In the last extremities of panic and exhaustion, with daylight receding above and only green depths below, Sal DeLuca tried to breathe by gulping the cold, cold water. It was nauseatingly salty, heavy as wet cement, and his lungs rebelled at receiving it. He convulsed, his chest heaving to expel the alien fluid, then slacked and opened wide to the sea.
For a few more seconds he was still conscious, strangely calm, feeling the cold radiating outward from his flooded core, and the soothing dark stealing over him-there was nothing to be afraid of, and never had been. A rush of joy filled his skipping heart… and then, just like that, he was gone.
There was a momentary lull, when Sal's dead body gently touched bottom and began to sway slowly in the current. Then, suddenly, he started to dance, to flail and twist, to jerk limply in all directions as if tugged by invisible strings. Pieces of his outer suit ripped loose, leaving puffs of inky liquid as they flapped against their metal fastenings, unzipping themselves and tearing away, only to spin haplessly in the gloom, trailing bits of metal and fabric. In a few minutes Sal was stripped naked, having kicked off the last few shreds of rebelling Xombie tissue along with his clothes.
He was back.
Snapping his sprung joints into place, feeling the teeming armies of his body forging soft new cartilage and tougher ligaments, he looked around at the interesting surroundings. Awwwwwsommmme, he thought.
The river, which had seemed so murky and dark to his former sight, now glowed with a hundred thousand sources of pale light. Luminous bodies filled the green depths like so many oil lamps, a vast migration sweeping slowly out to sea.
They were all Xombies. And Sal was one of them.
There was an explosion-then another. The shock waves slammed Sal into the muddy riverbed, ringing his skull like a gong. Within that deafening sound, he could hear the crane barge shearing apart, its steel containers ripping like tinfoil as huge bubbles of force ballooned outward and upward, casting tons of scrap far out onto dry land. In a second, all that was left were black ribs of settling wreckage and oily whirlpools spinning apart downstream.
He could see bodies and parts of bodies floating down all around him, all the myriad bits and pieces moving independently, a glowing exodus from the barge's ravaged hull. His attention was drawn to the surface, up to the brightest lights of all, a great raft of votive candles bobbing on the waves. A human chandelier of living beings, survivors-fast-burning tapers of mortality, soon to be snuffed.
It was a fleet of boats to which the men had escaped and where they were now consolidating their survival, gathering their forces, and planning their next move. The futility of this effort wrung Sal's dead heart like a tragic chord of music: If they only knew.
Sal wasn't the only one; all the Xombies yearned to in tervene, but they were too heavy to swim, and in any case, the ebb tide was against them, pushing them downstream like a powerful wind. It was more than the tide: There was something else drawing them that way, a distant choir calling for them to come. So they walked with the current as though the river itself was the glorious force of their longing, as marchers in a vast candlelight vigil, parading down a valley to a rendezvous at sea. A final revival.
Across the intervening depths, Sal could sense many familiar auras: Lulu, Kyle, Russell, Derrick, Freddie, and most of the other boys from the shore party; Ed Albemarle, Julian, Jake, Lemuel, and Cole; Voodooman and a whole host of former Reapers, as well as Chiquita and many fallen Kalis, now shed of their masks and the mortal fear that imposed them. Even Uncle Spam was there, his riven body made strangely graceful in this octopus's garden of algal mats and junk cars. All were innocents again, baptized by the purifying waters of Agent X. Children of Uri Miska.
Born again, Sal was called back to the steel womb from which he had come, to the place they were all being shepherded: back to the boat.