Vlad saw it happening and brought the Blackhawk into a low hover off to the left of the mob, while RJ poured fire into the shapes appearing out of the dusk. His bullets chopped into windshields, hoods, dead flesh and asphalt as he tried to keep the dead away from the line. Through the windscreen, Vlad saw a young officer waving his arms frantically as his men struggled to close the gates to the field.
“Call this in,” Vlad ordered, and Conroy started speaking to Lemoore.
The crowd surged against the closing gates, and farther back the line came apart as people realized their sanctuary was being cut off. They scattered and ran back into the neighborhood.
The dead pursued them.
“Weapon dry,” RJ shouted, unclipping from his safety line and scuttling across to the port weapon, clipping back in. Vlad twitched the cyclic, and the big bird slid sideways, over the heads of the crowd, putting RJ’s port gun in position. The gunner went to work, tracers flashing in undulating lines.
Out on the football field, truck engines fired and headlights came on as the big vehicles began to roll into a column, each packed beyond capacity with refugees. Many more tried to climb onto rear bumpers, hoods and grills, a few falling to be crushed beneath unstopping tires. The trucks grumbled towards the gates, where determined civilians who had succeeded in pushing their way in now scattered to avoid being run down. Guardsmen backed away from the perimeter, forming up around the moving vehicles.
“Groundhog-7, Ranch House.” The controller at NAS Lemoore spoke in Vladimir’s ear.
“Seven copies.”
“Groundhog, Echo transport is pulling out and will return to base in convoy.”
“Ranch House,” Vlad said, “we already reported that there are not enough trucks.”
“Affirmative, Groundhog. The rest will have to follow on foot. Echo Company will remain on the ground as security and walk them in. You will provide air cover as long as possible.”
Vlad shook his head. The trucks had a long run through Fresno and the surrounding open country before reaching the base. That would leave, what? About two hundred men? To protect a thousand civilians as they traveled on foot, through an overrun city, at night, with one ineffective Blackhawk above. Insanity. Vlad asked for Ranch House to repeat its orders, and got the same reply. He muttered something in Russian which his co-pilot and gunner couldn’t interpret but understood well enough.
“Confirm, Groundhog-7.”
“Da, da, Groundhog-7 confirms.” More Russian then, a hot string of it intended for the controller, who didn’t reply.
The trucks passed through the open gates and out into the parking lot, as people poured after them. Guardsmen paired up and stayed well out to the sides, as fearful of what the panicked crowd might do as they were of the dead, and within minutes were engaging targets with their rifles. The trucks picked up speed, and as their taillights vanished into the neighborhood, leaving the refugees on foot behind, a cry of despair went up which briefly drowned out the moans of the dead.
Vlad stayed overhead, RJ doing his best to chop away at stiff shapes limping towards the flow of people. Scattered riflemen fought desperate battles on all sides, quickly depleting their ammo as the huge group moved slowly, the dead coming at them from all sides, snatching victims and dragging them into the shadows.
An hour later RJ reported that he was completely dry, and the gauges up front showed the Blackhawk’s tank was soon to be in the same condition. Vlad informed Ranch House that he was bingo fuel, and base ordered him home. He did as ordered. He would not be allowed to refuel and go back out.
Back at Lemoore, Vlad sat on a crate near the main gates, chain smoking and waiting. Sixteen of the twenty trucks arrived four hours after leaving the football field, the drivers staring out their windshields with haunted eyes. The thousand refugees traveling on foot and the company of men assigned to guard them didn’t show up until two days later.
When they did, they were dull-eyed corpses rattling the fence.
SIXTEEN
San Francisco Bay
The great ship turned and put the vast Pacific to her stern, making her way towards the mouth of the bay. The helmsman didn’t need landmarks; the complex navigational gear knew where it was going, but they were overdue to meet up with a tug to guide them and a harbor pilot to safely take them into the bay. The absence of lights on the Golden Gate Bridge was an unusual sight. Fires burned there instead, lines of stopped cars lighting off one by one as gas tanks exploded. It was surreal, but few aboard were in a position to notice.
