“NO! She screamed again, and only the strong arms of Sam Boneventura stopped her from racing to the beach, diving into the ocean, and swimming to the yacht.
She’d always taken pride in her maturity and independence; always reveled in her skill at making it on her own, without any help from her parents. Now, she was right back to being the little girl in pigtails, and she wanted her:
“DADDY!”
230
CG 6583
Sand Island Landing Zone
“Eight-Three, Skull Mobile,” Jonesy’s voice sounded in Carrie Scoggins’ ear.
“Go,” she replied.
“We need air support,” he said. “As much as you can give us.”
They’d just landed at the fenced-in ballpark, and were disgorging the last five of the seventeen people they’d rescued from the two buildings on the far side of Ford Island, from the Marines. It was a mixed bag of civilians and Navy personnel, including one Chief and one Lieutenant Commander. Most had been really glad to be rescued - most of them, but not all. The Lieutenant Commander had an attitude problem.
“Take me to your Commanding Officer,” he demanded. “Right now.”
She wanted to tell him where he could stick his demand, but after so many years in the Coast Guard, she’d finally learned discretion.
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “If you’ll just wait over there while we shut down...?” She pointed toward where the other refugees were clustered off to the side, near the Visitors dugout. Visitors, indeed, she thought.
The Naval Officer didn’t look happy, but he complied, anyway.
“You’re not really...” Jeri Weaver started to say.
“Fuck no,” she replied. “Close the door,” she ordered, and put the bird back into the sky with a roar.
231
M/V Point of Order
Off Midway Atoll
“Time to go,” Clara Blondelle said to no one but herself, as she kicked the latch of the liferaft cannister and shoved it over the side. The white fiberglass case popped open and the international orange liferaft inside immediately inflated. She cocked her head upwards, saw the seaplane growing ever-closer, and launched herself into the sea.
She was too close. Too damned close. The plane was going to come down right on top of her and she was going to die. She swam toward the raft and heaved herself aboard, diving into the cover of its canopy mere seconds before the plane, the yacht, and the sea around her exploded into a ball of fire.
232
Warehouse 14
Ford Island
“They’re running away!” Private Heidrich shouted.
“The fucking cowards,” Dittery whined.
The young PFC was too far out of the reach of McNaughton’s hand, but just close enough for his foot, which he planted on the whining bastard’s ass and shoved. “Secure that shit,” he snarled. “That goes for all of you.”
They were all now dressed in full combat rig. Their packs were empty. Their sidearms were empty. The M-4s they’d carried into the fray on the day everything went to shit were empty, All the ammo was gone. All the consumables were gone. Their hands, however, held an odd assortment of blunt and /or sharp instruments, including short pieces of metal framing they’d been honing into blades for weeks, three-foot lengths of rebar they’d taken from an interior masonry wall they’d demolished with a sledgehammer (which McNaughton, himself carried) during an unsuccessful attempt to break through into what they thought was a supply area byt turned out to be female restroom facilities, and varying lengths of stainless steel piping originally designed as some sort of weather vane.
The warehouse had been a FEMA supply dump, and thus, filled with disaster supplies, but the calamities those supplies had been designed for hadn’t included a zombie apocalypse. There were no firearms, no weapons of any kind. But if they somehow found a need for feminine hygiene products, baby wipes, and toilet paper, they were good to go.
“Watch and learn,” McNaughton said, pointing at the infected horde. The zombies that once filled the parking lot next to them were leaving - all following the big damned truck. The Coasties were drawing them away, so other Coasties could bring their admittedly ridiculous Duck Bus alongside the warehouse to pick them up and take them to safety. Whether this was by design, or merely the end result of their effort to not get themselves swarmed and ripped to pieces, didn’t matter, one bit, because it had worked.
233
USCGC Assateague
USS Arizona Memorial
“This isn’t working,” BM1/OPS Jeff Babbett said, into his helmet comm unit. His ears rang like the Bells of Saint Mary’s, making it almost impossible to hear his own thoughts, let alone his words. The chain gun, with its laughable name, Belinda, painted on its side, was one loud son of a bitch.
