I suddenly noticed he had a bloody bandage where his implant had been. Had he gouged it out?
“What’s wrong with your voice?” I asked.
“Helium! We drove through a bunch of helium on the way in! Sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, doesn’t it?”
“What do you want with me?”
“We’re taking back the base, the whole shebang,” Lowenthal said. “The Moguls are through! We’ve been waiting for a chance to catch them all together! Now it’s our turn!”
I felt a thin stirring of hope. “The Air Force?”
“There is no Air Force anymore. We know that. But we sure as hell aren’t going to fetch and carry while they suck down piña coladas and hog all the women. Schneider, hose down those fuckers, we’re getting out of here!”
There was a tremendous roar that buffeted the vehicle, deafening even with the headphones. What Schneider hit I don’t know, but there were no more laser blasts. A few seconds later, I felt a big bump, and all at once the ride became quiet and smooth, as if we had emerged from a tunnel. There was no light through the viewports. This could only mean one thing: We were outside the bubble and racing across the sea. I could hear distant-sounding concussions, like fireworks.
Saying, “You must be freezing,” Lowenthal handed me a hot-water bottle and went forward. I took the opportunity to peer out the nearest viewport. Falling away to our rear was the dome, partially caved-in like a rotten pumpkin, and within it the submarine. I prayed for its escape, weeping a little for myself, but so grateful for the boys’ sake.
All around us, explosions lit up the winter night—the ice was a battlefield. Giant hovercraft were colliding like bumper cars, and the sky was full of airplanes and tracer bullets. Flaming ice fountains shot to the heavens. Other vehicles charged in formation behind us as if we were part of a convoy, or so I thought, until I noticed they were shooting at us. A volley of rockets slashed through the air overhead. The force of their detonations rattled the tank like a garbage can.
Up front, Lowenthal shouted, “Goddammit, where are those UCAVs? Does Boyleston know we’re out here? Tell him we need air cover!” Facing forward, he pounded the gunner’s leg. “Schneider! Return fire, dammit!” Then he looked back.
What he saw was as astonishing to him as it was to me. Schneider was dead, with my blue hands around his neck. I looked at those hands, then at the plum-colored blood running down my legs—my blood—as if they belonged to someone else.
“Aw shit,” Lowenthal said, as a blinding light shone in the front viewport.
Then the wave hit: The cockpit blew in, and glass and smoke billowed toward me, enveloping everything. I was weightless, the floor underfoot burst upward like the flaps of a cardboard box—it was so sudden there was no fear or pain or surprise—and in the peculiar lull that followed, I and every other loose object in the tank whirled in space, a dirty blitz of crushed ice, hamburger, and hot metal, all ricocheting off each other and flying apart in a perfect illustration of atomic fission. Gravity returned with a wallop as the armored truck landed upside down and plunged into the fractured sea. Gray ice water rushed in, covering the mess and driving out the smoke. We sank to the bottom.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was taking an awful long time to die. I wasn’t in any discomfort, but worried about the grievous pain to come. Death by drowning, twice in one week! But it was different this time. For one thing, I seemed to acclimate quicker to the temperature. The water was cold, yes, but the effect was not so much torturous as vividly sensual . . . and not really that bad. I was surrounded by a flowing corona of warmth, with tendrils of incoming cold twining around and through me like a time-lapse film of roots growing. The cold had a calming, grounding effect, which I was grateful for.
My eyes idly roamed the flooded interior of the overturned tank. It was like a shaken snowglobe, full of drifting particles. Everything was so totally smashed I was amazed to be in one piece. The gunner, Schneider, was inextricably tangled with the cannon works, having been stuffed up into the turret by the force of the blast. Lowenthal and the other men I couldn’t see at all, the whole cockpit area being lost behind peeled-back flooring and machinery.
Soft light filtered down from the gaping hole in the ice. Forcing my creaky joints to bend, I reached out and carefully took hold of a buckled sheet of steel, leery of jagged edges, and eased partway through the opening.
