World of Ashes II

by J. K. Robinson

  Nobody outside was any the wiser, he had lots of time to plan this. Taking two rifles and a kitchen tray on rollers he set the weapons up into a rickety booby-trap, only this wasn’t actually meant to kill anyone. If it did, great, if not it would still be the distraction he needed to make them all stand up and present easier targets. His plan was to kill them all at once, but before he set that plan in motion he saw in the dim light from the flickering fire the best gift of all. The weather sealed M249 that had been on his boat. These bastards had stolen it, and now he’d reclaimed it. With perfect swiftness he loaded the light machine gun and set it on a table that would face the entire pool area. From this angle they would have nowhere to hide, not even in the pool. First he pulled the string on his contraption and the two Ak’s barked until their recoil knocked the table over. They all stood up and started shooting at the table, then Daniel killed them all.

  Chapter 8

  Dawn the next day saw Daniel comfortable on the highest deck of the Scimitar with a bottle of Dom Perignon in a bucket of ice. He was honestly surprised to see a trio of speedboats he recognized from Crystal River entering Tampa Bay, he couldn’t have imagined they’d arrive so soon. Too late to prevent a tragedy now, but at least they came. Pouring another glass for himself and the ghost of Lea, who had been pounding them back glass for glass with Daniel all night, he imagined they clinked their chalices together in toast.

  The other crews spent some time searching the bay before Daniel grabbed an orange bandanna off a dead cartel scumbag and waved it until someone with a pair of binoculars spotted him. None of the others were prepared for the scene aboard Captain Daniel’s barge of death. He unashamedly told them all what he’d done, lazily holding the M249 by its carrying handle he showed them the skiff the pirates used to sneak up on them, and how he’d survived. Nobody blamed Daniel for what he’d done to the murderous bastards, not even when they saw the three naked bodies collecting flies under a pile of empty brass in the lounge.

  “I don’t know how I’m gonna tell Leon’s wife.” Deputy Gifford said, sitting down on a bench seat. “Did they say anything? Why they’d kill our people?”

  “I don’t speak Spanish.” Daniel said flatly.

  “We saw the Titanic II, can’t believe you guys found that.” Gifford apparently wasn’t good at awkward silences. The crews wrapped the bodies of their friends for burial and dumped the slaughtered cartel bodies into the oily, polluted water.

  “We thought it would be too hazardous to try to board her. Too many infected… Should have known there would be bandits out here too.”

  “No way Cartel did the big ships.” Gifford scoffed. “These people were pirates. Pirates don’t blow up cruise liners, they steal the stuff onboard.”

  Daniel sighed. “I don’t think the regular rules of logic and sanity apply anymore.” He said, cradling the SAW like a baby now. It was disturbing to watch, but then Gifford thought Daniel might just need his cordite scented safety blanket right now.

  “It wasn’t for nothing, though.” The deputy tried one last time after a moment of blessed silence. “There’s enough food stored below to feed everyone in town for a month. That’s better than finding pure gold.”

  “You mean like this?” Daniel reached out and yanked a gold chain off a yet to be disposed of body. “Fuck your golden roads of El Dorado.” He chucked the lump of metal into the water. “If I ever find out there are more of them… If they had anything to do with this,” Daniel gestured at the widespread destruction of the resort city. “I’ll make it my life’s mission to fucking kill all of them.”

  It might have made more sense to stay on the Scimitar, if just for that night, but nobody wanted to be there. A nearby boat was found with a hundred or so empty gas cans in it, probably from a salvager who had been collecting them for years. Most had holes in them, but enough were in decent condition that most of the day and night was spent syphoning the fuel from the yacht. With the salvage boat filled with their hard won booty, boxes of food and precious diesel, Daniel took a gallon of it and went for a leisurely stroll through the inner decks, tipping over expensive bottles of whiskey and antique oil lamps. He piled anything that looked combustible in the kitchen opened the stove’s gas vents before climbing aboard any boat Gifford’s chatty ass wasn’t on.

