The Savage Dead (13 page)

“Sí,”
the man said, nodding emphatically. The stick was shaking in the air between them, and Paul couldn't help but see the bits of scalp and clumpy bits still clinging to the tip.
“Yo no qué hacer. La golpeé con esto. Ella no iba a morir. La golpeé una y otra vez. Ella no iba a morir.”

“She wouldn't die?” Paul repeated.

The man nodded. His haunted expression gave way suddenly to a desperate need to be understood. Yes, yes, he nodded. Yes.

Paul was frightened. It was finally sinking in that he was standing just a few feet from the man who had caved that poor woman's head in. And he was still holding the stick he'd used to do it. He had to hold himself together. He had to get that weapon away from him and get him to a ship's officer. But to do that, he had to look like he was in control.

“Give me the stick,” he said, holding out his hand. “Give it to me.
Dame el palo
.”

“No.” The man shrank back, clutching the stick to his chest. He was shaking all over.
“Ellos volverán, los muertos.”

“Los muertos?”
Paul turned his palm up and thrust his hand in the man's direction.
“Dame el palo.”
He wanted to hand the stick over. Paul could see that in the man's demeanor. He wanted someone to step in and take control. “My name is Paul,” he said. “What's your name?
¿Cuál es su nombre?
”

“Pedro.”

“Pedro, okay. Pedro, you need to give me the stick.
Dame el palo, por favor
.”

Neither man moved for a long moment. Then the man's face went slack and he held the stick out for Paul to take.

“Thank you,” Paul said. He'd been holding his breath. He let it go now and stepped backwards into the hall. He motioned for the man to follow. “Come with me,” he said. “Let's go get help.
Ven conmigo
.”

Pedro nodded and stood.

Paul took another step back. He put his hand on the door. “Come on,” he said, motioning for the man to follow.

The man stepped into the hallway and Paul closed the door behind him.

And there was another man standing there. Paul lurched back, stumbling over his feet and bumping into the wall. The man wore the white uniform of a ship's officer, but the entire front of it was covered in what looked like bloody fish guts. His face was a ghastly mess, the lips bloated and torn, hanging from his mouth. Like the woman back at the elevators, his face and arms were laced with deep, bleeding scratches, and there were bite marks on his hands.

Paul didn't even get a chance to raise the stick. Pedro had stepped out of the way of the closing door and right into the man's arms. Both men tumbled to the ground, the officer coming down on top. Pedro pawed and slapped at the man, but the officer tore into him with the ferocity of a wounded animal. He pounded on him, scratched him, scratched at his eyes. Paul watched, horrified, as the officer clamped his teeth onto Pedro's nose and tore it away.

Blood spurted onto the man's face and onto the walls and Paul lurched again.

The officer looked up, locking eyes with Paul, blood dripping off his chin. Paul swallowed, and something inside him let go. His bowels turned to water. His legs felt like they could barely hold him.

“What's wrong with you?” he said.

The man rose to his feet, a low, stuttering growl rising from his ruined throat.

“Stay back. Leave me alone.”

Paul could feel himself shaking so badly he thought he might fall apart. What he was looking at was impossible. People didn't do stuff like this. It wasn't real. It couldn't be.

But the man was coming after him.

Paul turned to run, but froze in his tracks. A woman, this one dressed like a passenger, was coming at him from the opposite end of the hall. At first it took a moment for Paul's mind to take her all in, for there was no way in hell she should still be on her feet, not looking like she did. There was no meat left on her right thigh, only tattered flaps of pink skin and strings of tendons hanging from her femur. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side. She was supporting herself on the railing with her other arm, pulling herself along inch by painful inch. Her mouth was an angry, vacant hole, and though she seemed to be speaking, she didn't make a sound.

Before Paul could move, the ship's officer was all over him, his cold, blood-sticky hands clamping down on his shoulder.

Paul let out a scream and pulled away. He still had the broken-off broom handle he'd taken from Pedro and he jammed it into the officer's face. Outside of the movies, Paul had never seen anyone so inexplicably violent. The man snarled and snapped like a pit bull, and though Paul had the pointed end of the broom handle digging into his throat, the man still raged.

“Get off,” Paul said, grunting as he tried to turn the man away.

Instead, Paul pitched over backwards, the man coming down on top of him.

