Xombies: Apocalypticon Read online

  “The natives are restless,” Robles said.

  “Jesus. You think Xombies could do that?”

  “I doubt it. Set fires like that? Langhorne’s tame ones, maybe. Not the ones out in the wild. Why would they?”

  “Then who? Who else could survive out there?”

  “Somebody who’s eager for attention, obviously.”

  “From us, you think?”

  “Or about us. Broadcasting our position. I’m thinking of the Moguls.”

  “They can’t dig up a radio?”

  Robles squinted thoughtfully. “Then maybe an invitation: Coast is clear, no Xombies. Welcome ashore.”

  “Funny. How about an SOS?”

  “Possibly an SOS, yes.”

  “Or a trap.”

  “Could be a trap, yes.”

  Coombs sighed in frustration. This was getting them nowhere. The question was whether to stay or leave, and if they left, where to? He knew what Kranuski would say: Norfolk. But Norfolk was dead, everywhere was dead . . . except here. Coombs watched the distant flames for a moment, blood thumping like voodoo drums in his head.

  “One way to find out,” he said.

  Coombs was surprised at his own recklessness—as an inspector for the Naval Sea Systems Command, or NavSea, his job had been to eliminate risk, to take new submarines on shakedown cruises and rid them of bugs. He administered the SubSafe program, and was ruthless in implementing its strict requirements through all aspects of submarine construction and testing. Not everyone appreciated the job that he and his team did; he often sensed resentment from civilian techs who didn’t like their work scrutinized and critiqued, and especially didn’t like having to do it over if it didn’t pass muster the first time. Or the second. Or the third . . .

  Now many of those same civilians were part of his crew, and here he was, endangering the boat in a hundred different ways, putting all their lives at risk for some ridiculous plan that could only come to grief. Why? That was the sticking point, the quandary of quandaries for which there was no good answer anymore. Why indeed? Why do anything? Coombs knew Robles would have the simple answer to that one; he was always game.

  Robles would say, Why not?

  “That’s WaterFire!” Alice Langhorne said, sounding bemused but also amused.

  “It’s what?”

  “WaterFire. It’s a festival they hold in Providence. That’s why those braziers are in the river. It’s kind of a big street carnival—I’ve been to it. On summer nights they play music, and people stroll along the riverbanks to watch the fire.”

  “I think I’ve heard of that,” said Robles.

  “Watch the fire, huh? That’s it?” Coombs said.

  “That’s it. It’s a big tourist draw.”

  “Why is it happening now?” Kranuski demanded.

  Langhorne lowered the binoculars, shaking her head. “You got me. Maybe we look like tourists.”

  Coombs asked her, “Do you still want to go through with your operation?”

  “Hmm.” She raised the binoculars to her eyes again. “Well . . . I don’t think we have any choice, do we? We’re here. What else are we gonna do?”

  “We sure as hell do have a choice,” erupted Kranuski. “Captain, those fires could be a beacon opening us up to aerial attack. We know the Moguls have planes, and there may be others. I advise we leave while we still can.”

  “Rich, if someone wants to call in an air strike on us, we’re already dead ducks. The tide’s against us; it would take us all night to get back out to deep water. In the meantime, we’ll be wallowing in the bay like a beached whale. Besides, nobody’s going to try and sink us, especially not the Moguls. If anything, they’d try to capture the boat—it’s too valuable a prize to destroy.”

  “I agree,” Kranuski said sharply. “So maybe while we’re going on this wild-goose chase, they’re setting up a blockade, fencing us in. It wouldn’t be hard. Are you willing to let that happen?”

  Coombs heard the unspoken accusation: Like you did before? “We’re not going to gain anything by hiding at the bottom of the ocean, Rich. Our supplies are low, time is running out. At some point, we have to roll the dice, and I say that time is now.” Coombs awkwardly turned to Dr. Langhorne, all three of them squeezed together in the bridge cockpit. “Alice, are your . . . uh, people ready to disembark?”

