The End of the World is Nigh

by Tony Moyle

  “I may not see it. I felt it tonight, more than ever before. It’s hard to explain. It feels like a shroud is pushing down on my body as if it can no longer hold my soul in place.”

  “You’ll be fine, it’s just the exertion of tonight.”

  “No Phil, I’m in my sixties. I can’t go on forever.”

  On the table in the middle of the room was a letter that had not been there when they left. Someone had been in their room. Philibert unfolded it and read the elegantly written message.

  “What’s that?” asked Chambard.

  “It’s from Annabelle. I think she’s a planning something stupid.”

  - Chapter 25 -

  End of the Line

  What began as a restrained and disciplined panic was evolving into something much more lawless. Initially people’s reaction to the special measures implemented across Europe was one of resigned acceptance. Stay indoors, ignore other people, hunker down and wait for it to all blow over was how they’d interpreted the message. And this collective behaviour was working well almost everywhere.

  Everywhere except France.

  The French don’t follow rules. They make their own depending on what has annoyed them most on any particular day. Which could be literally anything. The price of cabbages, the enforcement of a tax to support the protection of cute, fluffy animals, the speed on motorways, the number of times they were legally allowed to shrug, car indicator lights, how much fish they could catch, boomerangs, gravity, the consistency of whipping cream, and queues containing more than two people. It’s hard to say where this national culture for rebellion came from, but the people of Marseille five hundred years ago might have offered an explanation.

  The mood in France was changing because normal life was being messed with, and change was just not an acceptable premise. The supermarkets weren’t being restocked sufficiently, and unlike the people of the United Kingdom, where every family of four now had more milk than their fridge could physically hold, they hadn’t panic-shopped to quite the same degree. Bins weren’t being collected, hospitals were cancelling all but the most critical operations and the police were absent because they were stuck on cordons rather than protecting shops and homes.

  It only took one person to break the rules before everyone followed suit like a pack of lemmings attending a free bar. Ghostly streets made way for burning cars and masked vigilantes. Looting was widespread and crimes of all types and severity had become more popular than reality television. Most of these temporary felons, crossing casually to the wrong side of the line hoping no one noticed, justified their actions by claiming they only robbed essential items they needed to survive.

  Closed-circuit television proved otherwise.

  One in two robberies involved the stealing of flat-screen televisions, one in three targets were high-end jewellery shops, and one in ten thefts hit car dealerships. And the culprits of these crimes weren’t just youths looking to climb through a window of opportunity that the police had opened wide before they’d left town permanently. Little old ladies with false hips were seen ram-raiding shopping centres in disposable sports cars, children as young as ten were wielding semi-automatic rifles, and gangs of middle-class mothers, brandishing baseball bats and wearing face masks, were roaming the streets generally tidying up the mess.

  Buildings were set alight for the sheer fun of it, gangs patrolled their own sectors of cities like Gallic mafia families, and the police did nothing but watch from their cordons as a new genre of mass entertainment was created. They weren’t that bothered. They only had one order to follow. As long these people were kept inside the city they couldn’t spread the virus. Whether anything of the city or its inhabitants survived afterwards was debatable. But then again this was the actual apocalypse, so no one would survive long enough to care.

  None of this behaviour would have been possible without a catalyst. It’s not enough to have a culture of people with a propensity to break rules. Lots of people, for example, secretly held the belief that homeless people were feckless layabouts with only themselves to blame who blighted the streets and should be removed, or even better, lined up and shot. However extreme this notion might be, generally people withheld these views because of a complex set of social rules and the very good chance of being categorised as a heartless bastard. Most kept these views, and others they held about people of colour, men with Rottweilers and those afflicted with ginger hair, largely to themselves. Until someone or something made it acceptable to voice them. And when someone made racism, or looting acceptable, the floodgates opened.

  The Oblivion Doctrine was the catalyst.

  Anytime the authorities tried to calm the public, the Oblivion Doctrine would pop up in news feeds and mailing lists to offer the opposite opinion. After all, this was their apocalypse. No government was going to spoil it. Bird flu might be the compound that drained the life from people by mobbing their senses and squeezing the nutrients they needed to survive out of their bodies, but the Oblivion Doctrine provided the soundtrack, the documentaries and the official merchandise. The only question was whether they themselves understood the price of wiping out humanity.

  *****

  It was agreed unanimously that the safest place for their retreat was the caravan. It might be small, cramped and in desperate need of a damn good clean, but it was, at least for now, far enough away from danger. Limonest was a small provincial town of mostly rural folk. The flu might be wreaking havoc just fifteen kilometres away but it had not yet arrived here. Nor had the fear and panic that went with it. The town hadn’t completely avoided the looting and crime, but there were more attractive targets to pillage than the spoilt ready meals of three obvious misfits living in a small, sheltered wood just off the main road.

