by Mark Tufo
I nodded. The only way I was going to shoot BT was if the bullet went through my head first and then into his. He’d be pissed that I scrambled some of my brains into his, but eternity is a long time; he’d get over it eventually. You have an abstract idea of how big a ship an aircraft carrier is, but when you’re actually on one, it blows away any preconceived notions you may have had. We’d come in on what was called the second deck; Overland was bringing us down to the fourth deck, where the crew would spend their downtime. Unlike the stairwell, fourth deck was an abysmal depth of dark. When I got my NVGs back on, I was not prepared for what I saw. I was expecting wide open spaces—much like the flight deck, but what I was looking down was a long hallway with evenly spaced hatches. It would take a battalion to secure this ship. We weren’t even a full platoon anymore.
“Overland seem suicidal to you?” I asked BT.
“Not especially.”
“That’s what I figured. So why is he continuing this mission?” Again my squad was bringing up the rear. Grimm, along with some of the other walking wounded, was in the middle of the formation. “This is a fucked up situation, BT. We’re in over our heads.” Normally he might come back with something about how we’re always in over our heads, that he didn’t give any response was even more telling. We were, for the most part, in a single line formation. I’d lost count of how many doors we passed, didn’t open any of them. We finally came upon an open area, the cafeteria. The last meal served here had been humans, and by the remnants left strewn all over the place, it had been quite a feast. The congealed blood and other unsavory matter was over a half-inch thick in some places. With every lift of our feet, our boots were making a tacky sound as if we were stepping on tape. No matter how much I wanted to believe that was the case, the overwhelming stink of death prevented that. When we got to the far end, Overland had Rose set up a Claymore with a tripwire. If it were up to me, I would have used a mini-nuke and obliterated the entirety of this section. Fuck it, I’d blow the whole boat. Never seen a floating mass grave until now. While Rose was setting up, Overland came and found me.
“Captain, I need you and your squad to watch this area. I can’t have any zees coming up behind,” Overland told me. It wasn’t quite an order; I had a feeling he wanted me out of the way for whatever was going down, and this was the best way to go about it. That was the cynic. The conspiracy theorist section was convinced this was how he was going to get rid of me completely, leave us all buried deep inside. He would take the rest out onto the flight deck, hijack a helicopter, and leave us sailing along in this nightmare carrier. Felt like a serious stretching of a long-game for Deneaux, but was it out of the realm of possibilities?
“We have no comms; how long do we stay here before following, or are you coming back?” I asked. I couldn’t gauge his facial expressions to see if he was lying because of the goggles. Nothing in his voice betrayed him, didn’t mean he wasn’t betraying me.
“I’ll send someone back as soon as I can.” Couldn’t have asked for a much more vague response than that.
“Leave Grimm,” I told him. I thought he was going to protest; he didn’t.
I watched them head out. “Kirby, Stenzel, find the closest available room. I want Winters to do what he can for Grimm in as safe an environment as possible. Rose, you keep an eye on the cafeteria. Tommy, Gary, I want you to scout ahead, not more than a hundred feet. Want a lay of the ship and anything you think might help us if we get caught down here.”
“Now that you made sure to get everyone out on task, what do you want to tell me?” BT asked.
“Something’s not right here. This mission doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way a platoon could clear this boat. And now we’re by ourselves, no comms, and no exit strategy.”
“Not sure where you’re going with this, Mike.”
“Seriously? You don’t know where I’m going with this?”
“Oh, I know your depths of paranoia, but this seems a bit overboard even for you. If the powers that be were trying to get rid of us, why not just send this squad here and call it a recon? Why all the resources? Why jeopardize an entire platoon?”
“I don’t know…I haven’t figured out all the angles yet.”
Winters and Stenzel were moving Grimm a few doors down to a small cabin, junior officer quarters, maybe. I went in to check on him once he was settled on a bed.
“He all right to lie down?” I asked.
“He doesn’t have a concussion; there’s not much I can do for him here. He probably needs surgery to repair the damage…I mean, it looks like he may have a broken orbital socket, but I can’t be sure. I don’t want to start randomly prodding around. He needs an x-ray.”
“Do we have that?” I couldn’t imagine that the evacuation from Etna had started taking large medical machines.
“We could.”
I was slow on the uptake, our immediate situation taking up most of my internal operating system. “Huh?” was my unthought-out reply.
“A few decks up is a state of the art medical facility.”
“What if he doesn’t get surgery?”
“Hard to tell,” he shrugged, “he could be just fine, or if the bones move around, he could have anything from sight issues, blurred, or double vision, or he could lose the eye altogether.”
“Okay. Let me know if there’s anything we can do in the meantime.” I left the room. Stenzel was waiting out in the hallway.
“Sir.”
“Stenzel.” She didn’t move. “Something on your mind, Sergeant?”
“NVG batteries, sir, they’re rated for ten to thirty hours.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure why she was concerned with it; this current shit-fest was still in its first hour.
“Even when the sun comes up, there will not be any sunshine down here.”
I was beginning to see where she was going with this, although I seriously doubted that nine hours from now we would be in the same spot.
