Omega Days (Book 4): Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  U.S. aircraft carriers were mighty things, but it was the ship’s aircraft that allowed the carrier to visit earth-shaking destruction on an enemy, as they both served as offensive weapons and provided for the ship’s defense. Without them, the ship was extremely vulnerable, relying on an entire battle group of screening ships including destroyers, guided missile cruisers, frigates, and subs to protect it from attack long before a threat could reach striking distance.

  Nimitz, like all supercarriers, had minimal defenses of its own: a few Phalanx close-in weapon systems with Gatling-gun-style barrels to chop inbound missiles out of the air, and several batteries of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to shoot down aircraft. Neither system could protect the carrier from a surface threat. It had no gun batteries, only the fifty-cals to guard against small craft and suicide bombers in speed boats. If Charlie and his team could secure the catwalks where those guns would be mounted, the carrier would be helpless when the second boarding party came at them.

  Chick was about to order two of his group to stay and watch the choppers while he and the others headed up to the catwalks when another flash of movement appeared down near the helicopters and he spotted a man running. Charlie saw the muscular upper body, the short haircut, and the brown face with its cruel scar.

  The priest!

  Charlie opened up with the M14 at once, the powerful cracks ringing though the hangar. Bullets sparked off metal and the priest suddenly stopped and dodged, throwing himself behind the nose of a Navy Seahawk. The auxiliary deputy sent three-round bursts into the bird, peppering its thin skin with holes.

  From beneath the helicopter’s fuselage came the flash of shotgun fire, the air around Charlie and his pirates buzzing with angry hornets, a nearby wooden crate splintering. They went for cover.

  “I’ll watch the front,” Charlie yelled at the deputy. “You watch the tail. Don’t let him out.”

  The boy knelt at the right end of the crates and sighted on the rear of the helicopter while Charlie targeted the nose. The shotgun crashed from under the chopper’s belly, splintering the crate again.

  “The rest of you get to the catwalks like we planned,” Charlie said to the others, then looked at Ava. “You know what to do.” He aimed back at the helicopter and fired three heavy-caliber bullets at the place where he’d seen the shotgun flash. “This fucker is mine.”

  You just hide there, Father, Charlie thought, searching for movement. I can afford to be patient.

  • • •

  Adventure Galley

  Aboard the cutter, now renamed by the captain after her infamous ancestor’s ship, Elizabeth Kidd stood in the combat center looking over her operations specialist’s shoulder. She had admitted to herself that her team had stopped being Coast Guard a long time ago, and might as well call the ship what it was. On a video screen, one of the cutter’s exterior infrared cameras was zoomed in on the drifting aircraft carrier, showing her images in varying shades of green. It was the same system they’d used to surveil the vessel across the long distance of the bay, from their position of concealment behind the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge.

  The cutter had slipped into the San Francisco Bay five nights ago, invisible as it hugged the northern coastline and dropped anchor behind the bridge. Then they had watched, and planned and trained. By the time Liz decided to strike, her boarders were eager and pep talks sprinkled with rhetoric about taking what was rightfully theirs urged them on. For Liz’s part, the time spent watching gave her a good idea of just how thin the crew aboard Nimitz was, as well as the comfortable, unsuspecting patterns into which they’d fallen. She’d been pleased when the Black Hawk lifted off the deck yesterday without any torpedoes aboard and hadn’t returned.

  The appearance of the Navy helicopter was unexpected, but the way it flew carelessly into their air defense envelope told her it was accidental; her ship remained undetected. Shooting it down was an easy decision and left the carrier vulnerable. One bird was down and the other missing. How many pilots could they have?

  On the bridge two decks above, Mr. Waite was now conning the ship in a slow, distant circle around the crippled aircraft carrier, permitting Liz to use the exterior camera to get a view of her prize from all angles. Since her warning shot, there had been no sign that the occupants were mustering on deck as ordered. This wasn’t particularly surprising; they were mostly civilians as far as she’d seen, disorganized refugees who’d lucked into an island fortress. That fact made her angry, considering how hard she’d fought—and what she’d lost—just to reach a point where her people were barely holding on. She’d used this in her speeches to the crew as well.

