Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  It must be fast. It must be quiet. It knew these things, but it also felt the hunger, the need to rip and bite, feel hot blood on its skin. That particular image was maddening. It must have control. Be quick. Be clever. Resist the urges.

  But above all, it had to kill.

  • • •

  Rosa didn’t know this part of the ship at all. After the initial attack, her time had been spent mostly between the mess and common areas on Second Deck and the medical spaces on the 03 Gallery Deck. In those areas, it seemed there were ladderways at every turn, numerous opportunities to climb to higher decks. It was not so down here, and she was disoriented as well. Was she heading forward or aft? On the starboard side or to port? She thought she was on Third Deck but could be as deep as Fourth Deck. Could she be all the way down on the Engine Room level?

  She noticed that the ship’s violent pitching had slowed to a more predictable roll. The seas must have calmed.

  There was very little stenciling on walls or hatches down here, only an occasional incomprehensible abbreviation or string of numbers and letters. Rosa supposed that crewmen assigned to these areas quickly figured out where they were and how to get around, and anyone who didn’t had no business being down here.

  She pressed on, reaching a point where she could continue down the passage or take a new corridor that branched to the right.

  I’m going in circles.

  Moaning came from the darkness ahead, and her flashlight revealed several crooked silhouettes at the edge of her light, moving toward her through the water. Too far to risk wasting a bullet, and she couldn’t bear hearing that ghastly screech again when the thing heard her fire. Rosa moved right, passing several unmarked hatches, finding no ladderways.

  The medic realized she was looking for a way up and out of this place. Did that mean she was giving up on Michael? She wanted to deny it, but she was scared, and she wanted out. The guilt of leaving him behind warred with her fear, and she wanted to cry. How could she abandon a child like that? How could she stay down here another minute?

  Rosa knew what kind of person would leave a ten-year-old boy to his fate in a place like this, and the fact that Michael had sacrificed himself so that Wind and Denny could escape made her feel smaller still. She was weak, a fraud who claimed she wanted only to help people, but then ran when she was needed most. Michael would now join the ranks of the others she’d betrayed with her cowardice; her partner Jimmy, her mom, anyone she’d hurt because she was only pretending to be a doctor. This realization was like acid in her mouth, yet not powerful enough to turn her back. She kept looking for a way out.

  The passageway ended at a single hatch marked ACCESS-JP5 BKR 01-PRESCONT. The hatch was closed, and someone had jammed a long steel pry bar between the handle and the door.

  “No,” she whispered, resting a palm on the hatch. It was damp and cold. There were no openings to the right or left, only the way back, and moaning and splashing was coming from there. No, I can’t face them. No more. She was freezing and tired, her foot was sending arrows of pain up her leg, and all she wanted to do was sit down, let the water and the cold take her someplace quiet and safe. It would be so easy. . . .

  Figures appeared at the back of the hallway, dead faces with black eyes. Two, half a dozen, more pressing in from behind.

  “No!” she shouted, firing the pistol, the muzzle flash blinding as the bullet blew off a jaw. She shoved the weapon into its holster and jerked the pry bar free with a squeal of metal. Without caring what was on the other side she was through the hatch, water pouring over the knee knocker, and then she was shoving it closed. Rosa nearly dropped her flashlight as she jammed the pry bar home against the handle on this side, just as something began beating at the steel.

  The medic drew the pistol and panned the Maglite around, ready to fire one of her four remaining bullets. It was a high, echoing room, perhaps two decks high. She realized she was standing on a metal catwalk that encircled the compartment, and the space beyond the railing dropped yet another deck; the place was a tube, and the water from beyond the hatch had simply spilled through the gridwork. This place was dry, free of the flooding.

  The center of the chamber was filled with a forest of vertical purple pipes of many different sizes. Valve wheels and gauges bristled from the pipes as they rose in cornfield rows through the high room, and there was a sharp odor in the air that made her nostrils burn. She suddenly understood the meaning behind the hatch’s cryptic message; this was a pressure control room for the JP-5 jet fuel stored in bunker number zero-one.

