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Authors: Walter Greatshell

BOOK: Xombies: Apocalypse Blues
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“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. She sent me into the visiting room alone, so it was a little scary. And—big shock—he was just this guy. Nothing special, just an old burnout with greasy hair and bad teeth. And he knew how he looked to me, too, because the only thing he said was, ‘What the fuck you expect, coming here? This ain’t no Hallmark card. Go home and tell that bitch she can shove her divorce up her ass.’”
“That’s terrible!”
“Yeah—he’s a douchebag. Or was. So I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing does.” Hector wept for a little while, holding the edge of my fur cape. “It’s so soft,” he sniffed.
“Yours, too,” I said, stroking his shoulder. All at once, something inside me gave way: I put my arms around him and crushed his body against mine, smothering us both in fur. For a second he recoiled, then clutched me to him, convulsing with emotion. It felt good to cry.
After a moment we relaxed, heaving chest to chest, and he looked at me searchingly. “God, you’re beautiful,” he said.
“No I’m not. If anything I’m weird-looking.”
He chuckled softly. “No you’re not. Here, I’ll show you.” He took something from his pocket: a stub of grease pencil.
“What are you doing?” I said, leaning away.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t bite.”
“What’s that for?”
“Just a little touch-up. It’ll come right off.” He made a curlicue in the air. “I wouldn’t do anything to embarrass you, Lulu. Ever.”
“Okay . . . just watch the cheek.” I submitted, while he made some marks on my face. It felt strange to have his face right in mine as he drew, so that I could study the tortoiseshell brown of his eyes, his every tiny mole. The pressure of the pencil and his baked-bread smell caused a ticklish heat to spread through my body. Without thinking about it, I leaned that extra few inches and kissed him.
He broke off before I did, leaning back with a grin to inspect his handiwork. Then he got up off the sink and stood me in front of the mirror. In the smeared reflection I could see a striking cat-girl, oval face framed in a fur hood, with black-tipped nose and whiskers. It was not a tragic face. It was a face that belonged to a whimsical world free of the shitty buckets and cold that defined this one. I nodded, eyes welling with tears again.
“I like it,” I said.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
“
T
his is bullshit,” said Mr. Monte the next day. It had been twenty hours since we’d been dropped off. “We don’t have a clue when they’re comin’ back, and they’ve stranded us out here with nothin’. Meanwhile, we’ve left them a boatload of supplies fit for a king. It ain’t right.”
Everyone was awake, though it was as dark as ever. We had shared out whatever candy and snacks people had brought, and once more the Brits had made tea, but as soon as this meager breakfast was over, we were all restless. We weren’t accustomed to having free time. There was nothing to do except listen to the men argue downstairs.
Albemarle was trying to remain positive: “Hey, we have heat, we have lights. We have water. If you think about it, it hasn’t really been that long—”
“Those friggin’ utilities are electric-powered,” said Monte. “They’re only givin’ us back a little bit of what they’re gettin’ in spades from the boat’s reactor. It’s our own juice! They ain’t doin’ us no favors.”
“And where’s the CO? Where’s Coombs?” demanded DeLuca. “What the hell are they thinking, cutting us off like this? Now we’re just fuckin’ civilians again, is that it? After we been covering their asses all this time? I’m sorry, but we’ve earned the right to
at least
know what’s going on. At
least
. I’ll tell you what: I’m about ready to go and ask. They don’t want to come to us? Fuck ’em, we’ll go to them.”
DeLuca’s idea resonated with the frustrated men and soon snowballed into a plan: If four more hours went by with no word, a miniexpedition would be sent out to find Thule’s headquarters. It wasn’t expected to be far away—just a matter of following the packed-down road taken by the buses. At the very least we could walk back to the sub.
I say “we” because I was going along. When I heard what was being discussed, I piped up, “Excuse me, but I’d like to volunteer to go.” Before they could dismiss me out of hand, I said, “It’ll be harder for them to turn you away if you have suffering children with you. Believe me, I know—my mother used me as a weapon all the time. People get self-conscious about their behavior when kids are around. They’re afraid of looking cruel.”
“Lulu”—Albemarle sighed—“you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a military base on highest alert. They’re not gonna give a shit. Go back upstairs.”
I didn’t budge. “Well, what chance do you think you guys have, then?” I asked.
“Probably nil, but at least they’ll have to take notice of us. Even getting arrested would be better than nothing.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “They can’t arrest kids. They’re not
prepared
for kids. We’re your ace in the hole. Send in a children’s crusade, and all the bureaucracy falls apart.”
“What horseshit,” scoffed Albemarle.
“Oh really? Well, it got me in the gates of your factory, Albemarle. It got me past
you
. Why am I here among you now, when everyone knows women are a plague on mankind?” Suddenly I clasped my hands together and gave them my most yearning, guileless eyes. “Please, sir,” I begged weepily. “My daddy is in there. Please let me go see my daddy.”
The men looked at me like I was a monster. But they knew I was right.
 
 
Cold or not, it was good to be out doing something. There were nine of us: DeLuca, Albemarle, myself, and all the boys I knew best—Hector, Julian, Jake, Shawn, Cole, and Lemuel. This time they wanted to go with me. We followed the road across broad snowfields, with dark blue hills on one side and an endless sloping plain on the other. Somewhere down there it became the frozen sea, but it was impossible to tell where.
As we walked, the two men traded furtive glugs from a pint bottle—part of the swag from the cruise ship—and when we noticed, they told us it was “cold medicine.”
At one point Lemuel said, “Hey, is that the boat?”
He was right. Far away across the flats we could see specks of light. I felt a strange twinge of loss to see it, and the feeling surprised me—when had I become attached to that submarine? Or maybe it was only the sense of forward motion I was attached to. We all felt something, because the boys stopped heckling each other and became very somber. Shawn recited a strange little poem:
One bright day in the middle of the night, Two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. When the deaf policeman heard this noise, He came out and shot the two dead boys.
We came up on more empty barracks, dust-bowl homesteads rising from the plains, then gradually other shuttered structures, one labeled BX and another labeled USO. Except for all the oil tanks, radio towers, and radomes, it could have been a deserted frontier town. Wind whistled through the wires.
“What the hell’s going on here?” DeLuca said. “Is this the goddamned base or isn’t it?”
Albemarle replied, “They’re around here somewhere. Look!” He pointed out a thin curl of smoke rising from one of the buildings set back from the main street. There were two snowmobiles with little trailers parked by the entrance. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Those LCACs we saw didn’t come from there, Ed. We’re missing something.”
“One thing at a time.”
We wallowed through the snow to the glass doors and went inside. There was a kind of air lock to preserve warmth, and on the other side of that a pile of broken furniture heaped to the ceiling. It was warm in there, and the woodsmoke was so thick it was almost overpowering. Yellow firelight flickered through hundreds of tiny windows that covered the inner walls—they were mailboxes. There was muted conversation coming from behind them.
“It’s the APO,” whispered Albemarle. “The base post office.”
“No shit,” said DeLuca.
A sooty canvas flap covered the opening to the sorting area. Very cautiously, Albemarle lifted it, and we all peeked inside. “Jesus,” he whispered.
In the middle of the floor there was a makeshift stove fashioned from heating ducts, and a group of Inuit men camped around it. In the firelight, they looked like hunter-gatherers from some prehistoric age. They were toasting Pop-Tarts. When they saw us I felt a thrill of fear, not knowing what they might do.
It was not much. Most of them glanced our way and went back to their own business. Only one got to his feet and came over, looking us up and down with a jaded air. It wasn’t that we weren’t strange—it was that he had seen it all.
“Do you speak English?” asked Albemarle. “Any of you?”
