by Jeff Thomson
ISC Sand Island
Honolulu, Hawaii
“Lions and tigers and zombies,” BM3/OPS Rees Erwin said, as they walked cautiously through the stand of trees that sat roughly dead center between the Sass’s pre-Pomona moorings, the Small Boat Station, the Medical Clinic, and the Comm Center.
“Oh my,” Molly said, completing the saying, and once again whistling through the graveyard of what had been the USCG Integrated Support Command, Sand Island.
She was not quite as rigged up as either Jonesy or Duke, but then there were Marine Corps rifle squads that weren’t as heavily armed as those two had taken to being in recent weeks. She couldn’t blame them.
She wore body armor and MOPP gear, a helmet with face shield, a filter mask, two 9mm pistols in a shoulder rig, an LE baton, and an M-4 rifle, with a few spare magazines, placed here and there. Rees carried a rifle, but he didn’t look too comfortable doing so. She couldn’t blame him, either. The poor kid (actually, they were the same age) was a navigator, not a commando. For that matter, she was a boot officer, and in no way, shape, or form, desirous of being compared to Rambo. But they were in a zombie apocalypse, and desperate times...
The oddest thing, in her estimation, was that she seemed to be getting used to it - not really, not completely, and certainly not in light of recent events, but it had become the new normal. This revelation, as she scanned their surroundings for anything nasty like, say, a horde of zombies bent on turning the two of them into an afternoon snack, might have jolted her, and probably should have, if not for the fact that her life had seen more ups and downs than a seismic readout in the middle of a gigantic earthquake.
Boot Ensign to ship’s Captain, to Operations Officer and LTjg, in about the time it would normally take for her to get qualified to stand underway watches; a world-ending virus that turned most of humanity rabid; the rekindling of an old love affair (and the ill-advised consummation of that affair in the shower of a certain newly-promoted Chief Petty Officer); the very real possibility that her cousin, Samantha, now hated her because of that affair; the pending arrival of the person who, in all probability, was now the Commandant of the entire Coast Guard, whose orders she’d flagrantly disobeyed; and... and... and...
They paused at the edge of the trees. Wouldn’t do to simply blunder out in the open and directly into a crowd of hungry zombies. No. That wouldn’t do, at all.
“Lovely weather we’re having,” Rees said, his voice muffled by the full gas mask he wore. The nonchalance carried an edge of hysteria. More whistling, she supposed.
“Be a nice day for a picnic,” she replied, scanning the area and finding it - to her great relief - empty. They moved forward, out of the trees.
They looped around the end of the Comm Center Building, her eyes never leaving the shattered glass opening of what used to be the entrance atrium. The Skull Mobile stuck out like a bizarrely-shaped thumb. It stood empty, as did the atrium - so long as she ignored the dead and obviously-chewed body that lay on the ground a few yards to one side of the truck.
And there - finally - stood Duke, next to a stake-bed truck, parked nose in, almost to the wall below an office window. She waved. He, on the other hand, snapped her a parade ground salute - or, at least, as much of one as he could manage in his heavily armed and laden condition.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” he said, still holding his salute. She didn’t, at first, understand why. And then she did, and could have smacked herself upside her own head for sheer idiocy. He’s waiting for me to return the salute.
Military decorum in this situation seemed so far beyond the circumstances, so foreign, so alien, that four years of Coast Guard Academy training had flown right out the window and headed for a world not quite so FUBAR. Not that one existed. Not really. Maybe in her dreams...
She returned his salute with a mixture of solemnity and wonder. He dropped his right hand (his left being filled with the twelve-gauge shotgun he held pointed toward the ground), then gestured with it toward the panel truck.
“Your chariot awaits,” he said. “Keys are in it.”
“Can you drive a stick?” She asked Rees.
“Badly,” he replied. “Might grind a few gears.”
“If you can’t find ‘em, grind ‘em,” Duke said. “Ball field is around the other side of the building,” he added. “And from what I understand, the survivors are getting nervous.”
