Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

by Bryan Cassiday

  Halverson felt like a fool. Only an idiot would call to an iguana, he figured. But he had to admit it felt good to see the fluorescent orange and lavender reptile.

  Victoria joined in, cheering Newton and waving at him, too.

  She suddenly turned grim. “He won’t make it here with all these ghouls swarming on the pier and under it.”

  “He’s moving pretty fast. But you’re right. I don’t see how he can get past these things on the pier and surrounding it.”

  The iguana came to an abrupt halt and spun around to face the creatures pursuing him. He hissed at them and expanded his dewlap to make himself appear larger and more threatening.

  Unfazed, the ghouls kept trudging toward him through the sand.

  The iguana whirled around, shot across the sand, and scurried into the ocean, where it writhed like an eel through the water.

  “Can iguanas swim?” asked Victoria.

  “Apparently.”

  “What about the creatures?”

  “I don’t see how they can do much of anything except stumble around like winos.”

  “Good for Newton.”

  Halverson watched as the ghouls squelched through the wet sand and into the onrushing surf in their efforts to catch Newton. The ghouls kept scrabbling through the water until their heads disappeared beneath the three-foot-high swells pounding against their dead bodies. After the waves passed over them, the ghouls continued their trek into the ocean and disappeared out of sight under the water.

  Halverson thought he could distinguish something knifing rapidly through the water toward the pier. He ran to the end of the pier to get a better look at the swimmer. Just as he had thought. He recognized the bright lavender and orange colors of the iguana’s skin slicing through the sea.

  “He’s heading here,” said Halverson.

  Victoria ran over to Halverson to watch Newton.

  The iguana made a beeline through the water toward the edge of the pier.

  “What’s he gonna do when he gets here?” asked Victoria with concern.

  As if to answer her question, Newton reached the corner piling underneath Halverson and Victoria, sank his claws into the wet brown wood, and scrambled up it to the top of the pier. He mounted the wooden handrail in front of them and looked at them.

  Victoria laughed. “I think he recognizes us.”

  Halverson smiled. He couldn’t remember smiling in a long time. All it took was an iguana to cheer him up, he decided.

  Then Halverson cut his eyes to the right and down at the skiff floating near the pilings and his good humor vanished.

  “What?” said Victoria, picking up on his change in mood.

  “That skiff’s taking on water.”

  “Maybe the waves are just splashing into the skiff,” said Victoria, trying to sound hopeful.

  “It’s not the waves.”

  “It’s always something,” Victoria said miserably.

  “That skiff’s got a hole in the bottom of it.”

  “Isn’t there some way to plug the hole?”

  “With what? Even if we could, it wouldn’t last very long. The hole’s too big. No, that skiff’s not going anywhere.”

  “Now what do we do?”

  “We have to find another way out of here.”

  Victoria gazed at the burning blockade of cars on the pier. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

  Halverson leaned over the edge of the pier and looked down at the pilings. Armies of ghouls were mobbing under the wooden floor planks, meandering between the pilings, and wading into the muddy surf.

  Several of the creatures started banging their fists against the pilings in seeming frustration. Other creatures weltered into the ocean and disappeared under the swells.

  “We should be safe here as long as that blockade holds,” said Halverson.

  “Then what?”

  Even as she spoke, a tiny girl ghoul managed to slink around the blockade somehow. Her blonde tresses on fire, she shambled toward the end of the pier.

  Victoria froze at the sight. The girl reminded her of Shawna.

  Halverson snatched the Persuader from Victoria’s hands, swung the barrel upward, and trained it on the creature’s flaming head. He squeezed the trigger. With sinking heart, he heard a click.

  Undaunted, shotgun in hand, he charged the tot.

  Louring, she reached out to claw him.

  He reversed the position of the shotgun in his hands and now gripped its muzzle. With both of his hands he swung the shotgun’s stock at her head.

  Taking the full brunt of the blow upside its head, the creature pitched off the wharf into the pounding surf below.

  Halverson took the shotgun and inspected the barricade to make sure none of the other creatures were breaching it.

  Satisfied with his examination, he jogged back to Victoria.

  She was sobbing, her head bowed, overcome with images of Shawna flooding her mind.

  Halverson draped his arm over her shoulder to comfort her. Things were going from bad to worse, he knew. The shotgun was empty. He had no more ammo in his pockets. The pier might wind up as their deathbed.

  He stared out at the flint green ocean as clouds of smoke drifted over it. He did a double take.

  He thought he could make out a sailboat floating on the undulating sea in the distance.

  “Am I imagining that?” he asked.

  “What?” she said, raising her head.

  He pointed at the vessel.

  “It looks like a sailboat,” she said.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Halverson called out and commenced jumping up and down waving exuberantly to the sailboat. Victoria joined him.

  The sailboat didn’t change direction.

  “Maybe we’re too far away for them to see us,” said Victoria, ceasing waving.

  Halverson followed suit. He noticed the boat was sailing with the wind. He thought about it.

  “I wonder if anybody’s on that boat,” he said.

