He’d been quiet for the last couple days, but that wasn’t really anything unusual - not unusual enough to notice, anyway. That was before Lydia opened the door and saw him hanging by the neck from the overhead.
16
M/V True North
Midway Atoll
“We’ve got a problem,” Professor Christopher Floyd said, the moment he set foot on the Bridge of the True North.
“Hi, John, how’s it going?” John asked with no more sarcasm than would fit in a large dump truck.
Floyd waved off the pleasantries as if they were an annoyance, which, to him, they most certainly were. “We have about a week and a half before we have to administer the secondary booster to everybody,” he said. “And, I suppose, the primary inoculations for those other people.”
The CDC had initially gotten it wrong when they said the Pomona Vaccine only needed a primary dose and a booster. They discovered, almost at the last possible moment, that a secondary booster was needed within forty-five days of the original. He received the tiniest jolt of glee when he thought of how the greedy rich bastards who recruited him to produce their (at the time, illegal) vaccine, then left him stranded to fend for himself would be reacting, as people within their pre-planned, well stocked redoubts were turning zombie, after all.
“There is an eighteen percent chance of infection without the secondary booster,” Floyd added.
“Okay...so...Give everybody the booster,” John replied, clearly not grasping the problem. Christopher Floyd had spent his entire life, from the time he first learned to speak in complete sentences, right up to the present day, dealing with people who failed to grasp one problem or another. He’d have thought by now he’d be used to it. He’d thought wrong.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “We need fresh antibodies.”
“Okay,” John said. “So?”
Floyd shook his head and took a deep, steadying breath. “The only source is from infected spines,” he added, pausing to see if the bleeding obvious had sunk in. It had not. “Which your...friends...dumped into the ocean.”
“Ah!” John replied, the light of not-quite drooling idiocy finally dawning in the man’s eyes.
“Clearly, then, you’re going to have to find some more zombies,” Floyd said. “And soon. Eighteen percent may not sound like much, but it works out to four-point-five of us.” He let the idea sink in for a moment, then added: “Which four-point-five would you like it to be?”
“I see your point,” John said. He paced back and forth from the port side, to the starboard side, then back again, his head down. Floyd waited in annoyed impatience. Finally, the man stopped, looked up, and asked: “Do we have enough Primary left to innoculate the Sass crew?”
“Yes,” Floyd replied.
John nodded and paced some more. They hadn’t told their new acquaintances about the existence of the vaccine. Floyd was unsure why the information was withheld, but in the final analysis, he didn’t care, and so gave it minimal thought. Whether or not John’s niece let the cat out of the bag, he did not know, but he suspected not, given the fact nobody had asked about it. Clearly, John was thinking along the same lines, because he stopped pacing, strode out onto the Port Bridge Wing, and shouted: “On the Sass!”
His niece, Molly, popped her head out the corresponding door on the other ship. “Hey Uncle John,”: she said in a perky voice. Floyd hated perky. “What’s up?”
“Time to let your crew in on the secret,” he replied.
She looked momentarily confused, confirming Floyd’s theory on the genetic inheritance of dimwittedness. But sooner than he would of thought, her eyes brightened with dawning light, and she said: “Uh-huh...” She did not look happy. Nevertheless, she nodded, gulped, then headed back inside her own Bridge. A moment later, her voice came over their 1-MC. “All Sassafras personnel, lay to the Mess Deck.”
Floyd turned from the scene in time to see John pick up the VHF handset. “Gus, this is John,” the man said into the mic.
Floyd heard a fumbling at the other end, and then: “This is Gus. Go, over.”
“How’s the repair going?” John asked. Gus, the engineer from the Sass, Frank Roessler, and that possible lunatic, Harvey Walton, had gone to the old seaplane hangar in search of parts some time ago.
“Be a couple hours,” came the reply, then the voice faded, as the man’s mouth moved away from the still-keyed mic. “No, that has to feed through the manifold on the other side. I think.” There was the clattering of some tool dropping, and then the word: “Shit!” And then Gus’s voice increased in volume and clarity. “Make that three or four hours. Over.”
