LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (15 page)

“It’s clear,” said Ky softly from above me, glancing to her side, where the creatures were still pressing forward to tumble through the other hatch.
 

My blade flashed again and again as I pushed forward, trying to create enough space.
 

It was a losing battle. I could barely make out the lip of the hatch now, as the horde pressed me back. My heels were nearly at the lip of the passageway.
 

A massively fat, pasty man reached out, hands clenching, his trucker’s cap over a patchily-bearded face turned backwards and his “Don’t Worry Be Happy” sweatshirt clinging to his sodden body. Inspiration struck, and I cursed.
 

“If this doesn’t work, you’re definitely winning the Darwin awards this year, good buddy…” I muttered, sheathing the machete quickly. Pulling my combat knife from my boot, I struck quickly, pushing the blade up, through the man’s jaw and into his brain. Instantly, I cut my light, plunging the corridor into darkness as I allowed his massive form to fall over on me.
 

I barely kept my footing as I danced at the edge of the hallway, but as his weight came down, I turned the body, keeping it pressed between me and the gathering horde.
 

Several creatures moaned loudly, and more pressed into the small space. I could hear them start to splash into the water below, heavy sounds of bodies entering the thick, cold liquid below. I could feel them pouring over us, their weight forcing the air from my lungs. I struggled against the urge to void the contents of my stomach under the onslaught of stench and decay as the massive corpse concealed me.
 

Minutes seemed like hours as I waited, listening. Groan, splash. Groan, grunt, splash. It seemed endless and interminable.
 

Finally, when I was sure that there were only a few remaining in the hallway, and that the majority of them had fallen into the waters below, I pushed the huge corpse away, into the stragglers in front of me. Grabbing the large pack I had discarded earlier and tossing it up through the hatch, I saw the relieved face of Kate and Ky as I jumped for the metal edge and pulled myself up.

A hand latched onto my boot briefly, but a quick kick to a swollen face dislodged the grip. Several moans escaped the corridor below as I pulled my body onto the floor above.
 

Kate’s voice was relieved in a brief whisper.

“Jesus, man. Take your time, much?”

“Sorry, I was a little pressed.”

She gave me a sideways look, as if understanding there was a joke there, but not what the joke actually was.

Too late, I realized I was the only down there, so the punchline was definitely lost on my friends.

Well, I thought it was funny, and that’s all that mattered.

I looked around as Kate stood up, taking in the destroyed interior of the large bar and observation deck. We stood on what had been the interior wall of the port side of the ship’s bar. Above our heads, rows of bar-height tables were bolted to the floor, creating a forest of protruding metal bars topped with still-glossy wooden counter tops. At the very top, there was a bank of windows, most of them blown out and vacant, and set in the center of the wall of windows was a large sealed hatch leading to what we had to assume was an external walkway.
 

I spared a glance toward the hatchway through which all the other creatures had fallen, and saw only the accumulated gore and refuse of Kate’s barrage of automatic fire, including bullet holes in the bulkhead that now formed our ceiling.

“Can you take him?” Ky said worriedly, nodding toward Romeo. “He can’t climb these posts.”
 

I nodded, and kneeled down, pulling the hunting harness we had snatched for him several days ago from my pack and securing it to my tactical harness with two large carabiners. The other piece I slipped over the dogs body and connected to the latch on the harness, pulling it once for safety. He looked up at me, eyes curious and trusting, but slightly annoyed.

“Sorry pal, express elevator to the ceiling—it’s the only way to travel.”

Kate nodded and I stood, barely noticing the extra weight of the dog on top of the considerable weight of my supply pack.
 

It was nice to be a superhero.
 

Kate and Ky grabbed nearby table legs and began the ascent. As I looked beneath me, at the drooling, hungry faces, I shuddered once and grabbed the first bar, eager to be rid of this ghost ship.

We stood on the exterior port side hull, finally outside again, and commanding a panoramic view of the surrounding area—the river, the banks, and the roadways ahead and behind. The ship swayed slightly as the water continued to course around its sullen carcass.
 

