The Savage Dead (15 page)

“The FBI just told me they found one of the trucks I'm looking for at the Cruise Ship Terminals in Galveston.”

“Yes, I know about that.”

“I think they're connected.”

“To Senator Sutton? You've tried your contact onboard ship, I suppose?”

“I have. I haven't been able to reach her.”

“I see. What do you want to do?”

Juan thought about it. The logical thing was to get to Galveston and look at it firsthand. That was the cop thing to do, to put all the pieces in place before taking action. But the operator in him had a different hunch.

“Can you get me on that ship?”

“Stand by.”

Juan said nothing. He held the phone to his ear and waited. The man Juan knew simply as Mr. Crouch had a reach far beyond that of a normal White House staffer. Even with his Delta Force contacts, and his contacts working undercover in Mexico, there were limits to Juan's intel. But Mr. Crouch, who seemed to have direct access to the president, could go anywhere, hear anything, see all. He was the proverbial fly on the wall.

And so much more.

After a long wait, several minutes at least, Mr. Crouch came back on the phone. He said, “We can't raise the
Gulf Queen
. She's not answering on any of the regular channels.”

“I need to be out there, sir. Can you get me on that ship?”

“You need intel first. I'm ordering a Predator drone to recon the vessel right now. Give this phone to the ranking SAPD officer you see.”

“Yes, sir.” Juan went back inside the homicide office. A dozen cops stopped what they were doing and looked at him, hostile glares everywhere he turned. He saw the deputy chief that had been with the homicide lieutenant earlier and handed him the phone.

The man listened without speaking.

Then he hung up the phone.

He called one of the uniformed cops over and pointed at Juan. “You get him to Lackland Air Force Base as fast as you can, you understand? Code Three.”

The young officer, the same one that had been so eager to fight earlier, looked confused. “Sir, I . . .”

“You put him in your car and you run lights and sirens all the way out to Lackland Air Force Base. You don't stop, you don't wait, you don't do nothing. You just get him there. Base security is under orders to guide you right to the runway. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the officer said, clearly stunned.

The deputy chief turned to Juan and said, “I'm told there's going to be a T-38 standing by to take you where you need to go. I don't know who the hell you are, son, but apparently you've got some friends in mighty high places.”

C
H
A
PTER
15

Pilar was frustrated.

Frowning, she looked around the empty bridge. It was a narrow room some forty feet long, curved like a bow, just wide enough for the officers' chairs and some foot traffic. She'd had a crash course in operating the ship's various systems, and she'd already examined those and satisfied herself that all the automated systems were working perfectly. A ship like the
Gulf Queen
could cruise around the world on autopilot, so there was really nothing for her to do there. All she had to do was watch the security monitors outside Senator Sutton's door and wait for some indication she was dead.

Which was why she was frustrated.

For twenty minutes now she'd been watching the corridor, and so far nothing. The door was propped open, as were most of the doors on the ship by now, but so far nobody had stirred in the senator's room.

Someone was in there though. She could hear them moving around through the bug planted in the room.

Maybe they had turned already and just hadn't figured out how to get out of the room. Some of the zombies were like that, stupid and docile. Frowning again, she figured she had no other choice but to go down there and see for herself. And that wasn't going to be easy.

She picked up her pistol from the engineering console and left the bridge. There was a service stairwell on the far side of the bridge, but she'd already checked that out and there were zombies trapped on the next flight down and she didn't want to have to face them if she could help it.

She went back the way she'd come, passing the room where she'd shot that little boy. There were scratching noises coming from in there, but she wasn't going to let herself get sentimental and go have a look. It'd been a stupid decision for her to go in there in the first place. She was smarter than that.

It was all the damn kids she'd seen, she decided. That was it. That was why she was tearing herself up inside. Going into this, she'd known there'd be children onboard. She'd known they were all going to die. She'd known that, academically.

The trouble was she hadn't internalized it.

That didn't happen until she came on board and saw them in their little dresses and suits, walking hand in hand with their parents. She'd once given orders for a group of seven men to be killed, and then watched without so much as a grimace as they were held down and their heads cut off with a chainsaw. Their pleas, their screams, the sucking sounds their throats made when a cut went badly—none of that had bothered her in the least. But children—oh, God! If there was a hell, no amount of prayer could keep her from it now.

Her, or Ramon Medina.

Time to go, she told herself. She could drive herself nuts like this.

She made her way to the stairwell, but stopped before going down. The stairs were of the switchback variety and she could see several landings below her. Two floors down a man in a T-shirt and bathing suit was looking up at her, his eyes locked on hers.

Her grip tightened on her weapon.

The man lunged up the stairs. More followed after him. Pilar couldn't tell how many, but it sounded like a lot.

She tensed, her pistol raised, waiting for them to round the stairs.

Their shadows bobbed on the walls. The stairwell started to shake. Echoes of their pounding footsteps resounded off the walls.

She took a breath and tried to steady the weapon. The first few were already coming into view, and that's when the first pangs of doubt swept over her. There had to be thirty or forty of them coming for her. The odds of landing a headshot on each one were astronomical. With a rifle, maybe, but never with a handgun. And even a headshot was no guarantee. Some of them took three, even four solid headshots before they went down.

But they were still coming, and they were close now.

“No, screw this,” she said.

She lowered her weapon and ran back to the hallway outside the bridge. There she stopped. This was stupid. She couldn't go forward, couldn't go back. She was stuck.

Behind her, a zombie rounded the corner, then three more, five, nine. Pilar stared at the lead zombie. His hair still looked normal, like he'd just combed it. But his mouth was smeared with blood and his teeth were broken. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his chest was black with dried blood. There wasn't a hint of the man he used to be in his eyes, no humanity whatsoever. With that awful, empty look in his eyes, he ran for her. She squared her shoulders, raised her pistol and blew the top of his head off.

The zombie stumbled, sagged to his knees, but didn't fall. He looked up at her, half his face missing now, and his mouth moved like he was trying to chew up the distance between them. Three other zombies pushed him down, rolling him into the wall like a big wave does a poor swimmer. That was all she needed to see. She didn't stand a chance out here. Certainly not armed with only a pistol.

Which meant there was only one place left for her to go.

She turned and looked at the room where she had shot the little boy.

Karma is a brutal bitch, she told herself, and stepped into the room.

She closed and locked the door behind her, then closed her eyes and tried to pull herself together. This was going to be hard. Bodies hit the door behind her, causing her to flinch. She closed her eyes again and thought of what she had to do to stay alive. That had always been her strength, surviving. But when she opened her eyes what she saw took her breath away. The little boy was crawling across the floor, pulling himself along on broken fingernails.

Pilar tried not to look at him as she made her way to the balcony and pulled the drapes apart, but something crashed behind her and she wheeled about.

The little boy had pulled a flower vase down from a side table. He was trying to climb over the table to reach her, and watching him, Pilar felt her stomach turn.

“Go away,” she begged him.

The only response he could manage was to slap the floor.

The pounding on the door was growing louder. She looked from the door to the little boy, raised her pistol at what was left of his face, but couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger. Not again.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I guess I'll always let you down. I guess that's my fate.”

She went out to the balcony and looked over the edge. Four stories below was the deck of a restaurant. In between, was a sloping wall of black windows. The angle was steep, but doable.

Behind her the door burst open, and Pilar went over the side.

She slid down the windows and dropped onto the restaurant deck. Two older women screamed and stumbled over each other to get out of the way, then stopped, holding each other, as they stared at the gun in her hand.

She ignored them. There was a door at the front of the restaurant, and Pilar headed for it.

“Don't go out there,” a man said.

Pilar ignored him, too. The few people hiding there moved in her direction, all of them muttering for her to stay away from the door. They'd piled deck chairs up against it and run a broom through the handles to brace it closed.

“Hey,” a man said as she started pulling chairs out of her way. “Hey, don't do that!”

He made a move to stop her, but froze in his tracks when she stuck her pistol in his face.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Pilar pulled the last of the chairs away.

“Where are you going?” the man said.

Another woman came forward. “Aren't you going to help us?”

Pilar threw the broom out of the way and pulled the door open. Milling around on the deck beyond were four zombies. They all stopped and looked at her.

“No,” she said to the woman. “You're on your own.”

“But you have a gun,” the man said. “We could die here if you don't help us.”

“Then you'll die.” She pointed at the broom. “Better put that back when I'm gone.”

