Apocalypse's Prelude

by Carl Damen

  It began with a ceramic mug suspended in mid-air, a parabola of tea frozen curling away behind it. Shara Chuskus lay on the stairs, her elbows and knees chaffed from the carpet, staring at the apparition at the end of her outstretched hand. She spent a moment wondering at it, then yelped and pushed back as the whole mess succumbed to gravity.

  She edged away from the stairs, breathing hard as she fought to disbelieve what she had just seen. A few minutes passed, the memory faded, and she was able to tell herself that it had all been a quirk of perception; her mind stretching out a single moment into a feat of magic.

  That was what she told herself through the rest of the day, what she told herself as she went to bed, what she told herself when she awoke the next morning.

  Then, she went into the bathroom, looked out the window, and saw the man and woman on the street corner. They were staring at her.

  There was the cup, just past her reach, two or three inches off the ground—

  The watchers turned to face each other, huddled for a moment in concentration, then left, walking down the street in the direction of the Metro station.

  Shara sat on the edge of her bed, trying to convince herself that it was all coincidence, that it was just a couple of lost tourists looking up at the very same moment she had been looking down. No one was watching her.

  Today was Saturday. She decided not to leave the house.

  Sunday morning, awake again, in the bathroom. On a whim, she looked out. There they were.

  This time there was no talking herself out of it. Something was happening. The simplest explanation, the least interesting explanation, was that she was suffering from paranoid hallucinations. She discarded this interpretation almost immediately. Her family had no history of mental illness. Besides, who wanted to accept insanity when it seemed something exciting was about to happen?

  By Sunday evening, she had almost convinced herself that she had developed super powers, that her watchers were part of a secret organization, out to recruit her to fight evil. Just before she went to bed, she realized how crazy that sounded, and decided to schedule a screening with her doctor.

  Monday morning, and the watchers were there again. They stood on the sidewalk, dressed in light windbreakers, their faces obscured by hoods. Today they didn't take their gaze away from Shara's window, didn't turn away in conversation. Shara waved at them experimentally. Maybe if she acknowledged them, they would prove themselves to illusory. Didn't work; they kept right on looking.

  She sighed and jerked the curtain closed. They were real... Maybe the rest was, too.

  She needed something small for a test, something not much bigger than the mug... there. Her toothbrush hung limply in a metal ring above the sink, practically begging to be levitated. She widened her stance, gritted her teeth, and glared at the toothbrush. Nothing.

  What did they always do in movies? Arm out, fingers splayed, gentle waving motions... Nothing. Did she need to be expressing strong emotion? Feel danger, maybe? She wasn't about to fling herself down the stairs, but maybe falling backwards onto the bed would—

  A gentle ringing focused her attention back on the toothbrush. It stood erect, floating an inch or two in the air, the bottom wavering and occasionally contacting the metal ring. She gasped, and the toothbrush fell back to its original position.

  "Shit."

  She took a few steps backwards, felt something cold against the back of her knees, and dropped down onto the toilet. This wasn't real, couldn't be happening, had to be-

  Verification. She needed to film it, see if others saw it, or if they only saw a toothbrush. She snorted at that. If they saw anything, they would see off-the-shelf special effects.

  No, the only thing to do was to ignore this, at least for a few more hours until she could see the doctor. Until then, she would go to work, play it cool, hope she wasn't losing her mind...

  Back to the window, tearing the curtain aside— The watchers were gone. Somehow, they had sensed what she had done, had gone back to tell the leaders of the conspiracy that a new convert was ready... Probably wasn't a good idea to think that way...

  She showered, dressed, tried to brush her teeth through supernatural means, gave up, did it the old fashioned way, and was out the door by seven. Down the sidewalk, surreptitiously looking for hooded figures hiding in the hedges.

  A hole gaped open in the sidewalk in front of her, and she dropped down into the great concrete cavity of the Washington, D.C. Metro system. There was the usual Monday morning crunch at the security gate, but before too long she had been scanned, approved, and electronically billed for her upcoming ride. She pushed into the crowd milling around the precipice of the platform, finally giving up and stopping next to a support column some fifteen feet from the edge.

  Shara...

  Despite the noise echoing through the tube, she heard her name clearly, too clearly. A quick look around showed that no one was paying attention to her. "Hello?"

  No one took notice.

  Shara...

  This time she noticed the smoothness of the word, the lack of acoustic distortion; a word spoken directly into her mind. She felt excitement bubbling through her; the watchers were here, were communicating with her. "Who's there?"

  Instead of a voiceless word, the answer came as an all encompassing vision. Sound died, everything around her began to fade, commuters becoming translucent and popping out of existence in rapid succession until she was alone on the platform. The hallucination theory was suddenly seeming a lot more inviting.

