Crossbones (5 page)

Evan and Maya walked across the deck holding hands, following after the haze-gray helicopter marked with
NAVY
and the number
2
on the tail, to where it had been towed. Evan was of average build, and his once-collar-length black hair was now neatly trimmed in a military style. In his midtwenties, he wore a flight suit with the legs bloused into boots, a survival vest, and the Sig Sauer Calvin had given him snugged into a shoulder holster under his flight jacket. Maya, just twenty, wore blue coveralls that didn't do justice to her slim figure, though she swore she was developing a pot belly. Doc Escobedo assured her she was only now entering her second trimester and wouldn't be showing for a while. A small, .380 automatic handgun was tucked in a pocket of her coveralls.

The bearded hippie unhooked his little tow vehicle from the helicopter's nose, gave Evan a thumbs-up, and motored back to the elevator. Maya moved close to the aircraft in order to get out of the wind, pulling Evan's hand as she brushed blowing hair from her face.

“Two hours, right?” she signed. Maya had been deaf and mute since birth.

Evan made sure he was facing her so she could read his lips. His
signing was improving every day under her tutelage, but he still made mistakes, and so he spoke whatever he signed. “Two hours, maybe less. Up around San Pablo Bay, then back down.”

She nodded. “Where's Gourd?”

“He knows we're flying.” Evan checked his watch. “He'll be here; you know Gourd.” She smiled, and a look into her sapphire eyes made Evan's heart flip, as it always did. He placed his hands on her belly. “I love you.”

She grabbed one of his hands and pulled it up to her breast. “And I
want
you. Being pregnant makes me horny.”

Evan gasped in pretended shock. “What would Calvin think?”

“My dad knows how this baby got in here.” She grinned and kissed him as Evan wrapped her up in his arms. When they parted she said, “You be careful.”

He winked. “Always.”

Another man in a flight suit trotted across the deck carrying a pack in one hand and an M4 rifle in the other. He was one of Calvin's hippies, also in his midtwenties, and had earned his nickname from the shape of his body while growing up. He was one of the survivors from the Alameda pier evacuation as well as the battle with the dead on
Nimitz
's open-air fantail. Vladimir Yurish had identified the young man as a potential pilot candidate and begun his training. He was behind Evan in the process but learned fast. Since reaching
Nimitz
, he had shaved his beard, buzzed down to a crew cut, and hit the carrier's gym. He no longer looked like a gourd, but the nickname had stuck. Evan was happy about that, as no one seemed able to remember the man's actual name, and Evan was too embarrassed to ask.

“Take your time,” Evan called. “Really, it's all about you.”

“Wiseass,” Gourd grumbled, giving Maya a peck on the cheek and putting his gear in the chopper. “You're starting to sound like the boss.”

“Nyet!”
Evan yelled, putting on the thick accent. “That is to compare Baryshnikov to MC Hammer!”

“Who?” said Gourd, climbing into the right seat of the cockpit. “Hey, are we going, or are you two gonna hug and kiss away all our flight time?”

“This aircraft,” Evan said, still using the accent, “will depart when the pilot is ready, and not a moment sooner.” He kissed Maya again, then crouched and kissed her belly through the coveralls. “See you soon, little one.”

Maya walked to the superstructure, then stood and watched as the helicopter's turbines heated, the blades began to move, and then as the wheels finally left the deck. She stood there as it climbed and headed east, not going inside until it was out of sight.

•   •   •

N
imitz
, this is Navy zero-two,” Evan said into the helmet mic. “We are airborne.” He received an acknowledgment from the aircraft carrier as he rose toward the east.

The SH-60 Seahawk was essentially the Navy version of the Black Hawk. It carried some different equipment—a rescue winch, dipping sonar for sub hunting, and the capacity to carry torpedoes—but it was for all other purposes the same aircraft, a fact that made the process of training rookie pilots easier for Vladimir. The only real difference was that the Seahawk had a hinged tail for tight storage, a design with a mind toward a carrier's limited space.

