by Jeff Thomson
He hadn’t even turned the corner to the athwart ships passage that led to the Mess when he began to hear...screaming. He broke into a run.
42
Clara Blondelle, Spute’s recent girlfriend, age thirty-eight, with bottle-created hair so red it was almost purple, stood on the bridge of the M/V True North staring out into blackness. She sort of saw the ocean out in front of her, certainly saw the fore...thingy at the front of the boat (it’s a ship, Clara - ships carry boats - whatever...) But not another damned thing. She was tired, she was bored, and she was more or less thoroughly unsatisfied with her boyfriend.
Well... That wasn’t entirely true. She was quite satisfied that his friends had provided vaccine. That had - quite literally - been a lifesaver. But the rest of it...? Don’t think so.
Teddy was a nice enough guy, she supposed, and good enough in bed - at least for a zombie apocalypse. What was that thing...? Any port in a storm? But he wasn’t the head guy - the Man in Charge. He was just another underling. Just another also-ran, like all the rest of her lovers had been. Why couldn’t she ever find the Top Dog? Why was it always the Lap Dog, instead?
She didn’t have an answer. But she did have ambitions.
The actual Man in Charge, John, was out of the question. Too married. Too bad. That Mick Fincham character was fairly yummy. He could butter her buns, quite nicely. But he was just a dog - not Top, not Lap, just Dog. And while it might be fun to go there, at some point, ultimately, it would lead nowhere, and she’d had enough of nowhere, thank you very much. Jim Barber was an interesting brute, but far too grumpy, and she got the distinct feeling he didn’t trust her. Bob Stoeffel, now... There was a tasty morsel, if ever she saw one. And a widower! Might be nice to console him. But, then, in the end, he’s just a cook. Lane Keely? Too normal. And too married. Gus Perniola? It’d be like screwing Santa Clause. That Gilcuddy guy was far too needy, and the Professor? No F-ing Way! No Bride of Frankenstein for her. Guess Teddy will have to do.
For now...
Sooner or later, they would get to someplace new. They were headed more or less toward Hawaii - at least that’s what John had announced, although he’d added the caution that they probably wouldn’t be going to Maui or Oahu, or any of the decent islands, because of the plague. But they would certainly be going to some island, sooner or later. They would have to, since their boat (ship, dammit - whatever) couldn’t carry an infinite amount of supplies. Sooner or later they would find some slice of civilization. And sooner or later, she’d find a suitable replacement for Teddy Spute.
She was ostensibly up there on the bridge to stand watch as lookout. John had more or less required the spouses, girlfriends, and children, for God’s sake, to help out on watches. Said it was a necessary thing, and it would give them something to do, since there was no telling how long they’d be out there, and sooner or later they’d get bored. Couldn’t fault him. She was already bored, and it had only been three days.
She was supposed to be up above on the Flying Bridge, or whatever they called it. But Teddy was up there, “shooting the stars,” whatever that meant. So he had asked her to come down and monitor the radar (nothing - absolutely nothing - for miles and miles and miles), and the radio (ditto...)
But then, the radio crackled.
“...Anybody out there monitoring sixteen?” a male voice called out of the black.
She didn’t really know how to use a radio, but she had seen people using it in the three days since they left Astoria. You pick up the hand-thingy, press the button on the side, talk, say “over,” when you were done talking, then let go of the button so you could hear the other person talk. Seemed simple enough. The red readout thing said: “16,” so all she really needed to do was press a button. She was bored, so why not? She picked up the microphone.
“Hello...?”
43
Blackjack Charlie Carter, was thirty-five, tall, and lean, with jet black hair and a face so lined it could have masqueraded as a cracked desert floor The recently “promoted” Captain of the motor-sailor Daisy Jean, heard the voice crackle over the radio and smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He turned to his underling and said:
“Joe-Boy, hone in on that signal and find out what direction it’s coming from.” The man (man-child, really, couldn’t have been more than seventeen) instantly did as he was told, going to the Radio Direction Finder above the small chart table and spinning the knobs. Blackjack Charlie really liked having “underlings.” They had been necessary during the evacuation, that was for sure.
