Xombies: Apocalypticon Page 8

  The sight that greeted him on deck was something beyond his wildest nightmares:

  There was a riot. Not on the boat itself, but just above it on the wharf. A thousand murderous hooligans fighting, choking, whacking at each other with hammers. Hundreds of teenage boys were fleeing the melee, swarming over the edge of the quay and dropping from the pier to the dock below, where armed Navy crewmen were helping them cross a plank to the boat’s stern. Helping them! Several officers appeared to be shooting into the crowd, and it took Webb a second to realize there were Xombies in the mix.

  Holy God, he thought, a jet of ice water freezing his guts. There they are.

  They were the first Xombies he or any of the crew had ever seen, having been sheltered from the plague in their windowless steel cocoon all these weeks. It was a shock actually to be in the presence of the blue devils they had heard so much about: unstoppable, ghoulish berserkers, the women worse than the men. He had to admire the way the rebellious shipyard workers were fending them off with nothing more than hammers and crowbars, holding the line even as skull-cracked creatures bounced back for more. The crew’s bullets were not much better—Webb overheard one frustrated officer, popping a spent clip, mutter, Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.

  What the hell’s going on up here? he demanded of the OOD, Tim Shaye.

  Captain’s orders! We’re to assist in boarding the refugees! The man was sweating and half-crazed.

  Are you kidding me? Webb couldn’t believe Coombs could be so stupid as to give in to these people’s extortion. What are we supposed to do with them? They’re not coming below!

  I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the skipper. Shaye’s radio squawked the order to cast off. Excuse me, I have to tend the lines.

  Incredibly, the boat managed to get under way and clear of the submarine pen without losing a single crewman. This miracle was accomplished by Webb’s simple expedient of ordering the crew below and shutting the hatch, letting the massed refugees fend for themselves topside. No telling how many of them were lost before the last Xombie was finally expelled, but of the hundreds remaining, only a handful were adults. The rest were shell-shocked teenage boys . . . and one girl. Everyone, above and below, thought the worst was over.

  That was when the real trouble began.

  Webb was in Navigation, conferring with Rich Kranuski and Artie Gunderson about the best offshore anchorage, when the general alarm sounded.

  Armed detail to the mess! someone shouted over the 1MC. Xombies on board!

  What now? Gunderson groaned, and was suddenly knocked out of his seat by a hurtling blue body. It was the machinist’s mate, Donald Selby, all wild hair and grinning bared teeth. Tackling Artie against the console, Selby forced his gaping wet maw on him, covering the other man’s mouth and bending his neck so far backward it cracked, then in one grotesque slurp seemed to suck the very life from Gunderson’s wilting corpse.

  As Webb and Kranusky fought to pull the men apart, Alton saw Doc Lennox attacking Chip Stanaman in the control center. Chip’s family had welcomed Webb into their home one Christmas when he was on break from nuclear power school, and still sent him cards every year with pictures of the kids. Fuck! Webb bellowed, unable to break Selby’s grip—Gunderson already looked as dead and purple-faced as his attacker, eyes bloodshot and hugely dilated. Webb was on the verge of losing it. He was not a tremendously social guy, but these were his poker buddies, his friends, the only family he knew, and he was failing them.

  Forget him! Kranuski barked. Damage control’s not reporting any trouble amidships—we can still contain it right here! I need you to guard that hatch and make sure nothing gets aft! As Webb obeyed, Rich jumped for the emergency intercom, and said, Attention all hands. This is the XO: Evacuate CCSM and secure forward bulkhead. Repeat: All decks, secure forward bulkhead.

  Things abruptly settled; the eye of the storm. The command section, which had been a bedlam of shouts and violent scuffles, was now silent. As Kranuski finished what he was doing and leaped for the aft hatch, Gunderson and Selby jerked upright like two fright puppets, lunging for him. It was close. With an assist from Webb, Rich cleared the heavy watertight door just as several more demonic faces came bounding up the companionway at his heels.

  The hatch clanged shut with the finality of a tomb.

