Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead

by Campbell, John L.

  It opened at once, revealing a stairwell lit with red battle lights. Xavier started down.

  • • •

  The magazine was well lit, as Brother Peter would have expected. Turn off the ice cream machine and the lights in the john, shut down TVs and air conditioners, but keep the systems essential for war fully functional. It made sense.

  The aircraft carrier’s magazine was composed of numerous chambers located off a wide, central hall, each secured by a thick, blast-resistant steel door. There was dried blood down here, signs that even this area had not escaped the damnation that had stalked these passageways, but there were no zombies. He noticed that the red hatch beside the elevator on this level was standing open and peeked inside. Stairs. The dead things went thataway.

  Peter moved briskly, swiping the key card at every reader, opening the motorized blast doors for each magazine compartment. Lights were on inside as well, and his eyes roamed over racks of missiles, cluster munitions, smart bombs, “dumb” iron bombs, bunkers of ammunition for twenty-millimeter Gatling guns, torpedoes and chaff canisters. There was oh so much firepower aboard this floating tomb, and none of it interested him. Peter was seeking the holy trinity, the black-and-yellow symbol with three triangles that would signal he had arrived.

  He found it on the last blast door on the left side. Beneath the radiation symbol was a warning that the area was restricted to a particular security clearance, and that unauthorized access would result in prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, section blah, blah, blah. He opened the door, half expecting to hear angels trumpeting and choirs of cherubs singing his praises. Instead he was hit by a puff of cool, dry air and found a rather small compartment lit with white fluorescents. The walls were covered in more warnings, alongside detailed safety procedures. A single missile rack occupied the left wall.

  “Praise God,” he whispered.

  There were forty of them cradled three high on padded steel racking, and they looked almost identical to the AGM 88 HARM, the high-speed anti-radiation missile carried by the Super Hornets, designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar. Ship killers. Each was thirteen feet long, weighed 780 pounds, and had a range of sixty-six miles. Their smokeless, solid propellant rocket motors pushed them along at Mach two-plus, about 1,420 miles per hour, allowing them to cover that sixty-six miles in short order.

  These beauties were different from the HARM. They had yellow noses and measured their punch in kilotons.

  MARS. That was what the briefer at the Navy seminar called them. The god of war, blasphemous to even utter, as if there were any other than the one true God.

  Who, in fact, was sitting on the top of the nuclear weapons rack. He appeared as a bitten and slashed Sherri, only dressed in the Air Force shrink’s uniform, complete with eyeglasses.

  “Let’s get cracking, shall we?” said God.

  Brother Peter nodded and opened a tool locker, quickly seeing that it had everything he needed. Well, almost everything. Peter looked around and smiled when he saw the phone box on the wall beside the locker. Now he had everything. Using tools from the locker, Brother Peter opened the phone box and attached the stripped end of a coil of wire to a point inside, playing the wire out across the magazine. Then he used a battery-powered screwdriver to remove a curved panel from the skin of three missiles.

  “You still got it,” said God.

  Peter ignored the voice, focusing on the work.

  These were tactical nukes: short range with a low yield. The word low was laughable, considering that the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had produced a yield between thirteen and eighteen kilotons, and each of these much smaller devices packed at least half that punch by themselves. Little Boy had been a simple gravity bomb, but a nuclear warhead could be attached to a variety of delivery systems: artillery shells, cruise missiles, the towering intercontinental ballistic missiles—ICBMs. In the 1960s, the American ICBM of choice had been the Jupiter and Thor, and during Peter’s time in Omaha, it had evolved into the Minuteman III.

  At its foundation, however, a nuke was a nuke and they all worked the same. Enriched uranium assembled into a supercritical mass. It started a nuclear chain reaction that grew exponentially by compressing a subcritical sphere of material—plutonium-239—using chemical explosives. All were set off by an electrical charge and the resulting implosion was the stuff of nightmares: fatal burns, smoking cities, shadows of ash left on walls by incinerated children.

