The sickly light radiating from underneath the plasma kiln silhouetted Xombies laboring at its base. Rows of railroad tracks led to the pool, with sludge carts going in and out, in and out, dragged by lines of workers, who then shoveled the heavy gunk into metal buckets as if it were toxic waste. But it wasn’t toxic waste; it was industrial product. This was the source of the ichor—the black pitch of which the whole place was built. Even the Xeppelin was made of this stuff, blown up like so much oobleck. A million Xombies boiled down for glue.
But oobleck was not the only product there. As I watched, I could see buckets of it being lowered into supercooled wells in the floor, shooting fountains of dry-ice vapor, and this frozen material then returned to the furnace to be blasted again by the plasma arc. In this way it was disintegrated, crystallized, reduced to a fraction of its former mass. Rendered to its pure nanoparticles—dust to dust. The ultra-fine white powder was then transferred to a deep concrete tunnel, perhaps part of an old government fallout shelter built during the Cold War.
I suddenly realized I knew how this all worked because I had seen it before—I had seen it while I was linked to all the other Maenads, jacked into the Hex.
Through all this, Moguls were being hatched. The black cocoons that I had seen outside were cracked open in the nuclear pool, and their withered residents granted freedom—the freedom to slave away in service of the all-consuming fire. Once titans of industry, they were now merely drones, existing to service that infernal queen.
I remembered seeing those plastic-encased mummies at Thule, then later in Miska’s secret lab, all being kept in cold storage until Agent X could be perfected; my queasy feeling as Dr. Chandra Stevens explained to me that they were all sick and elderly men who paid to be inoculated with the disease. Their brains had been chilled to protect them from the effects of oxygen starvation, but they still had the manic need to share their “gift,” so MoCo scientists laminated them in carbon-fiber shells for safekeeping. Bottled Moguls betting on a better life—the ultimate golden parachute. But they never got the Tonic they ordered, an eternal youth of permanent bliss. Instead, this was their final reward: hauling sludge in Hades.
Clearly, somebody up there had a sense of humor.
What began as a wall quickly became the ceiling, our butts dangling in space. The thought of falling obviously didn’t bother Bobby at all. That’s right, we dead. Following his lead, I worked my way along the overhang, clinging firmly to the least little protrusion, my body molded to the slimy, jagged surface as though making love to it. In a matter of seconds, I was fifty feet above the reactor pool. Looking up, I could see Bobby scuttling into the first opening above the incinerator chute, pushing past leaping Xombies to get inside.
Someone grabbed my leg. Not someone—something: Kasim Bendis. He was back, with the president’s pen wedged between his neck vertebrae. Now he had one more problem: The bone and tissue had fused around it; he would have to break his own neck to get it out.
Trying to talk, he could only make a horrible gargling sound: “Gluurgggaaaaaachhh! Gglarghaaachhhh!”
I tried to pull free, but Bendis had gravity on his side. With one hard tug, he yanked both of us off the wall. Falling, I grabbed hold of the first thing I found: a handful of black tendrils. They stretched long, then instantly recoiled, pulling me upward and dragging Bendis after me.
He swung from my ankle like a trapeze artist, both of us swaying wide over the seething pit. Above us, Brenda was following Bobby toward a shaft of sunlight.
I realized I couldn’t escape. However much I kicked and fought, Bendis was too strong. The only real choice was whether to hang on or let go. The thought of falling no longer scared me, or even made me sad. It was just … irritating. Whatever happened, I couldn’t be hurt, much less killed.
I had a sudden revelation: Even if they reduced me to my bare molecules, I would still exist, and at some point in eternity I would even exist again as myself. Not just once, but infinite times. This was true of everything in the Universe, alive or dead—you didn’t have to be a Xombie. Everything lived forever. The curse of the Xombie was that we remembered.
And suddenly I did remember. I remembered that I was not alone.
Letting go with one hand, I reached over my shoulder and unzipped my Hello Kitty backpack. It was squeezed tightly between us, Bendis’s body now enfolding mine like a hungry starfish around a clam.
