Xombies: Apocalypse Blues (46 page)

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Authors: Walter Greatshell

BOOK: Xombies: Apocalypse Blues
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For instance, how did I get into the submarine? It took me a while to realize that’s where I was, then I couldn’t make sense of it. I was in the wardroom, laid out inside the long glass case that usually held an inscribed silver platter with the boat’s King-Neptune-themed crest. They had dressed me in a modest nightgown and had put a satin pillow under my blue head. A tube from my neck carried blood the color of Concord grape juice to a spigot outside the case, where Dr. Langhorne appeared regularly to collect a bag, while the stern portrait of Admiral Rickover seemed to stare down disapprovingly from above.
At times I was alone. Other times a procession of men and boys, everyone I knew and some I didn’t, filed by the case as if in mourning. I couldn’t hear their murmured words, but it was fascinating nonetheless to witness my own funeral. So many sad faces—Coombs, Robles, Monte, Noteiro, Albemarle, Julian, Jake, Lemuel, Cole—some more surprising than others in that they were Xombies. Even Mr. Cowper was there. I felt him, somewhere unseen. The dead mingling with the living in perfect civility, if a little aloof, a little more alone in their blue skins.
How could this be? How was it that I, too, felt nearly at ease among all these mortals? How was it I didn’t burst from the case and begin strangling, willy-nilly? No, I had changed; I knew something I hadn’t before, knew it in every cell of my being: You can’t take it with you. The Xombie compulsion to salvage some rudimentary taste of life was debunked, futile, leaving me to rattle around eternity all by myself. The Xombie walks alone. That was the thought that filled my amorphous consciousness and defined my existence. That was my boogey man, always there, always peeking at me through the cracks. Eternity. Empty eternity. No hope of salvation. That was the difference: I knew this was all there was or would ever be.
The other Xombies also felt this hopelessness, I knew, and I sensed that they blamed me for it, that I was the source from which their existential fear flowed. Yet at the same time they loved me. They came forward with this strange mixture of resentment and reverence, each kneeling before Langhorne twice a day to receive a shot of human anguish deep in the lungs.
Finally, witnessing this communion day after day, I began to realize I was the mother of all these Xombies. That is, I was being milked to provide them with the means of civility. Without my blood, they would revert overnight to their guiltless, marauding state. They would lose themselves but gain oblivion . . . and peace. This was the conflict, the eternal war that raged inside of us. How long could our fragile undead souls weather such a storm?
The miracle that Dr. Langhorne and Sandoval had peddled to the Moguls out on the grass was far from a cure. It was closer to an addiction, with me the heroin. An addiction that might be driving us mad. At best it was a poor stopgap until we could get back to New England and hunt down Uri Miska.
For that was and had always been Langhorne’s plan. And now, at her bidding, they sought the true cure, the one with the potential to restore humankind. The enzyme circulating in our blood was only a preliminary phase of treatment—a short-term means of suppressing symptoms. It was imperfect, but Miska knew more. Miska would know everything.
Come on, sourpuss! It’s an adventure!
From time to time I would forget it was Dr. Langhorne talking to me (or talking to herself, as is more likely) and fall under the strange, vivid delusion that it was my mother by my side. For a brief instant the rift between present and past, living and dead, would be healed.
“You ever hear that joke, ‘What’s long and hard and full of seamen—A submarine’? It’s no coincidence this thing is a giant phallus, Lulu. It’s all about who’s got the biggest dick. It’s true. But you know what’s funny? You know what I noticed? Look at this submarine straight on, and its outline is an inverted Venus symbol. That means it’s our job to shake things up, turn this can upside down. What do you think?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer, and I wasn’t expecting to give one, but I felt my lips forming the words “Penis Patrol.”
“That’s okay, kiddo. No need to talk. You rest. You just rest.” In her voice I heard the same lonely mantle of déjà vu, of communication with spirits. It was all that held back the green vastness of the sea.
Then the moment would pass, and I would grasp after it, clutching at a wisp too fleeting to catch. I would feel the cold.
Here’s a fairy tale:
Once upon a time I was alive. The end.
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XOMBIES: APOCALYPTICON
AVAILABLE IN MARCH 2010 FROM ACE BOOKS!
“
A
im for that dock there,” Sal said, consulting his printed-out map.
“What do you think we’re doing?” Kyle Hancock said. “It’s the current; it’s wicked.”
“Well, paddle harder—it’s going to take us underneath the hurricane barrier.”
“No shit.”
“Paddle! Paddle!”
The paddlers paddled, putting their shoulders into it, trying to find a rhythm. Sal watched the great, gray barrier loom above them, its open gates like massive steel jaws and the river beyond a yawning gullet, eager to swallow them whole. It was so shallow in there at low tide that Xombies could wade right up and grab them at will. “All together!” he shouted. “Stroke, stroke, stroke . . .”
Then they were clearing the worst of the current, moving into calmer eddies near shore. “Okay, we’re good, we’re gonna make it,” Sal said, heart still racing. “Don’t stop, we’re almost there.”
“Shut
up
,” Kyle said. “God damn.”
“Yeah, man,” agreed Russell. “We don’t need you to tell us what to do. We know you’re Officer Tran’s little bitch, but just try to chill, a’ight? We on it.”
Russell and Kyle Hancock were brothers, the only surviving pair of siblings on the ship, and their mutual strength made them de facto rulers of the Big Room. Russell was one year older than Kyle, with a corrected cleft lip and a resulting lisp that made him sound like Mike Tyson—kids had learned not to rag him about it. His brother Kyle was lighter built, less touchy, with the easy confidence of a born player—as they liked to say, Russell was the muscle, and Kyle was the style. The brothers were not overt troublemakers, they simply used their power to do as little as possible, making needier kids like the Freddies—Freddy Fisk and Freddy Gonzales, or just Freddy F and G, Tweedledum and Tweedledee—do their work for them. Why shouldn’t they? There were no extra rations in doing it yourself—the privilege of not starving was reserved for “essential personnel” only. As far as Kyle and Russell were concerned, Sal DeLuca and all the other overworked ship’s apprentices were suckers.
“Dude, don’t even start,” Sal said. “I’m just trying to help us stay alive, okay?”
“We don’t need your help—
dude
.”
“Yeah, give it a rest. You ain’t a ship’s officer.”
“No, but I’m responsible for
your
ass.”
“Leave my ass be. And you best watch your own, bike boy.”
They all snickered.
Sal shook his head, grinning in spite of himself. This had been going on for months, part of the friction between the ship’s apprentices and the “nubs”—nonuseful bodies. Nubs were often the guys who were having the worst time of it, the true orphans, whose adult sponsors—their dads—had been killed and who could barely hold it together enough to function, their shock and despair manifesting as attitude. He knew Russell’s gibes were a response to the helplessness of the situation, a survival mechanism. A thin wedge against panic, which Sal could totally relate to, having lost his own father at Thule. Hey, to laugh was better than to cry . . . or to scream. Once you started screaming, you might never stop.
The screams came at night, in their sleep.
They were below the high dock, fending off its barnacled pilings with their paddles. “Okay, everybody be quiet,” Sal said. If there were Xombies up there, they could just jump right into the boats. He tied up to a rusted ladder, and whispered, “I’m just gonna take a look, okay? Nobody move unless I give the all clear.”
“What is this Squad Leader bullshit?” Kyle hissed, getting up. “This ain’t no video game, dumb-ass.”
“Fine,
you
go first.” Sal made room for him to pass.
Kyle hesitated, sudden doubt flashing across his face, so that Russell said, “Sit your ass down. Let a real man go up.”
“
Fuck
you.”
Russell belligerently mounted the ladder. They watched in nervous silence as he paused at the top, peeking over the edge at first with trembling caution, then visibly relaxing and raising his whole head above. “Come on, chicken shits,” he called down. “Ain’t nothing’ to—”
A blue hand seized him by the throat.