  In the vast pantheon of disappointing car journeys it seemed almost impossible that the journey back from Mâcon could be worse than the one out. But it was, on several levels. The long pieces of splintered wood, that once held together a humongous and valuable piece of Renaissance art, made a tremendously irritating rattling noise, and because most of it trailed out of the opened boot, the bitter winds penetrated the car and pummelled its passengers. Gabriel’s driving had got worse, although neither Ally nor Antoine could identify where she was hiding the vodka which she was clearly using to top up her mood. And while on the way out no other drivers had challenged the Renault’s erratic dominance of the roads, now a venerable collection of locals thought they were auditioning for the next Mad Max film.

  To avoid the dystopian chaos that was the A6 between junctions twenty and twenty-two, they made a hasty detour via the smaller national roads which gave Gabriel a much larger pallet of objects to aim for. Lime trees, bollards, roundabouts, soon to be deceased pedestrians and rogue pets all served to add some extra excitement to a day that would last long in the memory.

  Back in the relative sanctum of the knackered caravan, mugs of hot drinks prescribed and administered to settle head and heart, they sat around the small retractable table to analyse the family tree that had been concealed behind the picture frame.

  “Do you think Bernie wanted you to find this?” said Gabriel, fiddling with the paper in a rather irritating way that showed a lack of respect to the clearly sizeable amount of work that had gone into it.

  Family trees were hard to construct even with the benefit of computer archiving, the internet and family insight. Going back fifty years wasn’t such a problem because most of the people who featured were likely to be still alive. Going back a hundred years was also fairly straightforward given the desire of every First World country to document people like a sinister stocktake. But, unless you hit a line of royalty in a family tree, going back further than that was almost impossible. Paper records had a habit of being lost or burnt or simply never existed in the first place. Yet Bernard had managed to track Nostradamus’s tree from the roots of the famous seer right up to the present-day branches in every detail.

  “Bernard always had a purpose. He ce
rtainly meant for us to find the family tree,” replied Ally. “The real question is why?”

  “It has something to do with the coffer,” said Antoine confidently. “Bernard knew what was in the coffer and wanted to keep it out of the wrong hands. After they tried to steal it from me, but realised it was already gone, I imagine they traced it back to Bernard. I bet whoever killed him now has it. And we must get it back.”

  “But we don’t know who they are.”

  “We do now. It’s clear to me that Bernard had a suspect in mind. The man circled right here in red ink.” He placed his finger over the name of Mario Peruzzi the fifteen times great-grandson of Michel Nostradamus.

  “I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis,” replied Ally.

  “But why hide it in the painting?” said Gabriel, twiddling her hair. “Why not leave it inside a bin or keep it in a high-security bank vault?”

  “Or put it in an envelope, add a stamp and send it in the post? That’s an ancient way of sending physical documents to each other, Gabriel,” she added sarcastically.

  “Maybe he was trying to be more dramatic?” offered Antoine who was clearly unconvinced by his own answer.

  “The painting has more to do with this,” said Ally. “The two are connected. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the painting left to me, and not Antoine, contains a reference to a piece of jewellery that you own. Bernard is placing you and Mario in the same puzzle.”

  “More than that,” said Antoine. “Him, me…and you.”

  “I know,” said Ally not fully understanding why that might be. “He believes that I can solve it.”

  “And can you?” asked Gabriel.

  “Not without help,” she replied uncharacteristically. She hated to accept or ask for it, but collectively they had more chance of success together.

  “Was that difficult?” asked Antoine.

  “Very.”

  “Give it time, it’ll get easier. Let’s consider all the evidence. The coffer was living in my basement for four hundred years, and along with it the locket was also in my family’s possession. Based on that, it would seem appropriate to assume that my ancestors were in some way connected with Nostradamus himself.”

  “I’d go further than that,” added Ally. “I think maybe one of the people in the painting was the real author of the prophecy.”

  “Which one?” said Gabriel.

  “That’s just it, we’ve no way of knowing for sure. Our only lead is Mario Peruzzi. If he has the coffer then he has the secrets it contains.”

  “But why would Mario want to kill someone to retrieve something that once belonged to a distant relative of his?” asked Antoine.

  “How do you feel about your ancestors, Antoine?”

  “Proud, in general. I know they were active in supporting those that were not as fortunate as themselves.”

  “And how would you feel if someone uncovered some dark secret that destroyed that legacy?”

  “I’m not sure really, it would probably change how I viewed myself. What are you implying?” said Antoine scratching a patch of scalp that his white hair was unable to cover.

  “A theory, that’s all. The only item that Bernard didn’t buy from you was the book. And in that book is probably one of the most accurate passages that Nostradamus ever wrote…”

  “But you say he didn’t…”

  “Correct. But do you see anyone else in the world disputing it? I mean they’ve already nicknamed N1G13 the Nostradamus flu. That prophecy was the perfect weapon for securing Nostradamus’s legacy so why would you want to hide it? Then the question remains, what else was inside the coffer? What if those contents were less than complimentary about his work?”

  “But that would mean this Mario character knew they existed all along, otherwise why would he go to such lengths to steal them?”

  “Must have,” said Gabriel trying her best to follow, but not altogether succeeding.

