Steve was incredulous. “But you could be torn to pieces!”
“Thanks,” Babe said.
Steve was matter-of-fact. “Sorry Babe, but you’re already dead. I know that sucks, but even you know it’s true. He’s important.” He pointed at me.
Babe laughed. “Thanks again.”
“If anybody goes it should be me,” said Bob, “I’m the only one here qualified to pilot this big bitch anyway.”
Babe flicked his butt and it hit a dead zombie in the face. “Fuck that, teach me.”
“Son, I’ve been doing this my whole life. I can’t teach you everything you’ll need to know about steering a quarter of a billion tons of boat through a hurricane in the next ten minutes.”
Son of a bitch. The Amazing Super Hero Squad of Super Cool Brave Dudes was on this boat.
A particularly vast portion of the Gulf of Mexico picked that moment to disappear from under the Majestik Maersk, and we all had no deck under us for a moment and went sprawling.
Bob actually looked scared. “We need to get up there before the containers break loose! We’re side-to!”
I didn’t know what the fuck that meant, but it scared the ever-loving shit out of me.
“Right. Babe, me, and Bob are heading back up to the wheelhouse. The rest of you get to safety and wait for the helicopter.”
Ship passed me a post-it: No!
“Buddy, you’re a Double Whopper for these rotten critters. Besides,” I said, punching him, “I need you to look after Kat, and you can do that better than me.”
He grabbed his post-it from my hand and pointed at it furiously. (That indicated no dear reader.)
“Ship, he’s right. I need you with me.” It was said in a small voice but we all looked at Alvarez, who put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“My idea. Besides, I’m too cool to die.”
I couldn’t tell if Ship was hurt or pissed or scared when we split up.
Shit Magnet
Holy shit, what the hell was I thinking? They went left, we went right at the end of the corridor. Evidence of undead attacks were everywhere. That classic bloody drag mark. Bloody hand prints on the bulkheads. Broken doors and bullet brass. If all this shit was here, it indicated that there were zombies here too.
We followed the still illuminated exit signs until we came to a closed hatch. The lights were flickering, but the exit signs weren’t, the signs being on their own batteries. There was only one hatch lock engaged, but there weren’t any windows in any of the hatches, and we couldn’t see what was on the other side.
We couldn’t go back though. We were close to exiting the interior of the ship and setting foot on open deck. There was an emergency schematic on the bulkhead next to this exit. From here, there was maybe a fifteen-foot stretch of corridor, then another hatch to the open deck. It was all we could do to stand now, the damn boat was rocking so hard. Fifty feet of running would bring us to the steps up to the wheelhouse, and unless these dead bastards had learned to fly or open doors, they couldn’t have gotten onto the bridge.
Fifteen feet of corridor we couldn’t see. Fifty feet of deck we had to traverse. A hundred feet of steps we had to climb. Less than two hundred feet to our destination, but that could be the longest couple hundred feet in history. Babe looked at me and Bob. We both nodded, weapons ready. Babe moved the hatch lock and pushed the hatch with his foot. The fifteen feet was devoid of anything living, but the far hatch had been left open and the raging seas and rain were pouring in. We couldn’t sink because of this, but it was still damn wet. So was the zombie that pitched past the open portal when the ship rolled.
That didn’t bode well, but we couldn’t do anything about it. Babe’s suppressed Sig was ready, but I didn’t have one, nor did Bob. I kept my M4 close and Bob had a silver revolver. We moved through the hatch and closed it behind us, sealing it with one lock lever. The ship was rolling badly and we heard the containers creaking against the strain. Babe moved forward and looked out the hatch left then right. Looking left he should have seen the zombie that had face planted, but if he did he made no mention of it when he waved us forward. Babe made for the wheelhouse and we ran after him.
