“No excuses, Commander.” The Air Boss was now on the scene, and subject to the Commander’s wrath at close range. But Drake simply didn’t have the energy. He was still physically weak and trembling from the wash of adrenaline that flooded his body during his ill-considered exercise in individual heroism.
And, anyway, he knew this was really nobody’s fault. A working flight deck was a damned dangerous place at the best of times. And everyone on board was massively overtasked. Those F-35s hadn’t been up in months before today. They were supposed to be on a regular maintenance schedule whether they flew or not. But everything had slipped in the ZA, maintenance standards in particular. If those incredibly high-tech birds had managed to take off and land safely, that alone was a major accomplishment.
A little leakage had to be overlooked.
That is, until it almost got everyone on the flight deck killed in a gala fireworks display that would have made a jaunty farewell for humanity’s last supercarrier and her crew. As it was, it looked like only a single man had been lost. One of the other welders had been injured when the airborne pallet crashed into the section of rampart he was working on. Now, Drake watched the medical personnel checking the the man’s vitals, while a litter crew stood by. Damned dangerous day for welders, Drake thought, remembering the ones who had gone into the sea when the crane went over – but then he steeled himself and tried to dredge up the strength to crack one last whip.
“Load that man up!” he shouted. “Get him in the litter and get him out of here. Clear this scene and get back to work. There’s no time for occupational health and safety on this goddamned ship right now.” There’s no time at all, he thought, but didn’t say it. The medics gave him a look, but complied. As they lifted the wounded man and started to move, Drake added:
“And I want an aid kit and a litter at every work site on this ship. Not just the trauma bays – everywhere men are working. I also don’t want medical personnel sitting on their asses in the hospital – I want them out roaming the boat, looking for people to treat. And they don’t stop when the battle starts, either.” Drake knew someone was going to complain that they shouldn’t risk their invaluable doctors, nurses, and paramedics that way. But Drake figured they’d be back down in their nice safe hospital soon enough – when the casualties started piling up, and they had people to work on.
Until then, their necks were on the line like everyone else’s.
* * *
As Drake’s shoulders began to sag, and his breathing slowly came back to normal, he decided to take himself back up to his little room off the Flag Bridge, up in the island, and a million miles above all this madness. He’d treat himself to a couple of minutes of blissful solitude, and silence. Get his head together before the fight started. Where his aide had ended up, he didn’t even know. He crossed the open stretch of flight deck alone, half in a daze. As he trudged, he tried to master his thoughts.
But he wasn’t very successful.
What the fuck was I doing with THAT? he thought. It was emphatically not the job of the acting commander of the carrier strike group to do shipboard damage control and firefighting – never mind hurling himself at a burning crate full of grenades. As the ship’s highest ranking officer, he shouldn’t have taken such a terrible risk. But of course he knew full well why he’d done it: because it had to be done, and there had been no one else. And, anyway, pretty soon no one on this boat was going to be safe.
Maybe not even down in the hospital.
Was there even any point to everything they were all doing? What the fuck were they doing? Surely there wasn’t much more faith or hope for the crew to hang on to at this point. But then Drake grabbed himself by his mental lapels, shook himself, and dragged his head back from that cliff edge of nihilism. Despair was the unforgivable sin. And he simply couldn’t go out that way – he couldn’t give up. If he was out of faith, he’d just have to push through it, and carry on. He’d fake it, if he had to.
And also remember, he admonished himself, we don’t have to WIN this battle. Of course, there was no possible way they could win it – it was fewer than three thousand of the living against ten million of the dead. They couldn’t win.
But maybe they could hold.
Maybe, just maybe, they could hold off the hurricane of dead long enough. Plus, Drake still had one or two tricks up his sleeve.
Maybe they still had a chance. And however tiny, it was something. It wasn’t certain death. And it was something they could hold on to.
