The second, came from within the harbor. Blackjack Charlie Carter led this one himself.
He knew he should have remained aboard the Point of Order, just as he’d done when he ordered the majority of the men he’d escaped with from Soledad to attack the unidentified ship they now knew was the True North. Military tradition (not to mention common sense) dictated that the person in overall command of any attack should be placed behind it, so that he could monitor what happened over the entire battlefield. This was a sound tactic tried and tested over centuries. Stonewall Jackson had basically ignored this method during the Civil War, choosing instead to lead from within the thick of things, but it got him killed. Charlie had no desire for history to repeat itself, but did it anyway.
The central problem was one of perception. The glue holding the pirate band together consisted of three essential ingredients: their greed, his ruthlessness and success at feeding that greed, and his own cult of personality. Men followed Patton because they were ordered to; they followed Spartacus because they believed in him and because he was one of them.
On further consideration, perhaps Spartacus wasn’t the best historical example to use - even if only inside his own head. Charlie had no desire to end up crucified, either.
At the moment, however, he had neither the time nor the need to contemplate such things, as he and ten of his pirates hopped off the two rigid-hulled boats allocated to this portion of the attack, and headed inland. No one opposed them.
He’d expected at least token resistance. Judging from the way his men were scurrying, bent low and cringing toward the nearest cover, as if they might be shot at any moment, they expected it, as well. The lack, combined with the utter silence of the lonely atoll in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, felt eerie, and filled him with a sense of foreboding.
He supposed it was the same at the beginning of any battle. Only the most bloodthirsty psychopaths didn’t feel fear as they awaited the drawing of first blood. Charlie was a great many things - chief among them being a right bastard - but he wasn’t psychotic. Thus, the fear and anticipation.
Part of him was delighted there hadn’t been any resistance, just as part of him wasn’t surprised. They were attacking early in the morning, after all, both by design and because the failure of the Corrigan’s mission dictated they needed to grab the vaccine (and the person who made it) and go, before anyone from the Coast Guard could respond. It could be his plan would go off without a hitch - just another example of chance favoring the prepared mind.
Then again, someone on the Corrigan Cargo III managed to get off a warning transmission before whatever happened to stop any further transmissions. Something or someone had interrupted the broadcast, so the plan might still be viable. They could be launching the nuke toward Oahu at that very moment, though something told Charlie the truth of it. The Corrigan was fucked.
Too bad, so sad...
Didn’t matter. They could still pull this off. He could still snatch success from the jaws of disaster. His plan could still work.
Another historical reference popped unbidden into his forebrain: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Gunfire erupted, as if on cue, shattering the dark, silent night, right along with Blackjack Charlie Carter’s plan.
196
The Tank Farm
Kapalama Basin, Oahu
“Duck!” Jonesy shouted, as his right hand kukri-machete sliced through the neck and spine of a zombie lunging toward the large bosun’s unprotected back. Blood sprayed like a gusher, painting Duke’s helmet with foulness, and covering the left eyepiece in gore.
He clumsily wiped it away with the back of his hammer-filled hand. “A little warning next time,” he grunted, swinging the short-handled eight-pound sledge into the forehead of an infected asshole wearing a Justin Bieber tee-shirt.
“Bold fashion statement,” Jonesy commented, slicing the guts of one zombie with his left kukri, and chopping the arm off of another with his right. Actually, he thought the tee shirt seemed a little creepy, given that the man wearing it looked to be in his mid-thirties, but individual music choice lay so far down his list of important things, as to be nonsensical - which, of course, it was.
It still gave him pause.
Had he become so desensitized by the violence and blood and horror of it all, that such inane observations became commonplace? Certainly seemed so.
There he was, ass-deep in shit - again - killing zombies - again - so they could retrieve the Skull Mobile from the place it had been abandoned, to use it in a desperate rescue through zombie-filled territory. Again.
No wonder his brain was filled with nonsense. He needed it as a buffer to protect him from the utter insanity of the real world.
The empty lot where they’d commandeered the bulldozer, and at the far corner of which they’d picked up the fire truck (both were where they’d left them in Ala Moana State Park) didn’t have a whole lot of zombies stumbling around in it - nothing whatsoever like the mall - but there were still enough to make the journey from the finger pier (where Harold and Scott Pruden waited with the LCVP) to the fire station where the Skull Mobile rested, quite a bit more terrifying than a simple evening stroll. Having no desire to bring a bunch more of the freakazoid assholes down on them by shooting off a bunch of guns, Jonesy and Duke were doing it old school.
Two more zombies, two more dead bodies, and they were finally at the big-ass truck.
Duke theatrically patted his pockets. “Where did I put those keys?” He said.
“Don’t fucking even,” Jonesy menaced.
Duke jangled the keys. “Just kidding.”
“Asshole,” Jonesy replied. “This thing better start.”
197
USCGC Sassafras
ISC Sand Island
“The baby is in the boat,” Jonesy’s voice called over the VHF radio.
“Baby?” Amy Montrose asked, smirking. “Is that a comment on last night?”
