The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  I disconnect my phone, close the pizza box, and stuff it in the bottom of my go-bag. Then I massage my forehead and steel myself, anticipating pain. I pinch my arm over the relevant tattoo and go knock on her frontal lobes.

  ***Busy.***

  She’s aware of me and she’s got the blinds turned down—I’m picking up nothing about her environment, just an icy half-amused, half-angry awareness that pursuit could show up at any moment.

  ***I know,*** I send. ***I’ve been ordered to bug out. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, get the first plane out, and run like hell.***

  She doesn’t seem to be surprised. My heart sinks.

  ***I think you and Johnny should get out right now,*** I add.

  ***Why do you think that?***

  ***Bad guys sent a wet team for me. They’re possessed, some kind of parasite.***

  ***I know.*** She sends me a glimpse of my pizza-box horror, trapped writhing between silver tongs in some kind of ritual. My stomach flip-flops. ***I’m on the run; they were going to plant one of those things on me. I blew my cover. It’s possible it was blown before I started, though: they may have tagged me right from the start, in London. Then saw me and Johnny and made the connection from him to you.***

  ***I got a heads-up that the local police and security agencies are compromised and presumed hostile,*** I tell her. ***I warned Johnny about it.***

  ***Understood. Keep your distance. I’ll call Johnny in due course to plan our exit. I’ve got to go now.***

  And just like that she cuts me off.

  I quickly shave and dress in my all-purpose suit—I may have to bluff my way past some desk pilots in the very near future and it doesn’t hurt to look like a civil servant—and stuff one of the pistols in a pocket. Then I shovel the rest of my crap into the case and head for the lobby, leaving the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the door handle.

  Next stop: the airport.

  10.

  THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DOOMED

  AWKWARD SMALL TALK OVER STALE COFFEE: IT’S NOT HOW Johnny imagined catching up with his former associate, but Patrick is badly shaken and somewhat withdrawn. Johnny is short on time and urgently needs to draw him out, so coffee in an almost deserted Starbucks with a sullen, overweight barista pushing a mop around the floor is the order of the day.

  “How long have you been in Denver?” he asks.

  “Four years.” Patrick’s hand shakes as he tips a paper twist of sugar into his espresso. “More or less.”

  Not long after he left the Network, then. “And on their retainer?”

  “About the same.” Patrick falls silent for a moment as he concentrates on stirring his coffee with the ritual focus of a heroin addict cooking up the next hit. Not spilling a drop demands infinite patience. “They’re bastards. But they look after you as long as you’re useful.”

  “What do they want you to report on?”

  “What you’d expect.” Patrick half-shudders, half-shrugs. “We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.”

  “And sometimes?”

  Patrick grimaces. “If there’s talk of miracles, wine out of water, speaking in tongues—they ask me to check out a service. It’s a bad job, I can tell you, but usually it’s boring. When it isn’t”—he pauses long enough to pick up his cup with shaking hand—“I’m not there.”

  “Ever checked out an outfit called the Golden Promise Ministries? Out of Colorado Springs, run by a guy called Schiller?”

  Patrick shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  Johnny keeps his thoughts to himself. Instead, he pulls out his wallet and, after a quick scan, counts out bills. “Here’s five hundred. The number on this card is a burner: call me if you see anything that might interest your, uh, employers. Call me when you’ve got a repair bill for the car and I’ll pay the garage for you.”

  Patrick stares at the pile of fifties. He reaches out and shakily pushes them back across the table. “Not playing that game, Johnny. I’ll thank you for fixing my car, but you don’t know what they’re like. What they do to double agents.”

  It’s Johnny’s turn to stare. Then, after a few seconds, he shoves the money back towards Patrick. “Then it’s my penance for spoiling your evening, mate. Call me when you’ve got the bill for the car.”

  Patrick stares at him, perplexed. “You can’t fix everything that’s broke with money, Sarge.”

  “I know. But money helps.” Johnny knows exactly what’s going through Patrick’s mind: What’s happened to my old sarge, then? He stands. He doesn’t want to have to stay and explain. “At least I tried.”

  He walks out the door, moderately certain that this is the last time he’ll ever see Patrick. It’s cold, and a solitary snowflake spirals down in front of his face. He goes to his truck, climbs in, and starts the engine. Maybe I should tell the Duchess, he ponders. But there’s no telling where he’ll catch her; best get it sorted himself. He drives away slowly, with a head full of darkness and questions.

  It is, perhaps, inevitable that his encounter with Patrick distracts him and leaves him in a disturbed state of mind: old ghosts swirl around just beyond the corners of his vision as he drives back towards the third safe house, less attentive than usual. But as he parks opposite, a pricking in the skin of his chest brings him sharply back to a state of alertness. Something, his sixth sense is telling him, is wrong.

  It’s too late to drive on, but—as usual—he hasn’t parked directly outside the front door. Johnny stares at the safe house. The warning is worryingly nonspecific: the vague itching and sense of dread tells him nothing useful.

  He slides out of the cab, keeping the truck between himself and the safe house windows. He leaves the door ajar as he rapidly scans the sidewalk, then breaks into a jog. The itch fades as he leaves the shadow of the pickup, just another local out for an evening run: it’s amazing what people will miss if they’re not watching carefully, and he didn’t pick this neighborhood to site a safe house on the basis of its vibrant street life. Once out of the direct line of sight from the safe house he crosses the street, re-scans to make sure there are no bystanders, then doubles back. His nostrils flare as he ducks and glides around the side of the house.

  There is a kitchen door that opens onto the backyard, and it has a well-oiled lock. The key turns silently. Johnny steals inside like a thief in the night, right hand drawn back and knife in hand. It’s of a single piece, the blade oddly flat, the handle an extruded extension: a thing of power, lethal as a cobra. A gift from the Duchess, years ago. The kitchen is dark and still and just as he left it, the tripwire—actually an empty tumbler set on the floor just inside the door—still present; but his skin is prickling again. If there was an enemy already in the house it would be far more intense. What if they aren’t here yet? Johnny stands up, then passes through the ground floor rooms silently and rapidly, ending just inside the front door. The pizza joint flyer he’d balanced against the front door when he left is still upright. No, not here yet. Which means—

  There is a bright discordant jangle of shattering glass from the front window on the lounge, to the left of the vestibule he’s standing in. Johnny turns, lowering his—knife to a gunfight, he absently realizes—as a familiar rattling hiss kicks in. Gas grenade.

  He smiles, lips peeling back from teeth in a frightening grimace.

  Johnny’s got his fight.

  * * *

  PERSEPHONE USED TO HAVE NIGHTMARES, WHEN SHE WAS A girl. Dreams that would drag her shuddering awake, drenched in a clammy sweat, with her own shriek of terror echoing in her ears.

  They always started the same way: with her waking in a hospital ward, moonlit through unshuttered windows, surrounded by the living dead.

  They were living because they breathed in their sleep, lying cold and motionless on beds with rusting steel frames, sheets drawn up to their chins to cover the woun
ds and evulsions inflicted upon their bodies by the metal of war. But they were dead, too, because they would never wake. She could force herself out of bed inside these lucid dreams and poke and pry at the sleepers, scream her lungs out into their cold blue ears, to no avail.

  There were always twenty beds on the ward, nineteen of them occupied by sleepers. Male and female, young and old, white-skinned and sallow in the moonlight. She could run to the end of the ward—or fly, at will—and there was a corridor, and on the other side of the corridor another ward, another twenty beds. Up and down the corridor the wards stretched towards a morbid vanishing point in the gloom. She’d ventured into the corridor, once or twice, but the first few wards she checked were all the same. And besides, she wasn’t alone. She never actually saw the Watcher but she knew it was there; a lurking immanence observing her increasingly frantic explorations, avoiding contact for the time being as, suffused with a growing sense of panicky terror, she cast about for relief from the infinite loneliness of the graveyard.