Vladimir had checked Evan Tucker out for solo flight three weeks ago with the understanding that he had much to learn and would require a great deal of practice before he could call himself proficient. “The most important thing to remember,” Vlad said, “is that when you crash due to stupidity, you do it in the water where you will harm no one else.”

Evan had been going up once a day since his solo flight, mostly
small trips, practicing his turns, hovering, climbing and descending, and of course, landing. Longer flights tested his navigation skills, like today. With only two helicopters flying, there was no worry of running out of the JP-5 aircraft fuel on which they ran. Millions of gallons remained in the carrier's fuel bunkers, and any leaks—piping compromised by gunfire—had been repaired by Chief Liebs and his handful of men wearing hazmat suits. That same crew had also safely disarmed the nuclear weapons Brother Peter had rigged for detonation. The televangelist, firmly in the grip of misguided religious zeal fueled by lunacy, had been intent on using the nukes to incinerate the ship and all aboard. Father Xavier arrived just in time, preventing their annihilation by killing the madman with his bare hands. Evan knew that brutal—though necessary—act still weighed heavily upon the priest.

“So where are we going, Gourd?” Evan knew, of course; he had been the one to create their flight plan and had the same plastic-coated map strapped to his thigh as his co-pilot. It was Gourd's job, however, to keep them on their planned flight corridor.

“Due east,” the former hippie replied over the helmet intercom. “Cross Oakland Middle Harbor, locate the expressway, and come left zero-nine-zero. Then we follow Interstate 80 north.” His voice was developing the same businesslike tone familiar to aviators all over the world.

“Roger that,” Evan said, smiling. The clean-cut young man in the right seat had come a long way from the casual wayfarer he'd been. They both had. Evan went from a lone biker wandering the highways of America, trying to write a novel, to an accepted member and then leader of a traveling band of hippies riding out the apocalypse on the road. Along the way he had made and lost friends, had fallen in love, and was now soon to be a father.

The Seahawk climbed to five thousand feet as he leveled off, quickly crossing from water to land—
feet dry
—as it overflew industrial Oakland. A wide ribbon of elevated concrete was ahead, the
multilane expressway packed with derelict vehicles. Evan began a slow left turn as he neared it, then lined up the nose of the helicopter with the metal graveyard below and flew north at an easy 140 miles per hour. Like the Black Hawk, the Navy bird could go much higher and much faster, but Evan was cautious. As the Russian frequently reminded him, he was an amateur, and dead pilots were of no use to anyone. Evan kept it simple, concentrating on his controls and cockpit readings, letting Gourd do the sightseeing.

There wasn't a lot of detail at this altitude, but it was clear to see that the world had died. The old world, anyway. Much of the urban sprawl of Oakland had been consumed and blackened by fire, and many of the motionless vehicles below were charred. Nothing moved. Nothing they could see from up here, anyway. But the dead were down there. Earlier, lower altitude flights revealed that the highways and streets were packed with what could only be estimated as millions of bodies, a slow-moving swarm of the undead. Vladimir setting down and waiting while the hippies scavenged for farming supplies was both a testament to the man's nerve and an affirmation of his insanity.
Not this kid,
Evan thought. He liked it fine way up here.

Evan made a correction to account for the twenty-knot crosswind coming off the bay, descended to three thousand feet, and kept the Seahawk moving north up the highway. They were flying over Richmond now, with Berkeley to the right. Starboard, he reminded himself. To port was the flat surface of the bay, sunlight burning through an overcast sky in places to touch the water with golden fingers.

Gourd was fiddling with some dials, grunting in frustration. “I still can't get the air radar to work in this damn thing.”

“Are you afraid we're going to run into another aircraft? Evan asked, seeing endless, empty skies all around them. “I don't think that's likely.”

“The boss expects me to know this by now,” Gourd said.

Evan chuckled. “A few months ago you were wearing tie-dye, smoking weed in a van, and wishing your mother had named you
Moonbeam
.” He laughed at his own humor. “Give yourself a break.”

