The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  There’s a noise like a sewing machine the size of an airliner punching holes in sheet steel. I throw myself at the floor, but she’s not aiming at me—she’s aiming behind me, at the source of the lurching shadows that careen across the pews. And for all that they’re undead the bodies ridden by the eaters aren’t bulletproof—break enough bones and they’ll be reduced to crawling towards their victims like something out of a Monty Python film, even if the shooter isn’t firing banishment rounds. I, on the other hand, am not bulletproof at all, so I hide behind the furniture and make myself one with the floor.

  The camera. When I made my throw-self-at-planet move it was attached to my wrist by a lanyard. Now, not so much: I am attached to a lanyard but no camera. I look around but I don’t see it—it probably slid under a few pews. Well, sucks to be me. I’ve got a pistol; it’ll have to do.

  It takes me a few seconds to get the damned thing disentangled from my jacket, and then I run into a second problem. I’m used to punching holes in paper targets with a standard issue Glock 17, as used by police tactical response teams, MI5, and just about everyone in the UK who is legally allowed to carry a handgun these days. But this thing isn’t a Glock. There are odd-looking buttons on the side and the grip feels all wrong. It probably has a safety catch. Pausing to RTFM, in a dimly lit temple while my pulse is running at warp speed and a deranged valkyrie with a space-age weapons system chews holes in the landscape, isn’t an option: so I mentally consign my soul to wherever it is that dead agents’ souls go, flick the switch or button or whatever that’s nearest the trigger guard into the other position, and squeeze the trigger in the general direction of the altar—firing under the pews.

  Bang goes the pistol, and I nearly bite right through my lower lip as I button up to keep from screaming aloud and giving away my position. My upper right arm is in searing agony where Jonquil and her posh friends made holes in it last year. “Shit,” I say very quietly. I haven’t been working out on the range since the business in Wandsworth, and it’s clearly a non-starter. But…

  ***Take this pistol.*** I put it on the floor and give it a good shove, and it goes skittering back behind me. ***Kill the woman with the machine gun.***

  Rattle-click-crunch: a feeder is crawling towards me. I can feel waves of festering resentment and rage gnawing away at what’s left of his mind. For a miracle, he reaches for the gun instead of the warm, pulsing, living leg so close to his jaws. Leg of master. He’d bite me if he could—but he’s bound to serve the will of those whose taint I’ve carried ever since the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh fucked up big-time in Brookwood last year.

  ***Wait!*** I announce, feeling the feeder preparing to lurch to its feet. ***First, find a small silvery box, looks like so***—I visualize it mentally—***on the floor somewhere. Bring it to me! Then await my order to fire.***

  A fresh burst of automatic fire sprays overhead as the nun with the very big gun lays down suppressive fire. There’s a crunch, and a wail that dissipates like pollen on the desert wind as one of the feeders falls apart. Then something bangs into my hip. I reach back for it with my left arm, swearing quietly. It’s the camera. I push the power button and wait for it to wake up. I hope it’s not broken.

  About ten seconds have passed: an eternity in a fight.

  Schiller is now leaning on the altar, holding a cable attached to a Pelikan case that he’d obviously brought through earlier and stashed behind it. He’s exhausted but determined. His handmaiden stands guard beside him, a white-hot blaze of righteous anger, and she’s taking regular aimed shots at the walking corpses who are still stumbling in through the entrance, for all the world like a horde of green-haired munchkins in an early computer game. They’re not doing well; this isn’t what the feeders were intended for. Maybe half a dozen of the brighter ones are still moving, but they’re mostly the ones with enough of a residual sense of self-preservation to use the furniture for cover. (If I didn’t know better I’d say the others were trying to get themselves killed, seeking release from their deathless agony…)

  Johnny is—oh dear. Johnny is down. So is another of the bodyguards, but another four arrived through the gate from the New Life Church while I was trying to become one with the lithosphere. I can feel his anger and frustration and pain just as I can feel the dry, complacent yearning of the hosts riding Schiller’s goon squad. They’ve come for Jesus’s summoning, and—

  Where’s Persephone?

