Humanaty's Blight

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Chaos ruled the seas. More small boats were arriving. The troop carriers had snipers or riflemen positioned around their ships and were keeping the smaller craft at bay. The sinking hulls of those of our fleet that had been hit floated like wreckage after a storm. Men and women in lifejackets swam for their lives. Other small speed boats risked sinking their own boats to rescue them.

Sue came to my side. “The radio operator wants to speak to you.”

I went below.

“Sir,” he began as if I deserved that sort of respect, “The army reserve unit has asked that you order all attacks to cease and all boats to land and everyone take up positions near the docks.”

“Why?”

He spoke into the microphone and listened to the headset he wore. He said, “He does not have enough men. More are coming, but not enough are there to defend the pier. I don’t understand it all, but there is a cannon that was in a museum, and powder. The leader also has two bazookas and shells. He also has a few rocket launchers and has men reading the instructions on how to fire them.”

Reading the instruction on how to fire them?

The radio operator listened to his headset again and said, “Since they don’t know how to use what they took from an armory, they want your permission to wait until the ships are almost tied up, so they don’t miss.”

“Tell him to do what he thinks is best. And order all the small boats ashore to reinforce our troops there.” I turned away and ran for the stern.

“What’s that all about?” Steve asked.

Where to start. Words fell from my lips in no particular order. Steve had us racing for the port with both the engine and sails. We were outdistancing the first troopships, but not by much.

Steve seemed to understand what I told him and pointed. Ashore, there were cars, trucks, motorcycles, and men on foot arriving. Scurrying like ants after someone scuffed their hill. Instead of fighting each other, they now had a common enemy.

I saw no sign of the cannon, bazookas, or rocket launchers. Just men and women running to join in the fight. We pulled Truant up to a floating dock, leaped out and tied her, then ran to join the others.

A kid about sixteen reached us before we put a foot on land. He wore cutoff jeans and sneakers. His tee-shirt had the logo of a rock band from a previous era. He pulled to a stop and asked, “Is one of you, Captain Bill?”

Sue jabbed her thumb in my direction.

The boy straightened and saluted. I returned it as I’d seen in the movies, confused again, but that was becoming my normal state of being.

He said, “Please come with me, sir.”

“Where?”

“HQ. They need you.”

I glanced at Steve and Sue. “Come on, both of you. I’m not doing this alone.”

The four of us ran. Behind several cars and trucks piled together, were at least twenty people and open wooden crates that had contained military equipment. All were painted the same dull green. People were arguing, shouting, and trying to figure out the instructions.

Nobody was in uniform.

Two more tan trucks with army decals pulled up.

The driver of one jumped out, raced to the back and dropped the tailgate as he shouted, “I got the magnets. Found them at a hardware store.”

As others, all armed with automatic weapons climbed down from the two trucks, an older man with white hair and an unmistakable military bearing marched to examine them. He pulled one magnet the size of a shoe free from the magnetic grip of the others. He stuck it to the metal frame of the truck. It stuck firmly, with a solid twang. He seemed satisfied.

“Captain Bill,” the boy announced as he motioned to me.

A skinny man in his forties snarled, “Thank God.” He was dressed in baggy cargo shorts and wore a Dallas Cowboys ball cap. “Major Dundee. Retired. No relation.”

He must have heard a thousand references to the movie he may have been named after in his career, but it made it easy to remember his name. “You in charge?” I asked.

“Until you arrived. Tell me what you need, Captain, and I’ll get it done.”

Others turned to look at me, pausing in their activities to hear my instructions. I turned to look at the troopships and found they had slowed. It looked like the first two had dropped anchor. Others were taking up positions behind them.

Hooks that normally held lifeboats on the sides of the ships swung out and started lowering gunboats already filled with armed soldiers. There were large machineguns mounted on their bows and within seconds the first of them splashed into the water. Each odd appearing boat was surrounded by what looked like a huge inflated innertube.

Steve whispered to me, “Self-sealing and partitioned hulls. A hundred bullets won’t sink them.”

The older man holding the magnet strode in my direction. Without introductions or permission, he said, “Used to be a SEAL a long time ago. Maybe I can help?”

I looked at him blankly. I’d seen SEALs in video games. They were the baddest of the bad. “How?”

He gestured to a set of crates. “C4. Explosives. Detonators over there,” he pointed.

I didn’t understand much of what he said and less of why I needed to know.

