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-rushing forward in mute frenzy. "Xombierama," said a much-pierced boy in awe.
Fear sounded all over the deck as this inhuman host, this nightmarathon, swept across the field and down the landing in an avalanche of flailing blue arms and legs. People steeled themselves for the bitter end, but appalling as the enemy seemed, its numbers served only to clog the already-precarious stern crossing, and a great many were simply crowded off into the propeller wash. Also initially alarming were the spastic multitudes swarming the Sallie, their rushing bodies spilling off as if from a sluice… but they were too late: Sandoval's leap had been lucky-the submarine had moved just out of jumping range, and the naked throngs pummeled harmlessly down the ship's side like a lumpy waterfall, piling up at the waterline to claw against the passing hull.
It really began to seem that the handful of Exes already on board were all we had to fear (which was certainly bad enough). But then the Sallie began to tip over on us.
"Whoa," people moaned, seeing the rig teeter from the weight of massing bodies. If they hadn't kept jumping off like lemmings it would have gone already. My heart constricted, and I tried to will the ship to move faster: Come on come on come on…
So close. As the ship's big rudder fin finally came even with the Sallie, the great crawler tilted past the point of no return. Cracking sounds like gunshots could be heard as its plank bed flexed, and the rear wheels levitated upward. Keens of mass dread erupted from all of us as the front end of the thing dipped into our surge, but still didn't topple-the banks of tires at its axis gripped the ledge until the last possible instant, until the vehicle was so improbably steep that the audio equipment on its back plummeted through the Ex-humans hanging below.
"It's gonna hit the screw, it's gonna hit the screw," someone jibbered.
The Sallie dropped.
It went loudly, each of its nine rows of wheels slamming first against the concrete ledge, then against the lower wooden pier-BABAMBABAMBABAMBABAM! As it jounced downward, it must have just cleared the giant propeller, because the ringing, fatal blow we were all holding our breaths for never came. What did happen was scary enough: A mound of water engulfed the stern, carrying away Exes but also rows of men. Some of them escaped the propeller and were left bobbing in our wake. We could hear them calling in the dark.
Not many of us had the energy to be mortified. I couldn't see if Cowper was still aboard or not, and for the moment I didn't want to know. A few hysterical kids were being restrained. I understood: At that instant my biggest fear was that someone might include me in their compassion, might slow our flight. I would've gladly killed someone like that, even though we were safely out of reach of the Ex mass.
But there was nothing to worry about. The boat didn't stop.