  I blink, bemused, as I open myself up to the world and listen. I can’t taste her mind anywhere around us. It’s as if she’s legged it back through the gate.

  Oh.

  Well, that royally buggers everything up, doesn’t it?

  A quick situational audit tells me that I’m up against: Schiller (no mean sorcerer in his own right), Our Lady of the Lewis gun, no less than six security guards with pistols (two of whom are sitting on Johnny McTavish—for some reason they’re reluctant to damage him), and the goon squad’s boss, Schiller’s head of security.

  In the white hats we have: Johnny (out of action), Persephone (out of area, running so fast she’s trailing a sonic boom if she’s got any sense), six assorted Russian Civil War-era zombies (only one of whom has a remotely modern weapon), and Yours Truly.

  It’s not looking good. Especially because—now that I try—I can feel the hosts in Schiller’s bodyguards. Alas, they’re too far away to eat. I could try and get closer, but I suspect it would end in tears.

  I glance at the camera. It’s up and running, but the case is very scuffed. More worryingly, the battery icon in the top right corner of the display—which is cracked—is flashing red. Either it’s about to run out of juice, or being chucked around the floor has damaged the battery contacts. I look up again. The guards are dragging Johnny to the altar like a very reluctant bride, and the madwoman with the machine gun is staring in my direction, eyes narrowed.

  For a stomach-churning instant I think she’s seen me, but then I realize I’m between her and the door that the pile of semi-dismembered feeders came through a minute ago. I’m pinned down, I realize. If I pop up to aim the basilisk gun, it’ll take anything from a tenth of a second to a couple of seconds to lock on to a target; meanwhile, I’m in front of the sights of an automatic weapon. Plus, they’ve got Johnny. And I am not sanguine about killing people I know—especially if they’re human and they’re on my side.

  ***Fan out,*** I tell my remaining feeders. ***Move forward quietly. They intend to raise the Sleeper. We are going to stop them.***

  Then I begin to work my way forward beneath the pews, worming along on my belly like the snake in Schiller’s Garden of Eden.

  “DEARLY BELOVED.” SCHILLER CHUCKLES WETLY: “NO, WRONG service. We are gathered here as it is prophesied, to bring about the second coming of the Christ Militant, who with fire and the sword will sweep all before the triumphant armies of his elect, that the unbelievers be cast forever into the fiery lake and the reign of God on Earth be brought about. It is to our eternal regret that we could not complete the planned conversion of the unbelievers, but the atheist servants of the British Government were upon us, greedily spying on our secrets; and so we must bring down the curtain on this aeon of sin and perversion as soon as possible. Shed no tears for them, for their damnation is of their own doing.”

  He coughs, then clears his throat noisily and spits to one side of the altar. Then he turns to face the dark-suited guards who hold Johnny before him, in front of the sarcophagus.

  “Elder McTavish, the rite of awakening may require the presence of two elders of our bloodline—but only one of them needs to be willing.” Schiller frowns theatrically: “It will go better for you if you are Saved first and take Jesus Christ as your personal savior. What do you say?”

  Johnny tenses; the guards hold him down, kneeling before the altar. They’ve handcuffed his wrists behind his back and one of them is in the process of fastening shackles to his ankles. He looks at Schiller with weary contempt. “The thing what’s buried
under that stone ain’t Jesus, me old cock. You’ve been ’ad.”

  “Really?” Schiller smiles, evidently amused. “I think not, and you’re going to burn in hell for eternity unless you change your mind in the next thirty seconds. But don’t take my word for it; Christ will return and prove me right. Enough idle chatter. Sister, pass me the chalice and the needle.”

  There is a large silver goblet on the equipment case by the altar. Roseanne scans the temple again, looking for signs of motion among the pews or in the pile of dismembered body parts by the far entrance: she sees no threat, so she reaches out with her left hand to take the vessel—but her eyes never stop their endless scan of the space before her. It takes her a couple of seconds to find the packet of sterile needles on the top of the Pelikan case by touch alone, but she manages it in the end. Schiller takes a needle and abruptly rams it into the ball of his thumb, squeezing it over the chalice.

