by John Ringo
The frangible round blew out the light latch, and the hatch opened on darkness.
“Zombies in the darkness,” Faith said. “That brings back memories.”
“And whose idea was that?” Steve asked.
“Uncle Tom’s?” Faith answered. “I don’t know why you keep blaming me!”
“‘But I’ve never been to a concert, Da!’” Steve mimicked.
“You’ve gotta let that go, Da,” she said. “We going or not?”
“Let the—” Steve said.
“—zombies come to you,” Faith finished. “You’ve covered that. They’re not coming to us. Hello! Zombies! Hello!”
“What’s that?” Steve asked as a zombie came around the corner of the companionway.
It was emaciated and could barely stumble along. Steve wasn’t even sure it was a zombie. Except for being naked it could have been a nearly dead human.
It stumbled on the stairs and started clawing upwards, snarling in a weird, dry tone.
“Jesus,” Faith said, stepping forward. She’d drawn her .45 and fired one round into the zombie’s back, then another into its head. “That was a mercy killing.”
“There’s still some sound,” Steve said and pulled out his earplugs. “Hello! Zombies! Hello!”
“. . . lo . . .”
“I don’t think that’s a zombie,” Faith said, stepping forward.
“Wait,” Steve said. “Just take our time. If that’s a survivor, they’ll keep ten minutes while we make sure we’re safe.”
“Roger,” Faith said.
“I’ve got point,” Steve said, stepping past her. He had to step on the zombie’s body to get down the narrow companionway.
The lower passageway was just as narrow and had a host of hatches. It also was covered in feces. Steve had wondered if he’d gotten his seals seated on the respirator. He knew, now, that he had. Otherwise he’d be smelling all this filth. One of the hatches, leading to a stateroom to port, was open. That floor was covered in feces as well. The sounds were emanating from a hatch forward. Which was covered in scratches and badly battered.
Steve tapped on it with the butt of the Saiga.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” a weak female voice answered.
“Jesus,” Faith said. “Survivor.”
“There goes this salvage,” Steve said. “Miss, we need you to just hang on . . .”
“. . . water?”
Faith pulled off her assault pack and pulled out a bottle of water.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “Hey, passing through some water. You gotta open the door, though.”
“. . . zombies . . . ?”
“We’re inoculated,” Faith said. “And we’ve cleared all the ones in this area. You can open the door. You’re safe. I mean, I’m a girl. You don’t have to worry about me or anything. And the guy with me’s my Da . . .”
There was a sound of a bolt being pulled and material being moved. Slowly, as if the person moving it could barely manage. Finally, it cracked open.
“Here,” Faith said. She clearly was trying not to react.
The girl was probably a little younger than Faith but was emaciated and haggard.
Faith opened up the water and started to hand it to her, then held it up for her to drink.
“Don’t drink it too fast,” Faith said. “You’ll just puke it back up.”
“Thank you,” the girl said, taking careful sips and treasuring them. “Thank you.”
“Sorry it took so long,” Steve said. Emotionally he’d known that there were going to be survivors on the boats. The law of the sea sort of mandated that they rescue people. Which they’d been ignoring because, well, there wasn’t anywhere to take them and there wasn’t much “law of the sea” anymore.
Seeing the survivor drove it home, though.
“Where’s Charlie?” the girl asked after a few sips.
“The infected?” Steve said. “We . . . took care of him.”
“Oh . . .” the girl said. “I sort of thought so. I heard the guns.”
“Family?” Faith asked.
“No,” the girl said, slowly. She seemed to be trying to remember how to speak. “He was the captain. He put the bolts on and told me to lock myself in here after . . . after Dad . . .” She started to sob.
“Miss, we sort of need you to stay here until we’re done clearing,” Steve said. “We’ll get you over to our boat as soon as we can. But . . . you want us to clear up some before you go through. Okay?”
“Okay,” the girl said. “Is there . . . anybody else?”
“How many on the boat?” Faith asked.