  “Why should they have it so easy when you’ve had it so hard? What did they do to deserve such a sanctuary?” It worked, and her crew was now bloodthirsty.

  No, the carrier’s occupants hadn’t complied, and Liz didn’t expect they would. She’d given Chick six hours to create as much chaos and destruction as possible before sending in the second team—and now that Nimitz had passed under the Bay Bridge, the walking dead were aboard as well. Even if they could coordinate a surrender, the flight deck wasn’t an inviting place to assemble.

  Liz had no intention of firing on the carrier again unless there was no alternative. She wanted it intact, and the shot across the bow was a bluff. That, combined with the terror of Charlie Kidd belowdecks, would soften them up nicely for the second wave.

  Lieutenant Riggs would command the motorized lifeboat they’d towed here with them, leading a group of the remaining ten civilians Charlie had recruited and most of her Coast Guard crew. Their numbers would easily overwhelm whoever remained aboard after her brother ripped through them. Although Riggs was a pilot and not a true seaman, he accepted the assignment eagerly. He’d also welcomed the promotion to executive officer, after Ensign Liggett put on that mutinous display as they left Brookings, Oregon.

  Liz would hang the girl at her leisure.

  • • •

  Amy had lost track of time. Was it possible she’d been locked in this maintenance closet for a week? She thought it was. The captain had ordered the room’s lightbulb removed, so the only illumination came from the narrow crack at the base of the door. Once a day the door opened about six inches (prevented from opening further by someone’s boot braced against the other side—she’d tested it) for a handful of crackers to be tossed inside, along with a plastic bottle of water. She didn’t get fresh water until she’d handed out the empty. Twice, a bowl of half-eaten cat food was pushed inside. After resisting for a day, Amy gave in and devoured it. The stuff tasted as bad as it smelled, and she decided that cats probably didn’t care, considering they licked their own rear ends. Amy had a bucket for a toilet, and it was never emptied. The closet was foul. She was hungry, dirtier than she could ever remember, and her bones and muscles ached from sleeping on the cold steel deck.

  Footsteps or voices would pass in the corridor outside, but no one stopped to speak to her. When she pounded on the door or yelled, she was ignored.

  The young woman had no illusions that anything awaited her other than the rope, but she decided she wouldn’t have done anything differently. Well, instead of simply yelling and demanding the captain turn back for the Brookings refugees, she could have taken the bridge at gunpoint.

  Here in the dark she could see their faces clearly, the families struggling to survive, looking at Amy with trust even as she burdened them with more and more of the captain’s restrictions. She saw the children, and for days their images brought tears. She was all cried out now, though.

  They’re all dead. All of them, even the kids. They’d been left with no way to defend themselves against the oncoming horde, and there was nowhere to run. I own that. I should have seen what that bitch was planning. Amy would have liked to blame it on the fact that she was young and inexperienced, that she was only following orders. How convenient it would be to tell herself she’d been seduced by all the lofty concepts she’d learned about command and duty and obedi
ence to those appointed above her. And how simple to rationalize that she’d been overwhelmed by her captain’s reputation and charisma.

  Right. Lie to yourself the way you lied to those people. Will that save you from the rope? She knew it wouldn’t, but she no longer cared about being hanged on deck while the crew looked on. Amy decided she deserved punishment, for she’d betrayed those people just as assuredly as the madwoman commanding this ship.

  When she heard the fifty-seven-millimeter gunfire on the foredeck, felt the dull vibration in the steel beneath her, Amy knew that Elizabeth Kidd was now inflicting her terror on yet another group of refugees. It made the young woman clench her teeth until her jaws ached and make fists so tight the nails left marks in her palms.

  No amount of forgiveness could undo the role she’d played in Brookings, she knew that. As she sat alone in the dark, awaiting her fate, she wondered if she might find some small measure of absolution. Not for the defenseless people she’d left to their fates, but for herself.

