“He’s right,” said Victoria, straightening up. “This wharf looks shorter than the one we moored at.”
“They all look the same to me,” said Reno. He shrugged. “Pieces of wood that stick out into the ocean.”
“I didn’t see another wharf when we sailed in,” said Halverson.
“Then we must be north of the wharf we docked at, since we came from the south,” said Victoria.
“If there is another wharf,” said Reno and looked skeptical.
“Let’s head south and check it out,” said Halverson.
“We got nothing to lose.”
“This area doesn’t look familiar to me,” said Parnell, surveying the vicinity. “I don’t think we landed here.”
“I can’t remember.”
Annoyed at his inability to recall where they had landed, Halverson pushed his shopping cart southward, scowling. He was a trained black ops agent. One of the first things he had learned at the Farm was to be aware of his surroundings at all times. Lack of awareness could cost you your life in his line of work.
As they rolled their shopping carts past an alley, a ghoul lurched out from behind a garbage-laden blue recycling bin and lunged at Reno.
Chapter 16
Reno wasn’t carrying his shotgun when he was attacked. He had set it in his shopping cart. He started when he felt the creature’s hand snatching at his arm.
The six one creature had close-cropped grey hair and a half-inch-long grizzled beard. Clad in a black and white LA Kings hockey jersey and dirty blue jeans, the creature sneered with its thin lips and glared out of white-filmed blue eyes that looked crossed. The creature swiped at Reno’s neck.
Reno pulled away from the diseased hand in a reflex action. He whipped the hunting knife out of his trouser waistband, dislodging part of his front shirttail from his pants in the process.
From below his waist he thrust his knife upward and buried it to the hilt into the creature’s belly. He jerked the knife upward, tearing the decrepit belly in half until slime-coated intestines spilled out of a hole in the Kings jersey.
The creature kept trying to plod forward.
The brownish yellow rotted entrails spilled onto Reno’s hands, even as the creature kept advancing on him.
The creature slipped on its own intestines spooled on the pavement, but kept its balance as it resumed its attack on Reno.
Infuriated, Reno ripped the hunting knife higher up the creature’s belly, all the way up to its rib cage until he hit bone with the steel blade.
The creature kept trudging toward him.
Seeing red, his hands covered with viscera, Reno left his knife lodged in the creature’s rib cage and stretched a long coil of the slimy intestines between his two hands. He sidestepped behind the creature, looped the entrails around the creature’s throat, yanked them, and commenced strangling the thing with its own guts.
Frustrated that the creature would not die, Reno raised his knee, jammed it into the ghoul’s spine, and tried to break the ghoul’s back while he continued strangling its throat.
Reno heard the sickening muffled crack of the ghoul’s spine snapping.
Yet the creature continued to struggle in Reno’s stranglehold.
Winded, Reno was having difficulty maintaining his grasp on the greasy intestines.
Its back broken, the creature flailed its arms in a futile effort to reach Reno behind it.
Neither Halverson, nor Victoria, nor Parnell was aware of Reno’s plight, as Reno was bringing up the rear.
Try as he might to maintain his grasp on the oozing entrails, Reno nevertheless lost his hold and they slithered out of his hands.
The creature turned around to attack him.
Reno cursed.
He cocked his right leg and kicked the creature in the stomach to stave the creature off. His foot entered the gaping hole in the creature’s stomach, passed through the entrails, and through the creature’s back.
Standing now on one foot as the creature plodded toward him, Reno could barely maintain his balance. He had to hop backward on his left foot to prevent himself from toppling over as the creature pressed relentlessly against him.
Reno could not pull his right foot free of the creature, because the ghoul continued to shuffle toward him without letup, keeping Reno off balance in the process, forcing him to skip backward on his left foot.
Gasping, Reno didn’t know how much longer he could fend off the creature and maintain his equilibrium on one leg.
Realizing he could not keep this up much longer if the ghoul didn’t drop dead—and it obviously wasn’t going to oblige him and do that—Reno humbled himself and cried out for help.
Halverson, Victoria, and Parnell craned their necks around at the sound of Reno’s scream.
Reno heard Halverson yelling something at him. On the verge of passing out from exhaustion, Reno could not quite make out Halverson’s words.
Something about the head, decided Reno. He caught that much. Boil the head? No, that made no sense. How could he boil the head? Oil the head? That made even less sense than boiling the head. What was the point of oiling the head? That would make it even more slippery than it already was. It had been hard enough holding onto the ghoul’s intestines, he decided with disgust.
Kill the head! Yeah, that was what Halverson was saying.
Hopping on his left leg, his right leg buried inside the ghoul’s gaping stomach, Reno snapped his knife from the creature’s chest and rammed the blade into the creature’s left temple. Once it crashed through the skull, the tempered steel rammed into the brain and tore through it like a hot knife through butter.
The creature dropped on the spot, dragging Reno down after it, trapping his right foot under its back.
He saw the others rushing over to help him as he sprawled on the asphalt in the alley’s mouth.
