by Jeff Thomson
The next thing he saw was John Mad Dog Kennedy, lying in a heap on the deck, ten feet down the passage. His head looked like a smashed pumpkin. Glancing the other way - aft - he saw two more bodies, lying four feet apart. He couldn’t tell who they were; didn’t really want to know. All he did know was rage. These were his boys, his babies, his crew. Someone or some thing had killed them, and oh my dear God did that piss off BM1/DECK Dennis Hurdlika.
The crew was in danger. The ship was in danger. And what did you do when the crew and the ship were in danger? You defended it.
He strode to the nearest berthing compartment door and thrust it open. “Everybody up!” He yelled. “Roll out! General Quarters! Man your Battle Stations!” Without waiting to see if the occupants obeyed his command, he strode to the next compartment and the next and the next, repeating the process each time, rousing the crew.
It was the most boneheaded thing he could have done.
In his defense, it should be noted that Dennis Hurdlika’s brain was malfunctioning. While he was unconscious, the infection from the bite on his shoulder had worked its way through his bloodstream, and was now zipping and zapping from synapse to receptor in his frontal lobe, cooking it, as if it had been thrown into a microwave. At the same time, his hypothalamic region was dumping hormones directly into his lizard brain, jacking it up as if someone had attached a big ass pair of jumper cables to it, while injecting an insane dose of methamphetamine. In short, Dennis Hurdlika was becoming a zombie.
He did not know this. He could not know this, any more than a psychotic axe-murderer would know or realize or care that he was batshit crazy.
This lack of knowledge, however, did not alter the fact that by opening all the doors and rousing the men, he was making certain the uninfected members of the Cutter Sassafras’ crew would now be mingling with those who had become zombies. He didn’t know this, couldn’t know this, as he made his way forward toward the Bosun Hold,
98
Lydia Claire stared at LTjg Amy Montrose in shock and anger, and more embarrassment than made any real sense. “What did you say?” she demanded.
“Strip down to your skivvies,” the officer replied, calmly.
They were standing just aft of the superstructure on the fantail, behind a tarp, strung to provide some semblance of privacy as the four female crew members who’d been involved in Fueling Ops stood under the Decon Shower. It had been a good thing, both in that it cleared them of any possible contagion, and the cascading water had hidden Lydia’s tears
Her heart was broken, as was her faith in the crew, the Captain, and humanity, in general. How could they have shoved those refugees away? How could they have turned their backs on people when they were most needed? How could they?
Yes, she understood, somewhere in the recesses of her wounded, traumatized mind, that doing what they did saved their own lives. Yes, she knew they couldn’t help anybody if they allowed themselves to get infected. She understood, rationally, logically. But rationality and logic didn’t make it hurt one bit less.
Herself, Montrose, Seaman Jennifer Collins and Seaman Titsy McGangbang had started by being doused with the chemically-treated water in their full MOPP gear, then took those off and were doused again in their uniforms. Now they were supposed to strip down further to just their underwear.
Being in the military and being housed with other women in a variety of settings, from open bay berthing areas containing thirty or forty of them, as in bootcamp, to the four-person berth she shared on Polar Star, made undressing around other women a thing so common, she scarcely thought about it anymore. But walking around the ship, soaking wet and in her underwear was not something she commonly did, although she suspected it was something Titsy McGangbang at least thought of doing.
That wasn’t the Seaman’s real name of course. It was Tara McBride. She’d been given the unfortunate nickname because of the rumors surrounding her transfer from one of the High Endurance Cutters homeported in Seattle that shared dock space with the Star and the Healy. Supposedly, the well-endowed nineteen year old redhead had allowed the entire Deck Force to use her as a morale boost. This was almost certainly bullshit, and anyone with a brain knew it was, but nicknames, and sexual innuendo, and cruelty knew no intellectual master, and so the rumors had flown like a flock of salacious seagulls, and Titsy McGangbang had been born.
Lydia usually felt sorry for the young woman, but when SN McBride wordlessly stripped off her work blue uniform to reveal a skimpy bra and even skimpier thong, (both of them white, both of them transparent, thanks to their waterlogged condition) her empathy took wing and headed for parts unknown. It was evident from the wet cloth covering her private parts that the woman shaved. Completely. It was also evident from her suddenly see-through bra, that she also had a pierced nipple.
