by Jeff Thomson
Out of the corner of his eye, Russell saw the pointed and shining toe of a neatly polished dress shoe pulverize the Admiral’s nose, pull back, then do it again, and again, and then it was over. The man stopped struggling, as if some internal switch had been flicked to OFF.
A door opened somewhere off to his right. The screaming began.
9
Jonesy leaned against the shore tie transformer that gave power to the Sass when in port, and watched the poor enlisted pukes lugging heavy cases of frozen meat from the truck to the brow and onto the ship. His head hurt. He felt like his ass should hurt, as well, since the XO had shoved a gigantic pile of horseshit up it at the end of the meeting.
“The mission is to do whatever the fuck you’re told to do,” Medavoy had snapped, in answer to Jonesy’s question. This hadn’t set well with the others seated at the table in the Wardroom, but they all knew the XO, and so knew challenging his asinine response would only lead to far more trouble than it was worth. Even Jonesy had refrained from sarcasm, which he thought showed remarkable restraint.
He hadn’t liked the XO from the moment he’d walked into the man’s small office and saw the derision upon the bastard’s face as he flipped through Jonesy’s service record. All a show, of course. Medavoy had known who he was. Everybody on The Island knew who he was. Hard not to, after the M/V Haika Maru.
It had been a freighter, filled with illegals, mostly women, mostly very young women, and no small amount of heroin.. Fairly routine, as such things went. But then one of the assholes pulled a gun.
He shoved the memory away. Best not to dwell on it, the shrinks repeated, over and over, and over. About the only intelligent thing those psychobabble weasels said.
It had been a good shoot. Everybody knew it. And he had been cleared - officially. But in the Blame Game of political bullshit, they couldn’t just leave well enough alone, and so he’d been placed on Admin Leave.
This left him in the limbo of Administrative dipshits who couldn’t make a decision if their lives depended on it, and so he sat, doing nothing, going nowhere. Of course, if you had to be in Purgatory, Honolulu was a pretty damned nice place to be, but the feeling of uselessness grated on his psyche. The seemingly endless time led to idle hands, which led to frequent trips to the liquor store. His liver hurt, thinking about it.
And then BM1/OPS David McGinness (his predecessor on the Sassafras) did something incredibly stupid, and the billet on the Sass came open. When God closes a door, he opens a window, or some such bullshit, he thought, as he shifted his lean to a more comfortable position on the transformer.
This was not a religious thought. Jonesy had no religious thoughts. Not that religion was a bad thing, per se, but it wasn’t - and never had been - his cup of ecclesiastical tea. He believed in...something...just not what they taught in Sunday School.
All of which was rather beside the original point, which was the rat-bastard-ness of one LT DICK Medavoy.
LCDR Sparks, whom Jonesy had known when he was a LTjg, had personally approved the transfer, but Medavoy (ever the asshole) hadn’t been happy. He thought that a TACLET member of the Armed Forces of the United States who dared to actually use the weapon he’d been issued, and who’d been placed on Administrative Leave following his psych eval, had to be crazy, and, therefore, was not to be trusted. This distrust had been evident from Day One, Moment One.
A siren blared in the distance; just background noise, the urban song of city life, barely worth the electrical energy to pass the knowledge between his synapses, but some tingle of instinct tickled Jonesy’s spine. He dismissed it, and tried to go back to his intellectual cataloging of the many and varied faults of the Sass’s XO, but then he heard another siren. And another. And another.
Then he saw the column of smoke.
Honolulu was beginning to burn.
10
********************SECRET********************
1954Z18MAY
FM: COMCOGUARDPACAREA
TO: USCGC POLAR STAR (WAGB 10)
SUBJ: POMONA
1. SUMMARY:
A. AS DISCUSSED IN MSG 1341Z16MAY, THE VIRUS HAS BEEN DECLARED A WILDFIRE OUTBREAK BY CDC.
B. AN ATTENUATED VACCINE FOR THE NEUROLOGICAL PATHOGEN HAS BEEN DEVELOPED, BUT ONLY IN LIMITED QUANTITIES, DUE TO THE INADEQUATE SUPPLIES OF NON-HUMAN HIGHER ORDER PRIMATES FROM WHICH TO DRAW VIRUS BODIES.
