Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

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.