Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  As if dismissed from school, the boys broke formation and surged toward the sub. I was swept along in the rush, taking comfort in being momentarily ignored, lost in the crowd. Albemarle was yelling, “Hey! Hey! Wait!” but it wasn’t until the shooting started that we all stopped short.

  There was a bright spike of automatic-weapons fire from the vicinity of the submarine. I couldn’t see much, caught in the sudden pileup, but I could hear an amplified voice bellow, “HALT. YOU ARE IN A RESTRICTED AREA. WE ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE, AND WILL NOT HESITATE TO DO SO UNLESS YOU TURN BACK NOW. LEAVE AT ONCE.” As the voice spoke, a harsh spotlight cleaved the mist, probing us like a boy stirring ants with a stick.

  People fell back behind the Sallie or jammed into the shadows between rusty cylinders, and as I took refuge in just such a trench amid dozens of grease-smelling boys, I lost touch with Cowper. A squall of curses and complaints arose from the gang, leading me to believe all hope was lost. Then they turned on me: “You and that stupid old man! Shoulda known he was fulla shit! What are we gonna do now? Let them Marines fry our asses? ” At once I was being manhandled, shoved from hand to hand out of the hiding place into the searchlight’s bullying glare.

  Then I was alone in the road, feeling very small beside the multiple tractor tires of the Sallie vehicle. One of my shoes had come off, and I could all but taste the cold, coarse macadam through my thin stocking. The spotlight was warm. In a reverie of hurt feelings, I shielded my eyes and began walking toward it. Fine, I thought madly. It felt good to let go. Tears streaming, I walked faster and faster, aware of nothing but my own feet and the baking noonday light. Swelling orchestral music seemed to accompany me, as if I was expected to break into some showstopping Broadway tune.

  Suddenly someone snatched me off my feet and dove with me out of the light. As we hit the dirt I had a strange, strong sensation of being tackled by Santa. Then my senses returned, and I realized it was only the padded costume that made me think of Santa—it was the boy in the chipmunk suit (as if that was somehow less bizarre). Over his furry shoulder I could see row after row of great wheels lumbering by, close enough to touch.

  “Sorry,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Jesus, you okay?”

  My cheek stung from being scuffed on the ground. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but as the Sallie passed entirely, I saw the flattened chipmunk head in the middle of the road. Sitting up, I said, “Did you just apologize for saving my life?”

  “Oh, sorry—I mean—” Before he could say more, rattling bursts of automatic gunfire broke out at the waterfront, and he threw himself on top of me, crying, “Geddown!”

  But they weren’t shooting at us. They were shooting at the advancing Sallie. Gleaming under the spotlight like a monstrous sowbug, the flat juggernaut maneuvered drunkenly toward the sub, where orange-vested figures could be seen running for cover. The gunfire was coming from a white Humvee parked at dockside, which was being used as a gun rest by two men in Darth Vader helmets. Flashing jets of ammo speared out from them in a twin stream, gouging nickel-bright pocks all over the crawler and leaving red afterimages hanging in the air.

  The boy’s body shuddered at each volley, his face screwed shut against the racket. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, more to himself than to me. He was heavy, a big guy who needed a shave, but even without his mask, he had a chipmunk quality that made me want to pet him and say, “There, there.” For all the noise, I was strangely calm and couldn’t bring myself to turn away from the action though I was afraid any moment a stray bullet might catch me in the eye.

  There was no stopping the thing. At the last possible second, the soldiers gave up shooting and retreated to the submarine’s gangway. Their Humvee disappeared from view as the hulking tractor closed with it and bowled it over the edge of the landing with a junkyard crash. Continuing on, the Sallie then struck the pivoting base of the gangway, buckling the narrow span like a Tinkertoy and causing the guards to fall out of sight. And still the machine kept on, jutting out farther and farther into space, making its own bridge to the submarine. I held my breath for the impending, catastrophic fall—Penis Patrol—but the Sallie stopped there, half its wheels frozen in midair. The sub’s searchlight stayed trained on this precarious object as if staring in disbelief.

  A voice issued from the deejay equipment left on the Sallie:

  “THIS IS COMMANDER FRED COWPER, REQUESTING PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD.”

