Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead

by Campbell, John L.

  God, looking like the Air Force shrink, sat cross-legged on the end of the conference table, eyes closed behind His glasses, hands resting on His knees. “Shh,” He said. “I’m in the zone.”

  “We need to go back down,” said the minister.

  God opened one eye. “You’re such a screwup. They won’t want to go below again.”

  “I’ll go alone.”

  A smile, and the eye closed. “Do you think you’re going to just walk right in and find them? No one leaves nuclear weapons just lying around, not even crazy-fuck Arab terrorists.”

  Brother Peter thought. “They’ll be secured. I’ll need a way to gain access.” He chewed on a thumbnail, his eyes distant. “How will I do that?” He thought about how he had been able to move around the silo way back when. Electronic pass card, of course. Why hadn’t he remembered that?

  “Because you’re batshit crazy,” said the Lord.

  “Pass card,” Peter repeated, ignoring the insult. “That’s how we did it.” Who would have access? he wondered. They would probably still have the card on them.

  Brother Peter thought about it. The handling of nuclear weapons, in any service branch, was done by specialists, just as he had been. Since dealing with nukes was usually not an everyday occurrence, however, they would have another job, wouldn’t they? Nukes were weapons. On carriers, who handled weapons? Red shirts. They would have access to the magazines, and some of them, the specialists, would have access to the chamber where the nukes were stored. He needed a red shirt with a special access card. He knew how to recognize the card.

  “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” God asked, unfolding Himself from the conference table and tousling Brother Peter’s hair. “See how much you can accomplish when your mind isn’t boiling over with lust?”

  At the mention of lust, Peter immediately pictured Angie West.

  “Same old Peter,” God said, chuckling and glancing at His watch. “Let’s get Armageddon rolling, shall we? I have other appointments.”

  • • •

  Father Xavier pretended to sleep and watched Peter Dunleavy through slitted eyes. The man was sitting stiffly on the other couch, staring at nothing. His lips moved slowly.

  “Is he talking to himself?” Rosa asked softly beside him.

  Xavier hadn’t known she was awake too. “It looks that way.”

  “Is he crazy? He’s acting crazy.”

  “Maybe it’s just a stress reaction,” the priest said, standing and yawning loudly to get the other man’s attention.

  Peter’s lips stopped moving at once, and the focus returned to his eyes. “We should get going,” he said.

  Xavier nodded. “How about we let everyone wake up, and put together a plan?”

  The minister slumped back into the couch and crossed his arms. Dakota, Eve, and Lilly joined them a few minutes later, and they all gathered around the conference table. Everyone looked at the priest, except for Peter.

  “This hasn’t gone like I’d hoped,” Xavier admitted. “The ship is more complex than I imagined, the dead more numerous. There are so many doorways and passages, places where they can surprise us.” He ran a hand over his head, realizing he needed a haircut. Much longer and he’d have an Afro, he thought, which, as a former Marine, was any hair length longer than a quarter inch. “I feel like we’ve been wandering around without getting much done.”

  Lilly put a hand on his arm. “We’re killing them, like we talked about. Every one we do is a step closer to taking the ship, right?”

  The others nodded. Peter stared at the table.

  “Thank you,” said Xavier, “but I think we can do better. This level of the ship seems to have fewer of them, for whatever reason. That could change rapidly, but for now it’s a good thing.”

  “Do you think they all just stopped in place out there because we took a nap?” said Brother Peter. “That’s a little naïve, isn’t it?”

  Xavier smiled at him. “Probably. But we have an indication that there’s fewer of them here, so we’ll go on that premise. They’ll be more manageable, so I think we should stay on this level.”

  Peter looked about to speak, then closed his mouth.

  Rosa was right, Xavier thought, this guy is an asshole.

  Xavier continued. “We should get back to checking and clearing every room, making a mark on the door after we do.”

  Dakota retrieved a handful of markers from the tray of a dry-erase board mounted to a wall. “These will do for now, until we find some spray paint.”

