Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  Evan closed his eyes and took deep breaths, forcing himself to think. He still had time. Gourd wore a sidearm, and—no, he wore it on his right hip, and that was pinned as well. There would be other things he could use, though, and he reached for more pouch flaps.

  A growl came from outside, and Evan scrambled back through the opening, bringing up the Sig. The trio was close now, but another creature covered in soot was limping along the side of the Seahawk. The charred skin of its face was peeled back to reveal gray bone and teeth, empty eye sockets, and something black and wet lurking behind them. It lunged. Evan stumbled backward and fell, the creature landing atop his legs, its skeletal fingers clawing at his groin. The teeth sank into his thigh—

  —and bit into something metal.

  Evan screamed and shoved the Sig against the top of its skull, pulling the trigger. The head disintegrated in pieces of bone and a tar-like substance that spattered across the front of the chopper.

  Are those its brains? Evan wanted to vomit.

  A rustling noise came from his right, and Evan looked to see that not ten feet away, a black ball of a head was rising from the cinders, narrow shoulders following, nearly skeletal arms levering it out of the black powder. Teeth clicked as it tried to stand, and beyond it two more lifted themselves out of their camouflage, cinders sliding off their backs and heads.

  Oh, Christ, they’re under the ash.

  He scrambled to his feet and started running south, now far less worried about a twisted or broken ankle, searching the ground ahead of him for hidden shapes. Behind him the trio and pair shifted direction to follow the running shape. The creatures climbing out of the ash did the same.

  Evan forced himself to slow to a brisk walk and not to give in to panic, knowing even at that pace he was still faster than the opposition behind him. After a few minutes his breathing and heartbeat began to settle, and he suddenly realized that this was the first time he had been alone since the first two weeks of outbreak last summer. Since then he’d always been surrounded by people who cared about him. There had been terror, and many times he’d been convinced he was about to die, but he had known he wouldn’t die alone. There would be someone there to mark his passing and ensure he didn’t come back as something terrible. If he was pulled down by the dead out here in this wasteland, no one would ever know. Did they know he had crashed? If so, he might be dead to them already.

  That made him think of Maya. He saw her crying, her belly only now starting to swell with his baby. It caused an ache in his chest.

  I’m coming home, Maya. To both of you.

  This resolve made him walk faster.

  Ash kicked up by his passage across the destruction quickly coated his gear, clothing, and skin with a thin film. It also got into his nose, making him snort and cough, causing it to start bleeding again. There was an acidic, aluminum smell to it, sharp and unpleasant, and it tasted coppery in his mouth. He knew that refineries all across America produced more than just gasoline, and most of what they made—along with their waste—was toxic to humans. What the hell am I breathing in right now? And do my lungs hurt from exertion, or something more insidious, invisible and lurking in the air and ash?

  Evan stopped to rest for a moment, looking around to make sure he was alone in these blackened fields. The drifters following him were no longer in view, but he shuddered at the thought of what might be lying beneath the surface, right underfoot. He took a moment to wipe at his eyes and trickling nose, wishing for a bottle of water, settling for a stick of gum from a flight jacket pocket.

  He pulled a stubby, steel bottle from a thigh pocket, and turned it to see the impressions of teeth from where the creature had bitten him. The bottle was topped with a mouthpiece like a scuba diver would use, mounted beside a valve and a small pressure gauge. Vlad had called it an emergency egress device, two to five minutes of bottled oxygen for fliers who went down in water and would need to escape a submerged aircraft. Evan took a single pull from the bottle, sucking down sweet air, and twisted the valve closed. It made him feel better at once, convincing him that there was some bad shit in the ashes out here. He told himself he would use it sparingly.

  Moving once more, he walked across a warped metal sign lying flat on the ground, the word Chevron still visible beneath an oily black film. He checked his map. The Chevron refinery was large enough that it was marked on the map, but that was farther east from where he thought he was. Had he strayed off course? He doubted it. The Chevron plant was a greater distance from the crash site than he could have walked already and the sign could have been blown here in the firestorm.

  Richmond. Chevron. Why was that familiar? Then he remembered the girl he had spent a week with in Sacramento before he went to Napa, an activist and a hippie wannabe who might have fit in pretty well with Calvin’s people had she not been so angry all the time. She had once ranted about the Chevron plant in Richmond and how an accident in 2012 had filled the air with sulfur trioxide, a poisonous gas. Evan had commented that it sounded like the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, back in the eighties, and the girl had then gone on about that. She’d been pretty annoying, and the only reason he’d hung around for an entire week was that she was a freak in bed. At least now the Chevron plant wouldn’t be poisoning anyone else.

  Untrue. That shit is on the ground now, in the air, on your skin, he thought.

  Evan took another quick breath from his oxygen bottle. How badly would it suck to escape zombies, a madman with a nuclear weapon, and now being shot down, only to die from chemical poisoning and bleeding lungs? He chewed the gum harder.

  He was less than a mile from the elevated concrete span of I-580 when the weather front Gourd had seen on the radar finally arrived, and it started to rain. Evan tipped his head back and wiped at his face and arms, scrubbing fingers through his short hair, opening his mouth and then spitting. Rain had never been so welcome.

