The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z)

by Manel Loureiro

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Manel Loureiro

  English translation copyright © 2014 by Pamela Carmell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Apocalypse Z: The Wrath of the Just was first published in Spain by Dolmen as La ira de los justos. Translated from Spanish by Pamela Carmell. Published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2014.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477818442

  ISBN-10: 1477818448

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919470

  Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  When you set sail for Ithaca,

  wish for your road to be long,

  full of adventures, full of knowledge.

  —Constantine Cavafy, “Ithaca”

  Like so many things in life, that leg of the journey started by chance.

  For a year and a half, nothing unusual happened on the Atlantic Ocean midway between America and Europe. A few whales and some trash floated by, but not a single ship or sailboat or column of smoke loomed on the horizon. Nothing. It had never been part of a major trade route, but the absence of humans was even more pronounced now. It was as if every human had disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving no one to give a thought to the unusual things happening there.

  Over several days, the August sun heated up the water’s surface by four or five degrees. Tons of water evaporated, then cooled and formed a dense layer of clouds. At the same time, the atmospheric pressure plummeted, causing the wind to move in giant, lazy circles and pick up speed.

  Had a meteorologist been there (only about forty were still alive around the world, and they were too busy trying to survive to worry about isobars), he’d have said that a convective storm cell—a supercell—was brewing. But no one was monitoring the storm, so no one posted a warning. Meteorological satellites had gone dark or crashed into the atmosphere. Thirty hours later, no one witnessed the moment the supercell became a Category 5 hurricane headed for the coast of Africa.

  And no one alerted the crew of a small sailboat, four hundred miles to the east, that all hell was about to break loose.

  2

  “What’s for dinner?” Prit demanded to know as he stuck his head into the Corinth II’s cabin.

  “Guess,” I said with a wry smile and turned toward the voice.

  My old comrade Viktor Pritchenko was short, wiry, and in good shape for a guy nearly forty. His piercing blue eyes watched me from the cabin door as the wind tore through his long blond hair. The sun had tanned the Ukrainian a deep copper and bleached his mustache the color of straw.

  “Let me guess—fish. Again.” Prit groaned. “I’m sick of fish!”

  “Me too, but we’re sailing through a good fishing area and we have to take advantage of it. Who knows when we’ll we reach land or what we’ll find to eat when we get there. Besides, our supplies are for emergencies.”

  I could tell my old pal was mentally licking clean the cans of food stored in the cabin there. He groaned again and let out a string of Ukrainian curse words. As he started back up the steps, a large ball of orange fur bounded over him and sent him reeling backward. He cursed louder and grabbed for my cat, who by then was watching him from the top bunk, his tail twitching. But it took a lot more than that to make Prit lose his cool.

  “Control your damn cat or, I swear to God, I’ll throw him overboard!” he said with a half smile.

  “I don’t believe you.” I didn’t look up from the mackerel I was cleaning. “Deep down, you’re really fond of him. Besides, he’s not my cat; Lucullus thinks we belong to him.”

  As if agreeing with me, Lucullus let out a long, loud meow and then jumped off the bunk and swaggered toward me in his feline way, waiting for some fish guts to land in his bowl. Pritchenko shook his head and went back on deck, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  I looked at my calloused hands covered in fish scales and laughed bitterly. A year and a half ago, my life was completely different. I was a respected lawyer living in Pontevedra, in northwest Spain. I had a family, friends, and a cushy, very middle-class life. I was tall, thin, and handsome (some said), with a great future ahead of me. The shining offspring of baby boomers. Born with a flower up my ass, as my family used to say.

  But my little world had had its downsides too. Not long before the pandemic, my wife died in a traffic accident. I slid into a black hole of depression and almost didn’t climb out. Despair and guilt had me in a choke hold. Why’d I let her drive on such a stormy night? I almost turned my back on my job, my friends, and my family. Those months were an alcohol-soaked blur. Looking down the barrel of a shotgun sounded like a good idea. It’d be easy, fast, and, if I did it right, painless.

  Then Lucullus came along. Worried about my descent into a personal hell, my sister gave me an orange Persian kitten. What the hell happened to my sister? Where the hell could she be? Surprisingly, her gift did the trick. Taking care of that kitten helped me get over my self-pity and move on.

  Then at Christmastime a year and a half ago, the hell unleashed in Dagestan dwarfed everyone’s petty problems. Like most people in the West, I’d never heard of the former Soviet republic deep in the Caucasus Mountains in central Asia. The tiny country’s ministry of tourism should get a fucking prize—posthumously, of course. For two weeks, while the planet still had media, that little republic was all anyone talked about.

