The Coasties were sending another message.
“Yankee - India - Papa - Papa - India - Echo...What the fuck?” He said, first reading off the Morse letters, then commenting on their content. “Yippie? Fucking yippie?” Coasties...
67
Nawiliwili Harbor
Lihue, Kauai
“Holy mother of God,” Rene Batiste, Public Affairs Specialist, de facto historian, and thoroughly shocked human being said, upon entering the Coast Guard Station
Carol Kemp came up behind him and immediately wished she hadn’t. What caught her eye was the High Definition, Technicolor, remnants of what must have been a virtual tidal wave of blood and gore splattered over the walls of the entrance lobby. Jackson Pollack, during his most booze-besotted, frenetic dance of splashing paint upon canvas, couldn’t have held a candle to the macabre artist who’d created the riot of red and white, and grey - and wouldn’t have wanted to.
The blood lay everywhere, mixed with chunks of flesh and bone and brain, covering the walls and floor and ceiling. To the left, a disembodied arm lay twisted atop what may or may not have been the thigh of whatever poor soul to which they had once been attached. To the right, lay a torso, the entrails piled in sick profusion at one end, and the bloody stump of a neck at the other. The head was nowhere in sight. Tatters of what appeared to be a uniform shirt were scattered here and there. No pants - not that she could see. Not that she wanted to see.
To the right of center, hanging from the wall opposite the entrance, a framed photograph, with a brass-plaque identifying its subject as Sailor of the Quarter, stood sentinel over the scene, but the face of the person in question had been obliterated by a splash of congealed ichor. To the left, hung a bulletin board, covered in child-like crayon drawings, all having the central theme of Thank You Coast Guard. A class picture hung at its center, identifying the artists as members of Mrs. Abernathy’s First Grade Class. At least, that’s what Carol thought it said, splattered as it was.
“Fuck me left, right, and sideways,” Bohenna said, coming up behind her.
They all filed in - at least all of her team that Vincenzo hadn’t tasked with staying outside to make sure they weren’t surrounded by any unwanted visitors. Bobby V, himself, slid next to her and stared in silent horror.
She turned at the sudden sound of scuffling, just in time to see Seaman Jarod Sinclair stagger outside to be noisily sick. Carol might have joined him, but her throat felt as dry as Death Valley and lined with what may or may not have been solid concrete.
Something clattered off to their right, around the corner, where they couldn’t see the source. Her heart leapt into her throat, found the blockage there, and receded back into her chest, to pound against her breast bone. Five people turned toward the commotion. Three M4's, one shotgun and one nine millimeter pistol turned with them.
A Thunk, followed by a grunt, followed by a low growl sounded in her ears, to be joined shortly thereafter by shuffling footsteps. She tensed.
68
CG 6583
Over Downtown Honolulu
“Appears to be the Hawaiian Taxation Department building,” AT3 Mark Columbus said, consulting a satellite-view map of the city.
“Let’s bypass it,” Greg Riley suggested, speaking with his lips pressed to the intercom microphone attached to his helmet. “Not sure which would be worse:” he added, “zombies or tax collectors
“I fart in your general direction,” LTjg Zack Greeley said, doing a horrible mock-French accented imitation of the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
LT Carrie Scoggins just shook her head and peered through the wind screen at the hundreds of rooftops spread out before them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of survivors stood upon those rooftops. All of them wanted to be rescued. Thinking about it - about the enormity of the task - sent a wave of exhaustion through her body, catching her by surprise.
This is impossible, that small, yet insistent inner-voice said, adding shame to the exhaustion. This is the job, her other voice - the strong, dedicated one that convinced her to apply to the Coast Guard Academy six years ago - said in reply.
Great, she thought. I’m hearing voices in my head.
She banked the aircraft as they passed over the Honolulu City Hall, heading toward Ala Moana Center. The huge, open-air mall (the largest in the world, if she remembered correctly), housed three hundred some-odd stores, including Bloomingdales, Nieman Marcus, Macy’s, Nordstrom, and who knew what else. It covered three or four square blocks of insanely expensive real estate, separated from the harbor by only the Ala Moana Beach Park.