The pointed end of the broom handle sank into the man's neck. Paul heard it enter with a sucking sound, like a boot getting pulled down into the mud.

And still the man fought him.

He didn't even seem to notice the pain. He opened his mouth and blood welled up at the back of his throat, choking off any noises he might have made. But it didn't slow him down at all.

“Get off me,” Paul said, and twisted the four or five inches of broom handle sticking out of the man's throat to one side.

The man fell onto his back, hissing and gargling as he struggled to get back on his feet. Paul backed away until he ran into a door. Without warning, someone slammed into the other side of the door, growling just as the ship's officer was trying to do, beating on the wooden door with his fists, trying to claw his way through.

Paul bolted. He didn't even look where he was going.

He just ran, his mind reeling.

C
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12

Pilar had been careful to stay in open areas, where there were plenty of directions to run, if necessary. She'd had her sidearm handy, just in case, though so far she hadn't needed it. She'd been moving through the ship since before dawn, surprised at how fast the bacteria had spread, how thorough it had been, and was impressed with what Ramon Medina had been able to accomplish. A lesser man would never have been able to pull off something so spectacularly destructive and wasteful of life. He really was a man endowed with a unique and terrible vision.

And then she'd seen Paul coming up the stairs. She'd been careless, daydreaming about Ramon, and that was bad. She'd walked right into Paul, and she'd been so startled by seeing him that she'd blanched and run rather than shoot him where he stood. If she could do it over again, he'd be dead right now. From here on out, she couldn't afford that kind of mistake. It would get her killed.

But she had learned something from the encounter. He'd called her Monica, which meant he was still in the dark about who she really was. That was good, but it was small comfort because it meant that Senator Sutton was almost certainly still alive. After all, if she were dead, he'd be with the body, trying to figure out what to do next.

And if the senator was still alive, Pilar would have to take the plan to the next phase. That meant she'd have to go back to the bridge and plug into the ship's computer system. That was going to make things far more difficult for her, but at this point it couldn't be helped.

She pushed Paul Godwin out of her mind and took the stairs up to Deck 20. Here too the decks were deserted. She saw a few crew members running around with radios in their hands, but none of them had any sense of discipline. They were lost, and from the look of panic on their faces she knew there was little doubt that the whole ship would be overrun by mid-morning. The crew was certainly helpless to do anything about it. And once she finished this last stage of the operation, she'd be able to sit back and let the zombies do the work for her.

She stayed in the shadows as she worked her toward the bridge, and she was almost there when she heard a little boy crying from a cabin off to her right.

Pilar stopped, turned, and stared at the door that was hanging open. Every nerve in her being was humming, telling her to stay away—just turn around and continue the mission. She was so close now, just one more hallway and she was there. But that little boy's voice called to her in a way that sounded so painfully familiar she was unable to turn away.

Pilar drew her weapon and kicked the door open. She walked into the cabin, ready to shoot anything that moved. The cabin was a big, spacious affair, and not even the overturned dresser and the bed sheets thrown to the floor could disguise the opulence of the place. This family had spent a king's ransom on their vacation. She went through the living room and into the bedroom, and all at once she realized what had happened here. The boy she'd heard sobbing was perhaps ten years old, maybe a little younger. He was cowering beneath the body of his father, whose face was a bloody wreck. The mother had collapsed on top of the father's legs. She must have tried to claw her way through the father to get to the boy, for she had obviously changed. The bib of blood down her front told plainly of that. Her forehead was bashed in, no doubt by the broken and bloody laptop computer by the father's side.

The father was just dead. He was, she figured, one of the three percent who simply died when exposed to the bacteria and failed to revive. If he hadn't turned by now, he wouldn't turn at all. He'd simply died, and left in his wake a cowering son so overcome with grief that he couldn't even move out from under the bodies of his parents.

Pilar had been prepared to turn around and leave. She'd seen a lifetime of children robbed of their parents. She'd lived that hell herself. She was already turning on her heel, admonishing herself for being stupid enough to come in here in the first place, when the boy said, “Why?”

She lowered her weapon. All at once she saw that the boy was infected. His eyes were bloodshot, his face scratched and bloody. Clearly, the mother had gotten to him, despite the father's efforts. But he was still alive, and he was still capable of asking the hard questions. At least for a few minutes longer.

