by Jeff Thomson
“Hold this!” Jonesy said, thrusting the sextant into Harold’s hands. They were on the Flying Bridge: Harold as lookout and Jonesy taking a sun line, when they heard shouting from back on the fantail - lots of shouting. “If you break it, you bought it,” he added, leaping down onto the Signal Deck.
He’d just reached the bottom of the ladder at the bottom of the steps leading from the Bridge Deck, when Mr. Larsen popped his head out the Bridge door.
“I’m going!” Jonesy shouted.
“Go!” The Bosun shouted in return, tossing Jonesy’s helmet to him. He’d left it on the chart table, since it made using the sextant functionally impossible.
Jonesy fumbled the catch, almost dropping it over the side, but managed to grab it by the chin strap just in time. It swung and smacked him in the elbow pad as he turned to race aft. He bounced off the RHIB sponson in his uncoordinated attempt to don the helmet while running, but it was on his head when he reached the end of the superstructure and entered into a scene of absolute chaos.
Shouting members of the crew were running in every direction - several of them directly toward him. He spun to avoid colliding head on into Medavoy as the man sped away from the melee.
“Deal with this, Jones!” the CO shouted, as he scampered past.
“Working on it!” He said, ignoring the fact that the Commanding Officer was running away from the danger threatening the crew of his ship.
Much of the crew were clustered on the port side, since the battle was happening to starboard, but along the way, FN Douglas Carney had fallen, and YN3 Greg Haversham had tripped over him, knocking down SA Tommy Barnes, who was trying to get up as Jonesy shot past. CS3 Manny Manoa bulled his way through the smaller crowd surrounding the fight, took one look at Jonesy, then headed in a different direction.
“Doc’s gone nuts!” The big man yelled, then shoved CS3 John Ryan out of his way. Ski, Frank Roessler, Molly, LTjg Bloominfeld, and CS1 Gary King bobbed and weaved around Duke, who struggled with the writhing forms of HS3 “Doc” Harris and BM2/DECK Masur - the sole member of the fight not wearing a dress uniform.
Masur stood pinned against the towing windlass, pushing back against Doc, who was trying to eat Masur’s face. Duke was trying to get his forearm around Doc’s throat in a choke hold, but the wiry young man-turned-raving animal was writhing and jumping and seemingly oblivious to the big Bosun’s efforts.
“Move!” Jonesy shouted, and pushed his way into the action, just as Doc chomped down on Masur’s arm.
Masur screamed, as a chunk of his flesh flew out of Doc’s mouth, and a copious amount of blood streamed out of the wound. Doc’s head flew backwards, as he ripped at Masur, and smacked Duke square in the nose. Blood squirted from both nostrils as Duke staggered from the impact. But the movement of Doc’s head gave Masur just enough room for a roundhouse punch that connected with the new zombie’s chin, and snapped his head sideways with a violence that should have torn his head off, but it barely seemed to faze the raving maniac.
What it did do was give Doc/zombie a sudden view of Jonesy off to his side. Like an animal distracted by a shiny object, Doc whirled and charged, just as Jonesy was bringing a baton out of its sheath, knocking the weapon from his hand and sending it spinning across the deck.
Off balance, Jonesy stumbled back, struck the bollard he’d been sitting on the night before with the inside of his knee, and fell sideways to the deck with a clang, as his weapons struck the steel decking. Doc lunged forward, but then something happened that utterly surprised everyone - even the new zombie.
Many of those who had run to the supposed safety of the port side had returned at Jonesy’s arrival, like a convoy of motorists slowing down to view a grizzly accident, their faces filled with both fear and a sick fascination. But their expressions changed to shock and wonder as ENS Molly Gordon, the new boot officer - the new girl - strode into the fray, planted the ball of her left foot, and spun with her right to send an amazing spinning kick directly into the side of the charging zombie’s head.
A chorus of “Holy shit!” spread throughout the crowd, as Doc staggered from the blow, tripped over the figure of Masur (who was curled onto the deck, cradling his bitten arm and moaning in pain) and fell against the towing windlass, smacking the side of his head against the lip of the windlass barrel. He/it didn’t fall to the ground, since most of his/its body was leaning against the machine, but he/it did stop his frenetic, violent scrambling that made it so hard for Duke to come to grips.