“What the hell are you talking about?” the voice of the patrol boat’s acting CO, MK1 Frank Roessler, came through the din. “Looks like it’s working just fine.”
From a certain perspective, this was demonstrably true. The weapon worked perfectly, thank you very much. The rounds fed into the receiver, shot through the barrel at a loud and somewhat alarming rate, and the casings flew out of the ejection port and onto the deck, exactly as it had been designed to do. That wasn’t the problem - or rather problems. The most obvious came in the form of the large stand of trees squatting at the end of the (mostly) wrecked Ford Island Bridge. About a third of those trees were now on fire, thanks to the incendiary rounds. Thick, white and grey smoke billowed upward, and the soft tropical breeze blew it right over the Assateague’s bow, where he stood, partially obscuring his vision, and thus making it difficult to aim. Of course, there was anything to really aim at, because the stand of trees sat between the patrol boat and the zombies gathered at, and exiting from, the island end of the bridge. He couldn’t hit what he couldn’t see. These two things would have been bad enough on a good day, but they paled in comparison to the third problem: Belinda was about to run out of ammo.
“We should move,” he said over the comm unit.
“To where?” Roessler replied.
The answer came as if from God above. “Assateague, Skull,” Jonesy’s voice called.
234
“...Reposition at the end of Enterprise Street,” Jonesy said into his helmet mic. “I’ve got a plan.”
“You call that a plan?” Duke asked, staring at him.
“Watch the road, moron,” Jonesy replied, pointing to another crowd of zombies directly ahead.
They were rolling down St. Louis Avenue, at about the average speed of a running man. A large, long building squatted on the harbor side, with three smaller, yet also large, buildings to the inland side as the street paralleled the shore. Zombies squirted out of the gaps between the three buildings, but none were concentrated enough to cause any real problem. The massive crowd behind them, however, kept growing in size with each passing moment.
“That’s a lot of assholes,” Marc Micari observed, firing his M-4 through the truck’s back window. He might as well have been shooting spitballs at an elephant, for all the good it seemed to do.
Duke plowed the Skull Mobile through the gaggle of cannibals, and continued down the street.
“Save your ammo,” Jonesy warned Marc. He keyed the radio. “Let us know when you’re in position.”
“For what?” Frank’s voice asked.
“Never mind that,” Jonesy replied. “Just be ready to fire everything you’ve got.”
235
The Duck Bus
Essex Street, Ford Island
“What the fuck is he thinking?” Harold asked. He loomed behind Molly, who once again piloted the absurd tourist bus.
They waited, per Jonesy’s orders, in the sun-dappled lane created by the building on one side of Essex, and the harbor on the other. The Rapid Response boat, with Jennifer Collins at the helm, and a hodgepodge mix of non-rated junior enlisted guys as barely-trained gunners, turned a lazy figure eight, twenty yards offshore.
&
nbsp; “He knows what he’s doing,” Molly replied, not entirely believing her own words. She believed in Jonesy, sure enough - and it had nothing to do with certain unmilitary feelings she might (did) have for the man. He’d earned their trust, over and over again in the weeks since they’d all bugged out of Honolulu. Faith wasn’t the problem. Trust wasn’t either.
The problem - the heart of the matter - in Molly’s view, came in the form of a simple question: how many times could they tempt fate? Over and over again, they’d succeeded (sometimes messily, and twice, tragically) in spite of the insurmountable odds they’d faced, and every time, Jonesy had been right there, in the middle of all that death and destruction and danger and mayhem, flipping the finger at fate, as he repeatedly demonstrated suicidal bravery. Forget Murphy’s Law, forget paranoid negativity, and go straight to the Law of Averages.
Simple logic said sooner or later, their luck would run out - Jonesy’s luck would run out - and that would be all she wrote. Death would come calling, one final, tragic time, and Jonesy would have no choice but to answer.
