Chief Liebs nodded. He was in his early thirties, hair already silvering, not especially tall but with a straightforward, pleasant face. The other sailors in his party called the chief gunner’s mate “Guns,” a nickname of respect.
“August thirteenth, I think,” he said. “What day is it now? I tried to keep track, but that didn’t last long.”
Mercy told him she wasn’t exactly sure either, but that it had to be well into September or even beyond. The realization that he and his shipmates had been barricaded in that storeroom for over a month shocked the chief.
“They’ve been pounding at that door the whole time,” Liebs said, looking at the piles of corpses, wondering if the officer who had saved them was here, realizing he probably was. “They couldn’t get in, and we couldn’t get out.”
Chief Liebs told them the storeroom was ventilated, so there was no fear of suffocation, and stocked with plenty to eat and drink. There was no way to dispose of waste, and they had turned a corner of the room into an impromptu head, which of course made the entire space reek. They had fashioned a deck of cards with cardboard and a marker to pass the time. Liebs lowered his voice and admitted that each of them had struggled with having no sense for the passage of time, day or night, and the endless pounding and moaning at the door had been maddening. That one of his men might commit suicide had been his biggest fear, and Liebs had used every bit of his leadership skills to keep them from making that choice. As Evan listened, he decided it had been the man’s personality and caring that kept them alive, nothing he had learned from the Navy.
“What’s the condition of the ship?” Liebs asked.
“It looks like it ran aground,” Evan said, “just off Oakland. It’s infested with the walking dead, and you’re the only survivors we’ve found.”
Liebs was quiet as he absorbed this: the loss of his ship, the loss of so many friends. At last he looked up at them. “I have a fiancée in New Jersey. Do you know anything about what happened back east?”
They didn’t, but told him a little about what had become of California, or at least what parts of California they had heard about. Mercy rubbed the man’s back slowly. “She might be okay,” Mercy said. “You can’t assume she’s not.”
The chief nodded without comment. He asked if there had been any Navy activity around the Bay Area, any other ships or aircraft. He frowned when they told him there had been none, and they shared what they had found at the USNS Comfort, the hospital ship resting abandoned and overrun by the dead at an Oakland dock.
When the other sailors joined the group, Liebs introduced them to their rescuers. All were young and male. One was a basic seaman, a boatswain’s—or bosun’s—mate, another was an electronics technician, and the third was a petty officer second class who was an operations specialist, a carrier’s jack-of-all-trades. The last in their group was a young man from Colorado, a machinist’s mate and petty officer third class whom Liebs referred to as a “nuc,” pronouncing it nuke.
“You can tell because he glows in the dark,” Liebs said, making the boy smile. “He helps run the reactors.”
“How are they?” the nuc asked. “At least one must be at reduced power. Have you been down there?”
Calvin gave the boy a smile. “Son, we wouldn’t know a nuclear reactor if we were standing in front of it, and no, we haven’t been down there.”
“Are you worried there might be something wrong with them?” Mercy asked, her face showing a hint of alarm. Next to her, Evan suppressed a grin. The walking dead were trying to eat them at every turn of a corridor, and Mercy waded into them like she was Special Forces, but she was still afraid of radiation.
The nuc shook his head. “I’m sure they’re fine, I’m just thinking about maintenance. If there were a problem like you’re worried about, you’d already be dead.”
Mercy was oddly comforted by the blunt words.
Stone asked, “What’s the deal with all the dead firefighters?” When the chief looked at him, obviously not understanding, Stone said, “Everywhere we go, no matter what part of the ship we’re in, we find unrolled hoses and zombies in firefighter gear.” He gestured at examples among the heaped dead around them. “But there’s no sign of a fire.”
Liebs got it. “That’s because we were at general quarters. Every sailor on board is trained in damage control, and that mostly means firefighting. General quarters is battle conditions, when fire is most likely, so lots of people without combat assignments suit up and prepare to fight fire.” He shook his head. “Fire on a ship is no joke. I’m glad you haven’t seen any.”
