End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  All of a sudden there was a hum from the computers, and the bridge was bathed in red light. “Heyyy!” Colin said excitedly from the main console. “Auxiliary power, boys! How ‘bout that?”

  Backup power, emergency power – just a strip of red lights across the roof. But a few of the computers were booting up, the dangling phone was suddenly spitting what sounded like a dial-up tone, and out on the deck – through the blurry sheets of rain – I could see safety lights coming on. “Nicely done!” Varley said.

  “Hang on,” Colin said, his face bathed in the glow of a computer monitor. “I think I can get full power on, too, it was just an emergency shutdown by the look of it, so if we just…”

  For a second the auxiliary power dropped out – the bridge was lit only by gloomy, overcast daylight again – and then, only a few seconds later, full power was restored.

  It unleashed hell with it.

  Klaxons blaring. Fire alarms shrieking. The entire bridge was suddenly bathed in full electric light, an assault on our dilated pupils, and most of us were left blinking and recoiling. Over the whole ship, emergency systems were engaging and alarms were going off. As far as the Regina Maersk was concerned, we’d awoken her from her slumber right back into the middle of whatever crisis had shut her power off in the first place.

  Varley had rushed back to Colin, leaning over the computer monitor. The rest of us ended up right there with them, looking over his shoulders, shouting useless contradictory shit. “Shut it off!” Varley screamed. “Shut it the hell up!” After silently making our way all through the ship and up into the superstructure, it felt like we’d awakened a sleeping dragon.

  “Alright, hold your horses!” Colin yelled, slapping a few of our hands away. He was navigating through the computer – not Windows, nothing familiar, but some kind of archaic industrial operating system for a cargo ship. Soon it was clear to all of us that he wasn’t really sure what he was doing, that he’d stumbled onto the power controls by a fluke. Both Varley and Geoff both tried to reach in and take over the controls.

  And over all the squabbling, without anybody keeping an eye on the door, the undead had arrived.

  Luke was the first to see them, yelping in terror and levelling his Steyr at the door, unloading a clip. The noise in the confined space of the bridge, right next to most of our ears, was deafening. We turned as one – a scrambling, panicked mess of people – to see a crowd of zombies stumbling in through the door.

  Luke had felled some of them, but more were coming, drawn by the noise. His burst of gunfire had been right by my head and left my ears ringing, not to mention all the sirens and klaxons that were still going. Being deaf made the experience seem strangely peaceful: flashing red lights, Varley’s face screaming instructions, bullet casings vomiting forth from Geoff’s M4 as he opened fire on the doorway. I couldn’t hear a fucking thing.

  I scrambled backwards, trying to get away from the group, trying to pull my Steyr off my back even as I’d slipped and fallen to the ground. I stumbled around a console, found a bit of breathing space and flicked the safety off. The others had already gunned down dozens of zombies but more were still coming through – fresh, every single one of them, with the unsullied skin and clouded eyes of zombies who’d been survivors, like us, just a few days ago.

  Matt was screaming something in my ear – “Behind us,” I realised, after a moment – and I turned to see more undead stumbling in from the starboard side of the bridge. That was when the panic really hit me: the realisation that we were caught on both sides, that there was no escape route.

  I turned around and fired with Matt, focusing on the starboard stairwell, ears still ringing, the warning lights still flickering silently around us, panic creeping up my throat. My hearing was starting to come back: I could feel the dull thud of the Steyr against my shoulder, the bark of someone’s shotgun, the ever-constant wailing of the sirens. We’d had no time to warn the others about the starboard zombies, and they’d lurched right up into the bridge and closed on our position, the others still with their backs to them. We tried to point them out, tried to gun them down, but it was all happening in a matter of seconds and nobody could hear us over the alarms and the gunfire. Stephen whirled around to see a zombie lurching right up into his field of vision, pushing him to the ground.

