Crossbones (30 page)

Nimitz

Michael was about fifty feet away from her, with only the curving catwalk between them. Only it wasn't Michael anymore. It was . . . something else.

In the glow of the flashlight beam, Rosa could tell by the wounds on his naked body—and the creamy glaze of his eyes—that he was dead. The shock she felt in knowing that the child she'd come to rescue was lost to the dead was replaced by her horror at the changes he had undergone. His flesh was a maroon shade, and new muscle rippled across his chest, arms, and legs, far more than nature had ever allotted to a ten-year-old boy. She thought she saw the muscles shiver beneath the taut skin. Michael had grown no taller, and his powerful upper body joined with the small stature reminded her of baboons and pit bulls. He bared his teeth.

A word floated up from her memories of catechism class:
demon
.

Mutation
was the next word. Although the medic had a quick and capable mind, she had trouble wrapping her head around the idea that a genetic mutation could do that, and so quickly. It wasn't possible.

The impossible creature hunched and curled its fingers into claws, then let out the crazed, inhuman screech Rosa had heard earlier. The medic recoiled at the sound, her bladder nearly releasing in the same primitive reaction as prey in the wild when confronted by a predator's cry. The thing moved at her then, fast and low, powerful leg muscles driving it forward.

Rosa jerked the pistol up and fired twice. The first bullet hit the meat of a pectoral muscle, and it didn't flinch. The second bullet hummed through empty space, because the creature was no longer there. With a grunt it leaped sideways, flinging itself over the railing, out into the center of the room with its forest of pipes.

There was no thud as it hit bottom, because it didn't land. Rosa caught a glimpse of it hanging from a large valve wheel by one hand, then swinging its body out of sight behind a cluster of pipes. She hunted for it with the light, shadows flickering between the vertical steel tubes. Rosa tracked the pistol along with the moving flashlight.

There was a
clang
, a series of thumps, and another
clang
.

It's moving through the pipes, leaping from one to another.

The primordial screech came from somewhere within the steel forest, and Rosa fought the urge to bolt. Neither did she dare to freeze as she knew it was still moving in there, no doubt getting closer, trying to flank her.

Rosa's eyes went up as she raised the flashlight higher, to where the pipes stretched upward another deck. Maybe it was climbing above her and preparing to drop while her eyes looked for it at this level. She snapped the light back down and caught a flash of dark red skin as it leaped between pipes, ten feet in and six or seven feet higher. She almost squeezed off a shot, but then it was gone.

The moans of the dead horde in the pipe shaft echoed off the walls, and her flashlight showed her that the first of the corpses had completed the climb up the stairwell. A
Nimitz
crewman in blue coveralls with most of his face bitten away stumbled along the catwalk, the others close behind it.

She had to move but was afraid that if she turned her back, Michael would be on her. Where could she go? Climb the nearby ladder to the little platform and hatch above? The dead couldn't climb ladders. That thing could, though. Then she decided it wouldn't even need to go up the ladder. It could scale the pipes and then leap across space, landing on her back as she climbed. Her panic and indecisiveness had her paralyzed.

The screeching howl came again, perhaps from the center of the pipe forest, perhaps from above. She couldn't tell and kept probing with the light, desperate to find it so she could kill it.

It's different from the others.
Can
it be killed?

Groans from the left, closer now. She snapped the light over and saw ten of them, rotting in their uniforms and work coveralls, surging down the curve of the catwalk toward her.

Can't stay! Two bullets left, can't face them. Move!

Rosa moved, running to the right around the curve, away from the horde. The sounds of thumping against metal came from the pipe forest as the thing moved with her, possibly above her now. Michael had come through a hatch on this side. It was her way out. And there it was, set in the wall on the opposite side of the room from where she'd entered, standing open and . . .

Corpses were pushing through from the other side, one after another, tripping over the knee knocker and then pulling themselves upright, eyes reflecting the flashlight beam. They snarled and moved toward her, their noises echoed by the hungry figures behind her.

The bone-chilling screech came again from the pipe forest.

•   •   •

W
ith a roar, Charlie Kidd leaped through the hatch from the hangar deck, triggering a burst from his M14 at waist level. The priest was thirty or forty feet away, pistol raised and facing him in a long passageway. Among Coast Guard boarding parties, and in all law enforcement circles, hallways were known as
fatal funnels
; there
was simply no place to go once the shooting started, and when there was a shooter at each end, the one slower on the trigger usually died.

Charlie and Xavier fired at the same time.