  A man emerged from the Sallie’s unscathed rear cockpit and stood holding a wireless microphone. He wore a stunning white military uniform, with black and gold epaulets and a cluster of medals over his breast pocket. In spite of the fog, the distance, and the masterful new costume, I could see at once that it was indeed Cowper. No wonder he almost ran me down—he had been driving backward. Amazed, I pushed the boy off and stood up. Hundreds of others were coming out of hiding around us, equally bemused, murmuring in the dark.

  The submarine’s loudspeaker replied, “FRED, THIS IS COMMANDER COOMBS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, BUT IN MY BOOK IT’S TREASON. YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH CRITICAL NAVAL OPERATIONS.”

  Cowper said, “HARVEY, THIS WAS NOT MY ORIGINAL PLAN, BUT I’M TRYING TO MAKE THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION. HERE’S THE DEAL: LET ME AND ALL THESE PEOPLE ON BOARD, THEN PUT US ASHORE SOMEPLACE HALFWAY SECURE. IN RETURN, WE’LL EARN OUR KEEP—I KNOW YOU’RE SHORT OF HANDS. THESE KIDS WILL DO ANYTHING YOU TELL ’EM, PLUS WE’VE GOT A CREW OF OLD FARTS WITH DOLPHINS WHO ARE JUST ITCHING TO GET BACK BEHIND THE WHEEL. HEY, I’LL RE-UP. WHERE ARE YOU GONNA FIND ANOTHER GUY WITH MY EXPERIENCE?”

  “I’M NOT BIG ON EXTORTION, YOU SENILE SON OF A BITCH,” said Coombs.

  “WHAT EXTORTION? IT’S A HUMANITARIAN GESTURE. NOT TO MENTION KEEPING FAITH WITH THESE PEOPLE . . . AND ME, FOR THAT MATTER. SANDOVAL PROMISED US—TAKE IT UP WITH HIM IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT. THE BASTID IS THERE, ISN’T HE?”

  “AS A MATTER OF FACT HE’S OVERDUE. IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME TO HEAR THAT YOU AND YOUR MOB HAVE KILLED HIM.”

  “I’M TRYIN’ TO SAVE LIVES, YOU ARROGANT PRICK, BUT IF YOU DON’T START LETTING US BOARD RIGHT NOW, I’M GONNA BACK THE SALLIE OVER YA AND SCUTTLE THE WHOLE SHEBANG. WE GOT NOTHING TO LOSE.” Cowper ducked back into the low glass cab and started the engine. To us he announced, “ALL ABOARD! NO RUNNING! BOARD THE BOAT IN AN ORDERLY WAY—THE CREW WILL DIRECT YOU BELOW . . . OR ELSE.”

  We were already moving. After the first tentative steps, boys stampeded past, too rushed to give me a hard time. I could see that the collapsed gangway didn’t slow anyone down—apparently it was just as easy to hop down from the concrete ledge to the guano-caked timbers alongside the sub and from there to the stern, where a plank had been laid across. I just let myself be dragged along. Everyone else was on fire with the instinct to survive, but I felt listless and totally out of it.

  Fighting the malaise, I tried to blend in with the rest as I waited for Cowper, staying close to Albemarle and the other men who were shepherding the stragglers. Below, I could see the two fallen Marine guards being fished from the water by the submarine’s crew—the guards both looked shaken but alive. Other sailors were helping boys across that finger of dark water. They didn’t look particularly resentful of us, which I found reassuring.

  It was a surprise when some of them suddenly pointed weapons up at the landing and began to shoot. We were sitting ducks.

  The gunfire caused shrieks of terror, and everyone dropped to the ground. No, I noticed, some of us didn’t duck, didn’t stop, but simply charged ahead with manic fury. They didn’t look right. These were the ones the sailors were shooting at. There were blue people among us, and many more coming down the hill.

  Exes. Xombies.

  Not everyone was as slow on the uptake as I—Albemarle and the other men had already created a defensive line at the rear of the crowd and were brandishing large hammers like those used for chiseling. I would learn that these were standard equipment at the pla
nt. “Don’t panic,” they shouted. “Just keep moving!” When a skinless creature in burnt security clothes rushed up through the fog, they all raised hammers like Thor and clouted it down. The problem was, it wouldn’t stay down, but rebounded off the pavement like a dented gingerbread man.

  “It’s Reynolds!” someone screamed.

  “Just like you’re marking studs, boys,” shouted Albemarle, pelting the thing again.

