Stay Dead | Book 1 | Wild Undead

by Mortimer, L. C.

“I grew up in a small town,” Isaiah started, ignoring her. “I was raised by my mom because my dad died when I was little. She didn’t get married again. Said she was too busy with us kids to even think about dating.”

  “How many kids are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Four.”

  “Not too many,” I pointed out.

  “Still a lot of mouths to feed,” Greta murmured.

  “Mom is a cool lady,” Isaiah continued. “She worries about me and my siblings a lot. Sometimes I worry about her, too, though.”

  “She’s still around?” I asked.

  “Still around. Still kicking. Still fighting. I still hope she’ll meet a guy to keep her happy. You know, we’re all moved out now and she doesn’t need to be alone. It’s not a good idea to be alone for too long.”

  “She sounds cool,” I told him.

  “She’s the one who thought I needed to take this trip,” Isaiah said. “She thinks I work too much, which is true.”

  “What’s your job?” Greta asked.

  “I’m a graphic designer for a media firm,” Isaiah said.

  Greta and I both looked at him, blinking.

  “Basically, I have no usable survival skills, so it’s a good thing we have Grandma here to take care of us.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Greta snapped, but I saw the hint of a smile that spread over her face before she forced it to disappear. “I have a name. You’ll do well to remember that.”

  “Sorry, Greta. I just miss my Gran. You remind me of her a little bit.”

  “Because I’m old?”

  “Because you’re smart. Clever. Because I think people probably underestimate you.”

  “You’re not wrong,” she admitted.

  We were silent for a few minutes and I realized I should probably go next. Greta obviously didn’t want to share a lot about her life, but I could share about mine. We’d all gone on the cruise for different reasons, I knew. That was the problem with meeting people on a ship.

  Sometimes, people were running from something. Sometimes they just wanted to relax. You never really could tell much about people until you got them talking. Then it became easier to sort the truth from the lies, but it was never completely possible.

  “My friend invited me on the cruise,” I said.

  “Sorry about your friend,” Isaiah whispered.

  I just shrugged. I was sorry about Angela, too. It was strange to think that I now lived in a world where she no longer existed. It was horrible to think about the fact that I was in a world where Angela was no longer alive. All of the people I met in the future would never know about her unless I told them. People wouldn’t know just how important she’d been to me unless I decided to share those stories.

  It wasn’t like someone would meet both of us at a bar and think, “Woah, those girls look like they’re the best of friends.”

  There would be nothing else like that.

  “It’s fine,” I lied. We’d all lost people, or we were all going to. If the virus was as widespread as I was starting to think that it was, then we were all going to be without the people we loved. “Her boyfriend backed out of the trip. I took his ticket.”

  “Did you at least have fun before the attack?” Isaiah asked.

  “The best time,” I nodded. “My feet still hurt from dancing.”

  “Oh, I went to the club last night,” Isaiah said. “Or was it the night before? I don’t know. It was fun though.”

  “Yeah, I had a good time,” I said. “Only now, I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do. I don’t really have anyone who is going to miss me.”

  No boyfriend. No girlfriend. Not even a cat.

  “That’s good,” Greta said. “Then you won’t do anything stupid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you miss people, you make rash choices to try to get back to them,” she explained. “This is a big problem.”

  “That’s probably true,” I admitted. “Don’t worry, though. There’s going to be no journey home for me. I guess I’ll figure out what I’m going to do next once we land somewhere. Think there will still be planes flying home?”

  Mostly, I wanted to know what Greta thought our odds were for actually making it home.

  “No way to tell,” she said. “We were on one cruise ship. Everyone got sick fast, though. Imagine what things are like back home. People could be sick there, too.”

  “Do you think this was like, a lab experiment gone wrong?” Isaiah asked.

  “I think you play too many video games,” she responded.

  “I do not.”

  “You do.”

  “It’s a valid question.”

  “It could be,” she shrugged. “It could be an attack. Biowarfare. It could be anything. We’ll probably never know. Whatever it was, it was successful.”

  “Too successful,” I whispered.

  We sat there for a long time, gently moving through the water. Even though it was loud, and the waves were still crashing, Greta was still guiding us.

  I didn’t know where she was taking us. I didn’t know if we’d reach our destination. All I knew was that whatever happened next was going to change everything.

  Chapter 9

  Greta

  THE KIDS WANTED TO play get-to-know-you games, but I just wanted to live. I might be retired, but I was nowhere close to being ready to kick the bucket. It was much more important to me that we find a place to land this little boat. The zombie on top of the lifeboat was making me more nervous than I was letting on.

  The damn thing just wouldn’t quit. Why not? It had been splashed. It had been pushed by the wind. Still, it hung on. We weren’t exactly moving at a leisurely pace, so why was it still there?

  Despite my exhaustion and the fact that I wasn’t feeling very friendly, I knew that Isaiah and Winter were right. We were going to be surviving this mess together, it seemed, and one of the most important parts of having a team was knowing was skills and assets everyone brought to the table.

