Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (25 page)

Mercy gave Chief Liebs her M4 and what little ammo she had left, as he was the professional marksman. The others spread around their weapons, and everyone supplemented from the big knife racks in the galley. The chief took point, with Evan behind him holding a flashlight and his Sig Sauer.

Liebs advanced with the rifle to his shoulder, muzzle moving everywhere he turned his head. A pair of sailors staggered out of a hatch in the corridor just beyond the mess hall, and the chief put them down with a fast pair of shots, barely pausing as he moved past, setting a swift pace. The others peered through doorways and closed hatches as they went by, but the Navy man was all focus, moving forward.

Calvin fired four times to their rear, dropping a cook and a jet engine mechanic. Liebs killed four more corpses that tumbled into the corridor from a narrow ladderway, finishing them before they could disentangle themselves at the bottom of the stairs.

The group passed through a pair of knee knockers, then came to a four-way intersection with a set of stairs tucked into an alcove to one side, stairs that only descended. The decapitated and decomposing body of an officer was stretched out on the gray tile, his head a few feet away. The eyes rolled and a blackened tongue probed past its teeth.

“That’s nasty,” said Stone, booting the head down a passageway like a soccer ball.

“No,
that
was nasty,” said Mercy.

Chief Liebs held a finger to his lips and crept toward the stairway as the others kept watch down the four corridors. Evan moved up with him, holding his breath, and both looked over the railing. They heard the moans, a low hum coming up out of complete darkness. The depth of the sound indicated that there were many of them down there. Chief Liebs motioned Evan back from the rail, and the group came together in the intersection.

“Let’s just go past this,” said Dakota, and Juju nodded with him.

“We can’t,” said the chief, pointing to the stairway. “That’s the only way to reach the armory.”

Frightened glances from the others.

“Those stairs lead down to a good-sized compartment, sort of like a lobby,” the chief said. “To the right is the armory door, with a small service window about four feet to one side. Straight ahead is an office and quarters for the master-at-arms, and left of that is the brig. To the far left is a berthing compartment for gunner’s mates, an office for the chiefs, and then chief’s quarters.”

He explained that the area should be well lit, even on reduced reactor power, and speculated that a firefight might have damaged the electrical panels. He repeated that the stairway—he called it a ladder—was the only way in or out of the section.

“There’s twenty or more down there,” Liebs said.

“Do we really have to do this?” Juju asked.

The chief looked at Evan, who said, “We’re out of ammo and out of time. Even if we passed, we don’t have enough bullets to reach daylight again.”

“The armory will have everything we need,” said the chief. “My men are all trained in basic rifle, shotgun, and pistol. All of us together, plus what’s waiting down there, have a chance to take back the ship.”

“If we can get to it,” said Evan.

Liebs let out a deep breath. “Yes, if we can get to it. I’ll go down first.”

Off to one side, Stone laughed softly, shaking his head. When the others looked at him he said, “Don’t take this wrong, but you guys are really stupid.”

Calvin grinned. He had known the boy since he was born. “Enlighten us, wise one.”

Stone explained his simple but effective idea. It was brilliant.

•   •   •

T
hey all had to admit that the kid was right, and even Chief Liebs gave him a pat on the back and told him he would have made a fine sailor. It was Stone who snapped them out of their frontal assault state-of-mind, and even showed each of them where they should stand in order to carry out his plan.

Once everyone was in place, Stone said, “Just call me Bait.” He jumped halfway down the stairs and shouted, “Dinnertime!” at the drifters waiting in the darkness. Stone backed up the stairs. “C’mon, sexy, that’s it, good little zombie. Come on. . . .”

The dead scrambled over one another in their rush to follow the live meat up the stairs. The first drifter to set both feet on the tile of the intersection caught a butcher knife through the ear. The body was still stiffening from its brain being pierced when one of Liebs’s sailors rushed it from the other side, half tackling, half carrying the body away and dumping it in a corridor. The chief prepared his knife again, and another sailor stepped into tackle position.

Stone stood ten feet away from the top of the stairs, hooting and tormenting the dead, even turning and smacking his behind at them. The drifters were so fixed on the difficult task of first climbing stairs and then getting to the lively meal that was so very close that they didn’t stand a chance against the chief and his butcher knife.

One by one the walking dead climbed up the narrow ladderway to their doom. The chief broke three knives in the process, instantly rearmed by Mercy standing behind him with two fistfuls of fresh blades from the galley. Dakota and Evan joined in the tackling process when the dead came too fast and too close for the sailors to keep up. Calvin saw none of it, facing away from the action so he and his assault rifle could watch the corridors.

