On one of these floes, an iceberg the size of six city blocks, Sandoval and Cowper came back to life.
“Oh my God,” Sandoval said, or rather tried to say—his throat was still crushed in Cowper’s grip. The choking was not what bothered him; it was the feel of Cowper’s alien flesh. “Get … off … me!”
Voice or no voice, Cowper’s headless corpse seemed to understand him. Having no more business to transact, it willingly pulled free, though their blue skin had bonded and required some nasty-looking tearing to separate.
Where am I? Sandoval wondered, staring with black eyes over the vast expanse of ice-strewn ocean. There was no land in sight. What am I? But he already knew the answer to the latter question—it was no mystery. Good thing, because he could hardly expect any answers from Fred Cowper. Looking at that ridiculous headless figure in its bloodstained hospital gown, then down at his own blue hands, Sandoval thought, I’m a Xombie—great.
As he came to this unbelievable conclusion, he suddenly realized he wasn’t the only one waking to a strange new destiny: The baboon that had kept him company in his last moments of life was apparently going to keep him company in the afterlife as well.
It lived.
They drifted for days, weeks, partially refreezing every night and thawing again in the sun. Cowper barely moved, facing south like a gnarled tree. The broken-necked baboon paced around the floe’s rim, occasionally staring at Sandoval with its head cocked quizzically to one side, as if to ask, “Am I dreaming?” I know the feeling, buddy, Sandoval thought. His crushed legs caused him no pain, but they prevented him from walking, so he took great interest in their healing process: the splintered bones softening like putty, and his newly prehensile muscle tissues kneading them back into shape—a shape he could actually control if he wanted to. Long and fast, or short and strong—or something else altogether? He was afraid to mess with the original design too much, lest he screw it up and never get it back the way it was. But the possibilities of this newly plastic body fascinated him.
All around him, he sensed life, an awesome profusion of microscopic organisms that made the sea look like a living nebula, an animated horoscope of swimming, drifting, dancing celestial bodies, all eating or being eaten. The life was thickest on the bottom, illuminating the topography, so that at night Sandoval felt as though he were flying high above a radiant red desert. He would have gladly walked across that desert to the distant shore of Canada, except he knew there were a lot of crabs down there, and crabs ate Xombies. Miska had designed them to.
By day there were seals, birds, whales, an occasional polar bear. But even the hungriest bear could make nothing of Sandoval, Cowper, or the baboon—they had no smell, no warmth, no presence. They weren’t living flesh, and they weren’t carrion. They were about as palatable as clay.
Then Sandoval remembered his pen. It was a special pen, a laser pointer with a GPS beacon, designed to direct aerial fire on ground targets. A powerful tool for playing God. But Sandoval no longer had any desire to play God; he just wanted to reach dry land. So he turned on the beacon and waited. And while he waited he remembered.
The chairman of the board, James Sandoval, was not surprised by sounds of gunfire filtering into the briefing room. He was already despondent over the shooting of a civilian employee at the company picnic though it had been far from unexpected: Bob Martino was a union organizer and chronic loudmouth from way back. Still, a terrible threshold had been crossed. Things could only get worse from here on out.
Sandoval and the NavSea leadership were sitting around the big conference table, watching a live video feed from the security cameras at the fence line, less than a mile away, where things were going downhill fast.
“Everyone off the fence!” the guards shouted, sounding like harried gym teachers. “Pull back, pull back!”
They were leaderless, rudderless, shocked by the sudden death of Security Chief Beau Reynolds, who had gotten blown up in a freak explosion while standing on his observation platform like a half-assed Douglas MacArthur.
Sandoval panned the closed-circuit cameras as guards were snatched off the scaffolds and abandoned the fence, retreating before the horror that they had dreaded and drilled for, but for which no one could ever be truly prepared. Perhaps some were even relieved that the waiting was over.
The main gate was on fire, its bright glow in the evening mist silhouetting a scene of desperate flight. Shots sputtered like strings of firecrackers all along the perimeter, and men could be heard shouting hysterically for ammo, for reinforcements, for God Almighty.
Whatever was outside the fence was mostly hidden by plastic slats threaded through the wires, but the crashing chain link gave clear indication of multiple climbers, a sound like a stirred-up monkey cage. White phosphorous and burning magnesium fluoresced brightly in the fog, strobing, and it was possible to see scores of flaming shadow puppets scrambling up the barrier.
Two figures stood apart from the confusion, looking weirdly out of place: a skinny old man in golf slacks and a dark-haired little girl in a green velvet party dress.
“Holy hell,” said Commander Harvey Coombs, staring at the monitor. “Is that Fred Cowper?”
“It is indeed,” said Sandoval. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing bringing that girl in here. Figures he’d pick a time like this to show up.”
“We could use his experience. He served on the original 726, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. Put in his twenty in the Navy, then did a full term here. He’s one of the real old-timers. Looks like he’s taking us up on our offer.”
“A little late. Can we get him, you think?”
“Well … it’s pretty hairy down there. I’d have to say no, and the girl is completely out of the question. It’s just too late—he had his chance a month ago and blew it. In a matter of minutes, that post will be completely overrun, and after that the compound is wide open. It’s critical that you men get to the boat right now … or you never will.”
