Cryptologic Technician Darrell Millichamp: “This some kind of bird flu thing?”
Shaking his head in time with his scrolling finger, Corso continued, “‘Homeland Security … an interagency body … accelerated and effective response…’ This is nothing we haven’t heard a hundred times before. They’re feeding us raw bullshit. How do I know?” Corso jabbed a finger just below the camera lens, the source of the flickering shadows. “I know because it’s happening right in front of me.”
Crash and Salvage Leading Petty Officer Ronaldo Ribeiro: “What the fuck is this?”
That was when the man-overboard whistles blasted. Big Mama’s crew trained for few things more stringently than emergency muster, and even though this was an unprecedented third instance in two weeks, and the on-air breakdown of some poor sap at WWN was fascinating, their brains complied at a Pavlovian pace. Nishimura leaped to his feet. As he hurried aft, he heard rather than saw the clatter of dropped silverware and the clop of abandoned coffee cups.
It was an awful thing, the prospect of a sailor being swept into the depths, and almost as awful was the prospect of a sailor falsifying such a tragedy. Yet Karl Nishimura felt a shudder of relief as he hit the ladder and, with the skill of anyone six months into deployment, danced his way up the steps. If he had access to Veevers’s Idea Box right now, he’d put in a request for these alarms to keep happening, one after another, until they got home. This was the sort of disaster for which sailors were trained, and he’d take that any day over the jarred, loosened terror he’d seen in Chuck Corso.
Just Plain Jenny
Every member of a flight squadron was given a call sign. Nicknames, that’s all, but not to be taken lightly. Call signs were rite and requirement, bequeathed at off-the-books ceremonies during which FNGs (Fucking New Guys/Girls) supplied bribes to elder squadron pilots, partook in a ridiculous and/or revolting ritual, and threw themselves upon the mercy of the court. Call signs were rarely flattering, usually referencing a negative characteristic or infamous foul-up. But a call sign also meant you, negative and infamous parts included, had been accepted. Everyone called you by your call sign. It was stenciled on a plane.
Jenny dreamed of her name on a plane.
Rex: just another way of spelling wrecks, as in has-too-many. Tits: nice fellow with overdeveloped pectorals. McDonald’s: during liberty in Australia, he pooped on the floor of a McDonald’s. Torch: on an approach, he splashed the flight deck with fuel from an open dump valve, starting a fire.
Jennifer Angelys Pagán’s call sign was Jenny. In other words, she had no call sign. It made her think of her abuela’s favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz, and how Dorothy’s sidekicks, though perfectly capable, still longed for the approval of the Wizard. In the Red Serpents squadron, Jenny was the only FNG not yet nicknamed. She wasn’t the only Puerto Rican in the squadron, but she was the only woman, and though she wanted to believe gender had nothing to do with the delay, could she be sure? Story of her life. Story of the life of every woman aboard.
Jenny—just plain Jenny—was one of the first people on Olympia to know that a third man-overboard alert was in effect. She was on Vulture’s Row, the narrow catwalk just above Primary Flight Control that provided, through a shimmery jet-fuel haze, a view of the flight deck from 150 feet up. Despite steely sheets of rain, the Opstempo was high, with jet blast deflectors rising, catapults firing, and all four elevators lifting aircraft from the hangar deck.
By chance, directly below Jenny’s position were the tubes containing the flags that could be flown from the island’s mast. She saw someone extract a red-and-yellow flag from its holder. Jenny felt the sternum prickle of knowing bad news before anyone else. She gripped the railing with both hands. It was always precarious and potentially dangerous to suddenly shut down flight ops.
It was loud as the Indy 500 down there, entirely reliant on hand signals because industrial earmuffs worn by much of the deck crew left them deaf to the ship’s whistle. Jets in the process of taking off or landing would do so minus the required undivided attention, and when things went wrong on a flight deck, sometimes people died.
The whistle began to sound. Jenny leaned over the railing, rain instantly soaking her hair, and scanned the water around the four and a half acres of the boat, looking for the glow of a ChemLight, the signal of a sailor in the water. The deck was bordered by nets, making it hard to fall off, but anything was possible. Carriers were often called the most dangerous workplace in the world. A blistering-hot jet blast could toss a crew member into the shark-filled drink fifty feet down. Less exciting, you could be cleaning the outside of the bridge windows, forget to buckle your harness, and slip on wet steel.
