Never Fear Page 21

  This was it. The end.

  Oddly, as lonely and as strange as it had been for the past month—as often as we cried for those we knew we had lost—we had found a way to live. And even though it might have been slowly, Jeff and I had been moving toward one another—despite living with a bunch of other people and always having Tracey as part of our work pattern.

  While there is life, there is hope, Jeff had told me.

  And he had smiled.

  And while there is breath, there is life.

  But now…

  One was upon me. I fell back and went crashing down into the corpses in the crypt beneath the church.

  Bone dust darkened the air.

  The zombie fell on me…

  And didn’t move.

  I pushed it off. As I did so, it began to change.

  The zombie had been a little girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. She was tall for her age, and she’d been wearing a tailored shirt and jeans, an outfit that concealed her budding breasts, but as her flesh changed from mottled gray rot to a reddish hue and then something that was almost ivory, the beauty and feminine structure of her face became obvious.

  I was holding a stone memorial, ready to crush it over her head. I’d been hearing that strange death rattle as she had come after me, that movement of wind in her lungs.

  Now, there was just the sound of breathing.

  I like to think I didn’t stare at her too long, almost as stunned as I had been when it had all begun.

  Because something had happened. Something like…

  Science.

  Or a miracle.

  “The crypt!” I screamed. “Get them into the crypt. It—it heals them!”

  I don’t think any of them believed me at first, but we were overrun. We were dying. We had nothing to lose.

  Jeff dropped down beside me. “The fungus—all the fungus down here. The decay, the rot… something growing. Something growing cures it, just as something biological must have caused it!”

  Jeff and I were the only ones in the crypt. The others were herding the zombies in.

  His arm was around me—and we were suddenly facing down twenty of them. We backed away, and backed away. I almost fell into a rotten tomb, but Jeff caught me, and a zombie fell in it instead.

  And the others were crying out to us.

  I could hear Stephen. Always my dear, dear Stephen. But the others were my friends, too, so close. We were so lucky…

  So many zombies…

  And then, right when it seemed we had nowhere else to go, it took. The fungus as Jeff said—or the miracle, as I believed—took hold.

  The zombies fell.

  They just fell.

  And they began to change, a few were still broken, and screaming in pain. A few died. But, later that night, by the time we waded our way through them, we had another thirty human beings on the island. Human beings who were lost and confused. Coming to grips with what had happened to them.

  At first…

  And then today.

  Salvation Day.

  Because miracle or not, we had the cure. And it was a cure that worked almost instantly. When more came, we’d be prepared.

  We were alive.

  We were breathing.

  There was hope.

  Chapter 7

  Jeff

  We took the boats to the tip of Manhattan today. Carefully. With the others who had come—and the amount of those others who were able to be saved—we’d acquired something of a nicely efficient army.

  We went for supplies.

  We were becoming adept with solar energy. Of course, summer had come.

  That helped.

  Crops were growing.

  Dear Lord, we’d built houses!

  That afternoon, though, in Manhattan, I had some very specific plans. We were able to roam the area freely—whatever zombies had been there had died out. Those who hadn’t—had moved on. That was the thing—without fresh human flesh, they died out. I’ll never understand why, but the cows and chickens and pigs were immune to the virus or bacteria, and those inflicted with it did not want to eat cows or chickens or pigs.

  Just other humans.

  We stayed on the island, though—for the time being—because we could protect it.

  Our little army saw no action that day.

  We collected supplies.

  And we went home.

  We had barely reached the docks—repaired by a very nice work effort led by Ali, thank you very much—when Tracey came running out to me. Her eyes were glistening.

  “Oh!” I cried. “It’s time!”

  “More or less!” she said.

  Tracey was with a fellow who had been a Baptist minister and a carpenter before The Day. They were very happy. That had left me able to… well, able to do some things I’d wanted to do for a very long time.

