by Sean Ellis
Even as she pushed away from him, rolling over and scrambling back to her feet, she processed that bit of information. It wasn’t Booker that smacked Collier with the chair, so who?
The answer came to her, even as she saw the pieces of the Trinity, the crystals still blazing with the build-up of energy, hovering above Collier motionless body. Now she understood the frantic psychic alarm sounding in her head.
Atlas!
It had to be Atlas. If what he had told her was true, he was made of the same stuff as the Trinity, immune to its power.
Or was this something else?
She could see his outline, like a living shadow. The brilliance of the Trinity’s light was confounding the cameras and computer processors of the adaptive camouflage suit, but his features remained obscure, an enigmatic emptiness in the fabric of reality.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, unsure of what exactly it was that she was asking of him. “Just drop it and walk away.”
The shadowy head tilted toward her. “Why?”
“You did once before. In Libya, remember? Just walk away. Let us destroy it.” She knew that Booker was carrying a brace of grenades for that very purpose. “Once it’s gone, this will all be over.”
Atlas did not move.
The dais had cleared, the president whisked away to safety by her secret service bodyguards. Most of the audience had fled back to the relative safety of the festival tents, but further out, there was a rising discordant cacophony of sound as the millions gathered across the mall began to get the first sense that something was terribly wrong. Standing nearby, alone, looking lost and afraid amid the chaos of overturned chairs, was Kiong.
Mira felt an almost overpowering urge to run, to grab hold of Kiong and flee, but where could she go?
There was only one path to salvation, not just for herself, but for the whole world.
“Remember what you told me in Tibet? This isn’t what you want, it’s what he wants—the Wise Father.” She put all her fear into those two words, hoping to trigger a sympathetic contempt. “He’s used you your entire life. That’s what you told me. But you’re finally free. He doesn’t have any hold on you now.”
“I thought that was true,” Atlas said, his voice uncharacteristically small. “But I was wrong. Don’t you see? This is what I was made for.”
And before Mira could say another word, he brought the pieces of the Trinity together.
69.
Ten thousand years.
That was how long he had waited for this moment, and it was everything he imagined it could be.
He had come so close the first time, and the bitter taste of that defeat had stayed with him for a hundred centuries, eating away at him like acid. Then, he had thought only of conquest and domination. The world would be his to rule, the Trinity united as a crown upon his head. But, as the centuries turned, his contempt for all creation grew. This was a world of sheep; sheep were not meant to be coddled, but to be shorn and slaughtered and devoured.
Did it matter that these thoughts were not his own?
When he had learned of his true nature, he would have believed it so. Now he knew otherwise.
The sheep went on and on about free will and choice, but that was an illusion. The decisions were already made, driven by the interactions of a complex chemical computer that allowed debate only as a way of reinforcing what it wanted to do. Every single so-called choice—what to eat, where to live, who to love—all of it was just the outworking of a bioelectric, pleasure-seeking feedback algorithm.
He was no different.
He saw now that even his earlier doubts had been part of the grand design. His imagined opposition to the purpose had brought him here and delivered the object of his desire into his hands.
Should he be bothered by the fact that this desire burning in every fiber—every nano-particle—of his being, the overwhelming urge to rip the world asunder, was not truly his own? Of course not. It would make him happy, and in the end, that was all that mattered.
That was how he had been created.
And now, the power to make it happen was his. The Trinity was his.
For ten thousand years, he had dreamed of this moment, of how he would lay the world to waste. With a single thought, he could vaporize the earth’s iron core; the planet would explode like a firecracker shoved into an apple. He could rip the moon down from the heavens; the change in gravity would trigger crustal displacements that would capsize the continents long before the silvery orb crashed into the earth. He could unleash a global firestorm, he could make the atmosphere a poisonous fume; so many possibilities.
And then what?
Destruction was his raison d’etre, yet he had never before considered what would come afterward. Would the completion of his purpose mean the end of his life? Would he, like a spider or a spawning salmon, expend all of his vital energy in one final magnificent act—not procreation but destruction—and then cease to exist?
Did it matter? Did he have a choice?
Even this question of what to do next was moot. The Trinity was guiding him to the decision it knew he would eventually make. This annihilation was not something to be carried out quickly. He was not merely a destroyer, but a tormentor.
No quick and painless end for the sheep. Let them bleat in terror before I devour them.
The sheep. He could sense them, millions of them gathered here in droves, clamoring to hear the words of God. To the Wise Father, they were nothing but sheep waiting for the knife. He wasn’t their God, he was the….
Oh.
Atlas felt a gleam of satisfaction as the idea finally emerged, a seed planted in the primitive human consciousness, germinating in doctrine and myth, poetry and imagery, dreams and nightmares, blossoming at last.
He settled the blazing crown of the Trinity atop his head and when he spoke, his voice was like thunder.
“You want God? I will show you how your God has forsaken you.”
70.
Kiong saved her again.
As the brilliance of the Trinity’s joining filled the world with light, Mira felt herself being pulled away. She did not resist, but stumbled along behind Kiong, threading through the chaotic maze of overturned chairs, chasing the fleeing crowd.
