There was no reply, no sign of anyone having heard, and no time to repeat the message-they were already there.
Covered by sharpshooters and several deck-mounted Gatling guns, the Williards swept in from the submarine's stern, splitting into two groups and streaming up both sides of its featureless black hull. Weighted lines were heaved across the jettylike expanse, fastening the boats on one side to those opposite. When the hawsers were drawn tight, the fleet closed on the sub's flanks like a row of stitches. It reminded El Dopa of a cartoon he had once seen of Gulliver's Travels, where tiny people shot lines over an unconscious giant's limbs to secure them. It was a tricky operation: Without its cleats in place, the submarine was a uniquely featureless object, offering nothing to tie up to and no good purchase on its round sides for any kind of landing. El Dopa was impressed with his men's ingenuity; though few of them had much previous experience handling boats, they had all become quite adept sailors over the past four months.
Now the boatmen swarmed from their vessels, whooping and hollering as they rappelled onto the sub. They all wore the cowboy boots, weirdly decorated helmets, and body armor that distinguished them not only as Reapers but as the elite Hopalong Phalanx, whose new commander, General Righteous Weeks, was eager to prove himself.
Watching from a safe distance, El Dopa said to his second, "They're aboard." He picked up the microphone of his marine radio, and announced, "Attention submarine, I need you folks to listen to me. We don't have much time, so I ask for your full attention. You are under attack. Those sounds you hear are authorized representatives of the People's Expedition of the New United States taking over your ship. We demand your surrender, and will sink you if you don't immediately comply. Trust me, we are capable of doing what we say. If you cooperate, I promise no one will be harmed-you are worth more to us alive than dead; otherwise, we wouldn't bother doing what we're doing. With that in mind, perhaps we can negotiate some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement. Work together. On the other hand, if you refuse to surrender, you simply make yourselves and your vessel useless to us, and we will take you out. So I'm telling you to prepare yourselves for whatever is about to happen. It's up to you. Don't be afraid-it's time we all made our peace with eternity. You have one minute to decide."
Righteous Weeks stood on the deck of the submarine and wondered what to do next. So far it had been much too easy-not a single shot had been fired. Could it be a trap of some kind? Every inch of the sub's five-hundred-foot deck was occupied by his men now, right up to the top of the sail, so he didn't think there was any hiding place from which they could be ambushed. He knew that the harbor was too shallow for the monster to submerge. But he was no expert on submarines, nor were any of his men. He had certainly never seen one this big before, much less set foot on it, so he was very tense. Not for the first time, he regretted the loss of his friend Marcus. Voodooman knew about shit like this.
The leader of the few remaining Kalis came over, the one called Betty Boom, and asked him, "Where do you want us to set the charges?" They had a boatload of plastic explosives and radio detonators, courtesy of Uncle Spam.
"Anywhere-I can't see as it matters much."
"It does, though. I've done a lot of welding, and this HY80 steel is a bitch. Blowing any kind of meaningful hole in this mother is going to take everything we've got."
"Then use everything you've got."
It helped to see that someone had defied and defiled the sub already, laying claim like dogs marking their territory, undermining its awesome power with some choice graffiti. The rubberized black deck and conning tower had been tagged like the sides of a subway train: XOMBOYZ, NUBZ, LULU, the classic skull and crossbones.
"Looks like pirates already been to work on this thing," Weeks said.
His second-in-command, Grover Stix, laughed, "Yeah, somebody done beat us to it."
One of the men came running up. "Hey, Righteous, take a look at this."
"What is it?"
"Somebody left the front door open."
It was a hatch at the far bow, just forward the conning tower. Weeks hustled over and pushed through his gathered men. "Well, damn."
It was open, all right. A round well in the deck, exactly like a manhole in the street, with rungs leading down to darkness. Taking a megaphone, Weeks leaned over the hole, and said, "ATTENTION SUBMARINE: YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO SURRENDER."
He didn't know if anyone was listening, and he didn't much care. Fuck a siege-if nobody answered, he was fully prepared to start bombing this motherfucker until somebody cried uncle. He called up El Dopa and briefed him on the situation.
