Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  They moored their SRP inside the shelter, across from the much larger craft, and made their way up a wooden stairway before moving out onto the station’s grounds. Amy led with her pistol in hand, the four men behind her armed with M4s. Normally a boarding party would have been fully outfitted with tactical gear and helmets, but that equipment hadn’t yet been delivered to Joshua James. She hoped they might find some here but knew it was a long shot. It was usually the cutters that did the boarding. This station’s mission was probably more attuned to lifesaving and fisheries protection.

  It started to rain as the team moved down a sidewalk toward the station’s single building, a spread-out, one-story structure painted white, with a three-story lookout position that resembled a traffic control tower. Overgrown lawns extended to either side as the group closed on the building, stacked up in a single-file, tactical formation. Amy’s heart was thumping as she tried to remember her training.

  “Seven-five-four, this is Team One,” she said into the radio mic clipped to her shoulder. “Mooring is secure. We are advancing on main building from the northeast.”

  “Copy, Team One,” came the reply.

  As they reached the building’s corner, Amy stopped and took her bearings. To her right was a short open lawn bordered by the harbor on two sides. Out to her left she could see the access road leading to the station, and the entrance to an RV park that appeared filled to capacity with motor homes, cars, and recreational trailers. The corpse of a teenager in cutoffs walked stiffly across the road and disappeared behind a big brown-and-white motor coach. Amy cautioned herself that the presence of so many RVs meant either lots of frightened, desperate refugees hiding within or lots of dead things trying to get out.

  To her immediate front was the lawn between the station and a parking area crowded with vehicles. A black Charger with Brookings Police on the door sat at the curb. Nothing moved, the breeze coming off the Pacific making the colors snap atop the flagpole out front.

  “Team One advancing to main building,” Amy reported quietly. She led her men past the building toward the entrance, weapons aimed at the windows they passed, and then they were facing double glass doors. “Breaching,” she told her radio mic, and they went into an empty, tiled lobby.

  One of the expectations of a Coast Guard officer was to be able to lead boarding parties and conduct searches, going aboard everything from small pleasure craft to the big oceangoing freighters and container ships. The purpose of the boarding was almost always to look for migrants and contraband: drugs and illegal arms. Occasionally intelligence would direct them to a counterterrorism op. Amy had learned how to move a team through the close quarters of a ship, a maze with plenty of places for bad guys to hide, ever aware that someone might pop out of a hatch with an AK-47 on full auto. The training had been both intense and fun, but it had been training. This was her first live mission, and she had to watch out not only for armed aggressors, but also for things that bit. Dead things. Her heart hadn’t slowed, and now she was sweating.

  She motioned her team down a corridor to the left, and they began a room-to-room search. It smelled bad in here. Rotten. They found a mess hall with a kitchen—which smelled a different sort of rotten—small offices and a meeting room, separate berthing for both men and women, as well as heads and showers. Rusty blood smears in one shower told them someone had died in here but had since moved on. Otherwise, there were no other signs of violence in this half of the building, and no occupants.

  Amy checked in over the radio and took her team back to the lobby, then started toward the other side of the station. More offices, a briefing room, storage for the gear needed aboard rescue craft—life jackets, rope, rafts, and boat safety equipment—and then they came upon the small armory. It was open and empty except for a pump shotgun and several boxes of shells. It looked to the young officer as if the coasties who had gone out in the station’s other vessels had armed up before leaving. She understood now why the place was so empty.

  “Seaman,” she said, snapping her fingers to get a bosun’s mate’s attention. “Take that weapon and the ammunition.” The young man immediately slung the shotgun across his back and stuffed the boxes of shells into a nylon satchel. Amy keyed her mic. “Armory secure and empty.”

  At the back of the team, one of the Klondike men was watching the rear as he had been trained and saw a man in dark trousers, dress shoes, and a light blue shirt covered in service ribbons come through a doorway they had just passed. He wore short gray hair, and a pair of commander’s insignia was pinned to his collar. His shirt was darkened on one side, and a chunk of his neck was missing, blackened at the edges.

