The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory Page 14

  I hooked the orange glow stick onto the end of my webbing, trying to pry the piece of steel with my bar as I cut, but it was a no-go. I kept cutting as two more dead men got through the door. Three tried to use his stick, but he was too far away. The first thing grabbed Frank and tried to bite him through the helmet. The Orca dropped his stick in favor of his knife, dispatching the beast with a sideways stab to the dome.

  I was two-thirds of the way through my cut before I realized we were fucked. It dawned on Frank too, because he started screaming Come on! to the dead as they entered the room and moved toward the nearest target: him.

  The couch made a screeching sound as it slid a bit, then some more, and the door was suddenly open wide enough for the dead to pour in. Being underwater screwed with their already poor coordination, but in this 15x20 room, it would be over for all of us shortly. Frank’s bang-stick was lost under the feet of the dead, but he used his knife like a ninja, taking out two more of the rotting things.

  Three reloaded quickly and took out another creature. There were six of them in the room now with more coming. I was most of the way through, and tried to pry the circle, but that shit still wouldn’t budge. Frank was still yelling when I finished the cut, and the piece of metal fell into the room. It missed my foot by inches, digging a furrow into the wooden desk and clanging away to the deck. It had to have weighed two hundred pounds. The sides of the hole were going to be too hot to even casually touch, and sharp as fuck, but that was still better than staying in this room

  “I’m through!”

  So am I, Frank said and began to yell. Get out! Getoutgetoutgetout! The dead had him and now he began to scream as he fought them with his gloved hands and a knife. Three seized the briefcase and made his way to me. He pointed at the hole I had made and started to climb up on the desk. I thrust off of the wood and shot through the opening perfectly. Spinning around, I grabbed the package that Three passed to me. He pushed off of the desk, but dead hands latched on to him. I reached down and began to pull, but there were many dead yanking the other way. I couldn’t hear him as his comms were down, but I could tell what was happening. He closed his eyes, scrunched up his face, and opened his mouth wide in a silent scream. Bloody water flooded his helmet and his mouth as they pulled him from my grasp. There were a dozen or so on him, tearing.

  Frank had stopped screaming as well, and I realized I was alone.

  Happy As a Pig in Poo

  So it was pretty dark and quiet in my new room. I extended my hand using the chem-light to survey my surroundings, and was rewarded with about an extra foot and a half of vision. My light revealed stuff I was familiar with. Tools, parts, barrels of liquids. I had cut into some type of storage area, and the stored stuff looked to be mechanical in nature. This would be a good room to loot if the ship hadn’t been crawling with the living dead.

  Thinking about the dead, I looked back into the hole. By the light of my dropped plasma-cutter, I could see the things feeding on Three. I could also see one of the things standing on the desk reaching for me. It was able to get the tips of its nasty fingers on the edge of the newly melted steel and was rewarded with burned fingers which would have incapacitated any human from the pain. I hadn’t been able to hear Three scream, but I heard those fingers crisp up like forgotten hot dogs on a grill. It made me suddenly hungry.

  “Rampart, this is Orca Seven, come in. Rampart, Orca Seven with status report, over?”

  Nothing. I tried a few more times, but either I wasn’t sending, or I wasn’t receiving. I couldn’t tell. I moved past a few shelves and found a bulkhead, then ran my hand down that until I found a door. This one was locked with those six handles, and I turned them all. Pushing the door open, I was reluctant to step outside the room, but I also had no intentions on making this my new home, so a Man-Up was necessary.

  My right boot hit the deck soundlessly, and the rest of me followed. I looked to the right, then back to the left. Right angled down, further into Hell. Left was the opposite, and I really didn’t want to go play in the rest of this sunken, infested boat, so my options were limited. I began trekking slowly upwards, using a handrail to help me forward. This briefcase was friggin’ heavy, but I would be damned if I would leave it behind. My whole crew had gotten killed for it.

