The Living Dead 2

Pirates vs. Zombies by Amelia Beamer

Amelia Beamer works as an editor and reviewer for Locus Magazine. She has won several literary awards and has published fiction and poetry in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Interfictions 2, Red Cedar Review, and other venues. As an independent scholar, she has published papers in Foundation and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Michigan State University, and attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2004. Her first novel-a zombie tale called The Loving Dead, which she describes as “a darkly humorous story of sex, relationships, and zombies”-was published this summer. Our next story is set in the same milieu.

Many people dream of owning a yacht. Who wouldn’t revel in the freedom to sail the seas while enjoying all the amenities? Problem is, yachts are kind of expensive-the world’s largest yacht, the 525-foot Project Platinum, owned by the Crown Prince of Dubai, is estimated to cost upwards of $300 million. In 2004, a former child actor named Skylar Deleon (who once starred on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) took a yacht out for a test drive, then tied the yacht’s owners to the anchor and threw them overboard. That’s one way to get a yacht-at least until you get arrested and sentenced to death.

If people are willing to do stuff like that to get their hands on a yacht now, just imagine what they’ll be doing when boats become the only way to put some distance between you and the zombie-infested mainland. This strategy may not always work out, of course-just take a look at the ending of Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, in which the survivors forsake the safety of a shopping mall for the freedom of the open seas, with unfortunate results.

As the title implies, our next story is a tale of piracy (and zombies) on the high seas, a warning about how, in a disaster, empathy is often the first casualty, and a reminder that though a plague of zombies may sweep away the world you knew, the person you are and the problems you face often stay depressingly the same.

The noise a zombie makes when it’s eating someone is a lot like the sound of drunk people having sloppy sex-grunting and moaning and wet smacking.

Kelly was in a rowboat below, eating people. You couldn’t help but hear it, over the sound of water against the ship.

We hadn’t known there was a rowboat down there. We hadn’t known he’d turn into a zombie. What were we supposed to do? When your friend turns into a zombie, you have to do something. We’d grabbed him by his hands and feet and swung him like you swing a little kid. And then we flung him into the water. Only he didn’t splash. He thudded. We looked down over the side of the ship and swore. The person he’d landed on was smashed so badly, we couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. The other person in the rowboat had fainted.

“Sorry!” we’d called.

Both of the people in the rowboat woke up before they died. They screamed. We screamed. And then we vomited off the side of the ship, until our stomachs heaved dry and our noses ran and our eyes watered.

“Did you bring water?” we asked one another. “Where is the water? Who has Kleenex?”

“When was I supposed to get water?” we asked. “Before or after the customers started rioting? When we were running to the car, or running to the pier?”

We took stock of the ship. Ten paces from front to back. No cabin, no facilities, no supplies. No water. It was the only ship left. A replica of the Niña, Columbus’s ship. The sign had said so, when we’d stolen it.

Our phones didn’t have service. No one knew we were out here. We wiped our faces on our sleeves and spat. One of us had a box cutter. We supposed we could use it to open our wrists, if we had to. We sat down to wait for help. The sun was setting, and it was going to be a cold night.

It takes a while to eat a person. This would be the last thing that Kelly taught us. At Trader Joe’s, he’d trained us, and introduced us around, and let us know who was friendly and who wasn’t. He’d brought us to the bay, too, after people had started turning into zombies in the coffee aisle. Maybe zombies could swim, he’d said, but it would be a lot easier to defend your territory on a boat.

Now there were three zombies in the rowboat. They were quiet but for a soft moan now and again, like the sounds we all made when hung over. The whole bay was foggy with screaming. Boats of all sizes littered the water, motoring or drifting. There were screams from the Emeryville shore, and the Berkeley shore, and from Oakland further south and inland, and we thought we could hear them from the Bay Bridge, and Treasure Island, and across the water from San Francisco. The world was over, and it wasn’t even 2012 yet.

We were thirsty. We looked over the side, at the rowboat. It was starting to drift away. There were gallons of water in it. Safe, plastic gallons. Plus backpacks that surely had clothes and first aid gear and food. Bedrolls. Oars. Those people were far better prepared than we were, and see what it got them. We looked at one another, but the decision had already been made. Help wasn’t coming. If we were going to survive, we had to lower our standards.

We lowered a length of rope, cooing and beckoning to the zombies. Kelly grabbed onto it, and started climbing up. He’d lost his glasses, but maybe zombies weren’t nearsighted. We swung the rope away from the boat and let it go, dropping him into the water.

