The final call was Jeff’s to make. He’d kept quiet and listened carefully to both sides. He brought up a few more points like prioritizing trying to find people who knew how to operate the ship. Right now, they were just kind of bobbing around in the ocean. If there was a storm or they got too close to land, then they were screwed. If both of those things happened simultaneously then they were dead. Everyone agreed that finding someone to sail the ship should be their highest priority.
Consensus reached Jeff made some notes on a clipboard then signed off on it with a flourish. An aide took the clipboard to a second lieutenant standing by the phone who immediately called the officer on the deck. Referencing the notes on top of the clipboard he relayed the orders and waited for the officer on the other end of the line to repeat them back to him. Once that was done, he hung up and waited for his next task.
The tight little group of officers gathered by the windows looking out over the stern facing portion of the flight deck. The Marines rushing around below looked like a bunch of ants from up on the bridge. Drew pointed out to Yue that the Marines were pausing outside one of the hatches that’d been closed. The monitors on the bridge came on showing the complete insane asylum the inside of the ship had become. The infected rushed back and forth growling and gnashing their teeth. They could sense humans all around them but were unable to get at them. Their frustration making them even more frantic than normal.
The second the speakers started pumping out Metallica the crawlerz took off running. They moved so fast they seemed to just vanish from certain areas. Thirty seconds later the lead Marines in the fire team came storming down through the opened hatch and started securing hatches along the passageway. They were being careful to secure their flanks before moving forward. To get to the level the survivors were currently holed up in they were going to have to fight. It’d be a much easier trip down if they only had the infected coming at them from one direction at a time.
Heavy seabags filled with ammunition were lowered down from above. They needed enough to carve their way through the massive piles of infected flesh standing between them and the survivors they were tasked with rescuing. Once the fire team leader had the go ahead to enter the next passageway it was go time. Weapons went hot and war faces were switched to on. A quick buddy check of everyone’s body armor and the hatch into the next passageway was jerked open.
The men going in couldn’t see the monitors showing the sudden surge of the infected. To the men watching on the bridge it looked like the passage suddenly just filled up with crawlerz. The Marines had jumped into an empty sewer pipe right as someone flushed every toile above them. Their rapid expenditure of a ridiculous amount of ammunition did nothing to stop the onslaught. They might as well have been shooting a pellet gun into the water for all the good their bullets did. The crawlerz swarmed over them then overflowed into the adjacent passage the Marines were using as their staging area.
The Marines in the staging area were shooting as they ran for the ladder to escape. The men on the deck were ignoring orders to seal the hatch since they could see their battle buddies coming up the ladder. Two of the Marines made it out screaming for the guards to shut the hatch. The Marines at the hatch were already swinging it shut when a crawler erupted out of it. The Marines swung the hatch as hard as they could trapping the crawler. They shot the crawler in the face but were now having to fight the other crawlerz struggling to get out. They couldn’t get the hatch shut with the one crawlerz body wedged into it.
Men were laying on the top of the hatch as the monsters below slammed into it trying to open it. The body of the crawler who’d gotten stuck was being ripped in half by the violent motion. A few more men came and added their weight to the top of the hatch. That helped make it stop moving around so much. One of the men was trying to get the latch to lock into place. He was only inches away from making it happen when one of the Marines who’d escaped suddenly howled with bloodthirst and jumped on the top of the dog pile. He started biting and digging into the human pyramid that’d formed to try and secure the hatch.
The pile dispersed as the men jumped out of the way of the ravaging surger. The Marines brought their weapons to bear on the newly turned surger and the other men who’d just been bitten. Without those men standing on the hatch the crawlerz pressing to get out suddenly had very little resistance. The hatch doors flew open and the crawlerz hit the flight deck going about a million miles per hour.
The Marines around the perimeter held their fire at first. Jeff was barking out orders for everyone to start shooting immediately. The crawlerz continued to spew out of the open hatch. Like acidic pus from a lanced boil bubbling up to destroy everything it touched. The flight deck erupted into a massive battle. Everyone was firing. The crawlerz were leaping high into the air and coming down behind the firing lines. The infected were moving so fast that most of the shots fired missed them completely. Even when hit they just kept coming. If it wasn’t a mortal wound it didn’t slow them down.
The dead were piling up on the flight deck. Even as the men who were bit turned and attacked their former ship mates. It was bedlam below. A bloodbath that very quickly turned into a one-way battle. The Marines going back to back before being ripped apart by the crawlerz. All of them dying or being turned in a pile of their own spent brass. It was horrific and loud and over way too soon. Hundreds of men dead or infected. The tide of the battle turned because of the men guarding the hatch trying to do the right thing.
In less than twenty minutes the situation had gone from hopeful to an even higher level of totally FUBAR. The flight deck was covered with infected running back and forth. The infected ripped apart the corpses of those who hadn’t turned fast enough. Silence reigned supreme on the bridge. No one could believe how quickly everything had gone wrong.
