Chaos Theory: A Zombie Novel (18 page)

June 25
th

They have taken my ship. The United States military has taken my ship. I am a puppet, and there are armed guards in my wheelhouse “for my safety.” I can’t even use the head without armed escort. They are bringing infected aboard for study and examination. That bitch doctor, who is also a colonel in the Army, has told me that this is the best hope for the world. She struts around here like she owns my boat, and with her escorts and their weapons, she might just. Her arrogance would amuse me if not for the fact that she is in charge of me. I requested to evacuate the three hundred civilians aboard, but she said no, stating that the
Majestik
was safer than anywhere else. Safer until you bring zombies here, stupid woman!

Three hundred people…plus the crew, plus the soldiers and sailors and doctors. Where the fuck is everybody?

“Contact!”

I had to think it. I just couldn’t have kept my mind on what I had been reading, or peanuts or porn stars. I just had to. I put the book in my pack and checked my rifle. Babe had been the one to call out contact and he was pointing down at the deck.

Other than Captain Bob, we all came to those giant windows and looked toward the back of the ship. The containers were stacked a few high, and in between some close to the superstructure stumbled a lone infected. It just milled about, not doing anything scary. Another stumbled into view, then another. They were coming from the rear, and within seconds, the maze of containers was filled with moving bodies.

And they kept coming. They moved in all directions, as long as those directions were forward. Two of them stormed past, pushing the others out of the way. One of the newcomers grabbed a shambler and screamed at it, punching it over and over. The others turned to look, but then moved forward again when the screamer dropped the one it had been striking. Great. Runners. Hadn’t seen them in a while.

Once again, I should have kept my big mind shut.

The Runner looked around, then up at us. We didn’t think to duck, and we should have, because he screamed, and then fought his way through the crowd to get to the stairwell. The other one did the same, chasing his buddy at top speed, and soon four more were pushing and shoving the slower ones. Then two more, then another. How the hell were there so many runners in one place?

I felt the ship move slightly, and my Ship put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped, and may or may not have given off a quiet manly shriek that only the two of us heard. Ship moved his head in a “let’s get the F outa here” motion, and I was on board with that plan. Oh yeah, and it had suddenly gotten very dark outside.

“We need to get out of here before we get trapped!”

The medic looked at me like I was crazy. “They can’t get in here, we should wait.”

“Yeah, but we can’t get out either! After a week up here, you’re gonna look mighty tasty dumbass, and I don’t mean to the zombies!”

“I’m done,” Bob said. “I’ve set her course for one sixty five, she should miss all the rigs, even the abandoned ones. I’m with him, let’s go.”

We could hear frantic stamping on the exterior metal stairs. Babe moved to the door and looked down. “Here they come.” He slammed the hatch and threw all six hatch locks and the slide bar.

Zero did the same across the wheelhouse. “This side is fucked too,” he said calmly and pulled his radio. He called for extraction, and the chopper was on its way.

“Alright,” began Alvarez, “we can’t get to the roof of this structure, or use the exterior stairs, we have to go down the interior stairwell!”

I shook my head. “By the time we get to the bottom all those pus bags will have reached it.”

“Then we use one of the other doors in the stairwell and get into the ship! Now or we die!”

He ran to the door and threw it open, shining his tactical light into the stairwell, “C’mon!” He ran down the stairs and we all followed. I could hear the Runners beating the shit out of the hatches upstairs. Six landings down, Alvarez opened a wooden door and moved in covering the left side, while Babe covered the right.

It was a narrow corridor and we moved into the ship. All the lights were on and it looked comfortable. I realized
I
wasn’t comfortable. My belly wasn’t feeling so good and I had a lot of spit forming in my mouth. That was when I realized the
Majestik
was starting to move in several directions. It wasn’t like being tossed around, more like a slow wave. I looked at Ship, and he nodded, also looking green.

