by J M Lassen
“You’re exhausted,” he told me, barely keeping his eyes open.
“So are you,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”
I had the revolver in my belt, but Harry held up the Mossberg.
“You want the shotgun?”
“You’ll need it.”
“You’re more likely to need it than I am.”
“You might need it for me.”
“Oh.”
“We don’t know for sure how it’s spread.”
“By bite,” he told me, confused.
“I know,” I said. “But we don’t know how else. How did Dad get it?”
Harry had to concede that point. He shrugged. “All right,” he said.
Harry is either a brother of amazing toughness, or a complete psychopath. Maybe both. I hadn’t seen him cry once since we had to put Mom and Dad down. Then again...maybe he just hid it from me, the way I’d hid my crying from him.
I told Harry, “If I start laughing...you have to kill me.”
He nodded, “You don’t even need to say it, bro.”
“Don’t call me that.” It freaks me out when Harry tries to use cool-kid slang. I said warily, “Same for you?”
He didn’t even answer. He just looked at me and said, “You know you still look like a dork in that thing.”
He was referring to my safety vest, which I’ll admit was hot as heck even in the middle of the night. No sea breeze could get through it, and we were becalmed in the first place.
I had worn this dumb vest almost the whole trip, no matter how hot it was, everywhere except below deck. It was stupid, I know it.
The truth is, I’m terrified of the water; I hate to swim. I almost drowned at when I was about ten, and if there’s one thing that scares me it’s the idea of falling into the water, which was one of the reasons I wasn’t hot on this whole stupid Costa Rica trip to begin with. Just thinking about falling into the water makes me break out in the sweats. It scares me more than dying. It scares me more than laughers. It scares me more than the idea of getting shot by pirates, but in this case, Dad’s vests had that covered, too. Did I say he wasn’t a survivalist? Okay, maybe he was. This one was ShurGuard Junior Masai combined ballistic fabric and flotation vest—in other words, a combination bullet proof vest and life jacket. Pretty bad-ass, even if it had me sweating up a storm. But like anyone would be able to smell me over that crude oil?
I tried to play it cool, because Harry likes to razz me about being scared of the water.
“What can I say? Dad knows how to pack. You should be wearing yours, you know.”
He rolled his eyes.
My brother is one weird dude; he seems to think he lives a charmed life. Maybe he does. I know I don’t.
He went below.
I took my post.
%~<>
I don’t know how far into the night I actually made it, pinching myself to stay awake.
I got some sleep, like it or not.
Then the world exploded.
I opened my eyes to the breaking dawn stillness.
I saw a vast bulk outlined against the rising sun.
I jumped up before I was awake and so I was more than a little punch-drunk, already sick from the crude oil fumes. I had the revolver out and leveled, instinctively.
Then I shoved the revolver in my belt and leapt for the wheel.
I screamed at the top of my lungs: “Harry! Get up here!”
What I’d seen towering above us, coming in at an angle and fast, was a vast grey Mexican warship towering over me stories-high, at like twenty knots. Written across its bow was the name, in block letters: Veracruz. Flying from its flagpole was the Mexican Naval Jack, the white-green-red, gold stars, white anchor—I knew it because Dad used to build plastic models of sea vessels, back before he got one of his own.
But this Naval Jack was sprayed with blood, and hanging in tatters. It had been partially burned away—and as for the Veracruz? There were holes in the deck—big ones, in a string, like from automatic cannon fire. It was coming at us at exactly the right angle to strike us amidships—and with its speed and its size and our side, and the Second Chance being made out of, you know, fiberglass instead of steel and all, it would have cut us in half as easily as a machete cutting a vine.
I realized there was no point turning the wheel without the motor going. I double-timed it astern and pulled the recoil start for the Yamaha two-stroke. It choked and sputtered. I pulled the recoil again and again and screamed and screamed and screamed myself hoarse for Harry.
“Harry! Get up here!”
He stumbled out in his board shorts and Dad’s Johnny Cash T-shirt, aiming the shotgun at whatever he could see, which wasn’t much; his eyes still weren’t focused and his wire-framed glasses were on half-crooked. He howled, “What? What? What?”
I pulled the recoil start again and screamed, “Ship! Bearing down! Take the wheel! Turn it! Turn it! Turn it!”
Harry jumped to the wheel, staring up at the huge ship in horror. We were pointed straight at it, at an angle, and we weren’t moving.
“Which direction?” screamed Harry, spinning around in the half-dark, his eyes still not clear.
I screamed, “Away!”
Under my breath, as I yanked at the recoil start, I muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”
The Yamaha outboard finally kicked in and went vroom, vroom!—the sweetest sound my ears had ever heard. At that point the Veracruz towered over us like a building. Harry started cranking the wheel, desperately trying to turn the Second Chance away from the onrushing Veracruz while I stood there trying to figure out what we did if it struck us.
Probably drown, I thought.
That’s when I heard them: laughers.
