Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “Let’s have a butcher’s . . . what, that there? No, that’s not a shoal.” He bent over the screen. In its faint green glow he looked a little perplexed. “Too small, see? And it’s right up on the surface, practically—I don’t know what that is. Sometimes you get seals round Puffin Island, off the Orme even . . . I dunno. It might be a seal, I suppose.” He glanced up, through the cabin window. “There isn’t any moon, worse luck, but if we look over, lemme see . . . that way—” he pointed out on the starboard side—“we might be able to see something, if we get out on deck and stay quiet-like.”

  Which we did, joined by Danny, who’d just appeared from below decks with more beer; and perhaps I should mention at this point that Claire and I had only had a couple of cans each by that time. I’d been hitting on the majority of the joints as they went round, Claire hadn’t, but we were both completely on the case so far as our shared perceptions went. Given what happened over the next hour or so, it’s important you know that.

  Out on the aft deck, Jack explained to Danny what we’d seen on the fish-finder. We were all of us whispering, in case we scared the seal; we were still expecting seals at this point. Danny nodded, and pottered over behind the wheelhouse on the port side. Claire cupped her hand around my ear and whispered, “What’s he up to?” At that time I didn’t know. Soon enough it would become clear.

  The three of us on the aft deck—Jack, Claire and I—gazed out over the waves. It was difficult to make much out on the surface, even with the light in the wheelhouse switched off and our eyes accustomed to the darkness. Away off in the far distance was a glitter of shore-lights: Anglesey to the north-west, Penhirion and the mainland south-west. Between the lights on land and where we lay at anchor was mile after mile of still dark ocean. The green navigation light danced on the tops of the soft sluicing wavelets near the hull; all the rest was a vast murky undulation, slop and ebb, slop and ebb, featureless, unknowable.

  Suddenly light sprang out from the Katie Mae, swinging through the darkness, settling on the waves in a rough rippling ellipse. I jumped a little, tightened my grip on Claire, looked round: there was Danny, all but invisible behind the spotlight on the wheelhouse roof, directing the strong beam through and beyond us to light up the slow dark waves. “Shit,” swore Jack under his breath, then, louder, hissing: ”Turn it off, man, you’ll frighten it away! Bastard’s left his nav-lights on as it is,” he added sotto voce.

  “I thought you wanted to see!” Danny sounded a bit smashed already. Claire looked at me, and I read the same judgement in her eyes. The harsh light from the Katie Mae’s spot made her look even paler than usual; almost translucent.

  “We do, but we’re not gonna see anythin’ if you frighten it away, you knob! Turn it off and come back here—no—wait a minute . . . ” Jack’s voice trailed off, and I turned back to the water, trying to see what he’d seen. If anything, the spotlight made it harder; it was total illumination or total blackout, vivid purple afterimages blooming on your retinas whenever you looked outside its magic circle. I squinted, tried to shield my eyes. Beside me Jack was doing the same thing. “Hold it steady, over there—look—what’s that?”

  A slumped low shape in the black water. Dull and dark, the waves washing over it as it dipped and rose on a tranquil tide; then Claire gasped and dug her fingers into my arm as a slight swell lifted it far enough out of the water for us to see a gleam of white. A face, all tangled round with lank dark strands like seaweed.

  Jack had seen it too. “Christ almighty,” he breathed; then to Danny: “Hold it! Hold it there!”

  “What?” shouted Danny.

  “Look where you’re pointing it, man! Forget about the bloody seal—there’s someone in the water!” Abruptly Jack was gone from beside me, over to the aft lockers, flinging them open one after another. His voice came back on the quiet night air as Claire and I clung to each other and watched the body floating towards us in the spotlight: “. . . find anything on this bastard boat . . . ” Then he was back, a long boathook under his arm like a jousting lance. “Right.” He called to Danny: “Listen up. Claire’s gonna come up and get that light, okay?” He glanced at Claire; she nodded. He smiled briefly at her and resumed: “You get down here and give Will a hand. I’m gonna hook him when he gets close enough in, then you two’ll have to pull him up.”

