Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (21 page)

Angie sat huddled against the bulkhead near the starboard hatch, the aircraft carrier’s bridge silent around her. She had shut all the doorways and moved from her spot only once, when she could no longer stand the reek of the quartermaster and the presence of the officer who had bitten Skye. She dragged the bodies out to the catwalk and flipped them over the railing, sending them plunging to the flight deck.

Now her only company was the muted starlight beyond the windows.

She sat with the Galil standing upright between her knees, head resting against the front stock, trying to clear her thoughts. It didn’t help. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, she felt drained and everything seemed to be catching up. She was finally able to cry: for Skye, hiding on the deck above, alone with her bite and waiting for the change; for her uncle Bud, a man whose life and death couldn’t possibly be balanced out by her murder of Maxie; for her husband, Dean, and daughter, Leah.

Her husband and daughter were never far from her thoughts. They were like water in a pool, momentarily displaced by a large object, such as when she was shooting. When the object was removed, the water rushed back in to fill the space. How long had it been since she had seen them? More than a month. Could it be two? Days and dates had become confused, blurring together.

As always, she told herself that Dean had gotten them out of Sacramento and safely to the ranch outside Chico, that her mother was looking after Leah the way only a woman could, that they were all alive. She had to tell herself that, or she would go mad. But it was sounding more and more like a lie.

Are
they
so sure that
you’re
alive? Has Dean reconciled himself to being a widower?

She clenched her teeth at the hateful thought. Dean would never give up on her. If he didn’t have Leah to worry about, he would be looking for her already, but Angie wanted them to stay right where they were. She would find a way to get home.

But if that was her priority, why was she here on this suicide mission? She barely knew these people, and most not at all. Was it because the Russian had promised to fly her north when this was over? No, she had been pushing for this assault even before the offer. So why?

Bud Franks, that was the reason, and damn him for affecting her life the way he had. Bud had been a man of right and wrong, of simple beliefs, and one of them was that you don’t run out on the people who depend on you, not once you’ve taken responsibility for them. He was a good and honest man.

And where did Skye fit in? Again, Angie hardly knew her, in fact knew nothing about her life before the airfield hangar. And there was no arguing with the fact that Skye was distant and could be outright unpleasant. Most of the time. Yet Angie felt connected to her. She grieved for what the girl had gone through, the changes attacking her body. And now for the bite, a death sentence.

Somewhere in all this she grieved for herself, and for her family, so alone and far away. Angie cried a bit longer, and those tears carried her into a fitful sleep.

•   •   •

S
kye finished bandaging her arm with the supplies from her small first-aid kit. The bite was deep but hadn’t taken as much flesh as she originally thought. Not that it mattered. It had broken the skin. She treated the wound first with alcohol wipes—the burn of the moisture on the tender flesh was almost as bad as the bite—and then loaded it up with a painkilling, antiseptic cream that would also help with clotting. She covered it in clean gauze pads and wrapped it tightly.

It helped, and both the bleeding and the sharp edges of the pain subsided. At least she would be a bit more comfortable when the fever came for her.

Skye was on the uppermost deck of the
Nimitz
, in an area that a sign designated as
PRIMARY FLIGHT CONTROL
. It was a small room ringed with windows and parked atop the ship’s bridge, the only thing above it an antenna farm and clusters of radar and communication dishes. As with the decks immediately below, the room was surrounded by a catwalk. Some sailor had hand-painted the words
Vulture’s Row
on the metal piping of the catwalk’s handrail, and Skye imagined a row of those birds looking down on something of interest. The nickname made sense to her. The catwalk commanded an all-encompassing view of the flight deck.

There had been no zombies in here when Skye came bolting up the stairs. Now, as she sat in the open air on Vulture’s Row with her legs dangling out over the side, there was only one in the making. Fever, sweating, delirium. That was what she knew about the onset of symptoms. The speed with which it hit was different from person to person—her own symptoms had come on very quickly after her exposure to the blood outside that Oakland church—and somewhere along the way the virus took hold and began the change.

She looked at her left hand in the starlight, trembling slightly. The smooth skin of that hand was the color of ash, the same hue that was overtaking the rest of her body. Her left eye was fully blind now, unable to detect light of any kind. Mercifully, the headaches were gone, at least for now. It was bad enough to have to wait for your own execution without the added suffering of a crippling migraine.

Skye didn’t remember much of her first duel with the virus. The big man named TC had called her a bitch, and somehow she had gotten into the blue truck. She remembered being afraid of TC, of the way he looked at her, hungry and sly. And then there was a foggy span of dreams and nightmares. Crystal had been there, alive and whole. Mom had stalked toward her, dead and losing her insides onto her shoes, stepping on them. There were teachers and boyfriends, all of them dead, miles of the dead. She thought she remembered someone touching her, not in the way a person touched someone who was sick, with gentle hair strokes and soothing wet rags on the forehead. This was different touching, the kind not allowed without consent. Someone said something about having a party.

