Cutter
08 Aug
1350
I was inside Hotel 23. Trapped. The dead Marines outside were pounding on the door to the environmental control room. Sliding the steel peephole to the side, I could see her . . . Tara was there, bloody, dead, wanting. John was behind her pawing at the door. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten here; I only knew that I was here. Surrounding the familiar faces were the Marines. Many of them were riddled with fatal bullet holes. My radio operator was there also. He still had his headset strapped to his head . . . then . . . he talked. The dead radioman talked! He said . . . “Sir, wake up . . . I have some important information for you.”
I am not certain of the nature of the message that arrived last night while I was sleeping. I woke up to the sound of the radioman tapping on my door. The message stated that we were to deploy to the coastline to help out a wrecked Coast Guard cutter. They were in no immediate danger and were anchored off the coast of Texas, only eighty miles up the coast from where the Bahama Mama probably still rested on the shore. After I had read the message and discussed its contents with the Gunny, we decided it would be best to leave tonight.
Shaken from the dream, I told Tara what I had seen in my vision. She was more than a friend and I felt I could tell her anything. Also, Dean was a rock. Her wisdom helped me deal with the demons that racked my soul more often than not these days.
The feeling was similar to coming off a long vacation to find that work had piled up in my absence. As I write this, my third in command is charting our course overland to rendezvous with the cutter that is dead in the water. In any other situation we would have departed already, but since the men onboard were relatively safe, we were taking the time in planning and provisioning to ensure a safer trip.
I would like to keep this excursion to a maximum of forty-eight hours. There is still much that needs to be done with merging the two camps. Hotel 23 cannot accommodate all the people, but I feel that with the right heavy equipment and some concrete dividers taken from the interstate, we could form a large wall around the perimeter outside the chain link fence. It could take months to gather the needed barriers but it might be worth it.
On another note, Danny hurt himself today playing with Laura outside. They were chasing Annabelle and Danny tripped in a small hole in the ground, spraining his left ankle. They are getting to go topside more these days, but the Marines are under strict orders to ensure their safety whenever they are aboveground. I have already packed my equipment into LAV number two. I have affectionately (and secretly) named this LAV “bumble bee tuna.” I don’t know why, it just fits for some odd reason.
It is very hot outside today and we will be bringing some extra water along with us in order to stay hydrated and alive. I know our water situation is not as good as it should be and neither is our fuel situation. This is a problem that will need to be resolved between official duties. In a way, I am happy that Hotel 23 is a small drop in the strategic command bucket. I am taking the same Marines with me on this mission. I didn’t notice any huge screw-ups from any of them on the last mission, so I don’t see the need to fix something that isn’t broken on a mission with such short notice. Perhaps I will mix them up on the next mission, if there is one.
11 Aug
2228
The departure from Hotel 23 was uneventful. It was very humid outside and it felt as if we were entering a sauna when we opened the hatch leading topside from the compound. The vehicles were already fueled up and ready for departure.
The roads were in severe need of maintenance that would never be given. The concrete was cracked and I hadn’t seen roads this bad since my overseas duty in Asia.
We continued east to the coastline until we came across what used to be a major roadway. Now it more closely resembled a field with wrecked cars lined up pointing east. It wasn’t what I was used to seeing. The rusting hulks were the only indication of the direction and curve of the road.
We crept along beside the wrecks in the general direction of the road, making sure to keep a safe distance from them to avoid any problems. The undead were not intelligent and this was not a known radiation zone, but the rolling hills of Texas could hide them easily in the troughs between here and our destination.
Another thing in the back of my mind was the difference in the big picture. In the old world, there were only a handful of animals that could deliver a fatal bite, such as some breeds of snake. Now the pendulum of deadly creatures to vulnerable humans has swung toward cataclysm. At least with a deadly viper one might have a possibility of survival. From the stories I am hearing from the Marines, these creatures that haunt the world have no antidote. The Gunny claims to have seen hundreds of men, strong men, who succumbed within thirty-six hours of being bitten or scratched. There is even a documented case of a few victims’ being infected by the accidental transfusion of saliva to open wounds.
Something still haunts me about them. Where do they get their energy? They seem to have unlimited supplies of energy in death. I secretly hope that someone or some think-tank is working to assess the strengths and weaknesses of these things, which most likely outnumber us by millions in the U.S. and billions abroad. These were among the thoughts swimming around in my mind during our mission to rescue the cutter Reliance, dead in the water. We were quite a few miles from our destination when we saw the first group of them in our NVGs.
