Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  The white shard was a sliver of dragon’s tooth, shaved from the remains of Tiamat, the dragon city which had been grown—not built—on the banks of the Euphrates by the Annunaki sky god, Enlil. Hurbon had amassed pieces of the dragon’s teeth, and through ritual and chemical input he had ignited the genetic code hidden within them, the code that was hidden in all things Annunaki—the code to bring to life the Annunaki once again.

  The space gods had first visited Earth in prehistory, had settled here and been worshipped by the planet’s mortals as gods. Their technology had been far in advance of anything man could imagine—then or now, in fact—and had been mistaken for the supernatural acts of deities. Millennia after their departure following internal squabbles, the Annunaki had been reborn through a genetic download from Tiamat, the wombship. But those Annunaki had been taken down by their own squabbles once again, and Tiamat, a sentient spaceship grown through organic technology, had despaired, committing suicide to end the feuding between members of her brood. Each part of Tiamat had retained the codes, however, each section geared to regrow the eternal Annunaki, re-creating them like photocopies, over and over and over again. All it took was a little organic material to start the process, planting the download in the soil of human flesh.

  Hurbon forced the sharp sliver of dragon’s tooth farther into Nathalie’s leg, watched impassively as the leg twitched and the woman moaned, her cry so soft, so lost. He kneaded the flaps of skin back together, holding them there with his stubby fingers as he smeared a little binding gum over the flesh. Bloody and jagged though it was, the fix held and the shard of tooth was lost beneath the surface of the woman’s flesh.

  Nathalie had slipped into unconsciousness by then, her eyes clenched tight, her lips peeled back from gritted teeth.

  Hurbon watched in the flickering candlelight as the flesh on Nathalie’s leg seemed to ripple around the wound. The skin buckled, the blood sliding down where the skin beneath had folded as it began to re-form and reshape.

  And yes! There were scales.

  And yes! There was hunger. Ravenous hunger, as from a thing just born.

  “Welcome, goddess,” Papa Hurbon murmured to the darkness. “Welcome back.”

  Chapter 20

  After they had returned to the Cerberus redoubt, Kane, Grant, Brigid and Mariah were rushed to the medical wing, where physician Reba DeFore checked them over. DeFore was dressed in the standard Cerberus operations uniform of a white jumpsuit with diagonal blue zipper, and she had tied her ash-blond hair back from her face in a French braid.

  In the darkened examination room, DeFore ran an otoscope across Brigid’s eyes, testing for her reaction. “And you say you were blinded?” she asked.

  “Kind of,” Brigid said as she followed the light with her pupils. “It’s hard to describe. It was like I was blind, but I could see in a sort of muffled way, like only seeing a thing’s outline or shadow.”

  “Sounds strange,” DeFore admitted.

  “It isn’t the first time—” Brigid began, then stopped herself.

  “Isn’t the first time what?” DeFore encouraged after a moment’s silence.

  “The more I’ve worked with Cerberus over the past few years,” Brigid said, “the more I’ve become aware that what we think of as reality is not an absolute. We may not always be seeing the whole picture.”

  DeFore stopped, switching the light of the otoscope off. “Well, your eyes seem to be back to normal now,” she said. “Any special reason you reached the conclusion about reality not being absolute?”

  Brigid shrugged dourly. “Ullikummis,” she said.

  Reaching for the light switch, DeFore stopped, her hand against the switch. Brigid heard the woman’s breath catch, and for a moment there was a thick silence in the room that seemed almost to manifest in a physical form. The physician had suffered at Ullikummis’s hands, Brigid remembered, and it had taken a psychological toll on her, as it had many members of the Cerberus operation.

  “He’s not coming back, Reba,” Brigid assured her colleague as she waited in the darkness. “We threw him into the sun. He’s never coming back.”

  DeFore worked the light switch and was shaking her head slowly when the light flickered back on in the room. “Didn’t you also say that about Enlil and Marduk and Lilitu and all the others?” she said gravely. “But they all came back to cause misery, didn’t they?”

