Crossbones (7 page)

“Make time . . .
Captain
.”

Liz pursed her lips. “Very well,
Commander
. Since you're now my executive officer, I'll explain myself to you, this time. Don't get used to it. As my XO, I expect and demand your support, are we clear?”

Coseboom nodded.

Liz ticked off a finger. “I don't know
what
those things on the
dock were, but they were already dead, so I didn't
kill
anyone. I rescued a shipmate in peril, which I would do again for any of you.” Another finger went up. “We are a ship at war, and I will not permit it to be compromised by anyone, regardless of their claims. Were his actions extreme? Perhaps, but that will be decided by appropriate command levels at a later date.”

“You
are
appropriate command levels, Captain.”

She went on as if she hadn't heard him, raising a third finger. “Senior Chief Kidd is the ranking enlisted man aboard, and a veteran of deck operations, something otherwise lacking aboard this ship. His assignment is more than justified.”

Now she stepped away from the hatch frame and closer to the other officer. “We don't know if we're at war, facing plague, or right in the middle of the End of Days. Mr. Coseboom, you heard the reports on the ship's condition and crew deficiencies the same as I did. We're less than a quarter strength, and that will mean hardship: long watches with very little rest. We need every capable hand, and all the experience we can get.”

Coseboom nodded slowly, and Liz softened her voice. “Boomer, the ship needs you and so do I. There's no telling what this is all about, or how long it will take before things get back to normal. Until that happens, I will command this vessel in a manner I believe serves the mission.”

“And what is that mission?”

“Right now,” Liz said, “preserving ship and crew. We're going to make for Port Angeles up on Ediz Point. I'm hoping we can fill out our missing stores and crew there.”

Coseboom took a deep breath. “They'll have heard what happened at Base Seattle. There's bound to be trouble.”

She nodded. “And if there is,
we
will deal with it. Understood, XO?” She extended a hand.

Boomer looked at the hand, then shook it. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Very well.” She moved to the hatch and stepped into the passageway. “I want sidearms issued to all three officers, Chief Newman, and Senior Chief Kidd.”

Coseboom started to say something, but Elizabeth left without waiting to hear what it was.

Seaman Recruit Moses Thedford sat on a metal stool in the cutter's tiny, four-bed sick bay, twisting a damp rag nervously in latex-gloved hands. Just nineteen years old, he was not trained for boarding parties or even as a bosun's mate, yet there he had been with a rifle in the bow of the commander's Prosecutor, hauling aboard
Klondike
survivors. Neither was he a medic, yet here he sat watching over three wounded crewmen from that ship, possessing the same medical skills as everyone else aboard—or less. And why? Because he was a one-stripe nobody, ensuring that he would be shit upon by everyone with more than six months in the Coast Guard. The other reason, he knew, was that he was a cook, and therefore everyone thought he'd have nothing better to do.

Wait till you motherfuckers want to eat,
he thought, twisting the rag.

He could just as easily have said it out loud, because no one could hear him. The three men in the sick bay beds were sleeping, one of them tossing fitfully with fever. The other two had what looked like serious wounds, one at the neck, the other at the inner
thigh, and Moses along with two of his shipmates had done their best to stop the bleeding and bind the wounds. It seemed to have worked, but who the hell knew? His shipmates had run off to their stations as
Joshua James
completed a turn and engaged forward propulsion, leaving Moses alone with no idea of how to care for these men.

He was tired, close to coming off third watch and thinking about his rack back in the barracks when the world went ass-up, and it looked now like this was all the crew the cutter was going to get. It meant there were no medical officers, no med techs, not even an EMT-trained rescue swimmer. It meant endless shifts ahead for everyone aboard.

No one to watch these men but poor Moses. I should have stayed in the Bronx and taken the auto body job at Terrell's. The Coast Guard sucks.

Moses thought about the wounds. He wanted to believe that their flesh had been torn by protruding pieces of metal on
Klondike
's railing, but he had seen what was happening up on the cutter's decks, had seen the way those things attacked. Moses knew bites when he saw them. And it was clear to him that either ISIS or Al Qaeda had set off some kind of biological weapon, a bug of some kind that turned people into rabid maniacs. Dead people, though? What bullshit. He'd attended countless training classes concerning bio attacks, but not one about the living dead. In the Coast Guard there was a manual for everything, and if there was one about zombies, he would have seen it. No, it had to be ISIS . . . or ISIL, depending upon who you talked to. Both meant
bad guys
.

