gatheringdeadkindle

by Stephen Knight

  There was nothing more to do. McDaniels turned and hurried up the steps, on his way back to the 27th floor.

  CHAPTER 22

  Surging along at twenty knots, the ride aboard the Escanaba was uncomfortable as all hell, for the ship kept taking rollers over the bow. As she steamed into a quartering head sea, the twenty foot waves hit her 270 foot long hull with all the tenacity of a relentless prizefighter seeking to score a knockout. But the Escanaba was no lightweight. She pushed through the seas, taking all the punishment they could muster as her white steel bow sliced through each advancing wave, then dove down into the trough on the other side.

  Commander Hassle and the rest of the crew on the Nob’s bridge grabbed onto anything that would support them so they wouldn’t be knocked sprawling across the deck. As they drew closer to the entry point to New York harbor, called Lower Bay, the sea state began to diminish thanks to the terrain on either side. Ahead and to the left of the Escanaba’s bow lay the New Jersey shoreline and Staten Island. To the right was the western portion of Long Island. The land masses were mostly dark, punctuated here and there by the orange blaze of raging fires. Occasionally, the glow of smaller lights—headlights perhaps, Hassle thought—would break through the shroud of blackness, but the Nob was too far to offer any refugees even a glimmer of hope if they happened to catch sight of her running lights. They were on their own.

  For her part, the Escanaba had the sea lanes to herself. Other ships were in the water, of course, but most of them were dark, unlighted. Many were at anchor; others, like the six hundred foot container ship to the Nob’s port, were adrift. Hassle and others looked at the vessel through the FLIR systems mounted on the ship’s mast. Dark figures stumbled across the container ship’s decks, looking toward the Escanaba’s lights as she drew past. The figures on the ship’s decks had long ago stopped paying any attention to the driving rain or raging wind that battered their vessel. The container ship belonged to the dead now.

  Jesus Christ, Hassle thought to himself.

  Coney Island slowly came into view, its carnival rides forever at an end. The great rollercoaster, the Cyclone, was a skeletal presence in the obsidian night, the remains of some great beast whose passing had gone mostly unnoticed. Hassle did not turn one of the FLIR scanners in that direction, for fear he might see a legion of dead tottering through the remains of the amusement park. He had happy memories of summers spent at Coney Island, and he did not want them violated by images of the dead claiming their new kingdom.

  More and more boats became visible through the radar and the FLIR as the Escanaba rounded Coney Island and Sea Gate and propelled her way into the waters of the Upper Bay. The Port of New Jersey was dark, desolate, illuminated by only the battery-powered buoys that marked its harbor lanes. Governors Island was similarly nondescript, a lump of darkness against the gray waters as it slid off to the ship’s portside. To starboard, lights still gleamed in Brooklyn, but there were fires as well. Beacons strobed in the water ahead as NYPD launches maneuvered against the weather. Escanaba’s radio operator contacted the launches and briefed them on their mission.

  The response was terse: “Do what you gotta do and get out.”

  “Guess they won’t be helping us out,” said Lieutenant Commander Miles Sullivan, the ship’s executive officer.

  Hassle shrugged. There was nothing else to do.

  Then, Lower Manhattan lay before them, an inferno of flame and smoke and windblown sparks that flared and glittered before the storm consumed them. The skyline of the city was different; the Woolworth Building as no more, apparently the victim of a collapse. The half-completed Freedom Tower stood in high relief against the glowing backdrop of flame, a testament to dreams unfulfilled. As the Escanaba drew nearer, the smell of acrid smoke reached Hassle’s nostrils. Off to port, the Statue of Liberty stood silent witness to the fall of the Greatest City in the World. The crew standing watch on the Escanaba’s bridge surveyed the destruction from inside the comparative safety of the pilothouse. No one spoke. There wasn’t much that could be said.

  “Stay sharp for surface contacts,” Hassle warned. “No telling what’s in the water now.”

