You're Never Ready for a Zombie Apocalypse (Guardians of the Apocalypse Book 1)

by Jeff Thomson

  “Yes sir, Petty Officer Jones, sir!” Harold said with an exaggerated salute.

  Jonesy coughed into his fist. It sounded strangely like “blow me.” He scanned up and down the dock to see if there were any other higher ranks. Most of the officers and senior enlisted were cool, but there were always a few assholes. Best to be safe.

  Harold and Frank, and at least half a dozen of the other poor bastards who were now straining to get the stores up the steep gangway and into the ship, had been to more than one party at Jonesy’s apartment that he shared with OS3 Bill Schaeffer. The parties weren’t strictly supposed to happen, since Jonesy was a senior Petty Officer, but, number one, the Coast Guard wasn’t as strict about rank as the other services; number two, he and Bill had become instant roommates because of limited housing availability, even though pairing a Third Class with a First Class wasn’t strictly supposed to happen, either; and, number three, Jonesy didn’t really give a rat’s ass about rank. With a crew of less than fifty people (including officers), who were often sent to the ass-crack middle of nowhere, the Sassafras had far too few people from whom to choose as friends. Jonesy took them where he found them, regardless of their rank.

  He started his Coast Guard career as a Deckie aboard an icebreaker on the Great Lakes. Breaking chunks of ice off the superstructure with a wooden mallet, scraping, painting, messcooking, and other forms of groveling subservience generally relegated to the bottom of the military food chain, had not appealed to him, and so he put in for Quartermaster School. At that time, Quartermaster (QM) combined the equivalent of four Navy ratings: Quartermaster (navigation), Signalman (SM, visual signaling and communications), Radarman (RD - self-explanatory), and Operations Specialist (OS, a sort of Navy catch-all that meant the poor bastard was condemned to be stuck in a windowless, locked compartment called the Combat Information Center - CIC). In the Coast Guard, however, it just gave him one more thing to deal with - like he needed more.

  His first unit as a QM3 was a buoy tender in Alaska - one of the older 180-foot variety, which had since been phased out. He enjoyed the Hell out of it. But then some Headquarters Half-Wit decided it would be a brilliant idea to combine Quartermaster with Bosun Mate (BM), which covered basic and advanced seamanship, small boat handling, and all things deck-related on larger ships. If Jonesy wanted to become a Bosun Mate, he would have become a Bosun Mate, and so he began casting about for some other job he could do within the Coast Guard.

  At around the same time as the transitional cluster fuck, inevitable of all bureaucratic changes, they began talking about creating a new rating, specializing in Tactical Law Enforcement. It was to be a demanding job, and certainly not dull, so Jonesy volunteered. Thus, he was transferred to the Maritime Safety and Security Team (MSST), and sent to the Special Missions Training Center at the Marine Base on Camp Lejeune, where he received training in Advanced Combat Marksmanship, Close Quarters Combat, Progressive Breaching, Vertical Insertions, Underwater Port Security, Explosive Detection with Canine Teams, and Tactical Boat Ops.

  Shortly after he graduated second in his class (over a full dozen Marines, which pissed off the Master Gunnery Sergeant to no end), and emerged as a fully-fledged Coast Guard Ninja, he discovered the MSST was being phased out, and so he found himself transferred to the Pacific Area (PACAREA) Tactical Law Enforcement Team (TACLET). Shortly after arriving there, some other Half-Wit (presumably not the same one) decided it would be a really good idea to attach a TACLET to a Polar Icebreaker, and so he was sent to the Cutter Healy, then prepping to depart on a four month deployment to the Arctic. They still hadn’t officially created the new rating yet, and so he went aboard as a BM2/OPS, just filling in his time requirement to be advanced to First Class.

  Upon returning to their home port of Seattle, he discovered cooler and more rational heads had prevailed and decided that, no, a Polar Icebreaker really did not need a TACLET, at which time, he was transferred to the District 14 TACLET, in Honolulu, now as a BM1.

  A week after his arrival, there was an...incident...that landed him on Administrative Leave. Shortly thereafter, the BM1/OPS aboard the newer, 225-Foot buoy tender, Sassafras, pulled a truly boneheaded move, which landed him in Leavenworth Prison, and left an open billet with no immediate replacement available - until the Powers That Be thought of Jonesy.