In ones or twos at a distance, zombies aren’t really scary. Fifty of them are scary. One of them that you didn’t see that grabs you is fucking terrifying. Two thousand of them is terrifying, I don’t care if you’re watching them on TV from a lunar station. Yeah, zombies can be scary, but I would be a liar if I didn’t tell you that the awe of the sea from my vantage point had me shitting my pants. We were next to containers stacked four high in some places, but when the Majestik nosed down, and I could see skyscraper-sized waves in front of me, I almost shit myself, but I kept running. I ran because the hundred or so undead shitheads that were between us and the stairs were strewn about on the deck trying to stand.
Forty eight out of fifty feet to the stairs and the ship took a wicked roll, pitching all three of us to the deck. Do you remember what was on the deck from the end of the last paragraph? Shit yeah. One of the things latched on to my jeans, and two had Babe, but Captain Sea-Legs was up and on the stairs in a nanosecond. He pointed his revolver at one of the things that had Babe and fired. He grazed Babe in the shoulder and the army guy howled. That got the zombies going, and they found their God damned sea-legs. I kicked loose of the one who had me and got to Babe, but a particularly disgusting one of them, all black and bloated and wet and slimy from the rain bit into his calf. The poor kid screamed and I shot the one who had his right arm in the face before it could bite him. He jammed his suppressor into the right eye of the one that had bitten him and pulled the trigger, spraying its brains on the ones behind it. They all started standing, so I grabbed the kid and dragged him to the stairs. Bob was halfway up, and it was friggin’ windy.
I made Babe go in front of me, and he was limping badly, crimson dripping on the white steps and being diluted by the rain. We would have been fine, what with the boat rocking and the undead already unsteady on their feet, we should have reached the wheelhouse way before these lurching assholes. Two runners appeared and sprinted at us, and one came from nowhere and leapt on the side of the railing. Babe shot it in the shoulder as it tried to climb over and it fell back on the deck making that shriek that they make. Not dead yet, but fucked.
The other two screamed as well and were on me snapping in an instant. I spun my M4 and flipped to full auto just as one of them was opening its stinking maw to take a nibble. I blasted them both at the same time and made those fuckers dance on the steps. They both fell back into the arms of their dead cousins, soon to join them as a species if you believe in that shit. The dead ones had already started up the stairs.
Babe was bad off. He was in agony and I could see it. A huge swell must have hit us because the whole ship listed to port. An entire contingent of the dead fuckers went over the railing and landed hard on the deck, and it was all I could do to keep Babe and myself from following them over. Bob already had the hatch open and was screaming something at us, but he was a good fifty feet above us, and I couldn’t hear him over the wind and rain and the entire Gulf of Mexico that threatened to crash down on us.
I got Babe to the top and we got inside and out of the rain. We were all three of us soaked to the skin. I immediately looked for the first aid kit to staunch the flow of blood from Babe’s calf wound while Bob ran to the ship controls. I found it but the fucking thing was empty, not even a band-aid, and I remembered that Steve had raided every first aid kit that he had found on the ship.
Fuck.
I took my sopping wet shirt off and tied it around his wound, but it wasn’t a bandage. He bled through my black t-shirt in three seconds, and the tap-tap- tap of blood coming from his leg hit the carpeted wheelhouse deck leaving a trail of drops behind. It sounded just like the hard rain outside.
Outside.
I turned and looked through the giant, panoramic windows, and was witness to the full fury of the sea. Fuck Mother Nat
ure. This was all God, and he was pissed. The moving mountains that were out there were complete with snowy caps, and they roiled and crashed everywhere. The bow of the Majestik went up and up and up, then it went down, and the whole bow went under the water. I could see the wall of water coming through the containers as I braced myself for the impact. The good thing was that it washed a shit load of those dead fuckers away. A wave of hurricane driven pus bags bounced through the containers with some spilling over the side. The bad thing was the containers that let go up by the bow. As the nose of the ship came back up, a whole wall of the multi-colored shipping containers, with MAERSK on the side broke loose and went into the water. It was loud, and I could hear it over the storm and the sea.