Turns out zombies can’t swim. So we did the same thing to the other zombies. They sank. That was the one thing the ship had: rope. We took turns climbing down a rope and taking the water and gear from the little boat, like the Grinch stealing Christmas. And it felt like Christmas, after; we had enough supplies to last a few days. Plus we didn’t drop each other.

We cleaned up, and then we did something secret. We gave ourselves pirate names. Juicy Liu, Highwater Mark, and Justin Case. It seemed fitting. We’d stolen a boat. We’d killed Kelly. (Twice.) That made us pirates.

We were no longer the kind of people we thought we were, so we had to give up something.

Juicy volunteered to take the first watch. She wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, she said. But then she kept me and Highwater up, singing, “A three-hour tour” over and over. She didn’t know any of the other words, so she kept singing those. When she got bored of that, she sang, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Voices from neighboring boats joined in. For the first few minutes, it made me believe that humanity could survive.

I dozed but came awake when she nudged me with her foot. The singing was over. Juicy snuggled into my bedroll. I paced the deck, understanding why someone would sing. It’s like making noise when hiking, to warn the rattlesnakes. If you were singing, you were too crazy to be bothered.

So I started singing. Christmas carols, because I couldn’t remember any other songs. Then James Taylor, the Beatles, Dylan. I found that I knew all of the lyrics to “In da Club” by 50 Cent, so I shouted those a few times. I thought I heard Kelly rapping with me. That was impossible, but I looked for him anyway. The water was calm and unbroken.

I woke Highwater as the sky started turning a friendly blue. I hadn’t seen dawn in ten years or more, not since early morning marching band practice in high school. I watched the sky warm while I lay in Highwater’s bedroll, and I remembered how everyone, even cute girls, looked lumpy in band uniforms. Girls with their hair up in the uniform hats, like librarians. Librarians with chin straps. Marching in formation with books in their mouths instead of clarinets.

“No way Columbus sailed the ocean blue on this thing,” Juicy said. “I don’t even know anyone who can sail a square sail. It’s got to have an outboard motor.”

I squinted against the light. Juicy was beautiful. It’s funny, I had no recollection of her previous name, and no desire to remember. Whatever it was had never suited her.

“But where are we going to go?” Highwater was sunburned and he smelled like the kitchen of a Long John Silver’s at the end of the night.

I could still see the empty dock, far off the port bow. Unless it was the starboard bow. I wondered which way it worked. If it was like stage directions.

“Avast!” a voice called. Down below, in the water, there was a little man in a little motorboat. He pointed a little handgun at us.

We put our hands up, trained by cop dramas.

“Put your hands down. D’ya think I’d have bothered you if I thought you had weapons?” he said. He had a smile like a fighting dog. “Just toss your supplies over, water and food, blankets, first aid, whatever you got. Sunscreen, especially.” He wore sunglasses, the bastard, but his bald head was a deep, painful pink. “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want to waste my ammo.”

“Okay, okay, give us a minute,” Highwater said. Always the fast thinker. “What do we do?” he whispered.

I found that I was very thirsty. “We’re pirates,” I said.

“So…what?” Juicy whispered. “We parlay?”

I squirmed out of the bedroll, came to the edge of the boat. “Let’s join forces, man,” I called. “We’re resourceful folks, the kind you want on your side. We stole all of this stuff ourselves, and dispatched three of… You know. Those things!” Nobody had said the Z word yet, and I didn’t want to be the first.

The little man shot his little gun. The three of us on the Niña hit the deck-was that where the phrase came from?-and waited. My ears rang.

“I mean it,” the little man shouted.

“Okay, you win,” I called.

So we lost our supplies, and the little man motored off.

“This can’t be a full-size ship,” Juicy said. It’s maybe ten-twelve paces from bow to stern.”

“Maybe it’s a scale model,” I guessed.

We were going to die of thirst. Unless one of us turned into a zombie out of nowhere, the way Kelly had, and then we’d die of being zombies. Maybe dying of thirst wasn’t the worst way to go. The worst way to go, I thought, was being lashed head-to-head with a decomposing skeleton, and left to starve. Some king did that to his enemies, back in the day when people could do things like that and not get put on trial for being a terrorist. Although probably you’d still just die of thirst.

