by Jeff Thomson
The man stood and moved to the other side of the room, where LT Wheeler and LTjg Montrose waited. Three down, ten to go.
“Next.”
29
COMMSTA Honolulu
Sand Island, Oahu
“This is almost like watching the Big Game,” Scott Pruden observed.
“Zombie Ball?” Amber quipped. The scene below and beyond them was surreal in the extreme. To the East, Sassafras maneuvered its way toward their usual pier - or what had been their usual pier before the zombies covering the land side of it took over the base.
The waterfront took a sharp, ninety-degree turn to the north and east, pointing toward the sprawl of Honolulu. The once picturesque view in that direction now looked like something Dante might describe during a particularly nasty acid trip. Burnt buildings, wrecked cars, and destroyed lives littered the far side. If she squinted in just the right way (which she tried to avoid doing at all costs), she could see survivors on rooftops, watching the show.
To the north, lay the Mess Hall, where every now and then, she could see those crazy fools in that absurd truck playing chicken with crowds of zombies, and winning. Beyond, squatted the first of the huge gantry cranes of the Container Port, and the now burned and derelict hulk of the freighter moored there.
Far to the north and west, she could hear the pounding of Assateague’s 25MM Auto Cannon, now augmented by the deep, three-round boom of the fifty caliber machine gun from the Rapid Response Boat they’d watched two guys requisition not so long ago. And over it all hung the black smoke of the destroyed Sand Island Bridge.
On second thought, Dante on his worst day, in his most extraordinary hallucinations of Hell, couldn’t have envisioned the scene taking place in front of Amber Winkowski and Scott Pruden.
“More like Dancing With the Devil,” he replied.
“Or a normal episode of Real Housewives,” she countered. Their banter served two purposes: it lightened the mood, and occupied the mind, which would otherwise be able to concentrate on just how dire the situation truly was. People - former ones, anyway - were being killed out there. Normal (relatively) sane people were risking their lives to save the few survivors of what had once been a thriving base filled with a few hundred Coasties, civilians, and dependents.
And in the middle, stood Amber Winkowski and Scott Pruden, watching it all.
“COMMSTA, this is Sassafras, Two-One. Over.” The radio, nearly forgotten in her hand, crackled to life.
“Go, Sass,” she said into it.
“Can you see the team on the ground?” The female voice - presumably Ensign Gordon - asked. The Sass had been calling them but, for whatever reason, the homicidal motorists weren’t responding.
Amber glanced in their direction, saw them, and was about to answer, when:
“Sass, this is Ground Team. Over.” Loud music played in the background, explaining their silence. “Turn that shit down, Duke,” she heard one of them say.
“Is that...?” Scott asked.
“Black Sabbath?”
30
The Skull Mobile
Sand Island, Oahu
“Sorry, Sass,” Jonesy said into the integrated mic beneath his gas mask. “Duke was trying to destroy our hearing.”
The Bosun Mate in question flipped him the finger, then swerved the big truck to take out four staggering zombies, three of them clothed, one not. The one not was a fat fucker - or had been before the deprivations of the Pomona Plague. The folds of skin hung loosely off his large frame, but it remained evident he hadn’t been a swimsuit model before being infected. He died like the rest, careening off the left front bumper and spinning into a nearby bush.
It almost seemed like sport, though there wasn’t a single thing sporting about it.
“Looks like we’re running out of targets,” Duke said, sounding almost disappointed as he pulled a U-turn to head back the way they’d come. Sure enough, not a single zombie in sight.
“What’s your status, Ground Team?” Molly’s radio voice asked. He couldn’t tell if she sounded pissed or relieved.
“We’re...” he began, searching for the right terminology. “Eliminating the external threat.”
“Any contact with the other units?” She asked.
“Negative,” Jonesy replied, trying not to think of Dan McMullen, and failing. “But now that the music has been turned down...”
Duke replied with the universal sign for jerking off.
“Understood,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
“We have a plan?” Duke joked.