Lt. (jg) Doug Mosey stood with a radio mike in his hand, calling the hangar deck, the last place the XO had reported his position. There was no answer. Throughout the bridge, enlisted men and women tried to remain calm at their stations, and weren’t doing a very good job of it. They took their cues from the only officer on deck, a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant junior grade left to conn the greatest warship in the world, a job for which he had not yet passed qualifications.
“Lieutenant,” called a petty officer wearing a headset, “combat reported in the aft machine shops, and in starboard enlisted berthing.”
Mosey nodded and ran a hand over his dry lips. Combat had been reported in so many areas of the ship, and these were just the latest. Many sections did not respond to requests for situation reports, and hadn’t been heard from after their first, frantic calls. Several times the petty officer reported hearing gunfire in the background, indicating the presence of a security team, but most of the time there had just been screaming.
As the Nimitz approached the bridge, the navigation computer automatically relinquished control to manual conning, assuming, as it had been programmed to do, that a qualified harbor pilot who knew the bay was aboard. A young woman in khaki, a quartermaster 2 class or QM-2, reported the change. Mosey didn’t acknowledge her, so she repeated it. The officer was staring out the bridge windows. Tiny, flaming objects were falling from the Golden Gate and vanishing into the dark waters below.
“Lieutenant,” she said firmly, “we are on manual navigation and the helm is awaiting orders.”
“Slow to one-third,” he said. “Maintain present course.”
The bridge crew glanced at each other.
“Try CINCPAC again,” Mosey said. The last order from Commander-In-Chief-Pacific had been for Nimitz to steam into San Francisco Bay and drop anchor, in order to provide assistance to both civilian and military authorities attempting to control an unspecified “civil uprising.” There had been no further orders, and Nimitz had not been able to reach them since.
After a couple of minutes, “CINCPAC does not respond, Lieutenant.”
Of course. No one was responding. And now the ship which had been sent to provide protection was in need of rescue. Mosey looked out the bridge wing down onto the massive deck, lit by whatever landing and work lights they had been able to switch on. In the light and shadow he saw two men in purple refueling shirts (“Grapes,” they were called,) running past the number one catapult, a crowd of sailors limping after them.
Nimitz began to pass beneath the Golden Gate. A pair of flaming bodies dropped out of the sky and slammed onto the deck. After a moment, one of them began to drag itself away.
Coming back from a Far East tour, Nimitz had first stopped in Hawaii for two days before heading east, and then up the west coast. Her support ships dispersed, and the air group had flown off to their home port in Seattle, leaving the cavern-like hangar deck empty of aircraft except for the ship’s helos.
“Combat reported in the reactor spaces,” said the petty officer.
Mosey spun to look at him. “Did you hear any weapons fire?”
“Negative, sir.” The young man swallowed hard. “Only…only moaning.”
Midway up the California coast, things had gotten strange, and then quickly stepped over the line into madness. It had been those SEALs they brought on board. A lone helo carrying a team of special operators had flown in from Los Angeles, reporting casualties on board.
The eight men had been mixing it up in some kind of “civil disturbance” and were pretty badly torn up, having to be taken off the helo on litters and whisked down to the medical facilities. Mosey heard scuttlebutt about bite wounds of all things.
The attacks started in sick bay, and then spread. Within an hour what looked like a full blown mutiny was underway. A mutiny? On an aircraft carrier? Ridiculous. But in the midst of it the admiral had been killed, the captain went missing as was presumed dead, and the executive officer had taken command of the ship.
“Sir,” said the quartermaster, “the nav gear indicates we need to come right.” She was nervous. None of them had ever entered San Francisco’s waters before – there hadn’t been an active naval base here for many years – and this was unknown territory. The regs required that a knowledgeable harbor pilot take command of the bridge to guide them in. They should have remained off shore until one arrived.
More bodies were slamming onto the deck from the bridge above, several of them burning. Most started moving again after impact, and Mosey couldn’t take his eyes away from the sight. There was no sign of the grapes who had been chased a moment ago.
