Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

      But almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, he thought, smiling faintly at the memory of one of his father’s favorite expressions. And now the Sugar Jane was a plague bomb bound for some unsuspecting shore.

      But what was the sense in worrying about it? It didn’t matter anymore.

      Not without the boy it didn’t.

      Not to Robert Connelly.

      There was another thud against the door and it splintered. A shard of plywood skidded across the deck, landing near his feet. Bloody fingers tore at the hole in the door. A face appeared at the widening crack, the cheeks and lips shredded to a pulp, the small, dark teeth broken and streaked with blood. The moaning became a fierce, stuttering growl.

      That might be Bobby there; it was hard to tell. But it didn’t matter.

      Robert looked over the controls. The boat would run itself. And it looked like they had enough fuel to finish the voyage. There was nothing left to do here. He stood as straight as the rolling deck of the boat allowed and prepared to run for it.

      There was a hammer on the chair beside him.

      He picked it up. Tested its heft.

      It would do.

      The door exploded open.

      Bobby and two others stood there. Bobby’s right hand was nearly gone. So, too, were his ears and nose and most of his right cheek.

      “Ah, Jesus, Bobby,” Robert said, grimacing at the wreckage of his son.

      They stumbled forward.

      Robert moved past Bobby and swung at the lead zombie, dropping it with a well-placed strike to the temple.

      The other closed the gap too quickly, and Robert had to kick it in the gut to create distance. He raised the hammer and was rushing forward to plant it into the thing’s forehead when Bobby grabbed his shoulder and clamped down with a bite that made Robert howl in pain.

      He knocked the boy to the deck and swung again at the second zombie. The claw end of the hammer caught the zombie in the top of the head and it dropped to the deck.

      Bobby was on him again.

      He grabbed the boy and turned him around and hugged him from behind, determined not to let go. A group of zombies was bottlenecking at the door. Robert knew he had only a few minutes of fight left in him. He charged the knot of zombies at the door and somehow managed to push them back. Hands and arms crowded his face, but he wasn’t worried about escaping their bites. Not at this point. All that mattered was getting on top of the cabin and up into the rigging.

      Bobby struggled against his hold, but Robert managed to get his left arm across Bobby’s chest and over his right shoulder, pinning the boy’s arms. With an adult, it wouldn’t have been possible. But with a boy, and especially with a boy who had existed at a near-starvation level for two years, Robert managed fairly well.

      The zombies clawed at him. They tore his cheeks and arms and neck with their fingernails. One of them took a bite out of his calf. But they couldn’t hold him.

      He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top. He could feel his body growing weak. The infection felt like somebody was jamming a lit cigarette through his veins. But he reached the top of the rigging, and once he was there, he slipped a small length of rope from his back pocket and looped it around Bobby’s left hand, then around his own.

      “It’s all right,” he whispered into Bobby’s ear. “Don’t you worry. We’re together now and nothing else matters.”

      In the distance, he could see the bobbing string of lights that marked the Florida coast. Fireworks exploded above the horizon.

      It was the Fourth of July.

      “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

      The zombie, his child, struggled against him. It wouldn’t be long now. He felt so weak, so sleepy. Soon, nothing else would matter.

      They were together. And that was enough.

      “That’s what counts,” he said. “I love you, Bobby.”

      CHAPTER 3

      It was a cloudy, humid morning. Some of the prisoners were trying to sleep. Others were gazing vacantly out of the bus windows as it made its way southward through the heart of Sarasota, Florida’s coastal district. Billy Kline had his head against the wire mesh covering the windows, watching the others as they swayed in their seats to the motion of the bus. Beside him, Tommy Patmore was absently pulling at the loose threads of his work pants. The mood was subdued, quiet, each man lost to his own thoughts.

      A few of the guys had their windows down, but not even the occasional draft of sea air that managed to find its way into the bus could cover up the smell. Their work clothes were little more than heavy-duty orange hospital scrubs with SARASOTA COUNTY JAIL stenciled across the back, and though they were supposedly washed after every use, they nonetheless stank of mildew and sweat and something less definable that Billy Kline had only now identified.

      It was the rank odor of despair.

      He’d been thinking a lot about despair lately. There were times when he felt it as a physically immediate and distinct sensation, like the burning itch between your toes after a few days of taking communal showers; or the painful swelling in your bowels that came with your first few meals; or rolling over at night and seeing the man in the cot next to you enveloped in a living haze of scabies. But there were other times when it was more tenuous, like when you heard the resignation in your mother’s voice when she said good-bye at the end of your ten-minute Tuesday-night phone call; or when you seethed with a cold, mute rage every time some bored guard emptied everything you owned onto his desk from a paper grocery sack and picked through it like he was looking for a pistachio kernel in a pile full of shells.

      He felt so much rage.

      Billy was twenty-five, halfway through an eight-month sentence for selling stolen property to undercover officers. Before that, he had done two months for car burglary, charges dismissed. And the year before that, he’d done three months, again for car burglary, and again with the charges ultimately dismissed. There had been other visits, too.

      But this time was different.

      This latest round of trouble had finally pissed his mom off to the point where she no longer asked for explanations or feigned credulity when he provided them unsolicited.

      This time, he had finally hit bottom.

      Beside him, Tommy Patmore sucked in a deep breath.

      Billy leaned over and whispered, “You’re gonna unravel those pants you keep picking at ’em.”

      A murmur.

      “What’d you say?”

      “Be quiet.”

      Tommy glanced furtively around the bus. No one was paying any attention to them.

      Billy followed Tommy’s gaze and frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

      One more look around.

      “Ray Bob Walker came to see me this morning before we left. They asked me if I wanted to join.”

      Billy sighed inwardly. He’d been dreading this.

      “And? What’d you say?”

      Tommy looked at him. It was enough.

      “Ah, Tommy, you gotta be shitting me. What were you thinking?”

      “Be quiet, Billy. They’ll hear you.”

      “Fuck them. Tommy, I told you those Aryan Brotherhood assholes will get you killed. Is that what you want? You know what those guys do. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

      “Be quiet,” Tommy said. “They’ll hear you.”

      He looked around