Red Tide (Billy Knight Thrillers 2)

I thought hard for a while. It came back to me slowly: No, the drums had not made me like this. Drums could not do that. But something that went with the drums had.

For a time that was enough. I was satisfied. Something that went with the drums was not good. Now I knew.

I came back to that question eventually. What had happened to me? If not the drums, what? What was the bad thing connected to the drums?

I worked on that. Nothing came to me. I drifted for a while, listening to the drums.

There was a new sound. A door opening. The drums got louder for a moment. I heard scuffling, heavy breathing, a sharp SMACK sound, a thump.

The feet moved closer to me and I felt a new pain blossom in my side, about the size and shape of a foot. A voice hissed something in a language I did not know. The foot kicked me again. The voice laughed.

“You’ve bloody killed him!” said a different voice. “You fucking bastards!” I knew the voice. I was sure I’d heard it before, but—

“Not dead. Zom-BEE!,” the first voice said, sounding very happy. “Your friend is a zom-BEE!” And it laughed.

I almost didn’t even hear the feet moving away, the door opening and closing, the lock clicking home. Because I had begun to remember and it all came pouring back over me, cascading across my mind in a terrible flood.

I remembered. I knew what had happened to me and what the drums meant. I knew where I was.

I was on the Black Freighter.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Christ. Oh hell, mate, what’ve they done?”

I felt a hand touch me, shake me, slap my face. Although the voice was in my ear the hand felt far away. It was as though he was talking to me and touching somebody else.

“Bloody fucking Christ,” Nicky said. I heard a soft fumbling sound and then he was forcing something small and cold between my lips. I felt a few drops of something bitter roll slowly across my tongue and into my throat. Then I felt Nicky lift my hand into the air and feel for a pulse.

“We’ll be all right,” he said, as if he was trying to convince himself. “Long as they haven’t given you the second powder. That first dose just puts you out, mate. The second, that’s what makes you a right proper zombie. We’ll be all right.”

I wanted to talk back, make some small joke about my condition. I couldn’t. I tried to move just a little bit to let him know I was alive. I couldn’t. I tried as hard as I know how to speak, to say I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t. I think I managed to twitch one corner of my mouth.

“Gotcha,” Nicky muttered, but whether he had seen my mouth twitch or just found my pulse, I don’t know.

And then, as strange as anything that had happened to me so far, Nicky dropped my arm, picked up my foot, and started to take off my shoe.

So they got to him, too, I thought. They’ve pushed him over the edge. Poor Nicky. He was never strong enough for this, never meant to stand up under this kind of treatment. Of course he’s cracked, poor guy.

He had my shoe off now and I felt his thumbs digging in around my toes, and just above my arch and below my big toe, at the large pad on the bottom of the foot.

And if I needed any more proof that Nicky had slipped quietly out of his tree, he started to hum at me. At first it was just sounds, “EEeeh,” and “Aaah.” He would hold to one note and sing it for a full breath as he poked at my feet.

And then the sound changed and he was humming, “All You Need Is Love.”

It didn’t make sense. I was in mortal danger and paralyzed and my friend was poking at my feet while singing The Beatles’ greatest hits. The weirdness of the whole thing suddenly made me want to laugh out loud. A huge bubble of hysterical laughter built up inside me, tried to explode.

“Uh,” I said, very softly.

“Right,” said Nicky cheerfully, “We’ll have you dancing in no time,” and he swung into “Penny Lane.”

I had said something. My mouth had opened—only a little, sure, but sound had come out.

And Nicky had been expecting it.

It didn’t even begin to make sense. Which one of us was really crazy?

Did he know what had happened to me—and how to fix it? It seemed impossible. But Nicky was rubbing my feet briskly, poking at the same two or three spots on both feet, and humming at full blast—now it was “Good Day Sunshine.” And as he did—as a result of what he did?—I felt a slow flush spread outward from my heart and climb from the base of my spine up to the top of my skull.