Xombies: Apocalypticon Read online

  Approaching Voodooman and Righteous Weeks, he shouted, “I roped Darleen! She ain’t right, but I’m takin’ her and Maybelline!” Before he could reach them, one of the demonic ghouls leaped from the crowd and knocked 50 Cal out of the saddle, taking his wife and daughter with him. The horse reared, kicking someone in the head with a sound of busting crockery.

  “We gotta catch that horse!” Voodooman shouted, and the two men plunged through the dwindling crowd after it. Things were going south fast, the ranks of fleeing people eroding around them like a sand castle. The horse was their only hope—Marcus realized that without it, they were no better than sheep: easy pickings for the ravenous wolves at their heels.

  But just as they caught up to the plunging beast, and Righteous caught the reins, Voodooman knew it was too late.

  The demons were on them.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Marcus saw something ugly rushing toward him, a blue-faced scarecrow with a shock of straw blond hair. It grabbed him hard around the neck and toppled him into the horse’s haunch, causing the animal to buck, kicking wildly. He felt the force of its hooves rocket past his face, hard enough to snap his neck or crush his skull had they struck him. Instead, they hit the thing on his back: two iron-shod pistons straight to its face. Something wet spattered his neck, and at once the weight was off his back.

  He spun to see a whole pack of blue devils swarming in, this final invasion going unnoticed by Righteous, who was too busy steadying the horse to see them coming.

  “Look out!” he shouted, just as the other inmate vaulted into the saddle. Marcus grabbed hold of his waist and put one foot in the stirrup, hanging off the side like a circus rider as Righteous kicked the animal into motion.

  The horse wouldn’t go; it tossed its head in confusion, spinning sideways to see the wave of crazed harpies sweeping in from behind. Its big golden-apple eyes rolled with panic.

  “Hah!” shouted Righteous, kicking its flanks. “Run, bitch!”

  All at once a huge, humped shape barreled out of the darkness and straight into the thick of the ghouls, running them down or tossing them right and left on the honed tips of its horns—an enormous Brahma bull with blood in its eyes.

  “Damnation!” yelled Righteous. “It’s Damnation! Somebody musta left his pen open!”

  The bull veered around the stalled horse, nearly goring Marcus as it stampeded past him toward thicker concentrations of people in the visitor parking lot. He winced as its horns thundered by, close enough to graze his back. That would be the final irony: if after everything that happened, he was killed by a steer.

  But it didn’t touch him, kept right on going. The sight of the bull snapped the horse out of its panic, and it immediately broke into a following gallop. Marcus swung himself up over the horse’s rump, grabbing Righteous Weeks around the waist, and saying, “Don’t get no ideas. This don’t mean we’re engaged.”

  “Just hang on.”

  Weeks reined the horse sideways behind the arena, driving the nervous animal away from the crowd and off the main thoroughfare. A ravening horde of maniacs followed, but Marcus applied his spurs, and the creatures fell behind in the dark. Other refugees were there as well, scattered across the parade grounds and running for the farm out-buildings. When they saw the horse, some turned around to beg for help and were immediately attacked by blue-faced ghouls. There was shooting along the fence line, guards in the towers trying to stop what they thought was a mass escape. No way Righteous was going anywhere near there; get shot trying to escape with his parole hearing coming up next month? Uh-uh. Ignoring the civilians, he called to any convicts they passed, “Stay away from the perimeter fence! Get up inside the main camp!”

  Prison buses and trucks with horse trailers were peeling out of the rear staging area, some covered with crazy attackers, some crashing before they got out of the parking lot. The animals were all over the place. Marcus saw a bucking, panicked mare with a blazed face dragging a snarl of concertina wire with people tangled up in it.

  Making for the inner gate of the camp—the triple-fortified central compound that contained the main cellblock—Righteous and Voodooman found themselves once again falling in with a fleeing mob, but here there were fewer crazies to be seen, perhaps because all the spectators had reflexively run the opposite way and were bottled up down at the exit. This was a much smaller crowd, mostly prisoners and trusties, not a single one of them female, and some even armed.

