by Jeff Thomson
The room swam before his eyes. He could see the lockers on the bulkhead to his left, see the bunks across from him, and the two people in those bunks. They made him angry. But he couldn’t remember their names, for some reason. He knew he should remember, knew somewhere deep inside that he had known these guys for a long time. So why couldn’t he remember their names? That pissed him right the fuck off. He groaned - or was it a growl? He lurched to his feet and farted again.
Behind him, someone (who?) stirred. “Manny, go back to sleep, and quit fucking farting,” a muffled voice said.
Rage filled him like hot liquid, oozing through his pores like lava. He had a fleeting moment of confusion, of wondering why he felt so angry, so goddamned fucking angry, and then it was gone, and only the rage remained.
He turned, saw the eyes of the thing behind him, and then he howled.
71
In the next compartment aft, along the Port side of the passageway, YN3 Gregory Haversham woke up. A noise had disturbed him, but when he opened his eyes, he found that he didn’t recognize a thing about his surroundings, didn’t know where he was. For that matter, he didn’t know who he was. He only knew that he wanted to kill.
Two compartments aft and over on the starboard side of the passageway, Seaman Apprentice Tommy Barnes slept on, but things inside his brain were turning. Synapses were firing in his frontal lobe, but receptors weren’t receiving the signals. His lizard brain, however, was wide awake, and it was hungry.
One deck above, in the single-occupancy Chief’s quarters, BMC Bernie Adams woke up feeling like shit. He staggered to his metal sink and ran water into the bowl, splashing it on his fevered face. Should go see the Doc, he thought, vaguely. But then he remembered. The Doc was dead. He pulled on his uniform with trembling hands. Had trouble tying his shoes. Had trouble remembering how. He left them untied, opened the door with some difficulty (the door thing - how did that work again?), entered the passageway, and went in search of something to eat.
72
“Okay...Now what?” Amber Winkowski said to no one as she surveyed her new prison. The head smelled of disinfectant, and the blue shit they put in the toilet bowl water. There was a sink - not a very big one, not big enough to fill with enough water to help her survive more than a few hours, let alone days - and a shelf with cleaning supplies and (thank Dear God) seven rolls of toilet paper.
On the deck lay the obligatory swab and metal bucket, complete with strainer. This ubiquitous item appeared over and over again, in every unit, on every ship, in every building and warehouse and galley, everywhere, in every branch of the military. It was part of the scenery. She’d have probably noticed it more if it had NOT been there. But this time, she did notice it. Specifically, she noticed the long wooden handle protruding from the depths of the bucket.
She could make that into a weapon. She knew she could. But how? She examined the bracket where it connected the bottom of the shaft to the mop. Four small screws, two on each side, attached the metal to the wood. Okay...so...she needed a screwdriver. She knew they had one. Hell, they had several, along with all sorts of assorted tools in the Comm Center. None of them, however, were in the head with her.
She could break it. Hadn’t she seen that done in countless movies? It would be simple, and then she’d have a weapon. She picked it up a bit clumsily, the heavier end with the swab portion making it unbalanced in her left hand. She raised it to chest height, raised her right knee straight in front of her, and brought it smashing down.
OUCH! That shit hurt! And it did nothing to break the wooden shaft. All she’d gotten for her efforts was a pain in the knee. Great! Just perfect! What else could go wrong?
She checked herself on the last question. Better not to ask.
Then she realized her mistake. Idiot! She chided herself, then dropped the swab end to the deck, took a firm grip on the opposite end with her right hand, and stomped down with her right foot. Pain shot up from her sore knee, and she staggered back, catching her balance at the last moment. She smiled. The wood had cracked. One more time...
She stomped, and with a splintering of sound and wood, the shaft snapped, leaving her with about a three foot makeshift spear. She examined the broken end. Yes. Plenty jagged enough. Plenty sharp enough to jab into that worthless jackass turned zombie in the Comm Center.
She steeled herself, and moved to the door.
