Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  The 418-foot vessel climbed, crested and dove, and at the bottom of the trench between the waves, the sleek bow cut the water and knifed under, the sea surging up against the bridge windows. Liz gripped an overhead handhold and watched in terror, thinking the ship would simply keep going, arrowing to the bottom like a crash-diving submarine. Each time, however, the bow burst from the surface and began climbing the next swell. At the crest, the cutter’s propellers cleared the water as the vessel tipped forward, blades whining like airplane props before biting in once more.

  Liz had never experienced a sea like this. What the earth had done was unimaginable, and the resulting destruction—to both cities and terrain—demonstrated both the power and brutality of nature. But this was a geological event, not a storm, and it ended relatively quickly. The sea soon came into balance with the larger, deeper bay, finding new shores to surge against, and the land ceased its movement, seemingly satisfied with its new form.

  Ocean waves pushed in from the Pacific, but now they were thrown back into a powerful new current, one that entered the bay, then curved like a horseshoe to rush back out. Liz was forced to turn and point the cutter east, maintaining forward propulsion to keep from being pulled out into the Pacific.

  Nimitz had no such propulsion. Liz saw the flattop on her surface radar, several miles away. It had passed them at some point during the event and was now running bow-on toward the northern edge of the newly widened San Francisco Bay at ten knots. If it didn’t run aground somewhere, Liz knew, it would be dragged out into open water. The vessel’s severe list and inability to maneuver told her it would not last long out there.

  Now that her ship was no longer in peril, fury began building in her, reddening her neck. Riggs and her crew were lost, and any chance of taking the carrier was lost with them. Charlie and his team were likely dead as well. And still Nimitz eluded her.

  Not for long.

  Liz snatched up a handset. “Combat center, bridge. Are you still alive, Mr. Vargas?” She had to call twice before getting a response.

  “Vargas here, Captain.” He sounded dazed.

  “Clear your head, mister,” Liz snapped. “How many rounds left in the forward gun?”

  A pause. “Nineteen, ma’am. Armor-piercing and high-explosive mixed.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Light up your target acquisition system and prepare for surface action.” She clicked off and lifted her binoculars, finding Nimitz in the moonlight. “Mr. Waite,” she called to her quartermaster, “set an intercept course for that carrier. Flank speed.”

  • • •

  Did she have a concussion? Amy wasn’t sure. Her head hurt, and her body felt like a punching bag after being thrown about the maintenance closet. Other than some brief training maneuvers, she’d never been to sea or experienced a storm. She could only imagine this had been just that, but so fierce and sudden? And then to end just as quickly? It was like nothing she’d ever heard about.

  She sat on the deck and ran her hands over her body. Nothing broken, nothing cut—wait, her ear was bleeding, but not badly, and there was a lump on her head. She felt the rolling motion of the sea, so they were still afloat.

  With a groan she got to her feet, holding on to a shelf as sudden dizziness threatened to put her back on the floor. Then there was a shadow in the light at the bottom of the door, a rattle of keys as the deadbolt was unlocked. The door opened and Amy shielded her eyes, blinking in the sudden light. Mr. Leary, the older civilian contractor, was standing there. He looked pale.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Amy stared at him for a moment, then nodded.

  “Come out of there.” He extended a hand.

  She saw that he was alone and allowed him to guide her out into the passage. “Why . . . ?”

  Leary shook his head. “It was wrong leaving those people behind in Oregon,” he said. “It was murder. We’re all dead anyway, Miss Liggett. No one should die locked in a closet.” He dropped his ring of master keys on the deck and walked away, his head down.

  Amy watched him go, then checked the passage. It was empty, and the ship was quiet, lacking the normal sounds of people moving and talking and working.

  Dead anyway.

  She snatched up the keys and started running.

