Strands of Sorrow (8 page)
Authors: John Ringo
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #Military
“Reptilian inhabitants?” Petty Officer Third Class Sahms said.
“Snakes?” Seaman First Class Gardenier replied.
“Gators,” Petty Officer First Class Querce said. “Probably. Ask for a clarification.”
* * *
“Ground Ops, Force Ops. Clarify ‘reptilian,’ over.”
“Gators are dragging the bodies and parts into the water,” Faith replied. “The vultures, coyotes and seagulls are fighting over the scraps. Over.”
* * *
“Dragon Three, Force Ops, your camera working, over?”
“Force Ops, Dragon Three,” Wilkes replied. They were just taking off from the
Boadicea
, having dropped off the latest group of refugees.
Despite being the only known Sea Dragon in inventory, they used “three” as their number. The reason was a tiny bit of military trivia. Any military airframe that had the number “One” was carrying the President. Any that used “Two” was carrying the Vice President. So “Three” was the lowest number they could use.
“Do a pass over the kill zone from yesterday’s civilian side clearance. Break. Get a shot. Over.”
“Roger,” Wilkes said, gesturing to the west. “Nature of shot, over?”
“You’ll see it when you see it, Dragon. Multiple requests for video, over.”
“Roger,” Wilkes said. “Proceeding.”
“Wonder what that’s ab—” Sophia started to say over the intercom. “Holy
shit
!”
“What’s up?”
Olga said.
“Wolf, Tang, talk to us!”
“It’s a visual, Legs, Lee,” Wilkes said. “Lean out and look.”
“Son of a bitch!”
Yu replied a moment later.
They’d seen the circle of vultures over both kill areas. That was expected. They’d seen that before and learned to avoid the spirals. But most of the bodies they’d left behind yesterday were already gone. And the waters of the river were
churning
with alligators. The coyotes were basically background to the mass of at least a hundred alligators.
“Tang, Legs. Two-thirty, ground level. In the river up by the bend.”
“What?” Sophia said, skewing her head around. She was carefully circling the feeding frenzy as Wilkes handled the camera.
“Okay, that’s . . . Look there,” Wilkes said, pointing. He’d also directed the steerable camera on the bird’s nose to the sight and zoomed in.
The majority of the gators were swarming halfway down the section of river on the west side of the island. Right by the bridge something was swimming in the river. Sophia had an odd moment of not being able to get the scale. It looked like a house cat. No, it was too big to be a house cat. Either the bridge was
really
small or it was too big to be a bobcat. As it clambered out of the river and shook itself off, she realized what it was.
“That’s a fucking TIGER!” she screamed.
“I know,” Wilkes said.
“It’s a fucking TIGER!” Sophia shouted again.
“Calm down, Ensign,” Wilkes said.
She spun the bird around for a better look, shook her head, then keyed the radio.
“Ground force, Dragon, over.”
“What’s up, Sis? You diggin’ this?”
“Be advised, you have a
Panthera Tigris Tigris
approaching your location,” Sophia radioed. “Potentially hostile.”
“Location, over?”
“Approaching from north on bank having swum the river,” Sophia said.
* * *
“This I gotta see,” Faith said. She wriggled into the back past the gunner, then out the rear hatch and onto the roof. “Freeman, hand up the mike!”
“Roger, ma’am,” Freeman said. He handed the microphone to Lance Corporal Harvey, the gunner, who handed it to Faith.
“J, Shewolf,” Faith said. “Check out what’s approaching from the north.”
“Roger, Shewolf. Care for a skin, over?”
“Possibly gator but not tiger,” Faith said, looking through binoculars. “Look at the dugs. She’s nursing.”
The tigress walked through the surrounding packs of coyotes and dogs like, well, a tigress and settled down to feed at one of the corpses. When a smaller gator approached she growled at it and when it didn’t back off, she spun around, landed on its back and bit down on the back of its head. The alligator was left shuddering in death throes. She went back to eating man.
“Did that tiger just kill a gator?”
someone radioed.
“Calling station, Shewolf,” Faith replied. “They do that. They’ve been observed to kill saltwater crocodiles in the wild. There’s a reason mammals rule the earth. Ground force. Coffee break’s over. This is not getting the mission done. Load up. Container Group. What’s the status on containers to close the bridge?”
“We’re ready when we get the call, Shewolf, over.”
“Ground force, move to escort container force, break.” She paused and looked at the feeding frenzy again. “Upon bridge closure, return this AO. Fire is authorized on canines and canines only. They can’t swim off the island once the bridge is closed and clearly they’re a potential threat. We’ll let the reptilians clear the bodies. Move to link-up with container force, now. No readback. Just follow me.”
