Free Xombies: Apocalypse Blues by Walter Greatshell Page A

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