  Curiously, it never occurred to her to gaze out through the windows at the night world her dream had crash-landed in the midst of.

  Years later, in her early teens, she’d shyly confessed these dreams to her adoptive father. It was a tentative gesture of intimacy, as she began to deconstruct the emotional barriers that she had erected during her childhood in the camps and on the long road out of Srebrenica. Alberto had taken it seriously, not pooh-poohing it as teenage angst; rather, he sat her down and delivered the first of a series of lectures on the interpretation of dreams, with the aid of a copy of the Liber di Mortuus Somnium. “Precognitive dreams are not representations of a fixed future,” he explained. “Rather, they’re echoes of events which hold particular resonance, sufficient to overcome the barrier between now and then. They might not come true, and they are in any event symbolic, not literal predictions. But you should always take them seriously.” Then he spent an afternoon with her, showing her how to make a dream catcher from cobwebs and feathers, and then how to program it as a screensaver on her Amiga; and she’d taught herself to sleep soundly without waking the rest of the household.

  She never learned to like hospitals, though.

  Now the night world has crashed through the window and landed in the ward of the dead in the mid-afternoon light, and it’s Persephone’s turn to be the watcher floating through the corridors, observing and monitoring with a cold knot of horror.

  The open window is one of three at the end of a hospital ward bay. There are four beds on the bay: two are occupied. It’s very quiet, but for the heartbeat beeping of monitors tracking pulse and ventilation rate. One of the inmates is sleeping, but the other woman follows Persephone’s progress with frightened eyes.

  Persephone tugs her skirt down, hitches her handbag strap up on her shoulder, reaches for a convenient lie, and offers a smile that doesn’t reach the corners of her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m just taking a look around. Journalist.”

  She walks towards the door at the end of the bay, then pauses as two slivers of fact slice through her mind. There’s a door. On a ward side-bay. You don’t put doors between a patient and the nursing station if there’s any risk of acute incidents. Doors are for privacy. And the woman’s eyes are still watching Persephone, but her head—

  She turns and walks back to the woman. Who lies utterly still on the bed, breathing but unmoving except for her eyes.

  “Can you speak?” she asks quietly.

  The woman—girl, almost: late teens, early twenties—blinks at her with horrified eyes, then begins to silently weep. Her lips move, as if in prayer. But her body lies still as if stunned, bedridden. Paralyzed. Persephone notices the sealed port of a nasogastric feeding tube nestling by one nostril. No wonder she can’t talk: this is a long-term spinal injuries unit.

  Persephone pulls her cameraphone out of her shoulder bag and captures the layout of the bay on a slow video scan. She spots the file by the head of the bed, medical notes. She has a queasy feeling. Something here is very wrong.

  “You don’t mind?” she asks, taking the file. The woman’s eyes close. There’s a name on the cover: Marianne Murphy (23) Saved. Persephone’s brows furrow as she pages through the notes, reading and photographing the evidence. Yes, nasogastric feeding. Yes, physiotherapy. But, oddly, no medication. Nothing about vertebrae or spinal damage. Then Persephone comes to the ultrasound scan printouts. Images of a fetus, results of amniocentesis. Her skin crawls. She points her cameraphone at the woman. “Blink if you understand me?”

  Marianne blinks. And now, Persephone realizes, the young woman has a name to her. “One blink for no, two for yes.” Blink, blink. “Are you held here against your will?”

  Blink, blink.

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you? Did they make you pregnant?”

  Blink, blink.

  “You’re paralyzed. Was there an accident?”

  Blink.

  “Was it the ministry? They did this to you?”

  Blink, blink.

  The nightmare is solidifying around her. Persephone glances at the sleeper in the other bed, sees a nasogastric tube and a cervical collar to lock the woman’s head in place. She can see what’s happening here, although she’s reluctant to acknowledge it: in the combined spinal injuries and maternity ward the women are prisoners in their own flesh, arrow factories for the full quivers of the theocratic movement. “‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,’ is that what he said?”

  Blink, blink.

