So the situation would have been just hunky dory. They had the sailboat, and whatever might be on it, and they had the guy’s trophy wife, who looked like she’d be all sorts of fun in the sack, but then the stupid bitch pulled a .32 out of her jacket pocket, put it to her head and blew her own brains out. That sucked - a fly in the old ointment. But in the end, they had the sailboat, and it turned out the wannabe survivalist, while clearly a moron poser, had nonetheless packed wisely.
They found enough food and water to last them for weeks, as long as they kept fishing. Blackjack Charlie still didn’t like fish, but it beat the Hell out of starving to death, so he would make do. The sailboat held camping equipment, vitamins, toilet paper out the wazoo, and a shitload of weapons. The asshole packed shotguns and rifles and pistols and two AR-15's, equipped with bump-stocks, effectively making them into automatic weapons. They wouldn’t be starting any wars with the cache, but it more than made up for the weapons they’d lost during the ill-fated attempt to grab that boat with the vaccine.
“This can go one of two ways,” Charlie said to the assembled survivors. He kept his voice clear and calm and low enough that Goddard (still aboard the Point of Order) wouldn’t hear. “You can die, right here, right now, or you can join our merry little band, and have all the salvage and booze and pussy we find along the way.” The women didn’t seem to like the idea, but Charlie didn’t care. It was the men he wanted, and men needed three things to keep them happy: food, booze, and entertainment. From the looks of the women, the men had already been availing themselves of the recreational possibilities, so the women’s lot in life wouldn’t be changing, just expanding to the tune of three more men to bang. Four, Charlie supposed, if he included Goddard, but he suspected it wouldn’t be an issue.
One of the men, a stringy fellow who looked like he’d be able to handle himself, if push cane to shove, stepped forward and said: “We never liked the Captain much.”
Blackjack Charlie smiled.
The stringy fellow smiled back and reached out a tentative hand. “Doug Hennessy,” he said. “Always did want to be a pirate.”
Charlie looked him in the eyes, trying to catch any deceit, any too-smart-for-his-own-good-ness in them. He saw none. He would need to separate the men. Put a couple on board Point of Order, along with the women, and leave Felix on this, their new ship (he certainly couldn’t trust George), but this could work. Yes, sir, this could work out quite well.
“In that case,” Blackjack Charlie said, extending his own hand in return. “Welcome me hearties!”
13
COMMSTA Honolulu
Oahu, Hawaii
“Well, that sucks,” Amber said aloud. Her voice sounded funny, after however many days she’d spent alone. She knew she was talking only to herself, which wasn’t the greatest sign in the world, but she wasn’t going to worry about it until she started having a two-sided conversation, like a female version of Gollum.
So that didn’t bother her. What did was the unfortunate discovery that the solar panels on the roof of the Comm Center Building were not hooked up. She’d known they wouldn’t be, but hope springs eternal - another one of her Grandmother’s sayings.
In an effort to promote green technology, President Obama pushed the Pentagon into transitioning to solar power, wherever it was deemed feasible. Honolulu was sunny far more days than it was not, so it seemed like a good place to start. The Coast Guard placed an array of solar panels along the perimeter of the building, and had been just about to hook everything up and bring it on line, when they discovered that at a certain time of day, the reflected light off the panels had a tendency to blind the pilots of the incoming civilian aircraft landing at the southernmost East/West runways of Honolulu Airport. This would not do, so the project was scrapped.
In typical military and/or governmental fashion, however, no allowance was made for removing the panels, and as a consequence, they remained where they were, even though the project had been abandoned more than three years ago. The panels were still there, covered in weather-worn tarps. They’d finished almost every phase of the project, however, so all that remained - in theory - was to hook everything up, and flip the switch.
In theory.
In practice, there were several problems. First, Amber wasn’t entirely sure where or what the cables snaking from the array, through the junction box-looking thing situated amongst the proliferation of antennae at the center of the roof, and then down into the Antenna Equipment Room actually hooked into. Second, she was equally unsure just where the on/off switch might be (although, presumably, if she discovered the answer to the first problem, she’d have the answer to the second). And third, Amber knew Jack-Shit about electrical systems.
If this had been a civilian facility, her plan of restoring power to the Comm Center would have been a pointless dashing of her dwindling hopes - if it had been civilian. The military, on the other hand, kept manuals for everything. Amber knew how to read a manual. She’d learned to repair her aged Toyota, for example, by reading the repair manual, without benefit of any previous mechanical training or experience. She could do this.
Of course, first, she had to find the manual. Somehow, she knew Murphy and his damned Law would make certain what she needed wouldn’t be in the Comm Center Building. The question, then, was where it would be. The answer might just save her life.
14
Eastern Island
Midway Atoll
“Hot diggity dog damn!” Duke exclaimed, looking into the neoprene case they’d just opened. Inside were six nearly pristine Thompson Submachine Guns, wrapped in the old-style paper gun wrap, and covered in a thick layer of cosmoline. They would need to be cleaned, and it would be no easy task, but Jonesy didn’t care. They were Thompson By-God Submachine Guns,
They found no zombies on Eastern Island, but nobody expected they would. The only thing there was an abandoned airfield, with scraggly bits of brush scattered over the otherwise barren land mass. They did, however, find a concrete bunker, built into a berm about fifty yards to the side of the nearest landing strip.
