2012 The War for Souls

by Whitley Strieber

  “Captain, for this to last—”

  “We don’t need it to last, we need it to work for a few hours.”

  The doctor threw a look of desperation toward General Samson, who did not react.

  “Okay,” Captain Mazle said into her phone, “how much can you give him?” She looked at the doctor. “Compromise: you can get your forty, but only for one minute.”

  “I applied for two, Captain.”

  “Do it! Now!”

  The doctor drew a narrow silver case from his pocket, opened it, and took out an instrument with a black, tapering handle and a long blade so thin that it was no more than a shimmer in the air. “This specimen has mild arterial damage from cholesterol,” he said, “typically associated with advance of age in this species. Do we want to invest—”

  “This species,” Jennifer snarled. “Where do you get off? It’s the only other intelligent species we’ve found across a billion parallel universes and throughout our own.” She gestured toward the remains of Al North. “This creature, if it can successfully do what it’s being designed to do, could save us all.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “Because, Doctor, have you heard the news from home? Have you heard what’s happening there?”

  “It’s an aged specimen.”

  Samson broke in. “I don’t want you two sniping at each other, not when we’re working against time and there’s so much at stake. We are behind schedule so MOVE.”

  “I won’t be responsible if I’m rushed!”

  “Doctor, I’ll hand you over to the soultechs.”

  The doctor’s scales shuddered and flushed yellow. Everybody feared the soultechs and their skills to capture the soul and to destroy the soul.

  “Under what regulation? You have no right.”

  “Maybe and maybe not, but I will do it, of that you can be sure.”

  “You ought to do it anyway,” Mazle added.

  “Shut up, bitch,” Samson said, his voice deceptively mild.

  “How dare you!”

  “Gonna tell on me again? Daddy’s getting old. Daddy’s not who he used to be. So maybe Daddy loses his power soon, and I get to kill your fucking little prune of a soul.”

  “Talk about a hollow threat.”

  “Are you willing to take the risk?”

  “All you do is talk, but the clock doesn’t stop, does it, General? You’re easily distracted. You’re failure prone. Daddy says.” She curtsied.

  “This thing of yours probably won’t even work.”

  “A mix of biological material from both earths. It’s bound to.”

  “Well, great, because if it doesn’t we can all kiss our asses good-bye. We fail here and we die here—in this facility, fifteen hundred cubits beneath gorgeous Kansas.”

  The doctor began to set out his instruments. “Get support services in here,” he said, “if you want this done.”

  “I’ll be your support services. This is extremely classified.”

  “Nothing like a military idiot for a nurse-assistant,” the doctor muttered.

  “Maybe I’m better than you think. Maybe I’ve even been trained.”

  “I bought my job and your Daddy sure as hell bought yours. If I’m lucky, I might be able to flush a child’s craw. Very lucky.”

  Jennifer opened the small box she had brought in with her, in which there was red liquid. “Look at it, Doctor. This is living material from the one-moon earth.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “There are humans crossing between the two worlds,” Samson said miserably.

  “That’s ridiculous,” the doctor replied.

  “We believe it was a lucky accident. But that might not be the case. The union’s hand might be in the matter somewhere.”

  Mazle, suddenly interested, strode up to him. “You didn’t tell me this.”

  “You didn’t need to know,” he replied.

  “This casts everything in a very different light.”

  “In what sense?” the doctor asked. He had a stake in the matter, too. They all did.

  “If we’re defeated by enemy action, Echidna might not be so—well, so hard.”

  “Harder, never doubt it,” Samson said. “I’ve had experience in the palace.”

  “I grew up with her last crop of children,” Mazle said. “My egg was honored with a place in her basket.”

  “I’ve seen them running eggs through that exalted basket. A new clutch every ten seconds.”

  Mazle turned on her hireling doctor. “Get to it,” she shouted at him. “Get to it now!”