“It’ll be as dark as the inside of a cave, sir, if the batteries die. I don’t like caves.”
“Neither do I, Stenzel. If we start getting close to that timeline, we’ll bug out.”
“What if we can’t?”
I’d never seen this side of her; Stenzel was usually a rock in every situation. Everyone had their weak point, and being blind inside a large iron box in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by a bloodthirsty enemy appeared to be hers. In fairness, that would be the deal breaker for about 99.9 percent of the population. The rest of us, for the moment, had just pushed that little nugget of shit farther down the colon than Stenzel had, or farther up, maybe. I’m of the ilk of dealing with one problem at a time, and considering we were dealing with a half dozen of them, I was overtaxed.
“I’ll figure something out.”
Can’t say she liked that answer. Why would she? I didn’t actively address her concern. I’d sidestepped and delayed, hoping that other circumstances would come into play that would render this a non-issue. Kind of like when the missus had asked me to fix some shingles on the garage and I’d merely waited until water damage had caused the roof to partially collapse. One problem solved.
“Movement,” Rose whispered.
“Overland circle back around?” I was attempting to see what she had.
“Not unless he slipped and fell in the cafeteria.” She was pointing off to the left by where the food used to be served.
I could make nothing out. Yeah, I saw the glass food display and serving station, and I could see countless bodies and the aftermath of a zombie feeding frenzy, discarded clothes, footwear, a few rifles, but as for movement, nothing.
“You sure it’s not a trick of the lighting? Or lack of?” I asked.
“Just stay still and quiet,” she added.
Both of those things were extremely difficult for someone of my disposition. Or me. They were difficult for me. I had a distinct inability to stay focused on anything for any particular length of time, and especially when I know
people are expecting me to. It had been five minutes already, bordering on two and a half hours, when I was just about to tell Rose she was seeing things when I saw it. Wasn’t much…and it was just on the edge of the very minimal peripheral vision that the NVGs afforded. Now I was still and quiet. An arm had slid forward, an ass had raised an inch or two. But it wasn’t just the one—there were at least three that I could see. They’d move a few inches then stop for minutes at a time. They were low crawling, and it was terrifying.
I went a few feet to where Stenzel was. “Go and check on Grimm. Ask Winters if it will be all right to move him.”
“Are we leaving?” There was a desperation in that question.
“Maybe. Kirby. Quietly go up and find out what Tommy and my brother are up to.”
“What’s going on?” BT came out of the room Grimm was in after Stenzel asked about his status.
“Got some zombies playing possum in the caf,” I told him. “They’re slow crawling their way toward us.”
“You haven’t shot them yet?”
“Don’t want them to know we’re on to them. Got a feeling it’s more than a trio, and I would rather withdraw than get trapped in this hall or one of these rooms.”
“Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. They’re small enough I’d get claustrophobic if I was in one by myself.”
“Like growing a watermelon in a jar.”
“What?” he asked.
“Thinking out loud, sorry.”
“Don’t do that. That’s how you scare the shit out of people.”
Rose reached back and tapped my shoulder. I looked over; she was holding up five fingers. Then she splayed them again. I was hoping it was because she didn’t think I’d seen it the first time and not that there were ten little zombies making inchworm-like locomotion our way. Then, because that wasn’t bad enough, she added another three. This already sucked, now we had thirteen zombies. Fortunately, with all the issues I have, triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number thirteen, is not one of them. Like any rational person, I avoid it as best I can, for instance, I either got twelve gallons of gas or fourteen, but never thirteen. There was one time where I had to oops out about fifty cents worth of gas onto the ground to get to the safer number fourteen, but that’s an extreme example. That’s normal-ish, right? The more I write about it, the more I feel I may have to add it as an issue. Anyway, the baker’s dozen were moving a little quicker now. Tough to call it a renewed sense of urgency, but the pauses between their choreographed shimmies were seconds now as opposed to minutes. It was getting more difficult for them to hide the rustle of clothes and the smack of the sticky floor.
“Sir, I’d like to keep Grimm as still as possible until he can get proper medical treatment. We risk permanent damage if we move him now.”
I showed Winters what I’d been looking at. He didn’t say anything as he went back to go and get Grimm ready to move.
“Sergeant Van Goth says he’s hearing something strange.” Kirby was whispering in my ear.
I pulled him back and into the room with Grimm and Winters. “Anything else?”
“That’s it, sir. He seemed concerned but he said he couldn’t put a finger on it. For what it’s worth, Sergeant Talbot and myself didn’t hear anything. He going to be all right?” Kirby was pointing at his friend.
“I hope so.”
“Sir, Rose says we need to pull back or start firing on the zombies,” Stenzel said. If they tripped the claymore and we were hiding behind it, we were likely to become casualties as well. Did not at all like the fact that I could see my brother running down the hall.
“Mike, Tommy says we have to go now if we’re going to go at all.”
My hand was being forced, and I had not a clue which card to play. There was the awesome three of diamonds I had if I stayed or the powerful four of clubs if I left. I hoped my opponent was bluffing.
“Clubs it is.”