And then there was a moment of clarity. She saw herself bound and gagged, helpless on her back, partially undressed. TC crouched above her with his broad face covered in sweat, stroking himself with one hand and crooning as he guided his member to her . . .

“Motherfucker,” she whispered.

He hadn’t raped her, she knew that, but he was masturbating. And had he been moving as if he would do more? She thought he had, though it remained hazy. There was also a vague memory of someone else being present, maybe even interrupting the man before he could go further. Had it been Carney? The fogginess frustrated her.

What was clear, however, was that he had preyed upon her while she was in the grip of the fever, fighting for her life, and she hadn’t known until this very moment. Oh, if only she could have remembered earlier, when they were together! She would have shoved the muzzle of her M4 in his mouth, said, “How do you like it?” and blown his diseased brain out the back of his head.

She sighed. The opportunity was gone. TC was somewhere deep in the ship, probably dead by now, and Skye would never get a shot at revenge. Even if she started hunting now, the fever would claim her before she could get very far. And if he was already a zombie, killing him wouldn’t really mean anything. She sighed again, a deep, cleansing breath, and let the anger go.

Skye looked up at the stars and breathed in the salty night air, enjoying the quiet, the calmness in her body. Even knowing what was to come, she found that she was at peace. Not with the world or what had become of it; she would weep for that deep inside, as long as she held on to conscious thought. It was peace with herself. The final, bitter irony was that she should finally come to terms with who Skye Dennison was just as Death was calling her number.

She slipped the nine-millimeter out of her shoulder holster and set it on the catwalk beside her. There was no way she would allow herself to become that which she despised, and it would be wrong to inflict this upon Angie, to put her at risk or force her to fire the final bullet. Angie was a friend, and Skye hadn’t had one of those in a long time.

Skye decided she would wait for the symptoms to start, and then she would do it herself. But not yet. She would watch the stars a bit longer.

“I think I went up too far,” said Brother Peter, comfortable now that the heathens could not hear him speaking. He was seated on the small leather sofa, watching the priest and the medic sleep on the other couch across the room. As Rosa had predicted, he had no idea who she was. “Up to go down, that was the rule. You can only get down there by starting above, but I went too high. I need to get back down to the hangar deck. That’s where they arm planes, I think. That’s the place to start.”

God, looking like the Air Force shrink, sat cross-legged on the end of the conference table, eyes closed behind His glasses, hands resting on His knees.
“Shh,”
He said.
“I’m in the zone.”

“We need to go back down,” said the minister.

God opened one eye.
“You’re such a screwup.
They
won’t want to go below again.”

“I’ll go alone.”

A smile, and the eye closed.
“Do you think you’re going to just walk right in and find them? No one leaves nuclear weapons just lying around, not even crazy-fuck Arab terrorists.”

Brother Peter thought. “They’ll be secured. I’ll need a way to gain access.” He chewed on a thumbnail, his eyes distant. “How will I do that?” He thought about how he had been able to move around the silo way back when. Electronic pass card, of course. Why hadn’t he remembered that?

“Because you’re batshit crazy,”
said the Lord.

“Pass card,” Peter repeated, ignoring the insult. “That’s how we did it.” Who would have access? he wondered. They would probably still have the card on them.

Brother Peter thought about it. The handling of nuclear weapons, in any service branch, was done by specialists, just as he had been. Since dealing with nukes was usually not an everyday occurrence, however, they would have another job, wouldn’t they? Nukes were weapons. On carriers, who handled weapons? Red shirts. They would have access to the magazines, and some of them, the specialists, would have access to the chamber where the nukes were stored. He needed a red shirt with a special access card. He knew how to recognize the card.

“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”
God asked, unfolding Himself from the conference table and tousling Brother Peter’s hair.
“See how much you can accomplish when your mind isn’t boiling over with lust?”

At the mention of lust, Peter immediately pictured Angie West.

“Same old Peter,”
God said, chuckling and glancing at His watch.
“Let’s get Armageddon rolling, shall we? I have other appointments.”

•   •   •

F
ather Xavier pretended to sleep and watched Peter Dunleavy through slitted eyes. The man was sitting stiffly on the other couch, staring at nothing. His lips moved slowly.

“Is he talking to himself?” Rosa asked softly beside him.

Xavier hadn’t known she was awake too. “It looks that way.”

“Is he crazy? He’s acting crazy.”

“Maybe it’s just a stress reaction,” the priest said, standing and yawning loudly to get the other man’s attention.

Peter’s lips stopped moving at once, and the focus returned to his eyes. “We should get going,” he said.

