Apocalypso x-3 Page 8

  “The what?“

  “The She-Devil!”

  Todd said, “That’s bullshit, man, bullshit. For one thing, Lulu was just a messed-up chick, not some kind of… Shevil. For another, we had no idea you even existed, or we would have tried to contact you. Why else would we have been desperate enough to go ashore? We had no weapons, nothing. We saw almost forty of our friends get killed, either by Xombies or by Reapers, so you can go fuck yourself!”

  “Todd,” Ray hinted through his teeth.

  “I’m cool, I’m cool.”

  At Todd’s outburst, their interrogator mellowed his tone. “Perhaps you are telling the truth. Or perhaps not-we will see. I just have a few more questions, and I suggest you answer truthfully because you will be judged. Not by me, but by the Lord Adam, Blessings Be Upon Him.”

  “My bad. Go ahead.”

  “Do you repent your sins?”

  “Definitely!”

  “Have you rejoiced in the company of homosexuals?”

  “What?”

  “I assume you are repenting being Sodomites and sexual deviants?”

  “That’s not really-”

  “There’s no need to lie. We have signed affidavits testifying to your perversions at Thule.”

  “Thule! Are you kidding? We were prisoners of those motherfuckers!”

  “That’s immaterial,” the man said mildly. “Are you sexually attracted to each other?”

  “No!”

  “So you are free of sin?”

  “No-just not that one.”

  “Are you prepared to take a vow of chastity from this day forth?”

  Sensing closure, both boys jumped at it. “Hell yeah.”

  “Do you love America?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you true patriots? Would you die for your country?”

  “Yeah… probably.”

  “Then why aren’t you dead, like so many other patriots?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Because I have a sacred duty to perform. Answer the question!”

  “Well… same here.”

  “Which is better: the Prophet Jim or the Apostle Chace?”

  “Uh, Jim?”

  “Both are equal in the eyes of the Lord! Do you believe in the Resurrection of the Moguls?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “Are you prepared to swear loyalty to the Lord Adam, the Lord’s Prophet Jim, the Lord’s Apostle Chace, and all the Living Saints of the Adamites?”

  “Uh-sure.”

  “What is His purpose in revealing Himself at this time?”

  “Who?”

  “The Prophet Jim.”

  “I… don’t know.”

  “You haven’t witnessed His deeds?”

  “I don’t think so… Have we, Ray?”

  “No.”

  “Are you prepared to swear undying allegiance to the Living God, that ye may serve Him as instruments of Miska’s final destruction? Are ye prepared to don the mantle of the Sons of Adam?”

  “Sure.”

  “And if any man among us should fall short, or betray the trust placed in him, or otherwise desecrate this sacred oath, do you swear to uphold the penalties for such conduct, even if those penalties be imposed upon you or your dearest loved ones?”

  “What are the penalties?”

  “Hard labor. Scourging of the flesh. Castration. Purification by fire. In that order.”

  “Wow. And, just out of curiosity, what’s the alternative to joining?”

  “Purification.”

  “Right. I guess we’re in!”

  “Then welcome, brothers! Welcome and rejoice!”

  After the debriefing, Todd and Ray were released from their bonds but left locked in the windowless restroom. Many hours went by, perhaps days-they had no way of telling except by their increasingly ravenous hunger. They had ample water from the tap, but no food or privacy. They took turns sleeping on the hard tile floor.

  By the time the door burst in, they had no strength left to resist. They didn’t want to. “What took you so long?” Ray asked, as a man hogtied him and put a bag over his head.

  They were carried up a dead escalator to a deserted Italian restaurant on the next floor. When the door of the restaurant closed behind them, it suddenly became very quiet. Their captors sat them down and removed their hoods. Todd sneezed, and a man said, “God bless you.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The restaurant was cleaned out. It was just a large carpeted room with floor-to-ceiling tinted windows overlooking the street. Sepia daylight filtered in. The only furnishings were the banquet chairs on which they sat, and a small table between them.

