Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 21

  Our monsters inside

  It was just like Logan to want to shoulder the whole world on his shoulders. He could have let Lizzie go with him. He perhaps should have. But he was pretty sure that he was going to need some aggressive fire support from a distance.

  But truth be told, he was still just a little bit upset with her. He needed to be trusted. There was no way that they could sit by and watch all of those people die, and in the end Lizzie's desire to help clashed with his knowledge that they couldn't. The slap was a step too far. Not that he would tell her any of that. He was far too insular for that. He always hated the way people made those assumptions about him. Of course he wanted to help, of course it tore him apart when he couldn't. But he had been in charge of the WDC a long time. He had been a General for a long time and a Doctor too. As much as ignorance could be bliss, knowledge could be heart wrenching. He knew there was nothing he could do to help those people, and he needed Lizzie to trust his judgment and his expertise. He was only trying to protect her.

  As he rowed gently but with all of the strength he had, for the sake of having to tow a very heavy rope behind him, it was all he could think of. Had he been right to leave? Had he been right to let them die in their own mess? All he wanted to do was protect Lizzie. To stop her from getting too close to some of them and then having to watch them die.

  So in the end, that was the difference between them. He still wanted to run. He had seen enough, and done enough that maybe he just wasn't strong enough for anything more. But all of that just made him cold in the heart. The reason he cared for Lizzie so much, was that she had the heart that he used to. He used to care. Everyone he couldn't save used to torture him right down to his soul. But now. In the new world, after having ran for so long, he could let them go.

  Maybe it was that his armor was too thick, or his heart was too hardened. But he had to admit, with the clarity of mind that the strain of the exercise brought to him, that maybe he had been wrong. Maybe it would have been okay for them to stay. To see them kindly through the last few days of their lives.

  He stopped rowing for just a moment, his inner anger boiling over. He felt that red mist descend and his rage start to get the better of him for just a few seconds. He put a hand against his eyes to try and talk himself down. He had done it again. He had run away. Just like he had all of those months ago when he didn't take the shot that might have saved someone, like he had when he took to the road in his retirement. He had run from his responsibilities. His God given duties. He had turned tail and ran scared. Scared of the monster inside of him.

  'You okay?' The sweet voice on the radio. That sweet girl who he was supposed to take care of. He was supposed to learn how to feel from her, but all he was trying to do was turn her, into him. He was trying to push his coldness and his world weary armor onto her. He had thought it had been to protect her. But instead, it was suffocating her. Stopping her from being the person that she was. The person that he should be looking to for inspiration. Learn how to feel again. He couldn't bring himself to reply. Deep down he knew that would just make it worse, make her blame herself even more, when all of the time everything that had happened was his fault. He pushed on.

  The water was heavy, and the weight of the rope was pulling the boat down at the rear, which made getting any traction on the undulating but still calm enough waves all the harder on his old shoulders. And that was when the answer hit him. All of this time, since he hung up his stars and hit the road hard, all of that time he had been trying to run from what he thought was the monster inside of him. But that monster, that beast he thought he needed to take away from the world, was a better man than he was.

  The world needed that monster back. But what was more, is that he needed it back too. He needed that power again. He needed that damned evil side of him back. Because at least that monster had a raging fiery heart, that cared about every last lost soul on this rotting earth. Which was more than he could say from himself.

  'I'm almost there. Are you in position?' He spoke softly and coldly, with a wave of new found power spilling over him. He closed his eyes, and tried to remember how he used to feel. Tried to breathe how he used to breathe. Tried to see how he used to see. The time had come to stop running. Stop running from the monster inside, and shake hands with it instead. There was a reason he was still alive. There was still too much that he had to do.

  'I thought I'd lost you there.' She still spoke like she was walking on egg shells to him.

  'So did I.' She was of course talking about the radio signal. He, of course, was not. 'I'm back.' That sent a shiver down his spine. He owed to her to try and bring himself around. To try and let the man he used to be shine through, and defeat the embittered shell he had worn for far too long.

