Tom felt all-too-well-known anger rising.
“I am fine. Just tell me where my daughter is.” He swatted away the nurse’s hand and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, ignoring every joint, muscle and limb, every ounce of his body screaming in agony.
“You don’t look so good.” Tom heard the doctor say before the sharp prick of a needle sent fire through his veins.
Then darkness returned.
◆◆◆
“Dad…”, “Dad?”….”Daad!”
Comforting like a lullaby through the heavy blanket of the sedative, Anna’s voice echoed through the cotton-wool wrapped recesses of his mind. He smiled, eyes closed, not daring to open them lest this was but a barbiturate-induced illusion. Anna’s hand brushed gently through his hair, before grabbing his hand, her touch giving him all the reassurance he needed.
“Hey, little monkey.” Tom smiled softly as their eyes met.
Tears ran down Anna’s face, and she rested her face in the palm of his hand, letting the warmth of his touch wash away her fears.
“I thought you were…”, Anna whispered, but Tom softly placed a finger over her lips.
“I will never leave you. I promised, remember?”
They embraced, and Anna’s body finally stopped quivering as her dad’s arms wrapped around her.
“So you have finally decided to grace us with your presence.” Another voice piped up from somewhere in the background, near what looked like a heavy bulkhead door.
His eyes still adjusting, Tom made out what looked like Nadia’s athletic frame a few feet away. A gentle punch on his shoulder and slap on the back confirmed it.
“Good to have you back!” Nadia grinned, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth as usual.
The nurse, still in the room, took a step forward to object, but one stern glance from the non-nonsense Russian had her rethink and pivot on the spot, instead going back to re-arranging a tray of surgical instruments.
Tom released Anna from his hug and rubbed his head still pulsing with the pain of what he could feel was a sizeable lump right above his temple.
“A few inches lower, and you’d be wearing wings now.” Nadia inspected the injury and winced at the line of stitches visible through the gauze.
Meanwhile, Tom gave himself a once-over, padding down his legs and arms, before poking his ribs and abdomen. Apart from the dull pain emanating from his joints and muscles, there didn’t seem to be anything too serious, and he breathed a sigh of relief, the oxygen filling his lungs quickly lifting whatever fog still clouded his mind.
“Where are the others? Mama S? Amadou?” Tom asked with trepidation, cradling a comforted Anna in his arms.
“Getting some fresh air topside. God knows it stinks down here.” Nadia dragged a long puff from her cigarette and, with a vexatious look, blew the smoke in the nurse’s direction before nodding towards the heavy metal door. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Tom struggled to his feet and swayed unsteadily as he tried to regain balance.
“But the doctor said for you to…” The nurse again wanted to interject, but in the end, just shrugged and left the room.
“Do I sense some animosity here?” Tom couldn’t help but notice Nadia’s angered glance as she watched the nurse’s every step.
“Tell you about it later. For now, let’s get you up there. The others are eager for news.” Nadia grinned and offered her shoulder to lean on, and Tom gladly accepted.
The outside assaulted Tom’s senses in a rush of salty Indian Ocean breeze and bright midday sunlight as soon as the three made it topside and through the last port onto what looked like a more secluded part of a large upper deck. Tom felt dizzy at the expanse of the blue ocean below them, extending into the distance and beyond the horizon. He braced himself against the bulkhead, trying to steady his feet against the slow but incessant sway of what he could now see was an enormous vessel.
“Haven’t got your sea legs yet, have you?” It was Amadou who first stepped forward out of the shadow of a tall stack nearby, immediately embracing him in his best attempt at a bear hug.
“Ouch. Easy tiger, easy!” Tom writhed in pain, trying to wiggle out of the wiry Congolese’s iron-like enfold.
“Gone a bit brittle, have we?” Amadou backed off and inspected his friend by jovially poking him in various places.
“Just a bit.” Tom conceded, and his smile widened as he watched an unmistakable silhouette come up a ladder from the deck below.
