He came straight for me, ignoring Cowper. From the crowd, boys’ voices entreated me to swim for it, run, hurry, but there was not a thing I could do to escape, and I didn’t try. As Julian got close, Cowper suddenly darted between us, snagging the boy by one leg, whirling with it, and slamming him down on his face. Julian was bigger and younger, but he seemed clumsy next to Cowper—or maybe it was just that he wasn’t fighting back at all. While Cowper attacked, he behaved as if the old man were some kind of baffling invisible obstacle, like a high wind. In a flurry of blue limbs, Julian tried to break free and get at me, but Cowper was tenacious as a pit bull. He wrestled Julian to the edge of the ice and finally flipped him into the water. With a pleading cry of, “Lulu!” Julian scrabbled at the slick ice, then sank like a stone.
The wind was knocked out of me, seeing Julian just vanish like that, but I slowly became aware of the sensation his death caused among the spectators on the opposite shore. It was fizzing in me as well—What just happened? Could it be true that those doctors had done what they promised? Had they cured Cowper? No. He wasn’t a horrible Xombie, but he wasn’t human. What had they turned him into?
The show was not over. As I stood there in shock, something else stirred in the darkness: many people this time. A whole host of men came shuffling into the spotlight, and from the way they walked I knew at once that they were human. There were about a hundred of them. Even before they fully emerged, I began frantically slipping and sliding my way over, because it was obvious from their clothes that they were the men from the sub. Commander Coombs was in front. Flanking him were Mr. Robles and Mr. Monte, with Noteiro and Fisk and all the others streaming after. Kranuski and Webb were there, too, the creeps.
They all looked haggard and suspicious, and the sight of me in my getup didn’t seem to alleviate their fears. I couldn’t blame them; I was just one more part of the whole appalling circus. My own relief was short-lived. Before I could reach the men, there was more commotion from another direction, a line of dark figures that unmercifully resolved itself into feral blue Xombies, scores of them, swarming in to intercept us.
A collective moan of dread arose from the living. As the rampaging creatures skittered into the light I could make out the warped features of Albemarle and Jake and Cole and Lemuel, as well as Xombies from the tanks in the research compound and many others I had never seen before—forty or fifty all told. But there was something unusually awkward about them, and as they swept forward like a bizarre chorus line, I realized what it was: They were connected together by a cable that had been threaded through their bodies, like fish on a loop.
Coombs and the others reacted as if they had been expecting something like this, bracing themselves for the attack. They were doomed and knew it. Nothing would protect any of us from that host. Not even Cowper.
Just before the two groups could collide, however, the tethered Xombies were abruptly jerked up short as if they had reached the end of their leash. Thrashing wildly, they began to be dragged backward, then, one after another, hoisted upward , until the whole string of them flailed in the air, dangling from the boom of a high crane.
“Ooooh,” went the crowd.
Jim Sandoval’s amplified voice rang out: “This is to all the new citizens of Valhalla: Congratulations, your period of orientation is finished. We welcome you to this ceremony ushering in a new age of mankind, and we invite you to join our community, to share in our fortune, and to enter a world where the Maenad threat has been lifted.”
Relieved laughter and grudging applause from the Moguls met this pronouncement. The rest of us looked on stonily.
Sandoval continued, “Today we bury the past, not just symbolically, but in our hearts. We bury it and put flowers on it and stand before its gravestone to say our final good-byes. Today we renounce the past and are baptized anew. There can be no doubters, no one left dangling. Lulu, will you please come forward?”
The float bridge had been put back in place, and at the end of it stood Sandoval, reaching out to me with a big phony smile. I hesitated, reluctant to leave Cowper and the other men. I was suddenly very self-conscious about participating in whatever this was they were doing. Having cast my lot with the undead, I couldn’t bear to set foot back on that deceiving turf. What would happen if I refused? As if reading my thoughts, Sandoval flicked his eyes warningly upward at the flailing Xombies. The sword of Damocles. There was no choice—I went.
