Was Olympia under attack? It had to be. Whatever enemy had managed to brainwash navy sailors into attacking Their own was now launching air assaults. The battering on the trunk hatch cut off; Jenny imagined the white-eyed sailors tossed like paper in a fiery back draft. The trunk filled with the eye-watering sting of jet fuel, and the temperature leaped to broiling. She could roast alive in here or succumb to toxic fumes, her choice.
Like an officer taking muster attendance, Jenny double-checked the status of each of her hands and feet (brown shoes, never forget), before moving in a pattern that, at first, felt hopelessly random. Right foot, left hand, left foot, right hand: she was stretched out too far and shaking. As flight-deck blasts continued, training kicked in. Her body found its rhythm, and her limbs moved in concert.
She reached the first exit hatch. Her temples throbbed as she rotated mental maps of the boat. This would be the refueling station. She tested the hatch with the back of her hand only to instantly retract it. It was hot. Ears still ringing from detonations, she leaned closer until she picked up not just tendrils of heat but shrieks of twisting metal. A bomb had pierced the deck, she thought, before she realized the shrieking was human. People in the refueling station were dying, and Jenny found herself hoping it was by fire so their last sights would not be their fellow sailors devouring them.
Jenny consulted her mental maps, What was on 01 deck? The avionics shop. Beneath that? Venting and fan rooms. That ought to be a safe spot to escape the claustrophobia of this chute, after which she would find others, maybe even fellow Red Serpents, and they could come up with a plan to take back the boat, Five more rungs down, in the dead zone between deck levels, she heard a familiar voice.
“My Sweet.”
To verify that she had, indeed, gone mad, Jenny looked down.
Three rungs under her, Father William Koppenborg clung to the trunk wall with one hand. In his other he held a large brass crucifix affixed to a broken wooden rod. Jenny had tried and failed to accept the crucifix as a holy item, but this one seemed different—its Christ had come alive. Real blood dripped from his tiny wounds, and clumps of real hair and flesh sprouted from the cross’s corners. The images brought back the memory of Father Bill’s fingers biting into her thigh.
“Father.” Her gasp echoed in the metal duct, “Are you okay?”
He grinned up at her, In the safety light, his teeth shone like pearls.
“I knew we’d find each other,” he purred.
He ascended a rung, the crucifix clanging off steel.
“Father, no,” Jenny said, “We should go down, 02 deck is—”
His free arm snaked around her calf.
Jenny’s balance shook. She grasped a rung.
“Father, I’ll fall—”
“Shh, My Sweet,” he said. “Let all mortal flesh keep silence.”
He bit her.
The most disquieting element, Jenny realized, was that the bite felt like the long-in-coming climax to an unsavory story. For selfish purposes of spiritual exploration, she’d overlooked the fervent bore of Father Bill’s watery eyes, despite knowing there was something amiss. Now she stared in dazed dismay as the skinny, turtleneck-clad, soft-spoken gentleman of the cloth vised his jaws to her leg.
Standard issue for navy pilots was the CWU 27/P Nomex flight suit, resistant to fire, chemical spills, and radiation, but also designed to be thin and lightweight; Jenny could feel each of Father Bill’s individual teeth tighten on her calf. But he didn’t break the Nomex. Jenny instinctively kicked, but as the priest had her leg cinched, the kick became a flail. Jenny’s opposite foot fumbled from its rung, and with sweat-slicked abruptness, she fell.
Father Bill’s teeth zipped up her calf, thigh, and hip as she dropped.
One of Jenny’s hands snatched a rung. Her body jerked to a halt. She dangled by one arm, her feet bucking for footholds, but every rung she found was occupied by Father Bill. She considered letting herself fall farther—trunks had safety netting at each deck level for just this purpose—then saw with horror that the net below, and probably the one below that, had been sawed away, presumably by the crucifix. If she let go, she might drop twenty stories.
Staying still would be lethal. The three-foot drop had put Father Bill’s head at the level of her breasts and he went at them, mouth wide. Her flight suit was looser here, all pouches and pockets. Jenny helixed her torso and kneed Father Bill in the arms, chest, and groin. There, she felt what she thought was a belted weapon until she understood it was his penis, implausibly erect, which made her fight harder, executing a one-arm pull-up so she could kick this Catholic priest as hard as possible in his injured thigh.