C. THERE IS, HOWEVER, NO CURE. ONCE THE SUBJECT REACHES FULL NEUROLOGICAL STAGE, THE DAMAGE IS IRREVERSIBLE.
D. INFECTED TREATMENT CENTERS HAVE PROVEN TO BE A STOP-GAP SOLUTION OF LIMITED UTILITY. SECURITY AT THESE CENTERS HAS BROKEN DOWN IN MOST URBAN AREAS.
E. EVACUATIONS ARE IMMINENT.
2. ACTION
A. YOUR RULES OF ENGAGEMENT REMAIN THE SAME: DISABLE, RESTRAIN, SECURE.
B. DEADLY FORCE ONLY AUTHORIZED IN EXTREMIS, WHEN LIFE OF SELF OR OTHERS WOULD BE THREATENED BY NOT USING DEADLY FORCE.
C. USE YOUR BEST JUDGEMENT.
D. AS VIRUS IS HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS, AND AS YOU AND YOUR CREW HAVE NOT BEEN EXPOSED, YOU ARE DIRECTED TO PROCEED TO APIA, GUAM, UNDER STRICTEST NBC PROTOCOLS, TO TOP OFF FUEL.
E. DO NOT TAKE ON ANY OTHER STORES, AS PACKAGING MAY HAVE BEEN CONTAMINATED.
F. TAKE UP STATION IN POSITION: 14-7-25N/177-12-34W TO ACT AS FUEL AND SUPPLY POINT FOR HEC AND OTHER COGARD SHIPS AS DIRECTED.
G. AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS.
H. GOOD LUCK.
Captain Gideon Hall, Commanding Officer of the four hundred foot Icebreaker, Polar Star, stared at the message in disbelief. It seemed absurd, if not outright insane.
Head to Guam for fuel? They still carried half of their one-point-three million gallon full load. They hadn’t even bothered to arrange for fuel in Australia, to which they now apparently would not be going after the two month deployment in Antarctica.
Speaking of which, they’d been OUTCONUS for six goddamned months. And now, PACAREA wanted them to go sit in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean to act as a gas station for other ships? With no liberty for the crew after two months in the ice?
In a Zombie Apocalypse?
He hadn’t wanted to use the “Z” Word, but what the Hell else could you call hoards of naked, screaming, violent former humans who wanted to take a bite out of you, if not zombies?
Hadn’t seen any direct signs of it himself, and there hadn’t been any reported cases before they left McMurdo, but that was three weeks ago. A lot had changed.
Polar Star was fitted with a satellite Internet Receiver. It didn’t work all the time, due to the remote locations the ship tended to traverse, and because the Pacific Ocean was really damned big and their ship was really damned small, but it did work sometimes, so they had seen some of the videos, which hadn’t seemed real. The general consensus among the crew was that it must be an elaborate hoax, but this soon went the way of the Dodo, once it came under the intellectual scrutiny of anyone with active brain cells. If it had been a hoax, it would not have been everywhere you looked.
There wasn’t one Social Media Site, one News Site, one Government Site that didn’t carry almost nothing but mention of the Pomona Virus. Even some of the retail sites had gotten into the act, offering survival kits and other Apocalypse Supplies.
It was, therefore, real.
It must be bad, if PACAREA was ordering full Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical protocols. They must be thinking worst case scenario, if they were ordering Polar Star to take station and wait.
They think the world is going to fall.
The thought flashed across his mind, and then was quickly shunted aside. Couldn’t be. The whole world couldn’t fall. Impossible! And yet...
He picked up the phone and called the bridge.
“Bridge, Norton,” the Nav Watch, BM3/OPS Charlie Norton answered.
“Have all officers assemble in the Wardroom.”
11
Jonesy couldn’t see anything but the smoke, off to the east, but there was a lot of it. Somewhere o
n Kapiolani Boulevard, he thought. Maybe King Street, but probably Kapiolani. Ala Moana Mall...?
