Finn was caught off guard by the sudden noise, but he only hesitated for a second. He shoved his spear into the corpse’s eye socket so hard that the tip came out the back.
The wailing stopped as the banshee’s body went limp, taking the tip of Finn’s spear along with it. I dropped mine and closed the distance between us. Finn turned as I wrapped my arms around him and tried not to cry. His body was tense, every muscle flexed.
“Do you… think… others heard?” I stuttered, terrified.
“I don’t know,” he breathed heavily. “I don’t think we should wait around to find out.”
But we didn’t have time to leave, because just then we heard footsteps, and they weren’t the slow, shuffling ones we’d come to expect. Before either of us could react, an extremely skinny corpse came through the main entrance and made straight for us.
It was sprinting.
The corpse was sprinting.
Finn shoved me sideways just as it made contact. It knocked him flat on his back, causing one of the Molotov cocktails to shatter.
“Finn!” I cried as he and the corpse wrestled against each other on the buffet floor. They rolled across the carpet, knocking over several chairs.
I watched in horror as Finn guarded against the sprinter’s snapping jaws with his forearm. Its teeth latched onto him as it tried to tear into his flesh. I bent down and snatched up my spear. I raised it up, but hesitated. They were both moving so much that I might hit my husband by mistake.
Finn pulled his filet knife from its sheath and stabbed at the sprinter’s head. He lashed at its face, causing several deep gashes across the cheeks and forehead, but it continued to thrash on top of him. It was intent on chewing through the layer of duct tape that served as Finn’s only protection. Its thick, black blood oozed from its wounds and onto Finn’s chest.
Fear was warping my sense of time. It seemed like Finn had been fighting for hours when only seconds had gone by. Just when I thought it looked like he was getting the upper hand, the sprinter pushed off of him. It stood up remarkably fast.
My shoulders tightened as its head slowly turned. To me.
The impact was almost instant. I felt myself being pushed backward. I nearly tripped when something solid collided with my back. All I’d managed to do was raise my spear, and the sprinter had impaled itself through the chest as it tried to grab at me. Its outstretched fingers were inches from my face, and they were getting closer. The spear had gone straight through its body, and the corpse was working its way to my end. I pleaded in my mind for it to stop moving. It didn’t.
Just die already! I thought.
The corpse continued its sickening journey, inching slowly as it clawed and scraped at my arms. Its rotten, blood covered teeth were getting closer. I locked eyes with it just as Finn sunk his filet knife into the creature’s temple. The dull, grey eyes stayed open as it collapsed onto the floor, taking my spear along with it.
My breath came out in short bursts as I grabbed onto Finn. We both looked down without speaking.
Its stomach was concave, and the skin on the chest stuck to each and every rib.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my voice high. “Were you bit?” I looked him over, but it was hard to tell how badly he was hurt. There was blood and black sludge all over his front.
Finn shook his head as he raised his forearm. The top layer of duct tape on the sleeve was mangled, but the sprinter hadn’t been able to bite through to the skin. I breathed a sigh of relief as I tightened my grip around his waist.
“So much for them being slow,” he said shakily. His face was ashen.
“We should get going,” I whispered, trying to sound calm. “There are bound to me more coming after all that noise.”
Finn nodded, but neither of us moved. Instead we just stared at the corpse that had nearly killed us.
After a moment he pulled away and handed me his broken spear. “Take mine for now, I’ll fix it later,” he said as he grabbed mine, which, despite being covered in the filth of the corpse, was still sharp.
He started to make his way back toward the mound of bodies we’d taken down. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“We came here for a reason, Lily,” he said as I stepped a little closer to the pile. “If we don’t do it now we might lose our window. Who knows when we’ll get another one?”
My heartbeat raced as we shuffled through every pocket. I took care to avoid the sticky black stains that covered most of their clothing. At any moment a sprinter could burst into the restaurant and be on top of us. I found myself looking in every direction, especially behind. I tried to focus on watching for movement at the main and side entrance, as they were the closest. The passageway that led to the spiral staircase Finn and I used earlier was deserted. It only took a minute for us to sort through the contents of the pile, but it felt like hours. We found four cell phones, two lighters, and a pack of menthol cigarettes.
“You have to love our generation,” Finn mumbled, shaking his head. “Nearly everyone has cell phones now.”
The sprinter was all I could think about as we made our way back. “Why do you think it was so fast?”
Finn shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe the hungrier they are, the quicker they become,” he whispered. We maneuvered around a large sculpture of an athletic looking woman that had somehow been pushed from its pedestal.
“Think about it, the creepers with the big bellies move slow, even for them. The normal ones move a little quicker, and the ones who haven’t fed for the longest are like marathon runners.”