  “Anytime.”

  “Then for God’s sake, let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE

  AP—Thursday, December 16—According to government scientists, contamination by the mysterious substance known as “Agent X” or “Blue Rust” is much more widespread than previously supposed.

  “We are finding it throughout the environment, including inside the human body, where it forms a weak bond with anaerobic hemoglobin,” said Cary Welks, Director of the National Science Foundation. “But I want to stress that so far we have not seen any adverse effects in humans.”

  Agent X was first discovered in October by researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who noted an unexplained in crease in malfunctions involving highly sensitive, vacuum-sealed electronic equipment. Since then, similar effects have been reported around the globe.

  —The Maenad Project

  Lt. Cmdr. Dan Robles was never a “team player” in the sense of being blindly loyal to senior authority—he never had much use for that particular military mentality. A child of illegal immigrants who went through hell to get their citizenship, he always had the deepest regard for the American Dream, if not necessarily the American reality. “My country right or wrong” did not sit well with him; you couldn’t trust an institution with your soul. Though eager to serve, Dan never believed it was in his country’s best interest that he be a robot who just followed orders. He did what he did because he thought it was right, or because it didn’t matter one way or the other. Plenty of things in life didn’t matter much, and he was content to toe the line. Why not? You couldn’t very well have everybody making up their own rules. Thus, most of his nineteen-year naval career had been relatively uneventful, though his flippancy toward officialdom and mindless patriotic bromides had probably cost him at least a grade in rank—some senior officers didn’t appreciate the philosophy that true patriotism included a deep sense of skepticism and a healthy dose of the absurd. That was why he quickly washed out of the Marines.

  No, Dan Robles always hoped that if the official version didn’t cut it, he would go his own way, no matter the consequences. But this ideal of his had never been truly tested until Agent X.

  He would never forget the night that civilian mob arrived at the submarine pen, threatening to sink the boat unless they were let aboard—and the crew’s anger and confusion at being ordered to risk their necks helping the hijackers. Officers like Rich Kranuski and Alton Webb would never forgive Harvey Coombs for caving in to pressure, but as far as Robles was concerned, the commander did the only sensible thing. Fred Cowper was not bluffing; he would have sunk the boat. Furthermore, those people had an absolute right to be there—they had been promised a ride to safety, and it was only because of their marathon refit that the vessel was sea-worthy in the first place. They had been swindled.

  If guys like Webb and Kranuski thought he was a traitor for going along with it, Robles took that as a sign that he must be doing something right.

  These were things he had learned about himself since the end of the world.

  “Wait a second,” Robles said, tethered to the rail and standing above them on the sail’s crest. “Captain, there’s something else out there. Drifting toward us.”

  They all trained their binoculars up the river.

  “What now?” It was too dark to see properly, but Coombs could make out a long, black object moving downstream with the outgoing tide. A boat of some kind. It lazily floated toward them under the hurricane barrier. What the hell . . . ? As it emerged into the moonlight, it began to resemble a strange canoe, with a shiny silver blade rising like a figur
ehead from its prow. “What is that?” he asked. “Hiawatha?”

  “It’s a gondola,” Langhorne said. “Wow.”

  “A gondola? Like in Venice?”

  “Yeah. It’s because of—”

  “It is a gondola,” said Coombs queasily. “What the hell is a gondola doing here? Don’t tell me: It’s because of Firewater.”

  “WaterFire.”

  “Dan, can you see anybody in it?”

  “No. It’s too dark.”

  “We better throw some light on that, then.”

  “Or blow it out of the water.”

  “Either way, it’ll make us conspicuous.”

  Kranuski snapped, “Are you kidding? Nothing’s gonna make us more conspicuous than we already are. We can’t let it near the hull—it could have a bomb in it . . . or worse.”

  Coombs thought about it, then said, “Rig the spotlight, quick. And pass up that carbine.”

  As Kranuski and Robles handled this, Coombs asked Langhorne, “In your opinion, could Xombies be tending those fires?”

