The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory

by Rich Restucci

Remo shook his head in what could only be disgust and removed his helmet to wipe his forehead. Those looks were usually directed at yours truly for doing something monumentally stupid, but I hadn’t done anything dumb for at least ten minutes. At least I didn’t think so. Remo picked up a phone and pressed a button. “To the soldiers, sailors, crew, and refugees on board the Majestic Maersk: my team is here to remove you from this ship and bring you someplace safe. If you can hear me and are near a phone, please call the wheelhouse.” He replaced the receiver, which was on a cord if you can believe it, back in the cradle.

  The phone rang in under ten seconds. Remo having kept his hand on it the whole time, picked it up immediately.

  “Yes. Yes, we’re in the wheelhouse. We have it secured, but we’ll need to get to you. Do you have the data Schumitz was looking for? Where are you? How many of you are there? Exfil is a boat coming tomorrow. My team will come for you within the hour. Sit tight.”

  “WAIT!” I had positively yelled that. Remo gave me a sideways glance. “Ask if Ship, Alvarez, and Donna are with them.”

  Remo asked and then nodded to me in the affirmative. He passed me the receiver.

  “This is Alvarez.”

  “Are you still ugly?” A large vehicle could have been driven through my smile.

  “Uhh… what? Who is this?”

  My face was in deep shit later, as this particular smile got even bigger and threatened to rip my cheeks apart. “Well, you dumb SOB, you and I came to Atlantis together. I met Ship in New Hampshire, I fix stuff, and a crazy CIA guy kidnapped me off of an oil rig. Ugly and dumb.”

  “You! You bastard! You’re alive?”

  “I am, yeah.” I could hear him talking to the others with him, but couldn’t hear what was being said. There was some crying in the background. It was probably not Ship.

  “Good to hear your voice, buddy! I wish you weren’t here though, this is going to get bad. Ship is scribbling furiously, and a certain young lady would like to speak to you.”

  My girl got on the phone. “Thank you for not being dead.”

  “I do what I can.”

  “Where were you? Did they hurt you? How did you get away?” All of a sudden her tone changed. “Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing here? You’re going to get yourself killed!” She kept going, and before I could get a word in edgewise, she was telling me that Ship had passed her a message.

  There was a pause. “You’re absolutely right.” She hadn’t said that to me. “Ship says you’re an imbecile and should have known better than to attempt a rescue. You’re too important to die on this boat. I agree with him! Why are you here?”

  “Well, somebody had to save your dumb asses, and that somebody is me.” Remo and Kinga were looking at me. “Uhh… I mean us. We’re going to come get you.”

  “This horrible ship is crawling with infected. They’re everywhere.” She sighed. “You should just leave.”

  “OK.” I acquiesced shrugging, not that she could see me through the phone. “We’re just going to take off. I’ll order you a pizza before I go. Oh darn. And oh fudge and oh golly and stuff. You have something I need, I can’t leave.”

  “The hard drives! That’s why you’re here!” I heard her snap her fingers. She was always doing that shit, it was unnerving. She also has this nasty habit of screaming “SOCK!” and hitting me across the face with one of her socks. That shit is terrifying, but hilarious at the same time.

  “Uh, no. I’m here for you and the other two dumbasses that are with you. I don’t give a shit about hard drives. That having been said, who has them?”

  Alvarez had the hard drives. They had lost plenty of men getting them though. Of the twelve that had come back to this boat, three were left, but they had picked up another three that had survived for more than a year on this infected tub. I also learned that Captain Bob’s body was nowhere to be found when the team had entered the wheelhouse. The rest of the information would have to wait until we got to the survivors, as it was time to get this show on the road.

  I was more than a little apprehensive, but it was now or never. Also, if you never saw the movie Aliens pre-plague, you’re a dumbass.

  Upstairs Downstairs

  Kinga had radioed in to Schumitz on the Atlantis, and had left the key secured on the roof of the superstructure. Now if anything happened to us, at least they could get that damn key. So we had that going for us. Our rescue attempt would be in the galley. That’s where everybody was holing up.