I looked west, taking in the destruction along the swollen river bank. On the left, the bank we had so recently vacated, trees were strewn into the water, branches clawing at the sky. Jagged edges of earth crumbled into the waves, as millions of gallons still poured into the crevasse. The gap between the shore and the ship where we had boarded was gone, submerged beneath the growing river. It was as if the water was flowing in faster and harder, like the earth was tilted at an odd angle, and the water was rushing the wrong way.
 

“Is it getting stronger?” asked Ky, removing her cap and scratching her head absently.

Kate stood wearily to the side, eyes narrowed as she stared at the far bank. “Seems that way,” she muttered, glancing down and then back again.

I followed her gaze. Down the row of windows—many of which were now gaping holes in the side of the ship—and across the dingy white hull, the far shore loomed. Rocky and jagged, the remains of the small bridge that had spanned the river here were still in evidence, directly behind the mangled twisted metal of one of the ship’s propellers. The other was submerged in deeper water near the shore of the north side of the river.

“Time to move,” I said, hitching my large pack up and stepping carefully forward, toward the stern of the ship.

The large vessel lurched slightly as I finished speaking, and my hand lashed out instinctively for Ky, finding her pack as she slipped and fell on her rear. Romeo scrambled briefly against the slick surface and Kate cursed loudly.

“Definitely time to move,” she said, whistling once for Romeo, who scampered for purchase before finding Kate’s outstretched hand.

We stepped gingerly around the gaping windows, watching the swelling river warily on both sides. As the water pressure built up, we were keenly aware of how precarious our position was. If the water pushed the bow or stern hard enough into the river, the entire ship could be washed away. Worse, it could right itself, finding water that was suddenly deep enough to accommodate its girth, and taking us to a watery grave beneath its rusty keel.

Ahead, the center of the ship gave way to the ferry platform, and we were forced to walk downhill, following the gentle curve of the hull. Walls gave way to a narrow pathway between what was once a guardrail on the lowest deck of the ship, and what had once been the waterline. Rust and barnacles covered the keel to our right, while I constantly anticipated the rotten face of an undead attacker appearing from the car deck on my left. I had to remind myself that the cars—and the zombies that had been in them—were all piled up on the bottom of the ship, far from the edge where I walked. It would have taken an extremely agile zombie to make that climb.
 

It wasn’t much comfort, though, I reflected. It was still creepy as shit on this dead-ass ship, and I was ready to be done with it.
 

We reached the end of the line as the hull tapered sharply into the stern, propeller extending before us like twisted children’ toys, tangled in the thin steel girders and rebar of the old bridge. The roadway ended nearly thirty feet away from where we stood, watching the rushing water tear past the mass of razor sharp debris that stood between us and the far shore—a mixture of jagged, twisted bridge remnants, crumbled concrete, and rusted ship parts littered the waterline below.

Beyond the water’s edge, the roadway canted up sharply and to the left behind a thick mask of green foliage. Five hundred feet beyond the shore, on the other side of the roadway, a steep rocky incline led up dramatically into the foothills of the next mountain range.
 

“Well, if this isn’t the actual, literal definition of shit creek, then I’m a hobbit,” I said loudly, absently turning and watching the bright lights flare into the sky from farther south.
 

Mt. Hood must be at it again. Or still. I shivered at the thought. That couldn’t be good. In a global ice age kind of way.

“Yeah, and we’re fresh out of paddles,” Kate muttered.
 

It was at least fifty feet to the churning water below—fifty feet through a forest of sharp edges, rusty debris, and culminating in a torrent of dangerously fast water and submerged chunks of concrete and rock. I peered over the right side of the ship, along the gently sloping keel as it dipped toward the raging water below. The water was slightly calmer in the shadow of the ship, eddies swirling and twisting in the faint shelter of the large beached vessel.
 

