Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

As I watched in dismay, he opened the lid and reached inside.

To the plinking of Bach, Lemuel said, “I give you my heart, Lulu.”

Before I knew what was happening, I felt a cold, slippery object being pressed into my hand. It squirmed like a living creature.

“Now I just need you to give me yours… ”

I was about to leap right out of my skin, when suddenly a large circular saw came out of nowhere and chopped Lemuel’s head off.

It was Julian. He proceeded to cut Lemuel’s still-standing body in half lengthwise, then to remove his limbs from his bisected trunk. It was fast work. Shutting down the saw and flipping up his splattered visor, Julian said, “That oughta hold him for a while.”

“That’s why I don’t bother with girls,” said Sal DeLuca, who was walking by with an enormous submarine sandwich. “They really make a guy go to pieces.” Bystanders laughed.

“Shut up, Sal,” I said, dropping the heart and looking for someplace to wipe my hand. “Why don’t you go do something useful?” As Jughead, Sal did nothing but sleep and eat, seemingly grateful to dispense with all effort.

“Gee whiz,” he said, “have a heart.”

I almost caught him.

On Sundays, everybody went to church, where we learned all about the Father, the Son, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. In the evenings, we held sing-alongs around a bonfire, the officers handing out ukuleles and leading the crowd in Don Ho numbers. Every now and then a rogue Xombie would join the party, but this happened less and less as the weeks went by. The Xombies were pulling out-a mass exodus to the west. The only way to make them stay would have been to inoculate them with my blood serum. Most of these Xombies were male; the female ones were much more elusive, if not gone altogether.

Or so we thought.

One evening in late September, just as the first cool snap came through, I was lying naked on the highest point for miles around: the water tower. I had staked out this spot as the best place to commune with the heavens, and even to a non-Xombie, it would have been a beautiful view-in fact, teens from the surrounding towns had been climbing it for years, as evinced by the graffiti they left behind.

A hundred feet above the ground, I lay spread-eagled on the cold steel surface, my body just as cold and passive as the metal, the flesh of my back wedded to it, using the tower to amplify the stellar chorus-in effect, making myself an antenna, channeling the strange vibrations through hair and toes and fingertips straight to my dead blue heart.

Lulu, a silent voice said. It caused my heart to jump.

Who? What? I asked.

Come away with us. You don’t belong here.

The voice was not coming from above but from below. Peeling myself off the metal, I crawled to the edge of the tower and looked down. Even in the darkness, I could clearly make out figures skittering up the ladder. They were Maenads-female Xombies. More Maenads than I had ever seen.

“What do you want?” I called down.

“To free you,” the leader replied.

“I’m already free.”

“No, you have another purpose.”

“Which is what?”

“To help complete the Hex.”

“The what now?”

“It’s all right, Lulu,” the lead Maenad said, cresting the tower. She was a black silhouette in the moonlight, her skin like metal and her wild hair gleaming like a crown. “We’ll show you.”

Others rose over the edge, fanning out to encircle me, pressing me toward the center. As they closed in, I felt a vestigial tingle that I recognized as fear. The mortal fear of Xombies. For an instant, I even considered jumping off the tower, but then thought, Why? I was as much a monster as any of them; what possible reason did I have to be afraid?

They pressed in on me, getting too close, and I raised my hands to keep our distance. The two Maenads on either side of me took my hands, gripping tightly. My flesh shriveled at their touch, and I twisted wildly to break free. Two more of them seized my kicking feet, and all of a sudden I felt an electric force shooting through me. It surged up my arms and legs like water through a fire hose, jerking my limbs taut, flooding my heart, and filling my head to bursting.

I fell backward, and they fell with me, all of us connected like paper dolls, a web of six-sided figures draped like lace across the steel dome of the tower. Facing the sky, I said, “Oh.”

We were one, linked not just with each other but with other hexagons all over the world. Streaming live and jacked into the Agent X network-the proliferating mass of cyanotic rust that had already infected the human race and was now spreading like wildfire in the iron-rich veins of our very planet. This blue rust was merely the visible manifestation of the indestructible Maenad morphocyte. It was everywhere now, fusing the billions of Maenads into an information complex greater than the entire Internet, drawing power from Earth’s magnetic field. Soon it would be able to focus that power, channel it, exploit it.

But to what end?

As if in answer to my unspoken question, I could suddenly see masses of strange black objects floating in the sky. They looked like enormous embryos-pulsating, alive, and intricately organic. Hundreds, thousands of them were rising off the land like so many spores, rising in streams from multiple sources all over the world.

I didn’t see them with my eyes but with the eyes of a billion others, vast Hexes of Maenads, and as I watched, I could see the first of them actually leaving the bonds of the Earth, pushed by collective thought alone, rising beyond the highest reaches of the atmosphere and accelerating into space. Heedless of gravity, heedless of time.

For that brief moment, I knew everything.

A little later, I was sitting on a second-story ledge over the drugstore, just watching the show. That was what I thought of this experiment of Langhorne’s: It was a play, some kind of performance art, so we might as well enjoy it. All the world’s a stage, I mused, as Julian Noteiro passed beneath me.

In a hurry as usual, Julian sensed my eyes on him and looked up. “Hi, Midge.”

I froze, then dropped from the ledge to the sidewalk. “Whoa,” I said, getting up and brushing myself off, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa-what?”

“I’m sorry?” Julian said, reluctantly pausing.

“Did you just call me Midge?”

“Uh… yes?”

“Let’s get this straight, once and for all,” I said, jabbing a finger in his chest. “Nobody calls me Midge. All right? Midge is not a name, it’s an insect. I may be short, but I refuse to be called Midge for the rest of eternity. I am not Midge. My name is Lulu, get it?”

“Okay, sure, Lulu.”

“Also, I am not ‘going steady’ with Lemuel, in case you were under that impression.”

“You mean Big Moose?”

“No! I mean Lemuel! I’m Lulu, you’re Julian, and he’s Lemuel. My friend Lemuel-not my boyfriend. I didn’t ask for a boyfriend, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I don’t want a boyfriend. Period! Case closed! End of story!”

Without warning, I kissed him.

Apropos of nothing, I leaned forward and kissed him, and it was like two car batteries joined at the wrong terminals: Electricity arced from our lips, our hair crackled, our flesh ran liquid, and boiling acid seethed in our veins. We burned. Flesh sizzled against flesh as every Maenad cell in our bodies recoiled against the forbidden contact.

Julian screamed in pain, fighting to break free. But just when I thought we had to die, to explode, something… the wall burst, the defenses cracked wide, and instead of being forced apart, we fused harder, melting one into the other until I didn’t know where I ended and Julian began… and I didn’t care. At once I understood that there was something beyond the X barrier-something awful and wonderful and utterly strange. Something no one knew about.