I could still see the empty dock, far off the port bow. Unless it was the starboard bow. I wondered which way it worked. If it was like stage directions.
“Avast!” a voice called. Down below, in the water, there was a little man in a little motorboat. He pointed a little handgun at us.
We put our hands up, trained by cop dramas.
“Put your hands down. D’ya think I’d have bothered you if I thought you had weapons?” he said. He had a smile like a fighting dog. “Just toss your supplies over, water and food, blankets, first aid, whatever you got. Sunscreen, especially.” He wore sunglasses, the bastard, but his bald head was a deep, painful pink. “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want to waste my ammo.”
“Okay, okay, give us a minute,” Highwater said. Always the fast thinker. “What do we do?” he whispered.
I found that I was very thirsty. “We’re pirates,” I said.
“So…what?” Juicy whispered. “We parlay?”
I squirmed out of the bedroll, came to the edge of the boat. “Let’s join forces, man,” I called. “We’re resourceful folks, the kind you want on your side. We stole all of this stuff ourselves, and dispatched three of… You know. Those things!” Nobody had said the Z word yet, and I didn’t want to be the first.
The little man shot his little gun. The three of us on the Niña hit the deck-was that where the phrase came from?-and waited. My ears rang.
“I mean it,” the little man shouted.
“Okay, you win,” I called.
So we lost our supplies, and the little man motored off.
“This can’t be a full-size ship,” Juicy said. It’s maybe ten-twelve paces from bow to stern.”
“Maybe it’s a scale model,” I guessed.
We were going to die of thirst. Unless one of us turned into a zombie out of nowhere, the way Kelly had, and then we’d die of being zombies. Maybe dying of thirst wasn’t the worst way to go. The worst way to go, I thought, was being lashed head-to-head with a decomposing skeleton, and left to starve. Some king did that to his enemies, back in the day when people could do things like that and not get put on trial for being a terrorist. Although probably you’d still just die of thirst.
We searched the place, now that we had daylight. We didn’t find any water, but we found a whip, lashed to the wall below deck. (Whether it was a full-sized whip, or just to scale, I don’t know.) It was big. I went to show off and hit myself in the ear. It didn’t even snap.
Back when phones and the Internet still worked, people on Twitter had said that you could use whips to control the zombies. That, and how zombieism was an STD, incubating before it turned its victims. Those people had to be zombies by now, due to their total lack of bullshit detectors. But we were thirsty enough to try anything. Juicy took the whip from me. She switched it without hitting herself. It popped like when Indiana Jones does it. She called for Kelly.
A few minutes later, Kelly bobbed up out of the water. So maybe zombies could swim. Maybe they were just lazy. They needed external motivation. Juicy talked to him, using the whip for punctuation. She said his name. He still responded to it, which didn’t bother any of us, though maybe it should have. He knew our names at one point. Someone did.
Kelly climbed up the rope we dangled down for him. He stood, dripping onto the deck, eyeing us as if we were a hundred dewy virgins. He looked that way at all of us, which probably upset Juicy. He didn’t seem to remember that they’d been together. But it was nice to have him back. I told him so, but he didn’t say much.
“We need you to attack them,” Juicy said, pointing. She’d picked out a nice little motorboat, the kind that has a cabin with refrigerators and beds and a big-ass water tank. Kelly made a noise like the Incredible Hulk, and wiggled his hips like Elvis. I think he still loved Juicy.
She told him to go wait in the water, and act like he was drowning. With luck, he wouldn’t look dead that way. He smiled at Juicy, and he went.
It was like bioterrorism, what we were doing. It was like giving smallpox-infected blankets to the Native Americans. It was like taking someone else’s towel off the hook on the locker room wall when they’re in the shower because yours got wet-it was just plain mean.
We waved to the motorboat. We pointed to Kelly. We pointed at the rigging. Or the spar. Or the mizzenmast. Whatever the sail was attached to. There was no wind.
The elderly couple understood, and they motored over to where Kelly bobbed and waved. They seemed like such nice people, helping out a stranger like that. We reminded ourselves that it was us or them.
The couple threw out a rope. They pulled Kelly out of the black water, and by the time they dropped the rope and backed away, he was wiggling onto their deck. And then it was like an L. L. Bean catalog gone terribly wrong: flannel tearing and sensible shoes flying.
While Kelly ate, we argued about whether we should have done something differently.
We called our new home the SuperBall. It’d had a different name before, but the paint got messed up when Juicy pulled the boat up next to the Niña. She’s never been good at parallel parking. But you should have seen her, boldly swimming over to get the boat, with the whip in her teeth, her clothes all wet and clingy. It was all Highwater and me could do not to jump on her, once we got aboard the boat. I saw the way he looked at her, and he saw the way I looked at her. We were both ashamed of ourselves, going after Kelly’s girl. Although it wasn’t like he was taking care of her anymore. And he’d always been flirting with other girls. Rumor had it he’d been screwing around.
We let the old couple stay. They obeyed the whip, like Kelly, and it was their boat, after all. We started calling them Homer and Marge, which are terribly old-fashioned names when you think about it. Their hair was thin and fine and pale, and both of them were balding. They wandered around on the deck, moaning. They were always together. Groping each other, even. Kelly followed them around, but they ignored him.
Us pirates stayed inside the cabin. That way, all of the other boats that went past would think that we were already a ghost ship. We would be safe.
Back on shore, it would be like every zombie movie you’ve ever seen. Here it was peaceful. We played with the Ouija board we found, but we couldn’t contact any ghosts. You’d think with this many dead people around we could find a ghost willing to talk. We checked the radio, but no one would talk to us on that either. Or maybe the batteries were dead. I taught Juicy some hymnals that I remembered from O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also the chorus of a screamer by this band Lordi called “The Night of the Loving Dead.” I couldn’t remember any of the words except for the title, but I sang it and she smiled.
Even then I knew. She’d already chosen Highwater. They hadn’t even kissed yet, not in front of me, but I knew. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.
Juicy asked me to go outside. The look she gave me when she closed the door told me she knew how I felt. Her eyes were wet with desire. Or maybe grief. Or need. She couldn’t stop herself; she was trying to tell me.
I paced, waiting for her to open the door. I wanted to call out her name-her real name-but the only one I could remember was Kelly’s. I opened my mouth to say it, just in case. Then I heard grunting and moaning and wet smacking.
The Crocodiles by Steven Popkes
Steven Popkes is the author of two novels: Caliban Landing and Slow Lightning. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, SCI FICTION, and in the annuals the Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction, and Year’s Best Fantasy. His story “The Color Winter” was a finalist for the Nebula Award. He is currently working on a novel about flying witches.