  He lifted the lid of the black lacquer box, looked at the blood-covered material within. “Won’t this explode, if it touches this air?”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  He drew out a long, wet object. A lip. “This is dead.”

  “So is the cadaver, but we’ve got its soul.”

  General Samson thought of the millions of them collected deep under this room. The harvest of bodies had a certain value when terraforming began, but the harvest of souls was truly valuable plunder. It wasn’t the doctor’s business, though, or the Captain’s. For Samson, it was a guarantee of wealth beyond imagination, the kind of wealth that bought an endless supply of perfectly cloned bodies, and with them the sort of eternal life that only the highest nobility enjoyed.

  The doctor unrolled his instruments, taking a fleam in his long, narrow fingers, and drawing it along the line of one of General North’s eye sockets, removing the dried flesh from the edges of the wound.

  Then, using instruments like two golden chopsticks with splayed ends, he drew out a bloody ball. “This eye is not in acceptable condition.”

  “Acceptable for what, Doctor?” Mazle asked.

  “For use!”

  “It won’t see?”

  “Oh, it’ll see. For a while. Somewhat. But—look at it, look how it’s deteriorating.”

  “Why is that?” General Samson asked.

  “General, I know you go topside because I prepare your allergy kit. Think if you entered their world without your serums. You’d disintegrate, and this eye is disintegrating.”

  “But if we get it back to its home world, then the rot will stop, won’t it?” Mazle asked.

  “This is all ridiculous. This can’t work.”

  She persisted. “Can you attach it to the cadaver?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “THEN DO IT NOW GOD DAMN YOU!”

  He began using his instrument to touch the left eye socket, gingerly, experimentally. As the doctor touched the socket just with the tip of his probe, his fingers working with a pianist’s virtuosity, immense generators that drew their energy directly from the planet’s core started up deep beneath the facility.

  Tiny sparks appeared around the eye, until the whole rim of the socket was shimmering as if with millions of little stars, each one of which was actually an enormously complicated object in itself, a whole miniature universe consisting of billions upon billions of stars no bigger than dust motes on a gnat’s toe.

  “Is the tissue going to explode?” Samson asked.

  “No,” Jennifer said.

  “I can’t be sure,” the doctor responded. “We’ll have to see.”

  “We’ll have to see? We could all be killed!” Samson shouted, backing away from the table where the operation was taking place.

  “Good,” the doctor said. He then rested the instrument in its case and took the eyeball between the gloved fingers of his left hand.

  “How dare you say that!” Samson hissed.

  “Look, I’m here because I have to be. This whole thing—taking this planet like this—it’s wrong. These creatures don’t deserve this kind of treatment because of the avarice of a bunch of developers, and to be drafted by the military to do the work of a greedy few, it’s sick and it’s evil, General, and I don’t give a rat’s ass who knows what I think.” He inserted the eyeball, which settled into the socket with a sucking plunk. “Well, whaddaya kno
w, it didn’t explode. Too bad, we live on.”

  “I ought to have you disensouled,” Samson muttered.

  “Ah, the hollow threat again. You two are certainly expert at tossing those around. Problem is, you can’t do without a doctor, therefore I’m not in any danger, am I?”

  He inserted the second eyeball, then attached the lips. The doctor stared for some time at a photograph.

  “Hurry!”

  “The lips are too fat.”

  “Thin them, then!” Samson glared at Mazle. “Time?”

  “01048.”

  Still staring at a photograph of Al North, the doctor pressed a glittering cloth against the lips, the contours of which gradually grew more and more to resemble those of the general.

  He then addressed his attention to the genitals and rectum, which were taken out of the box and attached to the body. In the end, it appeared fresh and undamaged.

  Finally, he stood back. “It’s completed,” he said.

  “Bring up the soul,” Samson said.

  Jennifer Mazle spoke into a fist-sized walkie-talkie, and in a few moments two of her soultechs appeared carrying between them the enormous glass tube that contained the living soul of Al North. The light inside the tube no longer flashed and twisted, but clung close to the copper filament, which glowed deep red. “You think this will actually work?”