“Oh?” She asked.
He raised his shotgun and jacked a round. “Apparently, there are zombies.”
136
Mess Hall
ISC Sand Island
“Get behind me,” John said, shoving Samantha aside and not giving his daughter the option of disobeying. The reason for this rude maneuver stumbled toward them out of the CPO Mess. It was a shabby woman in a shabbier dress, with either badly-spoiled beef stew, or blood and guts all down the front of it. John wasn’t taking bets as to which. The woman’s hair was matted, with one side sticking almost straight out, and the other side curled into a rat’s nest. If this was zombie chic, John Gordon was not impressed. He demonstrated his dislike by putting a bullet through the former woman’s brain.
He turned toward Sam, ready to take her into his arms and offer comfort, but she didn’t appear to need it. She stared at the body on the floor for a moment, then turned away and headed back toward the General Mess. He followed.
The large room was more or less clean, now. More or less. There remained a large stain in one corner, where a chewed corpse had once lain, but Seaman Apprentice Martin Tabinski, and DC3 Harrison Dodge had done a decent cleaning job. The unfortunately-named Harrison had to sit down about halfway through the process, but that was more than likely a result of the deprivations he’d suffered, prior to being rescued by Jonesy and Duke. Tabinski seemed to be taking it well enough, though he did look a bit green. John couldn’t blame either one of them.
Gus came limping out through the Galley door, where he and Gary King and Greg Riley had been trying to restore some semblance of order - or at least enough of it so that Gary could prepare some soup for the survivors - if, that was, they ever managed to get power restored. That would be a tricky proposition.
John knew the solar panels on the Comm Center roof were supplying enough electricity to keep the lights on and the radios operating, with plenty of watts to spare. In order to transfer that power to the Mess Hall, however (or, for that matter - and perhaps more importantly - the Clinic), they would need cable, and lots of it. Naturally, of course, the cable wasn’t anyplace sensible or accessible, like, say, some convenient storeroom within the Comm center Building. That would have been too easy. Instead, the cable they needed lay inside the Facilities Engineering Building, which according to both Amber Winkowski and Scott Pruden, was full of zombies.
Of course it was.
And of course, they were already out of time, since the first two helo-loads of survivors had already landed at the ball field. There were zombies there, as well, and John’s niece, Molly, had gone over to address the problem, taking her away from the relative safety of the Sass, and adding to her uncle’s stress levels, which were high enough - thank you very much - as a result of his sixteen year-old daughter, who’d insisted on joining him at the Mess Hall. If his hair hadn’t already been showing more pepper than salt, it would have started doing so right there and then.
“Gary found a grill,” Gus said, limping up to them.
Either the gash the bullet had gauged in the side of his leg, courtesy of that wingnut Lieutenant who’d tried to kill them (and who’d been trapped on the roof of this very building, now that John thought about it) really hurt, or Gus was just milking it for sympathy. Probably both, he thought, knowing what a crusty old bastard his friend was.
“No propane, though, but he thinks he’s still got some back on the Sass,” Gus continued, unaware John was mentally accusing him of fakery. “That’ll at least give him a way to cook the soup.”
Soup would be all the survivors would get for their first mea
l. It didn’t take a medical degree to figure out their starved digestive systems wouldn’t take well to Gooney Bird Fricassee. But afer starving for however many days it’d been since their last decent meals, soup would probably seem like a feast.
Thanks to the efforts of Jim Barber and Harvey Walton, and yes, even Teddy Spute, they had plenty of soup and canned vegetables, tuna, chile, and various spaghetti-like substances, as well as rice and dried beans, pasta, cooking oil, instant oatmeal, and coffee. They would need to identify the locations of every Walmart within easy enough access of the coastline, every lumber and home improvement warehouse, every stockpile of every one of the things they’d spent their lives taking for granted. And they would need to do it soon.
It would not, however be his problem.
When had it shifted, he wondered. When had he gone from Captain of his own ship, to crew on someone else’s? When had he cast off the mantle of responsibility for the lives of others?
