by Jeff Thomson
Calm down, asshole, he said to himself. He was panic-firing, and he knew it. He had only fired dual pistols a few times, and then only in the controlled environment of an indoor range. This was neither indoors, nor controlled, and he was blasting away like some untrained rent-a-cop who’d seen too many action movies. He willed himself to get his shit together.
Duke fired twice more, killing first a naked elderly woman, then a clothed young man in board shorts and a pink wife-beater with tiny sailboats on it. He, at least, wasn’t spraying and praying.
Jonesy snapped a look behind him, down the asphalt road they had so recently traversed. Nothing was coming that way, and the so-called “hoard” of zombies had suddenly turned into about half-a-dozen scattered individuals staggering toward them from the Mall. He holstered one of the nines - mainly as a way to resist the temptation to go all Lethal Weapon like an idiot - and put three rounds into the nearest attacker: a middle-aged man, wearing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer tee-shirt and a Speedo.
“Shore Team, report!” Molly’s voice snapped.
“Large concentration,” he said, sort of amazed that his voice didn’t sound shrill. “Coming from the Midway Mall,” he added, though he doubted she had any idea of where he was referring to.
“Do you need assistance? Over.”
“Negative,” he said, looking around, as Duke took out two more with two shotgun blasts. There were now only three zombies left in sight, and they were the slow ones, who stumbled down the road, as if dragging their tired asses home at the end of a very long day.
He holstered the remaining nine and calmly ejected the magazine from his M4, then replaced it with one from the right-side ammo pouch on his belt, and tucked the empty into another pouch on the other side. They continued walking backwards down Nimitz, but there really wasn’t any great hurry. The three remaining insane inhabitants in view looked emaciated, as if they hadn’t eaten in about a week, which he supposed was possible.
He pulled the charging handle, took aim and fired once (head shot), twice (another head shot), a third time (left shoulder), and finally a fourth time, with a final head shot. All three remaining zombies in view were now maggot food.
He stopped back pedaling, and Duke followed suit. They both looked around. Nothing in either direction down Nimitz, nothing coming from the turn down Peters, nothing coming at them through the trees - not even goonie birds, who had all decided there were better parts of the island to be.
“That was...interesting,” Duke said, reloading the shotgun from his own ammo pouch.
“They should create a ride at Disneyland,” Jonesy replied, in his most laconic voice.
“Zombies of the Carribean?” Duke quipped.
“Wrong ocean, dude,” Jonesy said.
“Whatever,” Duke replied. “Everybody’s a critic.”
141
“Don’t mean to be critical,” Lane Keely said, pulling the binoculars from his eyes and looking at John. They were on the Bridge, and the True North was steaming ever-westward at a sedate twelve knots. “But is there some plan beyond just going to Hawaii?”
“Yes,” John said.
“And it is...?”
John looked at his friend and shipmate. They’d known each other for well over a decade. Nearly two, now that he thought about it. They’d served together on the original, one-hundred and eighty-foot Sassafras, and then again at Group Humboldt Bay, in the California Redwoods. Both ended up in Astoria - John, as the chief on the two-hundred-ten-foot Medium Endurance Cutter Alert, and Lane as an instructor at the National Motor Lifeboat School, where they intentionally made the forty-four foot MLBs capsize, as training, which John always considered to be suicidally insane.
He looked out into the setting sun, and marveled at the interplay of light and shadow and color on the mare’s tail, cirrus clouds painting the sky in hues of orange and red and purple and deepest blue. He loved this time of night.
He turned to his friend. “Molly is out there,” he said. “She’s aboard the Sass, she can take care of herself, and she’s alive.”
Lane scratched his bald pate and uttered a sound that was half-sigh and half-grunt, but said nothing.
“Out with it,” John said.
“Are you sure she’s alive?” Lane asked.
“Yes,” John replied.
“Why?” Lane asked. “How?”
That was a good question. He didn’t have a clear, definable answer, but he knew the answer, anyway - sort of. He exhaled through his nose and said: “I know, because if she’s not alive, if she’s dead, if they’re all dead, then there really isn’t any point, is there?”