“Lieutenant, we need to reduce speed and come right.”
Mosey rubbed at his lips again, still staring out the window. The fighting was everywhere, seemingly in every compartment, and cries for help choked the intercom, frightened voices shouting over each other. The XO had put Mosey, the only officer around, in command and left to lead a large security detail in an attempt to retake the ship. That had been two hours ago, and it was twenty minutes since he had last called in.
The quartermaster appeared beside Mosey and gripped her senior officer’s upper arm tightly, her voice coming through clenched teeth. “Sir, we are going too fast, and if you do not maneuver this ship, we are going to run into Alcatraz. Do you read me, Lieutenant?”
Nimitz cleared the Golden Gate, and the city came into view on the right. The ship’s bridge went silent as everyone stared. San Francisco was blacked out. Heavy smoke rose in pillars visible against the lighter evening sky, and within the city itself, fires raged. One skyscraper’s top dozen floors were ablaze, making it look like a giant birthday candle. The steep boulevards and the sweeping Embarcadero, normally lined with headlights, were black, and the famous pier which usually glowed like a carnival was a silhouette sprinkled with small fires. The blinking lights of a lone helicopter drifted high above the city.
“It’s dead,” Mosey whispered.
Nimitz sliced through the choppy waters at one-third its max steaming power, throwing a powerful wake from its steep, razored bow. An alarm went off, and another young man in khaki yelled, “Sir, we have a collision warning left at zero-four-zero degrees.”
The QM-2 ran to her terminal. “Lieutenant. Lieutenant!” She swore and turned to the helmsman. “Come right fifteen degrees. Slow to seven knots.”
The young man spun his tiny wheel – a chrome disc the size of a dinner plate, something which always shocked visitors to the bridge of such a massive vessel – and the great ship began to turn, although slowly. The collision alarm kept sounding. Before the order to slow could be executed, the hatch to the bridge banged open, and Mosey spun around. “Why isn’t that secured?”
Two men came through, a younger man in bloody blue camouflage with a rifle over his shoulder, half carrying-half dragging an older man in red-soaked khakis. Mosey immediately recognized the XO, who was trying to raise his head. A sailor standing the port watch with a big pair of binoculars around his neck looked through the open hatch, and saw the passageway filled with stumbling, bloody sailors, groaning and coming towards the opening. He slammed the metal hatch and dogged the handle.
“I thought he was dead,” the security man said, his voice shaking. “Thought I lost him in the passageway, but he’s moving again. He’s hurt bad.”
Mosey saw the younger sailor’s sleeves were hanging in tatters, the flesh of his arms ragged with bites and bleeding. He was pale, and barely finished speaking before he lost his grip on the XO and sagged against a bulkhead, sliding to the floor. His eyes were open, but glassy and far away, no longer seeing. The lieutenant ran to the XO and dropped to his knees beside him, turning him over.
The helmsman’s maneuver hadn’t been quite enough, and as Nimitz passed the fabled prison island – much, much too close - it scraped its port side hull across a ridge of sunken rock. More warning bells sounded, and the bridge lights snapped over to red as the warship shuddered, hard enough to throw several people off their feet. Nimitz turned away, a sixty-foot gash torn in her outer hull, which immediately began to fill with seawater.
The XO let out a gasp as Mosey turned him onto his back, revealing a torn throat already congealing with blood, eyes turned to a cloudy gray. He grabbed Mosey’s head in both hands and pulled him down, biting off the younger officer’s lower lip and a chunk of his chin. The lieutenant screamed as the XO’s next bite tore out his jugular, spraying the nearby helmsman.
It went quickly after that. The XO, soon accompanied by the sailor who had carried him here, finished off the unarmed bridge crew in minutes. A few tried to escape, caught at the secured hatch while they struggled to open it. The female quartermaster managed to dodge reaching arms and snapping teeth, yanking the hatch open only to be pulled to her death by the corpses waiting on the other side.
