by Jeff Thomson
They were standing, cheek to jowl, up on the Flying Bridge and Signal Bridge, waiting for the fireworks to begin. Those who weren’t wearing full gas masks, wore filter masks, their upper lips slathered with menthol rub to help reduce the stench. Tara wore a filter. Lydia wasn’t so brave. As such, no one could see her blush as the self-confessed lesbian snuggled up to her in a highly inappropriate manner. Being Tara, this meant it was a highly sexual manner, as well, and that thought had her inwardly seeking a somewhere else to be.
She had nothing against gay people. She’d known quite a few over the years, and from her experience, they were just like everyone else, except in the choice of their lovers. None of her business. Who someone slept with in no way affected Lydia Claire. Really. Even if the girl was a friend, and good looking, and extraordinarily sexual, and paraded around their shared stateroom buck naked, and had a tendency to get affectionate in a most inappropriate manner. Like now.
Give yourself a really good orgasm. Then get on with it.
On what planet did that sudden thought make any sense, whatsoever? Was it stress? Was it repressed excitement over the fact they were going to kill a whole bunch of zombies? Was it her minds’ way of distracting her from the fact? Just a bit of mental misdirection to keep her away from the severe angst over what anyone with a shred of humanity would consider a horrible necessity? Or was it because a beautiful, highly sexual woman was trying to cuddle - in public?
Run away! Run away! Her over-stressed brain shouted at her.
Lydia spun away from the embrace and stared at the woman. “You think this is going to be fun?” She snapped, having nothing else she could say.
“You don’t?” Tara countered.
“This is crazy!” She replied. Hello multiple meanings...
“Of course it is,” the woman laughed, her uncovered eyes sparkling with a kind of happy madness. “It’s absolutely fucking nuts. But insanity can be fun, darling.”
Darling? When the Hell did I become darling?
Run away!
“There’s nothing fun about this,” Lydia insisted. “Nothing at all.” Nothing to see here. Move along. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here and watch a lesbian put the moves on me. Was that it? Was Tara putting the moves on her? Or was she just being gregarious, as usual?
“Open fire!” BMC Jones said into the walkie-talkie.
Too late...
The Assateague fired their 25mm auto cannon, with (or so she’d been told) incendiary rounds, at the barrels placed strategically on the concrete pier. The first round missed, but that was no surprise, as there were zombies gathered between the ship and the target - one heck of a lot of zombies, many of whom were splattered, in truly disgusting fashion, as the projectile smashed through them.
An audible Oh! went up from the crowd, which she could hear even through the various masks and the insistent ringing in her ears. She wanted to look away, wanted to blot the vision from her eyes and her mind and her memory, the same way she had in Guam. But she couldn’t do it here, any more than she’d been able to do it there. Like a horrific car accident , with bodies strewn over the highway amid flashing lights and twisted wreckage, she had to look, needed to look, to bear witness to the carnage. She’d never understood the phenomenon, and understood it even less now, but there it was, right in front of her eyes, in technicolor and HD and Surround Sound.
Another ear-splitting BANG ripped through the late afternoon, and another trail of carnage cut through the crowded zombies - some of whom were fighting between themselves to scoop the slaughterhouse offal into their greedy, insane mouths. The nauseating horror of it left her feeling numb, yet excited, sick, yet exhilarated, as never before in her life.
“Zombie chow time!” Some joker observed, at the top of his lungs. Sounded like that kid, Jerry Nailor.
A disconnected part of her brain sensed Tara’s presence, felt the arm encircle her waist in another embrace, took in her warmth, and the softness of the woman’s breast as it pressed against her. Tara leaned in close, placing the fiber of the filter mask right against Lydia’s ear.
“Exciting, isn’t it?”