  The gate guards watched stupefied as men poured through from the farm, unsupervised and completely out of order, babbling incoherently about crazy women and blue devils. The guards didn’t try to stop or interrogate them—leave that for the block captains and the warden, wherever he was. The quick-response team had already been dispatched to the arena with tear gas as well as more lethal munitions. Clad in their imposing black riot gear and shields, resembling a Roman cohort, they’d mop up any trouble quickly, and the prisoners knew it. Emergency procedure during a jailbreak was first and foremost to get everybody under lockdown, and these boys were obviously eager enough to do that for themselves.

  Voodooman and Righteous Weeks were another story: Two convicts riding into a restricted area on the warden’s prizewinning stud was a clear violation of something, and the guards were quick to draw down on them. “Stop right there!” they shouted. “Get down off’n that horse!”

  “You gotta close the gate!” Marcus shouted, jumping to the ground. “They’re right behind us!”

  Ignoring Marcus, the second guard shouted up at Weeks, “What you think you doin’, boy, bringin’ that horse up here? Take that back where it belongs.”

  There was a sudden influx of men streaming through the gate, running wild-eyed from the not-yet-visible threat at their heels, no one wanting to be last in line.

  “Can’t you see they’re almost here?” Marcus screamed, as much to his fellow inmates as to their keepers. “Shut the damn gate before it’s too late!”

  “Too late for what?” the senior guard scoffed. “All I can say is, you both better have the warden’s permission to be riding that horse, I tell you what.”

  “We do! He sent us to tell you to close the gate!”

  “Is that right? Why don’t I ask him that?”

  “He ain’t here!”

  “He damn sure is.”

  A manic, burly figure came rushing out of the darkness. People scattered out of his way, not for the usual reason that he was the warden, but because something was clearly wrong with him. Even from a distance, he looked like a rabid animal.

  “Warden!” the guard said in alarm, leaping to help him. “You okay? I was just—”

  With brutal force, the guard was slammed backward to the ground, the tails of Warden Henrickson’s wool coat covering them both like a cape as Officer Shoney’s breath was sucked from his lungs.

  Utterly stunned, the second guard stood by helplessly, waiting for something to make sense. Marcus knocked him down and wrestled his shotgun away, shouting, “Everybody inside! Just go!” Righteous rode the stallion through the gate, forcing an opening in the packed mob, followed closely by Voodooman, dragging the guard, and a few dozen stragglers.

  Then there was no more time—the men inside heaved the high, sliding gate shut against the cries of frantic late-comers, who were racing up the hill with nightmarish freak jobs all around them. “Please God, let us in!” someone shrieked.

  “You can’t just leave them out there!” one of the prisoners yelled.

  Voodooman leveled the shotgun on him, on everyone, forcing the crowd away from the fence. “Ain’t nobody touches that gate. All right? Nobody touch the gate!”

  “What the hell we supposed to do now?” asked Righteous.

  “Go inside and wait until the SWAT team arrives.”

  “More like the National Guard.”

  “Or the mo’fuckin’ Yoo-nited States Marines. Damn!”

  The peals of terror from outside seemed to rouse the guard from his stupor. Shaking free of
Voodooman’s grip, he grabbed his rifle back, and shouted, “Everyone to your cells! Go back to your cells and wait there!” He shuddered, then suddenly vomited on his shoes. Trembling, flinching at the sounds outside, he wiped his mouth, and said, “Everything’s under control! Everything’s under control! Return to your cells at once.”

  No one made any argument.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DEAD SEA

  The American shore, ominously dark as any cannibal coast, was visible in the moonlight as pale cliffs above a thin white hem of breakers. Commander Harvey Coombs knew there were supposed to be houses up there—the famous Newport mansions—but he couldn’t see a thing, not a single light. Nor had he seen any other towns or cities: Falmouth, Fall River, New Bedford—all the teeming port settlements of southern New England were dark. To look upon that black coastline now was like peering down a tunnel through the ages. Seeing it the way it hadn’t been seen in centuries.

  Pilgrims, thought Coombs, lowering his binoculars. We’re pilgrims.

