The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(71)
Pirates vs. Zombies
By Amelia Beamer
Amelia Beamer works as an editor and reviewer for Locus Magazine. She has won several literary awards and has published fiction and poetry in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Interfictions 2, Red Cedar Review, and other venues. As an independent scholar, she has published papers in Foundation and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Michigan State University, and attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2004. Her first novel—a zombie tale called The Loving Dead, which she describes as “a darkly humorous story of sex, relationships, and zombies”—was published this summer. Our next story is set in the same milieu.
Many people dream of owning a yacht. Who wouldn’t revel in the freedom to sail the seas while enjoying all the amenities? Problem is, yachts are kind of expensive—the world’s largest yacht, the 525-foot Project Platinum, owned by the Crown Prince of Dubai, is estimated to cost upwards of $300 million. In 2004, a former child actor named Skylar Deleon (who once starred on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) took a yacht out for a test drive, then tied the yacht’s owners to the anchor and threw them overboard. That’s one way to get a yacht—at least until you get arrested and sentenced to death.
If people are willing to do stuff like that to get their hands on a yacht now, just imagine what they’ll be doing when boats become the only way to put some distance between you and the zombie-infested mainland. This strategy may not always work out, of course—just take a look at the ending of Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, in which the survivors forsake the safety of a shopping mall for the freedom of the open seas, with unfortunate results.
As the title implies, our next story is a tale of piracy (and zombies) on the high seas, a warning about how, in a disaster, empathy is often the first casualty, and a reminder that though a plague of zombies may sweep away the world you knew, the person you are and the problems you face often stay depressingly the same.
The noise a zombie makes when it’s eating someone is a lot like the sound of drunk people having sloppy sex—grunting and moaning and wet smacking.
Kelly was in a rowboat below, eating people. You couldn’t help but hear it, over the sound of water against the ship.
We hadn’t known there was a rowboat down there. We hadn’t known he’d turn into a zombie. What were we supposed to do? When your friend turns into a zombie, you have to do something. We’d grabbed him by his hands and feet and swung him like you swing a little kid. And then we flung him into the water. Only he didn’t splash. He thudded. We looked down over the side of the ship and swore. The person he’d landed on was smashed so badly, we couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. The other person in the rowboat had fainted.
“Sorry!” we’d called.
Both of the people in the rowboat woke up before they died. They screamed. We screamed. And then we vomited off the side of the ship, until our stomachs heaved dry and our noses ran and our eyes watered.
“Did you bring water?” we asked one another. “Where is the water? Who has Kleenex?”
“When was I supposed to get water?” we asked. “Before or after the customers started rioting? When we were running to the car, or running to the pier?”
We took stock of the ship. Ten paces from front to back. No cabin, no facilities, no supplies. No water. It was the only ship left. A replica of the Ni?a, Columbus’s ship. The sign had said so, when we’d stolen it.
Our phones didn’t have service. No one knew we were out here. We wiped our faces on our sleeves and spat. One of us had a box cutter. We supposed we could use it to open our wrists, if we had to. We sat down to wait for help. The sun was setting, and it was going to be a cold night.
It takes a while to eat a person. This would be the last thing that Kelly taught us. At Trader Joe’s, he’d trained us, and introduced us around, and let us know who was friendly and who wasn’t. He’d brought us to the bay, too, after people had started turning into zombies in the coffee aisle. Maybe zombies could swim, he’d said, but it would be a lot easier to defend your territory on a boat.
Now there were three zombies in the rowboat. They were quiet but for a soft moan now and again, like the sounds we all made when hung over. The whole bay was foggy with screaming. Boats of all sizes littered the water, motoring or drifting. There were screams from the Emeryville shore, and the Berkeley shore, and from Oakland further south and inland, and we thought we could hear them from the Bay Bridge, and Treasure Island, and across the water from San Francisco. The world was over, and it wasn’t even 2012 yet.
We were thirsty. We looked over the side, at the rowboat. It was starting to drift away. There were gallons of water in it. Safe, plastic gallons. Plus backpacks that surely had clothes and first aid gear and food. Bedrolls. Oars. Those people were far better prepared than we were, and see what it got them. We looked at one another, but the decision had already been made. Help wasn’t coming. If we were going to survive, we had to lower our standards.
We lowered a length of rope, cooing and beckoning to the zombies. Kelly grabbed onto it, and started climbing up. He’d lost his glasses, but maybe zombies weren’t nearsighted. We swung the rope away from the boat and let it go, dropping him into the water.