Controlled Crash
Hustle was expected aboard a carrier, even demanded, but never had Jenny moved so fast, dancing over the rounded partitions at the bases of the watertight doors and clutching pipes to swing around corners. Hazily, she noted this as proof of mastery, but felt no pride. She’d left Father Bill, who, despite the way he’d clutched her knee, was a frail, unarmed old man, while she was a fit fighter pilot with a pistol. But the Psych had shown up, and he was young and strong. Meanwhile, all that silence from the flight deck? The flight deck was where she had expertise and might truly help.
She did not kid herself. The guilt that had built all night, without the analgesic of sleep, had swelled like a goiter. Her bolting failures pushed her from the chapel, past the fan rooms, up the ladder, and along the avionics shop. Here might be a chance to right wrongs, to help people instead of putting them at risk.
The chamber adjacent to the deck-handler room was aswarm with sailors, some rushing for the deck, some retreating from it with stunned faces. Jenny pinballed off their bodies, her flight suit buffering impacts, and burst outside. The rain hit her like a net; it caught and tangled her, and by the time she regained her balance, she was soaked, her curly hair pounded as straight as the flight helmet she’d left in the chapel, never to be seen again.
It was another sign of how thoroughly she knew every inch of her quarter-mile-long workplace that, when she booted something aside, she knew it wasn’t supposed to be there. She watched the object spin and come to rest.
A man’s head, sheared from its neck like a ham.
Jenny kept moving. To stop might be to never move again, so she focused not on the rainwater pooling in the head’s mouth and eye sockets but on her brown shoes, the shoes she deserved—she had to convince herself of that, and fast, She looked up and took in a chaos unknown to even the most apocalyptic of training videos. Was the rain to blame? Were the clouds pregnant with Russian or North Korean toxins? The candy-colored jerseys and float coats were scrambled, far from their usual positions. There was only one reason for that: a FOD walk.
For a few seconds, she convinced herself it was true, that she was again witnessing her favorite ritual. The debris here, however, was far more significant. A slot seal from one of the catapults, ripped free like loose intestine. A refueling cable lay unattached, like an aorta snipped from its ventricle. Glass from the Datum lights lay in colored shatters, bad news for landing pilots. A bomb cart of three AMRAAM missiles was just sitting there in the open, unsecured, a violation beyond belief.
Then there was the other debris. The decapitated head. A boot sprouting half a man’s calf. A fire helmet filled with a stew of blood, skull, and brain. The deck was wet, as it often was, but not just with water, oil, and jet fuel. There were puddles of red liquid everywhere; white-eyed sailors stomped right through them.
The asphalt trembled as ship whistles blasted: man overboard. Jenny looked around, wet hair whipping her cheeks, and saw two deck crew gesturing toward the water. The whistles blasted again, six more times: man overboard. Turning, Jenny saw a sailor hurling a ChemLight after a fallen comrade. Then again, and again, six whistles, six whistles: man overboard, man overboard—dear God, men were throwing themselves off the boat.
Jenny had seen fights like this in Detroit, hand-to-hand, fist to flesh. This was navy versus navy, the cracking open of the simmering animosity beneath every military unit, if not every gathering in America. No U.S. military machine was more protected than an aircraft carrier, Jenny knew, but she also knew those protections faced outward. Here was the carrier’s Achilles’ heel, an attack from inside.
Father Bill’s description of golems echoed through her bones.
One day, golems would turn on Their creators, learn how to build more of Their own kind, and use Their overwhelming numbers to cleanse the Earth of evil.
Jenny grunted away her fear and charged into the rain. Again her hand touched the butt of her pistol only to draw away. There were missiles here, external fuel tanks, scattering sailors—too dangerous. That must be why she heard no other pilots firing. The only other armed souls aboard were the small contingent of marines, but who knew where they were. There were plenty of weapons locked and guarded in the ship’s magazine, of course, but Jenny had no clue how quickly those arms could be mobilized—especially if the eyes of those guarding them had gone white.
She scooped up a latch bar that, from its school-bus coloring, must have fallen off a weapons skid.