One of the giant steel boxes got caught in a big wave and was thrown end over end against the hull up forward, and came spinning across the tops of the other containers. The screeching metal noise was unbelievably loud, even over the storm. The bow took another dip, and the five thousand pounds or so of metal box (if it were empty) slid forward. We came up the far side of the surge, and that damn thing came shooting across the others right toward the base of the wheelhouse. It must have caught on one of the other containers, because it started flipping again, and suddenly fell into the gap where the tents had been. I felt a small sliver of satisfaction in knowing that those infected that hadn’t been washed over, and were hanging around the tents, now resembled something akin to oatmeal.
Captain Bob was having a hard time steering the ship. He called out to me and I left a dry heaving Babe sitting with his back against the command console to go assist Bob. I got to the bridge controls and almost shit. I hadn’t seen the ship’s steering wheel when we were up in the wheelhouse before, and now that I had seen it…well… I believe I already stated the almost shit thing.
It looked like a steering wheel you’d find in a Lego car. I was expecting a ship’s wheel like you see in the movies with the spindles and stuff, which immediately made me feel like a moron. This wheel was missing the top part and was very small. It looked almost like the steering wheel you would see in a race car.
“I need you on the wheel while I…OH SHIT!”
Bob pointed back behind me and I looked across the room into the snarling face of a Runner who had made it to the top of the exterior stairs. She was flailing about and smacking her fist against the hatch porthole. I think she could have smacked it until doomsday…well…a different doomsday, and it wouldn’t have given way. We would have to wait for that second doomsday, as with the next loll of the Majestik the Runner, who had released a hand rail to pound with both fists, went over the railing and plummeted to the deck. One less Runner, one more pus bag.
“Hold the wheel, keep it turned this way!”
I took the fancy wheel and kept it pinned to the left. Bob moved around pushing buttons and rolling dials for a minute then came back. “Look,” he said and pointed out the window. Through the storm I could see that way off in the distance there was blue sky. How the hell did that happen?
I asked Bob.
“I turned us around. We’re still in the shit, but the storm is moving south southeast at about forty miles per hour. The worst of it is in front of us and we were going to be running thought it for the better part of a day. This way we’ll be out in five hours tops.” The screeching of rending metal punctuated his statement . The loose container was still banging around on the forward deck. Bob suddenly had something in his hand. “Atlantis, this is Majestik Maersk, do you read?”
Almost instantly, we got a reply, “Majestik this is Atlantis, we have you, what’s your status over.”
“This fucking tub crawls with zombies Atlantis, and Majestik is now on a heading of three hundred over.”
For the second time today, I felt like a moron. Fucking radios. I had lost mine in the tunnel of death we were in a few hours ago. I asked Bob if he had the wheel OK, and he gave me a thumbs up while he spoke to Jimmy at Atlantis. Apparently, they were getting hammered by the storm as were we. I went to check on Babe.
He was looking at me weird, and he licked his lips when he saw me. He looked hungry. I pointed my M4 at him and he said, “Not yet.”
“I need your radio, buddy.” He handed it to me. “Do I look tasty yet?”
He smiled. “Gay. I might need you to take care of it, I’m feeling weak.”
I wasn’t smiling. I really liked this guy. He had saved my ass on several occasions. The ship rolled forward and I fell on him, smacking his wound with my knee. He shrieked and pushed me off, then started laughing uncontrollably.
“I’m gonna fucking die! How funny is that? I’m gonna die because a dead guy bit me….” He started looking in all directions but nowhere special.
I sat up and put my hand on his forehead. I was shirtless and the wind and rain were blowing in through the broken bridge window so I was chilly, not cold mind you, but chilly. The heat coming off this guy could have powered a nuclear submarine.
“Where’s Cannonball? Where’s my dog?”
“He’s right here, pal,” I said with tears in my eyes and stood up. “He’s outside and barking for you, buddy.”
“He took my Frisbee!”
“Dogs do that? Do you want to see him?” I moved Babe’s suppressed Sig away from him, then picked it up.