Five days ago, they had been at Soledad Prison. Things had been going to shit for about a week before that, with both inmates and guards getting sick. Then the food trucks stopped coming. Then the Mess Hall had been closed, after three convicts turned and started eating one of the guards. The jailhouse humor-mill suggested it was normal behavior for the three, since they had all been in for either Aggravated Assault (two of them) or Manslaughter, but no one at the prison seemed willing to take the chance, and so they went into lock down. Then the riot started.
The word bedlam, long-absorbed into the English language, had taken on its own meaning, but it was derived from an insane asylum in Old London that, from all reports, had been really, really bad. The post-Fall riot at Soledad was worse, and it gave Blackjack Charlie the opportunity he needed, so he’d grabbed a few of his closest associates (calling them friends would’ve been too much of a stretch) and headed for the coast.
Didn’t take a genius to figure which way the wind was blowing: out to sea. He was a genius and a former Merchant Mariner, and so he led his band of miscreants to the affluent confines of the San Francisco Yacht Club. There, they found the Betty Jean. It had not been unoccupied.
The owners (a husband and wife in their late fifties) proved willing enough to let them come aboard. Of course, the sawed off shotgun Blackjack had shoved in the husband’s crotch had been rather persuasive. The two of them now resided somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
The couple had stocked well: plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of fuel. They’d also brought along a healthy stock of extremely good booze. That was becoming a problem. Most of the eight man crew he’d brought out of Soledad were now shitfaced. The problem would work itself out when the booze ran out, but unfortunately, it wasn’t their only problem.
The Betty Jean had a more than adequate supply - for two people. He had eight people, and not a single goddamned one of them was particularly well-disciplined. They had, after all, been in prison. Impulse control was clearly not their strong suit. So this problem would soon become acute, unless they found themselves another boat.
He smiled again, and put on his least intimidating voice.
“Hey! Glad to hear another human voice,” he said into the radio. “Where are you?”
44
Jonesy turned the corner onto the Mess Deck and into carnage. Terry Proud lay crumpled in the far corner. Blood shot from his neck like a busted lawn sprinkler, spraying Frank, who was hiding under a table in an effort to get away from Scoot, who was trying to see what other parts of Terry he could rip to shreds.
He slid to a stop on the terrazzo deck and stared.
“Fucking do something Jones!” Ski shouted from the opposite corner to Jonesy’s left.
That snapped him out of it. He dropped the face shield on his helmet, pulled the taser from its holster, and advanced on Scoot. He knew the taser would only be a temporary solution, but temporary would be good enough for a start. Thumbing the device to ON, he stepped up behind the naked back of his BM2 and pressed the trigger. Two electric probes shot out, trailing thin wires, and stabbed into the flesh between Scoot’s shoulder blades. They crackled with twelve hundred volts of electricity, and the newly transformed zombie shipmate jerked in spasms as the signals in his brain went haywire,
Any normal human being would have dropped and begun to vibrate like a dying cockroach. Scoot, however, was no longer strictly human. He twitched, let out a scream of more rage than
pain, then spun and launched himself at Jonesy.
The former friend/current zombie slammed into him, toppling them both into, then over the bolted Mess table at Jonesy’s back, and sent them crashing to the deck. Jonesy’s breath left him like a spurned lover, slamming the door on his ability to take in oxygen. Gnashing teeth tried to take a chunk out of his face shield, as clawing hands tried to remove his kidneys through his abdomen. Jamming a forearm beneath the biting chin, Jonesy shoved with everything he had, and rolled the raving naked lunatic off of him and to the side. Planting his foot on the Mess Table stanchion, he thrust his leg straight and sent himself sliding head first on the supposedly non-slip deck, worn smooth by the tramp of thousands of feet in the three years since the last time the flooring had been replaced. It shouldn’t have worked, the terrazzo should have been too coarse, but the fact the crew had been too damned busy to maintain the decking might have just saved his life.
