“Aim for that dock there,” Sal said, consulting his printed- out map.

“What do you think we’re doing?” Kyle Hancock said. “It’s the current; it’s wicked.”

“Well paddle harder--it’s going to take us underneath the hurricane barrier.”

“No shit.”

“Paddle! Paddle!”

The paddlers paddled, putting their shoulders into it, trying to find a rhythm. Sal watched the great, gray barrier loom above them, its open gates like massive steel jaws and the river beyond a yawning gullet, eager to swallow them whole. It was so shallow in there at low tide that Xombies could wade right up and grab them at will. “All together!” he shouted. “Stroke, stroke, stroke…”

Then they were clearing the worst of the current, moving into calmer eddies near shore. “Okay, we’re good, we’re gonna make it,” Sal said, heart still racing. “Don’t stop, we’re almost there.”

“Shut up,” Kyle said. “God damn.”

“Yeah, man,” agreed Derrick. “We don’t need you to tell us what to do. We know you’re Officer Tran’s little bitch, but just try to chill, a’ight? We on it.”

Derrick and Kyle Hancock were brothers, the only surviving pair of siblings on the ship, and their mutual strength made them de facto rulers of the Big Room. Derrick was one year older than Kyle, with a corrected cleft lip and a resulting lisp that made him sound like Mike Tyson--kids had learned not to rag him about it. His brother Kyle was lighter-built, less touchy, with the easy confidence of a born player--as they liked to say, if Derrick was the muscle, Kyle was the style. They were not overt troublemakers, they simply used their power to do as little as possible, making needier kids like the Freddies--Freddy Fisk and Freddy Gonzales, or just Freddy F and Freddy G, tweedledum and tweedledee--do their work for them. Why shouldn’t they? There were no extra rations in doing it yourself--the privilege of not starving was reserved for “essential personnel” only. As far as Kyle and Derrick were concerned, Sal DeLuca and all the other overworked ship’s apprentices were suckers.

“Dude, don’t even start,” Sal said. “I’m just trying to help us stay alive, okay?”

“We don’t need your help--dude.”

“Yeah, give it a rest. You ain’t no ship’s officer.”

“No, but I’m responsible for your ass.”

“Leave my ass be. You best watch your own, bike boy.” They all snickered.

Sal shook his head, grinning in spite of himself. This had been going on for months, part of the friction between the ship’s apprentices and the “nubs”--non-useful bodies. Nubs were often the guys who were having the worst time of it, the true orphans, whose adult sponsors--their dads--had been killed, and who could barely hold it together enough to function, their shock and despair manifesting as attitude: keepin’ it real. He knew Derrick’s jibes were a response to the helplessness of the situation, a survival mechanism. A thin wedge against panic, which Sal could totally relate to, having lost his own father at Thule. Hey, to laugh was better than to cry…or to scream. Once you started screaming, you might never stop.

The screams came at night, in their sleep.

Then they were below the high dock, fending off its barnacled pilings with their paddles. “Okay, everybody be quiet,” Sal said. If there were Xombies up there, they could just jump right into the boats. He tied up to a rusted ladder and whispered, “I’m just gonna take a look, okay? Nobody move unless I give the all- clear.”

“What is this Squad Leader bullshit?” Kyle hissed, getting up. “This ain’t no videogame, dumb ass.”

“Fine, you go first.” Sal made room for him to pass.

Kyle hesitated, sudden doubt flashing across his face, so that Derrick said, “Sit your ass down, nigga. Let a real man go up.”

“Fuck you.”

Derrick belligerently mounted the ladder. They watched in nervous silence as he paused at the top, peeking over the edge at first with trembling caution, then visibly relaxing and raising his whole head above. “Come on, chickenshits,” he called down. “Ain’t nothing’ to--”

A blue hand seized him by the throat.