With this thought, he reached the island and began to haul open the hatch with his palsied and infant-weak arm. But, for some reason, he paused just to stare at the damage-control station built into the outside of the island. Consisting of a large-bore hose, buckets of sand, and fire blankets with pull tabs, these things were placed at intervals all over the ship, on every deck. There were also fifteen separate hose stations all around the outside edge of the flight deck. The carrier and its crew were extremely well equipped and highly trained to do shipboard firefighting and damage control. This was because that was always how warships went down. Not from the damage suffered in an initial attack – but from the follow-on damage caused by spreading fires, chained explosions, and flooding, particularly below decks.
Drake thought about his order to put aid stations and medical personnel all over the boat. In the ZA, and certainly with the rampaging infection risk they were about to face, combat medicine was perhaps as important as damage control – an out-of-control outbreak would take down the ship as quickly as an out-of-control fire, finishing them in minutes in either case. Then again, once someone was infected, there was nothing you could do but shoot him in the head.
But that too was damage control.
At last, Drake hauled open the hatch and staggered inside. He had to dig down for the strength to climb the ladder. He just needed to sit down for a minute. That was all. He’d be fine in a minute. As he climbed, he thought about all the things that still needed be done, to come together, for them to have a fighting chance.
And the responsibility for it all sat on his shoulders – alone.
And Drake, in his innermost heart, didn’t for one minute believe all those stars would align. Not in time to save them. But as long as their escort destroyer, the USS Michael Murphy, stayed afloat, they could still complete their mission. Fick’s Marines, and Alpha with their mission objective, the scientist and his data, were on their way in. Even if the carrier fell, the Murph could recover those guys, and ferry them back to Fortress Britain. The Kennedy might go down, but the Murph would raise the banner and carry on.
And maybe the world would still have a chance.
Meanwhile, Drake couldn’t allow himself to say anything that even hinted at how hopeless he rated their chances. He couldn’t let his facial expression betray his doubts. In his innermost depths, he didn’t believe they were going to last an hour against this thing, not once the full onslaught started. But until they went down – and they’d go down fighting – he would try to carry out his duties to the utmost of his abilities, and to his last pulse of strength.
And the foremost of those duties was to lead.
With that thought, he reached the level of the Flag Bridge and reached for the hatch handle. But it opened up from the other side first. From behind it appeared Lieutenant Campbell, the current watch commander in their Combat Information Center (CIC), who purposefully strode out with a sheaf of papers under one arm. But when she saw Drake, she stopped in her tracks, and stopped him in his with a sharp look.
“‘Congratulations on your escape from the frying pan?’ Jesus, Commander, that’s what you said to the expeditionary force? Why’d you have to tell them that?”
Drake exhaled. Nothing was private on board a US Navy ship, and everything got recycled into scuttlebutt. Oh, well, screw it, he thought. No point in anything but honesty this late in the day. “For one thing, it’s the truth. For another, if you can’t maintain a little humor in the face of impending d
oom, then the ZA’s hardly worth fighting – is it?”
“Fair point,” the LT said, as Drake tried to push tiredly around her. “Though the doom might be a bit less impending if we had those tac-nukes on the Washington, wouldn’t it?”
Drake paused and looked up at her. “Sure would,” he said unhelpfully, trying to sidestep her and preparing to apply a forearm shove if necessary.
It was common knowledge among the boat’s senior officers that their escort sub, the nuclear-powered Virginia-class USS Washington, had not crossed the Atlantic with the carrier and the destroyer, and was still back somewhere near Portsmouth in Britain. In part this was because, at 25 knots, she had only 60% of the top speed of the two surface vessels – and speed was critical.
But the real reason was that she was the world’s only other nuclear-powered vessel, and thus had unlimited range and endurance – and CentCom has insisted on keeping her in reserve, in case this mission were to fail. On the other hand, no one – other than Drake himself – could know the sub’s current location for sure. Because it was an ironclad rule of fleet operational security (OPSEC) that only the commander of the strike group actually knew the location of the nuclear sub at any given time.
