Chapter 214 - A Story of 'You, Get Off the Ship Already'
This ship that drifted to the Reclaimed Land was apparently one of the world's largest luxury liners, operated by an American shipping company. The number of passengers exceeded five thousand, and it seemed to have been in the middle of a cruise visiting various parts of the world.
However, due to the global pandemic, major ports were quickly overrun with refugees trying to escape and the infected who chased after them. Fortunately, this ship had called at a port in Southeast Asia just before the infected rapidly increased, and had been able to replenish supplies such as fuel, food, and water. Thanks to that, even after ports everywhere became unusable, it apparently managed to avoid calling at any port for a long time.
The ship's crew and passengers could only watch the world collapse through the radio. Satellite TV broadcasts were cut off early on, and radio broadcasts also decreased day by day. Amateur radio communications from survivors seeking help everywhere continued for a long time, but there was nothing they could do.
Fortunately, the ship had a large amount of food and fuel, and being a luxury liner, it also had entertainment facilities. They couldn't get off this ship, but even so, because it was an environment isolated from land, the crew and passengers were initially able to calmly continue the voyage as they had before.
However, the supplies loaded on the ship were finite, and in the first place, without fuel, this ship would turn into nothing more than a lump of iron floating on the sea. Maintenance and repairs of the ship were also essential. Even though they had enough supplies and fuel to cross the Pacific Ocean, they couldn't stay secluded inside the ship forever while away from land.
After some time had passed since the pandemic, around the time government agencies of various countries had collapsed across the board, the liner began to encounter boats and small vessels drifting on the ocean. Many of those boats were carrying people who had somehow escaped from the land overrun with the infected, and they were seeking help from the liner as their boat's fuel and food were running out.
They could have ignored them, but the ship's crew and passengers were still humanitarian at this point. The fact that they were living isolated from the hellish state of the land was likely a big factor. Every time the liner encountered people seeking rescue on the ocean, it rescued them.
Among the people rescued were armed police and soldiers who had escaped the land, and sailors who were crew members of patrol boats that had been drifting on the ocean after their engines failed.
Fortunately, being one of the world's largest luxury liners, there was plenty of space to accommodate refugees. It didn't go as far as assigning a private room to each person, but the parks, casinos, and movie theaters inside the ship became living spaces for the refugees. As a result of rescuing refugees one after another, the number of passengers on the ship rose to nearly double the original amount.
The group continued their voyage aimlessly, but eventually, disputes began to occur within the ship. Communication with the outside was cut off, the ports they visited were prowled by the infected, and port facilities were destroyed, making even entry impossible. In a situation where they didn't even know if their own families left behind before the cruise were safe, people began to accumulate stress.
Naturally, supplies also began to run short. As a result of rescuing refugees in addition to the original number of people on the ship, the pace of supply consumption accelerated. There are limits even with economizing, and above all, they needed to replenish the ship's fuel. Without fuel, the ship would turn into a mere lump of iron, and they would no longer be able to lead a comfortable life.
And the seeds of anxiety were not just the lack of supplies. Pirates, who had disappeared as a result of military operations by various countries, began to actively operate again.
Fishermen who had obtained weapons, and soldiers who had turned into lawless armed groups as a result of broken discipline. They repeatedly carried out attacks to steal supplies from refugees who had escaped to the ocean. There were many other vessels that had evacuated to the ocean besides this ship, but they gradually decreased.
Starting with communications seeking rescue after being attacked by pirates, the number of parties capable of communication decreased rapidly. Because the pirates' range of activity was around the land, the liner had no choice but to wait for time to pass while semi-drifting on the ocean far away from land.
When three months had passed, the people on the ship finally decided to land and collect supplies. The liner was anchored offshore, and a dozen selected people were sent out on a boat for reconnaissance. Those selected were soldiers and police officers who had been rescued while drifting, and those who were confident in their skills.
Taking whatever weapons were at hand, they landed, stole past the prowling infected, gathered supplies, and returned to the ship. After repeating that several times and gathering enough supplies, the ship left that port. This was because survivors on land who had spotted the ship had set out to sea in boats seeking help.