  That was when the chaos really started. When I turned and ran. The starboard zombies were thicker, more numerous, unstoppable – I cut and ran for the port door, jumping over the bodies thick on the ground, Matt right on my heels. We weren’t the only ones to run but we were at the front, and as we burst out into the darkness of the stairwell we had more fresh zombies to contend with. I was past shooting now, pretty sure my rifle was dry anyway, using it as a club to push my way through the undead on the stairs, sheer terror and adrenaline clawing at my mind. Down a few levels, glancing back for Matt, the darkness overwhelming. I came to a landing that seemed safe, turned back up to look for Matt, and saw him staggering down behind me. A flashlight was bouncing in the darkness behind him – Zach Heller, yelling something incoherent. “There’s more of them!” Matt yelled. “Keep moving, there’s more of them!”

  Something lurched out of the darkness in a side corridor. I caught a glimpse of a pallid face, blood-soaked clothes, an open mouth of teeth bearing towards my face – and then Matt had pushed forward, grabbed the zombie by the neck, but slipped and fallen and now both of them were tumbling down the stairwell into the darkness.

  “Matt!” I screamed. I went after them, Steyr on one hand, the other on the handrail, praying I didn’t fuck the steps up and fall down myself. Zach came after me, the shadows from the flashlight whirling around the stairwell, still echoing with sirens and screams and distant voices I thought I could recognise. Matt was lying on the next landing, the zombie thrown clear of him, but Matt was human and the zombie wasn’t and Matt was knocked senseless and the zombie wasn’t and the zombie was already on its hand and knees and clambering towards Matt’s blood-speckled face –

  I ran at it with a flying kick, my boot hitting its head like a football, knocking it away from Matt and into the wall and then kicking it again and again and again, until it stopped moving entirely. I fumbled in my pocket for a fresh Steyr magazine, standing over my brother’s limp body, looking around wildly in the dim light afforded by Zach’s flashlight. Stephen Heller came stumbling down the stairwell, the left side of his face slick with blood, half his neck torn away – bitten, but still moving, slotting new shells into his shotgun. I nearly shot him in sheer surprise; stayed my trigger finger at the last second. “Thousands of ‘em, there’s fucking thousands of ‘em!” Stephen screeched.

  There weren’t thousands of them, but even a few more would be enough to royally fuck us in the dark, claustrophobic confines of the superstructure stairwell. “Help me!” I hissed, trying to pick Matt up, and Zach came forward and pulled one of Matt’s arms over his shoulders. My brother’s head lolled back alarmingly. He wasn’t dead, I knew he wasn’t dead, but he’d fallen down the stairs and he was unconscious and the worst part was that I couldn’t feel a thing. If he’d broken any bones, I’d feel it just as bad. But if he was unconscious enough to be beyond pain…

  We staggered down the stairs with Matt’s dead weight between us, Stephen going ahead of us with the flashlight, no clear plan except to get back to the boats. Already I was wondering how the fuck we were supposed to get Matt’s unconscious body down the rope ladder. Just a moment ago I’d been able to hear screams and gunshots coming from the bridge, but now it was silent, apart from the distant moans and scrapes of the undead. Had the others escaped? Or were they all dead?

  A few more levels down, and suddenly Stephen screamed in frustration – there were more zombies surging up the stairs. Zach and I backtracked, down a random corridor off the last stairwell, Zach yelling at his brother to keep the flashlight steady even in the face of a surging tide of monsters. Stephen had dropped the flashlight but was firing into the darkness with his shotgun
, angry loud barks blowing open zombie heads in the crazy slanted light, shadows whirling everywhere as the flashlight rolled and dropped down the stairs. Zach abandoned me and Matt and went back to help his brother, and I found myself dragging Matt alone down an almost pitch-black corridor echoing with gunfire and zombie snarls behind us.

  There was dim light ahead of us: an open door, gloomy grey sunlight coming through a porthole. A sailor’s cabin. I dragged Matt inside, dropped him on the twisted bedsheets of the bunk, and ducked back outside the door. Zach was screaming in agony and Stephen was howling in anger. More zombies were pushing up the corridor from the stairwell. Zach was down on the ground, twisting and screeching, the undead tearing into him – until suddenly he was silent, even as he writhed, still alive. They’d eaten right into his vocal cords.