“Don’t be nervous,” Sandoval said, helping me across. Before anyone else could follow, Rudy brought Don over on a chain to police the bridge, barely restraining the beast from charging across and attacking Cowper. Dr. Langhorne came up and took my arm.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“Cheer up,” she said. “You’re about to be saved.”
They walked me around to the garden side of the fairwater and stopped before the brilliant ocean pool sunk in the grass. The crowd moved with us. Several doctors, including wire-haired Chandra Stevens, were waiting there with medical instruments and an aluminum stretcher.
“Now just relax,” Langhorne said, and ripped my dress off.
There was a minor uproar among some of the boys, shouts of “Leave her alone!” but Sandoval, who was standing back from the whole thing, quashed it by saying, “Now now—these are doctors. Professionals.” The Blackpudlians, who had been softly singing the whole time, went dead. As Langhorne strapped me naked to the stretcher, I asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the only thing to do. My daughter was about your age, so don’t think this is easy for me. But there’s no cure, no future—nowadays little girls grow up to be Furies. This is all that’s left.” She put her lips to my ear, whispered, “None of this would be happening if you’d done what you were supposed to.”
“What?”
“I expected your cycle to have kicked in by now, honey. A surprise package for that bum I was married to. Why do you think I let him have you? But I guess he gets the last laugh after all, the bastard. Now he gets to be Christ Almighty.” She strapped an oxygen mask to my face and turned on the flow. Cold air hissed through. It seemed thin—I couldn’t get enough and began hyperventilating.
While Dr. Langhorne was ministering to me, Sandoval addressed the Moguls. As unctuously as a TV evangelist, he said, “There is no salvation without baptism. Cold-water immersion—not as a superstitious rite, mind you, but as a means of preserving higher brain function while the morphocyte conquers the body—is the key to resurrection.” He shook his head despairingly. “But what kind of resurrection? Resurrection as an intelligent monster, anathema to all that’s human? That’s not my idea of a quality afterlife. Quality resurrection requires something more. Alice, can you hand me the inhalant?” A small glass tube was produced, and he held it up for all to see. “This is it. The chalice. The sacrament. It doesn’t look like much, does it? But it is body, mind, and spirit. It is freedom and safety from the ravages of time.”
The Moguls were fiercely intrigued, their competing babble resembling the trading floor of a stock exchange. Questions rang out: Is it really the lost formula? Is there enough to go around? How much are you asking for it? Is it safe? Does it have to make you blue? Many of them were concerned with the disposition of their wealth and power—would they still have use for these things and the ability to manage their affairs? Above all, they wanted to remain themselves, or what was the point?
Sandoval grinned, holding up his hands. “Gentlemen, please. In answer to your questions, let me just explain that this is indeed the end product of Dr. Uri Miska’s research: the famous noninfectious, behavior-stabilized strain of the ASR morphocyte, which I promised you we had recovered. New, improved Agent X, now Xombie-free!” That inspired laughter all around. “It’s not a myth. You’ve just seen for yourselves how well it works in that unscripted demonstration of paternal love—a father very clearly recognizing his daughter and rescuing her from a marauding ghoul! It was a beautiful moment, wasn’t it? Is that th
e ugly behavior we have all come to associate with life after death? Of course not. Aside from the minor cosmetic alteration, it’s perfect, and as far as we know, this is all there is of it in the whole world. A single, last dose is all that remains.”
This sobered the crowd. Someone said, “That’s all? Just what’s in that little bottle?”
“Yes.” He paused a moment to let them stew, then said, “But we can make more. Oh yes. We can make quite a bit more, as I will demonstrate. Because just as wine is changed into Sangre de Cristo by the miracle of transubstantiation, so the morphocyte multiplies in the fecund female body, changing it into a wellspring of eternal life. Gentlemen, I hold before you your future—” He handed the ampoule back to Langhorne, who loaded it into a pneumatic gun resembling a cordless drill. “Synthesized in the consecrated body of a virgin, and extracted and distilled for your everlasting benefit by me and the dedicated staff of Mogul Research Division. But, as a famous man once said, ‘You must act now.’”
A tumultuous clamor of bidding and protest erupted from the crowd.
