Dead Sea

Chapter Fourteen

That all happened a month ago. The summer is over now and fall is on the way. The days grow shorter. It’s getting colder out here at sea, even during the daytime. The winds rip across the water, shaking the drilling platform. When the tide gets rough, it’s like being back onboard the Spratling again.

After a few days, we settled into our new lives with remarkable ease. It felt weird, at first, not living with the constant danger. Not being on the run or in hiding, constantly glancing over our shoulders and looking for the dead. It was hard to relax, in a way. Felt irresponsible for doing so. But once we’d realized that the zombies couldn’t reach us, and that we really were safe for the first time since this whole thing began, we embraced our new home.

Sometimes we talk about what could be happening on the mainland. We have no way of knowing, and it’s all speculation on our part, but it helps to take our minds off things. Are the cities and towns full of dead people, or has humanity managed to fight back? If so, is there hope for a rescue someday—a way off this oil rig, and back to the lives we knew before Hamelin’s Revenge?

Probably not.

We are surrounded on all sides by a dead sea. Even if the creatures in the water couldn’t reach us, their smell still could. With each passing week the stench has grown stronger-rotting fish and brine. The birds have a never ending smorgasbord. But when we’re inside the building and running the air filtration system, the smell doesn’t bother us too much. It’s only when we’re outside that it gets to be too bad, and even then it’s only unbearable on days with no wind. When it rains, the stench disappears.

Carol and the kids adapted well to our situation. We’ve each got our own room now. The privacy is nice, after all that time on the ship. She insisted on continuing their education. Both of them grumbled about it at first, but I think they actually enjoy their classes. It gives them something to do during the day—takes their mind off the overall situation. Trapped out here as we are, with no lifeboat or means of escape, monotony and boredom are our two biggest enemies. In the evening, we play video games or foosball, or shoot pool. Malik’s gotten really good at the latter. He’s a born hustler. One of the oil platform’s crew members left behind a kite and a spool of string. When they’re not studying or helping me with general maintenance, Tasha and Malik like to fly it outside. They get a really good breeze out here and the kite soars high. Carol reads a lot. We found some paperbacks in the crew’s berthing area, along with magazines and even a few old newspapers. The newspapers make me sad; they’re full of news that doesn’t matter. Current events that once seemed so important—the price of gas, the war in the Middle East, sex on television, celebrity baby photos. Once in a while, when we’re feeling hopeful, we turn on the television or radio. There’s never a signal, though. The static over the radio is the loneliest sound in the world.

When I’m working outside, I keep an eye out for ships on the horizon or planes in the sky. I’ve yet to see one. Doubt now that I ever will. Maybe we’re the last humans. I don’t know. Like I’ve always said, survival instinct is a motherfucker. It still is. We’ll go on living, go on fighting to survive. We have to. If we are the last humans left alive, then God has a pretty fucked-up sense of humor. How are we going to re-populate the planet once the zombies all rot away? Tasha and Malik are brother and sister. I’m a gay man. And even if I wasn’t gay, it turns out that Carol has already been through menopause. So much for that idea. The future falls to Tasha and Malik. They are the next generation. They have to survive. I have to be their hero.

We found some bags of marshmallows in the dry goods storage room. Sometimes at night we build a fire in an empty oil drum, using broken up skids for kindling. Then we roast marshmallows. The smoke drifts up into the sky. I like to pretend that somebody up there can see it. Maybe not an airplane, and certainly not God—God is dead. I know that now. God is one of them. But maybe someone else can see it. There are astronauts onboard the international space station, right? They were there when the disease first started, and they’re still up there. Like us, they have no way to get home. So I pretend that they can see our smoke, and that they no longer feel so alone. They know that someone else is still alive, that humanity survives, that life prevails.

But it’s just pretend.

I found a Bible among the personal belongings the crew left behind. The spine is cracked and the pages marked and worn. Whoever it belonged to read it an awful lot. I’ve flipped through it a few times, reading passages at random, looking for solace and comfort. I haven’t found either. But I did find a verse that spoke to me. Jeremiah, chapter eight, verse twenty: “The summer is over, the harvest is in, and we are not saved.”

The summer is over and death’s harvest is in. It was a bumper crop this year. And here we are, safe on this oil rig—safe, but not saved.