“Well, yeah, that makes sense,” Lane said, the sarcasm just a smidge away from being written in flashing neon.
“Fine,” John said. “If that doesn’t satisfy, then leave it at this: Do you have any better ideas?”
“Nope,” Lane admitted. “No, sir, I don’t.”
“Then this is the one we’re going to run with,” John said. “Keep calling the Sass on the GSB. Do it on the hour and the thirty, just to give you something to do.” Lane nodded. “And let me know if you hear anything.”
With that, John turned and headed below, praying to all the gods he didn’t believe in that he was right, that Molly was alive, and that there was hope.
Please let there be hope...
142
“Henry David Goddard, at your service,” Mr. Sweater Vest said, hopping onto the port side deck of the Daisy Jean. Blackjack Charlie knew the name from somewhere, but couldn’t quite dredge up the memory. Then the newcomer did it for him.
“I am the United States Representative from the Forty-Fourth District in California,” he said, reaching out a hand to shake.
Blackjack took it and shook, connecting the name. Goddard had been elected a year-and-a-half before, during the sea change that was the ascension of Donald Trump. He had been, at the time, just another Republican, from the primary bastion of conservatism in the ultra-liberal Golden State. There hadn’t been anything remarkable about the man - at first. Slowly, but surely, however, the crazy began to peek its head out in various speeches and attempts at legislation.
He was, if Charlie recalled, anti-abortion (no surprise), anti-gays in the military (or anywhere else, for that matter), pro-pray the gay away, anti-vaccination, anti-climate science, anti-Evolution, pro-Creationism in schools, pro-prayer in schools, pro-Second Amendment (as if a Republican could be anything else), a Birther, a racist, and finally - and this had been the nail in his coffin - a vociferous proponent of the flat-Earth theory. None of these would have been fatal, in, say, the Bible Belt, or the Deep South, but California was a different matter. Even the most hard-line right-winger in California was nevertheless fairly well-educated, and the idea that somebody in such a position of power could actually believe - in the Twenty-First Century - that the Earth was flat, simply did not fly. When he tried to put forth a bill requiring the teaching of that theory in public schools, he effectively sealed his own fate.
The Forty-Fourth District had been Republican since time immemorial, and the party leadership wasn’t about to risk losing the seat to a Democrat by running someone who actually believed something so patently batshit, and so they put forward a Primary challenger, who promptly wiped the political floor with one Henry David Goddard. He would not be getting re-elected in the next cycle - if there ever were a next cycle. Until such time, however, he was still a sitting member of the House of Representatives.
“Sir,” Charlie said, affecting a tone of respect he did not feel, and then got straight to business. “What is the status of the rest of your crew?”
“All dead, I’m afraid,” he said, as if commenting on the weather. “Tell me,” he continued. “Have you heard anything from anyone else in authority?”
“No, sir, I have not,” Charlie said, easing his hand under the untucked hem of his shirt. Time to drop this motherfucker in the ocean, he thought, grasping the butt of the 9mm. The last damned thing they needed was some p
olitical wack-job thinking he was in charge. He was about to pull the weapon and put a round in the asshole’s forehead, when the man said something that changed everything.
“Well, then,” Goddard said, clasping his hands behind his back and bouncing lightly upon his toes. “It is quite possible, under the Succession Act of 1947, that I am now the President of the United States.”
143
“There are eight of us, Jonesy, “ Harold said, waggling five fingers on his left hand and three on his right. “This is fucking nuts.”
After the fight at the Mall, Jonesy and Duke had commandeered a pickup truck. At least it was a truck in the technical sense. In a very real sense, it was an absolute piece of shit, with rust, and bald tires, and a wonky suspension that bottomed out whenever they hit a bump or pothole - which was to say, about every thirty seconds. It had one advantage, however: they found the keys in the ignition. They used it to cruise the rest of Sand Island’s 20 miles of road, finding only two more zombies and no survivors. They’d used it to pick up the dead bodies.
