Plague of the Dead

by Z. A. Recht

  “Well, I hope something happens soon. I’d like to get off this ship and stretch my legs on dry land for a change. I bet half the ship’s with me on that idea.”

  “Let’s not go rushing off to shore,” Sherman replied. “At least until we’re invited, that is.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that they know anything about what’s going on back in good old North America, eh?”

  “They know as much as we do, or less,” Sherman said. “I’m sure our communication problems with home aren’t what we think they are. We’ve been getting bulletins from almost every other corner of the world for the past couple days. Did I tell you the Brits managed to fight back an outbreak in London?”

  “No,” Denton said, surprised. “Good for them. Gotta wonder how long that’ll last, though.”

  “They’ve got a pretty good position on that island, just like the people here,” Sherman said, folding his arms across his chest. “Don’t jinx ’em. Let’s hope for the best.”

  From behind Sergeant Major Thomas announced, “Sir! Radio contact from the island, sounds American. All he’d say was ‘take me to your leader.’ Sounds like Hal, sir.”

  Sherman grinned. Hal Dorne was a bit of a crackpot, but professional under duress. Sherman had served with him decades ago, before the man had retired and left America entirely, preferring the solitary paradise of the islands. He was a drinker and sometimes prone to childlike acts of mischievousness.

  “Tell him it’s me, Thomas. I’ll be on the bridge in half a minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sherman left Denton leaning on the ship’s railing, looking out over the clear blue waters.

  “It’s a shame,” Denton said to himself. “Us being here, in a place like this, and all that shit’s just lurking over the horizon. Like the eye of a storm. And to think that the only reason we’re here is to gear up to go rushing back out into it.”

  He sighed, squinting his eyes at the people on the shoreline in the distance, with their sullen movements and cold stares.

  “A shame,” he repeated softly. “Damn shame.”

  0908 hrs_

  “We’ve stopped,” remarked Scott, sitting up suddenly.

  “Whuzzat?” mumbled Brewster, pulling away the thin wool blanket he’d been lying under away. “Stopped? Where?”

  “I don’t fuckin’ know,” said Scott. “Do I look like I have x-ray vision to you?”

  “You don’t look like much of anything to me,” Brewster shot back.

  “Damn, these mattresses are thin,” Darin said, pulling himself to a seated position from one of the bunks in the quarantined room. “My back aches like hell.”

  “Maybe it’s the virus,” taunted Decker, slowly flipping over cards as he played a round of solitaire in the corner of the room. “Next’ll be the fever.”

  “Fuck you, cockbreath,” Darin said, throwing the finger to Decker.

  “Knock it off,” said Brewster, rubbing his temples. “At least you got a bunk, Darin. I’m sleeping on the damn floor here. You want to talk about a back ache? My whole fucking body aches.”

  “ . . . And we’re still stopped,” Scott repeated, annoyed at being forgotten.

  “Yeah, I noticed it a couple hours ago,” Decker said, looking down at his cards. “And before that the hum in the ship was a lot quieter. I think we’ve stopped for repairs.”

  “The whatthefuck?” Brewster said. “The hum? What the fuck is the ship’s hum?”

  “You know, that noise inside the ship you’d have heard if you weren’t constantly flapping your jaw, Private. The ship’s generators and engines.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said one of the room’s other occupants. “Where do you stop in the middle of the ocean to do repairs? A floating service station?”

  “Maybe it was—” Darin started, but Brewster interrupted.

  “—Fuck this honkey theory shit. Let’s just find out.”

  He hopped to his feet and stepped over to the door. He raised his fist and banged on it, a quick series of blunt strikes. After a moment a weak voice was heard through the metal, shouting to be heard but dulled by the partition.

  “Yeah, what?!”

  “What’s the story?!” Brewster shouted back, certain his voice sounded just as distant to the guard on the other side.

  “What?!”

  “The story, man! We’re stopped! Where are we?! What’s going on?!”

  “The islands!” came the reply. “We’ve got a busted fuel pump! Sherman knows a guy here who can fix it, or something! Rumor says we’re getting shore leave!”

