Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

There was no boat. There was no crew. There was only a shared dream, fragile as a bubble in an endless sea. And there was no sea, just ripples of time and space-the bottomless, shoreless reach of eternity.

And Beatles music.

Suspended in the depths like a black thought, the USS No-Name echoed with the murky strains of “Eleanor Rigby.” Within its vast hull, we all listened, everyone equally intent, equally inert, whether whole or in pieces, all motionless as corpses in the smothering dark, embedded like fossils amid the roots of a tree-which was what the boat had become: a single organism of cold flesh and metal, blue limbs intermingled with blue steel, organs with plumbing, sinew with cable, bone with bracing. The flesh persisted, the flesh was permanent-the metal somewhat less so. Water trickled in, pooling blackly in the bilge.

In the airless environment, a creeping patina of blue rust became more evident by the day… at least in the areas where lights still functioned. Nobody cared. There was a short somewhere, many shorts, all neglected, life-support systems ignored and faltering… for there was no life left to support.

It didn’t matter as long as the reactor still burned, the screw still turned, and the music still played. That music was our residual humanity made manifest; it was the sound of hope: hope of finding the living and relieving their mortal woes, the damned seeking the doomed and spreading the seed of Maenad salvation… before it was too late. Such was our mission.

Such were we missionaries.

All at once, the music stopped. From miles away, far across the void, down from the world of light and air, came a new sound, a deep electronic vibration low enough to be detectable even through water. A sound meant specifically for submarines to hear: an Ultra Low Frequency radio signal.

In the belly of the boat, a rusty, cracked voice: “Can you hear that?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like an invitation.”

“Let’s RSVP.”

The glittering blue surface of the sea spread in all directions to the thin circumference of the horizon, swells rolling in long regiments under the sun. In the middle of this enormity, a giraffe-speckled pole rose from the water-the boat’s radio antenna. It scanned the heavens for the least electronic whisper and immediately fixed upon the loudest signal. This was routed to the AV console in the radio shack, where Reggie Jinnah played it for a small audience that included Captain Harvey Coombs, Dr. Alice Langhorne, and me. All of us Xombies. Reggie’s mates, three other Anglo-Pakistani musicians who formerly comprised the Beatles tribute band known as the Blackpudlians, waited in the background, having been using the room as a makeshift music studio.

On the video screen, we could see an image of a man. He was a very familiar man, a man we had not seen since the height of the Agent X pandemic and never expected to see again. A man I had seen shoot himself on national television.

The superimposed caption read, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

“Turn up the sound,” I said.

“Sorry.” Reggie hit a switch. Now we could hear the man’s familiar voice:

“-time to correct the mistakes of the past. We are rebuilding humanity one soul at a time, just as we are rebuilding civilization one brick at a time, and we can choose the kind of society we want it to be. Do we want another society doomed to failure? A society based on fear and lies? Or do we want one based on reason and truth? Not a society of exploitation, corruption, and waste, but a federation of free peoples in which the Golden Rule prevails; a society in tune with nature, run on green principles of clean energy and self-sustaining agriculture, and serving the highest goals of mankind, for which everyone shares the burden and the benefits. If you can hear this, you are invited to join our grand endeavor. We are located in the heart of Washington, DC, a place we now call Xanadu. In Xanadu, we have learned to live in harmony with Xombies as we have with each other, not as adversaries or exploiters but as fellow citizens of the Earth, celebrating the diversity of all beings, for all beings play a precious role in building the future. If you still live in fear, hatred, or despair, join our growing family and learn the meaning of freedom.”

This was followed by a long series of diverse and attractive faces-men, women, and children, of many races, styles, and physical types-all saying the same thing: “I am Xanadu.” At the end, the president came back, closing with, “We are Xanadu. And we welcome you.”

“Sounds bloody good to me,” said Reggie. “Where do I sign up?”

Two boys missed the boat.

Unlike all their shipmates, Todd and Ray were neither dead nor undead. They were very much alive, thank you, though a casual observer might not have deduced this fact from their ghoulish appearance-in fact, such an observer would have had to be forgiven an involuntary shudder at the sight of two such unspeakable monstrosities as Todd Holmes and Raymond Despineau.

But there were no observers, casual or otherwise, to shudder or deduce anything. Other than the two teenagers, the entire riverfront was deserted. Neither man nor Ex-man walked its urban shores, the place having been recently cleansed of its inhabitants. Whether alive or dead, red-blooded or blue-, all had been caught up in the Reapers’ recent Waterloo and swept downriver to the sea.

All except Todd and Ray, who had missed the boat.

Let me tell you how they looked: Imagine a pair of seven-foot-tall rag dolls; pumpkin-headed monstrosities with blackened knotholes for eyes and gaping, raggedy mouths. Scarlike seams crisscrossed their bodies, stitched shut with shiny metal staples. Their naked, veinous flesh was weirdly active, a crazy quilt of mismatched skin samples, some with hair, some without; some with nipples or moles or freckles or ears or faces, some without; but every part alive with tics and twitches and grand-mal spasms, several square yards of jerky meat, all aflutter with the animating energy of Maenad Cytosis-the original Agent X.

Like beauty, this ugliness was only skin-deep. It was a shell of undead tissue that clung to each boy’s mesharmored body like a thick excrescence of living coral, a literal power suit that amplified his strength to Maenad proportions. But that was the secondary purpose of Reaper outerwear. The prime purpose was that it allowed the boys to walk among Xombies unmolested. It was camouflage.

Each suit had been carved from live-caught Xombies, tailored to spec, and worn by a foot soldier of the Moguls during their scavenging raids. Todd and Ray had stolen the awful, offal garments in order to make their escape, only to be trapped inside the grisly vehicles of their flight. Now the Reapers were all dead, their barge sunk, and the submarine, which had been the boys’ last hope, was a floating flytrap, a five-hundred-foot-long Pandora’s box. Witnessing the annihilation of the Reapers, the boys had been hesitant to go anywhere near the thing