The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  “Please wait.” Officer Black speaks. “This will be investigated.” His tone is much less self-assured. “You are correct in your inferences about the Golden Promise Ministries. More to the point, they have raised a ward against us around a substantial part of central Colorado—from south of Colorado Springs to north of Denver. Your people appear to be able to move freely across it because it was programmed to detect our sigil of office. Which is highly suggestive of an internal rogue element, but that is not your concern; Internal Affairs will investigate in due course. That is not all, however. Yesterday an artificial weather system blanketed the area, and all flights are grounded. They have also suborned the highway patrol, the Denver police department, and the local FBI office.”

  “What about the military?” asks the female Auditor. She leans forward intently. “Aren’t there any units within the area that can intervene?”

  “No. The only major installation within the zone is the Air Force Academy.”

  “Well, can’t you use them? Arm the students and—”

  “The Academy is under investigation for discrimination against non-evangelicals,” Black says dismissively. “The faculty and student body must be presumed hostile.”

  “So you’re locked out of the area,” Angleton muses. “I take it O’Donnell here was your last remaining asset in Denver?” O’Donnell’s shade nods. Something grayish-pink peeps briefly at the world through the shattered eggshell of his skull. “If our people can deactivate the ward from the inside, how well positioned are you to follow through?”

  Officer Green pipes up: “We have assets sleeping in place.” He grins, heat-cracked ivory flashing in a carbonized jaw. “You are not the only soul-eater, Doctor.”

  The female Auditor clears her throat. “We want our people back. Preferably alive.”

  Officer Black looks at her. “If they survive, we will not prevent them leaving.”

  “Forgive me for saying this, but your people have a reputation for not playing well with allied—”

  But she is talking to a blank wall, for Officer Black has vanished into the Other Place from which he came, taking his horror show companions with him.

  “Well, I think that went reasonably well, all things considered!” The Senior Auditor remarks to the suddenly small and dingy room, as he reaches for the water carafe to fill a tumbler with a hand that is only very slightly shaky.

  Angleton shakes his head. “Longer spoon next time,” he murmurs.

  The female Auditor is visibly frustrated. “They’re relying on our assets to do their dirty work, and they won’t even guarantee safe passage!”

  “Then they’d better be up for the job, hadn’t they?” Lockhart shows his teeth. “Mahogany Row sent them—except for Doctor Angleton’s secretary, of course. Who is not without resources of his own.”

  “One may hope so.” Angleton reaches for the table water. “But I admit I wasn’t expecting him to have to deal with a challenge of this magnitude so soon.”

  * * *

  ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH GODHEADS, JOHNNY REFLECTS, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.

  Here he is, sitting snug in the leather-lined baseball catcher’s mitt of a luxury-trimmed Suburban, surrounded by fake walnut veneer and cup holders and power sockets, staring out at a blizzard through tinted windows. Up front a godshattered man in black with a cymothoan parasite in place of his tongue wrestles with the power steering. (At least it isn’t one of the hypercastrating variants, Johnny notes with relief; those things give him the cold shudders.) It is apparent that Schiller’s people have caught up on their research: they’ve worked out who and what Johnny is, which is why they’ve switched from shoot-on-sight to the velvet-glove treatment, like it was all a bad mistake and they want to kiss and make up. It’s that damned summoning recipe from the Book of Apocalypse, of course. If Schiller popped out of nowhere then it follows that he may be short on willing elders to help with the ritual.

  But it’s also fairly clear that although Schiller’s people know what he is, they don’t understand where he’s coming from. It’s like something out of quantum mechanics: you can know where something is, or where it’s going, but not both at the same time. Yeah, that’s it, he thinks as he stares out at the swirling blanket of snow: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as applied to dead gods.

  Fuckwits.

  “How long have you been Saved?” he asks the missionary.

  There is no immediate reply, and he’s about to ask again when the husk speaks: “Three years.”

