by Jeff Thomson
This is good, Charlie thought. This is real good. I can use it.
“Good answer,” Charlie said. “What about the nukes?”
Minooka stared at his officer a moment longer, then looked at Charlie and shook his head. “Can’t give you those,” he said. “And neither can this asshole.”
Blackjack thought of the crazy fuck they had in the next compartment: the wombat still reciting those numbers, still reciting that code. Torture wouldn’t work on him. The fruit bat was already round the bend, batshit crazy. But that code... If they were right, if it was, indeed the release codes for the nuclear weapon positive action locks...
What would be better than an army? Who needed a President, if he had a nuke?
“But he can get me inside the weapons locker?” Charlie asked.
“Yes,” then squid replied.
“And if he doesn’t?” Charlie asked.
“Then he’s a moron,” Minooka replied, sneering at the officer. “And there’s one other guy who can.”
Charlie looked at Dirk Parker. “Cut him,” he said again, and watched as the Lieutenant Commander screamed.
17
USCGC Assateague
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
“That sucked,” Jeri Weaver said, picking himself up off the deck.
“You think?” MK2 Frank Roessler replied, doing the same.
“I think the homemade explosive worked,” Jeri answered.
Chunks of concrete, some as large as baseballs were still splashing into the ship channel, but not too close. Smaller ones were pinging off the steel superstructure. One struck his helmet. Black smoke billowed into the otherwise blue sky. He couldn’t remember ever seeing anything so impressive or so frightening in his life - except, perhaps, for all the zombies gathered on the Container Port pier.
The crazy assholes had been howling and clawing in Assateague’s general direction, drawn by the music blaring through the loud hailer. Said music had changed from Green Day’s American Idiot, to the Cranberries Everybody Else is Doing it, So Why Can’t We? The zombies couldn’t care less. Their attention was focused entirely on what remained of the Sand Island Bridge.
The center section - what Jeri could see of it - was gone. The jagged ends of the Honolulu side showed hundreds of mangled pieces of rebar poking through the concrete, but in the middle, he could see nothing but smoke-filled air.
Dan McMullen’s evil plan worked. What the fuck do you know about that?
18
USCGC Sassafras
Honolulu Harbor
“Samantha, honey?” John said, tentative, scared out of his mind to see his little girl lying in a ball on the Flying Bridge deck. Please no...
Movement - the ball slowly unraveling to reveal his MOPP gear-wrapped daughter, alive, if not exactly having the time of her life. She looked at him through the gas mask face shield. Her eyes blinked. She shook her head.
Without quite noticing the interim space between where he’d come up the ladder onto the Signal Bridge, and where Samantha still lay on the Flying Bridge, he suddenly found himself at her side, kneeling, stroking the treated material over her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Idiot question, he chided himself. The girl just got knocked flat, dumbass.
“I’m fine, Dad,” her muffled voice said. “What–?” she started to ask, but stopped, answering her own question. Her eyes popped, reminding him of the actor, Marty Feldman, or maybe the animated Gollum, for some odd reason. Struggling to her feet, her whole body turned toward the northwest - toward the column of black smoke rising above the far end of Sand Island.
“Is everybody okay?” She asked.
“I don’t know, honey,” John replied, crushing her with a one-armed hug.
“Is anybody hurt?”
19
SASS Two
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
“...Sass Two, Sassafras. Two-one. Over.” Molly’s voice crackled over the radio speaker on the center console - where the radio receiver Jonesy had forgotten to turn off sat, mocking his incompetence. Failure, failure, failure, it seemed to be saying, along with the undeniable truth: this is your fault.
Duke reached to grab the microphone, his eyes not leaving the bow.
“Don’t say a word about it,” Jonesy barked.
The big man stared at him, anger in the eyes behind the face shield. They calmed, after a moment, flicking between Jonesy and Dan McMullen, still being seen to by Gus.
Not that it’ll do any good, Jonesy thought. Dan was dead. Dan had no face.
And it’s my fault.
