This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  Rhodri looked at his hands. He had never seen them like this in his entire life. The tendons and veins stood out. There was no "extra" to him anymore. His skin hung tight on his body. His legs bulged with muscles from making his way up and down the hill.

  By all rights, he should be doing fine. He still had some food, though in a month or so, he knew he would have to go back into town, where the dead still milled. But for now, at that very moment, if he had run out of food, he would have just sat there and waited to die. The ships had all disappeared, even the yachts, the pleasure cruisers.

  He still kept the fire going, but he didn't know why. He didn't even bother to look at the ocean anymore. When he lit the fire, he stared into the flames, imagining all sorts of things, both nostalgic and sometimes darker. Sometimes, while staring into the flames, he wondered what it would be like to step into them, to let the fire curl over his body and burn him away into nothing. He didn't like to admit it to himself, but the idea had been growing in his head.

  He was thinking about how much it would hurt when his radio crackled to life. He had rigged the radio to run on a couple of car batteries. To be honest, it had been so long since he had talked to anyone over it that he had forgotten the damn thing was there.

  "You there, buddy?"

  At first, he thought he was having auditory hallucinations. He stared at the radio as if it were alive—as if the machine itself were talking to him. His lower lip quivered, hidden underneath weeks of mustache growth. If he talked to it, if he spoke to the radio, it would be real, and the pain of not receiving a reply would most certainly destroy him.

  "Guy in the lighthouse? You there?"

  It was real. He leaped up off the couch and dove at the radio, pulling the receiver to his mouth. His first attempts at speaking were dry rasps, unintelligible. It had been so long since he had heard his own voice, he almost jumped. Rhodri was not the type of person to spend time talking to himself. He cleared his throat and tried it again.

  "This is Seaside Lighthouse, over." He waited for a reply, still half sure that he was hearing things.

  "Seaside Lighthouse, this is Captain Gary Schwenk of the container ship Gypsy Drifter. I speak for about fifty live human beings who have been at sea for a very long time. What is your status?"

  Status? Status? What the fuck was he supposed to say? "I'm alive."

  He could hear the smile in the man's voice on the other end of the radio. "That's good. We're glad to hear it."

  "Are all your people alive? Over."

  "We had some losses. We were taking on freight in Vancouver, B.C. when this all went down. We didn't get out unscathed. Took on more cargo than we were expecting, mostly live, people fleeing on foot. We had a bit of an outbreak, but we were able to get it under control. Lost a lot of people, though. A lot of friends." The captain's voice drifted away on the last part. There was no "over" this time.

  Rhodri filled the empty space the only way he knew how. "I'm sorry to hear that. Over."

  "It's the past now. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for your fire. You kept us from dashing into some pretty gnarly rocks last night. Over."

  Rhodri's eyes filled with tears, but he tried to keep his voice steady. "I'm glad to hear that. I had almost given up. Haven't seen any ships in quite some time. Over."

  "Well, we're glad you didn't. Over."

  "What's your plan? Over," Rhodri asked.

  "Well, that's what we're calling you for. Over."

  They talked for a while longer, and when they were done, Rhodri climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out at the ship. It was huge. Its deck was half-filled with shipping containers. The captain had said that they were only halfway loaded when they had been forced to flee the docks in Vancouver. The ship was ugly, industrial, its hull faded and aged. Still, it was the most beautiful sight Rhodri had ever seen.

  ****

  Captain Gary Schwenk switched on the ship's internal communications and grabbed the microphone. He hesitated, going over what he was going to say.

  They had been at sea for months, waiting for some sort of contact, radioing at every stop to see if there was someone out there that could tell them what was going on.

  He thought back to the nightmare at the Vancouver docks. People running every which way in the city. People dying. They had been in the middle of packing a load that would go over to China, hundreds of shipping containers, loaded one by one onto the ship.

  His entire crew was scattered about the city, all but Mark Wilde, who lay sick in his bunk. They had orders to be back the next day. The ship would be loaded by then. He didn't begrudge them their release. The crew worked hard to keep the Gypsy Drifter in order. It was an older ship, prone to losing a bolt or two every now and then. If they wanted to come back to their jobs with a hangover and an itch down below, then who was he to complain?

  The shipping docks were quiet that day. He was in constant contact with the port authority and the longshoreman that moved the shipping containers.

  He watched as the current container being loaded onto the ship jolted to a stop in mid-air. "Hey, what's going on?" he asked over the radio.

  "Shut up," the man said. Gary got the impression that he was listening to something else.

  He waited for a minute or two, and then he turned to look at the gantry crane where the man no longer sat. He saw the operator climbing down the ladder that led to the paved staging area of the docks.

  "Where the fuck are you going?" he asked into the radio, knowing that it was impossible for the man to answer.

  He stepped out of the bridge and onto the railing to yell at the man, and that's when he heard a noise in the air. He turned to see where the noise was coming from. A flood of people came running down the street. These were not longshoremen or workers or foremen. These were just ordinary people, some in their pajamas, some in even less, running like mad.

  He reached for his cell phone and began texting his people. "Get the fuck back here, right now. Leaving in one hour."

