Apocalypso

CHAPTER SIX
REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE

So the days progressed, emulsifying one into the next, until the habits of the world we were creating became ingrained. Not real… but at least routine. Many things needed to be scavenged, so the females were always begging the males to take them “shopping,” which was the pretext by which stores were pillaged for fifties geek-chic costumes and props, Xomboys cooling their heels while Ex-girls posed in outfit after outfit, store after store, with the boys teetering behind them under mountains of boxes and shopping bags. This was multiplied many times over, as there were many boys playing the same roles: nine Archies, for instance, and twice that many Jugheads (the girls were fewer, more closely matching the number of female characters, though Betty and Veronica were disproportionately represented). There were also Fonzies, Beavers, Opies, Charlie Browns, Lucys, Blondies, Flintstones, Jetsons, Bradys, Munsters, Mary Worths, Gidgets, Gilligans, Daisy Maes, Li’l Abners, Richie Riches, Little Audreys, Little Orphan Annies, and Little Lulus. Why the hell, I asked myself, wasn’t I a Little Lulu instead of a fucking Midge?

At the end of every week, the excess goods were distributed throughout the community in the form of gifts. Every Sunday was Christmas in Loveville. In short order, the town was cleaned up, spruced up, and lit up-Officer Arlo Fisk led a delegation of undead nuclear engineers to the nearby Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station, getting the plant going at a small fraction of its capacity… but more than enough for the needs of the town.

On Saturdays, the entire population went to the beach, taking over a cove of the Potomac with our coolers and beach blankets and sun umbrellas. Archies danced around as if the sand was hot, and Reggies rubbed lotion on the girls’ backs. I suffered Ex-Lemuel’s oafish attentions, knowing I was expected to be his fictional “steady,” which was annoying because he took it all a bit too seriously, just as he did the Monday night football games-few of the players he tackled left the field in one piece.

Lemuel had not been the same since drowning in icy slush up at Thule; of all the Dreadnauts, he was always the least pacified by my blood. I would have much preferred spending more time with the aloof Julian Noteiro, but in the persona of brainiac Dilton Doily, he was always busy tending to the technical demands of Loveville. He actually avoided me-he shunned me… so I shunned him right back. But my annoyance grew as this silent treatment continued, until one day I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“What is your problem?” I demanded.

Refusing to look at me, he said, “My problem?”

“Please! Ever since we arrived here, you’ve been very aloof with me.”

“Aloof?” He mulled over the word. “Aloof… hm.”

“It means removed or distant or-”

“I know what it means. Here’s the thing, Lulu: I’m not human. You’re not human. We are a mockery of everything that’s human, our existence is pointless, and we are condemned to live this way forever. And you ask me why I’m aloof?”

“No, I get all that. And I also know you were an aloof kind of guy even before the world fell apart-fine. What I don’t understand is why you have to treat me differently from everybody else. You work fine with others, you talk with others, you make an effort with others. Why do you have to be such a total Xomboid with me?”

“Lulu, I don’t know what you want from me. This whole thing is your idea-I’m just playing my part.”

“My idea? What whole thing?”

“You can cut out the innocent waif act-nobody buys it anymore.”

“No, seriously, what whole thing? You lost me.”

“Are you kidding? Lulu, you’re in command. You brought us here. You gave Langhorne free rein to use us as rats in her mind-control experiment.”

“Me? No! I’m nothing more than a liaison for Fred Cowper. He’s the captain.”

“That head can’t be captain. Fred Cowper did not lead us here. You did.”

“That’s ridiculous. When did this funny farm become my responsibility? I’m not in charge. I’m not qualified to be in charge.”

“Absolutely. That’s why Langhorne’s picked up the slack; she’s the only one willing to step up. That’s why we’re hemorrhaging people right and left.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The new Blues are heading for the hills, we lose a few every day. We’re marooned-no one’s in charge.”

“Well, I don’t hear any suggestions coming from you.”

“Nobody listens to my suggestions. You want advice? Why don’t you go ask your boyfriend?”

“D’uh, somebody talkin’ about me?”

A large hand spun Julian around, and a right haymaker knocked him clean out of his shoes.