  Game over, Alton Webb thought. If the boat’s entire command-and-control section was infested with these things, and at least a dozen vital crewmen were down, including the captain, then they were lost. They had already been desperately shorthanded, with barely a third their normal crew complement; now they not only had to rig for auxiliary control and stabilize the boat but fight Xombies in the bargain. It was physically impossible.

  Executive Officer Kranuski was not ready to give up. He had assumed the mantle of acting captain and was busily fielding situation reports. For want of anything better to do, Webb went along with it, pretending that Kranuski knew what he was doing even though the man had never commanded a sub in his life. At least his initial hunch had been right: Just about everything aft of the forward bulkhead appeared to be clear of Xombies. This was confirmed by the two other bridge officers who survived, Lieutenants Dan Robles and Phil Tran, who had already posted a lookout topside and transferred helm control to the aft maneuvering panel. But without some further miracle, they were just treading water until the ebb tide stranded them in the mud. Without proper soundings, they couldn’t even drop anchor; its chain would swing them around the rocks and shoals like an immense wrecking ball.

  It was Robles who made the suggestion, What about Fred Cowper?

  What about him?

  We have to recruit him, and anybody else he’s got up there who can help.

  That asshole’s the cause of all this!

  He’s also got more experience than anybody else on board.

  That’s what makes him so dangerous! Forget it—we have enough on our hands without entrusting the boat to a guy who just threatened to sink it.

  Okay, he’s a ruthless old bastard, but we can probably trust him to pull his own fat out of the fire. You can always hang him later. Right now we need every available hand.

  But what about that girl he’s got with him?

  You can hang her, too.

  “Aim for that dock there,” Sal said, consulting his printed-out map.

  “What do you think we’re doing?” Kyle Hancock said. “It’s the current; it’s wicked.”

  “Well, paddle harder—it’s going to take us underneath the hurricane barrier.”

  “No shit.”

  “Paddle! Paddle!”

  The paddlers paddled, putting their shoulders into it, trying to find a rhythm. Sal watched the great, gray barrier loom above them, its open gates like massive steel jaws and the river beyond a yawning gullet, eager to swallow them whole. It was so shallow in there at low tide that Xombies could wade right up and grab them at will. “All together!” he shouted. “Stroke, stroke, stroke . . .”

  Then they were clearing the worst of the current, moving into calmer eddies near shore. “Okay, we’re good, we’re gonna make it,” Sal said, heart still racing. “Don’t stop, we’re almost there.”

  “Shut up,” Kyle said. “Damn.”

  “Yeah, man,” agreed Russell. “We don’t need you to tell us what to do. We know you’re Officer Tran’s little bitch, but just try to chill, a’ight? We on it.”

  Russell and Kyle Hancock were brothers, the only surviving pair of siblings on the ship, and their mutual strength made them de facto rulers of the Big Room. Russell was one year older than Kyle, with a corrected cleft lip and a resulting lisp that made him sound like Mike Tyson. Kids had learned not to rag him about it. His brother Kyle was lighter built, less touchy, with the easy confidence of a born player. As they liked to say, Russell was the muscle, and Kyle was the style. The brothers were not overt troublemakers, they simply used their power to do as little as possible, making needier kids like the Freddies—Freddy Fisk and Freddy G
onzales, or just Freddy F and G, Tweedledum and Tweedledee—do their work for them. Why shouldn’t they? There were no extra rations in doing it yourself—the privilege of not starving was reserved for “essential personnel” only. As far as Kyle and Russell were concerned, Sal DeLuca and all the other overworked ship’s apprentices were suckers.

  “Dude, don’t even start,” Sal said. “I’m just trying to help us stay alive, okay?”

  “We don’t need your help—dude.”

  “Yeah, give it a rest. You ain’t no ship’s officer.”

  “No, but I’m responsible for your ass.”

  “Leave my ass be. And you best watch your own, bike boy.”

  They all snickered.

