Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  Grant was ushered through the doorway and into a corridor beyond, windowless like the room of hieroglyphs and lit only by what little light trickled in from its far end. Grant had to duck to get beneath the low lintel of the door, and he took that moment to look at its edge, spying a chiseled hole in the side of the stone frame where a lock had sat but was now missing.

  His dark-skinned captor followed Grant from the room, not threatening, just accompanying him. He stood to Grant’s right, keeping his gun and holster on the far side of his body from his captive. Grant considered overpowering him...but then what?

  “Where are we going?” Grant asked as they trudged down the ill-lit tunnel-like corridor.

  “You shall see,” the man said, then laughed just a little as if he had made a joke.

  The corridor ended in a small flight of steps. The steps were carved from stone, ancient and well-worn. Daylight poured down from the opening above as Grant reached them.

  “Ascend,” the man beside him ordered.

  Grant did so, squinting at the harsh daylight after spending so long in the semidarkness. He emerged into an open space surrounded by leafy trees. People were waiting at the edge of the tree line—fifty or more—with still more sitting in the trees. Many of the figures wore ribbons or thicker blindfolds over their eyes. They were mostly men with just a few women, all of them with dark skin that suggested African descent. It was hard to tell more than that, as everyone had the feeling of being a silhouette to Grant, the colors around him were still drained and muted as his eyes continued struggling to adjust to the sheer brilliance of the sunlight.

  The open area formed a roughly marked circle of about twenty feet in diameter, the area behind Grant cast in shadow where a structure towered behind him. He began to turn, his eyes still squinting against the brilliant sunlight. But it wasn’t just the dazzle of sunlight that was affecting Grant—oh, no, this was something entirely other.

  Slowly, realization dawned. Grant’s eyes were not adjusting properly. There was a problem, a limitation to his vision. The color was drained from the scene he was looking at, leaving only a kind of off-gray wash to the vista. The grass underfoot was the dark gray of charcoal, while the sky was brighter, a kind of platinum gray with the faintest trace of blueness, so infinitesimal it was like something seen only from the corner of one’s eye.

  Grant turned, trying to process what he was looking at, and as he did so something drew his eye. There, sitting almost directly above the entrance he had just emerged from, was a figure whose body glowed with brilliance. It was like a magic trick—the muscular figure was luminous with color when everything else here was grayed out. It shone with rainbow brilliance, sitting on a throne that had been placed on a step of a towering stone pyramid, head an impossible ball of ever-swirling color. It was hard to look at the figure, but harder still to look away—such was the magnetic draw of that beautiful crown.

  The luminous figure was surrounded by others, ordinary men and women—ordinary, the term was so utterly perfect yet failed to encompass just now average, how mundane, these people were by comparison in Grant’s eyes. They were all shades, shadows, silhouettes with features. Men and women, all of them wearing the blindfold over their eyes like his jailer, like some kind of cult or weird, unsettling magic trick.

  “Where am I?” Grant asked, facing the brilliance of the seated figure on the pyramid steps. The figure was achingly beautiful to look at, beautiful and awe inspiring.

  “You bring the tribute, apekin—” the figure said in an otherworldly voice that sounded like a monk’s chant heard in a cathedral’s echo.

  “Tribute?” Grant muttered, failing to understand.

  “—to my brother, Ninurta,” the luminous figure replied in a voice that seemed to cross dimensions.

  Grant’s mind raced. Ninurta, Ninurta—the name was obviously Annunaki, though he could not place it.

  As the brilliant rainbow figure spoke, Grant heard the scuff of feet on dirt behind him. Grant peered over his shoulder—much as it pained him to draw his attention away from this beautiful creature poised before him—and saw figures emerging from the surrounding crowd. Four of them stepped forward, indistinct amid the other silhouettes of the crowd, and began to stride closer, spreading out to approach Grant from all sides. Grant knew an ambush when he saw one, and if he had had any doubts about the strangers’ intentions they were dashed when he heard the clank of metal on metal and saw a thick chain droop from one of the figures’ hands.

