Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1621 UTC -1, 22nd November 1987

The Dietrich, North Atlantic

VADIM GRABBED HARRIS’S shotgun and locked the container behind him. Maria and Harris joined him as he made his way quickly back along towards the bridge castle, gripping the rails as the ship surged up and down in the still-choppy ocean. The castle bridge looked perfectly calm in the ship’s lights, but something wasn’t right. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing, just a coincidence that he didn’t know where Gulag, Skull and Mongol were and now a child had gone missing.

He opened the hatch to the castle bridge and the three of them stepped inside, Harris closing the hatch behind them. Mr Carlsson was comforting his wife, who looked close to hysteria. She turned on Vadim as soon as he entered.

“Where is she? What have you done with my little girl?” she screamed, advancing on him, clawed hands outstretched towards him. Mr Carlsson had to physically interpose himself.

“Where did you last see her?” Vadim tried, but Mrs Carlsson wasn’t listening and her husband was too busy trying to stop her attacking him. “Calm down!” Vadim put every last bit of command he had into those words, to no effect. More refugees were taking an interest now, standing in the doorways of the overpopulated bunkrooms.

A slap rung out. Mrs Carlsson went quiet, staring at Maria, who seemed surprised that she’d struck the older woman.

“I’m so sorry, Anna,” Maria told Mrs Carlsson. “Serafina needs you.” Mrs Carlsson stared blankly at the other women for moment; Vadim was worried that she was about to go into shock. Instead, she nodded slowly. Something about the Carlsson girl was trying to push its way into Vadim’s brain.

“We saw the girls playing marbles,” Vadim said. “They were using ball bearings. Do they ever go down to the engine room? The stores?”

“No, we told them not to,” Mr Carlsson told him.

“In my experience, that doesn’t always work with children,” Harris said, earning himself a glare.

“We’ve got good kids, officer—” Mr Carlsson began.

“I found Gloria exploring down there yesterday,” Anna suddenly said.

“Let’s look,” Vadim said, pushing past the Carlssons, but stopped at the sound of running feet.

The little girl was too fast for him. She ran by him, arms outstretched, reaching for her father, jumping into his arms.

His screams didn’t begin until his daughter’s teeth sank into his neck.

Vadim grabbed the girl, tore her off her dad and rammed her against the wall, the shotgun held lengthways against her neck, but dropped her when Mrs Carlsson hit him with the full weight of her body. The girl leapt for her shrieking mother next, and Vadim grabbed Mrs Carlsson and spun her round him, kicking her down the corridor. The shotgun roared, deafening in the cramped confines – again – and two members of the Carlsson family hit the floor.

“No!” a bleeding Mr Carlsson screamed from behind him and charged Vadim. Vadim rammed the butt of the shotgun back into Carlsson’s face, then grabbed the man and dragged him away from Harris and Maria. The shotgun roared again, another shell casing tumbled to the floor.

“Everyone out, now!” he screamed, moving towards the port side, the direction Serafina had come from. The refugees who had come to see what the screaming was about had dived back into their cabins when the gunplay had started. Now they were starting to peer out through the doorways again. “Out, behind me, now!” Vadim tried again, and they started to obey. Then the first of the engineers appeared at the top of the port stairs, looking for meat.

“Contact!” Vadim screamed at the top of his voice, hoping some of the squad were close enough to hear him. The engineer raced up the stairs to the next deck; a fresh round of screaming started. Another zombie tried to leap over the rails into their corridor, and Vadim’s shotgun blast took him in the face in mid-air. “Out! Out! Out!” he screamed, backing away from the stairs as people scrambled to get out the starboard hatch. “Fräulein!” Vadim shouted, hoping against hope she was somehow in earshot. “Get everyone up to the bridge!” There were two lockable metal hatches between the fourth and fifth decks.

He pushed the refugees out towards the starboard hatch as he backed towards it. They spilled out of the tower and onto the main deck. He heard screaming from behind him. One of the engineers had run up the starboard stairs from belowdecks and jumped on one of the refugees.

“Move! Move!” Vadim shoved people through the hatch, trying to make his way through the press. He kicked the zombie and its struggling victim back down the metal stairs, took a few steps down and fired the shotgun twice more, emptying it. Already he could see other zombies leaping onto the stairs.

He turned and shoved the few remaining people in the corridor out through the hatch. There were screams behind him in the corridor now. He stepped out onto the main deck and slammed the hatch shut, and something hit it hard. At this point it didn’t matter whether it was zombie or victim, he had to lock it down. He spun the wheel and slammed the locking lever in place. “Hold that shut!” he ordered two of the burlier refugees. They jumped to obey him. “Harris, with me!”

