Crossbones (11 page)

Xavier stared at the man, who suddenly seemed surprised. “Oh, no . . . we didn't mutiny,” the man said. “We supported the captain, but there were more of them. The ship went down just off the mouth of the bay.”

“And your captain?” the priest asked.

“Murdered. We came into the bay looking for a safe place to beach.” The launch pilot shook his head. “But the dead are everywhere, and there's no place to land. Then we saw this thing, saw your helicopter.” His shoulders fell. “Please, we don't have anywhere else to go.”

Chief Liebs and Calvin said nothing, and Xavier kept looking at the launch pilot. “Are you armed?”

The man nodded. “We have a rifle, two handguns, and a few knives. It's all on the deck of the boat, and no one is going to touch them.”

The priest took a deep breath. If he went forward now, he'd be putting their plans to the ultimate test. He didn't care much to hear about a violent mutiny, especially not knowing on which side these people had actually been. But then would someone with harmful intentions even mention something like that? Wouldn't a simpler lie suffice and not put prospective new hosts on their guard? The story had a ring of truth, but how loud was that ring? If Xavier turned them away, what sort of man would he be? He looked at the crying child, his mother hugging him close.

“If you come aboard,” Xavier said, “you'll all do exactly as you're told, and answer all our questions. That's the price just to get in. Staying will mean additional agreements.”

“We will,” said the launch pilot.

“Everyone will be strip-searched, one at a time, as you enter. Your weapons and all your bags and possessions will be confiscated for now.”

“We understand,” the man said. “We don't want trouble.”

Xavier said something to Liebs, who stepped back through the hatch. Calvin remained on the platform, rifle aimed at the boat's occupants. The priest pointed to the launch pilot. “You first.”

The man climbed onto the platform and approached slowly, arms still raised. Then he cautiously extended a hand. “Thank you.”

Xavier hesitated, then shook it. “What's your name?”

The man gave him a smile. “Charlie.”

When the Seahawk reached El Cerrito, Evan turned slightly northwest and began following the water's edge of South Richmond, dropping to two thousand feet and slowing to one hundred miles per hour. Gourd had gotten the weather radar working and reported a rain system heading in from the west. He said he saw no lightning strikes. Evan had flown in rain before, but only with Vladimir in the co-pilot seat. He might have to cut this trip short. Still, the front was a ways off, and he still had some flight time before it arrived.

At this altitude and speed, they both had a good look at what was below them. Most of Richmond had burned, and that was no surprise. The tank farms at its western edge had ruptured during an earthquake last fall, and with no one to control the outbreak of fire, the blaze set off row after row of fuel tanks. Winds from the Pacific pushed the conflagration east, where it devoured the industrial areas and rail yards before moving on to consume Richmond itself. Below and to the north, the city appeared as a blackened grid.

The Navy bird passed over Marina Bay, a place of charred docks, gutted multimillion-dollar homes, and no boats of any kind. Anything that once floated there had either sailed away or been scuttled
by fire. The chopper crossed a stretch of water and then overflew a large peninsula neighborhood that the super-rich once called home, their mansions now enormous shells surrounded by charcoal lawns and burned trees.

“You ready?” Gourd asked over the helmet intercom.

“Ready for what?”

The co-pilot laughed. “To be a daddy, dumbass.”

“I'm nervous,” Evan said. “Diapers and formula aren't standard issue on aircraft carriers.”

“Those are just logistics,” Gourd said. “Maya can feed it, and any piece of cloth can be cut and folded into a diaper. People were having babies long before Huggies came along.”

“I guess.”

“You're still nervous, though,” Gourd said. “I get it. I'd be scared shitless.”

Evan thought about it. “I'm not worried about Maya; I know she'll be a great mom. And I'm not worried that the baby will be born with . . .” He trailed off.

“Be born deaf?” Gourd adjusted a knob on the weather radar. “And if it is, that'll be okay too.”

“I know,” said Evan. “That's not it. It's this world. What kind of life will it have?”