  And we did just that: Danny and I knelt down in the scuppers, braced against the capstans while Jack leaned perilously far out from the side, one hand grasping the side of the boat, the other waving the boathook back and forth till the waterlogged shape drifted within reach. All the way in, until it was so close to the boat the spotlight wouldn’t go far enough down on its mount, Claire never wavered: she knelt on the wheelhouse roof and trained the light dead straight on the bobbing body in the waves. Danny had got a torch from somewhere, and that gave us light enough for the last part of the job.

  Jack’s hook snagged in the clothing of the body; he hauled it in like a fish on a gaff, and Danny and I managed to get a grasp underneath its arms. Together we dragged it out of the water and up on to deck, where it plopped down as if on a fishmonger’s slab, a cold dead weight of waterlogged clothing and wrinkled flesh.

  I think we all thought at that time it was a dead man. It had been lying, after all, face down in the water; it was clammy cold to the touch; and we hadn’t felt anything like a heartbeat as we heaved it aboard. The three of us stood around it as the saltwater drained off into the scuppers; no one quite knew what to say, or do. A hand touched my shoulder, and I nearly jumped off the side.

  Claire had come down from the roof of the wheelhouse and was standing behind me. “Jesus,” I muttered fretfully, and she squeezed my arm remorsefully, peering around me at the body on the deck. “Sorry,” she whispered; then, quite unexpectedly, she buried her face in my shoulder. “Has anyone looked to see . . . ” she began, and couldn’t finish. Danny just looked at me, his tanned, weather-roughened face as pale as Claire’s. It was left to Jack, as ever, to take care of the practicalities. “She’s right,” he said, grimacing; “suppose we’d better have a look who he is and that. Do us a favor, Danny boy; get that torch down here, will you?”

  He knelt on the deck, and gently turned the body over by its shoulders. What we’d thought was seaweed around the head we could see now were long, damp locks of hair. Danny brushed them away from the face, a thing I doubt I could have done myself right then. He wiped his hand several times on the leg of his jeans, and straightened up a little. We could all see the face now: it was a man in his early twenties, unshaven, startlingly pallid. “Shit,” Danny said, and the torch he was holding wobbled for a moment. “Just look at his face a minute, Jack . . . ”

  “I’m looking at his face.” Jack sounded stressed. “What the fuck d’you think I’m doing down here—” and then he drew in his breath sharply.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” Like the torchbeam, Danny’s voice was wavering slightly. “That lad we were talking to in the Liverpool Arms on Regatta Day that time, what’s his name . . . ”

  “Andy.” There was a slight roughness, a catch, to Jack’s voice. “Andy something or other; crews on that boat out of Bangor these days, doesn’t he? Andy, Andy . . . Christ, I must be going senile in my old age.” He slapped the side of his head, and Claire jumped a little at the sudden noise in the midst of all that illimitable stillness. “Andy Farlowe, that’s it. His old feller used to have a fishing boat in Conwy harbor; he’s retired now, lives up Gyffin somewhere. Christ. I’ll have to go round, I suppose, tell him what’s happened—”

  “Wait.” Claire’s nails dug into my arm. “Wait. Look at him, Will.”

  “What?” I looked at her instead; she was staring fixedly at the body, her mouth slightly open. “What?” I asked her again, and she whispered it, no more, so quiet you would have missed it in the normal run of things: “He’s moving . . . ”

  I was going to say, impossible, you’re imagining it; but now as I looked I could see the limbs twitch, just a lit
tle. The hands clenched, unclenched, the head moved ever so slightly from side to side. It—he—gulped a little, and his jaw sagged open. A little trickle of seawater came out in a splutter. All at once his eyelids opened, and the eyes rolled back from up inside his head. He blinked once or twice, and seemed to be trying to speak.

  Jack was down with him in a shot, finger probing the airway for obstructions, ear pressed to his mouth to gauge the breathing. “Fuck,” he said, looking up as if unable to believe what he was seeing or feeling: “he’s still alive, you know.”

  Not only that: within a few minutes he was conscious, talking, the lot. With Jack and Danny helping him we got him on his feet and down below decks, where Danny had the best part of a bottle of rum held against emergencies, like when we ran out of lager. He coughed and spluttered a bit, but it seemed to do the trick; he looked round at us, shook his head and cleared his throat. “Who are you lot, then?” he croaked. We all burst out laughing, I think from sheer relief as much as anything.

