Quaranteam Thunder Below Ch 01

This is an authorized, official spinoff of CorruptingPower's Quaranteam universe. All concepts, characters and ideas are used with permission from the creator.

All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.

Chapter one

USS Boise, SSN 764

June 3rd 2020

Somewhere in the North Atlantic

I frantically sprinted through the decks and compartments, opening valves, flipping breakers, and realigning equipment. I had minutes before I had to be back at the sticks to steer the ship, and still, there was so much I needed to do to get her ready to surface.

Schmidt was back aft in the engine room, doing all he could to keep the reactor going, keep us steaming. He was running a fever of 102, half out of his mind with delirium, and so congested that he was almost constantly wracked with wet, phlegmatic hacking, but so far he had kept everything going. He and I were the only two sailors left alive on the entire submarine. A crew complement of 150 submariners, dead in their racks. A submarine crew is meant to have no less than 50 men on watch at any given time, the bare minimum number of men necessary to operate the myriad, complex and interconnected systems. We had two. And soon, it seemed, we wouldn't even have that.

Sliding into the helmsman's chair, I pulled back on the sticks, causing the bow planes to shift, bringing us shallow. I reached over to the mike, keying up the 1MC.

"Surface, surface, surface." I rang the diving alarm twice, the obnoxious aoogah klaxon bringing none of its usual comfort.

I glanced at the spread-out pile of manuals sitting open around me, looking for the next steps of the surfacing procedure, before reaching over to the Chief of the Watch chair and starting up the Low Pressure Blower. I prayed I hadn't screwed up the sequence of operations.

The machine started up without a hitch, blowing air into the Main Ballast Tanks, and I heaved a sigh of relief. I was a fucking Radioman! A communications technician. Never in my nine years of Navy training had I ever been prepared to take on half of the equipment procedures I had just performed, let alone performing them all solo.

Oh sure, eventually I'm expected to qualify as Chief of the Watch and Diving Officer of the Watch, the men who trim and drive the ship, but I was nowhere near high ranking enough for it. That was still years in my future. Still, we had shit to do, so I needed to do some shit.

"Maneuvering, control."

Nothing.

"MANEUVERING, CONTROL, TEST."

Silence.

"Schmidt, it's Hart. Please answer me, man."

Goddamnit. Schmidt was gone. I gritted my teeth, hard, fighting down the panic and despair with practiced iron will. I tried not to think about how Schmidt's last moments had to have gone.

As I tied the yoke in position, shifting the rudder to cause the ship to circle, I reached over to the Ballast Control Panel and raised the High Data Rate Mast. I trudged aft towards Radio, the communications room, my normal domain, and did the job I was actually trained for.

I worked my magic on the console, and within fifteen minutes, I had 128 kilobytes per second internet and access to an open voice net. I prayed that there was still someone on the other end of the line to answer.

"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise, over."

COMSUBLANT, or Commander, Submarine Forces Atlantic, was our parent command, the fleet that we belonged to. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, someone was supposed to be manning that station. Every fiber of my being hoped that someone was there, that someone, anyone, was monitoring the net. That there was any other soul left alive on the planet.

For several long minutes, I heard nothing, and I felt despair creeping on like a cold, black fog. Nothing on this earth is as isolated, as alone, as a submarine crew underway. And I was alone on the crew. The last swingin' dick on this giant metal machine.

The radio crackled to life, and my heart leaped in my chest.

A female voice spoke. "Last station, this is COMSUBLANT, say again?" Odd, there were vanishingly few women in the submarine force; the pilot program for integrating women onboard had started barely a year before. I was used to hearing men over the comms.

"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise, over."

"Boise?! Boise, this is COMSUBLANT, it's good to hear you! Go ahead, over."

"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise. Ship has suffered a mass casualty event, break. Majority of ship's company is Davy Jones, break. Remaining crew is insufficient to fully operate, navigate or fight the ship, break. Request your station advise, over."

"Boise, this is COMSUBLANT, Roger, break. Request your station pass ship's posit over secure chat, over." I slid over to my console, and with a few mouse clicks, pulled up a secure chat feed. I typed in the current ship's positional coordinates, then slid back over to the handset.

"COMSUBLANT, this is Boise. Ship's posit passed over secure chat. Standing by for instructions, over."

