Survival Instinct (Book 3): Fighting Instinct Read online

  His leg was on fire. Mathias had previously taken two shots to a bullet-proof vest, but it had felt nothing like this. Lying on his back, Mathias gritted his teeth, his uninjured limbs squirming on the deck.

  “Christian’s dead,” a woman reported from beside the man who had taken a bullet to the throat.

  “Mathias, I need you to hold still while I look at your leg,” a man was speaking next to Mathias’s head.

  Mathias’s eyes were squeezed shut, so he had no idea who was talking, but he nodded. A pair of hands touched his calf, near the wound. He cried out as fresh pain shot up his leg. Finally opening his eyes, Mathias propped himself up on his elbows to see the damage. He was surprised to find Josh cutting away a section of his pant leg.

  “Josh? What are you doing here?” He was confused, and looked around, verifying that he was still outside on the fourth deck and not in the medical centre.

  “Someone up front was shot. I was on the way back to my position when I saw you get hit.” He spoke with a cold efficiency that was unlike him. Mathias noticed that Riley had the same tone whenever she was working on somebody.

  “Danny?” Danny was up front.

  “He’s fine,” Josh assured him, finally freeing his wound so that he could look at it.

  Mathias looked at his team, who were watching the proceedings. “Get back to work!” he barked at them. “Don’t wait for another pass before getting the last of those planters and panels off the railing!”

  His team flinched and quickly turned around. They were even more scared now than they had been previously, and Mathias couldn’t blame them. A man was dead, while their leader lay injured.

  “Ahh!” Mathias couldn’t help crying out as Josh touched his leg again.

  “The bullet went clean through,” Josh told him. “Looks like it missed your major arteries. You’re lucky.”

  “Too bad Christian wasn’t.” Mathias looked past Josh toward the dead man. He was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, head cocked sideways, one eye open while the other was half closed.

  Josh stuck a needle into Mathias’s leg, drawing his attention back to his own problem.

  “What was in that?”

  “Morphine.”

  “We don’t have a lot of that. Why did you waste it on me?”

  Josh looked at him like he was crazy and didn’t bother answering.

  “It’s not going to mess with my head too much, is it?”

  “No more than the pain would. I didn’t give you that much.”

  “Now what are you doing?” Mathias watched as Josh prepared another needle.

  “I have to stitch up this hole, which means numbing the area around it.”

  “Okay.”

  Mathias watched as Josh first numbed up his leg, and then began stitching. It was a strange sensation. He felt no pain, but he could feel the needle tugging at his flesh.

  I was shot once in the leg. How many times had Alec been shot? he found himself thinking. A lot more than once, that was for sure. Mathias wouldn’t have to worry about being trapped in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  Josh washed the blood away from the wound and then wrapped it up in a bandage.

  “Try to stay off it,” he told Mathias.

  “I can’t abandon my post,” Mathias frowned at him.

  “That’s why I said try.”

  The body behind Josh twitched. Mathias assumed that it was just some post-mortem thing, but then the body moved its arm in a way that was definitely not a post-mortem thing.

  “Josh, turn around.” It was possible the morphine was messing with him.

  Josh did as he was asked. He saw the arm movement, which was followed by an unsteady head movement. Understanding it wasn’t right, Josh moved from Mathias’s leg, to his head, away from the corpse.

  “What’s happening?” Josh asked him.

  “Riley knows more than I do, but just accept for now that that man has turned into a zombie and others who die without being infected will do the same.” Mathias pulled his gun and pointed it at the zombie’s head.

  “Don’t waste the ammo.” Josh took a scalpel out of his medical kit.

  Just as the zombie was becoming aware, just as it was starting to reach for Mathias, Josh crouched down next to it and drove the scalpel deep into its left eye, jamming it in with the flat of his hand. The zombie’s body flailed once, then stopped for good.

  “Who knows about this?” Josh turned to Mathias, his cold, clinical attitude saving the less important questions for later. For now, he simply trusted Mathias.

  “I don’t know. Riley and whoever was on staff with her when the off-shippers came back. Me, I guess, although I wasn’t sure this would actually happen.”

  “People need to be warned.”

  “It’s going to frighten them.”

  “Better than getting eaten by a zombie!” Josh spoke louder than he meant to. He was angry. What, exactly, he was angry about, Mathias couldn’t say. It could be that Riley knew something and hadn’t told him, or it could just be the presence of a zombie on board. Josh hadn’t had to face a zombie in a long time. He was quick to rein his emotions back in.

  “Then tell people. Ask Riley if you want details, and then tell people,” Mathias told him.

  “I’m going to do just that.” Josh suddenly got up and disappeared, leaving his scalpel buried in the former-zombie’s eye, only the very end of it shining silver through the blood.

  “What’s going on, Mathias?” someone from his team asked, eyeing the body that Josh had stabbed.

  “There’s no time to explain the details, but you need to understand something.” His team turned away from the last of their duties to listen. “If anyone dies by something other than a headshot, they’re going to come back as a walking corpse.”

  A man and woman gasped in unison.