Jonesy shrugged. “Kill a shitload of zombies,” he said, then keyed the radio. “Once we’ve cleared the outside of the Chow Hall, we’ll proceed inside and begin extraction. Over.”
“You make it sound so simple,” Duke said, spotting a lone zombie in the near distance and heading for it.
“Roger,” Molly replied. “Keep us posted.”
“Roger that,” he said. “Ground Team, out.”
The Skull Mobile bounced over the half-dressed woman as if she were a speed bump, slightly rocking the chassis. They drove on, circling the perimeter of the Mess Hall, finding nothing. Well, not nothing. They found plenty of dead bodies, laying in bloody profusion, all having suffered impact or crushing injuries, courtesy of the Big Damned Truck.
“I told you we should have grabbed this thing sooner,” Duke said. “But no, you just had to wait.” He shook his head in theatrical fashion.
“I’ll have myself shot at my earliest convenience.”
“See that you do,” Duke replied.
They drove three more laps around the building, and found no likely candidates. The big man rolled the big truck to a stop in front of the Mess Hall entrance. They looked at each other in silence, knowing what they were going to have to do.
“Now comes the fun part,” Jonesy said, grabbing his Thompson submachine gun.
31
M/V Point of Order
10.450253N 164.784516W
“Just throw the fucker over the side,” Charlie said into the radio. “Feed the sharks, and hope they choke on his sorry ass.”
The Lieutenant Commander’s body flopped over the side of the Paul Hamilton and landed in the water with barely a splash. The man had refused to cooperate. He hadn’t lived to regret it. Only, he did end up regretting it - to the tune of four solid hours of enhanced interrogation. What a bullshit euphemism. They tortured his ass, over , and over again, first cutting off one ear, then breaking one finger at a time, then taking a hammer to his kneecap. The fucker never gave them what they wanted - never gave them the code to access the Small Arms Locker. Then the asshole went and died on them, about twenty minutes ago.
Not good.
Not good for them, because they were running low on ammo. Not good for Blackjack Charlie Carter, because every failed mission, every foul-up, everything that didn’t go according to his plan made him look bad in the eyes of his pirates.
He keyed the radio. “Put that Minooka kid in a room with the Gunner’s Mate he told us about. Let’s see if a little friendly persuasion works better than...” He let the sentence drift. Torture. Had he really resorted to something so barbaric? Yes. Yes he had. And odds were better than average he’d do it again, if necessary. He spared a moment - just a moment - in contemplation of how easy killing had become.
The pimp he’d wasted with his blackjack hadn’t bothered him in the least. Fucker had it coming - in spite of what the Judge and the jury decreed. Asshole deserved to die. Probably did society a favor.
Then there was the married couple - the previous owners of the Daisy Jean. The same couldn’t be said about them. They hadn’t had it coming, but they’d been in the way, and so they needed to go. He supposed he could have put them ashore, tied them up nice and tight, and stashed them in some convenient shed on the pier in San Francisco to keep them from raising the alarm until Charlie and his crew were safely out to sea. But the world had turned to shit by then. Zombies were everywher
e. Killing had become commonplace.
Then there had been that ship...the...True North, was it? He hadn’t done the actual killing, himself, but he knew that’s what would happen. And he’d ordered Old Joe and the rest to do it.
Old Joe...
Had killing him been necessary? Maybe. Maybe not.
How many had he killed by now? Did he dare try and count? No. No fucking way.
All that was fine and good. Killing had become the new reality in this fallen world. But torture...?
Fuck it, he thought. What’s done is done. Concentrate on the present...
The present looked FUBAR. Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. Was it really that bad? No. Not yet.
“Roger that,” Doug Hennessy replied, and keyed off - presumably to do Charlie’s bidding. But suppose he didn’t?
He examined the idea: could Hennessy fuck him? Certainly. But would he? No, he decided. Not yet, anyway... He wasn’t quite sure why he felt certain of this fact, but he did. Hennessy and a significant cadre of the others were still with him. For now...
The one saving grace to this whole mess was that George wasn’t around to point out the failure. Sooner or later he’d have to deal with the repercussions of killing the drunk fuck, but not today. Not now.
