The complex of buildings that fringed the harbor was completely destroyed. The shops and restaurants had all burned to the ground, a mess of black charred rubble. Smoke still rose in lazy tendrils, and some of the debris had been hurled into the water. To his right, he saw the long rocky arm of the break wall, reaching out into the ocean. The line of huge quarry boulders that formed the wall was distorted by the wreckage of two sail boats. The first one had been driven bow-first into the rocks. The hull of the boat had been chewed open as the ebb and flow of tides had ground the vessel further onto the jagged teeth of the wall. She lay askew, across the channel, listing to one side so the high mast pointed skyward at an accusing angle. Gulls and crows perched in the tangled wreckage of rigging.
The second boat was nothing more than a lighter ethereal shade within the deep murky water. She had sunk stern-first, so that only the tip of her bow and mast still showed. There was a litter of wreckage – lifejackets, plastic buckets, sails and rope – bobbing on the surface.
Directly across the harbor, Bannon could see the three jetties, pointing like fingers into the calm water of the marina. Pleasure boaters had used the closest concrete jetty. There were several small sailboats and a couple of luxury yachts normally moored.
Now there was just black charred chaos.
Several of the smaller boats had sunk. One of the luxury yachts had burned to the waterline so that just the black ribs of her hull structure showed, like the ravaged carcass of some great animal. Bannon shifted his gaze.
The second marina jetty was the largest, and widest. It was the dock used by the commercial fishing fleet that still operated out of Grey Stone. Bannon saw ‘Mandrake’ moored in deep water and apparently undamaged, and closer to the shoreline, a trawler. The trawler’s superstructure had been burned so that the boat looked like a featureless hulk, and there were black charred streaks down the side of the once-white hull.
Game fishermen had used the furthest jetty. The boats there were sleek, luxury cabin cruisers with graceful flowing lines and high flying bridges. Many of the boats were gone from their moorings, but Bannon barely noticed. Suddenly all his attention was on the twenty-foot half-cabin cruiser at the deep end of the dock.
Sully’s boat.
She nudged placidly at her moorings, the boat’s bow bobbing listlessly with the ripples of the incoming tide. Bannon gave the boat his full attention.
She was white, with generous lines along her hull. There were two Perspex windows facing him, like close-set eyes, and fitted above the windshield was a blue canvas tarp. Bannon stared hard for long seconds, then turned to Sully.
“What’s your plan?”
Sully shrugged. “You swim across the marina to the last jetty,” he said. “I’ll be there waiting for you.”
“What if the zombies see me?”
“You’ll be safe in the water,” Sully said. “They don’t like it.”
Bannon looked thoughtful. It was about a hundred yard swim to the jetty where Sully’s boat was tied. That was no problem for him. He had been in and around the ocean all his life. He knew he could comfortably cover the distance. “What about you?”
“I’ll meet you at the end of the dock.”
“You’re not swimming across?”
Sully shook his head, and seemed uncomfortable at the suggestion. “No,” he said bluntly, and then sniffed. “I’ll go back around along the waterfront.”
Bannon became wary. “I thought you were scared about getting another bite – further infection.”
“I am,” admitted Sully. “But as long as I just mingle and don’t provoke them, or get in the way of something the zombies are hunting, they pay me no attention. It’s like I don’t exist.”
Bannon smiled cynically. “You mean it’s like you’re one of them, right?”
Sully said nothing, but his eyes glowed with a sudden flare of anger. His lip curled into a snarl. He got wordlessly to his feet and glanced into the dawn sky. “Don’t take too long,” he made the words sound like some kind of an ominous threat. “You don’t want to miss your helicopter ride back out of here.” He turned and walked away, wandering towards the burned out buildings of the marina complex, leaving Bannon all alone…
… and suddenly feeling exposed and vulnerable.
Chapter 14.
Bannon stared down into the water of the marina, and shuddered. The surface was slick, rainbowed with stains of spilled fuel, and littered with floating wreckage. He could see burned timbers and the debris from sunken boats bobbing on the tide.
