Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

"We gotta get indoors!" Freddy shouted.

"We gotta make a run for it!" yelled someone else.

Kyle roused himself. Abandoning the mess of body parts that were still inextricably clutching his older brother-his soul brother, his best friend and last living family member-he cried, "Everybody on your bikes, let's go!"

That's it, isn't it, Dad? We're all going to die?

Everybody dies sometime, Sal. And if they're lucky, they stay dead.

Once again, Sal DeLuca was riding for his life. It was literally an uphill battle. When he'd rashly conceived this plan, he had no idea how soon his legs would start giving out, but he took strength in knowing that every inch he climbed would at least be rewarded with an effortless downhill glide on the return journey. He was sweating and dizzy from carb and caffeine overload-he never ate that kind of stuff.

Transit Street was shady and tree-lined, narrow as an old cart path, with quaint, pastel-colored historical houses arrayed on either side. The road was not particularly steep, but Sal might as well have been pedaling up Mount Washington-this was the first time he realized how much of a wreck he'd become. Had he been able to weigh himself, or look in a mirror, he would have been shocked at the sunken-eyed wraith staring back at him. Since the end of the world, he had lost nearly a third of his body mass.

Sal didn't know the College Hill district very well, having grown up miles away in South County, but he had been to Providence enough times to have some sense of its geography. This was the hilly part-he knew that much. Beyond that, he had to rely on the map and his own sense of direction. East, west, north, south-those he could handle. Up and down he was learning as he went along.

His intuition (and the map) told him that heading west up Transit was a smart move: Xombies were drawn to population centers, so it made sense to get off the main drag and into quieter neighborhoods. He could lure the creatures in after him and use the cobblestone maze of Colonial-era city planning to confuse them, slow them down-they didn't have maps to find their way out.

Sal knew he didn't dare head too far in that direction, though, because Phil Tran had told him that Lulu and the rest of Dr. Langhorne's "subjects" were foraging somewhere around here. Benefit Street was highlighted in red on his map, with the scrawled warning, TO AVOID. Sal was in full agreement with Phil on this point. The last thing he needed was to run into those things, however harmless they were said to be.

His plan was simply to pull a Pied Piper routine, clear the road for Russell and the other guys to get a head start in the opposite direction, then ditch the deadheads and loop back around to rendezvous with his team at India Point. From there they could follow bike paths along the waterfront all the way back to the rafts.

Easy as pie… in theory. What his map didn't show was that Brook Street was in a trough, a former creek bottom from which it had derived its name, and that by turning up Transit he would be hill-climbing at the same time as he was acting as live bait for hordes of the undead. Nice going, Scout, Sal thought ruefully. So much for that merit badge. He could only hope the other guys were having an easier time of it.

At least one part of Sal's plan was an unqualified success: The Xombies were coming. They had heard his singing and were swarming out after him like hornets from a disturbed nest, following hard on his wheels. He didn't dare look back, but he could hear them behind him, a gathering roar like the tide.

The Xombies are coming!-that was the crazed thought that ran through his mind like the ravings of a demented Paul Revere. The Xombies are coming, the Xombies are coming!

Then the sight that he had been expecting and dreading: more Xombies in front of him, trying to cut him off-half a dozen jittering blue monstrosities coming over the crest of the hill.

But Sal had prepared an exit strategy. Riding straight at them, he cut right up a cobblestone alleyway-and found himself on an even steeper hill. Oh, man! It had looked so good on paper! As he gunned forward, standing on his pedals, he barely had time to react as a small Xombie with only half a head lunged out of a driveway at him. Oh no you don't! Swerving hard to avoid its grasp, boosted by a screaming rush of adrenaline, Sal darted willy-nilly between houses and yards, jumping his bike up and down curbs and porch steps as the grotesque thing skittered close behind.

Suddenly he was cornered. It was going to get him; he had no choice. A veteran trespasser, Sal had been in similar circumstances before, chased not by Xombies but by vicious dogs or irate homeowners, and in his everyday life had taken to carrying a can of pepper spray when he went riding on private property. He didn't have his trusty spray can now, but Phil Tran had smuggled him something even better.

Don't use it unless you absolutely have to, Phil had whispered, slipping the cloth-wrapped package into Sal's coat pocket. The sound will give you away, so it's only to be used as a last resort. It might buy you a couple of extra seconds.

It was Lieutenant Tran's personal sidearm: a Navy-issue.45-caliber automatic pistol, loaded for bear with explosive dumdum bullets. Don't forget to release the safety, Tran had added. And don't shoot your own foot off.

I won't, Sal had said. Thanks, man.

As the creature's flailing blue hand caught the back of Sal's jacket, yanking him up short, he twisted around and rammed the gun into the center of its chest. The revolting, half-faced thing pushed right back against the muzzle, heedless, headless, its cratered skull healed over and smoothly misshapen as some abstract Modernist sculpture, with a dirty blond pigtail on one side. A weird tentacle of raw flesh lashed out of its open gullet at him.

BANG! Having never fired a gun in his life, Sal wasn't quite prepared for the recoil, which sent a painful shock up his whole arm. The force of the concussion knocked him and the Xombie apart, blasting a fist-sized hole through the creature and bowling it backward to the ground. Without waiting to see if it would rise again-he knew it would-Sal shot it again, then unloaded on the next nearest attackers before leaping his bike into motion.

All of a sudden another loud bang rang out-a string of echoing bangs, rattling the house windows and shaking the ground. Not gunshots, but explosions. A fast sequence of blasts, powerful as thunderclaps, coming from over the hill-from the direction of Benefit Street. Whoa, Sal thought, feeling that he had triggered the explosions somehow, that something was answering his shots.

No time to think about it. The pursuing Xombies froze in their tracks to listen, bodies cocked like alert dogs, and Sal didn't waste the opportunity. In an instant, he was through the alley and over the hump, turning right onto the next street and blazing downhill with the wind cooling his sweat.

Q: What makes them look so bad? A: Well, the grisly complexion is because their bodies have been deprived of oxygen. They're cyanotic. That's a precondition for Maenad infection-it can't work in the presence of oxygen, which is why Xombies must strangle or otherwise suffocate their victims. We think that's part of why they behave as they do, because their brains are damaged from lack of oxygen in the few minutes prior to the disease taking over. After that, nothing can hurt them, but whatever brain function they lose in those first minutes is critical.

Q: Then how did living women become infected in the first place? A: That's the big mystery. Tests show that most women's hemoglobin has a far greater susceptibility to Agent X infiltration than men's, which means the disease has been spreading longer, perhaps building up in their systems until it reached a kind of critical mass. But why the disease should have become virulent all at once, worldwide, is something we don't understand. It may be connected to the lunar cycle, or it might suggest that it was deliberate, like a timer going off. Q: Are you suggesting it was an act of terrorism? A: Anything's possible. One of the worst tragedies of this thing is how every female, whether infected or not, was immediately declared a menace-we'll never know how many millions of them were needlessly quarantined, driven from their homes, or killed outright. In this way, we exacerbated the Xombie crisis far beyond the problem of the plague itself, which could not destroy us as long as there was one immune female somewhere out there-and there may have been many. In condemning them all, we abetted our own extinction.