To Sail a Darkling Sea - eARC

by John Ringo

  “Indeed,” Steve said. “But. Then there was the usual falling out you’d expect, as more and more became infected. Faith was part of the entry to the main suite, which we currently use for a command post. Nobody with sense would want to sleep there. The major had apparently locked himself in with, presumably, the fairer of the fair ladies. When the evil overlord was to be overrun, he lined them up, flex-cuffed them, and shot them all in the head, one by one. Then shot himself.”

  “Fuck,” Zumwald said, shuddering. “And your daughter… ”

  “Saw it all,” Steve said. “Was part of the analysis team if you will. So… Faith takes a dim view of any man who thinks he quote owns a woman. Or feels that his needs override some cookie who is just wandering around the saloon.”

  “Okay, now I really realize how bad I fucked up,” Zumwald said. “And, again, I apologize.” He’d been watching where they were going and now realized it was to the lit hole in the side of the supermax. “We’re going to the liner? I thought you said I was coming back alive?”

  “We will be going only into cleared areas,” Steve said, pulling out a Tyvek suit and a gas mask. “You’ll want these, however.”

  “Shit, you cannot be serious,” Zumwald said. “If you’re trying to test my courage, you win. I’m a coward.”

  “This is not a test of courage,” Steve said. “It’s not even a test. It is what is generally called a learning experience. I’m aware you’re a coward. Not all bullies are, but you are. That’s okay, I can use cowards too. Jack Isham’s a physical coward and he makes a perfectly adequate chief of staff. I’m not asking you to kill infecteds. You’re just going to be taking a short walk. And I strongly suggest the Tyvek suit. It has booties. You’re going to mess up your Guccis if you don’t use the suit.”

  “Is this just you and me?” Zumwald temporized. The stink from the boat was evident even on the water. It smelled like shit and iron and the worst rotting garbage in history. He already wanted to puke. “No way you’re getting me in there.”

  “Oh, I brought people who can carry you, Mister Zumwald,” Steve said. “While we will be in areas that have been cleared, by a pro I might add, I am not an idiot. And I’m not rigged for heavy combat. So there will be security. And I really don’t think you want the indignity of Lieutenant Fontana and Staff Sergeant Januscheitis dragging you through the bowels of the ship. Put on the suit, Mister Zumwald. There are things you need to understand.”

  * * *

  “Holy fuck,” Zumwald groaned.

  “If you are going to puke in a mask, sir, this is the procedure,” the black lieutenant said, politely. “Take a deep breath as you realize you are going to puke. Lift the mask up to your forehead. Puke. You will automatically inhale. Try not to smell the surrounding air. The puke will probably cover it up. Redon the mask, clear it as we told you then take a deep breath. If you have to puke again, and you will, lather, rinse, repeat.”

  Zumwald wanted to pass out, not just puke. It was dark as fuck in the ship and he was lost. He had a flashlight, but there was no way he was finding his way back. Even if he hadn’t had heavily armed Marines following him. So far they hadn’t said a fucking word and that scared him worse than anything.

  “This isn’t actually the part I’m interested in,” Smith said, examining the bodies. “All Barbie shots. Where’s the other?”

  “This way, sir,” the big black lieutenant said.

  About all that Zumwald knew about the military was that generals were the bosses. But the black guy was the same rank as that little bitch that got him into this. And Smith had said they’d been together clearing the yacht, which was before they’d found any of the rest of the Marines. So he and the chick were probably buddies. Hell, he was probably banging her. Blacks were like that.

  The interior of the boat was like a fucking Taranto movie but for real. He mentally made the note that even Taranto didn’t use enough blood. In some of the rooms it was drying and still an inch or more thick. Walking through it was like glue. Each footstep gave this puk-inducing “suck, suck, suck” sound. Sometimes he couldn’t step around the bodies. One time when he balked, the two Marines just picked him up by the arms without a word and carried him over the pile of naked bodies.

  He puked. Couple of times. The boat smelled worse than it looked. And none of these fuckers seemed to even notice. Like it was a walk in the fucking park.