  Her eyes watered. Was it leaking? No, she’d encountered a genuine leak before, and this didn’t compare. And if it was leaking, then the fumes would take her out soon enough and none of this shit would even matter anymore.

  Rosa moved right, following a curving steel wall, passing tool lockers and boards displaying piping schematics, the wet bandage trailing behind her. She’d traveled perhaps a quarter of the circle when her light picked out a ladder bolted to the curving wall. Panning up, she saw that it rose to a small metal platform with a hatch set in the wall behind it.

  Freedom.

  Then she stopped. Why had this room been barred from the outside? Ahead and behind was only empty catwalk. She stepped to the railing that overlooked the pipe-filled center and pointed her light downward.

  Fifty dead faces peered back up at her, and the groaning rose like a hellish choir. Through the pipes she could see a metal stairway that curved from this catwalk down into that space. The dead turned as one and began crowding up the stairs.

  Rosa started for the ladder, then stopped when she heard a hatch creak open beyond the forest of pipes. The footsteps that stepped through the hatch and moved along the catwalk were slow but didn’t drag or stumble. Cautious movement? She put her light in that direction.

  “Michael?” she whispered, hoping.

  It was.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Stone opened his eyes. He was almost certain he’d stopped throwing up—there couldn’t possibly be anything left inside him—and along with his stomach, the world had stopped heaving, trying to spin him away into the cataclysm. His hands were raw from where he’d been gripping the nylon rope, his body entangled in the safety netting just off the port side of the carrier’s flight deck. The boy’s eyes burned from salt water, and he was shivering.

  Now I know what a drowned rat feels like.

  The aircraft carrier was still riding high seas, but the waves were more widely spaced now, no longer driving the massive vessel into the air and then dropping it into impossible trenches. He couldn’t remember being hit by the wave, but he’d seen it, a towering wall of blue-gray capped with white that came at the ship from the stern and starboard. Then there’d been a spinning sensation, his hands groping for something that might stop him, his lungs burning from lack of air. Stone was sure he would drown, or be crushed against some unyielding piece of the ship.

  Instead, one hand caught the safety netting and locked on, and the boy had pulled himself into it, riding out the nightmare of rising and plunging seas, shaking in the netting.

  Stone remembered seeing the dead, motionless on the flight deck just moments before the world tried to rip itself apart. Now, as the cloud cover scudded east, moonlight blanketed the bay and he could see that he wasn’t alone in the netting. Half a dozen broken and moaning corpses had been washed over and were tangled as he was, snapping their teeth and trying to crawl free. The closest was only ten feet from him, an elderly woman who looked as if her fall from the Bay Bridge had dropped her on her face, flattening her features and skull. She croaked behind a compressed jaw and shattered teeth.

  He couldn’t see Liebs in the netting. The man was standing right beside him when the monster wave appeared.

  “Guns?” he called, his voice sounding like the croaking dead woman.

  No response.

  He cal
led louder. “Guns? Chief, answer me!”

  The gunner’s mate didn’t answer, and the old woman croaked at him again, trying to disentangle herself from the netting. Stone thought about his friend, washed overboard into the night. The boy lowered his head against the netting and the tears came.

  The dead woman croaked again.

  Baring his teeth, Stone unsnapped the automatic in his shoulder holster and shot the drifter in the forehead. “Be quiet,” he whispered.

  “A head shot at ten feet with a stationary target. Should I be impressed?”

  Stone looked up at the voice to see Chief Liebs standing above him on the flight deck, smiling. The man lay down and reached out. “Give me your hand.”

  A moment later Stone was standing on the flight deck. The boy looked at the gunner’s mate for a moment, then gave him a ferocious hug. “You’re alive,” he said, his voice cracking.

  Startled, Liebs suddenly smiled and hugged the boy back. “Good to see you too, shipmate.”