73
BM1/Deck Dennis Hurdlika stuck his head inside the Crew’s Lounge, checking on his babies. They were in there, his Deckies: John “Mad Dog” Kennedy, so named for his habit of turning every scenario into an episode of All-Pro Wrestling (...and Mad Dog rips the turnbuckle from the post and smashes his opponent...). It made Dennis laugh. It made everybody laugh. SN John “Big Balls” Fitipaldi, Seaman Siemen (that joke never got old - poor kid), BM3/DECK Eddie Brown, BM3/OPS Eric Hebert (not one of his Deckies, but still part of his crew), SA Pierre Milancent, from New Orleans (which he told people at every opportunity), EM3 Dan McMullen, MK3 Danny Maury; all were there, all were part of Dennis Hurdlika’s crew.
He eyed the big screen TV and smiled. They were watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. How appropriate - twisted, but appropriate.
In the corner of the compartment, Danny Maury went into a coughing spasm. It electrified the room. Everybody scattered, leaping out of the bolted couches, trying to get as far away from him as they could. Cups went flying. A half-empty bag of microwave popcorn spread itself across the compartment like gigantic, salt and butter-flavored snowflakes. A soda can, just opened by EM3 McMullen, sent carbonated liquid spraying like a brown geyser into the air.
Dennis saw the abject fear in their faces - felt it himself. The cold - the goddamned Common Fucking Cold; if you caught it, if you got the fever, you were zombie city.
Danny looked at everybody and shook his head, laughing. “Take it easy, you fucking idiots,” he said in his Maine accent, waving his coffee cup at them. “Bug juice went down the wrong pipe, is all. Jeez, you’re all so fucking paranoid!” He laughed again.
The crowd hesitated, looking at Danny, looking at each other. And then the laughter - nervous laughter, though it may be - started. Dennis laughed with them, declined the opportunity to bitch at them about cleaning the compartment, then turned, closed the door, and continued his nightly round.
They were all his crew, and he was their Boats. Most of them wouldn’t have voiced the description, most of them would have been less likely to express the emotion than to turn into a turnip, but the fact remained. They were his babies, his kids, and he was their uniformed babysitter. He smiled at the idea. A movie poster flashed across his mind: Adventures in Babysitting. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure. No, wait. That was the Navy. Fuck a bunch of squids.
He dropped down the port side ladder and into Crew Berthing Forward. The two Berthing areas were split by an athwart-ship watertight bulkhead, with a watertight door separating the two. Most of his Deckies slept in the Forward half, due to its proximity to the Buoy Deck and the God-awful racket they caused when working buoys. There were a few in the Aft section, but most were up there. All was quiet.
He turned Forward, went through the watertight door, and entered the Bosun Hold. Duke and Harold looked up, startled by the sudden CLANK of the hatch. They were clustered together by the table along the port bulkhead.
“Do I want to know what you’re up to at this hour, or do you two need some alone time?” Dennis asked, half curious/half delighted in the opportunity to give them shit.
Duke gave him a go fuck yourself look. “We’re performing brain surgery, can’t you tell?” He asked, stepping away from the table to reveal six Gerber Gator Kukri Machetes laid out. Five were in their leather sheaths, and one lay with vicious-looking blade exposed.
“Planning on cutting a bunch of brush out here in the middle of the ocean?” Dennis asked.
They had gotten the rather unique implements as part of last year’s Fallout Funds. Thanks to the unintended consequences
of the Congressional well-meaning stupidity known as Graham-Rudman, any part of the budget not spent during the fiscal year would be removed from the following year’s budget. As a result, any money not spent by the Fourth Quarter (which ended in September) would mysteriously disappear, then reappear as items they may or may not have actually needed. For example, the small workout room they had forward of After Steering, contained a Stairmaster. On the one hand, this was a useful item for maintaining crew fitness. On the other hand, they were on a ship filled with ladders, both inside and out. A Stairmaster was - at best - redundant.
The Kukri Machetes were another example. They often worked on fixed Aids to Navigation attached to land. This land was, by necessity, right along the shoreline, and since no civilian wanted a blinking light on their property, these Aids were frequently in remote places only accessible by bush-bashing through often thick brush. So a machete was a useful thing to have around. The specialized Kukri Machete, on the other hand, was a bit of an extravagance. But they were cool, and there had been Fallout Funds, and so they’d bought six. This still did not explain why Duke and Harold were sharpening them at eleven o’clock at night.