  “Bring him here, the son of Adam’s other wife,” Schiller calls.

  “Fuck you—” Johnny’s sudden struggle is not unexpected, and a rabbit punch to one kidney gives the guards time to bend him over the altar, face-down.

  “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Schiller intones, “I bequeath this soul unto the tender mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ who sleeps dead but undying beneath this stone.” There is a knife in his hand as he leans forward to cut.

  The situation, I decide, is non-survivable.

  ***Go,*** I tell my minions, and pop up from behind my pew like a kamikaze photography buff.

  Shots crack out.

  Roseanne, the blonde handmaiden with the gun, fires simultaneously with the skeletal horror I donated my pistol to. She’s fast and practiced, and a crackling trail of bullets smashes the feeder’s rib cage to splinters, then wrecks the arm that holds the pistol.

  The feeder’s shot misses.

  For a horrified split second I stare down the muzzle of her gun as she points it at me with an expression of frustration rather than hatred on her face: Why won’t these pop-up nuisances just give up and die? she’s wondering. I watch for an eternity, waiting for the fucking camera to display a green gunsight around her, while her gun clicks, once, and a box pops out of one side. She begins to rotate her arm, turning her gun side-down to eject the empty magazine, and just then there’s another gunshot and a red stain splashes the back of her headdress.

  “Behold, the Lord will rise again, washed in the blood of the lamb! And the apostate gets his just reward!” Schiller shouts at me, as blood from Johnny’s throat gouts across the sarcophagus, splashing into the chalice. Fury and pride twists his face. “You’re too late!”

  ***Take out the guards,*** a familiar voice whispers inside my skull.

  What the fuck? I spin round and raise the camera, taking aim on the four armed missionaries who are between me and the gate. The red battery icon flashes—

  “He’s not yours to kill!” Persephone’s voice rings out.

  Then there’s another crash of gunfire as I simultaneously see four green targeting boxes appear on the camera’s display and click the shutter button—

  I’ve never looked directly into a basilisk gun’s target before. It’s a major design fail; I shall have stern words with Pinky when I get out of here.

  ***Go to the gate, Howard, go now.***

  I shake my head, unable to see past the green blotches and purple outlines of the four guards, frozen in the crackling flares of magnesium-bright light that have etched them into my retinas. There are more shots. I realize that staying upright isn’t a good idea, so I sit down hard, feeling dizzy.

  ***Schiller’s down. I’ll rescue Johnny.*** Persephone’s in take-no-prisoners mode, going by the icily professional feel of her thought.

  ***Johnny’s dead—I saw Schiller cut his throat—***

  ***—It won’t be the first time I’ve had to raise him. Go!***

  Everything is very confusing when you’re half blind and in the middle of a firefight, but I could swear the bench is shaking beneath me.

  ***What about you? Don’t you need a hand?***

  A blast wave ripples through me, like a giant door slamming in the near distance. I hear more shots.

  ***I’ll be fine.*** And I can sense the belief in her mind, a solid rock of self-confidence sufficient to hole a battleship. ***You’re out of your depth. Go, now!***

  I don’t have to be told a fourth time. I stumble towards the gate, fumbling my way past the pews of long-dead alien worshippers, the blazing human candles of the burning bodyguards, my compass the bright and mindless hymns of the faithful.

  Somehow I find my way to the other side, and an empty vestry in the middle of a temple full of lost souls. And that is where the Nazgûl find me amidst the other mortal wreckage, burned and half-blinded by the light, clutching a broken camera full of secrets.

  Epilogue

  AFTERMATH

  THE DUSTUP IN THE SLEEPER’S MAUSOLEUM HAPPENED LAST month, but I’ve only been home for a couple of days. Mo was just about mad with worry when I rang the doorbell at seven o’clock, bleary-eyed and sweaty, straight off the red-eye from DC to Heathrow. Economy class, of course; it may be painful, but I’m not stupid—after the mission ends, it’s back to business as usual.

  I slept for about six hours, ate, slept for about eighteen hours, and spent the next day in a zombie-like haze. Today’s the first day I’ve been sufficiently compos mentis to go back to the office. Lockhart, I gather, is chewing the carpet. (Good.)