  So convoluted had been his career, with so many changes and upheavals, he now considered himself to be an SN QM BM SM RD OS Coast Guard Ninja Brain Surgeon. He’d added the Brain Surgeon bit because, why the Hell not?

  He’d been aboard for six months, and had found himself a home on the ship, and a family in the crew. He was happy - more or less. And then, wouldn’t you know it, a zombie apocalypse happened. Dumb fucking luck.

  A Government Vehicle rolled to a stop thirty feet back from the truck they were unloading. Jonesy didn’t think anything of it. Mucky Mucks had been coming and going all morning. It might be Duke, he supposed, but the man shouldn’t be back from Hickam Air Force Base for another twenty minutes, even with the insane way he drove. He thought of the person being picked up there, and wondered at the Murphy’s Law of it all.

  Said person was a boot Ensign, sent to replace the one who’d moved up to Bull - not a big deal in the Grand Scheme of things. Jonesy had dealt with plenty of newbies straight out of the Academy.

  The new Ensign was a female - also not a big deal. He didn’t have any trouble taking orders from a woman. It was a bit odd, in that Sassafras had only one other female crew member in her short history: another officer, three years ago. He’d never met the woman.

  The other new buoy tenders all had female enlisted on board, but for some reason - either because of a foul up at the yard which built her, or an idiotic error at the Headquarters Planning Unit that had commissioned her - none of the crew berthing compartments on Sassafras had been fitted with a private head and shower. The Coast Guard was pretty open-minded about most things, but unisex showers wasn’t one of them. They’d been scheduled to retrofit the aftermost four-man (sorry, four person) compartment during their Charlie maintenance period, but then the zombie apocalypse came along and all such plans had flown right out the damned window.

  None of those things gave Jonesy a moment’s pause. What did was precisely who that female Ensign was. That was simply too goddamned complicated, so he shoved it from his mind.

  “Don’t make me have to get official, Harold,” he said. “You know how the XO gets about this military bullshit. He’ll have me put your ass on report for insubordination, I’ll have to do a shitload of paperwork, and that would piss me right the fuck off.”

  The Coast Guard, unlike the other Armed Forces, only seemed to be military when they weren’t otherwise too busy doing any of a dozen different missions, from Search and Rescue, to Law Enforcement, and Drug Interdiction, to Marine Environmental Protection, Customs, Immigration, Homeland Security, Port Security, Boating Safety, or - every now and then - Aids to Navigation, the primary purpose of their ship. Just the way Jonesy liked it.

  Yes, you needed discipline. Yes, people needed to follow orders. Yes, you should show respect to your superiors, just as they should show respect to those junior to them, but he preferred it to be mutual, earned respect, rather than a simple matter of doing what you’re told. Far less bullshit that way.

  He was about to expound on this to his African-American friend, who - though an accomplished smart ass of the highest order - had nonetheless gone back to the work of tossing produce up the brow, when he looked down the pier and saw who was getting out of that Government Vehicle.

  This should be interesting, he thought.

  4

  Molly Jean Gordon, Ensign, United States Coast Guard, the ink barely dry on her commission, looked up the pier toward the black hull and white superstructure of the USCGC Sassafras. She was of medium height, with short-cropped golden brown hair beneath her Combination Cap.

  She looked soft and feminine. She wasn’t, and many a cock-sure Midshipman had discove
red this to their great detriment during her four years at the Academy; none of which mattered now.

  She saw the produce truck and the line of uniformed men passing the stores up the brow, and thought: My first ship. My first crew, with no small degree of swelling pride. And then she saw Socrates Jones.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought. Why him? Why now? Her heart, which had been filling with a mixture of pride and anticipation and anxiety and nervousness and a sense of impending adventure, sank, like the Lusitania.

  Socrates Jones had been an...indiscretion. Her first, truth be told, though she hadn’t been a virgin by any stretch. Past dalliances had been under the usual circumstances: making out in the back seat, playing spin the bottle, a half-remembered, rather intoxicated prom night, and a few assorted bits of fun while at the Coast Guard Academy. Socrates had been something else, entirely.

