by Mick Farren
"I wanted to give you men the excuse that you were only following my orders."
Murphy's face was reddening. "So you took it on yourself?"
"That's my job."
"Men have died today without knowing what they were dying for."
Carlisle's face was harder than Cynthia had ever seen it. "That's nothing new."
"I'm not sure I like the way you do things, Lieutenant."
One of the deacons was on his feet. He looked around at the other men and waved a fist at Carlisle. "This is treason. The man's a traitor. We should simply arrest him."
He started moving toward Carlisle, but Murphy felled him with a gun butt. The man crumpled, and Murphy stood over him. The other PDs had their guns trained on the remaining deacons.
Murphy stared at Carlisle. "We're with you, Lieutenant, but we still think you should have let us make our own decisions."
Carlisle's shoulders sagged a little, but he quickly recovered and turned to Reeves. "I'm going to the roof. I want you to hold the fort here."
Reeves nodded stiffly.
Carlisle glanced at Cynthia. "Keep an eye on her."
Mansard
"The TV feed's down!"
"What?"
"There's nothing coming through, just a malfunction signal."
Mansard jerked away from what he was doing. "What are those idiots playing at?"
"There's no one responding from the island."
"How can that be? There's a half-dozen TV units on that island, plus deacons and the army."
"Don't ask me. It's like they were all blanked out, just like that."
"Are our people still on the line?"
The PA at the radio nodded. "Loud and clear. It's just the island that's communications dead."
"That's ridiculous."
Someone was shouting from the stern of the yacht. "There are choppers coming up from the island. One of them's the president's."
Two paces took Charlie Mansard to the rail. It was true – there were three helicopters rising from the island. One was Air Force Four; the other two were Herods from the escort. What he was seeing was insane. Was the president leaving in the middle of the show, before he had done his act? Mansard shuddered to think what power might be dragging Faithful away from the TV cameras. Maybe the country was at war.
The PA was beckoning. "There's this weird message coming in. They want us to power down and go back to the island."
Mansard held out his hand for the headset. "Give me that." He held it to his ear. "Who is this?"
A synthivoice was repeating the message. Mansard angrily shook his head. "No fucking robot is going to tell me to cancel the show. Get me Jimmy."
Jimmy Gadd was in the headphones. "What's going on, chief? Are we really calling it off?"
"The hell we are. Power up. People have come for a show, and we're going to proceed as normal."
"Are you sure?"
"Do it! We go right now!" A thought struck him. "Forget about the figure of Christ. We'll go with the other three. We'll give them the monsters. The world seems to be going nuts, so let's go with it." He suddenly laughed. "Maybe we can help it along."
Carlisle
He could still feel their eyes on him as he rode up in the elevator. He knew that he had lost a certain absolute trust, a trust that he would never get back. The men were following him out of pragmatism. He was no longer one of them, just another manipulating leader. The elevator stopped at the top floor, and Carlisle climbed the flight of concrete and steel steps that led to the roof. The wall around the door that opened on the helipad was chewed up by gunfire, and the door had been blown off its hinges. The body of one of his men, a rookie called Kaufman, was half buried in a pile of rubble. He stepped over more rubble to get to the outside. The sun was well below the horizon, and the sky was almost dark. The helipad was a mess. A third of the landing lights had been shot out, but the ones that were left were more than enough to show the other bodies and the debris on the flat landing apron and the way the concentric yellow rings that marked the pad were blackened by grenade bursts.
Donahue was waiting with his squad. They had the covers off the batteries of small Slingshot surface-to-air missiles that were mounted at the four corners of the roof. From the distrust and disappointment on their faces, they had clearly heard from the com center.
"So the president's coming, is he?"
Carlisle nodded. "They should be here any minute."
"And it's going to be a brand-new day is it, Lieutenant?"
Carlisle sighed. He did not know if he could handle an infinity of being treated like Judas. "I sure hope so."
"So do we."