By that time, the liner no longer had the leeway to accommodate any more refugees. If the number of people increased, the amount of supplies consumed would also increase. If that happened, they would have to risk danger many times to secure supplies. Furthermore, for the ship's crew and passengers who had learned of the information about the infected brought back from land by the landing party, humans other than themselves were now as good as sources of infection.
From then on, the liner ceased rescuing any other survivors. It anchored in places invisible from land, and when food ran out, it sent a landing party to collect it.
Although they continued such a practice for a few months, limits eventually emerged with that method as well. The amount of supplies that could be loaded and brought back in a boat was negligible, and above all, it was becoming difficult to find supplies themselves even when landing, perhaps because they had been looted by other survivors.
Above all, it had become difficult to procure fuel. Normally, refueling takes the form of docking and receiving fuel from a refueling ship there, but in this situation, it was difficult to dock and perform stable work. Refueling ships had also vanished from the ports, perhaps because survivors had taken them to escape during the pandemic; not a single one remained in the harbors. Even when they occasionally found a refueling ship abandoned in a port, many infected were also there, and they were forced to abandon landing.
Furthermore, due to the lack of supplies and the accompanying deterioration of the sanitary environment, an epidemic was spreading within the ship. Whether someone from the landing party had touched a corpse during supply collection and brought the virus back, a mysterious infectious disease was spreading even inside the ship.
It was a disease similar to a cold that, upon onset, caused high fever and pneumonia, and in the worst case, led to death along with clouding of consciousness. Whether the cold virus had mutated or it was a completely new virus was unknown, but in any case, there seemed to be no one with immunity to this infectious disease, and in no time, the ship's interior was overflowing with a massive number of patients.
A ship, which can cut off contact with the outside, is the best environment for preventing the intrusion of viruses from without, but it also has the drawback that once a virus enters, the infection spreads in an instant. It's like throwing a cigarette into a trash can full of scrap paper.
More than 70% of the people on board became infected with this disease. Since they couldn't look after each person in a private room, all those who developed symptoms were moved to facilities with vast spaces inside the ship, such as the theater, park, and shopping mall, where beds were lined up and they received treatment as if in a field hospital. That said, there were no doctors on board familiar with infectious diseases, and even if there were, in a situation where there was no specific medicine, there was no choice but to continue symptomatic treatment.
Because even the sailors involved in operation became infected, it became difficult for the ship to continue its voyage. It also became difficult to dispatch landing parties to land to procure supplies, and additionally, pirate activity had become more active along the coast, making it no longer easy to approach land as before. The ship spent several weeks almost drifting offshore, but during that time, supplies and fuel only continued to decrease.
It was then that the crew of this ship found a luxury liner drifting offshore in the same way. There was no response even when sending radio or light signals, and there was no sign of the infected being on board. Upon approaching and checking, that ship was almost unmanned, and there was no sign of people on the deck or behind the cabin windows.
The state of the interior was not known in detail, but it seemed the people of this liner decided to investigate that drifting ship, just like the boys. To ignore it and leave it as it was, they were running too short on supplies and fuel. They might be able to procure necessary supplies from the drifting ship, and fuel might remain as well.
The sailors used skillful ship-handling techniques to pull the liner alongside the drifting ship and investigated the interior. They found that the ship's interior was surprisingly free of signs of being looted, and there were almost no traces of anyone having been there. Food and consumables remained loaded in large quantities, and fuel remained in a state close to full; they concluded that the ship had likely begun drifting unmanned after its moorings came loose during the chaos of the pandemic while it was anchored in a port.
The liner's crew hurriedly carried supplies out from the drifting ship and transferred the drifting ship's fuel to the liner using hoses. Because the drifting ship was smaller, it didn't become full, but even so, it was an amount they wouldn't be troubled by for the time being.
In this way, they secured supplies and fuel from the drifting ship and should have been able to continue their voyage further—or so it was supposed to be.
The day after they were able to replenish supplies and fuel from the drifting ship, one of the crew members did not show up at roll call. Thinking he too had become sick, the comrades who headed to the section where that crew member's room was located witnessed the corpse of another crew member whose throat had been torn out.
Checking with the ship's surveillance cameras, the crew member who had missed the roll call was seen bursting out of his room, attacking a colleague walking in the passage, and running away toward the rear of the ship after killing him. No intelligence could be felt in that crew member's movements anymore, and the captain and others realized that he had become an infected.
