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Diamond Dallas suggested that we had one more possible ally, someone we hadn't brought into our little mutiny scam thus far, someone that could make our flight to freedom a hell of a lot easier, if he stopped playing Petty Tyrant long enough to do it. As it was, it was likely that the CO was only healthy because of his state room; the seclusion probably saved his ass...and the lock on his door.

  Appealing to his non-existent concern for his men was a waste of time. That was evidenced by his refusal to tell SUBLANT about our medical mess, his refusal to seek port and medical aid, his refusal to ease off on our 'mission' in any way. The only thing left for us was appealing to his common sense.

  Unfortunately, Petty Tyrant, or PT for short, had no common sense. That's probably how he reached the position of CO in the first place.

  "What is it now, Petty Officer Leonard?"

  Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I got the shit duty of trying to talk the Tyrant down? Probably not. To this day, I don't know if Diamond Dallas honestly thought I could do it, or he hoped I'd snap and kill the son of a bitch.

  "I think something very wrong is happening here, sir." Hell, yes, I said sir! I was pulling out all the stops on this one. I'd play to his vanity if it got me off the damned boat.

  He sighed. "For instance?"

  "The Mess Decks has used one-fifth of the usual rations for the last three days." We were getting ready for the next batch of ill, and based on the progression, there wouldn't be a single man well when that time came.

  "And this is news? Every time you start planning a mutiny, people stop eating." He didn't even snap it. Didn't the man have the... Okay, everyone knew he didn't have the sense God gave a goose, but it was his ass on the line, here.

  "It's not that simple, sir. Some of these people haven't eaten in the last month."

  "They must have found some great hideaway," he mused.

  I could tell he was replaying the drawings of the sub in his head, trying to figure out where anyone would hide a month's worth of food.

  I shook my head. "No, I don't just mean they aren't eating Gorilla Head. I mean...they aren't eating at all."

  "That's impossible," he dismissed me.

  "Oh, it's possible. To top it off, some of the men aren't sleeping." Mainly, it was Clueless and the COB, those that were afflicted longest.

  "What do you mean? They have insomnia? That is a concern for Doc, not—"

  "Again, I mean...at all. I charted out what Clu... I mean, I charted out what Lieutenant Cluze has done in the last three days. He's either been on watch, getting quals or attending meetings twenty-four-seven for the last three days. Not an hour of down time anywhere in there."

  And not a shower or head break that I could verify, though he didn't smell it. The two good things about this whole situation were no prima donnas hogging the shower and no lines on the Mess Decks.

  "Good man. Maybe I'll put him in for a commendation."

  I bit back the urge to throttle him. "Don't you think that's just a little weird, sir?" I inquired.

  "What? You've never gone a few days without sleep. I seem to remember, when the TG went—"

  "In an emergency," I conceded. "This is no emergency."

  It was usually the Nukes who got screwed in an emergency, hence the old adage: "One ship, one crew, one shaft, back aft." Nukes got the punch line of that ditty in every possible meaning of the word.

  Nukes learned to hate the Navy quicker than most rates, at least on a submarine. The worst possible thing you could taunt the average Nuke with was drinking him to death and putting 'lifer' on his gravestone.

  Don't let anyone fool you with stories to the contrary. The truth is that the only reason for SRBs is to avoid paying to educate a whole new batch of Nukes every six years. You have to appeal to the base interests of the Nukes. Better than most, they realize they are prostituting themselves, selling body and soul for a few bucks.

  The lure of money works once. Maybe twice. After that, sanity kicks in and most of them dive for the door rather than sign on. Who can blame them?

  Right about then, I was cursing myself for re- enlisting the second time. The multiple had been stellar, but the payoff had ceased to matter about the time that deployment had been moved up by three months.

  The PT's voice broke through my exhausted musings.

  "You're right. It's not an emergency." His raised eyebrow let me know that he considered the matter closed.

  Again, the need to throttle him rose up, stronger than it had been when he'd decreed the food poisoning on the last deployment was the fault of E-Div for the sanitizer being two degrees low and not the fault of the cooks for leaving food in the warmer for eight straight hours, stronger even than it had been when PT had announced that sending mail home from a port was a threat to National Security. As if 'I love you' would be the loose lips that would sink us, but I'm off topic again.