The slap of rotors came from the southwest, and navigation lights twinkled by the black silhouettes of the Trade Center. The lights of the downtown towers had been extinguished for the skywalkers.
"I think this is them now."
The chopper sound came closer, and the men on the roof peered into the darkness. Soon it was possible to see that there were three of them, one large aircraft and two smaller ones – the presidential helicopter and a pair of escort gunships. The pitch of their engines indicated that they were coming fast, then, as they hit the final approach, they slowed. Whoever was in command, presumably Dreisler, was being ultracautious. They hovered a way off from the pad, and sunguns flared in the noses of the escort ships, sweeping the pad with blinding white light. Carlisle shaded his eyes with his hand, thinking that it looked as if UFOs were coming in for a landing. Finally they seemed satisfied and came on in. Only Air Force Four descended to the pad, whipping up a vortex of dust and light debris. The gunships stayed protectively overhead.
Before the big ship with the presidential seal on the side even touched, four men swung down from the open passenger door. They wore protective helmets and body armor over dark conservative business suits. Their weapons were at the ready. They had to be Dreisler's crack team. Next out was a cameraman, hair blowing in the prop wash – the event was being recorded for posterity. The helicopter settled on its landing gear, and more deacons clambered from the door. Some of Donahue's men were looking nervous. Maybe it was a Trojan horse? The deacons formed a protective semicircle. Larry Faithful stepped down, with Dreisler right behind him. They walked quickly to where Carlisle was standing. The cameraman was working overtime. This was the stuff of history: the landing pad on the top of the high tower, the long black shadows cast by the lights of the helicopter, the slowly turning rotors. This was the Fall of Larry Faithful.
Dreisler shouted over the roar of the engines. "You did a good job, Carlisle."
Carlisle did not want Dreisler's commendation. He nodded and mumbled, "Thank you."
"Lieutenant Carlisle, I want you to meet President Faithful."
Even at a moment of such gravity, Dreisler could still muster the sardonic smile. After the magazine pictures, the posters and billboards, the thousands of television hours, the president looked like an alien. Nothing about him seemed real. The features – the prissy rosebud mouth, the phony compassion around his eyes – were all parodies of the image. He was small, not more than five foot three, a bantam rooster who walked on the balls of his feet. His face was covered in thick television makeup that was streaked by rivulets of sweat. The flesh beneath it had the inhuman regularity of expensive plastic surgery. How was it possible for someone who looked so fabricated to have caused so much trouble?
Carlisle inclined his head slightly. What could one say to a president whom one had just deposed? Faithful's eyes gleamed briefly and locked on Carlisle's. The lines were still there, but the compassion had vanished. His voice was too soft to hear, but even by lip reading, the power of the venom was obvious. It was a flash of black ice anger.
"May you rot in hell, Lieutenant."
Carlisle was still blinking when the shouts came. One of Dreisler's men was quickly beside him.
"Sir, you'd better take a look at this."
Dreisler stabbed a finger at Faithful. "Guard him wit
h your lives."
Carlisle hurried after Dreisler as the deacon strode to the edge of the roof. Out on the water, well beyond the tip of Manhattan, three huge figures of pure light, basking in their massive vapor columns, were advancing out of the night, bearing down on the city. Dreisler looked at the nearest aide.
"I thought we'd canceled Mansard's show."
"He seems to have uncanceled himself, sir. We could send in helicopters to break up the images."
"And we'd look ridiculous. It'd be a remake of King Kong. No, let him run. Arrest him when he's finished. If Charlie Mansard wants to put on the Day of Judgment, let him."
Mansard
Charlie Mansard gazed in awe at his own creation. The new projectors were a quantum advance on the ones they had used at the Garden. The image density was magnificent. His towering figures were no longer ghostly; the light seemed almost solid. He stood brace-legged on the yacht's gently rocking deck, hands clasped behind his back. The yacht was steering a course some distance out from the barges, so Charlie could see the full effect. All around him the party had stopped. An anxious silence had settled. Nobody seemed to want to stand next to him. Even Lynette was keeping her distance. He held his breath for a long time. Finally he let it out with a sigh.