  Stephen was screaming for his brother, his words unintelligible through the ragged mess of his throat. He was only a few metres ahead of me, but he may as well have been a million miles away. He’s already been bitten, a voice inside me said – but still I yelled his name, threw out a hand, screamed for him to run for the cabin. He didn’t even turn around. He stood his ground with the shotgun, shooting, pumping, shooting, pumping, the empty shells spinning off into the darkness. Zombie head after zombie head exploded, a maelstrom of gore in the bright muzzle flare of the gun, but soon it was empty and even as Stephen drew his revolver from the back of his jeans the undead swarmed him and forced him to the ground, his screams filling the darkness.

  I drew the cabin door shut. It was a dead-end corridor. I had a sudden, horrible memory of being in the police cell at Eucla. I twisted the lock shut and stood there, stomach sinking, as the undead shambled up the corridor and started hammering on the other side.

  With a steel door between us and them I had a moment to check on Matt. I put the Steyr down in the corner of the room and lifted his shaggy hair back, checking on his skull. He had a bad cut and a rapidly swelling egg on his scalp. After a few moments he was groaning and licking his lips. “What happened?” he muttered.

  “You fell down the stairwell,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  I had another flashback, all the way back to Perth – when we crashed his car trying to escape the house, and I had to drag him, confused and disoriented, into that mechanic’s workshop. How many close calls do we have left in us?

  He still seems pretty woozy; half-asleep, can’t make full sentences. There’s a sink in here, and the water’s running. He had a bit to drink but wants to lie down and rest his head. Mine still hurts like hell, so his must be killing him. I soaked a hand towel and pressed it against the cut; if he has a skull fracture there’s not much we can do about it here.

  I took the journal from his pack because I feel so antsy. I need to write. I can still hear the undead scraping at the door just a few feet away. The Heller brothers are dead. I know that. I don’t know what happened to Varley and Geoff and Colin and Simon and Jonas and Luke. It seems too much to hope they all got out of there alive. Even if they did, where did they end up? Back at the boats? Or holed up in some cabin or utility room like me and Matt?

  Some of them must have made it back to the boats. Some of them must be going for help. They must.

  12.30pm

  Matt was lucid again about half an hour after we’d jammed ourselves into the cabin. The undead are still at the door, scraping and moaning. They know we’re in here, even if we don’t move a muscle.

  I’d poked around the cabin for lack of anything better to do. Books in an Asian language, photos tacked to the wall of Asian people, a set of rosary beads on the bedside table. There was a green passport in the top drawer which said REPUBLIC OF KOREA, which I guess is South Korea. Weird to think that somebody from Korea could have ended up down here, at the arse end of the world, drifting between Antarctica and the Nullarbor. God knows what happened to him. He might have jumped ship somewhere, wherever the Regina Maersk was before she ended up off our shores. He might be in Mozambique or Sri Lanka or Indonesia right now. He might be back near Perth or Bunbury or Albany. Or he might be one of the dead out there – might even be banging against the door of his own cabin right now.

  “You feeling all right?” I asked Matt, once he was well enough to sit up.

  “What happened?” he muttered.

  “What do you remember?”

  “The bridge. Walking around on the bridge. Then the dead. Then… did I fall?”

  “Down the stairwell, when a zombie came at us,” I said. “And now…”

  We both glanced at the cabin door, at the snarls of the undead and their hands scraping and banging against the steel. “Oh, fuck’s sake,” Matt said. “Not this again.”

  “If we keep quiet maybe they’ll get drawn away,” I said.

  Matt pulled himself off the bunk, then suddenly sat back down on it, feeling woozier than he’d expected. “What happened to the others?”

  “Dunno.”

  He glanced at the porthole.

  “I already tried it.”

  Matt, being Matt, had to try it himself. He had the same result as me – you could stick your head out, or get your arm out, but not both. We were only on the second floor of the superstructure but there was no chance of a bedsheet abseil escape when the window was the size of a fucking dinner plate.