And did he care?
He did not.
He glanced at his daughter, wiping down tables in the General Mess. She was still his responsibility. So was Davie.
This sent a jolt of guilt up his spine, over his skull, and straight through his heart. He hadn’t thought of his son in how long? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know, because knowing - having a specific number, a definite length of time during which he’d abandoned his own son, his own flesh and blood - would make the guilt that much worse, and the cut through his heart that much deeper.
How could he have done it?
A flash of movement caught his eye, off to the left. Another zombie. That was why.
Or was it? Was it just a convenient excuse? Could he put the blame for his shitty parenting on the apocalypse?
No.
But he could sure as Hell kill more zombies. He raised his pistol and fired.
137
The Ball Field
Sand Island, Oahu
“Get over here now, Duke!” Molly shouted into the radio. “And bring a whole bunch of guns.”
A crowd of zombies, attracted - no doubt - by the noise of the helicopters, were staggering and stumbling around the perimeter fence surrounding the baseball diamond. The two helos squatted in the outfield, like twin dragonflies, their rotors spinning with ever-decreasing speed - the pilots having shut down their engines in a pure case of closing the asylum doors after the raving and homicidal lunatics had flown the proverbial booby hatch.
The doors of both aircraft were closed tight, though none of the diseased former-humans had yet to figure out how to climb the fence, which ranged in height from twenty feet behind home plate, and on the far sides of the outfield, down to a mere seven feet along the first and third base lines. The people in those aircraft, however, weren’t about to take any chances. Molly couldn’t blame them.
The zombies pawed at the fence, shook it, and in a couple spots, reached up and grabbed the top with clutching hands, but the concept of pulling themselves over the barrier to get at the tasty morsels therein, seemed to escape them, completely. So the people inside the two helicopters were relatively safe, but Molly doubted whether even she would be brave (or foolish) enough to get out and stroll around the ball field. No sense tempting fate - or a horde of ravenous fiends from Hell.
She and Rees Erwin were parked at the edge of a clump of trees between the Comm Center and the field, sitting comfortably and safely (relatively speaking) inside the stake bed truck. They had not quite gone to the extreme measure of locking the doors, though she’d certainly thought about it, and Rees’s left elbow seemed magnetically drawn toward the protruding knob on the driver’s door, but thus far, neither had succumbed to the urge for added protection.
Molly had her M-4 and pistols, and Rees had a sidearm and rifle, as well (though he looked rather like a duck on roller skates handling the weapons). They’d been prepared to take on light zombie presence - not the apparent battalion of them surrounding the fence.
“Roger,” Duke’s voice came through the speaker inside her ear. “Be there in a bit.” His voice sounded almost bored, but she’d be willing to bet he’d said the words with a wicked grin on his face. The man enjoyed this carnage just a bit too much.
“Team...” Wheeler’s voice cut in, hesitating, she was sure, because he couldn’t remember what team number she and Rees were, given the afterthought nature of their current mission.
Molly could relate. This whole mess had gotten way too complicated.
“To Hell with it...” she heard him say, as if from a distance, as if he were talking to someone else - presumably LT Montrose. “Ms Gordon, report,” he ordered.
She pondered just how to respond - whether to reply with a message filled with the appropriate level of military jargon required to make it sound calm and professional to the ears of her new Commanding Officer, or to lay it out as the short and bitter truth: that this was a shit show of dangerous proportions. She decided on a bit of both.
“Heavier concentration than we can handle with just the two of us,” she reported, glancing at Rees, whose enthusiastic nod told her he agreed. “Don’t think the civilians would react well to seeing us ripped to shreds,” she added, to which Rees favored her with a thumbs up.
“Roger that,” Wheeler said, through the electronic magic of radio. “Keep us advised. Sass out.”
Rees looked at her with slightly wild eyes and commented: “I guess if he hears us screaming, he’ll know it all went sideways.”
“Let’s try and avoid that, shall we?” She replied.
“Good call,” he said, just as the Skull Mobile came bounding out of the tree-lined shadows behind them.