"So the hatch was just sitting there open?"
"That's affirmative, out."
"A little convenient, wouldn't you say?"
"You got that right, El D. Personally, I think we ought to pump a few gallons of fuel oil down there and drop a match."
"I don't think so, at least not yet. Let's try smoking them out first. Over and out."
Righteous gave the order, and a case of olive drab tear-gas canisters was brought up. Taking one and pulling its key, he said, "Stand back," and dropped it down the hole. Immediately, a thick white smoke began roiling in the depths. He dropped another.
Nothing. They waited five minutes, listening intently, but the sub remained utterly silent. The sun disappeared behind the horizon, leaving a reef of vermilion clouds.
El Dopa came over the radio: "Think they could have flown the coop?"
"Well, the sentries had their hands full today-I wouldn't expect they was completely on their game. Wasn't as if we expected these jaybirds to abandon ship. And what for?"
"The whole world's been abandoned, why not this boat?"
"True enough. Your call, hoss."
Considering the situation, El Dopa said, "I know you guys lost your Bluecoats, and I'm short of Thuggees, but somebody's gotta go down there, check it out. If it's possible at all, we need that submarine. Having that thing in our pocket would go a long way toward making up for our losses today."
"It's cool, man. Bendis done drilled us on this commando shit; I got that motherfucker down. Trick is to get as many our folks inside as quickly as possible-pile in and overwhelm them with force, so that the fight is over before it can even begin. Won't be no booby traps in here, not unless they want to blow themselves up in the bargain."
"Good. And try not to kill everybody-a submarine without a crew is no good to us."
"Affirmative. Righteous out."
The Reapers on deck looked at him challengingly. "After you, brother."
Weeks didn't hesitate. To lead this army, you couldn't show fear. Donning a hooded gas mask over his steel face guard, he led them below, descending into the undulating layer of smoke as into a milky pool.
To his second, Grover Stix, he said, "If this is an ambush, be ready to haul ass out of here." He lightly tapped the barrel of his sawed-off combat shotgun against his head. The gun had a flashlight, a laser sight, and a drum full of special expanding rounds for use at extraclose range. It could stop a rhino.
At the bottom, Weeks paused, peering around, then waved the others down. They descended into a room full of pipes and ductwork, with a narrow corridor running through it, and other rooms branching off in the thick haze. Every wall was covered with control panels and softly humming banks of electronics-a lot of buttons and colored lights that were meaningless to them. Except for the beige tile floor, which was reminiscent of banal institutional settings the convicts were all too familiar with, it all looked very high-tech and complicated.
Dense white vapor filled the ship, flowing downward in lazy freshets and swirling across the floor, gliding from one compartment to the next, deck after deck, with the insidious flowing grace of a centipede. But the Reapers were unfazed by the smoke, in fact could not see it-their gas masks were equipped with ultrasonic goggles that generated a black-and-white digitized image of their surroundings and rendered the gas invisible. There was a sort of acoustic haze, however, a blurring effect caused by sound-damping tiles on the sub's walls and ceiling-it took them a few minutes to figure out the distortion.
At one end was a stairwell leading down, at the other a hatchway opening into a much larger space. Everything appeared to be deserted.
"Shoulda signed up for the guided tour," Grover said. "Where is everybody?"
"Just keep your eyes open."
The line of men filing belowdecks grew longer and longer, a parasitic worm pulsing downward, oozing segment by segment into the ship's belly.
"Goddammit," said Weeks. "What the hell do they think they're up to? Hide-and-go-seek?"
The place was a regular catacomb, riddled with holes and hidden passages. The men kept bumping their heads. Heading downward, they peered into a deserted mess hall, its vacant leatherette booths weirdly cozy, then continued forward through a smaller dining room and a sleeping area. At the end was a locked door marked DO NOT ENTER.
"Open sesame," Weeks said, blasting the lock. There was a scream, and the door swung open on two people wearing oxygen masks.
One of them was a woman.
"Good God a'mighty," said Grover Stix.
"Don't move!" barked Weeks, training his gun on them and making room for the men behind. "Who the fuck are you?"
