The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Was there really any doubt about which tool he’d choose?

  He lifted from its storage slot a five-foot-tall wooden pole topped with a hand-hammered, sixteen-inch-wide crucifix—hefty, sharp-cornered, and carved at each end with likenesses of the Four Evangelists. Father Bill’s hands knew the processional crucifix better than any item on the ship. He smiled lovingly at the central figure. Jesus Christ’s expression was demure, his ankles diffidently folded, his arms stretched bashfully to their nails. Father Bill would not be demure, diffident, or bashful. If this crucifix protected him, it would prove only he could save Olympia.

  Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.

  He strode into the hall. Rightward, noises. From the same hatch through which My Sweet had retreated staggered a demon sailor in frightful condition. His left arm below the elbow was gone, the rest looking like a chewed chicken wing left on a mess-hall plate. The sailor’s mouth dropped open when he saw Father Bill, a child expecting to be fed.

  Father Bill stepped over the body of the Psych, whispered Philippians 4:13 to himself, and showed the demon sailor what it was like to take Christ into your heart, literally. When Father Bill withdrew the brass cross, brown blobs of heart-meat spluttered out. This did not fell the sailor, but it did slow him, and the priest strolled past, his processional staff clopping like a cane along the steel floor.

  Live soldiers barreled through 02 deck, each in blatant physical, mental, or spiritual crisis. Many, bless them, shouted out Not that way, Father! or Careful, Chaplain! or Take cover, Padre! He returned a serene, pious smile and kept going, robust with belief that an aft course would reunite him with My Sweet.

  What would their unholy union look like? He had a better idea after coming upon a blubbering brown-skinned boy whose face was being gnawed off by a woman-demon, Finally, his Fresh Meat visions come to life! Two bodies locked in erotic starvation, the sticky, sloppy sealing together of female and male, eater and eaten. It held, quite gloriously, to Judaic tradition, which decreed God created man as the joining of two beings, immortal angels and earthbound beasts, so the blessed union might create a path to heaven. Just as Jesus rose from the dead, this new fusing of life and death established a unique holy plane, one Father Bill intended to reach as soon as he found My Sweet.

  His stride was so great and proud the medical tape binding his penis to his thighs came loose and his erection sprang free, long as a processional staff, hard as crucifix brass.

  Father Bill’s righteous march ended in the hangar bay. Connected to the flight deck by four giant elevators, the vast space ran two-thirds the length of the ship and held fifty aircraft in all states of maintenance. The hangar bay’s usual bouquet of human sweat, cold jet fuel, pungent hydraulic fluid, and salty ocean air today mixed with odors rarely smelled outside a slaughterhouse: the sulfur of freshly exposed meat, the gamey funk of pooled blood. Planes had been deserted mid-repair, the engine entrails of cables and wires were joined by actual entrails draped over wings and wheels like garland.

  Fire equipment was in ubiquitous use: axes, foam sprays, fire blankets, taken up in defiance of demons and operated by sailors hamstrung both by gear—slippery suede overshoes designed for working on jet wings—and the basic decency that made them reluctant to strike their friends. With my help, man will reinvent decency, thought Father Bill, mere seconds before he was surrounded.

  He’d been smiling so long that frowning hurt his face. This was not supposed to happen. He hadn’t found My Sweet. He lifted his crucifix to dispel the demons. When the demons instead grew closer on every side, his irritation turned to fear. In the chapel closet, he had defeated two demons at once, but now there were too many. Why was the Lord doing this? The armor of God was supposed to protect him!

  Hard fingers pressed into his back.

  No, not fingers. They were the securing fixtures of an access trunk. Trunks were not spaces inside which anyone sound of mind would spend time. Priests, though, spent whole lives in small spaces: rectories, confessionals, foxholes.

  He began to undog the latches. It took force; he hadn’t exerted muscles like this in years, and the last latch stuck, metal grinding against metal. Behind him came the rustle of demon feet, the sourness of demon breath. He imagined being taken by dozens of hands as cold and hard as the trunk fixtures. That did it: the handle squealed and the hatch opened. He pulled himself through a hole the size of a washing-machine door and into a vertical tube of manhole width. Securing his feet on narrow rungs, Father Bill looked down at the open, hundred-foot gullet.