Now he had to deal with the slow progress they were making on the return trip toward Palmyra. The Point of Order might have been a vast improvement over the Daisy Jean, but the one hundred twenty-five foot yacht wasn’t designed to tow the five hundred and nine-foot Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer. In any kind of seas, they’d be screwed, but the current conditions were more or less calm. Bit of a swell coming out of the Northeast, but nothing to write home about, nothing to rattle the plates in the galley, nothing to concern even the greenest of sailors. But they couldn’t tow her very fast without running the risk of ripping the transom off the yacht. That would be bad.
“What’s our actual speed?” He asked Felix, who leaned against the chart table. He stared back at him with stupid eyes.
“Charlie,” he began, hesitant.
“What?”
“You see the scale on this chart?”
“What?” He demanded.
“The last two fixes I did were four hours apart,” he said.
“So?” Felix was a tolerable man, if only because he was so pliable, so willing to do whatever the fuck Charlie told him. But the thickheadedness was really beginning to wear.
“In that four hours, we moved a quarter of an inch on this chart.”
Charlie knew what he was driving at: the fixes were too close together, on too large a scale of chart for him to get anything resembling an accurate speed. He sighted. “Give me your best guess.”
“About four knots.”
“Fuck a duck,” Charlie breathed. “How far to Palmyra?”
“About three hundred miles.”
Three more fucking days...
32
USCGC Sassafras
Honolulu Harbor
“This ought to do it,” John said from the Port Bridge door.
“Rudder amidships,” Molly ordered, engaging the Dynamic Positioning System. They were twenty yards off their old pier - though old was certainly a relative term. They’d last tied to it four weeks ago? Five? She wasn’t quite sure about the date, the days having become a blur of death and tragedy and killing and sleep deprivation.
“My rudder is amidships,” Gary King reported. Having a cook as helmsman was just another oddity to add to her growing list. Multitasking had become the new normal. Cooks could steer the ship, sixteen year-old girls could act as lookout, two-hundred twenty-five foot buoy tenders could be run with five people, and a boot Ensign, fresh from the Academy could become Captain.
Before the advent of Dynamic Positioning, taking station this close to a solid object like, say, a concrete pier, with only five people on board, would have been foolhardy, at best, and idiotic at worst. A person would have to be some kind of blithering idiot to even attempt it...
And just like that, she realized the flaw in her plan: DPS required GPS positioning information to function properly, and the GPS system was utterly unreliable.
“Uncle John,” she called, struggling to keep her voice from quavering. He stuck his head back in through the door. “We need to either tie up or get the Hell away from here. DPS won’t work.”
His brow furrowed in momentary confusion, to be replaced by the wide-eyed expression of someone who suddenly realized how badly they just fucked up. His mouth formed an OH, that might have been comical, were the circumstances not so dire.
“Right full rudder,” she ordered, goosing the throttles, and Gary King obeyed.
They’d become so used to the wonders and convenience of modern technology, that even four weeks (or five) into an apocalypse, they were still trying to rely on it. She disengaged the DPS and turned on the Bow Thruster, foolishly afraid the computer would become confused and refuse to work altogether.
Computers were only as good as the humans who programmed them. Garbage in, garbage out. If only being human were so cut and dried.
Grabbing the phone out of its cradle, she dialed the Radio Room. “Get your ass up to the forecastle,” she barked, when Bill Schaefer answered, then dropped the handset back into its cradle. “Drop the hook,” she said to her uncle, still standing in the doorway. He took off at a run.
She dashed from one Bridge Wing to the other, checking their position relative to anything they might hit. How could I be so stupid? She berated herself.
“Rudder amidships,” she ordered, and Gary King obeyed, as she cut back on the bow thruster. To his credit, he was performing with precision and skill - in sharp contrast to her own fumbling.
I don’t belong here. The thought bubble exploded into her head. I’ve got no business being Captain. This was demonstrably true, to anyone with eyes. Of that she was convinced. There wasn’t a pre-plague officer with any time in service whatsoever, who would have put her in charge of a dinghy, let alone a freaking buoy tender.
