Zombies: The Recent Dead (27 page)

“It’s murder,” she said, and I said, “How can it be? He’s dead already.” Saying it like that was awful; as bad as touching him would have been, knowing what we knew now, as bad as the thought that what you’d touch was . . . not alive, not in any way that you could recognize. But something in her balked at doing the necessary thing. I tried to argue my case, to convince her, but the trouble was, what I wanted to do had nothing with reason or logic. It was as instinctive as treading in something and wiping your foot clean; as brushing a fly off your food.

But she knew that as well, every bit as much as I did. More so, because she’d been down in the cabin with him, had laid hands on his bare skin and felt . . . what she’d felt. I think those scruples we were both wrestling with were actually something more like nostalgia, a longing for the last few remnants of the everyday shape of things. Maybe in situations like that, you’ll hang on to anything that says, this isn’t happening, everything is perfectly normal, you can’t seriously be going to do this . . .

But we were going to do it, because it had to be done. We couldn’t have taken
that
back to harbor with us—we couldn’t have walked him off the boat, taken him back to his dad in Conwy and said, look, here he is, here’s your lad Andy back safe and sound. That would have been a hundred times crueler than what we were about to do now. So yes, I felt bad; but it was the lesser of two evils. I was completely sure of that, just as sure as I was that come the daylight, I would probably feel like the shittiest, most cowardly assassin in all creation. But it was hours yet till the daylight, and below decks we had a dead man who didn’t know he was dead yet. So I went into the wheelhouse, stood at the top of the companionway and called “Andy?” The first time it got swallowed up in a sort of gag reflex; I gulped, and called out again, “Andy?”

No answer from below decks; just the slow pinging of the fish-finder. This was what I’d been afraid of. Gingerly, I grabbed the woodwork of the companionway hatch, and lowered myself into the space below decks. I was ready to spring back if anything happened; what, I didn’t know. But I knew that I didn’t want to do this; didn’t want to look now into the lantern light and see—

He was sitting just as we’d left him. The jumper Claire had tried to put on him was ruched up around his chest; he had one arm still caught in the arm-hole, and I think it was that—something as banal and stupid as that—that finally convinced me, if I’d really needed convincing. A child could have poked his arm through that sleeve—
would
have done it, out of pure reflex; but Andy hadn’t.

I stepped down, till there was just the table between us. “Andy?” I said again, and he looked up. I was already making to look away, but I couldn’t help it, our eyes met. His eyes were so black, so empty; how could I have looked into them and thought him alive?

I’d meant to say something else, but what came out was, “You all right?” It was crazy enough on the face of it, but what would have been normal? He nodded; I could see him nodding, as I stared down at my feet. “Cold,” he said; that was all. Then, out of nowhere, I found myself saying, “Come on: let’s get your arm through there.”

Considering what I had in mind, seemed like the height of hypocrisy; but I think it was a kinder instinct than I gave myself credit for at the time. Steeling myself, still not looking him straight in the face, I reached across and lifted the folding table up. I stretched out the wool of the jumper with one hand and slipped the other into the sleeve. Feeling around inside, my fingers touched his: he was making no attempt to reach through and hold on, which was probably just as well. Cold? More than cold; it was as if he’d never been warm, as if he’d lain on that ocean bed for as long as the sea had lain on the land. Fighting to keep my guts down, I dragged his arm through and let go the jumper. Released, his arm fell back down by his side; dead weight.

Doing that helped me with what came next, with the physical side of it at least. “Right,” I said, in a ghastly pretence at practicality; “let’s get you up on deck, shall we?” He looked up blankly. I had to look, had to make sure he was going to do it. Those eyes: I couldn’t afford to look into them for too long. God knows what I would have seen in there; or what he might have seen in mine, perhaps. “Come on,” I said, turned part-way away from him. “They’re waiting for you up on deck.”