I carefully outlined the unit’s rules of engagement (ROE). They knew to only use force against them when absolutely necessary. The loud engines of our LAVs triggered the undead to jerk on their axis and move toward us as we passed. They were conditioned and knew that any loud noise most definitely meant food.
I just glared at them from the gunner’s turret, then stared ahead into the night. The goggles were good, but one could see only so far with them, unlike the naked eye in daylight. It was sort of like having a huge green torch that lit up the night out to nearly eight hundred yards.
It was the same thing, corpse after corpse, wandering in the areas around their respective demises. Traveling with eight-wheeled vehicles had its advantages. We were fine trekking off-road until we came to bridges or overpasses. Approaching these structures meant that we would have to either pull the clogged arteries of the highway free from the vehicles that blocked them, or descend into the depths of the riverbeds. Sometimes it wasn’t a riverbed that the overpass was hiding, it was an interchange, or a smaller highway that ran underneath. That is what we happened on the night of our trip to the cutter.
LAV number one radioed back two hundred yards before reaching the decision point. They also knew never to stop. They idled forward as the radioman’s crackled voice came through: “Sir, we are approaching an overpass, the road is congested, what do you want to do?”
I asked, “What types of vehicles are clogging the pass?”
He replied, “Sir, I see a couple eighteen-wheelers.”
I had no choice but to order the men down into the embankment that lead to the perpendicular road below. I told the men to take it diagonally as they descended, and to stop for nothing. As much as I hated to think about it, these machines were still in need of depot-level maintenance (professional civilian maintenance), and on more than one occasion they have been known to sputter and die when coming to an abrupt stop.
Just as LAV number one disappeared fifty meters ahead of me into the abyss below, the radio keyed up, and then only static.
I keyed the microphone, asking for the station calling to repeat.
LAV one came back, “Sir, you might want to step on it and get around this. There is a school bus full of those things and there are quite a few of them around it.”
I gave thanks for the warning and asked the sergeant to keep me updated. We were almost on the crest of the hill and in view of them.
The radio again crackled. “Sir, we got active Geiger . . .”
I sat there for a minute, stunned. We were further away from radiated zones than Hotel 23. Why were we getting Geiger readings this far out?
As the nose of LAV two (mine) tipped over the ridge and began heading down the ravine to rendezvous with the highway, I saw the school bus. It was nothing special at first, until I took a second look.
The bus was ready for battle. Its windows had chicken wire and chain-link welded to the sides and a makeshift snowplow attached to the front. Our Geiger was now going off as we neared the big yellow bus. The bus was giving off high amounts of radiation. There were numerous undead occupants. On a more disturbing note, I could see nearly a dozen corpses on top of the bus, permanently dead.
I could not even begin to speculate on this one. The bus was hot, but the undead surrounding it were not nearly at the same level. The Geiger counter indicated the bus was giving off radiation levels that would make it deadly for prolonged exposure. Some of the occupants of the bus appeared to have very traumatic wounds, but some of them looked unscathed. They were very excited at the sound of our vehicles cruising by. The last sight I had of the bus was the second-to-last window on the right side. A young boy was hanging out of the window by his right leg. Nothing but bone was left on his left leg. His face was full of lesions and blisters. He didn’t appear to be dead, or undead.
Maintaining radio contact, we eventually skirted the wreckage and eluded the undead as we began climbing the hill to return to our easterly course. Something about the bus disturbed me. I wondered if the bus had been filled with survivors attempting to reach a safer area. They obviously came from a radiated zone and knew that to stay meant death.
I wondered how those on the roof of the bus had taken themselves out. I didn’t see any guns there with them. It was a few hours before I could think of anything else. We went on, all through the night, towing, skirting, avoiding. The only other complete stop we made was when we arrived at a fuel tanker that was at a safe distance from any bottleneck of pileups and traffic jams.
Since we didn’t have any time to figure the vehicle out, or to try to bring it back to life, one of the men simply attached a cloth-wrapped chain to the valve of the vehicle and yanked it from the tank. Diesel began to flow onto the ground. We all knew that diesel was not very volatile, and posed no real threat as long as we were smart about handling it. Using one of the k-bars, we cut one of the rubber hoses from the side of the tanker and taped it to the broken valve with hundred-mile-per-hour tape. It wasn’t pretty, or watertight, but it did the job. We filled the vehicles and the exterior fuel tanks with the fuel. One of the mechanics tested the fuel and claimed that it was still okay, but it probably wouldn’t be in a year or so, without treatment.