  Victoria squinted and raised her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “I can’t see anyone from this distance.”

  “There’s no way to tell if anyone’s onboard.”

  “Wouldn’t they head over here if there was?”

  “Unless they couldn’t see us or they thought we were infected.”

  “This is stupid. They’re so close. Why can’t they just come over here and check us out to see that we’re OK?”

  “Not only that, we have that fire burning on the pier. They ought to be able to see the flames if nothing else.”

  Victoria shrugged in dismay. “I guess we’ll never know if anyone’s piloting that boat or not.”

  “There’s only one way to find out for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  He faced her. “Can you swim?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s on me.”

  “You’re not thinking of swimming all the way to that boat. That’s a long way.”

  “I can make it. We don’t have much choice. That boat is the only chance we have of escaping the ghouls.”

  “There must be another way.”

  “There isn’t. And I have to go ASAP. The longer I wait, the farther that boat gets away from us. I’ll get the boat’s captain to come back here and pick you up.”

  Victoria sighed. “What do I do in the meantime?”

  “Guard the barricade.”

  “With what?”

  He handed her the shotgun. “You can use this as a club.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, accepting the weapon. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not letting those things turn me into one of them. If they breach the barricade, I’m drowning myself in the ocean.”

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that. With that sailboat we still have a chance.”

  Newton the iguana sat on the railing looking up at them, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Halverson wasn’t sure he could swim the entire distance to the
boat, even though he had said he could. It would depend on the currents, he supposed. When he had attended the Agency’s Camp Peary for training in the field, part of the program had been to send him to the SEALs to learn all aspects of swimming, including long-distance swimming.

  He had attended the Naval Special Warfare Center at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, to take the BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) course. During the drownproofing test, his trainers had bound his arms behind his back and tossed him into a pool to see if he could survive without drowning. That was one of the easier exams. At least it was over with pretty quickly.

  He gazed into the rippling water.

  There was nothing for it. He climbed onto the railing beside Newton and dove into the ocean.

  He had one thing in his favor. He wouldn’t have to worry about hypothermia. It was a hot day and the water was mild. He struck out at a steady pace. The last thing he wanted to do was burn himself out by swimming too fast. There was no real rush—except that the boat was continually sailing farther away from him. That could be a problem, depending on its speed. If it was heaving faster than he was swimming, obviously he would never reach it.

  Maintaining a firm, steady pace was the best thing he could do at this point, he decided. He hated leaving Victoria by herself to face the ghouls on the pier, but he saw no way around it. Their only chance for survival lay in that sailboat.

  He kept stroking through the ocean toward the sailboat, breathing at a steady rate. The seas weren’t rough. He didn’t have to fight high waves.

  He could make it, he told himself. Never give up. Never quit. He would reach that boat if it killed him.

  He found himself fighting a current. He had to swim harder. He couldn’t allow himself to be borne along by the current, which was streaming in the wrong direction. He kicked harder and increased his strokes, bound and determined to break free from the current’s potent grip.

  He felt himself breaking out of the current. He kept stroking until he had completely freed himself from its watery shackles.

  He peered at the sailboat. He tried to gauge its distance. He seemed to be gaining on it, but it was still a long ways off. As long as he kept gaining on it, he would finally reach it.

  The question was, how long could he maintain this pace?

  Another concern was niggling at the back of his mind. He wondered if there were sharks in Santa Monica Bay. He didn’t think there were. On the other hand, he had heard of shark attacks along the Southern California coastline.

  He pricked up his ears at a rumbling overhead. He glanced up into the smoky sky. The drone was flying over him.

  He didn’t think it could sense him in the vast expanse of the ocean, especially with the veil of smoke wafting above the water.

  As the drone flew directly over him, he held his breath and dove underwater.

  There was no sense in taking any chances of being discovered. He swam submerged for the better part of a minute.

  He surfaced, gulping for air as water streamed down his face. He dog-paddled and turned around to face the pier. It was farther away than the sailboat, he saw. He was past the point of no return.

  He was getting tired. He dog-paddled for a few minutes. He couldn’t rest too long or the boat might sail out of his swimming range.

  He resumed swimming toward the sailboat. He still couldn’t see anyone onboard. If he slowed his pace, he would never catch up to the boat. He had to reach it before he needed another rest.

  He swam faster, closing the gap between him and the wayward boat.

  His lungs felt like they were getting ready to burst.

  It was a question of mind over matter now. In his mind’s eye he envisioned himself already at the boat, just as a karate student at a dojo learned to envision his hand already through a block of wood he was about to chop in half. Halverson had to will himself to reach the boat.

  The boat appeared to be less than twenty feet away. The exhausting ordeal was getting to him. He didn’t think he could swim another stroke.

  He had to reach deep down inside himself to pull out one last furious burst of stroking.

  He struggled to pull alongside the sailboat. He espied an aluminum ladder hanging down the starboard flank.

  Reaching out of the ocean, he grabbed a rung. At the end of his rope, he hauled himself aboard.

