Scotty’s chest detonated, bone, meat, and blood, The bang, coming a split second later, credited the shot to Nathan Baseman, who hobbled from a nucleus of ghouls, clutching Kwame’s smoking automatic. Scotty dropped to his knees, blood gouting from his chest like a certain tapped half keg. As Scotty toppled off the anchor desk, Baseman threw himself the opposite way, smashing against the desk hard enough to rattle the whole set. His head was right below Chuck, in the foreground of the gnarliest shot Camera 2 had ever framed. He fired, fired, fired, fired into off-screen ghouls.
“Keep going, Face! Don’t stop!”
“They’re in the studio,” Chuck reported, straight to the camera, back on the job in an instant. Despite Scotty’s quivering corpse and Glass’s unnerving presence, he was still the loyal messenger of his dedicated producer. “This is our last broadcast, ladies and gentlemen—I repeat, our last broadcast!”
Baseman fired: Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!
“The news is,” Chuck said calmly, “we’re going to die.”
The Glass-thing eyed him, her jaw hinging open and shut in mimicry. She cocked her head to replicate his emphasis, peaked a scraggly eyebrow into her flaking forehead. Chuck took a quaking inhale, deciding to take Glass’s transfixion as a sign he was doing what he should be doing. If he could deliver his last story quickly and correctly, he might make the biggest difference he’d ever made, no matter if it were the living or dead who saw it. He raised his voice to be heard over the blasting bullets, furniture destruction, and lamentations of the famished.
“We can’t help you anymore. You’re on your own now, all of you. Remember what you saw on this station, The ghouls, They’ve taken it all. The museums, the factories, the power plants, the lakes and rivers, the highways, the homes. But don’t give up hope. Please don’t give up hope. Maybe those things needed to be taken. The government, the military, the media too—all of it was already rotted. And if it was rotted, doesn’t that mean all of it already belonged to Them, the rotting?”
The last piece of furniture to fracture was the desk itself as ghouls drove Themselves into it from both stage left and right. Paint split in lightning-bolt patterns. Screws and nails whined. Ghouls piled atop either end, and both ends collapsed, just like the world. Sparks fizzed from above and the fills died, leaving only the main lights to roast tonight’s special, Chuck Corso. Ghouls pressed in, a tempest of grabbing hands, except Rochelle Glass, whose blank eyes still faced the empty teleprompter. Her necrotic chin hinged up and down beneath a dangling black tongue.
Baseman pushed himself onto the remains of the desk, right where Chuck’s laptop used to sit. He quit shooting. He held the gun in his right hand and with his left took Chuck’s hand, their fists twice as large together. Though the older man was coated in sweat and covered in scabs, he grinned, at last the martyr he’d always dreamed of being.
“We did it, Face,” he said.
Chuck’s tears cooled the itch overtaking his whole head. He nodded, though to him, Baseman had been the one to work magic upon Chuck Corso. You only had to look at the Glass-thing jawing comfortably before her Mendicans to know Chuck’s transformation had been more radical than that of living to ghoul. He wanted to thank Baseman, but could only nod as two walls of decomposing flesh pressed in.
Baseman winked, planted the gun at his temple, and stared into Camera 2.
“Fuck Jansky,” he said. “Remember Baseman.”
The producer’s head exploded. Under garish studio lights, his skull became a red balloon that bobbed once before disintegrating. His headless body spun and fell to the floor behind the Glass-thing. The ghouls groaned and bent over to claim the first fresh mouthfuls. The frosted glass behind the desk shattered, the letters WWN dividing into sharper pieces.
The idea of WWN also divided, Chuck thought as his chair was wrestled away and he landed faceup on the glass-strewn floor. Scotty Rolph had been right about this one thing: a single source of truth had no more place in this America; everyone out there would wield their own tiny piece of it, each glass dagger reflecting the image of the wielder—a million truths, but no truth. Interesting thoughts blacked out by the slobbering heads of ghouls.
Chuck Corso fought. Of course he did. Ghouls descended. Too many for their own good. They tangled and fussed, until a single ghoul weaseled free and landed on him, a tall Black woman whose purple-gray skin made a soothing contrast with her snow-white eyes. Chuck noted the oddity of a paper name tag stuck to her blouse, supplying Chuck with an unexpected introduction to his murderer.