"Boise, this is COMSUBLANT Actual, over." Holy shit! The admiral herself was on the horn! Which was just as odd, last I knew, none of the female officers from the women in submarines pilot program were admirals yet. "Request Boise Actual to radio, over."

"COMSUBLANT Actual, this is Boise, command triad, wardroom and chiefs quarters are all Davy Jones, over."

"Boise, COMSUBLANT Actual, who am I speaking with? Over."

I wiped suddenly sweaty palms on the legs of my poopy suit. Sure, I'd spoken to officers a lot, given my rate, I was on first name terms with the commanding officer for Pete's sake. Still, admirals were another level entirely. "COMSUBLANT Actual, Boise, speaking with Petty Officer Second Class Hart, Charles S. Ma'am, break. I'm the senior man, correction, only survivor, present ma'am. Over."

"Jesus H. Christ, sailor. Everyone else is..."

"Gone ma'am. I had one of the nukes back aft, running the reactor, but I've heard nothing from him in hours. I was busy surfacing the ship solo, haven't had the chance to go back and check on him. Over."

"Well fuck me dry. Son, I won't lie to you, the fecal matter has hit the rotary cooling device shoreside. Brace yourself, sailor, this news ain't gonna be pleasant."

"Standing by ma'am." Sweat poured off of me in rivulets. Unconsciously, I started to unzip my poopy suit. It was so hot in here.

"We've lost contact with all underway submarines. A global pandemic is running roughshod over the entire planet. Casualties are staggering. Frankly, it's a miracle that you're alive, son. And a further miracle that you're in a state well enough to have preserved the submarine. We were able to recover our Strategic Defense Missile Assets, the boomers are all home, but by the time they were able to return to home port, their entire crews were dead or dying. In total, we've lost twenty fast attack submarines with all hands, and the crews of every other boat in the fleet have been utterly decimated."

"Fuck." Twenty subs, 150 men and officers each. A sickening number of men left on eternal patrol, their souls forever on watch in the depths. Boomers, or Ballistic Missile Submarines, were our nation's strategic deterrents. They were the subs that carried nuclear missiles. While it was a relief that no missile had gone missing, thousands of sailors in the submarine force were just... gone. For reference, the US Navy had 54 fast attack submarines in active service. We had just lost almost half of them.

"Fuck indeed petty officer."

"Orders ma'am?" I could feel the weight of the panic settling back in. I'd been running ragged for days, and I could feel the despair and fear settling in on my chest like constricting bands of iron. But, there was still more to do. I forced down the feeling of constriction and focused again.

"Hold fast, sailor. Help is on its way. We have your posit, the USS Kearsarge is en route with an emergency relief crew. ETA 20 hours and counting. Stay on the net sailor. You are Priority Only at this time. All other efforts are on hold until Boise is recovered. Remember, this is a secured net. Do NOT discuss this or anything else when you get shoreside. You're being given some time off post-deployment. You'll need it."

"Roger-" I had to stop briefly as hacking coughs wracked my chest. "Roger that COMSUBLANT. Boise standing by." I wiped my mouth, that cough had been painful. I looked down at my hand. "Is that... blood?"

Immediately, I heard shouting in the background, a flurry of motion. I could hear the admiral screaming at someone as a wave of dizziness swept over me.

"ETA TEN HOURS AND COUNTING! Someone scramble a helo, we need to get him out of there yesterday! Move it move it move it!"

I faded in and out, memories and nightmares fuzzing together.

********************************************************

It had started innocuously enough, sniffles, coughing. We thought it was the typical boat crud, the inevitable sickness that comes when you cram 150 men in close quarters into a giant tin can.

Then people started coughing up blood. Within a week, an entire watch section, one of three, was SIQ, Sick in Quarters, while doc, our sole corpsman, frantically tried to figure out what was happening.

By the time the second watch section started to cough blood, the initial wave was starting to die in agony, their bodies burning in fever as something tore them apart from the inside out. The ship was put on emergency watch standing, all nonessential watches were secured so that the few healthy men could eat and get a few hours of sleep.

Soon even that wasn't enough. The captain was coughing up blood himself when the decision was made to abandon the mission and return to port. By the time we were out of mission waters, we had a 20 man skeleton crew left alive, and most of them were sick.

