It was the tunnel. The thunderous noise was coming from deep within it—the sound of a roaring cataract. It was growing louder every second: some great mass rushing up like a dark tsunami.
“Xombies!” Freddy shouted
The boys broke and ran. Abandoning their bikes, slipping and sliding all over the place, trampling one another into the muck, most of them had no idea where they were going—as long as it was anywhere but there. Only Sal stayed with his bike, dragging it a little way up the bank. “Up here!” he shouted to them. “We have to go this way!”
Then he froze, suddenly aware that something was standing next to him in the bushes. It was something very big, a shadowy human figure half-hidden by the leaves. Alarming enough if it was a Xombie lurking there . . . but then the thing stepped into a bar of sunlight. The sight of it caused Sal to reel backward on his ass, legs entangled in the bike.
It was not a mindless Xombie—a Xombie would have attacked by now. This was something else, something even more preposterous: a nightmarish hulk assembled from surplus Xombie parts. A hideous Frankenstein’s monster crudely patched together with steel stitches. In what he thought was the final second of his life, Sal DeLuca gaped up at the monster’s seething form, a crazy quilt of bristling scalps, mottled blue skins, veinous bodily nets and sinews, and, worst of all, a living cuirass of animate human faces, all held together with what appeared to be metal staples. They were staples—what Sal at first took to be a huge, holstered pistol was in fact an industrial-sized staple gun.
“CHEW DUNE, BOA?” the thing roared at him.
Sal fainted.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FOUNDING FATHER
There was no food, or news. No one came around at all; trash and filth thrown in the corridors just stayed there. The prisoners who had televisions and radios kept them turned way up so everyone could hear, but all the channels were off the air except one, and that one just kept playing a tape loop from the Emergency Broadcast System—some vague warning about a disease causing women to go berserk, which the men already knew. Then the electricity went out. When the cell toilets went dry, the prisoners became very nervous. Sometime in the early morning of the third day, a voice came over the prison loudspeakers:
“Gentlemen, attention. Attention, gentlemen. Wake up, please.”
The inmates stirred. Some began to yell. “Who’s that? Hey, we need water in here! Who’s there? Help! Help us!”
“Attention. I ask for everyone’s attention. My name is Bendis, Major Kasim Bendis. I am a professional soldier, and I’ve come to save your lives.”
A gabble of voices echoed down the cellblock: “I told you!” “Get us outta here, then!” “I demand to speak to my attorney!”
Bendis said, “The judges are gone, the attorneys are gone, the guards and police are gone. Everyone you knew on the outside is gone, and you have been left here to die. But I’ve come to offer you a choice in the matter.”
“Just let us out, motherfucker!”
“I can do that. I can do that, and will, if that is your ultimate choice. But if I do that, you will be choosing death. Since my team and I were airdropped here and are now trapped with you, I would prefer that we all survive.”
“Airdropped? Who the fuck are you, man, James Bond? Where’s the rest of the damn cavalry?”
“There is no cavalry, no National Guard. No rescue—all that is over. Forget your former persecutors and think of yourselves as the rulers of your own destiny. Your own country. Yes, this is your country now. I’m a private contractor working for the company that owns this facility, and I’ve been sent to help you rescue yourselves. And to do that you have to listen to me. I didn’t come here to get us killed, or to make us into more of them—the infected. There are already enough of them out there. And be assured that if I just release you all from your cells, that is what will happen. You are hungry and scared, you are desperate to make some sense of what’s happening, so you will try to leave—it’s not unreasonable. You will open the gate and expose us to Agent X infection: the Maenad psychosis. They are waiting out there, trust me, and once it starts spreading in here, it will be too late. That would be a terrible waste since you are the lucky ones. You won the biggest lottery of all time, being within these walls, being men, and it’s my job to help you make the most of it.
