Something had flashed in one of the windows and I stared at it, trying to see what was going on inside. That’s when I saw a hand, fingers scratching at the glass. That’s when I saw the teeth and mouth, banging against the window again and again, desperate to get out.
Even though I’d smothered our emergency beacon light, I felt like the thing was staring straight at me. That more than anything else she wanted to rip every bit of flesh from my bones and pull apart every muscle. Open me up like a frog on the dissection tray.
I’d let us drift back away then. Just before Jeremy started screaming. Just before I saw the bite marks along his ribs.
“You ever had sex?” I ask him.
His back stiffens, his shirt sticking to his body. Even though we’ve been rationing water he’s been sweating a lot-too much. His skin’s hot and flushed and he wants me to think it’s from the sun and heat but I can smell the way his wound’s festering, the sweet putrid stink of it. He pulls his head under the canopy and slumps against the wall. “Why?” he asks.
“Why sex? It’s supposed to be pretty damn good,” I tell him, trying to lighten his mood.
“Supposed to be?” he repeats, raising an eyebrow.
I scowl, cross my arms over my chest. “Don’t you think about those things, being out here?” He starts to look at me funny and I think about the night I pinned him in his sleep. I roll my eyes. “I just mean, it’s not like we have anything else to do but think. It’s just sex is one of those things I’d planned on doing before I died. I’m kinda pissed it might not happen.”
He shrugs. “Who says you’re going to die?”
I notice he doesn’t say “we” and I swallow, my tongue suddenly feeling a little thick. Scrunching down until I can prop my feet against the raft wall, I stare up at the peak of the canopy, watching it stretch and ripple over the inflated support bar. “What do you think’s happening back home?” I say. It’s a question I’ve been trying desperately not to ask but it’s all I can think about recently. Well, that and sex.
Jeremy’s silent and I let my head flop over until I’m looking at him. He’s staring out at the horizon but from here all I can see is gray water, gray sky, gray life. Slowly I push myself to my hands and knees and crawl until I’m sitting next to him.
The ship’s farther away now. We’d lost sight of it the day before and for a while we’d been panicked, not realizing until then how much we needed to have it out there even if we kept our distance. How empty everything seemed without it.
But then we’d seen the smoke rising out of nowhere and we’d paddled toward it until we saw it billowing from the decks of the ship. For most of the day it’s been listing to the side, slowly and inevitably capsizing.
“I think they might all be gone,” Jeremy finally says softly, before dancing his fingers along his side as if I don’t know what he’s hiding.
Every time he falls asleep, Jeremy screams. He never remembers it, or at least never acknowledges it. It’s driving me insane and a part of me hopes the infection goes ahead and takes him soon so I can be done with it.
The thing is, it’s not like Jeremy or I were being stupid. It’s not like we didn’t know how the whole thing works: someone gets bitten, gets infected, dies and comes back from the dead hungering for flesh. We’d seen the movies and played the video games. We knew.
It’s just…when it came down to it, it wasn’t that easy. It was never supposed to be real, never supposed to actually happen. Everything got confused and strange. We lost our friends trying to run through the cruise ship and we fought over taking a life raft and ditching or staying for official evacuation orders.
Really, this isn’t what was supposed to happen at all-this isn’t how it was supposed to end up. We’d treated it like a joke because we’d have panicked otherwise. “Ha-ha, the zombie apocalypse’s hit, let’s take a life raft and run.”
Ha-ha, joke’s on us. Or them. I can’t remember anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t just make more sense to confront Jeremy and force him overboard. After all, it’s not like he has a chance of surviving this, and in the meantime he’s taking up resources that I might need.
Neither one of us says anything but we both know: if there was going to be a rescue, it’d have happened by now. There’ve been no planes, no coast guard or bright orange helicopters. Our little raft beacon chirps and blinks away merrily, sending little distress “rescue me” signals out into the world that either no one’s there to hear or they’re too busy ignoring us.
We know this. Just like we know that land can’t really be that far away-we’d been on a cruise after all. The whole point is to visit all the islands-they have to be out here somewhere.
But we can’t bring ourselves to lose sight of the ship to find out. Just in case.
I don’t realize what it is at first, the huge groaning noise like a whale’s swallowed us whole. There’s this massive, deep popping sound, a high-pitched whine and then the sound of the world sucking itself up with a straw.
The wave hits not too long after, tossing us around the boat. I grab the canopy trying to hold on and end up tearing part of it away from the sides.
“What the hell?” I ask, running my fingers over the raft to make sure nothing’s damaged.
Water knocks us around, up and down and up and down, and Jeremy’s at the flap, staring out in the night.
“No!” he shouts into the darkness and I suddenly realize just how dark it is. It’s nothing; pure absolute emptiness. The cruise ship’s gone, devoured by the ocean.
Jeremy jumps into the water and starts swimming as if he could somehow bring it back from the depths. I can’t even see him, he’s been swallowed up already, but I hear his splashing.
“It can’t go yet!” he screams. “I’m not ready. I’m not ready!”
I kneel in the boat, my arms over the side trying to feel for him as I listen to him beat at the waves and curse everything for taking away the ship once and for all.
When I finally get him back on board he shivers in my lap, his arms crossed tight over his chest. “I’m not ready,” he mutters, turning his face to my chest as tears burn hot against my skin.
I hold on to him, letting the raft rock us both, the silence of the sea settling around the sunken ship our only lullaby.
“Jenny Lyons,” I tell him and he cracks a small smile.
“Her?” he asks. “Really?”
I shrug. “It was eighth grade and computer class.”
“Didn’t she have braces then?”
“Oh yeah.”
He shakes his head.
“How about you?” I ask.
If possible, his cheeks pinken even more.
“Oh don’t tell me, sweet sixteen and never been kissed?” I mean it like a tease.
“More like eighteen,” he says staring at his lap.
I feel my smile tighten as I think about the bite on his ribs and suddenly it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.
It’s pitch-black dark when he finally comes clean. “Listen, I gotta tell you something,” he says. He must have known I was pretending to sleep because he doesn’t bother trying to wake me up first.
I shift a little, feeling the boat rock slowly under my movement. We haven’t seen anything else for days: no ship, land, rafts. Only so much nothing that it feels like we have to be the last people left.
As he explains I bite my teeth together as hard as possible, wondering if I can break them-break everything and be done with it.
“I’ll go overboard, if you want,” he says. In the darkness his voice has no body, no infection. It just is.
“But then you’ll turn into one of those things,” I tell him.
His breath shakes. “I’m going to turn into one of those things no matter what,” he says.