by Jeff Thomson
She sensed him before she saw him. What magic is it that enables one person to feel the presence of another? What sixth sense floats across the ether until it touches some sympathetic tendril emanating from the other person?
Molly did not normally wax esoteric in this manner. Lately, however, life had been anything but normal. From the greeting at home after she graduated from the Academy (Welcome home, Molly! Now roll up your sleeve so I can inject you with zombie vaccine), to the apocalyptic reason for it, and through seeing Socrates Jones (of all damned people) on arrival to her first unit, and all the zombie-craziness in between, normal had packed its bags and sailed to Aruba.
All of which was bullshit, she mused, pausing in the deeper, shadowy darkness of the superstructure. She could see him now, sitting on a bollard, with his chin resting on crossed arms upon the starboard rail, staring out to sea.
A plethora of girlish feelings swept through her at the sight, and it pissed her off. Damn him! Damn his good looks and charming manner and witty repartee. Damn his calm acceptance of her do-not-call-me edict at the end of the Arctic trip, the previous summer. Why hadn’t he pined away for her? Why hadn’t he curled into a ball of human misery and wallowed in his loneliness? And why hadn’t he called her, dammit?
She was scared, and she was nervous. Both things pissed her off. And one thing about Molly by-God Gordon, was that when she was pissed off, she bulled ahead. Damn the torpedoes!
She took a strident step forward, then froze. What the fuck was she thinking? The poor guy just killed his friend. What was she going to do: charge in and start bitching at him? Huge points for compassion, Moll, she chided herself. Get a grip!
Should she even be out here? Should she just go away and leave him to what had to be really long thoughts? What right did she have to interfere? She teetered on the horns of this latest dilemma, balancing on the knife edge of some metaphor for which she had no clear definition. She was stalling. In the end, however, he decided it for her.
“Ms. Gordon,” his honey-whiskey voice floated out of the darkness.
She was caught. And being caught, she did the only thing she could and walked aft toward him.
“How did you know it was me?” She asked, as she arrived.
“Your perfume,” he said, not looking at her. He patted the empty bollard beside him.
“Did I lay it on that thick?” She asked.
He chuckled. “No.”
“Is it that distinctive?”
Yes,” he said. “And no.” She sat beside him, taking great pains to not touch the skin of his well-muscled arm. “Who else, among the crew, would be wearing perfume?”
“Ah,” she replied.
“Okay...Maybe Harold,” he said.
“Well, you took a chance and it turned out to be right,” she quipped, sounding far more glib than she felt.
“Yay, me!”
They lapsed into silence - or, at least, as much silence as one could have when sitting on the deck of a ship, directly above the churning propellor that was propelling them ever-box-ward in the Box of Death, toward...what, exactly? She knew the technical answer, of course. They were patrolling a point on the chart of the North Pacific, a hundred fifty miles offshore and roughly equidistant between Oahu and Kauai. What they were supposed to do beyond that remained a mystery, but it was a question for another time.
“So...” She said, finally. “Whatchya doing?”
47
Two decks down and about a hundred feet forward, Seaman Apprentice Tommy Barnes, of Akron, Ohio, whose sole ambition growing up had been to learn how to surf, twitched in his bunk. He still hadn’t learned how - the Banzai Pipeline being no place for amateur surfers - but it hardly mattered, now. It would never matter.
He’d felt like shit all day. He hadn’t told anyone, however. Mrs. Barnes hadn’t raised any idiot sons, and only a real idiot would have mentioned feeling sick. Not with Petty Officer Kevorkian around.
He slept now. His dreams - if he had any - weren’t significant enough to interrupt his slumber. He was, however, feeling feverish.
Two four-man staterooms up and one over, on the port side, YN3 Gregory Haversham rolled over and snorted. He’d been feeling feverish, as well. And his skin felt irritated. Not bad, not enough to be worrisome, but enough to notice. A spasm rippled through the muscle of his right thigh. He stirred, let out a slight moan (that may or may not have sounded a little bit like a growl), then slipped back into the Land of Nod.