An intelligence specialist, judging by his insignia, had a red-shirted member of the crash crew pinned to the wheel of a recovery crane. A scoop of flesh was missing from the back of the specialist’s neck; vertebrae, white as larvae, nosed from red meat. Scrabbling for stability atop the gutted body of a fallen comrade, the red-shirt’s feet fumbled, and down he went.
“Stand down, sir!” Jenny shouted. “Stand down, sir!”
The intelligence specialist did not seem to hear. He grabbed the red-shirt’s right ear and chin as if to kiss him. Hot coals shifted under Jenny’s ribs, She’d been ignored so many times: disregarded by male cadets at Naval Air Station Pensacola, butted in front of by sailors who pretended not to see her, outshouted in the Red Serpents ready room as if she were as voiceless as the lingerie ladies pinned to the Sweetheart Wall. Olympia’s nickname might be Big Mama, but it was male to its marrow, and Jenny was done with it. No more Wrist Warfare.
She reared back as if she were still on the Detroit Cristo Rey High School softball team and swung the latch bar with all her strength.
The direct hit to the right side of the specialist’s head sent the concussion through her shoulder and down the bones of her spine. The sailor’s head struck his left shoulder with a gruesome crack. One of the visible vertebrae popped like a knuckle, his neck likely broken. He collapsed into the lap of the red-shirt.
Twisted from the swing, Jenny faced a new direction and a man trying to crawl away from three sailors munching on his leg, shoulder, and scalp. Everywhere she looked, it got worse: a pilot unloading his pistol into the chest of a sailor at a two-foot range, six shots that did nothing to dim the white want in the sailor’s eyes.
She heard a scream. There were dozens, but this one was beside her. Jenny swiveled to find the fallen red-shirt right where she’d left him. Despite its broken-neck paralysis, the specialist’s head was snapping its jaws in the red-shirt’s lap. More, the gored body beneath the red-shirt had quivered to life and was chewing through the red-shirt’s perineum. The red-shirt wailed. A dark rope of blood spurted from his crotch, spattering across the head’s happily chattering teeth.
Jenny backed away from the gush as if it were water from a suburban sprinkler. At the same time, an unmoored jet sideswiped a moored one with a metallic tearing sound, one of its folded wings casting sparks as it carved a gouge along the other craft’s fuselage. Plane-against-plane impacts were called crunches and were so superstitiously feared that no deck crew uttered the word crunch and no ship store stocked Crunch Bars.
From behind one of the crunched crafts, CMC Bertrand Veevers, creator of the Idea Box, dragged himself across the deck with one elbow, his other arm trying to keep his entrails from flopping out of his cloven chest. Veevers had survived four wars and eight promotion cycles, and it was here he would die, on a bloody tarmac at the hands of his own men. The question was how long it would take him to die.
Jenny kept backing away.
Her tailbone struck a solid object. She knew it was the outer railing of the flight deck, which ran above the safety netting—netting that would catch falling sailors unless said sailors were taking pains to leap over the nets, which, right now, they were. As she reached back to grab the rail, a hand grabbed her back.
Trained as an FNG, Jenny zeroed in on etiquette cues: three stripes, first class, anchor-and-trident symbol—a Navy SEAL. Other details sent a different message: pearlescent eyes, lax expression. The hand grasping her wrist was missing its index and middle fingers, all the informa
tion Jenny needed to know she could wrench her arm free. At the movement, the SEAL’s ring finger, apparently perforated by the bite that had stolen its partners, snapped off like a carrot. Jenny slid aft along the railing, and the SEAL followed, crab-pinching the thumb and pinkie he had left.
“No, sir!” she shouted. “Stop, sir!”
He did not listen or stop. They never did.
She lifted the latch bar to deliver a blow, but rain had combined with the grease on the bar to loosen her grip. The bar flew from her hands, landing unheard on the deck beneath the storm’s roar. The loss was instantly petrifying; she felt half her size. The SEAL was on her, his pincher hand no good but his other one functional. He leaned in with jaws wide enough to show his fillings.