Chief Liebs looked into the faces of his liberators. “I can’t believe a bunch of civilians got it in their heads to board this monster and take it by force.” He shook his head in wonder and respect. “I’m glad you did. I’m just amazed you’re still alive.”
“We won’t be for long,” said Calvin. “We used up most of our ammo clearing this room.”
“You said something about an armory?” Evan asked.
The chief nodded. “I’m a gunner’s mate. We handle ship’s security and tactical training, man the crew-served weapons, and maintain the magazines.” He produced the key again. “We also run the armory.” He looked around at them. “We’ll need to get there if we’re going to survive.”
“Do you know where it is?” Mercy asked, and abruptly blushed at the stupid question.
“Yes, ma’am,” the chief said, giving her a smile. “It’s only about a hundred feet from here. We just need to get there.”
THIRTY-THREE
Angie was awakened by a single, muffled pistol shot.
She scrambled to her feet and yanked open the bridge’s main hatch, pounding up the metal stairs to the level above. “Skye?” she called, her heart hammering, eyes already welling up. She went over the knee knocker and into Primary Flight Control, looking around the small compartment at the uppermost tip of the aircraft carrier.
It was empty.
She approached the open hatch leading out to the catwalk overlooking the flight deck. It was still dark, but the sky was lightening a bit. There was Skye, her body seated on the metal gridwork facing away, legs dangling and arms draped over the pipe railing, head slumped.
“Oh . . . Skye,” she whispered, walking out to her. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why?” Skye asked, lifting her head. “I got him.” She gestured with her pistol at the body of an officer lying nearby on the catwalk with a fresh bullet hole in his head.
Angie sobbed and laughed and dropped to her knees, hugging the young woman from behind. “I thought . . . oh, I thought . . .”
Skye hugged at the arms encircling her. “The shot—I didn’t think about that.” She turned and looked at Angie. Her skin was the color of lead, her left eye a milky orb, but otherwise she appeared fine.
Angie looked her up and down rapidly. “You’re okay? What about the fever?”
Skye shook her head. “I’ve been waiting for it all night. No fever, no symptoms.” She held up her bandaged arm. “This hurts a lot; the bastard bit me hard. I hope it doesn’t get infected. Human mouths are dirty.”
Angie laughed and hugged her again, crying. “That we can deal with.”
Skye let herself enjoy the hug, and felt a twinge in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time, a good twinge. She pulled away slowly. “My headaches are gone,” she said, then lifted her left hand. It was steady, without a hint of tremble. “That’s gone too. Angie, I haven’t felt this good in . . . in I don’t remember.”
Angie stared at the hand, at the girl, and suddenly realized that the gravel quality of her voice was all but gone. Skye had a nice voice. “Are you sure?”
Skye nodded. “I know my body. I’m fine. If it were going to hit me, it would have happened by now, right?”
“I don’t want to . . . to get too hopeful,” Angie said, “but . . .”
“
I think I’m immune. The blood exposure, maybe it was like—” Skye waved a hand, frustrated. “Like a vaccine? Maybe the slow burn worked like that. I don’t know, but maybe it’s like a childhood disease; once you get it, you can’t get it again.”
“Rosa might be able to tell us,” Angie said.
Skye nodded. “I might still turn if I get killed, I can’t tell, but that thing had to have given me a full dose with that bite.” She smiled. “Nothing.”
Angie liked this smile. It wasn’t like the crooked, sarcastic lip curls she had seen. This one was real.
They climbed to their feet, and Skye holstered her pistol. Below them, the walking dead of the Nimitz had once more begun to crowd the flight deck, coming up from below.
“Ready to go to work?” Skye asked.
Angie loaded a fresh magazine into the Galil. “You bet your ass.”
Skye smiled again, and it made the other woman’s heart soar, compelling her to give another big hug. Then Skye touched Angie’s arm. “Now that I know they can’t infect me, I want a machete as soon as we can find one.” Her eyes hardened. “It’s fucking on.”
