As Righteous spoke, he began to hear furtive scufflings from above, sounds like many feet pattering along metal ledges, filtering downward with stealthy urgency.
"Shit, there they are," said Grover.
Weeks could see them now: pale, gangly teens loping with unhurried speed along invisible black cliffs, some sliding and leaping down invisible ladders to the lowest balconies, where they spread out along the edge like a jury, while others gathered atop high outcroppings of webbed cargo. They were wraiths, seriously underfed and pale as grubs, with the haunted eyes and starkly jutting collarbones of concentration-camp inmates.
"These dudes been doin' some hard time all right," muttered Grover.
There were quite a few of them, fifty or so, but not nearly enough to present any serious threat to the growing ranks of armed Reapers who now covered the bottom deck from end to end. Guns, hell, Righteous thought. These boys look so sickly you could probably blow them over with a stiff breeze.
"All right, here's the deal," he called up. "We got no quarrel with you boys, but we just lost some of our best men back there, and we're a mite tired of games, so if you could just lead us to whoever's in charge, we'll be putting this submarine of yours back on a payin' basis."
The boys remained silent, watching the men with the mute fascination of a lost tribe of aborigines.
"What's wrong with you? No habla ingles? Come on!" Righteous aimed his weapon up at one of the nearest spectators, and said, "You. Come on down, son, and talk to me."
The boy didn't move; didn't even seem to register the words.
The silence grew awkward… then aggravating. Prison had made Righteous and the rest of the men very sensitive about being ignored. Shaking his head, General Weeks said, "What we got us here is a failure to communicate."
"Hey, Righteous," said Grover urgently. "Did you notice something about them kids?"
"What?"
"They ain't wearing no gas masks."
There was a missed beat as Weeks digested this, then suddenly he and all the other men started to hear something underfoot. Sweeping their acoustic beacons down into the machinery, they were taken aback to see movement amid all the tubes and tanks, a whole lot of squirming shapes: slick body parts wriggling forth from the shadows, issuing from channels under the decking, extruding from the deep crevices of the boat's intimate plumbing.
"Holy shit! Pull back! Everyone out!"
As the men tried to retreat they found the exit jammed, the line stalled by an equal and opposite force coming in. Their own rear guard, who had been posted along the upper decks, were now in full flight, pursued downward by the plague of lively human remains.
"What's going on up there?" Righteous shouted furiously. "Go back, go back-ain't no way out but up!" He tried shooting to get their attention, but there were already half a dozen gun battles going on to determine who was coming and who was going. Shit, he thought. What would Voodooman do? Fighting was no good; somehow he had to get above the Xombie tide, and fast. The narrow deck was becoming a precarious place to be. Some men were leaping across to higher beams and islands of machinery, staking claims above the squirming charnel horde.
To Alice Langhorne, Weeks shouted, "How do we get out of here? Show us the way up, or I'll cap your ass!"
She only smiled that infuriating smug smile.
"Fuck you, bitch," he said, and shot her in the belly.
Langhorne was blasted backward, tumbling into the bilge.
Picking his way over beams and catwalks, Weeks tried to find an opening through to the next level, but all he found were narrowing spaces packed with webbed cargo and machinery-dead ends. And all the while those boys stared down blankly from the mezzanines as though watching a play.
"You little bastards better show us the way up there or so help me God there ain't gonna be one of you left standing by the time I'm through." They ignored him.
Panic began breaking out among the men as crawling remains got among them, swarmed over them: "It's on me, it's on me, shit!-"
That was enough. Righteous started shooting, shot boys in the front and boys in the back, his shotgun pellets ripping through their shirts and flaying their translucent skin. The boys faltered, fell…
… then got up again.
Two specters rose out of the tumultuous gloom. The tall one was Alice Langhorne, glowing unearthly pale like some screen siren from the age of silent film. The other was Lulu Pangloss.
"Come on down, you guys," Lulu called, her unearthly, cool voice echoing across the galleries-not loud, yet pure and clear as a bell amid the screaming chaos. As the boys started coming, she said, "Don't worry-they don't bite."
"You," Weeks said in furious despair as he loosed his remaining firepower, shucking the empty shells into space. The soft antipersonnel rounds were as chisels in soft butter, mushrooming and blooming as they passed through the advancing boys, whittling their bodies into modernist sculptures.
Yet still they came, so that Righteous knew this was it: The Big Day. And he was glad.
"What the hell's going on down there?"
You been played, brother. Shoulda knowed it was a trap-damn! There had been tumultuous sounds of fighting, then the submarine abruptly fell silent. Without warning or explanation, all contact was broken off; even the men posted directly below the hatch had disappeared and wouldn't answer. It made no sense-a hundred men couldn't just vanish out of the blue like that. Not these men. But no reinforcements had been called for, and El Dopa was reluctant to send any more until he knew exactly what they were up against.
He wanted to abandon this cursed submarine at once, but the truth was he couldn't afford to. His forces needed a secure base of operations, at least until they could get their shit together. He sure as hell wasn't going back to that casino in the dark, even if his men had searched it from top to bottom and assured him it was deserted. With the Harpies loose, he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to sleep there again. How could everything have gone so wrong so fast?
