“Was this here last night? Did we drift?”
Ricci checked the map against the coastline and then the anchor line. “No, we’re exactly where we anchored last night.”
“How…?” Was all Clair could mutter.
Daniel wasn’t very well versed on the Titanic legend, he wasn’t sure if the open gash theory was still accepted, or if explorers had found something new. Either way the fate of the original Titanic had nothing to do with this one. Surely, if the wreck remained, mankind would find this scene just as fascinating, if only much easier to access. Right now though, it was just a ghostly hulk with tattered flags and no lights impeding their progress south. A few portholes near the white trim of the upper decks had scorch marks from a fire that had burst through the glass. That the entire ship hadn’t been consumed by it was a testament to this incarnation’s more modern features, however, it wasn’t designed to contain a plague.
“Turn on the radio. I need to call Crystal River.” Ricci said, pointing to the microphone next to Daniel.
“With all due respect, Sir, I don’t think that’s wise. We don’t know who else is listening.”
“Well we can’t very well explore this ship with just the five of us.” Ricci rebutted.
Daniel looked at their captain like he was insane. “We are not exploring anything. We’ve found a potential treasure trove of supplies with that ship, but you’re right, we can’t do it with just the five of us. We need to go back to town and get more people. Besides, did you consider there may be nothing on there we need? We could be expending valuable resources for little if any return.”
“I thought you were the one who suggested ocean going vessels would have supplies.”
“Yeah, freighters or liners that were still docked. This thing… Jesus…” Daniel looked away from the nightmare. “Probably ran aground because whoever was on it ran out of everything they needed too.”
“How did we not hear this?” Leon Sr. asked aloud.
Ricci shrugged. “She may have drifted in. Or maybe the lights were turned off and we just never saw her. If she was going slow enough, though, we’d never hear a thing.”
“Well wouldn’t the people getting off the ship make noise?” Clair used the binos to check the swampy, alligator ridden shoreline.
“Clair, I don’t think anyone got off that ship.” Daniel said, pointing to a porthole just below the fire charred windows. “Are you telling me that’s a survivor slapping at that window?”
Looking through his binos, Ricci confirmed what Daniel was seeing. “She’s a plague ship. Probably abandoned a while back.” That was the happiest version anyone imagined.
“So do you still want to turn around?” Daniel asked their captain. “We’re not even as far as Tampa Bay yet.”
Giving it some thought, Ricci decided they could at least sail around and see what was on the other side of this Mary Celeste. On the port (left) side of the beached steel and iron goliath, the story was much different. How the ship had stayed afloat through this disaster was a testament to the modern designs hidden beneath the veneer of historical accuracy. Daniel could see all the way inside the ship, whatever disaster had befallen her had blown a massive hole in the side about ten feet above the waterline around the amidships.
“A fire did this?” Leon Jr questioned with incredulity.
“Not likely.” Daniel affirmed. “This is a blast pattern. See how the steel is warped outward in some places and inward in others?”
Ricci reached for the radio and made the call to Crystal River. If someone attacked a cruise liner, a small town would barely be more of a challenge. The Police department back home responded without much delay, promising backup. It was likely the RMS Titanic II had been attacked by more than just zombies, someone with guns, really big guns, had seen fit to unsuccessfully send her to the bottom. But why? Was this how the Navy dealt with plague ships now? And if so, why not finish the job?
A few zombies inside the ship must have heard the motor because they started appearing from the dark, burned recesses within. Just like they’d seen before, the plague victims acted blissfully unaware of any danger to themselves, and one by one plopped into the ocean like so many turds or fell deeper into the ship as the ruined decks gave way below them.
“Skipper, you were in the Navy, right?”
“I was in the Coast Guard for eight months in 2002, then they found out I married my partner Ryan in Canada on my first leave. So… yes?” Ricci confirmed everyone’s suspicions.
“Wow. A thousand Sailors go out and five hundred couples come back.” Daniel teased. “Okay, still, the Army wouldn’t do this kind of damage to a target and then leave it largely intact. We’d smash it until was unrecognizable. Wouldn’t the Navy do the same if they were sinking plague ships?”
