I squeeze off three more rounds, dropping two more Draugar. When the next two trip over their fallen brethren and fall to the deck, I chance a look back and see Talbot coming over the rail. The ship between us and the cruise liner is a medium-size freighter, its deck covered with a patchwork of red, yellow, and blue metal shipping containers. It’s the second-largest ship in the floating island, its hull ten feet higher than our current position. It’s going to take all of our summer-camp teamwork to scale the wall.
“Go ahead!” I shout.
“We’re not going without you,” Willem replies.
Jakob fires his shotgun four times. The schuck-chuk-boom of each pump-action shot is a satisfying sound, as is the resulting effect. Six more zombies drop, pinning the two that fell. But all he’s done is bought Willem more time to argue with me.
“Go, Willem. Now!” I move away from him, around the bodies, firing off six more shots. Only three of the undead go down with this volley, but my goal is to distract more than kill. The emerging horde focuses on me as I reload my handgun again.
Just two more magazines and the second gun, I remind myself. At this rate, my ammo will be spent long before I reach the cruise ship. If I reach the cruise ship.
Willem moves to the starboard bow with Jakob and Talbot. None of them say a word. I’ve made my gamble, and like it or not, they need to see it through. As I head down the port side, I see Willem shoving Jakob up the side of the container ship. Jakob grabs the rail and is helped up by Willem shoving his feet from below.
They’re going to make it, I think. A groan turns me around. Three zombies emerge from a side door, cutting me off. They’re not zombies, I remind myself. They’re Draugar. They’re smart.
I fire at them, nearly point-blank. Their parasite-laden brains spray against the beige wall. “Not so smart now.”
More shuffling feet and groaning voices emerge from the side hall. I’m not exactly Einstein right now, either. As though to confirm my assessment of my own mental capacity, Draugar round the corner on the deck ahead. The deck behind me is already thick with shambling men—a collection of men with blood-soaked beards, cold-weather gear, and vacant white eyeballs. And still more are approaching the exit just ahead.
I look over the rail and find the vessel below overrun with living dead, reaching up for me. A staccato burst of assault rifle fire pulls my eyes up. Klein has just mowed down a group of zombies trying to board the Raven. Even more are headed their way. The collective has targeted them as well. But that’s not my concern. The horde about to tear me limb from limb is a much more pressing issue. One I can’t possibly defend against.
So I don’t. I tuck the gun into my waistband behind my back. With Draugar just feet away in every direction, I decide to follow the only path left available to me.
Up.
The deck above is just seven feet higher, less if I can get to the top of the rail. The port rail wobbles slightly as I climb it, and I nearly spill into the mosh pit of undead waiting below, but the rusty metal holds and I regain my balance. Channeling my inner Michael Jordan, I bend at the knees and spring up, reaching for the deck above. My hands clasp the freezing-cold lower rail of the upper deck, but now I’m dangling in front of the Draugar like meat in a butcher’s shop.
I pull hard, loosening the cracking, bubbled yellow paint on the rail. A shower of sharp flakes falls onto my face, stinging my eyes. I clench my eyes shut and grunt as I swing a leg up onto the upper deck.
I’m going to make it, I think, pulling myself up more quickly. But then my lower leg is snagged. Something is pulling at it. I nearly lose my grip, but knowing I’ll be torn to pieces if I fall inspires me to hold on tight. I kick out with my stuck foot and connect with something hard. But I’m not kicking a person who can be stunned, I’m kicking a Draugr that couldn’t care less.
With one arm wrapped around the rail, I reach back for my gun and pull it out. When I turn to take aim, I see the Draugr that has me. He’s a long-haired, thick-bearded fellow who looks like he should be hugging trees somewhere. Instead, he’s hugging my foot. His mouth opens wide as he lunges forward. His jaws squeeze tight and his teeth grind, clamping down hard on my foot. Pain lances through my body, along with the knowledge that I might be a dead woman walking.
This is it. My worst fear made reality.
A Draugr. I’m going to be a Draugr.
And if that’s true—if I’m infected with one of those parasitic bastards—the next shot I take will be through my own skull.
