Apocalypso x-3

by Walter Greatshell

“Yes, but then you also drive Brenda away, so the whole family is tant pis.”

  “Don’t start about Brenda! Don’t you dare. Brenda was another one who needed you while you were out joyriding around the seven seas, so don’t even start with me about Brenda, mister.”

  “I had my duties; I had no choice! Maybe if you had tried telling me this-”

  “I did try! I tried till I was blue in the face, but you refused to listen. You’re like every man I’ve ever known: selfish, irresponsible, egotistical, obnoxious-”

  “Somebody talkin’ about me?”

  We all turned at the impossible gruff voice.

  No. No. Come on.

  But it was. Standing behind me was Fred Cowper. Head and body reunited.

  At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing… then I almost jumped out of my new pink skin. Fred was whole. More than whole-he looked twenty years younger, as if losing and regaining his head was the best thing that ever happened to him. I was too stunned to speak; all I could do was gape.

  As if realizing it was her cue, Dr. Stevens leaped in. “Wonderful! Wonderful! So nice to meet you all. Come on, let’s go!”

  Reeling from the shock, we allowed ourselves to be nudged aboard the carts.

  As we took our seats, Dr. Stevens said, “I can’t wait to show you around.”

  There were more reunions along the way. Moving on, we came to a neighborhood of Immunes, including the two girls who had traveled with Todd, Ray, Sandoval, and Chandra Stevens all the way from Providence: Fran and Deena.

  As a Xombie, I had taken great interest in Immunes. In fact, they were the major reason I was here at all. Would I have continued so long with this absurd voyage if not for the dream of somehow liberating these doomed, forbidden beings? Unfortunately, they were not nearly as fascinating to my human consciousness-just regular people, after all.

  Sandoval gestured at the door with a flourish. “Step right up,” he said.

  We went inside. The room was empty except for a couch facing a bank of television screens. Each screen showed a strange mound like the one I had seen in Washington, with thousands of Xombies filing in, and the same black blimps suspended overhead.

  A man in a space suit was sitting on the couch between Fran and Deena, his body wired to a fuse box. The two women were very happy to have company. There were hugs and introductions all around.

  “Uri,” Sandoval said, “you have visitors.”

  Miska shifted his helmet slightly to see us, which allowed us to see his blue face through the visor. “Hello, Bobby,” he said. “Hey, man, turn that frown upside down. Deena, could you be a sweetheart and get my friend Bobby a Yoo-hoo?”

  Sandoval said, “Uri’s working for us now. He’s been very useful in maneuvering the Xombies wherever we need them to be, and as whoever we need them to be. For instance, I’ve been able to operate in several places at once. So has Miska. We’ve also been able to find all the X-infected Moguls in their hidden vaults and move them to one secure facility. Not so secure anymore, unfortunately, thanks to your visit, Lulu.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “What the hell were you doing to them there?”

  “Since Agent X cannot be ‘killed,’ and we have yet to find a means of treating five billion Xombies worldwide, it is necessary to isolate the threat. In this colony we have a certain number of Immunes who donate the blood factor we require to remain human. It goes into the drinking water here, so we all live together under the illusion of normalcy. Eventually, we expect to have fully immune children-a number of women are pregnant right now. But in order for human civilization to continue in the meantime, we have to deal with the existing Xombies. And we’ve decided that the best way to do that is by reducing them to a concentrated, crystalline form and converting that to organic biomass.”

  “How do you manage that?” Langhorne asked.

  “We pour it into the bay. The shellfish population is thriving.”

  “Mr. Sandoval?” There was a woman in camouflage fatigues at the door. “Major Hammersmith requests you come to the Command Center right away. It’s urgent.”

  “Hold that thought,” Sandoval said, hurrying out the door.

  We followed him down the tunnel to a row of humming tractor-trailers. The people there were too busy to pay any attention to us. They were frantically manning banks of computer workstations and cockpit simulators, from which scores of aerial and surface drones were being remote-controlled. These were the same lethal gadgets that had so recently attacked us… but, of course, we were Xombies then.

  There was some kind of major operation going on, all the drones swarming a strange shimmering mass-on the monitors it looked like an iridescent bluish black sea slug, an immense nudibranch covered with glassy tendrils. It was mountainous.

  “What is that?” Langhorne asked.

  “That’s what I was hoping Lulu could tell us,” said Dr. Stevens. “It came out of the Mons right after she did.”

  All I could do was shake my head. As I watched, the thing reared up and projectile-vomited a rope of pale, wormy innards hundreds of feet into the air. The seething mass flew in a high arc, unraveling as it avalanched to the ground, its lashing tendrils seizing any living thing in its path. But it didn’t pull the prey back to its body. Instead, the rear end poured into the front, pulsing forward like a giant maggot. In its wake it left nothing but a trail of scorched earth.