  Anyone still alive knows the story all too well. A group of extremist lunatics from neighboring Chechnya got it into their heads to steal some Soviet-era weapons for their jihad. They successfully broke into a munitions compound, but all they got was worthless shit. Instead of AK-47s, grenades, RPGs, and ammunition, they found a nearly
forgotten Cold War–vintage laboratory, guarded by a dozen soldiers. All it contained were test tubes, flasks, and some high-security freezers plastered with warning labels in Cyrillic. In frustration, the pissed-off Chechen leader ordered his men to trash the place, including the freezers.

  That was the stupidest—and the last—order he gave. Less than fifteen minutes later, he and his men were infected with the TSJ virus that had been waiting quietly for over twenty years in a flask inside that freezer. Just forty-eight hours later, the virus had spread throughout Dagestan; in just two weeks, it was racing out of control across the globe. By then the guerrilla leader was dead—or rather undead—unaware that he’d unleashed the Apocalypse. Humanity was wiped off the map all because a band of wannabe jihadists couldn’t read the warning labels on a freezer.

  As the TSJ virus swept throughout the world, things happened fast. The little virus proved to be the worst kind of bastard. It was extremely contagious and lethal, plus it was genetically programmed to keep spreading even after it destroyed its host.

  TSJ’s creator was one of the top virologists in the Soviet Union, but he’d been dead and forgotten for a couple of decades. He’d had a brilliant career as a bioengineer; the TSJ virus was the apex of his scientific legacy. After he died fleeing to the West through West Berlin, the project was purged and all his experiments were stored away in freezers, pending a reevaluation. Because of the heavy-handed Soviet bureaucracy and, later, the fall of the USSR, his work was forgotten. Until that fatal day.

  Dying of the TSJ virus was a hard way to go. First its victims languished in terrible pain, with violent convulsions similar to Ebola; hours later, they arose like murderous sleepwalkers. After they were clinically dead, they attacked every living thing that crossed their path. The Undead, the press started to call them . . . until the press ceased to exist. Most of the journalists succumbed to the infection too.

  It all seemed like a nightmare. Before I could process it all, my country was swept up in the evacuation efforts taking place worldwide. Social structures fractured and chaos spread like wildfire. Telecommunications shut down, then the government. Three weeks after the infection reached Spain, the world order disintegrated. Of the billions of people who’d inhabited the planet a month earlier, only a few thousand had survived and they were dashing helter-skelter, trying to stay alive, surrounded by a sea of Undead. The creatures weren’t smart, but they were unrelenting and their numbers were overwhelming. We survivors had only one choice. Run.

  I dropped the gutted fish into a bucket of saltwater and set its guts in Lucullus’s bowl. He watched me with feline intensity, as if to ask what the hell was taking so long.

  “Here you go, your majesty.” I stroked his back as he pounced on the fish guts. “It’s not Whiskas, but at least you won’t starve, buddy.”

  Lucullus chewed noisily, smacking and purring, and a wave of nausea washed over me. I leaned against a doorframe until the feeling passed. I’d seen too many people die terrible deaths over the last year and a half. Sometimes ordinary things, like watching a cat eat fish guts, turned my stomach. Before the Apocalypse, the closest I’d gotten to death was buying steaks at the supermarket.

  Lucullus looked up from his bowl and stared at me, apparently surprised to see me slumped against the wall. He made a typical cat comment and went back to eating.

  I picked my way through the small cabin and into the head, where I splashed my face several times. We hadn’t had time to stock up on fresh water before we sailed, so we had to severely ration what little we had. We stored water right out of the ocean in the tank in the head, and used it for bathing. Washing with saltwater made our hair frizzy and our clothes stiff, and the salt would corrode the boat’s pipes in a few months, but I didn’t expect to be on the boat that long.

  I studied myself in the chipped mirror above the sink. A sharp-featured, deeply tanned man with a thick mop of black hair looked back at me. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot from stress and lack of sleep.

  My life had been an odyssey from the moment the pandemic forced me out of my home. First I’d sailed to the nearby city of Vigo, headed for the largest Safe Haven in Galicia, only to discover that the city was devastated. After a series of adventures among the charred ruins of the city, I became fast friends with Viktor Pritchenko, a Ukrainian helicopter pilot who’d fought forest fires in that part of Spain. The catastrophe had stranded him there, thousands of miles from his family and home.

  Prit and I had been inseparable ever since and had saved each other’s lives many times. We first teamed up to flee from Vigo and the hordes of Undead there. Then we made a nerve-racking flight in his helicopter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But our hopes for restarting our lives there were dashed when we discovered that the islands had become a huge refugee camp for survivors from around the world. Everything was strictly rationed and a repressive military ruled. When civil war broke out, our lives were in danger, so we set sail down the African coast headed for the Cape Verde Islands, not too far away. Before the Apocalypse, they’d been sparsely populated and isolated. We were hopeful that the virus hadn’t spread there.