  A few hundred feet from the Scimitar Daniel took the flair gun from the boat’s emergency box and launched a bright red ball of phosphorus into a puddle of fuel near the center of the ship. The intensely hot flare ignited everything, the diesel fuel was just icing on the cake. The entire yacht was engulfed in distracting flames that kept all the eyes in the bay off of Crystal River’s painfully slow escape. Just before it was completely out of sight the vapors in the fuel tanks blew, tearing the yacht in half for a spectacular movie quality explosion.

  Halfway home Daniel was awakened by one of the crewmen on the boat he’d joined. At first he thought he’d been roused to see a storm to the south, which wasn’t really cause for waking him up, but when his eyes focused he saw what he was meant to see. At just this side of the darkened horizon the unmistakable muzzle flashes and missile launches lit the rain clouds around them. There was no way to tell who was shooting at who, but as time went on the side to the north of the incoming storm began to win, few of any of their ships were burning, yet the navy to the south was faced with braving the storm or certain annihilation at their enemy’s guns if they stayed. Who else, if not the U.S. Navy, could expend that kind of ordinance when the world was being flushed down the proverbial toilet around them.

  The boat’s captain turned on the radio, trying to catch anyone’s signals they could. All they heard were voices in Spanish, most of them broadcasts in the clear and further garbled every time someone stepped on another’s call, cutting one transmission short or another. Two of the people on Daniel’s boat spoke Spanish and translated. “I think they’re Columbian. Maybe Cuban too. They’re fighting ships from Texas. Maybe even the Coast Guard. Whoever we’re hearing though, it’s the losing side. I’d guess the other guys have encrypted commo.”

  “Serves ‘em right.” Daniel went back to bed. He wasn’t feeling very sympathetic to anyone these days. If Texas decided to fight Cuba, he thought, there was probably a damned good reason. Daniel heard jets out over the gulf before he slipped back into a deep sleep. Their final airstrike lit up the sky for an hour and ended anymore transmissions from the South American armada.

  There was a celebration back in Crystal River, even as the news of the deaths crushed the spirits of Leon’s mother and wife. People working tirelessly for the last few weeks, even before Daniel’s arrival, had erected a wall around the town and finished the first night he was gone. It wasn’t a large wall, any human could just climb over the three foot Jersey-barriers, but a zombie would find it nearly unnegotiable in the time it took for a volunteer militiaman to euthanize it. Captain Harrisburg took the news of Ricci’s death particularly hard. He was a distant relation of hers and probably the only genetic relative she had left. She made it her personal mission to see that at the celebration a few minutes of silence and a 21 gun salute were given to the fallen. She listened intently to Daniel’s debriefing at the police station, nobody knew she was around the corner while Daniel spared no details. If Ricci had still been in the military his sacrifice would have merited a medal. She did, however, interject herself into the debriefing when the subject of the naval battle they’d witnessed far offshore was brought up. The town had received the same radio signals, only they had looted military radios and, though not synced properly with the radios at sea, had provided them with snippets of information that identified the victors in the battle as little more than English speaking. None of the words recorded were particularly telling, nobody knew if this was indeed Texas’s doing, or if the US Navy was still just offshore protecting the mainland from some unknown threat. It was all a really scary notion. Most navies in the world had the firepower to decimate entire cities, and that was just from a single destroy
er. A larger warship would pose a real threat if a hostile government had survived.

  Chief Kuzma was on hand for the debriefing, the only thing he could say for certain was that the Russian Navy had nothing to do with this. He couldn’t guarantee there wasn’t a Russian submarine in the area, but then that had been a fact of life since 1950. According to what he knew before he’d been left for dead, the Russian fleet was heading home across the North Atlantic. Russia wouldn’t be coming back to Cuba. He island nation was lost, the communist Castro Regime no more, the last surviving member murdered by his own people before the dead had had a chance.

  Jose was waiting for Daniel outside the police station with his girlfriend Camilla, or should he say fiancé. The storm that had chased the battle was little more than a thick rain when it hit town. The bay didn’t swell like it had when Kuzma had arrived either, the natives remarked openly that they hadn’t seen any manatees in a long time, a species that was a main attraction of the town before. Had the zombies scared them off? It wasn’t beyond imagination to think a zombie might grab hold of the sea cow in shallow waters. That would be a horrible way to go, especially for an animal whose entire evolution had never suggested human corpses would be a problem.