“Goddammit!” I yelled. “Stop that, Lemuel! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t help it,” Lemuel said, looking stricken. “I have these feelings…”

“Well, you have to control them! This is getting way out of hand!”

“I know. It’s just that… I think I love you, Lulu.”

“Oh God.”

“I know! It’s impossible. But I can’t help myself. I feel like I’m starving all the time, then if I see you with somebody else, it just makes me lose it, I’m sorry.”

“We’ve all talked about this. It’s only because I’m the last girl you knew before you died.”

“But it isn’t just that! It really isn’t. I really, really love you-I’ve loved you since I first saw you, but the more I got to know you, the more I loved you. And ever since I died, it’s only gotten worse-you’re the only thing I think about, the only thing in the world that can still hurt me. I mean actual, physical pain. You make me feel human. It’s like every cell of my body craves you, and it takes everything I’ve got to restrain myself from grabbing you and holding you and kissing you-”

“I get it, I get it, stop.”

“No! You don’t get it! If you knew what I was going through, you couldn’t treat me the way you do. You would love me back! Please love me, Lulu-you have to love me.” He lunged forward and caught me in his arms. My Maenad flesh recoiled, but Lemuel did not let go.

“Lemuel-oof!-lay off! I told you I can’t love you like that!”

“Yes, you can! You just have to try! I’ll show you!”

Clutching me in his right arm, he used the other to unzip his varsity jacket, revealing a heart-shaped door in his chest. It was silver, elaborately engraved, and in fact was the lid of a fancy music box. Lemuel’s blue flesh puckered around it.

As I watched in dismay, he opened the lid and reached inside.

To the plinking of Bach, Lemuel said, “I give you my heart, Lulu.”

Before I knew what was happening, I felt a cold, slippery object being pressed into my hand. It squirmed like a living creature.

“Now I just need you to give me yours… ”

I was about to leap right out of my skin, when suddenly a large circular saw came out of nowhere and chopped Lemuel’s head off.

It was Julian. He proceeded to cut Lemuel’s still-standing body in half lengthwise, then to remove his limbs from his bisected trunk. It was fast work. Shutting down the saw and flipping up his splattered visor, Julian said, “That oughta hold him for a while.”

“That’s why I don’t bother with girls,” said Sal DeLuca, who was walking by with an enormous submarine sandwich. “They really make a guy go to pieces.” Bystanders laughed.

“Shut up, Sal,” I said, dropping the heart and looking for someplace to wipe my hand. “Why don’t you go do something useful?” As Jughead, Sal did nothing but sleep and eat, seemingly grateful to dispense with all effort.

“Gee whiz,” he said, “have a heart.”

I almost caught him.

On Sundays, everybody went to church, where we learned all about the Father, the Son, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. In the evenings, we held sing-alongs around a bonfire, the officers handing out ukuleles and leading the crowd in Don Ho numbers. Every now and then a rogue Xombie would join the party, but this happened less and less as the weeks went by. The Xombies were pulling out-a mass exodus to the west. The only way to make them stay would have been to inoculate them with my blood serum. Most of these Xombies were male; the female ones were much more elusive, if not gone altogether.

Or so we thought.

One evening in late September, just as the first cool snap came through, I was lying naked on the highest point for miles around: the water tower. I had staked out this spot as the best place to commune with the heavens, and even to a non-Xombie, it would have been a beautiful view-in fact, teens from the surrounding towns had been climbing it for years, as evinced by the graffiti they left behind.

A hundred feet above the ground, I lay spread-eagled on the cold steel surface, my body just as cold and passive as the metal, the flesh of my back wedded to it, using the tower to amplify the stellar chorus-in effect, making myself an antenna, channeling the strange vibrations through hair and toes and fingertips straight to my dead blue heart.

Lulu, a silent voice said. It caused my heart to jump.

Who? What? I asked.

Come away with us. You don’t belong here.

The voice was not coming from above but from below. Peeling myself off the metal, I crawled to the edge of the tower and looked down. Even in the darkness, I could clearly make out figures skittering up the ladder. They were Maenads-female Xombies. More Maenads than I had ever seen.

“What do you want?” I called down.

“To free you,” the leader replied.