  That was it exactly. This was now the wilderness, the New World.

  Coombs rubbed his puffy eyelids as if to remind himself that he was awake, was not dreaming. The freshly stitched incision on his forehead was real enough; the hole in his skull still hurt. Now that he had no clear mission objective anymore, the events of the past few months were growing in his mind like a tumor, a festering glut of unthinkable knowledge that kept gaining mass and crowding out the consolations of faith, hope, or rational thought.

  How could it have happened? Agent X, the Xombie horror, Thule and the grim paradise of the Moguls, and now . . . what? There could be no homecoming, no end of the journey. Somehow he had found himself commanding not an Ohio-class submarine, not a U.S. naval vessel at all, but a nuclear-powered ghost ship, a modern Flying Dutchman , haunted, lost, and forever doomed to sail a dead sea.

  In some part of him, Coombs had expected to come back and find America alight and sane like a beacon on the horizon, though continuous monitoring of every broadcast frequency revealed only dead air, the vacant hiss of static. Even the ambient sounds of the Atlantic Ocean were returned to a primeval state, devoid of human echoes. That pervasive churn of marine technology so familiar to submariners was gone. There was nothing to hear out there anymore but the random clicks and rasps of fish. That and the stealthy rhythms of his own boat. But still he had nurtured this irrational spark that some remnant of America would be waiting for him, like a candle in the window.

  But no. It was over. It was truly all over. And in that case, what in God’s name were they doing? Every one of them was already dead, they just wouldn’t lie down.

  Like Xombies.

  But what else was there?

  His headset crackled: “Commander Coombs. Dr. Langhorne requests permission to speak with you.”

  “Tell her I’m coming down.” He spoke the words with the dry mouth of a man descending into a catacomb, a chamber of horrors. That’s what the boat was to him now: a 560-foot-long steel tomb. Harvey Coombs was not a man who had ever put much stock in the supernatural. He was not superstitious or particularly religious beyond what was expected of any career-oriented, socially well-adjusted military officer. In his rational being he had no frame of reference for all that had happened in the four months since he had been assigned command of this nameless ship—his first and last command. He could not comprehend Purgatory, or Hell, or The End of the World. But there was a word for the mood that pervaded this boat and its crew: “dread.” Death was afoot belowdecks, quite literally, and the living suffered its unspeakable presence in duty and purest dread.

  Dread not, he mused. Dread not, dread naught, dreadnought. Dreadnaut—he had to smile at that one: Jason and the Argonauts, meet Lulu and the Dreadnauts. Not exactly the stuff of Greek legend; it sounded more like a cheesy cover band. And they already had one of those aboard.

  Climbing down through the dank chambers in the monolithic black sail, Coombs thought as he often did lately about the choices, the sheer chance, that had led him into the Navy, and by extension to this strange, infernal place. It might so easily have never happened at all. He might be out there even now, lost beyond that dark shore, amid the blue multitude. The same as everyone else.

  He could feel the anxious eyes of the crew on him now as he passed through the control center, searching him for confirmation of what they all felt and what they wanted him to feel. So that they could be reassured he was doing something about it, being the cool, competent leader they needed him to be. But he couldn’t—Harvey couldn’t give them that assurance. He had no such hope to offer.

  “Keep to our present heading,” he said. “Rich, take the conn for a minute.”

  “Yes, sir,” said his executive officer darkly. “Robles, you and Phil go down with him.”

  Lt. Dan Robles stood up from his console.

  “Stand down, Dan. I don’t need an escort this time.”

  “It’s just a precaution.”

  “I know, but it’s been a week, and I think we might let up a little bit—the good doctor seems to be handling things down there. She’s the expert.”

  “Respectfully disagree, Captain,” said Kranuski. “We can’t afford to relax our guard, not with them aboard. Whatever Dr. Quinn down there may think, it’s too dangerous.”

  Richard Kranuski had many disagreements with Coombs about how the ship should be run, and increasingly strong support among the weary, makeshift crew, but Coombs did not think the XO would mutiny—bad as things were, it hadn’t yet come to that. Terror was a great bonding agent. “If Langhorne feels safe enough to bunk down there all alone,” he said, “I should be able to manage a quick look-see.” He patted his sidearm. “I still got the old peashooter.”

