With brutal force, the guard was slammed backward to the ground, the tails of Warden Henrickson's wool coat covering them both like a cape as Officer Shoney's breath was sucked from his lungs.
Utterly stunned, the second guard stood by helplessly, waiting for something to make sense. Marcus knocked him down and wrestled his shotgun away, shouting, "Everybody inside! Just go!" Righteous rode the stallion through the gate, forcing an opening in the packed mob, followed closely by Voodooman, dragging the guard, and a few dozen stragglers.
Then there was no more time-the men inside heaved the high, sliding gate shut against the cries of frantic late-comers, who were racing up the hill with nightmarish freak jobs all around them. "Please God, let us in!" someone shrieked.
"You can't just leave them out there!" one of the prisoners yelled.
Voodooman leveled the shotgun on him, on everyone, forcing the crowd away from the fence. "Ain't nobody touches that gate. All right? Nobody touch the gate!"
"What the hell we supposed to do now?" asked Righteous.
"Go inside and wait until the SWAT team arrives."
"More like the National Guard."
"Or the mo'fuckin' Yoo-nited States Marines. Damn!"
The peals of terror from outside seemed to rouse the guard from his stupor. Shaking free of Voodooman's grip, he grabbed his rifle back, and shouted, "Everyone to your cells! Go back to your cells and wait there!" He shuddered, then suddenly vomited on his shoes. Trembling, flinching at the sounds outside, he wiped his mouth, and said, "Everything's under control! Everything's under control! Return to your cells at once."
No one made any argument.
CHAPTER TWO
DEAD SEA
The American shore, ominously dark as any cannibal coast, was visible in the moonlight as pale cliffs above a thin white hem of breakers. Commander Harvey Coombs knew there were supposed to be houses up there-the famous Newport mansions-but he couldn't see a thing, not a single light. Nor had he seen any other towns or cities: Falmouth, Fall River, New Bedford-all the teeming port settlements of southern New England were dark. To look upon that black coastline now was like peering down a tunnel through the ages. Seeing it the way it hadn't been seen in centuries.
Pilgrims, thought Coombs, lowering his binoculars. We're pilgrims.
That was it exactly. This was now the wilderness, the New World.
Coombs rubbed his puffy eyelids as if to remind himself that he was awake, was not dreaming. The freshly stitched incision on his forehead was real enough; the hole in his skull still hurt. Now that he had no clear mission objective anymore, the events of the past few months were growing in his mind like a tumor, a festering glut of unthinkable knowledge that kept gaining mass and crowding out the consolations of faith, hope, or rational thought.
How could it have happened? Agent X, the Xombie horror, Thule and the grim paradise of the Moguls, and now… what? There could be no homecoming, no end of the journey. Somehow he had found himself commanding not an Ohio-class submarine, not a U.S. naval vessel at all, but a nuclear-powered ghost ship, a modern Flying Dutchman, haunted, lost, and forever doomed to sail a dead sea.
In some part of him, Coombs had expected to come back and find America alight and sane like a beacon on the horizon, though continuous monitoring of every broadcast frequency revealed only dead air, the vacant hiss of static. Even the ambient sounds of the Atlantic Ocean were returned to a primeval state, devoid of human echoes. That pervasive churn of marine technology so familiar to submariners was gone. There was nothing to hear out there anymore but the random clicks and rasps of fish. That and the stealthy rhythms of his own boat. But still he had nurtured this irrational spark that some remnant of America would be waiting for him, like a candle in the window.
But no. It was over. It was truly all over. And in that case, what in God's name were they doing? Every one of them was already dead, they just wouldn't lie down.
Like Xombies.
But what else was there?
His headset crackled: "Commander Coombs. Dr. Langhorne requests permission to speak with you."
"Tell her I'm coming down." He spoke the words with the dry mouth of a man descending into a catacomb, a chamber of horrors. That's what the boat was to him now: a 560-foot-long steel tomb. Harvey Coombs was not a man who had ever put much stock in the supernatural. He was not superstitious or particularly religious beyond what was expected of any career-oriented, socially well-adjusted military officer. In his rational being he had no frame of reference for all that had happened in the four months since he had been assigned command of this nameless ship-his first and last command. He could not comprehend Purgatory, or Hell, or The End of the World. But there was a word for the mood that pervaded this boat and its crew: "dread." Death was afoot belowdecks, quite literally, and the living suffered its unspeakable presence in duty and purest dread.