They were both quiet for a while as a dead community slid past beneath them, and Evan banked northwest again, still following the coastline. Finally Gourd spoke. “There's got to be pregnant women who survived out there.” His voice was subdued. “Not many of them will have what we have. How hard would it be having a kid in
that
?” He waved at the windscreen. “What kind of life will that be, and for how long?”

“I'm not whining,” Evan said, but still he felt ashamed. His son or daughter was going to be born in safety, under medical care, with both parents still living. It would be a better life than probably any child out there, he decided, and the thought was both sobering and sad.

“I know you're not,” said Gourd. “I wasn't saying that.
I
feel guilty sometimes, thinking if I could trade places with some mother or family out there, let them live on the ship . . . I think the reason I took Vlad's offer to learn how to fly was so that maybe someday I could put my bird down somewhere and actually rescue someone, you know?”

Evan didn't know if that made him feel better or worse, but he was leaning toward the latter. Gourd knew him pretty well, and said, “Your only mission is to protect that family of yours, buddy. You put your ass on the line to make a safe place for them, along with a lot of other people. Don't be anything but happy about that.” He slapped his friend's knee across the cockpit. “You're going to be a good daddy.”

Better than mine,
Evan thought, remembering the fights between him and his father in the years following his mother's death. Dad called him a loser who didn't want to work. Evan shouted that he didn't want a pointless, nine-to-five grind like his old man, wasting his life. Dad called him a bum. Evan said his father might as well have already been dead for how worthless his life had become. All words that could never be taken back, and the last words spoken between them had been in anger.

Will
I be a better father?
he wondered.
Was Dad that much of a shit?
The man had lost his wife of twenty-five years and was left with a son he didn't understand, and who
wouldn't
try to understand
him
. Evan once told Father Xavier that the end of the world had clarified things and put them into perspective. Now he realized it had clarified something else:
regret
. He would never have the chance to talk to his dad again, to say he was sorry for the things he'd said and done. If he truly was to be a good father, he would have to ensure that neither he nor his child left this world having regrets about the other, and there could be no unspoken words. Evan decided that if nothing else, that was a worthy task for a man.

The shattered, circular remains of petrochemical tanks swept
past, and where rail lines wove through the industrial area, entire freight trains had been welded to the tracks by the intensity of the heat. Evan thought about the temperature required to do that and thought surely even the dead couldn't have survived those flames.

“So, Uncle Gourd,” Evan said, brightening his tone, “are you ready to change shitty diapers?”

Gourd laughed. “Hell yes! Bring 'em on!”

“Oh, you're so full of shit.”

“No, man,” said Gourd, “I'm all in. For you and Maya? Anything. Babies bring joy, my friend.”

“Wow,” said Evan, “that is some seriously girly talk for a chopper pilot.”

Gourd laughed again. “You know I'm still a flower child at heart, right?”

The Seahawk flew over the eastern end of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. It, like the highway that approached it, was snarled with motionless vehicles, a silent, dead river of metal that looked out of place against the beauty of the late-afternoon sun on the water.

“Hello,” Evan said softly, slowing the bird.

“What do you have?” Gourd asked, his voice professional again.

“Port side, out where the bridge starts to rise in elevation so ships can get under it.” He stayed over water and descended to five hundred feet, bringing the Navy bird into a hover and rotating left so the cockpit was facing what he had seen.

“What is that, a cargo ship?” Gourd asked, unzipping a breast pocket and pulling out a small pair of binoculars.

They were at least a half mile away. “I don't know,” said Evan, “but it wasn't there when we flew up here last week.”

“Maybe it broke loose of its mooring somewhere and drifted up against the bridge supports?” his co-pilot offered.

“Maybe,” Evan said, but he didn't think so. The vessel was clearly
not
touching any of the supports. He worked to hold the Seahawk in
a hover while maintaining altitude, the effort reminding him yet again that he was a long way from being a skilled pilot.

