Dead Calm (2 page)

A slight breeze rattled the sails, raising their
hopes, but both died as quickly as they came up.

Noise from below caught their attention, so Heather
bent down into the hatch to see who it was. Straightening, she
said, “Susan and Cindy.”

Susan had come along with Mary when Steve locked down
the Garnett Bank Building. The two were a couple until Susan
started to gravitate to Tick-Tock. Not wanting a jealous love
triangle while they were living in such restricted quarters, Steve
brought the situation out into the open the night they sailed. He
made the three of them promise to back off from one another, no
fucking or fighting, until they were once again on dry land.

A small voice called up through the open hatch to
wish all of them a good morning.

It was Cindy, the group's hope for a cure. After her
little brother, who was infected with the HWNW virus, bit her,
Cindy's immune system fought off the disease. The day before the
dead broke into the Garnett Bank Building, Heather and Marcia had
come across the little girl hiding in some unused offices. After
they saw the half-healed bite marks on her arm and came to the
conclusion that she was immune, they laid plans to take her
somewhere so that she could be studied and a cure found.

The three returned Cindy's greeting and then fell
into a restless silence until Susan appeared carrying a tray with
mugs of coffee on it. After passing these around, she took a seat
on the far side of the cockpit from Tick-Tock. Since Steve's
meeting about their back-and-forth relationship, she went out of
her way to avoid both Tick-Tock and Mary.

False dawn came and went with the four of them
sipping coffee as the boat drifted in an easterly direction. Steve,
Heather and Tick-Tock tried to keep as much of the deteriorating
situation to themselves as they could, but the group's state was
readily apparent to Susan and Brain. Only Cindy and Mary seemed
unaware of the danger they faced.

As dawn broke, Heather pointed to the Northeast and
said, “Cloud on the horizon, maybe we'll pick up some wind or it'll
rain and we can get some fresh water.”

Steve squinted in that direction and felt his hopes
rise at seeing the faint distant smudge. In the days since the
storm had passed, the sky had been cloudless and blue, so this was
a very welcome sight. They desperately needed some wind. If it
didn't kick in by nightfall, they would have to crank up the engine
and take their chances heading east. He knew if they ran out of
fuel before they reached land they were in deep shit, but it seemed
their options were getting more limited as time went by.

Feeling the discouraged mood of the group, Susan
stood to go below and see what Cindy was up to. She had set the
little girl to picking out breakfast MRE's from their dwindling
supply and promised to let her help put them together into some
semblance of food.

As she moved to the hatch, she heard the sound of
small feet pounding up the ladder, which could only belong to one
person. Stepping aside and turning to her left to give Cindy room
to pass, her eyes locked on the small smudge in the distance.
Remembering when she was little how she used to try and find shapes
in the clouds, she asked Cindy what she thought it looked like.

Cindy studied the formless mass for a moment before
saying, “Aw, that's not a cloud, Susan. It's a great big ship. You
can see the smoke stack and everything.”

Bored with the game, she turned to Heather to ask if
they could go fishing later but found herself ignored as everyone
in the cockpit crowded the rail to look at something. Wedging
herself between Steve and Heather, she couldn't figure out what was
so exciting. It was just a big boat and they already had a
boat.

Wondering if Brain was awake, she went below to see
if he wanted to play Monopoly before breakfast.

***

“That kid must have eyes like a hawk,” Tick-Tock said
as he steered the sailboat toward the vessel in the distance. “We
all looked at that ship and thought it was a cloud. Shit, I could
barely even tell what it was when I scoped it out with the
binoculars.”

Steve nodded in reply as the sailboat’s small engine
pushed them at a steady pace through the flat water. After days of
barely making headway, he was enjoying the breeze brought on by the
motion.

Heather agreed, “I must have looked at it a half
dozen times and all I saw was a cloud.”

Raising a pair of binoculars to his eyes, Steve said,
“Morning light is tricky. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you're
looking at.” To Tick-Tock, he asked, “How big do you think she
is?”

