Dead Calm

by Jon Schafer

  ‘Dumbasses,’ he thought.

  Turning back to his Head Ushers, he said, “After I finish with the magic show, I'm going to go down to deck four and tell them they should feel free to use the shops and restaurants on deck five. Pull the spotters back to six while I'm down there and make a show of it. I want them to see how trusting and generous we are.”

  With a big grin, Ricky added, “Maybe while I'm down there, I'll even get a chance to see Sheila again.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Dead Calm:

  Tick-Tock pried the outer elevator doors apart and held them open, leaving the inner ones exposed for Brain to release the lever locking them in place. After a full minute of looking, he still couldn't find the latch as he searched from top to bottom.

  With an “Aha,” Brain finally saw what he was looking for and moved a lever set flush with the inner panel. The doors parted with a soft click as both he and Tick-Tock jumped out of the line of fire. Steve was standing behind them with his rifle ready in case anything came out of the elevator. Just from the smell, or lack of it, they knew the car was clear of the dead but still they entered cautiously. On the Dead Calm, nothing could be taken for granted. After setting a chair under the maintenance hatch in the ceiling, Steve undid the fasteners that held it in place and eased it down to swing free on its hinges.

  Tick-Tock looked at Brain and asked, “I need to know if your mind's a little preoccupied tonight, Pork Chop?”

  With a cautious look on his face, he replied, “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you spent all that time looking for the release catch for the elevator door and it was right in front of your eyes marked with the words Emergency Release, Push Down.”

  Brain chuckled nervously and admitted, “I might have been thinking about Connie a little bit and my mind wandered.”

  “Put her out of your head,” Steve ordered as he shined his flashlight through the access hatch into the darkened elevator shaft. “Keep focused or you might end up dead. Or worse, undead.”

  “I can't help it, it's like she's invaded my brain,” the tech said and then asked, “Don't you ever think of Heather and get distracted?”

  Looking down from his perch on top of the chair, he replied, “I think of her before I do something dangerous but then I push her out of my head. If I'm thinking about Heather when I'm supposed to be concentrating on what I'm doing, and get distracted and killed, it's no consolation to either of us that my last thoughts were of her. I'm still dead. If you keep thinking of Connie when you're supposed to be focusing on what you're doing, then that's how you'll end up, dead.”

  Brain nodded thoughtfully and replied, “Understood. My mind is now purged of Connie.”

  Laughing, Tick-Tock said, “You might want to do the same thing with Mary and Sheila. I've seen the way you've been looking at them.”

  “Steve already warned me about Mary,” Brain replied. “But what's a lip-stick lesbian?”

  Tick-Tock laughed again, while Steve said, “You've lived a sheltered life, kid.”

  “A lip-stick lesbian is a lesbian who looks like a normal heterosexual woman,” Tick-Tock explained. “You know, she dresses like one, does her hair nice and wears make up. She's not dyked out with a butch haircut or dresses like a guy.”

  Brain considered Mary's long blonde hair, feminine features and how she was attracted only to her own sex before nodded in understanding. Curious, he asked, “So what about Susan? She's like Mary, but she's with you, Tick-Tock.”

  “Susan's bi-sexual,” Tick-Tock answered. “She goes both ways. Men and women.”

  “What about Sheila then?” Brain asked.

  “She's try-sexual,” Steve answered before pulling himself up onto the top of the elevator car. Sticking his head back into the opening, he added, “She'll try anything sexual.”

  Brain laughed, and in a mock serious tone Tick-Tock warned him, “You don't want to try tapping Sheila for a couple reasons, Pork Chop. One, is that Mary's on the trail of that and would cut your throat in your sleep, and two, is that you might come away with something incurable like gono-herpa-syphil-aids.”

  Brain chuckled, but from the look on his face seemed to take Tick-Tock's warning to heart.

  Perched above them, Steve called down, “If we're done with tonight's lesson on alternative lifestyles, can we get going?”

