Kyle decided to lay his cards on the table: "Mister, we're just trying to survive, same as you. All I know is, we had to get away, or they would have killed us. What happened after that, I don't know."
"Well, I do. Because I listen. I hear. I hear when the gods speak… and sometimes when they croak." He set a small digital recorder on the table and pressed PLAY. A thin, halting voice, captured off fuzzy radio airwaves, spoke as if reading a prepared statement:
"To all American service members, MoCo affiliates, and interested parties. This is Colonel Brad Lowenthal speaking. I and my fellow Air Force officers hereby declare our independence from the tyranny of the Mogul Cooperative. We have been used, abused, and lied to: MoCo is not America, and we are not sworn to support or defend it. The Moguls developed Agent X for the express purpose of creating a permanent ruling class, a master race, and as loyal Americans, we can no longer stand by and allow this to happen. Thus we reject Mogul authority and advocate open rebellion against its agents, both at home and abroad. This is a call for immediate action. If the ideal of democracy still means anything to you, join us in freeing ourselves and our nation from Mogul tyranny. It is time to take back what is ours. God bless America. Lowenthal out."
Kyle shrugged, uncomprehending. "Sorry, I don't really get it. What's it mean?"
"It means I'm out of a job. Without a mouth, there can be no mouthpiece. My days here are numbered. As soon as they learn the truth, I will be fired-quite literally."
Kyle lowered his voice. "What? Them Reaper dudes don't know about this?"
"Oh no. Only you… so far."
"Why tell me?"
"Because you and I both share the same secret: We are obsolete. Both existing here under false pretenses. Straw men, destined to burn."
Sensing an opportunity, Kyle said, "We don't have to. Not if you help us get back to the boat. You can come with us."
"Where is there to go?"
"Anywhere!"
That grin again. "And nowhere. I once had hope, too. Believe me, when I received the information that Uri Miska was still alive here in Providence, I wanted nothing more than to find him. You may not be surprised to know that my men and I are experts at interrogation-if Miska was hiding a cure, I was confident we could pry it out of him."
Kyle felt they were getting off topic. "Miska again. What is it about that dude?"
"Are you joking?"
"I'm not! Who the fuck is he?"
"Uraeus Miska is the most wanted man on Earth… what's left of it."
"Okay. That still don't tell me why I should give a shit."
"You don't know about Uri Miska… and yet you were looking for him as well."
"We weren't, though. It was all a mistake."
"Some mistakes can be deliberate. Dr. Miska is the man behind Agent X-author of both the disease and the cure, and one of the founders of the Mogul Cooperative… as well as its betrayer. He gave the disease but kept the cure. I was a mercenary soldier and military advisor for MoCo; it was my job to train and equip nineteen thousand prison convicts held in MoCo-owned penitentiaries. We were to conduct salvage operations for the Moguls, and had rigged up seven river barges for that purpose. We burned through ten thousand convicts the first month out, five thousand the second. By the third month after the Agent X epidemic, with experience and technical support from MoCo, we started to become more adept at our work, plundering the Gulf Coast and the cities up along the Inland Waterway. We were sacking Baltimore when I got the assignment to catch Miska. The Moguls had already failed to catch him during the initial outbreak and assumed he was dead. Now there were reports that he was active in Providence again, and they wanted me and my forces to find him. What I found instead was an errant grenade. Fortunately, we were near Miska's research facilities, and I was able to be saved."
"What happened to you?"
"Oh, I had a bit of a turn. But after the initial shock, I was saved, just as all may be saved-hallelujah. Saved by Him. I was born again."
"You're a Baptist? Me too!"
This seemed to amuse him deeply. "No. Not quite. There's only one who could save me, who can save any of us: Uri Miska himself. Yes, Miska saved me. He gave me his message of salvation and undying love, that I should carry it to my people here. Save them, too, before it's too late-before the ball drops and this great opportunity is lost forever. But I am not the man I used to be, Kyle. I know that if I attempt to pass on Miska's gift, they will in their ignorance try to stop me, and I am far from confident that I can overcome their resistance. Even my own men will prevent me. There's too much at stake for us to let that happen. I need your help."
