Father Bill had carried out his promise to drop anchor, thereby establishing a nation, and his citizens applauded, certain that segregation from society was the key to future greatness, Anchoring was a big operation for a carrier, but thanks to archaic speaking tubes—a last-ditch redundancy Nishimura had never thought would have its day—Father Bill’s disciples were able to contact a bare-bones fo’c’sle crew still resisting ghoul incursion. With alarming speed, those distant sailors succumbed to the lore of the Long Walk, and Nishimura felt the boat’s movement shift from sideways drifting to a vertical riding of waves.
He wondered if they’d ever move again.
In the hours since, Nishimura had heard and felt Big Mama’s body systems being shut down, like a beloved matriarch being pulled off life support. The keyboard plinking of search radars, including SPS-48E, SPS-49(V)5, SPS-65(V)9, and SPS-67, ended their concert. The tick of the rotating Mk 23 Target Acquisitioning System stilled. The white fuzz of the WRL-1H warning/intercept receiver dissipated into nothing. Worst of all, the hum of the Mk 91 Fire Control System fell silent, despite the boat’s proven susceptibility to fire. Meanwhile, periodic rumbles made Nishimura suspect munitions were being dropped into the sea. Olympia was being stripped of her identity, a void that Father Bill was undoubtedly preparing to fill.
The pop of the 1MC came so late Nishimura confused it for the ladle clanging against the water bucket. He could see the outlines of the room’s other seven men perk up, moonlight gleaming from their eager eyes.
“O Lord, in the name of your only son, Jesus, bless the war in Afghanistan, O Lord, the war in Iraq, O Lord, the war in Syria, O Lord.” Father Bill laughed lightly. “You remember all that? When I used to take my turn giving daily prayers with my so-called colleagues, those men of false faiths who have fallen, I always included this plea for God to help us win our wars.
“Tonight, I am blessed to remove that devotion. War is at an end. That includes the war we fought here on this ship, for it was never a war to begin with. The demons, we welcome Them. With open arms, we welcome Them.
“By joining with our demon halves, we will eliminate evil. I am seeking counsel from God on how best to achieve this, but for now, the demons require more lifeblood, which we are blessed to be able to give Them. Henceforth, I shall no longer call upon God to guide our bullets, for there are no more reasons to shoot.” The 1MC crackled. “Unless it is to protect our temple from the unenlightened.”
The unenlightened were the belowdecks skulkers who had yet to offer themselves as lay priests to the Church of Father Bill. They could be hiding anywhere on the boat; Jacobo Leatherdale had proven that. Nishimura was too tired and thirsty to keep the memory at bay any longer.
How quickly had the parting of the Red Sea convinced Israelite detractors Moses was a prophet? The Long Walk, Father Bill’s miraculous trek across the flaming, ghoul-crowded flight deck, had accomplished as much just as rapidly. One of his first acts was to partition each day into five sections, each heralded by a prayer he broadcast throughout the ship: Morning, Midmorning, Midday, Evening, and Night, During these monologues, Nishimura had observed Leatherdale begin to crack. Finally, in the middle of Evening Prayer, Leatherdale had looked at his third handful of peanuts that day and snapped.
“All the food’s down below! We lock ourselves up here, we’re going to starve! What are we doing? What are any of us doing?”
He’s right, Nishimura said. No, he hadn’t said it. He’d only thought it, Because, unlike Leatherdale, he had the Nishimura Delay—careful or cowardly, you decide. Leatherdale raved at his fellow starving, stagnant sailors for fifteen or twenty seconds before breaking for the catwalk.
Jacobo Leatherdale was navy all the way, weight-trained, athletically fit, and Nishimura would have given him better than fifty-fifty odds of landing on the flight deck uninjured if he could have prepared his jump. But Leatherdale had melted down while Henstrom and a bodyguard were present, doling out peanuts and water. Henstrom said two words—Stop him—and several meteorological-level slugs scrambled in chase. Nishimura heard the whomp of flesh thrown to steel, the gobble of Leatherdale’s protests.
Before Leatherdale, Saint Karl knew that Father Bill’s refusal to contact the outside world left them open to the dangers of finite food and water, explosions from untended engines, and the complete lack of a labor structure to address those things.
