“Navy zero-two, this is Nimitz,” he called.
Static answered.
“Nimitz calling Navy zero-two. Evan, come in.”
No one answered, and the blip did not reappear on the screen. He reached for the intercom phone and made an all-ship announcement for Father Xavier to call communications immediately. He was going to have to report the unthinkable to the skipper.
Evan and Gourd had crashed.
HERE THERE BE MONSTERS
THIRTEEN
January 12—Nimitz
They were gathered in the officer’s mess, the new arrivals kept separated from the main mess hall used by the residents of Nimitz. Big Jerry had already brought out coffee, along with a hot chocolate for the toddler, and was now in back putting together soup and sandwiches. The refugees sat at two tables, wrapped in dry Navy blankets, drinking their coffee quietly. Xavier and Chief Liebs had pulled chairs close to them, while Mercy stood at a pair of double doors with her assault rifle slung around her neck. Calvin sat on a table midway toward the other entrance, watching them closely with his rifle across his knees.
“We tried to help people when it started,” Charlie said. “We really did. But we had so few supplies, and there were so many people at the water’s edge, everywhere we went.” He looked down, shaking his head slowly. “We couldn’t save them all. And we didn’t find out about the bites until later, after we brought someone aboard.” He looked up at Xavier. “We lost half the crew. They just kept turning, and we . . . we had to . . .” He looked down again. “They were our friends.”
The priest watched him. Spending most of his life in poverty and crime-stricken areas, where everyone always seemed to be trying to get over on the other person, he thought he had developed a good nose for deception. He wasn’t seeing any of that here, just a man reliving painful memories. But he had been fooled before.
“Tell me about this mutiny,” Xavier said.
Charlie nodded. “We were out there for months, and putting in to shore to find supplies was dangerous, worse every time we tried it. We lost more people, and after a while we didn’t dare go ashore anymore.” He sipped his coffee. “The food and water ran out; people were hungry, angry, blaming the captain. A young female officer started it, started the mutiny. She promised the crew she would find them food. Lots of people sided with her, people with weapons.”
“And you?” the priest asked.
“We tried to stop them,” Charlie said, “tried to talk them out of it. The female officer killed one of us, a ship’s cook, just a kid. She did it to make a point. Then the fighting started.”
Not far away, Calvin listened closely, watching for signs that the man was lying or holding something back. Chief Liebs was watching closely as well.
“What happened?” Xavier prodded.
Charlie told them it happened fast, and was so confusing that he wasn’t sure of all the details. There was a lot of gunfire, people running and screaming. He said he saw the female officer shoot down the captain, also a woman. “I killed a man,” he said softly, looking up at the priest. “He was guarding the launch, and I shot him. He was part of the mutiny, but he was also a friend. I didn’t have a choice.” He took a deep breath and gestured at the others. “We took the launch and got out, trying to get away from the ship. Someone shot at us, but they missed.”
“We heard an explosion,” one of the women added, saying her name was Ava. She was the one holding the toddler, who despite the blanket and hot cocoa continued to squirm and whimper. “Something on board blew up,” she said.
Charlie bobbed his head. “Probably the magazine. We saw the ship break in half, and then it sank fast.”
Xavier looked at Chief Liebs for confirmation. The chief shrugged. “A magazine explosion could do that.”
“We . . . we didn’t go back to look for survivors,” Charlie said. “We should have, I know, but we were afraid they might be mutineers and would take away our boat. We just kept going.”
“And then you saw us?” Xavier asked.
“We saw your helicopter first. It was taking off. That’s when we knew people were still on this thing.” He looked into the priest’s eyes. “Please let us stay.”
Xavier pursed his lips. “It will have to be discussed. But you’re safe here for now.”
A speaker on the wall of the officer’s mess urgently requested that Father Xavier call the communications center.
“Father?” said Charlie. “You’re a priest?”
Xavier nodded as he rose and went to a phone. Liebs looked at Charlie. “What’s your rate and rating?”
