A white headache spike split her frontal lobe at that instant as if to remind her exactly what this was, and her blind eye began tearing uncontrollably. Skye clenched her teeth as she sucked in a sharp breath, stopping and catching herself on a handrail. Her pulse slammed in her ears for a few seconds, and then the pain evaporated. She took a deep, shaky breath and wiped at her eye.
“You coming?” Meagan whispered down from the top of the stairway.
Skye didn’t respond, only checked behind her with the light and caught up. Another identical room awaited: three more hatches and another set of stairs, a big yellow 01 on the wall. Here, however, the hatches stood open with darkness beyond, and a pair of severely decomposed corpses in blue camouflage lay facedown on the metal floor. The stink was a physical assault, making them all retch.
Angie checked the bodies with her light and determined they had both been shot in the head, probably quite some time ago. The gray walls of the room were scarred from buckshot strikes, and half a dozen empty, red plastic twelve-gauge hulls were scattered on the floor.
Something slid across the floor above: dragging feet followed by a harsh gasp. Angie dropped the heavy Barrett as her Galil’s muzzle snapped up to the top of the stairway. Through an open hatch to the left came a hollow choir of moans echoing off metal walls, and the thump of bodies moving close together, their pace quickening.
“Coming in from the left,” Skye growled, aiming her rifle and her light. Its white circle revealed a tight hallway crowded with corpses, all in blue except for the one in front, a bald man in khaki. Each was gaunt and torn, dead eyes gleaming in the flashlight beam, and the khaki corpse’s skin sagged in loose rolls around its neck.
They surged forward with a snarl as Skye began to fire, PUFFT-PUFFT-PUFFT, the stock kicking into her shoulder as spent brass was ejected from the rifle’s side port. A belly shot, a shoulder, then the khaki corpse’s face and it went down. The others walked over the body. PUFFT, a head shot, PUFFT, a chest, PUFFT, the top of a sailor’s skull blew off in a green spray and he sagged to his knees. The others pressed forward.
“Twenty more feet,” Skye shouted.
At the stairway, Angie saw a figure at the top of the risers, a young man in dark blue coveralls with one hand chewed down to a ragged wrist stump. He groaned and, as Angie squeezed the trigger, flung himself down the stairway with reaching arms. Angie’s rifle, with no noise suppressor, sounded like artillery in the tight space. Her round missed and spanged off metal. The corpse tumbled, arms, legs, and head at odd angles as he rolled, and Angie leaped back as he collapsed at the base of the stairs.
The now broken and bent sailor made a gurgling sound and pawed at her ankle, his teeth scraping at the leather toe of her boot. Angie jerked her foot away, put the Galil’s muzzle in his ear, and spread his head across the floor with a trigger pull.
More movement and snarling from above, and Angie planted one boot on the bottom step and started snapping off quick rounds, the muzzle flash a strobe revealing a pack of corpses stumbling down toward her. Bullets slashed into torsos and legs, and she adjusted upward quickly, making a head shot.
“Meagan, put your light up here!” Angie shouted.
The high school girl turned and lifted her Maglite, and in doing so put her back to an open hatch. Almost as if it had been waiting for the moment, the body of a sailor in its fifties lunged through the opening wearing only once-white boxers, its chest covered in a huge tattoo of a voluptuous mermaid entwined about an anchor. The ragged bites covering the older man’s torso were blackened and rotting at the edges.
The sailor caught Meagan’s head in both hands from behind and sank its teeth into her neck with a bloody spray.
She screamed as dead fingers hooked at her face, wrestling her to the floor while the old sailor groaned into the meat of her neck. Meagan thrashed and rolled, breaking free of the bite, and scrambled to all fours, still shrieking as the nearly naked sailor crawled after her. She grunted and slammed the lawn mower blade machete into the drifter’s head with a crack of bone. The body collapsed at once.
