“I’m not weak,” the minister repeated in a mutter.
“Okay, cool your jets, tough guy. Don’t forget who you’re talking to.” The shrink shifted forms into the hated, touchy gym teacher, making the minister recoil. “Naughty boys get punished, oh yes they do,” said God.
“I told you I don’t like that form,” Brother Peter said, his voice becoming a petulant whine.
God shrugged and turned into Anderson, Peter’s trusted and loyal aide whom the minister had fed to the undead. He was naked and covered in bites and torn flesh, scraps of zip ties dangling from His wrists and ankles. He held up His palms, both with bleeding stigmata. “WHO . . . AM . . . I . . . ?” God’s voice thundered, making the steel deck tremble.
Brother Peter clapped his hands to the sides of his head. “Stop! Please, you’re confusing me!”
Anderson became the shrink once more, adjusting the glasses on the bridge of His nose and chuckling. “Lighten up, Petey,” God said. “I’m just messing with you.”
Brother Peter wanted to lighten up. He wanted to understand why his savior was behaving in such a (fucking annoying) mysterious way. It was making clear thinking difficult. And why was God so (fucking sarcastic) displeased with him all the time? Wasn’t he God’s chosen (fucking murderer) disciple?
God simply looked at him and frowned.
Brother Peter forced himself to stand straight and rubbed his fists at his eyes like a tired little boy before looking his savior in the eye. “What should I do?”
God gave him a patient smile, the kind reserved for clumsy children, and shook His head. “You can’t be a puppet if you serve me. Figure it out.”
Now it was the minister’s turn to frown, and he thought for a moment.
“You wanted me to be on the ship, and I am,” said Peter. “You want me to be your avenging sword, the vessel from which you will pour your cleansing fire.” He wasn’t actually sure if God had said that to him, or if he just imagined that was what God intended. It didn’t matter. He knew what God wanted. It was what Peter wanted too.
“Excellent!” said God, shifting from the Air Force shrink to Sherri. Only She hadn’t been slashed, or bitten, and She looked, well, Peter thought She looked sort of sexy, and he remembered the things the young woman had done in order to keep herself alive a bit longer. God stepped close and draped Her arms around the minister’s neck, tipping Her head back, lips slightly parted. She sighed, and Brother Peter found himself growing aroused, instantly ashamed that he should feel this way about God, but unable to control himself. His face grew flushed.
“Or do you like this better?” God asked, becoming Angie West in heels and a see-through black nylon catsuit, just like the outfit his mistress in Cincinnati used to wear.
“Oh, yes,” Brother Peter said thickly, reaching for Her.
God slapped him sharply across the face. “No touching!”
The minister looked down, face burning. And that was just how the bitch was, wasn’t she? Strutting around with that tight little body, throwing it in a man’s face, then threatening violence if he should want to give her what she so richly deserved.
God lifted his chin and met his eyes. “I’m distracting you. Please continue.”
Peter thought about the training class in Omaha, when the Navy instructor spoke about comparative security measures. About the carriers. When he spoke it was with a sense of pride. “It was a highly classified subject. Only the best of us were allowed to attend.
“The Navy was bragging,” Brother Peter said, his eyes distant with a memory. “They talked about how easy we had it, how simple it was to maintain security measures so deep underground, and that they had it tougher at sea, which made them so much smarter than us.”
God began rubbing Brother Peter’s shoulders, slowly, patiently.
“They claimed they took them off the carriers in 1997,” the minister said, “and that’s why Marines were no longer on board, because there was nothing left to protect.”
“But you knew they were lying, didn’t you?” God was walking in a slow circle around him now, trailing Her fingertips across his neck.
“Of course they were lying!” Peter said, nearly spitting the words. “I could see it in that commander’s face, standing up there in his pretty dress whites. He was bearing false witness. And besides, no matter what they said, no one would really give up that kind of advantage.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” said God.
“Up-to-go-down,” Peter said. “They thought they were so clever with that. Up-to-go-down. They even showed us what they looked like. The arrogance! Showing us photos and then claiming they didn’t have them anymore. They thought we were stupid.”