Blood shot from his thigh as if from a ripe tomato. Father Bill moaned behind the teeth clenched to her flight-suit lapel. Jenny used the brief paralysis of his pain to secure a second handhold on the rung above her. She’d kick herself free. She’d climb the fuck back up and take her chances with the flaming carnage of the refueling station.
In the next instant, she felt a sensation both new and instantly knowable.
She’d been stabbed. It felt like an open-handed slap to the back, leaving behind a lasting, icy tingle. She knew she’d been tomahawked by one of the brass cross’s sharp corners but did not dare spare a hand to try to extract it. She simply hung there like a side of beef, the crucifix and broken staff a thousand-pound weight in her back.
Father Bill raised himself a rung. He caressed her cheek, leaving a lukewarm trail of blood.
“I know it hurts,” he cooed.
Jenny whimpered, hated the sound, and whimpered again.
“Jesus suffered like a common criminal before becoming the risen Christ. Transubstantiation is painful, My Sweet, But it’s happening, all over the boat.” Father Bill chuckled. “I admit, it is not the rapture I’d expected, But it makes a joyous sense, doesn’t it—demons and people, joining together, becoming one in shared communion.”
Father Bill’s voice shivered like steel sheeting.
The crucifix sagged in Jenny’s back, snapping one muscle fiber at a time.
“Help,” Jenny gasped.
“Oh, I will.” Father Bill nodded gently, “I will help you transubstantiate body to bread, flesh to blood. To do that, I will partake of your body. Do you understand? In the physical act, the spiritual act is accomplished.”
“Please…” Jenny begged, not understanding. “You’re going to…?”
“Eat you.” Father Bill’s eyes wrinkled with an apologetic smile. “I know you’ve struggled in your belief, but that’s all right. My belief will be enough. You will become of me, as Eve was of Adam’s rib, and together, we will rise anew, king and queen over a paradise we can scarcely imagine. I’m so happy to share that with My Sweet.”
His smile tore apart as his mouth opened like a bear trap. He trailed his teeth all over Jenny’s face, his bottom lip stretching across her nose and snagging on her chin, his breath rank with blood-tanged halitosis. Jenny let one arm loose from her rung and squirmed it between their bodies, but Father Bill redirected it as easily as he might the fussy limbs of baptized babes.
“Fear not,” he whispered as his mouth settled over the pain-bunched bulb of her left cheek, “1 Peter 4:1,” he said, his lips and tongue writhing against her skin. “Whoever suffers in the body is done with sin.”
Her dangling hand happened against the hardest item on her belt.
Father Bill’s teeth had only begun to sink into her skin when Jennifer Angelys Pagán, call sign no better than Jenny, thumbed away her holster lock and drew her Beretta M9. She knew her M9 only from bygone Personnel Qualification Standards, but she’d been a dedicated student (I am a United States Sailor!) who never wasted a shot (I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy!), and she could still hear the firearms proctor laud her skill with the M9’s three-dot sight system. Jenny heaved her arm upward and planted the muzzle in Father Bill’s ear.
Inside the metal tube, the shot was so loud it obliterated all other
senses.
When life burst back, Jenny found herself falling head over feet. Somewhere, a bullet ricocheted. The gun must have slid off Father Bill’s skull as it triggered, a theory confirmed by the priest’s moan of pain from what had to be a shattered eardrum. She saw his blood-covered face for a fraction of a second, aghast, like a child whose mommy had been cruel.
Jenny’s head struck a hard surface, her knee, chin, and shoulder rebounding like the loose bullet until she plunged through ruined safety nets with a diver’s precision. Father Bill was gone and Jenny was speeding toward gone too, and the sound that rumbled from the boat’s bowels must be air hurtling past her ears.
Oxygen burst from her ruptured chest, and every bone shattered.
Neither thing was true. It took half a minute to believe it. She blinked over eyeballs throbbing from being jerked by their stems, and attempted to orient herself, She moved her limbs. All four worked but touched nothing. Was she floating? An unfathomable, dark channel telescoped below her.
