Apocalypse's Prelude

by Carl Damen

  She gasped and spun around to catch a glimpse of him, to see Allen standing in the antechamber. Instead, there was only Mistaren.

  "You asked before what was in it for you?"

  As her knees began to tremble and the world to grow dark, she realized that there was never any choice but to cooperate with Mistaren. Allen, for all his power, all his ideals, had cooperated with him in the end; that's why she had gone to the old president. Now she had no choice but go to the new and hope for a different outcome.

  No! Couldn't do this, couldn't go back to being his slave! Think! Buy time and think!

  Was that Vince talking? No; the other Melana.

  She surveyed the room, sliding her eyes along the walls, hurriedly past the grim form of Mistaren, and eventually to her lone guard. "What happens to her?"

  He raised his eyebrows and glanced to his left. "Her? The innocent bystander? Didn't think you cared. She's the scapegoat, obviously. She helped you escape, gave you her armor. Probably, goes to prison for life. Not a bad fate, considering what's coming. Definitely improve her odds of survival."

  Melana blinked, feeling his words slipping past her, uncomprehending.

  "So, are you in or out? Will you try to kill the president, or am I going to be forced to kill you and pull Vince into this?"

  Words were said then, but she didn't know what they were. All she knew was that Mistaren smiled and stepped away from the glass.

  She stumbled forward, slid down to her knees. She had saved Vince; this time, she had saved someone. The last time she had been forced to choose, been forced to pick Melana or another she had made the choice of a monster, had paid for it ever since. Would this redeem her? Would it at least lead to her death?

  In the last glimmers of light before the world fell into eternal night, the general paused and said, "Oh, just thought you should know—Steig's alright."

  No answer.

  "Your cameraman? He was injured in the riot, not that you were really there for that."

  Still no answer.

  "Have you already forgotten the Terstein riot? Jesus, I know the rest of the country has, but I hoped for more from you. Do you realize what an impact it had? Guess you kind of overshadowed it..."

  Black.

  Gnarled skeletons of trees stretched up to claw at the sky. They creaked slightly in the wind, followed a split second later by the rustle of leaves along the ground. Something wasn't quite right about them, though. The creaks and rustles were almost too crisp, modulated; every tonal range was presented in its entirety. The sky as well was simply too clean. Above was blue, and to the sides it grew paler, eventually fading down into brilliant green. For the trees, every line of the bark showed in exaggerated contrast, every twig standing crisp and clean, distinct from the sky. Melana blinked and for an instant, almost too fast to follow, the sky blurred, pixelated.

  So... she was in an E.H.U.D. Mistaren had done it after all.

  The effort of standing was nearly nonexistent. As she rolled onto her right side the suit moved with her, mechanical muscles in the back pushing suddenly apart, in the front together, so that she found herself pulled by momentum onto her stomach. Gathering her limbs beneath her, she pushed, and found herself momentarily in the air before she came back down onto her feet.

  The dome of the sky had shifted, and now she was staring off into the green, the brown of rolling hills jutting up and terminating the horizon. Somewhere out there, she knew, lay Latterndale. Lay her own death.

  Now or never. She turned in a circle, trying to decide which way would take her where she wanted to go. If only she knew where she wanted to go...

  She quickly came to the sobering conclusion that it didn't matter; no matter what happened, Mistaren would have what he wanted, especially since the scramblers seemed to have no effect on him. With that in mind, he was now theoretically the single most powerful person on the planet. She shivered; it was not a pleasant thought.

  Had that been his plan all along? In her days in the pit, living as his guinea pig, his soldier, she had thought of him as a loyal man, devoted to the nation he served. Allen had schemed, had looked for a way to use them to better the world. Maybe Allen had finally gotten to Mistaren. Maybe he was finally ready to use his creations responsibly.

  Not that she was just a tool to be used. Not that she would forgive him so easily.

  Still, with no better direction, it was best to follow him for the moment.

  She stuck out her tongue and felt a rough rubber nob embedded in the helmet. She pushed on it, and a blue light flashed.

  "Voice commands."

  "Voice command active," an androgynous, synthesized voice answered.

  "Special protocol. Defender control."

  The blue light flashed again, and Melana extended her mind to fill the helmet. All of the familiar controls, the small switches and relays, the hidden things that made no sense on paper, the controls no soldier could operate or even know about, were suddenly at her disposal. She found two wires behind her head, held millimeters apart, and meshed their ends together. A grid formed over the world she saw through the helmets view ports, and a pulsing purple line extended out from her, winding away through the dead forest.

  Now or never. She took a step forward, and hoped Vince would never have to know the sacrifice she had made for him.

  Step after step, mile after mile she continued. When she was able to let herself forget about her current mission she was able to almost enjoy herself. She began to skip, to hop, to fly a dozen feet into the air and come down with barely any impact; to soar through the trees or lope on the ground, to let the forest of tree-bones be her personal playground. She let her eyes close, relying on her mind to avoid obstacles.

