The Savage Dead (20 page)

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23

Getting from the senator's cabin to her own, two decks down, was relatively easy. It would have been easier still if Pilar hadn't needed to conserve her ammunition, but she had only the one magazine left and she'd used two rounds just getting down the stairs and another seven taking care of the zombies clustered in the hallway near her own cabin. One of the zombies, a man whose belly had been torn open and emptied from the base of his sternum to the waistband of his underwear, had taken four direct headshots all by himself. That in and of itself wasn't anything special, except that through it all, he'd had an awful grin on his face. Even with his scalp splattered against the wall behind him, that grin had remained. Her fourth shot had finally put him down, but it hadn't gotten rid of the grin, and it hadn't completely stilled him either. He was still twitching like an electrified frog on the dissection table when she closed the door to her cabin and tossed her nearly empty pistol on the bed.

She stopped there and ran her hands through her hair. Christ, what had she come here for?

She looked down at her pistol and for the life of her couldn't remember.

This wasn't like her and it scared her.

Why couldn't she focus?

Think, she told herself. Come on, focus. It's right in front of you.

She'd shot the lady agent. She'd made her way down here. But why?

Ah, the rifle! Of course, the rifle.

She let out a long sigh and tried to get her head back in the hunt. It was hard, though. She felt nervous, jittery, rough around the edges. It'd been a long time since she'd felt this scared, this uncertain of herself. She didn't like it. Not a bit. There was a time in her life when she'd felt sharp as a knife, like she could do anything, like no one could get the jump on her. And for a time, back in Ciudad Juarez, that was true. But since then, and especially since she'd come aboard the
Gulf Queen
, that confidence had wavered. Now, she felt fragile, like a delicate piece of spun glass. A strong wind might shatter her to pieces.

Pilar closed her eyes, but that was no help. In her mind she saw the slums of Ciudad Juarez, miles upon miles of burned-out abandoned buildings and clapboard shacks and hungry children fighting dogs for scraps of trash and the constant echo of gunfire. She had gone to Harvard, and dined at parties that cost $30,000 a plate, and still the memories of Ciudad Juarez haunted her like ghosts from a battlefield.

“Please,” she muttered, begging herself to be strong. “Please.”

But when she opened her eyes, the little boy from the cabin upstairs was there, clawing his way across the carpet of her little room.

“Why?” the boy asked, his question punctuated by the icicle snapping of his fingernails. It sounded like there was gravel in his throat.

“Get away,” Pilar said. She put her palm up, shaking her head. “Go away.”

“You let me die,” the little boy said.

Pilar's eyes popped open. That was Lupe's voice. Even after twenty years, she knew it from the first syllable. She raised a hand, and extended it out to the boy.

“Goddamn it, you bitch, why did you let me die?”

She drew her hand back.

It wasn't the boy from upstairs. It was his ruined body, his face, but the eyes that stared back at her were the same that had found hers all those years ago in the back of that eighteen-wheeler.

She closed her eyes again, trying to push the image away.

“Why won't you look at me,” Lupe said. “I trusted you. You promised you'd take care of me. You said you would, you said so. You lied to me.”

“No,” Pilar said. She squeezed her eyes shut even tighter. “No, you're not real. I know you're not real.”

“You let me die. You let me
die
!”

It was too much. She opened her eyes, scooped up the pistol from the bed, and fired all in one motion, but the bullet put a hole in an empty spot on the floor.

Her ghosts were gone.

For now.

But it was a long time before her body stopped shaking, and before she was able to pull her MP5 from her luggage.

She cried the entire time she was loading it.

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24

Paul ran into the prop room and found Kelly and some of the bigger kids taking down bats to use as weapons. The equipment looked huge in their hands. None of them stood a chance against one of those zombies, but the fact that they were picking up weapons was probably a good thing. At least they weren't giving up. He supposed that was something.