  It not only washed the grime from his uniform and gear, it began to expose skulls in the ruins around him, most of them partially covered in what at first appeared to be burned chicken skin, but then was recognizable as scalp. More than a dozen of these figures began to rise around him in a circle. Their blackened skin was taut against their frames, making them appear almost skeletal. Evan froze, raising his pistol and turning in a circle. They were everywhere, maybe two dozen. He tracked the Sig, looking for the thin point in the crowd, preparing to shoot his way out of the encirclement. Beyond the ring of corpses, he saw more of them pulling themselves up from the cinders. The rain caused black rivulets of soot to slide down their bodies.

  The creatures didn’t rush him. Instead they shifted in place until they were all facing south, and their heads tipped back slightly. One made a cracking sound as the head broke free of the charcoal spine, the body collapsing, the head falling and rolling away. They made no other noise, and a breeze passed through them, carrying away black flakes of skin.

  Evan was stunned at their behavior, but not frozen. He ran between them, bumping two aside and expecting reaching arms and snarls, getting neither. He aimed for the elevated freeway, skirting left around a giant crater left by an exploding petroleum tank, avoiding a pair of burned drifters at the crater’s right edge.

  The earth began to tremble, growing in power, and then hurled the running pilot to the ground. Evan landed on his chest, his broken wrist smashing hard against a fragment of brick and making him cry out. The ground bucked beneath him, and Evan clawed for a hold, certain for one crazy moment that he might be shaken right off the earth’s surface and flung into the sky.

  There was a dull cracking sound beyond him, and he lifted his head to see a section of Interstate 580 wiggling in slow motion, like a piece of partially cooked spaghetti. About three hundred yards from where the interstate would feed into the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, the elevated roadway began to tip to the right, spilling cars and trucks over its rails and down into the ruin
s. The vehicles struck in a string of distant, metallic crunches, kicking up a black cloud. The highway continued to twist, dumping more cars and then collapsing in place, adding concrete dust to the rising cloud of ash.

  Evan was both horrified and awed, and he couldn’t look away.

  The earthquake ran its brief course and then stopped, but I-580 continued to collapse in sections for another full minute. When it was over, there was only the pattering of rain on the ground, the sounds of feet shuffling through ash, and the cries of the dead. Even looked back to see that the drifters were moving again, several dozen black shapes now, locked in on the only living thing within this field of destruction. He didn’t have the bullets to deal with them. Not even half of them.

  Evan turned back to face the highway. He picked out a point that hadn’t collapsed, a place he could use to move under and past the structure, and started moving again.

  The dead followed.

  SIXTEEN

  September—The Pacific

  The crew of Joshua James managed to stretch their food supplies until the end of September, nearly six weeks at sea steaming in wide figure eights across hundreds of miles of ocean. The bottled water ran out quickly, but the civilian contractors aboard Joshua James managed to get the desalinization unit working—for one day—and that got them through. The crew functioned on half rations throughout it all, and drinking water grew too precious to use for bathing. At the end of six weeks, the men and women aboard the Coast Guard cutter were a thin, haggard bunch.

  Two days after leaving Port Angeles, Liz had mustered all hands on the quarterdeck and held funeral services for Lieutenant Commander Coseboom, Chief Newman, and the seaman who had died when he accidentally drove his forklift off the dock. Also honored were Seaman Thedford and the three Klondike crewmen who had turned and had to be put down. Elizabeth wore her whites and read a Bible passage as she committed their memories, if not all their bodies, to the sea. Ensign Amy Liggett was subsequently named ship’s executive officer.

  Despite the losses, there had been a positive outcome from their raid on Port Angeles. In addition to the supplies and arms, they had picked up two new crewmen. Lt. Riggs was a helicopter pilot, and although there was no such aircraft on board, he had the basic skills needed to prep, launch, and fly their Predator drones. He was also a much-needed addition to the officer corps. Petty Officer Third Class Castellano was a rescue swimmer, and thus a trained EMT. Joshua James had its medic.

  Liz made it clear to the crew that they could not return to Seattle because of the chaos and could not attempt to contact any other elements of the U.S. military because of “false information and misunderstandings,” finally citing the need for security. She did not offer an explanation as to what any of that meant. She also informed them that their standard lifesaving mission had been changed to one of national security. They were now a warship awaiting orders from the proper authority. Again she did not elaborate. She did state that their objective, above all others, was to preserve ship and crew.

  Too little food, long watches, not enough crew to handle the workload, and decreasing hygiene led to low morale, despite the efforts of most of the officers to maintain positive attitudes. It was a difficult fight to win. Everyone aboard knew they had lost people, perhaps all their people, and they were powerless against forces they did not understand. Then there was Charlie Kidd, who took a harder approach with the crew, demanding they suck it up and do their jobs, maintaining order through threat and intimidation. Amy Liggett brought her concerns about Chief Kidd to the captain.

  “If we lose discipline, Amy,” Liz had said, “we lose the ship. I won’t allow it. The chief of the boat will handle the enlisted crew as he sees fit.” That had been all the captain had to say on the matter, and Amy hadn’t brought it up again.