Xavier nodded. “How about we let everyone wake up, and put together a plan?”

The minister slumped back into the couch and crossed his arms. Dakota, Eve, and Lilly joined them a few minutes later, and they all gathered around the conference table. Everyone looked at the priest, except for Peter.

“This hasn’t gone like I’d hoped,” Xavier admitted. “The ship is more complex than I imagined, the dead more numerous. There are so many doorways and passages, places where they can surprise us.” He ran a hand over his head, realizing he needed a haircut. Much longer and he’d have an Afro, he thought, which, as a former Marine, was any hair length longer than a quarter inch. “I feel like we’ve been wandering around without getting much done.”

Lilly put a hand on his arm. “We’re killing them, like we talked about. Every one we do is a step closer to taking the ship, right?”

The others nodded. Peter stared at the table.

“Thank you,” said Xavier, “but I think we can do better. This level of the ship seems to have fewer of them, for whatever reason. That could change rapidly, but for now it’s a good thing.”

“Do you think they all just stopped in place out there because we took a nap?” said Brother Peter. “That’s a little naïve, isn’t it?”

Xavier smiled at him. “Probably. But we have an indication that there’s fewer of them here, so we’ll go on that premise. They’ll be more manageable, so I think we should stay on this level.”

Peter looked about to speak, then closed his mouth.

Rosa was right,
Xavier thought,
this guy
is
an asshole.

Xavier continued. “We should get back to checking and clearing every room, making a mark on the door after we do.”

Dakota retrieved a handful of markers from the tray of a dry-erase board mounted to a wall. “These will do for now, until we find some spray paint.”

Xavier gave him a nod. “We also need to be on the lookout for weapons, and especially ammunition. We’re not going to live long without either, so if anyone sees an armed sailor out there, we should make it a priority and take him down as a group.”

And that was it. There really wasn’t much planning they could do, other than try to clear out the dead. No one suggested retreat, but Xavier did convince them that if they managed to find their way back to the rear of the ship and locate the original stairway, they would fall back to the two boats tethered outside in order to re-arm.

As Rosa had said, the blue tiles not only signified officer country but announced entry into areas dedicated to warfare tasks. They inspected a medium-sized compartment marked
SHIP’S SIGNALS
, a room filled with computer workstations and tall processing units. The only occupant was a decaying female sailor with an old gunshot wound to the temple.

JOINT INTELLIGENCE
was a series of connected rooms filled with more computers, projection screens, shelves of files that were intricately color-coded like those in a doctor’s office, and what looked like endless rows of maps and satellite images in cardboard tubes filed in honeycomb shelving.

As the group fanned out to peek behind workstations and inspect the long rows, Xavier thought about the security clearance it would have required just to enter this room. Intelligence areas in any service branch were highly restricted, and certainly the average sailor on
Nimitz
never saw this place. He was willing to bet that he was the first Marine grunt ever to do so.

The zombie came at him from the left while he was looking right.

It was a tall, dark-haired man, bloated and green, fluids dripping from its orifices onto the floor. It gasped and lunged, and Xavier managed only to twist and put his backpack in the way of the creature’s bite as teeth ripped at nylon. He could not avoid the filthy, ragged nails of its hands as it groped for his face, and in a second it dug four long, red furrows down his cheek. The priest cried out and tried to spin away but slipped in the mess the creature was leaving on the floor and went down hard.

The creature dropped on top of him, gnashing and clawing, and Xavier jammed the axe handle across its neck to keep the teeth away. Fluids spilled from its mouth and turned the wooden handle slick, and a puff of dead air burped from inside the thing, triggering Xavier’s gag reflex.

Rosa ran toward the sound of the fight and slid to a stop in a shooter’s stance, her nine-millimeter gripped in two hands.

“No!” shouted Lilly. She elbowed Rosa aside, and the medic’s shot went into the ceiling. Lilly kept her eyes on the creature, pointing. “It’s green. We’ve seen what happens when you shoot the green ones, remember?”

Rosa did remember. They popped, and sprayed their foul liquid everywhere. Xavier would be bathed in it.

Lilly poked at the raised forehead with her shotgun barrel. “C’mon, handsome, look at me, look at me.”

Xavier was strong, but the thing was wet and heavy, and the cords stood out on the priest’s arms as he fought the weight, grunting with the effort. He turned his face to the side to avoid what was drooling from its maw.

Poke, poke. “Give mama a kiss, sweetie,” called Lilly, as the others arrived and stared in horror. No one wanted to risk grabbing it and pulling it off, for fear the pressure would burst its taut flesh. The thing wanted Xavier, was struggling to bite at the axe handle and get a solid grip with its hands. Lilly was afraid to poke it too hard, but finally she shouted, “Hey,
douchebag
!” and gave it a solid rap on the head.

