Chapter 30 #2
Then the mask came back; he straightened.
“Let’s get this done.” His voice resigned.
The fuel dock came into view at the far end, exactly where he said it would be. An old, rusted crank pump sat at the end of the dock beside a faded sign: SELF-SERVICE FUEL. The paint peeling, the metal stained orange with corrosion.
Jeff steered alongside, his hands quick and practiced, every movement controlled.
“Alright,” he said softly. “Fast and quiet.”
Callan grabbed the dock piling and hauled himself up, a sharp breath escaping through his teeth as his injured foot hit the planks.
I jumped out beside him immediately.
Jeff and Ethan followed close behind.
The dock creaked beneath our weight, each groan of the wood too loud in the silence.
The marina stretched around us—long, narrow lanes of floating docks and boats, too many blind corners, and way too many shadows.
But the water on either side offered some comfort.
Those things didn’t seem to swim. We only needed to worry about the dock ahead.
One way in. One way out.
Callan shoved the pump nozzle into the fuel intake on the Mariner and gripped the crank handle.
“Here goes nothing.”
He turned it.
The pump shrieked, like nails on a chalkboard, a rusted metallic scream that shot across the still water and echoed off everything in the marina.
We all froze.
“Shit,” Ethan whispered.
Callan didn’t stop; he kept cranking. The pump groaned and squealed with every rotation, broadcasting our position to anything within a half-mile.
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
Jeff and I moved into position ahead of him on the dock, gaff hooks raised. The long wooden handles gave us reach. The steel hooks at the end curved to wicked points, designed to punch through the jaws of hundred-pound tuna.
They’d have to do for this job; the wind carried salt and diesel fumes across the dock.
And then—
A faint sound. Low, guttural, a moan that didn’t come from the distance but close, way too close.
From the dock to our left, a figure stumbled into view between two boats. It moved chaotically—lurching, stiff. Gray skin hung loose from its face. Its eyes sat deep in hollow sockets, clouded over, locked onto nothing and everything at once.
“Get ready, don’t let them bite you,” Jeff growled.
The corpse dragged itself toward us, arms outstretched, fingers blackened and curled. A low, gurgling rattle came from its open throat.
Behind us, Callan kept pumping.
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
“Don’t stop,” Jeff said, his voice steady.
More movement from deeper in the slips, another shape between the boats. Then another. They moved forward, slow at first, drawn by the rhythmic clang of the pump like moths to a flame.
“Shit,” Ethan breathed.
Jeff stepped forward and swung; the gaff hook arced hard and fast, the steel point jamming through the side of the first corpse’s throat with a wet, sucking sound.
The hook sank deep, catching on vertebrae, and a spray of dark, clotted blood splattered across the dock planks — black, thick as motor oil.
Jeff wrenched the hook sideways, and the thing’s neck tore open in a ragged flap of gray skin and ropy tendons.
He shoved forward with the handle and drove the body off the dock’s edge.
It hit the water with a loud splash and sank.
The second one stumbled toward me.
I swung; the hook caught its shoulder and sank into it above the collarbone.
I heard the point scrape bone as dark fluid oozed from the wound, running down the thing’s chest in slow rivulets.
Its arm went slack on that side, but it kept coming, mouth open, teeth exposed and cracked.
I twisted the hook and yanked sideways, ripping a chunk of shoulder free in a spray of black gore.
The corpse lost its footing and pitched off the dock, hitting the water face-first.
“Nice,” Jeff said.
But the noise had already done its work; moans echoed from deeper inside the marina. A chorus, the sound multiplied until it seemed to come from everywhere.
Shapes appeared between the rows, stumbling out from behind cabin cruisers and sailboats.
Five, then six, and more behind them.
“Half a tank!” Callan called.
I glanced back; I could see sweat running down his face, his arms working the crank in steady, brutal rotations. Every time his body shifted, his injured ankle took weight, and I could see it in the way his face contorted — a flash of agony he swallowed down before the next turn.
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
I turned back and shifted my stance, scanning the gaps between boats; that’s when one of them appeared directly in front of me, not from a distance down the dock, but right there.
It must have been in the cockpit, or slumped below the gunwale, because I didn’t see it until it already had both feet on the dock, and its hand grabbed my jacket and yanked it.
“Shit—!”
The thing slammed into me with a force that didn’t match its rotting frame. My boots skidded on the wet planks, and my back hit a piling hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. The gaff hook twisted in my grip, useless at this range.
Its face pushed toward mine; the skin around its mouth had peeled back to the gums, exposing every tooth—some broken, some missing, the rest stained dark.
Its jaw worked open and shut with a horrible wet click inches from my face.
Strands of something—saliva or decay or both—hung from its lips, and it looked like something out of a Halloween horror flick. Only this was real.
The smell hit me: rotting meat. The stench of decomposition was so advanced that the body should have collapsed under its own weight and liquefied.
I shoved against its chest, and my hand sank into the softened flesh above its sternum, my fingers breaking through fabric and skin into something cold and yielding underneath. I gagged and pushed harder, but its dead weight kept grinding me into the piling.
“SLOANE!”
Callan’s voice ripped across the dock behind me, raw with something beyond fear.
I jammed the wooden shaft of the gaff hook sideways into the thing’s mouth, bracing it between us.
Its teeth scraped and bit against the wood, gouging deep marks into the handle.
Its clouded eyes stared past me at nothing; its hands clawed at my jacket, pulling.
Its face pushed closer.
Jeff appeared beside me.
“Hold still!”
He swung the hook overhand like an axe.
The steel point punched through the back of the corpse’s skull with a sound like a boot going through a rotten pumpkin.
The tip burst out through the thing’s left eye socket in a spray of dark matter—brain and bone and fluid that splattered hot across my head and neck. The body went rigid for one instant.
Then it collapsed, folding against me before Jeff grabbed the handle and wrenched it sideways. The corpse slid off the hook and crumpled onto the dock, a pool of near-black blood spreading slowly from the shattered skull.
I staggered back, chest heaving.
“You good?” Jeff asked.
I wiped the gore from my neck with a shaking hand.
“Yeah.”
Behind us, the pump kept whining. Callan hadn’t stopped, but I heard the strain in his breathing now, the grunt of effort with every turn.
“Almost there!” he yelled, his voice cracking.
More of the dead spilled onto the docks, from everywhere now. A wall of gray, ruined bodies closing the distance with terrible persistence.
Too many.
Ethan backed toward the boat, his face white.
“I’m starting the engine!”
“Go!” Jeff barked.
Ethan leaped aboard; seconds later, the engine roared to life, the rumble shaking through the dock pilings beneath our feet.
The sound surged through the approaching dead like electricity; their moans rose in pitch.
“FULL!” Callan shouted.
He ripped the nozzle free and slammed the fuel cap shut.
“RUN!”
We didn’t argue.
Jeff grabbed Callan’s arm and hauled him upright. I took his other side. The three of us jumped onto the boat as the dead poured onto the dock behind us—a tide of grasping hands, the endless sound of hunger.