After Leatherdale, Nishimura revised that list. Father Bill’s reaction to the traitor did, in fact, help establish a labor structure. Labor, it turned out, worked rather smoothly when people at the bottom were terrified of people at the top.
Captured, Jacobo Leatherdale was dangled backward over the Pri-Fly catwalk, the railing pinched between calves and thighs duct-taped together. Trained to consider Pri-Fly as a holy place, the forty-one others crowded the catwalks to watch. Flanked by Henstrom and armed guards, Father Bill held the gold-plated crucifix with the broken staff and spoke in a trembling voice that Nishimura could not hear. The priest’s closed-eyes ecstasy said enough.
Father Bill made the sign of the cross and took up a knife. He leaned over the railing and cut Leatherdale across the chest, making a long, wandering slit, which bled in five or six streams before painting his face red and splattering to the flight deck five stories below.
The deck inferno had died out, revealing an apocalyptic sight. The bright, sleek falcons of navy aircraft had been contorted to briars of charred metal, tarantulas dead on their backs. More upsetting were the seared skeletons of sailors, traceries of carbonized bone that atomized to ash with any decent wind. Leatherdale’s red blood inseminated black embers; the afterbirth was raspberry jelly.
Despite this, the deck’s quarter-mile length still flickered with activity. A few dozen dead sailors plodded aimlessly amid the ruins. Demons, Father Bill insisted, though Nishimura clung to ghouls—he’d take Chuck Corso as an oracle any day over Father Bill, though Millennialists might still be the most apt name. The ghouls appeared ignorant of one another, yet they never collided, instead orbiting like galactic bodies in search of absorbable matter.
Their disinterest changed with the onset of Jacobo Leatherdale’s red rain. Nishimura registered the turning of twenty ghoul faces, forty white eyes flashing like startled doves. As They gathered and reached for Leatherdale, They did so like infants for a rattle; when They tried to snatch the falling blood, They did so like toddlers chasing bubbles; when They kneeled to lick the blood from the sooty deck, They did so like children seeking candy, the picture of innocent craving.
Upside down, Leatherdale had no intention of going quietly. He screamed and contorted, geysering blood over a wider area, good news for the crowded ghouls. Father Bill placed the knife blade against the duct tape. Nishimura still could not hear him, but he knew it was a prayer from the rounding of the priest’s lips: O Lord this, O Lord that.
“Amen!” Henstrom cried—Nishimura heard that, all right—and answers went up: Amen! and Yes! and even Hallelujah! Nishimura thought he might not be able to bear it, that he’d have to grab each one of these people by the collar and ask them what the hell they were doing. Then Father Bill sawed through the tape and Leatherdale dropped, a different kind of man overboard, landing with the gravelly crush of a pulverized back.
Leatherdale screamed, Thirteen ghouls took hold of him at once, and Nishimura did not believe he’d forget Their precise grips. Right foot. Left foot. Left knee. Right thigh. Groin. Right hand. Left arm. Left pectoral. Right armpit. Neck. Left ear. Inside of mouth. Into right eye.
Leatherdale screamed again, a plea to those he’d served alongside: “Shoot me! Shoot me!”
As if in response to a silent signal, the ghouls pulled, and Jacobo Leatherdale came apart. Arms snapped at elbows, Legs turned, and turned, and twisted off like shrimp tails. Ghoul hands plunged into his abdomen, grasped the pelvic bones, and pulled the bottom half of the body away. The skin and innards stretched like mozzarella. Suddenly, Leatherdale, perhaps five six in life,
was thirty feet long, spread across the deck in chunks strung together by veins, nerves, intestines, and flesh.
Nishimura wanted the ensuing silence to be the beat taken before action: tossing the insane Father Bill to the ghouls. Instead, it was the silence Nishimura often felt inside churches, that smug belief that your god was the true God, and that because you had your butt in the right pew, you’d never be forced to walk a plank.
“Taps, taps, lights-out.”
XO Bryce Peet’s curt, robotic, but professional ten o’clock sign-off had been replaced by Henstrom’s pushy cockiness. Nishimura swallowed, his throat tight and aching. Relief over having missed most of Father Bill’s prayer was erased by the realization water was not forthcoming. Nishimura laid his head on the floor and tried to think. An emergency survival class, eons ago, Water conservation tips. Work at night, avoid sunburn, evade winds, limit food.
