Apocalypso

CHAPTER TWENTY
FRENCH TOAST

I looked up along the coast. Not far upriver was the sight of the first landing by early settlers of Jamestown-the Pocahontas thing. The Disney musical. As a kid I had liked that cartoon, but my mother despised its cheap sentimentality, its glossing-over of ugly historic events. Hollywood is bullshit, she would say. American history is not pretty.

Looking at Norfolk, I had to agree. The city was dead, and the Navy base had been a scene of desperate fighting. Waterfront buildings were riddled with bullet holes, windowless from explosions, gutted by fire. A big submarine lay sunk at its moorings, only its radar mast breaking the water. Several vessels had run aground or capsized. Other ships were more or less intact, including an Ohio-class boat suspended on blocks in the vast dry-dock facility. The only one that interested me was the sleek black yacht riding at anchor. I could read its name through the periscope: La Fantasma. The yacht was empty; its passengers had come ashore here.

Assembling a shore party to salvage some critically needed items from the dry-docked boat, I consulted Cowper’s head about the necessary procedures for stabilizing our vessel.

“I just want to make sure everything is secure before we disembark.”

“Sounds like you’re not planning on coming back anytime soon.”

“It may be a while.”

“Good. Because I’ve had enough of this tub to last me an eternity.”

As the engineering team and I entered the dry dock, we could see that we were too late: the other submarine had already been plundered. Hasty scaffolds stood in place, and huge holes had been cut in the vessel’s hull, steel carved like blubber and machinery dangling out like entrails from a beached whale. The Reactor Control Operator, Mr. Fisk, could see at once that there was little point in going aboard.

Climbing the ramp out of the dry dock, I began to hear a rhythmic whirring sound from above. It was a thin electronic noise, like a printing teletype. It got louder, and suddenly we could see a strange creature silhouetted against the sky. It was spindly and four-legged, about the size of a deer or large dog, but with boxy saddlebags strapped to its sides.

It had no head.

Even stranger, it had no presence, no life energy. As Xombies, we were highly attuned to any aura of life, but this thing was a blank.

I asked, “What is that?”

“I’m not sure,” said Julian Noteiro. “I think it’s a machine.”

Without warning, the weird object erupted in gunfire-a fusillade of metal pellets issuing from where its head should have been. In an instant, half our crew was down, their bodies punched through like cored apples.

Perhaps because Bobby Rubio and I were shorter, we escaped the first volley and jumped over the side of the ramp, clinging by our fingertips. Julian, Sal, and a few other boys did the same, dangling beside us. The bigger men all plummeted to the concrete bottom, shattering limbs and skulls.

Seeking targets, the four-legged robot trotted down the ramp after them, its pulsing whine echoing in the chamber. As it passed me, I swung my slight body up over the ramp and tried to kick its rear legs out from under it.

But the thing was too fast-with mechanical precision it instantly dodged my kick and fired a side-mounted cannon in my face. It was loaded with metal chaff, a hail of razorlike flakes that would have blasted me to wet spaghetti if Julian wasn’t right there, swinging his hammer against the muzzle so that the explosion backfired, rupturing the cannon and knocking the robot off-balance.

Sal DeLuca and Jake Bartholomew used the brief chance to seize the thing and hoist it off its feet, boosting it over the side. Buzzing frantically, trying to stabilize itself in midair, the machine hit the floor and came unsprung like an old clock.

We pulled ourselves together as best we could. In the days and weeks to come, all our injuries would fade away, but for now we mainly had to be mobile enough to walk. To this end, splints were improvised for the worst fractures, and broken heads were tied up with rags and duct tape.

Julian was a mess, his body mangled by shrapnel from the cannon exploding, but he and the crewmen had a bigger concern: the meaning of that killer robot.

“Somebody hadda been remote-controlling that thing,” said Cowper’s head. “Which means they’re still out there.”

Coombs agreed. “Sure. But who? And why?”

“Could just be some kind of automated defense system,” Dan Robles suggested. “A leftover from the plague.”

“No way. That thing was clean, it looked new, which means it musta been maintained by somebody. It’s a complicated piece of machinery-it can’t just sit outside in the rain for months. I’m telling you, its operators are around here somewhere.”

Robles said, “So they just open fire? Some of us look human, yet they fired on all of us indiscriminately, Blues and Clears alike.”

Cowper replied, “Some of us are Blue, that’s enough. To some poor, scared schmuck, that makes us all suspect. No offense to you Clears, but you don’t look all that human.”

“I’m not offended,” Coombs said, “but I doubt a human could tell the difference.”

“You sound offended.”

“I’m not. So what’s our next move?”

“Somebody’s monitoring this place. Which means we either gotta get out of here… or we gotta go get ’em.”

