“But if you could…” Shaina began.
Furiously, Jenn kicked a spray of rocks from the roof. “But I can’t!” She scooped up a handful of the white rocks and was close to hurling them into the woman’s face. Like a child, Shaina cringed from her anger. Seeing her fear killed the fury roiling inside Jenn’s heart. There’s going to be enough fear without me making it worse, she thought. “I’m sorry, Shaina.”
The stick-thin girl smiled through her tears. It was the saddest thing Jenn had ever seen. Shaina didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. She only wanted to be happy. Jenn showed her the rocks. “If I could, I’d turn these into ships and we’d be safe.” She threw the rocks high in the air. At the top of their arc, they were like the stars, small and sparkling against a black background, but as they fell and passed in front of Jenn, they blurred.
They should have remained white against a dark background but instead they were white on white.
“What?” Jenn whispered, seeing what the white background was. There were ships—white ones with great silken sails—forging across the bay. They were Guardian ships, she realized in that instant. How did they get past the bridge?
Just as this thought crossed her mind, the rocks she had thrown in the air rattled as they struck the stones at the base of the prison wall, and as they did, there came an answering rattle: the distant pop, pop, pop of rifle fire. Her head swung to the Golden Gate Bridge where a battle was even then erupting on the south end.
“Did you do that?” Shaina asked, as she stared in awe at the fifteen ships.
She didn’t see Jenn shaking her head without conviction. What she was seeing was impossible. The Guardian fleet was heading northeast. If they had somehow slipped beneath the bridge, they would’ve been heading straight east to join the battle. How did they get into the bay at all?
The answer lay in Knights Sergeant Troy Holt’s audacious plan to gain access to the bay by land. Earlier that day he and sixty others had trekked to every marina within twenty-five miles, collecting boat trailers that could handle fifty-foot long ships. These were exceedingly rare. Another group had prepared the ships for travel, which meant removing the sails and dismasting them. A third group picked out the best route through a trashed-out city that still bore the scars from a major earthquake. A fourth group spent the day ringing bells, banging drums and running for their lives as they tried to shift as many zombies as they could out of the city. And the final group made preparations to attack the southern ramps to the bridge.
It was a long dangerous day for everyone, and the night was expected to be twice as bad.
As soon as the sun had set, the Guardians went into action, hauling the ships out of the water and heaving them through the southern stretch of the city. It was no easy task as the lightest of their boats came in at twelve tons. No one complained and no one even considered pausing for a break. When they had crossed over the peninsula and reached the bay, their labors doubled. The ships had to be made sailable in record time.
Although the Guardians weren’t the most imaginative sailors, they worked tirelessly until the masts were raised and the sails were roped into place. Once they were done they paused only for a quick prayer and to split into two teams: one to take the bridge, the other to throw themselves at the remaining Corsair ships, no matter the cost.
Troy was put in command of the second group and chose the forty-eight foot Lamb of God as his flagship. It was neither the biggest nor the flashiest of their ships, but its captain was feverish with pneumonia and Troy saw no need to displace another captain. The Lamb was a fine ship and a nifty little sailor. It had been brand spanking new on the day the first zombie arrived in the US and still sparkled. Its winch and pulley steering system made running the ship a breeze and Troy found himself with little to do as they ran first northwest as close to the wind as they could.
With the battle raging, Troy threw caution to the wind and charged through the uncharted waters at breakneck speed. When he finally skirted Telegraph Hill and shot into the northern part of the bay, he was shocked to see the fires raging across the water, the wall of smoke to the east, the carcasses of ships drifting on the swell—and where was the ugly barge they called the Floating Fortress?
“What is all that?” one of his Guardians asked, parroting his thoughts. It was all that remained of the two fleets.
Gunfire to their left showed that there were still ships left to fight. Instead of attempting to “over command” Troy simply said to his captains, “Go at them in twos and don’t stop firing until they beg for mercy.”