  Looking at Brain, Tick-Tock said, “Anything else you need to know, just ask me later.”

  After handing Steve's rifle up through the opening, Tick-Tock boosted himself on top of the elevator and reached down to give Brain a hand. Since the tech only had his holstered pistol, he waved him off and said, “I've got this,” before jumping up and grabbing the lip of the opening and easily pulling himself up on top of the car.

  “I've been working out,” Brain explained once he'd settled himself with his legs dangling in the access hatch.

  Giving him an appraising look, Tick-Tock said, “So I see.”

  Pointing to the rungs set in the metal side of the elevator shaft, Steve said to Brain, “Then you get to go first, Hercules.”

  Guided by a flashlight, Brain scaled the ladder until he was two floors above them. Tick-Tock and Steve waited while he listened and sniffed for the sound or smell of anyone or anything lurking outside the elevator doors. After a minute, he waved that it seemed clear. When the three men were stacked right below each other on the ladder, Brain stretched his arm out and undid the inside latch for the elevator doors on deck six. He eased the doors open to their stops and cautiously looked out into the short hall that ran in front of the elevators. Giving them a thumbs up, he motioned with his Colt .45 that he was going in. Swinging through the opening, he was quickly followed by Steve and Tick-Tock.

  Brain crept to where the passageway T-boned into the main passageway running along the port side of the ship. Cautiously looking around the corner into the Centrum, he studied this area for any signs of life.

  Or death.

  Gone were the shops and restaurants of the lower decks. They were replaced with conference rooms for conventions, business service desks and small private rooms furnished with computers and office equipment so executives could use the facilities to keep track of their businesses while on vacation. Seeing the area was clear, Brain moved to the starboard side and repeated his performance, while Steve and Tick-Tock each covered an end of the hall from in front of the elevator. It had been agreed upon that Brain would lead them on the expedition into the upper decks. This was to give him more experience moving around in a hostile environment. It was a skill they all needed in the post-dead world.

  After checking that the starboard side was clear, Brain led them in the opposite direction from the Centrum. Cautiously making his way down a short hall that dead-ended at a door marked Authorized Personnel Only, he stopped and took a quick look around before proceeding.

  With Tick-Tock covering their rear and Steve covering Brain, the tech tried the door in front of him only to find it locked. Extracting a large ring of keys that Tim had scrounged from somewhere, he tried the most likely ones first. On the fifth try, the lock turned. Steve shouldered his rifle as Brain eased down on the lever and opened the door; standing back while Steve searched the area beyond for anything living or dead.

  Illuminated by emergency lights set twenty feet apart on alternate walls, Steve saw that the passageway stretched all the way to the stern of the ship. Besides doors, which were staggered every ten feet on both sides, he saw nothing that anyone or anything could hide in or behind. Waving Brain forward, he followed him through the opening. Seconds later, Tick-Tock backed into the passageway and shut the hatch behind them. Just in case they had to make a quick exit, he tested the door lever to make sure it would open without using the key. Turning to Brain and Steve, he nodded and looked down the passageway.

  Since leaving the top of the elevator car, the men had moved in complete silence. Steve broke this by saying in a quiet voice, “Looks like you get to be Monty Hall, Brain.”r />
  “How's that?” He asked.

  “You get to show us what's behind door number one,” he replied.

  “And door number two, three, four and five,” Tick-Tock added. “We don't want to let anything come up behind us after we pass, so we need to check them all.”

  Brain took a deep breath and let it out before moving to the first door. Finding it locked, he went on to the next one. The undisturbed dust on the tile floor told them that no one had been through this way in months, so they were more concerned with running into the dead than the living. They knew that Z’s had a habit of milling around in one spot and had difficulty opening locked doors, so they would only stop to check out the ones that were unlocked. On his eighth try, Brain found one.