  He couldn’t say how long he’d been in the water: “I must’ve been spark out of it,” was all he could manage. “You were that,” said Jack, one arm round his shoulders in a bracing grapple. His attitude to the younger man seemed almost fatherly, most un-Jacklike: it was altogether more responsibility than I could remember him showing towards anything or anyone before.

  “How about the boat?” asked Danny, and it suddenly occurred to all of us: how had he got out there in the first place? We looked at him: he closed his eyes briefly, as if trying to remember. “We gone out . . . ” he began, and paused. Jack nodded encouragingly. “We gone out in the evening . . . in the straits past Beaumaris . . . ” Every word seemed to be an effort; not so much physically, though he still looked very weak, but an effort of remembrance. It was like watching someone being asked to remember what he did on his birthday when he was seven.

  “What happened, Andy? Did you fall overboard, or did the boat go down?” Danny seemed anxious to clear up the technicalities of it all.

  “I was out on deck,” Andy said slowly. He pushed his lank black mane of hair back, looked round helplessly for words. “It was . . . it was cold.” Jack nodded, as if Andy had just given him the temperature down to the nearest degree centigrade; Andy hardly noticed. “In the water. It was cold.” He shivered a little, and Claire said, “Have you got any spare clothes on board? We should get him out of those; he’ll be freezing. He’s probably in shock already: we should get him warm. Get some blankets round him as well if you’ve got them.”

  Jack sprang to it. “Shit, why didn’t I think of that—see that locker under the seats there, Claire? You have a look in there; that’s blankets. I think I’ve got a few things, jumpers and such, in there too, haven’t I?”

  Claire rummaged down in the locker, came up with a thick fisherman’s sweater and a couple of blankets. “Right, mate,” Jack rapped out a little paradiddle on the table-top. “Get you into these, shall we? Danny—let’s have the engines on and home James, what about it?”

  “Yeah . . . ” Danny was a little slower to react; he was staring at Andy as if he was having trouble taking it all in. At first I put it down to him still being a bit smashed; I’d have thought what had happened in the last ten minutes would have sobered anyone up, but it all depended on what sort of state he’d been in in the first place—he was always a pig when it came to spliff. “Yeah: you come up too, Will. Get on the ship-to-shore, just in case, let them know there might be a problem with the . . . with the . . . what is it, Jack?”

  “Wanderley.” This over his shoulder as he turned the balled-up sweater right way out. “Better get on to them; nice one, Danny boy.”

  “The Wanderley, out of Bangor. Okay?” With one long last look at Andy, he turned and went up the companionway to the wheelhouse. I went to follow him; stopped, and said irresolutely, “Claire?” She looked up at me, reached instinctively for my hand.

  “Never mind Claire—it’s crowded enough in here.” This from up in the wheelhouse. “Get up here, Will, I need you.”

  “You can give us a hand, Claire,” said Jack, “give our boy here the once-over.” He nudged Andy. “How about that for luck, eh, Andy lad? Floating in the water all night, and the first boat to come along’s got a posh lady doctor on it!”

  “I’m not a doctor, Jack,” Claire told him patiently, correcting this mistake for no more than the third or fourth time that night. “I work at the hospital; I’m a junior pharmacist.”

  “Well, it’s all the same, innit?” Jack wasn’t listening. He smoothed the last of the folds out of the sweater, turned to face us with a determinedly bright smile. “You’ve done all the first aid and that, haven’t you?”

  “I might not have been paying attention, though,” Claire said, in an uncharacteristically small girly-voice; but she knew she was beaten. Better women than her had been powerless in the grip of a full-on Jack attack. I squeezed her hand and turned to go up the companionway. She held on to it for a moment longer than I thought she would; I glanced back, and she was looking at me, her violet eyes dark and smudgy-looking in the lamplight. I raised an eyebrow, what? She bit at her lower lip, shook her head slightly, nothing, and gave my hand one last squeeze. I squeezed back, and smiled encouragingly. “See you later,” I said, and Jack, overhearing me, said “yeah, yeah, get up there Will man.”