“Huh?” Gary asked.
“Rose, Stenzel, Winters, let’s go. Kirby, help Grimm.”
It wasn’t a minute later we were approaching Tommy. He was urging us on quietly with an exaggerated waving of his arm.
“Hear that?” he asked. Would have had an easier time picking up the beating of a dragonfly’s wing from ten yards away.
“A clacking sound?” Stenzel had a hand cupped around her ear. “Like fingernails drumming on a table kind of…wrong cadence though.”
If people had hackles, mine would have raised. “Reavers,” It came out like a swear, my mouth going bone-dry.
“Here? How could that be possible?” Gary asked. He’d heard my story. He had every right to be afraid, to be very afraid. Fuck knows I was.
I had no clue how it could be possible. The reavers, as far as I knew, were a brand-new iteration of an old enemy. They shouldn’t be here. Not unless the zombies on the ship had found them and brought them back, like cavemen of old bringing rabid, horrifying, orphaned infant wolves into their homes. None of this made much sense. Supposedly this ship was one of the first assets to be lost when the z-poc hit. But if that were the case, we should be dealing with shufflers, and shufflers were somehow our ally against the reavers; we’d seen them actively attacking. But nothing here led me to believe we might run across even one of the slow walkers.
“Tommy, you’re on point. Get us up top.” We’d gone roughly twenty feet and had moved into a stairwell. I was the last in when the claymore went off. Could hear the pellets smashing against the hull, and it sounded like being stuck in a car during a brief but hellacious hailstorm. Tommy began to move a little faster, as if the detonation signaled the start of the conflict. I appreciated the fact that he wanted nothing to do with it. Grimm was hurting; could hear him wincing with every step. With his goggles gone, he was virtually blind, completely reliant on Winters and Kirby for his continued safety. There wasn’t a chance in hell that either man would leave him, but to be that dependent on others is extremely undesirable in a war zone. Climbed up two flights when Tommy held up a raised fist. We all heard the sound of the door open below.
“Found you,” rasped up. If the voice hadn’t been on the higher register, making me believe it had once belonged to a female, I would have said it was Dewey.
“Rose,” I whispered with urgency.
“On it.” She had an explosive in her hand. “When, sir?”
I waited until I could hear multiple footfalls. “Now would be good.”
“Move, Tommy!” I urged once the fuse was lit and she dropped it. I don’t know if her fuses were getting shorter or we were moving slower, but we hadn’t gone up more than half a flight when a bright fireball surged up the center of the stairwell. The heat so intense, anything plastic began to melt. The smell was better than that of the barbecued zombies that came with the updraft, but far from comforting. The software in my night vision had not been sufficient to thoroughly dampen the glare, all I could see in my limited field of vision was a blotch, looked a lot like the Eye of Sauron. I could hear my platoon running up the stairs—couldn’t see them—but I followed. It was quite possible I was the only one not bright enough to have turned away from the blast. Gunfire erupted ahead of me, my rifle as useless as a bottle opener in a canning factory. And not the kind with the pointy edge, either, but the looped type that fits around the neck of the bottle and pries the cap off. A hand reached out and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me out of the stairwell.
“You all right, sir?” Stenzel asked.
“Can’t see. What’s going on?”
“Reavers.”
“Shit. Where are we and where’re we going?” She had my elbow in her hand as we ran.
“Sub-deck, right under the top, and anywhere else.”
Rifle fire sounded behind us; I hadn’t even realized we’d passed anyone. My internal clock had ticked off about a half minute since I’d tried to burn out my retinas. Shouldn’t be more than another minute before I could see something besides The Blob from Chuck Russell’s remake of the same name.
> “Oh, thank god,” Stenzel said between footfalls. “There’s natural light, sir.”
I reached up and turned the goggles off before flipping them to rest atop my helmet. For the next ten seconds, it was worse. My heart quickened as panic started to spread its cancerous roots. Light leaked in around the edges of the starburst, then finally the impediment began to shrink. Up ahead, Rose was laying out some mines. We were in a large open area, the staging area for the aircraft, and there were more than a few of those we had to run around.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked Rose when we got on the safe side of the explosive. Always makes me happy when I realize I’m not going to get shredded like pizza cheese.
“No time, sir.” She motioned with her head to behind us, never taking her eyes off of what her fingers were rapidly doing.
I turned to look at a fleeing Tommy, Gary, and BT, in what could only be considered a nightmarish scene. Reavers and speeders were in pursuit. I got down on one knee; Stenzel remained standing. She fired. A reaver spun out violently, colliding with the landing gear of a Warthog. Oh what I wouldn’t have done to have that A10 firepower at my fingertips at that very moment. With the specially coated bullets we had, I wasn’t concerned with headshots, just placing our custom rounds into the body of anything that threatened my squad. Stenzel, on the other hand, was taking this attack as a personal insult and was making sure that heads were not-so-neatly removed from their bodies. She was using a much meatier .308 round, and the results were ruinous for those unfortunate enough to catch one.
“We need to leave.” Rose had stood and was running back with a line.
“Stenzel, go!” I ordered.