The Savage Dead (21 page)

C
H
A
PTER
26

Rachel Sutton knew what she'd find even before she stepped onto the bridge. There were mangled bodies of crew and passengers alike nearly everywhere she looked, and many of them were still moving. The body of a young Indian crewman, his radio operator's headset still hanging from the back of his bleeding head, partially blocked the doorway to the bridge, and she had to step over him, grimacing at the smell of his opened stomach and ripped bowels. She wandered in a daze, like a woman just coming to after surgery, toward the captain's chair and sank down into it heavily.

She felt so lost. Not angry, or hurt, or even grief-stricken, but completely and irredeemably adrift.

Wayne was dead.

Her husband of thirty-eight years was dead.

She kept trying to grasp the enormity of it, but her mind was on a loop, always coming back to him on the floor by the foot of their bed, staring up at nothing. Rachel had only glimpsed him there in the few moments before the shooting started, but in those moments her entire world had crumbled. Tess Compton and that woman had started shooting. Tess had been hit and fell to the floor. The other woman had rolled out of sight, and it looked like she had been hit, too. Seeing a chance to get away, Rachel had knelt down and retrieved Tess's gun from the floor, and in that moment she'd seen Wayne there at the foot of the bed, the hole in the back of his head as big as her fist.

What in the world was she going to do? What could she do?

Never had she felt this alone, this uncertain. For so long she'd been in control, the woman everyone else looked to for answers, and now she couldn't even make herself believe this was actually happening.

It wasn't until the tears started that she got mad and forced herself to concentrate. Fear helped to her focus, a little. She was in trouble. A lot of trouble. She was on a ship full of zombies, hunted by a cartel assassin, and the only protection she had was lying dead in her cabin. If she was going to get out of this, she needed to focus.

She sat up in the chair and smoothed the wrinkles from her slacks. You can do this, she told herself.

The ship appeared to be drifting. There wasn't much she could do about that. She had as much of a chance of successfully steering this ship as she did of fixing its engines, which felt like they had stopped.

And there wasn't much she could do about the fires that seemed to have broken out in several places.

She couldn't even figure out the fire alarms.

But maybe she could call for help or something. They'd shown her the radio, somewhere around here. She walked down the line of computer stations, reading the controls, looking for something, anything, that seemed related to the radio. She didn't think it'd be this hard to find.

Then she found something that caught her eye.

A security monitor.

She picked up the remote control and experimented with the buttons until she found the ones that controlled the video feed.

It was like watching a slideshow from the filming of a horror movie. Where there weren't fires, there were zombies, and blood on the walls and bodies on the floors. Here and there she saw people, actual living people, huddled in cafés and libraries; a man walking down one of the decks, swatting the air around his head like he was swarmed by bees and muttering to himself; people were jumping from the railings, falling into the sea; a young mother, her expression one of vacant-eyed horror, holding her sleeping daughter in her arms.

It was the mother and child that did it.

That was Rachel Sutton's moment of crisis.

She stared at the mother, at that horribly empty look in her eyes, and she realized that all of this, the zombies, the fires, the death, was because of her. Perhaps the cartels had done this, found some way to engineer whatever kind of attack this was, but they had done it because of her. All these people, the dead and the living, were as they were because of her.

She closed her eyes and swallowed.

When she opened them again, the monitor was showing a long view down one of the decks, the yellow lifeboats all hanging like enormous potted plants along the left side of the frame.

Of course, she thought.

Maybe, if she could get there, maybe get a few others to go with her, maybe then she'd be able to look at herself in the mirror again.

It was worth a shot.

At least she'd be doing something. Anything was better than sitting her, stewing in her grief and shame.

“I'll do it,” she said.

She picked up Tess's gun, such a heavy, awful thing, and left the bridge.

C
H
A
PTER
27

With her beloved MP5 in hand, Pilar found moving through the ship a snap, relatively speaking. The rifle offered better control, better accuracy, and more takedown power. Pilar climbed the crew stairwell toward the bridge. The mall, and most of the other areas accessible to the passengers, had become as hectic as a beehive, and many of the security cameras now showed only a blurry mass of faces and writhing bodies. But the crew stairwell was almost empty, and she'd only had to use a few rounds to work her way up to this point, just a few decks below the bridge.

She was close now, and she had a decision to make. The video feed on her iPhone showed the senator still sitting in the captain's chair. She looked physically and emotionally broken, like she wasn't going anywhere without a good reason, and that was the crux of Pilar's problem.

Between Pilar's position and the bridge there were about two dozen zombies, most of them crewmen. Where they'd come from she had no idea, unless they'd been on the way before they turned, made it this far, and just sort of stayed here after they died . . . another of those backwaters like the one she found down at the Great Northern Café.