Fighting the thing, Russell lost his grip and plummeted backward onto the raft. The disembodied hand was still on him—not just a hand but an entire arm, ripped off at the shoulder socket, its round bone nakedly visible, hideously flailing and jerking at the elbow joint as it strangled him. The other boys quailed back, screaming, but Sal lunged for the thing, trying to pry its fingers loose. It was a young girl’s hand, its dainty nails painted pink, but it was cold and rubbery, impossibly strong.
“Help me!”
he shouted.
Kyle jumped forward to pitch in, then two other boys, his poker buddies, Ray and Rick. As they grappled with it, the naked stump punched Sal in the cheek so hard it cracked a filling. Tasting blood, he braced his knee on Russell’s chest, and with a supreme effort, they managed to wrench the thing loose. It immediately went wild, flexing and bucking in their hands, trying to get at them. “All together now,” Sal said. “One, two . . .” On three, they hurled it far out into the water.
“Holy craaap,”
Russell wheezed, retching over the side.
“Let’s get
outta
here!” Kyle shouted.
“Wait!” Sal said. “We can’t just go back.”
“Why not? I’m not waitin’ for the rest of that chick to show up!”
“We have to expect shit like this to happen. We handled it! We can’t just give up now.”
“We sure as hell can!” Others chimed in: “
Hell
yeah, we’re gone! This shit is suicide.”
“Hold up,” said a ragged voice. It was Russell. He shakily sat up, and croaked, “Don’t nobody do a goddamned thing. I ain’t—
hem
—goin’ back to that submarine empty-handed. Just so they can lock us in jail again? How many days we already been sitting there dreaming we had some place else to go, some kinda free choice? Screw that shit. I’m
hungry
.” He got up and climbed the ladder again, wobbly but without hesitation. In seconds, he was over the top and out of sight.
For a long moment there was silence, then Russell’s face reappeared. “Come on!” he called down impatiently. “Let’s
do
this. You wanna eat or don’t you?”
Sal started to follow, but Kyle and the other boys shoved past, nearly knocking him into the water. Whether empowered by Russell’s confidence, the prospect of food, or the thought of that arm lurking in the water below; suddenly they couldn’t get up fast enough. “One at a
time
,” Sal said. But they weren’t listening to him at all—the old ladder was almost coming to pieces from their combined weight.
Stupid jerks
. “Everybody stay together,” he called after them as he tested the rungs.
Sal emerged to find the boys standing at the edge of a weedy lot, reveling in the glorious, slightly queasy sensation of dry land. It looked like no-man’s-land—the vacant area beneath a highway bridge. On one side was the flood-control berm—a high rock dam separating them from the city—and on the other a fenced tugboat landing and some condemned-looking buildings. Huge concrete pylons rose above them to Interstate 195. It was all reassuringly deserted.
As Sal joined them, Russell asked him, “Where to now?”
“Well, we gotta cross under the highway and follow the road here through the floodgate. There should be businesses and things on the other side.”
“Let’s do it.”
Following Russell, who was following Sal, the boys trooped quickly and quietly down the road, picking up any likely-looking weapons they happened to find—mostly rocks and chunks of brick.
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.
Sal wished he could find a good stick. He looked up at the highway bridge, imagining that the little girl’s arm must have fallen from there, picturing the awful scene: the girl in the backseat of her parents’ car, the Xombie lunging in and grabbing her arm, dad hitting the gas—nasty.
They found the tremendous open doors of the flood barrier and cautiously followed the road through. On the far side was a waterfront area of chic clubs and condos, and across the river an immense Gothic cathedral that was the electric company, webbed to the rest of the city by flowing skeins of wire. It was all dead, all out of commission, yet almost perfectly preserved, as if loyally awaiting the future return of humankind. Everything had gone down so fast, there was no time for looting and destruction.
Dodging from one shadow to the next, the boys did what they could to keep a low profile. “I don’t get it,” Kyle said, eyes wide with tension. “Why aren’t there any Xombies?”

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