  He tumbled onto the deck and lay supine, gasping, his muscles limp like jelly, unable to move another inch.

  Through the deafening roar of his hammering heartbeat and his inhaling lungs, he thought he heard footsteps coming up the companionway from the deck below. At last, the pilot had spotted him or had heard him clamber aboard the boat.

  Halverson had barely enough energy left to tilt his head up and look toward the wheelhouse. The decomposing, sickly green face of a male twentysomething ghoul bobbed into Halverson’s view as the thing clumped up the companionway. Green slabs of flesh were melting off its face and attracting a swarm of bluebottles. The creature was wearing a torn, grime-streaked wife-beater.

  As soon as the creature clapped its white eyes on Halverson, it bared its green teeth and green gums and moaned with hunger.

  Jesus Christ! thought Halverson.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  When Victoria picked up on the drone flying over her, she ducked into the Mexican restaurant to hide. She didn’t consciously think about it. It was more of a reflex reaction. After all, a drone had fired a missile at them earlier, though she had no idea why.

  None of anything that had happened since yesterday made the slightest bit of sense to her. Pestilence, flesh-eating zombies, missile-firing drones, what next? she wondered. Martians? The world was well and truly falling apart at the seams.

  The roaring of the drone tailed off into the distance.

  Circumspectly, Victoria emerged from the restaurant.

  Newton the iguana was lying motionless and contented on the top rail at the end of the pier, soaking up the warmth of the sun’s rays. The sun had baked off the briny seawater that had soaked him during his swim to the pier.

  Victoria walked around the restaurant to scope out the blockade a hundred-plus feet from the other side of the building.

  She froze in her tracks at the sight.

  A male teenage creature was in the process of tumbling over the BMW’s hood onto Victoria’s side of the burning barricade of cars. Somehow, the thing had crawled onto the BMW’s burning hood, even as the thing itself was burning.

  Both of the creature’s arms and its hair were being immolated. The creature ignored the flames. Awkwardly, it contrived to get to its feet on the dock’s wooden floorboards and traipsed toward Victoria.

  Victoria knew the thing wouldn’t die until its brains boiled inside its skull. Apparently, the blazes on its scalp hadn’t burned through its skull to the grey matter.

  Victoria refused to let the creature cow her. Shotgun in hand, Victoria rushed the scrabbling, flaming thing.

  Running toward the creature she didn’t know how she was going to attack it. She just knew she had to stop it posthaste.

  When she reached it, she started jabbing the shotgun’s muzzle at the creature’s chest, knocking the creature back.

  Then an idea coalesced in her mind. She knew what she was going to do.

  With the shotgun she shoved the creature toward the edge of the pier and with one final, forceful shove knocked the creature off the pier into the roiling water below. She peeked over the edge of the dock and watched the creature flailing in the crashing surf. A two-foot wave slammed into the creature’s head and doused the flames on it.

  Now the creature wouldn’t die from the blazes, she realized. As long as its brain remained undamaged, the creature would shamble on ad infinitum.

  It didn’t matter to her one way or the other whether the creature lived or died. As long as it wasn’t on her side of the pier, she could care less about the ghoul.

  She eyeballed the barricade. The flames on it were burning lowe
r. Sooner or later they would die out altogether. How much longer did she have before more of the creatures broke through? she wondered.

  She felt confident she could fight them off if they crawled over the blockade one at a time. However, when they started breaching the barricade in numbers, she would have to retreat or they would surround her and kill her.

  She glanced in the offing in the direction of the sailboat. The craft was still sailing out to sea, she realized, disheartened. Halverson could have drowned by now for all she knew. Her shoulders slumped.

  Then she straightened up. She wasn’t about to give up. She still had some fight left in her.

  A boat with a captain and passengers in it might float this way, she decided. It wasn’t over till it was over. As long as she was drawing breath, there was a chance she could get out of this debacle.

  And then there was Halverson. He might still be out there, she knew, still alive, still swimming to the boat.

  Victoria noticed the moneybags lumped in the back of the motor cart parked nearby. She decided to drive the cart to the end of the dock so she and Halverson could load the sacks quickly onto the boat when he arrived—if he arrived. In any case, she wanted to be prepared to embark at a moment’s notice.

  She checked one last time to make sure none of the creatures were surmounting the barricade.

  Then she climbed into the motor cart, fired the ignition, put the cart into gear, and drove along the creaking wooden planks of the pier’s floorboard until she reached Newton, who was basking in the sun on the top rail at the end of the pier.

  She searched the blue and green marbled ocean for the sailboat. To her right, isolated arching palm trees studded the beach. Also on the beach were maundering zombies stomping through the sand.

  She swept her eyes westward across the sea till they lighted on the sailboat. The boat was still sailing away from the pier, she saw. She sighed. If only the boat was at least sailing in this direction . . .

  She decided to return to the barricade, where she could spot in short order any zombie trying to breach it.

  The name of the game was survival. She was trying to hold on as long as she possibly could. It was crucial for her to kill the creatures as soon as they got past the barricade, where they were at their most vulnerable.