John Ringo - To Sail a Darkling Sea

“There is a god somewhere that is angry because of combining stuff like Cutty Sark with fifty-year-old Laphroaig,” Paula said. “We are one day going to run afoul of him and he will raise a great storm to punish us.”

“What is… Famous Grouse?” Rusty said.

“Scotch,” Paula said, hefting a box of pasta onto the deck.

“Got a case of that,” Rusty said. “Now if I could just find some shoes… ”

They’d turned up a set of max sized galoshes on a boat but so far the security specialist didn’t have any real shoes. Or pants that fit. His jeans fit around his narrowed waist but stopped mid-calf and were a bit tight in the crotch. Not that Paula minded the latter.

“We could strap a couple of inflatables to them,” Paula said.

“Very funny… ”

* * *

“And we’re clear,” Sophia said. “There’s a ship to the southeast the Last At Sea spotted. Said there were some infecteds on deck so they banked off. We’re to check it to see if it’s worth sending a salvage and recovery crew.”

“I’ll get my gear ready,” Rusty said. “I hope I don’t have to do one of those boardings like Faith did.”

“Eh, I’ll just pot ’em off with what my sister would call a Barbie gun… ”

* * *

“What is this thing, a ferry?” Paula asked, fingers in her ears.

The vessel named Pit Stop was a bit over a hundred feet long with a large bridge and presumably crew area forward and a low-set rear deck that could clearly be opened up at the back. The back deck had a vintage car, an inflatable and four pallets of stores piled on it. It sort of looked like a ferry. The difference was, it was also rather thin and lean looking. The design was actually vaguely similar to the cutter they’d cleared.

“No clue,” Sophia said. “But if you’d give me a minute, this isn’t as easy as it looks.”

Sophia was laid out on the flying bridge with ear-muffs on and an accurized M4 with a Leupold 9x scope propped up on a cushion. She’d wrapped the strap around her arm and was carefully preparing her shots.

Sophia was more than prepared to give her sister props for close-quarters zombie fighting. Faith was a brawler, always had been. When they went to tactical ranges, Faith regularly beat her scores.

When they went to target ranges, Faith went home pouting. Sophia had been planning on trying out for the Olympic shooting team when she got a little older.

Faith was a brawler. Sophia was a sniper .

The problem was catenary, the relative motion of two vessels bouncing up and down and side to side on the ocean. It meant your target was always moving all over the damned place. Which just meant that you waited for the right moment to take the shot. If you tried to follow the target, you ended up chasing it all over hell and gone. The US Navy SEALs might have figured out a way to chase the target. Sophia had time. She waited.

* * *

There was a crack and Paula flinched as one of the infected dropped with an almost unnoticeable hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head.

“Damn,” the mate said.

“Come to Seawolf,” Sophia whispered. “Be good little zombies. Yuck… they do eat brains… ”

* * *

“That’s why so many survived,” Sophia said.

As a skipper, and an Acting Ensign, whatever that was, she really shouldn’t be doing boardings. But when they’d left the main squadron, Rusty was the only volunteer for “hostile boarding specialist” that she could scrounge up. And clearing something this size was a two-person job. Paula and Patrick were trustworthy to hold the boat. Not so good at clearing zombies.

Fortunately, one of the ships they’d cleared had some double-ought and a couple of pump shotguns. So they both had adequate firearms. Rusty had some body armor borrowed from the Coast Guard. It wasn’t really his size, as usual. And he still didn’t have real shoes.

Needs must.

The reason for the surviving infected was a set of bags of rice on the pallets. The zombies had gnawed into the rice bags and had been feasting on the rice. And from the looks of things, the occasional bird that had tried the same.

There was also freshish rainwater pooled in the inflatable on deck.

“Water, food, zombies,” Sophia said, pointing. “No fresh water, no zombies.”

“I wouldn’t drink that,” Rusty said. The water was clearly foul. Then he thought about it. “Yeah, come to think of it, if I had that on the Voyage I’d have drunk it.”

“Interesting fact,” Sophia said, cautiously rounding one of the pallets. “With water like that, the trick is to use an enema.”

“Seriously?” Rusty said, grimacing.

“Your rectum sucks up water from your poop,” Sophia said. “It’s why it comes out solid. The water gets drawn out by the rectum. And it also filters out the bad stuff, obviously. So if you’ve got really foul water and you really need it, you just give it to yourself as an enema.”

“I wish I’d known that on the Voyage ,” Rusty said. “I was mixing water and urine.”

“Which was why you survived,” Sophia said. “Won’t work with salt water, by the way. But you can even survive, for a while, on small quantities of salt water. The problem is, it’s actually the salinity of the human body. So your body can’t really absorb it well. But when you’re really dehydrated, your salinity increases compared to salt water and you can survive. For a while. Then you go fricking nuts and die. Also the problem with urine. When you’re recycling, you’re still losing water and the salinity, not to mention urea, gets higher and higher and you die.”

“I really don’t want to be back in that situation again,” Rusty said.

“And, hopefully, you won’t,” Sophia said, regarding the open hatch on the deck. “Any zombies in there?”

“Want me to yell?” Rusty asked.

“Nah,” Sophia said. “I’m pretty sure any that are alive would have come for the feast… ”

* * *

The only “survivor” hadn’t. He’d hanged himself in the small cabin he was trapped in. But most of the belowdecks watertight doors were closed. The engine room was in good shape, as was the bridge. Pretty much the only areas messed up by the infecteds was a companionway. And the cabin with the suicide was a bit rank.

“Good find,” Sophia said, examining the main engine controls. When she’d first seen an engine room like this, she’d thought she’d never understand one. Now, while she was no expert, she generally knew how to get the engine started on something this size. If there was any fuel and juice. She went through the procedure for engine main start-it was an air-powered starting system-and hit the button to start it cranking.

“Come on, baby,” she muttered. She could tell the batteries were low, but the starter generator did turn over. Then the big diesels rumbled to life.

“Beauty, eh!” she shouted. They’d both donned earmuffs.

“Nice!” Rusty shouted, grinning.

She went up to the bridge to check the systems. There were readouts in the engine room but she understood bridge systems better. Besides, it was easier to talk. Everything, so far, looked in the green.

“Rusty, go get some of daddy’s little crawlies and drop them on the bodies on the deck and in the cabin. Then head back to the boat. We don’t have a prize crew so I’m going to con this back to the Large . Just follow me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rusty said.

“Don’t fall behind,” she said.

* * *

“Okay, so I’ve got to slow down,” she muttered. The Pit Stop was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a speed boat. But it was faster than the No Tan Lines . A lot faster.