The third BANG came with an instantly-added WHUMP, as the first barrel of Napalm ignited. WHUMP, WHUMP, the second and third went in huge gouts of fire, shooting upward and outward, into the crowded human beings, incinerating them, consuming them, cooking them in an instant. Dozens, or maybe hundreds disappeared in a conflagration of gargantuan proportions, as whoops and shouts of triumph and sick glee rose up from the Flying Bridge, like a chorus of lunatic angels, singing the praises of some murderous demigod of Hell’s making.
Still, she couldn’t look away, couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight of all those burning bodies, all that death. The visual was bad enough. The mental acceptance of it was worse. The physical sensations coursing through her body as she processed the sensory overload: elevated pulse rate, breathlessness, a tingling of every nerve in her body, all of them seeming to center on one particular section of her anatomy - something she’d neglected and ignored and repressed for months (give yourself an orgasm and get on with it), first down in the ice, and then after they learned about the fall of civilization and the realization that life as they knew it was well and truly over - broke through the barrier of her psyche like a bulldozer pushing against the wall of a tumbledown house being demolished. Why?
Because it excited her.
This, more than anything else, more than the horror, more than the insanity of what they were doing and seeing, pushed her beyond the point of no return. And then Tara pushed her just that much farther.
“Isn’t it exciting?” She said again into Lydia’s ear, punctuating the question by sliding the hand encircling Lydia’s waist downward, downward, until it rested firmly on her ass.
“Screaming Alpha!” Someone yelled, and people started laughing - actually started laughing - at the spectacle of hundreds of their fellow humans being roasted alive. Straw, meet camel...
“What is wrong with you?” Lydia screamed, spinning out of Tara’s dangerous grasp. Her eyes locked onto Chief Jones, standing there, head back, laughing uproariously as he pumped his fist in triumph. “What is wrong with you?” She shouted again, getting right into Jonesy’s filter mask-covered face. “Those are people out there! Human beings! Just like us! And you’re laughing! What’s wrong with you?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw LCDR Wheeler, the shock in his eyes evident, even through the plexiglass lenses of his gas mask. He gaped at her. She ignored him.
“You’re all insane,” she screamed, then turned and raced away, hardly touching the ladder to the Signal Bridge and barely noticing the rungs downward onto the deck as she sped aft.
Run away! Run away!
But on a ship, where the Hell could she run to?
115
USCG 6583
Barbers Point, Oahu
“Oh my God,” LT Carrie Scoggins said, over the intercom, staring in awe and horror at the devastation surrounding NAS Barbers Point, where the Coast Guard stationed their aircraft. Where the Coast Guard used to station their aircraft, she amended, as a shiver coursed through her battered central nervous system. Now, nothing remained but the detritus of a past nightmare: gone, yet lingering.
Fire had swept through the area, but it must have been some time ago, because the wreckage no longer smoked or smoldered. What remained were the skeletal outline of hangars and buildings, aircraft and vehicles, and many, many human beings.
A movie flashed across her mind - an old one, War of the Worlds (the original not that Tom Cruise piece of crap). The aftermath of the Martian Death Rays left similar outlines - human-shaped and made of ash. A horrible hint of what used to be.
While Carrie had never been in a war zone, she had seen enough pictures. This looked nothing like it. There were no bomb craters, no half demolished dwellings, no intact buildings standing sentry over the destruction. There was just the destruction itself.
The area stood bordered by the shoreline and three main roads. Everything inside that misshapen square was gone - consumed by whatever tragedy had taken place there - leaving only the charred remains of who knew how many lives.
And then it was passed, then it was behind them; the dull ache of loss and tragedy, the horrific images reduced to nothing but bad memory. Ahead, in the distance, lay the entrance to Pearl Harbor, the contents of the waterway, itself, still hidden from view.
“How many, do you think?” LTjg Zack Greeley asked from the copilot seat.
“What?”
“How many died down there?” He clarified.
“All of them,” ASM2 Kyle Rogers, sitting nearest the sliding door behind them said. “Every last goddamned one of them.”
