Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (22 page)

Both doors were chewed by bullet holes, empty shell casings covered the floor of the hallway, and the left door was marred by a pair of bloody handprints, now turned a rust brown so dark it was almost black. The battle that had taken place here made them pause, as did the absence of bodies. After a moment, Rosa led them forward, and the little group eased through the double doors.

Rosa and the others were so intent on what awaited them on the other side that they failed to notice Father Xavier was no longer with them.

Neither was Brother Peter.

Carney awoke to the smell of a burning cigarette. He was slumped in an uncomfortable position in the rolling chair, and he groaned as he straightened, opening his eyes. TC was sitting a few feet away, elbows on his knees, watching Carney. A cigarette dangled from his lips, smoke curling toward the ceiling. There was a slight smile on his face.

“What are you looking at?” asked Carney.

TC puffed and ground the butt out under a boot. “Nothing.”

“Then go look at it someplace else.”

The younger inmate chuckled.

A fake potted tree in a corner of the TV studio served as a urinal, and as Carney relieved himself he checked to be sure the nine-millimeter was still in his back waistband. It was. “We have to decide what to do,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re still in a dead end.” And there was still a steady thumping at the hatch.

“I got that figured already,” TC said from across the room. Carney waited to hear some juvenile plan about opening the hatch and going out hard and fast, but when he turned around, TC was no longer in the room.

“In here.” His voice came from within one of the open doors across from the control booth.

Carney entered the narrow electrical room, where he found TC on his hands and knees in front of a two-foot-square opening, a pried-off metal panel leaning against the wall beside it.

“It’s some kind of service tunnel,” said TC.

Carney crouched behind his cellmate and aimed his Maglite beam down the tunnel. It was tiled, tight, and packed with conduit, breaker panels, and bundles of colored wire cabled to the ceiling.

“How did you find this?” Carney asked.

“I woke up before you did,” TC said, looking back and grinning. “Started poking around.” He crawled into the tunnel, his big wrench in one hand.

Carney felt an involuntary chill at the idea of TC up and moving around while he slept, unaware and defenseless. He couldn’t let that happen again.

TC had forgotten to turn off his own flashlight before they slept, and the batteries were dead. He asked for Carney’s, then kept crawling as his cellmate followed. It was extremely tight, especially for two men built as broadly as they were, and at times they had to lie flat on their backs and shimmy to squirm past an electrical box or under a thick bundle of cable. Carney didn’t envy whatever sailors had been responsible for servicing this area, but he was willing to bet they had been young, flexible, and small.

After forty feet of crawling, they came to the back of another gray panel. It was secured by screws coming in from the other side and would have to be forced open. Turning in the cramped access tunnel in order to kick it free was an impossibility, and neither wanted to back out just so they could repeat this crawl feet-first. TC shuffled onto his back and began slamming the head of his wrench into the metal.

Carney winced at every strike. If those things weren’t already waiting for them on the other side, this would surely draw them. He waited in the dark, gripping the checkered grip of his pistol, smelling their combined sweat.

The panel popped off with a bang and TC scuttled out. Carney expected snarls and reaching hands, but there was nothing. He crawled after his cellmate and was able to stand in another square electrical room. TC’s hand was already on the handle of the only door, and he threw it open, lunging through and raising the wrench. Carney rushed out nearly on top of him.

The door banged into a dead sailor in a brown jersey and the creature groaned, staggering back. Two others in brown charged forward from the right. Carney shot the closest one in the face, so close that its forward momentum carried the zombie into him, throwing him into the wall. The second one came on and added its own weight, ripping with its jagged fingernails and snapping its teeth as it tried to reach past its dead comrade and get to the meal.

TC swung the wrench in a high arc over his head, but the ceiling was too low and the head of the weapon was stopped by a steel pipe. The sailor in brown flung itself at the younger inmate, and TC straight-armed it with his left hand. The zombie bit down on TC’s fingers, its teeth scraping the protective mesh of the biteproof glove. With a snap of its head it tore the glove off his hand. TC snarled and punched the creature in the side of the head with the fist gripping the wrench. It rocked to one side and came back biting.

Carney heaved against the weight, using the corpse pinned against him as a shield, trying to slide out to the right. The head of the twice-dead corpse lolled bonelessly between them, glassy eyes seeming to stare at Carney as black ichor spilled from its sagging mouth. Carney shoved again, gaining a few inches, and popped free to the right. The second zombie shoved the limp corpse aside and reached, only to have the nine-millimeter go off an inch from its forehead. It collapsed on top of the first.

