Deadfall: Hunters (12 page)

Tague came rushing out of the building with some iron bars in hand just as about six more came through the trees. The sound of crashing undead continued though. I stepped forward to help Blevin. I had thought about how I would use the sword for a week now and was glad I could try it out against these broken down undead models. I walked up to the first zombie and as it reached out to me, I swung hard against the arms in a downward fashion. In my thoughts, the arms would come clean off, but in reality, I just battered them down. The result was the same. With the arms out of the way, I stabbed it through the head. That was the design of the gladius. The creature collapsed.

Now, we needed the water. In many other situations, we probably would have just dropped it all and rushed back to the ship, but we really needed that barrel. Tague realized this and while we did our best with the first line of undead, Tague jammed the bars under the back end of the wagon, converting it into a pseudo sled. Tague called out to me and I rushed back to help him pull the wagon/sled. We pulled on it, tugging it a few inches each time. The hot sun beat down on us as we had our backs towards the pier. We had to pull it maybe three hundred feet back across the main street and onto the pier where Maxie was waiting for us. In front of us, Blevin screamed and shouted in a bloodrage as he tore down the already crumbled zombies. He seemed to be holding his own just fine, but behind him we all could see far more still emerging from the trees. After pulling the sled a ways, right to the edge of the pier, I looked back up that hill and caught a glimpse of a house, a large concrete or brick building through the trees at the top.

Looking back, it all felt weird. More and more zombies came out of those trees and we were freaking out as we drug that barrel toward the boat, and yet, it was like we were never in danger. As soon as we came onto the pier, Janine came running past us and was hacking and slashing, those short arms swinging a crowbar, effectively enough against the zombies. It was an unusual sight, David and Goliath, fighting side by side. Two levels of fighting, Blevin up high and Janine down lower. I knew Janine was brave, she had proven that before, but I still worried. And yet there, in that moment of panic, it was all under control.

Once we were on the pier, Blevin and Janine were able to keep nearly all of the zombies bottlenecked up at the edge of the pier while Tague and I pulled that heavy ass barrel to the boat, and with Maxie’s help, and the ships little loading crane, we got that barrel on board. Blevin and Janine jumped on board just as we were pushing off and even then, they were both safely away from the zombies, by a long shot.

Tired, sweaty and completely worn out, we sat along the edge of the boat, hanging our feet over the edge, drinking from our loot as Maxie allowed the boat to drift out slowly along the edge of the cove. The captain let us know it would probably take us an hour to get out into the sea, but we were safe. That is when things got creepy once again.

It was around 6:00 p.m. that afternoon, still very clear out, but the sun was headed down to the west over the land and mountains deep in Cuba. It was more than light enough out, but the shadows were starting to play tricks on us. So all along the cove, mostly concentrated along the pier, the mini horde of zombies continued to do their thing, looking around like idiots, moaning after their lost flesh. We watched with tired satisfaction until the drums began. It started out as one drum, then it was joined in by a couple more. It was coming from the street just behind the pier and the horde quickly turned around to follow the sound.

Then, the other figures showed up. They were small, much smaller than an adult human. They were dressed oddly. It’s hard to explain how they were dressed, mostly because they were hard to see. They darted in an around the horde, almost, corralling them towards the sound of the drums. The zombies appeared to simply ignore them. The small figures were too dark to see and Janine insisted they were wearing masks. Honestly, I couldn’t tell very well. Needless to say, the whole scene was surreal. The horde starting shuffling back towards the hill and disappeared behind homes and buildings in front of the main street. As our boat turned along the far side of the cove, two of the taller figures watched us from the shore and as we crossed under the shadow of the large container ship, a dozen more figures greeted us from the sides of the boat.

“They’re just kids,” Tague said, pulling a pair of binoculars off his eyes.