  'I'm in position. ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival)?' She was staring at him through a powerful scope mounted to a rifle the Captain of the ship had given to her.

  'Five zero minutes. Stand by.'

  It was nice to talk like that. In his military no bullshit way. It did make things between them all business again. But that was what he wanted for the time being. They were still partners. And bouncing some no frills radio chatter back and forth, knowing his life in part depended on her aim and her focus, was a nice way to make the differences between them and the rift that had happened because of the fairground nightmare seem like a silly speed bump in the road.

  He rowed hard to the side of the military ship that was blocking their way. He aimed for the ladder running up the side of the hull. That was probably going to be the only way onboard. The rope he had been towing, doubled over like a washing line as planned, had become all the heavier the closer he got to the ship.

  It was by then totally waterlogged which just made it harder to pull it around after him. It was thin and steel cable reinforced. It needed to be strong if it was going to be able to transfer the odd barrel of crude oil all of the distance by water between the crashed ships and the shipping tanker he had left behind.

  He coiled it around him like a harness and tied it off in front of his chest to give him some sense of balance. The danger was that the weight of the rope would pull him back off the ladder if he didn't hold on tightly. He bumped the tiny lifeboat he had been rowing into the grey hull of the half sunken ship, and tied a small rope against the lowest rung of the ladder to secure it.

  'Is the deck clear?' He asked through the radio mounted to his shoulder. The Captain had given him a freshly washed set of overalls for the mission. Given that they were about to part ways, it was the least he could do. But it still stank of oil. It was dark blue in color, but a smaller size than he might have asked for if he was just mulling about the engine room back on the tanker. He needed to make sure the sleeves and other loose bits didn't snag on anything as he moved around the ship.

  'Check, all clear.'

  He couldn't possibly have left his Desert Eagles behind. Even though, after a quick count, he realized there were only five bullets in each mag for each gun. He kept them holstered to his side by the leather strap that used to sit underneath his old leather jacket. That kept the middle section of his overalls tight too. He had even had to loosen the strap a little after a few good meals, but it was nice to feel his muscle mass come back at least.

  The Captain of the ship had also given him a gift. It was an old Makarov Revolver. Cast in silver with a six shot barrel. It was a little old school, and had a poor fire rate to say the least. But it was very cool, and Logan still loved that flare for the older weapons. A darker part of him was desperately hoping to get the chance to fire it.

  That was tied tight to his hip, under a belt Scot had loaned him for the occasion. He was sad to be leaving a good mate like Scot behind. But he was a mechanic, not a soldier. His place was in the ship. Treasured memories and smiles when he thought of him would have to do from there on in.

  'Two rungs up... looks badly corroded. Take it easy.' His radio was strapped to a shoulder
pad on the blue overalls, he couldn't reach it to reply, and he was holding on to the rungs of the bolt on ladder far too tightly to give any kind of hand signal. But he looked up and saw she was right on the money. They would snap easily if he put any weight on them.

  He bounced his weight on his legs and timed the swing a few times before bravely jumping past the two rusted rungs of the ladder. The rope pulled hard against his back but he just had enough space to fling out an arm and make a good contact with the second from last rung on the ladder. He was almost there. The weight of his body slamming against the deck after the swing broke the rungs away in the end. Getting down was going to be fun...

  A few more powerful leaps and he was pulling himself, and the entire weight of a 120 meter long doubled over steel tied rope, over the side. His chest heaved as he rolled onto the dry and cold deck. He took tight hold of the rope with one hand, and untied his harness with the other. He tied it around a T-shaped mounting point on the deck and gave off a relieved sigh when he could finally let his muscles relax for a second. He shook it off with a few waves of his arms in no particular pattern, but refocused remarkably quickly on the job.