He continued, “Mold some C4 around a magnet, insert a detonator, and slap it on the side of a hull of one of those ships, and… boom!”

“How do you get close enough to put them on the side of a ship that has hundreds of men with guns shooting at you?”

“I’d suggest you do it fast,” he said without smiling. “Before they can shoot your ass.”

Sue stepped in front of me as if protecting me, which she was probably doing. She said, “Why don’t you go ahead and put them on a few ships and show us how it’s done?”

He smiled. “I was thinking the same thing. In the old days, I’d scuba to the ships, but things are different. No tanks or trained men. We could use fast boats to approach, but it only takes one bullet to sink us and then those on the ships can shoot at us for practice while we’re swimming away. We need to find another way.”

She glanced my way, “Captain Bill used kayaks for his midnight raids,” she turned to me. “Didn’t you?”

I nodded as he snapped his fingers and said, “That will work, Captain. Their radar won’t see us, and we can dart in, plant the C4 and escape. Can you get me some men?”

My instinct was to explain I had no idea what to do, so they needed to stop asking for my advice. But his idea with the kayaks and explosives sounded good. I stepped up on the bumper of a car and called out as if I was actually in charge of something, “I need ten good men who are familiar with small boats.”

Several approached and I motioned for them to talk with the SEAL. I overheard one say that there were several kayaks in storage at the marina. They huddled together as we watched more of the invader’s gunboats from other ships join with the first group.

One took charge, and together, they sped in our direction. Each was loaded with soldiers in full battle-dress. Their upper bodies were disproportionate, which probably meant bulletproof vests or life jackets or both. All wore helmets.

Their first problem was that the surface of the pier was probably twenty feet higher than the water. A few metal ladders would let them climb up, one by one. The first gunboats cruised past the pier as the men aboard fired automatics and the machine guns on the bow in our direction. Everyone hit the ground, but I didn’t see any casualties.

A gunboat pulled up to each ladder as five ran aground on the beach to the south side of the pier and men piled out. We had men positioned near there and a war broke out. As each invader reached the top of the ladders, he was met with a dozen shots, some of them fatal, despite the body-armor. After a few deaths at each ladder, no more appeared. The gunboats backed off and streaked past time after time, spraying a lot of bullets in our direction, with few hits.

At the edge of the pier, a man, one of ours stood up, a long green tube held to his shoulder. He peered through an eyepiece, steadied the unit, and pulled his trigger. A streak of flame shot from the rear, as well as another from the front. A spear of fire lanced a half-mile to the closest ship.

It hit ten feet above the waterline, blowing a hole large enough to drive a pickup through. A concussion loud enough to physically jar us came next. But it was too far above the waterline to let the sea rush inside. I hoped we had a hundred more rockets stored close to the waterfront.

Flames erupted inside the darkness within the ship and quickly spread. The black hole turned orange. Another small explosion told us the shell must have found something else to blow up or the flames reached explosives, fuel, or the like.

More flames licked the outer part of the hull and as the man reloaded his weapon, the first flames reached the main deck. The second shell entered the side of the next ship, entering below where the gunboats had emerged, very near the waterline. Cheering broke out behind me.

There was the initial explosion again, quickly followed by another, far larger. The side of the ship was torn open and water poured inside. In no time, the ship listed to one side, and men by the hundreds were leaping into the water from it.

The pier broke out in louder cheers and jeers. The fire on the first ship rose up the superstructure as men with firehoses fought to extinguish it and lost the battle. A few of them leaped off, then more.

Sue jabbed me with her elbow at me and pointed to the man with the rocket launcher. “Why isn’t he firing again?”

I turned to Major Dundee and asked, “What’s happening?”

“He only had two rockets.”

Another man leaped to his feet and raced to the end of the pier, lugging what looked like a six-foot-long green tube. Another followed behind a green canvas sack over his shoulder. The first shouldered the bazooka, a weapon I recognized from the war games on my game console in the basement.

The second man inserted a shell and the first fired at the cluster of three ships behind the smoke and flames of the first two. The shell fell far short. He tried again, this time after his partner pounded his shoulder to tell him to fire at will, the bazooka was tilted much higher. The second shell fell short by a hundred yards or more.

They turned and ran, in our direction. A few bullets struck uncomfortably close, which caused them to zig and zag. They made it safely.

I asked, “Do you have more shells?”