Through his binoculars, Gourd saw a ship sitting motionless, very close to the bridge, its bow pointed away from them so that the vessel rested perpendicular to the span. It also just happened to be positioned so that the wide strip of shadow cast by the bridge lay right down the length of the vessel. If they had been going any faster, they might have missed it. Gourd didn't believe the shadow concealment was an accident. It was even harder to see because someone had painted the ship black; not a professional job, but thorough enough to cover most of the hull and superstructure. Patches of white poked through in only a few places.

Gourd focused, seeing some movement on deck, and not the slow, stiff-legged gait he had come to expect from the dead. The ship had a sleek look to it, and that was definitely a helicopter deck toward its stern, butted up against a pair of hangar bays.

“That's not a cargo ship,” Gourd said. “It looks milit—”

Evan caught movement. Something on the deck above the ship's helicopter bays swiveled, something tall and mechanical, something with a barrel. “Oh, shit,” Evan breathed, throwing the chopper hard to the right. A string of red, glowing shapes reached out from the ship, and a second later Evan's bird was filled with a deep rattling and the sounds of tearing metal as rounds tore through the troop compartment and shredded the tail. The aircraft shuddered, still turning away, and Evan applied full power. Warning buzzers and flashing lights filled the cockpit as more tracers blurred past the windscreen, several thudding into the turbines overhead. There was a squealing sound, a
boom
, and smoke poured into the cockpit. The bird staggered in the air, now pointed and moving east, starting its fall.

“Mayday, mayday,” Evan called on the
Nimitz
frequency. “Navy zero-two is going down, mayday, mayday.”

The Seahawk spun, both turbines torn apart, the bird's plunge slowed only because of the blades still spinning with their own
momentum, what Vladimir had called
autorotation
. The aircraft was going down at a steep angle nonetheless, crossing the shoreline now and headed inland, the ground rushing up fast.

“Navy zero-two, Mayday, Mayd—”

The Seahawk vanished into the burned ruins of Richmond.

•   •   •

P
atrick Katcher sat in the communication center behind
Nimitz
's bridge. His eyes widened as he heard the tense transmissions, and then he saw the blip on his radar scope that was Navy zero-two blink off the screen.

“Navy zero-two, this is
Nimitz
,” he called.

Static answered.

“
Nimitz
calling Navy zero-two. Evan, come in.”

No one answered, and the blip did not reappear on the screen. He reached for the intercom phone and made an all-ship announcement for Father Xavier to call communications
immediately
. He was going to have to report the unthinkable to the skipper.

Evan and Gourd had
crashed.

January 12—
Nimitz

They were gathered in the officer's mess, the new arrivals kept separated from the main mess hall used by the residents of
Nimitz
. Big Jerry had already brought out coffee, along with a hot chocolate for the toddler, and was now in back putting together soup and sandwiches. The refugees sat at two tables, wrapped in dry Navy blankets, drinking their coffee quietly. Xavier and Chief Liebs had pulled chairs close to them, while Mercy stood at a pair of double doors with her assault rifle slung around her neck. Calvin sat on a table midway toward the other entrance, watching them closely with his rifle across his knees.

“We tried to help people when it started,” Charlie said. “We really did. But we had so few supplies, and there were so many people at the water's edge, everywhere we went.” He looked down, shaking his head slowly. “We couldn't save them all. And we didn't find out about the bites until later, after we brought someone aboard.” He looked up at Xavier. “We lost half the crew. They just kept turning, and we . . . we had to . . .” He looked down again. “They were our friends.”

The priest watched him. Spending most of his life in poverty and crime-stricken areas, where everyone always seemed to be trying to get over on the other person, he thought he had developed a good nose for deception. He wasn't seeing any of that here, just a man reliving painful memories. But he had been fooled before.

“Tell me about this mutiny,” Xavier said.

Charlie nodded. “We were out there for months, and putting in to shore to find supplies was dangerous, worse every time we tried it. We lost more people, and after a while we didn't dare go ashore anymore.” He sipped his coffee. “The food and water ran out; people were hungry, angry, blaming the captain. A young female officer started it, started the mutiny. She promised the crew she would find them food. Lots of people sided with her, people with weapons.”