  Johnny is impressed. Either Schiller’s found some way to slow down the parasite’s growth or the man has a very strong mind indeed. (Had a very strong mind.) “How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  The missionary slowly steers the big SUV around a tight curve, peering out through the windscreen wipers as they batter huge slabs of melting snow away from the glass. It’s mid-morning, but the light is gray, fading towards twilight. “Before I was Saved I was in the FBI. I’m a back-office forensic specialist, not an agent. Jack—he’s our station chief—invited us all to an after-work service one evening, said it’d change our lives. I was…lost…didn’t believe him, kind of resented it. But you don’t piss off your chief over nothing, and I had nothing else on, so I went.” The vehicle rocks slightly as it aquaplanes through slush. “I was scared for a few seconds, at communion, but they had my back. And then everything was all right. Jesus came into my soul and now everything is wonderful.”

  Just like a heroin addict describing his first fix, thinks Johnny. “What does Jesus tell you about me?”

  “You’re of the prophet’s line,” says the missionary. “You are one of the Elect.” He falls silent for a while. “Jesus says he needs you, for the seed of the elders of the elect is holy.”

  Well fuck me, Johnny thinks ironically, with a flashback to his dad’s lessons, punctuated with blows from the tawse: For the priests of the Lord are of the house of Levi, and what are we if not the guardians of the holy seed? That particular beating had been over suspected masturbation, something dad seemed to have a peculiarly superstitious dread of; it had been one beating of many, mostly undeserved. There had been no denying the terror and glory of the Lord in the McTavish household, or the old man’s ability to bring home a trawler with a net full of fish every time he put to sea and prayed, or the fits and the babbling, and—when Johnny was thirteen—the coming of age ceremony, the service of dedication at midnight on a spume-blown rocky beach, attended by representatives of the distant branch of the family who could no longer stray far from the ocean or pass for human.

  “Does Jesus know what I am?” He pushes.

  “Jesus says you are of the line of the Masters. The prophet’s son. Jesus says God wants you by His side when He returns to earth. The elder says you are to help open the way of the Lord.”

  Johnny leans back, skin crawling. He’s got a lot of planning to do before they make it to the church on time. Normally he’d call up the chinless wonder on his tattoo hotline, but this close to so many supernatural parasites would be a spectacularly bad idea. So he’s got a bunch of planning to do, starting with, how to take best advantage of the besotted cymothoan host’s crush on his lineage—an unexpected bonus of his occult ancestry, born of a line of men who go down to the sea in boats and commune with the things of the deep. On the other hand, he knows from long experience what Persephone will expect of him, and how she is likely to react. All that’s in question is how to terminate Schiller’s operation and get out of this rat trap alive.

  After an hour of tense boredom, driving through a twilit blizzard behind an endless trail of brake lights, Johnny’s chauffeur takes a gently graded exit from the interstate and tur
ns onto a wide, straight boulevard. Squat, windowless stores and warehouses punctuate the desolation, snow already humped up before them. Traffic, however, is surprisingly heavy, and most of it is going the same way. Finally it begins to bunch up in a queue of turn signals, all heading for the same side road. It’s the gateway to the New Life campus: an airport terminal served by sky pilots. It’s large enough to have its own internal road network, and the parking attendants, bundled up in heavy winter coats, are working overtime to direct the churchgoing throng to the different parking zones.

  Johnny’s driver does not head for the regular parking. After a brief word with one of the attendants he turns down a side road and drives around to the back of a building the size of a cinema multiplex. There’s a loading bay, fenced off and guarded by cops, bundled up in cold weather gear and stamping their feet to stay warm. One of them holds up a hand.

  “O’Neil, FBI.” The missionary holds out an ID badge. “Special guest for the reverend.”

  “Let me see.” The window beside Johnny retracts, admitting a flurry of snow and a scalpel-sharp breeze. The cop glances at him, incurious. “Okay, go to bay two. I’ll call ahead.” His voice is rough and glottal, his cheeks slightly distended. Johnny gives no outer sign that he recognizes the host inside the officer’s mouth.

