Dark Days

his binge drinking always dragged him down. He was forty-five, tall, and carried a growing spare tire around his waist. His arms looked like pistons, and the knuckles on his huge hands were battered from fighting in ports all over the world.

A year and a half before, Basilio joined the crew of the Marques de la Ensenada, an oil tanker in the Spanish navy, anchored in Cartagena, Colombia. Six hours after going ashore, Basilio and a couple of shipmates had gotten plastered and had wrecked a bar, broken a chair over a pimp’s head, and picked a fight with several Colombian police officers. MPs arrested them and sent them back to their ship, where they were locked up in their quarters.

Basilio spent the next forty-eight hours in the throes of a terrible hangover, but he heard a lot of voices screaming and sailors running around up top. Through the narrow porthole in his cabin, he watched Cartagena’s military port quickly become an anthill.

Many ships, packed with people, hastily weighed anchor and jammed the mouth of the port trying to get out. On land, thousands of people, mostly civilians, tried to reach anything afloat, no matter the cost. The authorities had planned to evacuate the city by sea, but clearly the situation had overwhelmed them. There were too many people and too few ships. Out his tiny porthole, Basilio watched the Colombian military scurry around, trying to bring order to the chaos, but the terrified crowd was out of control.

Basilio didn’t read newspapers, and he hadn’t listened to the radio or watched TV for days, so he had no idea that in the days leading up to the Apocalypse, chaos was rampant all over the world. At first, with all the gunshots and explosions throughout the city, he thought there’d been a civil war or revolution in Colombia. But the frantic activity of the soldiers convinced him it was something else.

Anchored next to the Marques de la Ensenada were an American destroyer and a French frigate. Large detachments of their crews (except the sick or those locked up like Basilio) had gone ashore to join the overwhelmed Colombians in trying to control the panicked crowd. In horror, Basilio witnessed an avalanche of thousands of people sweep over those American soldiers and French sailors, as if they were toys, in their rush to the sea.

The shores had quickly become a hive of thousands of men, women, and children splashing and punching one another, trying to keep from drowning or being crushed by people falling on top of them. The water was churned up by thousands of arms and legs. People were knocked senseless when they stuck their heads up for air in the midst of that morass.

Someone panicked and started firing wildly into the crowd. Soon hundreds of people were exchanging shots, desperate to board the ships remaining in the harbor. Columns of black smoke rose across the city. Law and order was breaking down and nobody could stop it.

Basilio’s mouth was as dry as the desert. He rubbed his eyes, hoping that that hellacious scene was just a hallucination brought on by the DTs, but he knew it was painfully real. He turned away from the porthole, unable to watch anymore, but he couldn’t tune out the screams of thousands of people drowning a few feet away. The pounding and clawing of people futilely trying to climb the ship’s smooth sides were like blows to his head. Yet Basilio didn’t shed any tears. He was safe. Every man for himself, he thought.

Six hours later, one of the lieutenants on the ship opened the cell door. His uniform was soaking wet and torn. Blood poured from a huge gash in his head. Of all the crew that had gone ashore, he and a sergeant were the only survivors. Over seven hundred people, mostly civilians, were crammed into every corner on that tanker. Only four members of the original crew, including Basilio, had survived the chaos.

Loaded down with refugees, the Marques de la Ensenada began a harrowing journey back home. It lacked enough food, water, and medicine for that many people. Its crew barely knew how to steer the ship. A violent hurricane nearly sent the ship to the bottom. When it finally reached the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, more than a hundred people had died along the way. Twenty with “suspicious wounds” had been executed on board. There were still fifteen cases of infection onboard, which forced everyone to spend a month floating in the port in quarantine.

Enduring a month without a drop of alcohol was torture for Basilio.

Basilio had lived in Tenerife ever since. He’d even enlisted in the navy. The world had changed in a year, but his propensity to get into trouble hadn’t. A drunken spree that ended in a massive brawl five months before had gotten him assigned to a disciplinary post—guard duty on the quarantine ship. It was the worst fate a guy could have, cut off from the city, surrounded by people who might be infected. His drinking problem had landed him in what to him was the closest thing to hell in Tenerife. He cursed that shitty post every day.

