Apocalypso x-3

by Walter Greatshell

  “It’s your call.”

  I hated this passive-aggressive stuff. “You guys are the experts. Tell me how we can get aboard that thing.”

  “My suggestion is we don’t go aboard at all but just sink it from a safe distance and move in to collect the sentries.”

  “Assuming they’re not drowned, burned up, or blown to bits.”

  “Chances are they’ll survive, or spontaneously Xombify.”

  “It’s too big a risk.”

  “Then I think we should forget entering the bay and just go ashore somewhere along the coast, like we did before. Bypass the sea defenses entirely and head overland to DC.”

  “I have a better idea,” I said.

  Dead men can’t drown. Hence the sea held no terrors for us.

  The boys had gotten used to regularly crawling along the boat’s great hull, collecting mussels and gooseneck barnacles, filling their bags with unearthly delicacies while others trailed at the end of long tethers, spearing bottom fish or netting crabs and scallops. I, the sole girl, watching from atop the bridge, my black hair flying in the current as I mentally ticked off minutes of exposure versus mandatory items for the menu. It wouldn’t do to have the boys freeze before they could complete the grocery list. It was a novelty to them, this strange blue harvest; a welcome change from the sordid grotto of the sub. Despite the darkness and the cold, they were glad to do it, or maybe because of the darkness and cold.

  I went to the Big Room, the biggest space in the boat, which had once held twenty-four nuclear missile tubes. Now it was packed with mountains of treasure. Not treasure in the form of gold and jewels (although there was some of that), but more human-essential valuables such as food, drink, and medicine. It was a regular Costco down there.

  Some months earlier we had plundered these things from an anchored barge that was the cache of the Reapers. They didn’t need the stuff anymore, and neither did their masters at MoCo. For that matter, we didn’t need it either, but it came in handy as a lure for hungry refugees.

  The Blackpudlians were in there, tuning their instruments.

  “You sure it’s safe out there?” asked Ringo.

  “We’re already dead,” said Paul. “What more can they do to us?”

  “I don’t know. Crush our souls?”

  “Our souls are like our bodies, mate, only more so. Like rubber.”

  “Rubber soul, my arse,” said John. “There’s no such thing as a soul, rubber or otherwise.”

  “There’s filet of sole,” mused George.

  “I prefer plaice, myself.”

  “One must have a good sense of plaice.”

  “I’ve always known my proper plaice.”

  “There’s a thyme and a plaice for everything.”

  “Or even a nice bit of halibut.”

  “The halibut is, we haven’t the slightest idea of what we are, what any of this means, or what the risks are in going ashore.”

  I said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ve been out there, and it’s perfectly safe. We’re adapted to that world now.”

  “Lulu’s right. Fire with fire, mates.”

  “Right,” I said. “As a wise man once said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.’”

  “You hear that, lads? We are the egg men.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BRIDGE TUNNEL

  Climbing inside the forward escape trunk, I made room for as many guys as would fit, then ordered the inboard hatch shut. The chamber was “full as a nut,” as my mother would have said, but it didn’t matter; we weren’t claustrophobic, and didn’t need room to breathe. My only concern was logistical, how to best utilize the available space without touching skin, and we had solved that by wearing full-body, hooded wet suits.

  I backflashed to a pregnant cat I had dissected in biology class, how its unborn kittens fit together as neatly as Escher designs, interlocking yins and yangs. Then I opened a valve and let the water in. It was salty and freezing cold, gushing up powerfully from below.

  As brine covered my head, I had the oddest need to scream, recalling a similar experience when I was alive-Chick is ice-cold-but then the feeling passed. A few seconds later, the chamber was full. I cranked open the topside hatch, releasing a plume of trapped bubbles.

  We set to work. Twenty leagues beneath the sea, three groups of Dreadnauts exited the three hatches and slid down lines to the bottom. To human eyes, the water would have been utterly black and impenetrable, but to Exes it glowed with the muted auras of living creatures. Even plankton had its own light, so that the ocean was full of luminous motes.