  Sal shook his head, grinning in spite of himself. This had been going on for months, part of the friction between the ship’s apprentices and the “nubs”—nonuseful bodies. Nubs were often the guys who were having the worst time of it, the true orphans, whose adult sponsors—their dads—had been killed, and who could barely hold it together enough to function, their shock and despair manifesting as attitude. He knew Russell’s gibes were a response to the helplessness of the situation, a survival mechanism. A thin wedge against panic, which Sal could totally relate to, having lost his own father at Thule. Hey, to laugh was better than to cry . . . or to scream. Once you started screaming, you might never stop.

  The screams came at night, in their sleep.

  Now they were below the high dock, fending off its barnacled pilings with their paddles. “Okay, everybody be quiet,” Sal said. If there were Xombies up there, they could just jump right into the boats. He tied up to a rusted ladder, and whispered, “I’m just gonna take a look, okay? Nobody move unless I give the all clear.”

  “What is this squad leader bullshit?” Kyle hissed, getting up. “This ain’t no video game, dumb-ass.”

  “Fine, you go first.” Sal made room for him to pass.

  Kyle hesitated, sudden doubt flashing across his face, so that Russell said, “Sit your ass down. Let a real man go up.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Russell belligerently mounted the ladder. They watched in nervous silence as he paused at the top, peeking over the edge at first with trembling caution, then visibly relaxing and raising his whole head above. “Come on, chicken shits,” he called down. “Ain’t nothin’ to—”

  A blue hand seized him by the throat.

  Fighting the thing, Russell lost his grip and plummeted backward onto the raft. The disembodied hand was still on him—not just a hand but an entire arm, ripped off at the shoulder socket, its round bone nakedly visible, hideously flailing and jerking at the elbow joint as it strangled him. The other boys quailed back, screaming, but Sal lunged for the thing, trying to pry its fingers loose. It was a young girl’s hand, its dainty nails painted pink, but it was cold and rubbery, impossibly strong.

  “Help me!” he shouted.

  Kyle jumped forward to pitch in, then two other boys, his poker buddies, Ray and Rick. As they grappled with it, the naked stump punched Sal in the cheek so hard it cracked a filling. Tasting blood, he braced his knee on Russell’s chest, and, with a supreme effort, they managed to wrench the thing loose. It immediately went wild, flexing and bucking in their hands, trying to get at them. “All together now,” Sal said. “One, two . . .” On three, they hurled it far out into the water.

  “Holy craaap,” Russell wheezed, retching over the side.

  “Let’s get outta here!” Kyle shouted.

  “Wait!” Sal said. “We can’t just go back.”

  “Why not? I’m not waitin’ for the rest of that chick to show up!”

  “We got to expect shit like this to happen. We handled it! We can’t just give up now.”

  “We sure as hell can!” Others chimed in: “Hell yeah,” “We’re gone!” “This shit is suicide!”

  “Hold up,” said a ragged voice. It was Russell. He shakily sat up, and croaked, “Don’t nobody do a goddamned thing. I ain’t—hem—goin’ back to that submarine empty-handed. Just so they can lock us in jail again? How many days we already been sitting there dreaming we had someplace else to go, some kinda free choice? Screw that shit. I’m hungry.” He got up and climbed the ladder again, wobbly but without hesitation. In seconds, he was over the top and out of sight.

  For a long moment there was silence, then Russell’s face reappeared. “Come on!” he called down impatiently. “Let’s do this shit. You wanna eat or don’t you?”

  Sal started to follow, but Kyle and the other boys shoved past, nearly knocking him into the water. Whether empowered by Russell’s confidence, the prospect of food, or the thought of that arm lurking in the water below, suddenly they couldn’t get up fast enough. “One at a time,” Sal said. But they weren’t listening to him at all—the old ladder was almost coming to pieces from their combined weight. Stupid jerks. “Everybody stay together,” he called after them as he tested the rungs.

  Sal emerged to find the boys standing at the edge of a weedy lot, reveling in the glorious, slightly queasy sensation of dry land. It looked like no-man’s-land—the vacant area beneath a highway bridge. On one side was the flood-control berm—a high rock dam separating them from the city—and on the other a fenced tugboat landing and some condemned-looking buildings. Huge concrete pylons rose above them to Interstate 195. It was all reassuringly deserted.