  Then, as quickly as her revelry had started, it shut off, blurred away by the harsh buzz of scramblers. She slowed long enough to see the white ceramic tubes of the scramblers placed on several nearby trees; the outer defense perimeter.

  This was it.

  She continued to move, more sedately now, following the purple line over a last ridge and then—it was gone. Nestled in the valley below her was a low concrete and glass building, flowing water-fall like over a small cliff and coalescing in a sea-like atrium at the back.

  "Hey."

  Don't panic. She turned to the voice, careful to keep her movements natural.

  Another person in an E.H.U.D. stood some twenty feet away.

  He pointed back to the ridge that she had just come over. "All quite on your front?"

  She nodded.

  "Right. Sorry to interrupt; carry on."

  She nodded again, and the guard loped away, looking for all the world like an Apollo astronaut out for a stroll.

  She turned back to the valley, looked again at the hardened shell of Camp Eglon.

  This was it.

  Now or never.

  8

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 16

  Multicolored charts and graphs flowed across the computer screen, showing bars of this and that, endless streams of Gs, Cs, As and Ts; Xs, Ys. As chart followed chart, Edarus grew increasingly bored. He had spent the last two days caught up in the panic surrounding his sudden medical condition, and was taking this lull to free his mind and just think for a moment.

  Two days ago "free his mind" was nothing more than metaphor, but now it was a reality. He could feel a connection to his body slipping away, alien thought processes flitting in, touching him like errant signals caught by an antenna. To one side Amanda, concerned, suspicious. To the other, his staff doctor, Forre, reserved, confused.

  These feelings, these other senses, had come with his awakening Friday morning, laying on the atrium floor, looking up at the faces of his staff. Their eyes were wide, lost. They were concerned, certainly, but Edarus instinctively knew that it was concern for their own jobs, not his life.

  Then Amanda had loomed over him, concern for Than flowing down and around him. The strength of her emotion struck Edarus like a charge of electr
icity, stimulating his own memories of his son. There were... not as many as he would have liked.

  In the midst of the memories, the realization hit him that he was experiencing other people's thoughts and emotions. He gasped and sat up, felt something dry and flaky falling from him.

  Half-formed memories of the previous night flowed in, whispers from the dead, Lob touching him, pain—

  Something connected in his mind, and Edarus rushed ahead towards a looming realization: he had somehow become a Defender. He didn't know how, but he was now hearing those around him though they did not speak, seeing through eyes not his own.

  A man with glasses, someone Edarus vaguely recognized as Isaac's staff doctor, leaned towards him. He said words, but Edarus heard only thoughts. This is wrong, it can't happen, not to him...

  To me... What can't happen? What did happen? What would happen if people found out? Corruption charges: he saw the power of the gods, coveted it, took it for himself. Invalidation of yesterday's address: he knew more about the E.H.U.D.s than he was letting on, was abusing it to his advantage.

  He climbed to his feet; it was easier than he remembered, took less effort. The same effort was applied, however, and he found himself off-balance, stumbling.

  "No one..." The words burned as they rasped out. "No one speaks of this. No one tells anyone..."

  He was so hungry... "I need food.."

  "And what does that mean?"

  Amanda leaned against him, pushing his desiccated frame to one side by her relatively superior bulk.

  "Well..." Forre flicked through a couple of pages worth of charts on his tablet. "Okay, you se this sequence here?" He pointed to a written string of acids. "This is from yesterday's samples. This," he pointed to another, "was from his checkup last year."

  Edarus looked between the two. He couldn't pull any meaning from the jumble of Cs and Gs, but he could pull meaning directly from the doctor. He sensed Amanda's comprehension, but decided to say it aloud anyway. "You're saying my DNA is different."

  "Exactly." The doctor lowered the computer. "I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Latterndale, but medically, this isn't the man you married. Close, a brother, say, but definitely distinct."

  He wasn't the man she had married... It was hard not to laugh at that; he hadn't been that man for years. This was a deeper level, though, and he found himself wondering how it would effect him. How much of him was genetic, how much nature over nurture? Could a change in genetics cause a change in spirit?

  He had been disappointed in the state of his spirit for too long—he regretted all the extra time he had put in to work, the secrets he had kept from his family—

  No, that wasn't him; that was Amanda leaking in. She was disappointed in him. It didn't bother him; he found that he really didn't care. He wanted her to be safe, to be relatively happy, but he didn't really care what she felt about him now.

  Interestingly, neither did she. The more he pushed, the more he tried to tune in to her thoughts, the more he found that the disappointment she felt for him wasn't really her own, but was harbored on behalf of Than. In her mind, Than was disappointed in his absentee father.