  TWENTY-NINE

  January 12—Richmond

  A sound awoke Evan, and at first he thought it was because the rain had stopped. He no longer heard the steady patter in his water-collecting bowl, so he crawled through the dark on hands and knees out to the balcony, where indeed the rain was no longer falling. Evan cupped his working hand into the bowl and took several small drinks. He wished for pain relievers to go with the water; the fractured wrist was aching. What time was it? Ten? Eleven? He hadn’t put on his watch today.

  The sound came again and he froze. Not the rain. It was a thump, and it came from inside the house somewhere. A chill ran across his skin as Evan realized he had a visitor, probably the dead kind.

  A look outside revealed little. Although the rain had stopped, it was still overcast, and darkness blanketed the empty neighborhood. He strained to see down onto the burned lawn, the driveway, the street beyond. If anything was moving down there, he couldn’t tell.

  Because it’s already inside.

  Evan gathered his few possessions and tucked them into the pockets of his survival vest, then considered: knife or pistol? He would prefer to engage at a distance, but it was even darker inside the multilevel concrete house, and he couldn’t be sure he would hit the mark. Then there was the sound, and what that would attract. Reluctantly, he holstered the Sig Calvin had given him last summer and pulled the survival knife.

  A scraping noise floated through the house, and Evan crept to the bedroom doorway, holding his breath and listening. Another scraping, followed by the scuff of a footstep. Coming up the stairs. But which floor? The gutted house was an echo factory, making it difficult to judge the distance and location of sounds.

  How many in the house? How many already on this floor? He could picture them, burned corpses standing in the shadows with clicking teeth, sensing for movement. He imagined the hallway outside his room filled with them, just waiting for him to step out so they could rush him with claws and jaws open, incinerated nightmares screeching and—

  Stop that shit! His writer’s imagination was trying to unhorse him. But now the nightmares were real, weren’t they? Evan clenched his teeth and stepped into the hall, the survival knife raised and ready to plunge into a blackened head. The hallway was empty.

  The sound of something rough sliding against a concrete wall came from the darkness ahead. Evan wished for one of those pistol attachments that permitted a small flashlight to be snapped in place under the barrel, but he had seen no need for one while he was choosing his equipment. He was a pilot, there were no zombies in the sky, and because of his rare and newly acquired skill, he was not permitted to go into the unsecured areas of the carrier with the hunting parties. He supposed he’d never considered actually surviving a crash, and he regretted the decision now.

  A mournful, broken wail came from the darkness, closer than he expected, a cracking sound that reverberated through the house and gave him another chill. It was answered a moment later by a chorus of similar cries coming from beyond the balcony.

  They’re on the lawn too. Are they communicating? Jesus, they don’t do that!

  Evan forced his imagination into neutral. Why he’d never tried writing fiction was beyond him. Okay, less storyteller, more Vladimir.

  That thought propelled him down the hallway, knife pointed ahead of him now. He remembered a landing that overlooked switchback stairs from his daytime tour of the house, and a hallway that continued on toward the bedroom where he’d found the remains of the murder-suicide. Evan stopped at the edge of the landing and looked over the solid banister.

  It took a moment to focus, for his eyes to distinguish the grays from the blacks. Where blue-tinted windows once climbed the face of the house at the central staircase were now only empty frames, and what outside light there was resolved the grays into walls and stairs. A darker shape, black against the gray, was past the turn at the switchback and halfway up the stairs to Evan’s level. It was one of the burned things, and as it climbed, its right shoulder scraped against the wall, leaving a sooty smear on the concrete.

  Evan risked a look down and saw no others but wasn’t reassured. There could be more on the floor below him, just out of sight. Most certainly would be more.

  A dry croak from below confirmed his fear.

  The thing on the stairs let out another parched wail and scraped the wall again, nearly at the top. More Vladimir. Evan waited until it set a foot on the uppermost hallway floor, then stepped in and swung the survival knife overhand, driving the blade into its forehead. There was a cracking sound, and the charcoal orb split in two, spilling cold wet sludge onto his knife hand as the body collapsed. It rolled down to the switchback, a brittle arm snapping off in the process.