As always, Mama Samaki huffed and puffed with each step, looking more like a mountaineer as she clung to the railing until she finally reached the top.
“Don’t they normally have elevators in these things?” She half complained, half chuckled. “Come here, my Mzungu. Let me give you one of Mama Samaki’s special hugs!”
She hobbled forward, her fleshy arms extended wide, and Tom nearly fell backward as he clumsily tried to avoid her oncoming embrace.
“I think we’ll save that for another time.”
Amadou stepped in at the last minute, involuntarily landing in her arms that closed around him like a pair of Anacondas. Now standing nose to nose with him, Mama S frowned.
“Sorry, Mama S, but it looks like our friend is still a little worse for wear,” Amadou explained, and she released him, her shoulders sagging in disappointment.
“I can’t believe you are all here. We are all here.” Tom changed the subject and looked around the immediate vicinity. “By the way, where exactly are we?”
The fact that they were on a rather large ship was unmistakable, but whose vessel it was and how they got onto it was still a mystery to him.
“I think you better sit down for a moment, just until you come right.” Nadia pointed to a set of deckchairs, and Tom gratefully accepted the invitation.
The deck was covered in green maritime paint, and the outer bulkheads sported a pristine white paint job, interrupted by large cabin windows at regular intervals. Further towards the ship’s midsection, a row of neatly tied-up lifeboats hung over the side, waiting for deployment. All in all, the vessel’s appearance was everything but naval; in fact, for all intents and purposes, it felt like they were on some kind of a cruise ship.
“You are not wrong,” Nadia noticed Tom’s puzzled look. “Welcome to the MS Nautica, the world’s only floating 5-star refugee camp.”
“The MS Nautica?” Tom had trouble following.
“Yep, you heard right,” Nadia grinned. “We are on a cruise ship, courtesy of Uncle Sam. From what I heard, they were sitting in the Seychelles, getting ready for another voyage down the African East Coast when the navy confiscated and took over the whole thing.”
“It’s five-star accommodation with a 1-star canteen”, Mama Samaki lamented, dropping herself into one of the chairs, which responded with a worrying creak.
“So, where are we headed then?” Tom was still struggling to put the pieces together.
“For now? Nowhere fast,” Nadia frowned. ”According to the kitchen crew, this ship has been seconded as the humanitarian tail end to an American Strike Group. Kind of a humanitarian token to soften the blow of whatever is about to go down, back where we’ve just come from.”
“They’re going to bomb the heck out of this place, that’s what is going to go down,” Amadou chimed in.
“I mean, it makes sense, right? Why waste troops that will only end up joining the enemy when they die. Instead, why not get rid of Al-Shabab and the dead in one go by blowing both to smithereens.” Nadia nodded in agreement.
“So for once, the rats are coming aboard opposed to leaving the sinking ship.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Tom couldn’t help but feel pangs of unease, but decided it was probably best not to say anything until he had caught up with everything that had happened since things had gone dark. He changed the subject.
“How long was I actually out for?”
“Just on two days, give or take,” Anna looked up at h
er dad, the worry of the last 48 hours still etched on her pale face.
“We weren’t sure you’d snap out of it at all, actually,” Amadou blurted out, earning him a scolding look from Mama Samaki, who had done her best to keep Anna’s spirits up throughout.
“Ahem…I mean, we knew, of course, that it was just a matter of time…” Amadou hemmed clumsily.
“In any case, we are glad you’re back. We can talk about all that other stuff another time”, Nadia came to the rescue. “You must be hungry.”
Tom hadn’t thought about food for what seemed like an eternity, but upon Nadia’s mention, his stomach responded with an audible growl.
“That’s settled then,” Mama Samaki slapped her thighs and pushed herself off the deckchair.
They returned to the bulkhead door. Their steps echoed metallically as they followed a plain, narrow passageway before laying below following an improvised sign pointing towards the mess deck. The grey paint job covering the steel structure of the ship’s interior gave it a distinctly bland look.
