With the water lapping over my feet, the Voice said, Follow , and I waded forward into the icy wash, struggling against atrophy. What did it want from me?
Then I paused, sensing something rushing up in the dark, bright as a torch in my consciousness, all teeth and fury. Not a Fury, however. My fading reflexes were too slow to ward it off. A lithe, coarse-haired body slammed into mine, fangs sinking deep into my neck. I spun like a rag doll from the impact but kept my footing, grappling with the creature. Its strength was much greater than my own.
It was Don, the mandrill. And somewhere nearby I could hear a strained whisper urging him on: “Get ’em, Don old boy. Go get ’em. That’s a good boy.” It was Sandoval, lying half-dead. Don had been protecting him.
The ape was going to tear me apart. There was simply no way I could stop it. He would tear me to bits, and I would never reach the sub. I tried gamely to push on in the hope that he would give up, but he ripped into me even more savagely, an engine of pure wrath. I had no feeling at all about him except an excruciating dreamlike sense of being held back, prevented from attaining my one vital goal.
Then suddenly there was a violent upheaval, and I broke free. That Voice, achingly familiar, spoke to me again: Go, Lulu. Hurry. While ya still can.
It was him, Mr. Cowper, risen to do battle with Don.
He and the baboon were locked in brute combat, wreathed in briny spray that gathered on them like scales and shattered with each blow. I hardly registered the fight—it was Cowper that had my attention, not as my father (I was immune to any such sentiment) but as a walking contradiction. He was neither a neutral presence like me nor shiningly mortal like Sandoval, yet both states coexisted within him, resonating something arresting and perverse: what Langhorne had called Homo perrenius . Only then did I grasp the utter paradox of that. The fleeting aura of life—so delicate that it could not be contained except in fragments of memory—clung to him along with his tattered robes, ennobling and elevating him to an exalted somethingness from which I was barred. Though dead, he had no reason to yearn for mankind. He was whole.
Hurry . . .
The baboon was gaining the upper hand—Cowper was nearly as frozen as I was, no match against that warm-blooded dervish. It broke his clutching fingers, ripped out his throat, all but tore his head off; but he maintained his grip, granting me time to escape. I moved away as quickly as I could, followed by the sounds of rending flesh and bone, sprinting across the water just as I used to do as a little girl, when rain made lawns into lakes and it was possible to walk on water if you just ran fast enough.
Then I did something very human: I went back for him.
In a few long, loping strides I was upon them, seizing the animal’s head under my arm and bending it backward as Cowper and I pinned its body between us. At that moment I felt vibrantly a part of the creature, warm and alive and full of feeling, squeezing it tighter and tighter in an ecstatic desire to merge. Leathery black paws flayed my face as the thrill reached a frenzied peak, then its neck snapped, and the beast went limp. All those overwhelming feelings died with it, leaving a vast hollow gulf in the center of things, across which Cowper and I regarded one another.
In that look, he made clear to me the price of being real: Mortal man’s sorrows mercifully die with him, and a Xombie feels no grief. Cowper had no relief on either count. Happiness is a transient feature of youth and purpose—it is pain that accrues over time, tempered only by the ultimate refuge of death. What he had done to me in life was only one of countless sins that would follow him into eternity, forever replenished and compounded by the futility of his existence. Cowper was haunted; he could never escape himself. All he wanted was oblivion. I stepped forward and took his mangled head in my hands.
The boat was sinking, the flower bed splitting open, and dirt trickling down the fissures as gigantic blocks of ice upended, shedding their thin skin of turf. The broad sailplanes, oriented vertically, slowly carved downward into the boiling swell until all that was left above was the bridge, the very top of the sail, where I had spent so much quiet time. Plumes of air shot upward like the spout of a sounding whale as the free-flooding compartments topped off. Almost gone.
I ripped Mr. Cowper’s head off.
Tucking it under my arm like a football, I scrambled up and down bucking slabs to the far end of the last iceberg just as the highest point of the submarine vanished in swirling eddies. Mum’s extinct voice spoke in my ear, Come on in, sillybean, the water’s fine. The ice was closing again with a tumultuous racket, and any second it would swallow me up or grind me to paste between porcelain walls. Far away in the dark, I could hear Sandoval screaming as Cowper’s body found him. Untroubled, I stood up straight and let myself fall forward into the menacing surf.
Gone. The boat was gone. My body slipped downward through roiling bubbles, down into that dark where something told me I belonged. Then my free hand chanced upon the rim of the bridge cockpit and grabbed hold. The sub had stopped descending—it could go no deeper here without scraping bottom. Suddenly the giant propeller, the screw, began to turn. Though hundreds of feet away, I could plainly hear its swish-swish as it started to push the enormous bulk in my hand. The submarine began to move forward, pulling me along with it.
Feeling the current like a breeze, I slipped my stiff legs into the cockpit, then braced myself in that little space—a rajah in his elephant howdah—with Cowper’s head on my lap. I could very nearly reach up and caress the slowly passing ceiling of ice, while beneath me I straddled a vast tube of warm air and light and unsuspecting humanity. I dreamed I could see myself down there among them, the living me, innocent of time, just celebrating our escape. I was a ghost, but I did not believe enough in my own existence to feel shortchanged. In that way I was content to fade . . .
Lulu.
That Voice again. It was not Cowper this time—or at least not him alone. Finally, as I leaned over the edge of the bridge, I fully understood the Voice and the collective will it represented.
