaking to her more eloquently than any member of the living dead ever could. She stepped closer to her father, holding the head out before her like a beacon.
“This is my father,” she said, not really caring whether the creature even listened. “He didn’t want much out of life. He just wanted to ride a double-decker bus someday, to see the Tower of London, to have a real beer in a real pub. He only wanted to see his daughters grow up to be happy…”
She grew silent. As she held the head by its hair, it rocked below her hand like a pendulum. She didn’t know what else to say, but she said it anyway.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Maybe…maybe I can make it up to you.”
She hadn’t been able to make her father happy while he was alive. But now that he was dead…now that he was dead, maybe she had a chance.
She placed the head in one of the empty cabinets, where it once more began its howling.
“Welcome to your new home,” she said. “I have to try to get back to mine.”
Then she shut the door on the past and left the room of death forever.
%/(z)
DEEPWATER
MIRACLE
THOMAS S. ROCHE
The laughers come howling; they tend to make noise. It’s a creepy sound, sure, and it can paralyze you with fear. But at least you know they’re coming.
Pirates aren’t like that.
Pirates creep up on you all nice and quiet; they’re on you before you know it.
But then, when you’re asleep and becalmed, anything can be on you before you realize it. I found that out in the worst possible way. In fact, I’d say there are probably not many worse ways I could have found it out.
That’s why I should have never let Harry go downstairs to sleep in the V-berth. Even though we were totally becalmed, I should have made him sit up, to make sure I didn’t doze.
But he was exhausted, we were both exhausted, with everything that had happened. And the petroleum stink made us woozy. I knew “Harrison,” as he was fond of calling himself recently, just had to get some sleep. Apparently, so did I.
His real name is Harry Potter McAvoy and yes, he’s named for that Harry Potter. He’s fourteen and he’s my brother, and he’s a little bit of a strange egg. He’s skinny and he’s fast enough when it comes to running but if I was ever in a fight with him I would forfeit just so I didn’t have to completely pulverize him. He’s got these goofy little round wire-framed glasses that make him look like even more a dork than he would be otherwise. When he doesn’t have his nose in a book, he’s on the internet, researching things that no sane person would ever have a need to know. He’s smart as all get out but not exactly what you might call a “normal” kid. Wanna know the capital of Primorsky Krai, on the Pacific coast of Russia? Harry’s your man. Want your brother to get introduced to a girl you’re interested in and not completely creep her out? There are better brothers out there, on that count.
About two years ago, Harry started calling himself Harrison, But I can’t get my head around that. He’ll always be Harry to me. If you think “Harry” is a perfectly fine name, then you’re not my brother; he’s a straight-A student and I am not kidding you reads Dickens because he thinks it’s awesome, so at some point he decided that Harry Potter McAvoy was not a dignified enough name for a future college professor or neurosurgeon or whatever he’s going to become. So he renamed himself Harrison, which pleased my Mom no end. “Just like Harrison Ford!” That did not please Harry, especially because I am named Luke after—yes, it’s true—Luke Skywalker. The only thing I can say is that at least my Mom did not succumb to the urge to make my middle name Skywalker, because apparently that’s just a little bit weirder than calling your second son “Harry Potter.” My middle name is Francis, after her uncle—who was essentially her grandfather after her parents died.
Harry picked “Harrison” because it sounded more dignified. He thought this even though to my knowledge that dude in the books isn’t named Harrison at all, but Harry from the get-go. I wouldn’t know; I haven’t read them. In the scheme of things, that’s just one more of the many disappointments I handed Mom & Dad that I’ll have to answer for if I ever face St. Peter...if any of us do. If we’re not already in Hell. Well, for what it’s worth, they both learned to laugh about it at the end. Ha ha, there, that’s a little joke. See? At least I’ve still got my sense of humor.
It was our sixteenth day at sea and, as far as Harry and I could tell, the sixteenth day after the end of the world. It was the sixteenth day after the Panama Laugh h
it the papers and as far as Harry and I could tell, the sixteenth day since the last paper was published.
It was our sixteenth day at sea, and as far as Harry and I could tell for a while there, it would be our very last day on this Earth.
