John Ringo
To Sail a Darkling Sea
Once upon a night we’ll wake to the carnival of life
The beauty of this ride ahead such an incredible high
It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead
This moment the dawn of humanity
The last ride of the day
CHAPTER 1
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall,
one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Robert “Rusty” Fulmer Bennett III wasn’t a guy to just sit around if he could help out. But he also wasn’t, still, in the best of shape.
When he’d boarded the cruise ship Voyage Under Stars with his buddy, Ted, he’d weighed 337 lbs, nekkid. By the time the rescue teams from Wolf Squadron found him, Ted had long before zombied and Rusty weighed 117 lbs and was naked, covered in bed sores and mostly unconscious on his filth covered bunk. Since he was still 6' 7", and, honestly, big boned, 117 was pretty bad. The one nurse Wolf had found so far, no doctors, said it was a miracle he’d survived.
So he still wasn’t in the best shape of his life when he sat down in the “Wolf Squadron Human Resources” office. In the four weeks since he’d been found he’d put on about twenty pounds but that wasn’t much. And he could barely work out at all. He wasn’t sure that he could hack it as a “clearance specialist” but he was all up for killing zombies.
He filled in his name on the clipboard and took a seat. Then he opened up a packet of sushi and started to munch.
“Still putting on weight, huh?” the guy next to him asked.
“I never thought I’d like sushi,” Bennett said, offering some of the rolls. “Anything is, like, the best food in the world, now. Except hummus. If I never eat hummus again I’ll be so glad.”
“Gotta try fish eyeballs,” the guy said, taking one and nodding. “Mmmm… tuna is sooo much better raw than dolphin. Brad Stevens.”
“Rusty Bennett,” Rusty said. “Actually, it’s Robert Fulmer Bennett Third. But everybody calls me Rusty. Like, you ate a dolphin?”
“Not the Flipper, ark, ark, kind,” Stevens said. “It’s a kind of fish. But, hey, when that’s what you’ve got.” He shrugged. “I’d have eaten a, you know, dolphin, dolphin if I could have caught one. There were a couple of times I’d have eaten the asshole of a dolphin… ”
“I’d have eaten the asshole of an asshole,” Rusty said.
“You’re like a string-bean pole,” Stevens said. “How much did you lose?”
“Two hundred pounds,” Rusty said. “I was kinda big when we got locked down.”
“Oh,” Stevens said, wincing. “In one of the cabins on the Voyage?”
“Yep,” Rusty said. “One of the reasons I want to go do something is every time I walk in the damned cabin I’m afraid the door’s going to close behind me and never open again.”
“I thought I’d lost weight. I can’t believe they cleared you for work.”
“I just walked down here,” Rusty said, shrugging. “The worst they can do is say no… ”
“Stevens…?”
* * *
“You’re still in very poor shape, Mister Bennett,” the lady said. Like most he’d seen, she was pregnant.
“I really want to help out,” Rusty said. “And I’ve got to get out of that fu… forking cabin, ma’am. I keep having nightmares that the door won’t open.”
“I took this job on the Grace because it’s the biggest boat I could get on,” the lady said, smiling. “Try having nightmares that you’re back in a tropical storm in a life raft and you’re suffering from morning sickness and starving.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rusty said. “I’m good with my hands. But I’m not a mechanic or anything. I can shoot. I’ve been shooting my whole life. And I want to fight zombies, ma’am.”
“You’d never make the medical requirements for clearance personnel,” the lady said. “They carry tons of gear when they clear.”
“I heard there’s some thirteen-year-old girl that does it, ma’am,” Rusty argued. “If she can… ”
“Don’t compare Shewolf to your normal thirteen-year-old girl,” the woman said, laughing. “You haven’t seen the video have you?”
“No, ma’am,” Rusty said. “I haven’t gotten out, much.”
“If you go up to the lounge, you can probably find somebody who can show it to you,” the lady said. “Shewolf led the boarding of the Voyage. She wasn’t supposed to, but it happened. The Dallas had used a machine gun to clear some of the zombies but while she was going up more showed up. She went over the side, anyway. There was a Marine in a little bit better shape than you, not much but a little, who was supposed to go right after her and got bogged down climbing. One of the reasons they want people in the best possible shape for clearance. At that point, most of the copies… You know that song, ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again…?’ ”
“Sort of?” Rusty said. “Kinda before my time.”
“Go watch the video,” the lady said, looking at her screen. “Since you know she made it, it’s a hoot. But… I mean you can go try to track down Nurse Schoenfeld and get her to clear you. But I’d suggest something lighter. At least for now. And I’d guess you don’t like enclosed spaces… ”
“I don’t mind if I know I can open the door, ma’am,” Rusty said.
“Being on a small boat is physically wearing,” the lady said, “but they need people for light clearance. Clearing life rafts and small craft. Not many people want to do it because you get beat up on those little boats. But… ”
“Ma’am,” Rusty said. “Being out in the air on a small boat… That’d be like heaven, ma’am.”
“How strong of a stomach do you have?” the lady asked.
“I… pretty strong?” Rusty said.
“You’re on the assignment board,” the lady said, making a definitive tap on her keyboard. “Since you don’t have a defined skill that anyone is looking for right now, you’ve got a week to find something. After that, you get put on boat cleaning or you can go into the hold with the lame and lazy. People who don’t want to help out.”
“Cleaning?” Rusty said.
“Cleaning up a boat after zombies have trashed it.”
* * *
“I don’t want to have to clean out a new boat,” Sophia said, mulishly. “I’ve seen these boats. And I’ve cleaned them up. Rather get knocked around on a thirty-five.”
Sophia “Seawolf” Smith was one of the founding members of the Wolf Squadron. As such, despite being fifteen, she was a shareholder and not a minor one, as well as being a member of the Captain’s Board as skipper of the thirty-five-foot Worthy Endeavor. The boat had gotten beaten up by nearly six months at sea, not to mention the zombies that took it over, but it was still her boat.
“You won’t,” Fred said. “You, especially, won’t.”
Fred Burnell was the “Vessel Preparation and Assignments Officer” on the Grace Tan. The massive supply ship had an open center and rear deck. On it were, now, four “cabin cruiser” yachts on props in various stages of repair and refitting. Since all of them worked when they were brought alongside it was mostly a matter of cleaning them out.
“Things change,” Burnell said. “We’ve got crews cleaning them up, now. But we’re retiring the thirty-fives. They’re just too small and don’t have enough range.”
“So, what am I looking at?” Sophia said.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Burnell said, smiling slightly.
“No,” Sophia said, frowning. “Sorry. Should I?”
“No,” Burnell said. “I guess seen one cast-away, seen ’em all. The Endeavor plucked me off a life raft. So let’s just say I owe you one even if you don’t know it. There’s a very nice 65' Hatteras Custom sitting out there. Not too beat up by zombies. The only ones on it were below, and we’re changing out all the below materials. Good engines, low hours… ”