“May I ask a question, sir?” Bennett said, raising his hand.
“It’s gone,” the young man said. “It’s all gone. It’s the first question I asked, too. It’s what everyone asks. If you don’t believe me, try to get one of the zodiac guys to drop you off on the shore. Ask the zombies. Whatever place you’re asking about, we probably don’t have contact and we don’t know. There’s some Yanks who are in a headquarters somewhere in the US. Omaha or something like that. They’re sort of in charge but they can’t get out. Now, we really need to do the showers so I can get you over to the boat and you can get some food, a bunk and people who are there to answer your questions.”
The response sounded rote. The guy has answered the question before. A lot.
“Decontamination shower” had some rather unpleasant historical connotations. But he could smell the chemicals and there was enough spray around that if it was mixed with, say, Tabun, the guy running the shower would have been doing the dying cockroach.
Thomas grabbed a pair of Navy PT shorts and a Marine T-shirt. Someone had found a well-stocked US Navy ship. Presumably The Hole had given them permission to loot it.
The shower was, as advertised, hot. And that was good after spending months in a hold with limited, and always cold, water.
He showered quickly. He wanted to just sit under the water for an hour. But he washed grabbed his towel, shorts and shirt, put them on and got out.
“Put the towel in the bucket, please,” the young man said, pointing to a blue bucket. “They get laundered and reused. What compartment were you in?”
“L-1438,” Thomas said tossing the towel in the barrel.
The kid pulled out a piece of plastic and a Sharpie and carefully wrote L-1438 on it.
“Were all you in the same compartment?” he asked, handing it to Thomas.
“Yes.”
“Right,” the kid said, pulling out more plastic and starting to write the compartment on them.
“May I ask the purpose of this?” Thomas asked.
“They keep people in the same compartment together at first, mostly,” the kid said. “You may bloody hate your compartment mates but they’re the only people you know at first.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. “What now?”
“Wait for the rest of the blokes to get done,” the kid said. “Unless they call for a group to head over to the boat.”
“How many you got?” an older man said, walking up.
“Just this one, right now. Five when they get done showering.”
“You okay going on your own?” the older man said. He was wearing a US Navy uniform with rank tabs for a Petty Officer Third Class but no name tag.
“Yes,” Thomas said.
“Zodiac’s ready to go with some others,” the man said. “Come on.”
He led the way around the corner to the promenade deck of the liner and pointed aft.
“See that group by the gangway?” he asked. “That’s the stair thing. Join them. Okay? Or you can wait.”
“I’ll go with them,” Thomas said.
The group, with the exception of an older man wearing a US Navy uniform and no rank, was also dressed in T-shirts and shorts, holding plastic bags. From there it was possible to see another decontamination shower, a larger one. There was one of the fire-gear and MOLLE covered “zombie hunters” under the shower, still holding his M4, being doused down. The water was running off him blood red.
Thomas briefly wondered if he’d just taken a shower in zombie blood contaminated water.
“Right, the zodiac’s here,” the man in uniform said. “Make your way down the steps, carefully, and into the boat.
The boat wasn’t, technically, a Zodiac. It was a Brig designed to carry four and a driver. Thomas found it interesting that a sailor was calling it a zodiac and not a RHIB. Language changes were already occurring. He pushed ‘RHIB’ to the back of his memory since using the term might betray his cover.
There were six in the group. People needed help getting in. Everyone could barely see.
Thomas waited until the other passengers had found seats before boarding. He stepped lightly onto the boat and dropped into a spot on the deck. He was wedged between an older man on the deck and a fortyish woman sitting on the front seat.
“Wrap the blankets around you if you get cold,” the kid driving it said. “You’re going to have to leave them in the boat.”
The blankets were USMC green wool blankets and already damp. Thomas decided to forego.
“Everyone keeps saying everything’s gone,” the woman next to him said. “It can’t simply be gone. Something had to survive!”
“I don’t know, lady,” the kid said, pulling away from the floating dock. “There’s zombies all over on the land and there’s not much in the way of radio stations. Some ham operators, pretty much. There’s some that say they’re, like, king of some place I’ve never heard of, but there’s not much.”
“Submarines?” Thomas asked.
“There are subs,” the kid said. “So I’ve heard. I’ve never seen ’em but other people have. The boat I’m taking you to used to be owned by some rich Russian dude. He tried to jack the boat that found him. It’s one of the real ‘Navy’ boats. Some of the boats are run by civilians and some of them are Navy. Anyway, the guy tried to jack this Navy boat and a sub surfaced and told him they’d open fire if he didn’t surrender. So then I guess we jacked his.”
“So there are Navy ships?” the woman asked.
“Sorta,” the kid said. “They found a Marine ship, which is where the Marines and a bunch of the loot came from. But it’s still floating somewhere out there. The boats are all salvage. Some of them are Navy, some of them are civilian. Something about who can have what guns. Like, I’m a civilian. I didn’t want the whole ‘three bags full’ thing. But my boss is Navy. But he was an Army dude when he was a kid and he’s never been in the Navy before. It’s all sort of like that. Sort of fucked up but it mostly works.”
“I’m confused,” the woman said.
“Okay,” the kid said. “The boat you’re going to, it’s called the Money for Nothing. It’s got a Navy dude in charge of it but the captain, the guy who runs the boat, is a civilian. But the Navy dude, who’s the operations guy for the squadron, had never been in the Navy before this. So if you’re confused, you’re not the only one. Like I said, it has to do with who gets guns.”
“Controlling legal authority?” Thomas asked.
“That’s it,” the kid said. “Like, they’re clearing out some of the little towns here in the islands and to do that you’ve got to have… what he said. Somebody told me it’s sort of technically an act of war but we’ve got permission from somebody or something.”
“So did you live here, before?” the woman asked.
“Oh, hell no,” the kid said. “I was on a cruise ship, too. We abandoned ship when the zombies took over. I was in a lifeboat that got found by one of the Wolf boats. And let me tell you, that fucking sucked. Being in the boat, I mean. Look, there’s a pamphlet they give you when you get to the boat. Just wait til you read it then ask questions, okay?”
The inflatable pulled up to the waterline transom deck of the yacht and people were helped out. Thomas took the offered hand of a man he pegged as an Indonesian and probably a steward. There had been four stewards and two Indonesian waitresses, initially, in the compartment he’d been stuck in along with six other passengers. Two passenger as well as one of the stewards had “turned.” During the subsequent six months he had, slowly and painfully, “learned” the dialect that was common to the other ten survivors.
He’d never let on that he spoke two other dialects of Indonesian and had been able to understand what they were saying two hours after they’d closed the compartment.