  Edarus knew it wasn't true—he had felt the boy's overt concern for him when he had been woken and told that his father had had an accident Thursday night. Knew that Than's first instinct had been to run out and prove himself to be every bit as heroic as Edarus had been, facing down Lanlin virtually unarmed.

  It was enough to slow Edarus, to give pause to his never-ending urge to do his job. Personal responsibility always came first, yes, but to whom was that responsibility due: his son, or his country?

  Sitting in the kitchen, gorging himself on whatever was at hand, he had dropped everything and walked, trance-like, up to his son's room.

  Responsibilities were shifting.

  All of that changed when Than saw the skeletal man in his doorway. Images dredged up from old nightmares crawled out into the room and stood alongside Edarus—his body, cold and lifeless, crumpled on the White House floor, Lanlin standing over him, triumphant. Edarus, riding in an open-roofed car, his head abruptly jerking back and to the left even as a stream of gore spewed from his forehead. Edarus, dying a thousand ways, each leading to the corpse now standing in the doorway, looking down at Than.

  He returned to the kitchen.

  As he sat alone, eating anything he could lay his hands on, he reflected on what had happened, tried to separate what he had seen from what he desperately hoped he hadn't. In the end, the only conclusion he could be sure of was that Mistaren must have made himself into a Defender at some point, and then had turned him. Why? He replayed what he could remember of his conversation with Lob, the day, six months ago, that he had become wrapped up in all of this.

  Mistaren must have already been one of them, had realized that the best way to utilize his powers had been to manipulate high-level politicians. Then why give Edarus this gift—this curse—if all it meant was that Edarus had a better chance of escaping from Mistaren's thumb?

  Well, for one, Edarus now had a vested interest in making sure that Lob's designs for the E.H.U.D.s came to pass. For two, he now had blackmail material should Edarus deviate from the course.

  Either way, only one conclusion could be safely drawn. He downed a cup of orange juice and stared at the kitchen wall. "I can't trust Lob anymore."

  "And what's that supposed to mean?"

  Amanda was gripping Edarus's left hand now, slowly twisting the deformed, drooping ring hanging loosely from his shriveled finger.

  Doctor Forre shrugged. "I don't know; not for certain. His genetic makeup is different, that's all. It might be some sort of error, but the physical changes suggest otherwise."

  Amanda nodded. "Do you have any theories on what happened?"

  Forre made brief eye contact with Edarus. "A viral infection of some sort. No thought beyond that."

  A flush of nervousness, brought on by the lie. Strange that someone who knew so many secrets felt guilty by telling what was, at worst, a half-truth.

  "Why don't you tell me what's going on, Mr. Latterndale?"

  Syrup dribbled down into Edarus's beard as he chocked down another chunk of waffle. He wiped at the syrup, licked it off his fingers, and looked back at the doctor who had interrupted his solitude.

  "Ged de fugg oudda of hewe."

  The doctor pulled out a chair next to Edarus and sat down at the breakfast bar. He gestured to the chef, then to the formless mass of flour and syrup on Edarus's plate. "One for me."

  "I said—"

  "Doesn't matter what you said. Being president does not mean you rule the world; it means you're subject to the will of the people. You're obviously not well, so as one of the people its my duty to make sure you get well."

  Edarus grunted and took another bite.

  "We haven't formally met. I'm doctor Trent Forre."

  Edarus tried to focus, to put as much of his energy as he could into forcing the doctor away.

  Forre's eyes widened for a moment, then collapsed into a glare. "That's one of the things that's wrong with you. I'll have to make sure you get over that."

  The world stopped, and Edarus's mind flashed up to Than, laying safely in his parent's bed, then back, across time and space to the White House, September twelfth.

  When he returned to himself, Edarus found his hand inching towards a butter knife laying on the counter.

  Forre noticed, and scooted back a few inches. "You have nothing to worry about from me, sir. After all, I was your cousin's trusted doctor for many years."

  Edarus blinked then, not taking his eyes from the doctor, called to the chef, "I think I need to be alone for a medical consultation, if you don't mind."

  "Sir." The chef flipped out the half-liquid remains of his current waffle, flicked off the iron, and left.

  "What do you want, doctor?"

  "I was on the Defender's medical staff, in the early days of the program. I know the symptoms, and I have to say, you've got the dis
ease. A far more rapid strain than I've ever seen, but I know I'm not wrong."

  "That doesn't tell me what you want."

  The doctor nodded, scratched his chin. "What I want actually depends on what you want. Everything you said yesterday, about solidarity with the Defenders, writing wrongs, all that bullshit? If you really meant that, I want to help you. I can coach you a little on seeming normal, on keeping this a secret."

  Edarus looked into the doctor's eye, saw courage, fear, resolve, regret. There was a period of about six months reflected in the man's eyes, six months of nursing unwilling patients through painful transformations, through cancers that swept through their bodies again and again. And through it all, he couldn't help them. He saw them suffer, made them suffer, and now he was looking to atone.