Oleg held Jamal back as Tala managed to spin in the infected crewman’s iron grip. With her free, barefoot, she kicked out at her attacker. She managed to reach her knees even as it tried to pull her back. Dried tendons pulled taut as the infected’s decaying maw opened wide, preparing to clamp on Tala’s leg. She slipped backward, eyes wide staring at Oleg and Jamal who watched in terror.

Then Gennady was upon it, grabbing it from behind as the office door burst open, unfettered. Gennady snapped its head back and the surprised crewman released Tala, falling backwards atop of Gennady. As Tala jumped into Oleg and Jamal’s outstretched arms, Gennady disappeared. Beneath them the office seethed in a whirlpool of decay.

There were no screams as Oleg and Jamal numbly secured the opening, only the crack of the conference table collapsing under the weight of dead flesh. Scrabbling hands slipped beyond the reach of the grating.

Chapter 16

Three men had gone onto the monkey island, only two came back. Diego watched one of them, Guillermo Hernandez, cutting a line of coarse white powder atop his cabin table. His usually slicked back pompadour fell limp across his face as he snorted the line of speed. Languidly, Diego supped his beer as Hernandez jumped from the edge of the bed and began pacing the deck, muttering to himself.

Hernandez’s cabin was adorned with posters of Tank Girl and Durham Red, gig tickets and flyers from hardcore punk bands and pictures of topless punk rock girls, all colourful mohawks, extraneous nipple piercings and bullet belts dimpling the flesh below the belly button. Diego marvelled at his colleagues ability to cart so much paraphernalia with him on every voyage.

Where neat, orderly, orangey beige plastic brightened the banal space Diego called his own, Hernandez created a dark, inhospitable and vividly antireligious personal fortress. Diego supposed it provided ample deterrent for repeated inspection, Hernandez’s habitual drug usage was common knowledge throughout the company, yet he’d survived three voyages with the Saudi’s apparently unmolested.

Diego cringed as Hernandez switched on his ghetto blaster, acerbic guitar feedback bled from the speakers proceeded by lo-fi garage production punk. The noise shook Aidan from his near slumber, the beer bottle, already perilously angled in the cadets drowsy state, tipped violently at the jagged sound of powerviolence. The young Australian shot Hernandez a glance, but if Hernandez noticed he didn’t say anything. Instead, Hernandez pogo danced around the small cabin, windmilling his arms and banging his head with reckless abandon, oblivious to his company and the flat Pilsner now soaking into his bedding.

Diego paid him little heed. Distantly, he decided the aggressive paroxysms of Latino hardcore punk were preferable to the suffocating, melancholy silence of the vessel. The impenetrable dead air was beginning to swallow hope like a little black hole forming within the heart of the ship.

Two days had passed since James Stewart died. Diego had been their lookout and their radio man, their safety was his responsibility and he’d failed. Diego had become used to failure in his life, but he’d never cost a person their life. A feeling of deep nausea overwhelmed him each and every time he attempted to process the scenario. Replaying the impact in his mind over and over, his abiding memory before darkness was the fear Diego had felt for himself and himself alone.

Then he came to, overhead lights were blinking. Diego came to rest on the rubberized laminate of the bridge deck, the radio station chair having tipped over at some point. Diego wasn’t sure if he’d lost consciousness or the period of impact was marked by a brief and total blackout of the ships electronics.

There was an alarm sounding somewhere on the bridge – an electronically synthesised woman’s voice “Warning, hull breach. Warning, hull breach…” repeated over and over gaining clarity as his dull tinnitus subsided. The crash of metal on metal briefly deafened Diego.