Tick-Tock scrutinized the ship through his binoculars
before replying, “Hard to tell. She's still a long way off and she
was broadside to us when we first spotted her. Now we're looking at
her bow on.”

“Is it coming toward us?” Heather asked.

“I’ll say no,” Tick-Tock answered. “Looks dead in the
water. I don't see any navigation lights, and it doesn't seem to be
making any headway. It could be spinning on its anchor, but there's
no wind. My guess is her rudder is turned and she's spinning in the
current.”

Steve let the binoculars drop to hang from the strap
around his neck and asked, “How long until we're close?”

After judging the distance, Tick-Tock replied, “We’re
only making five or six knots, so I’d say it'll take over an
hour.”

“It seems like we're moving faster,” Heather
commented.

“That’s because we’ve been sitting still for the past
few days.”

“If we’ve got an hour then we've got enough time for
a war council,” Steve said. “We should go over our options.”
Leaning into the open hatch, he called out, “Brain, we need you up
here.”

The engineer appeared seconds later asking, “What's
up, we close to that ship yet?”

Steve shook his head, “Not yet, I need you to steer
the boat while we figure out how to handle this.”

As Brain came on deck, Steve noticed how much weight
the man had lost. Before Dead Day, Brain had been grossly
overweight. The weight, combined with his arrogant attitude, made
Steve reluctant to include him in his plan. Now he was glad he'd
asked the young engineer to join them. After all they'd gone
through since then, Brain had proven his worth countless times.

“Whatever you decide, count me in,” he said as he
took the wheel.

Because of Brain's ego problem before Dead Day, or
D-Day as they sometimes called it, Steve was reluctant to tell him
that his engineering talents were too valuable to risk by allowing
him to board the ship. He didn't want the tech's head to swell up
so much it wouldn't fit through the door. Steve didn't want to put
any of the survivor’s lives at risk, but he knew that in the post
dead world, Brain’s knowledge was priceless in their struggle to
survive.

“First, we have to figure out what kind of ship it is
and go from there,” Tick-Tock said. “From what I can see it looks
like a tanker.”

Brain shook his head, “It's not a tanker. It's a
cruise ship. I could tell earlier when I looked at it through the
binoculars. Every year on my Mom's birthday, I used to take her on
a cruise.”

“Cruise ship,” Heather asked with excitement, “like
in ‘The Love Boat’ cruise ship?”

Brain nodded, “It's so obvious I didn't mention
it.”

Obvious to you maybe, Steve thought. Scrutinizing the
craft in the distance, he said, “That ship could have everything we
need. Food, water and even gas for the engine.”

“And showers,” Heather added. “It's getting old
trying to wash up with salt water.”

“And shops for Mary to browse through,
la-di-fucking-da,” Tick-Tock wisecracked. “But if their GPS is
working, we can plot our position and figure out where in the hell
we are. Even if it's out, we're not totally screwed. All we need to
do is find a sextant, a nautical almanac and an accurate
chronometer, so I can plot our position and course by hand. On a
ship that big, I’m sure one of the officers will have them.”

“Do you know how to do that?” Brain asked. “Figure
out where we are?”

“Haven’t done it since I was a kid, but then again, I
haven't sailed since then, and I seem to be doing a pretty good job
so far.”

No one could dispute this comment. During the storm,
Tick-Tock had stayed on deck for its duration with Steve as his
first mate. The two of them brought The Usual Suspects through
twenty-foot troughs of water and battering winds with no loss of
life or serious damage to the craft.

The conversation turned to the bounty the ship could
provide and their mood was charged with excitement until Steve
brought them back to earth by saying, “But first we have to figure
out how to get on board.”

***

The four who would be in the boarding party, Steve,
Heather, Tick-Tick and Susan, sat around the table in the forward
cabin as they ran through the possibilities of what they might find
on the cruise ship.

“It could be abandoned,” Susan said hopefully.

“Abandoned by the living,” Tick-Tock said. “That
would leave us with a ship full of the dead to deal with.”

“Or it might be full of the living,” Heather
added.

“In which case we'd be looked on as intruders,” Steve
pointed out. “Remember how we were prepared to kill anyone who
tried to take what was ours at the bank building?”

