Zombies: The Recent Dead (26 page)

“There’s no juice,” Danny told Jack, who had watched me all the way round the wheelhouse and didn’t need telling.

“What you think I am, Blind Pew? I can bloody see there’s no juice—get your arse down that engine hatch and find out
why
there’s no juice, Danny. Make yourself useful for once, ’stead of standing round giving other people orders.”

That last bit didn’t go down too well, but Jack had already vanished back below. Danny stood a moment by the wheel, breathing heavily, then barged past me out on deck. The engine hatch was in the stern: I could hear Danny swearing as he banged it open and clattered down the short ladder. A few seconds later, Jack came swarming up the companionway and out on to the aft deck. “Bloody typical,” I heard him mutter, before he let himself down through the hatch to see what he could do.

I stood in the dark wheelhouse and tried to work out our options in this, our newly powerless state. Down below decks there were the hurricane lamps, and right now they were the only light we had, apart from Danny’s torch. I looked at the inert console: without electricity, the head-up radar wouldn’t work, and more to the point, neither would the ship-to-shore VHF radio. Most worryingly of all, we could forget about the electric starter motor for the diesels; and without the diesels, we were going nowhere in a hurry. True, we might be able to start them using the auxiliary power supply, but we’d had trouble with that before when the main batteries had run down flat—which they had a habit of doing. It had been one of the things Danny had been meaning to get around to, for which read: one of the things he was going to get Jack to do for him.

At least there was the fish-finder, I thought sarcastically. That was still doing a grand job there on the side of the console, beeping away occasionally, mapping out the gently shelving bottom below the boat. Here and there on the display stray sonar returns stirred lethargically; if we’d been on a charter the punters would have been wetting themselves in anticipation of a big haul. My attention was distracted from the slow drifts and patterns on the electronic screen by Claire coming up the companionway.

“All right?” I smiled, to show her that everything was okay, just a few minor hiccups here, absolutely no-problemo. The dauntless crew of the
Katie Mae
coping with an emergency, just watch ’em go. “How’s Andy?”

She didn’t answer me straightaway. “Danny’s gone to sort the batteries out,” I explained, assuming she was worried about the power being out; then I looked at her more closely, and realized it was something more than that. She was shaking from head to toe—quite literally shaking, gooseflesh standing out on her bare skin.

I was ashamed of myself. It had been a long fifteen minutes or so since we’d first had an inkling of something floating out there in the water: we’d all been through the mill a bit, emotionally speaking. No wonder Claire was still a bit freaked. I put my arms around her, but she didn’t stop shivering. “What’s the matter?” I muttered into her soft-smelling hair. “No need to worry now. It’s all right.”

She put her hands on my biceps and held me slightly away from her. “No it’s not, Will,” she whispered urgently. “It’s not all right—you don’t know the half of it.”

“What is it?” I could tell it was bad from the intensity of her response. “Why are you shaking like that?”

A huge reflexive tremor shook her all over. “It’s down there.” She indicated the short companionway with a glance. “It’s . . . it’s
cold
. Don’t you feel it?”

Now she mentioned it, I did. It was pleasantly cool in the wheelhouse, but standing at the top of the companionway was like being in front of an open walk-in fridge. “It’s water-level down there,” I explained, less than sure of my own explanation. “The water’s always a few degrees colder than the ambient air temperature.”

“It’s not that.” Claire shook her head vehemently, lips pursed. I had the feeling she knew very well what she wanted to say, but couldn’t quite bring herself to say it: it was like watching someone with a stutter trying to spit it out. “It’s . . . ” she glanced back down the steps, “it’s
him
.” She hissed the last word, lips almost touching my ear.

“What do you mean?” I was whispering too.

Again she glanced down below; shook her head. “Not here,” she said, and practically manhandled me backwards out of the wheelhouse: I had to brace my foot against the gutters to avoid going overboard. From aft came the clashing sounds of metal on metal, and of Jack and Danny arguing down the engine hatch. Claire and I went and knelt down on the foredeck, face-on to each other, knees touching.

“Should we be out here?” I wanted to know. “I don’t think we ought to leave Andy on his own.”