  The missionary nods, then drives towards the designated parking spot. It’s inside the fence, behind a motorized gate. The engine stops. “Follow me, sir? I am to bring you to his holiness. We must hurry: the feasting of the body and blood of Christ is about to begin.”

  15.

  BLACK BAG JOB

  WE’RE DRIVING THROUGH SNOW DESCENDING IN THICK, BLANKETING sheets across the street so that Persephone must follow the tire tracks of other cars and trucks. Overhead, the sky has darkened to the color of unpolished iron, gray-black with a hint of rust when the snowfall lightens enough to see it. We’re heading for darkness at noon. The trees are sodden mounds of white, rearing up out of the twilight around us as we drive uphill, along a narrowing trail through the outer fringes of a forest.

  Seen with my eyes closed, it’s a very different picture. The patterns in the darkness (random firing of nerves in my retinas) glow oddly greenish, following the curves of the landscape. But beyond the hills ahead of us there is a waterfall of light, greenish-blue—a bilious tint I’ve seen before in the phosphorescent gaze of walking corpses—fountaining into the sky in a vast geyser of unconstrained power. Something has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and a chaotic flux of raw information is bleeding in through it. I know it’s not an artifact of my eyesight because the glowing patterns don’t move when I turn my head. It’s unpleasant to watch, so much so that after a minute of staring at it I have to open my eyes again.

  “There is a fence and a gate coming up in a quarter of a kilometer,” Persephone warns me. “There are probably cameras. If you have any useful ideas…?”

  “Pull over,” I say. This is where some of the tools I signed out of the armory back home might come in handy.

  Persephone stops the car, and I rummage in my go-bag. It takes me a while to find what I’m looking for: a small pouch containing a wizened, stumpy gray claw, and a cigarette lighter. I rummage around some more and come up with a small, battered tin: an electronics geek survival kit stuffed full of wires, diodes, capacitors, and bits’n’pieces. The breadboard is already configured, just waiting for me to connect the miniature Hand of Glory to it via a cable clip and plug in a nine-volt battery, then light the thing. I unroll the grounding strap and plug it into the dashboard cigarette lighter. “All set.”

  “Neat,” Persephone observes warmly. “I didn’t know they came that small.”

  “Ever wondered why there are so many one-legged pigeons around Trafalgar Square?” You don’t really need a hand from a hanged murderer to make one: like so many pre-modern magics, there’s plenty of room for optimization tweaks. I hook up the battery. “Once this lights off we should be good for about three to five minutes of invisibility. But it smokes and stinks of burning rotted pigeon, and if you turn up the aircon too high you’ll risk blowing it out.”

  “When you’re ready.” She fiddles with the climate control, redirecting the warm air towards our feet and turning up the fan. Then she drives on.

  I don’t need to be told: I flick the lighter and set fire to the mummified claw. It fizzles and sends up a plume of acrid, smelly smoke, and a green LED lights on the board. “Three minutes.”

  Persephone doesn’t answer. There’s a fence alongside the road, three meters high and topped with rolled razor wire—casual visitors clearly not welcome. We follow it around a curve and then there is indeed a gate in the fence, overlooked by a pole with what might be the black plastic dome of a CCTV camera on top. Right now it’s buried under a shroud of snow. Luckily for us, the gate is open. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered shutting it, with all the traffic to the church? I hope that’s what it is. Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.

  Persephone turns through the gate, onto a single-track road that is almost entirely covered in snow. There’s an unpleasant lurch as the back wheels let go, but she calmly turns into the skid and regains control before we end up in the ditch. Then we’re driving up the path to the compound, albeit slowly, following the almost-buried tire tracks.

  “Let’s hope we don’t run into anyone coming the other way,” I opine.

  “We won’t.” She sounds very certain. “They’re all in the New Life Church or the compound ahead. This is Schiller’s big day. That tells me.” I blink and see what she’s nodding at. It’s just around the next hillside.

