Xombies: Apocalypso Page 3

  “Now the trapped women could only wait as the following horde caught up with them: Xombies tall and short, fat and thin, young and old. Xombies of all kinds except for one specific group: the initial women carriers of Agent X, the Maenads, who had gone rogue spontaneously, then spread the disease to everyone they could catch … and kiss. Once again, these less-impulsive multitudes were holding back, watching from the shadows.

  “Unlike them, I could not stand to watch as the cage was surrounded. The worst weren’t even the running dead but the crawling ones—the blasted remnants left over from the earlier fight, whose bodies had half frozen and healed together in strange, awful configurations and now came scuttling out of burnt storefronts like a freak invasion.

  “In seconds, the kennel was an ovum buried under a thousand competing sperm. The victims could be heard screaming as the cage crumpled … and then all vanished in a blinding flash.

  “It was fire. White-hot fire as bright as the sun. Brilliant sparks rained down like a shower of stars, burning through anything they touched, incinerating skin and hair and turning Xombies into roamin’ candles, great balls of fire, their bodies consumed even from within by tumors of malignant flame. Inhuman torches fled the bonfire, shedding layers of flesh like dead leaves until there was nothing left to combust, and they toppled into paper-doll silhouettes of molten slag.

  “Down at the river, there were more fireworks. Floating braziers which had once been piled with firewood for the pleasure of strolling tourists were now loaded with living, praying females, attracting an audience of avid blue spectators down the riverbanks and into the knee-deep scum, where there was no escape from the incendiary barrage that was loosed upon them, a glowing hailstorm that obliterated anything and everything in that blazing, boiling trench.

  “On the opposite end of town, hung above the street, a pair of giant masks forged out of steel grating—playhouse faces of comedy and tragedy—were likewise packed with live girls and allowed to gather a tremendous cult before a tanker truck on the rooftop was detonated, showering jellied fire on the whole congregation.

  “Such fire traps had been set in cities all over America, all over the world, and in one day they immolated millions of Xombies, perhaps tens of millions … plus thousands of uninfected women.

  “Providence burned, or parts of it. It’s an old city, built in the days of brick and stone, and its walls are resistant to fire. Many newer buildings disappeared, in some areas whole blocks, but after a few days of heavy sleet and snow, the inferno sputtered out. And then it was over. Whatever tarlike deposits remained soon froze solid and were covered with a thick crust of ice. Providence was purified.

  “That was when the men emerged, the instigators of the holocaust. They were a peculiar confederacy of men, whose chief point in common was that they had all survived the plague because of their isolation from women and who now believed that this was nothing less than divine providence: Agent X was God’s punishment for original sin. Women were the enemy, instruments of Satan, and it was only right and proper to burn them in order to save their immortal souls. This was a very timely gospel, and many desperate people joined the church, including not a few women.”

  Todd asked, “Why are you telling us all this?”

  “Because these people are still around, even after all these months. I drove them out of Providence, sent them fleeing into the wilderness, but they are coming back. In fact, they are experiencing a bit of a renaissance these days, spreading their gospel far and wide like some kind of traveling revival show. Revival in the literal sense—they are restoring Xombies to mortal life.”

  “Restoring Xombies! You mean curing them?”

  “Yes, but not just any Xombies. They are mainly baptizing Xombie Moguls—elderly tycoons who had the foresight to embalm themselves in Agent X prior to the plague. Restored to life, these men still have tremendous resources at their command, and they no longer need guns, they don’t need fences, and they don’t need to wrap themselves in dead meat to stay alive. But they do need women—immune women—in order to retain their humanity … and to procreate. Do you understand what that means?”

  “They’re shit out of luck?”

  “It means they are a threat to the survival of our species. They survived the plague, but they can’t survive Enceladus. They may be immune to Agent X, but they are perfectly vulnerable to ordinary injury and death, and every day the number of new Immunes increases. Xombies will not touch them, nor can I.”

  Todd said, “Maybe you should try explaining all this to them.”

