Apocalypticon x-2 Read online

  "What is this squad leader bullshit?" Kyle hissed, getting up. "This ain't no video game, dumb-ass."

  "Fine, you go first." Sal made room for him to pass.

  Kyle hesitated, sudden doubt flashing across his face, so that Russell said, "Sit your ass down. Let a real man go up."

  "Fuck you."

  Russell belligerently mounted the ladder. They watched in nervous silence as he paused at the top, peeking over the edge at first with trembling caution, then visibly relaxing and raising his whole head above. "Come on, chicken shits," he called down. "Ain't nothin' to-"

  A blue hand seized him by the throat.

  Fighting the thing, Russell lost his grip and plummeted backward onto the raft. The disembodied hand was still on him-not just a hand but an entire arm, ripped off at the shoulder socket, its round bone nakedly visible, hideously flailing and jerking at the elbow joint as it strangled him. The other boys quailed back, screaming, but Sal lunged for the thing, trying to pry its fingers loose. It was a young girl's hand, its dainty nails painted pink, but it was cold and rubbery, impossibly strong.

  "Help me!" he shouted.

  Kyle jumped forward to pitch in, then two other boys, his poker buddies, Ray and Rick. As they grappled with it, the naked stump punched Sal in the cheek so hard it cracked a filling. Tasting blood, he braced his knee on Russell's chest, and, with a supreme effort, they managed to wrench the thing loose. It immediately went wild, flexing and bucking in their hands, trying to get at them. "All together now," Sal said. "One, two…" On three, they hurled it far out into the water.

  "Holy craaap," Russell wheezed, retching over the side.

  "Let's get outta here!" Kyle shouted.

  "Wait!" Sal said. "We can't just go back."

  "Why not? I'm not waitin' for the rest of that chick to show up!"

  "We got to expect shit like this to happen. We handled it! We can't just give up now."

  "We sure as hell can!" Others chimed in: "Hell yeah," "We're gone!" "This shit is suicide!"

  "Hold up," said a ragged voice. It was Russell. He shakily sat up, and croaked, "Don't nobody do a goddamned thing. I ain't-hem-goin' back to that submarine empty-handed. Just so they can lock us in jail again? How many days we already been sitting there dreaming we had someplace else to go, some kinda free choice? Screw that shit. I'm hungry." He got up and climbed the ladder again, wobbly but without hesitation. In seconds, he was over the top and out of sight.

  For a long moment there was silence, then Russell's face reappeared. "Come on!" he called down impatiently. "Let's do this shit. You wanna eat or don't you?"

  Sal started to follow, but Kyle and the other boys shoved past, nearly knocking him into the water. Whether empowered by Russell's confidence, the prospect of food, or the thought of that arm lurking in the water below, suddenly they couldn't get up fast enough. "One at a time," Sal said. But they weren't listening to him at all-the old ladder was almost coming to pieces from their combined weight. Stupid jerks. "Everybody stay together," he called after them as he tested the rungs.

  Sal emerged to find the boys standing at the edge of a weedy lot, reveling in the glorious, slightly queasy sensation of dry land. It looked like no-man's-land-the vacant area beneath a highway bridge. On one side was the flood-control berm-a high rock dam separating them from the city-and on the other a fenced tugboat landing and some condemned-looking buildings. Huge concrete pylons rose above them to Interstate 195. It was all reassuringly deserted.

  As Sal joined them, Russell asked him, "Where to now?"

  "Well, we gotta cross under the highway and follow the road here through the floodgate. There should be businesses and things on the other side."

  "Let's do it."

  Following Russell, who was following Sal, the boys trooped quickly and quietly down the road, picking up any likely-looking weapons they happened to find-mostly rocks and chunks of brick. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Sal wished he could find a good stick. He looked up at the highway bridge, imagining that the little girl's arm must have fallen from there, picturing the awful scene: the girl in the backseat of her parents' car, the Xombie lunging in and grabbing her arm, Dad hitting the gas-nasty.

  They found the tremendous open doors of the flood barrier and cautiously followed the road through. On the far side was a waterfront area of chic clubs and condos, and across the river an immense Gothic cathedral that was the electric company, webbed to the rest of the city by flowing skeins of wire. It was all dead, all out of commission, yet almost perfectly preserved, as if loyally awaiting the future return of humankind. Everything had gone down so fast, there was no time for looting and destruction.