Booker was with them as well, his camouflage suit no longer functional. He had torn the gray fabric away from his face, but pieces of it clung to him like a funeral shroud. Mira had no idea how the blind woman had found them both and rescued them from Atlas’ apotheosis, but was grateful that she had. Now at least, she would not have to face the end alone.
Atlas’ voice boomed outward like the shockwave of an atomic bomb, propelling the three of them into the nearest tent. The force collapsed the tent, and all the others, but the heavy panels acted like an airbag, cushioning their bodies against the impact.
As she struggled back from the brink of unconsciousness, Mira could not help but look back. The base of the Washington Monument was completely engulfed in radiance, too bright to look at directly, but even her scorched vision could not hide the fact that something was happening inside that ball of light.
The transformation happened with unbelievable swiftness. The blaze began to rise, like the sun climbing up from the horizon. Fifty feet. A hundred. Below it, the shape of a man emerged, but monstrously large, legs as thick as sequoia trees, with bright scarlet skin stretched taut over muscles that pulsed and rippled grotesquely. A long thick tail, sheathed in crimson scales, hung down, sweeping back and forth with such force that several of the flagpoles ringing the monument were sheared off like wheat stalks by a scythe.
And still it kept growing. The air bristled with a rushing sound, like sand blasting across a desert. Streamers of white light reached out from the Trinity like the tentacles of an enormous ethereal jellyfish, and whatever they touched dissolved into a fog of elementary matter: raw material to fuel the transformation. The sheer size of the abomination Marquand Atlas had become seemed to diminish the talisman’s fire, but it
was still there, blazing away atop the monstrosity that now stood half as high as the white stone obelisk.
Giant black bat wings unfurled, stretching out as if to cover the world in shadow, revealing powerful arms with hands that, while massive, looked absurdly ordinary. The same could not be said for what sprouted from the top of the enormous torso. Where arms and wings met, there were several distorted faces, vaguely human and faintly reminiscent of the man that had gone before—if Atlas had ever truly been human—but malformed, bestial. Thick horns sprouted from the heads—some in pairs, others singular, emerging from foreheads like the tusk of a narwhal—spiraling weirdly around the faces.
Mira had seen something like this before. The tortured visionary poet and artist William Blake had, two hundred years earlier, so perfectly captured with watercolor paint the essence of what she now beheld, it was surely the inspiration for the thing Atlas had chosen to become. Blake’s inspiration had been the Bible book of Revelation.
And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns.
The words came to her unbidden. She had not been raised as a believer, and while she had a passing familiarity with the Bible, this passage was etched in her consciousness. She did not merely think it; she heard it. Someone had read this to her long, long ago….
The great dragon. That ancient serpent called the devil.
Satan.
“Shit!” Booker’s oath broke the spell. “How do we fight that?”
Mira felt like saying, Fight it? Are you insane? Part of her knew that the horrifying apparition was not what it appeared to be. This wasn’t the living incarnation of evil from faith and folklore. It was a construct, something made of Trinity nano-particles. Not flesh and blood perhaps, but real. Tangible. Vulnerable?
Maybe.
Tarrant, the man she knew as Walter Aimes, had undergone a similar transformation in the hidden city of Agartha, and she had beaten him simply by destroying the segment of the Trinity that was sustaining his life.
Okay, maybe not simply.
The creature raised one enormous leg and took a step forward. If they had not already been flat on the ground, the tremor of its footfall would have pitched them headlong. For all his size, Atlas did not move with the exaggerated slowness of a movie monster. Instead, he advanced at what would have been a normal walking pace, albeit one that covered a hundred feet in a single stride.
“He’s coming for us,” Mira realized aloud. She felt this with absolute certainty, and all thoughts of mounting a defense were swept aside by the imperative of survival. “Scatter! Go!”
Another earthshaking footfall knocked them down before they could move from the spot. Atlas towered above them and Mira could feel his intent vibrating in every nerve of her body; he meant to stomp them flat. Frantic, she gave up trying to rise and instead tried crawling on all fours, desperate to remove herself from the impact zone, knowing even as she tried that she would never be fast enough.
She resisted the urge to look; looking would slow her down, make her second guess herself. Nevertheless, she could feel him there, looming above, a foot as large as a locomotive rising…falling.
Boom.
The impact was close, but somehow not as close as she thought it would be. One of the others?
She looked despite herself and saw Booker still scrambling over the flattened tent off to her left. Kiong however, was perfectly still.
So was Atlas. He stood unmoving, a towering colossus with wings spread wide, staring down in every direction with fourteen eyes that burned like lava in his multiple heads.
He doesn’t see us, she realized.
“Del! Freeze!”
Booker glanced back, saw what was happening, and went perfectly still. “What’s he waiting for?”
“Kiong is hiding us.”
“She can do that?”
Mira didn’t answer, but moving with exaggerated slowness, began creeping back in Kiong’s direction.
Several of Atlas’ heads looked up, distracted by something beyond them, and he lurched into motion again, stomping past them and setting up a temblor that sent cracks shooting up the sides of the monument. Mira threw herself flat as the thick tail whooshed through the air overhead, but could do little more than hang on and ride out the quake until the ground stopped moving. The chorus of screams that echoed across the flattened tent site overshadowed any sense of relief at having escaped the giant’s wrath.
