Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “You stole my identity, you bastard!”

  “I gave it to you in the first place,” the man spat back, almost amused. The imposter’s eyes narrowed slightly. Too late, Danal realized that this was no mere lookalike— Nathans had selected him for his cunning, his intelligence and resourcefulness. The false Van Ryman barked an order.

  “Command: Release me!”

  To his horror Danal’s hands automatically withdrew as if he had touched hot wax. The Servant’s legs took two quick steps backward. He let out a helpless cry.

  “Command: Stand still!” the imposter snapped.

  Smug in his triumph, he collected his dignity, straightening the black robe, and looked at the helpless Servant. He briskly rubbed his hands together again, wiping the nervous sweat from his palms. “You’re still a Servant, Vincent. You have to obey my Commands.” He bent over Danal; his breath smelled of Glenlivet scotch. “Listen.”

  With a swish of his robes he went over to the stone pedestal where he snatched up a mammoth leather-bound tome, one of the neo-Satanist holy compendia thrown together by Vincent Van Ryman and Francois Nathans. The imposter flipped to a finger-smeared page and began to quote from memory. His eyes never left Danal’s.

  “‘And all have their missions, and all will Serve, though they may not know it. The greatest of these will be called Danal, and he is the Messenger. He is the Prophet. He is the Bringer of Change and the Fulfiller of Promises. He is the Stranger whom everyone knows. He is the Awakener and the Awakened. He is the Destroyer. The return of Satan rests in his deeds.’”

  The imposter’s eyes widened with fervor, and he spoke so vehemently that droplets of saliva sprayed from his mouth. “Danal. We chose that name while you were still in the vat, because of the Writings, to force fulfillment of the prophecy.” He furiously flung the pages to another spot and quoted again, shoving the book in the Servant’s face. “Look! It says, ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ Satan said. ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

  He snapped the book shut with finality, and carelessly let it drop to the floor with a thump. “It’s all in the Writings—proof positive. The meaning is clear. You should be sacrificed again, and Walpurgis Night is a perfect time.”

  “I wrote most of the damned Writings!” Danal stood like a gargoyle himself, immobile but filled with hatred. He couldn’t move. The Command phrase locked all his muscles.

  “I know. I was with you.”

  A horrible suspicion crept upon Danal, and the imposter stopped himself, smiling in wonder. “Ah, you don’t know, do you? Nathans wouldn’t have told you.”

  Danal stared at the imposter, wide-eyed. The look in the man’s gaze, the build of his body, his mannerisms as he moved—all clicked together like the flash of a switchblade snapping open. Stromgaard.

  The man chuckled. “You should see the look on your face, Vincent!”

  “You’re dead,” Danal said in a low voice.

  “So were you,” the imposter countered, “but my death was only staged.”

  Danal recalled the night of the sacrifice, seeing his “terminally ill” father dying and wasting away on the altar stone. He could still feel the nauseating packing sensation, the crunch of bone, as the sacrificial dagger bit into his father’s skeletal chest. Blood sprayed up ward. The heavy stubble on his jaw… covering a faint line of pinpricks from surface cloning?

  Stromgaard was dead. He had to be. The muscles in Danal’s neck stood out as he tried to shake his head, to deny it. But the Command phrase kept him motionless.

  “I wanted out of your little games,” the imposter continued. “And, frankly, I was getting sick of all the cold cynicism from you and Nathans about our religion. Don’t you have any sense of wonder left in your lives? Can’t you give supernatural events the benefit of the doubt?

  “Nathans gave me another face so I could walk unrecognized, and we used one of the neo-Satanist converts to take my place on the sacrificial altar—there were so many willing ones! A pathetic story and some heavy makeup convinced you to do just what we wanted. It was for the best, it was for the good of the religion, because it showed a dramatic change of power from one High Priest to his successor.” Stromgaard Van Ryman scowled as if he had swallowed something bad. “I was there at the Sabbat. Do you know what it’s like to be in the audience while you watch your son kill his own father?”

