Xombies: Apocalypticon Page 9

“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.”

  “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.

  That’s a good girl, Alice thought, eyes brimming with tears. You’re doing so good! Voice steady, she said, “There’s a large liquid-nitrogen tank at the back of the train—it’s used for storing blood specimens. There are racks of test tubes inside. Some of them will be labeled PMS for positive mutagenic serum. That’s the stuff.”

  As the girl obediently complied, Langhorne ordered, “Boys, don’t crowd her, but keep those lights on her. Stay out of the way of the camera.”

  Lulu entered the open doorway of the first train car. It was full of deep, wavering shadows from their portable lights. Computer workstations, office furniture, and bulkier equipment crowded the long compartment. There were human knickknacks here and there: family pictures, silly coffee mugs, dead potted plants. Lulu saw a picture of Langhorne pushing a little girl in a swing. Moving on, the next car was full of sterilizing equipment and a row of chemical showers. There were warning signs posted in stages along the way and illustrated instructions for all the proper decontamination procedures. The third car was full of high-tech medical equipment—it had the look of a hospital operating theater, with tiers of benches looking in from outside on the platform. Within the car were several beds with elaborate metal restraints, and three large white tanks with glass viewports. Two of the tanks had Xombies in them.

  Lulu remembered almost drowning in a tank like that as she was being interrogated at Thule. Two of her friends had died right next to her as she climbed their bodies to survive. They were both here now, Jake and Julian, serenely bearing lights and batteries. The memory held no terror for them or for Lulu. It was all just very . . . interesting.

  The fourth and last car was shrouded in layers of heavy plastic sheeting. At one time the baffles had obviously been pumped up with air, now they hung limp. Lulu and the others tore carelessly through the seals to enter. It was a “clean room,” containing air locks, biohazard suits, vacuum tanks, and all manner of UV lamps and microscopes, as well as more arcane scientific gear. Stainless-steel cabinets and refrigerators lined the walls. Like the compartments before it, the place didn’t appear ransacked.

  “I knew it,” Langhorne said. “They went after our facilities downtown, where the spectrometer and the X-ray diffraction labs are. They didn’t even touch this place. Very few people knew about it, and to those who did, it was totally taboo—the secret Mogul burial chamber. Hallowed ground. No one belonged here unless they were dead. But this is where we collated and stored all our information. This is where Miska tied the threads together.”

  Lulu approached the back of the car. Something was off there; something didn’t fit. Amid all the wildly redundant human safety precautions, a door had been left open. It faced down the tunnel, a gaping window of black void. Beside the doorway was a large, stainless-steel vat. It was almost as tall as she was, plastered with bright yellow and orange warning signs: LIQUID NITROGEN—HANDLE WITH CAUTION. HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. BIOHAZARD. MUTAGEN.

  “Cellular aging is associated with patterns of phosphorylation—proteins breaking down—so we developed a fast, synthetic delivery agent that could rewire each cell’s nucleus to correct these patterns. The ideal was a hardy, self-replicating cell doctor that would never let the cells die—for any reason. And that’s exactly what we came up with: a viral mechanism that enabled each cell to function independently and self-sufficiently. This thing . . . this thing—it was bigger than penicillin, bigger than the invention of fire!”

  Lulu unclamped the heavy lid and peered inside. The tank was empty.

  “Well?” said Langhorne eagerly, unable to see what was wrong. “Get it and let’s go!”

  There was a distant splashing. Lulu turned and stared blankly out the back of the carriage, her slight body framed by the doorway. From the echoes in that hollow gulf of air, she could sense the tunnel’s length: a mile-long river sealed at both ends. A flooded crypt. Its temperature matched that of Lulu’s own inner sea: fifty-five degrees. The light from the doorway cast a brown swath across the blackness, out of which loomed her own elongated shadow. Directly below her feet, she could make out the sepia glimmer of submerged railroad tracks receding into the murk.

  Her attention followed the line of the tracks to the vanishing point, fixating on something deep in the darkness, a ghostly, lurking presence she could not quite pin down. The unfamiliar sensation caused a ripple of gooseflesh, bristled her hair. Her own reaction shocked and amused her: How interesting. She hadn’t known she was still capable of fear.

  But what am I afraid of? she thought. I’m the boogeyman here.

  Summoning the awkward instrument of speech, she said, “Big.” Her voice sounded alien to her, rusty and shrill. It repulsed her. She cleared her throat and tried again: “There’s something big out there.”

  Listening from the sub, Langhorne wasn’t sure who had spoken. She knew it couldn’t be one of the boys, and certainly not Ed Albemarle. The raw, high-pitched sound paralyzed her for a second, because she knew from experience it could only be the voice of an articulate Xombie, but none of her Xombies had ever said a word. With dawning excitement, she realized it had to be Lulu—Lulu was talking! While Alice was absorbing this development, she also scrambled to make sense of what the girl was trying to tell her.

  “Something big? Out—out where?” she asked.

  Just then the ceiling came down.

  Above the tunnel there was an explosion—a series of explosions. Demolition charges had been planted in Miska’s basement and along the s
ecret stairwell, detonating in sequence to amplify their effect. Xombies trailing at the end of the cable were first shredded by the blasts, then pulverized by the collapsing mass of the structures above, first the stone ceiling, then the iron scrollwork, then centuries-old timbers, bricks, and lead pipes. Above, Miska’s house folded in upon itself, three stories compacting into one, then none, as walls and floorboards buckled, windows coughed out glass, and heavy enameled bath fixtures were sucked downward as if swallowed by a leviathan. In an instant, it all vanished in a billow of smoke, leaving a gap in Benefit Street like a yanked tooth.

  In the tunnel beneath, the avalanche of rubble crashed to the bottom, burying the concrete platform and hitting the water with enough force to create sea waves that actually lifted the first Pullman car off its tracks. Dust, smoke, and hundreds of tons of debris roared down as if through a chute, perforating the train like volleys of grapeshot, pelting the Xombies within.

  Then, all at once, it was done.

  As dust and silence settled, all who were not buried or blown to bits climbed indifferently to their feet. They were filthy and dinged, but unperturbed. Lulu, at the far rear of the train, was one of the least damaged. The shock wave had blown her out the doorway, and she now stood up in sloshing, chest-deep water, sensing the silvery spray of glass and shrapnel embedded in her back. There was no blood or pain; all it took was a serpentine ripple to dislodge the shards, the clean wounds pursing shut like dozens of freakish eyelids.

  Lulu’s senses were clouded, her body still ringing from the physical shock, but she knew that she was not alone in that water. There was someone else out there with her—someone or something that was both alive and dead, both Xombie and human, the pale shine of its life force eclipsed by the shadow of death, yet not any kind of Xombie she had ever encountered. Who’s there?

  Now a light appeared at the far end of the tunnel, getting brighter and brighter as it came around the bend. As it hove into view, Lulu could see an enormous plunging silhouette wreathed in spray. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn it was a train. She was clear on one point, though: Whatever it was, it had no fear of her and was coming fast.