Last Stand on Zombie Island (41 page)

The small boat, a Zodiac 558 Hurricane, fired up its 200-horsepower diesel water jet and soon Billy and the seaman were zipping across the narrow gap between the cutter and the chicken boat. As they sped away from the cutter, he could see the machine guns manned and pointed directly at the freighter’s decks, watching for any sign of danger. The fast little Zodiac, with all the maneuverability of a 17-foot long jet ski, turned sideways and slid to a stop about fifty yards from the freighter. The Coastie killed the motor and slapped the inflatable side of the boat.

“Here you go, sir,” the boy, whose crash helmet was marked
Myers
, said in a voice that sounded just a year or two beyond puberty. Maybe he would introduce him to Cat when they got back.

The charterboat captain licked his lips as he checked the regulator, sniffing the rush of air when he tested it. He placed the mouthpiece in his mouth and inhaled the wet compressed air with a rattle after pulling his mask down over his eyes and nose. He pulled himself over the side of the boat and plunged lengthways into the ice-cold Gulf water.

He bobbed back up and felt sheer terror being in the water only a half football field away from a ship loaded with infected. No one had seen them swim but he still felt as if Jaws was circling just inches below him as he broke the surface. He reached out of the water and received the yellow plastic suitcase. As he did, he spit the regulator mouthpiece out of his mouth and took a gulp of salt air. “They sent you alone, huh?” Billy asked Myers to make sure his voice still worked.

“I didn’t have a choice, everyone outranks me,” the kid laughed.

“I know the feeling,” he said as he popped the mouthpiece back in, took a test breath and submerged. He stroked with both arms and kicked the fins on his feet out behind him as the main source of propulsion. The case was tied with a leash to the buoyancy compressor on his chest, and it bobbed along a few feet off his side. He covered the space to the freighter in just a few minutes of steady swimming.

As the freighter grew closer to him, he could see the rust-streaked sides, with paint bubbled and flaking in paper-plate sized pieces. He stopped fifteen feet away and pirouetted in the water 360-degrees, first watching the seaman on the small zodiac with an M16 in his hand gingerly, then the white cutter in the distance with its machineguns on the freighter, and back to the stinking derelict freighter itself in front of him.

He dived down under the waves and felt the water fill his ears. The sound of the regulator’s bubbles blew thick all around his head as he surged down the hull of the freighter. Underneath the ship was many times worse than on the surface. The hull was a living coral reef with generations of barnacles and slimy algae hanging from the side of the ship like an underwater rain forest.

As quick as he could from six feet under the waves and sunshine above him, he placed the suitcase against the hull of the ship. The magnets, insulated from the hull by a layer of thick growth, refused to stick.

Great.

He let go of the case and let it float up above his head, still attached to the leash on his BC as he worked on the side of the hull with his dive knife. The old knife’s stainless screwdriver tip, flecked with pinholes of rust from a hundred dives, hacked and picked off chunks of marine life from the ship. For ten minutes, he worked until he was surrounded by a cloud of murky water and floating debris.

Finally, looking at a pitted but much cleaner section of hull, he pulled the case down from the water above him and pushed it against the ship. The speaker magnets clanked hard on the vessel and the package remained firm to its new and last home.

He had pushed himself back from the yellow box when he felt the hands grab him from behind around his mask and regulator. The hands, mangled and swollen, were clearly visible on the plastic face shield of his mask until they pulled it from his face with a wrenching motion.

Spitting out his regulator, he spun around in the water in an explosion of bubbles from the loose mouthpiece. Behind him in the water was the vaguely familiar reanimated corpse of the Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer that had fought beside him on the bridge, moustache trapping small bubbles as his mouth contorted in an empty scream. An open and grisly wound was on the Chief’s neck, a waft of black blood emerging from it. The Chief hung suspended in the water; lungs filled with water and held down below the surface by his gun belt even as his lifejacket pulled him to the surface. Although not buoyant enough to float, he still sat as if some unmoored underwater mine and reached out for the charterboat captain.

Billy stiff-armed the man by his orange life vest and quickly burst away from him in a series of furious leg kicks. He was screaming as he broke the surface a few feet away from the Zodiac.

The young seaman looked as if he shit himself as he threw the M16 up to his shoulder and fired rounds blindly at the freighter’s hull. After a tense half-minute of screaming at the Coastie and willing himself over the side of the inflatable boat, Billy found himself on the deck heaving and looking at the sky.

He willed himself to look back at the freighter and saw nothing in the water there but the old Ukrainian ship.

“What the hell was down there?” the boy asked.

Billy shook his head. Was it a dream? Did his mind play a trick on him? “There is an infected down there in a lifejacket. He got the drop on me after I set the mine but I got away,” he blurted out, scanning the waves for a moustache.

“Guess he kept your mask, huh?” Myers said.

“I was tired of that one anyway,” Billy shrugged and fell back into the Zodiac.

— | — | —

ChapteR 46

Sam spent about eighteen hours a day, literally every minute he was not asleep, propped up at the bar. Sitting on the balcony of the Bay Sports Bar on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay in Daphne used to be entertaining and these days it was still the best show in town—even with an audience of one. The bar’s claim to fame was its incredible view of all of Eastern Mobile from the eastern foot of the nearly eight mile long Battleship Parkway Bridge over Mobile Bay from Daphne to the Alabama Port city. At night, you could see the entire downtown area with skyscrapers, moving cars, cruise ships, the
USS Alabama,
and everything else all lit up in the night sky. Since the outbreak the view changed somewhat.

It was now slightly deader.