Claire took a deep breath. “Listen,” she said, “that’s the trouble. I’ve been down there with him just now, and there’s something not right.”

And here we were with the radio down, I thought. Brilliant. “How do you mean? Is he injured? Has he gone into shock or something?”

“Worse than that,” she said, and my heart sank. “Didn’t you feel anything down there?”

I looked at her, trying to work out what she was getting at. “Feel anything? Like what? I don’t know: I was still a bit hyper from getting him out of the water and all that, you know?”

Claire frowned. “You were sat the other side of the table from him, weren’t you?” I nodded. “So you couldn’t—” A seagull swooped low over the boat sounding its harsh staccato alarm cry, a flash in the darkness over our heads. Claire jumped; if I hadn’t been holding on to her she’d have probably gone over the side. She held on to me for a moment or two, then tried to tell it another way. “Listen. When you and Danny went up Jack was fussing round him like an old mother hen. He got him to take his clothes off and put dry ones on, towel himself off and what have you. I picked up the wet clothes; I was going to put them in one of the lockers, but I didn’t like to—the touch of them . . . ” She paused, controlled herself and carried on. “They were coming apart, Will; they were rotting away.”

I didn’t know what to say. “We were grabbing on to his clothes when we were trying to fish him out. I think we tore a few of the seams . . . ”

“I didn’t say
torn
,” she said; “they were rotten, Will. Like they’d been in the water . . . I don’t know. A long time.”

“How long?” The voice behind me made me flinch. Danny had crept up on me again. I wished people would stop doing that; it had been a long night already, and I was getting edgy. Claire looked up. I could see the whites of her wide round eyes.

“The fabric was . . . disintegrating,” she said. “A long time.” Danny nodded. He seemed to be about to say something, but Claire went on:

“And that’s not all. Jack got me to look him over, see if he was injured at all.” Again the full-body reflex tremble. “It was like touching dead meat: he didn’t have any warmth in him whatsoever. What his core temperature would have been . . . I was shivering just touching him,
but he wasn’t
.” She glanced between the two of us, to make sure we registered her emphasis. “He wasn’t shivering, the way you would be if you’d been hauled out of the water in the middle of the night. He never shivered, not once. He was just sitting on the bench, looking at us . . . ” She started to shake again, and I tightened the grip of my arm around her. She squeezed it gratefully, and continued:

“Then Jack followed you up into the cabin thing, and I was left down there with him.” She clutched at both her shoulders, arms crossed tightly across her chest. “He hadn’t put the dry clothes on or anything; he was just looking around, as if—as if he’d never seen anything quite like that before, you know? As if there was something he couldn’t get his head around; like when you’re in a dream, and the details are just, I don’t know,
out
 . . . wrong somehow. And everything’s slowed down, and your reactions are like, you’re trying to move, but everything’s going like
this—
” She mimicked slow-motion, moving her head laboriously from side to side.

Yes, I thought, that was it; Claire had put her finger on it. I could see it now, the way he’d looked with a stupefied sort of incomprehension from one to the other of us as we’d gathered round him down below; the way he’d gazed at the lanterns hanging from the bulkheads, at the pictures of mermaids on the ceiling up above. Beside us on the deck Danny was nodding; he’d recognized it too.

“So, “Claire resumed: “I said to him, come on, better get these dry clothes on, or you’ll catch your death. And he just; he looked round at me, and he nodded, but it was as if he couldn’t really work out what I was asking him to do. I thought he might’ve taken a knock to the head or something, maybe he was still concussed, so I said, here, I’ll help you, and I went over to him and sort of got his arms up above his head, you know, like when you’re trying to put a jumper on a little kid?

“I was trying not to touch him too much, ’cos—” she looked at me, and I nodded
yeah, go on
—“and I got the dry jumper and slipped it over his head, and then . . . ” She started shivering again, her voice suddenly tremulous. “And then I felt the back of his head, and there was all his hair, you know, all long and wet, and underneath it—” the words came out all in a rush “—underneath it there was this big dent in the back of his head, it was huge, like the size of my fist, and it was like the whole back of his head had been caved in, and you could feel the edges of the bones grinding together.” She wrung at my arm, as if to make my own bones grind. “And I snatched my hand away, and I thought there’d be blood, but there wasn’t any blood, and he just kept on looking at me, like he didn’t understand . . . ” She was crying by now, and I hugged her, as much to stop myself from shaking as to stop her.