“Of course it’s nuts, Harold,” Jonesy replied. “But when has it not been?” He looked at each of them in turn. “Let’s do the math, shall we? Pre-Plague, the PACAREA AOR, all by its lonesome, was eleven million square miles, right?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Dan McMullen said.
They brought the Sass in, using the RHIB as a guide, and tied her off to the pier on the North side of the harbor. Gary King whipped up a delicious, fire-grilled dinner of steak and aluminum foil-baked potatoes, and they had eaten it in relative comfort on a strip of sand near the ship. And then they broke out the booze, taken from the Pretty, Pretty.
“Good idea,” Jonesy replied, continuing. “And there were maybe twenty thousand of us in uniform to cover it. Of that, around half were in support, admin, or supply positions. Those are important, don’t get me wrong, but that left ten, maybe eleven thousand of us to physically cover that eleven million square miles. Ten thousand of us to do Law Enforcement, Drug Interdiction, Immigration, Port Security, Homeland Security, Fisheries Enforcement, Marine Environmental Response, Boating Safety, Search and Rescue, and Aids to Navigation. Plus a bunch of whatever other bullshit they threw at us. And we did it, day after day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“I get tired just thinking about it,” Duke quipped.
Jonesy took a healthy swig from the bottle of premium tequila before resuming. “And we did it all while being the red-headed bastard stepchild of the Armed Forces. It was always, ‘Thanks guys. Great job! Oh, by the way, fuck you, we’re cutting your budget. Again.’ Tell me I’m wrong.” He pointed the bottle at Gary King. “You been in, what, twelve years? How many times have you seen that?”
Gary nodded. “Three or four.”
“But we kept right on doing it, every single damned day.”
“Your point is?” Harold asked.
“My point is, that this is no different.”
“You are insane,” Harold said.
“Of course I am,” Jonesy agreed. “So are you. So are every one of us. We did this every day, because we were insane enough to volunteer and stubborn enough to want to do it right.” Nobody disagreed. “But we didn’t do it for country or flag or honor, or any of that esoteric bullshit.”
“Big words,” Frank said, grinning.
“Fuck you,” Jonesy replied, grinning back. “We did it because it needed to be done, and we were the ones who stepped up. This is no different.”
“There are eight of us, Jonesy!” Harold repeated, waggling his numerical digits again. “We’re not going to cover eleven million square miles with eight people.”
“Nope,” he replied, shaking his head. “We’re not. But we can cover ten thousand.” He looked at each in turn again. “We can say, right here and right now that in this patch of ocean, everybody who needs to be rescued is going to be rescued. By us. Because there’s nobody else stepping up.”
“I’m with you Jonesy,” Dan said, after a silent pause in which everybody seemed to consider Jonesy’s words. “But how are we gonna do it?”
“Fuck if I know,” he replied. “We figure it out, like we always have.” He shrugged. “Damn near everything I’ve learned in the Coast Guard, I learned because somebody dumped it in my lap and said: deal with it.” Frank, Duke and Gary all nodded their heads.
“Been there,” Frank said.
“Done that,” Duke said.
“Bought the tee-shirt,” Gary completed the triplet.
“I’ll tell you this, though,” Jonesy said, pointing at Molly. “I’ll bet you she’s got a plan.”
All eyes turned to her. She blinked in mild surprise, then smiled, ruefully.
She chuckled,. “I’ll be honest. I’m so scared I might just wet myself at any moment.” This drew a few snorts of laughter. Her face turned serious, and she continued. “I’ll say this: If I gotta be stuck in a zombie apocalypse, I’m glad I’ve got you guys watching my back.”
“Cue the emotional music,” Dan joked. Jonesy pelted him with a pebble, and Frank shoved at his shoulder, toppling him to the side. He sat back up and looked at her, a little sheepishly. “So...Do you have a plan?”