TC leaped away from his own snapping opponent and swung the wrench sideways, connecting with its ear and snapping its neck, causing the head to slump onto the shoulder. The creature moaned and kept coming, and TC swung again, hitting the same spot, and staved in its skull. A dozen more grunting blows while it was on the deck turned the head to fragmented jelly.

Carney tracked the pistol around the room, a long space with racks of pocketed vests, rows of steel-toed boots, and dozens of helmets with attached goggles. Nothing else was moving.

“TC, you okay?”

The younger inmate stooped to pull the biteproof glove from the creature’s mouth. The webbing of his left hand between the thumb and index finger was torn and bleeding, the bite mark a curving series of red dashes marring a tattoo of a cross and swastika.

“I’m good,” he said, turning away from his cellmate’s view and quickly pulling the glove on over the wound.

They took a moment to catch their breath, then left the room and entered yet another narrow corridor with scattered lighting. The perfume of rotting flesh was thick here, but both had become accustomed to the smell. The hall led them past a garbage disposal area where the hatch stood open, permitting the rich aroma of the ship’s trash system to float into the hall. If a zombie had been lurking in the room, the smell would have effectively masked its presence. Carney pulled the hatch shut as they passed.

A steep ladder led them up to a large fan room, where only two of the big units were still turning, creating a hum that made the floor vibrate. A corpse in blue, shot down during the fall of the ship, was sitting on the floor slumped against one of the fans, a scattering of bullet holes piercing the sheet metal around it. The fan blew the scent of its decay through the room.

“Why don’t we see rats?” TC asked as they moved through the area. “I thought all ships had rats. This place is one big fucking Thanksgiving dinner for them, man.”

Carney shrugged. “It’s a Navy ship. You allow rats in your areas and they hand you your ass.”

“I hate fucking rats,” said TC. “Remember the rats at the Q? Big enough to put a fucking saddle on.”

Carney remembered. They were big gray-and-brown Norwegians, aggressive and smart—just like all the other animals in that paradise on the bay. As long as they never showed up in the administrative wing, the warden didn’t give a shit. Carney had no good memories of that place, but it didn’t surprise him that TC was feeling nostalgic about prison. It was where he had spent most of his life. It was what he knew.

The fan room led to an air filter cleaning shop, and then back into another corridor. To the left was a heavy steel hatch with a small, circular window inset that glowed red. The word
RIB
was stenciled on the steel. Their other choice was a short hall leading to another hatch marked
PARACHUTE BAY
.

TC hefted his wrench and went through the
RIB
hatch, and at once both men were hit by clean air from outside. The smell of decay was absent; a large, rectangular opening in the far bulkhead allowed a view of the water out the starboard side, a still-dark sky filled with stars above. Red battle lights lit the compartment.

RIB stood for
rigid inflatable boat
, as they quickly learned. The boats hung on racks on two walls, black rubber marked with
CVN-68
along with their own number, with bins of life jackets nearby, and a rack of upright, outboard motors to the left. The rectangular opening to the sea was fitted with a pair of swing-out arms, boat davits each with an attached winch. One of the boats rested on the deck near the opening, its bow attached to one winch line. There were shell casings on the floor, and a rusty smear on the side of the boat, but no bodies.

“Looks like someone tried to get out,” said Carney.

TC kicked the side of the boat and spit. “Too bad you want to stay. Here’s another chance to split.”

“Why don’t you go instead? I’ll help you lower the boat.”

TC gave him that uncomfortable smile. “I’m having too much fun. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

They left the boats behind and made their way down to the parachute bay, opening the hatch into a long, high chamber hung with white shrouds. The parachutes were suspended from above like long curtains, coils of nylon line at their base.

Carney was reminded of a movie they showed at the Q over a decade earlier, a big-budget Bruckheimer production about World War II, filled with waving flags and a soaring soundtrack. It was really more chick flick than war movie. He remembered a love scene in a parachute hangar, the billowing white silk adding to the romantic setting.

There was no romance here. Zombies moved within the shrouds.

Their silhouettes shuffled behind the layers of silk, slouched and dragging, pawing at the fabric and beginning to moan as they heard or smelled or sensed prey enter the compartment. TC tried bashing one with his wrench, but the parachutes and silhouettes skewed his depth perception, and the wrench puffed harmlessly into the silk, making it billow.

