The Boat (7 page)

He looked down at the kid. No movement. Adam felt a twinge of unease. Well, but…he was just asleep. That’s all. It’s not like the kid’s dead or anything. It’s just the
flu
. Nobody dies of the flu, not
really
.

He decided to jog over and check out the ambulance. The emergency room entrance was at the back of the hospital and relatively secluded. No one would bother the kid and if his mom came out, she’d see him lying right there. He’d be back in a sec. The uneasiness rolled through him again like distant heat lightning. He ignored it.

He jogged quickly to the ambulance and peeked in the back, through the windows. No one in there. He went quickly to the front. He was so strongly anticipating two paramedics sitting in the front seat that for an instant…he saw them. Then he realized it was just EMT jackets slung over the backs of the seats. Maybe they were in the hospital. Helping out. He scanned the dash. Man there was a lot of extra shit in there. Big radio. Some kind of screen, maybe GPS or something. Huh.

He turned at a light, scraping sound from behind him.

The kid was up and coming toward him. Adam’s first thought was,
geez, he’s an ugly fucker
. The kid’s hair was plastered down on one side and sticking straight up on the other. His tongue was swollen and peeking out between blistered lips. The worst were his eyes: they were glazed looking, almost as though he’d already developed cataracts.

His second thought was:
Kid looks dead!

That thought stuck and began to swirl like a slowing accelerating tornado. Once that thought got its full strength, it would be the only one left in his head.

“Yo, kid,” he said. “Your mom is right inside. She’s coming back for you, okay?”

The kid never hesitated, just kept coming toward him at a shambling walk. His eyes never left Adam’s face. Adam watched in surprise as the kid’s bare foot went right over the curb edge and his ankle twisted with a snap, but still he continued his sluggishly steady pace.

“Kid, you better lie down,” Adam said and the tornado was accelerating, accelerating, kicking up wind and beginning to fan the flames of his panic. “Stay back, man, I’m telling you.”

He wasn’t aware of his switch from ‘kid’ to ‘man’, wasn’t aware that it was part of his mind leveling the turf. All he knew right now was that his stomach had tightened and his legs were telling him to
move!

But he didn’t and then the kid was on him.

At first, Adam was able to bat him back, pushing roughly at the kid’s shoulders. He wasn’t aware of a high-pitched yelp that was coming from his mouth every time he shoved. Panic was wrestling the blinders down over his conscious actions, readying him for the unthinkable…should the unthinkable occur.

The kid’s efforts doubled and re-doubled; his arms like pistons, he kept coming on. He was snarling and chomping and Adam saw that he had bit off the first half inch of his own tongue. There was no blood, just a blackish jelly that slicked the kid’s lips.

Adam felt his gorge rise. “I’m warning you, man, stay the hell back!” He pushed again and the kid stumbled, the weakened ankle snapping again. Adam shuffled backwards but then the kid was on him again, his foot turned under, the skin scraping off onto the rough sidewalk.

“What the
fuck
?” Adam demanded; his voice both loud and weak. How could this be happening? That kid looked dead, he looked dead but he was still coming, still coming on. “Stay the fuck
back
; I’m not
telling
you again.”

The kid’s hands were on his arms and then on his stomach. Adam tried to hold him back, but his arms turned in his hands like muscular snakes and slid forward. The kid was reaching for his shoulders, reaching for his neck. His little hand made a grab at Adam’s windpipe and squeezed and for a brief second, Adam had no air. Reflexively, he kicked out, connecting with the boy’s stomach, sending him back and over. The kid’s head hit the big side mirror of the ambulance with a sound like a melon hitting concrete.

He crumbled silently to the ground. Adam put his hands on his knees and leaned over, a panicked whistle in his throat, trying to catch his breath.

“Danny!” A scream, high and despairing came across from the emergency room doors. His neighbor running over, an EMT running behind her. Adam’s mind cleared and he saw the sad bundle under the mirror for what it was. A little kid, he’s just a little kid. And I killed him, he thought. Now what was he going to do? Get arrested? Go to trial? Go to
jail
?

No. No way.