She nodded. “I’ve been thinking of one. Haven’t worked out all the details, but yeah. I do.” She had everyone’s rapt attention. “We start by doing the same thing we’d do in any disaster.”
“Which is?” Harold said, then hastened to add, “Ma’am,” before Duke could carry out his evident threat of physical violence.
“Duke,” she said. “You were at a small boat station in California, right?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Did you ever go through an earthquake?”
“Of course!”
“What’s the first thing you guys did?”
Duke thought about it for a second, then smiled. “We made sure our own shit was good to go.”
“Exactly,” she said, waving her finger in the Bosun’s direction. “The Kukui, Assateague, and Galveston Island are all out there, somewhere. Their crews are probably in the same mess we’re in - or worse.” She looked at their surroundings. “We’re not in bad shape.”
“Are you nuts?” Harold blurted, and was promptly smacked upside the head by Duke’s large right hand. “Sorry...”
She nodded. “Yes. We’ve lost thirty-nine crew members. Yes, that’s a tragedy. More than I can express without bursting into tears - which I absolutely will not do.” Molly smiled at them all. “But look around. We’re on a secure island, free of zombies. We have food, water, fuel. And we have each other.”
“Could be a whole lot worse,” Jonesy agreed.
“We find those other ships, consolidate our resources, and then we start rescuing people,” she concluded. “We can figure the rest out later.”
They all looked at each other, the light dawning in their eyes. These were good men - good people - in extraordinary, impossible circumstances so far beyond their experience, it couldn’t have been seen with the Hubble, but they weren’t giving up. Not by a long shot.
Jonesy raised his bottle of tequila. “A toast,” he said. “The Coast Guard’s unofficial motto:” He theatrically cleared his throat. “We, the unwilling...”
“Led by the unknowing...” Molly said, waving the hand not holding a bottle of rum, and drawing a roar of appreciative laughter.
They all chimed in. “Have been doing so much, with so little, for so long, that we’re now capable of doing anything with nothing!” A cheer went up, along with several bottles of premium booze. The laughter died when Dan McMullen said:
“I hate to be a buzz-kill here,” he began.
“Then don’t,” Gary said.
Dan ignored him. “Harold’s right. There are only eight of us.”
“Not any more,” Bill Schaeffer said, coming up from the direction of the ship. He walked to Molly, and announced: “You’ve got a phone call, Ma’am.”
144
“...Cutter Sa
ssafras, this is M/V True North, two-one-eight-two. Over,” John said into the GSB 900. Barber had gotten through to somebody, and the first thing he’d done was call John, who raced to the Bridge, barely pausing to get dressed. His hair was mussed, his shirt was untucked, and his eyes were red and puffy, but he was smiling.
“True North, Sassafras. Over,” Molly’s voice - distorted by distance and weather, and whatever other crap the communications gremlins might be throwing at them, but still perfectly, blessedly recognizable - came though the tiny speaker and went straight to John’s beating heart.
“Hey, Molly,” he said. “Over.”
“Good to hear your voice,” her voice said.
“What’s your status?” he asked, trying to maintain some semblance of radio protocol.
“Alive,” she replied. “Got knocked down. Got back up again,” she said. “You? Over.”
“Same,” he said. “Where are you? And before you answer, be advised. There may be unfriendly ears listening.”
“Not taking any chances?” Jim asked.
“No, sir, I am not.”
“Will she understand your cryptic message?” Jim asked.
“She’s smart,” John replied. She’ll figure it out.”
As if to prove the point, there was a definite pause at the other end of the transmission. It went on for mere moments, but as they ticked by, John began to worry. He needn’t have bothered.
“We’re at your favorite golf course,” she said.
“What the fuck?” Jim blurted. “What the Hell does that mean? You don’t golf.”
John thought about it for a moment, at first just as confused as his friend. Then he got it and smiled. “I’ve played golf exactly once,” John said.
“Where?” Jim asked.
“Midway.”
145
“Roger that,” John’s voice said over the GSB. “See you soon. True North, out.”
Molly smiled and placed the radio mic back into its bracket.