  I managed to nod and made my way down to the Mess Decks again. After all, since they obviously didn't eat, it was relatively safe.

  Cat Man looked up, a cup of the paint thinner that passed for coffee in hand. We'd run out of the good stuff we'd brought on board with us some time earlier; Navy fare was all we had left, but it would keep us awake, and that was the important thing. We slept in shifts, never all of us at once and never leaving a sleeping crew unprotected in aft berthing.

  The Navy had trained us well for this, since the rules state that they only have to give us one meal and one hour of sleep in every twenty-four. I'd been short-changed on that more than a few times in my life, and so had every man I trusted.

  "So?" Cat Man queried, though I could tell he already knew the answer I had for him.

  "Asshole," I grumbled.

  Diamond Dallas snorted in mirthless laughter. "Did you kill him?"

  "If I had, I'd already be in the weapons locker, don't you think?"

  "Guess so. What now?"

  My silent musing that I only needed three minutes to crack the weapons locker was cut short by Garibaldi barreling toward us, wide-eyed and pale for a man with an olive complexion. "I saw... I know..."

  He gasped it out, making me raise an eyebrow in disbelief. The semi-annual brush with death required a mile and a half run, and there was nowhere on a sub that you should be able to wind yourself.

  Garibaldi wasn't my favorite person on the best of days. I respected him, because he could take an order, he did his job well and he was one of the best for looking the other way when someone had to break a few safety protocols along the way. If he'd just keep religion out of the engine room, I'd probably like him a lot more, but I've come to appreciate a little religion over the last few weeks.

  "Cat got your tongue," Cat Man taunted.

  Garibaldi turned beat red then rushed into the galley and grabbed a plastic shaker the size of his forearm, knocking over several others in his haste. He ignored the crank's shout of protest and returned to us, opening the cap and sprinkling the powder over himself...then us.

  I sneezed, waving my hand in front of my face, coughing on the cloud of garlic dust. "What the fuck are you doing, Garibaldi?" It was the wrong day to mess with me.

  Don't take me the wrong way. There were days I would have loved to crack Garibaldi, though he was a productive body, and we needed those, but this wasn't that day.

  "Protecting us...well, if the stories are true."

  Diamond Dallas wiped garlic away from his eyes with a look of disgust. "He's left the torpedo tube," he quipped.

  "Just wait. They'll be here in a minute. Then you'll see. Or, if I'm wrong...we're dead, I guess."

  Cat Man stared at Diamond Dallas, and then they both turned to stare at me.

  Great! Usually, I like being the LPO, but sometimes, it really sucks the big one. I sighed. "Just slow down and tell me—"

  "Cluze and Adams. I saw them in the laundry room, and—"

  Diamond Dallas cursed softly. "Is that all? Come on. We catch guys every couple of deployments. You know—"

  "Not screwing, you idiot!" />
  I held up my hand for the break I needed to try and make sense of this, waving away the crank who'd come out to complain about the mess of garlic powder. "Start at the be..."

  The words stuck in my throat at the sight of Clueless in the doorway. His skin was a ruddy hue again...well, as ruddy as it gets when you've seen nothing but fluorescent for the last eighty or so days, but that wasn't what made my heart skip to a non-rhythm.

  That was accomplished by the fangs in his mouth, little pointed teeth about half again as long as normal canine teeth and thin as needles for the extra length, and the drops of blood just south of his lower lip. I no longer had to ask what Garibaldi had seen in the laundry room. I was pretty certain I had the full story unfolding in my brain.

  As unlikely as it sounded, Clueless had really gotten laid in port, and the bitch had really bitten him. Of course, she was probably pretty hard-up. She'd wanted a meal. By all accounts, Clueless didn't have much else to offer a woman, so the meal must have been the sum total of her interest in him.

  The crank's scream made me jump, but I found myself rooted to the bench as he grabbed the garlic out of Garibaldi's hands and dumped a healthy dose over his head.

