The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  The snow is falling in ever-heavier sheets, obscuring the roadside signage and turning the slopes to either side of the freeway into blank white planes. “Sometimes they try to nurture the talent within the organization. You usually work for Dr. Angleton, don’t you? Yes, I suspect you’re one of them. The specialists who come up through the ranks. And then there are the external assets. Lockhart deals with those. Because sometimes the bureaucracy needs people who can do things that bureaucrats are not allowed to do, people who can work outside the law or who have unique skills. The organization needs to scratch its own back.”

  She thumps the steering wheel hub hard. Howard jerks upright. “What?”

  “I am not outside your agency, Mr. Howard, I am outside your organization chart. And I’m outside it because I am more useful on the outside. Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”

  The idiots in Rome, endlessly bickering over who had killed her parents, had tried her patience sorely. And the patronizing men at the Ministry with their no job for a little girl. The British organization, at least, had a more pragmatic approach—one reflecting its antique collegiate origins, all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee; never mind its wartime expansion into a special operations team, willing to take anyone whether or not they had been to the right school or university. Buried somewhere in the lard-belly of committee agendas and office politics is a steel spine, and the arrangement they offered her has proven to be very satisfactory.

  “The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger organization, built from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.

  “I believe Gerald Lockhart may have misled you about our working relationship, Mr. Howard. Perhaps he implied that Johnny and I are contractors who work for the agency. A little white lie that lends us a bit more flexibility than we’d have if we spent all our hours filling in time sheets and attending meetings. That sort of stuff is Gerald’s job—dealing with the bureaucracy so that we don’t have to. Us? We go places, break plots, and kill demons.”

  She closes her eyes briefly to consult her memory map, opens them again as a stupid minivan driver blazes past, spraying turbid slush everywhere. There are more flashing lights. The big USAF base is some miles ahead, off to the right, behind a chain-link fence surrounding the area of a medium-large European state.

  “Forty to fifty minutes,” she says, pressing down on the accelerator. The yellow glare of the gate lies off to one side and astern, just beyond the horizon, lighting up the starless sky of the Other Place. An echoing glare of light lies dead ahead, straight down the highway. “Then we can shut down Schiller’s revival service.”

  She glances sideways to check his reaction to her words. Howard is staring intently at the pizza box on his lap instead of listening.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  Howard looks up. “I think they’re onto us,” he says.

  MORNING AT THE NEW LIFE CHURCH.

  The New Life Church isn’t just a church—it’s a campus and office complex, with multiple buildings housing the World Prayer Center and a whole slew of small group ministries focussing on specialized niches.

  Its worshipers are, in Raymond Schiller’s eschatology, misguided at best and damned at worst; or they were, until he convinced the Board of Overseers to give him a fair hearing at a prayer retreat in the compound near Palmer Lake. The Board of Overseers have now been Saved, and are duly grateful. As a sign of appreciation they have agreed to make the main sanctuary available for Ray’s big tent event, in a joyous celebration of the Golden Promise Ministries’ bounteous commitment to the people of Colorado Springs. In fact, they’re pulling out all the stops to bring their flock to the true cause—they’ve rearranged the main sanctuary for a largely standing congregation and, with the Sheriff’s Department providing volunteer fire marshals and a waiver, they’ve got a roof to cover 8,000 souls. New Life only has about 9,000 regulars at present and barely a third are likely to show for a non-Sunday special organized by a different local church, but Golden Promise have been love-bombing Colorado Springs and environs with advertisements for the event for the past week; and once they’re Saved, the new converts will be most zealous in their attempts to bring friends and family along.

  Kick-off is due at 2 p.m., for an event that is planned to run all afternoon. It’s a tight schedule. The Golden Promise team are supposed to complete their tear-down by 9 p.m. so that the sanctuary can be returned to order for the Sunday morning service. The reality, as Ray has explained to Pastors Dawes and Holt, is that Sunday is cancelled. Every day is Sunday in the world to come, and once the New Life Church is rededicated to a higher purpose it will process new blood around the clock.

  It’s morning at the New Life, although Ray couldn’t be certain if his watch didn’t tell him so. “Who ordered this?” He frets at sister Roseanne: “Our Lord sends his storms to protect the flock of the faithful until it’s time to take what is ours of right, but if it stops them coming to Church…”

  “I’m sure it will be all right, Father?” She clutches his day planner apprehensively. “The Lord will provide snowplows and road salt, I’m sure!”

  Ray glances at her sharply, but there’s no sign of irony in her hopeful face. Irony is a sin, but his handmaids are faithful followers, pure and chaste even without a host to guide them. He nods slowly. “I’m certain He will.” He turns his head to his security chief. “Alex. Our expected drop-in guests. You’re ready for them?”