One of the men, the guy with the neck wound, made a rattling sound from his bed at the other side of the room. Moses Thedford remained on his stool, gripping his rag tightly. The man wasn't moving. What should he do now? He looked at the intercom phone on the wall. Should he call an officer? He immediately rejected the idea, knowing the conversation would go something like this:

Sir, this is Seaman Thedford in sick bay. One of the injured men just made a noise.

Did you check on him, Thedford?

No, sir.

Then unfuck yourself and go check.

Of course an officer wouldn't curse at him, he knew, but a chief or a petty officer might, and either way Moses would come off looking like an idiot, probably drawing some shitty work detail as punishment for being stupid. Slowly, he got off the stool and moved to the side of the man's bed. His eyes were closed and his face was turned away, but the young Coast Guardsman saw at once that the man's pillow was drenched with blood, his neck bandage wet and sagging.

Shit, he bled out!
Moses lifted one of the man's eyelids; cloudy and no reaction to light. When he pressed his fingers against the neck, there was no pulse.
Oh, shit, it's gonna be my fault.
He turned to the man in the next bed, the one with the leg wound, and saw this one staring blankly at the ceiling, his chest unmoving. Moses ripped back the blanket to look at a thigh bandage dripping red, soaking the mattress beneath.
Bled out.

“I already fed the dog, Ma!” the third
Klondike
man screamed, squirming as his feverish head sought a cool spot on the pillow.

The scream made Moses jump. “Shut up!” he yelled. Then he went for the phone, knocking over the metal stool. The feverish guardsman shouted, “It's David's turn!”

Moses punched the button for the bridge. He didn't care if he pissed off the captain herself. This was
not
his job, and
not
his fault.

Behind him, the dead man with the neck wound sat up in his bed.

•   •   •

L
iz stayed on the bridge long enough to check their position and course, see where the Navy destroyer was and that it appeared disinterested for the moment, and to wait for LCDR Coseboom, who arrived a minute after she did. Boomer sent Amy off on the task of arming key crew members per the captain's directive, then took command of the conn as Liz left again. She told him to have Chief Kidd report to her quarters.

Liz's accommodations were spacious by warship standards, especially for a boat this size. There was a couch that folded down into a rack, plenty of storage, a private head, and a drop-down desk with a wall safe mounted above it. She'd stored Special Agent Ramsey's pistol and spare magazines in there, preferring to use the smaller variant Sig employed by the Coast Guard. Her room had no porthole—this wasn't a cruise ship—so she snapped on a light above a small table and a pair of chairs. A low
meow
greeted her.

“Blackbeard,” she said, letting the cat out of the carrier from where it rested on one of the chairs. The black-and-gray-striped animal meowed long and loud as she picked it up, then began to purr and rub its head against Liz's chin.

“Mommy's got you,” she said, scratching the cat behind the ears. It leaned into the rub. “Now we really are shipmates.” She chuckled. “Yes, I'm happy to see you too.” She looked around her quarters. What was she going to feed him? Coast Guard galleys didn't stock cat food, and she certainly hadn't packed any in her sea bag. That was when she realized she had left her laptop in her Camry on the dock. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now, and it wouldn't have helped feed her cat, anyway.

“We'll figure something out,” she said, as Blackbeard turned a circle in her lap and curled up, still purring.

After several minutes there were two sharp raps on the door. “Come,” Liz called. Charlie entered, his broad, squat frame filling the doorway. He closed the door behind him and stood at attention
in front of the table, eyes fixed on the bulkhead behind his sister. “Senior Chief Kidd, reporting as ordered.”

In her lap, Blackbeard hissed and jumped down to hide under the couch. “Stand easy, Senior Chief,” she said, and her brother did, clasping his hands behind his back. “Are you wondering why you're not in irons, Chief?”

“It's not because I'm your brother. I know that cuts me no slack.”

“You're alive
because
you're my brother, Chick. I could have left you in that Hummer.” She gestured for him to sit. “We'll talk later about what the FBI told me.”

“Sis, I—”

She cut him off. “Save it. We'll talk about it later, because at this point it's moot. The helicopter is another matter.”

Chick leaned forward on the table. “What was I gonna do, let them take your ship away? Put you in cuffs right beside me in the back of that helicopter? Not gonna happen.”

“Oh, you did it for me, did you?” She shook her head.

“We're at war,” he said, “and people die in war.”

“Do not lecture me on war, mister.” The undeniable fact was that his actions had kept her in command, but at the cost of seven lives, men with families. Her crew had families too, though, didn't they? And no matter what was happening to them back on land, they would want to know their loved ones were safe out on the water. Unfortunately she couldn't provide the same reassurance to the men and women aboard. Seattle was in chaos. It was confusing and frustrating, made more so because her sense of duty was at war with her need to look after her younger brother, something she had once failed to do and that had exacted a heavy price on both of them.
Am I still atoning for that sin?