  Persephone swallows. Very gently, she reaches out and touches Marianne’s forehead. “Can’t stay. Got…got a story to tell. I’ll put an end to this. I promise.”

  Blink, blink.

  The crèches and kindergartens of a quiverfull movement, pious mothers raising bountiful families of young believers for the greater glory—ten and twenty children, far more children than most women can bear—need additional ammunition. So they look further afield, to the wombs of young unbelievers taken by the roadside, homeless runaways, addicts, prostitutes. Doubtless they’ve got a little list, of those who won’t be missed. Bait the line, spread the net; carry them down to a quiet hell filled with hospital beds, where they’ll be paralyzed and used like wasp-stung caterpillars to nurture their kidnapper’s spawn. She can hear Schiller’s apologetics echo in her mind’s ear: Nature is bountiful, nature gives us great examples of God’s meticulous design for life, including certain parasitic insects—

  Persephone removes her finger, suppressing a shudder, suppressing thought, forcing her body into obedient calmness. She’d like to scream with rage, smash things, forget the job and rescue these women right now: it’s a fatal temptation. But it would be a mistake. In fact, if she leaves behind any sign that she’s been in this bay she will be signing their death warrants: Schiller will not suffer such witnesses to live and testify against him in Federal court. So she will be heartless and patient—for now.

  There is a clipboard by the other woman’s bed. She takes it and holds it to her chest. No spare stethoscopes or white coats, unfortunately; the clipboard will have to do. It’s a Saturday, so the place should be running on weekend staff. Fifteen minutes have passed since she broke from Schiller’s bid to brainwash his new recruits. The alarm will be out. Escape is going to be difficult: it’s becoming clear that there is a lot more to this operation than just a rogue church.

  She closes her eyes for a moment, composing herself and wiping the expression of feral loathing from her face. Then she opens the door and starts to search for an escape route.

  The hospital, as it turns out, is running on a weekend shift pattern: the wards are almost deserted except for the hunched, unmoving forms of the inmates. There are no televisions, she notes, but a number of bedside lecterns feature bibles that are open at particularly educational passages, displayed before the captured eyes of the bedridden. One of the bibles sits beside an empty bed; acting on impulse she takes it, tucks it beneath the elbow of the arm with which she carries the clipbo
ard.

  As she nears the end of the ground floor ward she approaches a nursing station. Two nurses—both women, in green scrubs—are discussing something. Persephone’s breath catches, and she makes a peculiar gesture with the fingers of her left hand. Sounds flatten and footsteps fade away as she approaches the desk. Neither of them seem to notice her. It is Persephone’s privilege and her burden, to shorten her life’s extent in return for the grant of certain powers prearranged; it’s not unlike smoking.

  “—bed in bay six,” one of them is saying. “And there’s a prep kit in ward two up back—Ilene will be able to show you.”

  “When’s this new arrival due?” asks the other.

  “Not sure, he said there’s been some problem—patient tried to run. Doesn’t want to comply.”

  “Oh dear.”

  There’s something wrong with their voices, Persephone notices, with the heightened perception that comes with her occult bargain. She should have noticed it before, the slightly mangled syllables of the believers. It’s the hosts, she realizes with a frisson of revulsion.

  “Well, you go and get the prep kit. I’ll make sure the bed’s ready when they capture her.”

  The taller nurse nods, then walks right past Persephone—unseen—in the direction of the lobby.

  Persephone spins a blind spot in the remaining nurse’s mind and hides within, holding her rage in check. She barely allows herself to breathe until they are alone in the room. Then she lets the shadows slip from her shoulders. “Hello,” she says, smiling. “I don’t suppose you’d let me borrow your car?”

  The nurse stares, mouth opening to shout as Persephone brings the bible around sharply, spine-first, against the side of the woman’s head, then drops it and grapples. It’s not much of a fight. The nurse has no idea about self-defense, and Persephone has her face-down in a choke hold within seconds, closing her carotid arteries until she stops struggling. Persephone finds it takes a serious effort of will to relax her grip. She wants someone to pay for what’s happening here so badly she can taste it.