Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  “That’s possible,” Mariah told them, much to her colleagues’ surprise. “Well, not blast exactly, but you could bury it. The mine in Libya was created, we think, by shunting the materials that were here through an interphase wormhole. That’s disrupted the soil, which is why we had the sinkhole effect.”

  “Meaning?” Kane encouraged.

  “Which means the ground is still moving,” Mariah explained. “It wouldn’t take much to drop the whole thing under the earth and just bury it for good.”

  “When you say it wouldn’t take much,” Kane asked her, “how much?”

  “A big enough explosive planted deep enough,” Mariah theorized, “would cause the walls to collapse.”

  “There were people inside there,” Brigid reminded them. “Innocents.”

  Kane glanced up at the pyramid. Its walls were drawn in shadow black to his altered eyes, and the people gathered close by looked like wraiths. But atop the pyramid, two figures glowed furiously, as if they had been ejected by the sun itself.

  “We could use the Mantas,” Grant said, referring to the TAV aircraft that the Cerberus team used. “Drop a bomb down the mine.”

  “Okay, but what do we do here?” Kane asked. “We have two sources, right?”

  Brigid shook her head slowly. “I think we just have one source, and one very big, very scattered, receiver,” she said.

  “Then where’s the source?” Kane asked.

  “The mirror originated here, which means the signal originated here,” Brigid theorized. “It was bright silver when we last saw it, before Grant put a ton of ordnance through it.”

  Grant laughed at the memory. At the same time, Mariah issued a warning that the locals seemed to be amassing once more and turning to Nergal—false Nergal, hologram Nergal—for instruction.

  “Of course,” Brigid said, snapping her fingers. “Nergal!”

  “Nergal?” Kane queried.

  “His head, his face—” Brigid said. “It’s blinding. It’s not his head, it’s the mirror. The mirror embedded in the throne.”

  “Then we need to find a way to counter that signal,” Kane realized, “before it’s too late.”

  “Kane,” Brigid said slowly, an idea forming in her head, “do you remember what I did when we went back to Saskatchewan and the landing site of Ullikummis’s space prison?”

  Kane thought for a moment. The incident had occurred just a month before, and had seen himself and Brigid infiltrate the cult of Ullikummis’s followers as they investigated persistent rumors of the stone god’s resurrection. The whole thing had been a bust, but Ullikummis’s acolytes had managed to bring a stone creature to life, utilizing the ferrous content in human blood to drive it. Brigid had managed to turn the acolytes away, falsely assuming the role of her other self, Brigid Haight, who had been created through brainwashing techniques and had worked as Ullikummis’s so-called hand in darkness. Haight was revered as some kind of demigoddess by the faithful, and so Brigid—Baptiste, that is, not Haight—had been able to command them as if she were still in the thrall of that Annunaki brainwashing.

  “You pretended to be—um—someone you weren’t,” Kane said ruefully, avoiding mention of the dark personality that Brigid had once adopted.

  “Precisely,” Brigid said. “And I figure we can do it again. Only question is—who wants to play god?”

  Chapter 18

  Brigid explained her idea via shared Commtact to the Cerberus ops room. “Brewster, I need you to boost the Commtact signal,” she told Brewster Philboyd on the comms desk, “and home in on a frequency you’ll be able to find if you triangulate on our location.”

  “Triangulating,” Philboyd responded, running the locator program on the biolink transponders through his system. “I see a weak broadcast signal,” he said once the data came up on screen, “very localized, roughly fifty feet to your east.”

  From her cover amid the foliage, Brigid eyed the black pyramid, estimating the distance. “That’ll be the one,” she confirmed.

  “Signal currently appears to be on a long loop,” Philboyd informed her as he analyzed the wave algorithms, “frequently breaking and re-forming.

  “What is it I’m looking at here, Brigid?” Philboyd added as he worked his desk in the Cerberus operations room.

  “An ancient Annunaki recording,” Brigid replied with a nonchalance that suggested it was an everyday occurrence. “So old that the data keeps glitching.”

  “I’m copying the frequency over now,” Philboyd assured her, working his computer desk. “What is it you’re after, exactly?”

  “Narrow-beam broadcast,” Brigid told him, “Commtact to signal.”

  “From you?”

  “No, use Kane.”

  “Care to give me an idea of what it is you guys are up to out there?” Philboyd asked, a note of surprise in his voice. “I thought we shot you to Libya, two thousand miles north.”

  “You did,” Kane assured him, speaking over the linked Commtacts for the first time. “We got shanghaied into another jump shortly after. We’ll tell you all about it when we get home. Which reminds me—you think you can send a squad and an interphaser to our nearest location when we give the signal?”

  “I guess we can,” Philboyd told him reassuringly. “You need arms, a mop-up squad?”

  “Just a quick exit,” Kane said.

  “Our interphaser was compromised,” Brigid elaborated.

  “Shot,” Kane said. “Compromised by being shot.”

  “Signals are locked,” Philboyd confirmed. “Say the word and I’ll cut you into the broadcast.”

