by Jeff Thomson
She leaned in and gave Professor Floyd an indecent view of her breasts. He couldn’t help but notice them, since they were a scant six inches from his nose. His eyes at first flashed with annoyance over the apparent affront of having someone actually deign to touch him, but then they drifted to the cleavage, then shifted slightly to the left, where she knew he was staring straight at her all-but exposed right nipple. She tugged at his arm. “Come on, Doc,” she said. He came.
117
Old Joe heard the flurry of shots on the far side of the ship. It sounded like a .45, but he couldn’t be sure. Thing was, though, none of his men had been carrying a .45. He did not share this with Sugar. The pimp was nervously walking back and forth across the solid deck of the RHIB, making Joe nervous. He heard the second flurry of shots, and they were definitely .9mm, which he was sure none of them had been carrying.
The .357 Skizzy Pete held hadn’t made a sound since the first flurry of .45, and while there had been a shotgun blast, Old Joe was pretty sure that fucknut Lazardo, who’d gone up there with a shotgun, was now deader than shit. He didn’t mourn the man.
“What the fuck is taking so long?” Sugar asked, for the fifth time in the last six minutes. Old Joe was about ready to shoot the fucker himself.
“Do I look like I know?” Joe asked. “Why don’t you go up there and find out?”
Sugar apparently didn’t think much of that idea, because he shut right the Hell up, which suited Joe just fine. He should have been more careful what he wished for, however, because the silence gave him time to think, and what he thought was that maybe they should just get the flying fuck out of there, right now. Fuck Skizzy Pete. Fuck that child molesting piece of shit, Eddie Cochrane. Lazardo was certainly dead, Joe-Boy was absolutely dead and still floating out there somewhere in the dark. This left just Old Joe and the pimp. The pimp could go fuck himself, as far as Joe was concerned, but he didn’t feel inclined to do anything about it, since Sugar still held the other shotgun.
Blackjack Charlie would be pissed, but fuck him, too. This whole thing was a mistake, and it had been that bastard’s idea.
“Fuck this,” he said, reaching his decision. “We’re leaving.”
“Fucking right!” Sugar agreed.
Blackjack Charlie could go fuck himself. Old Joe was going to save his own ass. He cut the line to the grapnel with his buck knife and slammed the throttle forward.
118
Frank dumped Moncrief’s bloody and wrench-battered body onto the pile at the aft end of Number One MDE. That made four. Danny, Ski, the EO and Moncrief were dead, and Frank was alone in the engineroom of a ship which may or may not be totally overrun by zombies.
He returned to Main Control and shut the door, cutting off the loud thrum of engine noise. He sat heavily onto a chair as far away from the pools of blood on the deck as he could get and dropped his headphones onto the counter top. Out of habit, he checked the gauges and readouts, ensuring all was still in the green. It was.
He was a veteran, a sailor, and an engineer on this third ship. He could walk all the mechanical spaces blindfolded, if he needed to, and was stupid enough to try. He did not, however, need to, but he wasn’t exactly sure what he did need to do.
The Engine Room was free of zombies. The hatches and watertight doors were all shut and dogged tight. He was safe, for the time being, anyway. Nothing could get at him that wasn’t wholly, one hundred percent human. Number Two MDE was running fine, the board was green, the bilges were dry, and there wasn’t anything that needed his immediate attention. He could breathe easy.
Except he couldn’t. He had no idea what was happening in the rest of the ship, no clue about the rest of the crew or what was going on anywhere but within the confines of his compartment. He looked at the telephone handset on the wall.
Who ya gonna call? The Ghostbuster’s jingle popped into his head. That’s all he needed right now - movie themes. He better not start thinking about Titanic. Oops. Too late.
“Get ahold of yourself, Frank,” he muttered, then leaned over, picked up the phone, and dialed the Bridge.
Nobody answered.
