“Well, I’d assume so,” Jim said with a raised eyebrow. “No one let you out?”
“No,” Moto answered. “We just broke out.”
“Well…” Jim paused. “Didn’t you come across anyone else on your way up here?”
Sensing from their body language that they hadn’t, Jim fell back into the captain’s chair. His eyes gazed forward blankly as he tried to process the realization that his friends were dead--or, even worse, had become one of “them”.
“I don’t know what happened,” he started; his eyes still deadlocked straight ahead. “I wasn’t able to fall sleep after everything that had gone on, so I decided to walk a few laps on the deck, you know, get some fresh air. After a while, I came across a couple different trails of blood. Before I’d decided which one to follow, I heard some commotion up here where one of the trails led, so I came to investigate. I was hoping at that point that it was just another overreaction to someone having a new scratch or something. When I walked up, the door was open and there was someone inside screaming like I’d never heard before. It was almost inhuman.” Jim motioned toward the room where two corpses lay on the floor. “That guy was just attacking the captain. It was like he was on something. He was just snarling and biting and clawing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We’ve been seeing a lot of that lately,” Moto said. “So what’d you do?”
“For some reason, I couldn’t admit to myself what I knew was happening. I just yelled at him to stop. I screamed and threatened him, trying to reason with him, but no matter what I said he wouldn’t even acknowledge that I was in the room; not until I threw a stapler at him.”
John opened the door to the room to investigate the bodies, making sure there wasn’t any chance of reanimation.
“I’ll never forget the look on his face when he turned after I hit him with the stapler. I’ve never seen anything like that. I just froze. It was Manuel. He still seemed normal ‘til I saw his eyes.”
“I recognize this guy,” John said while squatting down next to the man’s body. “It’s that old man that fell and hit his head.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy,” Jim said. “He’d become a pretty close friend of mine, even though he didn’t know much English. He was the only guy on the ship that could hold his own across the chess board from me. I guess seeing him like that, it just screwed me up. I couldn’t do a thing. I just stood there and watched them fight.”
John stood up from investigating and held up a 1911 .45 caliber pistol.
“I really thought the captain was done for as soon as I came in,” Jim continued. “There was already so much blood. By the time I’d grabbed the toilet’s tank cover for a weapon, Manuel was on his knees, just holding up the intestines and biting at ‘em like a kid with spaghetti. The captain turned his head toward me and asked me to kill him. Finally, that snapped me out of it, so I hit Manuel hard in the head. That’s what they were doing to the few that were around before you guys showed up. They said you’ve gotta hit ‘em in the head. It worked, but what I wouldn’t have given for that gun you found. I’m not gonna sleep for weeks. I thought killing Manuel would help me build up to hitting the captain, but it didn’t get any easier. I was looking for any excuse to not have to do it, but his eyes were just begging me. The vibration in my hands when I finally hit him, that sound; I’ll never forget that feeling. Never again will I be able to do that.”
Jim sat in silent recollection for a moment, as John and Moto waited patiently for him to continue.
“God, it was awful. At that point, I just wanted to get out of here and go be around some other people who could do the killing for me. When I came and opened the door, though, there was one just waiting outside for me. He’d been there all night and morning, until you guys put the axe through his head. I wondered why no one else had come around yet. I never dreamed that it was because everyone was dead. We had no trouble killing dozens of the things back at the coast. I don’t understand how they were able to overtake us like this.”
“They’re pretty easy to dispose of in small numbers,” John acknowledged, “but all it takes is for one to catch you off guard. We’re gonna have to sleep in shifts from now on, or find a safer place to hole up.”
“You guys seem to have some idea what all this is about,” Jim said. “Can you tell me what the hell is going on? I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t real, that this can’t possibly be happening right now.”
“From what we overheard before, it seems like an infection or something has taken off,” John said.
“More like an epidemic. Or pandemic?” Moto offered.
“Sure. Anyways, even the Chinese seem to be worried about how far it’s already spread,” John said.
“Yeah, I don’t know what it is, but it seems like people that have been around it don’t stay dead. I don’t know what it takes to get infected, but if they’ve got jacked up eyes, bleed and puke thick, black crud, and start walking like a marionette with a shoddy puppeteer,” Moto summarized.
“Are you saying what I haven’t been able to admit?” Jim asked.
After the silence had lasted long enough, Moto chimed in. “Maybe not the George A. Romero variety, but yeah. I don’t know how you could call these things anything other than zombies.”
“I read about this, but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I mean, they’ve never been wrong before, but this was just too much,” Jim said.
“Wait, the news about this has already leaked?” John asked. “What are they saying about it?”
“Well, last I checked, almost no one online seems to know about it still,” Jim answered. “But this hacker friend of mine that runs a conspiracy blog that I’ve been following for years predicted all of this. He’s usually more focused on politics and stuff, but lately he’s been really diving into all this. The guy comes across as a complete psycho to most people, but his track record keeps me paying attention… at least, until he started talking about how some guy was picking up the research where the Nazis left off with chemical warfare, time travel, all that fun stuff. He lost me completely when he started throwing around the word “zombie”. I guess now I need to read back through all of his stuff.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid a lot of that might be more accurate than you’d ever care to know,” Moto said.
