Crawlerz
Book 2
“Batten Down the Hatches”
R S Merritt
Text Copyright © 2020 Randall Scott Merritt
All Rights Reserved
This series is dedicated to my beautiful wife and family.
Cover Design By:
Harry Lamb
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Longest Layover
Chapter 2: Slave Drivers
Chapter 3: Knowing is Half the Battle
Chapter 4: Early to Rise
Chapter 5: Life Aboard the Neverland
Chapter 6: The Lost Ark
Chapter 7: Improvise, Overcome, Adapt
Chapter 8: The Fine Art of Seduction
Chapter 9: Hold My Beer
Chapter 10: Double Tap
Chapter 11: Awkward Beginnings
Chapter 12: The Infection is Airborne
Chapter 13: Dinner Interrupted
Chapter 14: Reunions and Revenge
Chapter 15: Meanwhile Back at the Base
Chapter 16: Best Served Cold
Chapter 17: General Quarters
Chapter 18: Loose Lips
Chapter 19: Change of Plans
Chapter 20: If at First You Don’t Succeed
Chapter 21: Can Do
Chapter 22: Ship of the Damned
Chapter 23: Never Tell Me the Odds
Chapter 24: A Beach Getaway
Chapter 25: Abandon Ship
Chapter 26: East Bound and Down
Chapter 27: The King is Dead, Long Live the King!
Chapter 28: Just a Flesh Wound
Chapter 29: Full Speed Ahead
Chapter 30: Treadmills Aren’t just for Drying Clothes
Chapter 31: Sardines
Chapter 32: The Seabrook Island Survivors Club
Chapter 33: You Can’t Fight the Rip
Chapter 34: Home Sweet Home
Author’s Note:
Other Books by RS Merritt
Chapter 1: The Longest Layover
Yue woke up on the hard floor of a military cargo plane. She assumed it was military based on the spartan and drab interior. All around her women from the clan were either sitting up rubbing their heads or still sleeping off whatever drug they’d been slipped. Surrounding them were boxes of supplies. Several of the boxes looked like they’d been pulled straight out of the clan’s trucks.
“How are you are feeling sweetie?” A familiar voice asked from across the aisle. Yue turned her head painfully until she could see it was Charani talking to her.
“Ouch.” Yue responded pointing at her head. Charani chuckled.
“Yeah. Me too. I didn’t even have the beer or wine. What kind of psycho spikes a Diet Coke?” Charani grimaced.
“Where are we?” Yue asked. It hurt to talk. She had the worst headache of her life. She didn’t say anything, but she’d had the Diet Coke as well. Boxed wine and Bud Light weren’t the kind of alcohol she got excited about. It needed to be some sort of icy mixed drink that was more sugary slush than booze before she was interested.
“On a plane.” Charani deadpanned.
Yue sighed and lay her head back against a box. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t have just pointed their guns at them and told them to get on the plane. Why the roofies? Her clothes all seemed to be on right. Looking around she didn’t see where anybody looked like they’d been molested. Not that any of them would necessarily know if they had been. She looked back over at Charani and asked if she thought they’d done anything to them while they were out.
“Like rape? No, I asked around and no one remembers or feels like anything like that happened. Don’t worry yourself about that none. You don’t feel like anything happened to you right?” Charani gave Yue a hard look. A deadly glint in her eye told Yue that if Charani suspected something like that had been done to her then those men better sleep with one eye open.
“No, I was just trying to figure out why they felt the need to knock us out.” Yue said. The plane bounced around in the air slinging them all around roughly. There were a couple of dingy round windows, but boxes had been stacked in front of them. It was dark out so there probably wasn’t anything to see anyway. A sinking feeling in her stomach as the plane started descending rapidly. It felt like they were going straight down. A couple of the women screamed. They were all freaking out they were about to die in a fiery plane crash.
The plane bounced on a hard surface before being yanked to a rapid halt. The plane began taxiing along some sort of runway. Charani and another woman slid the boxes out from in front of the window so they could look out. The plane braked to a hard stop knocking the small group of women who’d gathered to stare through the grimy glass off their feet. The back of the plane started descending to make a ramp down to the runway. Yue hadn’t been one of the ones in the group looking out the window, so she happened to be the first one down the ramp. A naval officer flanked by a couple of seamen with shore patrol bands on their arms stopped her at the bottom of the ramp.
Yue was busily looking around trying to figure out where she was. The bright lights were making it hard to see. The way the ground was shifting and the fact that she was staring at sailors running around everywhere. The officer waited for all the women to come down the ramp then asked them to follow him.
“We have a few that haven’t woken up from the drugs yet.” Charani said loudly. The officer got a confused look on his face then ordered the men to bring out a couple of stretcher bearers.
