Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Read online

  “He intended for us to use this as a base to spread out from, gradually expanding our area of control until we could seal off and quarantine the rest without hampering critical operations.”

  “See, that just doesn’t work for me. The Xombies won’t cooperate unless we have some kind of clear advantage . . . which we might, if we just think about it. Look, this is a submarine—a highly adjustable environment. We can play with it. How can we make it uncomfortable for them?”

  “CO,” I said.

  “The problem is, whatever hurts them, hurts us,” Kranuski said.

  “Which brings us back to oxygen,” Cowper replied.

  “I’d rather go down fighting than blow myself to kingdom come.”

  “CO,” I repeated, a bit louder. Boys in the room frowned at me. Chipmunk Boy gave me a wide-eyed inquiring look and shook his head: Don’t.

  Cowper said, “Quiet, Lulu. What about controlled flooding? Or changing the air pressure? The temperature? How can we make climate control work for us?”

  “Or a big dose of radiation?” another man offered gloomily.

  I said, “Excuse me, but what about CO? Carbon monoxide?” My skin crawled with embarrassment, but I had to speak up. “That won’t burn as much, and it mimics oxygen in the bloodstream.”

  All the boys rolled their eyes at my impertinence. “God, shut up,” said one, and another said, “It’s poisonous, stupid.”

  Forging ahead as I had so many times in school, I tried, “But there are emergency air masks, aren’t there? Like on airplanes?” Almost apologetically, I added, “Isn’t that what these nozzles are for?”

  There was a sudden hitch in the men’s discussion. Annoyance and confusion played across all their stubbly faces. Cowper said, “Goddammit, Lulu . . .” then trailed off in consternation.

  Albemarle scratched his big head. “Kid’s right,” he said.

  Without bothering to thank me, Cowper, Kranuski, and the others applied themselves to the problem of how to fill the boat with carbon monoxide. It turned out to be very simple, much simpler than I expected when I made the suggestion. All I had known was that submarines—even modern nuclear submarines—are equipped with backup diesel engines. But my trivia-packed brain did not know that these were specifically Fairbanks-Morse engines, or that they suck air from the living spaces inside the sub (drawing it in through vents at the top of the sail) and expel exhaust gases out a retractable tailpipe at the stern, creating a powerful suction that can replace the boat’s entire volume of air in minutes.

  Or, by blocking the exhaust, can just as quickly flood the boat with suffocating carbon monoxide.

  After a rather heated phone conversation with the engineers in back, Cowper made an announcement over the PA system:

  “Attention all hands. We are about to fumigate everything forward amidships with carbon monoxide. The CO burner is to remain off. Unless you want to die, close off all vents from the forward bulkhead and don EAB apparatus. Do not remove it until I give the all clear.”

  After this message was repeated a few times, orders were given to disconnect the exhaust coupling. The fresh-air intake was left shut, and the open hatch through which we had entered was ordered closed. I felt bad about this because of how it must have looked to the people stuck above, but consoled myself with the knowledge that we were doing all this for them. And if we didn’t succeed, they would live longer than any of us. We then put on the air masks that had been handed out. They looked like World War I gas masks, and could be connected to oxygen-giving metal nipples anywhere in the room. The men went around checking and rechecking them to make sure they were fastened correctly, giving the one on the unconscious Coombs extra attention.

  While inspecting mine, Cowper winked at me through our foggy faceplates, and said, “Lookin’ good, sweethaht.” His gnome face was all scrunched up from the tight seal. I wanted to ask him, Are you really my father? Would you be? But I couldn’t find my voice, and he moved on.

  When all was in readiness, he sat down on his dais, saying, “A-gangers, give Clyde a kick.”

  “Engage diesel, aye,” Kranuski barked.

  “Engaging diesel,” Robles said.

  A deep rumble could be felt through the deck. The tension in the room was fierce—it was like sitting in a gas chamber. Hollow-voiced, Kranuski announced, “Diesel engaged . . . sir.”

  “Very good, Mr. Kranuski.”

  “You want gas levels, Commander?” asked Robles.

  “Nah, no smog alerts. All we need to know is if it’ll kill you. Everybody keep breathing nice and steady. Don’t anybody tense up and fool themselves that they can’t breathe. There’s good clean dedicated air coming through those pipes. Relax.”

