Apocalypticon x-2 Read online

  He dreamed of sitting in fluorescent green twilight on dunes of granulated steel, surrounded by an immense steel cylinder that rose fifty feet above him, its top open to a corrugated metal sky. Sal wasn't alone. There were other boys there: his buddy Ray Despineau, Hector, Rick, Tyrell, Sasha, Shane, Jake, Julian, and more. He knew them the way one gets to know people one has been cooped up with in difficult circumstances for almost a month. He knew them too well.

  Working at Finishing was not like working at a lot of the other departments in the plant. It was dirty. You had to wear Tyvek coveralls, goggles, and a respirator. The coveralls started out white and turned black. You had to climb the rickety scaffolding again and again, lugging all your equipment, moving up and down inside that hull segment like a cockroach in a garbage can. You took your breaks sitting on cold piles of lead-colored, lead-heavy blasting grit. Worst of all, it was a complete waste of time: This huge vertical cylinder on which the boys tested every pneumatic tool known to man-drilling, gouging, grinding, blasting-was intended to house the command-and-control module-the CCSM deck-of a Hawaii-class nuclear submarine. But it never would; that sub would never be finished. No matter how much work they put into it, the thing would just sit here in its blasting cell, slowly rusting away, monument to the imperatives of a powerful, lost civilization.

  "This blows," said Kyle, a strikingly handsome sixteen-year-old with intricately cornrowed hair. His mother had braided it, and he refused to touch it-as though, if he waited long enough, she might return. "What good is this? We ain't never gonna need to know how these things are made. We're never gonna build one; nobody ain't never gonna build one ever again. This is just busywork to keep us… busy."

  From high up on the scaffold, a voice boomed down, "Busywork?" It was Mr. Albemarle. Big fat Ed Albemarle, supervisor of the Finishing Department. "Did I hear someone say they want to trade places with somebody on the outside?" he bellowed. "Because I guarantee you there are plenty of folks out there who would jump at the chance."

  "No, sir. I just don't understand what good it'll do us to know the difference between pastel green and mare island green, or how to mix epoxy for sound damping or relagging or nonsweat-"

  "That's antisweat." Mr. Albemarle was making his way down to them. "It keeps condensation from forming inside the hull. Keeps this from happening." He indicated the rust on the cylinder. "And if you intend this thing to last at sea for twenty years, that's pretty important."

  "But this one's never going to sea."

  "No, this one isn't. Get up, all of you."

  They stood, brushing grit off their papery suits. Ed Albemarle reached the sandy floor and planted himself in front of them, eyes shaded by his gray hard hat. "I guess there's something that hasn't been made clear to you, so let me try to hammer it in: Everything matters. The knowledge that's in your heads might be the only knowledge there is, and all our lives might depend on it. Welding, grinding, fore and aft, above main axis, below main axis, centerline, frame lines, buttock lines"-at buttock, the boys smirked for the hundredth time-"everything. So that you don't cause a fire and suffocate with your thumb up your butt because you were splicing a cable and cut a boot off one of the penetrations and didn't know how to seal it up again!"

  Derrick said, "Come on-you guys and the Navy crew will do all that. Like they'd even let us touch it, give me a break."

  "Everybody thinks that when they're sitting on the bench-you guys are reserve players. Any one of you could be the difference between life and death for all of us. Believe me, if and when that boat sails, you are going to carry your weight. For all you know, you boys may be the damn crew."

  They all laughed. Tyrell said, "Cabin boy is more like it."

  Albemarle frowned. "It's time to grow up, ladies. This is not Bring Your Children to Work Day. You are not here to play. Your fathers, your uncles, your grandfathers, maybe your older brothers are all working round the clock to earn you a safe cruise out of here. There's no other way out, trust me. Maybe you don't know what that means, maybe you think you don't care, but whether you like it or not, you are going to earn that ticket. Now come on."

  Albemarle walked between the massive timbers supporting the hull section and opened the exit door, waiting at the eyewash fountain as the boys filed out.

  "Are we finished for today?" groaned Freddy Fisk, a short, stocky boy with stamina issues. Freddie was the son of Arlo Fisk, one of the nuclear experts.

