Eventually – more like “really soon” – the mountain of dead was going to surround the boat completely. And then they’d be attacking the flight deck from every side, in a full 360-degree assault. Or, put another way, the living would be in 360-degree, all-around defense. And there weren’t nearly enough of them to manage it, and fewer all the time. The attrition of the militia was slow, but steady.
And, anyway, Handon remembered, they were all pretty much fucked as soon as the tide surged up to the hole in the starboard hull. Handon really had no good idea what they were going to do about that.
Come to notice it, the current line was fixed just ahead of the hole. But, for a minute or two in there, it had been total chaos, and there had effectively been no line. Had the hole been defended during the two breakthroughs? He was in no position to know. If there were dead below decks now, the crew would just have to deal with them. Though he figured somebody ought to at least alert CIC, or whoever was running this whole shit circus from perfect safety up in the island…
* * *
Commander Drake blasted through the door into CIC, moving as he had been all day like a man possessed – possessed, perhaps, by the will to live. Ordinarily, he would be running the fight from CIC – or, rather, a bunch of his subordinates would be running it on his behalf, and under his orders. Then again, ordinarily, the fight would be happening at standoff distances of tens or hundreds of miles, and fought with long-range missiles and fighter interceptors. And if anything got even so close as to be in fucking visual range, the CIWS and Sparrow missiles would take them out.
But today the fight was nose-to-nose, and they were slugging it out right in the trenches – or, rather, right out on his goddamned flight deck. So the Flag Bridge was the better place for Drake. He could see most of what was going on, and a get a high-level view of the fight. But he also found he had to keep running up and down, from deck to deck, to deal with different emergencies. His legs and lungs were feeling the burn, and he hoped this got him in really good shape, in case he or any of them managed to live through the day.
Ignoring all the other chaos in CIC, most of it directed by LT Campbell as if she were some kind of high-tech orchestra conductor of industrial-scale violence, Drake dashed across the floor and found Captain Martin where he’d left him: staring at his own laptop, along with four other displays built into the two consoles that had been earmarked for his use.
“Sitrep,” Drake said, the possibility of formalities not even occurring to him.
Martin looked tired, stressed, and slightly pummeled – that made him and everyone else on board. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’re not there yet. I don’t think we’re there.”
“Why not?” Drake leaned in. He could see the drone’s-eye view of the battle on one of Martin’s screens. The jet-powered UAV was mainly staying out off the bow of the carrier – though there were other demands on its time, and it was occasionally re-tasked for brief periods – so that Martin could have his view of the undead storm, and the general state of play. Or, rather, his view of the mass of dead piled up to, and increasingly around, the prow of Drake’s fucking ship.
“I’m not sure,” Martin said. “They’re not stacking up as thickly in the front as I’d simulated – and the mass of them on the deck itself now may be significant enough weight to count against us.”
“How can you tell?”
“What I’m doing here,” Martin said, demonstrating as he narrated, “is taking screenshots and doing volumetric sampling and estimations based on the 2-D images, using objects of known dimensions and distances in the foreground and background for scale.”
“And?”
“And they’re coming at us at the predicted rate – but they’re coming over the prow onto the deck faster than I predicted. Much faster. They’re basically a hell of a lot more aggressive than I programmed them in the model.”
Drake shook his head. “Yeah, real life’s so often a disappointment that way, isn’t it?”
Martin sagged. “At the end of the day, the mass, weight, and pressure of dead are all lower than I’d predicted at this point.”
Drake cursed silently. “And the tide?” But all he had to do was check his own watch. He saw they were only a few minutes from high tide. He changed questions. “How about the seabed?”
Martin brightened slightly. “A bit better news there.” He pivoted to another monitor, which showed an extremely murky undersea view. This was being provided by their Mk18 Kingfish UUV, which was piloted by a sailor a few seats over – Martin simply shouted requests at him (“Pan left!” “Swing round to the starboard side!”) as necessary. Right now it was doing a slow swim-by of the port side of the keel, close to the bow. Great, horrible, writhing masses of not-so-slowly decomposing corpses covered the seabed, as well as piled up against the hull of the mighty warship – all of them digging and grabbing and writhing, trying to climb up, or dig down, or just get into the carrier directly.
“The bad news,” Martin said, pointing at the screen, “is that they’re totally covering the ocean floor around the front of the keel, so I can’t actually see what they’re doing to the seabed.”
“And the good news?”
“I presume they’re doing to it what they were back when I could see them – scrabbling and digging. The lower down they are, the more interested they seem in the cavitation and other noises coming from the hull. And the ones at bottom are digging down, just as the ones on top are climbing up.”
“Great. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s just very difficult to judge the net effect on the sandbar from this murky video.”
Drake started to tell him he was in no position to give a flying fuck about one man’s difficulties with video clarity right now. But as they both watched in real time, the UUV operator did something he shouldn’t have – he swam in too close. Maybe it was the noise of its propeller, or the swivelling of its camera, that drew the attention of an undersea corpse, which twisted off the pile it was on, and half-lurched/half-swam toward it. This caused a minor avalanche of aquatic Zulus, which collapsed over the camera view on screen. First the video jerked, then twisted downward – then it filled with a rotting, torn shirt, and a breast, complete with nipple.