  Grant tensed, ready for anything, wondering just what the hell he and his teammates had stumbled into this time. What the hell—and where?

  * * *

  THE CONGO, KANE remembered now, the thought so vivid it woke him up without his even realizing it.

  He had been dreaming of that mission—was it three years ago? Four maybe?—when he and Brigid and another Cerberus operative, a physician called Reba DeFore, had become caught up in a mystery concerning a mystical object called the Mirror of Prester John. The mirror was a kind of remote view screen designed by an Annunaki overlord called Utu, through which great Anu himself had gazed upon clandestine meetings and secret trysts. The Cerberus warriors had found it inside a hidden chamber, one which could only be accessed via some kind of teleport door, or at least that’s how Kane had understood it.

  In his dream, people had mistaken his colleague Reba DeFore for one of the indigenous locals because her skin was tanned. It was a dream and it abided only by the laws of dream—that desperate need to change the facts to make something belong. Idiocy. In reality, DeFore was ash blonde, with tanned bronze skin. Only the stupid or the blind could have mistaken her for a local woman.

  Kane pushed the dream away, letting his senses settle as he tried to figure out where he was and what the heck he was lying on. Because he was lying down, and he sure as shooting didn’t remember going to sleep.

  Something had hit him. Something bright, a light, a dazzling light. So bright it had struck like a physical blow, the way sound can be felt when it’s loud enough and deep enough, the way music can shake a room.

  He listened for a moment, playing possum, stretching out with every iota of his fabled point-man sense to try to get a feeling for where he was, who was with him and whether he was in danger. Well, the last was a given, but there was danger and there was danger; Kane knew the difference.

  He heard the sound of a room, hard walls, not a breeze, not the sounds he would associate with being outside. Nothing played across his skin, either, no wind on his face or on the hairs of his forearms. So he was inside—somewhere. Maybe still inside the pyramid chamber? No, it felt too small for that. He was in a smaller room than that; he could feel the way the air came back to him when he breathed, the tiny trace sound it made as it echoed about the room. These subtle tells were the kind he had used to his advantage all his life.

  Was anyone else here? He couldn’t say. He held his breath, listened for the telltale breathing that someone else would perform. Nothing.

  Behind the lids, his eyes seemed to be staring at the sun, a bright—almost organic—orange painted across their backs.

  He opened his eyes, listening as much as looking, still reaching out with his senses like a blind man with a stick. When he opened his eyes he saw the same thing as when they were closed: an orange swirl whose vibrancy changed subliminally with each breath.

  He wanted it to be something in front of him, a trick, a screen, a light shone directly into his eyes, but instinctively he knew it was not.

  What was it he was thinking about Reba DeFore just a few moments before, the way she had been mistaken for a local in his dream, how only the stupid or the blind could have made such an error. Be careful what you wish for, Kane, he chastised himself bitterly.

  Without moving, he tapped on his Commtact and hailed his partners, subvocalizing his words. “Baptiste? Grant? Can you h
ear me?”

  * * *

  BRIGID BAPTISTE HEARD Kane’s voice through her ear canal where the subdermal Commtact channeled it through her jaw bone. “Kane?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Baptiste, you okay?” Kane asked. “My eyesight’s been compromised, I’m blind. I’m gonna need you to—”

  “I’m blind, too,” Brigid replied, cutting Kane off in midinstruction.

  “What?”

  “Well, not blind maybe,” Brigid said. “I can see colors...a color anyway.”

  “Orange?” Kane guessed.

  “Green,” Brigid corrected. “Luminous green. Like when you stare into a lightbulb filament.”

  “Yeah, mine’s more a kind of noonday sun,” Kane told her, “but the same basic effect, I guess.

  “You alone?”

  “Hard to say for sure,” Brigid replied. “I think so.” Like Kane, she had listened to the space she was in, trying to sense where she was and whether she was being watched.

