by Rick Chesler
He reached down the rest of the way and unlatched his holster, removing the 9mm. With a last glance at the loading bay employee’s decapitated body lying nearby, oozing a small river of chunky fluid, Starinskovy stuck the barrel of his pistol into his own mouth.
Three crylos ran for him now, accelerating as they drew near. He wondered fleetingly if it would be more painless to be crushed by them, like being struck by one of his own tractor trailers, but then glanced at the headless victim again and decided he didn’t want that no matter what. They say you can still see for a few seconds after your head’s chopped off while there’s still blood in the brain. That dinosaur probably swallowed his head whole…what if the guy could still see and think as he rolled down that thing’s throat?
Starinskovy clenched his teeth so hard around the gun barrel that one of his incisors cracked in half and the barrel cut open the inside of his lip. Then he pulled the trigger and his cranial contents were power-ejected across the concrete wall behind him.
The first of the dinosaurs reached its prey and scooped the dead but still warm body into its mouth. The second beast came and tried to steal it but the first one clenched down. The newcomer separated one of the legs at the hip and absconded with its long, stringy treat. The third arrived too late for any real meat and contented itself with licking the brain matter and blood from the wall while the rest of the pack loped off toward the city’s center.
#
Port of Savannah, GA
An oil tanker steaming into the harbor at Savannah was not an unusual sight. Dozens of the industrial behemoths plied their trade in the harbor and surrounding waters dotted with oil rigs each day. This tanker, however, had been extensively retrofitted to facilitate a specific and unusual purpose.
It carried zombies. Lots of them. Hundreds.
The onboard oil reservoir had been drained of oil and, although it still reeked of petroleum, safety or comfort were not concerns for the tanker’s passengers. Inside the oil tanker’s hold, a crowd of undead milled back and forth in darkness with nowhere to go.
In the ship’s bridge, Captain Ned Whittaker looked not ahead at the crowded waters of the inner harbor, but instead gazed upward, scanning the sky. He frowned, seeing no signs of what he was looking for. His radio exploded with urgent questions from the Harbormaster, and he could no longer put them off.
“Captain of tanker ship, Gulf Oil II, please respond. The harbor pilot has not been able to establish communications.”
Normally, the captain would have ceded control of the ship by now to the harbor pilot. This time, however, that was not going to happen. Whittaker again shot a worried glance to the sky. Where was it? He couldn’t ignore the Harbormaster or put him off too much longer before the Coast Guard would be dispatched to board him by force.
He squeezed the transmit button on his radio, his sweaty finger slipping off of it once before gaining a solid grip, and spoke into the microphone. “Port of Savannah Harbormaster, this is Gulf Oil II acknowledging. Had a technical problem with the starboard prop that we wanted to check out, it seems to be good now, over.” He craned his neck up once again to the sky.
Then a different radio crackled—this one a walkie-talkie on his belt. One of his crew asking if it was time to open the oil bay doors. He swiped up the handheld unit and barked into it.
“Not yet, Malcolm. Standby for command.”
“Roger that, standing by.”
Then the ship’s marine radio: “Harbormaster to Gulf Oil II. Copy that. Sending harbor pilot boat to your port side now for boarding, over.”
The captain clenched his teeth and yet again looked to the air. What more could he do? This wasn’t going according to plan. He would have to call DeKirk, although it definitely wasn’t like him to screw up on plans. Just as he lifted his cell-phone, he heard the faint whumping in the distance, but growing louder by the second. A grin crossed his face. Finally. This has to be it. Still, the port was an extremely busy area for air as well as vessel traffic and he forced himself to wait just a little longer to get a visual confirmation before giving his crew the final orders.
Looking through the windshield of his pilot house, he watched the harbor pilot’s small boat approach his tanker. He had maybe three minutes until that boat would be alongside, but if this aircraft was in fact the one, as it should be, then that should be enough time. The engine noise from above reached a crescendo, and this time, when the captain looked to the airspace he saw it: a blue A-star touring helicopter, exactly the kind DeKirk said would be coming for him.
