“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Barnard said.
“When we get out on missions, I’ll dump the simple stuff on you,” Faith said, shrugging. “Sorry, best way I can put it. I’m not big on words. I tell you we need wheels, you find the wheels and get ’em running. I say we need a house cleared, you handle it. I’ll be figuring out where we’re going next and which house to clear. You get it done. Okay?”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Barnard said.
“I’m still a green lieutenant,” Faith said. “Killing zombies I got down pat. Running a platoon, that I’m still learning. So I’m going to be asking your opinion on stuff. And hopefully most of the time we’ll agree and I’ll say ‘Yep, sounds good, go for it.’ But if I say we’re doing it another way, we’re doing it my way, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Barnard said.
“Bottom line is if something fucks up, people may get pissed at you,” Faith said. “But it’s really on me.
“So, we got a mission,” Faith said. “We gotta pick up all the weapons on the base, get ’em sorted out and get ’em fixed up and cleaned. How do you think we should detail that out, Staff Sergeant?”
“I see they kept the last bullet for themselves,” Sergeant Douglas said, pulling open the back door of the Humvee. A desiccated and bug-chewed female corpse in NavCam tumbled out at his feet. The skull cracked away from the body and rolled onto his boots. A half-dozen rats followed it and skittered under the Humvee. “I do so love my job.”
“You hear anything about what we’re going to do with the bodies, Sergeant?” Lance Corporal Ken Ferguson asked. “That’s our gunnery sergeant in there.”
“We dumped Captain Carrion’s little helpers on the bodies on the points,” Douglas said. There was a .45 on the floor in the rear compartment and an M4. From the looks of things, they’d all shared the .45 at the end. The M4 was out of rounds. “But other than that, I really don’t know. We haven’t been doing much cleanup, but we hadn’t planned on holding any of the places we hit. Maybe they’ll get the civilians to collect ’em up. But don’t figure on a lot of ceremony. There’s not enough of us left to bury the dead and we’ve got more important missions. And we’re done here…Building seven next…”
“How long to sweep the base?” Steve asked, looking at the operations plan.
“About five days, sir,” Colonel Hamilton. “To fully sweep it.”
“Two,” Steve said. “Get as many weapons picked up as you can in two. Detail some areas for the Navy ground people to sweep as well. Day three you need to be rolling. Clean them up on the way to Anguilla.”
“Yes, sir,” Hamilton said. “The question has been raised about the dead, sir.”
“Which has already been considered,” Steve said. “Lieutenant Commander Isham is getting teams together to gather them up and get them buried. Mass grave, mind you. We’ll be working on that while you’re on the op. As noted, we’re going to hold this base for the time being and it’s a public health issue. As are the legions of rats and flies. We’ll be getting it cleaned up and habitable while you’re on float, Colonel. So, good news, not your problem. Bad news: ground clearance ops have their own unpleasantries. Two days, Colonel. Any questions?”
“No, sir,” Colonel Hamilton said.
“Base this size I can’t believe they don’t have AT-ATs,” Isham grumped.
The handysized freighter M/V Paul Osted was unloading its cargo onto Pier L. All of it. A team had gone through its computerized manifest and triaged the containers based on “this is definitely useful, this is possibly useful, this is not useful right now.” The plan was to unload all the containers, sort them out, reload the “useful”—pretty much anything in terms of “consumables”—while checking the “possibly useful.” The “this isn’t useful” were going to be stacked and stored.
“AT-ATs?” Steve said. “Like the elephant tank things in Star Wars?”
“Those big gantry cranes,” Isham said. “Like they had, you know, in Tenerife?”
Fortunately, the ship had its own cranes. Unfortunately, as usual, the people using them had limited experience. The answer was “don’t hurry.” On the other hand…
“Well, we couldn’t exactly use the ones in Tenerife, Jack,” Steve said. “Bit of an infected problem. How long?”
“Two weeks, minimum,” Isham said. “You have no clue how much stuff is in there.”
“Alas, most of it useless,” Steve said.
“There are two, count ’em, two containers listed as ‘medical supplies,’” Isham pointed out. “Don’t know what kind until we get to the detailed manifest. But the codes indicated pharmaceuticals and equipment. That should be good.”
The ship had been out of Rotterdam headed to a series of small African ports when the Plague had been announced and it was “stranded” at sea. Shortly after the crew, which had naturally already picked up the virus, had gone zombie. The captain had left a quite detailed log up to a point.
“Anything like that is useful,” Steve said. “The truth is that everything we critically need is sitting on some ship, somewhere. If we had, say, the internet we could probably even figure out which and where.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Isham said. “I know what business I’m getting into when I’m done with this Navy shit.”
“I think it’s the only business there’s going to be for the foreseeable future,” Steve said. “I just hope we can keep civilization functioning in that environment.”
“You worry too much, Steve,” Isham said, turning away from the unloading ship.
“Clearance of the bodies on the base?” Steve asked. The pier had been cleared but he could see the seagulls squawking over the bodies on Radio Point.
“Not a lot of takers,” Isham said. “I’ve got some guys with civilian construction experience digging a pit for a mass grave. You know how big a mass grave you need for about seven thousand bodies?”
“Big is about the best I can do,” Steve said.
“The same guys are willing to go around with front-end loaders to pick them up,” Isham said. “Problem being, you got to have people on the ground, too. And between being afraid of the infected and, well, not being into moving bodies…”
“We’re keeping back some Navy masters-at-arms,” Steve said. “Have them roust out the “lazy” among the SLLs. At gunpoint if necessary. The carrot will be we’re going to be rough clearing some Caribbean islands. If they help out on this, and they will even if we’ve got to break out whips, we’ll put them on a nice Caribbean island with some weapons in case of infected and they can just scavenge and beachcomb the rest of their lives.”
“We might have to get whips,” Isham said. “They’re pretty comfortable with a bed, water and sushi.”
“There was a study done post-Katrina,” Steve said as they walked down the pier. “About how refugees respond. About ten percent have to have something to do to help out and they tend to be the first to jump ship and get out of whatever refugee camp they’re in. At the other end, ten percent will do anything they can to avoid leaving food and a place to sleep. They used cruise ships for some of the refugees and that bottom ten percent had to be physically removed from them. So round up that bottom ten percent and tell them they can either pick up bodies or we will drop them off on the Cuban side, where the infected haven’t been cleared, and they can try to fend for themselves. I am that serious.”