“Good to go, Hannigen,” Smith said.
Hannigen fired up the boat’s outboard motor and moved us forward and slightly away from the ship’s side. The boat’s propeller churned up the sea behind us as we moved slowly forward. The boat wasn’t going to have to move very far to reach the warship’s bows.
I turned my head away from the glistening sea to study the island in the distance. The green trees swayed in the breeze above the rocky cliff face and I thought I saw a building slightly set back from the coastline. The structure was built in what looked like old, yellowish stone from a bygone age, almost like a medieval Spanish castle.
“See that?” I asked Smith, nodding to the land.
Smith’s expression suddenly turned serious. “I clocked that building a while ago, kid. That’s the whole reason why we’re going down under the water.”
Chapter Seven
“Why, what do mean by that?” I asked, now more concerned than I ever was before this damn dive.
Smith shrugged. “Forget about it for now.”
I rubbed my face and studied the building across the sea. What the fuck was Smith talking about now? There always seemed to be some hidden agenda to what he was doing. Was I supposed to be worried about what lay on the shore? There was never any let up to what was going on in Smith’s mind.
Hannigen slowed the boat and stopped beside the bows. I glanced up at the huge gray bulk and saw the colossal starboard anchor, housed in a recess below the ship’s side. An orange line of rust followed the Y shaped anchor down the side to the water’s surface. I didn’t know how bad rust was in a warship but guessed they could go on sailing for a while before they needed some serious repair work.
“Okay, you ready, kid?” Smith asked.
I nodded, trying hard not to quiver in my seat.
Smith spat into his facemask and rubbed the saliva around the transparent eye pieces. I did the same, trying to pretend I knew what I was doing. Smith turned a valve on his air tank behind his back and whirled his finger, instructing me to follow suit. I reached behind my back and turned the valve. I heard a hiss of air from the mouthpiece hanging below my chin.
Smith pulled his mask up over his eyes and inserted his breathing tube between his lips. He gave me a thumbs up, looking almost alien-like in the diving gear. I followed his lead, placing on the mask and inserting the mouthpiece. Instead of a thumbs up, I gave him the middle finger. I saw by the expression in his eyes he found the gesture amusing. The weird air I inhaled made me feel a little light headed for a few seconds and the rubber mouthpiece tasted like a sweaty armpit. The mask limited my view from all sides, making me feel increasingly claustrophobic.
To my surprise, McPherson reached into a locker at the back of the boat and took out two spear guns with several more barbed lances, almost like an archers quiver rolled in a long lightweight, black holder. He handed the armaments to me and Smith. I nearly spat out my mouthpiece, asking what the fuck we needed weapons for.
Smith held up the spear gun, giving me an encouraging nod. I wasn’t so enthusiastic. Why did we need weapons down there? What the hell lay below us?
Smith slung the container with the spare barbs around his back and I did the same with my own package. I looked down at the spear gun in my hands, without any prior knowledge how to operate the weapon. I presumed it worked like a normal firearm only underwater. The stock was the same length as an assault rifle but with a barbed spear protruding from the end where a barrel would normally be.
I glanced at Smith and pointed at the spear gun, shaking my head and making audible noises to indicate my lack of knowledge towards the weapon.
McPherson picked up on my reservations. He pointed at the gun in my hands.
“It’s a pneumatic powered gun. Just point the trigger and fire if you need to. Then reload the spears by pulling it back on the mechanism,” he said. “Just like firing a pop gun at the fairground.” McPherson pointed to his head and made a trigger indication with his thumb. “Like shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll be all right down there, so you will Brett.” He pointed towards the sky. “You got the man upstairs looking after you, so you have.” He crossed himself, dipped his hand beyond the boat and flicked seawater over Smith and I.
I took a long blow on my mouthpiece. These Irish guys had an unshakeable belief in a higher entity. Although I couldn’t believe in any type of religion, I didn’t doubt these people’s conviction in their faith. These were tough, war torn guys and absolutely inspired and motivated by their loyalty. I disagreed with Smith. These Irish guys were like a pack of attack dogs, one word and they’d be tearing out the opposition’s throat, even though they had a deep seated sense of Christianity.
