Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Read online

  “But at least you could have told them . . .”

  “Miss Pangloss, I am under no obligation to share any information whatsoever with you or any other civilian, especially in regard to a highly classified operation. Thule’s status is probably the most closely guarded secret in the world at this time. If a bunch of civilians with that knowledge were to land on a foreign shore, do you have any idea how fatally that could impact the mission? One well-placed bomb—boom! No more SPAM. And SPAM is the key to rebuilding America.”

  “So . . . what are we supposed to do if Thule doesn’t want us?”

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it. Don’t worry—you’re one of us now.”

  I was not in the control room at the time, but Julian would later describe to me how we surfaced through twenty feet of solid ice. The black water off the western Greenland shore offered very little clearance, being only about a hundred feet deep from bottom to frozen ceiling. Since the boat was some seventy feet high, this did not allow for much “wiggle room,” but Coombs got as close as he dared—around two miles offshore. Once he found a good spot, he backed a thousand yards away from it and fired two Mark 48 ADCAP torpedoes. They were wire-guided, and Mr. Noteiro (who had been some kind of torpedo specialist in ages past) wove them over shoals and around hanging ice masses to the precise spot Coombs had chosen. Julian said everyone in the control room held their breath as the “fish” unspooled.

  Then Vic detonated them.

  This, no one on board failed to appreciate. The torpedoes seemed to hatch two howling leviathans that descended on the sub and swallowed it whole, causing the rock-steady floor to bounce like a trampoline. For a minute the stealthy ship was a rattletrap jalopy, all squeaks and bangs and rattling cutlery, but in short order things settled down, replaced by more reassuring sounds of cheering and applause from the control center. Apparently we were all right.

  We made our way back to the site of the explosion, penetrating a cloud of silt to find a wide, shallow crater in the seabed. Above was all loose floating rubble, broken in a spiderweb pattern outward from the blast. Even shattered, the volume of ice was so massive that Coombs did not try surfacing the entire boat but only raised the fairwater like a gopher peering from its hole.

  This was the true arctic winter. This was darkness at noon. I ascended to my lookout on the bridge and for a moment could only stare at the lunar desolation: black and white, yin and yang. By comparison, the snowy landscape of St. John’s had been a ski resort, with its buildings and lights and forested hills. The sea there was still a liquid presence, just as it had been around the cruise ship, where the liner itself had been a constant reminder that we were in fact at sea. But in this place . . .

  There was nothing. Nothing moving. Nothing to render scale. The deep ice and deeper snow gave no intimation of water beneath, any more than sand dunes in the Sahara give hints of a hidden aquifer. And this did look like fine sand, a vast rippled plain of it. More oppressive still was the fact that I was not towering above the way I usually did, but was only about eight feet high—that was how much of the sail protruded from the ice. I could have easily jumped from the bridge down onto that buckled white heap. The great blocks pushed up by the dive planes actually rose higher than my head. Ironically, all this ice was the product of global warming—the vast Greenland ice cap sloughing off into the ocean.

  Mr. Robles came up and rigged the spotlight, flashing a Morse-code signal out across the nothingness. Snowflakes caught in the beam were as brilliant as welding sparks.

  “Can’t we just call them on the phone?” I asked. I had learned to leave no flesh exposed, but the cold still penetrated. The thermometer read minus thirty-four.

  “And reveal our position?”

  “Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”

  “Reveal our position to someone other than that guy, I mean.”

  Slow on the uptake, I hesitated before following his line of sight. “Oh,” I said. “Wow!” Far away in the murk there were answering flashes. A live human being! Thrilled, I babbled into the mike, “Contact! We’ve established contact! What’s he saying?”

  Robles said, “He’s just acknowledging us. Wait. Repeat after me: ‘Welcome USS No-Name . . . official escort en route . . . ETA five minutes.’”

