“We’re quarantined.” Henry and his wife stepped into the hall. “There’s no place to go. We’ve got to try to get this ship under control.”
“You’re a VIP, Doc. Someone high up wants you alive, and we’re going to make sure you stay that way.” Miguel replied through labored breaths. The effort of moving quickly on crutches was wearing on him. “You’re our only ticket off this boat.”
“Run!” Pam shouted.
Henry and Kelly rushed up to Miguel and started to help him down the hallway.
“No! Go! You can’t stay here! Go!” Miguel rejected their attempt to help him.
Henry and Kelly understood — without them, the military would not rescue anyone else. If they were caught, everyone was doomed. They reluctantly left Miguel and rushed towards Pam.
Henry arrived at Pam’s position, and looked down the corridor she was defending. His countenance became one of horror. “Holy shit!”
Kelly pulled her husband into the stairwell, and pleaded with Carl and Miguel. “Hurry!”
“I’m almost out!” Pam slung her rifle around her back, drew her sidearm, and resumed firing.
The young sailor stepped into the hallway next to Pam after getting Henry and Kelly safely behind him. Holding a long bloody knife, he confronted the approaching swarm with resolution.
In seconds, the last of Pam’s ammunition was spent. She took her rifle back out and held it like a battering ram. She and the sailor stood in the junction—prepared to defend it with their lives.
Carl turned from defending the corridor behind him, broke into a run, and in one motion, scooped Miguel up over his shoulder. Miguel twisted around onto his stomach and drew his combat knife.
“God damn! That’s a lot of ghouls!” Miguel gasped. The undead pack behind them was closing. Their numbers seemed to crowd the hallway into a single writhing mass of hunger.
Suddenly, something hit Carl hard in the side, and Miguel’s world twisted into a tornado of gray metal, red blood, and terrifying screams. He was overcome by a sensation of weightlessness before hitting the hard metal floor with a bone-jarring thud. The wind was knocked from his lungs, a sharp pain throbbed in his head, and a lightshow of stars clouded his vision.
A single thought ran through Miguel’s mind as unconsciousness took him: “This is it. I’m dead.”
Miguel felt the weight of writhing bodies on top of him, hands gripping his arms, and the hard scrape of metal against his back as he was dragged violently across the ground. A commotion of grunts shouts and yells filled Miguel’s mind until he fixated on one constant sound. It was familiar, yet strange in tone. He opened his eyes and pushed the dizziness from his mind.
“No! No! No! No!” Pam repeated over and over again in a shrill, panicked pitch. She stood over Miguel with her back towards him, thrusting the butt of her rifle into the horde of undead raging in the doorway. Gore smattered in all directions as her rifle came away with a spray of viscera. Tangled gray arms reached through the portal, bruised and bent at unnatural angles.
Miguel regained his senses, and realized that he was in the stairwell. He was surrounded by a dozen screaming and terrified civilians. As he regained his bearings, he looked around for Carl.
“Get to the Humvees!” Carl shouted. “Go! Go! Get to the Hummers!”
Miguel’s friend and commanding officer lay on his back in the junction outside the portal. Carl was fighting madly for his life. He held his axe by the head and used the hilt to fend off a dozen grasping claws and snarling maws.
Miguel struggled to his knees, his head throbbing with every beat of his heart. Weak and disoriented, he lunged to Carl’s defense with his knife in hand.
“No! No! No!” Pam continued to scream, tears streaking down her cheeks as she crashed the butt of her rifle into the eye socket of a ghoul.
“Go! Run!” Carl’s pleas grew more frantic and panicked. There was desperation in Carl’s voice that Miguel had never heard in his friend before. “Go now! Go now! Please!”
Miguel stabbed a zombie through the eye socket and reached into the melee to grip Carl by the collar. He was beginning to pull him to safety when Miguel noticed Carl’s wounds. Four or five vicious bites were hemorrhaging blood from Carl’s legs, abdomen, and arms. Miguel’s heart dropped, and he slackened his grip on Carl’s collar.
His strength pooling red on the floor beneath him, Carl was fighting against the monsters to buy time for Pam, Miguel, and the civilians. “Go! Please Go! Leave me! Please go now!” He screamed madly.
Miguel heard himself shout an order to the civilians behind him, “Go!”
“Go!” He backed away from Carl’s struggle, gripped Pam by the shoulder, and yanked her toward the stairs.
“Leave me! Run!” Carl’s orders rang through the stairwell over the moans and snarls of the raging undead.
Miguel looked down at his friend as he began to ascend the stairs. Beyond the pain and fury in Carl’s eyes, there was something else — a resolve, a refusal to lose another person under his command. He was prepared to die here, to keep the undead from pursuing his friends, but he could not keep up the struggle forever.
“Carl!” Pam sobbed as she turned away from her commander.
“Carl!” Miguel fought back tears as he pulled himself up the stairs on his back. His eyes locked on his friend. Carl was fighting like a wild beast. He was buried under a writhing swarm of undead in a growing puddle of his own blood.
“Go! Get to the Humvees! Get out of here! Go!” Carl gasped.
Chapter 36
“Help him!” Pam ordered.
A couple of civilians supported Miguel by the shoulders, and they helped him to ascend the stairs. Carl’s shouting from below had ceased. It was replaced by screams and gunfire from the open portal leading to the flight deck above.
“And you stay next to me!” Pam grabbed Henry by the arm and led the group up the stairs.
Bright white ship lights cast long black shadows on the enormous deck. Sporadic muzzle flashes cut through the darkness — the accompanying noise echoed for miles. Cries of the injured and dying joined the chorus of moans that carried over the cool ocean air.
Near the front of the ship, two blood-covered marines stood atop a jet fighter. They protected a family of four that was huddled in terror on the plane’s wing. Two dozen walking corpses reached for them hungrily, as they sat just out of reach. Occasionally, one would manage to climb atop the plane, only to be knocked off the aircraft by the marines. They tumbled to the ground with a thud before regaining their feet and resuming their attack.
Henry thought of the story of Sisyphus, damned forever to roll a boulder up a hill. Just like the boulder, the zombies were repeatedly cast down from the summit. While the undead could play this game for eternity, however, the marines could not. They, and the family they protected, would eventually be overwhelmed.
At the rear of the flight deck, a collection of over a dozen civilians sat huddled inside a semicircular barricade. Munitions carts, clothes, guns, and chairs, formed a makeshift and waist-high perimeter around the group. Its rear faced the empty blackness of the ocean beyond the aft edge of the ship. It was assailed by a raving mob of howling monsters. A handful of soldiers and civilians fought with blades and clubs to defend those behind them. Bodies that fell became part of the barricade.
Countless bodies littered the deck. Some moaned mindlessly. Others cried in anguish at the pain of their mortal wounds, but most lay still. A naval officer sat lazily against a nearby wall. He cast a lethargic gaze on the group as they emerged from the ship. If not for the pool of blood beneath him and the gruesome wound on his leg, he would have appeared drunk. Several bodies sat piled around him, and he pointed his pistol clumsily at Pam… unsure if she were friend or foe. He looked at her for a few seconds, smiled an awkward smile, and lowered his weapon. He rested his head against the wall. He was guarding the door — attempting to prevent any more ghouls from reaching the flight deck. His effort had cost him, but he continued doing his duty even though his life was coming to an end.