Elements of the Undead - Omnibus Edition (Books One - Three)

by William Esmont

Dawn

  Dawn brought a miserly gray light and a return of the rain, a torrential deluge that made Megan miss the storms of the previous day and night. The wind blew in every direction at once, spinning their small boat in tight, looping circles down the river.

  They rounded a bend, and Megan did a double take. Civilization, or some part of it, had returned. They slid past a burnt-out oil refinery, the landscape indelibly charred by the inferno that had raged out of control during the collapse. The next several hours brought more of the same, a voyeuristic tour of the cataclysm that had befallen the former industrial corridor. Silence reigned over the boat. Luke, still reeling from his father’s sudden death, was more morose than ever, his eyes glazed and his shoulders slumped, oblivious to the world around him. Archie kept his sights fixed on the shoreline, searching for a safe place to dock.

  The rain slowed to a steady drizzle, and a fine mist rose up, enveloping them and shutting out the world beyond.

  Megan was about to nod off when Jack spoke. “Megan—”

  She slipped from her seat and knelt by his side. “Jack! You’re awake!”

  Jack grunted and struggled to sit up. He let out a yelp of pain when his stump brushed against the gunwale.

  “Ouch,” Megan said, cringing. “Careful.” She helped him sit up the rest of the way.

  “Where are we?”

  She shook her head and sighed. “I wish I knew. We’ve been adrift since last night, ever since the shipyard.”

  Archie noticed Jack was up and said hello. Jack returned the greeting.

  A puzzled expression came over Jack’s face as he looked around the boat. His brow furrowed in concentration, as if he were trying to remember something just out of reach. “Where’s Ryan?”

  Megan put a finger to her lips and shook her head, but it was too late.

  “He’s dead,” Luke said from the other end of the boat.

  Jack sat up straighter. “Dead? How?”

  Megan cursed herself for not anticipating the question. “We tried to go ashore last night. We lost him.”

  “Zombies?” Jack asked, his voice grave.

  Megan shook her head. “An alligator.”

  “Fuck. That’s awful.” He called out to Luke. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Luke didn’t respond.

  Jack dropped his voice to a whisper. “How’s he holding up?”

  Megan stole a furtive glance at Luke. She thought of their episode in the river, how he had clung to her as if he were about to go under himself. “I don’t know.”

  She noticed Jack massaging his arm right above the stump. “How’s it feel?”

  He grimaced. “You don’t want to know.”

  Megan looked at the sky. The mist was lifting. He was right. She didn’t want to know. She reached into Ryan’s bag and pulled out the medical kit. “It’s time for more antibiotics. Do you want some more Vicodin, too?”

  Jack licked his lips, the hunger in his eyes unmistakable. “I do, but not as much this time. That last dose knocked me on my ass.”

  She grinned. “You needed it.”

  “Maybe.”

  Megan took the pills from the medical kit and handed them over.

  Jack dry-swallowed. “Yum.”

  “Megan? Jack?” Archie sounded excited. “Check this out.”

  “What is it?” Megan asked, twisting so she could see.

  Archie was pointing downriver. “Take a look at this.”

  Megan saw a blocky concrete pier jutting thirty or forty feet into the river.

  Archie asked, “What do you think?”

  Megan looked at Jack, but he just shrugged with his one good shoulder.

  As they drew closer, a large two-story structure became visible beyond the pier. At first glance, it appeared to be intact, unlike all the other ruins they had passed. Hope welled inside of her.

  A sign was bolted to the pier a few feet above water level: Galveston Coast Guard.

  “We’re stopping,” Megan said. “Right here. Right now.” She dipped her hands in the river and began to paddle. “Paddle!” she screamed over her shoulder. “Paddle, damn it!”

  Luke and Archie joined her, slowly at first, but picking up the pace as their course began to shift. Faster than she expected, they reached the pier, slamming into the upriver side with a bone-jarring thud.