  “I don’t know. Not ordinary ones, I would say.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But there’s always the possibility . . .”

  “What?”

  “That Miska’s out there.”

  Robles turned on the spotlight and swept its beam across the water. The eerie, drifting gondola suddenly stood out starkly from the surrounding darkness, as if pinned under a microscope. With its lacquered black hull and red velvet seats, it looked to Coombs like some kind of funeral barge, a weird, medieval specter lost in time and place. Discordant as those torches.

  “There’s somebody in there,” Robles said urgently.

  “Shit.” They all raised their weapons and took aim, ready to pour fire down.

  “Wait!” Robles said. “It looks like a little kid. He’s not moving.”

  “Who gives a crap?” said Kranuski, wielding the rifle. “Let’s sink the bastard before he does move.”

  “Hold up,” Coombs said. “Can you tell if he’s blue?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “You don’t think you can tell, or you don’t think he’s blue?”

  “He’s not blue. He’s definitely not blue. I can see him breathing.”

  “Try hailing him,” Langhorne said.

  To Kranuski’s disgust, Coombs switched on the microphone, and said, “HEY, KID. CAN YOU HEAR ME?” His amplified voice echoed across the water. “LET US KNOW YOU’RE ALIVE, SO WE CAN HELP YOU.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then a small, shivering hand rose into the light, and everyone on the bridge heard a deeply reassuring sound, a noise more welcome in its pure humanity than any words could be. A sound no Xombie would utter:

  It was the high, thin whimper of a child.

  Exercising extreme caution and a long hook, they wrangled the gondola alongside and took the boy aboard. Alice Langhorne gave him a sedative to calm him down. He was in shock, practically catatonic, and instantly fell into a deep sleep. All she had gotten out of him was that his name was Bobby. He looked about ten years old, filthy, and half-starved. You think this is our firebug? Coombs had asked her. Alice could only shrug—the poor kid didn’t look capable of striking a match. It would be interesting to find out how he could have survived all these months, but in the meantime she thought it best to let him sleep.

  After cleaning Bobby off, then treating all his minor cuts and contusions, Langhorne hooked the unconscious kid up to an IV drip and relegated his care to the other minors on board, the older boys in the Big Room. One of Phil Tran’s medical trainees got the duty, a scraggly kid named Sal DeLuca—teenage son of the late Gus DeLuca. Tran assured her he was smart. Anyway, they had more than enough space back there, a regular Boys Town. And Alice had other things to think about.

  “All hands prepare for exiting shore party, logistics hatch two.”

  Coombs’s terse command rang through the ship, and everyone knew exactly what to do—Kranuski had drilled them on it, and Alton Webb made damn sure there were no mistakes. All doorways in the control section were sealed off and tightly dogged, leaving only a single passage leading from the quarantined third level to the open topside hatch. In that way, the crew would be insulated from any threat, and the unleashed Xombies had nowhere to go but up . . . and out.

  Alice Langhorne was posted forward in the communications suite, the “radio shack,” a tiny compartment in the far bow. Though she regretted not being able personally to escort her fellows topside, she knew it was more important that they begin to function alone—she wouldn’t be there to hold their hands when they went ashore. She was seated at a computer console, wearing a radio headset and intently watching live video from the third deck. It was a split-screen image broadcast from two tiny digital cameras bolted to the late Ed Albemarle’s blue skull—what Langhorne dubbed her “Xombiecams”—one facing forward and the other back.

  When all was in readiness, Coombs called down to her from the bridge. “This is it, Alice. Proceed to move them out.”

  “Gotcha.” Switching on her audio feed, she said, “Guys? Guys, listen to me. It’s time to go up. Ed, open the aft door and move them out.” She had tested this and was confident it would work, but it was still a relief to see the picture on the screen lurch into motion. “They’re moving.”