  "We're never finished at Finishing."

  "But Mr. Albemarle, we clear our cots at five thirty and go to class till noon, then we get a half hour for lunch and work for you guys till six. All we get is a half hour for dinner, then we have to study until lights out. We're missing dinner!"

  Ed Albemarle rubbed his temple as if in pain. "Didn't you hear anything I just-? Fine, if you want to go, go!"

  A little cheer went up, and the boys started to leave.

  Ed raised his voice above the bustling escape: "I just thought you might want to head down to the pier with me and take a quick look at tomorrow's assignment. Your last assignment, really. All the classes are assembling down there right now, but if you'd rather go to the cafeteria…"

  The boys stopped dead.

  Sal DeLuca asked, "Are you serious, Mr. A?"

  Ed nodded. "We don't have forever. The noose is tightening. It's time you boys got some familiarity with your new home before she puts to sea. So you want to check it out?"

  Twenty-six eager heads bobbed like wake-churned buoys.

  "Then let's go."

  Sal woke up. At first he thought he was still dreaming: He was high up in a cavernous space, a steel chamber echoing with the avid chatter of boys. We're home, he heard them saying. We're back!

  Home! Sal thought woozily. Then he came to himself and realized where he was: the Big Room-the huge midsection of the submarine, which had formerly housed twenty-four Trident missile tubes and now served as a makeshift dormitory for close to a hundred refugees, most of them teenage boys like himself. Oh, he thought, Providence.

  Like everyone else in the Big Room, Sal DeLuca had made a nest for himself, a pallet of cardboard and foam rubber to cushion the steel-grated deck. Turning stiffly on his side, he peered down off his balcony to the more populated lower levels, half-expecting to see all the faces from his dream down there. He longed to hear the comforting boom of Mr. Albemarle's voice, or Tyrell's wisecracks.

  But Ed Albemarle was dead. No, worse than dead. He was a mindless Xombie and Dr. Langhorne's test subject, as so many of the Xombies were. Either that, or they were simply gone, like Tyrell. The lucky ones were gone.

  Sal's father was gone.

  You can't go home again, he thought.

  "Sir, you should come up and take a look at this."

  "What is it?"

  "Fire. We're seeing fires up here. From downtown."

  The boat had spent the whole day traversing Narragansett Bay, painstakingly threading the narrow shipping channel to the exact spot where it had started out months before, then penetrating even deeper inland. Past the bridges and the islands. Past the barren submarine compound that jutted out into the bay like a hunk of Texas panhandle. Right up to the gates of Providence itself.

  The coast looked clear. There were no signs of shipping, no boatloads of refugees, no obstructions of any kind. The industrial shorefront was deserted and peaceful, the buildings quiet as tombstones. On the low hills beyond, the first leaves of spring could be seen. The boat anchored in sight of downtown, near where the tugs docked, just outside the highway bridge and the great steel hurricane barrier.

  It was no place for an Ohio-class submarine. At almost seventeen thousand tons, she was too big, too broad, and too deep for this harbor. A total breach of regulations, Kranuski reminded the captain. The slightest glitch and they could run aground, get stuck in the mud. Die like a mastodon in a tar pit. Without regular dredging, the channel was already changing, shifting, filling in. A vessel their size plowing through could collapse it compl
etely in their wake-they might be digging their own grave. Kranuski's exact words.

  Commander Coombs didn't like being bottled up either, in shallow water where the boat couldn't submerge, surrounded on all sides by hostile land. It made him very claustrophobic. Sitting ducks, he thought. But there was no choice. They couldn't risk a bad connection; the ship-to-shore data link had to work. And the target had to be within walking distance. Xombies didn't drive, though Langhorne would probably have them doing that next.

  He climbed the ladder to the bridge cockpit and accepted a pair of binoculars from Dan Robles.

  "Can you still see it?"

  "Yes, sir, it's still there all right." Lieutenant Robles sighed, nursing untold grievances, the lids of his eyes heavy with the weight of injustice. "Dead ahead."

  Coombs wasn't bothered by his quartermaster's attitude, it was nothing personal. He knew that Dan Robles was not affronted by him but by the world at large. Dan had once been a funny guy with a droll Latin sensibility, who could make you laugh with the slightest flex of his pencil-thin mustache, but the Xombie apocalypse had deeply offended him, and now he simply had no more patience for such nonsense. Not that Robles would ever complain or fail to follow the strictest definition of duty-that was a matter of honor. Coombs couldn't imagine what kind of crisis it would take to crack the man's haughty composure (he was the only officer willing to act as liaison to Dr. Langhorne, undeterred by her ghouls), but thus far nothing had, and that was saying something. That was saying a lot. Dan was one of the loyal ones, the steady few, and the captain trusted him completely.

  The sun had set. The water was glassy-still, reflecting the acrylic pinks and blues of dusk, and the dark city skyline. The three huge smokestacks of Narragansett Electric loomed to port. At once Coombs could see what Robles was talking about-even without the binoculars.

  Through the raised gates of the city's hurricane barrier and under the highway overpasses, less than a mile upriver, there were fires burning. Deliberate bonfires, a neat line of them. Coombs felt a wave of childish nausea at the sight, adrenaline curdling his blood: Who's there? The fires appeared to rise right out of the canal, reflecting orange in its black surface. What could it mean? A chain of floating crucibles in the heart of Providence? He could smell acrid smoke.

  "The natives are restless," Robles said.

  "Jesus. You think Xombies could do that?"

  "I doubt it. Set fires like that? Langhorne's tame ones, maybe. Not the ones out in the wild. Why would they?"

  "Then who? Who else could survive out there?"

  "Somebody who's eager for attention, obviously."

  "From us, you think?"

  "Or about us. Broadcasting our position. I'm thinking of the Moguls."

  "They can't dig up a radio?"

  Robles squinted thoughtfully. "Then maybe an invitation: Coast is clear, no Xombies. Welcome ashore."

  "Funny. How about an SOS?"

  "Possibly an SOS, yes."

  "Or a trap."

  "Could be a trap, yes."

  Coombs sighed in frustration. This was getting them nowhere. The question was whether to stay or leave, and if they left, where to? He knew what Kranuski would say: Norfolk. But Norfolk was dead, everywhere was dead… except here. Coombs watched the distant flames for a moment, blood thumping like voodoo drums in his head.

  "One way to find out," he said.

  Coombs was surprised at his own recklessness-as an inspector for the Naval Sea Systems Command, or NavSea, his job had been to eliminate risk, to take new submarines on shakedown cruises and rid them of bugs. He administered the SubSafe program, and was ruthless in implementing its strict requirements through all aspects of submarine construction and testing. Not everyone appreciated the job that he and his team did; he often sensed resentment from civilian techs who didn't like their work scrutinized and critiqued, and especially didn't like having to do it over if it didn't pass muster the first time. Or the second. Or the third…

  Now many of those same civilians were part of his crew, and here he was, endangering the boat in a hundred different ways, putting all their lives at risk for some ridiculous plan that could only come to grief. Why? That was the sticking point, the quandary of quandaries for which there was no good answer anymore. Why indeed? Why do anything? Coombs knew Robles would have the simple answer to that one; he was always game.

  Robles would say, Why not?

  "That's WaterFire!" Alice Langhorne said, sounding bemused but also amused.

  "It's what?"

  "WaterFire. It's a festival they hold in Providence. That's why those braziers are in the river. It's kind of a big street carnival-I've been to it. On summer nights they play music, and people stroll along the riverbanks to watch the fire."

  "I think I've heard of that," said Robles.

  "Watch the fire, huh? That's it?" Coombs said.

  "That's it. It's a big tourist draw."

  "Why is it happening now?" Kranuski demanded.

  Langhorne lowered the binoculars, shaking her head. "You got me. Maybe we look like tourists."

  Coombs asked her, "Do you still want to go through with your operation?"

  "Hmm." She raised the binoculars to her eyes again. "Well… I don't think we have any choice, do we? We're here. What else are we gonna do?"

