“Your time is running out!” a voice whispered through the holes in the acrylic. Its tone held husky secrets. “You do not understand this Prime.”
“Silence! I didn’t ask you to speak.” The Prime’s cheeks flushed scarlet. Threaten me in front of the help?
“And yet, I speak,” the voice carried on.
“Silence!” The Prime had a second of doubt. If he lost control, if someone had tampered with his protections!
“I taste your doubt!” Urgency had crept into the voice, a hint of passion.
The Prime turned his back on the blackness. He had to prove his power. It seemed that something was changing. And the thing had said that his time was running out! But that could be taken many ways. He had too long relied on the prescience of the Infernal and the Divine to distrust it now, and yet, it could be an attempt to unhinge him—they were all capable of lying. It was a vain attempt to win advantage over him. A lie! It had to be punished. If he no longer controlled it, he was about to find out.
“You doubt, Prime,” the voice said.
“Doubt this!” The Prime lifted his hands as he spoke the words. With one he stroked an invisible symbol on the left side of the door, with his right, he touched a mark opposite it. “I command you to obey, by the Power of the Lake of Fire!”
A tortured scream answered from in the black—a terrible sound that started low like breaking rocks, then swept upward toward a screech of pain that threatened to shatter the acrylic—then nothing.
“Now!” The Prime stood so close to the wall that his belly touched it. Glancing to his right he saw that the Operative was shaken. “You will obey my commands and speak only when I allow it.” His voice turned to acid. “Do you hear me?”
The darkness was broken by the gray suggestion of a weary man’s shoulders—then the voice. Weak now, it whimpered, “I hear.”
“You hear—what?” The Prime felt pride swell his body and stiffen his cocks.
“I hear, Master.” The voice was beaten, its passion muted. “I shall hear your command and comply.”
“This Operative must be given the power of spiritual silence. No one among your kind or among your enemies must be able to read his thoughts.” The Prime pushed his face, livid with unborn curses, against the plastic. “Now!”
“I comply, and yet, it is imperfect, for there is no perfection,” it hissed quickly, as though its abjection had driven it to loathe the sound of its own voice.
The Prime hesitated, his hands unconsciously rising toward the symbols of pain that were etched invisibly on the wall around the door. How he enjoyed overpowering this creature. He had tested its endurance before. On more than one night, the Prime had dropped the many floors to approach the thing in its cage and test it. It was a servant—a slave. The Prime had been impressed by its ability to take punishment. At night he dreamt of fucking it.
“It is done,” the creature whispered past the plastic.
The Operative spoke, “I feel a strange sensation, Sir—light-headed.”
“Do not be concerned.” The Prime turned away from the Operative, looked into the darkness again. “You have kept your bargain, and I will bring you no more pain.” He stepped back. And that’s all I’m bringing you. The Prime continued grimly, “Your information about the First-mother was correct. We have her,” he glared. “What of her guardian?”
The voice said: “Unknown. His power is great.”
“His appearance?” the Prime growled back his doubts.
“Like all men,” the voice breathed wearily. “And his mind is closed.”
“Well open your mind to his,” the Prime ordered quietly. “Do what you have to do and tell me when you know.”
“I will search,” the voice said. The gray shadow shape behind the plastic faded.
The Prime cursed his luck. If only there were another way to keep the thing. He would love to watch its face as the door closed. The Prime shrugged his shoulders and spoke to the Operative, “Follow me as before.” A different flex of his arm, and the door closed.
“You have been given a great power,” the Prime told the Operative, and then a quick reprimand. “But you must never step away from one of them.”
“Where should I begin?” the Operative’s voice held a note of self-recrimination.
“You have the file.” The Prime began to pick his way across the hall. He paused to be sure the Operative was following. “Investigate it as you would any murder.”
As they walked toward the elevator, the Prime thought to ask his ally if there was any progress on the God-wife. He still wasn’t sure who he was fated to know exactly, but by all accounts he’d soon have a world all his own to repopulate.
33 – The Burning Bags
“I am here!” the voice said from the darkness. It seemed to come from all sides and inside. It echoed in the mind, at once clear, at once garbled with throbbing power. “Rise and Behold!”
The words held and hugged him, stifled and liberated. He could not breathe. The absent hammer of his heart reverberated in his skull. The once perfect darkness swirled about him a moment longer—tried to drag him back into it; but the voice overpowered the whirlpool of welcome black.
“I am here! Arise!” The words pulled him up. An electric charge of energy flashed through his body. He convulsed around a ragged breath of air, and another. His chest rose and fell, yet he did not feel the coolness of the air, he tasted no revivifying moisture in it. He tried again, and was answered with a wet crackle and a hiss of escaping gas. He was lying in an awkward position—perhaps that was it. His eyes began to see again—the images that struck him were blurry.
He struggled upward with slippery hands covered in purple blood. They snatched and scrabbled numbly over the slick skins of garbage bags. A heat pressed against his face threatening to push him back, but he grabbed a large handful of cardboard and electrical wire—pulled himself forward.
Once standing he saw that corroded iron walls hemmed him in at all sides. His shoes were buried in the greasy remains of rotting garbage bags and refuse. With cold fingers he grabbed the side of the Dumpster and hauled himself up and over—again he heard the crackle and hiss. As he swung himself over he struggled, lost his hold. His feet could not find purchase and he fell. He landed with a sickening thud—a heavy clatter of bones and cartilage. Again there was the crackle and hiss.
“I am here!” The voice came from behind him. He turned. A pile of garbage bags twenty feet tall was heaped against the red brick of an ancient building. Its green and black plastic patchwork was on fire. White, orange and yellow flames burned its edges, but it was not consumed.
“I am here!”
He got to his hands and knees, incredulous, and then raised his head.
“Forgive me!” he said, voice crackling like cellophane.
“Your trials are before you!” the burning garbage said. “And you will pass again into night before it is over.”
“Forgive me, I am unworthy.” The man watched rivulets of purple and brown fluid trickle slowly out of his shirt cuffs. “I failed.”
“I shall judge.” The flames leapt up.
“We were to save him and we did not.” The man rested his head on the pavement. Dizziness pulled his forehead toward the ground, plucked at his consciousness.
“You were betrayed. I was betrayed.” The fire burned white hot now. “Vengeance is Mine!”
“Command me!” His mind reeled against the revelation.
“I command thee. You have lost a friend, and so you must redeem her.” The fire licked at the air overhead. He could feel the heat of the flames like a pulse. “And the road before you is winding.”
“Command me!” He fought the dizziness now, getting one shaky foot under him, rising.
“I command thee to find a man named Updike. He is one of the worthy. As with the building of the Tower, so will this labor be hard. He commands an army, and with this army shall you strike at the heart of Evil. Only then shall you find salvation for yoursel
f, salvation for your friend.” The fire burned upward like a pillar flying to Heaven. “Go now to the place of flight and deliver a message that will be known to you then. I have spoken.” With two great roars of power and flame, the pulsing gout of fire blasted skywards, and was gone.
The man stood at the airport remembering his first moments of Afterdeath. He was bereft. After the vision his head had become heavy; his thoughts were jumbled. He looked at his shoes. A rainbow sheen of oil made them magical. The grime collected as the man walked to the airport. Such a long way, it had been a day or more since he set out.
Slowly, fearfully he let his hands explore his chest again. His attention was constantly drawn there by the strange crackle and hiss. His hands were still very numb, yet they registered shapes and textures, still gave some hint of hot and cold. He clenched his eyes in pain and realization when he found a ruin of flesh and cloth. Numerous holes oozing slippery fluid pierced his ribcage. His fingers felt the shards of shattered bone. He breathed in, still unable to look at himself, and was answered with the crackle and hiss. His chest was smashed like a wicker basket. His organs were crushed and pulped like rotten fruit.
He was dead. But he had a mission. And the Lord in Heaven himself had commanded it. He looked up as people passed, their faces registering disgust at his condition. Somehow Reverend Able Stoneworthy found a part of his soul that could smile.
34 – Captain Jack Updike
Captain Jack Updike could hear Angels. When he was lying awake at night listening to the voices he often came to the conclusion that he was crazy. But his religious training got him to recant every time. You never know—perhaps that was the way it worked for visionaries or people like Joan of Arc. The messages came garbled at first, in various languages, from a multitude of voices. It was the sound of discussion, debate and dialogue—heard through a wall, the words muffled, the tone carrying the emotion or intent. Rarely did they speak directly to him. Occasionally, he was called “eavesdropper” and at other times, he was encouraged to love and spread peace. He supposed that as long as they weren’t telling him to kill anybody, it was a madness that could be his little secret.
And then one told him to raise an army of the dead.
He first heard the Angels before the Change. After, the reception improved, and he soon received word of his mission.
His behavior during the Gulf War ended his stint as chaplain in the United States Army. He had killed a man who was under his spiritual care. Updike was summoned to a trauma unit to comfort Private Randolph Gauthier, out of Louisiana. He had been mortally wounded. With the soldier’s teary eyes looking on, Updike added a lethal dose of morphine to the I.V. drip. Since the boy had not been expected to live, that would have been the end of it, but for the Angels. They reminded him that confession was good for the soul.
Updike confessed, and was arrested. He endured a long period of incarceration leading up to the trial. Updike maintained that what he had done was God’s to judge, not a military tribunal. His superiors felt the growing media scrutiny was damaging so an army psychologist diagnosed Updike with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Criminal charges were dropped, and Updike was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged.
He spent the next few years before the Change looking for a new religion since Catholicism had abandoned him during his trial. Updike sampled many churches, but none suited him. In time he came to consider himself an untethered Christian minister. He believed the Old Testament was the unadulterated truth and he would preach it in his own way. “The Bible, capital ‘T,’ capital ‘B.’ The Old Testament brought down to earth by God’s own voice: The Bible with an angry God—the God who killed a man for gathering wood on the Sabbath. That One.”
Updike kept his military rank without the affiliation. If asked, he would tell people that he was a Captain in the Army of God.
Then the Change came. He had little recollection of the first months. The debate in his head had grown to deafening proportion just before it happened—loud voices shouted in ancient tongues, only some of which he understood. They referred to the “Scroll” and to the “Lamb.”
The debate was accompanied by a headache that grew worse with the volume of the voices. The combination made the preacher distracted, and concentration impossible. So acting on impulse, he took a backpacking trip into the hills of Kentucky seeking some solace from the beauty of nature. The debate in his head raged on and his head pounded, but codeine pills kept it bearable. The rain would not let up, but he attributed it to some spawn of Global Warming.
Updike discovered the Change by accident. Passing a church cemetery one afternoon he took shelter under the eaves of a crumbling mausoleum. He was propped up against its ancient door and lighting a pipe when a man came up out of the ground. He was dead—gray and hideous, he clambered up out of the wet earth like a mud guppy, finally pulling himself free by gripping the sides of his rust-colored headstone.
The corpse lay on the ground for a time, his shrunken eyes peering up into the downpour. His suit was all of one color—mud—and his hair was pasted to his head and face. The rain poured down, scoured the dirt from the fellow’s features. The dead man’s lips and jaws moved like they were made of wood. Now certain he was insane, Updike watched this reborn creature bathing in the rain.
“Alive?” it had asked the heavens in a papery voice. It raised an arm.
Updike stepped forward. “Dead.” He looked the man over. “Not for long.”
The dead man’s face contorted with surprise. “What?”
“Dead.” Updike expected this apparition to disappear with the admission. “You just crawled out of your grave.” Updike almost swooned then, but came out of it when the dead man clutched his overcoat. He grabbed the cold hand.