  I raced behind Tracey, heading to the little house near the church we had made for ourselves. It had one room, but we’d managed a pretty cool fireplace and quaint little outhouse—for us, at the moment, it was really good.

  But I was late. Too late.

  I called out with dismay, thinking how much I had failed her. But Lenore, my beautiful Lenore, was laughing and happy. “We have a very good nurse, you know!”

  When I came into the room, I saw that we did. Tracey had delivered my son in my absence.

  I was shaking as I took him. I managed to kiss Lenore quickly, and then look at Tracey, who smiled and said, “I’m thinking he’s about eight pounds, healthy and perfect as can be!”

  I thanked her, tears in my eyes, and knelt down by my Lenore. My wife, in my heart, and in my soul, and through the words of our Baptist carpenter minister in the Anglican church.

  “He’s… he’s just fine.”

  “Well, of course he is—we’re all just fine!” she said.

  I cried. I hadn’t been able to help it.

  “What shall we name him?” Lenore asked me softly.

  “Adam.”

  I didn’t say it; the word came from the door. It was Stephen who had spoken. He was standing there, next to Dirk. They were both holding a spray of flowers.

  I smiled.

  They had become a couple, too. Dirk had confessed to me that he’d once been a real ass. Now he’d never been happier. He had Stephen. And, of course, Lenore and I had loved Stephen dearly for years. We couldn’t have been happier.

  “Adam,” I said.

  “He is the first to be born in our new world,” Lenore whispered, beautiful blue eyes tender as they rested on me, and our child.

  “Adam!” I said.

  And so he was. Our child.

  A special child.

  For he was hope.

  Hope for the future.

  Hope for the human race.

  THE SHADOW OF HEAVEN

  Jason V Brock

  There are more things in heaven and earth…

  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  -William Shakespeare, HAMLET 1.5.166

  (Hamlet to Horatio)

  I.

  “There—I think I see it, Commander.”

  Ensign Adams’s breath disappeared overhead as he lowered his binoculars, pointing with a gloved hand at the unstable horizon through the ice-rimmed main windows of the ship. “Looks like something about ten kilometers out, sir.” Backlit by the windows, he turned to face Commander Merritt, the senior officer aboard the destroyer USS Higgins. Cloaked in his winter overcoat, the ensign’s brittle voice seemed distant in the cold dry air, his words nearly obliterated by the surging wind and unforgiving swells of the squall. Outside, colossal waves, some the size of buildings, slammed the Higgins—exploding across the ship’s icebound hull in frosty white plumes, adding to the inches-deep transparent slick of frozen seawater on the deck as she plunged further into one of the most hostile environs on the planet: the Southern Ocean. Gales such as this arose suddenly and with terrifying ferocity this close to Antarctica, reducing visibility to a few feet,
churning the barren seascape into a foamy lather as it thrust icebergs the size of city blocks into the path of interlopers to this foreboding, isolated part of the world. At times, mighty whitecaps pounded on the destroyer with such titanic fury that they caused the vessel to flinch backward, bobbing like an oversized cork in the roiling black depths.

  Merritt, his drawn face numb from the chill, carefully considered the ensign’s words, leaning against an interior deck rail to keep his balance as they rocked in the grip of the storm. Bringing his binoculars to his face, he scanned the dead gray interface between leaden sky and dark water beyond the icy windows Adams was motioning toward, noting the faint curtain of blue-green ripples from the southern lights, streaked by rose-colored lightning ribbons in the distance as freezing night collapsed around them. Even on the closed bridge, the saline-tinged atmosphere had gotten so frigid that the inside of his nose crystallized with each breath.

  Our luck to be the closest in the vicinity of a distress call.

  “Are you sure you saw a vessel? Maybe it was a ‘berg,'“ the Commanding Officer asked at last.

  “It didn’t look like an iceberg…” Adams was scrutinizing the horizon as he spoke: “One moment, sir.”