We moved down the corridor, not seeing any evidence of an undead plague. There were stairwells and doors aplenty, but nobody living, dead, or undead to be seen. Still, Alvarez and Babe checked every nook and cranny without opening doors, while Zero covered the rear. Ship stopped and put his massive mitt on one of the bulkheads. You don’t call the walls on a boat walls, you call them bulkheads. Fucking stupid, I know, but it sounds cool, and I firmly believe that is why sailors call walls bulkheads, floors decks, ropes lines, and toilets heads. My knowledge of nautical terms notwithstanding, the big guy looked pretty bad off. I stopped and looked at him, and he looked back at me. I saw it coming, and pulled off a ten point zero Louganis to the right, (six point five from the Russian Judge) but he still got me with some of his spatter.

Everybody has to puke on me. Ever since Steven Jordan in the fourth grade, I’ve been the planet’s vomit target, and honestly, I’ve gotten pretty spry when it comes to dodging. The problem is, sometimes there’s no place to go, and in my haste to escape I bounced off of the opposite bulkhead while Ship continued to spray.

Have we covered the fact that Ship is large? We may have gone over that a time or three. So using your Holmsian deductive powers, you’ve undoubtedly come to the conclusion that big guys supply vastly more spew than smaller guys.

You’re correct. It looked like a spilled vat of pork and beans. Same consistency, same texture, same color. I remember this as clear as my own name too; it made me damn hungry for pork and beans. The only difference between Ship’s partially digested whatever, and an actual delicious meal, was the smell. That stench wasted no time in assaulting my senses, and as I’ve previously stated, I wasn’t feeling that well myself, so I followed Ship down the toss trail and coated the deck with my own vile liquids.

Everybody was looking at us now, some with the backs of their wrists against their mouths. The problem with everybody looking at us was that nobody was looking at the door (hatch) directly behind my monstrous buddy. It opened, and out strolled a dead guy, bloody and filthy. That damn door had been closed not a nanosecond before, I had watched Babe check it, so it would seem that the dead could open doors now.

What was really weird was that it was holding a gun. A little silver revolver that was pointed nowhere special. It moved toward my colossal comrade, stepped in the puke, slipped, and went on its ass. The revolver went off, pinged off of a bulkhead, and the slug buried itself in some wood paneling down the corridor. Every weapon in our little company pointed at the thing, and I know what you’re thinking: The gun? The door? This guy is alive! For fuck’s sake, don’t shoot him! Someone save this poor troubled soul, who knows what he had to live through on this ghost ship to survive!

Nope. This guy was fucking dead. Or undead, whatever. Half his neck was gone and he had bites all over his bare arms. I probably should have mentioned that three paragraphs ago, but hey, this is my tale. Oops.

Anyway, all the guys would have opened up and turned this thing into Swiss cheese, but we were in a metal can if you remember. We had just seen what a ricochet could do in here, and I didn’t want to end up like the paneling, so I screamed for everyone to hold their fire. So did Alvarez and Zero.

It was all moot though, as Ship brought his steel-toed, puke-covered death boot up in a vicious kick that nearly decapitated the thing. With a sickening crunch, the creature’s jaw exploded and teeth flew as its head snapped back, snapped being the operative word. It was dead, and now everybody was looking at Ship for a different reason.

And now you want an explanation of how the thing opened the door. That shit is as tough for you now as it was for me then because I have no idea how it did that. There was simply nothing different about that door handle than any other. I realize that this sounds like a copout, but remember, this is an account of the living dead, so deal with it. Insofar as the gun? I’ve seen those things carrying everything from cigarettes to stuffed animals to hedge clippers, so why not a gun?

We moved on. I was really feeling like shit too, and what little there was left of my stomach contents constantly wanted out. The
Majestik
was moving harder now, and when I looked out a porthole, I could see that the swells had grown and we were looking at maybe six foot seas. Now that might not sound like a lot to you, but if you’ve ever encountered six foot seas, you know it can be hell. If you haven’t gone through that, I only have one recommendation for you: Don’t. The only reason we weren’t being tossed around like jelly beans in a tin can is because this particular tin can was fucking huge.

Moving deeper into the ship we could only go in one direction: down. I know that might not have been the best idea, but we couldn’t get to the exterior decks from where we were. There were just too many zombies. We started seeing signs of struggle as we made our way down too. Blood. A deck of cards all over the floor. Bullet casings and a broken porthole. We saw one more zombie before we entered the door at the bottom of the last stairwell, but it never saw us, and Alvarez took it out with his knife from behind.