  I had been thinking that the thing to do was what we always did. Set up something that makes a ton of noise as far from us as possible, then move in and do what we want. The problem with that plan was that there was no way to get far away on this boat. The infected were swarming the deck and several were already at the port and starboard hatches to the wheelhouse. We would have to go quiet as Remo was fond of saying.

  “But what if there are fifty of them right on the other side of this door?” I asked, pointing at the secured heavy doors that led to the bowels of the ship. Wow. Never thought of that until right now. I was about to descend into bowels. Eew. I had already been down there once, and it was bad.

  Kinga spat, “Then we’re in deep shit. You fall back to the ladder and get out.”

  “What about you guys?”

  “Aww princess, you worried?” Kinga asked checking his rifle. “You’re not that pretty.”

  Remo smirked.

  That was unfair. Number one: I was worried. These were good men. Number two: I am pretty. Classically handsome is the term. “Yeah, I don’t want to see you get eaten.”

  Remo pointed toward the door. He had already listened and had come up with nothing. He unlocked the top and bottom bar-locks and put his paw on the door handle. On three, he mouthed. I was nervous as he nodded his head once, twice, and on the third nod threw the door open wide.

  Two dead men greeted us. Truly dead. One was slumped to the side on the landing with half his head missing. It was crushed, not shot, which told us a few things. The mostly eaten carcass with what looked like military garb next to him told us other things. The top of this one’s head was missing and the smeared spray on the wall communicated to me he had blown his own head off. Bitten or trapped.

  The fluorescent overheads and small, sunken wall lights were crusted in gore, bathing the landing and stairs below it in an eerie red-brown light. I peered over the side of the top railing. The stairway was such that each landing blocked my view when I tried to look down, but absolutely no light filtered up from below. I was amazed that the boat still had power after so long without maintenance. Surely they must be low on fuel by now.

  Both MARSOC guys panned back and forth with their tactical lights.

  “L3’s on, lights off,” Remo whispered into his mic.

  One of the things that Schumitz had provided us was Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggles. (GPNVG). Desert Coyote in color, the eyepieces actually looked like two sets of binoculars attached by a rail across the top. They were mounted to our helmets, and when they were deployed (swung down to cover our eyes), they made us look like that three-eyed alien from Star Wars, except these things had four eyes. They gave us a wider field of vision than regular NVGs and although bigger, they were lighter on our heads. I flipped the thing down and it turned on automatically. Everything went green.

  It was fucking fantastic. I almost giggled. I could see everything. I could read the lettering on Kinga’s assault pack. Did I mention it was awesome? ‘Cause it was awesome, dipped in awesome with awesome sauce! I took another look down the stairs, but the view was the same. Oh and no way was Schumitz getting these back. Call it hazard pay, but these things were just too cool.

  “Me first, then you,” Remo pointed at me, “then you, Kinga. Check each door, but don’t open it. We go quiet from here on. If we are going to get overwhelmed, or if we get separated, fall back to the stairway and up into the wheelhouse. Exfil to the monkey island if the wheelhouse gets compromised.”

  King
a began closing the doors as I wondered WTF a monkey island was. We had left our HK416’s on Atlantis, and were using MP5SD3’s. These were more sub-machine guns than battle rifles, but they were fitted with integrated suppressors.

  Kinga leaned toward me when Remo took his first cautious step down the stairs. “The monkey island is the roof of the wheelhouse.”

  I nodded and began to follow Remo. Our boots made almost no sound as we descended into the darkness. We had been moving down the superstructure for a few minutes when we heard a moan from below and Remo threw up his left hand. We waited, listening, but all we heard was some movement. Nuts clenched, I trailed the MARSOC guy as he moved downward. All the doors inside this tower were locked as we moved down.

  We had learned from the crappy, non-electronic blueprints that the galley was in the center of the ship, on deck three. There were six decks, and we were on the landing outside of deck five when we heard the moan again. It was followed by a rasping hack chaser, and they were too close together to be one critter. We had multiple targets in the stairwell. Is it a stairwell on a ship? Nautical terms are beyond me for the most part (I hadn’t known what a monkey island was). I will have to ask the boys if we live through this.