“Why?” he said again.

Pilar didn't hear a little rich white boy, though. What she heard was Lupe, twenty years ago, cowering in the heat of an eighteen-wheeler's trailer, asking why the world had to be so hard and cruel. What had he done to deserve a death like this? What could he possibly have done to deserve this?

Pilar raised her weapon and centered the front sights on the little boy's forehead.

He didn't flinch. He didn't look away. He didn't have to. It was Lupe's face staring back at her.

“Why?” he asked.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”

“I don't want to die.”

She almost put the pistol down. It was too much, far too much. But then he vomited blood all over the back of his father's corpse, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were yellow and bloodshot. He was still alive, but death was lurking in those eyes, biding its time.

“I'm sorry,” she said again. “God, I'm so sorry.”

She fired one round.

It took a long time for the echo of the shot to fade away, but fade away it did. She turned, utterly disgusted with herself, and made her way to the bridge.

There she plugged her iPhone into the ship's computer and called up the housekeeping subroutines. She cleared her mind, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand. It was one of the comic ironies of an operation like this that a mighty cruise ship, a floating testimonial of American opulence and excess, could be undone by those who cleaned the toilets.

Pilar accessed the housekeeping end-of-cruise command and forced the computer to activate it. She turned to the ship's security cameras, which showed long views of most of the ship's twenty-eight decks, and waited.

One by one, the locks to the cabin doors clicked, and the doors sighed open.

The program she'd accessed was designed to allow housekeeping unlimited access to the various cabins onboard ship once all the passengers had disembarked. Most, if not all, of the passengers had closed their doors during the night to tend to their sick loved ones. During the night, most of those sick passengers would have died.

Now, the dead were free to move about the ship.

C
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13

Tess went back to sleep after Paul left, but it didn't help any. When she woke, she was still sore, still groggy, still dreadfully hungover. It'd been stupid of her to drink like that, but tequila was Juan's favorite drink and for all the time she'd spent with him over the last few years she'd picked up a taste for it.

But good lord, did it have a way of sneaking up on her.

She rolled over and checked the clock on her phone. Paul had been gone for a long time. He might have caught some breakfast, but she didn't think so. The plan had been for them to all go up together once the senator and her husband got ready.

And he hadn't closed the door, either. What kind of idiot couldn't close a door? She pulled it closed and then went to the bathroom and peed and splashed some water on her face. Her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles on her cheeks.

Great, she thought. She was going to be hurting all day.

It was ten o'clock back in Washington, so she took her phone out to the balcony and tried calling Juan, just to check in. But her phone wouldn't connect. She was getting a signal. She had two bars. But every time she tried to call out, all she heard was static. Text messaging wasn't working either. Every number she tried came back with a Message Not Sent error.

“Come on,” she said irritably. Freaking four-hundred-dollar phone and it wasn't worth a crap.

Tess went over to the desk and pulled out the list of shipboard contact numbers she'd gotten from First Officer Amato. Her room was equipped with a wave phone that was able to call any other wave phone on the ship. These phones never went out of range because they were for shipboard communication only.

She tried Amato's extension on the bridge and got nothing.

She tried his cabin. Again nothing.

The first couple of calls got her frustrated, but as she went down the list and got nothing, no matter what number she called, her internal alarms started to go off. Something was wrong.

From her workbag she pulled out her tactical gear and got dressed, secreting a few extra magazines for her Glock in the cargo pockets of her BDUs. Then she pulled her hair back in a ponytail and went across the hall to knock on the senator's door.

The hallway was deserted except for a man walking away from her down at the far end. That seemed odd, too. At this time of the morning there should be people coming and going every which way.

She knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“Senator Sutton, it's Tess Compton. Will you open the door please?”

“Just a second.”

It took her a long moment, but Sutton eventually threw the dead bolt and then undid the chain and opened the door. Right away Tess knew something was wrong. Sutton looked like she'd been crying, and she was wearing the same dress she'd worn the night before to dinner. Her hair was a crinkly mess that stuck out in different directions like quills and her skin looked pallid and damp.

“What happened?” Tess said. “Are you okay?”

Sutton nodded. “It's Wayne. He's really sick.”

“Where is he?”

Sutton pointed to the closed door of the bathroom. Inside, Tess could hear Dr. Sutton throwing up.