As his neighbor fell to her knees at the wreck of her son, Adam said, “Some guy…he came and…he tried to get your kid.” He heaved in a breath. His eyes skittered from the EMT back to his neighbor. Her eyes were big as tennis balls, it seemed, swimming with watery blue tears. “I stopped him, but then he, he pushed your kid and–”

To his horror, he saw the bundle of kid twitch, and then one of his arms lifted, swaying. Shit, oh shit, the kid would tell them the truth, the kid would tell everyone that he had kicked him and then…

His neighbor looked down, smiling in relief. “Danny! You’re okay, oh baby, oh my baby, mamma’s here honey and everything–” The kid reached both arms up as if for a hug and she raised him to her, to her neck, and then she must have seen the eyes and the tongue and a shadow passed across her face. But it was too late…the kid’s mouth was on her neck, tearing. A great gout of blood welled out around his questing mouth. Her eyes shifted to Adam’s in mild shock and then they rolled up to show only the whites. The EMT said, “What the
fuck
?” and leaned forward to try and get his hands on the kid’s head. But the kid turned his head, snake-quick and he had the EMT’s hand in his mouth. The EMT screamed in mingled shock and pain and Adam’s neighbor fell over backward, blood jetting from her throat, raining down on the EMT and the feasting boy.

Adam ran.

~ ~ ~

Adam clicked off the power on the walkie-talkie.

The despairing screams went on behind him.

Mohammed was the first time he had publicly and forcefully overrode Steve in a decision and now this had happened. Not good.

Mohammed was thirteen and the third youngest person in the group. He was here with his aunt. She had saved him. Very few children had made it, and everyone knew why but rarely discussed it. Everyone knew that children and the people with children had been more vulnerable at the time of the panic. Very few had made it through; none with families intact.

Mohammed had wanted desperately to go out on one of the scavenging runs. Two months on a boat was a long time, plus, he didn’t consider himself to be a little kid. He thought he should be on
Big Daddy
, with the men.

Steve had said that Mohammed was too young for a scavenger trip and he’d put a hand on Mohammed’s shoulder, giving him his
Big Daddy
smile. Adam, seeing that look of certainty in Steve’s eyes, the way Steve didn’t even
bother
to check with him…Adam had said that Mohammed
could
go. That in fact, he
should
go. He was hardly a kid and, after all, shouldn’t everyone be involved in the group’s survival? Mohammed’s aunt had been very uneasy but Adam–who’d made himself over to some degree since the panic–had convinced her otherwise. He’d been very pleased when she had come around to his way of thinking. He mistook the concern in Steve’s eyes for jealousy. Jealous of Adam’s position and place on the largest of the boats.

And now the kid, Mohammed, was dead. People were going to lose their confidence in his leadership abilities if he didn’t do something. But how can you fix a situation like this? Can’t bring the shitty kid back, now can you? No.

He’d just have to think of something else.

Chapter Five

“I should have stopped him,” Steve said. His voice was equal parts anger and anguish. He was standing behind Maggie as she leaned over the survivor from the life raft, stitching the gash on his forehead. Brian and Denny sat nearby, ready to spring forward if the guy woke up struggling. Randy and Bonnie had taken Babygirl into the salon. 

She looked around and then bent back to her work. “You tried.”

Steve shook his head, watching the Jeep that careened along the shoreline. Two people were in the front seat. Only one in the back. They were too far away to see their expressions but Steve read fear and despair into them, anyway.

“I could have tried harder.”

“It isn’t your responsibility…Mohammed wasn’t your responsibility. His aunt let him go. Not you.”

Steve’s hands balled into fists at his sides. Maggie, sensing his tension, glanced toward shore. Then she looked back down. “They’ll make it. Don’t worry.”

She felt his movement and assumed it to be a nod. She and Steve had become close. She liked him and sensed his willingness to have things between them progress beyond friendship. But she missed her husband.

“
Big Daddy
, you have eyes on them? Over.” Steve’s shadow slipped over Maggie as he stepped past her to the bow.

“We’re all set. Ready to roll. No worries, man. Over.” Carl’s voice over the walkie was calm but somehow still burly as though his beard were a testosterone amplifier. Steve’s eyes went from the racing Jeep to
Big Daddy
, which sat idle, fifty feet from the end of a long pier. The Jeep rounded a turn and shot down the pier, headed right for the water.

