Patient Z (23 page)

Cal felt suddenly mad enough to turn his boat around and head back to the rig and…what? Tell Mitch to bend over and grab his ankles? It was an absurd idea, and an arousing one too, taking charge with the bigger man. Telling the
cop
what to do. And then he pictured Mitch in uniform, and that was it; he was fucking gone. He imagined Mitch pulling him over and Cal getting out of a traffic ticket by blowing Mitch, then fucking him up against his squad car, making him beg for more.

He laughed at the porn-movie fantasy of it, and the laugh turned shaky as he climaxed, his hand filling with wetness and warmth. Damn, should have brought himself a towel. He hadn’t been planning on jerking off under the stars. Especially not while thinking about Mitch. He scrambled up, one blanket wrapped around himself, and went inside to clean up.

* * * *

Cal woke on deck with the dawn, fine rain pattering on his face. Ah yes, this sleeping-under-the-stars thing had drawbacks he’d forgotten about. He got in out of the rain and washed up, cleaned his teeth, thought about shaving and didn’t bother. Nobody to complain of beard rash from him kissing them, so why go to the trouble? Maybe he’d grow a big beard. Go for the full mountain-man effect.

He ate breakfast, cleared up, and took a cup of coffee with him up to the wheel. Time to move. The sun was breaking through, the gray clouds clearing and the rain shower drifting away out to sea. Visibility was decent. He’d continue on hugging the coast and wouldn’t stop until he only had a day’s worth of supplies left, and then he’d go ashore and raid someplace for food.

Maybe he’d lay in a month’s worth of supplies and just continue on and on, right past Mexico and Central America and down to South America. See what a man might find down there. Or maybe he’d go through the Panama Canal and get back to the east coast. Go north again, back to New York, see what had become of his home.

It was all a dream. For all he knew the Panama Canal was blocked with abandoned ships and wrecks. And he wasn’t a good enough sailor for such a journey. Hugging the coast might stop him from getting lost, but what if he lost sight if it in fog? He’d done some navigation training with the group, but enough to find his way to New York? Ridiculous. Still, it was a nice fantasy for a while, displacing the truth that he’d have to go ashore again soon.

He didn’t have to stay there, though. He could go ashore, get supplies, and come back to the
Cora
and anchor close in to shore. He’d be able to sleep in relative safety and move on whenever he wanted to. It would be like his personal version of the rig.

It would be much lonelier, but he didn’t care. Lonely was safe.

The morning sun broke through in earnest at last, and the sea sparkled. A glint of something white caught his eye, and he grabbed the binoculars stashed beside the wheel and trained them on the shoreline. It was a boat. No, several boats, partly hidden by trees enclosing an inlet. The boats were arranged around a jetty. But the place hardly looked like a marina. Cal counted. Ten decent-sized boats, a couple of them larger than the
Cora
, and a bunch of small ones, often tied up behind the large ones, no room for them at the jetty.

He throttled back, and the
Cora
gradually slowed. Cal trained the binoculars on the jetty itself. Rather old and broken-down. The kind of thing you’d expect to find a dinghy or small, old boat tied up at, not a bunch of modern cabin cruisers. Absolutely not a marina. Someone had brought all these boats here recently.

He checked the shore. There were a couple sheds almost hidden in the trees that came right down to within a few yards of the shore. And there was movement. He couldn’t see clearly enough, no matter how much he tried to focus the binoculars. But someone or something was moving there.

He looked at the boats then, his curiosity starting to grow. And what he saw made him suddenly convinced he knew whose boats these were. On the prow of each large boat a heavy machine gun had been mounted. The threatening black shapes were horribly incongruous on the elegant prows of the pretty leisure craft. The cabin cruisers had been turned into gunboats. Attack ships.