On the list of not-good things, that one stood right up there at the top. No answer on the Bridge meant no body on the Bridge - at least not any reasonably sane ones, anyway. Anybody who survived this cluster fuck was going to be at least a little nuts. He already felt the fringes of his own sanity beginning to fray. But nobody up there meant there was nobody steering, nobody looking out, nobody to pull back on the throttle or turn the helm if something like, say, a supertanker stumbled into their path.
There. That was something he could do, some action he could take. He could stop the ship’s motion.
The old ships of yore had an engine telegraph system, where the people in the pilot house would signal the engine room to go from All Ahead one-third to All Back full, if the situation warranted. And then somebody (or, more likely, bodies) in the engine room would make it happen. In these modern times, however, the bridge had direct throttle control, and the Engine Room personnel only had to make sure the engines kept running. They could, however, manipulate the throttle from right there in Main Control. He did so, bringing it to All Stop.
He heard the pitch of Number Two MDE drop as the load reduced. Okay. Problem solved - for the time being, anyway. What now?
Well, Ski said they needed to do PM on the Evaporator. He didn’t have anything else to do, at present. Might as well get to work. He stood, grabbed his headphones, and headed toward the door, but before he could even grasp the handle, the phone rang. He snatched it off its cradle.
“Main Control, Roessler.”
“Frank?” the voice on the other end said. “Good to hear your voice, man. It’s Jonesy.”
A wave of relief washed over him like he was rolling in the surf at Waimaia. “Dude! What the Hell is going on?”
“You okay down there?”
“Yeah,” Frank replied. “But it’s just me. The rest are...” he let the sentence fade.
“I know the feeling,” Jonesy replied. “I’m on the Bridge. Was that you who shut us down?”
“Yep.”
“Good thinking. Are you safe down there?”
“Yeah,” Frank replied, surprised to actually feel safe.
“Stay put. I’m going to check the rest of the ship.”
“Anybody else up there?” Frank asked.
“Ms. Gordon,” Jonesy said, a bit cautiously. “She just got promoted to Captain.”
“The Hell you say?”
“All the other zeroes are dead, Frank. She’s our new CO.”
He thought about it for a bit, then - rather chagrined - said: “Gotta be better than the last one.”
“I agree,” Jonesy said. Frank could hear the pleasure in his voice, which seemed weird, but at that particular moment, he did not care. He wasn’t alone, anymore.
“Stay put,” Jonesy repeated. “I’ll call you when I know.”
“Roger that,” Frank said, and hung up the phone.
119
Jim Barber raced down the ladder from the Bridge to the Port Boat Deck in time to see his daughter drop the over-large First Aid kit down onto the deck next to Professor Floyd and the bleeding body of Mick Fincham. “Christ! This thing’s heavy,” she said, then saw her father and smiled. Her face was flushed with the effort, but her eyes looked dull, almost dead with shock.
He glanced at her, did a double-take and scowling assessment of her near-lack of clothing, decided now was not the time for a fatherly lecture on decorum, and kept running. Then he was past and headed for the rail, chasing the sound of the speeding small boat engine.
The RHIB carrying two men sped away from the True North, bouncing on the mild swell as it picked up speed. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired twice. The one not conning the boat went down, fast and hard, and Jim saw the shotgun fall from his hands and drop into the sea. He shifted aim and fired at the helmsman, who jerked to the right, but kept on
his feet. He fired again and missed as the RHIB sliced left and away, then missed again, as it cut right, zig-zagging into the night. He brought the sight to his eye again, but released the trigger without firing. No point. The boat was out of range, and in any event, it was leaving.
The fight, it seemed, was over. He watched the pirate bastard disappear into the distance for a while, then turned and headed back to his daughter and the carnage that had been left behind.
Mick was in horrible shape; his shoulder a bloody mass of exposed bone and ripped tissue, but the belly wound was much, much worse. “He needs blood, Dad,” Stephanie said, her voice trembling. “Lots of it. And Morphine, but the cabinets in the Sick Bay were locked. So I brought this,” she babbled, the words coming fast, and pointed at the First Aid kit, now lying open, with Floyd searching through it, picking up something, then tossing it back, then again, then again.
