“What have I gotten us into?” he whispered.
At the wheel beside him, Evan smiled thinly. “Our future, one way or the other.”
CVN-68. The USS Nimitz. Her nickname through four decades of service was Old Salt. She had taken over four years to build, the first nuclear supercarrier of her class, not due for retirement until 2020. She was nearly eleven hundred feet long—the equivalent of most skyscrapers—and one hundred thousand tons; Nimitz’s four-and-a-half-acre flight deck soared ninety feet above the water line, with the superstructure climbing another eight stories above that, the ship a full eighteen stories from keel to mast. The flagship of Carrier Strike Group 11, she carried ninety aircraft that she was capable of launching at a rate of one every twenty seconds. Her twin General Electric A4W/A16 reactors drove eight steam turbine generators that, when combined, put out 8,000 kilowatts, enough to power a small city. These turned four bronze screw propellers, each of which measured twenty-one feet across and could push the behemoth up to a speed of thirty-two knots. Her distilling units produced 400,000 gallons of fresh water per day, the mess halls could serve 20,000 meals every twenty-four hours, and she carried 3.3 million gallons of JP-5 aircraft fuel.
Nimitz had hundreds of ladders and hatchways, over four thousand compartments, and enough pipe, duct, cable, and wiring that if put end-to-end would cross Indiana and back again. The average age of the nearly six thousand serving crewmen of CVN-68 was between nineteen and twenty-one.
Most of them were still here.
Using binoculars, the assault teams spotted them at once. Figures moved on the flight deck, in the openings of the aircraft elevators, wandered along catwalks. Both boats slowed as they came at the great ship from the starboard side, moving to within shouting distance of one another as Evan and Rosa let the boats idle and coast.
The assault plan was simple, necessarily so because admittedly they had no real idea about what they were up against, were not professional military, and were short on time. The dead were sure to find those left behind, and likely sooner than they anticipated. So the plan called for a single circuit around the ship to see if any of the dead could be baited into going off the side and into the water. Then they would dock at the aft swimmer’s platform Rosa said would be there. After that? Enter and start killing. It wasn’t elegant, and despite their commitment, most had plenty of doubts.
Angie moved to the bow of the patrol boat, kneeling with her Galil and bracing her left elbow on her knee. She sighted on a rotting sailor in the center elevator opening, watching as the target rose and fell with the motion of the rocking boat. She let her breath out slowly and squeezed.
The bullet hit the sailor in the hip, making him stagger.
She aimed again, timing the motion of the boat. Squeeze. The Galil cracked, but the dead sailor didn’t move. A complete miss. Angie let out another long breath, aimed carefully, fired. The bullet tore fabric and gray flesh from his shoulder. She slung the rifle and returned to the back of the boat.
“It’s like I figured,” she said. “We don’t have a shooting platform stable enough for head shots with any kind of consistency. We’d expend too much ammo just to get a quality hit.”
“How about using the barge?” someone asked. “Would that be better?”
She shook her head. “A little better, maybe, but not enough to justify the ammunition. Besides, they need it at Alameda.” She thought about breaking out the fifty-caliber Barrett, the enormous sniper rifle sitting on the deck in its long plastic case, but immediately dismissed the idea. The movement of the boat would disrupt accuracy just as with the Galil, and there was even less ammo for the heavier weapon.
Minutes later both vessels moved off together, starting their circuit. The supercarrier’s high, outward-curving steel walls cast acres of shadow, dwarfing the two small craft. It was intimidating, and when those on board thought about what stalked and crawled the passageways within, the feeling turned to an icy fear.
At the wheel, Evan imagined the terror this thing would inspire showing up off the coast of some foreign land, jets thundering off the deck with the promise of destruction mounted beneath their wings and bellies. It was not something a third world despot would care to see, knowing there was little he could do to prevent the ship from raining hell onto his corrupt little empire. An engine of death, now deadlier than ever imagined.
And in we must go, he thought.