“Ethan.” He said it aloud, as if that made it true, not a guess. It didn’t have to be Ethan. It could be a bunch of pirates going out to raid boats like, well, like Cal’s. So now what? Whoever it was, they were a threat to the rig. You didn’t mount guns on boats to fight zombies, but to attack other humans. Should Cal go back and warn Mitch and Bren? He was out of range of the radio by now. But Mitch knew about the threat of Ethan already. He needed no warning. He didn’t know how many boats Ethan had now, Cal argued with himself. Ethan had been busy. Gathered himself more boats, maybe more men. And he’d learned from that last raid. With those belt-fed heavy machine guns his large boats could lay down enough suppression fire that his men could climb aboard from the smaller, maneuverable motorboats. They’d be almost unopposed until they got on deck. And tough as those girls were, if Ethan had more men, once it came to a fight on deck, the contest would be uneven.

Damn. He’d stayed still here long enough, and the tide was starting to take him into the shore. If someone was watching from there… He definitely saw movement. The boats were surely guarded. He should move. If anyone had seen the
Cora
stop, maybe they’d assume he was just taking a look—which was exactly what he was doing—and then moving on. He opened the throttle again and continued on down the coast. For two miles. Then he started to look for a place to berth the
Cora
and go ashore.

In the end he left it at anchor and took the collapsible dinghy he’d been given at the rig when they reequipped the
Cora
. Better to leave it where no wandering zombie could bumble aboard, or anyone steal it, unless they swam out to it.

He put on his walking boots and took a pack carrying mostly ammo, a first-aid kit, water, and a couple of power bars. This was just a short recon mission. Nothing more. He had the binoculars around his neck and his pistol in a belt holster. His rifle he kept in his hands. At the last minute he remembered to toss in a pad of paper and a couple of pencils. He might want to make a note of something about the setup. Even sketch a map.

And whose benefit would that be for? a sarcastic part of his mind inquired. He could hear the smirk behind it. Shut up, he advised himself. He hid the dinghy and started walking north.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Cal went slowly and quietly when he approached the jetty and the tethered boats, remembering the movement he’d seen from offshore. As he’d feared, they were guarded. He just hadn’t anticipated what they were guarded by.

When he reached the end of the trees surrounding the inlet with the jetty, he found a compound enclosed by a high wire fence. It had a couple of wooden huts with tarred roofs inside. It was only open at the jetty. A person could get in that way, but then they’d meet the guard. Zombies. Five zombies, including a couple of fresh-looking ones, wandered around inside the fence. They couldn’t leave and trundle off to find victims. They had to wait for victims to come to them.

As he watched, the shambling zombies suddenly perked up, their moans increasing in pitch. For a second Cal thought they’d somehow noticed him in cover in the trees, caught his scent, maybe. But then he heard the sound of car engines. And a moment later, car doors slamming and men’s voices, coming closer.

The zombies were getting very excited. In zombie terms anyway. They’d all staggered as close to the sound of voices as the fences would let them and were reaching out, hands grasping. When men came in sight through the trees, the zombies strained against the fence. The group of men stopped, and a voice carried to Cal on the breeze coming off the sea.

“Put these suckers down.”

Several men raised weapons and fired on the trapped zombies. They dropped en masse into a heap of rotting flesh. Cal dropped too in reaction to the shots, fearing stray bullets. He looked up again cautiously.

“Toss ’em in the water,” the guy giving the orders said.

Disposable guards. When you wanted to access the huts and the boats, you blew the heads off this lot and brought another bunch in. Pretty sick stuff. Okay, they were just zombies, and he’d killed plenty himself. But in self-defense. Not like this fish-in-a-barrel shit. Several men dragged the corpses off and tossed them in the water. The rest split up, some heading straight for the boats, others going into the huts and emerging shortly afterward, carrying boxes with US Army markings stenciled on the sides. That had to be ammo. Maybe explosives. From the other hut they started rolling out drums of kerosene and maneuvering them to the boats. Clearly they were going to be busy here fueling the boats before they left. Cal lay watching.

Were they going to leave the place unguarded when they did go? Should he stick around and see? Or should he head back to the
Cora
now? But he didn’t know for sure yet that his speculation about this being Ethan and his men was true.

The man in charge was stalking up and down the jetty, snapping orders at people. Eventually he stopped in the middle of the jetty and shouted. “Hey, listen up.” The chatter from the other men died down. They stopped messing about with kerosene barrels and ammo—the combination made Cal edgy—and looked up at their boss. “One final reminder. I want the fag taken alive.”