Sandoval had a pang of regret saying this. At one time he had really hoped to get Cowper for this run. The man was a maverick, a hard case who knew subs inside and out and could be counted on to get the job done, red tape be damned. Rough around the edges, sure. A bit of a crank. Some people couldn’t stand him, especially those in the upper echelons of military/industrial middle management, but to Sandoval, that was the highest recommendation of all.
At least most of the executive committee was safely aboard the rescue ship to Diego Garcia—that was a load off his mind. His adopted nephew, Ray, had made it to the compound in one piece, though Ray’s sister had not—another good woman lost to the plague. And his ex-wife, Alice, had landed in Thule weeks ago to head up the science team. Sandoval had hoped to be away by now himself, but endless last-minute delays kept piling up until he was a whole day behind schedule.
From the sound of it, things would have to be accelerated a bit.
“Gentlemen,” he said, gathering up his things and breaking the hush in the room. “The corporation wishes to thank you for your efforts in securing the enormous volume of classified material stored at this facility. By your efforts over the past weeks, you have safeguarded the cream of naval war-fighting technology, as well as the very building blocks of American civilization, assuring that they will neither fall into the wrong hands nor be lost to future generations. Without your work, it would be impossible to do what I now propose we all do: get the hell out of here.”
There were hasty handshakes and good-byes all around. A sense of imminent death was in the air, but no one wanted to be the first to run, to show fear, and Jim found himself repeating, “We’ve done all we can, we’ve done all we can,” until finally it was just him and Harvey Coombs.
“Come on, Mr. Sandoval, time to close up shop.”
“You go ahead and make ready to cast off. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You know I can’t do that, sir. We don’t sail without you.”
“I have one more small
errand to run, and it’s my eyes only. Don’t worry, Harvey, I’m not going to blow my brains out or anything. But I do need a few more minutes before I can get down to the dock.”
“Then I’ll accompany you.”
“You will not. Your business is running that boat, getting it safely out of here, and nothing can jeopardize that—not even me. So you worry about your job and let me worry about mine. That’s an executive order, Commander.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m leaving you out here all alone.”
“I appreciate your concern, but you’re interfering with both our duties. Until I’m aboard that boat, I am not your responsibility.”
“I could take you under armed guard.”
“But you won’t.” Sandoval opened his coat, revealing a nickel-plated .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.
Coombs shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.” He turned on his heel and left.
Sandoval called after him, “Thanks, Harv.”
There was a lull in the shooting, then an explosion that rattled the blinds.
Huh. Better hurry.
Instead, Jim dawdled, picking up a heavy pewter model of the proposed Hawaii-class boat and turning it over in his hands. It would’ve been a beautiful thing, a marvel for the ages, but it was a dream never to be realized. In spite of all they’d done to preserve its essence for posterity, Sandoval was poignantly aware that it would never be more than this shiny little paperweight—a trillion-dollar toy.
He thought of a book he had read as a child, about a carved toy canoe set afloat in a stream that made its way to the Great Lakes and finally out to sea. There was something terribly sad about it: The boy who made the canoe would never know how its journey ended, if it went a mile or a thousand miles—he just gave it the first push.
There was a radio telephone on the conference table, and Jim picked up the receiver. “I’m on my way, Mr. Velocek,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Sandoval pushed the model over with a bump and went to the door, turning off the lights as he left the room.
Walking downstairs and out the rear exit, he took a golf cart through deserted machine shops full of massive lathes, drills, and other steel-milling equipment. He found his Caddy in the east loading dock and gratefully sank into its deep upholstery one last time, reveling in its lush, amniotic suspension.
Jim could live in that car; he loved his things and hated to leave them. Having been born poor and come to wealth in his late teens, he never lost his deep need for material validation. In that way, both MoCo and the SPAM program reflected his packrat mentality: you can take it with you. Having known both abject poverty and absolute luxury, Sandoval liked to say, I prefer luxury.
He started the engine and pulled onto the service road.
Outside, the shooting had stopped, and a muffled calm descended with the fog.
Isolated pockets, isolated pockets, isolated pockets …
Sandoval caught himself muttering and put a stop to it. Those words had been cropping up in his thoughts too often, like an insipid tune he couldn’t stop humming. He supposed it was some kind of post-traumatic stress thing, and wondered if worse was to come. Bitter-cold pragmatist though he was, he knew he hadn’t yet really faced THE END OF THE WORLD, any more than he had faced his daughter’s suicide, and he wondered if it was even possible to come to terms with such a thing. Short of dropping dead from grief, what could be an appropriate reaction? And he had to put up a brave front, lest his own horror demoralize his subordinates.
Most of the people at the plant had been rather sheltered from the terrible events of the past month. The remote point of land occupied by the submarine compound was not on any map and was screened from prying eyes by miles of restricted Navy property. It was a rare “isolated pocket”—a place the Maenad plague had not penetrated. Its convenient desolation was the sole reason for their survival, but it also created a false sense of security. Most of them had never even seen a so-called “Xombie.”
Well, now they would. Oh yes.
