by Jeff Thomson
No, it wasn’t, thank you very much. Exciting was not the word she’d use. Disturbing, certainly. Frightening, possibly. Batshit crazy wouldn’t be beyond the realm, either, comes to that. But exciting? No.
Then again, it could be Ms. Montrose, sent here by the new CO to deal with Lydia’s latest tantrum. The woman had enough on her plate: new ship, new role, new people, and an ongoing operation that had just set fire to a big chunk of the Honolulu Container Port. Now she had to deal with Lydia’s bullshit, on top of everything else?
Or maybe it’d be Captain Wheeler, himself. Wouldn’t that just be the cherry on top? Take the CO away from the awesome responsibility so recently dropped onto his shoulders.
All of these thoughts swirled through her stressed brain in the time between “Come in,” and the door opening to reveal:
BMC Jones?
“What?” She asked, instantly knowing how it would sound. “No, I didn’t mean that,” she stuttered.
He leaned against the door jam, the filter mask dangling in one hand, as he wiped the menthol jelly from under his lip. Inside now. Doesn’t need it, her mind explained, in that weird way the brain sometimes filled in the blanks without being asked. His sole response was a single, raised eyebrow.
“I meant, why you?” She said.
He laughed.
So now she was oh-for-two in her expectation of how this would go. Anger, she expected. Rage, wouldn’t be going too far, since her outburst had been in front of probably three-quarters of the new crew. Maybe two-thirds. Certainly more than half. Didn’t matter.
He shrugged. “I’m the senior enlisted person in our band of misfits,” he said, with a dazzling smile. “That makes you one of my babies.”
There it was. Babies. Crying, whining, complaining babies who need to be spanked and sent to bed without any supper.
Bet Tara would volunteer for the spanking part. The thought zipped through her brain like a supersonic jet on a collision course with the pit of her stomach. It crashed there, smoldering, it’s heat matching the shame and confusion and...interest?
No way, Jose. Not going there! Not now. Not ever.
Get a grip, Lydia...
“You were right,” he said, apropos of apparently nothing.
Well, that was unexpected, she thought.
“We probably shouldn’t be laughing,” he continued, totally unaware of her inner-surprise (or turmoil). “There isn’t a Goddamned thing funny about any of this.”
Where is this going? There’s a but, in this. He’s about to say it. He’s about to tell her how wrong she was.
“But funny or not, in a little while, I and some of the others are going to have to go back over to the base, so we can land the incoming helos from the Star,” he said, still smiling, though it appeared more pained than pleasant. “And when we do, we’re almost certainly going to have to kill more people.” He sighed, shrugged himself off the door frame and stepped toward her. The move wasn’t threatening, wasn’t hostile, wasn’t in any way confrontational, but it filled her with unease. “Can I let you in on a secret?” He asked.
She didn’t answer, just stared at him, at his hazel eyes, that looked at once both friendly and heartbroken.
He leaned closer and whispered in her ear: “I laugh so that I don’t start screaming.” He stepped away from her as she sat back in her chair. Of all the things she expected, this didn’t even make the thanks for playing, here’s your prize for showing up list.
He tilted his head and looked at her for a moment, then asked: “Will you do me a favor?” She stared at him for what seemed like an hour, saying nothing. Then she gave him a brief, single nod.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “Keep reminding us we’re human.” He paused, then added: “Deal?”
She looked at his eyes, trying to spot the bullshit in those hazel orbs, but there didn’t seem to be any there. “Deal,” she said.
He held her eyes with his for about half a minute, then winked, turned, and left the Ship’s Office.
She sat at her desk, dumbfounded.
“Chief Jones, please call the Bridge,” someone’s voice sounded over the 1-MC.
The office door popped back open and he came re-entered, smiled, shrugged, and reached for the phone. “It’s Hell being so popular,” he said, then into the telephone: “Chief Jones...” His gorgeous hazel eyes locked with hers as he listened. “Roger that,” he said, after a moment, then replaced the handset in its cradle. “Helos are here,” he explained, as he turned and - once again - exited the compartment, leaving her alone.