That made sense to her. The bridge was the symbol of authority onboard ship. It was the same way of thinking that brought the senator up here, no doubt. But what was she supposed to do about with all these zombies? That was the question before her.

With the MP5 she could probably shoot her way through. At a full sprint, and with a few carefully aimed bursts she could make it. She'd be on the bridge in forty-five seconds to a minute, nothing to it. The trouble was that would allow the senator an opportunity to hear the shots and react. Maybe she would think it was help coming to rescue her, but Pilar knew she couldn't rely on that kind of assumption. Despite the fact that she'd dared to take on the cartels, Senator Sutton wasn't a stupid woman. A far more likely response would be for her to run the other way, toward the public stairwell. If she took it, she'd probably be gone in all of three seconds. If there were too many zombies for her to risk the stairwell, she'd probably do what Pilar did earlier. Go into a stateroom and lock the door. That would leave Pilar in the unenviable position of having to figure out which stateroom she was hiding in, and then to force entry, all the while having to deal with zombies coming at her from both sides.

Pilar scanned the landing just above her, where the zombie crew had gathered. There were three ways off the landing. They could go up or down, or they could follow a side corridor down to the officers' cabins. Pilar figured she would need about fifteen seconds to get up the stairs and kill the senator. It was doable.

But it wouldn't come cheaply.

She took out her iPhone and tried to think of another way. But there wasn't and she knew it. Working quickly, she removed the Otterbox so the phone would slide easily across the deck. She went to her music, called up Vicente Fernandez's “
Volver, Volver
,” her favorite, and turned the volume up all the way.

Then she crawled to the top of the stairs, careful to stay just out of the zombies' line of sight, hit play, and threw the phone toward the officers' corridor. It slid like a hockey puck across the tiled floor, the opening trumpets of the song sounding clearly down the hall.

It worked. Nearly all the zombies turned at the same time toward the sound, and as the trumpets gave way to the lonely beauty of Vicente's baritone, the zombies started that way.

That's it, she told herself. Go, go, go!

Jumping to her feet, her rifle at the ready, she charged up the stairs, passing right by two zombies that hadn't moved down the hall yet and entered the bridge.

But it was empty.

The senator was gone.

“What the hell?” she said.

Pilar raised her rifle. There wasn't any place to hide on the bridge. She could see all of it at once. So where was Sutton hiding? And how had she known to run? Pilar hadn't given her time to do that.

But the senator was most certainly gone.

Pilar moved down the curve of the bridge, weapon at the ready, finger flexing on the trigger.

The bridge was clear all the way to the opposite end. And there Pilar saw what had happened. Down at the end of the corridor, near the passenger stairwell, a large group of zombies were turning and heading down the stairs.

“You crazy bitch,” Pilar said. “You went down the stairs.”

Pilar couldn't believe it. Running through a crowd of zombies like that took guts.

Or a death wish.

Pilar didn't think the senator had either.

“Why would you do something like that? What were you thinking?”

Pilar went to the captain's chair and tried to put herself in the senator's mind. She might have heard the music from Pilar's phone. Maybe. Pilar could hear Vicente's voice even now, thin and distant, but still rising triumphantly above the mariachi horns. But that wouldn't have caused her to run the way she did, would it?

“No,” Pilar said. “There's something else. But what? What am I missing? Ah!”

The security video feed next to the captain's chair was locked onto one of the gathering platforms for the lifeboats. Another showed a café on the same deck, port side. There were people inside, maybe as many as forty of them, all huddled together in the dark.

“You're going to try to save them, aren't you?” Pilar said at the video monitor. “That's what you're going to do. You're going down there to put them on a lifeboat and get away.”

Just like a politician, Pilar thought. She'd turn a tragedy into a PR opportunity; probably brand herself the hero of the wreck of the
Gulf Queen
. It made Pilar sick just thinking about it.

“Once, you would have done the same thing,” came a voice from behind her.

Pilar spun around, weapon up and at the ready.

Lupe was standing there in the doorway, dead and covered with blood. Flies swarmed around his face, crawled over his eyes.

“Not the fake hero part,” he went on. “That's not your style. But you would have tried to save those people. You probably would have done it, too.”

Pilar shook her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself it was just some six-year-old child, some unfortunate little boy that had died and found his way up here. But when she opened her eyes again it was still Lupe. And he was coming at her, hands outstretched, like he wanted to hug her.

“Stay away,” she said.

He was almost on her now. With an awful numbness in her chest she swung the rifle's butt stock at Lupe's chin and knocked him facedown into the captain's chair.