And bodies.
Corpses – their flesh pecked from their bodies – drifted with the current. They were bloated, sun-blackened, hideous lumps. Some of the bodies were clothed, others floated naked and were made obscene by their gruesome wounds.
Bannon kicked off his boots, and then peeled off his shirt. He put the Beretta inside one boot and then wrapped everything into a tight bundle. There was a rock a few feet to his left – one of the quarry boulders from the break wall. It was a peculiar light grey color. He stuffed the wad of possessions behind the rock and went bare-chested to the water’s edge. He wedged the tightly-wrapped emergency beacon down the front of his jeans and checked his wristwatch. He was running out of time. He eased himself into the murky water like he was lowering himself into a scalding hot bath and sank slowly down to his chin without making a splash.
Below the surface, the rocky break wall was thick with moss and slime. Bannon pushed himself off with his feet and began to swim in a kind of breast-stroke… careful to keep his arms, hands and feet below the surface… and even more careful to keep his chin and mouth above the surface.
The murky water smelled like rancid effluent, thick and greasy so that Bannon felt the wretched odor of it like a coating of slime on his skin and on the back of his tongue. He kept his mouth closed, breathing slowly through his nose, and began to draw his way out into the deeper water, casting a wake of low ripples behind him.
On the distant shoreline, he could see figures moving. They drifted into and out of sight with no apparent purpose – the undead meandering through the carnage of the destroyed buildings, pausing like vultures to pick at the ruins in search of anyone who might have survived.
None of them seemed to notice him.
Near the first jetty Bannon suddenly felt something beneath the surface of the water brush against his left leg. His heart stopped beating. His eyes went wide. He felt a surge of pulsing dread.
He suddenly wondered if the drifting bodies that bobbed like lumps of wood had attracted sharks. An unbidden image of sleek grey predators hunting through the murky depths came to him, his imagination so real that he felt himself cringe and tuck his legs up tight against his torso. There hadn’t been a shark sighting in local waters for decades… but then there hadn’t been a harbor full of decomposing dead bodies to lure them before now either.
Just as he felt himself begin to panic, Bannon’s other leg brushed against the same obstruction. It wasn’t a shark. It was hard… and it wasn’t moving. He prodded at it carefully, mindful of the dangers of getting tangled in debris. He thought he felt something like maybe a yacht’s mast, or perhaps a spar. Carefully he trod water, and edged himself away from the obstruction. When he felt he was clear, he stretched out again, and stroked towards the barnacle-encrusted piers that underpinned the closest jetty. He was breathing hard. He could feel the burn of tired muscles in his chest and across his shoulders. He slinked into the shadowy gloom underneath the pier and reached out for a dangling jetty rope to support himself.
The severed head of a woman bobbed up in the water, floating like a cork close beside where he rested. The face was bloodless, the waxen skin pale and bleached as marble. The eyeballs were missing so that Bannon stared into two gaping dark holes. The lips had been nibbled from the face, and part of the nose was missing. There was a bullet hole in the side of the head. A school of small fish darted in the water around the decapitated head, worrying the soft flesh. The
head turned over slowly and then drifted past him, out into the soft light. Bannon shuddered and pushed himself away from the pier.
Bannon guessed it was only about thirty yards to the main marina pier where the ‘Mandrake’ sat gently tugging at her mooring lines. He fixed his gaze on the squat shape of the big fishing boat and tried to work through the water with purposeful rhythm. A couple of gulls were perched on the bow of the boat, and a dozen more of the scavenger birds were squawking and bickering in the air above the main deck. As Bannon swam closer, he suddenly realized why.
The stench of rotting fish was withering – a reek so fierce that Bannon’s eyes watered. The air seemed thick and cloying. He reached the broad stern of the long-liner and clung to one of the fender tires that had been hung from the side of the pier to protect the hull of the docking boats.