  And then there was Lucia.

  I walked out of the head and inched between the central table and the base of the mast. The cabin door was standing ajar. I stuck my head in, trying not to make any noise. Lucia was lying on the bed, fast asleep and wearing a pink-flowered bikini she’d found stuffed in a drawer on the boat. One arm hung limply over the side of the bed. She clutched an old issue of a fashion magazine; it, along with a navigation manual and a sports magazine, comprised the entire onboard library.

  Lucia joined our little group several days after Prit and I met. She was only sixteen when she got separated from her family during the chaotic evacuation of her hometown. Lost and scared, she and Sister Cecilia, a nun and trained nurse, took refuge for a year in the basement of a hospital—all alone—until Prit and I stumbled upon them. Before Lucia and I could stop it, we were deeply in love, despite the ten-year difference in our ages.

  The world had changed drastically. Most of those changes added up to a pile of shit the size of an aircraft carrier, but I was grateful I’d met Lucia, I thought with a half smile.

  With all the chaos, death, and devastation in the world, some things hadn’t changed. People were still violent, selfish, and dangerous. Some became murderers if the situation called for it. But people still laughed, sang, dreamed, and cried—and even fell in love. How could they help it if they met a woman like Lucia?

  Eighteen now, Lucia was tall and slender with legs that went on forever, black hair, high cheekbones, and bright-green eyes. She had a sensual beauty that could stop traffic. I’m sure that before the Apocalypse, every man who saw her did a double take. She reminded me of a panther, especially when she stretched lazily, like she was doing just then.

  I didn’t want to startle her, so I gently kissed her hair. Lucia moaned in her sleep and turned, opening her eyes just a slit.

  She asked in a sleepy voice, “Is it my turn to take the watch already?”

  “No, honey,” I whispered as I ran my hands along her long legs.

  Lucia had slept only four hours since she’d taken the night watch. We’d all agreed to stand watch the same number of hours, but Prit and I knew that Lucia was at the limit of her endurance, so we tried to spare her a couple of hours when we could. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what we were doing. Exhaustion was taking its toll on everyone, but Prit and I had more stamina. For the moment, anyway.

  “Go back to sleep. It’s still three hours before it’s your turn again.”

  “Why do you smell so fishy?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Guess what’s on today’s menu.” I’d washed my hands, but they still smelled, so I stuck them under the quilt.

  “Yuck!” Lucia covered her head with the pillow.

  Just then a wave struck the hull and the boat lurched. If th
e sea was getting rough, I needed to finish fixing dinner and then go help Prit tie down loose lines.

  “Well,” I continued, faking nonchalance, “I was torn between beef Wellington with a port wine reduction and roasted potatoes or a plain mackerel with no sides. I know deep down, you and Prit have simple tastes, so I decided on the lighter menu.”

  “Shut up or I’ll shut you up!” she said as she linked her hands behind my neck and stared at me with her big green eyes.

  When the boat lurched again, I lost my balance and fell on top of her. Her breasts pressed against my bare chest and her kiss seemed to go on forever. The temperature in the cabin shot up several degrees.

  “Maybe we should have dessert first,” I whispered in her ear, as I slid my hand toward the knot in her bikini top.

  She arched her back as I nibbled her neck. The sea surged again, shaking the Corinth II so violently that we rolled against the bulkhead. My back hit a sharp corner and knocked the wind out of me, proving the old maritime adage that you always hit the part of your body that will hurt the most.

  “You OK?” Lucia asked, trying to stifle her laughter.

  “What the hell’s Prit doing up there?” I grumbled as I rubbed my back. It felt like someone had hit me with an ax.

  The Ukrainian’s urgent voice broke in. “Get up here! Now! You gotta see this!”

  I jumped off the bed and shot through the hatch. As I crossed the galley, I noticed that the bucket of fish had fallen. Lucullus was stalking the gutted mackerel that skidded across the floor each time the boat pitched and rolled. I decided I’d rescue our dinner later and rushed up the stairs onto the deck.

  What I saw left me speechless. When I’d caught the mackerel two hours before, the sky had been crystal clear, as it had been every day since we left Tenerife. Now it was an eerily white mosaic.

  Clouds shredded apart, clumped together, then wildly broke apart again. The sea had been calm, but now whitecaps the size of rams broke against the sides of the boat.

  When I faced the other direction, into the wind, the blood drained from my face. Across the horizon as far as I could see stretched a black wall; flashes of lightning lit up the dark sky every few seconds. It was a monster storm.