This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  "The first outbreak moved fast. If it was airborne, we would all have it by now."

  He nodded. He was no doctor. He wasn't even particularly bright. He was good at following orders from the company, and people naturally trusted him.

  "So, what do we do?"

  She looked at him with a pained look on her face. He wanted to kiss her lips, but he was married. He mustn't forget that. "I don't know," she said. "You're the captain."

  It fell upon him, the onus to keep people safe. He ran a hand through his graying hair, weighing the options at his disposal. He could let them stay and keep an eye on them. He could find the people that were bitten and get them off the ship somehow. He looked at the gun in his hand. Or he could kill them all now.

  He didn't like any of the options. All three were shit sandwiches. He was just deciding which one to take a bite of. With the doctor by his side, he went to the bridge and called up his own men, one by one. Once there, he held his gun on them apologetically while he made them strip. None of his men had bites, and he was thankful for that fact.

  When he was done, he told his men what to do. They argued. They fought. He loved them for it, but in the end, they all saw the sense of it. His men dragged people up from the hold in twos. The Captain repeated the process of making the people strip. He avoided looking in their eyes. He could see the hate and the fear there, and it made him feel awful.

  They had maneuvered the ship closer to the shore to the east. It was a natural shoreline, a few houses scattered here and there. It would be a long swim, but if the doctor was right, those people were dead anyway. The first set of people were both bite victims. Over the side they went, screaming and swearing at him. He didn't see what happened to them after that. They could have started swimming. They could have simply sunk to the bottom of the ocean for all he knew. But he didn't want to know. He knew he was cowardly in that respect, but he still had to live with himself after this was all over, so he spared himself the knowledge of their fate.

  They went through the refugees methodically. Those that were fine were allowed to stay if they wanted to, but some people chose to go over the side with their bitten family members. Captain Schwenk did not forbid it. Some people begged and pleaded to stay. Some people didn't know how to swim. He gave them life preservers and pitched them over the side anyway. He would have given every single person a life preserver if he had enough of them, but he didn't.

  The last group of two people they brought on deck looked rough. They were older and had faces that looked like they were going to melt off their skulls.

  The bites were apparent on their arms, their bandages already soaking through with blood. The woman howled curses at him, and they refused to move.

  "Get 'em over the side," Schwenk said, hardened to the atrocities he was committing by this time.

  Russell Darby and another man moved to push the couple overboard. The woman, old and cantankerous, snapped at Russell Darby's hand with her teeth. She bit him hard, drawing blood. Darby hissed in pain and shoved the woman to the ground.

  "Get over the fucking side before I shoot you in the face," Schwenk said to the woman. He didn't know where the words came from. It was as if an entirely different man was speaking through him, using his own body like a sock puppet. The woman looked at him with hate in her eyes. She hadn't turned into one of them yet. She was simply pissed.

  She cursed him, and the old man did the same. Schwenk never stopped aiming the handgun at them, until they went over the side.

  "Fuck." Darby hissed off to his left. He held his hand between his legs.

  Schwenk went over to him, his brain already compartmentalizing Darby in his head. That wasn't a man he'd worked with for a year. That wasn't a guy with two young boys and a wife back home. That was just some poor bastard that got bit. Wrong time, wrong place, that's all.

  "Lemme see it," Schwenk said.

  Darby held out his hand. There was some bruising, and the finger bled from a couple of rectangular depressions in the skin. It wasn't anything to be worried about if times were normal, but they weren't normal.

  Schwenk smiled at the man, trying to remain calm. "Hey, it's gonna be alright."

  "Griego, get this man a life preserver." This man, not Russell, not Darby, but this man.

  Darby looked at him then. Shock on his face. "Captain, you can't be serious."

  Schwenk said nothing, but he did Darby the favor of not pointing the handgun at him.

  "Captain, you can't do this. It's just a bite. It's small; it's nothing. Doc, tell him," Darby pleaded.

