The Apocalypse Codex lf-4

by Charles Stross

  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 wounds 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 clipboard.

  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.

  There is an office off to one side of the reception area, into which Persephone drags her victim. As she begins to shake and snore, coming round, Persephone leans over her and, again, invokes one of her stored macros. An hour of life against a couple of days of deep unconsciousness and subsequent memory problems: a fair bargain, under the circumstances.

  A couple of minutes later a woman in hospital scrubs steps out, carrying a shoulder bag. Nobody pays her any attention as she walks out to the two-story car park on the other side of the road from the maternity hospital. (Cameras and robot imaging systems might notice, but Schiller’s people distrust what they see through a glass, darkly: and human eyes have difficulty noticing Persephone when she is willing to pay the price of moving unseen.) Neither does anybody pay any attention to the nurse who can’t remember where she parked, walking up and down the rows of vehicles clicking her key-fob remote until finally a Toyota pickup clunks and flashes its lights in welcome.

  Persephone climbs in, dumps her handbag on the passenger seat, and starts the engine. She doesn’t bother with a seat belt, but on impulse checks the glove box. There’s a box of ammunition and an odd-looking revolver within: a Chiappa Rhino snub-nose. Expensive and exotic for a nurse, but gunliness is clearly next to godliness for these folks. With a humorless grin she tucks her spoils into her handbag beside the bible.

  Then, without any fuss or amateur dramatics, she drives away from her mission, the church compound, and the ward full of nightmares.

  DENVER IS A MIDDLING-OLD CITY BY AMERICAN STANDARDS. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, it’s almost as old as the post office at the corner of my street. Most of it is trackless suburban sprawl, residential streets with no pavements for pedestrians alternating with uninhabited retail and industrial zones consisting of air-conditioned and mostly windowless boxes. It is, in short, uninhabitable without a car—except for a small chunk of downtown and th
e central business district. So my first job is to procure a set of wheels.

  There’s a Hertz rental agency in the basement of a hotel a couple of blocks away, according to my JesusPhone, so I walk over, shouldering my bag. “What have you got, right now?” I ask the woman at the desk.

  “Huhlemmesee…” I can’t tell if it’s an accent or a speech impediment. She rattles away on a keyboard, pounding at a mainframe user interface that probably predates the dinosaurs. Then she frowns. “We’re outa compacts and SUVs. Will a coop do?”

  A what? I blink, then shrug. “How much?”

  “The basic package is three-forty a day…” I shudder quietly, hand over the magic card, and hastily make some notes on my phone. I’m being robbed blind, of course. The basic package doesn’t include insurance, fuel or satnav; by the time it’s loaded up for a week (with an option on early drop-off at the airport) I’m looking at the thick end of a return business-class fare to Christchurch via Ulan Bator. “Sign here.” I just hope Lockhart’s going to approve this.

  The car itself proves to be a coupé (rhymes with its typical owner’s toupeé): a land-barge with a detachable plastic roof like an aging sales manager’s hairpiece. It bears the same relationship to a sports car that a round of golf bears to a half marathon. I sling my bag—complete with sleeping horror—in the boot, plug my phone into the cigarette lighter, and fire up the anti-tracing app from OFCUT. It won’t stop a chopper or a coordinated four-car tail team from following me, but it’ll work against casual remote viewing. Then I hit the road.

  After wrestling my way out of the car park (hopefully without leaving too many paint scrapes on the concrete pillars), I drive for miles beneath sullen clouds that weep a thin drizzle of sleet. The skyscrapers slowly give way to big box stores, drive-ins, streets of cookie-cutter houses, then finally scrub separating anonymous industrial units. More miles and I come to a highway with signage for the airport. Apparently it used to be a strategic bomber base—a flat pancake of snow-capped concrete stretching for kilometers in every direction.