“How long's he been like that?”

“Since last night. It got really bad around two or so.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

“It's supposed to be a vacation. I wanted you and Paul to—”

“I'm not on vacation, senator. I'm here on duty.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“Is your phone working?”

“Well, I don't know. I haven't tried to—”

Tess went over to the senator's desk and pushed her papers out of the way. She pulled out the senator's list of contact numbers from the desk drawer and started trying them, one after another, but got nothing.

“Where's your cell phone?” Tess asked.

“Um, over there,” Sutton said, pointing to the bedside table nearest the balcony.

Tess scooped it up and started dialing. Same static as on her phone.

“Christ, I can't even reach Paul on this thing.” She quickly went through some of the phone's other functions, got nothing but more frustration and tossed it on the bed. “Your Internet and texting are down, too. Where's your laptop?”

“In my briefcase.” She pointed at the floor next to the desk. “There.”

Tess quickly opened it and signed on, but the laptop was just as useless as the phones.

“What's going on?” Sutton asked.

“I have no idea. But I can't reach Paul. I can't reach my contacts in Washington. I can't even reach Amato or the captain. The wave phones just ring on and on.” Before Sutton could respond, Tess crossed to the bathroom door. “Dr. Sutton, this is Agent Compton. I'm going to get the ship's doctor for you. What do I need to tell him about your symptoms?”

He mumbled something, but she couldn't really hear him through the door.

“He's had trouble talking for the last thirty minutes or so,” Sutton said. “But he's been running a fever, vomiting, diarrhea, too, I think. He's been tearing up a lot, too. He said he thought it was food poisoning.”

“All right. I'm going to have to go get the doctor. We need to have him looked at, and quickly. Are you going to be okay here? You'll lock the door?”

Sutton took a hesitant step forward, and put her hand out.

“What is it?” Tess asked.

“Do you mind, um, can I come with you?” Sutton glanced at the bathroom door. “I just can't listen anymore,” she said in a whisper. “God, that sounds so bad, I know, but I just can't take hearing him like that.”

Tess studied the woman. She was ripping herself up inside with guilt and worry. Their marriage, from the little Tess had seen anyway, had been on the rocks for a while now, but she still clearly loved the man.

“Sure,” Tess said. “Why don't you put on something besides your dinner dress, though. You have a pair of jeans or something?”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

Sutton changed into a pair of loose fitting khaki slacks, a blue blouse, and dark blue deck shoes and they headed out. They hadn't gone but a few doors down though before Tess realized there was something wrong besides the phones. A lot of cabin doors were standing open an inch or two, but there didn't appear to be anybody around.

Tess pushed one of the doors open and glanced inside. She held the door open so Sutton could see.

“Where is everybody?” Sutton asked.

“Shhh,” Tess whispered. “I don't know, but let's try not to make too much noise.”

Tess's instinct was to pull her weapon and move out like she was going through the shooting course back at the academy, but she didn't want to scare Senator Sutton; and besides, a part of her just couldn't believe that something was really critically wrong onboard the ship. How could it be? They'd only been at sea for one day. A bad phone connection and being unable to get online didn't amount to a catastrophe. The girl at the AT&T store had warned her she'd have intermittent cell phone coverage at sea anyway.

Still, she'd been an agent long enough to learn that when her internal alarms were going off, there was usually a reason. And she was on full alert as they got on the elevator and the doors closed behind them.

“Do you think he'll be okay?” Sutton said.

She was wringing her hands together, and for the first time, Tess could see the liver spots on Sutton's skin. Tess turned her attention to the lighted numbers on the elevator's control panel, the decks counting down from 8 to 7 to 6.

“Food poisoning is nothing to play around with,” Tess said, as the elevator chimed at Deck 5 and the doors started to slide open. “But we're going to get him the help he—”

Tess stopped in mid-sentence. The elevator doors opened directly onto the main floor of the mall, and the place was packed with people. But there was something wrong with them. Tess realized that the instant the doors opened. One woman crossed directly in front of them, stopped, and turned in their direction.

Sutton gasped.

The left side of the woman's face was normal, but the other half looked like it had been caught in the gears of a machine. Her green dress was soaked in blood and bits of flesh dangled from the jagged edges of her wounded face.

The woman's lips opened to reveal a broken mouth of bloodstained teeth.

