Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

They came to a set of ancient railroad tracks, leading eastward toward the monolithic, upraised trestle, and west down a tunnel of dense foliage. There was a flattened car across the tracks. Sal entered the leafy passage. He didn't know how far they would get before the Xombies caught up, but it was worth a try.

"Where does this lead to?" asked Freddy Fisk from behind.

"A train tunnel, I think. It goes under the whole East Side. If we can sneak back under cover like this, maybe we can pull an end run to the rafts," Sal said hopefully. "Nice call, Kyle."

"My pleasure, man-can we just go?"

Now they were able to pick up the pace though they could only ride single file, and at times the greenery was so thick that they had to push their way through.

"You think there are ticks in here?" asked Freddy G. People hissed at him to shut up. "Haven't you guys ever heard of Lyme disease?"

"Shut the hell up, man."

Freddy decided not to ask about poison ivy.

Bumping along the old railway ties, the boys were hyperalert to any sound or movement in the surrounding woods, but all was silence. It became swampy, the ground a soggy mulch of dead leaves and trash and black mud, the rank material clinging to their tires and flying up behind them in greasy clods. The mulch gave way to puddles, then a continuous oily pool that gradually rose to cover the tracks.

Sal stopped, hanging on to a branch rather than put his feet down. As Kyle pulled up alongside him, he whispered, "Yo. Check it out."

Ahead of them was a yawning black cavern flanked by graffiti-ridden concrete buttresses-an old train tunnel. This was the source of the smoke they had seen. A lazy gray plume still wafted from the darkness. Though obviously condemned and shut up for many years, the tunnel's steel doors had been breached and now stood wide open, like a gateway to some infernal kingdom.

"Should we try calling down there?" Sal asked.

"I don't know," said Todd.

"Well, I ain't goin' in there," said Kyle.

"I know," Sal readily agreed. "It's too bad, though. If we could use this tunnel, we might be able to cross right under the hill without the Xombies ever seeing us. Take a shortcut back to the boats."

"Yeah, but if there are some of them in there…"

"I know. Plus, we have no lights, and we don't even know if it's open on the other end."

"Not to mention it's flooded."

"That too."

"So what now?"

"We have to climb up there to the street." Sal indicated the steep wooded bank.

Kyle looked at the thick underbrush. "With our bikes?" The other boys, who had been gathering behind, looked shell-shocked and utterly whipped-they could barely keep their bikes upright. "It'll take forever for all of us to get up there. The Xombies are comin' now, man. And bet your ass there gonna be more up top."

Sal erupted, "What the hell do you want me to say? We gotta do something! You're the one who-"

As he spoke, he became aware of a hollow rushing sound like the echo from a storm drain. Kyle's eyes flicked past him and suddenly grew wide, fixing on something, their dilating pupils vivid with a pale light of terror. Freddy and the other boys gaped as well, all of them rocked with the same unspeakable fright. Sal turned his head.

It was the tunnel. The thunderous noise was coming from deep within it-the sound of a roaring cataract. It was growing louder every second: some great mass rushing up like a dark tsunami.

"Xombies!" Freddy shouted

The boys broke and ran. Abandoning their bikes, slipping and sliding all over the place, trampling one another into the muck, most of them had no idea where they were going-as long as it was anywhere but there. Only Sal stayed with his bike, dragging it a little way up the bank. "Up here!" he shouted to them. "We have to go this way!"

Then he froze, suddenly aware that something was standing next to him in the bushes. It was something very big, a shadowy human figure half-hidden by the leaves. Alarming enough if it was a Xombie lurking there… but then the thing stepped into a bar of sunlight. The sight of it caused Sal to reel backward on his ass, legs entangled in the bike.

It was not a mindless Xombie-a Xombie would have attacked by now. This was something else, something even more preposterous: a nightmarish hulk assembled from surplus Xombie parts. A hideous Frankenstein's monster crudely patched together with steel stitches. In what he thought was the final second of his life, Sal DeLuca gaped up at the monster's seething form, a crazy quilt of bristling scalps, mottled blue skins, veinous bodily nets and sinews, and, worst of all, a living cuirass of animate human faces, all held together with what appeared to be metal staples. They were staples-what Sal at first took to be a huge, holstered pistol was in fact an industrial-sized staple gun.

"CHEW DUNE, BOA?" the thing roared at him.

Sal fainted.

There was no food, or news. No one came around at all; trash and filth thrown in the corridors just stayed there. The prisoners who had televisions and radios kept them turned way up so everyone could hear, but all the channels were off the air except one, and that one just kept playing a tape loop from the Emergency Broadcast System-some vague warning about a disease causing women to go berserk, which the men already knew. Then the electricity went out. When the cell toilets went dry, the prisoners became very nervous. Sometime in the early morning of the third day, a voice came over the prison loudspeakers:

"Gentlemen, attention. Attention, gentlemen. Wake up, please."

The inmates stirred. Some began to yell. "Who's that? Hey, we need water in here! Who's there? Help! Help us!"

"Attention. I ask for everyone's attention. My name is Bendis, Major Kasim Bendis. I am a professional soldier, and I've come to save your lives."

A gabble of voices echoed down the cellblock: "I told you!" "Get us outta here, then!" "I demand to speak to my attorney!"

Bendis said, "The judges are gone, the attorneys are gone, the guards and police are gone. Everyone you knew on the outside is gone, and you have been left here to die. But I've come to offer you a choice in the matter."

"Just let us out, motherfucker!"

"I can do that. I can do that, and will, if that is your ultimate choice. But if I do that, you will be choosing death. Since my team and I were airdropped here and are now trapped with you, I would prefer that we all survive."

"Airdropped? Who the fuck are you, man, James Bond? Where's the rest of the damn cavalry?"

"There is no cavalry, no National Guard. No rescue-all that is over. Forget your former persecutors and think of yourselves as the rulers of your own destiny. Your own country. Yes, this is your country now. I'm a private contractor working for the company that owns this facility, and I've been sent to help you rescue yourselves. And to do that you have to listen to me. I didn't come here to get us killed, or to make us into more of them-the infected. There are already enough of them out there. And be assured that if I just release you all from your cells, that is what will happen. You are hungry and scared, you are desperate to make some sense of what's happening, so you will try to leave-it's not unreasonable. You will open the gate and expose us to Agent X infection: the Maenad psychosis. They are waiting out there, trust me, and once it starts spreading in here, it will be too late. That would be a terrible waste since you are the lucky ones. You won the biggest lottery of all time, being within these walls, being men, and it's my job to help you make the most of it.

"But I'm not here to make that decision for you. I'm just here to help you make it for yourselves-to advise you. What I need you to do now is pick a representative. Pick someone among yourselves to speak to me, one-on-one, and I will release him. Once he has been fully briefed on the situation, he will pick a council representing the dominant factions among you, and together they will assume full control of the penitentiary. As I said, I am only here in an advisory role-you are in charge. So choose your government."