“Seems rather austere for a cruise ship,” Tom remarked.
“Apparently, this is the Quarantine Section. Or also formerly known as Crew Quarters. Self-contained and easily separated from the rest of the ship”, Nadia shrugged.
“Quarantine, huh?” Tom wondered out loud. “Did they say how long they are planning to keep us here?”
“Nope. Not a word. Could be a week, could be two, I am guessing?” Amadou looked at the others for confirmation but received nothing but blank looks in return.
“As usual, we’re mushrooms.” Tom shook his head in disbelief, and he grabbed the railing of the ladder leading further below.
“Mushrooms?” Mama Samaki tried to follow the conversation.
“Yep, mushrooms: feed ‘em shit and keep ‘em in the dark,” Nadia grinned.
As a pilot in South Sudan, often flying American and French operators without any papers or flight charts at all, she had been there herself more than once.
The next deck revealed a large space with neat rows of foldable tables and plastic chairs, the kind of chow hall bereft of anything even remotely enticing or comfortable. More bare, grey metal walls plus a long stainless steel tray line at the far end, where steam rose lazily from mostly empty bain-marie’s. The handful of chafing trays actually containing any kind of food were tended to by a crew in Hazmat suits. Sweating profusely, with their visors fogged up, they looked as miserable as they likely felt beneath the rubber. A few civilian helpers were hovering around the kitchen further in, wearing cruise ship uniforms. The group joined a small queue of fellow quarantinees, their grey military-issue overalls, and shuffling gait more reminiscent of a county jail than a medical facility.
“A far cry from the Love Boat,” Tom quipped as a rapidly emptied ladle of sloshy liquid only partially hit its target and sent the hot brown contents dripping from his tray.
“You’re welcome,” growled the melting man from inside his yellow suit on the other side of the line.
The group took a seat at the farthest end of the room, out of earshot of both fellow passengers and crew alike. Mama Samaki was barely able to contain her disgust for what they were being served. The others ate a spoonful or two but pushed their trays away soon after.
“It’s not the Ritz, but at least no one’s biting you on the ass around here.” Nadia stared at her tray, running her spoon through the soupy liquid in endless circles.
“Are you sure about that?” Amadou countered.
He had heard rumours the day before, about one of the new arrivals having turned during the night on account of a bite that had gone undetected upon admission. Somehow and despite all the hatches being dogged down from the outside at night, the corpse had managed to get out and wander the passageways until it was able to sink its teeth into the poor guy doing his rounds on early morning watch, the man’s screams raising more than just alarm bells in the process.
“There is a reason why we’re locked down this end, you know?” Tom thought out aloud, force of habit already shifting his focus towards devising a Plan B.
After all, it would only be a matter of time before this thing would take over the ship just as it already had so much of the continent and he’d be darned if he’d allow Anna and him to get caught up in the middle,
“Here comes the doc.”
Amadou pointed at the entrance to the mess deck, where a couple of nurses were busy readying a table for the sole physician’s daily rounds. Examination on admission, by all accounts, was but a casual affair, with surprisingly little interest shown in patient history or status beyond acute and rather obvious bites. In most cases, the overworked staff spent but a few minutes with new arrivals, mainly focused on addressing minor ailments and complaints. At the end of the day, Tom figured it was probably easier to just lock up and observe in quarantine than it was to set up and operate a lab to test each and every survivor. Going by the number of decks, the ship could easily hold in excess of 1200 passengers, perhaps even twice that number in an emergency scenario like this. Given the rapid spread of the disease, Tom couldn’t help but wonder whether there were actually that many civilians left along the coast and further inland. Between security forces, rogue military units, gangs, starving predators, and the millions of ravenous dead, his group had beaten overwhelming odds to make it half as far as they had come. In any case, from what the others had heard, numbers of newcomers had dwindled to a handful here and there in the last week or so; in part, they suspected, because many ended up in the hands of the butchers back at the military research facility or, more recently, were either being blown to pieces in terrorist attacks and retaliatory missile strikes, or cut off from coastal access by the hordes of corpses invading what had previously been a corridor of safe passage.
