Todd and Sal crossed back under the bridge, using the grandiose floating casino to screen themselves from the cargo barge. They could still hear gunfire and shouts of battle over there.
"Doesn't look like anybody's coming after us at least," Sal called across the water.
"Not yet, anyway."
Gliding under the shadow of the casino's superstructure, the boys felt slightly safer, less visible. The problem was getting on board: The gangplank was raised, and there was no other obvious means of entry. Todd took that as reason to quit right there, but Sal thought the big red paddle wheel looked climbable and persuaded the other boy to hold his Jet Ski steady while he stood on its seat and reached as high as he could-there! Once he had a handhold, the Xombie glove gripped tight, and he was able to swing his legs up. What he had not anticipated was how to get Todd up without also losing both Jet Skis. They had no rope to tie them with.
Making a snap decision, Sal hissed down, "Just wait for me here."
"No way, man. I came this far, I'm not letting you go in there alone."
"You have to. It's better this way-if anything happens to me, you can get back to Ray." He didn't wait for argument, climbing over the rail and hurrying across the deck. The main-entrance door was open, black as a cave.
There was no chance to scope out the situation properly, so Sal steeled himself and ducked into the open hatch, hugging the wall. All the lights were out. Remembering the layout from before, he knew he was in an antechamber before the main gambling room-a lobby and coat-check area with benches, potted trees, and a service counter. Hiding behind the plants, he peered deeper inside.
The place was deserted, dim and shuttered as an empty convention hall. El Dopa was nowhere to be seen, nor were any of those Kali goons. Muted sounds of shooting and other commotion filtered down through the open skylights, but otherwise there was no noise of any kind.
Keeping a low profile, Sal slowly made his way to the center of the room. The bed was still there, still unmade. It was actually an entire bedroom set, with a night table, a lamp, and a comfortable sitting chair. There was a thick book on the table: The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Once again, he thought the furniture looked like some kind of weird museum exhibit, set up on its pedestal in the middle of the room.
The deeper he went, the more convinced he was that the entire casino was abandoned, and this conviction was only reinforced when he tried the elevator and found its buttons dead. The power was out. There was a stairwell in the back corner, and he climbed up to the next level, a curtained platform that had once served as a lounge area and cabaret stage. Now it was half in shadow, and Sal could make out row upon row of silent machines-frozen gears and wheels and springs, power cables and truck batteries, all with no readily discernible purpose. It reminded him of the old textile mills he had seen during a school field trip to Lowell, Massachusetts-monuments to unsafe labor. The floor beneath was wet and stained black, and there was an odd smell that the boy associated with the submarine's forbidden third deck-Dr. Langhorne's section. It made his hair stand on end.
Continuing up, he found himself on the highest balcony, the last place they had seen Kyle. Feeling an intense need to pee, Sal scanned the offices and restaurant, the restrooms and kitchen, then cautiously made his way up the spiral staircase in the back. Had that face been a figment of his imagination? He was trembling uncontrollably-this was the only place left to look.
Emerging in a pitch-dark corridor with padded leather walls, he worked his way toward a cracked circle of dim red light. It was a broken window, a round porthole in a heavily padded door. No sounds from within, but something smelled really bad. Okay now, okay…
Working up his nerve, taking a deep breath, Sal pushed through and was struck with the full putrid stench, like burnt hair, burnt flesh. It was worse than when his mother used oven cleaner on the ancient crusts under the broiler, a foul, musky animal stench-the funk of pure, concentrated death. The walls and ceiling were full of bullet holes, like stars, and these bright constellations were the only source of light. In the red gloom, Sal could make out piles of blackened bones, human skulls, and possibly worse-he didn't stay long enough to find out. There was no need to: That charnel pit was all he needed to understand that everyone on this barge was gone. Surely and most importantly, the boy he was looking for was gone.
Gagging, weeping for Kyle, for himself, for all of them, Sal covered his mouth and rushed to the next door-the last door-
– and broke through into blinding daylight.
Sobbing, dashing across the breezy sunlight of the top deck under a canopy of paper lanterns, Sal vomited over the rail, hacking up his guts into the sea far below, then stood back and stopped in amazement. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he squinted across the water at a sight so astonishing and terrible that it shocked him out of his own grief.