Scott Pruden (what had he called himself? Jurgen-something?), stood up through the sun roof/gun port, pointed the M-240 machine gun at the zombies, and opened fire. From the expression on the young man’s face, the trained psychologist inside Molly diagnosed him to be holding an internal argument between his rational side - telling him to be freaked out beyond all measure by what he was doing - and the demented inner-child in a toy store, reveling in the excitement of mowing down a bunch of crazed bad guys with a machine gun. This was all just more psych-babble bullshit, to be sure, but once again, it seemed to fit the circumstance.
Duke waved through window at them as he sped by. Sure enough, his grin was both wide and wicked.
Molly pointed toward the ball field and said to Rees: “Let’s go.”
138
The rooftop
Honolulu, HI
“...bring a whole bunch of guns.” Molly’s voice came through Jonesy’s ear bud, and a cold chill went through his heart - a neat trick, considering the fact he was currently roasting inside his MOPP gear.
He glanced over toward the two Swimmers, ASM1 Ronny Wallace, and ASM2 Kyle Rogers, standing on the next tier down, surrounded by survivors. Most of those were quiet. One look out at the nightmare vista sprawling beneath and around them in the wreckage of Honolulu, as seen from the terrific height of the top of the tallest building for a couple miles, made wondering why a pointless exercise. They were in shock. Odds were, they’d remain so for the rest of their lives.
Shock was a funny thing - although funny could perhaps be the most incongruous and counter-intuitive word for it. Some people - maybe most - walked around like so many concussed goonie birds, unable to wrap their heads around the enormity of the sudden and incontrovertible end of life as they knew it.
From his admittedly proportional experience responding to natural disasters, Jonesy knew that things like tornadoes and hurricanes and major earthquakes, from which it was at least possible to rebuild, still left the majority of survivors viewing the rest of their lives as Before or After whatever cataclysm rocked their world. Life went on, of course, but it was never really the same, and they never got over the base of the skull tingling suspicion that Mother Nature was about to bitch-slap them into oblivion.
About a quarter of survivors, however, never got over it. The shock and loss were so
profound, so all-encompassing and horrifying and terrible, that they couldn’t get past it. After, became a constant state of Aftermath, and Before was relegated to a sort of dream-state made up of snapshots from a life they’d never see again.
Of course, there were always the assholes, who used the disaster as an excuse to relieve themselves from the burden of having to take responsibility for the rest of their existence. Their actions - no matter how wrong-headed, misguided, or just plain fucking stupid and selfish - were never, ever their fault again.
The final quarter of survivors (which was probably closer to ten percent) was made up of those people who always seemed to be taking more responsibility than their share. Doctors and nurses, police officers and firefighters, people who served in the military, teachers and air traffic controllers, and a host of other active, operational occupations, were in this smallest of groups. But even in that group, there were people who couldn’t be counted on in a crisis. Even in that, most rarified group, there were assholes.
There were those who tried to play the part: they put on their uniforms, assumed the accouterments of authority, and went through the motions of a life in service to others, but they did so for selfish reasons. They liked the power, liked the dominance and status it gave them. They liked to be in control. They liked to be bossy, opinionated pain in the ass bitches, like the shrunken woman Jonesy had needed to keep separated from the other two survivors, Marc and Wendy. And their dog. Couldn’t forget their dog.
The chocolate lab stared at him through the one visible eye (the other being flat on the roof). His tail flopped once, twice, as if sensing Jonesy’s thoughts. He lifted his head about an inch off the rooftop and gave an approving snort, then resumed his near-coma-like state.
“He must really like you,” Marc said, fondly looking at the furry lump.
“How can you tell?” Jonesy asked.
“For him, that’s high praise,” Wendy explained.
He was about to make some inane quip in reply to this show of friendliness, when the bossy bitch started striding forward, threatening to cross the demilitarized zone he’d created, looking as if she were about to pummel him with a sledgehammer-like piece of her mind. Wendy also started forward.
