Free Xombies: Apocalypse Blues by Walter Greatshell

he looked more confident himself.
    As the last of us were helped down from the platform by furiously yelling submariners —“Get out of the way! Down, down! Move your asses!”— the amount of shooting redoubled, and I was shocked to see how many Xombies were massed on the landing above. We were becoming outnumbered. Spent shells tinkled down the sides of the sub like slot-machine tokens, and icy water splashed me as bullet-riddled demons stage-dived off the edge to fall into the depths beneath the pier. The water was soon packed with thrashing bodies.
    Passed bucket-brigade fashion along a line of jumpy crew-men, I finally made it up onto the sub’s runwaylike deck, its entire length crowded with milling refugees. Above us soared the mammoth black cross that was the vessel’s conning tower, a steel Golgotha beckoning the pilgrims with salvation.
    Waiting my turn to go below, I prayed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    T hey 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