When he had his fill of news, he came back to himself, remembering that he was in charge. His first mate, Nicholas Griego, had made it back intact, which he was thankful for, though half his bridge crew was missing.
"What should we do?" Griego asked when Gary made his back to the bridge.
Schwenk turned to look at the man. He was young for his position, but he had a good head on his shoulders. At that moment, he seemed like nothing more than a terrified boy, and Schwenk supposed that's exactly what he was. "Just take us out to the open ocean. We'll park this barge and see what we can see. I'll make some calls on the radio. See if there's anything we can do."
It was a weak plan, but it was all that he had at the moment, and Griego followed through without question, bless the man.
On the bridge, he watched the crowd of people milling around on the deck. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them, all scared, all floating on a ship with no destination. He tried to radio the port authority, but all he got was static. He used his satellite phone to call his higher-ups, but there was no response on that either. They were based in San Francisco. Could the sickness be there as well?
With no orders and no contact, he sat in the bridge, looking at the readings on the ship and double-checking his roster. He had Russell Darby do a headcount of the crew. Just as he'd thought, only half had made it back to the Gypsy Drifter. He was short-staffed. They were in for some long shifts.
He waited for something to happen, anything. But in the end, all he had was the waiting. He had Griego organize sleeping arrangements for the people in the ship's hull. It was an uncomfortably tight squeeze, and he would have to figure out the food situation, but luckily, they had enough fuel to make it down the west coast and back again if they needed to. Somewhere had to be safe, right?
He thought of his wife, all alone outside San Francisco in Fremont, California. He picked up the satellite phone and called her. It rang, and he waited for an answer. He waited a long time.
****
That night, Mark Wilde died. Captain Schwenk wouldn't know this until much later. The fever in his body broke hot. He was not aware that he was dying. His brain, swollen, searching for any sort of relief from the sickness running through its cells, simply turned off. But it came back on again, not all the way, but enough for the person formally known as Mark Wilde to make his way into a room filled with refugees.
He bit one person, and then there were screams. They tried to fight the man off, but this only resulted in more bites, one of them was serious. By the time the second man bled out, they had subdued Mark Wilde. Other people showed up to watch the second man die.
Mark Wilde, bludgeoned into anonymity by the refugees, lay strewn and broken on the floor. When Captain Schwenk arrived, he threw a towel over his body and ordered everyone out of the room. His men carried the bodies to the deck, and a woman with striking Asian features volunteered to take a look at the wounded.
No one noticed when the second man rose from under the sheet. No one noticed when it killed a third man, a sailor that Captain Schwenk had known for years. By the time anyone noticed that something was going on, the dead were rising up, and there were a good dozen dead folk on the ship.
The refugees ran back and forth, screaming, hollering, looking for any way to get off of the ship. Many were bitten in the confusion. One man, a construction worker with arms like pythons, managed to kill one of the walking dead by crushing its head with a fire extinguisher. Schwenk, with his captain's pistol in hand, roamed the halls of the ship, killing the dead. He fired bullets into the heads of people he had known for only a few hours, relatives of others on the ship.
His ears rang when he was done, and he wondered just how bad things were going to get. The Asian woman tended the wounded again, asking for boiled water and sterilized rags, as the first aid kit had been exhausted with the first round of bites.
As he was about to leave, she pulled him to the side. He thought maybe she was going to flirt with him. The captain's uniform had a way of doing things to the ladies, and he was fully ready to turn her down, thinking of his wife, stuck in Fresno without him. But she wasn't interested in him.
"It's the bites," she whispered to him in a dark corridor, the steel bulkhead splattered with the blood of someone he had shot in the head.
"The bites?" he asked.
"I'm sure of it," she said.
"How can you be so sure? We don't even know what's going on yet."
"Check the bodies," she whispered.
Without telling anyone, he walked up onto the deck, pulling back sheets and blankets, picking up arms and examining them. Rough semi-circular wounds, chunks of missing flesh, every one of the bodies had them, and he knew that the doctor was correct. It was the bites.
He pulled his handgun from his belt and ejected the magazine. He loaded another. The gun was meant for pirates, to deter anyone