I thought back to the first creeper we’d seen. It seemed to make sense that the full ones would be slower while they digested. But as I thought about it something scary occurred to me. Every corpse on the ship would turn to sprinters once their food source was gone, and we hadn’t seen another living person on the ship since the theater.
How long does it take a corpse to starve?
“That means sooner or later, every corpse around us could be like the one back there,” Finn continued, mirroring my thoughts.
“Mankind would have a hard enough time surviving this if they were just the slow ones,” I breathed. “If they have the ability to run, we don’t stand a chance.”
We managed to make it back to the kitchen without running into anything that wanted to eat us. After barricading the door we wasted no time in checking the phones. The first two were dead, but there was an old, oversized Nokia that was at fifty percent. The fourth was an Iphone that had been turned off. When Finn powered it up he grinned and held it out for me to see; ninety-three percent.
I smiled back as we each took a phone and started walking around the kitchen, looking for a signal.
We didn’t get through today.
No Survivors
August 26th
We spent the first half of the morning trying for a signal. Finn finally got through with the Nokia just as I was about to give up.
He was standing on one of the metallic kitchen tables under a skylight when he suddenly yelled.
“It’s ringing! Lily, it‘s ringing!”
A few seconds later Finn‘s mother was on the line. The connection was full of static, but somehow it held. Even from several feet away, I could hear her burst into tears the second she realized it was him. She couldn’t believe we were both still alive.
Apparently The Wellspring had been all over the news for over a week. The president had even given an official statement regarding the accident, the state of its passengers, and how it was being quarantined. Finn put his mother on speaker after a few minutes so I could hear better.
“Okay Mom, say what you just told me again, Lily is listening now, too.”
His mother’s voice was hoarse, as if she’d recently gotten over being sick. “The president said your ship was attacked by terrorists! He said there was some unknown pathogen or bio-chemical warfare, and the entire ship is contaminated,” she said, her voice shaking.
“A
nd what of the survivors?” Finn asked. “Have they said anything about those still on the ship?”
“Only that there were none! But I never believed them for a second. I knew you weren’t dead!” Mrs. Datson yelled and sobbed at the same time.
“I could feel it in my heart that you were still alive, both of you. The government said they’ve been searching with infrared cameras, and that no one on the ship was alive. Wait… that means… oh my God. I have to tell someone. I have to tell someone before it’s too late! ”
“Mom?” Finn asked, his eyebrows drawing together.
We could hear heavy breathing on the other end as Mrs. Datson tried to catch her breath. “The president… or the military, whichever… they’re going to…”
Seconds passed, but Mrs. Datson had gone silent. A slight buzz of static was the only thing I could hear.
“Going to what?” I cried, almost falling on top of the table Finn was standing on.
“Mom, they’re going to destroy the ship, aren’t they?” Finn asked, closing his eyes.
At first I thought the connection was lost. I was just about to tell Finn to try her again when she responded.
“Yes.”
The word stuck in me like a knife. I stared down at my empty palms as my mind went numb. After all we’d been through, we were going to die anyways.
“They haven’t… us when it’s supposed to… yet,” she continued. The connection was fading.
“They were supposed to bomb the… yesterday, but there’s been so much… from the public that they’ve delayed… until after… makes another address. There are… contaminating the waters… the ship… to be destroyed… airborne. They said… were… bodies… and… birds… to feed on them.”
“Mom I‘m losing you,” Finn said, clearing his throat.
“Listen carefully. We need to conserve battery life on this phone so I’m going to talk quickly. I want you to contact the military, I don’t care how you do it, just get through and tell them you’ve made contact with living survivors on the ship. Make sure to tell them we’re alive and talking, okay? Please don’t forget to say we’re coherent and that we held a conversation with you. Let them know we’re not sick, and that my wife and I need a rescue team sent ASAP, understand?”
“Okay,” she responded. The static was growing louder.
“After you contact the military, I want you to call every news channel you can and tell them about us. Make sure to say we aren’t sick, you’ve contacted the military, and they know we’re here. Even if you can’t get through to the military, I still want you to tell the news channels they know we’re here. That should have them putting pressure on the right people to get us the hell out of here. Call us tonight to give us an update, we‘ll be waiting.”
We lost connection just as we gave her the number to the Iphone in case the Nokia went dead. The static was so bad, we weren’t sure how much she was able to hear, but it was the best we could do. I asked Finn why he didn’t mention all the dead people. He merely shook his head and gave me a solemn look.
