Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  Two corpses in mechanic’s coveralls stumbled across a strip of grass and onto the access road, moving to meet the running shore party. Boomer stopped twenty-five feet from them, took the Sig in two hands, and fired three times, putting them down. The shots echoed across the quiet base. He’d seen enough during the Klondike rescue that the sight of other Coast Guardsmen in this condition—or shooting them, for that matter—caused him no hesitation. As his captain had said, the head shots put them down, and they didn’t get back up.

  The map Liz drew for them led the party to a warehouse about midway between the far helicopter hangar and the pier behind them, positioned right on the access road. Boomer hauled on a big sliding door mounted on rollers, running it open while the bosun’s mate pointed the M16 inside. The lights were on, and nothing appeared to be moving among the high steel racks packed with crates. Forklifts were lined up to one side of the high-ceilinged space.

  The officer looked at Chief Newman, who was also holding a Sig. “You know what we need. I’m taking three men and heading to the armory.”

  “Copy that,” Newman said, pointing at the forklifts. “Take a couple of those.” Parked beside the vehicles was an airport-style tractor attached to a string of flatbed carts, something to service large aircraft out on the runway. “I’m using that,” the chief said.

  Boomer gave him a thumbs-up and ran for a forklift.

  • • •

  Liz used her binoculars and tracked her shore party until they reached the warehouse. A radio to keep her in contact with her men now hung on one hip. On the forward deck below, her brother had mounted a fifty-caliber on the port side and was loading it with a belt of heavy rounds. He yanked back the charging handle to arm the weapon and pointed it toward shore. Three other fifty-cals would also be aiming at the base now, positioned at intervals down the length of the port side. She hoped they wouldn’t have to use them.

  The mass of a peeling, green-and-white commercial fisherman drifted in off the port bow, coasting into one of the slips near the shore, its diesel stacks blatting smoke and noise as it reversed to slow itself.

  “Goddammit,” Liz growled. The fisherman ended up directly between the shore and Charlie Kidd’s fifty-caliber. As she watched, four men in jeans and flannel leaped to the docks carrying empty duffel bags, running to shore and then heading in the direction her shore party had gone.

  She was about to switch to the exterior PA system and order the fishermen to clear out when a muffled echo of gunfire floated up the bridge ladderway from decks below. Gunfire? Who else aboard was armed? She looked around.

  Amy Liggett was not on the bridge.

  • • •

  Amy moved down the passageway, eyelids heavy, her body exhausted. Tired people made poor decisions, she knew. It had been Amy who put Seaman Thedford in charge of babysitting the wounded Klondike survivors, and then, in all the excitement, promptly forgot about him. How long has this poor guy been waiting for his relief? He must be bursting to make a head call. She was almost at sick bay when she realized she hadn’t brought anyone to relieve him. Stupid. Tired and stupid. She would let him visit the head, then tell him to hang on just a bit longer until she could find someone to take his place.

  Alone in the corridor, she came to a hatch marked with a red cross in a white circle and was reaching for the handle when it moved upward on its own. The door swung in.

  “Moses, I’m sorry—”

  Her voice and her breath caught as the young black seaman, now gray, gripped the open hatch frame with pale, blood-encrusted fingers and leaned out, gasping. He lunged, but the lower lip of the hatch caught him at the ankles and he collapsed face-first into the passageway.

  Amy let out a shriek and stumbled backward, clawing for her sidearm as more corpses in bloodstained uniforms tumbled out on top of the former Moses Thedford. Heads turned, creamy eyes with pinpoint pupils seeking and locking on prey, and they scrambled to their feet, moving awkwardly toward the young ensign. All were croaking and rasping.

  Of all the military branches, it was the United States Coast Guard that trained the hardest with handguns. In their law enforcement role, it was the weapon most commonly carried. Though still considered green in almost every area of responsibility, Amy Liggett had qualified as expert with the Sig Sauer P229. As she had been trained, she took a wide stance and a two-handed grip, then fired two shots in quick succession. The forty-caliber slugs took the Klondike survivor in direct center mass—also as Amy had been taught—and punched out his back without slowing him in the least.

