The Apocalypse Codex lf-4

by Charles Stross

  I catch a flash of light in the corner of my left eye and begin to turn just in time to see Persephone standing, camera before her face, taking aim at the lead zombie before I can tell her not to.

  There is a concussive blue-white flare of light from the vicinity of the eater: it’s so painfully bright it brings tears and leaves a green-purple haze in my eye. About half a second later the crump! of the explosion reaches us.

  “Woo-hoo!” Persephone bounces straight up in the air, lands a step higher up behind me. “That was fun!”

  “Give me that back.”

  “Why?”

  (It’s a Basilisk gun. When you point and shoot one, about a tenth of one percent of all the carbon nuclei in whatever it’s locked onto are spontaneously replaced by silicon. There is a slight insufficiency of electrons to go around: the result looks a lot like an explosion, and what it leaves behind is more like concrete than flesh. Red hot concrete full of short half-life gamma emitters.)

  “Firstly, you don’t want them to start shooting back. Secondly, I may need them.”

  “Why, can you—” She looks at me and does a double take. “Oh, that. Angleton said you—” She swallows whatever she was about to say, hands it over, and we start climbing again. Actually, she may have done us a favor. The other walking corpses are still picking each other up: the blast knocked most of them down. On the other hand they’re angry now, and some of them have rusty bolt-action rifles.

  We climb again until we reach the top of the steps. I’m gasping for breath and my buttocks and upper thighs feel as if I’ve been beaten with baseball bats. Ahead of us there’s a wall of unmortared giant limestone blocks, windowless and surrounded by a row of pillars the size of ICBMs supporting the roof above. It is like the Parthenon in Athens—if the ancient Athenians who built it had been twenty-meter-tall giants. I can see a dark-mouthed opening between two pillars about eighty meters away, and I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there. On the other hand, our pursuers are wheezing angrily through the gaps in their rib cages and brandishing stabby implements in a most unfriendly manner, as they come surging up the steps below us like a wave of bony hooligans.

  I point at the opening wordlessly. Persephone nods, then picks herself up and breaks into a loose-limbed jog.

  I stagger drunkenly towards the opening, trying to ignore the grotesque carvings inlaid on the bases of the pillars and the walls of the temple—not so much Achaean as Aztec, but with added writhing tentacles and horned skulls—and follow Persephone up to the threshold. It’s a big rectangular doorway about five or six meters high and three meters wide, and the wooden doors that would normally block it have been carefully opened and wedged. Gee thanks, whoever. I pause beside Persephone and look inside. It’s gloomy, the dim light filtering down from skylights in the ceiling. The roof is free-standing, vaulting high overhead—the classical columns outside are decorative, for there’s no forest of roof supports within—and I find myself peering across fifty meters of stone towards a raised dais that supports an altar-shaped sarcophagus. There’s a glowing circle in the air beside the sarcophagus and, unlike the one we found in Schiller’s office, this one reeks of power, fat and bloated with the life energy of worshipers. There’s a faint metallic smell in the air, as of blood, and it makes me feel hungry. I can feel Persephone’s mind behind me, wondering at our surroundings; I tap her on the shoulder and she glances at me.

  “No time,” I say, then take a step forward. The eaters will be reaching the top step soon, and I’d rather not stop to dicker with them. Besides, there are more tremors. They’ve started again, gentle aftershocks to the earlier screeching and groaning of stones. The ground is vibrating again, as if some huge beast is stirring uneasily in its sleep beneath our feet, and even though the shocks are weaker they’re making me nervous.

  Then a human figure dives through the open gate towards us, and all hell breaks loose.

  16. THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE

  “DON’T SHOOT HIM!” SCREAMS SCHILLER AS HE RISES FROM his throne, clawing at its wooden arms in pain as he stands. “Take him alive! ‘For I am the way and the life, sayeth the Lord!’”

  “Yes, Father,” Roseanne says meekly, lowering her FN P90; the barrel of the bullpup submachine gun is smoking slightly where it melted the cuff of her part-synthetic sleeve.

