Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

Rifles? Chace thought. Since when had Xombies ever carried guns?

They were so damn fast, it was already too late; most of the sentries never saw what hit them. As Chace started to give the order to fall back, he spotted more inhuman creatures rushing in from behind the Memorial, cutting off his escape route-it looked like hundreds of them. They whipped across the stage like a high wind, snatching his men off their feet and spiriting them into the dark. Seemingly no one was immune.

Chace ordered someone to hand him the microphone. As he started to speak, the marching band struck up a slow number, “Greensleeves,” and he realized the musicians had all been replaced by a band of naked Maenads.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. We’ve been wimps, and God is justly punishing us for our weakness. Women pretend to be weak in order to gain sympathy, but there is a difference between being weak and being willing. They desire to be seduced; it’s their nature. Come on now, this is no surprise. Their unclean loins are instruments of Satan’s will-always have been. Women are too easily possessed… and they too easily possess us, leading us into sympathy and temptation, using our charity against us, making us their minions. And Satan laughs to collect our souls. Look around you! How many millions of men have joined the Enemy because they hesitated in the face of a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife? That is why Satan loves the ladies! They are his public-relations dream team, his spokesmodels. As men of purity, we must be immune to their witchcraft. Because that’s what it is, people; let’s be real. Faith is no longer required for belief. We are in the time of Revelation, it’s no fairy tale, and we can no longer hide from the inconvenient truth: The only Global Warming we need worry about is the fire down below. Witches and demons roam the Earth. The Antichrist himself is afoot, raising his army for the last battle. As soldiers of God, we have inherited a mission, to purify this land and make of it a kingdom worthy of the Savior’s return, so that He may lead us in the final battle between Heaven and Hell. The greatest mission ever known. The second-greatest story ever told, but the greatest mission ever known… and the soul you save may be your own. As much as we would all like to practice compassion on these miserable creatures, we simply don’t have that right. Such days are past. There have been holy women, yes, but they most of all would tell you it is Woman’s affinity for sin that brought Man’s fall from grace, and Woman’s appetite that has again destroyed us. From now on, their appetite for our dutiful souls must be matched by our appetite for their blood!”

While he was talking, his bodyguards started to slip away. Attempting to stop them, Dixon felt a cold hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t leave now, man,” said the spitting image of Elvis Presley. “The show’s just gettin’ started.”

Unhinged with rage, Chace said, “Go back to Grace-land,” and stuck a commando knife into Elvis’s heart. He stabbed him again and again, venting all of his frustration and terror on this charlatan, following the King to the floor until absolutely sure he was dead.

It felt good to lie there for a moment and catch his breath. There was pain now, a deep sorrow for all that was gone, but also relief. Chace sobbed a little for his long-lost mother. She had been such a decent, hardworking soul, salt of the Earth, and as a child he had always hoped to make her proud. But she learned of the sickness in his soul when she caught him with another man, and it was not something she could either forgive or forget. She never spoke to him again.

“Come on, sir! This way!”

It was one of Kasim Bendis’s tin soldiers, a handsome young man, half out of his mind with fear. Dixon allowed himself to be hustled into the cover of the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of green troops were making a last stand against the encroaching blue enemy.

As the snipers fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, they were astonished to find themselves under fire. Some of these men were accustomed to fighting Xombies, even crafty Maenads… but not armed ones. For the first time ever, the Hellions were shooting back! It was a very discouraging development since everyone knew Exes could not be killed, only damaged enough to temporarily slow them down. Then, hopefully, one could dismember them at leisure; crush them, freeze them, burn them to a puddle of black tar. But if they had guns… well, a guy simply stood no chance.

“This can’t be happening!” men cried, and, “We’re immune, we’re immune!”

On every side, surprised men were shot, clubbed, or stabbed by Xombies. Some shot themselves, witnessing that hopeless scene of Xombies firing guns, Xombies riding motorcycles, Xombies driving trucks. One was even wearing a flamethrower.

As Chace watched the last of his forces go down and the Maenads overrun their positions, he was approached by the last person on Earth he needed to see just then. It was Jim Sandoval. Sandoval’s guards had disappeared, and the man looked calm and utterly cheerful amid the wholesale panic. “Isn’t this something?” he said brightly. “Look at ’em go!”

Chace grabbed a gun off the ground. “Jim, you don’t believe in anything, do you? Never did.”

“Dix, you’ve got me all wrong.” Sandoval’s flesh suddenly rippled, a wave that started at his scalp and passed down the length of his body, seeming to strip off his outer layer of skin and clothing to reveal an entirely different person-a woman. Not a grotesque blue Maenad, but seemingly a living woman. And in an ordinary woman’s voice, she said, “I’m not Jim.” She leaned down and shouldered a flamethrower abandoned by his men. “My name’s Brenda.”

Dixon tried to shoot, but the gun was out of bullets. Throwing the gun at her, he pulled a cheap two-way radio from his pocket and hit the emergency signal. He had one last thing to do before they got him.

“This is Chace Dixon,” he croaked. “Just do it!”

“Just do it?” the radio squawked. “Is that a go?”

“Yes, go! Now!”

The woman paused over Dixon. The light of her weapon’s pilot flame guttered in her eyes, barely illuminating her expression of inscrutable fascination. Chace realized it wasn’t her looking at him, but someone else looking through her eyes. She was just a window… but who was on the other side? Then she pulled the trigger and everything flared bright as day, the heat blowing her hair back.

At that same exact moment, Washington, DC, froze in the glare of a newborn sun.

It was slow going. All routes to DC were choked with dead vehicles, and pileups cluttered every intersection, blackened wrecks reeking of burnt rubber. Big Ed Albemarle used the truck like a bulldozer, pushing cars aside and clearing a path for the buses. I rode shotgun, wielding a road map and scanning for openings. We drove freely on the sidewalk, across parks or backyards, or plowed through fences-the fastest route was usually off-road-but then urban congestion increased to the point where driving was simply impossible.

At a place called Indian Head, we cut through a fenced Navy installation and traded the battered vehicles for a fleet of shallow-draft police skiffs, gunning them up the wide Potomac. The sinking sun turned deeper and deeper red, staining the whole sky and landscape the same color. Layers of mist hung over the river, swirling as the boat cut through.

There was a lot of trash in the water, but the first real sign of damage was the collapsed span of the I-95 highway bridge-the southernmost link of the Beltway-which lay toppled on its side as if pushed over by a giant hand. Cars and trucks were scattered like bathtub toys in the shallows or lurked just below the surface to gut our boats. Then there were massive chunks of the bridge itself, bristling with exposed rebar-it was one of these that gashed a couple of our aluminum hulls and struck off one propeller-but some of the men jumped in the water, heedless of crabs (of which there appeared to be none), and after several hours of makeshift repairs and careful maneuvering in the dark, we cleared the wreckage and continued upriver.