Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

Oh no. It was another familiar face, and not a pretty one: Major Kasim Bendis-Uncle Spam. He pulled clear of the wall, and I realized these creatures were subsets of the whole vast structure, extruded at will.

I knew Kasim well from my brief time with the Reapers, when he looked like a pile of leftover barbecue with a hat, so this was a step up. I hadn’t been in such great shape back then either, with huge holes bored through my head and torso, but at least I didn’t have to come back as a drip sculpture. Clearly there were worse things than being a Xombie.

“Hey, man,” I said, “pull yourself together.”

“Get her! Get her!”

Well, this was quite a coincidence… or was it? Come to think of it, I had been led here, lured here in remembrance of things past. But was it deliberate? If so, who was dropping the crumbs? Bendis? He certainly didn’t look capable of anything so interesting, being just another Xombie drone. In the presence of human beings, he would no doubt step lively, but amid all these Mogul Xombies, he was basically cheap labor… until I came along and upset the applecart. Apparently, all this talk had shocked him to action, or perhaps someone else was pulling his strings. Either way, he was suddenly a maniacal dervish, grabbing me by my neck and yanking me against his chest. Brenda stepped forward as if to intervene, then suddenly went stiff, twitching in place.

Other goop-monsters joined in, pinning my limbs, pulling my hair. One of them was the former president of the United States.

Repeating, “She’s the Tonic, the Tonic!” the Ex-president took a handsome fountain pen from his scorched coat pocket and jabbed its sharp nib into my jugular, instantly filling the ink reservoir with my purplish black blood. As all the others watched in fascination, he tipped back his head and raised the pen over his open mouth, thumb poised to flip the release.

Before he could do so, he was hit by a thing like a hairy medieval mace, which rammed the pen into his mouth and out the back of his throat, where my captive blood burst free, spraying Kasim Bendis in the face.

As Bendis flailed backward, the mace whirled in the air and struck the other Moguls in turn, splatting them like fudge-filled treats. Now I could see it was not a mace but Bobby Rubio’s head, studded with hornlike spikes and attached to a freakishly elongated neck. The rest of Bobby’s body had changed as well, three of his limbs anchored to the ground while the fourth-his right forearm-had lengthened and split apart into a double-bladed scythe, a giant pair of shears, literally cutting Xombies off at the knees. The boy resembled a giant fiddler crab. But as I joined the fight, I could see all the other Ex-Moguls being birthed from side alcoves, a hundred or more. It was hopeless.

While Bobby’s body returned to normal human proportions, I grabbed his hand, and we ran. As we approached the main entrance portal, it shrank like a stony sphincter, the archway and surrounding wall bunching up and contracting in grinding spasms, sprouting long black thorns. We were cornered.

Looking for a way out, I felt someone touch my arm. It was Brenda. She had followed us up the entrance ramp and was mutely pointing at a series of openings high in the ceiling, from which Xombie catwalks descended into the plasma oven, chutes for the endless lemming parade.

“I think she wants us to go that way,” Bobby said. Brenda nodded wildly.

“How?” I asked.

Battling some inner demon, black veins popping in her forehead, Brenda croaked, “Climb.”

“We can’t climb up there!”

“Sure we can,” Bobby said. “Come on!”

“Is there even a way out up there?”

“Is there a way out down here?”

“Good point.”

Bobby led the way, with me following on his heels and Brenda picking up the rear. In seconds, Bobby was way ahead of us, finding handholds among the gore and charnel rebar. The kid was a spider.

Having never been overly coordinated, I moved forward in fits and starts. It was easier than I thought. The surface was more irregular than any cliff face, a conglomeration of organic and inorganic debris held together by a blood pudding made from a million nuked Xombies. Ichor oozed from every crevice, dangling in long black drips that hung halfway to the floor. When I brushed against them, I got a static shock, and they retracted like sensitive tendrils. Slug eyes.

Avoiding contact with flesh and bone, I seized upon all manner of other junk: heavy machinery, trucks, highway signs, dinosaur skeletons, planes, trains, automobiles. It could have been the nest of some gigantic packrat. Except that it moved. The whole thing heaved up and down in a slow, rolling motion, vines swaying eerily.

Beneath the furnace, filling the deep bottom of the hollow, was that black pool of ichor that began to churn and erupt like a vast cauldron of boiling oil. In the center of this pit was an island, a peculiar mound banked with marble columns and statuary, steaming and glowing green from within. I could make out the head of Abraham Lincoln. The radiation in the chamber was intense; no human being could have survived it for more than a few minutes.

It occurred to me that the pile of rubble was a crude nuclear reactor, using uranium from the dry-docked sub at Norfolk and the power plant at Calvert Cliffs to generate the plasma arc in the furnace. There was a brain behind all this, and it smelled human.

The ichor was not boiling from heat so much as from restless, restless life-it moved like a living thing, a vast, seething mollusk. The room was actually relatively cool, most of the heat wicked away by the porous walls or ventilated out a huge stone chimney that rose to the ceiling and supported both domes. Like the uranium fuel rods, that chimney was preapocalyptic, a cracked relic of human craftsmanship. I recognized it at once as the base of the Washington Monument. All that remained of the famous obelisk was its stump.

The sickly light radiating from underneath the plasma kiln silhouetted Xombies laboring at its base. Rows of railroad tracks led to the pool, with sludge carts going in and out, in and out, dragged by lines of workers, who then shoveled the heavy gunk into metal buckets as if it were toxic waste. But it wasn’t toxic waste; it was industrial product. This was the source of the ichor-the black pitch of which the whole place was built. Even the Xeppelin was made of this stuff, blown up like so much oobleck. A million Xombies boiled down for glue.

But oobleck was not the only product there. As I watched, I could see buckets of it being lowered into supercooled wells in the floor, shooting fountains of dry-ice vapor, and this frozen material then returned to the furnace to be blasted again by the plasma arc. In this way it was disintegrated, crystallized, reduced to a fraction of its former mass. Rendered to its pure nanoparticles-dust to dust. The ultra-fine white powder was then transferred to a deep concrete tunnel, perhaps part of an old government fallout shelter built during the Cold War.

I suddenly realized I knew how this all worked because I had seen it before-I had seen it while I was linked to all the other Maenads, jacked into the Hex.

Through all this, Moguls were being hatched. The black cocoons that I had seen outside were cracked open in the nuclear pool, and their withered residents granted freedom-the freedom to slave away in service of the all-consuming fire. Once titans of industry, they were now merely drones, existing to service that infernal queen.

I remembered seeing those plastic-encased mummies at Thule, then later in Miska’s secret lab, all being kept in cold storage until Agent X could be perfected; my queasy feeling as Dr. Chandra Stevens explained to me that they were all sick and elderly men who paid to be inoculated with the disease. Their brains had been chilled to protect them from the effects of oxygen starvation, but they still had the manic need to share their “gift,” so MoCo scientists laminated them in carbon-fiber shells for safekeeping. Bottled Moguls betting on a better life-the ultimate golden parachute. But they never got the Tonic they ordered, an eternal youth of permanent bliss. Instead, this was their final reward: hauling sludge in Hades.