Ricci had to think about it for a moment, “Yeah, they’d just torpedo it or at least shoot below the waterline. You’re right, this doesn’t make any sense.”
Clair spoke up, surprised she had to be the one. “And what does this ship, as creepy as it is, have to do with us? We’re looking for supplies and survivors, not shipwrecks.”
“Don’t be so short sighted.” Daniel argued. “If the US Navy didn’t do this, then who did? Because if they’d dare to shoot up a famous luxury liner, we’d mean less than nothing to them.”
With no way of doing anything more about the situation the exploration mission went on, the port of Tampa Bay only a short distance away now. Already, and still not being out of sight of their grizzly discovery, more beached ships were coming into view. Some of them were in the later stages of succumbing to the elements, others floated about, their anchors either still attached or broken off long ago. A few of the largest vessels, cargo ships and the like, were technically sunk, but the water was so shallow their masts and forecastles were high and dry. Most, they saw, had infected people onboard. Some didn’t, and those were the most interesting ones. Each and every ship without infected aboard showed signs of attack from actual weaponry. None of them were detectives, or even cops for that matter, but it didn’t take a genius to start to piece together what had happened here. Someone attacked a bunch of unarmed ships off the coast of Tampa Bay, this was easy to see. What was harder to see at first, and what probably would have sent them scurrying for home, was the scene inside Tampa Bay proper. Boats by the hundreds littered the water just below the trough of the waves, threatening to drag the boat down if they made any wrong moves.
A distant explosion ashore, who knew from what, sent a washing machine high enough into the air they could see it from the sea. “Well that was different.” Leon Jr. commented as the flaming white appliance reached its apex, seemed to hover in mid-air for a moment, then came crashing back down like a missile fired from orbit.
The vast majority of the condos and houses that populated the beaches around the bay had been burned and reduced to rubble. Two large container ships, both baring the same blast damage as the cruise liner, were listing dangerously to one side. The hulks had dozens of smaller boats washing up against them, one by one being dragged under and crushed.
“What happened here?”
“Nothing good. Can we leave now?” Leon Sr. was getting the willies. This was turning out to be nothing like the prescribed scavenger mission they’d signed up for.
Ricci put on his big-boy pants and made a command decision. “Not until we find something worth taking back. We need food, our entire hold, meant for ice and fish, is completely empty. I’m not going back to Crystal River until I fill it with cans of food, livestock or survivors. If you have a problem with continuing that mission, here is your port-o-call.”
Nobody volunteered to get off the boat. Honestly, who would? Probably everyone, including Captain Ricci if he’d known what gathering those desperately needed supplies would entail. That or go home and get a small army to deal with it, or them, to be more accurate. Deciding to present as small a target as possible, Captain Ricci ordered everyone below deck but Daniel, who
would be camouflaged like a pile of life-jackets while they crawled into the bay at the boat’s slowest speed. He’d be watching everything from under a wench meant for hauling catches out of the sea, one of the Police Department’s M16’s at his side ready to kill zombies or people alike. The M249 was still in its water tight case, but the latch was undone to shave precious seconds off the time it would take to mount the weapon if the shit hit the fan.
Clair was suddenly struck by the infamous Good Idea Fairy and had them roll newspaper meant for packing fish into some spare clothes, pour some chum on it and lay the dummy over part of the deck. The idea had probably come from the movie Serenity, but it would do a pretty excellent job of making someone on the shore think the boat was simply adrift, too small to be worth looting and covered in potentially infectious bodies.
Painstakingly, with the wind at their backs, the boat carried them alongside an anchored yacht that looked abandoned with all the lifeboat launches empty. Daniel was mildly alarmed to see that the ship’s name was written in both English and Arabic, probably the personal pleasure craft, and then ark, of a rich Saudi. The name Scimitar السيف wasn’t just painted on, but was actually a raised metal inlay with gold leaf. Very opulent.