“And you?” the priest asked.

“We tried to stop them,” Charlie said, “tried to talk them out of it. The female officer killed one of us, a ship's cook, just a kid. She did it to make a point. Then the fighting started.”

Not far away, Calvin listened closely, watching for signs that the man was lying or holding something back. Chief Liebs was watching closely as well.

“What happened?” Xavier prodded.

Charlie told them it happened fast, and was so confusing that he wasn't sure of all the details. There was a lot of gunfire, people running and screaming. He said he saw the female officer shoot down the captain, also a woman. “I killed a man,” he said softly, looking up at the priest. “He was guarding the launch, and I shot him. He was part of the mutiny, but he was also a friend. I didn't have a choice.” He took a deep breath and gestured at the others. “We took the launch and got out, trying to get away from the ship. Someone shot at us, but they missed.”

“We heard an explosion,” one of the women added, saying her name was Ava. She was the one holding the toddler, who despite the
blanket and hot cocoa continued to squirm and whimper. “Something on board blew up,” she said.

Charlie bobbed his head. “Probably the magazine. We saw the ship break in half, and then it sank fast.”

Xavier looked at Chief Liebs for confirmation. The chief shrugged. “A magazine explosion could do that.”

“We . . . we didn't go back to look for survivors,” Charlie said. “We should have, I know, but we were afraid they might be mutineers and would take away our boat. We just kept going.”

“And then you saw us?” Xavier asked.

“We saw your helicopter first. It was taking off. That's when we knew people were still on this thing.” He looked into the priest's eyes. “Please let us stay.”

Xavier pursed his lips. “It will have to be discussed. But you're safe here for now.”

A speaker on the wall of the officer's mess urgently requested that Father Xavier call the communications center.

“Father?” said Charlie. “You're a priest?”

Xavier nodded as he rose and went to a phone. Liebs looked at Charlie. “What's your rate and rating?”

“Petty officer third, bosun's mate,” Charlie replied. “You're Navy, right?”

Liebs nodded. “Chief gunner's mate.”

Charlie extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Guns.” The use of the nickname made Liebs smile a bit and confirmed that if nothing else was true, the man was a seaman as he claimed, albeit a bit old to only be a petty officer third. Still, who was he to judge another man's career movement?

The double doors closest to Calvin pushed open, and there stood Tommy in his scrubs, wearing a backpack and holding a pistol. The orphan girl Wind was close at his side. The orderly saw Xavier talking on a phone, saw Calvin, and waved them over frantically.

Xavier hung up the handset, frowning deeply, and moved to speak with Tommy. Calvin joined them a moment later, and Xavier said, “Chief, I need you too.” Liebs gave the new arrivals a long look. They were heads down, warming up and drinking their coffee, so he went to the three men.

“Comm reports that Evan's chopper is down,” Xavier said, keeping his voice low. “He made a distress call, then went off the radar somewhere over Richmond.”

Liebs cursed. “Did he activate his beacon?” the gunner's mate asked. “If so, we can find him. I'll go pick him up in a RIB boat.”

“I don't even know if he's alive,” Xavier said. “Can you handle this?”

The chief nodded and pushed through the doors, hurrying down the passage and taking Wind with him. This was no place for children right now.

The priest turned and gripped Calvin by both shoulders. “Michael is lost somewhere in the bow. Rosa has gone looking for him.” That was as far as he got. Calvin swore, pulled free of the priest's hold, and shoved through the doors yelling, “Where are they, Tommy?”

“Cal, wait!” Xavier and Tommy both went after him.

•   •   •

I
should get a fucking Academy Award,
Chick thought, standing as soon as the men were out of the room. “Getting more coffee,” he called, waving his mug at Mercy. Standing at the far doors, the woman began lifting her assault rifle.

Ava, the woman who had spoken to back up Chick's story, stood as well, still carrying the little boy and bouncing him as he continued to whimper. She walked toward Mercy.

