Damn. Jim rolled down his window a crack, saying with false cordiality, “Well, howdy there, Gus. What’s this all about? You know, these people are heading into a restricted-”
He was interrupted by a length of steel pipe smashing his passenger window. Peppered with glass, Sandoval cringed, then felt himself yanked bodily out of the car.
“Sorry, Jim, we need the ride,” said Gus as he wrestled him to the ground. “I’ll explain later.”
Lying there on the damp pavement, Sandoval looked around at his attackers: DeLuca, Holmes, Big Ed Albemarle. “Take me with you,” he said. “Let me talk to Coombs-you’ll never get through without me. I can help you.”
Ignoring him, DeLuca shouted, “Holmes, you’re up! Take the car and deliver our terms. Honk if they’re amenable to discussion.”
More urgently, Sandoval said, “I’m telling you, let me talk to them. You can’t negotiate. They have orders to shoot to kill.”
Gus looked at the others as if to ask, What do you think?
“Take him along,” someone said-Sandoval realized it was Fred Cowper. So Cowper had made it after all! Hell, this was all probably his idea. The old man had aged a lot since his retirement party, but he was clearly as cantankerous as ever.
Cowper said, “Gus, you and Ed ride shotgun.”
They shoved Sandoval into the passenger seat and piled in behind him. “Say the wrong thing, and none of us gets out alive,” Albemarle said.
As the car skirted the crowd and caught up to the rolling platform, Sandoval’s attention was suddenly drawn to a blurry figure running alongside. At first he assumed it was someone else from the crowd trying to catch their attention, but then he heard shouting and noticed that the adults were banding together and throwing the smaller kids up onto the crawler’s deck. Everyone was pointing at the Cadillac with terrified expressions on their faces.
A hand grabbed hold of Sandoval’s window frame, making him jump. He whipped around to see a vision so awful that his mind couldn’t absorb it. The sight hit him like a physical blow, a rabbit punch that knocked all the air out of him.
The thing was an obscene caricature of a beautiful young woman, her perfect teeth gleaming Pepsodent white in a tautly grinning purple face, with a gaping crater in her skull through which the remaining brain matter was visible, undulating like a wrinkled scrotum. The living matter seemed to be reaching out of her head for him.
Before Sandoval had time to react to the shock, the woman seized the car with both hands and vaulted up like a circus rider mounting a galloping horse. He drew breath to shout, Look out! But before he could get the words out, two long legs slithered in through the broken window, and her whole naked body landed on his lap. He could see right through her heart.
Pandemonium broke out in the car.
Gus DeLuca spun the wheel, and suddenly there was a utility pole in the headlights. They were only moving at about 15 mph, but the car slammed hard, deploying its air bags, and everyone dove, screaming, out the doors. Sandoval tumbled to the ground with the woman wrapped around him, her nimble and ridiculously strong arms crushing his windpipe while her neck strained to force that crazed sucker-fish mouth over his. Her exposed brain licked his forehead like a sticky tongue.
Help me! he tried to shout, head twisting wildly to avoid her questing mouth. Somebody help! He couldn’t reach the gun; his arms were clamped tight by her cold, naked thighs. Sandoval could feel himself blacking out.
Then by some miracle he was free, doubled over on his side and retching in pain. It was Gus DeLuca and Big Ed Albemarle: They had brained the thing with the heavy hammers they used in the factory-they were still braining it. It had no brains left to brain.
“X marks the spot,” DeLuca crowed.
“Die… die… die… ” muttered Albemarle, his denim coveralls speckling with inky blood as they pounded the writhing thing into the ground.
Stepping back to rest his arm, Gus DeLuca said, “Ed, we gotta go.” The parade had moved on, and they were alone in the fog. The Cadillac was steaming from its crumpled hood, totaled.
“What about him?” He pointed to Sandoval.
An eruption of gunfire and screams rattled the gloom, then a rockslide of trampling feet that was the sound of mass panic. An amplified voice said, “Halt. You are in a restricted area.”
“Fuck him and the car he rode in on,” said DeLuca. “We gotta get down there.”
They left him.
In the distance, Sandoval could hear a chorus of voices begging to be let on the boat. He knew there wasn’t much chance of them ever getting past the Marines posted there. It was the end of the line for all of them, himself included.
He could picture the scene: the dockyard full of empty missile tubes, the dead hulk of the Sallie blocking the road, its driver shot dead in the front cab and terrified boys pouring off the crawler’s deck like panicked wildebeests entering a crocodile-infested river.
They were pinned down on the broad tarmac between the submarine’s gangway-the “brow”-and the terraced lawn that was the site of yesterday’s dockside picnic. Bob Martino’s blood would still be there in the grass for anyone who cared to look. The boat would still be there, too, though not for long, its speckled mast array looming in the dark as if suspended in midair. Beneath that, the railed gantry would fade into black nothingness, a bridge to nowhere.
How did those poor saps think they were going to escape when the man who owned the submarine factory could not? Did they imagine they could appeal to pity? Lay claim to human dignity, decency, or justice? At this late hour, when the coin of mercy was a debased slug not even fit to steal a gumball? When the sleep of death itself had become a luxury? How dare they be so stupid-Jim Sandoval damned them for their pride.
Resigned, lying there in the dirt, he could only shake his head as the shooting resumed. It would all be over soon.
Something slippery touched his hand.
He jumped up to see the ruined Maenad coming toward him. She was just a quivering pulp on the ground, roadkill, but she was still alive, still moving. Not fast, but faster by the second. Most incredibly, he still sensed that same wild eagerness as before, emanating from these smashed remains-pure, frenzied lust at the sight of him. As he watched, the mincemeat of her mangled flesh was knitting back together, not quite healing but gathering itself into sturdier form. The sound it made was awful.
There was an explosive crash down at the wharf. Still staring in horror, Sandoval thought, What the hell are they doing now? The shooting abruptly stopped. and the thinly officious voice of Harvey Coombs came over a loudspeaker:
“FRED, THIS IS COMMANDER COOMBS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, BUT IN MY BOOK IT’S TREASON. YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH CRITICAL NAVAL OPERATIONS.”
Jim listened, snorting incredulously as the amplified voice of Fred Cowper, USN (Ret.), replied, “LET ME AND ALL THESE PEOPLE ON BOARD, THEN PUT US ASHORE SOMEPLACE HALFWAY SECURE!”
Was this a joke? Fred talked as if he was calling the shots. As if he and a ragtag bunch of hardhats and teenage boys were the ones holding the aces.
Which, Sandoval suddenly realized, they just might be.
With dawning wonder, he understood why they had brought the Sallie vehicle on their little crusade: The massive freight hauler wasn’t just to give the kids a lift. In its sheer bulk, it was the only weapon they had capable of sinking a nuclear submarine. What he was hearing down there was the ultimate game of chicken.
Demolition derby, Sandoval thought, not without admiration. Fred, you old bastard!
As he stood there shaking his head, the raveled Maenad rose to its feet and lurched toward him. At the same time, he could see movement in the fog: several odd-looking people running for the wharf. Not people-Xombies. Lots more Xombies, attracted by the light and commotion.
It was going to be a hell of a fight. Feeling reanimated himself, Jim knew he had to get down there, too… but obviously he’d never make it on foot. Dodging the gropes of that mangled Hellion, he sprinted toward the nearest available vehicle, an electric cart by the tool shed.