"Well, we obviously can't do that!"
"It's either that or jump in the river!"
"That's bullshit, man! There's gotta be another way!"
Sal shook his head. He didn't say what he was thinking: Dream on, dude. You took too long to reach the underpass. You were too slow, and you blew your chance to ever leave this park. You shouldn't have let yourselves get surrounded like this-that was dumb, wicked dumb. I did my part, risked my ass to draw them off, and what do I get? Bunch of dumb nubs, that's what I get. Now I get to die with you-thanks. Thanks a lot.
"What about that smoke? What's that?"
"What smoke?"
Kyle pointed it out to him, a small puff of gray rising above the tree line.
"That wasn't there before," said Todd.
"Maybe there's somebody there!" Freddy cried hopefully.
"Yeah, maybe somebody's trying to signal us," Derrick said.
Scanning the USGS map, Sal said, "This says there's nothing back there but some old train tracks. Mr. Tran specifically marked it off-limits, see? It's in Lulu's area of operation."
"I thought they were supposed to be way the hell over on the opposite side of town."
Sal shrugged helplessly. "Looks like there's a tunnel or something. All I know is, it says not to go this way."
Kyle said, "Well, maybe we need Lulu's help at this point, you ever think of that?"
"How can Langhorne's pet Xombies help us? They're just a bunch of… Xombies!"
"Idiot! Those Smurfs of hers are hooked up directly to the boat-at least we can let Langhorne know we're in trouble."
It was an incredible idea, running to Xombies for help, but Sal couldn't think of any argument. They had no choice. And there was no time to debate it anyway. "All right, let's go."
The road became a rough path through the sticks. Now they had to pick their way more carefully, agonizingly aware of hideous goons flooding across the field behind them, hemming them in. Sal alone could possibly make a break for it, a last-ditch effort to lead the Xombies away, but he couldn't bring himself to try. He was exhausted, they all were. Subconsciously preparing to quit-just to let go.
Far from getting out of the park, the boys were becoming ever more deeply cornered in it, forcing their bikes down a muddy hollow littered with beer cans and plastic jugs and dirty diapers, junk tires and box springs. It stank of rotten eggs-the brackish nearness of the marsh. The path became uneven, rolling upward, hemmed in by scarlet sumac and walls of reeds-once they got into that brush and had to start running on foot, it would be all over.
They came to a set of ancient railroad tracks, leading eastward toward the monolithic, upraised trestle, and west down a tunnel of dense foliage. There was a flattened car across the tracks. Sal entered the leafy passage. He didn't know how far they would get before the Xombies caught up, but it was worth a try.
"Where does this lead to?" asked Freddy Fisk from behind.
"A train tunnel, I think. It goes under the whole East Side. If we can sneak back under cover like this, maybe we can pull an end run to the rafts," Sal said hopefully. "Nice call, Kyle."
"My pleasure, man-can we just go?"
Now they were able to pick up the pace though they could only ride single file, and at times the greenery was so thick that they had to push their way through.
"You think there are ticks in here?" asked Freddy G. People hissed at him to shut up. "Haven't you guys ever heard of Lyme disease?"
"Shut the hell up, man."
Freddy decided not to ask about poison ivy.
Bumping along the old railway ties, the boys were hyperalert to any sound or movement in the surrounding woods, but all was silence. It became swampy, the ground a soggy mulch of dead leaves and trash and black mud, the rank material clinging to their tires and flying up behind them in greasy clods. The mulch gave way to puddles, then a continuous oily pool that gradually rose to cover the tracks.
Sal stopped, hanging on to a branch rather than put his feet down. As Kyle pulled up alongside him, he whispered, "Yo. Check it out."
Ahead of them was a yawning black cavern flanked by graffiti-ridden concrete buttresses-an old train tunnel. This was the source of the smoke they had seen. A lazy gray plume still wafted from the darkness. Though obviously condemned and shut up for many years, the tunnel's steel doors had been breached and now stood wide open, like a gateway to some infernal kingdom.
"Should we try calling down there?" Sal asked.
"I don't know," said Todd.
"Well, I ain't goin' in there," said Kyle.
"I know," Sal readily agreed. "It's too bad, though. If we could use this tunnel, we might be able to cross right under the hill without the Xombies ever seeing us. Take a shortcut back to the boats."
"Yeah, but if there are some of them in there…"
"I know. Plus, we have no lights, and we don't even know if it's open on the other end."
"Not to mention it's flooded."
"That too."
"So what now?"
"We have to climb up there to the street." Sal indicated the steep wooded bank.
Kyle looked at the thick underbrush. "With our bikes?" The other boys, who had been gathering behind, looked shell-shocked and utterly whipped-they could barely keep their bikes upright. "It'll take forever for all of us to get up there. The Xombies are comin' now, man. And bet your ass there gonna be more up top."
Sal erupted, "What the hell do you want me to say? We gotta do something! You're the one who-"
As he spoke, he became aware of a hollow rushing sound like the echo from a storm drain. Kyle's eyes flicked past him and suddenly grew wide, fixing on something, their dilating pupils vivid with a pale light of terror. Freddy and the other boys gaped as well, all of them rocked with the same unspeakable fright. Sal turned his head.
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 voi
ce 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 for 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.
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