  • • •

  Alone in the cutter’s combat center, Mr. Vargas sat in a chair facing the fire control system. His left arm was broken after slamming against a vertical water pipe and now hung limp in his lap. Although the pain would spike with excruciating bursts, it was bearable as long as he didn’t move around a lot, and it wouldn’t interfere with his duties. He could do this one-handed.

  On a screen to his left was the infrared image of Nimitz, three miles out. The camera watching it was locked on and held the target, pivoting as the cutter executed a 180-degree turn and headed west at flank speed. Vargas switched on the targeting system for the forward gun and punched in a code to slave the video image to the fire control computer.

  A small square with crosshairs at its center appeared on the image, and with a fingertip pressed to the screen he dragged the square until it was centered on the carrier. The fifty-seven-millimeter Bofors gun had an effective direct range of 9,300 yards—double that if arcing shells at a forty-five-degree angle—and the carrier was well within its reach. It could fire 220 rounds per minute, but at that rate his nineteen remaining shells would be depleted in 3.6 seconds. With a tap of the screen he set the firing selector to single, then tapped the word lock nearby.

  Out on the bow, the radome mounted over the deck gun’s barrel locked on target, and with a hydraulic whine, the gun turret rotated slightly and the barrel elevated a half inch. The weapon’s gyro-stabilized sights would now make continuous corrections, holding the deck gun on target despite the rise, fall, and roll of the sea.

  “Target is locked,” Vargas reported.

  • • •

  Liz watched the carrier through her binoculars, the cutter closing fast and keeping well off its port side, just in case someone was foolish enough to try using the same fifty-caliber heavy machine gun she carried on her own ship. She knew that weapon’s capability and kept out of its range.

  Elizabeth Kidd knew she was finished. They couldn’t take the carrier, couldn’t look to it for the life support it once offered. Nor could she and her handful of crewmen continue operating the cutter; there simply weren’t enough of them. She could drop anchor and use her remaining launch to send a shore party in search of supplies, but that was no longer an option. The earth and sea had eradicated all traces of civilization; there would be nothing to scavenge. And even if she managed to get the cutter back out to the coastline and somehow found another harbor, she didn’t have the manpower to take and hold it. The food and water aboard would run out, and the fuel tanks would run dry. She’d gambled on seizing Nimitz, and lost.

  I’m sorry, Chick. I failed you again. But if we don’t get to live, then neither do they.

  “Mr. Vargas,” she said into the mic, “make your first target the carrier’s bridge, second line of windows down from the top of the superstructure. One round of HE. Fire when ready.”

  • • •

  Vargas tapped the targeting screen to enhance until the windows and catwalks of the superstructure’s decks filled the screen. Then he found the level the captain wanted and used his thumb and forefinger to pinch his targeting square, tightening it on the new objective. He centered the crosshairs on a window, then pulled up the battery menu and tapped an icon reading HE, for high explosive.

  A light turned green, and Vargas depressed a red firing button with one finger.

  The deck gun roared, its muzzle flash a white tongue that leaped across the cutter’s forward deck. There was a brief, high-pitched scream, and then the bridge of USS Nimitz erupted in a flash of red and white, glass and burning debris raining onto the flight deck.


  The captain’s voice came over his headset. “Adjust your target to Nimitz’s port side bow, at the waterline. Make every shot count, Mr. Vargas. You may exhaust your magazine.”

  The man’s right hand danced across the touch screen. It was an awful thing he was doing, he knew that; there were civilians aboard, and they’d made not a single aggressive move against the cutter. But orders were orders. And besides, he was going to get to sink an aircraft carrier! The thrill of that quickly swept aside any moral reservations he might have had.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Nimitz

  Michael was about fifty feet away from her, with only the curving catwalk between them. Only it wasn’t Michael anymore. It was . . . something else.