“I would, but he won't.”

Evan couldn't argue. Vlad was a stern teacher with high expectations. Personally, Evan liked the man's methods, sarcastic or not. He thought he learned faster as a result. “Look,” he said, “if you're going to play with something, get the weather radar online. We're more likely to run into a storm than a plane.”

“Roger.” Gourd began playing with a new set of dials next to a scope, and Evan kept them pointed north.

•   •   •

X
avier followed Petty Officer Second Class Banks into the superstructure, then up the back-and-forth metal stairway that climbed through the center of the eight-story tower. Banks was an operations specialist, a carrier's jack-of-all-trades, one of the five Navy men the group had located and rescued during the assault on
Nimitz
. One of that five hadn't survived the dead.

“Pat was doing his daily sweep of frequencies,” Banks said as they climbed. “He thinks he heard something.” Patrick Katcher, also known as PK, was a Navy electronics technician who, like everyone else, performed many different jobs aboard ship. One of them was learning the carrier's complex communication equipment in the hopes of making contact with other survivors.

“What was it?” Xavier rubbed his thigh. The jump rope, boxing and running, and now this climb had caused the grenade fragment to shift.

“It's hard to tell, the audio isn't great. He recorded it, so you can decide for yourself.”

They emerged on the bridge level, one deck below Pri-Fly, the primary flight control station. The bridge was empty, though Xavier
saw a young man through the windows, standing on an outside catwalk with a slung rifle, looking through binoculars. It was Stone, the seventeen-year-old who had transformed from boy to warrior. Banks led the priest through a hatch and into the comm center behind the bridge. Katcher sat before an intimidating console of screens, digital readouts, and keyboards, listening to a headset with his eyes closed.

“PK, it's the skipper,” Banks said, and the tech looked up, gesturing at an empty swivel chair beside him and handing the priest a second pair of earphones.

The electronics tech pointed to a screen with several horizontal colored bars. “I was scanning the frequencies like always, listening, transmitting and then listening again. As usual, nothing but dead air. But here . . .” He pointed to the digital colored bars. “See for yourself. There'll be some static at first.”

The tech hit a playback button and Xavier listened, watching the screen. As the man had explained, the hiss of dead airwaves came through the priest's headset for a moment, followed by Pat Katcher's bored voice. “USS
Nimitz
transmitting in the open. Any copy, please respond.” The colored bars jumped as the voice spoke, then settled into a barely perceptible waver, and the hissing returned.

The colored bars twitched again, and Xavier's eyes widened. The tech hit the pause button. “Did you hear it?”

The priest nodded. “I thought I heard the word
Reno
.”

Katcher smiled. “That's what I thought too. Listen again.”

Once more the recording played, and Xavier strained to hear. The contact was brief, only one and a half seconds during which time the colored bars registered some kind of disruption in the frequency. There might have been other words, or just different pitches of static, but he was certain he heard that single word, spoken by a living voice.

Xavier took off the headset. “It's definitely contact. Have you—”

Katcher frowned. “I've been transmitting over and over on that frequency since it happened. But that”—he tapped the screen—“was all I got.”

“Where could they be?”

The younger man tipped back in his chair, sighed, and ran his palms over his face. “Anywhere. The Bay Area, out to sea, an aircraft. It could actually be from Reno, Nevada, or it could be on the other side of the world.”

The priest shook his head, not understanding.

“I think we got lucky with a satellite,” Katcher said. “One that was still working just happened to be in exactly the right position at the time of transmission. I can't be sure, it's just a theory.” He made a disgusted noise and looked around the room at all the high-tech gear. “I don't know how to use ninety-five percent of this stuff, or I'd give you a better answer.”

Xavier clapped the man on the shoulder. “You did great, PK, and you're learning. It's cause for hope, so keep at it.”

The tech smiled and returned to his transmitting. Xavier was rising from his seat when Stone, the bridge lookout, stuck his head through the hatch.

“Father, there's a boat headed this way.”