The Nutty Professor shook his head in apparent disgust. “No. No. This won’t do. It’s not what I need.” His voice was almost conversational, except for the tone of disdain, but that was normal, from the few discussions he’d had with the man. He looked at Jim and shook his head again. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“What do you mean nothing?” Jim demanded, getting angry and letting it show in his tone. “You do something, God dammit, or I’ll...” Stephanie stopped him with a hand on his knee.
“I think he’s right, Dad.” She’d been listening to Mick’s heartbeat with the stethoscope from the kit. “His heart’s got a bad rhythm. Not sure what it means, but it can’t be good. And he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“If we had a real doctor,” Floyd added. “Not me, but an actual MD, with an operating room at a trauma center, with all the available equipment and drugs and anaesthetic, and sterile protocols...” He let the words trail off, then shrugged. “I still think they’d lose him. The damage is too severe. Looks like this was point blank.” He pointed to Mick’s ravaged abdomen. “Haven’t turned him over yet, but from the position of the entry wound, I’d be surprised if the spine wasn’t damaged.” He shook his head again. “And I’m not an MD.”
Mick gave a shudder, as his body went into violent spasms. Blood spurted from his mouth as his head rolled side to side. He coughed a great, crimson gout, all over Christopher Floyd, who gave a sharp, short scream, and backpedaled away like a crab. Their shipmate twitched a few more times, then fell still and silent.
Stephanie stared at him in horror, her mouth hanging open, her face white as Floyd’s shirt had been, moments before. Her hands trembled and tears welled into her eyes as she turned them toward her father. He wanted to take her in his arms, to comfort and soothe her, but something inside told him it would be a bad idea. She wanted his comfort, clearly, and she needed it, too, but she needed the strength of knowledge in having dealt with this on her own, more. I am a cold bastard, he thought to himself, but he also knew his instinct was right. She would be better off in the long run, and this brave new world was going to be a long run, indeed - long and almost certainly bloodier.
“Check his heartbeat, Steph,” he said, softly. Her eyes held a mixture of pain and shock as she stared at him. But he saw them change, shift, harden in resolve as she took a deep breath, nodded, then put the earpieces into their proper place and the scope to Mick’s chest. She listened for a moment, moved the scope, listened again. She did it twice more and sat back, shaking her head.
Mick Fincham was dead.
120
Molly watched Jonesy pass through the interior Bridge door and head below. What are your orders, Captain? Those five words sent her world well and truly sideways. Was it possible? Was she now the Captain of the USCGC Sassafras? It couldn’t be. But it was.
LCDR Sparks had stayed ashore, fearing he would turn and endanger the crew. Medavoy had turned, had endangered the crew, and had gone back-flipping over the side. Bloominfeld now lay with the bodies of Borgeson and Ross on the port wing, and Ryan had gone down in a plane crash, which left exactly one Commissioned Officer aboard ship: her. CWO4 Kinkaid and CWO2 Larsen may or may not still be alive, but she, technically, outranked them, so she, technically, was now Captain of the ship.
Oh Hell no! The thought stabbed through her brain and her heart the way Jonesy stabbed DC1 Holdstien. She couldn’t do it! She wouldn’t do it!
Did she have a choice?
Of course she did! Larsen or Kinkaid were more qualified. She could hand it off to them. Hell, Jonesy was more qualified than she was. But Jonesy wasn’t an officer, and Kinkaid and Larsen could very well be dead, or worse.
Controlling Legal Authority.
The phrase entered her mind like a stately liner entering port, escorted by tugs and fireboats, with all hoses shooting sea water into the sky. The Coast Guard, for all the military in-jokes about Puddle Pirates and Shallow Water Sailors, and Navy Lite, was part of the Armed Forces. They carried heavy weapons. She had the authority to arrest people, seize their boat, fire on them, if necessary, kill them, if necessary. The Captain of a ship - any ship so armed, and commissioned by the US Government, or any responsible government - held the Controlling Legal Authority. That was the Law.
But this is a Zombie Apocalypse, dammit!