  Alex nods. “We have security in plain clothes checking the doors, and the parking garage barrier is manned. I’ve issued mug shots and everyone’s been briefed on the troublemakers; the control room’s manned and watching for them.” He cracks his knuckles. “They won’t get past us.”

  Ray closes his eyes. “They are approximately twenty miles north of here, coming south along the Ronald Reagan Expressway. Slowly, because of the weather. The Holy Spirit told me so.” He opens his eyes. “Now, what of the other task?”

  “It’s being taken care of. I sent some missionaries.” Alex has a habit of becoming uncharacteristically terse when he is discussing something that he thinks Schiller is best insulated from, lest he end up on a witness stand someday.

  Ray nods, thoughtfully. “I’ll be in the vestry. Bring them to me as soon as you have them, unless I’m on stage; in that case, hold them until I’m ready.” He stands and rests a hand on sister Roseanne’s shoulder for a moment—his sense of balance has been erratic this past day or so. “God be with you.”

  PATRICK IS IN THE KITCHEN, BREWING UP A POT OF TEA, WHEN he realizes something is very wrong.

  Moira is upstairs in the bedroom, tucked up and crashed out on a cocktail of temazepam and Imodium to keep her guts under control. The chemo this time round is visibly eroding her, like a too-fast river wearing down a sandstone bed. It cuts into her earlier with each course. She won’t be stirring much before noon, but he needs to get moving and buy food, then call the shop about her car. So he’s up and about in a pair of worn bedroom slippers and a dressing gown that’s seen better days, sluicing h
ot water around the teapot and getting ready to spoon loose leaf tea into it. The Irish Breakfast blend brings back memories, not all of them bad.

  It’s unnaturally dark outside, and the weatherman’s got no clue about what’s happening: there’s something on the news about an extreme weather event and a blackout that’s hit the phone company—backhoe through a cable, probably, or a fire in an exchange. But Patrick pays scant attention to the radio. Something is tickling his nerves.

  He can’t say precisely what it is, but his hackles rise. Then, a moment later, he feels it. It’s a tight, warm sensation at the base of his throat, in the other tattoo they applied when he signed the contract. A warning and a threat. He glances around, taking stock. The kettle is on the burner, heating up. There’s nothing visible in the backyard. Danger. He’s felt it before, this premonition of disaster. It takes him back to an evening in Belfast: taking a shortcut home from the pub via Barrack Street, just off the lower Falls, when he’d realized he was being stalked. Or another time in Marseilles, setting up a fallback route for the Duchess when the same faces kept showing up in shop window reflections behind him. The fetid breath of disaster panting after him.

  There is a reproduction grandmother clock in the front hall, patiently ticking away the seconds. Patrick darts through and opens the cabinet door on its front, pushes aside the lead counterweights and disturbs the pendulum that has counted out the twilight hours and months he’s spent here with Moira. Leaning inside the cabinet with its muzzle on the floor and the butt close to hand is a sawn-off pump-action shotgun. Five in the tube and one up the spout. He keeps it for emergencies, along with the discreet camera on the front stoop and the screen inside the door. Right now the camera is showing nothing much, just the usual view of the steps and the mailbox, but something about it isn’t quite right—

  There is a hammering on the door. “Police! Open up!” There’s nothing on screen, but right then the tattoo heats up like a bad patch of sunburn and begins to glow.

  Out of time for the subtle stuff, Patrick feels an old and familiar fury: So they want to fuck with me and mine? Not that he’s got much. This run-down two-story house in the suburbs, and his run-down wife, sallow-skinned and exhausted from the cancer, sleeping upstairs. But he will not let them pass, whoever they are. He pulls the shotgun, brings it round to bear on the front door, and fires without hesitation.

  Click. Nothing happens.

  Crunch. The door bows inward near the lock, but the reinforced frame he installed is holding for now—until they bring a jack to bear.

  Patrick swears angrily and works the slide, ejects a cartridge, and pulls again. Click.

  His tattoo is burning hot now. The kettle begins to wind up to an eerie banshee scream from the kitchen as it comes to a rolling boil.

  Another cartridge goes rolling across the floor as Patrick squeezes the trigger again: another misfire. He glances down as he reloads, futile—the red plastic tubes projecting from the cartridge bases are glowing cuprous green in the shadows. They’re loaded with banishment rounds, but it looks like someone’s brought countermeasures.

  Patrick drops the gun and legs it towards the kitchen, hunting wildly for anything suitable—the knife rack by the worktop, the kettle screeching its iron lung out—grabs Moira’s favorite carving knife and the aforementioned iron jug, skids back into the hall, and turns at bay as the door opens.

  They are not the police.

  “Motherfucker!” Patrick screams in fury and throws the contents of the boiling kettle at the first intruder. Conservatively attired in a black suit and tie, white shirt, the missionary takes the steaming gush direct in the face without flinching. His eyes glow the same shade of green as the flawed shotgun cartridges rolling underfoot as he steps forward. Glowing green wormlike shapes writhe within the intruder’s eyes. “Get the fuck out!”

