Apocalypse blues x-1

by Walter Greatshell

  I looked up. Hector and Shawn were bearing down on us, full of demonic sunshine, so close I could see that the swelling around their implants had gone blue. In a few seconds, they would grab us and do the things they did. Jake and Julian weren't moving, impassively watching them come. The men behind the fence watched, too.

  Standing up and making an X with my arms, I screeched, "Wait! I know where it is! Colonel Lowenthal! I know where it's hidden!"

  Jake and Julian stared at me, startled.

  "I know now! Oh God help us! Please!" Suddenly I knew this hopeless, ragged plea would be the last sound I would ever make. It was just too late. Hector was coming for me, and nothing anyone could do would be fast enough to stop that. I sank to my knees before him and saw points of red dancing all over his body.

  With a strobing, brilliant flash, he came apart. Just tumbled to pieces midstride, while the afterimages of that searing light lingered in the air like childish squiggles. He and Shawn both.

  The gate rolled open.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  "Come on, Lulu," Julian said. "You did it. They're waving us in."

  He and Jake were standing over me, dog-tired and dirty as losers at tug-o'-war. I couldn't seem to move or look them in the face. Everything was a hazy jumble of accusatory ghosts, an ever-growing population of those I had wronged crowding my aching head. I was out of my mind. It's a strange thing to be mad and to know it.

  "Tyrell's dead," I muttered.

  Julian wasn't listening. "Come on, we gotta go."

  "We left them there to die. I couldn't tell you."

  "She's out of it, man," said Jake, crying.

  "I lied about the rations, too. They were giving me extra the whole time."

  "Lulu, it's okay."

  "They're all dead! Don't you get it?"

  "Lulu, it's okay, it's okay." Julian knelt beside me, trying to get me to look at him. "Whatever you're talking about, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we're still here, and that's because of you. You saved us."

  Resisting, wanting to shout, Shut up! Shut up! You're so stupid! I melted and sobbed, "No…"

  "Lulu, what do you have? If we're going to survive, you have to tell us what's going on. Obviously, you know something we don't. Quick, before they get here."

  Angrily meeting his eyes, I said, "I have something these people want. Something Cowper gave me."

  Jake exhaled harshly, head bobbing.

  "What is it?" Julian asked me.

  "Kind of a… Xombie vaccine. A miracle cure."

  "For Agent X? Are you serious?"

  "For everything. It's what Agent X was supposed to be: some kind of elixir of life for the fabulously wealthy." I couldn't stop a loony giggle from bursting out. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."

  "Are you serious?" Julian took me roughly by the shoulders. "Where is it?"

  "Hidden on the boat."

  "Holy shit! Lulu! And you didn't tell anyone?" Horror and outrage were driving the initial disbelief from his voice. His hands were a pair of live wires. I could see he felt betrayed, not just for himself but for the whole human race.

  "I didn't know," I said. "I didn't realize where it was until just now!"

  Julian was about to kill me or something, but Jake stepped in, and said giddily, "She's fucking bluffing, dude. Can't you see that? She's bluffing the fuckers!"

  Julian wavered, taken aback. "What?"

  "Of course she's bluffing. She's buying us time, tricking them into letting us back on the boat. She's playing 'em!"

  Julian turned to me. "Is that what's going on, Lulu? Because if you're not bluffing, and this shit is real, then you absolutely cannot give it to them. It's our only leverage. If you hand it over, we got nothing."

  Jake said, "Don't you see? That's the beauty of it. It doesn't even matter if it's real or not. All that matters is that they think it's real! She's got it all worked out!"

  "Do you, Lulu?"

  I couldn't bring myself to answer. To let them down.

  "Ice-cold, man," Jake marveled. "You think she's gonna tell you? Chick is ice-cold."

  Don came galloping out the gate, ivory fangs gnashing. The sight of that red, white, and blue-daubed monster ripped us from our funk.

  "Bad monkey!" Jake gibbered.

  I held their sleeves, and said, "Stay calm, he's tame, he's tame. Just wait."

  "Are you sure?"

  "He's friendly, you'll see."

