Pirates and Zombies (Guardians of the Apocalypse Book 3)

by Jeff Thomson

  “Take one more step, bitch, and we’ll see how you like having your head shoved up your own ass,” Wendy challenged.

  “Always a class act, my dear,” Marc said, taking a restraining grip on her arm.

  Jonesy flipped him a salute in gratitude, then held out his other hand in fine traffic cop fashion, to forestall the advance of the recipient of Wendy’s threat.

  “Stay put,” he cautioned.

  “I demand to know...” the woman began.

  “I don’t care what you demand,” Jonesy replied, cutting her off. “And I’m covered in weapons, so I win.”

  Beyond the annoying bitch’s shoulder, down on the lower tier, he saw ASM1 Wallace step away from the other survivors. He held his head down, as if concentrating...or listening.

  The Swimmers monitored the air frequencies, while Jonesy took care of the ship and ground teams’ radio feeds. Wallace clutched at his throat - also a neat trick, given the full gas mask he wore beneath his helmet - then waved at Jonesy and gestured toward the Coast Guard Base, where Jonesy saw one of the helos rise into the air.

  One trip down. How many more to go?

  139

  LCVP Star 2

  Lihue, Kauai

  “Ramp lowering,” BM2/DECK Ed Dickie shouted, over the roar of the Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel, as the steel bow opened and descended to the rocky shore, creating a ramp. They were beached against the only low point in the shoreline, about a mile to the West of the airport. This was as close as they could get without breaking out mountaineering gear - which they did not have - since the rest of the shore was steep cliffs, covered in greenery.

  LTjg Carol Kemp led the way onto the land, followed by CWO4 Vincenzo, going by rank, as was traditional in the military, where last on/first off was the accepted method of boarding a small boat. In the Coast Guard, however, with its multitude of missions and drop-back-twenty-yards-and-punt method of doing things, such formality was not always practical. Usually they just boarded in whatever order they arrived. It worked out in this particular case, because she and the Warrant Officer had been delayed at a last-minute meeting with Captain Hall.

  “We need Lihue as a secondary air base,” he’d said. “And the Fed-Ex building will be useful as a logistics center.”

  Vincenzo reminded him of the Sass crew’s nearly disastrous mission there, but he hadn’t needed to. They’d gotten all the gory and frightening details from Mister Barber, with lurid embellishments from the mad British pilot, Mister Walton.

  It didn’t matter. The original plan to scout it for potential salvage had been sound - if poorly executed and inadequately armed. It worked out in the end, however, with zero casualties, and subsequent trips to the airport had culled the zombie herd, from what they managed to glean from both Barber’s in-person reports, and the radio comms they’d overheard between the seaplane (called Wallbanger, which Carol secretly found hilarious) and the Sassafras, and in any case, it wasn’t as if they had much in the way of alternatives. With the hundreds of refugees that would soon be coming out of Honolulu, they needed that base. The proximity of the airport, coupled with the civilian presence in the area, made it a no-brainer.

  That did not, however, make the mission any less stress-inducing. She adjusted the uncomfortable weight of the sidearm on her hip and moved forward, away from the landing craft.

  There were twenty in their party, each of them carrying sidearms, and about two-thirds carrying either shotguns or M-4's. This left the Star pretty much stripped of small arms, but an icebreaker wasn’t exactly considered an assault platform, so no one gave it much thought.

  The Department of Homeland Security’s requirement that all Coast Guard ships larger than two-hundred and ten feet long, periodically go through what were, in essence, war games with the Navy, had always been a running joke with the rank and file. Officers weren’t allowed to join in on the humor, of course, but their command-mandated ignoring of it was mostly done with a wink and a nudge.