A hundred yards away, the other barge was still at war, still fighting the Xombie invasion. Only by now its deck was literally covered with human remains, great crawling heaps of blasted, smoldering offal, an unkillable killing field. With hordes of fresh meat still coming over the side.
Hundreds of Reapers were lined up on the bottom tier of the cargo pyramid, twenty feet above the carnage and pouring gunfire down on the swarming invaders. The men had an arsenal of firearms laid out behind them, and gun caddies running back and forth, replacing weapons that jammed or got too hot to hold. The shooters had gone through an extraordinary quantity of ammunition, but apparently there was plenty more where that came from. The only danger seemed to be that the pile of creeping flesh would get so high that Xombies could use it as a ramp to reach the upper decks.
"Oh my God," Sal said.
The number of Xombies coming on board was nothing short of amazing-the riverbed must be packed with them. Scanning the whole panorama, his eyes were drawn to the highway bridge just a few hundred feet away, and he stared in amazement at thousands of Xombies choking the span and toppling over the railing into the water. Others were walking into the river from shore, running in like strange, spastic bathers and vanishing from view only to emerge minutes later over the barge gunwales.
Both tugboats had come alongside the embattled barge, and their crews were trying to cut the rope netting hanging over the side, which was the Xombies' point of ingress. In order to avoid being attacked themselves, they had to clear the gunwales with high-pressure fire hoses. A man had managed to barricade himself inside the crane cockpit and was transporting others by sling to the tugboats and a dozen other vessels. Everyone was shouting advice and encouragement. It was also, Sal noticed, a beautiful spring morning.
Sal heard a metal scraping sound.
"Peekaboo, I see you," said a girl's voice.
He turned. It was Lulu Pangloss.
The Ex-girl was dressed in a sailor suit with the casino's gold logo embroidered over the breast pocket. She sat casually in a deck chair, her doll-like face preposterously blue, and her black eyes twice as large as life.
Sal faltered, his back pressed against the rail. "Lulu. Shit. What's… goin' on?"
Voice bright and bottomless, Lulu said, "Quite a view, don't you think?"
"What are you doing here?"
"Think of it as a humanitarian mission," she said. "Free inoculations. Bring the kiddies."
"I thought they… killed you."
"They wish." A smoky giggle.
"I'm looking for Kyle-do you know where he is?"
"I'm right here, bro."
Glancing up to the roof above the patio, Sal was struck dumb in the literal sense-he suddenly found it difficult to form words.
No, he thought. No-hell no!
Perched up there like a parade spectator, with his legs dangling over the side, was Kyle Hancock. The boy was not blue… but he was not human, either. Aside from the half-healed bullet holes in his head, there was an unsettling emptiness about him, a vacuum. Something in his X-ray gaze made Sal feel nakedly exposed, even in that Xombie suit. He couldn't make himself meet those eyes, but those thirsty eyes met him, and he could actually feel them probing and prodding like invisible fingers.
"What happened, Kyle?" Sal asked, mouth dry. "Where's El Dopa and all them?"
"We handled them." Tilting his head toward the other barge, he said, "They over there now."
"Why are you both here?"
"Waiting for you, brother."
"Me? Why?"
"Because I knew you'd come."
"Yes, to save you," Sal said bitterly. "But it's too late."
"I've already been saved, Sal."
"Looks more like the exact opposite."
"I know. It looks strange, but the crawl from darkness is always difficult. Birth pangs are painful."
"You're not Kyle-Kyle didn't talk like that."
"I'm still here, there's just more of me. Kyle was a dot; now he's a line. Yesterday, I was standing where you are, trapped in that point of time, full of the same thoughts and fears. I remember the feeling: It was like being blind and helpless… a tiny flame in a wind tunnel. Scary. I wish you could just trust me, but I know it doesn't work that way."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
Lulu cut in: "Feeling better isn't the point. The point is surviving. Going on. That's what what Agent X was invented for: saving your stupid ass from the end of the world."
"Don't you mean causing the end of the world?"