  They laughed, talked about the wave and being hung up in the netting, then looked out at the moonlit bay. It awed them to silence. Everything looked different; a great cliff was to the east, Oakland was gone, and so was the Bay Bridge. To the west, the Golden Gate had vanished except for a lone support at its north end. Where San Francisco had been was only the Pacific, rolling into the bay unchecked. There was no sign of the black ship.

  “We’re heading west,” Liebs said, “at a good clip too.”

  “And we’re listing a lot more to port,” said Stone, gesturing at the increased tilt to the flight deck. They were the only ones here. The dead had been either washed into the safety netting or swept away by the sea.

  “Chief Liebs, Calvin. Do you copy?”

  Upon hearing the voice, the two men stared at each other in surprise, then at the radio still clipped to the gunner’s mate’s combat vest. Stone’s had been torn away at some point.

  “I can’t believe it still works,” said the younger man.

  The chief shook his head. “I can’t believe it was made by a government contractor and still works.” He keyed the mic. “Go ahead, Cal. I’m on the flight deck with Stone.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Calvin said.

  • • •

  Is everyone okay?” Petty Officer Banks called. There wasn’t much that could be thrown around on the bridge; it was all bolted down. The people were another matter, and they’d been bounced around plenty. Warships weren’t known for their soft, forgiving surfaces.

  PK stuck his head out of the communications room and gave the man a thumbs-up, then went back to where Maya was sitting propped against a comm console, lightly touching her fingertips to a gash in her forehead.

  The electronics tech crouched in front of her. “Are-you-okay?” he asked, exaggerating the words. Maya laughed at the face he was making as he spoke, and nodded. The man patted her leg and went in search of a first-aid kit.

  Maya’s hands went to her belly. Are you okay?

  • • •

  He’d thought the radical tipping of the deck would flip the Navy helicopter right over on top of him. Xavier had been thrown hard against the bulkhead to his rear, then just as quickly sent rolling back into the chopper’s landing gear. He’d lost his cover and expected the man behind the crates—Charlie, the man who’d led killers into their home—to shoot him, before he realized his opponent was being tossed about just as he was.

  The helicopter might indeed have fallen over on him had it not been chained to the deck. Even though Nimitz was grounded and going nowhere, Vladimir always insisted that every safety precaution be followed when it came to aircraft.

  Thank you, Vladimir.

  At some point when the ship was rising and falling, spinning and tilting, Xavier had lost his grip on the shotgun. Now that he was once again lying on his stomach, hidden behind the helicopter tire and unsure of where the other man was, he could see it resting on the rubberized hangar deck floor, out in the open, twenty feet away.

  Not a chance. That just smells like an ambush waiting to happen. Instead he drew the pistol Calvin had given him, the one taken from the girl who’d shot him in the body armor. A quick inspection revealed he had seven rounds. There were plenty of shotgun shells in his combat vest, but there was no way he was going out there to retrieve the weapon.

  Where was this guy?

  • • •

  In over twenty years at sea, Charlie Kidd had never experienced anything even approaching what they’d just been through. Knowing ships and storms, he calculated it would have taken fifty-foot waves at least to toss an aircraft carrier about, and concluded that there would be little or nothing left of the urban sprawl encircling the bay. The Pacific had exerted its authority, and he counted himself lucky to be alive.

  But you’re alive too, aren’t you, priest?

  The crate behind which Chick had been hiding was sent tumbling away in the tempest, and he’d found himself sliding across the deck as it tilted at a sickening angle. Then the forklift by the far bulkhead shifted and began to slide, coming at him. Chick scrambled and dove as the heavy piece of equipment tipped and crashed onto its side.

  That was where he was now, crouched behind its bulk, peering at the shot-up helicopter from a new angle. The M14 was still in his hands—he wasn’t sure how he’d managed to hold on to it—and he scanned the shadows beneath the helicopter for something to use it on.