“Four,” the girl said. “Me and . . . Mom and Dad and Captain Charlie.”
“Then . . . no,” Faith said. “You’re it.”
“Okay,” the girl said, tearing up again.
“Just hang in there,” Faith said, handing her the bottle. “Sip this. Slowly. We will be back.”
“Okay.”
“Seven, Away Team,” Steve said over the radio.
“Away, Seven. Everything okay?”
“Nominal,” Steve said. “One survivor. Female, early teen. Noninfected. Will clear before transporting.”
“Okay,” Stacey replied. “We’ll get ready for her. Is it useable?”
“Unknown at this time,” Steve said. “No power. Prep for engineering survey.”
“So you want me to get ready to come over and see if I can get it running again?” Stacey replied.
Steve hung his head. Stacey was never ever going to get military radio discipline.
“Yes, dear,” Steve said.
“Then why didn’t you just say so? Get the survivor back here and we’ll talk.”
Steve and Faith checked the rest of the hatches. A series of homemade locks had been put on them, reinforcing the ones already there. They had to resort to a crowbar to get the master cabin door open.
“Nice,” Faith said, waving her taclight around the cabin. “I don’t suppose I get this one?”
“I’d say that the survivor will get the forward cabin again,” Steve said. “If she wants it. She might be tired of it. Your mom and I in this one.”
“So Soph and I get the little beds again,” Faith said, disgustedly.
“There are probably more cabins in a boat like this,” Steve said. “So at least you should have your own.”
There were a total of five cabins. The master and forward were both queen beds. The two smaller forward cabins had a double in the starboard cabin and bunks to port. The rear cabin had two bunk beds and a daybed couch. And there were no more zombies.
“I’ll take this one,” Faith said when they found the last cabin. “No zombie poop.”
“We’ll see,” Steve said. “Right now we need to get the remains gathered up and the survivor back to Mile Seven.”
“Captain Charlie” was fairly easy to move, despite the tight quarters. He hadn’t been a big guy before starvation had gotten him. They took him up to the aft-deck, tied some metal they’d found in the engine room to his ankle and heaved him over the side.
Despite his own starvation, the father was a bit more of an issue.
“Take the legs,” Steve said, getting his hands well locked into the corpse’s armpits.
“Why are dead bodies so heavy?” Faith asked, heaving the legs up to clear the railing.
“I’m not sure,” Steve said. “But it’s what they mean by ‘dead weight.’”
The father, like Charlie, disappeared into the depths with barely a splash.
“Okay, this one . . .” Faith said, looking at the mother’s gnawed and decomposed corpse. She turned her head away and retched slightly.
“Don’t throw up in your respirator,” Steve said. “I’ll get it.”
He got a plastic trash bag and gathered the mother’s remains up. There wasn’t much he could do for the pile of goo that had been most of her intestines. And when he tried to gather it up he found himself retching.
They
loaded the bag with more metal and made sure it sank.
“Dear God, we commend these people to the depths in the sure certainty that in the end of times the sea will give up its dead, amen,” Steve said quickly.
“Amen,” Faith said. “I didn’t know you were even a Christian, Da. I knew Gran was Catholic but . . .”
“The girl’s going to want to know that we did more than just pitch her parents over the rail of their boat,” Steve said. “Besides . . . keeping up the niceties to the extent you can isn’t hard and enough people think it’s worth it that . . . it’s worth it. Taking thirty seconds to say a prayer sort of shows that we’re still civilized or something.”
“How’s it going?” Stacey called. The Mile Seven was tied up to the bigger boat with every fender and bolster they had alongside to prevent them from banging together in the light swells.
Steve started to shout through the mask, then keyed his radio.
“That’s the last of the bodies,” Steve said. “We’re bringing the survivor over now.”
“Okay,” Stacey yelled, waving.
Steve changed his gloves before opening the hatch to the cabin.
“Miss,” he said, turning around and squatting down. “Let’s try piggy back. Will that work?”