Angie heard the screaming, saw the beam of light drop away, knowing they had been attacked from behind. She bared her teeth, thumbing the Galil’s selector switch from Semi to Auto. A second later she emptied the magazine up the stairs in a chainsaw roar of fully automatic fire, slugs shredding flesh and shattering skulls. Even those not instantly destroyed were flung back by the short-range fury, giving Angie time to drop her empty magazine and slap in another. God, she needed light! She risked a look back.
“Meagan, talk to me. . . .”
Through an open hatch came a muffled sob and the sound of sneakers running on a metal deck, quickly fading. On the floor before her was a fallen creature with Meagan’s blade jutting from its head, dark ichor pooling around it. Angie cursed and backed up, grabbing the dropped flashlight and holding it tightly along the length of the Galil’s front stock as she switched back to semiautomatic fire.
CRACK! CRACK! Angie advanced on the stairs again, taking the time to sight and drop her targets. Bodies collapsed on the stairs, and as new shapes appeared above, slowing as they climbed over others of their kind, she took them out too.
“Skye, you still with me?” Angie shouted between rifle shots.
Over at the left hatch, Skye had dropped to one knee for steadier shooting. Hit. Hit. Miss, goddammit. Another miss, fuckers. Miss, c’mon! Deep breath and squeeze. Hit, no, that was a neck shot. Okay, now it’s a hit. Hit. Hit.
The headache spike was scratching at the top of her brain, probing, deciding where to strike. Skye tried to ignore it and concentrated on keeping her own light on the corridor, her sights on target. Every miss allowed them a step closer. She briefly registered Meagan’s screams, knew something was in the room behind her, but also knew that was why they had brought the girl, for security. She and Angie couldn’t keep up their fire and still keep watch behind. If Meagan didn’t protect her area of responsibility, the shooters would be screwed. No sense worrying about it.
Miss and a ricochet. Head shot. Groin shot. Head shot.
Skye dropped an empty magazine and slapped in a fresh thirty rounds. She heard Angie call to her but didn’t look back. “I’m still here,” she called. “Is Meagan dead?”
“She’s gone,” Angie said.
“That means she’s dead,” said Skye, and then both of them were firing. Skye’s corridor was quickly filling with unmoving bodies, making it difficult for new arrivals to close on her. They slowed as they climbed over their fallen shipmates, exposing them to Skye’s M4. She took full advantage and shot them down.
After another magazine, Skye saw nothing else moving down her hallway and took the time to curse herself and her impairments for all the extra ammunition wasted on misses. Angie had similarly stopped shooting and closed the other two hatchways, dogging them tightly in hopes of avoiding another ambush.
They looked at the lawn mower blade and the dead sailor with his lewd tattoo, a scrap of pink flesh still in his teeth. Then they looked at one another as a silent agreement passed between them, one that compelled them to linger here no longer and move on. Meagan had been bitten and had run off; there was nothing they could do to change that. Both suspected they would see the girl again, but under different circumstances.
Skye closed the hatch through which she’d been shooting and joined Angie at the stairs, now choked with bodies. They listened. Nothing moved above, and the only sound was fluids dripping through the steel mesh of the stair risers.
Angie slung the heavy Barrett, took the lead, and began picking her way up through the dead. Skye stayed with her.
EIGHTEEN
What had it taken, less than a minute? Evan held the hot Sig in one hand, training his flashlight on the two bodies lying facedown on the deck, both men younger than him, wearing reeking, digital camouflage. Evan had been in the lead, and the two drifters
had come suddenly through an open hatchway to his right, nearly on top of him. They would have killed him too, but the aircraft carrier’s structural design had saved his life. Specifically, the knee knockers.
Throughout the ship, most of the doorways were oval-shaped, a design that helped add steel and strength to tighten the structure, as opposed to simple open door frames. A person passing through was required to duck under the curving top, and because the lower part of the frame was six inches off the floor, also required to step over. It was a skill that required some getting used to. Sailors on their first cruise often fell victim to the knee knockers as they learned how to move through the ship, and the medical corpsmen were kept busy the first month or so stitching up gashes in both foreheads and shins.
