Dead Calm (10 page)

They all looked to where he was pointing at the
chained metal doors with the crosses painted on them.

“Don't think anyone's coming from that direction,”
Tick-Tock said. “That leaves the stairs here in the Centrum, and we
can cover them no problem.” Looking at Steve, he asked, “You
thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Maybe,” Steve answered before turning to Heather and
saying, “I'm thinking we can bring everyone on board.” A cautious
look crossed her face so he added, “From what Tim and Connie told
us, we're secure here as long as we keep the stairs covered.
Reverend Ricky might be a threat, but I bet he already knows we're
here. Since he hasn't made a move on us, I doubt he will.” Heather
still looked less than enthused at the idea, so Steve put in,
“Besides, you said you wanted a shower and some real food, this is
our chance.”

“There's a shower in the locker room behind the
kitchen,” Connie volunteered. “We use it all the time. There's no
hot water, but it's not too bad. I think the water tank is near the
hull of the ship so the sun heats it up pretty good.”

Heather considered this before turning to walk the
length of the Centrum as she surveyed their position. Coming back
to study the grand staircase leading to the decks above, after a
moment of thought, she said, “Okay, let's do it. I think we could
all use a break from riding on the SS Minnow. Call Brain and tell
him to get ready to come aboard and we'll meet him at the hatch. We
need to post someone to cover the stairs so we don't get any
surprise visitors, and we'll have to keep our guard up at all
times. I want everyone to stay conscious of where they are and what
the fastest route back to the sailboat is in case we have to
evacuate.”

Heather turned to Connie and said, “You and Tim are
welcome to come with us when we leave, but first I think you need
to know what the rest of the world is like. After you find out, you
might want to stay here.”

“I think we have a good idea of what it's like out
there,” Connie replied. “Before we lost the signal, we used to get
radio broadcasts from KLAM in Florida-.”

Tick-Tock laughed out loud, cutting Connie off.

“What's so funny?” She asked.

“Nothing,” Tick-Tock replied with a big smile. “Go
ahead with what you were saying.”

Looking around, Connie noticed that all of them were
smiling, but she didn't get the joke. Hoping that someone would
eventually let her in on it, she continued, “So KLAM gave out
reports of what was happening, and it sounded like things got bad,
but I’d rather take my chances out there than stay here and live in
hiding.”

Heather shrugged, wondering if Connie would feel
differently once she saw her first Dead City. Turning to Steve, she
raised an eyebrow and said with a smile, “Looks like you're the new
Captain of this ship, so what are your orders?”

Having mentally run through what needed to be done
while Heather and Connie talked, he said, “Tick-Tock covers the
stairs, Heather you stay with him. Susan, you, Connie and Tim go
with me to meet Brain at the hatch.”

“Bring back some tear gas canisters and extra ammo,”
Tick-Tock said. “They might come in handy.”

“Gotcha,” he replied.

“How many are with you?” Connie asked.

“Two other people and a Mary,” Tick-Tock replied.

Looking at the rows of shops, Susan said, “She'll
think she died and went to Heaven.”

Unclipping the radio from his belt, Steve filled
Brain in on what had happened and about their plan to move onto the
Dead Calm. When he finished, he turned to Heather and said, “We’re
all set, but there are a few things that worry me. Why didn't
Reverend Ricky or any of his followers show themselves when we
circled the ship? And since he has rifles, he could have kept us
from boarding, but he didn't.”

Tick-Tock, who was using his K-Bar knife to pry the
Plexiglas cover off a diagram of the ship, mounted near the stairs,
said, “Maybe he wants us here.”

Heather shook her head, “I don't think so. We pose
too much of a threat of upsetting the balance in his little
commune. There's got to be another reason.”

“Maybe we have something he wants?” Susan
proposed.

“Could be,” Steve said thoughtfully, “but what?”