She growled at them and charged the elevator.

Tess pulled Sutton back and pushed the door close button. She pulled her pistol and leveled it at the woman. There were more people just as ghastly behind her running for the elevator.

“Hurry, hurry!” Tess said.

The doors started to close just as the woman reached them. She jammed an arm inside, but Sutton kept her finger down on the door close button while Tess kicked and pushed to get the woman away.

Then the doors closed and they started up.

“What in the hell was that?” Sutton said.

Tess shook her head, but when the doors opened again, this time on Deck 6, she had her weapon up and ready.

The landing in front of them looked deserted and they stepped out, Tess in front. But they'd only made it a few feet before a terrified man in a crewman's uniform came running through a set of doors on the opposite side of the landing.

The man nearly tripped when he saw them. He cried out, “Alive!” and ran toward them, his eyes wide and full of panic.

“Whoa!” Tess said. “Where are you going?”

The man babbled something in a language that sounded to Tess like Portuguese, but she couldn't understand a word of it.

“Speak English,” she said, trying to grab the man and hold him steady.

He was covered in sweat. He twisted away from her, turned quickly to check the doors from which he'd just come, and then scrambled off across the lobby to the doors at the far side.

Tess and Sutton watched him go. He got most of the way across the lobby when the doors to which he was running burst open. Half a dozen men and women charged out. He screamed, and then the crowd fell on him, tearing into him with their hands and teeth.

“Oh my God!” Sutton said.

At the same moment, the doors at the opposite end of the lobby opened, and more people came out of there, every inch of their hair and faces and clothes drenched in blood.

Sutton screamed.

A man ran out in front of the others. He wore a blue sport coat, a sky blue silk shirt, and tan slacks. The clothes had obviously cost a great deal, but they were stained and ripped now. He ran at Tess and Sutton, arms outstretched. His mouth was twisted but his eyes showed absolutely nothing. They were dead eyes.

Tess raised her weapon and yelled at the man to stop.

He kept coming.

“I said,
stop
!” Tess barked, and then fired three rounds directly into the man's chest. The bullets straightened him up, but barely slowed him down.

Tess sighted in again and shot him in the face. The bullet blew a big chunk of blood, bone, and brains all over the floor behind him, but he still didn't go down. He staggered forward, only one arm raised now, his head tilted at a sickening angle, and Tess, despite her fear, lowered her weapon and gawked at the man.

“How in the hell?”

“Agent Compton!”

Tess looked over her shoulder. The crowd that had attacked the crewman were rising from his corpse and heading their way. The corpse behind them looked like it'd been eaten, even though it continued to twitch and writhe.

Tess raised her pistol again and fired another headshot, this one hitting the man right below his nose. A pink spray jetted out behind the man and he sagged to the floor in a heap.

“Agent Compton!”

“That way,” Tess said, pushing her toward the elevators.

Sutton reached the elevator ahead of her and hit the up button. Tess put herself between the senator and the crowd forming around them. A woman pawed the air in front of Tess. She took a step back and shot the woman three times in the face before she fell to the ground.

Another woman stepped over her without a change in her expression and lunged for them.

Tess sidestepped her, grabbed the woman's outstretched arm, and threw her headfirst into the wall next to the elevator doors. She put a bullet in the back of the woman's skull before the woman even had a chance to rise to her knees.

“How we doing on that door?” Tess asked.

“Here it is!” Sutton said.

The next instant there was a chime and the doors sighed open. Sutton ran inside, motioning for Tess to hurry.

Tess stepped inside and jammed her thumb into the door close button again and again. “Come on, damn it, close!”

The doors closed just as the crowd was closing in and then they were alone inside the elevator, just the two of them, a quiet, summery arrangement for strings playing on the overhead speakers.

“What in the hell is going on?” Sutton demanded.

Tess shook her head.

“What was wrong with them?”

“I shot that man in the head and he kept coming after us. I blew part of his head off and it barely slowed him down.”

Tess's anger faded, but her body still felt like it had electricity coursing through it. Her fingers tingled with it. Her face, even her hair, seemed to have been touched with an electrical charge. Only gradually did she realize how hard she was breathing.

“We're stopping!” Sutton said.

She backed into the corner farthest from the door, and would have shrunk into the wood paneling, if she'd been able.