“Charani.” Yue gasped and put her head on Drew’s shoulder as silent sobs racked her body.
“We have to abandon ship sir. No way we can take her in now. Even if we find someone who can sail her how would we tie off the mooring lines?” One of the Marine officers asked. He started to add more doom and gloom. Looking at the stricken faces around him he stopped. He’d just realized that no one on the bridge needed him to tell them how screwed they were.
“If we can get somebody on the phone who knows how to sail the ship couldn’t they just walk us through it?” Drew asked. He was kind of wondering why they hadn’t gone that route originally. Other than the fact that they wanted to rescue everyone.
“Start calling. I want every phone on this ship called and the people who answer I want catalogued. I want their ratings and locations. We need to come up with a plan and we can’t do that without knowing our resources.” Jeff ordered.
“Yes sir. We have that list sir. Assuming no one on it has died in the last few hours which might be a pretty big assumption.” One of the Marines replied.
It turned out the list had actually been maintained on a laptop on the other side of the ship at a little portable desk. The group updating it had been saving it over the ship’s WIFI to a shared folder that’d been setup. By the time they figured out how to get to the file and read it Jeff was on the verge of a meltdown. They could’ve just called the numbers on the list and reconfirmed everything already instead of goose chasing the no longer current list. He scanned the three neat rows and immediately picked up the phone and started making calls.
An hour later they had a senior chief on the line who was checked out on navigating and sailing the behemoth. The senior chief was handed over to a couple of the Marines who focused on learning everything they could about the myriad of buttons, levers and dials they were staring at. With that major item checked off Jeff grabbed a cup of coffee and walked back to lean against the bulkhead next to Yue. She smiled at him and asked how it was going.
“Well. You saw we found a guy who can help us steer the ship. He’s never actually steered the ship since he’s new but that’s fine. At least he’s trained on it. Assuming we can figure
out how to steer the ship we have thousands of infected now crawling all over her. We’re pretty much prisoners up here in the superstructure. Even if there was a way to bring up a plane, we couldn’t actually get to it. Not that it’d matter too much since we don’t have any pilots handy. My working plan is to take this gigantic zombie covered floating nuclear power plant and run us hard aground. If we hit hard enough it should throw off the infected. That may give us time to get on the lifeboats and make our way to shore. Of course, if we do that, we’re basically abandoning the hundreds of sailors stuck inside the ship right now.” Jeff answered straight faced.
“When we come steaming in full ahead and run aground that’s going to make a lot of noise. Probably attract even more of the infected.” One of the Marine officers standing behind Jeff brought up. He’d obviously been eavesdropping.
“What if we just smashed into something instead of running aground? Or ran aground a few times just enough to fling off the bulk of the infected? Then we backed up and went somewhere else?” Drew asked trying to think of a solution to their dilemma.
“We have a couple of grunts sailing a nuclear carrier via an eight hundred number for support. I don’t think we’re pulling off anything fancy. We’ll be lucky if we actually end up within a few hundred miles of where we’re aiming at.” Jeff answered.
“Where are we aiming for?” Yue asked.
“North America.” Jeff said smiling. Seeing his gallows humor wasn’t winning him any points with Yue he told her Charleston was the current target. It was close to one of the bases and the closest place to where they currently were. The Marines and the senior chief were working on plotting a course to get them there now. They didn’t want to move too fast since they wanted daylight for when they got there. Drew snapped his fingers.
“That’s it. All we have to do is wait for the bulk of these things to turn into crawlerz then they’ll hide in the ship when the sun comes out. They hide while we leave.” Drew said. Then the confident look slid right off his face.
“Yep. We leave a whole lot of sailors to starve to death locked up in their quarters.” Jeff said.
“We could play the music through the speakers and give them a chance to make a run for it. We’d just have to coordinate it right.” Drew said. There was a way out of this mess. They just needed to figure it out before everybody died.
“Where are they going to run to though? We’ll still have all the infected topside to deal with. We can’t wait for them all to transition over. A lot of the people below don’t have that kind of time.” The Marine officer interjected again. He wasn’t doing it in a mocking way at all. They were all brainstorming and trying to come up with a solution. Drew noticed a few derogatory looks being shot their way by the senior officers standing on the other side of the bridge. They were probably pissed that Jeff had left them to go hangout with his girlfriend and her kid brother. The fact that he was actively working with them on a plan and excluding the senior military men in the room wasn’t a good look politically. Yue noticed almost immediately and tried to signal to Jeff what was going on, but he was completely oblivious.