Vadim ran down the narrow alley between the bridge castle and the container stacks, under the aft crane. It was too late: he watched as one of the zombies ran past the end of the alley, heading forward.

The boom of Skull’s .303 high above him came as a comfort. Vadim reckoned the sniper was on top of the bridge castle. Two more zombies ran into the alley ahead of them, and Vadim threw the empty shotgun at Harris, drew the Stechkin and snapped off four shots in rapid succession, laying both to rest. He continued moving around the tower.

The port hatch was wide open; he saw newly-made zombies sprinting up the stairs away from him. Sensing movement, the zombies feasting in the corridor turned bloodied faces towards him and charged the hatch as he tried to slam it, knocking it open. Vadim thumbed the selector on the Stechkin with his free hand and fired it on full automatic through the gap, not troubling to aim. It had the desired effect. The zombie fell back and Harris added his weight to the hatch, allowing Vadim to close and lock it.

“Get two more men here, big ones, to hold this closed!” Vadim ordered Harris, taking the shotgun back, and the officer ran back to the starboard side. They called the dead mindless, but Vadim had no idea how intelligent they actually were. Could they unlock hatches and turn wheels? He didn’t want to find out. He put his back against the hatch and holstered his now empty Stechkin. That had been his last magazine. So much for conserving ammunition, he thought.

“Skull!” Vadim called as he slid new shells into the shotgun. The sniper’s answering call was drowned out by several shots from New Boy’s KS-23, accompanied by a Stechkin; the dead had evidently reached Princess and New Boy’s cabin. “Did any get away?” Vadim called up to Skull.

“None onto the main deck!” Skull shouted down. Then there were several shots from a pair of AK-pattern rifles. Two large, terrified-looking men ran around the corner and Vadim barely kept himself from shooting them; they turned out to have been sent by Harris, to hold the hatch lock in place. Vadim moved away from the hatch for them.

It was all happening too fast. The mindless – no, predatory – dead moved too quickly. He backed away from the bridge castle, looking up as portholes were painted red and agonised cries echoed out across the ocean. Think, damn you, think! The chatter of light machine guns added to the noise, sounding like it was coming from the bridge. The Fräulein and Mongol, Vadim assumed.

“What’s happening?” Leary asked as he huffed up to Vadim, who ignored him. Then someone was charging him. Instinctively he brought the shotgun up, catching Maria under the chin and knocking her to the ground. Assuming she’d been bitten, he took aim at at her face.

“Stop!” Harris said, pushing the barrel out of the way. Maria had tears pouring down her cheeks.

“Gloria’s in there!” the woman shouted at him. Vadim turned to look at the castle bridge. Frankly, he didn’t think there was much chance for the girl.

“What happened?” Leary asked, appalled. Again, everyone ignored him. Vadim tried to think, but he didn’t like any of his options. They would have to go in there and clear the tower, room by room. It would be messy. He looked away from the bridge and found himself looking at the containers. A plan was starting to develop.

“We need to get in there!” Maria cried.

“Maria, please,” Vadim said, and despite the panic, she fell quiet. Glass smashed, somewhere above them. Vadim looked up. Princess had squeezed through a porthole out onto the wide ledge running around the third deck. She poked her AKS-74 back through the porthole and fired a string of three-round bursts into the room. Vadim could hear New Boy’s AK-74 from inside the cabin. Princess stopped firing and let her weapon drop on its sling; New Boy thrust his head and torso through the porthole, but was yanked back in. Vadim’s heart sank.

“Aah! Get off me! Get the fuck off me!” New Boy howled as he fought, half out of the porthole. Even down on the main deck, Vadim could see the fury on Princess’s face as she changed her Stechkin’s magazine, pushed her hand into the porthole and fired off the entire magazine. New Boy cried out in pain and Princess dragged him through the porthole.

“Has he been bitten?” Vadim shouted up.

“No!” Princess shouted down.

“Are you sure?” It had definitely sounded like he’d been bitten.

“I hit him in the leg,” Princess cried, New Boy echoing the message in more plaintive tones. That would do for now; Vadim couldn’t see Princess having any compunction about putting a bullet through the young scout’s head – or anybody else’s, for that matter.

He noticed the Fräulein’s and Mongol’s RPKS-74s had stopped firing.

“Liesl!” he tried shouting.

“Here, boss!” It came from the bridge. Briefly he wondered where Gulag was. “We have about fifty up here…”

The Fräulein was interrupted by a shot as one of the dead tried to climb through the hole from which Princess and New Boy had come out. It appeared that Princess’s plan was to plug it with bodies.