  We reached deck four and I have to tell you, the green that was my world when looking through these alien eyes was becoming unnerving. I had a great field of vision, and I could see in the pitch black, but the noises of the dead inside this deathtrap were causing me to re-think this operation.

  Pitch black. Why was everything pitch black? The power was on, and I can’t believe this stairwell wouldn’t be lit up like a Christmas tree so the crew wouldn’t get killed in here. It didn’t make sense, and if something didn’t make sense, I should be afraid, and if I’m afraid, I gotta tell the boys.

  “Stop,” I whispered into my mic. Remo ceased all movements other than to crouch and scan harder if it were possible.

  “What?” Kinga whispered. “What is it?”

  “Why are all the lights out?”

  Kinga stepped forward and crunched on broken glass. I can’t believe we hadn’t stepped on any before, as all the lights above us must have been broken too except for right outside the wheelhouse. The point is, the broken glass sounded like a shotgun blast in the quiet of our surroundings, and then we heard the moans and cries of the dead echoing all around us.

  “Call it!” Kinga whispered into the mic.

  “They can’t see us, we take them out when they come into… Contact!”

  Remo fired once, twice, three times. These weapons were way quieter than our other suppressed weapons, but they still sounded like cannon fire to me. The door to deck five above us opened, and dead poured through. Apparently, the door had only been locked on the stair side. Light also streamed in and I was temporarily blinded. It only lasted a few seconds, but that was a damn long time to be blind when something that wants to eat you is headed in your direction.

  Kinga spun and fired, dropping several of the things, and I decided it was time to act. I didn’t know how many were coming from below, but there were a shitload coming from above, so I fired at some of them. They probably couldn’t see us in the dark, but hey, these are the walking dead, so who knows?

  It’s difficult to score a headshot with these L3 NVGs on. My first shot took a Majestik crewman in the throat, and he didn’t give a shit. I adjusted and aimed for his noggin again, but was a bit high and scored a hit on the abdomen of the thing behind him. After my second miss, I was able to compensate, and I dropped the crewman, who promptly collapsed and rolled to the landing below, his brethren falling over him in a heap. The mass looked like a middle-school pig pile. I did not want to play.

  I heard Remo call out: “Loading.” and I turned one hundred eighty degrees to cover while he switched magazines. He didn’t need the cover. He was reloaded so fast I didn’t get a chance to pull the trigger, and I turned back to assist Kinga.

  “We need to bug!” Kinga said fairly calmly through the mic.

  “Can’t go down,” Remo answered in his steady voice.

  I looked at the tangled mound of pus bags that now looked all arms and legs. They were trying to stand but were being pushed and trampled by their hungry cousins. “Not going up!” Perhaps my voice had a twinge of panic to it, but I thought I did well considering. “Way more up than down, Remo! Choose fast!”

  “Down then.” He sounded like he was asking me to pass the salt at the dinner table. How could he be so calm when we were in such imminent danger? He moved down the stairs one step at a time as he ventilated melons with his 9mm sub-machine gun.

  I fired past Kinga’s head. “I thought they couldn’t see us?”

  Kinga dodged a dead hand that snaked out and tried to grab him, then fired into its owner’s face. “They can probably hear your constant bitching.”

  “I’ve got a path,” Remo said, interrupting us both. “Get on my six now.”

  “Move!” Kinga shouted, and we ran down the stairs after our buddy.

  Path? He had a path? There were like, three less infected in our way than there had been up above. Remo used the butt of his MP5 to break the jaw of a dead obese woman, and he pushed through the doors to deck three.

  “Nope!” he shouted and began to fire. We pushed through behind him and found out why. The deck three corridor was jam-packed with dead. They were already moving in our direction, and there were at least forty of them in the tight hallway. There was a door to our left. It was a metal hatch actually, and it was locked.