“Yeah! My leg hurts and I want to see my dog. Where’s Mom?”
“She has Cannonball, they’re outside. I can see them.”
I helped him up and we looked out the window. His eyes went wide and he said, “Whoa….” I shot him in the back of the head and he dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I sat down next to him and held his hand while I cried. I took my shirt off his leg and covered what was left of his face.
I used Babe’s radio to call Alvarez, but there was no response. We were in a big steel tub with tons of steel between us and he either didn’t respond or couldn’t respond. I was immediately worried, this was my family now. “I can’t raise them.”
Bob moved a little to the left and picked up a telephone receiver, wired to the bridge controls, “Alvarez, this is Bob,” he said, his voice sounding like it was coming through a far off megaphone, “we’ve made it to the bridge and we’re secure for now. If you can find something that looks like a phone on a wall, that’s the intercom system and it will connect you with us. Oh, and to the zombies? Fuck you.” Bob hung up. “Intercom system. Oh, the chopper can’t come for us until the storm passes.”
I nodded. “Tell them,” I said, pointing at the intercom. Bob called out again telling our guys that the helicopter was going to be a little late, and we waited.
It was almost dark when the seas had calmed enough for the zombies to make it all the way up the stairwell and start beating on the hatches. They were at the interior hatches too, but they were solid. Just like Captain Pedersen, we were stuck here.
Bob turned us around and we headed back toward the storm, chasing it home. The bridge was lit up like a Christmas tree. I found deck lights and flipped them on. The angry seas hadn’t washed away all of the infected, but there were considerably less than there had been. One hundred or five hundred didn’t make a difference though, we were still fucked. Alvarez hadn’t called either.
“We’re about seventy miles further north west than we should be.” Bob was looking at a computer screen. “ I’ve laid a course to the southwest of Atlantis, and we should miss all the other rigs and ships if…”
He let that hang. He didn’t have to finish… If we got eaten and there was nobody left to steer the ship. He had set it on auto-pilot or whatever the fuck it was called. I was in a shitty mood and looked at my friend’s corpse.
Gunshots broke me from my self-loathing. Bob and I ran to the port side rear windows and looked at the rear deck. My group of friends was battling a group of zombies as they ran through the stacks of containers. They couldn’t see it, but they were surrounded, and in a minute or two, the infected would be on them in numbers that would overwhelm them.
&n
bsp; “Get on that fucking intercom!” I screamed at Bob. Startled, he ran back and picked it up.
“They have to climb! Tell them they have to climb! Big group coming from their left…the starboard side!” (No, I’m not wrong, I was looking toward the rear of the boat, dear smartass reader, it was the starboard side). Bob relayed the information and the group of humans moved as one through the containers to my right. They ran up one of the red catwalk thingies between the containers, but a couple of runners were right behind them. Zero and Alvarez dispatched the chasers, but shambling behind them were more of the slow variety, and there were more infected than bullets I was wagering. Captain Pedersen’s log said that there were three hundred people aboard, but I was looking at more than three hundred right now and this was only on the rear deck.
Our friends jumped from the catwalk on to an orange MAERSK container. Steve almost fell as he had a huge pack full of medical supplies pilfered from the ship. Zero caught him by the pack strap as he teetered on the edge. He would have fallen fifty feet or so into a horde of hungry dead cannibals. The top of the container was maybe six feet from the catwalk, and soon the catwalk was full to bursting with reaching pus sacks.
Some of the more industrious undead tried to climb over the railings, but they couldn’t jump the gap, and fell to the deck like lemmings. I know lemmings don’t really do that. Don’t be a dick, it was metaphorical.
So there they were, in a light rain, six feet from a few hundred reaching zombies, with zombies surrounding the containers. They took out runners as the runners fought to get to the top of the catwalk, and they were on top of six containers, so they had plenty of room. We were stuck up here on the bridge, no rain but only a half inch of steel and glass between us and more undead.
Chaos Theory: A Zombie Novel Page 20