Knowing the chopper pilot would have visual confirmation of the massive oil tanker, the captain looked grimly ahead and then placed his hand on the throttle control. His radio was blaring chatter from the harbor pilot coming alongside, but he no longer cared. Nodding to himself, he shoved the throttle to Full Ahead, then grabbed his personal backpack from the deck and ran from the pilot house.
He’d already rehearsed the run from the pilot house to the helipad with a stopwatch and knew he could make it in just under sixty seconds. As he ran down a metal stairwell, he shouted commands into his handheld radio. “Caesar, you’re almost clear to roll. Open the doors and prepare to transport your cargo.” He heard the roger reply and reached a catwalk at the bottom of the stairs, turned and sprinted down the narrow straightaway. Everything looked good.
He was dubious about Caesar’s chances to drive an 18-wheeler out of here once they struck the dock, especially a truck loaded with forty tons of something straight out of a nightmare, hopefully still tranquilized, and able to remain so for the three hours it would take to transport it to Atlanta.
There was one more piece of the plan, one that was far more immediate—and brutal. So much so that he shuddered at the thought of the release of the other ‘crew’ he had transported from Antarctica. He brought the radio to his lips once again while he trounced along the side of the ship.
“Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, come in!”
“Right here, captain.”
“Unlock the cargo doors for our guests, and then you know what to do. Get the hell out of there and meet me on the helipad.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The captain ran up another stairway, taking the steps three at a time and looked left as he emerged on an open deck. What he was trying to see was not difficult to spot. It was hard to hide that sleek black 18-wheeler. Although they did try. A black mesh tarp was hung over it to keep prying eyes in the sky from looking down. Having the thing inside on the deck itself meant for the duration it had been closer than he wanted, really, but it was his duty to ensure the asset was delivered according to plan.
Dreadnoughtus schrani was a newly discovered reptile from the fossil record, but of course DeKirk wasn’t working with fossils. This was the real deal. A living, breathing dinosaur larger than a T. rex, larger than a brontosaurus, even. Even though it was a vegetarian, the thing was ridiculously huge, Whittaker thought, and he had been unable to keep from taking a glimpse or two inside during the trip. Just a few times, when Caesar went in to administer another round of tranqs…administered through a giant needle and a hose system.
Caesar was all set—prepped for his adrenaline-fueled mission to come. Malcolm on the other hand had the unenviable job of releasing the plague of zombies upon the Savannah populace.
“Let’s go, Malcolm!” the captain shouted as he ran to the end of the dreadnought deck toward the helipad, where the chopper now hovered just above the red-painted H in a circle on the elevated portion of deck. His crewman acknowledged with a raised hand as he ran from the great cargo doors after releasing the chain and lifting one side so it opened with an enormous clang.
Whittaker didn’t stick around to see what came out of there. He was being compensated well, and DeKirk was not the type to spare expenses or cut corners when it came to his enterprises, but this was no game, and nothing was worse than facing what was down there. He didn’t want to think about the population, and what was to come, but as it had
been laid out to him, it was inevitable. He could either be on the right side of this changing world order, standing with the protected, the victors…or be one of them: the prey, the food, the dead…and the undead.
As the helicopter descended onto the landing pad, Whittaker thought of what would happen when this mission was over, as long as it was successful—and why shouldn’t it be with all of the extensive planning they’d done? He hoped he could get away from the mayhem and violence and rest somewhere away from it all. He didn’t need a private island or a mega-yacht or anything like that. Just a quiet little cottage on the rocky Scottish coast where he could live out his remaining years in rugged, rustic solitude, watching the sunset each night with a glass of fine whiskey. Dulling his senses, drowning out the screams and the nightmares that would surely haunt the rest of his days.
