“And the alien sexers? When do they arrive?”
The aides became silent. Eyes cast to the floor. The General waited. Eventually one of them, a pale man with impossibly frenetic eyebrows, spoke. “There … uh sir … there was an accident.”
The General waited.
Emboldened, the young woman to his left said, “there was an outbreak on the runway at the base in London before they could escape. The plane … the plane –” She dropped her head into her hands. Tears pattered rhythmically onto her purple dress. She always wore a purple dress, thought the General. The color of hibiscus.
One of the aides pulled up a holo-vid. A jet swung its nose parallel to the runway. The engines engaged and it accelerated. But before it had traversed half the length of the airstrip, a silver blob appeared to one side of the tarmac. As the plane rushed forward, the blob, and then another, and another, crept onto the road. Their metallic skins gleamed as they inched into the path of the jet.
The pilot swerved the plane a moment before impact. But it was too late.
Hibiscus was inconsolable.
“There were no survivors,” said Eyebrows. “All eight alien sexers, the only eight sexers of our generation, are dead.”
The General steepled his fingers. Leaned back in his chair. How had this happened? All of the alien sexers – dead. How could it have been allowed? To have them all in one place …
“We were evacuating them,” said Eyebrows, intuiting the General’s question from his silence.
“Without the sexers,” sobbed Hibiscus, “we have no defense. At their present rate of expansion, the aliens will make landfall in North America within the month. There’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
The General exhaled.
“There might be,” said a reedy voice from the back of the room.
Eyebrows turned in his chair. Hibiscus lifted her disheveled face to see who’d spoken.
“Identify yourself,” said the General.
“Professor Slowborn, from the Time Institute.”
“Who let you in here?” Eyebrows growled. His face contorted into incredible screws of anger, eyebrows flailing across his forehead.
“Let him speak,” bellowed the General.
The man shuffled forward, parting aides and more aides to either side of him as he approached. The General noted the man’s ancient tweed jacket. His faux leather shoes. His crimson suspenders.
“The time travel machine works, sir.”
The room gasped.
Eyebrows raised one appallingly fluffy brow. “How do you know? I thought the prototype was months from completion.”
“We tested it,” said Slowborn, and flopped a holo-paper onto the General’s desk.
General Bravo liked the man’s watch. Rolex. Vintage.
“I travelled to tomorrow, and fetched the newspaper,” said the Professor.
The General held the membranous periodical to the light. “Impressive,” he rumbled.
Eyebrows looked affronted, but Hibiscus had ceased crying. “You mean,” she said, “you mean we could go back in time and stop the alien invasion before they arrive?”
Professor Slowborn swallowed. “Well, not exactly. You see, the time continuum would be destabilized if we changed such massive–”
“Blah-blah-blah. General, this …” Eyebrows spat the word, “… aca-de-mic is wasting your time.”
“General, I believe there may be a solution,” continued Slowborn, unfazed. “I can find you a sexer more accurate than any we have today.”
“Go on,” said the General.
Hibiscus patted Eyebrow’s forearm. He settled, for the moment.
“Neurologists have found the area of the brain that allows –” The Professor glanced up at the paused video of the plane crash. “… allowed the sexers to find the queens among the swarms of aliens. With this information, geneticists are working on a modification to breed a new generation of humans. A generation that can sex the aliens with unprecedented accuracy.”
“There’s no time to breed another generation. Anyway, we know all of this!” shouted Eyebrows.
“Yes,” said Slowborn carefully, “but what you don’t know …” The room leaned forward to hear. “… is that our research has found a person with greater penetrance of this gene than any alien sexer has today. Some mutation, some anomaly, made this woman uniquely adept –”
“Who is this person?” asked the General.
“A chicken sexer from South Africa,” said Slowborn.
“South Africa,” mused the General. “South Africa …” He stared up at the ceiling, trying to remember where he’d heard the name.
“Country on the southern tip of Africa, sir,” said Slowborn. “Before The Floods enveloped most of it. We’re looking for a woman who lived there in the early 1900s.”