“Come on, honey baby,” he said, his charred-bacon lips mashed against my ear. “Won’t you share a little of your sweet nectar with Kasim? So we can both be freeeeeee.”
“Sounds like somebody’s got a sweet tooth,” said a rusty voice from my backpack.
Bendis looked down in surprise, and a jagged set of jaws sprang shut on his face like a bear trap.
It was Fred Cowper. Fred’s hideous head thrashed like a shark tearing at a piece of meat, engulfing Bendis’s entire face. Kasim let go of my body, fighting to pull his head away, but Cowper was relentless. With an explosive snap, his neck tendrils sprang erect, ripping the backpack open and kicking me and Bendis apart. The major clawed furiously, hand over hand, but suddenly he had nothing to hang on to but the slippery cords of Fred Cowper’s severed neck.
Cowper bit his face off. Released to gravity, Bendis plummeted to the reactor pit, bouncing off the marble cladding and into the oobleck. Shed of the weight, I recoiled upward, using the momentum to propel myself over the ledge. Brenda caught me and pulled me in.
“Thanks,” I said.
“What’s a sister for?”
It looked like we were home free, only a short tunnel away from daylight. Bobby was already there, waving us through. But as Brenda and I moved forward, the opening closed around us, folding shut like a giant, spiny sea anemone.
Just before the spines pierced our bodies, Brenda shoved me through the disappearing gap. In doing so, she sacrificed herself, stuck fast by the contracting spikes.
“Run!” she cried. “Run fast!” She held up a small spray bottle, some kind of atomizer, and shot it off. Hissing vapor engulfed her, and immediately her riven body turned human, all punctured flesh dying red.
The spray had an instant effect on the walls, turning the spines to red goop and burning through the connective ichor like a coal fire. A bloody fissure appeared as the blue-black tissues retracted, melting and undermining the mass of rubble. Blood poured down like red paint into the black pool—a lot of blood.
This liquid was literally the building’s lifeblood: thousands of gallons of coolant and hydraulic muscle, pumped at high pressure through branching arteries in the dome wall, a hidden web of living plasma ducts that supported the weight of the ceiling.
As the flesh retreated, the bone framework sloughed away, and the blood broke through. A steaming torrent of gore burst upon the chamber. It resembled a volcanic eruption, a scarlet flow of meat pulp and grinding debris that crushed Xombies and tumbled the steel blast furnace like a tin toy. Crimson sludge battered the hot reactor, causing the banked marble to crack and explode, releasing all its stored energy in one massive explosion. With the entrance portal blocked, there was only one outlet for the enormous pressure : up the shaft of the Washington Monument.
This makeshift chimney prolapsed with a geyser of gore and flame that billowed higher than the original Monument, a false obelisk that obliterated the Xeppelin above. But it was not nearly enough to release the explosive pressure within the mound. For this, the roof itself burst, expelling a jet of superheated gas from its weakest point: the chute above the kiln, our exit, which was the terminal end of the fissure between the mound’s two lobes. This passage now ruptured outward, releasing a fountain of glowing ejecta high into the sky.
Bobby and I rode this bubble of force, cartwheeling upward like scraps of pounded gristle. Soaring far and wide, we were flung clear of the dome to land in the deep mud of the moat.
“Ow,” Bobby said.
Sitting up in the knee-deep scum, we gathered our wits, assessed our multifarious d
ings, and pulled out the more egregious bits of shrapnel. Actually, the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, but we weren’t going anywhere. The alarm had gone out on us. Xombies and robots were closing in on all sides, even from above—aerial drones swooping in to destroy the saboteurs.
Bobby got up first, trying to drag me by my broken arm. “Come on, we gotta go!’
I got up, willing my bones to mend faster, wobbling forward on the rubbery new shoots. Both of us were hobbled by the mud—the stuff had a life of its own, sucking at us like putrid quicksand. Bobby was fast and light enough to walk above the stuff. It was heavy and slippery, a toxic mixture of clay, soil, radioactive ash, and contaminated rainwater, all churned to a thick gray batter by countless Xombie imagineers. A human being would have quickly floundered, become exhausted, and suffocated like a fly in amber, but we could not tire, could not drown.
