Undead Underway
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Undead Underway
Copyright © 2007/2016 by Brenna Lyons
First Fireborn Publication: October 2016
Cover Artist: Brenna Lyons
Photo Credit: 123rf
Logo copyright © 2014 by Fireborn Publishing and Allison Cassatta
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This book is written in US English.
PUBLISHER
Undead Underway
It all started when Clueless...that is, when Lt. JG Edward Cluze staggered onboard from liberty in a little town that shall remain nameless, somewhere above the Arctic Circle.
I could tell you the port, but then I'd have to kill you, military secrets being what they are and you not having the clearance I do.
Strictly speaking, I'm joking. After all, when a nuclear sub comes up, the heat bloom on satellite tells the whole fucking world where we are, but I've always wanted to say that to someone, and you seemed like a good bet for believing it.
Anyway, back to the story.
Clueless made it back. Pissed me off, because when 0200 local time. came and went, I'd bet he'd passed out somewhere in town and was busy making himself into an Officer-sicle that wouldn't be discovered until the sun rose fully in a couple of months.
It wouldn't have made me cry not to see him come back before we cast off, but it sure did tick me off to see him half-falling down the ladder, because that meant I was out twenty-five bucks to Diamond Dallas. Well, that and the fact that I'd have to deal with him for the rest of the underway. I could be one EOOW short, if it meant losing Clueless.
Who am I? Sorry about that. Maybe, I should have started with my name, but since this fuck-up wasn't my fault, I figured I should start with Clueless Cluze. My name is Bob Leonard, otherwise known as Petty Officer Len. I run E-Div.
Yeah, Clueless thinks he has some say in it, but as I noted, he's clueless. When the orders come down, the men listen to me, not Cluze. Why? Because they want to be alive at the end of the day....whenever that is.
You see, when you work on a sub, there is no night or day, really. There's no going topside to see the sunlight. You don't even keep the clocks on 'home port time' or even on the time of whatever time zone you're in at the moment. The minute you cast off, you go to Zulu time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time. And that, my friend, is what started this whole mess rolling.
So, Clueless made it down the aft hatch in one piece, a miracle in the making, if you're the praying sort. It might have been better for the crew of the MSP, if Clueless had been the praying sort, but he wasn't. I've come to learn that you never could tell when a cross will come in handy, but we can get back to that later.
If he'd been an enlisted man, someone might have lifted a hand to help Cluze back to his rack. We'd been known to drag guys down and heft them into top racks, when they were far gone, but that was what we did for other enlisted guys. He wasn't enlisted; he was an officer. A snot-nosed nub with a lot to learn about the Navy and submarines and...well, you can guess what I was going to say.
I can report, with confidence, that the nickname was a fitting one, because I was one of the luckless bastards who had to train him at S1C, the Nuke prototype that used to stand in Windsor, CT. About half of the pups who came through S1C were certifiably idiots, possessing two-five knowledge, at best. Two-five is the lowest passing score, and it essentially means that a student is smart enough to agree with the right answer to a question when told it by someone training him. Clueless was smart enough to agree...most days, or at least he was at S1C.
Cluze was worse than most. When the new bar code qual system was instated, we once qualified a box of grease pencils, just as a lark. I'm sorry to report that the grease pencils had a higher GPA than Clueless did. For that reason alone, when I'm particularly annoyed with Clueless, I tend to call him Greasy. He's never understood it; typical for him.
At any rate, I gave Clueless just the right amount of shit for costing me twenty-five and not having the good grace to die like a man in the sub-zero temps. For those of you who have never been on a submarine, the right amount would be a verbal trouncing the likes of which sent one E-Divver off the sub in a straight jacket.
The weak link, as always, must be eradicated.
I paused in mid-rant, staring at his collar. For a moment, an instant in time, I would have sworn that he had lipstick on the white shirt. Then the blue...
