These aren’t my crew, she thought. Not one of them.
Where were her people?
Frank Roessler, she knew, was elbow deep in the Assateague’s engineroom, Gary King was feeding the growing number of refugees, Bill Schaeffer was locked in his radio room cage. Duke was on the other side of the island. Harold Simmons had been yanked from his sick bed to try and rescue the air crew. And Jonesy?
She looked in the general direction of the Ala Moana Mall, unable to actually see the place, due to the hundred some-odd buildings between the Sass and the disaster unfolding with such deadly consequences, maybe two miles distant. Jonesy...
She said none of this to either Montrose, or Wheeler, who looked off, somehow. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but he didn’t look as she’d grown used to seeing him. Of course, she didn’t really know the man, and had only been serving under him for...what? Two weeks? Three? What day was it?
None of which mattered.
“What’s the plan?” She asked, turning to the two superior officers and seeing their doubtful expressions. “Or is there one?”
Montrose looked to Wheeler, got no answer, then said: “The problem is how to get them out of there.”
“The other helo?” Molly asked, alarmed. Not only were her people in mortal danger, but it seemed as if she couldn’t do a single goddamned thing to help them.
Montrose shook her head, not even bothering to check with Wheeler this time. What’s wrong with him? Molly wondered.
He blinked at her, his face pale, almost ashen. He’s in shock, she thought, answering her own question.
“We have to do something,” Molly insisted.
Wheeler blinked again, then his eyes seemed to focus. He held her gaze, his own intensifying, as if he’d suddenly come to a decision. “We will,” he said, finally. Then he sighed, as if slowly deflating. “Question is, what?”
She stared at him a moment longer, the anger welling up inside her like a storm surge. He doesn’t know what to do. The thought hammered around inside her skull, clanging off the rage center in her brain. He’s the Captain, Goddamnit! He’s not allowed to be uncertain. Uncertainty at the top of the command chain was Bad Thing Number One at the Academy. They drummed it into the cadets’ heads, constantly throwing scenarios at them to weed out those who couldn’t cope.
Even if the person at the top doesn’t know what to do, it’s their job to at least act like they do. Do something, damn you! She screamed at him inside her head. Wheeler just stood there, staring out toward Honolulu.
With a snarl, she grabbed a set of binoculars and stomped her way out the bridge door. There had to be something they could do. If they didn’t, those men would die. Jonesy would die.
She shoved it aside, using the one weapon she had against the despair trying to overwhelm her: anger, putting all her focus into the twin eyepieces of the binoculars. The answer’s out there, she insisted to herself. I know it is. She thrust into motion, all-but running onto the catwalk forward of the Bridge windows.
The Sass was moored, with her bow pointing toward the Honolulu side of the channel, giving Molly almost a hundred and eighty degrees of vision. She started to the left, scanning the shoreline, searching for the answer. At first, she saw nothing but the destruction they’d been staring at since their arrival. It lay everywhere, so ubiquitous it had become part of the background. She took a calming breath, letting her eyes drift, allowing her subconscious to pick up on the one anomaly that would set off alarms in her conscious mind, the same way they taught lookouts to scan the horizon.
Almost immediately, she spotted the first thing - or, rather, things. In the mostly empty field adjacent to the fuel tanks across the channel from them, two bulldozers squatted, like yellow leviathans, next to a pile of sandy dirt. Her brain tried to explain the scenario, tried to give it context, but she shoved it aside, as well. Why they were there meant nothing; that they were there could mean everything.
In and of themselves, however, they wouldn’t be enough. She kept scanning.
The first step would be getting to the people on the rooftop; the second, would be getting them off the rooftop; the third, would be getting them all back alive. There were dozens of ways to achieve steps one and two, and she was pretty sure she already had at least part of the answer to number one. None of it would be any good to anyone, however, if she couldn’t figure out how to do step three.
How to get them off the rooftop...