  Hiking through twilit meadows of eelgrass, with the incoming tide pushing us like a breeze, we made our way up a wide valley carved in the continental shelf. This was the mouth of the deepwater channel, the Chesapeake stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway, connecting Norfolk with Annapolis and Baltimore in the far upper bay. Up there, it had been regularly dredged to accommodate shipping, but at this end it was plenty deep enough for even the largest ships to pass without risk of hitting the undersea highway tunnel-which was a good thing, because an Ohio-class submarine required enormous clearance. Passively drifting on the current, it loomed behind us walkers like a great black zeppelin, weightless as a cloud.

  My party followed behind a team led by Alton Webb. This was a man I had hated and feared in life, and who hated and feared me. He had abused me, terrorized my friends, killed my father, and betrayed the entire boat. All this was irrelevant now, dismissed as pocket change amid the wages of human ignorance. I could no more hold a grudge from life than I could blame a trapped animal for biting the hand that fed it-any more than I could blame myself for my former human foibles.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Blame might be gone, but guilt was forever. In fact, guilt was the emotional currency of this new existence-one of the side effects of immortality was an almost frantic selflessness, a deep pity and shame more potent than Original Sin. This grim empathy was what kept us working on our common task: to save humanity. Not in the crude, almost sexual way of wild Xombies but as a simple matter of conscience.

  Alton Webb, bearing a larger burden of shame, was now perhaps the most humane of all the Dreadnauts, the silent martyr of the sub, whose devotion to me made him a practical extension of my will. Without his example, I could not have persuaded the others into continuing the journey after Providence. I felt guilty about making them feel so guilty- and round it went, a wheel of never-ending remorse that we all sublimated in duty: duty to the memory of home and country, duty to the ship, duty to each other, and, most intensely, duty to the still-doomed. More than anything else, we lived to save the living.

  Before us were fields of sonar buoys, proximity mines, curtains of steel mesh, an obstacle course that no unescorted ship could hope to navigate. So how do you propose to do it? Coombs had asked.

  Simple, I said. We walk.

  Unlimbering their tools, the blue boys began cutting a wide swath through the barricades. Nearing the drilling rig’s anchorage, we could sense humans around us-wisps of life energy like blurred X-rays. Our proximity to them goaded the teams to work faster, Clears and Blues competing for the right to those prizes. The men were drunk on it, desperate to play God. I wanted to say, Calm down, but the others were already well ahead of me, bounding up the rocky slope. Darn it. Here was the problem with weaning them off my blood; I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy.

  We reached the spot directly below the oil platform and directly above the tunnel crossing. There was something like a large building on the seafloor, a rusty ziggurat connected by a thick pipeline to the surface. I had brought a device called a Momsen lung, a kind of inflatable life preserver. We had hundreds of them on the sub. Opening the air valve, I instantly became buoyant and shot for the surface.

  Emerging between the towering legs of the superstructure, I listened for signs of life, but the thing felt empty. Whoever had been there was gone now.

  “Hey!” I shouted. My voice e
choed hollowly above the slosh of the waves. There was no answer.

  I bled air from my vest and sank back to the bottom. Brushing floating hair out of my face, I checked my GPS display, mentally feeding my coordinates to Cowper’s head in the Nav Center, where he typed it out for the crew using his long black tongue.

  We came across a sunken ship, a guided-missile frigate. Then a destroyer. A helicopter assault ship. Dozens of smaller vessels. This had been a battleground. Now it was a graveyard.

  Signaling the rest of my party to take it slow, I studied the white seabed around us. The bottom appeared to be covered with dead coral, clinking underfoot like bleached bones, and it took me a second to realize it was not coral at all but actual bones-human remains. The whole area was a vast killing field. The sheer quantity of bones was remarkable, far more than was accounted for by the sunken wrecks. How did they get there?

  Before I could work this out, there was a strange commotion from up front, a lot of yelling inside my head. Pull back, pull back! At the same time, a swarm of dim objects, visible only as pale wisps against the bioluminous haze, suddenly swept across the bottom and started fastening onto me with sharp pincers.

