by Jeff Thomson
The sign, though he could not read it, said: Grosvenor Park.
27
John, Spute and Floyd pulled their rental truck onto the pier bare moments ahead of Jim and Gus in their heavily-laden SUV. They each got out of their respective vehicles - all of them, except Floyd, a bit creaky, since breaking, entering, burglary, and lifting and toting were such a younger man’s game. But casual passers-by, ignorant of their recent activities, would have only seen five men moving with purpose toward a ship that itself was a bee hive of activity.
The five men met at the foot of the gangway.
“We need to leave,” both John and Gus said at the same time.
John and company had just removed several hundred thousand dollars of scientific equipment and supplies from the College, where John had killed a man with a well-placed crowbar. Gus and Jim had just cleaned out half of the ammo stores from a place where the gun store owner now lay trussed up like a turkey on the floor. Being elsewhere when the police discovered their crimes would be a good idea. There was only one problem.
Marcie Gordon called down to them from the head of the gangway.
“John, have you seen Samantha?”
28
John Gordon wove the SUV through the streets of suburban Astoria, searching for his daughter. He was going to kill her, if she wasn’t already dead.
The idea, the possibility, she might actually be dead - or worse, ready to turn into a raving zombie, like the hulking behemoth at the College - froze his insides like an ancient glacier, it’s ice ten thousand years old. What the Hell could she have been thinking?
It’s a zombie fucking apocalypse! Let’s party!
He was going to kill her.
He’d always considered himself a good father. He wasn’t a brute. He wasn’t a drunk (most of the time). He tried not to be an asshole. He did his best to keep their mother, his wife, Marcie, happy. He’d always heard this was the key: keeping Mom happy, and he had done so, for the most part. He hadn’t pestered his children: Samantha, sixteen, going on thirty, and David (Davy), a bright ten year old, whose mind worked so fast sometimes it scared him. He hadn’t picked at them, constantly, as if nothing they ever did could ever be good enough, like his own father had.
Henry Gordon had been a prick. That was the kindest thing he could have said about the man. No wonder John left to join the Coast Guard the day after he turned eighteen. Doing so, left his younger brother, Charlie, alone to take the brunt of the bastard’s animosity toward the world, and take it he had.
Charlie had been a great kid: always cheerful, always warm, always funny in a way John could never be. It was a kind sort of funny: never at anyone else’s expense, never dark, never biting. How he’d retained it during the three years he’d spent alone under that fucker’s roof after John left, John would never know.
He’d been happy for Charlie when the kid won a scholarship to Stanford, and even happier when he’d met and then married Ashley Jane Wilkes. Their father had not come to the wedding. He hadn’t been invited.
And then Molly came along, all dimples and sparkling eyes. The word precocious got used so often about everybody’s children that it ceased to have any real meaning, but Molly was precocious in spades. At four, she’d learned how to read; at six, she was performing Sixth Grade math; and at ten, she’d won the State Science Fair for her age group by doing an ingenious thing with mice in a maze that John, to this day, still didn’t understand.
Then the accident happened.
There were moments in life, seared into the memory like a burn scar, with a cruelty so vast, so cold, and so absolute John had never again been able to believe in a loving God. Moments like the time Harriet Gordon - John and Charlie’s mother - committed suicide by hanging herself in the garage. John found her. He’d been eight years old. Her suicide note had been an apology to her children. It hadn’t said a word about their father, and the heartless bastard hadn’t said another word about her, either, as if she never existed.
John still had the occasional nightmare about the day he found her. It had been terrible, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable. But it was nothing compared to the day he heard about Charlie.
John had just made Chief. The Chief’s Mess on the Cutter Planetree sponsored the traditional Kangaroo Court, accusing him of everything from brigandage to buggery, all the while plying him with alcohol in front of two thirds of the entire crew at Rosie’s Bar and Grill, in the unlikely town of Pelican, Alaska. It was unlikely, first, because the entire town had been built on stilts and sandwiched between the waters of the inlet and the mountain behind it, and second, because Rosie’s was a place that had to be seen (and experienced) to be believed. The walls and ceiling and long wooden bar were covered with well over a thousand signatures. The rule was, if you wanted to sign your name, you had to first drop trou, as explained by the plain wooden sign: Drop Your Pants and Party. And party they had. It had been epic.
He’d awoken at noon the next day with a hangover so horrible, his eyelids had hurt, and when he stripped to take a shower, he discovered the signatures of a dozen of his shipmates in magic marker upon his bare butt. No memory of how they’d gotten there, any more than he had one of getting back to the ship at the end of the night. He’d been sitting in the mess, nursing a cup of coffee, when the Messenger handed him the telegram.
We regret to inform you of the tragic death of your brother and his wife. STOP. Car accident. STOP. They are survived by their daughter, Molly Jean Gordon. STOP You have been designated executor. STOP.
Everything had stopped, as abruptly as if he had been in the car with Charlie when the drunk slammed into them head on - including his hangover. He’d sat there, slumped behind the mess table, frozen like the permafrost earth in the high Arctic, feeling nothing. His brother, who had survived their father with his kind humor intact, who had excelled at Stanford, who had married a wonderful woman and fathered an amazing child, who had the world at his feet and a life full of potential ahead of him was dead.
