Omega Days (Book 4): Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  She also created a pair of shooting platforms on the station’s lawn, parking a pair of dump trucks on the grass forty yards apart, and posting round-the-clock, rotating sentries armed with M14s up in the beds. Whiskey-Deltas that slipped past her skirmishers were engaged from there. Refugee work parties collected the bodies, dragged them out to a breakwater, and burned them.

  “I’m concerned,” Amy told her captain. “The shooting incidents are increasing because the numbers of the dead seem to be climbing, and sometimes it’s too much for the people on the ground.” So far her team of civilians had avoided being bitten, but there were some close calls.

  “By now the RV park is probably empty,” Amy said, “but I think they’re starting to come from those hotel and seaside condo complexes farther south. I’d like to lead a clearing operation.”

  Liz denied the request. There simply wasn’t enough manpower or ammunition, the same reasons the scavenging parties couldn’t go exploring much beyond the immediate marina areas. A residential area to the east could provide them with much-needed supplies, and the town itself on the other side of the river would be a real boon, but—at least for now, she conceded—they couldn’t risk the losses.

  Still, there were three losses in as many weeks. Fortunately, to Liz’s thinking, only one had been a coastie while the other two were refugees on work details. Those deaths weren’t as significant as trained crew. Including the two surviving men from Klondike, and the pair of airmen they had picked up in Port Angeles, Joshua James was down to a total of eighteen serving Coast Guardsmen.

  • • •

  Charlie knocked at his sister’s door, and she let him in. He was wearing a black knit watch cap and a dark gray fleece pullover under his combat vest. In addition to the grooming standard, Liz had loosened the uniform regs, in part to conserve water used for laundry, but also to boost crew morale. The chief wore his sidearm as well as a machete-like blade he’d found on a fishing boat, and his M4 was slung on his back. He brought coffee.

  Liz smiled in appreciation and took the cup, waving him into a chair. She was able to drink without wincing now, the knife wound to her face less painful and healing in a ragged pink scar, just as Castellano said it would. This had become a routine for them, some quiet time in her quarters late in the evening before third watch began. She asked the same question she did every night.

  “How’s the crew?” Since their time at sea, her brother had changed, making a real effort to win over the crew, eliminating the derogatory sea slang from his vocabulary (terms such as deck ape and bilge rat) and treating the young men and women as human beings. As a result, and as the only chief on board now, he had become something of a father figure and big brother seeing to their needs, keeping them positive, encouraging them when they were low. He now had both the respect and pulse of the crew, and that was important to any captain.

  Chick eased into a chair. “They’re holding it together. Keeping busy helps, and so do regular meals. Having the civvies handle some of the workload is a big relief. Getting the chance to kill a Whiskey-Delta really helps some of them, helps with their anger and fear.”

  She nodded. “Any problems?”

  He gave a shrug. “Homesickness. Questions about their families, worry about being infected. Nothing too serious; I’m dealing with it. No one is speaking against you.”

  “And my officers?” Liz knew Charlie watched and listened and would give her the straight story, a very valuable asset.

  “The girl is too busy to gripe. She’s trying really hard, and she listens when I talk to her.” In the Coast Guard, it was the chiefs who typically trained and looked after junior officers. “She’ll be okay. Lt. Riggs was a little bent out of shape when you wouldn’t let him recon the airport down south, but he’s over it. It would be great to get him a helicopter.”

  “And I’d love to get him one. It would change everything for us,” Liz said.

  “Otherwise he’s a fair leader and a good watch-stander,” said Charlie. “He’s just itching to fly.”

  The captain nodded. She hadn’t been speaking lightly. A working helicopter would open up all sorts of doors: improved recon, extended scavenging efforts, and the ability to send out longer ground patrols that could depend on air support and medevac if needed.

  “Hey, I got you something today,” Charlie said, and pulled a black square of folded cloth from a pouch on his combat harness. “I found it on that booze cruise schooner in the marina.” He opened it for her to see.

  She looked at it and shook her head. “You have a sick sense of humor, Chick.”

  He laughed and tucked it away.

  She leaned back in the chair and sipped her coffee. “How are you holding up?”

  The patented Charlie Kidd grin appeared. “Never better.”

  He looked it too, but that hadn’t always been the case. Charlie had forever been rough around the edges, and he’d had his share of problems. In school there had been truancy, underage drinking, and fighting. Lots of fighting. He didn’t get along well with other kids, and not being as large as most of them, he was often picked on. Charlie compensated by going on the offensive, taking on boys much bigger than he was and taking his share of beatings in the process. In time, when kids realized the small but scrappy boy wasn’t afraid to fight back—sometimes by ambush in a school hallway followed by a ruthless pummeling—they left him alone. In high school Charlie discovered the weight room, put on mass and muscle, and became a real threat that people avoided.

  He used his new size to settle old grudges, and was expelled several times. Teachers began to label him a bad kid.

  Liz’s mother and father, both professionals working in Boston, grew increasingly worried that their son was headed down a road that ended in either prison or self-destruction. It was Liz who persuaded Charlie, after he’d kicked around aimlessly after high school for a few years, to join the Coast Guard, where he would be provided with much-needed focus and discipline. Charlie consented and quickly began to thrive in the structured world of the military.