“Okay, Freeman, head back to the base,” Faith said as soon as she was back in her seat.
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Freeman said, starting up the M-ATV and turning it around.
“You know how they call amphibious forces the ‘gator Navy’?” Faith said as they drove through the vehicle park.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Takes on a whole new meaning, don’t it?”
* * *
“Civilian side is blocked, locked and the usual chartreuse cleared, sir,” Faith said, saluting Colonel Hamilton. “Any more we’d have to do night sweeps, sir. Should I schedule those?”
“Not at this time, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said, looking around at the mass of equipment. “We’re probably not going to activate the civilian side until we have this side up and going fully. When the lights come on at night, any infected will be drawn to the fence line of this side. Where they’ll be easy enough to eliminate.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Faith said.
“Don’t plan on getting any rest this evening, though,” Colonel Hamilton said. “While the enlisted are hard at work on the AAVs, you and I will be going over plans for clearance of Mayport as well as looking at amphib assault concepts using other than designed ships.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Faith said.
“No rest for the weary . . .”
All four of the Marines started at the pounding on the hatch of Building Fourteen. It had already been a sucky night and none of them needed to get heat from higher.
None of the M1s were in anything like useable condition. Everything rubber had succumbed to the heat, humidity and just sitting. Even Decker was scratching his head at getting the fuel system on their chosen tank working again. He was an experienced tanker which meant he knew more than just “Level One” repairs. But this was something he’d normally be talking to a master gunner tank vehicle repair specialist about. It didn’t help that they were trying to do it all using hand lights and one generator. But they were, by God, going to get the lieutenant a tank. Might be a bit late for her birthday. This was a fucking depot level job.
Januscheitis got up from where he had been replacing another of the sixteen million fucking seals on the bitch and walked over to the hatch.
“Who’s there?”
“Somebody who can knock politely, talk and who would like to get out of the zombie fucking haunted dark!” a voice said. “Open the fuck up!”
Januscheitis cracked the hatch and was surprised to see at least a dozen Navy pukes standing there clutching M4s, shotguns and tool bags.
“What?” he asked.
“Get out of the way, Jarhead,” the short, burly machinist mate first class said, pushing past him. “No way four of you were going to get an M1 this worn-out up and going in four days. Faith was the only entertainment we had for
months
so now you have some
real
mechanics. Where’s the manuals . . . ?”
CHAPTER 6
“Survivors, one-thirty, half a mile maybe,” Olga said. “Livey. Up on the roof of a house. Clear to starboard.”
“Roger,” Sophia said, banking off of the search pattern.
They’d been crisscrossing East Arlington for an hour. Greater Arlington “town,” more of a small city, was not so much a suburb as an extension of Jacksonville, which was across the river.
As with London, it had burned extensively. Whole neighborhoods were gone. But the road network tended to act as a fire-break and while one neighborhood would be nothing but ashes and debris with the occasional infected wandering through it, the next would be relatively untouched. They all were damaged, though. Overgrown, unkempt, yards and gardens run wild. In fact, one way to spot survivors was the occasional carefully tended backyard gardens, always with a fence. They probably snuck out during the day, quietly, to plant, weed and harvest. It was a living.
The other way to spot them was the roofs. There were survivors who had found some stash of food in an industrial building of one sort of another. Some were in grocery stores, others in warehouses. But some had survived in their homes or apartment buildings. In most cases, at some point they had climbed up or chopped through to the roof and painted a distress sign. H-E-L-P and S-O-S being the most common.
Spotting those signs, with a single helicopter, was tough. Not only the satellite people in the Hole but sub crews and pretty much anyone with free time was combing the satellite overheads for them. But they were spotting quite a few that were missed from the chopper.
And, unfortunately, some of those locations were now deserted. They never were sure why and wouldn’t be until someone checked them out on the ground. If that ever happened.
“Force Ops, Dragon, over,” Wilkes said.
“Force Ops.”
“Request permission to discontinue sweep and start doing active rescue, over.”
“Stand by.”
“Roger,” Wilkes said as they passed over the house. There was a woman on the roof waving a sheet. “Mark this.”
“Aye, aye,” Sophia said, hitting the waypoint marker on the GPS.
“Dragon, Force Ops. Permission granted.”
“Roger Force Ops. Dragon, out.” He switched to intercom. “Crew. Get the hoist ready. We’ve got clearance to start rescue ops. We’ll start with this one, then go back towards Mayport and work out from there.”
“Roger,” Olga replied. “’Bout time.”
* * *
“You know, sir, this is almost a waste of time,” Sophia said.
