Xombies: Apocalypse Blues (13 page)

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Authors: Walter Greatshell

BOOK: Xombies: Apocalypse Blues
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For a second, I was leery about giving myself away by speaking into the radio, but as I made myself start walking it came naturally. Talking made me feel less alone.
“Nothing so far,” I said, more loudly than necessary. “I’m passing rows of computer equipment . . . checking all the doors. Nope. Now I’m passing under an escape trunk—it’s closed. I’m looking into a room full of TV monitors and consoles—hello? Nobody there. Now a smaller room . . . the ceiling’s getting low . . .”
I was at the end. This last room had the cramped, utilitarian look of a place behind the scenes—the front of the sub, I supposed. It was festooned with thick skeins of insulated cable that clung to the bulkhead like fossilized muscle and sinew. Fax machines and other communications gear were stuffed wherever they could fit amid gray-painted guts of ducts, pipes, wiring. Teletype paper had been dumped on the floor, but otherwise there was nothing there.
Feeling let off the hook, I dawdled to peer in every cranny. I still had fifteen minutes. What interested me was that I could see part of the actual hull there—that curved ceiling was all that kept the sea out. I noticed that the inner walls and floor did not actually contact the hull, but seemed to float within it, creating a crawl space on all sides, as if the living and work areas of the sub were a clunky, angular structure shoehorned inside the ringed shell—a ship in a bottle. It dawned on me that I had seen all this in pieces back at that great hangar. It had been a submarine factory.
Duh
, as the boys would say.
Crawl space. A chunky yellow flashlight hung from a hook in the corner. I took it and performed a few contortions with the tank on my back, struggling to peer into the narrow crevice along the hull.
Faces looked back at me.
I flinched, nearly dropping the flashlight. I must have cried out, too, because Cowper would later tell me that he and the other fellows in the control room thought I had “bought it.” But the faces didn’t move. They had stopped like clocks.
Years ago, when Mum and I were still living in our old house in Oxnard, California, I had wormed my way through a mysterious trapdoor above the closet into a tiny neglected attic. Crouched on the ledge, I flicked on my flashlight and found myself surrounded by basketball-sized hornets’ nests . . . papery-dry and long dead. This was much the same.
Mesmerized by something gleaming in the dark, I sighed and banged the radio against my mask, forgetting it was there. “It worked,” I said. Then I turned off the flashlight so I could no longer see the boy’s gold tooth.
CHAPTER
TEN
N
o matter how squeamish you are, getting rid of bodies breaks down to a job of heavy lifting. The novelty of cool, rigid flesh wears off, and you realize how awkward they are to move, how darn heavy. After a dozen or so, they’re no more fearsome than the baggy old futons my mother always made us drag from apartment to apartment. “Come on, lazypants,” she would cry, as I buckled under my half. “Nearly home!”
Finding every Ex was a grotesque Easter egg hunt, made more difficult by our breathing equipment in the tight spaces. Since operating the boat took precedence, corpse-gathering was relegated to the boys and me, under the supervision of a whiskery old character named Vic Noteiro. He knew every possible place to check, and was perfectly happy to let us do the checking while he made himself comfortable and told anecdotes about his days painting submarines. “Guys kept sayin’ I should retire,” he said. “Retire from what? Sittin’ on my ass all night listening to the radio? Makin’ twenty bucks an hour? Whenever ya feel like it, ya slap on a coat of Mare Island? Pure titty.”
Then the question was how to dump them overboard. No one knew if exposure to air would cause them to revive, but we didn’t want to find out, even if it meant we had to “suck rubber” awhile longer. In the meantime the bodies were weighted, bagged, and trussed like mummies. That was awful because they had lost their blue pallor and looked vibrantly alive—much more rosy-cheeked than any of us. “It’s the carbon monoxide is all,” Vic told us dismissively. “They’re stone dead.”
A skeptical-faced boy asked, “How can the carbon monoxide affect them if they don’t breathe?”