“Easy, my son,” he said, and paused. The words echoed in his head. The debate had stopped. He heard his own voice, none other—and felt no pain.
The dead man sat up, looked around at the headstones—gray lumps in the downpour. His lips drew back slowly in a hideous grin, then the hands clamped over his eyes. “Dead.” The man’s lungs crackled horribly as he wept. He turned to the preacher. “Is this Heaven?”
Updike pondered that. “Not unless I am dead too. I was not buried, and my flesh is warm and my heart is beating.” The preacher set a hand against the dead man’s chest. There was no movement within. “Or I am mad. Finally.” He started weeping then, and fell into the cold embrace of the dead man. The pair of them sobbed a long time.
They had been together ever since. The dead man’s name was Oliver Purdue. He had been a civil servant in life—working for the Department of Agriculture.
They traveled to the next town and discovered that the world had changed. Newspapers and radios proclaimed it loudly. The sun had disappeared behind an endless cloud, and dead people had begun to rise.
One night, they were camped under the eaves of an old farmhouse—a hotel owner had refused to serve them due to Oliver’s state. The farmer allowed them hot water for tea and washing up, then quartered a loaf of bread and hunk of cheese for them.
“Captain, what about the others?” Oliver’s voice was weak. He soon discovered that gargling with cooking oil improved its strength. He also had to remember to inhale before he talked. “Will they get out?”
“Interesting question, Oliver,” Updike had said over the fire. “Some will.”
“But the others.” His eyes were dull as he looked into the glowing embers. “When I woke up in my coffin, I didn’t feel alone. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. But there was thumping, and a sort of roar—like a hundred voices screaming in the dark.”
Updike had shuddered at the appalling idea.
“I was lucky.” Oliver’s face rose in the firelight. “Someone buried me with an old hunting knife. I could hack my way through the lid of my coffin. But what about the others?”
“Tragic.” Updike dreaded what he had to do but he remembered the Angel whispering that he must raise an army of the dead—and t
he meeting seemed more than coincidence. They returned to Oliver’s cemetery pushing a wheelbarrow full of tools. They dug at the freshest gravesite. By evening they had pulled Muriel Thorn from the ground. She was in an awful state—being the victim of a car accident, but Updike was so overjoyed by her release that he welcomed her back with a hug.
The next day, they exhumed two more—blinking, mouths open in mute horror—the corpses were pulled from their graves. And it continued from there, the reborn helping with the next exhumation. Updike’s workforce grew each day.
Some dead left to reclaim their old lives and as time progressed terrible stories of rejection trickled back. Updike’s force multiplied. With Oliver as his right hand man, he worked his way across the state, and soon began sending exhumation forces ahead into neighboring states. Soon others, many living, took up the cause.
The exhumed were a dedicated and grateful workforce, who existed on olive oil and little else. They could eat, though there were no digestive processes. Some of the exhumed were too frail to work or were dismembered. But these pitched in as they could with anything from accounting to raising funds.
That was all so long ago, and his mission had seen him build an army of workers that grew with each dig. He felt great pity for those that rose without body or head, or who had been killed by massive trauma, yet still retained some awareness. In those cases he offered a choice. They could try to make the best of it or they could be destroyed utterly by fire. Updike was surprised by the number that chose a living death. The dead had lost their faith in death.
In some cases the dismembered could be stitched and glued back together, and the reattached parts would function without much difficulty. Why? Updike soon stopped asking why. He knew only that the world was a changed place, and so long as there were needy dead people he would do what he could for them.
He soon ran into trouble with the Authorities. In those days, governments and their functioning bodies were in transition, and so he didn’t worry overmuch about red tape. But, he did have to account for dismembered body parts, and brainless dead. These, the Authorities suggested, should be relocated to special Internment Facilities. Updike suggested mass cremation, since even dismembered parts were reanimated, but the Authorities balked at such a final solution.
The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two Page 18