"Yes, I think these are pretty much okay."
The relief among the crew was like a lifted weight. Charlie had given his seal of approval. They gathered around, slapping his back, hugging him, and pumping his hand. Champagne corks popped.
The Beast came first. It was a roughly humanoid demon with hunched shoulders and spindly, angular, almost insectlike legs – a cross between man and mantis. Mansard had borrowed heavily from mid-twentieth-century monster movies for that one. It stalked up river with a menacing shamble. The scales on its body were a deep bottle green and they gleamed with highlights of midnight blue and acid yellow. Its eyes were upswept emerald slits that glared balefully as it swung its head from side to side as if seeking its prey. Mansard had chuckled the first time he had seen the animated motion.
"Checking out who's been naughty or nice?"
Two spiky projections that could have been either antlers or antennae rose from the top of its elongated skull. Steaming saliva dripped from its fanged mouth, and its talons constantly flexed. Every few paces it halted, and its nostrils flared as if it were sniffing the air. The finishing touch was the numerals '666', the number of the beast, which pulsed hellfire red on the scales between the towering horns that were the approximation of a forehead.
The second figure also had its roots in the pop culture of the twentieth century. Mansard had used the movie goddess Elizabeth Taylor as the basis for the Whore of Babylon. She reclined on a shell-like litter that was born on the back of a roiling, multiheaded, serpentine thing. Mansard would never have admitted it, but when they came to the dragon they had been a little short on memory for the complex image and had been forced to disguise the fact by making it look as if it were half underwater. Although the thing that carried the shell was something of a half measure, every care had been taken in creating the figure that was riding in it. Mansard had not spared a byte in lovingly fashioning the Whore exactly as he had imagined her. She lolled in her litter, lascivious, leering, and drunk. Her gaping peignoir was the same scarlet and gold as the scales of the thing, and it shimmered with its own internal light. Her hair was a cloud of curls, black as the void, that seemed to ripple with a life of their own. Her lips were dancing flames begging the moths to come to them, while Cleopatra eyes made sultry promises, a menu of original sins. She raised a huge gold goblet, encrusted with evilly glowing gems, in a toast to the city that was still called Babylon on the Hudson. Wine, the color of dark blood, splashed over her all but totally exposed breasts. What did the Bible say the wine represented? The 'abominations and filthiness of her fornications'. In his newest creations, Mansard had pushed the moral envelope as hard as he could. From the start, he had roared at his design team.
"Go for it! There's no point in covering up her tits. The bitch is supposed to be bad, goddamn it! As bad as it gets!"
He did not want to think that the final group of figures, his original Four Horsemen, were in any way eclipsed by the new ones. They had been greatly improved since the Garden. In addition to the greater density and realism, improved computer capacity had given them a more comprehensive range of movement and gesture. The horses reared and pranced, and their riders looked from side to side as if surveying their domain. War pointed with his lance, and Death swung his scythe out over the river as if taking in all of New York in a single sweep. The sleeves of the robe of Pestilence flapped like giant wings as he broadcast his contagion, while the new levels of contrast made the black hollows of Famine's eyes look like the pits of hell.
Mansard noticed that there was a strange sound coming from across the water. It was not cheering; it was more like the confused shouting of a mob.
A PA moved up beside him, holding out a radio headset. "It's Jimmy, chief. He wants to speak to you."
Mansard held it to his ear.
Jimmy sounded jubilant. "Looking good, huh?"
"Not too bad."
"Can you hear that weird sound?"
Mansard nodded. "Yeah, what is it?"
"I think it's the sound of thousands of people going nuts. Maybe we touched a nerve."
1346408 Stone
All through the day, things had become progressively more strange. The usual mind-numbing routine of a Sunday in the camp first slowed and then ground to an inexplicable halt. In a place like Joshua, the first reaction was always one of fear. Any unexpected glitch in the normal discipline was viewed as a possible harbinger of some awful event. First, breakfast was more than two hours late, and when they were finally marched to the mess hall, the bosses were oddly quiet and preoccupied. There was none of the usual abuse and victimization. The billyclubs were still, and the hectoring voices were impossibly subdued. If anything, the guards seemed worried, almost frightened. Something was happening, but the prisoners had no idea what it was. One of the earliest theories was that there had been a breakout in some other section of the camp, but considering the wholly atypical behavior of the bosses, that idea hardly held up. After previous breakouts, the guards had actually stepped up the brutality. When the escapees had eventually been recaptured, the guards had taken a positive delight in parading their charges past the gibbet where the hanged and beaten bodies were put on display as a deterrent to the others.
The kitchens were the camp's clearing house for rumors and tidbits of information. They were one of the few places where inmates from different sections intermixed and, under cover of the steam and the clatter, were able to exchange furtive, muttered sentences. The first story to come out of the kitchens was attributed to a group on the women's side who had a clandestine radio. Supposedly, there were reports coming out of Canada that there was about to be major shakeup in the Faithful administration. Another, from G block, claimed that black deacon cars had been going in and out of the camp all through the night. There were also the usual doomsayers, who muttered that there were mass executions coming as the authorities intended to drastically reduce the size of the camp population.
In the middle of breakfast, there was an announcement over the PA. All religious services were canceled. That was unprecedented. Even the TV was shut down. The inmates spent the rest of the afternoon locked up in their barracks rooms quietly speculating what might happen next. At six, the TV came on again. The inmates were expected to watch the presidential special. They sat in silence through the opening filler, through the choir and the celebrities' pleas for peace and harmony. There were a few wry smiles among the inmates as soap opera star Charity Masterpiece exhorted the viewing audience to work together in Jesus. Then, to everyone's slack-jawed amazement, just before Faithful was due to begin his address, the transmission started to come unglued. There was a fleeting shot of running soldiers, then an interruption sign came on, only to be replaced ten minutes later by an e
qually confusing shot from the set of the Faithful special, showing performers and people who looked like deacons milling aimlessly about. Obviously something had completely disrupted the show. There was a kind of guarded excitement in the barracks – something was really radically wrong in the outside world. The TV signal went off again, in a flash of snow and horizontal lines.
The next TV picture was the most bizarre of all. Three enormous sky walkers were moving up a river. The Manhattan skyline identified the river as the Hudson.
1334680 Montague let out a low whistle. "The Beasts of Revelations. " Montague had been a Rastafarian in the real world.
1346809 Pitlik looked at him in surprise. "They're just big holograms."
"Armageddon time. Jah know." His eyes had taken on a glaze and the whites had turned yellow. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
"He's flipped."
Montague kept repeating his words over and over like a mantra. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
Later they would come for him with a straitjacket.
The first pictures of the monsters came from circling helicopters, but in a few minutes there was one from ground level, somewhere on the lower Manhattan waterfront. The camera crew was being jostled and buffeted by a crowd of struggling people; the roar of mass hysteria poured from the speakers. Near the mike, someone was babbling about the end of the world. Hands were clutching at the lens. The world had gone insane. From within the brutal order of the camp, it was a vision of the impossible. More than one inmate of D block wondered if 1334680 Montague was right. The cameraman must have staggered forward. After a series of lurches, the vantage point was directly over the river. People were actually jumping into the water.
"Armageddon time."
The picture died completely. There was no power. The bosses had pulled the plug. There was a deathly silence, broken only by 1334680 Montague droning on. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
The PA cut in. "All prisoners will remain in their barracks blocks until further notice. Food will be brought."
In an hour, food was brought and Montague was taken away. The food was slopped out by two kapos from A block. It was an unpleasant soup. A scrap of paper was attached to the bottom of one of the pails. There was a message on it: "Faithful has been arrested! There's going to be a new government!"