“That guy sounds like he knows his stuff. Did he post anything recently?” John asked.
“I tried to pull up his blog on my phone last night when I couldn’t sleep, and we were still close enough to the coast. I couldn’t get the site to work but, it was odd, my emails were still able to come in,” Jim said.
“Sounds like censorship to me,” Moto said. “So, what do we do now?”
The question was becoming more and more annoying as it seemed that there was never one right answer anymore. Moto had always asked the questions, and depended on John for the solution, no matter the insignificance of the situation. He hated making decisions. Where’re we eating? Whose car? Should we eat there, or get it to go? They were well-practiced roles between the two. Moto stood expectantly looking at John--anxiously waiting for the perfect, big brother-like answer he had always been able to produce in the past.
“We go home,” John said after some deliberation.
A look of confusion spread across Moto’s face. “You don’t think we should bunker down on an island and let this all blow over or something? Why don’t we go somewhere easy to defend, with our closet full of food and let everyone else fight it out for a while?” he asked.
“No. Home,” John said decisively. “Mom made me promise when we left that I’d bring you home if it all hit the fan over here. Besides, we need to warn people.”
“I don’t think this is exactly what she had in mind when she said that,” Moto replied skeptically.
“What do you propose, then, Gilligan?” John asked while fingering through dozens of rolled up maps organized in a wall of pigeonholes. “We go sit on some Corona-commercial-looking islan
d, and lay in hammocks? Sit around aiming our guns at everything that moves? Or better yet, wait to run out of food? It’d just be a matter of time before some boat full of infected drifted ashore, and zombies’d eat us in our sleep. The ship has some food, sure, but they sure as hell weren’t able to re-stock at port. Without refrigeration, half of the food will be gone in just a few days. Even if we went to a bigger island that did have some food and water sources, that would just mean there’s that much more beach line to patrol. We would never be able to keep it contained. Don’t forget those things can just walk around under water. The one thing I’m banking on is that this stuff hasn’t hit home yet.”
Moto hated when John rambled. It was like disagreeing with you wasn’t enough. John had to completely annihilate your idea so that everyone knew that it wasn’t worth the effort to disagree with him. He knew that John’s mind had been made up, and voicing his opinion any further would be pointless.
“We do have more than enough diesel to get to the states,” Jim chimed in. They had forgotten he was now a part of this decision too. “It doesn’t sound like a bad plan. We’d have a chance to gather supplies and get ourselves prepared before the outbreak arrives. Heck, the U.S. might even be able to keep the infection from ever reaching their shores.”
Moto mumbled loud enough to be heard. “Yeah, they have a great track record for preventing that kind of thing.”
“The quicker we can warn everyone about this, the better chance we give them of keeping this thing under control,” Jim responded. “We’ve got to let our government know what we’ve seen out here so they can take the right action before it’s too late.”
“You’re really naïve enough to think that our government doesn’t already know about all of this?” Moto laughed. “Hell, they probably started it. They’re sure as hell not gonna give millions of people a reason to load up their guns and start shooting at anything that goes bump in the night. They have no shot at stopping this thing, and they know it.”
“The important thing is that we give them every opportunity to,” Jim said. “We can’t just sit on this information.”
“I have no doubt they’d do everything in their power to stop this from reaching their shores,” John said as he pulled out the map he had been searching for. “The main focus for me is getting our boots to sand before they close up shop. Then we can spread the word and pray they don’t lock us all in padded rooms.”
“Good point,” Jim nodded. “I’m all about keeping an open mind. But even I would never have been convinced of walking, dead bodies if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”
“If we’re gonna do this thing, we’ve gotta move fast,” John said. “I don’t want to cruise up to the shoreline a day late and get gunned down after the paranoia has set in. I take it you know how to drive this beast?” John asked Jim hopefully.
“It’ll take me a few hours to plot the course. We’d have to be careful not to get ourselves into waters where pirates are known to patrol. Cap never left me with anything too involved, but from there it’s just a matter of steering, I suppose,” Jim said as he dragged his middle finger across the heavily used map, searching for their current location.
“Point us the right direction, and show me how to drive this thing.” John said as he walked over to the captain’s chair. “You can plot while I steer. We’ve gotta assume that our window is already closing.”
Jim visibly fought back his discomfort and inhibitions about forgoing the procedure. Deciding that John was right, he nodded and approached the chair. Before long, countries would begin doing whatever they could to keep the plague from their borders, cutting off all international travel and gunning down any and all boats or planes on approach. Allowing even one wrong person into the country could kill millions. Moto wondered if this split-second decision was going to do nothing more than that and allow these three to bring the infection to the States. He decided not to voice his concern. There was no reason to remind Jim about his own questionable circumstances, and start a conversation that could very well end up with him being locked back in the food closet. After Jim had reversed the propeller and unstuck the vessel from the island, Moto decided to instead be productive and turned to go clear the deck of the infected corpses that remained. Though he hadn’t entirely agreed with the plan, something about heading home now felt right.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“We’re receiving several reports of massive explosions along the coast of Puerto Rico. Some witnesses are even claiming to have seen a mushroom cloud, though nothing has been confirmed at this time. The U.S. is denying any involvement with the sudden attack as there are thousands of United States citizens still on the island. We will keep you updated throughout the day as we learn more.”