As they motored along its length, they saw where radar domes and antennae had been crushed or torn completely away, tangles of dangling cable and wire, mangled catwalks, and what might have once been a large Gatling gun–style weapon, which was now crumpled like tinfoil. Nimitz had obviously collided with or rubbed along something nearly as indestructible as she, and there was no doubt part of her hull had been breached, accounting for the list.
Evan’s imagination, so useful in his writing, now conjured images of bloated green corpses trapped in water-filled compartments, relentlessly hammering at closed hatches in slow motion. Eternally hungry, trapped forever, until someone on one of these boats opened a hatch and set them free.
He shuddered and tried to keep his mind on his job.
The baiting attempt met with partial success. Upon seeing the boats below, several corpses up on the deck lurched off the sides, arms reaching. One wore a blue jersey and helmet; another was in green. Both fell about four feet before landing in the safety netting that completely encircled the flight deck to prevent a careless sailor from being blown over the side by jet blast. Their arms and legs became entangled, and they jerked and kicked facedown in the netting, still clawing at the prey out of reach below.
A quick sweep with binoculars revealed several dozen more like them along the length of the deck, caught in the netting and flopping like fish. One, a figure in yellow, managed to disentangle itself and crawl to the edge, dropping over the side and falling ninety feet, vanishing into the bay. A moment later it reappeared, its yellow helmet making it easy to spot as its “float coat,” the safety vest worn by everyone who worked the deck, kept it on the surface.
Xavier looked at it through his binoculars, watching it bob and gnash its teeth. He scanned the surface. “You would think there’d be more.”
Evan leaned forward so he could look up through the windscreen. “Baiting isn’t going to work like we’d hoped, not with that netting.”
Xavier was still watching the floating creature in yellow when the water around it suddenly thrashed white, the body abruptly plunging below the surface. Several seconds later a dorsal fin slid briefly from the water yards away, joined by another.
“Did you see that?” Xavier asked.
“I saw that,” said Evan. “That’s why you don’t see more in the water. There probably were.”
Now it was Xavier’s imagination that went into hyperdrive. He hadn’t thought about this. How many of the walking dead had gone off docks and piers, fallen from bridges and boats? He had seen them in the murk around the forklift where Little Bear had died, still moving along the bottom. All evidence indicated that animals were immune to OV, so the slow-moving drifters were now part of the food chain.
“There’s another one,” said Evan, pointing to starboard. A large, white-gray fin slid along the surface fifty yards from the carrier, then slipped beneath the surface like a diving submarine. How many were out here? he wondered. He couldn’t help but think about a famous shark movie where the creature devoured a boat about the same size as the one on which they were standing. I think we need a bigger boat, the writer thought, glancing at the carrier.
The priest looked at Evan. “Don’t fall out.”
The younger man grinned. “My luck to survive a zombie apocalypse only to be eaten by a prehistoric animal.”
Xavier informed the rest of them about the sharks and announced that baiting simply wouldn’t work. Anxious looks were exchanged. They couldn’t pick off the dead fr
om a safe distance and couldn’t lure them off the ship and into the water. Both would have improved their odds. They would have to do this the hard way.
The opposite side of the ship was much the same: a few shapes within the single elevator bay, several up on the flight deck, and more in the netting. Not as many as they would have liked, however. A lone figure in khaki shuffled along a catwalk high on the superstructure, bumped into a wall, turned, and shuffled back the other direction.
Both boats completed the circuit and arrived at the broad stern of the ship, a flat wall of steel rising out of the water. A vast, rectangular space about halfway up exposed the interior to the outside world, an area used for live testing of jet engines, a place where their fire and fumes could be vented outward. The opening was nearly as wide as the ship but too high to reach. The rest of the stern was covered in radar and antenna arrays, surface-to-air missile launchers, a scattering of catwalks, and an incomprehensible row of vertical piping.
