by H. L. Murphy
The doctor drew in several deep, cleansing breaths. That was not his worry at the moment. Subject B required his attention.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Voyage of the Churchill
Our triumphant return came at a critical juncture as it turned out.
Lizzy, my beautiful, kindhearted wife had taken up her shotgun, and was currently straddling the prone form of one Farrah Fuckwit. The muzzle of said weapon rested none too comfortably over Farrah’s left eye. I could hear my wife shouting the kind of language she usually gave me a hard time for using. Through it all I could just make out a smile on Farrah's face. I was having a bad day for smiling assholes.
“Honey, I'm home,” I shouted as I literally carried His Royal Corpulence, Carroll the Obese over the gunwale. With each passing second I could feel my vertebrae compacting under his weight. In response to my hail, I heard a string of obscenity come from my wife that should have burnt the paint from the bulkheads and scoured the deck. “Nice to know things have gone so well in my absence.”
I walked up behind my wife slowly, making sure to make enough noise so as not to surprise her. After the days events the last thing I needed was a spooked wife to blow the nearly useless cunt’s head clean off. At least, not until I weaseled the location of our missing supplies from the sociopathic bitch. No, I don’t have any residual sympathy for Farrah’s ordeal in the Q Zone. She placed my family, my people, in extreme danger with her choices.
“Honey? Whatcha doin?” I asked as sweetly as possible without being insulting.
“I'm about to end this miserable cunt’s life,” Lizzy shouted, pressing the barrel of her shotgun down harder. My wonderful wife fairly vibrated with anger. In all our life together I'd only ever seen her this way once. Interpersonal conflict with her mother. Every bit as bad as you might imagine.
“Okay, can we maybe hold off on ending that miserable cunt’s life?” I said calmly as I moved up next to Lizzy. If Lizzy was bound and determined to kill Farrah, there was little I could do to stop her. Still, it was a burden I didn't want her carry. There is a reason I call everything I'd been through ‘nightmare fuel’. “At least until I understand why she needs to stop having a head.”
“I caught this waste of skin in the cargo hold,” Lizzy explained. “Trying to break into a bunch of crates”
An explosion of worry went off in my bowels as I could all but picture the crates in question.
“Steel crates with Cyrillic writing on them?” I asked with noticeable frost. My eyes were locked onto Farrah.
“Yes,” Lizzy shouted, then turned slightly to gaze at me. “How did you know that?”
“It's the only thing in the cargo hold worth steeling,” I said softly, gently guiding my wife away from the edge of the abyss. With great caution I moved the barrel of the shotgun from Farrah’s eye, though the moment the woman attempted to get up I drove her back down with the heel of my boot. I stood over her, boot firmly planted across her chest, just above her breasts. I'm an asshole, I'm just not that kind of asshole. “How about I escort this useless flap of skin and bones back to her cell, and you go say hello to Carroll the one handed wonder?”
Lizzy seemed ready to argue Farrah’s immediate fate, but gave ground on the basis of Carroll’s miraculous return. Watching her stride over to the collapsed lump of dumb ass that was Carroll Rivers, all I could feel was the swelling of my heart with my love for Lizzy.
Of course, that didn't stop me from clamping a scarred, powerful hand around Farrah’s scrawny neck, and haul her from the deck. Though not the whole way up. I brought her high enough she could walk, only just, but not so high as to make her comfortable. Moreover, it was clear if Farrah took a bad step I'd simply drag her body along without stopping. Motivation, it comes in many forms.
Back in her cell, I tossed Farrah against the wall none too kindly.
“So it turns out I don't need you to find the missing engine parts,” I opened the conversation. Anger coursed through every cell of my body. “And in the course of rescuing Carroll, James and I acquired more supplies, so it's looking less and less as though I need you alive for any reason. So why shouldn't I hand out bait bats and string you up like a piñata?”
