by Jeff Thomson
Goddard - at the moment - seemed necessary, if only because he really might be the President. Even if he isn’t, though, he could still be useful if the masses thought he was. Manipulated in the right way, the man could smooth the rough waters caused by the undeniable fact they were committing acts of piracy. Hell, treason, so far as the Hamilton was concerned. But if Goddard were to be acknowledged as Commander in Chief...
“Not yet,” Hennessy replied.
“We hope,” McGee added.
Charlie sat behind the ridiculously large mahogany desk and rubbed his tired eyes. Things had gotten far more complicated than he’d ever wanted or imagined, way back when they made the breakout from the horror of Soledad.
He hadn’t wanted to be in charge, then - except for the fact that he didn’t really trust any of the others, and so didn’t want to give up control to anybody else. He didn’t want to be in charge now, but circumstances (and the death of every member of the original crew from the Daisy Jean, except Felix and George) had put him in this position.
Was there anybody else who could be in charge? No, he thought. Fuck no.
McGee and Hennessy were good men, but were they good leaders? That Aussie, Dirk-something, seemed alright - if a bit of a hot dog. Felix was just this side of useless - unless and until they found a lab and the means for him to do what his education and experience made him capable of doing. And if they didn’t? No great loss.
And George was dead.
That could be another problem. He’d been Goddard’s own personal ass-kisser. Whether that was from a true belief in the former Representative, or just the delirium of George’s alcohol-soaked brain, Charlie didn’t know, and it no longer mattered. Unless, that was, Goddard decided to make it matter.
People like Goddard got used to the ass-kissing, came to count on it - before Pomona. The zombie apocalypse changed everything, but old habits could become issues, in a heartbeat.
People in extremis tended to grab the familiar with an iron grip, and not let go, no matter how pointless and absurd those things may be in the current situation. And when that happened, those same people would fight, tooth and nail, to protect those old, familiar things, and would no more willingly discard them than they would a life preserver.
So, yes, George could become a problem, which could make Goddard into a liability. And if it did...? He didn’t want to go there. Not yet. Not until he had to. In any case, the man would be the abso-fucking-lutely worse choice to take over.
The rest of their slowly-growing band of misfit pirates were capable enough, but to put any of them in charge and relieve Charlie of the burden of command? Again, fuck no.
He shook away the swirling thoughts and stood. Such ruminating would do him no good, at all. Time to get to work.
5
COMMSTA Honolulu
Sand Island, Oahu
“Looks like they’re gathering around the Mess Hall,” Amber Winkowski said, squinting into the morning glare at the crowd of zombies. Her hand, out of habit, tried to adjust her frizzy pony tail which should have been sticking out the back of her dark blue ball cap (emblazoned with gold letters proclaiming USCG COMMSTA HONOLULU), but her searching fingers found air, and nothing more. Feeling foolish because she’d cut her mop just that morning, she faked an itch and scratched her neck, instead. It didn’t fool her companion, ET2 Scott Pruden, one bit.
“Want to explain why you cut your hair?” He asked.
“No,” she replied.
“Wouldn’t have anything to do with that guy you’ve been talking to on the radio?”
“What?” She snapped, giving him a serious what the fuck are you talking about expression. “No,” she said again. “It has nothing to do with...” She sputtered, searching for what to say.
Cliche demanded there be some quasi-romantic reason for anything a woman did - and like most cliches and stereotypes, the trope held a grain of truth at its center. But not this time. Honestly. She might lie to Scott all day long, but she couldn’t bullshit herself, and in this case, she wasn’t. It had nothing to do with that guy: Bill Schaeffer, the Operations Specialist on Sassafras. Try and explain that to Pruden, though.
“When’s the last time you took a shower?” she said, in a not-terribly kind voice.
He sniffed his pits. “Do I offend?”