We stuffed the broken valve with cloth that we cut from the seats of the vehicle, a large 120-ounce drink cup and a piece of rope.
It dripped a little, but it would take ages to leak dry. We marked it on our charts as a possible refuel point if needed on the way back. The prospect of having a known fueling point made me feel a little better, but with the shoddy maintenance on the vehicles, coupled with questionable fuel quality, any positive feelings were diminished.
As the sun came up, we arrived at Richwood, Texas. The sign indicating the name and population was partially obscured by graffiti crossing it out. I could smell the salt air. We were not far from the Gulf. We had been attempting to contact the cutter via radio all night. No joy. The men were tired and movement during the day was risky. We were in an industrial area and it didn’t take long to find a fenced-in factory in which to play hide and sleep.
The factory was called PLP, and judging from the equipment sitting outside the main building, they had something to do with industrial piping. One of the Marines knocked the lock off with an axe that was strapped down to the exterior of LAV three. We drove through, shut the gate and reattached the chain using tape and spare tent stakes. We parked the LAVs around back and set up a watch rotation as well as defensive perimeters using the stacks of pipes that littered the exterior.
We got very little sleep that day, because of the incessant banging from inside the factory. The undead workers knew we were out here and wanted to be also. By the time we woke up and cleared the heavy stacked pipes out of our way, we had an audience at the fence near our area. Not many, but enough. One is too many. Another random thought . . . how many humans could one of them infect if victims walked in a line, allowing the creature to bite everyone? Unlimited? Fifty?
We sent four men to distract the undead audience so that the rest of us could open the gates and exfiltrate the factory. The sun was hanging low. It was thirteen hours since we had stopped. We needed the extra time to allow full sleep rotation. We could have saved four hours by just letting everyone sleep at the same time, but that would have been foolhardy. We were out of the area quickly and on our way to the coastline. It had been a bit since I had seen the ocean. The familiar smell brought back memories, like the smell of old cologne found in the back of a medicine cabinet.
Once again, we tried to establish communication with the cutter. Our HF radios could easily reach Hotel 23 if tuned properly and should have been able to reach the cutter even more easily. The only thing I could think of was signal bounce, a phenomenon well known to radio operators. Being too close or too far from the intended recipient of a transmission could put the signal in a position to bounce over the receiving radio antennas. There was overcast, and sometimes this was a factor in a signal bounce problem.
We checked in with John and the rest of the Hotel originals. I told them of the school bus and the fuel truck and factory. I asked John if Tara was in the room and he said that she wasn’t. I then told him to tell her not to worry and not to mention the school bus to her. The main purpose of my call was to get an accurate position for the cutter. John said he would have the radioman send out a message and would get back to me within the hour.
As we idled along toward the ocean, her green color came into view. The vast expanse of the Gulf lay before us. Her palette of color had been long missed. Judging by the reactions of the men, they too missed the view of open waters. Approaching the marina, John came back over the radio and relayed the response from the carrier. Carrier intelligence had received the last Link-11 datalink update thirty minutes prior. The cutter was at 28-50.0N 095-16.4W. According to our charts, this put the ship four miles off the coast.
We were close enough to the marina to see the details. Only small sailboats remained there. This area reminded me of Seadrift. Why wouldn’t it? It was not far from there. I wondered if the pickled onions were still sitting on the deck of the Mama. She wasn’t far from here either.
We were going to need awhile to plan this amphibious rescue mission, so we pulled our three-vehicle convoy into the parking lot of the Fair Winds marina. I radioed John again and asked him to get a message to HQ requesting updates if the cutter’s position drifted more than half a mile. He told me to be careful and he would see me in a couple of days.
With the lack of communication between our convoy and the cutter, I wondered if this was in fact a rescue mission or a salvage mission. I was startled from this thought by the sound of carbine fire. I cursed under my breath and wondered which man had broken the ROE. I picked up the microphone and keyed out, asking who had fired and why. The senior man on LAV three came back asking me to turn the scope directly to six o’clock and see what was approaching.