Smith flipped his head backwards and dive-bombed over the side of the boat, disappearing into the sea below.
Shit, it was time for me to go down with him. I hadn’t said the word for a long while, probably since I was a kid in London when I shouldn’t have been uttering such obscenities. But through the mouthpiece I managed to squeeze out “Oh, bollocks,” before I leaned backwards and stupidly and voluntarily fell out of a perfectly good boat.
After the splash of the water’s surface, I couldn’t hear anything apart from my own breathing, sucking in and out of the air tank on my back. I panicked at first, flapping around in an unfamiliar environment. The salt water stung the cut on my lip. Water, lightweight but I sunk. The weight belt. What the hell? Everything was blue. I settled, I could breath. Wow! Another world. It was fucking beautiful. Crystal clear sea and everything moved in slow motion. It was like some kind of weird dream.
Shoals of colorful fish breezed by me like I was an alien inhabitant in their environment. The reef in front of me opened in amazing expanse. Acres of sea vegetation fluttered in the underwater tide across the rocky surface. I saw Smith examining the ship’s hull a few yards to my right. He was flipping his legs, keeping himself level to the point of impact where the ship had hit the reef. I kicked my legs and moved further towards him.
Smith pointed to the bottom of the ship, something I’d never seen before. The tapered end of the front of the warship was wedged into a crevice in the gray, rocky reef’s surface. The whole steel structure had been bent around the gap in the reef, almost like a giant pair of snippets had pulled the entire front of the ship around to the right. The rippled, sandy sea bed sat around twenty yards below and to the rear of the rest of the vessel.
Even I could see that if the warship was put in reverse gear the whole of the front hull would be ripped out and the ship would sink. We couldn’t move. We were stuck where we were.
Instead of arguing about the whereabouts of our location, the men who stood around that table on the ship’s bridge should have made the decision to anchor out at sea and taken the smaller sea boat to investigate the island. The result of their indecisiveness had cost us dearly.
I looked at Smith and gave a cut throat signal. The ship was unmovable. He nodded.
Movement over his shoulder caught my attention. At first, I thought it was another shoal of fish swimming by. Then I noticed the ragged form was human sized and shaped. The emaciated creature, who had once been a living male person, clawed its way through the sea towards us. The flesh around this thing’s face was gray and rotten, presumably eroded by time below the water’s surface. The scowl was unmistakable, lips gone and protruding teeth snapping in anticipation. Medium length sandy hair billowed around the partially visible skull. The remains of a pair of beige shorts and a brightly colored yellow shirt flapped around the zombie’s gaunt body.
I flapped my hand and pointed behind Smith at the approaching ghoul. Smith picked up on my signal and the terrified look in my eyes. He immediately spun around and saw the floating dead guy drawing nearer.
As usual, Smith didn’t panic. He raised his spear gun and waited until the zombie was around ten feet away from us. Smith aimed and released the trigger. The spear shot from the gun and whizzed through the water at an incredible speed I never th
ought possible below sea level.
The spiked barb penetrated the undead man’s head with an overwhelming impact. The guy’s head rocked backwards and he immediately ceased his movement towards us. His body went completely limp, drifting up to the surface and his eyes rolled upwards, almost as though he was looking at the heavens above the sea. The spear was lodged firmly in his forehead and a plume of reddish brown blood drifted out through the wound into the sea.
Smith took out another spear from his quiver and reloaded the gun. I turned my head in all directions, scanning the close proximity. In my experiences with the undead, they were like roaches. Where you’d find one, you normally uncovered a whole bunch of the bastards.
I was proved right. I spotted the dilapidated hulk of a fishing boat or some kind of yacht nestled amongst the sea vegetation perched across the reef, some fifty yards from our position. The vessel must have taken the same route as us in the past and beached itself on the reef. Several more ragged figures drifted out from the boat and began making their way towards us. Maybe they had a sense of the smell of us or they could simply detect our movement in the water, I wasn’t sure.