He chuckled at that last one and thought he saw through the gloom the glare of suspicious eyes. Karl Nishimura might make for a good second sacrifice to the demons, those eyes said, a sacrifice that might get a guy promoted upward. Nothing Nishimura could do about that right now. He closed his eyes and coughed up spit to wet his throat, Conserve water, conserve energy, be thankful he could see the stars through a slice of window. He thought of that poor Red Serpents nugget who’d had the bolting incident and how everyone had considered it a big deal. If only they could have seen past the next wave.
A Forever Situation
“How’s it look?”
The question had become the tick of a clock.
On his maps app, Luis showed Charlie the places Rosa was most likely to have gone. Friends’ neighborhoods, though Luis was not sure he could pinpoint exact houses, which might mean knocking on dangerous doors. He tried to think of other places he knew Rosa frequented and was abashed to know mostly places that had served him as a husband: grocery stores, takeout restaurants, laundromats. If he’d never bothered to learn what his wife did all day, how could he hope to find her?
The app kept being blocked by notifications, his post retweeted incessantly.
“Will you turn that shit off?” Charlie griped.
“Makes me feel good,” he admitted. “Word’s getting out.”
“The ego boost is what feels good. You want to run out your battery?”
It was a good point; the electricity was working so far, but the lights had stuttered. He turned off all phone notifications, a regimen of swiping that hurt like hell. By habit, he did it with his right hand, inside which all existing nerves were live wires twisted to the spot of his missing thumb. “How’s it look?” Charlie kept asking. If she were talking about his hand, he could tell her exactly how it looked. It looked not good.
If she was talking about the thumb itself, different story. The thumb was gonesville. Luis had snatched what had fallen from Mamá’s mouth and tossed it down the garbage disposal from which Charlie had removed his mother’s hand. When he hit the switch, slivers of white bone and red muscle jitterbugged from the drain like radish shavings.
Now he felt faint and nauseated. Could be the blood loss, the trauma of losing a body part. But what if it was more? He hoped most of John Doe’s blight had been juiced in the sink, but he knew the strain Mamá carried could be slugging through his veins right now, recruiting healthy blood cells for the sarcophage cause.
How’s it look?
The situation? Pretty fucking bleak. He’d tried to help Charlie deal with Mamá’s body; since childhood, he’d fantasized about the brave face he’d one day wear as a pallbearer. Charlie had told him to sit down, but Mamá’s dangling weight made it hard for his diener to dislodge her hand from the disposal. Luis had wrapped his arms around his mother’s torso, the red hash of her face close enough to kiss, but he was not much help. One stupid thumb gone and his whole hand went to shit. At last, he retreated and listened to the wet crackle of Mamá’s extraction and the hard scrape of her body being dragged into the garage, where it would rest with all the dignity of a bag of dog food.
Luis plugged his phone into the wall, again horrified by the challenges of a missing thumb. Charlie sat across the table. What differed from their usual work lunches was her merciless stare. He hadn’t the strength to defend himself. His bottom lip actually pooched. Be nice to me, he thought. I don’t feel well.
Finally, she proclaimed it: “We can’t leave.”
“Rosa,” Luis protested.
“I’m going to say this as gently as I can,” Charlie said. “Forget Rosa. The phones go back up, she’ll call. The roads get safe, she’ll come home, But we are not going on some wandering rescue mission with you like you are.”
He held up his bandaged hand, “We’ll cauterize this. Sew it. We know how.”
“Here’s something I’m not going to say gently. You are useless right now. You think you can climb a fence? These are the suburbs. Every house is fenced off like San Quentin. You can barely make it to the sink.”
“I just need a little time, It’s shock.”
“We’ll see. In the meantime, we need to shore up this place. I heard one on the other side of the garage door. How long till one of Them puts a fist through a window? An hour? A minute?”
“If we lock ourselves in here … Mamá…”
“What? What about her? Acocella, talk.”
“She … if she just lies out there, she’ll…”
“I worked in a morgue too, you know. We’ll bury her. I promise. We’ll figure it out. But we have to worry about that later. What you need to do right now is direct me toward hammer and nails.”