  Dusk was settling in. The orange sun, as it set over the calmed waters and glistening islands of the cold Russian climate, sent dazzling patterns across the decks. Lengthened the shadows, closed off the open doors to any light, and dazzled his eyes against the white paint of the scarred hull and cabins on the deck.

  The deck was uneven, with the bow of the ship having sunk into the ship beside it. It was like walking uphill all of the time, at an angle that seemed far steeper now that he was there than it seemed from afar.

  'Okay. I'm ready to go.' He drew the Captain's Makarov, and locked eyes with the closest open doorway. It was just nice to be by himself for a while. Like it had been back in that camp site. Just so he could re-find that soldiers mind inside of himself, the one he had been running from. He always had worked alone, when he was just a grunt or a non-commissioned officer. How he liked it. Why he took those General's stars was still his biggest mystery. He belonged on the ground, not behind a desk.

  He stepped inside the door and stopped a moment while his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness inside. The silvers and grays of the painted walls glimmered with an orange glow by the door. Rusty in the odd patches. Pipes adorning every wall. He slowly stepped inside, a strange hissing noise the only accompaniment. His heart beat slowed. Not with skill or lack of fear. But through the love of fear. The focus it brought. The madness it allowed. How he had missed it.

  With a new found focus he stood bolt upright, abandoned his military training to walk crouched with one pace distance between his steps, and strode into the corridor with fear as his friend. Some of the pipes had become cracked and broken. They ejected steam at the odd intervals. He would have to be careful to avoid it. It would be superheated.

  He timed his steps just right, his boots lightly squeaking on the heavily polished floor. His body reflected upon the slick surface in what little light remained. He made sure to glance back every now and then. It would be far too easy to kid himself into focusing on what was directly ahead, and one of the zombies might easily be able to sneak up on him if he did.

  He pressed his back against the wall before rounding the next corner. He listened for what seemed like hours, for the faintest sign of anything that may be lurking in the shadows beyond. There was nothing. He rolled his head around the corner, just to the point that his eyes were poking out. The corridor took on a new phase of darkness and stretched beyond what he was able to see. It was filled with a lingering smog. The water vapor from the leaking steam pipes, mixed with smoke from a fire. He crouched back to his lowest point before moving on. It would choke him to death if he stood up in it.

  He moved into the dizzying mist that blocked his eyes and his throat. Hardly being able to breathe made his lungs labor over every sip of oxygen. He couldn't help but to gasp. There was a figure in the mist. He wasn't sure of it at first, and didn't trust his hazy mind and blanketed eyes for a few seconds. But there was without any doubt, something moving around in the superheated mist around him.

  If he hadn't been able to see it, then chances were that it wouldn't be able to see him either. He listened carefully to it breathe. Listened intently to it moan. Tried to use those sounds to pinpoint exactly where it was. He stepped further in every pause of its breath until its feet finally emerged from the grey colored smog around them.

  With one carefully planned kick to the shins he brought the monster to the floor and drove a knife into the sailors soft and tender skull. It's face, what might have been a man, was melted in the heat of the mist. The skin all but missing. The flesh all but hanging on. Bone showing in the gaps where the muscle had peeled away. It's eyes saturated with water and bloodshot to the point of there being nothing but a single shade of black to them. A General. How fitting?

  The stars were different to the ones Logan used to wear. They were slightly larger, and he was of a somewhat higher rank, so wore two on each shoulder rather than one. A Major General then. But they would do. Time for Logan to come out of retirement.

  He gave the corpse a fitting but half baked salute, and pulled the patches clean away from its shoulders. He unfastened the pins at the back and placed one star upon each shoulder. Brigadier General James Logan. The other two. The two he would have never taken out of some kind of sense of entitlement, he placed gently over the zombie's eyes, and finished his salute.

  Maybe that was just something that he had to do. A process that he needed to go through just to feel like he used to feel. A ritual that would put him back in the mindset of being a General. So he wore them with pride, and even smiled, quite by accident, as he saw them glistening in the pale light at the bottom of the cloud of fog.