Smith floated alongside me and I knew he was also aware of the impending danger. I started to seriously wonder if the damn spear guns were going to be enough to hold off the dozen or so undead coming at us. We could have swum upward and tried to get back on the boat but we’d be chancing our luck in case the zombies caught up and started to bite away at us before we broke the surface.
A large dark mass momentarily blocked out the sunlight and I glanced upward. I saw a huge silver backed shark turn in the water and bite the head off the undead man that Smith had previously shot with his spear gun. The remaining stump of the zombie’s neck seemed to erupt with blood, floating in all directions in spiraling veins.
More large, man-eating fish emerged through the waters, obviously curious and motivated by the smell of blood.
Smith and I now had two problems to contend with. A bunch of man-eating sharks and a horde of man-eating zombies.
Chapter Eight
I tapped Smith on the shoulder and pointed up at the sharks circling above us. One of the huge fish took the headless zombie’s corpse between its teeth and shook it like a rag doll. More blood and bodily fluids seeped out of the torso, turning the sea around it into a light pink cloud. Smith nodded and pointed at his spear gun. He made a fork sign with his fingers towards his mask and then pointed at the approaching undead. Obviously, he was more concerned with zombies than sharks. For the moment, anyhow.
My air intake increased. The gurgling noise from my mouthpiece worked overtime and a rapid succession of air bubbles fizzed around me and rose swiftly to the surface. I tried to stay as calm as I could but I knew the sharks now had the taste for blood. They were on the look-out for more food. We couldn’t allow the undead to draw too close, not only did they pose their own threat but the sharks would also pick up on their rotting scent and go into a feeding frenzy, biting into anything that moved, including us.
Smith aimed and fired another spear shot at the leading zombie, a gray faced man who was clad in nothing more than a pair of faded red shorts. The spear zipped through the side of his head and he briefly ceased moving through the water before floating upward slightly, with his arms flailing in the moving tide. A plume of blood drifted from the head wound, floating closer towards the pack of sharks.
One of the huge fish turned in the water, flipping its tail and kind of waggling its head from side to side. The shark moved closer to the second dead man, turned on its side slightly and bit into the side of the torso, gripping, then biting again twice in quick succession.
Although the scene was shit-your-pants scary, it was also awesome to watch these huge predators of the sea in action.
The shark’s unrelenting attack severed both the corpse’s legs and the body parts drifted downwards towards the seabed, producing wisps of rising blood as they sank.
The undead fanned out slightly across the water, making it more difficult to keep track of them. The sharks separated from their close knit pack, darting away in different directions to investigate the vicinity.
The situation was rapidly heading out of control with zombies and killer sharks looming in all directions. We couldn’t make it back to the boat now. The sharks would be on us before we made it halfway up. I glanced skyward and saw the black bottom of the sea boat shimmering on the surface to the right. I estimated we were somewhere around thirty yards away from the boat. Not far in the grand scheme of things but too far with the dilemmas we faced.
Adding to our problems, shooting the zombies with the spear guns posed its own setback. Although the barbed weapons stopped the undead in their tracks, the process created a torrent of blood through the sea, attracting more sharks to our location. It didn’t seem to bother the man-eaters that the undead flesh was rotten; in fact they seemed to be enjoying the taste.
I spotted a zombie, a female in the remnants of a bright blue bikini approaching us, clawing her way across the surface of the reef. I aimed the spear gun, never having fired an underwater weapon before and released the trigger. The thing had a kickback like a normal firearm and my aim was suspect at best.
The spear zipped through the sea and hit the undead woman, sending her reeling back and upwards. However, the shot was not good enough for a kill, as the spear had lodged into the center of her throat. Blood seeped from the wound but the injury didn’t stop the undead woman from attempting to thrash her way through the water towards us. Her face was clearer now, a decaying gray mask of horror, white pupils wide and yellow teeth gnashing, her auburn hair billowing around her head.