“Go stand on top of our wheelhouse, be prepared to shoot anyone that looks like a threat.” Daniel said to Leon Sr., preparing the ladder to climb the ten or so feet over the side of the yacht. They could have gone around to the stern of the Scimitar where the boat launches and swimming ladders were, but that was in clear view of a neighborhood crawling with zombies. If the zombies saw them they’d mass against the fences and direct anyone watching right to them.
Daniel was the first one over the deck, he crouched and waited in silent terror for a flood of zombies from every hatch, but the flood never came. With very little grace, Captain Ricci flopped onto the polished wood deck behind Daniel. The decking exposed wasn’t exactly nice looking, not anymore, but someone had taken very loving care of this boat before abandoning her. Whoever had owned her had been forced to live here for a long time, and after so long housekeeping had ceased to be a priority. The cabins smelled like feet, curry and piss, dim emergency lighting was blacked out by cardboard in front of all the portholes and windows. This might have been for privacy, but who knows why.
“Think maybe the batteries are still good? We might find fuel for her. We could fit almost everyone in town in this thing.” Ricci whispered to Daniel.
“I want to finish clearing the boat first. The last thing we need is a horde, like the one that had Kuzma trapped, breaking free on us.” Daniel motioned towards the lower two decks.
Sweeping through the galley, which looked almost fully stocked except for a few weeks rations, the two men found themselves in a lavish smoking lounge with a round bed in the center. All the tacky, stereotypical trappings of an Arab’s home one might see in the movies were nonexistent here. Everything was sleek and modern, cleaned and polished to a fine finish in hues of black metal. Even the bedspread was black and shiny.
Ricci snickered. “I could have some fun in this place.”
“Gross.” Daniel reached out to a closet door and slid the mirrored hatch back into the wall. There was nothing inside but a disturbing collection of sex toys that ranged the entire spectrum of fetish behaviors. “I take that back. This… This is gross.”
“Yeah…” Ricci agreed. The next stop was the engine room, probably the only room on the yacht that wasn’t at any point in its life clean. There they finally found evidence of what had happened to the passengers and crew. The engineer’s bunk, a closet behind the engine room near the rudder, was smeared with blood that was gathering flies. They’d multiplied, feeding on one of the two corpses in the locked cabin. The more preserved body had been this ship’s Patient Zero, attacking the engineer and probably causing everyone to abandon ship unnecessarily early. Someone had stayed long enough to shoot them both, the uniformed engineer before the infection set in, hence why the flies would eat him and not the other. His female companion was rotting too, but more like beef jerky rots, becoming shriveled and dehydrated. If not exposed to the elements, Daniel surmised, zombies didn’t rot quickly at all. Decomposers like maggots, mold or fungi probably found the virus to be as lethal to them as it was to anything else. What a heinously perfect virus, even the remains could not be reclaimed by nature without great effort.
Ricci tapped Daniel, “Hey, look at that. Half a tank! They must have refueled Stateside somewhere. No way they came from the middle east on just half a tank.”
“She won’t fit in King’s Bay. Sonya only made it in because of the storm surge, but that jetty should do fine for a dock.”
“We won’t need her to be inside the bay. We can maybe fit everyone still in town on this one boat, then head for a part of the mainland that’s still safe.”
“Nowhere is safe.” Daniel started heading for the hatch to go back upstairs when he heard voices. He was pretty sure he recognized the crew’s voices by now, and these weren’t them. “Get down.” Daniel whispered to Ricci, pushing him back from the hallway through the dining room.
Someone above deck, probably Clair, screamed. Her shouts were cut off suddenly by gunshots, a fight broke out, and more gun shots. Leon Jr screamed for his father, presumably because someone had just shot the older man, then they ended his son’s life too. The color drained from Ricci’s face and he tried to fight Daniel to get to his crew, but Daniel was bigger and stronger and pushed the man into the sex-toy closet of the bedchamber. Hiding among the leather outfits and disturbingly large dildos, neither dared to breathe as the men who’d just murdered their crew poured into the lower decks.
