by Jeff Thomson
Amber kept watching the Ensign. The woman seemed to be struggling with a dilemma. Understatement. She looked like she was about to wrestle all the Pamplona Bulls at once. Ms. Gordon held up her hand to gain the group’s attention.
“Mister Perniola, it should be noted, is a friend of my Uncle, who was also in the Cabin, and witnessed the event.”
“Seems awful convenient,” YN1 Denninger said. “Don’t you think?”
“Oh, who cares?” The civilian woman retorted. “The guy was a ‘round the bend asshole. I can easily see him doing what she described.”
“And you are?” Denninger asked. Apparently, he’d elected himself devil’s advocate. In any event, nobody else seemed to be stepping up for a shot at the title.
“Marsha Gilbert,” the woman replied. “I am - was - a representative of Raytheon. They make - or made - radars, GPS units, radios. All sorts of electronic gear,” she explained. “I was here helping out with the retrofit on one of the Patrol Boats - the Galveston Island.” She looked to Gordon. “Any word from them?”
“No,” the Ensign replied. “They were sent over to the Big Island. We haven’t made it that far east, yet.”
“Been a bit busy rescuing your asses,” Mister Perniola said.
Denninger shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, dismissing the current conversational thread. “I still say it’s awfully convenient.” He began to tick reasons off on his fingers. “He was trying to assume command. He outranks you, so it was appropriate for him to do so. You say there was a struggle. You say he grabbed a gun. You say there was a fight, the gun went off, and the Lieutenant was killed. And the only people who were there to back up your version of events, are friends of your Uncle?” He spread his hands in a theatrical demonstration of incredulity. “Pretty damned convenient.”
“I’d say it wasn’t the least bit convenient,” a man said, striding onto the Mess Deck. Amber couldn’t be sure, since the guy wasn’t wearing a gas mask, or all that MOPP gear, but he looked like one of the men from the truck who rescued them all.
“And you are?” The YN1 asked again. He really needed to get some new material.
“BM1/OPS Socrates Jones.”
Another gasp rippled through the crowd. Everybody knew that name - everybody who worked on the base, anyway. They’d all heard about the Piper Maru. Hard not to. Coastie-involved shootings weren’t just rare, they were non-existent. Everyone had heard the rumors: that he’d snapped, that he wasn’t wrapped too tight, that he was a Section Eight. Of course, everybody had also heard the result of the Post-Action Review Board: it was a good shoot - cleared of all charges. But, in the same way journalists say: If it bleeds, it leads, Rumor Control couldn’t be bothered with such mundane technicalities as a perfectly legal incident. There had to be controversy, there had to be scandal. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth the gossip.
“Anybody bring up that goddamned shooting board,” Jones said. “And I’ll cut out your liver.” He walked right up to the YN1. “It happened as she said it did. If you don’t like it, I don’t give a fuck.” He then turned to the Ensign. “Assateague’s coming alongside.”
57
Seaplane Wallbanger
21.523792N 159.045585W
“Come with me, please,” the big man, Barber said, helping Lieutenant Steven Wheeler to his feet. They’d managed to get out and walk around a bit when they dropped the two civilians off at Lihue Airport, so his joints weren’t stiffened to immobility, exactly, but they weren’t far from it. In one sense, he was delighted to have the opportunity to move around. But on the other hand, he was being escorted into the rear cargo compartment of the plane - away from the rest of his new crew, away (presumably) from prying eyes and ears. This did not bode well. Nothing good was ever told in secret. His suspicions were doubled when the man closed the adjoining door.
Barber sat down on the pile of what looked like crates - or something box-like, at any rate - covered with a large tarp and tied down to eyelets on the deck. “What’s back here?” Wheeler asked.
The big man looked around him and snorted. “You know,” he said. “I never asked.” He flicked at one end of the tarp, as if he were going to look beneath it, then apparently decided otherwise. “I’m sure I don’t want to know,” he added. He shrugged. “Nothing useful, anyway, or we’d have used it by now.”
“Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer,” Wheeler said. He thought of the pilot - that odd British man - and understood Barber’s reluctance.
“Exactly,” the man said.
“Which brings us to the reason you brought me back here,” he said. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“But you’re going to tell me, anyway,” Wheeler said.
“Yep,” Barber replied. “Are you ready?”
“No,” Wheeler said. “But give it to me.”
“You’re walking into a shitstorm.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Wheeler said.
“I could leave you ignorant,” Barber offered. “Let you walk right into it.”
“Tempting,” Wheeler replied - and it was true enough. He knew there would be difficulties: new command, taking over from someone who’d led a battered and nearly beaten crew from the brink of - quite literally - death, with confused loyalties, and with an overall commander (Captain Hall) pissed off at the Ensign for disobeying his orders. Toss in the odd zombie apocalypse and the report of piracy, and what you had was a difficult situation, to say the least. And now this man is saying there’s more? He sighed. “Better tell me.”
So Barber did.
Shitstorm, indeed...
58
USCGC Sassafras
The Wardroom
“You need to either finish clearing the base, so I can set up the lab, or get me back to Midway,” Professor Christopher Floyd said. “Otherwise you’re just wasting my time.”
Jonesy was sorely tempted to tell the cantankerous son of a bitch exactly what he could do with his time. It would have felt good. It would have allowed him to vent his anger and stress and concern for...Molly.
She sat at the head of the Wardroom table, her face like stone, her body just as rigid. She stared at the wooden surface, neither looking left, nor right, nor at anyone in the compartment. She had checked out. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. The line from the Eagles’ Hotel California, went back-stroking though his mind, in that odd and disconnected way song lyrics sometimes did. But the point remained valid. She couldn’t check out. They needed her. Maybe more now, than ever.
“I can get the lab up and running in a matter of hours,” Floyd continued. “But that’s if - and only if - we can find all the equipment I need. Which is still an unknown. And the longer we wait, the longer it’s going to take.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Harold Simmons said.
The Mad Scientist scowled at him. Harold wasn’t helping. Didn’t change the fact that what he said was kind of funny, but general jocularity wasn’t what they needed.
Jonesy cocked another look at Molly. Still staring at the table. Not good. He knew - or thought he did - what must be going through her over-stressed head: she’d killed a man. Not a zombie, not an infected fiend from some unknown circle of Dante’s Hell. A man. And a Coastie officer, to boot. Her superior officer, who’d been trying to exercise his right to assume command - however much like an asshole fucktard the guy had been acting. Plus the impending arrival of yet another superior officer - probably more than one - from the Star, who’d definitely be taking command, and would certainly have a few choice words to say about both the death of Lieutenant Edwards, and the flagrant disobedience to Captain Hall’s direct orders.
And then there was Dan McMullen. Can’t forget that.
No. Jonesy couldn’t forget that, would never forget that. It was seared inside his brain like an overcooked lump of meat left too long in a George Foreman Grill.
Duke, sitting in his usual place nex
t to Harold, smacked him a half-hearted backhand. Everybody seemed distracted.
John, sitting at the foot, and clearly seeing his niece’s lack of engagement in the process, said: “What’s it going to take?”
The question was general, and, thus, directed at no particular person, but Jonesy knew he was the only person who could answer. So he did. “There are still a number of breaches in the fence line between the base and the Container Port. We don’t know how many, and we don’t know where they are. That needs to change.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got maybe another three hours of daylight left.”
“And one Hell of a lot of fence to cover,” John said, nodding.
“Sounds like another job for the Skull Mobile,” Duke said, with pride.
“Yeah,” Jonesy agreed. “But I don’t want to go out there unless we’re armed to the teeth.”
“I like that!” Duke agreed.
“You would,” Harold retorted.