"No. The end of the world is coming from up there." She pointed her dainty blue finger at the sky. "I know you can't see it yet-neither could we. But it's there, like a white ball of dust, getting brighter. Closer every second. Soon it will be brighter than the full moon, and when it hits Earth, it will scour the planet's surface like a billion atom bombs. Nothing will live, nothing will survive it… except maybe us."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"The Big Enchilada. Uncle Miska knew about it. A few others did, too, but were forced to keep it a secret. They called it Wormwood. It's a comet, a huge body of ice and debris blasted off one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, in a volcanic explosion."
"The Big Enchilada-oh my God," Sal muttered, shaking his head. "You people are crazy."
"Miska found out about it years ago and dedicated his longevity research to preventing it. He knew no higher lifeforms would survive the impact but that certain primitive bacteria could-the same bacteria that seeded the early Earth. If human cells could be engineered to resemble these bacteria, then mankind might survive-hence, Agent X. He calls it the galactic prophylactic."
"How the hell do you know all this?"
The question seemed to catch them up short. They looked at each other, Lulu cranking her bulbous doll's head completely around, a cherubic nightmare with pigtails.
"I don't know," she said finally. "We just do."
"When's this huge disaster supposed to happen?"
"It could be at any time."
Sal didn't have a clue what to think anymore, his whole foundation of reality having come unstuck. It wasn't just the shock of hearing Xombies speak intelligently, or of learning that Kyle had joined that deathless horde, or even of seeing daylight through the shrinking cavity in Kyle's chest-everything was wrong, ever since Agent X. God had gone wrong, the whole world was inside out, desecrated beyond redemption, and Sal couldn't handle it anymore. He was done playing, he quit, and in quitting, something in him broke loose; the adrenaline drained from his spine like quicksilver, leaving numbness and exhaustion. All he knew for sure anymore was that he wanted no part of this.
Across the water, someone with a megaphone yelled, "Fire! Fire!" At first the men there must have misunderstood, because the shooting increased, but then people started pointing up at the smoke pouring from the container stacks. "Ship's on fire!" the megaphone squawked. "Fire in the hold, fire in the hold! Abandon ship!"
The defensive line collapsed as men started running around like ants, barking orders and screaming that everyone had to reach the boats. This was no small challenge: the Xombie-infested deck had been a rather abstract menace before, an annoying but purely technical problem to be dealt with in good time. Now suddenly it was a moat that they had to ford before they burned to death. And the barge was full of flammable, toxic, explosive cargo-there was no time to lose.
Black smoke began pouring out of the deck hatches and windows. There was a series of metallic bangs from within the pyramid that caused the whole thing to jump, and a hundred smoking holes magically appeared in the metal. Schrapnel whanged like bullets off the deck, and the sea was sprinkled with tiny white splashes. But threaded among those splashes was a white ribbon-the wake of a Jet Ski.
It was Todd. Todd was coming for him.
Sal took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and took a running leap over the railing.
He was just off his feet when something hooked him around the arm and neck and yanked him backward, upward, carrying him into the rope canopy. A cold, hard cheek pressed against his, and a sardonic skull's mouth lined with black teeth whispered in his ear:
"Haven't you always wondered what it would be like?"
Choking, trying to break free, Sal found his free arm tangling with the disordered mass of flesh and bone that was Uncle Spam's lower body. Its branching, animated nest of gristle was clinging to the overhanging netting like a spider to its web, upper torso dangling, arms carrying the boy as it scrambled up toward its lair in the radio shack.
Sal's own strength was insufficient but that of his Xombie oversuit more than made up the difference: It flexed violently, every fiber rolling like a fleshy wave-a wave comprised of individual Maenad cells popping upward like coral polyps, or spectators in a microscopic football stadium. Starting at Sal's feet, it gained force as it rose to his neck, finally converging to whipcrack against Uncle Spam's clutching arms. The result was explosive, breaking the headlock and dropping Sal's body to the top deck.
Stunned, he tumbled, got up, tried to run-and dove straight into the ropes. Something scuttled toward him, knocking him down, sitting on him like a ton of rank-smelling wet kindling. Pinned, Sal fumbled in his utility bag for the butane torch, then shoved his arm deep inside the chomping, slimy maw and flicked it on. With a bleating sound, the crushing weight vanished.