“But I’m not here to make that decision for you. I’m just here to help you make it for yourselves—to advise you. What I need you to do now is pick a representative. Pick someone among yourselves to speak to me, one-on-one, and I will release him. Once he has been fully briefed on the situation, he will pick a council representing the dominant factions among you, and together they will assume full control of the penitentiary. As I said, I am only here in an advisory role—you are in charge. So choose your government.”
After an hour of rancorous debate, they arrived at a consensus. Their leader was a man they all knew, a jailhouse celebrity who did not put on airs or demand special treatment, a humble and private man. He was Joe Angel, aka Angel Suarez, aka El Abrigo, aka El Dopa—this last being the name he was best known by, as it was the name he recorded under. In his two years in the joint, El Dopa had somehow managed to be a jailhouse musician, a convict-rights advocate, and a crusader for world peace through the healing power of transcendental meditation. He was a uniter, not a divider. This had served him well not only in the joint but on the outside, where record executives were falling all over themselves to sign the next big crossover star.
The truth was, El Dopa had never been a criminal, and his teenage years had been characterized less by drive-by shootings than by drive-thru cheeseburgers. He was a suburban kid from a solidly middle-class family; there were no ties to gangs and crime syndicates, not even any crimes to speak of. His conviction on illegal firearms possession was a calculated PR stunt arranged by his agent and record company to boost his street cred upon the release of his debut studio album, El Dopa Represents. As a first offender, he’d expected to get off with time served, probation, and a stint of community service that he could use to push his album in schools, but his arrest coincided with an election year, the War on Terror, and the governor’s tough-on-crime campaign. Joseph Xavier Angel, twenty-nine, small-town boy, small-time crook, Vedanta Yoga enthusiast, was blindsided with five years hard labor.
Marcus Washington—Voodooman—had no objection to El Dopa’s election as spokesman—Why not? He didn’t know the man personally, and frankly he didn’t much care. Like all the inmates, Marcus had sat in his cell for the last three days staring at his three hungry cellmates and grimly contemplating the future. They were all doing it, in every cell of the prison: sizing each other up, assessing each other’s weaknesses, coming to a consensus. No tortuous discussion was required; the process of elimination was subliminal and automatic, as if on some level they had always known they were going to eat each other. Only the victims were unsure—that was what identified them as victims.
Marcus was everything El Dopa pretended to be: Born into backwoods poverty in the wilds of Texarkana, he had run away from home at twelve and started making deliveries for drug dealers in New Orleans. He graduated to gang membership at thirteen, dropped out of school at fourteen, and wound up in the system at fifteen, convicted for killing three rival gang members. Then it was years in juvenile detention, followed by more years at the ACI—medium security—where he was convicted a second time for murdering another inmate before finally being transferred to the private supermax facility at Huntsville.
At first, the whole business about Agent X had seemed pretty promising—any lifer serving six consecutive terms for capital murder had to be interested in any change in the status quo. It was like the bull in the card game: Without some kind of major intervention, Marcus had no hope of ever again tasting freedom. He barely remembered its flavor.
El Dopa met with Major Bendis for several hours, then came out and freed the leaders of every major prison faction, holding a private discussion with them fo
r more long hours. Water was provided. Finally, the council emerged, and El Dopa addressed the rest of the population:
“Those with the most power bear the most responsibility—how could it be otherwise? They’re the ones most capable of doing anything. In our society, money equals power. Thus it follows that those with the least money should bear the least responsibility. The poor should be given the most slack. And yet we here have borne not only the least opportunity but the harshest punishment. Most of us have never known the benefits of civilization; how could we be expected to uphold its laws? Especially when the rich and powerful are exempt. It isn’t us who profit off war, or religion, or political corruption, or the rape of the environment. Those crimes, which cause misery and death to billions, go unpunished, or are in fact rewarded, while the corporate media demonize our petty crimes of poverty, our acts of human desperation, our very survival, and we are sentenced to lifetimes of slavery.