“Petty officer third, bosun’s mate,” Charlie replied. “You’re Navy, right?”
Liebs nodded. “Chief gunner’s mate.”
Charlie extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Guns.” The use of the nickname made Liebs smile a bit and confirmed that if nothing else was true, the man was a seaman as he claimed, albeit a bit old to only be a petty officer third. Still, who was he to judge another man’s career movement?
The double doors closest to Calvin pushed open, and there stood Tommy in his scrubs, wearing a backpack and holding a pistol. The orphan girl Wind was close at his side. The orderly saw Xavier talking on a phone, saw Calvin, and waved them over frantically.
Xavier hung up the handset, frowning deeply, and moved to speak with Tommy. Calvin joined them a moment later, and Xavier said, “Chief, I need you too.” Liebs gave the new arrivals a long look. They were heads down, warming up and drinking their coffee, so he went to the three men.
“Comm reports that Evan’s chopper is down,” Xavier said, keeping his voice low. “He made a distress call, then went off the radar somewhere over Richmond.”
Liebs cursed. “Did he activate his beacon?” the gunner’s mate asked. “If so, we can find him. I’ll go pick him up in a RIB boat.”
“I don’t even know if he’s alive,” Xavier said. “Can you handle this?”
The chief nodded and pushed through the doors, hurrying down the passage and taking Wind with him. This was no place for children right now.
The priest turned and gripped Calvin by both shoulders. “Michael is lost somewhere in the bow. Rosa has gone looking for him.” That was as far as he got. Calvin swore, pulled free of the priest’s hold, and shoved through the doors yelling, “Where are they, Tommy?”
“Cal, wait!” Xavier and Tommy both went after him.
• • •
I should get a fucking Academy Award, Chick thought, standing as soon as the men were out of the room. “Getting more coffee,” he called, waving his mug at Mercy. Standing at the far doors, the woman began lifting her assault rifle.
Ava, the woman who had spoken to back up Chick’s story, stood as well, still carrying the little boy and bouncing him as he continued to whimper. She walked toward Mercy.
“Sit down,” Mercy ordered, swinging her rifle barrel toward the woman.
“You’re going to scare him,” Ava said, still walking toward her. “We’re about to have a potty emergency. I need to take him to the bathroom.”
Mercy’s rifle wavered, and she looked back to the leader of the refugees. He had already disappeared into the back with his empty coffee mug.
“Please, he really needs to go,” Ava said, stopping in front of Mercy. “Where’s the bathroom?” Her right hand slipped under the blanket and crawled up under the boy’s shirt to where she had taped an object to his back. The boy cried and tried to twist out of her arms. “Shh,” Ava said, her hand closing on it. The crew of Nimitz had searched all of the adults, but nobody searched children.
• • •
Big Jerry looked up from a cutting board, where he was spreading mayonnaise on slices of bread. A package of ham slices was open beside him. Chick smiled as he approached, waving the empty mug. “Need a refill,” he said.
The former stand-up co
mic smiled back. “Help yourself.” He gestured to a big urn on a countertop.
“You folks have been really good to us,” Charlie said, turning toward the counter but ignoring the coffee urn. Instead he plucked a butcher knife off a magnetic strip on the wall. Then he walked to the table, holding the knife low at his side. “That looks tasty,” he said.
Jerry smiled again, then noticed the still-empty coffee mug in the man’s hand. “You didn’t get—”
Chick’s right hand came in fast, and the big comic grunted, eyes going wide. “Hey . . .” he gasped, eyelids fluttering. Their faces almost touching, Chick gave him a grin.
• • •
Xavier caught hold of Calvin’s arm in the hallway, his strength bringing the man to a halt. “Calvin, wait.”
The aging hippie made a snarling sound and jerked his arm free. “Tommy, where are they?” he demanded again.
“They’re in the bow,” Xavier answered for him. “If you run off alone it’s going to make things worse.”