  On that table was a feast beyond their wildest imagining: a platter of cold cuts, pickled vegetables, crackers, dried fruit, and two cans of cold apple juice.

  As they ravenously dug in, the door opened, and someone entered the room-a tall bald man with a limp. He was very grave and very pale, wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a dark robe. He looked like some kind of Orthodox priest. Then Ray had a second look and dropped his spoon.

  “Uncle Jim?” he said. He clapped his mouth shut, thinking, Shut up, idiot!

  “Uncle?” Todd said.

  “More like a family friend.”

  The man turned ominous, rearing up over Ray like Nosferatu.

  “I know you,” he intoned.

  Ray nodded, shrinking in his seat. “You’re not dead.”

  “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. What are you two doing here?”

  Ray was speechless, so Todd intervened: “We came back here after you… left the ship. I’m Todd Holmes, sir. My father was your shop foreman-Larry Holmes?”

  “I know Larry,” Sandoval said.

  “He died, sir.” Todd almost said, Same as you.

  Sandoval’s eyes flicked from Todd to Ray and back. “The submarine. Is it here?”

  “No. It was, but it’s gone. It was attacked by these Reaper dudes and pulled out. We came ashore to forage for supplies, so we got stranded.”

  “Alice Langhorne, was she on board?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is she?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What about the rest of them? Lulu Pangloss?”

  “Lulu’s a Xombie,” Ray said.

  “A Xombie. How?”

  Todd jumped in. “A bunch of people got turned into Xombies at Thule, but Dr. Langhorne figured out a way to keep them under control using Lulu’s blood.”

  “I bet she did,” Sandoval said thoughtfully. “I just bet she did. What was that you said about Reapers?”

  “They attacked the boat. We saw it all from India Point.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Uh-that’s a good question. Something really… weird… came out of the boat and got ’em. That’s why we didn’t try to get back aboard.”

  “I see… ”

  “What happens to us now?”

  “You’ll be taken to Indoctrination,” the man said. “There’s a whole process for new disciples, you’ll see. Everybody has to go through it.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Just a few days; it’s like a crash course.”

  “A crash course in what?”

  “Good citizenship.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  SANDOVAL

  Having literally been run over by a truck, James Sandoval was half-frozen and already half-dead when Fred Cowper’s headless body strangled him. Cowper wasn’t doing so well either, having been mangled by a monkey and beheaded by Lulu Pangloss. They froze solid like that, a pair of vandalized statues from a forgotten war memorial. The dead monkey lay frozen a short distance away.

  Over the following weeks, the sagging Mogul dome overhead was ripped away by storms, and the weird tableau of Sandoval and Cowper became drifted with snow and collected wind-driven icicles on its leeward side-just another strange formation on the frozen sea. But then the sea began to thaw. Spring was co
ming earlier and earlier every year; seas that had once been frozen in May were now navigable. The sun beat down, and soon the thick white mantle on the Davis Straight cracked loose and started to move. More storms came, bringing rain and waves that fractured the ice into huge floes, herding them into sun-warmed waters farther south.

  On one of these floes, an iceberg the size of six city blocks, Sandoval and Cowper came back to life.

  “Oh my God,” Sandoval said, or rather tried to say-his throat was still crushed in Cowper’s grip. The choking was not what bothered him; it was the feel of Cowper’s alien flesh. “Get… off… me!”

  Voice or no voice, Cowper’s headless corpse seemed to understand him. Having no more business to transact, it willingly pulled free, though their blue skin had bonded and required some nasty-looking tearing to separate.

  Where am I? Sandoval wondered, staring with black eyes over the vast expanse of ice-strewn ocean. There was no land in sight. What am I? But he already knew the answer to the latter question-it was no mystery. Good thing, because he could hardly expect any answers from Fred Cowper. Looking at that ridiculous headless figure in its bloodstained hospital gown, then down at his own blue hands, Sandoval thought, I’m a Xombie-great.

