Xombies: Apocalypso Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lulu Pangloss like a dead skin. Go native. That was what gnawed at me and ate me up inside: How easy it would be to let go. Surrender to the Xombie.
    Don’t give up the ship, I thought. More like, Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
    Whatever happened, I would likely never see this ship again. The orphaned steel behemoth would sit here and rust, hatches open to the elements, wallowing with the tides until hard weather heeled her over, and water filled the hull. Then she would settle to the shallow bottom, every intake plugged with mud and the great gold propellers crusted thick with oysters and lurid orange sea squirts. Eventually, the boat would silt over entirely and join the shore, sprouting grasses and wooded slash so that her fairwater would become a brushy hillock, red with sumac and rusty edges, reeking of rotten iron. And in her belly the fallow reactor would crack and seep radiation into the environment, its brittle control rods breaking under the pressure of invading sediments. But the clay would also contain the poison, forming a solid cast within the chamber and hardening around the decaying metalworks, effectively fossilizing them. A million years hence, only the extruded patterns would remain, pressed in rocky strata miles from the sea.
    Finishing my final walk-through, I stumbled across my mother. It was as though she were waiting for me.
    Entering the reactor room, I almost jumped at the sight of a wild-haired blue Fury hanging from the ceiling. The last time I had met her was in the slime pit of the Reaper barge, and we hadn’t been able to communicate verbally. The time before that, I was still a human girl, and she was the monstrous Xombie chasing me. We hadn’t talked much then either—she was barely capable of speech. But since then, she had recovered most of her wits … if not her looks.
    “Mummy,” I said. “We’re going ashore now.”
    She didn’t react, just staring at me.
    I said, “We’re probably not coming back.”
    She tipped her head sideways and closed her eyes. I started to leave, and she said, “Lulu.”
    “What?”
    “Fred Cowper’s not your father.”
    A strange chill blew through me, the ghost of a human feeling. “What do you mean?”
    “Fred Cowper and I never had any children together. He wasn’t capable. You never met your real father, the father of my children. His name was Al Despineau. Alaric Despineau.”
    “Alaric?” That was my hated middle name. “What do you mean, ‘children’? How many children do you have?”
    “None, anymore.”
    “What does that mean? I’m here.”
    “You are dead, my darling, and so is the past. There is no changing it now; it’s fixed and dilated. I’m so sorry.”
    Mummy fled into the dark.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    PEPPERLAND
     
    F red Cowper was incommunicado when I found him, dead to the world and unavailable for comment. Frustrating, but Xombies were notoriously unreliable that way, able to tune out indefinitely just when you needed to talk to them. Stuffing Fred’s head in a ditty bag along with a few other necessities, I left the ship. Albemarle and the crew had rigged lines across the water, and I easily crossed this rope bridge to shore. Everyone was waiting for me there, as if only I could provide the answers they sought. I knew they would stand that way for hours, days, unless I told them what to do next. Time meant nothing to any of them, not even me. Time was totally arbitrary unless you forced it to mean something—unless you divided it into portions and measured it out like medicine. That was the human thing to do.
    I assembled us all on the beach. Even in my own altered state, I thought we looked weird in the daylight, like creatures dredged out of the deep sea. Not liking the word “Xombies,” we had chosen to call ourselves Dreadnauts, but this forbidding moniker had more recently been amended by the four Brits to Dreadnuts. There were three categories of us: Dark Blue, Bright Blue, and