Mutated

by Joe McKinney

CHAPTER 25

  Gabi started shooting before Jimmy made it up to the flybridge. He glanced down through the rain and saw her directing concentrated fire on the men who had spotted them.

  She moved aft, stepping through wet puddles of blood and mud and ropes of guts left behind from the zombie attack early that morning, right out onto the open part of the deck.

  “Gabi, get behind cover!” he shouted.

  She didn’t bother looking back at him. “Get us out of here!”

  He hit the ignition and the Cummins diesel fired up with a cough, sending a tremor through the boat. “Thank you, baby,” he muttered to the boat, stroking the navigation console. God, he loved this boat.

  He fed the throttle and a thick cloud of black smoke rose up from the engine. For a moment, it obscured Gabi from his view. When the smoke cleared, she had sighted her rifle on another of the Red Man’s boats, this one less than fifty yards to starboard. The men who had first spotted them were dead, one of them bent over the railing, his fingertips dragging the glassy surface of the river.

  “Let’s go,” Gabi shouted. “Come on, Jimmy, get us moving!”

  The Sugar Jane gained speed slowly. The first boat was dead in the water, but to back away from the dock they’d have to go right between two larger trawlers. Jimmy could see black shirts aboard, but couldn’t count them. Not through the smoke and rain.

  He glanced down again at Gabi. It scared him that she was so out in the open, so exposed, but there was nothing he could do about it. This first maneuver was going to put her even more in harm’s way.

  “Okay, coming about,” he called down to her.

  She didn’t acknowledge him. She went down to one knee and resumed firing, her bullets tearing up the trawler just off the starboard bow.

  Jimmy cut the wheel hard to starboard and the Sugar Jane began to rotate, the bow swinging around toward the shore.

  He saw the little speedboat just as they started firing. A bullet hit the navigation console in front of him and peppered his face with bits of burning fiberglass and wood splinters. Jimmy flinched away from it, shielding his eyes.

  There were three men in the little boat.

  “Piece of cake,” he muttered.

  He grabbed his AR-15 and sighted it over the railing. Despite the rolling of the boat and the driving rain he managed to fire off three quick rounds, one of which struck a black shirt with a handgun and dropped him. The remaining two black shirts ducked down behind the gunwale, but their boat offered little in the way of cover, and as the Sugar Jane continued to swing around, bringing the flybridge directly over their position, Jimmy had a clear shot. Six shots later all three men were dead.

  But the Sugar Jane was still coming around and Jimmy had to drop his weapon to correct the steerage back on course. He reversed the engine and started feeding throttle as fast as he dared. She was a temperamental boat these days, and too much throttle would almost certainly cause the engine to sputter and die, dooming them both.

  Ahead, two of the Red Man’s larger boats were barreling down on them, hoping to box the Sugar Jane in before she had a chance to pull away from the angle created by the pier and the shore.

  Jimmy saw only one way out.

  He said a silent prayer and pushed the throttle as hard as it would go, grimacing at the straining groan of the Cummins behind him. The first boat, with its dead crew, was still a good seventy feet from them. Jimmy turned the Sugar Jane to pass across its bow, a maneuver, he hoped, that would force the second of the two approaching trawlers to pass across its stern. It would give them some cover and take the boat out of the fight. At least for a moment.

  That would just leave the other trawler, and Gabi was already laying fire down on them.

  He held his breath as the dead boat loomed closer, ignoring the rain driving into his eyes and the occasional bullet that smacked into the walls of the flybridge. Jimmy was intent on gauging the pass, aiming to put the tip of the dead boat’s bow just inches off the Sugar Jane’s starboard side, and he didn’t hear Gabi’s screams until they’d reached a desperate pitch.

  When he whirled around she was curled into a fetal ball against the port side gunwale, her rifle tucked under her. Six or seven black shirts were pouring down fire on the Sugar Jane’s stern, chewing up the hull and filling the air with splinters.

