Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Zombies In Paradise

by Thomson, Jeff

  The estuary widened, turning around the northern edge of Sand Island and into Kapalama Basin. There were more warehouses to the right, another tank farm, and more of Honolulu - or what remained of it. Hundreds of small craft - dinghies and sailboats and sport fishers - lay scattered along the shore to all sides, as if some giant boy, wading through a puddle, had dropped a big rock in amongst his toy boats, the ripples, like storm-tossed waves, slamming them onto the land.

  “What the fuck, over?” Duke asked. “What happened here?”

  Jonesy shrugged. “A gigantic shitstorm called the Pomona Virus.” Good as any other answer, he thought.

  The Sand Island Bridge came into view. Duke eased back on the throttles, bringing them to a floating stop. “Shitstorm my ass,” he said, staring at the span between the island and the rest of Honolulu, proper. “More like shit sandwich.”

  Jonesy couldn’t disagree. The bridge was crawling with staggering, stumbling, walking zombies - all of them headed toward Sand Island.

  103

  USCGC Sassafras

  Honolulu Harbor

  “You want the bad news, or the really bad news?” Jonesy asked, tossing the folded chart of Honolulu Harbor onto the Wardroom table. His head felt fuzzy, his eyes burned, his body hurt. Anyone suggesting he needed to fall into a coma for a week would not be accused of crazy talk. Didn’t matter. Too much to do. He dropped into an empty chair.

  “Anything worse than the fact the world has been overrun by zombies?” Lane Keely asked. He, John, and Gus sat on one side. Jonesy, Harold, Duke, and Dan McMullen sat on the other. Molly sat at the head. Every last one of them looked exhausted, which also didn’t matter

  “No,” Jonesy replied, yawning. “Thanks for putting it into perspective.”

  “Learning, sharing and caring,” Lane said, leaning forward to examine the chart.

  “Let’s start with what you’ve done since arriving,” Molly said.

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Jonesy thought: I should stop being surprised at how well she’s doing and just accept it. He placed his finger approximately an inch off the ISC pier. “We dropped the hook here. Anchor’s holding. Weaver’s keeping an eye on her. Duke and I took the small boat over to here,”he swept his finger in a counter-clockwise arc around the island, bringing it to rest about two inches from the graphic representation of a bridge - actually two bridges, because the directional lanes were separated, running parallel from Honolulu proper to the northwest end of Sand Island. “What we saw there is the really bad news.”

  “There’s a zombie parade heading to the island,” Duke said, stealing Jonesy’s thunder. Jonesy didn’t care.

  “What’s bringing them?” John asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonesy answered. “Free nachos?” He raised his hand to stave off the caution against sarcasm Molly seemed ready to make. “My guess is they were attracted by the same thing all those people in all those buildings were.” He waved the same hand vaguely toward the city. “We made noise, the zombies heard it and thought: Lunch.”

  “Speaking of which,” Dan McMullen said. “I haven’t eaten since last night.”

  “Tighten your belt,” Duke suggested..

  “Point is, there’s an army of them heading right toward us,” Jonesy said, ignoring the exchange.

  “Isn’t there a fence?” Gus asked.

  “There are fences all over the damned place,” Duke replied. “But if there’s a breach anywhere...” He let the thought hang.

  “Can we block the bridge?” Molly asked.

  “With what?” Harold countered, as a huge yawn escaped his lips.

  “Isn’t there a container port?” Lane asked. “Don’t they have big forklifts to move the containers?”

  “Yeah,” Jonesy nodded. “And a battalion of zombies to keep them company.”

  “Why block the bridge?” Dan asked. Everyone gawked at him as if presented with a demented, idiot child. He stared right back at them. “Why not just blow it up?”

  Harold patted his pockets. “Sorry,” he said. “Left all the explosives in my other pants.”

  The meeting devolved into an exchange of sarcastic remarks, serving no purpose. Molly seemed willing to let them run their course. Jonesy, on the other hand, wanted to either get moving or take a nap. Moving felt like the only viable option. The nap might take a while. Just as he was about to put a stop to the snark-fest, Gus Perniola slowly raised his hand.

  “I know how to make nitroglycerine,” he said.

  “And I know how to make satchel charges,” McMullen offered.