No—above her. She was somehow on her stabbed, bleeding back, staring up at the nine levels through which she’d fallen. She must be in the ship’s hull, close to the reactors. The sailors who operated the nuclear-powered engines were an enigmatic bunch who rarely saw the light of day, and it struck Jenny all of them could still be down here, too obsessed with knobs and meters to know about the chaos above. She took a deep breath that sent pain splintering through her body.
“Help!”
The force of her shout made her body sway. Now she saw it: a flight-suit strap was caught on a handle of the access trunk’s lowest hatch. She was dangling from her waist like a yo-yo at the end of its string. No flail of arm or leg brought her close enough to grab the ladder. Exhausted, she quit; her body spun slightly. She commanded herself to breathe, to think, to review those mental maps. The hull floor should be ten or fifteen feet below her, She could sever the waist strap and survive such a fall, no problem.
Something else was below her too: noises.
Shuffling, slithering, smacking, slobbering.
The reactor engineers, Jenny told herself, trying to wriggle into a position from which she could see. As she did, her left boot, jarred loose by the fall, toppled off her foot—her brown shoe, the legacy owed her as a naval aviator, officially gone.
The boot landed on a mouth. With Venus-flytrap instinct, it began to chew.
A dozen sailors lay knotted in a heap below Jenny, bodies so broken by Their falls They looked like a single monstrosity, this snapped arm linked to that broken leg, linked to that busted rib cage, linked to that jawless head. A pile of corpses would be bad enough, but this pile twitched and squirmed. Broken arms strained for Jenny. Broken legs writhed. Heads atop broken necks snapped Their jaws.
The rumbling she’d heard while falling was the sailors’ hungry moans.
Still Jenny could hear the thrown-pebble crack of blood dropping from her back, pock, pock, pock, against the forehead of a shattered sailor, who tried to reach the blood with his tongue. The others heard, saw, and smelled Jenny’s blood too, and fought harder to drag Their broken bones over one another until they became a rolling hill of flesh, swelling higher and closer.
Jenny heard a second thing, oddly musical: the sprightly, piano-wire plinking of her waist strap starting to tear, thread by thread.
Taking Command
On October 27, 1966, more than fifty years before ghouls appeared on USS Olympia, almost to the day, the USS Oriskany, an Essex-class carrier active in both Korea and Vietnam, had five decks overtaken by flame after a magnesium parachute flare blew up in the hangar bay. Forty-four men died. Nine months later, on July 29, 1967, the USS Forrestal surpassed the Oriskany as America’s worst non-enemy-action carrier disaster when an F-4 Phantom, parked on the flight deck, fired a Zuni rocket into the four-hundred-gallon fuel tank of an A-4D Skyhawk. The explosions began a twelve-hour blaze that killed 134 men and injured another 62.
We will exceed that, Nishimura thought. We probably already have.
The lower levels of the island were drowning in a rising tide of fire, with only one catwalk and ladder system still offering an upward path, and that one a gauntlet of noxious smoke and licking flame.
Any sailor who could not get belowdecks braved the path, producing the repugnant sound of navy retreat. Boots clanged up ladders and along catwalks, a clamor that changed as slower, heavier, and shakier footfalls began to give chase. Nishimura only had to step out of the nav bridge once to confirm his suspicion. The ghouls were learning. The ghouls were climbing.
Many were aflame, moving pyres of melting flesh and baking bone. Sailors tried to slide past Them and caught fire too, while other sailors, desperate to help, pushed the burning sailors off the rain-slicked catwalks onto the deck, perhaps hoping they might roll themselves into the ocean. Ghouls fresh from lower decks were indistinguishable from living sailors, and when offered a hand up the next ladder, bit off the helping fingers. Nishimura saw one woman go down from a ripped-open throat, only to see that same sailor, minutes later, appear at the nav bridge door, her windpipe voiding itself of bloody air-bubbles.
The navigation bridge was abandoned just before it was encircled.
“Pri-Fly!” Nishimura shouted. “Go, go, go!”
Abandoning your station was the worst thing one could do in the navy, but what was the alternative? One ladder higher, at 010 deck, the island’s zenith, was Primary Flight Control, a.k.a, Pri-Fly, where Air Boss Clay Szulczewski and Mini Boss Willis Clyde-Martell, the two men who’d gamely tried to befriend Nishimura, controlled all aspects of flight ops, from deck to airspace. In their realm would the above-deck crew of Olympia make their final stand.