The bodies of the two zombies he'd killed before entering the theater were still there, the man still twitching. Paul bent over him and stared into the man's ruined face. The eyes were barely recognizable, but Paul could see one of the eyeballs still trying to track him. What propelled these things, he wondered, made it possible for them to continue on like this?

Not at all like the movies, where the easy headshot did them in.

What were they?

He closed his eyes and tried to push away the thought that all of this was happening because of Senator Sutton. He didn't want to believe it, and he could even tell himself that it was pure nonsense, but, if he was honest with himself, he had doubts. Strong doubts.

It was seeing Monica that did it, really. Tess had told him that she and her boss thought Monica was somehow connected with the cartels, and while he didn't want to believe that either, there were just too many coincidences piled on top of each other.

“Did you do that?” one of the boys asked.

Paul opened his eyes and studied the boy. He was a good-looking kid, a bit small for his age maybe, but with an open, trusting face.

“I did,” Paul said.

“Is it hard?”

“Is it . . . you mean, was it hard to do?”

The boy nodded.

“I had to do it. It was him or me.”

Paul wasn't sure if the boy had heard him or not. He was looking at the body, a look on his face like he might get sick at any moment.

“Try not to look at it,” Paul said.

“It?”

Christ, the kid was almost crying. What was he supposed to do with that?

“You called him ‘it,' ” the boy said.

“I . . . what?”

“Do you think it hurts? What happened to him, I mean. Do you think it hurts?”

“I don't know,” Paul said. In truth, he hadn't even thought about it. He supposed not, but that didn't seem to be what the kid was driving at. The questions the kid was really trying to ask, Paul felt wholly inadequate to answer.

Instead of trying, he smiled at the boy, patted him on the shoulder, and then went over to Kelly and asked if she was ready to move out.

She nodded.

“How are we gonna keep these kids together?” he asked. “If they split on us, we'll lose a few.”

She frowned at that, but didn't look worried. “They won't split up. They move as a class when they're at school.” She clapped her hands softly to get the room's attention. When the kids were looking at her, she said, “Okay, we're going to line up, same as you do when you go to lunch at school. Mr. Paul here is going to go out first. He'll be our line leader. Stay together and stay behind him. I'll be the back of the line. Okay? Everybody ready?”

The kids didn't look ready, Paul thought. Not at all. But it was going to have to happen, like it or not.

They moved up the stairs and out onto the deck. It was midday now and the heat and the smell of the ocean were a refreshing change from the dark, stale air of the theater below. He motioned for the kids to follow him as he moved toward the rear of the ship. He'd been playing on his phone through the entire muster drill, but he remembered that most of the lifeboats were toward the rear. From here, they were going to have to travel half the length of the ship and go up two levels, and all of it without being seen or heard, which he thought was pretty unlikely. Between their feet scudding on the deck and their sniffles and sobbing and coughing, they couldn't help but make noise.

Paul's thought was to get them on the far side of the mall before reentering the ship and heading up the stairs. The deck was deserted, which was good, but then they reached the ship's English-themed pub, the Lamb and the Rose, and Paul's heart missed a beat.

The pub had a huge window facing seaward upon which somebody had written the words
ALIVE INSIDE—PLEASE HELP US
with some kind of white greasepaint. Even before he looked, he knew from the noises he heard inside that the words were no longer true.

Inside, three men and a woman were feeding on the corpses of perhaps ten people. It was hard to tell because a few of the bodies had been torn apart.

How was that possible? How could people tear each other apart, literally limb from limb, with their bare hands?

From behind him, one of the kids gasped.

Paul turned to shush the boy, but it was too late. When he looked back at the pub, the zombies were staring at him, blood and viscera dripping from their mouths.

“Oh, no,” Paul said. He turned to Kelly. “Run! Get them out of here!”

Some of the kids were already running. Kelly pushed the stragglers along and they hustled past Paul just as one of the zombies crashed through the pub's glass doors. The others were right behind it. Paul swung the bat at the first zombie and caught it on the chin. It wasn't enough to kill the thing, but it knocked it off balance and gave Paul the chance he needed to run.