The sea. I was buried in depths of silty green dusk, looking through paler heights to a weblike membrane far above. Streamers of bubbles and lava-lamp blobs of oil rose to that circle of light, but my body felt anything but buoyant—it was stiff and heavy as that of a rusting Tin Man.
In molasses-thick bewilderment, I realized I hadn’t caught a breath in . . . how long? Minutes. Ten minutes at least. Longer than I’d ever held my breath before, that was for sure, and I didn’t feel a thing. Come to think of it, I was not actually even holding my breath—my mouth and nose had been open to the sea the whole time, slowly cycling frigid, salty, diesel-tainted water in and out. Was I breathing water? I consciously stopped doing it, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
Hovering there at the bottom of the ocean, half-in and half-out of the tank, I felt a pang of intense loneliness: I was dead, but I lived. I was a Xombie. Duh.
I let myself sink languorously back inside the vehicle, pondering the change, wondering what would happen to me in this cold, cold water. Things were gradually ticking down to some kind of stop: not death, but a cessation of motion in which the glowing ember of my consciousness would remain, dreaming, as the tissues and fluids of my body congealed at the freezing point. This was what I had read about black holes in space, that to be sucked into one was to have time stretched to infinity at the “event horizon.” That was where I seemed to be—nearing the event horizon, never to escape.
And I was not alone. Someone else had awakened in the confines of the vehicle: the upside-down gunner, Schneider. Unlike me, he was squirming around, his gloved hands slowly clenching and unclenching, releasing trapped puffs of blood from his clothing, his head and torso compressed into the squat bell of the tank’s cupola by the upthrust seat platform.
As I looked down in fascination, his limbs stretched out like probing feelers, each seeming to have an inquisitive life of its own. The right hand located a belt tool—an oversized pocketknife in a leather holster—and both hands speedily extended the blade. With quick, violent chops, Schneider used the knife first to cut through the seat harness, then any offending bone or joint that was pinned in place, tailoring himself to squeeze out. I thought of trapped animals gnawing their own limbs off, but Schneider did it completely mechanically, with the cool deliberation of a surgeon.
Even so, the cold was affecting him as well—he was ebbing—and when he finally jerked free it was only to lie writhing in place, black eyes staring, mouth working silently. Looking at him, I felt nothing. He was nothing. Nothingness was the main impression I had of everything, a never-changing infinite void in four dimensions, stretching out before me with no possibility of relief because I, too, was nothing.
Then something long, white, and slender, an enormous skeletal finger, reached in from the blocked cockpit. Tapping along the junk pile, it found an opening and began to emerge, one great finger after another until the entire monstrous hag’s hand was visible, larger than my body—a giant spider crab. It moved over Schneider’s twisting form, its claws seizing and picking at the ragged edges of his wounds. As it ate, its eye-stalks remained fixed on me, not warily but brazenly. Then a second crab came through to join the feast. Soon the opening was all pointed legs, as crabs crowded the narrow space. I was bait in a crab trap.
Schneider wasn’t finished. As the creatures covered him, he pushed against them, fended off their claws, tried to get out from under, but they were strong and blandly determined, clamping tight and digging in. Soon I could barely see him. When there was no more elbow room at the table, the next crab came for me.
It wa
s a challenge to move—I was almost completely inert and could forgive the crabs for mistaking me for a drowned corpse. Propped stiffly in the far corner of the compartment, hair swaying like moss, I was even in the semifetal posture of the dead.
The crab’s extraordinarily long, bony pincers, each one a grasping six-foot tong thick as my arm, stretched out and took hold of my hair and left hand. It pinched hard as tinsnips, but I felt no pain. Nor was I numb—my body registered every nuance of the injury, yet it was a clinical, detached analysis. It did not “hurt.” There is no way to describe it except perhaps to say my body was a country under siege, and I its queen. I felt a certain stewardship, but that was it. The stolid-faced crustacean began pulling me toward its mouth to feed. Others were coming as well.