  In the glow of the flashlight beam, Rosa could tell by the wounds on his naked body—and the creamy glaze of his eyes—that he was dead. The shock she felt in knowing that the child she’d come to rescue was lost to the dead was replaced by her horror at the changes he had undergone. His flesh was a maroon shade, and new muscle rippled across his chest, arms, and legs, far more than nature had ever allotted to a ten-year-old boy. She thought she saw the muscles shiver beneath the taut skin. Michael had grown no taller, and his powerful upper body joined with the small stature reminded her of baboons and pit bulls. He bared his teeth.

  A word floated up from her memories of catechism class: demon.

  Mutation was the next word. Although the medic had a quick and capable mind, she had trouble wrapping her head around the idea that a genetic mutation could do that, and so quickly. It wasn’t possible.

  The impossible creature hunched and curled its fingers into claws, then let out the crazed, inhuman screech Rosa had heard earlier. The medic recoiled at the sound, her bladder nearly releasing in the same primitive reaction as prey in the wild when confronted by a predator’s cry. The thing moved at her then, fast and low, powerful leg muscles driving it forward.

  Rosa jerked the pistol up and fired twice. The first bullet hit the meat of a pectoral muscle, and it didn’t flinch. The second bullet hummed through empty space, because the creature was no longer there. With a grunt it leaped sideways, flinging itself over the railing, out into the center of the room with its forest of pipes.

  There was no thud as it hit bottom, because it didn’t land. Rosa caught a glimpse of it hanging from a large valve wheel by one hand, then swinging its body out of sight behind a cluster of pipes. She hunted for it with the light, shadows flickering between the vertical steel tubes. Rosa tracked the pistol along with the moving flashlight.

  There was a clang, a series of thumps, and another clang.

  It’s moving through the pipes, leaping from one to another.

  The primordial screech came from somewhere within the steel forest, and Rosa fought the urge to bolt. Neither did she dare to freeze as she knew it was still moving in there, no doubt getting closer, trying to flank her.

  Rosa’s eyes went up as she raised the flashlight higher, to where the pipes stretched upward another deck. Maybe it was climbing above her and preparing to drop while her eyes looked for it at this level. She snapped the light back down and caught a flash of dark red skin as it leaped between pipes, ten feet in and six or seven feet higher. She almost squeezed off a shot, but then it was gone.

  The moans of the dead horde in the pipe shaft echoed off the walls, and her flashlight showed her that the first of the corpses had completed the climb up the stairwell. A Nimitz crewman in blue coveralls with most of his face bitten away stumbled along the catwalk, the others close behind it.

  She had to move but was afraid that if she turned her back, Michael would be on her. Where could she go? Climb the nearby ladder to the little platform and hatch above? The dead couldn’t climb ladders. That thing could, though. Then she decided it wouldn’t even need to go up the ladder. It could scale the pipes and then leap across space, landing on her back as she climbed. Her panic and indecisiveness had her paralyzed.

  The screeching howl came again, perhaps from the center of the pipe forest, perhaps from above. She couldn’t tell and kept probing with the light, desperate to find it so she could kill it.

  It’s different from the others. Can it be killed?

  Groans from the left, closer now. She snapped the light over and saw ten of them, rotting in their uniforms and work coveralls, surging down the curve of the catwalk toward her.

  Can’t stay! Two bullets left, can’t face them. Move!

  Rosa moved, running to the right around the curve, away from the horde. The sounds of thumping against metal came from the pipe forest as the thing moved with her, possibly above her now. Michael had come through a hatch on this side. It was her way out. And there it was, set in the wall on the opposite side of the room from where she’d entered, standing open and . . .

  Corpses were pushing through from the other side, one after another, tripping over the knee knocker and then pulling themselves upright, eyes reflecting the flashlight beam. They snarled and moved toward her, their noises echoed by the hungry figures behind her.

  The bone-chilling screech came again from the pipe forest.

  • • •

  With a roar, Charlie Kidd leaped through the hatch from the hangar deck, triggering a burst from his M14 at waist level. The priest was thirty or forty feet away, pistol raised and facing him in a long passageway. Among Coast Guard boarding parties, and in all law enforcement circles, hallways were known as fatal funnels; there was simply no place to go once the shooting started, and when there was a shooter at each end, the one slower on the trigger usually died.