As we passed the binoculars around, the reality of it all hit us. They were kids, ragged filthy, skinny, probably no older than ten, maybe twelve. But, they were alive. Even with the binoculars, I couldn’t tell what their faces were giving away. I don’t know if they were happy to see us, or angry. For the next few days out on sea, we would recall those two days and come up with all sorts of hypothesis. My general opinion was that they didn’t want us there. Somehow, they had survived the apocalypse when the adults had not. These kids had managed to create a safe haven out of that little sea side community. And it is also my opinion that it had been the kids that had let the zombies loose on us, as a deterrent, as a way to get rid of us.

Everyone extolled the virtue of those kids. Janine, of course, being the closest in age to the strange kids we had encountered from afar, was quick to point out that maybe kids, those that survived, did it better than the adults. Tague was just happy to be alive.

We had our water and were headed from Cuba to Haiti and all I could really think of was…kids can be dicks.

Maybe that’s just the former teacher in me.

Here is the great irony of everything that happens in life. I just reread the last entry to the rest of the crew, going over everything that happened in that small town. Everything we do to survive carries such an enormous risk. A simple thing like getting drinking water could easily lead to our deaths. And yet, we were all inside, reading the journal and talking, because it’s wet out on deck. It’s been raining, nice and gentle-like for the past two days. It’s the kind of rain shower that would have been perfect for gathering water. Of course, now we don’t have to because we have enough water.

It’s one thing if I’m walking for miles on end on a “boring” day. I keep busy by walking. But I’ve been stuck inside the boat now with nothing but my thoughts. I’ve been going over my journal, trying to piece everything together between the written pages and the typed pages. Janine and Blevin have been with me most of the time, reading over everything, adding their own bits of information, trying to remember where they were at the time events like Black Mountain happened to us.

It’s also been a bad time to think about Heather. Nothing like a grey, dreary day to make a guy remember what he lost. I keep doubting myself, thinking back to all the things that went wrong leading to her….

But the worst has been the dreams. At first, I thought they were nightmares, but over time, I came to realize that they weren’t nightmares. Nightmares are wild, random, and just have the right content in them to mess with you. Dreams are the same, wild and random, but just have other things, thoughts and images, in them. A dream to one guy could be a nightmare to another.

So I confess here, that the dreams I have been having don’t seem to fall into either of those sides. The first two times, I found it weird and in my desperate state at the time, I lost myself in their reality. Then, after a while, I just dismissed them as more random dreams, playing on my thoughts. But now, thinking even more about them, I really don’t know what to think. I’ve had dreams repeat themselves in the past. You have a dream and then, years later, you have the same dream. Dunno what it means, probably that you are the same guy having the same dream. But, I can’t ever remember having such a similar dream, this many times.

She’s there. It’s Heather. She’s repeating the same thing over and over again. At first, I thought it was my name. She’s not saying Brian, but my brain was telling me that’s what she was saying. The more the dream repeats itself, and she keeps saying the same foreign word, the less I think it’s my name. But there she is, repeating it. And what’s worse, I can never remember what the word sounds like when I wake up, but when I have the same dream again, I recognize the word.

In the dream, Heather is a dark shadowy figure, misty almost. And there’s thousands of her, or hundreds, I don’t know. Just a lot of her. They are all staring at me, but I don’t see eyes. I don’t know if they are all talking at the same time, and if they are, they are saying the word in perfect unison. The word builds up, a crescendo, louder and louder, until it’s completely deafening. I’m not scared in the dream, not even afraid, but I feel completely out of place. It’s like being in a foreign country for the first time, everything feels so off. But there’s nothing else in the dream. No buildings, or cars or people. Just the ghostly Heather and her doppelgangers.

So what does it mean? That I’m crazy? I don’t know. I haven’t told anyone. If you read this, maybe you can make you own decision. Then again, if you survived Deadfall, then how else would you be other than crazy?

Maxie let us know that we should be a day away from the Haitian Coast. From there, another day to Fort Liberte, where we are going to try to make a landing and try to figure out what exactly we should be doing there. I think the better proof that I’m crazy is the fact that I’m sailing to this island without really knowing why.

