CHAPTER 25

They might have been man and wife; Pilar really couldn’t tell at this point. Not with all the damage that had been done to them. The zombies had chewed them up badly before they died. But Pilar imagined that they were husband and wife. She found something comforting in that. Creepy, yes, the way they stood there side by side, still wearing the tattered remnants of matching clothes, like being dead hadn’t changed their vacation experience much; but it was nonetheless comforting to imagine love holding on even when life couldn’t. He was tall, maybe six-foot-four, and she was short, just a little over five feet. They were probably a cute couple in life. Now, covered in blood and with bite marks all over their bodies, they stood in front of the salmon bar at the Great Northern Café. It was funny, actually. The two zombies, so plain, so average, typical middle-class Americans, were standing there looking at mounds of raw salmon, perhaps the same contaminated fish that had caused them to turn into zombies in the first place, and all they could do was paw at the glass. Just average Americans, hoisted on their own tasty petard. Ramon, Pilar thought, would be pleased.

Pilar, however, was screwed. The man and wife zombies weren’t all that big of a deal. She could have sprinted right by them. The problem was the large crowd of zombies filing in through the door behind them. She’d been doing fine, making her way without having to use her weapons, when she rounded the corner just outside the café. A man was facedown on the floor at the foot of some stairs, and from the trail of blood on the steps it wasn’t hard to figure out that he’d just tumbled down them. She could have avoided him, too, but something about him caught her attention. Ramon had told her that the same chemical reactions the bacteria used to stimulate the medulla oblongata, making postmortem movement possible, also inhibited the onset of rigor mortis. But . . . not in this zombie. It looked stiff, like every movement was bought with consider effort. She had taken out her iPhone and captured a quick video of the man, because she figured Ramon would want his scientists to see it. But when she was done with the video, she’d looked up to find herself surrounded.

A crowd of them had come around from the back of the stairs. Another smaller crowd had come up behind her. She looked forward, back, up the stairs, and realized they had closed in on her without making a sound. The only place to run was into the Great Northern Café, and so she’d sprinted into there.

Now she was hiding in the kitchen with a clean shot on the cute couple over by the salmon. From this distance, with her MP5, she could pop them both with an easy headshot.

But that probably wouldn’t kill them, at least from what she’d seen so far. It usually took two or three, unless of course it was at point-blank range. All of which was a moot point anyway because the cute couple had brought along about seventy of their closest friends.

Unfortunately, she was running out of time. She had to find the senator, kill her, and then get off this damn ship before the authorities figured something was wrong and sent a force out to take care of the problem. But before she could do any of that, she had to get out of this kitchen without getting killed.

Somewhere onboard a fire had broken out. Every once in a while, she caught a whiff of smoke through the air vents, and that wasn’t good. She’d turned off the fire alarm systems when she’d hacked into the ship’s security and housekeeping programs, but even still, where there was fire there was smoke, and at sea nothing brought help faster than a ship on fire. Sooner or later, she figured, somebody was going to see that smoke, and they’d come running.

Which meant she had to get out of this kitchen. She looked around for something she could use to clear a path out the door. There were knives and heavy cast iron pots everywhere, but nothing she could use to cut a hole through the crowd.

Except maybe that, she thought as her gaze wandered over the Viking gas range.

She looked inside the cabinets and on the shelves until she found what she was looking for—a case of Lysol disinfectant spray. She could make some serious use out of that.

Working quickly but quietly, she laid out sixteen cans on the prep surface next to the range. She checked the pilot light to make sure it was still burning, and then grabbed the biggest knife she could find and punctured all the cans.

No telling how long it would take for the whole thing to go up, she thought. Best to move fast.

She ran to the opposite side of the kitchen, where the zombies seemed to have clustered. Large crowds of them could be a lot like water. They moved fast when headed in a straight line, but when left to their own devices, they had a tendency to cluster in groups and just sort of stop, like a backwater on a river. They had clustered that way up near the front of the restaurant, and Pilar smiled when she saw the two married zombies right there in the thick of the crowd, still side by side.

There were two doors into the kitchen: one up near where the backwater had formed, and another toward the back. She went over to the door nearest the zombies, opened it, and whistled.

Pilar didn’t wait around to see what would happen. She didn’t need to. The crowd surged toward the door, even as she ran to the opposite side of the kitchen and ducked behind a table. She clapped her hands over her ears and opened her mouth wide to equalize the pressure just as the kitchen exploded.

The explosion threw her against the wall, and left a ringing in her ears. Her head felt like it was about to cave in. She had to blink several times just to keep her vision from shaking.

She stood up on wobbly legs.

The room was full of smoke. Debris was everywhere.

So too were the zombies.

Most had been knocked to the ground. Very few appeared to be seriously damaged from the blast—aerosol cans didn’t make that big of an explosion, after all—but nearly all of them were sprawled out on the floor. Only a few still kept their feet, and those were turned every which way, clearly disoriented.

It wasn’t much, but it was the window she needed.

She was still seeing double as she sprinted through the maze of bodies and out the front door of the café. Pilar headed up the stairs the rigor-afflicted zombie had fallen from, found a quiet little observation deck overlooking the foyer in front of the café, and dropped down against the wall.

She took out her iPhone and blinked at it, trying to read the display so she could go back to reviewing the security feeds. She had a minute, maybe two, to get her head back in order before the sound of the explosion drew even more zombies into the area. Best to use the time she had wisely.

“Now where are you?” she said at the screen.

She thumbed through one screen after another—corridors and casinos, shops and cafés—and found nothing.

Until she reached the bridge.

There, sitting in the captain’s chair, distraught and apparently in shock, sat the senator.

Pilar had to laugh. When you were afflicted with the kind of narcissism that drove people into politics, where else would you sit but in the captain’s chair?

So this was going to be easy.

All Pilar had to do was go get her.