Free Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead by John L. Campbell Page B

down and produced hemoglobin. The entire body would then turn a blackish green, and fluids would seep from a corpse’s mouth, nose, and other orifices. Body tissue would begin to split, releasing gases and more fluids, and by seventy-two hours rigor mortis would be gone.
    “Bodies in water decay at twice the speed of a corpse aboveground,” she finished.
    “I’ve seen all that,” Xavier said, “but not in all of them. Some show those early signs, others are further along, some are withering like mummies. It’s not consistent.”
    “Right.” Rosa drank from her water bottle. “That’s the problem. It’s been more than a month since the outbreak. Most of them should be piles of muck and bone by now, but they’re not. Some even look fairly fresh.” She looked at the priest. “You said it. They’re not consistent.”
    Carney was nodding slowly. “If they followed the biology you described, Doc, then in a month or so you wouldn’t have to worry about fluid exposure. They’d be dry as a bone. But most of them are . . .”
    “Still juicy,” said Evan. “You’re both right, it doesn’t make sense.”
    “Neither does the fact that they’re dead and still hunting us,” said Xavier.
    “Are you suggesting,” Carney asked, “that they’re somehow stabilizing wherever they happen to be in the decaying process?” The inmate looked at Rosa with a raised eyebrow.
    She huffed her frustration, not at his question, but at her lack of information. “I don’t know. I can’t explain what they are or why they do what they do, or even if what we’ve seen is normal for all of them. There could be other . . . varieties, I guess, with different levels of senses and motor skills. We don’t know if they adapt, or if they can learn.” She let out a shaky laugh. “Jesus, I hope not. I certainly don’t know where OV came from, if it’s man-made, a freak of nature, who knows. It has to be something recent, though, or we would have seen it a lot sooner than August.”
    “And that makes it man-made,” said Evan.
    Carney nodded. “Some asshole cooked it up, and some other asshole let it out, on purpose or by accident.”
    Rosa shrugged. It was as good a theory as any, and this imposing man who admitted to committing two murders had just phrased it more succinctly than any of the doctors she had been around. “I wish I could tell you more. I wish I knew if any of what I just said is true, but I can tell you we’d be foolish to think we understand anything about it.”
    Xavier squeezed the woman’s shoulder. “You did just fine, thank you.”
    Carney gave her a nudge. “Yeah, thanks, Doc.”
    She nodded and left to find a place to sleep. They heard a bottle break, followed by a string of muffled obscenities, and Carney went to handle his cellmate. Xavier and Evan sat quietly for a while, then wandered over to the row of windows in the hangar’s wall. Everyone was sleeping and there were no sounds other than Carney’s low voice and TC’s drunken one, as the older man forced his companion into a vacant booth and ordered him to sleep it off.
    The clouds were scattered now and a partial moon reflected off windshields, turning the hangar across from them white and casting pools of absolute shadow in places the light didn’t touch. A corpse lurched through the parking lot on its way to the airfield, a man in some sort of uniform, missing an arm. Xavier and Evan froze. It didn’t look toward the windows, and if it had it would probably only have seen its own reflection in the glass, but still they held their breath until it passed.
    When it was gone, Evan looked at the older man. “So we just heard a medical explanation. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t sound like science is going to give us all the answers.”
    “It never does,” said Xavier, looking out at the night.
    “Where’s the military in all this?” Evan leaned his palms against the window frame and stared up at the moon. “Where’s