I climbed the ladder.
When I reached the top, Williams stood with his back to me. Tanya was poised in her fighter’s stance and Sam brandished his tire iron while Jax held her bat tightly.
Williams had no idea I was behind him.
I swung for his legs, hitting him on the backs of his knees.
He let out a grunt of surprise and went down to the deck, his gun toppling over the side of the boat.
“Get us out of here!” Tanya shouted to me.
I went up to the bridge and got the boat into reverse, backing away from the jetty slowly and turning the wheel to point our bow out to sea. Through the rain-smeared windows, I could see at least a dozen soldiers running up onto the jetty.
I took us out of reverse and increased the throttle as much as I dared to take us out of the marina. When the Lucky Escape started to move forward, I increased our speed.
As we left the jetty behind, I let out a breath of relief but we still weren’t in the clear.
Shouts from behind us were followed by the sharp crack of rifle shots.
“I can’t believe they’re firing on us when we have one of their soldiers on board, man,” Sam said. “That’s fucked up.”
I looked back. Half a dozen soldiers were firing at us while the other half ran back along the jetty. The dark-haired soldier, Williams’ companion, was pulling himself out of the water and climbing one of the jetty ladders.
Either we were out of range or the soldiers were bad shots; none of their bullets hit our boat. When we increased the distance between us and the marina, they stopped trying and stood watching us.
I looked down at the aft deck. Sam was standing over Williams, looking towards the marina. He said to Williams, “Can you swim, man?”
Williams nodded.
Sam pushed him over the side.
Williams went under for a moment, surfaced, then started a slow breaststroke back to shore.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I shouted down at Sam.
He looked up. “Why not? He said he can swim.”
“We could have got some information out of him. We could have found out what they were doing in that tent.”
Sam sighed. “You should have said that, man.”
He dived over the side and started swimming towards Williams in a fast front crawl.
What the fuck was he doing? Didn’t he realise we had to get out of here? I slammed the Lucky Escape into neutral and we bobbed on the waves of our own wake as the rain continued to lash down on deck.
Not that it mattered. We were all soaked to the skin from our dip in the sea. I shivered with cold.
Sam reached Williams and grabbed him around the neck, dragging him back through the water like a lifeguard rescuing a drowning victim. Faced with superior strength and size, Williams seemed resigned to his fate and let Sam bring him back to the boat.
Tanya and Jax helped get Williams on board and sat him on the cream-coloured, padded vinyl bench that ran around the bow.
I went down the ladder.
Sam looked at me. “Well, he’s here, man. Ask him your questions and we’ll throw him back overboard.”
Williams looked up at me with defiance in his eyes.
“Are you going to answer our questions?” I asked him.
He said nothing.
“Look, this isn’t a prisoner of war camp,” I said. “There isn’t a war on and we are not enemies. The zombies are our enemies. We’re survivors of a terrible event and we should work together. Don’t you agree?”
Williams remained silent. He probably didn’t want to get back to shore and have to tell his superiors he had given us information.
I sighed. “Okay, Williams, listen to me. If you don’t tell me what was happening in that tent on the beach, we’ll throw you overboard but we’ll wait until we’ve sailed out to the middle of fucking nowhere.”
Sam looked at me, horrified. Luckily, Williams couldn’t see his face.
“You may be able to swim for a while,” I said, “but eventually you’ll get tired. And then it’ll all be over.”
Williams looked down at the deck but said nothing.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll start the engines.”
I started to walk to the bridge ladder.
Williams’ voice was low and weak, resigned. “They gave us a vaccination,” he said.
I turned to face him. “Tell me more.”
He shrugged. Keeping his eyes locked on the deck as he struggled between the need for self-preservation and orders from his superiors, he said, “I don’t know what it was. They said it would keep us alive if we got bitten.”
“Who gave you the injection?”
“The army medics.”
“Where did they get the vaccine?”
He looked up at me. “How should I know? The government, I suppose. Probably some scientists.”
I thought about what Jax had said about Apocalypse Island. If her story was true, the vaccine had probably been developed there. Did the fact that the army had a vaccine prove the existence of Apocalypse Island? Not necessarily. It proved there was a government still active somewhere and they were still pulling the strings but Apocalypse Island could still just be a myth.
“Are they vaccinating the people in the Survivors Camps?” I asked Williams.
He shook his head. “They’re doing the military first. Then they’ll get around to…”
“They’ll never inject the ordinary people,” Tanya said, stepping forward. “The best way to control them is through fear.”
“They will inject the survivors,” Williams said, looking at Tanya earnestly.
She shook her head and raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe everything you’re told?”
He looked down at the deck again.
“Listen,” I said, “do you know what the Survivors Board is?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s a list of all the survivors in the camps.”
I leaned closer to him. “Where is it? Where can I find it?”
“You have to go to a camp. It’s on their computers.”
“You mean it’s a database?”
He nodded. “The survivors in the camps can ask if their relatives and friends are still alive and the soldiers in charge consult the database.”
“And it’s in every camp?” I asked.
He nodded. “As far as I know.”
“How do they keep the list updated, man?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know much about it,” Williams said, “but I think each camp updates it if someone dies or new arrivals come to their camp.”
“You mean it’s networked?” Sam asked.
Williams nodded.
Sam rubbed his chin. “Holy fuck, there’s a network.” He looked at Tanya and Jax.
I rolled my eyes. They probably wanted to take that over as well as Survivor Radio.
“Okay, we’re done with you, Williams,” I said.
Sam stepped forward to throw him over the side but Williams held his hands up. “No need for that. I’m going.” He dived over the side and started swimming for shore.
I turned to the others. “Let’s get…”
Something splashed into the water thirty feet off our bow. It exploded and the sea fountained up to join the falling rain. A second later, we heard a deep boom from the beach.
“They’re firing mortars at us!” I shouted, running for the ladder and climbing up to the bridge. I took us out of neutral and increased the throttle. The waves from the explosion hit us and the Lucky Escape rolled from side to side. I held onto the wheel and turned our nose into the waves, increasing the throttle as the boat steadied.
Another explosion off the port side seemed closer, maybe twenty feet away. The accompanying boom reached us after the sea had erupted in a fountain of salty spray.
Again we were battered by the sudden high waves. The spray from the explosion hit the bridge windows like watery bullets, streaking over the glass. I slammed the throttle up to max and headed for deeper water, turning south in a gradual arc.