With a feeling like soft mallets beating a minor chord on the xylophone of his spine, Kyle asked, "What do you mean? My help in what way?"
"Come here and I'll show you. I told you before that all organic life must evaporate, but there is life that is not organic. There is a form of life that is as stable and as unyielding as stone-permanent as death. Let me show you."
Kyle began backpedaling. "Cool-listen, I really have to go to the bathroom-"
"You are lying to preserve your life, but didn't your mother ever tell you that lies, like death, will eventually catch up with you?"
"Screw you. My mother's dead."
"Exactly. Fortunately for us, there is an alternative…"
Uncle Spam pushed back his deck chair, its metal legs screaming against the metal floor, and tipped his head up to reveal his face in the lamplight. It was the face of a skull-eyeless, noseless, denuded of most of its flesh. What meat there was clung to the bones like lichen on a rock, grayish and rubbery, tenaciously spreading new shoots. He stood up, though he had no legs to stand on-only a cleaved mass of bone and tissue from the chest down, splaying open like a nest of snakes as he rested his weight on it, all the separate strands and slabs of gristle, the exposed blue innards and rickety splintered bones, acting in concert with his arms to hoist him up and carry him along on his back, groin first, crablike, an uncanny death's-head and torso gliding on a forest of fleshy roots. He looked like a grotesque mollusk-a human gastropod with a second mouth at his crotch, a gaping vertical maw lined with sharp ridges of splintered pelvic bone, wide enough to reveal the writhing, vestigial heart deep within, straining in that damp nest of ribs like a baby chick eager to be gorged.
Oh shit! Kyle thought frantically, spinning for the door. Oh shit oh shit oh shit-
He didn't make it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SNAIL TRAILS
Rich Kranuski lay awkwardly in his new stateroom-the captain's quarters-and tried to steal a few minutes' sleep. He was bone-tired from being on station for the last forty-eight hours, coping with the crisis of traffic in their near vicinity-a ghost fleet of small engines puttering in and out of a ghostly marina, with all the sounds of routine human activity that went with it, even music. XO Webb had finally been able to confirm visually that the sounds came from no phantom but from a veritable floating city: Two enormous barges with attending tugboats and a host of lighter vessels, like mother ships with a litter of pups, all tucked into the mouth of the Seekonk River. Scum, sea gypsies, human trash from the squalid look of them, but whether pirates, refugees, or MoCo, it didn't much matter: Whoever they were, they were bound to be frightened, sick, and hungry. If they were anything like the crew of the sub, they would also be dangerous… and there were a lot more of them.
The only question was: Why hadn't they attacked yet?
The presence of potential hostiles in such close proximity lent great urgency to his efforts at trying to chase down the source of all the recent vandalism-or at least put a scare into whoever was behind the snafus. No doubt it had something to do with the failure of those kids to return from shore-Dan Robles and Phil Tran had certainly made their feelings known, but the unspoken resentment was even worse: It was as if the entire crew had suddenly turned against him. He could sense the angry whispering, the ill-concealed loathing everywhere he went: You sent those boys to their de
aths. Even Webb had started subtly to distance himself as though from a bad smell, when the whole thing had been his idea in the first place! Kranuski silently railed, Why can't they understand that I'm as frustrated as anyone, but that someone had to start making the hard calls. And hard calls were all that was left now-no matter who commanded the ship. Let them try to lead under these conditions.
Come on, come on, come on! It wasn't going to get any better the longer they stayed here; Kranuski was desperate to get under way, if they could just patch things together long enough to clear out. But whoever it was, the mystery bandit was still at large, jacking one key system after another.
