Message in a Bottle

I felt that this story was just a bit long for the book so I am posting it as a sample of what you might expect to find in the coming release Letters From the Dead from Library of the Living Dead Press.

Though it is unedited by the master Becca, it is as good as I can make it. I hope you enjoy.

Message in a Bottle
A Letter From the Dead
By Mark M. Johnson

A large cruise ship was discovered run aground on the North Carolina shore in the former United States of America. Among the remains of over one thousand souls onboard the mostly preserved ship, this letter was found still sealed in a plastic bottle.

This was supposed to be a dream vacation and I cannot believe that it has come to this. As I sit here writing this letter while barricaded in our cabin aboard this mighty cruise ship, I am not sure how much longer we will be alive. The ship has descended into madness all around us, there has been no food but what we hoarded here in his room for ourselves for weeks now. It has been a little more than a week since the Russian sub surfaced alongside the ship and attacked us, then the fighting and killing started, and the eating.

When my wife Elisabeth and I boarded the ship in Miami over six months ago, there had been only rumors of the plague, nothing more. A few remote reports of some strange new disease spreading, another bird flu like scare we thought and paid it no more mind than that. We were on our second honeymoon after all, and you can imagine what was on our minds at the time.

We had a wonderful day at sea and then a very relaxing and uneventful daylong stay at the cruise line’s private island in Haiti. It all began to fall apart when we docked for the day in Ocho Rios Jamaica the next day.

The ship had to make dock to refuel but due to the rioting in the city, all shore excursions were canceled. We were not happy about that I remember. It seems so stupid now that I was so upset about being denied the trivial shore adventure I had paid for. After we saw the smoke rising from the fires in the city, it did seem like a good idea to stay on the ship though.

Just before our early departure from the Ocho Rios, there was some commotion on the dock. Some kind of fighting broke out when a large group of Jamaicans fleeing the rioting were prevented from boarding the ship. As we were departing the dock and making for the open sea, Elisabeth and I witnessed a great many people throwing themselves into the water off the dock. Some were running and screaming as they leapt into the clear blue-green water, while others just seemed to walk off the edges of the dock as if in a trance.

The captain apologized to the passengers for all the unpleasantness over the intercom and informed us that we were now headed to our next destination, George Town on Grand Cayman Island. We were all understandably upset about the situation we had just witnessed, and many of our fellow passengers were making calls home.

Elisabeth and I were never blessed with children and had no family to call, but we did place a few calls to our friends at home in Cincinnati Ohio. Unfortunately, we were unable to contact anyone. When the calls actually went through, which was only twice out of the many calls we made, the phone just rang and rang. However, some of our new friends onboard the ship had better or worse luck with their calls, depending on how you looked at it.

We heard horror stories of entire cities in chaos, rioting and fires burning unchecked. It was all quite unbelievable at the time; the rumors ran rampant on the ship. Apparently, in the last few days since we had boarded the ship on our dream second honeymoon, the world had fallen apart. It was just so incredible that it could have happened so fast, in a matter of days all that humanity had built was going down in flames. We even discussed the idea that this was the beginning of the last war, that maybe one of the world’s crazy governments had unleashed a first strike with a biological weapon. As more news came in though, that became ever more unlikely.

We heard news of chaos from all over the world by the time it was announced that the George Town port had been closed to all ships. We were informed that the ship was making sail for Miami at best speed and it would be another day or so before we arrived back where we had started.

When we arrived in Miami the next day, the captain made the decision to avoid the dock and dropped anchor just off shore. From our vantage point just over one mile from the Miami shoreline, we could see the destruction and madness with our own eyes.

There were sirens screaming and emergency lights flashing everywhere we could see. It sounded like a war zone with the sound of constant gunfire echoing across the water. Many personal watercraft had left the mainland to escape the fighting and had anchored just off shore long before we arrived; the giant cruise ship joined them.

Crazy as it sounds, a very large number of the passengers elected to go ashore and into the chaos. I am sure they all had their reasons, like family and children left behind. We have no one but each other, so there is no reason for the two of us to leave the ship. The Captain used the lifeboats to send them all to shore, I have no idea what happened to them after they landed and disappeared from view.

The stories that we heard from the Miami evacuees were just unbelievable, I never would have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes. They broadcasted signals from the local Miami stations and CNN on the ships room TV’s for everyone to see. The dead, that is dead people, are getting up and killing anyone they can catch. It is the reckoning; God has finally passed judgment upon man. There can be no other explanation.

Elisabeth and I are believers, we are God fearing Christians, always have been. We were not included in the rapture, and from the looks of it, neither was anyone else. Maybe we were wrong; maybe there is no going up to heaven until you die. After much thought, we have decided that we wanted to live.