Let me tell you a little something about 'Navy Blue.' It isn't blue, at all. It's black. What sick psychopath named it Navy blue, I will never know, but trust me on this one. There's nothing blue about a Navy uniform, unless you're talking dungarees or poopie suits.
Anyway, his jacket collar shifted and hid the spot of red from me, and common sense intruded rather quickly. Clueless was a long, tall drink of water with wild, red hair and an oversized nose that not even a Tromso-babe looking for an open wet bar and a US Navy baby would have taken up on a roll in the hay.
That was saying a lot, considering the fact that the US Navy was banned from Tromso, Norway after the first...and last visit a US Navy submarine had made there. It seems that the government of Norway didn't like the population explosion some nine months later, courtesy of their universal health care system, from young women giving only "some US Navy submariner" as the Daddy's name on the birth certificate.
It was no great surprise that the MSP had been the only sub to stop there. That was why we were stuck going even further north for a port than we had the last time.
So, it wasn't lipstick. There was no way it was lipstick. Clueless must have cut himself shaving and managed to make it across the brow without someone noticing it and ruining his chances of down time in port. No one took more than one dress uniform on a cruise, so someone sending him back would have screwed Clueless completely, though the only reason it would have was because the CO was being an asshole and making us wear uniforms ashore in the first place.
Usually, we wore civvies, but when the Petty Tyrants start up, there is no reasoning with them. When the CO, also known as 'the old man,' though he was only ten years my senior, put that one down, there had nearly been a mutiny right then and there. Even the COB and Senior hadn't been able to talk him down that time. But, liberty was liberty, even when you were freezing your ass off in sub-zero and perpetual night in uniform. It was better than being inside the black tube of death, and no one could argue that logic.
I may have lost twenty-five bucks to Diamond Dallas, but there I was with a piss-drunk JO who needed correction, on my way to the rack for a few hours down after standing my port and stupid. So, I blasted him properly and sent him to the rack, fully prepared to make sure he was the first one racked out when the start-up came due. I grinned the whole way back to the rack, imagining Clueless hung over on watch...or better yet, suffocated in the puddle of his own puke he'd likely soon be sleeping in.
I should probably warn you that submariners chuckle over things like that. Our unofficial motto is "Everything is funny until someone dies. Then it's fucking hysterical." That's a code those of us who survive submarines live to religiously. You never know when someone is going to flick your balls or rim a mug just for the laugh.
Of course, if he's stupid enough to rim it with the coffee in it... Believe it or not, that's a standard nub mistake! Well, if he's that stupid, he learns our second motto: "Stupidity should be painful." In a case like that, the joke's on him, you know?
Getting Clueless racked out was easier said than done. It took Cat Man and Diamond Dallas combined to get him up. By the time they finagled him out of the rack, looking a little worse for wear, they'd disturbed two other officers, and that is never a pretty sight.
When Cat Man practically pushed Clueless out of the tunnel and into the engine room, he announced that he'd never seen anyone manage 'the sleep of the dead' on board before. Usually submariners sleep light; even the ventilation fans cutting out will wake them, but not Clueless. Not that night or any night after that he slept.
Or was it day? I guess it was day, though we were so far north that there was little or no day to the day. Never mind that. I've gotten off the subject again...sort of.
Torturing Clueless that watch was sweet justice. It was always good entertainment when some nub thought he could drink with the big boys. In ten years, I hadn't met a nub that could drink me under the table, and that included Lonnie, a monster of a man who weighed in at more than double my one-seventy-five and stood a full six-feet-four in height.
It didn't surprise us that Clueless couldn't look at food or stand the smell of coffee. That's how you can tell a true submariner, by the way. A true submariner can drink tar-thick coffee in any state from hung-over to state five seas.
Clueless had never been cut out to be a submariner, and we all knew it. The only thing we had to do was drive him crazy...or drive him to go AWOL. We'd done both to weak links before, and he was undeniably the weak link of the current underway.