The remaining helo was out. She knew this intellectually, understood the reality, and accepted the premise. With only one helo left, they couldn’t drop it into the exact same set of circumstances that destroyed the first one. Coasties were by and large a bit crazy - had to be, in order to do what Mother Nature and the US Government called on them to do - but they generally weren’t stupid, and attempting the same maneuver would be both suicidally stupid, and fail to rescue the civilians and her crew.
Something nibbled at the edge of her consciousness, like catching sight of something out of the corner of her eye. Now what was it...? Then she thought she had it, and scanned backward to the empty lot with the bulldozers. The two yellow monstrosities still squatted there, next to the pile of dirt, but they weren’t the answer, so what was?
Something else yellow...
By adjusting her gaze slightly to the left, over near the huge fuel tanks, she located the single-storey building, with its large sign declaring itself to house the Emergency Response Unit. A large, yellow hazmat truck (so identified by the words emblazoned on its side) sat parked off to the right. That wasn’t the answer, however. The larger truck with its nose just sticking out of the overhead bay doors of the building, on the other hand, was exactly what they needed: a firefighting ladder truck, the end of its ladder sitting squarely atop the cab.
There was the answer to the second step. Finding someone who could actually drive the thing, and getting them out there remained a problem, of course, but one crisis at a time. One crisis at a time...
She continued her scan.
Amy Montrose sidled up next to her. Molly, keeping her eyes glued to the binoculars, sensed more than saw her. With a twisted sort of synchronicity, the alarms went off for the third time. She stared at the object, unsure if she believed what she was seeing.
Montrose must have seen her tense, because she brought her own pair of binoculars to her eyes and asked: “What?”
Molly pulled her eyes away from the lenses, blinking to force her vision to focus. She pointed.
“Is that...?”
“What?” Montrose asked again, bringing her own set of binoculars to her eyes.
“A Duck Bus?”
101
Nawiliwili CG Station
Lihue, Kauai
LTjg Carol Kemp climbed the gangway leading up to the debris-strewn deck of the one hundred thirty foot ocean-going tug, Mahalo, moored about a quarter mile down the pier, on the Coast Guard Station’s side of the Nawiliwili cruise ship harbor. From the state of things, it looked as if the ship had been abandoned in a hurry.
Boxes of what looked to be dry stores, long-since ruined by rain and weather, lay stacked in haphazard fashion near the gangway, as if waiting for pickup by people who had simply failed to show. Two old and faded seabags - those ubiquitous carry-alls of sailors since time immemorial - lay between the gangway and the hatch into the ship’s superstructure, clearly dropped by whoever had been carrying them. A pair of boots, tied together by their laces, joined the seabags on the deck a few yards away. Carol saw a smear of what may have been either rust or blood near the toe of one of them. She hoped for the former, but suspected the latter.
What happened to the crew? She really didn’t want to know. Didn’t matter. They were gone, and the tug boat remained.
The surf boat, some twenty yards down the pier, however, was another thing, entirely. From what Petty Officer Bohenna told her, a small fire had taken place in the engine compartment. His team was currently trying to see if it might be repai
rable, but it wasn’t sounding good.
The low thrum she heard, and the deep vibration she felt through the soles of her own boots, told her Bobby V had gotten the tug’s engines started, which was good, but begged the question of why the crew hadn’t simply escaped the plague by getting underway. The answer to that question did matter - maybe.
It could be the crew’s non-nautically skilled family members had been the ones retrieving the personal possessions and non-perishable food abandoned on deck. Or it could have been looters, or survivors taking advantage of available resources. Or it could be something else, entirely.
So maybe the answer to the question didn’t matter at all. Or maybe it did, because it begged the first question of where did whoever it was go? She shook it off. She wasn’t going to find out by standing on deck and wondering.
Seaman Jarod Sinclair’s head popped out of the wheelhouse door above her, followed by his frantically-waving hand. Carol doubted he was excited to see her. She took off at a run, bounding up the ladder two steps at a time, and arriving just as a static-filled scream split the air.
102
The Motor Pool
Schofield Barracks, Oahu
“Duck!” Duke shouted to Marc, who stood between the bosun mate and a gaggle of zombie assholes. The civilian did as ordered, as the big man opened up with his twelve gauge.