  “Oh, I have. But after how I terrorized them and chased them out of town, they are not conducive to helpful hints. In fact, they think I’m the Devil and have come back to slay me. No, I cannot help them. But maybe someone else can.”

  Suddenly Todd and Ray felt their suits stiffen, seams popping, and abruptly the flesh capsules of their helmets burst open like giant milkweed pods, revealing their startled, sweaty faces, then split downward and peeled off their bodies as though sheared away by invisible blades. The liberated meat jerked violently loose from under their seated butts and scuttled away in a blur of peculiar, flapping locomotion.

  Freed from the restraining flesh, the two boys cried out in relief and immediately tore the wire cages off their heads so they could rub their filth-encrusted faces. Ray checked his gunshot wound and found that it was almost healed, a healthy pink dimple in his side. Then he froze.

  Both boys froze, hearts stopped in unison. Listen. There was a sound in the distance—the mournful, impossible, unmistakable sound of a train whistle. A train was coming! Just on the other side of the hill. And if there was a train, there were people; where there were people, there was life. Ray’s shocked eyes met Todd’s, and they came to an instant, unspoken agreement: Run.

  They ran.

  CHAPTER THREE

  XMAS

  We are creatures of habit. Immortality is not something you learn overnight. There are stages, similar to the five stages of dying: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—not necessarily in that order. And there is an extra one: fear. It’s scary to wake up dead. For that was how we all thought of it, despite Dr. Langhorne’s explanations. You were alive or you were dead, and since we no longer fit the definition of life, we had to be ghouls, zombies, revenants, none other than the ever-loving Living Dead.

  I say that all these things had to play themselves out, and there were many little melodramas before the strange new dialectic was resolved. Boys being boys. We were on the boat a long time working it through.

  Being human was a craving most found hard to ignore: the comforting, pointless routines of eating, drinking, dressing, breathing. Hoping, praying, hurting, doubting. Loving and hating. In my case, reading and writing. We liked our mortal identities, frailties and all, and were deeply afraid of losing ourselves.

  Eating, yes. What do you think, we didn’t eat? Xombies aren’t magic—there’s no such thing as a perpetual-motion machine; everything that moves requires a push. Most unreformed Exes get around this by moving as little as possible, existing in a fugue state that allows them to subsist for a long time on the stored energy of their residual human tissue as well as elements in the air, every pore soaking up gases and microparticles like a sponge, taking in nitrogen and carbon dioxide and even ambient light, and off-gassing a bit of ionized oxygen—the undead are regular air purifiers. Environmentally semiconscious!

  We on the boat, however, had daily duties to perform. The cost in energy was such that we had to supplement “light soup” with more substantial food. I say “had to”—the truth is we ate less for physical nourishment than to sate the hunger in our souls. Eating was an act of nostalgia. We could as easily have gotten our calories by glugging diesel oil or chewing rubber boots—our bodies were capable of rendering almost any organic-based substance into motive force. For that matter, we could have taken bites out of each other … and some did. Since pain was no longer an issue, and even the grossest injury
did not lead to death, cannibalism was a sin comparable to stealing from the cookie jar. Except cookies don’t grow back.

  Little by little, everybody began to relax. To surrender. And in surrendering to realize we were free. Free of pain, free of disease, free of old age, free of death. Free even of the Xombie curse—with no human crew left, Dr. Langhorne decided there was no need for me to continue donating my blood serum. I was doubtful about this, having developed a maternal bond with my blood recipients. It was hard to just cut the cord.

  Despite my qualms, they remained entirely placid, choosing to stay on the boat rather than to join the wild ones ashore—which was yet another freedom: the freedom of choice. Many other freedoms we could not yet comprehend, but for now, this alone was enough, an existence not only rid of pain but with the prospect of joy. The joy of saving others.

