The Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Weight (7 page)

Before passing under the bridge, they readied their weapons. A few of the dead could be seen wandering
its span, so they wanted to be prepared in case one of them dropped down and landed on the boat. Out of the few that noticed them, only two leaned too far over the rail in their never-ending quest for food as the boat passed beneath them. They both fell into the water off the port side of The Usual Suspects.

On the far side of the bridge, the current picked up
in the channel to the right of Alexander Island, and they had a difficult time pushing against it. The sailboat shuddered and shimmied as Brain increased the throttle to continue making headway. When they were finally through and back into calmer waters, he noticed a red warning light flashing on the control panel. Fear crept in when he read the label below it.

Trying to keep his voice even,
he said, “We’ve got flooding in the forward compartment. Don’t know how bad it is, but it’s more than the pumps can handle.”

“Throttle back
and turn our stern into the current,” Tick-Tock called out to him as he and Steve went below.

The galley was dry, but upon entering the main sleeping area
, they both felt the squish of the water soaked carpet under their feet. They found Connie standing by her bunk with a terrified expression on her face. When she saw them, she said, “I just noticed the floor was wet a second ago when I got up to go to the bathroom. Are we sinking?”

Ignoring
her question, Steve said, “Everyone get topside.” Pointing to where Cindy had pushed herself into the corner of her bunk at the mention of the boat going down, he added, “Take her with you. Make sure you have life jackets for both of you.”

“So we are sinking,” she said with fear in her voice.

Before he could answer, Mary said in a condescending manner, “Oh great, I escape one sinking ship and here I am on another. You need to do something about this, Steve. I just took a shower and I’m not getting in that stinking water.”

Fear turn
ed to anger and Steve yelled, “Get your ass topside or swimming in the bay will be the least of your worries!”

Never having had him talk to her this way, Mary caught on that the situation was serious.
She held up her hands and hung her head to show she was being compliant as she exited the compartment.

  Tick-Tock called out that he was going
topside to check the hull as Steve went forward to check the compartment that he and Heather shared.

He e
ntered his room and found the floor awash in an inch of water. Checking the bulkheads, he couldn’t see any cracks or holes but knew this didn’t mean anything. The sailboat had a double hull, and with the signpost stuck in its outer section and the space in between filling with water, the leak could be anywhere. Steve knew there was little he could do below, so he went on deck to join Tick-Tock.

As he came up the ladder he heard Heather
calling for towels and rags. Grabbing a double handful of dirty laundry from a hamper, he raced on deck and moved quickly toward the bow where he found Heather holding Tick-Tock’s legs as he hung over the side. Steve called for Brain, then had the tech sit on his legs as he bent at the waist and joined his friend.

Hanging upside down, Tick-Tock
’s voice took on a nasal quality as he said, “The post shifted sideways from the force of the current.” Pointing at a two-foot long gash in the hull, visible just below the waterline, he added, “then it ripped free, and that’s why we’re taking on so much water.”

Handing over a wad of shirts and pants, Steve could see they’d need a
lot more than that to plug the leak. Everything Tick-Tock shoved into the hole was being sucked into the gap between the two hulls. He considered using a cooler top or some other flat object but saw they had no way to secure it in place. They needed waterproof fabric, and a lot of it. He called for Brain to pull him back up, then headed to where the mainsail was furled around the boom. Grabbing Tick-Tock’s K-bar knife from where it was wedged in its sheath on the dashboard above the wheel, he cut away the covering on the sail and slashed at the ties holding it.

Brain had followed him
, and with Connie’s help they started pulling the nylon loose. When he felt he had enough, Steve cut long strips of fabric that Brain gathered and took forward to Tick-Tock. Feeding it to him as he hung over the side, the gaping hole in the hull was slowly plugged.

Steve helped Heather pull Tick-Tock up. Dizzy from hanging upside down for so long, he couldn’t stand and dropped to the deck.
While he recovered, Steve leaned over the side and examined his friend’s work. A few yards of red sail floated in the current, but it appeared that the hole had been plugged. There would still be leakage, but hopefully not too much for the pumps to handle.

Steve checked
the area around them to make sure they hadn’t drifted close to land and could see Bay Town and a huge oil storage facility on his right and the outskirts of Houston on his left. While they had been busy plugging the hole, hundreds of the dead had converged on the shore. As he watched, dozens entered the water and slogged forward in an effort to reach them, continuing until they disappeared into its murky depth.

Shuddering at the thought of what might already be below
them, Steve asked, “How much further do you think we can make it?”

From his position on the deck, Tick-Tock replied, “Not much. Even at slow speed we’re going to be taking on water. We need to find a spot to go ashore or we need to find another boat.”

Going ashore and making their way on foot was out of question, so they’re only option was to find another boat. Steve held out his hand to Tick-Tock and helped him to his feet. Together they went to the cockpit where Steve picked up the chart as everyone gathered around.

He glanced
up several times as he compared it with what he could see on shore but found nothing in the immediate vicinity that might harbor a boat. Looking back at the chart, he saw that further up, the river branched off. The right fork headed north into a residential section while to the west laid a more industrial area.

He p
ointed to the left fork saying, “I think we should try this way.”

“But don’t you think we’d have better luck in
Bay Town?” Brain asked. “With all the waterfront homes through there, we’re sure to find something.”

Steve shook his head. “If anyone in that area had a boat, they used it to beat feet when all this started. I think we’
ll have better luck looking for a small commercial ship. Something corporate owned that everyone forgot about when the shit hit the fan.”