“You won't kill me,” Farrah sneered. “That bitch might have killed me. She was shaking so badly I thought she was going to yank the trigger by mistake. You need me. You need what I have, and what I can give you.”
“What's that? A scorching case of herpes? The clap? Syphilis?” I suggested. “No thanks, I've had that offer before and it wasn't any more tempting then than now.”
At some point while I was speaking, Farrah seemed to transform from the waif like sociopath I knew into a hate fueled waif like sociopath because she leapt at my face with fingers curled like claws. Six weeks again she would have sliced my face to ribbons, but I'd been playing in another league all together since then. So instead of shredded face of Finnegan, Farrah found herself being driven into the back wall of her cell by a large steel toed boot. She collapsed to the floor, not an atom of oxygen in her lungs. The gasping, sucking noises of forcibly emptied lungs seeking to refill filled the steel box of her cell.
“Let me make our current situation painfully clear,” I said, watching for the first sign of attack. “A category five hurricane is bearing down on us as we speak, and I don't have anymore time to waste on you. So either you justify your continued presence here, or I throw your ass overboard.”
Her eyes, when they met mine, burned with hatred fueled by insanity, or insanity fueled by hatred I didn't know. It was impossible to tell. It crossed my mind the best course of action I could undertake involved splattering her brain with my forth-five, securing her ankles to an anchor, and dumping her for the sharks to snack on. If I gave this animal a chance, she would cut my heart out and eat it while I died.
Metal scraping against leather informed us both my subconscious had already made a decision. The cool wooden grips of the Colt revolver felt right in my hand as my thumb pulled the hammer back. All that remained between Farrah and a well deserved ending was a few pounds of pressure to be exerted by my finger.
“I know what's in the crate,” Farrah snarled. “I know.”
“That don't win you anything,” I said coldly, settling the barrel inches from her forehead. “If anything, that's just another reason to end you.”
Her eyes focused on the muzzle, a cold, black emptiness from which blinding death would erupt. The end was fast approaching and even knowing it to be true, Farrah fought to deny me any potential advantage. Her own fate being tied to ours meant nothing to her if she weren't in a position of control. It wasn't enough to survive, she needed to dominate us. Tendons tightened, the pad of my finger pressed against the curve of the trigger, and I could visualize the bullet leaving the barrel to burrow through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate brain matter. The bullet sped through the hopes, dreams, thoughts, fears, and memories of the woman once known as Farrah, to explode out the back of her skull. In the end, the entrance and exit of the bullet would horribly deform Farrah's skull rendering her unrecognizable and prime nightmare fuel. I would carry the burden of her death on my soul even though I'd done what I could to avoid this moment. I was out of time and needed to move past this encounter to saving my people.
A low sigh slipped between my lips, and that seemed to make the moment real for Farrah. It suddenly dawned in her eyes that death, with a capitol ‘D’, stood before her about to render judgement.
“I moved the parts Carroll stored in the machine shop,” she blurted.
“Why?” I asked.
“Leverage,” she said evenly.
“Over moments like this?” I wondered.
“Exactly like this,” she agreed. “Don't kill me and I'll show you where they are.”
A part of me wanted to say, fuck it, and move along with the executing of this particular problem, but the practical part made a convincing argument to keep her alive in order to restore both engines to operationa
l status. Besides, I could always kill her later. Chances were, she'd give me cause.
Moving too fast for Farrah to follow I holstered the revolver and lifted her from the floor, hand clamped around her throat.
“Where?” I breathed the word in her face.
“Cargo hold,” Farrah gasped.
Still not experiencing warm feelings for Farrah, I repeated the earlier mode of transporting her. This time, though, I was moving faster and she may have gagged a few times as her feet failed to keep up. Got a problem with me for that? Let's see how easy going you'd be after enduring the consequences of her actions for weeks on end. You know, the whole thing about her chucking half our fresh meet because she's a fucking vegan activist incapable of accepting her view isn’t the only one, and likely not the healthiest, oh, and stealing the goddamn supplies James and I risked our asses for. Jesus Jones, thinking about it, I'm surprised I haven't shot her yet.