“We’ve locked off the hatches, but we’re stuck up here!” Only fifty? That wasn’t good. Even allowing for the few he’d got out, there could be as many as a hundred humans – potential zombies – in the bridge castle.

“My daughter!” Maria shouted up. “Gloria, she’s only eight, is she up there with you?”

It took some moments for the answer to come.

“No!” the Fräulein shouted down. Maria looked stricken, but she held it together. Vadim turned to Leary and pointed up at the aft crane.

“Do you know how to work that?”

THEY DUMPED THE containers into the sea, leaving a sinking trail of them in the ship’s wake as they cleared the two aft-corner stacks. The longshoremen and the other civilians outside with Vadim emptied the contents of two of the forty-foot containers over the side. Skull and Princess leapt from the bridge castle to the top of the container stacks. Princess had left her Dragunov in her cabin, so she went to retrieve a G3 from the container.

He had a problem. His plan called for at least two shooters, but he also needed bait. New Boy would have been the best choice, but he was leg-shot. It looked like Vadim himself would have to replace Princess as one of the shooters, but he really needed to be on the main deck, co-ordinating. Besides, they would also need a gunner on the main deck, which was why he was now carrying Princess’s AKS-74 and the two spare magazines she had managed to grab from her cabin.

“I’ll do it,” Harris said. Vadim looked over at him, frowning. If Harris was prepared to do this, he must have been desperate. It was a deeply flawed plan.

“Do what?” Maria asked.

“He doesn’t have enough guns down here and he needs bait,” the police officer said. Maria looked at Vadim.

“Me too,” she said.

Leary, who’d proven adept with the crane, was currently lowering the first of the forty-foot containers into place. He had lifted it out of its guides and left it straddled across the starboard walkway, effectively cutting off the aft of the ship, though one of the forward-pointing doors had been left open.

“They move very fast,” Vadim warned Harris and Maria.

“My child is in there,” Maria said. She was clearly on the edge of hysteria, and with good reason: if Gloria wasn’t on the bridge it was extremely unlikely that she was still alive. This didn’t seem to be a good time to tell her that. “Besides, I used to run from the police all the time.” She glanced over at Harris.

“This is going to happen very quickly,” Vadim said, drawing his knife. Harris stared at the blade.

“Well, if it worked for Wile E. Coyote…” he muttered.

ONE OF THE forty-foot containers was suspended in the air about twenty feet above the port side of the ship. All the longshoremen and the rest of the civilians were inside the starboard container. Vadim was lying down on top of it. Harris and Maria were the only two people left on the main deck.

It had been Harris’s idea for Maria and him to smear blood from the deep cuts Vadim had made in their hands on one of the port-side container stacks. The police officer had described it as ‘street sign.’

It had taken every last bit of resolve that Vadim had not to sink his teeth into the wound.

Harris started somewhat cautiously, but Maria strode to the port hatch and wrenched it open.

“Zombie freaks!” she shouted into the bridge castle. They needed to make lots of noise; a shouted conversation with the Fräulein suggested that the majority of the dead were up on the fourth deck trying to get into the bridge. Had there been a zombie on the other side of the door this would have all been over very quickly.

“Come on, dead men!” Harris shouted. They quickly descended into a stream of obscenities that seemed very American, and to Vadim’s limited knowledge, very New York in their colour and variety.

“Movement!” Vadim shouted from atop his container, spotting dark shapes behind the portholes on the second deck. “Here they come.”

Maria and Harris looked ready to bolt, but to their credit, they stayed where they were until the last moment.

“Go!” Harris shouted and they were off at a sprint, heedless of the movement of the ship. The blood-spattered dead poured out of the bridge castle after them. They looked very close behind Maria, who was just behind Harris; too close for comfort. Maria and Harris disappeared behind the port container stacks as they ran along the side of the ship. More and more of the creatures came out of the bridge castle. As far as Vadim could tell, all of them took the bait, but his view was obscured.

The echoing boom of Skull’s .303 rolled out over the ocean. He was covering the port side, tasked to shoot any of the zombies that got too close to the runners. The .303 fired again and again, as fast as Skull could work the bolt; Vadim was worried.

It seemed to take forever, but finally the stream of zombies dried up. He signalled Leary in the operator’s cab of the crane. He lowered the other forty-foot container down across the portside walkway, blocking their way back aft.