  "This is a joke, right?" the skinny teen asked. "This is some sort of hazing?"

  "Fuck, no," Cat Man whispered, shaking his head as if he could dislodge what he was seeing. I could tell his mind was as blank a void as the railing he'd put the ball bearings in; in fact, I could almost hear the same metal swish and tink as he moved his cranium back and forth.

  For a long moment, no one moved. Clueless bobbed forward then back again, his eyes narrowing, his tongue cleaning the blood from his face. He stepped toward us then recoiled, his fangs receding. "Garlic? Shit, I won't be able to pass through here until it's properly cleaned up. That was cold, Garibaldi."

  "Bite me," the big Italian managed in a half- laugh.

  It was so out of character for him that I found myself laughing too.

  The crank squeaked then cleared his throat. "If that's true, I'm never cleaning it. I'll go to mast first. Green carpet, here I come."

  Clueless wasn't amused. He stepped toward us again, and Garibaldi fumbled the heavy silver cross from under his poopie suit, holding it out in front of him like a shield. Based on how quickly Clueless backpedaled, I gathered that part of the legend was true too.

  "You can't stay in here forever," he spat at us.

  The truth of the matter stunned me. "Don't have to. If you can't come near the garlic, all I have to do is walk past you and..." I stood and strode to him, ignoring the crank's groan.

  As I expected, Clueless backed off, bolting halfway down the passageway.

  Hot damn! Now we're cooking with fire. I turned to the others. "Grab as much garlic as you can find. Powder everyone who's healthy down then meet me in the engine room."

  "Anything you say," the crank professed.

  "Not you, nub. You stay here and protect our food stores."

  "What? Are you nuts? They'll—"

  Cat Man smacked him in the back of the head. His smile announced how good it felt to do it. "What are you? Stupid? You heard...that thing. You're covered in garlic and have it all over the Mess Decks. You're safe here. Just stay between them and the food, or we're screwed."

  "If they can't come in here, why do I have to guard it?" He was being petulant now, showing his youth and inexperience...and pissing me off.

  I turned on him with the look that sent men scrambling. He swallowed hard, a sure indication that he knew murderous intent when he saw it.

  "Better," I growled at him. "Now... If you're not here, they can just get a couple of sacrificial lambs to clean the shit up and starve us out."

  "And what the hell am I supposed to do if they do show up here?" he asked hopelessly. "Attack them with my bare hands or something?"

  Cat Man barked in laughter. "Try crossing two knives in front of you," he suggested.

  I sighed, a headache coming on from the overpowering scent of garlic and lack of sleep. "Try walking toward them. They have to back off. Isn't that right..."

  I swallowed the rest, along with a bitter curse. Clueless was gone. That meant it was a race against time, and like it or not, Clueless wasn't completely clueless.

  "Let's move it," I ordered. "On second thought... Garibaldi! You're double-protected. Collect Lonnie and clean out the ammo locker. Bring it all down to the engine room." Between Garibaldi and Lonnie, they could carry everything we needed and more.

  "Drop one off to me on the way," the crank suggested.

  "Fuck, no," I replied, unable to stop myself from abusing the new weak link among us. "I'm not giving you a chance to create a casualty we'll have to fix. The men with Fish get the guns. They know what not to shoot at."

  He mumbled a couple of curses that earned him another warning look from me. Confident that he knew I'd kill him with little provocation, we set out to accomplish our many tasks.

  We racked everyone out. Some of them weren't happy with the situation, but that was their problem, not mine. They sobered up PDQ and got with the program when they realized we were serious and sane... well, as sane as any submariner who has done three deployments in less than two years can be.

  We managed to get them down to the engine room without interference from the undead. In fact, we didn't see hide nor hair of them, which probably meant they were having their own powwow, deciding how to get the last of the blood on board.

  All said, twenty-six of the thirty made it safely to the engine room and tunnel. We figured that the vamps got the rest of us, a belief that was later proven sound. We talked over the sound of cutting metal and welding, and before long, we all had the extra layer of protection a quickly-constructed cross offered.

  Rosenbloom fingered his in distaste, but he left it hanging around his neck.

