“What happened to him?”
“He disappeared. When the Maenad contagion started spreading, he trashed the Providence lab and took off with his experimental ‘Tonic.’ We recovered what we could, some data and a small sample, and transferred it by helicopter to the submarine for safekeeping. This was all in the heat of the Agent X outbreak—you can imagine the difficulties. We lost hundreds of men on the ground. All of them, actually. Only the helicopter pilot and I made it back to the plant.” He said this as if it unnerved him to think about it.
“Lucky you just happened to have a submarine lying around.”
“Hey, what can I tell you? Submarines were my hobby ever since I was a kid. With some guys it’s model trains. I just happened to be in a position to own my own submarine factory. If I’d known it would be such a headache, I would’ve unloaded it long ago.”
“Poor little rich boy.”
“No, but until you’re faced with the kinds of choices I’ve had to make, you can’t judge.”
“You mean like choosing SPAM over people?”
That struck a nerve. “SPAM had nothing to do with it,” he said. “I had to be sure that the Tonic would reach its destination. We couldn’t predict what would happen with a lot of refugees on board—it was too much like letting the inmates run the asylum.”
“But you promised them!”
“It was the only way to keep them on the job. That sub had to be seaworthy and ready to go. There was no other choice. Of course, it was all moot after you and Cowper showed up.”
“We were only trying to survive.”
“I know. I don’t blame you for almost getting me killed. That was your only choice. At that moment, you had the leverage and would have been stupid not to use it. Plus, stealing the Tonic ensured that we didn’t dare throw you overboard. The most we could do was lock Cowper up and try to get him to talk.”
“But . . . you were in there with him. You were arrested, too.”
“No I wasn’t.” His lips formed into a sly, rueful smile.
He had been pretending to be a prisoner. That whole time. “You lying creep,” I said.
“It was all I could think of to get Cowper’s confidence. It was rough, too. I was stuck in there with a ruptured kneecap, and Fred Cowper is not the most gentle nursemaid a person could ask for. I should have known he was too smart to open up—did you know he was my first choice to command the boat? I was very disappointed when he turned me down. I never liked that Coombs. He tolerates too much hanky-panky.”
“You mean like giving me the run of the ship.”
“No, that was actually deliberate. We thought Cowper might confide something to you through the door. You were slower on the uptake than we expected, though—it took you a week to find him.”
“Thanks.”
“De nada. More tea?”
Each day, when I returned to my tent, it was a little more furnished, more deluxe, though the one amenity I really wanted was a bathroom—I didn’t like using a chamber pot, no matter how unobtrusively it was whisked away, and I would have liked to wash more often. I suspected that Sandoval was allowing me only so much comfort, so that visiting him would remain a welcome indulgence.
One thing that surprised me was how free I was to roam around. Valhalla was wide open to me, and I could even leave the bubble altogether via my private balcony if I could stand the cold, though I wouldn’t get much farther than that. There was no Inuit taxi service except by Mogul appointment.
My tent was at the northwest side of the main bubble, close to the wall, in a thinly peopled region of giant helium tanks, compressors, and webs of anchor cable. The lines creaked eerily from the force of the wind outside—I gathered that the dome would blow away without these robust moorings, which moaned like the tortured rigging of a great sailing ship. I could see why most people chose to live more toward the center, in the faux-cheery surroundings of the Global Village. But at least I could come and go as I pleased.
What I quickly discovered, however, was that there was nowhere I cared to go. My first act after leaving Sandoval was to try to find someone, anyone, from the sub. This did not require much of a search—I remembered what the boys had told me about being able to locate a person by their implant, and immediately found this monitoring system—the Valhalla Directory, or VD—on Channel 8 of my interactive television. All I had to do was type in a name, and the selected implantee would appear as a numbered dot on a map of the complex.
I could find myself, I could find Dr. Langhorne or Dr. Stevens or Rudy or Colonel Lowenthal or even Miss Riggs, but the people I really wanted to find were not there: all the surviving boys and men from the boat. They were either being detained outside the bubble or they were gone altogether. I prayed it was the former, but either way they were out of reach. I was alone.