  "Are you sure?" There was no fight left in them, but they stood their ground, instinctively shielding me from the fantastic beast. Don raced around behind and menaced us toward the compound. Jake said, "If that thing bites me, I'm gonna freak."

  "Just walk. He's not going to bite you, trust me." As I said this I caught a peripheral look at the squirming remains of Hector and Shawn, a scalding rebuke to my continued prideful existence. Trust me. The peat fire that was my madness suddenly flared up, and I ran to them, diving to my knees amid their loose parts and trying to piece them back together or something. I don't know what I was doing. Just before Julian dragged me away, I had picked up a small piece of Hector and swallowed it. Screwing my eyes shut, I pressed on the implant with the heel of my hand until pain routed everything else.

  Laser dots swarmed us like persistent flies as we were shepherded through the gate.

  "Anytime, Lulu."

  Colonel Lowenthal's weaselly voice, amplified by the intercom, was piercingly loud in the confines of the cell, a brightly lit metal tank exactly like the ones I had seen holding Cowper and the other Xombies. This time I was on the mirrored side of the glass, sandwiched between Jake and Julian in a space about the size of a phone booth.

  I looked at our scruffy reflection and summoned the words, "I want to make a trade." It was not me speaking, but it was so sane-sounding, I said it again: "I want to make a trade."

  "We've already made one. I fulfilled my end of the bargain, now it's your turn."

  "I'm not going to tell you anything until you return our people to the boat."

  "I see."

  "Once we're all out there, and Captain Coombs is back in charge, I will let him set the conditions under which we will hand over the materials. I don't think I can make that determination on my own."

  "Really? You mean to say that's too much responsibility for an underdeveloped seventeen-year-old girl to handle? I'm shocked. And here I was all prepared to fold."

  "Fuck you," said Julian.

  "I'm sorry," Lowenthal said, anything but. "I shouldn't joke. It's just funny to me that you think you're in a position to negotiate. You sound like some of the guys we had to deal with here, all polished brass, as if military protocol was some kind of natural law like gravity. They couldn't tell which way the wind was blowing until it blew them away. It was really sad. Lucky for me, I guess. But you're just like them-you think you're privileged to hold on to your illusions, exempt from anything that doesn't suit you. Haven't you learned anything by now? Maybe they let you get away with this on the sub, but if so, I don't know why you're demanding to have that jackass Coombs be put back in charge. Captain Lulu is more like it."

  "If you think you're intimidating me, you're wrong," I said. "I know how important what I have is to you. You and your Moguls. Well, tell them they'll never get it without me, not until you set us free."

  "Ooooh. Listen to her. Hey, it may be true we'll never find it, lady, but at this point I seriously doubt you know anything helpful. I personally think your papa destroyed it, if it ever really existed, but I'll keep searching every inch of that sub until I know for sure, even if it takes a year. Either way I'm not cutting any more deals. All you're doing now is grasping at straws, trying to buy time. I respect that-it's what I would do in your position-but unless you have something real to offer, it has to end now."

  "It is real. I could take you to it right now, right this second, but I guarantee you'll never find it if anything happens to us or anyone else from the boat."

  "You're such a baby. Even
if that were true, don't you realize your best bet is to accept what you've been so generously offered? Full citizenship in MoCo, security, a halfway-decent future? Life, goddammit! It's the most anyone can hope for now, and you're throwing it away because somebody changed the rules on you, and your feelings are hurt? I don't think so; you're not that dumb. And if you are… well, honey, we no longer have the luxury of being able to save people like you from themselves, I'm sorry."

  Julian said, "It's you we need to be saved from, asshole."

  Lowenthal suddenly seemed to lose all interest. "I'm sure we're all in dire need of a savior. In the meantime, we have to manage as best we can. Without Miska's data we'll have to beef up our own research, which means we need a lot of test subjects. Fortunately we've just received a big shipment by U-boat: You three will participate in the first clinical trial, starting right now."

  "Good!" yelled Jake, losing it. "Bring it on, motherfucker!"

  "I will."

  "You do that!"

  "I am."

  "We don't give a shit!"

  "You got it."