Yes, it was - most definitely was - and that, ultimately, made the law so much more important. When all social order collapsed, which had either already happened, or was on the verge of happening, then the law was the only thing holding utter chaos at bay. She’d seen the messages, read the reports of cities falling to the Infected, one by one being over-ridden by zombies. But pockets of survivors had to still exist, didn’t they?
They existed - she and Jonesy and MK2 Roessler and OS3 Schaeffer, and hopefully at least a few more were alive and uninfected. It stood to reason, therefore, that others would have survived. This may or may not be fuzzy logic, coupled with wishful thinking, but she had to believe in it - she had to - or otherwise, what was the point?
So...Okay...She was the Captain. What did that mean?
It meant she was in charge. It meant she was responsible for the lives of however many crew members survived. And if she was responsible, then it was damned well about time she got off her procrastinating ass and did her job.
She picked up the chart table phone (careful to avoid the pools of blood on the deck) and punched the number.
“Radio, Schaeffer,” the answer came immediately, as if the young man snatched it off its cradle before it had even started ringing.
“Schaeffer, this is Ms. Gordon,” she began.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, seeming glad that somebody was in charge, that somebody could tell him what to do.
“This is far too complicated to explain at the present time, but I have assumed command of the ship.” She waited, breathless, her heart pounding as Schaeffer processed the information. It did not take long.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Have we got comms with anybody?”
“Not directly, ma’am,” he said. “Haven’t heard from COMMSTA Hono, or any of the other cutters in several hours. Couple days, come to think of it. BBC is still broadcasting, so are a few other stations, and there is still some chatter on the civilian channels, but nothing official.”
“Very well,” she said, taking it all in. “Try and raise the COMMSTA. Failing that, try each of the cutters. If you reach any of them, let them know we are in distress but still in control of the ship. Will follow with details when we get them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And if I can’t?”
She thought about her answer for a few moments that seemed to stretch into infinity. If they couldn’t connect with Coast Guard assets, then what? Did they try the Navy? Did they send out a general distress? No. They were still in control, still in command, and were not in any immediate danger, so far as she could tell. She cast a glance at the three points of access into the Bridge: one interior, and two exterior doors. All closed. No immediate danger. Roessler was secure in the Engine Room, she w
as secure on the Bridge. The rest would sort itself out.
“Ma’am?” Schaeffer asked, popping her out of her thought bubble.
“If you can’t raise any Coast Guard assets, then just maintain a watch and listen for any official government forces. Do not let any civilians know our condition, if for no other reason than we don’t yet know it ourselves.” “Ma’am?”
“Look...Bill’s your first name, right?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Look, Bill...We’re in a bad situation, here. I’m not going to soft soap it. But we don’t want to make it worse. We don’t want to bring anything down on us to add to our problems, understood?” She was thinking about pirates, but did not want to utter the word.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We’re alright for now. I want to make sure we stay that way, understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get to it, and keep me informed.”
“Roger that,” he said, and hung up.
And now, all she could do was wait. She moved to the forward windows, picked up a pair of binoculars, and began to scan the darkness. Come on, Jonesy. Give me some good news...
121
BM2/OPS Socrates Jones found what was left of CWO2 Larsen in the Wardroom Passageway, on the port side. He had not died well. In the berthing spaces, the next deck down, he found chaos and blood and death. Bodies were strewn throughout the passageway, in the berthing compartments, and in the Crew’s Lounge, which looked like an abattoir. The big screen TV, home to so many gory and gratuitously violent movies on cruises past, looked like a grotesque version of modern art gone horribly wrong. He stared at a bloody handprint on the left side of the screen, his mind numb, then he smacked his helmeted head, as if to clear it, and kept moving.
As he was walking cautiously (both for stealth and because there was so much bloody mess) forward toward the Bosun Hold, the watertight door swung open. He tensed, knowing that all he had for weapons were his two knives - the Bowie, and his dive knife, held in a sheath on his left calf. The batons had both been bent by the Flying Bridge battle to such a degree that he couldn’t retract them into their carry positions. He’d left them up there.
