Zombie Ever After (21 page)

“What about you two?”

“We’ll be fine,” Donovan said. He’d rather take his chances with the biplane. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped in any place or with any group less mobile than he and Cathren were alone. Or, any group that ATELIC might have access to. “We’ve got Ol’ Blue here,” he said, wiggling his thumb over his shoulder at the blue biplane, like a hitchhiking Clark Gable in
It Happened One Night.

“Suit yourself,” the officer said. “Take care out here, ya’hear?” He saluted Donovan and Cathren, then turned to the front and gave the signal for the convoy to move on.

Cathren waved to the kids and the others on the transport trucks as Donovan walked back to the plane to prepare for takeoff. In a minute, Cathren was at his side again. They got the engine running and then taxied to the middle of the highway.

“Ready, copilot?” Donovan said, grinning like a happy teenager in his dad’s new car on a first date.

“Roger that!” Cathren called out against the windy roar of the biplane’s twin engines. She gave Donovan a cute attempt at a salute, which melted his heart.

“Hey,” he said, “we never kissed!”

Cathren smiled and leaned over to him. He leaned into her and they kissed for a long minute, holding each other tight.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too.”

In no time, Donovan again got the tired biplane aloft. She flew like a beauty now, relieved of her additional passengers. The sun had begun to set when Donovan found himself awash in something close to bliss. Despite the zombie apocalypse, despite all they’d been through and all they’d suffered, he experienced a sense of elation that he and Cathren were back together, flying far away from death and destruction.

That’s when (and no doubt why) the engine started to sputter. They chugged along for a minute or two, as if they were riding over speed bumps in the sky.

“What’s wrong?” Cathren asked.

“Not sure,” Donovan said. He fiddled with the controls, then stared at the dashboard as if it would reveal its secrets to him. Which it did.

They were on empty: the big red “E.”

“Ah, fuck. You’re not going to believe this,” Donovan said. “We’re out of gas.”

The plane sputtered once more, went silent, and began to fall out of the sky like a giant, blue duck riddled with buckshot. They fell through the gray clouds, plunging toward the ground. Actually, the ground was water. Lots and lots of water. The San Francisco Bay—ready to engulf them in all its wet, deadly beauty—loomed below.
 

There was no way out. They were going in.
 

The bay below them rose closer by the second. Wisps of gray clouds whipped past them like lights in an elevator, one floor after another after another in rapid succession. Somehow, Donovan managed to pull the plane out of a nosedive for the second time that day, but this time only barely. Their luck had run out. They hit the water and skidded like a disk skimming the surface of a lake. The plane bounced and slapped down again hard. Bounced again and hit harder, and, this time, stayed put.
 

The lower left wing was cracked and it hung limp from its braces. Donovan surveyed the rest of the craft. They’d lost both right wings, upper and lower. He didn’t know when. Perhaps the wings snapped off during the descent—the wind was fierce. Or perhaps it happened after the plane hit the water. Donovan glanced over at Cathren. She was knocked out cold, a bloody gash on her head. He grabbed her hand and started to lift her out of the seat as the aircraft began to sink. He yanked her up, pulled her close to him, and held her tight. Then he jumped with her into the ice-cold, contaminated waters of the bay.

The heat-sucking, black waves engulfed them. They sank deeper and deeper as Donovan tried to find the strength to swim back to the surface, with her lifeless body by his side.

They broke the surface, Donovan inhaling ferociously, water splashing around them, Cathren still out. Donovan leaned in to determine if she was breathing. She was not. He tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, but that was almost impossible to do while also trying to tread water and stay afloat. He continued for a moment and then, out of options, he punched her right in the stomach.

Water shot out of her mouth directly into his face as the waves had them bobbing up and down in the cold bay. She sputtered, opened her eyes, and stared at Donovan.

“Did you just punch me?” she asked softly, coughing. She frowned at him and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Yeah, well, sorry,” he said, “but I had to.”
 