  “I’ve got grandkids,” I told them. “Kids, too.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be trying to get home to them?” Winter asked softly. I knew why she was asking me that. I’d just told her that having a family was bad because it meant you’d be distracted. I really believed that.

  I also believed that having a family was good because it gave you hope. It gave you incredible hope. When you had a family, you knew someone out there was always thinking about you and wishing for you. It meant you knew someone was thinking about how important you were. Someone was loving you even when you had a hard time loving yourself.

  “Yes,” I said. “It does mean that.”

  “How many grandkids?”

  “Quite a few. All ages. Even some babies in there.”

  “I bet they miss you,” Winter offered.

  “Thanks, Winter.”

  “So, what made you choose this ship?”

  “Trust me. If I’d had a choice, I would have chosen something totally different. I won a contest, but I didn’t get to choose much of anything. I’m pretty that’s on purpose. They don’t want the winner to actually be able to claim the prize or the tickets. Unfortunately for the event organizers, I’m very flexible. I’m probably more flexible than they wanted me to be because here I am.”

  “Did you at least have fun before everything happened?” Isaiah wanted to know. The kid was sweet. I’d give him that. He was nervous and a little squirrely, but he was sweet.

  “Probably too much fun,” I admitted. “I mostly just ate and drank. It was nice.”

  “My favorite thing about the cruise is that everything is designed for ultimate relaxing,” Winter offered. “Or, at least, that was my favorite thing.”

  “Well, our days of relaxing are over,” I told them both. “Now it’s only survival. When we find this island, we’re going to have some hard choices to make.”

  “Like whether we talk to people or not?” Isaiah asked.

 
“Like whether we talk to people or not,” I agreed.

  I wasn’t even sure if we’d reach an island or not. I just didn’t want Isaiah and Winter to lose hope. The truth was that we were in the middle of nowhere and we were floating in a lifeboat. There weren’t really a lot of options when it came for survival locations.

  We’d land where we landed. Maybe it would be the island our cruise ship had planned to stop at. Maybe it would be someplace else. Either way, we’d risk a lot if we chose to get off of the little boat.

  “The virus could be there,” I told them.

  “It might not,” Isaiah, ever the optimist, offered up. He looked like he didn’t really believe it, and I didn’t believe it, either.

  “It’s probably there,” Winter said. “This thing spread fast on the ship. It was right after our last stop, too. I think it’s probably been spreading for a while, but the world is so big that it took a long time for people to notice.”

  “You might be right.”

  “A couple of people got sick on the ship today,” Winter continued. “I heard people talking. Even my roommate got sick.”

  “My friends got sick, too, after being bitten by people on the island,” Isaiah added.

  “They got bitten by people on the island and didn’t think that was strange?” I was shocked. What was going on with these young people and their kinky games? I’d never considered myself to be a prude, but if a stranger tried to bite me, I felt like that would be a pretty big red flag.

  “They thought it was strange. They were just into it,” he shrugged.

  “Did you get bitten?” Winter wanted to know.

  “No.”

  “What about you?” Winter asked me.

  “No.”

  “So, none of us got bitten. None of us got blood on us. We should all be safe, right? It’s not airborne, I don’t think.”

  “I’m not a scientist. I don’t know,” I told them. “But it’s probably a safe bet that if we were going to get sick, we would have already turned into those creatures.”

  As if on cue, the zombie on top of the lifeboat started banging again.

  “We’ve got to do something about that monstrosity,” I muttered. “As soon as we stop, we’re taking it out. I don’t care what it takes. I can’t handle much more of its banging.”

  A moment later, the lifeboat sputtered and then slowed. I tried to keep edging it forward, but it was no use. We were out of gas, and we hadn’t managed to reach another ship, land, or any sort of island.

  “What happened?” Winter asked.

  She already knew the answer. We all did.

  “We’re out of gas. Let’s try to get some sleep.”

  Chapter 10

  Isaiah

  SLEEPING ON A LIFEBOAT was easier said than done. I knew why Greta told us to try to sleep. It was dark outside, and there was literally nothing we could do except talk to each other. We were all strangers, and none of us wanted to accidentally get into any sort of fight with each other right now. That would be a really, really fast way to die.

  Instead of talking or arguing, I chose to pick a particularly hard bench to lie down on. I pulled off my shirt and bunched it into a ball. Then I placed it under my head and pretended it was a pillow. I could do that. I could pretend. We all could. We had to.

  I thought about the things my mother used to tell me. She used to say that if you could just picture yourself having a better day that sometimes, just sometimes, that would work. If you could picture yourself doing a good job, believing in yourself, or achieving something you really wanted, then you could do anything.

  Strangely, it only took a few minutes before Greta started snoring. I had no idea how she could sleep so easily. We’d turned the lantern off that was hanging in the center of the boat, so it was almost completely pitch-black inside. There was just the slightest hint of the moon reflecting off the water if I peered out of the little windows.

