Gaining his footing on the moist deck, Reno fired shotgun blasts at the gyrating mob.
Halverson followed suit, picking off ghouls like they were targets in a turkey shoot.
When his shotgun clicked empty, he tossed it down and sprang for the bollard on the dock to unfasten the painter.
He was in the act of unwinding the painter when the vanguard of the creatures reached the boat.
Reno snagged a box of Remington Sluggers that Halverson had unloaded from the shopping cart onto the main deck. Reno fumbled the box open, spilling some of the cartridges in his haste. He jammed as many of the remaining ones as he could fit into the shotgun’s magazine.
Victoria and Reno opened up on the ghouls with barrages from their shotguns, providing Halverson with cover fire.
Upset by the ruckus, Newton the iguana was crawling restively around on the sailboat’s prow. He had recently grown his tail back after a ghoul had torn it off in Santa Monica. He was now swiping his tail back and forth and inflating his dewlap in his restlessness.
Halverson thought Newton might try to jump ship the way he was acting. Halverson had become attached to the iguana and wished he wouldn’t leave. The iguana was a survivor like the rest of them, bloodied but not bowed.
Halverson hurried to untie the painter. Make haste slowly, he told himself. Festina lente, as the ancient Romans used to say.
One of the ghouls stepped off the jetty and onto the sailboat’s deck.
Reno swung his shotgun’s barrel at the creature and clouted its head.
Logy, the creature stumbled backward. Reno thrust his shotgun’s muzzle into the creature’s chest and shoved the ghoul over the gunwale into the choppy ocean. The ghoul flipped head over heels into the dark waters and splashed Reno in the face.
Blowing moisture off his lips Reno wiped the seawater off his face with his left hand.
Halverson finished unfastening the painter as a short, middle-aged ghoul wearing a Yankees baseball cap and wire-rimmed spectacles squinted at him and stepped off the jetty toward the boat.
Reno rushed up to the ghoul and repelled borders, shoving the creature away from the gunwale with his shotgun muzzle before the creature could step aboard. The creature plummeted into the ocean.
A withered-up middle-aged Korean women shuffled along the jetty in a ragged black dress, wielding a furled black umbrella with its ferrule aimed at Reno. Reno dodged the steel spike that protruded from the ferrule as it glanced past his right eye.
It almost seemed like she had tried to take out his eye, decided Reno. But those creatures didn’t know how to use weapons, did they? Reno broke out into a sweat. If they did, that was a whole new ballgame—something he didn’t even want to consider. She was probably so uncoordinated she didn’t know what she was doing with the umbrella. Probably. He hoped, anyway. Hell, she didn’t even know what the thing was for.
He blew the Korean ghoul’s thin head off without a second thought. The head and brain exploded like a bowl full of slugs as the body pirouetted and toppled into the ocean.
Reno recoiled in disgust.
A blonde Russian woman in her forties came dashing out of a greasy spoon on the side of the road nearest the beach. She ran toward the sailboat, screaming something in Russian and waving her hands to them. She was wearing an ocher dress and was running in high heels that were slowing her gait.
Halverson was about to cast off from the dock when he spotted her.
“She’ll never make it,” said Reno.
“Let’s help her,” said Victoria.
“How?”
Halverson weighed his next move. The problem was, the ghouls were thronging on the pier and were nearly on top of the boat. More of them would start jumping onboard any second. He didn’t know how much longer Reno and Victoria could hold them at bay by shooting and prodding them with their shotguns as they were doing now.
A knot of ghouls on the road surrounded the Russian woman. One of the creatures latched onto the Russian’s arm and yanked on it, cracking and snapping the arm out of its socket. The creature raised the arm to its green teeth and gnawed on the bloody limb.
Blood gushed out of the Russian’s shoulder onto the street. She screamed in pain, her face ashen.
Another ghoul glommed on to her other arm and heaved on it till it tore free, its tendons snapping. Blood now spurted out of both of her mutilated shoulders, drenching her flanks.
On the boat Victoria jerked her head away, shocked at the woman’s plight.
As Victoria looked away, another ghoul closed in on the Russian with its yawning mouth. The ghoul bit down on the woman’s throat and tore out the carotid artery.
The blood-soaked woman fell to the street, her gashed throat a torrent of blood as the ghoul stood over her and chewed voraciously on the hunk of flesh from her throat.
“Don’t tell me you still can’t bring yourself to shoot those things after you witnessed that,” Reno told Parnell, who stood petrified watching a clutch of the ghouls now disemboweling the supine, armless Russian.
She was beyond help, Halverson knew.
Standing on the rocking boat, he cast off from the dock.
At the same moment, a one-eyed fortysomething male ghoul with black hair stepped off the dock to board the boat. The creature was wearing a black business suit and a red silk necktie, both of which looked in better shape than its rotted, wrinkled face. Oddly, the only feature on the creature’s head that wasn’t suffering from decay was its black hair.
The ghoul headed straight for Reno.
Chapter 22
As the ghoul descended through the air, Reno jammed his shotgun’s muzzle into the creature’s chest.