  “Ensign,” the seaman hissed, and the team pivoted as the corpse groaned and began a quick sidestep toward the bosun’s mate.

  “Engage!” Amy yelled, bringing up her pistol, but the crewman in front of her was quicker and triggered a three-round burst, hitting the dead man in the throat, jaw, and nose. The body dropped. “Stay in formation,” Amy ordered, moving to the bosun’s mate at the rear of the stack, grabbing him by the strap of his ammo harness.

  “You’re our rear security, and you engage on sight. Don’t hesitate!” Her voice was a tight growl.

  “Aye-aye,” he said, and nodded.

  Amy looked at him for a moment, then softened her expression and patted him on the shoulder. “We’re all tense.” Then she looked at the corpse and keyed her mic. “Seven-five-four, this is Team One. We just had contact with a Whiskey-Delta.” Her captain had decided that until something better came along, they would simply be called Whiskey-Delta for “walking dead,” while the living would be referred to as Limas. “It’s down, no casualties.” Then she noted, “I think we just took out the base commander.”

  Joshua James acknowledged, and Amy pressed forward. The only part of the station they hadn’t investigated was the lookout tower, and as soon as they opened the door at its base, which was a single communications room, they were hit by an oily, nauseating stench. Across the room, near a spiral metal staircase that led up into the tower, a bloated green Coast Guardsman turned and began trundling toward them. Its eyes were white with pinpoint pupils, and it was so swollen that its uniform had begun to split at the seams. Gases erupted from its body in a blatting sound as it lurched, and Amy thought for an instant that she could hear it sloshing.

  The seaman behind her, the same one who had shot the base commander, stepped past her and fired another burst. The creature exploded, painting the walls and equipment with a sticky green-and-black grease, and then the real smell hit them.

  Amy gagged, and the rifleman beside her vomited, joined two seconds later by one of his shipmates. The young ensign managed to keep it down for a moment, until she thought about the powdered scrambled eggs she’d had this morning. Her breakfast came up in a heave.

  In the center of the room, what was left of the green coastie flopped about and snapped its teeth, as something in the tower above started down the stairs and let out a long wail. Amy shot the exploded dead thing in the forehead, spat, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Let’s finish this,” she said, and started up the stairs to kill whatever she found.

  • • •

  While Team One was still entering the sheltered Coast Guard mooring, Chick’s crew motored up to the commercial docks, a high pier set in front of a warehouse. There were no vessels here now, and the SRP tied up at a low wooden walkway with a stairway at one end. The crewmen spotted movement among the barnacle-encrusted pilings and aimed their rifles into the shadows under the pier.

  Water sloshed against wood and concrete, causing a figure in a yellow rain slicker to bob up and down. The surf turned it over and they saw a picked-at, gray-white face with one colorless eye, mouth open and trying to gargle out a sound. The dead fisherman was caught on something, and one pale hand beat helplessly at the rising and falling water. A pair of crabs were locked onto the head and were busily din
ing on putrid flesh.

  “That’s fucking nasty, Chief,” one of the seamen in the launch said, aiming his rifle.

  Chick pushed the barrel aside. “Don’t waste the round. Let the sea have him.” He looked under the pier to the right and pointed. “You think that’s nasty?”

  The others peered into the shadows to where the chief was pointing. Wedged between a piling and a concrete retaining wall was the white carcass of an adult sea lion, also bobbing in the ebb and flow. It was covered in bites, and as they watched, gray arms broke the surface, hooked fingers digging into the rotting meat and pulling, heads and shoulders emerging as teeth chewed into the animal before sliding back down.

  The four men with Chick stared in revulsion, then looked at the surface of the water all around their launch. Chick laughed. “Keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times,” he said, then looked past his men, and his smile faded. Out at the marina to their north was a rough pier of earth and stone, separating it from the river. Chick saw no fewer than a dozen pale creatures trying to claw their way out of the water, hands unable to find a purchase on the slime-coated rocks, slipping and sinking only to emerge and try again.