  They were crabs-millions of crabs. Crabs of all kinds: blue crabs, rock crabs, primitive-looking horseshoe crabs. All of them unusually large and aggressive. Girded with sharp spines and powerful claws, they were hard to get off, hard to kill, and just plain hard. Most disturbing of all, they obviously had a taste for Xombies.

  Deja vu, I thought, batting at them. Quickly becoming overwhelmed, I ordered, Retreat!

  I wasn’t the only one; all the Dreadnauts were in flight, facing against the tide and dragging bunches of crustaceans from their extremities like bizarre fruit. The frenzied crabs followed, swimming and scuttling over the bottom in a rolling wave.

  As the point man, farthest from the ship, Alton Webb had the worst of it, doing what he could to stall the attackers by using his own body as bait, hacking crabs off himself with karate moves. But this was not very effective, and he was quickly enveloped in shrouds of hungry creatures.

  My group and I were also covered but not so burdened that we couldn’t climb the lines to the boat, shedding our wet suits and some of our flesh to rid ourselves of the sharp-clinging foe, or even biting crabs off each other with our teeth.

  Within the ship, Coombs ordered Reverse Slow, causing the great screws to begin resisting the current. It was risky because any sound we made at this range and depth could be noticed by a reasonably alert enemy, but the only other choice was to drift blindly into the defensive lines.

  The crabs followed us up the trailing ropes, linking legs and massing by tons to actually put a drag on the submarine. If they reached it, their sheer numbers could block the intake ducts and destabilize the ballast. But the last men to the lines, Alton Webb and Jack Kraus-both of them buried in vicious crustaceans and eroding like sandcastles-realized the danger and simultaneously decided on the last, best course of action:

  As one, they pulled out their knives and cut the nylon cords, dropping away from the sub and taking the threat with them. Adding their own bones to the heap.

  Once the surviving Dreadnauts were back aboard, crew members armed with bolt cutters and hammers dealt with any persisting crabs. Some of these had actually burrowed into the bodies of their victims, lodging up inside bellies and chest cavities like ironic cancers-the only cancers a Xombie could get-which necessitated the crudest parody of surgery to remove.

  Cutting crabs off me, Alice Langhorne asked, “What just happened out there?”

  “What does it look like? Crabs! We were attacked by crabs.”

  “I was worried about something like this. I just didn’t expect it to apply so indiscriminately.”

  “What?” I asked, yanking a small crab off my left earlobe.

  “When we were doing risk assessments for MoCo, we realized that Maenads were not deterred by water obstacles. They could easily ford rivers, lakes, and oceans, meaning any kind of moat was useless, and even islands offered only temporary protection. Extreme cold was the only guaranteed defense, which is why the Moguls all came to Thule. But the problem solved itself: It turns out that the ASR morphocyte-Agent X-is able to colonize the bodies of certain invertebrates.”

  “Shit.”

  “It does not do this by piggybacking on iron molecules, the way it does in human blood cells. Crabs don’t have hemoglobin. Their environment has to be saturated with microbial ASR-pulverized Maenad tissue-so that they absorb it into their bodies and nervous systems. Once this reaches a critical mass, the morphocytes form a rudimentary nerve center that takes control of the host organism, causing it to suddenly develop an insatiable appetite for richer sources of Agent X-such as ourselves.”

  I erupted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us before we went out there? We just lost three guys!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m still getting used to this; my mind is so different than it was when I was alive… like a black hole in space. I find it very hard to narrow my focus. To attend.”

  “Well, you have to. We all have to.”

  “I’ll try to be more careful.”

  “Screw being careful,” I said. “It’s time we played hardball.”

  Keeping well clear of the bay entrance, we headed south until we came to the bottom leg of the causeway, which was basically a long pier connected to the Norfolk shore. The water here was too shallow to dive the boat, but we didn’t intend to. Instead, we lined up for an easy shot and fired a spread of four torpedoes at the bridge pylons.

