by J M Lassen
The zombies glopped toward us, leaking fluids and laughing out wet sounds.
“What should we do?” Harry asked me.
“Back up,” I told him.
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll give me time to think of something.”
Harry, to his credit, is the one who thought to glance behind us to make sure there weren’t more zombies coming from the bow. There weren’t, but he saw something else that made his jaw drop.
He said, “Remember that part where you were gonna think of something?”
“Yeah,” I said warily.
“Think fast, bro.”
Behind us, there was a gunshot.
%~<>
A big black powerboat towered over us. It was probably about the same length as the Second Chance, but sitting much higher in the water. Guys with guns sat or knelt on its foredeck—eight men, at least.
One guy had a cowboy hat; another had a “Git-R-Done!” baseball cap. I spotted one with a Jimmy Buffet shirt and another’s said Don’t Mess With Texas. They all had rifles.
For a second, I thought, Whew, we’re saved. The feeling lasted right about until the time I saw the two flags flying from the back of the powerboat: the Confederate flag and the Jolly Roger. The pirate flag flew above the other.
On the bow of the boat was stenciled the name, in a hasty spray-paint job obviously done after whitewashing somebody else’s name off the front; this was a stolen boat.
And now its name was ¡Adios, Vatos! “Goodbye, dudes.” This was one of the paranoid groups we’d heard about in those last AM broadcasts—pirating civilian ships in the supposed service of securing the border against invaders.
“Invaders,” “refugees,” “steaming cups of the American melting-pot,” or just your average pair of Texan brothers trying to come home for the end of the world. Call us what you will, but I can tell you I’m pretty sure what the pirates would have called us would not have been polite.
That rifle shot wasn’t aimed at the zombies on the Second Chance. They’d shot in the air just to get our attention. I guess, unlike Harry and me, these guys had plenty of ammo.
One of the guys shouted through a bullhorn.
“¡Deja las armas, amigos!”
Harry and I are half-Latino, and it shows. With a name like McAvoy, the topic of my ethnicity does tend to come up now and then, and I patiently tend to explain the simple facts: Irish-American father, Costa Rican-American mother, American-American kids...whatever. But I’ll be honest, I was pretty sure what these guys had already decided Harry and I were, and it made me mad.
Sometimes when I’m mad, I do things that can be a bit reckless...like steal a car to impress a girl.
Or mouth off to pirates.
I did that second thing now. I said: “Que? No hablo, Bubba. I don’t-a speak-a the-Español-a so-a-good-a.”
“Put down the weapons, boys. We’re taking your boat.”
I was starting to panic, turning quickly from one threat to the other: the laughers as they crawled toward us on their broken bones...and the pirates pointing rifles at us.
“I said put down the weapons. We’re taking your boat, boys.”
“Don’t you even want to know who we are, first?”
“We know who you are,” said the guy, his voice dripping contempt even through the distorted electric crackle of the bullhorn. “Do not fire a shot, or you will be killed.” The riflemen on the bow of the ¡Adios, Vatos! had us in their sights, fingering their stocks. “Put down the weapons and put your hands up. You’re within Texan territorial waters now, and you’re under our authority. We’re impounding your boat in the name of the...”
He kept talking like it meant something; these guys were a self-appointed government. The laughers were gaining; they weren’t far away at this point.
I said, “We have to take care of these things...and then we’ll talk, okay?”
“Do not fire a shot,” the guy with the bullhorn crackled ultimately. “If you fire, we’ll fire back.”
“We’re not shooting at you!” I pleaded. “Okay? Let us do this, then we’ll talk.”
“Don’t shoot, don’t move, put your weapons down.”
“What about these laughers?” Harry howled.
There was a dry laugh through the bullhorn. “Sounds like you boys had better decide fast. We’re taking your boat. If the laughers get you first? Well...just a little more mess to clean off of her.”
I eyed the crawling laughers—feet away, now, gaining. They crawled on their ruined limbs, their bones broken in many places.
Harry shouted, “You’d do that?”
The answer came without hesitation: “This is getting old. At least it’ll be fun to watch the laughers eat you.”
%~<>
While the writhing laughers came closer, I growled at Harry:
“Do you want to trust these guys?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all. I think they’ll kill us even if we let them take our boat.”
I eyed the laughers. They were close. “You think they’ll really shoot us if we take down the laughers.”
“Yup,” said Harry, flatly.
I shrugged. “You want to fight them?”
“I’ve got one shotgun shell left,” he said. His voice wasn’t shaking at all; he was back to the bad-ass Harry I knew. Cool as all get-out. “You’ve got two bullets. Would you like to fight them?”
There were at least eight men visible—all with rifles. “I guess we don’t fight, then,” I said. “What do we do?”
I said, “Uh-uh. The right question is, where do we go?”
Harry said, “Huh?”
I nodded off in the distance, where the Veracruz was still visible. She was steaming around in a circle, listing badly enough that she was now slowed down to just a few knots.
“I go left,” I said. “You go right. Let’s hope they’re lousy shots.”
The laughers were just a few feet away, then.
“I can’t swim with the shotgun,” he said.