In the next compartment forward, CS3 Eric “Manny” Manoa, all six-foot five and two hundred-fifty pounds of him, farted. This was nothing new. His gaseous expulsions were legendary on two ships, the Recruit Training Center at Cape May, New Jersey, and the Culinary Specialist A-School, in Petaluma, California. What was new - really new - was the fever.
One deck up and almost directly above the flatulent cook, BMC Bernie Adams, alone in his stateroom, thanks to his exalted rank, lay awake, reading. He wasn’t really seeing the words, however. Truth be told, he hadn’t comprehended a single goddamned sentence in the last ten pages.
He was worried. Oh, Hell, be honest, Bernie. You’re scared, he thought to himself. He coughed, tried to muffle the sound, as if not hearing it might somehow eliminate the possibility of what it could mean, failed to do so, and collapsed into a coughing spasm that felt like his left lung might explode. He groaned to a sitting position and hacked a disgusting goober into a tissue he’d grabbed from the box on his night stand.
The box wasn’t secured for sea, he noticed. Bad Bosun Mate, he thought, then glanced at the crumpled tissue in his hand. It was smeared with blood.
48
“Whatchya doing?” Molly asked.
“Performing brain surgery,” he replied with his usual dry humor. “Can’t you tell?”
She leaned her elbows on the rail and joined him in staring out to sea. The water sparkled with reflected starlight. There was a splash off to her right.
“Flying fish?” She asked.
“Either that, or Cthulu, the Beast from the Depths,” he replied. “Can’t decide which.”
“You’re just a bundle of sunshine, aren’t you?” Their conversations had always tended toward the sarcastic, pretty much from the moment they met. Great minds thinking alike...
He didn’t respond, and she didn’t press. They sat there in silence. It wasn’t uncomfortable.
That was something else they had fallen into right away: companionable silences. So many people felt the need to fill the air with useless chatter. It had always annoyed her - possibly because it interrupted the chatter going on inside her own head. One more thing in Jonesy’s favor. She shoved that thought to the side so hard it would have fallen overboard, if it’d had an actual body.
Finally, after about three minutes, he broke the silence by asking: “Did you hear how I came to be on this ship?”
“Not exactly.”
“After the Healy, when the Powers That Be finally realized how truly pointless it was to have a TACLET on a Polar Icebreaker, PACAREA sent me to D-14.”
“That was nice of them,” she said, to fill in the conversational gap, thus giving lie to her earlier observation about companionable silence.
“Oh yeah,” he laughed. “Here, Jonesy. Have a nice little Hawaiian vacation.”
“You should fire your travel agent.”
He thought about it for a moment, then said: “He’s probably a zombie by now.”
“Bundle of sunshine,” she repeated, as a squadron of frightened butterflies took flight in the pit of her stomach.
“That’s me,” he quipped.
She gave him a moment, then said: “You were saying?”
He took a deep breath, then continued his tale. “A week after I got here, we received intel on a freighter out of the Orient. Human trafficking, drugs. Nice bunch of guys.” He reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a roll of lemon-flavored throat lozenges. He took one, then offered the roll to Molly. She declined.
&
nbsp; “My team had the crew under guard, back on the fantail,” he said, popping the glorified candy into his mouth and shunting it off into the depths of his cheek. “And we were just starting the pat-down, when one of the assholes pulled a gun. Didn’t even think about it. I took the shot.”
“I...heard about it,” she said.
“The entire fucking Coast Guard heard about it,” he laughed. “Not exactly an everyday event.”
She gave her own grunting chuckle, but didn’t otherwise respond, not wanting to interrupt.
He glanced at her, then resumed staring out to sea. “You know, I looked it up on the Internet. Typed in ‘Coast Guard Involved Shooting.’ You know what I found?”