  She scrambled out and onto the rain-slicked concrete. They had no lines with which to tie up, so Megan kept one hand on the boat and one on shore. For the moment, the current was with them, pressing the boat against the pier. “Hurry! I can’t hold it for long!”

  Working together, Luke and Archie helped Jack ashore. Once they were all on dry land, Megan released her grip on the boat and watched as the current carried it back into the storm.

  The roar of thunder filled the air as they turned and set off for the building.

  What’s Done is Done

  Wake ere the burst of the great white sun

  Into the blazing skies,

  Our limbs are stiff and the lids are gummed

  Over our blighted eyes.

  But our souls have perished in dust and heat,

  And this is the tale we tell,

  Our lives are ever a grim retreat

  With Death on the roofs of hell.

  from Out on the Roof of Hell, by Henry Lawson

  Twenty-Four

  Crew Quarters/Gulf Star Oil Platform

  Gulf of Mexico

  Chris Thompson awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright in his bed and driving the tender flesh of his scalp into the razor-sharp springs of the upper bunk. Excruciating pain stabbed into the crown of his head. Tears sprang to his eyes.

  “Fuck me!”

  He probed gingerly at his scalp and, not finding any blood or mangled flesh, carefully smoothed his hair back into place. He swung his feet to the floor. A finger of nausea tickled his gut, but he swallowed it away. For the third time in the past month, he had dreamed of his brother Dave. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the details, to commit the fleeting images of Dave’s face to memory, but it was too late. His brother was already gone. Again.

  Chris had to pee. He wrapped his fingers around the cool, greasy rail of the upper bunk and pulled himself to his feet.

  His thoughts skipped to the afternoon the world had died and how he had shoved Dave onto an overloaded news chopper before waving goodbye forever. Chris himself had been plucked from the roof of the Liberty Medical Center only a few minutes later by a group of grim-faced Texas National Guardsmen who were in the process of abandoning the dying city. He could almost still hear the thunderous sonic boom and picture the dirty black cloud kicked up as a malfunctioning nuclear warhead plowed into north Houston at supersonic speeds. He recalled the incandescent flash on the western horizon and the sudden blaring of alarms in the cockpit of the Blackhawk in which he was riding as San Antonio took a direct hit and disappeared in a cataclysmic fireball. His next memory was of waking up in the smoldering and tangled wreckage of the Blackhawk on the western outskirts of the city. Aside from the senior officer on board, Captain Marlon Hines, and a young corporal named Emilio Hooper, Chris was the only one to survive. He preferred not to dwell on the next several months and his desperate struggle to survive in a world where humanity skated along on the brink of extinction. At first, Hines had refused to acknowledge the demise of the military, insisting somewhere, somehow, the armies of the world would reconstitute and reclaim all humanity had lost. That never happened. Aside from a few sporadic transmissions on the salvaged helicopter radio, evidence of a functioning military became less and less frequent, until finally, on a muggy day a few weeks after the collapse, the last recognizable voice of authority had vanished from the airwaves altogether. Hooper had disappeared soon after, leaving behind only a note saying he was going to California to search for his family and that he was sorry for abandoning them.

  Chris had come up with the idea of venturing into the Gulf of Mexico to seek sanctuary on an abandoned oil pla
tform. All the while, he wondered what had become of his brother. Had Dave survived the attack? He had no way of knowing. He could only hope for the best, that some day he would find his brother alive and well.

  In the weeks following, Chris and Hines had met up with other survivors, and by the time they reached the coast, their ranks had swollen to a ragtag group thirteen strong, including a handful of men who had made their livings plying the waters of the gulf in search of fish and oil. These men were their saviors, for neither Chris nor Hines had the skills or knowledge necessary to operate a boat, much less attempt long-term survival in the harsh and unpredictable confines of an oilrig. Over the years, through countless trips to Galveston to scavenge supplies and search for survivors, their numbers had increased to a hundred and seventy souls spread across the Gulf Star and an adjacent platform, the Dixie Sunrise.

