Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  A wounded aircraft carrier, listing dangerously forward and to port, spun in the churning sea, white water crashing across its flight deck and sweeping away the few drifters remaining there. The vessel climbed a wave that came at its stern, hovered at the crest for a moment like an enormous teeter-totter board, then slid down the steep back side and out of sight.

  The megaquake subsided at nine minutes past midnight. In its wake it left a landscape so raw and broken that it could have been a scene from the planet’s violent birth.

  The cauldron of the new bay surged with the debris of mankind: fragments of buildings, railroad boxcars, bits of aircraft and capsized ships, tractor-trailers and roofs of houses. And with every surge of the Pacific current, thousands of bodies were forced to the surface.

  They reached.

  They groaned.

  And they were pulled beneath the waves once more.

  THIRTY-THREE

  January 13—Richmond

  On the uppermost stairway landing of the concrete house, Evan was getting tired, just as he’d predicted. The charred fragments of twenty corpses littered the steps below him, victims of his survival knife, and more climbed slowly toward him, crunching their fellows underfoot as raspy groans filled the house. Evan had long since switched on his flashlight and stood it upright on the concrete banister so he could see what he was fighting. Stealth no longer mattered; they knew he was here.

  His good arm ached from swinging and stabbing, and his broken wrist cried out from all the exertion. Some broke apart as he kicked them down the steps; others merely tumbled down to the switchback. More took their place. Evan lost track of time.

  Then came a moment when the moaning abruptly ceased. The half-dozen burned drifters on the stairs stopped climbing and instead shuffled until they all faced in the same direction, then cocked their heads and stood silently. Evan had seen this behavior before, during his run through the charred petrochemical fields. He couldn’t tell how bad the quake would be so he stood his ground, chest heaving, blade still held ready. Several seconds later the shaking started, pitching his flashlight over the side of the banister. The house bucked beneath his feet, and he was thrown to the floor. There was a sound of concrete cracking, and he scrambled back down the hall just as the central stairs and the landing where he had just been standing collapsed into the house.

  Worse. Much, much worse.

  Back in the bedroom, Evan could see out beyond the balcony, scattered moonlight beginning to reveal the rooftops of the houses below. They seemed to ripple for an instant, then detonated in an explosion of brick, glass, and wood fragments. Within seconds, the residential blocks nearest the water dropped into the sea, and the bay surged forward, consuming the neighborhood.

  Evan moved out onto the shaking balcony, thinking he would climb onto the iron railing and somehow pull himself up to the roof. Then the house came apart around him and he was falling, tensing for impact, expecting to be impaled on a twisted piece of rebar. Instead, the sea charged in and he was caught by the water, swept up and over the spot where the concrete house had been only seconds ago, thrown hard against the hillside behind it just as this ground too shook apart and fell beneath the foamy surface.

  Like the float coats used by Nimitz deck crews, Evan’s survival vest featured a water-activated pellet that triggered an internal gas canister and inflated the vest with a sudden whoosh. A second pellet automatically activated the small white strobe at the vest’s collar, and Evan found himself floating in savage waves.

  His body felt as if it were flung in every direction as the water rose and fell, his left arm slipping free of its sling, and the air was filled with a cracking sound so loud and so close that he thought it would make his heart stop. Evan washed up sharply against something hard and metallic, and he instinctively wrapped an arm and his legs around it, realizing it was the base of a shuddering radio tower. In the moonlight he could see the earth yawn open to his left with a massive rumble, a black maw stretching in two directions and widening by the second. Seawater and shattered houses roared over its far edge in a waterfall.

  From somewhere beyond the crevasse came the long, metallic scream of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge coming apart, but there was little time to think about it. The radio tower was leaping and shuddering, trying to pull loose from the deep anchors holding it to the earth, threatening to shake him off and back into the swirling waters. Evan locked both elbows around the metal strut and tightened the hold with his legs. The tide that pushed him here had now poured back into the still-widening crevasse, and he found that he and the radio tower’s base were less than twenty feet from the chasm’s crumbling western edge.