  He refocused and made his way through the remainder of the dense and choking gas cloud. It was easy to become disorientated and lost, but he had a good sense of direction. He rounded another corner just as he had the last, to see the light finally return through a shattered window. The air felt fresh and clean after the choking mist, but he didn't stay to savor it. He could hear glass creaking and snapping close by.

  A quick check of the ground beneath him confirmed there was no glass to be seen. That meant the window had been shattered from the inside. Probably someone trying to escape. He took a brave but brief glance out of the shattered glass to see a lone zombie wandering, lost, on the deck outside.

  It was facing the other way and was none the wiser to Logan's presence. He took a second to take in the view. The sun setting across the freezing water revealed they were close to the port of St. Petersburg. The place that used to be named Leningrad during World War Two. He sighed a second in relief at the prospect of having finally reached their destination.

  There was no sense in leaving the zombie walking around free. Even if he could have made it around it without startling it, there really was no sense in leaving it. He might need to escape that way, or for that matter, what was the point in leaving any of them alive? Why leave a zombie standing when it could just bite someone else, and pass this un-holy disease on to the next person. Logan whistled gently to get it's attention.

  Never had he seen a smart one. It just swiveled on the spot and began to glare at him. It snarled its pointed teeth and stumbled towards the circular shaped hole that used to be a reinforced glass port hole. Logan just backed away half a step and watched it stretch its arms through the hole. It was about to try to climb through, with just its head on show on the inside of the ship, when Logan, with all of the force he could muster, punched down hard on the back of its head. A snap confirmed he had broken the neck, and copious rivers of black blood meant he had driven a sharp piece of glass into its throat. It struggled and twitched as it slowly choked on its own blood and succumbed to second death.

  He walked away. Didn't even bat an eyelid. There was another interior blast door to his left hand side. That must lead into the bowels of the sh
ip. If he was going to secure some fuel, that was probably where it was going to be.

  'What's your status?' Lizzie was getting nervous. He could hear it in her shaking and trembling voice. He didn't like being away from fire support on principle, but truth be told, he was drunk on his own power. He was drunk and blinded by it, the thrill of being alone. The purpose in overcoming his own fear.

  'Radio silence. Hostiles present. Stand by.' Is all he said. Not to be cruel or cold, but to be smart. He took a tight hold of the circular locking mechanism in the middle of the glistening green door. It was old and rusted shut with time. But enough force finally dislodged it and he started turning to unlock it. The familiar beckoning scent of oil hit him as soon as he opened the door and slid inside. It was dark in the corridors of the ship. But it was pitch black inside the engine room entranceway.

  He stumbled around a while, having literally no use of his eyes at all. He managed to make his way down a short corridor, lined with the same steam pipes as the areas he had left behind. He used them as a guide, and relied on his ears to guide the way. His foot hit something soft. He froze to the spot and instinctively placed a hand on his Desert Eagles, but was calm enough and smart enough to not fire or jump too hard.

  It was a body. He could feel that through his boot. But not a zombie. He made sure to feel around it with his boot rather than risk placing his hand into an infected mouth or worse, an open wound. It was hard to tell with his shoe, but he was pretty certain this particular victim had been torn apart. The feedback from his boot lacked the firmness of skin, and seemed to feel like supple organs and snapped sinew.

  He ran his shoe across the middle of the victim to feel for a belt. There might be some equipment there. Sure enough, he felt what he was sure to be a small handgun and another hard item. He traced the leather belt with his hand, confident enough he was safe to do so. He took the gun first, and breathed a sigh of gratitude when he finally noticed the other item was a torch.

  He clicked a button. It was dim, and the light had faded as the batteries died, but it was better than nothing. He let the light shine down onto the corpse. A woman. Ripped apart. The vicious wounds were sickening to the sight. The cold stare of fear locked into her eyes. Her very human eyes.

  In a way she had been lucky. The beasts had consumed too much of her flesh for her to come back as one of them. The virus must need some kind of regenerative energy, some measure of life.

