The gaps in the smoke created by the Sea Knight's downdrafts allowed Franco and Roberts to see the mob, and also allowed the mob to see them.
Ignoring the fire, the crowd surged forward in search of new victims. The soldiers watched as a trio of the things walked directly into the flames. Each of them went up fast, but they kept coming. One even made it to the catwalk at the top of the stairs before succumbing to the fire and falling over.
Hollywood movies had trained audiences to expect groans and growls but not here. The zombies from Tioga Island made no sound, giving them an extra layer of sinister.
Van Buren's voice broadcast into Franco's earpiece: "Biggy, you want me to open up on those things?"
The stupid question rattled Franco into action.
"Damn straight. See if you can clear us a path off this roof!"
Heavy machine gun fire erupted from the chopper as it orbited above. Fifty-caliber rounds ripped the ship between the bridge and the bow, tearing into the creatures. One lost its head completely, while another was literally cut in two. Yet the headless corpse kept on coming and the top half of the split creature pulled itself along with entrails hanging out behind.
"We have to find out where this ship was going," Franco said to Roberts. "You cover me from up here."
Acting before he could rethink it, the sergeant jumped from the roof and landed on the catwalk outside the bridge. As he did, the walking body of a dead, twenty-something girl came up the stairs, reaching for him with two burning arms.
Franco fired his automatic shotgun, punching a hole through her abdomen so big that he saw another zombie climbing the stairs behind her.
He fired again, turning the creature's head into something resembling a melted lollipop and revealing some kind of white ball attached to her spine. Another blast disintegrated whatever that was and caused the corpse to drop to the deck and stay there.
Bullets from Roberts's M4 carbine kept the next attacker at bay while Franco opened the bridge door and stepped inside … only to be grabbed by a pair of grimy, bloody hands.
Franco brought his shotgun up … and then stopped as this particular zombie spoke.
"It didn't hold! The PX didn't hold!"
The man was clearly of southeast Asian descent and spoke poor English, but the sergeant understood him well enough.
Franco brought his shotgun butt into the man's gut. He crumpled and his hands came off Biggy's shoulders.
"Where's the rest of your crew, you damn gook?"
"Get me out of here! Get me out of here!"
Franco reached for the crewman's throat, but another blast of fifty-caliber fire from the orbiting Sea Knight sounded particularly close. If that was not enough to motivate him, Roberts's frantic voice called over the radio, "I can't hold them! Get back up here!"
More fire came from Van Buren's big gun, Roberts's rifle, and Sal Galati shooting from the open rear ramp onboard the chopper as the team fired furiously to hold back the tide.
"Okay then, you're coming with me," Franco said and practically threw the man toward the exit.
Two more creatures pushed through the veil of smoke and climbed the stairs. Franco got the impression that an entire line of the things was marching toward him in one long snake stretching across the deck and down into the cargo hold.
"Climb, you fuck," he said and practically pushed the man up onto a deck railing, steering him toward the superstructure roof in the process. Roberts put aside his carbine and helped.
Two more half-burning things reached the bridge just as Franco slung his shotgun so as to escape to the roof. They came out of the fog with such surprising speed that Franco actually gasped. An old woman's bloody teeth lunged for his throat … and then her skull exploded.
The shot came from Sal Galati, strapped into a sitting position on the open rear ramp of the circling helicopter. He had made the shot despite distance, despite a moving target, despite riding in a flying helicopter.
Of course an exploded skull was not enough to stop this particular animated corpse, but the force from the blow caused the body to first bounce into the wall and then stagger the other direction, up and over the railing, and down into the Pacific with a splash.
As he often did, Franco turned fear into anger, meeting the next zombie with both hands and throwing it over the railing despite a patch of fire burning on its shoulder.
More approached but Franco did not wait around. He climbed onto the roof, where Roberts hovered over the crewman. The guy from the freighter curled into a fetal position and mumbled something sounding like a prayer in what might have been Thai.
"Get down here and pick us up," Franco ordered on his radio while also leaning over the side and firing a shotgun blast to obliterate one of their living dead pursuers. "Then this guy is gonna tell us where this boat was going. Ain't that right, buddy?" And Franco picked the man up by his shoulders.
The Sea Knight stopped circling and came in low over the deck, the twin rotors creating a hurricane-like wind around the superstructure.
"Grab the rope, you dumb ass," Franco said and thrust the Asian man toward a rope that had been dropped down by Galati.
The sailor did as instructed and the soldiers on board the helicopter reeled him up fifteen feet and into the open ramp. A moment later the two ropes Roberts and Biggy had used to descend onto the ship returned, and while it took longer to go up than to come down, the soldiers attacked the task with vigor as the burning fuel waned and the mob was free to encircle the bridge in earnest.
Franco reached the helicopter a second behind Roberts, crawling into the passenger compartment. There he found Sal standing over the rescued seaman with a finger in his face.
"Where was your ship going?"
The Thai man still seemed rather shaken, but not nearly as panicked now that he had been rescued from the freighter.
He answered Galati's question calmly but in his native tongue and added a shrug to emphasize what clearly was a response of "I don't understand English."
Franco took to a knee and worked to regain his breath. Escaping the ship — particularly almost being bitten by the woman whom Galati had made headless — had sent far more shivers down his spine than he had realized. Fortunately the adrenaline of action as well as his innate ability to twist any emotion — fear, sadness, shame — into outright anger had kept those shivers from interfering with his task. Still, he did not like the idea of zombies and teeth and boats filled with walking dead.
Just as important, after the incident at Red Rock he had made a conscious decision to show a lot more empathy and interest in Gant, Wells, and others like them. Meaning black people. He figured that was the best way to combat the streak of racism that had led him to try to kill his commanding officer in that Pennsylvania dungeon.
Gant's disappearance provided the perfect opportunity to end any suspicions about Franco's dark heart. After all, would a racist son of a bitch put so much effort and concern into finding his black C.O.?
"Listen, you," Sal wagged his finger with all the sternness of a second-grade school teacher berating a pupil for dog-devoured homework. "You had better cooperate. Tell us where you were going with your cargo."
Again their newest passenger shrugged and said, "No English."
Franco took a deep breath, turned his head to glance out the open ramp at the freighter drifting below, and then stood up, marched over to the Thai man, grabbed him, and threw him to the back of the helicopter. The man stumbled and slid, two feet from the edge of the ramp, his hands clawing at the metal floor.
"Listen, you stupid gook," Franco said, hauling him up by the collar and thrusting his prisoner out toward open space. The freighter and a mob of zombies waited some fifty feet below. "Now listen, you dumb fuck. I know you speak English, I know you were taking these friggin' things back to whoever made them in the first place, and I damn well know that I could throw your sorry ass down there and no one would ever know. So start yapping or you're going back on board the love boat."