  “Look at the family tree again,” said Ally, having already used her highly honed research skills to make the conclusion she was leading them to. “What do you notice about all the people at the bottom of the tree?”

  Antoine took a long, hard look at the document again as Gabriel stared vacantly at the mirror down the other end of the caravan. What was the point wasting valuable brainpower, when he worked it out she’d find out anyway?

  “They’re all dead,” replied Antoine. “Apart from one.”

  “Exactly. Mario isn’t just one of Nostradamus’s descendants, he’s the only descendant.”

  “Our trail points to Mario Peruzzi, then.”

  “Great!” exclaimed Gabriel. “Call the police, they can deal with it. Then both of you can go back to whatever it is that you do, and I can return to the important work of building my tree house to escape the angry mobs of zombies that will soon be marauding through the streets of Limonest.”

  “You know the virus only kills people, right? It doesn’t also bring them back from the dead. Viruses don’t do that, they’re not Netflix writers,” said Ally disdainfully.

  “Plus the police are a little busy, what with all the looting and social disorder,” added Antoine correctly.

  “What then?” asked Gabriel.

  “We have to find out where and who Mario is. We need the internet,” added Antoine.

  “I already tried that in the car on my phone,” replied Ally. “Mario’s a ghost. There’s not a single piece of information about anyone with that name.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Gabriel.

  Only members of isolated tribes living deep in the Amazon rainforest, who wore clothes made from feathers, hunted exotically coloured amphibians with small, blunt sticks and still prayed to the big yellowy thing in the sky, didn’t have an online footprint. If you weren’t one of those it was impossible not to have one. Yet here was an individual who was effectively invisible to the vast expanse of the worldwide web.

  “It’s not impossible,” huffed Ally.

  “I’m telling you it is! Give me the name of someone you think can’t be found anywhere on the internet,” said Gabriel perked up by the inclusion of the modern world into the conversation.

  “Ok. My dad, Horace Oldfield. He’s never touched a computer in his life.”

  “Pass me your phone,” said Gabriel, hand outstretched.

  She went to work. It didn’t take long. Watching her work was no less captivating than watching a skilled craftsman blowing glass or a surgeon conducting a successful lobotomy.

  “There you go,” she said defiantly after no more than a five minutes. “Horace Oldfield, eighty-six years of age, widower, one child, which is you of course, lives in Blackburn, retired carpenter and rather fond of Turkish Delight.”

  “Jesus! How did you do that?” said Ally with a newfound respect for her.

  “Oh it’s easy if you know how. I got his photo from the care home’s website and used that to scan for all other visual references of him. Got some more information by hacking a couple of government agencies.”

  “I’m impressed, and slightly worried,” said Antoine.

  “Well, that wasn’t where I got most of the info from.”

  “Where, then?” asked Antoine.

  “He’s on Facebook and Snapchat,” she added matter-of-factly.

  “Bullshit!” exclaimed Ally, grabbing her phone back. “He’d think Snapchat was the noise a crocodile makes before it eats you. Oh…right…so he really is. They must have run a class at the home.”

  “Looks like your dad is more down with the kids than you are,” replied Gabriel, intentionally trying to rile her.

  “Gabriel, before you became a prepper?” asked Antoine, “what was your job exactly?”

  “Computer programmer…and IT ninja,” she replied, adding a bit of spice in case this might turn out to be a job interview.

  “So, if you can find all that information about Horace, could you also find Mario?”

  “Of course. There’s a reason you can’t fin
d any information on him, but it’s not just because you don’t have the talent,” she said without flinching. “The real reason is because he’s working hard not to be found.”

  “Then what are you waiting for, find him.”

  “It’ll cost…”

  “Another ten thousand euros,” replied Antoine before Gabriel could even offer her starting price.

  “I’m sure this isn’t good for her,” added Ally.

  - Chapter 26 -

  The Royal Seer

  Every now and then a set of seemingly impossible combinations will come together to beat the odds. Down the years hundreds of people have won bets on unlikely sporting outcomes, but it would be false to say that they predicted them. Most of these punters didn’t believe in their wildest dreams that the result would actually happen, they just hoped it would. However, the seemingly impossible occurs with frequent regularity.

  Statisticians, a breed of people who shrivel up at the slightest contact with sunlight and own exceedingly boring haircuts, would be the first to pour scorn on people’s claims of such things being coincidences. If two strangers met at a party and quickly identified they had the same birthday they’d quickly label it a rarity. Until the numbers men point out that the chances of it happening are more likely than it not happening. In a room of seventy-five people there’s a ninety-nine percent chance of this eventuality. What might seem rare is in fact almost guaranteed.

  Accurately predicting one event might not be quite the fluke that it first appears. But doing it twice, that was starting to look like skill.

  The odds of being struck by lightning once are about twelve thousand to one. It’s possible to dramatically increase these odds by walking out in a storm wearing inappropriate footwear and waving a pole vaulting stick in the air. The likelihood of being hit twice in a lifetime, though, are closer to one in a million. It does happen. But no one who’s survived both events curses their luck. They’re quite convinced that they’ve angered the cosmic energy in some way.