The big black man went down with at least one hit to the chest. In the same instant, the senior chief felt the side of his head struck as if by a hot, iron fireplace poker. He grunted and collapsed against the left wall.

•   •   •

X
avier was flat on his back. The 7.62-millimeter rifle bullet had hit him in the right side of his chest like a train, and he couldn't remember falling or banging the back of his head on the steel deck. He couldn't breathe and felt like an elephant was standing on him as he fought to draw in air. The pistol was no longer in his hand, and he clutched at his chest through the armholes of his body armor. The fingertips came away slick and red.

Have . . . to . . . breathe . . .

Xavier couldn't move, simply lay on the deck like a fish out of its bowl, sucking at nothing. His vision grayed at the edges.

•   •   •

H
ead wound.
Chick's mind struggled as if moving through mud, fuzzy and blinded with a white, pulsing light he couldn't escape by closing his eyes. He was lying on one hip, sagged against a bulkhead, and the world's nastiest headache had his brain in a vise. Something warm and wet was running down his neck.

Fucker shot me in the head.
He was amazed. He wasn't supposed to get hit! One hand rose to the side of his head, fingertips shaking, and he touched ragged flesh where his right ear had been, finding only a bloody channel plowed along the side of his skull by a bullet and ragged pieces of meat that had been his ear. He stifled a cry, tears running from his eyes as he squeezed them shut, trying to
block out the glare of white pain in his head. He wanted to be sick. His hand fluttered and fell to the deck with a thump.

Sleep. I'll sleep, and then I'll feel better.

Chick's body relaxed and slid further down the wall, and the pain seemed to subside just a little bit.
That works. Sleep . . . I'll just . . .
A groan from down the corridor made him open his eyes. The priest was rolling onto his side, trying to get to his hands and knees.

No!
Charlie fought to rise, felt the passageway spin, saw the black man fall to his stomach, then grip the frame of an open hatch and pull his body through. The chief bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, the pain widening his eyes. He grabbed the M14 from the floor beside him, forcing himself to stand as he leaned on one wall.

Then he was staggering down the corridor and fighting double vision, intent on the hatch, as he left the handgun and a blood trail behind him on the deck.

•   •   •

T
he smallest of breaths caught in his lungs, and Xavier gasped, trying to pull in another. He was still on his hands and knees, blood was dripping from one side of his body armor and onto the deck, and his chest hurt so much that he wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. He was sluggish, wanted only to lie down until he could breathe again. Another short breath, and Xavier fought to draw air as he grabbed the side of a metal locker and used it to help himself stand.

It was a large storage room, filled with rows of equipment lockers. Yellow oxygen tanks with hoses and masks hung on one wall, and filling the center he could see long racks of yellow coats and pants, rows of boots and lines of helmets. Firefighter gear. A steel ladderway on the left climbed one wall to the deck above, but the
thought of dragging himself up those steep stairs made him gasp harder.

He pulled a long, wheezing breath, still holding on to the locker and wanting to lie down. Was his right arm going numb? It felt unresponsive, but that might just have been a reaction to the pain in his chest. Another small breath. If only he could rest for a few minutes.

He heard bootsteps in the passageway beyond the hatch.
Where my pistol is.
Xavier clenched his teeth against the pain and plunged into the racks of coats and gear.

•   •   •

S
tone and Chief Liebs ran across the flight deck, looking for cover as the carrier's bridge rained fiery debris from above. The blare of a fire klaxon filled the air. They found a depression on the starboard side and jumped down into it, a rectangular pocket in the deck where launch controllers had once gathered to manage flight operations, protected here from the waist down. Pieces of twisted, smoking metal clattered to the deck around them.

Liebs looked up at the shattered bridge level, billowing smoke in the moonlight.
Banks . . . PK and Maya . . .

“Out there!” Stone shouted suddenly, pointing across the water.

Liebs could feel the carrier moving, but without the landmarks of San Francisco and Alcatraz—both had vanished beneath the surface—it was hard to judge direction. He thought they were moving west, and a glance forward showed him the hills of Tiburon, the northern support of the Golden Gate Bridge coming up on the right. Yes, it was west, with the black Pacific beyond.

The gunner's mate looked to where the younger man was pointing. In the clear lunar glow, the low-slung, black silhouette of the enemy warship could be seen pacing them several miles to starboard. And then the shape was obscured behind a red-and-white flash.