  Brigid nodded gravely. “They used genetic downloads,” she said, “stored on their spaceship. The ship is dead, and so are they. All the Annunaki are dead.”

  “You say that having just come back from facing—who was it?—Nergal and Ninurta,” DeFore said. Then, responding to Brigid’s surprised look, she added. “Grant told me when I examined him.”

  “Then he told you that they were insubstantial,” Brigid said firmly. “Ghost things, recordings.”

  “And Ereshkigal?” DeFore challenged, referring to the Annunaki goddess of the underworld whom Grant had run into in Spain.

  “Not fully born,” Brigid said. But the denial seemed to trigger something in her own mind, a realization that the Cerberus team had been chasing branches of the same foe, reborn gods, each one failing on some molecular level. Were they all being played, somehow? Was there a mind behind these disparate attacks?

  “Brigid?” DeFore probed, bringing Brigid out of her reverie. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” Brigid said. But her expression told a different story.

  * * *

  BAXTER HAD BEEN trying to solve a wooden Chinese puzzle when he heard the old woman call for him. He pushed himself up from the high stool he sat on when he heard the cry, his body all muscle and sinew. Baxter was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and the hard body of a man who worked out ritualistically, with well-defined muscles down his arms and a six pack visible beneath the clinging material of his white undershirt. He was a guard in Ohio Blue’s employ, posted belowdecks where he currently was tasked with monitoring their guest, Dagmar Gellis.

  “You okay, ma’am?” Baxter called as he rose from the stool. His guard position was semicasual, he was free to wander the corridors of the boat just so long as he returned to check on their guest every half hour or so. He placed the Chinese puzzle box on the stool as he rose, a trinket from one of Ohio’s acquisitions teams that had somehow found its way aboard the fabulous riverboat that now sat rocking gently with the subtle ripples of Bayou Lafourche.

  Gellis called again, mumbling something that Baxter could not make out. With a weary sigh he paced up the corridor and knocked at the door of Gellis’s cabin. “Did you call?” he asked.

  A groan came from within, as if the woman were answering him in her sleep.

  Working the door knob, Baxter pushed the door open and put his head inside. “You need something, ma’am? You hungry, or maybe a drink?”

  Something struck him the second that Baxter opened the door, hitting him hard across the back of the head. He tumbled forward, shouting in pain as he flailed toward the floor.

  Baxter stumbled, righted himself and turned, all in a swift three-step movement. The woman called Dagmar Gellis was standing against the wall by the door, the handle of a glass water jug in her hand, her fake limb in place of her missing leg. The jug had been left for Gellis should she become thirsty. Before Baxter could say a word, the older woman swung again, smashing him across the face with the heavy glass jug. Baxter slumped back against the wall in a shower of water and shattering glass. In a moment, the jagged handle was all that remained in Dagmar’s hand; its body and its contents were strewn across the wooden floor of the cabin.

  Baxter struggled to stay upright, feeling the telltale warm trickle of blood as it leaked from his nose and burned at several cuts across his cheeks.

  The woman was walking toward him, a grim expression on her face, her teeth fixed around a single i
tem she held in her mouth.

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Baxter said, running a hand through his hair to brush shards of glass from it. “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re not a prisoner...”

  The woman lunged at the guard with the broken remains of the water jug, swiping the jagged stump of handle at his face. “I need blood,” she declared, but the words were delivered through the item she was holding between her teeth so that they came out as I neeg glood.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Baxter began, dodging out of the way of the jagged handle. He was a guard, what they used to call a sec man many years before; he knew how to handle himself in a fight—especially one against a weak old woman.

  “Glood!” the woman barked, throwing herself at Baxter and swiping the jagged glass at his throat.

  Baxter shoved her back—hard—feeling the glass graze against his Adam’s apple. Gellis tumbled backward at the blow, her ugly ginger wig slipping so that it almost covered her left eye.

