2012 The War for Souls

by Whitley Strieber

  Pam broke into a run, and disappeared into the house. Martin saw in his mind’s eye a flashing image of a car key, but knew that her heart was taking her to her old room, and the rooms of those she loved, and he saw her looking at the melted, deranged ruin of her home and knew that she was feeling the same horror that he had, the same anguish at seeing something so much a part of herself made so ugly.

  Nobody spoke, nobody needed to, they could hear her rage in their minds, even Martin could hear it, and a moment later could also hear the increasing roar of wings, and the forlorn, eager cries that grew louder as the nighthawks, seeing her terror like a bright star in a void, found them again.

  From the house, then, silence. She’d become aware of what her emotions were doing.

  Nobody moved. Not a hundred feet overhead, the creatures swarmed. And from the dark woods all around now came the chuckling of outriders. They had begun marching this way, working their steel fangs.

  The truck stood in the drive, but when they drew near it, they found that it was peppered with tiny craters. Farther down the driveway were heaps of something—the remains of people, there was no way to tell.

  As they got into the double cab, Pam tried the key. “We need a miracle, thanks,” she muttered.

  The truck’s engine growled.

  There was a huge crash and the ceiling was crushed enough to knock Martin’s head forward—which was fortunate, because enormous claws came ripping through the metal, ripping and clutching.

  “Keep down, Dad!”

  The engine ground again. “Come on,” Pam said.

  It was a double cab, and Trevor and Mike had gotten in the back. Trevor came forward between the seats as more of the huge nighthawks landed around them, their great heads thrusting, their beaks, lined with narrow teeth, opening wide when they bellowed, then snapping closed with a lethal crack.

  More landed, and more, until Martin could smell their breath, a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and rotting meat that made your throat burn.

  Then one of the heads thrust forward and crashed through the windshield, and the teeth slashed toward Martin. From between the seats, Trevor fired the disk-shaped weapon.

  There was no report. The head simply flew apart, the upper and lower halves of the beak whirling against the opposite doors, the eyes exploding into a dust of glass and gelatin, and the tongue fluttering in the ruined face as the creature shot backward and ended up squalling on its back in the driveway, its fifty-foot wings flapping furiously, hammering the ground so hard that the truck rocked with every great convulsion.

  With a thunder of howls, the rest of them took off, rising as mayflies do from a spring brook, but monstrous.

  “Thank you, God,” Pam said as the truck finally started. She put it into drive and accelerated toward the street, driving over the creature, which snapped and crackled and squalled beneath the bouncing vehicle.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  They went down to Harrow in the ravaged truck, and changed there to another one—Bobby’s police car, which stood open on Main and School. The keys were still in the ignition, and it had a quarter tank of gas. Also, between the front seats, a sawed-off shotgun. They got in, Martin behind the wheel.

  They rode in silence down an empty Highway 36, passing an occasional motionless car, but otherwise meeting not the slightest sign of life. “That’s a terrible weapon,” Martin said to Trevor.

  “It’s nearly empty,” Trevor replied.

  “The light is coming,” Mike said. “We need to hurry.”

  Martin scanned the sky, looking for some sign of an orange disk. He saw nothing, but he stepped on the gas, driving the police interceptor up to a hundred and twenty, then a hundred and thirty. Bobby kept the thing in good shape.

  “Take a right,” Mike said.

  “I thought it was in Smith Center.”

  “The monument’s on 191.”

  Martin turned north on 281. The fields were fallow, the country totally empty.

  “Left,” Mike said.

  Another mile and Martin saw the little monument just off the road. A short distance from it was a small building.

  “Okay,” Mike said, “you got it. Now what?”

  They got out. Martin carried the shotgun.

  Mike took it. “That’s an eight-shot semi,” he said, “not seven.”

  “It’s loaded?”

  “I know that.”