“I’m already free.”

“No, you have another purpose.”

“Which is what?”

“To help complete the Hex.”

“The what now?”

“It’s all right, Lulu,” the lead Maenad said, cresting the tower. She was a black silhouette in the moonlight, her skin like metal and her wild hair gleaming like a crown. “We’ll show you.”

Others rose over the edge, fanning out to encircle me, pressing me toward the center. As they closed in, I felt a vestigial tingle that I recognized as fear. The mortal fear of Xombies. For an instant, I even considered jumping off the tower, but then thought, Why? I was as much a monster as any of them; what possible reason did I have to be afraid?

They pressed in on me, getting too close, and I raised my hands to keep our distance. The two Maenads on either side of me took my hands, gripping tightly. My flesh shriveled at their touch, and I twisted wildly to break free. Two more of them seized my kicking feet, and all of a sudden I felt an electric force shooting through me. It surged up my arms and legs like water through a fire hose, jerking my limbs taut, flooding my heart, and filling my head to bursting.

I fell backward, and they fell with me, all of us connected like paper dolls, a web of six-sided figures draped like lace across the steel dome of the tower. Facing the sky, I said, “Oh.”

We were one, linked not just with each other but with other hexagons all over the world. Streaming live and jacked into the Agent X network-the proliferating mass of cyanotic rust that had already infected the human race and was now spreading like wildfire in the iron-rich veins of our very planet. This blue rust was merely the visible manifestation of the indestructible Maenad morphocyte. It was everywhere now, fusing the billions of Maenads into an information complex greater than the entire Internet, drawing power from Earth’s magnetic field. Soon it would be able to focus that power, channel it, exploit it.

But to what end?

As if in answer to my unspoken question, I could suddenly see masses of strange black objects floating in the sky. They looked like enormous embryos-pulsating, alive, and intricately organic. Hundreds, thousands of them were rising off the land like so many spores, rising in streams from multiple sources all over the world.

I didn’t see them with my eyes but with the eyes of a billion others, vast Hexes of Maenads, and as I watched, I could see the first of them actually leaving the bonds of the Earth, pushed by collective thought alone, rising beyond the highest reaches of the atmosphere and accelerating into space. Heedless of gravity, heedless of time.

For that brief moment, I knew everything.

A little later, I was sitting on a second-story ledge over the drugstore, just watching the show. That was what I thought of this experiment of Langhorne’s: It was a play, some kind of performance art, so we might as well enjoy it. All the world’s a stage, I mused, as Julian Noteiro passed beneath me.

In a hurry as usual, Julian sensed my eyes on him and looked up. “Hi, Midge.”

I froze, then dropped from the ledge to the sidewalk. “Whoa,” I said, getting up and brushing myself off, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa-what?”

“I’m sorry?” Julian said, reluctantly pausing.

“Did you just call me Midge?”

“Uh… yes?”

“Let’s get this straight, once and for all,” I said, jabbing a finger in his chest. “Nobody calls me Midge. All right? Midge is not a name, it’s an insect. I may be short, but I refuse to be called Midge for the rest of eternity. I am not Midge. My name is Lulu, get it?”

“Okay, sure, Lulu.”

“Also, I am not ‘going steady’ with Lemuel, in case you were under that impression.”

“You mean Big Moose?”

“No! I mean Lemuel! I’m Lulu, you’re Julian, and he’s Lemuel. My friend Lemuel-not my boyfriend. I didn’t ask for a boyfriend, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I don’t want a boyfriend. Period! Case closed! End of story!”

Without warning, I kissed him.

Apropos of nothing, I leaned forward and kissed him, and it was like two car batteries joined at the wrong terminals: Electricity arced from our lips, our hair crackled, our flesh ran liquid, and boiling acid seethed in our veins. We burned. Flesh sizzled against flesh as every Maenad cell in our bodies recoiled against the forbidden contact.

Julian screamed in pain, fighting to break free. But just when I thought we had to die, to explode, something… the wall burst, the defenses cracked wide, and instead of being forced apart, we fused harder, melting one into the other until I didn’t know where I ended and Julian began… and I didn’t care. At once I understood that there was something beyond the X barrier-something awful and wonderful and utterly strange. Something no one knew about.