  Kinga, brandishing his knife, had already dispatched two of the things with it while simultaneously firing the MP5. He let loose with a kick that bent back a former policeman’s leg at the knee. I shot the dead cop in the melon, and spun to face the young man with no lips that had grabbed me and was pulling my face to its maw. I brought my forearm across its forearms and down a bit. The move actually brought the thing’s teeth closer to me, but I swung the other way and hit it in the back of the head with my weapon. It wouldn’t let go, and I almost went down, but the thing’s head snapped left and shit sprayed out of it onto the bulkhead. Thanks, Kinga.

  I dropped the lifeless thing, (actually, it let go of me) and continued to select targets. Between the three of us, we were doing well, but not well enough. Kinga was firing behind us up the stairs, Remo was a straight-up Jedi with his knife and sub-machine gun, and I helped when I could.

  An emaciated thing slashed Kinga across the face with its skeletal hand and the MARSOC boy took a step back. He also stopped firing and the dead surged forward. They had reached the landing, and four of the horrid things plowed into him, biting. He was still able to get a shot off before he went down, his rifle pinned between him and three hundred pounds of dead people. I have no idea how he did it, but he had his knife in the temple of a guy in a filthy New York Jets jersey and had already shot the bony thing with his pistol, when I reached down to yank off the businessman that was clawing at my buddy’s midsection. Guy was heavy, and when I pulled him up, he immediately latched onto my vest and leaned in for a nibble, making that growling sound that some of them make. His head popped before he could reach me, and the shit that flew out of it coated my face.

  Gagging and spitting out his gray matter, I shot the two that were on the stairs in front of me, while Kinga grappled with the last one that had grabbed him.

  Two. There had only been two in front of me. That didn’t compute as there had been more than that a few moments before. Kinga is a hero, but he was tiring, and the thing on him was bigger than he was. He held its face at bay by pushing its throat up, but it was inching closer. I had clicked on empty when I shot the last dead guy, so I let my rifle dangle and pulled my Sig. It was a long draw because of the suppressor, and before I could examine the inner contents of the thing on Kinga, Remo shot it from behind. Except I could hear Remo firing his rifle twenty feet away, and the shot had been louder than it should have been.

  I spun and saw a familiar face. “Fast as a snail you are.�
� My buddy Zero smiled and turned to fire into Remo’s crowd. “You three numbskulls! In here!” He kept firing and moving as I pulled Kinga up and Remo spun and tactically withdrew. The four of us ran through the now open hatch that had been locked previously. Zero was the last in. He wiped his hand, which also contained a recently fired Desert Eagle .357 Magnum across his forehead.

  “What took you assholes so long?”

  Boo Boo

  We were in a narrow hallway, white walls and a carpet of all things. Light came in via small openings in the ceiling. They were mirrors in tubes to filter in natural light. It was still dark though, but I could see another hatch maybe twenty feet away. Two doors, one on each side of the hall were open, and there was a body slumped at the far end. The cries of the dead and their fists against the steel hatch seemed very close. I guess they were less than an inch away when I think about it.

  “Remove your NVGs and I’ll turn on the lights,” Zero told us. He took his off and we followed suit. The army boy called down the corridor, “Jarek, turn the lights on.” The overhead florescent bulbs came to life and Zero studied Kinga and Remo head to toe for a few seconds. “So I’m saving marines again,” he sassed and stuck his paw out to Kinga. “Zero.” MARSOC introduced themselves, and I threw my arms around this guy and gave him a bear hug. I had always thought Zero was a marine too, but as it happens, he was an army guy.

  “Gay.” He clapped me on the back. “Gay, alive, and here… What the fuck happened to you?”

  “Long story, which I will gladly tell when we get everybody off this tub. What’s the plan?”

  Zero ejected the polymer mag from his M4, taking a quick look at it before he slammed it back in and yanked the charging handle. “I could use some .556 if anybody thought to bring any. Last suppressor is junk too.” He began unscrewing the cylinder from his weapon.

  Remo dug in his pack then stepped forward, passing two magazines to Zero. “Schumitz thought you might need these.”