  The doctor shook her head, either refusing to do what Darby was asking or denying her role in the whole affair. It wasn't clear which.

  Griego appeared, and he handed the life preserver to Darby, thrusting it at this chest so hard that Darby's arms instinctively came up and wrapped around it. He stood in a daze.

  "You're serious. You're going to throw me over the side like one of them?" Darby asked.

  Schwenk had nothing to say. Nothing he could say would make this right. What he was doing wasn't right; it was survival.

  Darby stopped pleading with Gary. He knew he would find no mercy there. The Captain always did what he thought was right. Instead, he addressed the rest of the crew, the refugees standing on the deck, muttering to each other and watching. "You see this? This is the kind of man that runs this ship. I was his friend. We had dinner at each other's houses. This man played with my boys! Now he's going to throw me over the side like garbage. Know that! You're next!"

  "Alright, get him out of here," Schwenk said. He turned his back as Griego and another man escorted Russell Darby to the edge. He went on his own with no more complaint.

  The sea was calm that evening, which was good for the swimmers. He felt good about that, at least. He heard the splash as Darby hit the water, and then he opened his eyes to find everyone staring at him. They looked at him with fear. He never thought he would have experienced that look in his life.

  He was a good man, faithful to his wife, to God above, and to his men. He never did anyone wrong. He did what he needed to do and what he was told by the company, but now they were all looking at him like he was a madman. He couldn't handle that look.

  He spoke to them. "Listen. I didn't want to do it. But the bites, they were all going to get sick as well. My number one concern is the safety of the people on this ship. I think we got everyone. I don't think there are any more infected. Know that I am a good man, at least I believe myself to be. If you have a problem on the ship, you can come to me. I don't value my life over yours or the lives of my men. We are all equals here. And while it's my ship, and I'm calling the shots of what to do with it, if you have an idea or want to voice any concerns, know that you will always have my ear."

  "We don't know what's going on here. We don't know what this is, but I will try to find out. I will try to find you a place that's safe."

  His speech didn't strike the fear from everyone's eyes, but he saw a good many of them look at him as if he were a human again.

  "I'm sorry about what happened today. Know that I don't like this any more than you do. With that being said, I think we should all get some rest and see what tomorrow brings. Maybe I can make contact with the shore and see what's going on. We'll be alright. Trust me on that."

  The people walked back to their makeshift quarters down below, the cold rooms of the ship's interior. There were about fifty of them, including his own men. It was still a lot of mouths to feed. A few of the people muttered half-hearted thank-yous as they walked by. It was a start, at least.

  ****

  That had been months ago. They had sailed up and down the west coast, burning through fuel, stopping at cities along the way, and trying to reach anyone on the radio.

  As food had dwindled on the ship, he had been forced to open up the shipping containers on board. Many of them were filled with crap, a whole container of jeans, a container devoted to transporting someone's Mercedes, a container piled high wi
th crates of wristbands for some cause or other. These containers they had pitched over the side using the crane on board.

  The less weight they carried, the longer their fuel would last. In some of the crates, they had found what they were looking for, food. Many of the crates contained canned goods from a grocery store that no longer existed. They had rationed those, causing consternation among some of the people onboard. But in the end, those crates, filled with generic spaghetti in a sauce that would stain anything it came in contact with, had kept them going for months. Boxes of cereal, so dry that it made your throat ache to swallow it, kept their bellies full. And the rain barrels on board kept them supplied with fresh water.

  But it was all running out now. The fuel, the food, the crate of alcohol they had found hidden in one of the containers. The people were getting desperate. He could have stayed aboard his ship for the rest of his life, but these other people weren't used to the sea. They wanted to be on land, and he could understand that. On the sea, they had no control. It was the captain's way or the highway, or at least a pretty good talking to until they saw the light, his light.

  They had stopped at every large city between Vancouver and San Diego, finding nothing but smoldering ruins and shades of the dead. Through his binoculars, he spied a world that had gone to shit.

