The Savage Dead (22 page)

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28

Rachel Sutton walked down the stairs from the bridge, pausing only long enough to catch her breath and, occasionally, to duck back into the shadows to let a zombie stagger by.

They weren't that hard to avoid, which kind of surprised her. Curious about why she kept seeing zombies mentioned everywhere, even from veteran senators who started using terms like zombie banks and zombie markets, she'd actually watched a zombie movie late one night while working up notes for a meeting. The movie—she forgot the title, except that it was “Dead” something or other—had come on late night TV and was actually pretty dreadful. But she'd come away from the movie thinking that the whole zombie craze was about using the zombie as a clever metaphor for some perceived social ill. There was probably also something of a more general hopelessness to it, a modern ennui with the status quo. But, ultimately, it seemed, life for the living in those movies was pretty pointless. Where was there to run when everybody, eventually, ended up as one of those decaying, venomous things? It was a good metaphor for politics and the economy, but she was baffled as to the zombie's cultural appeal. She certainly didn't get it.

But now, she found herself surrounded by real zombies, and it wasn't like anything the movie had led her to believe.

As long as you were careful, and quiet, they were easy to avoid.

So she made her way down the stairs until she got to Deck 5. There she had to stop because a group of zombies had gathered on the landing and didn't seem to be moving.

She went back up to Deck 6 and left the stairs. Six was one of the mixed-use decks, half passenger accommodations and half bars and restaurants. The Pecos House, the
Gulf Queen
's five-star steakhouse, was here, and seeing signs for it made Rachel think of Wayne again. He'd been so looking forward to eating there.

And she'd complained about it.

What happened to them? They used to make each other so happy. But her career had exploded and his had been driven into the background. Everything he did was to support her. All the time off he'd taken. All the traveling. Everything he'd done he'd done for her, to support her. He'd been her biggest cheerleader. He'd been the warm body under the covers when she climbed into bed at two in the morning, mentally and physically exhausted from the day. He'd been her center, her core, her foundation. He'd asked for nothing in return, and if she was honest with herself, she'd given very little more than that.

Could she really blame him for the drinking?

She hated him for it, but could she really blame him for it?

She shook her head and continued on.

She reached a foyer at another stairwell and stopped. Rachel looked around. There was nobody in the corridor, just a few bodies crumpled on the floor. She had a straight shot all the way to the stairs that she hoped would lead her to the lifeboats. And if that way was blocked, the deck was right behind her. She could simply go that way.

She listened for the sound of footfalls on the stairs and heard none.

Still, something bothered her. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end, and she'd survived the shark tank that was Washington long enough to trust her instincts when they told her the shit was about to hit the proverbial fan.

An instant later, her instincts proved right.

From behind her, from the corridor that led outside, she heard a roar like a packed soccer stadium.

So many voices crying out.

It's a rescue vessel, she thought, and ran for the deck railing.

She peered over the side. She saw forty, maybe more, yellow lifeboats drifting away from the ship, floating aimlessly on the current.

“No!” she said. “No, no, no!”

She looked up, toward the source of the noise. All down the length of the ship she saw people leaning over their balconies, their faces bent and twisted in fear. They were crying out, reaching for the lifeboats as though they stood a chance of pulling one back.

About a dozen or so couples jumped.

Very few rose to the surface again.

My God, she thought. Oh, my God. We're all dead.

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29

Tess woke with her face pressed into the carpet and a searing pain in her chest. She tried to roll over onto her back, but it hurt too badly and the best she could manage was to explode into a fit of coughing that made her chest feel like she was being hit with a hammer over and over again.

When she tried again, she coughed again, but this time she was ready for it and she was able to control it.

A little.

Her ribs hurt like hell and her eyes were burning.

She coughed again.

It took her a moment to realize the room was full of smoke.

That sent a surge of adrenaline through her and she rolled over, her back against the bed. There was blood all over the carpet and on her clothes and she quickly patted herself down, looking for a wound.

But there wasn't one.

The blood belonged to someone else.

She glanced to her right and saw Dr. Sutton face-up at the foot of the bed, looking away from her so that she could see the clotted gunshot wound to the back of his head. So that explained the blood.

The air was thick with smoke and it made it difficult to see. She kept blinking against the tears.

But through the smoke she thought she saw movement.

“Senator Sutton?”

Then a breeze from the balcony cleared some of the smoke from the carpet and she saw the man from the hallway, the one she'd shot right before she and Senator Sutton had entered her room, crawling across the floor.

“Whoa!” Tess said, pushing her back into the side of the bed.

The man's face was barely recognizable, and most of his brains appeared to have been blasted out the rear of his skull and all over his back.

“How the hell . . . ?”

He pulled himself along the carpet an inch at a time. A noise like a tire going flat came from a hole in his throat.

Despite the pain in her chest and the smoke in her eyes Tess knew she had to stand up. Her instructors at the Secret Service Academy had never once questioned her mental toughness. Nor had Juan Perez the entire time she'd served on his team. The only person who had ever questioned her ability, her resolve, was her mother, and that had come in the form of begging her to settle down with some promising young banker, or maybe settle for a doctor if she couldn't find a banker she liked, anything but this Secret Service nonsense. That was what spurred her on. That was what gave her the strength to stand up.

She pushed herself to her feet and onto the bed just as the man slashed at where her shoes had been a moment before. She looked down at him and the only word she could think of, the only word that made sense, was
zombie
.

The guys on her detail, when they were on the road, they played a drinking game to that TV show
The Walking Dead
.

She'd even joined them a few times.

Tess thought it was stupid, but it was a boys' club, law enforcement, and if you wanted to get ahead, sometimes you had to be one of the boys.

But now, looking down at that man she knew to be dead, she couldn't think of anything else but the word
zombie
, and what she'd thought was stupid and gratuitously violent before, now filled her mind with a horror so complete and fully realized that she wanted to curl up in a ball and cry for her mother.

And that made her mad.

She jumped off the bed, ignoring the pain and the smoke, and picked up the chair from the desk. Tess raised it over her head and smashed it down on the zombie's upturned ruined face.

It barely registered the blow.

She changed her grip on the chair back so that she could wield it like a fence post digger and jammed it down on the back of the zombie's head.

A chair leg found its mark and sank deep into the softened skull.

She twisted the chair with a grunt and the zombie's arm fell to the floor.

“Mother fucker,” she said, and pulled the chair loose and jammed it back down again. “Goddamned mother fucker.”

And then it was done.

She coughed and looked around, her mind starting to clear.

The senator was gone.

So too was the woman who shot her.

Juan was right, as always.

So what did she do now? That was the real question. The senator was obviously still alive. If Monica Rivas had simply wanted her dead, her body would be here in the room. There'd be no point in moving her.

But she couldn't think with all this smoke. It was making it hard to breathe, hard to see.

She went out to the balcony and breathed deeply of the sea air.

Then an explosion threw her against the railing, nearly pitching her over into the sea.

Startled and short of breath she turned and looked up the side of the ship. It was enormous, a cliff of metal and glass towering above her, and it was on fire. Smoke roiled off its superstructure, spilling across the green-black sea. She could hear people screaming. It sounded like being on the ground level at a soccer stadium, the rhythmic roar of human voices. People were jumping from the balconies into the sea, some of them holding hands. On a few, the ones close enough, she could even see the bent and broken grief on their faces.

The hopelessness of it all.

And then, an MH-47 helicopter rolled over the side, ropes hanging from its belly. The enormous twin-blade helicopter seemed suspended in midair for a terrible moment, then turned and headed out to sea.

It doubled back a moment later, but kept its distance from the enormous burning wreck that was the
Gulf Queen
.

Juan is here, she thought, her heart leaping up in her chest. He's here!

In her mind she had the whole thing figured out. Juan had somehow managed to uncover what was going on aboard the
Gulf Queen
and had called in his old Special Forces–days connections to deal with it. He was here!

All she had to do was get to him.

But it wouldn't be his style to come and save her. She wouldn't be the girl he'd hired if that was what she hoped for.

She knew that, right from the start.

She turned away from the balcony and went over to her own cabin, where her tactical gear was still spread open on the bed.

She had a Colt AR-15 with a sixteen-inch barrel there, plus a cache of fully loaded magazines.

Tess took up the weapon and examined it, checked the action on the bolt and the catch and release of its receiver. The Colt was a rock. Hardly state of the art, it nonetheless got rounds down range consistently and accurately, and it could do it in just about any weather. You could mistreat it, bang it around, fail to clean it, and still it brought the goods to the battlefield.

She loved this gun.

And it was here in her hands.

What remained was her core objective. She had to find the senator and get her to safety.

And to Juan.

But between her and that objective stood a ship full of zombies.

She slapped a magazine into her Colt and loaded the rest into the cargo pockets of her BDUs.

Juan expected her to do this.

And yes, she could do this.

C
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30

Rachel Sutton stood at the railing, watching the lifeboats drift away on the current.

What the hell was she supposed to do now?

She looked up at the cliff that was the ship's hull and superstructure. A surprisingly large number of passengers were at their balconies, pointing and yelling. Some looked as baffled as she felt. Others were angry. Some fell to the ground and wept openly. Rachel couldn't look anymore. She turned away.

Maybe the thing to do, she reasoned, was to go find an empty cabin somewhere, lock the door, and sit and wait for whatever was going to happen. It wouldn't be long before somebody came looking for a whole ship full of missing people. Surely they could find a ship this big with little effort.

At least she hoped that was the case.

She went back inside the ship, turned down a corridor at random, and walked into the first room she came to.

“Hello?” she called, and waited.

Nobody stirred. She heard nothing.

It was empty, just as she'd hoped. She went back to the door and closed it and locked it and then crawled into the still-made bed and curled into a motionless, desperate fetal ball.

It was hard for her to believe that things had gotten this bad.

And she'd never seen it coming. It totally blindsided her.

She pulled a pillow close and curled around it. Rachel pressed her nose into the fabric, breathing the clean cotton smell, and she thought of Wayne.

Rachel had no idea how long she cried, or for how long she slept after that, but she had slept, for she woke with a start and the vague impression that someone was yelling. She lay there for a long moment with her eyes open, arms clutched around the pillow, listening.

Then she heard it again, people yelling.

But different than before.

Was that elation she heard?

Curious, she rose from the bed and walked out on the balcony. She leaned over the side and stared up at the other passengers, all of whom were watching the sea and pointing.

She followed their gaze, and at first saw only a black smudge low on the horizon. Since her early forties, things viewed at a distance all looked like ink blots. But then she heard the unmistakable slap of helicopter blades against the air, and within moments, the inkblots turned into a pair of jet-black helicopters, moving low and fast over the water.

Oh, my God, she thought. They sent the SEALs to rescue me. Yes!

Suddenly elated, she ran out of the room and through the hallway, looking for the nearest set of stairs.

She was going topside.

She was going to be there when they landed.