She shook her head, but doubted he’d been expecting an actual answer.
“Nothing. Not a single goddamned entry, except for a series of stories about a murder several years ago, up in Alaska. For all I know, there’s never been one.” He gave a short, breathy chuckle, and shook his head. “I am a man outstanding in his field,” he added, his voice dripping with irony. “And that’s certainly the attitude the Shooting Board took. What a cluster fuck!”
“I can imagine,” she said.
“I doubt it,” he replied, not unkindly. “Three Admirals and half-a-dozen Captains, and every last goddamned one of them just had to make a speech, with me sitting in a chair in the middle of the room.” He shook his head and snorted in obvious disgust. “It was like watching a bunch of Republicans at an I-Hate-Hillary Convention - with me as Hillary.”
She stared at him, open mouthed, and said: “That must have been...”
“Gangs of fun,” he said. “And ultimately pointless. Every member of the boarding team swore under oath, they’d have taken the shot, if I hadn’t.” He shrugged. “And then there were the helmet cams. Every team member wore one, and everybody with eyes could see it was a good shoot.”
“But of course, it wasn’t that simple,” she said, knowing there had been more to it. She’d read the reports, seen the videos on the news, and had been right in the Rumor Control Pipeline at the Coast Guard Academy.
“Yes and no,” he said. “Yes, because after all the posturing, the evidence was overwhelming.”
“And no because...?
“No because they couldn’t just leave it at that.”
“Naturally.”
“Ain’t life grand?” he chortled. “And so I got to spend some quality time with the Psychological Trauma Team!” He gave his breathy laugh (that contained no humor in it, whatsoever) again. “Imagine your brain getting gangbanged by Oprah, Dr. Phil, and the entire cast of The View - not a single damned one of whom knew what the fuck they were doing.”
“Yikes!”
“As I said,” he quipped. “Gangs of fun.”
“And...?” She knew the basic details of the story, at least what she’d been able to filter out from Rumor Control, but hearing him talk about it gave it a sense of immediacy and personality that no scuttlebutt nonsense could ever achieve.
“I should have lied to them and told them what they wanted to hear.”
“But you didn’t.”
He looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t lie.”
She stared at him, cocking an eyebrow.
“Oh, I bullshit with the best of them,” he said, in response to her obvious disbelief. “But that’s different.”
“I see,” she said, dripping with sarcasm. “You’ll have to explain the difference to me sometime.”
He chuckled again and resumed. “Anyway, when they asked what I was feeling, I told them the truth.”
“Which was?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I felt nothing.”
She stared at him again, the shock clearly reflected on her face.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, holding up a traffic cop-like hand to stop her protest. “It sucked. Well and truly.” She kept staring at him. “I’m not a sociopath.” He shrugged yet again. She couldn’t decide whether the gesture annoyed her or was simply a manifestation of his boyish charm. “Simple matter of black and white,” he continued. “Kill him, or he kills somebody else.”
She stared at him a moment longer, at his eyes, which held that damnable charm and, at the same time, deep down, a sense of vulnerability that threatened to melt her heart. He wanted her to believe him. Needed her to believe him. She nodded and gave him a slight smile.
“You get it,” he said. “At least intellectually,” he added, as if in response to her narrowed gaze. “But they decided I wasn’t wrapped too tight - or way too tight, not sure which. And so they pulled me off the Team. Called it a ‘temporary stand-down.’ Couldn’t even call it a suspension - which is what it was. And so they put me on Admin Leave.”
“Bastards,” she said, softly, meaning it.
“And since the whole thing was far too public (thanks to somebody in Public Affairs releasing the helmet video, when they weren’t supposed to), they couldn’t very well kick me out after they cleared me. Couldn’t even say I was crazy, because that would make it seem like they cleared a lunatic.”
“The media would have loved that!”
He laughed. “I actually got chased one night. Thought I was going to have to do a Lady Di.” He shook his head, and she could almost see the memory flashing over his hazel eyes.