  The concrete of the station suddenly began to soften and run, changing from its normal vault into a dark cube of some kind, devoid of decoration or complex architecture, fading into shadow all around. She was so caught up in watching her location melt away that it took her a moment to realize her clothes were fading, too. She watched as her outfit went through a reversed dressing process, disappearing layer by layer until she stood naked and alone in the great chamber.

  She whirled around in panic for a moment, trying to cover herself, then realized it was a fruitless gesture in the face of someone—something—that could apparently speak into her mind, play with her perceptions.

  "Hello?"

  "-ello?"

  "-lo?"

  "-o?"

  Pretty detailed perceptions. She stamped down on the ground, felt the rough surface digging into her feet. Whatever was going on, it seemed pretty real.

  A low flurry of echoes sprung into existence, drawing her attention behind, to where two human forms stepped out of the shadows. A man and a woman, naked as she was, skeletally thin, bald and pasty. They looked as though they had been through hell.

  Instinctively, she knew they were her watchers.

  She folded her arms over her breasts, realized how ridiculous the gesture was, dropped her arms, and tried to stand a little taller. "Um... Hello? I, I don't mean to nag, but... what's going on?"

  Neither watcher visibly reacted, even seemed to have heard her, but within a few seconds a voice, crisp and echoless, spoke into her mind. You slipped, just as we did... Your body has remembered what your mind has not...

  Another thrill of excitement. Her delusions of grandeur, her fantasies of adventure returned, pushing away that still small voice that told her, You need professional help.

  Shara tried to respond to them, to push her words out of her mind and into theirs, but could only muster the mental equivalent of a nervous chuckle. "What do you want me to do?"

  A mixture of regret and anger washed over her. Remember...

  People suddenly burst into being, as dead and naked looking as the watchers, moving at a hugely exaggerated pace, jumping corporately from place to place, individually milling about like streams of ants. Every once in a
while they'd suddenly drop down, lay prone for several seconds, then stand and repeat the cycle. As this happened, two men moved among them, both dressed in simple, military-like fatigues. They seemed to be in charge.

  As Shara watched, metadata were applied to the stream of images. Names, biographies, intimate fears and desires. Whole personal histories flashed before her, and she was caught up with them, became a part of them, realized she had been a part of them already. She remembered who they were, how she had lived with them, died with them, been reborn with them... killed with them. Above all, she remembered the two clothed men. One young, inexperienced, always hungry for power, for pain, for dominance over them.

  The other...

  She loved him, revered him. They all did. He was their leader, their prophet, the one who would deliver them and lead them into their destiny—

  The vision exploded into violence. The deathly horde escaped their bonds, flooded out of the cube, followed their prophet as he led them out of the grave and back to the land above. Then it all reversed. Swarms of warriors, dressed in impenetrable slabs of grey armor, faces more skeletal than those of Shara's cohorts, pushed back, drove their captives back into their bonds and their tomb.

  Then they were there, in real time, kneeling around their fallen prophet, the concrete digging into Shara's knees as a new man, a dark presence who had been there, nibbling at the edges all along, entered the cube. He was gnarled, old, even more dead looking than the cohort. He smiled at them, told them in no uncertain terms that they had failed, and that they were his now. He approached their broken prophet, allowed him a final word before he was put to death for his rebellion.

  He stared out at them, body broken but spirit intact, and willed them to listen, to take his words to heart. "We are Defenders. We will defend. We must tick on," he said. "The Q-bomb must tick on."

  Then he was dead. Then the pace picked up again, then Shara was alone with her watchers, collapsed at their feet, weeping for a life lived and better left forgotten.

  We can still do as he said... we can still be the bomb...

  "No..." The words were low, raspy, but hers. Made with human lips, shaped by a human tongue. They were not the words of... of what she had been.

  It is what he wanted...

  "No!" She was on her feet now, charging at them, ready to hurt them far more than they had hurt her. "You can't have me back! I won't go back!"

  "Ma'am?"

  The platform was back, the commuters were back; thank God, her clothes were back. She whirled around, terrified by the now alien world that she had clung to as her own. A sea of confused faces stared at her, expressions of concern and annoyance distributed more or less evenly among them.

  The two faces she needed to see most weren't there. They came, they destroyed her life, tore down the second chance that she had been given, and didn't even have the decency to show up in person.

  Little squares of plastic began to rise around the crowd, mobile cameras ready to document the crazy woman's breakdown, to share her shame with the world. She tried to pull in on herself, to separate herself from the world around her, but the minds were too frenzied, too loud and insistent, all focused on her, all yelling, screaming out the pain she had suffered.

  Then she tried to push out, to send out her pain and terror and hatred out into the crowd, into her unseen watchers somewhere out beyond the Metro, beyond her little world.