  A piercing alarm started to go off. Everyone jumped, thrashing around for the source.

  “Nothing to worry about!” Cowper said loudly. “Nothing to worry about! Carbon-monoxide detector—that’s what we want.”

  It was an annoying noise. Kranuski and Robles roamed the various control stations, making adjustments and conferring with quiet intensity. Long minutes passed, and the air became dense and warm, causing the light to waver.

  “Mr. Cowper?” I said, indicating the remains of the Xombie. Its squashed fibers were relaxing, turning from purplish blue to bright, meaty red. He nodded, trading looks with the other men. Some of the boys made muffled sounds of disgust.

  Robles said, “Carbon monoxide above lethal concentrations, sir.”

  “Thanks, Dan. We’ll let it go a little while longer.”

  The smooth thrumming of the engine began to stutter.

  “She’s starting to skip,” said Kranuski. “Not enough air.”

  “I know,” said Cowper intently.

  “Going to run her until she stalls?”

  The old man held up a finger, as if counting down in his head. Then he said, “No. Hopefully that’s enough. Kill it, but leave the carbon-dioxide scrubbers running.”

  “Diesel off.”

  “Diesel off, aye.”

  “And mute that damn alarm.”

  Once it was still, Cowper addressed the whole ship. His amplified voice sounded thin and distant under the mask, like an old-time radio program. “Gentlemen, you are now surrounded by toxic gas. The gas is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, so you may be tempted to adjust your mask or scratch your nose. I advise you to refrain from this, because doing so will cause you to fall asleep and never wake up. In case some of you are wondering, this is not an attempt to smother the enemy—as far as we know, they are not vulnerable to suffocation. Quite the opposite, in fact: It’s our guess that Agent X can’t invade the bloodstream if there’s too much oxygen present. Respiration is a buffer against the disease, which is why we don’t all catch it like the flu.

  “In light of that, you may be curious what we’re doing. If what we think we know about Agent X is true, then flushing the boat with carbon monoxide should suppress the disease even better than oxygen does. Hopefully it’ll give us a chance to retake the boat.” He hung up the mike. “Lulu, come up here a second. Watch your air line.”

  I stepped up on the periscope platform with him, and he beamed at me benevolently. I felt like a squire about to be knighted.

  “Since this was your idea,” he said, “I’d like to give you the honor of locating a Xombie.”

  “. . . Excuse me?”

  “We need you to flush out one of them for us. See if your plan worked. Charley, put a tank on her, will ya?” A man came forward bearing a stubby yellow oxygen tank.

  “Alone?” I asked. I was thinking, This is a joke.

  “We can’t all go. What if it didn’t work? We need somebody to test the waters.”

  I looked around at their tired faces, some mocking, some troubled. Cowper’s was the most indifferent, and for that I carelessly shouldered the heavy tank, saying, “Okay. Where to?” At that moment I would have jumped off a cliff to spite him.

  “You see that door there?” To the others he said, “The res
t of you tend goal and make damn sure nothing gets in.”

  There was a brief interruption of my airflow as Albemarle switched the line. Kranuski handed me a walkie-talkie. “Lulu, take this radio and leave it on talk, like this, so we know how you’re doing. You’ve got twenty minutes of air, but start heading back after fifteen. You won’t even need that much time. Just go forward to the radio shack and come back. It’s a straight shot; you can’t get lost.”

  It was strange to have him call me Lulu, like he thought he had to be chummy with the condemned. “Louise,” I muttered.

  He either didn’t hear or ignored me. “You ready?” he asked.

  “Just hurry up.”

  Cowper signaled them to turn the wheel, which looked like a bank vault. Robles kicked the door outward, gun at the ready. I pictured a wall of water on the other side, water that became a white horizontal column, blasting these people down and drowning them so that they drifted about the flooded green room like wide-eyed statues with flowing hair. But nothing came through.

  Robles patted me on the shoulder. Without irony, he said, “Hey, good luck.” Other voices also chimed, “Good luck,” and someone said, “Rock on.”

  I stepped in over the raised sill and helped them close it behind me.