Dread not, he mused. Dread not, dread naught, dreadnought. Dreadnaut-he had to smile at that one: Jason and the Argonauts, meet Lulu and the Dreadnauts. Not exactly the stuff of Greek legend; it sounded more like a cheesy cover band. And they already had one of those aboard.
Climbing down through the dank chambers in the monolithic black sail, Coombs thought as he often did lately about the choices, the sheer chance, that had led him into the Navy, and by extension to this strange, infernal place. It might so easily have never happened at all. He might be out there even now, lost beyond that dark shore, amid the blue multitude. The same as everyone else.
He could feel the anxious eyes of the crew on him now as he passed through the control center, searching him for confirmation of what they all felt and what they wanted him to feel. So that they could be reassured he was doing something about it, being the cool, competent leader they needed him to be. But he couldn't-Harvey couldn't give them that assurance. He had no such hope to offer.
"Keep to our present heading," he said. "Rich, take the conn for a minute."
"Yes, sir," said his executive officer darkly. "Robles, you and Phil go down with him."
Lt. Dan Robles stood up from his console.
"Stand down, Dan. I don't need an escort this time."
"It's just a precaution."
"I know, but it's been a week, and I think we might let up a little bit-the good doctor seems to be handling things down there. She's the expert."
"Respectfully disagree, Captain," said Kranuski. "We can't afford to relax our guard, not with them aboard. Whatever Dr. Quinn down there may think, it's too dangerous."
Richard Kranuski had many disagreements with Coombs about how the ship should be run, and increasingly strong support among the weary, makeshift crew, but Coombs did not think the XO would mutiny-bad as things were, it hadn't yet come to that. Terror was a great bonding agent. "If Langhorne feels safe enough to bunk down there all alone," he said, "I should be able to manage a quick look-see." He patted his sidearm. "I still got the old peashooter."
"Like that'll do you any good if-"
"Nothing will do us any good, Rich, if it comes to that. At some point, we just have to trust to fate."
"It wasn't fate brought those things aboard," remarked Alton Webb from the plotting table.
"Stow it, Lieutenant," Kranuski said sharply, reining in his man. To Coombs he said, "Well… it's your call, Captain."
"Thanks for reminding me." Coombs ducked away through the hatch.
Descending the companionway, he deliberately quickened his pace, not giving himself time to think. Alice Langhorne's work area was in the old mission control room, the deck that had once housed the submarine's nuclear launch systems. It was stripped now, an empty shell on the third deck of the command-and-control module-the boat's forward section. The hatch was sealed off and plastered with red caution tape. Someone, probably a teenager, had scrawled, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, beneath a large skull and crossbones. Using his command access key, Coombs opened the door.
Half the lights were out in there; it was dim and clammy a
s a dank basement. In the center of the room was a small glass coffin bathed in lamplight, with a dead girl inside. She was blue, blue of flesh as well as of dress, with glossy black hair fanned out around her head. The scene was funereal, eerily dreamlike.
Coombs stepped over the raised threshold. The girl was Louise Pangloss-Lulu-Fred Cowper's daughter. Commander Fred Cowper, retired, who had hijacked the sub as a refugee ship, filling it with a bunch of discontented shipyard workers and their teenage sons. Fred Cowper, whom Coombs had arrested for treason and later seen hauled ashore at Thule Air Base to be interrogated about the missing "Tonic"-the stolen antidote to Agent X. Harvey didn't know what had happened to Cowper after that, not until their escape from Thule, when Lulu's lifeless body had been found wedged atop the sail after two days submerged… holding Cowper's severed head in her lap.