Flashlights danced through the black corridor as the laughter of children and the sound of running feet reverberated off steel bulkheads. Three shapes ran through the darkness, sneakers sliding to a stop outside a door labeled
SAFETY MEETING
. The door opened, and flashlights darted about inside, revealing rows of chairs, a conference table, and two freestanding dry-erase boards.

Nothing moved, and nothing would as this was a secure area. But they still weren't supposed to be here, and wasn't that part of the fun?

In seconds they were inside, a boy and a girl climbing atop the conference table and cavorting like ninjas, filling the air with high-pitched
hee-yahs!
The other boy went to one of the dry-erase boards and began drawing a dripping, lurching zombie, then a kid firing an enormous laser cannon. Red and black markers zipped across the white surface, showing the creature's brains blowing out the back of its head. A dialogue bubble over the kid's image read, “
Suck this!
”

The girl's name was Wind. She was eleven and an orphan, having lost both her parents during the taking of
Nimitz
. The nine-year-old boy on the table with her was Denny, the child who had
come into the Alameda firehouse with Tanya, Margaret Chu, and Maxie, and was now the only one of that group still alive. The artist was ten-year-old Michael, Calvin's youngest son who, along with his brother, endured childhood diabetes. He knew he shouldn't be here, not because the bow was off limits—it was—but for a deeper reason. He shouldn't
be
here because he had nearly been devoured during the battle of the fantail, when he'd fallen with a twisted ankle and a corpse grabbed hold of him. Only the fast and savage actions of his oldest sister, Maya, had saved his life.

It should have given him a cautious respect for the threat the dead posed, but that incident was months ago, he was ten, and kids quickly grew numb to horror.

“Look!” Michael shouted, putting his flashlight beam on the drawing.

“Gross,” said Denny.

“Is that supposed to be you?” Wind asked.

“Yeah. Cool laser cannon, huh?”

“I meant the other one,” she said, then stuck out her arms and did a stiff-legged walk across the table, head cocked to one side and groaning. Denny immediately did the same.

“Ha-ha,” Michael said, then wrote the word
Wind
on the board with an arrow pointed at the zombie's rear end. He laughed and added the word
break
in front of her name. “Now it's perfect.”

Wind leaped down from the table and darted across the room, swiping a sleeve at the drawing and smearing it as she went past. “C'mon,” she yelled, headed for a door across the room. Denny ran after her. Michael made a face at what had become of his drawing, then followed.

The door opened onto another dark passageway, and the three kids ran down it, bouncing from wall to wall, flashlight beams jerking across the ceiling.

“I'm a
craaaazy
person!” Wind shouted, rebounding off a wall.

“Craaaazy!”
parroted Denny.

Michael bounced off a door. “A
looonatic
!”

More laughter and screeching, and as they neared the end of the corridor their sneakers splashed through a puddle of water. They slid to a halt, Denny running into Wind with a grunt, and the laughter stopped.

Michael shone his light on the floor, revealing a long, narrow puddle streaked with green and yellow, along with a distinct, wet boot print. The water smelled bad, and in fact the entire corridor reeked. The puddle and boot print went in the direction from which they had come, so he tracked his light back along it, turning to see its origin. The gore-streaked water came from the head of a ladderway that descended into darkness. An even more repugnant odor came from that opening in the floor.

Denny pointed. “That's—”

Wind clamped a hand over his mouth. “We know what that is,” she said, her voice soft. Then she looked at Michael, who stared back with wide eyes. “We need to go.”

Michael nodded. They weren't supposed to be in the bow, they all knew it, but the grown-ups had been clearing this area, hadn't they?

Was
it clear?
Michael wondered.
Who, exactly had said that it was? Had
anyone
said that, or was that just what he wanted to hear, not wanting to give up the coolest playground in the world.
As he stared at the trail of slime on the floor, more thoughts leaped at him.
The three of them were unarmed. How many drifters had come up from below? Who else knew they were up here playing in the bow? His dad was going to kill him for being here.
Michael was suddenly certain that the grown-ups would have marked the areas not yet cleared.
Had he and the other two kids simply not seen them? Had they cut through some compartments and missed them?
His heartbeat accelerated.

