The diesel engine fired, and others had already cast off the mooring lines. Half the people on deck pushed against the mossy surface of the wharf to help the barge move off, while the others began firing at the horde as it reached the end of the pier.
Zombies fell to gunfire. Dozens staggered off into the water, sinking quickly and each replaced at once by another corpse falling into the water. A handful flopped down onto the deck before the barge could gain much distance. More screaming as people tried to scatter from the creatures slowly climbing to their feet.
Maya snatched the handle of a yellow ice climber’s pick from an open Rubbermaid tote and waded in, her face contorted by a silent war cry. She planted the pick in a head, kicked the body free, buried it in another. A drifter came in on her side, close enough to bite, but the young man with the pregnant wife rammed the barrel of a shotgun under its jawbone and blew its head apart.
People scrambled clear as Maya swung her pick in a deadly arc, through an ear, through an eye, overhand and down through the crown of a rotting head. It ended quickly, and the deaf girl stood in the midst of a slaughter, chest heaving, wiping blood off her face with a sleeve. Members of her Family moved in quickly to clean her off with disinfectant wipes, while others rolled the bodies off into the water. Maya never let go of the ice-climbing pick.
The barge chugged steadily away from the pier, and many of those aboard were quickly reminded of a scene they had witnessed before: hundreds of reaching corpses stumbling off the end of the pier and sinking beneath the surface, still trying to get to the escaping prey.
Once the barge was away, Margaret and Maya knelt beside Big Jerry as a few others gathered around. The part-time stand-up comic cracked a joke about fat track stars, his grin failing to conceal the pain of his blown knee. They made him as comfortable as they could.
It was quickly decided that returning to Alameda, any part of it, would be impossible. They would head for the
Nimitz
. On the deck, Sophia moved through the refugees making a head count. They had lost four adults, including Elson, and thankfully no children.
Another woman was doing the count with her. “No,” she said, “your count’s off. We’re short.”
Sophia counted again.
Okay, the woman was right, she was off by two, but Ben was with Vlad, and Vlad was . . .
Sophia began to scream.
• • •
V
ladimir crouched on the destroyer’s gangplank, looking at the moving horde. The drifters on the ship behind him were coming, and he knew he had only seconds before he and his small companion were discovered. He saw that the zombies below weren’t really packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, belly-to-back as they appeared from above. There were gaps, and if he moved fast enough, he just might make it.
Vladimir hugged Ben and ran for a destination on the wharf, sprinting into the horde, weaving like a ball carrier in one of the American football games he had come to enjoy, as snarls surrounded him, bodies lunged, and fingers clutched at his flight suit.
The group had left the car out on the wharf, alone and abandoned. He knew what it represented to them and saw the way Angie’s lip curled every time she looked at it. Because of their distaste they had, intentionally or unintentionally, separated themselves from it. Now, Maxie’s eighties-era Cadillac resembled a white-and-chrome island along the edge of a river of corpses.
Vladimir tore himself away from a drifter’s grip, dodged left, then right, shouldered another aside, and reached the car. He tore open the passenger door and hurled Ben inside, then scrambled after him.
Hands caught at his legs.
An arm encircled his waist.
Vladimir turned, lying half on the seat, and shoved the muzzle of the Browning into a snapping mouth, blowing its brains across half a dozen of its kind. The arm dropped from his waist. Another two bullets and his legs were free, and he hauled on the door handle.
A drifter pulled back, trying to rip the door from his grasp. Ben was screaming, curled up on the floorboards. Vlad kicked the zombie in the chest and it fell back. Teeth sank into the rubber sole of his boot, and he kicked that one away too. More pressed in, and with a curse bellowed in Russian, Vladimir slammed the door shut and slapped down the peg lock.
The driver’s door creaked open behind him.
Vlad rolled on the seat and brought up the Browning, blasting until the slide locked back, clearing the door. He pulled it shut, locking it, then checked to make sure the back doors were locked. They were.
Fists thundered against the sheet metal, covering it in dents, and horrid faces pressed against the glass, teeth biting and leaving scratches. It sounded like being inside an orchestra drum.
The back window cracked. A side window burst into a cloudy mass of shattered glass, still hanging in its frame.
The Cadillac lurched and slid a foot toward the edge of the pier.
Vlad pulled himself into the driver’s seat, reaching for the ignition, keeping his promise and refusing to pray to a sadist who wasn’t listening anyway. He found the keys dangling and started the well-cared-for engine.