What made the situation worse was my isolation within the complex. Except for the doctors, no one would speak to me, no one would come anywhere near me, and when I ventured out of my area, I felt like Typhoid Mary—word got around that I was coming, and people disappeared into their holes like timid rabbits. I could sometimes see stragglers clearing out as I approached, and it made me mad. Obviously, they were following my movements, using the Directory to shun me, but why? I remembered what Dr. Langhorne had told me about sexual competition here, and wondered if that was it—did they hate me because they thought I was an interloper poaching on their territory? Were they scared of me because they thought I could bring Sandoval’s might to bear? If that was so, it was worth thinking about. How much power did I wield? What could I get away with?
The more I considered, the more I began to feel a peculiar thrill of a kind I had never experienced before. Look at it objectively, I thought: If Sandoval was king, and he adopted me, that made me a princess. Even in less fanciful terms, he was certainly one of the most powerful men on Earth—and had been even before Agent X—whereas what had I been? A nothing, a nobody . . . yet it was me he wanted by his side. Furthermore, even at fiftyish, he wasn’t exactly a broken-down old coot. Again, looking objectively, he was handsome, charming, even boyish in a way—all the qualities prized by romance novelists. In my young girlhood, I had been a secret reader of such tripe, and it must have been lying dormant, my Harlequin gene, waiting for the right moment to bust out. The fact that he didn’t make me physically ill made anything possible.
Every now and then I was overwhelmed with the numb gratitude of a sweepstakes winner—maybe I was not going to have to suffer and die like the others . . . or even break much of a sweat. This kind of fantasizing began to occupy more and more of my thoughts, steering them away from uglier matters. Maybe I was set for life! Whatever became of the rest of these people, I was off the hook. I had a man.
Or did I? What about those who were resentful, who felt I had an unfair advantage? You already have enemies here, Dr. Langhorne had said. You’re a threat. What would they do to me? No, the question was, what would I be willing to do to hold on to my advantage? Some deep, grubbing part of me, I knew, would do just about anything. Paranoia and self-loathing added their flavors to my demented euphoria.
But why should I fear the worst, when Sandoval had all but promised me anything I wanted? I was getting way ahead of myself. This was my chance to take an active role in deciding how the future played out—if Sandoval was so interested in proving himself to me, then he would have to show some goodwill to my friends. Put them under my jurisdiction, maybe, as they had been on the sub. It was too late for Cowper and Hector and Julian and—no . . . I didn’t dare think of them. I wished I could bang on the implant until they went away. But there were many more to save. And if my position was as secure as I hoped, I would work toward more-humanitarian policies for the complex as a whole. We should all be working together!
A vast sense of responsibility and purpose welled up inside me. Utik was right—I was the Mother of the Future, me. Somehow all this fell to me. But I had to be careful; if I was going to flex my muscles, I would have
to tread lightly, come up with a plan. Approach Sandoval. And most of all, beware the jealous envy of the less-enlightened.
The next day, over our sixth lunch together, I made my case to him.
“No,” he said.
I was caught short. The brevity of his dismissal was inappropriate to the well-reasoned, inspiring twelve-point proposal I had spent all night drafting.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Why not?” The question seemed to amuse and disgust him. “Lulu, you’re not Eleanor Roosevelt, and I’m not FDR. You’re a sweet girl, and I know you had to bring this up as a matter of conscience. I salute you, but that’s about it. Now that you’ve done all you can, try to relax.”
