This was it.
Beyond that muffling caul of vapor, I could see activity—a lot of activity. None of it human.
It was Xanadu.
Xombies were at work here; Xombies were busy. They seethed dimly in the haze, parades of blue ants spiraling in and around a bizarre anthill—a huge mound of rubble rising from the center of a flooded crater, partially divided into two lobes and split open at the fat end like an overripe fruit. The dome was at least a hundred feet high, with a column of blurred heat issuing from a recessed pit at its summit. The sides were bushy with twisted rebar, giving the artificial hill even more resemblance to an exotic fruit or seedpod, something spiny and subtropical.
A causeway of packed gravel exuded from its woundlike opening, crossing the water and branching into several feeder roads that splayed in all directions like rhizomes. The whole thing gave the impression of organic function—the fractal architecture of nature.
Above it all hung a strange, living balloon, a thousand-foot-long Xeppelin that rippled and pulsated like a gigantic grub. Attached by a fat umbilicus to the dome, it slowly rose to the end of its tether as it filled with heat, then settled back down as it cooled—over and over again.
The inflated flesh bag was translucent as a fetus, shot through with purplish blue veins and connective tissue. A beardlike mass of filaments hung from its bottom rim like stinging tentacles. In its cycles of rising and falling, expanding and contracting, the Xeppelin was weirdly lifelike, appearing to feed on the dome’s exhaust.
Everything else was still under construction, expanding outward and upward. Xombies were building their temple brick by brick, stone by stone, bone by bone, from the surrounding rubble. Only workers who didn’t sleep or need rest could have built so much, so fast. They used no concrete, simply fitting the pieces together by hand and pounding hot tar into the cracks. Somehow, it held together.
The overhanging walls of the V-shaped entrance portal all but defied gravity, its builders not being overly concerned with the laws of physics or even basic geometry. For a busy construction site, it was surprisingly quiet—there were no engines of any kind, and the naked Xombies labored silently, ceaselessly.
I was paralyzed by a strange feeling I didn’t understand, but Bobby didn’t wait—without a word, he was off and running. I watched him go down, curiously following his progress as he leaped to the muddy field. The outside edge of the work zone was only a few hundred yards away, a plain of mudflats surrounding a moat of stagnant water. Raised highways of packed debris crossed the moat, and long lines of Xombie-drawn wagons were traveling to and from the site. Morphing his skin blue, Bobby joined an inbound convoy, his alien presence unnoticed by the laboring multitude.
I followed him down, not knowing what to do, certain only that I had to do something. Cautiously approaching a raised road, I immediately realized the workers passing above had no interest in me at all—or in anything other than their plodding task. Their job was Egyptian, biblical, endless slave trains pulling wobbly carts full of raw materials, mostly charred bones and resin-encased mummies, hard as rock.
Certainly this would have been a hellish chore for human beings—they would drop like flies from the heat alone—but Xombies showed no signs of strain, nor so much as a drop of sweat. They had no boots, no helmets, no gloves, nothing, yet were impervious to pain.
Upon closer inspection, the carts were weird agglomerations of steel and flesh, self-loading meat wagons made of interlocked limbs and interwoven bone, marching in lockstep on ranks of severed legs. They looked like giant bugs. Even to my jaded sensibilities, the versatility of Xombie bodies was marvelous and hideous.
My caravan merged with others as the various roads joined together at the main entrance ramp. This broad avenue crossed the moat and humped over a retaining dam, then sloped downward through the yawning gap beyond, a wedge-shaped defile buttressed by arches of human bone. It was like entering a narrow river gorge, with only a crack of sky to light the way. Above, I could see the tentacles of the Xeppelin raising buckets of black slop. The air became even more densely humid, reeking of something I recognized well: the smell of ichor—Xombie blood. My blood. The whole structure was saturated with it, plastered with it, oozing purple-black extract from the very walls. Not tar, but gore. It was literally the glue that held the joint together.
At long, irregular intervals, the whole structure seemed to settle, wheezing with a deep bass throb as it compressed like a huge bellows … or a gigantic heart … before expanding once more. I had to stop in awe. Not only the builders but the building itself was undead, a million-ton golem lying helpless as a beached whale.