First, he had been jarred awake by the shooting upstairs in the suite occupied by Uncle Spam's bravos. That wasn't so unusual-those maniacs were always blasting away at something or other, but usually they did it outside. Then there had been a spell of calm, followed by sounds of someone-or some thing-skittering across the balcony and down the stairs. At that point he dispatched his Kali Thugs to check it out. As they went up, weapons at the ready, jingling noises could be heard from the vicinity of the Xombie Generator, or Gen X-what his people called the Harpy Jukebox.
And that was when all hell broke loose. El Dopa still didn't know exactly how it happened, but one thing he did know was that whoever was up there must have pulled the cotter pins that held all his captive Harpies in place. Free of those pinions, they slid off their racks with the ease of greased rotisserie chickens. Terrifying blue chickens.
It was a close thing-much too close. If not for his body-guards taking the hit, he would never have had the valuable seconds he needed to escape. But once he was safely in the raft and paddling away, he realized his troubles were only beginning: The other barge was at war, besieged by a zillion more Harpies. It wasn't until hours later, when his surviving troops were safely aboard their lifeboats and trying to figure out what to do next, that El Dopa learned that the three Jet Skis he'd seen leaving the scene were those boys from the submarine. They had stolen Reaper gear and Reaper boats, and trashed an entire barge just to cover their escape. Most disturbing of all, the whole plot had been cooked up by one of his most trusted lieutenants, Marcus Washington, aka Voodooman.
That was when he and his men came to the conclusion that there was only one thing to do: trade up.
El Dopa wished he was as confident now-things weren't playing out quite as he had hoped. An entire phalanx was gone, and the follow-up party he dispatched below had also vanished without a trace, so that now the men were balking at going down there again. Helpless to initiate any action, he felt marooned, as if he had been banished to sit here in limbo, watchin
g his men mill like ants on the endless deck of a haunted submarine, gradually overthrown by the cruciform shadow of its baleful black sail. Night was coming on fast.
All right, this was long enough-if Righteous Weeks was alive, he would have reported by now. Time to blow the motherfucker wide open. Charges were wired and ready; all that was required was to move the boats off to a safe distance. Once the submarine was breached-its conning tower ripped clear off and its top deck peeled back and gaping open like a giant Jiffy Pop-he'd take the rest of his men and see if there was anything inside worth salvaging… or any survivors worth saving. He didn't expect there would be.
That was when the lid came off all by itself.
Betty Boom was standing directly over the forward hatch, closing it over the shaped charges to amplify their force, when suddenly the whole topside of the sub started popping open. Not with explosions, but mechanically, hydraulically, as all twenty-four enormous Trident missile doors sprang from its flush black surface, flipping outward like thick steel petals and catapulting the men and equipment on them out into the harbor. Mooring lines stretched across the sub's deck were either snapped or yanked out by their cleats, or they jerked entire boats out of the water to smash against the upraised hatches as though spiked by giant Ping-Pong paddles, leaving them dangling brokenly, dripping fuel.
Observing the spectacle from his command yacht, El Dopa was spared either the indignity of being launched into the sea or the injury of falling down one of those twenty-four wells that had suddenly opened in the sub's deck. He did have a moment of acute embarrassment when he screamed for retreat, expecting any second to be hit with a barrage of nuclear missiles. But there were no missiles and not enough boats left to retreat. When, after a few minutes, it became clear that nothing was happening, a Reaper lieutenant named Bone Voyage radioed him from the sub.
"There's no missiles down there," the man said. "It's hollow-a big, empty shell. Can't see nothing in the dark, but we're gonna get some lights on it."
No missiles? So it was a bluff? The mother of all motherfucking bluffs! To cover his embarrassment, El Dopa called his armada back and ordered a wholesale assault. The sub was wide open now, ripe for invasion. Whatever was happening, it was imperative he regroup his scattered forces and get some lines down there, or if not that, a shit-load of TNT. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Organizing the few hundred men who hadn't been knocked unconscious or drowned, El Dopa ordered his cruiser alongside the sub, and shouted, "I'm personally taking charge of this operation! Everyone who can fight is to follow me! We need lines and sharpshooters up there, now!"
Loading an extralong clip into his nickel-plated Uzi, he boarded the sub at its far stern and rallied his people. Cautiously approaching the missile bays, they trained spotlights on that double row of hazy pits, each one seven feet wide and vanishing into unknown depths. The lights didn't penetrate far. Watching his footing, El Dopa leaned over the abyss and peered inside.
"Hello!" he called. "If anyone can hear me down there, sing out so we can help you."
At first there was nothing, just dense smoke swirling like on the surface of a polluted well. El Dopa got a whiff of tear gas and had to retreat, coughing. Then movement-something rising out of the smoke: an eruption like pale bubbles, blooms of strange-shaped gourds, a cornucopia of unspeakable skinned fruit.
When he saw what it was, El Dopa fell back, shouting incoherently, shooting wildly, his mind ticking off the limited options still available to him and his men. The way he saw it, the only feasible one was that they all jump overboard and blow up the submarine. Blow it up whether they could find a usable boat or not, whether they could get clear or not. Blow it up blow it up blow it up. Just go!-there was no time for anything else.
