Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

Jayhawk and the three other Dolphins moved into position, but Barnes could tell it was too late for the man on the ground even before the H-Boys started shooting. The man was pulled down below a sheet of corrugated tin by one of the zombies, and a moment later the water turned to blood where he had been standing.

      “Echo Three-Four to Mama Bear, Delta One-Six has been compromised.”

      A pause.

      “Roger that, Echo Three-Four. Status report.”

      Instinctively, Barnes swept the area, taking it all in. He saw the smoking helicopter, the zombies advancing through an endless plain of maritime debris, the uncles scrambling to escape the zombies, jumping into the channel and swimming for the boats. One of the boats had already made it a good fifty yards from the bank.

      Echo Three-Four completed his status report. There was another pause while Mama Bear conferred with Papa Bear, and then Mama Bear gave the order that turned Barnes’s stomach.

      “Smoke ’em all,” said Mama Bear. “Disable those boats and neutralize any targets in the water.”

      A moment later, the air was alive with tracer rounds.

      Barnes watched as the machine guns chewed up people and zombies and boats, and something inside him went numb.

      Three miles to the east, on a small shrimp boat chugging quietly away from the darkened coastline, Robert Connelly heard the guns and saw the smoke columns rising up into the darkening sky.

      “You okay, Bobby?” he said to his son.

      The boy nodded into his shoulder and Robert hugged him.

      Robert turned and looked over the faces of the forty refugees who had commandeered this boat with him. Several of them coughed. Half of them were sick with one kind of funk or another. Their faces were gray and gaunt, their eyes dull and languid in the darkness. They were all too tired, he realized, to understand just how lucky they were. The others had insisted on going to the main docks just above San Jacinto State Park, claiming there’d be more places to hide there. But Robert and his people had refused to go that route. They decided to take their chances, alone, down around Scott Bay. And now, as he listened to the explosions and the gunfire, it looked like that gamble was paying off.

      He listened to the water lapping against the hull, to the steady droning thrum of the engines. He felt the wind buffeting his face.

      He could feel the anxiety and the frustration and two years of living like an animal among the Houston ruins lifting from him. He took a deep breath, and though his chest hurt, it felt good to breathe air that didn’t taste like death and stale sweat and chemicals.

      He squeezed Bobby again.

      “I think we’re gonna make it,” he said.

      CHAPTER 2

      “Bobby?”

      A hard thud against the door.

      “Bobby, let me see you. Bobby?”

      Robert Connelly looked through a yellowed, grimy window, trying to catch a glimpse of his boy out there. He saw a few of the infected staggering around in the dark, trying to keep their balance as the boat pitched on the dark waves.

      A hand crashed through the window and Robert stepped out of reach. The zombie groped for him, slicing its arm on the glass stuck in the frame. There was a time when seeing the zombie’s arm cut to ribbons like that would have made him vomit, all that blood. Now the arm was just something to avoid.

      Robert got as close as he dared to the broken window. “Bobby, are you out there? Bobby?” Sometimes the infected remembered their names, responded to them. He had seen it happen before.

      He waited.

      There was another thud against the door, and this time something cracked.

      “Bobby?”

      He heard the infected moaning, the engines straining at three-quarters speed. The waves slapped against the hull.

      He stepped over to the controls and looked out across the water. Far ahead, shimmering lights snaked across the horizon, sometimes visible, sometimes not, depending on the pitch of the bow over the waves. He thought for sure it was Florida. They had almost made it.

      The thought took him back almost two years, to those lawless days after Hurricane Mardell. He remembered the rioting in the streets, the terrified confusion as nearly four million people scrambled to safety. Bloated, decaying corpses floated through the flooded streets. Starvation was rampant. Sanitation and medical services were nonexistent. Helicopters circled overhead for a few days after Mardell, picking up whomever they could, but there were so few helicopters, and so many to be rescued.

      And then the infected rose up from the ruins.

      At first, Robert believed they were bands of looters fighting with the authorities. He didn’t believe the reports of cannibalism. Paranoid hysteria, he called it. But then he saw the infected trying to get into the elementary school gym where he and Bobby and about a hundred others had been living. After that, he knew they were dealing with something more than looters.

      He took Bobby on a desperate three-day trek north, and they made it as far as the quarantine walls, where they were turned back by soldiers and police standing behind barricades.

      “We’re going to survive this,” he told his son. “I will keep you safe. I promise.”

      He had said those words while they were sitting on the roof of a house less than half a mile from the wall, sharing a can of green beans they’d salvaged from the kitchen pantry. There was no silverware, none that they trusted the look of anyway, and they had to scoop out the food with their fingers. In the distance, they could see helicopter gunships sprinting over the walls. It was late evening, near dark, and they could hear the sporadic crackle of gunfire erupting all around them.

      “It doesn’t matter, Dad.”

      Robert Connelly looked at his son. The boy’s shoulders were drooped forward, the muscles in his face slack, like somebody had let the air out of him. “Bobby,” he said, “why would you say something like that? Of course it matters.”

      There were two green beans floating in the bottom of the can. Robert offered them to Bobby.

      The boy shook his head.

      “There’s no point.”

      “Bobby, please. It matters to me.”

      The boy pointed at the wall. “Look at that, Dad. Look at those walls. Look at all those helicopters, all those soldiers. Think how fast they put all this up. They’re not ever going to let us go. They want us to die in here.”

      Robert hardly knew what to say. Bobby was only thirteen years old, too young to think his life was valueless.

      But he’d already noticed there were no gates in the quarantine wall.

      He hoped they’d simply missed them.

      They hadn’t.

      For two years, Robert kept them alive, fighting the infected, rarely sleeping, scavenging for every meal. The struggle had carved a fierce resilience into his grain, a belief that his will alone was enough to sustain them against the cozy, narcotic warmth of nihilism.

      With a small band of like-minded refugees, he found a serviceable boat in the flooded debris field of the Houston Ship Channel. There wasn’t a sailor among them, and yet they’d dodged the helicopters and slipped through the Coast Guard blockade undetected. For a glorious moment that first night, holding his boy, he’d believed they were really going to make it.

      Now, he knew better.

      One of the forty refugees on board the Sugar Jane was infected, and that first night, while they were at sea, he turned.

      Robert Connelly was the only one left. He’d made a promise to his son and he’d almost kept it. He’d sought