  The boys aren’t waiting for direction: they pile through the gate in eerie silence, drawing batons and tasers in unison. Their hosts ride them with expert precision, coordinating perfectly to fan their mounts out across the floor of the courtyard on the other side. Schiller shuffles round the throne and takes a hissing breath. “Tell Alex to secure this side, then follow me through,” he tells the other handmaid. “Roseanne, help me.”

  Roseanne goes to his right arm and lifts it across her shoulder. “Father, will you—”

  “The prodigal son will serve, willingly or no,” Schiller says quietly. “Through the door, Daughter. ’Less’n I’m mistaken Pastors Holt and Dawes are already beginning Holy Communion: I can feel the life flowing back into me as I stand.” He takes a step forward, then another, gathering strength as he moves. A few seconds later he lets his arm drop from his handmaid. “Follow me. Alex’s men will be here soon. We need to be on the other side to unseal our Lord’s tomb.”

  The cathedral-sized building on the other side of the gate awes Roseanne. She’s dreamed of it for years, even before Father Ray took her for a handmaiden; dreaming in awe and ecstasy that she might be the one to quicken the Lord in His sleep. It’s far above her place to hold such dreams, she knows, but even so she is determined to be present at the second coming, and she feels an icy spike of rage at the flippant Englishman who so foolishly turned down Father Ray’s generous offer. She tightens her grip on her gun’s foregrip. For a butterfly-ticklish moment she’d almost thought Father Ray was going to offer her to the Englishman as part of his ludicrous list of bribes, not that she does not welcome the idea of fulfilling her duty to be fertile and submit to the husband he will eventually choose for her, but the hot flush she felt for a few seconds in the vestry has left her disconcerted and angry with herself for sinning in her soul.

  And so, as she follows the holy father through the portal to the holy sepulcher, her mind is not entirely focussed on the job.

  JOHNNY ROLLS AS HE HITS THE FLOOR—TOO SLOWLY, ALTHOUGH the bullets cracking above his head like maddened wasps are as fast as normal—and bolts sideways, away from the direct sight-line of the gate.

  He knows this place. He heard stories about it on his father’s knee as a wean; he knows the layout, for the village kirk reproduced it in miniature. It’s in his blood, and he knows just how desperate Schiller must be to complete this ritual now that he’s here.

  (Set a thief to catch a thief. Johnny will be having some pointed words with the Auditors when he gets home, by and by, if Persephone doesn’t get to them first; and then there will be a pointed debate among the invisible collegiate membership of Mahogany Row. But that’s of no matter right now. What matters here is preventing Schiller from completing the service of possession that he’s trying to carry out—that, and maybe escaping with his skin intact. And the Duchess and that Howard guy Lockhart sent along on this caper as an understudy.)

  There’s the nave: there, at the front of it is the Altar of the Sleeping Christ, as dad called it—more like the cryonic suspension capsule of an alien nightmare, if you look at it without god-glazed eyes. The ground is shaking slightly beneath his feet. Are the support systems coming online already? They’re elder gods to the superstitious neolithic tribes who had worshiped them, ancient astronauts if you want a more modern metaphor. They’re nameless and inhuman horrors, either way. There are benches in the nave, half-melted looking things made out of some kind of crystalline mineral. They’re sized for humans but each seating position is punctuated by a gully in just the right position to accommodate a stumpy tail.

  Johnny duck-walks behind a pew as the first two bodyguards
bound through the gate. He can feel his skin crawling with power in this place, and the throb of blood in his ears is disturbing: there’s a curious sense of euphoria, a giddy light-headedness that seems to come on the back of the distant hymns of damnation filtering through the gate from the church sanctuary back in Colorado Springs. The sacrifices. He’s beginning the sacrificial ceremony. Johnny freezes for a couple of seconds, during which the next two bodyguards arrive and fan out on either side of the gate. The sacrifice of souls joyfully given by their owners is the most potent part of the ritual, necessary to power the invocation that will awaken the Sleeper. All it takes are donations of circulatory fluid from two members of the blood, descended from the ranks of the Sleeper’s chosen priesthood—there is some archaic genetic manipulation at work here, and other, more arcane processes—and the rite of awakening may be performed. Fuck, he’s beginning. He needs me here. Willing, or…?

  With a pang of embarrassment, Johnny McTavish realizes that he might have made a really bad error of judgment. Not merely bad: the worst. In which case there’s really only one thing he can do.