With Faith’s help he got the girl back onto the Mile Seven and cast her off.
“What are you doing?” Stacey asked.
“I want to take off my respirator,” Steve said. “And I don’t want to do it alongside that boat. Not until it’s cleaned out.”
“Thank you for this,” the girl said.
“I still haven’t asked your name, miss,” Steve said.
“Tina Black,” the girl said. She was a tiny thing with black hair and blue eyes.
“Let’s get you inside . . .” Stacey said, wrapping her arm around the emaciated girl.
“Despite her condition, we need to decontaminate, first,” Steve said.
“Steve,” Stacey said dangerously.
“We’ve got some water in the tank,” Steve said, relenting. “Use the fresh-water shower.”
“A shower?” Tina said. “Is that what you meant? I thought it was . . . I don’t know what I thought.”
“We need to get you cleaned up is what it means,” Sophia said. “I’m Sophia Smith, the second mate. That’s my mom, Stacey. The guy who can’t seem to use normal words is my Da, Steve. And the hulking moron with a shoot-first attitude is Faith.”
“Bite me, Soph,” Faith said through her respirator.
“Don’t mind her,” Sophia said, wrapping her arm around Tina’s shoulders. “She’s adopted . . .”
* * *
“When Dad went I was down in my cabin,” Tina said, sipping tomato soup. She’d had a shower and her hair was combed. All three of the Smith women were larger than her, so the sweats she’d borrowed from Sophia made her look even tinier. “I heard Mom . . . screaming. Captain Charlie blocked the door and put some food and water in my cabin. Then he made all the locks and told me to lock myself in the cabin. He’d . . . he’d told Dad that was what we should do in the first place. All of us in different cabins with a way to make it hard to get in or out. Then he . . . he went.”
“How long ago?” Stacey asked.
She’d geared up and gone over to check out the Fairline after Sophia had taken charge of the survivor. After a bit, and some toting of materials from the Hunter, she’d managed to get the engines running. The boat still had nearly two-thirds of its fuel and the water tanks were full up. The reason that Tina had run out of water was the batteries supplying the pumps had finally gone dead.
“I don’t know,” Tina said. “There was a big storm . . .”
“We got hit by that, too,” Sophia said. “That was about a month ago.”
“Then . . . about a month and a half,” Tina said. “I ran out of food after the storm sometime. And . . . as long as the water lasted I’d drink a bottle of water, then fill it. Then the water shut off and I couldn’t flush or anything and . . .” She curled up into a ball.
“I can’t promise that nothing bad is ever going to happen again,” Steve said. “And I can’t bring your parents back. But I promise I’ll do my best. Okay?”
“Okay,” Tina said. She leaned into Sophia and tucked in her head.
“Hey,” Faith said, standing up. “Somebody should probably be on deck making sure we keep the boat in sight. I volunteer for watch.”
“Go for it,” Steve said. “I’ll be up in a bit.”
“Don’t mind her,” Sophia said. “She’s good at fighting zombies. Not so big on the whole helping others thing.”
“I guess you need people who are good at fighting zombies,” Tina said. “Can I ask . . . What did you do with my mom and dad?”
“We gave them a decent burial at sea, Tina,” Tom said. “The best we could under the circumstances.”
“Thank you,” Tina said.
“There’s something we need to talk about,” Steve said.
“Now?” Stacey asked.
“If not now, when?” Steve said. “It’s about your parents’ boat. This one is about done. The law of the sea, such as it is right now, is that if a boat is unoccupied it’s salvage. But you were on your boat. So it’s yours by right. Not to mention it’s got your name on it . . .”
“But you need to use it?” Tina said. “If you can take me back to Virginia . . .”
“Virginia’s not there, Tina,” Sophia said. “I mean, the land’s there but it’s all zombies.”
“All?” Tina said. “I mean . . . All?”
“We’ve been inshore a few times,” Steve said. “Everywhere we’ve been there are zombies on land. No lights at night. No sign of civilization.”
