Her eyes opened in a brightly lit room. She was in one of the corners, curled up with her knees against her chest. There were control panels everywhere, but none of the buttons were lit up. Big windows all around the room let in endless amounts of sunlight. Though she could see only the sky from where she was sitting, a sea gull perched on a post outside reminded her where she was.
The cruiseliner. The bridge maybe?
The setting outside didn’t look too different than when she was actually out there, so she guessed three hours had passed at most since she first got on deck of The Atlantic Princess.
She tried to stand, but still felt too dizzy and drowsy and her muscles weren’t cooperating.
There were a dozen or so girly posters hastily taped to the far wall near the door. Every girl on every poster had their eyes X’d over in red paint and—where applicable—their breasts were circled. She remembered the paintings in the art gallery on the Promenade and the caryatids in the atrium and realized that that is what Dane must have done with all his free time while alone on the ship.
She hurriedly inspected herself. She was somewhat relieved to see she was still in the trylar wetsuit, so if Dane had decided to accost her again while she was sleeping, then he had only done so outside her uniform.
But he said he wasn’t interested in the living.
Freak.
She tried to stand once more, even pressing her back against the wall and pushing with her legs, but still wasn’t able to muster the energy. She sunk back down in the corner.
Then she heard the French-Canadian prick say, “Don’t bother. The tranquilizer is going to be in your system at least another hour. So sit tight.”
She heard footsteps and saw Dane emerge from behind one of the control panels. He casually pulled up a nearby chair and sat down in front of her. He was smiling.
She tried to muster her energy again; maybe just enough to jump on him and get in a few punches to his face. However, all her body wanted to do was relax. She could roll her eyes and she could breathe and she knew she could talk if she needed to, but everything from the neck down was rebelling.
It left too many possibilities—unlimited tortures he could inflict on her while she was utterly defenseless. In her fear and uncertainty, she was sort of wishing he had gone ahead and shot her when he had the revolver pressed to her head outside the VIP room. She should have died with everyone else, yet here she was on the bridge, doped up on the floor while Dr. Aaron Dane loomed at her from his chair.
Gathering her anger, she snarled, “You killed them all. You slapped armor on a bunch of zombies and you led us here to get slaughtered.”
He nodded and replied, “You noticed that, did you?”
Tears started to form on her lower eyelids. She wanted to wipe them away, but even her arms were refusing to move. She stuttered, “Why? Why would you do that?”
Dane didn’t answer right away. He took a moment to watch her weep, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it a couple times, letting a flame ignite, then letting it go, then flicking it again—all the while staring her in the eyes and smiling.
He casually commented, “I had to quit smoking. All the cigarettes went stale a long time ago, but there are still plenty of working lighters. It’s kind of sad they don’t really serve a purpose anymore.”
“You’re a psycho,” she countered.
And he replied, “You’re so observant.”
She gritted her teeth and tried moving again. She envisioned knocking him off the chair and choking him, watching his face turn blue and his eyeballs bulge from their sockets.
He had killed
He had killed everybody.
“I know you think I’m crazy,” Dane said. “I know you think I lost my marbles from being stuck on a ship with only dead people to keep me company.”
“Something like that,” she snapped.
“Well, I’m sane,” he said. “Before the apocalypse, I was just starting to get my life in order. I was on speaking terms with my wife again and we were talking about me moving back to
Courtney took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then let her groggy head fall to the side so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
Regardless, he continued, “Then the bodies of the recently dead started rising from autopsy tables and funeral viewings and scaring the bejesus out of everyone. Eating them too. They increased their numbers with a simple transference of blood and saliva. One becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, yada-yada-yada. Worse than that though—not even like the goddamn Fibonacci sequence or anything else that makes sense. Plagues can never be solved with math.” He paused his rambling a moment as he toyed with his lighter, shaking it to listen to the fuel swishing around inside. Once he was satisfied, he went on, “I never got to say goodbye to Lilly or Bobby. No, the last thing I remember before the American Army came and ripped me out of my apartment wasn’t a picture of Lilly or Bobby, but rather the garbage cans overflowing outside. The sanitation crews went on strike because of unsafe working conditions. Who’d have thought that the first thing to go after an apocalypse would be cleanliness? That’s what’s insane. But me? I’m still all there in the head.” He put a forefinger on his temple and added, “No insanity here.”
Courtney scoffed.
Without another word, Dane got off the chair and kneeled down in front of her. He gently resituated her head so she was facing him.
