Halverson gripped the moneybag with both hands and flung it onto the sailboat’s deck.
“Bull’s eye again,” said Victoria.
“I’d rather be lucky than good.”
Halverson heard a ghoul moaning behind him. He swiped the ghoul’s hand away from him before it could claw him.
“I’m scared to death of drowning,” said Victoria.
Halverson kicked at the ghoul’s chest to keep it away from him.
“Stay away from the pilings,” he told Victoria. “You don’t want the waves to bash you against them.”
“How do I stay away from them?”
He grabbed her arm and hustled her over to the north side of the pier. “Jump off there.”
She bowed under the rail, straightened up, and got ready to jump off the edge of the pier, her heart thumping like a jackhammer in her chest. Holding onto the rail behind her, she stared at the undulating dark water that swirled beneath her. Petrified, she stood leaning over the turbulent ocean. She couldn’t bring herself to take the plunge.
Halverson shoved her from behind.
She screamed and toppled off the pier into the ocean.
Halverson was poised to dive off the pier when a ghoul snuck up behind him and tried to snatch his arm. Halverson wheeled around to fight the creature off.
It was his brother.
Halverson heard Victoria screaming below him. “Help!”
The sight of Dan gave Halverson pause. Halverson thought he should kill Dan and put him out of his misery.
Another ghoul staggered toward Halverson.
Victoria screamed again.
Halverson dove off the pier.
He dog-paddled, frantically casting around for her. At last, he saw her hand reaching up out of the water.
He swam over to her.
Beyond her, on the shore, he could see herds of the creatures jumbled on the sand plodding aimlessly.
Several of the creatures laid eyes on him and waded into the boiling white surf toward him as waves broke around them and hindered their pursuit.
He knew the creatures wouldn’t be able to reach him by walking because of the water’s depth where he was paddling and he knew they didn’t have the necessary coordination to be able to swim out to him. He noticed some of them walking into the water and disappearing under the waves. As the creatures had no air in their lungs, they couldn’t float. What happened to the ghouls after they submerged? he wondered. Did they keep walking under the water forever?
To hell with the things, Halverson decided.
Swimming, he added a final burst of speed to reach Victoria before she sank.
When he reached her, she attacked him with groping, clawing hands.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Victoria rose to the surface, windmilling her arms, gulping water and coughing. Panic-stricken, she tried to glom onto Halverson’s arms to keep her from drowning, digging her fingernails into his flesh.
Unable to swim with her grabbing his arms, he fought her off to free himself from her desperate embrace.
He wrapped his left arm around her throat, her chin in the crook of his arm, and swam with her floating on her back toward the sailboat that was bobbing up and down on the rolling combers.
Choking on seawater Victoria continued fighting Halverson, thinking he was trying to strangle her when he had wrapped his arm around her neck. The salt water stung her eyes and was wreaking havoc on her stomach, which was feeling queasy from her swallowing mouthfuls of the ocean. She felt like she was suffocating and, at the same time, felt the urge to vomit, which intensified her sensation of suffocation.
Death by drowning, she decided. It was even worse than people said it was. And why in the world was Chad trying to strangle her? Maybe she was flipping out. Which would she do first? Go raving mad, drown, or suffocate from being choked to death?
Halverson grasped the lowest rung on the aluminum ladder on the sailboat’s seaward gunwale and, with his other hand, tried to haul her up over his body so that she could crawl up the ladder.
She heard him saying something to her, but she couldn’t make any sense of it. Her mind was logy from lack of oxygen. She was having difficulty focusing.
“Crawl up my body,” she strained to hear him saying like he was talking through a pillow.
As if to emphasize the point, he attempted to pull her head up toward the ladder in the crook of his arm, which choked off her air supply. She felt her face turning red.
When the next wave raised them and the boat, Halverson managed to drop his arm from around her throat, slide it under her arm, and hold her in this manner.
She could breathe freely. She gasped for air.
“I can’t hold you like this much longer,” he said, grimacing with effort. “You need to climb up the ladder.”
Now she could hear what he was saying.
She reached up and grabbed a rung. Exhausted by her ordeal in the ocean, she pulled herself feebly up Halverson’s body and up the ladder.
She crawled over the gunwale and tumbled onto the deck.
Halverson climbed up the ladder, hauled himself over the gunwale, and jumped onto the deck beside her.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
She sat up, her sopping wet hair plastered on her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she spluttered. “I feel sick.”
“You swallowed seawater.”
He belted to the cleat that had the painter tied to it. He undid the painter. He looked up at the end of the pier.
Coughing on seawater in her throat and mouth, she followed his gaze. She spat the water out of her mouth and coughed and wheezed.
They could see Newton’s fluorescent lavender and orange body standing on the pier’s rail. Three ghouls were shambling toward him.