Seaman Dixon Grimes, looking as if he were closing his eyes, leveled his M-4 and started firing, as well. OS1 Rudy McGuin came up, carrying a nine-millimeter pistol, and shoved Grimes to the side before joining in the fray. Scott Pruden, feeling as if his balls might have vacation plans, joined in the terror-inducing not-fun-at-all, with his own M-4. At least he wasn’t closing his eyes.
Time felt to Scott like molasses, but it took almost no time for the four of them to obliterate the half-dozen zombies who’d come shuffling and staggering around the corner of the Motor Pool Maintenance Building. With all of them on the ground in bloody heaps, the fire stopped, and the silence felt solid enough, Scott could have used it as a diving board, had there been a suitable swimming pool handy. There wasn’t, so he stood there, with the gunfire echoing in his ears, and sending waves pulsing through his brain as he did a nervous three-sixty to check for any more unpleasant company.
“Can I get up now?” Marc Micari asked from the ground at everyone’s feet.
“Only if you tell us why we came here,” Duke answered, adding the usual touch of menace to his voice. It seemed as if he lived to intimidate. Whether or not this was true, Scott mused, it certainly felt true, and in any case, the big guy was really good at it.
If Marc noticed, he didn’t react, choosing instead to stand and brush himself off, before looking around and pointing to the building from which their unwanted guests had joined them. “We need a car battery, a crowbar, and an acetylene torch,” he said, smiling. “Oh! And I suppose we should grab a Humvee, just for fun.”
Ensign Devon came up from wherever he’d been cowering during the melee. “What do we need a Humvee for?” He asked.
Marc, still smiling, winked at Duke, then replied: “So that some of you can return to the Star while the rest of us visit the armory.”
103
The Rooftop
Ala Moana Mall
“Grab his arm!” Jonesy barked, as Greg Riley leapt toward the roof of the next building, upon which they stood, and as the horror below them unfolded in grisly fashion. Glen Newby did as ordered, dragging the poor bastard up and onto the rooftop. A gigantic, lumbering zombie, wearing a torn and filthy Romones tee-shirt, and the tattered remains of checkered shorts, made a grab for Riley’s leg, catching the toe of his boot. A single nine-millimeter round to its head from Jonesy’s pistol ended the attempt.
Both Riley and Newby fell to the deck in a heap, exhausted. Forty-three people now stood up there with them, where before, it had been just Jonesy, Newby, and Harold. On the rooftop below them, carnage reigned supreme.
Hundreds of assholes had gotten up there, presumably from inside the mall at their feet. At least fifty civilians were dead, or dying, along with ASM2 Kyle Rogers, ASM1 Randy Wallace, and Seaman Pat Querec. At least as many zombies were chewed to pieces by the combined fire of two M-4s, Jonesy’s Thompson, and the MG 240 machine gun operated with demented skill by Jeri Weaver, hovering above them in the 6583.
Jonesy felt sick. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true. The nausea was there, to be sure. No one with a shred of humanity left in them could look at the scene and not get at least a little queasy. Mixed in with it, however, was a toxic stew of adrenaline, shock, horror, and anger.
This operation, that had been ongoing for a couple days now, and had been running smoothly (in a relative way), had now turned into a gigantic clusterfuck in the blink of an eye. Except that wasn’t really true, either. It hadn’t happened as a result of managerial incompetence, which would be the case with a true example of the word, clusterfuck. There hadn’t been any management of it, at all. It had simply happened, the way shit does.
Three good men were dead on the roof below, and three more - including two of their only four helicopter pilots (along with one of their only two helicopters) - were almost certainly dead on the street. Jonesy didn’t know a better word to describe the scene. Maybe FUBAR, but that could just as easily be used to describe the world as a whole, so another word might be more appropriate. Clusterfuck it would be, then.
“What now?” Harold asked.
How the fuck should I know? Jonesy thought, but didn’t say. He looked around at the roof of the building upon which they now stood, as Newby (back on his feet) took pot shots at the zombies below. “Save your ammo,” Jonesy cautioned. “We’re gonna need it.”