  Baxter moved swiftly then, grabbing the woman by her wrist and shoving it against the wall of the cabin so that it struck with a loud crack. He did this three times, and on the third the woman let go of the jagged remains of the jug, still struggling with her free hand against the man’s attack.

  Baxter saw the thing clenched in the woman’s mouth. It was as long as a wisdom tooth and similar in shape and color, a kind of yellowed off-white, and it was attached to a length of thin gold chain.

  “What the hell—?” Baxter muttered, seeing the gold and white flash in the woman’s mouth as it caught the light.

  The woman was reaching for his face, hitting him with her free hand, blows made strong by anger.

  Baxter shoved her other hand aside as it grasped for his face, his undershirt, and pushed her bodily against the wall so that her feeble frame struck it with a clonk. “What’s gotten into you?” he shouted. “Calm down. You almost—”

  The woman hissed something through her clenched teeth, ancient words, words of power, spoken in French Creole. Then she moved her jaws, and the thing she held between her teeth slipped out of sight, chain and all.

  The guard grabbed for the woman’s mouth, shoving her jaws together with as much force as he dared. “What is that?” he demanded, pushing her jaw so that she was forced to stand on tiptoe. “What do you have there?”

  Gellis squirmed against him, her eyes going back in her head as if suffused with ecstasy.

  “Spit it out,” Baxter insisted, shoving her against the wall again. “Spit it out, I tell you!” Then he pulled her forward, yanking her savagely by the back of her neck so that she fell forward. The woman staggered several paces as she fell, stumbling over herself as if in a rush to meet the floor of the tidy cabin, tripping on her false leg. Her wig dropped as she fell, spinning across the floor.

  Baxter was behind her then, grabbing her in a bear hug and wedging his arms low under her rib cage, amid the layers of cloth she wore. He yanked hard, once, twice, until she was forced to spit out the thing she had tried to swallow. It shot from her mouth with violent force, whipping across the cabin before striking a wall and finally coming to rest.

  The muscular guard let go of Gellis, and she sank to the floor defeated as the support he provided disappeared. He paced across the cabin, knelt and picked up the toothlike item where it had dropped, covered in saliva. He saw now that the item was held on a long gold chain, just a fraction of an inch in width, the kind that the woman might have worn around her neck.

  “What is this?” Baxter asked, thrusting the toothlike charm at the woman.

  Gellis shook her head. “There are powers you don’t understand,” she told him. “Ancient powers, things older than our civilization.”

  “What is it?” Baxter repeated angrily. “What does it do?”

  “Strengths can be tapped by ingesting parts of the great ones themselves,” Dagmar Gellis chanted, her eyes unfocused. “Fear is the only barricade holding man back.”

  Baxter stood there, disturbed as the woman bit down hard on her own tongue, swallowing it an instant later. Within seconds she was choking, blood streaming down her jaw.

  The guard moved then, tried to force the woman to spit out the hazard she had swallowed. He tried for a long time.

  * * *

  EMIT PART.

  The sheet of paper stretched before Brigid was written in her own hand. She was sitting at the table in her apartment suite, high in the Cerberus redoubt complex, studying a chart outlining all the Annunaki gods in their complicated structures and substructures. It was a chart she had made herself, trying to figure out the multitude of different names and aspects that each of the Annunaki had been known by in the varied mythologies of Mesopotamia, Sumeria and others.

  Enki... Enlil... Ninlil... Ninurta... Nannar... Marduk... Zulum... Gishnumunab... Lilitu... Kinma the Judge...

  The list went on and on, a vast family tree of links and crossing lines, like the Mercator map on the walls of the ops room two floors below.

  At the bottom level of the chart was Ullikummis, son of Enlil and Ninlil, one of many children sired by Enlil. And at the top, two names: Anu and Ki, the first of the Annunaki, sires to them all; the first Annunaki to appear in Earth’s mythology, the first to walk the Earth.

  Brigid’s eyes scanned the chart, then flicked for a moment to the notebook at her bedside table. “Emit part.” What did that mean? What if they were Annunaki words? Could something in her subconscious, something of the aspect of her that had been Haight, have been trying to send her waking self a message?