  He took the trunk door and pulled, but a hard thud shivered up his arm. The crucifix’s wooden staff was too long to fit through the hatch, Demons were crowding into the opening, reaching past the staff. Drop it, ordered the part of Father Bill’s brain one might call rational. But rationality did not lead a man of God—faith did. This was his rod and staff, his comfort as he walked through this valley of death.

  Trusting God to keep his legs as strong as Joshua’s and his arms as steady as Moses’s, he let go of the rungs, leaned right into fifty or sixty clawing fingers, and took hold of the crucifix with both fists. Demon hands cold as ice tugged at his CVN-68X CHAPLAIN turtleneck and grasped for hair he’d shed long ago. He closed his eyes against the cold, rolling snake flesh, imagined himself a suffering saint pit against Revelation’s serpent, and pulled on his staff with wobbly old muscles.

  The wooden pole cracked in half, flinging Father Bill off his feet. For a moment, he was lost, until the brass crucifix and the remaining two-and-a-half-foot-long shaft braced across the chasm like a pull-up bar. Father Bill gasped, swinging about, and found purchase on another rung.

  “Praise God,” he panted. “Praise God!”

  Demons fought to get into the trunk, each one in another’s way. Father Bill rearranged the crucifix and took a firm grasp of iron rung. Which direction to go? He gazed down; he gazed up. Heavenward, he thought, and began to ascend—slowly, one hand devoted to the crucifix and half-staff. Within thirty seconds, demons were inside the trunk, but They had neither minds for climbing nor faith to hold Them up: Father Bill heard Them tumble, one after the other, down the tube, followed by the faraway thumps of Their bodies piling below.

  Millennialists

  Vindicator exploded.

  Six hundred feet long, ten thousand tons, traveling at twenty knots with a complement of three hundred and fifty enlisted sailors, fifty-five officers, and, in all likelihood, Admiral Vo—and in one second, it became a giant, billowing magnolia tree of blinding-white flowers. Heat’s invisible hand shoved Karl Nishimura and the nav-bridge crew from the windows. Swirling balls of red and orange fire belched upward and grew pelts of smoke, Seconds later, as Karl recovered, a lake’s worth of salt water crashed back into the ocean, kicking up huge, twisted scraps: part of a rudder, a blade of a propeller, the top half of the mast.

  “We need to button up!” Henstrom bellowed, adding hysterically, “Sir, sir, sir!”

  “Hold course, Boatswain’s Mate!” Nishimura barked. “Lang, put your eyes on, look for sailors in the water.”

  “We can’t get to the rescue boats, sir,” Lang said. “Look at the flight deck, sir!”

  Nishimura was looking at the flight deck. He’d not taken his eyes off it for an hour that felt like six months, an entire second deployment. No influx of guns had arrived from the ship’s magazine. No help seemed to be coming.

  Yet all was not lost. There had come a late surge of mettle. On Big Mama’s deck, beneath the fire cloud of the largest ship explosion since Pearl Harbor—and this was, without doubt, a Pearl of a different sort, the Japanese Imperial Army’s cry of Tora! Tora! Tora! replaced by haunted, hungry groans—Nishimura witnessed feats fit for the canon of navy heroics.

  A clutch of crewmen fired Catapult 2 twice. Unattached to any jets, the steam-powered shuttle tore several ghouls in half, chumming the Pacific. One gutsy junior EO had commandeered a crash-and-recovery
crane, using the arm to hurl aside ghouls while crushing others with its six massive wheels. A ragtag group in a rainbow array of float coats had united to wield a 150 PSI fire hose that lobbed ghouls into the ocean. No one could feel a ship’s tilt like a helmsman; the circling pattern Nishimura ordered was helping send ghouls off the edge.

  What chilled Nishimura most were glimpses of ghouls dropping Themselves off the side of the boat, either chasing sailors who’d jumped or in search of something else. Nishimura wondered if these ghouls, whose bodies resisted death, nevertheless craved it, and mistook the black ocean, aglow with ChemLights, for the star-filled heavens.