“Who said they don’t breathe? They breathe. They’re like plants: They
absorb
what they need through every pore. No actual respiration, but they do breathe—just a lot slower, like them yogis in India. For all we know, they’re in Nirvana now.”
There were fourteen Xombies altogether—ten from the crew (actually twelve crew members had been lost, but two conveniently fell into the sea), the two Marine guards, and two from our crowd. When we had them all lined up in the big mess hall, Kranuski and Cowper came down to look. Vic had identified each one with a Magic Marker, and a man named Kraus ticked them off one by one: “Boggs, supply officer; Lester, weps; Gunderson, the nav; Montoya, communications; Lee, sonar chief; Baker, cob; Henderson, quartermaster; Selby, machinist’s mate; O’Grady, torpedoman—” He faltered, clearing his throat. “Shit.”
“I know,” said Cowper. “When you’ve worked with a man, it’s hard.”
Kranuski snapped, “It’s not that. What about the tubes?”
Cowper nodded carefully, as if treading on shaky ground. “I was thinking of that. Will your people accept it?”
“It’s burial at sea. Better than dumping them down the TDU.”
“Okay. I’ll make an announcement—”
“No announcement. Sorry,
sir
, but you’re the one who told me not to get hung up on ceremony. Let’s just get this over with.”
Cowper agreed, and they went back upstairs.
Not sure what we were doing, I helped carry all the corpses down another level to the torpedo room. This was frustrating because we had just dragged three bodies up from there, plus our oxygen tanks, and it was hard not to brain yourself with those masks on. Shiny forest green torpedoes with blue caps were stacked in cradles on either side of the aisle. Straight ahead were four elaborate chrome hatches with dangling tags that read, TUBE EMPTY. Noteiro yanked off the tags and opened the round doors.
“Stuff ’em in there,” he said, raspy-voiced. “Move it!”
We managed to pack three bodies in each tube. There was a huge piston that helped ram them in. Since I thought torpedoes ran on their own power, I wasn’t sure how these were going to be launched, and watched closely as Vic shut the tubes and went to a wall console with a padded stool in front of it. Headsets of different colors hung from a bar under the lights; he put on a pair and adjusted the controls. There was a hollow sound of water rushing through pipes.
“Flooding tubes one . . . two . . . three . . . and four,” he said. “Tubes one through four ready in all respects.” A moment later there was an explosive whoosh, unnervingly powerful, then three more hair-raising blasts in close succession. This was something even the boys had never seen. A bit shaken, we loaded the last bodies into one tube for a final firing. Then it was done. I couldn’t say what I was thinking:
Like flushing goldfish
.
 
 
The next thing that happened nearly made us forget our exhaustion and all the night’s ugliness: the diesel engine rumbled to life again, this time sucking fresh, cold air into the sub. Boys were so happy they hugged each other. They even forgot themselves and hugged
me
. Unfortunately, though most of the poison was gone in minutes, we were told to leave our masks on until every compartment could be ventilated and inspected for residual pockets of gas. This put a damper on things.
Since the boys and I were not trusted with this duty, we were left to wait in the crew’s mess, our breathing gear plugged into jacks on the floor. We sat nodding off in the blue-upholstered booths like winos at an all-night diner.
“I’ve had it,” said a maniacal freckle-faced guy with Creamsicle orange hair and white eyelashes. “I’m not wearing this mask another second!” Then he went right back to sleep.
Ignoring him, Chipmunk Boy asked me, “What’s your name?”
“Lulu. Louise. Louise Pangloss.”
“I’m Hector Albemarle.” He offered me his furry mitt and I shook it, feeling silly. Pointing at the others, he said, “That’s Tyrell Banks, Jake . . .”
“Bartholomew,” moaned the sleeping guy.
“—Jake Bartholomew, Julian Noteiro, uh, Shawn Dickey, Sal DeLuca, Lemuel Sanchez, Ray Despineau, and Cole Hayes.”