  Patrick lunges forward, carving knife held low. The missionary is spreading his arms wide. Now his mouth opens, revealing something silvery and twitching. The knife is a faint hope. Patrick leans hard and the point sinks into the missionary’s chest, right between the ribs, but no blood comes out. And now Patrick’s tattoos are glowing nearly as brightly as the low-power bulb in the hall light fitting. The missionary takes another step forward, and the second one crosses the threshold, cutting off any chance of escape through the front door.

  Patrick takes a step back, treads on a loose shotgun cartridge, and falls against the wall beside the clock. Door hanging open, chains and counterweights disemboweled—he reaches in and yanks hard on the pendulum, a kilogram of brass on the end of a meter-long steel shank. (The clock was his old man’s; the only thing of his that he’s bought to the new world.) Raising the improvised shillelagh he takes a swipe at the missionary’s head with the counterweight. Success. The thing in front of him raises an arm to block, and stops pushing forward. The knife blade sticking out of his chest is oozing slowly, thick and dark.

  “Join us,” drones the missionary. “We are the Saved. Join us and bathe in the blood of the lamb and be Saved forever.”

  “Fuck off,” Patrick snarls, waving the pendulum at the walking corpse. “Get aff my fuckin’ patch, motherfocker!”

  “Join us—” The missionary repeats the invitation perfectly, like an answering machine from hell.

  “Patrick”—another voice from the top of the stairs, one that detonates an emotional hand grenade that sends grief-tainted shrapnel tearing through his heart—“what’s going on?”

  Only one thing left. Utter desperation and fear threaten to weaken his knees before he can do it. It’s a last resort: maybe they can—

  ***Help?***

  Patrick loses consciousness immediately. Someone else looks out through his eyes, someone more detached, with the aloof cruelty of a small boy contemplating the antics of insects trapped in a jam jar.

  “Hello,” says Patrick’s mouth.

  The missionaries hold their ground, but look apprehensive. It’s like they know their own kind.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” says Control. “Did Ray send you?”

  “Join us—”

  “Bo-ring.” Patrick’s body jabs the pendulum into the nearer missionary’s face and lets go of it. And then, with an agility alien to a sixty-year-old in poor condition, he stoops sideways and scoops up the shotgun.

  “Patrick? Who are these—”

  “Oh shut up.” He spins towards the staircase and casually pulls the trigger. The detonation is deafening in the confined space. What’s left of Moira’s upper torso fountains blood as it topples forward, coming to rest at the foot of the stairs. Her head lands face down on the landing.

  Control ejects the spent cartridge, chambers a fresh round, and turns back to face the missionaries, raising the shotgun and bringing the barrel to rest under his borrowed body’s chin.

  “Who sent you?” Control demands, resting a finger lightly on the trigger.

  “Why did you kill her? She was Unsaved.” The second missionary is more talkative than his taller companion, whose unfortunate encounter with a carving knife has damaged his lungs.

  “Who sent you?” Control repeats. “I’m getting impatient here. Tell me or I’ll kill the hostage. Then you won’t get to eat him.”

  “We do not eat them!” protests the second missionary. His voice is thick and hard to make out. His tongue ripples fatly between his lips, silvery with twitching legs: it has grown almost too large for this mouth. Soon it will asphyxiate the carrier, and the host will require another body. “We bring them to the Lord.”

  “All right.” Control lowers the shotgun muzzle far enough for Patrick’s mouth to swallow convulsively: certain physiological reflexes continue, even if the usual tenant is elsewhere. “Who is your Lord?”

  “We serve the Gatekeeper of Heaven, He Who Sleeps and Will Rise Again. Come with us. Accept the love of Jesus Christ into your heart and mouth and rejoice in everlasting light for eternity. You, too, can be Saved. Help us tear down the Wall of P
ain and open the gates of the pyramid and dance wild and free forever in the silver heat of His gaze!”

  Control sneers. “I don’t think so!” Then he pushes down on the trigger, and the top of Patrick’s skull disappears in a mist of fatty tissue and bone splinters.

  IT IS A SMALL MERCY, IN CONTROL’S OPINION: A REWARD FOR all Patrick has done for the Agency, and a final discharge that painlessly clears all debts. (Which are not inconsiderable, counting the group health insurance.) The situation was already non-survivable by the time Patrick became aware of it. He should have grasped this as soon as he realized the CCTV was being spoofed. Or in any event once the banishment rounds misfired when he engaged the enemy.

  But Control is now aware of the true identity of the adversary. And that means there’s still some hope of saving Denver.

  THE TROUBLE WITH GODHEADS, IN JOHNNY’S EXPERIENCE, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God.

  Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift.

  And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings.