Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 18

  “Meanwhile, we were tucked under dirty aprons and sacking, with bags of flour heaped around us—we were a sorry sight, mate. The warmth from our bodies caused moisture to condense on the walls, so that after a few days it began to look like a bloody icebox in there. We had to chip it off the peephole to look out. And that was nothing compared to what it was like outside.”

  “Bottles, tins, everything froze solid. The sink taps went dry. There was still plenty to eat and drink, but we had to use Sterno to melt it. Once the lights went out, all we had to see by was Sterno, too. I think it was our silly gobs pressed around that anemic flame, with a bottle of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild melting above it, that finally pushed us over the edge.”

  “We couldn’t take it no more.”

  “We came out, found a torch, and used the kitchen’s big gas cooker to make a proper joint of beef, hardly taking notice of how much bangin’ about it required. ”

  “We ate it before it was barely done.”

  “Blimey that was good.”

  “Best bit o’ beef I ever ate.”

  “And while it cooked, we thawed cases of porter on the stove, so that for once there was no shortage of drink. We lived in that kitchen for eight days, making up for lost time. When no meanies set upon us, the range of our forays increased, until eventually we deemed the ship safe.”

  “That’s how we’ve been living ever since. Robinson Crusoe times four.”

  “Until you lot came along.”

  “Which begs a question . . .” said Dick.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “We heard a few things on the wireless. We thought the women had all . . .”

  “Become meanies? No. I have a medical condition.” They looked at me askance until I added, “It has something to do with menstruation. Since I don’t, uh, menstruate, I didn’t catch it.”

  “Ah.” They seemed to accept this without further question.

  During the walk back, Jake came up next to me, and said, sotto voce, “Did that guy call you a muppet?”

  We arrived at the lower promenade a few minutes late, but no one was much upset. They were too busy. Most of the sub’s crew was there, including Commander Coombs, and a major operation appeared to be under way. Our new companions did attract a great deal of attention, however. I tried to politely introduce them, but Coombs and the other officers rudely brushed me aside, subjecting the overwhelmed quartet to an extensive “debriefing.”

  “Not cool,” said Hector, watching the interrogation.

  “I mean, this has been their home for months,” I said. “And we just barge in and take over? What are they supposed to think?”

  Julian said, “Hey, survival of the fittest.”

  I was disappointed in him. “That’s not right,” I said. “We have to come together, especially now.”

  “Dream on.”

  Approaching Mr. Robles, who looked miserably cold, I asked, “What’s going on? Why is everybody here?”

  “We’re salvaging whatever we can off this ship.”

  “Really?” My heart sank. Cowper’s medicine was one thing, but . . . “That’s a long way to carry stuff,” I said.

  “We’ll rig up something. Maybe open a loading bay. Don’t worry.” Trying to cheer himself up, he asked, “So how is it in there?”

  I thought about the cold, the bodies, the dark. He wasn’t asking about that. Looking at his beaming expression, I replied, “It’s a fucking extravaganza.”

  The next few days were full of hard physical work, but I can’t say it wasn’t interesting. Using the sub’s massive sailplanes as levers, a crane was improvised to hoist the forward escape trunk out of its bed, leaving the bathysphere-like pod dangling in midair above a large well in the deck. Objects up to seven feet wide could be taken aboard. While the men were handling this delicate operation, the boys and I were given long lists of provisions and sent off to scour the liner.

  It was decided—wisely, I think—to leave the ship in its deep freeze, with only a small backup generator running to provide light. Whether or not Xombies could revive after being frozen was unknown, and we wanted it to remain that way. Apart from that, there were concerns about heat or vibration destabilizing the ice mass on the ship’s superstructure.

  Mr. DeLuca had managed to activate the liner’s communications suite, though there was nothing coming over the airwaves that the sub’s array couldn’t already pick up. As civilians we weren’t allowed to listen in, but by all accounts it was a weird and troubling international chorus of despair, the last struggling pockets of humanity. If we did send a Mayday, it would only join that hopeless din, but anyone who wanted to could try it—they just had to wait for the submarine to leave the area first. It was a gamble Coombs knew no one would take.

  Using the Englishmen as guides, pack routes were established throughout the ship, and I organized parties to loot the various regions. It bothered me to be doing this without seeking the Blackpudlians’ consent, but I kept reminding myself that it was not really their ship.

  They looked a lot different once they had gotten cleaned up and trimmed their beards and hair. First, they were quite young, all under thirty. Second, though they were third- and fourth-generation citizens of the UK, all were ethnic Pakistanis—Reggie, for instance, was actually Rajeev Jinnah. Two of them were practicing Muslims. Much as he loved the Beatles, Commander Coombs was not pleased to have these aliens aboard.

  Large cargo sledges were cobbled together from lifeboats and heaped high with goods. The mountains of booty included food and drink, bedding, towels, toilet paper (probably the most eagerly anticipated item), furniture, appliances, plumbing, electronics, building supplies, sporting goods (including a brace of shotguns for skeet), cookware, silver, fine china, clothing, bulk fabric, laundry supplies (also much awaited), freezer components to expand our cold-storage capacity, and medical supplies—including Cowper’s Lanoxin. Diesel fuel, oil, and various other substances usable by the sub were also tapped, though our reactor, of course, required nothing.

  Then the task was dragging this treasure trove to the boat and finding room for it belowdecks. The Big Room became something of a warehouse again, but at least this time with the promise of greater comforts to come.

  The cold was our bitter taskmaster. With the sub wide open and tons of subzero groceries being stowed, heat was retained only in certain sections, and these were not the sections most frequented by civilians. A couple of barely adequate warming stations (heated tents) were set up for us, but my requests for more were answered with, The sooner you’re done, the sooner we can close the hatch. The officers hated leaving the boat open like this—it was too vulnerable to attack. They wouldn’t let us relax until we finished.

  The only ones who did not seem uncomfortable were the four Brits. They actually requested to stay in the more familiar environs of their ship until it was time to leave, and could be glimpsed from time to time following their own routines like backwoods trappers encroached upon by modernity.

  As it turned out, we left a bit sooner than expected. Four days after our first sight of the Northern Queen, and just as we were dragging our umpteenth sledgeload through a deep groove in the ice, the boys and I were shocked to hear the sub’s deafening horn. We could see the crew up top rushing to replace the escape trunk.

  “Holy shit!” said Julian. “We’re under attack!” We dropped the lines and ran.

  But it was not an attack, it was a leak. There was serious flooding on the liner—the boys stripping the carpentry shop had noticed it and flashed a signal to the officer on watch. The ship was sinking. It was not happening so quickly that there was any danger, but Coombs wanted to be sure the sub was in one piece and we were all on board in case of any ice upheaval.

  The Blackpudlians—Wally, Phil, Dick, and Reggie—were the last to come below, lugging their instruments.

  “Well, that’s it then.” Wally sighed, taking a final look at the ship.

  “That’s it, mate,” said Dick.
r />   “Feels like a lifetime we been on her.”

  “It does at that.”

  Turning to Mr. Robles, Phil asked, “How much longer d’ye reckon she’ll last?”

  “A little while,” Robles said. “Few hours, maybe. Strange how she popped all her gaskets at once.”

  “Bloody mysterious,” said Dick.

  Robles shook his head. “I guess it’s a miracle she’s lasted this long.”

  “Hear that, Reg?” said Phil. “A miracle.”

  “Auld girl did right by us.”

  “And we by her.”

  We left the awesome, ghostly sight, shutting ourselves once more in the confines of the submarine. There was something melancholy about it, about turning our backs on that lost ship, and I was reminded of the times when my mother and I had taken walks along a pasture, bringing slices of Wonder Bread to a huge old horse that lived there. I was four or five, and the animal was wonderful and terrifying. My mother was always the one who did the feeding, holding each slice on her wide-open palm in such a way that the horse could nibble it off with its giant lips. She made it look easy, and the day came when I begged her to let me feed the horse. Are you sure? she asked. I swore I was, and she showed me just how to do it, palm flat. But when the great animal came at me I panicked, clutching the bread in my outstretched fingers so that the horse accidentally bit them. I screamed. My mother tried to soothe me, saying, Honey, look—your fingers are fine, but I was childishly hurt and petulant, crying, I never want to see that horse again! Promise me, Mummy! Promise me we’ll never come here again! And as I said it, part of me prayed she wouldn’t hold me to it, that she’d see me through the tantrum and give me a chance to make up with the horse. But she never took us back there.

  “Sir?” It was sonarman Gus DeLuca. “I’m picking up sounds from the ship.”

  Coombs was impatient. “What kind of sounds?”

  “She’s foundering, sir.”

  “All stop.”

  “All stop, aye.”

  I sat back from my workstation, cocking an ear toward the sonar room. Everyone became very quiet. Coombs put on the earphones, tilting his head in concentration. Then he straightened up and gave the headset back. Crossing very deliberately to his station, he announced, “Gentlemen, I need a periscope sighting if you please.” He seemed to be gritting his teeth.

  We maneuvered around until we located a small polynya, just big enough to raise the periscope. Coombs broadcast the view over every monitor in the boat.

  There was the Northern Queen, blue in the twilight. She was several miles south, but at full magnification, she filled the screen.

  “Attention all hands,” Coombs said over the loudspeaker. “I advise you to look at your handiwork.”

  A subterranean popping sound reverberated through the hull. It had been going on for some time, and I just didn’t register it, dismissing it as pack-ice movement. Ice made a lot of peculiar noises, and this was similar: a groan like rope creaking under a great and increasing strain. Coombs put the hydrophones on the PA, turning the volume way up, and we could hear a harsh metallic grinding—a freight train screaming to a stop—and roaring water.

  His voice muffled by the racket, Coombs said, “The tub’s overflowing.”

  Perhaps the liner was listing at a more extreme angle than I remembered.

  “Omigod, look!” Shawn said as the sleek whale’s tail funnel atop the ship buckled and crashed down her side. An instant later we heard sheet-metal thunder. Icy clouds bloomed in the night, white as stage smoke. “Whoa,” said Shawn, delighted.

  The vast ship began to roll over.

  Again the noise was very much like an approaching train, triggering a primordial instinct to flee. Feeling it in our marrow, we watched the many-tiered superstructure tip over with gathering force until it struck the patch of sea ice so recently occupied by ourselves. The sledges we had built were no more, lost in that tumultuous junkyard crash that went on and on until the ship was completely upside down . . . and even then it continued: dual cacophanies of ruptured steel and surging rapids that provided an awful accompaniment to the visible death throes we could see on screen. The gargantuan hull moved as if alive, a sea monster sloshing in a pond, rolling this way and that, spouting geysers high into the air, until at last it reared up accusingly and plunged out of sight.

  I thought it was over. My hands were clinging, white-knuckled, to the console. But no—Coombs, like a demonic maestro, let us hear the whole ghastly works all the way to the bottom. It was like he was saying, This could be you.

  When it was finished he lowered the periscope.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  There was no course change as Julius had predicted, no Lancaster Sound, just that continual northward push. We passed latitude seventy-five, only fifteen degrees short of the North Pole, yet continued up toward the encroaching glaciers of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. It looked to me like a dead end, at least on the map. There was only one narrow cut threading those landmasses, a permanently frozen-over passage called the Kennedy Channel, and I dearly hoped we were not going to attempt that. The frustrated atmosphere in the sub told me I was not alone—everyone was confused. But our fears turned out to groundless: on February 25, Commander Coombs ordered a course correction that put us on a direct heading for the Greenland ice cap.

  “Thule!” Cowper announced triumphantly to me through the door when I was next able to sneak to the goat locker. He seemed to be feeling better. “Thule Air Base!”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Just where we’re heading, on the west coast of Greenland. It’s a dead giveaway.”