We’ve been careful to ration our food supply. The fresh water tank is full. I found an instruction manual that told me how to siphon water up out of the ocean in case of an emergency, but I won’t. That’s just asking to be infected with Hamelin’s Revenge. No sense taking chances. We’ve cut back on showers, only taking them every few days. We’ve got plenty of diesel fuel though, so there’s no chance of running out of power for a long time, unless the generator dies. On our second day here, we discovered a walk—in freezer filled with meat and frozen vegetables. Twice a week, we get something out of the freezer and defrost it. Otherwise, we stick to the dry stuff and canned goods, and even those are rationed. We’ve been supplementing our food with the birds. There are certainly enough of them. Rather than wasting ammunition, we hunt them with Alka-Seltzer tablets. We go out onto the platform and scatter a mixture of table scraps and Alka-Seltzer tablets that we found in the medical supplies. The birds gobble it up. But their digestive system is different than a human’s. Since they can’t burp or fart, the Alka-Seltzer sits in their stomach, fizzing away, until the gas and foam builds up to the point where it has nowhere to go. Then the birds’ stomachs pop. Once they’re dead, we have to gut and clean them pretty quickly. Otherwise, their burst stomachs leak into the rest of the body, ruining the meat. It’s pretty fucking gruesome, but necessary. We’ve got to save our food supply for as long as we can, and we can’t use up the rest of our bullets on seagulls.

Of course, when we run out of Alka-Seltzer, we’ll have to come up with another way to hunt them. Maybe nets or nooses or something…

Shit. Who the fuck am I kidding, anyway? That doesn’t matter now.

Nothing matters.

I told Carol and the kids that we could survive a long time on birds. And we could have. With all of their natural predators either gone or dead—or living dead—there are lots of birds now. Fuck the meek. The birds have inherited the earth.

Yeah, we could have survived by eating them.

But…

Tomorrow, when the kids wake up, I’ll have to tell them that they can’t go outside anymore. I already told Carol. I waited until after Tasha and Malik had gone to sleep, so that they wouldn’t hear. When I’d finished, Carol started crying. She retreated to her room and asked to be left alone for a while. I let her go. Nothing I could have done or said would change the situation. I felt like crying, too.

Earlier this evening, when I went out to hunt some birds for tomorrow’s breakfast, things changed again for the worse. I was standing on one of the catwalks, tossing Alka-Seltzer coated with hamburger grease out onto the deck, and the birds came in to feast. Their slender gray and white bodies soared through the air and landed on the platform. They began pecking at the bait, but before any of them could eat, another bird swooped down out of the sky and crashed among them. Feathers flew into the air and the other birds squawked in surprise. I wondered what had made it land like that, and then I saw.

The bird was missing its legs and one of its eyes, but it was still moving. It ignored the bait. Instead, it attacked another seagull. Two more of them zipped toward us. The regular birds scattered. I dropped my bucket and ran across the platform, waiting to feel a razorlike beak slashing at my flesh. I didn’t, though. I made it inside.

I was damn lucky.

Hamelin’s Revenge has jumped species again, just like it did with the fish. The birds had been immune.

And now they aren’t.

We can stay inside here for a long time. As long as the generator doesn’t break down, we’ll be fine. But sooner or later we’ll run out of food and water. What happens when there’s nothing left to eat? How do we hunt or forage when all of our prey is already dead—and hunting us? If one of us died, could the rest of us eat them? Would that make us any different than those things outside?

The birds are zombies now, and there’s a hell of a lot more zombies than there are of us. Humans are a thing of the past. We’re the last of them. The last of a dying breed. We are the new dinosaurs. Our civilization ends with us. All of the things we’ve achieved are meaningless now. All of our advances. All of our stories. Heroes don’t matter anymore, and that’s okay, because I’m not a hero. I never was. I’m just a fallen archetype, based on a falsehood. What happens to a hero when he dies? He becomes a myth. But what happens to myths when there’s no one left to tell about them? Do they just fade away, as we will? I’m sure they do. I bet human history is full of forgotten myths—heroes we’ve never heard of simply because there was no on left to tell us about their exploits. Their journey—their trials and tribulations—were pointless in the end because they were forgotten. Those myths and archetypes didn’t survive.

Forget the meek. The dead have inherited the earth. They are the new breed—the planet’s new dominant species. They rule at the top of the food chain.

Back in the day, there was a rap song I used to like. The lyrics said, “Evolve or Die.” That line has taken on a new meaning for me. In order to survive, a species has to evolve. We did it when we came out of the ocean, and we did it again when we came down from the trees.

Survival instinct is a motherfucker.

But evolution is even worse.

And if we have to evolve to survive, then maybe I’ll just open the door.