32
A lifetime spent with a limp is better than having to shoot myself in the head, so I lower the barrel of my handgun dangerously close to my foot and pull the trigger. The Draugr whose teeth are locked on to my foot goes limp, but his mouth doesn’t open. Instead of trying to pull me down, his deadweight is hanging from me. But this time when I kick my foot, there isn’t any resistance. My foot slides from his mouth, and I yank it up out of reach as the other zombies swarm together like two converging armies on the battlefield.
Out of reach, I cling to the rail above the throng and catch my breath. I search the top of my sneaker for punctures but find none. Draugar may be stronger than normal people, and immune to pain, but human teeth are human teeth, and they’re not designed to cut through sneakers. I’ve escaped what I thought was certain death with some bruised toes.
I hear Willem’s voice in the distance, barely audible over the moaning zombie din. “Jane!” He’s on the deck of the container ship. He waves his arms at me. “We made it! Get moving!” He points toward the aft of my vessel. “Go! They’re coming!”
A head floats into view at the back end of the second deck. The Draugar are using the exterior stairs to give chase. Fighting the urge to punt the first one down the staircase, I climb over the rail and run aft, as Willem wanted. At one of the two exterior entrances to the bridge, I open the door, intent on taking a shortcut to the ship’s starboard side. What I find inside slows me down, not because it’s trying to eat or infect me, but because the man inside is fully human.
The man—dressed in some kind of frilly pink and yellow cabaret outfit—cowers away from me. Then he must realize that I’m not here to kill him and shouts, “Go away! Leave me alone!”
“Who are you?” I ask, glancing back to make sure I’m not yet being followed. “What’s your name?”
“Steven,” he says.
I figure the guy is part of some kind of song-and-dance routine performed on the Poseidon Adventure. Either that or the crew of this ship was into some kinky shit. “You’re from the cruise ship?” I ask.
He gives a furtive nod. “I’m a dancer.”
“No shit,” I say, looking at the flowery pom-poms billowing from his lower arms and legs. I reach a hand out to him and say, “Come with me if you want to live.”
I nearly lay on a Schwarzenegger accent but hold back, which is good because the guy is already looking at me cockeyed.
“Seriously,” I say, staring pointedly at the detritus surrounding Steven—wrappers, old water bottles, something gross I can’t identify. I also catch a whiff of human waste. “I can tell you’ve been hiding here for a while, but you can’t anymore. They’re right behind me.”
Steven looks terrified. “They—killed them. Killed them all. I—I can’t.”
Then I say the last thing this joker is expecting. “Suit yourself.” I head for the door, yank it open, and leave without looking back. I’ve got bigger problems to deal with, and dragging around a guy dressed like a fly-fishing lure will attract all sorts of attention anyway.
Once outside the bridge, I look to the right and see what Willem was pointing at. A large anchor lies on the deck. The metal cable attached to it is strung from the top of the rail of this deck to the bottom of the container ship’s main deck. I run to the anchor line and take a look back. With a gasp, I raise my handgun and nearly put a bullet in Steven’s head.
“I can’t believe you just left me!” he says with a whine that makes his outfit se
em fitting.
Of all the people in the world I could have found hiding on this ship, it had to be a cabaret dancer! When I was a kid, the Colonel was roped into going to a Broadway show. Dragged me along for the ride. We both hated it—he was missing a football game and I was missing WrestleMania—and the whole way home he grumbled, “Fucking nancy dancers.” The mantra confused me at the time, but Steven is helping me understand my father’s severe annoyance. My father judged most people he met on how he perceived they would do on the battlefield. Dancers were near the bottom of his draft list, right along with beat poets, landscape painters, and just about everyone in Portland, Oregon, many of whom were my friends.
“Move,” I say, shoving the guy to the side and pulling the trigger twice. The first round strikes the zombie that’s farther away. It falls to the side, folds over the rail, and topples out of view. The second stumbles forward and falls facedown on the deck just a foot from Steven.