Whittaker reached a ladder that led up to the helipad and started to climb. The roar of the helicopter was deafening now, but also very comforting, for it signaled the end of his journey. It signaled success. He topped over the ladder and emerged onto the helipad. One of the two crew besides himself—his chief mechanic, whom he meant to take with him on the bird—was already on the landing pad, hunched over against the forceful rotor wash. He knew the pilot wouldn’t open the door without consulting the captain, so he gave the visual signal and the door was opened. The mechanic, a trusted DeKirk Enterprises employee for many years, jumped inside while the captain rounded the craft to get to the door. As he did so, he glanced off to his left, down to the deck to check on Malcolm.
This time, the sight was not nearly as encouraging. The captain shook his head in bewilderment. The 18-wheeler was revving its engine, but somehow Malcolm had gotten his foot tripped up in one of the chain links bolted to the deck. The captain watched him pry off one of his rubber deck boots in an attempt to pull his foot free of the chain.
It looked like it may have been about to work, but at that moment the shadows in the brig exploded in a rush of arms, legs, rotting flesh and razor-sharp teeth. In the days that followed, the captain would swear that he could hear Malcolm squealing out for help, even through the helicopter noise, but in seconds he lost sight of the crewman under the onslaught of dozens of zombie figures bursting out of the hold, and falling upon him, thrilled at the gift of a meal so close.
Whittaker turned away, looking past the ship, as the Port of Savannah loomed larger. The converted oil tanker was deep inside the sheltered waterway now, and a little Harbor Patrol boat squealed alongside the mammoth ship, light bar flashing, siren wailing. There was absolutely nothing anyone on it could do. Even emptied of oil, a sixty-thousand ton vehicle with existing momentum simply could not be stopped on short notice.
The captain turned back to the helicopter. Except for poor Malcolm down there, they were ready to go. Sure, there were a few lowly deckhands still down below in the bilge area, having been instructed to stay down there until landing in port, but they didn’t speak English, were undocumented, and most important of all, not easily traced back to DeKirk enterprises. In short, they were expendable…and would only serve to whet the zombie’s appetites after they had finished off Malcolm—or let enough of him remain to be reanimated and join the growing army before it leapt onto the Savannah port.
Whittaker climbed the helicopter’s ladder, even as the stench of the living dead mob reached him. It was choking, almost unbearable—and it rose so fast after being trapped in that hold for so long. After a transoceanic voyage confined in an oil tank with no water or drainage, even on the open deck, the smell of rotting flesh mixed with caked-on urine, feces (the captain flashed on a vodka-infused card game in Antarctica during which he’d won a bet with one of the Russian soldiers that zombies do need to “take a piss,” after he’d chained one up in the corner of the room and waited until it soiled itself), and blood was so revolting as to be an almost palpable, physical threat.
Whittaker stopped climbing about halfway up, reeling from the olfactory assault. He gagged, but pushed himself to resume his ascent. The pilot would have no qualms about leaving him behind, fearing what DeKirk would do to him even more should he fail to complete his objective. He turned back and looked down, one last time, to say goodbye to his ship, to the tanker and the dreadnought, and his eyes then locked on the dispersing crowd near the open cargo doors.
“I’m sorry, Malcolm,” he said to the gore-stained deck and the grotesque bloodstain—all that remained of the man he had just so recently played cards with and shared numerous bottles of vodka.
The captain climbed two more rungs and motioned up to the pilot to lift away. The rotor whine increased in pitch and the helicopter began rising from the deck. Suddenly, Malcolm was there—at the bottom of the ladder, leading the pack of the undead, having pulled away from them. Whittaker marveled at the ability of the corpse to even move, as badly devoured and shredded as it was: right leg stripped almost entirely of flesh below the knee, abdomen torn open and insides all but devoured, revealing the bony pelvis and spinal column; his neck open with a dozen bites and his cheekbones exposed, pink tongue wagging in a mouth of vampiric-looking sharpened teeth that hadn’t been there before.
He lunged and grabbed onto the lowest rung of the ladder just before it was carried beyond his reach.
The captain was too many rungs above to pry his former crewmate loose. “Let go, Malcolm! Stay dead!”Or undead. Damn it, how fast did that transformation happen?
