The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory

by Rich Restucci

  “We’re already trapped,” I said, looking at Remo.

  “Yeah, but we have food, and these.” Kinga tapped his MP5. “The thing I worry about is gas. We only have the three masks.”

  The conversation moved forward with the military guys pointing here and there and telling people where to go or not to go. They moved some of the shit in the galley around such that they created a killing field while at the same time setting up defenses. It was short work because most of the stuff was bolted down. In just a few short minutes, we heard gunfire outside in the hall, and the radios blared to life, Shitheads, this is Nobody, come in, Shitheads! It was Zero. We hadn’t set up call signs. We could hear the gunfire over his radio. He didn’t wait for a reply, Jarek is down! I’m hit! A dozen hostiles at least! Falling ba— Lost that part in auto gunfire, ETA three minutes!

  “Nobody, Shitheads,” Kinga replied, “we read you and backup is on the way.” Remo and Kinga began to get ready to leave.

  Negative! Nobody will— BOOM! We felt the explosion, it rocked the bulkheads.

  “Grenade,” Alvarez, Remo, and Kinga all said at the same time.

  “You three,” Kinga pointed at Alvarez, Ship, and me, “secure this room. Don’t open any doors until you hear code word Apple. Anybody tries to get through the door, kill them.”

  “You can’t go!” yelled the whiny guy. “We need you here! We don’t have guns!”

  Remo nodded at me. “They do.”

  “We aren’t leaving him out there to be shot or ripped apart by those things,” added Kinga. “Just get behind the tables and you’ll be fine.” The guy turned around and literally sprinted headlong into a table. It must have hurt, but to his credit, he just limped around it and went prone in the back.

  The gunfire increased, and we heard a couple of rounds hit the hatch. I moved toward the hatch in an attempt to secure it better, but Donna’s tiny frame stepped in front of me. Her eyebrows were raised and she looked pissed. I held up my hand in mock supplication, “I need to secure the doors.”

  “You need to secure your ass to that table or you’re going to die.”

  “If I don’t man up, we all die.” I put my hands on her shoulders and then did something she totally didn’t expect. I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Another bullet pinged off the metal bulkhead, and I gently pushed her aside. A shadow fell over me from the rear, and Donna looked up. And up and up. I smiled and turned around, looking up myself. “What is it, big fella?”

  He kept the note in the book this time. Just like we used to do. Good luck getting out of my sight again. Holy shit. My eyes went all hot. I almost cried. And FU if you think I’m girly. You try living through the shit I have and see if you don’t get misty when confronted with true friendship. Come to think of it, if you’re reading this, you probably have spent some time in a hurt locker. Then you can empathize right? Anyway, I looked back at Ship and he was not giving me the stinkeye. I nodded toward the door, and told him my intentions. He nodded and moved off to do stuff.

  “What do we do?” Donna asked.

  “We fuk’n kill them all. But first, we shore up this door.” I heard the sound of metal on metal, and turned to see Ship and Alvarez ripping a door off of one of the walk-in refrigerators. Okay, so they unscrewed the top half and then tore it off, but I’m sure Ship could have shredded through the hull with his teeth if he had wanted. We monkeyed the door so that it blocked the hatch into corridor, then Alvarez screwed it into the wooden floor using the hinges. The top portion was caught on one of the hatch pins, and that shit wasn’t moving without serious strength. Or explosives. Shit, I hope they didn’t bring any explosives.

  What did they want anyway? Why were they here? They had purposely landed on this ridiculous boat, literally covered in plague, but for what? The only thing I could think of was that they wanted the hard drives or the key… Oh shit. I distinctly remember thinking that: oh shit at that particular moment. If they were here for the key, then they must have come from Atlantis, and that could only mean one thing: we’re fucked. All this passed through the microcosm that is my mind quite quickly, and then came the anger. These fuckers had no right. They must have killed people I care about. They had, at the very least, shot Jarek and blown up Zero. They were going to die.