Annie Teller reached for Chuck’s head with both hands. Here was another surprise: the woman had broken her fall with open hands; large shards of glass jutted from her palms like stiletto blades.
There was nothing Chuck could do. He felt the wintry tingle of his bottom lip lopped off. He saw the tip of his nose hacked away. Both eyebrows were gouged out; he watched them waggle across his vision like caterpillars. The rest he could not see but felt with perfect clarity. The cleaving of his forehead. The severing of his left ear. The tacky, pulling sensation of his face being peeled like an orange. He laughed, a freer noise without the impediments of lips and skin. He’d been under the knife many times before—blepharoplasty, rhytidectomy, all those fine procedures—but this was the face-lift to beat them all, the one that would reveal his true self, the one that would, at long last, make him comfortable with the nickname he’d never liked: the Face.
Steer into the Wind
They were weighed down. Nomex flight suits nabbed from a squadron ready room. Helmets, not mere cranials. Jenny ripped down a photo collage of sexy women before finding Nishimura a pair of thick-soled boots. Tools repurposed as weapons—fire ax in his hands, parade rifle on his back. The rifle ceremonial, no ammo. But it had a bayonet, didn’t it? Jenny was a wisp with double his strength. She carried a sword from an officer’s commissioning ritual. Ceremonial, too, and therefore unsharpened. But it was still steel, wasn’t it? In her left pocket, a pilot’s Beretta M9. In her right pocket, a turkey fork for close-quarters grappling, Shit gear, overall, but they ran like gazelles and dreamed like children. They could do the impossible. If Operation Bills-Lions was going to work, they had to believe.
They huddled by the deck-handler door, doused in red safety light. Nishimura put his hands to the lock.
“I’m not ready,” Jenny pleaded.
“You are.”
“What if I can’t remember the MFD checklist, the IFF code—”
“You will.”
“What if an engine overheats, I don’t know how to—”
“Doesn’t matter, What matters is we try. You all set?”
“Let me tell you about the golems.”
“What? Jenny.”
“It’s the only thing Father Bill said that makes sense. It’s inside me like a disease. If I die out there, I want someone else to know.”
Nishimura heard Missionaries one level lower, making the noises he once made as their leader. Their hunt today was for neither food nor supplies.
“Quick,” he said, “Real, real quick.”
“The golems are here to protect the Earth. They don’t give a shit about us.”
“The golems are the ghouls? All right. Got it. Now let’s—”
“Querido Dios, will one pinche man on this boat listen to me? We summon Them. That’s what’s important, okay? It’s in some old book, Father Bill said. I don’t remember. But we summon golems to help us, and to help us, They destroy us. It’s muy importante you understand. You’ve got to tell other people.”
“We’ll both tell them. I’m opening the door now. You got this, pilot. You got this!”
Sunlight walloped them like a typhoon. Nishimura knew he should blockade the door behind him to keep belowdecks ghouls at bay and slow down the Missionaries, but he was blinded by the diamond-white world, the black defects of the flight-deck ghouls Father Bill would not allow his adherents to kill. There were lots of Them, which meant there was no time for anything
but running.
They scrambled to the port-side stern. Jenny started firing the M9. Even at a sprint, she was as good a shot as her word, Two ghouls went down straightaway from critical head-blasts. A swarm of ghouls banked from the starboard side like the shadow of a passing cloud. Their sudden appearance threw Jenny off, her bullets forcing useless spumes of cold blood from chests and torsos. Nishimura yelled at her to run, just run, and she pocketed the gun, took her sword in both hands, and sprinted.
The October 24 firestorm had warped the deck’s asphalt-and-rubber coating. Jenny was athletic enough to stay upright; Nishimura wasn’t. Three times he went down. The first, he bounced back up. The second, he lost his ax to a ghoul. The third, he shoved away a trio of the dead with his new brown boots until he could swing the rifle around and bayonet the middle one through the throat. Even with the delays, when he got to the F-18 Super Hornet by Elevator #4, Jenny was still under the fuselage.
“Get in the plane!” he cried.
