The Big Easy listed slightly onto her side and I felt cold water rush over my feet. The rocks we’d hit must have punctured the hull. The bow of the boat was on fire, the stern was sinking, and the zombies were wading towards us with a hungry hate in their yellow eyes.
11
We stood on the sinking deck with our weapons ready. The bat felt heavy in my hands. The footlocker sat on the deck behind me. Lucy stood next to me, wielding the tyre iron. I wasn’t sure if we should stay on the boat and fight or get the hell out of here. If we stayed, we were in danger of being blown up by the next missile that came our way. If we swam for it, we’d swim right into the zombie horde.
Some of the creatures had almost reached the boat already. I hefted the bat and took a swing at a rotting man who was wearing a life vest. I had no idea how he’d got here or why he was wearing the vest but those things were irrelevant now. They were part of his old life. Now, he had become a creature that acted in accordance with the virus coursing through its body.
What had once been a man with hopes and dreams was now nothing more than something I had to exterminate.
The bat connected with his skull, which collapsed like an overripe watermelon. The creature collapsed into the water.
Lucy attacked a bald-headed zombie similarly dressed in a life vest. Perhaps he’d once been a friend of the man who’d become the creature that now floated in front of me. Or perhaps they’d never known each other and had simply ended up on this beach by chance. Either way, they both met the same fate as Lucy’s tyre iron cleaved the bald skull in two and the creature dropped like a bag of cement into the sea.
The life vests ensured the two corpses remained afloat as other creatures waded past them to get to us.
“Why are they in the water?” Lucy asked. “They usually avoid it.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I’d try to figure out their unusual behaviour later; right now, we needed an escape plan.
“We can’t swim for shore,” I told Lucy, “but we can swim for that big rock out there.”
“Won’t they follow us?”
“I hope not,” I said, throwing the footlocker over the side. These zombies were ignoring their usual instinct to avoid water but could they actually swim? From what I’d seen so far, the animated corpses only had rudimentary movement. Could they perform a physical task as complex as swimming?
I doubted it. Even hybrids—which were way more capable than the shamblers we had wading towards us—couldn’t swim. I’d seen a group of them fall into the sea and simply drown.
I vaulted over the railing and into the water, followed closely by Lucy. Now we had the boat between us and the creatures. I grabbed the footlocker—which was floating—and swam for the rock that jutted from the water.
I didn’t look back until I scrambled out of the water, dragging the footlocker up onto the rock. The Big Easy was swarming with zombies now. The boat’s bow was underwater and the creatures scrambled aboard easily.
They seemed to know Lucy and I were on the rock and some of them stepped off the boat into the deeper water but they flailed helplessly once they were out of their depth. They didn’t exactly sink but they were unable to achieve any forward movement. They struggled and splashed as if they were drowning but they didn’t actually drown.
I heard a buzzing sound that I thought was the drone overhead but soon realised was coming from the deeper water. I looked in the direction and saw Sam and Tanya in the Zodiac, speeding towards our position. They were armed with M16s and they looked like they meant business.
Sam steered the craft so that it came up alongside the rock and Lucy and I got in. As soon as we were sitting down, he revved the engine and we sped away towards the Lucky Escape.
“You’re such a geek, Alex,” he said, motioning to the footlocker with his head. “Even in a crisis, you have to save the paperwork.”
“There could be something really important in here,” I told him. “I couldn’t let it sink. There might be something in here that Brigadier Gordon needs to complete Operation Dead Ground. By keeping it from him, we may have saved a lot of lives.”
He shrugged and looked at me incredulously. “Dude, we don’t even know what Operation Dead ground is.”
“We know it’s not good. The clue is in the name, remember?”
He grinned and nodded.
“It might not be safe to get on board the Escape,” I said. “You saw what they did to the Easy.” I looked back at the burning, broken craft that had been our home and safe haven for all this time. Without that boat, I’d have been long dead. I remembered time spent on the boat with Mike and Elena. Now, like my two friends, the Big Easy was gone. Another casualty of the world we now inhabited; a world where nothing good can ever last.
“They won’t hit the Lucky Escape with any missiles,” Tanya said.
I frowned at her. “How can you be so sure?”
“They won’t risk blowing Patient Zero up.”
“For all they know, Vess might be on the Easy,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, they know he’s on the Escape. Before we came to rescue you, we dragged the crate up onto the deck so they could see it from the air. They can’t blow up the boat because then they’d lose their precious science experiment.”
Putting Vess’s crate on display was good thinking but it probably meant the boats we’d heard earlier were racing towards the Escape now, hoping to board her and take the prize.
It was still too misty to see the military boats but I had no doubt they were close.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “We can’t outrun the army forever and we can’t hide as long as they have air support.”
“You’re the brains of the group,” Sam said. “Planning is your department, dude.”
“I’ll think of something,” I said, not feeling anywhere near as confident as I sounded.
We reached the Escape and climbed quickly on board. Tanya climbed up to the bridge and got us moving. I could hear the drone but when I searched the sky for it, I couldn’t see it.
I was sure it had a visual on us, though.
Cold and wet, I stood at the railing and peered into the mist in our wake. Unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, there was a dark shape back there, almost completely hidden by the mist.
“They’re getting closer,” I said to Sam and Lucy, pointing at the shape. “That’s their boat.”
Sam looked at me and for the first time in ages, his usual bravado was gone. “So what’s the plan?”
As I’d already told everyone, we couldn’t run forever and the drone gave Gordon’s men a bird’s eye view at all times so we couldn’t hide. Not in the boat, anyway.
“The only way to hide from the drone is to enter a building,” I said.
Sam gestured around us. “Dude, there aren’t any buildings out here. We’re in the sea.”
Ignoring the fact that he was stating the obvious, I said, “How quickly can we hotwire a car, load Vess on board, and drive away?”
He thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple of minutes maybe.”
“We have to get to land,” I said. “Out here, we have no chance. If we can quickly get into a car and drive to a town, we can hide out in the buildings. Maybe even use the sewers. That’s the only way we can avoid the army’s airborne eyes.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” Lucy said. “Zombies. If we go to any town, it’s going to be crawling with zombies.”
I nodded. She was right but what choice did we have? “We either risk it or end up being captured by the military.”
“Not much of a choice, Dude.” Sam turned towards the shore. “If we study the map, we should find a good place to land. There’s bound to be a harbour somewhere around here. I’ll check it out.” He went up to the bridge to talk to Tanya.