Thrown backward, the ghoul slammed the back of its head against the ends of the dock’s floorboards with a sickening thud. The creature dropped and disappeared under the waves.
Everything was happening so quickly, it seemed a blur to Halverson. He was forced to act reflexively rather than logically to what happened next.
A large comber came in and pitched the boat toward the barnacle-engirdled pilings.
Halverson bounded to the steering wheel and managed to veer the boat away from the jetty before the pilings cracked his hull. It was a near miss that could have been catastrophic for them.
At the wheel, he fetched a heartfelt sigh of relief.
Hundreds of ghouls were crowding onto the jetty, crammed against each other so tightly in their anxiety to reach the sailboat that some of them were spilling off into the drink.
Reno wiped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief from his rear trouser pocket. “Those things scare the hell out of me.”
“You’re not the only one,” said Halverson.
His adrenaline-fueled heart was still thumping wildly.
“You know why they’re so scary?” said Parnell, trembling.
“Because they want to kill us,” said Reno.
“No. It’s because we’re scared of what we can’t see. We’re scared of the unknown.”
“What are you blathering about? We can see them right there.” Reno nodded at the ghouls teeming on the dock.
“We’re scared of what those infected people represent. They represent pestilence. We’re terrified of diseases because we can’t see them. We can only see the results of them.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m scared of one of those things champing down on my throat.”
“Hollywood has it all wrong. It’s not the giant King Kong monsters and dinosaurs that scare us. It’s the tiny things that frighten us the most. The things we can’t see. The things we can’t understand. The microbes that get into our bodies and start destroying us from within without our knowledge.”
“You’re scaring me with talk like that, Doc,” said Victoria. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“You’re starting to scare me more than those ghouls are,” said Reno. “Am I reading you right? Are you saying we could all be infected by the plague that ginned up the ghouls and not know it?�
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“This is what’s so frightening,” said Parnell. He started pacing around the deck in frustration. “We simply don’t know. We need to do research on one of the infected. That’s why it’s vital that I have a human specimen.”
“It was either you or him,” said Halverson. “If you were still hanging onto that specimen with your snake pole, you’d be one of them by now.”
“I’m not arguing with you about that. All I’m saying is that we need to get our hands on a specimen so we can find out what’s causing this plague.”
Halverson knew the disease was a mutation of H5N1 that was manmade, but he didn’t see how that helped them. The CIA had found out the truth and now it was doing everything possible to prevent anyone from finding out about it. The Agency, i.e., the government, didn’t want anyone to know that the USA had helped engineer the virus.
“I heard a news report on TV that it’s H5N1,” he said, which was a lie. He hadn’t heard it on TV.
“H5N1 doesn’t cause zombies,” said Parnell. “But it does have almost a hundred percent kill ratio. I’ve never seen any reports that said it created zombies.”
“It’s a new strain.”
Parnell shook his head. “H5N1 doesn’t spread easily from infected individuals.”
“This new strain does.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Where did you hear this?” Reno asked Halverson, cocking an eyebrow inquisitively. “What news report?”
Halverson didn’t want to go into this. “I heard it on TV before the power went haywire.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Halverson shrugged. “Believe what you want.”
“I don’t see how you can know so much more about this disease than the rest of us.”
“What do you mean?” asked Parnell.
“First, he knows how to kill the things—by shooting them in the head. And now he tells us what caused the things. Where does he get his intel from?”
“I told you,” said Halverson. “I heard it on TV.”
“But none of the TVs or phones or Internet or anything work.”
“Not anymore. But the TV was broadcasting for a while.”
“So you say.”
“Where do you think I got my information from?”
“I have no idea. That’s what I find puzzling.”
“There is no cure for H5N1,” pointed out Parnell.
“Thanks for that cheery bit of news,” chipped in Victoria.
“But we can’t be sure this is H5N1,” said Reno.
Parnell changed the subject. “I just wish I could make some sense out of all this.”
“There must be some point to this insanity,” said Victoria.
The farther they pulled away from the ghoul-infested dock, the calmer she felt. She had thought her heart was going to explode the way it was pounding when she was fleeing from the ghouls back there.
“Just because you want there to be a point doesn’t mean there is one,” said Reno.
“My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, because nobody knows anything,” said Victoria.
Sea spray in his face, Reno leaned his hands on the gunwale and peered over the water at the ghouls rummaging around on the jetty. “We’re all fucked. That’s all I know.”
“Just because the whole world’s going to hell doesn’t mean we have to,” said Halverson, steadying the sailboat’s wheel.
“Get a load of Confucius.”
As Reno turned with a smirk on his face to look at Halverson, he heard and saw motion on the companionway beneath the wheelhouse.
The silhouette of a young woman appeared at the head of the companionway.
“Oh shit,” said Reno. “Not another one.”
He reached for his shotgun that he had laid on the deck.
Chapter 23
All of nineteen years old with green eyes and curly chestnut hair that cascaded halfway down her back, the five eight Brittany Pine stood wide-eyed with a grime-streaked oval face at the head of the companionway looking for all the world like a doe that had stumbled for the first time upon humans in the forest. She was wearing torn jeans and a tangerine blouse with one of its arms ripped off.
