Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

"Wait a second," Robles said, tethered to the rail and standing above them on the sail's crest. "Captain, there's something else out there. Drifting toward us."

They all trained their binoculars up the river.

"What now?" It was too dark to see properly, but Coombs could make out a long, black object moving downstream with the outgoing tide. A boat of some kind. It lazily floated toward them under the hurricane barrier. What the hell…? As it emerged into the moonlight, it began to resemble a strange canoe, with a shiny silver blade rising like a figurehead from its prow. "What is that?" he asked. "Hiawatha?"

"It's a gondola," Langhorne said. "Wow."

"A gondola? Like in Venice?"

"Yeah. It's because of-"

"It is a gondola," said Coombs queasily. "What the hell is a gondola doing here? Don't tell me: It's because of Firewater."

"WaterFire."

"Dan, can you see anybody in it?"

"No. It's too dark."

"We better throw some light on that, then."

"Or blow it out of the water."

"Either way, it'll make us conspicuous."

Kranuski snapped, "Are you kidding? Nothing's gonna make us more conspicuous than we already are. We can't let it near the hull-it could have a bomb in it… or worse."

Coombs thought about it, then said, "Rig the spotlight, quick. And pass up that carbine."

As Kranuski and Robles handled this, Coombs asked Langhorne, "In your opinion, could Xombies be tending those fires?"

"I don't know. Not ordinary ones, I would say."

"That's what I thought."

"But there's always the possibility…"

"What?"

"That Miska's out there."

Robles turned on the spotlight and swept its beam across the water. The eerie, drifting gondola suddenly stood out starkly from the surrounding darkness, as if pinned under a microscope. With its lacquered black hull and red velvet seats, it looked to Coombs like some kind of funeral barge, a weird, medieval specter lost in time and place. Discordant as those torches.

"There's somebody in there," Robles said urgently.

"Shit." They all raised their weapons and took aim, ready to pour fire down.

"Wait!" Robles said. "It looks like a little kid. He's not moving."

"Who gives a crap?" said Kranuski, wielding the rifle. "Let's sink the bastard before he does move."

"Hold up," Coombs said. "Can you tell if he's blue?"

"I don't think so, sir."

"You don't think you can tell, or you don't think he's blue?"

"He's not blue. He's definitely not blue. I can see him breathing."

"Try hailing him," Langhorne said.

To Kranuski's disgust, Coombs switched on the microphone, and said, "HEY, KID. CAN YOU HEAR ME?" His amplified voice echoed across the water. "LET US KNOW YOU'RE ALIVE, SO WE CAN HELP YOU."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a small, shivering hand rose into the light, and everyone on the bridge heard a deeply reassuring sound, a noise more welcome in its pure humanity than any words could be. A sound no Xombie would utter:

It was the high, thin whimper of a child.

Exercising extreme caution and a long hook, they wrangled the gondola alongside and took the boy aboard. Alice Langhorne gave him a sedative to calm him down. He was in shock, practically catatonic, and instantly fell into a deep sleep. All she had gotten out of him was that his name was Bobby. He looked about ten years old, filthy, and half-starved. You think this is our firebug? Coombs had asked her. Alice could only shrug-the poor kid didn't look capable of striking a match. It would be interesting to find out how he could have survived all these months, but in the meantime she thought it best to let him sleep.

After cleaning Bobby off, then treating all his minor cuts and contusions, Langhorne hooked the unconscious kid up to an IV drip and relegated his care to the other minors on board, the older boys in the Big Room. One of Phil Tran's medical trainees got the duty, a scraggly kid named Sal DeLuca-teenage son of the late Gus DeLuca. Tran assured her he was smart. Anyway, they had more than enough space back there, a regular Boys Town. And Alice had other things to think about.

"All hands prepare for exiting shore party, logistics hatch two."

Coombs's terse command rang through the ship, and everyone knew exactly what to do-Kranuski had drilled them on it, and Alton Webb made damn sure there were no mistakes. All doorways in the control section were sealed off and tightly dogged, leaving only a single passage leading from the quarantined third level to the open topside hatch. In that way, the crew would be insulated from any threat, and the unleashed Xombies had nowhere to go but up… and out.

Alice Langhorne was posted forward in the communications suite, the "radio shack," a tiny compartment in the far bow. Though she regretted not being able personally to escort her fellows topside, she knew it was more important that they begin to function alone-she wouldn't be there to hold their hands when they went ashore. She was seated at a computer console, wearing a radio headset and intently watching live video from the third deck. It was a split-screen image broadcast from two tiny digital cameras bolted to the late Ed Albemarle's blue skull-what Langhorne dubbed her "Xombiecams"-one facing forward and the other back.

When all was in readiness, Coombs called down to her from the bridge. "This is it, Alice. Proceed to move them out."

"Gotcha." Switching on her audio feed, she said, "Guys? Guys, listen to me. It's time to go up. Ed, open the aft door and move them out." She had tested this and was confident it would work, but it was still a relief to see the picture on the screen lurch into motion. "They're moving."

The gondola had been salvaged-there was no point in risking a raft if they didn't have to-and was secured to a cleat at the far stern, where the deck sloped underwater toward the boat's great rudder fin. Now Commander Coombs watched from his perch atop the sail as Xombies began to emerge from the logistics hatch and move aft down that long, long stretch of deck.

Though he was thirty feet above them, the sight of those things still made him uneasy. Surely it was utter madness to imagine they could be set loose like this and come back of their own volition. That they could be made to go on some kind of complicated scavenger hunt and even obediently return to the ship laden with groceries. Langhorne made it all sound so feasible… but she was crazy. And if she was crazy, that meant he was crazy, too, for listening to her-a zombie himself.

Coombs could never get over how they moved. There was something bizarre about it, a jerky precision like a windup toy. Buglike, that's what it was, like ants or flies, flickering so you couldn't quite take them in except in blinks. Yet at the same time they could be boneless as an octopus, fluid as wisps of smoke

It was fully dark now; Coombs couldn't see as well as he would have liked, but things seemed to be going as planned-far better than he'd expected, actually. So far so good. There were forty of them, all strung together on a cable, and he tried to keep count as they emerged:… twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

There was Albemarle, unmistakable from his size, an alarming, naked behemoth still clutching his big hammer from the factory. With his hammer and his video headgear, he looked almost human. Coombs watched as he loped to the gondola and swept aboard with barely a ripple. Several other Xombies also boarded the boat. They were the ones strapped with spare batteries, lights, and other devices that had to stay dry. As the gondola cast off, those left behind began slipping into the water, ducking under its forbidding black surface as easily as crocodiles from a riverbank.

Then, as if by magic, the gondola began to move. It glided away without any visible means of propulsion, and Coombs knew the creatures down there were pulling it, towing it as they walked along the murky bottom like some perverse Nantucket sleigh ride. He shook his head in sickly wonder.