  The tower gave out a long groan and leaned toward the abyss. Evan screamed and hung on.

  There was an abrupt vacuum then, an instant where sound and air vanished as the expanse of the bay beyond the crevasse suddenly dropped, and he thought of the surface of a not-quite-baked cake falling. The silence was broken as the roaring sea rushed into the sudden depression with a fury Evan knew he could not look upon and keep his sanity.

  At that moment, the ground let out a roar of its own and heaved upward. A towering wall of rock shot skyward, spitting truck-sized boulders into the sea as if they were pebbles, rock slabs the size of buildings calving away like Arctic ice. The radio tower fell to the left, smashing onto the edge of the crevasse, its top snapping away and vanishing into the depths just before the rising angle of the newly risen cliff pinched the crevasse shut. Clinging to the tower’s remains with his arms and legs, looking like a sloth hanging upside down, Evan saw that the base was lodged in a vertical crack that split the face of the wall, trapped there, prevented from slipping into a sea that was now surging against what had become an ocean cliff.

  The sea.

  Evan’s radio tower, now a forty-foot, horizontal tangle of red-and-white steel, was hit by a wave that completely submerged him, the force nearly tearing him free. He held his breath, and when the water fell back he came up choking. The choppy surface was only a few feet beneath him when the wave went out, but he was submerged again when the next surge pushed against the cliff.

  The shaking and monstrous rumble of tortured stone continued, frightening on a level that pierced Evan through some primitive core, and he screamed back at it. The quake was still trying to shake him loose, and his arms and legs were ready to give out. When the next wave washed over him, he swallowed seawater.

  The water dipped back, and Evan vomited, coughing and gasping. Can’t stay like this. Ignoring the pain in his fractured wrist, he forced himself to crawl up the side of the shaking tower. It took two cycles of waves to complete the move, and each time he held a deep breath and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, hanging on. At last he was on the top of the tower—at least it was the side facing up—and although the waves still crashed against him, they didn’t cover him, only washed around his body. He was able to breathe. The survival vest, now inflated and even bulkier, threatened to pull him off with the water when the waves struck, however. He still had to hang on to the steel to keep it from floating him off his perch. Evan reached for the snaps to cut it loose, when Vladimir’s voice barked at him.

  “You will never take it off.”

  Right, not until my boots are back on the deck of the carrier. If it’s not already at the bottom of the bay. That thought brought an image of Maya holding her belly with both hands, and Evan wanted to scream. Instead he forced himself to crawl down the radio tower to where its base was jammed into a split in the rock. Surf still rising and falling around him, the earth still vibrating the tower and dropping bits of stone from the cliff above, Evan carefully reversed until his back was to the rock, planting his boots against a steel strut and gripping another with his good hand.

  A wave rose against him, then retreated. He had a solid hold.

  Evan felt the shaking stop, and at once the tortured sounds of cracking rock q
uieted. The sea remained, crashing against the high cliff that stood roughly where downtown Richmond had been, but at least for now, the earthquake was over.

  Unbroken water stretched before him in the moonlight. He saw no land masses, nothing protruding from the surface, and only unrecognizable debris riding the high swells. By his last calculations, he should’ve been able to look west to see the hilly fingers of land where both Tiburon and San Quentin poked into the bay, but there was nothing. If anything remained of the rest of Marin County, it was either hidden behind the darkness or beneath the Pacific.

  Before him now was an alien sea, and he was afraid of it. Looking around revealed only cliff face to his left and right, more cliff face above, none of it climbable. Even if it was, and he managed to pull himself a hundred feet up its sheer face and over the top—using only one hand—what new devastation would be waiting?