  Then there were the marines. Olympia had a twenty-person marine detachment, or MarDet, aboard, to conduct short-term training for amphibious assaults. Tensions between marines—known to sailors as “those Semper Fi motherfuckers”—and navy folk never really let up. Unlike sailors, however, the marines were armed, very armed, and trained in close-quarters combat. Nishimura watched in awe as roughly a football team’s worth of marines ran plays like the New England Patriots. They formed nets around ghouls and funneled Them into choke points inside which They could be incapacitated, something the marines did with what might be considered excessive enthusiasm.

  Behind Nishimura, nav-bridge chatter intensified. Some voices Nishimura knew like his own. Others came from strangers who’d made their way to the island, seeking sanctuary.

  “Report on Vindicator survivors.”

  “Nothing, sir! The water’s on fire!”

  “One of ours bombed Vindicator, sir!”

  “Stop that, Henstrom. They blew themselves up.”

  “With the admiral on board?”

  “He probably ordered it himself. He probably knew.”

  “Radio the marines. The second there’s a gap, I want sailors in those rescue boats. I don’t care how it happens.”

  “MarDet’s not answering, sir. No one’s answering.”

  “Keep trying until they do answer! You see how many of those … people are coming out of the ATO? The lower decks must be mobbed with Them.”

  “You mean They’re climbing? Up ladders? I saw one who couldn’t figure out a door.”

  “Don’t ask me! They’re figuring it out!”

  “We need men on those arresting wires! How many birds we got in the air?”

  “Request into Pri-Fly, sir, Some of those pilots might be able to make it to California.”

  “We don’t need our air wing in California! We need it here protecting its CV! They should be strafing the deck and taking out these bastards!”

  “With navy men all over? Are you serious, yeoman?”

  “An attack on a carrier is an act of war, sir. With all due respect, sir, Those are the enemy now, sir.”

  “Why isn’t anyone calling battle stations? Master Chief, sir, shouldn’t we be going to battle stations?”

  Master Chief, that had a familiar ring. That’s right, it was him. Someone must be asking him a question. Nishimura swallowed. It burned like the ashy fire in the sky had slipped its forked tongue down his throat. He must still be the senior officer on the nav bridge. If so, he should probably turn around and reply. Still, his gaze remained on the brave men and women scurrying across the deck. They reminded him of his children and their soft, fragile, defenseless bodies.

  His mind skipped from immediate to extended family. Given the life-after-death appearance of the ghouls, it might have been natural for Nishimura to think of Larry’s family in Trinidad, of the voodoo practices they insisted were real. Instead, he thought of his ancestors on his father’s side, particularly Grandmother Ayumi, a woman who found a cackling glee in terrifying children.

  It was from Soba Ayumi that little Karl heard of the Millennialist. Legend had it that the Millennialist staggered from the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima, once a man but now a charred-black monster, eyeless, fingerless, jawless, and encrusted with broken glass, a phantom that stalked Japan at night. From its punctured chest came birdlike, wheezing laughter. It kept walking, brandishing its ruined body as a parader might brandish a standard, so that no one could forget how it died—how all might die, Leaps of so-called progress. Dehumanizing tech. Death machines developed by rooms of identical old men.

  Little Karl had lost sleep, unable to comfortably categorize the Millennialist, as he could, say, Optimus Prime and Megatron. The Millennialist was not an assailant but a victim. The Millennialist was not a warmonger but a product of war, Though frightening, the Millennialist meant no harm. As a child, Nishimura had found this profoundly disturbing.

  Now, at forty-three, he wondered if this same childhood doubt might rob him of future sleep. The Millennialist, the ghouls—who was really the enemy? The monsters? Or the men with the means to create Them?

  Finally, Nishimura tore his attention from the mayhem four stories down and looked at Diane Lang, the textbook example of the dedicated lookout, but also part of the death machine. She was hanging on his next words with the heartbreaking expectation he’d know what to say. He should at least try. He was, after all, Saint Karl. He parted lips that cracked with dryness. He thought of reminding them of naval aviators’ 17:1 kill-loss ratio from Vietnam through Desert Storm, of telling them to have faith that numbers like that would always prevail.