“Oh for Christ’s sake McBride! Could you at least try to not act like a slut?” Jennifer Collins said. She was a friendly young woman - also nineteen - who was cute, in that purely Irish sort of way, complete with freckles and sun-dappled brown hair. Unlike her fellow Deckie, her reputation was solid, both in terms of her perceived virtue (the boys tended to treat her like their kid sister - even the ones who were younger than she was), and in her work-ethic.
“Fuck you, Collins,” the redhead snapped.
“Both of you give it a rest,” Ms. Montrose said. Lydia liked her well enough. Didn’t really know her, in the way most of the crew didn’t know the officers, but at least she wasn’t a bitch like some of the female officers she’d met. “And you two strip down. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get dry,” she added as she began to strip off as well.
Collins’ lingerie choice had been wise. They were rose-colored, which made them both pretty, and good at concealing her attributes. Ms. Montrose had worn a white sports bra and dark blue panties. The panties covered herself well, but the bra clearly showed her prominent areolae. Lydia looked down at her own fashion choice and immediately had to quell the irrational desire to cover herself. She might as well have gone commando, for all the good her white underwear was doing, but it hardly mattered, as long as it was just the four of them. This brought up a rather important subject.
“Uh,” she began, looking around the tarp-enclosed area. “What are we supposed to wear when we head below?”
Montrose looked at Lydia, then the other two, then herself, then the surrounding area, where there was a decided lack of anything to conceal their near-nudity. “Shit,” the LTjg said. “Hey!” she yelled. “Who’s out there?”
“Tis I,” Wheeler said in his strong Boston accent.
“I know I’m the Morale Officer and all, but I don’t think a wet tee-shirt contest would be an appropriate morale event,” she said.
The Assistant OPS Officer didn’t say anything for a pregnant moment. Lydia could just imagine the not-at-all appropriate thoughts going through the man’s head. She hated him for it. She hated all of them, at the moment.
That wasn’t exactly true. She didn’t hate them. She didn’t like them very much, but she didn’t hate them. What she hated was the callous brutality of mankind, in general, which could label a young woman a slut, just because she wore her sexuality on her sleeve; which could leave four women uncovered in wet underwear on a ship full of testosterone-laden men; which could abandon hundreds of refugees, just to save their own asses.
“Right you are,” Wheeler said, finally. “I’ll take care of it.”
Would he? Could he? Could he “take care” of the black despair filling her heart like cholesterol? Could anybody? Ever? Lydia doubted it. But she did know one thing for sure: as soon as she could get off this ship, she would.
99
Skizzy Pete Hannity checked the Ruger .357 he carried for the umpteenth time, making good and damned sure the thing was loaded. It was, just as it had been all the other times he’d checked. He was nervous. No. Let’s call a spade a spade, Pete old boy. You’re scared shitless.
He was, too. He’d never gon
e in for guns before. Oh, sure, he’d used them a couple of times when he’d needed to threaten some of the bitches he’d banged. You had to do that sometimes with bitches. His father taught him that. And, yeah, a couple of them accused him of rape, and the jury agreed - those goddamned liberals in California. But the guns he’d used had never been loaded. This fucker most definitely was, and he was most definitely going to have to use it, which scared the living shit out of him.
He’d never hurt anybody - not really. The bitches complained, but of course they did. That’s why they were bitches.
They acquired the pistol from a liquor store they’d visited, following their escape from Soledad. Charlie had constructed another one of his signature blackjacks using a leather drawstring bag he’d shoplifted from a specialty store, which he filled with quarters stolen from a vending machine Old Pete jimmied. It served its purpose well, to judge from the liquor store clerk, whose unconscious body they’d moved before emptying the cash register. They found the pistol and a short, double-barreled shotgun behind the counter.
Skizzy Pete was there for that robbery, as well as the three others, on the way to the Marina, where they’d commandeered the Daisy Jean. They had been exciting - even fun. This, however, was not.