  As the knob turned in his hand, Brain's eyes grew wide with surprise. Steve motioned him back against the far wall as he and Tick-Tock took up positions on either side of the door. Reaching forward, Steve turned the knob and gave it a slight push. As it opened to bang lightly against the inside wall, the three men saw the same thing through the entrance. A small room with two single beds, two dressers and another door set in the right side wall.

  “Crew’s quarters,” Tick-Tock said in a low voice. Pointing to the door in the near wall he added, “Gotta be a bathroom.” Brain moved forward to check the area but Tick-Tock stopped him by saying, “I got this one.”

  Giving the beds a wide berth because they brought up childhood fears of the boogeyman reaching out from underneath and grabbing him, Tick-Tock checked the bathroom first and found it empty. After getting up his nerve, he used his rifle barrel to lift the blankets covering the beds so he could look under them. Relieved that he found no boogey men, he exited the room.

  Steve looked at his watch and then at the remaining doors. Realizing that if even one in ten was open, that it would take all night to clear the rooms, not to mention the exposure to possible attack in searching each one, he knew they needed to come up with a quicker way to by-pass this area.

  Pulling the deck layout from his pocket, he saw the area where he was standing was grayed out except for the hallways crossing it. Knowing that these diagrams were for the passengers use, it made sense that they weren't going to show the crew's quarters and mechanical sections.

  “We’ve got to figure a way to secure these doors or we'll be here forever,” Steve voiced his concern.

  “We could use the keys,” Brain proposed.

  Tick-Tock and Steve both looked at him questioningly so Brain produced the ring of keys that Tim had given him. “These are the masters for deck six,” he said.

  “Masters?” Steve asked, “I thought those were just for the locks on the main doors. Don't you think you could have let us know that you had the masters a little sooner?”

  Brain shrugged, “You didn't ask.”

  Steve realized that he should have thought of asking about the keys but this still didn't stop him from saying, “Okay then, you're back on point. Lock all the doors you find open.”

  Now moving at a much more rapid pace, they covered half the distance to the stern in minutes.

  Stopping when they reached a passageway that came into theirs from the right, Tick-Tock pointed to footprints in the dust that went back and forth from that hallway into the one they were using.

  Steve nodded and said, “Keep a close eye on our backs, Tick-Tock.”

  Now, with the additional threat of running into the living as well as the dead, the three men proceeded at a slightly slower pace. As they continued down the hall, they noticed that the doors in this section were spaced more widely apart and were labeled with their contents or function. Steve breathed a sigh of relief that they were finally out of the crew area and into the mechanical section.

  Nearing the end of the passage, Brain suddenly called out, “I found it,” as he stood and pointed at a steel door surrounded by a heavy jamb that protruded an inch past the wall.

  Tick-Tock inspected the hatch, which to him looked like it would be more at home on a nuclear submarine, and said, “If we open this and Captain Nemo comes out, I’m gonna cap his ass.”

  “If anything comes out, cap its ass,” Steve advised.

  Seeing that the footprints in the dust ended at the hatch, Brain was sure he had found the switching room. With a simple sign over the door reading ‘Electrical’ and with all the traffic in and out, it had to be the control room where power from the generators could be shunted to different parts of the ship.

  Six large, round, locking bolts activated by hand levers were spaced equally around the hatch, of which five were unsecured. After glancing at Steve, who nodded at him to go ahead, Brain twisted the last one and pulled on it before jumping out of the possible line of fire.

  Cool air wafted out from the opening. Steve was happy to see that the room was deserted and surprised that it was just a twelve by twelve room with three computer work stations lined up on the far wall. He had expected something larger and more complex, since the area dealt with controlling the emergency power on the Dead Calm. Shrugging it off, he realized that, with everything computerized now, it was a wonder the entire ship wasn't controlled from a laptop.

  “A/C is on,” Tick-Tock noted.

  Brain pointed to the computers and said, “They need it. It's shut down everywhere else on the ship except for areas like this.”

  Even though the Dead Calm's main air conditioning system was off, the ship didn't seem to heat up to the point of being uncomfortable because the weather was mild. Despite this, the men found it refreshing to feel the cool air blowing on them.