The car slid another foot, tires at the edge now.
Vlad had never met the man and knew he never would, but he could tell Maxie had treated this automobile well. Now he would see just how much punishment this classic example of American manufacturing could take as he hauled the wheel over and accelerated into a squealing U-turn. Bodies thumped down the sides, banged off the grille, rolled across the hood, and streaked the windshield with gore. The right tires went up and over what felt like a row of logs, making the suspension twist, forcing Vlad to slow down—if they became high-centered it was over—and then bumping back to the ground with a bounce. The Caddy was pointed back toward the access road to the naval air station, and a wall of the walking dead was before him.
Ben crawled onto the seat and tucked into a tight little ball next to the Russian pilot. Vlad gripped the wheel with two hands and said, “Sing me your song again, little one.”
He stomped the accelerator.
Rosa went in first, her pistol held in a two-handed grip. Her first impression was of something out of a carnival’s haunted house: white walls and divider curtains splashed with red, a white tile floor strewn with corpses and streaked with blood, a stuttering strobe overhead. Even on a reduced reactor,
Nimitz
kept the sick bay fully supplied with power, and every light bar would have been lit if not for the battle damage. Now, fluorescent tubes were shattered, metal housings dangled from the ceiling by conduit, and several lights flickered on and off. A few remained intact, which only served to deepen the shadows.
Every footstep sent empty brass casings skittering across the tile, and Rosa moved carefully, watching the decomposing bodies on the floor for movement. Tommy, Lilly, and Eve stayed close behind her, turning on flashlights.
The aircraft carrier’s sick bay was like a hospital wing, with waiting rooms and records compartments, X-ray and surgical suites, a full pharmacy, and nurses’ stations. To the right was a line of curtained ER cubicles, and up ahead was an eighty-bed hospital ward. At sea, six doctors and a surgeon were assisted by an army of corpsmen and enlisted orderlies, handling everything from garden-variety lacerations and fevers to ruptured appendixes, fractures, and even industrial accidents. In wartime, the facility stood ready to take on combat casualties.
It was the sick bay and the presence of everything she would need to care for the sick and wounded—sterile instruments, bandages and splints, medication, and a lab—that had convinced Rosa to support braving a warship infested with the dead. This facility, combined with someone with medical skills, could be the deciding factor between life and death for the survivors, not only now but in the future. Now that she was here, the medic was determined to take and hold the place.
Combat had taken place here, Rosa thought. Counters and walls were pocked with bullet holes, blood pressure and EKG machines were overturned and shattered, beds were flipped over, and curtains had been pulled down by frantic hands.
Most of the dead were dressed in scrubs; a few were in hospital gowns, and one was in a white lab coat. Near a tangle of bullet-riddled bodies, the corpse of a woman in blue camo sat propped against a wall gripping an assault rifle. She wore body armor and a bandolier of magazines and was covered in bites, one ear dangling by a string of sinew, her dead eyes the color of pewter. A single bullet had pierced her forehead.
Rosa motioned at the armed corpse, and Lilly went to relieve it of its weapons and ammo.
It had been a massacre, Rosa thought as she eased deeper into the hospital. But who had done the killing? How had it started? Something banged against hollow metal down a corridor to her left, and Rosa’s pistol snapped in that direction, Eve following with her flashlight. Open doorways in a darkened hall, blood-slicked tile and stillness in that direction. Behind them, Tommy parted bloody curtains with the barrel of his shotgun, peeking into ER cubicles.
“We’re not alone,” Eve whispered.
“Not since we came on board,” Rosa replied.
The two women moved slowly up the hallway, and when the banging came again, they froze, holding their breath. Then they moved forward. As they came upon an open doorway on the right, Eve put her flashlight inside.
“Holy shit,” she said.
Rosa turned with her pistol and looked to where Eve’s light was pointing. It was a small supply room, with shelves of neatly ordered items stacked in rows: folded sheets and blankets, hospital gowns and robes wrapped in plastic, bedpans, toiletries, slippers, and towels. Several folded wheelchairs leaned against a wall near stacks of red plastic bio buckets. Heaped on the floor in the center of the room, violating the sterile order of the place, was a pile of weapons, boots, and body armor, all of it covered in blood. There were ammo vests and bandoliers, boot knives, grenades, a backpack radio, assault rifles, pistols, and submachine guns. The blood had dried, leaving it all coated in a rusty smear. It looked as if everything had simply been dumped.