Within five minutes the bridge, still lit by the hellish red of emergency lighting, was manned by bodies which shuffled and bumped against one another, oblivious to the many warnings coming from consoles and the blaring alarms of loudspeakers. Nimitz pushed on through San Francisco Bay in a slow turn to the right, its helm unattended. On several of the lower decks, automated watertight doors rolled closed in response to the hull breach, trapping the living and the dead together in dark spaces. The compartmentalized design of the outer hull prevented the flooding from spreading, but the damaged section took on so many tons of water that the aircraft carrier began listing forward and to port, pulling it slowly away from its former heading.
In its journey across the bay, Nimitz scraped the long side of a freighter drifting and crewed only by the dead, ripping off protruding radar domes and gun mounts. Still in a slow right arc, the carrier rounded the tip of San Francisco and headed for the Bay Bridge. Treasure Island, a former naval base turning into a trendy community of condos, passed close on the left, and without a pilot to steer clear, the warship ran across shoals at roughly the same point in its damaged hull, tearing it open further. More seawater poured in, and the vessel pulled left. The same side of its flight deck rubbed against one of the massive concrete and steel supports of the Bay Bridge, shredding metal and rubberized decking, dragging the ship even more sharply to port.
The ship’s computer reacted to the new damage - and lack of response to its warnings - by shutting down forward propulsion. Nimitz was adrift, now turned almost due east by the latest impact and the weight of the incoming water. Slowing, but momentum still carrying it along at eleven knots, the city-sized ship was an unstoppable force. A fifteen-foot sailboat holding a dozen refugees who had managed to get out of Oakland (none of whom knew how to crew a sailboat) blundered helplessly into the shadow of the looming aircraft carrier. The sailboat snapped in half and was pulled under in seconds.
Nimitz drifted towards the western tip of Oakland, and finally found a large enough shoal to stop it, grounding in a frightful squeal of tearing metal and grinding rock. Silt and mud sucked at the hull, creating a vacuum and holding the ship tightly to the shallow bottom. As before, seawater rushed in and filled whatever space it could before the engineering design allowed it to go no further. Nimitz came to rest a half mile off shore, listing on an eight degree angle to port.
Without the appropriate responses to its queries, the master computer shut down all but one reactor, and reduced power on that one so that it could run internal systems only, power but no propulsion. Scattered, desperate battles flared in isolated spaces of the ship, and th
en died out. Bodies thumped against metal bulkheads or floundered in flooded compartments, feet dragged across decking and stumbled up and down stairways, low croaks and moans echoing throughout miles of passageways.
America’s greatest naval weapon was now a ship of the dead.
SEVENTEEN
Questions about how and where the Omega Virus started, how it managed to spread so fast, and why no one was prepared to deal with it ceased to matter. It was here, it was a pandemic, and for most it was an extinction level event. For those who cared, the generally agreed-upon outbreak date for OV was mid-August. The first two weeks of the plague, and the devastation which came with it, forced the remaining survivors to wonder if life had moved into its final act.
For many of them, that question was swiftly answered.
Long Beach
Hank Lyons lived in a two story apartment complex not far from the industrial parks and shipyards. A single man in his fifties, he watched the news until he could stand it no longer, and then shoved as much canned food as possible into a piece of rolling luggage and headed out in his Ford Escape. Baxter, his Jack Russell, rode in the front seat beside him, eyes bright and stubby tail wagging at the adventure.
The airport was shut down, the roads were rapidly jamming with panicked motorists, buildings were burning. At one point a bullet punched through his back window.
“Screw this,” he told Baxter. The dog barked in agreement. Hank headed for the docks, thinking he and his dog might get aboard a ship – any ship, it didn’t matter – which could carry them to safety.
He wasn’t the only one with that idea. Three blocks from the port, the Escape became trapped in a sea of unmoving traffic, people streaming between the cars on foot. He snapped on Baxter’s leash and joined them. Within minutes, the dead poured out of Long Beach and into the traffic jam, and people started running, dropping their bags and possessions and fighting to move faster, pushing and trampling the slow to move. Hank ditched the rolling luggage, lifted Baxter into his arms and ran with them.
Omega Days Page 13