by Jeff Thomson
The man stared at him for a moment, then seemed to relax. “No,” he said. “Early is good. There’s a lot to brief.”
“I’m all ears,” Bill replied, deadpan, taking a seat at the second of two bolted-down chairs.
“Lots of chatter all night long,” Bert said. “Lots of news. All of it bad.” Bill cocked an eyebrow at him, but said nothing.
“The BBC has been reporting from all over the world: Paris, Budapest, Bremerhaven, Cairo, Rio, Singapore City...” he consulted a handwritten list on the console. “...Osaka, Shanghai, Mexico City, Lima... All gone.”
“Gone?” Bill asked, incredulous.
“Fallen to the Infected,” Bert clarified. “No communications. No word,” he gulped. “Last word out of Mexico City was cut off by screaming.” Bert’s face had turned a sickly white. “I heard it all.”
“Fuck me.”
“It gets worse,” he said, and a terrible chill started in Bill’s scrotum and moved upward toward his heart.
“Worse?”
“Worse,” Bert repeated. “New York has fallen. They blew the bridges to Manhattan about an hour ago. Washington, D. C., is being evacuated,” he said, his voice gone cold and dead. “All the politicians, anyway.” He tried a faint smile, but it didn’t work. “No great loss, there.” He tapped the Top Secret board. “List of all the main players and where they’re evacuating to. About half of them have confirmed arrival.”
“And the other half?” Bill asked.
“No word yet,” his boss said. “Don’t know, don’t really care. We have bigger problems.” Bill cocked another eyebrow at him. “Ford Island has fallen, and the word is, Sand Island won’t last much longer.”
50
OS2 Amber Winkowski, brought the last of the bottled water into the Comms Room and set the dolly on the deck next to the rest of it with a sigh of relief. Sixteen cases of water, in total. She hoped it would be enough. “That’s all I could get my hands on,” she said, straightening her sore back. She was twenty-eight, not tall, and her short, frizzy hair was tied into a pony tail and tucked beneath her blue US COAST GUARD COMMSTA HONOLULU ball cap.
Sports Illustrated would not be inviting her to grace the cover of its Swimsuit Issue, and that was just the way she liked it. She was just Amber: not tall, not petite, and hippy - both in her Bohemian/Feminist attitudes (her car sported two bumper stickers that proclaimed: US Out of my Uterus, and Sorry, But I Was Too Busy Leaving My Husband, Killing My Children, and Practicing Witchcraft to Care - a twist on a truly idiotic televangelistic proclamation by Pat Robertson), and the fact that her backside wasn’t small. She didn’t care. The pretty girls, the ones that had been prom queens and cheerleaders, and the object of unrequited teenaged sexual fantasies, always seemed to get hooked up with shitheads. They were used. They were liked for what others hoped they could give them, whereas Amber was liked for being Amber - just the way she liked it.
What she didn’t like was the jackass who would be her companion for who knew how long.
OS3 Jackson Grabon, age twenty-two, stared at her, but said nothing. He hadn’t helped her at all, even though he would benefit from her labors every bit as much as she would. It would be the difference between survival and dying of thirst - or of hunger, since she had also brought in three cases of MRE’;s and another two of industrial-sized canned goods. And yes, she also remembered to bring a can opener. He seemed oblivious about this, as, Amber mused, he had always been oblivious about most things. He just sat there munching on the remains of a ham and egg MRE. The detritus of its packaging lay haphazardly on the console. He belched.
Even if he doesn’t turn, she thought. I might have to kill him.
51
“I could kill the stupid bitch,” John snapped.
“I know,” Spute said in a placating voice. The two of them were on the Bridge. Clara was back on the Flying Bridge, though John had been tempted to toss her over the side.
“What the fuck was she thinking?”
“I don’t know, dude,” Spute said. “I didn’t exactly bring her along for her brain power.”
“Yeah!” John spat. It was almost a yell. “And her nice ass might just get us killed.”
Spute woke him up with a phone call bearing the news that Clara had “inadvertently” let slip they had vaccine - over the fucking radio! Inadvertently, my left nut! John thought. How could she have been so stupid?
