John Ringo - Under a Graveyard Sky

“When this says it’s okay,” Gardner said, holding up the hydrocarbon meter.

“Picky, picky,” Fontana said. “ Women !”

“You know, Fontana, on a boat like this I know ways to just catch you on fire. Ah, god. Not now…”

“What?”

“I gotta puke again,” she said, hurrying to the rail. “Be right back.”

* * *

“You gonna be okay?” Faith said as Hooch puked over the rail.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry, that’s not what… I mean…”

“I’d say I puked the first time but I didn’t,” Faith said, then shrugged. “I mean, I have puked. Trust me. But I’ve seen worse than this. You should have seen some of the stuff on the Alpha .”

“How many of these have you done?” Hooch said. The scene in the lower deck was fucking awful. The male of the group, presumably the dad, had survived. By feeding on his family in what had been the master’s cabin. From the looks of it, they’d all zombied and had been fed on one by one. As he’d killed them he’d brought them down into the cabin as a nest and slept with the dead and decomposing corpses. Hooch had managed to hold it in until he noticed one really totally, what the fuck? detail. At the head of the bed, not covered in filth, almost like a little shrine, was a teddy bear. Like somewhere in the thing on the boat’s brain it almost remembered that it had somebody it cared about. It just couldn’t recognize that it was the tiny little corpse it was feeding on.

“People keep asking me that,” Faith said. “I need to get a count…”

* * *

“Five,” Steve said, nodding. “That’s not bad for a boat this size. Come on, we’ll get you over to the rescue boat.”

“Wait,” one of the men said, holding up his hand. “I’ll stay onboard.”

“Why?” Fontana said.

“If we leave the boat it’s salvage,” a woman said.

“Heh,” Steve said, grinning. “It’s salvage already. You’re not going to get screwed but you kind of want to sit down and have a chat about the new reality.”

“You do, you really do,” Gardner said. “And I’m saying that sort of officially as a member of the Coast Guard. In fact, as far as we can tell, I’m the number four senior United States Coast Guard officer. Cause there’s only six of us left.”

“What?” the man said, his face going ashen.

“Just come on over to the boat and get some fresh air,” Steve said. “We’re not going to pirate your boat.”

“Not exactly pirate,” Fontana said. “Hey, I wonder if I’m, like, Senior NCO of the Army.”

“In that case, I think Hooch is the Commandant…”

* * *

“How much fuel in the tanks, Hooch?” Faith asked, looking at the form. She was letting him do it for the experience. Besides the post-clearance tasks were getting old.

“Like, half a tank?” Hooch said.

“But dead batteries,” Faith said. “Okay. Hey, Paula! Toss me the slave!”

“Slave cable?” Hooch asked.

“Got it in one,” Faith said as Paula hefted the cable up from the other boat’s engine room. “Vicky make it up from cables and stuff they found. They do a little salvage in the harbor when the zombies aren’t real active or boats they can get to that don’t have any. But it’s stuff like this. I mean, I’ve had a couple of other people say they’ll try out clearance and they see one boat like this and give it up. It’s not just the zombies.”

“Who clears ’em out?” Hooch asked.

“Oh, the crews do,” Faith said. “If you want a new boat, that’s the catch unless it’s a hand-me-down like the Endeavor . Okay, engineering deck hatch is over here …”

* * *

“This is confusing,” Hooch said, looking at the electrical panel.

“Confused the shit out of me the first time I looked at it,” Faith said, throwing a breaker back and forth. “But this isn’t complicated. The Large , the Vicky , that fricking Alpha. Those are complicated.” She hit the “Start” button and the engine started whining. “Come on, baby…”

The engine rumbled to life and she grinned.

“And we have a working boat,” Faith said. “I think we get some sort of spiff for that but I don’t really know what it is.”

“Spiff?” Hooch said.

“Bonus,” Faith said. “Like, extra rations or booze or something. Speaking of which.” She keyed her radio. “You want the good pickins, come and get ’em. And it works.”

“Awesome,” Sophia replied. “Maybe I’ll ask for an upgrade.”

“Might want to look at the master cabin before you say that.”

* * *

“Oh, my God,” the man said, his face white.

“I know, zombies, right?” Faith said to the “captain” of the “prize crew.” The group were recent rescuees, mostly from liferafts, who had volunteered to join the Flotilla. “They’re worse than a rock band. Just try to avoid the crap. The flying bridge isn’t too bad and it’s a nice clear day. All you got to do is run it into Bermuda. The course is laid in on the GPS. Just follow the marked route. That’s the current channels, whatever the markers might say. Don’t necessarily follow the markers. They’re getting filled up. Follow the marked route, got it?”

“Yeah,” the man said.

“If you get in trouble, we’re always up on sixteen,” Faith said. “ Don’t go into the lower decks unless you’ve got a really strong stomach. The Marine with me puked put it that way.”

“Who cleans these up?” the guy asked looking at the feces and blood smeared interior.

“First test of a captain in the Flotilla,” Faith said, grinning. “Can you find a crew who’s willing to clean the boat?”

* * *

“You drink, Hooch?” Sophia asked.

“There’s two reasons for my nickname,” Hooch said.

“Twenty-five-year-old Strathisla,” Sophia said, handing him a highball half full of dark whiskey. “One of the real reasons to be a clearing boat.”

“And stuff like this,” Faith said, admiring the new gold and diamond tennis bracelet. She’d had to “extend” it with a bit of parachute cord since it was for a much smaller wrist. “Especially since I don’t drink.”

“This is authorized?” Hooch asked, taking a sip of the scotch. “I’m not really into scotch but that’s pretty good.”

“And enough of it and you forget what you see,” Sophia said, taking a pull. “Balancing doing this job half hammered and just doing it is the tough part. And we’re authorized one third of the salvage from cleared boats as the clearance boat. We really don’t have the room for it. Basically, we can take anything we can carry.”

“Hell, you don’t even clear ,” Faith said. “What do you see that’s so bad? And I don’t drink .”

“Remember that raft with the kids in it, Faith?” Sophia asked, taking another drink.

“Yeah,” Faith said, looking at the deck.

“Kids?” Hooch asked.

“Life raft,” Sophia said. “Two kids. Maybe six and eight.”

“Zombies?” Hooch asked.

“No,” Faith said. “That was the tough part. They hadn’t zombied. There was no salt-water still. I mean…”

“There was a pack for one,” Sophia said. “It had been opened. But the still was gone. Maybe they could read the directions, set it up, but didn’t hook it up right and it drifted away. But it was gone. They’d died of dehydration.”

“Oh…crap,” Hooch said.

“That one still…” Faith said, her face working. “I mean, they must have tried really hard . They at least got the still out, you know?”