  At first, he had some radio contact with other ships, who, like him, found themselves adrift on the ocean. Those ships weren't as lucky as he was. They weren't container ships, just merchant vessels who got out while they could. Their fuel reserves weren't as large as the Gypsy Drifter's, and over time, the ships had dropped off the radar.

  The Gypsy Drifter was the only ship on the ocean now. But the ocean wasn't the best place to be as, over the last few months, the seas had been wracked by wave after wave of terrible winter storms. His ship could handle it, but many of the smaller vessels could not. One by one, they were either lost to the sea or forced to make land. But Captain Schwenk and The Gypsy Drifter had another problem. Scurvy.

  He scratched at the red rash on the back of his hand and then ran a hand over his patchy scalp where the hair had started to fall out. He was listless, tired. They needed to get on land. Outside the coastal town of Seaside, Oregon, he had stopped the ship, dropping the anchor upon seeing the signal fire of the lighthouse. It was the only light they had seen for a month. He watched the fire burn all night.

  In the morning, he grabbed the speaker from his radio. "You there, buddy?" Those were the words that his exhausted mind had thought to conjure up. Those were the words that would give them hope. And then finally, there was a response. Finally, after months of not reaching anyone on the radio, he had found someone.

  While the picture of Seaside didn't sound pretty, the man in the lighthouse, Rhodri he'd said his name was, claimed that the town was virtually unlooted. That meant food. That meant weapons. That meant a chance at survival.

  He had discussed it with the people on The Gypsy Drifter. They had argued about it for hours. "The man could be a liar," Lisa said. "He could be a cannibal," Tommy Wincott added, his teenage brain running wild. But in the end, they had all agreed that it would be better to die on land than at sea. Plus, they rightfully assumed that there would be more live people on The Gypsy Drifter than there would be living people in the city if any fighting broke out.

  They had conducted a lottery to determine the order of the people who would leave the ship first. Some had volunteered for the first boat, mostly men who thought they could handle themselves on the beach. But most people wanted to be the last ones to leave, just in case anything went bad on the shore.

  Captain Schwenk watched the first boat row across the ocean. It was calm and cold out, but the sun was with them. He followed their progress with his binoculars, praying underneath his breath. He scanned the shambling shapes on the shore. There wasn't a lot of them, but there were enough to be a problem. There were eleven men on the boat. Their goal was to reach the shore and establish a beachhead for the rest of the people to land.

  He would miss the Gypsy Drifter. She was a good ship, sturdy and reliable, though not as much as she had been. His crew had been diminished, but he found a couple of worthy mechanics in the group of refugees. Together, they had managed to keep her running. He had enjoyed some good times on the boat. It hadn't all been doom and gloom.

  He had found love on the ship, sharing his captain's bunk with Lucy, the capable doctor that had stolen his heart. There were times when he felt guilty. He didn't know if his actual wife was dead, but he was a realist. He knew he would never actually have a way of knowing if she were dead or alive outside of a miracle. He had to move on. All the people on the Gypsy Drifter had to move on.

  A woman named Lisa had been valuable with that realization. She had been a therapist in her previous life. When she first offered up her services, not many went to her. But after a while, after her easygoing confidence rubbed off on some of her early clients, even he had to admit that he needed someone to talk to. The world was a terrible place. It was a crumbling and lonely place at times. It helped to have someone to talk to about it. As the captain, he always had to maintain an air of calmness and coolness, but Lisa, with her cracked spectacles and unkempt red hair, had been able to allow him to see that the sun was going to come up tomorrow and the day after. This realization gave him the confidence he needed to approach Lucy.

  Lucy was wonderful in every way, kind and smart– smarter than him, that was for sure. They made a good couple.

  He put thoughts of Lucy to the side as he watched the rowboat grind into the sand of the Seaside beach. The men hopped out, taking a defensive stance as two others pushed the boat back out to the sea so it could load up its next group of passengers. He watched as one of the dark shapes approached the men.