“Roger that,” John said. “Keep me posted. Out.” He looked at Floyd, and said: “First thing in the morning, that plane is going back to Kauai.”
“You sure about that?” Floyd asked. He was not hopeful.
John nodded. “If Gus says he can fix it, he can fix it, so yes, I am.” The man smiled at him. “And when it goes, you’re going to be on it.”
17
USCGC Sassafras
Midway Atoll
“So you were vaccinated before you reported aboard?” Dan McMullen asked. What remained of the Sassafras crew were gathered on the Mess Deck, minus Frank, still working on the Catalina’s engine on the island.
“Yes,” Molly replied, feeling more than a bit conflicted. In the first place, this was a gigantic piece of information she’d kept secret. It was one thing to have held the fact close to her vest from the command, since it held all manner of legal ramifications. But to have withheld the information from the bare handful of survivors who were now her crew, her world, her family, in effect, felt an awful lot like betrayal. And then there was Jonesy, whom she was assiduously not looking at, as she tried to explain the situation.
“Uh, no disrespect, Ma’am,” Dan continued. “But wasn’t that considered murder?”
“The technical term would be Accessory to Murder,” John Gordon said, stepping onto the Mess Deck from the Buoy Deck. “Hope you don’t mind me coming aboard, Ms. Gordon,” he added, in a formal tone. “Thought I should probably be here for this.” His right hand held a parcel. Molly knew what it contained, but first things first.
She waved it away as of no consequence, which it wasn’t - especially in comparison to what McMullen had asked, which was a huge consequence, because, ultimately, he was right. At the time she’d received the vaccine, mere possession of it was considered a felony. Whether it should have been, whether the refusal of the Powers that Be to use the most readily available source of the antibodies needed to create the vaccine - infected humans - had directly contributed to the eventual downfall of humanity, or not, was immaterial.
“At this point,” Jonesy said. “I don’t think it really matters.”
Leave it to Jonesy, she thought. “No,” Molly disagreed. “Dan’s right. Technically, at the time, it was crime, and I knew it.”
“So what?” Duke said. “If I had access to the stuff, I’d have taken it, too.”
“Dude,” Jonesy said. “If you had the stuff, it would have been a wasted injection.” Duke raised a questioning eyebrow. “You’re so disgustingly, robustly healthy, we could toss you into a vat of Ebola, and I doubt you’d even catch the sniffles.”
“It’s all that clean living,” Duke replied, which made the other members of the Sass crew burst into laughter. Judging by the way she’d seen him toss back the premium bourbon on the first night they got to Midway, she could understand why. He’d consumed enough alcohol to put down a wildebeest, and it hardly seemed to phase him.
“Well, in any event,” John said. “You’re going to get a chance to find out,” he added, waving the parcel. It was a rectangular pouch, roughly ten inches square, made of some form of plastic, made to look like leather. In it, she knew, were the primary doses of the Pomona Vaccine.
“We have vaccine now?” Harold asked.
“You have vaccine,” John replied.
“And it’s ma
de from human spinal tissue?” Gary King asked.
“It is,” Molly answered. This was the sticky point, the reason people had been so reluctant to do what might well have saved humanity: killing one group of humans to save the rest. True, the humans being killed were infected. Also true, the infection caused irreparable damage to the brain, turning the afflicted into crazed, homicidal, zombie-like creatures who would kill you as soon as look at you. Whether the second nullified the moral ambiguity of the first, was a matter for each person to decide.
“Cool,” Bill Schaeffer said.
“I’m game,” Gary said.
“Count me in,” Jonesy said.
“You already have my answer,” Duke said, taking off his uniform shirt and rolling up his tee-shirt sleeve. Molly hadn’t until that moment realized just how big the man’s biceps were. His arms looked like tree trunks. High on the right shoulder was a tattooed skull, with two hearts where the eyes should be. Underneath it was written the word: Mom.
They all looked at Dan McMullen, who had raised the legal and moral questions. He shrugged. “Why not?”