I noticed signs for the galley and we followed them. A large barricade had been erected outside the galley doors. Chairs, tables, carts, trays, trash cans, and everything else you can think of had been piled on both sides of the door. A dozen or so bodies were splayed here and there outside the barricade, indicating a big battle had occurred here. The barricade was destroyed and spread out, so it hadn’t held.

We heard movement on the other side of the broken door. Babe pulled his inspection mirror and took a peek. The shit got scared out of him exceptionally quickly, and he gave panicked hand motions for us to move back the way we had come. It didn’t matter. Something alerted those dead fuckers to our proximity and all hell broke loose.

Separate Ways

It never ceases to amaze me what people are wearing when they return from the dead seeking the flesh of the living. I guess if you get overwhelmed, or die quickly, then you don’t have a chance to change. Or maybe you get too sick, or just don’t give a shit. Whatever the case may be, when the plague first struck Boston, it was November, and pretty chilly, although not freezing, so everybody had clothes on.

So when the twenty-something chickie, wearing cut-off jeans and a disgusting halter top that had fallen to about her midsection , came through the door and looked right at me, boobs a-kilter, all I could think of was that she probably looked better in death. Oh, I should have mentioned that she was pushing three bills. Much like the fatties that had tried to eat me on my first day as an escaped convict, this girl was a lot of woman. At least they had been wearing mu mus. In life, this poor girl had thought she was a size six. She wasn’t. She was followed by a guy in a brown-stained apron with
Kiss the…
on it. The rest of the verbiage was obscured by those brown stains that were undoubtedly not ketchup. I of course immediately pictured this guy cooking up healthy humans so he and his buddies could eat some livers with fava beans and a nice Chianti. I even pictured a parsley garnish. Hey, it’s all about presentation. And if you’re inwardly bitching about the word ketchup vs. catsup, I’m a punch you in the face.

Those two were the first through the galley doors, but they were followed by a lot more of their kin. A whole bunch more.

We executed a tactical withdrawal and ran back down the hall (I dunno what the nautical term for hall is) at high speed. The dead folks gave a slow chase, but that slow speed of theirs is nothing if not constant. A couple of twists and turns brought us to a berthing area, and there was blood everywhere. To make matters worse, the power was fluctuating and the lights were flickering. I also realized the Majestic was getting tossed around more than it had before.

My sea-legs abandoned me and I fell to one side into a room with two bunks. One of them held the partial remains of a guy, and he sat up from his nap and looked at me, drooling. I got up quickly and slammed the door. Yeah, it was a door, not a hatch. The thing inside was beating on the portal (do you see what I did there?) in an instant, and suddenly Alvarez was shooting in front of us.

“Contact forward!”

This corridor was much thinner than the others we had been in and I was afraid of ricochets, but as it turned out, I should have been afraid of zombies. The marine in front of me raised his rifle to help Alvarez but the lights flickered, and when they came back on one second later, the marine was gone. Like a total Houdini. I was inwardly
what the fuck
-ing when I heard an “Ahhh shit!” then a suppressed gunshot. The sounds of the rifle shots were deafening in this metal tomb and my ears were ringing. Pity the rifles didn’t have suppressors.

I peeked into a room I hadn’t seen, and saw the marine holding his neck. “Let me see it,” I demanded, “Let me see!”

He brought his palm from his face, and I could see that his earlobe and patch of skin where his jaw met his skull were gone. He looked at the re-killed zombie, then at his bloody palm, then at me, then he shook his head.

“Nope,” he said, put the long suppressor under his chin, and blew his head off. The dropped ceiling of the room was sprayed with his goo, and a bullet hole appeared in the now red tile. The Gulf sprayed up on the porthole, and I realized that we were in the midst of the storm now.