  I moved back to the table I had been on and began to check my magazines. Alvarez did the same, and Ship was just finishing up. Two full mags of 9mm with eight rounds in a third magazine. Thirty rounds for my Sig, and a SOG SEAL Pup. My knife was going between somebody’s ribs today, and that fucker was not going to be a zombie. That’s how mad I was.

  Except I was still wicked woozy. I put my hand on the table to steady myself and Ship noticed. That was the least of my worries as Donna was also right there. “You need to—” I cut her off by passing her my handgun.

  “Remove the suppressor,” I told her. “I think our secret is out.”

  She took it, immediately checking the magazine. This girl is perfect. Her concern for me was evident. “You should lie down.”

  I leered at her. “I should be on a beach with you, sipping an umbrella drink. I have the perfect bikini in mind…”

  She folded her arms. “You don’t have the tits for a bikini.” See? Perfect.

  Ship and Alvarez both raised their collective eyebrows, looked at each other, and moved away, finding something terribly important to do elsewhere.

  I laughed out loud, and it fucking hurt like hell. Zombie apocalypse hero tip number sixteen: Don’t laugh when shot unless you need to look cool.

  The gunfire outside ceased abruptly. We all looked at each other, and I put my hand to my head, listening intently to the radio I had just shoved in my ear hole. Nothing. Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the back door. “Apple,” came over the radio.

  Ship, Alvarez, Donna, and I all hunkered down behind some tables and chairs. We aimed our weapons at the sound and covered the door. “Hey, Q-MED. Wanna open the door?”

  Without a word, the skinny guy ran over to the door. He glanced back at us and I could tell he was nervous, but he pushed the door open after I nodded at him. Remo and Kinga were there, and they stepped through. “Close it,” Remo said. They were both looking at me as they made their way to the table.

  My heart was beating a little fast. “Zero and Jarek?”

  Kinga shook his head in the negative. “Zero’s gone. Jarek is alive, but they have him.”

  Alvarez sighed in relief. “He’s alive at least.”

  Kinga shook his head again. “He’s bitten. Apparently, the fast ones do give a shit about him. One got him on the shoulder.”

  “Fuck!” I yelled and smashed the table with my fist. It sent tendrils of agony through my side, but I didn’t care I was so mad. Pretty sure I had helped kill this guy. “What do these asshats want?”

  Remo pulled a laminated piece of paper from his vest and slid it across the table toward me. “You.”

  War and Peas

  “Not the best picture of you,” Donna said. I had to agree. If you’ve read my other journals, you would know that the dude who grabbed me last year and carted me off to a secret underground facility in Montana had a shitload of these wanted posters made up. He had them tossed out of aircraft all over the place so people would turn me in if they found me. There’s a reward. An actual price on my head.

  Everybody in the room except for the dude hiding behind the table was staring at me. Even Table-guy was peeking his head out, but he was so scared he didn’t know where to look.

  “How did they find me?”

  Kinga, still staring answered slowly. “They wouldn’t say. They did say we have ten minutes to give you up or they’re coming for you. They killed Zero, and they believe that killing all of us to get you is acceptable.”

  “They couldn’t have gotten past the Stockdale at Atlantis though,” I breathed. “That boat is designed to kill everything.” The Stockdale is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, with enough armament to take on pretty much anyt
hing. It was currently sitting next to our home, Atlantis.

  “No, I don’t see how they could have done that either,” agreed Remo. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to defend ourselves. We can worry about Atlantis and the Stockdale when we get off this tub.”

  “You’ve seen them,” I asked, “how do they look? Tough?”

  Remo began checking his magazines. “They did not come to play Monopoly.” It would be that the hilarity drips off of him when we were all about to get dead. “They’re fully outfitted.” That spoke volumes to me.

  “Can we take them?”

  Kinga snorted. “Of course. I don’t accept that I’m going to die here. Death means I failed and I don’t fail. You,” he pointed at the skinny engineer guy, “what’s your name and what’s the best way to the wheelhouse other than up the stairwell?”

  “Name’s Todd. There isn’t a way up to the wheelhouse other than the exterior stairs or the stairs through there. Well… I mean we could go through the hold, up and out through the crew service hatch, and across the deck.”

