Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

At first, Sandoval looked upon this ridiculous assignment as truly the last nail in the coffin-who exactly did they think was going to take time out from the struggle for survival to participate in this scavenger hunt? And who would be around to read it?

But during the long nights in limbo, he began to find the idea strangely compelling: that he was at the center of extraordinary events that deserved to be memorialized. It had never occurred to him that all this sad, ugly scrabble for crumbs could be shaped into something coherent… and even majestic. That it only required a historian who could do it justice, a writer who could really milk the situation for all the poetry and pathos it was worth. A writer who could immortalize him, James Sandoval, as a keeper of the flame of civilization. A prophet for a new age.

He thought of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free… ” Yes! That was exactly the kind of writing this situation called for. Unfortunately, Sandoval knew, he wasn’t that writer. And unless by some extraordinary accident he found another Emma Lazarus with the requisite skills to enshrine in poetry or prose such an eternal testament to the unquenchable power of the human spirit, the project would have to languish. Sandoval had other things to worry about.

That was the beginning of the true “isolated pockets” phase of the plague, when all commerce, all movement, seemed to grind to a halt like film jamming in an old movie projector. Telephone, radio, satellite, and computer networks folded simultaneously, leaving an ominous silence that was all too easy to fill in with raging paranoia. Sandoval’s people were reduced to using shortwave radio over the submarine’s transmitter, but without functioning relays or a direct line to SOSUS, this was a feeble candle in the darkness.

Delegations of volunteer fact finders were sent out and never heard from again. They lost half the men this way, and nearly all the company vehicles. The tidbits of news they did hear were all bad:

Population centers worldwide were saturated with Maenad Cytosis and Xombie psychosis, cities rupturing outward like virus-infected cells to spread waves of raving maniacs across the remnants of civilization. Canada was being bombed. Long lists of expired “safe zones” were broadcast, but even while still operational, these were nothing but tracts of remote countryside where truckloads of uninfected females were dumped-huge, open-air refugee farms that resembled POW camps, surrounded by watchtowers and silver briars of razor ribbon. No warm school gymnasiums, cozy church basements, dry armories and civil defense shelters loaded with blankets and hot coffee and donuts. It was all mass hysteria and sudden death. Death at best.

Especially in those early days, Sandoval received all kinds of conflicting instructions from an assortment of increasingly incoherent provisional leaders-those who would talk to him at all-raving about EMP detonations, satellite warfare, alien invaders over Kansas, and the ever-popular Rapture. He knew one man in particular who was making great hay with the religious angle, a former media Mogul named Chace Dixon, who begged him for help he had no power to send. It had been days now since he last bothered tuning in.

In the end, the last acting NATO commander-some third-tier lieutenant in the French Navy-decided that humanity’s last, best chance was to set up a nautical sanctuary in Chesapeake Bay. This cockeyed optimist ordered every survivor to report to Norfolk, where he and his staff were supposedly following orders from the president of the United States-the dead president-to guard some kind of secret project called Xanadu.

It was all nuts. Yet even Sandoval wasn’t immune to these fantasies. He often pictured a simple, nautical existence for the dregs of mankind, coming ashore only when necessary to forage, the way old-time mariners approached uncharted coasts, maybe finding a tropical island somewhere to settle down. Live out your years on fish and coconuts. Swim every day and get a really deep tan. No bills to pay-in fact, forget all about the pain in the ass that was Western Civilization. It was more trouble than it was worth, anyway.

All very delightful, except that Sandoval knew there were precious few island havens. Islands were the first things to go because there was nowhere to run when your women came after you. Most of the islands he knew of were either embattled fortresses or Xombie-infested charnel houses. That such daydreams had taken the place of serious planning was perhaps the clearest possible indication of the end of the world.

Harvey Coombs himself had recommended going to Norfolk in search of whatever seaborne military forces still existed. Sandoval didn’t have the heart to tell him that their real mission was in the opposite direction.

The helicopter landing pad was at the extreme northern tip of the compound, a barren patch of dirt overlooking the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay. As Sandoval pulled up, the fog was so thick he could barely see the black Bell JetRanger. But the pilot saw his headlights and came running to meet the car.

“Can we fly in this?” Sandoval asked.

“Oh yeah, no prob. With GPS, it’s no sweat, and we’ll be flying above the muck anyway-it’s just ground fog. Hang tight for a second while I finish my preflight.”

“You’re the boss.” Sandoval locked himself in the car and plugged in some music. He already owed his life to Stan Velocek several times over, and was accustomed to doing whatever the retired aviator told him to do. As both his personal pilot and bodyguard, Stan went everywhere with him, and the first thing Jim had done when he arrived at the plant was to make sure the man would be well taken care of.

Good thing, too. If it wasn’t for Stan, he would never have survived the expedition to Brown University. None of the other two hundred men who went out there ever made it back to the plant. Jim could still picture that line of company vans and trucks leaving the gate like a military convoy, full of heroic working stiffs-solemn-faced shipfitters and tank rats who had been stirring up revolution and were placated with an offer to seek out lost loved ones outside the gates: all the mothers, sisters, and daughters who hadn’t even been infected when they abandoned them and took shelter in the submarine compound.

They didn’t find anyone… but at least Jim found what he was looking for: Miska’s Tonic.

Well, maybe not the Tonic, the fabled magic bullet-Uri Miska had either been lying about that or destroyed all traces of his work. But Sandoval did get a preliminary version of CORE: Miska’s Cognition-Retention Enzyme.

Though CORE was neither a cure nor a true vaccine, it was a reasonable stopgap, a suitable substitute that Sandoval could sell to his Mogul partners. Snake oil. It was certainly the closest he ever intended to let those bastards come to being gods. There wasn’t much, just a residue on a test sample, but with this they could theoretically make more… as much more as they needed.

His ex-wife, Alice Langhorne, PhD, had told him where to find it. Alice could be a pain in the ass, but she usually came through when it counted. She had hidden the sample in her office high atop the monolithic Brown Science Laboratory, and when they got there, it was just where she said, in the back of the fridge. A copy of Miska’s hard drive was there, too-good girl!

While he was at it, Sandoval would have liked to take another slight detour and visit his father at the Xibalba annex-Miska’s underground hideaway-but it was just too dangerous. He knew where it was, but he had never been inside, and this was not the time to figure it out. Good old Piers Alaric was certainly not going anywhere.