“What?”
“I know I was never much of a father to you.”
“I had no basis for comparison.”
“Still, you must’ve thought I was a real bastard all those years. I felt like one.”
“Then why didn’t you do something to change it?”
“I was human. Humans are fuckups, and I fucked up big-time. See, there’s something else your mother and I never told you.”
“What?”
“I’m gay … Or rather, I was gay. Now I’m just a head.”
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
“I shoulda told you while we were both still alive, and it woulda meant something.” His black eyes rolled back in his skull, lubricated by their greasy lids; his mouth worked like a gasping fish. “I’m—I’m … sorry.”
At Fred’s unexpected confession, I did something I hadn’t done since becoming a Xombie.
I laughed.
“It ain’t that funny,” he said.
Testing him, I asked, “So if you weren’t my father, who was?”
“Another Navy man—a NATO officer named Alaric Despineau. She met him while we were stationed in Europe.”
“So she cheated on you?”
“It ain’t that simple and you know it. We were all … confused. I was at sea for months at a time, which made it easy for me to pretend I had no part in it. Truth was, Grace needed something I couldn’t give her. He could.”
“You mean children.”
“Among other things. I had no understanding at the time and hung her out to dry. Now I see how she had no choice … any more than I did. Biology is a bastard.”
“What caused them to break up?”
“Your mother had an unfortunate attraction to men who weren’t available. It was her independent streak. Alaric was always away at sea, so Grace was stuck raising you alone. Over time they just drifted apart.”
“Who was Brenda?”
He blinked. “Brenda?”
“I just heard of a woman named Brenda Despineau.”
He paused a long time. “That was Grace’s first child. Your sister.”
“Sister. How come I never knew about her?”
“She was a good bit older. At first she helped raise you, but eventually she and your mother had a falling-out. Grace had troubles, as you know. Brenda left home as soon as it was humanly possible … and took your brother with her. She woulda taken you, too, if she could have.”
A brother now, too. I felt a long-dead nerve throb to life in my skull. “What happened to them?”
He shook his head. “Brenda didn’t want my help, or anybody’s. She was a real tough cookie. What she really wanted was you, but your mother took you and went on the run. After that, we all lost touch with each other for years. That is, until you and your mother found me.”
“You never heard from any of the others? Or bothered looking?”
“Honey, I don’t go where I’m not wanted. Just a little fatherly advice.”
“You’re not my father.”
“I can dream, can’t I?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PETROPOLIS
As we approached the north channel of the great Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the hydrophones detected curiously subterranean noises, rushing from one shore to the other. This wasn’t the clear swish of boat propellers but a deeper rumble, like bowling balls hurtling through a pipe.
“Traffic,” said Phil Tran, listening over the headset.
“Ship traffic?” asked Coombs.
“Traffic traffic—there’s some heavy machinery passing through the Bridge Tunnel. Big rigs.”
“I told you so,” said Alton Webb. “We should have come here in the first place.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” To me, Coombs asked, “Want to take a sighting?”
“A sighting … sure.”
“Periscope depth.” The command flitted through the ship like a dead leaf. Flesh and metal moved fluidly to comply.
“Periscope depth, aye.”
“Raise periscope. She’s all yours, Lulu.”
My stone-cold hands seized stone-cold handles, my stone black eyes drank in daylight. I walked the periscope in a circle, taking a series of pictures, then quickly lowered it.
“Anything to report?”
“Just that bridge causeway, about zero ten degrees. Visibility is bad.”
Coombs said, “It’s gonna take a miracle to get past that thing.”
“What exactly is the Bridge Tunnel?” I asked.
“You’ve never seen the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel? It’s only one of the engineering wonders of the world: twenty miles of highway crossing the mouth of the Chesapeake, with three elevated bridge segments and two offshore tunnels. The center bridge is actually out of sight of land and has a rest stop on an artificial island. I’d bet dollars to donuts they’ve got the north passage netted and probably mined.”
“Reapers again?”
“Or somebody more legitimate. Either way, they’re bound to not like us.”
“So what do you think?”
“You speak for the skipper. What does he think?”
“He thinks we don’t have any choice. They’re doomed if we leave them like this.”
“Concur. So how do you propose we get past their defenses?”
I consulted with Cowper, closing my eyes and putting my hand on my forehead like a cheap psychic communing with spirits. “The captain proposes that we look closer.”