“Probably,” she said. The stench of Honolulu blotted out all other smells, going so far as to leave a permanent taste in her mouth. Scott could smell like a decaying dung heap, and she might not notice. She couldn’t notice her own foul odor, though it had to be there. “And so do I. I haven’t washed my hair in far too long,” she explained. “So I cut it. Seemed easier.”
“It...Looks great,” he said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his reply and failing, miserably.
“It looks like I cut it with pruning shears,” She cocked a jaundiced eye in his direction. He coughed, as though to cover some embarrassment. They’d been tiptoeing around each other ever since she found him, over in the Facilities Maintenance Building. She couldn’t forget the nightmare of zombie killing and running, and driving like mad through the horde - wouldn’t forget it for the rest of her life. But Scott Pruden had known how to get the solar power going, and she knew how to get in touch with the other surviving units, so their relationship turned from guarded, to symbiotic, to just being glad they didn’t have to face this apocalypse alone. So cut the guy some slack. “But thanks for the effort.”
“Learning, sharing and caring,” he said, offhanded, staring out across the baseball diamond, behind the Comm Center Building on which they stood. “That’s what I’m all about.”
“I’m sure...” Her voice trailed off at an odd sound coming from beyond the Container Port, northeast of the base. “Is that...?”
“Green Day?” Scott finished her question.
6
USCGC Assateague
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
“I wanna be an American Idiot!” Jeri Weaver sang, at the top of his lungs, along with the album and song of the same name being supercharged through the one hundred ten-foot Patrol Boat’s loud hailer. The sound quality sucked ass, but it felt good to crank the tunes.
Jonesy told he and MK2 Frank Roessler to make a bunch of noise, beginning at the top of the hour. It was now the top of the hour. And since he hadn’t designated what form the noise needed to take, Jeri and Frank decided on a bit of rock-n-roll. Actually, Frank wanted The Who, or Led Zeppelin, but Weaver won the toss. Green Day it was.
They stood ready at the 25mm auto cannon, on the deck forward of the superstructure, wearing full MOPP gear, and gas masks, but not body armor or the rest of the accouterments the boys in the RHIB needed, due to their pending proximity to a veritable shitload of virus-crazed bad guys. They were to wait for the signal before opening fire. Just what the signal would be, remained a mystery. Jonesy said they’d know it when they saw it.
“You are an American idiot,” Frank declared, yelling to project his voice through the gas mask and over the deafening sound of the loud hailer,
“Damn straight,” he yelled back, patting the large weapon housing. “With a 25mm Bushmaster.”
The Marines called it by that name. Coasties, on the other hand, not finding a whole lot of bushes out to sea, tended to give each gun its own name. He caressed the painted letters: Belinda, and let loose with a delighted laugh. “Lock and load!” He shouted to no one in particular.
7
USCGC Sassafras
Honolulu Harbor
Green Day, Samantha Gordon thought, the words dripping with irony inside her own head. Perfect.
Weeks ago - or was it months - on the night before her father’s converted ex-Canadian Coast Guard Buoy Tender, renamed the True North, departed Astoria, Oregon, and changed their lives forever, sixteen year-old Sam, her heart filled with hope and sadness and unrequited love for a certain Justin Blaisdell, found heartbreak and horror, instead. When she discovered him in Grosvenor Park, he had his tongue halfway down Chey
enne Drummond’s throat, and his hand firmly planted on her betraying bitch-ass.
She’d intended on asking him to a concert. She ‘d hoped there would be kissing involved. Instead, she found him making out with a slut. The best part - the real mind-screwing part - was that the band she held tickets for, the band she wanted to take him to see, the band whose music blared from the tiny Ipod speakers on the picnic bench they’d been humping on, was none other than Green Day.
Perfect.
Of course.
Because last night, her heart - finally on the mend - shattered yet again. She’d been thinking and dreaming of a certain Socrates Jones. In truth, she’d been dreaming of him for five long years, since Valentine’s Day, when she was a few months shy of eleven years old. Sure, he was far too old for her, sure, he still thought of her as a kid, sure the odds against anything happening were astronomical, in the extreme. Didn’t matter. The heart wants what it wants.