  “You were perfectly willing to murder me when the roles were reversed,” Danal countered.

  “No matter.” Stromgaard shrugged. “I traveled, I went on pilgrimages to the original Salem, Massachusetts, to the Hartz Mountains of Eastern Europe, to the Balkans, to Budapest, to Transylvania. I studied the Writings, all of them, with an open mind, not with your rude sarcasm. It was all going so smoothly—I was perfectly content as an ascetic. Until you betrayed us! You and the whore!”

  Danal strained until he thought his muscles would burst, but he still could not unlock the invisible binding of the Command phrase.

  “That’s why I came back, to save the religion. For the good of neo-Satanism. You deserved everything you got, Vincent. For betraying the hopes of thousands of people, for mocking things you didn’t even try to understand.” He shook his head, sadly, it seemed. “But now we’ve brought you back, all the way back, and you can redeem yourself by unleashing the next Millennium.”

  Danal remembered swimming through death—the warm darkness, the comforting light, the chimes, and the final unbreakable wall of memory he could not penetrate. “You don’t know how cruel that was. Bringing my memories back was the worst.”

  “It was necessary,” Stromgaard said.

  “Why? Why was it necessary?”

  “Nathans had his own reasons. And I had mine.” The imposter’s face took on an expression of impatient scorn. “Nathans is afraid of death, even though he surrounds himself with it at Resurrection, Inc. He wants to be alive to enjoy the benefits of the perfect world he’s working so hard to create. Hah! And if a resurrected person can regain all his memories, then Nathans himself can live on as long as he wishes. That’s what he thinks. If he dies, he can just be resurrected, have his memories triggered, and live again. His own kind of immortality. Not realizing, of course, that after tonight when Satan and the New Age have come, all his efforts won’t count for anything at all.”

  Van Ryman led the Servant over to the terminal on the wall, commanding him to follow. Danal moved woodenly. He had no choice. Sweat broke out on his forehead; he resisted with every grain of his free mind, but his body paid no attention, listening only to the Commands. Now, at least, he could move. He had a chance, so long as Stromgaard allowed him to keep his voice.

  “And your reason for bringing back my memories?” Danal prodded.

  “It’s obvious, Vincent—” he snapped. “If you paid any attention to the Writings. ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ says the Word, ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

  “We sacrificed living victims and even some Servants, to no effect. But I figured it all out—it all fits. ‘Both the living and the dead’—that’s you, a Servant who was once dead and then reawakened to his old life. And you’re Danal, just like the Writings say. We have to sacrifice the same victim, first as a living person, then a second time as a resurrected Servant, a Servant with all his memories, with his own soul back. That’s very important.”

  “I wrote that passage!” Danal exclaimed. “It doesn’t mean anything. You know that—we did it right in front of your eyes!”

  Van Ryman looked intently at Danal, then spoke in a low awed voice, “And how do you know your hand wasn’t guided? By some greater power?”

  Danal could hardly believe what he had heard. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “If you have Faith, no answer is necessary. If you have none, no answer is possible.”

  Despite himself, Danal made a scornful noise. “That’s exactly the type of invincible ignorance we lashed out at in the first place.”

  “But i
t does make sense. You wrote the truth without even knowing it. Think about it—Satan’s been dormant, sleeping because His followers were too few for too many centuries. But now neo-Satanism has grown strong—and because of Resurrection, Inc., the dead are walking again, just like in a dozen prophecies.

  “Now you, Vincent, were sacrificed to Him, and then we brought you back to life. We snatched your soul from Satan, ripping it like candy from His claws. How can He ignore that? He is awakening—I can feel it. He’ll follow you here to reclaim what was given to Him.”

  Van Ryman removed a handful of glistening electrodes from the innards of the Net terminal, and turned to look at Danal with bright and distant eyes. “Hold still, now.” Stromgaard positioned the electrodes in a clump at the back of Danal’s head. The Servant tried to clench his fists, but his body refused him even that.