  “How did she do that?”

  Winter’s voice came to me through the darkness. She was speaking quietly, making sure that her voice was low, almost silent.

  “I don’t know. Must be magic.”

  “Grandma magic,” Winter agreed.

  The two of us were quiet for a long time. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to talk or not, but I wanted to. I had so many questions that I was curious about. Mostly, I wanted to know what was going to happen to us. I knew Winter was close to my age, which meant we probably had about the same amount of life experiences, but I wanted to know what her opinion was.

  “Winter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What happens next?”

  Were we going to crash land on an island and have to live there?

  Were we going to find civilization?

  Maybe we’d end up back on the American coast. That would be convenient. We hadn’t traveled too far, now had we? This was a domestic cruise, after all. We were only visiting islands that were part of America. We hadn’t gone to any other countries. We hadn’t gone too far from the mainland.

  The mainland probably carried its own set of problems, though. What if the same infection had spread there? What if it was more out of control than the cruise ship had been?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we’ll make it back home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No idea? None? You must have some sort of gut feeling.”

  “I don’t. I was never good at guessing games,” she admitted.

  “Me neither.”

  “If we can find some sort of land tomorrow, we can make a plan. We just don’t want to stay on the boat for too long.”

  “We’ll run out of food,” I said knowingly.

  “Plus, it’ll be hot,” she added. “If I’m going to die, I want it to be when I’m old and surrounded by people I love. I don’t want it to be because I fried to death.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Frying to death might not be terrible.”

  It wasn’t true. That sounded like a terrible way to die. Every method of dying sounded equally horrible to me, in fact, and I wasn’t sure why some people didn’t seem to be scared of death.

  Greta didn’t seem scared. Greta didn’t seem to think we were going to die, either. For being older than the rest of us, she was a clever girl. I’d give her that. Maybe that was how she’d gotten to be so old. It was obvious that she’d loved her husband a lot. They’d had a bunch of kids and stuff. That was cool.

  I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to have kids. If the world really was dying all around us, then maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe nobody would. There was a very real possibility that my bloodline would end with me.

  Was that really something I’d be able to deal with?

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “It’ll be horrible. We’ll want to find land.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Try to get home.”

  “I’m from the Midwest,” I told her. “Home is a long way away.”

  “I don’t really have anyone to go home to,” Winter admitted. “I don’t know whether that’s a relief or a burden. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have anywhere I need to be. I have no one to miss me. Maybe it’s just sad and pathetic. Not sure.”

  “Greta has people,” I said. “We could stick with her.”

  “I don’t know if Greta wants to take us to meet her grandchildren,” Winter whispered.

  “We could, though. We could stay together. After all of this.”

  Suddenly, it seemed kind of important to me. If we could all stay together, then we could make this thing work. We wouldn’t have to be alone in the apocalypse. We wouldn’t have to figure out a way to deal with isolation, loss, and fighting.

  “Maybe,” Winter whispered.

  “I don’t really have anywhere else to go,” I admitted. “If civilization is struggling as much as our ship was, there’s no chance of me making it back home.”

  I understood how far the journey was fr
om a state that bordered the ocean up to Kansas. Even if I ended up managing to drive, it would take hours. It would take over a day in normal conditions. If there were roadblocks or other problems, it would be much, much longer.

  And I didn’t want to be alone.

  “I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” Winter said, but her voice sounded strained and tired. I wondered if she was scared of what was happening around us.

  Maybe she felt better prepared than I did.

  Me?

  I was just some nerdy guy who’d boarded a ship and hadn’t really expected for anything exciting to happen. I knew my friends were hoping to hook up with people while they were on board, but that wasn’t really my style. It wasn’t something I had really been hoping for.

  I’d just wanted to get away.

  My job was strangely difficult for something I could mostly do from home. Working remotely meant I could get a lot of things done at coffee shops or in my bedroom if I wanted to, but what I really, really wanted was something new. What I really craved was a relaxing sort of adventure.

  Now I was starting to realize that those were two mutually exclusive things.

  I could have an adventure or I could have relaxation.

  I probably couldn’t get both.

  As Winter and I were silent in the darkness of the lifeboat, we listened to the zombie hitting the top of the boat over and over and over...

  Chapter 11

  Winter

  “OUCH,” I SAT UP, GROANING. I’d slept terribly for some reason, and I wasn’t really sure why. The bed on the cruise ship just wasn’t the same as my bed at home. While I loved things that were soft and fluffy and covered with pillows, my bed on the ship had been very hard and minimalist.

  I needed to get up and get some coffee in me. That would make everything better. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  “Who wants coffee?” I asked Angela, glancing over.

  Only, Angela wasn’t there.

  Instead, a wide-eyed woman who looked to be in her 70s looked over at me.

  “I would love coffee,” she smiled brightly.