Alton Webb, bearing a larger burden of shame, was now perhaps the most humane of all the Dreadnauts, the silent martyr of the sub, whose devotion to me made him a practical extension of my will. Without his example, I could not have persuaded the others into continuing the journey after Providence. I felt guilty about making them feel so guilty- and round it went, a wheel of never-ending remorse that we all sublimated in duty: duty to the memory of home and country, duty to the ship, duty to each other, and, most intensely, duty to the still-doomed. More than anything else, we lived to save the living.
Before us were fields of sonar buoys, proximity mines, curtains of steel mesh, an obstacle course that no unescorted ship could hope to navigate. So how do you propose to do it? Coombs had asked.
Simple, I said. We walk.
Unlimbering their tools, the blue boys began cutting a wide swath through the barricades. Nearing the drilling rig’s anchorage, we could sense humans around us-wisps of life energy like blurred X-rays. Our proximity to them goaded the teams to work faster, Clears and Blues competing for the right to those prizes. The men were drunk on it, desperate to play God. I wanted to say, Calm down, but the others were already well ahead of me, bounding up the rocky slope. Darn it. Here was the problem with weaning them off my blood; I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy.
We reached the spot directly below the oil platform and directly above the tunnel crossing. There was something like a large building on the seafloor, a rusty ziggurat connected by a thick pipeline to the surface. I had brought a device called a Momsen lung, a kind of inflatable life preserver. We had hundreds of them on the sub. Opening the air valve, I instantly became buoyant and shot for the surface.
Emerging between the towering legs of the superstructure, I listened for signs of life, but the thing felt empty. Whoever had been there was gone now.
“Hey!” I shouted. My voice echoed hollowly above the slosh of the waves. There was no answer.
I bled air from my vest and sank back to the bottom. Brushing floating hair out of my face, I checked my GPS display, mentally feeding my coordinates to Cowper’s head in the Nav Center, where he typed it out for the crew using his long black tongue.
We came across a sunken ship, a guided-missile frigate. Then a destroyer. A helicopter assault ship. Dozens of smaller vessels. This had been a battleground. Now it was a graveyard.
Signaling the rest of my party to take it slow, I studied the white seabed around us. The bottom appeared to be covered with dead coral, clinking underfoot like bleached bones, and it took me a second to realize it was not coral at all but actual bones-human remains. The whole area was a vast killing field. The sheer quantity of bones was remarkable, far more than was accounted for by the sunken wrecks. How did they get there?
Before I could work this out, there was a strange commotion from up front, a lot of yelling inside my head. Pull back, pull back! At the same time, a swarm of dim objects, visible only as pale wisps against the bioluminous haze, suddenly swept across the bottom and started fastening onto me with sharp pincers.
They were crabs-millions of crabs. Crabs of all kinds: blue crabs, rock crabs, primitive-looking horseshoe crabs. All of them unusually large and aggressive. Girded with sharp spines and powerful claws, they were hard to get off, hard to kill, and just plain hard. Most disturbing of all, they obviously had a taste for Xombies.
Deja vu, I thought, batting at them. Quickly becoming overwhelmed, I ordered, Retreat!
I wasn’t the only one; all the Dreadnauts were in flight, facing against the tide and dragging bunches of crustaceans from their extremities like bizarre fruit. The frenzied crabs followed, swimming and scuttling over the bottom in a rolling wave.
As the point man, farthest from the ship, Alton Webb had the worst of it, doing what he could to stall the attackers by using his own body as bait, hacking crabs off himself with karate moves. But this was not very effective, and he was quickly enveloped in shrouds of hungry creatures.
My group and I were also covered but not so burdened that we couldn’t climb the lines to the boat, shedding our wet suits and some of our flesh to rid ourselves of the sharp-clinging foe, or even biting crabs off each other with our teeth.
Within the ship, Coombs ordered Reverse Slow, causing the great screws to begin resisting the current. It was risky because any sound we made at this range and depth could be noticed by a reasonably alert enemy, but the only other choice was to drift blindly into the defensive lines.
The crabs followed us up the trailing ropes, linking legs and massing by tons to actually put a drag on the submarine. If they reached it, their sheer numbers could block the intake ducts and destabilize the ballast. But the last men to the lines, Alton Webb and Jack Kraus-both of them buried in vicious crustaceans and eroding like sandcastles-realized the danger and simultaneously decided on the last, best course of action:
As one, they pulled out their knives and cut the nylon cords, dropping away from the sub and taking the threat with them. Adding their own bones to the heap.
Once the surviving Dreadnauts were back aboard, crew members armed with bolt cutters and hammers dealt with any persisting crabs. Some of these had actually burrowed into the bodies of their victims, lodging up inside bellies and chest cavities like ironic cancers-the only cancers a Xombie could get-which necessitated the crudest parody of surgery to remove.
Cutting crabs off me, Alice Langhorne asked, “What just happened out there?”
“What does it look like? Crabs! We were attacked by crabs.”
“I was worried about something like this. I just didn’t expect it to apply so indiscriminately.”
“What?” I asked, yanking a small crab off my left earlobe.
“When we were doing risk assessments for MoCo, we realized that Maenads were not deterred by water obstacles. They could easily ford rivers, lakes, and oceans, meaning any kind of moat was useless, and even islands offered only temporary protection. Extreme cold was the only guaranteed defense, which is why the Moguls all came to Thule. But the problem solved itself: It turns out that the ASR morphocyte-Agent X-is able to colonize the bodies of certain invertebrates.”
“Shit.”
“It does not do this by piggybacking on iron molecules, the way it does in human blood cells. Crabs don’t have hemoglobin. Their environment has to be saturated with microbial ASR-pulverized Maenad tissue-so that they absorb it into their bodies and nervous systems. Once this reaches a critical mass, the morphocytes form a rudimentary nerve center that takes control of the host organism, causing it to suddenly develop an insatiable appetite for richer sources of Agent X-such as ourselves.”
I erupted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us before we went out there? We just lost three guys!”
“I’m sorry. I’m still getting used to this; my mind is so different than it was when I was alive… like a black hole in space. I find it very hard to narrow my focus. To attend.”
“Well, you have to. We all have to.”
“I’ll try to be more careful.”
“Screw being careful,” I said. “It’s time we played hardball.”
Keeping well clear of the bay entrance, we headed south until we came to the bottom leg of the causeway, which was basically a long pier connected to the Norfolk shore. The water here was too shallow to dive the boat, but we didn’t intend to. Instead, we lined up for an easy shot and fired a spread of four torpedoes at the bridge pylons.
Four plumes of white spray rose to the sky, and a great span of concrete and steel tumbled into the water. Then we just cruised over it.
We were inside Chesapeake Bay.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FRENCH TOAST