  More monsters came tearing in, nimble as stage-painted acrobats. Keeping them off required a kind of assembly-line operation, a constant gauntlet of flying hammers, but our hundred-to-one advantage was quickly eroding. In places the line started breaking up into fractal eddies of hand-to-hand fighting. To the boys up front, who were taking their sweet time boarding the sub, these must have seemed more like fringe disturbances at a rock concert than a desperate losing battle, but for us at the rear it was doom breathing down our necks: medieval combat and middle-school fire drill rolled into one.

  Then Cowper was at my side, splendid in his dress whites. “Don’t get trampled!” he shouted over my head, “We’ll make it!”

  “When did you manage to change your clothes?” I asked.

  “I always come prepared.”

  “We can’t all fit in that submarine.”

  “Sure we can,” he said. “You see those big cylinders by the road? Those used to hold ballistic missiles, but they were taken out to make room for cruise missiles and SEAL teams. That refit’s been postponed indefinitely, which leaves a big empty space inside the missile compartment—you’ll see. Don’t worry.”

  I wished he looked more confident himself.

  As the last of us were helped down from the platform by furiously yelling submariners—“Get out of the way! Down, down! Move your asses!”—the amount of shooting redoubled, and I was shocked to see how many Xombies were massed on the landing above. We were becoming outnumbered. Spent shells tinkled down the sides of the sub like slot-machine tokens, and icy water splashed me as bullet-riddled demons stage-dived off the edge to fall into the depths beneath the pier. The water was soon packed with thrashing bodies.

  Passed bucket-brigade fashion along a line of jumpy crew-men, I finally made it up onto the sub’s runwaylike deck, its entire length crowded with milling refugees. Above us soared the mammoth black cross that was the vessel’s conning tower, a steel Golgotha beckoning the pilgrims with salvation.

  Waiting my turn to go below, I prayed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They weren’t letting us below.

  “The hatches must be kept clear,” shouted someone at the head of the crowd. “Ship’s personnel must have free access or we cannot cast off! Make room!”

  A squall of protest and pleading met this development, but we were packed too tightly to riot, and in any case, it was only those boys near enough actually to see the hatches who really objected—the rest of us knew we weren’t getting below anytime soon. The sub was hundreds of feet long and the Xombies all but upon us.

  We watched helplessly as they spilled over the landing, scrambling for the best crossing and leaping like grotesque pirates for the stern. Albemarle’s thinning rear guard did its best to hold them off, but the footing down there was terrible: a slippery ramp to the sea. Men fell by the dozens, locked in death grips with twistedly grinning monstrosities as they slid out of sight. Every loss set off a new a chorus of grief. Cowper was there, and I dreaded the moment I would see him grappling for his life or being dragged into the water.

  At some point the shooting stopped, and I heard people say, “They’re out of ammo.” No sooner had this idea been relayed through the crowd than there was a commotion up front.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, as boys around me frantically craned their necks to see.

  An obese, Buddha-faced kid nearby replied, “The crew have all gone below.”

  “Maybe they’re getting more bullets,” I said.

  “They’ve closed the hatches.”

  A sickening weight seemed to press the air out of us.

  “Well, that’s it,” someone said calmly. “We’re dead.”

  “We’ve been played,” another boy agreed.

  “They let us on the boat, wait until we good and trapped, then lock us out. All they gotta do now is wait—frickin’ Exoids’ll do the rest.”

  “Shit, man.”

  I didn’t know what to believe and wasn’t sure they did either. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said shrilly. “We don’t know what they’re doing down there.”

  “Shut up. They got food, they got water, they got air, they got power. They’re sittin’ pretty.”

  Not everyone was taking it as stoically as these few boys. Elsewhere on the deck, the babble of panic could be heard: a hundred variations on the theme of, “They can’t just leave us out here!”

  Turning on me, a wild-eyed boy with a hairnet said, “This is all your fault.”

  “God, shut up,” I groaned.

  “If you hadn’t come along, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “You are so stupid.”

  They all closed in around me like hostile savages, grimy hands reaching for my arms, my hair, my throat.

  Completely exhausted, I could think of nothing to say or do. Time stopped, and everything froze into a weird tableau, jittering like film snarled in an old projector. Wait. Vibration—the deck was vibrating. Whitewater boiled up around the rudder. From one end of the submarine to the other, a desperate, bedraggled cheer broke out.