  Dodging from one shadow to the next, the boys did what they could to keep a low profile. "I don't get it," Kyle said, eyes wide with tension. "Why aren't there any Xombies?"

  "Be glad there ain't," said Russell, gingerly touching his bruised neck.

  "It could be that viral thing they talked about-viral progression," Sal said. "The cities got so full of Xombies, they reached critical mass. Once there was nobody left to infect, there was no reason to stay, so they scattered outward across the country. Maybe there aren't any left here."

  The boys' chests swelled with hope. "Is that true?"

  "I don't know. It's just what I heard."

  "God, I hope you right, man."

  Staying off the exposed waterfront, they followed a shaded inner street with fewer doorways. This led them to a second highway underpass, one older and darker than the first, a sunken hollow, its corroded iron girders busy with roosting pigeons. There were peeling psychedelic murals on the walls, ads for funky-sounding businesses: Cafe Zog, Olga's Cup and Saucer, Acme Video, Z-Bar. Cars sat dead in the road, their windows broken and doors wide open to the elements. Pigeons were roosting in them, too. This was not a good place to be, it didn't feel safe. The boys could be cornered here in the dripping wetness, trapped amid the rust and rank birdshit. "We shouldn't a gone this way, man," said Kyle. They walked faster and faster, trying not to panic, not to run…

  … and emerged in the light of spring. Before them was a tiny hillside park with a veterans' memorial, benches, and maple trees. Dew glistened on the grass. But the boys hardly noticed any of that. They were more interested in what lay just beyond: a bright red-and-yellow gas station with a sign reading FOOD MART.

  Now they ran.

  The coolers were dead, the ice cream melted, the milk curdled, but nearly everything else in the place was edible, and the forty boys made a valiant attempt to eat it all. It was a treasure trove more welcome to them than King Tut's tomb, and as perfectly preserved, not in natron but sodium benzoate.

  Snack cakes and pies, puddings, nuts, cookies, crackers, canned meats and cheeses, beef sticks, jerky, pickles, salsa, pretzels and potato chips galore. Candy! Whole cases of chocolate bars, chews, sours, mints, gum. And drinks: bottled beverages of every kind-energy drinks, soda pop, fancy sweetened teas and cappuccino, Yoo-hoo, or just plain water-all free for the taking. It was a teenage dream come true, an all-you-can-eat paradise of junk food. All the cigarettes they could smoke, too, if they wanted them, and a few other vices besides.

  "Can this stuff make us sick?" Freddy Fisk asked through a mouthful of minidonuts. "It must be pretty old by now."

  "I doubt it," Sal said, munching Fritos. "There's enough chemicals in this stuff to last until doomsday."

  "Then it's definitely expired."

  What they didn't eat, they stuffed into ditty bags they had brought from the sub. They sacked the store until all that was left was money and auto accessories. Sated, idly scratching lottery tickets, some of them were already starting to feel that perhaps it had been a mistake to eat so much, so fast. Of that junk. Damn.

  "I don't feel so good, man."

  Sal was consulting the selection of maps. "Well, don't croak yet-we still have a ways to go to get back."

  "You guys go ahead, I'm staying here-urp."

&
nbsp; "I think we all staying here," Russell said. Something in his voice made them turn around to see what he was looking at. The front windows of the minimart overlooked the little memorial park and the elevated highway just beyond. Until now, the boys had not been in a position to really see Interstate 195-it had been an abstract concept, no more alarming than the underside of a bridge. Now they had a good view of it. Freddy G vomited-whulp!

  The highway was a river of death, a glacier of stalled metal, curving away as far as the eye could see. Thousands upon thousands of cars and trucks jammed bumper to bumper, all dead silent, the diamond bits of their smashed windows glittering in the morning sun. The interstate had become a colossal junkyard, a graveyard for humanity's mobile aspirations… when graveyards no longer stayed filled.