  A dozen steps more, and there was a man in front of me. He had his back to me, and was holding onto the railing as I was. He was motionless, and dressed in that same black camo that I had been seeing all over this tub. I took a step toward him, and his head moved. He looked like he was listening for something, but I hadn’t made a sound. The thing took another step forward, which was away from me, and stopped, sort of staring into the darkness ahead of it. At this rate, he would reach the end of the corridor in about six days, so he had to go. I reached for my knife. It was still stuck in the head of one of the dead a deck below me. I didn’t have my bang-stick, my cutter, or even the luxury of using harsh language against this creature as it probably couldn’t hear me.

  I pushed the orange light down toward the floor, but the only thing there was more spent casings. They had all rolled to one side of the deck because of the list of the ship. There was fuck-all here to deal with this creature. How was I going to get past this asshole?

  I decided a search of the briefcase might yield me a weapon. There were two belt-buckle pockets up front, and a small pouch in the back. The pouch held a book in a plastic Zip-Lock style bag. The left-side pocket contained a hockey puck with a signature I couldn’t quite make out. The right side offered me a silver Cross-type pen and pencil. There were matching seals on the writing implements, and the graphic looked to have gold in an exterior ring with a blue center. There was an eagle in the center as well. I couldn’t make out the writing by chemical light, but what was important was that I now had something to kill the zombie in front of me with.

  Re-death by pen, bitches.

  What if I couldn’t get the thing through his head? It was difficult enough to stab a dude through the noggin with a knife, but with a pen? It would have to be the temple. Or better yet, through the eye. I would have to go all ninja on his ass with five and a half inches of ink-filled metal.

  As sneaky as possible, I slunk up behind him. Making a fist, I put the pen between my middle and ring fingers so it stuck out. The gloves would only get slightly in the way. I nodded to myself. Yeah, this shit was doable. I tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked in every direction but at me. Rolling my eyes, I pulled back on his right shoulder a little. He fought me and pulled away, actually taking a step further down the corridor. Was this a joke? A fucking undead prank? Tee hee, I’ma fuck with my food before I nibble. I pulled harder, and this time, he did turn enough to see me. Of course, he lunged immediately, and of course, I punched him in the eye. The point of the pen scraped the outside of his nose and plunged into the thing’s orbit. It went between the eye and the socket, and that shit went deep. The creature’s hand, which had been grabbing for me, went limp-ish and sort of hung suspended in the water. His eyes glazed, and I gave him my smirk through the mask. You know, that awesome half-smile that melts a woman’s will and makes their panties hit the floor? That smirk. Oh? You can’t do that? I’m available for lessons.

  So, mid-smirk, the thing’s eyes snap back to me, completely focused. I had half a breath to think Oh shit! and cease smirking before his hand was on me and he was all teeth. He let go of the railing, spun, and had both hands on me as fast as a cobra. Snapping, he pulled me toward him as he leaned in, and he smashed into the glass of my helmet, losing a tooth. Undeterred, he kept up with the snapping, and actually bit off a chunk of his tongue. That shit was nasty, as it was attached to him by a string of tongue-meat and flapped in the water.

  Stupidly, I was still holding onto the briefcase, so in a moment of genius, I let it go to fight off the undead menace. I grabbed his neck with my left and began punching him with my right. He looked at me with those dead, red eyes, and I could tell this fucker had been a bad guy, even in lif
e. All these black camo motherfuckers had most certainly boarded this vessel and caused her to sink. They had killed the people on board, or had died trying, but they had undoubtedly put a large hole in the side of the Kanawha, causing untold destruction and death.

  Assholes. I think per capita, our planetary asshole ratio had gone through the fucking roof with the onset of this damned apocalypse. Why can’t we all just get along?

  I was not getting along with this fuk’n dead guy, that was for sure. He wanted my entrails to be my extrails, and that shit was bothersome. I gave a monumental shove with my left hand under his chin, and for a split second took him by surprise. I was able to push his head back just enough to give him a palm-heel strike, and drive that pen into his head up to the hilt. Well, pens don’t have hilts, but if they did…

  He instantly stopped moving, other than his eyes, which blinked a few times before they rolled back (past the pen) into his head. I was taking no chances, and when he hit the deck, I stomped on his dome until I heard a crack. That stomping shit is way harder underwater.