• • •
There was enough starlight, and the quality of their rifle optics combined with their elevated shooting position helped in their work. Nothing that moved on the deck could escape them, and with the superstructure’s location just aft of midships, there was nothing they couldn’t reach. Brass tinkled down through the levels of catwalk grid and spun through space as below, bodies crumpled and fell. At various points around the flight deck, where stairways led up onto the perimeter, corpses lurched up into the gunfire one after another, bullets dropping them flat or spinning them over the side to sag motionless in the safety netting.
By the time the sun began to peek over the Oakland foothills, their rifles and bandoliers were empty except for pistol ammunition. On the deck below lay two hundred fifty fresh kills.
The women slung their rifles across their backs and checked their sidearms, their next move a room-to-room hunt down through the superstructure. There had been armed sailors who had tried to prevent the ship from falling, and although they had failed, they would still be around, along with their weapons and ammunition. Angie and Skye would find them.
As they left the catwalk and reentered the ship, neither woman looked toward Alameda, and neither one saw it fall to the dead.
WRATH
THIRTY-FOUR
The sky was a cool pink as the sun approached, and beneath its pale glow, more than ten thousand of the walking dead flowed silently down the access road beside the seaplane lagoon and into the mouth of the main pier. Close to the end of her overnight watch, a young woman named America, positioned as a lookout on the stern of a World War II frigate, had wrapped herself in a blanket to ward off the chill, and nodded off. She was asleep when the horde began to move, asleep when they turned the corner and started down the pier, and she was only just coming around when half a dozen drifters made their way up the ship’s gangplank and found her at the stern.
She didn’t even get a chance to scream.
Among the dead were Alameda natives, drifters from Oakland and Sacramento and some that had crossed the Bay Bridge, along with the first of many that had torn down the fences of NAS Lemoore. Among these was a fighter jock nicknamed Rocker. His flight suit was black with old blood and ragged from many miles of travel, and his head flopped to one side.
Vladimir Yurish was up early, as was his custom, and he stood on the deck of the same vintage destroyer where only last night Maya had been, staring out at the Nimitz just as she had done. Vlad stood at the bow, which pointed toward the open bay, and quietly smoked a cigarette as he gazed upon the first touches of light on water. The Nimitz remained little more than a silhouette. A light, cool breeze tugged at his flight suit and ruffled the hair of the small boy beside him.
Ben, three years old, stood beside the pilot with his small hands gripping the wire railing encircling the deck, a mere sprout beside the towering oak that was the pilot. He was looking out at the water as well.
Vlad had planned a peaceful morning by himself before the others awoke. When he crawled from his sleeping bag, he walked away stretching and swinging his arms, trying to work out the stiffness from sleeping on hard ground. He quickly found, however, that he was not the first one up. Small Ben was seated alone on the pier thirty feet away from the others, playing with a little blue-and-yellow plastic truck and making engine noises. Vlad glanced back to Sophia, knowing she would panic over the boy’s absence. She was motionless in her bag. Let her sleep, he thought, and knelt beside the child.
“What sort of truck do you have?” Vlad asked, not expecting much of a response. Sophia had told him about the boy’s rescue from the street in front of the Alameda firehouse, and how Angie had run at the dead and laid waste to them with the ferocity of a she-bear defending a cub. Sophia knew nothing about the boy, and he spoke very little. Ben had taken to Vladimir at once, however, sitting in the big Russian’s lap without invitation and handing over a book to be read, or standing on Vlad’s legs and tugging on the man’s protruding ears with his little hands, laughing as if they were the most delightful two things in the world. Vlad put on a show of patient endurance, but he somehow always ended up near the boy, and Ben often wandered into Vlad without seeming to notice, casually wrapping a small arm around one tall leg. Sometimes Vlad would take great long steps with the boy clinging to his leg like a small chimp, and it never failed to make Ben laugh.
“It’s a blue truck,” said Ben. “And yellow.”
“Yes, but do you know what it does?”
Ben nodded. “It’s a dumb fuck.”
