Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

Making for the inner gate of the camp-the triple-fortified central compound that contained the main cellblock-Righteous and Voodooman found themselves once again falling in with a fleeing mob, but here there were fewer crazies to be seen, perhaps because all the spectators had reflexively run the opposite way and were bottled up down at the exit. This was a much smaller crowd, mostly prisoners and trusties, not a single one of them female, and some even armed.

The gate guards watched stupefied as men poured through from the farm, unsupervised and completely out of order, babbling incoherently about crazy women and blue devils. The guards didn't try to stop or interrogate them-leave that for the block captains and the warden, wherever he was. The quick-response team had already been dispatched to the arena with tear gas as well as more lethal munitions. Clad in their imposing black riot gear and shields, resembling a Roman cohort, they'd mop up any trouble quickly, and the prisoners knew it. Emergency procedure during a jailbreak was first and foremost to get everybody under lockdown, and these boys were obviously eager enough to do that for themselves.

Voodooman and Righteous Weeks were another story: Two convicts riding into a restricted area on the warden's prizewinning stud was a clear violation of something, and the guards were quick to draw down on them. "Stop right there!" they shouted. "Get down off'n that horse!"

"You gotta close the gate!" Marcus shouted, jumping to the ground. "They're right behind us!"

Ignoring Marcus, the second guard shouted up at Weeks, "What you think you doin', boy, bringin' that horse up here? Take that back where it belongs."

There was a sudden influx of men streaming through the gate, running wild-eyed from the not-yet-visible threat at their heels, no one wanting to be last in line.

"Can't you see they're almost here?" Marcus screamed, as much to his fellow inmates as to their keepers. "Shut the damn gate before it's too late!"

"Too late for what?" the senior guard scoffed. "All I can say is, you both better have the warden's permission to be riding that horse, I tell you what."

"We do! He sent us to tell you to close the gate!"

"Is that right? Why don't I ask him that?"

"He ain't here!"

"He damn sure is."

A manic, burly figure came rushing out of the darkness. People scattered out of his way, not for the usual reason that he was the warden, but because something was clearly wrong with him. Even from a distance, he looked like a rabid animal.

"Warden!" the guard said in alarm, leaping to help him. "You okay? I was just-"

With brutal force, the guard was slammed backward to the ground, the tails of Warden Henrickson's wool coat covering them both like a cape as Officer Shoney's breath was sucked from his lungs.

Utterly stunned, the second guard stood by helplessly, waiting for something to make sense. Marcus knocked him down and wrestled his shotgun away, shouting, "Everybody inside! Just go!" Righteous rode the stallion through the gate, forcing an opening in the packed mob, followed closely by Voodooman, dragging the guard, and a few dozen stragglers.

Then there was no more time-the men inside heaved the high, sliding gate shut against the cries of frantic late-comers, who were racing up the hill with nightmarish freak jobs all around them. "Please God, let us in!" someone shrieked.

"You can't just leave them out there!" one of the prisoners yelled.

Voodooman leveled the shotgun on him, on everyone, forcing the crowd away from the fence. "Ain't nobody touches that gate. All right? Nobody touch the gate!"

"What the hell we supposed to do now?" asked Righteous.

"Go inside and wait until the SWAT team arrives."

"More like the National Guard."

"Or the mo'fuckin' Yoo-nited States Marines. Damn!"

The peals of terror from outside seemed to rouse the guard from his stupor. Shaking free of Voodooman's grip, he grabbed his rifle back, and shouted, "Everyone to your cells! Go back to your cells and wait there!" He shuddered, then suddenly vomited on his shoes. Trembling, flinching at the sounds outside, he wiped his mouth, and said, "Everything's under control! Everything's under control! Return to your cells at once."

No one made any argument.

The American shore, ominously dark as any cannibal coast, was visible in the moonlight as pale cliffs above a thin white hem of breakers. Commander Harvey Coombs knew there were supposed to be houses up there-the famous Newport mansions-but he couldn't see a thing, not a single light. Nor had he seen any other towns or cities: Falmouth, Fall River, New Bedford-all the teeming port settlements of southern New England were dark. To look upon that black coastline now was like peering down a tunnel through the ages. Seeing it the way it hadn't been seen in centuries.

Pilgrims, thought Coombs, lowering his binoculars. We're pilgrims.

That was it exactly. This was now the wilderness, the New World.

Coombs rubbed his puffy eyelids as if to remind himself that he was awake, was not dreaming. The freshly stitched incision on his forehead was real enough; the hole in his skull still hurt. Now that he had no clear mission objective anymore, the events of the past few months were growing in his mind like a tumor, a festering glut of unthinkable knowledge that kept gaining mass and crowding out the consolations of faith, hope, or rational thought.

How could it have happened? Agent X, the Xombie horror, Thule and the grim paradise of the Moguls, and now… what? There could be no homecoming, no end of the journey. Somehow he had found himself commanding not an Ohio-class submarine, not a U.S. naval vessel at all, but a nuclear-powered ghost ship, a modern Flying Dutchman, haunted, lost, and forever doomed to sail a dead sea.

In some part of him, Coombs had expected to come back and find America alight and sane like a beacon on the horizon, though continuous monitoring of every broadcast frequency revealed only dead air, the vacant hiss of static. Even the ambient sounds of the Atlantic Ocean were returned to a primeval state, devoid of human echoes. That pervasive churn of marine technology so familiar to submariners was gone. There was nothing to hear out there anymore but the random clicks and rasps of fish. That and the stealthy rhythms of his own boat. But still he had nurtured this irrational spark that some remnant of America would be waiting for him, like a candle in the window.

But no. It was over. It was truly all over. And in that case, what in God's name were they doing? Every one of them was already dead, they just wouldn't lie down.

Like Xombies.

But what else was there?

His headset crackled: "Commander Coombs. Dr. Langhorne requests permission to speak with you."

"Tell her I'm coming down." He spoke the words with the dry mouth of a man descending into a catacomb, a chamber of horrors. That's what the boat was to him now: a 560-foot-long steel tomb. Harvey Coombs was not a man who had ever put much stock in the supernatural. He was not superstitious or particularly religious beyond what was expected of any career-oriented, socially well-adjusted military officer. In his rational being he had no frame of reference for all that had happened in the four months since he had been assigned command of this nameless ship-his first and last command. He could not comprehend Purgatory, or Hell, or The End of the World. But there was a word for the mood that pervaded this boat and its crew: "dread." Death was afoot belowdecks, quite literally, and the living suffered its unspeakable presence in duty and purest dread.

Dread not, he mused. Dread not, dread naught, dreadnought. Dreadnaut-he had to smile at that one: Jason and the Argonauts, meet Lulu and the Dreadnauts. Not exactly the stuff of Greek legend; it sounded more like a cheesy cover band. And they already had one of those aboard.