  On my command, the boat emptied like an uncorked cask. Men and boys erupted from the hatches and spilled over the side like hairless lemmings, plummeting to the bottom and clambering forward through swaying eelgrass as through a meadow, leaving clouds of roiled silt. They emerged from the water draped in seaweed and nipping crabs, their splashes making prisms in the sun. Mounting the bank, they lined up on dry land and waited.

  It was the moment we had dreamed of in life … and beyond death. The crucial first step toward restoring our lost humanity and returning home. Home. What was home anymore? We only knew what it was not: Home was not the cold bowels of a submarine or the colder void of eternity. Home was not anyplace we had left behind. Because without our loved ones, our houses were only haunted shells.

  After the battle with the Reapers, we had briefly considered putting ashore in Providence to look for surviving family members and friends, whom we could indoctrinate into our tribe. The simple truth of the matter was, the population of rational undead could only grow as long as there were mortal human beings to inoculate. Otherwise, those “undecideds” would likely die and be lost forever. Thus it was crucial to find such people and save them … even from themselves.

  Easier said than done. Our loved ones had scattered along with the rest of humankind. And as the survivors dwindled, the feral Xombies moved on as well, leaving the coasts and migrating inland, heading west and south as if driven by some powerful compulsion. We denizens of the boat felt this, too, this need to move on. Some simply left and never returned.

  Home was elsewhere, a sanctuary beyond our reckoning. There were no words for it. The nearest thing was love, an emotion we had all but forgotten and knew only through its absence—a vague residual ache in hearts that had long since ceased to beat.

  Flashes of remembrance struck me like electric shocks, that familiar sad face looming out of the mist. Come on in, Sillybean, the water’s fine. The past reaching out its long-fingered hand to stroke my cheek.

  Just a dream, I reminded myself, as I suddenly found myself sitting at a table overlooking a ballroom floor. The band was playing “Hey Jude,” and the moment was rich with the luster of its own impermanence. Moments were priceless when you knew they were finite. That hand, that face.

  It was my mother. It was our last Christmas Eve, and Mummy had heard of a fancy dress ball at the Biltmore Hotel. Come on, sourpuss! Better than moping at home! So we assembled our best outfits and traipsed to the high-priced citadel that was the Biltmore … only to be stopped cold by the admission charge: forty-five dollars a person.

  I was furious—it was so typical of my mother, so typical I didn’t bother whining about it because I knew perfectly well that that ninety dollars would wipe us out for the rest of the month. There was just no way.

  We retreated in shame under the sneering noses of doormen and parking attendants and waiting hoi polloi. Well! What do you want to do now? Mummy asked. Her jaunty game face was painful to behold. I don’t care, I said. Resplendently tacky in our party dresses, we walked to a coffee shop. It was a grubby, forlorn place, and as I sat there with my mother amid the homeless and other beat-down human refuse of the season, I thought, Our natural habitat. I raised the cracked vinyl menu like a shield. Six ounces of USDA Choice Sirloin, grilled to perfection and served with your choice of—

  Hey.

  Mummy hadn’t touched her menu. She was looking at me with that light in her eyes.

  What?

  Let’s go.

  Where?

  Back. Up there.

  We can’t afford it.

  Oh pooh. We’ll figure that out later. Let’s just go.

  Really?

  Come on!

  We fled the dive, running back to the hotel, trailing laughter and flouncing satin.

  Winded, we entered the ballroom. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, all dim-lit opulence, with candles and tuxedoes and tall windows overlooking the city. We were shown a table, and treated as if we belonged in such society. My mother was clearly at ease, having assumed a poise I had never seen before, navigating the etiquette traps with perfect confidence. We ate dinner, prime rib, then sat for a long time, just breathing it all in, watching people dance. The band was good, and when the piano player struck up a cabaret rendition of “Hey Jude,” my mother stood up and reached out her hand and said, Let’s dance. I had never danced before, but I was caught up in it, trusting that the need to believe was enough.

  And it was.

  This is it.

  I waited until all the others were ashore before I left the bridge. It was the first time I had ever been alone on the submarine, and I listened to the foam-padded silence with something like worry.