  “Like that’ll do you any good if—”

  “Nothing will do us any good, Rich, if it comes to that. At some point, we just have to trust to fate.”

  “It wasn’t fate brought those things aboard,” remarked Alton Webb from the plotting table.

  “Stow it, Lieutenant,” Kranuski said sharply, reining in his man. To Coombs he said, “Well . . . it’s your call, Captain.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.” Coombs ducked away through the hatch.

  Descending the companionway, he deliberately quickened his pace, not giving himself time to think. Alice Langhorne’s work area was in the old mission control room, the deck that had once housed the submarine’s nuclear launch systems. It was stripped now, an empty shell on the third deck of the command-and-control module—the boat’s forward section. The hatch was sealed off and plastered with red caution tape. Someone, probably a teenager, had scrawled, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, beneath a large skull and crossbones. Using his command access key, Coombs opened the door.

  Half the lights were out in there; it was dim and clammy as a dank basement. In the center of the room was a small glass coffin bathed in lamplight, with a dead girl inside. She was blue, blue of flesh as well as of dress, with glossy black hair fanned out around her head. The scene was funereal, eerily dreamlike.

  Coombs stepped over the raised threshold. The girl was Louise Pangloss—Lulu—Fred Cowper’s daughter. Commander Fred Cowper, retired, who had hijacked the sub as a refugee ship, filling it with a bunch of discontented shipyard workers and their teenage sons. Fred Cowper, whom Coombs had arrested for treason and later seen hauled ashore at Thule Air Base to be interrogated about the missing “Tonic”—the stolen antidote to Agent X. Harvey didn’t know what had happened to Cowper after that, not until their escape from Thule, when Lulu’s lifeless body had been found wedged atop the sail after two days submerged . . . holding Cowper’s severed head in her lap.

  She looked peaceful now, waxy and unreal. Her casket was a converted trophy case from the wardroom. It had been moved here after the men began to complain about “the dead girl stinking up the mess.” Now it looked as though the doctor was using it as a desk: There was a chair beside it, and a box of documents on the floor. Atop t
he other materials, he could make out a spiral notebook labeled, Xombies—A True Account, by Louise Alaric Pangloss, and several computer disks labeled, Maenad Project—Mogul Archives, Vol. I-VII. Flipping through the notebook, scanning its dense blocks of minute handwriting, Coombs felt a twinge of pity. Lulu had been a smart girl, “a smaht cookie,” as Cowper once said.

  There was a rustling sound behind him. “Doctor?” Coombs called, trying to sound officious. “Dr. Langhorne?”

  The walls began to move.

  Don’t panic . . . oh hell . . .

  There they were—blue and cold as part of the machinery, as if they had sprouted from the guts of the boat itself. Forty of them, wedged wherever they could fit amid ducts and pipes and empty electronics bays, like toads under a rotting log.

  Sensing him, they had begun to stir, swaying into motion like . . . like . . .

  Like zombies, he thought. When they looked at him with those bright spider eyes, Coombs had to suppress a whole-body shudder. He had seen things like these take his men, witnessed close-up that nightmarish Xombie kiss: a man struggling helplessly, pinned face to face with one of these blue monstrosities like a rat in the coils of a snake, as the demon’s gaping mouth covered his and instantly sucked all the breath from his body. The inconceivable horror in the man’s dying eyes. Most of all, Coombs wished he could forget the sound—that hideous crunch of collapsing lungs, of crumpled ribs and vertebrae. A human being drained like a kid’s juice box.

  And then, seconds later, springing back to life as one of them.

  The Xombies shuffled toward him, crawling, slithering, their unblinking black eyes staring as if fascinated. Closing in. Some of them were men and boys he knew—big Ed Albemarle was there, and Vic Noteiro’s grandson, Julian—the naked and the dead. Coombs unsnapped the holster of his gun, flicking off the safety. He began to think that this hadn’t been such a hot idea, that maybe this was it, the last mistake he would ever make.