I complied and saw probably fifty of them pouring out of the urban area a quarter mile from our position. Fifty was better than five thousand on any day, so I wasn’t too worried. The sergeant wasn’t shooting at the undead fifteen hundred feet away; he was shooting at the ones pounding on his back doorstep! I don’t know why, but the group of four corpses behind LAV three looked familiar. I couldn’t place them. I had seen thousands of these things since they first walked, and I was probably just being paranoid.
I signaled the men to prepare the vehicles for amphibious travel. These Marine LAVs were just as seaworthy as most small boats. They were large, heavy and slow, but they could move in the water. They have two small screws in the back, boosting the vehicles to speeds approaching ten knots. We opened up on the ones in our area and the chain of them that popped up between the water and us. Our path was clear and our vehicles ready so we barreled into the Gulf of Mexico, undead hordes behind in pursuit.
The water that splashed up onto my face was warm. Water began to spill into the troop compartment, and I shot a worried glance over to the Gunny. He smiled and told me not to worry, that if it weren’t leaking he would be the one worried. I trusted the man and popped my head back topside to observe the activity on the shore. I told the other LAVs to cut to idle and form a line one hundred yards from the marina. The inside of my vehicle had two inches of water, but it showed no sign of sinking.
I climbed out onto the top and just watched them gather on the shoreline like ants. It was then that the radio beeped again with another voice message incoming. It was the familiar sound of crypto syncing up. It sort of sounds like an old computer modem, until the voice comes into recognition. John came back and told us he had a position update on the cutter. Even though we had only requested updates in the event of a drift greater than a quarter mile, HQ felt that the news of the cutter’s not moving at all would also be valuable. I had to agree. The ship had no significant movement since the last time an automated update was sent from the antenna on the mast of the ship.
The moans from the dead carried well over the water and into my microphone. I heard Tara’s voice and a struggle for the microphone back at the compound. She came on and asked if everything was all right. I explained our current situation and informed her that we were in no immediate danger. I asked her to put John back on and she reluctantly did. I told John that we were about to head out into the open water in search of the ship. Fog was beginning to roll in. The light of the moon, as well as the cold of the night, magnified the fear that every man felt.
We left the gaggle of undead at the shoreline and headed for the coordinates given to us by the carrier battle group. As we slowly advanced, the moans were drowned out and we forgot about our enemy for the time being. I tried not to think about the undead that were lurking on the ocean floor or floating with neutral buoyancy just below the surface. I wished them the worst, as those were the ones I feared most.
The LAV’s onboard optic was much better than my goggles, so I scurried back in the hole and deployed the sensors. I could still see the shoreline. The undead were still there. Again, like ants they swarmed. I swung the viewer back around toward the front of the vehicle. My feet were wet from the salt water that had leaked or splashed into the compartment.
We were now one mile off the coast and I could see a small shining object on the horizon. It almost looked like a candle. When we reached the two-mile marker, the radio came alive again with a position report. John claimed that the Coast Guard cutter had again remained stationary since the last update. That was fine by me. The less hunting for it in the open water the better.
I grabbed a strobe light from one of the survival kits and clipped it on the cargo net topside. I wanted to do everything I could to get indications that the crew was alive before attempting to board. I still could not see the silhouette of the cutter. We were now at the three-mile distance from the shoreline. The source of the candlelight became apparent. The light was the flame from an offshore oil platform. At her base was the cutter. It appeared to be moored on the southeast support column of the rig. There was no sign of life from this distance.
As we approached the rig, I could hear living human voices in the distance. They appeared to be yelling. I was nearly certain that our strobes could be seen from their vantage point on the vessel. As I got closer, I began to realize that the voices were not coming from the ship, but from the platform. I listened and went back inside to use the LAV optics. I could see the green outline of men on the platform waving their arms. We were now close enough to make out what they were saying. They were telling us not to board the ship.
It was overrun.
I wondered how a mechanical malfunction had turned out to be an infestation onboard this warship. The Gunny and I were the first to touch the ladder of the oil platform. On my way up, I could make out figures on the boat. It was a long climb to the top, even longer than the ladder in the missile silo of Hotel 23. As I reached the top rung, I was helped to my feet by one of the crew. I counted roughly thirty men on the platform. They all appeared to be in good health.
I asked who was in charge, and one of the men replied, “LTJG Barnes, sir.”
I asked to speak with the LT, but the men quickly informed me that he had sealed himself inside a compartment on the vessel and had no way out. I had a feeling that my next question had been anticipated, as, when I asked them how the hell those rotting shitbags could take over a warship, they started to explain the situation piece by piece.