  Standing with my back to the door, breathing bottled oxygen, my first inane thought was, Call Control Data Institute—Today! I was in a tight passage through ceiling-high racks of electronics, enveloped in their soft refrigerator hum. The floor was dirt-concealing flecked beige tile. Those aisles would have been just the place to conceal lurking Xombies, too, but none appeared.

  For a second, I was leery about giving myself away by speaking into the radio, but as I made myself start walking it came naturally. Talking made me feel less alone.

  “Nothing so far,” I said, more loudly than necessary. “I’m passing rows of computer equipment . . . checking all the doors. Nope. Now I’m passing under an escape trunk—it’s closed. I’m looking into a room full of TV monitors and consoles—hello? Nobody there. Now a smaller room . . . the ceiling’s getting low . . .”

  I was at the end. This last room had the cramped, utilitarian look of a place behind the scenes—the front of the sub, I supposed. It was festooned with thick skeins of insulated cable that clung to the bulkhead like fossilized muscle and sinew. Fax machines and other communications gear were stuffed wherever they could fit amid gray-painted guts of ducts, pipes, wiring. Teletype paper had been dumped on the floor, but otherwise there was nothing there.

  Feeling let off the hook, I dawdled to peer in every cranny. I still had fifteen minutes. What interested me was that I could see part of the actual hull there—that curved ceiling was all that kept the sea out. I noticed that the inner walls and floor did not actually contact the hull, but seemed to float within it, creating a crawl space on all sides, as if the living and work areas of the sub were a clunky, angular structure shoehorned inside the ringed shell—a ship in a bottle. It dawned on me that I had seen all this in pieces back at that great hangar. It had been a submarine factory. Duh, as the boys would say.

  Crawl space. A chunky yellow flashlight hung from a hook in the corner. I took it and performed a few contortions with the tank on my back, struggling to peer into the narrow crevice along the hull.

  Faces looked back at me.

  I flinched, nearly dropping the flashlight. I must have cried out, too, because Cowper would later tell me that he and the other fellows in the control room thought I had “bought it.” But the faces didn’t move. They had stopped like clocks.

  Years ago, when Mum and I were still living in our old house in Oxnard, California, I had wormed my way through a mysterious trapdoor above the closet into a tiny neglected attic. Crouched on the ledge, I flicked on my flashlight and found myself surrounded by basketball-sized hornets’ nests . . . papery-dry and long dead. This was much the same.

  Mesmerized by something gleaming in the dark, I sighed and banged the radio against my mask, forgetting it was there. “It worked,” I said. Then I turned off the flashlight so I could no longer see the boy’s gold tooth.

  CHAPTER TEN

  No matter how squeamish you are, getting rid of bodies breaks down to a job of heavy lifting. The novelty of cool, rigid flesh wears off, and you realize how awkward they are to move, how darn heavy. After a dozen or so, they’re no more fearsome than the baggy old futons my mother always made us drag from apartment to apartment. “Come on, lazypants,” she would cry, as I buckled under my half. “Nearly home!”

  Finding every Ex was a grotesque Easter egg hunt, made more difficult by our breathing equipment in the tight spaces. Since operating the boat took precedence, corpse-gathering was relegated to the boys and me, under the supervision of a whiskery old character named Vic Noteiro. He knew every possible place to check, and was perfectly happy to let us do the checking while he made himself comfortable and told anecdotes about his days painting submarines. “Guys kept sayin’ I should retire,” he said. “Retire from what? Sittin’ on my ass all night listening to the radio? Makin’ twenty bucks an hour? Whenever ya feel like it, ya slap on a coat of Mare Island? Pure titty.”

  Then the question was how to dump them overboard. No one knew if exposure to air would cause them to revive, but we didn’t want to find out, even if it meant we had to “suck rubber” awhile longer. In the meantime the bodies were weighted, bagged, and trussed like mummies. That was awful because they had lost their blue pallor and looked vibrantly alive—much more rosy-cheeked than any of us. “It’s the carbon monoxide is all,” Vic told us dismissively. “They’re stone dead.”

  A skeptical-faced boy asked, “How can the carbon monoxide affect them if they don’t breathe?”

