TRITON was less of a town and more just a series of homes along the road that traveled adjacent to the Puget Sound, but the boys were right. It didn’t take me long to find a boat. In fact, I found a few. Covered by a moldy blue tarp was a small speed boat sitting beside an abandoned a-frame cabin. Even though the engine was solar powered, it didn’t look like it would run so I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t. The other two boats I found were overturned and encompassed by thorny vines near the water.
Gerald pulled out his knife and began cutting away at the vines that covered the larger of the two boats. I set my two bags down and looked out over the water at Frenchman’s Cove. Triton is parallel to Seattle but there’s a large arrowhead shaped landmass between the two, the Kitsap Peninsula, also known as the Great Peninsula. The path Derek drew out for me on the map had me traveling around the peninsula, far north and then coming back down. It seemed like a waste of time, but I understood his reasoning. Less traveling by land means less zombie encounters. Safety. Talking about zombie safety, there was a sound that caught me attention just then, a wrestling of leaves, a breaking of twigs, maybe thirty or forty yards away...
“I told you. You need me,” Gerald said as he hacked at the vines, pulling them away with a gloved hand.
“Yes, I could never have cut those vines all by my lonesome. Whatever would I have done without you?” I said with a deadpan face and quiet voice as my eyes scanned the woods that surrounded us.
“Ha-ha,” he mocked. “You say that but who’s doing the cutting and who’s staring off into la-la land?”
“Shut up.”
He stopped cutting and looked at me happily confused. “Did I offend you? I thought you were supposed to be a badass.” He shook his head and ripped through the last of the thorny vines with a chuckle and a grunt.
“You need to shut up because I think I heard something.”
Gerald flipped the boat over with a quickly beefy motion. “Let’s try the motor,” he said.
“No,” I said firmly. “There’s movement in these woods. I think something is coming, some things.”
“Zombies? I don’t hear anything.”
“Good for you. I do, though.” I looked down at the boat he’d overturned. It was a small fishing boat with a large gas motor on it. It looked like it had some gas in the tank, but one of the blades was broken.
“Broken blade,” Gerald pointed out. “But it will probably still function, that is if the gas is still good after three years. Gas has a shelf life of only a few months. If it’s an ethanol blend, then maybe a year.”
“So it’s a bust. What about the other boat? It looks like a peddle boat.”
“It is, but I want to try the bigger boat first. It can fit both of us and our gear. Plus, our legs will get fucking tired of peddling quick.”
“Hey,” I said and I put my hand on his arm to stop him from pull-starting the engine on the bigger boat. “You’re not coming with me. I agreed to let you come with me this far, but only one of us is getting in a boat. Me, just me.”
“Erin, you have to admit that you need me. You can’t-”
“Stop,” I said and I tightened my grip on his arm, but he pulled the engine’s cord to spite me. Thankfully and predictably it didn’t start. The gas in the tank had gone to shit years ago. Even still, the engine made a loud go of it before failing. I stared at the woods, listening carefully. Nothing. Maybe it was animals I heard before? I let out a breath of relief. “Fuck! What’s your problem?”
“I don’t like that you’re just leaving, just like that, just fucking chasing some goddamn idea of saving humanity.” His usually jovial face turned mean too suddenly for me to keep up. “This is fucking stupid, Erin. You’re being fucking stupid! You’re not thinking right because you’re scared. You’re running away and it’s bull shit! And everyone knows it. You’re being a fucking coward. Let’s go back to the bunker, back to your son.”
I forced myself to look into his angry judgmental stare. It wasn’t easy because part of what he said was true. Being in that bunker, infected as I was, was hard. I felt like a trapped animal, feared and pitied. Maybe it was stupid to think there were still scientists alive in Seattle, and that my peculiar infection could help anyone or anything. It was very likely I was wasting my time, that this was a suicide mission I concocted because I had to tell myself that I could make this all mean something when it meant nothing. In fact, maybe he was one-hundred percent right about me and what I was doing. Maybe I was running away. As doubt filled my eyes, Gerald moved away from me. He grabbed up my bags and started walking back toward the bunker, thinking he’d won.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
For a moment I thought I’d follow him but there was movement in the woods and I knew it wasn’t animals this time. It was zombies moving in on us.
“Stop!” I shouted at Gerald before he moved too far from me. He stopped and looked back at me with angry eyes. A zombie was coming at him and he didn’t even see it. It looked recently dead, hardly any rot on him. Maybe a day...It still had its lips and eyes intact. I pulled my machete out of my belt and ran at it.
“Hey!” Gerald yelled as I chased toward him, obviously thinking I was attacking him and not the rotting thing behind him. He dodged out of my path and I brought my machete down on the zombie’s head. I pulled it down to the ground and freed my machete from its skull with a foot on its head and a quick yank.
