Otherwise, they would gather together after passing over the wall of cars and attack her en masse. As soon as they banded together they would become invincible by sheer weight of numbers.
She withdrew her cell phone from her pant pocket to see if she could make a call to her mother in Santa Barbara. Maybe the phones were working now, Victoria hoped. They weren’t. Nothing worked. They might as well be back in the days of the covered wagon. Time to suck it up and be a pioneer. Why not? Her ancestors had done it. Why couldn’t she? Instead of battling Indians she was battling zombies.
Her heart accelerated as she spotted another creature trying to make its way over the burning cars. She braced for another attack.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Flat on his back on the sailboat’s wet, rocking deck, played out, Halverson wasn’t sure he could move a muscle as he watched the creature shuffle toward him, its jaws wide.
He knew he had to do something. His basic instincts were flashing red, warning him that he had but two choices left: fight or flight. He wasn’t going to flee back into the ocean, that was for sure—or his trek out here had been all for naught. If he returned to the ocean, he figured that would be the last of him. He had to find the strength deep down inside him to fight it out with the creature.
He yawned, still unable to move his body.
He had a killer headache, his eyes burned, and his lungs ached. But he knew if he didn’t do something—and soon—that thing in the wife-beater was going to have him for lunch.
Halverson had to keep going to save himself and Victoria. He and Victoria were the only two persons that mattered to him anymore.
Despite his pain and fatigue, he willed himself to move as the creature crouched down beside his chest and prepared to gorge on his throat.
Halverson delivered a sharp jab to the creature’s solar plexus to keep the creature at bay. His fist landed in mushy decaying flesh. He wanted to punch the thing in its face, but its face was so rotten and flyblown he dared not touch it lest he become infected. Indeed, maggots were squirming in and out of the creature’s nostrils and cheeks.
Halverson wanted to throw up at the sight.
Instead, he mustered the energy to roll to his right out from under the descending ghoul. Standing behind the ghoul, he kicked it in its butt. The creature staggered forward and fell on its stomach on the deck.
The creature thrashed its arms as it tried to stand up.
Halverson was standing feebly, bowed forward, his hands braced on his weakened knees, breathing deeply, trying to regain his strength.
The creature managed to find its footing. It advanced on Halverson.
Halverson wished he had more energy, but he would just have to make do with what little he had left. He cast around the boat for a weapon of some sort. Something he could club the creature’s skull in with.
He picked up on a boat hook lying on the port side of the deck.
As the creature moved in on him for the kill, Halverson lunged for the boat hook. He snatched it up from the deck with his right hand, held onto the pole with both hands, and thrust it at the creature that was following him. He drove the spike at the end of the pole into the creature’s chest, stopping the creature in its tracks.
Try as he might, the creature could not advance now that it was pinned on the boat hook.
Halverson strode forward and shoved the creature backward until it toppled over the gunwale into the ocean. Halverson wrenched the boat hook free of the creature’s chest in the midst of the creature’s fall. He dropped the boat hook on the deck.
Now he had to turn the sailboat around and tack close-hauled into the wind toward the pier.
He hoped Victoria was OK. He could see the cars still burning on the wharf. That was a good sign. As long as they were still burning, they should keep the creatures from advancing to the end of the pier where Victoria was waiting for him. Hopefully.
He could not see her from here. The pier was too far away. Sailing was second nature to him because of his SEAL training. If anyone could sail there in time to save her, he could.
The wind whipped into his face as he stood at the wheel of the twenty-foot sailboat.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Victoria slammed the butt of the Mossberg into the six five creature that was lumbering toward her in burning, smoking clothing. The thing had a massive tombstonelike head. She couldn’t miss it if she tried. She connected with the shotgun’s stock. The shotgun’s steel muzzle vibrated in her hands and all the way down her arms as the stock slammed into the creature’s skull.
Not good, she decided, her arms twinging. It felt like striking a steel girder.
The creature pitched to its right, but didn’t fall over. The stock not only didn’t crack the creature’s skull, it didn’t damage the thing’s brain either.
Victoria cursed. The creature’s skull was too big and thick, she decided. She wasn’t going to be able to kill the ghoul this way.
She backed away from the ghoul. As she did so, three more ghouls tumbled over the burning blockade, their ragged clothes on fire. She wouldn’t be able to fight them all off anymore. There were too many of them. She had to retreat.
Her heart in her mouth, she whipped to the end of the pier.
In desperation she peered out to sea. She saw the sailboat heading in her direction. Halverson had made it! she saw. But would he get back here before the zombies got to her?
She glanced back at the blockade of cars. She shook her head despondently. Too many of the creatures were crawling over the burning cars. Even though the creatures were on fire, they kept shambling down the pier toward her, their arms outstretched before them.
She didn’t think Halverson would get back to the pier before the creatures reached her and tore her apart. She couldn’t stand the idea of them devouring her flesh and ripping her apart. She thought she would rather drown than go through that ordeal, despite the fact that from all she had heard drowning wasn’t a pleasant way to go, either.