Chapter Six

The Dead Calm:

Richard Rosencrantz, known to his faithful followers
as the Reverend Ricky Rose, looked out from the bridge of the Calm
of the Seas at the sailboat holding position off the right side of
his ship. Turning to his second in command, who in the pre-dead
world had been a third-rate lawyer named Donald Parsons, working
out of a dilapidated double wide trailer set up in a strip mall
parking lot, he asked, “How many came on board?”

“Four,” Parsons replied. “My guys counted four that
came on board and three more still on the sailboat. He said the
ones on board move like they know what they're doing, maybe former
military. Altogether there are three women, three men and a little
girl in their group. Two men and two women came onto the Calm, and
they were all carrying automatic weapons. A young woman and a kid
met them down in the Centrum. That's who we think let them on the
ship. They must have opened one of the hatches on deck four.”

“Saved us from doing it,” Ricky commented, and then
asked, “Are the faithful staying out of sight?”

Parsons nodded and said, “Except for one guy on deck
five who's keeping an eye on the newcomers, I pulled the rest of
the watchers back and herded the faithful onto deck eleven. It's
the only one that doesn't open up onto the Centrum. I don't want a
bunch of people getting curious and hanging over the rail and
gawking. I also tried to identify the girl and the kid, but I
didn't recognize them as any of the followers. The kid looked
familiar, like I’ve seen him hanging around, but I’ve never seen
the chick before.”

Ricky nodded at this. He and Don both knew that not
everyone on board welcomed Ricky’s leadership and that a few
passengers roamed the huge ship and didn't participate in the
nightly sermon or the extra-curricular activities afterward. As
long as these break-a-ways didn’t interfere with Ricky or his
Ushers, they were left alone. But if any did voice an objection to
the way the ship was run, they were immediately silenced.

“Good work, Don,” Ricky told his number two. “Make
sure you keep your thumb on the faithful and keep them under
control.”

Ricky turned and walked to a table covered with
charts near the back of the bridge. After sifting through them, he
laid out one showing the Gulf of Mexico, the Mexican coast and the
Yucatan peninsula. Placing his forefinger on a red pencil mark, he
asked, “Is this our position?”

“As of this morning it is,” Parsons replied.

Ricky shook his head and made clucking sounds in his
throat to show his displeasure.

“We’re drifting further and further away every day,”
Parsons commented. “There's no way we could make it to Cozumel now,
even if we tow three lifeboats full of fuel behind us. And then
we’d have to tow another two for supplies.”

With a heavy sigh, Ricky said, “I know Don, we're
caught between Scylla and Charybdis.”

Parsons gave Ricky a questioning look so he
explained, “lt means a rock and a hard place. We can't make it to
safety, and time's running out if we stay here.”

“Well, we didn’t know the ship was going to sink when
we made the decision to stay with it,” Parsons replied.

“But we knew that Cozumel was free of the dead and
taking in refugees if you brought your own supplies. We should have
gone when we had the chance,” Ricky countered.

Parsons nodded, but he knew that when they had first
made radio contact with Cozumel and found out it was a safe haven,
the Calm of the Seas was still in excellent condition. The booze
was running freely and the orgies on the pool deck were going full
tilt boogie. There was no way the people on board were going to
give that all up to be farmers or fisherman on an island off the
Mexican coast. It was live for the moment, and to hell with the
future. The only problem was that the future was here.

“How long did Brother Seth say we have until the
pumps go out?” Ricky asked.

“Two weeks at most.”

“Well, we had a good thing going here while it
lasted, but I guess it's time to move on.” Sighing, Ricky thought
back over the past few months and the pure power he'd enjoyed and
was about to lose.

When Richard Rosencrantz had boarded the Calm of the
Seas months earlier, it had been to take a much-needed break from
his business of promoting religious tent revival meetings. Needing
a breather from travelling from one end of the Bible belt to the
other while hawking an endless stream of snake handlers, people
speaking in tongues and little girls in pretty, white dresses
singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’, a seven day cruise seemed to be just what
he needed. After decades in the business, he was starting to get
burned out, and it seemed like he was doing too much for too
little. Month after month he felt like he was working his ass off.
And for what, he asked himself, ten percent of the take when the
plate was passed around at the end of the night? It just didn't
seem to be worth it.

