The Sea Hates a Coward Read Free Page A

clenched.
    “Help me,” it hissed.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    B EFORE HE COULD fully understand what he was doing, Schneider was stooping again and sweeping up the rain-slicked corpse in his arms. The urge to vomit rocked his gorge as he pulled its arm round his shoulders, felt its ruined chest slide against his, but what was the point in revulsion? He was every bit as vile as it was, and anything would be better than hearing its moans receding behind him.
    Spider legs clattered in the distance.
    “Let’s get out of here,” he murmured, only reflecting briefly what a ludicrous thing it was for one corpse to say to another, before hobbling briskly out of the cone of floodlit steel. He hoped desperately it had been shock rather than damage that had kept the body slumped on the floor; there was no way he could carry the thing if it collapsed. But after a few exhausting paces, it seemed to match his pace, leaning heavily on him but moving in a way that suggested its bones were still roughly in the right place.
    As he lurched past the base of a floodlight tower, Schneider was struck by a vision that made him think he was dreaming—and then he remembered what a memory was. Even with the constant slashing rain and the stink of salt, and the fact he was dead, he could have closed his eyes and been back in the library gardens, propping up the paralytic junior archivist who had just pissed all over the statue of the founders.
    He had joked at the time that it had been like trying to smuggle a corpse away from a crime scene; he was struck by the irony of his current situation. Of course, he couldn’t remember the archivist’s name, or what celebration or tragedy had gotten him so pissed, but the sanity of the recollection made the present somehow more bearable.
    Despite everything, Schneider found himself laughing as he stumbled through the dark, a weird, panting sound that would have been utterly chilling had it not come from his own neck.
    It dried out soon enough as he noticed pale faces in the dark, turning in sleepwalker confusion toward the unfamiliar noise. They were everywhere around him, swaying in the rain, loping in slow circles and bumping against each other like floating debris. The corpses, the cadavers, the...
    “Zombies,” he blurted at his lurching companion in something like a real voice, unable to suppress a small gasp like somebody revealing the twist of a ghost story to a group of children. The dead face just stared back at him with a hint of a baffled frown and he laughed again, drawing the gaze of yet more uncomprehending eyes. Let them come, thought Schneider. It felt good to laugh.
    His helpless wheezing brought the zombies shambling towards him, but naming them seemed to have robbed them of something of their horror. Even their smell— his smell, he reminded himself—had become familiar to his nostrils. Despite their watery eyes and their loose, peeling skin, they were utterly harmless. And in any case, he was one of them. The only real danger here seemed to be the brutish overseers and their attack creatures. Them, and the inevitability of bodily collapse—though that was less of an immediate threat to his life.
    The word ‘life’ caught in his mind like a sharp stone, and drained the weak humour from the situation. He was, after all, dead.
    But there was no time to reflect—hearing a burst of radio static some way behind him, he remembered there were still terrible things that could happen to him. And to the reeling creature leaning against his left side.
    They had to keep moving, but the safety in numbers that the aimless crowd offered was surely enough to buy him a minute to work out where he was and—hopefully—where to go next.
    The initial plan of ‘into the dark’ seemed suddenly inadequate as his eyes adjusted. The space beyond the floodlights was anything but dark. Specks of brightness twinkled far out in the distance to either side, while ahead of him stood a mountain, outlined in