Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (15 page)

When she saw them, she began making a soft whining noise.

She had found or forced a small gap between the chain link and a support pole and forced her right arm through it up to the shoulder. The edges of the steel links acted like a cheese grater and, as she pushed through, efficiently shredded the sleeve of her work uniform and the flesh underneath. Now that arm, thrust outward with the fingers grasping at air, hung in tattered ribbons of gray and black, revealing bone. The girl shoved her body against the fencing, still trying to get through, face pressed against the links and jaws working slowly.

“Someone locked her in there instead of killing her,” Xavier said.

“Someone who cared about her,” said Rosa. She didn’t see hunger or malice in the girl’s face, only a pathetic sadness. “This was somebody’s daughter.”

Eve, one of the hippies, rested a hand on Rosa’s shoulder. “You’ve seen them before, hon. They were all special to someone. But now they’re just . . .”

“Monsters,” said a hippie named Tommy. “It’s only the first one we’ve found on board. When they start coming for us you won’t feel so sorry for them.”

Eve gave Tommy a reproachful look, then lowered her voice as they all stared at the thing on the other side of the fence, still reaching, still whining. “We can’t think they’re human anymore. They don’t respond to compassion or anything else, and this one would kill you if she had the chance.”

“She’s right,” said Xavier.

Tommy retrieved a long metal file from a worktable and walked to the fence. “I’ll do it.”

“She can’t get to us!” said Rosa. “She can’t hurt anyone in there.”

“And leaving her like this is cruel,” the priest said, nodding at Tommy. Rosa walked back out into the corridor as the hippie quickly stabbed the long file through one of the girl’s eyes and punctured her brain. She stiffened and collapsed, but not all the way to the floor, her trapped arm leaving her sagging against the chain link. Xavier offered a silent Hail Mary before turning away.

They moved on, resuming their cautious inspection of every opening and door, Xavier still in the lead. By the time they reached a room marked
GENERATOR CONTROL
, a long narrow chamber of electrical boards, gauges, and workstations, the priest estimated that they had crossed to the port side of the ship. Here, more corridors led toward the front of the ship, even more sporadically lit than those previously, and now the ominous openings of stairwells were added to the many hatches and doors.

They cleared another row of small offices and a room filled with lockers before they began to smell a new odor steadily growing stronger, something unpleasant, a chemical smell. As they traveled the main corridor the odor began to dominate all else, covering the fragrances of machine oil and rot, causing a few of them to squint their eyes and cough. Xavier was about to turn them back when Rosa gripped his upper arm.

“What’s that?” she whispered, pointing past him. “Up there. Is that a leg?”

The priest pulled his flashlight and trained it ahead. It was indeed a leg, sticking out of a hatchway ahead on the right, wearing a rubber boot and a pant leg made from heavy yellow material. The corridor lights beyond the leg were out, a tunnel of blackness with some kind of liquid pooling on the floor and spreading slowly toward them. The chemical odor was much stronger here, making them wince and cover their mouths.

“My God, what
is
that?” said Eve.

Xavier moved toward the leg, Rosa close behind, and he let his shotgun muzzle lead as he came to the opening. His shoes splashed through the fluid on the floor.

A sailor in firefighter’s gear with an air tank and face mask lay in the opening, stretched out on his back. A single bullet hole pierced his mask, the Plexiglas cloudy with congealed gore, the body appearing deflated as body fluids had exited through the openings in the fire-retardant suit. The smell was foul enough to compete with the chemicals in the air. Two more similarly dressed bodies were crumpled on the deck in the compartment beyond the opening. Someone had shot some zombies, and apparently quite some time ago.

Everyone in the group was coughing now, trying to cover their mouths and noses, squinting and waving at the air as if that might drive the odor back. Xavier swept his flashlight across the floor, seeing empty shell casings scattered across the deck in the spreading fluid. His eyes burned as he looked at the straw-colored liquid, his light tracking to the left wall and upward, seeing that it rippled down the steel in a thin stream. At the corner where the wall met the ceiling was a cluster of pipes, purple, white, and blue, all of them ruptured by gunfire. The yellow liquid was coming from a purple pipe.

Rosa saw it too and gripped Xavier’s arm. “On carriers, anything having to do with JP-5 is purple,” she said, her voice strained.

“What?” The priest rubbed at his stinging eyes.