  Johnny stands and shouts, “Over here, motherfuckers!”

  Heads whip round.

  Then knives fly.

  * * *

  “HAND OF GLORY,” SNAPS PERSEPHONE, HOLDING OUT AN OPEN palm just as I hear a couple of gunshots.

  I drop to the floor behind a row of church pews perfectly suited to the hindquarters of deep ones. “I’ve got it in here somewhere…” I rummage in my shoulder bag, end up upending the complaints department on the floor, then drop a spare tee shirt on top of it. Something buzzes aggressively—like a rattlesnake—and I jump back before I realize the ward’s broken and the giant isopod is free. Well, fuck it. I find the second and last mummified pigeon’s foot and pass it to Persephone, who’s kneeling behind another pew with her pistol held at the ready, then go hunting for the lighter. Which I pass across in due time.

  “Make a distraction,” she says, “I’m going to sort this out.” Then she flicks the lighter, turns transparent, and disappears.

  I sigh and power up my camera. Just then I feel an echo of hunger tugging at my attention from somewhere just outside the door. ***Not now,*** I send irritably: ***I’m busy.***

  Unfortunately these are not my feeders in the night; I get a distinct sense of peevish resentment, and then the hunger pressing in on the edges of my mind redoubles. A moment later there is a great clattering of bones as the front of the picket of the damned reaches the entrance and shuffles across the threshold, luminous green worms writhing and twisting in their sunken eye sockets.

  There’s a great shout from the other side of the nave, and then a gurgling scream and another gunshot. The first three walking corpses shuffle towards me. Two of them raise tarnished swords; the third clutches an ancient and rust-speckled rifle with a bayonet the length of my arm. They don’t look friendly.

  I raise the camera and frame them in the viewfinder. One last chance before I blow them back to Molvanîa or wherever they came from, before they got swept up in the Russian civil war and ended up in one of the Bloody White Baron’s death trains: ***I am the Eater of Souls! You are mine to command. Halt!***

  It’s a bit of an exaggeration (if not an outright lie: I am not the Eater of Souls, I’m just his administrative assistant), but for a miracle the half-skeletonized soldiers stop dead just inside the threshold. I sense bafflement and incomprehension.

  ***Report!***

  The rifle barrel rises, and rises until it points at the ceiling in scabrous salute. ***The watch…reporting, Master.***

  Another three zombies arrive on the threshold, rocking and shuddering to a halt. There are more behind them, the walking undead ruins of a bloody civil war, staked out to die without hope of perpetual rest beneath the racing moons of an alien world: the sentries on the edge of forever. ***It is him,*** I sense one of them saying, ***it is the Lieutenant come to lead us home.***

  (By “home” I do not think he is talking about anything this side of the grave.)

  ***Enemies have come to wake the Sleeper,*** I tell them. ***They must die. There are two allies, an invisible witch and a man with two knives that eat souls. They must live.***

  ***Must they?*** comes a question from the ranks. There’s always one.

  ***I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Follow me!*** And with knocking knees, I force myself to stand up and walk out from behind the row of pews and shout, “Hey motherfuckers! Over here!” ***Charge!***

  I hope Persephone appreciates my distraction…

  Before me, the Altar of the Sleeping Christ is a plain sarcophagus carved from a single slab of black granite, inlaid with metallic flecks that form disturbing patterns if you stare at the surface for too long. It’s four meters long, far too big for a human unless it contains a pharaonic nest of concentric coffins, not that anyone with any sense is going to go looking inside. Reddish sunbeams track slowly across the dusty flagstones of the temple and drip bleeding from the backs of the empty pews.

  At one side of the room, a fight is in progress. Two of the black-suited bodyguards are down, twitching in their death agonies as Johnny’s knives suck the souls from their bodies. The other two aren’t shooting, but they hold batons as if they know how to use them and they’re circling around Johnny McTavish, who—knifeless, now—is at a marked disadvantage.

  A woman in a blue gown leads an older man dressed in priest’s vestments towards the sarcophagus. He casts an angry glare at McTavish, but seems satisfied by the man’s mere presence. It’s not far to the altar, and they’re arriving just as I shout and start to run towards them. The woman looks up in surprise, then raises her arms as if in prayer in my direction. Only she’s not praying.

