The tall zombie gurgled and trudged towards me. I hunched forward and took a sidestep left, holding the spear at the ready out in front of me. The ghoul swatted the air between us and I noticed he had long arms so I was going to have to be careful to avoid his swinging hands. I took a tentative forward step and he swung at me again. I ducked and felt the air ripple above my head. I feinted right but dodged to the left, hoping to gain enough free space and an angle to dig the end of the spear into his head. My left foot sank into dry sand and I didn’t move where I wanted.
The zombie swiped at me again and this time his left inner forearm bashed against the side of my head. The blow didn’t hurt or cause any serious damage but it did knock me off balance and I went down on my left knee.
“Hey, buddy, how you doing?” I heard Smith say from somewhere beyond me.
For a moment, I thought he was talking to me and I glanced in his direction for a split second. He was simply goading the two zombies around him. He stuck the second male through the forehead with his spear with ease and moved closer to the gurgling woman. The second male went down into the sand in a crumpled heap and gurgled no more.
I was determined to prove to Smith I could handle this undead guy I faced. He lurched towards me, bending at the waist and gnashing his teeth as he drew closer to my exposed face. I twirled the spear around in my hands so the barb was pointing upwards. As the zombie lowered, I sprung upward, jamming the sharp spear end through the skin on the underside of his chin. The sound was like ripping paper as the sharp metal point plowed through saturated, peeling skin and brain matter. The spear point erupted out through the gap in the man’s skull, sending a shower of light brown liquid across the sand behind us.
The zombie quivered for a second then went limp and became heavy, jerking the spear to my right and out of my hands. I let both the weapon and the corpse fall to the ground.
Smith stood between two prone bodies, his work already done. He held the spear down to the shallow waves and washed the blood and pulp off the metal shaft.
“Going down low and hitting that sucker with an uppercut. Good tactic, I like it,” he said.
I shrugged. “It wasn’t quite how I planned it.”
“It never is, kid.” He raised the spear from the sea and pointed it at me. “But it’s the victory that counts.”
“Yeah, whatever, man,” I sighed, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder. “Let’s just get going before any more of those things crawl out the sea.”
Smith glanced across the bay and back out to sea. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him there might be more ghouls washing up on the beach at any moment. “Roger that,” he muttered. “You might want to get your weapon back first.” He nodded at the corpse, face down in the sand to my right.
I really wasn’t in the mood to extract a spear from some dead guys head but thought about the consequences. Running out of spear shots, cornered with no way out and a hundred dead heads coming forward for me. Having no weapons and ammo on you was as good as your own death warrant right there in your pocket.
I pulled back on the spear shaft and heard another sickening squelching sound. The tall zombie’s head disintegrated into a squidgy mess as the remainder of the skull caved in on itself, producing another flow of runny pulp that soaked away into the sand. The stench was like a combination of rotting fish and spoiled meat.
“Jesus on a motorbike,” I rasped, turning my head away. “That’s fucking disgusting.”
The blood and the guts and the gore were one of the worst things in this apocalyptic world. No matter how many times I’d witnessed death and mutilation, I could never bring myself to feel comfortable with it.
“You should be familiar enough with these kinds of situations by now,” Smith teased.
I ignored Smith’s jibe as I moved past him to wash the blood and brains off the spear. The sticky mess on the metal shaft took some shifting, even in the sea. I crouched in the shallow waves and picked up a small wad of seaweed, rubbing it back and forth along the spear until it was clean.
As I stood, I noticed a bright white light reflecting off the sea’s surface. I gazed across the water to the source of the light. The glow was radiating from the warship. The light would blink quickly, then flash in longer sequences. I turned back to Smith, who was studying the dense tropical forest behind us.
“Hey, Smith, I think they’re trying to get the spotlight working but it keeps cutting out.”
Smith turned and studied the ship in the distance.
“You dumbass,” he sneered. “That ‘aint no spotlight. It’s a signal lamp. They’re sending us a message in Morse code.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. Nothing like showing yourself up. I nearly laughed out loud at my ignorance and lack of knowledge. “Do you know Morse code?”
“It’s been a long while since I’ve had to read any light signals,” Smith said. “I’ll try my best to figure it out. Could be Wingate operating the light. I’ll see what I can do.”
Smith muttered to himself, trying to decipher the coded message. Me, I had no clue about Morse code but realized that damn flashing light was starting to give me a serious headache. How the hell could people have stared at those lights all day and night deciphering and sending messages to each other from ships and shore bases? I would have ended up in some kind of coma if I’d been tasked with that particular vocation.
“Hold…your…fire…we …are…friendless,” Smith blurted.
“Friendless?” I questioned. “I know we’ve had our share of tough times but we’re not that bad.”
“I think they mean
friendly
,” Smith said. “Either whoever is sending that message can’t spell right or I got it wrong.”
“Why are they telling us that?” I asked, screwing up my face in confusion.
Smith flashed me an incredulous sideways glance. “They’re not sending it for us. They’re sending the message to the shooter.”
Chapter Thirteen
“You think the sniper will listen?”
Smith shrugged. “Whoever it is up there may not even know Morse or even speak English. And even if they do and can, there are no guarantees they’ll comply with the request. They might not want us on the island, period. Sending that message is a long shot. It don’t change nothing.”
“So we continue on as we planned?”
“U-huh, we still got to stop the son of a bitch.” Smith nodded to the side of the bay. “Let’s get going, we got work to do, kid.”
We trudged back across the sand towards the track. The sun was drawing closer to the horizon and I guessed it was around late afternoon sometime. How long we’d have to spend on this island searching for a hidden enemy was anybody’s guess.