Worse still, Rich couldn't shake the feeling that the perpetrator was watching him-that no matter where he went, he was being discreetly followed by some lurking presence. Gremlins. At first he thought it was paranoia, but several times now he had heard strange noises and turned around to find himself facing an empty passage… except for that one time when he caught the briefest peripheral flash of something round and pale disappearing into the ventilation bay-an indistinct balloon shape that his imagination filled in with Fred Cowper's gnomish features. I'm just tired, Kranuski thought, which he was, but it still disturbed him deeply. He badly wanted to believe it was his imagination, an optical illusion or maybe a trick of the light. Anything.
Rich was not prone to superstition or flights of fancy. He didn't believe in vengeful ghosts or other such Halloween nonsense-God knew it had taken him long enough to wrap his mind around the concept of Xombies, but his threshold of absurdity had been pushed far beyond its limit in these past three months, and he was determined to be realistic: He couldn't ignore any threat just because it clashed with his former sense of reality.
Certainly he couldn't think of any reasonable explanation for the weird, glistening trails he kept finding in the least-accessible parts of the ship, as though someone or something had dragged a slimy mop everywhere he, or it, went. It reminded him of a joke he once liked to tell, but which now kept running through his pounding head like a broken record: Why did God give women legs? So they wouldn't leave snail trails. It wasn't so funny now.
Then there was the business with the safe.
The captain's safe was supposed to be sacrosanct. He was the only one with its combination, and in ordinary times that responsibility would have represented a degree of military privilege that was far beyond merely commanding a warship. Within that tiny Pandora's box was all the awesome potential of a Trident nuclear submarine: code books, missile coordinates, mission profiles, classified technical specs, all the mission-critical logistical data needed to independently carry out a full-blown nuclear exchange.
Of course, all that stuff was long gone, removed by STRATCOM, along with the missiles themselves, when the boat was decommissioned. Except for a few Navy-surplus torpedoes, she was more or less toothless now, little more than a refugee scow, her mission reduced to carting around a valuable reactor until they could find someone in authority to give it to. If the ship's safe was in large measure what made the captain the captain, then what was he anymore but a petty bureaucrat? A school bus driver.
And it wasn't even so much that Kranuski's safe was empty. It was that it had been violated, scorched, with a big black hole where the combination lock should have been. The sight of that hole galled him no end, affronting his sense of military order. It was a constant reminder of the kind of undisciplined individuals he was dealing with now.
The empty safe was Fred Cowper's doing. That damned old man had broken into the safe during the brief few hours that he and his gang were in charge of the boat after Harvey Coombs was incapacitated. Captain Coombs had quickly recovered and relieved Cowper of duty, arresting him for mutiny, but not soon enough to safeguard the safe-Fred had wasted no time cutting that baby open and making free with its contents.
The safe had not been empty then. Aside from some reasonably current military intelligence and the only complete SPAM manifest, it had also contained a sample of an experimental Agent X antidote, salvaged from Miska's research lab and brought aboard by James Sandoval-Chairman Sandoval. Cowper must have instantly grasped the serum's hostage value. He squirreled it away and never gave it up, even under some pretty heavy interrogation, knowing he and his daughter Lulu were safe only as long as he held that secret in his head.
A lot of good it had done him, or that big-mouthed girl Lulu. From what Kranuski had seen, Miska's mysterious Tonic was no antidote at all but merely a kind of Xombie Prozac. Valuable enough in its way, he supposed, as a limited means of keeping small numbers of Xombies in check (although even that had not been borne out by Langhorne's shore party), but far from the grand hope for humanity he had been led to expect. Clearly, there was no such hope.
Looking at that black hole in the safe, Commander Kranuski had the creeping sensation that something inside was looking back at him. At times he even thought he heard things from it: ratlike scritchings in the night, an odd flibbery-flubbery noise, and, once, even a loud, metal slam that jarred him out of a fitful sleep. Or was that just a dream? Increasingly, he was having trouble distinguishing dreams from reality.
Stupid, he thought impatiently. And yet… for some reason, he couldn't bring himself to open the safe anymore. It was right there in his quarters, staring him in the face, but he just couldn't do it. He almost thought of asking Webb to take a look inside for him, make it seem like a casual thing. He would have if only Webb weren't already treating him like some kind of convalescent-home patient, going behind his back. Webb was a loose cannon, and Kranuski didn't want to cede to the man any more authority than he already had.