The thing looked up with filmy gray eyes, snarled at her, and crawled off Xavier. Rosa leaped away and Lilly danced backward, still calling to it as the creature crawled after her on all fours. Xavier rolled on his side, gagging, and Dakota pulled him to his feet.

“Aren’t you a pretty one,” said Lilly, keeping just out of reach, backing down a row of files. “Pretty little thing, you look like a bad acid trip, yes you do. Come on, handsome, come on. . . .”

The bloated sailor climbed slowly to its feet, tottering as the fluids sloshed inside it. It moved forward faster, then broke into a gallop, tight flesh straining at its uniform.

“It’s going to blow!” Rosa shouted. “You’re too close!”

“Not yet,” called Lilly, leading it farther away. “Not yet. Wait . . . okay, kill it!” She had reached an opening in the shelving and dove through. Rosa fired, three quick barks of the nine-millimeter. One round punched into some files, one hit it square in the back of the head, and the last hit just above where its kidneys would have been.

It was green.

It blew apart.

The sound it made when it went was almost as horrible as the splattered mess, but was nothing in comparison to the smell that followed. The group fled the intelligence rooms retching, back into the passageway. No one had noticed that Brother Peter had stood on the edge of the action the entire time, watching and doing nothing.

Rosa took the point and hustled them through another hatch into a small, blue-tiled galley and mess, apparently reserved for officers. The stenciling on the hatch said
DIRTY SHIRT
. Dakota shot down a pair of creatures in cook’s whites, and Eve found a dead boy of seventeen or eighteen standing and swaying near a stainless steel dishwasher. She used her shotgun.

With the room secured, Rosa broke out her medical bag and went to work on the fingernail gouges down Xavier’s cheek, her own face the stone mask of a crisis professional. The priest winced as she cleaned out the wounds, but otherwise didn’t complain. Between street fights, boxing, a gangbanger’s blade, and now the end of the world, his face had turned into a road map of violence.

Rosa sank a needle into the priest’s arm.

“What’s that?”

“Antibiotic, hopefully enough to kill whatever’s inside you. Unless the virus transmitted through the scratches, and in that case you’re fu . . . you’re screwed.” When he started to say something, she shook her head. “I know, you’ve heard the word before. Just be still. Even if the virus didn’t transmit, his claws were disgusting and even a normal infection could be dangerous.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“That’s a big dose,” she said. “You might experience some nausea.”

“After smelling that thing?” Xavier laughed. “How will I know the difference?”

As she applied a square bandage to the wounds, Xavier blinked. He hadn’t thought about getting the Corpse Virus through scratches. The medic saw it in his eyes. “Try not to think about it,” she said, taping down the gauze pad. “There’s no evidence to suggest you can get infected that way. I didn’t see a single case of it in all those weeks at the ferry terminal.”

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen,
he thought. “You watch me closely, Doc. If it looks like . . .”

“I’ll do what I have to,” she said brusquely, “but I’m telling you not to worry. Doctor’s orders. Now let’s go, jarhead.”

They got moving with Dakota on point, Xavier at the center of their little band with Rosa close by. Brother Peter stayed in the rear. They searched the officers’ quarters and found nothing. The air traffic control center, a large room with rows of radar scopes, held a trio of zombies in yellow firefighter gear. They shuffled forward groaning and snapping behind Plexiglas oxygen masks and went down to head shots.

The Combat Information Center, or CIC, was a low-ceilinged room that would have been black except for the colored lights of computer terminals and the hazy blue glow of screens. A pair of vertical, blue plastic plotting boards split the room, covered in grease pencil marks. The air-conditioning was still on in here, and the glowing darkness made the place look like the bridge of a spaceship in a science fiction movie.

The dead surged toward the intruders at once.

There were more than twenty of them, officers and enlisted men in varying states of decay, galloping forward among the terminals. Rosa, the three hippies, and Brother Peter opened up, standing shoulder to shoulder like a firing squad, and the roar of their weapons in such a confined space was deafening. Heads were torn apart and bodies thrown backward, computer screens exploded in showers of glass, sparking like Fourth of July fountains, and the vertical Plexiglas boards disintegrated.

To the right of the shooters, Xavier advanced on a pair of corpses and buried his axe quickly in each of their heads, jerking the blade free and searching for more.

It was over in less than thirty seconds, the stink of old blood and putrid insides mixing with gunpowder, the air-conditioning doing little to dispel the reek. The group reloaded and moved through the room, out another hatch and into a new corridor. After a short distance they were back on gray tile.

A hatch on the left opened into a vacant dental suite that looked capable of handling a dozen patients at once. Rosa told herself to stock up on supplies until she saw what was up ahead, a pair of white swinging doors. In black letters on each door was the word
MEDICAL
.