Bill stumbled through the door, looking every bit as disheveled as the zombies on the pier they’d almost hit. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair stood up in every direction, and his uniform looked as if he’d been sleeping in it - which was absurd, since she knew the one thing he hadn’t been doing in far longer than was either safe or sane, was sleeping.
“Get up forward,” she snapped. “Help John drop anchor.” He nodded and ran out the same door as her uncle had, fumbling to put on his own gas mask.
Throttle back, bow thruster in neutral. What else did she need to do? Think, god dammit!
A quick check of the radar told her they were a hundred yards off the pier. Three hundred feet, two hundred twenty-five for the ship, seventy five feet from the nearest obstruction. Far enough. Quick check of the chart - depth in the harbor about forty feet at low tide. How much anchor chain? Pythagorean theorem had never been her strong suit. Screw it. Seven times the depth of water for chain length, so...two hundred eighty feet. Chain is measured in shots, one shot equals ninety feet, three times ninety is two seventy, so three and a quarter shots? Too complicated.
Two strides brought her to the 1-MC. Exterior speakers already engaged on the panel, so... She keyed the mic. “Three shots on deck,” she called through the loud hailer. “Put out three shots.” Dashing back to the forward windows, she saw her uncle’s waved hand, then watched as John directed Bill in engaging the anchor windless, confirming the locking clamp, releasing the brake, and then releasing the clamp with one mighty swing of a sledge hammer.
With a rumble and clang of metal against metal, the big chain ran out, dragged downward by the sheer weight of the anchor itself. Even from the Bridge, she could see the painted stripes go flashing by, indicating the first shot, then the second, and when the third appeared, John pulled back on the brake and the running chain stopped dead, with a bounce and a loud CLANG..
Okay...What’s next? Her mind scrambled through its inadequate memory banks, searching fo
r the answer. The hook is down, its sitting in the mud on the bottom, the chain is holding them in place...what am I missing? She stared in misery out the forward windows, and saw that her uncle had it well in hand. Of course, you idiot. You need to set the hook. She goosed the Bow Thruster, sending the bow itself slightly to the right - just enough to set the anchor into the muddy bottom. Schaeffer, leaning over the side and watching the chain, gave a thumbs up. They were hooked. The ship was once again secure. Her fuckup had caused no lasting damage.
Until the next one.
She looked toward the shore, toward the base, where her men were risking their lives to carry out her plan, on her orders. And she’d just proven she had no fucking idea what she was doing.
Only next time, on the next thing she fucked up, it won’t just be a matter of denting the ship. Next time, her incompetence could get one or all of her men killed.
33
Sass Two
Sand Island, Oahu
“Zombies to the left of me, crazy buoy tender to the right,” Gus sang to himself. “Here I am. Stuck in the middle with you...” His audience for this bastardized version of Stuck in the Middle With You, by Stealer’s Wheel, was the dead body of Dan McMullen, now resting under a tarp in the bow of the RHIB.
They’d left him alone - save for a corpse - as Jonesy and Duke went off to kill zombies and (presumably) rescue people. They could have all of it they wanted. He felt more than happy to give up his entire share of the “fun” to them. He’d seen them racing around the parking lot in that absurd truck, playing bumper tag with the insane recent inhabitants of Sand Island. Have fun, boys, he thought. I’ll just sit here in the boat.
Me and the dead body.
The bow of the RHIB rested slightly on the sand and crumbled concrete of the former pier. He kept the motor running, just in case, but the water of the harbor remained calm, and the breeze stayed slightly out of the north and east, making him glad the mask he wore still worked. The stench had to be awful. Even with fresh filters (and they’d be running out of those, before too much longer), he could still smell the overwhelming aroma of rot. All that pollution, all that destruction, all that death... He could still smell it over the charcoal and rubber aroma of the mask, made all that more horrible because he knew its source. Damned near enough to make him puke, even with the mask. Without it... He didn’t want to think.