“Looking to do some shopping?” Zack Greeley asked.
“I could pickup a few items,” Greg Riley offered.
“I was thinking more about the survivors,” she said, too busy flying the helicopter to point. Not that she needed to.
A crowd of at least a hundred people were standing upon the roof of the first large structure. Similar, though smaller groups were standing on several of the other structures. Many of those people were waving.
“What have they been living on?” ASM2 Kyle Rogers asked.
“Orange Julius?” Greg Riley suggested.
“Ooh!” Mark Columbus exclaimed, with a note of hunger in his voice. “Panda Express.”
“Well, if you’re gonna go that far, why not go all the way?” Zack said. “Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.”
“Killer prime rib!” Kyle agreed.
“Stick your tongues back in your heads,” Carrie said, trying to keep the amusement out of her voice. She understood their enthusiasm, of course. Three months in the Antarctic ice, followed by severe rationing, thanks to the apocalypse, had left all their pallets threatening to resign in protest. So starved were they for decent food, the gooney birds the Sass cook had been preparing seemed like gourmet delicacies - and that was just so wrong.
“Buzz kill,” Zack joked.
“We’ve got a job to do,” she replied, switching from intercom to the VHF frequency. “Six-five-eight-five, six-five-eight-three,” she said into the helmet mic.
“Go, Eight-Three,” LCDR Sagona’s voice said into her earpiece.
“Lots of customers at the mall,” she said.
“Fuel state?” he asked.
She checked the gauge. “Got enough to drop the guys and make one lift,” she replied.
“Don’t forget, the Star is away, off the North Shore,” Sagona cautioned. The ship had moved to support the repair efforts at the repeating antenna.
“I am aware,” she replied, trying not to sound snippy. She did know. Of course she knew. And she knew he was just being the responsible leader. Didn’t stop it from rankling a bit.
You know you have a problem with authority, her father had said when she told him of her desire to apply for the Academy. This was true enough, but she’d managed to suppress her instinct for rebellion for years. Every now and then, though, it reared its ugly head.
“Roger that,” Sagona said. “We’ll fuel, then return,” he told her, and added: “Commence your approach.”
Here we go again..., she thought, easing back on the collective.
69
The Skull Mobile
Schofield Barracks, 536 SMC Motor Pool
“Interesting hood ornament,” Marc observed, and Scott Pruden had to agree. On the other hand, interesting seemed inadequate.
An Army Sergeant - or, rather, the half of him that remained - lay atop the hood, to the right of center, directly in line with the passenger seat. His dead eyes stared inward, as his entrails trailed outward from the bottom of his armored torso. He’d been flung onto the hood when Duke rammed the squad of zombies at the road block, though, at first, his legs had remained attached. They’d been severed when the Skull Mobile blasted through the gate barricade, its heavy metal frame effectively pinching the lower half of the sergeant completely off. His right cheek now lay smushed against the cracked windshield.
Ensign Devon clearly agreed that interesting didn�
��t quite cover the reality, as demonstrated by the retching sounds coming from his throat
“Don’t you dare puke in my truck,” Duke warned. The officer retched again, and slapped a hand over his mouth to keep whatever was trying to get out, in. “Open the fucking window!” Duke growled. Anger flashed in the Ensign’s sickened eyes, but he apparently thought better of it, and did as the threatening Bosun Mate asked.
Maybe he’s not so stupid, after all, Scott mused.
“What street am I supposed to turn on?” Duke asked the still-vomiting officer. Unsurprisingly, he did not receive a response.
“Grimes Street, wasn’t it?” Marsha Gilbert, the former Raytheon Tech asked.
The plan - as was to be expected from anything devised by a four-striper Captain, like Gideon Hall - was multi-faceted, and, therefore, complicated. They couldn’t simply go to the antenna and get it back in operation - oh, no! Too easy! And so Hall had added a few excursions to their little joyride into the zombie haunted wilds of Northern Oahu. The first of them was to check out the headquarters of the Eighth MP.