  Four plumes of white spray rose to the sky, and a great span of concrete and steel tumbled into the water. Then we just cruised over it.

  We were inside Chesapeake Bay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  FRENCH TOAST

  I looked up along the coast. Not far upriver was the sight of the first landing by early settlers of Jamestown-the Pocahontas thing. The Disney musical. As a kid I had liked that cartoon, but my mother despised its cheap sentimentality, its glossing-over of ugly historic events. Hollywood is bullshit, she would say. American history is not pretty.

  Looking at Norfolk, I had to agree. The city was dead, and the Navy base had been a scene of desperate fighting. Waterfront buildings were riddled with bullet holes, windowless from explosions, gutted by fire. A big submarine lay sunk at its moorings, only its radar mast breaking the water. Several vessels had run aground or capsized. Other ships were more or less intact, including an Ohio-class boat suspended on blocks in the vast dry-dock facility. The only one that interested me was the sleek black yacht riding at anchor. I could read its name through the periscope: La Fantasma. The yacht was empty; its passengers had come ashore here.

  Assembling a shore party to salvage some critically needed items from the dry-docked boat, I consulted Cowper’s head about the necessary procedures for stabilizing our vessel.

  “I just want to make sure everything is secure before we disembark.”

  “Sounds like you’re not planning on coming back anytime soon.”

  “It may be a while.”

  “Good. Because I’ve had enough of this tub to last me an eternity.”

  As the engineering team and I entered the dry dock, we could see that we were too late: the other submarine had already been plundered. Hasty scaffolds stood in place, and huge holes had been cut in the vessel’s hull, steel carved like blubber and machinery dangling out like entrails from a beached whale. The Reactor Control Operator, Mr. Fisk, could see at once that there was little point in going aboard.

  Climbing the ramp out of the dry dock, I began to hear a rhythmic whirring sound from above. It was a thin electronic noise, like a printing teletype. It got louder, and suddenly we could see a strange creature silhouetted against the sky. It was spindly and four-legged, about the size of a deer or large dog, but with boxy saddlebags strapped to its sides.

  It had no head.

  Even stranger, it had no presence, no life energy. As Xombies, we w
ere highly attuned to any aura of life, but this thing was a blank.

  I asked, “What is that?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Julian Noteiro. “I think it’s a machine.”

  Without warning, the weird object erupted in gunfire-a fusillade of metal pellets issuing from where its head should have been. In an instant, half our crew was down, their bodies punched through like cored apples.

  Perhaps because Bobby Rubio and I were shorter, we escaped the first volley and jumped over the side of the ramp, clinging by our fingertips. Julian, Sal, and a few other boys did the same, dangling beside us. The bigger men all plummeted to the concrete bottom, shattering limbs and skulls.

  Seeking targets, the four-legged robot trotted down the ramp after them, its pulsing whine echoing in the chamber. As it passed me, I swung my slight body up over the ramp and tried to kick its rear legs out from under it.

  But the thing was too fast-with mechanical precision it instantly dodged my kick and fired a side-mounted cannon in my face. It was loaded with metal chaff, a hail of razorlike flakes that would have blasted me to wet spaghetti if Julian wasn’t right there, swinging his hammer against the muzzle so that the explosion backfired, rupturing the cannon and knocking the robot off-balance.

  Sal DeLuca and Jake Bartholomew used the brief chance to seize the thing and hoist it off its feet, boosting it over the side. Buzzing frantically, trying to stabilize itself in midair, the machine hit the floor and came unsprung like an old clock.

  We pulled ourselves together as best we could. In the days and weeks to come, all our injuries would fade away, but for now we mainly had to be mobile enough to walk. To this end, splints were improvised for the worst fractures, and broken heads were tied up with rags and duct tape.

  Julian was a mess, his body mangled by shrapnel from the cannon exploding, but he and the crewmen had a bigger concern: the meaning of that killer robot.

  “Somebody hadda been remote-controlling that thing,” said Cowper’s head. “Which means they’re still out there.”