The rock, or whatever it was, had smashed through the face shield, obliterated the gas mask, and crushed the Electrician’s Mate’s skull. Their friend, their shipmate, was dead.
“She doesn’t need to know,” Jonesy explained. “Not yet.”
Duke nodded.
“Go, Sassafras,” he said.
The reply wasn’t immediate. Jonesy could see her in his mind’s eye, knew her eyes would be closed in silent prayer. She doesn’t need to know, he said, to himself, this time.
“What’s your status? Over.”
Duke thought about it, shrugged at Jonesy, and said: “Operational.”
“Tell her the Bridge is gone, and we’re proceeding with the plan.”
Duke nodded and repeated the words, then replaced the radio mic into its cradle.
Jonesy pointed. “Assateague.”
Proceed with the plan. Finish the mission.
Grieve later.
20
USCGC Assateague
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
“You guys good?” Jonesy called from the RHIB.
Frank’s ears still rung, his body still jittered from the adrenaline rush of nearly blowing up. But he was alive, and so was Jeri Weaver. He gave a thumbs up, then noticed something off about Sass Two. Couldn’t put his finger on it right away, couldn’t quite say anything, except that something didn’t look right.
Then Gus Perniola moved, and suddenly, Frank’s world went sideways. Dan McMullen was dead. No doubt about it. The bloody mess that used to be his friend’s face made it clear as really clean glass. He staggered back against the 25mm gun, named Belinda.
Why he should remember the stupid goddamned girl’s name of the stupid goddamned auto cannon fell so far beyond the realm of his understanding, Andromeda could be its next door neighbor. He stared, at once filled with disbelief, and believing all too well the evidence of his own eyes.
“Frank,” he heard, through the ringing in his ears. The name registered, in a vague sort of way, but not the context, not the meaning, not anything but the name, itself, and the holy shit, what the fuck are we gonna do now claxon going off inside his head.
Dan McMullen was dead.
“Frank!” The name again. “Wake the fuck up!”
He blinked, looked around. Saw Jeri Weaver, saw the smoke climbing from what used to be Sand Island Bridge, saw the RHIB, and Jonesy, waving. Waving at him.
You guys good? The question swam a breast stroke through his forebrain. No. Not good. Not good at all.
“Dude?” Jeri said, grasping Frank’s shoulder.
“Roessler!” Jonesy’s voice blared through the integrated speaker in Frank’s helmet. He shook his head, blinked, shook his head again, focused.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Square the fuck away,” Jonesy snapped at him.
“Yeah,” he repeated.
“Nothing has changed,” Jonesy’s voice blared into his ear.
Nothing, except...
Jeri shook him by the shoulder again. He blinked at the young man.
“Yeah,” he said, yet again. “Yeah, I’m good.”
He saw Jeri turn and give another thumb’s up toward the RHIB.
“Plan remains the same,” Jonesy said. “Understood?”
“Roger that,” Frank replied, understanding his breaking heart all too well.
“Open fire.”
21
Task Forc
e Barber
Lihue, Kauai
“Shoot the fucker, Spute,” Jim Barber barked, firing a three round burst from his Thompson.
Teddy Spute, fish out of water, gaped at the incoming horde of zombies, but didn’t pull the trigger of the shotgun he held. Might as well have brought my wife, Barber thought, and regretted it the moment it passed through his consciousness.
His wife would be pulling the trigger.
The Wallbanger sat on the tarmac, maybe fifty feet behind them. The FedEx warehouse, where they’d damn-near got their asses eaten, stood a hundred yards from their position and issued forth a crowd of crazy assholes, all seemingly intent on turning the small band of humans into dinner.
A dozen or so were close enough to make it uncomfortable. A couple dozen more were getting to the same point. And Teddy Spute just stood there, like a moron, watching them come.
“Fire the fucking weapon!” Jim shouted, taking his own advice and spraying the zombies as they came near.
Behind them, he heard the rat-tat-tat of Harvey’s Thompson, chopping away. At least he wasn’t alone. At least somebody else was firing.