The Eighth Military Police Brigade, as Scott understood it, was the Pacific Area Army’s version of NCIS - sort of. The distinction had something to do with civilians vs military, which seemed far too convoluted to him, and so he thought as little about it as necessary - which was to say, hardly at all.
The idea behind their excursion, according to Captain Hall (or whoever actually originated the plan) was that if anybody at Schofield Barracks survived the apocalypse, it would be the MPs. Scott didn’t quite follow the logic, since the only way to survive was to have an adequate supply of food and water - items not generally associated with a police station. Without them, any survivors would have starved to death, or died of dehydration. Scott, himself, would have died, if Amber Winkowski hadn’t stumbled upon him in the Facilities Maintenance Building on Sand Island.
He needed to remember to thank her again. She was back in the windowless sensory deprivation chamber known as the Comm Center, which he happily avoided like a dose of the plague. Still, she’d saved his life. Some demonstration of his gratitude seemed in order.
Be that as it may, the plan further stated that, in the event they didn’t find any survivors, they should at least be able to locate one of the things they desperately needed: ammo. They were nearly out of .45 ACP, for example, and while this was no longer a standard military round, the odds were better than average that some of the Schofield Barracks residents would have a store, if for no other reason than to supply any personal weapons that might be laying about. They’d almost certainly have 5.56mm, for the M-4s, and probably 7.62, for the 240. They could raid the base armory, of course - and such a raid was planned - but the armory, with its supply of heavy weapons, would be a tougher nut to crack than the MP’s firearms locker - or so the theory went.
“There’s Grimes,” Duke said, pointing.
Ensign Devon, who’d brought his head back inside the truck, and was now resolutely not looking through his side of the windshield at the former Army Sergeant/hood ornament. He nodded and pointed vaguely in the direction of the turn. Duke maneuvered the truck onto an empty street, bordered, on one side, by a grassy field, and on the other, by scattered trees, and equally scattered buildings.
Nothing moved. No sign of life. Until, that is, they turned into a parking lot at the end of the block and saw - of course - zombies.
70
Nawiliwili CG Station
Lihue, Kauai
“Fire!” CWO4 Robert (Bobby V) Vincenzo ordered, as the zombie lurched around the corner of the hallway.
Technically, the order had been LTjg Carol Kemp’s to give, and technically, she should probably be pissed, but at the moment, she was entirely too busy blasting the living shit out of the homicidally maniacal former human. Shot and projectiles from three M-4s, one twelve gauge shotgun, and one nine millimeter pistol exploded the former human in a gout of flesh and blood and guts and brains, and what appeared to be the remnants of a Coast Guard uniform.
This last bit was the last straw. It really was.
She could deal with the apocalypse (as if she had a choice), and the fact the majority of people had turned into what they were calling zombies, but were more accurately described as raving, murderous lunatics, with a taste for human flesh. This stretched the limits of her own sanity, of course, but the reality was undeniable. She could deal with it. And she could deal with the fact they had to kill a whole bunch of humans in order to save a lesser number of uninfected members of the species. These things were all bad, all monumentally FUBAR as could be, but still manageable, if for no other reason than she had no other choice.
But the uniform...
The...thing...they’d just killed, that now lay in a heap of gore they created with their weapons, had been a fellow Coastie.
“Fuck...,” BM3/OPS Steve Bohenna breathed next to her, voicing her own sentiments.
Bobby V grunted at her elbow. She looked at him, saw his frozen, numbed expression. Maybe the guy wasn’t so much of an asshole, after all. She saw his throat working, saw him swallow. He spat.
“The only good zombie,” he said, “is a dead zombie.”
Nope, she thought. Still an asshole...
71
Seaplane Wallbanger
Midway Atoll
“Sit down and shut up, or I’ll duct tape your lips together,” Jim barked. The subject of potential future violence was - of course - CWO2 Peavey. The annoying fucktard had been hovering at the hatch between the cabin and the rear compartment, trying to tell Harvey to watch the shoal water. Harvey knew to watch the shoal water - if for no other reason than he’d landed at Midway more times than either he or Jim cared to count. Doing so only reminded Jim of how tired he was.