  Brigid’s emerald eyes flicked from the notebook to the chart and back, trying to piece it all together. There was something there, just out of reach, a grand plan she was a part of, but she could not put her finger on where or how or who was pulling the strings.

  Had some part been emitted from the family tree of the Annunaki? Was that part already loose, moving the players across the globe like a chess master moving pieces?

  “What if the apocalypse is happening and no one can see it?” Brigid asked herself, tracing the line of the family tree upward with the tip of her finger.

  At that moment a wall-mounted comms device hummed to life with a pleasant tone, glowing a soft pinkish red where it was located beside the suite door. Heeding its call, Brigid did not get up, instead activating the Commtact that had been surgically implanted in her skull.

  “Brigid,” she acknowledged.

  “This is Lakesh,” Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact, directly into Brigid’s ear canal. “Would you be able to meet me in the operations room as soon as possible?”

  “Is there a situation?” Brigid asked.

  “Everything shall be explained when you get here,” Lakesh replied. “I’m calling Grant and Kane also.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Abruptly, the communication feed faded. Brigid took one last look at the family tree that lay atop her desk before folding it back up and replacing it in its plastic wallet. She left the pad where she had found it that morning, at a twenty-degree angle to what it had been the night before.

  * * *

  NOT LONG AFTER they had all been examined, the three members of CAT Alpha regrouped in the ops room under the watchful eye of the operations staff. Along with Brigid, Lakesh had requested Kane’s and Grant’s presence as soon as possible. As the top field agents for the organization that request was hardly unusual, but when they arrived, coming from separate locations within the vast mountain base yet somehow meeting at the doors to the ops room almost in unison, they could not help but sense Lakesh’s concern as he welcomed them into the room.

  “Something wrong?” Kane asked, perceptive as ever as Brigid and Grant were ushered in to join him.

  Lakesh nodded gravely. “Your point-man sense has alerted you once again, my friend,” he began, but Kane correc
ted him.

  “Not my point-man sense,” Kane insisted. “It’s just, well, I know body language and yours is telling just one story, and it’s a pretty negative one.”

  “Quite so,” Lakesh agreed, leading the three operatives over to one of the consoles in the twin aisles of computer screens. Brewster Philboyd sat at the screen, monitoring a satellite feed with a separate screen linked into the Cerberus communications input. “Brewster, if you would?”

  Philboyd tapped the satellite feed screen with the end of his pen. “Recognize this?”

  The screen showed an overhead shot of what appeared to be an overgrown patch of swampland. The canopy of green leaves all but hid a dirt track that wended through the terrain, leading somewhere to the top—or north—of the feed image.

  Brigid pulled a pair of square-framed spectacles from the pocket of her jumpsuit—a necessity thanks to her farsightedness—before picking out the details of the image. As she did, Kane looked gruffly at Brewster and Lakesh.

  “Instead of playing twenty questions, why don’t you just tell us what it is we’re looking at,” Kane said. “It’s been a long day already.”

  “Redoubt Mike,” Philboyd announced with a momentary apology concerning his occasional flair for the dramatic. “CAT Beta journeyed there via mat-trans roughly five hours ago—”

  “How ‘roughly’?” Grant asked, theorizing that the details of this case were about to become relevant.

  “Four hours and forty-seven minutes,” Philboyd said, glancing up at Lakesh as if he expected the man to respond. When he did not, Philboyd continued. “Redoubt Mike is located in Louisiana. You guys went there in—”

  “Yeah, we remember,” Kane said, brushing the details aside. “Go on.”

  “The redoubt should have been sealed when you left, but we suspect that protocol was never executed,” Lakesh chipped in.

  “Kane’s old friend Ohio Blue contacted us early this morning requesting a meet-up at a location about forty miles north of the redoubt called Bayou Lafourche,” Brewster stated. “There was no reason to suspect duplicity...”