by James Axler
“If I lie down, I’ll never get up again,” she told herself in a hoarse whisper. She barely sounded like herself.
With tussled hair and a loping form, the bruised woman made her way to the djévo, where the two guards lay outside, dead or something like it. The curtain had become twisted, holes in the material hooking onto themselves in a knotted tangle. Brigid pushed the curtain aside with her left hand, holding her TP-9 pistol with her right, hunched over with the pain and blood loss.
Inside were Kane and Grant. And blood, lots of blood.
“Kane?” Brigid whispered from the doorway. “Grant?”
Brigid fell to her knees and wept, knowing without looking. She knelt there for a long time, with tears flowing down her cheeks, pain in her chest each time she drew breath.
Chapter 32
But it was not over. Brigid cried a long time as the blood drained from her body and the candle at her side finally guttered out.
Selfishly, Brigid remembered the trick she had used once before, when Ninlil had emerged from her chrysalis state and threatened to destabilize humanity forever. An Annunaki trick.
* * *
BRIGID THOUGHT BACK to when she was in the ante-nursery of the wombship Tiamat. Brigid pressed her hand firmly against the newly born reptilian body of Ninlil, applying all the incredible pressure of her corrupted understanding of the universe. Ninlil’s body shook in the stone egg from which it was emerging, juddering in place.
Standing behind Brigid, the dark-haired warrior called Rosalia watched as the astonishing scene took place. Rosalia’s brain struggled to comprehend what was happening; it seemed that Ninlil was becoming focused even as the world around her blurred.
Brigid recalled the equation she had used to find the hidden door to Agartha, driving into her mind that different way of seeing, of comprehending. The Annunaki were multidimensional, the static rules of physics did not apply. Backed inside the egg, Ninlil’s body wrapped upon itself, becoming smaller to fit the enclosed space.
Time took a half step back; evolution itself was reversed.
Then the stone chrysalis sealed with Ninlil crouched inside it, and Brigid slumped forward, exhausted.
* * *
TIME COULD NOT be turned back, but evolution could. The thing that had evolved out of Papa Hurbon, the thing that had killed...
If the Annunaki could be reborn, then why not...?
There was not much time. “I can reverse it,” Brigid said in a whisper, reaching inside her pants pocket for the boney shard she had placed there just a couple of hours earlier. “I can make everything how it was.”
She drew the dragon’s tooth from her pocket, still connected to its gold necklace chain. Dagmar Gellis had tried to swallow it, certain that it would give her ancient powers—powers derived from the Annunaki. Hurbon had done something similar with his own shard of Tiamat, tooth or bone, and it had burned through his body and grown a monster in the compost that remained. But Brigid was different. She had been of the Annunaki once, briefly, in a time she had hoped to always forget.
The Annunaki’s was an organic technology, utilizing genetic material to create and to build. It needed something of her so that she could access it, she knew.
It was selfish, so selfish. But the alternative was beyond comprehension.
Gritting her teeth, Brigid reached into the wound in her chest, closing her eyes against the indescribable pain, and pressed the dragon’s tooth there, pushing it into her body until the hot folds of flesh and muscle wrapped around it.
Hurbon had imbibed the dragon’s tooth and it had overwhelmed him. The others—Ereshkigal, Nungal, Ki—had also begun as human and thus been overwhelmed, their human foundations corrupting and spoiling the transfer. But Brigid had something that they did not—she had been trained in the ways of the Annunaki, forced to see as they see by the god prince Ullikummis, the only human ever to do so. It had changed her so much that she had become a different person then, Brigid Haight, whose worldview was Annunaki. The change had been so traumatic that she had buried the memory of it, had pretended it had never been.
Brigid recalled those lessons now, reached for them, hidden as they were in the dark corners of her memory; her wonderful, flawless, eidetic memory. She had once told her colleagues that it was better to forget some things, that Haight had died. But the lessons she had learned at Ullikummis’s indulgence, the philosophies of the alien Annunaki, were all still there. She only chose to shy away from them because she had been so afraid of what she might become if she tapped them ever again.