  Martin went to the chapel, a white portable building, its siding weathered. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. Inside were a few pews, a table, and a cross on the wall behind it. He noticed that this was not an ordinary Christian cross. Christ lay upon it, but the four limbs of the cross were of equal length. He wondered who might have done that in rural Kansas, made it into such a very ancient symbol, for the solar cross marked the solstices and the equinoxes, and related to the greatest depths of human memory and knowledge, from the time when we did not think like we do now, but made wonders in the world because we were surrendered to God, and thus acting on exquisite instinct, not plodding thought.

  “Who is she?” Pam asked.

  For a moment, Martin was confused. Then he saw her, too, a shadow standing in the corner of the chapel, so still that she at first appeared to be little more than a thickening of the dark. But he could see her eyes there in the corner of the room, her gleaming eyes, and her slimness.

  Jennifer Mazle sprang at him. One second, he was wondering if the figure was even alive, the next he had been slammed to the floor.

  Her hands came around his throat, closed. His head felt as if it was going to explode. At that same moment thick light surged in the windows and the door with the force of a tidal wave, causing the glass to shatter and the door to slam all the way across the chapel, where it hit the wall and dropped the cross to the floor.

  Martin looked directly into Mazle’s face, into eyes that bulged until the contact lenses popped out, revealing the reptile eyes of the seraph. In the light that was all around them, he could see the kids moving with method and direction, and could hear the whispering of their minds.

  Mike pulled Mazle’s head back. Her mouth opened and her long, black tongue came out as she screamed. Trevor thrust the shotgun into her mouth and pulled the trigger, and her lithe body shot backward in a shower of green blood. The head burst.

  “But the light!”

  “Don’t think, Martin!” Pam yelled.

  “Just let yourself happen, Dad!”

  As he took his attention away from his mind and into his body, he felt his soul return also, and knew that the light had been taking him so stealthily that he hadn’t even realized it.

  Then Pam marched into the corner where Mazle had been standing and simply disappeared.

  For a moment, Martin thought she’d gone through a concealed gateway, but when he heard echoing footsteps, he understood. Cunning doors like this were seen in some Egyptian temples he’d worked on, but especially in Peru, where there were many of them in old Cuzco, doors that to this day only the Inca knew. But to find one here in Kansas—well, he would have been surprised once.

  Concentrating on his breath, on the way his body felt as he moved, leaving his thoughts and his fears behind, he found that he could move through the light easily and without danger. The kids weren’t even concerned by it.

  He crossed the ruined chapel with the others, walking straight into the corner, feeling it give way, seeing the darkness, then finding his footing on steep black steps.

  They had defeated the light, and if only mankind had recognized his own soul before it was too late, the whole world would have been able to do the same thing. But the seraph had infiltrated us with the lie that we were a body only, that there was no soul that was admissible to understanding and to science, and that science itself was a strange exploration having nothing to do with the kingdom of God, when, in fact, there was no real science that did not address heaven and satori.

  As they went down, the air changed, growing thicker and
warmer, beginning to smell stifling. This was the air of Abaddon, air as it would be everywhere in this world of theirs very soon. It was heavier, their air, and would be filling low places first.

  He was last in line, going down the iron steps. Faint light came from below. From above, now only darkness.

  They went down for a long time, and Martin remembered the part of Wylie’s book about Al’s descent. He had been taken miles into the earth.

  As the light from below got brighter, it took on a blue cast, and the narrow shaft they were descending became more distinct. “It’s our guide,” Mike said.

  Martin knew that the blue light of souls was also the color of good worlds, and that Abaddon was brown, but the human earths were palest blue, the color of their waters and their skies, and the glow of their dead.

  “Are we sure?” Martin asked. They were a good two hundred steps down, and he was beginning to feel a distinct sense of claustrophobia in the narrow space. He forced himself not to think of the depth or the closeness. He’d found reading Wylie’s description of Al’s descent beneath Cheyenne Mountain to be almost unendurable, so vivid was the sense of being enclosed in rock, and he could never forget the feeling he’d had here earlier.