As he passed through the deserted inner checkpoint and turned away from the direction of the submarine pen, Sandoval was a bit surprised to see that Coombs had really taken him at his word—they had gone ahead to the boat and left him alone. That was easier than expected; maybe they were glad to get rid of him. But why should that be surprising? They had military duties to perform, a ship to make ready, a crucial mission to undertake. Jim Sandoval was ballast, deadweight. He was a civilian and, from their point of view, the worst kind of civilian: a civilian you had to kiss up to. By bailing out, he was probably doing them a favor.
How many other residual pockets of humanity were out there? Jim wondered. Hundreds? Thousands? The corporation had obviously benefited from isolation and dumb luck, and he knew of a few other such organized hideaways from the epidemic, but that was no indication of how many survivors there might be among the general population. The independents, the rogue elements. Because, ultimately, they would be the backbone of any new civilization.
Sandoval’s own experience had not been hopeful. He’d been in touch with Washington for the better part of January, discussing contingencies and implementing the Family-to-Work Plan, just so the illusion could be sustained that the company was keeping up its contractual commitments to the Navy, but after martial law was announced, it became harder and harder to get anyone on the horn. When he did, they urged him to “sit tight” and “hold the fort,” as if all he needed was a little bucking up.
The NavSea team on the factory premises, led by Commander Harvey Coombs, became a paranoid clique that transferred its base of operations to the boat and didn’t want to share whatever information was coming over the submarine’s communications array. But, apparently, they hadn’t had any better luck than Sandoval at calling in the cavalry because Coombs soon turned up, hat in hand, stressing the need for cooperation … especially in regard to the Plan. As keeper of the Plan, Jim Sandoval held all the cards and held them close to his vest. One thing that was clear to both of them was that their deadlines and employee morale issues were small potatoes in the larger scheme of things.
Jim counted as victories his ability to persuade the rank and file that a gutted nuclear submarine could be a godsend to them and their male offspring—a big steel safety net—as well as to finagle extra security and a sea convoy for routine supplies.
But in doing these things, he had the inescapable feeling that he was engaged in something shady, that the resources he was diverting to one neutered SSBN (or an SSGN, as the Navy had permitted him to call it, though the bellyful of guided cruise missiles it was supposed to carry would never be delivered) might be more desperately needed elsewhere. Who was he to decide who lived and who died? Even using the submarine’s S8G reactor to supply power to the local grid could be interpreted as a wasteful extravagance, lighting a few suburbs while the rest of human civilization went dark.
By mid-January, everything had really shut down. Sandoval received a last official instruction: to compile all the available records of the Agent X epidemic into one report, a sort of doomsday scrapbook, and preserve it for posterity as an essential part of the boat’s cargo. A message in a bottle. Everything had happened so fast, there was no other official record, no history. Anyone still alive was to participate in this final archive and add their own perspective on the disaster. Officially, it was called The Maenad Project. Jim dubbed it The Apocalypticon.
At first, Sandoval looked upon this ridiculous assignment as truly the last nail in the coffin—who exactly did they think was going to take time out from the struggle for survival to participate in this scavenger hunt? And who would be around to read it?
But during the long nights in limbo, he began to find the idea strangely compelling: that he was at the center of extraordinary events that deserved to be memorialized. It had never occurred to him that all this sad, ugly scrabble for crumbs could be shaped into something coheren
t … and even majestic. That it only required a historian who could do it justice, a writer who could really milk the situation for all the poetry and pathos it was worth. A writer who could immortalize him, James Sandoval, as a keeper of the flame of civilization. A prophet for a new age.
He thought of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free … ” Yes! That was exactly the kind of writing this situation called for. Unfortunately, Sandoval knew, he wasn’t that writer. And unless by some extraordinary accident he found another Emma Lazarus with the requisite skills to enshrine in poetry or prose such an eternal testament to the unquenchable power of the human spirit, the project would have to languish. Sandoval had other things to worry about.
That was the beginning of the true “isolated pockets” phase of the plague, when all commerce, all movement, seemed to grind to a halt like film jamming in an old movie projector. Telephone, radio, satellite, and computer networks folded simultaneously, leaving an ominous silence that was all too easy to fill in with raging paranoia. Sandoval’s people were reduced to using shortwave radio over the submarine’s transmitter, but without functioning relays or a direct line to SOSUS, this was a feeble candle in the darkness.
Delegations of volunteer fact finders were sent out and never heard from again. They lost half the men this way, and nearly all the company vehicles. The tidbits of news they did hear were all bad:
Population centers worldwide were saturated with Maenad Cytosis and Xombie psychosis, cities rupturing outward like virus-infected cells to spread waves of raving maniacs across the remnants of civilization. Canada was being bombed. Long lists of expired “safe zones” were broadcast, but even while still operational, these were nothing but tracts of remote countryside where truckloads of uninfected females were dumped—huge, open-air refugee farms that resembled POW camps, surrounded by watchtowers and silver briars of razor ribbon. No warm school gymnasiums, cozy church basements, dry armories and civil defense shelters loaded with blankets and hot coffee and donuts. It was all mass hysteria and sudden death. Death at best.
Xombies: Apocalypso Page 9