Vadim hammered on the top of his container. The longshoremen came out of the rear doors. Eight of them hovered behind the doors while the ninth ran through the narrow alley between the stacks and the bridge castle, underneath the crane, towards the port hatch of the castle. If any of the dead were still waiting, he was done for.

Vadim heard gunfire from the stacks: Princess’s G3. The dead were on the starboard side of the ship now.

Watching the longshoreman run to the port hatch, Vadim wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a middle-aged, overweight man move so quickly. He heard the hatch shut and lock. The longshoreman poked his head around the corner and gave Vadim the thumbs up.

Vadim turned to face towards the bow of the ship. He could see Harris sprinting for all he was worth, occasionally staggering with the movement of the ship. Behind him, Maria was doing the same; and behind her, in the narrow walkway, were all the dead. As Vadim watched, several of the zombies were pitched overboard by the sheer press of their numbers.

Princess was leaning over the container stack, shooting down into the dead closest to Maria. They went down, took others with them, were trampled into the deck. Vadim brought the AKS-74’s folding stock to his shoulder, but held fire; there was too much of a risk of hitting Maria.

And then Maria went down. Vadim didn’t hesitate. The AKS-74 thumped into his shoulder as he fired again and again. Afterwards, he was sure it was some of the finest shooting he’d ever done. Princess was firing even faster from the tops of the stacks. One after another, the zombies dropped. Maria was back on her feet. Harris was running under Vadim now, into the container. Vadim let his weapon hang from its sling. Maria was sprinting, the outstretched fingers of the dead practically touching her.

She was in the container. So were the zombies.

Shouting from behind him, as eight Brooklyn dockworkers tried to slam the rear doors shut. He heard panic and what sounded like metal hitting metal. More and more of the dead were sprinting into the container, adding their strength to the press against the rear door.

“Close the door, you weak American bastards!” Vadim roared from the top of the container. It seemed to take forever, but finally he heard the locking lever clang into place.

“It’s shut! It’s shut!” one of the longshoremen shouted. Vadim watched as more and more of the zombies ran into the container.

“We’re out here! Come and eat us!” The longshoremen were shouting and banging on the closed rear doors, trying to keep the zombies’ attention, but Vadim could see them slowing down. One even came back out the open front door.

“Signal Leary! Signal Leary!” Vadim shouted. The smart zombie, hearing the noise, tried to jump up, so Princess shot him. Vadim held on for dear life as the crane lifted the front of the container sharply, and he heard the zombie cargo slide towards the back of the container. Vadim grabbed the open front door slightly awkwardly with one hand, holding on to the roof with the other, pulling with all his might, trying to give gravity a guiding hand. The open door teetered and then slammed shut on the container, and Vadim clambered forwards, leaning down the front and slammed the locking lever into place. He pushed himself back onto the roof.

“Tell Leary to drop it!” he shouted to the longshoremen, and moments later the front of the container dropped back down into place. He stood up and ran back to the other side of the container.

There were still zombies milling around the walkway; he heard the odd gunshot as they tried to climb the stacks. He climbed down, noticing a red smear down the rear door of the container. An arm lay on the deck. The saperka he’d lent to one of the longshoremen was red. Harris was bent at the waist, gasping for breath. Maria sat in the black slush, the back of her sweater torn. She looked up at Vadim.

“Now we have to do it again, for the rest of them,” he told her.

“Did you just call us weak American bastards?” one of the longshoremen asked him.

“I apologise, it was the heat of the moment,” Vadim said, and for some reason, they were all laughing.

VADIM CHECKED THE deck behind their ad-hoc blockade to make sure that none of the dead had gone the other way, but it was clear. Then they pulled the same trick again. It was easier the second time: there wasn’t so many of them, and Maria and Harris didn’t have to get so close. They didn’t quite get all of them into the containers, but Vadim, Princess and Skull accounted for the stragglers between them.

Then they turned their attention to the bridge castle. After a shouted conversation, the Fräulein agreed to stay on the bridge with Mongol and guard the refugees and the crew. Mongol threw down the bridge’s first aid kit to New Boy, but he was out of action for the time being, so Vadim and the two snipers would clear the bridge castle, level-by-level and room-by-room. Maria insisted on coming with them; she eventually had to be restrained by Harris and several of the longshoremen.

They cleared belowdecks first, finding a zombie trapped in one of the pistons. Princess killed it with her saperka.

They found Gulag in a bunkroom on the second deck. They had to force the door; the cabin was full of bodies. Vadim entered first and almost fired before he recognised his comrade, covered head to toe in blood.

Vadim could see he was still sentient, though. He knew this because he was looking down the barrel of the man’s Stechkin.