Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  She looked back into the troop compartment. Her three-year-old Leah was buckled in beside her daddy, also under a blanket, asleep and leaning against him. Had it only been a few hours ago that Angie and Dean rescued her from a gang of murderous bikers and engaged in a long, running gunfight? Angie’s heart ached at how much she’d missed them, and soared at the fact that Dean had kept the two of them alive over the long months of hardship and separation. It had come at a cost; dear friends lost and the discovery that Angie’s parents were dead. But her husband and child were alive, and she wasn’t ashamed to admit to herself that reuniting with them was worth the price.

  “Nimitz, Groundhog-Seven, we are inbound to your position,” Vladimir called over the radio. “Acknowledge.”

  There was nothing.

  Angie looked down as twilight settled over fields of destruction. “Looks like it was the big one,” she said.

  “Yes,” the Russian replied, “I have seen this in the movies. An earthquake to break California off into the ocean, although that does not appear to be entirely the case.”

  “Everyone thought it would be L.A.,” Angie said.

  “Mother Nature has fooled us yet again,” Vladimir said. “How very crafty of her not to do what people expected.”

  Angie watched through the windscreen as the helicopter moved over the hills of Napa, then crossed Vallejo, identified as such only because of a map and their position. Now the city lay in ruins, flattened as if by a thousand tornadoes.

  “It appears we have a new geological formation ahead,” the pilot said as the Black Hawk approached the upheaval that had created a new line of coastal cliffs on the Pacific. Fragments of superhighway and square miles of shattered brick, wood, and steel were all that remained of the population centers that once stood where the cliff now existed. Vladimir descended to one thousand feet and brought the helicopter into a hover above the cliff’s precipice, facing west.

  No one spoke.

  It was like discovering the edge of the world. The megaquake had utterly transformed the built-up and heavily populated Bay Area into a massive, primitive cove where the Pacific rolled in across seemingly endless space. The San Francisco peninsula was gone. There were no cities, no bridges, and no aircraft carrier; only the rolling sea backlit by a winter sunset. The magnitude of it all shocked them to silence, leaving only the beat of rotor blades above them.

  Vladimir checked his fuel status and muttered a curse. He’d been counting on a safe landing zone, and now it was gone. Alternative options were all unpleasant.

  “Vlad,” Halsey called over his headset, “I got something low on the starboard side. Looks like a flashing light.”

  The Russian rotated the aircraft to face north, and Angie lifted a pair of binoculars. “I see it too. Two miles out, maybe less.”

  Vladimir spotted the blinking light and immediately accelerated to full military power, descending rapidly. It took only moments to cross the distance, and the Russian dropped the aircraft until it was a mere fifty feet above the surf, the towering cliff wall to their right. Angie and Halsey saw the remains of a radio tower jutting from the cliff, several motionless bodies piled at one end, clothing whipping in the rotor wash. One of the bodies wore flight gear, a vest-mounted strobe light winking in the falling light.

  “It’s Evan!” Angie shouted.

  “Is he alive?” Vladimir demanded, his voice tight.

  She looked. There was no movement. Three corpses were draped across the tower struts at his feet, each with its head kicked flat.

  The body in the flight suit lifted a hand, but Angie couldn’t tell if it was the simple reaching of a mindless corpse. Then the hand curled into a thumbs-up.

  “He’s alive!” Angie shouted.

  “Door gunner,” Vladimir called in his stern, commander’s voice, “prepare to recover a downed pilot.”

  Angie looked at the nearness of the cliff, at the blur of blades as Vladimir brought them lower and closer. “Can you get close enough?” she asked, thinking about her daughter asleep in the back.

  Vladimir’s eyes were hard and focused. “We are going in,” was his only response.

  • • •

  Evan Tucker was strapped into the co-pilot’s seat, shivering beneath a blanket. Angie had moved into the back to make room for him and gave Halsey a big hug from behind, yelling over the wind that she had never seen such an act of bravery. While the helicopter hovered at one end, the ranch hand removed his safety harness, climbed down onto the wobbling, creaking radio tower, and crawled to Evan. Then he walked them both back down the shaking structure to the chopper doors, surf rushing about their legs and wind threatening to blow them off as the blades spun overhead, close enough to the cliff to kick loose stone free with their downdraft.

  Halsey blushed and smiled.

  Vladimir had the Black Hawk back at one thousand feet now and ordered Angie and his gunner to begin looking for the aircraft carrier’s wreckage as he began a slow circuit of the new bay.

  “You crashed,” Vladimir said.

  “I was shot down,” Evan replied.

  The Russian grunted. “And how did you enjoy autorotation?”

  “You mean crashing? It sucked.”

  Vladimir muttered the Russian word for amateur and shook his head with a deep sigh. “Sadly, I am quite certain it will not be the last time.”

  Evan made a face. “Sorry, I’m not the great Vladimir Yurish, Lord of the Skies.”

  The Russian’s face split into a homely grin. “I like this name. Use it whenever you please. And for your information, Evanovich, I have crashed my birds four times during my career. Not one incident was my fault, of course, and we were discussing your incompetence, not my innocent misfortune.”

  Evan laughed. “Good to see you too, Vlad.”