  “Who said they don’t breathe? They breathe. They’re like plants: They absorb what they need through every pore. No actual respiration, but they do breathe—just a lot slower, like them yogis in India. For all we know, they’re in Nirvana now.”

  There were fourteen Xombies altogether—ten from the crew (actually twelve crew members had been lost, but two conveniently fell into the sea), the two Marine guards, and two from our crowd. When we had them all lined up in the big mess hall, Kranuski and Cowper came down to look. Vic had identified each one with a Magic Marker, and a man named Kraus ticked them off one by one: “Boggs, supply officer; Lester, weps; Gunderson, the nav; Montoya, communications; Lee, sonar chief; Baker, cob; Henderson, quartermaster; Selby, machinist’s mate; O’Grady, torpedoman—” He faltered, clearing his throat. “Shit.”

  “I know,” said Cowper. “When you’ve worked with a man, it’s hard.”

  Kranuski snapped, “It’s not that. What about the tubes?”

  Cowper nodded carefully, as if treading on shaky ground. “I was thinking of that. Will your people accept it?”

  “It’s burial at sea. Better than dumping them down the TDU.”

  “Okay. I’ll make an announcement—”

  “No announcement. Sorry, sir, but you’re the one who told me not to get hung up on ceremony. Let’s just get this over with.”

  Cowper agreed, and they went back upstairs.

  Not sure what we were doing, I helped carry all the corpses down another level to the torpedo room. This was frustrating because we had just dragged three bodies up from there, plus our oxygen tanks, and it was hard not to brain yourself with those masks on. Shiny forest green torpedoes with blue caps were stacked in cradles on either side of the aisle. Straight ahead were four elaborate chrome hatches with dangling tags that read, TUBE EMPTY. Noteiro yanked off the tags and opened the round doors.

  “Stuff ’em in there,” he said, raspy-voiced. “Move it!”

  We managed to pack three bodies in each tube. There was a huge piston that helped ram them in. Since I thought torpedoes ran on their own power, I wasn’t sure how these were going to be launched, and watched closely as Vic shut the tubes and went to a wall console with a padded stool in front of it. Headsets of different colors hung
from a bar under the lights; he put on a pair and adjusted the controls. There was a hollow sound of water rushing through pipes.

  “Flooding tubes one . . . two . . . three . . . and four,” he said. “Tubes one through four ready in all respects.” A moment later there was an explosive whoosh, unnervingly powerful, then three more hair-raising blasts in close succession. This was something even the boys had never seen. A bit shaken, we loaded the last bodies into one tube for a final firing. Then it was done. I couldn’t say what I was thinking: Like flushing goldfish.

  The next thing that happened nearly made us forget our exhaustion and all the night’s ugliness: the diesel engine rumbled to life again, this time sucking fresh, cold air into the sub. Boys were so happy they hugged each other. They even forgot themselves and hugged me. Unfortunately, though most of the poison was gone in minutes, we were told to leave our masks on until every compartment could be ventilated and inspected for residual pockets of gas. This put a damper on things.

  Since the boys and I were not trusted with this duty, we were left to wait in the crew’s mess, our breathing gear plugged into jacks on the floor. We sat nodding off in the blue-upholstered booths like winos at an all-night diner.

  “I’ve had it,” said a maniacal freckle-faced guy with Creamsicle orange hair and white eyelashes. “I’m not wearing this mask another second!” Then he went right back to sleep.

  Ignoring him, Chipmunk Boy asked me, “What’s your name?”

  “Lulu. Louise. Louise Pangloss.”

  “I’m Hector Albemarle.” He offered me his furry mitt and I shook it, feeling silly. Pointing at the others, he said, “That’s Tyrell Banks, Jake . . .”

  “Bartholomew,” moaned the sleeping guy.

  “—Jake Bartholomew, Julian Noteiro, uh, Shawn Dickey, Sal DeLuca, Lemuel Sanchez, Ray Despineau, and Cole Hayes.”

  Most of the boys acknowledged me in some way as they were introduced, nodding or at least glancing over. They were quite a mixed bag. You get to know someone pretty fast when sharing a chore as miserable as body-snatching, and I had formed distinct impressions of all their personalities: