Chimera-44 (3 page)

“
Will do, Away Team, be
safe over there.”

Wilson moved to the hatch at the rear
of the bridge and peered down into the interior of the ship. He
fished a flashlight from his life vest and triggered a beam down
the ladder well. More flies buzzed up to greet him from below. He
was so glad that this was his last week in the Patrol Group. Next
Monday he reported to his new assignment as a naval attaché.
Tuesday he was set to leave for Los Angeles, and then for a
month-long Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii. He just
had to get through today.

“
Well, this is what they
pay us the big bucks for,” he said with a forced smile to the
sweat-soaked sailor behind him, and started down the
ladder.

“
I’d rather drag my balls
through broken glass than go down there, sir,” came the response
back even as the sailor was slinging his rifle to follow
him.

With the small flashlight in his
mouth, Wilson carefully climbed down the ladder with one hand for
his pistol and the other for the rungs. He came out into what
looked to be the ship’s galley, as evident by a number of pots
slowly moving on the wall with the drift of the derelict vessel. He
played the flashlight along the perimeter of the new compartment
and illuminated the dark in rays of passing light. It was a wreck
of dishes, blood, and filth. Flies scattered in the light like bats
in a cave and buzzed around his eyes and mouth as he stood there.
On a table mounted against the wall was another body.

“
Look at that bloody Muppet
there, sir,” said the sailor as he aimed his rifle at the body atop
the table.

Wilson concentrated the beam of his
flashlight on the cadaver in question and examined it briefly from
arm’s length away. The skin and flesh on the face of the man had
been pulled away from the skull, exposing teeth and pink bone to
the air. The beam of the flashlight reflected white from the teeth
now visible due to the absence of the cheek muscles. The man was
shirtless and the skin of his brown chest showed circular bite
marks and a slash from one side of his ribcage to the other. In the
open wound, pink lung tissue bulged from around a cage of exposed
ribs. A double handful of maggots hurriedly worked along the
opening to accomplish their own mission. On the arm closest to
Wilson, he could see an ornate tattoo in what looked like
Indonesian script.

“
Sir…” said the sailor in a
deep whisper, “the eyes.”

Wilson pointed the light back to the
face of the body on the table and stopped on the eyes. Ever so
slowly, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing as it sat on a
flower, one of them was blinking.

As he stood fixated on the
blinking eyelid, the lieutenant reached for his radio to
tell
Larrakia
to
send over the medic. The crackle feedback of the radio was electric
for the injured man and Wilson froze as he saw the head pivot
towards him on the table. He took a step back and extended his
pistol out defensively into the man’s face.

“
What the hell…” said the
sailor behind him as he brought his own weapon up to the injured
man’s face.

“
Stay there please, sir.
You have been injured,” Wilson said, struggling to regain his
composure. “We have help coming.”

The man sat up on the table and
pivoted his legs over the edge in one fluid movement. As he did so,
dark and thickly mottled organs pressed against the jagged wound
across his chest. The man pushed himself off the table and onto his
feet, swaying briefly before he caught his sea legs again. With
arms outstretched, he reached for Wilson and opened his mouth in a
raspy guttural sound.

The sailor’s rifle was deafening
inside the sealed metal box of the compartment as three rounds of
5.56x45mm NATO green tip barked the short distance from the muzzle
to the decomposing man’s face. In a shower of congealed black
spray, the man staggered backwards and slumped to the
deck.

Wilson turned to the sailor, his ears
ringing and yelled, “Are you mad?” as he wiped blood and fluids
from his face and eyes that had splattered there from the
inconceivably mobile attacker.

The sailor shrugged and stammered an
explanation that the young lieutenant could not make out in the
shadows of the compartment, illuminated only by the puddle of beam
coming from his flashlight. The radio crackled in Wilson’s ear but
was drowned out by the sounds of pounding on the bulkhead walls.
They were not alone on the ship.

He pulled the sailor close to him and
yelled in the man’s ear, “Let’s go back on deck. There is something
very wrong here.”

“
That’s the understatement
of the year, sir!” yelled back the equally deafened sailor as he
checked his weapon and slung it over his shoulder.

Wilson scrambled up the ladder well
back to the putrid wheelhouse of the ship and turned to help the
sailor up. As soon as the man’s head and shoulders popped above the
hatch, his face contorted into horror.

“
They’ve got my legs!
They’ve got my legs!” the man screamed as he struggled to heave
himself out of the hatch to safety. With the Steyr AUG slung across
the sailor’s shoulder, it was trapped by the confines of the well
and useless to the man.

Wilson shone his light down the narrow
ladder well and caught the sailor’s attacker in the illumination.
It was the same cheek-less tattooed man who had just eaten three
5.56mm rounds at point blank range only a moment before. He was
hungrily tearing at the flesh in the back of the sailor’s thigh
with his teeth. Other hands were reaching up as well from the
galley below. Recoiling back in horror, Wilson let go of the sailor
and the man disappeared down the hatch. His screams filtered back
up the ladder well and filled the bridge, echoing off the rusty
metal.

The lieutenant fought the urge to look
down into the compartment below, but mustered enough strength to
slam the hatch closed and dog it down to keep it that
way.

“
Larrakia
, Away Team,” he said
breathlessly into the microphone of his portable radio over the
screams below deck. “The situation here has changed…”

—
| — | —

Chapter 3:

WPA Flight 6551

Peter Soto watched as his son licked
his finger, jabbed it into the tiny bag and swirled it around the
bottom. The bag had formerly held a half dozen salted cashews,
heavy on the salt and light on the cashews. Over the years, airline
flights, even intercontinental ones had become skimpy on the
snacks. If he had paid cash instead of traded his miles in for this
flight, he would have almost felt the need to complain.