Unable to run, we swam, slithering through the muck like salamanders, disappearing from targeting systems so that the incoming missiles missed us, exploding harmlessly in the mud. Reaching dry land, we pulled ourselves from the mire and ran, shedding clods of gunk. It was no use; we were surrounded. As if on command, every Ex had turned away from the Xombie mountain’s majesty, ditching their burdens and charging across the fruitless plain. All descended upon us.
Then they stopped.
The ground shook. A titanic force rocked the mound from within, making it wobble like an immense aspic. Within the Mons, something new was happening. Buried beneath the catastrophic destruction, the steel hatch to the underground silo had warped and cracked. It was a small crack, but still a crack—just enough for a trickle of bloody water to enter, water red as barn paint, which soaked into the pure white powder at the bottom.
The microscopic particles, each one an independent crystalline spore, began locking together, growing, multiplying, building webs of water and protein that mimicked cell membranes, then furnishing those membranes with hardy clockwork. This reconstituted mass, representing the flesh of over four thousand rendered Clears, themselves each a colony organism, expanded like yeasty dough, quickly filling the concrete silo and blowing the lid off. What came out amid the fire and steam was twenty tons of pure id. A literal living will: thought translated to shape, and shape to action.
With a deafening scream, it rose from the breached citadel.
“Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” I said, as all the puppet Xombies and robots went berserk, blinded by the massive electromagnetic discharge, attacking one another or just crashing to earth. Amid all this, something very large and very hard to look at was being birthed from its shell.
“Let’s go,” Bobby said, taking my hand.
I wiped mud off his face. “Go where?” I asked.
“Back to the boats. They’re waiting for us.”
“Okay.”
PART V
Sesame Street
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LIVE
Throttling away from shore, we hurtled out of the inlet and veered south down the Potomac. It was much faster going downriver than it had been coming up, not only because the stream was with us but because we knew all the major obstacles, and the best routes through them. Soon we were out of view of the madness happening behind us and started focusing on what was ahead. Stopping along the Virginia shore to refuel, we briefly surveyed the town of Mount Vernon. From a distance it looked like every other town, its rooftops rising from groves of shade trees, the fall leaves rustling in the breeze. I could see a main street lined with pubs and restaurants. It could have been a quiet Sunday morning.
Looking closer, the evidence of long neglect became more apparent: streets littered with abandoned cars and blown debris—roof tiles, broken glass, fallen tree limbs. As in Washington, plants had run rampant: Huge thickets of knotweed and thistle filled every patch of earth—lawns were extinct. Seams in the pavement were shaggy with greenery, and larger cracks sprouted actual trees. In places, the city had given way to swamp, storm drains backed up and the stagnant water clotted with algae. Here and there amid the refuse could be seen shoes, clothes, New Year’s Eve decorations. Just shit. The town was dead, we were dead, and we felt no urge to pretend otherwise. Not anymore. We returned to the boats.
Following a sharp eastward bend in the river, we paused at Blossom Point to ditch two of our faltering skiffs for a big power cruiser. The boat was sitting on a trailer in the dockyard, all fueled up and still hitched to the car that had backed it halfway down the launch ramp. Whatever had happened to the unfortunate boat owner, his loss was our gain.
As we rounded Smith Point and turned south into the vastness of Chesapeake Bay, there it was.
From a distance, it could have been our submarine, that winged tower on its black peninsula, but as we drew closer, there was no mistaking the differences. It was five thousand tons lighter and a hundred feet shorter than our boat. This was not the USS No-Name, resurrected from its murky grave. It was not an American sub at all, but a French boomer of the Triomphante class.
And it appeared to be abandoned.
The ship was wide open to the elements, adrift in the middle of the channel like a floating log. Humans had recently been here, we could sense them, but it was only a vague aftertaste. There were no spotters on the bridge or escort vessels. The periscope and radar masts were not deployed. Bay and sky were clear as far as the eye could see … and our Xombie eyes could see very far indeed.