“Incoming!” he yelled, pulling Stone down into the flight
controller's pocket. A shell screamed in, and then there was a blast, the aircraft carrier shuddering as the
BOOM
of a deck gun rolled across the water. Another high-pitched whine then, another
BOOM
, and a second impact shook
Nimitz
.

Liebs lifted his head and risked a look. The superstructure had taken no new hits, and the flight deck was clear.
The hull. They're going to sink us.
A third shell detonated against the aircraft carrier's port side.

Stone was standing up beside him now and had come to the same conclusion. “What can we do?” he shouted.

Liebs shook his head. “Not a goddamn thing.”

•   •   •

C
alvin grabbed the railing of the starboard catwalk and hung on as a third shell punched into the other side of the ship, then started moving again. Bodies littered the grid of steel underfoot, freshly killed humans as well as the dead put down a second time, and his boots pounded among them as he ran for the short stairway leading to the flight deck.

The shriek of an inbound fifty-seven-millimeter shell came a second before another blast and rumble. He climbed to the flight deck, saw the smoking bridge high above, and saw the enemy ship steaming parallel to them miles away.

“Liebs! Stone!”

“Over here!” the gunner's mate shouted, and Calvin spotted the two men. He ran to them and jumped down into their hole.

The deck gun put another high-explosive round into the carrier's savaged hull.

“Can we shoot back?” Calvin asked.

The gunner's mate shook his head. “We've got nothing but the fifties. And even if we put a fifty-cal on the port rail, they're out of range. It wouldn't do much if we
could
hit them. That's a goddamn warship out there.”

The hippie leader's mind raced through everything he knew about
Nimitz
, everything he had seen, then stopped when his mind came to a single image. “Chief, can you put one of those RIB boats into the water?”

“Look, if we abandon ship—” he started.

Now Calvin shook his head. “Can you do it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

The older man told him what he wanted, and the gunner's mate looked at him with cool, appraising eyes for a long moment, then nodded. “It might work, Cal,” he said. “But it's a long shot.”

“Cal, no way!” Stone shouted. “That's insane!”

Calvin smiled at the boy, squeezed his shoulder, then showed them both the bite wound. Stone cursed and looked away. Chief Liebs looked at the torn flesh that was a death sentence and said, “We have to hurry.”

Richmond

Where cities once rose from the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay, an angry planet had thrust a fifty-four-mile-long wall of bedrock high into the air, a cliff climbing a hundred feet above the crashing shore. In what had been Richmond, a fragment of red-and-white radio tower jutted horizontally over the water, wedged into a crack at the base of the cliff.

Evan, his back pressed against the rock and his boots braced on a steel crossbar, sat atop the remains of the tower, his useless left wrist in his lap. Death was coming for him in the form of a rotting, middle-aged woman wearing scraps of a red dress, strands of wet hair plastered to her pale face. Waxy blue eyes stared at him, and teeth clicked together as the corpse dragged itself down the length of the tower.

In the distance there was an occasional red flash in the night, a hollow boom, but Evan's attention was locked on the drifter. If the dead had been more coordinated, he knew, it would be on him already, but it moved slowly, gripping the steel and pulling itself
forward. A wave surged up from below, and for a moment the tower was awash, the dead woman lost from sight beneath churning foam. Perhaps it would wash her off? But then the water receded, and she was still there, hanging on and inching forward.

The flare sputtered out, leaving them in the black-and-white of the strobe blinking on his vest. Evan popped his remaining canister, jamming it into the rock face, able to see her once more in the dazzling pink light. The drifter made a croaking noise deep in its throat. Ten feet to go.

Another wave pushed up onto the tower, and for an instant a pair of bodies was tangling in the broken steel at the far end, arms flailing. The tide carried them away before they could catch hold.

How many of the dead in the Bay Area?
Evan did the math.
Eight million? Most of them would be in the sea now, churning with the current like vast schools of fish. How long before more washed up onto the tower?

The dead woman croaked again and pulled herself closer, closer, one hand reaching out to touch his right boot. Evan pulled his legs in. She advanced, and reached again, clawing for his ankle.

Evan kicked out savagely, his heel connecting with the bridge of her nose and rocking her head back. He kicked again, feeling bone give way beneath rotting flesh, and the dead woman pawed at the boot hitting her face, letting go of the steel. Another kick sent her off the tower and into the sea.

“Yes!” he cried. “Drown, bitch!”

The next wave brought another pair of drifters against the twisted radio tower, and this time both creatures managed to hang on. They clawed their way to the top and started pulling themselves toward him.

Evan thought of the woman he loved, the child he would never see, and his despair turned into a sob.