Nestled amid the piping on the starboard side of the ship was a narrow length of steel catwalk riding just above the water, a single, oval-shaped door set in the hull behind it. The swimmer’s platform. They tied off on the piping and disembarked, shouldering backpacks and weapons. No one would remain with the boats; everyone was needed, and the group of twenty-eight filled the platform.
Angie had talked them out of bringing along any grenades or LAW rocket launchers, citing that in confined steel spaces, the weapons posed more threat to the living than to the dead. She could only hope no one had quietly smuggled something along in a pack. Skye, in one of the few times she spoke, told them to leave behind the Claymore mines as well. They were useless, and she knew from experience.
Brother Peter nodded along with the rest. He had a pair of grenades in his jacket pockets.
Angie, in addition to her burden of weaponry and ammo, carried the thirty-pound Barrett M82A1 by its top handle. A shoulder bag of spare magazines for the four-foot-long sniper rifle—each fifty-caliber bullet weighing four ounces—put her right at the edge of what she could handle and still move. She wasn’t complaining. The shooting would lighten her load quickly, and she knew she would soon long for the added weight of spare ammunition.
Xavier moved to the door as behind him flashlights were readied, magazines and chambers checked, soft words of encouragement offered to one another. This had been his idea, so it was only right that he should go first. A metal wheel was set in the center of the door, and he turned it to the left—lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, he thought—expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t, and turned easily. He tugged, and it didn’t move. Rosa caught his attention and made a pushing motion. He did, and the heavy door swung inward with the softest of creaks.
Darkness and a faint perfume of decay awaited.
Xavier took a breath, raised his flashlight and shotgun together, and entered the USS Nimitz.
BELLY OF THE BEAST
SIXTEEN
As Xavier had feared, the lights weren’t on everywhere in the ship. Such was the case in the area beyond the swimmer’s platform hatch, a space that was little more than a metal box with steep, steel-grid stairways both climbing to higher decks and descending into the bowels of the ship. Daylight from the open hatch revealed a large 02 stenciled in yellow on one wall. Xavier switched on his flashlight.
His nose wrinkled at the air, warm and rich with decay. He doubted that the ship’s master computer, running the vessel on reduced power, would consider air-conditioning a priority for areas other than those used for computers. As a result, Nimitz had been turned into a humid maze of decomposition. It was something Xavier hadn’t considered, and he wished he had brought a bandana to tie across his face.
He stood very still, listening, feeling. There was a vague vibration that traveled up through the soles of his shoes, and a distant knocking of something banging sporadically against metal, though he could not tell if it came from above or below. He panned his flashlight around the room, the hand gripping the shotgun already sweating. A single, oval-shaped hatch featuring a long handle that it could be opened with—a dog, he remembered from his distant service days—was mounted in the center of each wall. Three doors and stairs up or down provided so many choices, none of them likely to be good.
“What do we have?” said Calvin, entering and stopping beside the priest. Others followed.
Xavier moved the flashlight around. “Take your pick.”
It had been agreed before they left Alameda that their group was too large to move as one and still hope to be effective. They would jam up in hallways and doors, and in a fight would very likely end up shooting one another. Smaller fire teams had been selected that would split apart as soon as possible, with the simple plan of clearing the ship as they went. It wasn’t sophisticated or efficient and they knew they would leave drifters behind them as they moved, but to Skye’s earlier point, there were only so many of the walking dead on board, and each kill would lower their numbers. They couldn’t replace their losses.
Except with us, Xavier thought.
Communication was going to be a problem, they knew. None of them had any hopes that civilian two-way radios would have any chance of creating a signal that could penetrate the steel walls for distances of any use. The fire teams would be on their own and would have to scavenge what they needed on the move, as they had been doing for weeks.