  “Grant with you?” Kane asked.

  “No.” She thought for a moment, listening intently to her surroundings. “I’m inside a room. Small room. I can’t hear anyone else, no breathing.”

  “No snoring?” Kane asked. “Grant snores.”

  Brigid’s mouth twitched with a smile. “You two spend way too much time together. You know that?”

  Kane grunted an acknowledgment, then went on. “Any idea what happened?” he asked. “I remember seeing that figure appear from the darkness. Looked like a snake face to me—”

  Snake face was one of Kane’s nicknames for the Annunaki, as accurate as it was disrespectful.

  “I barely saw it,” Brigid admitted. “But it was definitely Annunaki.”

  “Was it Utu?” Kane asked, recalling the would-be god the pair had met here the last time that they had visited.

  “What makes you say—?”

  “Didn’t you recognize where we are?” Kane asked, sounding somewhat smug through the Commtact link.

  “Should I have?”

  “We’re back in the Congo,” Kane said. “You remember...the Mirror of Prester John, Utu, Princess Pakari? All of that?”

  “Yes, I remember,” Brigid said, taking a condescending tone.

  “Then you’re slipping,” Kane told her. “We were in Utu’s little storeroom, just like before. Sure, someone had put a new coat of paint on the place, twinkling diamond wallpaper and so on, but it was definitely the same spot. I’d know it a mile away.”

  Brigid thought about this for only a second, recalling Kane’s point-man instinct and the way he could sometimes intuit things that even her eidetic memory could miss.

  “Then it was an interphaser, all right,” Brigid stated. “But why would we be brought back here? When we left the place, the mirror had been destroyed and Utu had been—” she stopped, gripped by sudden realization.

  “Blinded,” Kane finished after a moment’s pause. “Utu was blinded by the flash of energy that came from the mirror when it blew. It literally burned out his eye sockets.”

  A sinking feeling struck Brigid as she started to put things together. “Kane, do you think that...maybe... Utu came back somehow?”

  Over the Commtact, Brigid fancied she could hear Kane’s sharp intake of breath.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, GRANT STOOD in the dirt arena—because he realized now that that’s what it was—as the four figures approached, weapons in their hands. He was still seeing everything in gray tones, a washed-out shadow world to the one he was used to. Inside it hadn’t been so bad, but out here he was struck by the absence of color.

  Grant could hear the conversation playing out over the Commtact frequency he shared with Kane and Brigid as the figures paced around him, edging closer. They were talking about being blinded, and now he recalled the figure at the far end of the room they had stepped into via the interphase pillar, the way that its head had been a brilliant corona. He had turned, seen the figure only for an instant, caught only at the edge of his sight. Could that be what had changed his eyesight? Likely. And was that stolen glance the reason he was not blind when his companions were?

  There was no more time to think, however. Even as Kane and Brigid’s conversation played out across the Commtact, the first two figures made their moves. They were tall men—in fact all four were tall, the shortest of them as tall as Grant. They approached from opposite sides, holding their bodies bent to keep their center of balance low as they drew their weapons. The one to Grant’s left had a broad knife with a hooked design, the kind of blade one might use to cut through long grass. The one to Grant’s right was wielding the chain he had first detected, looped around his clenched fist, letting its links hang down almost to the ground, the gray, gray ground.

  “Now, fellas,” Grant said, holding his hands loosely out at his sides in a gesture of surrender, “I hope this isn’t what it looks like. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Even as the last word escaped Grant’s lips the two men charged at him, weapons ready. Grant took a half step to his left, taking him deliberately closer to the knife man. He was the primary threat, Grant calculated, because a knife like that could do a whole lot of damage in next to no time, even in the hands of an amateur.

  * * *

  LIKE BRIGID, KANE had been surreptitiously exploring his cell as he spoke to her—or at least as surreptitiously as a blind man could. His eyesight had not returned in any measurable sense. He still saw that dazzle of orange in place of anything more definite, and there was no change whether he waved a hand in front of his face or blinked repeatedly.

  He checked the cell—he figured it was a cell judging by the locked door and the lack of windows—by a process of bumping into things and playing his hands ahead of him, running his fingers across whatever he met. He estimated the room to be about eight feet square, with rough walls whose crevices and indentations suggested to him that a design had been carved into them. There was a door with no handle on the inside, detectable only by the seam at its edges where it sat almost flush to the wall.

  There were two items of furniture in the room. One was the bed on which Kane had been lying when he had awoken, which was a simple wooden slab chained to the wall, and the other was a backless chair or stool carved from wood.

  The floor, like the walls, was made of stone. A gutter ran around the room, two inches wide and parallel to the walls, jutting out just a little at the door. The gutter was roughly an inch deep, sloped so that it ran into a small gap at the bottom of the wall with the door in it. The gap was roughly the size of a brick. Kane guessed that this gutter was used for the sanitary purposes of prisoners, but realized it could also be for more sinister reasons, reminding him as it did of the gullies sometimes found within slaughterhouses designed to let the blood wash away.

  Once he had a better idea of where he was, Kane raised his voice and called for attention. “Hey,” he shouted. “Anybody out there? Who are you? Where am I? What do you want with me?”

  The only response came from Brigid. “Kane, you’re close,” she said over the Commtact. “I can hear you.”

  * * *

  IN THE DIRT CIRCLE outside the pyramid, the knife man took the bait, driving the knife, tip first, at Grant’s chest. Grant twisted, bringing his left arm around to meet the knife hand just behind the wrist, flipping the man’s arm out and up even as Grant’s other arm came around in a powerful swing, fist balled. Grant’s punch connected brutally with the man’s nose, breaking it and knocking the man back with a shriek of surprise and pain. Grant was still tangled with the man’s knife arm, and he brought his left arm down, forcing the man’s arm with him, knife and all. As he did so, his second attacker launched his own attack, playing out the length of chain like a whip, cutting it through the air until it struck Grant across the back.

 
Grant grunted, still hanging on to his first opponent’s arm as the chain struck him. Whoever his captors were, they had stripped away his duster but left him wearing his shadow suit and shirt. The shadow suit absorbed the impact of the chain, dissipating the blunt trauma so that it felt more like a hard tap. In that moment, Grant relieved his first foe of the knife, drilling a second punch into the man’s face as he struggled to fight back.

  Then Grant turned as his second opponent drew back his whip for a second try. The chain whip came hurtling toward Grant’s face, and the Cerberus warrior sidestepped—more by instinct than anything else, for his sight remained faulty and indistinct out here.

  As he dodged, Grant spoke, piping his words over the Commtact frequency. “I’m alive,” he said, keeping his words intentionally vague.

  * * *

  IN HIS CELL, Kane tensed as he heard his partner’s words. “Grant? Where are you?” he asked.

  “It’s cool out here,” Grant replied with a grunt of expelled breath, “wish I was wearing something warmer!”

  Outside. Kane got the code straightaway; it hardly needed a genius to work out that Grant wasn’t able to talk and so was disguising their conversation as something else.

  “Me and Baptiste have been blinded,” Kane said emotionlessly, keeping professional about the situation. “How about you?”

  * * *

  “NOT GREAT,” GRANT responded as he ducked below the swinging chain and snatched it from the air before its user could draw it back.

  As Grant moved, he became aware of a shadow—black on gray grass—crossing behind him. He switched direction at the last instant as something came hurtling toward him from behind. It was a long-handled hammer, swept through the air by his third opponent. It missed Grant and struck the chain wielder instead as he tried to get out of its path.

  The chain wielder crashed backward with a painful expulsion of breath accompanied by the sound of breaking ribs. He slumped to the ground in anguish, arms around his legs in a fetal ball.