He took a deep, calming breath. It had no effect, whatsoever. He looked out the rear Bridge window at the yellow ball of the rising sun. It sat a full diameter above the horizon.
How much longer did they have? How much longer before pirates descended on them?
52
Blackjack Charlie looked into the lightening sky. “We wait till dark,” he said, making up his mind. They had to be careful, had to do this right. If they did, they would be golden. They’d have vaccine. If they didn’t...?
Such thinking would only lead to trouble, he thought. At the very least, he must never speak it aloud. He nodded to himself, then turned to Old Joe.
“Sober everybody up. Put them to bed. Tie them there, if necessary,” he told the man. “And lock up the rest of the liquor.” The last damned thing he needed was a bunch of drunk fuckers messing this up.
Old Joe nodded, but didn’t move. Blackjack Charlie sighed.
“Now would be good,” he said, making shooing motions toward the door leading below.
“Right boss,” the man said in his gravelly voice. And then he left.
Old Joe wasn’t really that old, being maybe ten years older than Joe-Boy, but having two men in the same gang with the same name could get confusing. Having two men in the same cell block could be confusing, for that matter, and that’s where the nicknames had been created.
Joe-Boy, barely seventeen, had been tried as an adult after beating his own father to death with a baseball bat. Maybe the guy had it coming. Blackjack didn’t know, didn’t care. He’d wanted to call the kid Shoeless Joe, after the White Sox baseball player, but most of the people on the block could barely remember last week, let alone several decades before they were born.
Old Joe had been doing a dime for Armed Robbery. The two of them arrived on the same prison bus, and wound up together on C-Block, though in different cells. The nicknames had been picked and agreed upon by the general consensus of people who couldn’t give two shits about much of anything, and they stuck. “Blackjack” Charlie Carter’s moniker had come in the same manner, though his had been far easier to grasp by the general population.
He’d carried a blackjack for years, having discovered the utility of the leather filled pouch of tiny ball bearings during his travels as a Merchant Mariner. There had been that Chinese asshole in Shanghai, and that Australian fuck in Melbourne. They tried to mug him, thinking he was too drunk to be much trouble. He had been drunk - both times (hilariously so in Shanghai) - but he and his blackjack proved to be far more trouble than either bastard counted on. He left them both in need of a headache remedy, but it was the pimp in San Francisco that got him the nickname.
That douchebag busted in on him while he was banging one of the guy’s hookers. Fucker hadn’t even bothered with him. Just marched right in and started smacking the girl around. So Charlie had taken his trusty blackjack and taught the guy a lesson. Bit too good of a lesson, unfortunately, because the useless piece of shit died from it. That got Charlie sent to Soledad. The nickname had been a no-brainer.
He was going to need all of his brains now, though, stuck, as he was, on a boat filled with drunken idiots in the middle of a zombie fucking apocalypse. But that was okay. He had plenty of brains to spare. And tonight, if he could keep his band of misfits sober, he would have the means to ride this shit out. And with a little luck, he’d be riding it out in style.
53
“Sorry, but no,” Captain Gideon D Hall said. “We can’t divert.”
LTjg Amy Montrose stood next to LT Wheeler in the Captain’s office/stateroom, and trie
d not to slump her shoulders in disappointment. They hadn’t been able to talk directly to the CO until this morning, but both had been certain he’d okay the proposed Crossing Ceremony. Apparently, they’d been wrong.
“The idea has merit,” The Captain agreed. “But until we get to Guam and top off the tanks, we’re on a schedule.” He tapped the message board on his desk. They both knew what it contained. “With everything falling apart, we can’t delay.” He looked pointedly at each of them. “We need to get to Guam before it falls.”
A symphony of fear played Toccata and Fugue in D Minor along her spine. What the original Phantom of the Opera theme had to do with the current situation, she had no idea, and was only speculating on it to take her mind away from the stark reality of their uncertain future. She was babbling internally - the worst kind of nonsense - and it irritated her to no end, but she struggled to maintain a placid expression on her face. Nothing to see here, folks... Nothing, that was, except the slow and continuous decline of human civilization.