  For a single, perfect instant there was silence, and she was able to forget about what her life had been.

  Then Shara was gone...

  5

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 2

  Three faces stared out from the portrait. Little Than, ten years old, slightly bored, but happy to be out of school. Behind and to his right was Amanda, late thirties, her face stern but beautiful, stress-filled eyes shining above wide cheek-bones. To her left sat Edarus, his face looking full and healthy, hair and beard thick and black. Around him shimmered a thin nimbus, another face: middle-aged, weathered, grey beginning to tinge the black.

  Light fog momentarily covered the picture then faded, and Edarus Latterndale straightened, taking his attention away from the picture of his family and focusing on the young Lieutenant who had just opened his door.

  "Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Secretary."

  Edarus sighed; he had been Secretary of Defense for nearly two years, but everyone still acted unsure around him. "Yes, Hutchfield, what is it?"

  "The explosion, sir. Crews were going through records on everyone who was in the tunnel, and one name came up on a watch-list."

  "What name?"

  Hutchfield shook his head. "Your eyes only, sir." He held up a tablet, then carefully placed it on Edarus's desk.

  "Thank you." He glanced momentarily down at the tablet, then up to the Lieutenant. "Is that all?"

  "Sir." Hutchfield turned and pulled the door closed as he left.

  Edarus sighed again, then leaned forward and picked up the tablet. He held his thumb over a scanner at the bottom of the screen and waited for the device to verify. An image appeared of a young woman with bobbed blond hair. Below, her name: Shara Chuskus. Edarus swallowed. He saw another face in the picture, a gaunt, bald woman, eyes sunken into her head so she resembled nothing so much as an angry skull.

  So, she had been at the site of the explosion...

  He put aside this new tablet, then turned to face his own, docked to his desk. He opened a browsing window, searched for a moment, then settled back in his chair to watch the news. A smoking crater was sunk into a suburban D.C. street, rescue workers in bright orange jumpsuits swarming over the crater's lip. Interspersed amongst the workers were others in suits of lumpy grey armor. At a gesture the volume came up. "—as to the cause, though some experts are blaming an out-dated infrastructure, which lead to a gas-line rupturing and bringing down the station. The mayor has issued a statement that—"

  Edarus silenced the device and looked back at the new tablet, at the picture of the smiling young woman staring out at him. It could be a coincidence, couldn't it? She might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, may have simply been caught in a freak gas explosion.

  He knew it wouldn't be that easy.

  "Hutchfield," he said, gesturing at his tablet.

  A moment later the man entered. "Sir?"

  "Footage from the explosion: do you have it?"

  A nod. "Pulled it as soon as I saw a ping on an eyes-only list, sir. It's already on the tablet."

  Edarus almost smiled. Competence, honest-to-God competence. "Good work."

  As soon as he was alone again, he checked through the tablet and found several video files. After searching through a few, he found one from a camera in the ceiling over the train tracks, looking at the platform immediately at the bottom of an escalator. The footage wasn't very good quality, but he could easily make out Chuskus as she floated down to the crowd, stood at the back, suddenly began to speak, to look around and gesture wildly.

  Edarus adjusted the volume, but there was no sound.

  He continued to watch for several more minutes as Chuskus continued to panic. People began to take notice, to turn and record her with their mobiles. Chuskus doubled over, clutching her stomach and convulsing. Then the footage flashed white and died. Edarus rewound, played it back at half speed, repeat, quarter speed, there. A few frames before the end, she appeared to glow, then erupted in a spreading cloud of flame—

  "Shit." Edarus dropped the tablet and dug into his pants, desperate to find his mobile. It wasn't there. He stood, rounded on his chair, felt through his hanging jacket. There it was. It was out, dialed, up to his face.

  Three rings, then an answer. "Elliot Nieman, how may I help you?"

  "Ellie, this is Ed. I need to schedule a meeting."

  "Sure thing. How urgent is this?" The sounds of shoes clicking on marble and other voices filtered through the connection as she spoke. She must be busy today.

  "Say an eight."

  A momen
t of silence, then: "I can get you in at one. Who all do you want there?"

  "Entire cabinet."

  She gave a low whistle. "Alrighty, then. Sounds pretty important." She was quiet for a moment, then grunted. "You're in. President will see you at one-fifteen."

  "Great." Edarus disconnected the call, tossed the mobile onto his desk, then sighed. Chuskus had blown herself up, and security hadn't noticed anything when she came in. There was only one explanation...

  He sat back down, rummaged in his desk for a moment until he found a thin black memory drive. He slid it into the new tablet, then navigated to a folder marked "E.H.U.D.: TOP SECRET." Clicking on it brought up a series of security dialogue boxes, and then, finally, some hundred images.