From his perch on the pier’s railing Newton saw the ghouls approaching and hissed at them. He inflated his dewlap to frighten them.
But nothing frightened the ghouls, Victoria knew. They were already dead. They couldn’t care less about anything. As a result, they feared nothing.
If she had just one bullet left for the shotgun, she could at least blow her own head off, she decided. Death by gunshot would be preferable to being torn apart or drowning. But the gun was empty.
She heard someone yelling her name.
It was Halverson, she realized.
He was telling her to do something. She couldn’t make out what. The raucous wind was swallowing his words.
She saw him motioning to her on the sailboat. He looked like he had a coil of rope in his hands as he stood on the deck near the wheel.
“Catch the painter!” he called out. “Tie it to the pier!”
He flung the coiled painter at her. Loops of it landed on the pier. She dashed up to the painter and snapped up a length of it.
“Swing it around the rail and throw it back to me!” shouted Halverson.
The painter was pulling her toward the edge of the pier, she realized anxiously. Hurriedly, she looped the painter once around the rail at the edge of the pier then prepared to hurl the rest of the painter off the pier at Halverson.
She hoped she possessed enough strength to heave the painter far enough to reach the boat. The longer she dallied, the longer the distance would be between her and the boat.
She hurled the painter at the boat with all the strength she could summon.
Aided by the gusting wind, the end of the painter flew through the air and landed on the boat’s bow.
Halverson scrambled to retrieve the painter before it slid off the bow. He latched onto the painter and wound it around a steel cleat on the slippery deck to moor the boat to the rail.
Meanwhile, on the pier three zombies were closing in on Victoria.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
&n
bsp; Halverson dove into the ocean. He swam to the pier. He had seen the ghouls swarming around Victoria and knew she couldn’t fight them off by herself.
He dog-paddled up to one of the pier’s pilings and embraced it. He started shinnying his way up the wet brown wooden piling. He managed to gain purchase clawing the barnacles that girdled the wood, cutting his hands as he grabbed the sharp crustaceans and hauled himself up.
Whenever he saw a wave approach, he stopped climbing and hugged the piling until the wave rolled over him. Otherwise, the wave would sweep him against the pile or off the pile into the water below. After the wave passed, he resumed climbing.
He reached the pier’s floorboards. He grabbed the railing and hauled himself over it and onto the pier just as a tall creature pushing seven feet with a tombstone head lunged at Victoria. The creature’s shabby clothing was on fire, and its features were seared. Its eyebrows and lips had been burned off its face.
Halverson kicked Tombstone Head away from her. The creature recoiled, staggering backward.
Halverson took the shotgun from Victoria and charged the stumbling creature. He grabbed the muzzle with both hands and swung the stock at the creature’s monolithic head. He didn’t hear the skull crack, but the impact of the jolt sent vibrations all the way down both of his arms.
Tombstone Head shuffled around groggily. Other than its daze, the creature showed no ill effects from the wallop.
The creature’s head felt like it was made out of cement, decided Halverson. He didn’t know if he had the strength to bash Tombstone Head’s brains in.
Halverson opted for another means of attack.
He kept poking the Mossberg into Tombstone Head’s chest, driving the ghoul back toward the edge of the pier. Despite its immense size, the creature didn’t possess any more strength than any of the other creatures Halverson had encountered. He was able to drive the ghoul backward.
When Tombstone Head backed all the way to the end of the pier, the rail prevented the ghoul from falling into the ocean.
Now what? wondered Halverson. How was he going to push Tombstone Head over the rail into the ocean? The ghoul was built like a tank.
Halverson observed that Tombstone Head’s center of gravity was high on account of his great height, which would make Tombstone Head vulnerable to falling over the rail. All the ghoul needed was a strong push in the right place.
Halverson sprang to Tombstone Head’s side at the rail, cocked the shotgun like it was a bat, and swung the shotgun with all the strength he could muster into the ghoul’s throat, continuing his swing till Tombstone Head pitched off balance over the rail into the crashing surf below.
The two other ghouls moved in on Victoria.
Halverson knew she couldn’t fight off both of them at the same time. While one attacked her in the front, the other could whipsaw her by bushwhacking her from behind.
Halverson hustled toward the afire fortysomething female creature plodding nearest him, swung the shotgun at it, and creamed the back of its skull with the stock. Halverson heard the sickening muffled crunch of the ghoul’s skull splitting open.
The creature dropped to the floorboards. The stench of the ghoul’s burning dead flesh suffused Halverson’s nostrils. He fought off the urge to wretch.
The third creature wasn’t in flames anymore, though its singed body and clothing were still smoking and sloughing off cinders as it stumbled forward.
Victoria was pushing at the creature, fending it off with her outthrust arms and kicking legs, desperately striving to forestall it from biting her.
Halverson noticed the creature was shorter than him and even an inch or two shorter than Victoria. He decided to launch his attack from above.
He raised the shotgun over his head like a sledgehammer, pummeled the smoldering crown of the ghoul’s head with the stock, and rived the ghoul’s skull, sending the creature to its knees and then flat onto its stomach, motionless on the pier’s planks.