Cal chilled. He was right. The guy standing there, looking about as threatening as an accountant—aside from the rifle slung on his back—must be Ethan.

“I’ve got a score to settle with that cocksucker, and I don’t intend for him to die quickly, you understand? Take him alive.”

Cal had already started making his choice. This just finalized it. He had to help Mitch. Ethan would kill him and make it slow and painful. They had a lot of boats this time, and more weapons. They might win. So what the hell did Cal do about it? He was one man with one boat and a couple of guns. What he needed was explosives. Would Ethan’s men empty their hut of grenades? He guessed he was going to have to check it out when they left, steal as many as he could carry, and get back to the
Cora
, then head back to the rig to help. He had plenty of fuel on the
Cora
, and it could go fast flat out. He’d burn the goddamn engine out if he had to. Did he have a chance of catching them before they reached the rig? Probably not, but he could open a second front.

So he waited in cover, fretting, thinking about his plan, as much of a plan as it was, until they finished messing about loading and fueling up and most got aboard the boats. A couple of guys remained on the jetty, casting the boats off—then doing one more thing before they left. They stood at the start of the jetty and yanked on ropes attached to a small truck they’d brought and parked inside the compound. A ramp at the back of the truck crashed down, and the two guys ran like hell and jumped onto boats. Five new zombie guards stumbled down the ramp, heading toward the movement but losing interest when the boats pulled away, taking the last of the men with them.

Cal scrambled up and headed for the wire. He had to get at the explosives, which meant putting down the new guards first. At the moment, they were shambling around aimlessly, sometimes bumping into each other.

Cal drew his Browning pistol and rattled the wire to draw them closer for easier shots. “Hey, deadheads. Come get some.”

They turned at the sound of his voice. A couple of them, a man and a woman, both pretty fresh looking, moved a few steps closer to him, and he took aim. But then both stopped, turned away, and wandered off again.

“What the fuck?” Cal shook the wire again. “What am I, chopped liver? Can’t you see me, you dead bastards?”

Screw this. What the hell was the matter with them? Didn’t zombies have any pride in their work anymore? They didn’t make zombies like they used to.

“Okay, be like that. See if I care.” One by one, he shot them, and they crumpled to the ground. In one case it almost
crumbled
, so rotted was it.

He got inside the fence easily enough. The gate wasn’t secured in any serious way. It didn’t need to be with zombies inside. The ammo-and-explosives hut was more challenging, but Cal had learned lock picking from an old guy in Arkansas about a year ago. The elderly picklock used to smile as he said the skills of a craftsman must be passed on so they didn’t vanish. Cal doubted—given the shriveled and wrinkled prison tattoos on the man’s arms—that he’d acquired the skill in question working in any legal capacity.

Inside he found several stacks of boxes full of grenades and dynamite. The question was, how did he get these back to the
Cora
quickly? Running back outside, he found the answer. A couple of small dinghies with outboards remained tied up at the jetty. Too small and slow to be much use in a raid. So he loaded several boxes of explosives into them, then roared off down the coast to the
Cora
. The flotilla could only move at the speed of the slowest boat, and their slowest boat had been a lot slower than the
Cora
. He
would
catch up.

* * * *

Mitch resisted the temptation to sulk in his room for a second evening and went to join the group for dinner. He had to put up with looks both pitying and curious. Some people were sorry for him that he’d lost his man; others wondered what he’d done to drive Cal away. He took his tray to join Bren, who was sitting alone, unusually—Inez was working the serving line. Bren’s brooding air had probably put people off. But Mitch wasn’t deterred by it. As soon as he sat, she started talking like he’d been there all the time and had only turned away to get the salt.

“The key is gonna be the moms. Get them on our side, and we could tip the balance.”

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” Mitch asked.

“The council elections, dammit.”

Of course. She had talked of little else since that meeting. Not even Cal’s departure had stopped her. She only talked about that in terms of what it might do to the council election. Mitch was sure she was sad to see him go, but she wasn’t the sort to talk about her feelings of grief and disappointment at losing Cal. She probably blamed Mitch, as he was sure many of them did, assuming he’d done something to upset Cal.