She looked down. “We’re standing in jet fuel.”

And that was when the dead began to gallop out of the blacked-out corridor ahead.

Evan looked down as the others scrambled through the hatch behind him. It had only managed to bite into the thick heel of his motorcycle boot, and it was only a rotting, decapitated head with a crew cut. He had nearly stepped on it.

“Yaah!”
he cried, booting the head across the wardroom like a grisly soccer ball.

Calvin slammed the hatch behind them and held down the lever as dozens of fists hammered at the steel from the other side. Flashlights swept the room, illuminating a shadow on the far side, darting among the tables and chairs. The boy named Stone shot at it and missed, and the bullet sparked off a steel bulkhead.

Across the room, Freeman, the hippie who had run in, threw up his hands and screamed, “Don’t! No, don’t!”

Evan pushed the muzzle of the boy’s weapon away before he could fire again, and across the room Freeman began crying like a child. Fists pummeled at steel, and the hatch’s lever suddenly shot up. Calvin grabbed it and forced it back down. “They know how to open the doors!”

Several of the group ran to his aid, while others scoured the room, one of them returning with a metal folding chair that they jammed between the handle and the door. It seemed to hold. Evan quickly checked the room, finding a similar door on the far side, as well as Freeman, who had tucked himself into a ball on the floor and was sobbing. Calvin appeared a moment later, crouching beside the man and speaking softly.

“Everyone reload,” Evan ordered, feeding shells into his shotgun, the others following suit. When he was done, he located the head he had kicked, nudged it out from under a table with the toe of his boot, and then smashed it with a folding chair until it came apart. He returned to the new hatch and listened at it but heard nothing on the other side.

Calvin joined him. “Freeman’s in bad shape,” the older man said. “He’s in shock, and he isn’t hearing me.”

Evan glanced at the man on the floor. A woman was now kneeling beside him, stroking his hair. “What do we—?” Evan started.

“Nothing,” said Calvin. “We leave him here.”

Evan’s eyes widened in surprise. This was one of Calvin’s people.

Calvin saw the look. “Yes, he’s family and I love him like all the rest, but we can’t help him, we can’t stay here, and bringing him along puts everyone at risk.” He looked back at a man with whom he’d shared a life. “I hate it, and if anything happens to him I don’t know how I’ll live with it, but there’s no choice. We’ll try to find a way to lock him in here and come back later.”

Evan nodded as the other man gathered his people to deliver the news. He realized that despite the title others frequently attributed to him, it was Calvin who was a true leader and had been since the beginning. He was someone who would consider the welfare of the entire group and make hard decisions, even though the outcome might be heartbreaking. And he was someone who, if he asked others to put themselves in harm’s way, would not hesitate to stand beside them as well.

The writer listened at the door again, knowing they had to keep moving. How long would it take for the mob outside to stumble across a back way into this place? Surely there was another way in, possibly several in this steel maze. If not, it would mean their little band would be forced to go back out where the dead were waiting for them.

Calvin’s people moved Freeman to a couch and covered him with a blanket, then assembled on the door, one of them carrying another folding chair so they could secure it from the other side. It would have to be enough.

Out they went, Evan leading them into a short corridor of empty offices. This opened into a long hallway that appeared to run bow to stern, or if not quite that long, at least in those directions. Doorways, hatches, up and down stairways, and equipment lockers awaited, infrequently lit fluorescent bars providing a little illumination.

Corpses milled about at an intersection a hundred feet to the right.

More were lingering to the left, only twenty feet away.

Some were staring at walls or actually sitting on the deck, none of them making any noise, and as Evan looked back and forth between them, he was yet again fascinated by their behavior, even after so many encounters. They seemed almost docile when they weren’t agitated. He knew that wouldn’t last. Word was passed back, and the group readied itself.

They attacked left, toward the closest knot of zombies, weapons roaring in the close space and rounds sparking off bulkheads or shattering light bars. The corpses became animated at once and lurched into the gunfire. In seconds, a dozen bodies were sprawled across the deck.

“To the rear!” Calvin shouted, and the little group turned as one, those in the back now at the front, opening fire on the creatures shuffling toward them from the intersection. The shooting was an endless, reverberating crash, muzzle flashes lighting the hall and filling the air with gun smoke.

The dead fell and didn’t rise.

“Reload!” called Evan, and fingers clicked rounds into chambers, slapped in fresh magazines, or pushed shells up tubes.