“About a dozen,” the second man said.

“Good try, but no sense in wasting them. Maybe we can get you closer.”

They both nodded eagerly.

The second ship, the one that had taken a rocket where the water rushed in, listed so far to one side, it looked ready to roll over. The number of men leaping from the first ship increased. The water was dotted with them. Firing from the beach at the edge of the pier was almost continuous.

I turned to look. The gunboat crews were pinned down at the beach. All the shooting had brought more people from Everett to find out what was happening. Many had chosen to join in. We now had hundreds perched on the hillside, all waiting for any of them to expose themselves.

The white-haired SEAL carried a green kayak balanced on his head as he jogged our way. Behind him, others tried to keep up. I estimated darkness would fall in a few hours. The kayaks would head out then.

The SEAL put his kayak down and motioned for the others to do the same in a semi-circle around him. He started a lecture, probably teaching them how to attach the magnets with the C4 to the hulls, the best places to do it, and how to approach the ships. He didn’t need my input.

More gunboats from the other seventeen ships appeared and raced for the shore to support those pinned down there. I motioned to the man with the bazooka. He jogged to me. “Listen, those gunboats are going to land and they will give us hell. Can you and your buddy go blow up the gunboats that are already here?”

He cracked a crooked smile. “If they blow up, those others will think twice about landing there, right?”

“Can you do it?” It became a rhetorical question and the pair of them quickly covered the few hundred yards to where the fighting was, and where five gunboats and their crews were attempting to gain a foothold on the beach.

Our men ducked behind a cinderblock shed and loaded the bazooka. With the tube raised, the first stepped out, took quick aim, and fired. He leaped back under cover. The shell struck the gunboat in the midst of the other four. The explosion threw flames twenty feet into the air. A secondary explosion that I took to be a second shot fired by the bazooka, but was not, came within seconds. Then another. It was not a video game.

Two of the gunboats no longer existed. Another was burning. Soldiers were scattered, some looked dead. Others cried for help in a language I didn’t understand. I puked and splashed vomit on my feet and still bare ankles. Those people nearest me moved a step or two away.

The bazooka holder stepped into the open again and fired another shell at the two boats least damaged. More explosions and fires. He and the man carrying more shells turned and raced back to where I stood wiping my chin with the back of my sleeve.

A man I hadn’t seen before approached and saluted stiffly. I could get used to the respect they showed. I returned it, hitting my forehead too hard with my fingers and flinching.

He said, “The Commodore of that enemy fleet is on the radio. He wants to speak with you.”

“Where’s the radio?”

“Follow me, sir.”

I followed. There were five men, all with radios in front of them under a brown tent set up well back from the action. The firing of rifles was still almost constant. I accepted the preferred microphone and squeezed the transmit button. I paused.

“Captain Bill,” Sue prompted. “Tell them who you are.”

“Captain Bill here,” I said in a pompous voice. “To whom am I speaking?”

An echoey voice replied in perfectly enunciated English. “Surrender now and you may live.”

When I didn’t respond, Sue reached out, squeezed the button on the mic again and said in a husky voice that she pretended to be mine, “Surrender, and your ship may still be floating in an hour, ass hole.” The exact words he’d used, all but the two at the end.

“I have ten thousand trained soldiers in this harbor. You have no chance.”

Sue still held my hand with the mic. She transmitted again, “Maybe you had that many a while ago, but a lot of them are swimming right now, so you can’t count them.”

“I order you to surrender or we will storm your shores and take no prisoners.”

Sue puffed out her chest and said gruffly, “Have you looked up in the sky lately? If not, Captain Bill says you should. He’s called in an airstrike on your ships. Their ETA is about ten minutes.”

She let go of my hand. All eyes were on her. I said it first, “What good will that do? We don’t have any way to call in an airstrike.”

She grinned and shrugged in the way fourteen-year-olds do when dismissing others. She said, “We know that. He doesn’t. I hope he has a real bad ten minutes wait. I’d love to see a plane, any plane, flying this way.”

The laughter around me caught me by surprise. The men in the radio area were repeating the conversation to anyone listening. A boom sounded, another explosion, but it was different.

We ran outside and found a cloud of smoke near the edge of the pier. A cannon mounted on wheels sat there. Exposed, it looked like it was leftover from the Civil War over a hundred and fifty years earlier. The thing may have been sitting beside the steps of the city hall or VFW building earlier today. It had been covered with tarps and hidden from the ships, but it was at the edge of the concrete pier and pointed at the gunboats. The cloud of smoke slowly dissipated as the cannon was rolled back nearer us and three men leaped to reload.