Jonesy, Duke, Jim Barber, and John Gordon had taken the short boat ride, following Harvey Walton’s direction. He’d shown them the flat, concrete slab covering the bunker, and the hidden recess that concealed the locking mechanism, and then he produced a key. Barber had been instantly suspicious, as had Duke, and Jonesy pulled one of his .45s, but John calmed them, pointing out that whatever had gone on in the past with this odd newcomer, at least he’d volunteered to share his secret.
“I...inherited...the key from a former...associate,” the man explained, inserting the cautiously censored pauses. “Although I will say it’s much easier to find the bunker in daylight,” he’d added with a smile.
They’d opened the slab with less effort than Jonesy would have bet it would take, and the bunker door swung open on slightly rusted, but otherwise functional hinges. Jonesy’s bullshit meter was redlining, but he forced himself to reserve judgement. This was a brave new world, and John was right. What happened in the past, stayed in the past - so long as it actually did stay in the past and didn’t rear its ugly, treacherous head at some time in the future. What happened now was what counted, which was that Harvey Walton had shown them a cache of weapons. He hadn’t needed to. Odds are, they’d have never even gone over to Eastern Island. What would have been the point? It was barren, empty. There was nothing of value there, from all appearances, and it contained no obvious threat, so why waste time?
All of which was fine and good, and he could justify going along with the odd man, but when he saw the neoprene cases within the bunker, his bullshit meter exploded.
“If this is war surplus, then where did the cases come from?” he asked.
They weren’t new. There were three of them - the large one containing the six Thompsons, and two, smaller, square ones - covered in dust and showing obvious water marks, as were the concrete walls of the bunker, indicating the bunker had been flooded at some
point in the past. But neither did they date from the Nineteen Forties. More like the Nineteen Nineties, at the absolute earliest. So where had they come from?
“My...associate...brought those here ten years ago,” Walton explained. “He used to store certain items here, from time to time, and noticed the bunker had a flooding problem, so he brought those cases out to store his items.”
“Items?” Jim asked, looming toward Walton in a manner that should have intimidated anybody, but if Harvey felt any such emotion, he didn’t show it.
“Well, yes,” Walton replied, as if the answer to the question was something even the most sincere idiot could understand. “The man was a smuggler.” He noticed they were all staring at him, and so he added: “I was not.”
“What were you, then?” John asked.
“Transport and air reconnaissance,” Walton replied. “Out here, one takes the work one is offered, and does not ask a lot of questions one does not wish to have answered,” he added, sagely.
“I...see,” John said, not enthusiastic about the information, but still willing to go along.
He could tell Duke was none too happy about this arrangement and Jim Barber looked damned pissed off about it, but neither said anything - yet. For Jonesy’s part, the practical side of him could see the reasoning and justification for Walton’s actions. He was a business man, in a catch-as-catch-can line of work, out on the farthest edge of civilization. From that perspective, what he’d done made sense, if you ignored the potential illegality of the enterprise. Bottom line was, Harvey Walton had presented them with six gorgeous Thompson Submachine Guns in nearly pristine condition. This was one gift horse about whom he was content to keep his opinions to himself.
“And the other cases?” John asked. “What’s in them?”
“Spare magazines,” Walton replied, pointing to the one on the left. “And a depleted supply of point-four-five ammunition.”
“And how, exactly, did you get that key?” Barber asked.
Walton looked uncomfortable for the first time. He pulled at the open collar of his threadbare Hawaiian shirt. Jonesy suspected the man was doing it for effect, given that the shirt itself was unbuttoned halfway down his sunbaked, hairy chest.
“Unfortunately, my associate caught the virus, and turned into a zombie,” he said, not looking at anyone. “I was forced to dispatch him.”
“Dispatch him?” Barber asked.
“I believe the term you yanks use, is with extreme prejudice,”: he said, still gazing at the dusty concrete floor. He took a deep, steadying breath, then lifted his eyes and looked at each of them in turn. “One does what one must.”
“So you came here,” John said, getting to the heart of the matter, “To take fuel, spare parts, and these weapons.”
“Yes,” Walton replied. “But then I found you, and I must say I’m delighted.”
“How were you planning to take those things with people still here on the island?” Jim Barber asked, getting to the other heart of the matter.
“Ah, yes,” Walton said, once again looking uncomfortable. “You see I flew by here four or five days ago,” he began. “I saw what happened. I saw the zombies.” He shuddered visibly. Jonesy could just imagine what the scene looked like from the air: the chaos, the few uninfected survivors being chased down and torn to shreds. It was all he could do to keep from shuddering, himself.
“And you just thought you’d slip in and take what you wanted?” Barber asked.
“Well...yes,” Walton replied. “Sort of, anyway.” He added. “I was on my way back from Kauai, when I had a bit of mechanical difficulty.”
“Your engine was on fire.” Jonesy said, making it a statement.
“Indeed,” Walton agreed.
“Where were you headed?” Barber asked.