We searched the place, now that we had daylight. We didn’t find any water, but we found a whip, lashed to the wall below deck. (Whether it was a full-sized whip, or just to scale, I don’t know.) It was big. I went to show off and hit myself in the ear. It didn’t even snap.

Back when phones and the Internet still worked, people on Twitter had said that you could use whips to control the zombies. That, and how zombieism was an STD, incubating before it turned its victims. Those people had to be zombies by now, due to their total lack of bullshit detectors. But we were thirsty enough to try anything. Juicy took the whip from me. She switched it without hitting herself. It popped like when Indiana Jones does it. She called for Kelly.

A few minutes later, Kelly bobbed up out of the water. So maybe zombies could swim. Maybe they were just lazy. They needed external motivation. Juicy talked to him, using the whip for punctuation. She said his name. He still responded to it, which didn’t bother any of us, though maybe it should have. He knew our names at one point. Someone did.

Kelly climbed up the rope we dangled down for him. He stood, dripping onto the deck, eyeing us as if we were a hundred dewy virgins. He looked that way at all of us, which probably upset Juicy. He didn’t seem to remember that they’d been together. But it was nice to have him back. I told him so, but he didn’t say much.

“We need you to attack them,” Juicy said, pointing. She’d picked out a nice little motorboat, the kind that has a cabin with refrigerators and beds and a big-ass water tank. Kelly made a noise like the Incredible Hulk, and wiggled his hips like Elvis. I think he still loved Juicy.

She told him to go wait in the water, and act like he was drowning. With luck, he wouldn’t look dead that way. He smiled at Juicy, and he went.

It was like bioterrorism, what we were doing. It was like giving smallpox-infected blankets to the Native Americans. It was like taking someone else’s towel off the hook on the locker room wall when they’re in the shower because yours got wet-it was just plain mean.

We waved to the motorboat. We pointed to Kelly. We pointed at the rigging. Or the spar. Or the mizzenmast. Whatever the sail was attached to. There was no wind.

The elderly couple understood, and they motored over to where Kelly bobbed and waved. They seemed like such nice people, helping out a stranger like that. We reminded ourselves that it was us or them.

The couple threw out a rope. They pulled Kelly out of the black water, and by the time they dropped the rope and backed away, he was wiggling onto their deck. And then it was like an L. L. Bean catalog gone terribly wrong: flannel tearing and sensible shoes flying.

While Kelly ate, we argued about whether we should have done something differently.

We called our new home the SuperBall. It’d had a different name before, but the paint got messed up when Juicy pulled the boat up next to the Niña. She’s never been good at parallel parking. But you should have seen her, boldly swimming over to get the boat, with the whip in her teeth, her clothes all wet and clingy. It was all Highwater and me could do not to jump on her, once we got aboard the boat. I saw the way he looked at her, and he saw the way I looked at her. We were both ashamed of ourselves, going after Kelly’s girl. Although it wasn’t like he was taking care of her anymore. And he’d always been flirting with other girls. Rumor had it he’d been screwing around.

We let the old couple stay. They obeyed the whip, like Kelly, and it was their boat, after all. We started calling them Homer and Marge, which are terribly old-fashioned names when you think about it. Their hair was thin and fine and pale, and both of them were balding. They wandered around on the deck, moaning. They were always together. Groping each other, even. Kelly followed them around, but they ignored him.

Us pirates stayed inside the cabin. That way, all of the other boats that went past would think that we were already a ghost ship. We would be safe.

Back on shore, it would be like every zombie movie you’ve ever seen. Here it was peaceful. We played with the Ouija board we found, but we couldn’t contact any ghosts. You’d think with this many dead people around we could find a ghost willing to talk. We checked the radio, but no one would talk to us on that either. Or maybe the batteries were dead. I taught Juicy some hymnals that I remembered from O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also the chorus of a screamer by this band Lordi called “The Night of the Loving Dead.” I couldn’t remember any of the words except for the title, but I sang it and she smiled.

Even then I knew. She’d already chosen Highwater. They hadn’t even kissed yet, not in front of me, but I knew. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.

Juicy asked me to go outside. The look she gave me when she closed the door told me she knew how I felt. Her eyes were wet with desire. Or maybe grief. Or need. She couldn’t stop herself; she was trying to tell me.

I paced, waiting for her to open the door. I wanted to call out her name-her real name-but the only one I could remember was Kelly’s. I opened my mouth to say it, just in case. Then I heard grunting and moaning and wet smacking.