“Planning on cutting something, anyway,” Duke said, guardedly.
“Do I want to know?” Dennis asked.
“Not really, Duke replied.
“Roger that,” Dennis said, then turned, and started for the door, but then he paused and looked at what Harold had been doing. The young seaman had taken an aluminum baseball bat from the Morale Locker, covered the business end with a six-inch strap of leather, through which he’d punched ten-penny nails, and was now wrapping it with eighth-inch cotton line, tying small knots at the top of every wrap. This was ordinarily used as fancy work, called coxcombing, to wrap rails, or - in the Old Guard - the large brass helm that had been replaced by the modern joystick up on the Bridge, but this was definitely not decorative. The bat looked deadly as Hell. He stared at it for a moment, speechless, then shook his head and said: “I really don’t want to know.”
He turned, opened the watertight door, then closed it behind him as he continued his round.
He went back through Forward Berthing, then opened the watertight door leading to the Aft Berthing area, and stopped. It sounded like a brawl was going on in one of the four-man compartments. He went to investigate.
74
Jonesy climbed the ladder, dead on his feet. He hadn’t slept since Scoot. That was, what? Two days? Three? He couldn’t be sure. His head felt fuzzy.
But not feverish - definitely not feverish.
He passed the Captain’s vestibule, outside The Cabin (as the CO’s quarters were always called), flipping the door an insolent bird and mouthing the word asshole, as he went by. He needed to adjust his attitude.
He paused outside the Chartroom, just forward of the Radio Room, and thought about going in to make a pot of coffee, but decided to check in on the Bridge, instead. The red lights were on in all the interior spaces, to preserve the night vision of anyone going out on deck, but it was still damned dark when he entered the Bridge and looked around. He saw Medavoy over by the chart table (his chart table, god dammit) writing his Night Orders.
Jonesy could just imagine what they were: Continue Box of Death on station, while the crew gets slowly but surely killed because I’m a fuck wit who refuses to do what’s necessary to protect them.
Okay...probably not. He doubted Medavoy was self-aware enough to accept responsibility for his idiotic orders. Calm, Jonesy, calm...
The asshole in question closed the Night Order book, slid it under the fathometer, as usual, then turned to head below. He glared at Jonesy for a moment, barely acknowledging his presence, then called “Good night,” in the general direction of LTjg Bloominfeld and Ens. Gordon, and left the Bridge.
Instantly raising the general IQ of the compartment, Jonesy thought, disgustedly. He really had to watch this. If he accidently voiced what he was saying in his head, due to being so sleep-deprived, he’d be Court Martialed in a second. Might be worth it, though...
Fuck, Jonesy, adjust your attitude, he told himself, as he walked over to join BM3/OPS Jack Ross at the chart table.
“Are we having fun?” He asked.
“You know me,” Ross said, in his laconic drawl.
Jonesy picked up the Celnav book, where watchstanders were supposed to record their celestial fix information. There were no entries in it for 2000 - 2400. There should have been, because Jonesy required his boys to take at least one per watch, if the sky was clear enough.
“Any stars tonight?” he asked.
“A few,” Ross replied, hesitantly.
Jonesy closed the book, then lightly smacked Ross’s forehead with it. “Take a wild guess who’s going to be calculating sunrise and sunset for the next week.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Ross said.
Jonesy turned, with the book still in hand, and looked at SN Borgeson, leaning against the starboard door. He was there as helmsman, but since the ship’s autopilot was doing an excellent job of steering the ship, the seaman was pretty much just an extra lookout. Jonesy favored him with a smack on the forehead with the book.
“Hey!” Borgeson complained. “What?”
“If you ever call me Petty Officer Kevorkian again, I’m going to shove your head in the shitter,” Jonesy said.
“Sorry Jones,” the young man said. “It was only a joke.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he replied, then sidled up to the Bridge windows next to Molly. He looked down at her (since she was almost four inches shorter), then over toward LTjg Bloominfeld. The man did not look well. “Are we still in the Pacific Ocean?” He asked, sounding far more cheerful than he felt.