The man stepped forward. "I'm Captain Harvey Coombs, United States Navy."
"You're the captain of this thing?"
"Uh, no-actually I was relieved of command. That's why I'm locked in here. We're both under arrest."
"Under arrest? You better not be fucking with me! Who's in charge? Where they at?"
"The one you want is Mr. Webb. I'm afraid we don't know where he is-or anyone else for that matter. We've been in here for the last two days."
To Langhorne, Grover said, "You a real woman?"
"How flattering."
"Goddamn. What's your name, then?"
"I'm Dr. Alice Langhorne. Pleased to meet you."
"Langhorne? Goddamn. You the one's friends with Uri Miska?"
"That's right."
"Holy shit. You been up at Valhalla, ain't you? What's it like up there? Is the streets really made of gold?"
"Shut up, Grover," said Righteous Weeks. "This ain't no social call-we got business to attend to." To Coombs, he said, "You gonna take us to whoever's in charge of this pig boat, and you gonna tell 'em we demand their immediate surrender. I don't want no killing if I can avoid it. We just want to partner up with y'all."
"Well, if you came this far, I assume you must have already been through the control center. That's where the commander usually is."
"Ain't nobody up there now."
"Wait-nobody at all?"
"We ain't seen one damn soul since we come in."
"That's… unusual. I don't know what to tell you. All we can do is keep going down."
"Lead on, chief. And don't you fuckin' try anything, I swear to God."
The next deck down looked gutted, all its furniture and electronics pulled out and only capped ends of wire remaining. "Look like somebody done stripped this place good," said Grover. "Reminds me of what I did to my house after the bank foreclosed on it." Coombs and Langhorne could barely see anything through the smoke and had to be helped along. There was a series of bumps from somewhere below, then a loud whooshing sound.
"What's that noise?" Weeks demanded.
Coombs said, "Sounds like the muzzle doors closing and the tubes being drained. The forward torpedo tubes."
"You didn't have to say that-I know what tubes means."
"Then that is the sound of the tubes being blown dry."
"So somebody's down there?"
"Would have to be."
Following the noise, they arrived at the bottom, emerging in a roomful of machinery that led into another space that was obviously the torpedo room.
"I'd avoid doing any shooting in here," Coombs said. "That's the auxiliary machinery room-we call it the Snake Pit. There are a few thousand gallons of reserve diesel in that tank, and those torpedoes up there run on some nasty flammable stuff. Not to mention the explosive warheads themselves."
The Reapers ventured forward, pointing their weapons down the racks of deadly green cylinders until all their sonar beams converged on something odd at the end of the aisle: several interlocking metal cases the size of coffins, finished matte black and plastered with military inspection certificates. Their lids were open and all the shelves pulled out, as if someone had recently been raiding their contents.
"Where they at?" Righteous demanded.
"They're gone," Coombs said, peering myopically through the haze. "You see those cases? Those are for diving gear-SEAL gear. It was part of our SPAM manifest. Stealth rebreathers, assault weapons, night-vision scopes, satellite uplinks, laser range finders, cameras, cadmium battery packs, covert reconnaissance and communication equipment. Also limpet mines and all kinds of ordnance, you name it."
The Reapers listened like a rapt tribe of Neanderthals to this recitation of state-of-the-art commando stuff: SEAL gear for a SEAL mission that was as cold and dead as every conflict of the old world, relics of an extinct civilization. The very definition of lost treasure in that almost all of it was missing-most frustratingly the guns and ammo.
Popping a skull-like diving mask out of its foam cradle, Harvey Coombs said, "See? Do-it-yourself SEAL team. Just add water."
"Where'd they go?"
"Outside." Coombs indicated the four chrome hatches. "Through these tubes."
"What the fuck they doing out there?"
"Any number of things. Repairs, reconnaissance… underwater demolition. We have a few master divers on board who are qualified to work with underwater munitions, so-"
"Munitions? Shit. Grover, tell Betty Boom to keep an eye out for fuckin' frogmen. Ain't better be no Navy SEALS out there, or they gonna be dead SEALS. You, too."
