Xombies: Apocalypticon Read online

  Serves me right. Oh shit . . .

  “Commander,” said Alice Langhorne, appearing at his shoulder and nearly causing him to discharge his weapon. She waved the Xombies back, saying, “Shoo, you guys.” As they moved away, she said, “Sorry. They’re just being friendly.”

  “Doctor,” said Coombs, his mouth paper-dry. Clearing his throat, he asked, “How’s our little Snow White?”

  “She’s still inert. Still dormant.”

  “How can you tell she’s even alive?”

  “Well, she’s not, strictly speaking. But as you can see, there’s no evidence of physical deterioration, no decomposition. Even in that hyperbaric chamber, the cells of her body are continuing their metastasis. And it’s a good thing they are: Without her ability to synthesize the Miska enzyme in her blood, we wouldn’t have the means to pacify the others. They’d revert overnight.”

  “Won’t she run dry?”

  “She can regenerate indefinitely; all she needs is a little replacement hemoglobin to make up lost volume.”

  “Hemoglobin? Phil Tran told me you had her on glucose.”

  “We’re out of glucose. Besides, saline and glucose are no substitute for whole blood—we can’t take any chances with her. She’s our golden goose.”

  “Where are you getting the hemoglobin?”

  “I’m donating my own, for now.”

  Coombs had noticed that the doctor’s face seemed a little wan but dismissed it as nothing unusual. Everybody gets pale on a submarine, it’s an occupational hazard. But now . . . “You can’t be doing that,” he said firmly.

  “It’s a minimal amount, a couple of CCs a day. There isn’t any alternative, unless you want to solicit contributions from the crew. I think we both know how that’ll go over.”

  Coombs could think of nothing to say to that. “What did you want to speak to me about?” he asked.

  Langhorne loomed above him, taller and more buff than he was, harshly competent and a good ten years older. Her hair was a platinum flattop, a razored shock of glass needles that jutted from her scalp like a crown. Like everyone else on board, she had a bandage on her forehead where the Mogul tracking implant had been removed—she was the one who had removed them. Without benefit of anesthetic.

  For a woman in her fifties, Langhorne radiated a certain intensity. Among the men, she had already developed quite a reputation as a ballbuster, but Coombs was grateful for her confidence, her powerful sense of purpose, which was something he desperately needed right now. They all did.

  “What do you think?” she said to him impatiently. “The plan, Sherlock. We’re almost there, aren’t we? We need to go over the plan.”

  “We can’t have a plan until we know where to land. Right now we don’t even know if the bay is navigable. We won’t know that until we can see out there, and that won’t be until sunrise.”

  “It’s not that complicated. Just get this boat as close to the city as you can, blow up a rubber raft, and these guys will do the rest.”

  Captain Coombs looked at the slack-jawed Xombies, aimlessly milling around and staring off into space. Now that they were actually approaching their destination, it troubled him to think Langhorne might be wrong, that he had let himself get caught up in her delusion. Plan my ass. Maybe they should just scuttle the sub right now and be done with it—the end result would be the same. “You really think these things are going to be able to get ashore and execute a complex mission?”

  “They can hear you, by the way; they’re dead, not deaf. And they’re not stupid, they’re just a little . . . slow. Think of them as severely depressed.” She smiled grimly. “But then, aren’t we all?”

  “Okay, great, but have you actually talked to them? I mean about doing this? Are they even capable of understanding?”

  “Yes. They don’t say much, but they’re willing, or at least they’re fairly suggestible. Can’t you tell? They’re more coherent than they look. The problem they have is that they’re being bombarded with new sensations—every cell of their bodies is lit up like a Christmas tree from the Maenad infection, and it’s overwhelmingly euphoric. They’re stoned. The modified X enzyme in Lulu’s blood acts as a depressant, bringing them down enough to function, but they do need supervision. That’s why we’ll have a video data link to guide them along the way. The only problem is the time factor: They have no sense of time, and if they’re not back within eighteen or twenty hours, the inoculation will wear off, and we’ll lose control of them—that is, they’ll lose control of themselves. Either way, we’ll never see them again.”