Which just left Harold, who sat there, looking decidedly uncomfortable.
“What?” Jonesy asked him.
“I don’t like needles,” he replied.
Duke slugged him in the shoulder. “Don’t be such a baby.”
18
US Coast Guard Base
Honolulu, Hawaii
Don’t wimp out on me now, Amber, she thought, as she slid out the window and into the night. The smell assaulted her immediately, like simultaneous punches to the gut and the nose. It had been muted by the concrete building, but once outside, the full force hit her like a stinking fist. She swallowed hard, trying to keep from puking.
The manuals she needed to hook up and turn on the solar panels were not in the Comm Center Building. Of course they weren’t. Why should she expect God to shine His loving light down upon her when He’d kicked her (and the rest of humanity) so firmly in the keester, over and over again?
She’d managed to find a tool kit, left behind by who knows who, who knows how long ago, but whoever it had been, saved her one Hell of a lot of searching. He, she, or they had also provided her with a weapon, in the form of the crowbar she carried in her hand as she crept across the small grassy area on the side of the building. There were a number of large, lush green bushes, of some variety she couldn’t remember, and didn’t care about, because they provided her with cover. There were zombies out there, somewhere. She hadn’t seen any, hadn’t heard any, except a few rustling sounds she’d caught as she slipped down through the false overhead and into OSC Bernard’s office.
That was the easy part. She’d known the office was locked, ever since her failed attempt to not leave the body of OS3 Jackass directly in front of the Comm Center door. It was still there. And yes, it had been chewed on, exactly as she’d feared it would be.
She came to an open area, where the grass and bushes gave way to the asphalt tarmac of a small parking lot. The base was covered with them. Officers only, of course. Enlisted scum had to walk from the General lot in the fenced area, northwest of all the buildings. It would have been a bear of a walk during winter in somewhere like Alaska, or Maine, or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but in Hawaii, it was a pleasant stroll, so the inevitable complaints about the long walk had been met with just as inevitable blank and unconcerned stares.
She looked left, looked right, saw nothing. She waited, straining her ears. Heard nothing. Still, she hesitated.
A twisted, cartoon version of Alex Trebek popped into her overactive imagination. I’ll take Second Guesses for a hundred, Alex... She shook her head and the image popped like the thought balloon it was, but the essential question remained: Do I really need to be doing this?
Yes, the answer came, loud and clear inside her skull. You really do.
Without power, without the electricity she’d taken for granted her entire life, the radios would not work. Without the radios, her connection to the world was gone, lost, cut. Without them, she was alone.
Being alone never bothered her, and she couldn’t understand the people who couldn’t be by themselves, as if their own self was never enough company. She liked herself, she enjoyed her own company, and so she didn’t mind being alone. But then, she’d never been in a zombie apocalypse before, and if there was ever a situation that called for the comfort of other people - live, sane, people, not determined to rip her to shreds - this was it. She needed those radios.
Before she could second guess herself any further, before she could come up with any more lame excuses to climb right back through that window and into the relative security of Chief Bernard’s office, she stepped out into the parking lot.
Of course, that’s when the first zombie showed up.
She froze. This was an idiotic thing to do, even in the best of circumstances - which these weren’t - but that went double when confronted with a zombie wandering aimlessly down the ring road crisscrossing between Sand Island Parkway and the pier. The naked male was faced away from her and stumbled down the asphalt in the drunken sailor way they seemed to walk. He was more than fifty yards from where she’d come out of cover, with his back to her, and apparently oblivious to her presence, so freezing in place was as pointless as it was foolhardy. The longer she stayed that way, the greater the risk he might turn, see her, and start the lunatic howling that seemed to be the zombie version of the dinner bell.
Thanking the stars, moon, planets, and whatever other celestial bodies she could think of, for the pair of sneakers she’d kept in the Comm Center for those odd days when she felt motivated enough to hit the gym after her shift (which wasn’t often) she scampered across the parking lot and street, and back under the cover of the bushes on the far side, pausing there to catch her breath.