The location didn’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things. Long ago, he adopted the attitude: if it didn’t effect him, he didn’t care - one of his many defense mechanisms: a weapon, like his sarcasm, to combat the general fucked-up-ness of life. The fact this attitude lay at odds with his current occupation was an irony he tried not to examine. Cognitive Dissonance is your friend...
He tore his eyes away from the column of smoke and glanced toward the chain of enlisted scum who were supposed to be loading stores up the brow. Instead, they were staring at the burning city.
“Quit skylarking,” he barked, fully aware of his goose being far better than their gander. “Those stores ain’t going to load themselves!”
He felt a mild - very mild - pang of guilt for being such a dick, but the crew knew he was just playing the part. At least he hoped they knew it. Whatever the case, they got back to work.
He was about to turn away and resume his contemplation of the mass-conflagration on shore, when his eye caught sight of Molly. She stood up on the bridge wing - his bridge wing - and stared into the distance. Thinking of her as he paid no attention whatsoever to the unloading, made him feel...conflicted. She was an officer; he was enlisted. And never the twain shall meet, as they say (whoever the fuck THEY are), he mused.
The bitch of it was, he liked her. Love was an easy enough thing to fall into, at least for him. He’d done it plenty of times. Of course, those times almost always involved far more alcohol than was either safe or sane for the average wildebeest, but that was just a detail. Endorphins were released by neurotransmitters in response to a biological imperative, or so he’d read. Sounded like bullshit then, and still did now, but it fit, he supposed.
He’d felt the fluttering of the heart, experienced the pleasant distraction of adoring the feminine divine. It was fun, and usually resulted in his getting laid, so, all to the good. However; love was a piece of invariably-ending-in-disaster cake, and he’d liked Molly.
The simplest relationship in all of human interaction was the one between two heterosexual males. There were no rules, no expectations, no stony silences if one forgot the other’s birthday. They didn’t ask you to talk about the relationship. They didn’t give a damn about the relationship. It just was. It existed simply because two individuals wanted it to.
If you like each other, if you enjoy each others’ company, you hang out together. Maybe get a few beers. Maybe watch some form of athletic activity. Maybe get shitfaced, falling down drunk and sing loud and off key until the neighbors call to complain about all the caterwauling. What you do not do - ever - is burst into tears and blubber about not fulfilling each others’ needs. You are friends. Nothing more. Nothing less. You certainly do not tell the other they should never call, never write; that they should walk away and never turn back, because the relationship “just won’t work.”
And so now he was back to the sour feeling in his gut. And the pain in his ass.
He blew out a sigh, ending in the ever-popular word: “Fuck.”
Something caught his eye. More like some one: a single figure staggering down the pier toward him. Is that...the Captain...?
It was. Jonesy broke into a run.
“Get the Doc out here!” He shouted, over his shoulder. “And the XO!”
12
The Captain looked...wrong. Jonesy couldn’t immediately identify the nature of the wrong-ness, but he felt it, nonetheless. LCDR Sparks was still a good distance down the pier - close enough to be recognized, but not with any detail. He was staggering, however, and that was enough to make this urgent.
The man was covered in blood. His face was clean; his uniform was anything but, and it was ripped in three or four places. Jonesy got close enough to see Sparks’ face: white and hollow-eyed, with apparent shock; but the CO held up a traffic cop’s hand to stop him.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said, his voice raspy and unsteady, as was his balance. He swayed in place, jerking slightly, not quite with any rhythm, as if his entire body twitched with nerves.
For once in his life, Socrates Jones had no idea what to say. The man - his Commanding Officer, a man he admired and even liked (as much as anyone could be said to feel the emotion for someone so exalted as a ship’s Captain) - was a mess of blood and shock and unreality.
This shit didn’t happen. Forget the craziness about it being a zombie apocalypse. That had its own brand of unreality. Forget the entire world as he knew it coming undone in a wave of madness. This was an absolute crack in the framework of reality.
“Captain...?” Jonesy asked.
“Get the XO,” Sparks said.
“He’s on the way, sir,” Jonesy replied. “What...?”
“The Admiral, he’s...” the man began, but then Doc Harris came running up to them. “Stay back!” Sparks shouted this time, and then he crumpled, his body folding in on itself as he fell to his knees. “Don’t come any closer,” he said again.