  He didn't look at it for long. It was hard to look. But equally hard to look away. So great is the human fascination with the macabre. He walked away. Guided only by the fluctuating strength of the poorly powered torch. He though of Abe as he walked carefully through the bowels of the ship. Doctor Abraham Priest, his friend. He really wished that he was still alive. The world needed brilliant scientists like him to fix this. Whatever it was.

  He had deduced the zombie state was some kind of extension of permanent vegetative state. Which, all the more upsettingly, meant that something of the human survived. That was why the zolpidem drug worked after all. It reawakened the parts of the brain that were still alive. Those parts that needed to be functional for the body to walk, for the lungs to work, for the compulsion to eat to remain. It gave the dead life. And that life was what was needed for them to die. He had said it was like balancing an equation.

  The long stretch of metallic colored and otherwise featureless corridor finally ended with a locker room. The zombie in there was immediately startled by the light and lunged for Logan. A quick draw of the Makarov and a shot to the head brought it crashing down. He didn't want to shoot. That would alert every single one of them on the ship and the one it had crashed into. But it wasn't like he had a choice. The sound was thrilling and the echoes finally died down. He liked old guns like that. The firing pin slowly rolled back and the revolving mechanism pushed the next bullet into the chamber.

  Now speed was the key. He started opening the lockers indiscriminately, looking in some sense of urgency and desperation for more batteries or another torch. He finally found a more powerful one and pushed the old failing light into his belt alongside the gun he had taken from the decimated corpse. He half threw himself through the next door.

  He was surprised to see the engine room almost fully lit. It was only green and red emergency lighting, but it was amazing that it still worked. The engine, by some miracle, was still ticking over. It was enormous. Cavernous in fact.

  The engine, itself the size of two eighteen wheelers side by side, was housed in a vault the size of most warehouse plots. The pistons, though poorly maintained and in desperate need of some greasing, still rotated at the very top. The hissing noise was addictive and it was hypnotic to look at them rotate over and over. The engine was then lined by a series of metal walkways adorned with red colored chain link barriers to either side.

  Ten zombies were already in sight. There was no more sneaking around. They were stood, most of them still, staring at the rotating cylinders of the bare engine. They hadn't heard the gunshot. They were decrepit and old zombies. Turned such a long time ago. But still, oddly, in their first phase of development. He had noticed that about them. They, at first, seemed to act like they were lost. Like they thought they were still alive and trying to get on with their daily tasks. Soon after, for the most part, they developed a herd mentality. They were easily led astray by a sound, or a scent. A gunshot or a desperate cry from some fresh victims. These seemed to have broken the pattern, and seemed content on trying to live out their lives as engineers. Maybe it was a cycle.

  He had entered the engine room at the upper right corner. He could see a fuelling pump at the opposite side of the room. The pump itself looked every bit the same as those at any gas station at the side of any road. There might be some barrels there, or maybe some empty ones that he could at least fill up.

  For some reason he was driven into attack mode. The time for sneaking around had come and gone. He just wanted it over. He just wanted to fight. To vent all of the rage that was bubbling inside of him. He just wanted to hit these monsters head on.

  'Lizzie!' He barked down the radio and started jogging noisily over the metal walkways. His boots clanging harshly on the surface of the steel. 'Make some noise out there! See if you can draw some of them out of the ship.' He must have sounded desperate, because it threw her into a panic.

  'What is it?' She screamed down the radio receiver. She must have started shooting though. He could hear the impact of the high velocity rounds even from this point so deep inside the ship.

  'Time to take the fight to them.' He said, making sure to sound all the calmer to settle her mind. He threw himself into the first zombie, sending it hurtling down the lengthy drop to the bottom of the room. It hit the deck with an explosion of blood upon impact. He kept up his momentum and just kept running into one after another. They screamed and barked at him, but he just kept bulldozing his way through the crowd that just seemed to grow from an unknown place. They tumbled to the deck below, crunching their old, dead, and brittle bones into the solid steel below.