  “Postoperative reensoulment isn’t exactly gravitic science,” the doctor said. “If you could stuff him for me, Captain.”

  Jennifer drew Al’s body up, and hung the head back over the end of the table until his mouth lolled open. She sprayed into it from an aerosol can gaily painted with hieroglyphics, in colors familiar to anybody in any of the three parallel worlds, because all three of them had evolved Lysol spray. Then she lifted a thick, black cable that was coiled on the floor at the head of the operating table, and pushed it deep down Al’s disinfected gullet.

  “This soul’s been cut the way you want it cut, right, General Samson?” the doctor asked.

  “I approved your pattern.”

  “Because with all these shittily completed new connections, once the soul goes in, the only way you’re gonna get it out again is by tearing this body to pieces.”

  “Am I going to want to do that, Mazle?”

  “It’s been debrided of every thread suggesting independence.”

  “And the brain?” Samson asked.

  “Its memories have been erased back to two days before it entered Cheyenne Mountain,” Mazle replied.

  One of the soultechs held the tube, which was about four feet across at its top, tapering to a diameter of perhaps nine inches at its base. Another inserted the cable into the socket.

  “How old is that equipment, Mazle?”

  “My dad’s company buried it in the Egyptian desert, at a place called Dendera.”

  “When?”

  “Eight thousand years ago.”

  “What cheap bastards you people are. What if the humans had found it?”

  “Not too likely.”

  “Still, eight thousand years, and we have to rely on it. That’s criminal irresponsibility, in my opinion.”

  “The objective is to create wealth for garbage like you to enjoy, General, not spend it on extravagant equipment we can do without. And I can’t help it if my family has been running a successful enterprise for twenty generations and you’re a propertyless consumer.”

  The body began heaving. “Don’t lose this, Mazle.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Doctor?”

  “Normal,” he snapped.

  “Fill it,” she said to her soultechs.

  One of them began raising the impedance in the tube until the soul was a purple spark dancing on the end of the filament.

  The body heaved again, then again.

  “You’re sure these seizures aren’t a problem?” Mazle asked the doctor.

  “You can’t expect this to work like modern equipment.”

  Samson snorted derisively, but made no comment.

  Slowly, the color of the filament went from purple to violet, then to white. The body’s eyes flickered open, the chest gave a great, oily heave. The muscles rippled, the skin flushed, and there came from the gaping mouth a noise, earsplitting, like a hiss of gas escaping a broken pipe. A scream, Samson realized. That had been a scream.

  And then Mazle said, “Look.”

  The tube that had contained the soul was as black as a shroud. Al North’s eyes were open, though, wide open.

  General North was crying.

  FIFTEEN

  DECEMBER 19, PREDAWN THE STALKER

  THEY’D MADE A SORT OF evil Golem, a monster that would be incapable of disobeying its orders. But it was more than that. Wylie saw the idea behind it. They had used the eyes and lips and tongue and the other parts they had managed to cut out of poor John Nunnally from down the road, and grafted them into the body of Al North. Because the result was mixed of flesh from the two earths, they probably hoped that it could move more freely in our world, and get around the fact that, because we ignored them, they could not enter freely here.

  Unlike the outrider and the wanderers from the other earth, it would be able to enter this world fully.

  So far, the only person who had managed that, seemingly without any restriction, was Trevor. But now there would be another, and this one would come with blood in his eye, a monster in the truest definition of the word.

  Wylie wanted to stop writing, he wanted to warn his family, but his fingers moved relentlessly on, taking him where they chose to take him, on a journey he could not stop and could not control.

  He was aware that dawn was coming, but he could not stop, he could not speak. He couldn’t even turn away from the keyboard. Nick slept in the easy chair that stood in the corner. Brooke, he thought, was in their bedroom.