Fighting the thing, Derrick lost his grip and plummeted backwards into the raft. The disembodied hand was still on him--not just a hand but an entire arm, ripped off at the shoulder socket, its round bone nakedly visible, hideously flailing and jerking at the elbow joint as it strangled him. The other boys quailed back, screaming, but Sal lunged for the thing, trying to pry its fingers loose. It was a young girl’s hand, its dainty nails painted pink, but it was cold and rubbery, impossibly strong.

“Help me!” he shouted.

Kyle jumped forward to pitch in, then two other boys, his poker buddies Ray and Rick. As they grappled with it, the naked stump kicked Sal in the cheek so hard it cracked a filling. Tasting blood, he braced his knee on Derrick’s chest, and with a supreme effort they all managed to wrench the thing loose. It immediately went wild, flexing and bucking in their hands, trying to get at them. “All together now,” Sal said. “One, two…” On three they hurled it far out into the water.

“Holy craaap,” Derrick wheezed, retching over the side.

“Let’s get outta here!” Kyle shouted.

“Wait!” Sal said. “We can’t just go back.”

“Why not? I’m not waitin’ for the rest of that chick to show up!”

“We got to expect shit like this to happen. We handled it! We can’t just give up now.”

“We sure as hell can!” Others chimed in: “Hell yeah,” “We’re gone!” “This shit is suicide!” “Go, dog, go!”

“Hold up,” said a ragged voice. It was Derrick. He shakily sat up and croaked, “Don’t nobody do a God-damned thing. I ain’t--hem--goin’ back to that submarine empty-handed. Just so they can lock us in jail again? How many days we already been sitting there dreaming we had someplace else to go, some kinda free choice? Screw that shit. I’m hungry.” He got up and climbed the ladder again, wobbly but without hesitation. In seconds he was over the top and out of sight.

For a long moment there was silence, then Derrick’s face reappeared. “Come on!” he called down impatiently. “Let’s do this shit. You wanna eat or don’t you?”

Sal started to follow, but Kyle and the other boys shoved past, nearly knocking him into the water. Whether empowered by Derrick’s confidence, the prospect of food, or the thought of that arm lurking in the water below, suddenly they couldn’t get up fast enough. “One at a time,” Sal said. But they weren’t listening to him at all--the old ladder was almost coming to pieces from their combined weight. Stupid jerks. “Everybody stay together,” he called after them as he tested the rungs.

Sal emerged to find the boys all standing at the edge of a weedy lot, reveling in the glorious, slightly queasy sensation of dry land. It looked like no-man’s land--the vacant area beneath a highway bridge. On one side was the flood-control berm--a high rock dam separating them from the city--and on the other a fenced tugboat landing and some condemned-looking buildings. Huge concrete pylons rose above them to Interstate 195. It was all reassuringly deserted.

As Sal joined them, Derrick asked him, “Where at now?”

“Well, we gotta cross under the highway and follow the road here through the flood gate. There should be businesses and things on the other side.”

“Let’s do it.”

Following Derrick, who was following Sal, the boys trooped quickly and quietly down the road, picking up any likely-looking weapons they happened to find--mostly rocks and chunks of brick. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Sal wished he could find a good stick. He looked up at the highway bridge, imagining that the little girl’s arm must have fallen from there, picturing the awful scene: the girl in the backseat of her parents’ car, the Xombie lunging in and grabbing her arm, dad hitting the gas- -nasty.

They found the tremendous open doors of the flood barrier and cautiously followed the road through. On the far side was a chic waterfront area of clubs and condos, and across the river an immense gothic cathedral that was the electric company, webbed to the rest of the city by flowing skeins of wire. It was all dead, all out of commission, yet almost perfectly preserved, as if loyally awaiting the future return of humankind. Everything had gone down so fast there was no time for looting and destruction.

Dodging from one shadow to the next, the boys did what they could to keep a low profile. “I don’t get it,” Kyle said, eyes wide with tension. “Why aren’t there any Xombies?”

“Be glad there ain’t,” said Derrick, gingerly touching his bruised neck.

“It’s gotta be that viral thing they talked about--viral progression,” Sal said. “The cities got so full of Xombies they reached, like, critical mass. Once there was nobody left to infect, there was no reason to stay, so they scattered outward across the country. Maybe there aren’t any left here.”