  Because he was facing Lang, he missed the disaster’s inciting instant, though in the sequence of disaster that followed, he could picture it. A fighter-pilot cowboy in the air, in cahoots with a desperate controller at Carrier Air Traffic Control Center or, more likely, in direct violation of CATCC orders, touched his jet down on the deck.

  The intent, surely, was to wipe the deck of ghouls in a single swoop, but the deck had become a briar patch of asphalt and steel. The second the F/A-18-C’s wheels hit the runway, they sheared across a slick of engine oil, jet fuel, fire-hose froth, and human blood, and collided with the drifting Super Hornet. The one-hundred-mile-per-hour crash was thunderous. It was the whang to end all whangs, and all aboard Olympia coiled in self-protective shock.

  So apocalyptic was the chain reaction that it bordered on the absurd. The exploding Super Hornet fired off two AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. A C-2A Greyhound and a MH-60R/S Seahawk were hit and blew up, the whoosh to end all whooshes. An adjacent servicing unit of nitrogen tanks blasted into the sky, hot scraps of metal scything the deck. Enflamed jet fuel from the Greyhound showered the fighter jet next to it, which went up like polyester drapes. The jet fired its own missile payload straight into the flight deck, detonating the Mk 29 Sea Sparrow missile launcher as well as the LSO platform, a critical loss if Big Mama hoped to land any aircraft in the future. Right now, if Nishimura had to guess, such resumption of normal activity was never going to happen.

  Like any carrier, Olympia looked impervious from the outside. The reality was she was a kiln of explosive and toxic chemicals, stocked with three million gallons of aviation fuel and three thousand tons of ordnance. Most of it was held belowdecks, where Nishimura had considered it to be safe. With the whole flight deck in flames, those pleasant delusions were gone. Anything was possible; everything was probable. Sailors staggered from the firestorm with bodies ablaze, the sole distinguishing characteristic between the living and the dead being that the living gave up, fell, and tried to die, while the ghouls kept moving, a whole company of Millennialists.

  Through luck of positioning, some sailors survived. Many were flash-burned so terribly that crinkled sheets of skin draped from their faces and hands. They looked, in short, like ghouls, and Nishimura watched with stupefaction as unscathed survivors cut down these helpless sailors with guns and blunt objects. It was “blue on blue”—friendly fire—needless slaughter that would only redouble the carnage.

  Ship sirens blared a call for battle stations, competing with ripping eruptions and pealing screams, ensuring no effective way of spreading the word to a scattered crew, much less anyone outside the boat. This was despite the fact that Big Mama was equipped with whip antennas, WSC-6 comm suites for the D
efense Satellite Communications System, WRN-6 Satellite Signals Navigation Set GPS, jam-resistant USC-38 comms, SSR-1 FM fleet broadcast antennas, SRN-9 and SRN-19 NAVSAT receivers, and a brand-new Challenge Athena III high-speed C-band SATCOM system.

  Comm devices everywhere, yet no ability to communicate.

  This is how the world ends, Nishimura thought.

  Body to Bread

  Anyone deployed on a carrier was schooled in the locations of access trunks. For most pilots, trunk training ended there, and if you were a nugget, an FNG, it was possible you’d never seen the inside of one, though you passed dozens every day. The gaps in Jenny’s education were filling rapidly: she balanced on rungs beneath the safety of the dogged trunk, hoping the slapping palms of the four milky-eyed sailors would stop.

  She needed Them to stop; peering down the bottomless steel tube, little wider than her shoulders, filled her with hyperventilating dread. It shouldn’t have; F-18 cockpits offered mere inches of clearance between knees and dashboard displays. In flight, however, Jenny could control herself inside an expansive sky; the trunk, on the other hand, was a long, steel throat.

  “Please go away,” she whispered.

  Instead, They multiplied, clobbering the hatch harder, as if expressing discontent over what sailors like Jennifer Angelys Pagán had done to Their beloved navy. They knew her besmirched flight record, smelled her female body, tasted her Puerto Rican blood. She could not be trusted.

  Then the world above the hatch exploded, or that was how it sounded. There was a crunch of an intensity Jenny had never known, followed by the pride-of-lions roar of incalculable balls of flame. Seconds later, another explosion, just as bad, and another, even worse. It was deafening; the whole boat shook; the rungs vibrated under Jenny’s sweaty hands.