  Head shot, the captain had said, and Amy focused, raising her aim. She fired, and the round hit the crewman in the forehead, spraying gore into the faces of those behind him. The body crumpled. In the tight steel corridor, the pistol shots echoed, hurting her eardrums. She shifted her aim right and fired, blowing off a jaw and making one of the things stagger against the bulkhead, but not stopping it.

  The three creatures were fifteen feet away and leaned into a sidestepping gallop. Amy turned and ran back up the corridor, but only twenty feet before she turned again and resumed her shooting stance. The Sig banged out four more rounds, and the remaining Klondike crewmen went down.

  Five rounds left. Moses Thedford hopped toward her, arms flailing, mouth yawning as he let out a ghastly moan. Amy fired once, hitting Moses in the eye, blowing out the back of his skull. He collapsed.

  She remained in her shooting stance, pistol trained on the open hatch down the hallway for a moment as she did the math, counting occupants. Then she advanced cautiously. Sick bay was a blood-splattered ruin, but there were no more bodies in here, moving or otherwise. When the sound of running boots came from the distance in the passageway, followed by her captain shouting her name, Ensign Liggett holstered her sidearm and leaned against the open hatch frame, resting her forehead on her arm.

  “Clear,” she called back. “And it’s contagious, Captain.”

  Liz Kidd turned and ran back for the bridge.

  • • •

  Air Station Port Angeles had fallen almost exactly as LCDR Coseboom had guessed. When the dead began attacking and rapidly multiplying in the small town across the harbor, the residents who could went to the marina to escape by water. Most of them made it and put to sea long before Joshua James arrived, with Victoria, British Columbia, as their destination.

  Victoria had fallen by the time they reached the Canadian city, and death was waiting for them.

  The majority of Port Angeles’s citizens made for the Coast Guard station, quickly clogging the access road and then abandoning their vehicles to go ahead on foot. The base was never meant to be particularly secure. Its remote location provided security, as its position at the end of a slender peninsula meant that a small armed detachment could hold back any moderate threat. The gate, such as it was, had never been intended to stem the tide of thousands of panicked refugees, and the civilian mass pushed in without resistance. The few guardsmen assigned to defend the gates weren’t about to fire on their terrified and unarmed neighbors, and so the civilians poured out onto the airfield. Once they arrived, however, they weren’t sure what to do next, and so most of them stayed on the airfield.

  Like a wolf pack taking down stragglers at the back of a herd, the dead followed the living onto the peninsula, taking down the slow and steadily increasing their numbers. By the time the last of the living were through the gates, there were the dead surging immediately behind. The five armed Coast Guardsmen on duty went down firing, falling in minutes and then rising to join the horde soon after.

  Before Joshua James was even on the horizon, the only living beings at the air station were scattered pockets of frightened, hiding refugees and a handful of Coast Guardsmen.

  Corpses covered the runway, drifting without purpose and wandering slowly between the buildings at the west end of the base. Few noticed the cutter gliding silently into the long pier, but
distant gunfire, followed by the not-so-distant blatting of a commercial fisherman’s diesels, got them moving.

  • • •

  Chief Petty Officer Newman, a boarding party team leader who had a nose for sniffing out contraband and concealed drugs, was well satisfied with what he and his small crew had accomplished in a short time. All four flatbed carts were loaded with foodstuffs and bottled water and he’d found a crate of foul-weather clothing, four medical kits, a surgical kit, and perhaps the biggest score of all, eleven cases of toilet paper.

  He pointed to a young seaman. “You’re driving,” he said, spreading the rest of his men into a protective square around the tractor and small trailers. Those who hadn’t been carrying firearms had managed to put their hands on fire axes.

  The tractor engine fired and was pulling out of the warehouse when two men with crew cuts and wearing flight suits almost ran past the doors, then slid to a stop as they saw their fellow coasties. Newman was startled and almost shot them.

  “That your cutter?” one of them shouted.

  “Yeah, and you’re coming with us,” Newman said.