  The first indication he might be something more than a passing fancy happened while she was living, and he was stationed up in Alaska with her Uncle John. He was a young QM3, only twenty-one at the time, fresh out of Navigation School, and to her, he seemed like something out of Greek mythology. She’d been sixteen, for all of three months, and was, for the first time in her life, smitten.

  The crush had been harbored in absolute secrecy - the secret not divulged, even under the duress of pillow talk, after they’d “hooked up,” almost five years later. It had been so damned easy to fall into his arms - regardless of the impropriety.

  He had been a BM2 by then, just one of the people who trained her in bridge watches and celestial navigation aboard the USCGC Healy, the polar icebreaker on which she had spent her Cadet Summer, between Junior and Senior year. And what a summer it had been!

  The Eagle, the Coast Guard’s very own tall ship, was the prestige posting, but the Healy, homeported in Seattle, was the one everybody wanted. It went places, not the least of which was above the Arctic Circle, but also, San Diego, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, through the Panama Canal, to Curacao, in the Netherland Antilles, then San Juan, Puerto Rico, Boston, Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Bergen and Tromsö, in Norway, Thule, Greenland (okay...that wasn’t so great, but it had been an adventure), then over the top of North America, through the Northwest Passage, down through the Bering Straight, and back home to Seattle.

  Four months, seeing some of the most beautiful places in the world, including one night near the ice edge, above the Bering Sea, where she witnessed a spectacular, multi-colored, sunset worthy of the most psychedelic Pink Floyd concert. It lasted four solid hours. Jonesy shared it with her, holding hands on the ship’s fantail at two in the morning: magic.

  And, okay, she’d also had a torrid affair with an enlisted man. In retrospect: not the best idea. But while it was going on, it had been astounding. And now he was standing there next to the brow leading to her very first ship.

  Dumb fucking luck.

  She hesitated, frozen in mid-step, then chided herself for looking like an idiot, steeled her nerves, and strode up to him.

  “Ensign Gordon reporting aboard,” she said, thrusting her order package into his hand, while trying not to drop her garment bag, which threatened to tip her sideways. She brought her hand up in a salute, half a second before realizing he held a clipboard in one hand, and she had just shoved her orders into the other, making it impossible for him to return the salute.

  She heard a snigger from one of the men loading stores off to her side, and felt sure her face must have turned all the colors of that Arctic sunset. Not according to plan!

  “Shut your pie hole, Harry,” Jonesy barked, without taking his eyes off her. He tucked her orders under the arm holding the clipboard, and snapped a military salute. “Welcome aboard, ma’am.” His face carried a neutral expression, but his hazel eyes (which had always made her knees weak) were filled with mischievous delight.

  Damn him, she thought. How dare he? How dare he look at her that way? How dare he look so damned good?

  BM2/DECK Duke Peterson, her chauffeur from Hickham Air Force Base, came strolling up behind them, carrying her sea bag and carry-on. Thoroughly Scandinavian, she thought, with blonde hair and corn fed, ruddy features - pure Minnesota, unless she missed her guess. And she was trying to guess - desperately - trying to think of anything other than Socrates Jones.

  The sea bag was heavy, as she well knew, but the bruiser of a guy could have been carrying a paper cup full of daisies, for all it seemed to affect him. The Bosun Mate placed the bags on the pier at their feet and smiled at Jonesy.

  “Got her here safe,” he said.

  “Didn’t run anybody over?” Jonesy asked.

  “Wanted to, but I figured she was an Officer and probably wouldn’t like it.”

  “Duke, here, is a notorious driver,” Jonesy said to her. “Just be thankful he didn’t pick you up in The Scull Mobile.”.

  “Don’t hate the truck,” Duke replied, with a touch of wounded pride.

  Molly had no idea what they were talking about, but she relaxed (a bit) at the familiar comradery passing between the two shipmates. If they were comfortable enough around her to joke, then maybe this wouldn’t be a complete disaster.

  “There was that old woman, on the approach to the bridge,” she said. “I thought she was a goner, for sure.”

  “Nah,” Duke waved it off. “Missed her by a mile.”

  “Would have been worth serious points, though,” Molly replied.

  Duke grinned at Jonesy. “At least she has a sense of humor.”