The boys’ chests swelled with hope. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know. It’s just what I heard.”

“God, I hope you right, man.”

Staying off the exposed waterfront, they followed a shaded inner street with fewer doorways. This led them to a second highway underpass, one older and darker than the first, a sunken hollow, its corroded iron girders busy with roosting pigeons. There were peeling psychedelic murals on the walls, ads for funky-sounding businesses: Café Zog, Olga’s Cup and Saucer, Acme Video, Z-Bar. Cars sat dead in the road, their windows broken and doors wide open to the elements. Pigeons were roosting in them, too. This was not a good place to be, it didn’t feel safe; the boys could be cornered here in the dripping wetness, trapped amid the rust and rank birdshit. “We shouldn’t a gone this way, man,” said Kyle. They walked faster and faster, trying not to panic, not to run...

…and emerged in the light of spring. Before them was tiny hillside park with a veteran’s memorial, benches, and maple trees. Dew glistened on the grass. But the boys hardly noticed any of that; they were more interested in what lay just beyond: a bright red-and-yellow gas station--a Shell Station--with a sign reading, FOOD MART.

Now they ran.

The coolers were dead, the ice-cream melted, the milk sour, but nearly everything else in the place was edible, and the forty boys made a valiant attempt to eat it all. It was a treasure trove more welcome to them than King Tut’s tomb, and as perfectly preserved, not in natron but sodium benzoate:

Snack cakes and pies, puddings, nuts, cookies, crackers, canned meats and cheeses, beef sticks, jerky, pickles, salsa, pretzels and potato chips galore. Candy! Whole cases of chocolate bars, chews, sours, mints, gum. And drinks: Bottled beverages of every kind-- energy drinks, soda pop, fancy sweetened teas and cappuccino, Yoo- Hoo or just plain water--all free for the taking. It was a teenage dream come true, an all-you-can-eat paradise of junk food. All the cigarettes they could smoke too, if they wanted them, and a few other vices besides.

“Can this stuff make us sick?” Freddy Fisk asked through a mouthful of mini-donuts. “It must be pretty old by now.”

“I doubt it,” Sal said, munching Fritos. “There’s enough chemicals in this stuff to last until doomsday.”

“Then it’s definitely expired.”

What they didn’t eat, they stuffed into ditty bags they had brought from the sub. They sacked the store; all that was left was money and auto accessories. Sated, idly scratching lottery tickets, some of them were already starting to feel that perhaps it had been a mistake to eat so much, so fast. Of this junk. Damn.

“I don’t feel so good, man.”

Sal was consulting the selection of maps. “Well don’t croak yet--we still have a ways to go to get back.”

“You guys go ahead, I’m staying here--urp.”

“I think we all staying here,” Derrick said. Something hollow in his voice made them turn around to see what he was looking at. The front windows of the mini-mart overlooked the little memorial park and the elevated highway just beyond. Until now, the boys had not been in a position to really see Interstate 195--it had been an abstract concept, no more alarming than the underside of a bridge. Now they had a good view of it. Freddy G vomited--whulp!

It was a river of death, a glacier of stalled metal, curving away as far as the eye could see. Thousands upon thousands of cars and trucks jammed bumper to bumper, all dead silent, the diamond bits of their smashed windows glittering in the morning sun. The interstate had become a colossal junkyard, a graveyard for humanity’s mobile aspirations…when graveyards no longer stayed filled.

Silent, dead, but not entirely still. There was darting movement there. Not the movement of cars, but of bodies--naked blue bodies. Catch them in glimpses: the wink of shadows scurrying between the lanes, a flash of scary Zuni-doll faces. And darker shapes looming beneath the overpass--jumpy silhouettes blocking the light, flushing out the pigeons. Rushing down the on-ramp. They were everywhere.

Feeling his insides turn to water, Sal thought, No way, no way dude. Nuh-uh, no way, oh, no, no, no, please, no…

What he said was, “Guys? Can we, uh, get moving?”