  The Russian nodded. “Welcome back, tovarich.”

  • • •

  Contact, zero-one-zero,” Evan called, leaning forward in his seat and looking through binoculars. “Looks like the carrier.”

  The Russian adjusted course to the new heading, quickly spotting what Evan had seen. In the last of the light he could make out the dark rectangle of the carrier, sitting motionless just off the bay’s northern shoreline, about a half mile from the remains of the Golden Gate. The ship was listing to port at a dangerous angle, far worse than it had been when they flew off its deck only days ago.

  As they closed, Evan thought the ship looked dead, an empty derelict. One more piece of humanity’s remains in a world that had moved on without them.

  Vladimir approached from the stern, switching on his landing lights as he descended toward the lightless deck. Evan didn’t bother to ask if his friend could safely set down on such a steep angle. He’d decided that there was no feat with an aircraft so crazy that the Russian wouldn’t immediately attempt it, and likely succeed on the first try.

  Crouched between the seats and wearing a headset, Angie watched as the dark ship filled their windscreen. Her heart fell. They’re gone.

  And then flares began to light off in a rough square across the flight deck.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Nimitz

  Maya raced at Evan as he climbed from the chopper. She saw that he was injured, and so she resisted the urge to leap into his arms and wrap her legs around him, instead simply holding him tight and covering his face in kisses. Then she held his cheeks and stared at him as if he might not be real. Evan laughed and held her, feeling no pain, never wanting to let go.

  Sophia and Ben were there to meet Vladimir, and after hugging his lady and kissing her deeply, the towering Russian lifted his boy into the air and spun him in a circle.

  “Papa!” Ben cried.

  Xavier hugged everyone and told the Russian that the ship’s deck lights and communications were knocked out during the attack. Vlad thanked him for the flares, and told him he would
have landed even if the carrier had been belly-up.

  The priest crouched and introduced himself to a suddenly shy Leah West. She hesitated, eyes wide as she stared at the big black man whose face had been so marred by brutality. With a tiny finger she traced the line of the scar that ran from his hairline to his chin, then kissed him on the cheek. “Kisses make it better,” she said.

  Rosa and Tommy organized a stretcher team to take Dean down to medical, as Halsey introduced himself to those gathered on deck. Xavier walked with Angie, their arms around one another, the priest gritting his teeth against both the pain of the fresh wound in his chest and the older grenade fragment in his thigh.

  “You did it,” he said. “Your family’s safe.”

  Angie nodded. “Carney died. Skye too, I think. We couldn’t find her.”

  The priest thought about the girl, a troubled soul if ever he’d encountered one. Then he told Angie about the boarders, the earthquake, the shelling from the pirate vessel. He listed those lost, ending with Calvin’s sacrifice. There was an emotional moment, and they both cried for a time.

  Chief Liebs joined them, and Angie looked at his bandages and the weariness on his face. “Must have been a hell of a fight,” she said.

  The gunner’s mate nodded. “We’re not done yet.” He pointed to the bridge remains not far away. “There’s a whole bunch of bad news that’s going to drop on us when this ship breaks free from whatever’s holding it back. Good thing you showed up when you did. We were going to abandon ship in the morning.”

  “And go where?” the woman asked.

  He shrugged. “The father and I haven’t come up with a good answer for that.”

  Aboard aircraft carriers, there is a constant, subtle vibration so unobtrusive it is generally not even noticed until it is absent. At that moment, the gentle vibration in Nimitz ceased. All three of them felt the change and looked at one another.

  “What was that?” Xavier asked the Navy man.

  “I don’t know,” said Liebs, “I’ve never felt that before.”

  Several minutes later, a tall, thin young man in Navy coveralls appeared at the top of a catwalk ladderway on the edge of the flight deck. He looked around, then sprinted toward the trio.

  “Holy shit!” Chief Liebs exclaimed, recognizing his nuc, the young nuclear engineer rescued with him from the dry-goods locker so many months ago. In the Navy, nucs belonged to their own odd little tribe, keeping to themselves and only emerging from the deep for a quick meal before vanishing again. This boy had been no different, usually unseen. “I figured you were dead,” the chief said.

  The boy ignored the remark, his eyes intense. “The reactors shut themselves down. Did you feel it?”

  That was the missing vibration, Xavier thought. “Why?” He noticed the boy was soaking wet.

  “Because of the flooding. All power is out now.”

  “Can you get it restarted?” Angie asked.

  The nuc shook his head impatiently. “You can’t just flip a switch and turn on a nuclear reactor. Besides, they’re underwater by now.”

  “Can’t we pump them dry?” Xavier said, looking at the chief.

  The man was pale. “No power,” he said, “means no pumps. There’s nothing to keep the sea out.”

  Nimitz gave a long groan and shifted, the current pushing its keel free from the submerged ridge of rock. At once, the deck made a great creaking sound and tilted several more degrees to port. Slowly, the aircraft carrier began to move again.

  “We’re going to sink fast,” the gunner’s mate said, then looked west, up at the remains of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the darkness above, the dead grew agitated, many stepping off the side as they noticed the ship drifting toward them. Thousands more were packed on the high roadway.

  “But first,” Liebs said, “we’re going to have company.”

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