In this case, the uncoordinated drifters stumbled while trying to come through the opening, giving Evan both a warning and the precious seconds he needed to leap back and put a bullet in each of their heads.
“You okay?” Calvin called from the back.
“I’m good,” Evan replied, “just startled me.” He let out a shaky breath, reliving the careless moment when he had been alone in that sporting goods store, when the drifter almost got him. After that incident he had promised himself that careful would be his watchword.
And then he got on board an infested aircraft carrier.
On purpose.
Idiot, he thought. He reminded himself again to not be reckless, especially here, where there were so many unexpected openings. Lots of chances to be ambushed.
They were in a seemingly endless corridor: narrow, no more than five feet wide, the ceiling low and completely covered with cables and pipes, many of them color-coded for reasons at which Evan could only guess. It was warm, the air close enough to make him sweat underneath the black corrections-officer ammo vest he was wearing. Beneath the warmth was a dense stink of rotten meat and, below that, the more subtle aromas of oil, fuel, and the peculiar metallic taste of a ship.
A pool of fluorescent light thirty feet ahead showed that section of corridor to be empty, with more openings on the left and right, shadows in front and behind. Nervous breathing and anxious, shuffling feet came from the hippies behind him, and Evan stood still for a long moment, hoping his heart would stop its timpani drumming so that he could listen.
A distant clang. The creak of a hatch opening slowly. He gripped the pistol tightly and moved forward, checking openings with both his flashlight and Sig barrel before stepping past.
He thought about Maya, saw her beautiful face, and then savagely forced her out of his mind. Thinking about her would break his nerve and get him killed, and in that moment he understood why soldiers in combat zones sometimes tore up or burned photos of loved ones, even refused mail. It could make them distracted, weak. Evan got it.
His flashlight beam slid over a closed hatch with a sign mounted to one side reading MATERIALS STORAGE 2.10. He tested the lever and found it was tight, so he moved past. The crowd behind him—he could only think of them as a crowd, bunched together and making too much noise—followed too closely. And why wouldn’t they? he thought. We’re a pack of frightened, untrained people wandering a rabbit’s warren of the walking dead, surrounded by predators and moving deeper into a slaughterhouse. Frightened didn’t begin to describe it.
They passed by closed tool lockers on the left, a hatch on the right marked FAN ROOM, another tool locker—this one open and fortunately only filled with tools—and another hatch marked only with numbers. He stepped in something sticky, and the flashlight revealed it to be a pool of congealed blood with a hunk of scalp in it, a bristle of hair still attached. Evan fought the urge to gag and moved on.
They came to an intersection lit by a single fluorescent light bar, darkness extending in all directions. To the right was a short hall leading to an open hatchway with a sign above it: BERTHING 2.19.40. A wave of thick decomposition emanated from the hatchway, something so tangible Evan thought he should see a green fog, and then from within came the shuffling of many feet.
“On the right,” Evan warned, and two hippies hurried to kneel in front of him, their shotguns pointed at the opening.
“Watch the other halls,” said Calvin, stepping up next to the writer and aiming his assault rifle.
Evan put his light on the hatch, and the dead poured out.
There were dozens, scrambling over the knee knocker and clawing at one another in their frenzy to reach live prey. Their flesh was a bloodless gray tinged with green, with blackened bites and missing fingers, ears, long patches of skin, and even some entire limbs. Most were male, and the few females were nearly indistinguishable as such due to their rotten condition.
Weapons roared, the muzzle flashes a hot white in the darkness, heads blown apart and off at close range. Bodies collapsed as more rushed past, and volleys of gunfire turned the corridors into echo chambers. The metal walls were spattered with wet green and gray tissue, and a couple of corpses got so close to the gunfire that the muzzle flashes briefly set their shirts on fire.