Then she stepped through the door and started shooting.

 

 

Thirty minutes later, she was standing at a railing overlooking the mall. Earlier, when Paul had surprised her down on the ground level, the place had been deserted. It was anything but now. Zombies crowded nearly every inch of it.

She leaned on the railing and studied the crowd. There were four, maybe five hundred zombies down there and they made her think of Ramon. His vision had done this. His mad, horrible, beautiful vision had done this, and she marveled at the man. From a two-bit drug dealer working the back alleys of Ciudad Juarez he had made himself the most dangerous man in the world. He had raised the dead, and with them, now possessed the power to bring the Americans to their knees. He truly was the lord of chaos.

But the senator was still a problem that needed solving. She'd hoped to see her on the video feed, but that hadn't happened. She still thought it might, though, and so she'd pushed the ship's security cameras to her iPhone. Ramon wanted proof she was dead, and pictures if possible, so he could exploit them later in the media. Capturing Senator Sutton as a zombie on the monitors would be the absolute best-case scenario. And it might still happen. The bug she'd planted in the senator's room was still delivering audio to her phone, and she could hear the noises of someone inside the cabin bumping into things and staggering around. All they had to do was step into the hallway so the video cameras could pick them up.

She heard a noise behind her and turned. At the far end of the hall stood a woman in a black dinner dress. She spotted Pilar and staggered forward on bloody legs and broken ankles.

Pilar was about to shoot her when she heard shots from somewhere down below. She leaned over the railing, scanning the other levels until she saw a muzzle flash.

It was the lady Secret Service agent.

And she had the senator with her.

They were on the level right above the mall's main floor, and the agent was doing a pretty respectable job of holding off the crowd that had gathered around them.

“That's not good,” Pilar said. Not only had the senator survived, but now she had armed protection; and from the looks of things her protection knew what she was doing. She was making consistent headshots, so she was obviously cool under pressure. That was going to be a problem.

But first she had to deal with the zombie in the black dinner dress.

It was getting close. It'd be an easy kill for Pilar. At this distance, with a handgun, she could put a bullet in both eyes, guaranteed to knock the thing down and keep it down.

But firing at the zombie would be stupid right now. It would give her away, just as the lady Secret Service agent had given herself away. Right now Pilar had the advantage of surprise working for her, and she intended to get all she could from it.

As the zombie limped into range, Pilar did a spinning back kick, her heel catching the woman in the solar plexus and knocking her back against the railing. Before the zombie could straighten up for another attack, Pilar rotated ninety degrees, hopped slightly so that her body coiled like a spring, and then released that energy through a side kick. The blade of her right foot caught the zombie in the throat and sent her sailing backwards over the railing, falling down four stories to the main floor below.

Pilar watched it go over the edge, then scanned left, and scanned right.

Nothing.

She was alone up here.

Good, she thought, because it was time to move.

The way she figured it, the senator and the agent would have to make their way up here to Deck 9 or 10 in order to cross over to their cabins. That gave her a few minutes head start. They'd be heading back to their cabin, Pilar figured, because the lady agent would want to lock her charge up in a secure area. That was fine, because when they got there, they were going to find a little surprise waiting for them.

 

 

Ten minutes later, winded from sprinting most of the way, Pilar was standing in the hallway outside the senator's cabin. The senator's husband, the drunk, was standing in the middle of the room, swaying badly. He looked drunk still, but he was never going to taste alcohol again. He was covered in bloody vomit, his face gray like ash, but there was no aggression to him. He was one of the empty ones, the ones too addled to be aggressive. He just stood there swaying, looking at her blankly. He had knocked over some of the furniture, but other than that he looked completely harmless.

Pilar had expected to find a zombie in the cabin. Something had to be causing the dull thuds she'd heard on the audio. A pity it was this jerk, though. But it served him right. Any man who put a woman through the kind of hell he'd dished out for Rachel Sutton deserved a little misery, even if it was of the post-mortem variety.

“Too bad it has to end,” she said, and shot him in the face.

She stood over him, her gun trained on his head, waiting for him to move, but he didn't. He was truly and finally dead.

She holstered her weapon, and got ready for the senator and the agent to come back. She couldn't help but wonder though what kind of zombie Ramon Medina would make.