Plummeting, he twisted around in the air and managed to grab the spooling intestine with both of his hands now, straining to maintain his hold on the gooey bowels that were slowing his fall as they ripped out of the ghoul’s stomach.
Glancing up, he saw the fat ghoul’s head leaning over the parapet.
Christ! thought Halverson, shivering with apprehension. Don’t fall off, you fat cluck!
Halverson felt the intestine spooling slower as it reached the end of its length.
Then it stopped unwinding.
Halverson’s descent came to a halt with an abrupt jerk. Dangling, he barely managed to retain his grasp on the slimy bowels that stretched taut down the side of the prison.
Halverson looked down at the ground that seemed to be spinning below him as he rotated at the end of his tether.
He had about a six-foot drop below him. He would have preferred a shorter jump. He risked breaking a leg or an ankle at this height.
To hell with it. He wasn’t going to hang here for the rest of his life.
He felt a jerk on the intestines and looked up at the roof.
Like a spastic, the fat ghoul was tugging on its intestines trying to haul Halverson up to the parapet.
No way was he going back up there again, decided Halverson.
He released the bowel and fell.
He hit the ground hard. He landed in a crouch and somersaulted forward to break his fall.
He rocketed to his feet on his bruised legs. He lifted his legs up and down, testing them to see if they worked. They ached but they didn’t feel broken. He initiated a cursory recce of the grounds and spotted no ghouls maundering in the drifting fog. No ghouls in sight—until a ghoul walked off the parapet above him and crumped on the ground but ten feet from where Halverson stood.
The thirtyish female brunette ghoul had broken its legs and its spine in its fall. Unable to walk, the creature crawled toward Halverson, dragging its misshapen legs after it, its fractured spine sticking out of its back and protruding a half foot into the air.
Filled with disgust, Halverson dashed into the fog with no intention of hanging around waiting for more ghouls to drop off the prison roof.
Already he could hear a sickening thud behind him as another ghoul dropped from the parapet.
Chapter 77
Halverson figured Bascomb and Jones had both decamped to the boats and taken Victoria with them.
Now all Halverson had to do was find the boats—if they hadn’t set sail yet. Easier said than done what with the fog and smoke obscuring his vision, he decided.
He stopped running and tried to get his bearings.
He knew he was standing at the western end of the prison and that the pier was located in an easterly direction. The problem was, if he headed east he would as like as not run into the ghouls parading from the south end of the island toward the prison.
He shrugged.
He would just have to risk it. He had to reach the pier to get off the island. As it stood now, the island was indefensible. If he stayed on the island, it was only a matter of time before the walking dead got him.
He checked out his National Clandestine Service wristwatch, which included a compass on its face, then bore east through the fog.
Wending his way through the fog, he realized he didn’t have his MP7 anymore. He remembered he still had his Sig Sauer P226 automatic wedged in his waistband in the small of his back. He withdrew the Sig as he poked through the fog.
He heard scuffling ahead of him.
He slowed down and padded forward, expecting to meet up with the walking dead any second in the fog that was stealing across the island. He picked up on a line of the ghouls scrabbling in tandem.
He figured they were heading for the burning prison, seeking their fair share of the human flesh inside it.
He skulked closer to them. There was no way he could circumvent them on his route to the quay. He could use his gun only as a last resort, because a gunshot would alert the other ghouls and draw them here.
He reversed his grip on the Sig so that he held it by its barrel. He would clobber the ghouls upside the head if they attacked him.
He snuck through the fog toward them.
One of the ghouls groped for him as it spotted him in front of it.
Halverson crashed the butt of his Sig down on the creature’s skull. He hammered the creature’s head until the creature dropped to its knees with its brains dashed in.
Halverson tore through the line of ghouls and made for the pier.
The area he was passing through looked familiar. He decided he must be heading in the correct direction. He bore down a cement path that was shelving downward toward the shore.
He heard a commotion up ahead. He skidded to a halt. He wanted to check out the ruckus before he proceeded.
He peered through the whirling fog. He could hear the ocean lapping against the boats. He could also hear voices.
He could discern figures now, as well. Bascomb, Jones, and Victoria were making a beeline for the pier. Halverson twigged that Victoria was wearing only a white bra and her jeans. Halverson flushed with anger. Had Bascomb tried to rape her, like he had raped Brittany? Or worse? Had he raped Victoria?
Gun in hand, Halverson couldn’t wait to whack out Bascomb. Halverson leapt out of the fog and confronted them.
“Hold it!” he blurted.
Bowled over, Bascomb halted and could not believe he was beholding Halverson.
“You look like you just saw a ghost,” said Halverson.
“You have no luck,” said Bascomb. “You should be dead by now.”
“You got no luck,” chipped in Jones, AK in hand, gloating over Halverson.
Jones raised his AK to train it on Halverson.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Halverson, bringing his Sig to bear on Jones.