  * * *

  GRANT HAD SNEAKED back inside the pyramid. His eyesight was functioning the best, which meant he was the logical choice to try to find the weapons and equipment that the locals had stripped from him and his companions. Returning to the pyramid after what they had concluded about their location was strange, like visiting a place you didn’t know that you knew.

  There was no one inside. Everyone had been outside to witness the arena and sacrifice ritual that Grant and his companions had been caught up in, and they had remained outside to search for the Cerberus teammates when they’d absconded in all directions. What the locals did not know was that the Cerberus people had a hidden way to communicate via Commtacts, which meant it was far easier for them to coordinate their movements and work together than anyone suspected.

  Right now, Grant could hear the discussion between Kane, Brigid and Cerberus HQ, and he knew that their time here was running short. Good thing, too, as he was getting sick and tired of seeing everything through a gray filter.

  Grant turned a corner in the lowest level of the pyramid, and almost walked into the guard who had first assisted him from his cell. The man jumped in alarm on seeing Grant—a little bloodied from his battle in the arena—come striding around the corner toward him.

  “Monsieur, you are—” the guard began.

  Without slowing his pace, Grant walked up to the guard and slugged him across the jaw with his fist. “Shut up,” Grant said as the man fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  Grant checked the room that the man had been posted outside. He had to be guarding something—right?

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, KANE WAITED in the foliage beside the pyramid, with Brigid and Mariah close by his side. They had moved around toward the front of the structure and could once more see the glowing figures that waited at the throne and beside it, unmoved from where they had left them.

  “Nergal’s definitely connected to the throne somehow,” Kane confirmed. “A chunk of that mirror must have gotten embedded in it when we shattered it the last time we were here.”

  “Needn’t be a chunk,” Brigid said. “Just the right part for the recording to replay.”

  Mariah shook her head.
“I don’t care how sophisticated we pretend to be,” she said, “the Annunaki tech still seems magical to me.”

  Kane gave her shoulder a reassuring pat. “You’re a caveman,” he said cheerily. “But don’t worry—the snake faces have always played on that when they’ve dealt with humans. You’re in good company.”

  “Are you ready to do this, Kane?” Brigid asked as they watched the figures massing at the base of the pyramid.

  “Yeah,” Kane said. “Give Brewster the signal and count me in.”

  “Okay,” Brigid said. “And remember, Kane—no hamming it up!”

  * * *

  “MY BROTHER NINURTA needs assistance with...matters,” Nergal was saying as the crowd watched. His head glowed like a miniature sun, dazzling the senses of all who had felt its brilliance.

  No one in the crowd suspected that Nergal’s words were a part of a secret recording that had occurred thousands of years before, that the data was repeating in various configurations where it had been brought back to life by a hidden sliver of Tiamat, one that had been brought to the local Waziri tribe months before by a dark-skinned woman named Nathalie. The Waziri were a people with little knowledge of the outside world, and they had accepted the gift and the instructions that had come with it without question. Nathalie had told them to take it to their most sacred site and leave it there. The seed had triggered changes, had brought things Annunaki back to life. Life from death, the Annunaki way.

  And then Nergal pronounced something new, his words still distant as the stars. “People of Waziri,” he said, “your time has come.”

  If one were to listen closely one might have detected the subtle change in Nergal’s accent, but the weakness of the broadcast covered a multitude of sins.

  “I need not this chair,” Kane said, speaking through Nergal. “It has served its purpose and has no place in the ascent to Heaven.”

  * * *

  “ASCENT TO HEAVEN,” Grant muttered as Kane’s words were transferred via the Commtact. “Good one.”

  He had found the stash of arms that had been stripped from him and his colleagues, not in the first room where the guard had been posted but two rooms along, laid out neatly on a stone plinth as if they had been put out for display.

  * * *

  “REMOVE MY CHAIR,” Kane said, his words broadcast through his link to Nergal. “Crush it into powder and bury every piece.”

  Brigid rolled her eyes. “No hamming,” she reminded Kane.

  “With its destruction I will ascend,” Kane continued, ignoring her. “Do this for your god, do this for me and my brother.”

  Then he cut the link, and, as per instructions, Brewster Philboyd continued to jam any further broadcast emanating from the memory core that had become wedged into the throne.

  At the pyramid, people were hurrying up the steps, bringing axes and club-like branches with which they intended to destroy the chair as they had been told. Brigid felt sorry for them, the way that they had been duped—not once but twice.

  “Time we were going, I guess,” Kane said, attracting Brigid’s attention.

  One of Nergal’s adherents was taking an ax to the throne, and as it struck the dazzling figures of Nergal and Ninurta flickered and died, the old recordings destroyed forever. With their passing, something else happened—Kane’s eyesight, along with Brigid’s, Mariah’s and that of everyone else who had been under the fractured mirror’s spell, seemed to suddenly become brighter, normalizing.

  “Man,” Kane swore, rubbing a hand over his eyes, “who switched on the lights?”

  “The signal’s been disrupted,” Brigid said. “It’s not broadcasting into our perceptions anymore.”

  “Yeah, but does it have to be so bright?” Kane grumbled as he led the way back inside the pyramid.