  They monitored the radio, listening as the world quickly fell apart. Cities toppled like dominoes across the United States, the largest population centers going first. The plague was everywhere, all-consuming, and they learned about how it spread and what it left behind. All the while Joshua James drifted silently and alone in the northern Pacific, avoiding contact with all other vessels, and not responding to any radio transmissions, whether directed at them or not. Anyone trying to hail the lonely ship assumed it was crewed by the dead and moved on.

  Liz listened throughout the weeks as the military tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide of the infected, and the government hurried to implement plans, only to see them fail or come apart almost at once. Units were overrun, bases were lost, and the Navy ships that had managed to escape to sea or were already out when it happened went off the air one by one. Commanders broadcast that there had been undiscovered suicides aboard that quickly spawned infectious nests, and apparently these spreading threats eventually consumed their ships, for the situation reports ceased one by one. The carrier Ronald Reagan was operating far to the south for a while but fell into radio silence either because it had been lost or because its captain had dropped off the grid and was hiding, as Liz was. More than one ship reported mutiny before going quiet. After a while there were no more planes in the sky, and captains who had docked their ships in nearby Anchorage, Alaska, soon reported that the city had fallen before they went off the air. There would be no sanctuary to the north.

  The civilian news was only on long enough for those aboard Joshua James to hear about their country and hometowns being devoured by the dead, each crewman praying their loved ones had somehow survived but knowing it was a thin hope. Morale got worse, and eventually Liz prohibited anyone but the officers from listening to the radio.

  Joshua James experienced three suicides of its own: two civilians (a plumber and an electronics technician) and one female seaman from the engine room. The contractors obtained a pistol and ended their lives in a murder-suicide, shooting themselves in the head. The seaman, however, slashed her wrists and bled out quietly in her rack. She rose and killed two other crewmen—both Klondike survivors—before Charlie Kidd followed the screams and put bullets in all their brains. Elizabeth tightened restrictions on the firearms after that.

  Subtle grumbling began among the crew, increasing complaints and suggestions that the ship should put into the nearest port and permit each crew member to decide for themselves whether they wanted to leave. One of the most outspoken of these voices was a two-stripe seaman from the engine room named John Henry.

  After holding a brief Captain’s Mast, the nonjudicial punishment hearing of the Coast Guard, Navy, and Marine Corps, Elizabeth had the boy secured in an emptied-out maintenance closet and put on quarter rations. He remained there for four days before Liz decided he was subdued enough for her liking.

  • • •

  On the last day of September, Liz was in her quarters, Blackbeard curled up and purring in her lap as she sat at the small table making notes in her captain’s log. Two sharp knocks came at her door, and she called for the visitor to enter.

  The door opened, and Seaman John Henry rushed in, slamming his shoulder into Liz’s chest, knocking her back against the bulkhead as the cat screeched and ran for cover. She grunted and tried to push him off, but even though the boy looked like a filthy scarecrow, he was still much bigger than she was, and he had leverage. Liz grabbed for the sidearm on her hip, but Henry hissed, “Don’t,” and pressed a steak knife to her throat. Liz stopped moving and took her hand away from the gun.

  Henry pulled it from her holster at once, still pressing the serrated edge of the blade against her windpipe. He smelled foul—they all did—and his skin was jaundiced, cheeks and eyes sunken in dark hollows. The young man’s eyes were red from crying.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  “I understand, John,” Liz said, speaking slowly and careful not to move against the steak knife. “We all do.”

  He shook his head. “Not you! You just want us to float out here until we die.” He shook his head. “I want to see my mo
m again. You won’t let me.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Shut up!” he screamed, his breath sour. He had the shakes and looked ready to cry again.

  The hammer of a pistol clicked in the open doorway. “Put your weapons down right now, Seaman.” Amy Liggett, looking as dirty and unkempt as the wild-eyed Coast Guardsman, was in a shooting stance and aiming her sidearm at John Henry’s back.

  The boy glanced at her. “I’ll cut her throat. I’ll do it.” He moved the blade, and a red line appeared on Liz’s throat. The captain winced and hissed. “Drop that pistol and kick it to me,” Henry said.

  “Don’t you do it, Ensign,” Liz growled, and Henry pressed the knife harder, making her close her eyes and grit her teeth.

  “Now!” the seaman yelled, sliding the knife.

  “Stop!” Amy cried, placing her pistol on the deck and holding her hands out to her sides. She kicked the weapon toward the young man, and he kicked it under the captain’s folded-down rack.

  “You can’t keep us out here like this,” the seaman said, his face close to Liz’s. Blood from a two-inch slice trickled down her neck as he moved the blade to her jugular. “Call the Navy. Give them our position.” He nodded. “I’ll surrender to them when they arrive.”

  “I will,” said Liz. “But I’ll need the frequencies.”

  “Bullshit,” he snarled. “Just call them.”

  “I can’t,” she said, pressed hard against the bulkhead. “In time of war the frequencies change. The wartime freqs are locked in my wall safe.”