were connected together by a cable that had been threaded through their bodies, like fish on a loop.
Coombs and the others reacted as if they had been expecting something like this, bracing themselves for the attack. They were doomed and knew it. Nothing would protect any of us from that host. Not even Cowper.
Just before the two groups could collide, however, the tethered Xombies were abruptly jerked up short as if they had reached the end of their leash. Thrashing wildly, they began to be dragged backward, then, one after another, hoisted upward, until the whole string of them flailed in the air, dangling from the boom of a high crane.
'Ooooh,' went the crowd.
Jim Sandoval's amplified voice rang out: 'This is to all the new citizens of Valhalla: Congratulations, your period of orientation is finished. We welcome you to this ceremony ushering in a new age of mankind, and we invite you to join our community, to share in our fortune, and to enter a world where the Maenad threat has been lifted.'
Relieved laughter and grudging applause from the Moguls met this pronouncement. The rest of us looked on stonily.
Sandoval continued, 'Today we bury the past, not just symbolically, but in our hearts. We bury it and put flowers on it and stand before its gravestone to say our final good-byes. Today we renounce the past and are baptized anew. There can be no doubters, no one left dangling. Lulu, will you please come forward?'
The float bridge had been put back in place, and at the end of it stood Sandoval, reaching out to me with a big phony smile. I hesitated, reluctant to leave Cowper and the other men. I was suddenly very self-conscious about participating in whatever this was they were doing. Having cast my lot with the undead, I couldn't bear to set foot back on that deceiving turf. What would happen if I refused? As if reading my thoughts, Sandoval flicked his eyes warningly upward at the flailing Xombies. The sword of Damocles. There was no choice-I went.
'Don't be nervous,' Sandoval said, helping me across. Before anyone else could follow, Rudy brought Don over on a chain to police the bridge, barely restraining the beast from charging across and attacking Cowper. Dr. Langhorne came up and took my arm.
'What's going on?' I asked her.
'Cheer up,' she said. 'You're about to be saved.'
They walked me around to the garden side of the fairwater and stopped before the brilliant ocean pool sunk in the grass. The crowd moved with us. Several doctors, including wire-haired Chandra Stevens, were waiting there with medical instruments and an aluminum stretcher.
'Now just relax,' Langhorne said, and ripped my dress off.
There was a minor uproar among some of the boys, shouts of 'Leave her alone!' but Sandoval, who was standing back from the whole thing, quashed it by saying, 'Now now-these are doctors. Professionals.' The Blackpudlians, who had been softly singing the whole time, went dead. As Langhorne strapped me naked to the stretcher, I asked, 'Why are you doing this?'
'Because it's the only thing to do. My daughter was about your age, so don't think this is easy for me. But there's no cure, no future-nowadays little girls grow up to be Furies. This is all that's left.' She put her lips to my ear, whispered, 'None of this would be happening if you'd done what you were supposed to.'
'What?'
'I expected your cycle to have kicked in by now, honey. A surprise package for that bum I was married to. Why do you think I let him have you? But I guess he gets the last laugh after all, the bastard. Now he gets to be Christ Almighty.' She strapped an oxygen mask to my face and turned on the flow. Cold air hissed through. It seemed thin-I couldn't get enough and began hyperventilating.
While Dr. Langhorne was ministering to me, Sandoval addressed the Moguls. As unctuously as a TV evangelist, he said, 'There is no salvation without baptism. Cold-water immersion-not as a superstitious rite, mind you, but as a means of preserving higher brain function while the morphocyte conquers the body-is the key to resurrection.' He shook his head despairingly. 'But what kind of resurrection? Resurrection as an intelligent monster, anathema to all that's human? That's not my idea of a quality afterlife. Quality resurrection requires something more. Alice, can you hand me the inhalant?' A small glass tube was produced, and he held it up for all to see. 'This is it. The chalice. The sacrament. It doesn't look like much, does it? But it is body, mind, and spirit. It is freedom and safety from the ravages of time.'
The Moguls were fiercely intrigued, their competing babble resembling the trading floor of a stock exchange. Questions rang out: Is it really the lost formula? Is there enough to go around? How much are you asking for it? Is it safe? Does it have to make you blue? Many of them were concerned with the disposition of their wealth and power-would they still have use for these things and the ability to manage their affairs? Above all, they wanted to remain themselves, or what was the point?
Sandoval grinned, holding up his hands. 'Gentlemen, please. In answer to your questions, let me just explain that this is indeed the end product of Dr. Uri Miska's research: the famous noninfectious, behavior-stabilized strain of the ASR morphocyte, which I promised you we had recovered. New, improved Agent X, now Xombie-free!' That inspired laughter all around. 'It's not a myth. You've just seen for yourselves how well it works in that unscripted demonstration of paternal love-a father very clearly recognizing his daughter and rescuing her from a marauding ghoul! It was a beautiful moment, wasn't it? Is that the ugly behavior we have all come to associate with life after death? Of course not. Aside from the minor cosmetic alteration, it's perfect, and as far as we know, this is all there is of it in the whole world. A single, last dose is all that remains.'
This sobered the crowd. Someone said, 'That's all? Just what's in that little bottle?'
'Yes.' He paused a moment to let them stew, then said, 'But we can make more. Oh yes. We can make quite a bit more, as I will demonstrate. Because just as wine is changed into Sangre de Cristo by the miracle of transubstantiation, so the morphocyte multiplies in the fecund female body, changing it into a wellspring of eternal life. Gentlemen, I hold before you your future-' He handed the ampoule back to Langhorne, who loaded it into a pneumatic gun resembling a cordless drill. 'Synthesized in the consecrated body of a virgin, and extracted and distilled for your everlasting benefit by me and the dedicated staff of Mogul Research Division. But, as a famous man once said, 'You must act now.''
A tumultuous clamor of bidding and protest erupted from the crowd.
The doctors tipped me upright and quickly began lowering me by ropes into the pool. Struggling for breath, I couldn't scream as my feet dipped in. It was deep and cold, and so clear-I could see all the way to the bottom of the ice ridge, ten or fifteen feet below the surface, to the yawning black gulf beneath. Tiny fish swirled down there in spears of olive light.
The stretcher banged against the enamel white sides, then lurched violently, swinging me around. Someone plunged into the water at my feet, a doctor, and the freezing splash interrupted my terror like a slap, so that I could hear other shouts from above.
With a jerk the stretcher rose and landed hard on the grass. Someone yanked off my oxygen mask and unfastened my restraints. It was Wally, of the Blackpudlians, wearing a big fake John Lennon mustache and gold epaulets. ''Ave you out in a second, luv,' he said breathlessly.
Over his shoulder I could see Phil and Reggie in a wild-eyed defensive stance, brandishing their electric guitars by the necks like war clubs, strings twanging, and Dick up on the dive plane, hurling equipment at the doctors from above.
'Dance, you sorry sods!' Dick bellowed, swinging an amplifier by its cord and letting it fly. 'It's the British invasion!'
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From that point on, everything happened very quickly.
As the four Englishmen swarmed Sandoval and the doctors, clouting them down, bedlam broke out in the crowd. The boys set upon their Mogul overlords with a ferocity that belied their slinky eveningwear, tearing into the fat cats like demonic bimbos on Jerry Springer.
The riot didn't last long. There was a strange discontinuity, a break in time, during which I somehow bit my tongue so hard it bled. But it wasn't the pain or taste of blood that told me something had happened. It was the