With glacial speed I began to move. Far more agile than I, the crab anchored its legs and improved its grip—I wasn’t going anywhere. Reaching for a place to lodge the deadwood of my right hand, I encountered one of the hot-water bottles and clutched it to me like a toddler with a security blanket. It was still warm, the chemical heating element still circulating. By taking it, I surrendered to the crab, and was drawn head-first to its bristly mandibles.
Taking the bag’s drain valve in my teeth, I tore it open and squeezed with all the strength I could still muster, inhaling the hot water. There was no conscious plan in this, but rather some sort of physical compulsion, like an infant suckling milk—what had been my mind was subsumed to a larger but less-civilized intelligence spreading throughout my body. Though the water was scalding, the little of me that was left had no veto power over this ruthless new master, which registered it as a good thing. I did not stop drinking even when I felt organs rupturing inside me.
I was Gumby. That was what this was about. The freakish world was my toyland, my flesh, mutable clay. If it didn’t hurt, why not play?
As I kept drinking, I could feel the heat circulating. My belly became distended in a way that would have been agonizing to a living person, but I could feel myself softening up, growing more limber every second. My Maenad mind quickened.
The crab was fussily chewing a snipped-off hank of my hair with some scalp attached. I had only felt it as a tug and a cold spot behind my ear. With an abrupt jerk I broke free, inadvertently taking one of its claws with me. The crab didn’t seem at all troubled by the damage or disappointed by my escape, and I felt a rush of mutual understanding: We were both privy to a perfect peace unknown to higher forms of life.
Fully aware that the cold would soon immobilize me again, I arthritically clambered out and atop the vehicle. A number of crabs were in the way, but I jabbed at them with the severed claw to drive them back.
Standing on that overturned hulk, with its wheels cartoon ishly splayed outward, I did stop and stare at the surrounding seabed, my flight arrested.
It was solid crabs, covering every square foot of ocean floor, their legions receding into the murk. Surrounding the tank were layers, drifts of them, piling up ten deep. Around the front, two heaps seemed particularly busy—as I watched, a face surged up from the living mass, crab claws dragging down lips and eyelids, giving the features an exaggerated expression of gaping terror. It was Lowenthal. His one remaining eye looked at me, and I had an electric sense of contact, of his voice saying, Go. Then a claw penetrated his mouth and wrenched at his tongue. They pulled him down.
Shedding the heavy bulletproof vest, I kicked off for the surface.
There were fires above, casting the broken ice in fluorescent candy colors, but the heat did not radiate through the water. Coming up underneath the floating wrack, I found it already frozen together. I had no buoyancy, no air in my lungs, and had to keep treading water every second or I would drop to the bottom. The crabs were content to wait, I knew.
Working my way up between jumbled slabs, I punched through glassy new ice, shattering my knuckles but opening a sharp-edged hole I could cling to. My hair and face froze instantly on contact with the air—air that was seventy or eighty degrees colder than the water. Not far away, I could see flames and smoke coiling into the midnight sky. I boosted myself up on the ice and ran for it.
Water drained from my every orifice and flash-froze as I moved, so that I shed icicles with every step. My flesh was crystallizing, cracking, splitting open at the joints. As I ran I encountered bits of scrap and a charred torso, finally coming in range of the fire’s warmth. Its source was the blackened shell of a hovercraft, a giant crucible guttering in a pool of meltwater, and I sloshed up to it with arms outspread.
I don’t know how long I stood there. It might have been minutes or it might have been hours. Eyes closed against the withering heat, I could feel the ice glaze dissolve and the tissues of my body become pliable, alive. Not alive in the ordinary sense, which was as a mysterious entity separate from my mind, with its hidden anatomy and dimly recognized processes, but alive like a very familiar landscape whose every feature was known to me and whose every part I could not only inspect from afar but also inhabit at will with my mind’s eye.
I could ply the rivers and tributaries of my new Xombie structure and explore the deep, meandering wounds made by shrapnel. I could close the wounds and seal them, just as easily as sealing my lips. I could even pucker my tissues around bits of scrap, squeezing them from one muscle to another until they emerged from bloodless slits in my side and plopped into the water.