  “Most people on this boat would look upon that as a good thing.”

  “Yes, because they’re morons. These guys are our only connection to dry land—maybe you’d like to try stepping ashore yourself and see what happens.”

  “No thanks. What makes you think they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for, this supposed vaccine? Miska’s so-called Tonic? I thought he destroyed everything—and what he didn’t destroy, the Moguls already picked over.”

  “The Moguls didn’t know Uri Miska like I did. They financed his longevity research, but they didn’t work with him every day for ten years. They didn’t know everything we were doing, or everywhere we were doing it.” She said this with bitter satisfaction, having married and divorced a Mogul, the now-deceased James Sandoval, whose naval contracting firm had refurbished the submarine for exclusive Mogul use.

  As if thinking aloud, Alice Langhorne muttered, “Professor Miska had secrets—secrets he obviously kept from everyone, including me. I admit it. The son of a bitch had his own agenda, no question about that.” She looked at the angel-faced corpse in its glass casket, and Coombs thought he detected a gleam of welling tears. “Agent X was just the tip of the iceberg, I can tell you that,” she said. “We still know a few things, don’t we, baby? Oh yes. We’ve still got a few tricks up our sleeve . . .”

  Commander Harvey Coombs, captain of what was likely the world’s last active nuclear submarine, and probably the highest-ranking American naval officer left on the planet (even discounting his emergency field promotion to admiral, which he did), now looked at the troubled face of Dr. Alice Langhorne, perhaps the last surviving PhD, the last scientist, maybe even the last woman, and thought, She is nuts.

  And then: Hey, pal, join the club.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WATERFIRE

  Incomprehensibly vast as the horror was, it began with that most mundane of human annoyances: the persistent ringing of telephones. Seemingly at the exact stroke of midnight, Eastern Time, 911 phone banks began lighting up all over the country—indeed, all over the world. The extraordinary volume of calls would certainly have swamped the ability of emergency call centers to respond, had their operators been capable of responding, but they were not. Such call centers, staffed predominantly by women, were early casualties of the Maenad craze.So the phones rang and rang, unanswered.

  Therefore, if the events of New Year’s Eve do in fact represent the Apocalypse of biblical prophesy, as some have suggested, then it may truthfully be said that the Angel Gabriel did not herald the end of the world by blowing a trumpet. He notified us by phone.

  —The Maenad Project

  Sal DeLuca lay on a steel bed, dreaming of a steel beach.

  He dreamed of sitting in fluorescent green twilight on dunes of granulated steel, surrounded by an immense steel cylinder that rose fifty feet above him, its top open to a corrugated metal sky. Sal wasn’t alone. There were other boys there: his buddy Ray Despineau, Hector, Rick, Tyrell, Sasha, Shane, Jake, Julian, and more. He knew them the way one gets to know people one has been cooped up with in difficult circumstances for almost a month. He knew them too well.

  Working at Finishing was not like working at a lot of the other departments in the plant. It was dirty. You had to wear Tyvek coveralls, goggles, and a respirator. The coveralls started out white and turned black. You had to climb the rickety scaffolding again and again, lugging all your equipment,
moving up and down inside that hull segment like a cockroach in a garbage can. You took your breaks sitting on cold piles of lead-colored, lead-heavy blasting grit. Worst of all, it was a complete waste of time: This huge vertical cylinder on which the boys tested every pneumatic tool known to man—drilling, gouging, grinding, blasting—was intended to house the command-and-control module—the CCSM deck—of a Hawaii-class nuclear submarine. But it never would; that sub would never be finished. No matter how much work they put into it, the thing would just sit here in its blasting cell, slowly rusting away, monument to the imperatives of a powerful, lost civilization.

  “This blows,” said Kyle, a strikingly handsome sixteen-year-old with intricately cornrowed hair. His mother had braided it, and he refused to touch it—as though, if he waited long enough, she might return. “What good is this? We ain’t never gonna need to know how these things are made. We’re never gonna build one; nobody ain’t never gonna build one ever again. This is just busywork to keep us . . . busy.”