The doctors tipped me upright and quickly began lowering me by ropes into the pool. Struggling for breath, I couldn’t scream as my feet dipped in. It was deep and cold, and so clear—I could see all the way to the bottom of the ice ridge, ten or fifteen feet below the surface, to the yawning black gulf beneath. Tiny fish swirled down there in spears of olive light.
The stretcher banged against the enamel white sides, then lurched violently, swinging me around. Someone plunged into the water at my feet, a doctor, and the freezing splash interrupted my terror like a slap, so that I could hear other shouts from above.
With a jerk the stretcher rose and landed hard on the grass. Someone yanked off my oxygen mask and unfastened my restraints. It was Wally, of the Blackpudlians, wearing a big fake John Lennon mustache and gold epaulets. “’Ave you out in a second, luv,” he said breathlessly.
Over his shoulder I could see Phil and Reggie in a wild-eyed defensive stance, brandishing their electric guitars by the necks like war clubs, strings twanging, and Dick up on the dive plane, hurling equipment at the doctors from above.
“Dance, you sorry sods!” Dick bellowed, swinging an amplifier by its cord and letting it fly. “It’s the British invasion!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From that point on, everything happened very quickly.
As the four Englishmen swarmed Sandoval and the doctors, clouting them down, bedlam broke out in the crowd. The boys set upon their Mogul overlords with a ferocity that belied their slinky eveningwear, tearing into the fat cats like demonic bimbos on Jerry Springer.
The riot didn’t last long. There was a strange discontinuity, a break in time, during which I somehow bit my tongue so hard it bled. But it wasn’t the pain or taste of blood that told me something had happened. It was the silence. All those howling boys and Beatles were suddenly silenced, and I could see them crumpled on the grass, slowly coming to their senses like me. Even the doctors had collapsed. Only the Moguls remained standing amid the groaning masses, looking smug and barely ruffled. Sandoval was unconscious, having been pithed by Reggie’s blue-flecked Fender Stratocaster, but his fellow bigwigs were in tip-top form.
It was the implants. The goddamn implants. There had never been any chance that we could rebel—they could strike us down at any time with a jolt of electricity to the brain. Shock treatment.
“Stay calm!” Moguls were yelling to one another. “Microwave pulse! Everything’s under control! If any of them act up, nuke them again. Teach the little bastards a lesson.”
In the middle of this triumphant gloating, there came a strange, unholy grunt from the left side of the dome, and an awesome geyser of sod and ice erupted from the field. Debris shot high in the air, some of it getting sucked out a huge rip that mysteriously appeared in the canopy, frayed edges whipping outward into the Arctic void. A stiff breeze suddenly kicked up, and the whole dome billowed like an inverted sea.
As the Moguls all turned in bewilderment and alarm, a familiar armored vehicle barreled out of the debris plume.
“Utik!” I cried.
Hurtling toward us, the vehicle braked, going into a spin and piling up sod beneath its wheels the way a skidding dog bunches up a rug, revealing raw ice beneath. The Moguls scattered, but the tank stopped well short of hitting them. Its turret moved as if looking around, then spit lightning with an earsplitting GRONK!—the same goliath pig grunt as before. Fleeing VIPs dove for cover as a curtain of chipped ice rose between them and the exit. Disregarding the gunfire, the boys recovered their senses enough to break from their masters in the pandemonium and race for the sub, converging there with the liberated crew, who were crossing the pontoon bridge as Rudy restrained Don and waved them across. Cowper was out of my view behind the sail.
A couple of Moguls were returning fire. They crouched behind the ice wall, aiming their laser pointers like wizards with magic wands to summon down all the might of the COIL weapon. Its beam originated from a hidden point high up in the canopy, each shot a blinding strobe that left pinprick ghosts in my eyes and its sound that unnerving, familiar ZAPZAPZAP! Wherever the thing touched the truck, it flared up intensely, leaving scorched, glowing pits in the armor, though it wasn’t as instantly devastating on steel as it was on flesh. The men inside seemed well aware of this, driving evasively to present a moving target and doing what they could to keep the Moguls pinned down in a curtain of stinging debris. But it was only a matter of time.