“Garage. With her.”
“Do you have any lumber?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. You have bookshelves. And tables. It’s going to get a little noisy in here.”
“Won’t noise…?”
“Bring Them here? Probably. That’s why, when we do this, we need to do it fast before too many catch on, I’m going to need your help with that. All right? Acocella, look at me. I need you to hold things in place for me to hammer, Okay? Nod your head. This isn’t Autopsy Suite 1. No detailed procedure here. We need to put wood over that glass as fast as we can, you understand?”
He did, though amid a heavy brain fog, he couldn’t imagine a barricade keeping sarcophages out as much as it kept him and Charlie inside. He wondered if this was exactly what his crafty diener had wanted. He remembered her look of yearning from last night in the autopsy suite, as well as his gratified reaction. Now he felt the crimp of a thickening penis. The fuck was that about? He was all messed up.
Charlene Rutkowski tore apart the Acocella house with what seemed to Luis like too much relish. Furniture went sideways, legs jutted stiffly like those of dead animals. With slaughterhouse efficiency, she malleted them to pieces. The gunfire crack and sawdust smell shot Luis with enough adrenaline to gather the lumber Charlie created from tables, shelves, TV stands, armoires, dressers, drawers, headboards, chairs, and every cupboard door in the kitchen, He piled them by the front windows. Through Rosa’s gauzy curtains, he could see dark shapes loping closer.
The nailing was the scary part. Once the walls began shaking and the windows rattling, the sarcophages came for them. Arms fired through the living room glass. Sweatshirt arms, blouse arms, fast-food-uniform arms, military-dress arms. Neighbors entering Luis’s home without asking first. You simply didn’t do that in La Mesa. Charlie hammered too hard and fast to be caught, and Luis whacked sarcophages with whatever board he was readying. Their hands kept clenching, showing no pain.
Perhaps it was a good sign, Luis thought, that his own hand hurt like hell.
None got in. Of course not. Sarcophages hatched maggots on dead flesh, and goddamn it, nothing was dead in the Acocella house. Luis rubbed his pounding head with both hands; only one thumb showed up for the job. There was a dead person, wasn’t there? In the garage? Luis slapped himself with his good hand and helped Charlie nail up the biggest pieces: the dining room table, the headboard
. Rosa’s jaw would hit the floor, Luis thought, if she ever got home.
Within an hour of starting, they’d blocked out 90 percent of the sunlight on the ground floor. Sweat-grimed and scratched pink, they collapsed at the bottom of the stairs, drawn to the warm, unimpeded sun splashing down from the second floor. Luis shut his eyes. Maybe now, at rest, his dizziness would subside. All the activity had been lousy for his hand too. Last he looked, the towel had come loose, black and dribbling. A typical arrogant doctor, he kept no first aid kit at home.
“How’s it look?” Charlie asked.
Luis cracked open a crusty, stinging eye. Charlie’s smirk drew strands of sweaty blond hair tight across her face. Luis glanced at the blood-snarl of his right hand, then at the living room, which looked as if it had been visited by a deconstruction crew. At least four sarcophages still beat at the barred windows, but Their sounds had diminished. Maybe They recognized other windows in other houses as less vexing.
“Doesn’t look too bad,” Luis replied, “for a tornado.”
“We need to fix that hand.”
“Shower first, Please. Take turns keeping watch.”
“What if the water shuts off? We should conserve.”
“What if we smell like this forever? That’s not a life I want to live.”
Charlie laughed softly. “Okay. Be quick. You need me to hold you up?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Mmm, yeah, nothing gets me hotter than an old man slipping in the shower.”
Luis laughed. He needed the humor. His vision was swaying. His throat was ablaze, Washing out his wound was a smart, overdue thing to do, and he hoped skimming two days of crud off his body might turn his whole ill feeling around. He struggled to his feet, accepting Charlie’s help. At the top of the stairs was a stained glass window given to them by Rosa’s mother. It soaked the late-day light with wine shades. Luis told himself he was drunk on it, that was all that was wrong with him.
He shivered. Was there a breeze coming through some of the shattered windows on the ground floor?
The Living Dead Page 33