Deadfall: Hunters (23 page)

In salvage, often times, that really useful item you find ends up being not that great, while that seemingly pointless thing you pick up randomly, can end up saving your life. When we had been sailing towards Haiti, we had found that little collection of floating boats with zombies in them. We had salvaged many things from them, but what had been really important at the time, was a radar unit Maxie had gone to great lengths to get. It had taken us a great deal of time and sweat to get that thing out and then installed on our ship. See, it was a really big deal because we planned on using it to find our rain clouds to gather water. Of course, we got to Haiti shortly after that and now have only been at sea for a few days, so there was no dire need for water. Regardless, Maxie kept that thing going from time to time, just in case.

Here is where that thing went wrong. The idea was sound. I was really impressed at the time. I consider myself a gadget guy, so the idea of using radar to find our rain clouds was genius. Thing is, while we all understood what radar was, we really didn’t know how to use it. We could see what it was showing on the screen, but none of us were weather men or women. But how hard could it be right? Just go where the green was showing and collect fresh water right?

We had hit the coast of Florida two days ago and were now sailing up what was somewhere between Georgia and South Carolina. I couldn’t say where, Maxie probably knew. We were well out of range of land, and couldn’t see anything. It was all flat out there anyways, we wouldn’t see much. Again, we weren’t really low on water, but Maxie had really been wanting to try out his new toy, so when we heard a shout come from the cabin, we all rushed in. Maxie had found some rain and we were turning into it. He said it was probably still hours off.

We could stand by the edge of our boat and look off to the northeast, and clearly, the skies were gray. Thing is, they were really gray. The closer we got, the windier it got too. The small sliver of green on the radar screen grew larger and larger and denser. Of course, we just didn’t understand what that information was. Even if it was a storm, Maxie said, we’d just skirt around it, get our water, and be on our way. That is, until the storm started turning in landwards.

Looking back, it wasn’t the storm that was turning in, it was just that it was that large. There was very little rain on the edge of the storm, but a lot of wind. Strong wind and waves. Maxie was calm, but to the rest of us, it was like something out of a disaster movie. We thought for sure we were dead. Sarah was throwing up like crazy while her boy held on to her, or her to him. Janine was inside of the cabin sitting in one of the chairs, gripping the sides so hard her knuckles were white. Even mighty Blevin was looking just a tad green.

I couldn’t say much for myself either. I don’t remember being nauseous, but I have to admit I was a tad scared. Ok, I’ll admit here, I was terrified. Regardless, there was this coolness factor of standing on the deck and the wind was blowing mist into my beard. I felt like a sailing badass.

Then Maxie came out and told us he thought the storm was likely a hurricane. I wasn’t feeling the badassitude anymore.

Maxie turned the ship landward. Again, what we saw on the radar was that the storm was either turning into land, or it was just that big. There was no way we were going to get to North Carolina before it. In fact, that storm was hitting the shores near there already. That was going to be messy for them. Our best bet though, was to get to land ASAP and try to find a place to weather the storm. If we got lucky, we would find a river we could sail up a ways to get past the surge and find a safe spot to ditch the boat.

Things were getting dicey on the boat. We weren’t anywhere near the storm, or in any way that any huge waves were gonna tear us apart, but it was more than close enough for us non-sailors. When we got close to land, things got worse. It was all beach. Maxie thought it was Myrtle Beach. Nice beaches but no real harbors or anything like that. There were a few minor rivers, but nothing we could sail the boat up. There was some access to the coastal waterway, but we had no idea where they were. Then again, if we were able to find any, sailing up them in those winds and waves was going to be suicidal.

I think what was most infuriating was that Maxie remained quite calm the whole time. Maybe it was his job as the captain to do so, or maybe it was that he knew what he was doing as opposed to the rest of us. See, visibility was dropping, the wind was getting stronger and stronger and we couldn’t see where to park the boat. Eventually, Maxie did the smart thing and turned the boat around and headed back south. It really sucked have to backtrack, but a few days detour was worth our lives.