“Kure, actually,” he replied, referring to a nothing little island about six hundred miles to the West.
“Kure?” John asked, incredulous. “There’s nothing on it. It’s a barren rock. I mean there used to be a Loran Station, but we decommissioned it in the early Nineties.”
“I have a store of fuel there,” Walton replied. “I have little caches of the stuff all over these islands.” When they all looked at him in suspicion, he added: “That was the price of many of my more questionable services. My associate arranged for me to have stores here and there so I could fly wherever I needed.” They apparently still looked confused, so he added: “The Catalina has a range of slightly more than two thousand miles,” he explained. “But out here, that doesn’t mean much, so it behooves one to have extra fuel spread about. And if one is flying under the radar, as it were, it is beneficial to have it, shall we say, beyond the reach of official authorities. Otherwise, it’s a rather long swim back home.”
It made sense, but something nagged at the back of Jonesy’s mind - something the man said in passing, but he couldn’t quite dredge up the memory. And then he did.
“Wait,” Jonesy said. “You were coming back from Kauai?”
“Indeed, sir!” Walton replied, smiling again.
“Did you happen to see one of our Patrol Boats?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact,” Walton replied. “Yes, I did.”
15
USCGC Polar Star
16.019482N 177.002475W
Lydia Claire’s heart stopped as she stared into the compartment in disbelief. Either her eyes were lying to her, or this had to be somebody’s sick idea of a joke. She knew people twisted enough to do something this macabre, but still...
The workday was over. The evening meal had been eaten, and poor, unfortunate non-rated messcooks were cleaning up the mess of one hundred and twenty-four people. The sixteen hundred to twenty hundred watches were settling in for the rest of their watch, waiting for relief at the end their long day. Some people were lounging in their racks reading a book, or playing a video game, or writing letters home that would never be sent and never be read. She heard some were doing it. She wasn’t one of them. She couldn’t have taken the heartbreak, and didn’t understand anyone who could, but she had heard there were some. The usual gang of idiots were already in the Crew’s Lounge, no doubt watching Gratuitous Violence, Part VI, or something equally Oscar-worthy.
And YN2 Lydia Claire? What was she doing? Staring in disbelief at what she hoped to God was a mirage - an hallucination brought on by something slipped into her cup of hot green tea, at dinner.
She had come down to the Ship’s Laundry to press her uniforms. That’s it. Nothing fancy. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She’d walked forward from female berthing, through the long, Second Deck, starboard passageway, past the men’s staterooms, then through the Crew’s Lounge. A few called out greetings, but she just waved and kept going without a word.. She’d been rather anti-social lately, but had a hard time caring about it, or much of anything else, for that matter. She‘d closed the door between the Lounge and the Laundry, found the laundry bag with her name on it, and started pulling uniform shirts and pants out to find how badly wrinkled they were this time.
The bane of every E-2 or E-3 on every ship had always been messcooking, since time immemorial. Periodically, every non-rated person on the ship had to spend an entire month doing the jobs everybody hated. One would take care of the Wardroom. Another would do the Chief’s Mess, another would take the Mess Deck, another would work in the Galley, and one poor unfortunate would be stuck in the scullery, washing pots and pans and dishes till their fingers were wrinkled and raw from the hot water and caustic chemicals.
One of the luckier of these unlucky people would do the laundry. On certain days during the week, organized according to division (Deck, Ops, or Engineering) the designated people would drop off their dirty clothes, stuffed into laundry bags, labeled with their names. In the old days - in the Old Guard, as the senior people called it whenever some junior person started bitching - those bags would be tossed, as is, into the washing machine, still in the bag, and then into the drier, also still in
the bag, and then the bags would be tossed unceremoniously onto the “done” pile, still at least somewhat damp. In the new, kinder, gentler, fully integrated and unisexual Coast Guard, however, the clothes were dumped (unsorted - so the whites tended to turn rather gray) out of the bag, into the washers, then plopped into the driers, and, finally, stuffed back into the bags. The clothes still ended up just as wrinkled, and the females tended to find other methods of washing their underwear, but at least the clothes came back more or less dry.
The laundry room itself also contained two steam presses, for getting rid of the mass of ten thousand wrinkles into which the uniforms invariably devolved from this process. Lydia had been grappling with the wrinkle demons, using the steam press, for about ten minutes when she heard a distinct CLUNK from the compartment just forward.
The adjoining door was closed and the forward compartment contained the weight room, so she had not, at first, thought anything about it. But something nagged at her, some primitive sense of not right-ness, at the back of her brain, and it refused let go.
She’d finally gone to investigate. And that was when her heart stopped.
YN3 Kenneth Carter Duvall was in there, alone. He was a nice enough guy. Lydia certainly never had any conflict with him, nor had she heard of him having one with anyone else. He was quiet, unassuming, and reasonably affable.
She suspected he’d been picked on a lot when he was in High School. He had the look about him. He was a geek, though not one of the A/V Squad, Computer Club variety that later in life would end up as CEO of a billion-dollar Internet startup. Neither was he the sullen Jeremy spoke in class today, variety, like the two ass-hats who shot up Columbine. He was just Kenny.
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Zombies In Paradise Page 5