  Ship already had a note in his book by the time Todd had finished speaking. The big guy was gracious enough to spin the book around so that we could all see: NO!

  It was Alvarez’s turn to snort. “We would have to face a hundred infected down there, then four hundred more on the deck. Been there, done that. No effing way.”

  The husky fella, formerly hidden behind the table, and obviously some type of tubby ninja, was suddenly standing next to me, “Leave? You want to leave here?”

  Kinga shook his head. “No. I don’t want to, but this place is…”

  “But you said before that this was the best place to make a stand! There’s food!”

  “That was before we saw these guys,” Remo told him patiently. “They’ll get in here eventually.”

  The dude did something then that was totally unexpected. This is the part of the story where you’re thinking that he is some type of antagonist, and says that we should give me to the bad guys, or worse, grabs a gun and threatens us. Nope. “Okay. I’m in,” was all he said, but there was plenty of nervous fidgeting and hand wringing.

  “We’re saved,” Kinga said and everybody chuckled. Fat guy too.

  Bullets pinged off the hatch and several of us lowered ourselves instinctively. New spears of pain reached into my side when I ducked. The bad guys were killing the infected in the corridor between us and them. Whether they knew we were in the galley was irrelevant. This hatch would bring them right to us.

  “We have to go now.” Remo looked at all of us intently. “There are more of them than us. They’re heavy hitters. They’ve secured the stairwell and the wheelhouse. We’re running low on ammo, and only have three gas masks. They’ll come in here and kill us all. They don’t know how many fighters we have, or our status. Plus, we have explosives. We can leave some nasty surprises for them along the way.”

  Kinga nodded. “We exfil back the way we came and catch them as they’re going through the corridor crowded with infected.”

  It was Remo’s turn to nod. “Agreed.”

  “Yeah,” I said to sound cool, “good idea.”

  Both MARSOC looked at me and I felt small.

  We grabbed all our shit and moved out into the slaughterhouse that Jarek had created. I was going to shoot somebody for the loss of Jarek. This shit was happening. We made it to the first hatch, moved through it, and kept going. Alvarez closed it behind us.

  The second hatch was where Zero had gotten infected. It was also where the ladder to the hold was. I was scared just going in there. When Kinga began to open the third hatch, we were fired upon.

  “Fall back!” he screamed, slamming the door closed. “Fuck! Not going this way, there’s three at least.” Two more rounds mushroomed on the other side of the steel to emphasize his point. A muffled explosion, quite different from the sound of the grenades, sounded from where we had just been.

  Alvarez shook his head. “Surrounded.”

  Remo strode casually over to the ladder and peered down. He shone his light down the hole, shrugged, and started down. Kinga looked at us. “They’re on the way, clearing the last corridor. Let’s go.” He began climbing down as well.

  The rest of us were standing at the top of the ladder that descended into the hold, staring down. My side still hurt, but the adrenaline pumping into my body from the knowledge of what we were about to do was winning the battle over substance P.

  “Nobody say anything once we’re down there,” Alvarez told us. “If you talk, we all die.” He pointed at the entrance, and turned around to cover us. I moved to the ladder and Ship put his hand on my shoulder. I looked at him and he nodded in the negative. “Sorry, pal, its infected or bullets. Infected win.” I started my climb, and soon the eight of us were all at the bottom of the ladder shitting ourselves. Remo moved forward slowly, his NVGs on. He looked perfectly calm. Not everybody had night vision, and although the darkness wasn’t absolute, it couldn’t have been easy to see. I wouldn’t know those troubles, as my NVGs were most certainly on. With them, I could see the remains of something that had been wearing a once white lab coat. It clicked its teeth together at our passing. It couldn’t make any other sound as it had no throat at all. It was mostly bones with some gooey shit puddled around it, and it would never move again. It was gross. The signs of the dead were everywhere. Stains of brown, black, and red. Smears on the wall. A bloody handprint. A boot. The typical shit that you would find when the plans of morons trying to study the undead go awry. I had seen it before. Twice.