  We were moving.

  It was a sickening, slow race for time. The huge submarine took forever to get going, while Exes were fast overwhelming the lowest part of the stern. It was a giant blender down there. After the propeller started, there had been a general retreat up to the safety cable, but the enemy (mainly male ones, I should say) had no such qualms. They continued leaping to the slippery slope in droves, heedless of being sucked under, and were picking off our rear guard.

  Yet the sense that we were moving, the renewed hope of escape, did seem to give strength to our defenders. They fought back with incredible zeal, sacrificing themselves rather than permit the enemy to breach their lines.

  I watched as a Xombie grabbed someone around the neck, clamped on like a python, and was all but impossible to get off. Many times I saw men throw themselves and their clinging attackers over the side rather than risk joining the enemy ranks. For that was what was at stake, I belatedly realized, not death, but Ex membership. They did not want to kill but to multiply. They lusted for us. For them, strangling was a procre ative act—there was even a horrific sort of deep kiss involved that suggested a perverse, rough tenderness toward the struggling victim. It was horrible to see.

  The sub started to budge, glacially scraping along the landing. We were making the slowest getaway of all time. As we passed the overhanging hulk of the Sallie, I had a good long look at its mangled rows of tires, the blown-out glass cockpit, and the heavily pitted SALLIE emblem. The thought of Cowper backing into that firestorm made me shake my head in disbelief—had my mother ever seen that side of him? She never told me anything that explained her fierce attraction . . . or excused it. I could see him down there, taking his turn with a hammer, and felt something unlike any emotion I’d ever experienced: a raw amalgam of yearning and awe. Love. Was he really my father? For the first time, I wanted him to be. I desperately needed him to be.

  My reverie was interrupted by shouts of “Look!” and fingers pointing ashore. At first I couldn’t see anything in the gloom, but then a peculiar white shape came trundling across the grass, making a faint electric whine: a golf cart! It sped down toward us at top speed, faster than I thought golf carts could go, and skidded to a stop beside the Sallie.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Albemarle from below, “it’s Jim Sandoval!”

  Exes on the landing raced for the well-dressed driver, who climbed, scrabbling for footholds, to the Sallie’s freight bed. They vaulted up after him, and he ran to its projecting fr
ont end, bald head gleaming in the spotlight. Cornered, he didn’t hesitate but used his momentum to leap across the water into the mass of us—it had to be a good twenty feet. People were knocked over like tenpins. Before we could learn if anyone had been hurt by this desperate act, we were distracted by a thunderous sound from the shore: thousands of trampling footsteps. We fell silent, listening.

  They came. The foggy void boiled over with them like a biblical plague—or perhaps extras in a biblical epic—rushing forward in mute frenzy. “Xombierama,” said a much-pierced boy in awe.

  Fear sounded all over the deck as this inhuman host, this nightmarathon, swept across the field and down the landing in an avalanche of flailing blue arms and legs. People steeled themselves for the bitter end, but appalling as the enemy seemed, its numbers served only to clog the already-precarious stern crossing, and a great many were simply crowded off into the propeller wash. Also initially alarming were the spastic multitudes swarming the Sallie, their rushing bodies spilling off as if from a sluice . . . but they were too late: Sandoval’s leap had been lucky—the submarine had moved just out of jumping range, and the naked throngs pummeled harmlessly down the ship’s side like a lumpy waterfall, piling up at the waterline to claw against the passing hull.

  It really began to seem that the handful of Exes already on board were all we had to fear (which was certainly bad enough). But then the Sallie began to tip over on us.

  “Whoa,” people moaned, seeing the rig teeter from the weight of massing bodies. If they hadn’t kept jumping off like lemmings it would have gone already. My heart constricted, and I tried to will the ship to move faster: Come on come on come on . . .

  So close. As the ship’s big rudder fin finally came even with the Sallie, the great crawler tilted past the point of no return. Cracking sounds like gunshots could be heard as its plank bed flexed, and the rear wheels levitated upward. Keens of mass dread erupted from all of us as the front end of the thing dipped into our surge, but still didn’t topple—the banks of tires at its axis gripped the ledge until the last possible instant, until the vehicle was so improbably steep that the audio equipment on its back plummeted through the Ex-humans hanging below.