  “Oh, my God.”

  It was Pam, calling up from below. “What?”

  He reached the bottom of the steps. At first, he was only aware of color—gold, green, red, tan. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he could. “This is the most extraordinary room in the world.” He’d seen it before, of course, but not in the body, not with all the vividness of his living eyes.

  “Back down, Dad. Try to put your mind away.”

  “I can’t put my mind away! Don’t you see what this is? It’s where we saw the hieroglyphics. But now we’re here in the flesh, and it’s all so—so vivid and so real. This is the most superb example of Old Kingdom bas-relief on the planet. And it’s in the middle of the United States!”

  “Dad, listen to me. If you don’t just let it take you over, we’re in trouble. Because we’re not in the United States, dad. This is Abaddon, and the second they realize that we’re here, we are done.”

  “We’ve come through a gateway?”

  “We’re still on earth, but in the physics of Abaddon.”

  “Come on,” Mike said. “We’ve got work to do. Stuff to figure out.”

  Martin followed him across the room where Al North had been deprived of his life and his soul. He followed them through a low doorway, which was the source of the light, which was a living light that penetrated the flesh and made you weep to feel it upon your body.

  Then he saw why. He was in a cavern, blue-lit like a submarine cave just touched by sun from the surface. Before them stretched a sea of glass tubes, each three feet long, all plugged into huge black sockets, all living, exact replicas of the images on the wall of the temple of Dendera. Except these tubes were sparking with life, and you could see the lights inside them leaping and jumping and struggling, causing the whole room to flicker continuously.

  Slowly, Trevor, then Pam and Mike went to their knees. Martin followed them, because the light shining on them was not just alive, but richly alive, and they could see millions of summer mornings, dew on the flowers of the world, signs of struggle and happiness, and hear, also, a roar of voices that was vast.

  The flower of mankind was here.

  “What do we do now, Dad?”

  “I have no idea.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  DECEMBER 21, THE FINAL HOURS ON ABADDON: THE UNION

  WYLIE HAD REALIZED THAT HE was being dieseled when he saw that they were crossing the same sodden shopping street again. There were piles of yarn, there were farm implements, there were baskets and paint-brushes, and hatchets polished to a high shine.

  He might be a shape-shifter like the rest of them, but he was not on their side. No, he was a Union man, he had remembered that. They were right about him being an intelligence agent. He was, but not a very good one, given that he’d gotten his sweet ass caught just when that was the worst possible thing that could have happened.

  Wylie had examined every inch of the wagon, but it was made like a fricking safe. The goddamn driver would open a little hatch from time to time and shit and piss into it. Wylie stayed well back, but the place stank. He wondered if his own shit was yellow now, too?

  The wagon had been stopped for some time before he understood that it wasn’t going to be moving again. There was a series of clicks, and the door went hissing open. Even in this place, with its dirty brown sky, coming out hurt his eyes.

  He was coming to the crisis of his failure now, he knew.

  “Ready for lunch,” his captor said. “Your hands are comin’ to me and mine, I hear.”

  His hands. What a place. Trapped in the wagon with nothing to do but think, he had remembered more of his real life. If you looked—really looked—you wouldn’t find a trace of Wylie Dale before December 26, 1995, the day he’d made his transition into a human life that had been painstakingly constructed for him to enter. “Wylie Dale” had already been established as a novelist by the organization that had sent him to the human earth, but the first book he’d written himself was Alien Days, his story of his abduction, which had actually been a looking-glass memory of his arrival on one-moon earth.

  As Wylie’s eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing before a gigantic version of a building familiar to him. It was the model for the Tomb of Skull and Bones on the campus of Yale University. But the Tomb was not large. This building was two hundred feet tall, a great, ugly monolith.

  Compared to the rest of the city, which echoed with roars, screeches, discharges of steam, the rumbling of wagons, and various unidentifiable hoots, laughs, and howls, the silence here was total.