The kids were rounding a corner up ahead and Paul followed. There was no way they were going to outrun the zombies though. With a quick glance over his shoulder, he knew that. He was already catching up with the kids, but the zombies were right on his heels.

He gave it one last burst of speed, his sandals slapping on the deck, and rounded the corner. The corridor led back into the ship. The last of the kids, two little girls, were going around another corner just ahead of him. Paul followed after them, his lungs feeling like they were going to burst.

Kelly was up ahead, ushering the kids through a white metal door.

It was some kind of kitchen, though from which of the ship's twenty-three restaurants he had no way of knowing. In the blind panic to get away from his pursuers he'd gotten himself hopelessly turned around.

“What are we doing?” he asked Kelly.

The room was dominated by three long metal prep tables, each one stacked with clean white plates and coffee cups.

“Under there,” Kelly said, and before Paul could tell her he didn't understand, she opened some of the metal cabinets beneath the tables and motioned for the kids to climb in.

Paul ran to a second table and started doing the same thing. The kids moved fast, but still he could hear the zombies outside, getting closer.

They burst through the door right as he was pulling one of the cabinet doors closed on himself and a little boy. Paul strained his hearing, trying to figure out where the zombies were, but all he could hear was the pounding of the blood in his ears and the ragged pulls of his breathing. He couldn't quite catch his breath.

Just outside the cabinet door he could hear the faint tap and slide of shoes dragging on the tile floor.

The little boy next to him was trembling.

“They're going to kill us,” he said. “I don't want to die. I don't want to die.” He let out a loud groan.

The footfalls stopped.

Paul put his arms around the boy and squeezed him tightly. “Shhh,” he whispered. “It's just like hide-and-seek.”

The boy nodded against Paul's arm, but he was still shaking.

“Just be quiet,” Paul said. “Pretend it's hide-and-seek.”

Paul swallowed the lump in his throat and pulled the kid tighter. Outside, he could hear the zombies moving again, hunting for them.

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They might have been man and wife; Pilar really couldn't tell at this point. Not with all the damage that had been done to them. The zombies had chewed them up badly before they died. But Pilar imagined that they were husband and wife. She found something comforting in that. Creepy, yes, the way they stood there side by side, still wearing the tattered remnants of matching clothes, like being dead hadn't changed their vacation experience much; but it was nonetheless comforting to imagine love holding on even when life couldn't. He was tall, maybe six-foot-four, and she was short, just a little over five feet. They were probably a cute couple in life. Now, covered in blood and with bite marks all over their bodies, they stood in front of the salmon bar at the Great Northern Café. It was funny, actually. The two zombies, so plain, so average, typical middle-class Americans, were standing there looking at mounds of raw salmon, perhaps the same contaminated fish that had caused them to turn into zombies in the first place, and all they could do was paw at the glass. Just average Americans, hoisted on their own tasty petard. Ramon, Pilar thought, would be pleased.

Pilar, however, was screwed. The man and wife zombies weren't all that big of a deal. She could have sprinted right by them. The problem was the large crowd of zombies filing in through the door behind them. She'd been doing fine, making her way without having to use her weapons, when she rounded the corner just outside the café. A man was facedown on the floor at the foot of some stairs, and from the trail of blood on the steps it wasn't hard to figure out that he'd just tumbled down them. She could have avoided him, too, but something about him caught her attention. Ramon had told her that the same chemical reactions the bacteria used to stimulate the medulla oblongata, making postmortem movement possible, also inhibited the onset of rigor mortis. But . . . not in this zombie. It looked stiff, like every movement was bought with consider effort. She had taken out her iPhone and captured a quick video of the man, because she figured Ramon would want his scientists to see it. But when she was done with the video, she'd looked up to find herself surrounded.