“The government might know what’s going on here, but I bet the public doesn’t,” he replied. “If I tell my mother to start screaming about dead people coming back to life, no one will take her seriously. People with a lot of power want our ship destroyed in order to contain this infection. All of those attack helicopters make perfect sense now. They’re patrolling the top decks and making sure no one leaves, or that nothing escapes. Who knows if these things could survive all the way to the mainland, but I bet the military isn’t going to take the chance of even one of them hitting the water.”
I exhaled. “That means if we manage to make it to a lifeboat… they’ll kill us.”
Finn jumped down from the table and slumped into a nearby chair. “They’re not going to risk letting anything off the ship. It’s too bad they don’t know how quickly people turn once they’re infected, otherwise they’d know we were safe. When we were attacked in the theater it only took seconds for people to come back as those things.”
I plopped down on Finn‘s lap. “I wonder if it would even make a difference…”
We didn’t speak again for the rest of the day. Neither one of us wanted to talk about what the next few days would be like. Somehow we were supposed to escape a military quarantined ship with people waiting to shoot anything that moved, all while avoiding corpses that were getting faster by the minute.
August 27th
Mrs. Datson never called last night. We took shifts staying up in case one of the phones rang. After 4:00 a.m. I turned the Nokia off to conserve the battery; it’s at twenty-six percent. I turned the brightness all the way down on the Iphone, so it’s still at eighty-five percent.
I really started to worry after we hadn’t heard anything by this morning. Finn was trying not to show it, as usual, but I knew he was worried too. His mother should’ve called us, even if it was bad news.
“What could be taking so long?” I asked.
“Who knows,” he replied as he stood on the table under the skylight. He’d been there all morning. “We actually have more signal now than we did last night. I’m going to try calling her.”
I held my breath as Finn dialed his mother’s number. After what seemed like an hour his eyes widened, and he slowly lowered the phone.
“What’s wrong?” I breathed. “No answer?”
He looked at the Nokia as if he didn’t understand what he was holding. His eyes were vacant. “It just goes straight to voicemail, like it’s turned off.”
My pulse quickened as several unpleasant scenarios flashed in my head. Did something happen to her because of us? Was it the same people not letting us off the ship?
“What does that mean?” I asked, somehow managing to sound calm.
“I don’t know, Lily,” he said flatly. “It could just mean she has no signal, or we are losing the connection as we call, I don’t know. Guess the only thing we can do is wait and give her more time. If she doesn’t call in the next few hours we can try calling someone else. What do you think?”
I nodded as he grabbed two apples from a sack we‘d found in the pantry. “I keep having to remind you to eat,” he said as he tossed one to me.
I rolled my eyes as I took a bite. The apple was starting to turn, but it still tasted all right. Hunger had taken a backseat since dead people started trying to eat us.
The Nokia went off just before noon. Finn and I were looking for air freshener to combat the freezer full of rotting food when we heard its ring tone from the other side of the kitchen. I started toward it, but Finn bounded toward the phone and picked it up first. He quickly put it on speaker phone so we could both hear.
“Mom!” Finn answered excitedly.
There was no answer, only a low static.
“Hello?” I asked after ten seconds crawled by.
“Am I speaking to Mr. and Mrs. Datson?” asked a raspy man’s voice.
His voice had a degree of authority to it, and I immediately thought military. Finn and I exchanged confused looks before he decided to answer.
“Yes, but who is this?” he replied, “and where is my mother? Why is her phone off?”
“Have you or your wife been in contact with anyone else since yesterday?” The man asked, ignoring Finn’s questions.
Finn glared at the phone as he slammed his fist on the table.
“Yes, we’ve called dozens of random, reliable people and told them all what’s really happening here!” he yelled furiously. “The bodies… they turn within minutes after being bitten. We are NOT infected! Save us!”
We both waited for a response, but the phone was eerily silent. The static had stopped, but the timer on the call was still going. Finn was just about to hang up when a metallic sound came from the other end. It lasted only a few seconds before changing to a lower tone. I gripped the edge of the table so hard my knuckles started turning white. The noise changed to a higher pitch again, and then tapered off into silence.
�
�What the…” I began to say, but I stopped when Finn chucked the phone toward the kitchen wall. It shattered as he turned and sped toward one of the back tables. He snatched up our armored chef coats and threw one in my direction. “Put it on, now!” he yelled, scaring me.
“Finn, what’s going on? What was that?”
“Lily, we have to go. Now!” He shouted as he grabbed his replenished Molotov cocktail belt and quickly fastened it around the waist of his chef coat.
“Where?” My adrenaline surged as I put my jacket on.
“We’ve got options, it’s a big ship,” Finn answered as he slung the canvas duffle bag we’d found in the supply closet over his shoulder. We’d piled fruits and cans into it in case we had to leave in a hurry.
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