  As he worked against the storm’s fury, the commander was troubled that, in their attempts to discover the exact whereabouts of the missing research ship Terra Australis Incognita, they might have gone astray. The weary leader and his crew of just over two hundred were stuck now, committed to the search even as they struggled with the dreadful conditions approximately 300 miles off the coast of West Antarctica—well off-course from their originally assigned bearing based on Australis’s last communique. Merritt was further aggravated that they had been pulled into this mess just as the Higgins was returning for shore leave after a long, tedious mission: Subsonic underwater audio testing. The original search-and-rescue order had instructed them to triangulate the position of the troubled Australis once they were within its last known trajectory, but it concerned him that perhaps she had lost power after her final transmission to the Oceanographic Institute of San Diego, drifting farther than anyone had anticipated. That could mean she was gone—especially if these had been the circumstances for her and her crew in the two days it had taken the Higgins to re-route.

  “Still not seeing it, Adams.” Merritt grimaced in frustration.

  “Sorry, sir. It was there just a minute ago…”

  “Any recent pings, McConnell?” Merritt asked, addressing the Warrant Officer.

  The haunting Mayday call that McConnell had picked up as they were adjusting course, scratchy with static and crosstalk, had made it very difficult to decipher who it was, but the co-ordinates and the radar image supported the notion that it had come from Australis. Or at least from a crewmember that might be stranded on the so-called “new islands” that Australis had been allowed to detour and inspect by the Institute.

  “Negative, sir,” McConnell replied.

  Contemplative, Merritt lowered his binoculars, sighing in annoyance as he stroked his face. Throw into the mix that the closer we get to the last known heading of Australis the worse the fucking weather gets… the more radio-electronic interference—faulty GPS signals, slow clocks, bad wireless connections. Adds up to a lot of irritating bullshit… Oh well—”Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” as they say…

  Higgins had endured several of these storms, as powerful as any Merritt had ever encountered in his twenty-plus years as a sailor, in their efforts to find the Australis. Peering through his binoculars again as the mammoth destroyer heaved and fell like some vast roller coaster—lights flickering, deck rolling in the strong seas—the senior officer thought he vaguely made out what the ensign had seen: A shadowy triangular central mass situated among a scattering of large icebergs looming along the periphery of his vision like some ethereal vanguard of the Flying Dutchman. He frowned while adjusting the focus ring, his brow wrinkled in annoyance as he squinted past the thickening fog and billowing sea spray. Christ, it’s like something wants to keep us away…

  He glanced over at McConnell, his gray-haired scalp bristling. “You seeing this?”

  McConnell worked to keep his footing as he peered through his binoculars. “Aye… Something. Appears man-made, sir, but hard to make out through the mist and—” A crackle from the headset around his neck interrupted him. Placing the speaker to his ear, he listened intently, then moved over to his station, his dark features pressed into a look of apprehension.

  Merritt: “What’s happening, McConnell?”

  “Not—not sure, sir… There’s a lot of static; I thought I heard… A voice. It was coming in on the same frequency as the last transmission—”

  Continuing to monitor the gloom outside, Adams said, “Definitely something there, Commander. Looks to be a modest-sized vessel.”

  McConnell: “I’ve got something—putting up on speakers, sir. I have a radar reflection too. One small shape and a few larger masses; the larger areas could be land, but hard to say in this climate … And I checked again—not on our maps.”

  A smoky haze of static filled the room, pushing back the sounds of the tempest for an instant: <>

  More intense static. Then, garbled: “If you can hear my voice, please acknowledge! [blip, blip, blip] … is not— [blip, blip, blip] My name is Christopher Faust, over. [blip, blip, blip]… urgent mes— [blip, blip, blip]… communicate! Repeat: This is—”

  Silence. The wind howled in the sunless tumult outside the Higgins, sending chunks of ice and snow to shatter against the windows of the darkened bridge. Lightning seared again: closer, redder, like an eruption of stroboscopic tendrils cracking the black-ice sky into pieces. Distant thunder bellowed.