%~<>
When the Panama Laugh hit, we were in Costa Rica. Mom’s grandparents came from there, although they never spoke Spanish at home so she didn’t speak it that well...and I barely know a word of it. But Dad got it in his head that digging up the family roots was the way to form a more perfect union, if you know what I mean, and prevent future “misunderstandings” like the one I had with the car that didn’t belong to me. Ever since I came back from my community service, Dad had promised to spend more time with me and Harry and Mom, and this was the way he did it—an all-expenses-paid summer vacation to sunny Costa Rica on his pride and joy, the Second Chance, a name Harry told me I should take as a personal insult (but he was always saying stuff like that). The Second Chance could sleep eight people comfortably if you liked each other, and four if you did not. Like most families, mine fell somewhere in between.
The reason Harry thought the name Second Chance was a reference to me is that Dad blamed himself for what happened. He seemed to think that I stole that car in Prado Verde because Dad had taught me to be prepared. That was pretty silly; for the record, I stole that car to impress Jenna Mason. And to see if I could. And to see if I could get away with it. (In case you’re wondering...it didn’t, yes, and no.) The Second Chance was forty feet long and when the wind was right she could make twenty-five knots, which is not fast enough to outrun a gang of pirates in speedboats...but if you shoot at them with a Dragon’s Breath round, plenty of pirates will decide there’s easier prey, which we’d had to do six times since leaving Costa Rica—three times before and three times after what happened to Mom and Dad.
The “Dragon’s Breath” is an explosive incendiary shell made for the twelve-gauge shotgun, and in case you were wondering it’s illegal in most states. It makes the shotgun belch out flame to something like fifty feet—creating the illusion that you’re firing a cannon or something. To hear my Dad tell it, the round is utterly useless in a real fight—it’s nothing but fireworks. But if you can fire it at a good enough distance, pirates—and everyone else—believe you’re firing a rocket or a cannon at them, which leads them to believe you’re far more heavily armed than you are.
It’s a pain to fire because, one, make sure you put your earplugs in first, and two, you have to clean the gun every time you fire one because it leaves gunpowder residue everywhere. It also stinks, but on the Gulf of Mexico nowadays, “stink” is really a relative term.
My Dad had some pretty freaky toys, though he’d be pretty irritated to hear me calling them toys. I’d probably get a lecture. I wouldn’t exactly say Dad was a survivalist, but he believed in always having your deck stacked against every nasty possibility the universe could throw at you. Everywhere he went, he had everything ready for the very worst. You’re going down to Wal-Mart for a new pair of swim trunks? Pick up another case of bottled water while you’re at it, we’ve only got ten in the basement. Get some ammo while you’re at it; you really can never have too much ammo, can you?
And as for the Second Chance?
She was “a hole in the water that you put money into,” as Dad frequently put it, also alleging that the word “boat” was an acronym for “Blow Off Another Thousand.” But the Second Chance was worth it, from the sound of what was happening on dry land. All across Latin America and the United States—and maybe the rest of the world, there’s no way to know for sure—the dead laughers had taken over—the walking dead, their chests compressing in something like a weird, obscene semblance of a laugh. And without the Second Chance, we would have been be right in the middle of it. She was packed with all the good stuff. Satellite phone? Check. Shortwave? Check. Satellite Internet? Check. GPS? Of course. There was even a pistol-grip twelve-gauge shotgun from the Mossberg Just In Case series, packed in a waterproofed cylinder designed to keep it dry in case your boat went down.
And that’s what saved Harry and me...when Dad went laugher about a week ago. Harry was the one who got it and fired it, while I was still standing there like an idiot. Dad went over the edge, and Mom sat there sobbing.
Harry said he didn’t feel bad; after all, Dad had made us promise. “If I start to turn,” he’d said, “Kill me. Don’t even think about it. If that happens, I’m not your father anymore. I’m a thing. Put me down. It’s for my sake as well as yours.”
Harry did. Would I have done it? I’m two years older; I’m the criminal of the family. I spent a summer doing my community service under the authority of the Patterson Correctional Facility, in Morgan City, Louisiana sponging oil off sea birds with dish detergent. There, I made the acquaintance of guys with far bigger mental problems than I have. I won’t try to tell you I didn’t get in fights there; I did. You have to. I got in a lot of them, just like I got in a lot of fights back in Sunland Park. I was the family’s resident tough guy.
