Dead Sea

    After that, we met the other passengers. The redheaded woman was Carol Beck. She was a quality control manager at an injection molding plant and had been trying to flee the city. Stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate Eighty-three, she'd gotten out of her car to get a better cell phone signal. As she stood there, zombies had swarmed the on-ramp, forcing drivers to flee. She'd hid inside a factory. Next was Cliff Shatner, a young kid in his early twenties. He'd been a student at Towson University, majoring in journalism, and was partying in Fells Point when everything fell apart. He'd been trapped downtown, hiding inside the basement of the Soundgarden music shop. Stephanie Pollack didn't look so well when she introduced herself. Her skin was pale and dripping sweat. Her pupils were dilated. At first I thought it was the heat, but we soon learned that she was diabetic and had run out of insulin. The fires had forced her to flee quickly, and her supply of insulin had burned up with her apartment. We were concerned for her, but there wasn't much we could do. It was a hopeless, demoralizing feeling. It seemed so unfair-to survive the fires and the zombies, only to have your own body turn against you. And yet she was a trooper. She'd stood on the flight deck the whole time, baking in the heat, listening patiently as we talked and debated, and not once had she complained. Basil and Hooper, on the other hand, had done nothing but bitch since we'd got there. The chief told Stephanie to go lie down, promised he'd do anything he could to make her more comfortable, and had Joan escort her back to her compartment. He promised that if we could get to a port quickly, the first thing he'd look for was insulin. I thought the chances of that were pretty slim, but 1 kept that to myself.

    We had two teenagers in the group: a boy and a girl. The boy's name was Nick Kontis. His father had owned a Greek restaurant just off President Street. He'd watched his entire family get slaughtered by those things. He'd survived by hiding inside the restaurant's walk-in freezer. The night of the fires, he'd crept out, looking for water. He'd stumbled, literally, over a zombie a few minutes later. Legless, it had been crawling around in the dining area, munching on rancid, spoiled meat. The girl was Alicia Crawford. She was shy and soft-spoken, and we didn't learn much about her other than her name. She stared at the deck the whole time and kept cleaning her eyeglasses on her shirt. The last two passengers were Chuck Mizello and Tony Giovanni. Chuck was a forklift operator with four years of army experience, including a tour in Iraq. He'd taken shelter in a warehouse and survived on the contents of the vending machines. Tony was a tow truck driver. He barricaded himself in a hotel room across from the Inner Harbor. Like Mitch, he was a firearms enthusiast. I noticed that he scored points with my friend when he complimented the pistol at Mitch's side.

    Once the introductions were finished, each of us were assigned duties. According to Chief Maxey the biggest danger at sea was boredom, so each of us needed a task to perform. Keep our minds occupied. Hooper and Tran were in charge of the galley, and Nick volunteered to help them since he had a restaurant background. Runkle was going to help Chief Maxey and Turn on the bridge. Murphy was the obvious choice for engineering, since he'd been a boiler operator. Chuck, Tony, and the college kid, Cliff, volunteered to help him. Cliff didn't look happy when Murphy warned him it would be hot, dirty work, but he didn't change his mind either. Guess he wanted to fit in, make a good impression. Mitch, Basil, Professor Williams, and I pulled fishing duty. Carol suggested that someone should work with the kids, a shipboard school of sorts. Chief Maxey was hesitant about the idea, but she finally convinced him it was important. He didn't look thrilled. Neither did Tasha and Malik. I guess the one nice thing about the end of civilization was that they didn't have to go to school anymore. Carol would teach them in the mornings, assisted by Alicia. In the afternoons, they'd perform other duties, as would the kids. Joan was temporarily assigned to care for Stephanie.