  From high up on the scaffold, a voice boomed down, “Busywork?” It was Mr. Albemarle. Big fat Ed Albemarle, supervisor of the Finishing Department. “Did I hear someone say they want to trade places with somebody on the outside?” he bellowed. “Because I guarantee you there are plenty of folks out there who would jump at the chance.”

  “No, sir. I just don’t understand what good it’ll do us to know the difference between pastel green and mare island green, or how to mix epoxy for sound damping or relagging or nonsweat—”

  “That’s antisweat.” Mr. Albemarle was making his way down to them. “It keeps condensation from forming inside the hull. Keeps this from happening.” He indicated the rust on the cylinder. “And if you intend this thing to last at sea for twenty years, that’s pretty important.”

  “But this one’s never going to sea.”

  “No, this one isn’t. Get up, all of you.”

  They stood, brushing grit off their papery suits. Ed Albemarle reached the sandy floor and planted himself in front of them, eyes shaded by his gray hard hat. “I guess there’s something that hasn’t been made clear to you, so let me try to hammer it in: Everything matters. The knowledge that’s in your heads might be the only knowledge there is, and all our lives might depend on it. Welding, grinding, fore and aft, above main axis, below main axis, centerline, frame lines, buttock lines”—at buttock, the boys smirked for the hundredth time—“everything. So that you don’t cause a fire and suffocate with your thumb up your butt because you were splicing a cable and cut a boot off one of the penetrations and didn’t know how to seal it up again!”

  Derrick said, “Come on—you guys and the Navy crew will do all that. Like they’d even let us touch it, give me a break.”

  “Everybody thinks that when they’re sitting on the bench—you guys are reserve players. Any one of you could be the difference between life and death for all of us. Believe me, if and when that boat sails, you are going to carry your weight. For all you know, you boys may be the damn crew.”

  They all laughed. Tyrell said, “Cabin boy is more like it.”

  Albemarle frowned. “It’s time to grow up, ladies. This is not Bring Your Children to Work Day. You are not here to play. Your fathers, your uncles, your grandfathers, maybe your older brothers are all working round the clock to earn you a safe cruise out of here. There’s no other way out, trust me. Maybe you don’t know what that means, maybe you think you don’t care, but whether you like it or not, you are going to earn that ticket. Now come on.”

  Albemarle walked between the massive timbers supporting the hull section and opened the exit door, waiting at the eyewash fountain as the boys filed out.

  “Are we finished for today?” groaned Freddy Fisk, a short, stocky boy with stamina issues. Freddie was the son of Arlo Fisk, one of the nuclear experts.

  “We’re never finished at Finishing.”

  “But Mr. Albemarle, we clear our cots at five thirty and go to class till noon, then we get a half hour for lunch and work for you guys till six. All we get is a half hour for dinner, then we have to study until lights out. We’re missing dinner!”

  Ed Albemarle rubbed his temple as if in pain. “Didn’t you hear anything I just—? Fine, if you want to go, go!”

  A little cheer went up, and the boys started to leave.

  Ed raised his voice above the bustling escape: “I just thought you might want to head down to the pier with me and take a quick look at tomorrow’s assignment. Your last assignment, really. All the classes are assembling down there right now, but if you’d rather go to the cafeteria . . .”

  The boys stopped dead.

  Sal DeLuca asked, “Are you serious, Mr. A?”

  Ed nodded. “We don’t have forever. The noose is tightening. It’s time you boys got some familiarity with your new home before she puts to sea. So you want to check it out?”

  Twenty-six eager heads bobbed like wake-churned buoys.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Sal woke up. At first he thought he was still dreaming: He was high up in a cavernous space, a steel chamber echoing with the avid chatter of boys. We’re home, he heard them saying. We’re back!

  Home! Sal thought woozily. Then he came to himself and realized where he was: the Big Room—the huge midsection of the submarine, which had formerly housed twenty-four Trident missile tubes and now served as a makeshift dormitory for close to a hundred refugees, most of them teenage boys like himself. Oh, he thought, Providence.