Fearful sailors streamed up, while others, reacting to the 1MC call of “Condition Zebra,” raced down into fire, fingernails, and teeth to button up the ship. Nishimura despised it, but Tommy Henstrom might have been right all along. Dogging all hatches and sealing every blast door no longer felt like overkill, Big Mama had caught a virus, and organ by organ was shutting down.
A brawling, shoving horde of thirty-some men were crowded on the Pri-Fly catwalk when Nishimura got there, Something was going on inside Pri-Fly, but the mob denied Nishimura a clear view. He was trying when his sight was blocked by Henstrom, standing before him without a salute, his chin jutted in defiance, the raindrops on his face a hundred more accusing eyes.
“We need to unbolt the ladders,” he declared.
It was damn near an order from a sailor six notches down in pay grade. Nishimura felt his face’s glow turn the rain into steam. He would like to scream this seaman into submission, but one glance at the wild-eyed crowd of sailors stopped him. They might not react well to a show of officer superiority.
“Ladders stay,” he said.
“Then this whole island will be overrun,” Henstrom cried, “and it’ll be your fault!”
“We have sailors down there, Boatswain’s Mate. Would you leave them to die?” Nishimura looked away from the pissant and raised his voice. “Is there a hospital corpsman up here? We’re going to have sailors with burns, chemical burns, smoke inhalation! We need to make some room!”
“Those things are coming up the ladder right now!” Henstrom cried.
The look in Henstrom’s eyes did not allow Nishimura to doubt him, But the O-3 would have to deal with the goddamn situation himself. Nishimura pushed through the thicket of soggy sailors, who did not easily give way.
Nishimura hurled aside a final gawker and stepped into the Pri-Fly bridge. Two blue padded chairs stenciled AIR BOSS and MINI BOSS; plasma screens allowing the digital manipulation of all flight-deck and hangar-bay aircraft; the Air Tasking Order Flow Sheet detailing the day’s sorties. All of it was functioning, a balefire of hope high atop CVN-68X. Only two things were wrong, neither of which Nishimura registered until five words into his greeting.
“Have you made contact with…” he began, never getting to finish, Captain Page?
The first thing w
rong was Clay Szulczewski, or, more accurately, his remains. His body had been diced into roughly rectangular pieces with a fire ax—Nishimura knew this because the sailor who’d done the deed still held the tool, clabbered with blood and tissue, against his sobbing chest. Szulczewski’s face had been staved in, his gregarious smile reduced to scattered teeth and sticky shards of skull. He was identifiable only by pieces of his red uniform, stenciled with his job title. The volume of blood was obscene, what looked like three inches of purple gel sloshing niblets of meat across Pri-Fly’s floor.
The second thing wrong, predictably now, was Willis Clyde-Martell. He was relaxed into the mini boss chair, clad in a yellow uniform and headset, his contemplative posture in character. The middle of his face had been turned into a smoking black hole from a point-blank gun blast, Nishimura felt shock and grief, but shame too. He’d so badly craved the relief of someone who outranked him.
He looked at the man holding the ax. His insignia marked him as a builder; traces of color on his pants further specified him as a painter. Nishimura turned toward him, the blood at his feet sloshing like bathwater.
“Sailor,” Nishimura croaked. “What happened?”
The builder snuggled the ax blade under his chin.
“I didn’t want to, sir,” he wept.
Nishimura took hold of the air boss chair and considered the builder’s reply. It might mean the builder was shaken from having had to slaughter two ghouls. But there was a darker interpretation, as Nishimura had yet to see a single ghoul on 010 deck. Had Szulczewski and Clyde-Martell simply been in the way of fleeing sailors?
His shiver was a clutter of spiders. Again, he felt like a child surrounded by classmates hoping to test a grandfather’s claim that Japs bled blue. He turned from the builder and took in dozens of staring red eyes. They wanted to save themselves. They wanted the fucking ladders unbolted and pulled up. If Nishimura wouldn’t order it done, they’d find someone who would.
The Living Dead Page 26