“Well, we have finally been freed. We are in charge of not only our own destinies but the destiny of the country as a whole. The reins of power have been handed to us, and we must act accordingly—responsibly. If we just leave and scatter in all directions, we will end up like everybody else out there: crazy or dead. We gotta stick together, work as a team, as an army, to build a new society. Everything we need is out there, free for the taking, but in order to get at it, we need technical assistance, and that’s where Major Bendis comes in. He’s been sent not only to help us but to ask for our help. He says there’s a new world government being formed out there, a government we can help create, which will correct the mistakes of the past. A government in which we will all have shares.”
El Dopa held up a certificate resembling a treasury bond. It read, ONE MOBUCK, and in smaller print, This Mobuck entitles the bearer to 1/125,000 share of all benefits accruing from membership in the entity known as the Mogul Cooperative or MoCo, redeemable in gold or services. “You see this? Money’s no good anymore—this is the official currency of your new country. This is power. It represents a percentage of the total wealth—the more you contribute, the more it’s worth. The more you’re worth. That makes us all major stockholders. People, this is like having a share of McDonald’s back when it was just one restaurant—priceless.
“But we gotta move. There are other groups like us, other prisons all over the world, and if we don’t get on board quick, the shares will be divided into smaller and smaller fractions, sold and resold until they’re watered down to nothing. Right now we have the early-bird advantage—we’re the Founding Fathers.” He waited for this to sink in, then said, “Okay, then. Go ahead, Smitty.”
The chairman of the Prisoners’ Rights Committee stepped forward. “Y’all been waiting long enough, so we are going to open the cellblocks and let you out, but that don’t mean you can up and leave. That would be suicide. There’s a plan for how to do it right, and we’re respecting you enough to trust that you’ll assemble in the main hall and listen to the rest of what we have to say. It’s very important—all our lives depend on it. Give me a shout-out if you agree.”
Everyone shouted yes, and the cellblock doors were rolled back.
There was a stampede for the exit, like the ringing of a school bell.
The prisoners were scared, they were hungry, they were thirsty, and they were pissed off to have been kept waiting here one minute longer than they had to be when they could already be seeing to their mothers, their wives, their children, or otherwise making the most of this Get Out of Jail Free card. They had more important things to do than sit here listening to bullshit speeches.
Of the five thousand men in camp, only a few hundred had actually witnessed what happened the night of the rodeo; the rest could barely make sense of the garbled reports coming over the airwaves or the goofy horror stories circulating by word of mouth: Crazy blue bitches? Maenad what? Agent X? What the hell is that? Many of the men were in the joint for crimes against women—assault, rape, murder—and were accustomed to forcing their will upon the opposite sex, making women cry and plead, using them, breaking them, then turning them out to earn pocket money to spend on fresh bitches. The thought of a female being dangerous was laughable: Women were generally weak and gullible, suckers for any man with a sweet line of patter; they needed a firm hand to control them. Scrape away the clothing and makeup and high-ass attitude, and they were helpless as baby chicks: holes that begged to be filled. Their only purpose was to serve men, and if they talked back or got out of line, it was a simple matter of laying down some tough love . . . which was where the police, and the judges, and the prison system came in.
But if there were no police . . .
Hence the men smiled and nodded and patiently sat through those whole long speeches, but as soon as the doors rolled back, they shook off the unsolicited advice like a long-winded sermon in the prison chapel when all they wanted was free wine—they didn’t need El Dopa, they didn’t need no funny money, and they certainly didn’t need any half-assed Rambo motherfuckers telling them what to do.
Marcus himself held back, as did all the boys who had been at the rodeo that night. No one who had seen that, who had those sounds and pictures playing in his mind day and night, was in any big hurry to dash outside, however hungry or thirsty he might be. They tried to impress this upon the men around them, but the momentum to leave was too great . . . until the jackhammer sound of a modified AK-47 caused everyone to fall back in panic. Bits of concrete and ceiling insulation rained down on their heads.