  The man, Jerry-something, swung a giant monkey wrench purloined from the engineering section of the ship. He cracked the shadow across its head, and it dropped to the sand. Schwenk emitted a small sigh of relief. They could be killed.

  They were doing it. They were going to finally get free of the ship.

  ****

  Rhodri Williams watched the landing party from atop the lighthouse. His time at the lighthouse was done. He knew that now. There were no more ships; therefore, there was no more need for him to stay there and keep the fire lit.

  He wanted to be on the shore, helping the landing party, but currently, his lighthouse was encircled by the dead. They had found him eventually, and now they stood ringing its base. His only chance for escape came in the form of the men on the beach and whoever else came from the boat.

  He ran a hand along his ribs absentmindedly, scratching at his dry skin. He had been alone so long in the lighthouse that he couldn't believe what the sight of seeing other humans was doing to him. He cried softly watching those men walk on the shore. How long since he had seen someone living?

  Perhaps the end of October, he had seen a group of people running the other way up the beach, their backpacks loaded down with supplies, rifles in their hands. He knew that there had to be other people out there, but knowing a thing and seeing living proof were two entirely different things.

  The wind gusted, and the lighthouse swayed ever so slightly, sending his head swirling with a touch of vertigo. It was a new development. He had never before experienced the dizzying sensation until a few weeks ago. He suspected there was something wrong in his body. He dropped the binoculars from his eyes and grabbed onto the railing of the lighthouse, so he didn't lose his balance and plummet to his death. He didn't feel like he usually did with vertigo, and then he noticed something else. The men on the beach staggered around like drunks trying to stay upright. All of the birds on the beach were taking flight. The trees in town shook, and from below, he heard the crash of equipment. The lighthouse shook even harder as if it were trying to buck him off.

  And the words entered his head with dread. "Earthquake."

  Chapter 17: Whole Lotta Shaking Going On

  Joan lay on the
floor, exhausted but still unable to sleep. The baby's crying kept her awake. She needed lots of things, antibiotics, more sutures, alcohol for sterilizing equipment, but most of all, she needed sleep.

  The boy wailed in the other room where she had operated on Tammy. The baby had no name. Tammy hadn't woken up to name it yet. She had lost a lot of blood, and Joan wished that she had an I.V. drip to give her. But they were in an abandoned ranger station in the middle of the woods, not a hospital. It was questionable whether Tammy would ever wake up. She thought the odds were about fifty-fifty. So much blood… but Joan had done the best that she could. She stopped short of patting herself on the back for her performance. If Tammy survived, she would allow herself to do so, but only then. Otherwise, everything she had done had been in vain.

  "Shhh," she heard Dez whisper at the crying baby. The boy was fine. They didn't know how much he weighed, but he was a damn sight bigger than anyone looking at Tammy would have expected. The baby seemed to be healthy, though her only tests had been hearing it cry, seeing it breathe, and making sure that it had all its fingers and toes.

  He wouldn't stay healthy for long, though. If Tammy died, they would need some substitute for her milk, unless another one of the women's babies decided to come and their breasts started producing. It was a possibility. They were all under a great deal of stress, and sometimes that would cause women to have their babies early.

  If it didn't happen in the next day or so, someone would have to go out and find some formula for the babies. Maybe they could find what they needed on the highway. But that was suicide. But somewhere in those cars, there must be someone that had a baby, someone that had brought formula with them. Perhaps there would even be some antibiotics for Tammy.

  The baby cried again, an ear-piercing scream that made Joan's eyes pop open. She waited until she heard the soothing sounds of Dez from the other room. Maybe Dez should take the baby to another room, in case Tammy didn't wake up… and then did wake up as one of the dead. But no, Katie was there, a spear in her hand. She took turns with Mort, keeping watch. Mort had passed out easily enough. He claimed he was used to noise while he was trying to sleep. He said that it was actually easier for him to fall asleep when there was noise, that it was a result of sleeping under highways and next to train yards for so long.