“
Where are your brothers?”
he asked James, the oldest of his three boys. Of course, it wasn’t
just James, but David and Andrew, the elementary-aged boys that
needed the most attention.

The teenager shrugged as he licked the
salt from his fingers, with his ear buds from his iPod crammed deep
into his ears he probably had not even heard what he asked. Peter
reached across the aisle and pulled one of the buds out of the
man-child’s ear.

“
Where are your brothers?”
he asked again with the same type of firmness he used with his
employees.

“
They went to the bathroom,
Pops. It’s not like they can leave the plane or anything,” the boy
said with all the disinterested sarcasm that only a
sixteen-year-old that knew everything could properly
muster.

“
Go find them and don’t
come back until you do,” he said to the boy. This was greeted with
a dramatic sigh as the teenager lurched forward into the huge
forest of seats inside the Boeing 777 jumbo jet to seek his lost
siblings. The 777 held three aisles of three seats each across and
the boys had the whole of the far aisle to themselves in seats 40A,
40B, and 40C. Peter was just across the aisle from them in 40D, so
that he could block them in if he needed to.

Peter settled back into his seat and
resumed browsing his e-reader. Of their 31-hour journey back home
from Australia, the 7491-mile West Pacific Airline flight from
Sydney to Los Angeles was by far the longest single leg. Once that
was behind them all they had to do from LA was hop a flight to
Atlanta, then a short one-hour hop to Mobile and a drive back home
to Gulf Shores. He needed a vacation from his vacation.

The Australian trip was a chance for
him to reconnect with his boys. The three had spent all year with
their mother in Montgomery while he lived in an empty four-bedroom
house in Gulf Shores. Since the divorce, he had seen less and less
of them, but that had all changed after the custody agreement had
been modified. They were enjoying going back to school and he
enjoyed not having to write four-figure child support checks every
month to that shrew. The boys had collectively voted for a trip to
see what Australia had to offer and Peter had made it
happen.

The passenger on the center aisle seat
next to him lolled his head once more onto Peter’s shoulder. The
man was fast getting on his nerves. He had been agreeable enough
when he first boarded. Said his name was Wilson or something like
that. Some Crocodile Dundee navy-type going to LA and then Hawaii
for an exercise, he had said. The guy looked like hammered dog
shit. Sweating, coughing, pale, and clammy, Peter jokingly wondered
to himself if he was going to make the 15-hour flight without
dying. He had heard rumors in Sydney about some sort of flu
outbreak in Darwin, but dismissed it. After all, Darwin was a
continent away from Sydney. He glanced at his watch, five more
hours until they reached LAX.

He saw his sons coming back down the
aisle of the jumbo jet towards him. James stood behind the two
younger boys, pushing them along like a warden with two
prisoners.

“
They were wandering around
upstairs,” the teenager said with a half-frown, “I had to promise
the stewardess that they’d stay in their seat the rest of the
flight.”

“
We just wanted to see the
plane, Dad,” offered David, the youngest of the three boys. “It’s
huge.”

“
Yes and so was the one we
flew to Australia in last week,” he replied, “Now the three of you
get in those seats and don’t move until we get to California.” On
the flight out David had been fascinated by the hydraulic toilet
seat in the bathroom.

“
But what if we have to go
to the bathroom?” asked David with a shocked look.

“
Hold it.”

The boys climbed into their seats and
slumped in a rare gesture of solidarity.

“
Buckle yourselves in,”
Peter ordered.

“
But the sign isn’t lit
up,” protested James, pointing to the dark FASTEN BELTS sign at the
front of the cabin. The world of teenage injustice had to be
crushing. “Mom wouldn’t make us unless the sign was on.”

Peter dropped his voice to
a low rasp, “I’ll give you something to whine
about
if you keep it up,
mister.”

The three boys, in a display of
juvenile showmanship, dramatically buckled themselves into their
seats. David looked dejectedly out the window at the passing
clouds. Andrew pulled out the tablet he got for his birthday and,
with his lip poked out, started tapping on different menus. James
returned to the world of his iPod.

Peter resumed his own book and willed
the flight to speed up. They were all cranky after being cooped up
all day on the plane. He was sure everything would be ok when they
got back home. The flight attendants should be serving the rubber
chicken dinner soon and after that, they would be almost to
LA.

It was then that he noticed the
blood.

At first, it was just a single bright
red blossom about the size of a dime on his right forearm. Then as
he watched two more dripped down to join the first. It took him a
moment to realize that it was coming from the sick Australian Navy
officer buckled into the seat next to him, but when he did, he
seethed.

“
Hey, buddy,” he said,
elbowing the man in his side. “You are bleeding on my
arm.”

No response other than a mumbled grunt
came from the man.

Peter pushed the man over and away
from him as far as he could and, wiping the blood from the back of
his arm with a collection of napkins left over from lunch, pressed
the CALL button to get a stewardess over. As he waited, he looked
at the sick man’s face. His lips had turned blue and his cheeks
were covered in swollen splotches of pooled blood. The man’s eyes
were closed and he was unresponsive. Every few seconds, a drop of
blood would fall away from his nostrils. Peter wanted to jump up
loudly and step away from the man, but he had to set the example of
calmness for his kids.

A stewardess, an older woman with a
hard face and hair the color of dishwater, appeared in the aisle
between himself and his sons. Immediately she saw the
problem.

“
Oh my god,” she said aloud
with a hand to her face. “Is he ok?”

Peter looked at her. Was she serious?
“Well I don’t think he wants the chicken,” he said as he stood up
and sidestepped away to allow her to take his place.