He struggled to free himself from the skein of entrails and to work his right foot out from under the creature.
Halverson ran up and helped him slide out of the eviscerated corpse.
“Why didn’t you yell for help before?” asked Victoria.
“I thought I could take care of the stupid thing. It was halting around like a cripple.”
Grimacing and gagging on the corpse’s fetid stench, Reno got to his feet with Halverson’s help and used his hands to brush the sluglike entrails off his garb.
Victoria shook her head. “Just stupid male pride. And you almost got yourself killed.”
“That thing didn’t bite you, did it?” asked Halverson, his eyes locked on Reno’s.
“No,” answered Reno. He thought about it and smirked. “If I ever write a story about this, nobody will believe it.”
“Consider yourself lucky to be alive to talk about it,” said Victoria.
“If I was really lucky, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
Victoria stroked her eyebrow with her forefinger, musing. “It’s almost like the dead ones are the lucky ones.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Parnell. “We have to keep our spirits up or we’re doomed.”
“We are doomed,” said Reno. “This is hopeless. We’re just postponing the inevitable.”
“You’re sinking our morale with that kind of talk.”
“I’m calling a spade a spade. Is that too much for your sensitive ears?”
“We’ve got to stay positive to stay alive.”
“You’ve got your head in the sand like an ostrich if you really believe we’re getting out of this.”
Victoria chortled at the imagery.
The ghoul stirred at the end of the snake pole in Parnell’s hand and all but broke free with a sudden lunge away from him. Grunting with effort Parnell wielded the pole to herd the creature back toward them.
“You better not let that thing come near me again,” Reno warned Parnell, watching him struggle to maintain his grip on the snake pole, “or I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.”
“Let’s get b
ack to the boat,” said Halverson, eager to change the subject, and headed back to the shopping carts now that Reno was OK.
“If there is a boat,” said Reno.
“Of course, there is,” said Parnell. “It’s at the other wharf.”
“If there is another wharf.”
“I’m starting to regret we helped you,” said Halverson.
“I’m getting tired of listening to your negative thoughts,” Parnell told Reno.
“We need to concentrate,” said Halverson, in the lead. “We take it one step at a time. We focus on the little things, and the big picture will take care of itself.”
“Yep,” said Parnell. “Like that old tycoon said, ‘Watch after the nickels, and the dollars will take of themselves.’”
“That reminds me,” said Reno. “Who got our shekels?”
Parnell had no idea what Reno was talking about and blew him off as they returned to the shopping carts.
Chapter 17
Halverson was hoping against hope that they really had tied up at another wharf. He simply couldn’t remember if the wharf they had docked at was any longer or shorter than the one they had just left.
He continued to kick himself for not being able to recall.
As a professional black ops CIA agent he was trained to always be aware of and remember his surroundings. In enemy territory, which was part and parcel of his job, you never knew when or where the enemy might attack. To be prepared for an attack meant you needed to be acutely aware of your surroundings at all times.
Halverson didn’t know how he had blown it when mooring the sailboat. He only knew he could not let it happen again. Not being aware of his surroundings as the world was crumbling into a hodgepodge of chaos and nihilism would surely lead to his demise.
The ghouls would get him and get his companions as well, if he didn’t pay close attention.
He had been trained to operate in crisis mode at the Farm. That was his chops. Of course, he had never been trained to operate in a zombie pandemic.
He told his mind to go back and analyze the mooring of the sailboat.
The only reason he could come up with for his not noticing his surroundings was because he was concentrating on the mission to forage and obtain weapons. A blatant error in tradecraft.
He was dealing with an entirely different ilk of enemy. He wasn’t fighting terrorists like he was trained to. He was dealing with a plague of ghouls that were in the process of overrunning the entire planet.
Not only that, he didn’t have the technology he normally had for help. His satellite phone was gone. Cell phones were useless because the cell towers were burned and downed. Landlines were nonoperational. The entire power grid was, for all intents and purposes, out of commission. No infrastructure remained.
He had no means of contacting his boss, Scot Mellors, the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service. At this point he didn’t want to contact Mellors. Halverson believed it was Mellors at the CIA who was trying to kill him with drones because Halverson had found out about the American funding of the project that had unleashed the plague at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
Despite the severity of the situation, Halverson knew he must continue to hew to basic tradecraft.
“It can’t be very far from here,” said Parnell. “It’s not like we walked a long ways.”
“This area doesn’t look familiar,” said Victoria, becoming depressed.
Everything seemed to be piling up on her, she realized. The loss of her daughter Shawna to the plague had been the cruelest blow. She still hadn’t recovered from that tragedy. And now they were wandering around lost, it seemed.
“Let’s face it,” said Reno. “We’re fucked.”
“What’s the point?” said Victoria, coming to a halt. “I’m tired of this zombie virus, or whatever it is. Let the world go to hell.”
Halverson, Parnell, and Reno stopped and faced her.
“What’s wrong?” asked Parnell.
“I just told you.”
“Nothing’s changed. Let’s keep going.”