  “Of course you do,” Jonesy said.

  “Nobody’s playing with nitro on my ship,” Molly protested. “So I guess we’re going to have to take the base.”

  104

  USCGC Sassafras

  Sand Island, Oahu

  “They’re not fucking zombies!” Harold insisted, for the forty-seven thousandth time, almost shouting.

  Jonesy ignored him, focusing instead on the task at hand. He peered through the 3X Scope on his M-4, selected a target, squeezed the trigger, and killed the zombie - or whatever the fuck they were calling the insane former-friends and shipmates (many of whom were naked) milling around on the USCG Integrated Support Command, Honolulu pier. It dropped with a round through its skull.

  “Yeah, well...” he began, taking his eye away from the scope. “Whatever they are, we gotta shoot them.” They were on the Flying Bridge, sitting side-by-side on beach chairs, and using the railings to steady their aim. “We gotta kill them,” he amended, staring at his friend, hoping to see some glimmer in Harold’s eyes that this salient fact was sinking in. He sighed, seeing nothing but determined obstinance. Good thing Duke isn’t up here, he thought.

  The burley Bosun Mate had declined to join them in this turkey shoot, saying he had an “idea,” he wanted to explore with Frank Roessler. He’d provided no details and Jonesy had no clue, but whatever was going on, it didn’t fill him full of puppies and bunnies.

  Harold and Duke alternated between stony silence and shouting matches verging on fisticuffs over this not-a-zombie nonsense. Jonesy had long since gotten sick of the both of them. Sighing, he tried one last time.

  “Would you rather be killing zombies or humans?”

  “Neither,” Harold replied.

  “And yet...” Jonesy said, letting the dangling phrase convey the pointlessness of the argument. He took aim at another zombie - this one female. She/it fell to the ground.

  The others seemed not to notice. He remembered something he saw on a documentary or read in a book about the Old West buffalo hunters. If they shot any animal at random, it would cause a stampede, but if, instead, they identified the nearest bull and killed it first, the rest would just stand there, waiting to be shot. This was similar, except the part about the bull. It didn’t seem to matter who they killed. As long as they proceeded slow and systematic, it didn’t trigger the fight or flight instinct. The zombies would just stand there, waiting to be shot.

  “The only way to take back this base,” Jonesy continued. “Is to kill every last one of them.” He pointed to another female - this one vaguely familiar. “Isn’t that...?”

  She/it stood about five-foot-four, with short-cropped brown hair (now disheveled) and rather prominent breasts. And, oh yes. She was naked.

  “Petty Officer Depone,” Harold said, with a mixture of guilt and enthusiasm. The woman in question had been one of the base Admin people. “Always wanted to see her naked.”

  “Too late to do anything about it now,” Jonesy replied. “Except...”

  “Yeah, I know,” Harold said, not liking it.

  “You want me to do it?”

  “No,” Harold replied. He took the shot.

  “So I’ll ask the question again,” Jonesy said. “Would you rather kill zombies or humans?”

  “I’d rather find some woman of loose morals who looks like Petty Officer Depone and bang the shit out of her,” Harold replied.

  “Can’t he
lp you there.”

  Harold sighed, then shrugged. “Zombies it is, I guess.” And with that, he took aim at a large (clothed) former Electronics Technician, and blew its brains out the back of its skull.

  Jonesy identified another target, took aim, fired. Brain surgery, this was not. His mind drifted.

  For some reason, he kept thinking about a memory from his time on the Planetree. The District Seventeen planners, in Juneau, in their infinite ass-clownish-ness, decided it would be a good idea to send the aging ship from Alaska to Hawaii for Tailored Shipboard Training with the Navy. This, in and of itself, was fine - even welcomed by the crew - except for one small detail: they did it in January.

  January, in the North Pacific - not to mention the Gulf of Alaska - was never fun, always dangerous, and occasionally suicidal, such as when the fifty year-old buoy tender got stuck in a major storm, with seas ranging from fifty to seventy feet high, and the wind so strong, the wind speed indicator was pegged at a hundred knots. It lasted four solid days.

  On the second day, the BMOW on his round, discovered quite a bit of water in the Forward Hold. It seems they had sprung a leak. The Captain called the crew to make preparations to abandon ship.