I reached up and touched the implant, sunk in rigid bone. I could actually taste the metal screws and test the grip of their threads in my skull. The distant echo of my old sense of wonder wafted by like music in a passing car. Then I flexed my forehead. With a crack, the implant popped loose into my hand. It gleamed in the firelight, and I let it fall.
The sea was littered with wreckage. Here and there, Xombies wandered like lost children at a fairground, fast succumbing to the cold. I was neither afraid nor empathetic, and they were equally indifferent to me. But something did stir me—a riotous sound far across the ice. It rang in my head like the voices of long-dead loved ones, nearly forgotten. It was unbearably sweet and sad. Beckoning.
It was people. Miles away, Utik’s people were leaving Thule, a caravan of buses, snowmobiles, and dogsleds streaming north as Valhalla burned. The ones left behind were too busy fighting to stop them, and I could sense both the eager flight of the Inuit and the hatred and misery of those in the domes. This knowledge came through all my pores, as if my entire body had become an antenna attuned to the signals of fragile humanity. I could feel them, and they were all I could feel: a heartbreaking symphony in the vacuum, a kaleidoscopic concert of destruction, and I ached to liberate every one of them from the hideous threat that hung over them—the parasite of time. I had no choice: They were all there was of me, each one a jarringly vivid light in the vast emptiness of eternity, yet here they were at the whims of dismal mortality like candles set afloat in the night sea, to drift and fizzle out. No. They had to be saved. I had the power to save them. To preserve them, as I used to preserve delicate flowers in my memory book.
Lulu.
I stopped.
Lulu. Hurry.
It was the sound of the wind, playing my name. I couldn’t tell if it was one voice or many, but it reverberated in the sinews of my dead blue heart like a benevolent god. It knew me, knew me in a way I no longer knew myself, reminding me of what I most desperately wanted to remember: who I was. The Voice was not calling me to Thule, but back in the direction of the boat.
The boat—I had almost forgotten about it. Not to mention the guys in it. Out of sight out of mind had become the way of things now. Remembering those men was a shock, like finding valuables long thought lost, living heirlooms held in hock. They were mine!
Torn, I looked off toward the flickering chaos of Valhalla, miles away. The complex was so large, the distance was deceiving—some part of me knew I could never make it that far, that I would set like concrete before I was even halfway there, but it was very difficult to sever my attention from those warring thr
ongs and run the opposite way. Equivocation was foreign to my new nature. It wanted to just go. Running against the current, I went for the sub.
Following serpentine power cables across the ice, I felt myself freezing again, but found I could hoard more heat than before—my skin had toughened tremendously, creating a layer of insulation, and the soles of my feet were armored in callus. Things inside me were restructuring and streamlining as well. Even with that, I didn’t have long, but the boat wasn’t far, and I could move very fast. I still wasn’t breathing—or rather, I was breathing through my whole body. Absorbing. Filtering. I felt tireless and light, as if the world was rolling beneath me while I was harnessed to a fixed point in the sky.
Bonfires were strewn all over the sea. Approaching the dome, I expected to find it burning, too, or flat as a jellyfish washed up on the beach, but it was still only half-deflated, a lopsided soufflé. The lights were off, and it appeared deserted. I had no impression of human life, inside or out. The Voice was silent. Other than me, there was not even a Xombie to be seen, and I had an overwhelming desire just to lie down and join the scenery. I had already forgotten why I was here.
My feet frozen clubs, I slowed to a hobble, entering the towering breach made by the truck. The canopy was noisily tearing itself to shreds in the wind. It was dark inside, the grass crunchy. There were bodies everywhere, stiff with cold as indeed I soon would be, waiting for spring. But something vast was stirring in the emptiness, causing the grassy tundra to heave like a waking leviathan. It was the submarine. The submarine was moving.
I couldn’t see it in the near-total darkness, but I could find it easily enough by the escalating biblical cacophony of ice splitting open and volcanic jets of air blasting from every fissure, as well as water boiling up, rising like the tide, to spread in glassy waves across the field. I could feel these things happen as if they were somehow an extension of myself.
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 32