  He faced obstacles and setbacks, however. Learning to play well with others didn’t come easily to him, and there was still the occasional fight. These were almost always off-duty with alcohol involved, but he’d once gotten into a confrontation aboard ship with a larger man who outranked him, but who said the wrong thing to Charlie.

  I said step lively, short stuff. And what the hell are you smiling about?

  The senior man ended up with four missing teeth and Chick landed in the brig, minus one stripe.

  Surprisingly, Charlie had come back from the incident and worked to improve himself, changing his attitude and committing to a career in the service. Liz was proud of him for that. A lot of people would have used the setback as an excuse for self-pity, choosing failure over hard work, but not him. He was still rough-around-the-edges Charlie, and he still struggled with relationships. He had never had a woman in his life who was more than a fling, although recently Liz had noticed he was spending time with a refugee named Ava, and in his case she looked the other way regarding fraternization. He had made something of himself, rising to the rank of senior chief. A comfortable retirement would have been in his future.

  A retirement where he could go out on his boat and murder drug traffickers. She tried to push that aside.

  Despite his many improvements, Liz knew her brother better than anyone, and she could tell that inside, he hadn’t changed all that much from the little boy always on the alert for attack, prepared to meet it with a disproportionate level of violence. It seemed that something was always simmering just beneath Charlie’s surface, a darkness behind those smiling eyes.

  Liz knew where it came from.

  “I finally heard that one of the civvies you shot was a teacher,” Liz said, her voice soft as she watched him.

  Chick looked right back at her. “I heard that too.”

  • • •

  Mom and Dad are getting sick of this, Chick,” Liz said. They were
in her 1980 sky-blue Mustang, two years old now but new to her. All her friends thought it was cool that she had a car at sixteen, and Liz was in love with the sleek, powerful machine. And maybe in love with Scott Darby too, a boy one year older than her, though she was less sure of that. Eight-year-old Charlie rode in the Mustang’s passenger seat.

  “It’s bad enough you get held for detention almost every day,” she continued, “but now Saturdays too?” She lit a cigarette. Mom and Dad didn’t know she smoked, but she wasn’t worried about lighting up in front of her brother. If there was one thing the little turd did well, it was keeping his mouth shut.

  Like he was doing right now. Charlie rode in silence, hands clasped in his lap, looking at his Keds.

  Liz held the cigarette below the door as they stopped at a traffic light. Lexington, Massachusetts, wasn’t that big a town, and she didn’t want someone who might know her mother to see her smoking and make a phone call.

  “Why can’t you just be normal?” Liz demanded.

  Charlie said nothing.

  Liz went to the public high school, but Charlie was still in elementary school, and the teachers didn’t care for her little brother’s foul language, lackluster schoolwork, and playground scuffles. He was held after class as punishment all the time now, and it was Liz who had to break away from whatever she was doing—as if she were being punished for having a life!—to collect him at the end of the day. Mr. Drummond, the athletics coach, finally announced that what the boy needed was the disciplines of sports and physical exercise, and he took on Charlie’s correction personally, forcing him into four hours of Saturday detention every week.

  And Liz was expected to drop him off and pick him up. It was embarrassing. This was the fourth Saturday in a row, and it wasn’t fair. Why should she suffer because Chick was a little snot bag?

  “I’ve had it too,” she said, flicking her butt out the window a full block before they reached the school. “You better cut the shit, Chickie.”

  He said nothing as the Mustang rumbled to a stop at the side door to the elementary school, and made no move to reach for the door handle.

  “Well? Get out.”

  Charlie looked at her, and when he did there were tears in his eyes. “Don’t make me go, Sis,” he said, his clasped hands coming up. “Please just take me home.”

  “What are you doing, you little creep?” she said. “Mom and Dad will beat your ass. This wouldn’t be happening if you didn’t act like—”

  The boy seized her arm in both hands, tears running down his cheeks. “Please.”

  Liz pulled her arm free. “Why?”

  Chick just shook his head.

  “Fine.” She reached across him and opened his door. “Get out right now. And you better be here when I come back at three o’clock.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, then climbed out of the car. Liz watched the eight-year-old walk slowly toward the school, his head down as he wiped at his eyes. Mr. Drummond stood in the doorway smiling, and waved to Liz as she drove away.

  • • •

  She hadn’t learned about what had been happening until many years later, right after Charlie graduated from his Coast Guard basic training in New Jersey. Liz, a young officer by then, had gone to the ceremony dressed in her whites, glowing with pride for her little brother and the service branch they now both shared. Their parents had passed several years earlier, and Liz was all Charlie had left.

  In a quiet moment under a tree on base, Charlie finally told her about Mr. Drummond, and in a voice devoid of emotion he described what the man had done. There had been no sexual molestation, he assured her, but the physical abuse was something else entirely. Drummond made him run endless basketball drills, and when he was too slow or lost his grip on the ball, he was forced to drop his gym shorts while the man beat his bare buttocks with a leather belt. Drummond assured him that if he told anyone, Charlie would not be believed, and then Drummond would creep into his bedroom one night and strangle him. Sometimes Charlie was forced to drink glasses of water until he could no longer swallow, then had to stand on the court’s foul line until he peed himself.