  “Shore leave?!” Brewster shouted. “You motherfuckers are going out to get drunk and nail the native girls and we’re stuck in this fucking meat locker?! Shit, man, if that doesn’t beat all I don’t know what does! Join the army, they said! See the world, they said! Motherfuckers!”

  “If we went out there and we were infected—” Decker started.

  “Yeah, yeah, we’d infect the island and die and shit. I know,” Brewster said. “Spare me.”

  0938 hrs_

  Hal Dorne was a Master Sergeant, US Army, retired—and he knew it. The fishing dinghy he brought alongside the USS Ramage wasn’t his own, but the fisherman who owned it owed him a favor, and he’d called it in to score a ride. He pulled the faded baseball cap he wore from his balding pate and waved up at the deck of the ship in front of him.

  “Frank! How the hell are you?!”

  Sherman’s face peered over the side rails of the vessel, a wide grin spread across his features.

  “Not too bad, considering, Hal.”

  “I’ll say. You’re alive. That’s about as much as anyone can ask for today. What can I do you for?”

  “Never one for small talk, were you?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve got a daiquiri and a beautiful lady waiting for me back at the shop and I’d like to get back to both as fast as I can,” Hal said from the dinghy, shielding his sunburned face from the sky with his upheld baseball cap.

  “We’ve got ruptured fuel pumps, Hal. We’re trying to make it back home ASAP, but on half steam it’ll take us a lot longer. Think you can fix it?”

  “Well, she ain’t an Abrams, but I’ll give her a shot. Do I owe you any favors?”

  “Not that I can remember,” Sherman said. “You thinking of charging me?”

  Hal shot Sherman a lopsided grin. “I always charge my customers, Frank. Retired, remember? Pension doesn’t pay the bar tab. How much depends on whether I owe you any favors. Seeing as I don’t, what have you got to offer?”

  “Hell, Hal. I’d pay you cash, if you think it’ll still be worth anything by the time you get around to spending it.”

  “Cash? Keep it. I want parts and equipment. We’ll barter. Here’s the deal—I’ll see what I can do for your fuel pumps if you fork over, say, about a hundred gallons of fuel for our generators, some assorted tools, a new radio—and weapons.”

  “Goddamn, Hal, you drive a hard bargain,” Sherman said. “I can’t authorize the tools, fuel, or radio, but I can get you weapons. Small arms be okay? Pistols? We’re low on rifle ammunition.”

  “No deal without the fuel and radio.”

  “I didn’t say we couldn’t get those, Hal, I just said I can’t authorize ’em. I’m not the captain of this ship. Franklin will have to authorize that.”

  “Well, fetch him out here, let’s get rolling!”

  “He’s on the bridge trying to contact the mainland again. He’ll be out shortly. Want to come aboard and have a look at the pumps?”

  “Oh, you can’t authorize a barter but you can invite me on his little boat, is that it?” Hal said with a grin, reaching out to the netting dropped over the side of the ship.

  “That’s how it works today, Hal. Climb on up.”

  Hal was nimble for a man of almost sixty years, and pulled himself up the cargo netting with little trouble, dropping onto the deck of the Ramage and firmly shaking Sherman’s hand.
/>   “Welcome aboard the USS Ramage,” Sherman told him. “This way to the engine room.”

  The pair made their way into the bowels of the ship, heading towards engineering. Hal surveyed the corridors as they walked, taking careful note of the pockmarked bulkheads and occasional dried bloodstain coating the otherwise pristine deck.

  “Looks like you guys have seen a little action,” Hal said carefully.

  “We had an incident on the way here,” Sherman replied. “We’re ferrying refugees. One of them . . . got sick. It spread quick. We managed to control it. We lost a few good men and women, though.”

  “I gotta tell you, Frank, the people here won’t take kindly to you if they even suspect you’re carrying the virus. You should probably keep that under wraps—tight wraps, if you take my drift.”

  “I don’t blame them, Hal. Half the world’s been contaminated. They’ve got every right to be suspicious of outsiders. If it’d make them feel more comfortable, we’ll all stay onboard.”