I was talking to a petty officer. He was one of the ship’s information systems technicians, who ran the ship’s automated systems and networks. He seemed to have it together. The petty officer explained that they had run aground near the offshore rig. The updated charts they would normally have onboard were not available and they were not sure how deep the water was in this area. It wasn’t bad, but they ended up damaging their screw while getting themselves off the sandbar. The boat could be operated but that would cause too much stress on the engine and shaft because the screw was not functioning at 100 percent efficiency.
There would be no time like the night for us to retake the vessel. I knew for a fact these things could not see in the dark any better than the average living person.
Despite the petty officer’s explanation of how they came to be nearly dead in the water, the question remained about the undead and why they were present on the cutter in sufficient numbers to cause the crew to abandon the vessel. I ordered him to explain this. He was hesitant at first, but I explained to him who I was and under what authority I operated.
After lowering his head so that his eyes were hidden below his ballcap, he said: “Word came down from the top to get and transport specimens of them for research on the flattop [carrier].”
Insane . . . really? Would the people in charge actually want these things onboard their command ship, no matter how critical the research? Bringing them onto a cutter was one thing, but onboard the acting U.S. military command ship?
I know that the carrier had a full onboard medical staff and decent equipment for research, but this research could be done somewhere else, anywhere else, away from the military’s leadership. We were getting thin on active-duty military personnel or so I estimated.
“Why the Gulf of Mexico?” I asked.
He replied, “Because command wanted the radiated ones.”
I nearly slugged the man right where he stood for agreeing to follow those orders, but I restrained myself, and he went on to tell me that many smaller ships had been dispatched with extraction teams to the radiation zones of destroyed cities to find specimens for study. I agreed in my mind with the intentions, but not the means or storage of these things. Why did they need them from different areas? This man did not know the answer to that and I was betting the only people who did were on that aircraft carrier. I asked the man how many radiated corpses were onboard; he told me that they had acquired five of them from the New Orleans hot zone.
I asked him how only five of those creatures could effectively mission-kill the cutter. He stared off into the night and sat there for a minute, not knowing what to say. I snapped my fingers in front of his face, pulling him out of his trancelike state. He then began telling me what I had feared and suspected.
“These aren’t the same as the others, sir. They don’t decay like the others, they are stronger, faster, and some say more intelligent. I don’t get it. The radiation does something to them, preserves them. The doctors on the carrier think the radiation is some type of catalyst for preserving motor function and regrowing dead cells. Oddly, the regenerated cells are still dead. They don’t understand it, no one does. They won’t admit it, but I know they made a mistake when they dropped the nukes.
“The creatures on the ship broke out of their restraining straps and killed the three men guarding them. Those men turned and it was all we could do to secure the bridge and get the ship moored alongside this oil platform before we were eaten.”
He estimated that the ship housed nearly fifteen undead now.
It was time to act, I supposed. I told the man that I was sorry and that the carrier would not be acquiring their specimens from this ship. We were going to kill them all.
We lost a Marine in the assault. All in all it took forty-five minutes to secure the ship. It was dark and it would have been suicide for our whole squad to board. I took the Gunny and a seasoned staff sergeant with me. He would have had it no other way. I have recently been informed that he had a spouse back at the original Marine base camp. I can say that he fought valiantly and probably saved both the Gunny and me.
We carefully boarded the ship by jumping over the mooring lines onto the weather deck. Staff Sergeant “Mac” had the only suppressed weapon in the group. We left the others at home in the event they needed the weapons to defend themselves.
I was not familiar with the weapon’s handling, so I left it to the Marine. I would have loved to take more than three, but unfortunately we only had three sets of night vision goggles. Mac wasted the two creatures on the weather deck. Those two were part of the original crew. We piled them on the forecastle and proceeded to secure the ship. Using the ship’s 21MC bitch box we were able to establish communications with six surviving crewmembers holed up in the galley. I could hear the sound of the undead in the background through the speakers, relentlessly striking the steel roll-down galley shutter.
This partition was the only thing keeping the culinary specialists and the ship’s senior officer from being eaten.