  He grabbed for his rifle to return fire, but stopped short. Not far from Gabi’s head was the upturned box of M67 grenades, the contents now spilled out like billiard balls across the deck.

  “Gabi,” he yelled, “throw me a grenade.”

  He couldn’t tell if she could hear over the rain and the rattling cough of the rifles.

  “Gabi!”

  But she was already moving. Without getting up she lunged across the deck and caught one of the rolling grenades before the motion of the boat carried it away from her. Then she rolled over on her back and threw it up at Jimmy.

  He caught it like an egg. These things had saved their ass more than once and he had a great respect for their power.

  “Stay down!” he yelled to Gabi.

  Then he turned the Sugar Jane hard toward the trawler and pulled the pin on the grenade.

  The sudden move surprised the black shirts and for a moment they stopped firing, a few of them backing away from what looked like an imminent collision between the two boats.

  Jimmy waited until they were almost even and hurled the grenade. It smashed through a window and exploded inside the cabin with a muffled roar, throwing the black shirts into the water, their bodies trailing smoke. An instant later the trawler was a churning ball of black smoke laced through with orange tongues of flame.

  “Got him!” Jimmy shouted. “Damn straight!”

  “Jimmy!” Gabi said. “Starboard side, we got trouble!”

  He glanced that way. Its captain wasn’t as foolish as Jimmy had hoped. He hadn’t been fooled by Jimmy’s attempt to put the dead vessel between them. Instead, he’d come to a full stop and rotated back to starboard, so that now, as the Sugar Jane picked up speed to flank the trawler, she was presenting her bow full-on to the black shirts’ vessel.

  Gunmen were already moving into position, low-crawling toward the point of the bow with rifles up and pointed downrange.

  Jimmy realized he was stuck. His only hope now was to outrun them, but the Sugar Jane was already at full throttle and her diesel engine starting to sputter and smoke. They were making maybe eight knots, but the Red Man’s trawler was almost certainly capable of more.

  “Jimmy?” Gabi called up to him.

  He locked eyes on her. Her mouth was set in a tight line, her stare unblinking. He returned her gaze, unwilling to look away.

  “You be ready with one of those grenades,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “They’re gonna catch us,” he said, “so I’m gonna let them.”

  “What?”

  “Just be ready.”

  Bullets smacked into the flybridge and Jimmy ducked down out of sight. He just needed a few more seconds. A few more . . .

  He rose up just enough see over the railing. As he suspected, the trawler was gaining on them. Its captain had her at full throttle, aiming to close the gap enough for his shooters on the bow to fire down into the Sugar Jane’s stern the same way Jimmy had done against the little speedboat closer to shore.

  “That’s it,” he muttered. “Closer, closer . . .”

  He reached up and pulled back on the throttle, bringing the Sugar Jane to half speed. The diesel coughed and sputtered, but kept working.

  The Sugar Jane eased down slightly in the water.

  At the same time, Jimmy shouted, “Now, Gabi! Give it to ’em!”

  She rose up on her knees and tossed her grenade at the surprised black shirts on the trawler. They were gaining too fast now to turn away. The grenade hit the pilothouse, bounced forward, and rolled down into an open hatch leading to the forward hold.

  The explosion blew a massive hole in the po
rt bow, killing two of the black shirts directly above it and flooding the hold with river water.

  And still the trawler sped forward, unable to check its forward momentum. The bow ducked toward the water and continued to drive down, going lower and lower until the boat slowed to a stop and gradually began to sink. Within seconds, most of its bow and pilothouse were underwater, only its stern jutting up at a sharp angle from the plane of the water.

  Jimmy watched it as they pulled away, his chest heaving, and he almost allowed the warm glow of victory to overtake him. But Gabi was rolling around the deck, holding her arm.

  “Gabi!”

  He rushed down to her side and lifted her up, her head on his thigh. Smoke was seeping up through the seams of the engine compartment and the engine was making a series of consumptive coughs. Through the rain and smoke he peered at her injury. It didn’t appear too deep, but it was bleeding a lot.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “I know, just let me work.”