“I’m not sure we should go off on a wild-goose chase, Fred. That thing could have been operated from anywhere. They could be a thousand miles away for all we know.”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s your prerogative. Mine is to get us out of here in one piece. As it is, some of these guys will be crapping metal for a week.”

“Too bad we couldn’t trace the radio data link.”

“It’s still worth trying. We should return to the boat and scan the airwaves.”

“Tran already did that when we came in. There was nothing but a lot of interference.”

“It wasn’t interference driving that robot.”

Robles froze. “The boat.”

“What?”

“I think I just realized where they might-”

He was interrupted by an explosion. The sound was a deep, ringing gong that registered in our back teeth, and down at the waterfront, a white tower of spray rose far into the air. A pier warped off its concrete pilings and collapsed into the harbor. Almost immediately, there was a second explosion, but very little was visible now through the curtain of mist and falling debris. It took me a moment to realize that our boat was gone-all that was left was a spreading ring of foam.

“Unbelievable,” said Dan Robles.

“What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“They sank our boat.”

“Who?”

He pointed. “Them.”

Something was moving beneath the opposite dock slip; the water churned, boiled up, then parted as another submarine broke the surface.

It was the sub we had seen when we first arrived-the ship we thought was wrecked, with only a lonely radar mast to mark its watery grave. It was an easy assumption to make since we hadn’t sensed any life aboard. But no-it was very much alive, glowing like a lantern with multiple human candles. The crew had been hiding somehow, playing dead.

At first sight, I thought it was a second Ohio-class boat, but then I realized this vessel was not quite the same as ours. Its sail planes were mounted higher, and the whole thing was shorter and more slender. I had learned a bit about subs these past few months, but this type was new to me.

“What is that?” I asked.

“French boat,” Fred’s head said. “Triomphante-class. Playin’ possum, the bastards. I shoulda recognized that Dassault mast, but I was too busy playin’ pattycake. S’what I get.”

Taking all the time in the world, the foreign sub eased out past the wreckage of ours, heading for the deepwater channel. Men appeared atop the fairwater to pilot the thing out. One of them scanned the shore with binoculars, and when he spotted our party, he gibbered with excitement, motioning the others to look. The one with the greatest air of authority raised his own spyglass. Staring down those lenses, I could almost read the man’s mind: C’est impossible!

Reaching the channel, the French boat lazily submerged and was soon out of sight.

Over the next few hours, most of our crew trickled ashore. Some chose to remain on board to stabilize the damage, or perhaps because they were trapped and didn’t really care. The Blackpudlians probably stayed because they preferred it that way. Since they could not drown, they simply went down with the ship and waited for it to settle before finding a dry compartment in which to practice four-part harmonies.

Phil Tran was one of the first to appear, looking like a drowned rat as he slogged up the riverbank. Giving me a dripping salute, he said, “Lieutenant Tran reporting for duty, Lulu.”

“At ease, Phil,” I said. “What happened down there?”

“I picked up a radio transmission coming from the French boat. We went to battle stations, but they were already lined up for a shot. It was point-blank: We took two torpedoes below the waterline. The second one breached the pressure hull and flooded the missile compartment. She’s totally swamped.”

“What now?”

“Well, the enemy seems to have gone, so we have two choices. We can either ditch the boat or try to salvage it. It’s going to be a big job patching those holes and pumping her out, but everything we need is right here. And there’s another thing… ”

“What?”

“We actually traced two radio transmissions. One was coming from the French sub-that was the control signal for the robot. The other was the same ULF signature we detected off the coast. Xanadu.”

“Were you able to pinpoint it?”

“Yes. It’s coming from somewhere north of here, say two hundred miles away. Right in the vicinity of Washington, DC.”

The crew went to work. Needing neither rest nor diving equipment, they scavenged welding equipment from the Navy yard and quickly sealed the largest holes in the hull. The job was made easier thanks to the hull plates that had been conveniently cut from the dry-docked ship.

Once the flooded compartment was airtight, they rigged up every pump they could find (including a fireboat’s water cannon) to drain it. In less than a week, the enormous chamber was sucked dry. But it was a mess. Floating the sub was one thing; making it work was another. Once again, they were able to find much of what they needed in the spare boomer. What they couldn’t find, they made, using the steel-milling equipment on base. For some of the men, former shipyard workers, it was almost like old times. All they still needed were some fuel rods to replace the ones that had been damaged, but Mr. Fisk knew of a power reactor up the Chesapeake that was likely to be intact.

“All right,” I said. “We need transportation. Everybody spread out and find us a ride. Meet back here in fifteen minutes.”

Without a word, we scattered, reconnoitering the base. When we regrouped, it was Julian Noteiro who delivered the report. He had found three vehicles, he said, a convoy capable of carrying the entire party. One was an eighteen-wheel moving van with the word MAYFLOWER on its side; the other two were charter buses. All three needed work to get them running, but our engineers were equal to the task, and in short order we were on board and en route to Washington, DC.