“Where?” I demanded, releasing my grip to watch her fall to the deck. Farrah made a big production of gasping and coughing, unable to stop acting even now. I slid the revolver from its place and she collected herself in record time. Climbing to her feet, Farrah led the way to small, dark corner I hadn't even realized was there. It was here I decided to keep a little distance between us, just in case. As far as I knew, the sociopath had secreted a weapon along with the parts.
“You can't keep it a secret forever,” Farrah cooed from the corner. “It's too big. You'll need to tell someone, sooner or later. Can you imagine how that person will react? They'll turn on you when they find out.”
“Zip the lip, and give me the parts,” I demanded, thumbing the hammer back quietly. She hadn't glanced back at me since getting down on her knees to open what I assumed was a vent cover.
“They'll hate you,” she continued, swaying slightly. “They'll turn on you. Even your bitch will turn on you. She'll hate you, because of what you are. What you can do, what you will do.”
“Very carefully,” I announced calmly. “Raise your hands over your head, and if I see anything but engine parts, I'm going to pop your melon.”
“Of course,” Farrah said, slowly raising her hands, clutching the missing parts. “I'm the only one who knows what's in the crate. I know, and I won't turn on you. I'll stay with you.”
Did this fucking sociopath think she could talk me into abandoning my family? Over the contents of the crate? Maybe she figured if she repeated her fantasy often enough she could make it real.
“They'll turn on you, but I won't. I know what you are, and it is wonderful,” she continued, still swaying slightly. Unnoticed until this moment was the nearly silent ticking produced when Farrah's thigh impacted a rusting shelf.
Holy fuck! She was trying to hypnotize me. The calm tone, the repeated sentiments, and the tonal repetition. She was genuinely trying to hypnotize me into being her whatever. I stepped forward as she continued.
“I will always stay…ow!” She yelled as I slapped her left ear with the barrel of my revolver. The parts clattered to the ground, and I seized Farrah by her hair. I drug the apparently multi-talented sociopath across the bay. Stowed away in a small box of necessaries I found what I was looking for.
Duct tape.
Wrapping her wiggling, struggling ass up proved a challenge, but the old sentiment was true. Enough duct tape will fix anything.
“Well, I have to say, I did not see hypnotism coming,” I said as I taped Farrah to a wall. “Although it might explain why a normally trustworthy man like Carroll would turn on his brothers. Personally, I thought it was demon vagina magic, and I haven't entirely given up on you being a succubus. So maybe demon vagina magic is still in play, but I can't deny the proof before my eyes. Thing is, since my little change I've become exceeding concerned about mental coercion. You never had a chance, you little devil you.”
A veritable cornucopia of verbal abuse stung my ears as Farrah released her anger on me.
“Oh, and I don't believe for a minute you actually know what's in the crate,” I said as I collected the engine parts. “If you did, there's no way in hell you wouldn't jump off this boat.”
I left her there, duct taped to the wall, and went to find the Buffalo. He would need to work the problem while I did my best to get us the hell out of the path of the storm. If I could figure that out. Historically, though, the path of a category five hurricane is basically the Atlantic Ocean. Best we could hope for would be to gain some sea room and ride the storm out. Easy, huh? Yeah, maybe if you spent the past forty years at sea in all weather. I'd only been out for the past few weeks.
I grabbed the nearest public address receiver and started barking orders.
“This is the captain speaking,” I barked. “Repairs to the non functional engine are under way, in the mean time we need to secure all hatches, portholes, covers, every damn thing that might leak needs to be secured.”
Rain fell in sheets so thick I couldn't see the bow of the Churchill. A few switches angrily flipped, and the boat’s running lights flared to life.
“Angus,” Lizzy called from behind me.
“What? I'm a little preoccupied,” I snarled. Stress piled high on my shoulders, crushing polite from me the closer to potential disaster we came.