We had to take turns loading almost one hundred bodies into the torpedo tubes, before we shot them out into the ocean. The most half-assed burial at sea ever, but it was all we could do. Normally a submariner underway who dies is kept in a body bag in frozen food stores, basically a giant freezer. There were just... so many. Too many.

In four days, an entire crew had been decimated, and the few of us left fought to get the ship home. Me and Schmidt ended up being the only two crewmen left alive by the time we were close enough to surface

*******************************************************.

I was so hot.

I heard muffled voices coming from dead men's lips. But the voices were female. A loud banging sound split my head apart, and shadowy winged figures with bloody fangs flew out, circling. Circling. I opened my mouth and sand poured out. God I was thirsty. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

I stumbled out of radio, naked and sweating/shivering, and came face to face with monsters wearing plastic faces.

Blackness took me. From the darkness, pale figures strode forth, to take their stations in the empty seats all across the boat. Black, empty eyes turned to stare at me, before turning to their panels.

Outdated uniforms covering pale sailors, sailors who weren't solid enough to block my view of the bulkheads behind them. I shivered in fear and cold, as it struck me. A ghost crew manning a ghost ship.

********************************************************

I woke up in a hospital bed, feeling like I had single-handedly wrestled a bear. And lost.

I blinked my gummy eyes, trying to clear my vision. The room stopped spinning as I sat up, taking in the off-white, hospital colored paint job and the antiseptic smell.

A pressure in my throat told me I had been given a breathing line, which I pulled out as I tried to swing my legs over the side. I needed to stand, needed to pace. I felt like it would literally kill me if I stayed still. My arms ended up twisted in the fluid lines, and the little wheeled stick they hung from ended up tangled up next to me. One wheel squeaked annoyingly as I stood up out of bed.

A couple of medical alarms went off, and a doctor walked in, wearing a plastic face shield and a mask that covered her nose and mouth. She was in her 50's, white. Cold, clinical blue eyes glared at me behind her face shield.

"Petty Officer Hart, I need you to calm yourself. You've been through a lot, and right now the last thing you need is to stress your system. I'm Doctor Mayhew. I've been treating you through your bout with DuoHalo."

"DuoHalo?" I asked, my voice hoarse and raspy. "The fuck is DuoHalo? How am I alive? The admiral said-"

"Thankfully, you appear to have a higher resistance than most to it." She said with a grimace. "That being said, you do have DuoHalo. You'll need to start treatment immediately."

"Treatment. Ok doc, gimme the shot."

"Doesn't quite work that way." She said, a mischievous glint in her eye.

"What the hell does that mean? You can't just give me a shot for it? And I thought Covid was the new hotness. You mean we got hit with a second pandemic on top of the first? What, does God have a hate boner for humanity all of a sudden?"

She shrugged nonchalantly. "It is what it is. We've just been dealing with it as best we can. It hasn't been... great."

I swallowed nervously, my stomach sinking into my boots.

"How bad is it?" I couldn't help but notice that she wouldn't meet my eyes.

"You understand that what I'm about to tell you is classified at the highest levels, correct?" I nodded silently. "Bad. The virus has a nearly 100% fatality rate between the ages of 11 and 17. For females outside of that age range, it's 20-30%." The dodge couldn't have been more obvious.

"And males?"

"In excess of 50%," my brain sputtered to a halt. I tried to wrap my head around it, to encompass the concept. 2 billion men worldwide, gone.

Nope, too big. Didn't hit home.

My dad, gone. Pain, heartbreak. My brother, my uncle. Crushing heartache.

Every child from middle school until graduation. Nope, too big.

My niece and nephews. Pain! Think of something else.

I staggered, gripping the side of the bed as my legs failed me. I distantly registered the fact that I was hyperventilating, squeezing my eyes shut to keep the tears at bay.

I didn't even know if my family had been touched by this or not.

"Petty Officer Hart! Breathe! Breathe. Deep breath in, deep breath out."

I slowly, so slowly calmed as I tried to comply. My hands shook.

"When can I go home?"

"As of today, you are on the watch list. We still need to guard you from DuoHalo. We have-"

"Doc." I said in a calm, reasonable, ultimately no bullshit tone. "You've just told me that the world has fallen to shit. I've been on a four-month deployment cycle with multiple underways. I'm going home. I'm going to feed my dog. I'm going to call my family, and find out if any of them are even still alive." I looked up, meeting her gaze, locking my eyes on hers. "If you want to stop me, you're going to have to sedate me."