It was a smart move. Stone’s howling and catcalls echoed down the steel passages, and called to the dead. Calvin took careful aim and squeezed, well aware of the thin supply of bullets, determined to make his shots count. He fired on corpses up the center, down to the left, over on the right, pivoting back and forth. Shuffling figures in blackened uniforms emerged from the darkness, sliding along walls and filling the halls with echoing cries.

The pile of brain-stabbed drifters now nearly filled the opening to the right corridor, limp bodies spilling into the intersection. Live drifters, attracted to all the sound, clawed at the mound from the other side, unable to get through. Calvin didn’t bother shooting these, grateful that his area of responsibility was now effectively down to three hallways instead of four.

His rifle clicked on an empty magazine. “I’m out,” he shouted.

Dakota handed him a shotgun. Two minutes later Calvin called it empty as well.

“Use the M4,” Liebs yelled, stabbing a man he had known for two years. He tried not to think about it, about the fact that he knew everyone coming up out of the darkness, people he had laughed with, whose stories of family were as familiar as his own. The growing fatigue in his right arm and shoulder was a welcome distraction. “I’m going to need a relief soon,” he called.

Evan took a butcher knife from Mercy and handed her his Sig. “Give this to Calvin.”

He was about to tap Liebs on the shoulder when the chief lunged with his knife. The drifter, moving on a fractured leg, abruptly staggered sideways, and the blade cut a neat slice through its scalp but didn’t pierce the head. The bosun’s mate was already running, and he grabbed the live drifter around the waist, hoisting it, preparing to run it to the pile.

The drifter snarled, grabbed the young man’s head, and bit his ear off.

The bosun’s mate screamed and tried to throw the wriggling creature away, but it hung on and bit a large chunk of meat out of the boy’s cheek.

Mercy dropped her knives, stepped forward, and with Evan’s pistol shot the drifter at point-blank range. The wet blast out the back hit Dakota in the side of the face, and he staggered away, wretching. The bosun’s mate flung the body to the floor and clamped his hands to his savaged face, stumbled to a wall, and collapsed.

“Keep up the relay!” Chief Liebs shouted, stabbing the next creature to emerge from below. His petty officer second class moved in, hauling the corpse out of the way.

“There’s way more than twenty,” Stone yelled.

“No shit, kid,” the chief growled.

It seemed to last for hours, but in just over ten minutes it was done. A few more pistol shots from Calvin cleared the halls, and there were no more drifters coming up out of the dark. Flashlights revealed none on the stairs or in sight at the bottom.

Dakota was in a panic, scrubbing blood and brains off his face, and Chief Liebs went to his wounded man, a boy, really, kneeling beside him. The kid pressed his hands to his ear and cheek, blood seeping between the fingers. “I don’t want to die, Guns,” the bosun’s mate cried, looking up and trembling. Mercy knelt down too, trying to replace the boy’s hands with gauze pads. “Don’t let me die,” the sailor said.

Chief Liebs gripped his shoulders. “You’re going to be fine, shipmate. Don’t you doubt it.”

“But the b-b-bite!”

“You’re going to be fine,” Liebs repeated. “You just stay quiet and hang on. Your chief’s going to look after you.”

Evan saw the strained look on the chief’s face as he turned away.

“We need to get down there,” Liebs said, his voice cracking. He took the Sig Sauer, the last weapon in the group that still had bullets, and only four at that, and went down the stairs with a flashlight. The others followed, two of the sailors helping their maimed friend.

The compartment was exactly as described and, because of Stone’s plan, free of the dead, except for some thumping and muted moans coming from behind the brig’s bolted steel door, which they all ignored. The chief had explained to them that the armory door normally required that it be buzzed open from inside, but both he and the division officer carried a key in the event of an emergency. The armory’s solid steel door was the only option for entry, as the service window had been designed to be too small for an adult to crawl through.

“The armory is staffed twenty-four-seven by a pair of gunner’s mates. I expect they’ll still be in there,” said the chief, “so stay alert.”

Liebs keyed his way in.

Two dead sailors came at him immediately, and the Sig barked three times before Liebs called, “We’re clear.” Everyone came in, securing the door behind them.

Liebs hadn’t been joking when he estimated that the compartment held enough armament to retake the ship. Even after general quarters had sounded and the security teams geared up before running off to their own grisly ends, the armory was loaded.