She tapped them now. As the shard of Tiamat, its potency like a genetic bullet fired into its victim, embedded itself in Brigid’s body, she tapped those lessons, recalling the Annunaki ways.
There was another way of looking at time. The Australian Aborigines knew this, had utilized it for thousands of years. It held that time was not linear, one event following another, but rather that it was all at once. And being all at once meant that you could travel along it freely, moving from time to time the way you move through the rooms of a house. All it took was disconnecting yourself from time’s flow.
Brigid entered a meditative state of nirvikalpa, not accepting time as it stood, letting the change flow through her, through time.
The Annunaki were multidimensional creatures, whose aspects on Earth were but a fraction of their all. A part that they might emit from the infinite levels of reality.
Brigid reached deep inside her, reached for the power of the dragon’s tooth, and drew herself back, Annunaki-style, through the folds of time.
The long walk through the underground passages of the redoubt, the strain each step took, reversed now, heading back to the generator room. Ezili Coeur Noir had discorporated on exiting the generator but now she reformed and returned, hiding herself there, closing the door of her protective home. Before that, Anu stabbed Brigid with his clawed hand, but the mortal wound healed in reverse, his bloody claws drawing free and cleaned, magically, as they drew from the hole in her body that was no longer there.
Things moved faster, images flashing across Brigid’s brain too fast to process. Here Kane was alive, the blood returning greedily to his body. Grant wrenched Domi’s blade from Anu’s leg as the Annunaki lifted one golden foot from his head, and then he too began to absorb the blood he had spilled, his eyes closing as if he needed to sleep through this part of the process.
Hurbon was lying on the floor of the mirrored djévo room, his head a bloody wound. Kane stood over him, pointing his Sin Eater at the man’s skull, the bullet returning to the barrel, running back to its nest in the ammunition clip.
And then Ki was emerging from the freezer as Kane opened its door; and then Brigid and Kane and Grant were searching the redoubt, entering it, meeting Ohio Blue, leaving in the Mantas, rushing through the skies.
Another chance. It would be another chance to make things right. A chance to live. She just had to avoid all the mistakes they had made before, she just had to remember.
Chapter 33
Brigid looked around, her mind reeling. She was in her apartment, on the upper levels of the Cerberus redoubt, standing in the center of the darkened room beside the bed. Lights out. She had done it, then, moved through time, through space, reversed everything that Papa Hurbon had done that had concluded with his bringing Anu and Ki back to life. Had Ki lived through it, trapped in the freezer? This time she could change that.
But already that memory was beginning to fade, like a dream slipping away on awakening. Can you remember a thing that is yet to be? No—she could not forget, not this. Brigid had to write it down, before it was too late, before she forgot what she had done, changing time so that it flowed another way, opening up another path to follow. If she didn’t remember, then she ran the risk of repeating the exact same mistake, over and over again, caught in a loop
from which the Cerberus warriors could never be free.
She was losing consciousness already, the effort of moving through time. That other her, that past her, was taking control, taking her place in the cosmic scheme. She had to warn herself before the memory faded away like the dream.
Brigid reached for the notepad she kept on her night table, grabbed the pen and scribbled two words, writing them in a circle—widdershins, the way of all magic. Even as she wrote the final letter—p—her time-adrift mind dissipated and she dropped the pad and pen back on the nightstand. It was off by twenty degrees, but there was no time to correct it, she was already fading away, falling asleep. Falling...
* * *
BRIGID AWOKE WITH a start.
The sounds of the Cerberus redoubt filtered through the walls and door of her private apartment, faint but offering a reassuring background, reminding her that life goes on.
It was usually quiet here, whatever the time was. The staff at Cerberus worked on shifts, and people respected that someone was always sleeping no matter what hour of the day it was. But the sounds of talking, of laughter, seemed to echo through her door today.
