Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

Langhorne loomed above him, taller and more buff than he was, harshly competent and a good ten years older. Her hair was a platinum flattop, a razored shock of glass needles that jutted from her scalp like a crown. Like everyone else on board, she had a bandage on her forehead where the Mogul tracking implant had been removed-she was the one who had removed them. Without benefit of anesthetic.

For a woman in her fifties, Langhorne radiated a certain intensity. Among the men, she had already developed quite a reputation as a ballbuster, but Coombs was grateful for her confidence, her powerful sense of purpose, which was something he desperately needed right now. They all did.

"What do you think?" she said to him impatiently. "The plan, Sherlock. We're almost there, aren't we? We need to go over the plan."

"We can't have a plan until we know where to land. Right now we don't even know if the bay is navigable. We won't know that until we can see out there, and that won't be until sunrise."

"It's not that complicated. Just get this boat as close to the city as you can, blow up a rubber raft, and these guys will do the rest."

Captain Coombs looked at the slack-jawed Xombies, aimlessly milling around and staring off into space. Now that they were actually approaching their destination, it troubled him to think Langhorne might be wrong, that he had let himself get caught up in her delusion. Plan my ass. Maybe they should just scuttle the sub right now and be done with it-the end result would be the same. "You really think these things are going to be able to get ashore and execute a complex mission?"

"They can hear you, by the way; they're dead, not deaf. And they're not stupid, they're just a little… slow. Think of them as severely depressed." She smiled grimly. "But then, aren't we all?"

"Okay, great, but have you actually talked to them? I mean about doing this? Are they even capable of understanding?"

"Yes. They don't say much, but they're willing, or at least they're fairly suggestible. Can't you tell? They're more coherent than they look. The problem they have is that they're being bombarded with new sensations-every cell of their bodies is lit up like a Christmas tree from the Maenad infection, and it's overwhelmingly euphoric. They're stoned. The modified X enzyme in Lulu's blood acts as a depressant, bringing them down enough to function, but they do need supervision. That's why we'll have a video data link to guide them along the way. The only problem is the time factor: They have no sense of time, and if they're not back within eighteen or twenty hours, the inoculation will wear off, and we'll lose control of them-that is, they'll lose control of themselves. Either way, we'll never see them again."

"Most people on this boat would look upon that as a good thing."

"Yes, because they're morons. These guys are our only connection to dry land-maybe you'd like to try stepping ashore yourself and see what happens."

"No thanks. What makes you think they'll be able to find what they're looking for, this supposed vaccine? Miska's so-called Tonic? I thought he destroyed everything-and what he didn't destroy, the Moguls already picked over."

"The Moguls didn't know Uri Miska like I did. They financed his longevity research, but they didn't work with him every day for ten years. They didn't know everything we were doing, or everywhere we were doing it." She said this with bitter satisfaction, having married and divorced a Mogul, the now-deceased James Sandoval, whose naval contracting firm had refurbished the submarine for exclusive Mogul use.

As if thinking aloud, Alice Langhorne muttered, "Professor Miska had secrets-secrets he obviously kept from everyone, including me. I admit it. The son of a bitch had his own agenda, no question about that." She looked at the angel-faced corpse in its glass casket, and Coombs thought he detected a gleam of welling tears. "Agent X was just the tip of the iceberg, I can tell you that," she said. "We still know a few things, don't we, baby? Oh yes. We've still got a few tricks up our sleeve…"

Commander Harvey Coombs, captain of what was likely the world's last active nuclear submarine, and probably the highest-ranking American naval officer left on the planet (even discounting his emergency field promotion to admiral, which he did), now looked at the troubled face of Dr. Alice Langhorne, perhaps the last surviving PhD, the last scientist, maybe even the last woman, and thought, She is nuts.

And then: Hey, pal, join the club.

Incomprehensibly vast as the horror was, it began with that most mundane of human annoyances: the persistent ringing of telephones. Seemingly at the exact stroke of midnight, Eastern Time, 911 phone banks began lighting up all over the country-indeed, all over the world. The extraordinary volume of calls would certainly have swamped the ability of emergency call centers to respond, had their operators been capable of responding, but they were not. Such call centers, staffed predominantly by women, were early casualties of the Maenad craze.So the phones rang and rang, unanswered.

Therefore, if the events of New Year's Eve do in fact represent the Apocalypse of biblical prophesy, as some have suggested, then it may truthfully be said that the Angel Gabriel did not herald the end of the world by blowing a trumpet. He notified us by phone. -The Maenad Project Sal DeLuca lay on a steel bed, dreaming of a steel beach.

He dreamed of sitting in fluorescent green twilight on dunes of granulated steel, surrounded by an immense steel cylinder that rose fifty feet above him, its top open to a corrugated metal sky. Sal wasn't alone. There were other boys there: his buddy Ray Despineau, Hector, Rick, Tyrell, Sasha, Shane, Jake, Julian, and more. He knew them the way one gets to know people one has been cooped up with in difficult circumstances for almost a month. He knew them too well.

Working at Finishing was not like working at a lot of the other departments in the plant. It was dirty. You had to wear Tyvek coveralls, goggles, and a respirator. The coveralls started out white and turned black. You had to climb the rickety scaffolding again and again, lugging all your equipment, moving up and down inside that hull segment like a cockroach in a garbage can. You took your breaks sitting on cold piles of lead-colored, lead-heavy blasting grit. Worst of all, it was a complete waste of time: This huge vertical cylinder on which the boys tested every pneumatic tool known to man-drilling, gouging, grinding, blasting-was intended to house the command-and-control module-the CCSM deck-of a Hawaii-class nuclear submarine. But it never would; that sub would never be finished. No matter how much work they put into it, the thing would just sit here in its blasting cell, slowly rusting away, monument to the imperatives of a powerful, lost civilization.

"This blows," said Kyle, a strikingly handsome sixteen-year-old with intricately cornrowed hair. His mother had braided it, and he refused to touch it-as though, if he waited long enough, she might return. "What good is this? We ain't never gonna need to know how these things are made. We're never gonna build one; nobody ain't never gonna build one ever again. This is just busywork to keep us… busy."

From high up on the scaffold, a voice boomed down, "Busywork?" It was Mr. Albemarle. Big fat Ed Albemarle, supervisor of the Finishing Department. "Did I hear someone say they want to trade places with somebody on the outside?" he bellowed. "Because I guarantee you there are plenty of folks out there who would jump at the chance."

"No, sir. I just don't understand what good it'll do us to know the difference between pastel green and mare island green, or how to mix epoxy for sound damping or relagging or nonsweat-"