  You can blame the Black Chamber for the delay. Officious as any other component of the labyrinthine American secret state, they had to first satisfy themselves that I was not, in fact, an enemy agent. The carte blanche helped—or at least convinced them to make some phone calls first, rather than shooting me out of hand—but was not sufficient on its own to dig me out of the crater I had landed in. However, some pointed nagging from somewhere up the ladder at Dansey House—up the ladder from Angleton, I should add—eventually shook me loose.

  Not that they were keeping me in twenty-four-hour lockdown in the brig at Quantico; I had my own private five-star hospital room to occupy while recovering from superficial burns and concussion, to say nothing of suspected neurological insults that required multiple appointments with an MRI machine to rule out Krantzberg syndrome.

  Persephone and Johnny—if they survived—I don’t know about. They disappeared and the Nazgûl won’t tell me anything, and I wasn’t asking questions that might give away anything they’re not supposed to know I know. However, I’ve got some fragments, and I can speculate:

  I can infer that Persephone did not do a runner, but in fact used the Hand of Glory to conceal her side-trip to Schiller’s vestry in the New Life Church, where she did her best to wreck the link between his pastor’s sacrifice of souls and the power source in the Temple of the Sleeper. Then she came back to rescue Johnny—and me.

  Did she succeed? I don’t know. Like I said, she and Johnny disappeared while I was lying on my back in the vestry seeing stars.

  I’m pretty certain that Persephone saw to it that Schiller didn’t make it out of the temple alive after he tried to sacrifice Johnny. She’s nothing if not possessive.

  I’m pretty sure Schiller cut Johnny’s throat—I saw the blood. And the blood of two elders of the priesthood of the Sleeper were spilled upon the altar while it was hooked up to a grid powered by the prayers of thousands of god-raped worshippers. But the Sleeper—or Jesus, depending on which eschatology you choose to run with—did not clamber out of his sarcophagus and start rampaging across middle America. Maybe they got something wrong? Mind you, the tremors under the plateau suggest someone turning over in their sleep. The fimbulwinter that gripped central Colorado prior to Schiller’s summoning is very worrying, but the thaw afterwards suggests the information bleed between the walls of the worlds was staunched in time. Or at least prevented from turning into a flood.

  Which finally brings me back to the present, and the in
evitable fallout from the operation. Which, I gather, will involve a lot of committee meetings that I won’t trouble you with.

  CLASSIFIED APPENDIX

  GOD GAME RAINBOW

  WARNING: Copies of The Apocalypse Codex report containing this version of the appendix are classified GOD GAME RAINBOW.

  (Copies omitting this version of the appendix are classified GOD GAME with one additional single color code from: RED, GREEN, BLUE, VIOLET, PURPLE, SILVER.)

  If you are not cleared for ALL of the codewords listed above you MUST IMMEDIATELY commit this report to secure document storage (level 3 or higher).

  You MUST IMMEDIATELY report any uncleared access to this document to the designated Section Security Enforcement Officer for investigation, even if you have not read the classified appendix and you believe you were issued the document in error.

  YOU MUST UNDER NO ACCOUNT READ BEYOND THIS PAGE.

  THE SITUATION MAY BE NON-SURVIVABLE.

  Persephone raises her head slowly and peers out from behind cover.

  She and Howard are crouched at one end of a roughly rectangular space about the size of an aircraft hanger. There are doors in the middle of each wall, and rows of strangely shaped pews—cast or grown rather than built—marching the length of the floor. A raised dais or stage at one end supports a huge stone sarcophagus, and an active summoning grid at the opposite side of the temple from the door they entered by hangs in midair before the far entrance, lit from beyond by the harsh glare of electric lights.

  “Hand of Glory,” she says, holding out her left hand as a familiar figure dives through the gate back to the real world, followed by the harsh crackle of gunfire.

  “I’ve got it in here somewhere…” Howard mumbles apologetically behind her as she searches for a target. The shots cease; instead, four more figures rush through the gate, chasing Johnny. They’re clearly armed. There are more figures, indistinctly seen against the back-lighting of the gate.