“Yes, sir,” LT Wheeler said. Amy said nothing.
CAPT Hall leaned back in his chair. “You are absolutely right about crew morale, Ms. Montrose. We need to do something.” He sighed, looked at the overhead, and rubbed his face.
He looked tired, she thought. They all looked tired. Or maybe it was shell shock. One moment the entire crew had been looking forward to a great liberty call in Fremantle, the seaside city near Perth, Western Australia. And the next...? The world had turned sideways. They weren’t going to the land of beer and barbecued shrimp. They weren’t going to get the rest they’d earned after two months in Antarctica. They weren’t going to go home - ever, in all probability. No more United States. No more pizza and football on the TV. No more Reality Shows, or sitcoms, or movies of the week. No more movies, other than whatever DVDs the crew had brought with them. No more Mom’s Apple Pie.
No more Mom.
Their families were dead. Or if they weren’t they soon would be. Everybody knew it, though everybody was going to great lengths to avoid getting anywhere near the subject. The words: family, home, mother, father, sister, brother, girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, husband, and any other permutation of the concept of missing loved ones had been struck from the English Language, so far as the crew of the Polar Star were concerned. What they saw around them right now - each other - was all they had, and maybe all they would ever have.
“Tell you what,” the Captain said, interrupting her intellectual descent into depression. “Have the Bridge Gang lay out tracks from Guam to the X. We’ll do the Crossing Ceremony after we’re done refueling.”
“Yes, Sir!” LTjg Amy Montrose said, brightening.
“We’ll need to do something before we have to park in the middle of the ocean and wait.”
Those were their orders: Take station and wait for either contact from higher, or communications from the High Endurance Cutters that had been patrolling the Pacific before the Fall. Just sit there and wait, as the world fell apart around them.
54
“Good fix on the hour has us right on track. Time to turn, twelve minutes,” Jonesy said, tossing the Speed Wheel (a circular sort of slide rule for calculating time, speed, and distance) onto the chart table. He had the watch, along with CWO2 Eric Larsen, the Bosun, Seaman Siemen, the helmsman, and Harold F. Simmons, jr., the lookout. BM3/DECK Masur had the BMOW, but he was off doing rounds. Everyone else, except the watch in Radio and the watch in the Engine Room, was back on the fantail, attending the funeral of ET3 Terry Proud, and BM2/OPS Ricardo Scutelli.
Jonesy gladly relieved Jack Ross, one of his Thirds, so that he could attend. Jonesy, himself, had no desire. Forget that he caused one of those deaths. Forget that the crew had been looking sideways at him in his full LE rig since before the fight on the Mess Deck. Forget that the last damned thing he wanted to do was listen to their supposed Commanding Officer make a speech. He had no desire to go to the funeral because he had no desire to go to any funeral, ever again. He had already been to far too many.
“We will be coming right to two-seven-zero, and continuing the Box of Death,” he said, completing his report.
The “Box of Death” was so named because: (A), it was a box, in the middle of the ocean; steer a particular course for X-amount of time, turn ninety degrees, then steer that course for X-amount of time, turn ninety degrees again, etcetera, etcetera; and (B) because it was mind-numbingly, brain cell killing-ly dull. Ordinarily, it was used as an LE maneuver to take station in a particular area where high value targets were suspected, and cruise around till one of them shows up. In this case, they were on station to...wait. For what, no one was really sure. End of the world? Something obvious happens to change their status? Or maybe (and this was becoming increasingly unlikely) for new orders.
“Very well,” CWO2 Larsen said, his normally bland face looking somehow frozen.
He’s in shock, Jonesy thought. And why not?
They were screwed - well and truly fucked like a three dollar crack whore.
The crew didn’t trust him. But maybe that wasn’t it. They feared him, and wasn’t that a royal kick in the balls? He’d been many things over the years: friend, clown, teacher, student, asshole, certainly, but feared? No. Never. But they feared him now. He could see it in their eyes. He could sense it, from the way conversations would suddenly stop when he came near. They were afraid of him.
