by J. L. Bourne
Kil departed Larsen’s cabin asking himself, How stupid could I be? He knew the admiral expected Hourglass would lose men and he had suspected Larsen would spring this shit on him on the last leg of the trip. They would be in what were Chinese waters soon; Virginia was moving at a fast clip. Kil checked his watch, noting that they’d be surfacing shortly for a communications check. The sub’s retractable VLF long wire was useless without an airborne relay, meaning communications was only possible when surfaced. Kil felt the bow rise and marched uphill along the passageway to radio for his checks.
He would not reach the USS George Washington today.
48
Outpost Four—72 hours ago
The men slept soundly in their racks in the last warm living zones at the outpost. Crusow cut off the heat to the other zones, as diesel fuel was a commodity now literally more valuable than gold.
To combat the circadian rhythm challenges caused by months of prolonged darkness and light, they were all issued sleeping pills by one of the company physicians. Crusow had given his ration of pills to Mark in exchange for the other man’s ration of go-pills. Crusow didn’t like how deeply the pills put him under. Really, Crusow just hated the way the drug robbed his ability to wake himself up from the nightmares that haunted him—ghastly visions of his family’s death, and other things that scraped the back of his mind during sleep.
• • •
Mark’s sleeping pill–induced slumber had been successful in keeping him rested and capable. He dreamt of odd things tonight. One of his visions brought him high over the outpost, looking down on the facility. The sun shone brightly, illuminating the ice and snow. He saw off-white dots surrounding the outpost, and then he heard the howls. The thousands of dots surrounding the outpost in his dream were wolves.
The outpost was quiet now; earlier, Larry’s rasping could be heard by everyone.
Before sleep, Mark remembered that Crusow had shut Larry’s door, muffling the coughing noises. They all took some comfort that Larry agreed to tether himself to his rack before going to bed—a prudent precaution. His pneumonia sounded particularly horrible the past few days.
• • •
A broom fell outside Larry’s quarters, landing softly against his bunk.
Larry passed through the door and began his search.
The first door he came to was Crusow’s. He turned the knob with no success. After hitting the bulkhead in protest, he moved to the next door.
Larry’s right foot left behind peculiar footprints; marks that didn’t look like feet, but more like sponges dipped in red paint. The 550 paracord tether that Larry had used to secure himself to his rack had pulled much of the skin from his ankle and heel during the escape from his bunk room.
Mark always slept with his door cracked open out of habit. It was little trouble for Larry to find his way inside.
• • •
Mark was now dreaming of a great swamp.
He trekked in the direction of a large tower looming in the distance. He slogged through the ankle-deep muck for some time. He was closer to the tower now. The water was deeper, swirling all around him; reptilian tails broke the brown water’s surface. Mark moved more quickly through the swamp, the tower’s details becoming more intricate. At the moment he began to realize what the tower really represented, massive dark clouds suddenly filled the sky and violent thunder rocked the dreamscape.
The tower was the gulch, and everyone in it. The fallen faces grimaced, surged, and pressed against the walls as if tightly masked in fine black silk. Mark saw Bret’s face clearly; it smiled with life for a moment. Another flash of lightning seemed to transform Bret into the undead. Like the others, it fought for space on the tower wall.
Taking another step into the putrid waters, he felt a crunch under his booted foot. A piece of glass. Pain shot up through his leg, cutting through the dream, and he immediately woke to the sound of gunshots.
• • •
“Get back!” Crusow screamed. “It’s Larry, he’s gone!”
Mark’s right foot throbbed in excruciating pain, causing him to instinctively reach for it and apply pressure.
Crusow flipped on the lights.
Larry lay twitching in a pool of bodily fluids. Crusow had been successful in taking out Larry before he was able to bite Mark, but Mark’s foot had been penetrated by Crusow’s rifle round.
It was dark, and I had to take the shot, Crusow thought, panicking.
He had taken three shots with his rifle, two passing through Larry’s chest and one passing through his head. Kung barged into the room as both Mark and Crusow met the reality of what had just happened. Every one of Crusow’s rounds had passed through Larry’s infected body, including the round that penetrated Mark’s foot. The round had Larry’s blood on it.
Mark was now infected.
• • •
Mark died in considerable pain just before midnight. The infection crept up his gunshot-wounded foot until he eventually succumbed to cardiac arrest. Mark was Crusow’s last real friend in the world, and the last person on the planet who had spoken to his wife before she was murdered by the likes of Larry. Another link to Trish was gone forever. It would be difficult for Crusow to explain that meaning to anyone that who had not lived it.
Kung took on the task of dealing with Mark’s corpse. Crusow did not have the heart for it. The specter of a thought to join Mark passed through his mind more than once.
Crusow said his good-byes to his old friend and went back to his bunk room, catatonic.
• • •
After ensuring Mark wouldn’t return, Kung tossed the body into the gulch. Returning to the shelter, he found Crusow in his room, staring off into space.
“Crusow, we get out here!” Kung insisted.
“I don’t know, man. Where do you want to go?” Crusow said, thinking of the easiest way off this rock and of whether that ceiling beam might be made of stronger stuff than 550 paracord.