  “Goddamn right we are,” yelled the second man, and the two new arrivals began sprinting ahead of the slow-moving tractor, heading for the big white ship at rest against the base’s long pier.

  • • •

  The armory was small, far smaller than the warehouse, and that made sense to Coseboom. Ship crews needed a lot more food than they did arms and ammunition. He was glad he’d brought the bolt cutters, because as his captain had warned him, the stout, brick armory building was encircled with a high fence topped with razor wire, its gate chained and locked. The bolt cutters got them through and then into the building’s roll-up bay door. Two of Boomer’s crewmen drove their forklifts right inside the structure.

  It didn’t take the shore party’s leader long to locate what they wanted, and in short order both forklifts were loaded with heavy pallets and smaller crates stacked on top.

  “Commander!” one of his men yelled, a two-stripe damage controlman left at the fence as security. Coseboom ran outside to see him pointing. A mob of dead people were swarming from between two buildings and across a lawn that led to the access road. Another cluster was on its hands and knees on the grass, tearing at screaming, thrashing shapes. Boomer thought he saw bloody flannel and duffel bags. Passing left to right, two men in flight suits raced down the access road, heading for the docks.

  “Haul ass,” he barked to the men in the forklifts, then stood aside as they roared out of the armory, through the gate, and onto the road. “Don’t stop for anything,” Boomer shouted, then ran back inside. He returned a moment later with a pair of M4 assault rifles and several magazines. “We’re their cover,” he said, handing the damage controlman a weapon and taking off at a jog after the growling forklifts.

  To their rear, a tractor hauling loaded trailers, ringed by four men, followed closely.

  • • •

  Because of the fishing boat directly across the pier from him, Charlie Kidd lost sight of the first forklift as it neared the entrance to the dock, and he couldn’t see what was coming at the shore party from between the buildings. He could see to the left, however, and there the dead were surging in a wave across the lawns.

  Letting off a string of curses, he swiveled the M2 in that direction and ripped off bursts of fifty-caliber. At once, the three other weapons mounted on the port side did the same, chopping into stumbling bodies, knocking them down. Chick saw most of them get back up, and even those with their legs cut from under them began dragging themselves across the grass by their arms.

  He cursed again, firing shorter bursts, and tried to aim for the heads of the crowd. A few exploded in red and gray, but most of his rounds either slammed into dead flesh or sailed harmlessly overhead.

  The first forklift came into view and shot up the dock toward the cutter. Then Chick saw the second take the turn from the access road too sharply. Its load shifted, and the weight, angle, and speed carried the heavy vehicle, along with its cargo, right off the dock and into the water, its screaming driver still gripping the wheel.

  “Son of a bitch,” Charlie snarled, and kept firing.

  • • •

  They were coming in too fast, Boomer saw, a dead horde crossing the lawns in a shambling wave. He and the damage controlman knelt and fired their rifles into the mass as the tractor and its loaded trailers hummed past behind them. He spared a look to see Chief Newman standing at the head of the dock, motioning the men on foot to keep up, and waving the tractor on. Once it was past, he turned to add pistol fire to the defensive action.

  “Fall back to the ship,” Boomer ordered, and the damage controlman took off at a run. The officer changed magazines in his rifle and trotted to the head of the dock, stopping next to Chief Newman. With fifty-caliber rounds rattling overhead, the two men aimed and fired, trying to be calm, making sure their shots hit the mark.

  Back at the gangplank, both the tractor and the surviving forklift had arrived, and every available hand was racing off the ship to meet them, struggling back up the gangplank with crates and cartons. The sounds of the fifty-calibers dropped off as new ammo belts were loaded, and both Boomer and Chief Newman took turns reloading so that someone was always firing.

  The horde pressed in, savaged bodies of adults and children stiffly, inexorably approaching. Thirty yards out. Twenty. Ten.

  “Last magazine,” Newman called, slamming it into his pistol.

  Boomer slapped at a cargo pocket, finding it empty. “I’m out.” He dropped the M4 and pulled his sidearm, risking a look back. The supplies and arms they had found were being loaded, but not quickly enough.