They proceeded to tell us that they had taken down one of the radiated undead with a fire extinguisher and a fire axe. One of the men who had downed the thing was vomiting and weak, probably from exposure. The sailors wore radiation suits inside the New Orleans zone to acquire the specimens, which were no doubt very radioactive and dangerous to be near. The lieutenant told me that the other two were outside the galley partition pounding on the bulkheads. He seemed to think that much of the undead crew was there with them but wasn’t sure if all of them were present on the other side. We crept through the passageway, down the steep ladders. The galley was in the center of the ship, deep below the waterline. As we approached the main deck, Mac whispered that he was going to destroy one of the bright passageway lights so we could continue to have the upper hand. He shot it out, and this change in atmosphere triggered one of those things to move into the open in front of his weapon.
Mac took it out with two shots. The first shot hit the creature’s left shoulder and did nothing but spatter black, putrid blood on the wall behind. The second shot hit the creature right on the nose, and I suppose just enough of the brain was scrambled to do the job, as it moved no more.
We dragged it to the corner of the passageway and used zip cuffs to bind its arms and legs just to be sure. We kept lurking through the darkness. Every sound was thunder and every blinking LED seemed like storm lightning. The ship had the familiar smell of mothballs and a tinge of death. We came to a hatch. It was a large steel door used to keep water from flooding adjoining compartments in the event of an attack or emergency. There was a small circle of thick glass no bigger than the diameter of a coffee can on the door where a peephole would be. I looked through and could see the ship’s emergency lighting was on. An eerie red glow filled the small room beyond. I cranked the handle on the door, trying to be as quiet as possible, moving a centimeter at a time. We all winced when the hatch creaked from lack of maintenance. I stopped moving the handle and checked the hole again. I saw movement in the compartment beyond. A loud thud rang through our compartment as something very strong hit the hatch. It nearly opened from the pressure, but fortunately I hadn’t fully slid the handle to the open position.
The creature on the other side obscured the red lighting behind. Its face was pressed against the thick glass and it was banging its head in a futile attempt to get to us. Every fiber in my body was telling me to leave and not open the thick steel door. We could still turn back and survive. There were men down there and I knew that every hour they stayed in proximity to the radiated creatures meant they were an hour closer to their death. I told the sergeant that I would slam the latch open, then he would pull the rip cord that I had attached to the door, yanking it open.
As there was no use in being quiet about it anymore, I used no care in forcing the handle to the open position. I slammed it home and Mac yanked the cord. The door flung open and the creature came through. Luckily for us the creature was not accustomed to shipboard life and promptly tripped over the knee knocker, landing flat on its face. Expecting this thing to take its time getting up, I readied my weapon for careful aim. I did not get what I expected. This creature was on its feet fast. This was one of the preserved dead from the New Orleans zone. It lurched toward me and my goggles seemed to crackle like a late-night hometown TV channel that had just finished the national anthem. The last thing I saw was its bony claw reach out before intense light blinded me and I heard the action of Mac’s suppressed H&K.
I felt the air move and heard a loud thud as something hit the steel deck. I pulled off my NVGs. As my eyes adjusted to the bright light, I saw Mac’s Surefire torch lighting up the compartment. Using two mops from a nearby bucket, Mac and I pushed the creature into a corner and tried as best we could to stack heavy objects on top to incapacitate it like the other creature we had dispatched—again, “just in case.” We could not zip cuff the thing, as the radiation was likely at a deadly level. We took no time getting out of this area and through the next. Anywhere this creature had been was probably unsafe. I know it was my imagination, similar to the feeling of your head itching when someone mentions lice, but I could almost feel the heat of radiation on my face and neck.
The next compartment was clear. Only one more steel door separated us from the galley area. We were now facing two problems. First, our NVGs were “snowing out” due to some sort of electromagnetic or radiological interference, and second, the heavy steel door was in fact cracked open slightly. The only real barrier that separated us from the bulk of the undead in the galley was a long, dark corridor and a half-open steel door. I could see their shadows moving through the crack beyond the door. From where we were watching, the door was roughly ten meters away.
The only thing we could do was bust in there and shoot them. No special tactic, no smart way to handle it. I hated this and wished for a better method. We approached the door. I stopped Gunny and Mac and we checked our weapons. No safety, and no inhibitions. We had eighty-seven rounds ready to go between us. More, if we needed to reload, but we all knew if it came to that we were going to die anyway.