Until she found her cousin wandering away from the Wardroom with wet hair and no bra.
The betraying bitch had her own shower up in the Captain’s Cabin she now occupied. She didn’t need to use one in the Wardroom area. So where could she have been? There were plenty of people using the staterooms up there, plenty of possible places she could have gone, plenty of men to sex her up. But, no. When it came right down to it, only one man fit the bill for Molly - the betraying bitch - Gordon: Socrates Jones.
Samantha stared out at the desolation of Honolulu through the face piece of her gas mask. She didn’t need to be up there on the Flying Bridge, didn’t need to be outside, at all. Everybody else stayed inside, thanks to the disgusting stench of death and decay. But remaining inside meant being with her cousin. No, thank you.
She showed the lookout voice tube leading below to the Bridge her gloved middle finger - her fuck finger, though she wouldn’t had said the title out loud for all the useless money in this fallen world. Molly was down there, probably smiling at the memory of Jonesy’s body. She flipped her finger at the tube again, and looked toward the sound of the music - muffled, though it was through the hood of her MOPP gear..
I hate Green Day.
8
Sass Two
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
‘I like their taste in music,” Jonesy said, nodding in time with the relatively distant beat. On a normal day, in normal times, odds are he wouldn’t have heard a single note, what with car noises, and tour buses full of people talking and laughing, and the general hubbub of city life going on just on the other side of the basin - or, for that matter, the constant din of activity from the Container Port behind them. But normal didn’t live here anymore.
“Bunch of modern shit,” Gus grumbled.
“You gotta expand your horizons, old man,” Duke suggested - and received the predictable finger in reply.
“That’s the last of them,” Dan McMullen declared, easing himself down the line in the bosun’s chair.
“Pull us away from here, Duke,” Jonesy said. All this communication - except the single-fingered salute, of course - was via yelled comments through muffling gas masks - a neat trick, thanks to the covering firefighter’s hood, beneath the MOPP suit, and the helmets they all wore, which covered the wearer’s ears. But if he could still hear the tunes, being played on a patrol boat several hundred yards away, then they were nowhere near insulated enough to protect them from the percussion of six improvised explosive devices - assuming any or all of them actually detonated.
Then again, the homemade napalm they’d used at Port Allen worked well enough to deep fry a shitload of zombies, so perhaps he should cut the guy some slack. What am I thinking? He thought. Never cut any of them an inch of slack.
“Those things better work,” he said to Dan, nudging the Electrician’s knee with his boot.
“Oh ye of little faith,” the man replied, waving the tourist walkie talkie they were using as trigger. The idea was to detonate the charges by transmitting on the same frequency as the identical units that were attached to the devices, themselves. The theory was sound, so far as Jonesy could see, but he couldn’t help seeing Dan glance toward Gus, as if for silent confirmation. The older man remained impassive.
The RHIB reached the nearest gantry crane of the Port. “Far enough?” Duke asked.
Dan and Gus looked from each other, to the crane, to the bridge, then back at each other., “No,” they said in unison.
“Is Assateague far enough away?” Jonesy asked, worried, all of a sudden - okay, more worried. He’d been plenty worried before the discussion on minimum safe distance.
Gus checked the relative position and distance of the Patrol Boat, sitting at anchor - both fore and aft - a short ways around the bend from the bridge, roughly adjacent to the third of five giant cranes on this face of the Container Port pier. The charges had been set mid-span on both lanes of the road stretching between Honolulu and Sand Island.
“Should–“ he began to say, when two things happened, one after the other.
Molly’s voice cut in on the RHIB radio: “Sass Two, Sass. Two-one. Over.” This was the first thing.
The second was when the charges detonated.
9
USS Paul Hamilton
12.730048N 165.2590054W
“Petty Officer Minooka, you are guilty of Sedition,” LCDR Abernathy said, after once again blathering on about duty, and the Constitution, for a country that no longer existed. “I hereby place you under arrest.”