  There’s a noise like a sewing machine the size of an airliner punching holes in sheet steel. I throw myself at the floor, but she’s not aiming at me—she’s aiming behind me, at the source of the lurching shadows that careen across the pews. And for all that they’re undead the bodies ridden by the eaters aren’t bulletproof—break enough bones and they’ll be reduced to crawling towards their victims like something out of a Monty Python film, even if the shooter isn’t firing banishment rounds. I, on the other hand, am not bulletproof at all, so I hide behind the furniture and make myself one with the floor.

  The camera. When I made my throw-self-at-planet move it was attached to my wrist by a lanyard. Now, not so much: I am attached to a lanyard but no camera. I look around but I don’t see it—it probably slid under a few pews. Well, sucks to be me. I’ve got a pistol; it’ll have to do.

  It takes me a few seconds to get the damned thing disentangled from my jacket, and then I run into a second problem. I’m used to punching holes in paper targets with a standard issue Glock 17, as used by police tactical response teams, MI5, and just about everyone in the UK who is legally allowed to carry a handgun these days. But this thing isn’t a Glock. There are odd-looking buttons on the side and the grip feels all wrong. It probably has a safety catch. Pausing to RTFM, in a dimly lit temple while my pulse is running at warp speed and a deranged valkyrie with a space-age weapons system chews holes in the landscape, isn’t an option: so I mentally consign my soul to wherever it is that dead agents’ souls go, flick the switch or button or whatever that’s nearest the trigger guard into the other position, and squeeze the trigger in the general direction of the altar—firing under the pews.

  Bang goes the pistol, and I nearly bite right through my lower lip as I button up to keep from screaming aloud and giving away my position. My upper right arm is in searing agony where Jonquil and her posh friends made holes in it last year. “Shit,” I say very quietly. I haven’t been working out on the range since the business in Wandsworth, and it’s clearly a non-starter. But…

  ***Take this pistol.*** I put it on the floor and give it a good shove, and it goes skittering back behind me. ***Kill the woman with the machine gun.***

  Rattle-click-crunch: a feeder is crawling towards m
e. I can feel waves of festering resentment and rage gnawing away at what’s left of his mind. For a miracle, he reaches for the gun instead of the warm, pulsing, living leg so close to his jaws. Leg of master. He’d bite me if he could—but he’s bound to serve the will of those whose taint I’ve carried ever since the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh fucked up big-time in Brookwood last year.

  ***Wait!*** I announce, feeling the feeder preparing to lurch to its feet. ***First, find a small silvery box, looks like so***—I visualize it mentally—***on the floor somewhere. Bring it to me! Then await my order to fire.***

  A fresh burst of automatic fire sprays overhead as the nun with the very big gun lays down suppressive fire. There’s a crunch, and a wail that dissipates like pollen on the desert wind as one of the feeders falls apart. Then something bangs into my hip. I reach back for it with my left arm, swearing quietly. It’s the camera. I push the power button and wait for it to wake up. I hope it’s not broken.

  About ten seconds have passed: an eternity in a fight.

  Schiller is now leaning on the altar, holding a cable attached to a Pelikan case that he’d obviously brought through earlier and stashed behind it. He’s exhausted but determined. His handmaiden stands guard beside him, a white-hot blaze of righteous anger, and she’s taking regular aimed shots at the walking corpses who are still stumbling in through the entrance, for all the world like a horde of green-haired munchkins in an early computer game. They’re not doing well; this isn’t what the feeders were intended for. Maybe half a dozen of the brighter ones are still moving, but they’re mostly the ones with enough of a residual sense of self-preservation to use the furniture for cover. (If I didn’t know better I’d say the others were trying to get themselves killed, seeking release from their deathless agony…)

  Johnny is—oh dear. Johnny is down. So is another of the bodyguards, but another four arrived through the gate from the New Life Church while I was trying to become one with the lithosphere. I can feel his anger and frustration and pain just as I can feel the dry, complacent yearning of the hosts riding Schiller’s goon squad. They’ve come for Jesus’s summoning, and—