Everything was wet, The weather had been brutal lately, something no one knew better than Jenny. Weather was why she was perched on Vulture’s Row, drained and achy-eyed, instead of hitting her rack and grabbing sleep. Last night, mere hours ago, during a rain that had splotched down like tar, she’d had the worst bolting event of her life—in fact, the worst bolting event she’d ever heard of.
The details were too fresh and painful to relive, so she’d climbed the island’s ladders, leaden in a sodden flight that clung to her like wet cement, her Red Serpents patch heavy as a manhole cover, and watched the start of the carrier’s day. The first thing she’d seen was the flight crew performing a FOD walk. The foreign object debris walk was performed several times a day. Everyone on deck ceased work, formed a straight line, and crept forward in their steel-toed boots, lifting their black visors to scour the deck for any tiny bit of detritus that, if sucked into a jet’s intakes, could destroy a $70 million aircraft in seconds—not to mention the comparatively low-priced mammal piloting the thing.
Jenny loved the FOD walk. It might be the only thing in the navy, besides flying, she truly enjoyed. It was the rare time when the dark stripes of pay grade and rating yielded to a sunnier spectrum. The color of each sailor’s float coat designated the wearer’s usual task, but during the FOD walk, those distinctions—as well as class, gender, and race—magically dissolved.
If only the FOD walk could go on forever. She had a hunch the minute she went belowdecks, her Red Serpents XO would issue a flight restriction for her bolting debacle, scrubbing her name from the sked. Restrictions like that could be death blows to a junior officer—JOs already got too few flight hours. She felt like a ball of twine unwinding. A couple of more restrictions and she wouldn’t be doing shit work—she’d be in the brig.
Jenny had no idea how black marks like that might impact her military career, She felt sick, and the prospect of being humiliated in front of fellow Red Serpents made it all worse. Women were a seven-to-one minority on the boat, and plenty of men still felt that if you didn’t have literal balls, you didn’t belong. The possibility that she’d confirmed their doubts was crushing, She could feel tears emerging, stinging with jet fuel, and was glad the rain hid them. Crying—only further evidence of weakness.
She’d tried for so long to play the men’s game, first as an SLJO (Shitty Little Jobs Officer) awaiting orders and then while earning her wings at basic, where she endured sex talk so explicit she could feel her blush in her toes. By the books, it was harassment. It was also a quick way to make a hundred enemies at once should she report it.
It was more than just words, of course. Men would position themselves behind her so she’d blunder into them, giving them an excuse for redirecting her with their hands. There were forced kisses, and gropings, and struggles in which she pushed men away with her wrists, trying not to escalate to actual hand-to-hand combat. Wrist Warfare, as she came to think of it, made her hate herself. No man would defend himself with his wrists.
When Jenny had first boarded Olympia, as what navy folks called a nugget—a rookie pilot on her first deployment—she’d expected better, but didn’t get it. The squadron ready room was the biggest disappointment. She’d been looking forward to seeing it; ready rooms were famously free from many boat rules, and the Red Serp
ents’ room had foosball, a popcorn machine, and other amenities.
It also had a so-called Sweetheart Wall, a pastiche of photos of wives and girlfriends back home. With awkward exception, these were sexy shots. Pilots without women back home contributed clippings from magazines: models in lingerie, bikinis, or bubbles. Jenny tried to be cool, She’d tried her whole life to be cool. But when her colleagues’ eyes slid from the Sweetheart Wall to her, even if they meant nothing by it, her skin felt unworthy of her flight suit, and she found her arms lifting in anticipation of Wrist Warfare.
Now, after her bolting incident, she might as well stick a sexy selfie up there. She’d officially become what before she’d only suspected: unworthy. Soon everyone would know it. She’d put the deck crew in peril, no different from the unknown asshole perpetuating this third man-overboard false alarm. She pictured hurling herself off the catwalk, her body breaking into pieces—nuggets of a nugget—to be cleared during the next FOD walk.
