Several men appeared, strolling from the aft hatch and looking down at us with curiosity and pity. Their faces were blurred by air masks, and they wore foreign military uniforms-the uniforms of French naval officers.
“Bonjour,” said the leader. “Bienvenue a Le Terrible-although I prefer to call it the Apocalypso. Welcome aboard; we hope you enjoy your stay with us. My name is Alaric Despineau, and I will be your captain today.”
My jump-started heart almost stalled. Alaric? It was a name I knew all too well. Not least because it was my middle name: Louise Alaric Pangloss.
“Hi, Pops,” I groaned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SESAME STREET
“Lulu. Yes, of course.” Stunned, Captain Despineau said, “Mon Dieu, it is so wonderful to finally meet you, you have no idea. I have wished for this a long time.”
“You and me both, bub,” I croaked, sitting up and propping myself against the forward bulkhead. “I’d love to catch up on old times-oh, right, there weren’t any.”
My body felt carbonated, every cell fizzing painfully. I hadn’t felt pain in a long time. It kind of sucked. But there was also something amazing about it-I was physically present in a way I had forgotten possible. I truly existed.
Fred Cowper’s head was discovered in my backpack, and I freaked out a bit because it was just a lifeless head-Fred was dead!-but I didn’t have the strength to really get upset… or perhaps there was still too much Agent X in me. Before I could start screaming, Despineau gently took the pack from my hands and ordered someone to stick it in a freezer.
He sat with us as we faded in and out of consciousness, the pressurized oxygen suffusing our tissues, neutralizing the artificial Maenad organism. It would only stay dormant as long as the oxygen was applied, but in the meantime, we were mortal again… meaning weak as kittens.
Over the next few hours, the submarine traveled back to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, the southern shipping channel. It was easy to find because of the huge abandoned oil platform jutting from the sea. That was our destination, Despineau explained.
“We’re going on an oil rig?” I asked.
“Not on. Under.”
“Under?”
“Petropolis was designed with certain unusual features, such as an undersea docking port and a large decompression chamber. So was the Bridge Tunnel. All we had to do was connect them.”
“That seems awfully… convenient,” Alice Langhorne said.
“Not at all. They’re both emergency depots for the storage of sensitive personnel and materials.”
“SPAM,” I said.
“Yes, SPAM.”
“In other words, you planned for all this?”
“Lulu, I know your mother taught you about the Five P’s. Come on, what are the Five P’s?”
“Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”
“Voila!”
There was bumping and grinding as the sub docked, then the forward hatch popped open. Despineau led us up into a horizontal steel tunnel about ten feet in diameter. It echoed. I knew the boat had not surfaced; this tunnel was still deep underwater. At the end of the tunnel was a door like a bank vault, opening into a vertical chamber perhaps twenty feet in diameter and forty feet high, with a spiral stair and six decks of seats, enough for over a hundred people.
On the wall were three lit buttons. The top button was labeled PETROPOLIS, the middle button read APOCALYPSO, and the down button read SESAME STREET. Despineau pushed the bottom button, and, with a pneumatic hiss, we descended.
Sitting between Langhorne and me, he said, “Now you know.”
“What?” I asked.
“How to get to Sesame Street.”
The elevator stopped with a hiss, and the heavy door opened. We filed through into another short tunnel, then a watertight hatch protected by a giant ball valve. There was noise coming from the other side-the sound of many people.
“The Bridge Tunnel,” Despineau said delightedly. “I call it the Metro: ten miles of tunnel sheltering twenty thousand people, separated from land by ten miles of fortified bridges that double as airstrips. It is an ideal arrangement. Or it was, until somebody I know torpedoed the south causeway.”
“Sorry.”
It looked like a campground on the Fourth of July. The cavernous highway tunnel seemed to stretch to infinity, one of its two lanes occupied by a line of RVs and the other open to walkers, skaters, and bicycle traffic. Patches of plastic grass had been laid down as little parks for games of Frisbee and touch football. Hundreds of people were out in the road or just sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the view. I could understand why-it was a beautiful sight: men and women of all ages and all colors living together in harmony, staring at us not in fear but in simple curiosity. We who had so recently been Xombies wept to see them… and to be them.
“Whoa,” said Sal DeLuca, eyeing the bikes and skateboards with envy. “Blast from the past.”
A squadron of golf carts zipped toward us and squealed to a stop. The lead driver, a wiry-haired older woman in a brightly colored ski suit, jumped out to greet Captain Despineau, then started at the sight of Alice Langhorne.
“Dr. Stevens, I presume?”
“Alice?” the woman said. “Is that really you?”
“I’m not quite sure yet. Give me a few more minutes.”
They shook hands and fake-kissed. I remembered Dr. Chandra Stevens well… too well. She was the cheerful scientist who had supervised my torture at Thule. And she remembered me.
“Lulu! Hello! Alice, you should have warned me! Just kidding. Welcome! So nice to see you all, come on in. Would you like something to drink? Some nice iced tea, maybe? Oh, a tall glass of iced tea sounds good, doesn’t it? With a little sprig of mint-I always like that. And maybe some finger sandwiches and deviled eggs, what do you think? The eggs are super fresh; you should try them.”
My father, Captain Despineau, said, “Everyone, this is a good friend of mine, Dr. Chandra Stevens. Chandra, I believe you know many of these folks. You’ll have to excuse their long faces; they’ve just been through quite an ordeal.”
“Of course, I understand! I know there are some people here who have been very worried about you.”
From one of the carts at the rear, a tall, bald man approached. “Alice!” he called.
“Jim…?” Langhorne said doubtfully.
“Alice!” cried the man.
It was Mogul Chairman James Sandoval.
Sandoval, I thought. Jim Sandoval was a handsome older man whom I had originally found charming in a Daddy Warbucks kind of way. That was before he tried to sell me to the other Moguls as a human Fountain of Youth.
But Jim Sandoval was dead.
The last I had seen of the man, he was freezing to death in the Arctic with two crushed legs and a headless Xombie going for his throat. Now he seemed fully recovered, not a wrinkle on his brow or his elegant gray suit. His steely eyes beamed with amusement.
Alice Langhorne tottered toward him. She knew Sandoval even better than I did, having married and divorced him. They had a troubled daughter who had died prior to the Maenad Pandemic, a daughter about my age, but in a real sense their only child was Agent X, for it was Jim and Alice’s partnership that financed Uri Miska’s longevity experiments.
Her voice ragged, Langhorne said, “Jim. I thought you were dead.” She swayed forward as if to hug him, then swung a weak punch at his face.
He caught and held her, stroking her silver-blond hair. “Don’t you mean you left me for dead?” He grinned ruefully. “That’s all right, I probably deserved it.”
“What do you think you’re doing down here?” Langhorne asked.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Sandoval replied. “Same thing I’ve always done: Trying to make my daddy proud.”
“You mean being a Mogul.”
This made Sandoval laugh until he was blue in the face. “Honey, you have got me so wrong.”