  He didn't know what was going on, but he knew it wasn't good. The looks on those people's faces were not normal. They were terrified.

  He spoke over the ship's communications and said, "Mark, get your sick ass up here."

  For the next hour, Gary and Mark had spent the time telling people that they couldn't come aboard. The crowd of people had rushed through the dock area. Some of them approached his boat and asked for passage. He was not in the business of giving passage, and the company he worked for strictly forbade any non-company personnel on the ship. He held the company's line.

  The first person from his own crew to appear was Russell Darby. He had to push his way through the crowd, and when he appeared on the deck, he bent over, trying to catch his breath.

  "What the hell is going on out there, Russell?"

  Between gasping breaths, Russell said, "They're rabid or something."

  "Who is?"

  "The people. They're like attacking each other."

  Captain Schwenk didn't know what to think. He had heard similar tales from the people on the docks. They stood milling about, watching the entrance that led to the great concrete quays. He saw the fear in their eyes. He knew that something was going on, but he couldn't quite believe the stories that the people had told him. To hear it from one of his own men was something different entirely.

  "Tell me, Russell. What did you see?"

  Russell told him a tale that he didn't believe—couldn't believe—a tale of sitting in a bar and drinking when some injured woman had stumbled in. One of the men in the bar, drunk himself, had sidled up to the lady, thinking to play the hero. She was a "right fine piece," according to Russell. The lady had not responded to the drunk man's advances. Instead, she bit his nose off. That's when Russell had received the text. He fled from the bar with Jonesy, another man from the ship. The streets were in a riot. Cars were everywhere, honking their horns, trying to escape the city.

  He saw more people, injured and violent. He lost track
of Jonesy in the panic.

  Schwenk still did not believe the man. He must have gotten hit on the noggin. What he described couldn't be happening. It wasn't real. But when the next man showed up with a similar tale, he began to believe.

  "Mark, why don't you go lay down. We can handle it up here now."

  Mark, pale and sickly, nodded his head and went down below to the crew's quarters. With ten minutes left until his deadline, a huge explosion rocked the city of Vancouver. Flames lit up the night, and the people on the quay sent up a scream of absolute fear. Half his crew was back. He had no idea where the other half was.

  "Right, we're out of here," he announced

  "What about all the people here?" Russell asked.

  "They're not my people. You know the policy."

  "Sir, you can't."

  "I can, and I will. Now prep the ship."

  But Russell didn't move. Captain Schwenk stared the man down. He had never said no to him before, and he didn't need him starting now.

  "Captain! Look!" a voice called.

  He turned his head, and at the end of the quay, at the part of the dock wide enough for cars and trucks to drive through, he saw a line of people walking through the smoky streets. At first, they began as shadows, slow-moving, unconcerned. The smoke didn't bother them a bit. The people on the dock inched backward, knowing inherently that something wasn't right.

  Schwenk turned to see another ship ditch their ramp into the bay. They released a deafening blast of their foghorn, and then they were pushing away from the dock. The first of the newcomers made their way through the smoke, and Captain Gary Schwenk's jaw dropped open.

  "No, it can't be."

  But it was. The people emerging from the smoke were damaged, some burnt in horrible ways, some bitten, chunks of flesh missing from their arms and legs. One man walked with no left arm, shiny, red blood dripping down his side.

  The people below began to flood over the dock. Some fell in the water in their panic. They pushed his men to the side.

  "Let 'em aboard," Schwenk called to his men. It was the only humane thing he could do. He didn't want to see what happened when those obviously damaged people fell upon the people begging to get on his ship. The loading was not smooth, and despite the hurry, the shadows closed upon the last people on the ramp, whereupon the screams and cries as they were torn apart made his flesh crawl. The ship, its engines roaring, backed away from the dock at his signal. Some people, still on the ramp, fell into the water, but he didn't care. All he knew was he wanted to get away, and he couldn't save everyone. The world wasn't built like that. Never had been.

  Once they were on the open water. The crowd of people watched the city of Vancouver slide by them. They did so in silence, some praying on their knees, others feeling fortunate to still be alive. They watched the fires spread throughout the city. Occasionally, they saw someone on a yacht speed past them. One harried-looking family cruised by on one of the tourist ferries that crawled all over False Creek, the small inlet that divided downtown Vancouver in half.

  Schwenk ran his hand through his hair as they skirted the northern coast of the city. He saw horrible things, his binoculars held in his hands. He saw families running, blood running down their arms and legs. He saw a barricade of police officers overrun, their firearms sparking and spitting fire in the night. The weapons seemed to be useless. He watched a woman with her dog wrapped in her arms dive into the water and start swimming toward them as if she could catch the ship. But they were going too fast, and he had no intention of slowing down.

  "What the fuck is going on?" he asked. No one had any answer. Some of the people that he saved were using their phones, trying to find information. He walked through the crowd on the deck, and for a moment, he was one of them, terrified and scared out of his mind, watching as the news broke that the dead were coming back to life. Some of them laughed it off. Surely that couldn't be true. But he remembered those smoking people, their flesh looking like overcooked Ballpark Franks. A normal person couldn't walk with that type of damage to their body. A living person couldn't do that. A dead person? It was the only explanation that fit.