  “They need time,” Coseboom said.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Newman replied.

  The two men lasted another two minutes, and then the swarm overtook them.

  • • •

  No!” Liz cried, slamming a fist against the steel above the bridge window, watching her XO and chief go down. She snatched up the mic, switching to the PA. “Deck gunners, concentrate fire as they come up the center of the dock. Loading party, get it done!”

  The dead were forced into a narrow channel as they swarmed up the dock toward the much wider long pier. At this range, with bodies packed close together, the storm of fifty-caliber rounds chewed them apart, blowing off limbs, tearing torsos in half, and detonating heads. Though many still lived in these new, mangled forms, they began to slide off into the water or pile up, forcing the newly arrived dead to crawl over them. The fifties kept up their fire.

  Amy Liggett, sent to lead the loading party after her fight belowdecks, radioed to her captain that all supplies and surviving team members were aboard, along with two new arrivals, and that she was raising the gangplank.

  “Gunners,” Liz said, her voice booming across the ship from exterior speakers, “maintain your fire until we’re away.” She called to the quartermaster, standing near the helmsman. “Mr. Waite, take us out of here, flank speed.”

  A moment later the harbor’s water boiled at the cutter’s stern, and the ship leaped forward, throwing up a white crest. It roared away from the long pier as the machine gun fire stopped, and the dead arrived to follow the departing cutter into the water, arms still reaching.

  Liz didn’t look to see if Boomer was among them.

  They were just coming around the tip of the Ediz Hook, turning north, when the Guard channel buzzed with a transmission that made Elizabeth’s blood turn cold. “Coast Guard seven-five-four, this is DDG ninety-two. Respond.”

  Liz snapped a look at her quartermaster, who quickly shook his head. “The Momsen is not on the scope, Captain. Maybe they’re trying to draw us out, get a fix on our position.”

  “That destroyer has two helos,” she said, picturing a pair of gray birds flying fast just above the waves, preparing to drop
torpedoes. “Mr. Vargas,” she said over the intercom, calling the operations specialist down in the combat center, “do we have any airborne contacts?”

  “Captain, the air search radar is not online at this time,” Vargas reported.

  It was too close. Whatever was happening in Seattle, the destroyer had found the time—or been ordered—to hunt them down. There would be no going back.

  “Mr. Waite,” Liz said, dropping into the padded swivel chair with CAPTAIN stenciled on the back, “maintain flank speed and take us to sea.”

  An hour later, with the last strip of U.S. soil well behind them, Joshua James steamed into the vast Pacific.

  TEN

  January 12—San Francisco Bay

  Michael limped along a passageway, blackness all around him and the flashlight his only illumination. Jumping down the last four steps of the ladderway had landed him in a puddle of seawater and slime, and his right leg shot out from under him, twisting his ankle and making him cry out. There was no time to sit and cradle it, no time to cry. The dead sailor was already tumbling down the ladderway after him. Michael ran, moving in a painful, limping gallop, similar to the dead.

  Choices of corridors presented themselves, most with the dark spots of open hatches running their length, none of them attractive. He went right, hobbling as quickly as he could, hearing the thing land behind him with a wet, crumpling noise.

  God, it stinks down here.

  His flashlight swept across walls covered in vertical piping and valves, cables and colored conduit overhead, and hatches with their purposes stenciled on them in white letters, going by too fast to read. He nearly tripped over a decaying corpse in the center of the passage, leaping over it and tensing for a gray arm to shoot up and grab him. It didn’t—the body was long dead—but Michael came down his injured ankle with a flare of pain.

  A moan traveled up the steel tunnel behind him.

  At an intersection, Michael stopped and panned the flashlight in each direction, biting his lip at what he would see. All three passageways were empty. The moan came again, and that got him moving, to the left this time. Moments later his sneakers kicked several shell casings that rattled across the deck, and he slowed. A closed hatch to his left read CAT SUPPORT 3. A metallic bang came from behind him, accompanied by a moan. It was answered by another moan from the corridor ahead.