Basilio was stationed at the sentry post in the corridor that led to the isolation cells. It was small and spartanly furnished with just two chairs, a wooden table, and a rack that held a half-dozen shiny, black automatic rifles.

His hands trembling, Basilio poured a big glass of the local rum out of a bottle he’d hidden under the ammo box. He had to think of something fast. He knew he was fucked and he wasn’t going to get off easy. It was that fucking nun’s fault, that fucking nun from hell. Why’d she have to stick her nose where it didn’t belong? No, that fucking group from the Peninsula was to blame. They’d been trouble from the start. Who’d have thought anyone would still be alive there?

A few months after the Apocalypse, very few survivors made it to Tenerife; even fewer survived quarantine. His duties aboard the Galicia were unpleasant but not very demanding. Occasionally, small groups from northern Africa all the way to the Sahara desert made it to the Canary Islands on any boat they could get their hands on. Basilio despised those people. They were just damned African scum, most on death’s door who didn’t have the good sense to die at home. It baffled him why the authorities took those people in when supplies were alarmingly low. Basilio would’ve sent them all back to Africa with lead in their skulls, but those fucking faggots in the government didn’t know how to take charge of the situation like real men.

Basilio spit on the floor in disgust. Those Africans presented a problem, but also some distraction, especially the women. Most of them didn’t speak Spanish, English, or anything like it, just Arabic or one of those African dialects even God didn’t understand. But that gave the sailors an advantage. On more than one occasion, Basilio and a couple of guards had had some fun with those girls in a back room they jokingly called “Paradise.”

Of course, none of the medical staff, commanders, or civilian authorities knew about Basilio and his cronies’ little secret. They’d have been in serious trouble if anyone ever found out. Martial law was still in force and rape was punishable by death. But since those downtrodden African girls didn’t speak Spanish, they couldn’t complain. Besides, most of them had suffered so much along the way that being raped one more time didn’t matter much. They’d made it to the only safe place in two thousand miles, so they almost all kept quiet. Any woman who made trouble, well… Basilio smirked and knocked back half the rum in his glass. She wouldn’t be the first to have her file pulled and put in the “likely infected” pile. Just one step away from becoming fish food.

But this group was different. They were Europeans, and that changed everything. If that weren’t enough, they’d flown over from the mainland! Somehow, they’d survived for over a year, surrounded by Undead. The authorities had taken a real interest in them. Alicia Pons herself had taken on their case.

Fuck, Basilio, you’re in a shitload of trouble! he thought, pouring himself another drink. When she finds out about this, you’re a dead man. That Pons bitch’ll cut your balls off and feed ‘em to you with hot sauce. He slammed his fist on the table, as he racked his brain for a way out.

They were a strange group. First there was the fucking lawyer with the cat. He hadn’t stopped bellyaching since day one, demanding to speak to the person in charge. When they tried to put down his fucking cat, he raised such hell the doctors gave in. He broke the doctor’s arm in two places! Alicia Pons decided the cat could live, the most unbelievable decision so far. Basilio couldn’t see how that paper-pushing asshole had survived. He just couldn’t picture the guy shooting a gun.

The Ukrainian guy was another story. That guy was dangerous. He was short, blond, about forty with a huge yellow mustache. He was missing a couple of fingers on his right hand; he must’ve lost them in a fight. The guy was very quiet, calm, but he watched you… oh, damn, the way his pale eyes bore into the back of your neck gave you the creeps, as if he were thinking over how he could hurt you faster. (Basilio had no idea how right he was.)

The young girl was a fucking hottie. Nice body, with curves that made your head spin and that face… blessed Christ, she’d make a cloistered monk’s blood boil. And there she was, within arm’s reach.

During the first weeks, Basilio played it safe. He made some raunchy comments as he made his rounds, but