She raised her upper lip in a sneer. She’d have spit on him too if she were able, but manipulating her facial muscles was the most she was capable of at the moment.
He looked down and took her limp left arm in his hands. Before she could wonder what this was about, he unfastened the velcro on her glove and pulled it off her hand. When he was finished he nonchalantly tossed the glove over his shoulder.
She asked, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m going to show you something,” he replied.
Softly, as though he were caressing a newborn, he took one of her limp hands and curled up all her fingers one by one, leaving only her pinky outstretched. He held the digit firmly in this position while he brought the lighter up next to it.
Her eyes grew wide. She knew his intention and tried to pull her hand away, but under the effects of the sedative she wasn’t even able to defend herself.
Dane then ignited the lighter and let the flame lick her finger, seemingly relishing the torment as her head fell back and she let out a silent scream.
Long forgotten memories returned to her in a flood. She could remember a time when she was a naïve little girl and stuck her finger in the cigarette lighter in her father’s car just to see what would happen. It had only been for a second, but the blister lasted for a week. She remembered crying because the pain wouldn’t stop.
What was happening now hurt a lot worse. The tranquilizer had not numbed her tactile senses, so her nerve endings were able to detect every millimeter of skin on her finger burning and bubbling and sent signals of pain shooting up through her forcibly relaxed arm and straight to her brain where these signals could be recognized and exacted.
After almost five whole seconds he finally pulled the flame away. Courtney wanted to cradle her hand and maybe pinch her finger to prevent some of the pain signals from reaching her brain, but once he let go all she could do was stare down at her hand and see the black, peeling, blistering skin above the last knuckle on her pinky. Her whole arm was twitching involuntarily. Her face was wet with tears and she felt like throwing up.
Dane simply smiled and told her, “Pain is something you still feel.”
He then outstretched his own pinky finger and put the lighter to it, letting the flame lick at the skin freely. He was smiling the whole time and didn’t wince at all, even as the flesh began to bubble and peel away. When he was finished he displayed his mutilated finger to Courtney, stench and all.
She gagged and let her head fall to the side once more.
“I don’t feel pain,” Dane explained. “The nerve endings in my body no longer function. I feel nothing. My cells have ceased all stages of mitosis. By rights, I should be decaying, but my skin and muscles have stabilized. My heart beats but my blood runs cold. I breathe but I don’t require oxygen. I am technically dead.”
Courtney turned her head to face him again and mumbled, “Are you trying to say you’re a zombie?”
Dane nodded.
“You’re not a zombie,” she sneered. “You’re just a loony tunes masochistic misogynist.”
“Those are some big words for a little girl,” Dane countered. “But I already explained to you that I’m the sanest person you’ll ever meet. Why, you ask? Because I accept what’s happened to the world.”
Gritting her teeth to ward off the pain in her finger, she asked, “What are you talking about?”
He stood long enough to return to his chair and sit down again. He shoved the lighter back into his pocket. Then—making Courtney gag once more—he put his burnt finger in his mouth and started nibbling on it. But it wasn’t like he was simply chewing his fingernail—he was chewing the seared flesh.
She told him, “You’re sick.”
“No,” he replied. “I’m hungry.”
He rolled up the sleeve on his sweater and lifted the chainmail underneath, displaying the bite wound on his forearm that he had used to impress the Superintendent and the Procurement Committee at Eastpointe. He then lifted his arm and put his open mouth over the bite wound to show her that the teeth marks were at the perfect angle and perfectly matched his own.
She realized now that the wound was self-inflicted.
“God, you are a freak,” she said.
He rolled his sleeve back down and replied, “God? No, I’m an atheist. I’m a man of science. You call the dead rising an apocalypse? An apocalypse is something out of the Bible. What happened to the world wasn’t an apocalypse. It was an occurrence in nature.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Evolution,” Dane replied. “It was the theory for the longest time that evolution occurred so slowly that it wasn’t noticeable in a single lifetime. But then the theory was advanced that evolution occurred in leaps and bounds. Many believed the next phase of our evolution would be to grow wings so we could fly through the air. Others believed that the next phase would be to grow gills so we could breathe underwater. Both ideas are incorrect. The next natural phase of evolution would be—obviously—to beat death. To be immortal.”
“You’re not immortal,” Courtney told him. “You’re just loony.”
“Au Contraire,” Dane replied. “I am proof of the success of evolution.”
“No, you’re just a crazy bastard and I hope you rot in hell.”