  A groan from below came again, but this time as a pair.

  Evan held back a cry of disgust as he wiped the sticky hand violently on the leg of his flight suit. He wanted to run, forced himself to stand still. How far would he get in the dark? The street could be full of them, and they didn’t need light in order to find him.

  Should he figure out a way up to the roof, use one of his two flares? He’d seen no stairs leading up from this level, and anyone wanting to get onto the house’s roof would need a ladder. Perfect! He would be safe up there; the dead couldn’t climb.

  The throbbing in his left wrist reminded him that neither could he, not one-handed.

  Shit. What was he going to do, stand here all night and take each one as it reached the top of the stairs? And then what? Morning would be no different. And what would happen the one time he missed, or when his arm grew too tired to swing?

  Evan saw another black figure climbing toward the switchback below, followed closely by a second. Their moans came out as a dry wheeze, and more scrapes and thumping could be heard from somewhere downstairs.

  What would Vladimir do?

  He’d tell you you’re fucked, Evanovich.

  Taking a deep breath, Evan readied himself to meet the next creature.

  • • •

  January 12—San Francisco Bay

  South of Richmond, USS Nimitz was drifting steadily into the centermost point of the East Bay, still on an oblique with its port side facing northeast. The Bay Bridge was a dark silhouette behind it.

  Stone handed a heavy belt of fifty-caliber ammunition to Chief Liebs, and the older man finished loading the left side of the twin-barreled heavy machine gun he and his younger partner had fitted into the gun mount on the port catwalk beneath the flight deck. They repeated the process for the right side of the weapon. The fifty’s position was approximately a third of the way up this side of the ship from the stern. They couldn’t mount any weapons farther back; when Nimitz rubbed the Bay Bridge’s massive concrete supports last summer, the collision had torn away not only a Phalanx gun system and a battery of surface-to-air missiles, but that stretch of catwalk as well. The walkway ended at a twist of steel and a ninety-foot drop not far from where the two men were working.

  “Th
at one’s ready,” said the chief, slapping the large weapon. “The next position is amidships, under the port side catapults.” He pointed forward.

  Stone nodded, then in a flat tone said, “Be careful,” pointing above and behind the chief. A broken corpse, its ribs jutting out of a narrow chest, was tangled in the flight deck’s safety netting over their heads, a system designed to prevent crewmen from being blown overboard by jet blast. The thing reached a twisted arm down through the netting, kicking with legs bent at odd angles, and gnashed its teeth. Dark liquid drooled from its mouth and fell to the catwalk.

  Chief Liebs shot it in the head with his M4, and the creature stopped moving. It continued to drip.

  “How many of those dropped on us when we went under the bridge, do you think?” said Stone.

  “No idea,” growled the chief. “Too many. Hopefully they’re too fucked up from the fall to be able to get around much. But then, hope is not a strategy.”

  “I’ve heard that before. Who said that?”

  The chief led them forward along the catwalk, careful to avoid the dripping fluid. “I’m not sure. Probably a Republican. The officers used to wear that phrase out on us.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yes it does,” said the older man.

  Liebs used the Hydra to call Xavier, wanting to inform him that the first fifty-cal was loaded and in position, and to report they had seen nothing of the mystery ship that fired on them. There was no answer on the radio. Liebs thought that maybe the priest and Calvin would be waiting for them at the next gun position, as discussed.

  Liebs was walking toward a short stairwell that led from the flight deck down to the catwalk when a corpse staggered down the stairs and crashed into the railing. It wore the remains of a business suit, and its neck was broken so that its head hung to the side. The rest of it was intact, and it lurched toward them with a growl.

  Liebs fired, dropping the dead businessman just as two others, a black woman and a teenage boy, both withered and drawn, stomped down the stairway behind it. Stone’s M4 came up and he dispatched those two. A rotting soldier in camouflage followed, its left arm and side crushed from the impact with the deck, creamy eyes glaring at them. Liebs took it out.