  The lookout called then from his position at the bow. “Con, Bow... got people in the water, a lot of people!”

  “Bow, Con. Do you mean actual people or bodies?” Hassle asked over the intercom.

  “Ah... Con, Bow Lookout. A lot of ‘em are moving, so it’s tough to say. No one’s screaming for help, but they try to swim toward us. Don’t really know what to say.”

  “All lookouts, Con. Report on bodies in the water,” Hassle ordered. The reports came back immediately. Many bodies were motionless and severely damaged, missing limbs and suffering from what Hassle imagined were severe deboning injuries from the reports. But a good portion of these bodies were still moving. Not swimming, exactly, but reacting to the presence of the Escanaba as she pushed past them. Several of them made to climb aboard, but with only a smooth steel hull available, there were no handholds.

  Sullivan looked at Hassle, his face composed and calm in the red light that illuminated the bridge. “I’m thinking we might need to issue some weapons to the lookouts, just in case. From everything we’ve heard, we do not want one of those... zombie things... to get on board.”

  Hassle nodded. “Agreed. Get it done.”

  Sullivan picked up the ICS and issued the order for the lookouts to be armed. Hassle reminded the bridge crew to be vigilant for waterborne obstructions, and advised them to not respond to anything that was not a clear signal for help from actual, live human beings. And even as he said this, he found his gaze continually straying to the great city that lay to port. Using light-intensification binoculars, he scanned the ports and shoreline of Manhattan. The East River Drive was packed solid with abandoned vehicles, from the Financial District to as far north as he could see. Several vehicles were on fire, and silhouetted against the flames, the walking dead slogged through the wet night. Hassle watched as zombies standing along Peck Slip took notice of the Escanaba’s passage and literally climbed over the pier guardrails and flung themselves into the river, in what he believed could only be a vain attempt to get to the ship. New York City, the Big Apple, was essentially a giant graveyard filled with the walking dead.

  This is unbelievable. Just totally, completely unbelievable. Hassle was a rational, educated man, a skilled sailor and a more-than-just-merely-competent officer. He believed that an open mind and developing a personal flexibility to challenges were the cornerstones of a successful career in the U.S. Coast Guard, but what he saw now simply blew those things away. He and his crew were able to zero in on drug runners and illegal aliens trying to gain entry into the United States, and they had all been recalibrated to serve as one of the most potent lines of defense against terrorism. But nothing in their experience or training could prepare them for this. Nothing.

  But he kept his best commander’s face on, and never let his true feelings show. For the sailors and officers aboard the USCG Escanaba, he was totally calm, cool, and in control. Under his watch, the ship would prevail. They would succeed in their mission.

  There was simply no alternative.

  Ahead, great flashes of light strobed across the dark waters of the East River, illuminating everything for miles. Sparking explosions besieged an entire span of the Brooklyn Bridge, which lay only five hundred meters ahead of the Nob’s bow. Revealed in the sudden light were dozens of small boats, and floating in the swollen, windswept river, hundred—maybe even thousands!—of bodies, some of which clumsily pirouetted in the water to regard the explosions with dead eyes. A startled rush went through the bridge crew, and the ICS went wild with shocked reports from the lookouts.

  “Helm, slow to eight knots!” Hassle said as he trained his binoculars on the span ahead. He watched as a great section of the Brooklyn Bridge slowly collapsed, great chunks of concrete and steel and asphalt slamming into the water with incredible force. Plumes of water shot up even hig
her than the bridge itself, showering it with muddy river water.

  “Eight knots, aye sir!” the helmsman manning the con repeated. He grabbed the engine throttle levers and pulled them back to the required setting, and the white-hulled Escanaba immediately slowed.

  “Christ, you think they would have waited until we’d passed!” Petersen said from his station at the radar console. As he spoke, more explosions tore through the night as the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges were also attacked.