  He looked at the water. How many are down there? Is that why this place looks so empty? They’re not really gone, they’re just below us. He pictured hundreds of town residents at the bottom of the harbor, trudging through silt and stumbling over mossy stones, tangled in a century’s worth of fishing line and long-forgotten lobster pots as fish and crabs picked them slowly apart.

  Chick gave an involuntary shudder, then ordered his men out of the launch and onto the wooden walkway. He organized a more relaxed line than the ordered stack Amy was using and led his men up the stairs.

  The rain arrived, casting a murky pall over the harbor as the team reached the top of the pier and moved along its length, looking down at their launch from above. A conveyor belt hung over the water like a long arm, something that could have been lowered to fishermen, who would feed their catch up the belt to be deposited in bins. Netting with orange and yellow floats was strung high on drying racks, and even months after the fishing had stopped, the odor of the place’s former industry clung to it.

  The warehouse facing the dock had two high garage doors, both capable of handling forklifts, both of them closed. A metal door, also closed, stood between them. Chick took the team to the end of the dock where a ramp descended to a boardwalk, which in turn ran the length of one side of the southern marina. Rows of canopies, some tattered by weather, lined the boardwalk, and colorful banners sagged overhead. Paintings and sculptures, racks of souvenir T-shirts, and tables covered in crafts stood out in the rain, and the planks were littered with dropped bicycles, straw hats, and canvas shoulder bags. One of the banners read, Welcome! Brookings Art Festival, August 11–18. Moored at the edge of the boardwalk and accessible by a gangplank was a replica of an eighteenth-century two-mast schooner. An arch over the walkway was decorated with the image of a parrot and the words Captain Scupper’s Party Cruises. Nothing was moving down on the ship’s deck, or along the length of the boardwalk.

  “Seven-five-four, Team Two,” Chick said into his radio, rainwater dripping from the bill of his ball cap. “We’ve reached the commercial dock, no contact. Going inside.”

  The single door between the garage bays was unlocked, and they went in single file, Chick in the lead with a small flashlight clicked into a holder beneath his rifle’s muzzle. The smell hit them at once, making everyone recoil. Two months’ worth of rancid snapper, crab, tuna, and shrimp assaulted their noses, and the men fought to keep from retching. One failed, and Chick had to clench his teeth to keep from doing the same. If there were Whiskey-Deltas in here, he thought, they’d never smell them over the spoiled fish.

  “Spread out, lights on,” he ordered, and the men fanned out to either side of the chief, switching on their own rifle-mounted flashlights and advancing slowly.

  The structure turned out to be three smaller warehouses connected one behind the other, with a small cannery at the back. They found loading bays and worktables, rows of hooks holding yellow overalls and jackets, coils of hose and grinders for fish waste. Rows of ice makers stood empty and silent. Chick spotted some warehouse racking stacked with pallets of cardboard boxes and led them to it. A quick inspection unveiled a stockpile of canned tuna, crab, and sardines.

  “Jackpot,” Chick said, grinning. He looked at his men and nodded, and they immediately began stuffing cans into cargo pockets. Chick peeled open a can of sardines, sucked the oil from one fish, and then began chewing greedily. Again he nodded at his men, who tore into cans of their own, stuffing their mouths and making happy groaning and smacking noises. A month and a half at half rations made this feel like a feast, and the senior chief, considered a heartless bastard at sea, was instantly elevated to hero status. Charlie watched them eat for a bit, grinning, then got them back online.

  Moving deeper into the warehouse, they came upon a creature in shorts and a T-shirt, bent over a rolling tub at the waist, its upper body inside shoving putrid fish heads and tails into its mouth. It was making a grunting sound similar to his men as they had feasted on canned fish. Charlie reached his rifle into the tub and tapped the barrel against its head. When the creature looked up with milky eyes and into the muzzle opening, Charlie pulled the trigger.