Too bad we didn’t get far. We had been following the coast line in the hopes that we would see something we could use to park the boat (I’m sure parking the boat is the proper terminology). I could barely see the beach and the shoreside condos through the drizzle and rain. I was concentrating so hard and looking towards the beach that I was thrown on my ass when we hit something. Yes, we hit something. An iceberg, a whale, a torpedo. Maxie thinks we probably just clipped a sand bar, nothing serious, but it threw everyone around. Quick inspection saw that the ship had been damaged. It wasn’t major, but water was leaking on the inside, you know, like what happens to boats. Maxie thought they could sail a day or two, but he wasn’t going to take the risk. He turned the ship west, and sailed it right into the beach as far as he could.

The ship moored some distance off the beach, but close enough to jump out. The higher surge probably helped with that. Still, we had to jump into the life raft in waters that were churning from the storm. It wasn’t raining there, but the wind was pretty harsh. We took as many supplies as we could and headed towards shore. If we thought being on the ship was bad, being on the tiny life raft was terrifying. Each of those waves were like tsunamis against our little boat. When we managed to get the little boat on the shore, I was amazed we were all still in it, especially since most of the ocean was already in the little boat. I’m still not sure just how much of our gear we lost.

So we took our sorry asses off the beach and up the dunes. We found several of those beach side condo resorts right alongside the beach. They were tall and seemed like the best idea for riding out the storm. Technically, it was safest to get a ways inland, but we didn’t have time. The storm was bearing down on us. Those buildings were built to withstand storms like these. Unless it was a category 5. We hoped it wasn’t. We’d find a room a few stories high, and wait. Besides, I could use a good hot tub.

Oddly, I don’t remember the name of the resort. I usually made it a habit of knowing the names. It was very tall. There were two buildings with a small connecting building in between. We walked through the lobby carefully. Who knows what was lurking there. We found it pleasantly empty. There were the makings of an indoor water park, slides and pools. They were all empty of course, rusted. Despite that, you could still make out a hint of chlorine stuck to everything. Who ever thought the smell of a swimming pool was a pleasant reminder to better times.

We made our way up a few stories and found ourselves a room. The room was dank, musty, and almost moldy. Thankfully, there were no bodies, walking or not. The beds looked almost, new. I was tempted, very much so, to walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower. A small, tiny, infinitesimal part of me just wanted to turn that knob and have hot steamy water pour out. That was a long shot.

The room had an ocean view. That view was dark and grey for the rest of that day. Maxie made his bed right next to the giant glass windows looking out east. He watched as his ship rocked back and forth in the waves, still stuck against the beach. To the north, the storm raged on. It seemed to be moving in that direction and if we got lucky, it would leave us alone. I tried consoling Maxie, but it was a pathetic attempt. All I could do was thank him for the boat. He looked at me and smiled. He said, ‘it’s just a boat’. I got it, but it was more than that.

We slept well that night barricaded inside that room. It was exceedingly dark that night, and we refused to use any lights once the sun went. Any light shining through the glass windows was sure to be a beacon for any and all zombies in the area. So we talked, mostly nonsense. We also just listened to the wind roar against the building, until that was all we could hear, and we fell asleep to its soothing destruction.

Now, I’ve been through a few hurricanes in my lifetime. Nothing dramatic like Katrina, but enough to know the mess that usually follows. That’s why when I cracked my eyes open that next morning after a wonderful sleep, I looked out the window and was completely surprised by what I saw. It was a mess, just of a different kind.

The first thing I noticed as I scanned the now calm ocean was that our ship was gone. As I scanned out the giant window, my eyes went towards the shore. It was littered, a mess. I wiped the junk from my eyes to see that the mess was wriggling, moving. All up and down the beach, as far as I could see, lay bodies. Zombies. A beach load. Whatever I said or cursed was loud enough to wake everyone up at that moment. They joined me in cursing what we saw. We had to explain to Sarah about Carolina Beach. This was on a scale even greater than that.