Her mind tried to block the thought, but the truth of it came through anyway, painting her bruised psyche the color of human blood. “What caused it? Any guesses?” She asked.
“Fucking zombies,” AT3 Mark Columbus answered, as if that explained everything. In reality, it explained nothing at all.
“What do you think happened?” Zack scoffed. “Bunch of zombies running around with Zippos, lighting stuff on fire?”
“How do you explain it then?” Columbus snapped, the edge in his voice touched with hysteria. Her crew was beginning to lose it.
“Everybody take a breath,” she said, as if it meant anything, as if it would do any good. What kind of Hallmark platitudes could she give to ease the mental anguish they all felt? Sure the world has gone away, But tomorrow is another day... She could see the greeting card, with a cartoon cat doing something charming and Saccharin sweet. It made her want to laugh. It made her want to cry. She did neither.
“...Cutter Sassafras, Cutter Sassafras, this is Coast Guard Six-Five-Eight-Five, Channel Two-One. Over,” the voice of LCDR Randy Sagona came through the radio.
“Get your game faces on, everyone,” she said through the intercom. “This could get interesting.”
116
USS Paul Hamilton
7.214424N 162.632273W
“There are two ways this can go,” Blackjack Charlie Carter said to what was left of the assembled crew of the Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer. He’d already informed them of the impending arrival of Henry David Goddard, Acting President of the United States - their Commander in Chief, in name, if not in actual fact. They seemed skeptical, to say the least. This, Charlie felt sure, was due to the reality of armed men aboard their ship - pirates, no less - who’d already killed quite a few of their fellow shipmates. He didn’t care.
He didn’t care about a lot of things.
He didn’t care that the twenty-five year-old, five hundred and five-foot ship was, in fact sinking, since the rate of water coming in wasn’t going to be an issue before they made it to the shallows around Palmyra Atoll. This is what Hennessy had told him, and his own eyes had seen.
He didn’t care that Henry David Goddard was a pompous and clueless member of the House of Representatives, whose own party hadn’t wanted his stupid and crazy ass. Did he honestly believe the world was flat? Didn’t matter. What he represented now: the senior-most elected official, and, therefore, de facto Leader of the Free World, lent Charlie (the real power behind the throne, as it were) the necessary gravitas to be able to do things like, say, seize a US warship. That did matter.
At least Charlie hoped it mattered. He could go right on threatening and forcing, torturing and killing his way through the remnants of the destroyer’s crew, but it’d be much simpler to have their cooperation. More bees with honey, and all that.
That kid, Minooka, had said he had most of them convinced, but in the military, most of them didn’t mean all of them. This wasn’t a democracy. It wasn’t majority rule. He needed all of them convinced, needed them compliant - preferably Before Congressman Wombat came aboard to thrill them with his rhetorical abilities. If he didn’t get all of them, then the holdouts would have to be killed.
He didn’t care about that, either, when it came right down to it.
He also didn’t care whether the crew of that warship accepted his position, or gave it one single iota of respect. Why? Because he controlled all the guns.
It would have been easier just to kill them all, of course. He’d considered doing exactly that, but discarded the idea, almost immediately. He needed them - most of them, anyway. It came down to the weapons systems.
There were manuals for everything - the Navy had manuals for how a fucking crapper worked - so it was marginally possible they could have figured the systems out on their own. Maybe. In about a year. But they didn’t have a year - or, more to the point, he didn’t have a year.
His grasp on control of the - for lack of a better word - Pirates, was tenuous, and would only hold as long as he gave them results, and kept them fed and entertained. Salvage could provide the food. It could also provide the booze, and they’d found small amounts of other party favors here and there on the rich bastard yachts - formerly owned by people who took their scotch neat, and their cocaine Peruvian. That wasn’t a problem. The drunken stupidity might be, but access to the means for such stupidity was not.
The men also needed female companionship. Keep them fed, get them laid, and they are yours. It had always been thus, throughout human history. And there were plenty of women among the survivors.
