Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

A hundred yards away, the other barge was still at war, still fighting the Xombie invasion. Only by now its deck was literally covered with human remains, great crawling heaps of blasted, smoldering offal, an unkillable killing field. With hordes of fresh meat still coming over the side.

Hundreds of Reapers were lined up on the bottom tier of the cargo pyramid, twenty feet above the carnage and pouring gunfire down on the swarming invaders. The men had an arsenal of firearms laid out behind them, and gun caddies running back and forth, replacing weapons that jammed or got too hot to hold. The shooters had gone through an extraordinary quantity of ammunition, but apparently there was plenty more where that came from. The only danger seemed to be that the pile of creeping flesh would get so high that Xombies could use it as a ramp to reach the upper decks.

"Oh my God," Sal said.

The number of Xombies coming on board was nothing short of amazing-the riverbed must be packed with them. Scanning the whole panorama, his eyes were drawn to the highway bridge just a few hundred feet away, and he stared in amazement at thousands of Xombies choking the span and toppling over the railing into the water. Others were walking into the river from shore, running in like strange, spastic bathers and vanishing from view only to emerge minutes later over the barge gunwales.

Both tugboats had come alongside the embattled barge, and their crews were trying to cut the rope netting hanging over the side, which was the Xombies' point of ingress. In order to avoid being attacked themselves, they had to clear the gunwales with high-pressure fire hoses. A man had managed to barricade himself inside the crane cockpit and was transporting others by sling to the tugboats and a dozen other vessels. Everyone was shouting advice and encouragement. It was also, Sal noticed, a beautiful spring morning.

Sal heard a metal scraping sound.

"Peekaboo, I see you," said a girl's voice.

He turned. It was Lulu Pangloss.

The Ex-girl was dressed in a sailor suit with the casino's gold logo embroidered over the breast pocket. She sat casually in a deck chair, her doll-like face preposterously blue, and her black eyes twice as large as life.

Sal faltered, his back pressed against the rail. "Lulu. Shit. What's… goin' on?"

Voice bright and bottomless, Lulu said, "Quite a view, don't you think?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Think of it as a humanitarian mission," she said. "Free inoculations. Bring the kiddies."

"I thought they… killed you."

"They wish." A smoky giggle.

"I'm looking for Kyle-do you know where he is?"

"I'm right here, bro."

Glancing up to the roof above the patio, Sal was struck dumb in the literal sense-he suddenly found it difficult to form words.

No, he thought. No-hell no!

Perched up there like a parade spectator, with his legs dangling over the side, was Kyle Hancock. The boy was not blue… but he was not human, either. Aside from the half-healed bullet holes in his head, there was an unsettling emptiness about him, a vacuum. Something in his X-ray gaze made Sal feel nakedly exposed, even in that Xombie suit. He couldn't make himself meet those eyes, but those thirsty eyes met him, and he could actually feel them probing and prodding like invisible fingers.

"What happened, Kyle?" Sal asked, mouth dry. "Where's El Dopa and all them?"

"We handled them." Tilting his head toward the other barge, he said, "They over there now."

"Why are you both here?"

"Waiting for you, brother."

"Me? Why?"

"Because I knew you'd come."

"Yes, to save you," Sal said bitterly. "But it's too late."

"I've already been saved, Sal."

"Looks more like the exact opposite."

"I know. It looks strange, but the crawl from darkness is always difficult. Birth pangs are painful."

"You're not Kyle-Kyle didn't talk like that."

"I'm still here, there's just more of me. Kyle was a dot; now he's a line. Yesterday, I was standing where you are, trapped in that point of time, full of the same thoughts and fears. I remember the feeling: It was like being blind and helpless… a tiny flame in a wind tunnel. Scary. I wish you could just trust me, but I know it doesn't work that way."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Lulu cut in: "Feeling better isn't the point. The point is surviving. Going on. That's what what Agent X was invented for: saving your stupid ass from the end of the world."

"Don't you mean causing the end of the world?"

"No. The end of the world is coming from up there." She pointed her dainty blue finger at the sky. "I know you can't see it yet-neither could we. But it's there, like a white ball of dust, getting brighter. Closer every second. Soon it will be brighter than the full moon, and when it hits Earth, it will scour the planet's surface like a billion atom bombs. Nothing will live, nothing will survive it… except maybe us."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The Big Enchilada. Uncle Miska knew about it. A few others did, too, but were forced to keep it a secret. They called it Wormwood. It's a comet, a huge body of ice and debris blasted off one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, in a volcanic explosion."

"The Big Enchilada-oh my God," Sal muttered, shaking his head. "You people are crazy."

"Miska found out about it years ago and dedicated his longevity research to preventing it. He knew no higher lifeforms would survive the impact but that certain primitive bacteria could-the same bacteria that seeded the early Earth. If human cells could be engineered to resemble these bacteria, then mankind might survive-hence, Agent X. He calls it the galactic prophylactic."

"How the hell do you know all this?"

The question seemed to catch them up short. They looked at each other, Lulu cranking her bulbous doll's head completely around, a cherubic nightmare with pigtails.

"I don't know," she said finally. "We just do."

"When's this huge disaster supposed to happen?"

"It could be at any time."

Sal didn't have a clue what to think anymore, his whole foundation of reality having come unstuck. It wasn't just the shock of hearing Xombies speak intelligently, or of learning that Kyle had joined that deathless horde, or even of seeing daylight through the shrinking cavity in Kyle's chest-everything was wrong, ever since Agent X. God had gone wrong, the whole world was inside out, desecrated beyond redemption, and Sal couldn't handle it anymore. He was done playing, he quit, and in quitting, something in him broke loose; the adrenaline drained from his spine like quicksilver, leaving numbness and exhaustion. All he knew for sure anymore was that he wanted no part of this.

Across the water, someone with a megaphone yelled, "Fire! Fire!" At first the men there must have misunderstood, because the shooting increased, but then people started pointing up at the smoke pouring from the container stacks. "Ship's on fire!" the megaphone squawked. "Fire in the hold, fire in the hold! Abandon ship!"

The defensive line collapsed as men started running around like ants, barking orders and screaming that everyone had to reach the boats. This was no small challenge: the Xombie-infested deck had been a rather abstract menace before, an annoying but purely technical problem to be dealt with in good time. Now suddenly it was a moat that they had to ford before they burned to death. And the barge was full of flammable, toxic, explosive cargo-there was no time to lose.

Black smoke began pouring out of the deck hatches and windows. There was a series of metallic bangs from within the pyramid that caused the whole thing to jump, and a hundred smoking holes magically appeared in the metal. Schrapnel whanged like bullets off the deck, and the sea was sprinkled with tiny white splashes. But threaded among those splashes was a white ribbon-the wake of a Jet Ski.