  He had stirred them. For better or worse, he was in a fire fight now. He took the Makarov and pushed it into the skull of the nearest zombie. He waited to pull the trigger until he had pushed three or more zombies together. He fired one round that killed them all. The old but powerful bullets splattered through each skull in turn. And they fell to the metal railings.

  The weight of the zombies started to rock the chain link guards beside the walkways. The bolts that fastened the walkway into the solid side of the ship were starting to bend and skew. It was coming down.

  Logan, in a fit of bravery, launched himself from the walkway, and grabbed hold of the next one beside him. And just in time too. The walkway broke free of the anchor points on the wall. It snapped away and tumbled to the base of the engine room. In an ear splitting crunch it killed every zombie, or at least pinned them to the point they couldn't get back up.

  Something was starting to niggle at him. H
e really had bitten off too much this time. He had underestimated how many of them there were.

  One barrel would have to do. In a break in the fighting, after shooting off the last of the bullets from the Makarov, he made a dash for the fuelling station he had seen earlier. It was housed towards the base of the ship. He could even feel the rocking sensation of the water.

  'You're in trouble!' Lizzie screamed at him. He could hear a great many shots coming from the other side of the radio.

  'Tell me something I don't know, kid.' Radio discipline went out the window as Logan mashed for the pump and rattled the heavy drums around trying to find one that was already half full. 'They're all over me down here.' He made an effort to be calm. Talking about how much of a mess he had gotten into was just going to make her panic. Besides, he loved it. For the first time in what felt like years. He felt alive. He felt like he was needed, felt useful and happy in some odd sense of the word and feeling.

  'You're taking on water.' She cut to the point. He glanced down into he depths of the hull. She was right. That walkway falling must have exaggerated whatever hole was already in the side of the ship. Water was gushing in from every direction. It became louder and louder with each beat of his heart.

  'Well I was supposed to scuttle it wasn't I?' He acted like it was all on purpose, just to make her feel at ease.

  'Not with you inside!' She screamed back to him. He didn't have the time to reply. The pump slowly worked in reverse and he could hear fuel gushing into the barrel, drawing it directly from the engine itself. It wasn't a lot, but that engine back on the tanker was at least now running more efficiently. So it was going to have to do.

  It might at least get them back to England so they could resume their patrols around the Island. For that mater, even if they just made it back and set down an anchor, they could wait all of this out in relative safety and comfort, so they were just going to have to be grateful for what he was able to get for them.

  It finally filled to the top. He didn't bother shutting the pump off. It was dragging fuel from the engine and spilling all over the place. It was going to the bottom anyway. A little bit of spilled fuel was going to make no difference. He knocked over the barrel and started rolling it around to get it into position. The angle of the ship was changing dramatically and visibly.

  He had to push hard to roll the full barrel of fuel up what was now a rather steep incline. He had to take a different route around the engine given the failed walkway, but he sure enough managed it. He used the barrel to knock over one last zombie, or at least the last that he could see, and rounded a corner to find himself back in the locker room.

  'How long?' Lizzie was blaring at him. She was still shooting. How many of them were there?

  'Just clear that deck!' He shouted back from the effort of pushing the barrel around. It was almost the size of him, and from time to time, his boots would lose traction on the overly polished floor and he would slip. The strain on his arms was tremendous, to the point he feared that his tendons were about to snap. He growled and wiped away sweat as he had to push the barrel across the corpse he had left lying on the floor of the corridor.

  He didn't want to look at the damage the weight of the thing had caused to the slowly decomposing flesh. But the steel barrel became caked in blood and guts. He had no choice but to try and rub it away with his hands and sleeves and push on.

  Getting through the smog was the hardest part. It sapped all of his energy, and the angle of the ship, as the bow slowly sunk further into the sea, made the effort of pushing the full carton of fuel uphill all the harder. He could hear and focus on the gun sounds outside, and the scraping metallic sheer of the metal as this ship slowly crunched past its neighbor on the way to the bottom of the sea.

  He managed to maneuver it around the body of the General who's starts he had stolen, and rounded the corner to slip out of the door into the pale light of the sun's last dying embers.

  'Check your fire!' He panted down the radio to let Lizzie know that he would soon be on deck. He really wasn't counting on there being so many of them. They had spilled over from the adjacent ship and seemed to multiply with every second, like a bacterial swarm. Sailors, military men and civilians were amongst the swarm of desperate zombies. They must have been taking on survivors when they ran aground, half sank and obviously got into some kind of trouble.

  Logan had no choice but to trust in her aim. All he had to do was push the barrel to the rope he had rigged up before. He finally reached the anchor point, and with some effort, wrapped the rope around a hole in the barrel's edge and tied it as hard as he could. With a scream of effort he launched the barrel over the side and watched it sink almost immediately into the dark and consuming water. The people back on the tanker would have to just pull it aboard.

  His heart sank when he noticed the sinking ship had dragged his lifeboat down into the watery depths. He had no way out.

  'Damn it!' He shouted in rage. 'I need a new exfil!' He screamed down the radio. He drew the Desert Eagles and started firing, every shot calculated and precise. He only had ten bullets left between them. He put down ten of the enraged beats before he had no choice but to abandon his position for fear of being overwhelmed.

  'There aren't any lifeboats on that ship.' Lizzie was becoming more agitated. She was terrified for him. Logan was calm, focused, and ever calculating. But even he knew his options were fast running out. He holstered his now empty guns and started sprinting down the sinking ship. The steep angle made it easy to build up speed. He leapt with everything he had and slammed into the hull of the other ship. It hurt him badly, but he just rolled until the momentum of the fast leap was extinguished. He was hardly any better off. There were just as many of them on the other ship.

  He used his stolen gun, pathetic and tiny as it was, until that was empty too. He panted with breathless effort and darted his eyes this way and that, looking in false hope for a way off. A discarded snapped pipe was all he could see. He took it and started swinging indiscriminately at the horde of zombies. They rocked the ship side to side under their collective weight.

  Beyond the crunching clashes of bone and sinew, he could hear some rolling thunder in the distance. It didn't take him long to deduce it to be a jet engine.

  'You put the stars back on?' Lizzie was crying. She could barely speak through her strained gasps for air. It was the same. She had watched Jace die through the eyes of her scope too.

  'Yeah...' His voice immediately calmed. Like he was accepting a fate he didn't know was coming. 'Retired far too damn early anyway.' He paused with a lull in the number of zombies to beat senseless. 'Figured you were right. In the end. I wasn't helping people as much as I should have been. And I'm sorry.' That almost hurt him to say. 'You were right. I was afraid of becoming a monster. That's what I was running from. But instead I just ran right into it. So you were right. I just needed to be me again.' He smiled as Lizzie slammed a high impact round through a zombie's chest cavity. It exploded from the inside out and knocked another three of their feet.

  'You giving up?' She cried even harder. But he wasn't. For anything. The strangest mix of excitement and dread surged though his pumping veins.

  'No chance... Fighting loosing battles is what makes us great.' She didn't know where he got the quote from. But it hit her hard. He would never go down without the biggest fight he had in him. He couldn't focus on the radio anymore. He had to keep fighting. He moved around the hull as much as the swell of bodies would allow him, like he was a boxer commanding every position in a boxing ring. He was in the mood for a brawl.

  He lunged the metal pipe at their skulls to the point it started to bend and snap. When it did, he plunged the sharp end into the skull of the nearest snarling zombie and pushed it into a group of some more. He forced them over board into the water below. With the onset of winter, it was cold down there, and the odd flake of ice had already crystallized on the surface.