Then it went black.
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Drake spat. He looked over at the operator, who had the face and body language of a man who’d really just fucked up. “Get that asset free! Power it up!”
“Yes, sir,” the man said, fighting his joystick.
Drake looked back to Martin. They were out of time. They were out of everything. He cut to the chase. “Do I order the Murphy to start pulling? Or don’t I?”
Captain Martin took a deep breath. “How much fuel have they got?”
“Limited.”
“Then wait. I don’t think we’re there yet.”
“Fine. But we’d damn well better be there soon. Because we are this close to losing the flight deck.”
Martin grimaced. “It’s not going well?” He’d been down here in the dark cave of the CIC. And despite his flexible and high-tech views of the masses of dead beneath and above the ocean surface, he was basically ignorant about the fight happening right outside his door.
Drake shrugged. “A lot better since the destroyer’s weapons reloaded and started up again. You do have to love the way a large-caliber electric Gatling gun improves everyone’s day. However, when those guns run dry for good, and their ammo is going fast, the defenders on deck are going to be looking at the end. It’s only the destroyer that’s been keeping them from coming over the ramparts at four times the rate they currently are.”
Drake had just decided he didn’t have time to shoot the shit with the Brit anymore, when a junior officer from the Bridge trotted up and hailed him. “Commander! We’re getting reports of Zulus below decks.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Drake said, turning toward him. With no parting to Martin, he turned, grabbed the ensign by
the arm and headed for the ladder. As they half-trotted, he said, “Are we overrun?”
“No, sir. It’s just a couple of scattered reports of ones and twos, mainly ones. From what I can tell, we’ve taken them down, instead of them taking us.”
“Son of a bitch. That still means we’re in serious danger of shipwide outbreak – and getting ourselves hollowed out from the center. Which frames?”
“Got a list for you here…” With this, they blasted into the Bridge, where the activity was slightly less hectic than in CIC – and where the view of the danger flooding over and all around them was in plain view out the screens.
Drake grabbed the printout with one hand, and a hand mic with the other. Had the dead gotten in through the hole during the chaos of the breakthroughs? Or had the level of the dead pile reached up to the hole from the waterline? The difference mattered. Though their immediate response to it didn’t.
He gestured vaguely at the ensign with his hand mic. “Tannoy, ship-wide, go, go…” The young man punched it up for him. Drake spoke into the mic. His voice emerged – louder, crisper, and slightly mechanical-sounding – pouring out across every part of the ship, from down in the bilge rooms, out across the flight deck, and all the way up to PriFly.
“All hands. All hands. We have reports of a SMALL NUMBER of single Zulus below decks. Full alert at all stations. Do not leave your station unless critically important duties require it. Repeat, you are confined to stations. And be advised: if you have any doubts about ANYONE, you shoot to kill – and sort them out later. We are NOT going to have another outbreak on this vessel. Regardless of the individual cost. That is all.”
He threw the mic at the console. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. If it wasn’t one goddamned thing, it was another. Then again, if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. But once again – or, rather, much more than ever before – it was all falling apart around his ears.
The ensign brought him back out of his own head – which, thank God for that, because it was turning into a really crappy place to be. “Commander,” he said. “There’s one other thing that’s been spotted below decks.”
“What now?”
“Gunny Fick. And his fire team. Back from their mission.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Drake said. “Seriously?” But he didn’t wait for an answer to that one. “Have they got the scientist? And the vaccine?”
“Unknown, sir.”
“What the fuck does ‘unknown’ mean?”
“We’ve radioed across to the Murphy. The scientist evidently went into the drink. And the Murph’s open-water recovery op is in progress.”
“Do they have comms with their helo and divers?”
“Unclear, sir.”
Drake energetically cursed the fog of battle, which never seemed to go away, no matter how much technology they threw at it. In fact, the tech often seemed to make it worse. Then he remembered Gunny Fick was back on the boat. That simple fact made him feel better already.
“Get Fick’s ass on the horn.” Drake exhaled, but didn’t quite smile. “First decent news in several lifetimes…”
* * *
Fick and his Marines banged into the hospital through its double-width hatch, Fick carrying the front of the litter with Reyes on it, Brady and Graybeard sharing the back end.
Several hospital staff – doctors? nurses? techs? Fick didn’t have the time or energy to sort them out – looked up in mild alarm. Fick also saw two sailors in fatigues on some kind of guard duty; one carried an XM29, the other had a 12-gauge. In this first room, a handful of men and women were being treated for what looked like minor injuries – burns, concussions, blunt trauma… but they were all being watched like hawks by the two guards. Further inside, in the other treatment rooms and operating theater, one or two more seriously wounded were being tended to. Fick didn’t know if there were other guards back there, but he hoped so.
Nodding vaguely to everyone and no one, Fick led his team to an open examination table, where they plopped Reyes down. “Okay,” Fick said. “Good to go?”