I woke up this morning to Tague calling out from the deck. We were supposed to be seeing the Haitian coast today but ran across something else first. As we all came on deck, we were startled by a peculiar sight. Seven boats of various types and sizes, bunched together, floating in the ocean. There was a larger yacht type boat, like the kind millionaires have, sleek and elegant. Tied around this ship were the other ships, fishing vessels I think. They were lashed up together quite tight. Maxie said that having the ships like that was actually quite dangerous. It was ok if just floating around, but if any kind of weather kicked up, the boats would be trashed, even if the larger yacht survived.

The rain had stopped and the skies were clear, so we brought our boat alongside this floating island and got our own gear. If anything, there was always bound to be some kind of salvage that we could use. Maxie was hoping for some left over fuel. Of course, we’d have to earn it all. Not even one hundred feet from the boats and we heard the welcoming groan and moans of our undead friends. We saw at least twelve of them alongside the edge of the yacht and the fishing ship on the side we were facing. We watched and laughed as one of them leaned over the edge too far and flipped right over, landing in between the yacht and fishing boat.

We lashed up next to the fishing boat and Tague speared the two zombies there with plenty of space to spare. Blevin and I jumped over onto the ship and checked carefully for more zombies. We could hear them, a chorus of rotten meat, crying out from all over the floating island, so we proceeded carefully. I found the zombie that had fallen off the yacht, legs up and wedged in between the ships. I pushed on the yacht just a bit and the zombie slipped through, dropping into the water and disappearing into the ocean.

Makes me wonder, just how many of them are on the bottom of the ocean, or lakes or rivers? And are they still alive, or whatever they call life? I mean, we didn’t stick around to see, but how many of the zombies walked out of the Cape Fear River after that disaster? I just had a mental image of crabs tearing at the moving corpses.

So we continued moving through the small boat island. Blevin went down into the fishing vessel and we heard some commotion. He came back up with a smile on his face, holding three fingers up. Tague then followed him up some side netting up onto the yacht while I jumped from the fishing vessel to the some other boat, a larger, touristy type boat. This one was also lashed to the side of the yacht. Two undead went down quickly. A man and a woman, looking even sicklier than their zombie look gave them. They were skinny and gaunt. Zombies usually kept their dead body’s physical aspects. I had seen enough fat zombies to know.

Janine and Maxie followed behind us, scouring through the boats to find anything useful. I glanced over many times to see them tossing all sorts of items back across the waters and onto our ship. Later, we’d go through it all and end up tossing a lot of it overboard instead of keeping so much junk.

So here’s the moral of this story. It has come to my attention just how much we took for granted in the world before this one. Let me explain why. Tague and Blevin let me know later that they ended up taking out twenty more zombies up on the big yacht. They also mentioned how emaciated they looked, but they had no issues taking them down. I though, am never that lucky. After the touristy boat, I came around the ship on the other side, a smaller yacht. I jumped across and tripped, falling over, hitting my jaw on the side of a crate, and biting into my lip really good, biting through it and making a bloody mess for such a “small” wound. All this without even being attacked. I dealt with the lone zombie there and stopped to take a small break. I had this water bottle, small, long and slender, made out of plastic. I had this thing since the mountain home. Always tried to keep it filled. So I’m using the water to wash out my stupid mouth wound, spitting blood all over the place, when I get jumped by the quietest zombie in existence. I never heard a thing before it had me in a stranglehold. It’s grabbed me around the neck and I’m doing all I can pushing back with my hands to keep it from biting into my shoulder. We come crashing down on the ground and I’m trying to get myself turned around. I have no idea where my gladius is and I’m just trying to look around for anything I can use while simultaneously keeping the beasts mouth from clamping on my flesh.

I heard shouts from above and the next thing I know, Blevin is there, tearing the zombie off of me and effortlessly tossing it overboard, where it sank as silently as it had attacked me. There were, of course, more laughs at my expense. But that wasn’t the worse of it all. See, in the commotion, I, or the zombie, had fallen on top of my water bottle, and it had shattered. That’s when it hit me. It was gone. There was no replacing it.