There were racks upon racks of M16 and M4 assault rifles, twelve-gauge Mossberg 500s, the wooden-stocked M14s favored by snipers, nine-millimeter handguns, crates of empty magazines, and shelved cans of ammunition for everything in here. There were body armor and helmets, gas masks, pencil flares, spare fifty-caliber heavy machine guns with tripods, and lockers of belted ammo. In another area were crates containing the M240 machine gun mounted in the doors of helicopters.

Everyone but Liebs stood and looked on in awe.

“Guns,” said the nuc, crouched beside the bosun’s mate near the door.

The chief moved over to his men, kneeling and speaking quietly to the maimed boy. It was difficult to hear, but whatever he said made the boy smile and nod. When the chief stood, he wore a pained expression.

Calvin moved up close beside him and whispered, “I can do this if you want.”

Liebs shook his head. “They’re my men.” He went back to help the boy to his feet, telling him they were going across to the berthing so he could lie down and be comfortable. The armory door clicked shut behind them, and everyone on the other side of it simply looked at each other or down at the floor.

A minute later there was a single pistol shot.

Chief Liebs keyed his way back into the armory and handed the empty Sig back to Evan. “We have a job to do,” the Navy man said, his voice thick. He refused to meet their eyes as he pushed through the group and walked into the racks of weapons.

The explosion outside the sick bay got them running, Rosa in the lead, Lilly behind her loaded down with weapons and body armor. They hit the double doors simultaneously, throwing them wide.

Peter Dunleavy was in the hallway a short distance away. He grinned wildly and threw something at them. It hit the floor and rolled between the women, into the sick bay. Rosa had the impression of an olive-drab egg.

“Grenade!” she shouted, leaping forward into the corridor, away from the egg, as Peter sprinted away up the hall. The medic dove as she had been taught in training, and as she had done overseas when an insurgent managed to get close enough to throw one of these things: facedown, head away from the blast, legs outstretched behind and boots clamped together, both hands tucked under and cupping the privates. If she was lucky, the position would get her feet blown off but hopefully nothing more critical.

The grenade went off. It sounded strange, a muffled thump instead of a ripping blast, but enough to make her ears ring and blow apart light fixtures.

Then the screaming started.

Rosa turned over and looked back. One of the sick bay doors had been knocked flat; the other sagged on one hinge. Just beyond, Lilly’s torn figure was crumpled on the floor, her body armor ripped from her left side, bloody ribs jutting at odd angles from raw meat, left arm blown off.

Oh God,
Rosa thought.
She threw herself on it.

She wanted to scream, but someone else already was, a female voice high and wailing in agony. Rosa scrambled to her feet, the blast still echoing in her head. Behind her and up the hall, Xavier stumbled out of a doorway, colliding with the opposite wall and bending at the waist, holding his head. His pack was gone, his pants and shirt torn, blood soaking through the fabric and dripping on the floor.

Upon seeing Rosa he shouted, “Which way?”

Rosa pointed past him, and before she could even speak, the priest broke into a run, heading in the direction of the treacherous minister.

He was unarmed, but his big hands were clenched into fists.

Rosa went into the sick bay and saw that despite Lilly’s sacrifice, she hadn’t smothered the grenade completely. Tommy had a bleeding head wound, and he had to keep wiping a sleeve at it to keep the blood out of his eyes. He was kneeling beside Eve, putting pressure on the woman’s chest. Eve was on the tiles, arching her back, her head tossing from side to side as she screamed. There was too much blood.

Rosa slid to her knees beside the woman and clapped a hand over her mouth, forcing Eve to meet her eyes. “If you don’t stop, they’ll come. I can’t fight them and save you at the same time.”

Eve nodded, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting back the screams.

Rosa shrugged off her medical bag and unzipped it, looking at Tommy across from her. “Watch the doors,” the medic said, “and kill anything that comes through.” Then she went to work.

•   •   •

T
oo high, I went up too high,
Peter thought. He was running down an empty passageway, searching for a down ladder. Access to the magazines, deep in the ship, would probably be found in the hangar bay. He had to find it.

A zombie was on its hands and knees up ahead, gnawing on the leg of another sailor slumped dead against a wall. It turned its head at his approach and growled. Brother Peter got close before blowing its head off with the shotgun.

“You don’t have time for this,”
God said, looking like Anderson, naked and bitten and standing a few feet away.