  Life was good, or as close to good as it could be considering the mainland was off limits for the foreseeable future, dominated without exception by the undead. They had food from the sea, water from the regular rains, and more electricity than they could ever use from the heavy-duty generators fed by the bottomless storage tanks located underneath the platform.

  Chris stumbled across his quarters in the dark. The room seemed to sway beneath his feet. He yawned and tugged a shirt over his head before dropping into the chair in front of his computer. With a nudge of his mouse, the green LED in the corner of the screen lit up, and the screen filled with the fat whorls and streaks of a major hurricane over open water, the images beamed down live from twenty-two thousand miles directly overhead. The storm, not so affectionately dubbed “Big Bitch,” was a hundred miles out from the platform, and unfortunately, still tracking in a direct line toward Galveston. Chris had been watching it for a week, ever since it had plowed across Cuba and began its slow crawl toward the southern tip of Florida. That they could watch the hurricane’s progress at all was a bittersweet luxury, a sad reminder of a time when the world was awash in a seemingly effortless flow of information. No one knew how long the satellites would remain aloft, but Chris was intent on using them to the full extent while he had the chance. He scratched at the fine blond stubble on his chin. Going back to sleep was out of the question. He still had to pee. As he pushed his chair back, he noticed a light blinking steadily on the handheld radio sitting on the shelf beside the monitor.

  His heart skipped a beat. He grabbed the handset and keyed the transmitter. “Hello. Is anyone there?” He removed his thumb. Waited.

  Silence.

  “Hello. This is Chris Thompson on the Gulf Star. Is anyone out there?”

  No answer. The light stopped blinking.

  Chris swallowed. Someone had transmitted. Someone on shore. Someone is out there.

  He checked the adjacent frequencies, repeating his query. Again, no response. He couldn’t believe he had slept through the call. He tried to remember the last time he had checked the shore radios, but drew a blank.

  He drummed his fingers on the keyboard. Someone was out there, and they had tried to call. He was concerned about the lack of response, but he didn’t want to read too much into it. Anything could have happened. The batteries could have died. They could be away from the radio.

  Chris got to his feet. Taking his jacket from the hook on the wall, he pulled open the door and took off down the hall at a jog. The hurricane was still a ways off. If they acted fast, they still had time to dash into Galveston and see if anyone was there.

  But first, he had to convince Hines.

  Twenty-Five

  Galveston Coast Guard Station

  Galveston, Texas

  The Same Time

  Jack lay still, his eyes closed, his expression slack. His breathing came slow and regular, barely audible over the storm.

  “How is he?” Archie whispered.

  Megan met his eyes. “He’s just resting.”

  Archie fidgeted as if he had something to say, but didn’t want to say it. “Do you think he’ll turn?”

  Megan felt a flash of anger, but quickly dismissed it. Archie’s concern was valid, even if she didn’t want to hear it. “Not if I can help it.”

  She stared at Jack’s stump. Over the years, she had seen enough zombie bites to be pretty sure that if he were going to turn, it would have happened already. If the infection was inside him, he would already be showing signs of irreversible necrosis—the radiating pattern of black and purple lines that always accompanied a bite. The last time she had checked his wound, while swapping out the filthy T-shirt for a proper bandage from the Coast Guard medical kit, it had appeared normal, or as close to normal as she could expect given the recent trauma. Still, he had started running a fever in the past hour, and he couldn’t seem to remain awake for long, even though she had cut his Vicodin dosage in half. It was entirely possible that he carried the disease and that he would still turn. If that were to happen, she had a bullet ready for him.

  And one for herself.