“Can probably rig up a mount for the two-forty,” Frank said, referring to the M240 Machine Gun. The Sass had two on board, plus one more, currently mounted on the Rapid Response Boat. They had plenty of the 7.62 x 51 ammo, since they hadn’t used much of it yet - unlike both the 5.56 for the M-4 and the .45 for both the Thompsons and the pistols. They were running woefully low on that. There was an ammo store on the base, though the ships had all drawn from it before the bugout when this nightmare began. Plus, they didn’t use a whole lot of forty-five in the Coast Guard anymore - none at all, to be precise. To get more, they’d probably need to raid Ford Island, over in Pearl Harbor, and that was the last damned place Jonesy wanted to go in a Zombie apocalypse. It had to be crawling with in-shape, heavily-muscled maniacs.
“Three hours?” Molly asked, finally breaking free of her statue imitation. Jonesy, at first didn’t understand the non-sequitur, but then he did. Daylight. Three hours of remaining daylight.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
She looked up, then, but her eyes still seemed unfocused and vague. “No time,” she said.
“The mount will only take about half an hour,” Frank protested.
“No time,” she repeated. “First things first.”
They all looked at her, with concern in every eye - except Floyd, of course. Concern for another human being would require the self-absorbed bastard to acknowledge someone else mattered. Couldn’t have that.
She stood, suddenly. Jonesy pushed back his chair, not understanding, but ready to help her.
“Get the ship underway,” she said. “We need to do a burial at sea.”
59
USS Paul Hamilton
10.381672N 164.813546W
“Abernathy’s dead,” Morris Minooka said to the assembled survivors of the Paul Hamilton. The reaction seemed split roughly down the middle, with half gasping in shock, and the rest nodding in resigned acceptance. There were also a number of angry faces, and it was clear just whom they were angry at: him.
“Fucking traitor,” someone - a male - grumbled, but their appeared no outward indication of the speaker.
“Listen to what he has to say,” Swoboda cautioned, and that seemed to carry some weight.
Morris paused to gather his thoughts. He had to play this right, had to persuade them to his side. Unfortunately, his confidence was not high. He’d never been very good at this sort of thing. Oh, sure, he’d been able to persuade friends to do this or that. Who hadn’t at some point in their lives? And he’d done enough of it to rise through the ranks from E-1 to E-5, but that was mostly just keeping his nose clean and not doing anything overtly stupid. This was different. This was vital.
“Are you familiar with the term revenge is a dish best served cold?”
“Yeah,” Eddie Cochrane, one of the Missile Technicians said. “Like in Star Trek, Undiscovered Country.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” OS2 Kim Bindleman said, the incredulity in her voice so obvious she could have bitch-slapped the poor guy with it.
Cochrane shrugged. “Old Klingon proverb.”
“Whatever,” Morris said, dismissing the absurdity. “My point is, we have a choice. We can either keep fighting them, keep resisting, keep making things difficult...”
“Hell yeah!” Roger Groves, one of Morris’s fellow Fire Control guys said, interrupting.
“...In which case they’ll kill us just as soon as we’ve outlived our usefulness,” he continued past the interruption. He paused again, letting the intellectual stew simmer. “And the more of a pain in the ass we become, the quicker they’ll do it.”
“So, what? Just give up?” Cochrane asked.
“No,” Morris replied. “We wait. We play along, convince them they have our cooperation, convince them we can be trusted,” he added, pausing again. “And when they start to relax around us, start to trust us, when we have access to the weapons they’re willing to kill us for...” He paused one last time. “When the dish is good and cold...” He finished the statement in theatrical fashion by pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand.
He let his eyes roam around the assembled crowd, looking into each pair of their eyes, one at a time. What he saw gave him hope. What he saw gave him confidence.
What he did not see was the sinking suspicion he held within his own mind: That all this was so much pure bullshit.
60
USCGC Sassafras
The Wardroom
“Obstinate little bitch,” Professor Christopher Floyd said, in answer to LT Steve Wheeler’s question. He’d asked about Ensign Gordon, of course. He’d asked everyone he’d been talking to about the Ensign, all night long, pretty much since the seaplane slapped its belly onto the waters of Honolulu Harbor, and this was the first negative word he’d heard. “But if anything unpleasant should happen to her - of which I would wholeheartedly approve - then you’ll lose John Gordon, which means you’ll lose the cooperation of everybody on True North.”