  With a grimace, Captain Despineau muttered, “Ecrasez l’infame.”

  Stevens said, “It’s been moving in fits and starts, averaging about fifteen miles an hour, and that speed has remained relatively stable even as the thing has grown in bulk. We hoped it would eventually stop moving, but it just keeps crawling along, growing bigger and bigger.”

  “How big is it?” I asked.

  “We estimate it has grown over ten thousand times its original mass, so it’s gotta be in the millions of tons by now. It’s vacuuming up every bit of organic matter in its path. It keeps collapsing under its own weight, then pulling itself together again-sort of like a volcanic lava dome. We’re expecting it to melt down completely at any time, but if it reaches the open ocean, all bets are off.”

  Sandoval asked, “Where is it now?”

  “It came south down the Maryland peninsula and crossed the Potomac River at Blossom Point. It then entered Virginia and began veering eastward south of the Rappahannock. It is now approaching the York River at Gloucester Point. That’s right on the lower Chesapeake, and less than forty miles away from us here. Which is why we’re throwing everything we’ve got at it. So far, no good.”

  “And you have no idea what it is?” I asked.

  Sandoval said, “Oh, we have some idea.” He gestured back in the direction of Miska’s trailer. “This is Miska’s Big Enchilada-the end of the world he was predicting. Except that because it didn’t exist outside of his head, he needed an opportunity to create it… which Lulu generously provided.”

  “It’s not like I meant to,” I said.

  “No, it was our fault for putting all our eggs in one basket. Miska’s crazy as a damn doodlebug, and this is his ultimate madness unleashed-the finale to Agent X. I don’t know if he’s even consciously controlling it, but I guarantee he is linked to that thing.”

  “Then you should be able to kill it by killing him,” I said.

  “No, then we’ll lose control of the Xombies. Like it or not, we need him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  LEVIATHAN

  With nothing to do but wait, I found cots for Bobby and myself and slept the sleep of the living. The dead never sleep.

  We were awakened some twenty hours later by an alarm in the tunnel. Sitting up on our cots, we rubbed sand from our eyes and tried to figure out what was happening. It was like the scene of a fire: All the tunnel residents were out of their trailers, chattering in anxious groups.

  Bobby took my hand. “What’s going on, Lulu?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the distance, we could hear beep
ing as vehicles forced their way through the crowds. As they got nearer, the lane was cleared to make room for them, and in a minute we could see a convoy of electric buses. They were full of people, but as they came abreast of us, they stopped. The doors wheezed open and a man leaned out-Sandoval. I could see Miska sitting in the front seat like a derelict spaceman.

  Over a loudspeaker, Sandoval shouted, “All those who depend on Agent X inhibitors are asked to board the buses at once. Thank you.”

  “Why?” someone asked.

  “It’s a precautionary evacuation, just in the event that we lose power. You’re temporarily being moved to Petropolis. A little vacation in the fresh air.”

  Without the least quibble, I jumped up and got on a bus. So did everyone else from the boat, as well as a number of tunnel residents. It just seemed like a good idea; we didn’t question it. If someone had said to me, You are being controlled like a hand puppet, I would have said, No I’m not.

  Sandoval escorted us back to the bathyscaphe elevator and loaded us in like cattle. Next thing we knew, we were stepping out into the bright sky of Petropolis. There was something dreamlike about it, going from that tunnel to high above the blue of Chesapeake Bay.

  Shading my eyes, I asked Sandoval, “Why exactly are we up here? What’s going on?”

  “Ask him,” he said, nodding at Uri Miska. “It was his idea.”

  He went to Miska and unclamped the man’s helmet. No one thought to stop him-perhaps we were all dreaming. Or sharing Miska’s dream. In a minute, the blue man was out of his pressure suit and standing completely free, wearing only space boots and long johns.

  “That’s better,” Miska said. “Thank you, Jim.”

  Pointing at me, Sandoval said, “She wants to know why we’re up here.”

  Miska grinned amiably. “Tell her she’s got a ticket to ride.”

  I nodded as if that made all the sense in the world.

  Miska led us to the west side of the platform, facing the far Virginia shore. There was something going on out there, a disturbance on the horizon like a dark waterspout. Tiny flashes crackled around it, darts of lightning in a bruised sky, and the whole bay was unsettled with heavy surf. Petropolis shook from the blows.

  I knew what this was. Wormwood. The World-Devourer; the Big Enchilada. It was coming. It was growing. Soon it would arrive at the mouth of the bay and break through to the open Atlantic. Just an embryo in an amniotic sea, the Earth one big womb. Unchecked, it would take over the surface of the planet-here, there, and everywhere.