  “He did other things,” Charlie had said. “All in the name of discipline. All of it hurt. And sometimes he caught small animals, pets mostly, and made me watch while he killed them in the gymnasium basement.” He didn’t add that eventually he was made to do the killing. Charlie went on to describe a menu of abusive acts perpetrated by the man. After that moment in his sister’s car, right up until now, Charlie had never spoken of it. He endured.

  Liz felt like she might be sick, cried, and held her brother before becoming angry and demanding justice. All that passed quickly as guilt hit her like a bullet.

  “You tried to tell me, Chick,” she had cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  Charlie didn’t know why he waited until what should have been a happy moment to break the news. He didn’t blame her, but he also never said as much, and wasn’t able to explain that, either. He told his sister she was to do nothing, and had never spoken of it again, to her or anyone. Mr. Drummond was never revealed for what he was, and if the school knew, they covered it up quietly.

  Now, as Charlie Kidd sat drinking coffee across from his sister, he examined her lean face, the lines around her eyes, and realized how very long ago that had been. He waited to see if she would press the issue about the man he’d killed in the cannery. The fact that he’d been a teacher was purely coincidental, and Charlie had been more bothered by the fact that the man was allowing a child to be held like cattle for a future meal. Not much, however, for Charlie Kidd knew he was no crusader. It had been more for the sport.

  Liz said nothing more. Charlie knew his sister continued to carry the guilt for what had happened, that she had tried so hard in the years following to look after him. Though it might have helped her feel better, Charlie never felt the need to talk to her about it. He supposed it was too painful. He had, however, found an outlet for that pain.

  Nearly a dozen murders in twenty-one years. Henry Blake was nothing, merely the latest.

  The Coast Guard had taken him to ports all across America and the Caribbean, and he’d always waited until the need was truly upon him before taking a nocturnal trip off the ship to find someone worth killing. They were usually men, though two had been women. He didn’t act impulsively, careful to cover his tracks. There was nothing sexual about it, no ritualism or bloody messages. And he never spoke to his victims, gave no explanations as they watched him screw a silencer onto the end of his pistol, some pleading, others praying.

  It was a release, and it was fun. The words serial killer never entered his thoughts.

  He would never talk about that part of his life with his big sister, either.

  • • •

  As October drew to a close, Liz faced a steadily growing list of problems. Fresh water remained a constant issue, and despite the supplies from the cannery, feeding more than fifty people every day was becoming a real drain on their resources. The scavenging parties were forced to travel farther beyond the ship’s sphere of control. One such run resulted in two civilians being killed outright, and the fish and game warden returning freshly bitten.

  Charlie quietly took care of him that very night.

  Liz decided that the extended raids must have stirred up the dead, because the rifle positions at Amy’s two defensive dump trucks fired much more regularly as the dead drifted in, costing precious ammo. They were starting to slip past at night too, and one Whiskey-Delta even got into the Coast Guard station itself and killed a twelve-year-old girl. Generator-powered lights were set up on the lawn, allowing the sentries to spot and stop the dead as they came out of the night, but generators used fuel. More resources being depleted.

  The Guardian Ethos of the Coast Guard was a code by which Liz had lived her entire adult life. Part of it stated, I serve the citizens of the United States. I will protect them. I will defend them. I will save them. I am their shield. But Elizabeth was
finding it increasingly difficult to view these refugees—especially those who appeared to make little in the way of contribution—as the people she was supposed to be protecting. More and more they felt like a burden, and their losses no longer mattered to her beyond the resulting change in logistics.

  In the span of two days there was an incident of rape in the Coast Guard station’s barracks and an attempted theft of weapons and supplies as a man tried to escape into the night. Both offenders were civilian refugees.

  Liz had them both hanged, not even bothering to attend. Amy Liggett was ordered to preside over the executions.

  Charlie Kidd handled the rope.

  NINETEEN

  January 12—Nimitz

  Rosa was cold, and the thin scrubs, now soaked to the waist, did little to protect her. Her sneakers slid across a metal deck two feet below the surface of waters that were only a few degrees north of freezing, and her teeth chattered behind clenched jaws. Rosa’s medical knowledge told her that hypothermia wouldn’t be far off if she didn’t find a way to get out of this water and warm up.

  But there was no time.

  Michael was down here somewhere, and he would be cold too. Would he be smart enough—would he be able—to get himself out of the water? A baritone gurgle came from the darkness somewhere ahead, and she knew that Nimitz was not only taking on water but also moving. She felt the motion in her body, a subtle tremble and the vaguest of rocking. When she put her light on the corridor she saw the surface canted slightly to the left, in line with the ship’s list, and as the ruptured hull took on more of the bay, every space in that direction would flood more quickly than those to starboard. When she reached an intersection, she headed to the right. Hopefully Michael would have done the same.