In the end I had to help him to his feet. He was like a machine running down, almost; I hate to think what would have happened if we’d actually tried to take him back to dry land. Even through the layer of wool I could feel a dreadful pulpiness everywhere that wasn’t bone. Again the gag came in my throat; I clamped my jaw shut and took him under one arm, and he came up unresisting, balanced precariously in his squelching shoes. A little puddle of rank seawater had collected around his feet. The smell—I was close enough to get the smell now, but I don’t want to talk about it. I dream about it, sometimes, on bad sweating nights in the hot midsummer.

I motioned him ahead. Obediently, he stepped forward, and as he passed me I saw the horrible indentation in the back of his skull. The hair which had covered it before had flattened now, and the concave dent was all too clearly visible. No one could have taken a wound like that and survived. Just before I looked away, the bile rising in my throat, I thought I saw something in there; something white and wriggling. I came very near to losing it entirely in that moment.

If he’d needed help getting up the companionway, I would’ve had to have called Danny through—there was no way I could have touched him, not after seeing that wound in the back of his head. As it was, he put one foot on the steps, then, after what seemed ages, the next, and trudged up into the wheelhouse. I tried to focus on the normal things: on the feel of the wooden rail as I stepped up behind him into the wheelhouse; on the brass plaque that said
Katie Mae
, there beside the wheel; on the ping of the fish-finder in the silence. As Andy paused, silhouetted against the dim starlight of outside, waiting for me to tell him what to do next, I took several deep breaths. “Now?” I said, and waited for Claire’s voice.

“Now,” she said, a small voice from out of the darkness, and I ran forwards with both arms straight out in front of me. Andy was in the act of turning round, and I just glimpsed his eyes; there was a greenish phosphorescence to them in the dark, and Claire said later that I screamed out loud as my hands made contact with his shoulder-blades.

He was standing in the wheelhouse doorway. Ahead of him was just the narrow stretch of deck that linked fore and aft, and then the low side of the boat. Claire was crouching beneath the level of the wheelhouse door; on my signal she’d straightened up on to her hands and knees as I came up on Andy from behind. My push sent him careening forwards; he flipped straight over Claire’s upthrust back and out over the side of the boat. There was a solid, crunching impact as he hit the water; Claire was up off her knees and into my arms as the cold spray drenched the pair of us.

“What the
fuck
?” It was Jack. He was standing in the engine hatch; clearly he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “You stupid bloody—what the
fuck
, man?” He clambered up through the hatch and started towards us. Claire tried to get in his way, but he pushed her angrily to one side; she went sprawling into the wheelhouse. Jack squared up to me, fists clenched: no matter how smoothly it had gone with Andy, I saw I was in for at least one fight that evening. He swung away, cursing, and dropped to his knees; I realized he was scrabbling around down in the gutters for the boat-hook he’d used earlier, so that he could fish Andy out of the water a second time.

I was backing round on to the foredeck, trying to think what to do, how to explain it to him, when several things happened more or less simultaneously.

The spotlight on top of the wheelhouse glowed dully for a moment, then blinked sharply back into life; it caught Jack in the act of rising from his knees, boathook in one hand, the other shielding his squinting eyes as the beam shone full into his face. Danny’s voice rose above the engine sound: “Got you, you bastard! Batteries up and
running
!” And in the wheelhouse, Claire was shouting: “Will?
Will!
”

Heedless of Jack, who by then was down on his knees plunging the boathook into the black water, I pushed past and into the wheelhouse. “What? What is it?”

Fist up to her mouth, Claire just stood there, unable to speak. Then she pointed at the console. The fish-finder was beeping still, more frequently than before, more insistently. I looked at the traces on screen and my mouth went dry.

Down underneath the
Katie Mae
, fathoms down in the dark and cold, big sluggish blips were rising; detaching themselves from the sea-bed, drifting up towards the surface. I didn’t need Jack to interpret them for me this time; I recognized them all too well. Before, we’d thought they were seals. Now, we knew better.