Peter ran past the sight of his once-trusted right-hand man, pausing briefly at an intersection before running straight across.

Anderson jogged easily behind him.
“They better all be dead.”

“They are,” Peter panted. “And if not, they will be soon.”

“Praise God,”
said Anderson.

Brother Peter found a set of stairs that only went down. He looked first and saw Anderson at the bottom, waving him on.

“It’s safe,”
said God,
“hurry.”

The minister trotted down the metal risers and into the arms of a walking corpse. It grappled with him, snapping and giving off the odor of spoiled meat. Peter let out a cry and shoved at it with the shotgun, cursing as it yanked the weapon out of his hands and came back in fast. Peter pushed at its chest with both hands, throwing it back, but as it went it jerked its head and snapped, clipping Brother Peter’s right pinkie off at the first knuckle.

Peter howled and charged it, hammering with his fists, kicking and breaking its arms, seizing the shotgun and pointing. The creature tried to rise, and clamped its teeth on the muzzle.

BOOM.
Its head painted the far bulkhead.

The minister held up a shaking hand, staring at the missing digit with wide eyes. “Thou unclean beast,” he whispered.

“Ah, shake it off, Pete,”
said God, once more the Air Force shrink.
“It won’t matter soon enough to make a difference, right?”

Peter looked at his savior. “You said it was safe.”

A shrug.
“So I lied. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Satan lies,” Brother Peter mumbled, beginning to walk once more and rounding to the next descending stairway, finger dripping blood.

“Who do you think he learned it from?”
God called from behind him.

The minister moved down more cautiously this time, allowing his sense of depth and direction, developed from his Air Force days working deep underground in missile silos, to guide him. The Gallery Deck had been four levels above the hangar. He had two more decks to descend, and then he would head to port. An empty passage awaited him at the bottom, and he hurried around to the next flight. A sailor in the yellow jersey of a catapult officer was slumping up the stairway from below, steel-toed boots banging against the risers.

“Kill it!”
shouted the Air Force shrink, but Peter waited, letting it see him, letting it clear the stairs in its rush to feed. Then he shot it.

“We’re thinking for ourselves now, are we?”
asked the shrink, descending behind the minister.

“I’m doing what you want!” Brother Peter screamed. “Let me concentrate!”

“Oh, and talking back too. Growing a pair, Pete?”

The gym teacher was waiting at the bottom of the next flight, curling a finger at him.
“Let’s see if there’s any hair on those new balls, sweetness.”

Peter screamed again and charged the gym teacher, who winked out of sight a moment before the collision. The minister looked around for movement, then headed down a hallway toward the port side of the ship.

“What’s wrong?”
asked God, no longer in a physical form, now only a voice echoing in the steel corridor.
“Did you go down too far? Are you moving starboard instead of port? Will you burn for eternity if you fail?”

“I know the way!” Peter cried, ducking through a knee knocker, scraping the top of his head on the metal and ripping away hair and skin. Tears ran down his cheeks.

“You’re lost,”
God said.
“You’re lost and you’re going to get eaten without carrying out my holy plan, and then you’ll be in a world of shit.”

“I know the way,” Peter whispered, coming to a closed hatch, pulling up on the dog handle, and swinging the steel oval aside. The hangar stretched out before him.

“Bravo,”
said God, standing beside him now as Sherri, most of Her flesh bitten away, but the cruel box cutter wound still prominent on what remained of Her face. She tapped out a soft golf clap.

Brother Peter ignored Her and ducked through the opening.

•   •   •

I
’ll never find him,
Xavier thought, standing in a gloomy intersection of corridors.
He could have gone anywhere.

The grenade blast had blown the rows of chairs out in a circle, adding their own fragments to the destruction. Xavier had been on the carpet in a low silhouette as it went off, and the chairs had absorbed much of the damage. He escaped death but still caught at least six or seven fragments along his right side: his thigh, hip, ribs, and right shoulder. All of them felt like he imagined a knife wound would, the twisted fragments biting with every move, and all were bleeding. The one at his ribs hurt and bled the most. He knew at least one rib was broken, and he suspected the fragment had gone deep, perhaps slashing into an organ. What organs were on that side of the body? he wondered.

He couldn’t tell if an artery had been torn, but figured he would find out soon enough. If he collapsed and bled out in the next few minutes, he would have his answer.

The zombie’s scratches on his face didn’t seem so bad anymore.

Peter Dunleavy. World-renowned man of God and mad as a hatter.