Danny was still nodding his head. “I was trying to tell Jack down the engine hatch just now,” he said slowly, and if he’d been drunk or stoned before, he sounded dead straight now. Scared out of his wits, but straight. “I heard something about a lad going missing off one of the Bangor boats—I couldn’t think of the name, though. It might have been the Wanderley.” He stopped.

“When did you hear that?” It didn’t sound like my voice; it sounded like the voice of someone much younger and much, much more nervous.

“ . . . Two or three days back,” said Danny miserably, and none of us said anything for a minute or two there on the foredeck. Eventually I broke the silence.

“He can’t . . . that can’t be him. No way.”

“You didn’t touch his skin,” said Claire stubbornly. “I did. He’s been out the water fifteen minutes now, and he still hasn’t got
any
body heat. That’s not natural. Even in the middle of winter that wouldn’t be natural. It’s summer, a hot summer night. And he’s freezing.”

“You saw him,” was all Danny said to me. “You saw what he was like.”

“So he’s still cold—so he’s a bit out of it still—so what?” I was only resisting for fear of what might follow, because even to admit the possibility of what Claire and Danny were suggesting would be to kiss goodbye to anything resembling sanity, or safety. “He can’t get warm. It doesn’t make him a fucking zombie.” Well, the word was out now.

Danny was shaking his head. “You don’t last three days in the water, Will. If he went off that boat Saturday night, he’d ’ve been dead for Sunday. Sunday at the latest—and even then he still wouldn’t ’ve been lying round waiting for us to come by. The coast guards would’ve been crawling all over this stretch, and the choppers from RAF Valley: they’d have got him if he’d been floating on top of the water, man . . . what is it?”

My mouth must have been open; it’s a bad habit I have. I was thinking about back before in the wheelhouse, when Claire and I had been necking, and she’d asked me what was that thing going beep. The fish-finder, I’d said; and now I remembered it, that large echo we’d all thought was a seal. By the time we asked Jack, it was already up on the surface; but before that—I swallowed. Before that, it had been rising, slowly, from off the sea-bed. That’s what corpses do, after a day or so. The gases balance out the dead weight, and they rise . . .

“
What
?” We were all extremely nervous now, Danny as much as anyone. “Spit it out, for Christ’s sake.”

“This is the Llys Helig stretch, isn’t it?” My voice was steady, just. “We were talking about it, just before. What was it your dad used to say about this stretch?”

Danny was nodding before I’d finished. Clearly he’d been thinking along the same lines. “It was all along the banks here.” He gestured out across the waves. “All the old fishermen; they said the sea was twitchy from here out to Puffin Island.” Twitchy; that had been it. Strange word to use. “They said . . . they said it would spit out its drowned.” He glanced back towards the wheelhouse unhappily.

“Yeah,” I said, looking straight at Claire. I was going to tell her she was right, if I could find the bottle to come out with it, but in the end I just nodded. She didn’t say anything; but she put a hand to my face and I held it, very tight.

“What are we gonna
do—
” began Danny, but then Jack shouted from down the engine hatch, “Oy! Knobber!
Hand
down here? Jesus . . . ”

“Okay,” I said, deciding I’d be the grown-up on this boat. “Look, whatever we do, we’ve got to get moving again. You go and get those diesels started up, Danny.”

He was half-way over to the hatch before he remembered who was supposed to be playing captain. “What about you two? What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to take care of the other thing,” I said. In all my years on boats I’d never been seasick; but I came close to it then, thinking about what the two of us would have to do next.

Claire and I talked it over for five minutes or so. It wasn’t that we disagreed on the crux of it—I think part of her had sensed the truth about Andy almost from the start, and I was all the way convinced by now—but she wasn’t happy with what I proposed doing about it.