“Last I checked,” Molly answered. The LTjg only grunted.
“Excellent,” he said, then turned to go. “I’ll be down in the Chartroom, if you need me.” He reached the door and was unsurprised to discover Molly at his elbow.
“He doesn’t look too good,” she whispered.
Jonesy looked over at Bloominfeld, who was still staring out into the black night. “Watch your back,” he whispered in return, then headed below.
75
The rubber-covered grapnel went over the rail and hooked so quietly, even Old Joe couldn’t hear it from the RHIB. Perfect, he thought. Everything was going perfectly, without them even trying. Fate.
Fate had put him in that liquor store three years ago. Fate had caused a patrol car to roll by just as he was leaving, with gun and cash in hand. Fate had sent him to Soledad, caused him to meet Blackjack Charlie, and then served up a heaping helping of plague. Fate made the zombie guard slam the human guard into the cell release button in the C Block Guard Office. No other Block had been freed. Just their’s. Fate.
And tonight, they meant to come out of the darkness, directly onto this boat’s back end, and it had worked. Blackjack calculated the course to come up where they wanted to be, and Old Joe steered it, unerringly, for twenty miles, long before they could even see the ship. Blackjack had told him to come up slightly behind the boat, then loop into the South side. He’d said nobody would see them, and nobody had.. Fate.
The boarding ladder went up like a dream. Not a sound. “Go,” he said, motioning to Hank Lazardo. “Get up there fast and stay quiet until everyone else is up. Clear?” Lazardo nodded and smiled. He was a wack-job, to be sure, but that shotgun he carried was real, and the man knew how to use it. Old Joe watched as he scampered up the ladder and over the rail.
76
Jim, on the Flying Bridge with his M-1 Garand rifle, and John, on the Bridge, didn’t see the RHIB approach. They had expected it at sunset - had, in fact, been standing watch, staring into the empty sea since before the sun went down, more than four hours ago. To suggest everyone had lost their edge was an understatement.
Jason Gilcuddy, who never found the wife he sought, in spite of having searched in all the undefined “nooks and crannies,” didn’t see the boat, either, because he was standin
g nearly amidships, at the aft end of the Boat Deck, looking to the north. None of them saw the grapnel go over. None of them saw the boarding ladder go up, or the man that followed it over the rail.
Mick Fincham and Lane Keely didn’t see any of it, either, standing on the Buoy Deck, waiting for what they all hoped would not happen. Bob Stoeffel and Gus Perniola couldn’t see any of it, since they were both on the Mess Deck, both fully armed (Gus with the .44 Magnum they had taken from Gilbert Farcquar, and Bob with a Remington 12 Gauge shotgun and a 9mm Baretta), and both stationed to protect the families. Teddy Spute didn’t see shit, because he was below in the Lounge with those families, put there by a severely unhappy John and told to “Keep that stupid bitch from causing any more trouble.”
The stupid bitch in question was sitting by herself in a chair, staring between Spute, (whom she blamed for putting her in this predicament) and the other wives (whom she despised, because they had gone from warm and friendly, to suddenly cold). The children did not know of her idiotic mistake, although Stephanie Barber, age nineteen and technically not a child, had her suspicions. Professor Christopher Floyd, also sitting by himself, and also getting the cold-shoulder treatment from the wives (because they all thought he was nuts and didn’t trust him) knew what she had done, and thought her to be slightly above a low-grade moron, but he thought that of most people, so he didn’t share in the rest of this new crew’s animosity.
So nobody knew anything was happening when Hank Lazardo’s feet hit the deck. They didn’t know Blackjack Charlie thought the guy was a fucking psycho. They certainly didn’t know that in a purely clinical sense, Blackjack was right. They didn’t know that the prison dispensary had kept a supply of Thorazine ready for him. They didn’t know he’d been told to take a daily regimen of anti-psychotic meds, to keep him calm and even. And nobody knew, except Hank Lazardo, that he hadn’t had a dose in over a week.