  “Everyone take it easy!” Hassle said, his voice sharp-edged. “We knew this was going to happen, and we knew the Air Force had orders to bring down the bridges. It sucks that we have to pick our way through the mess, but this is what it is. Now everyone cut the chatter, and get back to doing your jobs!”

  The bridge crew did as they were told. Some merely shrugged off the attacks as something to be expected. Others took longer to refocus on what they had to do, but they did it, one by one. Hassle watched this from his position on the bridge, and felt a stirring of pride in his chest. No matter what happened, the crew of the Escanaba were professionals, and they would see things through.

  Sullivan grabbed the shipboard ICS handset. “Lookouts, Con. Stay sharp, we’re going to have to pass through those debris fields. Watch out for anything that’s lying right below the surface. Additional crews topside, we need all eyes on deck now.”

  Hassle raised his glasses back to his eyes and surveyed the destruction ahead. The Air Force attack had been precise; only one section of the Brooklyn Bridge had been rendered impassable, which mean the debris in the water would be fairly localized. He gave the helm bearing and speed directions, and the Escanaba shifted her position from the center of the river and moved more toward the Brooklyn side. Her forward speed reduced to five knots, so slow that her knife-like bow barely produced a wake as it sliced through the water. More crewmen emerged on the main deck, clad in foul weather gear and holding large flashlights. Searchlights were powered up on either side of the ship and directed downward toward the water. Even though they were looking for debris that could penetrate the ship’s steel hull—or much worse, destroy her running gear—the lights revealed countless reanimated corpses floundering about in the river. They turned toward the Escanaba as if of one mind and thrashed toward the slowly-moving vessel. The vast majority of them had suffered violent, painful deaths. Even from his position on the bridge, Hassle saw many were missing limbs, or trailed their guts behind them like streamers. It was madness, total and complete madness, a horror show on a stage so vast that it was incomprehensible.

  How are we going to survive this? Hassle asked himself. And his thoughts weren’t about his ship or his crew, but about the human race itself. How could humanity survive what seemed to be a plague of the dead?

  Knock it off. You have a job to do. Let echelons above reality figure out the big stuff. You just need to pick up some people before they become... non-people.

  The Escanaba slowly picked her way past the debris zone around the Brooklyn Bridge, then crept past the smaller one surrounding the Manhattan Bridge. As they slid past the bridge’s stout pilings and emerged on the other side, something slammed to the foredeck, collapsing into a pile next to the Nob’s 76-millimeter main gun. Hassle heard a distant thump as something else landed on the pilot house. He immediately put down his binoculars and bolted for the port exit.

  “Sullivan, you have the con!” he barked as he undogged the hatch and stepped out into the storm-torn night. Without pausing to zip up his coat, he scurried down the steps, made slick by rain despite their anti-skid coating. As quickly as he could, he made his way to the bow, moving from handhold to handhold as the big ship wallowed slightly in the wind.

  By the time he made it to the bow, several crewmen stood around the huddled shape lying next to the bulbous shape of the main gun turret. They shined their flashlights on it. Whatever their beams exposed, it had completely captivated their attention. No one even looked up when Hassle pushed his way toward them.

  The zombie was broken and battered, its legs snapped like kindling. Its body had been torn open by the impact, and a grisly black gruel leaked out from its punctured chest cavity. One eye bulged from its socket, and the left side of its face was crushed inward. Still, despite the incredible damage it had suffered, the ghoul still moved. It emitted a gurgling whine as it tried to right itself and crawl toward the clutch of Coast Guardsmen surrounding it. Its one good eye moved from man to man as it slowly inched along the rain-slick steel deck, using its one good arm to drag itself along.

  “Holy fuck,” whispered one of the crewman, a female Guardsman clutching an M16.

  “Never seen anything like that in my entire fucking life,” said another crewman, a short, slight kid Hassle knew came from Michigan. He didn’t seem to be repulsed by what he saw, which Hassle thought was odd. Hassle was at least twenty years older, and the sight of the oozing corpse slowly writhing on the deck like some sort of demonic snake almost sickened him.

