Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

"Now watch," said Chiquita.

Hovering over Freddy's lifeless body, the hideous masked figure waited like a vulture for him to suffocate. It wasn't long. Suddenly Freddy's grisly patchwork armor started moving, seething, writhing against its stitches as though trying to rip itself apart. The stitches began to tear, bleeding blue, and all at once the hood flap popped off and skittered away across the planks, revealing Freddy's gaping Xombie face. One of the Tarbabies nailed the escaping skin with the sharp heel of his boot.

Freddy exploded-that's what it looked like. He erupted to manic life, a half-baked gingerbread man, his living armor attempting to tear itself loose from him… and he from it. But because every part was simultaneously recoiling from every other part, it had no way of breaking free except to rip loose of the staples and leap into space.

Twisting every which way, Freddy's bones snapped like twigs, his body flailing around the deck in manic convulsions, jerked in fifty directions at once. He rolled into the midst of the K-Thugs, and they went to work on him, trimming Freddy like a side of beef. The tattered remains of the living cloak tried to worm away, dragging pieces of mesh, but the savage Kalis squashed it underfoot like Italian peasants making wine. The other three boys screamed, begged, and finally had to turn away, weeping.

Righteous Weeks came down. Rappelling by his lariat to where Sal lay defeated, the big ex-con kicked the boy's sword away and leaned over him, peering through the scorched eyeholes of Sal's helmet.

"If y'all gonna be honorary Skinwalkers," he said gently, "first thing you gotta do is fetch your own skins. Can't be wearing another man's rig-that is a serious violation of Reaper etiquette."

"Damn straight," said Chiquita. "Every suit gotta be tailor-made; otherwise, it ain't gonna fit right, maybe pinch a little around the neck. Ever heard of pick your own lobster?" He knelt over a hatch in the floor and wrenched a rusty bolt aside. "Here it's pick your own Harpy." He pulled back the heavy lid.

The three boys were dragged over so they could see down inside. The dark space below was filled with a thick gray substance resembling petroleum jelly. Within those murky depths, countless pale blue human shapes slowly tumbled and thrashed, their actions impeded by the dense grease. One of them rose into the light, glistening under a thick layer of translucent goop.

It was Voodooman.

Taking up a long-handled gaff, Righteous said grimly, "We been through a lot, ain't we, Marcus? Sho nuff is a sorry world." To the boys, he said, "Take this as a lesson to you. This is what you get when you cheat your friends. Least I thought we was friends." Planting the pole on Voodooman's forehead, he pushed him deep under the muck. "Consider it an initiation: Every Reaper got to skin and dress they own Harpy. Ain't no ready-to-wear in this outfit, no off-the-rack, not when it comes to a real live ghouly suit. Just like you don't want to trust no fool to pack your parachute, every man gotta take responsibility for dressing his own self. We all strickly custom-tailored. Now, which one of you's gonna be first?"

"First to what?" Todd snarled.

"Why, jump in and fetch one."

"Fuck you," said Sal.

"Hey, looks like we got us a volunteer."

As the Reapers busied themselves maneuvering Sal over the gruesome well, the other two boys' attention was suddenly drawn elsewhere.

From over the barge's high gunwale, through a gap in the barbed wire, a mass of alarming newcomers appeared. Fluidly as serpents, they started spilling down onto the deck. Human yet inhuman, shapeless yet terribly familiar, mottled blue and fluttery-quick, with black smudges for eyes and gaping pits for mouths, they rose up to loom behind the hooded figures of the oblivious Kalis.

Sal saw Chiquita turn his head as if sensing something and found himself literally face-to-face with a hulking great Xombie. It was Big Ed Albemarle, dripping from the sea and still clutching his rusty hammer. Beside Albemarle were men and boys with whom Sal had once been acquainted, all deathly blue and slimy with algae: Julian Noteiro, Lemuel Sanchez, Cole Hayes, at least a dozen others who had died at Thule and been resurrected, recruited to serve Dr. Langhorne aboard the sub. But they were not Langhorne's creatures, they were Lulu's-Lulu's guys, her Dreadnauts. They had not come for Sal. They had come, finally, for her.

"Holy shit," Todd muttered.

"Damn," Ray said.

All hell broke loose.

The Kalis were quick, incredibly fast, and Sal realized why these people had survived for so long. They were the end product of a ruthless process of elimination that had begun months before, weeding out the weak and the reflex-impaired. Anyone who had to think twice was an early casualty. Those remaining were the cream of the crop, the instinctive stone killers, the naturally gifted who could practically kill in their sleep-a veritable Olympiad of murderers.

But the Xombies were quicker.

As a spatter of gunfire rained down from the upper decks, Chiquita swung his machete at Albemarle, slashing the bigger man's throat to the bone, but Albemarle indifferently clocked him with the hammer, shattering his mask and the skull beneath, catching Chiquita's limp body in his huge arms. Face revealed, Chiquita was a chinless man with bad teeth, born Roy Ortiz in La Paz, Mexico, who had invented his female alter ego in homage to his beloved mother Chiquita. Roy was one of the few K-Thugs who had been a cross-dresser even before the Agent X plague, even before jail.

Ed Albemarle opened his mouth wide-a bottomless pit as dark and cold as the vacuum of space-and covered Roy's lower face, sucking the air out of his lungs. The man's bony chest collapsed with a familiar, sickening crunch. Absorbing the Xombie's vitalizing infection, Roy's dead body swelled with manic energy, breaking away and landing on all fours like a human tarantula, bugged-out black eyes darting for prey.

In the first skirmish, half the Kalis went down, and the others appeared to be equally doomed, waiting only for their brothers-in-drag to pop back to life for the battle to be over. But they were far from resigned to their fate: Not only were they expert hand-to-hand fighters, armed to the teeth. They were also shielded from Xombie assault by their repellent coating of black ichor-this in addition to their molded carbon-fiber masks, steel neck braces, and twelve-gauge shotgun loads embedded in their Kevlar-padded false breasts. To hug one of them was to trip a Claymore mine.

The short lag time was enough to make it an unexpectedly equal battle: The Xombies were more occupied with subduing their immediate victims than with defending themselves against the remaining K-Thugs, who knew exactly where to strike in order to undo the undead.

One by one, Xombies fell thrashing to the deck, their major tendons severed at the roots and a compound of white phosphorous injected into their chest cavities with gas-powered morgue syringes that the Kalis kept strapped to their forearms for just such an occasion. A potent weapon under any circumstances, white phosphorous had a particularly lethal affinity for Maenad body chemistry: Any ghoul so injected rolled around spewing incandescent foam from its nose, mouth, ears, and other orifices, its body swelling up and erupting like a grade-school science project until it abruptly collapsed into a puddle of burning grease. The deck quickly became a filthy abattoir awash with Xombie gunk and slithering remains. From above, red specks of laser sights darted amid the action, exploding whatever they touched.

But very quickly-shockingly quickly-the Xombies were back on the offensive, their numbers replenished by hordes of new arrivals, as well as all the active severed limbs and body parts squirming underfoot. Such chunks now became a significant hazard, flopping around like rabid squirrels and latching onto passing ankles, scrabbling up under robes. Freddy's revenge. The battle became desperate, a chaotic scrum of flying blades and swearing futility, so that any second the boys expected to wind up alone on deck with an orgy of ghouls.