The sixth and final blast of the ship’s whistle made a tuning fork of Jenny’s spine. Time to muster. That, at least, was something she wouldn’t screw up. She deserved no call sign. She was Jenny, just plain Jenny from Detroit, and she might never see her name on a plane.
It Will Be Our Fault
Time: plus three. Time: plus four. Time: plus five, Convention was to stay to the port side of the ship when headed down or aft, to the starboard side when headed up or forward, and sailors kept to that even when sprinting. Their six months of intimacy with Big Mama showed in the instinctive ducking of heads beneath pipes, the skipping of feet over the lips of hatches. By time: plus six, mustered sailors were sounding off to officers with clipboard checklists. Two or three sailors were MIA, and their absence caused actual panic, reflected in XO Bryce Peet’s updates.
Nishimura’s muster station was the same navigation bridge where he spent most of his days, on the fourth floor of “the island,” the seven-story conning tower that lorded over the deck. He mustered in khakis twice as dark from the rain and preserved an outward calm as Peet’s MIA list was whittled to two. “The following individuals, report to the quarterdeck with your ID card, From Supply, ET2 Zarr; from Air, ADAN Altebrando.”
It was unfitting for a navy officer, downright disgraceful, Nishimura knew, but he could not stop peeking at the TV in the chart room just aft of the nav bridge. He could tell by the faces of the navigation crew that they, too, were watching it.
“Time: plus seven,” the 1MC crackled, and Nishimura was stabbed with a sinking certainty that the timer would never stop, that eras of humanity would forever divide into pre-October 24 and post-October 24. Time: plus a hundred, time: plus a thousand, time: plus a million.
ET2 Zarr was found, a head count error, ADAN Altebrando made it interesting, failing to show until time: plus ten, after which Peet took to the 1MC to swear vengeance upon the sailor perpetrating these hoaxes. Because Captain Page remained in sick bay and the officer of the deck had stepped out, Nishimura found himself senior officer present. The nav bridge crew looked to him guardedly, seemingly aware that a fudged man-overboard might not be the day’s biggest problem.
Nishimura turned to his charts and began logging coordinates. Acknowledging an off-his-nut WWN anchor would speak poorly of him. He felt his face pinch into what sailors called the glow—a phrase he knew as well as Saint Karl and Nishimura Delay. An inebriated sailor in Australia had once described it to him. All forty-three years’ worth of Nishimura’s wrinkles, said the sailor, went poof, his face going as shiny as a cobra, the saint turned demon.
“Sir? Permission to speak?”
At the sound of the voice, the glow grew so tight Nishimura could feel his cheeks press against his gums. He believed it unprofessional to hold grudges, so for half a year, he’d fought back animosity.
Boatswain’s Mate Tommy Henstrom. Nishimura would not accept having a rival, and if he did, he’d prefer it be someone above his pay grade, not some sniveling O-3. Yet when hitting the rack at night, he found himself stewing over Henstrom, a master of passive aggression.
No matter the simplicity of an order, Henstrom found a way to challenge it. Nishimura had been dying to write up Henstrom, maybe get him docked a stripe, but had balked at every chance. Henstrom was spoiled, arrogant, and recalcitrant, but stopped short of cut-and-dried violations. Plus, the O-3 would contest punishment all the way to the top, and Nishimura, so close to punching out his navy twenty, did not need that stress marring his exit.
“Permission granted,” he said.
Henstrom made a big show of wincing at his check computer.
“Shouldn’t that last number be a nine, sir?”
“It is. Nine. For nineteen.”
“It screened out as an eight, sir. Eighteen.”
Nishimura checked his own screen as seven bells sounded softly—only 0700. The POD, plan of the day, had never gone tits up this fast, as Waylon Leneghan liked to say. Sure enough, Nishimura had keyed in the wrong digit. It was the first such mistake of his career, and of course it had happened in front of Henstrom. The glow burned; his face felt ready to melt. He looked up just in time to see Henstrom raise a mocking eyebrow at one of the lookouts, Diane Lang.
Henstrom mugged, pretending to protect Nishimura’s feelings. “I’m sure you’re right, sir. Must be a glitch. You think it could be the same thing affecting Hickenlooper?”