Xavier could only assume from hearing the man’s one-sided conversation that he believed he was speaking directly with the Lord. It went beyond assumption that the man planned to detonate a nuclear weapon inside the ship. Those words had been quite clear.

Did he have the knowledge and the skills to do it?

Xavier had to believe he did. If it was true, there wouldn’t be much time to find and stop him. But where had he gone?

The distant echo of a shotgun blast rolled down the corridor to the right, and the priest took off at a run.
Thank you, God,
he thought, praying he wouldn’t bleed to death before he caught up to the madman.

•   •   •

I
t was a losing battle, and it didn’t take long. Eve bled out on the tiles of the sick bay waiting room, letting out a soft sigh before her eyes closed and her body grew still.

Rosa was bloody up to her elbows, surrounded by clumps of red-soaked gauze and trauma instruments. She flung a stainless steel clamp across the room and pounded her own thigh. Tommy stood and stared down at the dead woman, shaking his head. He had stayed out of the way keeping watch, except for when he had to step over to Lilly as she attempted her return from death, putting her to rest with a single rifle bullet.

“We have to find Xavier,” Rosa said, slinging her medical bag and not bothering to wipe the blood from her hands and arms. “Can you keep moving?”

The hippie nodded. He had wound gauze around his head to form a thick bandage and it seemed to have slowed the bleeding from what was really just a superficial flesh wound.

“Good. Load up with as much ammo as you can carry, and find a pistol.” Rosa walked over in a crouch and began removing the weapons and ammo from Lilly’s body.

“Hey, Doc,” Tommy said, gesturing at the other dead woman.

Rosa stood, drew her pistol, and put a round in Eve’s head. Tommy flinched.

“Let’s go,” said Rosa.

•   •   •

S
omeone had been here, and not long ago, Peter thought. Hundreds of bodies were crumpled on the rubberized deck of the hangar bay, brass and shotgun casings lying everywhere. Whatever creatures hadn’t been killed must have moved off in pursuit of the shooters, because the long, high compartment was empty of movement.

God be praised,
he thought, expecting some sarcastic remark from his savior as He took one form or another. There was nothing, as God chose to be elsewhere at the moment.

Batshit crazy, wasn’t that what the Lord had called him? Was he? No, he rejected that idea. God had said it, yes, but God had also admitted that He was capable of lying. No, it was a test, a test to see if he would falter and break faith, if he would be weak and abandon his holy purpose. Brother Peter smiled, confident in the strength of his belief.

He moved into the bay, feeding the last of his shells into the shotgun, knowing it was less than fully loaded. If he ran into trouble . . .
The Lord will provide,
he thought, looking for a sign. Surely God would provide guidance.

And He did.

Along the left side of the bay he spotted movement, but not the familiar shuffle of a corpse. This was mechanical and rhythmic, the repeated opening and closing of a set of elevator doors. Wide doors, like a freight elevator. Wide, red doors.

Red meant ordnance.

An oval hatch was set in the bulkhead not far from the elevator. It was red too.

The televangelist hurried toward the motion, staying close to the wall like a rodent scurrying for safety. When he got there he saw the zombie, a young man who had somehow gotten himself caught between the elevator car and the opening, his severed upper body stuck in the gap and hanging out, arms reaching as the head lolled and made a croaking sound.

The zombie wore a red jersey the same color as the door, and a plastic card was clipped to his shirt near the collar. Brother Peter used his foot to push the snapping head to the side and plucked the card off the jersey, examining it. He smiled as he recognized what it was.

The card had a magnetic stripe down its back so it could be swiped at a card reader, and sure enough such a unit was mounted beside the elevator doors. On the front was a photo of the zombie when he had been alive, a young man with a crew cut and a serious expression. Beneath the photo it read,
Weaver, R., Petty Officer 2nd
, along with a string of letters and numbers. The bottom half of the card was coated in a film that would change color if exposed to radiation.

“Thank you, Weaver, R.,” Brother Peter said, tucking the card in a pocket. Then he stomped repeatedly on the creature’s head until it was flat and the moving stopped. He grabbed the corpse under the arms and heaved, straining with the effort. The upper body came free with a wet, ripping sound, and he dropped it at once, jumping into the now-freed freight elevator before the doors could close.

There were only two button choices, one marked
H
and one marked
M
. He pressed the
M
and the doors closed, the elevator car sinking smoothly into the ship.

Brother Peter hummed one of his favorite hymns as it descended.