  This was just a precaution - and a pointless one at that. Given the conditions, if they’d dropped into liferafts and/or the two small boats in those seas, not a single one of them would have survived. Nevertheless, they went through the motions.

  Jonesy’s billet on the Watch, Quarter and Station Bill, was to prepare the Abandon Ship kits, which included charts, hand-held GPS units, sextants, and various other means of figuring out where they were, should the worst be necessary. An ET1, named A. A. Alpers, joined him in the Chartroom, though there didn’t seem to be any purpose for him to do so, as he wasn’t performing any useful function. Instead, he sat on the edge of the desk and repeated an insane mantra: “I hope this fucker sinks. I hope this fucker sinks. I hope this fucker sinks,” over, and over, and over again, until finally, Jonesy had to say:

  “Shut the fuck up, Trip.”

  Needless to say (given Jonesy’s continued existence) they did not have to abandon ship that day, or the next, or the next. They survived the journey to Hawaii, and when they were brought into dry dock and raised out of the water, technicians went around with a hammer and poked seventy-six holes into the fifty year-old rusted hull.

  When asked to describe the experience, as he inevitably was whenever anybody in the Coast Guard heard he’d been on the Planetree, he always asked the person to think of the meanest, nastiest, most terrifying roller coaster they could imagine, then invited them to multiply that by ten, give the coaster the ability to kill them at any given moment, and then try and wrap their heads around the idea that they were a thousand miles from the nearest safe harbor.

  Then he’d say it was like that, only worse.

  They spent four days riding Mother Nature’s Roller Coaster, standing watches, then hitting the rack, where sleep was impossible, since their entire world was being tossed about like, well, quite a bit like a ship in a storm at sea. Half the crew - including the Captain - couldn’t even get out of the rack. But Jonesy could, and Jonesy did.

  At first, the mind boggled at the enormity of it all. Every moment was spent with the clear and certain knowledge that the next could be the last. After a while, Jonesy became philosophical about it.

  He could either give in to the fear, give in to the horrible, impossible fucked up-ness of it all, and be consumed by it, or he could embrace it and start to enjoy it. Only the latter option would preserve his sanity, and so that is what did. He started to enjoy it, though at first(and second, and third) glance, there wasn’t a single enjoyable thing about it.

  The memory swept through his mind in the warped-time of such things, passing in an instant, as he peered through the 3X Scope, selected yet another target (a Marine Science Technician he vaguely recognized) and pulled the trigger. The zombie fell like all the others.

  He’d hated that journey through the storm. And he loved it. Most important of all, he had endured it, just as he was enduring the nightmare of having to kill his fellow Coasties.

  He moved the scope along the pier, sighted another target, and began the slow squeeze of the trigger that would end in the death of yet another former human being. He breathed in and held it. A bit more pressure and...

  He pulled his eye from the scope in horror. The zombie he’d been about to kill was their former CO, LCDR Russell Sparks.

  105

  USCGC Polar Star

  22.326906N 177.241548W

  “Are we getting any secure traffic from the COMMSTA?” Captain Hall asked.

  LCDR Stubbelfield shook his head. “We’re fifteen hundred miles from Honolulu, sir. We have sporadic comms with them via the GSB, but the only operational antennae they have are on the roof of the Comm Center. Power’s been lost to all the repeaters. At least we think it’s the power.” Hall’s eyebrow ticked upward. “No one’s been up the mountains to check,” he explained. “And if there are pirates...”

  Hall nodded and turned to CWO4 Vincenzo. “What can you tell us about this Barber guy?”

  “Good man,” Bobby V replied. High praise, Amy Montrose thought. Robert Vincenzo didn’t like most people, and if he didn’t like you, life was a cold day in Hell. If he did, you were golden, but even then, getting a compliment out of the man was a rarity. Mark it on your calendar, because you might never see it happen again. “Bit of a crusty bastard,” the Warrant officer continued, smiling. “But a good man.”

  “We can trust him?” LT Wheeler asked.

  “I would.,” Vincenzo replied.

  “Not much choice,” Master Chief Wolf weighed in.

  “If they’ve got vaccine, we can’t afford not to go,” Commander Swedberg said.

