by Mark Teppo
“We’re supposed to go through that door?” Comet asked, peered at the back side of the free-standing door.
“I suppose so,” I said, glancing over at Rudolph.
“You first,” the reindeer said.
I sighed and reached for the door knob. I was expecting some sort of shock, but the handle was cool to my touch and turned easily. What I saw through the portal seemed exactly the same, but when I stepped through, all of the reindeer vanished. I could see Rudolph and Comet when I looked back through the open door, but the rest of reindeer and Santa—who I knew were clustered around the door but out of direct sight—weren’t there.
I was somewhere else, but I hadn’t felt any sort of transition or change as I had crossed the threshold. I was just . . . here now.
I got out of the way as the others filed through, taking the moment to re-orient myself in the new room.
“It’s just like the beginning,” said Santa. There were seven doorways leading off this room, the eighth being the one across which we had all just crossed. Over the door was an orange-tinged ‘0’ and the other doorways were marked ‘1’ through ‘7.’
“Bernie, you said we were halfway there. That was a six point location code you were spouting earlier, wasn’t it?”
I nodded and rattled it off for him again.
He pointed to the second door. “It’s a layer within a layer. I got it now. Seven series of seven by seven by seven. And once you pass through the orange door, it repeats itself. It’s like a Mandelbrot structure: the greater the magnification, the more area you discover. We need to hit the second cube, the seventy-eight chamber of that lattice—” He flashed us a tired smile. “—and there I’m guessing we’ll find another floating cube with another three hundred forty three chambers. And it’ll be the twenty-second one that will have our boy.”
“Dig,” Cupid concurred. “It’s like God’s Own Pachinko machine.”
I grabbed the strap of the leather satchel on Rudolph and scrambled onto his back. “Let’s keep moving,” the hairless reindeer said. “We’ll have all year to deconstruct the theory.” His hooves clattered against the floor as he made for the door that would take us to the second lattice.
*
I had to give Santa credit. He certainly seemed to have figured out the organization of the lattices of Purgatory. Entering the second cube, we found ourselves in chamber LVII, and it was pretty easy to follow the Roman numbers on the walls to LXXVIII. We all gathered in the last chamber as the blue light outlined the floating grid of the last numbers in the location code series. 5.CXLIII.XLVIII.2.LXXVIII.XXI.
Santa approached the hovering shape and said the number that he wanted. The cube twisted and opened under his touch and dropped a hanging door in the center of the room.
This door was locked.
The edges of the indigo outline still held some of the orange coloration, sparking and jetting tiny strips of color. Centered in the smooth portal was a large seal, infinitely textured and raised in a very specific pattern. Blitzen recognized it.
“Great Seal,” he said. “Kind of like the ones in the last chapter of the Big Book.”
“Which book?” Cupid asked.
“Revelations. You know, the seven seals that are opened at Judgment Day.”
Santa looked at me. “I thought you said Purgatory was a holding station. They held them for thirty days and then they went to their final destination.”
I raised my hands as I slid off Rudolph’s back. “Wait a minute. That’s what the system said.”
“You sure the thirty days wasn’t referring to the transference of paperwork?”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it when the words that would get me out of trouble failed to appear.
“Great,” Rudolph said, “the bureaucratic elf makes a paperwork error. Anyone surprised?”
I wasn’t sure: that’s the only thing I was sure about. Yes, it took thirty days for the request for Passage to be processed. But Santa was right. What did that mean? Was the paperwork a formality? Had I made the mental jump to ‘paying $50 and getting out of jail at the end of three turns’ on my own?
“That’s what Judgment Day is all about,” Blizten said. “Judging.”
“Really?” Rudolph asked.
Blizten ignored him. “All the souls who haven’t been formally condemned or accepted are granted release at that time and they pass into the next realm when the final trumpet sounds.” He nodded at the Seal. “This may be one of those. His paperwork is in transit, but David Anderson may be waiting for the Final Judgment before his Passage happens. This door may not open until then.”
“That’s kind of puts a damper on things, doesn’t it?” Cupid pointed out.
“How long till Judgment Day anyway?” Dasher wanted to know.
“More than twenty-four hours,” I said, my eyes on Santa. “It’s got to be past midnight,” I said softly. “It’s got to be Christmas Eve now. It’s time to go home.”
Santa didn’t reply, which wasn’t terribly surprising, given the situation. He stared at the seal, chewing on the end of a mustache. I could see the frustration clearly in his eyes. To have come this far and . . .
“Hey, code warrior,” Rudolph snapped.
“What?” I turned toward him. “Me?”
The big reindeer dropped his head and pointed at the door with his antlers. “Front and center. You wanted to tag along and be useful. Now’s your chance.”
I deferred, pointing over my shoulder at Santa. “No, I wanted to keep him from hurting himself.”
“That’s what you’ll be doing by getting that door open,” Rudolph said.
“Open?” I squeaked.
“Look at Prince Charming there. You think he’s going to call it quits now?”
I didn’t need to look at Santa to know the answer to that question. “How am I supposed to open it?” I asked.
“Try using the razor sharp power of your intellect,” offered Rudolph. “Come on, binary monkey. It’s just a lock. We’re heard about you and security systems.”
My ears burned. “It’s a hobby,” I said.
“So’s masturbation,” Rudolph replied, “But not nearly as useful right now.”
He had me there.
I stepped up to the door and examined the Great Seal. It was two concentric circles with an unknown script running between the two shapes. The inside was cross-hatched with more symbols—lines and whorls that, if I had to guess, probably said: Do not open until Judgment Day.
“I’m not sure where to start,” I admitted after a few minutes of looking at the Seal. Sure, I have a faculty of languages, but the script meant nothing to me. The only thing I had learned from my examination was the writing was of a different texture than the smooth surface of the door. It was extruded like scar tissue on Barbie’s shoulder, and I reached out to touch it.
The electrical discharge knocked me across the room, a violent sparking of blue fire that limned the outline of the Seal in an angry glow. I bounced off the far wall and rolled a few times, the seams of my clothes smoking. There was an immense ringing in my ears and my vision was filled with wavy lines. An acrid taste was in my mouth. I must have bitten my tongue.
Comet leaned over me, nosing me with his muzzle. A tiny spark leaped between us at the contact. “You okay?” he asked.
I was still vibrating somewhere in the ultrasonic range and couldn’t manage much more than a squeak.
“Well, I’m glad we got the obvious out of the way,” Rudolph said. “Anyone one else have any bright ideas?”
No one said anything for a moment, and I pushed myself upright. The reindeer were standing around the floating Seal, and they were all trying not to look at each other. Comet looked like he was trying to calculate how many days it was until Judgment Day. Groaning, I tried to get up and found such activity more difficult than I thought it should be.
“Prancer,” Santa snapped suddenly, his voice firm and decisive. The way it was during Zero Hour when he was f
linging presents around. “Are those cutting lasers on your antlers?”
“Yes, sir,” Prancer replied. “Nd:YAG.”
“Perfect,” Santa said. He snapped his fingers at the Seal. “Cut us a hole, son.”
Prancer nodded as he stepped up to the door, he turned on the laser cutters attached to the tips of his antlers. He leaned in and put the fiery points against the stone just outside the Seal, careful to keep his nose from touching the charged symbol. The stone whined like a living thing and Prancer turned his head to the left and then to the right, inscribing a tight circle in the stone. The Nd:YAG cutters left a dark line in the stone and a smell like scorched sand filled the room.
Prancer clicked the lasers off and stepped back from the portal. The rest of us got out of the way as he put some distance between himself and the shining symbol. “Fire in the hole,” he said as the pod strapped to his back irised open and a slender tube popped out. There was a spark of fire back by his tail and an RPG round lanced out in a gout of smoke.
There was a sound like lightning hitting the large tree out in the yard, followed by more smoke than you’d find at a goth concert held in an underground bunker. I held onto the floor, waiting for it to stop rolling. Shapes moved in the smoke—shapes I assumed were reindeer. Comet had lost his balance as a result of trying to not step on me and had banged his head against the wall. A hoof caught me on the hip as he tried to stay upright.
A hole opened in the smoke, a whirlwind of moving air that striped away the obscuration and revealed the shattered portal. The Seal was gone and the door was open. Standing on the other side of the threshold was a thin man in a white robe. “Hello?” he said. “What’s going on?”
Rudolph appeared out of the mist and the guy visibly jumped at the sight of the hairless reindeer. “I’m Rudolph,” he said, “I’m here with Santa.”
The man’s eyes were wide already and they got wider. “Excuse me?”
“Santa Claus,” Rudolph explained. “The guy in the red suit who delivers presents at Christmas?”
“Yes,” the man said, “Yes, I know who Santa Claus is. But . . . but what are you doing here?”
“Your daughter made a request,” Rudolph said. “We’re here to take home.”
“Suzy?” His eyes filled. “My Suzy?”
There was a ringing in my ears, a persistent buzzing sound that was interrupting my enjoyment of this scene. Almost like a flying insect. I brought up my hand and felt something prick my palm. I jerked my hand away from the sting.
A tiny winged cherub about the size of a grapefruit buzzed my head, stabbing at me again with his tiny sword. I ducked, dodging his flashing sword. There was a tiny trickle of blood on my palm where he had tagged me once already.
Comet danced past me, bumping me with his shoulder. A targeting eye-piece was lowered across his left eye, but the cherub was too small for him to get a decent lock. He couldn’t get a clear shot.
The tiny angel came at me again, chattering and hissing like a deranged mouse.
Santa appeared out of the smoke, his cap gone and his white hair in wild disarray. The camouflage paint was streaking into his beard and his sleeve was on fire. But his hand was steady. “Get down,” he said, the large muzzle of the .45 pointed right at my head.
I dropped to the floor as the gun went off. A tiny echo followed the report of the pistol, a thin whistle like someone had forgotten a tea kettle on a hot stove. The only remnant of the angel was a pair of tiny feathers drifting in the haze and a fading gleam of light.
“They know we’re here,” Santa shouted. “Go to Plan B.”
“There’s a Plan B?” Comet wondered as he stood watch over me as I tried to get up again.
I brushed the cherub feathers from my shoulder where they had fallen. “Run like hell is my guess,” I muttered.
A keening buzz like a thousand hornets singing backup for an Irish pipe band filled the room—the angelic response to Santa’s whistling call. Tiny bubbles started to pop in the smoky air, tiny points in space bursting like soap from a Calgon bath, and each bubble released an angry sword-wielding cherub. A squadron of the miniscule angels dive-bombed Comet, and he reared back, triggering both of his mini-guns.
The cherubs moved like hummingbirds on crack, but their rapid ability to shift direction wasn’t enough to avoid every single bullet thundering in their direction. He fired off four times as many rounds as there was chubby angels; in situations like this, quantity has just as permanent an effect as quality, and all that came down on him was a cloud of angel feathers.
There was more gunfire from across the room and Santa’s hand fell on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Time to go.” Rudolph got a mouthful of David Anderson’s robe and pulled the man out of his processing chamber. The hairless reindeer dragged him for a few steps until Mr. Anderson got the idea and found his own source of motivation. I heard another of Prancer’s RPGs go off and more smoke filled the room.
Vixen triggered his flame thrower, illuminating the far side of the octagonal chamber, burning away the smoke. A large angel—a seraphim, I guessed, all clean, white marble wreathed in white streamers—caught the brunt of the blast, turning into a pillar of fire. The angel came on, its blank face alight in the furious gleam of the fire streaming from its frame. Dasher caught it from the side, tracers from his mini-gun making flashing lines between the reindeer and his target. The angel twisted and bucked, knocked around by the force of the bullets. The assault must have finally breached its body because it came apart suddenly, opening up and imploding in on itself like a balloon popping. An amber light burning in the center of the angel vanished, spreading outward in a split second of vaporization.
The ruined portal to David Anderson’s cell wavered and vanished, closing back into the tiny cube of the floating grid as Mr. Anderson got farther away from the tiny room. The floating grid was in stark relief, the indigo outline of the boxes very evident against the smoky background. Rising up through the insubstantial lattice structure were more angels. More seraphim, their streamers agitated and the angles of their blank faces sharp.
We fell back from the 78th chamber; Dasher and Prancer brought up the rear, their weapons sporadically active as a seraphim got too close. Rudolph slowed down long enough for me to get one foot in the strap of the satchel and he was off again, running down the hallway. Mr. Anderson was riding Vixen and Donner didn’t seem to be bothered by the weight of Santa in addition to his large missiles.
I caught myself wondering if two Hellfire missiles were going to be enough . . .
We reached the outer edge of the second cube without too many detours. The cherubs appeared to be acting as spotters for the seraphim. When we entered one of the chambers, there was invariably a pair or three of the tiny winged angels, and they would immediately start piping their celestial alert when they spotted us. Santa had evidently been spending some time at a target range because he rarely needed more than a single shot to dissociate a cherub.
But they were waiting for us in the first room: a full rank of seraphim ranged in front of a line of solid stone pillars. Tiny stubby wings jutted out from near the top of these massive shapes, tiny wings that didn’t look like they could lift a hamster, much less a three hundred pound block of stone. Blitzen was leading the team and he slid to a stop. “Thrones,” he shouted. “We’ve got thrones.”
“Get out of the way,” Santa yelled from behind Rudolph and I. Rudolph put on a burst of speed and, as he entered the room, he executed a tight turn. I stayed low and held on tight as centrifugal forces tried to tear me off his back. Rudolph didn’t slow down; he dashed for the first door—the passage to the first cube—and Blitzen was right behind him.
Donner fired both of his missiles.
My head hurt from the sound as the armament streaked into the large chamber and impacted the assembled host. My skeleton ached as the shock wave from the explosion threw me off of Rudolph’s back, and a good two years worth of memory cells in my brain burned out in a
flash of discordant imagery as I slammed against a hard surface that might have been the ceiling. My sense of smell took an extended vacation and I couldn’t feel my toes. I just wanted to lie on the floor for about six weeks until my bones stopped hurting.
Blitzen kicked against the rippling wall, shaking his head. The mini-gun enclosure hanging across his left flank was twisted and bent. He frowned at the damaged gun. He couldn’t see that his left ear had been torn as well and it looked like the pain hadn’t registered in his brain yet.
Rudolph had scorch marks across his back and he was favoring a back hoof. It seemed like he has something loose in his mouth that he couldn’t quite get at. The leather satchel slung across his chest was askew and red light was bleeding from the top of the bag.
“You’re leaking,” I said, raising my voice to hear it over the ocean sound still hammering in my skull.
Blitzen looked at Rudolph. “What is that?” He was shouting too. Or least it looked like he was. I could barely hear him.
The hairless reindeer looked down and saw the light. “Must have been cracked by the explosion.”
“What? What cracked?”
“The old Clock,” he said.
Blitzen took a step back. “The Nuclear Clock? I thought that had been dismantled after the accident.”
Rudolph shook his head. “You think anyone knew how?”
Blitzen moved even farther away. “What are you doing with that?
“Insurance policy. Donner shot off both his missiles,” he said to Blitzen. “We’re out of the heavy armament. They’re going to cut us off at the exit point again. They’ll be waiting. We’re going to need a edge.” Rudolph looked down at the bag, the red light shining against his nose. “Get the others. I’ll lead.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll definitely be behind you,” Blitzen said. He nodded toward me. “Bernie, get this gun rack off me. I’ll be your taxi.”