It didn’t look Navy to Rosa; these were infantry tools, and the odd, personalized assortment of weapons indicated that it was not from a regular unit. The body armor was a digital black-and-gray pattern, as were the backpacks. Rosa looked at the weapons and ammunition and sighed. They had been down to their last magazines.
Bare, galloping feet slapping at the tile made her jerk left. Rushing out of the gloom was a bare-chested zombie muscled like a weight lifter, wearing black-and-gray camo pants and a black bandana. A skull with crossed daggers was tattooed on his left pectoral, the letters
S.O.G.
inked beneath it.
A Navy SEAL.
Rosa fired, two, three, four times. Two shots went wild, one grazed bone where the thing’s right arm had been stripped of flesh and muscle, and the fourth slammed into its groin. It didn’t slow, and let out a long rasp.
Eve emerged from the storeroom, put her light on it, and screamed.
Tommy’s shotgun went off back in the ER, three shots in succession.
The dead SEAL was twenty feet away, then ten feet. . . .
Rosa fired and the nine-millimeter slug punched through the SEAL’s cheekbone. It didn’t stop. She fired again, grazing the side of its head, and then it was on her, and she fired point-blank. The zombie’s weight slammed into her and threw her to the floor, dark ichor spewing out of the creature’s mouth and onto the tiles beside her, oozing out of the final bullet wound through the bridge of its nose.
Eve started to pull the dead SEAL off the downed medic as a corpse in bloody scrubs staggered toward them from the dark corridor. The woman let go of the heavy, limp body and tucked her flashlight in her armpit, racking the shotgun—ejecting a perfectly good shell—and firing. She had to do it three times before her buckshot hit the mark and put the thing down. By then, Rosa had shimmied out from beneath the SEAL on her own.
The medic went into the storeroom and soon emerged with a second nine-millimeter pistol belted around her waist, a full ammo pouch of pistol mags, two bandoliers of rifle magazines, and an M4, the same assault rifle she had carried overseas. She and Eve returned to the center of the sick bay.
Lilly was sitting in a plastic chair wearing a dead woman’s body armor, weighted down with her gear and looking pale. She gave Rosa a brief smile, then staggered off the chair and threw up. Eve went to her.
Tommy stood nearby with his shotgun. “I got two more down that way,” he said, indicating the direction of the hospital ward. “They looked like patients. I expected a lot more drifters in here, being as it’s a hospital.”
“It’s been a while,” said Rosa. “They’ve spread through the ship. This was probably the site of the initial outbreak. Any hospital would have been the scene of tremendous virus transmission. It would have gotten out of control after it broke here.”
Rosa told Tommy about the weapons cache, and he headed in to re-arm himself. Eve first got Lilly calmed down, then reported that she was happy with the shotgun and would take Tommy’s spare shells when he upgraded to an assault rifle. Lilly didn’t say anything, just nodded that she was okay.
Turning in a slow circle, taking it all in, Rosa was even more convinced that this was where it began, at least for
Nimitz
. Why should this hospital have been different than any other? Wounded personnel had come on board, likely SEALs from what she had seen, which was a common occurrence with aircraft carriers, and they were infected. Medics would have stripped them of their gear so they could be treated, dumping it all in one place so a gunner’s mate or masterat-arms could collect it later. The SEALs would have turned, started biting. Their victims would have turned. Security would arrive to find the place overrun, the dead already spilling out of the sick bay and into the rest of the ship. It would have been dominoes after that.
“We need to clear this area,” Rosa told the others. We need to lock it down and make sure nothing else is in here with us.”
It wasn’t until that moment she realized neither Xavier nor Brother Peter was with them.
• • •
T
he door marked
CHAPEL
closed silently behind him, and Xavier walked into a nondescript room with rows of chairs arranged to accommodate about twenty people. Cabinets lined one wall, and a pair of lecterns stood in a corner, one with a simple cross on its face, the other with the Star of David. The walls were unadorned, and as the priest moved to the front of the room he realized that, aside from the admiral’s quarters, this was the only other carpeted compartment he had seen. A single fluorescent bar was the only source of light in the room.
He leaned the fire axe against a chair and took a seat in the front row, leaning forward and resting his arms on his knees. The wall before him was blank. He assumed, with the multidenominational nature of the crew, that the celebrant for each faith would have his articles secured in one of the cabinets, bringing them out for the service.