  The kid deputy killed by the priest had turned just as the cataclysm started, staggering across the deck, thrown flat and then crawling on hands and knees. He’d crawled too close to one of the open aircraft elevator shafts when a monster wave hit the ship, the impact flinging the dead kid out into the sea.

  Where . . . are . . . you?

  The priest’s shotgun was lying out in the open. Would the man be reckless enough to make a grab for it? Up until now, he’d shown patience and proven he wasn’t stupid. Would the man get desperate and do something stupid?

  Chick ached to get the man in his gun sights. His hands flexed around the rifle. Come out, come out . . .

  The senior chief no longer cared about the others who had come aboard with him, or about the mission. Only a fool would believe his sister and her ship had survived that. It was over. But this wasn’t. The priest was their leader, and he’d dared to stand against Chick and his sister. His death was the only mission that counted now.

  Come out, come out . . .

  • • •

  Xavier couldn’t stay any longer, couldn’t keep hiding. People would be hurt, frightened, and he couldn’t help them while hiding behind this tire. In a single movement the former boxer propelled himself to his feet and sprinted to the right, across the twenty-five feet of open space between this and the next chained-down helicopter. Halfway across, he saw the hatch in the far bulkhead, partially hidden by shadows, a way out he couldn’t see from his former hiding place.

  He poured on the speed.

  A rifle cracked and a bullet hummed past his head.

  Then he was behind the chopper and at the hatch, hauling it open, going through. From the hangar deck behind him came a loud curse, followed by the sound of running boots.

  • • •

  Calvin was sitting on the cold deck, back pressed against a bulkhead, wrists draped over his drawn-up knees. His assault rifle rested beside him in a clutter of spent shell casings.

  He’d followed the blood trail and found the woman. She attacked from an open hatch on the left, just as the aircraft carrier began heaving in the monstrous waves. She was mortally wounded, her flannel shirt and jeans soaked red from where his earlier rifle bullet punched through her lower side. The wound had been mortal, and death claimed her while Calvin was still hunting.

  A snarl of hunger was the only warning the hippie got as the logging truck driver burst from the hatch, on him in an instant w
ith clawing fingers and snapping teeth. The two of them locked together, Calvin trying to fend her off with the rifle as a barrier while the ship threw them down the passageway and back again.

  Calvin head-butted her to no effect. He shoved and she hung on, still snapping, a fingernail clawing a red stripe down his neck. And then Nimitz bucked hard to the right and threw her clear. Calvin swung the rifle muzzle around and sprayed her with 7.62-millimeter bullets, emptying the clip, ensuring that he not only hit the head but blew it apart.

  The woman went down, little more than bone fragments and jam from the neck up.

  Now Calvin rested against the bulkhead, feeling the turbulent sea subsiding to a rhythm the ship handled easily. He pulled the Hydra radio from his combat vest and turned up the volume, keying the mic.

  “Chief Liebs, Calvin. Do you copy?”

  After a moment the gunner’s mate responded. “Go ahead, Cal. I’m on the flight deck with Stone.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” Then the aging hippie put the radio away and lifted his wrist from where it rested on his knee, the denim there dark and wet. Calvin looked at the torn flesh where the woman had bitten him, then rested the damaged hand in his lap.

  He thought about Maya and Michael, about his other children and a grandchild he would never see. He thought about those already lost. Then Calvin lowered his head and allowed himself to weep silently.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Adventure Galley

  The cutter’s night-vision camera captured the image of the motorized lifeboat carrying Lt. Riggs and most of Liz’s crew being hurled through the air by a towering wave, only to be sucked into the crevasse as soon as it hit the water again. Moments later, the earth thrust upward, sealing the crevasse and creating a towering cliff against which the sea crashed and was thrown back.

  Gone.

  There was no time for rage or grief, because the sea was trying to kill her. Terrifying swells capped with white raced in from the Pacific, sweeping away all traces of civilization and threatening to send the cutter to the bottom. She’d ordered the helm to turn straight into it, calling the two remaining men in the engine room and ordering flank speed, then joined the frightened young helmsman to help him hold course.