Oh pooh. We’ll figure that out later. Let’s just go.
Really?
Come on!
We fled the dive, running back to the hotel, trailing laughter and flouncing satin.
Winded, we entered the ballroom. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, all dim-lit opulence, with candles and tuxedoes and tall windows overlooking the city. We were shown a table, and treated as if we belonged in such society. My mother was clearly at ease, having assumed a poise I had never seen before, navigating the etiquette traps with perfect confidence. We ate dinner, prime rib, then sat for a long time, just breathing it all in, watching people dance. The band was good, and when the piano player struck up a cabaret rendition of “Hey Jude,” my mother stood up and reached out her hand and said,
Let’s dance
. I had never danced before, but I was caught up in it, trusting that the need to believe was enough.
And it was.
This is it.
I waited until all the others were ashore before I left the bridge. It was the first time I had ever been alone on the submarine, and I listened to the foam-padded silence with something like worry.
Could it be possible to live again? I was afraid to find out. To abandon the boat was to put hope to the test—and if hope failed, what then? All that was left was to give up. Give up all trace of the girl I once was; shed Lulu Pangloss like a dead skin. Go native. That was what gnawed at me and ate me up inside: How easy it would be to let go. Surrender to the Xombie.
Don’t give up the ship,
I thought. More like,
Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Whatever happened, I would likely never see this ship again. The orphaned steel behemoth would sit here and rust, hatches open to the elements, wallowing with the tides until hard weather heeled her over, and water filled the hull. Then she would settle to the shallow bottom, every intake plugged with mud and the great gold propellers crusted thick with oysters and lurid orange sea squirts. Eventually, the boat would silt over entirely and join the shore, sprouting grasses and wooded slash so that her fairwater would become a brushy hillock, red with sumac and rusty edges, reeking of rotten iron. And in her belly the fallow reactor would crack and seep radiation into the environment, its brittle control rods breaking under the pressure of invading sediments. But the clay would also contain the poison, forming a solid cast within the chamber and hardening around the decaying metalworks, effectively fossilizing them. A million years hence, only the extruded patterns would remain, pressed in rocky strata miles from the sea.
Finishing my final walk-through, I stumbled across my mother. It was as though she were waiting for me.
Entering the reactor room, I almost jumped at the sight of a wild-haired blue Fury hanging from the ceiling. The last time I had met her was in the slime pit of the Reaper barge, and we hadn’t been able to communicate verbally. The time before that, I was still a human girl, and she was the monstrous Xombie chasing me. We hadn’t talked much then either—she was barely capable of speech. But since then, she had recovered most of her wits … if not her looks.
“Mummy,” I said. “We’re going ashore now.”
She didn’t react, just staring at me.
I said, “We’re probably not coming back.”
She tipped her head sideways and closed her eyes. I started to leave, and she said, “Lulu.”
“What?”
“Fred Cowper’s not your father.”
A strange chill blew through me, the ghost of a human feeling. “What do you mean?”
“Fred Cowper and I never had any children together. He wasn’t capable. You never met your real father, the father of my children. His name was Al Despineau. Alaric Despineau.”
“Alaric?”
That was my hated middle name. “What do you mean, ‘children’? How many children do you have?”
“None, anymore.”
“What does that mean? I’m here.”
“You are dead, my darling, and so is the past. There is no changing it now; it’s fixed and dilated. I’m so sorry.”
Mummy fled into the dark.
CHAPTER FOUR
PEPPERLAND
F
red Cowper was incommunicado when I found him, dead to the world and unavailable for comment. Frustrating, but Xombies were notoriously unreliable that way, able to tune out indefinitely just when you needed to talk to them. Stuffing Fred’s head in a ditty bag along with a few other necessities, I left the ship. Albemarle and the crew had rigged lines across the water, and I easily crossed this rope bridge to shore. Everyone was waiting for me there, as if only I could provide the answers they sought. I knew they would stand that way for hours, days, unless I told them what to do next. Time meant nothing to any of them, not even me. Time was totally arbitrary unless you forced it to mean something—unless you divided it into portions and measured it out like medicine. That was the human thing to do.
I assembled us all on the beach. Even in my own altered state, I thought we looked weird in the daylight, like creatures dredged out of the deep sea. Not liking the word “Xombies,” we had chosen to call ourselves Dreadnauts, but this forbidding moniker had more recently been amended by the four Brits to Dreadnuts. There were three categories of us: Dark Blue, Bright Blue, and Clear.
The Dark Blues were those who had been violently infected with the original strain of Agent X. Their bodies “died” in the process, starved of oxygen while Maenad microbes hacked their cell nuclei and rewrote their DNA. With their drowned blue flesh and unblinking black eyes, they were the most Xombie-like in appearance, though with regular infusions of my blood serum, their higher faculties had gradually returned. They just had to relearn everything.
Along with Big Ed Albemarle and the boys who died with me at Thule, there were some thousand or so other Dark Blues on board, all new arrivals. Most of them were in bad shape—either missing major pieces or barely pieced together. They were leftovers from the recent Reaper madness. My mother was among them.
The Bright Blues were those like yours truly, who had either been passively infiltrated from within by Agent X spores (and this would apply to all the billions of first-generation female Maenads), or been deliberately inoculated with Uri Miska’s “Tonic” before brain damage could occur. I met both criteria, and knew that intelligence alone was no buffer against X-mania, since in the seconds before the Tonic kicked in, I had strangled the first man I saw. Horrible. I didn’t like to think of that even though I realized there was a higher purpose to it all.
Uri Miska had developed Agent X as humanity’s only defense against the coming cataclysm—the Big Enchilada—which would kill all life on Earth. Since we weren’t alive, we might survive. Xombies, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. This vague knowledge had been communicated to all of us through increasingly intense, dreamlike visions, and most on board believed it even if they did not fully comprehend it.