  “You know, we are identical twins,” I said, when he eventually pulled back out. “You’re not any smaller than me. What did you think was going to happen?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said irritably. “What’s your idea then?”

  “We wait,” I whispered. “And stay quiet. There’s only a few of them outside, maybe they’ll wander off.”

  “And maybe the Army will fly down in helicopters and rescue us,” Matt said. “Fucking hell, man. Got any real ideas?”

  “Well,” I said. “When we don’t come back, Eucla will send a rescue team.”

  “There’s only two boats, and they’re both here,” Matt said. “So you’d better hope somebody made it back to one of them.”

  “No shit.”

  I went to the porthole. The whole situation was giving me horrible deja vu about the police station, during the zombie siege, when we’d been stuck in one of the cells with Ash. At least here we had a porthole to the outside world. I opened it, stuck my head out. It was still raining, lighter than before, the sea fairly calm but the sky a turgid mass of cloud. The cabin was on one side of the superstructure – port, starboard, fuck knows – and it was the one facing away from the coast. All I could see was endless grey ocean, beyond the painted white steel of the deck and the guard rails, covered in drizzling rain. Even down here, at the back of the superstructure, there was a corpse curled up on the deck and a zombie that I could hear but not see.

  And then, turning to the left, I was shocked to see another head sticking out the porthole down from mine.

  He withdrew instantly. White, haggard, bearded, bloodshot eyes – but I’d seen him, I was sure I’d seen him. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! Hey, hello! What are you doing, man?”

  “What’s going on?” Matt demanded behind me.

  The stranger had withdrawn his head but left his window open. The wind was howling so I raised my voice. “Hey! We just want to talk, man! We’re from the coast! We came out here to take a look, and we got attacked! What’s going on? Are you from the ship? We just want to talk, mate…”

  His face emerged cautiously from the porthole again.

  “It’s all right,” I said, cautiously, as though talking to a frightened animal. “You all right, mate? We’re not here to hurt you. What’s your name?”

  He said something softly, that I couldn’t quite hear over the wind.

  “What?” I said. “I can’t hear you. My name’s Aaron. Aaron King. I’m in here with my brother Matt. What was your name?”

  He spoke more clearly. “Declan,” he said, his voice hoarse, as though he hadn’t used it in a while. “Declan Moran. You need to be quiet. They’ll hear you.”

  I g
lanced down at the deck; I could still hear a faint, bedraggled whingeing coming from a zombie somewhere out of sight. “Mate, don’t worry about it,” I said. “They can’t hear us out here and the ones outside the door know we’re in here anyway.”

  He blinked a few times, looking uncertain. “No… we need to be quiet.” he said. He had a European accent I couldn’t quite place.

  He didn’t look well. “How long have you been in there?” I said.

  “Um…” he said. “A week, maybe a week? I don’t know, I’ve got water, but…”

  He trailed off. I suddenly realised who his accent reminded me of – Nana. He was Irish.

  “What happened here?” I said. “Where were you last?”

  “Albany,” he said. “Albany, we were in Albany and everything was fine, but then when it all fell apart the refugees got onboard, and, well… we were all right for a while, we stayed off shore for a while, didn’t know where to go, the captain thought we should go to Christmas Island but we set course for Kangaroo Island in the end but then there was – people got sick, you see, and we didn’t really know what to do, and, and, and…”

  He trailed off. His eyes were darting all over the place. A week in that cabin with the dead at the door… God knows I was going insane after just 24 hours in the Eucla police cell.

  “Anyone else in there with you?” I asked.

  “No. No, just me.” He was still looking at me strangely. Like he couldn’t believe I was there.

  “Declan,” I said. “Listen to me. We can get you out of here, okay? We can get all of us out of here. We came here on boats. We can get back to the boats and we can go back to the mainland…”

  Declan’s eyes widened. He shook his head, he started to stay something, but whatever it was I didn’t hear it because he pulled his head back inside the porthole and slammed it shut. “Declan!” I yelled over the rain and the wind. “Declan!”