There in the ocean gloom at the base of the sail I saw them: so many of the guys I had known in life, minus just a few, and many more I didn’t know. All of them were wrapped around the fairwater by the cord that had been threaded through their bones, like early seafarers lashed down before a gale. Even Julian was there, clinging tight as a starfish. All my Xombies.
I remembered Utik telling me of ancient Netsilik shamans who fearlessly dove to the bottom of the sea to force favors from the goddess Nuliajuk. Only I didn’t think this goddess would cooperate, and the scouring sea would pluck us off, one by one, until we were reduced to our hardy elements: individual Maenad microbes, dispersed by the currents. That was the closest we could come to death. Yes, for all practical purposes, this was death. The fellows had chosen wisely.
I closed my hardening eyelids and bid it come.
EPILOGUE
Dead? Obviously not, or I couldn’t be writing this now. In limbo was more like it. Limbo—I always thought that was a corny word. What about purgatory? Too religious. And terms like “netherworld” and “stasis” smack of cheap science fiction.
No, I was under a spell—I like that. That’s what it felt like: an enchanted sleep. My body was a beautifully preserved relic, completely inanimate, yet I hovered around it like a half-awake roving eye, blearily taking stock of the surroundings. I missed a lot; there were big gaps in my awareness, and I wasn’t absolutely certain any part of it was real.
For instance, how did I get into the submarine? It took me a while to realize that’s where I was, then I couldn’t make sense of it. I was in the wardroom, laid out inside the long glass case that usually held an inscribed silver platter with the boat’s King-Neptune-themed crest. They had dressed me in a modest nightgown and had put a satin pillow under my blue head. A tube from my neck carried blood the color of Concord grape juice to a spigot outside the case, where Dr. Langhorne appeared regularly to collect a bag, while the stern portrait of Admiral Rickover seemed to stare down di
sapprovingly from above.
At times I was alone. Other times a procession of men and boys, everyone I knew and some I didn’t, filed by the case as if in mourning. I couldn’t hear their murmured words, but it was fascinating nonetheless to witness my own funeral. So many sad faces—Coombs, Robles, Monte, Noteiro, Albemarle, Julian, Jake, Lemuel, Cole—some more surprising than others in that they were Xombies. Even Mr. Cowper was there. I felt him, somewhere unseen. The dead mingling with the living in perfect civility, if a little aloof, a little more alone in their blue skins.
How could this be? How was it that I, too, felt nearly at ease among all these mortals? How was it I didn’t burst from the case and begin strangling, willy-nilly? No, I had changed; I knew something I hadn’t before, knew it in every cell of my being: You can’t take it with you. The Xombie compulsion to salvage some rudimentary taste of life was debunked, futile, leaving me to rattle around eternity all by myself. The Xombie walks alone. That was the thought that filled my amorphous consciousness and defined my existence. That was my boogey man, always there, always peeking at me through the cracks. Eternity. Empty eternity. No hope of salvation. That was the difference: I knew this was all there was or would ever be.
The other Xombies also felt this hopelessness, I knew, and I sensed that they blamed me for it, that I was the source from which their existential fear flowed. Yet at the same time they loved me. They came forward with this strange mixture of resentment and reverence, each kneeling before Langhorne twice a day to receive a shot of human anguish deep in the lungs.
Finally, witnessing this communion day after day, I began to realize I was the mother of all these Xombies. That is, I was being milked to provide them with the means of civility. Without my blood, they would revert overnight to their guiltless, marauding state. They would lose themselves but gain oblivion . . . and peace. This was the conflict, the eternal war that raged inside of us. How long could our fragile undead souls weather such a storm?
The miracle that Dr. Langhorne and Sandoval had peddled to the Moguls out on the grass was far from a cure. It was closer to an addiction, with me the heroin. An addiction that might be driving us mad. At best it was a poor stopgap until we could get back to New England and hunt down Uri Miska.
For that was and had always been Langhorne’s plan. And now, at her bidding, they sought the true cure, the one with the potential to restore humankind. The enzyme circulating in our blood was only a preliminary phase of treatment—a short-term means of suppressing symptoms. It was imperfect, but Miska knew more. Miska would know everything.
Come on, sourpuss! It’s an adventure!
From time to time I would forget it was Dr. Langhorne talking to me (or talking to herself, as is more likely) and fall under the strange, vivid delusion that it was my mother by my side. For a brief instant the rift between present and past, living and dead, would be healed.
“You ever hear that joke, ‘What’s long and hard and full of seamen—A submarine’? It’s no coincidence this thing is a giant phallus, Lulu. It’s all about who’s got the biggest dick. It’s true. But you know what’s funny? You know what I noticed? Look at this submarine straight on, and its outline is an inverted Venus symbol. That means it’s our job to shake things up, turn this can upside down. What do you think?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer, and I wasn’t expecting to give one, but I felt my lips forming the words “Penis Patrol.”
“That’s okay, kiddo. No need to talk. You rest. You just rest.” In her voice I heard the same lonely mantle of déjà vu, of communication with spirits. It was all that held back the green vastness of the sea.
Then the moment would pass, and I would grasp after it, clutching at a wisp too fleeting to catch. I would feel the cold.
Here’s a fairy tale:
Once upon a time I was alive. The end.
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“A im 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. “God 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 Gonzales, 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 a 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.
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 whol
e head above. “Come on, chicken shits,” he called down. “Ain’t nothing’ 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 have 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 some place 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.
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 33