  Rain lashed the expansive plate glass stretching across the far side of the room, blasting it like a wide-open fire hose. During her years in the desert, Megan had grown accustomed to the temperamental nature of the weather—the sudden storms that roared across the blasted landscape, scouring it clean in a frenetic burst before disappearing as if they had never been. The storm outside was something else entirely, and for the first time since the uprising, she feared the undead may not be the worst of her problems. Half-forgotten images of the Hurricane Katrina disaster danced in her head—flooded houses, desperate people trapped on their roofs, society submerged beneath the filthy murk of an out-of-control Lake Pontchartrain. She chuckled. Not that there was any society left to submerge these days. The undead had taken care of that. Still, the potential for flooding concerned her, especially considering their location right on the coast. If the storm was a hurricane, and she suspected it was, would they suffer the same fate as the people of New Orleans? Would they be drowned and washed away like so much flotsam?

  “What’s wrong?” Archie asked, picking up on her change of mood.

  Megan bit her lip. “It’s nothing. I was just imagining the storm washing all of this away.”

  Archie gave her a dismissive wave. “This place was here long before this storm, and it’ll be here for a long time after. I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  Megan stole a glance at Luke, who was sitting on Archie’s other side. The boy just stared into space. “I hope you’re right.”

  Archie patted her on the knee and got to his feet. “I’m going to check outside.” He extended a hand to Luke. “Want to come with me?”

  Luke looked up at him, and for a second, Megan thought he was going to say something. But then he shook his head, and his gaze fell back to the floor.

  “Be careful,” she said to Archie. As Archie walked away, she bent down and kissed Jack’s forehead. “Come on, Jack,” she whispered. “You can’t die here.” She took his good hand and clasped it tight, enjoying the feel of his skin against hers. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Luke watching their exchange.

  Archie returned. “I can’t see anything through the rain.”

  A flash of lightning illuminated the room, followed within seconds by a boom of thunder.

  He put his back to the wall and slid slowly to the floor. “Maybe we should try the radio again?”

  Megan handed the radio to him.

  Archie turned the bulky military handset over in his lap and, using his thumbs, pried open the battery compartment. He gave it a shake and four AA batteries clattered to the floor. “If only we had more…”

  Megan picked up one of the batteries and inspected it, willing it to produce power. When the radio had first died, they had searched the Coast Guard station top to bottom, and while they had found a few stray batteries, they were either the wrong size, corroded, or in the case of a set of two dozen identical copper-tops in a trash can beside the desk, completel
y exhausted.

  Archie’s hands froze in mid-air. “Did you hear that?”

  Megan cocked her head, instantly alert. “No. What was it?”

  “It sounded like metal scraping on metal.” He carefully placed the radio pieces on the floor. “I’m going to take another look. Just in case.” With a tired groan, he got to his feet and unholstered his pistol, then set out for the other side of the room.

  Megan closed her fingers around the grip of her own pistol, the cool plastic and metal construction of the Glock suffusing her with a sense of calm.

  Luke gestured at the spot vacated by Archie. “Can I?”

  Megan patted the empty space beside her and nodded.

  Luke slid close to her. “Megan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we going to die here?”

  Megan turned to meet his eyes. She chose her words carefully. “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  Luke broke eye contact. “It’s just… I don’t want to die in here. Not in this place.”

  “Me either,” Megan said. “Me either.”

  Together, they watched Archie press his face against the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes.

  Megan was about to call out and ask if he saw anything when Archie took a sudden step to the side, ducking behind a nearby wall. Her gut clenched as he waggled his fingers in a walking motion.

  Zombies.

  Twenty-Six

  Heliport/Gulf Star Oil Platform

  Gulf of Mexico

  Chris found Hines taking readings from one of their diesel generators. He had to yell twice to get the soldier’s attention.

  Hines turned to face him, visibly annoyed at the interruption. “What is it?”

  “We need to talk!” Chris shouted over the wind. “Can we go inside? Out of the rain?”

  Hines cast another glance at the generator, shrugged, and slammed the access panel shut. He set off for the maintenance room door at a brisk pace, and Chris broke into a trot to keep up with him.