She finally just whispered in his ear that he needed to get the other men involved in their impromptu planning session. Jeff walked over to the group of men and expanded the brainstorming circle to include every man in the room who wasn’t actively trying to learn how to drive a multi-billion-dollar boat. Standing in front of the group armed with a freshly opened set of dry erase markers Jeff started facilitating a brainstorming session that the lives of everyone on the ship depended on.
He tried not to look down on the flight deck while they talked. The sight of the demonic horde rushing back and forth below tended to strip away what little confidence he had that they may come up with a plan that’d have any chance of working.
Chapter 23: Never Tell Me the Odds
“It seems like a nuclear sub with a team of Navy SEALs on it would be able to come up with something to help us out.” Yue commented. They were nearing the end of the brainstorming session. They’d checked in with the men manning the radios and uncovered a few tidbits such as the fact that a nuclear attack sub was shadowing them. Even Jeff had been surprised to hear about that.
Unfortunately, no one could think of a way the SEALs or the sub in general could help. If they made the call to abandon the ship, then the sub may be of some assistance. Assuming they survived the plunge and made it past the crawlerz trying to catch them. At the end of the day it was iffy whether or not the sub would even want to pick up a bunch of possibly infected crewmen. They were there in case a VIP needed to be taken off. The President had actually been spotted on camera. He was full-on infected and currently trying to beat his way through a solid bulkhead with his face.
They hadn’t located the Vice President or any of the other VIPs. Not that it really mattered since there was no way to rescue them even if they could find them. They’d tossed around every option they could think of. What they’d come up with seemed like it might actually be doable. They were relying on the sub to communicate and coordinate most of the plan with the ground and air forces they needed. It still needed some serious tweaking, but it seemed a little more promising than ramming into the beach and hoping for the best.
Pilots from a base up north were making their way to Charleston where they’d commandeer a couple of attack helicopters. Once they had those, they’d fly them to a small unpopulated island off the coast. Once the ship was close enough to the island, they were going to anchor her in place. At least they were if they could figure out how to deploy the anchor. Once anchored the attack helicopters would fly over and shoot the infected off the flight deck. Assuming that didn’t catch the ship on fire or anything the helicopters would then begin transporting survivors to the island. They’d rinse and repeat letting as many of the infected come out onto the flight deck as possible. They’d start in the evening to lure out the crawlerz along with the surgers then hopefully by the time the sun was up the people locked away inside would have a chance to make it on deck. They’d play the loud music by sections to attract the infected and run the evacuations by the numbers.
The plan had holes in it big enough to sail the carrier through. The crew had been trained on abandoning ship, but it wasn’t something they’d ever actually expected to do. Especially not while being chased by man eating freaks. Once off the ship they’d still need to figure out how to get to the island. It wasn’t like the helicopters could carry them all. It wasn’t like they had a ton of time to come up with better ideas. The people down below without access to water were going to pass out from dehydration soon. That included the exhausted men in the engine room responsible for keeping the reactor up and running. Once the reactor scrammed, they’d be dead in the water. Literally.
“There’s always the chance that the helicopter shoots them all right? Then it’s pretty much just deciding what outfit to wear to the beach.” Yue said to Drew after the brainstorming session. It’d become obvious the senior military men no longer appreciated their presence or welcomed their ideas. Not that it mattered as long as Jeff thought they were needed but neither Drew nor Yue saw any reason to push it.
“Yeah or the helicopter shoots us or sinks the ship somehow. I have no idea how attack helicopters work. I should’ve spent more time on the internet looking at stuff like that and less time looking at. Uh. Other stuff.” Drew replied with a careless shrug. Yue rolled her eyes at him while studiously avoiding looking down at the insane mob partying below on the flight deck.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a different sort of motion. One of the infected had managed to make it up onto the catwalk that wrapped around the exterior of the bridge. Yue watched as it slunk over and stared into the bridge. Once it realized people were inside it began beating on the glass hard enough to freak out everyone in the room. A Marine was dispatched to deal with it. A minute later the beasts bloody brains decorated a section of the window. The sound from the shot was sure to cause more of the
m to attempt the leap up to the catwalk. There was a ladder going all the way down to the deck but so far none of the infected seemed to have figured that out. When you had a vertical leap of around two stories you didn’t really need anything to help you reach the stuff on the top shelf.
Yue cringed when it occurred to her that the stuff on the top shelf was them. Every one of those monsters down there wanted nothing more than to bounce up to the bridge and pop open a bottle of uninfected human. As if on cue two more of the infected appeared out on the bridge catwalk. The Marine checked his rifle and went back outside. Another Marine was assigned to watch the shooter and make sure he didn’t get bitten. His orders were to leave the guy locked out for a solid two minutes once the job was done to make sure. At some point they were hoping to stop making dumb mistakes.
“How many times does he have to be the one to do that?” Yue asked watching the Marine shoot the two who’d just showed up then calmly shoot another one in the head who was trying to climb over the railing.
Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches Page 21