Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

Now the grisly mule trains began breaking off, bearing their loads up wavy ledges that climbed the inner walls. After that, they disappeared from view. All the traffic was inward; there was no exit route that I could see, no train of empty carts.

I continued downward along the main path, heading for the low archway at the end, a wavering glimmer of light. The air was being sucked that way, rushing like a river into the depths. All angles were askew, all edges rounded, all lines twisted, forming crudely sinuous curves and shapes. Random patterns became grotesque reliefs-gaping mouths, eyes, whole faces that writhed and dissolved as I looked at them. Snatches of words and gibberish emanated from the walls, so many that they combined into a roar, as though I were emerging from a tunnel into a packed stadium. There was even light at the end of the tunnel.

I walked through.

Suddenly, I was no longer in that booming cavern but walking down a peaceful, sunlit street. There were palm trees and parked cars and hibiscus bushes and rows of houses, many of them Spanish-style bungalows with roofs of clay tiles. The white concrete sidewalk sparkled at my feet, sown with mica glitter. In the middle distance was a range of brown hills. I was wearing sneakers, and the hand holding mine did not burn because we were both alive. I looked back, and the tunnel was gone.

“Lulu, look! That’s our new home!”

I looked up at the smiling, beautiful woman holding my hand, and she was familiar to me. Not from life, but from some photographs Fred Cowper once gave me. I had hated her in those photos because her life looked so perfect and orderly and above all normal, everything mine was not.

“You’re Brenda,” I said. “You’re my sister.”

She nodded in surprise, but pleasantly. “How did you find out?”

“Fred and my mother-I mean, our mother. They told me some things, and I’ve just been putting the pieces together.”

“Why don’t you come inside? There is someone here who’s very eager to see you.” She opened a low wrought-iron gate and led me through a tiled patio full of greenery to a door like the arched portal of a miniature castle, made of wood planks with heavy iron bolts and fittings. There was a welcome mat that said, MI CASA ES SU CASA.

We went inside. “Wait here a sec,” she said, disappearing through another arched doorway.

The living room was cool and breezy, with bare white walls and rustic furnishings of dark wood and bloodred leather. It echoed. The only decorations were a few pieces of glazed pottery and a small crucified Jesus. I heard footsteps and looked up. There was a big, dark-eyed boy looking at me, and for a second I didn’t know why my heat-tempered heart suddenly turned molten.

“Hi, Lulu,” he said shyly.

“H-Hector,” I said.

“Hey.”

It was Hector Albemarle, the boy who saved my life. The boy who loved me. But Hector died right before my eyes, blown to bits in the cold hell of Thule.

“Hector,” I asked, “what are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are. We came here together, Lulu.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m part of you.” He stepped forward and gently touched my stomach. “Right in there.”

I stepped back. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? You took me inside you, Lulu. And I’ve been there ever since, growing bigger and bigger.”

Shaking my head, I started to argue, But we never did that, and then something dawned on me. Something so beyond even my Xombie comprehension that it made me shriek. “Hector! Do you mean-? No!”

He nodded sadly, sweetly, exactly the way he always did in life. “Yes.”

It came back to me, the madness I felt witnessing his death on that muddy field. The grief and horror that caused me to lose my mind and dive for his shattered remains, trying to gather them together, save him as he had me, and when that wasn’t possible… when that wasn’t possible…

I ate him.

Not much of him. Just one little piece before Jake and Julian dragged me away. But was it perhaps enough to have taken root inside my living body, lying dormant until I became a Xombie? I could definitely feel something unusual in there, a tough mass like a tumor. Except Xombies didn’t get tumors, Xombies didn’t get anything. Or did they? Was I going to give birth to a clone of Hector Albemarle?

“I’m sorry, Lulu,” he said. “I know it’s weird.”

“No,” I said, feeling strangely dreamy. I looked at him, at his poor sad face, and couldn’t help smiling. “No, Hector. I think it’s wonderful.”

He beamed hopefully, his brown eyes welling with tears. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Now I was weeping, too. “Come here, you big dummy.”

Bobby ripped me out of my stupor.

“Lulu, wake up! Lulu, Lulu, Lulu, Lulu! Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Bobby was shaking me, pinching me, pulling my hair. I was not in sunny California. I was in a cavernous domed chamber, perhaps a hundred feet deep and twice as wide. Suspended within it like a steel kraken was some kind of blast furnace, an infernal-looking contraption fed by numerous twisting ramps, down which trains of Xombies marched to their white-hot reward. They were its fuel, its lifeblood, and it was their cannibal god.

Beneath the furnace was a black pool, like a tar pit, fed by the slow melting of the walls and ceiling. At Bobby’s urging, I turned to see a creature of tar leaning over me-a black-dipped Medusa with black lips, black teeth, shining spider eyes, and skin as sickly iridescent as crude oil. With her overgrown nails and crazed hair, she was an intimidating presence… even to me. Compared to her, I looked like a blue kewpie doll. But I still recognized her.

“Brenda,” I said.

Trying to contain my disquiet, I asked, “Why?”

“Why?” The Ex-Brenda looked blank. I could see her mind stumble, like someone groping in sudden dark.

“Yes, why? What is all this? What is it for?”

Everything stopped.

The chamber went awesomely quiet, absent that roar of voices. Even the blast furnace and the churning of the pool were muted. There was a noise beyond hearing, however, a silent alarm that required no ears to hear, but which rang in Maenad cells like a billion dinner bells. I heard it loud and clear, and at once sensed millions of eyes staring at me, probing not just with those eyes but with the rude fingers of their minds, as if I were in a tank full of invisible eels fondling my body, trying to worm inside my deepest self.

Back off, I thought, slapping them away with the force of my will.

Distracted, I was caught off guard by the vise grip of the her sharp-nailed hand on my upper arm. Hey! I flailed with inhuman agility, kicking, twisting, but the Ex-woman was twice my size, double my strength, and equally impervious to hurt. Our flesh crackled at the point of contact, the familiar Xombie repulsion effect known as the Solomon Principle.

“Because we have to,” she said. “The future depends on it.”

“Depends on what? Whose idea was this?”

“Uri Miska’s.”

That knocked me cold. We, too, were following a vision of Uri Miska; he was the father of us Xombies, the man who had created Agent X as a means of insulating mankind from the coming cataclysm of the Big Enchilada, which would wipe out all mortal life. It was the whole point of our submarine mission.

Shocked, I said, “Miska! Why?”

“Why? Why? What do you mean, why?” The woman shook her head as if wracked by some powerful inner turmoil.

“I mean I don’t understand! Let go!”

“Where did you come from? How did you get in here?”

“Tonic!” hissed a voice from behind us. “She is a spy! She has the agent of free will!”