  When he had his fill of news, he came back to himself, remembering that he was in charge. His first mate, Nicholas Griego, had made it back intact, which he was thankful for, though half his bridge crew was missing.

  "What should we do?" Griego asked when Gary made his back to the bridge.

  Schwenk turned to look at the man. He was young for his position, but he had a good head on his shoulders. At that moment, he seemed like nothing more than a terrified boy, and Schwenk supposed that's exactly what he was. "Just take us out to the open ocean. We'll park this barge and see what we can see. I'll make some calls on the radio. See if there's anything we can do."

  It was a weak plan, but it was all that he had at the moment, and Griego followed through without question, bless the man.

  On the bridge, he watched the crowd of people milling around on the deck. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them, all scared, all floating on a ship with no destination. He tried to radio the port authority, but all he got was static. He used his satellite phone to call his higher-ups, but there was no response on that either. They were based in San Francisco. Could the sickness be there as well?

  With no orders and no contact, he sat in the bridge, looking at the readings on the ship and double-checking his roster. He had Russell Darby do a headcount of the crew. Just as he'd thought, only half had made it back to the Gypsy Drifter. He was short-staffed. They were in for some long shifts.

  He waited for something to happen, anything. But in the end, all he had was the waiting. He had Griego organize sleeping arrangements for the people in the ship's hull. It was an uncomfortably tight squeeze, and he would have to figure out the food situation, but luckily, they had enough fuel to make it down the west coast and back again if they needed to. Somewhere had to be safe, right?

  He thought of his wife, all alone outside San Francisco in Fremont, California. He picked up the satellite phone and called her. It rang, and he waited for an answer. He waited a long time.

  ****

  That night, Mark Wilde died. Captain Schwenk wouldn't know this until much later. The fever in his body broke hot. He was not aware that he was dying. His brain, swollen, searching for any sort of relief from the sickness running through its cells, simply turned off. But it came back on again, not all the way, but enough for the person formally known as Mark Wilde to make his way into a room filled with refugees.

  He bit one person, and then there were screams. They tried to fight the man off, but this only resulted in more bites, one of them was serious. By the time the second man bled out, they had subdued Mark Wilde. Other people showed up to watch the second man die.

  Mark Wilde, bludgeoned into anonymity by the refugees, lay strewn and broken on the floor. When Captain Schwenk arrived, he threw a towel over his body and ordered everyone out of the room. His men carried the bodies to the deck, and a woman with striking Asian features volunteered to take a look at the wounded.

  No one noticed when the second man rose from under the sheet. No one noticed when it killed a third man, a sailor that Captain Schwenk had known for years. By the time anyone noticed that something was going on, the dead were rising up, and there were a good dozen dead folk on the ship.

  The refugees ran back and forth, screaming, hollering, looking for any way to get off of the ship. Many were bitten in the confusion. One man, a construction worker with arms like pythons, managed to kill one of the walking dead by crushing its head with a fire extinguisher. Schwenk, with his captain's pistol in hand, roamed the halls of the ship, killing the dead. He fired bullets into the heads of people he had known for only a few hours, relatives of others on the ship.

  His ears rang when he was done, and he wondered just how bad things were going to get. The Asian woman tended the wounded again, asking for boiled water and sterilized rags, as the first aid kit had been exhausted w
ith the first round of bites.

  As he was about to leave, she pulled him to the side. He thought maybe she was going to flirt with him. The captain's uniform had a way of doing things to the ladies, and he was fully ready to turn her down, thinking of his wife, stuck in Fresno without him. But she wasn't interested in him.

  "It's the bites," she whispered to him in a dark corridor, the steel bulkhead splattered with the blood of someone he had shot in the head.

  "The bites?" he asked.

  "I'm sure of it," she said.

  "How can you be so sure? We don't even know what's going on yet."

  "Check the bodies," she whispered.

  Without telling anyone, he walked up onto the deck, pulling back sheets and blankets, picking up arms and examining them. Rough semi-circular wounds, chunks of missing flesh, every one of the bodies had them, and he knew that the doctor was correct. It was the bites.

  He pulled his handgun from his belt and ejected the magazine. He loaded another. The gun was meant for pirates, to deter anyone that wanted to steal themselves a cargo ship loaded with millions of dollars' worth of goods. But the gun was more than that now. It was protection from the dead. He had one box of ammunition, and he'd already spent a good fifteen rounds in killing the dead. He was no marksman.

  The doctor found him before she found her. Her eyes were big. They sparkled in the lights of the ship's deck. A cool, calm wind blew across the ocean, and he told her what he had found.

  "How many are bit?" he asked.

  "A lot. There may be more that I didn't see."

  He nodded his head.

  "Let me see your arms," he said. She showed him her arms. They were light, perfectly shaped. He cursed himself for noticing such things. "How do you know it's not airborne?" he asked as she held up her hair, and he examined the nape of her neck, admiring the curve of her shoulders and the strongness of her jawline.