“Not nearly as dramatic.”
“At least we’d still have our rowboat.”
“Hey, it was you who hit her overboard, slugger.”
“She was about to kill me.”
Her face went suddenly serious. “What are we going to do with Dan and Max?”
“I assumed we would untie The Hornet and let her float free.” Their bodies would float around on the boat until it sank or someone else found it.
A voice came from the bridge radio. A man’s voice. “Hornet.”
We looked at each other and went to the radio. I hesitated before answering. Maybe these were the pirates I had been thinking about earlier.
“Hornet,” the voice repeated.
“Should we answer it?” Lucy whispered.
“I don’t know. The last time we answered the radio, it didn’t turn out well.”
The man’s voice sounded frustrated. “Come on, you two. Don’t just stand there staring at the radio. Pick up.”
“What the hell? Can he see us?” I scanned the ocean for boats. Apart from The Big Easy and the slowly sinking rowboat, the sea was empty. Could it be someone with high-power binoculars? We were too far from the coast to be seen that clearly.
I picked up the handset. “This is Hornet. Who are you?”
“Name’s Harper. Frank Harper. I’m the guy with a gun to your friend’s head.”
“What?”
“Don’t take my word for it. Here… listen.”
Mike’s voice came over the radio. “Hey, man, I think you’d better get back here.”
Harper was on board The Big Easy. While we had been investigating The Hornet, he had boarded our boat.
I looked over to The Big Easy. Mike was sitting on the aft deck, his arms secured behind him. Leaning out from the bridge, radio handset in his hand, a fair-haired man in a black knitted cap, sweater and trousers stared right at me. In his other hand he held a revolver pointed at Mike’s head.
“You two get back here. Don’t even think about running. Your friend will end up dead.”
I felt angry that he had the nerve to try and take over The Big Easy. “What do you want, Harper?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “We’re going to take a trip to a lighthouse.”
twenty three
As soon as Lucy and I climbed out of the cold water and onto the deck of The Big Easy, Harper pointed the gun in Lucy’s direction. “You drop that gun and the flare gun you used to finish off that zombie and kick them across this way.”
She did as he asked. She had no choice.
“Same with the baseball bat,” he told me.
I tossed it across the deck. It clattered at his feet.
I felt mad at myself for letting this happen. Harper had piloted his boat up to The Big Easy while Lucy and I were on The Hornet, left it on the opposite side of the hull so we couldn’t see it, and climbed aboard while Mike was still sleeping. We never should have left Mike on board alone. I looked at Harper’s boat bobbing in the sea. It was filled with boxes, petrol cans and gas canisters. It also had an outboard motor. A means of escape?
I looked at Mike. His hands were tied behind his back with rope. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, man.” His eyes were dead, his voice flat. He had been forced awake by Harper but he was still in shock over Elena’s death. Whatever happened, I couldn’t let Harper take us back to that lighthouse. I had the terrible feeling that Elena was still there, wandering the place in zombie form. If Mike saw that…
“There’s no point going to the lighthouse,” I said. “It’s overrun with zombies. Your friend Eric is dead.”
“I know that,” he said unemotionally. “I saw it. It was only a matter of time before those things got to the place. Poor Eric should have stuck with me. I told him to come with me and we’d find out what was going on but he wanted to stay at his post, find out what he could from the radio.” He pointed at me with the muzzle of the revolver. “Do you know how to drive this boat?”
I nodded.
“So let’s weigh anchor and get going.”
“I just told you, the lighthouse is crawling with zombies.”
“And I told you I know that. That’s why I couldn’t go back on my own. I couldn’t take on all those creatures. But you three… well, I just saw you make a flame-grilled zombie burger over there, so clearing the lighthouse shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
There was no way I was going to ‘clear’ the lighthouse if Elena was in there. And there was no way Mike should even be going back to that area at all. “What’s the point in going back to the lighthouse?” I asked Harper.
“Never mind that. Come on, we haven’t got a lot of time. The tide’s high at the moment so any zombies on the island are stuck there and no more can come from the beach. In a couple of hours that situation will change when the tide goes out again. So move it. Get us to the lighthouse.” He jabbed his thumb at the ladder that led to the bridge.
“What about The Hornet? She’s still tied on.” I needed to stall him, needed time to think.
“You go untie her,” he said to Lucy, “then come straight back here.”
She went through to the front of the boat and I climbed up to the bridge. I watched Lucy through the window as she untied The Hornet and set her adrift. The tragedy of Max Prentice and his family would soon be in our past but I feared a much deeper tragedy in our near future. Lucy stood on the foredeck watching the boat slip away. I wondered if she had any plans on how we were going to get out of this mess. I hoped she did because I was out of ideas.
“Let’s go,” Harper called from below.
I started the engine and hit the button that retracted the anchor. Turning The Big Easy south, I gave her a little throttle and we glided along. Although we sailed at a sedate pace, my mind raced. I scanned the bridge for weapons then remembered the flare gun in the cupboard. I opened the cupboard and looked inside. There was a First Aid kit and the flare gun along with a dozen flares. I took it out and stuffed it into my wet jeans. Could I really kill a man? Killing zombies was one thing. They were already dead. But Harper was alive. It would be murder.
He seemed willing enough to murder us so why not turn the tables on him?
“Give it more throttle,” he shouted up at me.
I increased our speed very slightly and wondered how I was going to make my move. I had to be careful because I couldn’t risk setting The Big Easy on fire. I also had to make sure he didn’t kill one of us before I could kill him.
I leaned out of the bridge. I had a pretty clear shot at him from here but he was close to Mike, keeping the gun pointed at him.
He looked up and saw me. “What are you looking at?”
“Can I change into some dry clothes?”
“No.”
I sat back on the chair. I was cold. I was worried about what we’d find at the lighthouse. Maybe, just maybe, Elena had moved on with her zombie friends and was in Swansea or farther inland. I didn’t know what motivated the zombies to move around. Sure, they were in search of prey but what made them decide where to go? Did they wander aimlessly?
I thought of Mary and Dan locked in the storeroom on The Hornet. They had waited it out, banging every now and then to see if they could lure a curious person to open the door. When that didn’t work, they came crashing through to get us. So they could have escaped at any time but chose to wait. Why? Were they aware that if they came out too soon, we would have left the boat and been beyond their reach? Had they waited until they were certain we weren’t going to open the door and Lucy was close enough for them to make an attempt to get her?
So many questions. I had no idea how this virus controlled its hosts. I had picked up on the rain phenomenon and I assumed that applied to all extremes of weather. Maybe the virus would make the rotting host shelter from the sun on a hot day as well. But as far as killing their prey and spreading the virus went, I thought I might have underestimated the zombies so far. They seemed to have reasoning abilities that responded to situations and the environment.