He smelled the stench of vomit borne on the wind toward him. Now he wanted to puke, too. He turned green and held his hand over his mouth.
“Not you, too,” said Halverson.
Feeling weak, Reno felt chills running down his spine. “I’m getting seasick,” he muttered and slumped against the gunwale.
“Take a deep breath.”
Reno took Halverson’s advice. Now that the stench of Victoria’s barf had blown downwind of him, the sea air refreshed Reno as it recruited his lungs.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, as the color came back to his face.
Chapter 8
Careful to avoid the brunette ghoul’s entrails that were stretching all over the water like an unspooled hawser, Halverson sailed past the headland on the north side of the Santa Monica Bay toward Malibu.
“Where are we going?” asked Reno.
“North.”
“I can see that. Why?”
“We heard there might be people still alive up there,” put in Victoria, who was leaning limply against the gunwale after having voided her stomach.
“And?”
“And what?” said Victoria.
“And that’s all you’re going on? A rumor you heard?”
“What else is there to go on?” said Halverson.
“Can you at least untie me now? What do you think I’m gonna do? Attack you? That would be stupid since I can’t sail a boat.”
Halverson eyed Reno then nodded at Victoria.
“Are you sure?” asked Victoria. “I still don’t trust him.”
“He’s not gonna try anything,” answered Halverson.
Victoria shrugged.
She ambled over to Reno and untied his arms.
Reno stretched his arms in front of him and massaged his reddened wrists. “I feel better already.”
“Have you become an optimist about our chances now?” asked Victoria.
“I don’t feel that much better.” Reno paused in thought. “We’re gonna need food and supplies unless you’ve got some below.”
“Not that I know of,” said Halverson.
“You said you didn’t inspect the boat,” Victoria told Halverson.
“That’s true.”
“What do you mean?” said Reno. “Don’t you know if you loaded your own boat with supplies?”
Halverson didn’t feel like telling Reno the Costaguana wasn’t theirs. Reno already thought he and Victoria were crooks thanks to the moneybags. Telling Reno they had commandeered the boat would only reinforce Reno’s view of them as crooks on the lam, which wouldn’t endear them to him and could lead to a further falling out among them.
“We left in a rush,” was all Halverson said.
“My stomach’s turning somersaults,” said Reno. “My swim over here whetted my appetite. If it wasn’t for the help of the rip current carrying me, I wouldn’t have made it. I’ll check for food downstairs.”
Victoria held her belly and looked nauseous. “Please don’t talk about food.”
“Oh no. I’m getting out of here before you unload again. I couldn’t stand another whiff of your . . . yuck! I don’t even want to think about it.”
He strode to the companionway and disappeared below decks.
Halverson picked up on a boat floating up ahead. “We may have company.”
“Don’t tell me more of those things are headed this way,” said Victoria.
It was a motorboat, Halverson could tell by its twin Evinrudes, but it was adrift. He could not make out anybody onboard as yet.
Victoria padded up to his side and peered ahead at the craft. “It looks empty.”
Halverson wanted to make sure.
“Ahoy!” he called out to the motorboat.
“Are you sure that’s the right thing to do? Maybe we should just sail on by.”
“There could be people aboard.”
“Or ghouls.”
Halverson could make out somebody stirring on the vessel. A fiftysomething male rose from the deck to a standing position and gazed at Halverson and Victoria. The hollow-cheeked man was sporting a short white beard and wire-rimmed spectacles. His movements appeared labored to Halverson.
“He isn’t saying anything,” Victoria told Halverson suspiciously.
“Maybe he was sleeping.” That would explain his slow motion, decided Halverson.
“Or maybe he’s one of them.”
Halverson hailed the speedboat again. “Ahoy!” He waved at the man.
The man paused then waved back uncertainly.
“He’s just mimicking you,” Victoria told Halverson.
“Or maybe he thinks we’re ghouls and he’s not sure he should signal us.”
“Anything’s possible—now that ghouls have inherited the earth. Who could believe that would ever happen in their wildest dreams?”
Halverson sailed toward the speedboat.
“What’s wrong with your outboards?” he asked the man, closing in on the motorboat.
“I’m out of fuel,” answered the man, looking more certain of himself now that he could clearly make out Halverson and Victoria.
“Where were you headed?” asked Halverson.
“Anywhere but here,” answered the man. “Those things attacked me onshore. I grabbed the first boat I could find on the dock and took off. I didn’t know I’d be running on fumes.”
Halverson introduced himself and Victoria to the man.
“I’m Dr. Barry Parnell,” said the man, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose.
“Why don’t you come onboard with us?” said Halverson.
Parnell nodded. “I’m going nowhere fast in this crate.”
“Are you sure he’s OK?” Victoria whispered to Halverson.
“He’s not one of them, if that’s what you mean,” Halverson replied in kind. “Those things can’t talk.”
Halverson pulled his sailboat alongside Parnell’s motorboat.
Parnell tossed the speedboat’s painter to Halverson, who snatched it as he held onto the sailboat’s wheel with his other hand.