They were hovering, ramp down, over the roof of an apartment building. Five survivors were being loaded, all who had survived in the complex off of Wonderwood Drive.
“Because we can do this all day, every day, and still barely make a dent in the world?” Wilkes said. “I agree.”
“We need to get rid of the zombies,” Sophia said, looking down at the parking lot of the complex. Every time they hovered for any time, infected from the surrounding area closed in. “We could just hover and machine gun them. That way the survivors can self-extract.”
“There’s a lot of bullets on Blount Island, Wolf,” Wilkes said. “But not enough to clear an estimated one hundred million infected. Or weapons barrels or weapons for that matter.”
“We’re loaded and ramp up,” Anna commed.
“Figure out the strategic later,” Wilkes said, pointing southeast. “Next pick-up. Thataway.”
* * *
“You never realize how many cars there were in the world till you see something like that,” Wilkes said, looking down.
The I-295 bridge out north out of Greater Arlington was jam packed with vehicles. There were wrecks, places where people had desperately tried to ram their way out of the traffic jam, some evidence of fire, nothing huge. And now they were rusting ruins, roamed by a few infected.
“Same thing in London, sir,” Sophia said. The Queen Elizabeth Bridge had been dropped but the M25 had looked much the same. Heck, most of London was just as packed with cars. “Not sure how we’re going to move on the ground.”
“By going around the bridge,” Wilkes said. “Okay, do we see any obstructions?”
There was a group of survivors camped out on the mid-river island the bridge crossed at a sand quarry. Possibly they were from some of the people who had gotten stuck on the bridge. Or maybe they’d gotten there by boat but with the exception of one canoe, there didn’t seem to be any boats. What there was was a
huge
S-O-S composed of dump trucks and construction equipment. It was easily visible from space.
“Negative here,” Olga said.
“Nothing here,” Yu added.
“Negative, Tail,” Anna said, earning her a smile from EZ for her correct terminology.
The small camp had fifteen survivors and one of them apparently knew something about air-mobile operations. He’d set out a set of cloth panels anchored by metal parts that were in a Y indicating the wind direction and had the survivors lined up for boarding. He even had them to the side so they were out of the way of the rotor. The one sticky bit was that more than half of them were armed with bolt action or semi-automatic rifles.
As soon as the helo settled, the group moved forward, women and children first. A couple of the women were armed. Anna held up a hand, pointed to the weapons and motioned that they had to be cleared and pointed down.
The women who were armed showed that the chambers were open and she nodded and waved them in. Same with the men. One wanted to load with the magazine in an AR-15 and she shook her head and motioned for it to be dropped.
“Not only no,”
EZ said on the intercom, which the passengers couldn’t hear.
“But
fuck
no. Keep an eye on that asshole, Port.”
His own fingers twitched toward his .45 holstered on his vest, but he stayed in place. Sophia abruptly remembered that EZ’d been shot during an op, and the interpreter who’d done it had been on board his aircraft. The flight engineer was out of his seat, standing in front of the cockpit access, watching the onload with steel in his remaining blue eye.
Leo was forward, casually leaning on his machine gun which
could
be swung inboard.
“Keep the rounds
out
of the chamber,” Olga shouted, moving down the line of refugees. “Rounds, magazines,
out
.”
Some of them had pistols. She was just going to have to accept those. This group didn’t look like the type to try to fully disarm.
“Tell the
Bo
that the incoming group is fairly heavily armed,” Olga said. “Somebody is going to have to explain that they’re turning in their rifles at least.”
“Saw that and called ahead,” Wilkes replied.
“And one of the women is going into labor,” Olga added.
“We’ll call medical.”
“I do so love this job,” Olga said. “Seriously. Like rescuing people. Tired of the question ‘what took you so long?’”
“Would you rather be back on the
Money
?” Sophia asked.
“Before or after you jacked it?” Olga asked.
“I didn’t jack it,” Sophia said. “Officers of the United States Navy do not hijack nor pirate ships. We
requisition
them for the duration of the emergency.”
“Pirate.”
“Slut.”
“Can it,”
Captain Wilkes said. But you could hear the grin in his voice. “Coming into the
Bo
. Get ’em ready to move.”
* * *
“We’re not giving up our guns,” the man said calmly. He was nearly seven feet tall, dressed in jeans and an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt with an old jungle cammie top with staff sergeant’s rank on it thrown over the top, and as unshaven and burly as a biker. “We are citizens of the United States, not subjects of Great Britain.”