‘Mandrake’s’ hold was filled with thousands of tons of rotting fish. Bannon had ordered the hatches opened before they had sailed into Grey Stone, ready for a quick unload into the fishery’s refrigeration rooms. Now that cargo had spent a full day spoiling in the warm sun. The air was filled with a cloud of swarming, crawling metallic green flies.
He hung in the shadows of the fishing boat’s hull, floating in diesel fuel and filthy water for a full minute. He could hear movement along the pier, but it was indistinct – a fusion of muted sounds that could have been the swarming flies, or perhaps the struggled awkward gait of a zombie. He hesitated. If one of the undead was on the jetty, they would surely hear his soft splashes in the water as he swam away. He counted slowly to ten, knowing that every second was precious. The noise seemed to rise and fall, sometimes sounding right overhead, and other times fading so as to be almost indiscernible.
“Fuck it,” he thought to himself at last. His lips were quivering. He had been in the frigid water for several minutes. His fingers and toes felt numb. He couldn’t waste a single second more.
He hung in the water and began to pump his lungs with air like a bellows, cleansing them of carbon dioxide. When he felt himself on the verge of hyperventilation he took one last long breath and then duck dived below the surface, striking out with great kicks of his feet, and clawing through the water with his hands.
His vision was distorted, and his eyes began to burn. Dark jagged shapes loomed menacingly out of the distance. The water around him swirled and billowed with clouds of sediment.
He swam trickling air from his nose like a miser, until his chest felt like it was on fire and his lungs began to pump convulsively. He felt a sense of disorientation begin to creep over him, a dizzy vertigo that turned his arms and legs to slow lethargic lead.
When Bannon finally knew he could swim no further, he dashed desperately for the surface like a submarine that had blown its main ballast tank.
His head and shoulders crashed through the water, and he gulped and gasped for air. His lungs heaved, his breath gagged in the back of his throat, and his mouth filled with putrid water. He retched pitifully.
The undead heard him.
There were two ghouls standing on the jetty where ‘Mandrake’ had been moored. One of them looked up. Bannon glanced over his shoulder. Sully’s boat was just twenty yards away.
The ghoul stared at Bannon with some kind of fascination for long seconds, tilting its head from side to side curiously. It came to the edge of the jetty and peered down into the water, then shuffled away warily. The zombie turned its gaze back to Bannon – and it snarled.
Chapter 15.
Bannon hung in the water for thirty precious seconds, re-filling his aching lungs with putrid air, and then he dived one last time, back beneath the filthy surface of the harbor.
He swam towards the last jetty, fighting against the gentle relentless push of the tide, and when he saw the white bloated shapes of boat bottoms suddenly loom out of the murky haze, he paused for an instant to get his bearings. His vision was horribly distorted and his eyes stung. He saw the dark pier posts of the jetty, standing like ghostly silent sentinels, and he kicked off again, following the murky stilts until there were no more.
He was running out of air. He felt his lungs pump but he fought against the urge to rise immediately. He could see the bobbing keel of Sully’s boat, almost directly above him, and he could see pale light refracting off the water’s surface, glinting and glittering into a thousand tiny shards with the first touches of sunlight.
Bannon let the last of his air spill from the corner of his mouth as he rose slowly. Detail became clearer. The light became brighter. He could see the end of the jetty, the wavering shape of bowlines, and the steps of an iron ladder attached to one of the piers that sunk down into the depths. He swam towards it and grasped at the rusted rungs, pulling himself upwards until his head eased above the bobbing surface and at last he could breathe again.
He gasped.
He was clinging to the rungs of a ladder at the end of the game fishing jetty. Looking back towards the foreshore he could see three or four big sleek cruisers, desolate and left abandoned. He went up the ladder slowly.
As his head rose to the level of the jetty, Bannon paused and swung his eyes warily across the concrete wharf. The entire length of the dock seemed to be littered with abandoned debris. He could see tangled lengths of rope, suitcases and clothes, boxes and bodies.
And he could see Sully.
The man was standing ten feet away, waiting cautiously beside the boat tied at the end of the dock.