“Mira en la sala de máquinas.”
“¿Has visto cuántos se bajó de su barco?”
“Sólo uno. Es alto y delgado.”
Ricci wanted to ask what they were saying, as if Daniel spoke Spanish, but thinking quickly Daniel stuffed a red choker ball into his comrade’s mouth. More gunshots, the men were shooting the dead bodies in the rear compartment just to be sure.
“Tal vez él saltó por la borda.” A voice said from nearby, more men were entering the bedroom. It was only a matter of time before they found them.
Ricci was watching through a slit in the doors, Daniel’s view obscured as he readied his rifle to come out shooting. He didn’t have to, Ricci swallowed hard, handed his captain’s hat to Daniel and whispered, “They know I’m here.”
“No they don’t.”
Yes, they did, and to prove Ricci’s belief the door slid open and he fell out. The men shouted for him to stand in English, and when he did they shot him without ceremony. Ricci’s blood and some bone shards sprayed back into the closet. A well endowed love doll, probably a top of the line model from Japan, fell from its hanger and landed on Daniel with a pile of other crap he didn’t want to imagine. The men outside heard the noise and fired again, but when they didn’t see blood they peeked inside and saw only an anatomically correct mannequin with a few AK rounds buried in her back and oversized breasts. They had a laugh, kicked Ricci’s body for good measure, and finally left.
Daniel let out his breath slowly, channeling every ounce of energy he had to keep from moving so much as his little finger. Through a bullet hole in the glass door he could see Captain Ricci’s blood running along the polished black floor. He stayed there, watching the blood slow, then coagulate, and finally as the sun set through the tiny slits in the curtains he dared to venture out of his cage. Ricci was very dead, a dozen large caliber holes had spilled most of what was inside him into the closet.
Dragging his rifle out of a puddle of KY and blood, Daniel checked the magazine. Still full. His heart started beating faster, hard enough he could hear it pounding in his head. The coppery odor of his friend’s blood sent adrenaline coursing through his body, and after that things got a little blurry, or so he’d claim. In reality it only took hearing one of the men above deck to set Daniel on a course of revenge.
On t
he party deck the Arabian yacht Scimitar, the men who’d slaughtered Daniel’s crew were sitting on the section surrounding the pool. Naked women, completely complicit with their men’s horrible desires, danced by a fire pit to repetitive samba music while the others drank and carried on loudly. They were all drunk, bottles of liquor and beer littered the deck and the water where the smoldering wreck of Ricci’s last command was still sinking. His friend’s bodies were stuck against the hull of the yacht like so much flotsam. It was sad to admit, but Daniel wasn’t surprised by the attacker’s actions. If they were, as he suspected, Cartel members. It was only a matter of time before they took advantage of all the lawlessness and chaos and tried to carve out their own little discount empires.
Picking his position with care, Daniel first stalked into the cabin where a fully stocked bar had been made into sleeping quarters for the original guests. People’s stuff was strewn everywhere, the odor of sex permeated the room, a man and two women were sleeping in a queen sized mattress with a plastic bag half-filled with white powder. Part of it was spilled on a coffee table next to them, and someone’s nose and cheek print remained. Daniel raised his rifle, but suddenly thought better of it. Crouching down slowly, he slit the sleeping man’s throat with barely more effort than it took to move the knife through air. His eyes opened wide, arterial spray soaking the women next to him. He reached for Daniel but couldn’t muster the strength. A woman woke up, couldn’t come to grips with what she was seeing in time to scream, her only reflex was to reach for a gun. Daniel stabbed her in the heart and left the knife between her ribs. Taking her AK with the taped together magazines, he checked the weapon’s chamber while his knee was placed firmly on the next, and reasonably unattractive, woman’s throat. She was stronger than the others, and had sharper nails too. Without so much as a change in his blank expression Daniel put more weight on his knee and snapped her neck in a satisfying pop, never looking down at her.
World of Ashes II Page 14
