Crossbones (4 page)

“You
did
do it,” she whispered. She didn't mean the helicopter.

Chick turned to his sister, giving her a salute and a lazy smile. “Captain, boarders have been repelled.”

Liz glared at him, then looked over the side to where pieces of honeycomb rotor blades and other debris were floating to the surface amid a spreading oil slick. “Secure that weapon,” she hissed.

On the lower deck, Lieutenant Commander Coseboom, half carrying a
Klondike
survivor, was calling for a medic. “See to that,” Liz said, directing the order at the young ensign beside her, but still staring at a point in the water where seven men had just lost their lives.

•   •   •

T
he bridge was quiet when she returned, QM2 Waite calmly giving orders to the helmsman as
Joshua James
finished backing into the Duwamish Waterway, preparing to engage forward propulsion. The enlisted man glanced at his commanding officer, who was standing off to the side, hands on her hips and looking up at the bulkhead above the bridge's front windows. Despite her presence on the bridge, his command of the conn had not yet been relieved, so he ordered a course that would take them northwest into Puget Sound, calling for seven knots.

Liz stared at the bold, black letters stenciled above the windows, stark against the white bulkhead.
Honor. Respect. Devotion to Duty.
The Coast Guard's core values. Then she looked out the starboard side, thinking about what she had seen and done in Admiral Whelan's office, about the DEA helicopter and its loudspeaker, and once again seeing her brother leaning on a smoking machine gun.

Her entire adult life had been dedicated to her country, her crew, and saving lives. Now, in the course of a morning, Captain Elizabeth Kidd had broken out a federal prisoner, fired upon and killed agents of a sovereign nation, and unlawfully seized an American military vessel: all acts of aggression against her own country.

The word for that was
traitor
.

“Mr. Waite, advance to flank speed and keep us clear of that destroyer to the north,” she ordered. As she looked out at the gray surface beyond the bow of her cutter, she thought about how quickly things and people could change, and wondered at what new changes lay ahead.

January 12—San Francisco Bay

Father Xavier Church worked the heavy bag, slowly circling on the balls of his feet, throwing punches in combinations. He had already skipped rope until sweat plastered his shirt to his broad back, and twenty minutes on the speed bag had the muscles in his arms and shoulders burning. Soon he would begin running laps around
Nimitz
's flight deck.

He worked the bag harder than usual, fists slamming into the leather and dense padding with thumps that could be heard all the way across the gym. He was worried, and feared for the friends who had lifted off from the flight deck in Vladimir's Black Hawk only yesterday: Angie, Skye, and Carney. He prayed for their safe return from Chico, prayed they would find Angie's family safe and whole. Yet he couldn't help but think that their chances would have been better had he gone with them.

In his middle forties, Xavier's dark brown face was a graphic example of man's capacity for violence. A scar split his visage down the center, from hairline to chin, and a trio of pale claw marks
gouged one cheek. Behind the damage were dark eyes that were both watchful and weary with responsibility. Taking
Nimitz
from the dead had come at a substantial cost; friends had been lost and children orphaned. Xavier felt the absence of every life.

His fists hammered the bag, and he blinked away sweat as he struck, still dancing in a circle. He threw a powerful combination to the center and then a roundhouse high on the bag, hits that would have put a heavyweight on the canvas. Xavier winced as the grenade fragment deep in his thigh twitched, but he gritted his teeth and worked through the pain. Doc had managed to remove all of the other pieces of metal, and now only the one remained, too deep to reach without risking nerve and tissue damage. She hoped movement and time would work the piece closer to the surface, where she could get at it with a simple incision. Doc said it would be a painful process, and she had been right.

A balanced diet from the aircraft carrier's galley, combined with an exhausting and disciplined workout regimen, had returned the priest to fighting shape, hardening the wide V-shape of his boxer's physique. He still limped after exercising, or if he overdid the walking when he was out with the hunting parties, searching out the dead in the carrier's miles of passageways, but it couldn't be helped. There was always so much to do, and Xavier wouldn't allow himself to be slowed down.

