Apocalypso

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
OOBLECK

Trying to contain my disquiet, I asked, “Why?”

“Why?” The Ex-Brenda looked blank. I could see her mind stumble, like someone groping in sudden dark.

“Yes, why? What is all this? What is it for?”

Everything stopped.

The chamber went awesomely quiet, absent that roar of voices. Even the blast furnace and the churning of the pool were muted. There was a noise beyond hearing, however, a silent alarm that required no ears to hear, but which rang in Maenad cells like a billion dinner bells. I heard it loud and clear, and at once sensed millions of eyes staring at me, probing not just with those eyes but with the rude fingers of their minds, as if I were in a tank full of invisible eels fondling my body, trying to worm inside my deepest self.

Back off, I thought, slapping them away with the force of my will.

Distracted, I was caught off guard by the vise grip of the her sharp-nailed hand on my upper arm. Hey! I flailed with inhuman agility, kicking, twisting, but the Ex-woman was twice my size, double my strength, and equally impervious to hurt. Our flesh crackled at the point of contact, the familiar Xombie repulsion effect known as the Solomon Principle.

“Because we have to,” she said. “The future depends on it.”

“Depends on what? Whose idea was this?”

“Uri Miska’s.”

That knocked me cold. We, too, were following a vision of Uri Miska; he was the father of us Xombies, the man who had created Agent X as a means of insulating mankind from the coming cataclysm of the Big Enchilada, which would wipe out all mortal life. It was the whole point of our submarine mission.

Shocked, I said, “Miska! Why?”

“Why? Why? What do you mean, why?” The woman shook her head as if wracked by some powerful inner turmoil.

“I mean I don’t understand! Let go!”

“Where did you come from? How did you get in here?”

“Tonic!” hissed a voice from behind us. “She is a spy! She has the agent of free will!”

Oh no. It was another familiar face, and not a pretty one: Major Kasim Bendis-Uncle Spam. He pulled clear of the wall, and I realized these creatures were subsets of the whole vast structure, extruded at will.

I knew Kasim well from my brief time with the Reapers, when he looked like a pile of leftover barbecue with a hat, so this was a step up. I hadn’t been in such great shape back then either, with huge holes bored through my head and torso, but at least I didn’t have to come back as a drip sculpture. Clearly there were worse things than being a Xombie.

“Hey, man,” I said, “pull yourself together.”

“Get her! Get her!”

Well, this was quite a coincidence… or was it? Come to think of it, I had been led here, lured here in remembrance of things past. But was it deliberate? If so, who was dropping the crumbs? Bendis? He certainly didn’t look capable of anything so interesting, being just another Xombie drone. In the presence of human beings, he would no doubt step lively, but amid all these Mogul Xombies, he was basically cheap labor… until I came along and upset the applecart. Apparently, all this talk had shocked him to action, or perhaps someone else was pulling his strings. Either way, he was suddenly a maniacal dervish, grabbing me by my neck and yanking me against his chest. Brenda stepped forward as if to intervene, then suddenly went stiff, twitching in place.

Other goop-monsters joined in, pinning my limbs, pulling my hair. One of them was the former president of the United States.

Repeating, “She’s the Tonic, the Tonic!” the Ex-president took a handsome fountain pen from his scorched coat pocket and jabbed its sharp nib into my jugular, instantly filling the ink reservoir with my purplish black blood. As all the others watched in fascination, he tipped back his head and raised the pen over his open mouth, thumb poised to flip the release.

Before he could do so, he was hit by a thing like a hairy medieval mace, which rammed the pen into his mouth and out the back of his throat, where my captive blood burst free, spraying Kasim Bendis in the face.

As Bendis flailed backward, the mace whirled in the air and struck the other Moguls in turn, splatting them like fudge-filled treats. Now I could see it was not a mace but Bobby Rubio’s head, studded with hornlike spikes and attached to a freakishly elongated neck. The rest of Bobby’s body had changed as well, three of his limbs anchored to the ground while the fourth-his right forearm-had lengthened and split apart into a double-bladed scythe, a giant pair of shears, literally cutting Xombies off at the knees. The boy resembled a giant fiddler crab. But as I joined the fight, I could see all the other Ex-Moguls being birthed from side alcoves, a hundred or more. It was hopeless.