“Good luck,” said Angie, passing the priest without further preamble, her face a grim mask. Skye followed her, along with Meagan. In the weeks since Angie had brought her in, the girl had proven to be a decent shot and was more than willing to face the undead in hand-to-hand combat. In addition to the rifle slung over her shoulder, she carried her lawn mower blade in a leather-gloved hand, one end wrapped in a thick handle of duct tape, the other sharpened like a barber’s razor. Angie and Skye would be the sniper team, Meagan their security, and they were headed upward, intending to get as high on the superstructure as they could. From there they would eliminate targets on the open deck.
“Be safe,” Xavier called. It sounded stupid the moment he said it, but Angie let him off with a wink as she disappeared up the metal stairway. Behind her, Skye was stone-faced, her M4 in a two-handed grip.
Carney, TC, and half a dozen of Calvin’s Family headed up a few minutes later, the older convict in the lead, his cellmate bringing up the rear. Carney had announced that they would try to find the hangar deck, which Rosa assured them would provide an open field of fire. There were no good-byes. Everyone just left.
“This deck looks as good as any,” said Evan, stepping up next to Calvin. He approached the hatch in the far wall, listened at it for a moment, then raised the handle with a metallic thud. The hatch swung in, revealing a long, narrow corridor with fluorescent light tubes set overhead at intervals, about one set in every three lit. Openings and doorways lined both walls, and the sporadic lighting created pools of gloom along the hallway’s length. It smelled dead in here.
Something in the distance moaned.
The young writer tried to think of some clever parting words, but instead he just swallowed hard and stepped through the hatch, trying to force the shotgun he carried to stop shaking. Another five men and women of Calvin’s Family followed, and the aging hippie came last, giving Xavier a nod before closing the hatch behind him.
Xavier, Rosa, and a handful of frightened hippies remained in the room, staring at the closed hatch. Brother Peter stood at the back of the group, his .45 having been returned to him, and now additionally armed with a civilian model twelve-gauge shotgun.
Pistol shots reverberated from behind Calvin’s hatch, making them all jump. Rosa started toward the metal door, but Xavier stopped her. “We knew this would happen,” the priest said. “We have our own places to go.”
The medic nodded and said a silent prayer for her new friends. Xavier gave his team what he hoped was an encouraging smile as he led them down the descen
ding stairway, flashlight beam and shotgun muzzle probing ahead. Reluctant feet shuffled after him.
At the back, Brother Peter rested his shotgun over a shoulder and followed, unable to control his grin. He was already having a fine time.
SEVENTEEN
One landing up from Second Deck, the stairs emptied into an identical room, with three hatches and more stairs above. On the wall here, the letters MHD were stenciled in yellow. The daylight from the open hatch below them faded almost at once, and they switched on flashlights.
“Main hangar deck?” Angie whispered.
Skye shrugged, and Angie continued upward, with Meagan moving up to follow close behind. This put Skye at the back, which made more sense anyway. She advanced sideways up the stairs, looking up and down in intervals, panning both her light and rifle muzzle wherever her head turned. Muffled shots came from below and they froze, but only for a moment before Angie got them moving again.
Skye watched Meagan ahead of her, gripping her lawn mower blade machete, wearing hard plastic forearm guards from the prison riot vehicle and additionally protected by a flip-down Plexiglas face shield someone in a wood or metal shop would wear. Meagan had been a student in an Alameda high school, but other than that small detail, she had said absolutely nothing about her life before the plague, or how she had come to be on her own. She and Skye had that in common. Meagan’s hatred of the undead even rivaled Skye’s own, another thing they shared, but instead of using a firearm, the other girl preferred to get in close.
“That’s dangerous,” Skye had said to her only this morning, when she learned about the girl’s fighting preference. It was one of the few times they had spoken. “The blood spray, it’s dangerous. Even with the face shield.”
Meagan had only nodded and said, “Who cares?”
They hadn’t spoken again, but Skye thought she knew how the girl felt, about living or dying. It was all the same these days, anyway. She wished she’d had that Plexiglas face shield at that Oakland church, though. If she had, she wouldn’t be going through this now.
Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead Page 13