  I reach into my bag and rummage around for the camera, pull it out, and hit the power button while pointing it at the floor and keeping my finger well away from the shutter release. It pings a cheery tune as it boots, then the screen darkens for a few unpleasant seconds. I’m about to swear and pop the battery compartment—I think it may have crashed—when Pinky’s lethal firmware comes up, showing a live view of my kneecaps with an angry red gunsight superimposed. Eek! I turn it off hastily. Okay, so it takes ten seconds to boot from cold to full readiness. That’s a lot longer than the ordinary camera firmware takes. I should have driven out of town and found somewhere discreet to practice with it before relying on it in a hostile situation, but it’s too late for tears now.

  “That’s for your tourist snaps?” she asks.

  I nod. “It’s a basilisk gun.” Her violent flinch would be gratifying if she didn’t nearly lose control of the car. “Don’t worry, I turned it off. Until we need it…” I thread my wrist through the lanyard. Dammit, why do they make these things right-handed? My upper arm still aches; it’s going to be painful if I have to use it in anger.

  “Oka-ay…” She unkinks slightly. “We are about five minutes from the buildings. There is a high street with three smaller roads crossing it. I think we are looking for the church. You may want to keep that for later.”

  She takes one hand off the wheel for long enough to point to the miniature Hand of Glory. I sniff, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “Agreed.” I blow on it hard, turning my face away before I inhale. It stops burning, but a hideous smoke trail that stinks of burning fingernails rises from the claws. “Are we—”

  We turn a bend, leave the trees behind us, and we’re there.

  I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. The Branch Davidian compound at Waco, perhaps? But GPM isn’t poor, isn’t marginal or ascetic, and Ray Schiller is no David Koresh. The layout is more like the residential quarters on a military base: a long, straight boulevard with low buildings set to either side, manicured hedges fronting rows of curtained windows, and a church with a steeple at the far end of the road. It’s half-deserted right now, going by the empty car parks covered in snow outside closed doors. Probably most of the folks who work here commute in from Colorado Springs.

  I’m glad there’s virtually nobody about. The fewer people on hand, the less chance I’ll fuck up and kill someone by mistake. Or
worse, not kill someone, by mistake.

  I blink, trying to cop a brief sense of where everything is in here. There’s a pale green haze in my lap—the complaints department is leaking like crazy on the other side—and what looks like heaps and drifts of green slime all around us: the uncanny residue of its occult origins adhering to the snowfall. The buildings are limned in violet, until I look towards the church at the end which is shining with a harsh emerald light—and the building next to it is on fire, a harsh cuprous glare of raw power that shines through doors and windows, leaching through the concrete. “The building next to the church—”

  “I’m on it. That’s Schiller’s residence, I think.”

  She drives forward two blocks and parks carelessly, opens the driver’s door, and bails out in front of the church. A gust of freezing air slams into me; I swear, turn my camera on, pick up the pizza box and my phone, and follow her into an ankle-deep chilly white blanket.

  Persephone high-steps towards the front door of the big house, holding some sort of gadget in her left hand (a ward, perhaps, or a smartphone with some nonstandard firmware). Her right hand is buried in her coat pocket. I rush after her. My mood is dismal: I’ve been trying to keep a lid on it and mostly succeeding, but since we set off on this journey I’ve had a continual sense of foreboding, and it’s getting worse by the second. We should be getting out of this rat trap, not burrowing deeper into the darkness. This is a job for the Black Chamber, along with the Colorado National Guard and maybe the USAF, not a couple of deranged external assets (whatever they are) and a junior manager who’s so far out of his depth—

  Persephone is at the front steps when the door opens and a figure bundled up in cold-weather gear leans out. “Can I help—” It begins to say in a woman’s voice, as I raise my camera and try to focus past Persephone, who is standing too damn close for the smart autofocus to get a clean lock on. I can feel it in the back of my head, feel the sleepy hunger in its mind as it recognizes the thing in the pizza box I’m holding in my left hand and begins to turn towards me, reaching for its gun—