Before he could get back up again, she threw the seat belt over his back, secured it, and pulled the strap as tight as she could make it, pinning him facedown in the seat, his body bent the wrong way.

She turned away from him, back to the security monitors.

“What are you going to do?” Lupe asked.

She ignored him. Tried to anyway. Pilar forced herself to think like the senator. When she got down to the lifeboats—assuming she made it that far— she'd have to lower the boats manually. It wouldn't be hard to do. The manual controls were designed so that even the passengers could use them, if need be. Pilar would just have to keep her from doing that.

“You're going to drop all the lifeboats,” Lupe said.

“That's right.”

“Why?”

Pilar didn't answer. She went to the ship's emergency protocols on the computer and found the programs that controlled the lifeboats. With the first officer's passwords she'd taken before she killed him, it wasn't hard. But it did have to be done in stages. The computer only allowed four boats to be released at a time. But after a few keystrokes the process was underway.

“Why are you doing this, Pilar?”

“Shut up,” she whispered. He wasn't real. This was all in her head. She knew that. She knew that, damn it. But it was so hard hearing his voice again.

“You never would have done something like this when I knew you. There are children down there. They couldn't have done anything to you. There's no way they deserve something like this.”

“I said shut up.”

“Why did you change, Pilar? What happened?”

She jammed the rifle into the little boy's ear. “Shut up! Shut the hell up. Right now!”

“You don't want me to shut up. You wanted me to come to you. You want to hear this.”

Her lips were trembling. “I wanted no such thing.”

“It was no accident you played that song down there. Do you remember, back in Juarez, when we'd sit on the wrecked cars up in the hills above the shacks and watch the tire fires burn? Remember that? You used to sing that song to me.”

“Please stop,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Why did you change? Something went hard inside you. Why?”

“You know why.”

“Because I died? Is that it?”

Pilar said nothing.

“Dying is what we do, Pilar. It's part of us, like laughing, and singing.”

“Stop it,” she said, almost spitting the words out. “There is no such thing as dying, only giving up. If you live or die, that's your own choice. You make up your mind to live and nothing can kill you. Nothing but disease or something you can't control. That's what I did, Lupe. That's the choice I made. After they pulled me from that truck where you died, they put me on a bus and sent me back to Juarez. They dumped me on the street with the drugs and the gangs and the men who wanted to turn me into a whore. You want to know what happened? You're right. I was ten years old. I was a child, but something went hard inside me, something that refused to bow. My neck will never bend. Nobody owns me.”

“Not even Ramon?”

“Not even Ramon,” she said, and pulled the trigger. And then, at a whisper: “Not even my own ghosts.”

The boy's head burst all over the seat, clumps of his scalp dripping down the side of the chair.

She watched the boy's body go still, unaware of the tears on her face, unaware of anything but her loneliness and shame and desperate need to finally feel at peace with all the killing, all the death.

“Oh, my God, Lupe. I'm so sorry.”

She sniffled, and only then did she hear the sound of footsteps running up the stairs.

“Damn it,” she muttered. The sound of the shot had attracted all those zombies from down below. She was about to have a whole lot of company.

The first few burst through the door, pushing one another out of the way as they flooded onto the bridge. Pilar started shooting. The zombie closest to her, a short, plump man in white shorts and the bloodstained remnants of a blue Hawaiian shirt, was running at her full speed. Pilar's first shot hit him in the chin. Another man coming up fast behind him pushed him forward and soon both were on her, their hands pawing at her. Pilar's next shots knocked them both down, but didn't stop either man from moving. They crawled toward her, reaching for her, even as others trampled over them.

She focused on single, deliberate headshots, making every bullet count. Bodies started dropping. She fired through one thirty-round magazine, reloaded and emptied a second even as more zombies charged through the door. Nearly to the end of her third magazine, she began to retreat. The bodies were piled high in the narrow walkway. Some were draped over chairs. The bridge's windshield was spattered with blood and clumpy bits of muscle and bone and hair. The smell of gun smoke and blood was thick on the air. And still more zombies were coming through the door.

Pilar turned to run down the corridor where the senator had disappeared, but stopped in her tracks. Three zombies had already come around the corner from the public stairwell at the end of the hall.

More were behind them.

“Ah, damn,” she said.

She tried a few cabin doors close to her, but they were all locked.

She was trapped, zombies coming at her from both sides.

Pilar swung her magazine pouch forward and checked her remaining cache. She had five thirty-round magazines left and nowhere to run. She had no idea if it'd be enough, but it wasn't like she had much of a choice. She popped in a fresh mag, took a deep breath, and went to work.