Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

Carpet remnants, Sal thought. Scrap leather. He watched, revolted, as those bags-as well as Lulu and the captive Xombies at the stern-were hoisted away by crane.

"Fun's over, gentlemen," said Voodooman. Out of his flesh suit, wearing shorts and flip-flops, he was revealed to be a knobby-kneed older black man with gray in his beard. "Go on up."

They were led around the deck to where a rope ladder dangled from the mountain of shipping containers. There were more ladders up to the higher tiers. It reminded Sal of pictures he'd seen of an Indian pueblo in New Mexico.

Voodooman said, "We pull these ladders up after dark, so you don't need to worry none about Harpies kissin' on you in the night."

The boys climbed to the next level, following as the man briskly walked them around the first shelf of the pyramid. It was like the sundeck of a very unruly cruise ship, littered with deck chairs and sun umbrellas and just plain litter. They passed a port-a-john on a plank and were told to remember its location. At intervals there were holes cut in the metal floor, and at one of these the boys were directed to go below.

"Just like on the submarine," Kyle said, climbing down the ladder.

"Yeah."

It wasn't quite the same as the sub though, didn't have that subterranean heaviness, that density that always made Sal feel like he was locked inside a bank vault. This felt more like a barn: stinky but well ventilated, and not nearly as claustrophobic.

First they descended into a long shipping container loaded to the ceiling with cases of soda pop. Open at one end, it faced into a fluorescent-lit corridor under the pyramid, and they were taken down this narrow passage to another container-a bare box about the size of a bus and nearly as comfortable, with dozens of hammocks and folding cots, a hundred-gallon barrel of water, soap, rolls of paper towels, and a washtub. The perforated walls rang with raucous sounds of men.

"This is my crew's bunkhouse here," said Voodooman. "We'll let you use it for now, just until you get fixed up. All I ask is that you don't bring any food in, on account of the rats."

"Rats?" squeaked Freddy.

"What food?" asked Kyle.

"What food?" The man seemed to find this amusing. "When you get hungry, just head on down the passage-I'm sure you'll find something."

He left them alone, and the boys considered their situation. It was all so overwhelming, and they were so exhausted after the long, terrifying, tragic day, that they barely had the energy to discuss the situation.

"What do you think?" Sal asked softly.

"I don't know," said Todd, yawning. "Looks like they don't know much about us or the sub, which is good."

"I agree. They obviously think the boat's here to hook up with them and get supplies for some kind of bogus 'provisional government.' Sounds a lot like MoCo to me."

"Maybe it's true," Kyle offered. "Did you ever think of that? That would explain why Coombs brought us here in the first place, and why the crew mutinied."

The boys lay stunned as this possibility sank in.

"Shit, man, you're right."

As they were mulling this over, one by one, the exhausted boys fell asleep.

On one level, Lulu was aware of her body being rudely stripped from the jagged spike upon which it had been impaled, her gaping, shredded body cavity huge and drafty as a hollow tree. She felt herself being bound up with baling wire and bagged in coarse burlap, then tossed and banged around like a sack of bulk mail. While this was going on, she remained perfectly inert, as immune to rough handling as a rag doll, her consciousness dwelling elsewhere, out there, up where the stars pooled, carried along on tides of gravity and time. But it was not the immensely distant phenomena that held her attention. There was something else going on up there, something much closer to home, close and drawing nearer every minute-an amorphous paisley shape in the void, white on black, fuzzy as smudged chalk on a blackboard and crude as a child's drawing of a tadpole: a bulbous head with a long, trailing tail. Invisible to the naked eye, and insignificantly miniscule by astronomical standards, this eyeless object seemed to stare right back into Lulu's mind as though shining a spotlight on the back of her skull-no, not on her, but on Earth itself, the whole planet. Fixing upon it with the obsessive fertility of a sperm contemplating an egg. It was coming, this thing, not directly but on a wide, looping intercept, using the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter as slings to multiply its force. It was coming. How she knew this she didn't know, nor why. The knowledge came unsought, delivered upon her like an unsigned threat. What did it mean? It occupied the space of dreams, but whether this was dream, vision, sheer figment of her imagination, or impending truth, Lulu didn't know… or care. She was barely capable of caring. To her it was merely interesting-an abstraction like everything else.

Punish Mint, said a voice in her head. Punish Mint Gum. The sound of that voice had more of an effect on her than being skewered on a pike, more than having her skull fractured through burlap; it actually caused her to wince. Within the stifling bag, a blue tear ran down Lulu's dusty dead cheek, shed by a tear duct that instantly closed up shop, withering like a dried flower and being sucked up in her head. The last tear of her residual humanity.

Mummy, she thought.

They opened a trapdoor, opened the neck of her sack, and dumped her down the well. From one darkness to another, deeper, Lulu landed headfirst in a sump of cold grease, a gummy tank of artificial amniotic fluid that enfolded and encased her, making the least movement arduously slow… had she wanted to move. But she didn't. She was content to float, to feel. And she wasn't alone. There were hundreds of others buried around her, bodies entwined every which way like fossils in a tar pit, or flies in amber.

And one of them was her mother.

They woke to the sound of music. Not music, actually, just a beat, a powerful stomping of feet that caused the metal walls to vibrate. It was the middle of the night.

"Sounds like a party," Sal said grimly.

"Rock the house," said Kyle, rubbing his eyes. "Where's it coming from?"

"One way to find out."

They woke Todd, Ray, and Freddy and left the room, heading down the corridor. There was no one around. Some of the truck trailers had been set a few feet apart, creating a maze of narrow passages deeper into the stack, and the boys ventured down one of these. Following the music, they entered a crevice that got narrower and narrower before suddenly opening on a much larger space.

"Daaaamn."

A kind of courtyard spread out before them, an open-topped hall perhaps a hundred feet long, with sheer walls of stacked shipping containers and the night sky visible through a web of rope netting. The place was bright with laughter and the yellow flames of torches, dense with voices and music and the aromas of marijuana and hot popcorn. Half the people were making music of one kind or another-a lush cacophony of mismatched instruments and voices that sounded like the world's biggest jug band-and the rest were stomping and singing along. The song was "O-O-H Child," by The Five Stairsteps.

"I guess this is the party," Kyle said.

"No duh."

"Well, howdy, boys!" It was Voodooman. They hardly recognized him now, a blinding apparition in a hot pink suit and ten-gallon hat. He looked like a Nashville novelty act. "Glad you could make it! How do you like our little pleasure dome? Feel free to mingle, and help yourselves to the grub!"

Help yourselves-that was the invitation of a lifetime.

The room was a hoard of treasure, a moveable feast heaped high with vast quantities of luxury goods and non-perishable goodies of every kind, amid which the crowd milled freely, sampling at will. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet in a bulk food warehouse. But Sal felt too conspicuous, too vulnerable to join the free-for-all. He and the other boys were still sick from the convenience-store splurge, sick from losing friends and brothers, sick with worry and confusion over what to do next. They couldn't relax, much less enjoy themselves.