“I love you, too.” Kelly hugged her husband again. “It is what it is. We’ll get through it.”
The blaring sound of a ship’s alarm shattered the quietness of the cabin. Kelly and Henry looked at each other with confusion and disappointment.
“What is it?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Mexico launched another attack.” Henry suggested, as he sat up on the bed and began putting his pants on.
“Or?” Kelly could read her husband well, and his body language suggested that he was worried about something else.
The echo of gunfire from somewhere within the ship answered her question.
Henry locked eyes with Kelly, his gaze a mask of dread, “The ship’s infected.”
“What? How?” Kelly asked as she pulled her shirt over her head and slid on her pants. “What… what do we do?” The idea of being trapped in the bowels of a labyrinthine boat while the undead consumed the living outside, seemed a very real and very terrifying possibility.
The sound of booted footsteps moving quickly through the corridor outside punctuated the gravity of the situation. Shouts and gunfire rang through the ship, and periodically, a scream would signify that someone, somewhere, had joined the ranks of the living dead.
Henry considered their predicament. “We’re in quarantine. The military won’t send help. If the crew can’t get the situation under control, we’ll be sunk.”
“What? Why?” Kelly asked. Her head began to spin. She had fought against all odds to get herself and as many civilians as possible to the fleet. Now that they were here, the salvation they had all waited for could now be their doom.
“They can’t help us. If they try, they risk infecting other ships!” Henry shuddered at the thought. He and his wife were now doomed to the very policy he had created. He knew that, in theory, bulkheads and portholes would seal and protect a ship from taking on so much water that it sunk — but the living dead were an entirely different, much more insidious type of flood. Soldiers could not be counted upon to kill or abandon their infected friends. Civilians would be dishonest about being bitten, and they would spread the infection to others once they succumbed. Uninfected would panic and kill innocent people… who would rise up to consume anyone they encountered. The interior of an infected ship was a hellish nightmare. “We’re on our own.”
“We have to help!” Kelly slipped her shoes on. She opened the door to their room to be confronted by a horrifying site. A gore-covered ghoul, — a shirtless and grey-skinned young man clad in boxer shorts, crouched over a body just outside the door. Its victim was a sailor who lay lifeless on the ground with his throat ripped out. Hollow eyes locked onto Kelly. An unearthly moan joined Kelly’s terror-stricken scream.
With a snarl, the monster lunged. Kelly swung the heavy metal door closed. The blood-drenched corpse was caught full in the chest and pinned within the doorway. It screeched in hunger and flailed wildly with one arm. With the other, it fought to push the door back open. Kelly kept her weight against the door. She struggled to keep the beast from gripping hold of her and dragging her into its dripping red maw. The ghoul was stronger than she was, and it forced itself further into the room.
Henry drove his shoulder into the door to keep their attacker pinned. “Get back!” he screamed. The thrashing zombie caught his wife’s hair, and it yanked her to within inches of its snapping fangs.
Henry sent one powerful elbow after another to the monster’s head. He was slowly turning the creature’s orbital bone to pulp, but the ghoul ignored its injury. It pulled at Kelly’s hair… snapping, snarling, and spraying viscera in its wild cannibalistic rage.
Kelly grunted as she ripped a hunk of her hair free and tumbled backward. The zombie made one final swipe at her, before fixing its ruined gaze on Henry and redoubling its attack. Inch by inch, it wriggled and writhed its way into the cabin. Frantically, Kelly looked around for a weapon to aid her husband.
The sound of a second hollow moan from the other side of the door signaled the reanimation of the dead sailor who lay beyond. The door shuddered violently as the weight of a second body pressed against it.
Henry locked his legs against the ground and pressed his shoulder against the door. A bloody arm snaked into the room and wormed about for purchase. It eventually found Henry and latched onto his thigh. The first ghoul grabbed Henry by the collar, and it dragged him toward its gaping maw. Henry caught the monster by the neck with one arm to hold its snarling teeth at bay.
It was a battle of pure muscle, and Henry was losing.
Kelly stood helpless. Her mind flashed back to the Tierrasanta DDC. There, soldiers had struggled against an onslaught of undead and failed. The door was their only defense, and if the monsters forced themselves in… there was nowhere to run. Her eyes had gone over every inch of the bare room a hundred times in five seconds, assessing the utility of every object within. Resolved that there was nothing lethal, she grabbed the pillow from the bed and drove it into the face of the zombie that was snapping at her husband.
With the pillow protecting her and Henry from the infectious bite of the beast, she smashed her fists and elbows into its head relentlessly, shoving it out of the room with every blow. “Get away, you fucker! Get away!” The first ghoul loosed its grip on Henry’s neck and wriggled about helplessly as Kelly pounded it — her hands and elbows bruised and bloodied from the effort.
Kelly thrust the first ghoul out of the cabin with one final shove and then added her weight to her husband’s… driving the door closed. The sailor’s arm that had wormed through was pinned as it flailed about. With their weight pressed firmly against the metal portal, Henry began to ease off the door slightly before slamming back into it. Kelly began to perform the same motion in synchrony with her husband. The door bounced repeatedly against the ghoul’s limb, until they heard a stomach-turning snap.
A growing puddle of blood oozed down the wall and onto the floor. The arm lost mobility as muscles were crushed beyond function. Any living creature would have ceased its attack, but ghouls felt no pain, and the arm continued to claw after them feebly. Finally, the metal door closed with a wet slosh of blood. The severed limb fell lifeless to the ground in a puddle of black and red gore.
Henry turned the lock, and he and Kelly slunk to the ground to catch their breath. Safe for the moment, but they were still trapped by their attackers.
“What the hell do we do?” Kelly asked.
Henry shook his head slowly. He and his wife were smart people. He had never once felt the discomforting sensation of facing a crisis that they were unable to resolve. They were problem solvers. Individually, their intellects were formidable enough, but together they were unassailable. Yet, here they sat, trapped in an officer’s cabin aboard a ship infested with undead. They were on a timer that would eventually run out and see them sunk. “I… I don’t know.”
Kelly sighed. “If we wait, maybe they will get distracted by something and we can run to the landing deck. There have to be life rafts…”
Henry nodded. Rationally, he knew that there was a long way between their quarters and the landing deck. There wasn’t much chance they’d make it without weapons. Even if they did, the deck would most likely be infested with undead soldiers, sailors, and civilians who’d had the same plan before succumbing. “These Amphibious Assault vessels have an open bay below deck. If we can get there, we might find a raft or maybe swim…”
“Do you know where that is? I don’t think it’s a good idea to go deeper into this ship if we don’t know where we’re going,” Kelly countered.
Henry nodded and said, “Then all we can do is wait.”