She smiled at him. “Thanks,” she said. “I understand.”
 

They glanced around them while treading water, which was choppy but empty as far as they could tell. Yet dangerously cold. As well as, no doubt, filled with ATELIC mutant chemicals. The plane was gone, submerged. On the plus side, Donovan did spot land.

“Cathren, you feel okay?”
 

“I guess.”
 

“Strong enough to swim?”
 

“Maybe.”
 

“Good. I see land over there.” He nodded and directed her with his eyes.

“Where? Oh, yeah, I see,” she said, squinting into the twilight as waves smacked her in the face.

“Want to try?” he asked her.

“It’s n-n-n-ot like we have other options,” she said, stuttering from the cold.

“C-Cathren,” Donovan said.

“Yes?”
 

“One other thing.”
 

“W-what?”
 

“Sharks in these waters. Lots of them. So, um, swim as fast as you can.”

Burkhart Egesa sat in his office at the last of the ATELIC locations, his head in his hands. This building had been the original location, built with startup money and his own savings. Before success. Before riches. Before this nightmare.
 

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said.

Alena Portanova, his trusted assistant and second in command, let herself in.

“You wanted to see me?” she said.

“Yes, yes. Please sit down.”

She sat. And waited. After a minute or two she said, “Something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Yes, sorry. I’m having trouble putting my thoughts into words. Well…” Egesa cleared his throat. “We’ve been partners for the last few years, both professionally and ‘off camera,’ yes?” he said. “I wanted you to understand this isn’t easy for me. All that is happening.”

“The mutations?”

“Yes, exactly. You appreciate that this is not what I planned when I founded ATELIC, yes? Never. Not ever.” Unfortunately, due to his facial paralysis, his look of remorse looked more like nausea.

“Yes, I know,” Alena said. “You started this company to save lives, not destroy them.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask you this,” Alena said, hesitating. “This whole thing—the cryogenics, the concentration on”—She wanted to say, “this obsession with—immortality. It’s because of your folks, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they did die in a horrible car wreck when you were six.”

“So?” Egesa said, suddenly standing and cleaning the white board behind his desk.

“It had to get you thinking about, well, you know, having power over death. That kind of thing.”

“Pop psychology. Nonsense. Next you’ll be saying my brothers and sisters perishing in a house fire when I was nine contributed, too, yes? Ha!” He grimaced again and scratched under his chin like he had fleas.

Alena said nothing. She stared down at her hands and picked at her fingernail polish and said, “Well, I should be going.”

“Or that my cousins meeting their end in a plane crash when I was sixteen was a factor either. Ha! Thank you, Dr. Drew.”

“You mean Dr. Phil.”

Egesa was silent and started to draw a new equation on the whiteboard. Without turning around to look at her, he said, “Just wanted you to comprehend that I’m not to blame here, that’s all. Not my intention to, to—” He became lost in the science on the whiteboard. “Thank you, you can go.”

Alena got up and left.

“Close the door behind you, yes?” Egesa said.

Donovan and Cathren swam through the choppy waves. The icy water clung to them like a second, wet skin. They were soon frozen, approaching hypothermia. Swimming in the dark across the open bay, they imagined all the things that could be in the water with them: sharks, octopuses, eels, piranha, giant man-eating squid, mermaids. Hypothermia made their minds play tricks on them. The one thing Donovan was confident about was that there actually were sharks in here.
 

Triathletes had swum in these same waters back during the good times, accompanied by men in rowboats, with shotguns for dealing with unwelcome sharks. Cathren and Donovan had no such bodyguards. No escorts of any kind, except their fear, which was like another swimmer in the bay with them. A big, fat, annoying swimmer with a bad attitude.

They plodded on, dog-paddling for the most part as neither of them had significant swimming skills. Plus, they were both hurt, tired, and hungry, which made for painfully slow progress.