Her own flight-deck crunch: the back of her head striking hot, shaking metal, She did not have to look to know it was one of her planes, an F-18, though stenciled with someone else’s call sign. The SEAL, who outweighed her by half, sank closer, the upper knob of his mandible juddering free of its hinge. His breath was mint and copper—toothpaste and blood.
Jenny felt pieces of aircraft she knew as well as her own body digging into her back. The position light, the total temperature probe, the nose landing gear door, and all vibrating. That meant it had been queued for takeoff. That meant its engines were running. Flashing through her mind was a flight-deck sign she’d noted on her first day aboard Big Mama: BEWARE—JET BLAST—PROPS—ROTOR BLADES, All lousy ways to die, but not the only ways, not by far.
The Sailor’s Creed was more than a cheap poster taped to her rack.
I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy.
I am a United States Sailor.
Instead of pushing at his chest, she rotated her hands, a flip of the wrist—but not Wrist Warfare, not even close—and, using her own body as counterweight, hurled the SEAL to her right. His back bounced off the engine compartment; his eyes went wider and whiter, and he roared as if wanting the final word over a woman one last time.
The engine’s air intake caught the SEAL in its supersonic suck. He was yanked into the intake fan like a dry stick, his body snapping in half at the waist before being pulled into the compressor shaft. The engine clanged and coughed as the body hit first the red-hot combustion chamber and second the turbine’s bladed windmill, Jenny heard glops of meat blast from the exhaust and splatter to the deck.
She leaned away, terrified of being pulled in after him, and overcompensated, ending up facedown in a puddle. She rolled over, stinking of jet fuel now, and from that low position watched two hundred of Big Mama’s best take on the coup. Jenny had heard about the dizzying highs that could come from patriotism, Senior sailors never shut up about the cheers that shook the Enterprise on 9/11 when it changed course from Africa to Pakistan. The walls of military history were built of such bricks of valor, from Belleau Wood to Omaha Beach to Mogadishu. A new brick would be added now, one stamped Olympia.
That did not mean victory was theirs. Jenny smelled the fever sweat of failure, saw it in bowed shoulders and grieving mouths, and felt it in her weak-kneed shudders of exhaustion. Landing a plane on a carrier, that objective that she’d recently struggled to do, was often dubbed a controlled crash, a phrase now appropriate for everything that was occurring. The men and women around her, unacquainted with hesitancy, were hesitating at every opportunity. Of course they were. The invaders were their officers, their aides, their confidants, their friends, and it went against all training, all heart to harm Them.
Four white-eyed sailors, two of Them in float coats, spotted Jenny and closed in, dragging Their damaged parts through the downpour. Getting to her feet, Jenny coldly assessed her circumstances. She’d never reach the safety of the conn tower. There was, however, a small, circular hatch nearby, which fed straight down into a “trunk”—one of many narrow, rung-equipped shafts cutting vertically through the ship like drinking straws, permitting emergency vertical transport in case of fire or other calamity. She stepped toward it, keeping her eyes on the quartet. She would make it to the trunk first and be able to dog the latches before They got there. Nevertheless, it tightened, this circle of men.
Ocean of Blood
What civilians might call doors on a carrier were actually hatches—massive slabs of contoured steel that, once sealed, were nearly impenetrable. The chapel closet’s door, however, was wood. While Father Bill was ignorant in the ways of carpentry, the trade of Jesus of Nazareth, he knew this door rated little better than the balsa of his pornography lockbox. He was not altogether surprised when the white sailor’s hand punched right through it.
The man hadn’t even made a fist; the hand came through patty-cake-style, palm-first, and when it burst through the wood, the tips of two fingers snapped back, popping the flesh open at the upper knuckles. Without pause for pain, the sailor snaked his arm through the hole until his biceps halted it, The Black sailor, meanwhile, kept shoving the door open. Each time, Father Bill pushed back, but he knew his devitalized legs would lose their battle soon. The white sailor’s hand and arm probed about blindly until it found Father Bill’s boot, and took to clawing at the leather, an effort hampered by its broken, flopping fingertips.