He tried to push her toward the ladder she’d parked by the cockpit, but she pushed back. She’d knotted a nylon rope around the plane’s arrestor hook as they’d discussed, but now she was sawing at it with a knife, Why this sabotage? He wanted to invoke the glow, but her words still reverberated: Will one pinche man on this boat listen to me? Getting an aircraft off a quarter-mile-long flight deck without the aid of catapults was beyond his capabilities, He’d watched birds take off from carriers his whole career and never seen anyone try it.
Jennifer Angelys Pagán, however, had a plan. She’d explained it, denigrating it as she went despite Nishimura’s praise. On a typical carrier takeoff, hooters popped valves to let pressurized steam hurl planes off a 350-foot strip into the sky. It took two seconds. Using the whole length of the flattop would net them a thousand feet, half of what they needed to take off, and that didn’t account for the warped deck, Jenny’s idea was to set the brakes, then ramp the engines while watching the mast flags for advantageous winds. At the right moment, she’d release the brakes, hit the afterburner, and pray. By tethering the F-18 to a bollard, she hoped to maximize both turbines’ thrust. The key was the rope needed to break exactly when she pulled the brakes or the plane would shoot to the side, off the edge of the boat.
That’s what Jenny was doing. On the fly, she’d decided to score the rope with her knife so it would snap at the right moment. It felt like a long shot—how could she know how deeply to cut the rope? Moments ago, she’d been worrying about basic cockpit functions. Jenny looked up at Nishimura. He grimaced down at her. She clenched her teeth and threw her knife at him.
He deserved it, he thought. It was men who’d ruined the world. The sooner they were all stabbed, the better. But Jenny hadn’t aimed at him, The blade whizzed to Nishimura’s left. He wheeled to watch the tool, not delivered by a knife-throwing expert, bop handle-first off the face of a ghoul an arm’s length away.
It only befuddled the thing, but drove pins through Nishimura’s body. A dozen more ghouls had closed within ten feet. He swung the rifle into his hands. The bayonet was six inches long, perilously short. By the time he might dislodge it from one ghoul, he’d be beset by another. He needed Jenny’s M9.
As he thought it, a ghoul’s neck spewed gray flesh and brown meat across the deck. Next to him, a ghoul’s knee disintegrated into red mist. He thought Jenny was firing until he noticed the splatter patterns. He squinted up at the island and saw the glint of guns. Father Bill’s guards had spotted Nishimura and Jenny and were shooting at them. The glut of ghouls provided inadvertent, temporary cover. Henstrom’s voice squawked from 1MC boxes everywhere as bullets spattered like rain. Ghouls kept coming too. Dumbstruck with shock and fear, Nishimura screamed—
—a cold hand grabbed the back of his suit—
—he whirled, screaming, thrusting the bayonet, feeling the blade sink into flesh so supple he knew right away he’d made a terrible mistake.
The six-inch bayonet was buried to the hilt in Jenny’s chest.
“Oh,” he sighed. “Oh no.”
Jenny looked down. The blade disappeared into her lower left ribs. Nishimura tried to recall what vital regions hid under that area of flight suit. Lung, spleen, stomach? He did not know, Pancreas, large intestine, kidney? He didn’t know, he didn’t know. Jenny’s hand, the one that had thrown the knife, settled upon the rifle barrel.
“Pull it out,” she gasped.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Pull it out,” she shouted, “and get in the fucking plane!”
Nishimura pulled and the blood spurt was hot against his hand and brilliant red, because Petty Officer Pagán was alive, at least for now, and before they could dwell on the ramifications of what just happened, Jenny dropped her sword, ducked under the plane, and swung onto the stairs like a child around a stairway banister, Nishimura dropped his rifle in disgust and followed, the ghouls groaning, Their skulls bonging off the F-18’s underbelly. The stairs were painted white to show up on the tarmac, but what showed up on them was Jenny’s blood, amoeba splotches on each step, The ladder was poorly positioned; Nishimura had to jump to make the plane’s back seat, hard to do with his added pack of guilt.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Hydraulics, normal. O2, off, FCS Gain, normal. Fuel dump, off.”
“You hear me, pilot? I didn’t mean to!”
Jenny coughed, a burbling, soupy sound, “External wing tanks, normal. Probe, retracted. Strobe, on, Park break, on. Flaps, full down. Anti-skid, off.”