She said it in a near-whisper, so odds were no one else on the Bridge could hear it, but the words still sent a frisson of both excitement and embarrassment through Molly’s body, which was sore in some very interesting places. She was tired, and certain Jonesy would be even more so, but she was also elated, and (in a certain part of her psyche), relieved that all the doubt, all the questions, all the internal arguments to the contrary, she’d finally done what she wanted to do all along. She’d given herself to him - willingly, and without reservation.
But to have it called out in public...
“Uh, no,” she replied. “It has everything to do with the fact they managed to retrieve the Skull Mobile and load it on the LCVP.” That was her story, and she would stick to it till the end.
Such an end might be sooner than any of them thought or could want.
The ship hummed with the activity of her skeleton crew, as they made the final preparations to get the Sass underway. Molly would not be going with them. She’d be back in the ungainly Duck Bus for another try at committing organized suicide - this time on Ford Island.
How many times could they go to that particular well? How many times could they taunt death and walk away (relatively) unscathed? How many times before they all died?
Suddenly, the pleasant, glowing remnant of the previous night’s long-overdo trip to Jonesy’s stateroom departed for destinations unknown, to be replaced by the lingering fear that this time could be their last. How much luck did they have? Would today be the day it ran out?
“Roger,” BM3/OPS Rees Erwin said into the sound-powered phone to the engineroom, before hanging it back up and turning to make his report. “Both main diesels are up and ready to go, sir.”
“Very well,” LCDR Wheeler said. He turned to Molly. “All ashore who’s going ashore,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, then saluted, and headed down the ladder to the brow.
Here we go again...
198
M/V True North
24.395292 N 167.69
9874 W
“We’re under attack!” The voice of CWO2 Francis Peavy screamed across the radio ether. “We’re under attack!”
“The idiot sounds freaked,” Gus Perniola said. He and John and Lane were all on the Bridge. No one was sleeping. Not now. Not tonight.
“Can you blame him?” Lane asked.
“Goddamned right,” John spat, as he paced back and forth across the narrow pilothouse. Doing so in general, even when alone, didn’t exactly make for a long stroll, but with two other people in the small compartment, it seemed perfectly pointless. Didn’t matter. He was doing it anyway, if for no other reason than there wasn’t anything else he could do.
His family was under attack. And, yeah, so were the other people on Midway, but he didn’t give a single shit about any of them. Not now. Not tonight. His wife, his son, and his daughter were there, under attack, by pirates. Fucking pirates...
It seemed ludicrous, patently absurd, and utterly insane. Pirates! In the Twenty-First Century! Not that the entire goddamned world wasn’t just as ludicrous, just as patently absurd, just as utterly, mind-fuckingly insane. Wasn’t it enough to deal with a zombie apocalypse? Did there really need to be pirates, too? John didn’t believe in God - not after his childhood - but if God did exist, and if John ever met Him, his first burning question would be: What the fuck is wrong with you?
None of which made a damned bit of difference.
“What’s our ETA?” John asked.
“Same as it was ten minutes ago,” Gus answered.
“About sixteen-thirty,” Lane said quietly.
Eleven hours...
199
Ford Island Bridge
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
“Turn off all the radios,” Jonesy said. He and Duke had transferred from the LCVP to the Sass Two RHIB (leaving Scott Pruden and a not complaining one bit, Harold F. Simmons, jr., to fend for themselves), disentangled Marc Micari from his wife’s still-sleeping arms, and headed off into the morning twilight. Destination: Ford Island Bridge.
They carried fifty pounds of the C4 their civilian mad inventor had procured from the Schofield Barracks armory. Marc wanted to grab the whole hundred, but military grade explosive didn’t exactly grow on trees - not in the midst of an apocalypse - so more frugal heads prevailed, and they’d only taken half. It would have to do.
Not that Jonesy was in any way, shape, or form, eager to blow up another bridge, but it seemed the only way to solve the not inconsiderable problem of the veritable army of zombies stumbling and staggering across the harbor toward Ford Island. They could airlift the people off the other two locations housing survivors they were aware of, but the warehouse containing the Marines would need to be a land-based extraction. There were zombies on Ford Island. Lots and lots of zombies. They would need to go through them to get to the Marines. Cutting off the zombie pipeline from the rest of Pearl Harbor and Honolulu was the only viable option.
A disintegrator ray would come in real handy, right about now, he thought.
Duke eased the small boat up to the first bridge abutment.
“No time like the present,” Jonesy said.
200
Gooneyville Lodge
Midway Atoll
“I’m running out of ammo,” Samantha shouted. This wasn’t strictly true. She still had two full magazines left. She’d started with ten, though.
It all seemed so surreal. She had thought battle would be more real than anything she’d ever experienced, but the plain and simple fact she was even in a battle, in the first place, and thus so far beyond the realm of her previous experience she might as well have been in another solar system, threw reality right out the window. The pirates had come, they’d all opened fire at Doctor Delicious’s order, and now Samantha Gordon, sixteen year-old, recent-recipient of her very first driver’s licence, was yelling for more ammunition. It didn’t get any more unreal.
She hadn’t hit much of anything.