Suddenly, a wedge came between us. In a frazzle of molten strands, we were split in two, roots sundered and our gorgeous circuit cleaved apart by Lemuel’s brute sword-actually a NO PARKING sign planted in a can of concrete. While we were still stunned, Lemuel slashed again, chopping Julian’s upraised arm off at the shoulder, then reversed the weapon and clubbed the slighter boy to the sidewalk.

Blind and barely sensible, I tried to intervene, leaping on Lemuel’s back and locking arms around his freshly scarred neck, but what would have crushed a human throat had no effect on my fellow Dreadnaut.

Ignoring me, Lemuel seized Julian by his head and swung him in a circle, leaning against the centrifugal force like an Olympic hammer thrower before hurling him through the drugstore’s plate-glass window.

“Lemuel, Lemuel, stop!” I cried. “It’s just a game!”

The big boy wasn’t listening, still intent on Julian. With manic ferocity, he vaulted over the sill and was hit in midleap by an old-fashioned, enameled-steel candy machine. It cracked his skull like a Goober-filled shillelagh, and as he went down, it struck him again for good measure, thick glass and thicker skull fracturing together in a burst of brain matter and candy-coated peanuts.

“What the hell do you people think you’re doing?” asked Alice Langhorne, setting down the vending machine and helping Julian to his feet. “Oh shit, did you just lose your arm? Unbelievable-that’s gonna take a week to mend. Can’t I even go to the drugstore in peace? Let me tell you, I’m getting a little tired of all the horseplay, people. This is not in the story-there’s no dismemberment in Archie, I can tell you. If this continues, we’re going to have to start taking away privileges. You want to be benched all season? Yes, I’m talking to you, Moose.”

Things were getting out of control.

Lemuel’s jealousy was just the tip of the iceberg: the weekly football games were Coliseums of rampant carnage, two dozen Mooses going berserk on each other, and the lost body parts raked into a pile until their owners could claim them.

Then there was the conspicuous consumption of the Reggies, Veronicas, and Richie Riches, who were engaged in a race to see who could acquire the most stuff, all of them amassing huge stockpiles of worthless “valuables”: jewelry, designer clothes, original art, antique furniture, cars, boats, planes, and enormous estates in which to hoard it all. If one mansion got too cluttered, they took over another.

Likewise, the wasteful appetites of the Jugheads and Dagwoods were depleting the food supply for miles around, and they contributed nothing to the common good except perhaps a comforting example of human repose… and the occasional clever quip.

On the other hand, the blond Bettys were the workhorses of the community, volunteering for the most onerous tasks (such as helping the Veronicas get more stuff) and doing it all with a smile. In fact, the Bettys would have been perfect if not for their unhealthy obsession with the Archies… an increasingly violent obsession, which caused them to do almost anything for an Archie’s attention, such as jump in front of a speeding car or set themselves on fire-especially if an Archie told them to do it.

The Diltons, on the other hand, had no real faults, being the junior problem solvers and tech wizards of the neighborhood-Julian Noteiro was top Dilton. All they lacked was a sense of fellowship; their clinical solutions sometimes lacked consideration for social niceties; they were cold, clinical nerds.

Then there were the Archies.

Archies were the stars of the town, the planets around which all the other stories orbited. An Archie might be hated or he might be loved, but everyone knew that he among us all was the name on the masthead. Archie was the Hero, the Holy Fool, the Boy Next Door, and Jake played him to the hilt. Jake Bartholomew had been born to play Archie-he even looked like Archie.

But there were other Archies out there, and some of these gingers took great license with the brand. Archie is a bumbler, yes, so at first their accidental catastrophes were taken lightly-it was accepted that no vase, sculpture, or windowpane was safe with an Archie nearby, and ladders were acknowledged instruments of havoc. But the harmless blunders soon escalated to unnecessary heights of mayhem: The school science lab exploded, destroying Dr. Langhorne’s research, along with a wing of the building; then a fireworks display went haywire, causing a wildfire that burned down half the village. Both times it was an Archie that caused it.

