by Zack Archer
Then she threw the wheel and let go of it, pulling those two silver pistols out. She fired them like a gunslinger, willing several expertly-placed shots into the side of the white boat. Whatever her rounds struck ignited, because there was a flash of light and the boat caught fire.
The white boat’s navigator overcompensated and when he tried to drive off, Sadie shot him in the throat. The man slumped over the controls and the white boat spun out of control and slammed into another section of the bridge, creating a massive fireball.
Sadie slotted her still-smoking pistols back into their holsters and regained the wheel, piloting us toward the space under the bridge. “Whatever you do, don’t look up when we go under!” she shouted.
We passed under the bridge and of course, I looked up. It took my eyes several seconds to adjust to the murkiness, but then the underside seemed to shift and move.
There were snakes above us. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. One of them dropped into the boat, grazing Lexie’s shoulder.
“What is that?” she asked, her eyes still closed.
“Nothing,” I replied, grimacing, then grabbed the snake and tossed it overboard. One of Sadie’s crew smiled at me, then swung a metal pole at a hidden object under the bridge.
The man’s pole severed a nearly-invisible cord that sent a thick sheet of metal crashing down, blocking anyone us from following us.
We passed out the other side of the bridge, hooked a left, and cruised down what Raven said had once been a row of very fashionable restaurants. Everything was underwater aside from the tops of a few dozen palm trees and the roofs of four or five of the taller buildings. I saw the fins of several sharks out in the distance along with clusters of alligators.
“Once the pumps failed and the water rose, we had some serious migration,” Sadie said. “Sharks from the ocean and gators from the ‘Glades.”
“Check that,” Lexie said, gesturing to one of the taller buildings off in the distance. The upper portions of the structure had been painted black and emblazoned with a crude death’s head skull.
“Everything that comes in and goes out of Miami goes through there,” Sadie said.
“What is it?” Scarlett asked.
“That used to be the Four Seasons. Now it’s the Turk’s lair, his headquarters and party palace.”
“Who’s the Turk?” I asked for the second time.
“Bart Hill,” Sadie said. “He used to be the DEA’s Special Agent in Charge of the Miami Field Division. Bastard was responsible for overseeing operations throughout Florida, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Cuba, you name it.”
“How do you know?”
A frown creased her face. “’Cause he and his men busted me once upon a time.”
“What’s a ‘Turk?’” Lexie asked.
Sadie looked back. “Apparently, it’s the person in professional football who comes around to tell people that they’ve been cut. That they no longer exist.”
“Basically, the NFL’s version of the Grim Reaper,” I added, having heard the term before.
Something thumped the boat. Sadie barked to her crew in Spanish and they replied with a volley of words. The only ones I made out were monstruo de agua.
“Water monster?” Raven said. “Did he just say water monster?”
Sadie looked back. “That’s not what he said at all.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “He said water monsters. Plural.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” I replied, trading nervous glances with the ladies.
More thumps from under the boat, notes that sounded eerily like hands slapping against the hull.
Sadie pushed the throttle up and the propeller on the back of the boat groaned, making a clunking sound as if it was churning through debris. She throttled down and lifted a blade that resembled a samurai sword. Her crew also lifted swords and axes and marched toward us.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked, eyes sweeping either side of the boat.
Sadie pointed toward the stern. “The propeller’s stuck.”
“On what?” Lexie asked.
“Probably a knot.”
“Of what?”
“Zombies,” Sadie replied.
“But we’re in the middle of the water,” Deb said.
“And?’
“And zombies don’t live in the water,” Hollis offered.
Sadie smirked. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but the dead have found a way to…evolve.”
“Evolve?”
Sadie swung the blade violently and I ducked as—
WHUNK!
She decapitated a zombie who was pulling itself up over the gunwale.
The thing’s head flew back as the boat rocked, more of the waterlogged ghouls emerging from the water, fingers gripping the sides of the boat.
“We need to cut the propeller free!” Sadie shouted.
More hands shot of the water, then skulls, then moldering bodies. Sadie’s crew chopped at the things and we shot the rest, but more of them appeared. In seconds the water was filled with an oily slick of black gore and body parts that attracted some attention. I saw dorsal fins in the distance and the silhouettes of alligators peering over.
“We need to get moving, pronto,” Raven said.
I headed to the stern with Sadie, the two of us peering into the water. Visibility was shitty but I saw the corpses of several zombies, along with a net of some kind snared in the propeller.
“We need to untangle that,” Sadie said.
“Be my guest.”
“It’s a two-person job—”
“Nick. The name’s Nick.”
She nodded. “Hope you know how to swim, Nick.” She grabbed my shoulder and dragged me overboard.
The water was briny and had the odor of garbage. I sank and grabbed the bottom rung on a ladder dangling from the back of the boat. My eyes ratcheted all around, searching for zombies, sharks, and alligators.
Sadie was barely visible, using her sword to saw at the four zombie corpses tangled in the propeller. Reaching over, I grabbed the back of one of the zombies and the fucking thing tried to bite me!
The monster’s black eyes came to life as I put a metal dart through its forehead, then worked to snap off its arms and body like I was breaking down a chicken in a kitchen. The sodden corpse snapped apart and then I set to work on the next one, splitting it in half as dark shapes buzzed past us.