And what was the stupid idiot doing now? Playing catch-me-if-you-can with an army of zombies.
“Fuck waiting,” Wendy Micari said. “Let’s go get us some Marines.”
He’d told them to wait. He’d told her to wait, and so there they sat, waiting, while he tried - yet again - to see if he could get himself killed.
Idiot, she thought.
“Let’s not be hasty,” Harold cautioned. The two sat on opposite sides of the bus, and offered opposite views on what they should do. She looked at both of them through the Duck Bus’s rearview mirror. Jim Westhoff sat between them. His eyes met Molly’s as if to say: It’s your call... She knew what she wanted to do, but it wasn’t what Jonesy had told her to do.
Jonesy and Duke and Scott Pruden and Marc Micari faced a hundred-to-one odds. All they had to protect them were a few small arms, a light machine gun, a box of grenades, and the thin metal walls of the Skull Mobile. What chance did they have, really? Slim to none, she thought.
But maybe - just maybe - there was something she could do to relieve some of the pressure. No way to even the odds. No way to even come close. There weren’t enough non-infected humans at their disposal to make the slightest dent in the numbers. But if she could draw some of the zombies off of him, decrease the odds, even if only a little, it might make the difference between life and death.
Fuck waiting, she thought. “We’re going,” she said aloud, and shifted the Duck Bus into gear.
236
USCGC Sassafras
Waipi’O Point, Pearl Harbor
“Right fifteen degrees rudder,” LCDR Steven Wheeler ordered.
“Right fifteen, aye,” BM3/OPS Rees Erwin echoed, pushing the joystick over to the right, waiting till the rudder indicator pointed to the appropriate angle, then adding: “My rudder is right fifteen.”
“Very well,” Wheeler replied. He stared resolutely forward, watching the ship’s progress around the point and into the harbor. Amy Montrose marveled at the simplicity of the synchronized maneuver.
Under normal manning standards, there’d have been a team of people taking angles off aids to navigation, and radar ranges off prominent land features, passing them via sound-powered phones to the chart table, where one person would record the data and pass it to the plotter, who would pinpoint their position on the chart. Someone would then pass the information to the conning officer, and include any recommended actions. A lookout would be on the flying bridge, and another team of people would be on the bow, ready to drop the anchor, should it become necessary. Still another, larger team would be down in the engineering spaces, making sure everything worked exactly as it should.
Under normal manning standards.
Now, however, they had no one plotting their position, no one on lookout, no one in after-steering (where the rudder machinery sat unattended, so if anything went wrong...), one guy in the engineroom, one guy on the bow, and herself, Rees Erwin and LCDR Wheeler on the Bridge. Minimal Manning didn’t begin to describe their situation.
Granted, they weren’t going far. The trip from Honolulu Harbor to Pearl Harbor was nothing in the Grand Scheme of things. - provided nothing went wrong. So far, nothing had. It was, however, utterly unsustainable. There were only five people on board a vessel designed to require nearly ten times that number. How in the wide world had Molly Gordon managed to go all the way from Midway to Oahu with only eight? It didn’t seem possible, and yet...
“Rudder amidships,” Wheeler ordered. Erwin repeated the command, and complied.
The channel cut between the point, to the west, and Hickam Air Force Base, to the east, then bent around a short dogleg past Hospital Point, then due east along the southern end of Ford Island, and finally northeast, into Pearl Harbor, itself. There, finally, they came in sight of their pathetically small forces. Ranging from northeast to southwest, the LCVP sat, keeping station off (presumably) where they’d dropped the Skull Mobile, the Assateague waited to execute CWO2 Jones’s latest plan (whatever it was), the RRB drew its figure eight through the water off where the Duck Bus was supposed to be sitting, but oddly wasn’t, and the tiny speck of Sass Two, with its sole occupant, SN Tara McBride, floated, waiting.