“We go south, dummy!” Kung yelled, punching Crusow hard in the shoulder.
“I don’t know. Just let me be for a bit.”
Kung did not relent. He lay down on the floor near Crusow’s rack for the next couple hours, keeping a close eye. Crusow didn’t object. After Kung was certain that Crusow was sleeping, he hid Crusow’s carbine behind a locker and went to work rigging the Sno-Cat for departure. Kung fought frostbite forty-five minutes at a time in seventy-below temperatures and Arctic darkness to prepare the Sno-Cat.
Needing some tools, he entered one of the environments previously cut off from life support. He turned on the battery-powered backup lights. It was so cold inside that his breath seemed to crystalize and fall like snow. Thick frost covered the room. Kung thought that the facility would have been a block of ice by now. He scavenged the hacksaw he was looking for and departed.
He moved the biodiesel drum tank inside the living area, gathered more supplies, and readied the dogs and their small trailer for the journey south to nowhere.
49
As the USS Virginia entered the outer boundaries of formerly Chinese waters, Dean, Tara, Danny, and Laura hid, terrified, in the back of Dean’s stateroom—the door barricaded by their bunk beds and other belongings.
The dead punched and slapped a stateroom door across the passageway. There was no way of knowing how many were outside the door.
They said prayers, thanking the Almighty that the creatures were bludgeoning the other doors and not theirs. They all knew that this could change with a sneeze or the shifting winds of chance.
They’d been trapped now for twelve hours, awaiting rescue. How far could this have spread in twelve hours?
Laura sat in Tara’s arms, halfway in shock. “Why don’t we open the door and just shoot them?” she asked.
“We don’t know how many there are, honey. We’re going to have to wait it out.”
They all knew that the ship was still under military control. They had felt it turn numerous times in the past few hours
, turns too systematic and incremental to be random.
At least the navy still held the bridge and the reactor spaces, Dean thought.
Somewhere inside the massive ship’s superstructure, Admiral Goettleman keyed the 1MC announcement system: “This is Admiral Goettleman speaking, infection has broken out onboard, and we are currently mobilizing teams to neutralize the threat. If you can hear this, remain quiet and a team will work its way to you shortly. That is all.” The sound blared throughout the ship, ironically causing marked undead frenzy.
They all heard the announcement clearly, and so did the undead outside in the passageway.
The door began to bend, straining in protest to the noise intrusion in the creature’s new territory. Danny squinted in the low light, watching the middle of the door flex inward slightly. He sat next to Laura, telling her that everything would be fine. The boy in him believed his words were honest, but a competing voice said he’d no doubt be dead soon—the two of them reduced to small appetizers.
The door bulged inward still, nearly to failure, and death began to wrap its dark wings around the survivors. They all closed their eyes just before five small holes appeared in the door above the handle in nearly a straight line. Bodies fell with an audible thump.
“Back away from the door and get down!” a familiar voice screamed from the other side.
More suppressed 9mm rounds penetrated the door and surrounding bulkheads, causing ricochet injuries to Danny’s shoulder. He cried out, and more bodies fell.
“Open up, it’s me, Ramirez!”
Dean shot up and readied her pistol before unlocking the door and twisting the handle. The door flew open, revealing Ramirez and John standing there with automatic weapons, covered in dirt and sweat.
• • •
“Let’s move; the whole deck is overrun!”
“Tara, I owed Kil one. Make sure you tell him we’re square when you see him,” Ramirez said.
Tara hugged him briefly, sobbing with happiness to still be alive as they bolted from the stateroom.
They all moved quietly in single file, protecting the children in the middle. John held Annabelle in his backpack, the white dog zipped up to her neck. She didn’t like it very much, but she didn’t try to escape.
Annabelle was invaluable in confirming the presence of undead onboard. Just as planned, John took her back to the area where Danny thought he had heard the creatures. When the large steel door opened and the military men walked through, he didn’t hide; he feigned ignorance. He scooped Annabelle into his arms as the guards confronted him. Annabelle gave a terrible howl, urinating down John’s shirt. Her raised hackles further confirmed that the creatures were among them. John played dumb and the guards escorted him and his dog out of the area.
“Hurry, only two more knee-knockers to the flight deck hatch!” John said to everyone.
The adults watched Danny and Laura like hawks as they moved. The passageways could erupt with undead at any moment.
Annabelle’s hackles stood once again, and she tensed in John’s pack, growling.
“Get ready, Ramirez!” John warned.
The undead didn’t appear from the front—they were making ground on them from the rear, where Tara and Ramirez guarded the children. Ramirez turned and opened up on them, walking backward. He was changing mags, slapping the full one home, when he fell flat on his back over a knee-knocker. His gun discharged as he fell, sawing a diagonal pattern across two of the creatures that closed on him. Chunks of flesh, muscle, and bone peppered the steel bulkheads and other undead in the rear of the mass.
The creatures still advanced.
“Duck down, kids, hold your ears!” John screamed as he opened up on the rotting monsters that were set to dog-pile the marine.
Ramirez went full auto from his back, flesh and bone flying around the passageway and littering the blue tile deck.
