Free Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) by Manel Loureiro

of the
Marqués de la Ensenada
, an oil tanker in the Spanish navy, anchored in Cartagena, Colombia. Six hours after going ashore, Basilio and a couple of shipmates had gotten plastered and had wrecked a bar, broken a chair over a pimp’s head, and picked a fight with several Colombian police officers. MPs arrested them and sent them back to their ship, where they were locked up in their quarters.
    Basilio spent the next forty-eight hours in the throes of a terrible hangover, but he heard a lot of voices screaming and sailors running around up top. Through the narrow porthole in his cabin, he watched Cartagena’s military port quickly become an anthill.
    Many ships, packed with people, hastily weighed anchor and jammed the mouth of the port trying to get out. On land, thousands of people, mostly civilians, tried to reach anything afloat, no matter the cost. The authorities had planned to evacuate the city by sea, but clearly the situation had overwhelmed them. There were too many people and too few ships. Out his tiny porthole, Basilio watched the Colombian military scurry around, trying to bring order to the chaos, but the terrified crowd was out of control.
    Basilio didn’t read newspapers, and he hadn’t listened to the radio or watched TV for days, so he had no idea that in the days leading up to the Apocalypse, chaos was rampant all over the world. At first, with all the gunshots and explosions throughout the city, he thought there’d been a civil war or revolution in Colombia. But the frantic activity of the soldiers convinced him it was something else.
    Anchored next to the
Marqués de la Ensenada
were an American destroyer and a French frigate. Large detachments of their crews (except the sick or those locked up like Basilio) had gone ashore to join the overwhelmed Colombians in trying to control the panicked crowd. In horror, Basilio witnessed an avalanche of thousands of people sweep over those American soldiers and French sailors, as if they were toys, in their rush to the sea.
    The shores had quickly become a hive of thousands of men, women, and children splashing and punching one another, trying to keep from drowning or being crushed by people falling on top of them. The water was churned up by thousands of arms and legs. People were knocked senseless when they stuck their heads up for air in the midst of that morass.
    Someone panicked and started firing wildly into the crowd. Soon hundreds of people were exchanging shots, desperate to board the ships remaining in the harbor. Columns of black smoke rose across the city. Law and order was breaking down and nobody could stop it.
    Basilio’s mouth was as dry as the desert. He rubbed his eyes, hoping that that hellacious scene was just a hallucination brought on by the DTs, but he knew it was painfully real. He turned away from the porthole, unable to watch anymore, but he couldn’t tune out the screams of thousands of people drowning a few feet away. The pounding andclawing of people futilely trying to climb the ship’s smooth sides were like blows to his head. Yet Basilio didn’t shed any tears. He was safe.
Every man for himself
, he thought.
    Six hours later, one of the lieutenants on the ship opened the cell door. His uniform was soaking wet and torn. Blood poured from a huge gash in his head. Of all the crew that had gone ashore, he and a sergeant were the only survivors. Over seven hundred people, mostly civilians, were crammed into every corner on that tanker. Only four members of the original crew, including Basilio, had survived the chaos.
    Loaded down with refugees, the
Marqués de la Ensenada
began a harrowing journey back home. It lacked enough food, water, and medicine for that many people. Its crew barely knew how to steer the ship. A violent hurricane nearly sent the ship to the bottom. When it finally reached the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, more than a hundred people had died along the way. Twenty with “suspicious