While Bobby’s body returned to normal human proportions, I grabbed his hand, and we ran. As we approached the main entrance portal, it shrank like a stony sphincter, the archway and surrounding wall bunching up and contracting in grinding spasms, sprouting long black thorns. We were cornered.

Looking for a way out, I felt someone touch my arm. It was Brenda. She had followed us up the entrance ramp and was mutely pointing at a series of openings high in the ceiling, from which Xombie catwalks descended into the plasma oven, chutes for the endless lemming parade.

“I think she wants us to go that way,” Bobby said. Brenda nodded wildly.

“How?” I asked.

Battling some inner demon, black veins popping in her forehead, Brenda croaked, “Climb.”

“We can’t climb up there!”

“Sure we can,” Bobby said. “Come on!”

“Is there even a way out up there?”

“Is there a way out down here?”

“Good point.”

Bobby led the way, with me following on his heels and Brenda picking up the rear. In seconds, Bobby was way ahead of us, finding handholds among the gore and charnel rebar. The kid was a spider.

Having never been overly coordinated, I moved forward in fits and starts. It was easier than I thought. The surface was more irregular than any cliff face, a conglomeration of organic and inorganic debris held together by a blood pudding made from a million nuked Xombies. Ichor oozed from every crevice, dangling in long black drips that hung halfway to the floor. When I brushed against them, I got a static shock, and they retracted like sensitive tendrils. Slug eyes.

Avoiding contact with flesh and bone, I seized upon all manner of other junk: heavy machinery, trucks, highway signs, dinosaur skeletons, planes, trains, automobiles. It could have been the nest of some gigantic packrat. Except that it moved. The whole thing heaved up and down in a slow, rolling motion, vines swaying eerily.

Beneath the furnace, filling the deep bottom of the hollow, was that black pool of ichor that began to churn and erupt like a vast cauldron of boiling oil. In the center of this pit was an island, a peculiar mound banked with marble columns and statuary, steaming and glowing green from within. I could make out the head of Abraham Lincoln. The radiation in the chamber was intense; no human being could have survived it for more than a few minutes.

It occurred to me that the pile of rubble was a crude nuclear reactor, using uranium from the dry-docked sub at Norfolk and the power plant at Calvert Cliffs to generate the plasma arc in the furnace. There was a brain behind all this, and it smelled human.

The ichor was not boiling from heat so much as from restless, restless life-it moved like a living thing, a vast, seething mollusk. The room was actually relatively cool, most of the heat wicked away by the porous walls or ventilated out a huge stone chimney that rose to the ceiling and supported both domes. Like the uranium fuel rods, that chimney was preapocalyptic, a cracked relic of human craftsmanship. I recognized it at once as the base of the Washington Monument. All that remained of the famous obelisk was its stump.

The sickly light radiating from underneath the plasma kiln silhouetted Xombies laboring at its base. Rows of railroad tracks led to the pool, with sludge carts going in and out, in and out, dragged by lines of workers, who then shoveled the heavy gunk into metal buckets as if it were toxic waste. But it wasn’t toxic waste; it was industrial product. This was the source of the ichor-the black pitch of which the whole place was built. Even the Xeppelin was made of this stuff, blown up like so much oobleck. A million Xombies boiled down for glue.

But oobleck was not the only product there. As I watched, I could see buckets of it being lowered into supercooled wells in the floor, shooting fountains of dry-ice vapor, and this frozen material then returned to the furnace to be blasted again by the plasma arc. In this way it was disintegrated, crystallized, reduced to a fraction of its former mass. Rendered to its pure nanoparticles-dust to dust. The ultra-fine white powder was then transferred to a deep concrete tunnel, perhaps part of an old government fallout shelter built during the Cold War.

I suddenly realized I knew how this all worked because I had seen it before-I had seen it while I was linked to all the other Maenads, jacked into the Hex.

Through all this, Moguls were being hatched. The black cocoons that I had seen outside were cracked open in the nuclear pool, and their withered residents granted freedom-the freedom to slave away in service of the all-consuming fire. Once titans of industry, they were now merely drones, existing to service that infernal queen.

