“Oops,” she said as the infected collapsed on the floor.
“You hit?” Fontana asked.
“No. You?”
“I’m good.”
“I hate full metal jacket…”
* * *
“Okay, okay, okay,” Faith said. “I just… Seriously? An indoor pool? Seriously?”
The cavernous room was marked “spa.” Faith had always wanted to go to a spa. She’d sort of envisioned small rooms with hot tubs and massage tables or something. She’d always wondered what a “walnut scrub” was.
There were hot tubs scattered around in various styles. There were Roman baths, Japanese baths, stone flagging and walls… The ceiling, far, far overhead, was a massive skylight, which gave them an unfortunately clear view of the interior.
Zombies would eat each other for food. All they really needed to survive was something resembling water. And the “spa” had had lots of water.
So there were lots of zombies. And although they’d been awakened by Steve’s whistle, it had echoed in the cavernous interior and they weren’t sure where to go. The room was lit well enough they’d turned off their taclights. Not to mention, there were pools of water all over the place so even the zombies that noticed them were having a hard time getting to them.
Except for the close ones.
“I’m really glad we went to rifles,” she said, targeting one of the nearer zombies. It was having to go around a counter to get to them and she got it with a deflection head shot on the run and it dropped out of sight.
“Nice,” Fontana said, taking two more down.
“Is it just me, or was that exactly like shooting a duck in an arcade?” Faith said. She fired at another one but missed. “We going to move forward?”
“Yes,” Steve said, firing. “But one team. Head for that high ground over there.”
The “high ground” was what had probably been an indoor waterfall.
“Hug the wall,” Steve said. “Take them down as they come to us. Don’t engage over twenty five meters unless I say so.”
“What’s the fun of that?” Faith asked.
“I’d like as many of the rounds to go into the zombies as possible,” Steve said.
“Don’t shoot til you see the reds of their eyes,” Fontana said. “Gotcha.”
* * *
The one problem with the “high ground” was that once they’d gotten up there, all the zombies could see them and closed in. And they couldn’t exactly retreat.
“This is getting sort of hot,” Fontana said, doing a fast reload. He had to pat for magazines until he found one.
“Hot, yeah,” Faith said, firing steadily at the mass of infecteds clawing their way up the former waterfall. “But it’s not in the dunny, yet.”
“Dunny?” Hooch asked.
“Aussie for a latrine,” Steve said.
“What is, in your opinion, in the dunny?” Fontana said. “Cause I could sure use some time to reload mags.”
“Being in the dunny isn’t no time to reload magazines,” Faith said, reloading. “Being in the dunny is all your knives are stuck in bodies, you’re tripping over your mags and brass and your Halligan tool is bent.”
“I can’t wait for you to get legal so I can propose….”
* * *
“We in the dunny, yet?” Fontana asked as he stuck the pry base of his Halligan into a zombie’s eye.
“Nope,” Faith said, pounding one on the head with her AK. “I haven’t had to shoot one off me and I’ve yet to pull a knife…”
* * *
“….dunny yet?” Hooch yelled, sticking his bowie knife into a zombie’s stomach and ripping up.
“Halligan tool bent?” Faith asked, firing into a zombie’s head. Another one grabbed her legs and her feet slipped out from under her. The zombie dragged her down the rocks of the waterfall as she kicked at it. Others piled on, trying to bite through her armor.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Fontana said.
“Okay,” she yelled. “Now we’re getting there!”
“We’re going to have to melee down to her,” Steve said, smashing his Halligan into a zombie’s head.
“We’re barely holding here,” Fontana said.
“When we’ve winnowed them down…”
* * *
“Nice thing about being in a scrum,” Faith said as Fontana dragged her out from under the bodies. Steve was doing the same thing for Hooch. “You don’t have to worry which direction you’re aiming and there’s no real way to miss. That was in the dunny.” She looked around, sitting up, her legs still covered by zombie bodies.
“Hey, look, the waterfall is working again. Sort of…”
* * *
Day Four
Faith stood under the decontamination shower and made a motion with one hand for “more…”
* * *
Day Six
“Okay, seriously, like, how many of these damned things are there…?”
* * *
Day Nine
“This is why I hate five five six.” Faith fired three more times. “Oh, just die already!”
As the supply of rounds for the Smiths’ AK variants dwindled, they had switched to the Coast Guard M4s, which used the much smaller 5.56mm round. The arguments for or against 5.56 were complex but the fact that it generally took multiple rounds to stop one of the infected was notable.
“You need to shoot them in the head,” Fontana said, double tapping a zombie.
On the other hand, a team had finally found the key for the Campbell’s ammunition magazine, which had a plentiful supply of 5.56.
“The United States started to go downhill when it changed from a round designed to kill the enemies of our glorious republic to one designed to piss them off,” Faith said, shooting a zombie five times, then walking up and shooting the still-thrashing infected in the head. “Seriously, just die, okay?”
“Seriously, it’s legal to marry at fourteen in Arkansas.”
“Fine,” Faith said, double tapping a zombie that had reared up out of the darkness. “If we clear Arkansas by the time I’m fourteen we’ll talk.”
“That’s not fair…”
* * *
Day Eleven
“Okay,” Faith said, laying down fire with the MG240 off the Campbell. “This is more like it!”
They’d finally cleared the “passenger” areas all the way to the top of the ship. The top deck was mostly open and a perfect place to use a machine gun. Especially from the top of a water slide…
“Happiness is a belt fed gun,” Fontana said, grinning. “Remember, short controlled bursts or the barrel will overheat.”
“That’s got to be a design flaw. What’s the fun of short controlled bursts…?”
* * *
“Eh,” Faith said, stepping out of the stairwell. “Back in the dark again.”
The passenger areas were entirely clear. Except for the few emaciated survivors in the cabins, there had been no uninfected individuals.
Now it was time to work on the crew areas.
“I’ll clear if we find zombies,” Faith said. “But it there’s nobody who answers a knock, I’m just going to let somebody else check the cabin.”
“Hopefully down here they’ll all have died of dehydration,” Steve said. “The zombies that is.”
“Trixie doesn’t want to know about the cabins,” Faith said.
“We get it, honey,” Fontana said. “We’ll check the cabins.”
* * *
As a Senior Maintenance Officer, Robert “Rob” Cooper didn’t have access to all the supply areas. Technically. But as a senior maintenance officer what he did have was a lot of friends willing to look elsewhere when he turned up with a dolly. Besides, everybody was doing it. Everybody knew that things were going to shit-you only had to be around one person who “turned” to realize that this was really and truly bad-and everybody was stocking their cabins.
Rob didn’t stock his cabin. He stocked a maintenance locker. For one thing, it was closer to the supplies area. For another it had a white water line running right through it that was below the line of the water supply. And it wasn’t anything tough for a guy who’d worked his way up as an engineer to run a quick fitting into the line. In other circumstances, that would be an automatic firing offense and really really stupid.