“My biggest worry right now,” she said, “isn't downed helicopters or even that Navy destroyer out there. It's the crew. They don't know
what
to think, and that's because of you.” She leveled a finger
at him. “My XO is the Law Enforcement Division officer, the top cop on the ship, and he has some serious objections to one Senior Chief Charles Kidd not being in custody, much less being made chief of the boat.” She explained her decision and told him he would be running the deck division. That had been Charlie's job aboard
Klondike
.

“You'll have next to no staff,” she said, “but you'll still have to make it work.”

Chick nodded. “We'll be squared away, Skipper.”

“Also because of what you've done,” she continued, “my crew is in turmoil and no doubt questioning my decisions. I'll deal with that, but it leaves you as the only one I can absolutely count on to have my back. I need to be able to depend on you, Chick.”

“Without question,” he said.

“And you will
not
engage in further combat action without orders.”

“I understand.”

Two sharp raps came at the door, and Liz told the visitor to enter. It was Amy Liggett carrying two sidearm belts of Sig Sauers and spare magazines. Another was already belted around her waist.

“That will be all, Senior Chief,” Liz said, standing and buckling on the weapon. Liz asked the young woman to find some food and water for her cat, and then all three dispersed, the captain heading for the bridge and what would be the longest watch of her career.

•   •   •

M
oses Thedford didn't get to make his call to the bridge, and didn't get the hatch to the passageway open before the creature that had been a
Klondike
survivor was on him. His last conscious thought, as blood shot from his severed artery and the creature worked in deeper with its teeth, was that he should have stayed in the Bronx.

There were four of them in the compartment now, three
Klondike
men and Moses, his dark skin already turning ashy. Two of the creatures stood facing different bulkheads, a third wandered back and forth in the narrow space between the beds, and the thing that had been Moses stood with its arms limp at its sides, head cocked over, swaying and staring at the hatch. Occasionally there would be sounds on the other side, and Moses would let out a croak, but for the most part he was still, staring at the steel oval that kept them in this room.

It would be hours before one of Moses's dead hands finally came up slowly and reached for the handle.

•   •   •

M
any had called it the
Emerald City
and
Gateway to Alaska
, a place known for its jazz, poetry, alternative music, its iconic Space Needle, the Seahawks, and the Mariners. With 3.6 million people in the metropolitan area, Seattle's real estate was among the most expensive in the country, in part due to the high-paying corporate presence of Amazon, Microsoft, and an assortment of biomedical companies. It was a diverse, tolerant, progressive city.

It was dying fast. Many of those millions of residents would be dead by the end of the day, and that number would multiply exponentially as the plague spread. Uncontrolled fires began devouring neighborhoods and quickly spread to the thousands of square acres of dry forest waiting at the city's outskirts. Before long, a heavy smoke would hang in the streets, but it would only impair the living who were trying desperately to get out. Smoke didn't bother the dead.

On the bridge of
Joshua James
, Liz and Boomer plotted their course north. They would maintain flank speed and steam directly up the sound, putting as much distance between themselves and the Navy destroyer as possible. On that topic, Boomer gave a soft-spoken opinion.

“They must have bigger problems. They should have been all
over us by now. How hard would it be to launch a Navy helo out of Everett and put a torpedo into our side?”

Liz grunted noncommittally. The same thought had occurred to her, and so she had privately taken aside Petty Officer Vargas, the man now in charge of their electronic warfare system down in the Combat Control Center. Her orders had been to have the twenty-millimeter CIWS loaded, and use the fire control radar—when it decided to work—to track, identify, and target any aircraft within their threat radius. If an airborne attack was detected, Vargas was to be standing by for the order to engage. If a Navy helo
did
come at them, her intention was to spot it and destroy it before it could put a torpedo in the water.

Getting easier and easier to kill U.S. helos, isn't it, Liz?

She went back to the chart, noting that their course would take them up beyond Kingston, and then they would bear northwest for a time past Whidbey Island, continuing through Puget Sound. A right turn would take them into Possession Sound, the home waters of the Navy base at Everett, which wasn't an option. Their northwest course would eventually put Marrowstone Island off their port side before they finally turned west into the open water of the Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Joshua James
would slow then, approaching the Coast Guard Air Station at Port Angeles cautiously, monitoring radio traffic and perhaps sending in an SRP for reconnaissance.

“I estimate five hours if all goes well,” said Boomer.

“Which we know won't happen,” Liz replied, “but it's a plan for now.”