  “McConnell, stay on that frequency, but keep monitoring the others; Adams, your thoughts?”

  The young ensign was staring into the starless night, struggling to keep his equilibrium in the storm. “I… I believe it’s Australis, sir. Who else would be this far from McMurdo? Granted, farther away than we expected her to be, but we heard the distress call… so we’re obligated to check it out, Commander.”

  Merritt looked again, the stiff rubber eyecups of the Steiner chafing his eyelids: Illuminated by flashes of scarlet lightning, the triangular shape appeared to be a bow, with part of a mast attached as well; perhaps a half-submerged wreck, though it was too dim, too turbulent to make out anything definitive.

  “Aye,” the commander said. “Set a course for it.”

  II.

  “Looks like we’ve found her, Commander. No one here, though.” Ensign Adams released the button on his handheld as he stared into the blue-toned water, the white mast and bow of the sunken Australis thrusting up from the briny deep like the hand of a skeleton. The elements had relented since their post-midnight arrival; the ocean was almost peaceful.

  At first light, Commander Merritt had deemed it safe enough to dispatch a small advance team of four men through the half-mile or so of chop between the moorage of the Higgins and the suspected wreck of the Australis. Though slightly overcast, the sun was evident, clear, though quite low on the horizon even now, at midday; it was urgent that they discern what was happening before night fell and the temperatures dropped.

  “Roger that, Adams,” McConnell replied. “Stand by.”

  As Adams and his crew of three awaited their next orders on the drifting rigid-hulled inflatable, he studied the Australis: It was spooky, surreal. The water here was so clear he could see far down into it, almost to the bridge of the research vessel. Straining, he swore he could see something… something large; a supple darkness—

  “Adams, we have something near you, but not from the wreck, over.”

  Startled from his thoughts by McConnell’s gruff drawl, Adams replied: “Roger that. What do you have?”

  “Well… there’s a signal coming from nearby. The co-ordinates are dodgy, as there seems to be some strange
interference. Looks like it’s coming from that mass I was explaining from the radar, though. Some seismic disturbances there. I got another signal a while ago like a voice too. See anything? Over.”

  “Actually, yeah; over to my left there’s a big fog bank. Looks like about 800 or so feet away. Could it be from there? Over.”

  “That’s about the proximity of the radar image, over.”

  Adams brought his binoculars up. As he peered through them, he thought he saw something large move in the mist on the horizon: What the hell was that?

  “Roger, McConnell. I see something; request permission to investigate, over.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Roger, Adams; weather’s returning. Merritt says you’ve got an hour, over.”

  III.

  “Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky—”

  Like the Indianapolis at the bottom of the deep …

  Down to a dreamless sleep …

  Drifting,

  Spiraling:

  IV.

  Back onboard the Higgins, Adams was shaken, dazed, as he reported what the search party had discovered: “So there are some islands, Commander.” He looked from Merritt to McConnell as they stood in the infirmary, regarding the apparent sole survivor of the Australis: an unconscious man now lying on the sickbay table. “The radar image was correct… We found Australis, and there was something else… something deeper in the water, looked like it was poking around in the wreckage—”

  “What? Like a seal? A shark or something? Or did you see a body?” Merritt asked, his voice edged.

  “I-I can’t say; it was some weird… black-looking shape, but iridescent too. Like oil on water. It seemed to be part of something else even larger… maybe it was just the water playing tricks on my eyes, or a part of the ship, but…” Adams looked to the floor. “Anyway, after we went through the fog, we all noted that the temperature was rising; it was becoming quite humid, too. I had to lose a jacket I got so warm. Then, as we disembarked onto this beach we landed on, we were accosted by these giant… flying bats or something, but with feathers. They were shrieking and carrying on. Sounded very human at times. Like a cat in heat. Our compasses were flipping out, and that’s when one of my guys saw a helicopter blade half-buried in the sand. We formed a search line and walked for a mile or so—”