  Finally they came to the worst. He wasn’t sure what the fuck had happened in the room but the zombies weren’t just dead, they were fucked up. Huge fucking holes in their chests. He puked, again, when he realized he was looking at ribs and shit. For real.

  “Jesus, Smith, enough, okay?” Zumwald said, bent over. He was just puking in his mask at this point. There wasn’t anything to puke up. “Enough.”

  “I think you’ve noted the difference in the wounds?” Smith said. “Big fucking holes? That’s my daughter’s signature. Then there are these,” he said, walking over to a pile and picked one of the dead zombies up by its hair. “This is where Captain Wilkes, who was in training, got piled by zombies. Please try to stop puking long enough to note the cuts to the back of the neck. Do you see them?”

  “Yeah,” Zumwald said, looking then looking away. “You can see the fucking spine.”

  “I was given to understand that one of the things that Faith told you when you grabbed her arm was ‘The last guy who grabbed me, I cut off his hand.’ It was a tense moment; I’m not sure you remember.”

  “I remember,” Zumwald said.

  “She was being quite literal, I hope you understand,” Smith said. “She literally cuts off the hands of infected that grab her.”

  “You’ve made your point, okay? She’s a fucking badass. I’ll make the movie.”

  “I doubt it,” Steve said. “The likelihood of there being any significant movie industry in the near future is unlikely. What there is is this. Blood and death and shit and crap and horror. We are living, Mister Zumwald, a much worse reality than any movie you could possibly make. Even given a budget. Okay? Or, perhaps you should just get a camera. This is reality TV. On steroids. Every fucking day, Zumwald.”

  “And if there’s a star, it’s the lady that you manhandled,” the black lieutenant said.

  “And this is, yes, very much like Survivor. Some people do get thrown off the island, or the boats as it may be, Mister Zumwald. And, no, I won’t give you a boat. We need all the boats we can get working. And no, as noted, I will not throw you in the shark-infested harbor. I will put you down in the town of La Puntilla, which is a charming place from what I’ve heard and has plenty of resources for a resourceful person such as yourself. It will be a bit like I Am Legend. Just you, scavenging for survival in the zombie apocalypse. Does that sound appealing, Mister Zumwald? I’ll even give you a pistol. If I’m feeling sufficiently nice, I’ll even give you bullets for it. And more than one.”

  “You’re insane,” Zumwald said. “That’d be murder.”

  “No, throwing you in the bay, with or without concrete overshoes, would be murder,” Smith said. “Because the sharks around here have developed a real taste for manflesh. Putting you off in Puntilla would be, at best, abandonment.

  “But I want you to really look around. When you make this much of a mess, it’s a bitch to clean up. We are not going to even attempt to clean this boat. But those Marines fight in this crap, every damned day, looking for the few, rare, survivors such as yourself. They do it because they are told and because they are fucking Marines and every Marine sees himself as a hero. Then, Mister Zumwald, after walking through hell, they go back to the boat and have to clean up all their gear. Bad enough that they have to do this, then they have to clean it up. And they do that. Perfectly. Every night. Then the next day they go out and like the Spartans of yore—again, I’m sure you’re aware of the movie—they burnish their shields and go forth to do battle.”

  “What’s your point?” Zumwald said.

  “What the movie failed to mention was
that the Spartans only put a last coat of polish on, so to speak,” Steve said. “Each of them had body servants that did most of the work. So the Spartans could concentrate on what they did best: Killing. Now, body servants have, obviously, gone out of style. We organize and manage things now. You’re all about the deal in Hollywood. So here’s the deal. The deal of a lifetime. You are now in charge of cleaning all this crap off of the Marines’ gear. Every night.”

  “Oh, fuck you!”

  “Do you know what this is, sir?” one of the Marines said. He pushed up against the former executive from behind and held out what looked like a baseball for a second.

  “Shit,” Zumwald said, trying to back up. There was nowhere to go. It was a wall of Marine behind him. “That’s a fucking grenade, you… You’re all fucking insane!”

  “It’s what Miss Faith says when ‘fuck you’ isn’t enough, sir,” the Marine said. “Would you care to try the next step up from ‘fuck you,’ sir?”