“There has to be a first aid kit in here.”
“Shut up, sir. Landing gear lever, down. Master arm, safe.”
“You’ll bleed to death, pilot.”
“Your talking is screwing up my checklists, sir.”
“Affirmative. I’m sorry, Buckling in.”
Nishimura had gone for catapult rides off a carrier before, though generally he preferred the softer exits of helos. The sheer speed of launches made them hard to recollect; what he remembered most were the boggling numbers of people involved with making sure a launch went off, a hundred people, faces blotchy from heat rash, lips blistered by engine swelter, green-shirts packing into the shooter dome, yellow-shirts waving signals, red-shirts standing by for disaster. This time, no one. Just a pilot mumbling about caution lights, crank switches, voice alerts, EMI/IFEI checks, and a helmsman who had nothing to add but panic.
“Pagán, I know you’re being dutiful; no one values that more than me.”
Jenny coughed and blood speckled the windshield.
“But we’ve got a lot of ghouls out there, pilot.”
Father Bill’s Legion: at least fifty were rambling across the deck, though several had fallen from Pri-Fly gunfire, Another fifty clustered by the deck-handler door Nishimura hadn’t secured, denizens of the downward dark drawn skyward by instinct. That meant more might be coming, perhaps by the hundreds, Nishimura did not have to explain this to Jenny: they needed every iota of speed to get off this deck, an effort that might be complicated by the speed bumps of a hundred ghouls.
“Oh,” Jenny croaked. “That’s bad.”
Every deployment had crises, but Karl Nishimura had made a career of keeping his cool, even as it had cost him a life’s worth of friends. He looked across the boat and let the glow take control one last time. There, the twenty-foot-tall reticulating barricade. What if they could raise it, catch ghouls in its folds, clear the deck of Them in one swoop? Impossible with Jenny injured. Perhaps he could figure out the aqueous film-forming foam, the sprinkler system that might send every ghoul slipping off the edge. But why get complicated? The F-18 had a six-barrel, twenty-millimeter Vulcan rotary cannon capable of four thousand shots per minute.
“No,” Jenny said, reading his mind. “We’re not hurting Them.”
“What?”
“Golems.”
“Ghouls, pilot. We could take Them out!”
“They’re here to save us.”
“That’s the blood
loss talking!”
The F-18 roared. The world before Nishimura quintupled, joggled with vibration that sent every plate, screw, and rivet into screaming song. Jenny gunned the engine like a hot rod. Nishimura heard a sizzle and knew it was ghouls incinerating in the engine heat. Jenny had to scream to be heard, dotting the window with more blood.
“No ammo anyway! Had to keep our weight down! Mask on! Now!”
Nishimura felt he ought to argue, but he’d need oxygen to avoid hypoxia if they made it off the deck. It was only while snapping on the mask he realized his urge to argue had blinked away, and why? Because he trusted this pilot. It might have taken him to the last seconds of his life as a navy man, but he believed he’d made a friend, one he’d die for, not out of duty but personal affection. It meant more than any stripe or bar, and it would be a good way to die.
Through a heat haze, Nishimura watched Jenny lean from the side of the cockpit and push away the staircase. Bullets whistled past, scrunching into the jet’s chest. Jenny paused halfway out. She touched her fingers to her bloody chest and began swooping them across the side of the plane. Nishimura stretched the limits of his chest straps to see what she was doing. Just below the cockpit, she’d scrawled one word in blood:
“There!” she screeched. “My name on a fucking plane!”
The cockpit slammed shut. The latches cracked tight. The engines thundered, full thrust. Nishimura was a rattling component of a machine while Jenny cried jargon, canopy, harness, DEEC, CAS, seat, flaps, ADI, radar, TACAN, trim, IFF, circuit breakers, landing light—all spat out in seconds, With a jolt, the brakes were cut, the Super Hornet shrieking, but the nylon rope held, a second too long, the F-18 slithering to port before the rope snapped, the crack audible over the plane’s hellhound howl, and they were flung, a stone from a slingshot. Not a single one of Jenny’s golems struck, for They were swept back by the scorching wind, and Nishimura was glad, because golems or ghouls or Millennialists, Their purpose was the same.
The Living Dead Page 43