“Doc, it looks like you’re the only one here who thinks we have a ghost of a chance,” said Reno.
“What’s the alternative? Sit here and let the infected eat us?”
“It’s not like I have a lot to live for,” said Victoria. “I lost my daughter to those things. She was all I had.”
“We’re almost there,” said Halverson.
“You could have fooled me,” said Reno.
“How do you know we’re almost there?” asked Victoria.
“He’s just trying to cheer you up,” answered Reno. “He has no idea where we are.”
Victoria ignored Reno. “So let’s say we find the boat. Then what?”
“Then we get out of here,” said Halverson.
“And go where? The plague is everywhere. No matter where we go, the creatures will be there.”
“We don’t know what’s ahead until we go there.”
“Did you read that in a fortune cookie?” said Reno. “It makes as much sense, anyway. I got a built-in bullshit detector, you see.”
“Stay here, then, and get eaten. I don’t care. I’m going back to the boat.”
Halverson pushed ahead.
“I’m going with you,” said Parnell.
He shoved his shopping cart and the ghoul forward.
“You look ridiculous with that ghoul on a stick like that,” said Reno. “You know that?”
“He needs to be studied,” said Parnell and kept pressing forward.
Reno shrugged and walked after them, pushing his loaded shopping cart. “It’s the only game in town.”
Victoria stood noncommittally.
Reno grabbed a carton of orange juice out of his cart, shook the carton, twisted off its plastic cap, raised the carton, and poured juice into his mouth.
He grimaced at the taste. “A little warm and gamy, but not spoiled yet. Next, I’ll have a beer chaser.”
Victoria wasn’t paying attention to him. She was trying to figure out some reason to keep on going.
She gazed at Santa Barbara. From what she could see of the city from here, it looked like half of it consisted of burnt-out rubble. Not any different from LA and Santa Monica. The charred, desolate cityscape mirrored the current state of her mind.
Then she turned and took in the ocean. The blue and green dappled sea stretched to the horizon like a rippling carpet with the frothing surf for its frayed edges. The sea didn’t look any different than it ever had, she realized. Maybe there was something somewhere out there to live for.
There was only one way to find out, she knew.
She grabbed her shopping cart and pushed it after the others.
They kept following the coast road and rounded a bight.
“There!” hollered Halverson. “I see the jetty!”
He and the others hastened their paces, making for a wharf that had a sailboat moored to it a hundred-odd yards away to their right.
Halverson could not read the boat’s name from here, but the boat sure looked like the Costaguana. Even if it wasn’t, it was still transportation.
Halverson started when he heard Reno yell.
“Christ! Look at ’em all!”
Halverson turned to his left to see what Reno was looking at.
Halverson’s spirits sank at the sight.
Hundreds of the ghouls were maundering down the street at the intersection ahead of them between them and the wharf.
Chapter 18
“Now what do we do?” said Reno. “They’re gonna cut us off.”
“That’s why we got these Mossbergs,” said Halverson.
The ghouls paraded down the street like a lethargic irresistible force.
“We’ll never kill all of them,” said Reno. “They’re just too many.”
“We don’t have to kill all of them. Only the ones that get in our way.”
“They’re all gonna get in our way, from the looks of it.”<
br />
“We’ll have to make a run for the boat.”
“I can’t run with this snake pole and the shopping cart,” said Parnell.
“He’s got a point,” said Reno.
Parnell was right, decided Halverson.
Halverson strutted toward the ghoul squirming at the end of the snake pole, whipped his hunting knife out from his waistband, and drove the blade up through the bottom of the ghoul’s chin, through its desiccated tongue, though the roof of its mouth, and into its brain. The creature dropped dead.
Halverson withdrew his knife from the ghoul as he felt the creature’s dead weight slumping against his arm.
Parnell let go of the snake pole’s handle. “How will I find a cure now? We need to study one of the infected.”
“We’ll have to get another one,” said Halverson. “You never would have been able to get that ghoul past its buddies ahead.”
“Maybe we should shed these shopping carts, too,” said Reno, glancing down at his cart. “They’re only gonna slow us down.”
“We need supplies. Even if we dump the carts, we’ll still have to duke it out with the ghouls. We’re not gonna get past them without a fight.”
“They’re already in our path,” said Victoria.
“I got an idea. We can use these carts as battering rams when we meet up with the ghouls. That way we’ll be able to clear a path.”
“Ramming them with these carts won’t keep them off us,” said Reno.
“I know. That’s where the shotguns come in. We’ll blast our way through those walking corpses.”
“I’m not a killer,” said Parnell. “I’m a healer. I’m not much good with guns.”
“I hope you’re a fast learner,” said Reno. “It’s simple. All you do is aim and pull the trigger.”
“Always aim at the head,” said Halverson. “Anywhere else is a wasted shot.”
“Like I said,” said Parnell, “I’m not trained to kill people. I’m trained to heal them. Killing goes against my grain.”
“You’ll change your mind fast when one of those things tries to take a piece out of you,” said Reno, hefting his shotgun out of his shopping cart.
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