“A what-sexer?” asked Eyebrows.
“Chicken,” said Hibiscus. “Ancient livestock we used to eat before printed food.”
Eyebrows shook his head. “Madness,” he muttered.
General Bravo stood to his full height. He was wearing the pumps his wife had bought him last birthday. They gave him an extra two inches at least – not that he needed them. No man could stand beside the General as anything more than his shadow. “Bring me that chicken sexer,” he bellowed. “I do not need to remind you that the fate of humanity rests upon the shoulders of this woman.”
*
The first thing Agatha noticed about the future was the smell.
There wasn’t one.
Agatha and Lazarus sniffed the air. Stale and hot. The comforting ammonia stench of the chicken coop was gone. The sweet, damp rot of the forest floor; every smell she knew – was gone.
Lazarus dipped his head under Agatha’s skirt. His blunted horns scratched her hairy thighs.
The sky. It wasn’t a shade of gray she’d seen before. A silver hue suffused the muggy clouds. Agatha shut her eyes. A putrid suffocation enveloped her. She sucked at the air. Grabbed her cross.
“Agatha Wretched!” yelled a man’s voice.
“What do you think of the future, Agatha?” shouted another.
“Give her space!”
“How does it compare with your time?”
“Please say a few words for the cameras.”
“Stand back!”
Voices. Voices piled atop one another. Interlaced and congealed. Voices indistinguishable. A cacophony of throats chanted to her. At her.
“Agatha, if you had one piece of advice for us, what would it be?”
Her eyes snapped open.
A crowd of men and women compacted around her. They thrust strange cylindrical devices at her. Jostled among themselves, like the chicks in the coop.
She remembered stepping through the devilish orange-green orifice. Now, surveying the crowd with their strange devices, their peculiar clothes, thoughts of devilry and sorcery filled her heart. These were fallen people. They needed the word of God.
Leviticus. It could only be Leviticus.
She raised her hand, and the crowd fell silent. With the righteousness she had practiced monthly on the pulpit at Knysna Church, with the full force of Christ, Agatha gave forth. “Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the Lord your God.”
The men and women glanced at one another uneasily. “Necromancer,” they whispered among themselves. They shrugged. Threw quizzical looks.
One of them, one of the men, flared his nostrils. “By Einstein,” he shouted. “She … she has a scent!” The crowd erupted into a fresh clamor of questions.
“What’s it like?” shouted one of the women.
“Can we sniff you?”
Professor Slowborn stepped between Agatha and the crowd. “That’s enough,” he said. She flinched as he took her hand. “Come with me,” he whispered, and tugged her aside.
A box hovered before her. Agatha stooped to peer under the obstacle. It hung in the air. No wings. Not a single
feather covered the shimmering object. It sat in the muggy afternoon, plain but impossible. She crossed herself.
Slowborn nudged her. “Come,” he said. “We’re late for our meeting with the General in the airship.”
Agatha realized what had happened. She reeled with the sudden knowledge. She had died. Professor Slowborn was an angel. This was the chariot of death, delivering her to Saint Peter.
Her heart calmed. She was a good woman. A Christian. She had always followed the letter of God.
She was about to step into the floating box, when Agatha noticed that her goat was no longer by her side.
“Lazarus!” she cried. She gripped Professor Slowborn’s shoulders. “Lazarus needs me.”
“Who’s Lazarus?”
She tightened her grip. Shook him. “My goat,” she said, her voice unsteady. “My Lazarus. Take him to heaven with me.”
His eyes widened. “We will take care of … Lazarus,” said Slowborn. “I promise. I have biologists flying in from the university now to see him.”
A cold wash of confusion, of terror, swallowed her.
“Please … please bring him with me.”
“We can bring the animal,” said Hibiscus. “There’s space in the hover-car.”
Agatha could hardly hear the woman’s voice over the thwump-thwumping heartbeat flooding her ears.
She placed her folded forefinger in her mouth, ignored its ammoniacal taste, and whistled.