“It’s risky. We’re out of range of their sonar buoys out here, but any closer, and they might ping us.”
“We need to know what we’re up against.”
“Long as we don’t find out the hard way. Once they know we’re here, we lose all our advantage.”
“Oh, not all our advantage … ”
We proceeded south on the surface, the submarine’s fair-water silhouetted against the sun as it approached the bay’s south entrance. Coombs and Robles climbed up to the bridge cockpit and scanned the sea with binoculars. Neither shore was visible, but the elevated causeway crossed the horizon, abruptly cut short where it dipped underwater—a bridge to nowhere.
Nearing the deep channel, we submerged, running silent right to the mouth of the bay. It was strange to think of that huge tunnel passing beneath us, cars and trucks driving beneath the bottom of the sea. Just beyond rose a strange black tower, jutting into the sky like a gigantic sentinel.
Before we could discuss it, I heard a high-pitched whirring noise from outside the hull. The unmistakable whine of a high-speed propeller.
“What is that?” I demanded.
“Torpedo,” said Vic Noteiro. “MK-60. We must have triggered a CAPTOR mine.”
“Everybody brace for impact,” said Robles.
Before we could brace or do much of anything, a massive shock wave ran the length of the ship, causing floors to buckle and loose objects to go flying. We also went airborne, banging around the works like crash-test dummies, which probably would have killed some of us if we weren’t already dead. But everyone just got up and went back to work, leaning right to compensate for a sudden list to port.
“Full reverse,” ordered Coombs.
“Full reverse, aye.”
“Won’t they hear us?” I asked.
“Can’t possibly make more noise than we already have. Damage reports.”
Phil Tran said, “Looks like we caught a torpedo broadside, port midships, between frames sixty and seventy. Pressure vessel is intact, but there’s a breach in the outer hull—we’ve lost the main port ballast tank. We’re also losing hydraulic pressure on the aft port stabilizer. Reactor efficiency is down by sixty percent and still dropping—looks like damage to the fuel rods.”
“Any sign of pursuit?”
“Not yet. The mine was probably a stray.”
“Just in case, get us below the thermocline and play dead.”
“If we go too deep in this shape, we won’t have to play dead.”
“We
have to risk it.”
We stabilized the boat as much as was possible at the bottom of the sea. The damage was severe, but not immediately critical; we could still limp along.
Under cover of darkness, we tested the buoyancy and hydraulic controls, surfacing the periscope and slowly cruising the northern Virginia coast, studying the barrier islands at full spectrum and full magnification. We knew from the charts that there were many quaint tourist towns and fishing villages all along these shores, but not a single light was visible. The place looked deserted. It felt deserted.
The only aura of human life came from the south entrance to Chesapeake Bay, a dim glow like an untended storm lantern. As we got closer, we could see the glow was coming from a black tower sticking out of the water. It was the giant structure we had seen just before being torpedoed. My thought was, One if by land, two if by sea.
“Well, this is it,” said Lieutenant Robles. “Looks like somebody’s home.”
“I recognize that thing,” said Alton Webb. “That’s Petropolis. What they call a spar platform—some thirty wellheads doing directional drilling. In normal operation, it can pump around sixty thousand barrels of oil a day. What you see there is only the tip of the iceberg; there’s a lot more of it underwater, fixed by catenary mooring lines to the bottom.”
“Since when is there oil drilling at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay?”
“There isn’t. It’s been moved here from the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Why?”
“Probably to guard the entrance to the bay.”
Coombs said, “If there are sentries in that platform, I think we can assume the Chesapeake is being defended. We’ve already run into one torpedo, it would be foolhardy to go any closer.”
“Concur,” said Robles. “So what’s next?”
Robles and Coombs looked at me, though they were really looking through me to the invisible presence of Fred Cowper.
I said, “We have to get to those guys in the tower.”
Coombs was hesitant. “If we do anything to give ourselves away, their defenses will zero right in on us. They’re broadcasting on ULF, so we know they intend submarines to hear them. We should be prepared for a trap.”
“I doubt they’re expecting anyone like us. Besides, we don’t have much choice at this point. What else are we here for? If we have to abandon the boat, this is as good a place as any.”
“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.
Xombies: Apocalypso Page 17