  The problem was that this monster was intended to cross the gateway and come up that hill and come to this house and kill them all, and now they were asleep and they were not reading and so they could not see this warning, and as hard as he tried, he could not call out to them, and he knew that time was of the essence.

  Then he was swept away, far away, to the last place he cared to go, almost as if some larger force was at work, a silent wizard controlling the whole horrible catastrophe.

  Here, he saw dark, complicated heaps up and down sidewalks, bits and tatters of paper and clothing and all manner of debris blowing in a north wind, and there was a smell, thick, sweet, that he recognized as the odor of many dead.

  He was in New York, the New York of the two-moon earth, and these were people who had leaped from their apartments up and down Fifth Avenue, and there were more of them, Wylie was sure, on every single street everywhere in the city.

  Detail struck him—an Armani purse lying open on the sidewalk, a doorman who had shot himself at his post, his brains hardened on the wall behind him, his kind old face crossed by a path of busy ants, a bicycle lying neatly against a lamppost.

  He moved with a dreamer’s gliding ease but the horrible precision of reality, into a side street. Here was a little restaurant called Henri’s, all of its sidewalk tables bare, a full bottle of Cliquot champagne standing on a waiter’s station beside a copy of the Times for the day New York got hit, December 6. Headline: BIZARRE TRAGEDIES SHOCK WORLD.

  There was a flag snapping before a brownstone, and he could see that it was an art gallery, but he didn’t go in, not in this storm-tossed, broken morning.

  He fought to stop his hands, to pull away from the laptop. He could feel Al North standing, moving on wobbling legs, coughing, gasping, staggering, see him held up by sleek, creamy Mazle and black, gleaming Samson with their lithe bodies and long claws and their cruel reptile faces.

  New York gave way to the ocean, big green waves involved with complicated little waves, and off through the bounding whitecaps the heeling dark shape of a great liner. She wallowed in the storm, and as he drew closer he saw that her bows were well down, and every time a wa
ve struck her streaming flank, a great spray of water shot up, pushed across her by the driving wind like her own private rainstorm.

  The people had disappeared from the deck like so much sea foam, but he was not long there, he was inside in the great sweep of a restaurant with chairs waltzing to the roll of the ship. But there were also others there, men in tuxedos, women in long dresses standing at the tall windows of what he supposed was the main restaurant. What was so appalling was that they had been made wanderers here, and had simply starved to death. He could see trenches in the carpeting under their feet. They had continued to walk after hitting the wall. He could see their sunken, gray faces.

  I have to get home! Somebody help me!

  And then he was on a twisting street, there were pushcarts everywhere, little motor bikes, signs in an unknown language and dogs barking and monkeys chattering in the blaze of day. But the streets were empty, and not only that, water was coming, and the buildings were heaving like women beneath the plunging weight of the night. And small, intricate waves came farther each time the place shook, the careful water licking the motorbikes and the paper signs and the cold sidewalk bakeries where naan had been sold for a few rupees.

  India, some great city, and it was dead and it was sinking.

  He was alive in it completely. Standing at an intersection. Down the street a luxury building in the chaos—a Four Seasons hotel with curtains blowing out the windows. He looked down at the sloshing water, how very carefully it licked his bare feet, how clear it was despite being floated with cigarette ends and Fanta bottles and plastic bags and sodden, gray disks of naan from the dead bakery.

  Then he was in woods. His woods. And he saw a man.

  Nick! Brooke! Kelsey! For the love of heaven, wake up!

  Al North was walking and his movements were strange, purposeful but odd. He was flickering as he walked, like he wasn’t entirely there. When he blundered into brush, he would mutter and groan, and there would be blue flashes all around him. Where his feet touched grassy places, there was flickering blue fire.

  “Mommydaddy! Mommydaddy!” Kelsey flew in, throwing her arms around Wylie—who still could not stop typing. And Nick slept on.