With his lower body covered in brains and other parts, Ramirez quickly jumped to his feet, firing more rounds down the passageway at the advancing creatures. “Move, John, get out!”
John reached the flight deck access hatch and threw the hatch lever violently. He kicked the door open, and sunlight beamed inside. The smell of oil, salt, and machinery filled the passageway.
“Move!” John said.
The survivors sprinted out the access hatch and up the ladder to the relative safety of the flight deck.
Ramirez kept backing up and firing until John tapped his shoulder.
“Your turn, Ramirez. I’ll secure the hatch.”
Ramirez ran up the ladder to the catwalk, tripping on the way up. John took one last potshot and closed the hatch. He reached into his pocket, pulling out a bit of rope, and tied the hatch closed from the outside. Should hold for a bit, he thought.
Stepping up to the catwalk, John had full view of the carrier deck. Most of the aircraft were stored below in the hangar deck. John could see hundreds of people milling about. He was forward near the bow of the ship, near catapult one. Climbing up to the flight deck he could hear a bridge announcement.
“Onboard George Washington, this is the officer of the deck with an update. The admiral has informed me that we are to begin clearing operations soon and are now setting course for the Florida Keys. We remain in control of the reactor and bridge. Remain calm, that is all.”
After the announcement, John could hear the creatures beating on the steel hatch below. Calm, my ass, he thought. John briefly admired the ocean view around him and was surprised to see a handful of destroyers cruising in formation on both sides of the carrier with a supply ship off the port quarter.
“John, I need help,” Jan said, tapping his shoulder.
“What is it? Are you okay?”
“Dr. Bricker and I have set up triage farther aft near the bridge island. I can’t find William and I think he may be—”
“Don’t think like that. I’ll keep an eye out for him—there are a lot of people up here,” John said in what he hoped was a comforting voice. “Go back to the medical tent and I’ll come by in a bit, okay?”
“Thanks, John.”
He could hear Laura crying as her mother walked back to the group of Hotel 23 survivors.
50
USS George Washington—Post-Outbreak
“Admiral, the creatures control many of the living spaces as well as the supply hold areas. The crew set Condition Zebra on all main hatches early on in the outbreak per the OOD’s instruction, so many of them should be compartmentalized below.”
“How many do you estimate are down there now?”
“By my figures, there are likely at least two hundred, and that number would be much higher if not for the mandatory firearms regulation. I think the number of undead belowdecks will remain flat. As the survivors below neutralize more creatures, more will likely become infected in the process. The only number that will fall is that of the remaining living.”
Admiral Goettleman peered out at his panoramic view of the flight deck below. A large refugee camp formed, sprawling throughout the four and a half acres of steel and nonskid. As a contingency plan formed in his head, the admiral began to plan the how of his next move. First priority would be to retake the communications rooms; second, they would need to find a suitable port. He couldn’t risk losing control of the reactor areas to the undead while at sea. It would render the carrier nothing short of drifting hurricane bait. He grabbed the phone and dialed the pilot house above.
“Slight course adjustment, OOD. Make your course for Key West specifically and mind your draft.”
“Very good, Admiral,” the OOD replied on the other end.
After hearing the orders given to the bridge, Joe asked, “Would you care to walk me through your thought process, sir? I don’t follow.”
“I intend to make port at Key West and prepare for a worst-case scenario. If we lose too many personnel, we can’t keep this ship running. If that happens, I’d like to be tied up to an island, a place we can clear out and defend. Key
West has a naval air station. We can blow the bridges and isolate. Any word on Phoenix and the recovered black box?”
“Our programmers were attempting to compile the software to pull the GPS coordinates from the box when they lost control of our network. They say that someone attempted to gain access and alter the software. The intrusion only lasted four minutes. The strange thing is, the program was already complete when our people rebooted the ship’s servers and tried to compile it. They didn’t have time to go line by line to verify the code, so they transmitted the software to Hotel 23. Task Force Phoenix is not due back off mission for a few hours and we won’t know of their success until we reestablish comms.”
“That’s a priority, Joe. I want the first teams retaking the radio areas. We can worry about who tried to hack us at another time. Hell, it could be the Chinese version of our CYBERCOM. Virginia should be in the Bohai soon—if not now. Hourglass will be feet dry in what was communist China shortly. Larsen and his folks are likely very interested in what is happening here.”
“Yes, sir, the marines will attempt to secure the communications room up forward first. After secured we’ll get the comms back up with Phoenix and hopefully Hourglass.”
“What of the outpost?”
“They have not responded to our comm checks in a few cycles. Probably atmospherics.”
“Probably.” Goettleman again looked out over the camps forming below. “Dammit. We’ll need to post snipers up here on Vulture’s Row, overlooking the camps. Any sign of outbreak and we take the shot.”
“Yes, sir.” Joe paused for a moment, ensuring that no one would overhear him. “Sir, we’re not going to make it.”
“No, probably not. But I’ve never given up on a damn thing in my life. I won’t stop fighting until I’m one of them, or I’m rotting in the ground with a hole in my head. You graduated the farm, and know better. We’ll fight from lifeboats with our bare hands if need be.”
51