She didn’t think so, at any rate; didn’t see how she possibly could have, since her eyes had been closed for most of it. She’d just pointed and pulled the trigger until the thing was empty.
Other people had hit what they were aiming at, though. A dead body lay in the grass between the tree line and the buildings behind where the old Gooneyville Lodge used to be. Mister Spute had fired the killing shot.
He now dropped three more loaded magazines on the ground at her feet. “Don’t fire so much,” he counseled, then hurried on his way to deliver more ammo to those in need.
Sam looked to Shilo Grant, who hadn’t left her side since the latest insanity began. The slightly older woman gave her a weak smile.
“I don’t think I’ve hit a single one of them,” Shilo admitted. It made Sam feel slightly better.
They’d started by the Midway Mall, but the attacking pirates had overlapped the wall they were hiding behind, and so they’d pulled back, through the trees, to the old hotel. The darkness had been absolute. Even those who’d spent weeks on the atoll were losing their way, but apparently it had been even worse for the pirates. Or so she thought, anyway.
They could be working their way around them as she sat there gathering bloody wool, for all she - or anyone else - knew. They could attack at any moment.
Mister Spute came back through their position, hiding behind a short garden wall that enclosed a long-since dead garden. “Stay low,” he said. “If you get shot, your father will kill me,” he added. They were the last words he would ever say. A rifle shot to his head silenced him forever.
Samantha screamed.
201
Crew Berthing
USCGC Sassafras
Five down, plenty more where they came from, Lieutenant Amy Montrose thought, as she rapped twice on yet another door, to yet another four-person enlisted stateroom, and entered without waiting for a response. There, in the lower bunk, on the left hand side, she found the person she’d been looking for: Tara McBride - who was not alone. YN2 Lydia Claire’s forehead, eyes and nose peeked at her from beneath the obligatory mottled grey, woolen, military blanket.
“Good morning, XO,” Tara said. She seemed not the least bit concerned that Amy - the Executive Officer of the United States Coast Guard Cutter Sassafras - had just caught her in what would be anybody’s definition of a compromising position.
Don’t ask / Don’t tell was long since dead and gone (and good riddance, Amy thought), but homosexuality was still less than tolerated, especially when observed first hand. There were two women - both clearly naked - together in the same rack. No other interpretation could be made. She had caught them in flagrante delicto, as it were.
“Morning,” Amy replied, keeping her voice even. She was no prude. Given some of the exploits of her sordid past before going to the Academy in New London, Connecticut: not by a long stretch. “We’ve been searching for you, McBride,” she explained.
“Oh?” Tara replied, sitting up, causing the blanket to pool into her lap, and revealing the truth of her nudity.
Whereas Seaman McBride appeared to revel in the exposure, Petty Officer Claire seemed to shrink, as if proving Isaac Newton’s dictum: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. She cowered within the blanket. Had there been a dimensional rift in the fabric of reality, Amy was sure the woman would slip right through and disappear. There wasn’t, of course. Such absurdities only existed in the science fiction novels she’d read as a youth. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she thought of them now.
“What’s up?” McBride prompted.
“Get dressed,” Amy replied. “They need you on the pier. We have another mission.”
“What?” Lydia Claire exclaimed, sitting up and struggling to disentangle herself from the covers. Yep. She was naked, as well. “No,” she protested, enclosing McBride in a fierce, one-armed hug.
There it was, right in front of her, absolute, incontrovertible truth of not just simple fraternization, but clear evidence of homosexual activity. It fell int
o a grey area, between the hardline approach of the past, and the uber political correctness of the present. Technically, the two of them were in violation of at least two, and possibly three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As Executive Officer, it was Amy’s duty to respond with disciplinary action.
If you don’t go right now and join that man in bed, then you’re an idiot. The words she’d spoken to LTjg Gordon, just the night before, popped into her mind like a neon sign pointing directly at her own complicit hypocrisy. What’s good for the goose... Who was she to judge the ways of love in the middle of a zombie freaking apocalypse?
“Get a move on,” she said, and turned to go, but stopped before exiting, and added: “Congratulations.” She closed the door behind her.
202
Warehouse 14
Ford Island, Oahu
“The Coasties are still here, Staff Sergeant,” Private First Class Claus Dittery reported, as soon as McNaughton came onto the roof of the building that had served as both their sanctuary and prison for the past several weeks. “And it looks as if we might get some action today.”
“Why wasn’t I informed?” McNaughton asked, not yelling, but letting his displeasure be known, nonetheless. He’d left strict instructions.
“Just saw the small boat about ten minutes ago,” the young Private said, glancing at his watch. “I knew you were getting up and that you’d be coming up here first thing, so...”
The staff sergeant snatched the binoculars from Dittery’s hand. He should say something; rebuke the slacker for failure to comply with his explicit orders. He should be kicking the son of a bitch’s ass up one side of the building and down the other, but the fact of the matter remained: he was goddamned relieved to hear they hadn’t been abandoned.
“Where?” He demanded, keeping the menace in (and the excitement out) of his voice.
Dittery responded by pointing. “Ford Island Bridge, center span.”
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 4): Zombies of Infamy Page 33