But trust came into it, too. They didn’t trust each other. One of their number had already turned homicidal. Who would be next?
55
“...We commend their bodies to the deep,” LT Medavoy said, intoning the time-honored salute to fallen sailors.
MK2 Frank Roessler bowed his head with the rest of the crew, then watched in silence as the two shroud-covered bodies of Terry Proud and Scoot slid over the side and into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. The ship was still moving, and so the ripples from where the bodies entered the sea were soon lost from sight. Frank had always thought you stopped the ship for this sort of thing, but for whatever reason, the XO (sorry, CO) had directed one and all to keep steaming. Seemed disrespectful, somehow. One more reason for the crew to dislike the bastard, he thought.
Since the man brought his own family aboard after telling the crew they couldn’t bring theirs, the talk had gotten more and more nasty. But, after all, it was just talk, right? It could never get beyond talk, right? He should be sure - should be damned sure - nobody would actually mention the “M” Word, but they were all in uncharted territory here, so he wasn’t sure of a single damned thing. This was a whole new world, and it wasn’t a nice place. Was mutiny really that far beyond the pale?
“Ship’s Company, Atten-shun!” LTjg Bloominfeld barked. He was now the XO, since he was also now the highest ranking Commissioned Officer, after the CO. They’d been at Parade Rest throughout the ceremony, but now everybody stood to attention - more or less. It certainly wasn’t parade ground, but not a single damned one of them had done anything remotely parade ground since the day they left boot camp. It just wasn’t the way in the Coast Guard. Not that they weren’t military, nor that they didn’t feel a love of country, or whatever the thing was that stirred the patriotic part of the human soul or psyche, or whatever the fuck it was. Not one of them had marched or done close order drill, or the manual of arms, or any of that shit since boot. They were just too damned busy, under normal conditions, and so they were all out of practice.
And these were not normal conditions.
Bloominfeld looked around to make sure everybody followed his order, seemed a bit surprised that they had, then said: “At ease,” and they all sort of slumped into a more relaxed position. “Gather round,” he added, and the crew shuffled forward to form a human arc in front of the CO. They were all there, except the watchstanders, and everyone was wearing their best Tropical Dress uniform - even Duke, whom Medavoy had ordered to get out of his LE rig.
Frank wasn’t sure if that was a good move, or a really, really bad one
. On the one hand, nobody needed to be reminded that there were two people on board whose specific job was to “deal with” anyone who turned zombie - least of all at the funeral of someone who had. On the other hand, any one of the assembled crew could, themselves, turn at any moment, thus proving the need for those two men.
Nobody said anything. There were no smart ass remarks or jokes, or whispered comments of any kind. The only sound was the sea and the churning propeller beneath their feet.
They all look stunned, like a gaggle of concussed geese, Frank thought. And they look scared.
He was scared, for sure. He was damned near shitting in his pants. Okay...maybe not. He didn’t think he was in any actual danger of needing to change his shorts, but it was a matter of degrees. He was spooked, and he didn’t mind admitting it - at least to himself.
He’d been there on the Mess Deck during the attack - had seen what the full neurological looked like. He didn’t want to see it again - ever. Not much chance of that, though, was there?
“This is a sad day,” Medavoy said. “We all feel the loss of our shipmates.”
“Motherfucker didn’t even slow down,” Masur muttered next to Frank. There were several quiet grunts of agreement.
“But we should take heart in the accomplishments and contributions they made. And we should resolve to carry on the mission, as they would have done.”
“About now, Terry would be farting,” Ski said, on the other side of Frank. This produced a few chuckles.
Frank gazed at his shipmates in a surprised sort of wonder. They were trying so damned hard to make this seem normal. But nothing was normal. Not a single goddamned thing. And the forced jocularity clearly covered the one question none of them could escape: who was going to turn next? And then they all received the answer.
“Bugs! All over me!” Doc screamed, tearing at his uniform shirt, and all Hell broke loose.