“But this is different,” Susan said.

Shaking his head, Tick-Tock spoke up, “No, it’s not,
we're just on the other side now.”

The thought of being the bad guys didn't sit well
with those gathered around the table. The label 'Looter' wasn't one
they wanted to wear.

In their defense, Susan said, “But if someone had
come to us peacefully, we wouldn't have turned them away. Look at
that Harrison guy, for example. You fed him and let him stay, and
he was crazy as a loon.” Looking directly at Steve she added, “And
I'm sure we would have helped anyone else who asked. Hopefully
whoever’s on board that ship will act as civilized as we did. I
think it all hinges on how we approach them. If we go in with guns
drawn, then they'll react in kind. If we signal them and ask for
assistance, they might be more receptive to helping us.”

Steve inwardly cringed at hearing Brian Harrison's
name. The man had been found half insane, holed up in an office on
the twelfth floor of the Garnett Bank Building. They had come
across him when they swept the building after losing one of their
own, Donna, to a zombie who emerged from its hiding place.

Donna was the first person lost under Steve's command
and he took it hard. She had been bitten and infected, and he was
the one who put a bullet in her heart before she died and came
back. The two things that saved him that night from taking his own
life were his overwhelming will to never give up, and the
appearance of Heather.

Steve didn't know how the dead had breached the
defenses of the building, but he had a suspicion that Harrison was
involved somehow. The night the dead broke in, they lost three of
their number. Jonny G, his girlfriend Marcia and Mary's morning
show partner, Meat.

“We might want to seriously consider talking nice
first,” Tick-Tock decided. “If anyone’s left alive on that cruise
ship and they're armed, we'd be hard pressed to mount any kind of
assault against them. We'd take casualties.”

“So, we'll try the soft approach first and ask to
come aboard,” Steve said.

“And if that doesn't work, if they tell us to go to
hell?” Susan asked.

Steve said with determination, “Then we have no other
option than to take that ship by force. I didn't make it this far
to die at sea.” Turning to Tick-Tock, he said, “You were in the
Marines, any ideas on how we can do this?”

“A few. It depends on how many people we're going up
against and how well armed they are. I remember reading that after
9/11 they removed all the shotguns used to shoot skeet from the
cruise ships sailing out of U.S. ports. That'll at least cut down
on any potential arsenal they might have. The ship's officers will
have a few weapons. Maybe a couple rifles or a pistol or two. If
this is a normal cruise that got interrupted by the HWNW virus,
then we should be in good shape if we have to storm her. On the
other hand, if that ship was taken by people fleeing the virus,
then there's no telling what kind of firepower they have.”

“I agree,” Heather said. “Look at the weapons we put
together. M-4 automatic rifles, pistols, ammunition,” turning to
Tick-Tock, she added with a smile, “and that big old .50 caliber
machine gun you insisted on bringing along. Why would you want that
thing out here anyway?”

“To repel boarders,” Tick-Tock answered in a matter
of fact tone. “Let's just hope they don't have one too.”

***

The cruise ship continued to spin around as they
approached. When Steve went topside after the meeting ended, he saw
that the stern was coming around to point in their direction. Now
that the sailboat had closed in on the larger craft, its enormous
size became more apparent. Tick-Tock estimated that the ship was
around a thousand feet in length. As the rear of the vessel came
into view, they raised their binoculars and tried to make out the
cruise liner's name, painted on the stern.

“Calm of the Seas,” Steve read aloud before lowering
his binoculars.

Tick-Tock relieved Brain at the wheel. After checking
their position, he said, “Now I'm sure she's dead in the water.”
Glancing at the brass gauges mounted above the steering station, he
made a slight alteration in their course and added, “We've entered
a current. I can feel the tug on the wheel and we've sped up by a
couple knots. Current's moving in the same direction that ship's
heading. This has got to be part of the Gulf Stream that loops
south of the States before flowing out the through the Florida
straits. Since it's pulling us northeast, I'd say we're closer to
the coast of Mexico or Texas than we are to Florida.”