Brigid shifted, turning onto her side and reaching for the lamp. She squinted as she brushed the lamp’s side, switching it on with her touch. Beside the lamp, the notebook she kept at her bedside had been moved.
Brigid reached for the notepad, saw in that instant that there were words written upon it. She turned the pad slowly, looking at the words. There were two words—emit part—written in her hand, albeit shakily. The words were written not on a line but in a circle, like so:
Automatic writing, Brigid realized as she looked at the strange words, presumably written without conscious thought while she was asleep. Well, that was new.
But what did it mean? Obviously, something had disturbed her in the night, something had caused her to write those words on her notebook, an item that often seemed like a redundant indulgence when her memory was such a keen tool and yet could sometimes elicit the answer to a nagging problem from the day before. After all, what would a woman with a photographic memory ever need to write down?
She lay in bed, the covers pulled up high to keep her warm, holding the pad and gazing at the topmost sheet.
Emit part.
It meant nothing to her. What was the part? What did it emit? It was dream writing, the kind that adheres to the logic of the subconscious, whose meaning is lost when the waking mind takes over.
Brigid held the pad before her, staring at the letters until her eyes lost focus and stared beyond, into the whiteness of the page, turning the letters into a blur. From outside her suite, Brigid heard familiar voices raised in a friendly discussion peppered with joyful laughter, the sound barely registering on Brigid’s consciousness.
Eventually, she set down the pad, pushed back the covers and got out of the bed. She dressed rapidly, washing quickly so that she could go to the cafeteria for breakfast before grabbing a shower after.
* * *
THE CERBERUS CAFETERIA was a large room and it featured several long dining tables covered in wipe-down Formica, their seats affixed to the tables, along with some smaller, cozier tables that sat groups of four.
As Brigid entered, she heard the same laughter she had heard not fifteen minutes ago when someone had passed her suite. It was Domi, talking at her most excited volume, regaling Kane and Grant with some story or other.
Brigid strode past a table where Edwards sat with Sela Sinclair, comparing details from some gun catalog the two had found among the redoubt’s ancient artifacts, and headed for the serving area and much-desired pot of steaming coffee. As she passed Domi, Kane and Grant, Kane was offering a friendly denial to the albino woman.
“We’ve been all the way around the world, Domi,” he insisted. “All those myths got busted. They’re all just alien meddling, science that got muddled up as supernatural hoodoo in the retelling.”
“And the ignorance,” Grant added, talking around a warmed bagel at the seat beside his field partner.
“Don’t you guys hear yourselves?” Domi challenged animatedly. “You call it science, but it’s still magic. Alien science is magic because we still can’t really explain it, we just nod our heads and say ‘oh, yes, faster than light CCTV in the Stone Age.’ You talk about the dumb primitives who were too ignorant to know better, but, you ask me, you’re just as dumb as they were, only you’re too busy being sophisticated to realize it.”
Brigid smiled, moving on toward the serving area. It was an argument that Domi had had with them before, in varying forms—how calling an explanation scientific didn’t make it so. And maybe she was right; maybe everything the Cerberus warriors had discovered was still as magical as it ever had been, understood in a different way that was just as ignorant as any other.
Brigid reached for the percolating coffee, pouring herself a cup of java. The new day awaited, whatever it might bring.
Epilogue
Let’s say Brigid did fix it all. Let’s say everyone lived and the Annunaki were defeated. If the world had been remade, how would you know? If everything was put back in the way you remembered, or thought that you remembered—and maybe even that was a part of the fix, that you only thought you remembered it at all.
And how would you ever know that you were fighting on the right side when the battle is eternal and the sides can change and reverse in the blink of an eye?
How can anyone?
* * * * *
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First edition November 2015
ISBN-13: 9781460385494
Apocalypse Unseen
Copyright © 2015 by Worldwide Library
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
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