He shrieks and jumps back, but that reaction is nothing compared to what he does when he looks down and sees the softball-size exit hole blown in the back of the man’s skull. Inside the hollow is a mash of brains and bone, but the flesh is moving—crawling with parasites. The white worms wriggle out of the dead body, searching for a new host.
Steven waves his hands in front of his chest, making a squeal like the sound I imagine a hyena makes while giving birth. He bounces on his feet like he’s running in place and then leans over the rail and pukes his guts. But even that doesn’t help, because he pukes right into the shredded face of a Draugr reaching up for him.
When he comes back up, Steven is still shrieking. How this guy survived surrounded by all these Draugar is beyond me. Maybe he didn’t, I realize. Maybe he’s like Nate?
“Let me see your eyes,” I say, but he’s in another world. There are more Draugar coming now. Time is short. So I do the only thing I can think of; I haul off and clock the guy in the face. Not hard enough to break anything, but I put enough pepper into the blow to knock the silly out of him. At least for a moment.
He holds his cheek and looks at me, tears in his eyes.
For God’s sake.
I get a good look at his tear-filled blue eyes. No signs of a parasite, but that’s how Nate started, too. “Have you been bit?”
His eyes widen. “Zombies! I knew it!”
I don’t correct him, but I do point my gun at his head.
“No!” he shouts. “I haven’t been bit!”
“Do you remember everything?” I ask, lowering the gun. “Have you had any blackouts? Any missing time?”
“No, nothing like that, I swear.” He points at the turquoise design painted on the hull of the Poseidon Adventure. “I hid in the laundry room for two days. When things quieted down, I came here. Thought they wouldn’t think to look for me here.”
The first thing I realize is that Steven somehow thinks this is about him. Might be some kind of twisted survivor’s guilt. But that’s not what stands out the most. “You hid in a laundry room, and you’re wearing this.” I look over his outfit. “Why?”
With a huff, he tears off his frilly sleeves. “Happy?”
“Not in the slightest,” I say. The sound of approaching Draugar grows louder. I hear the pop of gunfire in the distance. Assault rifles. Handguns. A shotgun. Chat time is over. “You know your way around the Poseidon?”
“Yeah,” he says with a nod. “Been with the dance crew for three years.”
I point my gun at him again and then waggle it at the chain stretched out between the ships. “Get moving.”
He looks at the chain and then at the Draugar waiting below with fear-filled eyes. “I—I can’t.”
I sigh. “Go. Now. Or I’ll shoot you in the knee and leave you here.”
I think he’s about to argue the point, but he proves himself to not be a complete idiot by moving to the anchor chain. Whether I shoot him or not, if he stays here for another minute, he’s zombie food. While Steven works his way out onto the chain, dangling just a foot above the outstretched arms below, I target several Draugar coming at us.
Steven lets out a yelp every time I pull the trigger, but he keeps moving. By the time I slap in my last remaining magazine, he’s halfway across. Despite his frail personality, he’s lithe, muscular, and agile. With his legs wrapped around the chain, he pulls with his arms, sliding quickly across as deftly as any marine. If he wasn’t gussied up like a peacock, the Colonel might even approve.
The chain is thick and will no doubt hold us both, so I tuck my gun into my pants, wrap my cloak over my waist so it doesn’t hang down too low, and slide out onto the chain. Unlike Steven, I have done this before, and despite his head start, I make such quick time that I’ve nearly caught him by the time he reaches the container ship. Climbing aboard from the anchor chain is awkward but made easier when Steven helps pull me up.
“Thanks,” I say, and then, “Shit!” I put my hand atop Steven’s shaved head and push him down before jumping back. The lunging woman topples over Steven’s back and face-plants on the steel deck with a crunch that I think must be her teeth.
Steven is quick to his feet, kicking away from the zombie-woman. His eyes look like they’re about to explode out of his head, but his tightly pursed lips contain his scream—that is, until I take the woman’s hair, lift her head up, and slam it into the deck over and over until I feel her skull give in.
With the nasty business finished, I turn back to Steven and find him gazing at me like I’m frikken Genghis Khan reborn. “Zombies, remember? No reason to hold back on the already dead.”