  “I had plenty of time to think, to meditate, and I received a Great Revelation. It was wonderful, Vincent—it would make you breathless! You see, for centuries, Satan hasn’t been able to possess anyone because cynical mankind has learned to resist. You know, by materialistic thinking, by skepticism, by forgetting how to fear the unknown. But mankind has created his own downfall, building with his own hands a mind that’ll be Satan’s greatest possession of all! One single mind to dominate the Earth and control everything. The Net!”

  Before, Danal had always been too jaded to see the fervor in the eyes of someone who actually believed in the cult. But now Stromgaard’s face showed a beatific, glazed look of anticipation that defied all rational thought. Danal found that frightening.

  “The Net has no resistance, no inhibitions, no moral or religious qualms that can dim Satan’s fires!” Stromgaard continued. “Once Satan has possessed The Net, He can control the entire world in a second. All machines, and all men, will have to bow to Him.” He closed his eyes and took a deep, exalted breath.

  “Meticulous reasoning, Vincent, carefully thought out. You should appreciate that. We sacrificed you in the traditional manner the first time. Then we stole your soul back from Satan, and now I’m going to offer Him a different type of sacrifice.” The imposter attached the last of the electrodes to Danal’s smooth scalp and straightened the wires leading to the terminal. “I’ll deactivate the microprocessor that keeps you alive, and send the pulse into The Net. If Satan wants your soul back, He’s going to have to follow… and discover the incredible world awaiting Him!”

  Danal smirked, playing him along. “And I suppose you’re doing it here, alone, to get all the glory for yourself? If it works, you’ll be the most powerful man in the world, because you alone helped Satan to return?” He needed to manipulate the conversation around to where he could strike back.

  “Why shouldn’t I? Nathans stole Resurrection, Inc. from me. You stole neo-Satanism from me, even when we were just developing it. Neo-Satanism was supposed to have been mine, Vincent. For me! Now I’m getting something for myself at last. I’m the only one who truly believes in what the three of us created. You and Nathans think neo-Satanism is just a game, a bunch of parlor tricks. But I know better. When Satan returns, He’ll know me and what I’ve done, and He’ll be grateful.”

  Danal laughed in delight. “I don’t think so!” It was almost over. Van Ryman had not Commanded him to silence. He heard the invisible sound of the trap as it sprung.

  “What do you mean?” Stromgaard’s eyes narrowed.

  He shrugged, almost coy. “Don’t forget, when I regained my memory, I remembered all my Net access codes, too. And now I’ve got the last laugh!”

  “What have you done!”

  Danal allowed his lips to curl up in a smile, and remained silent for as long as he dared, letting his father’s insecurity and uneasiness build. “I’m a Servant—I don’t have any future in my old life. So I deleted my entire identity from The Net this afternoon. Vincent Van Ryman no longer exists. If Satan does possess The Net, he’s not going to have a single burned-out chip that remembers you!” He laughed again, a full, self-satisfied sound, then turned bitter. “You did the same thing to Julia.”

  “No!”

  Danal put a smug expression on his face. “Check it for yourself if you don’t believe me. I’m in no hurry.”

  Van Ryman’s face writhed in his utter fury and disbelief. He lunged at the white squares on the Net keypad, snarling at the screen. Danal yanked the electrodes from his head, and let them drop to the floor. “Stay where you are!” Stromgaard snapped.

  Danal slipped into his stepped-up perception of time, watched Van Ryman’s fingers go through the logon procedure, then hit the thirteen-digit password. The imposter stared at the pixels on the screen until they authorized his link with The Net… activating the trap.

  On acceptance of the logon, the incredible power of the entire Intruder Defense Systems poured explosively into the single terminal—following one line of the circuitry rerouted by the repair-rats. The plastic coverplate shattered. A power surge leaped back through the keypad into the imposter’s body. Silver arcs of electricity skittered over Van Ryman’s fingers and hands like the talons of a demon, blasting him. His dark hair lifted with the static discharge, like the puff of a dead dandelion.