The Russian’s eyes widened. “A what?”
“Dumb fuck.” Ben showed him how the back tilted as if pouring out a load.
Vladimir burst out with a laugh. “A dump truck.”
Ben looked up and nodded, smiling as if Vlad might not be as bright as he appeared. Then he drove the truck up the pilot’s leg. “Rrrrrrrr . . .”
Vlad let him play a bit, then asked Ben if he wanted to go for a walk. He did. They headed up onto the deck of the destroyer, Vlad careful to go slow and take small steps to accommodate quick but short little legs.
Now, at the rail with a fresh sea breeze making Vlad wonder if he should have brought the boy’s jacket, Ben looked up and said, “J is a letter.”
Vlad nodded solemnly. “Yes, it is.”
“So is B. I know some B words.” The child bounced on the balls of his feet. “Banana. Bird is a B word. Big.”
The Russian leaned on the wire railing and grinned down at his little companion.
“Jelly starts with J. And juice. And giggle.”
“That is a G word,” the pilot said, making the boy pause and look at him for a moment.
“Is good a G word?” When Vladimir said it was, Ben smiled. “Giggle. I said that. Go. Google. That’s a computer.”
Vlad was looking the wrong way, down at Ben, so he didn’t see the horde moving along the pier. He couldn’t hear the shuffling feet or whispery gasps over the wind and the song.
“Dog is a D word,” said Ben. “Danny. He’s at my school. . . .”
The dead flowed past the destroyer’s gangplank, moving steadily toward the row of parked vehicles and, beyond them, stacks of plastic totes and dozens of shapes still in their sleeping bags.
“. . . Dig. Daddy . . .”
Vladimir closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of his daughter, Lita, coming home from preschool, proud of a new word or song she had learned. She would dance in the kitchen of their tiny apartment, twirling in circles as she sang. His throat tightened, and he wondered when the memories would stop hurting. He thought never. Then he noticed Ben was no longer reciting words he knew, and opened his eyes.
Ben pointed past him. “Monsters.”
Vlad spun and saw the
horde, thousands strong, about to reach the vehicles. The group slept not fifty feet beyond them. Knowing there was no time for anything else, he jerked the Browning pistol from his shoulder holster—he had upgraded to a bigger frame and heavier caliber—and fired a shot in the air. Ben huddled tight against his leg.
The group was startled awake, sitting upright in sleeping bags, heads turning, seeing the oncoming dead. Then the screaming started.
The creatures at the head of the mass reacted to the screams and sudden movement, and broke into a gallop. People scrambled for their weapons, mothers snatched crying children from sleeping bags, and a few people, those closest to the wall of drifters, panicked and tried to crab-walk backward, tangled in their bags and shrieking.
The dead fell on these unfortunates first, tearing them apart.
Vladimir lifted Ben in his left arm, his right hand gripping the pistol. “We will be moving fast and quiet, my little friend,” he said, his voice low. “Can you be quiet?”
Ben nodded and buried his face in Vladimir’s shoulder, small arms hugging his neck tightly. Vlad moved, not toward the destroyer’s gangplank, for he knew they would be coming to the sound of his pistol shots, and instead jogged down the deck on the side of the ship facing the lagoon. He kept the vessel’s long superstructure between them and the horde, staying out of their sight. It took less than three minutes to reach the stern, where a battery of aft-mounted cannon pointed back toward the frigate where the lookout should have been. He crept beneath the long barrels and looked toward the gangplank.
A dozen drifters stumbled up the ramp and onto the deck, dead eyes searching. Seven wandered away from him, toward the bow and where he had been. Five headed in his direction. He could hear them rasping, whining, and in the background, gunfire rippled among the screams.
Shit. He glanced around the deck, looking for something they could hide behind until the dead went past, but the deck was bare, stripped of anything that might trip or impede tourists. Vlad backtracked down the starboard side, hunting for a way into the superstructure. Ben hung on tight and didn’t make a sound.
Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead Page 25
