Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  Charlie grunted as three feet of bloody iron erupted from the center of his chest. He dropped the rifle, eyes blinking and mouth moving wordlessly. Then there was only darkness.

  Xavier let the impaled man fall, the bar running him through clattering on the deck. “You should have gone left,” the priest whispered. Then he stripped the dead man of his spare magazines and picked up his rifle. Xavier looked at the figure on the floor, trying not to hate him for all he had done, struggling to muster feelings of forgiveness and mercy.

  Xavier shot Charlie Kidd in the head. It was all the mercy he could summon.

  FORTY-TWO

  Adventure Galley

  Twenty-five minutes! The twitchy fire control system had Vargas in fits, blinking on for a moment before crackling back into a wash of static. Console lights flickered green and then glowed red once more. The captain’s strident demands in his ears had finally caused him to rip off the headset and throw it across the combat center.

  He had it now, though. The video image was steady on both the camera feed and the gun screen. Auto-targeting and gyro-stabilization were both offline, but the operations specialist had managed to bring up the manual controls for the deck gun. A white circle was centered on-screen, rising above and then falling below the image of the aircraft carrier as the cutter rode the seas approaching the mouth of the Pacific. He used a joystick to keep the pip on target, able to use only one hand and forced to release the stick so he could press the fire button.

  The deck gun boomed, and on-screen a splash plumed from the water a hundred yards short of the carrier. Vargas adjusted the pip and fired again, then once more, starting to walk the splashes into the target.

  The magazine counter read ten shells remaining.

  He twitched the joystick, fired the deck gun, and then laughed out loud when a white bloom appeared on the green-and-black screen, right at the carrier’s waterline.

  “All mine now,” he said to the empty combat center, timing his next shot with the rise and fall of the ship. He fired again. Another hit.

  • • •

  Elizabeth Kidd stood at the starboard bridge windows with her binoculars, watching the impacts, relieved that Vargas was firing once more and had found his range. She was keeping track of the rounds in her head, deducting each shot from the count she knew they had on board. Now that Vargas was on target, there would be enough shells to send the carrier to the bottom.

  Her back was turned to the ladderway leading up to the bridge, and she didn’t see a haggard-looking Amy Liggett creep up through the opening with Special Agent Ramsey’s Sig Sauer in her hand. The sound of the floor hatch being dropped and dogged shut made her turn.

  Amy stood with the pistol pointed at her captain. “Cease fire. Now,” she said.

  “Ensign,” Liz started, “you don’t—”

  “Now!” Amy pointed the pistol at Liz’s face. “They did nothing to you, nothing to deserve this.”

  Liz shook her head slowly. “You haven’t seen—”

  Amy cut her off again. “I’ve seen plenty. You’re a monster, and this stops right now.”

  Over at the navigation station, Mr. Waite moved toward her suddenly. Amy pivoted and shot him in the chest. The young helmsman charged her too, but he hesitated, and Amy spun back, firing again, hitting the boy and sending him to the deck.

  Liz’s sidearm was in her hand then, and she blasted six rounds into the young woman across the compartment. Amy fell, the pistol dropping from lifeless fingers. Liz strode through the bridge and fired three more shots, one for the head of each corpse lying on the deck. She wasn’t about to let them get up and prevent her from finishing what she’d started.

  The deck gun boomed again, but she was away from the bridge windows now, unable to tell whether the shell had connected. She took the helm, keeping the cutter on course.

  Let’s complete the mission.

  FORTY-THREE

  San Francisco Bay

  Salt spray and wind stung Calvin’s cheeks as he raced the gray RIB boat across the bay, moonlight illuminating the black shape of the warship ahead of him. The gun on the vessel’s bow fired, blooming red in the night, and a shell streaked through the air overhead, hitting the carrier behind him.

  Calvin gripped the craft’s wheel tightly as it pounded over the waves, slowed by its cargo but still closing the distance rapidly with the throttle thrown all the way forward. He knew that he would be spotted at any moment—either on radar or by a lookout—and that the gun would turn on him. Calvin didn’t hesitate. The deck gun roared again, trying to kill his family, his friends.