He gave the bag a final, powerful hit, then crossed the mat to where a towel was draped over the back of a chair. A pump shotgun leaned there as well. Xavier mopped his head and face, then hung the towel around his neck. He was tightening his shoelaces when a man walked into the gym.

Calvin was older than Xavier by about ten years, but now he looked senior by at least twenty. A gray ponytail hung down his back, and he was dressed in jeans and boots. A sleeveless leather vest revealed lean, muscled arms. The man had ten days of gray stubble on his drawn face, and the lines at the corners of his eyes,
put there by sun and laughter, had deepened from grief. He looked pale, and his eyes no longer gleamed with mirth. Calvin carried an assault rifle, a big knife, and a woman's wedding ring hung from a thong around his neck.

“Sorry to interrupt, Father,” he said.

Xavier finished tying his shoes and stood. It had been only two days since he last saw Calvin, but he was nonetheless startled by the man's appearance. He looked washed out. “Are you feeling well, Cal? Getting enough sleep?”

The man shrugged but didn't reply. He tapped a legal pad he was holding. “I wanted to give you some updates. I can come back if you're busy.”

Xavier frowned. Even the man's voice was diminished, no longer booming and gregarious, and he now spoke only of business, never about his family. Xavier would see him moving quietly through compartments and passageways, usually alone and rarely speaking, tending to the needs of those on board; ensuring they were fed, properly quartered, had enough clothing, and were staying healthy. The only thing he seemed to speak about with any passion these days was his constant reminder to remain watchful and stay out of the unsecured areas of the ship.

He'd lost his wife and brother within hours of one another, followed by more than half the members of his traveling hippie family during the taking of
Nimitz
. Like Xavier, he bore the weight of that, but in his case, it had devoured him.
Ghost
was the word that came to Xavier's mind when he saw his friend. Pale, silent, lacking any spark of life.

“Grab a seat,” Xavier said, indicating the chair.

Calvin didn't take it. “I won't be long.” He looked at his pad. “Yesterday's hunt bagged four drifters down in engineering. No casualties. Chief Liebs thinks they're coming in from the bow.”

Xavier's frown deepened. It was something he and the chief had discussed at length, both of them frustrated by the lack of a
solution. The aircraft carrier's forward decks remained a nest of zombies, mostly in the lower areas. The survivors had tried to contain them, but
Nimitz
was a rabbit warren of passageways, ducts, and connecting compartments, and somehow the dead were slipping into the rest of the ship. Not in great numbers, he conceded, but even one of them in a supposedly secure area could be disastrous. The only way they would ever be safe was by hunting down every last walking corpse, and that was a task not without peril, especially in the bow.

“The doc reported a slip on a ladderway that caused a twisted ankle, and one bump on the head that needed stitches.”

“Knee knocker?” the priest asked. Calvin nodded. Knee knockers were the oval-shaped openings for hatches in corridors and compartments, designed to strengthen the ship's overall structure. The lower portion rose six inches above the floor, while the arched top was lowered, requiring ducking. Passing through them at any speed required timing and kept Rosa in practice with her needle and thread. Both men had visited her for such injuries, angry at their own clumsiness.

“How is Maya?” Xavier asked, interested in her health, but more interested in getting Calvin to speak about his family.

“She says the pregnancy is normal and on schedule,” the hippie leader replied, speaking as if Maya were a stranger and not his firstborn.

Xavier tried again and smiled. “You're going to be a grandfather. How's it feel?”

Instead of answering, Calvin began a terse, bullet-point report on food supplies, fresh water levels, the status of repairs for various ship's systems, an overview of training as everyone learned new skills, and the usual
no results
in regard to their attempts to reach the outside world with the aircraft carrier's communication gear. He spoke of crop conditions. Last fall, Vladimir had set his Black Hawk down in the parking lot of a Berkeley garden center, and an
army of hippies had raided the place for seeds, tools, fertilizer, and bags of potting soil. A small farm was created on the hangar deck, close to one of the aircraft elevators so it could get sunlight. The winter crop was surviving. Many on board were hoping they would find some goats or even a couple of cows out there, and sling them under the chopper for the ride home. Xavier grinned every time he pictured a dairy cow clopping through a space that had once held jet fighters.