The pain came a day later - brutal, crushing, all-consuming pain, He’d hidden it from Marcie as best he could, but it had still come out - lashed out - at odd times. She had borne it well, had borne him well; had been his crutch, his solid wall against which he could lean. Davy, their son, hadn’t even been a year old at the time, but Samantha had been a mischievous six, full of jokes and loving silliness. She had been his light in the darkness. Even more than his wife, his daughter helped him find the way home. And now she was out there in the zombie-haunted darkness.
STOP
He stared at the Stop sign through the windshield, his foot having depressed the brake without his conscious brain telling it to do so. The SUV sat at the crossroads corner of Grove and Juniper. To the right, he knew, was the Mall, but it was late, already after ten, so it would be dark and closed, given the Police-mandated curfew. To the left, Grove snaked its way through one of the ubiquitous housing developments built during the boom in the first few years of the Twenty-First Century, before the economy crashed and burned. Half the houses had never been occupied. Ahead, Juniper dead-ended at Grosvenor Park. He knew kids sometimes (often) went there to smoke weed, and makeout, and do all those things their parents never wanted to hear about for as long as they lived, mostly because they, themselves had done it when they were teenagers. He eased the SUV forward.
Samantha was there; he just knew it, in the Park, at night, in the dark, after curfew, in a zombie apocalypse. He really was going to kill her, because the pain of that long ago telegram had been so immense, so overwhelming, so deep and lasting, that the thought of having to go through it again, to feel it again, to have to live with it for the rest of his life if she had done something so stupid as to go out partying in a zombie motherfucking apocalypse was just too goddamned much to bear.
His foot pressed down on the accelerator.
29
BM2/OPS Ricky (Scoot) Scutelli leaned against the chart table on the Sassafras Bridge, trying to control his
spinning head. He was sick - had been sick - for the better part of a week now. And he was scared.
He’d gotten through the worst of the coughing and spitting of blood over the weekend, at the off-base apartment he shared with his wife, Maria. She had not been there, thank God. She had flown to the mainland to visit her sick mother in Cleveland, eight days ago. He hadn’t heard from her in four of those days. During their last conversation, she told him she was feeling sick.
Communications between the Hawaiian Islands and the mainland of America had been spotty, due to the sheer volume of calls passing back and forth. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the topic on every caller’s mind: Pomona. Everybody knew about it. Everybody was scared about it. A significant portion of everybody had it, in one form or another.
Scoot knew he had it, knew his wife had it, and her mother, and... and... And he was scared.
He’d never been more scared of anything in his entire life. Everybody was shitting in their pants, whether they had gotten the cold or not, which was why he’d kept his own illness a secret. With his wife gone and possibly dying, he needed something to hang onto, and that something was his other family: his shipmates. If the command ever found out he was sick, they’d put him off the ship, and send hm to Base Medical, where he’d be alone, except for all the other people slowly being driven insane by the zombie virus.
On the upside, he was feeling better, his spinning head notwithstanding. There was hope in that. This was an odd disease - whatever it was. Not everybody got it. Not everybody who got the cold passed onto the neurological stage. So maybe he wouldn’t, either. Maybe his wife wouldn’t. Maybe everything was going to be okay. Maybe he’d get through feeling like shit, get better, and move on to carry out whatever mission was assigned by the United States Coast Guard.
He chuckled at the absurdity of this last thought, shook his head to clear out the rest of the cobwebs, and went back to working on the underway checklist. He wasn’t - and never had been - the flag-waving Simply Semper kind of lifer one occasionally found on Coast Guard ships.
Scoot called it the Military Disease: a malady created when individuals were thrust into a position where there was no choice but to subvert their individuality and become part of a cohesive team. It wasn’t natural, in the modern era, with its Reality TV and Social Media and texting and Blog sites and a hundred different ways to remain utterly self-absorbed on a day-to-day basis. Some people adapted - or, rather, simply ignored it and pressed on - but others were consumed by it, and yet seemed to thrive on it, turning them into that which he and Jonesy and most of the people he’d met during his time in the Guard hated. Either way, it still wasn’t natural. The human mind and body rebelled against anything unnatural - like, say, the Pomona virus, or, say, the bullshit generated by assholes who took all the military shit too seriously. People like LT Dick Medavoy.
Scoot exited the pilothouse and climbed up the ladder to the Signal Bridge to visually check that both radar antennae were rotating on the mast as they should be. They were, but instead of ducking back inside, he glanced down onto the pier, where he saw two people - a woman and child - being escorted onto the ship by their new CO. They were carrying luggage.
Medavoy held an Officer’s Call, a little less than two hours ago, to brief the crew on their current mission. He’d told them they were to take position between Oahu and Kauai and just wait. For what, he hadn’t elaborated, but he hadn’t needed to. Everybody knew: wait for the end to come. And after...? : Pick up the pieces, Scoot supposed. But the plan was all rather vague - probably because nobody knew what was going to happen.
The result of that uncertainty had raised the inevitable questions about the crew’s families living in Hawaii. What about them? What would happen to them? And could they be brought on board and evacuated?
