The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney

Author:Joe McKinney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780786029303
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Pilar was frustrated.

Frowning, she looked around the empty bridge. It was a narrow room some forty feet long, curved like a bow, just wide enough for the officers’ chairs and some foot traffic. She’d had a crash course in operating the ship’s various systems, and she’d already examined those and satisfied herself that all the automated systems were working perfectly. A ship like the Gulf Queen could cruise around the world on autopilot, so there was really nothing for her to do there. All she had to do was watch the security monitors outside Senator Sutton’s door and wait for some indication she was dead.

Which was why she was frustrated.

For twenty minutes now she’d been watching the corridor, and so far nothing. The door was propped open, as were most of the doors on the ship by now, but so far nobody had stirred in the senator’s room.

Someone was in there though. She could hear them moving around through the bug planted in the room.

Maybe they had turned already and just hadn’t figured out how to get out of the room. Some of the zombies were like that, stupid and docile. Frowning again, she figured she had no other choice but to go down there and see for herself. And that wasn’t going to be easy.

She picked up her pistol from the engineering console and left the bridge. There was a service stairwell on the far side of the bridge, but she’d already checked that out and there were zombies trapped on the next flight down and she didn’t want to have to face them if she could help it.

She went back the way she’d come, passing the room where she’d shot that little boy. There were scratching noises coming from in there, but she wasn’t going to let herself get sentimental and go have a look. It’d been a stupid decision for her to go in there in the first place. She was smarter than that.

It was all the damn kids she’d seen, she decided. That was it. That was why she was tearing herself up inside. Going into this, she’d known there’d be children onboard. She’d known they were all going to die. She’d known that, academically.

The trouble was she hadn’t internalized it.

That didn’t happen until she came on board and saw them in their little dresses and suits, walking hand in hand with their parents. She’d once given orders for a group of seven men to be killed, and then watched without so much as a grimace as they were held down and their heads cut off with a chainsaw. Their pleas, their screams, the sucking sounds their throats made when a cut went badly—none of that had bothered her in the least. But children—oh, God! If there was a hell, no amount of prayer could keep her from it now.

Her, or Ramon Medina.

Time to go, she told herself. She could drive herself nuts like this.

She made her way to the stairwell, but stopped before going down.

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