  "Then do it, if you got the stones! Bust a move!"

  "Jake, be quiet."

  "It's done," said the colonel. "Just a few seconds now…" There was a slithering noise outside the tank, getting louder. "Well, it's been fun."

  "You're out of your mind," I said.

  "That's what they said about Masters and Johnson." From a row of chrome spouts high up the wall, ice-cold water began gushing in.

  I thought I knew what cold water was. I had spent plenty of time mucking around in tide pools, foraging oysters, clams, and periwinkles in the dead of winter, with my numbed fingers getting all cut up by mussel shells as I dug. But this was colder. Cold was the wrong word for this. This burned. Burned like it was peeling off skin as it rose over feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, crotch, hips, waist, nipples, shoulders. The boys and I pressed together as tightly as we could, our shouts and moans lost in the deafening torrent:

  "Oh my God, it's so cold!" "Turn it off!" "Hang on!" "Get closer!" "Away from the spray, right here!" "Let us out!"

  As the lapping tide threatened to rise over my head I had to swim, meaning I was forced to surrender my precious upraised arms to that searing flood, the last warmth I could give without going under completely.

  Then the boys were lifting me from either side, boosting me above the swirling, Coke-bottle green pool. My white flesh was rubbery as a half-thawed turkey, but not so dead I couldn't feel the vivid pleasure of warm air.

  "No!" I shrieked, fighting the intense relief. "You can't!"

  "Shut up, we're taller," said Julian.

  "Pretend you're on Girls Gone Wild," Jake said.

  I didn't try to resist as they propped me up on their shoulders, cradling my hips between their still-warm heads. My own head was jammed up against a caged light fixture in the ceiling, basking in its slight heat, while my submerged legs were sheathed in a fragile pocket of less-freezing water between the boys' bodies. If they moved at all, colder eddies swirled in like biting drafts. Violently shivering, I watched from my perch as Jake and Julian became immersed, standing on tiptoes and craning their necks until only their gulping, disembodied faces broke the surface like floating masks.

  Pounding the intercom in front of my face, I screamed, "Stop! Stop it! Turn it off! Stop!"

  The water stopped.

  All of a sudden it was so quiet-the only sound was my teeth chattering in that shallow pocket of air, and I was miserably aware that the boys couldn't hear anything with their ears underwater. Nobody spoke. I searched their faces for some sign of what to do, but their eyes stared straight up, unblinking, all thoughts turned inward as warmth and life ebbed from their bodies. They hardly seemed aware of me.

  She's bluffing, dude.

  If you hand it over we got nothing.

  Chick is ice-cold.

  "I know where it is," I said.

  "Where?" asked Lowenthal.

  "Let us out first."

  "No."

  "Please!"

  "No."

  Sitting hunched there on the faltering shoulders of my friends was so precarious I expected it to be mercifully short, yet the moment stretched on and on like a detour in time, a missed off-ramp with no U-turn in sight, receding into eternity: all the loneliness, pointlessness, emptiness of it. The waiting. I realized it was not death, but death's delay that was the ultimate cruelty.

  To the intercom, I said, "D-d-don't you realize you're d-doing us a f-f-favor?" Lowenthal didn't reply.

  As Jake and Julian succumbed, I begged them to hold on, not because I was so afraid of the end but because I was afraid of being left alone. I resented them going first. And yet I continued to struggle: As Jake went under I clung to Julian, and even as Julian's upturned mouth filled with water I tried to climb his sinking body to keep my own head above. In the end I stood upon them both as the cold took its sweet time stealing over me.

  Actually, I wasn't getting colder. A deep warmth had started to bloom, and with it a dreamy calm. I knew what this was, this welcome, enfolding dark. I knew these were precursors to the end, and the gratitude I felt was indescribable. Thank you thank you thank you thank you…

  But even as I slipped beneath the surface, trailing a string of mirrored bubbles, my alien hand found the necklace, snapped the chain, and held the locket up above the water. Up where the gold would catch the light.