And Drake sure as hell wasn’t telling the LT now. Nor was he commenting on the presence or absence of those Tomahawk cruise missiles, the ones with the tactical nuclear warheads, which were among the Washington’s payload of 40 missiles and torpedoes.
Finally, he head-faked left, then jogged right, and slipped around her. She turned and watched his back as he crossed the Flag Bridge, head down, finally reaching the hatch of his private room at the rear. At last – just a few minutes of solitude and silence. So he could recharge. And prepare himself for what lay ahead.
But it wasn’t meant to be. As he opened the hatch, he heard someone calling his name, and looked behind him to see a man actually leaping across the room. It was Captain Martin – the Brit from the Royal Corps of Engineers, and the Kennedy’s acting Chief Engineer.
“Commander,” Martin panted as he trotted up. “I need you.”
Drake blinked his eyes slowly. “Everybody needs me, Captain Martin.”
“No,” Martin said. “I need you – RIGHT NOW.” Something about his expression said this was a man who ought to be listened to.
And who had absolutely no plans to go away until he was.
The Running Dead
Pacific Avenue, Virginia Beach
The weather was turning on them now. When Wesley and his team, along with the survivors, had made their escape from the naval station, the sky had been bright and blue, but that had begun to change at an unnerving rate. The skies darkened and the rain blew in. At first it was no more than a sea mist, drifting across the road and covering the coast-facing windows of the truck, but five minutes later a light rain had begun and the rumbling of thunder and lightning troubled the sky to the northeast.
It didn’t seem to Wesley to bode well, as he slowed the truck to a near crawl, angled off the main street and down onto the access road. The truck was difficult enough to maneuver with so many people on board, but now he had to deal with buffeting wind and falling rain. The damn wipers were missing, and every time he had to swerve into the wind he was blinded, the front screen becoming a deluge of running water. As the truck screeched to a halt, he poked his head out the window, squinted, and tried to see what was waiting for them along the half-mile stretch of the bridge. In fact it was jammed, backed up with vehicles all the way across the sea inlet. But he hoped that they wouldn’t have to cross the bridge, that they would see some boats down on the lake on this side of the water.
“Can you see anything?” he asked, as the brakes of the truck squeaked in protest.
“I’m looking,” said Burns, and there followed a pause of about ten seconds that seemed an age, as Wesley looked into the rear-view mirror and back down the road at the fast-approaching rabble of runners. He estimated two minutes, tops, was all they had. Also understanding this, Derwin, still wincing from his injury, holstered his handgun, painfully hefted his assault rifle, leaned out the window, and took aim back down the street.
“Shit,” said Burns, eventually. “I see one boat trashed and half submerged, but nothing intact. There are some on the other side, though.”
Damn, and damn, thought Wesley, as he put the truck into reverse and took them back up the access road. Quickly shifting gears, he saw the dark shapes in the mirror getting ever closer, and hit the pedal again. The truck jumped forward and began rolling toward the bridge. A hundred yards ahead at the foot of it was where the vehicle jam started, and Wesley could see cars, trucks, even an eighteen-wheeler, just sitting there blocking the way.
The bridge was two lanes wide, with a gap in the center that seemed to be clear. It ran through the middle of the vehicles and ended about fifty yards in, where a driver must have thought it clever to try to force his way through the middle and gotten stuck. The access lane, as thin as it was, was the only way open, and Wesley aimed the truck at it as they sped up. But the bridge was arched, and beyond halfway he couldn’t see whether any of the other lanes were clear or not. They would just have to hope that they were.
“Wesley,” said Derwin. “Get a move on or I’m going to have to open up on these things.”
They rolled past the first of the abandoned vehicles – cars, vans, and even an ice-cream truck were bumper to bumper, their windows smashed out and many of the doors hanging open. The truck rocked as it drove over a pile of debris, and Wesley heard cracking noises over the whining of the engine, but he didn’t have time to think about it as he focused on the way ahead.