The brief run hadn’t winded her (she hoped), but the anxiety over what she was doing had. Or so she told herself. It could all just be so much self-serving bullshit, meant to cover for the fact she didn’t workout anywhere near as often as she should, and it was showing. Keep shearing those sheep, Amber, she told herself. This ain’t getting it done.
She broke cover again - walking this time, albeit quickly - and headed toward the Facilities Maintenance Building. It was a “U” shaped structure, at least three times the size of the Comm Center, butting up against the pier. To get there, she had to weave her way through a stand of trees, past the Base swimming pool, cross another street, and make her way through another, larger parking lot, filled with Government Vehicles. The trees gave her a modicum of cover. The rest did not.
At least she thought the trees gave her cover. She discovered the error of that particular line of thinking when she stumbled - literally stumbled - over the prone body of another zombie. She thought for one, heart-thumping, relieved moment the thing was dead. She was wrong about that, too.
With a surprised grunt, it twitched, then rolled over, onto its back and looked at her. The eyes were wide and unfocused for a moment, but then they sharpened and stared. There was a pause; a brief and shining moment when nothing happened, no sound, no movement, no reaction from either the zombie, or from Amber. The moment did not last long. The creature (whom she suddenly recognized as an SK2 female she’d had breakfast with a few times) screamed, and lunged to her feet. Amber ran.
Whatever mental mechanisms were destroyed by the plague, whatever intellectual processes were damaged or eliminated completely as the frontal lobe cooked and the amygdala regained its ancient prominence, it apparently created a disruption of the body’s natural equilibrium, in much the same way as alcohol affected the proverbial drunken sailor. The zombies could still walk - could still run, for that matter - they just couldn’t do it well. The female former Storekeeper (whose name continued to escape Amber’s pointless attempts at recall) staggered after her, like some besotted Coastie on liberty for the first time in a month.
Amber saw the clumsiness, the inebriated overcompensation that set
the zombie weaving and wobbling after her, and stopped her blind, panicked run. She still trotted, at a jogging pace, but she was no longer dashing headlong and blind into the unknown darkness. Doing so would have gotten her killed. She had no idea what lurked ahead of her, what she might be running into, and if she didn’t stop and think, and come up with some cohesive plan, she was bound to get her ass eaten. She liked her ass quite the way it was, thank you very much, and so she started to think.
She cut back into the trees, back the way she’d come. This was counterintuitive, unless she was planning to return to the relative safety of the window she’d crawled out of at the beginning of this insane adventure, but instinct told her to do it anyway. For once, she didn’t think, didn’t analyze, didn’t hesitate.
First things first: get rid of the Storekeeper. Okay...How? She could run it around and around in the stand of trees, hoping to confuse the thing, and so lose it, but her own lungs were already burning and her knees were feeling weaker by the moment, so this was not a viable solution. She could get behind the thing, then subdue it somehow. That sounded possible, but it meant more running, which was becoming more and more of an impossibility. What, then? What?
She tossed a look behind her, saw the naked woman staggering fifteen yards back, its keening howl sounding like a fog signal in the otherwise quiet darkness. She needed to shut the thing up, and fast. Which was when she remembered she was carrying a crowbar.
She’d picked the thing out of the tool bag with the idea it might come in handy to break into the Facilities Building. She hadn’t realized, hadn’t even thought of its basic utility as a weapon. She did so now. Casting another glance over her shoulder, she saw the zombie Storekeeper gaining ground, getting closer. She was going to lose this race, and second place wouldn’t get to take home a ribbon.
Up ahead, she spotted another one of the overlarge bushes dotting the base. There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to their placement, and there didn’t seem any now, but she wasn’t going to argue horticulture at a time like this. With what seemed like the last of her legs’ capacity to hold her upright, she picked up speed and cut suddenly to the right, behind the bushes and out of sight of the pursuing zombie. Then she stopped, turned, and held the crowbar aloft, ready to strike.
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Zombies In Paradise Page 6