  He would protect them.

  Strapped to both sides of the launch and protruding forward past the rubberized bow were MK-54 torpedoes, armed for contact detonation by Chief Liebs just before he and Stone lowered the boat into the water. Each of the two 608-pound weapons was eight feet long, and their 97-pound warheads carried a combined equivalent of 476 pounds of TNT.

  The deck gun did not turn on the small launch, and the cutter held its course.

  The warship’s shape grew before him, and in the moonlight Calvin could see the vessel’s mast, an American flag snapping in the wind.

  Calvin’s last thought was of his children as he drove the RIB boat into the cutter’s side at over forty knots.

  • • •

  The blast was a spectacular white flash as both warheads connected with the vessel right at amidships.

  Returning from the RIB boat launch bay to the flight deck, Chief Liebs and Stone had watched the launch’s wake as it crossed the water, ducking each time a shell from the deck gun slammed into the carrier’s side, but refusing to take their eyes off their friend.

  Ship-killing was exactly what the MK-54s had been designed to do, and the blast shattered the side of the other vessel, breaking its keel. The cutter’s bow and stern leaped skyward in a V as the center folded.

  In seconds, both ends of the broken warship slid beneath the waves.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Adventure Galley

  The bow, bridge, and broken remains of the cutter’s radar mast—everything forward of the torpedo blast—spiraled down through the black waters in a plume of oil, bubbles, and debris. It went down backward, the sleek bow pointed toward the surface for a bit, eventually pushed over by the current until it turned upside down. When it impacted with the bottom of the bay, the ship sent up a cloud of silt and steel fragments. Pieces of deck rail, black hull panels, and a splintered radar dish bloomed around it before sinking slowly to the sea floor. The bodies of the rescue swimmer, Mr. Vargas, and Leary the contractor billowed out as well, then joined the sinking debris.

  Radar masts crumpled as the forward half of the ship settled, kicking up more silt, and the broken cutter came to rest completely inverted. A quarter mile away, the severed stern ended up on its side, bursts of air exploding from ruptured compartments and open hatches churning the silt cloud around it.

  Red emergency lights glowed dimly on the cutter’s bridge, though all other instrumentation had gone dark. The sealed hatch to the ladderway leading to lower decks created a pocket of air; none of the bridge windows had ruptured, and the inverted compartment was intact, pressure holding back the black waters outside.

  Lying on what had been the ceiling, or overhead, of the bridge, Elizabeth Kidd opened her eyes to find herself entangled with the corpse of her quartermaster. Everything hurt. The blast had thrown her over the helm, across the compartment to slam into the navigation console. With difficulty she pulled herself out from under the dead man, a blast of raw pain informing her that her right leg, bent beneath her at an unnatural angle, was broken in several places.

  She touched her jaw tenderly and winced. That was broken too, and her tongue discovered she’d lost several teeth. Liz tried to spit, but the broken jaw made it too painful, so she only managed to let blood trickle down her chin. L
ooking at the windows, at the water beyond, she knew her beloved ship was no more.

  How had they done it? Without planes, carriers had no real offensive weapons.

  It didn’t matter. As bitter as the loss of her brother and her crew was, Liz took comfort in the knowledge that her deck gun had done so much damage to Nimitz that the carrier was already with her on the bottom, or well on its way.

  One last piece of business.

  There was a thump to her right, and Liz painfully turned to see a face pressed against the outside of the bridge window. Another soon joined it, a pair of pale, decaying things with cloudy eyes, hair drifting in the current. They looked in at her and beat the glass slowly with their fists.

  More pounding came from the opposite side of the bridge, and in the red emergency lights Liz saw faces over there as well. Still more pressed against the glass, figures standing on the bottom of the bay and ringing the bridge, peering in at the lone woman and pounding, frustrated by their inability to reach her. Liz thought one of those faces might be Mr. Vargas.