  A shadow passed over, and I suddenly noticed all the strange black clouds. They were not clouds, I realized, but Xombie airships-Xeppelins.

  “Where are they going?” Bobby asked me.

  “They’re leaving,” I said.

  Bobby started to weep.

  Maybe they heard him. One of the weirdly shaped bubbles was closer than the others-clearer, as if I could reach up and touch it. Closer and closer by the minute, swelling to enormous size, it scudded toward us over the bay, trailing black ribbons and casting its shadow on the water.

  It hove to Petropolis as though the massive oil rig was its hitching post, then hung its billowing muzzle over us. Sighing hugely, it unfurled veinous blue curtains and carpets of tender flesh. Through that entrance we could see a cathedral of dark glass, and the honeycombed bedchamber that would be our eternal resting place, safe from Earth’s impending ruin.

  We just had to be Xombies again.

  Miska entered. “All aboard,” he said, waving us in.

  Bobby went first-Bobby went gladly. Slightly less eagerly, the rest started to follow… though I held back, and my Dreadnauts with me. The florid walls trembled with the desire to receive us.

  And then we heard something. Music. A familiar tune from somewhere far away and below the sea:

  All you need is love…

  Across the bay, the World-Devourer listened, too, Wormwood spreading its long pale tubers in search of those human vibrations. It swept the Virginia shore, plumbing the entrance to Hampton Roads and sending tsunami waves through the deserted streets of Norfolk until it found the source.

  And it screamed.

  The leviathan had stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. All at once the water was alive with a monstrous scourge that swarmed over the behemoth and burrowed inside it like a plague of chiggers: a trillion feeding crabs. The X-altered crabs filled that corner of the bay, their age-old spawning grounds, attracted by the lure of Xombie flesh, dangled before them inside a thick-hulled submarine. There were more crabs there than water, all fighting to get at the Fab Four, driven to frenzy by the sound of long-dead music.

  The Big Enchilada had no such steel shell to protect it.

  It sought to retreat, withdrawing its amorphous limbs into itself, but they tore from the strain as thousands of tons of crabs infested them. The Devourer became the devoured. Rotten with parasites, Wormwood tried to flee its attackers by crawling ashore, but the weight of its riddled body in the shallows caused it to crack and shiver apart like a glacier of gelatin, and the carcass fell to the crabs. The crabs ate it; the crabs contained it; the crabs neutralized it. It was a good year for crabs-they would be delicious.

  I stepped back from the lip of the Xeppelin, and my friends stayed with me. We raised our arms and waved as its bow rose from the platform and swelled shut around Miska’s shocked face. Like a slow eclipse, the gargantuan shadow passed, leaving us standing in daylight.

  My baby would be human.

  EPILOGUE

  HEROES

  It’s a rum business, being a zombie and all. Excuse me, I meant a “Xombie.” All very ridiculous, when you think about it. When we were alive we called them Blue Meanies, but now we know there’s nothing mean about it. If anything, we’re generous to a fault. My mates and I-Dick, Wally, Phil, and I’m Reggie-came by this fate in a most peculiar way: We’d been playing small clubs for years, specializing in old-school hardcore for West Britain’s drunk and disorderly, but our youthful dreams of record deals and international fame had given way to the reality of living on a diet of take-away curry and greasy chips. We were knackered. Aside from the traveling minstrel bullshit, it wasn’t easy being “bloody Paki” in post 9/11 England, much less four bloody Pakis traveling about the countryside in an unmarked delivery van. We had tried painting the band’s name on the side of the lorry, but punters kept letting air out of the tyres, and it likely didn’t help that our group was at that time called the Golliwogs. Anyway, one day we decided to do a show dressed all in Sgt. Pepper kit, just having a laugh, but the audience went bloody mad, especially when we did an actual Beatles number-“Yellow Submarine,” I remember it well. Just a lark. Word got round, and suddenly we were jamming to packed halls everywhere we went-in a trice we found ourselves playing more Beatles and less Golliwogs. Whole different audience, that, one a bit less prone to head-butting, property damage, and public urination. Fewer skinheads. More family-like, I suppose, and we were ready for a bit of gentility, having had our fill of race riots-it was nice to play a whole set without a bloomin’ row breaking out in the bloomin’ front row. To be honest, we’d all been about to quit the band, find some steady work, settle down, and start families. All we needed was a regular gig, and this Beatles shtick was it, man. Dick found an advert for cruise lines seeking music acts, but they told us our band name was too “inflammatory.” Thus, the Blackpudlians were born, and the rest is history.

  Who would have thought four lads from Blackpool would save the human race?

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