She looked peaceful now, waxy and unreal. Her casket was a converted trophy case from the wardroom. It had been moved here after the men began to complain about "the dead girl stinking up the mess." Now it looked as though the doctor was using it as a desk: There was a chair beside it, and a box of documents on the floor. Atop the other materials, he could make out a spiral notebook labeled, Xombies-A True Account, by Louise Alaric Pangloss, and several computer disks labeled, Maenad Project-Mogul Archives, Vol. I-VII. Flipping through the notebook, scanning its dense blocks of minute handwriting, Coombs felt a twinge of pity. Lulu had been a smart girl, "a smaht cookie," as Cowper once said.
There was a rustling sound behind him. "Doctor?" Coombs called, trying to sound officious. "Dr. Langhorne?"
The walls began to move.
Don't panic… oh hell…
There they were-blue and cold as part of the machinery, as if they had sprouted from the guts of the boat itself. Forty of them, wedged wherever they could fit amid ducts and pipes and empty electronics bays, like toads under a rotting log.
Sensing him, they had begun to stir, swaying into motion like… like…
Like zombies, he thought. When they looked at him with those bright spider eyes, Coombs had to suppress a whole-body shudder. He had seen things like these take his men, witnessed close-up that nightmarish Xombie kiss: a man struggling helplessly, pinned face to face with one of these blue monstrosities like a rat in the coils of a snake, as the demon's gaping mouth covered his and instantly sucked all the breath from his body. The inconceivable horror in the man's dying eyes. Most of all, Coombs wished he could forget the sound-that hideous crunch of collapsing lungs, of crumpled ribs and vertebrae. A human being drained like a kid's juice box.
And then, seconds later, springing back to life as one of them.
The Xombies shuffled toward him, crawling, slithering, their unblinking black eyes staring as if fascinated. Closing in. Some of them were men and boys he knew-big Ed Albemarle was there, and Vic Noteiro's grandson, Julian-the naked and the dead. Coombs unsnapped the holster of his gun, flicking off the safety. He began to think that this hadn't been such a hot idea, that maybe this was it, the last mistake he would ever make.
Serves me right. Oh shit…
"Commander," said Alice Langhorne, appearing at his shoulder and nearly causing him to discharge his weapon. She waved the Xombies back, saying, "Shoo, you guys." As they moved away, she said, "Sorry. They're just being friendly."
"Doctor," said Coombs, his mouth paper-dry. Clearing his throat, he asked, "How's our little Snow White?"
"She's still inert. Still dormant."
"How can you tell she's even alive?"
"Well, she's not, strictly speaking. But as you can see, there's no evidence of physical deterioration, no decomposition. Even in that hyperbaric chamber, the cells of her body are continuing their metastasis. And it's a good thing they are: Without her ability to synthesize the Miska enzyme in her blood, we wouldn't have the means to pacify the others. They'd revert overnight."
"Won't she run dry?"
"She can regenerate indefinitely; all she needs is a little replacement hemoglobin to make up lost volume."
"Hemoglobin? Phil Tran told me you had her on glucose."
"We're out of glucose. Besides, saline and glucose are no substitute for whole blood-we can't take any chances with her. She's our golden goose."
"Where are you getting the hemoglobin?"
"I'm donating my own, for now."
Coombs had noticed that the doctor's face seemed a little wan but dismissed it as nothing unusual. Everybody gets pale on a submarine, it's an occupational hazard. But now… "You can't be doing that," he said firmly.
"It's a minimal amount, a couple of CCs a day. There isn't any alternative, unless you want to solicit contributions from the crew. I think we both know how that'll go over."
Coombs could think of nothing to say to that. "What did you want to speak to me about?" he asked.
Langhorne loomed above him, taller and more buff than he was, harshly competent and a good ten years older. Her hair was a platinum flattop, a razored shock of glass needles that jutted from her scalp like a crown. Like everyone else on board, she had a bandage on her forehead where the Mogul tracking implant had been removed-she was the one who had removed them. Without benefit of anesthetic.
For a woman in her fifties, Langhorne radiated a certain intensity. Among the men, she had already developed quite a reputation as a ballbuster, but Coombs was grateful for her confidence, her powerful sense of purpose, which was something he desperately needed right now. They all did.