“Up the side,” Carney said, leading them along a wall, past a bank of industrial sewing machines and cabinets of supplies. The silhouettes moved with them, boots sliding over steel, silk whispering across rotting bodies.

A woman in uniform, most of her scalp torn away and leaving only clumps of matted hair, stumbled through a gap in the parachutes and grabbed at TC. Carney shot her down, and the gunfire made the rest howl and move faster.

They found the room’s corner and followed the wall left. A closed hatch appeared up ahead, and they were nearly there when bodies began tumbling out of the shrouds, decaying sailors with cloudy eyes and snapping teeth. TC bellowed and threw himself into them, swinging the wrench and spraying red and green across the silk. Carney fired until he was empty, slapped in another clip, and fired some more, trying to pick out targets without putting a bullet in his cellmate. In less than a minute the deck was cluttered with motionless bodies.

TC used his sleeve to wipe off his face, smearing it across his forehead, grinning as his powerful chest heaved from the battle. “I love this shit,” he said, his voice a groan of pleasure.

Carney just looked at him and inserted his last full magazine into the Beretta, then led them through the hatch. They could travel down either of a pair of narrow corridors or climb a stairway into darkness. The older con switched on his Maglite and took them up.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Calvin whispered, peering around the edge of the hatch and into the large room beyond. Behind him, Evan pushed up close so that he could see too.

Both the officers’ and enlisted mess halls sat amidships on Second Deck, about a hundred feet of distance between them. Each was served by its own galley, but both depended on the same vast stores: humming banks of freezers, perishable coolers, and large chambers for dry goods. Under normal circumstances,
Nimitz
carried enough frozen and dry goods to feed a crew of six thousand enlisted personnel and officers for ninety days without requiring resupply. In the recent atmosphere of political instability overseas, carrier supplies had been increased to six months, permitting short-notice and long-term deployment. The Navy liked its ships to be as self-sufficient as possible.

Nimitz
’s galleys could feed up to five hundred sailors at a time, and the mess halls were caverns of long tables and benches, self-serve tray lines and drink dispensers, and long collections of trash and recycling bins. The walls were covered in motivational posters, newsletters and notices, bulletin boards where photos from recent ports of call were pinned, and numerous informational posters about the Navy policy on sexual harassment and fraternization, issues of real concern on gender-integrated vessels.

The galleys were expansive spaces of clean stainless steel tucked behind the serving lines. Rows of ovens and grills, coolers and sinks, dishwashers and deep fryers were arranged according to a Navy planner’s sense of order and efficiency. The industrial kitchens devoted entire rooms to cleaning supplies in order to keep floors and surfaces spotless.

Evan thought it had been Napoleon who said an army travels on its stomach, and he decided the Navy was no different. Gathering to take a meal wasn’t merely a biological need for survival; it kept people happy and motivated, allowed them to bond over a shared experience. To Evan, more important than navigation and weapons systems would be the mess hall.

Perhaps that explained why the place was packed with zombies.

There were hundreds of them, wearing every conceivable type of uniform: cook’s whites and camo, medical scrubs and khaki, coveralls, firefighter gear, and every color of jersey. All were bitten and torn, all were decaying—some dry and withered, others green and juicy—and all were dead. Milky eyes stared out of darkened hollows, little moans and airy wheezing issued from split and torn lips. Most were standing in one place, packed closely together and facing in the same direction like a concert crowd, swaying slowly, as if to the beat of an unseen band.

Somewhere up near the front of the horde, however, was an urgent, rhythmic moaning and the unceasing hammering of many fists on metal.

They’re not here because this place was important to them,
Evan realized.
They’ve got something cornered, and they just won’t go away.

Calvin and Evan looked back at their little group, six in all, and told them what they had seen.

“We could just close the hatch quietly and move on,” Calvin suggested.

The others shook their heads. It was Stone who said, “This is what we came for. If we can do it, we’ll really make a difference, right?”

The aging hippie looked into the boy’s eyes, seeing no fear, only determination. “Yes,” Calvin said, “we could. But there’s a lot of them. We all have to be in.”

Nods all around. They were in.

Together they made a plan of how the shooting would proceed, preparing all their magazines and loose ammunition. Then they lined up and moved into the back of the mess hall, single file and quick. They lined up side by side, with Dakota and Juju tasked to watch the hallway and their backs, protecting them from ambush.

Their preparations went unnoticed, the horde facing away and swaying.

The line opened fire.