His boat.
The boat where Maddie was hiding.
Bannon came up the ladder and heaved himself onto the concrete. He was shaking, his breathing ragged. He felt the chill of the frigid water deep within his bones. He blinked water from his eyes.
There was a wall of wooden boxes and plastic crates of rubbish behind Sully so that part of his cruiser was obscured. Bannon frowned. It was as if a large dumpster had been upended at the end of the dock. Sully pressed an urgent finger to the blackened rotting flesh of his lips, imploring Bannon to silence. He gestured back towards the shoreline.
“Trouble,” he whispered hoarsely. “I can sense them.”
“Where?” Bannon muttered.
Sully shrugged, like the instinct was like some vague nagging premonition that persisted. He studied Bannon.
“You made it,” Sully said, sounding just a little disappointed.
Bannon said nothing. He was staring at the reeking mess of rotting garbage and stacks of assorted debris behind where Sully stood.
“It was the best I could do to hide Maddie,” Sully grunted, sensing Bannon’s question, and explaining the high barricade in a hoarse guarded voice. “I figured it would cut down the chances of the zombies seeing the boat and getting curious.”
Bannon nodded. He was shivering, his lips pale and bloodless, teeth chattering, and his hands and feet numbed from the cold water. Suddenly his stomach gripped into a vicious cramp of pain, and then he folded at the waist and retched explosively into the putrid slopping water of the marina.
Chapter 16.
Sully’s gaze snapped towards the waterfront and he glared for long seconds. His eyes seemed to be searching the ruins of the marina complex. He cocked his head, and then his expression became grim and vindictive.
“They heard you,” he snarled. “They fucking heard you.”
Bannon straightened unsteadily. He scraped the back of his hand across his mouth and then spat. He lifted his eyes to the end of the dock and saw movement – undead gathering.
A small group of blood-drenched rocking shapes stood at the far end of the jetty. Bannon looked for an escape.
“How many?” Sully barked. He was casting about him wildly, looking for a makeshift weapon.
“Four,” Bannon choked. He felt his stomach heave again and he vomited over his feet, purging the last of the stinking seawater from his guts.
He felt shaky, but better. He took a deep breath.
“Untie the boat,” Bannon said.
“What?”
“Untie
the boat!” Bannon barked. “We need to get off this dock.”
Sully understood. He crashed through the barrier he had built, scattering the refuse and debris like a battering ram. He crouched over the stern line. Bannon cast off the bow line. Bannon leaped aboard the boat and Sully bunched the muscles in his broad shoulders and gave a mighty heave. The boat began to drift away from the end of the pier. Bannon thumped the engine start button and the twin outboards gurgled throatily. Sully took a running leap and landed in the cockpit, just as the undead came rushing along the pier.
One of the ghouls hurled itself off the lip of the jetty, enraged and maddened by the insanity of its infection. It had once been a young man, but his death had not been kind. The ghoul had only one arm, the other limb just a ragged tattered stump of flesh that hung from its shoulder. It leaped across the widening gap and crashed into the stern of Sully’s boat. Gnarled bloodied fingers clawed at the transom, as the zombie’s thrashing body dangled in the water. Bannon gunned the big outboards. The water around the stern of the boat erupted into a white roaring froth as the big propellers tore the silence apart, sucking the shrieking ghoul into their wash. The zombie was shredded between the spinning blades, its decomposing body minced, the infected oozing entrails sprayed across the scummy water.
Bannon conned the boat out into the deep water of the marina and then let the outboards idle. Sully went forward and dropped the anchor. The cruiser drifted with forward momentum for a moment then pulled up tight against the heavy chain, swinging her stern around as the hull responded to the tug of the tide like a weather vane in gentle breeze.
Bannon stared back towards the game fishing pier. More of the undead had gathered, standing precipitously on the edge of the jetty as if it were a cliff face. They snarled and hissed in futile madness.
“We’re safe… for now,” Bannon said grimly.
Dead Rage Page 19