Most of the boys acknowledged me in some way as they were introduced, nodding or at least glancing over. They were quite a mixed bag. You get to know someone pretty fast when sharing a chore as miserable as body-snatching, and I had formed distinct impressions of all their personalities:
In spite of the costume, Hector was mature for his age, brave, a peacemaker, and considered something of a nerd. I already liked him a lot though I was afraid of his stepfather, Ed Albemarle, with whom he had a prickly relationship.
Tyrell was a goofy streetwise guy, but also a hard worker, who brightened up the job with his incessant funny griping. He joked about fusing country-western and hip-hop to create a musical opus called
Westward Ho
. This was some kind of running gibe at Shawn, who aspired to preach New Age mysticism through the medium of rap.
Jake, too, considered himself a comic, dropping silly non sequiturs (“When I meet someone, I just like to know if they identify more with the Trix rabbit or with the kids. There’s no right or wrong answer—take your time”) that the others made no attempt to acknowledge, as if they thought he was a bore. He was sort of a spaz—I felt a little protective of him.
Julian was all business, a straight-edger who acted like he knew the sub better than anybody and resented being the one to have to correct us. It was he whose suggestion about “piloting by scope” had been rebuffed by Albemarle up top. Julian was the grandson of old Vic, who derived a sly amusement from seeing the boy steam. Shawn, a laid-back skate-punk and poet, was sexy in a Madison-Avenue-exploitation-of-youth kind of way, a walking hipness barometer with piercings like chrome acne, who seemed fascinated by everything that was going on. Unfazed by Tyrell’s jokes, he carried around a note-pad at all times, scribbling down lyrical thunderbolts as they occurred. He had been the deejay back at the factory.
The other four were quiet and withdrawn, more obviously in shock: Sal was angry and said nothing that wasn’t bitterly sarcastic—not that he said much. Ray was his best friend—I first assumed they were brothers—who spoke with a long-suffering weariness that reminded me of Eeyore in
Winnie the Pooh
. They both worked listlessly and had to be prodded to help.
Lemuel was the huge kid I had noticed on deck. I had thought he was Samoan or some other Pacific islander, but found out he was actually Native American, of Narragansett ancestry. His mother had worked the buffet at Foxwoods Casino. He was very shy, perhaps distrustful, though his size and physical strength made him conspicuous among us. He kept stealing glances at me.
Cole Hayes was in his own world and barely took notice of us or anything else. It was like he was watching a movie only he could see. He did what was expected, but he was a tall kid and kept bumping his head on hangers and lights, reacting to the pain with an incomprehension that reminded me of King Kong getting strafed. I learned later that he had been a high-school track star from the projects in South Providence, courted by the best colleges in the country. His future had been a vision of paradise like no one in his family had ever imagined. Then Agent X came along.
I returned their nods, hoping they were starting to overcome their suspicion. “Nice to meet you,” I said in general. To Hector, I asked, “How long have you all known each other?”
“Some of us went to school together, and I’ve known Julian and Tyrell a long time because our dads were friends. The rest I met up with for the first time at the plant, but we’ve all gotten to know each other pretty good since then.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About a month.”
“And you know everyone by name?” I was terrible with names.
“You learn it doing roll call twice a day. Plus it was kind of my job to get to know everyone—I was floor safety monitor.”
“Narc!” snorted Jake, the orange-haired kid, still feigning sleep.
“Safety Squirrel,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“How did you wind up in the factory?”
“It was really weird. We all got brought in under police escort, right before Agent X took off. It was Christmas break, and this big bus convoy goes to all our houses, picking everyone up like for camp or something, except it was the middle of the night. My mother and sister were freaking out thinking I was being arrested for something, until the security men told them my stepdad had authorized it—that there was something very important going on at the plant, and I was to take part. I think they gave her a note from him, too. We could see a lot of other guys already in the buses, so I started to think it might be some kind of lame father-son bonding thing sponsored by the company. As soon as they knew I was the guy on their list, they kind of raided my room, stuffed everything into duffel bags, and put it all on the bus with me. Sheila and my mom were standing out on the step in their nighties—I remember wishing they would go back inside, I was so embarrassed. That was the last time I ever saw them.”

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