“ . . . Stay here,” I managed to get out. Claire nodded, and I turned back to the doorway of the wheelhouse. There was Jack, bending over the side of the boat, his back to us. The stretch of water beyond him was brightly illuminated by our spotlight, still pointing where Claire had left it earlier. One look was all I needed. I grabbed Jack by the shoulder: he’d managed to hook a shapeless mass in the water, and was struggling to bring it in to the side of the boat. “Jack, Jack,” I croaked in his ear; “wait, no, look out there . . . ”

He pushed me away with a curse, went on trying to raise up the body in the water. I thumped his back, hard, and he swung round, ready to hit me. “Fucking
look
,” I hissed, and almost despite himself he turned round.

There they were, caught by the spotlight on the still surface; bodies, rising up out of the sea. Five or six just in that bright ellipse of light; how many others, out there in the dark where we couldn’t see? I’d counted at least a dozen on the fish-finder; there might be more by now. A low, unspeakably nasty sound came back to us over the waves, somewhere between a hiss and a gurgle. At the same time a stink hit us from off the water, like nothing I’d smelled before nor want to ever again. Jack turned back to me, round-eyed, horrified; opened his mouth to say something. Then it happened.

A hand came up and grasped the boathook. It nearly pulled Jack in; quickly he steadied himself, clutching at me and letting go his grip on the wooden shaft. The thing that had grabbed it—the thing Jack had thought was Andy—disappeared under the waves again, taking the boathook down with it, then bobbed back up to the surface. Whatever it was, it had been down there far longer than Andy had. Most of what had once made it human was rotted away; what was left was vile beyond my capacity to describe. It rested there on the swell awhile, goggling up at us as we stood petrified on the deck. Then, without warning, it swung the boathook up out of the water.

The metal hook ripped a long hole in Jack’s T-shirt. Within seconds, the whole of his chest was slick with blood. He staggered back, and the hook caught on the belt of his jeans. It nearly dragged him into the water, but I grabbed him just in time. He was screaming, wordlessly, incoherently. So was I; but I held on tight, arms round his body, feet braced against the scuppers, straining backwards with all my might.

I managed to call out Danny’s name. I felt him grab on to me from behind and yelled as loudly as I could, “Pull!” We both strained away, and then all of a sudden the pressure was off and we all three of us went sprawling backwards, me on top of Danny, Jack across both of us. We disentangled ourselves, and Jack pulled clear the boathook from his belt. Before he flung the whole thing as far away as he could, we had just enough time to see the hand and lower part of an arm that still clung to the other end.

Meanwhile Danny had seen what was happening out on the water, the bodies coming to the surface all around. From the look on his face I knew he was going to lose it unless I did something drastic, so without thinking I spun him round and practically threw him into the wheelhouse. “Get us out of here,” I told him, and turned back to where Jack was kneeling on the deck. There was blood all over him, and over me too where I’d held on to him: I knelt down alongside him to see how badly he was hurt, but he pushed me away. I knew it was because of what Claire and I had done to Andy, but there was no time for that now. I looked round for something I could use to defend the boat with, yelling over my shoulder, “Danny! Move it!”

A throaty grumble came from aft as the diesels turned over, choked momentarily, then caught. “Get us out,” I shouted, as there came a clang from the foredeck. I clambered up around the wheelhouse, spinning the spotlight around to face for’ard as I went. There was the boathook that Jack had thrown away, snagged this time on the prow. Something was using it to clamber up and over the rail: without thinking I ran towards it and kicked out hard. My foot sank part-way into a soft crunching mass; the momentum almost sent me spinning over, but I managed to steady myself on the Samson post as the thing splashed backwards into the water. There was something on my foot, some reeking slimy filth or other—I was scraping it frenziedly against one of the cleats, trying to get the worst of it off, when I became aware of Danny hammering the glass windscreen of the wheelhouse.

He was yelling something about “haul it in”: I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, but then I realized. We were still riding at anchor; Danny had revved the engines to loosen the anchor from its lodgement on the sea-bed, but before we could open up the throttle and head for clear water it needed to be winched all the way back in.

I edged back round the side of the wheelhouse, with no time to stop for Claire as she pressed her face to the glass, her lips forming words I couldn’t hear. Below me, down in the water, things were moving up against the side of the boat. We had to get clear.