  The punch line to the joke came in the form of the final exercise, called the Mass Conflagration (or Mass-Conflag, for short), in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong, all at once - in fine, military, simulated fashion. It included shipboard firefighting, personnel casualties and triage, man overboard, flooding, loss of power, dogs and cats living together, and general chaos and confusion. The precipitating scenario for it was dubbed Missile Hit Alpha; a simulated missile attack from some unknown enemy, causing all sorts of calamity, in which lay the true absurdity of the scenario. The Polar Star carried one-point-three million gallons of fuel, including JP5 jet fuel. Any hit from any missile not launched from someone’s shoulder, would simply turn the ship into a four-hundred foot fireball, thus rendering all damage control plans null and void, and thus, made the entire scenario just plain silly in the eyes of the crew.

  The Navy didn’t see it that way, of course, and neither did Homeland Security, or Coast Guard Headquarters, or the Commandant. So the games continued.

  They were all dead now, Carol supposed. All those admirals and generals and captains and planners and ass-kissing officers. on the rise, and bucking for promotion in the political world of Headquarters; dead and gone and burned to the ground by the biggest Mass Conflag in human history: the Pomona Virus.

  Three civilian pickup trucks came bouncing down the gravel and crushed coral access road to what passed for the beach. More than half of the team jumped at the sound (Carol included, she was a bit embarrassed to admit - if only to herself), and several of them swung their rifles toward the approaching vehicles, ignoring the plain and simple logic that zombies don’t drive.

  “Ease up, you damned Yard Birds,” Bobby V chided them, with an appropriate amount of derision.

  The team were not wearing any breathing protection, for a variety of reasons. They’d all been inoculated (having just received the Primary Booster before heading out in the LCVP), and they knew the same was true of all the civilians in Lihue, thanks to the efforts of Mister Barber and the Crazy Brit. The concentration of zombies, while still a concern (hence, the small arms), was not so high as to pose either an infection risk, or to stink up the place, unless they found themselves in a confined space somewhere - like, say, the inside of the Fed-Ex building. As for the stench of rotting corpses, well, most of them had been turned into material to make vaccine, and their bodies (minus the spines) had been tossed into the ocean to feed the sharks - which would explain the frightening number of fins they’d seen as they made their way from the ship to the shore.

  An older man, distinguished-looking, if a bit malnourished, waved at them as he made his way toward the LCVP, followed by two women: one middle-aged, the other in her mid-twenties. Carol knew the man to be Doctor Kenneth Octavian - an actual M. D., who had agreed to help out in Honolulu. She could just imagine how much shit he’d take for his name’s similarity to the Doc Oc character of Spider Man fame, but since he was, in fact, the one and only honest, for real, medical doctor they knew of, she supposed the snide remarks would be kept to a minimum.

  She didn’t know the women, but that was neither here, nor there. Either way, she didn’t envy them. Honolulu, with its zombies and scenes of utter destruction, and what had to be the worst stench of decaying flesh she could possibly imagine in her worst fever dreams, would not be anything remotely resembling a picnic in the sunshine. Their own job - to establish Lihue as a secondary base, and to help the civilians build a perimeter around the airport to (hopefully) keep out the bad guys - would be a day at the beach, in comparison.

  Naturally, of course - Murphy’s Law being what it was - no sooner had thoughts of comparative simplicity popped into her head, when the first ravenous zombies arrived, howling and yowling, stumbling and staggering, looking to see what all the fuss was about, and eager to eat everything that moved.

  140

  The Mess Hall

  USCG ISC Sand Island

  “Come on. Nuts to butts,” Gus Perniola said to the recently-arrived su
rvivors, echoing boot camp Company Commanders of days gone by. John, watching him work his crusty magic on the slow-moving refugees, spared a moment to reminisce about his days in Basic Training - so long ago, it seemed like someone else’s life. That way-too young man, fresh out of high school, with all the sense of a brain-damaged pet rock, didn’t exist anymore (thank the God he didn’t believe in), but his memory still retained the catch-phrases he’d heard a thousand times - usually yelled at him by some pissed-off bulldog-looking Chief Bosun Mate. One of those had been nuts to butts: an admonishment to close up the chow line and quit skylarking. Another had been you look like hammered slug shit - though he supposed that wouldn’t go over too well with the refugees.