  I put my hand against the bulkhead for a sec to catch my breath, and looked for my briefcase. It hadn’t wandered off, so I grabbed it, then decided I wanted my pen back. Try as I might, I couldn’t dig it out. The end of it was flush with where his tear-duct was, and it was stuck fast. I tried like hell, even squishing the fucker’s eye (second time in an hour), but it was a no-go. This prick would have a beautiful pen in his skull along with some fish and maybe a hermit crab in the coming months.

  I had to think about that. Can you imagine the jealousy and hate from all the other hermit crabs, when you have one walking around with a human skull as his house? I started laughing in my helmet. Great big guffaws. I even danced a little jig. I gave the dead guy another kick for good measure and began to laugh again.

  Damn, I was in a good mood! I took two deep breaths to calm down. I was a bit tired from the fighting/stabbing/stomping/thinking session.

  But I shouldn’t be. I was in the best shape of my life. Granted, everything overexerted a person when underwater. But the happy and the tired? Those were dead giveaways, and I was immediately concerned. Happy, but scared. Tired but pissed. I laughed again. How stupid is it to be happy and frightened at the same time. I mean, aren’t they mutually exclusive?

  I felt something move behind me. I didn’t hear it, but I just knew something was there from the pressure differential through the water. I spun in a wide arc, and, well, you already know what it was. I mean this is a damn zombie story.

  It was a zombie. This one was not clad in black, it was a seaman. Really, that was the first thought that popped into my head. Seaman. So obviously, in a display of natural immaturity, I began to laugh about homonyms. I was still chortling when the bastard grabbed me. I laughed even harder when I noticed the knife sticking out of the creature’s neck, and the slung MP5 around his shoulder. He looked ridiculous! I giggled as we grappled, pulling the edged weapon out of him and stabbing him in the head with it over and over. He went limp, and of course, that word got me going again. How many penis related jokes could there be in one minute?

  My smile evaporated, and I began to feel anxiety. Not scared, per-se, but just off. Something was up. I had figured it out after I destroyed zombie number one, and I almost had it again a moment ago before this asshole decided to dine on me, but the thought had fled.

  I stood there on the angled deck, staring at two re-killed dead men, wondering WTF I had been thinking about just a minute before. I was diving. There were zombies. I was alone. I was happy. I was angry. I could barely see… Whoa. Just whoa. Back up. Diving and happy? Full of anxiety?

  Fuck.

  I’m narc’d. If you’re not a diver, you might not know what nitrogen narcosis is. It’s a condition that divers suffer from, usually at depths over a hundred feet, where breathing air at pressure increases the solubility of gases in body tissues. It basically gets you high because the gas in the blood passing through the brain is pressurized differently than the pressure around you.

  It could be deadly.

  All I would have to do is get to a shallower depth and I should be fine. But I was only about forty feet down. The only way I could be suffering from narcosis is if… oh shit… if there was something wrong with the scrubbers in my re-breather. I might not be getting all the carbon dioxide out of my breathable air. Holy shitballs, I’m in trouble. Must have happened when the stairs collapsed.

  I snapped another chemical light and hung it on my vest. This one was green, and it was the most illuminating. Gave me about three feet of visibility. I started walking quickly up the companionway. I was tired, and I shouldn’t be, which led me to a bit of fear. The knife was in my left hand, which was the hand I needed to use to pull myself forward. The briefcase was getting heavy in my right hand, but what could I do?

  I detected movement in front of me. Initially, I thought it was me seeing things, but no, it was there. I moved steadily toward it because back the way I had come was not an option. I leaned forward, straining my eyes to see what was there. Four dead men materialized out of the gloom. They were headed toward me at a ridiculously slow speed even for the living dead. They were way further away than the three feet I thought the chem-lights would allow. I squinted, and realized there was light behind them. Faint, but there. I had come, maybe, sixty feet since I had cut the hole in the deck, so I should be coming up out of the water in just a minute or so. Well, after I dispatched these dead douches.

  The pus bags had definitely seen me. One fell as it moved forward on the deck, but its three pals seemed to be having little trouble.