  Xavier gave him a nod. “We also need to be on the lookout for weapons, and especially ammunition. We’re not going to live long without either, so if anyone sees an armed sailor out there, we should make it a priority and take him down as a group.”

  And that was it. There really wasn’t much planning they could do, other than try to clear out the dead. No one suggested retreat, but Xavier did convince them that if they managed to find their way back to the rear of the ship and locate the original stairway, they would fall back to the two boats tethered outside in order to re-arm.

  As Rosa had said, the blue tiles not only signified officer country but announced entry into areas dedicated to warfare tasks. They inspected a medium-sized compartment marked SHIP’S SIGNALS, a room filled with computer workstations and tall processing units. The only occupant was a decaying female sailor with an old gunshot wound to the temple.

  JOINT INTELLIGENCE was a series of connected rooms filled with more computers, projection screens, shelves of files that were intricately color-coded like those in a doctor’s office, and what looked like endless rows of maps and satellite images in cardboard tubes filed in honeycomb shelving.

  As the group fanned out to peek behind workstations and inspect the long rows, Xavier thought about the security clearance it would have required just to enter this room. Intelligence areas in any service branch were highly restricted, and certainly the average sailor on Nimitz never saw this place. He was willing to bet that he was the first Marine grunt ever to do so.

  The zombie came at him from the left while he was looking right.

  It was a tall, dark-haired man, bloated and green, fluids dripping from its orifices onto the floor. It gasped and lunged, and Xavier managed only to twist and put his backpack in the way of the creature’s bite as teeth ripped at nylon. He could not avoid the filthy, ragged nails of its hands as it groped for his face, and in a second it dug four long, red furrows down his cheek. The priest cried out and tried to spin away but slipped in the mess the creature was leaving on the floor and went down hard.

  The creature dropped on top of him, gnashing and clawing, and Xavier jammed the axe handle across its neck to keep the teeth away. Fluids spilled from its mouth and turned the wooden handle slick, and a puff of dead air burped from inside the thing, triggering Xavier’s gag reflex.

  Rosa ran toward the sound of the fight and slid to a stop in a shooter’s stance, her nine-millimeter gripped in two hands.

  “No!” shouted Lilly. She elbowed Rosa aside, and the medic’s shot went into the ceiling. Lilly kept her eyes on the creature, pointing. “It’s green. We’ve seen what happens when you shoot the green ones, remember?”

  Rosa did remember. They popped, and sprayed their foul liquid everywhere. Xavier would be bathed in it.

  Lilly poked at the raised forehead with her shotgun barrel. “C’mon, handsome, look at me, look at me.”

  Xavier was strong, but the thing was wet and heavy, and the cords stood out on the priest’s arms as he fought the weight, grunting with the effort. He turned his face to the side to avoid what was drooling from its maw.

  Poke, poke. “Give mama a kiss, sweetie,” called Lilly, as the others arrived and stared in horror. No one wanted to risk grabbing it and pulling it off, for fear the pressure would burst its taut flesh. The thing wanted Xavier, was struggling to
bite at the axe handle and get a solid grip with its hands. Lilly was afraid to poke it too hard, but finally she shouted, “Hey, douchebag!” and gave it a solid rap on the head.

  The thing looked up with filmy gray eyes, snarled at her, and crawled off Xavier. Rosa leaped away and Lilly danced backward, still calling to it as the creature crawled after her on all fours. Xavier rolled on his side, gagging, and Dakota pulled him to his feet.

  “Aren’t you a pretty one,” said Lilly, keeping just out of reach, backing down a row of files. “Pretty little thing, you look like a bad acid trip, yes you do. Come on, handsome, come on. . . .”

  The bloated sailor climbed slowly to its feet, tottering as the fluids sloshed inside it. It moved forward faster, then broke into a gallop, tight flesh straining at its uniform.