“Oh,” Gerald said.
“They’re everywhere,” I turned on the spot, looking at the woods around us. “Fifteen or more. It’s a horde!”
“I can smell them but I can’t see them. Where are they coming from?”
Mostly the south, but there are a few coming from the west and north.”
“They surrounded us? Are we dealing with intelligent zombies again?” Gerald panicked.
“No, I don’t think so. The zombies from the north smell like sea water, like they crawled out of the Sound. The zombies from the west look fresh, like the one that attacked you. Those from the south smell like they are long dead, just bloated rotting things. Three different groups are converging on us. Probably following the sound of that fucking engine you tried to start.”
Gerald gave me a dirty look before he pulled out his gun and knife, preparing for the zombies that were walking toward us slowly.
“We can outrun them and make it back to the bunker. They’ll follow us, but with Derek and Pane we can take them out easy,” Gerald said.
“You run back to the bunker, I’m heading to Seattle,” I said and I turned and ran back to the vine-covered peddle boat. Gerald had cut up the vines so completely that I pulled the boat out with relative ease.
“Erin!” Gerald shouted. I looked back to see him cut into the skull of one zombie and then another. A third western zombie rambled out of the forest, falling on the ground and not knowing how to get up. It struggled like a turtle on its back. Gerald walked up to it and jumped on his head, breaking it like a rotten pumpkin after Halloween. The two zombies from the Puget Sound, soggy meat sacks, no hands, pale skin and half eaten, probably by fish, were crawling toward Gerald with seaweed and fish netting dragging behind them.
“Fuck!” I said as I moved toward them. I didn’t want to move closer, but I did. I got close enough to see the barnacles growing on the exposed bone. I cringed as I slashed downward into the face of the closer zombie with, slicing through fluid-filled skin, brittle bone and rancid brains, which erupted upward like black water from a whale’s blowhole.
The other sea zombie ignored me completely and moved toward Gerald, whose back was turned as he watched the southern horde moving in. I approached it from behind, stabbing it in its fat head, more careful of the blackened brainy eruption that followed. Nasty.
I looked up when I saw Gerald moving in my peripheral vision. He was backing away from the advancing dead. I looked back to find them close and moving closer, a truly gruesome sight. These poor souls had been rotting for at least a year. Their lips were all but gone, eaten away or shriveled to nothing, leaving their broken teeth bare to the world, like a permanent snarl. Their eyes were either bloated with pus or wrinkled into raisins. Their stench choked me as they walked right past me to get to Gerald. They didn’t want me? They knew! Somehow they knew I wasn’t food anymore. I was one of them. I was a zombie!
“Erin!” I heard Gerald shout.
I looked back at him with wide eyes and I could feel the hot tears fall down my cheek before I realized I was crying. It shocked me, woke me up from my feelings, brought me back to what was happening around me.
Gerald was still backing away from the advancing dead, but he was looking at me; shocked and reluctant to leave even though I was safe and he was clearly outnumbered.
I could have killed them all without a fight, cut all their heads open, but that sounded like exhausting work so I ran instead. I ran back to the larger boat and pulled the red gas tank out of the hull and began dumping it on the zombies. Gerald must have figured out my plan because when I looked for him, I found him digging in my bags, hopefully looking for my easy-light matches Derek packed for me. He needed time though, so I ran ahead of them and started cutting into the horde to keep them off of Gerald.
“I got them!” he shouted.
“Give them to me!” I yelled without looking back. I put my free hand out, palm up, expecting him to put the matches in my hand. He did. “Go drag the peddle boat into the water,” I ordered while he seemed so obedient. He ran toward the boats.
It took a few matches before the whole group was on fire, but I managed it and to my surprise, I didn’t get burned. Because the zombies were still after Gerald, even while on fire, I had them following me as I ran toward him and the water.
He was standing in the water, bent over the peddle boat and looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. I stomped into the water fast and took my bag off his shoulder and he let me as he watched the burning zombies start to fall to the ground mere feet from us.
I looked back at them. “I guess the fire got to their brains. Hotheads.” I chuckled at my little joke, a joke that needed to be made because shit was getting too serious.
“You’re a zombie,” Gerald said.
I looked at him and then back down at the boat because for the first time he looked scared of me like the other. “I need to go and you’re not coming with me.”
“No, I’m not,” he said and he dropped the second bag he was still holding into the boat and walked back toward the land, where the zombies were still burning, but no longer moving, no longer undead. Gerald looked back at me once he was on dry land and a few feet away from the zombie bonfire. He waved goodbye. I didn’t. I climbed into the boat and began peddling away.
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