But in the time it took him to think it, even that time ran out-ran out like his ammo, like his last hope-and the roiling, bulging, breaking mass of undead flesh fell upon him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
OCTOPUS'S GARDEN
In the last extremities of panic and exhaustion, with daylight receding above and only green depths below, Sal DeLuca tried to breathe by gulping the cold, cold water. It was nauseatingly salty, heavy as wet cement, and his lungs rebelled at receiving it. He convulsed, his chest heaving to expel the alien fluid, then slacked and opened wide to the sea.
For a few more seconds he was still conscious, strangely calm, feeling the cold radiating outward from his flooded core, and the soothing dark stealing over him-there was nothing to be afraid of, and never had been. A rush of joy filled his skipping heart… and then, just like that, he was gone.
There was a momentary lull, when Sal's dead body gently touched bottom and began to sway slowly in the current. Then, suddenly, he started to dance, to flail and twist, to jerk limply in all directions as if tugged by invisible strings. Pieces of his outer suit ripped loose, leaving puffs of inky liquid as they flapped against their metal fastenings, unzipping themselves and tearing away, only to spin haplessly in the gloom, trailing bits of metal and fabric. In a few minutes Sal was stripped naked, having kicked off the last few shreds of rebelling Xombie tissue along with his clothes.
He was back.
Snapping his sprung joints into place, feeling the teeming armies of his body forging soft new cartilage and tougher ligaments, he looked around at the interesting surroundings. Awwwwwsommmme, he thought.
The river, which had seemed so murky and dark to his former sight, now glowed with a hundred thousand sources of pale light. Luminous bodies filled the green depths like so many oil lamps, a vast migration sweeping slowly out to sea.
They were all Xombies. And Sal was one of them.
There was an explosion-then another. The shock waves slammed Sal into the muddy riverbed, ringing his skull like a gong. Within that deafening sound, he could hear the crane barge shearing apart, its steel containers ripping like tinfoil as huge bubbles of force ballooned outward and upward, casting tons of scrap far out onto dry land. In a second, all that was left were black ribs of settling wreckage and oily whirlpools spinning apart downstream.
He could see bodies and parts of bodies floating down all around him, all the myriad bits and pieces moving independently, a glowing exodus from the barge's ravaged hull. His attention was drawn to the surface, up to the brightest lights of all, a great raft of votive candles bobbing on the waves. A human chandelier of living beings, survivors-fast-burning tapers of mortality, soon to be snuffed.
It was a fleet of boats to which the men had escaped and where they were now consolidating their survival, gathering their forces, and planning their next move. The futility of this effort wrung Sal's dead heart like a tragic chord of music: If they only knew.
Sal wasn't the only one; all the Xombies yearned to in tervene, but they were too heavy to swim, and in any case, the ebb tide was against them, pushing them downstream like a powerful wind. It was more than the tide: There was something else drawing them that way, a distant choir calling for them to come. So they walked with the current as though the river itself was the glorious force of their longing, as marchers in a vast candlelight vigil, parading down a valley to a rendezvous at sea. A final revival.
Across the intervening depths, Sal could sense many familiar auras: Lulu, Kyle, Russell, Derrick, Freddie, and most of the other boys from the shore party; Ed Albemarle, Julian, Jake, Lemuel, and Cole; Voodooman and a whole host of former Reapers, as well as Chiquita and many fallen Kalis, now shed of their masks and the mortal fear that imposed them. Even Uncle Spam was there, his riven body made strangely graceful in this octopus's garden of algal mats and junk cars. All were innocents again, baptized by the purifying waters of Agent X. Children of Uri Miska.
Born again, Sal was called back to the steel womb from which he had come, to the place they were all being shepherded: back to the boat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I AM THE WALRUS
The next day they went for a walk. It was easier getting out of the cylinder than it had been
getting in; turned out there was a small padlocked door at the base, hidden behind the bushes. Bobby felt funny, but for once he wasn't the least bit afraid.
Downtown Providence was dead, totally deserted, and as they strolled down Fountain Street, Bobby and Joe had to tread carefully over broken glass and other wreckage that had issued from burnt-out shells of buildings. Most structures were still intact, however, particularly two enormous masks of comedy and tragedy, which had been fashioned out of steel mesh and hung above the sidewalk. The masks contained black nests of bones-the charred remains of many women.
Circling back, they came to a massive brick edifice, the Providence Place Mall, which had been designed to resemble the mills that once dominated the city skyline, and it did, overshadowing even the great marble State House. The mall overlooked an artificial pond, and actually straddled its polluted tributary canal, which meandered sludgily under an archway beneath the soaring windows of the food court.
The old man was whistling a familiar tune, "This Land Is Your Land," when they saw the horsemen.
There were four of them, tattooed berserkers on blinkered police horses, and they burst galloping from a hidden tunnel by the skating rink. There were vehicles there, too, and other, more monstrous beings on foot: steel-stitched grotesqueries charging from every direction.
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