Stone was reminded of a shooting gallery he had once visited at a carnival. For Evan it was like tossing a rock into a lake and hoping to hit water. The dead were packed together tightly, and, give or take twelve inches, most of their heads were on the same level. Even when they turned to face the gunfire they could barely move, and many of them remained upright even after a head shot, their limp bodies supported by the crush of the others.

Assault rifles and shotguns crashed, bullets and buckshot finding their mark and spraying dead faces with gore. Stone intentionally sought out the “greenies,” bursting them at a distance. Slugs tore through chests and necks and shattered collarbones, but most hit the target. In this moment, the crew of
Nimitz
was truly equal, officers dying with enlisted men and women; fuel handlers, technicians, and basic seamen collapsing in tangled piles; radar operators and catapult officers going down next to those who handled mops and haze-gray paint all day. The ship’s executive officer, who had been dragged onto the vessel’s bridge as it entered San Francisco Bay, already turned and hungry, opened his mouth to moan and caught an assault rifle bullet through the front teeth, blowing out the back of his skull. He fell across the body of an eighteen-year-old discipline case who had spent most of his cruise scrubbing toilets and urinals.

As before, when the symphony of firing was replaced by the clicks of reloading, the dead began to press forward. Unlike in the past, not only were they slowed by their own mass, but a sea of dining tables stood between them and the newly arrived prey. Those who tried to climb over were quickly picked off.

The firing soon returned to its crescendo, gun smoke setting off smoke detectors that went off like high-pitched screams. Brass and plastic hulls carpeted the tiled deck as the shooters rapidly depleted what remained of their ammunition.

Calvin saw a gang of zombies moving left behind one of the serving lines, trying to come in from the side, and he took his time shooting them down, making every precious bullet count. Mercy dropped to one knee and used her M4 to eliminate an entire row, one by one from left to right.

The dead moaned, and died.

Bullets punched into drink dispensers and stacks of plastic trays, blew apart clusters of condiments on tables, put holes in the walls and ceilings and sparked off stainless steel. A bank of fluorescents shattered and its housing crashed down onto the heads of the mob. Another fire extinguisher went off like a baby powder bomb, and the putrid fluids of the deceased splattered across every surface.

“Move forward!” Calvin shouted over the next reloading.

Evan, Mercy, and Stone advanced up the right, feeding their weapons on the move, with Calvin moving left, inserting a fresh magazine. At the door, Juju and Dakota watched the hall nervously, wanting to join the fight, but knowing they played a critical role there. As they moved, Evan and Stone pulled pistols to finish off those that were still alive and writhing, pinned beneath mounds of dead sailors. Calvin and Mercy kept up their rifle fire.

Time became suspended, and for the little group the world shrank to include only the enlisted mess of the USS
Nimitz
and its ghastly inhabitants. Soon they were walking among the dead, picking their way through and climbing over, trying to stay atop the dining tables and still firing. Mercy shot an eighteen-year-old from Oklahoma who had joined the Navy to escape the drugs, teenage pregnancy, and hopelessness of her hometown. Stone put a final bullet in the head of a helicopter pilot who had turned without ever knowing that his pregnant wife was safe at a Texas refugee center. Evan blew the head off a thirty-year master chief who had been afraid that retirement would leave him without purpose in his life. Calvin shot a nineteen-year-old who couldn’t wait to get out of the Navy because he couldn’t live with the tormenting he received for not concealing the fact that he was gay.

The firing grew sporadic as targets became fewer. Stone ran to one wall and secured a pair of hatches so no new arrivals could flank them. Calvin shouted for Juju and Dakota to secure their own door and join the group.

Mercy, Evan, and Calvin moved into the immense galley to hunt the dead among rows of refrigerators and microwaves, baker’s racks and prep tables. When one popped up, they put it down without hesitation and moved forward. Calvin found a short hallway leading to the nearby officers’ mess—a quick peek revealed it was empty—and secured the door.

They all came together at what had drawn and kept the horde in this place: a large metal door to a walk-in cooler or storage room, its stainless steel surface so hammered by fists that it looked like crumpled tinfoil. The metal pin securing the handle had been dropped into place, and it was bent from ceaseless pulling and pounding.

Something was thumping at the door from the inside, and a muffled sound—moaning or yelling, they couldn’t tell—came from within.

Mercy used the metal barrel of her flashlight to hammer the bent pin out, and as soon as it popped free she pulled the handle and leaped back, Calvin and Evan standing with weapons leveled, tension on triggers. A wave of foul air billowed from the opening.