  “Please, Staff Sergeant,” Smith said. “Some couth. I did not say nor suggest that you, Mister Zumwald, would be wielding a toothbrush… ”

  “And you’ll need to use a toothbrush,” the other Marine growled, “cause I’ll be checking it. And if it ain’t good, I ain’t as nice as the Captain, Mister Zumwald.”

  The fucker sounded exactly like R. Lee Ermy. Zumwald had had to deal with that fucker one time and he hated fucking R. Lee Ermy. The prick.

  “I said ‘in charge,’ Mister Zumwald,” Smith said, then drew his pistol.

  Ernest knew he was dead but the fucker just pulled out the other things with the bullets in them and held both up in his hands.

  “So, recruit and manage people to clean gear, to the Gunnery Sergeant’s specifications, or one pistol, twenty-one rounds and La Puntilla. Such a deal I’m offering you!”

  “Dude, you missed your calling,” Zumwald said. “You should have been in my business. Deal.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Me that ’ave watched ’arf a world

  ‘Eave up all shiny with dew,

  Kopje on kop to the sun,

  An’ as soon as the mist let ’em through

  Our ’elios winkin’ like fun—

  Three sides of a ninety-mile square,

  Over valleys as big as a shire—

  “Are ye there? Are ye there? Are ye there?”

  An’ then the blind drum of our fire ...

  An’ I’m rollin’ ’is lawns for the Squire,

  Me!

  Kipling

  “Chant Pagan”

  Faith looked up from the computer at a knock on her door and thought about it. She had a shitload of homework and this damned report to finish.

  “It’s open,” she said after a second.

  The Boadicea didn’t smell like decaying zombies anymore. It smelled like a hospital. There was a thick reek of disinfectant everywhere.

  The cabin she was in had had a zombie in it. But she only knew that cause there wasn’t any carpet. But there were thick rugs, Persian or something she thought. She wasn’t sure where they’d came from but they were nice. The rest of the cabin, except for some minor fittings, was pretty much what she thought a cabin in a cruise she was supposed to look like. She’d never been on a cruise until the Plague and she wasn’t planning on going on one even if somebody hit a button and made the world like it was. But it had a big bed, bigger than the one she’d had on the Alpha, and a really nice head. Big shower and a bath tub which she’d put to good use more than once. The head wasn’t as “refined” as on the Alpha but all the fitting were original at least.

  They’d been clearing for a week. Faith wasn’t sure if it was deliberate on Captain Wilke’s part but she hadn’t been near any of the cabin areas on the supermax. All she’d seen was the bowels of the ship. The usual compartments and zombie mess. Some people might have thought that was punishment. For Faith it was sort of relaxing. Once they got past a certain point, there weren’t even many zombies and they had found some survivors.

  She had been in on the “spa” clearance. Wilkes had paid attention on that one and they’d hit it with every Marine they had from several different entry points. There were quite a few surviving infected but it was over in ten minutes. Not a single scrum. Faith had been mildly disappointed. But it was the “professional” way to do it. And she was starting to appreciate “professional.”

  What she did NOT appreciate was the homework. Captain Wilkes had scrounged textbooks for her to study. Not just Marine manuals, either. Math, science, English. Chemistry. Yuck! With weekly tests. And he was making her do all her platoon reports, then “annotating” them. He had given her a dictionary and thesaurus, among other things, and after the first report after giving them to her told her she was “not allowed words of more than two syllables.” It was worse than fucking school. “Recess” was killing zombies.

  “Hey, how’s the report going?” Wilkes said.

  “Fine, sir,” Faith said, standing to attention.

  “As you were,” Wilkes said, coming in and looking over her shoulder. “I would say that ‘fine’ would be mostly done, Lieutenant. Not stuck on the first sentence.”

  “I was reading Lieutenant Fontana’s report, sir,” Faith replied. “And trying to determine a better way to say what I was trying to say, sir. But… sir, what’s an ‘action plan’?”

  “An action plan is any plan which involves action, Lieutenant,” Wilkes said. “Direct conflict. When you told me to prepare to fire through the zombies, multiple times, and try to aim my shots so that TnTs would go through the hatch, that was an action plan.”

