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 beeping 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?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Greatshell has lived in five countries and worked many odd jobs across America, including painting houses, writing for a local newspaper, managing a quaint old movie house, and building nuclear submarines. For now, he has settled in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, Cindy; son, Max; and cat, Reuben. Visit Walter’s website at www.waltergreatshell.com.
Ace Books by Walter Greatshell
XOMBIES: APOCALYPSE BLUES
XOMBIES: APOCALYPTICON
XOMBIES: APOCALYPSO
MAD SKILLS
Xombies: Apocalypso Page 26
