Under a Graveyard Sky

going to have to figure out how to tow the damned thing or strip it soon. That was one of his nagging issues.

“It’s a supply ship,” Fontana said. “Would they have some?”

“We can try to ask,” Steve said.

“Do you have blowers?” Fontana said. “Blowers! Where are the blowers? If they’re answering I can’t hear. They’re saying something…”

“We passed an aid station,” Gardner said, pointing back the way they came.

“Which would have blowers?” Steve said.

“No,” Gardner said. “But it might have a stethoscope.”

* * *

Fontana ripped off his mask and leaned into the hatch.

“Where do you have air blowerthisairyoucan’tbreatheitwhereARETHEAIRBLOWERS!”

“OW!” Gardner snapped, holding her ears that the stethoscope was inserted into. “That hurt!”

Fontana quickly redonned his mask and took a deep breath.

“Wow, that really is foul.”

Gardner waved a hand for silence as she listened.

“Ask them if they said ‘locker by engineering’?” She pulled the stethoscope away from the hatch and covered it with her hand.

“LOCKER BY ENGINEERING?” Fontana shouted through his mask.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Gardner said, nodding and taking off the stethoscope. “Okay, you can bellow as loud as you want, now.”

* * *

“You got a clue how to use these?” Steve asked, looking at the fans and big coiled duct stuff. Mechanical wasn’t his gift any more than singing.

“As a matter of fact I do,” Gardner said. “But I’ll need some help moving them. Ooo, ooo, My. Poor. Pregnant. Back.”

“There’s a reason Sadie is back on the Large,” Fontana said.

* * *

In the end, Gardner did pretty much all the work but the toting. And in thirty minutes, they had the blowers evacuating and replacing the air in the corridors to the survivor compartment.

“How long?” Steve asked, looking at the descending sun. It wasn’t red. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad sign. A bad sign was if the dawn was red.

“When this says it’s okay,” Gardner said, holding up the hydrocarbon meter.

“Picky, picky,” Fontana said. “Women!”

“You know, Fontana, on a boat like this I know ways to just catch you on fire. Ah, god. Not now…”

“What?”

“I gotta puke again,” she said, hurrying to the rail. “Be right back.”

* * *

“You gonna be okay?” Faith said as Hooch puked over the rail.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry, that’s not what… I mean…”

“I’d say I puked the first time but I didn’t,” Faith said, then shrugged. “I mean, I have puked. Trust me. But I’ve seen worse than this. You should have seen some of the stuff on the Alpha.”

“How many of these have you done?” Hooch said. The scene in the lower deck was fucking awful. The male of the group, presumably the dad, had survived. By feeding on his family in what had been the master’s cabin. From the looks of it, they’d all zombied and had been fed on one by one. As he’d killed them he’d brought them down into the cabin as a nest and slept with the dead and decomposing corpses. Hooch had managed to hold it in until he noticed one really totally, what the fuck? detail. At the head of the bed, not covered in filth, almost like a little shrine, was a teddy bear. Like somewhere in the thing on the boat’s brain it almost remembered that it had somebody it cared about. It just couldn’t recognize that it was the tiny little corpse it was feeding on.

“People keep asking me that,” Faith said. “I need to get a count…”

* * *

“Five,” Steve said, nodding. “That’s not bad for a boat this size. Come on, we’ll get you over to the rescue boat.”

“Wait,” one of the men said, holding up his hand. “I’ll stay onboard.”

“Why?” Fontana said.

“If we leave the boat it’s salvage,” a woman said.

“Heh,” Steve said, grinning. “It’s salvage already. You’re not going to get screwed but you kind of want to sit down and have a chat about the new reality.”

“You do, you really do,” Gardner said. “And I’m saying that sort of officially as a member of the Coast Guard. In fact, as far as we can tell, I’m the number four senior United States Coast Guard officer. Cause there’s only six of us left.”

“What?” the man said, his face going ashen.

“Just come on over to the boat and get some fresh air,” Steve said. “We’re not going to pirate your boat.”

“Not exactly pirate,” Fontana said. “Hey, I wonder if I’m, like, Senior NCO of the Army.”

“In that case, I think Hooch is the Commandant…”

* * *

“How much fuel in the tanks, Hooch?” Faith asked, looking at the form. She was letting him do it for the experience. Besides the post-clearance tasks were getting old.

“Like, half a tank?” Hooch said.

“But dead batteries,” Faith said. “Okay. Hey, Paula! Toss me the slave!”

“Slave cable?” Hooch asked.

“Got it in one,” Faith said as Paula hefted the cable up from the other boat’s engine room. “Vicky make it up from cables and stuff they found. They do a little salvage in the harbor when the zombies aren’t real active or boats they can get to that don’t have any. But it’s stuff like this. I mean, I’ve had a couple of other people say they’ll try out clearance and they see one boat like this and give it up. It’s not just the zombies.”

“Who clears ’em out?” Hooch asked.

“Oh, the crews do,” Faith said. “If you want a new boat, that’s the catch unless it’s a hand-me-down like the Endeavor. Okay, engineering deck hatch is over here…”

* * *

“This is confusing,” Hooch said, looking at the electrical panel.

“Confused the shit out of me the first time I looked at it,” Faith said, throwing a breaker back and forth. “But this isn’t complicated. The Large, the Vicky, that fricking Alpha. Those are complicated.” She hit the “Start” button and the engine started whining. “Come on, baby…”

The engine rumbled to life and she grinned.

“And we have a working boat,” Faith said. “I think we get some sort of spiff for that but I don’t really know what it is.”

“Spiff?” Hooch said.

“Bonus,” Faith said. “Like, extra rations or booze or something. Speaking of which.” She keyed her radio. “You want the good pickins, come and get ’em. And it works.”

“Awesome,” Sophia replied. “Maybe I’ll ask for an upgrade.”

“Might want to look at the master cabin before you say that.”

* * *

“Oh, my God,” the man said, his face white.

“I know, zombies, right?” Faith said to the “captain” of the “prize crew.” The group were recent rescuees,