Sandoval was lying on the grass near me with a cut in his bald scalp. I crawled over to him. He was out cold, but I was careful as could be as I gingerly took his laser pen from its wrist clip. It was an elegantly simple thing with two buttons, one marked PROPOSE and the other, DISPOSE. The chain was only a few inches long, so I lifted his arm onto my lap to aim. It was trickier than I would have expected, the tiny red dot darting all over the place, but finally I got it settled on one of the Moguls who was directing fire and pressed the trigger.
Nothing.
In frustration I tried clicking on other Moguls. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Of course not—Sandoval had told me they were exempt from the thing! I hunted around for something to shoot, and as a last resort aimed it at the crane that was holding the Xombies.
This time it worked—a hydraulic piston exploded, toppling the crane’s boom like a tree on the firing Moguls. Then I had to make sure no Xombies interfered with the guys boarding the boat. As I picked a few off, I felt the secret godlike glee of a kid zapping ants with a magnifying glass.
While I was so intent on this, a brutal hand closed on my wrist, and a furious, bloody face pressed into mine.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sandoval demanded. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” He savagely swung me by the arm over the edge of the pool, so that my bare body slammed against the ice shelf, and my feet touched the water. He tried to let go, but I was still holding the laser pen, actually hanging from it, as he made every effort to pull away.
“Get off!” he bellowed.
“No!”
The bitterly cold ice quaked against my body, and something massive lumbered toward us. It was the armored truck. Sandoval tried frantically to withdraw his arm or haul me out, but before he could do either, the vehicle ran over his legs. He didn’t scream so much as make an explosive moan, a sound like a maimed animal. But he wasn’t dead yet, just pinned, and as the door on the tank was thrown open, he weakly gasped, “Find . . . Miska.” Then a combat boot stepped on him, and wiry arms seized mine, lifting me into the vehicle.
“Well, well, what have we here?” crowed a high-pitched Munchkin voice. It was so freakish my heart skipped a beat, but the person speaking was altogether more mundane, if terrible to see.
It was Colonel Lowenthal.
“Look what I caught, Rusty,” Lowenthal quacked to a hel meted man sitting in the turret. I couldn’t reconcile his bizarre new voice with everything else that was going on,
and I didn’t have the energy to try. It was the same truck I had been in before, but the men driving it were Lowenthal’s people, not Inuits, and all the trappings of Mogul luxury had been crudely ripped out, revealing undisguised pure function: gray bench seating and a huge Gatling-type gun with an articulated ammunition feeder like a crocodile’s tail. It smelled like hot iron inside. “A mermaid! Does that mean I get a wish?”
In a voice just as squeaky, the driver replied, “Strap yourself in before they get a bead on us!” The two of them sounded like Donald Duck’s nephews.
“What are you waiting for?” Lowenthal screamed shrilly. “Drive, drive, drive!” As the vehicle roared into motion he handed me a heavy flak jacket and a pair of headphones. “Put these on,” he shouted. “When he fires that cannon, it’ll blow your ears out!” He patted the weapon affectionately. “Thirty-millimeter Avenger! Forty-two hundred rounds a minute! Depleted uranium shells! You know who makes it?”
Dull with cold and shock, I didn’t realize he was still talking to me.
He poked me. “Guess!” When I shook my head, he said, “General Electric!” The way he said it, I could tell he was expecting a reaction of some kind.
I shrugged.
“Depleted uranium? Come on!”
“I don’t know.”
“Same company that made your submarine’s reactor!”
“Oh.”
“Uranium goes in one and out the other—never mind.”
There was a loud, searing crackle, accompanied by flashes of light from outside. The COIL weapon was stabbing at us. I drew the jacket up around my head.
Lowenthal saw my dread, and said, “Don’t worry! That laser is designed to cut through the thin skin of a missile, not the armor of this APC.” Just as he said this, a brilliant green flare appeared in the ceiling, raining white-hot sparks on us and filling the cabin with smoke. A spot on the floor burst briefly into flame. The truck lurched evasively, and the glare disappeared, leaving a molten orange peephole to the outside. “Whoops!” he laughed.
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 31