She sighed, exasperatedly. "Damn to hell the stubbornness of fucking bubbleheads. Fine! Fine. But before you go, you need to fill out this survey. Once you do, I'll sign the release forms myself." She wheeled over a computer on a stand, already open to a government website.

"What is this?"

"Figure it out yourself, you stubborn dick." She called over her shoulder as she stormed out.

Oracle survey. Huh. I entered in my social, name, date of birth, and DOD id number, then started clicking. It started out fairly basic, asking about myself, my personality, my views on things.

The questions in the first few sections alone read like a tinder profile on steroids. Interests, likes, dislikes, physical attributes. What the blue hell? Did the government start a matchmaking service? Whatever.

Then it got personal, asking about partner preferences. For the record, they're all pink on the inside, no boobs are bad boobs, and asses are masterpieces. Then it got weird.

"On a scale of one to ten, ten being very attracted, one being not attracted, rate how attractive you find coprophilia? The fuck?!" Thankfully, there was a little question mark next to the question. 'Coprophilia- a sexual attraction to excrement'. My stomach heaved. Nope. Definitely not.

The questions continued on just like that, getting weirder and weirder, and more and more invasive. I'll admit, I'm into some really twisted shit. The idea of screwing a lesbian, the idea of breeding sex, anal sex, dominance and submission, male dominance, I knew I was a dirty degenerate. But to lay all of it out in a government form just felt... exposing.

"Last question, thank fuck, on a scale of one to ten, ten being amenable, one being reluctant, how amenable are you to polygamy? Well shit, what man wouldn't want a threesome? Ten." I hit submit, gathered what few things of mine I saw laying in the room, and walked out.

On my way out the lobby door, I was stopped by an ensign in a navy working uniform. She was a tiny woman, obviously of Japanese descent, the top of her head barely reaching up to my chest. Slight, thin, spare frame and subtle curves. Her almond-shaped brown eyes peered at me over her facemask, through a curtain of inky black hair.

Reading her uniform, I found out that she was ensign Sato, and that she was an air warfare and surface warfare officer. Must be a real go-getter if she was only an ensign and already qualified.

I stood stock still for a long moment before I realized I was gawping and closed my jaw. She was gorgeous! I was thankful I'd had the presence of mind to wear my own facemask.

"ITS2 Hart, Charles S?"

"Ah-huh? Yes? Yes ma'am! I'm Petty Officer Hart! That is my name. What can I do for you?"

"Oh! No, I'm here for you! The admiral has placed you on indefinite remote work, until we can figure out the next steps for the submarine force. Basically, answer your phone when called, and stand by for further orders. After what you've been through, you need some time off."

"Is there even a sub force left?" I asked, struggling to see how the force would recover from this. Or myself, for that matter.

"Yes, there is: You." My heart felt like a knife twisted in it. So many men, good men, men I'd served with, fought with, were gone. My knees went weak, but I fought it off. Later, I can deal with this later.

"Aye aye. I'll stand by." I walked off, still trying to process.

********************************************************

June 10, 2020

Turns out, I had been laid up in the hospital for a week, delirious out of my mind, eaten up with fever. Thankfully, my personal effects had been brought to me in the hospital, and I had been able to bum a ride with a biohazard-suited duty driver from Portsmouth Naval Hospital to the Norfolk naval base. I'd had her drop me off on the sub pier, where I saw Boise moored alongside a couple of other submarines.

I was struck by how quiet everything seemed. How empty. There were no armed watches standing guard, no access brows in place. The hatches were shut. Only the mooring lines connected the ships to the pier.

I had ridden my motorcycle from the long-term deployment parking to my multiplex unit in military housing, just off base. Parking the bike in my designated spot, I was struck once again at how desolate everything looked. No kids playing on the playground. No couples on the sidewalks, arm in arm. No dogs outside, living the joyous goofball lives dogs live.

As I stepped inside my home, I grabbed the note posted to the door.

'I made sure the animals were all ok. Hope you recover, since I heard you were in the hospital.

-Jimmy'

I smiled. Jimmy was the neighbors' kid. I had promised him five hundred bucks to watch my dog and cats while I was away, and the ten-year-old had been eager to help me. The note was dated for the day before. As I unlocked my front door and stepped inside, I could hear Luna going nuts in her crate, yodeling and tapping her front paws.