  Silent, dead, but not entirely still. There was darting movement there. Not the movement of cars, but of bodies-naked blue bodies. Caught in glimpses: the wink of shadows scurrying between the lanes, a flash of scary Zuni-doll faces. And darker shapes looming beneath the overpass-jumpy silhouettes blocking the light, flushing out the pigeons. Rushing down the on-ramp. They were everywhere.

  Feeling his insides turn to water, Sal's thoughts raced. No way, no way, dude. Nuh-uh, no way, oh, no, no, no, please, no…

  What he said was, "Guys? Can we, uh, get moving?"

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE UNDERGROUND

  As usual, first responders charged into the fire. In the early moments of the outbreak, most EMTs and other rescue personnel simply vanished off the face of the Earth. Radio transcripts and dashboard cameras from police sources provide some of the earliest glimpses into the tragedy. A good example is the video log of 1A86, a patrol car with the LAPD, driven by Officer Mike McGuinness. Responding at 9:04 P.M. PST to reported "rioting" at Torrance General Hospital, the car's camera shows several police cruisers converging on the hospital's emergency entrance. Frantic medics run up to the cars yelling for help, as in the background a number of people can be seen on the ground being straddled and assaulted by crazed-looking women, some dressed in hospital scrubs. In the headlights, their faces appear bright blue. Using loudspeakers, the arriving officers command the aggressors to stop, then jump from their cars to intervene. They first attempt to break the grip of the attackers, then Mace and stun them repeatedly, then finally club them with nightsticks, all to little effect. They seem to have trouble getting handcuffs to stay on. First one and then another officer is attacked as more crazed rioters begin to appear. Shots ring out as officers realize they are overwhelmed-they can be heard screaming for backup. Officer McGuinness retreats to his vehicle and grabs his riot shotgun. At the same time, a K-9 unit pulls up, and the officers try to coax their cowering dog out of the car. As they are doing this, female rioters drag them down. McGuinness tries using the butt of his shotgun to knock one of the aggressors off, but others seize him around the neck, seemingly trying to kiss him as he goes down. As he struggles, his shotgun discharges at point-blank range into the open mouth of one female attacker, blasting most of her head off, but in an instant her body springs right back to join the others now piling onto him. At this point there is no one visible except squirming clusters of blue-skinned people. For a few moments they are all we see. Then they begin to get up, to move on, blowing away like leaves. But where are the bodies of their victims? It isn't until we notice that the dead cops have risen to join their killers, eyes glittering black in the headlights, that the full horror is revealed. -The Maenad Project "Uri Miska worked in a hole in the ground,"said Lang-horne's disembodied voice, echoing in the vault. "So that's where Agent X came from."

  The wrought-iron spiral staircase descended into perfect darkness, as if down a well. Certainly there was water somewhere down there-water dripping into water. The air was rank with the stench of mildew.

  "Now watch out. He may still be down there."

  Lulu went first, then Albemarle and the rest. They hardly needed light to see-the newly independent cells of their bodies were not only photosensitive, but receptive to every other stimulus as well. They moved through a kaleidoscopic world of visible, liquid sensation: sound as strobing colors, temperature viscid as oil. It was only Langhorne who was blind-despite the boat's powerful mast array, reception at her end was sketchy. Broadband was a thing of the past. At her command, the light-boys clicked on, flooding the stone passage with xenon-bright glare.

  They were in the terminal end of a large tunnel, its arched stone ceiling at least twenty feet high, its floor a stagnant, tea-colored pond several feet deep. Black trickles of seepage sheened the walls. To Lulu's immediate left was a massive steel door, welded shut, which must have once opened onto the street below Miska's house. The water was full of sunken machinery: generators, dehumidifiers, heaters, sump pumps. But strangest of all were the mummies. Hundreds of blurred bodies lay under the water, row after row of them, all uniformly white as if encased in plaster. Human cocoons.

  Lulu knew exactly what she was looking at; she had seen something like this before.

  They were Moguls. Not mummies but Moguls. Wealthy, dying men who had deliberately infected themselves with Agent X in order to stave off death-a controlled infection that preserved their higher brain functions. Now they littered the bottom of this flooded cavern like so many discarded beer cans. Human time capsules.

