Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

"Holy shit," he said, skull ringing.

"What's wrong?" asked Grover.

"Didn't you see that? Somebody winged my coin back at me. Sucker nailed me good, too; ahmo have a goose egg."

"Shit, man-an inch lower, and you'd be wearing an eye patch for the rest of your life."

"It's more a them damned kids, gotta be." Struck with a notion, Weeks shouted, "Come on out, boys, we ain't gonna hurt you none. We're on your side. I heard tell from your friends that you ain't hardly had a square meal since you first set foot on this barge and that the men here don't treat you no better than damn dogs. That ain't right. If you can help us, we'll put a stop to that. Sooner we can talk turkey with you and the rest of the crew, the sooner we'll get your bellies so full of ham and beans and biscuits and bacon and grits and corn bread and applesauce you won't never even have room for the pecan pie. We know what it means to be prisoners, to be shut up in a hole where you can't even reckon the days. Come out, and you'll be part and parcel of every decision we make-it's a democracy. Come be one of us, and we'll sure be glad to have you. It's a big, beautiful world out there, enough for all."

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.