“Except you?” Wheeler asked, stifling a yawn. He eyed his half-filled cup of coffee. If he had any more, his heart would explode. He yawned again. He sipped the coffee.
“Except me,” Floyd replied. “Which isn’t in any way to suggest I’m going to agree to anything you tell me to do,” he hastened to add.
“Naturally,” Wheeler said, casting a glance toward LTjg Amy Montrose. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the dark circles under them might as well have been labeled Samsonite, the bags were so heavy. At least she was still awake. Peavy lounged on the sofa, snoring softly. “But you can - in theory - make vaccine here at the base...?”
“In theory,” he replied. “I’m told, by that Weaver kid, they have a dental x-ray machine in the Medical Clinic, and an autoclave. No idea about the mass spectrometer, and a great big no, as far as the S-E-M.”
“S-E-M?” Wheeler asked.
“Scanning Electron Microscope,” the professor said, with obvious derision. “There isn’t one.”
“Can you make do without?”
“Possibly,” Floyd said. “Possibly. But Quality Control might suffer.”
“Don’t want that,” Montrose said. They were the first words she’d spoken in almost half an hour. They really needed to wrap this up and get some sleep, but there were two more people to talk to - the last two.
“No,” Floyd agreed. “I suppose there might be one at the VA Hospital...”
Wheeler looked Montrose. “Tripler Army Base,” she said in answer to his silent question. She’d lived briefly on Oahu as a child, when her mother was stationed at Pearl Harbor, as a Supply and Logistics Officer for the Navy. Her local knowledge - however out of date it might be - would no doubt prove invaluable.
He could ask the Sass crew for more current information - and he would be asking them, often - though he was beginning to suspect their cooperation would be slow in coming. He was the New Guy, sent there by some unknown Captain to take over from a young Ensign they’d all grown to trust and admire. Floyd had been right in his assessment. If he responded
to...recent events...with too heavy a hand, they’d mutiny. Maybe not directly, maybe not in any Mutiny on the Bounty sort of way, but they could still cause quite a few problems in hundreds of little ways, the effect of which would be to make the stewardship of one Lieutenant Steven Wheeler, USCG, an overall failure. He’d learned that much from a long night of conversations with each and every one of them. He would have to earn their trust and respect. This wasn’t the Old Guard, to be sure.
And maybe it shouldn’t be. New world, new rules.
“Good luck,” Floyd said, seemingly out of left field.
“Hmm?” Wheeler asked, popping out of his rumination.
“Good luck trying to get an SEM out of the Army Base,” the irritating man said. The sneer behind the voice was loud and clear.
Wheeler looked to Montrose for clarification. She shuddered, apparently envisioning the place. “Middle of the city,” she said.
He stared out the black porthole to his left, seeing nothing but darkness, and imagining the destroyed city beyond. “Surrounded by zombies, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Floyd answered. “And in any case, I think you’d be wasting your time.”
“Why is that?” Wheeler asked.
“Two reasons,” Floyd began. “First: it’s possible the virus has already burned itself out. The active virus, anyway.” Wheeler raised both eyebrows in surprised response. “It was never very stable to begin with. Put together with spit and baling wire.” He leaned back in his chair. “It may have been designed that way: infect as many as possible, then go away, leaving the survivors more or less safe.” He paused, then added: “That’s how I would have done it.”
“Safe?” Montrose replied with an explosive snort, loud enough to disturb the slumber of Peavy, who gave his own muffled snort, then rolled onto his side and went back to whatever dreams floated through that incompetent head.
“This brings up the second reason,” Floyd replied, ignoring the outburst. “Sooner or later, the zombies are going to die off.”
“They don’t appear to be going anytime soon,” Wheeler said.