“Everything?” Tina said, looking at Sophia for confirmation. “New York?”
“We sailed out of New York harbor when they blew the bridges,” Sophia said. “We actually attended the last concert in New York.”
“And there hangs a tale,” Steve said. “But the point is, we need your boat.”
“You can have it,” Tina said. “I never want to see it again!”
“And that won’t work, either, honey,” Stacey said. “After we get it cleaned up, we’re all going to have to go back onboard.”
“Oh,” Tina said. “I’m not sure . . . I really don’t want to go back.”
“Cross that bridge when we come to it,” Steve said. “But we have your permission to use it?”
“Yes,” Tina said. “I mean, I’ll give it to you. Just for getting me out of there.”
“Probably ought to get that in writing,” Steve said. “But I’m not really worried about it.”
“Is Washington still . . . ?” Tina asked.
“Let me see if I can put this in perspective,” Sophia said, getting up. She turned on the shortwave receiver and consulted a chart. “Hear that static? That’s the primary U.S. Federal Emergency Channel, the one that FEMA used to broadcast on. This . . .” she said, changing the channel. “That’s the BBC . . . This is ABC . . . CNN . . . Fox Radio . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Tina said, her eyes wide. She started crying again.
“You survived, Tina,” Steve said, taking her chin and making her look at him. “You survived. And as a parent I can tell you that it was more important to your parents that you survive than that they survive. You were important to them. So your job, from here on out, is to not only survive but do the best you can at it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Tina said.
“As I said,” Steve said, standing up. “It’s not going to be easy. But we are not only going to survive. We are going to win.”
* * *
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you use the word ‘win,’” Stacey said. She’d brought him a cup of coffee. That was one thing they’d taken off the yacht first off. They’d been out for two weeks. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I’m not sure I have any,” Steve said, looking at the other boat. “But so far all
we’ve been doing is running and hiding. That was the right thing to do. Now . . . I’m not so sure. My basic plan was to find an abandoned island somewhere and set up shop. Maybe there’s a house somewhere with a harbor or something. Seeing Tina . . . Honey,” he said, taking the coffee and setting it down. He turned to her and shrugged.
“There are people out there, just like Tina. Hiding in compartments. Starving. Dying of dehydration. On life rafts. We’ve been avoiding them for fear of someone going zombie. But by now, most of them will have gone through the cycles. If they haven’t, we’ve still got some of Tom’s vaccine. We can save people.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Stacey said. “I mean, Steven, there’s only four of us. We’re not exactly the Coast Guard. Just tying up to Tina’s boat was tough.”
“Compared to, say, going to a concert in New York in a zombie apocalypse at night?” Steve asked.
“You’re never going to let that go, are you?” Stacey said with a breathless laugh.
“Zombies don’t think,” Steve said. “But whoever created that virus does. And I bet they had a plan to survive. I bet they’re out there. And that person thinks humanity is beaten. There’s no indication that anyone is doing anything. Everything is gone. There’s no government, no Army, no Navy, no Coast Guard, no Homeland Security. No Homeland for that matter. It’s all gone. The bastard won. Well, I’m not going to be beaten. I’m not going to have my children and grandchildren grow up hiding from the zombies. I’m not going to let that happen. I will not bow to the zombies!”
“Do you have a plan?” Stacey said.
“I have an inkling,” Steve said. “I have a goal. I have the goal of a zombie-free world. I don’t know if I’ll see it in my lifetime. But I’ll start with the U.S. and that’s going to have to be good enough.”
“Big plan,” Stacey said, shaking her head. “Steve, I love you for your paladin side. But ‘saving the world’ is usually a metaphor.”
“If not us, who?” Steve asked. “Tom, if he’s out there still, is locked into a fortress and can’t get out. Ditto any remaining government groups. There probably are government secure points that held out. But they’re trapped by the zombies. We have mobility. And there are other boats, ships, survivors out there. We’ll rescue them and organize.”