  As Sal joined them, Russell asked him, “Where to now?”

  “Well, we gotta cross under the highway and follow the road here through the floodgate. There should be businesses and things on the other side.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Following Russell, who was following Sal, the boys trooped quickly and quietly down the road, picking up any likely-looking weapons they happened to find—mostly rocks and chunks of brick. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Sal wished he could find a good stick. He looked up at the highway bridge, imagining that the little girl’s arm must have fallen from there, picturing the awful scene: the girl in the backseat of her parents’ car, the Xombie lunging in and grabbing her arm, Dad hitting the gas—nasty.

  They found the tremendous open doors of the flood barrier and cautiously followed the road through. On the far side was a waterfront area of chic clubs and condos, and across the river an immense Gothic cathedral that was the electric company, webbed to the rest of the city by flowing skeins of wire. It was all dead, all out of commission, yet almost perfectly preserved, as if loyally awaiting the future return of humankind. Everything had gone down so fast, there was no time for looting and destruction.

  Dodging from one shadow to the next, the boys did what they could to keep a low profile. “I don’t get it,” Kyle said, eyes wide with tension. “Why aren’t there any Xombies?”

  “Be glad there ain’t,” said Russell, gingerly touching his bruised neck.

  “It could be that viral thing they talked about—viral progression,” Sal said. “The cities got so full of Xombies, they reached critical mass. Once there was nobody left to infect, there was no reason to stay, so they scattered outward across the country. Maybe there aren’t any left here.”

  The boys’ chests swelled with hope. “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just what I heard.”

  “God, I hope you right, man.”

  Staying off the exposed waterfront, they followed a shaded inner street with fewer doorways. This led them to a second highway underpass, one older and darker than the first, a sunken hollow, its corroded iron girders busy with roosting pigeons. There were peeling psychedelic murals on the walls, ads for funky-sounding businesses: Café Zog, Olga’s Cup and Saucer, Acme Video, Z-Bar. Cars sat dead in the road, their windows broken and doors wide open to the elements. Pigeons were roosting in them, too. This was not a good place to be, it didn’t feel safe. The boys could be cornered here in the dripping wetness, trapped amid the rust and rank birdshit. “We shouldn’t a gone this way, man,” said Kyle. They walked faster
and faster, trying not to panic, not to run . . .

  . . . and emerged in the light of spring. Before them was a tiny hillside park with a veterans’ memorial, benches, and maple trees. Dew glistened on the grass. But the boys hardly noticed any of that. They were more interested in what lay just beyond: a bright red-and-yellow gas station with a sign reading FOOD MART.

  Now they ran.

  The coolers were dead, the ice cream melted, the milk curdled, but nearly everything else in the place was edible, and the forty boys made a valiant attempt to eat it all. It was a treasure trove more welcome to them than King Tut’s tomb, and as perfectly preserved, not in natron but sodium benzoate.

  Snack cakes and pies, puddings, nuts, cookies, crackers, canned meats and cheeses, beef sticks, jerky, pickles, salsa, pretzels and potato chips galore. Candy! Whole cases of chocolate bars, chews, sours, mints, gum. And drinks: bottled beverages of every kind—energy drinks, soda pop, fancy sweetened teas and cappuccino, Yoo-hoo, or just plain water—all free for the taking. It was a teenage dream come true, an all-you-can-eat paradise of junk food. All the cigarettes they could smoke, too, if they wanted them, and a few other vices besides.

  “Can this stuff make us sick?” Freddy Fisk asked through a mouthful of minidonuts. “It must be pretty old by now.”

  “I doubt it,” Sal said, munching Fritos. “There’s enough chemicals in this stuff to last until doomsday.”

  “Then it’s definitely expired.”

  What they didn’t eat, they stuffed into ditty bags they had brought from the sub. They sacked the store until all that was left was money and auto accessories. Sated, idly scratching lottery tickets, some of them were already starting to feel that perhaps it had been a mistake to eat so much, so fast. Of that junk. Damn.