  “It’s going to blow!” Rosa shouted. “You’re too close!”

  “Not yet,” called Lilly, leading it farther away. “Not yet. Wait . . . okay, kill it!” She had reached an opening in the shelving and dove through. Rosa fired, three quick barks of the nine-millimeter. One round punched into some files, one hit it square in the back of the head, and the last hit just above where its kidneys would have been.

  It was green.

  It blew apart.

  The sound it made when it went was almost as horrible as the splattered mess, but was nothing in comparison to the smell that followed. The group fled the intelligence rooms retching, back into the passageway. No one had noticed that Brother Peter had stood on the edge of the action the entire time, watching and doing nothing.

  Rosa took the point and hustled them through another hatch into a small, blue-tiled galley and mess, apparently reserved for officers. The stenciling on the hatch said DIRTY SHIRT. Dakota shot down a pair of creatures in cook’s whites, and Eve found a dead boy of seventeen or eighteen standing and swaying near a stainless steel dishwasher. She used her shotgun.

  With the room secured, Rosa broke out her medical bag and went to work on the fingernail gouges down Xavier’s cheek, her own face the stone mask of a crisis professional. The priest winced as she cleaned out the wounds, but otherwise didn’t complain. Between street fights, boxing, a gangbanger’s blade, and now the end of the world, his face had turned into a road map of violence.

  Rosa sank a needle into the priest’s arm.

  “What’s that?”

  “Antibiotic, hopefully enough to kill whatever’s inside you. Unless the virus transmitted through the scratches, and in that case you’re fu . . . you’re screwed.” When he started to say something, she shook her head. “I know, you’ve heard the word before. Just be still. Even if the virus didn’t transmit, his claws were disgusting and even a normal infection could be dangerous.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “That’s a big dose,” she said. “You might experience some nausea.”

  “After smelling that thing?” Xavier laughed. “How will I know the difference?”

  As she applied a square bandage to the wounds, Xavier blinked. He hadn’t thought about getting the Corpse Virus through scratches. The medic saw it in his eyes. “Try not to think about it,” she said, taping down the gauze pad. “There’s no evidence to suggest you can get infected that way. I didn’t see a single case of it in all those weeks at the ferry terminal.”

  That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, he thought. “You watch me closely, Doc. If it looks like . . .”

  “I’ll do what I have to,” she said brusquely, “but I’m telling you not to worry. Doctor’s orders. Now let’s go, jarhead.”

  They got moving with Dakota on point, Xavier at the center of their little band with Rosa close by. Brother Peter stayed in the rear. They searched the officers’ quarters and found nothing. The air traffic control center, a large room with rows of radar scopes, held a trio of zombies in yellow firefighter gear. They shuffled forward groaning and snapping behind Plexiglas oxygen masks and went down to head shots.

  The Combat Information Center, or CIC, was a low-ceilinged room that would have been black except for the colored lights of computer terminals and the hazy blue glow of screens. A pair of vertical, blue plastic plotting boards split the room, covered in grease pencil marks. The air-conditioning was still on in here, and the glowing darkness made the place look like the bridge of a spaceship in a science fiction movie.

  The dead surged toward the intruders at once.

  There were more than twenty of them, officers and enlisted men in varying states of decay, galloping forward among the terminals. Rosa, the three hippies, and Brother Peter opened up, standing shoulder to shoulder like a firing squad, and the roar of their weapons in such a confined space was deafening. Heads were torn apart and bodies thrown backward, computer screens exploded in showers of glass, sparking like Fourth of July fountains, and the vertical Plexiglas boards disintegrated.

  To the right of the shooters, Xavier advanced on a pair of corpses and buried his axe quickly in each of their heads, jerking the blade free and searching for more.

  It was over in less than thirty seconds, the stink of old blood and putrid insides mixing with gunpowder, the air-conditioning doing little to dispel the reek. The group reloaded and moved through the room, out another hatch and into a new corridor. After a short distance they were back on gray tile.