It was Major Bendis. He and his men were sitting in the shadows, blocking the passage to the main guard station, barring the exit. They were dangerous men, men with a philosophy of violence, all five of them heavily laden with weapons and belts of ammunition. Despite their smoking guns, they appeared perfectly at ease, lounging back in plastic kiddy desks from the visiting area.
Speaking into a megaphone, Bendis said in his odd foreign accent, “As I said before, you are free to go. Just not all at once. We’ll let you go in your elected groups, starting with the smallest. Will the smallest group please to come forward? Everyone else stay where you are.”
The sixteen representatives of ILL—the Incarcerated Libertarian League—pushed through the crowd. They were all paunchy, red-faced NRA supporters and militant anti-government types who had been convicted of weapons charges and tax evasion, or who had killed bosses, coworkers, and ex-wives in suburban shooting rampages. Because of the latter, high-profile atrocities, most of them were on Death Row, where they shared a dormitory and were kept on permanent suicide watch: intrusive searches, twenty-four-hour video monitoring, and bright lights all night long. The thought that they were about to just waltz out of here scot-free was incredible to these men—they were all too familiar with betrayal, it had to be a trick of some kind—so they came forward hesitantly, upper lips sweating, pudgy nail-bitten hands trembling in disbelief.
Bendis nodded at El Dopa, who waved the men through, saying, “Go on, you’re free.”
Two of the soldiers led them through the various gated levels of the security station, the processing room, and the outer waiting area, to the heavy exit door. The outside video monitors were all dead. Directing them to wait, the lead mercenary peered through the security glass, then popped the latch. Jerking his bearded chin toward the exit, he hissed, “Run! Now!”
The men ran. Barging through the door into bright daylight, the first thing they saw was the surreal sight of the warden’s white stallion nibbling the grassy verge of the inner keep. The huge animal huffed and tossed its head, rearing away as the group headed down the enclosed path between fenced exercise yards to the outer compound. Beyond that was the secure parking and the driveway to the main gatepost, a fortified checkpoint through steel jungles of chain link and concertina wire, sandwiching a perimeter-long dog run and great thick brambles of razor ribbon.
Those brambles were full of naked dead people, scare-crows of raw meat, their clothes and flesh torn off and hanging in rags from the wire,
their mangled bodies bent in impossible contortions, limbs all but torn off trying to swim through the steel thicket, finally stuck fast.
Horrific as this sight was, the convicts had already either seen it themselves or heard about it from others with outward-facing windows. They were focused more on the peaceful vista just beyond: the rolling green landscape of the prison farm, thousands of acres surrounded by a single outer fence that bordered the service road. From what they could tell, the plague had run its course; the landscape was deserted. No guards to stop them, no crazy women running wild, just clear sailing all the way. Basking in the sunshine, they jogged anxiously toward freedom.
They made it as far as the parking lot before the Xombies hit. First there was just one—a creature so torn from its passage through the wire that it was practically skinless, all purplish muscle and yellow fat, its torn belly an empty cavity. It was a woman.
The men shouted to each other as the thing came around the building, skittering as though hyped-up on meth or PCP, much faster than they could run and open the gate—they were already out of breath. Fleeing wasn’t an option; the only choice was to stand and fight. Even though they had no weapons, the men weren’t overly alarmed at the prospect—they were comfortable with their sixteen-to-one advantage. One torn-up madwoman didn’t stand a chance.
First, they tried to just shoo her off, waving their fists and yelling, “Fuck off! Get out of here! Beat it!” but she kept coming. As she drew closer, and they really got a look at her—that flayed face with its hugely exposed black eyeballs rimmed in yellow—some of the men became more doubtful, but the ringleader, an ex-Marine named Sherman Oakes, said, “Holy Jesus, she’s already got both feet in the grave! Probably drop dead from a stiff breeze.” He wrapped his jacket around his fist, and the others did likewise, forming a defensive half circle to meet her.
Xombies: Apocalypticon Page 13