  “And in any event, we’re on the way,” Wheeler added.

  Hall turned his attention back to Stubbelfield. “What do we know about other units?”

  “The Sass is operational, though their crew is severely diminished,” Stubbelfield said. “Eight survivors.”

  A general gasp went around the room. This was the first time many of the assembled were hearing the information.

  Most of the officers were there: Wheeler, Vincenzo, the XO, Stubbelfield, the EO, LCDR Bacarov, the four pilots, LCDR Randy Sagona LTjg Jacob Vastic, LT Carrie Scoggins, and LTjg Zack Greeley, and finally, CWO2 Peavey (who’d recently been promoted from MST Chief), and his boss, LTjg Carol Kemp. The Supply Officer, CWO3 Dennis Falk, and the Bull Ensign, Jaime Devon, were either otherwise occupied, or deemed unnecessary. Amy understood the need for most of them at this meeting, except, perhaps, Peavey and Kemp. But then, the Captain wasn’t prone to filling her in on his plans, so her ignorance didn’t surprise her.

  “How can they remain operational with only eight crew?” CDR Swedberg asked.

  “Coffee,” both Vincenzo and the Master Chief replied. Laughter rippled through the room. Feels like whistling through the graveyard, Amy thought. Eight survivors out of a crew of forty-eight... She shuddered.

  “Assateague is also up and running,” Stubbelfield continued. “They only found one survivor on her.”

  “How can they run with only one person?” CWO2 Peavy asked, in his annoying, nasal, whining voice. The man was - not exactly hated, but loathed, anyway. Amy always felt the need to shower after coming in contact with him, but that was just a personal aversion to his wandering eyes. The general consensus held that he was a bumbling incompetent. He’d made Warrant Bosun during their deployment in Antarctica, after years of being a Marine Science Technician. How that could possibly qualify him to run a Deck Force - let alone the Deck Operations of a ship like the Star - seemed to be beyond anyone’s understanding. Thankfully, they still had Vincenzo. The idea of putting Peavey in charge of anything, gave her hives.

  His boss, LTjg Carol Kemp, wasn’t bad - but she wasn’t exactly good, either. Amy felt somewhat catty in thinking so, but it was more of a profess
ional assessment, than a personal one. In the woman’s defense, she hadn’t been given much opportunity to shine - especially since the apocalypse. She was the Marine Science Officer - necessary during Ops in Antarctica, but pretty much just a watchstander, otherwise. And as for the people she supervised, it was one thing to have Marine Science Technicians on an extended deployment into the ice, where scientists and extreme weather gave some justification for their presence, but out in the middle of the Pacific, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, they were about as useless as the proverbial boar hog’s tits.

  “I can answer that,” Wheeler replied. “The Sass met up with a civilian ship called the True North - an ex-Canadian Coast Guard buoy tender converted into an expedition yacht by a crew of retired Coasties. I served with the owner. John Gordon.” He turned to Vincenzo. “Another good man.” Bobby V nodded. “That ship is at Midway. They cannibalized their crew to fill out the other two ships.” He shrugged, looking at Hall. “Still isn’t much in terms of manning, but...”

  “Coffee,” Wheeler, Vincenzo and the Master Chief chorused.

  Amy concentrated her focus on the Captain, who leaned back in his chair and stared at the overhead - a sure sign he was running the situation over in his head. He looked back down. Decision time.

  “Mister Wheeler,” he began. “You’ll be taking command of the Sass, when we finally hook up. Miss Montrose will join you,” he said, his eyes flickering briefly toward Amy. He took a deep breath, then added: “And Mister Peavy, as well.” Amy’s heart leapt, at the thought of a new ship and new responsibility, did a back flip at the adventure of it all, then sank into a despair-filled pit at the thought of Peavy. “Coordinate with the Sass CO, Miss...” He paused, looking to Stubbelfield for the missing information.

  “Ensign Molly Gordon,” he said.

  106

  USCGC Sassafras

  Honolulu Harbor

  “Want to tell me why we’re doing this again?” Duke asked, shrugging into his LE rig. It fell into place on top of the MOPP Level 4 suit, which itself covered the body armor and long sleeved uniform shirt and trousers. The cuffs of both the shirt and pants were taped closed, over gloves and boots.