In seconds it was over, the short hall and hatch so packed with still bodies that the lone figure remaining flailed at the corpses on the other side, frantically but unsuccessfully trying to dig its way through. He was a nineteen-year-old in a red jersey, the skin peeled away from his face just below the nose, creating a toothy, skeletal grin. The boy made a whining noise as he thrashed. Calvin moved in close with his assault rifle, aimed, and fired. The boy stiffened at the new hole in his forehead, and dropped out of sight.
There was a brief pause before the clicking of weapons and magazines being reloaded filled the silence.
Nothing came at them from the other corridors, and so Evan led them left, toward the centerline of the ship. They passed an open hatch marked AVIATION STORES, flashlights revealing a pair of workstations and what appeared to be a low-ceilinged warehouse of metal racks and crated equipment, but no zombies. A dozen small offices were on either side of them, most doors open, all of them empty. The overhead lights followed a pattern of one set lit for every three dark as they moved past a pair of steep metal stairs, one rising and the other descending, a few more closed hatches marked with numbers, a water fountain in a recessed alcove, and then they arrived at another intersection.
The intermittent lighting continued ahead and to the left, but to the right was only darkness. The walls here were scarred with bullet impacts, and brass shell casings rattled underfoot. Dark, textured stains were everywhere. On one wall, a metal spool had been swung out on a short arm, a brass nozzle and canvas fire hose lying beneath it in a tangle.
“Fighting here,” said Calvin, his voice barely above a whisper.
Evan nodded. “But no bodies.”
“Oh, they’re walking around here somewhere,” the hippie said.
Evan put his light into the darkness to the right, seeing a few motionless corpses on their backs, the rest of the corridor lost in the darkness beyond his flashlight beam. Conduit, cable, and more piping covered the ceiling and walls everywhere he looked, some of it ruptured by gunfire, a few dripping clear liquid. Fresh water or sewage? he wondered. He couldn’t tell from the smell, because the stink of decaying flesh not only was thicker here than in places they had been but also reeked of rotting vegetation. The writer tried to make sense of that but quickly gave up. It seemed foolish to wonder about something as mundane as that when he was confronted by the impossible on a daily basis.
“We’re leaving a lot of unexplored areas behind us,” Calvin warned. “That could be a problem later.”
“I know,” said Evan. “Should we stop and check every door, every closet and storage room?” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He really didn’t know. On one hand it seemed the only intelligent thing to do, in order to ensure that they were efficiently clearing the ship and wouldn’t be ambushed from behind. On the other, he wondered if it was better just to let the dead come to them.
&
nbsp; Calvin peered down the corridors. “I don’t know. Maybe we’re doing it right. Maybe it’s best to take on whatever comes at us, thin out their numbers, and then go back later for a more detailed search.” He said this more like a question, and the two men just shrugged at one another. Not for the first time in the last couple of months, Evan wished he had followed his father’s advice and joined the military instead of wandering across America. At least he would have had some training when it all fell apart.
Of course he doubted even the military had expected something like this.
From behind Evan, a hippie named Dakota said, “Let’s keep it simple and just kill anything that moves.”
Evan nodded and Calvin clapped his Family member on the back. A Navy SEAL wouldn’t have approved of their tactics, Evan knew, but then any Navy SEAL left aboard was now probably playing for the other side.
They turned left, Evan heading toward what he was pretty sure was the rear of the ship, peeking inside several empty offices and workshops, passing another set of steep stairs and yet another partially unrolled coil of fire hose. He stared at it, a limp canvas snake on the metal deck. They had seen no signs of scorching or blackening from smoke. Just past the hose he saw a fireman’s helmet with a cracked plastic face shield, and beside it a yellow oxygen tank with shoulder straps and a rubber face mask. The tank had a rusty smear down one side.
“What the—”
A shotgun blast made him flinch and duck, and he spun to see the men and women behind him turning. A flashlight jerked frantically back down the hall from which they had come, and Evan caught a glimpse of two shapes in yellow firefighter gear stumbling out of the darkness. The shotgun boomed again, pellets shredding the zombie’s fire-retardant coat but doing nothing to stop it.
“The head!” a woman screamed.
Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead Page 14