  Not that Gus’s barked order was getting a welcome reception, either. Of course, the fact that all the...what were they now? Rescuers? Representatives of a destroyed government? Arrogant assholes who’d arbitrarily taken charge? No. They were Coasties - most of them, anyway. Ex-Coasties, in his and Gus’s case. And now they were ram-rodding this battered and bewildered, and shocked beyond all recognition or understanding band of survivors through their first chow line since being rescued off a rooftop in the tropical Hell of Honolulu.

  And they were wearing gas masks.

  Incongruous didn’t begin to describe how absurd and disturbing the juxtaposition of those masks and the blood-red tomato soup they were serving to the newcomers, must seem. If it were me, he thought. I’d say No Thank You, and move on my merry way.

  Then again, who knew just what these people had been living on since their normal food supplies ran out?

  141

  The rooftop

  Honolulu, HI

  “Roger that,” Jonesy said into the radio throat-mic. He turned to his newly-found friends (and their dog). “The helicopters are only going to be able to make one more run out here tonight,” he said, then glanced over the crowd of refugees still waiting with them on the rooftop. Too many, he thought, and one glance at Marc and Wendy, told him they’d come to the same conclusion.

  “Low on fuel?” Marc asked, proving Jonesy’s assumption.

  “The icebreaker they came off of won’t be here till morning,” he replied, then asked: “You have some experience with helos?”

  The nearly-emaciated man shook his shaggy head. “Jets,” he said. “Mechanic in the Air Force,” he added, by way of explanation.

  “What the fuck is an icebreaker doing in Hawaii?” Wendy blurted.

  “Surviving,” Jonesy answered with a distracted shrug. “Just like everybody else.” Truth be told, he wasn’t really paying attention. Something was off - a sour note in this atonal symphony of horror. It scratched at the back of his brain, always remaining just out of reach.

  He glanced to the next platform down, where the Rescue Swimmers were taking a head count. He knew they’d come to the same conclusion: there wouldn’t be enough room to take all of them over to the base in one shot. Some of them would have to remain overnight.

  Was that it? Was that the elusive little bastard running around in his brain, sending tiny alarm bells to his central nervous system? No.

  The fact sucked, no doubt of that. He knew, without thinking, that he would be spending the night on this rooftop, just as he knew he’d have to endure the incessant bitching of those refugees left behind. But that wasn’t what bothered him. Nature of the beast, really. Sometimes rescues didn’t go as planned. Sometimes you had to take a big old bite of the shit sandwich and swallow it with a smile. No. It was something else. But what?

  He looked at the survivors. They were skeletally thin, clearly malnourished, each and every one of them hanging onto life by a thread. When had they last eaten? What had they last eaten? He shuddered at this last question.

  Jonesy had always been interested in history - the real stuff, not that whitewashed garbage they spooned out by the truckload in public school. He liked the ugly bits those sanitized textbooks left out: the scandals and inconsistencies, the good and the bad, the warts of human nature. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal... Thomas Jefferson also owned slaves. School boards tried to hide such facts, presumably to protect the easily-offended sensibilities of their children, but Jonesy had always found such inconsistencies of human psychology fascinating. He’d lost count of the number of books he’d read, on a wide variety of real-life people and events: biographies, first-person accounts, tales of battle and conquest, and discovery. Screw Reality TV. He much preferred the real thing.

  But experience, and the so-called maturity earned by surviving year, after year, after year, had taught him that everything has both an up and a down side. The up was understanding the truth. The down was also understanding the truth, because with the knowledge came cynicism, and with cynicism came the lingering fear and certainty that human beings could be - and often were - truly sick motherfuckers.

  The question of what they’d eaten last, brought to mind the Battle of Stalingrad, during the Second World War. The siege went on so long, and the deprivations of the besieged became so dire, that people would actually walk around carrying butcher’s knives - not to use on the German invaders, but to carve up the city’s horses, as they dropped dead from wounds or shelling, or starvation. And when the horses ran out, the people started using those knives on their own dead and frozen relatives.

