Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,54
an older man in red-soaked khakis. Mosey immediately recognized the XO, who was trying to raise his head. A sailor standing the port watch with a big pair of binoculars around his neck looked through the open hatch, and saw the passageway filled with stumbling, bloody sailors, groaning and coming towards the opening. He slammed the metal hatch and dogged the handle.
“I thought he was dead,” the security man said, his voice shaking. “Thought I lost him in the passageway, but he’s moving again. He’s hurt bad.”
Mosey saw the younger sailor’s sleeves were hanging in tatters, the flesh of his arms ragged with bites and bleeding. He was pale, and barely finished speaking before he lost his grip on the XO and sagged against a bulkhead, sliding to the floor. His eyes were open, but glassy and far away, no longer seeing. The lieutenant ran to the XO and dropped to his knees beside him, turning him over.
The helmsman’s maneuver hadn’t been quite enough, and as Nimitz passed the fabled prison island – much, much too close - it scraped its port side hull across a ridge of sunken rock. More warning bells sounded, and the bridge lights snapped over to red as the warship shuddered, hard enough to throw several people off their feet. Nimitz turned away, a sixty-foot gash torn in her outer hull, which immediately began to fill with seawater.
The XO let out a gasp as Mosey turned him onto his back, revealing a torn throat already congealing with blood, eyes turned to a cloudy gray. He grabbed Mosey’s head in both hands and pulled him down, biting off the younger officer’s lower lip and a chunk of his chin. The lieutenant screamed as the XO’s next bite tore out his jugular, spraying the nearby helmsman.
It went quickly after that. The XO, soon accompanied by the sailor who had carried him here, finished off the unarmed bridge crew in minutes. A few tried to escape, caught at the secured hatch while they struggled to open it. The female quartermaster managed to dodge reaching arms and snapping teeth, yanking the hatch open only to be pulled to her death by the corpses waiting on the other side.
Within five minutes the bridge, still lit by the hellish red of emergency lighting, was manned by bodies which shuffled and bumped against one another, oblivious to the many warnings coming from consoles and the blaring alarms of loudspeakers. Nimitz pushed on through San Francisco Bay in a slow turn to the right, its helm unattended. On several of the lower decks, automated watertight doors rolled closed in response to the hull breach, trapping the living and the dead together in dark spaces. The compartmentalized design of the outer hull prevented the flooding from spreading, but the damaged section took on so many tons of water that the aircraft carrier began listing forward and to port, pulling it slowly away from its former heading.
In its journey across the bay, Nimitz scraped the long side of a freighter drifting and crewed only by the dead, ripping off protruding radar domes and gun mounts. Still in a slow right arc, the carrier rounded the tip of San Francisco and headed for the Bay Bridge. Treasure Island, a former naval base turning into a trendy community of condos, passed close on the left, and without a pilot to steer clear, the warship ran across shoals at roughly the same point in its damaged hull, tearing it open further. More seawater poured in, and the vessel pulled left. The same side of its flight deck rubbed against one of the massive concrete and steel supports of the Bay Bridge, shredding metal and rubberized decking, dragging the ship even more sharply to port.
The ship’s computer reacted to the new damage - and lack of response to its warnings - by shutting down forward propulsion. Nimitz was adrift, now turned almost due east by the latest impact and the weight of the incoming water. Slowing, but momentum still carrying it along at eleven knots, the city-sized ship was an unstoppable force. A fifteen-foot sailboat holding a dozen refugees who had managed to get out of Oakland (none of whom knew how to crew a sailboat) blundered helplessly into the shadow of the looming aircraft carrier. The sailboat snapped in half and was pulled under in seconds.
Nimitz drifted towards the western tip of Oakland, and finally found a large enough shoal to stop it, grounding in a frightful squeal