She blinked, shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it (did that ever work?), and blinked again, then swivelled in her chair, reached into the filing cabinet, and began searching for some kind of form that would help her keep track of all the new survivors who would soon be flooding the base. Things were about to get really damned busy.
118
USCG IRC Honolulu
Sand Island, Oahu
“I know you’re busy,” Molly’s voice said over the radio receiver in Jonesy’s ear. “But fuel is critical, if we want them to start rescuing survivors before the Star arrives in the morning, so we need your assessment A-S-A-P.”
“Would you like me to find a landing zone with or without zombies?” Jonesy snapped in reply.
“Good one!” Duke said through the intercom. The Big Bosun was more relaxed, now that they knew Harold wasn’t going to drop dead anytime soon.
They were slowly trolling around the base, searching for a location that was, first and foremost, free of zombies; second, large enough to accommodate two helicopters; third, safe enough, in terms of debris that might get sucked into the engines or sent flying with lethal force as a result of the rotor wash; and, finally, fourth, within easy access of the Medical Clinic, which Weaver, the Nutty Professor, SA Jerry Nailor, and ET1 Glenn Newby were currently trying to get up and running.
This left only three people on Assateague, with BM3 Tim Luton manning Belinda, but all they were doing was mopping up the straggling assholes, left after the mass conflagration at the Container Pier. Precision navigation and ship handling would not be required. They could make due. Or, at least, that was the Grand Plan (version 27.2, if Jonesy’s sarcastic math was correct), and LCDR Wheeler was sticking to it.
Not like the man had a whole lot of choice. Not like any one of them had a whole lot of choice. All they could do was keep moving forward, either until the job was done, or they fell flat on their faces. Jonesy didn’t want to give odds on which would happen first.
“Sarcasm not appreciated,” Molly’s radio voice replied. “Perfection is neither expected, nor required. Make your best guess.”
Jonesy spared a moment for a mental image of Peavey trussed up on the Bridge, with his mouth taped firmly shut, so his apoplexy over improper radio procedure wouldn’t drive Wheeler, Ambrose, Molly, and whoever had the unfortunate Helm duty, out of their fucking minds. He relished it, letting the fantasy play across the widescreen inside his head, for all of about three seconds. Then he shook it off as nonsense, and carried on with the task at hand.
“Ball field,” Duke suggested, pointing forward and to the left, as the open space in question came into view.
It lay sandwiched between the Comm Center and Sand Island Parkway, with Center Field pointed straight at the motorists whizzing by - until the Pomona Virus made traffic a non-issue. The Parkway was now littered with cars and trucks, thanks to a nasty multi-car pileup, directly in front of what used to be Wang’s Meat Emporium. Scared people, wanting nothing more or less than to get the flying fuck out of Honolulu, had simply abandoned them and tried escaping on foot.
Jonesy didn’t know for sure - none of them knew for sure, since they’d bugged out before the accident happened - but he would have bet every scrap of the now-useless money in his wallet, that every last one of those motorists was either dead, or a zombie. On balance, he thought he’d choose death.
“Coming up on the ball field,” he said i
nto the radio. “Will give you my assessment in a moment.” Switching to intercom, he said: “Shoot anything that moves,” to Greg Riley and Pat Querec, bouncing around in the back of the Skull Mobile.
Querec stood in the sunroof with the M240, having said he was “sick as shit” of getting pelted with the empty shell casings that came flying out of the weapon’s ejection port. Riley was serving double duty as ammunition bitch (Querec’s former job) and rear-hatch gunner. The nomenclature of that particular billet was pure bullshit, Jonesy knew, since, number one, the rear hatch was simply created by removing the glass from the rear window, and, number two, the gun was nothing more than a standard M-4, but the boys liked making themselves sound military, so he rolled with it.