Sam was not the owner of the bar. Hell, he was not even a regular patron before the outbreak. He worked in the
Checks to Cash
store downstairs. When the outbreak happened, he ran up to the balcony and into the bar, which at the time just held Adam, the burned-out day shift barkeep. He and Adam barricaded the stairs and waited for the shit to die down.

The bar was the only tenant on the second floor of a strip mall. A dump truck driver with a zombie hanging onto his face completely took out the main staircase. The rear exit was simply a fire escape design with a set of stairs that could be raised and lowered, so that was easy enough to fix.

Thus trapped and barricaded in the bar, Sam and Adam decided to enjoy the show only ten feet below. The spoiling food in the dark refrigerator along with the pretzels and peanuts were polished off after just a few days. Adam got hungry to the point of no return, decided to make a run across the street to the drug store to score more food, and never made it back. He had taken the old shotgun from under the bar but Sam never heard any shots. Hell, it may not have even been loaded.

This left Sam alone in the dark quiet bar. He holed up and watched out of a propped open side door. He was a prisoner just as much as a parrot hanging in a bird cage, laying low so the cats walking around the living room didn’t figure a way out to come pay him a visit.

With the snack foods depleted, he moved onto and drank the beer first as it had the most calories and was—after all—based on barley and hops so he reasoned that about a dozen beers a day would equal out to the caloric intake he would need to keep alive and functional. On Halloween, he dressed as a baseball player with the uniforms from the wall and even put out a bowl just in case any trick-or-treaters came by.

The imported stuff went first. If you have to live off beer might as well go for the good stuff, right. The number of zombies had thinned out from packs of a few dozen, then to single creatures. Were they dying off? Moving on? Getting night jobs? Sam would fantasize about zombie communities living normal lives shopping, playing cards, watching football, cutting the grass. He knew it was all unrealistic but it passed the time between drinks.

Occasionally he would toast himself in the mirror or tell a joke to lighten the mood. After a while, the sound of his own voice even sounded scary to him.

“A pirate walked into a bar with a steering wheel in his pants. The bartender said, ‘Hey you know you have a steering wheel in your pants?’ The pirate said ‘Aargh it’s driving me nuts!’”

By the first week of November, both the domestic beer and draft on tap had been done away with. Then he had to start hitting the heavy stuff. He had gone six weeks and never really at any time been completely sober. His stomach ached and he maintained alternating bouts of the shakes, nausea, and diarrhea but he was alive and more or less coherent.

One day, he saw a white coast guard boat with a red racing stripe pass in the distance at a slow speed. Afraid to yell out lest he be discovered, he watched it fade back down the bay like a ghost. It was about that time that he noticed that the numbers of zombies began to increase. There were more than he had ever seen before. Through an old pair of binoculars that had hung from a nail as a bar prop, he could make out shuffling legions of the undead making their way across the Bay Bridge from Mobile. There were miles of them, drawn for some reason to the Eastern Shore. He would sit on a bar stool by the window, sipping a scotch and soda, watching them shamble by.

He had started to keep count by doing a drinking game. Every time the 50th zombie passed going south, he would take a shot. He stayed drunk over the course of three days doing this. He gave up counting, figuring he would never be able to gauge the legions that stumbled down Highway 59 while he slept every night.

“Life is sure gonna suck wherever they are headed,” he said aloud to the empty army of bottles he was quietly amassing and then passed out for the last time.

— | — | —

ChapteR 47

November 13 0730

“Okay, those of you that have never been in a convoy listen up. We are going to go through a little crash course so to speak,” First Sergeant Reid grumbled.

The dozen-vehicle convoy was made up of four empty diesel dump trucks to load food in and an empty 9000-gallon tanker truck in the center. A 2-ton purple wrecker, christened
Juggernaut
, brought up the rear to tow any broken-down stragglers home. Six hummers, one for each of the trucks escorted the convoy. Four of the Rough Riders had volunteered to ride scout along with the convoy on their bikes.

For firepower, each of the hummers, the
Juggernaut,
and the gas truck had a driver and two shooters. Each of the dump trucks had a driver, a shooter in the passenger seat, and two armed volunteer stevedores riding in the back. Altogether, Stone had chosen 50 souls to go on the trip. About half were from his expanded MP Company, the other half were volunteers who had come forth after the last town meeting.

Spud and three of his associates were in charge of one of the trucks.

Reid read the riot act, “Number one, you will be assigned a position in the convoy. Do not leave that position. Keep moving at all costs. I do not care if you are lost, keep driving! Once we get Oscar Mike, you will proceed to your appointed location with no fucking ad-libbing.

“Number two, there is no such thing as traffic laws anymore so don’t worry about intersections, stop signs, the wrong side of the road, and so forth. If you get a ticket from a State Trooper out there these days, fuck ’em.”

This brought laugher across the assembled ranks. Even from a Florida State trooper, complete with a huge black ballistic vest emblazoned with “State Police” who had recently joined the MP Company by way of the last boat from Panama City Beach.

Reid continued, “If for some reason you find yourself having to ram through a stationary vehicle or a road block, remember this: hands on the wheel—just like you learned as a kid—at ten and two. This is because if your airbag goes off, this position offers you the best chance of keeping your hands on the wheel. Try to hit the other car at about 35-40 miles per hour and accelerate through the roadblock. You are aiming for the center of the blocking car’s front tire as the sweet spot. Now don’t freak out, your tires will be squealing and the whole damn thing will feel like it’s coming apart, but whatever you do just keep pushing.”

A radioman began passing out small handheld walkie-talkies.

“Now everyone will be issued a radio for this little endeavor with as fresh of batteries as we could find. Stay in communication, but remember we only got enough juice in these things for about 12-hours before the radios are deader than these zombies are.