He crept across the deck toward the left side of the boat. He didn’t know from Port or Starboard or any of that shit, and he didn’t care, either. He wanted to be off this motherfucking boat, for damned sure. But Blackjack Charlie made him come, and Old Joe made him climb the ladder after Lazardo. Now Lazardo was dead, and Joe-Boy was dead, and there he was with a gun in his hand that might as well have been his dick.
He heard something - some one - coming from around the corner. He cocked the pistol, ever-so slowly, ever-so quietly. He saw the barrel of the rifle before he saw the man. His first instinct was to run like a scared little bitch, but he knew it wouldn’t work. There was too much open deck, too much space with nowhere to take cover. He’d get a hole through his back before he got three feet. He waited, holding his breath.
The moment he saw the man’s face, he opened fire.
100
Seaman Borgeson lay dead, folded backwards across the center console, his spine at a right angle to his legs. It might have been possible he was an accomplished contortionist, if not for his missing throat. The wind pipe, larynx, part of his esophagus (and good dear God, is that his tongue?) hung below the bloody mess like a sick necktie made by a thoroughly insane member of the Hermes family. Borgeson’s blood covered the compass and helm controls, the pooling liquid falling in fat drops onto the deck in front.
The thing that had once been LTjg Craig Bloominfeld was trying to do the same to BM3/OPS Jack Ross. He had the young man pinned against the deep fathometer, trying to shove his head through the readout screen. Molly Gordon, brand new boot Ensign, so petite, so soft, so feminine, so far beyond her realm of experience, so far out of her depth, and so scared she felt as if she might wet herself, snapped a solid kick into Bloominfeld’s right kidney.
Might as well have tried to tickle his ass with a feather, for all the good it seemed to do. The newly-turned zombie maniac grunted, but kept right on slamming the back of Ross’ skull into the large, gray bulk of the fathometer.
She moved by instinct, not thinking, not planning, just falling back on her years of training at the various Krav Maga studios she’d attended as a teenager, first in Alaska, then Oregon, then in Connecticut, near the Academy. She did a reverse spin into an elbow strike at the back of Bloominfeld’s head. That, at least stopped his attempt to turn Ross’ head into a depth sounder, but it didn’t stop him from strangling the poor navigator. She shifted into a front kick to the same kidney, then a back kick with a spin to the side of the zombie’s head, and that made it break contact. Ross’ insensible and probably dead body fell to the deck, where it stayed, unmoving.
The Bloominfeld-thing turned on her, lunging for her throat, but she batted away its clutching hands, and retreated to the far side of the console, almost tripping over Borgeson’s feet. In the brief time it took her to maintain her balance, it was on her again, piling into her back, shoving her forward against the Bridge windows.
The one thing you could never do in defense was to stop moving. An opponent couldn’t subdue if he/it couldn’t grab, and so she twisted and ducked, and threw an elbow into the zombie’s blessedly still-clothed groin.
Basic male physiology 101: if the mere mention of getting hit in the testicles will make a man cringe at the very idea, then an actual blow to said testicular region will have an adverse effect. Screw a bunch of zombie bullshit. An elbow to the nuts can and will cause excruciating pain.
It did.
Then again, however, stories of PCP cranked bad guys going apeshit, even after being hit with multiple tasers were legion, and so her respite from zombie wrestling turned out to be brief, indeed. No sooner had she spun away from the Bridge windows and escaped his/its grasp, then he was on her again - this time pinning her against the chart table so hard, it knocked the air from her lungs like a hammer blow. She managed to turn herself so she faced him, and could use her hands and arms, but that was all. Her strength had departed with her supply of oxygen.
Krav Maga was all about aggressive defense - with emphasis on aggressive. She’d learned all sorts of defensive measures against choke holds: from the side, against a wall, from behind, from the front, while pinned to the ground - every conceivable scenario where she might have to fend off a choking attacker, or so she thought. She’d never learned what to do when a zombie had her pinned, bent backwards over a chart table, after slamming her diaphragm against that table so hard that all the available air in her lungs departed for destinations unknown.