I remembered seeing those plastic-encased mummies at Thule, then later in Miska’s secret lab, all being kept in cold storage until Agent X could be perfected; my queasy feeling as Dr. Chandra Stevens explained to me that they were all sick and elderly men who paid to be inoculated with the disease. Their brains had been chilled to protect them from the effects of oxygen starvation, but they still had the manic need to share their “gift,” so MoCo scientists laminated them in carbon-fiber shells for safekeeping. Bottled Moguls betting on a better life-the ultimate golden parachute. But they never got the Tonic they ordered, an eternal youth of permanent bliss. Instead, this was their final reward: hauling sludge in Hades.

Clearly, somebody up there had a sense of humor.

What began as a wall quickly became the ceiling, our butts dangling in space. The thought of falling obviously didn’t bother Bobby at all. That’s right, we dead. Following his lead, I worked my way along the overhang, clinging firmly to the least little protrusion, my body molded to the slimy, jagged surface as though making love to it. In a matter of seconds, I was fifty feet above the reactor pool. Looking up, I could see Bobby scuttling into the first opening above the incinerator chute, pushing past leaping Xombies to get inside.

Someone grabbed my leg. Not someone-something: Kasim Bendis. He was back, with the president’s pen wedged between his neck vertebrae. Now he had one more problem: The bone and tissue had fused around it; he would have to break his own neck to get it out.

Trying to talk, he could only make a horrible gargling sound: “Gluurgggaaaaaachhh! Gglarghaaachhhh!”

I tried to pull free, but Bendis had gravity on his side. With one hard tug, he yanked both of us off the wall. Falling, I grabbed hold of the first thing I found: a handful of black tendrils. They stretched long, then instantly recoiled, pulling me upward and dragging Bendis after me.

He swung from my ankle like a trapeze artist, both of us swaying wide over the seething pit. Above us, Brenda was following Bobby toward a shaft of sunlight.

I realized I couldn’t escape. However much I kicked and fought, Bendis was too strong. The only real choice was whether to hang on or let go. The thought of falling no longer scared me, or even made me sad. It was just… irritating. Whatever happened, I couldn’t be hurt, much less killed.

I had a sudden revelation: Even if they reduced me to my bare molecules, I would still exist, and at some point in eternity I would even exist again as myself. Not just once, but infinite times. This was true of everything in the Universe, alive or dead-you didn’t have to be a Xombie. Everything lived forever. The curse of the Xombie was that we remembered.

And suddenly I did remember. I remembered that I was not alone.

Letting go with one hand, I reached over my shoulder and unzipped my Hello Kitty backpack. It was squeezed tightly between us, Bendis’s body now enfolding mine like a hungry starfish around a clam.

“Come on, honey baby,” he said, his charred-bacon lips mashed against my ear. “Won’t you share a little of your sweet nectar with Kasim? So we can both be freeeeeee.”

“Sounds like somebody’s got a sweet tooth,” said a rusty voice from my backpack.

Bendis looked down in surprise, and a jagged set of jaws sprang shut on his face like a bear trap.

It was Fred Cowper. Fred’s hideous head thrashed like a shark tearing at a piece of meat, engulfing Bendis’s entire face. Kasim let go of my body, fighting to pull his head away, but Cowper was relentless. With an explosive snap, his neck tendrils sprang erect, ripping the backpack open and kicking me and Bendis apart. The major clawed furiously, hand over hand, but suddenly he had nothing to hang on to but the slippery cords of Fred Cowper’s severed neck.

Cowper bit his face off. Released to gravity, Bendis plummeted to the reactor pit, bouncing off the marble cladding and into the oobleck. Shed of the weight, I recoiled upward, using the momentum to propel myself over the ledge. Brenda caught me and pulled me in.

“Thanks,” I said.

“What’s a sister for?”

It looked like we were home free, only a short tunnel away from daylight. Bobby was already there, waving us through. But as Brenda and I moved forward, the opening closed around us, folding shut like a giant, spiny sea anemone.

Just before the spines pierced our bodies, Brenda shoved me through the disappearing gap. In doing so, she sacrificed herself, stuck fast by the contracting spikes.

“Run!” she cried. “Run fast!” She held up a small spray bottle, some kind of atomizer, and shot it off. Hissing vapor engulfed her, and immediately her riven body turned human, all punctured flesh dying red.