Despite making a decent living, Ricky's real problem
stemmed from watching the preachers and charlatans over the years
and how they lived off the other ninety percent. Jealousy and
resentment ballooned as he watched the false prophets drive around
in Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes while he was stuck with a
Cadillac.

Last year's model, he often reminded himself. It
wasn't fair.

And the power that these so called men of God
wielded, Richard often raged to himself. They could tell their
flock to do damned near anything, claiming it was an order sent
down from Jesus H. Christ himself, and the idiots would fall all
over themselves to do it. Standing on the bridge of the Calm of the
Seas, he remembered getting drunk with a Baptist minister one night
after a rather profitable show and what he had confided in him.

The minister explained how he used his ushers as
spotters. They would watch the crowd for any mother and daughter
combination that had come to the show unescorted. If the two
females seemed to be taken in with the Holy Spirit during the
service, an usher would approach them afterward and explain that
the Minister had a private message to them from God. Once alone
with his victims, the Minister would roll his eyes up and pretend
to go into a trance. In an ethereal voice he would say that it was
God speaking through him and that it was time for the little girl
to become a woman. He would tell them that the vessel he was
speaking through had been put on Earth to plant his seed. This
would grow into the Son of God. The Messiah.

Ricky remembered how the old pedophile had laughed
and said, “I got more teenage pussy with that trick than you can
shake a stick at. And that's not even counting the older broads,
who damn near threw themselves at me after every show.” Proudly he
added, “Eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, I’ve had them
all.”

Ricky could only shake his head in disbelief and
laugh. While craving the power these men had, he was not religious
himself. He had seen early on in his life that the church was for
suckers. Look at the suicide bombers killing themselves and
everyone else around them in the name of Allah. There was no way a
smart guy like Richard Rosencrantz was going to fall into a trap
like that. The Christians, Jews and Muslims had been trying to wipe
each other out for centuries and would keep on until one of them
succeeded. He just didn't get the upside to being a soldier of God
and having someone dictate how he should live his life.

But then again, he didn't see any down side in
profiting off other people's foolishness. Having grown up in the
back woods of Georgia, he’d been forced to attend enough revival
meetings as a kid to see they were so much bullshit, but he did
recognized there was a potential for profit to be made in an
overlooked niche of the travelling religious organizations.

Promotion.

His entire life he watched as the preachers and
ministers came to town on a Tuesday to start advertising their
meetings with a few flyers and street corner sermons. They would
tell the faithful to come out for service on Thursday, Friday and
Saturday nights, which were ill attended at best, and culminated
with the big show on Sunday, which was the best attended and the
most profitable. What Ricky knew from being raised in an area where
these revival meetings thrived, was that the people in these
regions had work to do. Whether it was farming, running a store or
working in a factory, they couldn’t just take off with little or no
warning to get closer to God. Besides being the Sabbath, this was
why the Sunday sermon was the best attended. People had time to
rearrange their schedules and plan ahead.

But, Ricky told himself, if these same people had
more than a day or two of warning, like a week or two in which they
were bombarded by constant reminders of the upcoming show, they
would be more apt to put in an appearance for multiple meetings.
And this meant the plate would be passed to more of the flock more
times.

In 1994, armed with a computer, a printer and the
idea that he could increase the profitability of any tent revival
meeting, Richard approached three preachers working the same
circuit a few weeks apart. After pitching his idea, he got all
three to give him a chance. His idea ended up being so successful
that by the following year, he'd contracted with twenty-two
different travelling revival meetings to provide all their
promotional needs. Expanding on his original idea to blanket an
area with flyers two weeks before his client hit town, he turned
his attention to the religious radio stations in the targeted
vicinity and started getting himself booked on talk and morning
shows to promote his patrons. Here he found he could spout the fire
and brimstone just as well as, or better than, anyone he
represented. He even toyed with the idea of hitting the circuit
himself but abandoned the plan when he realized how glutted the
market was. It was better to continue profiting a little from each
of the charlatans than risking it all by putting on a show
himself.