He barely had time to think, What the fuck is it? when Uncle Spam came for him again. Sal had no peripheral vision in his helmet, but he saw the lanterns bob as the thing approached, and his mind raced for what to do. Jump?-Lulu and Kyle were on the patio just below; if he twisted his ankle, they'd have him.
At the last second, he grabbed the metal basket of the barge-to-barge traverse, freed its anchor hook, and flung himself out into space. At the same instant, the monster pounced on his back, twanging the cable and doubling Sal's downward acceleration.
It was a long, fast glide, their combined weight causing the braided wire to sag steeply, the basket's steel coasters screaming from the strain. "Get off!" Sal shouted, fighting as best he could while hanging on by his arms. It wasn't fair: The nightmarish creature at his back had all the advantage. It was like a big, ghastly tick with a human head, interchangeably using its hands or the meat hooks of its grisly undercarriage to hang on and attack. If not for the protection of Sal's Xombie suit, he would have been dead already.
But suit or no suit, the thing was winning. In free fall, the boy whipped his head from side to side, trying to protect his airway as bunches of fluttery, slippery claws tore the Xombie flesh from his face mask and began punching through the wire mesh. Elsewhere, he could feel them stripping him, sharp pincers worming between the seams, burrowing into his tough blue leather to seek out the warm skin underneath.
The shuttle came to rest at the belly of the cable-the exact midpoint of the hundred-yard span between the barges, less than twenty feet above the water. Swirling smoke from the burning freight barge wafted across, choking him. Nowhere left to go, neither forward nor back.
Sensing Sal's hopelessness, the hideous mouth wheedled in his ear. "Just relax. There is no need to suffer any longer. Let go, and you can join your friends."
Let go? Letting out a shuddering, sobbing laugh, Sal said, "Okay." He let go with one hand, swinging in space, and with his free hand reached for the large, three-pronged grappling hook used to secure the basket.
"Nice hanging with you," he said, and jammed the hook's barbed points deep into the corded tendons of Uncle Spam's neck, throwing his full weight on it and dangling there. The monster recoiled, furiously grappling with the hook and chain.
Sal let go.
Shed of his weight, cable and basket jounced upward, catapulting Uncle Spam away like a rubber tarantula on a string.
Hitting the water, Sal plunged deep. Icy salt water dashed him in the face, flooding his mask but otherwise leaving him dry inside. The Xombie flesh contracted instantly, clamping tight and creating a waterproof seal over most of his body. Except for a threadlike trickle down his back, Sal was quite warm although completely unable to see, hear, or breathe.
The air trapped in his clothing made him fairly buoyant, popping him back to the surface with a minimum of effort. Athlete though he was, he had never been a tremendous swimmer. As a young child, he had taken swimming lessons at the YMCA-that was the extent of it.
Shaking the water out of his mask, the boy looked around for some sign of what to do next. His range of vision was not good. The two barges seemed very far away, as did the peaceful-looking green banks of the river. Large things were swirling around his legs, but they didn't touch him.
That leak was starting to worry him, however. The suit had been shredded back there in the fight and couldn't close properly. Freezing-cold water was pooling in his boots, making his toes numb, but worse than the cold was the weight-suddenly he was having to tread water just to keep his head up. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. On top of that, he could feel the pull of the tide; if he didn't figure out what to do pretty quick, he was going to drift around the point and out into the vastness of Narragansett Bay. While that might get him closer to the submarine, it would also put him far from shore. He'd never make it back alive.
I'm sinking.
Sal's legs were flooded halfway up to his calves now, dragging on him like a pair of loaded buckets. The effort required to stay afloat was becoming exhausting; if he stopped paddling for even a second, he would drop straight to the bottom and join all the others down there. Were his friends down there, too? Maybe looking up at him from the dusky green riverbed? He could hear Todd's voice: I got you, dude…
Without meaning to, Sal let up on his strokes, and water sloshed into his mouth. Swallowing a big gulp of brine, he vomited in his mask. No! Todd was up above, reaching down from his Jet Ski, trying to get ahold of Sal's helmet.
Fighting not to choke, unable to believe he was drowning, Sal flailed for a breath of pure air so he could keep up the struggle for just two more seconds-two seconds! That was all Todd needed. But then all of a sudden it was too much, everything against them, scales overbalancing like the pot of beans in that game he and his mom used to play before she died, and Sal went under.