By then the shooting was everywhere. Two-thirds of the soldiers were climbing over a retaining fence as the remaining third struggled to connect long hoses to the rusty pump spouts that stuck out of the huge reservoirs. Someone inside the fence had started up a small portable generator, presumably to run the pump. The gunfire and the pump’s piercing screech were deafening. I looked in horror at the other end of the dock. Drawn by the noise, hundreds of Undead were lumbering down every street toward the soldiers who were distracted by their work.
“They’ll be slaughtered!” I couldn’t contain myself. “Captain Birley, you’ve got to get them out of there! Order them back!”
Birley shrugged with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Don’t worry about them,” he said impassively. “They’re just helots doing their job. But maybe we can help them out. It’ll be fun. Culling!”
“Sir?” One of the young officers snapped to attention next to the captain.
“Bring up the M24s. Let’s have a little target practice.”
A murmur of excitement spread across the deck. I wondered what he meant by fun. Another six or seven men in the landing party had fallen, and the circle of Undead was slowly but surely closing. Three other soldiers had bites on their arms and legs. Considering how contagious the virus was, the bites were fatal, but they gripped their weapons and fought on admirably.
An officer dragged several heavy metal boxes across the Ithaca’s deck and started handing out rifles with telescopic sights. There was pushing and shoving and some sneaky elbowing to get one of the guns. Some walked away empty-handed, grumbling, while other hopefuls tried to bribe those with rifles into sharing them for a while. Pritchenko snagged one of the rifles without much effort.
“A Remington M24,” he muttered as he examined the rifle with an expert eye. “Snipers’ weapon. I wonder where our friends got them.”
Suddenly, all hell broke loose on deck. A dozen rifles fired on the crowd of moaning Undead as they advanced toward the dock. With a continuous staccato, the shooters cocked their weapons, aimed carefully through the scopes, fired, then started all over again. The audience cheered each bull’s-eye. Some guys were even placing bets on their aim.
I focused my binoculars on the port. At such short range, the shooters couldn’t miss the Undead teetering on the dock. In the blink of an eye, three of the monsters went down. Exploding bullets hit two of them in the head, spraying flesh, bone, and gore everywhere. Another bullet hit the third Undead in the chest and threw him back ten feet. The creature lay on the ground, with a puzzled look on his face as if he wondered what the fuck happened and why he was lying on the ground with a tunnel-size hole in his gut.
It would’ve been fun, but I couldn’t stop thinking that those monsters had been people once. When the head of a little girl in pigtails went flying and the shooters cheered, I stopped watching. For God’s sake! She couldn’t have been more than seven! I could handle killing Undead in self-defense, but here they were sitting ducks.
The team that had scrambled up the reservoir fired a flare, filling the air with thick red smoke. Several other soldiers pulled a guide wire that dragged a thick hose connected to the reservoir to the nearest Zodiac. With a slow purr, the boat pulled up to the tanker.
What was left of the ground team realized that the hose was secure and retreated to the shore. From the safety of the ship, I watched in fascination as twenty men and women slowly walked backward in a strange choreographed motion, dragging their wounded comrades. The muscular black guy towered over them and covered their retreat. He was one brave fucker. The guy rhythmically fired his M16 until he ran out of ammunition. He was too close to the Undead to reload, so he grabbed the gun by the barrel (it must’ve been red hot) and swung it like a club.
The officers on the Ithaca cheered as if they were watching a football game. The giant man with all the tattoos was cut off some fifty feet from the shore. The Zodiacs had pulled back a little to keep the Undead from hurling themselves on board, but one of them stayed in close so the guy could jump on. The soldiers on the boats yelled for him to get on, but he was too busy fending off Undead to hear.
The M16 whirled over his head with a shrill whistle, striking the head of an Undead with a brittle crunch. The blows probably weren’t fatal, but they were enough to help him break through the line as the Undead fell like sacks of potatoes. Seconds later, though, three new Undead closed in. The soldier split open the heads of the two closest to him with the butt of his rifle, then gave the third a kick to the solar plexus that must’ve broken some ribs.
The officers stopped shooting and cheered like crazy as the guy fought for his life.
I whipped around to Prit. “What the hell’s going on? Why aren’t they shooting?”
“Clearly they don’t want to shoot. If we don’t want any trouble, we shouldn’t either,” the Ukrainian muttered as he cast a furtive look at the officers.
I couldn’t read his mind right then. I was too upset.
“That’s murder!” I protested.
No one paid any attention to me. The soldier continued swinging his rifle, fighting his way to shore, and for a second I thought he’d make it. He was just a few feet from the dock with only two Undead between him and salvation. He tackled one of them like a defensive linebacker. The Undead flew into the water and sank with a splash. He grabbed the other beast by the arm and swung him around, letting him fly into a nearby group. The monsters fell in a tangle of arms, legs, and heads.
I got carried away and started to yell too, then suddenly the cry died in my throat. The soldier took a step back to make a running leap onto the Zodiac. Just as he started to jump, one of the Undead lying in the dirt a few feet away reached out and with his rotting fingernails snagged the man by his bootlaces. The soldier fell hard onto the dock and two Undead pounced on him. One of them sank his teeth into the guy’s bicep, leaving a deep, jagged wound. The other ripped into one of his calves. With a grunt, the soldier used his free foot to lash out at the head biting his leg and landed a kick that would have broken an elephant’s neck. He crawled to the edge of the dock and let himself fall into the water. After a second, his head popped up alongside the Zodiac. The soldiers dragged him on board, leaving a trail of blood across the boat’s canvas hull. Then they tacked and started their slow return to the Ithaca.
It was a monstrous crime. The guy was a dead man. Millions of TSJ virions had entered his body through those two bites and were reproducing wildly. In a few hours, that giant of a man would be a very large, very dangerous Undead. All because the men laughing and cheering beside me didn’t feel like helping him.
“Come on, Prit. I can’t take another minute of this. I’m just glad Lucia’s not on deck.”
“That was very strange,” Prit replied. “A landing party made up entirely of black, Latino, Asian, and Native American soldiers, but not a single white one. And they let their own people die like flies. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Nothing has made sense for a long time.”
“Yeah, but that was really strange,” the Ukrainian insisted.
The battered landing party finally reached the ship. Sailors connected the hoses to the tanks as the battle-weary soldiers climbed the net back onto the tanker. They lowered stretchers to the boats to bring up the most gravely injured.
Although it was heartwarming that they hadn’t left any wounded behind, their efforts were futile. The virus would transform the injured soldiers into Undead in minutes. In fact, some of the officers were firing down at the dock, targeting the fallen soldiers who’d already risen as Undead.