“Over here, Newton!” Victoria managed to call out between coughs. Seawater dripping out of her mouth, she leaned over and slapped the moneybag that lay in a lump next to her.
A ghoul reached for Newton.
Newton leapt off the rail. He sailed through the air, aided by the wind, and landed on the moneybag next to Victoria.
She smiled as the iguana scampered off the moneybag onto the deck. An iguana was cheering her up, she decided. What next? She and Chad had saved an iguana, but they couldn’t save their own families.
Halverson paid out the painter, releasing their mooring, and their boat sailed away from the dock.
Victoria wobbled on her feet, still woozy from her dip in the ocean.
She and Halverson watched the zombie-infested pier. One of the creatures managed to climb over the rail and plunged into the ocean.
Newton scampered onto the sailboat’s prow in front of Halverson and her and mounted it, joining them.
She and Halverson took in the shoreline. The wind was swaying the isolated palm trees that studded the beach. A couple of screaking gulls swooped through the smoky air. On the sand thousands of creatures thronged the beach, while hundreds waded into the ocean.
“How do we go on living?” she asked.
“We just do.”
Praise for Bryan Cassiday’s
Sanctuary in Steel
“Written with the epic scope of World War Z and infused with the gritty spook works derring-do of a Robert Ludlum spy thriller, Sanctuary in Steel is full of zombie mayhem through and through.”
—Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Flesh Eaters and Inheritance
“Cassiday blends thoughtful suspense and pulse-pounding terror to deliver a novel with both bite and creeping dread.”—David Dunwoody, author of Empire and The Harvest Cycle
“Sanctuary in Steel made me feel like I did the first time I watched Romero. Fresh, exciting and engaging like any outbreak story should be.”—Iain McKinnon, author of Domain of the Dead
Sanctuary in Steel
Bryan Cassiday
Copyright © 2012 by Bryan Cassiday
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, store
d in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Bryan Cassiday
Los Angeles
Printed in the United States of America
First edition: November 2012
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France
Chapter 1
Zombies ten thousand strong massed along the Santa Monica shore, plodding through the sand, lumbering into each other in their unstoppable death march toward the onrushing surf that crashed and boiled at their feet.
“They’ll do anything to get to us,” said Halverson at the wheel of a twenty-foot sailboat plying the waters some fifty yards from the littoral.
“They can’t walk on water,” said Victoria, her blonde hair blowing in the gusting wind that billowed the sails.
Eight years younger than Halverson’s thirty-six years and a mother as well, the couturiere looked like a teenager with her slim figure.
She did a double take. “Can they?” she added.
Halverson watched three of the walking dead as they traipsed into the churning surf, bound and determined to reach him and Victoria aboard the sailboat. The waves pounded the ghouls back.
The creatures stumbled in the water and collapsed to their knees, but got up again in their headstrong, albeit mindless, assault and headed toward the sailboat, defying the waves and trudging through the water till their entire decrepit bodies were submerged and only their heads remained visible to the naked eye.
And then their heads were submerged as well.
“Doesn’t look that way,” said Halverson. “They may be the next phase in the evolution of man, but they don’t fare too well in the water.”
“You really think we’re evolving into those things?” Victoria shuddered at the thought.
Halverson scanned the beaches swarming with ghouls. “They do seem to be taking over at man’s expense.”
Victoria shook her head in bafflement. “What the hell happened?” she muttered.
Halverson knew what had happened, but it was classified intel. As a black ops agent for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service he could not relate the eyes-only information to a civilian like Victoria. Though at this point, Halverson wondered how much of the CIA was left intact.
He heard a rumbling overhead, tilted his head up, and gazed into the sky.
It was becoming overcast. Too, smoke hazed the sky. A smattering of clouds scudded across the canopy of diminishing cerulean. Flying among the clouds was a drone—an MQ-1 Predator drone, to be exact, armed with hundred-pound laser-guided Hellfire missiles.
It was all the proof Halverson needed that some part of the federal government still existed.
Victoria followed his gaze. “How many of those drones are there?”
“Too many.”
“Is that one gonna shoot at us, too?”
Halverson’s eyes followed the drone. “It may just be doing recce.”
He doubted the drone would fire at them as long as it couldn’t make a positive ID of him. Convinced the government had him in its crosshairs, he nevertheless believed the drone could not ID him at this moment. There was still enough smoke roiling in the sky from the burning ruins of the city to obscure the vision of the drone’s cameras.
“Like that other one that fired a missile at us at the bank?” she said sarcastically.
“That drone was keying on the GPS signal emitted by my satphone, which I threw away.”
“Why would it fire at us?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
The less he told her about his job, the better off she would be in terms of life expectancy, he figured. The eyes-only intel he carried around in his head concerning the government’s involvement with the creation of the plague would only serve to get her name added to the same hit list his name was already on if he imparted the knowledge to her.