Nishimura gave Henstrom a lengthy look, careful to rein it back from a glare. It was a Nishimura Delay, all right, though this time he used it to search himself. He had made an error. Why? Because he’d been distracted by the news on TV. Navy manuals could not state it outright, but a sailor’s gut was their truest barometer.
He sleeved rain and sweat from his face and nodded at the TV.
“Turn that thing up,” he said.
Wilbert Legg, quartermaster of the watch, had it cranked full-volume in seconds.
“Martial law,” Chuck Corso said.
Nishimura saw his shiver replicated in every sailor on the bridge.
“That’s what our reporters are witnessing,” Corso continued. “National Guard, local law enforcement, even volunteer militias are responding to what is now a national emergency. When we talk to our reporters—those who are left—they keep quoting the same words from authorities. They’re stuck in my head. I’m afraid they always will be. Aggressive. Irrational, Unthinking. Noncommunicative. These are the words being used to describe the ghouls.”
“Ghouls,” Nishimura heard himself repeat.
“That’s the word he’s been using,” Henstrom announced proudly. “He says the ghouls are eating—”
“Henstrom, stop.” Lang sounded ill.
“Eating what?” Nishimura asked.
“This is gonna turn out like everything else, sir,” Lang said—no, Lang pleaded.
Nishimura knew what she meant. Stories trumped up by the news, screens cleaved into Brady Bunch grids of bickering partisans. The more salacious the content, the more viewers succumbed to their blackest instincts. Decades of cry-wolf exaggeration had numbed viewers to the potential for actual disaster, the same way the man-overboard flimflams were numbing Olympia. Chuck Corso’s voice, however, had the dull, off-tune ring of the real thing.
“Government response is unfolding in a highly disorganized fashion. According to our reporters, a lot of this is because it isn’t evident at all who’s a quote-unquote normal person and who’s a ghoul. To cut to the chase, ladies and gentlemen, what that means is citizens are being murdered by fellow citizens.”
“It’ll be a big deal for a few hours, sir,” Lang insisted. “That’s all.”
Nishimura only had to look at Corso to know the opposite was true. He had a look Nishimura had seen on pilots rescued from the water after a cold shot—a takeoff that went straight into the ocean, directly into the path of ninety-five thousand tons of steel carrier. It was the betrayed, little-kid realization of how quickly the world’s natural laws could turn against you.
“This
. Is. Not. Who. We. Are.” Corso pounded his desk with each syllable. “I’m begging those of you planning to take to the streets with guns. Please do not consider this a chance to … I don’t even know how to say it in a way that doesn’t use some code word to drive us further apart. Don’t go out looking to shoot people, all right? If this turns into some kind of nationwide lynching, whatever happens next will not be the fault of the ghouls. You understand? It will be our fault. Ours alone.”
“Why doesn’t the navy know about this?” Henstrom cried. “If this is real, why hasn’t anyone told us?”
“Captain Page is sick,” Nishimura said.
“Admiral Vo, then!”
“On the Vindicator.”
Henstrom spun around, displaying his disbelief to a larger audience.
“Why isn’t he calling us, then? Why aren’t we being briefed?”
“Sir,” Nishimura admonished, but his voice had gone softer than the ocean’s wake. Seconds before he’d said Vindicator, Nishimura had looked toward the guided-missile cruiser. Smoke rose from the area of its radars.
“Aggressive. Irrational, Unthinking. Noncommunicative,” Corso repeated, “All I’m saying is these words, being used to describe the ghouls, they sound familiar, don’t they? A lot of people in the country have been called these things by people in power. The people with the gavels and the guns. And what advice have these same people given our reporters? Immobilization. Dismemberment. Fire. The strength of the ghouls, they’re telling us, is in Their numbers. Where’s our strength, though? Isn’t our strength in numbers too?”
Corso wiped away sweat and looked at his palm as if seeing blood.
“We must not let ourselves slide into…” Corso hiccuped a sob. “I don’t know. Something worse.”
“It has to be biological warfare!” Henstrom proclaimed. “Shouldn’t we button up?”
The Living Dead Page 20