Father Bill felt the cold tunic of doom drop over him. Did he deserve this? Every time he’d chastened his sinful flesh with the box cutter, bandages had stopped the blood in half an hour. Under today’s duress, the wounds did not seem like they’d ever close. The thigh of his camouflage slacks was soaked, the floor beneath abstract with dark dribbles.
In this position, nerves electrified with fright, muscles shuddering with exhaustion, mind faint with blood loss, knowledge hit him with such power and purity it could have only come from the Lord Almighty. Father Bill did not doubt the insight. It made sense God would wait until this moment to speak. Martyrs often only attained enlightenment when attached to a burning stake.
Look at the blood falling from the white sailor’s broken fingers, Father Bill. See how congealed it is? The fingers drop blood, but do not bleed it. How was that possible? Father Bill knew, for he had been gifted the sight! On the third day, when God made the oceans, he created an ocean of blood from which all humans and animals would take their fill. The well was meant to serve the Earth forever, but thousands of years of murder, mass slaughter, and war had emptied the ocean of blood faster than it could be replenished. In the white sailor’s snapped fingers could be glimpsed the consequence: there was no more blood to flow, and without the deterrent of spilled red fluid, humans were emboldened to rip one other to pieces.
Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg, Catholic chaplain of the USS Olympia, was different. He was chosen. There was a reason his thigh not only bled but poured. The ocean of blood—it was inside him. And to think it took the cutting of his own flesh to know it! The ramifications hit like a hailstorm, the same ecstasy he felt when divining the true message of a Bible passage he’d misread for decades. If his ravaged thigh was the sign God had chosen him, he’d been wrong to see his recent desires as deviant.
There was nothing evil about the flesh monsters Fresh Meat had hatched.
The things he wished to do to My Sweet might refill the ocean of blood, as had been foretold in Revelation 16:4—one more passage he’d misread for too long.
The door cracked vertically, top to bottom. Two white-eyed faces appeared in the fissure. But Father Bill felt no fear. With a calm he would have believed impossible seconds ago, he surveyed the closet’s contents. Humble tools, but did Jesus have the bejeweled goblets or stained-glass glorifications of the church? Of course not. Jesus found strength in raw materials, whether those materials were objects or apostles.
Father Bill withdrew his feet from the door and rose to his feet. The door split down the center as neatly as a cracker, and the two sailors fell into the splintered results, entangled like wrestling children. Father Bill plucked from the shelves what he needed: the gold-plated chalice he used for Mass and a four-foot bronze flower vase kept around for holiday servic
es. The downed sailors gawped up at him, so hungry They used Their arms to reach for him instead of helping Themselves up. It was the only advantage Father Bill needed.
He lifted the vase by its opening, high enough to thump the low ceiling, and brought the flat base down on the Black soldier’s head. The skull caved with unexpected ease, parting like lips to swallow the vase; Father Bill let go and the vase stood upright, ready to accept fresh flowers. The white sailor had scrabbled to his knees, his dull eyes locked to Father Bill’s thigh. The priest took a step away.
“Lifeblood,” he said soothingly. “You want it, my son. I understand. But by order of the Lord, our God, my lifeblood is mine to share, and with that gift, I must be judicious. The Lord bless you, son, and keep you, Amen.”
The chalice fit in his hand like a choir bell. He brought it down on the white sailor’s head. It did not have the satisfying effect of the standing vase—the sailor jerked back, then lunged. Father Bill had to go through the untidy affair of striking the man ten more times, bashing through the skull only on the fifth blow, and driving shards of bone into the brain with every blow thereafter. The sailor’s head hit the floor, his butt raised high like a sleepy toddler.
Father Bill wondered if he ought to recite the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, and decided no. These men, after all, were already dead. He supposed new sacraments would need to be invented. In time, in time.
Noise from elsewhere in the chapel interrupted these happy reflections. More were coming, Naturally, demons would come not in twos but in scores. Father Bill dropped the chalice, its cup flat and useless, and addressed the shelves in prayer, intending to make a more considered and holier choice. The hymn board was sturdy but unwieldy. The brass offering plate fit comfortably in his hand, and its red velvet would hide blood, but the edges were rounded. The baptismal bowl was better, with a glass lining that gave it real heft.
The Living Dead Page 24