“We’ll have them carried to the briefing room. You were drugged?” The officer asked.
“Like you didn’t know.” Charani responded staring into the man’s eyes. She got in his face to the point the one shore patrolman stepped forward to restrain her. The officer put his hand on the man’s chest to hold him back.
“I didn’t know. I’ll find out what happened. I’m going to have these men escort you to the briefing center. I’m going to make sure the stretcher bearers show up and have them take the last three women over to join the rest of you. Then I’m going to check on some things before I meet you all in the briefing center.” The officer looked at them expectantly for a second before turning on his heel and walking briskly away to take care of the tasks he’d set for himself.
Their escort took them down a hatch into a labyrinth of grey metal hallways and hatches. The sailors they passed stared at them in shock. Yue guessed that was due to the decidedly non-military haircuts and clothing the women were wearing. She thought at first there might not even be any women on the ship. They passed a pair of women in the dungarees and blue work shirts in one of the hallways though which set Yue’s mind at ease. She could see how being the only women on a ship with this many men could be an issue. She’d been worried they were being brought on the ship to scratch an itch. Especially considering how they’d been drugged and transported.
The briefing room they were left in was large enough for all of them to have a seat. There were meticulously cleaned whiteboards all around the room. Clipboards were neatly stacked on a desk in the back. About twenty minutes after getting settled in the other three women were walked in. The corpsmen had used smelling salts on them instead of trying to carry them around in stretchers. The sailors told them to wait there for the lieutenant then left.
They were still waiting for the lieutenant to show up when several sailors entered carrying trays loaded with food and drinks. The delicious smell of hot coffee filled the room. Sandwiches and French Fries covered the trays. Yue started salivating as she and the other women moved in on the trays like a pack of starving hyenas around a barbecue sauce covered chicken.
“You all do remember what happened the last time you ate the food these people gave us right?” Charani called out loudly.
“Free airplane ride to possibly the safest place on the planet?” One of the women who normally did the highwire act fired back instantly. She had to have been thinking about that answer for a little while she’d said it so fast. She also brought up a very good point. Yue didn’t think there was a safer place they could be. At least as far as protection from the infected went. Assuming the aircraft carrier was sitting in the middle of the ocean.
“You’ve all been drugged and dragged out to the middle of the ocean to be used as party favors.” Charani said loudly. This caused more than a few of the women to pause and reconsider if the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were worth it.
“Not exactly.” The lieutenant commander who’d met them on the flight deck was standing in the back of the room. He’d been listening to the exchange and getting a bit more frustrated with every word. The women of the clan all turned around noticing him for the first time. He told the crew they could leave the trays and coffee. He asked them all to have a seat once they had some food. He grabbed himself a sandwich off the tray and poured a cup of coffee out of the provided carafe. He took a bit bite of the sandwich and tried to take a big swig of the coffee to show them it wasn’t poisoned. The coffee was way too hot, so he just sipped at it instead. Once everyone was settled in, he went up to the front of the room and waited until he had their attention.
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Watkins. You’re currently sailing on board the USS Gerald Ford. She’s a state of the art thirteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier with a crew of approximately three thousand. That’s not counting additional passengers we’ve picked up such as yourselves. You will in no way be treated as ‘party favors’.” Watkins stressed this last part looking around the room to see if anyone had any questions. He got quite a few hostile looks and one woman winked at him, but no one said anything.
“First off on behalf of the captain and myself I apologize for the way you were transported here. We’ve been placed under the command of the Department for the Continuation of the United States. It’s a department no one really knew existed until this whole mess started. The President granted them carte blanche since they seemed to have a plan in place for this sort of scenario. The man who had you drugged was the section leader for the southeast. I’ve been told it was his call in his section but that as long as you’re on board this ship, you’re safe from anything like that happening again.” Watkins paused and looked around the room again to see if anyone had any questions.
“What’s happening to the rest of the people we were with? Our husbands and friends that’re stuck back there. Will they be ok? Why’d they only send the women out here?” One of the women rapid fired questions at Watkins. Yue had been about to ask a set of similar questions. How was she supposed to protect her brothers from way out here in the middle of the ocean?
“We have very limited space for passengers. The only places that are really guaranteed to be safe are ships and islands. When we put out to sea with orders not to dock at the beginning of this, we had our normal crew. Since then more VIPs have been added. The ship’s still about ninety percent men though. The mission is to survive then rebuild. We can’t rebuild with a bunch of men. Or, at least not rebuild another generation.” Watkins answered.
“Got it. We’re breeding stock. What about our men?” Charani asked angrily.