Two giant Samoans drew a bead on Spute and staggered toward him. The wiry man seemed to realize this was not an optimal situation, seemed to clue into the fact that he might get torn to shreds by the dirigible-sized monsters Finally, he pulled the trigger. Twelve-gauge double-ought peppered the torsos of both, but didn’t slow them down, one bit.
“Oh, shit!” he screamed, backpedaling, and leaving Jim stranded in an oncoming tide of zombies.
“Motherfucker!” Jim growled, flattening his own trigger against the stop, and emptying the magazine in a continuous burst. He depressed the button, dropped the mag from the receiver, pulled another from his belt and slapped it in place, all the while walking backwards and trying not to trip over anything - like, say, a dead asshole.
He cocked his head behind him, saw clear tarmac, and picked up his backward pace, firing three round bursts again and again, emptying that mag as well. How many of these fuckers are there? He wondered, the vague question floating on by, leaving no ready answers in its wake.
He knew they’d killed a shitload of them when they were there before, could tell they were killing another shitload now - no thanks to Spute. There couldn’t be an infinite number. There had to be an end to them. All evidence to the contrary...
His earpiece crackled with static. “Task Force Barber, this is Wallbanger,” the Englishman’s accented words sent an unwelcome stab of annoyance through his brain.
“Stop calling it that,” Jim snapped. “What do you want? Little busy, here.”
“Thought you’d like to know about the army headed your way from the left,” Harvey said, droll as ever.
“Fuck,” Jim swore, then stumbled and nearly fell on his ass, when he noticed the “army” consisted of two battered pickup trucks, filled with armed men, racing down the tarmac.
22
USCGC Polar Star
25 NM off Midway
“Come on in,” Lydia said, in answer to yet another knock at her stateroom door, then added, muttering: “Everybody else seems to be.”
This time, it happened to be LTjg Amy Montrose - a first, in her recollection. Officers had been to her berthing area in the past, of course, for inspections and such like, but this appeared to be a social call.
“How’s it coming?” Ms Montrose asked.
“Fine, Ma’am,” she replied, straightening, not quite to attention. She was packing, sort of. No way she could take all the stuff she’d accumulated in the two-and-a-half years she’d been on board. Most of it would remain behind - for the time being anyway. At the moment, the future was so nebulous, thinking about it felt pointless. So the task became figuring out what she must have, versus what she wanted to have, and trying to fit it all into the two bags she’d been allotted as cargo on the helo.
“Still got about an hour,” Montrose said, leaning against the door jam. Thus far today, she’d been visited by Jennifer Collins, Tara McBride, a flustered and embarrassed Glen Newby, who’d also be going to the Sass, and was clearly unused to being anywhere near the female staterooms, and SK1 Mary O’Donnell, the senior enlisted female on board. Each person was a distraction - none of them welcome.
While her spirits were now out of the gutter, thanks to the impending transfer off this Death Ship, her anti-social mood remained. Maybe it was resentment, maybe it was a transference of guilt for leaving other people behind - people who’d become friends during her time aboard - or maybe it was simply a habit she picked up in the weeks since Guam. Whatever the case may be, she didn’t feel too sociable, and couldn’t care less what anyone thought about it.
“You know about the two bags thing?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” she said. Two bags - one of them her sea bag - were all she could take. In them, she needed to stuff all her uniforms and uniform shoes, her under things, her towels and shower stuff, her makeup - though she rarely wore any - a token bit of civilian attire or two, should the unlikely opportunity arise, and any personal items she couldn’t live without. Naturally, this last was the tough part.
Being in the military tended to make people Spartan, by benefit of the pain in the ass that constant transfers and moving could be. What was deemed necessary for a civilian, soon became a pointless waste of space for anyone in the service. Simple fact of life.
But two and a half years in the same place, which happened to be a ship that traveled all over the world, led to the accumulation of a lot of stuff. Presumably each and every item she possessed had been picked up and held for a reason - either personal, practical, or nostalgic. The point now was how much of it would help her start a new life on a new ship, in a zombie apocalypse.