But could I have shot Dad in the head with a shotgun, even with what he was trying to do to Mom?
I don’t think so. He’s always been the one I got along with.
But when mom, pouring blood from her arm and starting to weep, put Uncle Frank’s old service revolver to her head and tried to pull the trigger, she couldn’t.
“You have to do it,” she told me.
Why was I the one who argued with her? It wasn’t till she came at me with her teeth bared and her eyes wild that I did it. Harry, on the other hand, hadn’t even seemed to hesitate. He said the only reason he didn’t shoot Mom, too, was because he didn’t have a good line-of-sight; with a buckshot round, which the Mossberg was loaded with, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t kill me.
But just between you and me...she was always the one that he got along with.
Well, neither of them got along much now; they were floating somewhere, headless in the pea soup of crude-oil “mousse.” Shortly after we lost Mom and Dad, we smelled the oil and hit the giant field of gooey off-brown sludge.
We knew it was the Deepwater Miracle, or another offshore drilling rig like it.
Somewhere at the center of this, a bunch of wildcatters were laughing.
%~<>
In some of the last AM reports from the States we picked up at sea after we left Costa Rica, the coverage was everywhere—threatening to squeeze out the stories of the contagion in Latin America. That ended when it became clear to the general public how major this all was...when the outbreaks started in California and elsewhere. Then it had all happened fast.
But for the first day the story of oil spill was everywhere. The Deepwater Miracle was a deep-sea drilling platform about a hundred miles off the coast of New Orleans. The crew had gone dark. All contact with the rig was lost instantly. The wellhead had burst or uncoupled or something. It seemed obvious, now, what had happened—the crew had probably gone laugher.
The Deepwater Miracle started pouring crude into the Gulf of Mexico at an even greater rate than the huge 2010 spill.
I asked Dad if we shouldn’t steer clear of the Gulf.
He said, “When this blows over, we’re going to Corpus Christi. There’s no way the spill will reach that far.”
The substance covering the water was what they call “mousse,” a frothy substance made up of mixed-together crude oil and sea water. It only gets whipped up when the water is warm and there’s a certain amount of wind and wave action.
Why do I know? I told you, after I stole that car in Amarillo, I the whole summer fulfilling my community service by doing cleanup in the Gulf. Have you ever smelled frothy crude oil “mousse” on the water when it’s ninety degrees?
“Will it burn?” Harry wanted to know.
I shrugged and said, “I don’t think so. Not very well, at least. They talked a lot about the fire risk and said it was explosive. But they told us a lot of things that weren’t true.”
It wasn’t easy to sleep, but it was harder to stay awake.
%~<>
Now there was no AM or FM, no GPS. There was nothing except the occasional scattered broadcast, fuzzy and indistinct, that told us how pirates were roaming the Caribbean preying on the thousands of small boats packed with refugees; armed boat-bound militias had formed and were covering the Texas coast. But it had been days since we had seen another boat.
We didn’t know for sure what to expect on the Texas coast, other than that something bad. But could it be worse than what we’d done the first week at sea, before Mom and Dad went laugher—running from Cuban pirates taking pot-shots at us with rifles? Plus, Harry and I were running out of food, and fast. The beef jerky and the MREs were gone; so was the produce and the ramen and the cereal and of course the milk. We were subsisting on emergency rations, which are like the worst-tasting brownies you’ve ever had. They really didn’t give us a lot of energy.
We’d decided we’d make for the coast: Corpus Christi, Dad’s original plan. There, we’d try to hook up with Uncle Keith if he was still around, which we were beginning to think he wouldn’t be. Maybe no one was left expect pirates and laughers.
But Corpus Christi had to be better than just floating out here, waiting for the pirates to find us.
So we cut a wake through the vast sea of mousse, choking hard on the petroleum stink. It sucked.
About three in the morning, I told Harry to go below and catch some shut-eye in the V-berth, which is the V-shaped sleeping compartment in the bow of most small boats. I told him I’d keep watch.