Now the grisly mule trains began breaking off, bearing their loads up wavy ledges that climbed the inner walls. After that, they disappeared from view. All the traffic was inward; there was no exit route that I could see, no train of empty carts.
I continued downward along the main path, heading for the low archway at the end, a wavering glimmer of light. The air was being sucked that way, rushing like a river into the depths. All angles were askew, all edges rounded, all lines twisted, forming crudely sinuous curves and shapes. Random patterns became grotesque reliefs—gaping mouths, eyes, whole faces that writhed and dissolved as I looked at them. Snatches of words and gibberish emanated from the walls, so many that they combined into a roar, as though I were emerging from a tunnel into a packed stadium. There was even light at the end of the tunnel.
I walked through.
Suddenly, I was no longer in that booming cavern but walking down a peaceful, sunlit street. There were palm trees and parked cars and hibiscus bushes and rows of houses, many of them Spanish-style bungalows with roofs of clay tiles. The white concrete sidewalk sparkled at my feet, sown with mica glitter. In the middle distance was a range of brown hills. I was wearing sneakers, and the hand holding mine did not burn because we were both alive. I looked back, and the tunnel was gone.
“Lulu, look! That’s our new home!”
I looked up at the smiling, beautiful woman holding my hand, and she was familiar to me. Not from life, but from some photographs Fred Cowper once gave me. I had hated her in those photos because her life looked so perfect and orderly and above all normal, everything mine was not.
“You’re Brenda,” I said. “You’re my sister.”
She nodded in surprise, but pleasantly. “How did you find out?”
“Fred and my mother—I mean, our mother. They told me some things, and I’ve just been putting the pieces together.”
“Why don’t you come inside? There is someone here who’s very eager to see you.” She opened a low wrought-iron gate and led me through a tiled patio full of greenery to a door like the arched portal of a miniature castle, made of wood planks with heavy iron bolts and fittings. There was a welcome mat that said, MI CASA ES SU CASA.
We went inside. “Wait here a sec,” she said, disappearing through another arched doorway.
The living room was cool and breezy, with bare white walls and rustic furnishings of dark wood and bloodred leather. It echoed. The only decorations were a few pieces of glazed pottery and a small crucified Jesus. I heard footsteps and looked up. There was a big, dark-eyed boy looking at me, and for a second I didn’t know why my heat-tempered heart suddenly turned molten.
“Hi, Lulu,” he said shyly.
“H-Hector,” I said.
“Hey.”
It was Hector Albemarle, the boy who saved my life. The boy who loved me. But Hector died right before my eyes, blown to bits in the cold hell of Thule.
“Hector,” I asked, “what are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are. We came here together, Lulu.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m part of you.” He stepped forward and gently touched my stomach. “Right in there.”
I stepped back. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? You took me inside you, Lulu. And I’ve been there ever since, growin
g bigger and bigger.”
Shaking my head, I started to argue, But we never did that, and then something dawned on me. Something so beyond even my Xombie comprehension that it made me shriek. “Hector! Do you mean—? No!”
He nodded sadly, sweetly, exactly the way he always did in life. “Yes.”
It came back to me, the madness I felt witnessing his death on that muddy field. The grief and horror that caused me to lose my mind and dive for his shattered remains, trying to gather them together, save him as he had me, and when that wasn’t possible … when that wasn’t possible …
I ate him.
Not much of him. Just one little piece before Jake and Julian dragged me away. But was it perhaps enough to have taken root inside my living body, lying dormant until I became a Xombie? I could definitely feel something unusual in there, a tough mass like a tumor. Except Xombies didn’t get tumors, Xombies didn’t get anything. Or did they? Was I going to give birth to a clone of Hector Albemarle?
“I’m sorry, Lulu,” he said. “I know it’s weird.”
“No,” I said, feeling strangely dreamy. I looked at him, at his poor sad face, and couldn’t help smiling. “No, Hector. I think it’s wonderful.”
He beamed hopefully, his brown eyes welling with tears. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Now I was weeping, too. “Come here, you big dummy.”
Bobby ripped me out of my stupor.
“Lulu, wake up! Lulu, Lulu, Lulu, Lulu! Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Bobby was shaking me, pinching me, pulling my hair. I was not in sunny California. I was in a cavernous domed chamber, perhaps a hundred feet deep and twice as wide. Suspended within it like a steel kraken was some kind of blast furnace, an infernal-looking contraption fed by numerous twisting ramps, down which trains of Xombies marched to their white-hot reward. They were its fuel, its lifeblood, and it was their cannibal god.
Beneath the furnace was a black pool, like a tar pit, fed by the slow melting of the walls and ceiling. At Bobby’s urging, I turned to see a creature of tar leaning over me—a black-dipped Medusa with black lips, black teeth, shining spider eyes, and skin as sickly iridescent as crude oil. With her overgrown nails and crazed hair, she was an intimidating presence … even to me. Compared to her, I looked like a blue kewpie doll. But I still recognized her.
“Brenda,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
OOBLECK
Trying to contain my disquiet, I asked, “Why?”
“Why?” The Ex-Brenda looked blank. I could see her mind stumble, like someone groping in sudden dark.
“Yes, why? What is all this? What is it for?”
Everything stopped.
The chamber went awesomely quiet, absent that roar of voices. Even the blast furnace and the churning of the pool were muted. There was a noise beyond hearing, however, a silent alarm that required no ears to hear, but which rang in Maenad cells like a billion dinner bells. I heard it loud and clear, and at once sensed millions of eyes staring at me, probing not just with those eyes but with the rude fingers of their minds, as if I were in a tank full of invisible eels fondling my body, trying to worm inside my deepest self.
Back off, I thought, slapping them away with the force of my will.
Distracted, I was caught off guard by the vise grip of the her sharp-nailed hand on my upper arm. Hey! I flailed with inhuman agility, kicking, twisting, but the Ex-woman was twice my size, double my strength, and equally impervious to hurt. Our flesh crackled at the point of contact, the familiar Xombie repulsion effect known as the Solomon Principle.
“Because we have to,” she said. “The future depends on it.”
“Depends on what? Whose idea was this?”
“Uri Miska’s.”
That knocked me cold. We, too, were following a vision of Uri Miska; he was the father of us Xombies, the man who had created Agent X as a means of insulating mankind from the coming cataclysm of the Big Enchilada, which would wipe out all mortal life. It was the whole point of our submarine mission.
Shocked, I said, “Miska! Why?”
“Why? Why? What do you mean, why?” The woman shook her head as if wracked by some powerful inner turmoil.
“I mean I don’t understand! Let go!”
“Where did you come from? How did you get in here?”
“Tonic!” hissed a voice from behind us. “She is a spy! She has the agent of free will!”
Oh no. It was another familiar face, and not a pretty one: Major Kasim Bendis—Uncle Spam. He pulled clear of the wall, and I realized these creatures were subsets of the whole vast structure, extruded at will.
I knew Kasim well from my brief time with the Reapers, when he looked like a pile of leftover barbecue with a hat, so this was a step up. I hadn’t been in such great shape back then either, with huge holes bored through my head and torso, but at least I didn’t have to come back as a drip sculpture. Clearly there were worse things than being a Xombie.
“Hey, man,” I said, “pull yourself together.”
“Get her! Get her!”
Well, this was quite a coincidence … or was it? Come to think of it, I had been led here, lured here in remembrance of things past. But was it deliberate? If so, who was dropping the crumbs? Bendis? He certainly didn’t look capable of anything so interesting, being just another Xombie drone. In the presence of human beings, he would no doubt step lively, but amid all these Mogul Xombies, he was basically cheap labor … until I came along and upset the applecart. Apparently, all this talk had shocked him to action, or perhaps someone else was pulling his strings. Either way, he was suddenly a maniacal dervish, grabbing me by my neck and yanking me against his chest. Brenda stepped forward as if to intervene, then suddenly went stiff, twitching in place.
Other goop-monsters joined in, pinning my limbs, pulling my hair. One of them was the former president of the United States.
Repeating, “She’s the Tonic, the Tonic!” the Ex-president took a handsome fountain pen from his scorched coat pocket and jabbed its sharp nib into my jugular, instantly filling the ink reservoir with my purplish black blood. As all the others watched in fascination, he tipped back his head and raised the pen over his open mouth, thumb poised to flip the release.
Before he could do so, he was hit by a thing like a hairy medieval mace, which rammed the pen into his mouth and out the back of his throat, where my captive blood burst free, spraying Kasim Bendis in the face.
As Bendis flailed backward, the mace whirled in the air and struck the other Moguls in turn, splatting them like fudge-filled treats. Now I could see it was not a mace but Bobby Rubio’s head, studded with hornlike spikes and attached to a freakishly elongated neck. The rest of Bobby’s body had changed as well, three of his limbs anchored to the ground while the fourth—his right forearm—had lengthened and split apart into a double-bladed scythe, a giant pair of shears, literally cutting Xombies off at the knees. The boy resembled a giant fiddler crab. But as I joined the fight, I could see all the other Ex-Moguls being birthed from side alcoves, a hundred or more. It was hopeless.
While Bobby’s body returned to normal human proportions, I grabbed his hand, and we ran. As we approached the main entrance portal, it shrank like a stony sphincter, the archway and surrounding wall bunching up and contracting in grinding spasms, sprouting long black thorns. We were cornered.
Looking for a way out, I felt someone touch my arm. It was Brenda. She had followed us up the entrance ramp and was mutely pointing at a series of openings high in the ceiling, from which Xombie catwalks descended into the plasma oven, chutes for the endless lemming parade.
“I think she wants us to go that way,” Bobby said. Brenda nodded wildly.
“How?” I asked.
Battling some inner demon, black veins popping in her forehead, Brenda croaked, “Climb.”
“We can’t climb up there!”
“Sure we can,” Bobby said. “Come on!”
“Is there even a way out up there?�
�
“Is there a way out down here?”
“Good point.”
Bobby led the way, with me following on his heels and Brenda picking up the rear. In seconds, Bobby was way ahead of us, finding handholds among the gore and charnel rebar. The kid was a spider.
Having never been overly coordinated, I moved forward in fits and starts. It was easier than I thought. The surface was more irregular than any cliff face, a conglomeration of organic and inorganic debris held together by a blood pudding made from a million nuked Xombies. Ichor oozed from every crevice, dangling in long black drips that hung halfway to the floor. When I brushed against them, I got a static shock, and they retracted like sensitive tendrils. Slug eyes.
Avoiding contact with flesh and bone, I seized upon all manner of other junk: heavy machinery, trucks, highway signs, dinosaur skeletons, planes, trains, automobiles. It could have been the nest of some gigantic packrat. Except that it moved. The whole thing heaved up and down in a slow, rolling motion, vines swaying eerily.
Beneath the furnace, filling the deep bottom of the hollow, was that black pool of ichor that began to churn and erupt like a vast cauldron of boiling oil. In the center of this pit was an island, a peculiar mound banked with marble columns and statuary, steaming and glowing green from within. I could make out the head of Abraham Lincoln. The radiation in the chamber was intense; no human being could have survived it for more than a few minutes.
It occurred to me that the pile of rubble was a crude nuclear reactor, using uranium from the dry-docked sub at Norfolk and the power plant at Calvert Cliffs to generate the plasma arc in the furnace. There was a brain behind all this, and it smelled human.
The ichor was not boiling from heat so much as from restless, restless life—it moved like a living thing, a vast, seething mollusk. The room was actually relatively cool, most of the heat wicked away by the porous walls or ventilated out a huge stone chimney that rose to the ceiling and supported both domes. Like the uranium fuel rods, that chimney was preapocalyptic, a cracked relic of human craftsmanship. I recognized it at once as the base of the Washington Monument. All that remained of the famous obelisk was its stump.
Xombies: Apocalypso Page 23