“See you in an hour,” Montrose said, seeing that her attempts at friendliness were being ignored. Lydia felt a momentary pang, but it was fleeting, and soon faded, as she watched the woman walk away down the passage.
She picked up an Antarctica paperweight and looked at it. She’d bought it in McMurdo, thinking to send it as a gift to her sister’s six year-old daughter. The pain of it hit her like a sledgehammer made of polar ice, squarely in the chest, squarely in her heart.
Dead. All dead. All gone. Her mother, her sister, her niece, the childhood friends she’d had, her first sweetheart, her neighbors and coworkers and acquaintances of a life now over. All gone. Forever.
She dropped the paperweight back into the compartment beneath her bunk and resumed packing.
23
Sass Two
USCG ISC, Honolulu
“Stay in the boat,” Jonesy ordered, hopping out onto the rough, sandy remnants of an old pier on the North end of the base.
“Goddamned right,” Gus replied, holding station with the RHIB’s nose just in contact with the sand.
In days gone by - like fifty years ago, maybe - it might have been nice to swim off this small section of the Coast Guard Base. People might very well have done so, though pollution standards back then weren’t as high. Now, Jonesy might have considered swimming in Honolulu Harbor for a couple million bucks and a villa on Tahiti, but since such things as money no longer meant much, it remained a moot, internal discussion.
He followed Duke up the slight incline, crossed the crumbling concrete, and ducked down behind an ancient, rusty container by the fence line. The rumble of the auto cannon echoed off the buildings on the far side of the channel.
Jeri and Frank, he knew, were firing at the concert-sized crowd of zombies gathered on that end of the Container Port - drawn there, presumably by, first, the music blasted through Assateague’s loud hailer, then by the explosion, then, it would seem, by the sound of the big gun, itself. If it were him, he’d have run from the noise of such a deadly weapon, but nobody was accusing the zombies of having any sense.
The plan had three phases: blow the bridge, grab transportation, rescue survivors. Phase One could be checked off the list. The bridge was indeed blown. He didn�
��t want to think of the rest; the consequences, the death, and what would happen when Molly found out.
Failure... Failure... Failure...
Phase Two should have utilized at least three people, leaving one to man the boat in case quick extract became necessary. He and Duke would have to make do with just the two of them.
The idea behind Phase One was to cut off the access to Sand Island from the much more zombie-infested Honolulu. They’d certainly done that, he thought, as he tossed a glance toward the smoking wreckage of the bridge. The idea behind Phase Two was also simple: they could move much faster, and with much greater security, with wheels, than on foot. Common sense, really. They could have grabbed any vehicle they found, but Duke, of course, had other ideas.
“There she is,” he said, poking his head around the container.
On pretty much the first day they met, roughly seven months ago, Jonesy became acquainted with Duke’s mechanical alter-ego: his Eighty Three Ford Bronco, dubbed, The Skull Mobile. Rumor held it’s original color to be blue, but this couldn’t be confirmed in its present state. Very little remained of the truck that rolled off the showroom floor all those years ago. It’s suspension had been lifted to penis-compensating, nose-bleeding, potentially illegal heights, with the undercarriage weighted down to lower the center of gravity, and with the addition of a new, beefed up rear end assembly, drive train, and wide, thirty-eight-inch knobby tires. It was probably suitable for use on the moon.
A sun roof had been cut where no designer thought there should be one (over the back seat, as opposed to the typical front configuration), the windows and windshield were tinted, the rear seats removed (supposedly to make space available for Duke - the Minnesota farm boy - to go camping, without sleeping outside, should he so desire), and the body repainted in a profusion of colors (mostly primer) Jonesy sometimes found painful to look at. From the rearview mirror hung the bleached skull of a goonie bird.
He joined the large Bosun Mate at the edge of the container and confirmed his friend’s observation. The behemoth sat there, taking up one and a half spaces, roughly two hundred yards from their position, inside the fenced base parking area.
