“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know, but still… ”
She touched his arm. “Hey, man, Ashleigh had problems. After her sister died, she was never the same, so don’t take it on yourself. There was nothing anyone could have done.”
Ray broke down, and Deena comforted him. “Sorry,” he said, pulling himself together. “It’s just that I lost my sister, too. Now I really feel like an asshole.”
“Join the club,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to get us some food. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Funny. You’re very humorous.”
Deena was gone a long time. Ray wondered if the girl had blown him off, when she finally appeared with mugs of tea and hot soup, crackers spread with cheese and apple butter, sliced salami, and a selection of cookies and dried fruit.
“Wow, that’s what I call service,” Ray said. “Did you have any trouble doing all this with the boat rocking?”
“Not really.”
As they ate, Chandra and Fran appeared, drawn from their bunks by the smell of soup.
“Nice!” said Chandra, squinting in the sun. “Lemme go make some sandwiches.”
It became a picnic. Even Todd was able to take a bit of nourishment between bouts of vomiting. Sandoval remained dead asleep.
As noon rolled around, Ray went below to wake Sandoval. He was annoyed to see that a lot of the yacht’s carefully stowed food supplies had been haphazardly unpacked and were now rolling around the cabin. Cans and bottles zigzagged underfoot like small loose cannons. Worst of all, there was a powerful stench of airplane glue-a can of waterproofing sealant had spilled all over the plywood deck.
Cursing, he cleaned up the mess as best he could. As he worked, he began to feel dizzy from the fumes but was determined to muddle through. The swaying of the boat didn’t help. Having struggled as long as possible to ignore his rising nausea, he abruptly dropped everything and bolted for the fantail, puking his guts out. When he turned around, Sandoval was standing in the doorway, grinning like blue death.
“Rayyyy,” he breathed.
Trying to leap away, Ray was jerked back like a rag doll, pinned face-to-face with the black-eyed horror that had been James Sandoval.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
Crushing Ray against the deck, the Xombie pried his resisting jaws apart, stretching its own mouth wide and clamping onto Ray’s in a hellish antithesis of CPR-a kiss of death. With one suck, he collapsed Ray’s lungs. The boy heaved, convulsing as his rib cage crumpled, then went limp. Now the creature reversed the action, exhaling with all its might, inverting its own bronchial tissue into Ray’s airway to flood the dead boy’s chest with X-infected blood cells.
Ray died and was born again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
STORM
Sprawled on the aft deck like a corpse, Ray woke up with a bang. His consciousness exploded as his dying brain cells were resurrected by the invading Maenad morphocyte. He was dazzled by the strangeness and beauty of his new world: the plywood cabin transformed into a fairy cave, the sea diamond-bright and seething with energy, the sky awash with ripples of cosmic light, the clouds glowing with ethereal colors. Even by daylight, he could see the invisible tracks of time and space, the ghostly orbits of particles and planets, the rings around the Sun. And amid all these long transits of inanimate matter, the futile blip of human consciousness.
He sprang to his feet.
Todd. Poor doomed Todd. Having just been there, Ray was overwhelmed with pity… and dawning comprehension. Look at this, he thought, feeling his broken body renew itself. It was nothing. Death was nothing, not anymore. Neither was pain, nor hunger, nor any other yearning of the flesh. He no longer had to tolerate the hopelessness of human existence; he had a choice, he could do something about it. Not just for Todd, but for all the miserable human beings still teetering on the brink of death. They didn’t have to die! The dread that hung over every living creature could be vanquished. And with that realization came an electric rush of joy, an exultation born of equal parts love, lust, and evangelical ecstasy. He dove back inside to save his friend.
As if having read Ray’s mind, the woman named Chandra Stevens was waiting, staring down at him in brazen invitation, her bright inner flame making her clothes a paper lantern. Unable to resist that warmth, Ray tried to speak, to make her understand, but his words came out garbled, a drunken slur. A noise an idiot might make… or an animal.
Disdaining the faulty instrument of speech, he leaped like a wild animal, embracing Chandra in a grip of steel and pressing her body against the forward bulkhead, bending her neck back nearly to breaking. She didn’t resist, surrendering completely to the kiss, and it was only as Ray sucked the air from her lungs that he realized she had tricked him.
No!
The woman was full of pure oxygen, her blood and tissues saturated with it. She had breathed deep from an oxygen tank, hyperventilating like a free diver before descent, then took one last hit and held it. It was no experiment; she knew exactly what she was doing. Behind her, Sandoval’s body lay splayed out in the forward compartment, another casualty of her medical expertise.
Ray tried to pull away, but the gas worked too fast, wilting his undead flesh from the inside out, turning his sentient blue-black blood instantly red. That red blood jump-started his heart and hit his brain like a runaway locomotive, knocking him instantly unconscious.
As Ray came back to life, he could hear people talking about him.
“Is there going to be any permanent brain damage?”
“Shouldn’t be. We purged him before he was fully saturated. He was only dead a couple of minutes-that’s not enough time for oxygen starvation to kill many brain cells.”
“Oh my God. What’s it like, being a Xombie?”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“But don’t you still-”
“Son, shut up! I’m already tense enough, all right? Whatever I am, I’m still me, no thanks to this dumb kid. If it weren’t for Chandra’s quick thinking, you’d all be screwed. Now, we don’t have time for this; we have to batten everything down for that front that’s coming.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And make sure you get your dosage. I don’t want any more accidents.”
“No, sir.”
As the others left, Ray heard one remain behind. A soft voice spoke in his ear, “Please get better, Ray. For me.” It was Deena.
The hurricane hit.
It was not a true hurricane, merely a minor gale, but none of them had ever been on a small ship in rough seas. Sandoval and Chandra Stevens were unflappable, pretending not to be alarmed by swells that suddenly rose higher than their heads, or by waves breaking over the entire boat, or by the deck heeling over so far it became a steep hill.
But Ray could tell that his elders weren’t as confident as they pretended to be: the rabbity look in the Chandra’s eyes when the yacht shuddered under tons of whitewater, or Sandoval’s anxious silence as the boat struggled to right itself. Jim’s green face scared Ray more than the storm itself.
It was impossible to venture above without admitting a deluge into the cabin. Everything belowdecks was awash, and the bilge pump barely kept up. All aboard were soaked to the skin, cold to the bone, dreaming about a hot drink or a hot meal. More than anything, Ray was desperate to go to the bathroom-number two-but the head was a plastic bucket that had to be dumped overboard-a difficult operation under the circumstances. There was no question of opening the dive well. He held it in as long as he could, sweating out the intestinal spasms as he tried to sleep, until finally it was time for his watch.
It was after midnight. The swells were so large that the boat swooped in and out of the canyonlike troughs without much pounding, but the rain and wind were still fierce. Before Sandoval had retired for the night, they had turned off the engine and deployed the sea anchor, so the yacht was dragging along like a small man leashed to a large, eager dog.