“Back the way we came,” he whispered to Wind, who nodded. Flashlights panning ahead of them, the three children moved back
up the corridor, keeping to the balls of their feet and avoiding the water on the floor.

A moan echoed somewhere in the darkness, and the children froze.
In front of them, or behind?

“Go, go,” Michael hissed from the back of the little trio, waving them forward. Wind hesitated for a moment, peering into the darkness, then gripped Denny's hand and crept forward. Michael panned the light behind him to see an empty corridor and closed hatches. They went slowly at first, and then Wind picked up the pace, hurrying along and pulling Denny. A moment later she was running, a wail of panic starting low in her chest and rising.

“Wind, wait, don't!” Michael called after them, worried that her cry would draw attention, that she would run straight into—

—the dead thing lurched into the hall from a doorway on the right, only feet in front of the two running children. In the glare of a flashlight Michael saw a rotting blue uniform, patches of hair clinging to a gray scalp that was sloughing off the side of its face, and yellow eyes. It was still dripping and reeked of seawater. The thing snarled with blackened teeth and reached.

Wind screamed and fell, sliding into its legs, Denny piling up behind her. Liquid drooled from the thing's open mouth as it dropped onto the little girl.

“No!” Michael cried, swinging the flashlight and bashing it in the temple. The blow made a spongy sound. The creature jerked, head snapping up, eyes glaring into the light. “No!” the boy shouted again, and hit it once more, harder this time, rocking its head to the side. Beneath it, Wind kicked furiously and scrambled past its legs, dragging a wailing Denny with her. They got to their feet behind the drifter and began to run.

The thing started to turn in pursuit, but Michael bashed it again. “Over here, ugly!” When it turned back to face him, Michael backpedaled. “Over here!”

The creature began to crawl quickly toward him, then struggled
to its feet. Michael quickly judged the width of the hallway, knew he would never get past it. He backed up instead, drawing it in, away from the echoes of Wind and Denny's running feet. The thing snarled, pale fingers hooking into claws, took two jerking steps, and then broke into that obscene gallop they had all seen the dead do just before they took down prey.

Michael turned and ran.

He didn't get far. In seconds he was back at the point in the corridor where they had first encountered the puddle. Closed, oval-shaped hatches stood to the right and ahead, and on the left was the stairway from which the thing had originally come. Michael reached for a hatch handle, then heard the squishing of waterlogged flesh galloping in boots, splashing as it ran through the puddle. He would never get the hatch open before it was on him.

There was no choice. Michael bolted for the top of the stairway just as the creature reached him, leaping down four and five steps at a time into the darkness below.

Michael's abrupt scream rose from the stairwell.

The dead thing followed him down.

•   •   •

W
aiting room's empty, Doc,” said Tommy, poking his head into the curtained ER cubicle. Tommy was one of the hippies who had helped take back sick bay and now worked there as an orderly while studying to be an EMT. His beard was gone and he felt more comfortable in scrubs now.

Rosa looked up from the patient notes she was making, sitting on a rolling stool and using the exam table as a desk. She wasn't tall, but even without makeup and with her hair pulled into a ponytail, she was a very attractive woman. Beneath her scrubs and white doctor's coat was the full figure of an exotic dancer, remnants of another lifetime.

“I'll clean up next door and then hit the books, if that's okay,” he
said. The doc had just finished stitching up a lacerated forearm. There were a lot of sharp edges on this ship.

“Sure,” she said. “What are you working on today?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Today? Doc, I've been on the pulmonary system for four days. I didn't know there was so much to learn about a person's insides. I thought being an EMT was, like, stabilizing, and patching people up.”

Rosa smiled. “You need to know how it all works on the inside before you can fix the outside.”

“Off I go,” he sighed, then paused before leaving. “Doc, you look beat.”