We checked our clothing and tried to cover as much skin as possible. As near as I could figure, there were at least ten in there, and at least one of the special type. This hatch opened outward, away from us and toward them. I gave the signal and the Gunny kicked it fully open. It slammed against the bulkhead and locked into place. Inside this room were eleven undead corpses. They were all banging on the metal partition and didn’t notice us at first until I took a preemptive shot. I killed three before the rest took notice. I had hoped that one of them was the New Orleans creature. We began to shoot, three-round bursts. Limbs, jaws, shoulders and teeth were flying everywhere. I was careful not to aim in the direction of the partition, in case one of the sailors stood near. We were down to three when I heard a loud scream from over my right shoulder. It was Mac. He was bleeding from his face, and one of the creatures was standing behind him attempting to bite him.
I looked again . . . it was the same creature we had shot two compartments back. The one we didn’t touch, but tried to incapacitate. It hadn’t died. I emptied the rest of my magazine into the creature’s head. It fell, most of its head missing. I was almost overrun by the last of them when Gunny took care of them for me as I tended to Mac.
The bite wasn’t bad. It was actually not his face, but his ear. The creature had bitten part of his ear off. Mac was breathing heavily and going into what I would have described as shock. I asked Gunny to look after him as I went to check for survivors in the galley. This was no time to screw around. The ship wasn’t safe and would need a scrub-down before it could ever be used in a normal capacity again. I rapped on the steel shutter, asking if anyone was alive. I heard a series of mechanical clicking sounds and the door next to the shutter opened up and they started pouring out . . . living. One of them looked pretty bad. It was the one who had the hand-to-hand altercation with one of the New Orleans creatures.
The ship’s OIC was present, and I informed him of the situation. He knew it and hated to admit it, but he had no choice but to abandon this ship and hold out on the rig until we could get support from carrier HQ. We got the hell off the ship, with Mac and the sick sailor being first priority. Mac was a dead man. The other man had not been bitten and only needed decontamination treatment. I wasn’t certain whether it was too late. On the way out, I stopped off in the one of the ship’s heads and ripped the soap dispenser off the wall. I took a roll of paper towels as well. We were finally topside. It was still dark outside. It was only 0300 hrs. Mac and the sailor were in no shape to climb to the platform where the other survivors waited. We rigged a makeshift harness and pulled them up one at a time. I never really knew this Marine, but that doesn’t change my sadness. As the acting commander it was my duty to travel to the camp where his wife lived and tell her the news. Although I had no flag to present, it didn’t change the need to fulfill my obligation to Mac, as he is and always will be a United States Marine.
Gunny shot Mac in the back of the head two hours after we returned to the rig. He had already passed out from the infection and was not far from turning.
This mission ended the next day, with radio contact being established with the carrier battle group. I relayed a message to command through the radio operator at Hotel 23 and informed them of the situation and location of survivors here. Using salt water from the Gulf and the soap and towels, we attempted to decontaminate Petty Officer Tompost. We left the men with every bit of our food and water and departed the oil rig after making sure a rescue was en route. We also left the sailors a functional radio in the event help didn’t show. The only thing we had going for us were a few full cans of diesel and a spot to refuel on our charts. It was a two-day trip back. I brought Mac back home wrapped in canvas strapped to the exterior of LAV number two. I made sure he wouldn’t return, but his wife didn’t deserve to have his body thrown into the Gulf. He deserved a proper burial.
19 Aug
2350
Day before last I made my trip to the Marine base camp. This is one of the many reasons that I wish I were not the senior man present at the facility. I took four men, including the Gunny, and one LAV. Correction, there were five men. Mac was with us in a pine box, covered by an American flag. The flag wasn’t easy to come by, as it took forty rounds of ammunition and ten years of my life terrified away from me to get it. It was the least I could do. Tara asked to come with me to comfort the widow. I told her that it wasn’t a good idea, of course. Besides, this world is so full of death and doom. Mrs. Mac wasn’t the only one to lose someone, but I still felt for her. There weren’t many pre-existing relationships left here in the apocalypse.
I didn’t have a formal uniform and the nearest uniform shop was out of business. I knew it really didn’t matter. It was a solemn moment when I handed the widow her tattered one-sided flag. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never had the honor of doing this. In the movies, the widow always hugs the guy who gives her the flag and they both have a somber moment. All I got was a cold stare and a feeling of hatred. Who am I to blame her? If I can somehow be an outlet for her emotions, then it’s fine by me. I do know that I feel bad about what happened. He was a good man.
RIP Staff Sergeant Mac.