“I can’t swim at all.”
Harry said, “I see your point. On the count of three?”
The nearest laugher reached out and grabbed at my foot.
I said, “No, bro. Let’s just go now.”
We jumped over the rail.
%~<>
Shots rang out behind us. But my prayers were answered; the pirates were lousy shots. Mostly.
I hit the foul-smelling, frothy-brown water and went under—and then I felt a punch in my back, hard. I felt the wind knocked out of me. I’d been hit. But I was wearing Dad’s ballistic life vest. I was under the water for a sec, choked with the crude oil stink, and saw the bubbles of rifle bullets tearing through the mousse-fouled water. But I couldn’t stay down with the vest on—not for very long; it drained my strength, and fast. So I came back up started swimming for all I was worth—which isn’t much. Like I said, I’m not much of a swimmer. But I had a lot of incentive, with those pirates shooting at me.
Probably the only thing that saved me from getting hit a second time was that the vest I was wearing wasn’t bright orange, like most safety vests—but camouflage. It looked pretty dorky; Harry was right about that. But it blended in perfectly with the gooey petroleum foam I was paddling through.
I’m sure as I swam, I left a wake that the pirates could have shot at.
But it didn’t matter; there were so many laughers in the water that they couldn’t have picked me out of the crowd.
%~<>
I dog-crawled slick and fast through the ripe winy stink of the chocolate mousse; it choked and burned me even under the water. My eyes hurting worse than they’d ever hurt before.
I was disoriented enough, sick from the petroleum fumes and lost in the mousse, that I barely found the Veracruz. But she was not far away—and she was coming closer, having taken her long slow circuit on her broken rudder.
Sputtering paddlers in Hawaiian shirts and naval uniforms chased me. I left a t
rail, thinking miserable thoughts about Harry—I must have lost him. No way he could swim through this whole crowd and make it safely to the Veracruz.
But Harry was a pretty strong swimmer.
When I made it to the Mexican ship and found the rope ladder dangling and twisting and spinning at a crazy angle, my crazy brother was already crawling up it. I barely made it out of the stinky water before the zombies reached me.
Good thing the laughers couldn’t climb.
%~<>
Harry and I made it to the deck with great difficulty; I promised myself if I ever made it through this, I would learn to swim and climb. Harry, for all his being a bookish type and all, was actually pretty fit; he also weighed a lot less than me. He was panting on the slanted deck clinging to the rail and wiping crude-oil mousse out of his eyes by the time I got up there.
The passing of the Second Chance hadn’t cleared the deck of the Veracruz —but it almost had. The Veracruz must have been at sea for a long time, from the condition of the laughers in the crew. The Second Chance represented their first chance at a meal...and the less living flesh the laughers eat, the more they rot, and the more they laugh. And the hungrier they get. These ones were hungry.
There were a few who had been too destroyed to move. Too rotted, too broken...shot to death, but not put down, because they hadn’t taken shots in their brain.
Most of them were up against the railing, because the deck was titled at a terrifying angle.
“This ship is sinking,” said Harry, panting and retching.
“I know,” I said, panting and retching harder.
“We’ll never make it to shore.”
“I know,” I said.
“Where are the lifeboats?”
I gestured at the big open bays where the boats had once been.
“Someone probably took them and ran. I don’t blame them.”
“Are there others?”
I said, “Maybe on the other side—but there’s no way we’ll get them down with the ship listing like this.”
Harry took his wire-framed glasses out of his pocket. He put them back on and said, “Then what do we do?”
I spotted a laugher I recognized...the one hanging over the railing, dangling and laughing. The heavily-armed one.
The one with the rocket-propelled grenade.
%~<>
The guy was wearing what I think was an officer’s uniform, but it had been ripped apart and his chest was exposed. Across it was a big tattoo in deep black script: ¡Viva Mexico!
I killed him with one of the last two shots left in my Grandpa’s revolver. Or...he was already dead. I just finished the job. I took the RPG away from him—along with the binoculars he had dangling around his neck.
“Do you know how to work that thing?” asked Harry.
“Not a clue,” I said. “Do you?”
“Not really, but I’m good with machines. I saw this History Channel documentary—”
“Stow it,” I said. “Fine, you’re elected expert.” We were propped on the railing; the Veracruz was tipped at so steep an angle that we had to cling for our lives to keep from falling over. To get any further up on the deck, we’d have to crawl up the railing and find somewhere there were more handholds. Then we could try to get below decks.
But then, I didn’t like the idea of going below deck on the Veracruz—especially not with how bad she was listing.
I peered through the binoculars.
All eight of the gunmen had disembarked from the ¡Adios, Vatos! and were tearing through the Second Chance, tossing laughers over the side. They left a trail of them in the water, cutting a swath of writhing dots through the frothy brown mousse.
The Veracruz gave a horrible shudder and listed still more. I said something nasty. The ship felt unstable.
It was clear we were going into the water one way or the other.
Halfway hanging off the railing as the Veracruz tipped, Harry looked through the site of the rocket propelled grenade and fingered the trigger. It was basically like one of those bazooka things you see in World War II movies—except this one had a giant diamond-shaped tip on it that looked like a red and white bowling pin.