As far as he knew, the government was seeking to whack him alone. That would change if Victoria knew as much as he did about them, specifically about the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and about the superbug the scientists there, by design and aided by American funding, had created in a lab where they mutated H5N1 into the so-called zombie virus that was well on its way to wiping out the human race.
She bowed her head and massaged her brow. “This is hopeless. What’s the point?”
“We’re trying to survive.”
“You call this surviving? Floating in a sailboat surrounded by flesh-eating creatures?”
“We’re still alive.”
“This is more like death on the installment plan,” she said, surveying the slew of ghouls straggling all over the beach.
“No. We’re not dead yet.”
“What are we trying to prove?”
“We’re not trying to prove anything. At least, I’m not. I don’t know about you.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.” She shook her shoulder-length hair in the steady sea breeze impregnated with the ocean’s briny odor. “Why do I want to prove anything?”
“As long as we’re taking breath, we keep going.”
“OK, Dr. Feelgood.”
He gave her a look. “If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”
“You forget. I can’t swim.”
“I didn’t forget.”
She glared at him.
Noting her reaction he said, “Then you must want to live as much as I do.”
“With one qualification—not on these terms.”
“Why are you blaming me? These aren’t my terms. We’re both victims of this mess.”
“Touchy, touchy. Why do you think I’m blaming you?”
She picked up on Newton the iguana who was standing motionless on the sailboat’s prow. The two-foot-long fluorescent purple and orange iguana shifted his head to take in the walking dead that infested the beach. Hissing, Newton inflated his dewlap at the sight of the creatures.
“Newton hates those things as much as we do,” she said.
“Anything living hates those things,” said Halverson.
“You know what scares me more than anything else?”
“That the earth will never be the same again?”
She stared at the riot of ghouls that seemed to undulate like a single living creature on the beach’s sand, all gawky arms and legs flailing about.
“No,” she said.
“Then what?”
“That it’s all pointless. That there’s no point to any of it at all.”
“Why does it matter to you if there’s no point?” He steered to port so he wouldn’t drift too close to shore where the ghouls awaited with drooling, putrescent mouths.
“We have to suffer through this nightmare for no reason. Doesn’t that annoy you?”
“Why should it? It just is.”
She shook her head disconsolately. “It seems like a whole lot of hurt for nothing.”
Halverson knew what she was getting at. He surveyed the palm-studded beach that stretched from the bluffs to the sea.
Where once there had been beachgoers screaming with glee as they charged into the ocean, there were now hordes of walking dead battling the waves in confusion. Where once there had been lifeguards patrolling the sands in yellow Land Rovers with surfboards strapped to their roofs, there were now armies of ghouls plowing through that very same sand in search of living meat.
Where once the beach had teemed with life in the guise of roller-skaters, skateboarders, and cyclists coasting down the asphalt bikeway that snaked through the sand, there were now punch-drunk ghouls streeling about.
Where once the beach had smelled fresh with the invigor
ating scent of brackish sea breezes, the fetid reek of rotting corpses permeated the air.
Where once children had flown kites on the sand cheering as their kites soared ever higher, now there were only ghouls that didn’t know which way was up. Where once tykes had ridden the Ferris wheel and the rollercoaster on the Santa Monica Pier screaming with delight, there were now ghouls groaning with desire for the taste of living human flesh.
Where once bright-faced volleyball players had spiked balls down over the nets on the volleyball pitches, now the living dead moved in an obscene danse macabre through the shifting sands.
Where once city workers clad in orange Velcro vests had cleaned the beaches of litter, there was now the litter of walking corpses plodding under the swaying palms.
The beast was indeed slouching toward Bethlehem, Halverson decided. It was more than he could stand. Yet he knew he had to stand it.
Yes, he well and truly knew what Victoria was getting at. A whole lot of hurt for nothing.
A flicker of motion in the rolling dark green and blue waters off to starboard caught his eye. Something was bobbing to the surface. The object was large, bordering on five eight in length.
Victoria let out a gasp at the grisly sight.
It was a drowned human stiff, rising to the surface on account of its belly being bloated with gas, Halverson realized. The cadaver had towy black hair about an inch in length, a bulbous nose, and blue eyes. The body was wearing an off-the-rack blue button-down oxford shirt whose buttons had popped off thanks to the extreme distension of the belly. Charcoal grey slacks rounded out the corpse’s uninspired wardrobe.
For some reason that Halverson could not fathom—considering its appearance and condition—the stiff seemed to be holding its head up in self-importance. It must have been a trick of the light or the rolling of the waves that achieved the effect, Halverson decided. Indeed, how could a cheesy decaying corpse even come close to looking arrogant?
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