That’s another thing about history. The #Me Too bullshit notwithstanding, the majority of human civilization had been decidedly misogynistic, and the zombie apocalypse had drained the modern world of all those politically correct notions to the contrary. Men were in charge again. Period. They would stay in charge, as long as the world remained a dangerous place. And so women had once again been relegated to the role of chattel. They were there to cook and clean, and fuck. And if they didn’t like it, too damned bad. Let them go out and kill the zombies on their own. Good fucking luck.
So all of those things worked in his favor. He could see to the men’s baser needs. But it wasn’t enough. They needed Power.
This, too, had been an historical constant. Male-dominated society had always bred a need for competition. Someone had to be the best, the biggest, the baddest, the most powerful. This meant struggle, this meant conflict, this meant war.
To be the biggest and baddest, one must have the biggest and baddest army. But even that wasn’t enough, because smaller armies throughout history had proven they could win, as long as they had superior weaponry. Agincourt became a British victory because of the long bow. Roarke’s Drift was won, thanks to the rifle. The First World War ended because of the tank, and the Second, because of the Bomb.
We learn from history that we do not learn from history, some German philosopher had said. Well, Charlie Carter had learned from history. He needed the weapons, and so he needed the people who knew how to use them.
He’d already given a variation of this speech to them once. Hell, he’d given it so often since the breakout from Soledad prison, he would have considered patenting it, if there were a US Patent Office, or, for that matter, a US with which to file such a thing. It had worked on the Corrigan Cargo III, it had worked on the survivors on Palmyra, it had worked on roughly one-third of the various smaller vessels they’d found: sailboats and yachts and island-hopping freighters. The other two thirds of the people they’d found had turned zombie or been shot.
“You can either stop resisting and join us, or we can put a bullet in your brains and feed you to the sharks.” He paused for effect, though it didn’t seem necessary. He had their attention. Half a dozen weapons (superior weapons) pointed in their direction made sure of it.
“As I said before we had to resort to a certain degree of unpleasantness,” he continued, referring to his use of torture. “If you join us, and prove you can be both useful and trusted, then you will share in the salvage.” This was the euphemism they used in reference to the things they stole, the women they raped, and the people they killed. It seemed a much nicer title than thief, or rapist, or murderer. “If
you do not...” he said, as he jacked the slide on his 9mm, and jerked his thumb toward the open ocean, where fins could be seen in the distance.
“The difference between the first time I made this offer and now, is that now we can offer you a little extra incentive,” he added - as if the threat (fully proven by recent events) of being turned into lunch weren’t enough to convince them. He looked at the remainder of the crew - all of them useful, all of them capable of giving Charlie and his Band of Buccaneers what they needed - each in turn, holding their gazes, before moving to the next person. Then he dropped the gilded bomb:
“We have vaccine.”
117
USCGC Sassafras
The Ship’s Office
“Come in,” Lydia said, answering to the second knock on the office door, and dreading to discover who among the crew would be coming down to deal with her latest outburst - the most recent example of her whining loss of control and composure.
Her mother had always taught her that the most important thing for any woman - but most especially a Southern Belle - was composure: the ability to keep oneself measured and calm and not making a spectacle of oneself, no matter what the circumstance. In truth, she’d always thought it sounded like a crock of shit, but she’d never told her mother so. Turns out, the woman had been right.
First, she’d lost it in Guam, then she’d gone nearly catatonic after finding YN3 Kenneth Carter Duvall hanging from the overhead in the weight room on Polar Star. They’d actually deemed it necessary to send Tara McBride (of all people) to attempt an intervention of sorts, to keep her from diving right over the edge (give yourself an orgasm and get on with it). And now this. Once again, Poor Lydia was the center of attention, the damaged, whining girl.
So who were they going to send this time? Would it be Tara again? The arm around her waist, the breast pressed into her shoulder, the sultry whisper in her ear: Isn’t it exciting?