  "We sure as hell do have a choice," erupted Kranuski. "Captain, those fires could be a beacon opening us up to aerial attack. We know the Moguls have planes, and there may be others. I advise we leave while we still can."

  "Rich, if someone wants to call in an air strike on us, we're already dead ducks. The tide's against us; it would take us all night to get back out to deep water. In the meantime, we'll be wallowing in the bay like a beached whale. Besides, nobody's going to try and sink us, especially not the Moguls. If anything, they'd try to capture the boat-it's too valuable a prize to destroy."

  "I agree," Kranuski said sharply. "So maybe while we're going on this wild-goose chase, they're setting up a blockade, fencing us in. It wouldn't be hard. Are you willing to let that happen?"

  Coombs heard the unspoken accusation: Like you did before? "We're not going to gain anything by hiding at the bottom of the ocean, Rich. Our supplies are low, time is running out. At some point, we have to roll the dice, and I say that time is now." Coombs awkwardly turned to Dr. Langhorne, all three of them squeezed together in the bridge cockpit. "Alice, are your… uh, people ready to disembark?"

  "Anytime."

  "Then for God's sake, let's do it."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE

  AP-Thursday, December 16-According to government scientists, contamination by the mysterious substance known as "Agent X" or "Blue Rust" is much more widespread than previously supposed.

  "We are finding it throughout the environment, including inside the human body, where it forms a weak bond with anaerobic hemoglobin," said Cary Welks, Director of the National Science Foundation. "But I want to stress that so far we have not seen any adverse effects in humans."

  Agent X was first discovered in October by researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center, who noted an unexplained in crease in malfunctions involving highly sensitive, vacuum-sealed electronic equipment. Since then, similar effects have been reported around the globe. -The Maenad Project Lt. Cmdr. Dan Robles was never a "team player" in the sense of being blindly loyal to senior authority-he never had much use for that particular military mentality. A child of illegal immigrants who went through hell to get their citizenship, he always had the deepest regard for the American Dream, if not necessarily the American reality. "My country right or wrong" did not sit well with him; you couldn't trust an institution with your soul. Though eager to serve, Dan never believed it was in his country's best interest that he be a robot who just followed orders. He did what he did because he thought it was right, or because it didn't matter one way or the other. Plenty of things in life didn't matter much, and he was content to toe the line. Why not? You couldn't very wel
l have everybody making up their own rules. Thus, most of his nineteen-year naval career had been relatively uneventful, though his flippancy toward officialdom and mindless patriotic bromides had probably cost him at least a grade in rank-some senior officers didn't appreciate the philosophy that true patriotism included a deep sense of skepticism and a healthy dose of the absurd. That was why he quickly washed out of the Marines.

  No, Dan Robles always hoped that if the official version didn't cut it, he would go his own way, no matter the consequences. But this ideal of his had never been truly tested until Agent X.

  He would never forget the night that civilian mob arrived at the submarine pen, threatening to sink the boat unless they were let aboard-and the crew's anger and confusion at being ordered to risk their necks helping the hijackers. Officers like Rich Kranuski and Alton Webb would never forgive Harvey Coombs for caving in to pressure, but as far as Robles was concerned, the commander did the only sensible thing. Fred Cowper was not bluffing; he would have sunk the boat. Furthermore, those people had an absolute right to be there-they had been promised a ride to safety, and it was only because of their marathon refit that the vessel was sea-worthy in the first place. They had been swindled.

  If guys like Webb and Kranuski thought he was a traitor for going along with it, Robles took that as a sign that he must be doing something right.

  These were things he had learned about himself since the end of the world.

  "Wait a second," Robles said, tethered to the rail and standing above them on the sail's crest. "Captain, there's something else out there. Drifting toward us."

  They all trained their binoculars up the river.

  "What now?" It was too dark to see properly, but Coombs could make out a long, black object moving downstream with the outgoing tide. A boat of some kind. It lazily floated toward them under the hurricane barrier. What the hell…? As it emerged into the moonlight, it began to resemble a strange canoe, with a shiny silver blade rising like a figurehead from its prow. "What is that?" he asked. "Hiawatha?"