The burley Bosun wasted neither time, nor opportunity.
When Doc first began to turn, he - as usual with this plague - started by trying to rip his own clothes off. But with first Masur, then Duke rushing forward in an attempt to subdue him, he never got the chance to finish the job. As a result, he still had his pants on, and what remained of his dress uniform shirt still covered the man/zombie’s skinny chest.
Duke shot forward, grabbed his shipmate by the back of his belt and what was left of his shirt collar, then lifted him bodily over his head, took three steps to the far back end of the fantail, and pile drove the former Hospital Corpsman over the side. Jonesy joined him at the aft rail just in time to see the churning water from the prop wash turn briefly, shockingly red, as the giant propeller chewed him into chum, then continued its rotation. The sound of the machinery beneath their feet never changed pitch.
“Man overboard!” somebody shouted from the crowd.
“Don’t bother,” Jonesy said, turning to face the crew. “He’s dead.”
57
LT Richard Medavoy steeled himself before entering the Captain’s (his) Cabin. He’d just run from the debacle on the fantail. Worse yet, the crew had seen him run, like a coward; the most despicable failure he could have committed.
He knew what they said about him behind his back - had always known, since the Academy days, since before, since grade school and high school, when the bullies had taken the utmost pleasure in calling him by the shortened version of his name: Dick. Dick-Head, Dick-Face, Dick the Prick, Dick-Breath, Dick-Stain; on and on and on, the names had fallen on him like bricks, singly or in job lots, crushing him beneath their weight.
If they could only see him now...
Now that he was a coward.
But I wasn’t running away! Honest! I was running to...
He stared at the door and jerked his head, as if to remove a flying insect. None of that mattered. He had bigger problems.
He opened the door.
“There you are, Richard. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you. I was worried, so worried, and I heard no word at all, nothing at all. Why didn’t you tell me, tell me, tell me that it would take so long?” Marissa - Manic Marissa, to be precise - his wife, said in a rush of words, not pausing for breath. That was always the first sign of her manic phase: the blurted speech and repeated words. The second was the wild look in her eyes, like the caricature of a mad woman, only real, and certainly no joke. The third was her constant pacing - always pacing, around and around and around, ceaseless, like a Great White.
“It’s okay, Marissa,” he said, in a calm voice. “I’m here now.”
He didn’t know which he hated more: Manic Marissa, or Morose Marissa. Probably the former, come to think about it. At least the depressed Marissa didn’t talk all the time. She rarely talked at all in that phase. He found it kind of peaceful, in a disturbing way.
“The boy, the boy, the boy, he’s sick, so sick, there’s something wrong, wrong, wrong. You need to do something! Do, do, do something!”
But there was nothing he could do. At least, nothing any father would do - ever.
His eight year old boy (only eight), Carson, was more than just sick. He had THE FEVER. And LT (Dick-Face, Dick-Breath) Richard Medavoy knew exactly, precisely what that meant. He had just seen (run away from) what comes next.
58
“Okay, so what’s next?” LT Steve Wheeler said to the assembled “Crossing Council.” They had convened in the Wardroom, both as a
way to keep their plans secret from the uninitiated pollywogs, and to give the junior enlisted members of the Golden Shellback fraternity a bit of a status bump by allowing them into Officer’s Country, where few of them had ever been, except as messcooks. “We’ve got the King and Queen, we’ve got the Wog Talent-less Show, we’ve got the garbage being stored for the Whale’s Belly... What else?”
They were still twelve hours out of Guam, the NBC gear had been brought out of storage and prepped, the fuel hoses were distributed and tied down in place; there wasn’t a whole lot else to be done, and LTjg Montrose had been right. The crew needed a morale boost, and so he had convened the Council.
They could have been to Apia, by now, if they had run the turbines, but those things sucked up fuel like mad, and they ran on JP5 Av-gas, same as their two HH-65 helicopters, and they hadn’t gotten confirmation from Guam about its availability. They probably had it, since the island’s military base also had helos, but they couldn’t be sure till they got there, and this was no time for uncertainty, so they had taken the slower, diesel-fueled method.
“The Baby?” OS1 Rudy McGuinn suggested, referring to the third (and by far most disgusting) member of the Initiation triumvirate of King, Queen, and Baby. This brazen individual was always the largest member of the Initiated crew, whose belly would be covered in things most normal people would not even want to consider. The initiates face would then be rubbed in this revolting concoction before finally standing before the King’s Court to determine their worthiness to become a Golden Shellback.
“Who should it be?” LT Wheeler asked.
“Dave Ablitz,” BMC Stevens suggested, and this was met with uproarious laughter. The First Class Yeoman in question was quite large, and hairy as an ape. He would be disgustingly memorable as the Baby. At the moment, however, he was not in attendance, even though he was one of the few who had actually been through a full Initiation. The motion was carried and he was elected in absentia. That’s what he got for not attending the meeting.
“Slave auction?” BMCM Philip C. Wolf suggested. He was, without a doubt, the saltiest bastard on the Polar Star. He had made more deployments, logged more nautical miles, been to more liberty ports, and seen more sea time than all of his bridge gang put together. People didn’t even bother with the DECK or OPS designator when referring to him. He was the Master Chief. This might be the Captain’s ship, but that was his Bridge, three decks above their heads, and no simpering, touchy-feely Headquarters pussy fart was going to change the fact.
The “slave auction” had been a tradition in the Crossing Ceremony since the Master Chief was in diapers, and so LT Wheeler didn’t want to dismiss the idea out of hand, but the racial implications of it made just about everybody cringe. Plus, Wolf scared him. He suspected the man scared every officer, with the possible exception of the Captain, who was himself an “Old Salt,” in addition to being a Mustang.
The auction put the polywogs (or simply wogs) who had never crossed the line up for sale to any crew member who had, making said wog the slave of his or her purchaser for the entire day prior to the Ceremony. The money went to the Morale Fund, and the auction (a morale event in itself, filled with raucous hilarity) had always raised a lot of it, but as with the hazing aspects, it had fallen out of favor.
“I’m afraid the Captain won’t go there, Master Chief,” Wheeler said, and several of the others around the Mess table - including the XO, CDR Carl Swedberg - nodded in agreement.
“Not a chance,” LCDR Lawrence Stubbelfield agreed. “Sorry, Master Chief.” The Operations Officer was soft spoken, though competent, and friendly, in a detached sort of way. He was of mixed race, his father being white, and his mother, black, and both of them clearly tall. He stood six-foot-four when he slouched, and looked not unlike Kareem Abdul Jabbar - though not exactly like him, either.
Wheeler had come to Polar Star to replace him, arriving in Sydney just before she went down into the ice. The Lieutenant Commander had been scheduled to fly out of McMurdo, but first one, then a second, and finally a third C-130 had been unable to land due to weather. Two other flights had gotten in and out, but both of them were full, and so he had been slated to depart when they docked in Fremantle after two months in the Land Really Down Under. One zombie Apocalypse later, and the Polar Star now had two OPS Bosses. Wheeler had taken the AOPS position that would ordinarily have been a junior officer, but he didn’t mind. The two of them got along well enough, and he had no complaints - at least none he cared to voice to anyone.
Master Chief Wolf muttered something which may or may not have been an aspersion against the CO’s masculinity, but Wheeler ignored it. The XO raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. He was definitely afraid of the Master Chief.
“What about the Fashion Show?” YN2 Lydia Claire asked. She was a short blonde woman in her early twenties, a Southern Girl, with a dry wit, who always seemed to wear a half-smile on her face. Everybody liked her. This was her second deployment to Antarctica, and would have been her last, if not for the zombie apocalypse. They had done a modified Crossing Ceremony on the previous trip, which didn’t include the Whale’s Belly or the slave auction, or the more adolescent of the traditional accouterments, and it had been little more than a glorified pizza party, but it had included the Fashion Show.
The Fashion Show put male wogs in drag to parade up and down the Mess Deck for the amusement of all. Accusations of latent closet homosexuality aside, it had always been a fun part of the festivities. Wheeler wrote it down.
“Yeah, but how can we get the female crew members involved?” MST3 Michael Paladin asked. He was a slim young man, about the same age as Lydia, with reddish blonde hair and glasses. The Marine Science Technician was a likeable, unassuming guy who had come aboard just prior to the last deployment, and so he, also, had crossed the X.
“Like the Drag Kings?” EM1 Greg Lamonski (Ski, naturally) asked, referring to the female-to-male drag show. “That could be amusing.”
He was right, Wheeler thought, it would be amusing, but he suspected Ski thought so for different reasons. The man was a notorious slut, whose escapades at the many legal brothels of Sydney were legendary. It might be a non-issue (if not a reason for veneration) in an all-male crew, but with a mixed crew, the specter of sexual harassment had always hung about the man’s head, and so any idea that came out of it was suspect. They would need to tread carefully.
“I’m all for it,” Lydia said, favoring the assembled Council with a full smile.
Or maybe not... “Take an informal poll of the other females, Lydia. I don’t want to harsh anybody’s vibe, but I don’t think we need to be crossing any lines inside the ship.” Wheeler temporized.
“Good call,” CWO4 Robert (Bobby V) Vincenzo agreed. He was a salty bastard in his own right, and no one to be trifled with, either. If he liked you, you were golden, if he didn’t... You might as well just resign yourself to being in Hell for the length of your tour on the ship. He was in charge of the Deck Force, which contained four females, all of whom were wogs. The last damned thing he needed was a gender controversy. Wheeler knew the very thought of it pissed the man off, but Bobby V was not an idiot. “Damned political correctness complicates everything, but we can’t ignore it.”
The Initiation had been a time-honored tradition at sea for centuries. Sailors from navies all over the world engaged in it, often with relish, sometimes with violence (before the modern era of common sense in such things). The violent aspects had changed as the centuries turned from Eighteen to Nineteen, and the more grueling aspects went by the wayside, but it had still been not the least bit politically correct. It was disgusting, it was juvenile, it was a total mind-fuck, and there were always one or two idiots who took it too far (there were assholes in every crowd - just a fact of life), but it was also, above all, memorable. No one who had ever been through it forgot it, for as long as they lived.
Crossing the line was something maybe one percent of the population in all of human history had
done. It needed to be marked with some ceremony; it deserved to be memorable.
But then the Age of Political Correctness - that destroyer of all traditions, no matter how necessary - descended upon the sea going services of the United States, and the Initiation went the way of the Dodo. It was a testament to both Captain Hall, and the utterly fucked circumstances in which they found themselves, that the old traditions were being restored. This did not, however, mean they weren’t going to hedge their bets, just in case. As impossible as their circumstances seemed, there was always the possibility civilization would pull out of the dive before it was too late. To not think so would be to admit hopelessness.
“Right you are,” the XO chimed in. He’d been staying out of the conversation, much like the CO had stayed out of the meeting, not wanting to restrict the general entertainment value of the festivities, even though both of them had crossed all of the lines at one time or another in their careers. These included the Equator (Shellback), the International Dateline (Golden Dragon), the Arctic Circle (Bluenose, or Polar Bear - depending on who you asked), and the Antarctic Circle (Emperor Penguin), along with the Golden Shellback, which they were discussing, and the Order of the Ditch, for going through the Panama Canal. The one thing they - and a few other members of the Council - had done, but which did not come with a Crossing Certificate, was circumnavigating North America, by going Over the Top, through the Northwest Passage. The Star had done it, so had the Healy, as well as a couple of the Canadian Icebreakers, but few others had in history. Okay, some submarines had done it, but nobody cared about those sneaky bastards, and in any case, there was no certificate for it. “But as long as all of the women agree, then by all means, let’s do it.”
“Okay, then,” Wheeler said. “Fashion show. What’s next?”
59
“You know I gotta do this, right?” Jonesy asked, tightening the zip cuffs around Masur’s wrists.
