Two zombies obscured Big Mack’s view suddenly, jolting him back to his current situation, forcing him to take his eyes off of the vessels in the choppy water. Big Mack lifted his handgun and fired, blowing the temple out of the nearest ghoul. He fired again, catching the other zombie in the throat and sending it twisting to the ground. He lowered his aim and pulled the trigger again, but the gun clicked, it was empty. Big Mack knew he was out of ammunition and threw the gun aside, clutching his wound once more and stumbling as quickly past the still living undead as quickly as he could manage.
Big Mack pushed himself forward, forcing certain thoughts from his brain, ideas that he was going to be swarmed at any moment, that he would reach the dock and the ships would be gone, that he would get on a ship but die of his wound. Those thoughts were forgotten as soon as they existed, but their damage was immediate and noticeable. His steps became slower; his stomach wound seemed to hurt a little more. Big Mack was determined to make it, but that determination seemed to slide out of him along with the blood that still flowed from the hole in his belly.
If Bobby and Toga hadn’t slipped out of a building twenty feet from the docks in front of Big Mack, he may have just laid down and accepted a gristly fate. Instead seeing the fat man and the ex Jester spurred him on. Toga was loaded down with bags and boxes, and Bobby led the way, holding a large rifle. They ran up the dock and pat three guards who had been keeping people away from Bobby’s yacht. Big Mack wondered how Bobby had remained so fat for so long. Mack had been a lager man before this had all gone down, and the evidence of that remained, but in the months since the first outbreak he had lost pound after pound. There simply wasn’t a lot to eat at the end of the world. Bobby had always managed just fine. Seeing the man run his fat ass up to a yacht that wasn’t his filled Big Mack with rage, and he was determined to survive, if only long enough to kill Bobby.
Toga ran up the ramp to the yacht, dropping his load of supplies on the deck. The three guards ran up after them and busied themselves with getting the yacht away from the dock and to the open sea. Toga snatched up one of their guns, standing at the top of the loading ramp and ensuring no one got on undead or living. Big Mack kept on, his pace quickening. He couldn’t miss that boat. He had to get there, to convince Toga to turn on his new boss. Here at the docks there were more survivors jostling with each other and the undead to make it to a boat. As Mack watched one woman and her child went sprinting down the wooden dock and towards the yacht Toga was guarding. He blew them both away as soon as the woman’s foot hit the start of the ramp. Big Mack had done a lot of bad things in his life, before and after the zombies came around, and he had known Toga to do some of his own, but watching the woman and her child fall dead off the side of the dock and into the slowly rolling water brought the taste of vomit to his mouth. He swallowed it down and kept on moving.
The higher number of people meant that miraculously Big Mack moved through the crowd unmolested by a ghoul. He wondered for the first time that day if there was someone up above, God maybe, looking out for him. When his biker boot hit the beginning of that dock, he almost cried tears of joy. Big Mack spurred himself to move in quicker, setting his sights on Bobby’s yacht, even as it began to slowly move away from the docks.
“No!” Big Mack screamed, surprising himself with the intensity and volume he managed. Toga snapped his head around, his mouth opening in surprise when he saw Big Mack. He lifted his gun for a moment but then let it drop. Big Mack continued on to the end of the dock, but the yacht was too far. He kept his eyes on Toga, who returned the gaze. Big Mack had lost, he felt defeated. He was in pain and he was tired. Finally he tore his eyes from his old fiend and looked down, watched the water lap against the large posts that held the dock above the water. The waves broke in a spray of light pink, the red of blood mixing with the normal white. Big Mack thought about leaning forward and falling into the ocean and letting it pull him down and away from the coast. He looked back up at the retreating yacht just in time to see Toga push something off of the side of the boat. It was a large cube, and it splashed heavily into the water a hundred yards from the end of the dock. It took Big Mack a moment to realize what it was.
Big Mack did fall forward, but when he hit the shockingly cold water he began to swim forward, kicking his legs weakly, gritting his teeth at the intense pain the salt water was causing in his gunshot wound. He had no idea how long he swam for, it could have been minutes, it could have been hours, but eventually he was at the big cube, bobbing up and down in the sea. Big Mack struggled to find the orange plastic handle, but eventually located it and pulled it.