An audible gasp riffled through the compartment, and a jolt of mixed fear, anger, and disbelief sparked between Morris Minooka’s balls and brain. Was this fucknut serious?
“Petty Officer Swoboda,” Abernathy barked. “Restrain the accused and separate him from the ship’s company.”
Morris’s eyes darted around at what remained of the Hamilton’s crew. He saw disbelief, shock, strain, and that universal expression of disgust, shared by enlisted men and women everywhere, in response to the incessant douche-baggery of officers. What he did not see - anywhere - was a desire to actively protest his arrest.
Swoboda looked from Morris, to the Lieutenant Commander, then back to Morris again, before he stood, removed a pair of large zip-ties from his pocket, and moved to carry out his orders.
“Don’t do this, Ernie,” Morris pleaded. “You know it’s wrong.”
Swoboda’s eyes didn’t meet his - wouldn’t meet his. Neither would anybody else’s. “Don’t call me Ernie,” he muttered, as he put one tie around Morris’s wrists, then looped the second tie between the first one and the vertical stanchion of a nearby metal shelf unit, upon which - incongruously - perched feminine hygiene products.
Tied to douche bags, on the order of a douche bag, Morris thought, the bitterness and anger winning the internal struggle for control of his mind, over the shock and disbelief. He stared at Abernathy. One thought - one word - marched through his brain, like a company of recruits at boot camp: Revenge.
And then, as if in answer to his silent prayer, the wish was granted. The metal door clanked open, and three of the pirates - all armed, of course - entered. The first one in, whom they’d all more or less identified as the Man in Charge, pointed toward Abernathy, in response to which, the larger of the other two strode up to Lieutenant Commander Douche Bag, stuck a twelve-gauge shotgun in his face, and motioned with the barrel for him to stand. He refused. The large pirate thwacked him atop his skull as incentive. He still refused.
The Man in Charge walked up, stuck a nine millimeter in Abernathy’s face, and said: “Get up or get shot.”
Abernathy got up.
The head pirate cast his eyes around the compartment, as if favoring each of its occupants with their own, personal, menacing glare. His gaze fell on Morris. He paused.
Then he motioned to the pirate not dealing with Lieutenant Commander Douche, and said: “Bring this guy along.”
10
USCGC Polar Star
28.168098N 177.333279W
“Goddamned off
icers,” Master Chief Wolf mumbled. At least it sounded like goddamned officers to LT Steven Wheeler. He couldn’t always tell what the Master Chief said, and when he started grumbling, it was best not to question it too closely.
The two of them stood in the vestibule outside the Cabin door, waiting for LTjg Montrose to arrive. She appeared at the bottom of the ladder and started climbing.
They’d been summoned by the Captain. No one knew why. After the man’s near-meltdown on the Bridge, when the young Ensign on the Sass clearly disregarded his orders (going so far as to cut off all communications) he - for one - felt afraid to ask. Captains of ships were never supposed to lose their shit. Never. Life at sea wasn’t exactly safe. There were a dozen different ways to die a horrible death at the best of times - forget a zombie apocalypse. To function in that environment, the crew needed to have faith in their ship, and to have faith in their ship, they needed to have faith in their Captain.
He glanced at the Master Chief, whose face remained - as always - inscrutably grumpy. “Have you talked with him about...?” He let the question trail off, reluctant to make the obvious point.
Wolf continued to stare at the Cabin door. “We had a few words,” he said.
“And?” Wheeler asked, not really expecting a definitive answer and, in any case, not getting one, thanks to the arrival of Ms. Montrose.
She reached the top of the ladder, puffing a bit from the exertion. “Mistuh Wheeluh,” she greeted, in her imitation Boston accent. She, at least, seemed to be in good spirits. “Master Chief,” she added, without the accent.
The crusty old bastard navigator barely acknowledged her presence, choosing instead to knock three crisp times on the Cabin door before entering. They followed.