She tried to bring up first one knee, then the other, but Bloominfeld insinuated himself between her legs, as if he was trying to boff her while strangling the life out of her. She tried lifting her one arm straight up (which in this case was straight out toward the bulkhead behind the chart table), but her one-time OPS Boss had his elbow in her armpit while he continued to throttle her, and that particular hold-breaker proved unavailable. Her other arm was trapped as well, shoved under Bloominfeld’s jaw, keeping the zombie’s teeth from rending her face.
Its grip on her throat felt like a bear trap snapping closed on her neck. Her arms flailed, the blows having no more effect than a piece of paper might. Her vision began to close in - red, then gray, then black around the edges. Stars winked in and out in front of her dilating pupils. She had to do something! She was going to die.
Her flailing arm went to the chart table, trying to find a weapon, trying to find anything that might save her life. Her numbing fingers felt a pen or pencil (she couldn’t tell which by touch alone). She flicked whatever it was aside and kept searching, kept probing the damnably empty table.
There! A sharp pain in her finger. She didn’t pause to contemplate the incongruity of this fact, didn’t wait to puzzle out just what in the fuck pricked her. She grabbed for it.
101
“What the fuck are we doing here?” Harold asked. They were still in the Bosun Hold. Duke had put away the kukri-machetes, but Harold still had his “special” bat.
“Waiting,” Duke replied. He’d taken a pair of eight-pound sledge hammers, with twelve-inch carbon fiber handles out of a cabinet below the table, and was hefting them, as if testing their weight and balance in his hands. He took a practice swing with each and smiled. Harold didn’t like that smile one bit.
“What are you planning to do with those?” he asked, then amended his question. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
Duke just shrugged and tried another couple of practice swings. The hammers didn’t make a sound as they sliced through the air. Harold found it strange. Such big and massive and deadly things should make at least some damned sound.
“So what, exactly, are we waiting for?” He asked.
As if in answer, the dogging arm of the watertight door swung upwards with a CLANG. Bo
th men turned toward the door, and it seemed both knew they were jumping at nothing. Zombies didn’t open doors. At least, that’s what they’d heard. Harold held his bat at the ready.
Dennis Hurdlika stumbled through. His eyes were wild, and his normally pristine hair was mussed. There was a big blotch of blood on one shoulder, and more on his hands. He held the door for support.
“Zombies,” he gasped. “Behind–“
But his words were cut off as the unholy creatures shoved him into the compartment on their way through the hatch. Seaman Tommy Barnes (or what had been the young man) led the way, followed by YN3 Greg Haversham, SK2 Al DeBenedetto, SN Stanley St. John, and FNMK Ronald “Bart” Simpson. Both Simpson and DeBenedetto stepped on the prone form of Dennis Hurdlika. The rest ignored him. They were focusing on Harold and Duke.
“Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” Harold said, in rapid succession. He saw Duke snap a look in his direction, and yelled: “Don’t look at me! Kill those motherfuckers,” and raised his bat like Hank Aaron standing at home plate.
It was all Duke needed. The large Bosun Mate waded into the zombie flash mob, swinging both hammers like John Henry in a railroad tunnel. The one in his left hand smashed into Haversham’s shoulder and sent the ex-Yeoman flying into Stanley St. John, who fell back, tripping over Hurdlika. The one in his right took DeBenedetto square in the forehead. It was as if the young Storekeeper’s skull imploded in blood and bone and brain matter.
“Fuck you!” Harold screamed, and swung his bat at Tommy Barnes. He missed his former co-worker, but the swing carried the bat around and smacked the nail-covered end into Simpson’s left ear. The impact landed with a resounding THUNK, and blood covered the fancy knot-work he’d spent an hour adding to his makeshift weapon. He tried to yank it free, but it stuck, and instead pulled the falling zombie toward him.
Either from surprise or from the weight of the dropping former-man, the bat fell from Harold’s hand and went clattering to the deck, with Simpson on top of it. Barnes made a lunge for him, but Duke ended it with a massive, bone-cracking blow directly between its shoulder blades. It must have smashed the spine, because the young man - their friend - dropped like, well, quite a bit like someone who’d just had their spinal column crushed by an eight-pound sledge hammer. Harold stared at him in shock and horror, and might have stayed that way, had it not been for Dennis Hurdlika’s screaming growl.