That drifting ship from which this liner had procured supplies and fuel was, in fact, not unmanned. Whether an infected happened to be inside the ship when it left port, or the people who later set the drifting ship out to sea became infected, was unknown. However, all the people who had been on the ship turned into the infected, and the ship, having lost its operators, began to drift, but they who had become infected were still alive inside. Because they had prioritized supply procurement, they had not investigated every corner of the drifting ship, and the infected had been lurking somewhere inside.
And that crew member who had been investigating the drifting ship was attacked by an infected. They had intended to perform proper body checks on the members who boarded the drifting ship for supply procurement and internal investigation, but they were naive. The crew member who was attacked by an infected returned to the liner while keeping silent about the fact that he himself was infected. This was because he knew that if it were discovered he was infected, he would be killed on the spot or left behind on the drifting ship.
Furthermore, the body checks were not perfect. In addition to the transfer of supplies and fuel from the drifting ship, crew members were also falling one after another from the disease, so they were simply short-handed. Therefore, if there were no bite wounds visible from the outside, they considered it fine. Originally, they should have had them strip and inspected every corner, but they didn't do that.
The captain and others tracked the whereabouts of the crew member who had turned into an infected using the ship's cameras to minimize the damage. The infected killed or transformed passengers and refugees he encountered along the way into the infected, and headed toward the rear of the ship, which was now serving as a field hospital. And when the screams of panic were heard from the casino, movie theater, and ship park where many sick people were sleeping, the captain and others realized that containment of the situation had become impossible.
Even a person collapsed with a high fever from the disease would immediately stand up energetically and attack other people once infected. The fact that they had gathered many patients in one place so they could be looked after by a small number of people had backfired. Due to the infected who intruded there, the patients collapsed with high fever turned into the infected who attacked other people one after another.
Now that things had come to this, there was nothing that could be done. The number of people including passengers accommodated on the ship, refugees being rescued, and crew members was nearly 9,000. The majority of them had collapsed from the disease and were isolated in the rear of the ship. Communication with the crew members stationed in the rear of the ship was cut off one after another along with screams, shrieks, and the roars of the infected, and it was obvious that eventually everyone would turn into the infected.
The captain decided to abandon the ship. In the panic, the infected also intruded into the engine room, and whether some accident occurred there, the ship's power also stopped. Now, the ship was nothing more than a floating coffin. Thousands of sick people had now turned into the infected and would surely burst out from the rear of the ship to attack the survivors from now on.
It was impossible to sweep them all away. The captain and several crew members had guns, but they could not possibly defeat all the infected with those. Communication with the police and soldiers who had headed to suppress the infected was cut off. There was nothing left that could be done.
That being the case, the remaining means was to gather the uninjured survivors and evacuate from the ship before the infected prowled throughout it. After instructing to block the doors leading to the rear deck as much as possible, the captain used the ship's broadcast, which was running on backup power, to tell the passengers and refugees to evacuate the ship.
When the outbreak occurred inside the ship, the liner was sailing about 20 kilometers offshore from the nearest land. Considering the flow of the tide, if things went well, they might be able to reach land by riding the ocean current. No power was installed in the lifeboats equipped on the ship; they were merely objects to allow people to float on the sea until rescue arrived. However, in this situation, even if they made a rescue request, the coast guard or navy of any country would not come to help. There was no way to survive other than rowing the boat to land or entrusting themselves to the ocean current as a gamble. If neither succeeded, even if they evacuated the ship, they would then just drift on the sea and die of hunger and thirst.
The passengers hurriedly boarded the lifeboats and left the liner. The captain recorded the events so far in this notebook, and then he himself disembarked.
At the end of the notebook, it is written thus:
"If you are still human, you should leave this ship immediately."
Sato closed the notebook and met the boy's eyes. By reading this notebook, there were various things they had come to understand.
Those many corpses that had drifted ashore a short while ago were surely the crew and passengers who had evacuated this ship. They had rowed the lifeboats toward land, but the lifeboats must have overturned in the bad weather or something. Even if they could escape from the infected, they could not escape from the fate of death.
And one more thing they understood. It was that even now, thousands of the infected remained inside this luxury liner.
Waiting for your opinions and impressions.