“When am I not, Tommy?”

“This place is quiet. Why not grab a meal, maybe a nap? I got this.”

Rosa scratched another note on the chart. “I'll get to it.”

The man shrugged and let the curtain fall back into place. As he walked away, his voice called, “Don't make me rat you out to Father X, Doc.”

“Up yours, Tommy,” she called after him, smiling. It wasn't a threat without merit. The big priest was forever after her about pacing herself, reminding her that she wouldn't be able to tend to the needs of others if she didn't look after her own needs, and other assorted nagging remarks along that vein.
Father
was the right title. Rosa didn't know what she would do without him.

It was more than his gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) guidance that drew her to him. He had a particular strength, something Rosa desperately wanted to possess. He knew what it was to be responsible for others, understood the fear and constant worry that went along with leadership, the frustration of never being able to do as much as you wanted. Even after her time spent serving as a Navy corpsman in combat overseas, and as an EMT on San Francisco's streets, she had never felt the same, sometimes unbearable weight of
responsibility as she did now. In both those lives there had always been someone to turn to, backup waiting if things got too intense. Now, in this new life, this new world, there was only her; not nearly a doctor, but counted on to be just that.

Rosa left the cubicle and dropped the patient file in a plastic wall holder. Tommy was seated at a desk nearby, face pinched in concentration as he used a highlighter to work over a medical book. She pulled a different chart from the same wall holder and scanned it, standing near the desk and not looking up.

“Name the anatomical features of the respiratory system in mammals,” Rosa said.

Tommy grumbled but closed the book as she expected. “Trachea, bronchi, bronchioles, lungs . . . that's it.”

“And diaphragm.”

“Right, diaphragm.”

Still reading the chart, she said, “The process by which oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules are passively exchanged?”

“Diffusion,” Tommy said, “and before you ask, it takes place in the alveoli air sacs in the lungs.” He grinned triumphantly.

“The respiratory system, in Latin.”

“Ah . . .
systema
 . . .
resp
 . . .
respiratorium
. Did you use a lot of Latin riding the ambulance, Doc?”

“You'd be surprised. But it's part of being a professional. The
real
reason is that it makes you sound smart, so your patients won't catch on that you're about to kill them with your lack of skills.”
Oh, no, I'm starting to get snarky like Vlad.

Tommy snorted. He was used to it. “You're such a peach to work with, Doc.”

She threw him a wink. “Good, because the peach would like you to list the anatomical terminology of the entire respiratory system, top to bottom.”

Tommy swallowed. “I don't know it all.”

“Tell me what you know.”

He drew a deep breath. “Frontal sinus, sphenoid sinus, nasal cavity . . .”

She nodded slowly, looking at a simple stitch job on a lacerated shin. Those damned knee knockers. She would have to do a follow-up in a couple of days to ensure the stitches had held, and that the antibiotics were keeping away any infection.

“. . . oral cavity, pharynx, epiglottis, vocal fold . . .”

It was also time to do an A1C blood test on Calvin's boys. Their father had done a good job monitoring their sugar levels and giving them the proper doses of insulin, but they were growing, and as their bodies changed, so would the treatment. Her greater worry was that the insulin Calvin had on hand, as well as the supply aboard the ship, would not last forever. Rosa had been staying up late researching its manufacture, discovering that she had all the raw elements as well as the equipment to make it right here in the medical lab. Fears of getting it right, though, and risking injection into a child, kept her awake long after the research was done for the night.

“. . . thyroid cartilage, cricoid cartilage . . .” Tommy was touching points on his throat and chest as he spoke, using his body as a mnemonic device. Everyone did something different, and whatever worked, worked. The doc remembered that when learning the names of all twenty-seven bones in the human hand, she had turned it into a song.

“. . . trachea, apex . . .” He split his fingers into a V and touched his breastbone. “. . . main bronchi right and left . . .” He sighed. “That's all I got, Doc. I start getting jumbled when we get into the lungs.”