Sergeant Major Raymond Barney, late of Her Majesty’s Light Cavalry, British Army, was not a happy camper. He’d been left behind from the mission to secure Prince Harry and therefore was still stuck helping out the bloody Yanks, but at least now with some controlling legal authority. However, he also was still in their bloody Navy, even if he had retained his rank of sergeant major. It was confusing to Naval professionals and even more confusing to the raw, untrained, recruits that they were getting through the process of saying “Do you want to be in the Navy? Here’s a uniform. If it’s moving fast, don’t salute, if it’s moving slow, salute, if it’s standing still, paint.” Since he tended to move at what he considered a “measured” pace, he was so constantly being saluted he’d given up and just returned them.
He understood Yanks had a bloody love affair with their guns but he also understood Naval law and tradition and the reason for them.
“I respect that, sir,” Sergeant Major Barney said. “And if you were on land, I would be the first to insist upon retaining your arms. You are not on land. You are on a ship. A ship flagged by the U.S. Navy. Only officers of the U.S. Naval forces and designated persons, masters-at-arms such as myself, may retain arms on a ship, sir. I and my men shall be pleased to escort you and your people to the arms room. There you shall be given the opportunity to clean and service your weapons and turn in your ammunition. Or you may simply turn them in and clean them after you’ve gotten some food in you and a bit of rest, sir. But you are not boarding this ship further without turning in your firearms, sir. It is not going to happen.”
“Just give us a second,” the man said, his head down and the AR-15 clutched with white knuckles. Finally he looked up and breathed out. “Follow the sergeant major to the arms room.”
“Sergeant . . .” one of the younger members of the group started to protest.
“It was not a
suggestion
, Terry,” the man barked. “The sergeant major is absolutely correct in his reading of Naval Law. And this is, or
should
be, a secure area.”
“It is secure,” the sergeant major said. “We’ve established a vaccination program and obviously the infected cannot access the ship. The reason that arms must be secured is, in fact, to ensure it
is
a secure area, sir. Point of order:
Sergeant
? Unofficial title or official?”
“I’m a National Guard staff sergeant, Sergeant Major,” the man said. “Light cav.”
“In that case, Staff Sergeant, let me be the first to welcome you to the United States Bloody
Navy
,” Sergeant Major Barney said, smiling coldly. “I was
retired
bloody light cav and now I am forced to stand here explaining
plain sense
to you bloody Yanks! As soon as that information is verified, you are transferred at pay rate to the Navy. And as a member of U.S. Navy combat arms, you are
automatically
detailed to the rate of master-at-arms. Therefore, Sergeant whatever your name is,
you
are my new next senior NCO and
I
am your
boss
. Which means that
you
can stand here, after you get a bloody
haircut
and shave that
unmilitary
beard, and explain to your bloody Yank gun-huggers that, no, they are
not
carrying bloody arms onto
my
bloody ship! Is that
clear
, Petty Officer?”
“Clear, Sergeant Major!”
“So you lot go turn in your weapons,” Barney said, in a softer tone. “You’re at the barracks, for God’s sake. You don’t keep a bloody shotgun in your room at the barracks. You keep it where, Sergeant?”
“In the arms room, Sergeant Major.”
“Get some bloody food, take a breath. You’re
safe
. No bloody tricks, no bloody zombies. This is not a movie. This is not a video game. We are not going to stick a wire in your head or something. You are
safe
. It is
my
job to keep you safe when you’re on this ship and I take that job
seriously
. Which means not allowing persons who are untrained in shipboard firearms use running around with bloody arms. So if one of you keeps a holdout and I find out about it, I
shall
feed you to the bloody gators.”
* * *
“Lieutenant, ma’am?” an unfamiliar petty officer wearing master-at-arms insignia said as Faith was tightening a torsion bar.
Faith had insisted on it. Officers do not normally crack track or do other maintenance. By the same token, they are “familiarized” with it in Officer Basic Course and need to know the general outline so they can do planning. Faith’s insistence was based on that. She needed to know, generally, what was involved in getting the tracks back into shape to “increase her general military knowledge.”
The fact that it got her hands dirty and got her out of an office had nothing to do with it. Really.
So Staff Sergeant Decker was “instructing” her on the Preventative Maintenance and Service Schedule of an AAV-7A1. He was telling her what needed done, politely, and she was doing it.
“Stand by,” Faith said. She braced and hauled back on the massive fucking wrench, letting out her breath in a controlled “saaah.”
“Right there, ma’am,” Staff Sergeant Decker said. “That’s the right tension.”
“Roger, Staff Sergeant,” Faith said, letting up. She undogged the wrench and set it up on the track, carefully. Decker had already, politely, read her the riot act for just dropping it on the ground. You did everything perfectly by the book with Decker, which is why she liked him as an instructor.