  “I didn’t see any air base on my atlas.”

  “They don’t advertise it. Look again—it’s probably just listed as Thule, or maybe even Qaanaaq.” He spelled it for me. “Seventy-six north by sixty-eight west. It hasn’t been a fully functioning air base since the eighties, but it has an airstrip and a permanent Air Force contingent of about a hundred and thirty: the Air Force Space Command. There’s also Air National Guard, some Canadians, Danes, even native Greenlanders—about a thousand people all told.”

  “A thousand people way up here?”

  “That’s nothing—it used to be a city of ten thousand, back during the height of the Cold War. Part of the Ballistic Missile Warning System. It’s practically a ghost town these days, but they still monitor space launches for NASA . . . or did. No telling what they’re up to now.”

  “Why would we be going there?”

  “Who knows? Ask Coombs.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  As it turned out, Coombs came to me.

  He approached me as I was “cranking”—doing chores—and told me that when I was through with the lunch dishes there was a small job of relagging he needed done. Relagging was one of the few menial jobs nobody complained about. Except for stainless steel, all exposed metal on the sub was covered with something, whether it was perforated foam paneling on bulkheads, hard rubbery tiles on tanks and stanchions, or cloth wrapping around air ducts. This last was called lagging. Being fairly flimsy, it frayed over time like an old leg cast, eventually becoming so dirty and ragged it had to be reapplied like plaster of Paris—an artsy-craftsy activity I found soothing. Relagging was a never-ending job, but for me it was break time . . . usually.

  This time the duct was in Coombs’s cabin, which would have been interesting except that he hung around while I prepared the materials. It made me very uncomfortable.

  “So I guess the boys must be enjoying the new provisions,” he said, sitting at his small desk. He had his own compact command console in there, and a fold-up sink, which was kind of cool, but the place was papered with fake wood paneling like so many of the cheap motel rooms my mother and I had stayed in. Up at eye level there was a safe that must have once held secret launch codes. It looked like someone had burned through the lock—it was the heat from this that had scorched the lagging above.

  Working, I said, “Oh my God—yes, s
ir. They’re calling it ‘Barbie’s Dream Sub.’”

  “They are, huh?” I could feel him staring at me.

  “Oh yeah. They’re turning the Big Room into their own Galleria, and the British guys have made a private little den—I think they’re feeling a little overwhelmed. But the boys are fine. I guess this is the first time they’ve had enough to eat in weeks.”

  “No doubt. I’m glad to hear it. Must make your job easier.”

  “Yeah, morale’s good . . . except for one thing, I guess.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just the uncertainty. Same old thing.”

  “Hm.” He had suddenly become disinterested, checking figures on his computer screen.

  I couldn’t stand it. Hesitantly I said, “Sir, I was wondering . . . about Thule . . .”

  He looked sharply at me. “What about it?”

  “Are we going there?”

  He turned back to his screen. “Of course we’re going to Thule. Where else would we be going?”

  Surprised by his frankness, I said, “Well, there was talk of Alaska.”

  “Alaska! Lord no. You see what happens when rumors get started?”

  “Why Thule?” I was scrambling for follow-up questions; he had caught me off guard.

  “The military installation, of course. Right now it’s the most secure facility in this hemisphere, except maybe for Alert up on Cape Sheridan. Thule has been designated a federal SPAM depot. With nobody watching the store, the government has been moving anything critical to national security up here.”

  “Sensitive Personnel and Materials.”

  “Yes. Of which we are still a vital part, in spite of the serious breaches that have occurred.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone about this earlier?” I was freshly outraged. “How could you let all those people get off, when you knew—”

  “Knew what? Yes, I let them—I did not make them. What did I have to offer them if they had stayed aboard? I haven’t been in contact with Thule—they’re restricting their emissions just as we are. For all we know, they may be no more amenable to refugees than St. John’s. It’s a harsh place to survive.”