  The jet engine. He had almost forgotten. It gr
ew louder and louder. He looked up into the pale sky, to see a jagged edge of a wing stick out of the cloud cover. He recognized it almost immediately.

  'Is that a jump jet?' He asked no one in particular as he started lunging his fists at the crowd of finally thinning zombies. He swung as hard as he could for their skulls to try and at least slow them down. He turned tail and ran into a safe clearing. The other ship had all but sunk, and the odd enterprising zombie had even managed to clamber aboard this next ship. Another upwards glance confirmed that it was a Harrier Jump Jet. British built, vertical take off, attack plane.

  'Pilot! What's your call sign?' He yelled down the radio. Lizzie kept firing, slamming as many bullets into the zombie horde as she had left. He couldn't make out the reply. 'I say again, pilot, what is your call sign?'

  '...' Nothing but crackle. But the plane slowly encroached closer. 'Hummingbird.' The heart stopping familiar voice finally replied. Logan had to replay it in his head just to make sure.

  'Jack!' He half yelled and swung for another zombie head. 'Is that you?'

  'Logan?' He was just as surprised. It warmed Logan's heart just to hear him speak. His old friend, who he thought he had buried back in England. Lizzie's heart heaved to the point her shots went wide. She had to settle herself, and didn't even have the time to say something to Jack.

  'I knew you would still be alive!' The pilot finally responded and banked his plane back around. The overpowering thunder of the jet engine was heart warming, but Logan was in no way out of the woods. In fact, he was still very much in danger.

  'I wish I could say the same! I though I buried you!' It was hardly the time for a catch up. 'Are you armed?' Logan had no other choice. There was a chance he could survive it. But Lizzie would be out of bullets sooner rather than later. He was running out of steam and running out of makeshift weapons too.

  'Vulcan cannon running low... Three sidewinders.' Jack almost hesitated to say. He knew what Logan was thinking. Without waiting for a response he started firing his cannon into the ship, spraying the deck with shards of bullets. Logan just crouched and covered his head. The shrapnel bounced around him with deafening screeches. He swung the plane around for another pass.

  'Do it!' Logan yelled. He wanted Jack to drop his full payload on the ship, burst those sidewinder missiles apart and send this cursed ship to the deck.

  'Don't even think about it!' Lizzie bitterly complained, but her gun finally clicked, signaling that her last mag was finally empty. She was filled with dreadful elation, finally in the knowledge that Jack was alive and well, but at the same time, torn apart by the horror of the thought of losing Logan instead. She couldn't decide how to feel. Logan burst out a scream as a piece of shrapnel sunk deep into his leg. It was like being stabbed by a million knives of fire all at one time.

  'I am not getting off this ship... now nuke it!' He yelled again. He stood with all of the effort he had. The bullet hail had torn apart the zombies like falling leaves, the sharp shards of exploded metal had spilled their share of blood. But still there were more.

  It was all he had. Logan ripped the long shard of metal from his leg with a yelp of searing pain, and plunged the sharpest end into the next scrambling zombie to emerge from the bowels of the military vessel. It hadn't gone in deep enough to kill it. Logan just didn't have the strength. He twisted at the metal, while staring into the gaping jaw and milky eyes of his would be killer.

  'I do not want to get ripped apart by these animals, now nuke it!' He sounded more serious than he had ever done at any point in the time Lizzie had know him. She cried and cried in pointless frustration and meaningless protest.

  'I'm sorry General.' Jack did it. Logan heard the missile burst before he saw the smokescreen and felt the shattering impact. The fireball was intense. It billowed around him and engulfed him. He saw the zombie he had been wrestling melt by his very eyes, before a force unknown to him jettisoned him back into the water. The fire could have killed him. The explosion itself could have killed him, or even the impact of the water crashing over him as his limp body impacted the slowly freezing ocean. And if that hadn't, the icy water would have consumed him, filled his lungs, and drowned him while he was unconscious.

  'Please... please don't be dead...' Lizzie whimpered.