  He took a soaking wet handkerchief from his back pocket and tied it around her upper arm, as close to the shoulder as he could manage.

  “Tight?”

  She was grimacing from the pain. She nodded, unable to speak.

  “We’re in trouble, baby,” he said.

  “No shit,” she gasped.

  He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “That’s my girl.”

  It was hard to tell if that was rain or tears in her eyes. He suspected tears, even though she too tried to laugh.

  The engine’s coughing turned to a series of loud knocks, like some little gremlin was inside there banging against the hull with a hammer. Suddenly billowing clouds of black smoke poured up through the engine compartment seams, enveloping them both and causing them to hack.

  The next instant, the engine died.

  Through the smoke and rain, Jimmy could see the rest of the Red Man’s fleet racing toward them. They had been stuck on the opposite side of the pier and he had hoped that that would buy them the time they needed to escape, but it was obvious now that was not to be. A lot of water had passed under this boat of theirs. It had been their home, their refuge, their one solid link to the dream of Mexico they both shared. And now, quite possibly, it was going to be their coffin.

  “I’m out,” she said.

  For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, whether her rifle or some deeper reserve of her being, but then she held up the rifle and the empty magazine.

  He should have known.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He went forward into the cabin and looked around for the last time. He saw the pictures of their daughter and their granddaughter broken on the floor, crushed by muddy boots, the sheets torn from the bed, the cabinets hanging open. They had searched it, rifled it, but they hadn’t changed it. For him, the substance of this boat was always there, even as it filled with smoke and the sounds of the Red Man’s fleet and his screaming black shirts bore down upon him. He took Ben Richardson’s backpack from the bed and pulled off the cushion and exposed the hidden compartments he and Gabi had secreted there. He pulled out two more of the ARs and a handful of loaded magazines and brought it all aft to take his position next to Gabi.

  She looked down at the stuff he’d brought forward and nodded, a pained smile crossing her lips.

  “Not gonna give up yet, huh?”

  “Never,” he said. “Not while I’ve got you next to me.”

  She smiled again, and this time it wasn’t laced through with pain.

  With his help, she pulled herself to her feet. Her left arm was hanging by her side. But she still looked like the mama bear he knew her to be, always ready for the fight.

  Thick clouds of acrid-smelling smoke swirled around them as they turned to face the oncoming fleet.

  He reached down and took her hand, and together they waited.

  CHAPTER 26

  Niki watched Nate slip out the main doors and into the rain with mixed feelings. The man was, she decided, part cockroach. Had to be. There was no other way to explain the fact that he was still alive.

  And there was something else, some nagging intuition that told her he was just a little bit off. It was more than his obvious lack of good sense, more even than the veil of contrition he seemed to live behind, as though he were wandering the world looking for somebody to forgive him for some past sin. There was a sin there, somewhere, in his past. She would have to watch that before he got too close to Avery.

  Which was another thing.

  Assuming they all lived through this, Avery was going to want that man in her life. A relationship like that would go all kinds of places, and most of them were places that Niki knew were bad. Avery, as fragile as she was, would no doubt throw her heart into that man. He was just the sort to draw her out into the open, and then leave her high and dry.

  She pushed the thought back down. All of this was pointless. They were neck-deep in a world of crap and here she was worried about Avery’s love life.

  She took a deep breath and refocused on Nate.

  He was walking through the rain, stepping up onto the curb, the metal rod down at his side. Here at the back of the Red Man’s zombie army the stragglers were spread apart, and Nate walked between them, not bothering to slow down and not wasting his time engaging them.

  That was good, Niki thought. Loren had told her that he could sense the morphic fields that the surrounded the zombies, like they were heat shimmers rising off the desert or something. She didn’t know if she believed that or not, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. He had brought all these zombies here just the same. And he was continuing to hold them steady even now, in this pouring rain.

