Walter Greatshell - Apocalypse blues

Bonfires were strewn all over the sea. Approaching the dome, I expected to find it burning, too, or flat as a jellyfish washed up on the beach, but it was still only half-deflated, a lopsided souffle. The lights were off, and it appeared deserted. I had no impression of human life, inside or out. The Voice was silent. Other than me, there was not even a Xombie to be seen, and I had an overwhelming desire just to lie down and join the scenery. I had already forgotten why I was here.

My feet frozen clubs, I slowed to a hobble, entering the towering breach made by the truck. The canopy was noisily tearing itself to shreds in the wind. It was dark inside, the grass crunchy. There were bodies everywhere, stiff with cold as indeed I soon would be, waiting for spring. But something vast was stirring in the emptiness, causing the grassy tundra to heave like a waking leviathan. It was the submarine. The submarine was moving.

I couldn't see it in the near-total darkness, but I could find it easily enough by the escalating biblical cacophony of ice splitting open and volcanic jets of air blasting from every fissure, as well as water boiling up, rising like the tide, to spread in glassy waves across the field. I could feel these things happen as if they were somehow an extension of myself.

With the water lapping over my feet, the Voice said, Follow, and I waded forward into the icy wash, struggling against atrophy. What did it want from me?

Then I paused, sensing something rushing up in the dark, bright as a torch in my consciousness, all teeth and fury. Not a Fury, however. My fading reflexes were too slow to ward it off. A lithe, coarse-haired body slammed into mine, fangs sinking deep into my neck. I spun like a rag doll from the impact but kept my footing, grappling with the creature. Its strength was much greater than my own.

It was Don, the mandrill. And somewhere nearby I could hear a strained whisper urging him on: "Get 'em, Don old boy. Go get 'em. That's a good boy." It was Sandoval, lying half-dead. Don had been protecting him.

The ape was going to tear me apart. There was simply no way I could stop it. He would tear me to bits, and I would never reach the sub. I tried gamely to push on in the hope that he would give up, but he ripped into me even more savagely, an engine of pure wrath. I had no feeling at all about him except an excruciating dreamlike sense of being held back, prevented from attaining my one vital goal.

Then suddenly there was a violent upheaval, and I broke free. That Voice, achingly familiar, spoke to me again: Go, Lulu. Hurry. While ya still can.

It was him, Mr. Cowper, risen to do battle with Don.

He and the baboon were locked in brute combat, wreathed in briny spray that gathered on them like scales and shattered with each blow. I hardly registered the fight-it was Cowper that had my attention, not as my father (I was immune to any such sentiment) but as a walking contradiction. He was neither a neutral presence like me nor shiningly mortal like Sandoval, yet both states coexisted within him, resonating something arresting and perverse: what Langhorne had called Homo perrenius. Only then did I grasp the utter paradox of that. The fleeting aura of life-so delicate that it could not be contained except in fragments of memory-clung to him along with his tattered robes, ennobling and elevating him to an exalted somethingness from which I was barred. Though dead, he had no reason to yearn for mankind. He was whole.

Hurry…

The baboon was gaining the upper hand-Cowper was nearly as frozen as I was, no match against that warm-blooded dervish. It broke his clutching fingers, ripped out his throat, all but tore his head off; but he maintained his grip, granting me time to escape. I moved away as quickly as I could, followed by the sounds of rending flesh and bone, sprinting across the water just as I used to do as a little girl, when rain made lawns into lakes and it was possible to walk on water if you just ran fast enough.

Then I did something very human: I went back for him.

In a few long, loping strides I was upon them, seizing the animal's head under my arm and bending it backward as Cowper and I pinned its body between us. At that moment I felt vibrantly a part of the creature, warm and alive and full of feeling, squeezing it tighter and tighter in an ecstatic desire to merge. Leathery black paws flayed my face as the thrill reached a frenzied peak, then its neck snapped, and the beast went limp. All those overwhelming feelings died with it, leaving a vast hollow gulf in the center of things, across which Cowper and I regarded one another.

In that look, he made clear to me the price of being real: Mortal man's sorrows mercifully die with him, and a Xombie feels no grief. Cowper had no relief on either count. Happiness is a transient feature of youth and purpose-it is pain that accrues over time, tempered only by the ultimate refuge of death. What he had done to me in life was only one of countless sins that would follow him into eternity, forever replenished and compounded by the futility of his existence. Cowper was haunted; he could never escape himself. All he wanted was oblivion. I stepped forward and took his mangled head in my hands.

The boat was sinking, the flower bed splitting open, and dirt trickling down the fissures as gigantic blocks of ice upended, shedding their thin skin of turf. The broad sailplanes, oriented vertically, slowly carved downward into the boiling swell until all that was left above was the bridge, the very top of the sail, where I had spent so much quiet time. Plumes of air shot upward like the spout of a sounding whale as the free-flooding compartments topped off. Almost gone.

I ripped Mr. Cowper's head off.

Tucking it under my arm like a football, I scrambled up and down bucking slabs to the far end of the last iceberg just as the highest point of the submarine vanished in swirling eddies. Mum's extinct voice spoke in my ear, Come on in, sillybean, the water's fine. The ice was closing again with a tumultuous racket, and any second it would swallow me up or grind me to paste between porcelain walls. Far away in the dark, I could hear Sandoval screaming as Cowper's body found him. Untroubled, I stood up straight and let myself fall forward into the menacing surf.

Gone. The boat was gone. My body slipped downward through roiling bubbles, down into that dark where something told me I belonged. Then my free hand chanced upon the rim of the bridge cockpit and grabbed hold. The sub had stopped descending-it could go no deeper here without scraping bottom. Suddenly the giant propeller, the screw, began to turn. Though hundreds of feet away, I could plainly hear its swish-swish as it started to push the enormous bulk in my hand. The submarine began to move forward, pulling me along with it.

Feeling the current like a breeze, I slipped my stiff legs into the cockpit, then braced myself in that little space-a rajah in his elephant howdah-with Cowper's head on my lap. I could very nearly reach up and caress the slowly passing ceiling of ice, while beneath me I straddled a vast tube of warm air and light and unsuspecting humanity. I dreamed I could see myself down there among them, the living me, innocent of time, just celebrating our escape. I was a ghost, but I did not believe enough in my own existence to feel shortchanged. In that way I was content to fade…

Lulu.

That Voice again. It was not Cowper this time-or at least not him alone. Finally, as I leaned over the edge of the bridge, I fully understood the Voice and the collective will it represented.

There in the ocean gloom at the base of the sail I saw them: so many of the guys I had known in life, minus just a few, and many more I didn't know. All of them were wrapped around the fairwater by the cord that had been threaded through their bones, like early seafarers lashed down before a gale. Even Julian was there, clinging tight as a starfish. All my Xombies.