Tick-Tock
pulled out a satellite overlay that matched the chart and started tracing the route of the river with his finger. “It looks like there’s a lot of oil storage areas through there. Taking an oil tanker is out of the question, but I’d bet a lot of those companies kept a run-around to shuttle their people.”

“Then that’s where we need to try first,” Heather told them. “It makes sense for a few reasons. One, we’re more likely to find a boat, and two, all those refineries and storage places were high security areas because of the terrorist threat. That means they have fences around them.”

Steve picked up on her train of thought, adding, “And that means there were less people around to be infected, maybe no one at all. So far we’ve been passing mostly open and residential areas, that’s why there are so many Z’s. They died, came back and stayed pretty much where they were. But if we go into an area that had no population to begin with, we’ll have a better chance of finding something.”

From the shore, a low whining sound rose as if in answer to Steve’s question. Noticing they had drifted close to
a pier teeming with the walking dead, he asked Tick-Tock, “Think we can make it that far?”

Following Steve’s gaze, he said, “Doesn’t look like we have much of a choice.”

***

Twice they had to stop and let the pumps catch up with the water seeping in through the bow
, so it was near dark when they finally reached the fork in the river. Both times they’d halted, the current was so strong they had to drop anchor so they wouldn’t drift into the rocks and marsh along the shore. As they made their way slowly up the shipping channel, they noticed that the area they were passing through had fewer dead lining its shore. On their left was a park and on their right some uninhabited islands, further proving Heather’s theory that the less populated an area was before Dead Day, the less populated it was likely to be now.

Approaching the spot where they would turn, they came across the area where the ferry shuttled people back and forth between the park and the road leading to Bay Town. With dark setting in fast, they started looking for a place to anchor for the night. On the chart they found a slight inlet close by that would keep them out of the channel and had water deep enough to handle the sailboat. As they rounded the bend in the river, they spotted a large cabin cruiser already moored there. At first excited, since this was the first boat they’d seen that wasn’t half sunk or burned to the waterline, their joy quickly evaporated when they saw a dozen dead crowding the rail. Dressed in everything from bathing suits to tuxedos, this odd assortment of clothing made no sense until Tick-Tock came up with a theory.

“
Might have been an end of the world party,” he commented.

Heather looked at him curiously
, so he explained, “Near the end, there was all kinds of crazy shit going on. You were a cop, Heather, so I’m sure you saw your share of it, people partying and living life to the fullest since they would probably be dead the next day. Remember how many people requested ‘The End of the World’ by REM at the radio station? Looks like some rich guy got a bunch of his friends together and threw one last, big bash on his yacht. They came out here to have a good time and didn’t know they had someone infected on board.”

Eyeing the boat, Steve said, “
If we could get it running, that could be our new ride. There are only a few Z’s on it; we could handle them no problem.”

“It’s a possibility,” Tick-Tock said, “but you’re looking at a lot of ifs.
I’m sure by now the batteries are run down so we’d have to figure out how to jump-start it. And then there’s fuel. Unless we board her, we have no idea how much is left in her tanks.” Pointing at the fuel caddies they had taken from The Dead Calm, he added, “And we have gasoline. With a boat that big, it’s going to run on diesel.”

“
It’s something to keep in mind though,” Heather said.

“We definitely want to consider it,” Tick-Tock said, “but let’s look around first. We might come across some easier pickings.”
He pointed at the dead who whined at them in hunger, adding, “Besides, it’s not like they’re going to be sailing it off into the sunset any time soon.”

Deciding they didn’t want to spend the night near a boatload of the dead and the noise they
would make with fresh meat nearby, Steve and Tick-Tock studied the chart to locate another place to anchor for the night. Steve pointed to a man-made inlet only a little further up the river, “This looks promising. It’s labeled the Battleship Texas. I think I remember reading about it. It’s an old decommissioned warship on display. It’s off the river and might make a good base to go scavenging from.”

Tick-Tock folded
the chart and said, “Only one way to find out.”

Night
had fallen when they set out again. Deciding not to advertise their presence by turning their running lights on, they slid through the water like a phantom. To their right, a few isolated fires burned, giving off a weak glow; to their left, was the darkness of the park. Here, the San Jacinto Monument was visible as it reached upward. In the distance beyond that, a glow from the fire they had started when they set part of the bay alight, reflected off a bank of low clouds that had moved in. They were near enough to their destination that they could see the outline of the huge warship as they rounded a piece of land that jutted out into the river. With the electric switch permanently thrown off in the area, it stood out in stark relief against the sky.

That
made it easy to see the beams from flashlights crisscrossing its decks.

Idling back the engine, Tick-Tock
said, “It looks like someone had the same idea we did.”

As they watched, one by one the lights were extinguished. In the still air,
excited voices could be heard coming across the water. Straining to hear what they said, Steve found them unintelligible.

“Looks like they spotted us,” Heather said.

This was confirmed by a loud booming voice that challenged, “Who are you?”

After considering his answer, Steve called back, “Survivors.”

“We’re all survivors. What do you want?” The voice asked.

Not wanting to give away how bad their situation was, Steve called out, “We’re looking for a military base or a relief center. Somewhere safe.” In a lower voice he said to Tick-Tock, “Get ready to get us out of here fast.
Everyone else, get ready to lay down covering fire.”

After a minute
, the voice came back. “There’s nowhere safe around here. The last relief center was overrun months ago. They had a radio, and before it went offline, we heard that the Army base in San Antonio was up and running and they were taking people in.”