  “Just accept that fact and get back to work,” Mathias said before anyone could ask any questions. “Come on, we have a ship to defend, we can deal with that problem later.”

  They were slow returning to the task that Mathias had given them, but they did return to it. Mathias dragged himself over to the railing, where he lay on his stomach and watched the waters below. It seemed like there were more boats now.

  Shifting himself, Mathias poked his head out briefly to look down the length of the Diana. He could see the other cruise ship trailing behind them with most of its lights off. He also saw a lot of other boats around it. It seemed that Sher had summoned every boat that could make it out here. Some even appeared to have been towed by the faster boats. One boat in particular stood out. Or rather, one ship in particular stood out. Mathias didn’t know the name for what it was, but it was old, with sails, and made out of wood. The Diana passengers had seen a few ships like it in their travels, but they were always tourist attractions, and almost always anchored or docked. It seemed Sher had brought this one back into service on the high seas. Based on the angle it was coming toward them, it must have been somewhere different from the other boats when Sher had called it. Hopefully they’d be able to outrun it. Had Sher also gotten the cannons functioning? If he had, and the ship was able to reach them, then the Diana was in a lot more trouble than anyone realized.

  Mathias helped keep an eye out for other strafing boats while the rest of the solar panels and planters were removed. Once they were gone, the team spread out along their section. The panels and planters had actually been providing cover, so now everyone was lying down on their bellies like Mathias.

  “What did the sheep say when he met Michael Jackson?” Mathias found himself saying.

  The team members nearest to him looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Who’s baaaaaaa-d?” Much as he had been thinking of Alec a lot lately, Mathias suddenly found himself thinking of LeBlanc, LeBlanc who knew an endless stream of bad jokes, which he trotted out whenever the people around him were stressed. They weren’t really good jokes, but people laughed anyway.

  No one laughe
d at Mathias’s joke, but at least one person grinned. If he could get that one person to play along, then maybe he could reduce the tension.

  “Knock, knock.”

  No one answered.

  “Come on, knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Interrupting co-”

  “Moooooo!”

  That one got a few chuckles, probably because they had heard it, or even used it, as kids.

  “Loserssaywhat.” Someone else from down the line spoke quickly, mashing his words together.

  “What?” Mathias hadn’t caught it.

  The speaker laughed. “Guess our leader admits to being a loser.”

  Thinking back, Mathias realized what had just happened and chuckled. Good, they were getting into it now.

  “What has four wheels and flies?” a woman asked.

  “A garbage truck,” another answered.

  “A man walks into a bar. Ouch.”

  “Second man ducks.”

  “What did the bartender say to the moose? Why the long face?”

  Everyone was in on it now. Once a joke was told, people would chuckle, and then someone would tell another one. A few were real groaners, in fact, most were, but it was easing the tension. It helped people forget that there was a dead man behind them. There was no way to forget the men with guns in front of them, but that was a good thing.

  “Ladder boats!” the man on the end suddenly called out, cutting off a woman mid-joke. Everyone was suddenly silent and focused.

  A boat was driving up alongside the Diana, close to her hull. From their high vantage point, the defenders could clearly see that there was a long, hook-end ladder on board. A man at the back of the boat was scanning their deck, looking for the best place to raise and attach the ladder.

  “Remain calm!” Mathias ordered his team. “Remember your firearms training! This is no different than when we were attacked by pirates!”

  “Except for the fact that there’s a lot more of them,” a man down the line remarked snarkily.

  “True enough, but all that means is we’re going to be out here longer. Just remember, don’t take a shot unless you’re sure you can hit your target!”

  Mathias peeked over the edge. The man in the back of the boat saw him, and fired wildly in his direction. Quickly pulling his head back into cover, Mathias managed to avoid being hit.

  He wondered how other sections of the ship were doing. The front, where Danny was, was probably doing fine. They were higher than Mathias’s position and had more room to manoeuvre. These guys didn’t seem stupid enough to cut in close to the Diana’s nose where they risked getting smashed to bits by her.

  The balconies above them had less room, but like the front, they had a higher position. From Mathias’s understanding, there were a lot fewer people up there than there were down here, and most of them were holding rifles. A few times, he heard the sharp report of a shot, and every time he hoped the bullet found its mark.

  Mostly, he worried about the men and women on the other side of the ship, the ones on the same deck as him. No doubt, there would be ladder boats on that side as well, and the back. The back of the ship had its wake to defend it from invaders getting too close, but there was also that other cruise ship to think about. If Sher had men with rifles, they could easily board the other cruise ship, get up onto the helipad, and open fire on the rear defenders. Maybe there weren’t as many ship defenders or off-shippers at the back as there were in other locations. That’s what Mathias wanted to think.

  A gunshot boomed just a few feet away from him, as a woman on his line fired over the side.

  “Did you get him?” the man next to the woman asked as she pulled back into cover.

  “Not a kill shot, but I’m pretty sure I winged him in his arm. It’s hard to tell in this light.”

