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 the 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.
I suddenly noticed he had a bloody bandage where his implant had been. Had he gouged it out?
"What's wrong with your voice?" I asked.
"Helium! We drove through a bunch of helium on the way in! Sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, doesn't it?"
"What do you want with me?"
"We're taking back the base, the whole shebang," Lowenthal said. "The Moguls are through! We've been waiting for a chance to catch them all together! Now it's our turn!"
I felt a thin stirring of hope. "The Air Force?"
"There is no Air Force anymore. We know that. But we sure as hell aren't going to fetch and carry while they suck down pina coladas and hog all the women. Schneider, hose down those fuckers, we're getting out of here!"
There was a tremendous roar that buffeted the vehicle, deafening even with the headphones. What Schneider hit I don't know, but there were no more laser blasts. A few seconds later, I felt a big bump, and all at once the ride became quiet and smooth, as if we had emerged from a tunnel. There was no light through the viewports. This could only mean one thing: We were outside the bubble and racing across the sea. I could hear distant-sounding concussions, like fireworks.
Saying, "You must be freezing," Lowenthal handed me a hot-water bottle and went forward. I took the opportunity to peer out the nearest viewport. Falling away to our rear was the dome, partially caved-in like a rotten pumpkin, and within it the submarine. I prayed for its escape, weeping a little for myself, but so grateful for the boys' sake.
All around us, explosions lit up the winter night-the ice was a battlefield. Giant hovercraft were colliding like bumper cars, and the sky was full of airplanes and tracer bullets. Flaming ice fountains shot to the heavens. Other vehicles charged in formation behind us as if we were part of a convoy, or so I thought, until I noticed they were shooting at us. A volley of rockets slashed through the air overhead. The force of their detonations rattled the tank like a garbage can.
Up front, Lowenthal shouted, "Goddammit, where are those UCAVs? Does Boyleston know we're out here? Tell him we need air cover!" Facing forward, he pounded the gunner's leg. "Schneider! Return fire, dammit!" Then he looked back.
What he saw was as astonishing to him as it was to me. Schneider was dead, with my blue hands around his neck. I looked at those hands, then at the plum-colored blood running down my legs-my blood-as if they belonged to someone else.
"Aw shit," Lowenthal said, as a blinding light shone in the front viewport.
Then the wave hit: The cockpit blew in, and glass and smoke billowed toward me, enveloping everything. I was weightless, the floor underfoot burst upward like the flaps of a cardboard box-it was so sudden there was no fear or pain or surprise-and in the peculiar lull that followed, I and every other loose object in the tank whirled in space, a dirty blitz of crushed ice, hamburger, and hot metal, all ricocheting off each other and flying apart in a perfect illustration of atomic fission. Gravity returned with a wallop as the armored truck landed upside down and plunged into the fractured sea. Gray ice water rushed in, covering the mess and driving out the smoke. We sank to the bottom.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was taking an awful long time to die. I wasn't in any discomfort, but worried about the grievous pain to come. Death by drowning, twice in one week! But it was different this time. For one thing, I seemed to acclimate quicker to the temperature. The water was cold, yes, but the effect was not so much torturous as vividly sensual… and not really that bad. I was surrounded by a flowing corona of warmth, with tendrils of incoming cold twining around and through me like a time-lapse film of roots growing. The cold had a calming, grounding effect, which I was grateful for.
My eyes idly roamed the flooded interior of the overturned tank. It was like a shaken snowglobe, full of drifting particles. Everything was so totally smashed I was amazed to be in one piece. The gunner, Schneider, was inextricably tangled with the cannon works, having been stuffed up into the turret by the force of the blast. Lowenthal and the other men I couldn't see at all, the whole cockpit area being lost behind peeled-back flooring and machinery.
Soft light filtered down from the gaping hole in the ice. Forcing my creaky joints to bend, I reached out and carefully took hold of a buckled sheet of steel, leery of jagged edges, and eased partway through the opening.
The sea. I was buried in depths of silty green dusk, looking through paler heights to a weblike membrane far above. Streamers of bubbles and lava-lamp blobs of oil rose to that circle of light, but my body felt anything but buoyant-it was stiff and heavy as that of a rusting Tin Man.
In molasses-thick bewilderment, I realized I hadn't caught a breath in… how long? Minutes. Ten minutes at least. Longer than I'd ever held my breath before, that was for sure, and I didn't feel a thing. Come to think of it, I was not actually even holding my breath-my mouth and nose had been open to the sea the whole time, slowly cycling frigid, salty, diesel-tainted water in and out. Was I breathing water? I consciously stopped doing it, but it didn't seem to make any difference.
Hovering there at the bottom of the ocean, half-in and half-out of the tank, I felt a pang of intense loneliness: I was dead, but I lived. I was a Xombie. Duh.
I let myself sink languorously back inside the vehicle, pondering the change, wondering what would happen to me in this cold, cold water. Things were gradually ticking down to some kind of stop: not death, but a cessation of motion in which the glowing ember of my consciousness would remain, dreaming, as the tissues and fluids of my body congealed at the freezing point. This was what I had read about black hol
es in space, that to be sucked into one was to have time stretched to infinity at the "event horizon." That was where I seemed to be-nearing the event horizon, never to escape.
And I was not alone. Someone else had awakened in the confines of the vehicle: the upside-down gunner, Schneider. Unlike me, he was squirming around, his gloved hands slowly clenching and unclenching, releasing trapped puffs of blood from his clothing, his head and torso compressed into the squat bell of the tank's cupola by the upthrust seat platform.
As I looked down in fascination, his limbs stretched out like probing feelers, each seeming to have an inquisitive life of its own. The right hand located a belt tool-an oversized pocketknife in a leather holster-and both hands speedily extended the blade. With quick, violent chops, Schneider used the knife first to cut through the seat harness, then any offending bone or joint that was pinned in place, tailoring himself to squeeze out. I thought of trapped animals gnawing their own limbs off, but Schneider did it completely mechanically, with the cool deliberation of a surgeon.
Even so, the cold was affecting him as well-he was ebbing-and when he finally jerked free it was only to lie writhing in place, black eyes staring, mouth working silently. Looking at him, I felt nothing. He was nothing. Nothingness was the main impression I had of everything, a never-changing infinite void in four dimensions, stretching out before me with no possibility of relief because I, too, was nothing.
Then something long, white, and slender, an enormous skeletal finger, reached in from the blocked cockpit. Tapping along the junk pile, it found an opening and began to emerge, one great finger after another until the entire monstrous hag's hand was visible, larger than my body-a giant spider crab. It moved over Schneider's twisting form, its claws seizing and picking at the ragged edges of his wounds. As it ate, its eye-stalks remained fixed on me, not warily but brazenly. Then a second crab came through to join the feast. Soon the opening was all pointed legs, as crabs crowded the narrow space. I was bait in a crab trap.
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