The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence. If it wasn’t for their annoying habit of infecting further victims through touch, they’d be a trivial obstacle at best; as it is, with his ward and his full-body insulated clothing, not to mention his Ostblock ballistic knife, AKM/100 assault gun, and other tools of the trade, he’s well-equipped to deal with them. Except that there are too damned many, and they won’t stay dead, and the rest of his team are dispersed and in trouble.

  Speaking of trouble, here comes more. Most of the cultists are wearing black robes, or stupidly inappropriate army-surplus camo gear for the guards; if it’s naked and you can count the ribs, it’s probably one of the risen dead. Bonus points for shuffling like a stockbroker on a stag night, and big booby prize if you let it get so close you can see the green luminosity writhing in the depths of its eye sockets . . .

  Alexei melts into the shadows behind the figure climbing the steps from the crypt. It’s wearing a robe and shuffling drunkenly, and he’s about to slide the blade of his knife between its two uppermost cervical vertebrae when he realizes that it is not, in fact, one of the possessed. Which raises some interesting questions. A moment later his gloved hand is covering the climber’s mouth and his knife is at her throat. “Say nothing,” he grunts, tugging her backwards into the vestry. “You want live, yes? Be silent.” The cultist stumbles as he drags her into the shadows, but doesn’t say anything. Alexei rolls her to the ground and has her pinioned in a second. “Where is All-Highest?” he demands, in heavily accented but serviceable English.

  “Downstairs—with the Eater of Souls—” The young woman stiffens for a moment, then sags bonelessly. Alexei rises, wraps himself in the cloak that she won’t be needing anymore, and wipes his knife on the back of her dress. Then he tiptoes towards the steps down to the crypt. If the Eater of Souls is lurking downstairs, he reasons, then it’s very probable that what he came for is to be found there. And Alexei doesn’t give up easily.

  TO THE NORTH, A RED TRUCK CREEPS ALONG A DARKENED AVENUE. Three figures sit atop its roof. One of them holds a white electric violin. Her two guards watch and wonder, entrenching tools raised and ready to shovel mortal remains off the roof should any such encroach. The truck bumps slowly along in low gear, pushing through a sea of withered bodies that sway and jostle slowly. Occasionally there is a crunch or crackle as the truck rolls over bones that failed to get out of its way in time. The driver doesn’t speed up or slow down; to stop in the middle of this unnatural crowd is to court disaster, although none of the feeders has so far attempted to climb aboard the OCCULUS truck.

  Down in the darkened truck cab Major Barnes rides next to the driver, peering into the darkness for any sign of ambush. He talks into his headset: “Two hundred meters in. Dr. O’Brien, do you see any sign of survivors—”

  Mo, atop the cab, raises her bow. “Not right here,” she says shortly. The walking dead are undirected; the grounded metal framework of the truck blocks their ability to sense those who ride within, and the warm meat on the cab roof is out of easy reach.

  A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. “Down!” he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. “Shooters on the building roofline,” Howe reports: “Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can’t see anyone manning them. The crowd’s thickest there. Defenders have—no, wait.”

  Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. “Doc, can you do anything about them?” Howe asks. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get in there without—”

  Mo raises her bow, strikes a shivering note from the burning strings. Howe winces and moves aside. “Give me some elbow room,” she says flatly. Then she touches the strings lightly, coaxing an eerie, familiar leitmotif from her instrument. “Put this out through the PA circuit,” she mutters, grimly determined.

  Down below, Barnes grimaces tensely and twists input dials on the truck’s external public address systems. The growing wild resonance of die Walkürenritt floods from the big speakers mounted to either side of the cab; the driver looks sidelong at his CO, then floors the accelerator in low gear, adding the roar of the big diesel (and the crunch of unburied bones) to the music. Barnes announces to the back of the truck: “All right, gentlemen, this is going to be an opposed entry and they know we’re coming. Wards, up! Arms, up! Party time in sixty seconds!”

  The risen dead are fleeing, for the most part, out of the way of the truck as it roars and bucks across the path. It’s the music that does it; Mo stands atop the roof, utterly engrossed in tracking the melody. Richard Wagner, it was said, hated violinists: blood drips from her fingertips as the eerie extradimensional resonances of her interpretation of one of his most famous works drags the sound of an entire string section—and a brassy resonance echoing from the metal flanks of the truck—into being.

  The truck crunches across skeletal remnants that lie in rows around the chapel, silent and unmoving. A few bodies, less damaged than the rest, lie near a minivan; others are clustered near the door to the building, which is ajar. A few less emaciated figures lie among the skeletonized forms: of these, most bear the signs of gunshot wounds.

  “Back us up to the door,” Barnes tells the driver. Switching to the common channel: “All right, we’re going in. Standard entry protocol for mass possession. Scary and Howe, over to you. Dr. O’Brien, time to get down off the roof. You can follow with me once we’ve cleared the way. See if we can figure out what we’re looking at.”

  The soldiers pile out of the back of the truck, wearing bright yellow HAZMAT suits, MP5s at the ready. The bodies are packed in so tightly around the steps to the chapel that they dash across rib cages and cloak-swathed torsos on the way to the open door.

  There’s a snap of gunfire from up top: two of the soldiers drop to their knees and reply with a burst of aimed fire. A black-clad figure tumbles from the roofline. One of the soldiers throws something up and over the eaves; the others take cover as the fragmentation grenade explodes.

  “What’s up there?” Mo tries to ask, shouting in Barnes’s ear.

