"There is a constant thrum echoing upward from the bowels of the ship. Every few seconds without fail, another clank resonates through the steel pipes. It keeps the passengers and crew on edge. The men continue to perform their duties, but I can tell they're distracted. No where you can go on this god forsaken boat will escape that noise. I would worry we'd done something wrong, but it's been three days, and the noise has not stopped. That's why I'm writing this now. When we can sleep, we dream of that noise. We all dream about what's behind that door. I'm writing this because eventually...eventually someone will open it.
"We lost track of the exact date in the panic, but today is plus or minus August 3rd. I am Henry Yates, the current captain of the
Canoy
, a freighter converted into a refugee ship. The real captain, James Garland, didn't make it on board. I don't know what happened to him. He went into the city for his wife a few hours before it started. Never came back.
"The national guard had the idea to convert freighters into refugee boats. No one objected seeing as how all our shipments had been stopped anyway. A few folk saw it as a way to make up their losses. Wasn't the first time someone thought of cramming humanity into shipping crates, but the military thought it would make people feel secure. When the quarantines started going up and people needed places to stay, we opened up the boats. It worked, surprisingly well. Before the panic, anyway.
"New York went dark about four weeks before, I think. Time is funny like that. In those days, every hour was a year long, but looking back it feels like it all happened in less than a day. Once the eastern seaboard fell, the rest of the country got left in the lurch as everything turned to shit. The power grid went down. Communications were broken. Half of what was being said across the radio was nonsense and the other half only sounded like nonsense until it was unavoidably true. More and more, we saw the military taking things into their own hands. So far as we know, D.C. followed pretty quick after New York along with the stretch of every city in between. No one really knew if the government still existed. The generals made promises that the president was safe and working with other world leaders, but what difference did that make? Local commanders started to act without coordinating with any bigger authority. Frankly, that was for the best, but it meant some hard lines had to be taken.
"They made a big show of walling off the 'infected' regions. They told us it was working. They told us some new drug was being fast tracked to cure the virus. They told us it would all be over in a few weeks, maybe even days. I think most of them believed that, too. No one knew exactly what the infected were, but we'd seen the videos on the Internet before everything went down. It seemed hard to believe that the thing we were all hiding from was porn star looking women. People thought it was a joke or some kind of mass hoax. The more dangerous people thought it was a coup. That type didn't last long enough to rouse a rebellion, fortunately.
"The quarantined zones were small, but one of these creatures can rip a steel door off its hinges if the mood strikes. The army guys put all their resources into building those containment walls, and that was ultimately their mistake. They spent so much time focused on the infected that they ignored the problems outside the walls. From what we could piece together afterwards, this is what happened. Some time after dawn on June 7th, a military patrol on the north part of the quarantine zone reported a break in the perimeter. This unfortunately went out over a radio channel that many of the locals had been monitoring. Rumor of the break spread like wildfire through the community, and many people reasonably wanted to put more distance between themselves and the quarantine. Lots of people went out into the street. Next came the main breach on the south wall, the one facing the harbor, the weakest point in the quarantine's control zone with normal deployment. But, as I mentioned, the northern break had caused several groups to be relocated. I don't care what they say, that wasn't a coincidence. The infected planned it. They're not entirely mindless like we were told. They can think and reason and plan. Anyway, the checkpoints were overrun and by 8:30, the military was ordered to pull out, and the city went into a full blown panic.
"Here's the thing that people didn't understand. Why put everyone that close to the quarantine? Why not just move away? They didn't think one step ahead of that. To where? Where could all these people go? Most of them were poor and had no extended family. Travel was restricted between cities by the military checkpoints, the end-of-days lunatics outside military control, and the infected. So, they put everyone somewhere they could manage, and let out near zero. Maybe a few hundred people who did have other family or places to stay got passes out, but the majority were denied. So, like I said, one infected is all it takes. All those people shoved together waiting for on drop of the virus. Within a few hours of the breach, it wasn't a few bimbos, it was a full blown infestation spreading faster than anyone could react.
"People knew about the refugee boats since the start of the quarantine. The good, prudent citizens that they are, or were, worried about crime and disease, things like that. Once the infected cut the city in half, they had no where to go but the harbor. Seemed like a good idea, I'm sure. Hop on one of the ships, sail out of the harbor and dock somewhere safe. They came by the thousands and right behind them, the infected. Once it started, we weren't exactly ready to sail. We'd spent a month converting into a floating hotel. Most of the crew were gone or at least spread out. The captain left me in charge so I started doing my best to get things ready to leave. About half of our residents were sensible enough to start helping. The other half just watched, mouth agape, as the city they called home turned into a ruin.
"People, humans that is, are a herd animal, like cows or sheep. We want to make ourselves sound important so we call them tribes or communal groups, but we're just herds. I used to watch nature documentaries while on long cross continental voyages. Some predators like wolves learned that if they drove a herd of elk toward a cliff, the dumb things would run right off. Clever packs would use this as a main hunting tool. It's a lot less dangerous to make an elk hurt itself and come clean up the mess than it is to try and kill one. Prehistoric humans figured out the same thing. A cornered animal will fight, but a frightened animal will run as long as it doesn't have a wall in front of it. That's all I could think about as I saw people streaming into the harbor. We took on as many as we could. More than we could, really. We didn't have food or water to support that many.
"Soon as I realized these frightened people would doom us, too, I ordered the crew to cast off. We had people jumping from the dock onto the gangplanks. It's a freighter, not a passenger ship. Crew dock is twenty feet below the ship's deck. Short of a grapple, as soon as we detached the plank, getting on board the ship was hopeless. Still they ran up the boards as they fell into the harbor. We moved out into open water, and I saw people trying to swim out to us. The other ships were swarmed. Lucky for us, we broke off in time. Unlucky for us, that meant we slowly sailed away and had to watch what happened to all those people.
"This mass of people, like you'd see at a stadium or a concert, filled up the whole dock. Hundreds of them pushed right up to the edge, shouting into the harbor for the boats to come back. From where we were, you could see the back of the crowd. People would simply vanish. They'd fall and in a few minutes, someone else a few feet forward would be pulled down as well. The further the infected moved into the group, the quieter everything became. The first stage of the infection would render people speechless. Their cries for help would go silent as they turned to watch the abominations behind them.
"Finally, we could start to see them. I didn't understand what was happening for a while. Gorgeous women, like you'd see in a high class strip joint, moved forward through the crowd. They'd find a guy or woman who caught their interest and, in just a few moments, the infected slut would have the guy's dick in her mouth or her hand up the woman's pussy. That person would be absorbed into the massive orgy.