“Think they’re coming back?” Coombs asked.
“Only one way to find out,” I said.
We pulled alongside and boarded the ship. I was surprised by how normal it felt to be on a submarine again.
One by one, we entered the hatch, climbing down the ladder to the deck below. We moved quickly, headfirst, agile as cockroaches as we searched out every corner. There was no obstruction, no resistance, no reaction to our trespassing. No alarms whatsoever.
The interior of the French sub was different from what we were used to, me especially, but even I recognized the basic function of almost everything in sight. Most submarine technology is fundamentally the same: up, down; forward, aft; port, starboard; fast, slow. Beyond those basics, every control was in the service of the power plant, the weapons, or the life-support systems—the last having recently fallen into disuse on our vessel.
Compared to the barren shell of our boat, this submarine was a warm and cozy womb. I could smell coffee and fresh-baked rolls with butter, men’s aftershave, minty soaps, clean bedding, ironed clothes, and patent leather shoes. The smell evoked a whole dead culture, one I had never really experienced and therefore didn’t realize it was possible to yearn for: the solace of a first-class ticket.
“I feel like I’m in Paris,” I said.
The hatches slammed shut.
There was a whoosh of powerful compressors, creating a vacuum that sucked the stale air into holding tanks. As the cabin pressure dropped, we could feel it in our bodies—not as pain, but a sensation of tightness, as if our heads were going to pop. We could also hear it affecting the boat, its pressure hull flexing like an empty beer can. Just before our fluids boiled and eyeballs started flying, a human voice ordered, “Close all outboard valves and open O2 reserve!”
Pure oxygen flooded in. It was an extraordinary feeling. All of us suddenly opened our mouths as if remembering a question of desperate importance … then froze in place, our blue faces flushing bright red, our bloodshot eyes gaping as their pupils dilated to pinpricks. Then, one by one, we all took a long, ragged breath of air—a veritable backward scream—and collapsed to the deck.
A moment later, we began to rise. Shakily, painfully, we sat up, staring around like survivors of some terrible catastrophe. Dr. Langhorne was the first to speak, and she articulated what all of us were feeling in every quailing, agonized nerve fiber.
“Oh my God,” she sobbed. “I’m alive!”
I, too, was wracked with the smothering horror of it. As depressing as eternity could
be, I was not ready to give it up so soon. To be human again? So scared and fragile and cramped by time? The very thought was terrifying—perhaps the only thought that could terrify a Xombie.
Several men appeared, strolling from the aft hatch and looking down at us with curiosity and pity. Their faces were blurred by air masks, and they wore foreign military uniforms—the uniforms of French naval officers.
“Bonjour,” said the leader. “Bienvenue à Le Terrible—although I prefer to call it the Apocalypso. Welcome aboard; we hope you enjoy your stay with us. My name is Alaric Despineau, and I will be your captain today.”
My jump-started heart almost stalled. Alaric? It was a name I knew all too well. Not least because it was my middle name: Louise Alaric Pangloss.
“Hi, Pops,” I groaned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SESAME STREET
“Lulu. Yes, of course.” Stunned, Captain Despineau said, “Mon Dieu, it is so wonderful to finally meet you, you have no idea. I have wished for this a long time.”
“You and me both, bub,” I croaked, sitting up and propping myself against the forward bulkhead. “I’d love to catch up on old times—oh, right, there weren’t any.”
My body felt carbonated, every cell fizzing painfully. I hadn’t felt pain in a long time. It kind of sucked. But there was also something amazing about it—I was physically present in a way I had forgotten possible. I truly existed.
Fred Cowper’s head was discovered in my backpack, and I freaked out a bit because it was just a lifeless head—Fred was dead!—but I didn’t have the strength to really get upset … or perhaps there was still too much Agent X in me. Before I could start screaming, Despineau gently took the pack from my hands and ordered someone to stick it in a freezer.
Xombies: Apocalypso Page 24