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.
Clearly, somebody up there had a sense of humor.
What began as a wall quickly became the ceiling, our butts dangling in space. The thought of falling obviously didn’t bother Bobby at all. That’s right, we dead. Following his lead, I worked my way along the overhang, clinging firmly to the least little protrusion, my body molded to the slimy, jagged surface as though making love to it. In a matter of seconds, I was fifty feet above the reactor pool. Looking up, I could see Bobby scuttling into the first opening above the incinerator chute, pushing past leaping Xombies to get inside.
Someone grabbed my leg. Not someone-something: Kasim Bendis. He was back, with the president’s pen wedged between his neck vertebrae. Now he had one more problem: The bone and tissue had fused around it; he would have to break his own neck to get it out.
Trying to talk, he could only make a horrible gargling sound: “Gluurgggaaaaaachhh! Gglarghaaachhhh!”
I tried to pull free, but Bendis had gravity on his side. With one hard tug, he yanked both of us off the wall. Falling, I grabbed hold of the first thing I found: a handful of black tendrils. They stretched long, then instantly recoiled, pulling me upward and dragging Bendis after me.
He swung from my ankle like a trapeze artist, both of us swaying wide over the seething pit. Above us, Brenda was following Bobby toward a shaft of sunlight.
I realized I couldn’t escape. However much I kicked and fought, Bendis was too strong. The only real choice was whether to hang on or let go. The thought of falling no longer scared me, or even made me sad. It was just… irritating. Whatever happened, I couldn’t be hurt, much less killed.
I had a sudden revelation: Even if they reduced me to my bare molecules, I would still exist, and at some point in eternity I would even exist again as myself. Not just once, but infinite times. This was true of everything in the Universe, alive or dead-you didn’t have to be a Xombie. Everything lived forever. The curse of the Xombie was that we remembered.
And suddenly I did remember. I remembered that I was not alone.
Letting go with one hand, I reached over my shoulder and unzipped my Hello Kitty backpack. It was squeezed tightly between us, Bendis’s body now enfolding mine like a hungry starfish around a clam.
“Come on, honey baby,” he said, his charred-bacon lips mashed against my ear. “Won’t you share a little of your sweet nectar with Kasim? So we can both be freeeeeee.”
“Sounds like somebody’s got a sweet tooth,” said a rusty voice from my backpack.
Bendis looked down in surprise, and a jagged set of jaws sprang shut on his face like a bear trap.
It was Fred Cowper. Fred’s hideous head thrashed like a shark tearing at a piece of meat, engulfing Bendis’s entire face. Kasim let go of my body, fighting to pull his head away, but Cowper was relentless. With an explosive snap, his neck tendrils sprang erect, ripping the backpack open and kicking me and Bendis apart. The major clawed furiously, hand over hand, but suddenly he had nothing to hang on to but the slippery cords of Fred Cowper’s severed neck.
Cowper bit his face off. Released to gravity, Bendis plummeted to the reactor pit, bouncing off the marble cladding and into the oobleck. Shed of the weight, I recoiled upward, using the momentum to propel myself over the ledge. Brenda caught me and pulled me in.
“Thanks,” I said.
“What’s a sister for?”
It looked like we were home free, only a short tunnel away from daylight. Bobby was already there, waving us through. But as Brenda and I moved forward, the opening closed around us, folding shut like a giant, spiny sea anemone.
Just before the spines pierced our bodies, Brenda shoved me through the disappearing gap. In doing so, she sacrificed herself, stuck fast by the contracting spikes.
“Run!” she cried. “Run fast!” She held up a small spray bottle, some kind of atomizer, and shot it off. Hissing vapor engulfed her, and immediately her riven body turned human, all punctured flesh dying red.
The spray had an instant effect on the walls, turning the spines to red goop and burning through the connective ichor like a coal fire. A bloody fissure appeared as the blue-black tissues retracted, melting and undermining the mass of rubble. Blood poured down like red paint into the black pool-a lot of blood.
This liquid was literally the building’s lifeblood: thousands of gallons of coolant and hydraulic muscle, pumped at high pressure through branching arteries in the dome wall, a hidden web of living plasma ducts that supported the weight of the ceiling.
As the flesh retreated, the bone framework sloughed away, and the blood broke through. A steaming torrent of gore burst upon the chamber. It resembled a volcanic eruption, a scarlet flow of meat pulp and grinding debris that crushed Xombies and tumbled the steel blast furnace like a tin toy. Crimson sludge battered the hot reactor, causing the banked marble to crack and explode, releasing all its stored energy in one massive explosion. With the entrance portal blocked, there was only one outlet for the enormous pressure: up the shaft of the Washington Monument.
This makeshift chimney prolapsed with a geyser of gore and flame that billowed higher than the original Monument, a false obelisk that obliterated the Xeppelin above. But it was not nearly enough to release the explosive pressure within the mound. For this, the roof itself burst, expelling a jet of superheated gas from its weakest point: the chute above the kiln, our exit, which was the terminal end of the fissure between the mound’s two lobes. This passage now ruptured outward, releasing a fountain of glowing ejecta high into the sky.
Bobby and I rode this bubble of force, cartwheeling upward like scraps of pounded gristle. Soaring far and wide, we were flung clear of the dome to land in the deep mud of the moat.
“Ow,” Bobby said.
Sitting up in the knee-deep scum, we gathered our wits, assessed our multifarious dings, and pulled out the more egregious bits of shrapnel. Actually, the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, but we weren’t going anywhere. The alarm had gone out on us. Xombies and robots were closing in on all sides, even from above-aerial drones swooping in to destroy the saboteurs.
Bobby got up first, trying to drag me by my broken arm. “Come on, we gotta go!’