"Wait a minute," said Coombs, gesturing for silence. There was a peculiar squeaking sound coming from within the torpedo tubes.
"What's that?" asked Weeks.
"They're back."
"What? Back?"
"Ssh!" said Coombs. "You hear that? Someone's in there now-that's why the tubes were drained. Probably stuck waiting for whoever is supposed to let them back aboard."
The Reapers leveled their weapons. Righteous Weeks said, "Go ahead and open them doors."
"Only if you give me your word not to harm anyone," Coombs said.
"Open the doors right now, or I'll geld you like a motherfuckin' bull calf! Now do it!"
After a moment's hesitation, Coombs released the four breech doors, starting with starboard tubes one and three, then moving across to tubes two and four. The tubes were at a sideways angle and pitch-dark inside, making it hard to see down their full length.
Righteous Weeks shouted, "All right, everybody out! Don't try any-"
He was cut short by a flesh bomb, an avalanche of briny-cold meat: four twenty-foot tubes of solid-packed offal tumbling into the chamber as if from a grisly cornucopia. Guts! Guts amok! The light strobed with hysterical gunfire as this slippery living bouillabaisse of human parts disgorged onto the floor.
In the tight space, there was nowhere to go, and the front ranks of Reapers were instantly overwhelmed by the frenzied host. Immune to terror or surprise, the men didn't panic but had no defense against such an amorphous attack-a hellish migration of clawing, grasping morgue refuse that clung on and climbed their bodies to cover their masks and clamp tight around their throats. Guns were no good at all. As the first men were engulfed, those nearer the door recognized that they had a brief opportunity to get the hell out of there, cut their losses. And they didn't hesitate-they knew they wouldn't get another chance. The problem was all the guys in the way.
Fighting his way through the pileup, Righteous Weeks realized that he had made a serious mistake bringing so many men down here. Dragging the woman, he barely managed to get out the door before it was shut against the heinous enemy, then he joined the fight to seal it up against other poor fools still trying to jam through. There was no choice: Once this shit got loose, there would be no stopping it.
Grover Stix was buzzing with the thrill of being alive. Though he had been right in the thick of the nightmarish attack, his slight build gave him an advantage over men in luckier spots. With the wave of slurry sweeping toward them, he leaped atop the torpedo racks and shinnied down the tight space right over the others. In a second, he was out the door and helping Righteous close it.
As the door clamped shut, he had a last glimpse of that Navy man, Coombs, standing silent and seemingly calm amid shuddering webs and fronds of viscera.
As soon as the valve was dogged tight, Weeks turned and slapped the woman across the face with his shotgun. She fell back against the wall, banging her head.
"What the fuck was that all about, motherfucker?" Righteous demanded. "What kinda shit you tryin' to pull on us?"
"I beg your pardon," she said, adjusting her cracked oxygen mask. "I never promised you a rose garden."
Before Righteous could hit her again, the big pressure door in the amidships bulkhead clanked open, revealing a hazy black void-the impenetrable vastness of the Big Room.
"What's down there?" Weeks demanded.
Alice smiled and replied, "The rest of the boat."
There was no movement within the lightless depths aft. Through the men's sonic goggles the view had that strobing, stilted quality of a convenience-store security camera. Suddenly, out of a side cranny, the blurred shape of a little boy appeared and dashed through the doorway.
"Hey, stop him!" yelled Weeks, shining his echolocator on the kid's skinny back just as he vanished from view. "Who was that?"
"Bobby Rubio," Alice said. "Kid we picked up when we first got here. I thought maybe he belonged to you."
"Not hardly."
Pondering the situation, the Reapers considered their options:
Grover Stix offered, "I say we clear outta here and drop a thermite canister down the hole. Fuck this shit."
"Yeah," said another man. "What do we need with a submarine anyway? It's like a damn dungeon down here. I like to be in the open, or at least somewhere with a window."
"Damn straight-this thing's worse than being back in the hole."
"Now hold off," said Righteous. "We didn't just risk our necks and sacrifice twenty good men so we could pussy out at the last minute. This is an opportunity we ain't likely to ever get again-a chance to declare our independence. Hell, boys, we already in possession of this shitcan; we own it, lock, stock, and barrel, and now you want to queer the whole deal because of a little fresh meat? Just when we got 'em in a sack? We're holding the strong hand here; it would be a shame to cut and run when we're this close to winning the pot. We got the game, we got the numbers, and we got the grit-now we just got to see their bluff."
Without waiting for the others, he boldly walked down the short passageway and ducked through the aft hatch. Once inside, Weeks found himself staring up at a room as big and cold as his old cellblock back in Huntsville. He couldn't see much beyond thirty feet-the sonar imager, designed for close-range operation, dissolved into gray murk-but from the hollow sound he could tell it was a very big space. As in the rest of the sub, there was a jungle of pipes and wiring, but here there were no walls or ceiling to contain them, just a steel-grated pier extending into darkness and a dim jumble of machines in the gully below.
The others followed him in, voices hushed as if entering a church. Trying to demystify the place, Righteous rummaged in his pockets until he found something to throw-the first silver dollar he had ever plucked from between the horns of an angry bull. Fuck it, he thought, and chucked it high up into the air, smiling as it dinged off the roof, bounced down invisible ledges, rolled, and went still. He was about to say, Y'all might as well get comfortable-I don't go nowhere without my lucky dollar, when something small and heavy struck him in the forehead. His lucky coin!
"Holy shit," he said, skull ringing.
"What's wrong?" asked Grover.
"Didn't you see that? Somebody winged my coin back at me. Sucker nailed me good, too; ahmo have a goose egg."
"Shit, man-an inch lower, and you'd be wearing an eye patch for the rest of your life."
"It's more a them damned kids, gotta be." Struck with a notion, Weeks shouted, "Come on out, boys, we ain't gonna hurt you none. We're on your side. I heard tell from your friends that you ain't hardly had a square meal since you first set foot on this barge and that the men here don't treat you no better than damn dogs. That ain't right. If you can help us, we'll put a stop to that. Sooner we can talk turkey with you and the rest of the crew, the sooner we'll get your bellies so full of ham and beans and biscuits and bacon and grits and corn bread and applesauce you won't never even have room for the pecan pie. We know what it means to be prisoners, to be shut up in a hole where you can't even reckon the days. Come out, and you'll be part and parcel of every decision we make-it's a democracy. Come be one of us, and we'll sure be glad to have you. It's a big, beautiful world out there, enough for all."
As Righteous spoke, he began to hear furtive scufflings from above, sounds like many feet pattering along metal ledges, filtering downward with stealthy urgency.
"Shit, there they are," said Grover.
Weeks could see them now: pale, gangly teens loping with unhurried speed along invisible black cliffs, some sliding and leaping down invisible ladders to the lowest balconies, where they spread out along the edge like a jury, while others gathered atop high outcroppings of webbed cargo. They were wraiths, seriously underfed and pale as grubs, with the haunted eyes and starkly jutting collarbones of concentration-camp inmates.
"These dudes been doin' some hard time all right," muttered Grover.
There were quite a few of them, fifty or so, but not nearly enough to present any serious threat to the growing ranks of armed Reapers who now covered the bottom deck from end to end. Guns, hell, Righteous thought. These boys look so sickly you could probably blow them over with a stiff breeze.
"All right, here's the deal," he called up. "We got no quarrel with you boys, but we just lost some of our best men back there, and we're a mite tired of games, so if you could just lead us to whoever's in charge, we'll be putting this submarine of yours back on a payin' basis."
The boys remained silent, watching the men with the mute fascination of a lost tribe of aborigines.
"What's wrong with you? No habla ingles? Come on!" Righteous aimed his weapon up at one of the nearest spectators, and said, "You. Come on down, son, and talk to me."
The boy didn't move; didn't even seem to register the words.
The silence grew awkward… then aggravating. Prison had made Righteous and the rest of the men very sensitive about being ignored. Shaking his head, General Weeks said, "What we got us here is a failure to communicate."
"Hey, Righteous," said Grover urgently. "Did you notice something about them kids?"