A crowd of them had come around from the back of the stairs. Another smaller crowd had come up behind her. She looked forward, back, up the stairs, and realized they had closed in on her without making a sound. The only place to run was into the Great Northern Café, and so she'd sprinted into there.

Now she was hiding in the kitchen with a clean shot on the cute couple over by the salmon. From this distance, with her MP5, she could pop them both with an easy headshot.

But that probably wouldn't kill them, at least from what she'd seen so far. It usually took two or three, unless of course it was at point-blank range. All of which was a moot point anyway because the cute couple had brought along about seventy of their closest friends.

Unfortunately, she was running out of time. She had to find the senator, kill her, and then get off this damn ship before the authorities figured something was wrong and sent a force out to take care of the problem. But before she could do any of that, she had to get out of this kitchen without getting killed.

Somewhere onboard a fire had broken out. Every once in a while, she caught a whiff of smoke through the air vents, and that wasn't good. She'd turned off the fire alarm systems when she'd hacked into the ship's security and housekeeping programs, but even still, where there was fire there was smoke, and at sea nothing brought help faster than a ship on fire. Sooner or later, she figured, somebody was going to see that smoke, and they'd come running.

Which meant she had to get out of this kitchen. She looked around for something she could use to clear a path out the door. There were knives and heavy cast iron pots everywhere, but nothing she could use to cut a hole through the crowd.

Except maybe that, she thought as her gaze wandered over the Viking gas range.

She looked inside the cabinets and on the shelves until she found what she was looking for—a case of Lysol disinfectant spray. She could make some serious use out of that.

Working quickly but quietly, she laid out sixteen cans on the prep surface next to the range. She checked the pilot light to make sure it was still burning, and then grabbed the biggest knife she could find and punctured all the cans.

No telling how long it would take for the whole thing to go up, she thought. Best to move fast.

She ran to the opposite side of the kitchen, where the zombies seemed to have clustered. Large crowds of them could be a lot like water. They moved fast when headed in a straight line, but when left to their own devices, they had a tendency to cluster in groups and just sort of stop, like a backwater on a river. They had clustered that way up near the front of the restaurant, and Pilar smiled when she saw the two married zombies right there in the thick of the crowd, still side by side.

There were two doors into the kitchen: one up near where the backwater had formed, and another toward the back. She went over to the door nearest the zombies, opened it, and whistled.

Pilar didn't wait around to see what would happen. She didn't need to. The crowd surged toward the door, even as she ran to the opposite side of the kitchen and ducked behind a table. She clapped her hands over her ears and opened her mouth wide to equalize the pressure just as the kitchen exploded.

The explosion threw her against the wall, and left a ringing in her ears. Her head felt like it was about to cave in. She had to blink several times just to keep her vision from shaking.

She stood up on wobbly legs.

The room was full of smoke. Debris was everywhere.

So too were the zombies.

Most had been knocked to the ground. Very few appeared to be seriously damaged from the blast—aerosol cans didn't make that big of an explosion, after all—but nearly all of them were sprawled out on the floor. Only a few still kept their feet, and those were turned every which way, clearly disoriented.

It wasn't much, but it was the window she needed.

She was still seeing double as she sprinted through the maze of bodies and out the front door of the café. Pilar headed up the stairs the rigor-afflicted zombie had fallen from, found a quiet little observation deck overlooking the foyer in front of the café, and dropped down against the wall.

She took out her iPhone and blinked at it, trying to read the display so she could go back to reviewing the security feeds. She had a minute, maybe two, to get her head back in order before the sound of the explosion drew even more zombies into the area. Best to use the time she had wisely.

“Now where are you?” she said at the screen.

She thumbed through one screen after another—corridors and casinos, shops and cafés—and found nothing.

Until she reached the bridge.

There, sitting in the captain's chair, distraught and apparently in shock, sat the senator.

Pilar had to laugh. When you were afflicted with the kind of narcissism that drove people into politics, where else would you sit but in the captain's chair?

So this was going to be easy.

All Pilar had to do was go get her.