Medavoy had said: “No.”
And now the motherfucker was bringing his own family on board.
What an asshole! Scoot thought. And then he coughed. His head swam. Maybe he wasn’t getting better, after all. Maybe none of them were, or ever would...
30
Samantha could feel her heart coming apart, shattering into a million pieces, right there in the middle of Grosvenor Park. Justin Blaisdell was kissing Cheyenne Drummond.
Cheyenne Drummond, all blonde hair and blue eyes (Sam’s own hair was naturally a mousy brown, and so she died it jet black - about the way her heart felt at the moment), and a bra size larger than her IQ, (she contemplated her own mosquito bites, then dismissed the thought as being far too depressing). In school, she’d been Sam’s frenemy for years: the kind of girl who seemed to be a picture-perfect friend, right up until the moment Samantha turned her back, and then Cheyenne would stick the knife in and twist. She’d made the mistake of confessing her crush on Justin to the scheming little bitch in a moment of ill-considered self-delusion, just last week.
And now Cheyenne Drummond had her tongue halfway down Justin’s throat, and his hand was firmly planted on her conniving ass. Crack! Crunch! Shatter! Her heart fell to pieces.
As if the universe hadn’t already done enough damage, they had an IPOD station set up with external speakers and siting on the park bench, in front of which they were swapping cooties. At least she hoped it was cooties, at the very least. The music they were listening to was - wouldn’t you know it - Green Day. Of course it was. Crack! Crunch! Shatter!
SNAP!
At first she thought the sound had been just another internal explosion as her soul was being crushed, but then she realized she’d heard it with her ears, not inside her head. Somebody else was out there.
31
Brian J. Reeves, former sales rep for a company that had no more meaning to him than did the mosquitos buzzing in the night air, and current psychotic, naked, blood-covered, rage-filled zombie, snapped a twig under his bare foot, where it caused a one inch cut that left splotches of blood in his footprint. He didn’t feel it - or if he did, it didn’t register.
What did register was the sound of...something. The something, as it happened, was music, but it might as well have been explosive flatulence, for all it made any difference. All he understood was noise, somewhere ahead, beyond the trees (which could just as easily have been sky scrapers) in which he stood. The sound angered him. That emotion couldn’t have been explained, either, but it mattered even less than the mosquito that landed on his cheek and began to feed.
What mattered was the rage.
32
John pulled the SUV into the parking lot of Grosvenor Park, backed it into a slot by the groundskeeper’s building, and shut off the engine. There was a car he didn’t recognize, some foreign job, parked a few dozen feet away. It had several stickers of brand names he’d never heard of, plus one of a skull, in the corners of the tinted windows, and one on the bumper that said: My Child Beat Up Your Honor Student. He doubted the car belonged to a parent.
He knew Samantha was here - or so he kept telling himself. The question was: where. It wasn’t a big place, like Central Park in New York, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but it may as well have been. The night and the park were dark, and she could be anywhere.
And there could be zombies.
He picked the .357 off the passenger seat and looked at it. When Marcie asked the question of whether or not he had seen their daughter, John hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t thought about calling Sam’s friends’ houses, and certainly hadn’t thought about calling the cops - not with two truckloads of stolen contraband sitting on the pier. He’d simply pushed Jim out of the way and gotten into the still-running SUV.
He’d shoved it into gear and started to pull out, then slammed on the brakes. “Gun!” he’d yelled, and Gus handed him the cannon he now held.
He’d never fired a Magnum of any caliber before, and had only fired a revolver of any type once, when he’d successfully killed a tree branch with a .32. He’d fired automatics, of course. The Coast Guard had still been using the .45 when he went through boot camp. He�
��d scored expert. He had liked it so much, he’d bought one for himself - a Colt 1911. It was traditional. It felt good in his hand. And if he hit somebody in the pinky with it, it would knock them flat on their ass.
Then the Coast Guard had shifted to the 9mm, supposedly so they’d have ammunition commonality if there were ever another World War - or some bullshit. He really couldn’t remember the reasoning, and really couldn’t give half a shit, at that particular moment. What he did remember was that the 9mm was a lousy replacement for the .45. A Nine may or may not knock a person down with a single round. Probably not, come to think of it.
He hadn’t brought the Colt with him to the college. They had already been committing Burglary and Breaking and Entering, and Grand Theft. He hadn’t wanted to add Armed Robbery to his list of crimes, so he’d left it in its locked case aboard the True North. It wasn’t going to do him any good there, but after the incident at the college with the super-sized zombie, he was damned if he’d go unarmed ever again, and so he borrowed the big-ass pistol from Gus.
As he got out of the SUV and headed into the Park, he hoped the Magnum was as good as the 1911. If anybody got in his way or threatened or hurt Sam, he wanted to put the motherfucker on the ground.
33
Samantha watched in broken-hearted anguish as her fantasy of kissing Justin got sucked into the slurping, disgusting mouth of Cheyenne Drummond. She hated that bitch. And she wasn’t feeling too friendly toward Justin. In fact, she kinda hoped Cheyenne had Herpes.