  Brain entered the room and made for the center computer. After moving the mouse around, the screen saver depicting the logo for the Cayman Cruise Lines dissolved to reveal a standard windows desktop. Sitting in the chair in front of this screen, he indicated the empty chairs on either side of him and said, “It'll take a few minutes while I find my way around the system, so you might as well get comfortable.”

  Pointing to the computer on the right, Tick-Tock asked, “Think this thing has solitaire?”

  Already lost in his own world, Brain didn't answer so Tick-Tuck clicked the start button and was pleased to find it did.

  Forty minutes later, Brain leaned back in his chair and said, “That's it. I rerouted power from the disco on deck ten down to the water craft storage area on deck four.”

  “Good choice,” Tick-Tock said. “Disco sucks.”

  “Well, my reasoning is a little deeper than that,” Brain explained. “I didn't want to cut power to anything vital that Ricky's people might use on a regular basis. If something they're using goes out, they’ll suspect we've been here. They'll just come down and switch it back and cut us off.”

  “Then to be on the safe side, we'll fill the gas caddies as soon as we get back,” Steve said. “We can use them to top off The Usual Suspects and then refill them so we can store them on board.”

  Making sure they left everything as they found it, the trio started down the passageway until they came to where it branched off to the port side of the ship. Steve suggested they go out a different way in case someone had seen them and was waiting in ambush. Brain made the turn with the others following a few steps behind. They had only gone a dozen yard in this new direction when a clanking noise from their rear made them spin around and raise their weapons as they searched for a threat. Although the ship made all kinds of creaks and groans, this sound was one they hadn't heard before. It sounded like something had fallen or been dropped on the deck.

  Motioning for Brain to stay where he was, Steve signaled Tick-Tock that they go back and investigate. Brain watched as Tick-Tock dropped into a half crouch and cautiously made his way down the passageway. Steve followed a few feet behind him.

  Watching his friends' progress down the hall, Brain was suddenly distracted when he heard a familiar sound coming from the other side of the door he was standing in front of. Curious and excited at what he thought he'd heard, he forgot all about covering his friends as
he stepped closer to the hatch and listened.

  The mewing noise came again and Brain was sure of it. On the other side of the door was a cat. Remembering how Connie had told him she loved cats, he decided this could be his chance to make major points with the girl of his dreams by bringing her a furry little companion.

  Turning his attention back to the end of the hall, Brain saw Tick-Tock cautiously look both ways down the passage they had just come from. Shrugging, he turned to Steve and said, “Nothing there.”

  Brain heard the mewing noise from beyond the door again. Excitement coursed through him at his find.

  YES, he thought to himself. Connie's going to love me when I give her a cat. With his eyes on Tick-Tock and Steve, he reached out with his right hand, and grasped the doorknob. As he turned it, he called out, “Hey guys, I think someone locked a cat in here. Help me catch him for Connie.”

  Tick-Tock looked beyond Steve and saw what the tech was about to do. At the top of his voice he screamed, “No Brain!”

  But it was too late. The door swung open.

  The dead thing standing there made a mewing noise as it lurched forward with outstretched arms.

  ***

  Heather tried not to show her nervousness as Reverend Ricky made his way down the stairs. Still twenty feet from where she stood, she called out, “Far enough. Hold it right there.”

  Smiling and holding his hands out to show he was unarmed, Ricky said, “No need to fear me Sister Heather, I come in peace.”

  Since Steve, Tick-Tock and Brain were out exploring, it left only Susan and herself to hold down the fort. With their diminished firepower, Heather wanted to get rid of Ricky as fast as possible. Although Susan had a rifle, out of the rest of the group only Sheila had ever handled a firearm. Steve didn't want anyone who was unfamiliar with a weapon, or in Sheila's case couldn't be trusted with one yet, walking around armed. If Ricky found out that the group was split up and under gunned, he might try something.