Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

Come on, come on, come on! It wasn't going to get any better the longer they stayed here; Kranuski was desperate to get under way, if they could just patch things together long enough to clear out. But whoever it was, the mystery bandit was still at large, jacking one key system after another.

Worse still, Rich couldn't shake the feeling that the perpetrator was watching him-that no matter where he went, he was being discreetly followed by some lurking presence. Gremlins. At first he thought it was paranoia, but several times now he had heard strange noises and turned around to find himself facing an empty passage… except for that one time when he caught the briefest peripheral flash of something round and pale disappearing into the ventilation bay-an indistinct balloon shape that his imagination filled in with Fred Cowper's gnomish features. I'm just tired, Kranuski thought, which he was, but it still disturbed him deeply. He badly wanted to believe it was his imagination, an optical illusion or maybe a trick of the light. Anything.

Rich was not prone to superstition or flights of fancy. He didn't believe in vengeful ghosts or other such Halloween nonsense-God knew it had taken him long enough to wrap his mind around the concept of Xombies, but his threshold of absurdity had been pushed far beyond its limit in these past three months, and he was determined to be realistic: He couldn't ignore any threat just because it clashed with his former sense of reality.

Certainly he couldn't think of any reasonable explanation for the weird, glistening trails he kept finding in the least-accessible parts of the ship, as though someone or something had dragged a slimy mop everywhere he, or it, went. It reminded him of a joke he once liked to tell, but which now kept running through his pounding head like a broken record: Why did God give women legs? So they wouldn't leave snail trails. It wasn't so funny now.

Then there was the business with the safe.

The captain's safe was supposed to be sacrosanct. He was the only one with its combination, and in ordinary times that responsibility would have represented a degree of military privilege that was far beyond merely commanding a warship. Within that tiny Pandora's box was all the awesome potential of a Trident nuclear submarine: code books, missile coordinates, mission profiles, classified technical specs, all the mission-critical logistical data needed to independently carry out a full-blown nuclear exchange.

Of course, all that stuff was long gone, removed by STRATCOM, along with the missiles themselves, when the boat was decommissioned. Except for a few Navy-surplus torpedoes, she was more or less toothless now, little more than a refugee scow, her mission reduced to carting around a valuable reactor until they could find someone in authority to give it to. If the ship's safe was in large measure what made the captain the captain, then what was he anymore but a petty bureaucrat? A school bus driver.

And it wasn't even so much that Kranuski's safe was empty. It was that it had been violated, scorched, with a big black hole where the combination lock should have been. The sight of that hole galled him no end, affronting his sense of military order. It was a constant reminder of the kind of undisciplined individuals he was dealing with now.

The empty safe was Fred Cowper's doing. That damned old man had broken into the safe during the brief few hours that he and his gang were in charge of the boat after Harvey Coombs was incapacitated. Captain Coombs had quickly recovered and relieved Cowper of duty, arresting him for mutiny, but not soon enough to safeguard the safe-Fred had wasted no time cutting that baby open and making free with its contents.

The safe had not been empty then. Aside from some reasonably current military intelligence and the only complete SPAM manifest, it had also contained a sample of an experimental Agent X antidote, salvaged from Miska's research lab and brought aboard by James Sandoval-Chairman Sandoval. Cowper must have instantly grasped the serum's hostage value. He squirreled it away and never gave it up, even under some pretty heavy interrogation, knowing he and his daughter Lulu were safe only as long as he held that secret in his head.

A lot of good it had done him, or that big-mouthed girl Lulu. From what Kranuski had seen, Miska's mysterious Tonic was no antidote at all but merely a kind of Xombie Prozac. Valuable enough in its way, he supposed, as a limited means of keeping small numbers of Xombies in check (although even that had not been borne out by Langhorne's shore party), but far from the grand hope for humanity he had been led to expect. Clearly, there was no such hope.

Looking at that black hole in the safe, Commander Kranuski had the creeping sensation that something inside was looking back at him. At times he even thought he heard things from it: ratlike scritchings in the night, an odd flibbery-flubbery noise, and, once, even a loud, metal slam that jarred him out of a fitful sleep. Or was that just a dream? Increasingly, he was having trouble distinguishing dreams from reality.

Stupid, he thought impatiently. And yet… for some reason, he couldn't bring himself to open the safe anymore. It was right there in his quarters, staring him in the face, but he just couldn't do it. He almost thought of asking Webb to take a look inside for him, make it seem like a casual thing. He would have if only Webb weren't already treating him like some kind of convalescent-home patient, going behind his back. Webb was a loose cannon, and Kranuski didn't want to cede to the man any more authority than he already had.

Strangely enough, Kranuski almost wished Fred Cowper was somewhere on board-he would have liked to consult with a more-experienced man about some of these issues. Someone other than Harvey Coombs. Someone who understood the terrible burden of ordering innocent people to their deaths so that the less innocent might survive… or the essential problem of captaining a doomed ship to its fate.

Of course, the rational part of him knew there was no such assistance to be found, not from Cowper's head or any other quarter. He was all alone.

"We have to get the hell out of here," Sal said, dabbing his split lip with a towel. "We got away from the Moguls; we can get away from these bozos, too."

They were back on the crane barge, their second evening as guests of the Reapers. Kyle had not come back with them from the casino, and the other four boys were nearly in a state of hysteria, compounded by injuries to their bodies as well as their pride: Refusing to return to the cargo barge without Kyle, they had been beaten, kicked, and all but dragged back by El Dopa's black-masked goons. Something had to be done.

"I agree with Sal," said Todd. "We need to get out of here before the shit hits the fan. Something big is going on, something they don't want us to know about. The ship's gotten so quiet, did you notice?"

The four boys sat in their box and listened to the sounds of hectic activity reverberating through the metal walls. Quiet? Sal thought. The thing rattled like a tin drum, with men returning from the day's foraging mission. But Todd was right-the commotion seemed unusually furtive. There wasn't the level of profane banter they had heard the day before, just murmurs of intense conversation. Already they had begun to learn the basic rhythms of life in this floating ark, and the near silence wasn't usual. Certainly it wasn't like the submarine, where people worked around the clock in shifts, and the Navy officers might turn up at any moment to make sure they were keeping busy.

On the barge, it was much more loose. An endless cycle of long siestas and longer fiestas, punctuated by short bursts of hard physical labor. More or less everyone stayed up late into the night and slept late into the morning, which was one of the prime luxuries the convicts had been denied in prison. Nevertheless, certain routines from incarcerated life continued to hold true: Domestic chores were relegated to the "gal-boys"-male hausfraus and pot-watchers-who provided sexual gratification and never went ashore. These were not the same as the Kalis, also known as the K-Thugs or Tarbabies-the fearsome transvestite junta responsible for home defense, whose cultish authority was nearly equal to El Dopa's. Then there were Skinwalkers or just Skins, Voodooman's clique, former rodeo hands and other such daredevil types who executed the foraging missions in return for the choicest pickings.