In the world before, if I had broken my water bottle, I just would have purchased another the next time I was at the store. I wouldn’t have shed a tear. But here I was, nearly in tears, because of my shattered water bottle.

I scoured all of the boats, for hours, looking for a replacement, and found none. It was a horrible feeling, and all just for a water bottle. It was just one of those things, minor of course, which kept you connected to the old world. The world where living was just going to work, buying what you needed and wanted, and living. Now we lived in a world where we risked our lives for water and then I couldn’t carry that water around with my water bottle.

Sad.

Well, now that the water bottle incident is out of the way, I can get on to what we really found on those boats. Yes, we found plenty of useful things and Maxie found plenty of fuel as well, more than we could take. There were batteries of various sizes and types. Tague salvaged some radio equipment and Maxie quite literally ripped off the large yacht’s radar and is working on getting it setup on our smaller boat. It will help us hunt down rain when we need it and also find other derelicts out there.

We didn’t find any food, though. None. Not even scraps or the odds bag of chips tucked away somewhere. There was nothing at all. We looked all over the boats, all of them, and found nothing. Our assumption that these people starved to death out here was proven true when we found what passed for a ship log. So from what we could make out, the ‘owner’ of the yacht was coming out of the Virgin Islands and was slowly picking up survivors along the way. Everything seemed to be going well for several months, no mention of food issues. They were doing like we were, hitting up coastal cities for supplies. Then, the entries stopped and started up again, and everyone is dying. There were no dates after the last normal entry so it was hard to tell how much time had passed, but the only things that are mentioned is that they were dead in the water and almost out of food. Maxie checked the engine and found nothing wrong with it, other than it was very worn down. There was still plenty of fuel by the amount Maxie salvaged. The boats were in good shape, so we simply were left clueless as to what actually happened.

What a way to go.

As tragic as that all might have been, we did find something useful in the logs. Thirteen days before whatever tragic event overtook this hodgepodge boat island, they picked up their last set of survivors. It was a small fishing boat with three Americans that had come out of Haiti. There were no names, but the log mentioned that the Americans had been Missionaries in Haiti when Deadfall came about. They had survived for over a year in a remote village in the mountains of Haiti. Here the missionaries and many Haitians had lived in relative security thanks in part to the village elder. The log also mentioned that a few Americans had chosen to remain behind in the village but that the three on the boat had decided to try to make it back to the States in order to try to find their families, and get this, bring them back to the safety of their mountainside village.

A safe mountainside village. Felt comfortably familiar.

The other good news? The log mentioned they started off from Fort Liberte. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

That night, we set off from the floating dead island. We had debated staying latched to it for the night, but it just felt creepy. We watched in an eerie awe as the drifted away from the boats. Very little was said, but I know what was going on in my head. Death was all around us, thanks in a very large part to Deadfall, but maybe because of this, when mortality like this was unexplained, when we didn’t see or know how these people really died, other than the clear starvation, it’s still haunting. When we’re desperate and afraid, we make more mistakes. Think about it. In our normal lives way back when, we just went through our days. We didn’t think about dying, because for the most part, we didn’t think it would happen. It helped that every other walking being wasn’t out to tear our meat off. So we lived with confidence, and that’s really the best way to live. But in this world, where death is around every corner, we live on edge, and I think we make more mistakes that way.

I don’t know if there were any mistakes made on those boats. Maybe it was just dumb bad luck. Luck, fate, or destiny, it all plays a part. Luck is why I’m still here instead of a walking sack of bones back in North Carolina somewhere.

I’m rambling and not making sense. Very few things seem to make sense in this world. Oddly enough, somehow, I find myself on this boat, heading towards the unknown in Haiti, looking for an answer to a question I don’t think I have yet. I wish I knew the question, because everywhere I look, there appears to be an answer. It’s making sense out there somehow.

Off to Fort Liberte.