  I could feel cool grass against my cheek, and desert wind riffling my clothes. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. I was heavy, immovable, a lizard sunning on a rock. In the hazy distance, I could see our old house in Oxnard, white as a milk carton on the grass, with the peeling eucalyptus trees and the laundry line. At first I sensed the presence of my mother inside and was overjoyed, wild to tell her something. Then I began to notice something wasn't right-the focus was peculiar-and as I reached my hand out, the illusion collapsed: It was a miniature, a fake. A crummy little diorama. I was so frustrated I wanted to smash it! That's why I disliked miniatures and models, even the good ones in museums, because the more real they are, the more daintily inviting, the more they put you at arm's length. But this one was the most crushing disappointment of all.

  Or maybe I was just too old for toys. I remembered how delighted I was by the toy circus set on my birthday cake when I was five: the plastic Ferris wheel, the big top, the flags and trapeze, the clowns and camels. There was nothing realistic about it, nothing to scale. It was probably very cheap. But it was the only thing that interested me-the few other presents were so drab and functional I have no memory of them at all. But at the end of the party, the landlord and her daughter wrapped up what was left of the cake and disappeared with it.

  Not sure what had just happened, I said, "Mummy, where did the circus go?"

  "Oh, honey, those were just decorations. They belong to Mrs. Reese."

  "But it's my birthday," I said, tears streaming. "I wanted them."

  "Well, she made the cake, Lulu. I'm sorry. Come on now, be a big girl."

  My mother's voice was growing faint. The house was empty, a cheap toy, and the more I pawed at it, the more unreal it became. My heart seized up with a terrible feeling of loss, and I called, "Mum!"

  As I spoke, the dream shivered apart. I was in bed, naked as a baby, swaddled in flannel. It was no ordinary bed, but a fluffy giant pillow as rapturously soft and warm as a sheltering bosom. The room was dim, but the impression I got was something out of Arabian Nights-a large carpeted tent with hanging swaths of colorful sheer fabric and pillows all over the place. Was I still dreaming? I squirmed deeper, away from bad thoughts and a ghostly hand petting my head.

  "Welcome back, Lulu."

  I scrunched up my face. It was that blond woman doctor-Dr. Langhorne. She was sitting cross-legged at the head of the bed. Her eyes were red and her face raw-scrubbed, as if fresh from a long crying jag.

  "How are you feeling?" she asked.

  "Alive," I murmured, heartsick.r />
  "Oh yes. You were never in any danger. We made sure of that."

  "Why?"

  "Because you have a place here. You've earned a place here."

  "Don't say that."

  "Why not? It's a new day, Lulu. A brand-new life starts today."

  "No…"

  "Louise, I know this is hard, but from what I know about you, you're tough enough to take it. And starting tomorrow, things are going to get a whole lot easier."

  Reluctantly, I asked, "How?"

  "Tomorrow you'll get a guardian. Someone to take care of you."

  "Oh."

  "I know that doesn't mean much to you yet, but I think you'll find it exciting."

  "Uh-huh."

  "You're a princess around here. A rare bird. Important men are eager to meet you."

  "You mean like they've been meeting the boys?"

  She looked at me shrewdly, grateful to dispense with childish fictions. "Much more so," she said. "Boys are just a substitute borne of necessity."

  "Swell."

  "You know, later on you'll have a chance to see some of your pals again, the ones who have been 'adopted.' You'll see that they're getting along just fine."

  "Why not now?"

  "They're still going through orientation."

  "Why can't I go through orientation with them?"

  She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. "Honey, you don't need to."

  I remained in bed all day, feeling leaden and ill. At intervals my guts would seize up, bending me double and wringing out harsh silent tears, like juice from a frost-damaged lemon. I wondered if there were any hidden cameras as I used the bed-pan. Several doctors dropped by to check my vitals, and I had the impression they had drawn straws for the privilege. They didn't speak English. Ridiculously sumptuous meals were brought on a cart-soft-boiled eggs, fresh fruit, a variety of breads and crackers with a basket of individual little spreads and cheeses, a pot of tea. At lunch there was an antipasto tray that could have fed six people, and at dinner a four-course meal with whole roast game hens. I hardly ate any of it-I could tell it was from the boat.