Our Captain became a kind of leader for all of the passengers that elected to stay onboard the ship, as he well should. We joined forces with another cruse ship and several hundred personal watercraft to create a kind of floating democracy. As the world fell apart all around us, we organized and prepared to weather the coming storm of survival. We all took jobs and responsibilities as we pulled together in our attempt to go on living onboard the ship.

Day by day, and week by week, the city on shore died and after a month, all of the lights of glorious Miami had gone dark. Broadcasts from the rest of the world followed soon after and then we were alone. When some of the boats carrying survivors began to show up with infected on board it was decided to move farther out to sea where we would not be seen from shore. As we sailed away from shore, we could see thousands of walking dead falling into the water as they tried to follow us out to sea.

The going was hard as the summer months rolled past; we attempted to dock in Bermuda for a supply run and to refuel the ships and boats. It was a disaster and although we did refuel and take on more supplies, we lost over one hundred souls in the doing and that was only the beginning of the trials. After the disaster in Bermuda it was decided that we would avoid going ashore anywhere and put more efforts into fishing to feed everyone, with mixed success. We survived two bad storms, though many were lost in both, then the Russians came.

At the time we had lost most of the smaller craft to the storms, we were down to just two cruise ships and fifteen large pleasure boats. The sub surfaced a few hundred yards off the port bow and hailed us. It was very exiting at the time, we were just as happy to see them, as they appeared to be to see us. They docked on the side of our ship and the Captain and a few of the crew welcomed them aboard.

From what I could see of the submarine crew from looking over the upper deck rail, they did not look good. They appeared bedraggled and emaciated, perhaps from being cooped up on that sub. Four men from the sub passed from our view and into the ship, and then there was only silence. Minutes later we heard the gunfire from below and looked over to see men pouring out of the sub and onto our ship, we were being attacked!

The Russians killed the Captain and everyone else that went down to welcome them onboard. They fought their way up to the command deck and took control of the ship. They never met any formidable resistance as we had very few weapons making us easy prey. Not that our shipmates did not go down fighting, the other cruise ship even tried to ram the sub. It was not to long before the Russians had taken them as well. Most of the smaller boats ran to open sea and escaped, but we were trapped on our cruise ship.

As the Russians took the ship deck by deck, many fought and died resisting them. We had all heard what was happening from some who saw the beginning of the attack. The Russians were not taking prisoners they were eating them. These men are not walking dead, they are living men reduced to cannibalism to survive. We heard horrible stories of what they were doing with the young women they captured.

Elisabeth and I are far too old to be fighting Russian submariner cannibals, so we retreated to our room and barricaded ourselves in. Over the time that we have been on this ship, we managed to hoard at least a few weeks worth of food by not eating all of what we were given. None of that will matter though as we can hear them coming.

They are searching the rooms of this massive ship one by one, looking for food, us. It has been a nightmarish week as we struggled to retain our sanity while listening to the muffled screaming as people are found in the rooms around us on other decks. They have worked their way to our deck now, we can hear the crashing of doors being forced only just down the hall, and it is only a matter of time.

The search has stopped for now, perhaps they have found enough to eat, but they will be back I am sure. They may eat our flesh, but I will not allow those living monsters to take our lives. We intend to take them ourselves in a few moments. I wanted to leave something behind, something to tell our story. Even if no one ever reads this, it was worth writing just to get it out of my head. I will place this letter into one of the empty plastic water bottles we have in our room. As we are in an inner cabin, I have no way to toss the bottle into the sea so it will have to remain in the room. I hope that when they come for our flesh, they will overlook the bottle.

It is time to say goodbye now, please Lord forgive us for what we are about to do. My Lord, if you cannot forgive us this sin, then to hell with you.

I do not mean that. Oh Jesus, we just cannot face being killed and eaten by those bastards. It will be so much more peaceful if we just…

Oh God, I do not know if I can do this, please give me the strength and wisdom to do what is right.
It is decided, we will fight. Maybe we can take a few of those godless bastards with us.

God help us.

Bob and Elisabeth kolinsky

An almost completely preserved passenger manifest was discovered in the ship’s safe of this once glorious pleasure vessel. Although many of the passengers were said to have gone ashore, it is the best we can do to put names to all of the remains found onboard. The ship will be dismantled in the clean up of the eastern shore of this continent. The remains of the ships passengers have been placed in a common grave, within view of the sea they all so loved.

The graves and memorials of the millions of reaper plague victims seem to cover the entire of this new Earth. There is not a city being rebuilt that does not have hundreds of thousands if not millions of remains buried beneath it. It would seem that the Earth has become a graveyard, but we will never look upon it with such a narrow view.

As we reclaim this new Earth, bury our honored dead and remake human civilization, we endeavor to look only forward.

When we look back at the history of our planet, we will never think of it as the graveyard of our ancestors. For the people of the planet Earth, it will forever be a place of life, a place of hope, the genesis of humankind. It will always be, home.