Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

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, watching 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.

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.