Shaun Harbinger: Lightning: Fighting the Living Dead

IBACKED AWAY FROM LUCY, my heart pounding. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How had she been bitten? How had she gotten a syringe of the vaccine? How as I supposed to help her?

“Leave… me… alone,” she murmured.

I couldn’t just leave her in the storeroom; it didn’t seem right. But if I tried to move her to one of the bedrooms, what would she do? Would she freak out if I tried to get her to her feet?

I wasn’t sure it made a difference to her where she was; she was probably unaware of her surroundings. But I didn’t want to leave her here curled up on the floor. I approached her. “Lucy.” I kept my voice low, almost a whisper, trying to soothe her.

She shrank away from me. “Leave… me… alone.” She looked frightened, her eyes wide, darting from me to the room. If my presence was going to make her try to escape, I should just leave her here. I didn’t want her running up to the deck in a blind panic and falling overboard.

I turned to leave the room, colliding with a shelf in my haste. A pile of Sail to Your Destiny t-shirts fell to the floor. I got out of there and closed the door. As long as she wasn’t disturbed, Lucy should stay where she was, compelled by the virus to stay in a safe place.

The virus. It was running through her blood, changing her. If it remained in her system for four days, Lucy would become a monster, a hybrid. What would I do then? Kill her? No, I couldn’t do that. No matter what happened to her, I could never do that.

I went back up the stairs, through the living area, and out onto the aft deck. On The Lucky Escape , Sam, Jax, Tanya, and Johnny were waiting for me to reappear. They must have seen something in my face, because Jax looked concerned.

“Alex, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s Lucy. She’s been bitten. She took the vaccine and left me a note saying that she’s been bitten today.” Saying it out loud made it seem worse somehow. I sat wearily on the bench that ran around the perimeter of the deck and put my head in my hands. There was no way out of this.

A few seconds later, Jax and Sam came onboard The Big Easy , stepping over from the Escape .

“I’m sorry, man,” Sam said. He spread his big hands as if he was unsure what to say after that.

Jax sat on the bench next to me and put her arm around my shoulder. “Alex, I’m so sorry. I know how much you were looking forward to seeing Lucy again. It’s terrible that it has to end like this.”

“It hasn’t ended yet,” I said. “She was bitten today. That means she has four days before she turns.”

She patted my shoulder as if she were consoling an upset child who had just learned that Santa isn’t real. “We’ve all seen the hybrids. We know what happened to those soldiers after they got bitten. There’s nothing we can do for Lucy in the next four days that’s going to stop the same thing happening to her.”

“Jesus,” Sam said, “Way to go easy on the poor guy.”

Jax sighed. “I’m only being realistic, Sam.”

My mind reeled from shock and tried to find a solution at the same time. I couldn’t think straight. But I had to, for Lucy’s sake. I wasn’t going to just float around on the waves while she lay curled up in the storeroom becoming a monster.

I looked at Jax. “You said you were going to try to find Apocalypse Island.”

She nodded.

“Maybe they have a cure for this. You said yourself that if anyone had a cure, it was the scientists on that island.”

“Yes, I did. But it’s a secret government research facility, Alex. They aren’t just going to hand you the cure. And that’s assuming a cure even exists. Don’t you think that if they had developed an antivirus, they would be handing it out by now?”

“But they might have it,” I said, desperate to believe that there was something I could do for Lucy. I couldn’t accept a situation with no hope.

“Hey, we’re going there anyway,” Sam said. “There’s no harm in letting Alex come too.”

Jax nodded. “Just as long as he doesn’t expect some sort of miracle. We’re not even sure we’ll find the island.”

“We got a good lead on the coordinates when we were doing the story on the island,” Sam said. “We have a chance to find it. That’s all Alex is asking for, a chance.”

He was right. The slightest glimmer of hope would be enough to motivate me into action. I needed something to hang on to, even if it was just a thin thread.

“We should get moving,” he said. “Do you want me to stay on here with you, man?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

Jax climbed back onto the Escape . Sam took a seat on the bench where she had been sitting, and I climbed the ladder to the bridge. Lucy had lashed the wheel into a fixed position using cord. I untied it, thankful that she was smart enough to take the necessary actions to get The Big Easy here before she succumbed to the virus. If she’d gone off course, I would have wasted precious time searching for her.

I followed The Lucky Escape north along the coast. We kept a couple of miles offshore, aware that the army was fortifying positions at marinas and docks. We didn’t want to be taking fire from artillery on the cliffs, or tank on the beaches.

Sam remained mostly quiet, apart from an occasional, “Everything’s going to be okay, man,” or “Don’t’ worry, dude, we’ll find that island.” I knew he meant well but my natural pessimism shook off his kind words. I could only think about what would happen if we didn’t find Apocalypse Island. And even if we did, what if there was no cure? What if nothing could be done for Lucy?

The thread of hope was already unraveling in my mind.

We sailed north for three hours. The sunny afternoon became a cool evening as we reached the coast of Scotland. I switched on the running lights and asked Sam to get me a sweater. When he came back with it, and one for himself, he handed it to me quietly. I realized he must have fetched them from the storeroom and seen Lucy curled up in the corner. His earlier optimism seemed to have disappeared now that he had seen her with his own eyes.

A northerly wind whispered coldly over the decks, and the chill seemed to reach my bones.

The Escape changed course, heading away from the coast into the open sea. I followed, watching the stars appear in the darkening sky. Seeing the changes in the environment reminded me that time was running out with each passing second.

Half an hour later, the Escape stopped moving forward and began drifting. I cut the engines to The Big Easy and drifted alongside.

Tanya poked her head out from the Escape ’s bridge. “This should be the place.”

I looked over the choppy sea. The sky was a deep, dark blue, and an almost full moon hung over the water, illuminating everything with a spectral silver light. If there was an island around here, it should be visible.

I grabbed a pair of binoculars and climbed down to the aft deck. Sam was leaning over the safety railing, squinting into the distance.

Moving past him, I went to the sun deck and used the binoculars to confirm what I most feared. There was no island here. We were drifting in the middle of nowhere. I lowered the binoculars.

“I see something,” Johnny shouted. “Over there.” He pointed toward the dark horizon.

Bringing up the binoculars to my eye again, I scanned the area he had pointed at. I couldn’t see anything until I adjusted the focus, and then I saw a dark shape. It was a long way from our location and it wasn’t necessarily an island. It could be a large ship drifting out there in the night.