  She began crawling across the steel, biting her lip as she dragged her fractured leg behind her, eyes scanning. There, a pistol lying ten feet away, either hers or Amy’s.

  “Sorry,” she said to the ghouls beyond the glass, pulling herself toward the handgun. “I won’t be joining you. I make the decisions on my ship.”

  The pistol was still six feet out of reach when a deep cracking started at the front of the bridge, a four-foot, jagged line splintering the glass. Fists beat at the fracture from outside, and the cracking turned into a squeal.

  Liz lunged for the pistol as the window imploded, glass and corpses pushed violently in by the sea, flinging Liz back against a bulkhead as the bridge quickly filled with icy water and death. Her eyes stung from the salt, and she choked on seawater as she saw hands and teeth coming at her in the muted red light.

  Elizabeth Kidd’s final sensation was pain.

  In the end, a woman who had worked her entire life to rise above others, to stand out, give commands, and have her orders obeyed, joined the thoughtless millions shuffling across the sea floor.

  Just another face in the crowd.

  FORTY-FIVE

  January 13—Nimitz

  The aircraft carrier did not strike the remaining support for the Golden Gate Bridge, and the survivors aboard were spared a rain of the walking dead falling from the sky. Instead, Nimitz’s keel, too close to the shore, ground over a ridge of submerged rock extending into the bay from the Sausalito land mass, bringing the vessel to a halt half a mile from the remains of the bridge. The current still pushed at it from behind, and the underwater ridge would not hold the vessel back forever, but for the moment it had come to rest.

  Breaches in the hull on the port side, first from the carrier’s collisions last summer and now as a result of concentrated fire from the cutter’s deck gun, were substantial. Water flowed in steadily, and the ship’s pumps struggled to maintain neutral buoyancy. It was a battle they were slowly losing.

  By the time the sun rose over the craggy new cliff face to the east that morning, Nimitz’s survivors began emerging from below and assembled on the flight deck. Chief Liebs, Stone, and Xavier came together first and were waiting when the handful of surviving hippies started appearing alone or in pairs, finally deciding it was safe to venture out after hiding as the priest had instructed. There weren’t many left.

  Sophia, Kay, and the children of Nimitz appeared at the starboard side, everyone holding hands as they crossed the deck. Sophia was carrying the toddler abandoned by the pirates, and little Ben walked alongside, his small hand in hers.

  Rosa and Tommy found their way topside, the orderly now carrying the petite medic on his back as if she were a pack. Tommy set her down—her right foot was freshly bandaged—and the two of them immediately started looking the group over, tending to their assorted injuries, beginning with Xavier. Rosa ordered him to sit and strip off his body armor, then knelt beside him.

  The priest rested a hand on her shoulder. “Michael?”

  Fresh tears sprang into her eyes, and she shook her head.

  “Is there any chance . . . ?” the priest started.

  “No,” she said, her voice cracking. “He . . . he turned into . . . he turned.”

  Xavier nodded and squeezed her shoulder. Rosa pushed his hand away, her brusque doctor’s voice falling into place. “Be still so I can look at you.”

  Tommy crouched on her other side. “Listen to the doc, Father. Arguing just pisses her off. I know.”

  Xavier gave in and let the two medics examine him. The body armor had absorbed most of the bullet’s energy, but a 7.62-millimeter round moved at extremely high velocity, and this one had penetrated the Kevlar a bit. Rosa informed the priest that all his work in the gym and hitting the bags had built up nice, dense muscle in his pectorals, catching what energy remained in the bullet and preventing it from going deep enough to damage something vital. The doctor was able to pluck the flattened round from the hole in his chest with a pair of long forceps. Then, using liberal amounts of alcohol, she stitched his chest closed right there on the flight deck.

  Tommy gave the priest a towel into which he could scream during the procedure. Heavy bandaging completed the task as Tommy moved on to treat Stone and Chief Liebs, each with his own bullet wounds.