  I duly reported every word. Then Robles checked my safety line and boosted me over into a little rumble seat behind the main cockpit to make room for the exiting shore party. A folding ladder was passed up the hatch; Robles planted it on the ice, then swung himself over the edge and climbed down, testing the upheaved surface for stability. It was utterly dry and solid.

  As he did this, men began emerging from the hatch. The first was Phil Tran from the navigation center, then there were three seldom-seen officers from the propulsion spaces aft—one of them was the bland Reactor Control Operator, Mr. Fisk, who the boys hated because he was always torturing them with tutorials on nuclear physics and thermodynamics and all kinds of specialized engineering and chemistry. They just wanted to know which buttons to push. The fifth man out I wouldn’t have recognized if he hadn’t spoken, but he was gruffly complaining about his stiff leg and had to be helped off the sail.

  “Mr. Sandoval?” I called, amazed. “You’re Mr. Sandoval, right?”

  He was facing me, starting down the ladder. “Oh. You,” he said.

  “Is Mr. Cowper out, too?” I asked, heart beating wildly.

  He hesitated, then brusquely continued down to the ice. I didn’t know what to think.

  The last man out was Commander Coombs. When I saw him I threw caution to the wind, saying, “Captain! I just saw Mr. Sandoval! Does that mean you’ve let them out? Please, if I could just see him—”

  Coombs had a look of grim urgency. Shaking his head no, he turned off my microphone, and said, “Lulu, shut up and listen. This is very important—probably the most important thing you’ll ever hear. Don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. I know you can be entrusted with a secret, and this is a doozy.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen here, or who is in charge, but I am not going to just turn this submarine over to the Air Force. If they give me sealed orders from CINCLANT, or I can talk to some Navy brass, fine. That’s how it should be. But in the event that there’s no Navy presence and no direct line of communication to some pertinent senior authority, I have no intention of relinquishing control of this vessel. She’s too important to waste as a backup generator to light Air Force barracks. In that case I deliver the SPAM and head to Norfolk. But the base commander may think differently. That’s where you come in.

  “I’ve watched you for weeks now, and you’re a very smart girl. I haven’t given you any guidance, yet you have taken a fictitious job title and the most cursory instructions, and created an efficient program for managing the other kids on this boat. You have never come to me with an excuse, or failed to execute an assignment. You’ve never even asked me for clarification, yet your solutions exceed my expectations at every turn. You know when to keep your mouth shut, and when to dole out a few crumbs of information to keep your peers’ trust. You’re not mindlessly loyal, but you also don’t bear a grudge—you home in on what works, because you like it that way.

  “When we put Fred Cowper under lock and key, he told me about you. I thought he just wanted me to look out for you, and half the reason I gave you that Youth Liaison title was so I could keep tabs. But you’ve been very dependable . . . much more so than some people I’ve counted on.”

  Disturbed by his praise, which I thought made me sound like a rat, I said, “What did Mr. Cowper say about me?”

  “He called you a tough cookie. He doesn’t think you should suffer for his crimes, and I agree.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “And he has committed serious crimes, crimes against the future of this nation. That’s not just right-wing ranting, Lulu—for all we know, the information and technology that he wantonly ordered destroyed could be the difference between America risin
g to prominence again or being swept into the dustbin of history.”

  Trying to defend Cowper, I said, “But, sir . . . I don’t quite understand what ‘America’ means now. I mean, what’s left of it?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. But that’s why protecting what we still have is so desperately important.”

  “But that includes us, doesn’t it? Don’t people have to be preserved, ultimately?”

  “Yes, but not individually. Not at the cost of national security.”

  “Security for whom, then?”

  “‘For ourselves and our posterity,’ to quote a document that for all I know was made into a paper airplane and tossed overboard by one of the beneficiaries of Cowper’s humanitarian zeal! Now that’s enough; we don’t have time for this. All you need to know is that a few officers and I are going to go ashore. In case somebody other than me should try to take command”—he leaned across and pressed a fat silver key into my oven mitt—“you know what to do.”

  I watched him climb down and join the others. They were a strange, anachronistic sight in their bulky arctic gear—all they needed was sled dogs and a flag. I put the key in my pocket, shuddering involuntarily. You know what to do. The men began laying down a row of chemical glow wands in the snow.

  I heard a far-off whine and saw headlights following the contours of an unseen hill. “Vehicles approaching,” I said with chattering teeth. Then I remembered to switch the mike back on and repeated more clearly, “Vehicles approaching.”

  As the lights neared, wreathed in swirling powder, the sound of turbines became so loud it turned the ice into a vibrating drum. These were not ordinary vehicles. They were gigantic saucers gliding on fat rubber bumpers, their topsides bristling with antennae and weapons.

  “Hovercraft,” I said in disbelief. “Three of them, coming in fast. Big ones.”

  Coombs and the others were waving flashlights as if directing taxiing aircraft. The imposing vehicles stopped well short, pulling up side by side in a howling blizzard of their own making, then powered down the rotors. Their blinding headlights turned ridges of upthrust ice translucent blue, brighter than the glow wands, and when they lowered their boarding ramps, it was like an alien visitation.

  “There are ten or twelve men coming out,” I said. “They are approaching our group.”

  Barely audible under the idling engines, I could hear the lead stranger shout, “Colonel Brad Lowenthal, Commander Twelfth Space Warning Squadron! Welcome to Thule!”

  “Thank you, Commander!” replied Coombs. They shook hands. “I’m Admiral Harvey Coombs, and these are my senior officers! Are there any Navy personnel with you?” It was the first time I had heard Coombs call himself Admiral.

  “Everything is being arranged through SAC! First, let’s get your people out of this wet sub and into a dry martini!”

  “The rest of my crew will be staying aboard for now!”

  “That’s not necessary, Admiral! We have a team ready to take charge of your cargo and watch the ship! You’re under our security umbrella now!”

  “Thank you, Commander, but I need confirmation from NavSea before I can—”

  They were moving toward the hovercraft, and I couldn’t hear any more. It looked like an affable enough disagreement. Soon they were boarding the lead craft, which thundered to life and sideslipped away, trailed by the others. As the big vehicles turned in formation, I was sandblasted by their rotor wash. Seconds later, they were practically out of sight, and the heavy curtain of snow and space drew shut again.

  Half-deaf, I said, “They’re gone!”

  Mr. Albemarle was the OOW—the officer of the watch—and he erected a clear canopy over the cockpit to permit a normal six-hour duty shift. After an hour or so he was called below to attend to some minor crisis, and I volunteered to stand watch. He didn’t like me, but he trusted me enough to leave me alone up there, keeping in radio contact from the control room. From time to time he or someone else would sneak up underneath, trying to catch me napping. They didn’t do this to be funny—falling asleep on watch was considered a heinous crime. That was why standing watch topside wasn’t considered a very desirable posting, because it was not just the boredom and the cold you had to contend with, it was also Navy guys threatening you with the whippings, hangings, and keelhaulings traditionally meted out to errant sentries.

  They didn’t scare me; I wasn’t there to sleep. I was grateful for the chance to be alone. Never having been a tremendously sociable person, the daily strain of being in close quarters with so many people was taking a toll on me. Just after St. John’s, the boat had seemed incredibly roomy, but its limitations were finally starting to sink in again, and I was glad the end was in sight . . . if in fact it was. I was shaken by what Coombs had said. I didn’t want that responsibility, or even that key. I had become Cowper’s jailer. Every second I had that key, it was killing me.

  As the midmorning darkness wore on, I started thinking about my mother. The memories were intensely vivid, a trancelike dislocation that was common to everyone on the sub, weighed upon as we all were by the unfinished business of our lives. It was hardly surprising that our subconscious should come on so strong—what is a submarine but a giant sensory-deprivation tank?