  His personal locator beacon, the yellow cell-phone-sized device he’d activated and stuck in a pocket, was gone. So was the Sig Sauer handgun, jarred from its holster by one impact or another. And now he realized he’d dropped his survival knife when the concrete house came apart and the water took him. The two cylindrical flare grenades were still clipped to his vest, but they’d spent a lot of time in the water, and Evan wondered if they would even work.

  Let’s find out. The flashing strobe on his vest gave off some light, but it was also killing his night vision to the point that in between the flashes he was completely blind. He clenched the flare between his knees and pulled the pin, letting the spoon fly. There was a pink sputter, then nothing.

  Shit.

  Another pink spark, a stutter, and then the top of the cylinder erupted with a fluorescent pink light too bright to look at. It heated up fast, he discovered, so he plucked it from between his knees and wedged it into a crack in the rock wall.

  No one will see it. No one is left to see it. It’s there to make me feel better. For a moment, it did. Then he looked down the forty feet of mangled radio tower stretching out just above the surf. In the shimmering pink of the flare he saw that a wave had washed something else up onto his perch.

  It was dead.

  And it was crawling toward him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Nimitz

  The wave threw Rosa off the top rack and into the frigid water. Tilting like a funhouse room, the small berthing compartment slammed her against a fold-down desk and she went under. Her injured foot banged against something and she let out a scream that came out as a burst of bubbles. Then the room tilted in the other direction as the carrier was swept up by another wave.

  Rosa reached frantically, caught hold of a pipe, and pulled herself out of the water, gasping and bracing against the roll of the ship. Her warm, dry clothes were now soaked, and the medic shivered in the darkness, fighting to clear her head. Was the ship going down? No, but it was caught in phenomenal waves, enough to toss around a carrier. How was that possible in the San Francisco Bay?

  The medical backpack washed against her legs as the room leaned and the water—at her knees—sloshed to the other side of the room. She grabbed the pack and pulled it on. It was heavy, the contents saturated.

  Flashlight. She pawed at the water, found the sneaker torn apart by the bullet, and threw it aside. Below the surface, her bandage was soggy and unraveling. It’s a Maglite, it won’t float. She waited a moment until the room tipped left, then took a breath and went under, hands probing into the only place it could go: under the lower rack. Her fingers quickly closed on the flashlight’s long metal barrel, and she popped out of the water, shaking her head as the compartment tipped to the right.

  Please work, please work. . . .

  A cool white beam lit the compartment and Rosa sighed in relief. Bedding and personal items floated on the surface around her as she timed the tipping, took another breath and submerged. This time she came up with her Glock.

  Rosa didn’t know how long she’d slept, couldn’t guess what was happening to the ship. Michael was still out there, though, so her mission was unchanged. He would be terrified, maybe even crying out. That might help her find him, but it would help other things too. She tried not to think about that.

  Gripping the Maglite and pistol, Rosa threw the privacy bolt and hauled the hatch open, letting in a surge of water. It was thigh-deep now, and so very cold. She went out, keeping a wide stance and anticipating the severe roll now, staying on her feet. The passageway was clear of the dead for the moment, her light revealing a flooding, sloshing corridor stretching far to the right and left. Which way?

  Then she did hear a scream.

  It wasn’t human.

  • • •

  It couldn’t remember being Michael, had no concept of a mother who’d loved him, a father who fretted about his childhood diabetes, of a life before or after the plague. That was gone. Dead. No longer Michael. So much more, now.

  The newly born Hobgoblin stood in the darkness of the gear handling compartment, legs in a wide stance as the floor tilted back and forth. It needed no light, for its eyes viewed the world in variant shades of red, gray, and black, even in absolute blackness. The creature looked at its hands, its body, and the smooth crimson flesh pulled taut over new muscle. It still tingled all over, and the electrical activity firing in its brain—sensed as flickers of red light behind its eyes—had subsided but not entirely dissipated.

