The only aura of human life came from the south entrance to Chesapeake Bay, a dim glow like an untended storm lantern. As we got closer, we could see the glow was coming from a black tower sticking out of the water. It was the giant structure we had seen just before being torpedoed. My thought was, One if by land, two if by sea.
“Well, this is it,” said Lieutenant Robles. “Looks like somebody’s home.”
“I recognize that thing,” said Alton Webb. “That’s Petropolis. What they call a spar platform-some thirty wellheads doing directional drilling. In normal operation, it can pump around sixty thousand barrels of oil a day. What you see there is only the tip of the iceberg; there’s a lot more of it underwater, fixed by catenary mooring lines to the bottom.”
“Since when is there oil drilling at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay?”
“There isn’t. It’s been moved here from the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Why?”
“Probably to guard the entrance to the bay.”
Coombs said, “If there are sentries in that platform, I think we can assume the Chesapeake is being defended. We’ve already run into one torpedo, it would be foolhardy to go any closer.”
“Concur,” said Robles. “So what’s next?”
Robles and Coombs looked at me, though they were really looking through me to the invisible presence of Fred Cowper.
I said, “We have to get to those guys in the tower.”
Coombs was hesitant. “If we do anything to give ourselves away, their defenses will zero right in on us. They’re broadcasting on ULF, so we know they intend submarines to hear them. We should be prepared for a trap.”
“I doubt they’re expecting anyone like us. Besides, we don’t have much choice at this point. What else are we here for? If we have to abandon the boat, this is as good a place as any.”
“It’s your call.”
I hated this passive-aggressive stuff. “You guys are the experts. Tell me how we can get aboard that thing.”
“My suggestion is we don’t go aboard at all but just sink it from a safe distance and move in to collect the sentries.”
“Assuming they’re not drowned, burned up, or blown to bits.”
“Chances are they’ll survive, or spontaneously Xombify.”
“It’s too big a risk.”
“Then I think we should forget entering the bay and just go ashore somewhere along the coast, like we did before. Bypass the sea defenses entirely and head overland to DC.”
“I have a better idea,” I said.
Dead men can’t drown. Hence the sea held no terrors for us.
The boys had gotten used to regularly crawling along the boat’s great hull, collecting mussels and gooseneck barnacles, filling their bags with unearthly delicacies while others trailed at the end of long tethers, spearing bottom fish or netting crabs and scallops. I, the sole girl, watching from atop the bridge, my black hair flying in the current as I mentally ticked off minutes of exposure versus mandatory items for the menu. It wouldn’t do to have the boys freeze before they could complete the grocery list. It was a novelty to them, this strange blue harvest; a welcome change from the sordid grotto of the sub. Despite the darkness and the cold, they were glad to do it, or maybe because of the darkness and cold.
I went to the Big Room, the biggest space in the boat, which had once held twenty-four nuclear missile tubes. Now it was packed with mountains of treasure. Not treasure in the form of gold and jewels (although there was some of that), but more human-essential valuables such as food, drink, and medicine. It was a regular Costco down there.
Some months earlier we had plundered these things from an anchored barge that was the cache of the Reapers. They didn’t need the stuff anymore, and neither did their masters at MoCo. For that matter, we didn’t need it either, but it came in handy as a lure for hungry refugees.
The Blackpudlians were in there, tuning their instruments.
“You sure it’s safe out there?” asked Ringo.
“We’re already dead,” said Paul. “What more can they do to us?”
“I don’t know. Crush our souls?”
“Our souls are like our bodies, mate, only more so. Like rubber.”
“Rubber soul, my arse,” said John. “There’s no such thing as a soul, rubber or otherwise.”
“There’s filet of sole,” mused George.
“I prefer plaice, myself.”
“One must have a good sense of plaice.”
“I’ve always known my proper plaice.”
“There’s a thyme and a plaice for everything.”
“Or even a nice bit of halibut.”
“The halibut is, we haven’t the slightest idea of what we are, what any of this means, or what the risks are in going ashore.”
I said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ve been out there, and it’s perfectly safe. We’re adapted to that world now.”
“Lulu’s right. Fire with fire, mates.”
“Right,” I said. “As a wise man once said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.’”
“You hear that, lads? We are the egg men.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BRIDGE TUNNEL
Climbing inside the forward escape trunk, I made room for as many guys as would fit, then ordered the inboard hatch shut. The chamber was “full as a nut,” as my mother would have said, but it didn’t matter; we weren’t claustrophobic, and didn’t need room to breathe. My only concern was logistical, how to best utilize the available space without touching skin, and we had solved that by wearing full-body, hooded wet suits.
I backflashed to a pregnant cat I had dissected in biology class, how its unborn kittens fit together as neatly as Escher designs, interlocking yins and yangs. Then I opened a valve and let the water in. It was salty and freezing cold, gushing up powerfully from below.
As brine covered my head, I had the oddest need to scream, recalling a similar experience when I was alive-Chick is ice-cold-but then the feeling passed. A few seconds later, the chamber was full. I cranked open the topside hatch, releasing a plume of trapped bubbles.
We set to work. Twenty leagues beneath the sea, three groups of Dreadnauts exited the three hatches and slid down lines to the bottom. To human eyes, the water would have been utterly black and impenetrable, but to Exes it glowed with the muted auras of living creatures. Even plankton had its own light, so that the ocean was full of luminous motes.
Hiking through twilit meadows of eelgrass, with the incoming tide pushing us like a breeze, we made our way up a wide valley carved in the continental shelf. This was the mouth of the deepwater channel, the Chesapeake stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway, connecting Norfolk with Annapolis and Baltimore in the far upper bay. Up there, it had been regularly dredged to accommodate shipping, but at this end it was plenty deep enough for even the largest ships to pass without risk of hitting the undersea highway tunnel-which was a good thing, because an Ohio-class submarine required enormous clearance. Passively drifting on the current, it loomed behind us walkers like a great black zeppelin, weightless as a cloud.
My party followed behind a team led by Alton Webb. This was a man I had hated and feared in life, and who hated and feared me. He had abused me, terrorized my friends, killed my father, and betrayed the entire boat. All this was irrelevant now, dismissed as pocket change amid the wages of human ignorance. I could no more hold a grudge from life than I could blame a trapped animal for biting the hand that fed it-any more than I could blame myself for my former human foibles.
No, that wasn’t quite true. Blame might be gone, but guilt was forever. In fact, guilt was the emotional currency of this new existence-one of the side effects of immortality was an almost frantic selflessness, a deep pity and shame more potent than Original Sin. This grim empathy was what kept us working on our common task: to save humanity. Not in the crude, almost sexual way of wild Xombies but as a simple matter of conscience.