This had barely spread to the last of the fifteen ships when firing broke out on the approach to the bridge. Prayers were whispered across the fleet. It was assumed that the Guardians tasked with retaking the bridge would have the harder time of it, and they might have except that the seventy Corsairs weren’t in their painfully dug bunkers as expected. Instead, they were lined up along the far edge of the onramp watching the sea battle.
Having left their weapons in the bunkers, most of them weren’t even properly armed. The Guardians were on them in a flash and overwhelmed them so quickly that it was hard to call it a real battle. It sure made the Corsairs along the center of the span wonder if it hadn’t been just a few zombies that had caused the shooting.
They too were watching the sea battle and were only just noticing the new fleet. Chills broke out at the sight of the majestic white sails. To them the Guardian fleet looked less like ships as they did a flock of huge avenging angels and there was no pretending what their presence would do to the fate of the battle.
“To the south! Look to the south!” they screamed, jumping up and down, pointing as the white ships raced on. The Corsairs on the black ships were oblivious to the danger coming up from behind. They were night blind because of the fires around them, and they had tunnel vision as they saw only victory. They thought the cries from the bridge were their friends cheering them on.
Neither group of Corsairs was aware of the danger until it was too late. On the bridge, the Guardians outnumbered their opponents six to one, and with the element of surprise thrown in, the fight was over just as fast as the last.
The white fleet had much stiffer resistance to overcome, but when they saw the bodies of their fellow Guardians floating in the water, their faces so riddled with bullets as to be unrecognizable, an unbridled fury swept them. They charged down on the Corsairs without regard to their own safety. In some cases captains rammed the Corsairs and boarded their ships from two sides, killing anyone who didn’t immediately throw down their rifles.
Troy was not immune to the rage. When he saw the Harbinger, with the Queen’s flag dragging through the water from the broken mast, being blasted unnecessarily, he went to the wheel and aimed the Lamb of God squarely between the twin hulls of the catamaran.
“We’re boarding her,” he told his crew. No other instructions were needed. The black look was all that was needed to let the men know they wouldn’t be taking prisoners. In seconds, they were on top of the ship, smashing up under the raised platform that sat between the twin hulls. The shock of the collision knocked the six Corsairs on board off their feet.
In his blood fury, Troy bordered the cat with spear in hand instead of his M4, and went straight for the Corsair commander. The man was just climbing to his feet, his eyes filled with wicked malice, his mouth spitting foul words one after another. He saw Troy coming and leveled his rifle just as the Guardians came over the rail with roars of anger. The spear was long and not the quickest of weapons. Troy was only then bringing it to bear when the captain fired. The bullet kissed off the outer edge of Troy’s armored vest and then cut a velvet-red line along the inner aspect of his arm. Blood ran like water from the wound.
The Corsair lined up a second shot, but it never came. A minute before, he had been gleefully firing his gun into the stricken Harbinger. Twenty-nine times in fact and now his gun was as empty as his heart.
Troy filled that heart with twic
e-blessed steel. He pinned the man to the mast even as his Guardians swept the ship with bullets. In seconds, the only Corsairs left on the cat were dead Corsairs. Troy slashed down the black flag to cheers that soon were taken up by his entire fleet. The few Corsair ships left that hadn’t been targeted in the first attack were trying to flee. Only three made it to the coast of Angel Island.
By then the Guardians on the bridge had thrown the Corsairs back from the north end of the bridge. This area had been stripped of defenders earlier in the night and the fight was, once again, easier than expected. The bridge had been won, but not secured. The Guardian’s lacked the manpower to assault Battery Spencer on the Marin Headlands which overlooked the bridge.
The Corsairs did not counterattack as they should have when three-hundred of them could have destroyed thirty knights. They were stricken with fear as the Queen’s forces appeared victorious everywhere. The moment soon passed and the Guardian commander ordered fires to be lit along the bridge to show the bay that it had been taken back. An immense explosion of joy swept Alcatraz from one end of the rock to the other. The cheering could be heard on the bridge as well as on Angel Island where the Corsairs were just realizing that they had lost everything.