As their trip back to the states neared its conclusion, John had finally been able to find a satellite radio station that was covering the recent battle. The group listened anxiously and hoped that it might actually shed some light on unknown details and, in some way, aid the survivors. To this point, though, there had only been conjecture as to what had most likely occurred that had resulted in the missile strikes along the Puerto Rican coast. Many guesses conflicted in one way or another and none of them ever seemed entirely plausible when lined up with John and Moto’s first-hand experiences. It appeared that the brothers knew as much as, if not more than, any of the talking heads back in the states. The three were unable to find any other survivors aboard the ship but had been able to cleanse the deck of any potentially infectious materials.
“Initial reports claiming that the missile strikes were concentrated on areas occupied by the Allied forces are now believed to be inaccurate. At this time, we are not prepared to release any estimates as to the number of casualties, but we are hearing that the number is “significant”. Many nations among the Allied forces are calling for retaliation, though it is unclear who the perpetrator of the attack is. No official statements have been released.”
“Nukes?” John reacted. “Are they misreporting what we saw, or is this actually happening now?”
“As far as the states are concerned, they’re gonna assume it’s nuclear until they hear otherwise. Their finger is on the button, guaranteed,” Moto said. “We’ve got to make landfall before the good guys find out much more about what’s going on over there.”
“We have just received confirmation from several credible sources that biological warfare tactics have been used overseas. It is not apparent at this time…” Static.
“So much for that idea,” John said as he shut off the radio.
“How’d we lose signal?” asked Moto. “Isn’t this satellite?”
“Maybe something was about to be said that someone didn’t want to get out,” John said. “There’s no reason we should lose signal when we’re only getting closer to the shore.”
The glare of the setting sun gave an appropriate aura to their destination as the Carolina coast appeared before them on the horizon.
“Our best chance at getting to shore without being questioned and held as deserters is to take the life boat in after sundown,” Moto said. “I say we drop anchor and abandon the ship. I know we’ve got to get ashore as fast as we possibly can, but not if it means more eyeballs. You’ve gotta assume they’ve got everyone on full alert now.”
John hadn’t dealt much in nautical practices, but Moto’s assumptions seemed sound. There was no telling how long before all immigration was terminated, if it hadn’t already occurred. The men decided that the fewer things they brought along with them, the less suspicious they would seem. They could always resupply once they had quietly made it ashore. Unsure of their chances at making a successful landfall, the group prepared.
In the time it took the men to gather what supplies they wanted to take along on the raft, the sun had almost completely set. They loaded up and sped off toward the scarcely populated section of North Carolina’s shoreline with fishing poles, a spotlight, their ID’s and wallets, and Manuel’s easily concealed
.45 caliber pistol.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
-Two-
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
-Keyser Söze
Once the three men were safely ashore, they scurried inland to a residential neighborhood. They weren’t thrilled to find that they were going to have to lay low in an upper middle class neighborhood until realizing that the area was dead silent. It wasn’t vacation season for this area. The three approached a home with no parked cars, and only two lights showing. One illuminated the front porch, and the other was strategically left on in a front-facing window. Upon closer surveillance of the seemingly abandoned beach house, it appeared that their intuition had not misled them. It took no time at all to find a window left unlocked and the men were inside. They avoided any discussion or disruption until they were able to complete a quick sweep of the house to make sure that they were truly alone and then the feasting could commence. Avoiding windows and leaving the lights as they were was going to be key in not alerting any perceptive neighbors.
The group had quickly begun to regret not having brought along food or water in the lifeboat once they realized how many hours they had gone without a meal. In all of the excitement, they hadn’t slowed enough to realize how famished they’d become. The men anxiously slung open the door to the fridge with the utmost hope of what might be waiting for them. To their displeasure, the fridge had been swept clean of perishables, leaving nothing but baking soda, ketchup, and ranch dressing behind. After finding that the bounty in the pantry was largely the same, Moto frantically checked the freezer, but to no avail. Ultimately, the men were forced to settle for dry food with long shelf life, similar to what they’d had available to them on the ship.
Picking out the foods they found most appealing, they all settled in an inner living room with no windows and took full advantage of the opportunity to just sit, eat, and relax. John found the television’s remote control in an end table drawer and brought the big screen to life. He was anxious to see what kind of coverage the news had of everything that had been going on in Puerto Rico and if the cease fire had ended as a result. To his disappointment, the main news channels were discussing a new clean water bill and the overpopulation of animal shelters for the local county. After tearing through his beef jerky and eating what he could handle of the Vienna sausages Moto slipped out of the room. He soon returned with a bottle of wine and three crystal glasses.
And the Blood Ran Black Page 7