  Hallelujah.

  The federal government had not only trained him in how to handle these things but paid him for the privilege. Glory Be. Three should be more than enough, Peter thought.

  “Three works for me,” said God.

  Peter got started.

  • • •

  Xavier quickly figured out how this worked. The stairwell was either the primary way down to the magazine or a backup in the event the elevator failed. Regardless, the stairs descended deck by deck into the lowest level of the ship, and there was a locked red hatch at every deck. The same key worked in them all, which at first surprised Xavier. He would have thought that, security in mind, a different key would be needed for each door. Then he realized that would be far too complicated, especially in the chaos of battle. This way, with a single key, any intruder would be delayed as he opened each hatch, or, if someone got careless and left one open, a fail-safe was created with additional sealed hatches. He was thankful for the simplicity of the one key.

  The priest traveled down three decks without interference. Then he came to a red hatch where something was repeatedly thumping on the other side.

  Xavier had no weapon. He was holding a key and there was no other way down.

  He retreated up two flights to where he had seen a fire extinguisher hanging from a wall mount, then returned with it to the thumping. He inserted the key, took a few quick breaths, and hoisted the fire extinguisher as he swung open the hatch.

  A rotting face snarled at him, and he caved it in with the red steel bottle. The creature staggered back a few feet, and another corpse with a crew cut pressed into the opening. Xavier smashed it in the forehead, and when it stumbled back, he smashed it again. It went down.

  The first one came back at him, and Xavier used the fire extinguisher to shove the dead sailor against a wall. It craned its neck to snap at him. Using the bottle and the bulkhead as a hammer and anvil, Xavier pounded until the skull cracked and flattened. A hand gripped his ankle, and he turned on the crew-cut corpse as it tried to bite his ankle. A quick pounding sent it to join its shipmate.

  Xavier hustled down the stairway, and when he reached the next hatch he found it standing open. Had these sailors been in the magazine and tried to flee? Had something caught them on the stairs?

  Aware that there would likely be more, Father Xavier descended as quickly as he dared.

  FORTY-TWO

  Skye was in a dark place with a deep, tolling bell. With every clang came a burst of pain that made her head feel as if it would split down the middle. The migraines had returned. She wasn’t immune after all, and this was what it was like to die and turn. Pain. Her body was being shoved at, pounded. Something was probably devouring her as she changed, and when she rose she would be maimed like all the others.

  Then the darkness grew lighter, charcoal to haze and then brighter still. The bell became a thudding in time with her heart, and this was a small measure of relief. Zombies didn’t have heartbeats.

  There was pressure, a firm weight on her chest. Was she having a heart attack? No, she was too young, too fit. There was pressure between her legs too, and that made no sense either. The gray turned into a yellow curtain of fog, and it slowly parted at the center. She was on her back, her head a throb of agony, dizzy, feeling like she had to vomit. Her body rubbed against the steel floor, and she saw someone atop her, large, covered in paintings. No, her mi
nd said, those are tattoos. He was pinning her with one hand in the center of her chest, grunting and thrusting himself forward. His thrusts were hurting.

  She knew him, but couldn’t remember his name.

  And then she did.

  And realized that she was being raped.

  “Don’t . . .” Skye muttered, her voice thick, eyelids fluttering as she tried to swing at him.

  TC batted her feeble arm away and slapped her hard across the face, then hit her again, rocking her head back to the left. “Shut up!” he yelled. In his other hand he held her boot knife, and he pressed it against her throat. “You’re just a girl!”

  The blows sent Skye sliding back toward the darkness, and she was glad to go. Maybe she could stay there. But just before she slipped away, she saw a man standing behind TC, half of his face and one side of his clothing red with blood. He was gripping the enormous crescent wrench TC had used on her.

  It was Carney.