  “What a fuc . . . what a mess we all are,” said Rosa.

  Xavier wiped the tears from his eyes, wincing as his chest muscles moved. “What you said, Doc.”

  The double-wide hatch at the base of the superstructure creaked open, and two figures emerged, both tattered and bloody, both darkened by smoke. Maya helped PK limp across the deck toward the group, struggling to walk on her own. The others ran to them and swept them both up. PK was in bad shape from the blast, and the medics went to work on him at once.

  Maya found herself encircled by Xavier, Chief Liebs, and Stone. She signed to them that Banks had been killed in the blast, then looked around the deck. She signed the word “Daddy?”

  The men shook their heads slowly, and Maya’s hands went to her mouth.

  “Michael is gone too,” Xavier said, making sure she could see him speaking.

  The tears began, and she wiped them away. “Evan?”

  The gunner’s mate took her hands. “I’m sorry.”

  Maya began to cry, and Stone led her toward Sophia and the children. Her sisters and surviving brother would need to be told about their father, and it was only right that the news come from Maya.

  Xavier’s fists clenched at the senselessness of it all. The walking dead were what they were, an affliction put upon the earth either by God or nature, as present in all their lives now as weather and sunrises. But would mankind never stop preying upon one another? The priest let out a long breath. Sadly, there was no one left upon whom to place the blame for all this death.

  Except for you.

  Xavier hung his head. He would wrestle with that thought another time.

  Chief Liebs rested a hand on his shoulder and pointed at the sharp tilt to the deck, then at the nearby fragments of the iconic bridge where legions of the dead waited to fall on them. “We’re not going to be able to stay here,” the gunner’s mate said. “Either the weight of the flooding causes the ship to roll over, or the current pushes us loose and into the bridge. We don’t have the manpower to deal with what would spill onto this deck.”

  The priest nodded. “How many RIB boats are left?”

  “Two,” said Liebs. “Not enough to handle us all. Not in one trip, anyway.”

  “Where would we go?” Xavier wasn’t really asking the Navy man for an answer as he turned in a circle. To the south, where San Francisco had been, was now only rolling ocean, and the Pacific waited to the west beyond the bridge. North was the hills of Sausalito. Perhaps they could trek overland, find an intact community somewhere to
the north where they might find shelter and supplies. But if the horde waiting at the nearby bridge was any indication, the ruins in Sausalito would be crawling with the walking dead. He imagined leading a line of frightened children and wounded adults through there and shook his head. To their east was a towering, impassable cliff that extended both north and south as far as he could see.

  But the chief was right. They couldn’t stay here. Nothing but bad options.

  Xavier sighed, feeling the pain of his wounds and the weight of years well beyond his own. “Let’s use what time we have to gather weapons and supplies, then prep the boats. We’ll stay as long as we can, but then some of us will have to remain behind while the rest abandon ship. You can come back for us if you find safe landfall.”

  The gunner’s mate shook his head slowly. “Where are we going?”

  The priest looked out at the hostile world. “I have no idea.”

  FORTY-SIX

  January 13—Groundhog-7

  Nimitz was not responding to radio calls, and as they flew southwest, the view below began providing an explanation. The earthquake they’d felt up in Chico must have originated in the Bay Area, because the closer they got, the more devastation could be seen below. Entire communities lay in shattered ruins; roadways had buckled and bridges were down. Landslides had swept aside highways, rail lines, and towns.

  The dead moved across the landscape, the ever-present inheritors of the earth.

  The sun was beneath the horizon, purples and oranges streaking the western sky as evening fell. The Black Hawk cruised along at four thousand feet, Angie West sitting in the co-pilot’s seat with Vladimir across from her, both wearing helmets with radio headsets. In the back, Halsey crouched behind the starboard door gun, clipped into a safety harness and struck silent by the destruction passing below. Angie’s husband, Dean, slept strapped into a rear bench seat, wrapped in a blanket, his bandages slowly turning red from his many wounds. He was in bad shape, and Angie was worried about him.