The Sea Hates a Coward by Nate Crowley Page B

of beard. It was the skeletal man he had seen the previous night in the hangar, sat up to his hips in rot, still patiently whickering away at his exposed bone with his scrap of metal. While just a day ago the creature had seemed horrifying, a ghoulish remnant reminding him of his own decay, there was now nothing remotely threatening about it.
    “Alright, mate,” said Wrack, and nodded at the skull.
    The skull nodded back, prompting Wrack to bark a delighted laugh, and opened its jaws like a shoddy ghost train animatronic. The skull looked at him, mouth open and grinning like a bad comedian waiting for a reaction to an appalling one-liner, and emitted a barely audible wheeze.
    “You keep doing what you’re doing,” said Wrack, then lay back in the filth and lost himself in the fire-cast shadows of the nostalgic dead. What came next was not sleep as he had once known it, but neither was it the turgid black dreaming that had ensnared him before he had woken in the flensing yard. Whatever it was, it was devoid of much thought, and that was good enough.
    Morning came, and silence with it.
    The fire had burned down, its embers blackening as the sky outside lightened, and the zombies were still. They had gathered back in their drift, slumped against each other but no longer moaning and twitching as they had done before. Their eyes watched the horizon, gleaming pale as they waited for the sun to undrown itself. Scraps of flesh dangled from the picked ribs of the beluga-things, fluttering in eddies of the dawn wind.
    Wrack stood, stretching muscles turned to wood by rest and the weird processes of undeath. It felt dreadful to ease himself out of the muckpile and into thought, but it had to be done. If they lay here any longer, they were in danger of ending up right where they had started off, sunk beyond the responsibility of consciousness. They had to make a plan, and start waking the others. There was so much work to do: somebody had to start it.
    Wrack stood by the embers of the story-fire and clapped his leaden hands, and the pile began to stir. He was just about to address them, when a familiar clattering came from the hangar’s mouth.
    Not again, thought Wrack, rolling his eyes, and turned to the sound. This happened every time he was about to make a speech. The same overseer, the one with the grille for the face, was at the door, huffing with her wheelbarrow of offal, the thresher shark skittering at her heels. She foraged in the red mess, cursing to herself, not yet aware of what had changed.
    “Come on, arseholes,” she barked tiredly, then looked up and froze, a gelid kidney in her hand. Eyes crunching into slits above her corroded muzzle, she took in the smoldering ashes of the fire, the stripped carcasses, and the mass of still, silent zombies staring right at her. Registering Wrack alone in the centre of the hangar, her head swung round and she dropped the kidney, brows leaping in shock.
    A strangled noise blurted from her grille. She recognised him. Knew him as one of the zombies she had herded down the ship the previous day, as one of the dead sent miles out to sea on a disastrous hunt. Knew he should not be there, standing stock still with teeth bared in an animal grin.
    “Morning,” said Wrack, and the dead erupted from their pile like a swarm of flies. There were near a hundred of them, loping across the hangar with arms outstretched and shrieks rising from their ruined throats. Wrack ran ahead of them, eyes fixed on the overseer’s blanched face, flooding with a terrible hunger.
    The shark came at him, sliding on the deck in its haste to catch him between its jaws, and overshot Wrack by a good three feet. It wheeled round like a hound, raising sparks on the deck, and lunged for his leg. But the mob had grabbed it by the long lobe of its tail, and it was tugged back away from him.
    The overseer, eyes still fixed in disbelief on Wrack, fumbled for her radio, but he was upon her. Despite a two-hundred-pound