There was not, as it turned out, anything for either of them to shoot at. There were bodies, to be sure. The zombie carcasses were pretty much everywhere, though the concentration on this end of the base was nowhere near as thick as in other places, like, say, the areas that still contained people, before the Sass came along and rescued them. The ball field offered nothing to eat, save grass and sand, and the remnants of the faded chalk lines. The assholes weren’t picky, by any stretch of the imagination, but they hadn’t yet devolved to the point where they’d eat any of those things, and so they hadn’t stuck around to play the Zombie World Series.
In short, there were no bodies on the field. This was, no doubt, due to the fact that the fence seemed to be intact, which would make it a secure landing zone - or, at least, as secure as one could hope for in an apocalypse. There was still debris laying all over the place, since no one had been around to do anything vaguely resembling maintenance in so many weeks Jonesy had lost track, but as Molly said, perfection wasn’t expected. Good thing, too. Whether or not the field would remain zombie-free once the helos came down, making their high-pitched Whistling Shitcan noises...?
“Ball field is nominal,” he said into the radio, feeling delightfully smug at his correct use of verbiage. “Send in the birds.”
119
CG 6583
Above Sand Island, Oahu
“Holy shit,” the voice of ASM2 Kyle Rogers said through the intercom. It wasn’t muffled, since they weren’t wearing gas masks - yet. The helo was closed up tight -not pressurized, but not exactly letting the not-fresh-at-all air in, either. Didn’t help much. The stench of Honolulu still worked its way through, and it was nauseating. But with the helmets on, the masks wouldn’t fit - or visa versa.
The other three had them, but as she was the pilot, and would need both her hands and the radio headset inside her helmet when they came in for a landing, all she had was a filter mask, permeated with pungent vapor rub, staining the collar of her flight suit. It would have to do. She had her doubts.
They hovered about a hundred feet above the base, waiting for clearance to land at the baseball field. She knew that much from the overheard chatter between the Sass and their ground team. She could see the bizarre truck driving slowly around the perimeter fence. Checking for breaks in the fence line, she surmised.
She could also see the devastation. There were no words to adequately describe it. None had been created, because no one had ever seen such wreckage - not from hurricanes or earthquakes, or war. Nothing in all of human history could compare to the destruction wrought by the Pomona Virus.
Well, okay, that was certainly hyperbole, she realized, but so what? Too damned bad. This was beyond all her comprehension, beyond all knowledge, beyond all reason and sanity. Hell on Earth...
The base itself seemed relatively unscathed - though relatively was a relative term, indeed. Bodies could be seen throughout the grounds: on the pier, by the buildings, along the crisscrossing roads. It looked almost surreal from above, like a cartoon drawing from a demented child, but she doubted any child, anywhere, could have been so traumatized, abused, and just plain-old fucked up to imagine the reality of what lay below them.
She had to look away, but everywhere else was worse.
“I can see survivors,” Zack Greeley said from the co-pilot seat. Her eyes followed his pointing finger, past the Aloha Tower, to the buildings on the other side of the harbor. Tiny dots covered many rooftops. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They were waving.
“We’re gonna need a bigger helicopter,” Mark Columbus said, doing a bad imitation of Roy Scheider, from the movie Jaws. It was an obvious cliche. It was also true.
“How?” Zack asked. “How can we possibly...?” He let the question trail off. Didn’t matter. She knew the rest.
How can we possibly save them all?
“6583, 6585...” LCDR Randy Sagona’s voice came through the receiver in her ear.
“Go,” she replied.
“You take left field, I’ll take right,” his electronic voice said. “Making the approach now.”
“Roger that,” she said, switching back to intercom. “Everybody put on your gas masks,” she ordered, raising the filter mask, pre-slathered with vapor rub, from her neck to her face. She spared one last glance toward the waving survivors, then put all her concentration on the task at hand: landing the helicopter. This will be the easy part, she thought. She really didn’t want to think about what would come next.
All those people, all that tragedy. How can we possibly save them all?
120
ISC Medical Clinic
Sand Island, Oahu
“This isn’t going to work,” Professor Christopher Floyd, grunted, as he surveyed the available equipment in the clinic.