Reno pumped his shotgun and trained it on her. “One of those things must’ve crawled onboard while we were out foraging.”
“Wait a minute,” said Victoria. “I don’t think she’s one of them.”
“Of course she is. Look at the way she’s dressed. In rags, just like those other ghouls.”
Reno cocked his Mossberg’s hammer.
“Hold it,” said Parnell. “Look at her eyes. They’re green. Not white like infected victims’ eyes.”
“What’s your name?” Reno demanded. “How did you get here?”
Nonplussed, Brittany stared at the muzzle of the shotgun leveled at her.
“She can’t talk,” said Reno. “She must be one of them.” He shouldered his shotgun with Brittany in his sights.
“Look how scared she is,” said Victoria. “Why, she’s scared stiff.” Hesitant at first, not fully convinced Brittany was human, she darted to Brittany’s side.
Victoria reached for Brittany’s wrist, clasped it, and felt for Brittany’s pulse.
“Be careful,” said Reno. “Don’t touch her! You’ll get that disease!”
“She’s OK,” said Victoria, releasing Brittany’s wrist. “She’s got a pulse. She’s as alive as you or I.”
Brittany seemed calmer after Victoria touched her and didn’t have that deer-in-the-headlights cast to her eyes.
“But her clothes are messed up and she’s got dirt on her face,” objected Reno.
When Brittany set her voluptuous green eyes on Reno, he found himself willy-nilly relaxing his hold on the shotgun and lowering it a few inches.
“I tell you, she’s OK,” said Victoria.
“Maybe she’s OK for now but will change any moment into one of those things.”
“How do we know we won’t do the same thing?” said Parnell.
“Yeah, maybe one of those things bit her,” said Reno, ignoring Parnell. “If she got bit, she’ll turn into one of them.”
Victoria examined Brittany’s body, casting around for signs of teeth marks on her flesh. “I don’t see any bites on her. I don’t even see a cut.”
“Who are you?” Reno demanded again.
Brittany found her voice, though it came out faltering. “I’m Brittany Pine. My boyfriend and I were trying to hide on this boat when those creatures attacked us. They killed him.” She began weeping.
“I saw him on the jetty,” chimed in Halverson, corroborating her story.
“Where did you come from?” Reno asked Brittany.
“I’m an art student at UCSB,” Brittany answered.
“Are there any more like you around here?” asked Halverson.
“What do you mean?”
“Uninfected humans.”
“I don’t know of any. That’s why Don and I were trying to get on this boat and get out of here.”
“Don?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Is the whole city infected?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been all over town. UCSB is infected. I was at my art class when those creatures poured into the lecture room and attacked everyone for no reason at all. They just started tearing everyone apart and eating them.” Brittany sobbed at the memory. “I ran for my life and found Don in his dorm room. We thought the beach might be safe so we came here.”
“We don’t want to hear your life story,” said Reno. “We just want to know if anyone’s alive around here.”
Annoyed at his callousness, Victoria glared at Reno. “Haven’t you any decency?”
Reno raised his eyebrows, looking smug.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” said Brittany. “The cannibals are running amok all over the city, killing everybody in sight.”
“It’s just like LA,” grunted Reno, his eyes flat stones.
“Are
you gonna kill me?” said Brittany, staring with consternation at the shotgun in his hands.
“Why would we want to kill you, dear?” asked Victoria.
“I thought you were one of those things,” said Reno.
“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” said Brittany.
“Tell anyone what?”
“About the money.”
“What money?” put in Parnell. “What are you talking about?”
Reno shot a black look at Brittany.
“Don saw the two sacks on the deck and wondered what was in them,” said Brittany. “We peeked inside.”
“What’s this all about?” asked Parnell. He searched everyone’s face after hearing Brittany’s revelation. “Are we carrying money on this boat?”
“I don’t care if you stole it. It’s none of my business,” said Brittany.
“That’s why you two wanted to take this boat, isn’t it?” Reno said, his eyes accusatory. “It’s all about the money.”
“No! We were running for our lives. We wanted any boat we could find. We found out about the money afterward.”
“Whoa!” said Parnell, holding up his hands, discombobulated. “What’s this about money?”
“There’s money in those sacks,” said Brittany. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” she added in puzzlement.
“You’re way ahead of me. I didn’t know there was any money on this boat.” Parnell faced the others. “So I’ve hooked up with a gang of robbers, huh?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Reno. “That money was already on the boat when I boarded.”
“The money’s ours now,” said Victoria.
“But it used to be somebody else’s. Is that what you’re saying?” said Parnell.
“All money used to be somebody else’s.”
“She’s got you there, Doc,” said Reno with a smirk curling a corner of his lips.
Victoria was one part artistic dress designer and two parts hardheaded businesswoman. She had to be to survive in her profession as a couturiere. The fact was that the commercial world of dress designing was a rough-and-tumble one. You had to have a business sense, even more so than artistic talent, in order to survive it. In short, she knew the value of a dollar.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 63