Parnell climbed uncertainly onto the slippery hood of the speedboat’s bobbing prow. Balanced precariously, he leapt onto the sailboat’s deck when the two vessels floated close to each other. Somewhere along the way he lost his footing and took a tumble onto the sailboat’s deck.
Halverson released the painter and let the motorboat drift away.
He turned to Parnell. “Are you OK?”
Wincing, Parnell found his footing. “Just a couple of bruises I suspect.” He commenced massaging his right knee.
Reno appeared on the companionway. “I heard a thud down below.”
He clapped eyes on Parnell and looked surprised. Reno’s body tensed, preparing for a fight with a ghoul.
“Who the hell is this?” asked Reno.
“I’m Dr. Parnell,” answered Parnell, who looked equally startled to see Reno. “Who are you?”
Relaxing at the sound of a human voice Reno told him his name. “Paying a house call?”
Parnell smiled.
“Did you find anything below?” Halverson asked Reno.
“No soap,” answered Reno.
“We’re gonna have to raid the shore sooner or later for supplies.”
Halverson pricked up his ears and cringed as the eerie, unsettling sound of hundreds of ululating ghouls rent the air. The unearthly howls made his skin crawl.
“What the hell is that all about?” said Reno, craning his neck toward the source of the wails.
Chapter 9
It didn’t take Halverson long to find out—and he wished he had remained in the dark.
From the sailboat’s helm he could discern a yellow school bus stranded on a Malibu beach. Corralling the bus a raft of ghouls was shoving it back and forth, trying to tip it over. Even more chilling than the cries of the ghouls were the screams of the children trapped inside the bus.
Halverson watched in dread as schoolchildren stuck their hands out of two open window
s on the bus. The children were waving to him for help, it looked like. As much as he hated to admit it, there was nothing he could do to help them from here.
“How’d that school bus get on the beach?” asked Reno, as if the explanation of the bus’s presence made any difference at this point.
“The driver must have tried to escape from the ghouls onto the sand,” answered Victoria.
“He’s not escaping anywhere like that.”
“Isn’t there something we can do?” asked Victoria, watching in horror as the walking dead besieged the yellow bus.
“I wish.”
Before the words were out of Reno’s mouth, the ghouls contrived to tip the bus over onto the sand. They proceeded to crawl up the exposed black chassis onto the overturned side of the vehicle and then wormed their way into the few open windows.
The ghouls that could not locate open windows set to hammering out the safety glass in the closed ones with their decomposing hands.
“I can’t stand watching this,” gasped Victoria, covered her eyes with her hands, and turned away from the mind-numbing horror that was taking place on the beach.
Ghouls battered through the bus’s windows, shattering the glass, and squeezed through the metal sashes into the bus’s interior.
Once inside, the creatures tore apart the children that were scampering hysterically through the bus and squalling as they tried to escape.
Children’s blood jetted like oil from geysers through the broken windows and arched onto the beach’s sand.
“This is madness,” said Reno.
“There must be a meaning to this if we can just find it,” said Parnell, beholding the massacre of the schoolchildren with dismay. “I’ve always been amazed by nature’s complexity and the genius of living organisms in their attempts to survive. That’s one reason I decided to become a doctor. The anatomy of man is so intricately put together. It seems perfectly designed for such a complex world.”
“Designed for what?” asked Reno.
“To survive.”
Reno shook his head. “More like nature ‘red of tooth and claw,’ if you ask me,” he said, watching the unabated bloodletting and mayhem on the beach.
As if to countenance his view, a child’s arm and decapitated head flew out open windows on the upended bus, trailing bloody wakes, and arched into the greedy, snatching hands of the ghouls who were standing on the beach. The ghouls lost no time tucking into the body parts.
“There must be some meaning to all this if we can only find it,” said Parnell, cudgeling his brains.
“You think?” said Reno, not buying it for a moment.
“There is a grand design to nature. I’m sure of it.”
“Then how do you explain these diseased ghouls?”
“I can’t right now. It makes no sense.” Parnell frowned in puzzlement.
“There is no design to this, Doctor. Open your eyes and look at the senseless bloodshed.”
“By all that’s holy, this shouldn’t be happening,” said Parnell, mesmerized by the ongoing massacre at the school bus.
“Tell that to those school kids.”
“These murderers are infected. They have some kind of pestilence. They don’t know what they’re doing. All we need to do is find the cure.”
“What if there is no cure?”
“There’s always a cure. All you have to do is look long enough, and you’ll find it. First, determine the cause. Then, determine the cure.”
“By then we’ll all probably be wiped out.”
“I’ve heard a mutation of H5N1 is the cause,” chipped in Halverson.
Parnell’s face fell when he heard the news. “Then we’ve got our work cut out for us. H5N1 has a high kill ratio.”
Shaking his head Reno pulled a stick of gum wrapped in soggy white paper out of his trouser pocket. He unwrapped the gum and popped it into his open mouth. He chewed the sugarless Orbit mint gum and scrutinized the zombie assault on the school bus. The zesty taste of fresh mint burst onto his tongue refreshing his mouth.