That was just the beginning: Soon neighboring towns burned, bridges sagged, dams broke, and power lines went down-all in the wake of well-meaning involvement by Archies.

The Weatherbees, Flutesnoots, Grundys, and various other authority figures attempted to rein in these extreme manifestations of “character,” to channel them in more positive directions, but this only led to more opportunities for destruction. By the same token, increasing restrictions and curfews on one Archie just made the others act up. There was talk of eliminating the role of Archie altogether, replacing him with a less-destructive persona. But it was too late; the play had developed its own momentum and could not be controlled. It was like a runaway train, careening faster and faster to some unknown end.

The end came on a Monday night, right after the football game.

After a bad call, the game degenerated into a brawl, with players fighting and hooligans running onto the field with weapons. A tanker truck was driven onto the field, scattering the combatants and smashing through the goalposts before ramming the stands and exploding.

Flaming spectators swarmed down and made it a riot, then the whole population joined in and made it a war. The battle migrated from the stadium to the center of town, everyone savaging everyone else and being savaged in turn. All traces of Archie and the gang were erased. All the nice outfits were ripped to shreds (if not burned away entirely), all the neat houses were trashed, and all the tidy townsfolk were reduced to antic horrors, frenzied skeletons jigging to the music of The Monkees.

Perhaps because of the jukebox, they left the malt shop for last… but finally its time came. As if by some prearranged signal, the mob poured in, breaking down the door and crashing through the windows. The cash register became a weapon; plates and silverware became missiles. The level of crazed destruction was far beyond that of ordinary Xombies-this was violence for the sake of violence, mansized ants attacking each other and spiraling into even more extreme havoc, so that to a human witness, the scene would have been a blur, a chaos-making whirlwind.

“Stop,” I said.

The mob came at me, rearing up with everything it had to slice, dice, and make julienne fries.

“I said stop.” My voice had a power over them; they bumped into it like hitting an invisible wall.

Then the power went out.

Just like that, the lights winked off, the music died. Anything running on electricity clunked to a halt. All at once, Loveville was silent but for the crackling of flames. Somewhere in that silence, a telephone rang-it was the malt shop’s pay phone.

Grumbling, Emilio Monte answered it, saying, “Hello? Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh-no shit. Okay… I’ll tell ’em.”

He hung up and just stood there, ruminating over whatever he had just heard, while everyone else in the room waited expectantly in the dark, frozen in midfight. It was the first time the phone had ever rung. At last, Emilio picked his way through the wreckage of his shop, footsteps clinking on dishes and broken glass.

“Attention,” he said. “I got an announcement to make. That was Arlo Fisk on the phone, calling from the nuclear plant. He says he’s under attack.”

“Under attack! By who?” I asked.

“Another boomer. It’s a French boat-Triomphante-class. Arlo says they entered the reactor facility and routed his team. Says they stole the fuel rods, cleaned the place out.”

“Were they Xombies?” asked the charred corpse of Harvey Coombs.

“No. Just ordinary humans.”

This caused a stir.

Coombs said, “We should go after them!”

Alice Langhorne scoffed, “How? Swim?”

“No! Return to our boat! Get her reasonably shipshape, and start a search pattern.”

“That other sub will be halfway to Africa by the time we do all that.”

“Well, we have to do something. Look at us!”

“Coombs is right,” said Phil Tran. “If we ever want to catch them, we need to act like we give a damn.”

Dan Robles said, “Isn’t acting what we’ve just been doing? And look where it got us.”

I said, “That’s because we’ve been ignoring the elephant in the room. It’s not about us. Our story ended with our human lives. We no longer require care and feeding, and pretending otherwise is frustrating us to madness. Stop acting. Stop trying so hard. We are already free. Let’s focus on freeing them.”

Heads nodded, a change swept the room. Yes, free them, free them.

The tension ebbed like pressure dropping in an airplane, giving way to intense relief. Ravaged ghouls smiled. In letting go our humanity, we briefly felt the joy of being alive.

In minutes, a caravan of vehicles was pulling out of Loveville. For the first time, the town looked truly post-apocalyptic, streets littered with debris, buildings and cars engulfed in flames, fire hydrants spewing. By morning, there would be nothing left.