The maneuver put his steel-toed boot in striking distance and he kicked Scoot square in the nose, pulverizing it with a blood spraying crunch. Again, this should have incapacitated his opponent, if not killed him outright, but again, it seemed, zombies were made of sterner stuff. He (it) scrambled onto its knees and crawled toward Jonesy like some insane Pekinese, howling its rage and bloodlust.
Duke arrived then, hesitated as he took in the insane tableau, then swooped in and grabbed the screaming freak in a choke hold from behind. This should have ended the fight. The burly Bosun Mate had been tossing calves around on his family’s Minnesota dairy farm, pretty much since he could stand. A mere human being was but a rag doll, in comparison. Not this time.
The screaming ball of rage thrust upward from its crawl and backpedaled its feet, slamming Duke into yet another Mess table. Duke fell. The zombie didn’t. It spun and clawed at the (thankfully) lowered face shield on the LE helmet, found it impenetrable, and slid its hands downward to Duke’s throat.
Jonesy had regained his feet by then. It the nanosecond it took for the electrical connections in his brain to zip back and forth between its synapses, he realized that a taser hadn’t fazed it, a shattering kick to the nose hadn’t stopped it, and Duke’s heretofore unbreakable choke hold had held like wet tissue paper, and so only one option remained: deadly force. In a move he had practiced countless times in training, though never actually used in the field, Jonesy pulled one of the batons from his harness, snapped it out to its full length with a flick of the wrist, and side-armed it through the air to connect with Scoot’s head, just below the left ear.
He wasn’t supposed to do that - ever - wasn’t supposed to take a head shot with the baton - wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near the head, by law. But the law had changed; merged from the street and into the jungle.
It worked. It killed the zombie. It ended his friend’s life.
45
Spute dialed in his final sight with the sextant. Aldebaran would make five stars - plenty enough for a good fix.
They had GPS, of course, but John correctly said the system could go down at any time, given the state of the world. When it went down, if they didn’t have some other means to navigate, they were lost., and the Pacific Ocean was really damned big. As luck would have it, however, he, John and Jim, were all old-school navigators, and could all perform celestial navigation.
It took him a while to figure it out, back in the day, and his brain had actually hurt learning it, but learn it he did, and now, by God, he was using it. Made him feel like a real Old Salt.
Plenty of people who didn’t have the slightest idea of what they were talking about, believed you could only shoot the stars at morning and evening twilight, when the rising or setting sun revealed a solid horizon. They were wrong. Any time of night would do, as long as you could see a solid line in the distance. All it required was a good eye, a clear night, and a relatively calm sea. Spute had all three, and now he had a five-star fix to reduce and then plot. He looked forward to it. Civilian life had been turning his brain to mush.
Oh, it had been good enough. He’d had a decent job as a Surveyor, that paid well and kept him out of doors and not chained to a desk in some dreary office filled with ass-kissing sycophants trying to impress the “boss,” who wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. He’d bought and (mostly) paid for a pretty nice house, and he hadn’t saddled himself with a wife and kid to make him do any number of things he didn’t want to do.
Who the fuck wanted to change shitty diapers? Not Teddy Spute.
He put the pen and notebook, on which he’d written the sight information, into his shirt pocket, cradled the sextant carefully in one arm, and used the other to descend the latter to the bridge deck. It was a nice night. The temperature was pleasant, the sea was calm, the breeze was just strong enough to be fresh without threatening to rip his clothes off.
Speaking of which, he smiled as he thought of ripping Clara’s clothes off - with or without the assistance of a nice, stiff breeze - and giving her something else stiff to think about. She’d been a delightful find at a bar near his house, where the pickings had been slim, indeed - until she walked through the door.
She’d been wearing a low-cut blouse, insanely tight white pants that showed her black thong to delicious effect, and four-inch come-fuck-me-pumps, lifting her ass in such a delectable way, he simply had no choice but to hit on her. And it worked!
He smiled in anticipation as he palmed the bridge door handle and stepped inside.
“...What we’d really like to find is some vaccine,” the male voice crackled over the radio.