“But you—”
“No buts!” A trace of anger flashed across his face. Then he relented a bit, and said, “Look, I know where you’re coming from. I used to be a charitable man. When you have great wealth, it’s easy to be generous, especially when it’s tax-deductible. Humanitarian awards, honorary degrees, hospital wings, plaques—I could have had it all if I hadn’t given anonymously. But I’m not here today because I was generous. None of us is, not even you. We survived out of pure selfishness and must continue to do so. It may not seem like it, but we’re in a school of piranha here: At the first sign of weakness, they attack. Don’t look so down in the mouth—I know it sounds cruel, but once you accept the necessity of it, you will begin to see the higher purpose: honoring the gift of life. We won’t redress the world’s wrongs by sacrificing ourselves. We must exalt ourselves or risk being destroyed by others who exalt themselves.”
“I think that’s called looking out for number one.”
Sitting back in his seat, he sighed dejectedly. “Okay, look. You want to see your friends? Here’s what’s going to happen. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there’s going to be a ceremony tomorrow night out at the submarine. Big doings. All the Moguls are going to be there, and your friends will be with them. I had planned to tell you tomorrow, but those big sad eyes are killing me—you could have made a fortune for charity.” He held out his hand to me. “Is it a date?”
Heart slugging like a prizefighter, I nodded and took it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The next night, Sandoval personally escorted me from my tent to Utik’s armored carriage. We looked impossibly fabulous, I in my jade-and-parchment dress and he in gleaming baronial black tie, as if we were going to some kind of fairy-tale ball. But I felt grotesque, not well. Anxiety had been building and building all day, and the prospect of seeing all those familiar faces again—people it had taken me so long to win over—was caning my stomach like a piñata. What did I have to offer them? What was there to say to each other? I felt like the Whore of Babylon.
Utik got us situated on the divans with brusque efficiency, paying no special attention to me. Refusing the hot-water bottles, Sandoval said to him, “That’s fine, Herman. Let’s go, we’re running late.” Utik nodded and took his seat, barking something to the drivers. The vehicle lurched into motion.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Sandoval asked me, grinning like an idiot.
I nodded stiffly.
“Bet you thought you’d never see that submarine again.”
“Are we going on board?”
“No.”
“Then why aren’t we dressed for the outdoors?”
“You’ll see,” he said with a mischievous twinkle.
We sped through the planes, across the airfield, and toward the barrier wall. Looking out a gunport at the Arctic night, I had a brief twinge thinking about the COIL weapon. “They’re not going to shoot us by accident, are they?” I asked.
“No,” Sandoval replied. “We have a radio beacon that protects us. You see this?” He produced a hefty pen from his sleeve—it was chained to his wrist—and pushed a button on it. A red spot of light appeared on the wall.
“Yeah, it’s a laser pointer. I’ve seen lots of people around here with them. What is it with those things?”
“It’s more than a laser pointer. It’s also sending out a radio signal to the defensive array. It not only protects us, but anything I point at I can destroy at the touch of a button. One of the perks of Moguldom.” He put the thing away, looking pleased as a little kid.
“Where do you get all this stuff?”
“Off the shelf, mostly. This is just a cheap computer accessory that we adapted to the existing missile-defense system. That forehead implant is a slightly modified version of life-signs monitors used for years in animal testing.”
“But where does it come from? How does it get here?”
“We fly it in.”
“From where? Aren’t there Xombies everywhere?”
“Not everywhere. We have a lot of remote bases from which we conduct foraging operations. I have one in Namibia that’s fantastic—an abandoned diamond-mining town in the middle of the desert. It has this huge old opera house that you wouldn’t believe.”
“But if you have all that, why come here?”
“Because, my dear, the people we have running those places are not quite as genteel as you and I. In fact, they’re murderers and criminals—literally. They’re all former prison inmates.”
“What do you mean?”
“Male convicts represent the single largest proportion of Agent X survivors, especially those who were held in maximum security. The Maenads couldn’t get at them. Some of our biggest Moguls are captains of the prison-industrial complex, and they organized the labor pool. It’s the best-equipped army in the world today. And the only one, as far as I know. About a million heavily armed thugs, all doing our shopping for us.”
“What do they get out of it?”