“Sit down,” Mercy ordered, swinging her rifle barrel toward the woman.

“You're going to scare him,” Ava said, still walking toward her. “We're about to have a potty emergency. I need to take him to the bathroom.”

Mercy's rifle wavered, and she looked back to the leader of the refugees. He had already disappeared into the back with his empty coffee mug.

“Please, he really needs to go,” Ava said, stopping in front of Mercy. “Where's the bathroom?” Her right hand slipped under the blanket and crawled up under the boy's shirt to where she had taped an object to his back. The boy cried and tried to twist out of her arms. “Shh,” Ava said, her hand closing on it. The crew of
Nimitz
had searched all of the adults, but nobody searched children.

•   •   •

B
ig Jerry looked up from a cutting board, where he was spreading mayonnaise on slices of bread. A package of ham slices was open beside him. Chick smiled as he approached, waving the empty mug. “Need a refill,” he said.

The former stand-up comic smiled back. “Help yourself.” He gestured to a big urn on a countertop.

“You folks have been really good to us,” Charlie said, turning toward the counter but ignoring the coffee urn. Instead he plucked a butcher knife off a magnetic strip on the wall. Then he walked to the table, holding the knife low at his side. “That looks tasty,” he said.

Jerry smiled again, then noticed the still-empty coffee mug in the man's hand. “You didn't get—”

Chick's right hand came in fast, and the big comic grunted, eyes going wide. “Hey . . .” he gasped, eyelids fluttering. Their faces almost touching, Chick gave him a grin.

•   •   •

X
avier caught hold of Calvin's arm in the hallway, his strength bringing the man to a halt. “Calvin, wait.”

The aging hippie made a snarling sound and jerked his arm free. “Tommy, where
are
they?” he demanded again.

“They're in the bow,” Xavier answered for him. “If you run off alone it's going to make things worse.”

“That's my son.”

“And we're going to find him,” the priest said. “But we need to be smart, and go with a group.” He looked at the man, at the new anguish stamped on his friend's face. “Maya needs to know about Evan. You should be the one to tell her.”

Calvin's expression fell further as this new realization hit him. First Michael, and now his daughter would have to be told that her man, the father of her unborn child, might be dead. “Oh, God,” Calvin whispered.

“We'll get through this,” Xavier said. “I'll stay with you. We'll tell Maya, then we'll go get Michael and Rosa.”

The hippie sagged against the bulkhead and put his face in his hands.

“Tommy,” Xavier said, “go back into the officer's mess for a bit so Mercy isn't alone in there, okay?”

The orderly headed back down the hall.

“We're going to find him, Cal,” Xavier said, taking his friend's shoulders once again. “Rosa might already have him. You know her, you know she'd give her life to protect him.”

Calvin nodded, but when he took his hands away from his face, his eyes were filled with tears.

“Father . . .” Tommy's voice came from the mess hall doors, and Xavier turned to see the man standing there, his face pale. Xavier and Calvin went to him, and when they entered the room they saw that all the refugees were gone.

Except for the toddler, who was sitting abandoned on the floor and crying.

Mercy was crumpled against the wall in a pool of her own blood, next to the far doors. Her throat had been neatly slit by a straight razor, and her weapons were gone.

“Dear God,” Xavier said, going to the child as Calvin knelt beside a woman he had known for years. Tommy just stared in shock. Then a moan came from the galley, and Big Jerry stumbled through swinging doors. He lurched into the mess hall, moving awkwardly in the knee brace. There was no color left to his eyes, and his apron was stained red. The worst of it was spreading from the point where a butcher's knife protruded, buried in his heart up to the handle.

Jerry made a croaking noise and started toward Xavier and the crying child. With a sob, Tommy used his pistol to put their friend to rest. By the doors, Mercy shifted and opened eyes that were cataract blue. Calvin used his big knife to finish her with a single, sharp thrust, letting out a sob of his own.

Calvin pointed the bloody knife at the priest. “You did this.”

That was when the aircraft carrier began to tremble.