  One knife, one briefcase, and four undead. Oh yeah, and time. I needed out of this monkey suit soon, or I would slip into a coma. I switched my weapon and briefcase hands, I wanted the knife in my strong hand. I was dizzy when the first one and I met. He was nasty, all burned and black. I stabbed him in the right eye as he lunged. One down. Uneventful. Events transpired when I tried to take out number two, however. I slipped as I brought the blade around in a sideways arc trying to get into the temple, and ended up getting him, you guessed it, in the neck. He was on me before I could pull the knife out, and this time, he had friends. The first one closed his teeth around the dry suit on my left shoulder. It didn’t get me, but he was yanking on my suit with his mouth. Fucker was chewing through the rubber. Another grabbed me around the waist, and we went down in a heap. This heap happened to be in front of the third one’s face, and he tried to bite me through the helmet like all his buddies had. I fought for all I was worth, but there were three of them and I was in a dry suit. Shoulder-guy decided he didn’t like the taste of rubber, so he switched to my arm. Still rubber, but he seemed to enjoy this more. I couldn’t see him, as he had the arm with the briefcase, and I was frantically stabbing with the other hand, his buddy straddling me. It felt wet where the bastard was chewing on my forearm, but the dumb thing had still only gotten my suit. If he pulled out a chunk, I was in deep shit as my suit would flood.

  I managed to get a fatal jab on the one who was trying to eat my face. He collapsed, but on my stabbing arm. His pal was chewing on my chest and I decided enough was enough. I bucked and kicked and fought to get them off me. I freed my right arm, but not before a searing pain came from my left. The fucker had bitten me. I didn’t feel water gushing in, just a wetness, but it was cold so it wasn’t blood. He had just pinched me through the neoprene. The one on my chest had also gotten purchase, and I felt a brief pinch there too before the bastard was yanked off of me. I rolled to my left and grappled with the one gnawing on my arm. We both rolled around for a sec, me stabbing him but not penetrating his skull. Shreds of his face and scalp came away as I repeatedly thrust the blade at him. He batted my hand away and I lost the knife. I put both mitts on his throat, pushing and squeezing. A living person would have been choked out in moments, but this dead thing actually increased its assault if anything.

  I was tiring, and he wasn’t. My arms were losing strengt
h and the thing leaned ever closer until suddenly two inches of steel were sticking out of its forehead and its un-life fled. I looked up into the face of Smithers, who put his boot on the back of the zombie’s skull, yanked his blade out of the thing’s dome, and extended a hand down to me. His face turned from smiling to concern, and he grabbed my arm. Bubbles were leaking from the spot where the dead thing had bitten me. My suit was ruptured. He inspected it as I lay there, then helped me up. He was talking a mile a minute into his mic, I could see it, but I couldn’t hear him, so I let him know. He nodded and we moved uphill toward the light.

  Fifty or so labored steps and our heads broke water. All kinds of shit was floating in the room we entered, plastic bottles, paper, oil, and a dead guy with a hole in his head. I was dizzy as hell, and began to pull my suit off. Smithers stopped me, shaking his head inside his helmet. He grabbed my hand and began pulling me toward the far hatch. I could see waves breaking over the side of the Kanawha through the broken porthole. I smiled in spite of my anxiety.

  The hatch stuck but for a moment, and then we were outside under the cranes. Smithers closed the steel door, then helped me get my helmet off. I took a deep breath and instantly felt better. Three breaths later found me perfectly fine. Fine is better than in a coma.

  I glanced at the Mary’s Joy. I saw Remo and Everly pointing at us from the rear deck. Ship stood there with his tree-trunk arms folded, giving me the stinkeye. When I got my helmet off, I saw the glimmer of Bigfoot teeth, and knew it was possible for a Sasquatch to smile. Two of the crew were on the Kanawha in a couple of ticks, and they helped Smithers and I make it the rest of the way. One of them asked if I needed him to carry the briefcase, but fuck that. I had procured it. I had carried it. I had wielded it as a club to fend off undead attackers. I was going to see it to Everly.