Just then, a clutch of ghouls lurched out of the shifting fog toward Bascomb.
Bascomb flourished his AK over his head. “I am the last bastion of man. Without me, there is no hope for the human race. If I die, the human race dies with me.”
A thirtyish redheaded female ghoul clad in a besmirched green dress lunged at Bascomb as he was ranting, snagged his arm, and hoicked it out of its socket. Blood sluiced out of Bascomb’s mutilated shoulder as Bascomb let out an earsplitting shriek of pain. In shock he dropped the AK from his other hand.
The redhead held Bascomb’s arm up to its chops and tore flesh out of the forearm with its snaggleteeth. Blood streamed from the creature’s shriveled lips as the creature munched on Bascomb’s forearm.
Dazed from shock and loss of blood, Bascomb nonetheless managed to continue standing.
“You’re not lucky,” said Jones, his AK leveled at Halverson.
Halverson fired two rounds from his Sig at Jones before Jones could get off a shot.
Jones dropped to the ground and sprawled motionless.
“You’re not alive,” muttered Halverson, leering at Jones.
Victoria backed away in terror from the ghouls that were shambling out of the fog toward her.
“Help me,” Bascomb moaned to Victoria.
“Follow me,” she said.
Bascomb blinked his eyes as if trying to keep them focused. “You’re nothing without me. I made this place. You need me. All society will collapse without me. You can’t exist without me.”
“Run!” bellowed Halverson.
The walking dead moved in on Bascomb.
Bascomb didn’t move. Maybe he could not move, decided Halverson.
Whey-faced, Bascomb stood his ground unsteadily. It looked like he would pass out any minute from shock.
“Follow me,” Victoria told Bascomb with mixed feelings and headed for the pier.
Part of her despised him. Part of her didn’t want to see him die.
She didn’t know why she would want to help him. After all, he had tried to rape her. It was only after she had fought him off, losing her blouse in the bargain, that he had desisted.
Fresh, bloody scratches on her chest marred her body as testament of his assault. However, she couldn’t just abandon him to be eaten by the ghouls, no matter how big a louse he was. The idea of being eaten alive sent a shiver down her spine. She cringed.
Blood continued to well out of Bascomb’s mutilated shoulder that was frayed with ragged strips of flesh. He held his remaining hand over the wound to stanch the flow with little success. The blood kept seeping through his fingers.
“You can’t just leave me here,” he said feebly. “Mankind has no chance without me. I am your only hope. This island wouldn’t exist without me. I made it. If I die, mankind dies with me. You all need me. Without me you’re doomed.”
Victoria had never realized Bascomb was so full of himself. She should have figured it, though, the way he lorded over his little fiefdom at the prison. And then his assault on Brittany. Victoria should have tumbled to Bascomb’s overweening arrogance right then and there. But she hadn’t. She just pegged him for an asshole.
Halverson could not bring himself to help Bascomb. This was the same bastard that had shoved Reno into the hands of the ghouls and abandoned both Reno and him at the front door of the prison to be eaten by those same ghouls.
Instead of coming to Bascomb’s aid, Halverson peeled off toward Victoria as she made for the pier.
The ghouls converged on Bascomb and, moaning with hunger, deliberately began tearing him apart one piece at a time.
He screamed in pain a short while, then, fortunately for him, slipped into unconsciousness as the creatures devoured him.
While the walking dead were occupied with their feeding frenzy, Halverson and Victoria scampered onto the Costaguana.
They scurried around the boat, unfurling the sails, preparing the vessel for departure.
“Why don’t we just take the Zodiacs?” asked Victoria, busy helping Halverson with the sailboat’s rigging.
“They’ll run out of gas sooner or later,” answered Halverson. “We can go forever with the sailboat. There’s always wind.”
“Not in the doldrums.”
“I don’t plan on heading to the equator.”
A gaggle of walking dead was traipsing onto the pier, making straight for them.
Something shot out from between the creatures’ legs and scuttled toward the sailboat.
Halverson recognized Newton the iguana.
The iguana leapt off the dock, over the boat’s gunwale, and onto the deck.
“I didn’t even know he had left the boat,” said Victoria, watching the Day-Glo purple and orange reptile crawling near her feet.
“Just one big happy family,” said Halverson, as he untied the painter from the cleat on the quay and pushed off.
The boat sailed into the fog-shrouded obscurity of the bay.
“Where to now?” asked Victoria.
“We just keep moving,” answered Halverson, at the wheel in the pilothouse. “That’s all we can do.”
“What’s the point? There’s nothing but destruction out there,” she said, peering into the gloom.
“We can’t give up. We lost another battle with these creatures. That’s all. We haven’t lost the war.”
“If only we had something to believe in,” she said wistfully.
“We have ourselves to believe in.”