  The woman had a point. The flare was the best light they had for viewing the water since all the ship’s lower windows had been covered at the start of the siege, but the flare’s light was weird, casting odd shadows and bathing everything in an unnatural colour. They had to make do.

  Mathias and his team defended the side of the ship. More and more ladder boats came, and as they did, Mathias’s team had to fire more shots. The riflemen on the decks above them were clearly helping, but often it came down to Mathias’s team. The curve of the ship’s hull made it difficult for those higher up to see the ladder boats, which stuck dangerously close to the Diana’s side.

  Several times Mathias saw the hook end of a ladder rise up above the floor of the deck he was lying on. Each time that happened, one or two gunshots would rip through the air and the ladder would lower. At least once the ladder fell into the water, eliciting cheers from the team, but they were quickly cut off as they learned the ladders floated. It was short work for another boat, or perhaps even the same boat, to drive by and scoop it up.

  Mathias had shot and killed at least three men so far, wounding half a dozen others, and only completely missing twice. He was nearing the end of his first ammo mag when he heard the sound that sent a chill through his bones.

  The railing clanged as a ladder hooked onto it.

  “Ladder! Ladder! Ladder!”

  15

  Misha’s With The Animals

  Misha hadn’t bothered going to sleep. He stayed down on the second deck, near his post, keeping out of the way in one of the inner hallways. He had watched Cameron for a while, noting all the animals that came back negative for infection. It seemed that whatever the new version of the hybrid-virus was, it hadn’t been passed on to any of the animals on the ship. Misha wondered if that would remain true if a human bit a live animal. It wasn’t something anyone would try out, but it was a curiosity.

  For now, Misha sat next to one of the storage rooms and waited.

  “What do you think I should do when the time comes?” Jon asked him. Jon had nowhere to go while waiting for Riley to explain everything to the ship leaders, so he decided to hang around with Misha.

  “I don’t know,” Misha shrugged. “What’s your usual post when pirates come?”

  “I go with my team up to the front of the ship and assist the pilots on the helipad.”

  “Then go there.”

  “But people don’t know about the infection yet. They’ll think I’m infected.”

  “They’re your team, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then they’re not going to kill you. I don’t think they’d care what’s supposedly wrong with you, so long as you’re doing your job.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Don’t you?” Misha wasn’t particularly close with his own working team, but he knew they would never think of killing him. And off-shippers? Of all the working teams, Misha had noticed that they were the closest knit groups. Misha’s close friends had become his close friends by surviving the zombies together; off-shippers went out and faced zombies all the time, so it stood to reason that the teams would end up very close.

  “Would you come with me when I go up there?” Jon asked.

  “I have a job to do down here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I help block off all the portholes down here.”

  “A lot of people do that, so it shouldn’t take long. What do you do when you’re done?”

  Misha shrugged. “Usually I stay down here and help keep the animals calm.”

  “But that’s not a job assigned to you?”

  “No.”

  “So you could come with me?”

  “Why do you want me to?” Misha wondered.

  “I don’t want to go alone,” Jon shrugged. “There will be other people between me and my team, and all I have is this knife I found if anyone decides to attack me.”

  “Yeah, but why me?”

  “Because you believed me. You could have easily turned me over to the ship defenders but you didn’t.”

  Misha shrugged. “Lots of people would h
ave believed you.”

  “Not really,” Jon shook his head. “A few, yeah, but not a lot. I’m not sure Lauren and Abby completely believed me when I said I wasn’t infected. Claire did. She believed me. Peter probably would have believed me if he fully understood what was going on, but Abby and Lauren? My guardians? I don’t think they did, even though they wanted to.”

  “Well that was before even you had seen someone turn without being bitten,” Misha commented. “Are you sure you even believed yourself at that point?”

  Jon looked at his hands, squeezing his fingers together in a way that suggested to Misha that he hadn’t completely believed himself.

  “Just come with me,” Jon looked back up at him. “You and Rifle.”

  The German Shepherd looked up from where he was lying on the floor when he heard his name.

  “All right, we’ll come with you, but I have to finish my job down here first.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll help you with it.”

  “I’m not going to be of any use up there. Spear guns aren’t known for their accuracy.”

  “That’s fine. You and Rifle can hang back in the safest zones, and maybe relay a few messages from one zone to another. The helipad is fairly large for the number of people we send up there, so we section it off. Unfortunately, it makes communicating between us not that easy. What do you say?”

  Misha sighed and looked down at Rifle. “What do you think, bratishka? Think we should follow Jon into the danger zone?”

  Rifle chuffed, an answer that could be either yes or no. Not like he understood what Misha was asking him anyway.

  “Thanks for this, Misha,” Jon said after a quiet moment, understanding that by asking Rifle, Misha had agreed.

  Misha brushed off his thanks with a mumble.

  “What do you think Robin is doing right now?” Apparently, Jon wanted to keep talking.

  Misha shrugged.

  “Probably sleeping,” Jon suggested. “I’m glad she’s not a field medic in these situations. She doesn’t even work in the primary medical centre downstairs, but in the smaller one. They turn it into an emergency centre when we’re being attacked.”