  Lulu climbed the rest of the way down the stairs, passing through a metal turnstile onto a raised concrete landing. It resembled a dock, the gateway to a strange, subterranean river. All that was required to complete the image was a ghostly barge, the brooding specter of a gondola like the one that had brought them ashore. Tunnel of Love or River Styx?-either way, Lulu didn't have the fare.

  The thought of that gondola resonated in her frozen heart like a plucked string: There had been a boy in that gondola-Langhorne said so. Set adrift upon the river like a note in a bottle. But by whom? And from where?

  Not from here, certainly. The waters of this secret mausoleum led nowhere; they seeped out of the walls and back into the ground. It wasn't a sewer, or a cistern, or a dock on a river. It only looked that way because the pumps had stopped, had run out of gas and allowed water to start creeping in. Covering the train tracks.

  They were on some kind of subway platform, a facsimile of an old-time railroad station, with ornate gilded benches, artificial potted palms, and mock ads for patent medicine on the walls. As the boys' light rigs shone far down the cavern, Lulu could read, DR. MISKA'S MIRACLE TONIC! INVIGORATES THE BLOOD! RESTORES YOUTH AND VITALITY! The place looked like something from an amusement park, but there was nothing faux about the train-a row of actual Pullman cars, four of them, their undercarriages wholly submerged, looming deep within that fathomless, dripping tunnel.

  Langhorn's voice hissed with static: "It's an old condemned train tunnel-it runs underneath the whole East Side, right under Brown University, from one end of College Hill to the other. Uri learned about it back in the eighties, when he first started doing research for Brown. Back then, protein indexing was a highly speculative field, and he needed more specialized lab space than they were willing to give him, so he raised the funds to refurbish an old mill in the Jewelry District. That was his 'official' laboratory, the public showcase for his mainstream research. But he needed something a little more discreet for his long-term pet project. Something completely private. So he bribed a few city officials, bought this house, knocked a hole in the basement, and developed the tunnel for his own use."

  Lulu started walking toward the train as Langhorne continued: "Xibalba is the Mayan underworld, the 'place of fright.' Miska was interested in things like that. That doesn't mean he didn't take his research seriously, any more than when he joked about being some mad scientist out of an H. P. Lovecraft story-Lovecraft was from Providence, too. It was his Russian sense of humor. Ukrainian, actually. He was also crazy about fondue. In retrospect, maybe I should have been more worried. I was just grateful to be able to work with someone like him, you know? A shot at the Nobel
Prize? Kicking AIDS?-come on." She paused, showers of static filling the gap. "The sky was the limit with that man… right up until the day it fell.

  "Look at this place," Langhorne suddenly blurted out. "Looks like no one's been here-what an unholy mess. But this is just what I was hoping for: Everything should still be in place." Her amplified voice was husky with excitement.

  "This is where it began," she said. "Where it got loose. Right here. We tried to take every precaution, but it still got away from us. Got into the water table, into the soil. That was a bad strain, a preliminary strain; we knew that. It still needed essential modifications to preserve cognitive function and… other qualities. But in the meantime, we had been deploying it on a limited basis, administering it to investors who were in critical health, just to preserve their bodies until the Tonic could be perfected. We were testing a number of promising enzymatic agents, but there was one in particular that Miska said he was having spectacular results with. That was his exact word: 'spectacular.' He said it completely reversed the negative effects."

  Lulu looked into the murky brownish depths, contemplating the invisible thing that was in there-was in her. This entity that had contaminated the Earth and every person on it, spreading for years, bonding to iron and hemoglobin, gestating in women's wombs like the spawn of some incubus, finally to be born as a bastard angel of destruction.

  "Lulu? Honey? Why don't you go into the lab first." Langhorne wheedled, cautiously testing the waters.

  From her flickering console on the submarine, the doctor had been watching Lulu with deep fascination, reluctant to address her directly, worrying that the girl would suddenly spook like a deer in the forest. That was partly why she was talking so much-to accustom Lulu to the sound of her voice. The girl was free to go as she pleased, yet she stayed. Why? This world held no dangers for her; she owed them nothing. So what was holding her here? Loyalty? Love? Fear? Habit? Whatever it was, the longer she hung around, the more Langhorne began to think that maybe they had lucked out, that poor little Lulu Pangloss could be more useful than anyone, including Alice herself, had dared hope.