Dead Sea

    Carol shrieked. The dead man was dressed in dirty, faded dungarees and a red flannel shirt. A bright yellow hard hat covered his head. Time and the elements had not been kind. The zombie was in an advanced state of decomposition. His flesh and the clothes had melded together. His face was a gleaming skull, stripped clean of all flesh. A few ragged pieces of skin and matted hair hung down from underneath the hard hat. With no eyes left in the sockets, I saw right away that the zombie hunted by sound, just like the corpses back at the rescue station. It had been attracted to us by the sounds of the elevator. Carol's scream had confirmed our location. It reached for us, bones sticking through the split skin of its fingers. Malik raised his shotgun, but I knocked it aside.

    "No," I said. "He's too close. The backsplash will hit us."

    The zombie lurched into the elevator and we shrank away, hugging the walls. The doors slid shut again, bumped against the corpse, and then opened. The zombie turned toward them in confusion, grasping blindly. I took advantage of the distraction, pushing it out of the elevator with the butt of my rifle. It stumbled back out onto the platform, arms pinwheeling. Before the doors could close again, I darted forward and clubbed it over the head, hoping to knock it down long enough to shoot it. The zombie collapsed to the deck and the hard hat came off its head, spilling soupy liquid. Two grayish-pink lumps-its brains-splashed into the puddle a second later. Gasping, I turned away. Apparently, it had decomposed so badly that the hard hat was the only thing still holding its brains intact. When they splashed out over the deck, the zombie ceased moving. I struggled to keep from throwing up.

    Malik fanned his nose. "Oh man, that stinks!"

    I nodded. "That's the worst one yet. After all the things we've seen…"

    I shuddered, unable to finish. Sour bile rose in my throat.

    "Let's hope that it's the last one," Carol said. "That would be fine with me."

    And it was the last. The rest of the jack-up was deserted. Once we'd finished exploring it, Carol and the kids got settled while I brought our supplies up from the dock. Basically, the jack-up was a giant barge. One end held the actual drilling apparatus. At the other end was a three-story building. On top of the building were a heliport and several big antennas. They even had a satellite television dish and a Sirius satellite radio unit, though I doubted there were any signals still being broadcast. Inside the building were the crew's quarters, a galley, a gym complete with free weights and an exercise bike, a laundry room with three washers and dryers, several restrooms and shower stalls, and finally, a crew's lounge with couches, a television and DVD player, and-much to Malik's delight-an XBox videogame system, a foosball table, and a slate-bottom pool table. On the top floor, there were also several offices. Placards over the doors said things like company man and pusher. I wondered what those were. Where I'd lived, company men and pushers had been very different things.

    There were also half a dozen storage rooms. One of the supply rooms held janitorial and maintenance supplies. Another held medical supplies and other things we desperately needed, like toiletries and vitamins. But we breathed a sigh of relief when we opened the door to the last storage room. It was filled with food-boxes of dry and canned goods stacked all the way to the ceiling. The chief had said that a jack-up's crew usually numbered between fifteen to twenty people. I figured there was enough food here to last them a month. Since it was just the four of us, it would last us much longer, which was important since we could no longer rely on the sea for food. Not with Hamelin's Revenge infecting the fish.

    On the surface of the barge, in between the rig and the building, was a fenced-in area where the drilling pipe and other equipment were kept. It also held a big garbage compactor. There were other pieces of machinery tied down to the rig to keep them from falling into the ocean. The fuel truck that I'd noticed earlier was also strapped down and the wheels were chocked. I peeked inside the cab and found the keys dangling from the ignition. At the end of the maintenance yard was a giant fuel tank filled with thousands of gallons of diesel, and a small trailer housing a generator. Beyond that was another big tank, holding fresh water, according to the sign stenciled on the side of it.