  “She does indeed,” Jonesy replied, passing the clipboard to Duke, once he’d removed Molly’s orders from the paperwork chaos in his left hand. “You get to take over. I’ll get her checked in.” He looked at the sea bag and carry-on at their feet. “I’m going to steal Harold.”

  Duke nodded and shrugged. “Harold! Job opportunity,” he barked in fine bosun fashion.

  “What now?” the young man said, still tossing boxes of produce.

  “Get your ass down here and grab the Ensign’s sea bag,” Jonesy ordered. Harold’s shoulders slumped in obvious displeasure. “Secure that attitude, or Duke will find something unpleasant for you to do.”

  “I can think of three or four things,” the bosun agreed.

  “I’m doing it,” Harold said, sliding out of line and down the brow.

  Jonesy looked at Molly and smiled. “Can’t get good help these days,” he said, then picked up her carry-on and shouted “Make a hole!” as he worked his way up the brow and onto the ship.

  5

  “Semper Gumby, Gus,” QMC John Gordon (retired) said, as he made his way up the brow of his ship, the M/V True North. She was an ex-Canadian Coast Guard buoy tender - one hundred and eighty-nine feet of what used to be red-painted, rusted hull. Now it was re-plated, repainted a deep blue, topped by a white superstructure, and refitted into a decent, ocean-going yacht. He, on the other hand, looked as if he had been enjoying his retirement just a bit too much. His once lean frame, topped by short-cropped gunmetal gray hair, had developed a decidedly un-military beer belly, and his lined face needed a shave. “Semper fucking Gumby.”

  The expression was a play on the US Coast Guard’s motto: Semper Paratus - Always Ready. It meant, Always Flexible, and described their current operational status, to a tee.

  A robust fifty, he wore black cargo pants and a blue tee-shirt adorned with the caption: I haven’t had my coffee yet. Don’t make me kill you. He retired from the Coast Guard after twenty-five years, settled into a pleasant existence teaching nautical classes at the local state college in Astoria, Oregon, joined the local PTA, and looked forward to an easy, middle-class life.

  Until he won the lottery.

  The prize had been a staggering nine figures, after taxes. It felt unreal then and still did now, almost a year later. Of course, he’d done what any true sailor would do with a sudden infusion of ridiculous amounts of money: he’d bought a boat. And because it had been an insane amount of money, the “boat” had been a full-on ship.


  The ludicrous windfall was now going to save the lives of himself, his family and a few of his friends.

  “Yeah, John,” Gus replied. “I know...Semper all the way. But Jesus! We have everything we need. Why don’t we just throw off the lines and get the Hell out of here while the getting’s good?”

  Gus Perniola, a retired MKCS and long-time friend, was helping John load the last of the medical supplies. He stood maybe five-ten, and carried a shape best described as “round,” though it was the type of round found on older bikers with whom people would never consider messing, even though his face held a pleasant, happy expression, and his head was topped with fuzzy white hair and adorned with an equally white beard - kind of like Santa Clause meets the Sons of Anarchy. He was one of the very few people John told of his escape plan.

  “Because,” John said, balancing the enormous, blue and white First Aid Kit (its manufacturer boasted it contained “everything you need, except an operating room”) while struggling to open the Quarterdeck hatch. The dogs on the hatch were brand new and the action felt stiff as Hell. “We don’t know how long this thing’s gonna last.” With a metallic CLUNK, he managed to swing the dogging arm open, and they climbed through. “It could be weeks, it could be months, it could be years.”

  Pomona had arrived in Astoria eleven days ago - at least that’s when the first victim went apeshit, ripped off his clothing, and attacked a UPS guy who’d had the extraordinary bad luck to arrive at the man’s house at exactly the wrong time. UPS Guy got bitten and, in his turn, went apeshit, three and a half hours later, killed a doctor, an orderly, two patients in the ER, and injured five assorted nurses and staff at the hospital - two of whom now resided at the local “Treatment Center,” in a disused warehouse near the port. The cops put the first poor bastard down with extreme prejudice.

  Things had gotten worse since then, but John, while concerned, was not anxious to sever all ties with civilization just yet. There were plenty of things to do, not the least of which was to pay a call on their former shipmate, Gilbert Farcquar, at his gun store. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The guy had been an asshole when they served together, and time had not improved him.