“The sin of pride,” God whispered.
Brother Peter’s distant gaze became focused. “MARS, named after Jupiter’s son, the god of war. A wing-mounted weapon fired from the Hornet. But instead of blast fragmentation, it carried a nine-kiloton nuclear warhead.”
“Praise Jesus,” God whispered, and then stepped in front of the minister and gripped his shoulders with two powerful hands. “And you know where to find them.”
“Ammunition bunker, belly of the ship.” Peter grinned. “Up to go down.”
God peered into the minister’s face. “Do you still have the skills? Do you still have the faith?”
“I do,” Brother Peter said, standing tall, “and I do.”
“Then be my vessel, Peter,” God said, appearing for the first time as a tall old man with white hair and eyes filled with infinite wisdom.
“Thy will be done,” Brother Peter said, his heart filled with glory.
• • •
Xavier looked up from his thoughts to see Peter staring at him with a curious intensity he had not seen in the man. More than ever he was certain he had seen him somewhere before. Maybe he was just tired. “Are you okay?” the priest asked.
“I’m worn out from the gas fumes, but I’ll be okay. And you were right, we need to rest.” Brother Peter walked over to join them.
“Any ideas?” asked Xavier.
The minister nodded. “With all due respect to your plan . . .” Peter held out his palms deferentially.
Xavier chuckled and shook his head. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”
“Well, I just think being this deep in the ship is the wrong thing to do. It’s more tightly closed in, the lighting isn’t the best, and it’s hard to fight down here.” Peter summoned some of the charisma that had skyrocketed him to televangelist fame. “And that leaking fuel isn’t going to get better by itself; in fact, it’s probably going to poison this entire deck. It may not bother the drifters, but it makes staying impossible for us.”
Xavier nodded. He was thinking fuzzy. The man had just made an inarguable point.
Brother Peter pressed on. “There’s bound to be food, barracks . . .”
“Berthing,” Rosa corrected. “On a ship it’s called berthing.”
“Right, thank you.” Peter smiled, imagining burning the woman with a cigar butt. “We’ll find a safe place to rest and recover, maybe some ammunition, and hopefully some others of our group.” He gave a small shrug. “I think maybe it’s time to retreat, at least for a bit, then figure out how to come back safely later. Go up to go down,” he couldn’t resist adding.
Xavier found himself nodding, then looked at the others, who nodded as well. “That sounds good, Peter.”
The minister smiled. “I’ll lead,” he said.
Beside him, God smiled and clapped him on the back. “Good boy.”
TWENTY-THREE
This is stupid, Carney thought. What made us think we could do this? The Nimitz was a city-sized labyrinth packed with horrors, an unfamiliar and unfriendly territory, and they had thought the zombies would simply line up in neat rows awaiting execution? A professional SWAT or SEAL team would t
rain for months before attempting this, and they would have solid information and logistical support. This was not a task for a bunch of frightened amateurs.
TC was staring at him with a cocked eyebrow and a half smile. They were in a long compartment where the walls were covered in blue, white, and purple pipes; steam valves; and seemingly miles of aluminum conduit. Scattered light bars revealed shadowy mechanical equipment, giant reels of the arresting cable used to stop aircraft as they landed on the deck, and a spare catapult piston as long as a city bus.
“Whatcha thinking about?” asked TC. He had slung his auto shotgun, which looked oddly like a six-shooter only with a much larger cylinder capable of handling many more shells, in favor of a four-foot steel wrench. It looked heavy enough that an average person would need both hands to use it, but the muscled inmate carried it in a casual, one-handed grip as if it were as light as a yardstick. “Something’s cooking in there,” he said.
Carney looked at his cellmate in annoyance. TC frustrated him, dangerous one moment, charming and likable the next. Carney had to remind himself that it was the dangerous side that ruled the man. “Just thinking, is all,” Carney said.
“About Mexico maybe?” TC said, nodding slowly. “We could do it, man. I’ve been thinking about the boats, that one we took from the boatyard. I bet it’s big enough to handle the ocean, or at least the coast.”
Carney thought about the big Bayliner, with its full fuel tank and deck packed with supplies. The assault group had loaded both it and the patrol boat with food, water, and ammo, thinking they could use the boats as a fallback position if things got too hairy inside the aircraft carrier. The thirty-two-foot Bayliner could handle open water. Fuel would be a problem eventually, but there were sure to be plenty of marinas on the way down the California coast.
“We could just slip away,” TC said, moving in close, the trusted cellmate once more. “No one would know. We don’t owe these people shit, man.”
Mexico, Carney thought. Sun and sand. The idea had really just been something to keep TC’s mind occupied, to prevent him from going wild with his newfound freedom. Carney had never actually considered it a serious possibility. Had he?
A distant echo of gunfire made Carney start, but TC rested a hand on the other man’s arm. “It’s just those assholes who ran out on us, getting into some shit. Let them. It keeps the zombies busy and off our ass.”
Carney looked through one of the compartment’s wide openings and out into a dark corridor. The hollow booming of a shotgun sounded ghostly, and then it was gone. He took a half step in that direction, and TC’s grip tightened.
“Fuck ’em, bro,” TC said, his voice taking on a nasty edge. “They split, they don’t give a fuck about us. No one does, no matter how much they smile and say they do. It’s you and me, bro, always has been. C’mon, let’s go to Mexico.”
Carney looked at the man who had been his friend and ally for so many years. TC had never been terribly bright, and he acted impulsively, his violent tendencies often taking over and getting him into trouble that Carney had to resolve, often at personal risk. During their time together in San Quentin, it had most often felt as if he were TC’s keeper. But how many times had TC been there for him, saved his ass? That time when the young Latin King tried to shank Carney in the yard in order to prove his worth to his crew, and TC had seen it coming, warned Carney in time. The young gangbanger had turned up three days later with his neck snapped and his head nearly twisted around backward. Everyone knew who had done it, and TC just gave them that charming grin that invited anyone who thought they could prove it to please, give it a try. And when the Aryans decided that Carney’s refusal to join their crew was the kind of insult worthy of revenge, hadn’t it been TC who moved fast enough to push Carney aside and take the blade in his own ribs?
For years he had trusted TC, and he wanted to trust him now. Did Carney really owe anything to the others? To Angie, who had stood by his side, unbreaking as they fired on the dead? To Xavier, who, in his acceptance of Carney’s past, appeared to offer a second chance? And what about Skye? He still didn’t know what, if anything, she meant to him. Could he just abandon them all, slink away like the untrustworthy convict everyone assumed he would be? And would any of them care if he was gone?
TC watched his cellmate’s face closely, the grin spreading wider and exposing teeth. In that moment, Carney saw what was behind those smiling eyes, something he had known was there all along and had been a fool to even consider discounting. It was the snake, venomous and predatory, concerned only for itself, seeing the rest of the world as potential prey.
Even an old friend.
“No,” Carney said, pulling away. “You go if you want to.” He turned and headed for the opening, muscles tensing for the impact of TC slamming his heavy wrench into the back of Carney’s head.
The blow didn’t come.
“Whatever,” TC said. He cocked the wrench over a shoulder and joined his cellmate at the opening, walking with a familiar, swaying, prison yard gait. “We’ll just stay and fuck shit up, then.”
Jekyll and Hyde, Carney thought, but the Jekyll was only a mask. If he were smart, he would put a bullet in the back of TC’s head at the first opportunity. He should do it right now. And yet, he couldn’t. He told himself it was because he needed TC’s capacity for violence to get through this, that it was definitely not because somewhere down deep he still felt responsible for him, that despite it all, he still considered TC a friend.
They made their way down corridors, some lit and some requiring flashlights, passing berthing areas and doorways marked AVIONICS or simply SUPPORT. The distant gunfire had since been replaced with a hollow silence broken only by their footsteps and the sound of their breathing. They went by a set of steep stairs and took a careful look—nothing was lurking above or below—and passed a series of closed hatches labeled as assorted storage compartments. If the hippies had come this way, Carney decided, they hadn’t encountered anything; the floor was clear of both bodies and shell casings. They might, Carney thought, have drawn the dead away from this area, keeping them occupied, as his cellmate had suggested.
They came to a T intersection with long, low corridors to the right and left, the ceiling festooned with wire and cable, infrequent light bars showing emptiness except for a single body lying on the floor far to the left, one that did not get up and come after them. Ahead was an oval-shaped hatch with HANGAR stenciled on it in white letters. The hatch was slightly ajar.
TC pulled it open without waiting and ducked through. Carney followed, his M14 ready.
After hours in tight spaces and hallways, the sheer openness of the place was overwhelming. The USS Nimitz’s main hangar bay was 684 feet long and over a hundred feet wide and rose to a height of twenty-five feet. The space ran two-thirds the length of the ship, a vast and airy place. Spaced at even intervals along its length were three immense sets of steel, power-driven floor-to-ceiling doors that could close off sections of the hangar, each several inches thick and ready to be sealed to prevent the spread of fire. They stood open now. Daylight flooded into the cavernous bay through four wide openings where the aircraft elevators were positioned, one on the port side toward the rear and three on the starboard. The deck was spongy, covered in a gray-black nonskid coating. As everywhere else, the walls were crammed with pipes and valves, and a complex fire suppression system was suspended overhead.
Normally packed with Super Hornets, Prowler EA-6Bs, Hawkeye air search radar, and antisubmarine aircraft, the hangar bay was empty except for half a dozen SH-60 Seahawk helicopters—smaller versions of the Black Hawk—and a lone fighter aircraft that was partially dismantled and tucked against a high steel wall. Although it was wide open for the most part, there still remained shadowy areas filled with empty fuel drop tanks, tool lockers and forklifts, and empty bomb and missile carts, as well as a seemingly endless supply of hatches, openings, and ladderways. O
n the far side of the space, at midpoint, a pair of elevator doors were slowly closing on something caught between them, sliding open, then attempting to close again only to repeat the process.
And then there were the dead.
“Jackpot,” said TC, a mad grin on his face.
There had to be hundreds of them, Carney thought, some as close as twenty feet, though these had yet to notice the two new arrivals. The dead of the Nimitz were dressed in blue coveralls and camouflage, khaki, and colored jerseys, and almost half wore yellow firefighter gear. All were damaged to one extent or another, some slumped and limping, others stumbling along with missing or twisted limbs, heads cocked at odd angles or chests and bellies blown open and leaking dark fluids. There were sailors who were bloated and green, others withered and dry, and some with blackened sleeves of flesh sliding off limbs like snakes shedding skin, revealing bone and sinew beneath. They moved, they moaned, and even with the fresh air coming in through the elevator bays, they reeked of death.
Here the spongy deck was covered in spent shell casings, some no doubt from the original battle when the supercarrier was lost, others more recent. Several large knots of kneeling corpses, tearing and scrabbling over fresh meat, explained the sudden absence of gunfire and revealed the fate of the hippies who had broken away from the inmates.
TC started in, but Carney jerked him back. “We can’t handle this.” The older man’s voice was a harsh whisper.
“Fuck that,” TC said, pulling free and doing nothing to lower his voice. “This is what we came for. If we’re not going to Mexico, then I’m gonna get me some.”
Carney grabbed him again, seeing that the dead were turning toward TC’s voice. “We don’t have the ammo for this,” Carney said.
TC jerked away again and gave his cellmate a dangerous look. “Then go find a place to hide, old man,” he said, shoving the long wrench through his belt as if it were a samurai sword. He walked toward a dead woman in coveralls who was shuffling at him, staring with milky eyes and a slack expression. “What’s up, bitch?” TC said, leveling his shotgun and blowing her head off.
Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead Page 18