They were safe, for the moment. It’s all relative, he thought, because the truth was, they weren’t safe at all. They just weren’t in immediate danger, unless and until the zombies wised up enough to remember how to climb.
The image of a dark memory flashed across his mind: he and Molly up on the flying bridge, as the battle for control of the Sass was drawing to a close. Come on. You can do it. Hand over hand, easy as pie... trying to coax their former shipmates to climb the ladder to the signal bridge and so make it easier for Jonesy to kill them. He shuddered.
Fuck this, he thought. “Fuck this,” he said aloud. “Eight-Three, Ground, over.”
“Go, Ground,” LT Scoggins’ voice came across the radio waves immediately.
“We need an extraction plan,” Jonesy said, looking into the sky at the helo, hovering a couple hundred yards away. “One that doesn’t involve losing our last helo,” he added.
This time, she paused before replying. Don’t blame her, Jonesy thought. Her fellow pilots - her friends, or what remained of them - were probably in sight from her position in the aircraft.
“Roger,” she said, finally. “Any suggestions?”
“Break-break,” Molly’s voice cut in.
“Go, Sass,” Jonesy said, drawing at least a degree of comfort from it.
“I have an idea,” she said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
104
The Boat Basin
Midway Atoll
“Can’t imagine you’re liking this too much,” Stephanie Barber said, as she stepped up next to Samantha, and joined her in watching the True North steam out of the harbor - without Samantha on it.
“I think it sucks,” Sam replied. “More than anything in the history of suck.”
That this was true, and that Stephanie seemed to be at least sympathetic to Sam’s plight, in no way ameliorated her feeling of useless abandonment. She stopped staring at the retreating former Canadian buoy tender long enough to eye the older woman. Slightly older, she reminded herself with a frustrated rage she could do nothing about. She’s, what, twenty-one, maybe twenty-two? Five years, maybe six years older. Nothing in the Grand Scheme of things. Not in an apocalypse.
“They treat me like a kid,” she said, finally.
Stephanie nodded. “It�
��ll never change,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam snarled, lashing out. Not her. Not Stephanie, too.
“Easy,” Stephanie cautioned. “Nothing personal.”
“Says you,” Sam replied, but even as she did so, the snippy attitude felt wrong. Even worse, it felt childish. “Sorry.”
“It’s the whole father thing,” Stephanie said. “I left home almost four years ago, and mine treats me as if I never left.” She gave Sam a one-armed hug, waving toward the interior of the atoll with her free hand. “I’m over there stuffing human spinal tissue into a blender to make vaccine that will save who knows how many lives, but Dear Old Daddy acts as if I’m still in pig tails.” She gave Sam a squeeze. “You want to know the worst thing?” Sam nodded. “I only wore the pigtails because he wanted me to. I hated the damned things. Thought they made me look like the worst kind of dork. But try telling him.”
She was right, of course, and Sam knew it. She would always be Daddy’s little girl. She could even accept it, after a fashion. Not today. Not right now. Eventually. It didn’t, however, explain why she got the same treatment from people like Molly and (far, far worse) Jonesy.
“Yeah,” Sam said, begrudgingly. “But how does that explain everybody else?”
Stephanie shrugged. “You’re sixteen,” she said, as if it were the answer to everything.
Sam nodded and pulled away from the woman. “I’m well aware of my age,” she said. “But I’m also aware we’re in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”
“True,” Stephanie admitted. “But still...”
“But nothing,” Sam retorted. “All bets are off.” She could tell Stephanie wasn’t buying it, didn’t understand how everything had changed. “You have no idea what I saw in Honolulu,” she said.
Stephanie nodded. “Again, true.”
Sam waved at their surroundings, at the palm trees and sand, and clear, blue water. “This little slice of paradise is like the old world, the way life used to be. Honolulu is the way life is. It’s horrifying and dangerous. Everywhere you look is death and destruction. It smells worse than anything you can imagine, and it can kill you in an instant.”
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 4): Zombies of Infamy Page 18