  I remembered singing in a church at Christmastime. It was the only time I ever went to church, except for a brief enrollment at Sunday school. This was a Southern California Lutheran church, airy as a basketball court, with honeyed sunlight beaming down on the lustrous blond wood and congregation. And above it all, an understated, minimalist cross.

  My mother was beside me, gripping my hand. We were all holding hands and singing carols, but from my mother’s glazed look and sweaty palm I suspected an agenda.

  She had been working part-time in the church office as a secretary, and I knew she liked the pastor. I’d asked her if he was married. Oh, it’s not like that, honey, she said. We’re just friends. He’s a nice man, that’s all. She had even arranged for me to have a private talk with him in his study, under the pretense that the two of them had discussed my bookish ways, and he was “fascinated.” But meeting the man was only awkward; I knew at once that Pastor Lund and I had both been duped—each of us kept waiting for the other to evince any sign of interest. In desperation I scanned his bookshelf for anything familiar. Seizing upon Alive—The Story of the Andes Survivors, I asked, “What do you think of the proposition that survival cannibalism is a form of Communion?” He became very uncomfortable and recommended I read C. S. Lewis.

  Now Mum had begun singing in German, singing “O Tan nenbaum” while everyone else was singing “Oh Christmas Tree,” and doing it in loud tones of righteous indignation. People craned their necks to see what was going on.

  “Mom,” I hissed. “What are you doing?”

  She sang right over me. No one had any idea how to deal with it, paralyzed by the hard-to-define offense. When the song ended, a man in our pew leaned over and pleasantly asked her, “Was that German?”

  She remained rigid as a wooden Indian.

  It wasn’t over. When “Silent Night” began, she belted out the German version of that, too (“Stille Nacht”), while Pastor Lund dueled with her from the pulpit, directing his organist and choir to pour it on. Elderly ladies got up to leave, covering their ears.

  Once again I had been brought along as a prop. I was boiling. When it was finally over (I believe the service was cut short), and Mum and I were outside in that opulent residential neighborhood heading back to our roach motel, I turned on her furiously. “This is it,” I stormed. “This is the last time I trust you.”

  She put on her innocent face, twitching nervously. “What? Why?” she asked.

  “Don’t give me that! How could you do that?”

  “Because I love him! Can I help it if I love the man?”

  “But why do you have to drag me into it?”

  “Because you’re my child!”

  “Oh please. So it’s my duty to let you humiliate me like this
? Uh-uh, this is the last time. No more.”

  She faltered a little in her haughtiness. “Lulu, have a heart. What do you mean, ‘no more’?”

  “I mean that’s the last time I ever let myself be taken advantage of. I should have just got up and left, but I sat there and let you use me. Well, no more, no more.”

  I was yanked back to the present by the appearance of a string of fairy lights in the distance. Their blue twinkle revealed higher elevations in the dark, creating the illusion of a floating island.

  “Lights—I see lights,” I said. “They just came on to the east, running in a straight line. It looks like a runway or something—” Just as I said this, I could hear the whistle of approaching jet engines. “—omigod, a plane! A big jet is flying in from the south! It’s flying right over us! It looks like it’s coming in for a landing!”

  “It is an air base, after all,” said Albemarle dryly in my ear. “We’ve been tracking it. Kranuski is gonna try to make a sighting.”

  Behind me, the periscope rose up from its shaft.

  “C-5A Galaxy,” Albemarle said, as I watched the plane set down. “That’s a big mother. It’s for cargo—nothing to worry about.”

  The lights went out again. The magic island vanished.

  When my shift was over, I was supposed to go directly to the galley and help make lunch. I did go down there, intending to do just that, but when I arrived on the third deck and didn’t see Mr. Monte, I loitered around for a while, feeling tense and fidgety, then found myself walking straight through the enlisted mess and the wardroom to the deserted CPO quarters. It was not a conscious decision so much as a deliberately unconscious one. With the blood pounding in my head, I strode at that orange warning sign and stabbed the key into the lock. It went in smoothly. I turned the knob and opened the door.