  “Aw, hell, Frank, that’s no fun at all. Of course you can bring them ashore. You’d have a mutiny on your hands if you tried to sail away from a paradise like this without letting the boys stretch their legs a little. We’ve got a great little cantina in town. Tell ‘em to bring stuff to trade—most folks around here already think the world’s done. Cash’ll be useless. I gotta admit, I feel the same way. Just tell your guys to stay off the subject of the virus, keep out of trouble, and they’ll be fine.”

  “Can you really speak for the whole island like that?” Sherman asked, pulling open the heavy door that led to the ship’s engine room and letting Hal enter first.

  “No,” Hal scoffed, stepping into engineering. “But I can speak for most of it. There are a few bad eggs, like anywhere, who want protection at any cost. They think we should just shoot every outsider who drops by, but there’s no future in an attitude like that.”

  “I completely agree,” came a voice from ahead of them. Denton was sitting near the broken fuel pumps, scratching notes on a legal pad. His camera lay by his side, back open, film removed. “Sorry for interrupting. I was just getting some work in order.”

  “Not a problem, Denton. Hal Dorne, Sam Denton. Hal’s retired Army, worked with him before. Denton’s a photographer. You’ve probably seen his work in the papers.”

  “Not really, actually. Paper delivery out here isn’t daily,” Hal said, shaking Denton’s hand.

  “So you’re the mystery mechanic who’s going to get us moving again?” Denton asked.

  “That’s right. Though why you’d want to leave, I don’t know. If I were you all, I’d pull up a parking spot and find a stretch of beach to call my own. No better place to live out the end of the world than the tropics.”

  “You know,” Denton replied, a distant smile on his face, “I was thinking almost the same thing earlier.”

  “Anyway,” Sherman said, kicking the fuel pump with a dusty boot, “Think you’ll get her ticking again?”

  Hal had barely even looked in the direction of the pump since he had entered, but he fixed Sherman with a gaze and answered, “Hell yes. She’ll be on her feet sometime tonight.”

  “Don’t you want to look it over before you make an estimate?” Denton asked, incredulous.

  “If Hal says it’ll take him less than a day, then that’s how long it’ll take him,” Sherman told him. “He never let me down before. Unless he’s slipping. You slipping, Hal?

  “Only when I’m drunk.”

  “There you have it,” Sherman said.

  “Are you drunk?” Denton asked, a grin creasing his face.

  “A little,” Hal said with a chuckle. “As it stands, you’re in luck. What you’ve got running here is the General Electric LM 2500-30 gas turbine—real nice model, if you ask me. Little prissy sometimes, but she’s a workhorse. How many you have total? Three?”

  “Four,” Sherman said. “Broken pumps on two.”

  “Huh,” Hal murmured. He walked around the power plant, mumbling to himself quietly. When he’d finished a circuit, he stopped, nodded once, and turned to face Denton and Sherman. “I’m going to need some manpower to go fetch the parts you’re going to need from my shop. Some racquet-club yuppie on a long cruise showed up in his thirty-million-dollar custom yacht about half a year ago. It had a busted power plant just like this one. I replaced it with an inferior model and kept the broken plant. Its pumps are fine. We’ll use them.”

  “How much did you take him for?” Denton asked.

  “What?”

  “The yuppie in the yacht. How much did you take him for?”

  Hal chuckled. “I don’t take cash. I barter. I got myself a brand damn new Jacuzzi, fresh out of that guy’s yacht cabin. Can’t really enjoy retirement in the tropics without a hot tub, right?”

  Denton laughed. “You’re a terrible liar. You only have a generator on that island, no electricity. How can you power a hot tub?”

  “I said there were two generators, Sam,” Sherman said. “One of them powers the radio.”

  “The other one’s mine. And it powers my hot tub and mini-fridge. Can’t really enjoy paradise without cold beer and ice, either,” Hal said.

  Denton cast Sherman a curious glance.

  “You run with a strange crowd, Frank.”

  “I like to think so. Makes life that much more interesting.”

  “Yeah, yeah—let’s get started,” Hal said. “Got a crew chief I can talk to? Let’s get him to do some prep work on this beast while I head back to my shop and get the parts I’ll need.”

  “I’ll have Franklin send him down,” Sherman said.