Calvin wrapped up his report by stating there had been no excitement to speak of, just another couple of routine days for the survivors on
Nimitz
. It was just the way the priest liked it.

“Cal,” Xavier said, his voice soft, “we can talk any time.”

“I know.”

“About anything. If you're feeling . . .”

The hippie raised a hand and gave his friend a gentle smile, but his eyes warned him off the topic. They had been here before.

The priest nodded. “You know where to find me.”

Calvin left without another word, departing as silently as he had arrived.

•   •   •

X
avier's sneakers thumped on the rubberized coating of the flight deck as he ran, a Windbreaker zipped up to his neck with
U.S. Navy
across the back. It was California, but it was still January, and a chill wind was pushing in from the bay, giving him resistance as he ran. There were no aircraft up here, of course, nothing to interfere with his circuit of the deck's perimeter. He was alone, the only other person in sight a single lookout high on a superstructure catwalk, bundled against the wind.

Nimitz
was facing east, nose-in toward western Oakland, and stuck fast to a silt bed in the shallows about a mile offshore. The aircraft carrier tilted slightly forward and to the left, the result of a
damaged hull that had taken on water. It had been torn by rocks and bridge supports as the great ship cruised unguided through the waters of the bay in the opening days of the plague, and many of the lower, forward compartments were flooded. The tilt was enough to notice when walking or standing, but not uncomfortably so. After what they had gone through in order to make this a sanctuary, complaining about
anything
seemed obscene.

His heart rate and body temperature climbed as he hit his stride, running down the port side of the ship, toward the stern. Behind and across from him, the superstructure rose at the edge of the flight deck like an eight-story building, bristling with antennae, radar dishes, and air defense missile batteries. From here, the view north looked much as it always had, the flat expanse of the bay touched by wind and sunlight, darker smudges of land beyond, too far off to reveal any detail. Bridges still crossed the water, and gulls still swept through the air.

As he approached the stern, however, the view changed, and left no question about what had become of their world.

The Bay Bridge still teemed with the dead, their slow-moving shapes continuing to empty out of San Francisco and into Oakland, even after all these months. Beyond stood the ruins, where clean glass towers had once risen over the hilly city, where streets once hummed with the vibrancy of life. It looked gray now, burned and crumbling, wind sweeping through shattered windows and blowing clouds of ash before it. A city of the dead.

The priest pounded across the stern and headed forward once more, up the starboard side. Another dead city lay ahead, closer than San Francisco, but no less ruined. Fires had done more damage here, spreading from the waterfront industrial areas and fuel tank farms, charring entire square miles of urban area. Oakland looked black, and the occasional gust of wind would kick up clouds of ash that drifted across the city like little coal-colored sandstorms.
Xavier knew the fires would have done little to impair the dead. They would still be shuffling the avenues, charred and blackened, endlessly searching for the living.

Alameda was closest in view, and the dead there could be seen with the naked eye, at least a hundred thousand of them packing the expanse of airfields at the old naval air station. The priest didn't know what had drawn them there, why they stayed and didn't just wander away, but there they remained. From a mile out, the abandoned airfield resembled an open-air concert for a major rock band, a sea of heads and shifting bodies.

Xavier had completed two full circuits of the four-and-a-half-acre flight deck when he heard the hydraulic whine of an aircraft elevator rising from the hangar deck. He looked over to see one of
Nimitz
's Seahawk helicopters come into view from below, and as soon as the elevator stopped, a low, flat tow vehicle driven by a bearded man pulled it out onto the flight deck. A pair of figures, one a woman in blue coveralls with her dark hair whipping in the breeze, the other a man in a green flight suit, followed the aircraft off the elevator. Xavier threw them a wave and kept running.

As he passed the towering crane and the garage door that boasted the
World's Smallest Fire Truck
, he saw a figure step from the wide hatch at the base of the superstructure. The other man looked around, saw him, and waved him over.

Xavier slowed to a brisk walk, puffing and rolling his arms as he started his cooldown. Time to put his administrator's hat back on.