Malcolm tightened his grip, and even more so, his resolve. In a blind fury, a tunnel vision rage that concentrated his every molecule onto a single task, he held onto that ladder as if it were nothing less than life itself.
The aircraft drew out the remaining length of ladder until Whittaker and Malcolm were lifted along with it. The captain could see but not hear the pilot screaming at him to do something while he pointed down at Malcolm. But there was nothing the captain could do. He was worried enough about his own life at the moment, for below, the horde had arrived. As they waited for the ship to crunch into the pier, which was only seconds away, they looked up, hungrily, hoping maybe that Malcolm would shake the ladder loose and drop Whittaker into their midst.
The chopper dipped with the weight, then flew sideways along with the tanker’s motion.
The first zombies, arms outstretched in eager anticipation of a long overdue feeding, crowded under Malcolm, who was now suspended a few feet in the air on the ladder. The helicopter stuttered then dropped when a zombie leapt high, grabbed Malcolm’s ankle and hung on. Whittaker screamed as he looked down and saw the impossible: not only had Malcolm locked on, climbing even, but another zombie had jumped and caught Malcolm’s ankle, and then—others were leaping, connecting, and holding.
They’re making their own goddamned ladder!
Whittaker yelled to the pilot and climbed faster. Got to get inside, kick off the ladder and all this weight and fly off to safe—
Unfortunately, the pilot and the other crewman had reached the same conclusion, along with the certainty that they wouldn’t last the five seconds it would take for Whittaker to finish his ascent.
“Sorry!” the crewman inside the chopper called out as he worked the ladder’s fastening mechanism.
“No, wait!” Whittaker climbed, reaching for the top, for the crewman, even as he mistakenly took a precious second away from his task to look down. He saw the makeshift zombie ladder, and Malcolm’s grinning eyes as he served as the anchor—and two crazy-fast corpses scampering up the bodies of the others, stepping on Malcolm’s head, then leaping up the rungs. They closed the distance fast to Whittaker, who only had an instant to scream before he felt weightless.
The ladder split and fell free from the chopper, which ascended in a rush of wind and mercifully loud rotor noise.
Loud enough even to drown out his screams as he fell thirty feet to just miss the edge of the deck, to land on his back on the choppy, frothy water.
But the soft landing didn’t matter. Seven zombies, including Malcolm, fell with
him. On top of him, under him. They landed and sunk, all in one roiling pile, all of them biting and chomping and rending like sharks to a bleeding, helpless, drowning prey.
The last thing he heard, muffled and echoing in the underwater depths, was the sound of his former vessel crunching into the pier, where the rest of the zombie army—and the monstrous dreadnought—would be released onto the mainland.
Part 2: Patient 0
13.
Langley, Virginia
The fact that the CDC maintained an outpost inside the CIA’s headquarters was one that was little known, and yet, it made great sense. With the advent of bio-weapons, and with biological warfare on the rise, coordination between the two agencies had been increasingly necessary.
Alex and Elsa Ramirez found themselves escorted by a pair of armed U.S. soldiers along with a contingent of hazmat specialists into a windowless conference room. Ergonomic chairs surrounded a wooden table wired for communications over a slate gray, thin carpet.
A trio of upper echelon CDC division managers were already seated at the table, a battery of electronic devices spread out before them including smartphones, tablets and notebook computers. Alex didn’t care. What mattered now was that his mom was finally okay. After all these years of suffering, the uncertainty, the stress of ineffective treatments, at last she was beginning to show real improvement. Nothing could spoil that, not even a sterile debriefing environment with a bunch of government drones.
Yet, as he watched his mother slip into a seat, he knew that something wasn’t quite right. That place where they’d had to escape at gunpoint…the improbability of it all….he wished he could understand it better, to make certain that she was really okay. He seated himself directly across from her so that he could look at her closely. The lighting was bright, more than sufficient to conduct a visual examination of her features, which he did while the officials looked on in silence, aware of what he was doing.