Kill Ratio
Bryan Cassiday
Copyright © 2013 by Bryan Cassiday
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Bryan Cassiday
Los Angeles
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition: July 2013
CHAPTER 1
“We’re completely screwed. So what else is new?”
CHAPTER 2
At the wheel of the pitching twenty-foot sailboat named the Costaguana, Halverson was luffing south along the Southern California tidewater through choppy seas, a smattering of grey clouds racking overhead. For the time being he didn’t see any flesh eaters along the shore.
“I didn’t say anything,” said Victoria, sitting on the thwart in the stern, peering up at him as the water sloshed against the sailboat’s hull.
Painted avocado green, the hull had seen better days. Its paint was peeling in spots and it bore nicks in its wood. The exposed wood was suffering from salt and water erosion. Wedged in a hole in the hull to prevent leaking just above the waterline on the port side was a severed human hand, its fingers extended seaward.
Victoria was wearing a peach blouse and blue jeans with one of the front pockets torn and hanging down like a flap, courtesy of a flesh eater’s attack. She wore it like a battle scar.
The plague that had contaminated the world had not aged her one bit, Halverson could see. She still looked her years—twenty-eight.
“I was talking to myself,” said Halverson.
Clad in jeans and a torn T, he looked at her with his ginger eyes, the color of a lion’s. A few years shy of forty, he wondered if he’d ever reach that age, what with the pandemic.
Hearing the mast creak above her, Victoria craned her neck up and saw two legs in torn trousers kicking spastically. Its arms bound behind its back, the one-handed fortyish male flesh eater was hanging by the neck from the top of the mast and twisting in the wind.
“Why do we have to have that thing up there?” said Victoria.
“To scare away other flesh eaters,” said Halverson. “Like a Jolly Roger.”
“It’s not like we’re gonna meet up with a bunch of them on the ocean.”
“What about when we dock?”
“It gives me the creeps hanging up there.”
“Hopefully it does the same to the flesh eaters.”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s also handy for plugging leaks.” Halverson glanced at the flesh eater’s arm that was missing a hand.
Victoria rolled her eyes. “What’s the point of keeping it alive?”
“The flesh eaters won’t pay attention to it if it’s not moving.”
Head tilted back, Victoria squinted at the ghoul, the sun shining in her eyes intermittently as the creature swung to and fro in the wind. The creature’s jaws were champing the air like it was dying from hunger.
Halverson’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“We’re going about this the wrong way,” he said. “Instead of running away from the walking dead, we should be running toward them.”
Victoria screwed up her face and squinched her blue eyes at him. “The sun’s addling your brains. We’ve been out here too long on the ocean.”
“It’s only been about a month.”
“Seems like a year,” she said, head down, getting depressed thinking about it.
“What I’m saying is, we need to touch base with the people in power. That means we need to make land and then head east.”
“Right into the mouths of the flesh eaters.”
“We have to find out what’s left of the government.” Even as he uttered them, he regretted his words. After all, he had found out the hard way that somebody high up in the government was out to kill him.
She raised her head. “Do you have some messianic complex to save the country?”
“I want to see if there’s any country left.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Sailing out here on the ocean isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Where do you want to get? We’re still alive. That’s what counts.”
True enough, he decided. As far as it went. “I don’t want a bunch of infected zombies taking over. We have to fight them.”
“Back to your messianic complex. Why do you have to save the country?”
It was his job, Halverson knew. He worked for the National Clandestine Service of the CIA. But he couldn’t tell her that. Nobody knew what he did. She believed his cover story that he worked as a journalist.
She had a point, though. Why did he want to contact the government when he knew they were trying to kill him to silence him on account of what he knew about their involvement in the engineering of the mutated H5N1 zombie virus that had infected the world?
“I don’t want to live like a pariah at sea for the rest of my life,” he said.
Victoria nodded. “I can’t argue with that.”
“We need to beard the lion in his den.”
“Leave it to a journalist to come up with that line.”
“If I didn’t know better, I would think you didn’t like me. We’re not married, you know.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
Halverson could not read her face. He did not pursue the matter.
It was time for them to change their strategy, he decided. Instead of retreating, they needed to attack.
“Are you with me?” he said.
“The two of us against millions of diseased cannibals? You got to be kidding.”
“We can’t give up. If we give up, we’re dead.”
“There’s a big difference between giving up and walking into certain death.”
“We have to get rid of them before they conquer the world. It’s only a matter of time before they take over the oceans as well as the land.”
“How can they take over the oceans if they can’t swim?”
Halverson shook his head. “I don’t know. All I know is, I don’t want to live on the sea for the rest of my life.”
“I wasn’t cut out for a life at sea either,” said Victoria, suddenly aware of her queasy stomach. “I’m a hopeless landlubber.” She massaged her grumbling belly.
“Then you’re with me?” said Halverson, his hand on the wheel.
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