Only two people on Alcatraz were silent. The first was Denise Woodruff, who was nervously pinning her hair back with shaking hands. She knew the butcher’s bill was going to be long, and she hated what lay in store for her and the poor wounded soldiers. There would be too many, and she had almost nothing in the way of supplies left. Twine and yarn would have to take the place of proper surgical thread. IV tubing would replace actual drainage devices, and torn up boiled sheets would have to make do instead of real bandages.
The Queen was the other. She dreaded the moment the Harbinger was towed across the bay and tied to the dock to keep her from sinking. Mike Gunter would be on her, perhaps wrapped in a blanket from head to toe, or maybe still sitting on the captain’s chair, his head flopped to one side and his blood an inch deep across the deck.
Few people knew that Mike had been gut sho. For those that didn’t, they couldn’t understand their queen’s reluctance to celebrate. This was especially true in light of the fact that it was common knowledge that it was she who had won the battle almost singlehandedly. The news of the victory sped around the island in exactly one minute. The fact that Jenn had “conjured” the Guardian fleet from a handful of rocks took four minutes longer.
Although there had been twenty-three witnesses to the fortuitously timed rock tossing, nearly a hundred people swore on their mother’s graves that they had seen it first hand. And they all swore that Jenn had said, “I can turn these rocks into ships.”
Jenn caught only snatches of the silly rumor and could not find the energy to care. She watched as the white fleet sailed back and forth, rescuing sailors from the cold water of the bay and saving those ships that could be salvaged. Only gradually did the ships come in and, as she and Denise had feared, they were filled with wounded men. Many of them were Corsairs.
Coldly, Jenn ordered them to be laid in the barren prison cells. “We’ll get to them, if we have time,” she said. Just then, her heart was a black hunk of coal.
As much as she wished she could hang around the dock and wait for word about her love, she could not leave Denise alone to handle the wounded. The two went right to work, doing what little their incomplete training would allow. Sixteen volunteers helped to mop up blood, hold lanterns and remove corpses from the operating room. Many died while waiting their turn, but enough died on the operating tables that Denise cried as she worked.
Jenn held back. She didn’t dare cry, knowing that if she started she might never stop. As she worked her anxiety mounted with every new patient brought into the operating room. Each time she expected it to be Mike. Each time it wasn’t, she didn’t know whether to be happy or crushed.
When he was finally brought in, there was no need to ask who it was beneath the blood. The room went stone quiet. Even the dying held in their moans out of respect for their captain. The dying knew who had truly won the day and it hadn’t been either the Queen or Knights Sergeant Troy Holt. It had been Mike and those that had died with him. They had sacrificed everything for the chance at winning.
“Through there,” Jenn ordered, pointing at the other door in the room. “Denise, take over here.” To leave a patient biting on a leather strap in the middle of surgery was one of the worst things a person could do. Perhaps the only thing worse was hoarding supplies for personal reasons, and she had done that, too. The day before the battle she had Shaina create a secondary operating room, one that was designed for only one patient: Mike Gunter.
She’d had a feeling it would be needed even as she sent him off.
Jenn lit the lanterns and stared at her love’s broken body. He was alive, but only barely. “Someone fetch Donna. Everyone else out.” She didn’t need an audience as she cut away his clothing. Right away she saw that he was going to die. He had been shot four times; three were through flesh and muscle and were not life threatening. The fourth went through the right side of his abdomen and out his lower back.
“No,” she whispered. His liver had been nicked and two loops of intestines holed, but it was his right kidney that scared her. About a quarter of it was missing. She had no idea how to fix a kidney. When Donna arrived, Jenn pointed to a drawer of a cabinet. “Jillybean’s med books. See what it says about fixing a kidney.”