Five of the dirtiest, most foul-smelling men they had ever seen stood just inside, all of them bearded and in the same clothes they were wearing the night the ship fell. Beyond them was a dry-goods storage stacked high with cardboard boxes, littered with empty food containers and plastic bottles. The men were pale and gaunt, and they slowly raised their hands as if in surrender.

The man in front, wearing blue camo, looked at each of them and their weapons, his sunken eyes darting. “Chief Gunner’s Mate Liebs, United States Navy,” he said, his voice more of a croak than anything. He slowly pulled a large brass key from down the front of his shirt, hung around his neck on a chain with his dog tags. “I need to get to the armory.”

•   •   •

W
e were falling back,” Chief Liebs said, sitting on a dining table and drinking a bottle of water with the others standing around him. The four men who had been trapped in the storeroom with him were washing at the galley sinks, Dakota standing watch nearby.

“It was me, Sanders, and Lieutenant Sharpe, my commanding officer. We were herding some of our shipmates along”—he gestured toward the men washing in the galley—“and were cutting through the mess. We just couldn’t hold them back, and everyone was dying. They came at us in here from all sides. We burned through all our ammo and I was using my weapon like a club, had it torn right out of my hands. Sanders screamed and went down.” He shook his head. “The lieutenant led us back there, pushed us all into that storeroom. He must have been the one to drop the pin on the handle.” He paused. “He saved our lives.”

“You’ve been in there since this started?” Calvin asked.

Chief Liebs nodded. He was in his early thirties, hair already silvering, not especially tall but with a straightforward, pleasant face. The other sailors in his party called the chief gunner’s mate “Guns,” a nickname of respect.

“August thirteenth, I think,” he said. “What day is it now? I tried to keep track, but that didn’t last long.”

Mercy told him she wasn’t exactly sure either, but that it had to be well into September or even beyond. The realization that he and his shipmates had been barricaded in that storeroom for over a month shocked the chief.

“They’ve been pounding at that door the whole time,” Liebs said, looking at the piles of corpses, wondering if the officer who had saved them was here, realizing he probably was. “They couldn’t get in, and we couldn’t get out.”

Chief Liebs told them the storeroom was ventilated, so there was no fear of suffocation, and stocked with plenty to eat and drink. There was no way to dispose of waste, and they had turned a corner of the room into an impromptu head, which of course made the entire space reek. They had fashioned a deck of cards with cardboard and a marker to pass the time. Liebs lowered his voice and admitted that each of them had struggled with having no sense for the passage of time, day or night, and the endless pounding and moaning at the door had been maddening. That one of his men might commit suicide had been his biggest fear, and Liebs had used every bit of his leadership skills to keep them from making that choice. As Evan listened, he decided it had been the man’s personality and caring that kept them alive, nothing he had learned from the Navy.

“What’s the condition of the ship?” Liebs asked.

“It looks like it ran aground,” Evan said, “just off Oakland. It’s infested with the walking dead, and you’re the only survivors we’ve found.”

Liebs was quiet as he absorbed this: the loss of his ship, the loss of so many friends. At last he looked up at them. “I have a fiancée in New Jersey. Do you know anything about what happened back east?”

They didn’t, but told him a little about what had become of California, or at least what parts of California they had heard about. Mercy rubbed the man’s back slowly. “She might be okay,” Mercy said. “You can’t assume she’s not.”

The chief nodded without comment. He asked if there had been any Navy activity around the Bay Area, any other ships or aircraft. He frowned when they told him there had been none, and they shared what they had found at the USNS
Comfort
, the hospital ship resting abandoned and overrun by the dead at an Oakland dock.

When the other sailors joined the group, Liebs introduced them to their rescuers. All were young and male. One was a basic seaman, a boatswain’s—or bosun’s—mate, another was an electronics technician, and the third was a petty officer second class who was an operations specialist, a carrier’s jack-of-all-trades. The last in their group was a young man from Colorado, a machinist’s mate and petty officer third class whom Liebs referred to as a “nuc,” pronouncing it
nuke
.

“You can tell because he glows in the dark,” Liebs said, making the boy smile. “He helps run the reactors.”

“How are they?” the nuc asked. “At least one must be at reduced power. Have you been down there?”

Calvin gave the boy a smile. “Son, we wouldn’t know a nuclear reactor if we were standing in front of it, and no, we haven’t been down there.”