  • • •

  San Quentin had saved Bill “Carney” Carnes from TC’s wrench. The blow split his scalp, damaged his ear, and gave him a concussion, but most of it landed against his dense shoulder and back muscle, which absorbed the impact and prevented the wrench from crushing his skull. The Q’s weight equipment and pull-up bars in the yard had built that muscle.

  His cellmate had aimed poorly. Carney would not.

  Perhaps it was the squeak of a boot on the bloody floor, a subtle change in the air pressure, or just a predator’s natural perception for danger; whatever the reason, TC reacted a half second before the wrench landed, flinging his naked body forward over the unconscious girl. His own powerful muscles took the hit across his meaty upper back. It hurt, made him cough out a whimper as a pair of ribs snapped, but he twisted as quick as a rattler. TC crouched and then launched at his cellmate before Carney had the chance to strike again.

  TC slashed the boot knife in a wide arc at Carney’s face, the blade catching the older man at the corner of his mouth and slitting it and four inches of his cheek, speckling the wall with red. Carney swung the wrench and TC leaped back, barely escaping having his ribs caved in. He feinted with the knife and drove, but Carney caught his knife hand by the wrist and locked down with a powerful grip. TC grabbed Carney’s wrench wrist and twisted, and they came together, faces transformed into primal, snarling things capable of greater savagery than any of the walking dead.

  They were chest to chest when they head-butted one another at the same time. There was a thud, a spray of blood, and the men reared back, dazed like a pair of rutting rams. Neither loosened his grip.

  Carney saw the fresh bites on TC’s chest and arms, but they barely registered.

  TC heaved his weight into his cellmate, throwing the older man into an access panel with a hollow bang, and then it was Carney’s turn, pushing off and slamming TC into the opposite wall.

  There were no words, no threats, only growls as they began to spin, fighting to break each other’s wrist, hammering each other into the walls as they moved down the narrow corridor, locked in a violent waltz. Then came the litter of corpses, the stairs, and they were tumbling, falling down a wet, padded carpet of the dead. They landed in a tangle at the bottom and instantly sprang to their feet. The knife was lost, the wrench was gone, but true killers are never unarmed, and their powerful hands locked on one another again, clawing for a throat, an eye.

  TC jammed his palm under Carney’s chin, shoving the man’s head back, driving with the fingers of his other hand to blind, to gouge. Carney caught the wrist under his chin and bent it savagely. TC screamed and the pressure came off as he jerked his hand away. Then Carney was hammering at him, and as TC answered with blows of his own, the space was filled with their roars and rage.

  They were dancing again, hands catching at throats and squeezing, whirling through a dark compartment in the ship. TC relaxed his elbows and the two men suddenly came together, TC head-butting again, his broad forehead breaking Carney’s nose. Their backs were against a pipe railing and they stumbled over the dead before pitching down more stairs. There was a grunt, a crack of bone, then only falling.

  FORTY-THREE

  Chief Liebs was leading them, a gang of heavily armed refugees and hollow-eyed, bearded sailors, gunning down the dead. Liebs was armed with his favorite weapon, the wood-stocked, 7.62-millimeter M14, Carney’s choice as well. He was lethal with the rifle as the high-powered round not only destroyed the brain, but blew out large sections of skull. Everyone was firing, the group pressing steadily forward down passageways, clearing side hatches and intersections. Gun smoke filled the air, and anything that moved, died.

  “Up,” ordered the chief as they came upon a stairwell. “Up to the hangar bay. It’s open space, and we can do more damage.”

  The group hustled up the metal risers, Evan now in the lead with a Mossberg 500 combat shotgun. As he reached the top he heard gunfire to the left.

  And screaming.

  And children.

  It sounded like a hollow recording of some wartime atrocity echoing down the steel corridor. Calvin and Liebs joined him a moment later.

  “Those are our people,” said Calvin. “Where does that go?”

  Chief Liebs hadn’t even finished uttering the word fantail before Evan was sprinting down the poorly lit passage. Calvin was after him at once, and then Stone and Mercy blew past. The chief collected the others and followed.