“That’s my son.”
“And we’re going to find him,” the priest said. “But we need to be smart, and go with a group.” He looked at the man, at the new anguish stamped on his friend’s face. “Maya needs to know about Evan. You should be the one to tell her.”
Calvin’s expression fell further as this new realization hit him. First Michael, and now his daughter would have to be told that her man, the father of her unborn child, might be dead. “Oh, God,” Calvin whispered.
“We’ll get through this,” Xavier said. “I’ll stay with you. We’ll tell Maya, then we’ll go get Michael and Rosa.”
The hippie sagged against the bulkhead and put his face in his hands.
“Tommy,” Xavier said, “go back into the officer’s mess for a bit so Mercy isn’t alone in there, okay?”
The orderly headed back down the hall.
“We’re going to find him, Cal,” Xavier said, taking his friend’s shoulders once again. “Rosa might already have him. You know her, you know she’d give her life to protect him.”
Calvin nodded, but when he took his hands away from his face, his eyes were filled with tears.
“Father . . .” Tommy’s voice came from the mess hall doors, and Xavier turned to see the man standing there, his face pale. Xavier and Calvin went to him, and when they entered the room they saw that all the refugees were gone.
Except for the toddler, who was sitting abandoned on the floor and crying.
Mercy was crumpled against the wall in a pool of her own blood, next to the far doors. Her throat had been neatly slit by a straight razor, and her weapons were gone.
“Dear God,” Xavier said, going to the child as Calvin knelt beside a woman he had known for years. Tommy just stared in shock. Then a moan came from the galley, and Big Jerry stumbled through swinging doors. He lurched into the mess hall, moving awkwardly in the knee brace. There was no color left to his eyes, and his apron was stained red. The worst of it was spreading from the point where a butcher’s knife protruded, buried in his heart up to the handle.
Jerry made a croaking noise and started toward Xavier and the crying child. With a sob, Tommy used his pistol to put their friend to rest. By the doors, Mercy shifted and opened eyes that were cataract blue. Calvin used his big knife to finish her with a single, sharp thrust, letting out a sob of his own.
Calvin pointed the bloody knife at the priest. “You did this.”
That was when the aircraft carrier began to tremble.
FOURTEEN
It was a foreshock, nothing compared to what was to come, but it was as strong as the quake that hit the Bay Area in 1989. Though it lasted only eleven seconds, its force was tremendous, and its violent tremor traveled up into Nimitz from the point where the bow of the ship was mired in silt at western Oakland’s shallows. Positioned a little over a mile from the earthquake’s epicenter deep under Alameda, the warship began to shudder. Everything shook, and the vibration swept through the ship. Anything not secured was thrown about, and many things that had been secured were shaken loose.
The foreshock was powerful enough to disrupt the silt bed that had held Nimitz to the bottom for so many months, and with a groan of steel grating against underwater rock, the current pushed the warship’s bow loose and the entire vessel drifted sideways. It was at last free of the bottom, with steadily deepening water beneath its keel. Once again seawater poured in through the gashes in its hull, finding its way into forward compartments, and within minutes the aircraft carrier picked up another degree of list to the left and forward.
Untethered, and now at the mercy of the current, Nimitz began to move.
• • •
The dead were coming, thumping down the ladderway behind Michael as he ran down a dark passageway, gripping his hammer tightly, trying to keep the flashlight beam in front of him. His sneakers splashed through several inches of water, and each time he came down on his right foot, the twisted ankle caused a flare of pain that made him bite the inside of his cheek.
A short corridor to his left led to a hatch with FORWARD BERTHING 4.07 stenciled above it. Milky eyes and a snarl waited at the hatch opening, and Michael kept going. Another short hall to his left, another berthing compartment from which came the sound of splashing. He let out a soft wail and ran on, the water to his shins now and slowing him down. From behind came a chorus of groans.