Jeri Weaver glanced at Glen Newby, who rolled his eyes. SA Jerry Nailor just shrugged. They knew this would happen. Hell, Jeri bet that if the lab (what there was of it - and, truth be told, it was woefully inadequate) were fully equipped, the cantankerous bastard would have still bitched. He was a bitch, pure and simple.
That he was also correct in his assessment mattered not in the slightest. Okay, yes it did. They needed several things: a cesium x-ray machine, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), a centrifuge, and a mass spectrometer. They (or rather, the dental clinic) had the x-ray machine, and there were two centrifuges, but neither the SEM, nor the mass-spec were there - and yes, it was a deal breaker - at least according to the Good (Mad) Doctor.
The clinic was also without power, but that’s what Newby was for. The other Electronics Technician, Scott Pruden - who called himself Jurgen McAwesomeness, which Jeri thought was hilarious - had managed to restore electricity to the comm center, using the solar panels on that building’s roof. The clinic had no such panels, but Glen said he could string cable between the structures - provided they found enough cable.
Floyd threw his hands into the air, as he surveyed the admittedly sparse facility. “Won’t work. Won’t work at all.”
“And you knew that before we left the ship,” Weaver replied, his dislike for the man growing. This, also, was true. He’d given the man as detailed a list of the available equipment as he could remember. They knew what was there and what wasn’t. They knew they were going to have to raid some other facility - not on the base - to get the rest of what they needed. Either that, or they’d need to shift the production facility from Midway to Honolulu. Or, for that matter, visa versa.
“Why don’t we just maintain the lab on Midway and say to Hell with this place?” Glen Newby suggested, as if reading Weaver’s mind.
The Nutty Professor (and absolute douche-nozzle) stared at Newby with an expression of utter derision, as if he were speaking to a drooling idiot college student who didn’t know the difference between a beaker and a Buick.
“Because it’s an eight hour flight between here and Midway,” Floyd began, ticking reasons off on his fingers. “The seaplane can only carry so many passengers at a time.” He gestured toward the bank of windows, and the skyline of Honolulu beyond. “And there are thousands of people out there. Do you get it?” He asked, his voice filled with contempt. “Thousands. The clinic has to be here.” He spread his arms wide and spun, as if to display the futility of mak
ing a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was the Base Honolulu Medical Clinic.
He stopped spinning and stared at the three of them. Seaman Apprentice Jerry Nailor shrunk back, as if afraid, which Weaver thought likely. “We should let them all die,” he said, flatly. “As I’ve been saying, all along.”
121
The Skull Mobile
Sand Island, Oahu
Oh shit, we’re going to die! The certainty of it swept across Carrie Scoggins’ mind as the bizarre truck slammed into - and through - a veritable squad of zombies, sending their bodies scattering like so many rag dolls. And yes, it wasn’t a military thought, wasn’t an officer thought, wasn’t a thought that would get the mission done, in any way, shape, or form. But it was a human thought, and the human part of Carrie’s brain struggled to process the sheer insanity of the situation.
“Fifteen points!” The Seaman in the rooftop gunner’s port shouted with a disturbing level of glee. He swivelled his M240 to the left and squeezed off a three-round burst that made her eardrums feel as if they might explode. She averted her eyes, not wanting to see the result.
“Only fifteen?” The driver asked, complaining. “That Samoan should have been worth twenty, all on his own.”
These guys are nuts! She thought, then amended her assessment with the more reasonable part of her over-taxed brain. Of course they’re nuts, she thought. After what they’ve been through...
She knew what happened in Guam, of course, having heard it described in graphic detail, over and over again, by various members of the crew, but she hadn’t seen it, hadn’t witnessed the carnage and horror with her own eyes, since the Aviation Detachment (AVDET) had wisely stayed the Hell out of the way during fueling ops. She had seen the destruction at Barber’s Point and Pearl Harbor, and here in Honolulu, but from the air, it seemed removed, somehow, as if she were nothing more than a spectator. She was a spectator now, to be sure, but down here, on the ground, in the thick, and blasting through actual, live zombies, whose faces and blood and various other body parts she didn’t want to think about. . . This shit was real.