  • • •

  The hatch was right there, Big Jerry’s bulk disappearing inside, and Maya dodged a dead sailor coming around a jet engine resting in a maintenance cradle. She went to leap over another corpse lying in her path, saw it moving, reaching.

  Michael. Her ten-year-old brother, the youngest. Her heart cried out, but then in a second she realized he wasn’t one of the undead. His left foot had become twisted in a bundle of cables and he had fallen, trapped.

  “Maya!” he mouthed at her.

  Maya nearly went down herself as she tried to stop, skidding on the deck, turning as the dead sailor lunged. With a silent howl she buried the ice pick in its head, jerking it free as the body crumpled. She crouched and tried to free her brother’s foot, hoping the ankle wasn’t broken, afraid that it was. She wanted to scream at him, demand to know why he wasn’t with the others, wanted to cry for joy that he was still alive, cry for fear at what was coming down on the two of them. She couldn’t make a sound.

  She saw Michael throw his arms over his head and duck, and she spun on her knees, the pick already swinging. A female sailor—little more than a severed upper torso—was dragging herself at Michael, mouth open and drooling fluids, about to bite. The pick sank into her ear all the way to the shaft.

  Michael and Maya tugged together, trying to loosen his foot. She felt a vibration in her body that she knew to be a scream, but she did not pause, pulling hard.

  The foot popped free.

  The zombie that had been Margaret Chu landed on Maya’s back, snapping at her ear.

  Maya rolled to the side, throwing the woman’s weight off even as the dead Asian woman locked her hands in Maya’s hair. Three more drifters galloped in from different directions, encircling her. Maya’s neck muscles strained to keep Margaret from dragging her by the hair to Margaret’s deadly teeth, and she actually screamed, the sound coming out like a ragged wheeze.

  One of the charging corpses was blown off its feet, and another’s head disintegrated from the jaw up. Another caught a load of buckshot that turned its face into a red sponge, and as it fell, Michael was loose and on his knees with Maya’s pick, swinging, spiking Margaret Chu through the top of the head. Gray fingers went limp in Maya’s hair as she tore herself free.

  Big Jerry was braced against the wall beside the hatch, jacking another shell into the breech of his shotgun, bellowing something Maya couldn’t hear but understood. She grabbed Michael and the pick and they fled for the hatch. Jer
ry was firing, turning, firing, his normally round, friendly face a visage of rage, eyes narrowed as he cut down the dead. Shapes came in from all sides, too many, and then the two of them were inside, bouncing off a wall and careening into a cluster of terrified people.

  They were in a small room that was storage for parts and tools.

  No exits.

  Jerry stumbled over the knee knocker, dropped his shotgun, and grabbed the hatch handle, throwing his weight behind it as he hauled it closed.

  Dead hands caught the edges, a dozen or more, and tore the hatch from his grip.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Within the echoing passages, it didn’t take Rosa long to realize she would never find Father Xavier. He had run off in pursuit of a madman, unarmed and wounded, chasing a killer into a maze. There were too many corridors, too many stairs and hatches. He could be anywhere. There were only two of them now and remaining below would be suicide. The end result would likely be the same wherever they went, so Rosa Escobedo vowed to see the sun one last time before she died.

  The medic moved down a hallway with unsteady lights, the M4 to her shoulder and her eye at the sight. She thought about all of the wounded and dying Marines she had treated in the desert who had hunted insurgents the same way. A shape in a hatch caught her eye and she squeezed the trigger a second before she realized it could be her friend the priest. It wasn’t. It had been a rotting petty officer whose brains were now sliding down a steel wall.

  She needed a stairway. Finally she found a short one, only four steps to a small landing and a hatch. She and Tommy pulled it open together, sunlight and sea air pouring through, both of them gasping. There was an outside catwalk beyond, and as they exited they saw an overhang that could only be the flight deck over their heads. Another metal stairway led up to it.