“Yeah, Gunny,” Reyes said, looking up and around from his prone position. He punctuated that by putting his hand on his pistol on his chest rig. Fick reached to his belt pouches, emptied them of pistol mags, and laid them down on the table where Reyes could get at them.
A woman in surgical garb walked up and said, “Patients have to be disarmed, Master Gunny.” Fick checked her insignia and saw she was a Lieutenant Commander, and, thus almost certainly a doctor, if not a surgeon – not to mention that she terrifically outranked him.
But in this instance, Fick didn’t give a pickled rhino cock about the woman’s rank. He gave her a heavy look. “Maybe you’ve missed the bit where the hospital is the single most dangerous place in a world overrun by the dead.” He held her gaze fiercely until she looked away. “Take a tip from me. You just got thirty-nine percent safer, with this man here with his weapon.”
The doctor didn’t respond, but just sighed. She then looked down at Reyes and started feeling him up and quizzing him about his injuries. Fick nodded and turned to go. But he found another scrub-attired hospital dude standing behind him with a phone handset from the wall, holding it out. “You Fick?” he asked.
Fick took the phone. “Yeah,” he said, impatiently. He was extremely anxious to get himself and his men to their penultimate stop – the MARSOC team’s storerooms, where they could refit and rearm, and even get new rifles – so they could then get to their ultimate destination: the fight up top.
“Fick, Drake here. Welcome back aboard. We’ve got dead below decks. You’re gonna go police ’em up for me.”
Fick took a big breath. “Thanks for thinking of me. But there’s a little battle upstairs, with my Marines in it, that has first call on my time and attention.”
“No, Fick, you’ll do as you’re goddamned told for once, and here’s why: because we’re out of ready reserve, and because we have no one else to do this work, and because there’s no one better qualified than you. And because if we have an uncontrolled outbreak below decks, we are all. Fucking. Dead. The battle on the flight deck is winding down anyway.”
Gunny looked alarmed. “What the hell does that mean?
“It means we’re about to be overrun. And we’re going to retreat and button up inside this tin can. Now – you, sweep and clear. Check the following frames and compartments: Three-Seventy and Seventy-One. Four-ten through Four-fifteen inclusive…”
Fick ground his teeth, but pulled a small notepad and pen from his sleeve pocket – snorting in amazement that it hadn’t burned up when he was on fire, or dissolved when he was parachuting through the rain, or otherwise been ruined in some close call he couldn’t even remember from his day so far…
* * *
Handon spotted two things, almost at once – first a pair of militia out toward the right flank getting in serious trouble. Maybe they weren’t making their shots, maybe they were fumbling their reloads, or maybe they were just getting overwhelmed by what, even Handon had to admit, was a pretty damned overwhelming threat.
The second thing was Henno fighting over to their position to try and support them. The two sailors were backing up, causing the line to sag – and staggering, lurching, grasping dead were getting way too close to them before being put down.
Moreover, Handon had just had the bracing experience of seeing one young sailor get bitten – and then get pulled off the line by another, whom Handon gathered was his buddy, perhaps a friend of many years. A Marine had tried to dispatch the bitten one. But the friend had screamed at the Marine to “fuck the fucking fuck off.” He was going to do it himself.
And he had.
Now Handon could see Henno rushing to prevent that same vignette of maximal horror and pathos from playing out again. But what Handon could see that Henno could not… was two Foxtrots leaping up onto the deck, several yards behind the line. There could be no doubt about it – they were being enveloped, and the proces
s was accelerating.
But right now what Handon had to deal with was the fact that there were two fucking Foxtrots in their rear – and, as of right this second, evidently only he had clocked them. With the ambient roar of the battle, and everyone all tooled up and looking through their sights, and the never-ending threat coming from the front, and all the chaos, it was easy to fall into combat tunnel vision.
Handon brought his rifle up smoothly and took a shot on one of the Foxtrots. But the round only glanced the head, taking off a piece of skull and scalp, but leaving the gamboling, ravenous creature basically unimpaired. And in only another fraction of a second, it had taken down one of the militia in the line from behind. Fuck. It had been too far from him, and moving too wildly for Handon to make the shot. Now that it fell on the screaming and wriggling sailor, it was stiller, and Handon put it down with a second shot – which was too late for its victim.
The second one was still locking on to a target.
Handon leapt from the top of the forklift, praying to the gods of ankle support as he hit the deck, pulled his rifle back up as he ran, and put two rounds into the remaining Foxtrot’s brainstem. By the time he’d got there and done this, a few others behind the line had clocked the thing – but were so shaken to have leaping dead in their rear that they’d barely managed to stumble away.
Only Handon had raced forward, closing with the threat.
Now Henno, who while Handon was running and shooting had single-handedly cleared a wide area and some breathing room in front of the two struggling militiamen, turned to the rear and approached Handon. Only now did he see the two Foxtrots that had been coming at his back. He shook his head, and said, “Fuck’s sake…” Handon nodded.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 25