“You think the sniper saw us?” I asked.
Smith half turned towards me. “They saw us all right. Probably just couldn’t get an angle to get a shot away when we were stuck on that reef. The ship is out of range so they couldn’t fire on us back over that way. Just so happened Hannigen and McPherson were right in his sights when they came to pick us up. Wrong place at the wrong time. That sniper was probably watching us the whole time we were steaming into land, hoping we were going to sink in that damn reef.”
“Was that what you meant in the boat when you said ‘
That’s the whole reason why we’re going down under the water’
?” I asked.
Smith nodded. “I just had a feeling that castle was positioned on that cliff for a reason. That place is ideal for a look-out post out to sea. Ideal place to fend off any attacks. I thought I saw something metallic glinting in the sun right before the ship crashed and felt as though we should have gotten out of there if we’d had the chance. I sincerely hope they don’t have any long range weapons or old cannon in the castle that they can use against the ship.”
I suddenly thought of a possible scenario. “You think the sniper shot up that small, sunken boat the zombies came out from?”
Smith ducked his head at the entrance to the trail. “It’s a possibility. Who knows? Does it really matter?”
I followed him through the opening in the bush. “Suppose not. Only wondering what the hell happened out there is all.”
“Same thing that happened to the rest of the world, kid. Same old thing.”
Walking through the bush trail felt claustrophobic. Dry leaves and spiky branches smacked me in the face at what seemed like every step. I trod on sharp stones and twigs sticking out from the sand. Flies and big bugs flitted from side to side across the track, mostly via my face. I tried slapping the insects away to no avail. We followed the left turn on the trail and out of the shade provided by the cliff to our right.
I felt vulnerable, hot and susceptible to attack from all directions. What was to stop some wild animal or a zombie crashing through the bush to our left or right? A ghoul could be tangled in the foliage a few inches either side of me and I wouldn’t have seen it. I also pondered the possibility the sniper may have come out of his hidey-hole in the castle and made his way to the top of the track to come and meet us head on. He knew the terrain and we didn’t. He could be hiding someplace in the bush.
Bang! Bang! Goodnight
. Two shots, two corpses. Smith and I lying dead on a track in the middle of a bug infested forest on
Horror Island
.
“Aw, fuck!” What felt like a similar spear to the one I was carrying jabbed through the bottom of my bare left foot.
Smith turned his head back over his shoulder. “What’s up with you?”
I leaned to the side of the track, gripped the bark of a thin tree and lifted my left foot off the ground. “I think something just bit me.”
Smith scanned the ground around us. “You sure? You see anything moving?”
I saw a thick brown thorn protruding from the sole of my foot. “Maybe not,” I sighed. “Just a damn spiky prickle.”
Smith yanked out the thorn, which produced another stinging stab of pain. He tossed the offending spike into the bush.
“Don’t be such a damn baby, man,” he sighed. “Keep focused. I don’t like being on this damn track any more than you do.”
We carried on in silence. The track inclined and the going got tougher. Sweat formed on my forehead and I felt droplets running down my back inside the rubber suit. I was sure I heard things moving around and rustling through the undergrowth on each side of us. Smith seemed oblivious to the scary noises going on all around the trail.
After what felt like miles, the ground leveled out and the bush became sparser where the trees were spaced further apart. A clearing with patchy, sprouting grass lay around one hundred feet directly ahead.
Smith turned back to glance at me. “Okay, stay sharp,” he whispered. “We don’t know what the hell we’re up against here.”
“No shit,” I whispered back.
Smith flashed me a glare as if to say ‘
shut the fuck up
.’
We trod slowly towards the clearing with our spears held at the ready. Some oval shaped, brown colored clumps stood at odd angles in the ground around the clearing. Smith and I moved cautiously in hunched stances over to the clearing amongst the forest. We stopped to study the strange brown objects and saw they were stone slabs, half buried in the soil. I touched the nearest one to me and it felt dry and crispy against my fingers.
Smith rubbed away a layer of dust and dry mud from the face of the stone nearest to him.
“These are tombstones,” he muttered.
I flashed him a quick glance and rubbed the dry soil from the front of the stone I crouched next to. A crucifix shape was etched at the top of the stone with some lines of wording beneath. I just about made out the faded inscription carved into the stone. ‘
Fernand Duque de Estrada
’ the first line read. I couldn’t distinguish the next line down as the lettering was all but worn away. The third line was something in Spanish I couldn’t decipher but the fourth line spelled out the span of the guy’s life. The years read 1698 – 1722. The guy was the ripe old age of twenty-four when he was put in this hole in the ground. Poor bastard. But the grave was so damned old.
“Hey, Smith, this dude died in 1722, when he was only twenty-four. Shit, your ancestors and mine were probably still roaming around in Europe back then.”
“Yeah, this one died the same year,” Smith muttered. He moved on to the adjacent tombstone and brushed away the dust. “This one died in 1722 as well.”
I checked the tombstone to the right of old Fernand and found his pal had also died in the same year. “Same here,” I said.
“All Spanish names, how about yours?”
I nodded. “Yep, sounds Spanish to me.”
“Either they all died of disease or they died in some kind of battle,” Smith surmised.
We glanced around the clearing and I roughly estimated around one hundred tombstones stood around the clearing.
“Wow, imagine all these guys getting slaughtered in one day,” I said, picturing an 18
th
Century battle in my head. The smell of fired musket rifles and bayonets glinting with fresh blood as hand to hand combat raged night and day.