  Danal dropped back to normal time. Stromgaard Van Ryman toppled backward with the smell of smoking flesh. Wisps of steam rose up from his black robes.

  Danal didn’t allow himself a moment’s sadness for his father—Stromgaard had chosen his path long ago. “I would never delete my own identity,” Danal spoke softly to the dead man on the floor. “Not when I expected to win.”

  He sat down on one of the stone benches as events caught up with him. Danal felt numb, and his mind whirled. He had just killed Stromgaard, and that would be only the beginning. The momentum behind the wheels he had set in motion would come crashing through them all before the night was over.

  When he had buried all the memories in a safe mental place, the Servant went back up the dank stairs into the house, his house, and shut down all of the Intruder Defense Systems. He hoped it would be for the last time.

  Then he sent out the signal of his victory that would bring all the Wakers to him.

  38

  Jones’s dark armor melted into the shadows of the wet street. He and his Elite Guard companion waited. Off in the distance he could hear faint bustling noises as the Metroplex wound down into a coma for the night, but here, in a senior citizen’s area, all was quiet already. As Jones had requested, the two nearby streetlights flickered and went dead, leaving the area in deeper blackness. At the far end of each street, white-clad Enforcers turned back the occasional pedestrians.

  With the streetlights out of the way, Jones moved forward and crouched on one knee, afraid to come too close to the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch. The other Elite guard stayed back, pretending to be aloof and annoyed, but noticeably tense. Jones edged closer still.

  He expected to hear the “deadly field” humming, but he noted only the muffled silence of the damp evening. It would be curfew in another couple of hours, but already this felt like the dead of night.

  Jones could clearly make out the bright green grass blades, luscious and alive, all of them perfect, shimmering. Was it just an illusion? A hologram? Everything he had been told, layer upon layer of rumor said that these patches were deadly disintegrators to peel a man down to the bone in a flash of infinite pain.

  Jones had seen one, only one contradictory statement on The Net, and he had never been able to find it again. Nathans was sure someone else was tampering with the computer network, covering up the real explanation of the grass patches. But couldn’t it be just as likely that someone—someone who could indeed tamper with The Net—had planted a fake explanation for Jones to see, to lure him into—

  “Give me something to throw,” he said over his shoulder, slamming the door on his fear.

  The other Elite Guard looked around and cursed under his breath. “I can’t see a damn thing with this helmet.” Oddly, he took off his gloves instead, and Jones coul
d see that the other Guard was black as well. The Guard crunched his heel on the street until one of the decorative cobblestones loosened. He pried it out with the blade of his heater-knife and tossed the cobblestone to Jones.

  “Quiet, now,” Jones whispered.

  “It’s your show. Does it make you feel important or something?”

  Jones hesitated at the comment—why would the other Guard mock him?—but decided to ignore it.

  The other Guard had not seemed impressed either by the mystery or by Jones’s enthusiasm about the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m not going to tell you, that’s for sure. I’m not in a trusting mood tonight.”

  “I’m Jones,” he said, puzzled and dismayed at the other Guard’s attitude. Jones did not ask about it, though; as long as the man helped out when he was needed, the Guard’s problems were his own. Since, he was an Elite Guard, it couldn’t be all bad for him.

  Underhanded, Jones tossed the cobblestone into the deceptive patch of grass. He expected to see a flash of light, to hear some sound, but the stone simply fell through the grass, swallowed up without a trace. A second later, he thought he heard a muffled thunk as it struck something below.

  Jones stood up and withdrew his heater-knife, suddenly wishing he had something longer, a stick or a pole. He looked around, but saw nothing else. Resigned, he leaned over the low barbed fence, stretched his arm out as far as it would go, and touched the tip of the knife to the shimmering grass.

  The dark helmet hid his unconscious cringe. With his fingertips he held onto the pommel, ready to let go at any second. The blade vanished into the grass up to its hilt. Looking closely, Jones could almost see a shadow of it through the grass blades. He pulled the knife back out, completely intact.