  He keyed his mic. “Team Two, contact. One Whiskey-Delta down, continuing sweep.”

  Now that he knew the opposition fed not only on the living but carrion as well, Charlie realized that this place would be a magnet for the dead. He cautioned his men to be extra watchful and was glad he did. They shot down three more corpses, all feeding on one thing or another, as they completed their sweep of the building. With each kill, his men seemed more confident, and Charlie did nothing to shatter their illusion or jar their short memories. That confidence was useful. He didn’t want to remind them how quickly they would be fucked if they got hit by a swarm, like the one at Port Angeles. Let them enjoy the moment, he thought.

  At the very back of the building was a row of offices, the only place left to investigate. Charlie split them up in order to check the offices quickly, taking the door to the far right. He found it locked, so he shouldered it in and brought his light up fast, just as something in the room let out a frightened squeal.

  His light showed four of them in here: a big bearded man holding a cleaver, a ratty-looking woman in a dirty yellow fleece, and a narrow, bald man in a gray T-shirt that read Oregon State. A two-year-old boy sat on the floor next to the bigger man, a filthy street urchin of a child with a rope tied around his neck. The big man was gripping the other end.

  Chick panned the light across them. “Show me your hands,” he ordered. “And you drop that cleaver right now.”

  It hit the cement floor with a clatter. A pair of backpacks and a pillowcase were on the floor as well, cans of fish spilling from within.

  “Doing a little shopping, I see,” said Chick. “Who are you people?”

  “I’m Ava,” the woman said, starting to stand but stopping when Charlie waved her back down with the rifle barrel. The child didn’t answer, and the big man just grunted, “Robbie.”

  Chick looked at the rope around the boy’s neck, then at the man holding it. “What the fuck, Robbie?” he said. “You think he’s a dog, or are you saving him for a snack in case the food runs out? Take that fucking thing off him right now.”

  Robbie complied, not looking at the chief.

  “Very, very bad,” Chick whispered.

  The thin, bald man cleared his throat. “I’m Henry Blake, from Eugene. I’m an English professor.”

  Chick stared at him. “You’re a teacher? Really?” He pointed his M4 and shot Henry Blake in the face, the bullet flinging the body against a wall. Robbie made a panicked noise and lunged for his dropped cleaver. Chick rotated at the hips and shot him in the head too.

 
Boots and flashlights raced for the office from outside, and his crewmen crowded into the doorway, weapons raised.

  “Hostile Limas,” Chick told his men, then looked at the woman. “United States Coast Guard, we’re here to help you.” His rifle barrel tracked toward her, and Charlie began to grin. “Are you hostile too, Ava?”

  She shook her head and looked in his eyes. “No, sir. I’m friendly.”

  • • •

  Two hours later, deciding there were no armed camps in the immediate area that might pose a threat to her ship, Liz gave the order for Joshua James to come about. The 418-foot cutter then reversed slowly into the mouth of the Chetco, the commercial docks to its stern, the Coast Guard station to port, and the bow pointed out to sea before it dropped anchor. From here the vessel and its fifty-seven-millimeter gun commanded a dominant view of the small coastal town.

  Brookings, Oregon, had a new master.

  EIGHTEEN

  By midmonth, the crew of Joshua James was settling into its new home. Inventory from the cannery went a long way toward replenishing their food supplies, and this was supplemented by clearing out the Coast Guard station’s mess pantry. A food services truck was located near a marina restaurant and emptied, providing a little variety beyond canned fish. The boatyards at the far end of the south marina held some useful machine parts and lubricants, and both the diesel and gas tanks that had once served marina craft were pumped dry to fill the cutter’s fuel bunkers. During a patrol, Amy Liggett found an ambulance and drove it back to the Coast Guard station, much to the delight of their rescue swimmer, Castellano, who, although he was an enlisted man, was named ship’s medical officer.