  “Somebody shoot it through the head,” Hassle said, raising his voice above the wind. When no one moved, he reached for his pistol and pulled it from its holster. Thumbing off the safety, he gingerly stepped toward the zombie as it crawled toward him. It hissed again, fixing him with its one good eye.

  Hassle fired two shots through its head, and the zombie fell to the deck, motionless.

  More gunfire from overhead caught his attention, and he looked up. A Coast Guardsman waved to him from the railing on top of the pilot house.

  “One zombie dead up here, sir!” the crewman shouted.

  From the rear of the vessel, where the helipad was located, came more gunfire. Hassle stepped back from the zombie he had shot and slapped a crewman on the shoulder, hard, getting his attention.

  “Get a gaff and throw this thing off the side! Do not touch it! No one touch the thing with your hands, just gaff it and throw it over the side!”

  The crewmen muttered their acknowledgements and Hassle sprinted to the aft section of the ship. Two more zombies had come aboard, but the crewmen there had dispatched them with shots to the head. No one had been bitten. Hassle repeated his orders to toss the corpses overboard without touching them, then returned to the bridge.

  “We need to keep alert to make sure we take these things down the second they land,” he told Sullivan. He described how the crewmen at the bow just stood around watching the zombie before he had intervened and killed it. “Someone’s going to get bitten by one of these things if they’re not careful, and we can’t have that.”

  “Understood. Connolly took out the one topside, and he and some of the other guys tossed it. They were smart enough to use gaffs. But we should check everyone, just to make sure. Just in case someone might be... you know, infected.” Sullivan clenched his teeth together after he had said that last part, his face hard set.

  Hassle nodded slowly. “Have the medics check over everyone who was involved in handling the bodies. And have the chief of the boat put together a detail to dispose of anything that makes it aboard. And no matter what, those things get shot immediately!”

  “Aye, sir,” Sullivan said. He saw to the arrangements as the Escanaba bore down slowly but relentlessly on the Williamsburg Bridge. The center section of its span was missing, and the suspension cables supported only empty air. But figures still milled about in the darkness, figures that occasionally slipped and fell into the dark water. Most were on the Manhattan side of the bridge, and as he watched, Hassle saw flashes of light wink in the darkness on the Brooklyn side. Petersen noticed them too and trained his binoculars on them.

  “Muzzle flashes,” he said. “Looks like the National Guard and NYPD are taking out the zombies on the Brooklyn side of the bridge.”

  “Good on them. The more they kill, the fewer will try to get to us.” Hassle ordered the helmsman to steer the Nob closer to the Wallabout Channel, which lay on the Brooklyn side of the river. The helmsman repeated the order and executed it flawlessly, bringing t
he cutter to within one hundred feet of the entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Despite its name, the Yard was not a Navy facility and its piers and moorings were mostly vacant. Anyone who had a boat and who could get to it were long gone. The Escanaba plowed on at five knots, barely moving. It passed underneath the Williamsburg Bridge without any incident, and Hassle ordered the ship to mid-channel and an increase in speed to ten knots. The Escanaba’s diesel engines roared in response when the power was added, as if they had chafed at the mere five knots they had delivered for the past hour and half. As the ship left the shattered bridges behind, the crew seemed to sigh in unison.

  Then the lights of Manhattan winked out, as if the entire city had suddenly died in its sleep.

  CHAPTER 23

  By the time he made it to the cafeteria on the 27th floor, McDaniels was severely winded. His thighs felt like they were on fire, and his quadriceps spasmed and twitched, complaining at the demand placed upon them. Sweat poured off his face, and he coughed several times. He tasted blood in the back of his mouth.

  Well, I guess I never should have stopped going on those fifteen mile road marches after all...

  Finelly met him at the door. He took a moment to size him up, then said, “You look like shit, major.”

  “At least try and sound respectful when you say that,” McDaniels replied, breathing hard. “Is the elevator here?”