“To Hell with that!” Harris said, striding up to him.
He took the Captain by the arm and tried to pull him to his feet, but Sparks was dead weight. “Help me, Jones!” Harris yelled.
“Don’t you dare!” Sparks said, his voice suddenly becoming firm and commanding. “Doc, get away from me. I could be infected.”
“What the Hell is going on, Petty Officer Jones?” The annoying nasal whine of Medavoy’s voice rang out behind Jonesy, as the man himself came puffing up to them. “What...?”
“Dick, good...” Sparks said, finally allowing Doc Harris to help him to his feet.
“What happened, sir?” the XO asked, in his very best ass-kissing voice. It made Jonesy want to puke, every time it reared its sycophantic head.
“The Admiral...turned,” Sparks said, his voice betraying the shock already writ large upon his face. “We had to...kill him.”
The news hit Jonesy square in the gut. Kill the Admiral? What kind of bullshit was this? He shook his head. Didn’t matter.
As if a switch flipped inside his head, a cold, rational calm fell over him. This was reality. This was black and white, either/or. Forget the questions, forget the uncertainty, forget the unreality of the basic situation, and deal with it.
“What do you need done, Captain?” He said.
Doc pulled Sparks over to the Government vehicle Duke had used to pick up Molly, and leaned him against it. The Captain rubbed his face with both hands, then pulled them away and looked at them, as if they belonged to someone else.
Doc Harris took him by the wrist to check his pulse. Jonesy couldn’t tell what the pulse was, of course, but the expression on Doc’s face told him the answer was not good.
“Captain?” LT Medavoy asked. He sounded nervous. Of course, he usually sounded nervous, Jonesy thought - at least when the bastard wasn’t living up to the phallic symbol of his first name.
Sparks blinked and looked first at Medavoy, then Doc, and finally Jonesy. “We’re losing it,” he said, finally.
The remark had so many potential meanings Jonesy couldn’t begin to count. Had they lost “it,” and gone nuts? A distinct possibility, given both the general sense of impending apocalypse and the battered and bloody condition of the CO’s uniform. His own grip on sanity was feeling a bit tenuous at the moment, but he didn’t think it was what the man meant.
So, what was “it?” The base? Sand Island? Oahu? The entire fucking world?
“Not sure how much longer things are going to last,” Sparks continued. “Word from the mainland is bad. Los Angeles is overrun. San Francisco is almost there. New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta... The news from everywhere is bad.” He said this while staring at the ground, though Jonesy doubted the man was even seeing the concrete pier. “They haven’t evacuated Washington, D. C., yet, but it’s coming.”
“And Hawaii, sir?” Medavoy asked.
Sparks looked up at him and grimaced. He shrugged. “We’
ve been ordered to get underway,” he said, as if the answer was obvious - which, in a way, it was.
“What happened at the Staff Meeting, sir?” Jonesy asked. Medavoy snapped him a dirty look he caught with the corner of his eye, but ignored.
“The Admiral turned, full neurological, and started biting people. We tried to subdue him, but...” He let the thought drift, and just shrugged, instead. He shook his head, as if to clear the memory, then took a deep breath and drew himself up. “LT Medavoy, you are to lock the ship down. Nobody on, nobody off. Issue filter masks to all personnel, and get the rest of the stores on ASAP, then pull in the brow.”
He looked at Doc Harris. “They’ve discovered large doses of Vitamin C can inhibit the cold virus. Inhibit the cold, and it stops the respiratory infection, the lungs don’t bleed and the neurological pathogen doesn’t take hold. Sometimes. It’s not much, but... Not sure how you’re going to do it - maybe force feed the crew orange juice. Do the best you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Harris said.
The CO looked last at Jonesy. “Jonesy,” he began, and Socrates was taken aback to see him approach the next order with...what...? Regret? “The rules of engagement have changed. Control and containment are not viable. Once the person reaches full neurological, the only thing you can do is terminate.”
Jonesy had always heard the cliche of the color draining from someone’s face. He’d never seen it, and never felt it. Until now. The color drained from his face. He couldn’t see it happen, obviously, but he felt as if someone had opened a valve in his head and drained all the blood from his skull.