  Hugging Daniel for dear life, Jose didn’t make any moves to let go. “So I heard all our Titanic jokes are going to be a bit inappropriate now.” He smiled, finally letting Daniel breath.

  “Yeah, it’s a bit soon for me.” Daniel couldn’t believe he was saying that.

  On his way to John’s house he stopped by an open air bar where people were drinking well into the night. Already the pictures of Leon Jr & Sr, Clair and Captain Ricci were surrounded on a cabinet behind the tiki bar by candles and flowers. They would, at least, be missed by someone. The barkeep slid a tall draft beer to Daniel and let him sit with his own thoughts and a cold drink. Only after more than an hour of sitting and watching the celebration as he knocked back brew was Daniel approached by anyone.

  He didn’t recognize this girl. She was older than him, but maybe a little younger than Wendy had been. “I heard you were on Ricci’s crew.”

  Daniel didn’t say anything right away. He just nodded, then motioned to the barkeep for another beer. This would have been number six. “You knew him?”

  “He lived in my condo building.” She said, swishing her curly blonde hair back. Daniel wasn’t in to blondes specifically, but that was no reason to discriminate. “Kept to himself. He wanted to leave during the bigger evacuation efforts, but his Partner was overseas on business or something. Like I said, we didn’t see him outside much.”

  “Heck of a sailor though. Him and Leon Sr., Clair… Jesus what was her last name? Anyway, Leon’s boy… All of them deserved so much better than to be murdered by gangbangers.”

  “I’m Megan.”

  “Daniel.” He said, motioning for a beer for the lady.

  “Look, shit happens.” Megan said, sipping the froth from her beer. “None of us know when our time is gonna be up. So…” She bit her lip and made certain nobody else was listening. “Wanna fuck?”

  Daniel finished his beer without breaking eye contact. “Well yeah.”

  The next several hours were a blur of tequila shots, pink breasts, sweat, mocha breasts, and more failed attempts to put a condom on than should have been allowed. (You will always put them on upside down first. Deal with it.) Daniel had no idea when he passed out, or what time it was when he woke up again, but it was daylight at any rate. Looking side to side he discovered he was not only naked in a bed with the girl whose name he had to think through the fog of liver failure to remember, Megan, but her gorgeous ebony roommate as well. Flashes of the night before, and how this man-dream of a life experience had come to pass, came back to him piece by piece. These girls were freaks, and he’d really have to come back some time, but right now all he could think about was finding his clothes and getting somewhere he could take a shower. His head was throbbing, the notion to just get drunk again crossed his mind, but he settled for snatching a two-liter bottle of orange soda off the table to drink on the way back to the Sitton’s house.

  Lots of people were staggering around, not unlike zombies themselves, after the celebration of finding so much food and medicine in Tampa. Daniel was sure he didn’t smell the worst of all the drunks, a man who had the aroma of seeping vodka from his pours crossed Daniel’s path. It wasn’t Chief Kuzma, the local vodka aficionado, no, he was already back at the open air tiki bar talking loudly and flirting with women who thought his accent was sexy. Did Russians possess some kind of mutant liver that was unaffected by liquor? Daniel was mildly envious, but then figured he wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun with Kuzma’s tolerance.

  Lots of bodies were turning up with massive flesh wounds these days, some from zombies before they’d died, others looked like they’d been burned or shot at by survivors before it was common knowledge to aim for the head. That knowledge had been life saving for Daniel, but it had also been the hardest won lesson of his life. The scenario at the apartment complex in Virginia ran through Daniel’s head like a movie he couldn’t turn off. There were too many alternatives to consider, he figured, how could he have taken the zombie on the stairs down without risking himself and Lea? Shoot it. Like he’d done. There really hadn’t been a viable alternative for dealing with a fresh rage monster, and there still wasn’t. If he’d tried to hit the corpse with anything but a bullet it would have been just as likely to yank whatever it was out of his hands and eat them both. Then nobody would save Kaylee, nobody would bring her home, nobody would have taken out those cartel pirates in Tampa Bay… Was he actually doing more good than harm?