“We can’t go back,” said Ky. “We can’t go forward. So what … we live here now?” She was only half joking.

“Don’t send in the change of address card just yet, kid,” I said, looking up to where a telephone line hung suspended between two miraculously up-right telephone poles forty feet from the stern.

“Don’t … a what? A
post card
? One of those picture things you put in the mail? You know about the internet, right? Why would I spend, like what, twenty bucks? On a piece of paper that I have to mail?”
 

“Twenty bucks? Have you ever left your house? It’s like … well, it was …” I trailed off, realizing that I hadn’t sent one in years, and further more, I hadn’t mailed anything in years. Incarceration and all that.

“Twenty-two cents,” said Kate absently, following my gaze.
 

“Yeah,” I said, as if I had won a great battle, but simultaneously feeling at this point as if the victory were pyrrhic. Ky just shook her head.

As she did so, another tremor knocked me from my feet, taking me to the metal hull hard. Kate and Ky flattened themselves on the cold steel as the large ship rocked beneath us. Rocks spit into the air from the mountainside and trees swayed on the rocky shore.
 

And from a distance, I heard the unmistakeable moans of approaching undead on the north side of the river.
 

Brilliant. Just what we needed. If we were fortunate enough to get off this deathtrap, we’d be bunking with hundreds of zombie assholes.
 

“Mike, did you hear—?”

“Yeah, I heard it. What the hell? Where the fuck did they come from? Tour bus? National park? We’re virtually in the middle of nowhere.”

“Maybe they heard you were signing autographs,” Ky said, staring at the tree line.

I didn’t have time to respond. As the tremor continued, we felt the ship start to move. It was time to go.

I had a very bad plan, and it involved some very poor decision making. But it was all we had, and time wasn’t on our side.
 

“See that line?” I asked Kate, pointing at the telephone wire, and watching as it swayed precariously in the breeze. “I think that’s our play.”

She looked over to me like I was insane.
 

“How the hell will we get to that line? You number flight among your super powers? Because if not, you’re not going to reach that thing.”

I glanced at the line again, making mental calculations. It was roughly twenty feet below us, and thirty feet away. I dug through the largest of my bags and pulled out the length of rope I had scavenged two days ago. Looked to be about fifty feet, complete with a small grappling attachment. I knew this thing would come in handy.

The shaking stopped suddenly, and the sound of the approaching herd became louder and more insistent.
 

The quakes must stir them up, I thought. That’s why we saw more after the first eruption than we had in the last week. They were like rats, being driven to the surface from whatever hole they had been rotting in.

I held up the rope and stood.

“We’re going to use this and Indiana Jones our way to safety. Throw it over, pull it tight, tie it to the railing,” I gestured behind me to the solid steel railing several yards away, “and we slide right down.”
 

The ship shook again, but this time it wasn’t an earthquake—the vessel was moving, slowly rolling over onto one side as the water forcing its way upriver had finally worn down the massive bulk of metal, which was now rotating on the ship’s long axis, pushing its keel toward the water.
 

I swung the rope several times and eyed the distance. Releasing it, I realized quickly I had undershot. The rope soared into the void and the hook clattered off the concrete of the broken road. Cursing, I pulled it up as the ship continued to move slowly to the side.
 

“We’ve got company,” said Ky, holding tight to the side of the ship as Kate brought her rifle to her eye.
 

“Shit, looks like more than a hundred so far,” she said.
 

I followed their stares to the bend where the road moved into the woods. Gray flesh and rotten clothing met my eyes, a hundred forms shuffling into view en masse, feet scraping against the concrete and dirt. Several dozen more were filtering out from between the closely packed trees.
 

“Gotta go, man,” said Kate, moving her scope from face to face and then tracking it back to watch more of the creatures appear. “Really gotta move. We’ve got about two minutes to get to the ground and move away from the area before those things get here.”
 

She wasn’t wrong. I watched as the first of the shambling ghouls looked up and caught our silhouettes. As a group, they moaned in wanting.