  “Bad guys.” Barnes grins hungrily. “Ah.” He taps the earpiece screwed into his left ear: “Follow me.” The gunfire from the defenders on the roof has stopped as he steps out of the back of the truck and walks towards the chapel entrance. Mo follows him, her violin raised. They’re halfway across the ten-meter gap when a silhouette lurches clear of the side of the building and throws itself towards the major. Barnes raises his HK-5 and plants a neat three-round group in the middle of the assailant’s torso; by the time Mo’s bow makes contact with an eerily blue-glowing string, the fluorescence in the back of the revenant’s eye sockets has begun to fade. “Bloody fans, always waiting outside the dressing room ...” Barnes cocks his head on one side, listening. “Dr. O’Brien? This way, now.”

  They’re inside in seconds, and one of the soldiers pulls the tall oak door shut behind them. The chapel hall is full of bodies, the long-dead and the fresh draped across one another in promiscuous embrace. Some of the recent bodies are naked: in the soldier’s infrared vision they still glow with body heat.

  “Look sharp, some of them made it to the door,” Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the
rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.

  “Trapdoor over here, sir!” One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.

  “Secure it,” says Howe. “Tidily, our boy might still be down there.” He doesn’t say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.

  As the soldiers move in, something runs at them, out of the tunnel, frighteningly fast. There’s a burst of automatic fire. “Hold that!” yells Howe, as the revenant comes apart in a tumbling rain of dust and bones. “Batons!” A pair of troops step forward, holding heavily customized cattle prods before them—electrical shock-rods, customized with signal generators to loosen the grip of extradimensional horrors on their walking hosts. There’s a snap and crackle of sparks as they test their tools.

  “You think he’s down there,” Mo says quietly.

  Major Barnes nods. “Cultists. They go to ground for their rituals.”

  Up ahead, Scary triggers his shock-stick, sparking the terminals: he grins at Howe. “I love the smell of—”

  “Don’t say it, son, unless you want a week on toilet duty.”

  “Aw, Sarge.” He steps forward, bending to follow the lead team into the cellar. “That’s harsh.”

  There are no living bodies in the tunnel. Some of the possessed are still stirring feebly, their luminous eyes guttering in the darkness, but the flying wedge of soldiers with shock-sticks shut them down in short order: it’s easier than clubbing baby seals.

  At the end of the tunnel they come to an open door. Now there’s noise, and the troops take up position to either side of the entrance, ready for a forced entry. But while they’re waiting, Dr. O’Brien and Major Barnes arrive. Mo holds her violin, ready for a killing chord. Barnes glances at her, then waves Howe back from the right-hand side of the door. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.

  “It stinks, sir. You saw the sov kit back there?”

  “I did. I reckon we’ve got company. More to the point, we haven’t found our boy yet. Could be a hostage situation.”

  “Shit. I’ll tell Moran to bring up the snoop kit—”

  Mo’s eyes are hollow shadows in the darkness. “Major?”

  “What is it?”

  She points at the entrance with a hand half-folded around something. “He’s definitely in there.” She unfolds her hand, palm upwards to reveal the cracked and battered screen of Bob’s iPhone, icons glowing balefully in the darkness. “Got a soul tracker on this thing. He’s alive, and he’s not alone—”

  Which is when the screaming starts.

  ALEXEI IS BECOMING ANNOYED.

  He’s been down in the crypt for half an hour, moving with painstaking care. The place is literally crawling with the risen dead, feeding on the dwindling survivors of the Black God Slave Cult—some of whom have barricaded themselves into the ossuary, with predictable consequences—and only sheer luck and the revenants’ lack of situational awareness has saved him. They don’t communicate with each other, don’t raise the alarm when he lands among them and lashes out with a sharp-edged entrenching tool or shoots their neighbors with a silenced pistol firing banishment rounds. It would be good news under other circumstances, but Alexei is acutely aware that he has a serious lack of backup and a mission that under other circumstances would be hopelessly compromised.

  The sounds of gunfire from up above had nearly died out ten minutes ago. Now they’re getting louder and more frequent. And there’s something different about them: different weapons, much tighter fire discipline. The new shooters are professionals, but they’re not his squad—they’re firing NATO spec ammunition.

  As it is, it looks like the only way out is in; if he can find somewhere to hole up until morning, he stands a chance of exfiltrating on foot, and if he can meet the mission’s core objective, retrieve the missing document, so much the better—

  And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.

  Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in—at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.

  A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed. Sacrificial victim, thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal—especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress and expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.

  And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and—holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her—who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard—asks: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

  I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE . I’VE BEEN LYING here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists’ altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I’m in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I can’t move. I don’t even feel tired; I feel dead. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.

  The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness. I’ve seen this sky before, I realize; where? Oh. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I’m not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.

  I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She’s angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn’t remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They’re coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already—

  Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

  Bastard. I’m lying here helpless and I can’t even tell Laughing Boy that I’m not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I’m clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid—anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.

  “Untie me and I’ll take you to it,” says Iris, quick as a flash. “Please?” I can just about see her batt
ing her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: “You’d better cut All-Highest’s throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me—”

  I try to shout, She’s lying! But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly. Am I dead? I wonder. Am I undead? I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don’t know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it’s a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don’t surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic—

  “Nyet. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release.”

  The knife is at Iris’s throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.

  Iris’s breath ratchets harshly through her throat. “The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don’t want to touch his skin by accident—”

  But she’s too late.

  Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that’s come over me—the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome—is symptomatic of something else: I’m hungry.