  “Need a hand getting the parts here?” Denton asked.

  “Yes, actually. A pair of hands, more precisely,” Hal said. “And a driver. I don’t have any way to strap ‘em into the truck. We’ll have to ride in the back and hold ’em in.”

  “Any deuce drivers left?” Denton asked Sherman.

  “One, I think. He’s quarantined. Or maybe two.”

  “Oh, Private Brewster,” Denton said, nodding his head. “Better to just take someone else then, anyway.”

  “Troublemaker?” Hal commented.

  “No,” Denton replied. “He hasn’t made any trouble since I met him. Trouble just finds him pretty easily.”

  “Who are we taking, then?” Hal asked.

  “I’ll send Thomas,” Sherman said after a moment’s thought.

  “Sergeant Major Thomas?” Hal said, curiosity in his eyes.

  “Command Sergeant Major these days, actually. He still answers to Sergeant Major.”

  “Hell,” Hal scoffed. “He’ll probably chew my ass for being out of uniform and drunk on duty.”

  “I’ll remind him you’re retired,” Sherman said, rolling his eyes.

  1013 hrs_

  The boat ride to shore was swift, and the captain of the tiny vessel, a thin, sun-bronzed fisherman who looked to be around thirty, said nothing to either Denton or Thomas during the journey. He cast nervous glances at them as he tied the boat off to one of the wooden docks jutting out over the water in the inlet.

  “Get the feeling we’re not exactly treasured guests?” Denton whispered to Thomas, who had cast off his BDU shirt in the heat. The old sergeant folded his arms across his t-shirt clad chest and grunted in reply.

  “What do you expect? They think we’ve brought the virus with us. If I were them I’d shoot us.”

  Denton shifted uneasily. “Yes, well, let’s not give anyone any ideas, eh?”

  Hal had already clambered up onto the dock, and the fisherman looked as if he wished Denton and Thomas would follow suit quickly. The pair knew when to take the hint, and pulled themselves onto the sturdy pier. Thomas dusted his hands off and looked around the little town.

  “Nice enough place, Hal. Where’s yours?”

  “Around the coast a ways,” Hal said, starting down the pier towards the sandy shore, beckoning for the two to follow him. “There are a few trails cut through this island
.”

  Hal led them to a rusted, paintless pickup truck parked in the sand near the head of the beach. The body was patched in multiple places with scrap metal, spot-welded here and there as if they were afterthoughts, and the engine complained loudly when Hal turned the key, but it caught shortly and purred in tune when he shifted and accelerated.

  “She’s not much to look at, old Bessie,” Hal said, patting the window frame of the truck with a heavy palm. “But she gets the job done year after year.”

  With Denton perched in the bed, holding onto the roof of the cab, and Thomas lounging in the passenger seat, Hal took them through the village towards the thick forest beyond. Denton took the chance to snap a few pictures, steadying himself with one hand as the other brought up his camera. It still amazed him that the rest of the world was busy fending off what could be the enemy that will deal a mortal blow, but here, life went on more or less as usual. He captured the image of a pair of old men sitting on stools under a thatched canopy, drinking liquor the color of ripened bananas from cracked glasses. He managed one of a storeowner chasing a trio of kids from his shop, and another of a lone woman dozing with a wide hat pulled down over her eyes, lying under a tree, before the truck slipped into the foliage and obscured the town from view.

  A deep pothole jarred Denton from his reverie and sent him scrambling for a firm hold on the truck.

  “Jeee-sas!” Denton cursed. “Got anything bigger to hit on this island, Hal? I’m still holding on back here!”

  “These trails aren’t built for comfort!” Hal shot back.

  “That’s good, because I’m not comfortable,” Denton said, kneeling to help banish the sudden feeling of insecurity. The truck jolted off a rock a moment later, and affirmed his caution.

  “Don’t worry, we’re nearly there,” Hal said.

  “Already?”

  “Small island,” Hal replied. “Besides, it helps to be close to town, in case I need beer. There it is, through the trees on the left.”

  Denton tried to look in the direction Hal was pointing, but couldn’t see anything through the leaves. Thomas apparently had a better vantage point.