  Like everyone else in the Big Room, Sal DeLuca had made a nest for himself, a pallet of cardboard and foam rubber to cushion the steel-grated deck. Turning stiffly on his side, he peered down off his balcony to the more populated lower levels, half-expecting to see all the faces from his dream down there. He longed to hear the comforting boom of Mr. Albemarle’s voice, or Tyrell’s wisecracks.

  But Ed Albemarle was dead. No, worse than dead. He was a mindless Xombie and Dr. Langhorne’s test subject, as so many of the Xombies were. Either that, or they were simply gone, like Tyrell. The lucky ones were gone.

  Sal’s father was gone.

  You can’t go home again, he thought.

  “Sir, you should come up and take a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fire. We’re seeing fires up here. From downtown.”

  The boat had spent the whole day traversing Narragansett Bay, painstakingly threading the narrow shipping channel to the exact spot where it had started out months before, then penetrating even deeper inland. Past the bridges and the islands. Past the barren submarine compound that jutted out into the bay like a hunk of Texas panhandle. Right up to the gates of Providence itself.

  The coast looked clear. There were no signs of shipping, no boatloads of refugees, no obstructions of any kind. The industrial shorefront was deserted and peaceful, the buildings quiet as tombstones. On the low hills beyond, the first leaves of spring could be seen. The boat anchored in sight of downtown, near where the tugs docked, just outside the highway bridge and the great steel hurricane barrier.

  It was no place for an Ohio-class submarine. At almost seventeen thousand tons, she was too big, too broad, and too deep for this harbor. A total breach of regulations, Kranuski reminded the captain. The slightest glitch and they could run aground, get stuck in the mud. Die like a mastodon in a tar pit. Without regular dredging, the channel was already changing, shifting, filling in. A vessel their size plowing through could collapse it completely in their wake—they might be digging their own grave. Kranuski’s exact words.

  Commander Coombs didn’t like being bottled up either, in shallow water where the boat couldn’t submerge, surrounded on all sides by hostile land. It made him very claustrophobic. Sitting ducks, he thought. But there was no choice. They couldn’t risk a bad connection; the ship-to-shore data link had to work. And the target had to be within walking distance. Xombies didn’t drive, though Langhorne would probably have them doing that next.

  He climbed the ladder
to the bridge cockpit and accepted a pair of binoculars from Dan Robles.

  “Can you still see it?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s still there all right.” Lieutenant Robles sighed, nursing untold grievances, the lids of his eyes heavy with the weight of injustice. “Dead ahead.”

  Coombs wasn’t bothered by his quartermaster’s attitude, it was nothing personal. He knew that Dan Robles was not affronted by him but by the world at large. Dan had once been a funny guy with a droll Latin sensibility, who could make you laugh with the slightest flex of his pencil-thin mustache, but the Xombie apocalypse had deeply offended him, and now he simply had no more patience for such nonsense. Not that Robles would ever complain or fail to follow the strictest definition of duty—that was a matter of honor. Coombs couldn’t imagine what kind of crisis it would take to crack the man’s haughty composure (he was the only officer willing to act as liaison to Dr. Langhorne, undeterred by her ghouls), but thus far nothing had, and that was saying something. That was saying a lot. Dan was one of the loyal ones, the steady few, and the captain trusted him completely.

  The sun had set. The water was glassy-still, reflecting the acrylic pinks and blues of dusk, and the dark city skyline. The three huge smokestacks of Narragansett Electric loomed to port. At once Coombs could see what Robles was talking about—even without the binoculars.

  Through the raised gates of the city’s hurricane barrier and under the highway overpasses, less than a mile upriver, there were fires burning. Deliberate bonfires, a neat line of them. Coombs felt a wave of childish nausea at the sight, adrenaline curdling his blood: Who’s there? The fires appeared to rise right out of the canal, reflecting orange in its black surface. What could it mean? A chain of floating crucibles in the heart of Providence? He could smell acrid smoke.