Minute by agonizing minute, the prize—land—drew closer. The moonlight shone strong enough through breaks in the cloud cover to help them keep their eyes on the coast. But no lights glimmered on land. Because lights no longer lit most places in San Francisco these days. This place, however, was as black as used motor oil. Certainly blacker than the water they swam in, which at least reflected a bit of the moon in its choppy waves.

Without warning, Donovan felt a bump on his lower leg, just below the surface of the water.

“Is that you?” he asked Cathren, finding it difficult to swim and speak at the same time.

“Is what me?” she answered back.

“M-my leg.”
 

“N-n-nope,” she said through chattering teeth and lips the color of the moon.

This is going to get bad.
Donovan took a deep breath and dove under the water. Floating about a foot or two under the surface, he surveyed everything around him. The complete list of which included darkness, gloom, and a little seaweed.

But then something bulky and determined came at him at that moment out of the murky depths. At first, all Donovan could make out were its eyes. Next, the snout emerged. At last, its full, horrible, face materialized.

The shark opened its jaws, revealing a double row of razor-sharp teeth. The beast had no eyes, just dull sockets. One of its fins had been lost, and its gills were missing. The shark appeared to be rotting in the water, like chum.

Zombie shark.

Donovan’s life flashed before his eyes again. This was too much. If he hadn’t been underwater, he’d have screamed. The water he swam through was safe enough, mostly, as Mother Nature intended. But these sharks must have been spending significant time near where the ATELIC chemicals leached into the ground only to end up in the bay. Slurped up too much yummy mutant water and zombied out.

Donovan prepared to punch the monster with all his strength right in the nose. Instead, a split second before the creature closed its horrible mouth around his leg, it backed off. Donovan took the opportunity to surface.

“Shark!”
Donovan gasped. He gulped more air and dove back down.
 

The creature charged him a second time, now joined by another zombie shark. This new leviathan had lost most of its dorsal fin, half its face, and a significant portion of its tail. The freaks got close in the blink of an eye and were ready to chomp down on Donovan again.
 

At the last minute, the zombie sharks backed off again. Donovan started to wonder if maybe he’d insulted them somehow.
Whatever works.
Then, to Donovan’s astonishment, the two sharks departed for good. The first fiend turned and gave Donovan a stinky little “fuck you” look. It then high-tailed it out of town, its decrepit partner following close behind.
 

Donovan raised his head toward the surface, kicked hard, and reappeared.

“Holy—” he yelled, gasping for air,
“—fuck!”
 

“What? What happened? Where the hell did you go? Oh my God, I’ve been freaking out over here!” Cathren said.

“You’ve
been freaking?” Donovan said, trying to catch his breath. “I think I set a new record for losing one’s shit.”
 

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, calming down.
 

Donovan could just make out her silhouette in the night, even though she tread water only a few yards away from him. She was beautiful, in a lonely, lost way.
 

“What is it?” she said, tilting her head with a quizzical expression.

Donovan focused his mind. “Zombie sharks down below us,” he said, pointing into the depths below. He spat water in an arc into the waves. “They wanted a piece of me, but you know what?”

“What?”
 

“I think they sensed you.” Donovan took a deep breath. “Like some of the human zombies have done. I think you scared them off just by being in the water with me.”
 

“You think so?” she said, laughing.

Donovan started laughing, too. It’d been a long time since he’d laughed, even if just to compensate for being scared. They chuckled for a while, until Donovan realized that the laughter was making him weaker.

“We need to get going again,” he said, in mock seriousness.
 

Cathren giggled, slowed down to a snicker, and then went silent. “Okay,” she said, giggling one last time.

“Start paddling,” Donovan said, leading by example. They splashed along for another five minutes, Donovan freaking out every time an errant bit of seaweed brushed against his leg in the murky darkness.

“I think the shore is up ahead,” he said. “Not too far now.”
 

“I don’t think I have much left, babe,” Cathren said, her voice cracking.

“Me neither. But we have enough. T-t-trust me, Cathren, we do. We’re going to make it.”