While Donna did that, Jenn put in two large bore IVs and then went to work on the lesser gunshot wounds. Small bleeders were cauterized, large ones tied off. The wounds were cleaned and bandaged one after another, and still Donna pored over the books.
Finally, she looked up in distress. “These books, they’re not written normal. They don’t make any sense. It doesn’t really say…say anything that I understand. Look.”
The sixteen-year-old queen gazed at the diagrams and the long foreign looking words in growing fear. “What about surgery? What does it say about that?”
It said too much and none of it made sense. Even Jillybean’s handwritten notes in the margins only made things more bewildering. In the end, Jenn was forced to open Mike up and sew here and there whenever she saw a torn artery or vein, knowing that she really wasn’t saving his life; she was only prolonging it.
It might have been kinder for both of them if she simply snipped his exposed descending aorta.
When she finally left his bedside, it was full light out. Denise was still struggling to catch up and the line of patients seemed just as long as it had when Mike had been brought in. “I need just a moment,” she told Denise and then left to feel the sun on her face.
The air was strangely quiet and the island had a hangover feel to it. Few people were up and about. Those that passed her either gawked in awe or knelt swiftly and told her how great she was. She didn’t feel great. She felt low in spirits, exhausted to the core and convinced Mike would die if he didn’t get real help. The same was true with dozens of others.
Without guidance, her feet followed their usual route to the top of the prison. At once her eyes were drawn to the Golden Gate where her flag was proudly flying from both towers. Off to the north were the three Corsair ships. They were shuttling men from Angel Island. It was being abandoned. She bent over the telescope and saw long lines of Corsairs heading north. Leaderless, they could think of nothing better to do than to walk back home.
Closer, practically beneath her feet, were the docks. She counted forty-six ships almost evenly divided between black and white.
“How did so many survive?” she murmured. Some had only barely survived the battle. At least ten of them were being kept from sinking only because they were lashed to the dock and were being pumped dry by prisoners. The Harbinger was perhaps the worst of these. The ship looked as bad off as her captain.
“I want her saved,” she told the closest person. “I want new sails and rope and whatever she needs. She’s a good ship.”
It wa
s only when she saw the Bishop’s outthrust belly out of the corner of her eye that she realized who she’d been talking to. “Yes, she is,” he said. His voice was rough and his eyes sat in deep fleshy bags. “You like her because of her name I suppose?” She frowned and he guessed correctly that she didn’t know the meaning of the word. “A harbinger is a portent of things to come. An omen in other words.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s a good name.” And if she could be fixed could her captain be as well? “Yes,” she said again, this time answering her own question. Mike could be fixed. That was a fact in her mind. Not fixed by her, no that had been made evident. But he could be saved by only one person in a thousand miles—the “Girl Doctor.” Jillybean could do it.
“May I ask a favor of you, your Excellence? In one hour can you wake everyone on the island? I’m going to need all hands on deck. Those ships will need to be ready to sail by tomorrow.”
He shot her a look of surprise. “Why would you have a need of a fleet so soon after a great victory?” He paused only half a breath before going on. “Your people are tired. They’re entitled to a…”
“Many of my people are grievously hurt,” she said, speaking right over him. “Over a hundred by my last count. Most of them will die no matter what I do. But there is one person who can save them.”
“Ah, yes. Her.” His chins jiggled as he went up and down on toes. “You’ve always had an amazing faith in the old queen. Justified or not, the real question should be, why on earth would the Black Captain give her up? Forty ships, even packed with men wouldn’t scare him.”
He was right. Forty ships might mean nothing to him, if he wasn’t also dealing with Bainbridge. “Perhaps, but it also might be the final straw that breaks his back. It’s my guess that when he sees that big catamaran with my white and gold flag flying over it, leading forty ships straight into his harbor, he’ll be plenty scared. It’ll be all the proof I need to show that I’ve destroyed his fleet and crushed his army.”
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 48