  About halfway through this little adventure, Lonnie and Garibaldi showed up, banging on the closed hatch, carting M-16s, shotguns and pistols, along with all the ammo on board. There weren't enough guns for everyone, so most of the guys were assigned work-teams, one gun between them. They would eat together, sleep in shifts and even go to the head together. We weren't taking chances on anything, now that we knew what we were dealing with.

  The manic glee on Cat Man's face as he loaded his shotgun made me smile.

  "What are you thinking?" I asked, knowing his sense of humor...and of irony matched my own pretty well. In short, I could take a solid guess what was running through his mind.

  He didn't disappoint me. "Remember when we talked about your plan for downsizing the Navy?" he asked.

  I grinned, nodding. Oh, yes. I remembered it well. As I recalled, I said that we should give the Nukes handguns and set them loose with them. After a few days, one of them would snap and kill some dead weight. When word got around that he hadn't been punished, the weeding out would start in earnest. The weak links would go. The dead weight would go. The annoying assholes would go. About ninety-five percent of the officers would go.

  Speaking of which, Clueless was a lot more clueless than I'd given him credit for. His grand plan involved getting the PT involved. I would laugh at the absurdity of it, if it hadn't been such a serious moment. Okay, I'm lying. It was a riot, even then.

  The CO walked onto the Mess Decks, puffed up, his eyes moving from the crank sharpening a knife welded to a metal mop handle to Cat Man, busy cleaning his shotgun. His face paled. In true form, he decided to attack the most inane thing first.

  "What is this mess? Jakes, clean this up!"

  The crank looked to me, noted the minute shake of my head and went back to sharpening his weapon. I didn't argue it. The nub was a lot less dangerous with a spear than a projectile weapon. At least, he couldn't cause flooding with it.

  Petty Tyrant lunged to grab Jakes by the collar, and the teen moved, bringing his weapon up to just beneath the CO's chin. No one offered outrage. No one was surprised by the turn of events. It had been inevitable that one of us would end
up with a weapon to the old man's person sooner or later. If it hadn't happened there and then, it was going to happen in another twelve hours. So, what was the difference if we got in on the action a little early?

  "I told you, Captain," Clueless intoned. "They're not kidding this time. It's mutiny. We should head south. Let the Marines handle this."

  I held my breath, praying that PT would stay true to form. Clueless's plan was all too clear to me. Sure... Pop the hatch to bring in the Marines, overpower them and you have a hundred plus vampires on a feeding frenzy on a ship that carries a normal compliment of seven-thousand men.

  Shit! That sucks.

  I needn't have worried about PT. Once a tyrant, always a tyrant. "And have it said that I need the Marines to keep order on my own boat? Hell, no." And we all knew he wouldn't report a mutiny and risk having another fast attack sink us.

  "They have the weapons, Captain. How else do you suggest we stop them?" His eyes glowed red, probably a sign of his fury and frustration, but the PT couldn't see that with his back turned.

  A sudden inspiration struck me. "You know, you don't have any more fresh blood flowing around here, Clueless. None that isn't protected pretty damned well, that is."

  I hadn't thought it was possible for a vampire to blush, but he did, probably high on the infusion he'd gotten from Adams earlier in the day. Or was it night? As I said, it's easy to lose track on a submarine.

  I smiled at his reaction. "Unless, of course, you want to count the pain in the ass, over here. He's too much trouble to be an ally to us. He might as well keep being an enemy. Don't you agree?"

  Cat Man snickered. I imagine he was trying to hold it in, but the mental image of the fallout from this one was too much for him. It was nearly too much for me.

  Clueless was a little slower on the uptake. His smile widened, and he drooled. I'm not kidding! The son of a bitch actually drooled. "Well, of course the Captain is my ally and not yours," he answered silkily.

  Jakes shot me a look of disbelief.

  I shrugged. "Well, he's always been something of a bloodsucker," I offered brightly. Why not let him become a more visible one? And, better that I arrange to make PT a pain in Clueless's ass instead of mine. That was sure to happen, even if Clueless was too stupid to see it coming.