Strangely enough, Kranuski almost wished Fred Cowper was somewhere on board-he would have liked to consult with a more-experienced man about some of these issues. Someone other than Harvey Coombs. Someone who understood the terrible burden of ordering innocent people to their deaths so that the less innocent might survive… or the essential problem of captaining a doomed ship to its fate.
Of course, the rational part of him knew there was no such assistance to be found, not from Cowper's head or any other quarter. He was all alone.
"We have to get the hell out of here," Sal said, dabbing his split lip with a towel. "We got away from the Moguls; we can get away from these bozos, too."
They were back on the crane barge, their second evening as guests of the Reapers. Kyle had not come back with them from the casino, and the other four boys were nearly in a state of hysteria, compounded by injuries to their bodies as well as their pride: Refusing to return to the cargo barge without Kyle, they had been beaten, kicked, and all but dragged back by El Dopa's black-masked goons. Something had to be done.
"I agree with Sal," said Todd. "We need to get out of here before the shit hits the fan. Something big is going on, something they don't want us to know about. The ship's gotten so quiet, did you notice?"
The four boys sat in their box and listened to the sounds of hectic activity reverberating through the metal walls. Quiet? Sal thought. The thing rattled like a tin drum, with men returning from the day's foraging mission. But Todd was right-the commotion seemed unusually furtive. There wasn't the level of profane banter they had heard the day before, just murmurs of intense conversation. Already they had begun to learn the basic rhythms of life in this floating ark, and the near silence wasn't usual. Certainly it wasn't like the submarine, where people worked around the clock in shifts, and the Navy officers might turn up at any moment to make sure they were keeping busy.
On the barge, it was much more loose. An endless cycle of long siestas and longer fiestas, punctuated by short bursts of hard physical labor. More or less everyone stayed up late into the night and slept late into the morning, which was one of the prime luxuries the convicts had been denied in prison. Nevertheless, certain routines from incarcerated life continued to hold true: Domestic chores were relegated to the "gal-boys"-male hausfraus and pot-watchers-who provided sexual gratification and never went ashore. These we
re not the same as the Kalis, also known as the K-Thugs or Tarbabies-the fearsome transvestite junta responsible for home defense, whose cultish authority was nearly equal to El Dopa's. Then there were Skinwalkers or just Skins, Voodooman's clique, former rodeo hands and other such daredevil types who executed the foraging missions in return for the choicest pickings.
It was a fairly open system. Any man who questioned his role was welcome to switch, but from what the boys gathered, this was a very uncommon occurrence-not everyone could handle the extreme commitment of joining the Kalis, or the radical requirements of the Skins. Easier to mop floors as someone's bitch.
The shore missions left every afternoon, a fleet of four duck boats and support vessels gathering tons of supplies and depositing them on the crane barge. At the end of a week, most of this enormous quantity of goods (whatever the barge crews didn't take themselves) would be transferred to a prearranged shore depot, where they were marked with a large, Day-Glo X and left there for pickup at the convenience of their Mogul overlords. Once the goods had been claimed, there was always a sealed package left in their place, containing shares of Mobucks and the latest news and science updates direct from Valhalla. Airmail, the Reapers called it. It was a matter of some concern to them that in recent days the airmail had mysteriously stopped… almost as peculiar as that submarine just sitting out there, ignoring its load of tribute. Why didn't the thing take its cargo and leave? Company policy strictly forbade the Reapers from contacting the ship directly (the official reason for this was that security of trade routes would be jeopardized if the different transportation branches were allowed to mingle-a tactful way of saying that the military crews refused all truck with looters and thugs), but it felt like they were all holding their breath until the sub went away. Yet Uncle Spam kept telling them that everything was under control.
Whether the Reapers believed this or not, the boys could sense tension and scuttlebutt, dark secrets on the wind-unpleasant schemes that would require their attendance whether they liked it or not.
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