A path appeared in the crowd, and Lazarus burst into view. Insofar as the aging goat could, he gamboled to his master. The crowd cheered. Aaahed, as she hugged him.
“Oh Lazarus,” she said, teary-eyed for the first time in over a decade, “we’re going to heaven.”
“What does she mean, Professor Slowborn?” yelled one of the crowd.
The Professor held up his palms, and shrugged.
Agatha stood. Jerked on the rope around Lazarus’s neck. “Come boy, it’s time.”
Lazarus bleated. Shuffled toward the box. It took some coaxing, but Lazarus stepped up. Moments later, seated on leather that made the backs of her knees sweat, the chariot rose into the air. Agatha watched the crowd shrink beneath her. The box rose slowly at first, then soared to the heavens.
What a day, thought Agatha. What a way to enter the afterlife. What a blessed day.
Professor Slowborn sat beside her. Hibiscus smudged herself into the far corner, as far away from Lazarus as possible. The goat regarded the woman warily.
Agatha held her head with pride at the sight of him. Even now, in this stressful time – they were dead after all – he was in rut. Semen trickled down the goat’s swollen scrotum. And the smell. It was glorious. No goat south of the Zambezi River could compete with the gamey stench of Lazarus. Soon his magnificent scent bathed the flying box.
“Wow,” said Professor Slowborn, eying the growing pool of ejaculate on the floor. He shifted his leather shoe to avoid the pale liquid.
Agatha beamed, with all six of her teeth.
Hibiscus held her knees to her chest, and groaned.
The trip didn’t last long. Less than a minute after they’d left the ground, Agatha peered out a window to see yet another flying craft, this one far larger. A hollow in its underside appeared, and a darker light, an artificial light, swallowed them.
*
“And this is the war room,” said Slowborn.
“War,” she whispered. This wasn’t quite what she’d expected heaven to be, but Agatha was open-minded. Who was she to question the layout of God’s abode?
Through an open doorway, her eyes perched upon what could only be called a magical scene. Pools of light of varying colors floated in the vast room. Men and women buzzed around them, pointing and gesturing. The images in the pools shifted and morphed.
A man taller than her pathetic husband, taller than her late father, appeared in the doorway. “Welcome,” said the tower of muscle. A tight, bullet-gray suit jacket hugged his magnificent shoulders. “I am General Cthulhu Bravo. Thank you for gracing us with your presence.”
Agatha’s heart stopped when she saw his smile. His rugged, stubbled cheeks. The man held out his hand. His fingernails were pristine as the noonday sun. Agatha’s hairy knees trembled.
Taking a man’s hand so early after meeting was unchristian, especially for a married woman. Agatha lowered her eyes and curtseyed instead, lifting the hem of her blood-stained dress. It was her work dress – she wore it for the chicken slaughters. And it was relatively clean. She’d washed it just two weeks ago, when she’d last bathed. Anyway, one could hardly discern the bloodstains in its floral pattern.
General Bravo’s nose dilated as she curtseyed. He closed his eyes, and sniffed. “Gosh,” he murmured. The severe lines on his brow thawed.
Nothing less than the face of an angel, thought Agatha.
“What scent you have,” said the General. “Earthy, with a hint of –”
Lazarus snorted.
“Okay boy,” said Agatha. She stroked one of his horns.
Slowborn leaned to whisper in her ear. “Humans haven’t had a scent since the Cleansing in 2096,” he explained.
Agatha nodded without understanding.
“Lazarus requires water,” she said. “And a bed of hay to rest.”
“Of course,” said the General. He signaled to an aide with hopelessly large eyebrows. Eyebrows took the rope from Agatha’s hand. He held the animal at arm’s length, and led him away. Lazarus bleated excitedly. His footsteps clop-clop-clopped down a corridor.
“This way, ma’am.” She liquefied at the touch of the General’s broad hand between her shoulder blades. Agatha thought she heard him inhale sharply as she moved past him into the war room.
The largest pool of light, a giant rectangle floating above all the room’s frenetic inhabitants, showed a scene on a gray strip of concrete. A crowd thronged around two figures. It was she. She and Lazarus.
God’s eye, thought Agatha. She was watching herself step through the orange-green light into the afterlife. And she was watching through God’s eye. A voice echoed through the war room. It was her voice, speaking through her image in the pool of light. “Do not turn to mediums or necromancers …”
Agatha gaped. At the sight of herself. At Lazarus. The goat stood in all his splendor on the concrete, his nose perched high as the crowd listened to her preach.
Then the image in the floating eye of God changed. In place of the crowd and Agatha floated a glass bottle, golden in hue. And on the bottle, written in a hand more delicate than any Agatha had seen:
A voice, soothing, feminine, cooed as the bottle swiveled in the air. “Do you long for the holy touch? Does your soul yearn for eras past? You know what to do. Wear it … Necromancer. The scent of God. The scent of Agatha.”
“Please take a seat ma’am,” said General Bravo.
The bottle of Necromancer perfume disappeared. The eye of God works in mysterious ways, thought Agatha.
“Have you briefed her?” asked the General.
“Not yet,” said Hibiscus.
“Chromes,” said Eyebrows. “A race of aliens from Ganymede. They’ve never bothered us before.” God’s eye switched to an image of a red marble suspended in ink. “Their ships tend to keep to space around Jupiter. They haven’t travelled as far as Earth before. Until recently.”
Agatha eyed the insane man. Jupiter? Ganymede? Aliens? She stroked the cross at her neck. She was expecting harps and cherubs.
“Just under three months ago,” said Hibiscus, “they arrived.” The pool of light displayed an image of a sky filled with hundreds, nay thousands, of silver objects. At first, Agatha thought they were tiny. But then she realized that she was looking at large objects at a distance. They swarmed the horizon, until the sun and the clouds were lost behind a canopy of chrome.
The clouds, she thought. The clouds she saw at the airstrip were swarms of these … these … machines.
Hibiscus’s voice was low. “Other than shutting down
air traffic, they appeared harmless at first. This was London before the invasion.” The display zoomed to a cityscape. She’d never seen such structures. Towers hundreds of floors in height kissed the sky. Rivers hung, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, weaving between the pillars of steel and glass. Filtered sunlight threw amorphous ripples of color across the city’s vast concourses. Countless flying boxes shot in every direction, coordinating magically to avoid collision.
“And this, is after.”
Agatha gulped.
Most of the buildings had toppled. It appeared as though some giant hand, the Deity Himself, had flicked the monoliths aside. Like so many dominos.
The floating rivers no longer swam among the city’s spires. The flying boxes were absent. And the people, the millions she’d seen flooding the streets between the buildings, were nowhere to be seen. In their stead, small fires flickered here and there, among the rubble that had been London.
“Heavenly Father. What did this?”
“This,” said General Bravo, his face dark, “is a Chrome.”
The eye of God displayed a bovine creature. It had four legs, but shorter and stubbier than a cow’s. And a maw, but this was not a bovine mouth. Where a cow’s gentle molars would have been was a blur of blades, whirring like the cogs on a watch. But faster. Faster than any mechanism Agatha had seen.
Agatha’s cheeks burned. With all the force of a falling anvil, she grasped where she was. This wasn’t heaven.
This was hell.
Horror encased Agatha. She snorted back tears. “But why?” she pleaded. “I have been a faithful servant all my life. I have lived by the Lord’s Law.” She seized the General’s hand. His emerald eyes were just as she’d imagined Saint Peter’s to be. “I have done everything God asked of me.”
General Bravo tossed a puzzled looked at Slowborn.
“She thinks this is the afterlife,” said the Professor.
The puzzle on the General’s face didn’t resolve.
“A religious belief that died out in the late 21st century,” explained Hibiscus.
“Fascinating,” said the General. His eyes shone as they came to rest on Agatha’s.
“Agatha,” said Hibiscus. “You have done nothing wrong. You are here to help us defeat the Chromes.”
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