They moved forward, reaching the intersection and pointing their weapons in every direction. “On the right!” shouted Stone, kneeling and opening fire. Others joined him as corpses in blue coveralls, camouflage, and khaki filled the boy’s corridor. Bullets tore through cold tissue and decomposing organs, blasted dark gore onto the walls and into the faces of other corpses. Tops of heads were torn away, backs of skulls blown out. One creature in khaki, so bloated and green with gas that he looked like a balloon, exploded in a greenish-white mess that Evan briefly associated with spinach dip.

“I got a greenie!” Stone cried.

Evan started to laugh, and then the fresh stench hit him and he began to heave.

Corpses fell, and more clambered over them. The firing dropped off when the shooters were forced to reload, giving the dead a chance to advance. When the gunfire resumed, the dead had gained considerable ground.

“Behind us!” yelled Mercy, the woman who had two young daughters back at the Alameda pier. Armed with an M4 taken from an overrun military column outside of Oakland, she stepped out of the intersection and into another hallway, squeezing off rounds at a cluster of the walking dead emerging from another hatchway. Calvin stood beside her and added his own firepower.

Evan recovered from his retching, the bile bitter in his mouth, and resumed firing next to Stone. He suddenly thought that one of the corpses lumbering toward them looked familiar, a woman in soiled khaki with her head cocked on what could only be a broken neck. Then he realized where he had seen her; she had been galloping at the front of the horde bearing down on them just as Freeman had bailed out through the wardroom hatch. So they had found a way around the wedged door.

Evan shot her in the head.

The firing fell off once more as people reloaded. More figures stumbled over the fallen, still closing the gap between the living and the dead. Back at the intersection, Calvin and Mercy finished off their original targets and backed into the intersection so they could cover every approach. Groans echoed from Calvin’s side on the left, followed by a metallic clatter that made a chill race up the older hippie’s back.

It was the sound of a folding chair hitting the metal deck.

Before the hippie leader could move, Mercy called out more targets, this time on the right, and they both turned to fire. Shadowy figures in uniform trudged out of the darkened hall, bullets slamming into chests and groins and legs before finding their marks. Bodies tottered and collapsed.

A man’s long scream pierced the corridor to their rear, and then was abruptly cut short.

Calvin clenched his jaw and forced himself not to turn, not to break off and run to the sound of the scream, making himself scan their target corridor with his flashlight. One of the bodies on the floor groaned and tried to pull itself out from under several others that were pinning it to the floor. Mercy saw it and used the light to put a round in its forehead. With no more targets immediately in front of them, Mercy inserted a fresh magazine and urged Calvin to do the same.

Back at the main engagement, freshly reloaded weapons began to fire once more as the corridor began filling with mounds of the twice dead. Bullets tore into conduit and ventilation and ricocheted off door frames, and one punched a hole in a fire extinguisher hanging from a wall mount. There was a soft
whumpf
, and suddenly the hallway was filled with a white fog.

“I can’t see them!” Stone shouted.

Evan grabbed his shoulder. “Fall back to the intersection.”

The group did, backing into Calvin and Mercy. There were six of them in total.

“They’ll be coming,” Evan said, keeping his shotgun aimed into the white cloud, watching for movement. Any second now . . .

“This way,” Mercy said, leading them up the corridor that appeared to run toward the front of the ship, picking her way over bodies. The others followed.

Calvin stayed in the intersection, rifle to his shoulder, facing back down the hallway from which they had originally come. His eyes were wet with tears. “Come on,” he whispered.

Evan shouted at him. “Calvin, we have to go!”

Calvin didn’t move. “Come on,” he repeated.

On his left, the dead stalked out of the fire extinguisher fog, hair and skin now coated in white powder. They spotted the lone man in the intersection and broke into their deadly gallop.

There was a moan then, and Freeman staggered into the sight at the end of Calvin’s rifle. His throat had been torn open, one of his eyes dangled and rested on his cheek, and several fingers of one reaching hand had been bitten off.

“I’m sorry,” Calvin choked, and fired a single round, putting the man down. Then he pivoted left and emptied his clip into the crowd of surging, white-coated corpses, bullets flinging them back into one another, the heavy caliber doing withering damage at such close range. When his firing pin clicked on a dry magazine, Calvin turned and ran after his group.