He turned right, then left at an intersection. The glare of his flashlight picked out a bloated, pale thing in a blue uniform hunching toward him, glazed yellow eyes reflecting the light. He backtracked and crossed the intersection, coming to a hatch marked HANDLING GEAR. Michael worked the handle and pushed through into a large chamber, where his light revealed seemingly endless coils of rope hanging on the walls, orange buoys, chains hung from hooks and still more rope coiled on the floor, these lengths thicker than one of his legs. There was water in here too, and he splashed through it, hurrying across the chamber, looking for a place to hide.
A figure moved awkwardly through the hatch behind him, its groan echoing in the room. Michael didn’t dare to turn and put his light on it. He needed to find a way out, another hatch, a passageway, a ladder that would lead him up.
Something to his right rose from six inches of water, a woman with gray-and-white mottled skin, fluid drooling from her open lips. The flesh was sloughing off her fingers as she held on to a rope locker to help her stand. She gnashed her teeth.
Michael let out a cry and bolted left, away from her.
It was a stairway down to a forward magazine, an open rectangle set in the floor, just like the one he had used to get down to this deck. The space below was completely flooded, and the stairway opening was concealed beneath the six inches of seawater in the compartment. Michael ran into the opening without realizing where he was stepping, and plunged beneath the surface. His flashlight flew away, and he lost his grip on the hammer as he sank.
A pair of bloated corpses moved toward the opening from the chamber above.
• • •
Rosa was following the screams and came to a passageway with a pair of limping corpses in uniform heading for an open hatch on the left. She raised the M4 and fired, five times, six, seven before the pair went down. Without hesitating, she ducked through the open hatch and into a workshop.
Snarls echoed from an opening to her right, and she advanced with her light. Beyond was a second workshop, with another open hatch at the far side. A figure appeared in the light, a withered thing wearing a ball cap, and she shot at it, bullets sparking off the steel hatch frame before one found its mark. Shadowy movement came from the room beyond, and she went in.
It was a third workshop, one with countless lengths of pipe stacked and tied off against a bulkhead to the left. There were two corpses in here, both rotting and giving off a putrid stench, heading for a rectangular stairwell opening in the floor. Ros
a fired again, the muzzle flash blinding in the black space, each echoing shot making her ears ring, the whine of a ricochet passing close by her head. Both creatures went down.
Michael had been here, she was sure of it. That was what had stirred up the dead. Or had it been her earlier rifle fire? No, she told herself, shaking her head as she switched out the M4’s magazine for one that was fully loaded. Follow your instinct. The dead were heading for that stairwell for a reason. She did too.
Descending softly and cautiously, Rosa led with the light and the rifle muzzle, praying Michael wouldn’t suddenly appear in its glare. She was wired so tight she might trigger a nervous shot into the boy without thinking. Midway down the steep risers, Rosa crouched and used her light to see what was below. There was a flooded passageway leading forward, ripples making her beam of light flicker on the surface. She raised the light and put it deeper into the corridor, picking out the backs of a pair of figures about twenty yards off, shadowy at the edge of her beam, facing away from her. They weren’t moving, simply standing with their arms limp at their sides, heads tilted back and to the right.
They’re scenting for Michael. Her hand clenched the rifle’s pistol grip and she continued down. She was still on the stairs when the tremor rumbled up through her legs, growing in intensity, and then she was shaken right off her feet, thrown to the bottom and landing painfully in several inches of water, her flashlight bouncing away, throwing the area into pale shadows. A tremendous crash of metal came from above, and for a terrifying second she thought the ship was folding in on her. She saw a tangle of long, dark shapes tumbling down the stairway—pipes that had broken loose from the compartment above—and one shot at her like a medieval battering ram.
The medic jerked aside and tried to roll out of its path, sparing her body but unable to prevent the edge of the pipe from clipping her forehead. There was a flash of white and pain, and Rosa collapsed in the water, her unconscious form sagging against a length of pipe that had come to rest against her side.
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