Blevin took a look through the front of our room. The rooms exited onto a balcony walkway that was out in the open. The view was blocked by the building in front of us, but through a gap, we could see a steady flow of walkers heading what appeared to be north. There were plenty of bodies washed up and stuck into cars and corners of buildings. Most were still moving, although a lot of them were barely in any condition to walk.

This was a horde unlike any we had seen. This was just one of those large hordes that walked around cities, but a whole larger force. We made our way to the roof of the resort tower and could see the ocean of zombies covering land as far as we could see, north, south and west. That mess of bodies along the beach was likely the result of the storm surge on this exodus of undead. By that point, many of those on the beach had come back to life and had joined their brethren on their trek. There was still a bit of surf pounding the sand, and each time a wave hit, it would wash out more zombies, and replace those with a few more. It was almost comical to watch them stumble about in the waves, but their sheer determination was apparent. They weren’t wandering into buildings or looking for anything. This was a forced march.

And we were stuck in middle of it.

First thought was to wait it out. Problem with that was that from what saw from the roof that could mean a very long time. We had some supplies, whatever we had managed to get off of the boat and whatever was not completely soaked. We weren’t going back to the boat either, as there was very little of it left. We might be able to find something in the resort, but the odds were getting lower and lower the further we were from Deadfall. All that remained from civilization were canned and dried goods. A beach resort probably didn’t have large stashes of canned goods. We could easily run out of food, and then be in a really dire situation.

Getting out of the resort would be simple enough, but then what? Even if we got lucky and found a car, or even luckier and found a truck, the zombies were everywhere. It’s really cool to totally run down a zombie while driving a big truck, but several hundred thousand bodies are going to put a dent in that vehicle. Literally too. We wouldn’t be able to get anywhere. If we tried using the highways or main roads, they’d be chock full of walking dead while we didn’t have any maps or the knowledge to find the smaller roads. There were also no guarantees those roads wouldn’t be stuffed with moving bodies.

There was one solution left, the one we had been on to begin with. Wilmington was not very far, if only we could find a boat. Tague solved the first part for us. He had come back after going through the check-in area on the main floor of the resort with one of those tourist maps of Myrtle Beach. It was the exaggerated, almost cartoonish, kind, with really colorful images and goofy font words. Tague pointed out where we were, a resort called Dunes Village resort. Looking further north along the beach, he pointed out the cute drawn pictures of boats at a marina like structure with lots of really nice houses around them. There were no names to make it clear that it was a marina, but the pictures were enough. Even if it wasn’t a marina, it was a place where boats were. So clear, by the pictures.

We were gambling our lives on a cartoony map.

There was no distance key on our kid map. As far as we knew, that marina was six buildings, a golf course and a yacht away, or six miles. Even if it was just six cartoon houses away, that was a ways to go through that tsunami of zombies. The good thing was that if there were six houses, or many, many more, at least there would be houses. We would go from house to house, doing our best to avoid the undead in between. And so started our longest hike to date.

There were several large resorts first. Those ended up being easy. All of the zombies were headed north, so they rarely came down in between the buildings. The tall resorts usually had pools and hot tubs or outdoor water parks between each other, so we were able to dodge in and out and in and out of the obstacles and smash our way into the next resort. Many times the resorts were so close to each other that there was no time wasted. We spent more time walking through each resort, trying to find our way through, carefully and quietly. Most of the resorts were desolate. They had the appearance of having been cleaned out. I wondered how many of these places had become the survival place for the living. I don’t remember which building it was, a few down the line in our hike, but we came across one smaller resort hotel whose insides had clearly been changed around. The doors were barricaded from the inside and the furniture had been moved around to form what looked like living quarters. One of the lobby bathrooms had their walls torn down to fully expose it, the toilets had been ripped out and many of the sinks smashed out and replaced with other, larger ones. Old opened cans with that month’s old trace of food stuck to the sides littered the floor in that makeshift kitchen and a horribly foul smell erupted from the other bathroom. None of us even dared to go in. It wasn’t like, dead body smell, but of bathroom use without working water. There is no way to know how long they had been gone, but, it didn’t appear they survived here.