  Beside him on the bench, Andy looked up, silhouetted in the lantern light, running a hand through his sopping merman’s mane. He did seem to be in some sort of shock; bewildered by it all, withdrawn almost, as if part of him was still floating out in the water, in the long night reaches where no boats came. He tried to smile; I smiled back, then trotted up the short companionway to join Danny in the wheelhouse.

  “About time, Will.” He sounded edgy, about half a beat off a full-scale Danny fluster. “Ship-to-shore, there: get a move on.”

  There was a limit to how much I could stand of Danny playing Captain Bligh, but this was not the time to bring it up. I said nothing, and flipped the switch on the radio. Nothing. I tried again: still nothing. “VHF’s down,” I said in a neutral tone, hoping Danny wouldn’t take it the wrong way.

  He did, of course. “Down? It can’t be down, no way, I had it up and running this afternoon. Here—” He pushed past me in the constricted space. “It’s simple, look. On, off . . . ” He did exactly what I’d done: joggled the switch a few times. No gray-yellow glow on the LED frequency readout; no power-up, no nothing. Danny swore, and tried the other great standby of the non-technical layman, slapping the top of the set. The handset fell off its rest and dangled on its cord; besides that, nothing. That was Danny finished, then. “Bollocks,” he muttered under his breath. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks . . . ” He seemed disproportionately panicky, I thought. After all, it wasn’t the first thing that had ever gone wrong on his old tub of a charter boat: most of the equipment was second-hand or obsolete, or both, and something or other was always conking out on us. So how come he was so hyper now? He shouted down the companionway: “Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Ship-to-shore’s out.”

  “Out? What you mean, out? Channel eight for comms, channel sixteen for emergencies. Have I got to do everything on this poxy boat?”

  “It’s not coming on.” Panic rose in Danny’s voice, sending it high and querulous.

  Silence for a second down below decks. Then, Jack’s exasperated head thrust up the companionway: “Is it the batteries?”

  Quickly I tried all the rest of the gear. The fish-finder, our newest piece of kit, ran off its own nickel-cadmiums, but everything else came off the main batteries, and it was all down, no power on board the whole of the Katie Mae. “Oh, brilliant,” I said under my breath.

  “There’s no juice,” Danny told Jack, who had watched me all the way round the wheelhouse and didn’t need telling.

  “What you think I am, Blind Pew? I can bloody see there’s no juice—get your arse down that engine hatch and find out why there’s no j
uice, Danny. Make yourself useful for once, ’stead of standing round giving other people orders.”

  That last bit didn’t go down too well, but Jack had already vanished back below. Danny stood a moment by the wheel, breathing heavily, then barged past me out on deck. The engine hatch was in the stern: I could hear Danny swearing as he banged it open and clattered down the short ladder. A few seconds later, Jack came swarming up the companionway and out on to the aft deck. “Bloody typical,” I heard him mutter, before he let himself down through the hatch to see what he could do.

  I stood in the dark wheelhouse and tried to work out our options in this, our newly powerless state. Down below decks there were the hurricane lamps, and right now they were the only light we had, apart from Danny’s torch. I looked at the inert console: without electricity, the head-up radar wouldn’t work, and more to the point, neither would the ship-to-shore VHF radio. Most worryingly of all, we could forget about the electric starter motor for the diesels; and without the diesels, we were going nowhere in a hurry. True, we might be able to start them using the auxiliary power supply, but we’d had trouble with that before when the main batteries had run down flat—which they had a habit of doing. It had been one of the things Danny had been meaning to get around to, for which read: one of the things he was going to get Jack to do for him.

  At least there was the fish-finder, I thought sarcastically. That was still doing a grand job there on the side of the console, beeping away occasionally, mapping out the gently shelving bottom below the boat. Here and there on the display stray sonar returns stirred lethargically; if we’d been on a charter the punters would have been wetting themselves in anticipation of a big haul. My attention was distracted from the slow drifts and patterns on the electronic screen by Claire coming up the companionway.

  “All right?” I smiled, to show her that everything was okay, just a few minor hiccups here, absolutely no-problemo. The dauntless crew of the Katie Mae coping with an emergency, just watch ’em go. “How’s Andy?”