Harry said, “I’ve never killed anyone.”
“Me, either,” I said. “I can’t imagine Mom would approve.”
Harry gave me a frown.
“I think she’d be fine with it.”
Then the whole world exploded.
%~<>
Everything seemed to happen at once—but at the same time, there was sort of a lot of time to think. The backblast of the rocket launcher practically blew my eardrums out; it was like being hit with a hot wave of exhaust from a jet plane, except the jet plane is your brother, who’s squealing like a pig right next to you.
Whether it was the pressure of the rocket’s backblast hitting the deck that made the Veracruz finally give up the ghost, I don’t know. But I know seconds later, Harry and I were falling—and as we fell, I watched the guy whip off his glasses, right there in midair, and stuff them in the pocket of his board shorts.
Then everything was crazy. There was a huge blast—the Second Chance went up in flames. He’d scored a direct hit—right there amidships where Mom and Harry used to sit in the mornings and play magnetic chess.
The ball of flame went up, and I saw the bodies of the pirates tumbling end-over-end. Not all of them were whole.
Funny thing...I’d sort of figured he’d shoot the pirate boat, not ours. But when it comes right down to it, it made a lot of sense. The pirates were all busy looting the Second Chance—so that’s what he hit.
That’s why he’s my brother...that, you see, is why Harry is the smart one.
Was, I thought. Because the Veracruz was going down, and sucking me and him and the laughers into the guts of the ocean.
As far as I knew, I was the only one who came up.
%~<>
It took me half an hour to swim through the crude oil muck after the ¡Adios, Vatos!, which was drifting. There didn’t seem to be a moving soul aboard. The Second Chance was nowhere to be seen—she must have gone down.
I thought of everything I owned, practically—on that sailboat, headed toward the bottom of the Gulf. I thought of my brother, probably dead in the undertow from the sinking Veracruz. I fought down a sob and buried my anger by swimming like a fiend.
The water still writhed with laughers, which was part of why it took me so long to catch up with the boat. Those things couldn’t swim like I could—even being as bad a swimmer as I am—and I had to take big long wide circuits around them to avoid them again and again.
But I made it. I caught a rope that had dangled from the edge of the ¡Adios, Vatos! and hauled myself up.
As I reached the railing, I hearing laughing on the deck.
I had shoved Grandpa’s revolver into the thigh pocket of my cargo shorts; the three rounds left were thoroughly soaked. I had no idea if the revolver would fire. There had been pistols on the dead sailors of the Veracruz; I’d thought seriously about grabbing one, but the RPG had seemed more urgent...and then everything had gone nuts.
I pulled Grandpa Frank’s revolver out and thumbed back the hammer so I could fire faster and with greater accuracy. I had one round left; I had to make it count.
I pulled myself over the railing and aimed the revolver at the laugher—guffawing, braying hysterically. Harry.
He put up his hands.
He stopped laughing fast.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he said.
“What’s so funny?”
“Didn’t you see me waving at you?” he told me, his voice hoarse from the stink of the crude oil. “I thought you were dead.”
“Why didn’t you shout something?”
He rubbed his throat and said, “I guess I was laughing too hard.” From somewhere he had grabbed a flotation vest—a bright orange one. I don’t know who or what he took it off of, but he’d obviously put it on in the water. The thing was buckled in a haphaza
rd fashion, and that’s putting it nicely.
“I see you’ve finally realized the wisdom of wearing a vest.”
“Whatever,” said Harry.
Neither he nor I looked much improved for our adventure. We were both covered head to toe in petroleum slime. The stuff was revoltingly pungent; it burned your mucus membranes.
“I’m glad you made it,” said Harry dryly. Then, with a smirk, he added, “I guess.”
Then he and I heard it—up ahead, on the bow.
Laughing. Down here on the lower deck, we couldn’t see who it was. But it was clearly a zombie—voice, an old one, ruined, wet. Cackling, ruined, revolting. It made me wonder how I could ever mistake the joyous, ironic laughter of my crazy brother for the Panama Laugh.
I gripped the revolver.
We found the last remaining pirate just about halved, hanging mostly off the bow, clutching his bullhorn. A piece of fiberglass shrapnel from the Second Chance had practically bisected him when the grenade hit. He lay prone, immobile, laughing, tangled in the thick ropes that had attached the ¡Adios, Vatos! to the Second Chance. In one hand he still clutched the bullhorn; in the other, he had a boat knife. If, bisected or not, the pirate hadn’t cut the ropes that attached the two vessels, the ¡Adios, Vatos! might have been dragged down with the Second Chance. In a weird kind of way, that last pirate saved our lives.
I didn’t feel much like saying “Thank you,” though.
Harry and I looked at each other.
Harry sighed and shrugged.
The final pirate tried to rise. He couldn’t. Tangled in the ropes and almost cut in half by the jagged sheet of fiberglass, he could barely move at all. He clawed after us, laughing uproariously.
I raised the revolver. Whuddaya know? The thing did fire wet, after all.
