I flinched, nearly dropping the flashlight. I must have cried out, too, because Cowper would later tell me that he and the other fellows in the control room thought I had 'bought it.' But the faces didn't move. They had stopped like clocks.
Years ago, when Mum and I were still living in our old house in Oxnard, California, I had wormed my way through a mysterious trapdoor above the closet into a tiny neglected attic. Crouched on the ledge, I flicked on my flashlight and found myself surrounded by basketball-sized hornets' nests… papery-dry and long dead. This was much the same.
Mesmerized by something gleaming in the dark, I sighed and banged the radio against my mask, forgetting it was there. 'It worked,' I said. Then I turned off the flashlight so I could no longer see the boy's gold tooth.
CHAPTER TEN
No matter how squeamish you are, getting rid of bodies breaks down to a job of heavy lifting. The novelty of cool, rigid flesh wears off, and you realize how awkward they are to move, how darn heavy. After a dozen or so, they're no more fearsome than the baggy old futons my mother always made us drag from apartment to apartment. 'Come on, lazypants,' she would cry, as I buckled under my half. 'Nearly home!'
Finding every Ex was a grotesque Easter egg hunt, made more difficult by our breathing equipment in the tight spaces. Since operating the boat took precedence, corpse-gathering was relegated to the boys and me, under the supervision of a whiskery old character named Vic Noteiro. He knew every possible place to check, and was perfectly happy to let us do the checking while he made himself comfortable and told anecdotes about his days painting submarines. 'Guys kept sayin' I should retire,' he said. 'Retire from what? Sittin' on my ass all night listening to the radio? Makin' twenty bucks an hour? Whenever ya feel like it, ya slap on a coat of Mare Island? Pure titty.'
Then the question was how to dump them overboard. No one knew if exposure to air would cause them to revive, but we didn't want to find out, even if it meant we had to 'suck rubber' awhile longer. In the meantime the bodies were weighted, bagged, and trussed like mummies. That was awful because they had lost their blue pallor and looked vibrantly alive-much more rosy-cheeked than any of us. 'It's the carbon monoxide is all,' Vic told us dismissively. 'They're stone dead.'
A skeptical-faced boy asked, 'How can the carbon monoxide affect them if they don't breathe?'
'Who said they don't breathe? They breathe. They're like plants: They absorb what they need through every pore. No actual respiration, but they do breathe-just a lot slower, like them yogis in India. For all we know, they're in Nirvana now.'
There were fourteen Xombies altogether-ten from the crew (actually twelve crew members had been lost, but two conveniently fell into the sea), the two Marine guards, and two from our crowd. When we had them all lined up in the big mess hall, Kranuski and Cowper came down to look. Vic had identified each one with a Magic Marker, and a man named Kraus ticked them off one by one: 'Boggs, supply officer; Lester, weps; Gunderson, the nav; Montoya, communications; Lee, sonar chief; Baker, cob; Henderson, quartermaster; Selby, machinist's mate; O'Grady, torpedoman-' He faltered, clearing his throat. 'Shit.'
'I know,' said Cowper. 'When you've worked with a man, it's hard.'
Kranuski snapped, 'It's not that. What about the tubes?'
Cowper nodded carefully, as if treading on shaky ground. 'I was thinking of that. Will your people accept it?'
'It's burial at sea. Better than dumping them down the TDU.'
'Okay. I'll make an announcement-'
'No announcement. Sorry, sir, but you're the one who told me not to get hung up on ceremony. Let's just get this over with.'
Cowper agreed, and they went back upstairs.
Not sure what we were doing, I helped carry all the corpses down another level to the torpedo room. This was frustrating because we had just dragged three bodies up from there, plus our oxygen tanks, and it was hard not to brain yourself with those masks on. Shiny forest green torpedoes with blue caps were stacked in cradles on either side of the aisle. Straight ahead were four elaborate chrome hatches with dangling tags that read, TUBE EMPTY. Noteiro yanked off the tags and opened the round doors.
'Stuff 'em in there,' he said, raspy-voiced. 'Move it!'
We managed to pack three bodies in each tube. There was a huge piston that helped ram them in. Since I thought torpedoes ran on their own power, I wasn't sure how these were going to be launched, and watched closely as Vic shut the tubes and went to a wall console with a padded stool in front of it. Headsets of different colors hung from a bar under the lights; he put on a pair and adjusted the controls. There was a hollow sound of water rushing through pipes.
'Flooding tubes one… two… three… and four,' he said. 'Tubes one through four ready in all respects.' A moment later there was an explosive whoosh, unnervingly powerful, then three more hair-raising blasts in close succession. This was something even the boys had never seen. A bit shaken, we loaded the last bodies into one tube for a final firing. Then it was done. I couldn't say what I was thinking: Like flushing goldfish.
The next thing that happened nearly made us forget our exhaustion and all the night's ugliness: the diesel engine rumbled to life again, this time sucking fresh, cold air into the sub. Boys were so happy they hugged each other. They even forgot themselves and hugged me. Unfortunately, though most of the poison was gone in minutes, we were told to leave our masks on until every compartment could be ventilated and inspected for residual pockets of gas. This put a damper on things.
Since the boys and I were not trusted with this duty, we were left to wait in the crew's mess, our breathing gear plugged into jacks on the floor. We sat nodding off in the blue-upholstered booths like winos at an all-night diner.
'I've had it,' said a maniacal freckle-faced guy with Creamsicle orange hair and white eyelashes. 'I'm not wearing this mask another second!' Then he went right back to sleep.
Ignoring him, Chipmunk Boy asked me, 'What's your name?'
'Lulu. Louise. Louise Pangloss.'
'I'm Hector Albemarle.' He offered me his furry mitt and I shook it, feeling silly. Pointing at the others, he said, 'That's Tyrell Banks, Jake…'
'Bartholomew,' moaned the sleeping guy.
'-Jake Bartholomew, Julian Noteiro, uh, Shawn Dickey, Sal DeLuca, Lemuel Sanchez, Ray Despineau, and Cole Hayes.'
Most of the boys acknowledged me in some way as they were introduced, nodding or at least glancing over. They were quite a mixed bag. You get to know someone pretty fast when sharing a chore as miserable as body- snatching, and I had formed distinct impressions of all their personalities:
In spite of the costume, Hector was mature for his age, brave, a peacemaker, and considered something of a nerd. I already liked him a lot though I was afraid of his stepfather, Ed Albemarle, with whom he had a prickly relationship.
Tyrell was a goofy streetwise guy, but also a hard worker, who brightened up the job with his incessant funny griping. He joked about fusing country-western and hip-hop to create a musical opus called Westward Ho. This was some kind of running gibe at Shawn, who aspired to preach New Age mysticism through the medium of rap.
Jake, too, considered himself a comic, dropping silly non sequiturs ('When I meet someone, I just like to know if they identify more with the Trix rabbit or with the kids. There's no right or wrong answer-take your time') that the others made no attempt to acknowledge, as if they thought he was a bore. He was sort of a spaz-I felt a little protective of him.
Julian was all business, a straight-edger who acted like he knew the sub better than anybody and resented being the one to have to correct us. It was he whose suggestion about 'piloting by scope' had been rebuffed by Albemarle up top. Julian was the grandson of old Vic, who derived a sly amusement from seeing the boy steam.