There were laughers on the ship, hanging over the rails, reaching for us as they screamed out in hilarity. I could see them silhouetted against the pink light from the rising sun; as the sky paled, they howled, their ruined faces and broken fingers reaching for us as they neared. They were hungry—like all laughers, they wanted to eat us. That was the only way they could make the laughing stop. But the bite transmitted the virus and the second their victim got the joke and started laughing himself...he was no longer a nutritious breakfast.
Some of them tumbled over the railing of the Veracruz, trying to get to us. They must have been starving. How long had they steamed around in circles on that ship, getting hungrier and hungrier for human flesh?
Some laughers had already gone over the edge trying to get to us. They cackled out wet sounds in the water, uttering a gooey petroleum-slick cacophony that grotesquely imitated laughter. They were floating because they had safety vests, but not all of them looked like Mexican sailors. From what I could see there were fat guys in Hawaiian shirts and old ladies and little in pink swimsuits. Others were sailors, all right—twenty-ish, mocha-faced with their black hair cut military-short and their ears sticking out slimed with crude oil.
The ones who jumped kept splashing into the water all around us, if you can call that disgusting crude oil muck “water.” They were evacuees and Mexican sailors both, and many of them—both groups—had weapons strapped on, rifles over their backs, pistols in shoulder holsters. I even saw one dangling from the railing with what had to be some kind of grenade launcher. But they weren’t using their guns, of course—because laughers don’t do that. (If they did, we would have already been dead.) When they struck the water, there were plenty who didn’t have their vests on—it took only seconds for them to disappear into the gooey mousse and go down as I watched. Unable to keep their mouths closed because the Panama Laugh compelled them to keep them open—howling out laughter that turned to gurgles—they just vanished into the slime. They’d probably been evacuees on the Mexican destroyer. They’d been trying to abandon ship when they changed...and now they were trying to eat. We outpaced them as we turned away from the Veracruz. We left a long trail of orange-vested laughers in the water, paddling behind us and laughing in disa
ppointment.
The orange-vested things in the water dog-paddled toward us, laughing wetly. The dry laughter on the rails of the Veracruz came from the sailors and evacuees reaching for us; in another few seconds they’d be close enough to jump for it and land right on our deck. By then we’d know if the Second Chance would clear the Veracruz or be struck by it.
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” I howled, not so much at Harry as to the universe, begging it for my thoughts or my prayers or whatever to lend the turning of the Second Chance some impetus.
“To everything there is a season,” said Harry—ice-cool, as always.
But I could see his hands trembling on the wheel.
%~<>
The Second Chance cleared the side of the Mexican ship by about three feet. The Veracruz was listing badly, and seemed ready to topple on us. For maybe fifteen seconds, the railing was above us, even after it was clear that we were going to make it past the ship without hitting it.
But we were close enough for the laughers to jump.
Harry and I watched in horror as laughing sailors dangled over the edge—and got ready to leap on us.
I took the wheel away from Harry and said, “Get the shotgun ready.” Harry picked it up and chambered a round. It made an ominous rick-rack! sort of sound, as a shotgun shell was forced into the chamber.
I took the revolver out of my belt and steered a path through the huge field of gloppy crude oil muck...as all around us, sailors hit the deck.
%~<>
The “freeboard” of a vessel is the distance from the water to the railing. That measurement is disrupted if the vessel is listing as badly as was the Veracruz, because the railing’s a lot closer to the water than it ought to be. I had no idea what kind of ship the Veracruz was, but it was bigger than a destroyer; it had to be at least a frigate or maybe a missile cruiser or something. The freeboard was still at least thirty feet, even listing the way it was. The thing seemed ready to capsize any minute.
A thirty-foot drop onto the deck of a fiberglass-hulled sailboat is absolutely guaranteed to break a bone or two, unless you know how to land—maybe even then. Knowing how to land requires knowing, which requires higher brain functions. That is one thing laughers don’t have.
They were dead; what was left of their brains knew how to do one thing and one thing only: seek out live humans to eat.
It was their bodies that knew how to do the other thing—laugh, or something like it.
Dad said the laughing was “real”; he said it was “neurological.” He called it “cachinnation,” and claimed it was the same kind of unexplained laughter one sees in extreme psychotics. How he knew that, I don’t know, but I’m just going to be honest with you: I think he made it up. I think he’d read the term in some news story somewhere twenty years ago, and pulled it out of his brain to make me feel like he knew what he was talking about. I will say this. Dad was so used to being so smart about so many things that when he doesn’t know anything about something, it seriously pisses him off.
I’d tell you Dad’s pretending to understand the virus and the laughers was designed to make me and Harry feel better. In one sense it was. But I’ve been watching my Dad do this on many topics since I was a little kid; Harry is the only one who’ll call him on it, and he knew less about laughers than Dad did, so he let that one slide.
But whether they’re laughing because their viral death throes make their chest muscles go cachunk-cachunk, or they’re laughing because the only part of their brain that still works is the part that finds all this incredibly funny, I don’t know. But I know one thing.
Those Mexican laughers couldn’t jump worth a darn.
It’s just that...well...
...there sure were a lot of them.
%~<>
The jump did not dissuade them. They crawled like worms over the railing, heedless of how they landed—incapable of making that determination or that decision. They didn’t tuck and roll; they didn’t aim to land on their feet with their knees bent to absorb the impact. They just went.