From what Nadia told him, their group had been more than lucky to be picked up by a reconnaissance unit sent out to report on enemy numbers following the initial containment strikes. Had it not been for Tom’s British passport and Anna’s pleas not to abandon her ‘family’ winning over the entire unit’s hearts, they would now all be wandering the streets of Mombasa alongside their undead comrades. They had thus been spared the kind of desperate search of so many others following the instructions of the airdropped leaflets, only to find out most of the receiving centres had been closed down or overrun.
Instead, courtesy of a kind platoon leader, they had been flown out of their predicament and dropped directly aboard the Nautica, quite possibly saving Tom’s life in the process. The missile had struck the lower floors of the building closest to them, and its shockwave had tossed the vehicle about like a children’s toy. Tom’s and the other’s survival, thus, had been nothing short of a miracle. Jimmy had instantly chosen to make his getaway, bolting, or rather limping off into the sunset, pursued by an entourage of hundreds of corpses; a selfless act to buy the others some much needed seconds or just Jimmy looking out for number one, they would never know.
The doctor arrived and took a seat, slouching behind the U-shape of catering tables, forming an improvised consultation niche, where, following a temperature scan conducted by a civilian helper, a quick and impassive ‘Howzit?’ constituted the extent of his examination.
There were no charts, no pharmaceuticals, and no patient records. The tepidness of the whole affair belied the potential threat, were it not for a singular, distinctly nervous-looking armed guard busying himself checking over his rifle and generally trying to stay as close to the exit as possible. One by one, quarantinees were checked and left the mess deck, shuffling off to their respective bunks or topside, most bored out of their minds and themselves barely paying attention to the process.
“How long will we need to stay in here?” It was Tom’s turn, and at this point, he had more questions than answers, a state of affairs he thoroughly despised at the best of times.
The doctor looked across the top of his glasses, his expression somewhere between contempt and exasperation and tiredly respon
ded with a dismissive wave.
“Next!”
“How long?” Tom could feel his blood begin to boil.
He defiantly crossed his arms and stood his ground, but the doctor responded with little more than a sneer, before giving a slight nod to the guard, who immediately sprang into action.
“Move along, buddy. We’re here to help, and there are still plenty of people behind you waiting their turn!” The guard huffed, gesticulating towards the stairs with the butt of his rifle.
“Is that what it’s going to be like?” Tom leaned forward and placed his hands on the table, looking directly into the doctor’s eyes with a fiery glare. The guard lunged forward, but the doctor gestured for him to stay put.
“We’ll let you know.” He countered sarcastically, meeting Tom’s infuriated stare with a triumphant smile.
“Don’t take it personal.” Amadou patted him on the back as they looked out over the sparkling waves, a breath of refreshing sea air doing its bit to evaporate the tension. “It’s been like since we were dumped in here,” he shrugged.
“Why the secrecy?”
Tom refused to let it go. He had spent plenty of time in environments where virtually everything was on a need to know basis, but they were hardly asking for state secrets. Or were they? The thought started nagging at him as soon as it appeared.
“Why would they not answer even the simplest, straight-forward question?” Tom turned to Amadou but received only a blank look in return. “Think about it for a second. There are only two reasons for withholding information: either they know but telling us would pose a risk, or they don’t know themselves, which would point towards someone higher up not sharing with them. In other words: an alternate agenda being at play. I don’t know about you, but personally, I favour neither scenario.”
“I am not used to the games your military plays,” Amadou shrugged. “Where I come from, the end of a barrel ensures answers are provided.”
“Believe me, if I only had the opportunity…” Tom smiled secretively. He had lost the battle, but the war was still on.
The Virophage Chronicles (Book 2): Dead Hemisphere [Keres Rising] Page 30