"What?"
"They ain't wearing no gas masks."
There was a missed beat as Weeks digested this, then suddenly he and all the other men started to hear something underfoot. Sweeping their acoustic beacons down into the machinery, they were taken aback to see movement amid all the tubes and tanks, a whole lot of squirming shapes: slick body parts wriggling forth from the shadows, issuing from channels under the decking, extruding from the deep crevices of the boat's intimate plumbing.
"Holy shit! Pull back! Everyone out!"
As the men tried to retreat they found the exit jammed, the line stalled by an equal and opposite force coming in. Their own rear guard, who had been posted along the upper decks, were now in full flight, pursued downward by the plague of lively human remains.
"What's going on up there?" Righteous shouted furiously. "Go back, go back-ain't no way out but up!" He tried shooting to get their attention, but there were already half a dozen gun battles going on to determine who was coming and who was going. Shit, he thought. What would Voodooman do? Fighting was no good; somehow he had to get above the Xombie tide, and fast. The narrow deck was becoming a precarious place to be. Some men were leaping across to higher beams and islands of machinery, staking claims above the squirming charnel horde.
To Alice Langhorne, Weeks shouted, "How do we get out of here? Show us the way up, or I'll cap your ass!"
She only smiled that infuriating smug smile.
"Fuck you, bitch," he said, and shot her in the belly.
Langhorne was blasted backward, tumbling into the bilge.
Picking his way over beams and catwalks, Weeks tried to find an opening through to the next level, but all he found were narrowing spaces packed with webbed cargo and machinery-dead ends. And all the while those boys stared down blankly from the mezzanines as though watching a play.
"You little bastards better show us the way up there or so help me God there ain't gonna be one of you left standing by the time I'm through." They ignored him.
Panic began breaking out among the men as crawling remains got among them, swarmed over them: "It's on me, it's on me, shit!-"
That was enough. Righteous started shooting, shot boys in the front and boys in the back, his shotgun pellets ripping through their shirts and flaying their translucent skin. The boys faltered, fell…
… then got up again.
Two specters rose out of the tumultuous gloom. The tall one was Alice Langhorne, glowing unearthly pale like some screen siren from the age of silent film. The other was Lulu Pangloss.
"Come on down, you guys," Lulu called, her unearthly, cool voice echoing across the galleries-not loud, yet pure and clear as a bell amid the screaming chaos. As the boys started coming, she said, "Don't worry-they don't bite."
"You," Weeks said in furious despair as he loosed his remaining firepower, shucking the empty shells into space. The soft antipersonnel rounds were as chisels in soft butter, mushrooming and blooming as they passed through the advancing boys, whittling their bodies into modernist sculptures.
Yet still they came, so that Righteous knew this was it: The Big Day. And he was glad.
"What the hell's going on down there?"
You been played, brother. Shoulda knowed it was a trap-damn! There had been tumultuous sounds of fighting, then the submarine abruptly fell silent. Without warning or explanation, all contact was broken off; even the men posted directly below the hatch had disappeared and wouldn't answer. It made no sense-a hundred men couldn't just vanish out of the blue like that. Not these men. But no reinforcements had been called for, and El Dopa was reluctant to send any more until he knew exactly what they were up against.
He wanted to abandon this cursed submarine at once, but the truth was he couldn't afford to. His forces needed a secure base of operations, at least until they could get their shit together. He sure as hell wasn't going back to that casino in the dark, even if his men had searched it from top to bottom and assured him it was deserted. With the Harpies loose, he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to sleep there again. How could everything have gone so wrong so fast?
First, he had been jarred awake by the shooting upstairs in the suite occupied by Uncle Spam's bravos. That wasn't so unusual-those maniacs were always blasting away at something or other, but usually they did it outside. Then there had been a spell of calm, followed by sounds of someone-or some thing-skittering across the balcony and down the stairs. At that point he dispatched his Kali Thugs to check it out. As they went up, weapons at the ready, jingling noises could be heard from the vicinity of the Xombie Generator, or Gen X-what his people called the Harpy Jukebox.
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.