I picked up his weapon and closed the door. The whole thing had taken place in about six seconds, but in that precious time, shit had gone from bad to worse. Infected had come from in front of us and we knew that there were dozens behind. Zero was fighting a losing battle to the rear trying to close a hatch with ten dead hands already on it pulling the other way. Alvarez, Babe, and two of the other marines were firing to the front, but the corridor was only about four feet wide and was filling up quickly with infected. The now typical thoughts of “kill one and two take its place” were flying around in everybody’s head. Greg was trying to tell Captain Bob and Steve the medic that everything was gonna be OK, and the last marine had checked out and was standing there babbling. Ship was looking green, but had the sense to have his machete ready.

So who do you think stepped the F up? Yeah, dear reader, it was yours truly.

“Ship! Help me!”

The big guy looked at me and we both high-tailed it the sixty feet back to where Zero was about to have the hatch (this was a hatch, not a door) yanked from his mitts. I grabbed a hatch lock and pulled with him. I really wanted Mr. Hulk Hands to start pulling too, but in his smarter-than-everybody way, he diffused the situation. No, he didn’t have a cup of tea with the zombies and talk shit out, he used his blade to hack the fingers off of the hands pulling against us. With only a few whacks, he had the digits of those monsters on the deck at our feet. Putting his right hand (the one with the machete) against the bulkhead, he grabbed the hatch handle and pulled that shit closed, amputating a few more fingers. Zero slammed a hatch lock home and I did the same for another. We wasted no time in locking that shit up with all six locks, and I was briefly happy to hear the frustrated and pissed off wails of the dead fuckers on the other side. Yeah, I know they don’t get pissed off or frustrated, but I’m using poetic license to amp up the story. I hope it’s working.

Zero picked up a woman’s finger and smiled. “Now I want sausages.”

Ship promptly threw up on him.

Screaming from the front lines interspersed with the shots broke our revelry and I heard Alvarez holler: “Fall back!”

To where? Where were we supposed to fall the fuck back to? We were in a hundred-foot long, four-foot wide steel tube. There were doors on both sides of the tube, one of which contained a living dead guy, and it wouldn’t hold very long against an assault by the hands that would be pounding on it. We were well and truly fucked, and in moments we would be hand to hand with these dead assholes.

The pile up of destroyed infected was beginning to hamper the advance of their undead comrades, but not nearly enough. They were climbing over and we were losing ground. The hallway was filled with the hungry ones, but Ship stood on his tip toes, wiping his mouth and pointed. The big guy’s noggin was almost touching the deck above us, but he still unceremoniously picked me up like a little kid and raised me high enough to see that the tide of pus bags ended about thirty deep.

“Alvarez,” I shouted, “we have to move forward, they’re thinning out!”

“Fuck, I’m out!” he yelled, dropped his rifle and pulled his suppressed Sig. He and the marine next to him moved towards the dead, and Babe and the other marine followed. “Reloading,” yelled one of the marines. The dead, now only about fifteen feet away, surged forward, tripping over their buddies and themselves.

I ran the thirty feet to our forward line, when the marine that had suffered his momentary breakdown decided it was time to play. We were the third group of two, he and I, but he fought his way forward and brought his shotgun to bear.

“Rafferty! Get back on the fucking line!”

I used to go to a pub named Rafferty’s when I wore a younger man’s shoes.

The marine, Rafferty, emptied his shotty into the faces of those that would eat him, drawing his M9 pistol and discarding the big gun when it emptied. He took careful aim with the Berretta and fired it until that too was empty. Babe rushed up to join him and the two of them did pretty well until one of the things got past its destroyed pals and bit Babe in the hand. Babe backed up, a little shocked, but the marine went ape shit. He vaulted over the re-killed zombies and entered the fray with his Ka-Bar. If you’re unaware what a Ka-Bar is, it’s a knife. He destroyed one more of the things before the others tore him to pieces.

That was the impetus we needed to destroy the last vestiges of the undead force in the corridor. Rafferty’s sacrifice, if that’s what it was, had the dead focused on eating him or trying to eat him, and we took them all down. Babe’s last bullet went into Rafferty’s mauled face.

There were at least a hundred of these things in the corridor, and it was as blocked for us as it had been for them. We had lost two soldiers, and one was infected. That infected guy was a damn good friend of mine too.

Steve was bandaging Babe’s hand when Babe looked up at Zero. “Can they get through there?” He had nodded his head toward the hatch which was undoubtedly covered in zombie shit as they were pounding the fuck out of the other side of it.