There were only two Bright Blues on board: I and Fred Cowper—or rather, Fred Cowper’s decapitated head. In our perfect blueness, Fred and I were not grotesque so much as beautifully strange—living Hindu deities. Or so I chose to think about it.
But the Clears … the Clears were something different, something nobody understood yet—not even themselves.
They had the same regenerative capacity as the rest of us, the same apparent immortality, but without any of the negative side effects. They weren’t blue. They never needed daily doses of my blood to function. They looked and felt completely human … until they suddenly turned their bodies inside out, changed colors like chameleons, or split in two and joined seamlessly back together.
As they learned to control it, their flesh answered their will to a degree that we Blues could only marvel at. Since Clears had only just begun to grasp their potential, it was an alarming process of discovery—a few mirrors were broken out of sheer fright.
Socially, there was a peculiar division between Blues and Clears. Unable to convert each other, we were in a race for the last dregs of humankind. Having taken an early lead, Blues were far ahead, but Clears were clearly faster, having taken over our original Navy crew and all the civilian refugees in a matter of hours.
Dr. Alice Langhorne (a Clear herself) had traced their mutant strain back to a single carrier, a young refugee boy named Bobby Rubio, who had been picked up in Providence.
Bobby seemed to have no idea why he was different and still refused to talk about where or how he might have been “infected.” Langhorne didn’t think it was possible he could have been born that way, but a lot of people liked the idea that little Bobby was the next stage of human evolution, that the world might save itself.
As we commandeered a fleet of abandoned vehicles and headed inland along the road, I began to have a strange sensation. This was the first time I had been ashore in months, and the sight of all these quaint houses and shops caused weird flutters of emotion that I recognized as goose bumps. Goose bumps!
I wasn’t alone: My fellow travelers were experiencing similar jitters of anticipation. If anything at all remained of the America we once knew, this might be where we’d find it.
The buildings and cars ahead showed minor traces of damage: wires down, tilted utility poles, scattered debris. Unlike some other cities we had seen, there were few signs of panicked fight or flight—it all happened too fast. No backed-up traffic or buildings burned to the ground. Except for drifts of sand blown in from the dunes, it all looked pretty normal.
The wind kicked up, raising a cloud of dust that momentarily blotted out the sun. In that orange gloom, the signs disappeared, the cars disappeared, the
road
disappeared. This wasn’t sand; it was ash. Ash from afar, carried on the wind from the heartland, residue of a thousand burnt cities all over America.
We came to the outskirts of a town called Exmore, along the main highway that ran the length of the peninsula to Cape Charles. There were no barricades, no security of any kind. No life.
Through the settling haze, we began to make out a line of human figures along the highway, still and silent as statues, ankle deep in ash. Not humans—Xombies. They were inert as lampposts, completely dormant, staring at nothing.
“Pepperland,” said one of the Blackpudlians.
“Trucks a-comin’!” shouted Robles.
Then we could all sense it: a convoy of heavy vehicles roaring toward us down US 13. They were bright with headlights and the life auras of their passengers—several dozen human beings.
We automatically went into action, Blues and Clears racing for the chance to add new members to our respective teams. Hurriedly blocking the road, we took positions on either side and hunkered flat in the ditches. As the trucks neared, I could see that they were completely unprotected, no armaments of any kind. It was too good to be true. When the first one shifted down, we were all over that thing like ants on a half-melted Popsicle.
Or we would have been, had the people in that truck not suddenly glowed with a strange poison that robbed us of our strength. The closer we got to them, the weaker we became, so that the fastest and strongest of us fell the hardest, tumbling off the truck like frost-killed spiders.
Adding to our trouble, the dormant Xombies suddenly sprang to life and attacked us. One came at me, and when Lemuel smashed it with a sledgehammer, I realized it was only part Xombie. The other part was machinery, a mass of wires and gadgets stuffed into a gutted Xombie body. A remote-controlled meat puppet! The flesh had been crudely stapled back together, leaving small apertures for cameras, radio antennae … and weapons.
Those weapons opened fire, taking out targets with precise bursts of metal pellets, electrically propelled at a zillion rounds per second. Each blast sounded like a single shot but was actually a patterned stream of ammo that cut through flesh and bone like a superfast jigsaw. Anything it hit came apart as though run through a sieve. When the ammo ran out, they had false limbs that ejected bladed weapons that slashed us to the bone. Worst of all, they tagged us with lasers, opening us to fire from the sky—an orbiting attack drone. All around me, my Xomboys started exploding like popcorn.
Too late, I realized what it was: Immunes. We had heard rumors of Immunes from the Reapers, and I had refused to believe they really existed, thinking immunity was just more mortal wishfulness. But there could be no doubt about it: There were Immunes in those trucks … or people tainted with immune blood. Either way, we couldn’t touch them; our own bodies wouldn’t allow it.
The poor miserable humans had come up with a perfect defense. They had made it impossible for us to save them, as if suffering and death were the most beautiful prizes they could imagine. They had won. It was so tragic, I almost wished I could die with them.
But I couldn’t.
As shrapnel riddled my torso, I remembered what Alice Langhorne had told me about Xombies when we first met: “… a bag of obsolete parts governed by a solid-state master.” My body was not the fragile human form it had once been, but a completely arbitrary assemblage of cells. This was a disturbing thought as it threatened my very identity: Who was Lulu Pangloss if not this girl, this body, this face? How could she exist if she was a stranger to herself, some random, amorphous blob? It was too troubling to contemplate. So I had refused to face it, clinging to my mortal conception of myself, using my Maenad abilities as if they were party tricks, busying myself with plans and hopes and dreams.