Free Xombies: Apocalypso by Walter Greatshell

force shooting through me. It surged up my arms and legs like water through a fire hose, jerking my limbs taut, flooding my heart, and filling my head to bursting.
    I fell backward, and they fell with me, all of us connected like paper dolls, a web of six-sided figures draped like lace across the steel dome of the tower. Facing the sky, I said, “Oh.”
    We were one, linked not just with each other but with other hexagons all over the world. Streaming live and jacked into the Agent X network—the proliferating mass of cyanotic rust that had already infected the human race and was now spreading like wildfire in the iron-rich veins of our very planet. This blue rust was merely the visible manifestation of the indestructible Maenad morphocyte. It was everywhere now, fusing the billions of Maenads into an information complex greater than the entire Internet, drawing power from Earth’s magnetic field. Soon it would be able to focus that power, channel it, exploit it.
    But to what end?
    As if in answer to my unspoken question, I could suddenly see masses of strange black objects floating in the sky. They looked like enormous embryos—pulsating, alive, and intricately organic. Hundreds, thousands of them were rising off the land like so many spores, rising in streams from multiple sources all over the world.
    I didn’t see them with my eyes but with the eyes of a billion others, vast Hexes of Maenads, and as I watched, I could see the first of them actually leaving the bonds of the Earth, pushed by collective thought alone, rising beyond the highest reaches of the atmosphere and accelerating into space. Heedless of gravity, heedless of time.
    For that brief moment, I knew everything.
     
    A little later, I was sitting on a second-story ledge over the drugstore, just watching the show. That was what I thought of this experiment of Langhorne’s: It was a play, some kind of performance art, so we might as well enjoy it. All the world’s a stage, I mused, as Julian Noteiro passed beneath me.
    In a hurry as usual, Julian sensed my eyes on him and looked up. “Hi, Midge.”
    I froze, then dropped from the ledge to the sidewalk. “Whoa,” I said, getting up and brushing myself off, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa— what ?”
    “I’m sorry?” Julian said, reluctantly pausing.
    “Did you just call me Midge?”
    “Uh … yes?”
    “Let’s get this straight, once and for all,” I said, jabbing a finger in his chest. “Nobody calls me Midge. All right ? Midge is not a name, it’s an insect. I may be short, but I refuse to be called Midge for the rest of eternity. I am not Midge. My name is Lulu, get it?”
    “Okay, sure, Lulu.”
    “Also, I am not ‘going steady’ with Lemuel, in case you were under that impression.”
    “You mean Big Moose?”
    “No! I mean Lemuel! I’m Lulu, you’re Julian, and he’s Lemuel. My friend Lemuel—not my boyfriend. I didn’t ask for a boyfriend, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I don’t want a boyfriend. Period! Case closed! End of story!”
    Without warning, I kissed him.
    Apropos of nothing, I leaned forward and kissed him, and it was like two car batteries joined at the wrong terminals: Electricity arced from our lips, our hair crackled, our flesh ran liquid, and boiling acid seethed in our veins. We burned . Flesh sizzled against flesh as every Maenad cell in our bodies recoiled against the forbidden contact.
    Julian screamed in pain, fighting to break free. But just when I thought we had to die, to explode, something … the wall burst, the defenses cracked wide, and instead of being forced apart, we fused harder, melting one into the other until I didn’t know where I ended and Julian began … and I didn’t care. At once I understood that there was something beyond the X barrier—something awful and wonderful and utterly strange. Something no one knew about.
    Suddenly, a wedge came between us. In a frazzle of molten strands, we were split in two, roots sundered and our