“I’m watching the story of a lifetime unfold before me,” he said. “But if I write it, there’s nobody left on earth to read it.” He turned to Halverson. “Who’s your source for that info about the bird flu being the cause?”
Halverson couldn’t tell Reno the truth that his source had been fellow CIA black ops agent Greg Coogan without blowing his own cover story. Reno was no fool, Halverson knew. Telling Reno too much could prove hazardous to Halverson’s health—and to Reno’s health as well. If the government found out Reno knew about Coogan’s intel, they would add Reno’s name to their hit list right under Halverson’s.
“Some TV news show I was watching before the power went out,” hedged Halverson.
“You can put that in your write-up,” Parnell told Reno.
“Except for one problem,” said Reno. “There’s no paper left to publish it. And then there’s the distinct possibility there might not be anyone else left alive out there to read it.”
“Then write it for posterity.”
“Do you honestly think there’ll be any posterity after witnessing this debacle?”
Victoria riveted her eyes on the blood splashing out of the school bus that was shuddering as the ghouls inside it and on top of it were rampaging through it and over it transforming it into a blood-drenched abattoir.
“Isn’t there anything we can do to save those poor children?” she asked.
Nobody answered. They stood motionless, transfixed by the stomach-churning sight.
“Do you have any weapons onboard?” asked Reno, finally breaking their silence.
“An unloaded shotgun,” answered Halverson from the wheelhouse. “Unless there’s ordnance below decks that I don’t know about.”
“No. I already checked.”
“Then we’ve got squat.”
“Without weapons we’d end up like those kids as soon as we stepped onto the beach—torn limb from limb.”
The last screams of the dying children hung in the air like memento mori then trailed off.
The sudden pall of silence was deafening.
To Halverson the unnerving quiet seemed even more horrifying than the piercing screams of infants being butchered. A nerve-racking emptiness filled him.
He had to warn himself to concentrate on sailing the boat as his attention drifted.
Newton the iguana scampered to a different position on the prow as if to remind Halverson to keep alert at the wheel.
“What’s that creature on your bow?” asked Reno. “It looks like some kind of damn big lizard.”
“He’s not a lizard,” answered Victoria. “He’s Newton the iguana.”
“Well, excuse me for insulting him. I didn’t know those things grew so big.”
“He’s not even a big one. They can grow up to four feet long.”
“Does he eat meat? He looks like he could eat a dog.”
“No. He’s a herbivore.”
Reno eyed the purple and orange iguana with its scabrous skin warily. “He may be a herbivore, but he looks like a dinosaur.”
Victoria smiled. “He’s so laid back, you won’t even know he’s here.”
Reno pooh-poohed her remark. “As long as he keeps his distance from me, we’ll be fine.”
“I believe you’re frightened of him,” Victoria said with a shadow of a smile.
“Anything that looks like a dinosaur can’t be good.”
“We’re gonna have to dock somewhere pretty soon and send a raiding party out for food and guns,” said Halverson.
“I’ll second that,” said Reno. “And how about a laptop? I need to write my story.”
“I thought you said it was pointless to write it because nobody would read it,” said Victoria.
Reno stopped chewing his gum. He sighed. “I can write it for you guys. You can read, can’t you? And you’re still alive.”
Everybody remained silent. An atmosphere of glumness pervaded.
They
were alive, but for how much longer? wondered Halverson. He figured the others were thinking the same thing.
Newton the iguana took a few steps on the prow like he was testing his sea legs. Then he settled down in a stationary position flat on his belly, determined not to move for a while.
Reno grimaced at the iguana. If that leftover from the Paleozoic era never moved again, that would be fine with Reno.
Reno camped out on a wooden thwart near the stern as far away from the iguana as he could get.
Chapter 10
When they reached Santa Barbara, Halverson decided it was time to stage a foray onshore.
The onshore wind raking his cheeks, he guided the sailboat to a small dock. He liked the feel of the wind rushing against his cheeks and hair, and the fresh air cleaned his lungs.
As the boat rocked on the ocean in its approach to the weather-beaten dock, Reno fastened the mooring line to a wooden bollard on the wharf. Squinting, he scanned the area, searching for ghouls.
The town looked deserted with cars abandoned on the roads. Much of the town had burned down in the wildfires that had swept across Southern California, but many buildings had been spared.
“None of those things in sight,” said Reno.
“That’s why I pulled in here,” said Halverson. “We can go foraging.”
He released the steering wheel and stepped down from the helm.
“I don’t know,” said Parnell, scoping the vicinity. “Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not out there right around the next block.”
“The beachfront looks like a ghost town,” said Reno.
“The fact of the matter is we need supplies,” said Halverson. “We have to hit land sooner or later. Now’s as good a time as any, without any ghouls around.”
“I don’t like it,” said Parnell. He twisted his head back and forth, casting around the land.
“What?” said Reno.
“Listen.”
Reno strained his ears, listening. “I don’t hear anything.”
All Halverson could hear was the rush of sea wind against his ears.
“That’s my point. It’s too damn quiet,” said Parnell.
Reno shook his head. “You’ve got an overactive imagination.”
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