The spray had an instant effect on the walls, turning the spines to red goop and burning through the connective ichor like a coal fire. A bloody fissure appeared as the blue-black tissues retracted, melting and undermining the mass of rubble. Blood poured down like red paint into the black pool-a lot of blood.

This liquid was literally the building’s lifeblood: thousands of gallons of coolant and hydraulic muscle, pumped at high pressure through branching arteries in the dome wall, a hidden web of living plasma ducts that supported the weight of the ceiling.

As the flesh retreated, the bone framework sloughed away, and the blood broke through. A steaming torrent of gore burst upon the chamber. It resembled a volcanic eruption, a scarlet flow of meat pulp and grinding debris that crushed Xombies and tumbled the steel blast furnace like a tin toy. Crimson sludge battered the hot reactor, causing the banked marble to crack and explode, releasing all its stored energy in one massive explosion. With the entrance portal blocked, there was only one outlet for the enormous pressure: up the shaft of the Washington Monument.

This makeshift chimney prolapsed with a geyser of gore and flame that billowed higher than the original Monument, a false obelisk that obliterated the Xeppelin above. But it was not nearly enough to release the explosive pressure within the mound. For this, the roof itself burst, expelling a jet of superheated gas from its weakest point: the chute above the kiln, our exit, which was the terminal end of the fissure between the mound’s two lobes. This passage now ruptured outward, releasing a fountain of glowing ejecta high into the sky.

Bobby and I rode this bubble of force, cartwheeling upward like scraps of pounded gristle. Soaring far and wide, we were flung clear of the dome to land in the deep mud of the moat.

“Ow,” Bobby said.

Sitting up in the knee-deep scum, we gathered our wits, assessed our multifarious dings, and pulled out the more egregious bits of shrapnel. Actually, the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, but we weren’t going anywhere. The alarm had gone out on us. Xombies and robots were closing in on all sides, even from above-aerial drones swooping in to destroy the saboteurs.

Bobby got up first, trying to drag me by my broken arm. “Come on, we gotta go!’

I got up, willing my bones to mend faster, wobbling forward on the rubbery new shoots. Both of us were hobbled by the mud-the stuff had a life of its own, sucking at us like putrid quicksand. Bobby was fast and light enough to walk above the stuff. It was heavy and slippery, a toxic mixture of clay, soil, radioactive ash, and contaminated rainwater, all churned to a thick gray batter by countless Xombie imagineers. A human being would have quickly floundered, become exhausted, and suffocated like a fly in amber, but we could not tire, could not drown.

Unable to run, we swam, slithering through the muck like salamanders, disappearing from targeting systems so that the incoming missiles missed us, exploding harmlessly in the mud. Reaching dry land, we pulled ourselves from the mire and ran, shedding clods of gunk. It was no use; we were surrounded. As if on command, every Ex had turned away from the Xombie mountain’s majesty, ditching their burdens and charging across the fruitless plain. All descended upon us.

Then they stopped.

The ground shook. A titanic force rocked the mound from within, making it wobble like an immense aspic. Within the Mons, something new was happening. Buried beneath the catastrophic destruction, the steel hatch to the underground silo had warped and cracked. It was a small crack, but still a crack-just enough for a trickle of bloody water to enter, water red as barn paint, which soaked into the pure white powder at the bottom.

The microscopic particles, each one an independent crystalline spore, began locking together, growing, multiplying, building webs of water and protein that mimicked cell membranes, then furnishing those membranes with hardy clockwork. This reconstituted mass, representing the flesh of over four thousand rendered Clears, themselves each a colony organism, expanded like yeasty dough, quickly filling the concrete silo and blowing the lid off. What came out amid the fire and steam was twenty tons of pure id. A literal living will: thought translated to shape, and shape to action.

With a deafening scream, it rose from the breached citadel.

“Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” I said, as all the puppet Xombies and robots went berserk, blinded by the massive electromagnetic discharge, attacking one another or just crashing to earth. Amid all this, something very large and very hard to look at was being birthed from its shell.

“Let’s go,” Bobby said, taking my hand.

I wiped mud off his face. “Go where?” I asked.

“Back to the boats. They’re waiting for us.”

“Okay.”