  We were in a wider corridor than above us, with doors and a large open area in front. Our first mobile deceased came out of the darkness from the right, and Remo threw his fist up, then smoked it with his knife. The heavy dude, who’s name I never did get, (I’m sure you can see where this is going) didn’t stop when the jarhead had thrown up his fist. He just kept walking, staring right at Remo’s back. Had this dumbass never seen one single war or cop movie? Ever? Is there a person in the world who doesn’t know what it means when the hero military guy in front throws his fist up? I mean, it was dark, but he must have seen the fist. Water under the bridge, because as Remo was removing his giant blade from creature number one’s eye, creature number two, which had ninja talents of his own, latched on to Tubby’s arm and pulled in for a snack. Ship brought his machete, which looks like a machete, only bigger, down across the dead guy’s forearms, severing both of them. The thing stumbled back and moaned at the same time the fat guy screamed like a skinny girl. Dozens of other moans and rasps echoed through the area, and shit got real.

  “MOVE!” Kinga whispered very loudly, knowing the jig was up. We all got together in a circle, and began to move forward. A suppressed round came from behind me, then two more. Alvarez was firing into an open door. Remo fired his pistol, also suppressed, forward and I saw a body collapse. I was terrified, but I could see. I remember thinking how scared my half-blind girlfriend and best pal must be when I was grabbed from the side. I brought my arm around fast, whipping the thing laterally, but it didn’t let go. Ship’s size twenty boot lashed out and kicked the thing in the chest. I saw its ribs go, and all kinds of nasty shit coated my gigantic buddy’s foot before he could pull it back. Innards rained down in a foul thick splash. The thing still hadn’t let go of me, but I was able to move such that Kinga shot it in the dome and I threw it to the floor. Another one materialized out of the gloom, a young boy, and I shot it in the face. Two more appeared, reaching, and I began to doubt that coming down here was the best course of action.

  Everybody except for Todd and Hefty Smurf was firing their weapons, and Todd had come up with a broken broom handle, which he thrust into the eye of a skinny thing in a torn dress. I dared a glance to my left, which was forward of our position, and it was one of those times where I had been blissfully ignorant the second before. A crap-ton of the things were less than thirty feet away, and this didn’t account for the other three directions. I smoked
the two coming from our right, and I heard Donna yell, “I’m out!” Followed by Alvarez yelling, “Loading!”

  We would never make the ladder before these things tore us to pieces, so we had to pick another direction. Kinga chose and he moved forward firing into the crowd. We all focused our fire in that direction, and within seconds, the herd had been thinned enough to get through. I knew what Kinga was thinking, and I had seen this action before, but it hadn’t worked out for everybody. We surged headlong into the crowd, shooting, hacking, and stabbing. Part of our problem was we didn’t know where we were going, and half our gang couldn’t see. One of the things put its hands on my girl, and Ship decapitated it. He took out another with a spectacular backswing that sliced the thing’s melon in two from the nose up. It reminded me of a stupid video game I used to play on my buddy’s illegal phone in prison, until the top of the creature’s dome slid off and fell to the floor.

  The fat dude was grappling with an infected behind me when he was tackled by a screamer. Alvarez shot it, but hit it in the shoulder. Remo shot both it and the dead one, the now hysterical guy crying and trying to stand, but slipping in a puddle of viscera. He fell back on his ass in the infected fluids, and was swarmed by four of the things before we could help. His throat was gone before we could fire into them. It looked like we were all going to go out like that. Ship swung his machete, Donna stabbed with her knife, and Todd used his broom like a spear. I shot a mailman, an older woman, a younger guy, missed a guy in scrubs, shot him, and the slide on my SIG stayed back. I fumbled for my last magazine, hitting myself in the boo-boo and yelping. Ship must have thought they had me, because he effortlessly lifted me off of my feet with one hand and pulled me to him. That hurt worse than when I had hit myself. I heard a weapon clatter to the ground, turned to see Remo had dropped his pistol and had that little pump shotgun of his aimed into the crowd. The bass boom of that thing echoed throughout the hold, and I saw two infected drop as he jacked another round. I slammed my last pistol mag home, and fired into the face of something that had gotten close.