  Bones had been founded by William Huntington Russell, whose step-brother Sam had carried opium into China for the British when they were trying to get back the gold they’d spent on Chinese tea. British captains hadn’t been willing to do it. It might have been the 1850s, but drug running was still drug running. Russell had no problem with addicting the Chinese.

  “Are you happy?” he asked his grinning captor.

  “Yeah, I’m happy.”

  “Then fuck you.”

  “Could I season your fingers?”

  “You going to two-moon earth?”

  “I should be so lucky. No can afford.”

  Wylie thought of the shithole the seraph hordes were being sent to. “What does it cost?”

  “Whatever you have. Which assumes you have something. They don’t consider an artificial syrinx with a busted jaw and this old wagon worth a ticket. I live in it, you know. When it’s not otherwise occupied.”

  “So you’re poor?”

  “Poor as shit, which is why—” He stopped. He listened, so Wylie listened, too. Keening came, heart-freezing, getting louder fast. “Knees!”

  Wylie didn’t argue. As he went down to the hard earth and little knots of mushrooms like small, exposed brains, a line of flying motorcycles with silver fenders, ridden by figures in gold metallic uniforms and gleaming gold helmets and face masks, came speeding out of the sky and hung dead still a foot or so above the ground, their motors revving as the riders worked to keep them stable.

  This was followed by a smooth whoosh of sound, and a jewel of an aircar appeared.

  He knew who it belonged to, of course: Marshal Samson. His escort bowed, and he bowed, too. There was a click and he could sense somebody getting down, coming over.

  “Hello, Wylie.” The voice positively bubbled. “I knew it from the first. It had to be this. Actually, I’m impressed. I’ll never tell her that, of course, but it was a brilliant operation.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just came from raping your wife, incidentally. Bring him.”

  He was kicked from behind, and ended up scuttling through the huge doors, which had opened soundlessly and now presented the appearance of a gaping cave.

&n
bsp; As Wylie walked through the darkness of the anteroom and Samson opened the inner door for them both, the enormous golden floor struck him with a powerful sense of remembrance. That floor had been a source of scandal at home, a symbol to the Union of the greed of the autocrats who ran this side of the planet.

  A tall woman loaded with jewels, her hair sleek and white, dressed in the richest clothing Wylie had ever seen, came striding forward. Her face was so white that it glowed, the scales attractively tiny, the features delicate. He knew that this was the infamous leader of this world, Echidna, whose family had held controlling ownership of the Corporation for uncountable millennia.

  All the females in the line were called Echidna. When one wore out, a new clone replaced it seamlessly, without any public awareness. There was never an issue of succession, unlike the Union, which was a simple democracy and in turmoil all the time.

  “Come, Spy,” she said, “I want to gloat before dinner.”

  As they crossed the great room, he saw Lee Raymond, Robert Mugabe, and Ann Coulter playing a game involving dice on what appeared to be a table made of emeralds, rubies, and a great, gleaming expanse of pure diamond. He recognized the game. It was senet, the Egyptian pre-decessor to backgammon. In the human worlds, the rules of senet had been hidden away by the seraph, but here, where they had not, players at senet gambled for souls.

  He was not sure if they were human, or simply proud of their achievements as human, and showing off their forms.

  “I had no idea your penetration of human society was so extensive.”

  “But not of both human worlds, not as much as I hoped. This time around, we’re only getting the one, I fear.” She shot him a twinkling glance. “But we are getting it, you Union shit!”

  Coulter now shifted into a sallow reptilian form with big, beady scales. Her black tongue darted behind spiked teeth made yellow from too much tobacco. Wylie realized that she was lusting after him. Mugabe, who was apparently her seraph husband, scurried behind her, trying to keep a cloak around her.

  “Ann wants to bed you before we eat,” Echidna said. “It’s a particular pleasure of hers, to fuck her food.”