  Could it be possible to live again? I was afraid to find out. To abandon the boat was to put hope to the test—and if hope failed, what then? All that was left was to give up. Give up all trace of the girl I once was; shed Lulu Pangloss like a dead skin. Go native. That was what gnawed at me and ate me up inside: How easy it would be to let go. Surrender to the Xombie.

  Don’t give up the ship, I thought. More like, Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

  Whatever happened, I would likely never see this ship again. The orphaned steel behemoth would sit here and rust, hatches open to the elements, wallowing with the tides until hard weather heeled her over, and water filled the hull. Then she would settle to the shallow bottom, every intake plugged with mud and the great gold propellers crusted thick with oysters and lurid orange sea squirts. Eventually, the boat would silt over entirely and join the shore, sprouting grasses and wooded slash so that her fairwater would become a brushy hillock, red with sumac and rusty edges, reeking of rotten iron. And in her belly the fallow reactor would crack and seep radiation into the environment, its brittle control rods breaking under the pressure of invading sediments. But the clay would also contain the poison, forming a solid cast within the chamber and hardening around the decaying metalworks, effectively fossilizing them. A million years hence, only the extruded patterns would remain, pressed in rocky strata miles from the sea.

  Finishing my final walk-through, I stumbled across my mother. It was as though she were waiting for me.

  Entering the reactor room, I almost jumped at the sight of a wild-haired blue Fury hanging from the ceiling. The last time I had met her was in the slime pit of the Reaper barge, and we hadn’t been able to communicate verbally. The time before that, I was still a human girl, and she was the monstrous Xombie chasing me. We hadn’t talked much then either—she was barely capable of speech. But since then, she had recovered most of her wits … if not her looks.

  “Mummy,” I said. “We’re going ashore now.”

  She didn’t react, just staring at me.

  I said, “We’re probably not coming back.”

  She tipped her head sideways and closed her eyes. I started to leave, and she said, “Lulu.”

  “What?”

  “Fred Cowper’s not your father.”

  A strange chill blew through me, the ghost of a human feeling. “What do you mean?”

  “Fred Cowper and I never had any children together. He wasn
’t capable. You never met your real father, the father of my children. His name was Al Despineau. Alaric Despineau.”

  “Alaric?” That was my hated middle name. “What do you mean, ‘children’? How many children do you have?”

  “None, anymore.”

  “What does that mean? I’m here.”

  “You are dead, my darling, and so is the past. There is no changing it now; it’s fixed and dilated. I’m so sorry.”

  Mummy fled into the dark.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PEPPERLAND

  Fred Cowper was incommunicado when I found him, dead to the world and unavailable for comment. Frustrating, but Xombies were notoriously unreliable that way, able to tune out indefinitely just when you needed to talk to them. Stuffing Fred’s head in a ditty bag along with a few other necessities, I left the ship. Albemarle and the crew had rigged lines across the water, and I easily crossed this rope bridge to shore. Everyone was waiting for me there, as if only I could provide the answers they sought. I knew they would stand that way for hours, days, unless I told them what to do next. Time meant nothing to any of them, not even me. Time was totally arbitrary unless you forced it to mean something—unless you divided it into portions and measured it out like medicine. That was the human thing to do.

  I assembled us all on the beach. Even in my own altered state, I thought we looked weird in the daylight, like creatures dredged out of the deep sea. Not liking the word “Xombies,” we had chosen to call ourselves Dreadnauts, but this forbidding moniker had more recently been amended by the four Brits to Dreadnuts. There were three categories of us: Dark Blue, Bright Blue, and Clear.

  The Dark Blues were those who had been violently infected with the original strain of Agent X. Their bodies “died” in the process, starved of oxygen while Maenad microbes hacked their cell nuclei and rewrote their DNA. With their drowned blue flesh and unblinking black eyes, they were the most Xombie-like in appearance, though with regular infusions of my blood serum, their higher faculties had gradually returned. They just had to relearn everything.