The word came to us that it had fired ball bearings and steel nuts, like a giant shotgun. It was being reloaded and pointed to where the soldiers on the gunboats would come to take the pier from us. When I looked, the second ship was in the last stages of sinking, the stern high in the air, while the first was completely engulfed in flames. Only seventeen more to deal with.

Gunboats from those seventeen started massing together. Probably forty of them, each with twenty or more men, all heavily armed. They were determined to get a foothold so they could land more and more troops, enough to overwhelm our pathetically small force by sheer numbers and superior weapons.

I turned to look up at Everett sitting on the hill above and saw hundreds of people arriving. From where didn’t matter. They must have been hiding in the city or living with gangs, but wherever they’d been, they were now settling down in on the hillside with their rifles. More were working their way to the bottom, to join with us. At a guess, there were five hundred of our people protecting the hillside from the invaders.

While that seemed an impossible and formidable force to overcome, there were ten thousand trained and better-armed troops on the ships waiting in the harbor. Major Dundee must have had the same reaction and realization. He’d come into the tent a few moments earlier and waited for my attention.

“Major?” I asked.

“Sir, what are our plans?”

Without pause, I said, “We have perhaps five hundred people to hold off ten thousand. We’ve been lucky so far. Do you have any ideas?”

“I do,” Sue said before he could respond in the negative. She continued, “Five hundred against ten thousand isn’t fair. We need more. Dispatch the sailboats, send motorcycles and send radio messages to everyone in the northwest. Tell them whoever is in on those ships sent the blight that killed our friends and families. If they want a piece of them, get their asses here with whatever weapons they have and fight alongside us.”

Major Dundee looked from her to me. “Sort of like sending a hundred Paul Reveres to alert the citizens the British are coming. I like it.”

She smiled sweetly, but her eyes were hard. She said, “We’ll have another thousand here by dawn, and more by the end of tomorrow. In two or three days, we’ll outnumber them.”

The major turned to me. “Do I have your permission to do as she says?”

“Yes. Tell everyone to spread the word. Those who came on motorcycles should head out, stop and tell everyone they encounter. We need help. Lots of it.”

“And you think they will come?”

“I do,” I told him, as certain of that statement as any I’d ever made.

He rushed away. Ten minutes later, over the intermittent gunshots, the roar of thirty motorcycles was music to my ears.

More gunboats joined the others still on the water circling fast and sweeping in close and firing, before retreating. They broke into three smaller groups, about ten boats in each. I suspected what would happen next but couldn’t prevent it. Part of them went north of us, others south, and the last group came directly at us on the pier. While we could hold the pier, at least for a while, there were not enough of us to control the entire waterfront. They would land hundreds of troops to our left, a few hundred more to our right, and hundreds of others would attack directly at us.

I considered withdrawing.

The white-haired SEAL was striding my way. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t do it. If they take this pier, it’s over.”

“We don’t have enough to stop them. I can’t order all these people to stay and be killed.”

He looked out at the ships—and beyond. At the sun that was almost touching the tops of the Olympic mountains. “Can you spread the word for them to stay until midnight?”

That gave them six hours to escape before dawn. “I can do that.”

In appreciation, he pounded my shoulder with his balled fist so hard my knees almost buckled. He turned and hurried to where his group was gathered, still talking and planning and issuing orders I didn’t understand. He didn’t seem worried and the men with the kayaks were in good spirits.

Sue took me a few steps away from everyone else. We stood beside a rusted Buick as she said, “Remain calm. You have to set an example. You’re doing great.”

“I have no right to be giving orders. If these people ever find out I’m just a geek who lived in a basement, they won’t do anything I say. I don’t know what I’m doing or how this happened to put me in charge. You and Steve are doing ten times what I am.”

“Stand tall. You are the figurehead, Captain. You have us to support you. Steve, Major Dundee, the SEAL, and me. And others. Just take a few deep breaths and watch what’s going to happen.”

I turned to the setting sun but could only see seventeen ships filled with ten thousand troops between the sun and me. And of course, the gunboats they kept sending our way. “At midnight, I’m sending everyone away.”

She gave me a faint smile but didn’t argue.