“There’s another one coming,” said Victoria, gazing toward the Mexican restaurant in front of them.
Breathing hard after felling the ghouls, Halverson followed her gaze. Aghast, he could not believe his eyes.
“Christ!” he said.
“What? It’s just another zombie.”
“No, it’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
Halverson scrutinized the creature’s features to make sure. After all, the face was a shambles what with the advanced degree of decomposition that had taken place on it. He could be mistaken.
The dark hair was combed in the same style—to the creature’s right. The broad no-nonsense nose looked the same. The ears flat to the sides of the head looked similar, though the fact that the earlobe had disintegrated and fallen off the left ear complicated matters of identification.
The eyes didn’t help, not with that patina of white film on them. Neither did the mouth. The lips had rotted away, revealing crooked bottle green teeth and gums.
Maybe he was mistaken, Halverson hoped with a sigh of relief.
But then he twigged the dirty cast wrapped around the creature’s left leg and (the capper) the silver Arabic puzzle ring wrapped around the creature’s left forefinger.
Halverson glanced down at an identical ring on his own left forefinger. There was no doubt in his mind now.
“That’s my brother Dan,” he said and, shutting his eyes, clutched his forehead.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
“How can you tell? His face is half-eaten away,” said Victoria.
“When we were teenagers, my mother gave us identical silver puzzle rings and we both put them on the same finger.”
Halverson held up his left forefinger.
She saw the same ring on the creature’s left forefinger. Her breath caught.
“I know what you’re going through,” she said.
“I hate having him walking around like that.”
“Then kill him. Like you killed Shawna,” said Victoria glumly, recalling Shawna’s demise.
Halverson agonized over the idea. “I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I can bring myself to kill my own brother.”
“Remember what you told me about Shawna back in my house? ‘That’s not Shawna anymore,’ you said. ‘It’s one of those things.’”
But it looked like Dan, decided Halverson, and therein lay the problem. It was much easier for him to kill a stranger that had turned into a ghoul than it was for him to kill his own brother that had turned—especially if he had to kill his fake brother by moving in close to it and dashing its brains in. Killing Dan with a bullet would have been easier. But Halverson didn’t have that option.
Shotgun in hand, he gnashed his teeth and took two steps toward Dan then brought up. Halverson could not face wasting Dan. Halverson dropped the shotgun.
“I can’t kill him,” he said.
“I’ll do it for you,” said Victoria, walking up to him.
She leaned over to pick up the shotgun.
At that moment, Halverson spied a pack of at least a dozen ghouls shuffling toward them. Three males—a Korean, a Vietnamese, and a Russian—were lurching at the forefront, their scruffy clothes smoking.
Behind them, back at the barricade of cars, Halverson could make out the fire that engulfed the cars spreading to the pier. Jagged, crackling flames started shooting from the pier’s floorboards on the western side of the barricade, throwing the dark figures of zombies shuffling in front of them into stark relief.
The teeth of the flames gnawed the floorboards like the maw of a ravenous, growling beast chomping its way to the end of the pier.
Several of the creatures closest to the flames staggered away from the lambent yellow blazes with the putrescent flesh melting off their grotesque faces and gleaming like molten wax in the coruscating fire.
“We don’t have time,” said Halverson. “We have to get out of here. There’s only one way out now.”
He grasped her hand and they bolted toward t
he end of the pier.
When they reached the railing, Victoria said, “We have to throw the moneybags onboard.”
Halverson retrieved one of the moneybags from the back of the motor cart. He hauled the moneybag across the pier toward the boat. Straining his back he hoicked the sack up onto the top railing, where Newton the iguana was lying and watching with interest less than two feet away.
Halverson steadied the moneybag on the railing so it wouldn’t fall into the ocean.
“Pull on the painter to bring the boat closer to us,” he said.
Victoria grasped the damp painter and struggled to haul the boat into the wind toward the pier. Holding onto the painter she gasped for breath.
“It’d be easier if the wind wasn’t fighting me,” she said.
“That’s enough. If the boat gets too close to the pier, it might crash into the pier and get damaged. We can’t risk that happening.”
Halverson grabbed the moneybag and heaved it toward the sailboat that was rolling on the incoming waves.
The moneybag plunked onto the shifting deck.
“Good shot,” said Victoria.
“I got lucky. I’m not sure I can do it again,” said Halverson.
His back hurt. He felt like he had hyperextended a muscle in it when he had tossed the moneybag. Hopefully, it was just a twinge.
He retreated to the motor cart and retrieved the other moneybag. He hauled the moneybag across the moist floorboards to the railing. He managed to lift the moneybag onto the railing.
“I’m not gonna be able to jump from here to the boat,” said Victoria.
“Forget it. We’ll break our necks that way.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Halverson picked up on the zombies closing in on them for the kill.
“Then how will we get to the boat?” she asked, eyes wide.
He looked her in the eyes. “You’ll have to get wet.”
She looked scared. “I told you, I can’t swim.”
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 54