  Charlie and Xavier fired at the same time.

  The big black man went down with at least one hit to the chest. In the same instant, the senior chief felt the side of his head struck as if by a hot, iron fireplace poker. He grunted and collapsed against the left wall.

  • • •

  Xavier was flat on his back. The 7.62-millimeter rifle bullet had hit him in the right side of his chest like a train, and he couldn’t remember falling or banging the back of his head on the steel deck. He couldn’t breathe and felt like an elephant was standing on him as he fought to draw in air. The pistol was no longer in his hand, and he clutched at his chest through the armholes of his body armor. The fingertips came away slick and red.

  Have . . . to . . . breathe . . .

  Xavier couldn’t move, simply lay on the deck like a fish out of its bowl, sucking at nothing. His vision grayed at the edges.

  • • •

  Head wound. Chick’s mind struggled as if moving through mud, fuzzy and blinded with a white, pulsing light he couldn’t escape by closing his eyes. He was lying on one hip, sagged against a bulkhead, and the world’s nastiest headache had his brain in a vise. Something warm and wet was running down his neck.

  Fucker shot me in the head. He was amazed. He wasn’t supposed to get hit! One hand rose to the side of his head, fingertips shaking, and he touched ragged flesh where his right ear had been, finding only a bloody channel plowed along the side of his skull by a bullet and ragged pieces of meat that had been his ear. He stifled a cry, tears running from his eyes as he squeezed them shut, trying to block out the glare of white pain in his head. He wanted to be sick. His hand fluttered and fell to the deck with a thump.

  Sleep. I’ll sleep, and then I’ll feel better.

  Chick’s body relaxed and slid further down the wall, and the pain seemed to subside just a little bit. That works. Sleep . . . I’ll just . . . A groan from down the corridor made him open his eyes. The priest was rolling onto his side, trying to get to his hands and knees.

  No! Charlie fought to rise, felt the passageway spin, saw the black man fall to his stomach, then grip the frame of an open hatch and pull his body through. The chief bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, the pain widening his eyes. He grabbed the M14 from the floor beside him, forcing himself to
stand as he leaned on one wall.

  Then he was staggering down the corridor and fighting double vision, intent on the hatch, as he left the handgun and a blood trail behind him on the deck.

  • • •

  The smallest of breaths caught in his lungs, and Xavier gasped, trying to pull in another. He was still on his hands and knees, blood was dripping from one side of his body armor and onto the deck, and his chest hurt so much that he wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. He was sluggish, wanted only to lie down until he could breathe again. Another short breath, and Xavier fought to draw air as he grabbed the side of a metal locker and used it to help himself stand.

  It was a large storage room, filled with rows of equipment lockers. Yellow oxygen tanks with hoses and masks hung on one wall, and filling the center he could see long racks of yellow coats and pants, rows of boots and lines of helmets. Firefighter gear. A steel ladderway on the left climbed one wall to the deck above, but the thought of dragging himself up those steep stairs made him gasp harder.

  He pulled a long, wheezing breath, still holding on to the locker and wanting to lie down. Was his right arm going numb? It felt unresponsive, but that might just have been a reaction to the pain in his chest. Another small breath. If only he could rest for a few minutes.

  He heard bootsteps in the passageway beyond the hatch. Where my pistol is. Xavier clenched his teeth against the pain and plunged into the racks of coats and gear.

  • • •

  Stone and Chief Liebs ran across the flight deck, looking for cover as the carrier’s bridge rained fiery debris from above. The blare of a fire klaxon filled the air. They found a depression on the starboard side and jumped down into it, a rectangular pocket in the deck where launch controllers had once gathered to manage flight operations, protected here from the waist down. Pieces of twisted, smoking metal clattered to the deck around them.