Zombie Anthology (17 page)

    
O'Neil's words jarred the Captain out his own thoughts. Abandon
The Queen
? Had O'Neil gone insane? He turned to argue as the door to the bridge opened and Doc Gallenger came staggering inside. Before anyone had time to react, the good doctor's corpse raised the .45 in its blood-smeared hand. The first shot slammed into Steven's shoulder. The second and third shots buried themselves in his chest knocking him back to slide down the bridge's wall into a heap on the floor. Benson, the communications officer, took a round to his throat before O'Neil managed to draw his own sidearm and send the doctor to the hell he'd crawled out of with a carefully aimed shot to his face. O'Neil rushed to Steven's side, squatting beside him. Steven coughed blood up onto his lips as he spoke. “Leave me,” he ordered. “I'm staying with
The Queen
."

    
The other command personal were fleeing the bridge as O'Neil stood up. Most of
The Queen's
lifeboats were gone. Finding a way off the ship was going to be difficult but not as difficult as surviving afterwards. The dead would be waiting.

    
Scott and Jim were holed up in a corner of the Queen's port side main deck. They'd taken shelter behind one of
The Queen's
large, metal cooling pipes and were running out of ammo fast. “Jim, you're a good man,” Scott said, “but how would you feel about leaving all this and not looking back?"

    
Jim could see the gleam of an idea in Scott's eyes. “I reckon,” he answered, “What's gotta be is gotta be. I'm guessin’ you have something in mind to save our asses."

    
Scott grinned. “You could say that. Come on!” Scott yelled charging across the deck through the ranks of the dead and the few humans left alive alike. Scott reached the side of
The Queen's
deck and didn't stop. He hurled himself over the side landing on the yacht below to the utter bewilderment of the five corpses still aboard it. He hosed them with his AK-47 on full auto cutting them where they stood.

    
Jim followed Scott but skidded to a halt at the railing on the side of
The Queen's
deck. “Crazy mother fucker!” he shouted and took the leap over to the Yacht on the waves below. He landed with the sound of snapping bones.

    
O'Neil dispatched a corpse blocking his way in the corridor. He figured he had three rounds left in his pistol if he'd counted his shots right. It was beginning to sink in that was royally screwed. He jerked open the hatch to the exterior deck as someone called his name. Hannah came running up to him. She threw herself into him wrapping her arms around his body. He hugged her back tightly then forced himself to push her away despite how much he wanted to hold onto to her forever. He knew she didn't feel the same about him; they barely knew each other yet she'd won him over the night he'd met her on the docks giving him more purpose to his life than anyone or anything ever had. “The Captain's dead,” he informed her. “We've got get off the ship if we want to stay alive."

    
A dead woman came darting towards them through the open hatchway, a raised piece of glass held like a knife in her rotting hand. O'Neil tried to get a shot but Hannah was faster. She emptied the remaining rounds in her .38 into the woman's neck and face. O'Neil moved to lead them outside onto the deck but Hannah grabbed his arm and held him back. “Wait! What's that noise?"

    
"Oh God no,” O'Neil stuck his head outside and looked up at the sky. “It can't be.” However, is was. An F-16 fighter roared over
The Queen
. Its wings were wobbly and whoever was flying it was certainly not an experienced pilot. O'Neil and Hannah stepped outside to watch as the jet turned and streaked back at
The Queen
on a collision course.

    
"Would this be a bad time to tell you that I love you?” O'Neil asked as they watched the plane racing closer.

    
"No, I don't suppose it would,” Hannah tried to smile weakly as she took his hand in hers.

26

    
Scott could still remember the death throes of
The Queen
after the jet had plowed into her. The way the flames had danced over her frame as she sank into the waves. The image haunted his dreams at night. He remembered Jim as well. The black southerner had been as tough as they came but with two badly broken legs and the meager amount of worm-infested food they'd found on the yacht, Scott had no choice but kill him. Jim had been alive when Scott had shot him in the stomach with his own shotgun and dumped him overboard before he could reanimate and become one of the dead.

    
Only a week had passed since their flight from
The Queen,
but it felt like months to Scott. He lay stretched out on the top of the yacht's cabin and stared up at the stars. The yacht's engines were shot and he was thirsty. Sweat glistened on his bare chest in spite of the coolness of the night air. He knew he was sick whether it was from the rotting food he had been eating or just the fact that his body had finally suffered all it could take and given out. If he could make it to land, he might be able to pull through. Proper food, some medicine, some rest, and he might be his old self but those things he needed seemed like pipe dreams in the face of what the world had become. He felt his eyes close then forced them open to glance at the shotgun propped up on the deck near him. Scott started to consider
all
his options again as a gentle rain began to fall and the heavens wept.

THE END

III - Flashes of Death

1 - Divine Origins

    
On Earth, maybe things would have been different. Perhaps the government's tame “Pre-Cogs” would have seen the whole thing coming and put a stop to it. At the very least, shock troops from the “authority” would have shown up to help contain the mess. But out here, aboard Gareth, there had been only the station's crew to handle things.

    
Ben slumped against the wall of the communications room staring blankly at the useless consoles surrounding him. The dim, red lights flicked casting eerie shadows outside the doorway, down the corridors that led towards both engineering and the research labs. The whining, spurting noise of the life-support systems as they fought to stay active despite the power fluctuations reverberated through the air. Otherwise the station was silent except for the sound of his labored breathing.

