The doctor found him before she found her. Her eyes were big. They sparkled in the lights of the ship's deck. A cool, calm wind blew across the ocean, and he told her what he had found.
"How many are bit?" he asked.
"A lot. There may be more that I didn't see."
He nodded his head.
"Let me see your arms," he said. She showed him her arms. They were light, perfectly shaped. He cursed himself for noticing such things. "How do you know it's not airborne?" he asked as she held up her hair, and he examined the nape of her neck, admiring the curve of her shoulders and the strongness of her jawline.
"The first outbreak moved fast. If it was airborne, we would all have it by now."
He nodded. He was no doctor. He wasn't even particularly bright. He was good at following orders from the company, and people naturally trusted him.
"So, what do we do?"
She looked at him with a pained look on her face. He wanted to kiss her lips, but he was married. He mustn't forget that. "I don't know," she said. "You're the captain."
It fell upon him, the onus to keep people safe. He ran a hand through his graying hair, weighing the options at his disposal. He could let them stay and keep an eye on them. He could find the people that were bitten and get them off the ship somehow. He looked at the gun in his hand. Or he could kill them all now.
He didn't like any of the options. All three were shit sandwiches. He was just deciding which one to take a bite of. With the doctor by his side, he went to the bridge and called up his own men, one by one. Once there, he held his gun on them apologetically while he made them strip. None of his men had bites, and he was thankful for that fact.
When he was done, he told his men what to do. They argued. They fought. He loved them for it, but in the end, they all saw the sense of it. His men dragged people up from the hold in twos. The Captain repeated the process of making the people strip. He avoided looking in their eyes. He could see the hate and the fear there, and it made him feel awful.
They had maneuvered the ship closer to the shore to the east. It was a natural shoreline, a few houses scattered here and there. It would be a long swim, but if the doctor was right, those people were dead anyway. The first set of people were both bite victims. Over the side they went, screaming and swearing at him. He didn't see what happened to them after that. They could have started swimming. They could have simply sunk to the bottom of the ocean for all he knew. But he didn't want to know. He knew he was cowardly in that respect, but he still had to live with himself after this was all over, so he spared himself the knowledge of their fate.
They went through the refugees methodically. Those that were fine were allowed to stay if they wanted to, but some people chose to go over the side with their bitten family members. Captain Schwenk did not forbid it. Some people begged and pleaded to stay. Some people didn't know how to swim. He gave them life preservers and pitched them over the side anyway. He would have given every single person a life preserver if he had enough of them, but he didn't.
The last group of two people they brought on deck looked rough. They were older and had faces that looked like they were going to melt off their skulls.
The bites were apparent on their arms, their bandages already soaking through with blood. The woman howled curses at him, and they refused to move.
"Get 'em over the side," Schwenk said, hardened to the atrocities he was committing by this time.
Russell Darby and another man moved to push the couple overboard. The woman, old and cantankerous, snapped at Russell Darby's hand with her teeth. She bit him hard, drawing blood. Darby hissed in pain and shoved the woman to the ground.
"Get over the fucking side before I shoot you in the face," Schwenk said to the woman. He didn't know where the words came from. It was as if an entirely different man was speaking through him, using his own body like a sock puppet. The woman looked at him with hate in her eyes. She hadn't turned into one of them yet. She was simply pissed.
She cursed him, and the old man did the same. Schwenk never stopped aiming the handgun at them, until they went over the side.
"Fuck." Darby hissed off to his left. He held his hand between his legs.
Schwenk went over to him, his brain already compartmentalizing Darby in his head. That wasn't a man he'd worked with for a year. That wasn't a guy with two young boys and a wife back home. That was just some poor bastard that got bit. Wrong time, wrong place, that's all.
"Lemme see it," Schwenk said.
Darby held out his hand. There was some bruising, and the finger bled from a couple of rectangular depressions in the skin. It wasn't anything to be worried about if times were normal, but they weren't normal.
Schwenk smiled at the man, trying to remain calm. "Hey, it's gonna be alright."
"Griego, get this man a life preserver." This man, not Russell, not Darby, but