Dane chuckled. “Of course you wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Just look at how quickly you abandoned your own species once they evolved beyond you. You call them zombies. You don’t refer to them by name or even by male or female. They’re all just zombies to you. They’re immortal and you’re jealous.”
Courtney scoffed. She knew there would be no reasoning with this psycho, so she decided to stay quiet and concentrate on anything but the pain in her finger. It was making her nauseated and combined with the dizziness she was already feeling from the sedative, the idea of throwing up didn’t seem so farfetched anymore.
Despite her detachment from the conversation, Dane continued, “Evolution made a slight mistake in that it didn’t allow zombies a large mental capacity to solve problems nor the means to procreate. But being stuck here on this boat—searching for a cure—I was forced to use myself as a guinea pig most of the time. My evolution didn’t occur naturally. You wouldn’t believe all the things I had to inject into my own skin.”
Courtney couldn’t resist commenting, “Heroin junkie?”
“No,” Dane said. “The serum of the reanimated dead. It was all part of finding some mythical Cure. Instead it had the opposite effect. It made me one of them—Except I maintained my mental faculties.”
“That’s what you think.”
“But it changed my diet,” Dane continued, unfazed by her interruption. “You have no idea what its like to feel true hunger—hunger that can’t be tamed with the food from outdated military rations. No, a very specific sustenance is required to satisfy me.”
Courtney’s eyes grew wide. She gulped and softly asked, “Is that what I’m for?”
Dane formed another smile and replied, “Do you think I’d bother explaining all this to you if all I wanted to do was eat you?”
He stood and proceeded to one of the nearby control panels where he picked up the satchel bag she had seen him carrying earlier. He opened it and pulled out a syringe. He placed the syringe on the chair he had been sitting on before and hung the bag over his shoulder.
He stood in front of Courtney and gazed down at her.
He said, “Since my cells have stabilized and my body doesn’t radiate heat, the zombies consider me one of their number. In case you haven’t noticed, they don’t attack me. I walk with the dead.”
She let her head fall back so she could look up at him. She asked, “So what? Does that make you their leader or something?”
“No,” he replied. “I’m their messiah. And I’m going to deliver them into the new world.”
“What new world?”
“A world where the old products of evolution are washed away—a world where your kind is gone. I’m taking my army to Eastpointe and I’m going to destroy the last remnants of you.”
Courtney scoffed. She wanted to laugh, but her immobility wouldn’t let her. Instead she asked, “And you plan to accomplish this how?”
“Using equal parts physiological psychology and equal parts sensory stimulation using modern technology. The reanimated dead are a lot more complicated than you think. When there’s no food around, they operate with a pack mentality. And as you noticed earlier, I’ve equipped some of my shipmates with blades and armor. I only need to send electrical impulses to the pack leader and the rest will follow. I’m going to march my army to Eastpointe and pick up thousands of stragglers along the way, all willing to join the pack. Once I’m there—and since your city leaders were kind enough to give me a tour—I’m going to direct my army straight to the power plant. And from there, straight to the central housing.”
“You’ll never get past the wall.”
“The wall is nothing a pipe bomb won’t eliminate.”
Courtney struggled once again to move. Now more than ever she wanted to push her thumbs through his eyeballs.
Dane motioned to the needle he had placed on the chair and said, “That syringe will allow you to evolve like I have. It contains the serum of the reanimated dead. And then you and I together can procreate and give evolution the boost it so desperately requires.”
Courtney scoffed, “You and me? Don’t hold your breath.”
He chuckled. “You keep forgetting that I don’t require oxygen.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m going to leave you here while my army marches to Eastpointe. I advise you use the syringe before I get back. You’ll either be my Eve or you’ll be my dinner. It’s up to you.”
“Go to hell,” she snarled.
He chuckled again, then motioned to the small cooler against the far wall below the girly posters. He told her, “You’ll be hungry after you use the syringe, so I took the liberty of chopping up your teammates. You’ll find a leg or two in the cooler over there.”
She wanted to scream. She wanted to shout and yell and curse him into the ground, but her lungs didn’t give her ample energy to do so. All she could do was tell him in a loud voice, “I’m gonna kill you.”
He smiled and replied, “Good luck with that. I’m immortal.”
He then turned away and exited the bridge. Once the door was closed behind him, she could hear something metallic being propped up against it on the other side. She heard his footsteps go down the hallway, then she heard nothing.
She looked out the window and traded glances with the sea gull perched there. She stayed this way for some time, trying to fight away the tears and the pain still burning on her blackened finger.
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