    
His trembling hand lifted an illegal cigarette to his lips as he took a hit off it. “Smokes” weren't allowed in space even when the station's power core wasn't on the verge of imploding upon itself. Whether the power core did collapse or the life support systems finally gave out, either way, he was dead and he knew it. Just now, he wasn't too concerned with station regulations. He didn't give a crap. It wasn't as if there was anyone else left on board to report him smoking anyway.

    
He was all that remained of the Gareth station's over two hundred member staff and crew. No one had bothered to try to explain to him what was happening. As a 2nd rank technician, none of it had been his problem to deal with outside cleaning up the mess and trying to keep the station's systems functional during the crisis. He'd spent the last thirty six hours of his life running from one section of the station to another, replacing power coils and making repairs, just trying to hold things together. He was exhausted and on the verge of taking a walk to the nearest weapons locker and blowing his own brains out. He thought that might be the best course of action given what was going on but just didn't have the nerve inside him to do it. He'd seen what was happening and it scared the shit out of him. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen to him too. The whole station was contaminated. He imagined what it would feel like when his own skin began to melt away and his bones bend and stretch, reshaping themselves into a new form that was nothing near human as he transformed.

    
He'd been on the bridge when security chief Tankard had changed. He remembered the way the man howled, his fingers trying to catch and hold the flesh that ran from his face in tiny rivers like hot wax. He'd seen the man's teeth forced from his mouth as jagged, sharp fangs grew in rows to replace them and droplets of blood splattered unto the metal flooring beneath him. Then it had merely been over as Tankard stood up reborn. His forked tongue darting in and out of what passed for his new mouth and his red glowing eyes scanned the room and those around him. No one had tried to stop him as Tankard had flexed his new skeletal wings which now protruded from his back and his claws dug through the outer bulkhead opening a way into the void. Had Ben not had enough luck to be near to the bridge's exit, he too would have been swept outside into the vacuum. The image of Officer Davis trying to cling to the bridge's railing before her grip slipped, with the sound of breaking fingers, and she followed Tankard into the drkness screaming silently still burned in his mind's eye.

    
Ben shivered and dropped his half-finished cigarette, not even bothering to grind it out. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that the strange bio-energy released by these transformations was what had disrupted the finely tuned balance of the power core's reactions.

    
Until now, Ben had never questioned what type of research was going on onboard the Gareth station. It's hadn't been his job. Now that question haunted him though. What little he had heard second hand from other members of the staff hinted at the fact that the research staff had been doing some kind of genetic tinkering in hopes of determining the true origins of humanity to gain a better understanding how our race would evolve in the eons to come.

    
He reached up placing a hand on a nearby console and used it to pull himself to his feet. There was no way to reach Earth. The station was littered with hull breaches from where the “reborn” had fled its confines and emergency bulkheads sealed off all the possible routes to the station's docking area and the ships kept there. There was also no where near enough power left in the unstable core to open the small wormhole needed to send a “real” time, coherent distress call back home. So, determined at least to know why he was going to die, he set out staggering towards the main labs.

    
Doctor Jansen had been the project director so it was with his workstation that Ben started his search for answers. It wasn't functional now of course, so many things aboard Gareth were not, but after some minor tinkering, he managed to restore just enough power to bring the terminal on-line. The doc had been working right up until his death when one of his newly, transformed aides had seen it fit to tear the Doc's head from his shoulders and toss it aside in a fit of rage. Dried blood caked the terminal's screen and the Doc's corpse lay only a few feet from Ben as he worked and poured through the Doc's open files. As he read, a pile of cigarette butts grew on the floor near him until his makeshift pack was empty and lay crumpled up on the desk before him. As he read the Doc's last entry he realized what had happened aboard Gareth. He tried to stand up but his trembling legs gave way underneath him and he toppled over. Tears streamed from his eyes as they ran down his cheeks.

    
The Doc's theory was crazy. It reminded him of his mother and her “old world” ways. She'd tried her best to raise a son who still believed in the “Divine” despite the technological world he grew up in where science was the only faith. It seemed ironic in a way to Ben for that very science had proved his mother's belief in the fact that God and Angels were real to be correct.

    
The Doc had found what he had been looking for, the missing link between ape and man, the secret of that evolutionary quantum leap. He'd discovered what he had thought to be the blood of Angels laying dormant inside of mankind. The Doc had designed a catalyst to awaken that spark and force man into the next stage of evolution by reverting back to the beginning of species. Only the Doc had been wrong. It had indeed been the blood of Angels but not the kind the Doc and his staff nor Ben's mother had envisioned. No, the spark was not of the light. It was the residue of the Angels of the Morningstar who had been banished to the Earth with him as he fell. They had mated with the apes and brought about a new life-form called “man". All the greed, lust, hatred, and wars of history were explained away in the simple understanding of a single speck of a DNA strand.

    
Ben reached up to wipe at his tears and his hand came away wet with oozing flesh as body was wracked with mind-breaking pain. In the silence of the Gareth station, his insane laughter echoed throughout the vacant corridors.

2 - Icy Roads

    
"The Dead Walk". That was all people talked about anymore since the first paper to bare the headline hit the stands a few weeks back, though no one really knew what to say. It was a Tuesday in the small North Carolina where Jennifer worked and lived, and she had other problems. Foremost on her mind was the weather. She needed to be at work by 7 AM to do her morning paperwork for the store. She'd only recently been promoted to manager and always worried about having it in on time to her boss at the regional office. She crawled out of bed and made her way downstairs, flicking on the radio as she went about grabbing some cold pop tarts for breakfast.