John Ringo - Under a Graveyard Sky

“Makes sense,” Fontana said. “Except for the being sixty feet down and we don’t have SCUBA gear.”

“That is not an issue,” Steve said. “I am an expert free diver.”

“And then there’s them ,” Faith said, pointing to the sharks again. “You know, the sharks . The man-eating sharks. The man-eating, probably-been-surviving-on-zombies-that-fell-off sharks?”

“Right, those,” Steve said. “About those…”

* * *

“You sure about this?” Sherill asked.

Some people tended to call him “Captain Gilligan” for his vague resemblance to Alan Hale, Jr. He had the same blue eyes, thinning blond hair. As he was getting his beer gut back, the resemblance was increasing.

His devotion to the His Sea Fit was almost doglike. He’d already lost three crewmen who couldn’t take the constant pounding of being on a 35ft sport fisher, in deep ocean, day in and day out. Thirty-five foot sport fishers were not designed for long-endurance, at-sea operations. Captain Gilligan didn’t seem to care. You’d pry him out with a crowbar.

“If they don’t leave,” Steve said, sitting on the bulwark of the aft deck of the Fit wearing swim fins and goggles, “no.”

The sharks were still circling below but with luck that was going to change soon. There was another shot from the aft of the boat and Steve vaguely heard the ricochet go by overhead. There was a flush-deck at the rear of the yacht, which had the infecteds right at waterline. Whether they dropped in the water or not, the blood from them should attract the sharks.

“You’d better not shoot my boat,” Sherill said.

There was a splash in the distance and first one of the larger sharks then the entire group headed aft.

“Unlikely,” Steve said. “Angles are wrong.” Or course, they were probably going to be putting holes in the yacht but he figured it could probably take it. The “boarding support area” was half-way underwater and the yacht hadn’t sunk.

He took a deep breath and slid quietly over the side.

He porpoised down into the depths, spinning in a three sixty to keep an eye around. In his left hand he had a light line with a spring clip on one end. The other hovered over his H &K.

While there had been snorkels, swim fins and masks aplenty among the boats, not one single speargun had been found. Steve was hoping, really hard, that he wasn’t going to have to test if you could fire an H &K USP.45, with octagonal barrel and Austrian engineering, sixty feet underwater.

He hadn’t had much of a chance to do breathhold diving in a while. Most of the times they stopped there were sharks around the boats and zombies to kill. People to save. Even Jew Bay was a no-go zone. In fact, he hadn’t had a lot of time for anything but the Program in a while.

But while he’d grown up on a station, it was close to the coast. And he’d grown up swimming and free diving. This was home territory. Including the sharks, which in Australia were just one of those things like box jellies, spider and snakes you had to put up with.

When he reached the hawser he put his right hand on it and followed it down to the latch point. The hawser wasn’t tied to the fishing boat. It was connected to a quick release latch, which was, in turn, connected to an apparently massively strong davit.

Steve felt like he was out of air but knew it was just CO2 build-up so he let out some air as he carefully connected the clip to the quick release. That was as much as he could handle on one breath so he started back up. He spun around, again, looking for potential threats but the sharks were busy feasting at the aft of the boat. His motions were smooth and regular, just another healthy, happy fish in the water. Nothing to attract them.

His heart beat faster as a massive hammer head came coasting down the length of the megayacht. It seemed in no hurry to get to the feeding frenzy aft. On the other hand, it didn’t turn towards Steve.

He surfaced and swam, splash free, to the dive platform on the rear of the Sea Fit and pulled himself completely out of the water, sprawling out on the platform.

“You okay?” Sherill called from the tuna tower. He was holding a rifle in his hands.

“Fine,” Steve said. “Is that for zombies or sharks?”

“Yes!”

Steve breathed deeply and waved with two fingers for Sherill to back the boat closer to the megayacht. The less lateral distance he had to cross the better.

This time he slipped off the dive platform face down to get a better head start. He spun in place and then tried not to panic as the massive hammer came coasting towards him. It had apparently decided that the other boat was probably going serve up tasty zombies as well.

Steve decided to just keep heading down. Hammerheads were known to attack humans and this one was obviously accustomed to feeding on infecteds. But they were also fairly smart for sharks and also tended to focus on distressed, fish, birds and mammals. Steve’s movements were regular and steady. It should ignore him. Should.

He kept an eye on it as he headed down the hawser to the line. The medium weight nylon was more or less negatively buoyant and hadn’t gotten far from the hawser. Steve got ahold of one end and moved away from the hawser. As soon as he was clear, he sped up, swimming away from the boat and the quick release as fast as possible, the line wrapped around his left hand.

He felt the shock of the line going taught and looked back. The quick release had surrendered, finally, and the boat shot into the depths as the hawser snapped upwards.

Pulling Steve along with it. Which had been part of the plan.

Unfortunately, the sharp movements excited the hammerhead, which headed for the only reasonable source of protein in view: Steve.

The shark came in at lightning speed but Steve had had a master’s course in drawing and firing fast at this point. He fended the charging hammerhead away by placing the barrel of the H &K against its port hammer and pressing the trigger as it rolled to take a bite of tasty human.

The gun did not explode and the hammerhead did not take well to being shot in the head by a polymer capped, expanding, 45 caliber ACP. It spasmed and dashed away in a corkscrew, its tail lashing furiously.

Unfortunately, it was now “a distressed fish, bird or mammal.” Sharks sense such movements and are attracted to them. And while there were tasty zombies at the aft of the boat, there were also a lot of sharks. So some of the ones on the edge of the pack banked away and headed towards the new source of potential protein.

Which meant right at Steve.

He wasn’t sticking around to watch or anything but the sharks were coming in from near the surface. The hammerhead was tracking down and forward on the megayacht and that meant that the sharks’ path led them right to Steve.

Who they passed without note. He was still being calm and regular in his movements and they didn’t see him as easy prey. Five, six, nine sharks darted right past him in pursuit of the massive hammer as he calmly made his way to the surface.

“I thought you were a goner, there,” Sherill called. “They were too deep to shoot.”

“If you’d shot one of them I would have been a goner,” Steve muttered. If one of the charging sharks had been shot as well, all the rest would have closed in with Steve as tasty snack in the middle.

“What?” Sherill asked, starting to climb down.

“Easy peasy,” Steve said, decocking the H &K and taking a series of deep breaths. “No worries, mate.”

* * *

“Okay,” Fredette said, shaking his head and listening to the take from the captains. The increasing number of boat captains in the “flotilla” gossiped like old women on various frequencies, which made keeping up with the goings on of the group easy. “This guy is flipping insane. Diving into a feeding frenzy to release a boat and then taking out a shark with a pistol?”