The man said something using the word “English,” but he clearly didn’t speak it. His consonant-rich native language, every other syllable ending in
uk
or
ak
or
ik
, was impenetrable. He was trying to incorporate foreign words for our benefit, but none of them were English. Several times he repeated,
“Hvor kommer du fra?”
“Is that Danish?” Albemarle asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” replied DeLuca. “Now if it was Italian . . .”
Annunciating clearly, Albemarle asked the man, “Where is the air base? Air base—Thule?” He flew his hand through the air like a little plane, with sound effects.
“Smoke-um peace pipe,” Jake said in my ear. Lemuel slugged him.
One of the men at the fire said something that sounded like
kapluna
, and all the Inuit laughed. The one who was speaking to us led us outside and pointed in the direction we’d been heading.
“Valhalla,”
he said.
“Air base.”
“The base is that way?” said Albemarle. “How far?” He waggled his fingers like tiny legs. “Close enough to walk?”
The man made a chopping motion with his arm and repeated,
“Valhalla.”
It seemed to suggest that we were coming to the end.
“That’s good enough for me,” said Mr. DeLuca. “Let’s go. I gotta get my blood circulating.”
We thanked the man as best we could and went on our way. Shawn complained, “Shoulda taken those snowmobiles.”
“Oh that’d be good,” I replied. “Let’s see if we can get ourselves killed by the natives.”
“What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?” said Lemuel.
It wasn’t far. Looming up before us at the far edge of town was a wall of plowed snow at least twenty feet high. Its crest mimicked the horizon in the dark, or we would have noticed it much sooner. There was no telling where it ended on either side—it snaked across the land like the Great Wall of China—but straight ahead of us we could see a fenced gap where the road passed through.
“That’s one big-ass pile of snow,” remarked Cole.
We ventured up to the base of the thing, abashed by our relative puniness. There were no sentries at the gate, no signs, but also no way through. We could see cleared ground on the other side, but nothing beyond that because of an inner mound blocking the view. We could hear something, though: faint sounds of machinery . . . churning diesels and the high, silvery whine of turbines. It sounded like an airport, and a moment later looked like one as the sound reached a high pitch and we practically had to duck for a chunky gray cargo plane that climbed screaming into the sky right over us, fat wheels dangling like curled talons.
“That’s it,” said DeLuca, eagerly rubbing his hands. “That’s definitely it. Now we just need to let them know we’re here.”
Albemarle pulled out the megaphone he had used at the ship. Instead of using it himself, however, he handed it to me, saying, “Let ’er rip, Little Orphan Annie.”
“Oh,” I said. The scarf covering my face was a frozen caul, and I had to peel it off. “Okay . . . uh: GREETINGS, THULE AIR BASE. UM, I’M LOUISE PANGLOSS—FROM THE BIG SUBMARINE?—AND I’M HERE BECAUSE WE’VE BEEN LEFT ALONE SO LONG WE GOT SCARED YOU MIGHT HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT US. WE’RE COLD AND HUNGRY AND ARE WONDERING WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE CREW AND COMMANDER COOMBS . . . AND ALSO MY FATHER, FRED COWPER. HE WAS VERY SICK WHEN I SAW HIM LAST. WE HAVE WALKED A LONG WAY AND ARE VERY, VERY TIRED. PLEASE LET US IN. PLEASE HELP.”
Albemarle looked at me approvingly. “Well, if that don’t do it, nothing will.”
We waited a long time, but there was no sign of activity. They directed me to try again, and keep trying every few minutes, but halfway through my second plea, the megaphone died.
“Batteries maybe,” Albemarle said after examining the thing. “Or maybe the cold. We can try to warm it up a little and see.”
DeLuca erupted. “Fuck that. I’d like to get noticed before my toes turn black and fall off, if it’s okay with you. They obviously can’t hear that thing. What I propose to do is scale the wall and have a look-see, maybe signal them by flashlight. Shoulda done that in the first place.” Without waiting for approval, he climbed the roadside embankment and plunged into deep snow, making for the barrier.

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