In a frozen moment when he could have said something, could have done something, but didn’t, he saw her lift the radio microphone to her lips, take a breath, and say: “Oh, we’ve got plenty.”
He rushed to the radio set, jammed his finger into the OFF button, and said: “What the fuck did you just do?”
46
Molly stepped from the Mess Deck to the Buoy Deck and into darkness. It wasn’t entirely dark. A sliver moon cast its long shadow upon the sea off to starboard, and the wave tops - what little waves there were - sparkled with the silvery light. And then there were the stars: thousands upon thousands of tiny dots spread across the velvety dark.
At first, she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. Then it dawned on her: she was gazing at the spiral arm of the Milky Way; a concrete piece of the actual Galaxy, arcing away to infinity. They had to be at least two hundred miles from the nearest source of man-made light. Nothing blocked the majesty of Mother Nature, in all her glory. She stared upward in wonder, barely breathing. A feeling of calm eased into her, filling her heart and soul and mind and body.
And then she remembered what brought her into the darkness in the first place, and her eyes came back down to Earth - which in this case took the form of the Buoy Deck. Jonesy was not there.
After “dealing with” Scoot, he had disappeared. She called his room, but had gotten no answer. Most enlisted rooms didn’t have phones, but the First Class Petty Officers did; the design department apparently having decided that it might be necessary to get ahold of senior enlisted at any time of day or night without having to blast their names all over the ship via the 1-MC.
He hadn’t been in the First Class Lounge, the Crew’s Lounge, or on the Mess Deck (where CS3 John Ryan had been given the unenviable task of cleaning up all the blood), and she started her search on the bridge, where BM3/OPS Eric Hebert none-too-happily stood an extra two hours of watch. Scoot had been his relief. Under normal circumstances, Jonesy would have taken over the Midwatch, but nobody - not even LT Medavoy - had even whispered the idea. BM3/OPS Jack Ross would come on watch two hours early, though he didn’t know it yet.
So there remained but one place Jonesy could be: out on deck. Of course, at night, at sea, in the dark, out on deck was a pretty damned good place to hide. There were spots a person could sit quietly and you’d walk right by them. Or maybe trip over them.
She glanced up at the raised platform of
the forecastle, but dismissed it as a possibility, and turned to climb the starboard ladder to the boat deck. The idea that he might have come out into the darkness because he wanted to be alone crossed her mind, but she dismissed that as well. Friends don’t let friends dwell on the fact they just killed one of their shipmates.
This brought up an interesting and uncomfortable question: were they friends? They had been friendly, to be certain. Understatement, she thought, feeling a burning flush rise from places within her body upon which she did not want to concentrate. She reached the top of the ladder and drew in a deep breath.
The climb hadn’t robbed her of oxygen. She could run up and down the ladders and run several laps around the deck before becoming even mildly winded. But maybe, just maybe, the question of their friendship - their relationship - might have robbed her of her usual confidence. The idea, quite frankly, scared the crap out of her.
So, yes, she paused for a deep breath to steel her nerves. Partially out of nervousness, and mostly out of a desire not to trip, fall, break her neck and roll over the side into the depths of the lonely ocean, she moved forward, past the hulking shadow of the RHIB in its cradle, through the aircastle, and toward the fantail.
The white of the superstructure glowed in the warm night air. Outside, on its surface, an orange life ring, stenciled with the words USCGC SASSAFRAS, hung from the bulkhead, just forward of a long fire axe in a cradle, its blade covered in a leather sheath to protect it from the corrosion of salt spray. Inside lay the DC Shop, the Dive Locker (a closet, really), and the Survival Gear Locker, with its cargo of empty Survival Suits and piles of Type 3 PFDs.
Why, exactly, she was contemplating the layout of the aft portion of the 01 Deck might have been a mystery, had she been prone to self-delusion. She wasn’t, and so she knew why: to keep her mind from dwelling on certain thoughts and implications that would only serve to complicate the living Hell out of her life. Surviving the zombie apocalypse was going to be complicated enough.