Xavier clasped his scarred hands and lowered his head, closing his eyes. Dozens of prayers and litanies came to mind, meticulously memorized scripture passages, all quickly rejected. His shoulders sagged and he let out a deep sigh.
“I’m not sure I even have the right to speak with you, Lord,” he began, his voice soft, “so if it’s all right with you, I’ll speak plainly. I won’t blame you for not listening. I’d be surprised if you did, but . . .”
He was silent for a while, then said, “I want to be able to give them strength, to give them hope, but I’m so very tired. I need you, Lord. I have no right to ask, but I’m asking.” Xavier looked at the blank wall, his eyes moist. “I’m a sinner and a killer, and I broke faith with you when I should have placed myself in your hands. I’m so very sorry for that.”
He was quiet again, thinking of what it truly meant to be a priest. For much of his faith’s history, clerics had sanctioned and planned wars from afar, participated up close, even killed alongside their faithful warriors. All in God’s name. It was a part of his church’s history that few people were proud of, but it was their history nonetheless. Had those priests been forgiven, they who shed blood? Theirs had been a different time, a different world. Was this not a new world as well, demanding a different sort of priest? A warrior? Or was that just a convenient rationalization? Perhaps, now that the world had gone to hell, it was more important than ever to stand as a symbol for peace, to serve as a model of temperance and love. But how long would such a priest survive in this new world? And who was he to make such a decision?
Xavier looked at the blank wall again. It had nothing to say.
“I’ve taken lives, and nothing can justify that. But I know that I can still lift others up with your strength. I still want to be a priest, Lord, and if you’ll allow it, I know I can.” He lowered his head. “I won’t pretend to understand why you’ve chosen to destroy your world and your children, but I’ve been angry with you for it, angry and faithless. Let me be a shepherd in this new world. Grant me forgiveness, help me to make wise decisions. I beg that you not punish those around me because of my weakness. Help me to be the priest you need, Lord, whether a lamb or a lion. Let me renew my faith.”
Xavier pressed his forehead to his clenched hands and wept.
• • •
O
h, listen to this bullshit,”
God said. He was sitting in a chair at the back of the room, legs crossed as He picked a piece of lint off His uniform trousers.
“Bargaining, simpering. It makes me sick.”
Brother Peter used his fingertips to ease the door shut, then stood in the center aisle next to his savior. There were no more doubts about hallucinations. God was here beside him, as real as any man. “Do you hear his words?” the minister asked.
“Of course. He’s sitting right there.”
God mocked him in a falsetto voice.
“Don’t punish them for my failings, let me be your lamb.”
He shook His head.
“He makes me want to puke. Hey, Petey, at least you’ve got some backbone, man.”
Brother Peter looked around at the simple room, intentionally lacking the grandeur and icons of many places of worship. Military order, but with it came a simple purity. “Do you live here?” Brother Peter asked.
The Air Force shrink looked up at him.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s just so . . . plain,” the minister said. “It doesn’t need gold and statues and choirs. Can you hear us better in a place like this?”
God sighed.
“Okay, let’s just settle down, Pete. Don’t get all ‘Filled with Glory.’ It’s a fucking conference room shared by half a dozen faiths who smile at one another and have nothing but hatred for each other.”
God reached up and snapped His fingers sharply in Brother Peter’s face.
“Focus.”
“I’ve broken away from the others,” Peter said, his eyes locked straight ahead. “The priest is a threat, and I need to kill him.”
God nodded.
Peter’s eyes were glassy. “I’m going down to the magazines. I’m going to find the nukes, wire them together, ignite your holy wrath. Praise God.” A trickle of drool escaped unnoticed from the corner of his mouth.
The Air Force shrink stood and clapped Brother Peter on the shoulder.
“Good, let’s get to it. And by the way”
—God looked back to the front of the room—
“he can hear you.”
Brother Peter blinked rapidly, as if coming out of a half doze. God was gone, and the big, black priest was on his feet not far away, mouth hung open and staring at him. Peter realized his conversation, at least the last part of it, had been spoken aloud.
“Uhh . . .” Peter said, locking eyes with Xavier. Then he pulled a grenade from a jacket pocket and yanked the pin, letting the spoon fly. He dropped it on the carpet at his feet, then bolted out the chapel door.
Xavier was diving when the blast and shrapnel tore the chapel apart.