I reached around to my quiver of spare ammunition and took out a replacement spear. I tried to reload but had difficulty in jamming the spear back into the readied position. The mechanism seemed cumbersome and hard to cock. I had little time to figure out the reloading method and felt panic spreading within me. An unloaded gun was as useless as a rolled up newspaper under the sea. Smith had given me a crash course in using the diving equipment but nobody had thought to give me a rundown on how a damn spear gun worked.
A smaller shark, with slightly mottled skin below the dorsal fin, zoomed seemingly out of nowhere and grabbed the undead woman between its teeth. It took the zombie back across the reef, leaving a trail of rising blood in its wake. The shark tuned back out to sea and I lost sight of it in the shimmering depths.
I sincerely hoped Smith had some kind of plan. I was totally out of my zone and to coin a phrase – like a fish out of water.
In my haste to reload the spear gun, I somehow managed to stab myself in my left hand with the barbed point. The spear slipped from my clutches and sank away between a thick sprout of sea weed. A slow trail of blood drifted in front of my face. I’d once heard that sharks could smell the faintest scent of blood within their locale. The thought didn’t improve my increasingly agitated state.
I tapped Smith on his shoulder then flapped my hand in a gesture of confusion at the weapon in my grasp. I showed him the cut on my hand. To reiterate our predicament, I waved around at our surroundings then pointed at the boat above us.
Smith seemed to understand what I meant. He pointed skyward at the bottom of the sea boat and made a cut-throat gesture. A no go. He took the spear gun from me and reloaded it with ease. He handed me back the weapon, forked at his eyes and pointed back to the reef.
To me, keeping eyes on the problem didn’t seem much of a plan. Before the dive, Smith said we’d have forty minutes of air. Plenty for a ten minute exploration of the ship’s hull. He also said that if you breathe rapidly, the air will expend at a quicker rate.
We were stuck down below the sea with our backs to the crippled ship’s hull and zombies and sharks all over the damn place. To add to my woes, I was breathing like a birth mother, hastily using up the remaining air in my tank.
Chapter Nine
I tapped Smith again and he turned his head towards me. By the st
ern look in his eyes, I knew the action had irritated him. I pointed at the small gauge attached to the air tanks. The black needle hovered dangerously over the red zone on the indicator dial.
Smith studied his own air gauge and I also took a look. His tank was only around half used up. I guessed he was a damn sight calmer than I was.
We couldn’t stay where we were, that was for sure. If we were incredibly lucky, the sharks might disperse back further into the sea but the undead wouldn’t cease coming at us until they’d picked our bones clean.
A naked male zombie, with a large gut and a bald head, swum around the side of the reef towards us. His right thigh skimmed against the reef’s rocks, ripping away a strip of puffy gray flesh. His large stomach and shoulders were peppered with human teeth marks, obviously from an attack some while ago. I aimed my newly loaded spear gun at the approaching target and squeezed the trigger. I figured with a target that large and at close proximity, I couldn’t fail to miss.
As usual, my optimism was soon crushed. The spear whooshed through the water and did hit the target but with treacherous consequences. The barbed point rammed through the flesh of the zombie’s bulging gut. I didn’t know if the guy had been dead underwater so long that the body had swollen and produced internal gases but his whole stomach burst like a beach balloon under the impact from the spear. A cluster of brown, bubbles erupted from the gaping wound, along with a decaying, gray jumble of bodily organs.
The mass of stale meat floating in every direction seemed to send the sharks into a crazy frenzy. They zigzagged around in swift circles, crossing each other’s paths and scooping up pieces of flesh in their teeth.
This time, Smith tapped me on the shoulder and pointed towards the reef beyond the warship’s damaged hull. He motioned with his head at the rocky atoll and swam towards it. I reluctantly followed, not knowing what kind of extreme tactics Smith was ready to deploy.
The Left Series (Book 6): Left On An Island Page 4