  “Battle field preparation plan, sir?” Faith asked.

  “Knock on the door and make sure the zombies are awake,” Wilkes said. “You’re preparing the battlefield to optimize your strengths, kinetic projectile fire, over their strengths, direct contact engagement.”

  “So it’s another way of saying ‘get them into your killzone, don’t go into theirs,’ sir?”

  “It’s a more modern way of saying it,” Wilkes said. “Your father’s background is historical. Useful, don’t get me wrong. But he tends to phrase things in a way that would be normal in a staff meeting for, say, Operation Overlord.”

  “That’s… D-Day,” Faith said. “Sixth of June, 1944.”

  “Fifth and sixth, yes,” Wilkes said. “I’d expect that of your father’s daughter.”

  “Horrible with dates, sir,” Faith said. “But there’s this band, Sabaton, that’s got this really rocking song about it.”

  “Okay,” Wilkes said, chuckling. “Why am I not surprised. Lieutenant, the report will keep. It’s time for some professional education.”

  “Yes, sir,” Faith said.

  “Accompany me,” Wilkes said, waving.

  They went out of the cabin, down the corridor and around the corner to what Faith remembered as being one of the “big” cabins, the real luxury ones.

  “Senior officer’s country?” Faith asked.

  “We don’t have many of those, yet,” Wilkes said, wielding the key. As he opened the door, Faith could hear people laughing. “So we appropriated it. Officially. I wrote a staff study. It was approved.”

  Fontana, Lieutenant Volpe, Janu and the Gunny were all sitting around a table playing poker. There was a bar set up on one bulkhead and some snacks laid out.

  “There really aren’t enough of us for an O club,” Wilkes said. “So this is the Staff NCOs and Officer’s club.”

  “The dues are we gotta scrounge the stuff,” Fontana said. “Seawolf owe you any favors?”

  “Being my big sister and a pain in the ass count?” Faith asked.

  “I found you some razzleberry tea, LT,” Janu said, pulling some out of a cooler.

  “Staff Sergeant,” Faith said taking the can and popping it. “You shouldn’t have. No, wait, you should, you really, really should. Ah,” she said, taking a sip. “Nectar. I shall see what my sister, terror of the seas, has in her stash. That she’ll give up.”
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  “In that case, I’m a rum drinker, ma’am,” Janu said.

  “No rank in the mess, by the way, Faith,” Wilkes said. “Same to you, Jan.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jan said. “That’s going to be tough to manage, though, sir.”

  “The point to the mess is that in here, you can say to somebody that they’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey and get away with it,” Wilkes said.

  “I’ve heard that quote somewhere before, sir,” Gunny Sands said. “Brotherhood of War?”

  “Love that series,” Fontana said.

  “It’s also true,” Wilkes said, picking up the cards and shuffling them. “Reports and after action meetings are important. This is important, too. You can just talk and without it being official. Figure out the stuff you don’t figure out in meetings. Tell somebody they’re fucking up, even if they’re a superior. Although, I’d appreciate nobody telling me I’m a ‘cowardly fucktard.’ ”

  “You were out of your depth, sir,” Gunny Sands said. “You’re a pilot, not an infantry captain. And this shit really does suck.”

  “Appreciate that, Tommy,” Wilkes said, dealing. “Five card draw. No wilds. I really am out of my depth in clearance. I can’t wait to get a stick back in my hand.”

  “TMI, sir,” Lt. Volpe said. “TMI.” He tossed a penny on the table.

  “What are we betting for?” Faith asked, examining her cards. She’d played poker before but not a lot.

  “We are not betting,” Wilkes said. “That would be against military regulations. We are having a friendly game of cards that happens to involve some items of no particular value being on the table. Purely for the purposes of examination.”

  “Each cent is a dollar,” Fontana said. “Against back pay.”

  “We get paid?” Faith said.

  “Eventually, assuming that we ever have an economy again,” Wilkes said. “We should get paid. Armies that don’t get paid have a tendency to wither and die or revolt. We Marines won’t revolt. I won’t speak to wither and die.”