  As he came to this unbelievable conclusion, he suddenly realized he wasn’t the only one waking to a strange new destiny: The baboon that had kept him company in his last moments of life was apparently going to keep him company in the afterlife as well.

  It lived.

  They drifted for days, weeks, partially refreezing every night and thawing again in the sun. Cowper barely moved, facing south like a gnarled tree. The broken-necked baboon paced around the floe’s rim, occasionally staring at Sandoval with its head cocked quizzically to one side, as if to ask, “Am I dreaming?” I know the feeling, buddy, Sandoval thought. His crushed legs caused him no pain, but they prevented him from walking, so he took great interest in their healing process: the splintered bones softening like putty, and his newly prehensile muscle tissues kneading them back into shape-a shape he could actually control if he wanted to. Long and fast, or short and strong-or something else altogether? He was afraid to mess with the original design too much, lest he screw it up and never get it back the way it was. But the possibilities of this newly plastic body fascinated him.

  All around him, he sensed life, an awesome profusion of microscopic organisms that made the sea look like a living nebula, an animated horoscope of swimming, drifting, dancing celestial bodies, all eating or being eaten. The life was thickest on the bottom, illuminating the topography, so that at night Sandoval felt as though he were flying high above a radiant red desert. He would have gladly walked across that desert to the distant shore of Canada, except he knew there were a lot of crabs down there, and crabs ate Xombies. Miska had designed them to.

  By day there were seals, birds, whales, an occasional polar bear. But even the hungriest bear could make nothing of Sandoval, Cowper, or the baboon-they had no smell, no warmth, no presence. They weren’t living flesh, and they weren’t carrion. They were about as palatable as clay.

  Then Sandoval remembered his pen. It was a special pen, a laser pointer with a GPS beacon, designed to direct aerial fire on ground targets. A powerful tool for playing God. But Sandoval no longer had any desire to play God; he just wanted to reach dry land. So he turned on the beacon and waited. And while he waited he remembered.

  The chairman of the board, James Sandoval, was not surprised by sounds of gunfire filtering into the briefing room. He was already despondent over the shooting of a civilian employee at the company picnic though it had been far from unexpected: Bob Martino was a union organizer and chronic loudmouth from way back. Still, a terrible threshold had been crossed. Things could only get worse from here on out.

  Sandoval and the NavSea leadership were sitting around the big conference table, watching a live video feed from the security cameras at the fence line, less than a mile away, where things were going downhill fast.

  “Everyone off the fence!” the guards shouted, sounding like harried gym teachers. “Pull back, pull back!”

  They were leaderless, rudderless, shocked by the sudden death of Security Chief Beau Reynolds, who had gotten blown up in a freak explosion while standing on his observation platform like a half-assed Douglas MacArthur.

  Sandoval panned the closed-circuit cameras as guards were snatched off the scaffolds and abandoned the fence, retreating before the horror that they had dreaded and drilled for, but for which no one could ever be truly prepared. Perhaps some were even relieved that the waiting was over.

  The main gate was on fire, its bright glow in the evening mist silhouetting a scene of desperate flight. Shots sputtered like strings of firecrackers all along the perimeter, and men could be heard shouting hysterically for ammo, for reinforcements, for God Almighty.

  Whatever was outside the fence was mostly hidden by plastic slats threaded through the wires, but the crashing chain link gave clear indication of multiple climbers, a sound like a stirred-up monkey cage. White phosphorous and burning magnesium fluoresced brightly in the fog, strobing, and it was possible to see scores of flaming shadow puppets scrambling up the barrier.

  Two figures stood apart from the confusion, looking weirdly out of place: a skinny old man in golf slacks and a dark-haired little girl in a green velvet party dress.

  “Holy hell,” said Commander Harvey Coombs, staring at the monitor. “Is that Fred Cowper?”