Bottom line: what they needed - but didn’t have - was help. They needed help. Anybody would. Nobody, no matter how bad ass, no matter how well-trained and equipped, would be able to do this alone and have any rational expectation of sustaining the effort. And yet, here they were, making the best of an impossible situation.
“Ms. Montrose, if you could please relieve Petty Officer Erwin...,” Wheeler said. Amy complied, as he turned to the fish-out of water young petty officer and asked: “Have you ever fired an MG 240 machine gun?”
“Uh,” Erwin replied. “No, sir.”
“Learn fast,” Wheeler said, as he pointed out the port bridge door. “You’ll find your weapon on the Boat Deck.”
Erwin would have made a great poster boy for uncertainty, but he gulped, said: “Yes, sir,” and headed out the door.
Wheeler picked up the sound-powered phone off the bulkhead next to the chart table, turned the selector switch to Main Control, pressed the Call button, and, when he received an answer on the other end, said: “Petty Officer Dodge, how are the engines doing?” Amy couldn’t hear the response, but she could see all the indicators on the steering console were in the green, so she wasn’t surprised when Wheeler said: “Wonderful. Please head to the fantail and man the gun you’ll find there.” Whatever the young man with the unfortunate name said in reply, she couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t matter. “Nevertheless,” Wheeler said. “Head to the fantail.” He hung up the phone and looked at her.
“We need more guys,” she said, stating the obvious.
237
Warehouse 14
Ford Island
“You guys might want to back up,” The female pilot said through the radio. “Christmas is coming early.”
McNaughton hadn’t the slightest clue what she was talking about, but he’d be damned if he was going to look this particular orange and black gift horse in the mouth - or any other orifice, for that matter.
“You heard the lady,” he shouted. “Back the fuck up.”
He watched as his babies backpedaled through the maze of ducts and fans and satellite dishes on the roof, until they were all well back from where the helo hovered above. A helmeted figure popped his head out the aircraft’s door. He waved, then reached inside and came out with the most beautiful thing McNaughton had ever seen in all his years in the United States Marine Corps: an Army-issue green metal ammo box.
A cheer went up from his men. They all saw it, all knew what it was, and every last one of them wanted what it contained.
“Bombs away!” he heard whoever the helmeted guy was say, through the radio, before the box plummeted to the rooftop, caromed off a ventilation duct, and popped open, spraying 5.56 millimeter rounds everywhere.
&nb
sp; His boys started to move but he held them back. “Wait for it,” he warned, above the whine of the helicopter.
The helmeted man dropped one more box, and waved again, as the helo banked and raised into the air. This one landed more or less intact. He waited till the aircraft had completely cleared the roof. His men waited with him.
He smiled. “Your weapons aren’t gonna load themselves, Marines.”
238
M/V True North
27.982915 N 177.192062W
“Midway Tower, this is True North, Channel Sixteen,” John Gordon said into the radio microphone. This was the fifth time he’d tried calling. He hadn’t gotten a response from the first four. He didn’t expect one this time, either, and it was all he could do to keep from screaming in frustration at the silence.
“They’re probably busy,” Lane Kelly offered.
Or all dead, John thought, but didn’t say.
The radio crackled with sudden static, and his heart leapt into his throat like Michael Jordan heading for a dunk.
“John? Is that you?” A woman’s voice asked. It took him a moment to recognize the voice of his own wife.
“Marcie?” He asked, willing his heart rate to slow before the organ exploded.
“Oh thank God,” Marcie’s voice echoed the one inside John’s own head. If ever there was a time for divine intervention, this certainly qualified.
“Are you all right?” He asked his wife.
“Fine,” she replied. “But...”
“What?” He asked, his pulse poised to launch itself at the moon. “But what?”
Static filled the air again.
They were still twenty nautical miles from the atoll, but it shouldn’t have made that much difference. So why the static?
“Teddy Spute is dead,” she said, finally. His pounding heart sank. Then it dropped toward the center of the Earth. “So is Jim Barber.”
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 4): Zombies of Infamy Page 37