  It felt no pain, no cold. There was hunger, a burning sensation that must be sated, but there was another, even more powerful drive. The Hobgoblin wanted to kill, to rend flesh with its hands and teeth, to cause pain . . . and fear. It wanted to hear screams, and these combined desires were so powerful that the creature trembled.

  Across the room, a dead woman struggled to stand near an equipment locker, the motion of the room repeatedly throwing her back into the water before she climbed once more to her feet. The Hobgoblin instinctively knew it was neither threat nor of any consequence, it just was. Something to be quickly dismissed.

  More sensations came at the creature, images of violence and new perceptions. Without the words or need to describe them, the young Hobgoblin knew the importance of speed and stealth, understood it was strong, what its hands could do, how they would do it . . . ripping, crushing, tearing. . . . It suddenly understood prey, and its flesh tingled at the image, red pulses going off in rapid fire within its brain. It pictured prey in many forms and in seconds realized that this was what would satiate its hunger for fear and violence. Prey. Stalking. Killing.

  The ten-year-old’s new, mutated incarnation shuddered at the prospect, and it threw back its head, emitting a piercing, inhuman shriek of lust.

  Then it caught a scent, nostrils flaring, and its eyes narrowed as lips pulled back from its teeth. Prey.

  The Hobgoblin started moving.

  • • •

  The scream froze Rosa in place and made her skin crawl with a chill that had nothing to do with the freezing water. There was madness in that scream, a sound no human could make, and it terrified her, tapping something feral in her primordial brain.

  When she was fourteen, Rosa spent a week at a Wisconsin lake with a girlfriend and her parents. One night she’d been awakened by the most diabolical yowling and shrieking right outside the cabin, and both she and her girlfriend had run screaming to the girl’s parents. In the morning, the girl’s father told them it had been raccoons, either fighting or mating. Rosa decided right then that if a demon rose from hell, that was how it would sound.

  Until now.

  It came a second time, echoing through dark steel tunnels, and Rosa couldn’t tell if it was coming from the left or right, or how far away. It’s close. And the dead don’t make that sort of noise. Nothing does.

  Swinging the flashlight in both directions, she expected to see some demonic horror waiting to pounce, but the passageway remained empty. Rosa knew she’d come from the left, so she waded right
, staggering from bulkhead to bulkhead as the ship rode whatever unimaginable sea event it was now experiencing. She couldn’t picture the waves required to make this behemoth move like this, tried to envision the storm (it had to be a storm, right?) that was assaulting the ship. Her worst images of hurricanes didn’t seem sufficient.

  Yet Rosa knew she would gladly endure whatever howling tempest awaited on the flight deck if it meant escaping these black corridors of the dead. The dead and . . . something else.

  A heavy sloshing came from up ahead, and she jabbed the flashlight beam forward. Flung through an open hatch by the ship’s movement, a pale and pasty thing in khakis had collided with the left bulkhead only ten feet away. Its milky eyes found her, and it groaned.

  Rosa shot it in the face, and it collapsed. Five rounds left.

  The gunshot still ringing in her ears, Rosa heard the inhuman scream come again, definitely behind her now . . . she thought.

  And it was very near.

  • • •

  A primitive instinct caused the Hobgoblin to screech in rage and delight at the echo of the single gunshot. It was newborn and had yet to learn restraint. But its body tensed as its new brain said that this was something that could hurt it, and instinctually understood caution, the ways of stalking, and then gave the creature a strong sense of direction and distance to the shot. The Hobgoblin moved that way, down a narrow passage, the flooding waist-deep on a creature that occupied the frame of what had been a ten-year-old boy. Then it began angling, no longer heading straight in the direction of the sound.

  Wet clothing and clumsy shoes were irritating, and the creature tore off the shirt and pants, ripped at undergarments and clawed at sneakers until they came away. Then it was bare, hands smoothing across its crimson skin, feeling the powerful muscles underneath, touching the fatal wounds on its body, the ragged edges already toughening like leather. Better.