eroding. In places the line started breaking up into fractal eddies of hand-to-hand fighting. To the boys up front, who were taking their sweet time boarding the sub, these must have seemed more like fringe disturbances at a rock concert than a desperate losing battle, but for us at the rear it was doom breathing down our necks: medieval combat and middle-school fire drill rolled into one.
Then Cowper was at my side, splendid in his dress whites. 'Don't get trampled!' he shouted over my head, 'We'll make it!'
'When did you manage to change your clothes?' I asked.
'I always come prepared.'
'We can't all fit in that submarine.'
'Sure we can,' he said. 'You see those big cylinders by the road? Those used to hold ballistic missiles, but they were taken out to make room for cruise missiles and SEAL teams. That refit's been postponed indefinitely, which leaves a big empty space inside the missile compartment-you'll see. Don't worry.'
I wished he looked more confident himself.
As the last of us were helped down from the platform by furiously yelling submariners-'Get out of the way! Down, down! Move your asses!'-the amount of shooting redoubled, and I was shocked to see how many Xombies were massed on the landing above. We were becoming outnumbered. Spent shells tinkled down the sides of the sub like slot-machine tokens, and icy water splashed me as bullet-riddled demons stage-dived off the edge to fall into the depths beneath the pier. The water was soon packed with thrashing bodies.
Passed bucket-brigade fashion along a line of jumpy crew-men, I finally made it up onto the sub's runwaylike deck, its entire length crowded with milling refugees. Above us soared the mammoth black cross that was the vessel's conning tower, a steel Golgotha beckoning the pilgrims with salvation.
Waiting my turn to go below, I prayed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They weren't letting us below.
'The hatches must be kept clear,' shouted someone at the head of the crowd. 'Ship's personnel must have free access or we cannot cast off! Make room!'
A squall of protest and pleading met this development, but we were packed too tightly to riot, and in any case, it was only those boys near enough actually to see the hatches who really objected-the rest of us knew we weren't getting below anytime soon. The sub was hundreds of feet long and the Xombies all but upon us.
We watched helplessly as they spilled over the landing, scrambling for the best crossing and leaping like grotesque pirates for the stern. Albemarle's thinning rear guard did its best to hold them off, but the footing down there was terrible: a slippery ramp to the sea. Men fell by the dozens, locked in death grips with twistedly grinning monstrosities as they slid out of sight. Every loss set off a new a chorus of grief. Cowper was there, and I dreaded the moment I would see him grappling for his life or being dragged into the water.
At some point the shooting stopped, and I heard people say, 'They're out of ammo.' No sooner had this idea been relayed through the crowd than there was a commotion up front.
'What's going on?' I asked, as boys around me frantically craned their necks to see.
An obese, Buddha-faced kid nearby replied, 'The crew have all gone below.'
'Maybe they're getting more bullets,' I said.
'They've closed the hatches.'
A sickening weight seemed to press the air out of us.
'Well, that's it,' someone said calmly. 'We're dead.'
'We've been played,' another boy agreed.
'They let us on the boat, wait until we good and trapped, then lock us out. All they gotta do now is wait- frickin' Exoids'll do the rest.'
'Shit, man.'
I didn't know what to believe and wasn't sure they did either. 'Let's not jump to conclusions,' I said shrilly. 'We don't know what they're doing down there.'
'Shut up. They got food, they got water, they got air, they got power. They're sittin' pretty.'
Not everyone was taking it as stoically as these few boys. Elsewhere on the deck, the babble of panic could be heard: a hundred variations on the theme of, 'They can't just leave us out here!'
Turning on me, a wild-eyed boy with a hairnet said, 'This is all your fault.'
'God, shut up,' I groaned.
'If you hadn't come along, none of this would've happened.'
'You are so stupid.'
They all closed in around me like hostile savages, grimy hands reaching for my arms, my hair, my throat.
Completely exhausted, I could think of nothing to say or do. Time stopped, and everything froze into a weird tableau, jittering like film snarled in an old projector. Wait. Vibration-the deck was vibrating. Whitewater boiled up around the rudder. From one end of the submarine to the other, a desperate, bedraggled cheer broke out.
We were moving.
It was a sickening, slow race for time. The huge submarine took forever to get going, while Exes were fast overwhelming the lowest part of the stern. It was a giant blender down there. After the propeller started, there had been a general retreat up to the safety cable, but the enemy (mainly male ones, I should say) had no such qualms. They continued leaping to the slippery slope in droves, heedless of being sucked under, and were picking off our rear guard.
Yet the sense that we were moving, the renewed hope of escape, did seem to give strength to our defenders. They fought back with incredible zeal, sacrificing themselves rather than permit the enemy to breach their lines.
I watched as a Xombie grabbed someone around the neck, clamped on like a python, and was all but impossible to get off. Many times I saw men throw themselves and their clinging attackers over the side rather than risk joining the enemy ranks. For that was what was at stake, I belatedly realized, not death, but Ex membership. They did not want to kill but to multiply. They lusted for us. For them, strangling was a procre ative act-there was even a horrific sort of deep kiss involved that suggested a perverse, rough tenderness toward the struggling victim. It was horrible to see.
The sub started to budge, glacially scraping along the landing. We were making the slowest getaway of all time. As we passed the overhanging hulk of the Sallie, I had a good long look at its mangled rows of tires, the blown-out glass cockpit, and the heavily pitted SALLIE emblem. The thought of Cowper backing into that firestorm made me shake my head in disbelief-had my mother ever seen that side of him? She never told me anything that explained her fierce attraction… or excused it. I could see him down there, taking his turn with a hammer, and felt something unlike any emotion I'd ever experienced: a raw amalgam of yearning and awe. Love. Was he really my father? For the first time, I wanted him to be. I desperately needed him to be.
My reverie was interrupted by shouts of 'Look!' and fingers pointing ashore. At first I couldn't see anything in the gloom, but then a peculiar white shape came trundling across the grass, making a faint electric whine: a golf cart! It sped down toward us at top speed, faster than I thought golf carts could go, and skidded to a stop beside the Sallie.
'Jesus Christ,' said Albemarle from below, 'it's Jim Sandoval!'
Exes on the landing raced for the well-dressed driver, who climbed, scrabbling for footholds, to the Sallie's freight bed. They vaulted up after him, and he ran to its projecting front end, bald head gleaming in the spotlight. Cornered, he didn't hesitate but used his momentum to leap across the water into the mass of us-it had to be a good twenty feet. People were knocked over like tenpins. Before we could learn if anyone had been hurt by this desperate act, we were distracted by a thunderous sound from the shore: thousands of trampling footsteps. We fell silent, listening.
They came. The foggy void boiled over with them like a biblical plague-or perhaps extras in a biblical epic-