A shambling crowd of corpses slogged their way onto the pier behind the Jeep. Many were forced to the sides and they tumbled down the steep shoreline and rolled into the water. Big, angry Atlantic waves rolled them like bundled sticks, bashing them into the pylons under the pier. Some of them broke apart like poorly constructed dolls. Others dropped off the sides and plopped into the water further down.

The Jeep reached the end of the pier and turned in a tight circle, facing the onrushing hoard. Two people in the Jeep jumped out and ran in the direction they’d just come…straight toward the advancing line of corpses.

They kneeled in unison and threw ropes over their shoulders. The pier developed a split as the section with the Jeep began to move with the waves. Big plastic barrels revealed themselves under the raft as it rocked. The third person raised his hand in an all clear to
Big Daddy
and her monstrous diesel roared to life.
Big Daddy
chugged forward. She was powerful, not fast, but still fast enough to put a gap of five feet between the Jeep’s raft and the crowd of dead.

The first several rows of corpses never broke their painful, shambling run and they dropped straight off the end of the pier, still reaching for the people on the departing raft. The crowds behind continued to push forward and more of them plopped into the ocean. They looked like the arcade game where you drop a coin down a chute and hope for a shiny cascade of quarters to reach a tipping point inside the machine, making you arcade rich.

On the deck of the ThreeBees, Steve lowered the binoculars. Part of him–the scared, despairing,
flagging
part–wanted too much to laugh at the tumble of reanimated corpses. To laugh at their flailing, their insectile stupidity. He wanted to see them as the enemy and revel as each one became a sinker, chum, fishfood.

But you may as well curse the rain
, he thought.
May as well give a tornado the finger; tell a tsunami to go fuck itself.

It didn’t help. And it didn’t stop them.

On
Big Daddy
, a winch whined, dragging the Jeep raft close. The railing was clustered with men. Normally they would be cheering and the people on the raft would be celebrating, hands clasped above their heads. The unpacking of each new treasure–food, water, clothing–would have been greeted with fresh cheers.

But there was no sense of celebration this time.

No one counted this run as a victory.

Not after losing Mohammed.

Steve turned back to Maggie. She was laying a bandage over the guy’s forehead and taping it down. She worked quickly and economically, wasting nothing.

Steve had been part of the boats for ten days before Maggie showed up. She had come through the Pine Barrens. She was bedraggled and too thin but she led the little girl, having found her in a trailer park near the shore. When she was finally on the boat, she’d been invaluable because of her nursing skills.

It was Adam who had told her to stay on ThreeBees instead of joining the community on
Flyboy
. She preferred it, anyway. Although ThreeBees was substantially smaller, it seemed to her less claustrophobic.

“Okay,” she said and sat back. She stripped off the latex gloves. “Denny, would you and Brian grab a blanket? I want to get him out of the sun.”

As they trotted away, she looked at Steve, bringing a hand up to shade her eyes. “Do you think we should restrict him in some way? Restrict his access to the boat?”

“Why do you say that?” Steve was surprised that she seemed to have the same mixed feelings about the survivor, especially since his own misgivings were so vague.

She shrugged, glancing at the man. His eyelids fluttered slightly. He could be coming out of his faint. Or he could be faking unconsciousness. Maggie looked back at Steve, shaking her head.

She stood and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t know why I say that. There’s just something…” She put her hands on her hips, staring with consternation at the man she’d just stitched up.

“Off,” Steve said, supplying the word she needed. She turned to him and smiled briefly. She nodded.

“Off, yeah. Something just isn’t quite right,” she said.

Now it was Steve’s turn to shrug. “Yes, I felt it, too. But I don’t know how much of that is just us…I mean, nothing feels exactly right, does it?”

She nodded her head in acknowledgement and sighed. The boys were back with the blanket and they rolled him onto it.

“No restrictions, then?” Maggie said.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. We don’t know him. The circumstances of him being here are odd. Better to be safe than sorry especially with…” he trailed off and nodded toward the salon doors where Babygirl stood holding Jade’s hand. Baby’s angelic lightness was in sharp contrast to Jade’s jet-black hair and black eyes. Both were beautiful. And vulnerable.