“But then some celebutante got busted for drunk driving, for like the third time, and my fifteen minutes were up.” He didn’t look one bit sorry for the loss. “So there I was, off the Team, with nothing to do, and nowhere for them to put me, and no idea of what to do with me. And then Providence came calling.”
“Oh, do tell!” she said.
“The BM1/OPS on this thing,” he said, patting the rail, “went and got himself arrested for trying to ship a kilo of Maui Wowie home to Indiana, or wherever, and suddenly, there was this huge opening for a BM1.”
“And the rest is history,” she finished - or thought she had.
“And the music swells, and I walk off into the sunset.”
“And right into a zombie apocalypse,” she said.
“Ain’t life grand?” He gave her his most charming smile. He wasn’t doing it on purpose - at least she didn’t think so - but it melted her heart anyway.
Danger, Will Robinson...she said to herself, falling back on her own storehouse of personal sarcasm to fight the urge to take him in her arms and give him a big, wet kiss, right on the lips. Danger! Danger! Do something! Say something! Resist!
Out of desperation, she settled on a verbal kick to the nuts: “And now...?” She could tell by the sudden darkening of his expression that her jab had hit home.
He shrugged. “And now I feel nothing again.” He sighed, looked like he was about to shrug for the umpteenth time, seemed to realize he’d been doing it a lot, and let his eyebrows shrug for him. And then he said: “Black and white.”
“How bad was it?”
“It sucked. Full-blown neurological. Wild eyes, gnashing teeth, growling. Certainly not puppies and kittens.”
“But you’re okay?” she asked, ignoring the danger signals and placing her cool hand on his well-muscled forearm.
“Yeah, I am, actually.”
“So what are you doing sitting alone out here in the dark?” She asked the obvious question.
He pointed out to sea with his chin. “Look out there,” he said. She did. “What does it make you feel?”
She thought about the question. And she thought about why he’d asked it.
Her degree at the Academy had been in Psychology, so she acted in fine Shrink fashion and turned it around on him. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you feel?”
“Peace,” he said quietly, and she felt the answer in her own heart. “I feel peace. I feel like this is where I belong.”
She folded her hands on the rail and laid her chin upon them. “Uncle John talked about that. Said it was the mark of a true sailor.”
“Said the same thing to me when we were up in Alaska, four or five year
s ago.”
“He likes you,” she said.
“I like his niece,” he said, and she felt his answer right square in her heart.
Time to put a stop to this.
She stiffened and sat up. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m just saying...” he smiled.
“Well, don’t,” she snapped.
He looked at her a moment longer, then said: “Fine. Have it your way.” Her heart sank, as he looked back out to sea. Careful what you wish for, she thought. “Anyway, I’m out here to soak up as much peace as I can.” He looked at her again, and his expression wasn’t the least bit charming. “Because I think things are about to get a whole lot worse.”
49
OS3 Bill Schaeffer keyed his entry code into the door, heard its distinctive click, and entered the Radio Room. He was glad he had the watch this morning. He hated funerals, and a funeral at sea for two of his shipmates - one of whom had turned zombie - would have been a far too depressing way to begin the day. Plus, he was feeling just a bit...paranoid.
The familiar faint smell of ozone wafted into his nostrils, as OS1 Carlton Bertram (Bert) spun in his chair and looked at him with mildly bloodshot eyes. “You’re early,” his immediate supervisor said, glancing at the clock on the bulkhead, which read zero-seven twenty-five. The eight-to-twelve watch ordinarily began at a quarter till the hour, so technically he was, in fact, early, but that was generally not something for the guy he was relieving to grouse about - especially coming off the dreaded four-to-eight watch in the morning.
Dragging your ass out of the rack at three-thirty to sit in an enclosed compartment with no windows, listening to static and not much else, was universally hated by all. But there was something more going on here. Bert looked...nervous.
“Are you complaining?” Bill asked.