“Your daughter wanted to see you,” Lizzy said as calmly as she could manage. My firecracker of a wife does not suffer fools, or snippy husbands, lightly. I turned to see my little angel holding her mother’s leg, and gazing up at me with the most beautiful blue eyes ever gifted a child. Timidly, she stepped forward and held her arms up for me. Shit day or not, my little girl needed to be held by her daddy. Her rock in the quickly changing world. And, to be honest, maybe I needed to hold her to remind myself not everything in the new world was a nightmare waiting to happen. We stood there clinging to one another for a long time. Hugging that tiny life to me shaved so much hurt from my soul. Hermione raised her little head to plant a slobbery kiss on my cheek, and I felt my troubled spirit lighten while my exhausted mind focused with renewed determination. My little girl held absolute faith in my ability to do anything, do everything. Time to prove her right.
“Take her to our cabin,” I said to Lizzy in a far more suitable tone. “I'll get us through this.”
“I know,” Lizzy smiled and kissed me in that special way which promised much more.
As they walked away, Hermione looked over her mother’s shoulder at me and spoke.
“I love you, daddy.”
“I love you too, baby.”
Well, I can't possibly fail with that kind of belief backing me up.
I moved over to the engine room speaker.
“Engine Room, Bridge,” I barked. “I want full power to the operational engine. Then I want the port side engine running as soon as possible. No excuses. It runs, or we die.”
Standing at the wheel of the Churchill I thought I could almost reach out across time and space with my mind to touch every ship’s captain who ever faced something as terrible as this. Almost seemed as though I could sense their individual fears and their collective resolution to survive.
In reality, I did no such thing. I was psyching myself up to face the unimaginable fury of the sea. Simple, right? After all, hadn't I faced not just one, but three separate Class One zombies, and their hordes? Balls of brass that's me.
Lightning flashed, revealing the turmoil of the storm and underscoring how incredibly stupid my previous statement truly was. What were a few demigods compared to the power of the sea? No zombie walking the face of this or any other planet could equal the destructive potential of the Atlantic.
Not that I had any choice at all, but to take us out. As little as I knew about sailing, I knew we'd end up beat to hell against the shore unless we put some distance between us and the Treasure Coast.
With a deep breath, I spun the wheel and took us away from shore and into the teeth of the storm.
Epilogue
Dmitri hated Americans.
It wasn't a matter of ideo
logical differences, oh, no. He hated Americans because they were all soft, all stupid, and all reckless. If asked for proof of his claims, Dmitri would stoically point to the debacle which taken place on the Arleigh Burke class destroyer.
American security had failed to properly restrain the subject.
American doctors had failed to prepare the holding area in case the subject escaped.
American officers had failed give the necessary orders required to save the crew, the ship, and the subject.
Now, most of his team of Spetznaz were dead because of Americans. Only Sasha and Ivan had made it out of the superstructure alive, and only Sasha remained in the RHIB. Ivan had been bitten on the way out of the superstructure, and had killed himself rather than become a threat to his brothers. Such courage. Such loyalty.
Despite his feelings, this was not the time to mourn the loss of so close a friend. It would come, and Dmitri and Sasha would drain gallons of vodka together. Now though, there was only the mission. Certain critical samples had been obtained before events had spiraled out of control. Now, the mission was to deliver the samples to an American research facility under military control. Once there, the Americans would engineer a vaccine for the fucking zombie virus. Surely not even the Americans could fuck that up.
“Dmitri, what is that?” Sasha’s deep voice boomed through the rain. His sausage like finger pointed through the night at something, something in the ocean. Whatever it was seemed to be moving, waving at them.
“Probably another fucking American,” Dmitri muttered. “Determined to screw up our mission even more. Goddamn pricks.”
“He may be of use,” Sasha suggested. “We should at least interrogate him.”
“I'd rather kill him. Make me feel better about losing our brothers,” Dmitri said, moving the boat to intercept the bobbing man.