“Yeah, but, couldn’t you have just tossed her overboard or something?”
I glare at him. “I have anger issues. Plus, they’ve killed a lot of my friends.”
This seems to strike a chord. His fear slips away, replaced by a scowl. “Mine, too.”
Movement behind Steven catches my attention. A mob of Draugar lopes toward us. The way Steven’s mouth drops a little when he looks over my shoulder tells me the situation behind me is similar. The container ship is overrun, I think, and then I notice that while I still hear the occasional rattle of automatic gunfire, I haven’t heard a handgun or shotgun in a few minutes. Did they make it off the ship, or were they overcome?
“This way!” Steven says, proving useful. He’s halfway up a ladder attached to the side of a six-foot-tall container. When he nears the top, he has to leap across to the ladder attached to the end of the container above, but he manages the jump with ease. I follow him up and slide on top long before the horde reaches us.
A field of containers stretches out before us. It’s a vast flat space the size of a football field cut down the middle by a six-foot divide. Relief floods me as I see Willem, Jakob, and Talbot standing on the far side of the divide, but my elation is short-lived. They’re not just standing there, they’re waving at us. Frantically. And shouting something.
Run.
I look back and see at least fifty zombies barreling toward us, white eyes, white tongues, and all. And there are more coming, pouring out of the broken bridge windows above the containers. The worst part is that their formerly incoherent moaning has become a long, drawn-out word, spoken lustfully. “Jaaaane. Jaaane!”
33
Why do they have to make this personal? Fine. I killed one of the Queens. I get it. But why bother with the personal taunts? They’re afraid, I remember. Of me. They’re trying to freak me out. Make me screw up. If there is a Queen on board, it’s probably aware of my progress. The question is, will the Queen find a hole to hide in, or will it fight to the end?
There’s only one way to find out, of course, locate the Queen and kill it. Again.
To do that, I need to survive the next thirty seconds.
The horde closing in on us is moving quickly, but the living dead aren’t exactly spring chickens. They’re strong, sure, but a little less limber than they might have been in life. Of course, these Draugar are primarily seafaring blokes—sailors, fisherman, wh
alers, though I now see the occasional tourist mixed in—and many of them are seriously injured. In fact, it seems like most of them are injured. And I mean hacked, cut, or broken. Not just bites.
Where are all the people who just got bit and turned?
A question for another time. I’m about to tell Steven to run, but the flamboyantly clad man is already dashing across the field of containers, trailing a rainbow blur like a human Nyan Cat.
I give chase. The containers beneath our feet boom like war drums with each footfall but do little to drown out the incessant calling of my name.
Like a gazelle born to jump—or a dancer born to dance—Steven leaps out over the six-foot divide and manages to make it look good. Willem helps slow him on the other side.
“Jane!” The voice is right behind me. I don’t look. Can’t. A single misstep could cost me my life, and the gap is just ten feet away. I see Talbot raise his pistol—the peacemaker—so I expect the report. The high-pitched buzz of the bullet narrowly missing my head, not so much, but I hear a splat that sounds like a watermelon meeting its end at a Gallagher show and know that the nearest zombie has been dispatched.
And just in time. My injured leg protests as I leap over the divide, pulling a shout from my mouth. But then I’m airborne, soaring over a twenty-foot drop. I glance down and see a mob of Draugar. Their white eyes track my progress across the space, mouths open, tongues squirming, arms outstretched.
My foot falls short and catches on the container’s side. Lunging with my arms, I pitch forward. Jakob is there. His big arms catch me, scoop me up, and deposit me back on the container in time to see the rushing horde fall into the gap like a waterfall of undead lemmings. Not one of them attempts to jump the divide.
Most fall straight over the edge, dropping atop the throng below. My ears fill with the sound of snapping bones and a wet splatter of skulls striking the deck below. Some of the Draugar are moving fast enough that they smash their faces against the metal container below my feet. One is even high enough that he attempts to clamp down on the container’s edge, but his teeth shatter and he falls with the rest.
The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) Page 17