  Jonesy looked at the survivors below him. Had they turned cannibal?

  He glanced at Marc and Wendy. They were thin, certainly. But on reflection, they didn’t look quite as hungry as their neighbors. Then he looked at Mac. The dog saw him looking and flopped his furry tail upon the ground. He didn’t look hungry, at all.

  A tingling sensation of horror ran across his spine and danced pirouettes inside his ball sack. “What have you guys been eating?”

  142

  M/V Point of Order

  08.200221N 162.978453W

  “Get away from me, bitch,” Clara Blondelle snapped at one of the ragged whores with whom she’d been tossed into prison. There were five of them, plus herself: two from some freighter, from what one of them tried to tell her, and three from the Navy ship they were towing. The bitch in question was one of the Navy sluts.

  All of the women had that fresh fucked look - only in this case they didn’t seem to carry the glow of a good time. Their hair was messy, their clothes disheveled, and most were clearly without the support of a bra, if the obvious nipples and sagging tits were any indication.

  She examined the motives of her catty behavior and mind-set. She was now in the same boat (pun absolutely and sarcastically intended) as the women she so easily derided. They were objects, cast into this prison, awaiting the beck and call of some horny man to use them as he saw fit. Story of my life, she thought, the bitterness dripping from her brain and into the pit of her stomach.

  “I understand your anger,” the bitch said, backing away with hands held in plain sight in surrender. “And I can sympathize, believe me.”

  “I don’t need your sympathy,” Clara spat. That look of pity and derision in the woman’s eyes had been in the hateful stares of ninety percent of the women she’d seen since she reached puberty and learned her greatest skill was fucking, and her pussy and mouth, tits and ass were her greatest tools. Thus it had always been. Thus it would always be.

  “Maybe not,” the woman said, sitting on the plush couch in what Clara deemed their prison. Taking in the surroundings, it looked like someplace the crew might gather after their watch, away from the ever-so much more important owner and guests - out of sight so as not to offend their upper-class sensibilities. “But you are going to need our help. We all need each others’ help, if we’re going to survive this.”

  Two of the woman nodded. The other two just stared into space or into their lap. They were defeated, beaten, lost. Fuck them, Clara thought. And fuck this prison.

  “I don’t need anybody’s help,” she said, but the sound of her voice wasn’t convincing.

  “Gonna do
this all on your own then?” One of the others scoffed. The woman was tall and long-legged, but big hipped. Her face looked like Secretariat, after a collision with an ugly stick. “Good luck with that.”

  “Don’t need luck, either,” Clara said, meaning it. Luck was for suckers. She’d never needed it, never counted on it, and certainly never expected it to pull her out of the shit piled on her by life in general. Luck hadn’t gotten her this far. Luck hadn’t stolen the vaccine and the sailboat, hadn’t navigated her through hundreds of miles of empty ocean, hadn’t kept her alive, hadn’t delivered her into the hands of those pirates. No. Clara Blondelle had done all that. And Clara Blondelle would get the two things she needed more than anything else in her entire life: her freedom, and revenge.

  143

  Polar Star Shore Team

  Lihue, Kauai

  “Everybody find a piece of deck,” Bobby V said, as they entered the gymnasium of the obligatorily-named King Kamehameha High School. Damned-near everything in Hawaii had been named after the man, from schools and hospitals and government buildings, to liquor stores and pawn shops. It reminded Carol Kemp of Orlando, which she’d visited many, many years ago. The most memorable thing about the place (other than Disney World) was that everything else had been named some variation on the theme: Liquor World, Navy World, Shrubbery World, Sea World... Okay... That last one made sense, but the rest of them?

  “Don’t waste a bunch of time looking for a good spot,” CWO4 Vincenzo continued. “Every one is like every other.”

  This would be their new home, for the foreseeable future, and it was Spartan, to say the least. Eventually - like first thing tomorrow morning, she thought, as she settled down onto a hard piece of floor against the west masonry wall - they’d need to find more comfortable accommodations, but this would do for tonight.