  The first few zombies Nate passed didn’t stir, at least not until it was too late. He was coming up from behind them, and even as he passed them, they remained still, caught between their own atavistic impulses to kill and their obedience to the Red Man’s commands that held them in their place.

  But once one began to moan, that control wavered, and soon the zombies he passed were stumbling after him.

  That was her cue.

  She slipped out through the front doors and moved along the walkway next to the building. Red-tipped photinias, now run to riot, lined the walk, giving her a little cover. The rain helped some too. Within minutes she had made it to the edge of the building with nothing but a parking lot and open space beyond that stretching down to the river.

  Three zombies were standing out in the middle of the parking lot, all of them swaying in place, staring dumbly toward the Red Man’s platform.

  She waited.

  Back on the main part of the lawn, Nate was causing quite a stir. Even the zombies on the fringe were advancing toward him, and a momentary twinge of excitement went through her to imagine Loren up on that platform, losing control.

  But these three zombies weren’t moving like all the others.

  She looked to her right, but there were no more back that way. Just these three, standing still, looking like emaciated wraiths out there in the otherwise empty parking lot.

  She heard a muffled crash and at first thought it was thunder. But it was too close. She scanned the river and saw there was something going on over there. Several of the boats were moving, and black smoke was coming up thick from one of them.

  And something else, too.

  Muzzle flashes.

  “What the . . .”

  That was the Hintons. Had to be. The ones who brought Avery and Sylvia and Nate down here, and who were supposed to be waiting to ferry them to safety. They’re running off. Niki sucked her teeth in dismay. The cowards. The miserable cowards.

  She strained her hearing to pick up the telltale sounds of gunfire, but there was nothing. Watching the little bursts of fire a thought occurred to her. Back at Stoler’s compound, back when she was first starting to come into her own as someone who could teach others to kill zombies, she read Bruce Catton’s account of the battle of Vicksburg, during the A
merican Civil War. The fighting and killing had been atrocious, and yet observers on the fringes of the battlefield reported an eerie silence coming from the heart of the fighting. They were less than a quarter mile away from the worst of it, and they heard none of it. And yet, twenty miles away, farmers reported the noises were so loud, so deafening, that horses scattered in panic and their windows trembled like eggs that hadn’t quite yet set in the pan.

  Was that what she was experiencing here? Were the rain and the wind somehow masking the sounds of the fighting out there on the river?

  The questions hung unanswered, for at that moment there was another muffled boom, and a third boat started spewing black smoke. It was covering the river now, and the rest of the Red Man’s fleet was going that way.

  Her anger and dismay disappeared. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  She looked back to the parking lot. She had been worried that killing these three would leave her little better than she was back at the hotel, her only choice a sprint toward the river where the black shirts waited on their boats.

  But now . . .

  Time to move, she told herself.

  The three zombies were decrepit-looking wrecks, and though a faint warning bell was sounding somewhere in the back of her mind, she ignored it and charged into the open. She was running at a light jog, her metal bar coming up for the strike, when she realized her mistake.

  The zombie, a woman in a blue T-shirt and jeans, now hanging off her emaciated frame like a bag, her face oozing pus from open abscesses and unhealed cuts, turned toward her, and as she closed on it, Niki saw for the first time the sudden sureness of footing, the defensive posture, the look of brutal, feral intensity in the woman’s bloodshot eyes.

  Stage III zombie, Niki thought. Oh shit.

  But it was too late now. She swung for the woman’s head and was stunned when the zombie stepped back to avoid the blow.

  Niki recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. The woman was on her before she knew it, the stink of her breath hitting Niki in the face even as her fingernails slashed at the air, trying to catch a piece of Niki.

  Niki danced to one side and swept the metal bar across the woman’s knees, sending her tumbling to the cement of the parking lot. The zombie lashed out again, but that time Niki was ready for the quickness of her motions and was well out of reach. She moved around behind the woman before she could stand and brought the bar down on the back of her head, slamming her face into the ground so that it bounced off the cement and came up bloody.