They’d gotten a break of almost two full days in Honolulu, during which he’d slept the sleep of the righteously exhausted, but it still hadn’t been enough. His bones were tired. His skin was tired. His fat ass was tired. Mostly, though - at the moment - he was tired of CWO2 Francis Peavey - with good reason.
Aside from the general annoyance of the silly bastard trying to back seat fly, the idiot had only to open his damned eyes to know the shoals were clearly visible. They could see the deeper blue of the channel from the air. Even from a thousand feet, the thing might as well have been a highway. It ran straight and true, almost due north, jutting out of the ring of deep water surrounding the atoll, and extended into the central lagoon, with an obvious finger pointing toward the harbor. There might as well have been a neon sign proclaiming GO THIS WAY.
But no. The dumb fucker just had to whine and point and make a nuisance out of himself. Of course he did. It was proving all Jim could do to keep from getting out of the copilot’s seat and pummeling the asshole.
John saved him the trouble.
“Sit the fuck down, Peavey,” John said, grabbing his shirt collar from behind and dragging him back into the rear compartment.
“Thank you, John,” Harvey said.
“You’re welcome,” came the reply, followed by the sound of grunting, as Peavey was thrown onto one of the benches.
“I don’t like your foul language,” a woman’s voice said. Jim turned in his seat to look, and saw one of the survivors from the first building, Mrs. Dolores Eddington-Smyth, somehow managing to looked swelled, like a pissed off puffer fish, even though she - like the other survivors - was unquestionably suffering from malnutrition.
“It appears,” Harvey said, in his crisp British accent, ”that arseholes have no gender.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Jim replied, laughing.
“Show of hands,” Gus said, raising his own. “Who doesn’t care what she likes?”
The dynamic duo of Peavey and Eddington-Smyth had been making their presence known, with excruciating regularity, throughout the long flight. Everybody had grown sick of it.
“I pity the poor denizens of Midway,” Harvey observed.
“The important thing,” Jim repl
ied, “is that as soon as we land, we’ll be rid of them both.”
“Well, then, Harvey said, “Let us land forthwith!”
72
The Rooftop
Ala Moana Center
“Back up,” Greg Riley shouted to the crowd, as the 6585 made its approach to land on the roof of Nordstrom’s. “Please,” he added, though he doubted he could be heard over the sound of the rotors.
He, and ASM2 Kyle Rogers, had been trying to control the mob of survivors since the 6583 dropped them off and picked up the first six-person group. They’d become more and more unruly as time passed, up to and including rushing forward, shoving and jockeying for position, even before the wheels had touched the concrete surface. Only the spinning blades had kept them far enough back for he and Kyle to deplane. Now, with the arrival of the second helo (fresh from refueling at the Star, off the North Shore of Oahu) the shoving resumed.
But there’d been something else, something even more disquieting, during the interval. Something lay under the usual What took you so long, and Where have you been, comments he’d grown used to from the two previous buildings he’d helped clear, something that caused a shiver along his spine.
The people seemed nervous. He might have passed it off as excitement, and anticipation of finally being rescued, after however many weeks, and however much deprivation they’d suffered, if not for the way they all seemed to be looking over their shoulders.
“Move the fuck back!” Kyle yelled, throwing general decorum right out the proverbial window, just as, Greg felt sure, he wanted to throw a few survivors over the not remotely proverbial parapet, and down four stories to the street below. He felt this, because he wanted to do that very thing.
He glanced over the four-foot stub wall, and immediately wished he hadn’t. There were zombies down there, lots of zombies - so many of the crazed bastards that he wouldn’t want to count them, even if he could. They were everywhere. Looking down Ala Moana Boulevard, he saw enough more of them heading their way to make a decent sized army. The sight didn’t exactly fill him with puppies and bunnies.
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 4): Zombies of Infamy Page 13