  A hatch on the left opened into a vacant dental suite that looked capable of handling a dozen patients at once. Rosa told herself to stock up on supplies until she saw what was up ahead, a pair of white swinging doors. In black letters on each door was the word MEDICAL.

  Both doors were chewed by bullet holes, empty shell casings covered the floor of the hallway, and the left door was marred by a pair of bloody handprints, now turned a rust brown so dark it was almost black. The battle that had taken place here made them pause, as did the absence of bodies. After a moment, Rosa led them forward, and the little group eased through the double doors.

  Rosa and the others were so intent on what awaited them on the other side that they failed to notice Father Xavier was no longer with them.

  Neither was Brother Peter.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Carney awoke to the smell of a burning cigarette. He was slumped in an uncomfortable position in the rolling chair, and he groaned as he straightened, opening his eyes. TC was sitting a few feet away, elbows on his knees, watching Carney. A cigarette dangled from his lips, smoke curling toward the ceiling. There was a slight smile on his face.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Carney.

  TC puffed and ground the butt out under a boot. “Nothing.”

  “Then go look at it someplace else.”

  The younger inmate chuckled.

  A fake potted tree in a corner of the TV studio served as a urinal, and as Carney relieved himself he checked to be sure the nine-millimeter was still in his back waistband. It was. “We have to decide what to do,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re still in a dead end.” And there was still a steady thumping at the hatch.

  “I got that figured already,” TC said from across the room. Carney waited to hear some juvenile plan about opening the hatch and going out hard and fast, but when he turned around, TC was no longer in the room.

  “In here.” His voice came from within one of the open doors across from the control booth.

  Carney entered the narrow electrical room, where he found TC on his hands and knees in front of a two-foot-square opening, a pried-off metal panel leaning against the wall beside it.

  “It’s some kind of service tunnel,” said TC.

  Carney crouched behind his cellmate and aimed his Maglite beam down the tunnel. It was tiled, tight, and packed with conduit, breaker panels, and bundles of colored wire cabled to the ceiling.

  “How did you find this?” Carney asked.

  “I woke up before you did,” TC said, looking back and grinning. “Started poking around.” He crawled
into the tunnel, his big wrench in one hand.

  Carney felt an involuntary chill at the idea of TC up and moving around while he slept, unaware and defenseless. He couldn’t let that happen again.

  TC had forgotten to turn off his own flashlight before they slept, and the batteries were dead. He asked for Carney’s, then kept crawling as his cellmate followed. It was extremely tight, especially for two men built as broadly as they were, and at times they had to lie flat on their backs and shimmy to squirm past an electrical box or under a thick bundle of cable. Carney didn’t envy whatever sailors had been responsible for servicing this area, but he was willing to bet they had been young, flexible, and small.

  After forty feet of crawling, they came to the back of another gray panel. It was secured by screws coming in from the other side and would have to be forced open. Turning in the cramped access tunnel in order to kick it free was an impossibility, and neither wanted to back out just so they could repeat this crawl feet-first. TC shuffled onto his back and began slamming the head of his wrench into the metal.

  Carney winced at every strike. If those things weren’t already waiting for them on the other side, this would surely draw them. He waited in the dark, gripping the checkered grip of his pistol, smelling their combined sweat.

  The panel popped off with a bang and TC scuttled out. Carney expected snarls and reaching hands, but there was nothing. He crawled after his cellmate and was able to stand in another square electrical room. TC’s hand was already on the handle of the only door, and he threw it open, lunging through and raising the wrench. Carney rushed out nearly on top of him.

  The door banged into a dead sailor in a brown jersey and the creature groaned, staggering back. Two others in brown charged forward from the right. Carney shot the closest one in the face, so close that its forward momentum carried the zombie into him, throwing him into the wall. The second one came on and added its own weight, ripping with its jagged fingernails and snapping its teeth as it tried to reach past its dead comrade and get to the meal.