“I asked and it sounds like your men are being pressed into service for supply runs.” Watkins answered. He looked very awkward standing up there now. This was obviously not going the way he wanted it to go. Yue almost felt sorry for the guy. He’d been put in a seriously difficult position.
“Now what happens?” Yue asked when the silence started to drag. There was a low rumble of whispers that sounded like they might boil over. Knowing nothing constructive would come from that Yue wanted to head it off. Hopefully Watkins could rise to the occasion. He needed to dig himself out of the hole of appearing to endorse a government sanctioned sex trafficking ring. One that made slaves out of the husbands of the women being trafficked. It wasn’t a good look.
“Here’s what I know. You’ve all been treated horribly. No one on this ship agrees with how you were treated. The captain wanted me to stress that your guests on this ship. Not prisoners. What happens next is you’ll be tested to make sure you’re not infected. You’ll be isolated in this room until that happens. If we’d really suspected any infection, we wouldn’t have let the plane land here, but the doctors want to have a look at you. You’ll be issued uniforms and a berthing area afterwards. We really don’t have much more of a plan after that. We were thinking you could stay on as civilians and be given jobs, swear in as sailors if you wanted, or we could drop you off at the first safe refugee area we get close to.” Watkins answered. The man was sweating under the harsh glare of the women’s scorn. These weren’t the type who liked being ordered around.
“Where’s the first safe refugee area?” Yue asked.
“There really isn’t one yet.” Watkins answered uncomfortably. His tone was that of a person who’s doing the best he can under the circumstances he finds himself stuck in.
“So, we actually are prisoners? I mean if we can’t get off the ship…” One of the women challenged Watkins. He was saved from answering the question by the arrival of a couple of corpsmen who started getting everyone lined up. Unlike the rest of the crew who’d interacted with the women these guys were wearing gloves and masks. It didn’t make Yue feel great about how well the Navy was setting up protocols to deal with the infection.
Watkins announced he was leaving them to get the checkups and he took off. The corpsmen had them all get in a line. They took blood samples and did standard temperature checks and such. They were told they’d be seen by a female medical professional for female type checkups. The women made a few bawdy jokes to embarrass the corpsmen. This was not a shy group of women. About half of the women seemed to be acclimating pretty well to the odd situation. This was after all a relatively safe place to weather the apocalypse. The other half were the ones with the stronger connections to the men who’d been left behind. They were all bursting with worry for them.
Yue was one of the ones bursting with worry. She was scheming the entire time they were being cleared by the corpsmen. She noticed they were focused more on things like lice than if the women had crawler symptoms or not. Although she supposed the crawler symptoms would look a lot like the flu anyway. Lice running rampant on a ship this size wouldn’t be any fun. She had a few whispered conversations with Charani while they waited. Charani was ready to go as well although she wasn’t as gung-ho as Yue to get off the ship. She was worried about her vardo and she didn’t like that her freedom had been stolen from her.
They were provided with the same dungaree uniforms the rest of the crew was wearing and assigned berthing areas. Yue was surprised to see that they were going to be separated into different parts of the ship. There were only a few areas used for the women’s berthing and they were divided by ratings and other things that Yue had no idea about. Most of her military knowledge came from her dad’s stories and the season or two of NCIS she’d watched before moving on to Breaking Bad. Their escort did proudly tell them this was one of the first warships designed to support women in combat. Evidently that boiled down to there not being any urinals in any of the bathrooms on board.
“You still here?” Charani asked Yue. They’d just been told the bathroom equality bit by their escort. They were being taken to their new temporary home somewhere in the belly of the massive ship.
Yue had been transported back to a simpler time where her brother Drew made fun of her for using the word ‘head’ to describe a bathroom. She’d only been saying it then because her dad had said it. Little had she known then how soon she’d be using that term for real. Who’d have ever thought she’d be looking back fondly on the time spent driving a beat to hell car through
an apocalypse while cradling her dying father in her arms. She smiled and shook off those thoughts. Thinking of her father had just strengthened her resolve. She’d figure out a way off this gigantic floating prison. She’d find her brothers and they’d keep right on going with their search for a place to settle in this madness. This wasn’t her final destination. This was just a layover.
Chapter 2: Slave Drivers
Drew gunned the engine on the super silent electric crotch rocket. A high-pitched whine erupted from the bike and he was instantly transported out of reach of the surger who’d appeared out of nowhere. Beside him LeBron was wobbling around from having pulled off the same maneuver. Their escort was hunched over the handlebars of his own bike up ahead of them. The military force serving under Special Agent Leander had been fairly sheltered since the crawlerz spread out across the country. Drew was pretty sure this was the first time the guy serving as their escort had actually left the safety of the base since this all started.
Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches Page 1