There was a way around the vehicle that blocked the center lane, and they had made it nearly halfway across when a Winnebago came into view. How the thing had been turned on its side was a mystery, but the fact that it blocked the way was perfectly clear. It was crumpled up against the side of the bridge and wedged in tight by a semi cab. Wesley touched the brakes and was about to stop when a gap appeared on the right, one big enough to— he swerved into it, cringing at the shriek of tormented metal and cries of alarm from behind him.
“Sorry!” he shouted. “Just hold on!”
Something clanged down onto the blacktop, probably a side panel, but he didn’t have time to worry about it as he swerved again, back into the middle of the bridge and the gap between the two rows of vehicles. They were beyond the stuck RV, thankfully, and ahead of them the way was clear for another fifty yards.
But then it ended, abruptly, with the looming shape of an overturned eighteen-wheeler, and Wesley knew now why the bridge was backed up all the way to the other side.
He put his foot down, surging them forward at the overturned semi, and then hit the brakes, stopping them just yards away. He was about to shout at the others to abandon the truck, but as he opened his door he could already see Browning leaping out and taking up a position behind them, as the rest of the passengers jumped down onto the bridge. One of the women lowered a child, a wide-eyed young girl no older than five, into the arms of another.
“Are we not riding in the truck no more?” asked the girl.
“No, we have to walk now,” answered the woman.
“We gotta run!” shouted Burns, as he leapt down from behind the driver’s cab, “or we will never beat those bastards to the boats.”
There was no messing around or hesitation – ten seconds after Wesley stopped the truck, the group was pounding shoe leather across the steel grating of the bridge. They ran around the side, heading through a gap that only allowed them through in single file, and then they were onto open ground. The bridge sloped away into a flat, open street that stretched into the distance. But that wasn’t where they were going.
To their right, over a low fence, was a grass verge with a few sparse and unhealthy trees leading down to the docks, and as they rushed through and onto the walkway beside the lake, Wesley’s heart jumped in his chest. He almost stopped dead, fear trying to grip an
d pull him back, but everyone was running forward, their goal a pair of white yachts moored 200 yards down the pier. Behind him, he heard Derwin gasp, and knew that he had seen the same thing. How everyone else could be ignoring it was beyond him, but then maybe the survivor group were used to horrors on this scale.
Across the lake, and barely 300 yards away, the writhing mass of the storm had finally caught up with them. The only thing keeping them from being overrun and devoured was the expanse of water between them and it. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dark, kicking, clawing shapes spilled around the buildings that lined the waterfront. Bodies fell over one another and stumbled into the inlet, falling into the depths to be crushed by others as the storm hit the opposite side of the lake and started pouring into it there. The noise was both overpowering and indistinct, tens of thousands of screams and moans all rolled into one to make a rumbling, soul-scraping, voiceless static.
Wesley caught up with Burns, the leader of the survivors.
“How are you going to get the boat moving?” he shouted, through gasps for air. “The engine battery will be dead by now, won't it?”
“We’ve got a battery, with a lot of juice still in it,” shouted Burns. “And we’ve got fuel. And that boat is a high-priced bastard – just what I was hoping to find. It’ll start up, trust me. You just concentrate on keeping the dead off. And keep your fingers crossed.”
Gunfire erupted behind him, and Wesley turned and raised his handgun, seeing Derwin, Melvin, and Browning backing toward him and firing back down the walkway. The runners were on them now. Dozens rushed through the copse of trees and onto the path, relentless in their urge to catch their prey. They were fifty yards away now and closing, and they didn’t get tired. Wesley glanced back to the survivors, who were running flat out toward the boats and not looking back. Out beyond the trees, the bridge was being overrun, dark shapes sluicing between abandoned vehicles, shoving one another aside in their individual desperate attempts to catch the fleeing humans.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 7