  “It is indeed,” said Sandoval. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing bringing that girl in here. Figures he’d pick a time like this to show up.”

  “We could use his experience. He served on the original 726, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Put in his twenty in the Navy, then did a full term here. He’s one of the real old-timers. Looks like he’s taking us up on our offer.”

  “A little late. Can we get him, you think?”

  “Well… it’s pretty hairy down there. I’d have to say no, and the girl is completely out of the question. It’s just too late-he had his chance a month ago and blew it. In a matter of minutes, that post will be completely overrun, and after that the compound is wide open. It’s critical that you men get to the boat right now… or you never will.”

  Sandoval had a pang of regret saying this. At one time he had really hoped to get Cowper for this run. The man was a maverick, a hard case who knew subs inside and out and could be counted on to get the job done, red tape be damned. Rough around the edges, sure. A bit of a crank. Some people couldn’t stand him, especially those in the upper echelons of military/industrial middle management, but to Sandoval, that was the highest recommendation of all.

  At least most of the executive committee was safely aboard the rescue ship to Diego Garcia-that was a load off his mind. His adopted nephew, Ray, had made it to the compound in one piece, though Ray’s sister had not-another good woman lost to the plague. And his ex-wife, Alice, had landed in Thule weeks ago to head up the science team. Sandoval had hoped to be away by now himself, but endless last-minute delays kept piling up until he was a whole day behind schedule.

  From the sound of it, things would have to be accelerated a bit.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, gathering up his things and breaking the hush in the room. “The corporation wishes to thank you for your efforts in securing the enormous volume of classified material stored at this facility. By your efforts over the past weeks, you have safeguarded the cream of naval war-fighting technology, as well as the very building blocks of American civilization, assuring that they will neither fall into the wrong hands nor be lost to future generations. Without your work, it would be impossible to do what I now propose we all do: get the hell out of here.”

  There were hasty handshakes and good-byes all around. A sense of imminent death was in the air, but no one wanted to be the first to run, to show fear, and Jim found himself repeating, “We’ve done all we can, we’ve done all we can,” until finally it was just him a
nd Harvey Coombs.

  “Come on, Mr. Sandoval, time to close up shop.”

  “You go ahead and make ready to cast off. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “You know I can’t do that, sir. We don’t sail without you.”

  “I have one more small errand to run, and it’s my eyes only. Don’t worry, Harvey, I’m not going to blow my brains out or anything. But I do need a few more minutes before I can get down to the dock.”

  “Then I’ll accompany you.”

  “You will not. Your business is running that boat, getting it safely out of here, and nothing can jeopardize that-not even me. So you worry about your job and let me worry about mine. That’s an executive order, Commander.”

  “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m leaving you out here all alone.”

  “I appreciate your concern, but you’re interfering with both our duties. Until I’m aboard that boat, I am not your responsibility.”

  “I could take you under armed guard.”

  “But you won’t.” Sandoval opened his coat, revealing a nickel-plated. 357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.

  Coombs shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.” He turned on his heel and left.

  Sandoval called after him, “Thanks, Harv.”

  There was a lull in the shooting, then an explosion that rattled the blinds.

  Huh. Better hurry.

  Instead, Jim dawdled, picking up a heavy pewter model of the proposed Hawaii-class boat and turning it over in his hands. It would’ve been a beautiful thing, a marvel for the ages, but it was a dream never to be realized. In spite of all they’d done to preserve its essence for posterity, Sandoval was poignantly aware that it would never be more than this shiny little paperweight-a trillion-dollar toy.

  He thought of a book he had read as a child, about a carved toy canoe set afloat in a stream that made its way to the Great Lakes and finally out to sea. There was something terribly sad about it: The boy who made the canoe would never know how its journey ended, if it went a mile or a thousand miles-he just gave it the first push.

  There was a radio telephone on the conference table, and Jim picked up the receiver. “I’m on my way, Mr. Velocek,” he said.