"What do you think?" she said to him impatiently. "The plan, Sherlock. We're almost there, aren't we? We need to go over the plan."
"We can't have a plan until we know where to land. Right now we don't even know if the bay is navigable. We won't know that until we can see out there, and that won't be until sunrise."
"It's not that complicated. Just get this boat as close to the city as you can, blow up a rubber raft, and these guys will do the rest."
Captain Coombs looked at the slack-jawed Xombies, aimlessly milling around and staring off into space. Now that they were actually approaching their destination, it troubled him to think Langhorne might be wrong, that he had let himself get caught up in her delusion. Plan my ass. Maybe they should just scuttle the sub right now and be done with it-the end result would be the same. "You really think these things are going to be able to get ashore and execute a complex mission?"
"They can hear you, by the way; they're dead, not deaf. And they're not stupid, they're just a little… slow. Think of them as severely depressed." She smiled grimly. "But then, aren't we all?"
"Okay, great, but have you actually talked to them? I mean about doing this? Are they even capable of understanding?"
"Yes. They don't say much, but they're willing, or at least they're fairly suggestible. Can't you tell? They're more coherent than they look. The problem they have is that they're being bombarded with new sensations-every cell of their bodies is lit up like a Christmas tree from the Maenad infection, and it's overwhelmingly euphoric. They're stoned. The modified X enzyme in Lulu's blood acts as a depressant, bringing them down enough to function, but they do need supervision. That's why we'll have a video data link to guide them along the way. The only problem is the time factor: They have no sense of time, and if they're not back within eighteen or twenty hours, the inoculation will wear off, and we'll lose control of them-that is, they'll lose control of themselves. Either way, we'll never see them again."
"Most people on this boat would look upon that as a good thing."
"Yes, because they're morons. These guys are our only connection to dry land-maybe you'd like to try stepping ashore yourself and see what happens."
"No thanks. What makes you think they'll be able to find what they're looking for, this supposed vaccine? Miska's so-called Tonic? I thought he destroyed everything-and what he didn't destroy, the Moguls already picked over."
"The Moguls didn't know Uri Miska like I did. They financed his longevity research, but they didn't work with him every day for ten
years. They didn't know everything we were doing, or everywhere we were doing it." She said this with bitter satisfaction, having married and divorced a Mogul, the now-deceased James Sandoval, whose naval contracting firm had refurbished the submarine for exclusive Mogul use.
As if thinking aloud, Alice Langhorne muttered, "Professor Miska had secrets-secrets he obviously kept from everyone, including me. I admit it. The son of a bitch had his own agenda, no question about that." She looked at the angel-faced corpse in its glass casket, and Coombs thought he detected a gleam of welling tears. "Agent X was just the tip of the iceberg, I can tell you that," she said. "We still know a few things, don't we, baby? Oh yes. We've still got a few tricks up our sleeve…"
Commander Harvey Coombs, captain of what was likely the world's last active nuclear submarine, and probably the highest-ranking American naval officer left on the planet (even discounting his emergency field promotion to admiral, which he did), now looked at the troubled face of Dr. Alice Langhorne, perhaps the last surviving PhD, the last scientist, maybe even the last woman, and thought, She is nuts.
And then: Hey, pal, join the club.
CHAPTER THREE
WATERFIRE
Incomprehensibly vast as the horror was, it began with that most mundane of human annoyances: the persistent ringing of telephones. Seemingly at the exact stroke of midnight, Eastern Time, 911 phone banks began lighting up all over the country-indeed, all over the world. The extraordinary volume of calls would certainly have swamped the ability of emergency call centers to respond, had their operators been capable of responding, but they were not. Such call centers, staffed predominantly by women, were early casualties of the Maenad craze.So the phones rang and rang, unanswered.
Therefore, if the events of New Year's Eve do in fact represent the Apocalypse of biblical prophesy, as some have suggested, then it may truthfully be said that the Angel Gabriel did not herald the end of the world by blowing a trumpet. He notified us by phone. -The Maenad Project Sal DeLuca lay on a steel bed, dreaming of a steel beach.
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