  The gondola had been salvaged—there was no point in risking a raft if they didn’t have to—and was secured to a cleat at the far stern, where the deck sloped underwater toward the boat’s great rudder fin. Now Commander Coombs watched from his perch atop the sail as Xombies began to emerge from the logistics hatch and move aft down that long, long stretch of deck.

  Though he was thirty feet above them, the sight of those things still made him uneasy. Surely it was utter madness to imagine they could be set loose like this and come back of their own volition. That they could be made to go on some kind of complicated scavenger hunt and even obediently return to the ship laden with groceries. Langhorne made it all sound so feasible . . . but she was crazy. And if she was crazy, that meant he was crazy, too, for listening to her—a zombie himself.

  Coombs could never get over how they moved. There was something bizarre about it, a jerky precision like a windup toy. Buglike, that’s what it was, like ants or flies, flickering so you couldn’t quite take them in except in blinks. Yet at the same time they could be boneless as an octopus, fluid as wisps of smoke

  It was fully dark now; Coombs couldn’t see as well as he would have liked, but things seemed to be going as planned—far better than he’d expected, actually. So far so good. There were forty of them, all strung together on a cable, and he tried to keep count as they emerged: . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen . . .

  There was Albemarle, unmistakable from his size, an alarming, naked behemoth still clutching his big hammer from the factory. With his hammer and his video headgear, he looked almost human. Coombs watched as he loped to the gondola and swept aboard with barely a ripple. Several other Xombies also boarded the boat. They were the ones strapped with spare batteries, lights, and other devices that had to stay dry. As the gondola cast off, those left behind began slipping into the water, ducking under its forbidding black surface as easily as crocodiles from a riverbank.

  Then, as if by magic, the gondola began to move. It glided away without any visible means of propulsion, and Coombs knew the creatures down there were pulling it, towing it as they walked along the murky bottom like some perverse Nantucket sleigh ride. He shook his head in sickly wonder.

  He was interrupted in his reverie by a yelling from his headset. It was Alice Langhorne.

  “What was that, Alice? I didn’t copy.”

  “I said Lulu’s gone!”

  “She’s what?” Coombs felt an icy rush down his spine.

  “Lulu broke out of her case and escaped! Do you understand? She’s going with them!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BLUE MAN GROUP

  In attempting to
chronicle the Maenad epidemic, we are like archaeologists trying to re-create an ancient civilization from a few potsherds. The available record seems to be nothing but a catalogue of loose ends, the timeline of human history having been clipped like a cheap length of twine. But the unraveling was not so total. Throughout America and the world, there were refuges, havens, isolated pockets of relative security that continued to survive long after the initial outbreak. Most of these were militaristic in nature—bases and other fortified compounds—but others were due to geographical or cultural factors: islands, prisons, work camps, heavy industries such as oil drilling or mining, religious retreats. What they all had in common was a lack of women. For wherever women went, there followed doom.

  —The Maenad Project

  New Year’s Day, 6:29 A.M.

  Downtown Providence is deserted, all the office buildings and banks, the immense Providence Place Mall, the arena and the convention center, closed for the holiday, closed forever, and the boy skitters antlike through its brick canyons, heedless of either the harsh, wind-driven sleet or his own harsh tears mingling with it.

  “No, no, no . . .” he whimpers as he runs.

  Occasional cars shoosh past, taillights gleaming fire-alarm red off the wet pavement. Church bells are ringing, and not far away he can hear sirens and the blaring drone of car horns from I-95—it sounds like the world’s biggest traffic jam. But Bobby Rubio barely takes notice of the din, or of any of his surroundings. All his thoughts whirlpool around one frantic goal: to find his father.

  A big car pulls up alongside Bobby, dousing his sneakers with slush, and its driver leans across the passenger seat, yelling, “Get in, son!”

  Bobby’s heart leaps with the impossible hope that it is his dad, but realizes at once it’s just a stranger, a red-faced old man with a cockatoo crest of white hair and the leering urgency of a drive-by pervert. Disgusted, Bobby peels away with a snarl.