Sharks. Two of them.
Two, seven-foot bull sharks that began attacking the other zombies that were down below us and ringing the sides of the boats. I watched the sharks inhale lopped-off heads and runny strings of entrails, hoping that the feast would keep them occupied.
We were down to one zombie, a bloated man with a beard and long, black hair. A good portion of the propeller was stuck in his ribcage.
Having only a few seconds of air left, Sadie and I worked feverishly to rip the body apart. She drove her sword down through the zombie’s neck and planted her boots, bisecting the corpse, which fell away.
I made a motion to swim up and she thrust the sword directly at me. Right past my head—and speared the nose of one of the sharks before the thing took a bite out of me. The shark writhed in agony and sank, taking Sadie’s sword with it as we kicked our feet and surfaced.
Deb and Raven pulled us back onboard as I moved with Sadie up to the boat’s controls.“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“I’m taking you to see my Notch,” Sadie replied.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the name of our hideout.”
She laughed and throttled up. We sped through the outer edges of downtown Miami before heading west toward the Everglades, leaving the zombies, sharks, and alligators in our wake.
17
Thirty minutes later, we drifted up a marshy river that Sadie called a slough, heading into a section of the Everglades. The motor was off and Sadie’s crew used metal poles to push us into a shallow channel that was concealed by cluster
s of vegetation. On the other side of the channel was a floating dock and a barely-visible pier that was wedged between thick stands of mangrove trees.
We docked and climbed out onto the pier, the crew being careful to pull a camouflaged tarp over the craft. Sadie whistled for us to follow and we took off over a rickety boardwalk that had been built four feet above the spongy ground.
I was surprised to see that a section of the jungle-like woods had been hacked away. The upper canopy still existed, shielding the space from prying eyes, but the ground had been cleared, the brush burned back. There was just enough room for us to stand upright while carefully navigating the boardwalk, which threatened to give way at any second.
The woods were damp and filled with the chittering of insects, birds, and small creatures. On more than one occasion, we spotted larger animals moving through the brush, but nobody said a word and the things vanished from sight. Hollis was next to me, peering uneasily into the ground cover. I removed the small bear I’d grabbed back int the pet store and manipulated its tiny mouth.
“I’m here if you need to cuddle,” I said in a tiny bear voice. “Just sayin’.”
She smiled. “Where’d you get that?”
“Back in South Carolina.”
“I come bearing gifts,” I said, handing her the bear.
She mimed a laugh and stared at the doll. “It’s not exactly like my last one, but…it’ll do.”
Soon, I smelled smoke. Up ahead, a colony of shacks—some made of wood and punched tin and others of concrete block—replaced the undergrowth. The structures were positioned out and away from a distant hill that appeared to be dotted with caves.
“Home sweet home,” Sadie said, gesturing to the camp.
We moved down a path that bisected the structures. I glimpsed solar panels hidden behind screens made of branches and vines, most connected to communication equipment, and a small diesel engine on the back of a rusted truck that pumped water from a seep that gurgled out from a fistful of what Raven said was limestone.
“Okay, so…this is it? This is the base?” I asked.
Sadie turned to me. “You were expecting, what? Fort fucking Bragg?”
I didn’t respond. The forms visible in and around the colony, men and women, ceased moving to watch us from the shadows of the trees.
Sadie whistled and a tall woman with glasses and chestnut-colored hair stepped from behind a wall of mangrove trees. Her tight-fitting camouflage clothes were speckled with bush debris, her tanned face begrimed and dotted with sweat. She carried a sword similar to the one I’d seen Sadie use.
The woman frowned upon seeing us. “Jesus, look what the cat dragged in.”
Sadie sighed. “These are them, Dixie.”
The woman, Dixie, removed her glasses to reveal eyes as cold as gin. She barked a laugh. “These are the ones? These are the saviors that Sharla spoke so highly of?”
“Sharla’s dead and the helicopters were shot down,” Sadie said.
Dixie’s face fell. She moved closer to inspect us, but it was clear that she wasn’t impressed. “A dude with one hand and a bunch of chicks,” Dixie said. “That’s who we’re teaming up with?”
“Who are you calling a chick?” Deb asked, trading nasty looks with Dixie. I was about to ask who she was calling a dude with one hand and then I realized that, yeah, I only had one hand.
“Unless you have a meat-wand hanging between your legs, I’m talking about you, sweetheart,” Dixie said, jabbing at the air.
Deb stepped forward, fists balled up. Dixie squared her shoulders. I threw up my arms and stepped between them. “Enough.”
Dixie looked me up and down. “No offense, but what’s your name, Captain Hook?”
“Nick.”
“I’m not impressed with your team, Nick.”
“And I’m not impressed with your shitty little camp here. I’ve seen Cub Scouts and homeless people living in the woods that are doing better than you and your people. No offense, lady.”
“The name’s Dixie, and it’s a work in progress.”
“A shitty work in progress,” Raven said with a grim smile.
The other men and women circled us. I was readying for a brawl when a gunshot echoed. It was Sadie, and she was holding one of her pistols.