A series of faint pops punctuated the cries; someone, probably some of the soldiers who were manning the secure perimeter, were doing the logical thing and using their weapons against the onrushing behemoth. It was a Lilliputian response, unlikely to do anything more than irritate Atlas, but it was something.
She got to her feet and stared in disbelief at the swath of destruction that Atlas had left across the National Mall. Flattened tents, the ragged stumps from trees knocked down and stamped flat. Strewn randomly about the chaos were dozens, no, hundreds of amorphous blobs that looked like clothes stuffed with pillows.
Bodies.
Mira felt her throat tighten. Atlas, like the scorpion in the fable, had revealed his true nature, and the ultimate goal of the Wise Father. The Great Work was not some fantastic divine plan to create heaven on earth; it was a demolition project.
First, he weakened humanity’s defenses by destroying the Ascendant Ones. Then he created Atlas to finish the job. The original apocalypse had not been cancelled, only postponed. Now, the day of reckoning had come.
The abomination stalked toward the Reflecting Pool, beating his wings to create a hurricane force wind that blasted through the tent city, scattering belongings and bodies alike. What was left, he ground underfoot or crushed with a sweep of his prodigious tail.
As terrible as Atlas had become, the ensuing panic was far more destructive. Every possible point of egress from the National Mall was jammed tight with bodies, yet those behind them kept pushing forward, blindly crushing and trampling one another.
Mira suddenly became aware of dark shapes flitting about above the mayhem, helicopters—specifically AH-64 gunships—moving in to engage the beast. Their engines were barely audible over the tumult of Atlas’ rampage, but there was no mistaking the staccato chatter of their M230 chain guns. Tracers marked the path of the 30-millimeter rounds as they arced across the sky and tore into Atlas’ crimson flesh. His grotesquely muscled torso burst apart, geysers of blood erupting from dozens of wounds. There was a loud boom and then another, as rockets, trailing tongues of orange fire, lanced out at the beast. For a fleeting moment, Mira dared to hope that ordinary weapons—the product of humanity’s own long love affair with destruction—might prove superior even to the incomprehensible power of the Trinity. Then, Atlas answered the attack.
Membranous wings beat the air, knocking the rockets off course. Mira gasped in horror as the projectiles began to explode in the midst of the fleeing crowd. Atlas continued to flap his wings, unleashing a gale that sent one of the gunships spinning out of control until it crashed into the trees on the north side of the Reflecting Pool. The others fought their way out of the tempest and tried to put some distance between themselves and the monster, but Atlas’ horned heads followed their every move, and one by one, seven mouths opened and unleashed hell.
Tongues of fire—not the rolling orange of napalm spewing from a flame thrower, but streams of bright blue plasma, like blow-torches—lanced across the sky and sliced the helicopters apart. The stricken aircraft exploded in mid-air, raining molten fragments down on the trapped crowd.
The sound of explosions and the thunderclaps of the atmosphere being ionized by what could only be described as “dragon fire” reached their ears a moment later, along with the screams of the dying. The noise snapped Mira out of her paralysis. She rounded on Booker who was likewise transfixed by the awful spectacle, and shouted in his face. “We have to do something.”
“What? How do we beat something like that?”
As if to underscore Booker’
s despair, Atlas lashed out with tendrils of energy, sweeping across the carnage, devouring everything. Even from a distance, Mira could see the bullet wounds in Atlas’ torso begin to close over, the blood-red flesh restored completely. Atlas was healing himself. And he was still growing.
There was only one answer. “We have to destroy the Trinity.”
He blinked at her, incredulous. “And how exactly do you propose to do that?”
“He’s not indestructible. Bullets might not stop him, but they’ll slow him down.”
“And piss him off.”
“We need one of those gunships.”
“You mean like the ones he just knocked out of the sky? We won’t last five seconds.”
“We will,” she promised, nodding at Kiong. “We have a secret weapon.”
71.
Less than two hundred yards separated them from the spot where Booker remembered a squadron of grounded Apache gunships, but crossing that distance was like a journey through the nine circles of hell. Fires had broken out all across the Mall, ignited by the burning helicopters and fanned by the near constant beat of Atlas’ wings. Charred wreckage and broken bodies were everywhere, but it was the awful wailing of those who still lived that broke Mira’s heart. Atlas meandered back and forth across the Mall, raining down destruction with wanton indifference, like a child stomping through a room filled with balloons, sowing fear, feeding on the terror of his intended victims.
He would kill them all. Everyone, everywhere, and the more he destroyed, the stronger he would become.
“There!” Booker pointed to a line of helicopters that seemed to float like islands in the sea of human suffering. The security cordon around the area had long since collapsed, giving the frightened crowds a few more square feet of ground toward which to flee. There was no sign of the flight crews or the soldiers who had once guarded the aircraft. One of the helicopters had turned on its side, its remaining rotor blades now thrust ineffectually up at the sky, but the others seemed to be intact.