“Peace of mind. Some semblance of order. Life. Without our administrative apparatus, they would degenerate into squabbling factions and be picked off by Maenads. As it is, the attrition rate is . . .” He stopped himself. “Anyway, trust me, they need us as much as we need them.”
We passed uneventfully through the barrier and continued down a long, gentle grade to the sea.
At one point in the drive, Sandoval asked, “Would you like to see where we’re going?” When I gave a tentative nod, he directed me to a small window up in the vehicle’s turret, resting his hand on my waist as I looked.
Out across the ice was another dome. A lone bubble, dimly glowing in the moonlight.
“You know, Lulu,” he said, “without Agent X to bring us together, we might never have met.” Then he kissed me.
As we pulled up to the dome, men helped us out of the truck and hustled us inside. We passed through a drumlike revolving door, then a large antechamber full of parkas and boots, and finally a heavy flap bleeding warm air. I could hear music. Our escorts parted the curtain, and my mouth fell open at the sight that greeted us.
It was green. Live green grass as far as the eye could see, an achingly sweet-smelling park with sweet music filling the air and banks of stadium lights making the place look like a concert on a summer night. It was a concert. A silvery voice sang the refrain from a mellow Beatles song.
“That’s a lotta sod,” said Sandoval, enjoying my reaction.
Rising like a monument from a flowered mound in the center of the grass was the submarine’s fairwater, its dive planes hung with bunting, and four musicians dressed in Sgt. Pepper regalia atop the starboard wing. It was the Blackpudlians. Their lurid purple and yellow stage lights shone hotly on the spectators below, turning them into violet cutouts limned in gold. The turf at the base of the mound was incised with a deep, emerald-lit hole—a bottomless spring with porcelain sides, cut as cleanly as if with a cookie cutter. Surrounding the pool and fanning out across the lawn in all directions was a crowd of exquisitely dressed men—and women. Beautiful young women . . . just like me.
Tuxedoed waiters with trays of cocktails circulated through the crowd, eager to please, and as one of them approached us with champagne, I noticed it was Dr. Langhorne.
“Jim! How nice to see you!�
� she said, not sounding at all sincere. “Care for something cold?”
“Why thank you, Alice. I just might do that.” He picked up a glass.
“And your little friend?”
“She can speak for herself. Lulu, you two have met, haven’t you?”
I nodded, unsure why Dr. Langhorne was so angry.
“Sure, we’ve met,” she said. “We’re just a couple of soul sisters, aren’t we?”
Turning serious, Sandoval leaned toward her, and asked, “Everybody ready?”
“All is in readiness, sire.” She gave a mocking curtsy.
“It better be. It’s all or nothing now.”
“You’ve always been able to trust me.” Without offering me champagne, she smiled poisonously, and said, “Well, I’ll be trotting along. If you two need anything, just give me a ring.”
Sandoval smiled sheepishly, and said, “Already have, thanks.” When she was gone, he said, “Phew, she’s in rare form tonight.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She’s my ex-wife.” Seeing my dismay, he laughed, “Don’t worry about it.”
As we approached the fringes of the crowd, and people began turning to acknowledge Sandoval, I had another unpleasant shock.
“Oh shit,” I said under my breath.
The beautifully made-up girls that I had been so happy to see were entirely made-up. That is, they were not girls at all, but gleaming-coiffed boys. The boys from the submarine—my boys.
“Yep, a lotta sod,” Sandoval repeated.
They wobbled on their sinking heels and miserably marked my approach, some arm in arm with their brazen guardians . . . as indeed I was myself. I recognized Rick and Henry and Sal, Sasha and Derrick, Andy and John, Dexter, Todd, Dan, Freddy, Bryce, Tony, Aram, Kyle, Gen, Lucas, Chuck, Nate, Bill, as well as all the dozens of others whose names I had never properly memorized. Recognized them in spite of the blond falls and rubber boobs and killer clothes and expertly applied foundation and lipstick and eyeliner I knew so well: They had Miss Riggs written all over them, every one.
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 29