“Everyone needs to chill and stand the fuck down.”
Dixie and the others backed up as Sadie stood in the middle of everyone. “Whether we like it or not, we’re all on the same team—which means you need to play nicely in the sandbox, boys and girls.”
Sadie turned to me. “You’ll have to excuse Dixie. She doesn’t like strangers, but she grows on you.”
“So does mold,” I replied as Dixie muttered something I couldn’t make out.
Sadie pointed to the camp. “I’ll admit the accommodations could be better, but we’ve got lots to eat and drink, hot showers, a beach, no zombies, and mosquitoes. Tons of mosquitoes.”
“What’s the plan?” Deb asked.
“Take it easy and enjoy yourselves for a while. Everything we have is yours. Later, we’ll discuss operations and action-items. The plan is to head out at first light and break into the Vortex Lab.”
I moved around the camp with Hollis and Lexie, inspecting everything. I was surprised to see ample stores of food and non-lethal gear and medical supplies, but very little weaponry. I grabbed several bananas off a wooden crate and handed them to the ladies. Lexie peeled and ate hers in a very suggestive manner, which seemed to slightly offend Hollis, but which got the blood flowing for me in all the right areas.
We moved under a cluster of trees and I noticed that there were hammocks strung between them. Dozens of them.
“They’re sleeping in the trees,” I said.
“Smart,” Lexie said, munching on her banana. “Those aren’t up in the trees.”
“What?”
She pointed to the ground and I froze as an enormous snake slithered between my feet before vanishing into a lagoon beyond the trees. I reached over and grabbed Hollis’s wrist.
“It’s okay, I’m here,” I said.
“Thanks, Nick, but I’m not the one who’s ready to piss his pants.”
“Python,” Lexie said. “Invasive species. My daddy went on a snake hunt out near the Big Cypress National Preserve a couple, three years ago, and bagged one of those suckers.”
“How big?” Hollis asked.
“Twenty-one feet. When they cut it open the thing had seventy-five developing eggs inside it.”
My stomach lurched at the thought of the monster snake and its babies. “Thank God he got it,” I said.
“Yeah, see, that’s the thing,” Lexie mused, biting her lips. “With the end of the world and all, nobody’s been hunting the snakes.”
“Which means?”
“They’ve just been hanging out and eating and having sex and getting bigger. Much. Bigger.”
Visions of thirty-foot pythons danced in my head as I tiptoed through the brush. I spotted Sadie waving at me from the other side of a clearing.
“I hope you’re making yourself at home,” she said.
“Sure am. Just got acquainted with a big-ass snake back there.”
“Comes with the territory.”
“Hopefully I don’t get eaten.”
She laughed. “Snakes rely on scent to a large degree when they hunt. Since the zombies have such a strong odor, they actually appear to prefer them over us.”
“Lucky us.”
“We could talk snakes all day, or I could show you around.”
“I’d love to take a tour,” I said with a smile.
We strolled through the camp. Sadie showed me a small farm where several women tended to rows of vegetables, fruit trees, and a collection of several dozen chickens, goats, and pigs.
“Doesn’t look like much, but there are only twenty-nine of us, so it provides most of our food.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I arrived sixty-two days after the lights w
ent out. Ephraim was already here,” she said, waving to one of her crew, a Hispanic man with a shaved head who was sporting a pair of black wraparounds. “I had a boat. He had the land. A partnership was struck.”
Ephraim waved back.
“What about the others?”
“Most of ‘em we picked up on runs into Miami. They all have skills: electricians, plumbers, a doctor, three engineers…”
“You knew Sharla Frost?” I asked.
Sadie nodded. “A government plane crashed out past Coconut Grove. We rescued the survivors, and they had communications gear with them.”
Sadie pointed at a shack off to the right, a plywood and tin-shingled structure with a roof made entirely of solar panels. A battery of computer equipment was visible inside.
“Once they showed us how to hook it up, we were able to send and receive signals. Eventually, Sharla and her people reached out to us. We’ve made some expeditions to various parts of the state for them, mostly tracking down odds and ends that they thought might be important.”
“What do you get in return?”
She looked at me as if this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “I don’t want anything in return.”
“You’re a saint?”
She scoffed at this. “I’ve had winter in my bones for as long as I can remember. You know what that means?”
I shook my head.
“It means I was involved in a lot of shitty things in the days before the world ended. Stuff that I don’t even want to talk about. I let a lot of good people down.”
“Is any of that related to how you know the Turk?”
She looked like she didn’t want to answer, but then, her expression changed. She nodded. “You know what Overtown is?”
“Nope.”
“It’s an area down near the Miami River and the Dolphin Expressway. Weren’t a whole lot of opportunities for someone like me growing up, so I ran with the wrong crowd.”
“Drugs?”
“Whatever they had, I humped for them. They gave me a car and money and I drove, man. From the Keys all the way up to goddamn Portland, Maine, and everywhere in between. I’m not proud of any of it, but I did what I had to do. And then one day, I got busted. At some point, I don’t even remember when, I met the Turk. ‘Course, he was going by Bart Hill then, but I’ll never forget the dude. He’s spooky.”