  The street lights above Daniel made an audible buzzing sound before flickering and finally going black for the day. He paused, looking around and saw a transformer two blocks down catch fire. Something was wrong with the local power grid, but it wasn’t like Daniel was an expert or anything. People started exiting their houses, trying to see if they were the only ones experiencing the power outage. On the other side of the bay, where new housing developments had encroached deep into the swamps, a fire began to engulf an abandoned mansion. This wouldn’t exactly be a problem if the plume of smoke weren’t rising high into the sky, churning like a volcano. Anyone alive or undead could see this from miles away in the flats of coastal Florida.

  A pumper truck’s siren was heard spooling up from the firehouse, the loudest noise for miles. Now here is the interesting part about the psychology of zombies, one that wouldn’t be understood for many decades after the outbreak. Zombies in Stage One of the infection can distinguish between naturally occurring sounds and those made by humans. Zombies in Stage Two cannot. Stage Two Zombies will attack anything they sense moving, no matter if one or more senses are “blinded.” It’s not that zombies are better hunters at night, it’s just that they don’t have a favored sense the way living favor sight. So to any zombie, the noisiest tool mankind could think of was basically a large red dinner bell being paraded through city streets. Someone really goofed, overlooking that.

  Daniel had only enough time to drunkenly hobble/sprint to John’s house before the first volley of gunfire from the roaming sentries was heard. John and Daniel had been working on zombie proofing the house for weeks, it may be now that watching Home Alone too many times as a kid paid off. The first and best line of defense for the home was the actual white picket fence that surrounded the yard. This had been reinforced at ever post, the distance in between crisscrossed with beams cut before the electricity inevitably failed for good. Beyond that, John’s prized lawn, including Joanne’s flower bed, were strategically dug up to create pits with sharpened spikes at the bottom known as Punji Sticks. John specially cut each one so that it would be a barb that would have to be cut to remove the body, once a hook grabbed flesh it wasn’t letting go. The underside edges were dull and wouldn’t cut flesh, only twist it up the harder the zombie struggled. Many houses in the area had dug similar “Viet Kong Garden
s,” as Joanne liked to call them. The good news was, compared to their living counterparts, zombies are relatively stupid. A simple warning sign in Spanish and English was enough to keep the living from falling in, most of the time, the undead on the other hand had proven oblivious to the danger each and every time.

  The windows to the home were shielded with car doors John and Daniel scrapped, each with gun slots for taking down the infected if they swarmed the house. Every door had a solid steel bar across it like a castle, the only way in would be absolute brute force, hopefully something zombies weren’t organized enough to accomplish. The fighting got closer, riot gear clad militiamen ran towards the sounds of gunfire. Minutes later drastically fewer of them were running in the other direction, hundreds of zombies at their heels, including those who’d previously been militiamen.

  Daniel saw Joanne take Kaylee into the attic, a small space existed to store random stuff, it wasn’t well insulated but it was safe and provisions were stored there. John started to point his M1A1 through a gun slot, but Daniel stopped him. There was no need to draw attention to their house, the number of zombies was too great to risk a swarm. The neighbors were doing a fine job of drawing the zombies in, and Daniel and John witnessed firsthand the flaw in their punji stick design in horrific detail. Across the street the first three or four corpses that fell into the pits were incapacitated, sure, but after that the rest of them just used the front rank as a convenient bridge over the pits. The neighbors opened fire and several bullets broke daylight through John’s kitchen wall, the room closest to the defending house.

  John ran to the pull-down ladder to check on his wife and granddaughter. They were okay, but Kaylee was mortified. To her the zombies were far away, she felt safe at her grandparent’s home, the shattering of that illusion was almost more than the kid could handle. Kaylee started screaming and Joanne had to cover her mouth, nearly choking her. Daniel motioned for everyone to be as quiet as possible, but Kaylee broke free of her grandmother and ran to his arms. She was perfectly silent so long as Daniel held onto her.