They belly-flopped. Those who hit the deck hit it hard. Those who missed the deck and hit the water went plunging through the muck and sank—their rotting bodies would not float unless there was air in the lungs by pure chance—and in any event many of them had chest cavities that had rotted open, and clear damage to their lungs.
Then there were the ones who didn’t hit either the water or the deck—but landed on the edge, over the railing of the Second Chance or on the various winches, ladders, handholds and the like that dotted the deck of the sailboat. Those sailors destroyed themselves—causing not just broken bones, but actually ripping their bodies apart from the impact. Some impaled themselves.
One landed squarely on Harry and knocked him off the flying bridge; the both of them went tumbling onto the main deck. The shotgun went rattling down and slid away. Harry screamed and struggled with the dead, laughing sailor. The guy was short for a sailor, but a lot bigger than Harry. His rotting flesh and septic muscles had no problem overpowering my little brother. Harry fought desperately, screaming. But I couldn’t shoot without taking a chance on hitting Harry. The light was still not good and the Second Chance was careening wildly out of control, pivoting back toward the Veracruz—and all the remaining laughers who hadn’t jumped yet. I didn’t know what to do—if I let go of the wheel, we’d swing back toward the ship of laughers; if I stayed here that thing was definitely going to sink its teeth into Harry...and then it was all over.
“Luke!” he screamed. “Help! Get it! Get it! Get it!”
That’s when he lost it; his cool was just an act. The terror took him over as he gripped the wheel, waiting on pins and needles
My brother cried.
I abandoned the wheel and it went spinning. As I dove for Harry and the laugher, The Second Chance heeled back toward the Veracruz.
%~<>
I made it to the main deck, kicked the zombie in the face and aimed Grandpa Frank’s .38 revolver.
I blew its brains out.
It went limp instantly. I kicked the thing in the shoulder to tip it over the railing as Harry scrambled for the shotgun. It had slid practically over the edge of the deck as the Second Chance listed, but the pistol grip got hung up on the rigging. Harry grabbed it and took a quick circuit, evaluating the situation, which wasn’t good. Freed from my guidance, the wheel of the Second Chance had spun like a roulette wheel. This turned out to have been good news and bad news; it was easier to kick the laugher over the side, and the sudden whipping of the bow back toward the Mexican ship meant that a couple rag-clad, rotting sailors that were almost over the rail went tipping over and fell into the thick slime of chocolate mousse.
But there were more coming down.
Some struck the railing, joining the remnants of the earlier ones, who had been practically ripped in half by the impact and hung there in parts, still laughing. There were damaged spines twisting through gooey sacks of limp flesh. They hung squirming over the railing , groping for us and gnashing their teeth as they laughed. Others had plunged into the water but been wearing flotation vests; they began crawling up the side of the boat and hoisted themselves up to come after us. By then another half-dozen had hit the deck in various places.
“What do we do, Luke?”
“Probably die,” I said.
Harry and I started shooting.
%~<>
Only a head shot will down the laughers. Grandpa Frank’s revolver held six rounds. I had more in my pocket. Harry had seven rounds in the Mossberg and another seven in a holder on the side for quick reloading. The laughers were everywhere. Some couldn’t walk after they hit the deck, because their leg bones had been pulped. Others could walk, but did so in a broken shamble, on half-ruined feet with ankles sprouting jagged lengths of bone. They lurched at us violently, screaming out laughter. Harry and I pressed our backs together and fired and fired, both of us screaming and sobbing like idiots. The things were so close on Harry’s side that shotg
un could take out a couple, sometimes three at a time; their wet wreckage made it harder for the others to come for us, ’cause they made the decks slippery.
We cleared the Veracruz this time, just barely, but the wheel was still at the whim of the winds and the water. Then suddenly we heard a foul grinding noise—wet, and frothy. The Yamaha made a coughing sound, gave out one last scream, and began to pour out black smoke. It kinda went thumpa-thumpa, and then it was dead.
Harry and I both knew what had happened—a swimming crawler had gone to climb up onto stern of the Second Chance...and gotten caught on the propeller.
That was confirmed a minute later, as half-pulped crawlers writhed forward. They neared us, too destroyed to walk. They moved with excruciating slowness...as did the very last of them, who was nearly bisected, its abdomen ripped open. That was the one who had fouled the propeller, I was guessing.
There were maybe six of the ruined crawlers making very slow time toward us. I had maybe three shots left in the revolver.
Covered in stinking frothy crude-oil slime, the zombies began slipping and sliding across the wet residue of their fellows, laughing.
I aimed the revolver, but didn’t pull the trigger.
Harry aimed the shotgun, but didn’t pull the trigger.
“Why aren’t you shooting?” I asked Harry, even though I already knew.
“I’m almost out,” he said. “Why aren’t you shooting?”
“I’m almost out,” I said. I had reloaded twice; in my worst nightmares I had never thought I’d need more than eighteen shots, or Harry more than fourteen. I told Harry I had two rounds left. Harry said he had one. There were six laughers.
There was more ammo in the cabin, but the zombies were now between us and the hatch.