“Dunno,” Zero answered, “what happened to you?”

Babe held up his now bandaged hand. “I got killed.”

“Shit. Sucks.” Zero raised his eyebrows. “Wanna butt?”

Zero handed Babe a cigarette. “Might as well take up smokin’ now, got a light?”

Alvarez, the two remaining marines, and Greg were clearing a path through the dead, dragging some all the way down the corridor and shoving them against the hatch, which showed no signs of giving under the onslaught of dozens of fists. I pitched in, and so did Bob. Fuckers were heavy. Steve the medic had given us all purple gloves, but the pus bags were still…squishy… I guess is the best word. One of the marines climbed and hopscotched through all the bodies to the far end of the corridor for some recon. “Clear,” came through the radio.

Babe was sitting on the deck, coughing up new cigarette smoke and talking to Zero, who had a remarkable calming effect. Steve checked on him constantly, but all of us including Babe knew his game was over.

I grabbed the nasty black hand of one of the more rotten ones and the skin sloughed off. I chucked its hand-rind against a bulkhead, and it stuck like spaghetti. Then the
Majestik
rolled, and I lost balance and almost smacked face first into that black, disgusting thing. My face was about a half inch away and its smell permeated my senses. It was atrocious, and I still remember retching to this day.

Ship was also retching, but it was because the
Majestik
was now pitching and rolling all over the place. Captain Bob was leaning against a bulkhead and looking nervous, so I asked him what was up.

“The course correction software. It can’t account for this type of weather. I should be in the wheelhouse.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” I said, putting my hand up, “you mean we need to go back up there? I don’t think that’s possible, Captain.”

“Then we can’t steer into the oncoming swells, and we could get swamped. Worse, we could go way off course and smash into one of the rigs or other boats.”

I gave him the
you’ve got to be fucking shitting me
look and he held up his hands helplessly. “We didn’t anticipate the storm catching us so quickly. All we had were a few reports, but usually those rig weather guys are pretty good. Didn’t you ever listen to a weather report and have the weatherman be totally wrong?”

“Yeah, but my friggin’ life wasn’t in the balance!”

“Welcome to the sea my friend.”

“Fuck!”

Everyone turned to look at my outburst. Even Babe and Zero looked at us.

Alvarez was immediately suspicious. “What?”

“Captain Bligh here is telling me we might have come for nothing.” I chucked a thumb at Bob. I mean I pointed at him with my thumb; I didn’t pick up a zombie digit and throw it at him. Why would you think that? Ew.

Bob related what he had just told me to everybody, and they all had the same outburst except for Babe, who stood up.

He looked at Bob. “Tell me how to fix it.”

“What?”

“How do I make it so we won’t crash into anybody?”

“You can’t! You would have to go back to the wheelhouse and…well…steer. But you’ll never make it there, there are too many of them.”

“Whether they rip me to pieces or I die spitting up my pancreas, it doesn’t matter, I’m dead. At least I’ll have a chance to stop this fucking tub from killing anybody else if I try.”

Wow. Fucking True-Blue Hero. Captain America type stuff. Stupid, but heroic.

“I’ll go with him.”

I heard it and looked around to see what fucking moron would tag along on that one-way mission.

Everybody was looking at me.

Wait.

Time the fuck out.

Did that shit come out of me?

I sighed, both then and now. Yeah. I said it, but it was such a shock to my own damn system, my psyche must have checked out for a sec.

“I can’t get infected,” I blurted, and the sea-sick stinkeye I got from Ship almost knocked me over. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Alvarez about my immunity. Honestly, it didn’t mean anything on the rig. Nobody had to know, and not knowing meant everybody was safer.

“What does that mean?” demanded Alvarez.

I pulled my jeans up and showed him the bite mark on my leg. “That came from one of them a long time ago.” I pulled my shirt down exposing my collar bone scar. “This too.”

“Bullshit,” Greg said.

Ship already had a yellow post it filled out and handed it to Alvarez who read it aloud:
It’s true, I saw him get bitten months ago.

They had all been looking, but now they were all gawking.