  “Normality can be dazzling when you’re used to darkness,” Brigid told him. “I guess that’s a lesson for anyone who’s been in the thrall of alien dictators.”

  Kane glanced at her, his eyes watering. “Or human ones,” he said.

  * * *

  TRUE TO HIS WORD, Brewster Philboyd had come through, sending Farrell and Beth Delaney to pick up the team, using Cerberus’s second interphaser. They arrived via the parallax point in the pyramid, both dressed in Cerberus whites. Farrell had a shaved head and a goatee beard and hoop earring, and Delaney was blond haired with just a little paunch around her midriff.

  Grant joined them as Kane, Brigid and Mariah found their way back into the room where they had originally materialized and seen the throne and its illusion of Nergal.

  “I found them,” Grant said, handing Kane and Brigid back their respective blasters. He also had the backpack with the broken interphaser in it, wearing it over one massive shoulder.

  “How’s your eyesight?” Brigid asked.

  Grant nodded. “Better,” he said. “Shaky, but it kind of eased back to normal about two minutes ago.”

  “That’s about the time someone put an ax through Nergal’s throne,” Kane confirmed.

  “Troxler’s fading,” Brigid observed wryly, “has faded.”

  A moment later Cerberus Away Team Alpha and their entourage stepped into the quantum window opened by the interphaser and disappeared from the African continent.

  Chapter 19

  “The she-dog stabbed me,” Nathalie said, her voice cracking with pain. She sat on the floor on the djévo room, slumped over and clearly in pain, a tourniquet tied to her upper left leg above where Domi’s knife had severed the artery. The dark red of spilled life issued from the wound, which continued to bleed out.

  The room was imperfectly symmetrical. It had no windows, for it was located deep within the bowels of Redoubt Mike, under the earth of the Louisiana swampland. It always felt too warm to Nathalie, too warm, too dark, and it clung on to the dry smell of burning dust like an obsessive-compulsive hoarder unable to throw anything out. She was light-headed now, from the blood loss, and that only contributed to her impression of heat and rot and claustrophobia.

  The space was small, made smaller yet by the drapes that had been hung from the walls and over the doors, covering it in the dark colors of blood and red wine intermingled with the purples and blacks and deepest blues of bruises on human flesh.

  Where once there had been fluorescent lighting functioning on automated circuits, now there were candles, three dozen of them scattered across every cluttered surface and dotted across the floor like seeds scattered from a farmer’s hand.

  The room was cluttered by an odd selection of mismatched objects—feathers and bones, driftwood and skulls, jars of dried spices and plant roots vied for space along the walls, everything lit by the flicker of candle flames. Everything looked tired and worn, and the flickering light cast by the candles could do nothing to disguise that.

  Papa Hurbon sat across from her in his wheelchair, before the black mirror that dominated one wall opposite the room’s sole door. His gold tooth flickered in the candlelight as he opened his mouth to speak. “Don’t call your enemy a she-dog,” he advised. “Calling an enemy names only diminishes them in your eyes, not in theirs, and makes you underestimate them when the time comes. Like a child calling everyone they loathe dumb-ass—it only serves to confirm to others that the name caller is dumb, and all the more of an ass.”

  Nathalie writhed on the floor, her head swaying as she tried to keep upright. “Please, my beacon, my light. I am dying,” she said. “The white woman wounded me, wounded me bad. Look.”

  Hurbon did not move, though his eyes flicked for a moment to the blood-soaked rag that had been wrapped around his assistant’s leg. “Where are the Cerberus people now?” he asked.

  “Food store,” Nathalie said. “Dead or dying. My poison work...” She stopped, losing her mental thread as her mind threatened to slip into the unconsciousness that prec
edes death.

  “Okay,” Hurbon soothed. “Hush now, child.”

  Before the voodoo houngan, Nathalie keeled over, her body slapping against the floor with that awful sound of flesh turned heavy with illness. She lay there, eyes losing focus, facing the wall and the open doorway, her back to Papa Hurbon. “I’m dying,” she said, her words just a whisper now.

  “Not dying,” Hurbon assured her. “Evolving.”

  With that, Hurbon leaned forward until he could reach the sodden tourniquet tied to his assistant’s left leg. He plucked at it, pulling it down until he had exposed the bloody wound, his fingers red with the woman’s blood. Then, he reached beneath the blanket that covered his missing legs, and into the old leather bag he kept there. The bag was a pouch, large enough for Hurbon to get both hands in, and it had a strap by which it could be carried, like a woman’s purse, its brown surface scuffed, frayed threads showing at its edges. The pouch was full of items that Hurbon found useful—charms and vials and secret powders used in Bizango rituals, the type that even the most adept voodoo practitioners cautioned against handling for fear of displeasing the mystic loa.

  A moment later, Hurbon had withdrawn the item he was searching for, nine months after he had placed it there among the bones and the twisted, colorful ribbons and the fith-fath dolls that looked like people in caricature. The object was yellow-white and small, no longer than Hurbon’s thumbnail. And it was sharp, sharp enough to prick a man’s finger if he grasped it unawares.

  Hurbon leaned down, using the stubby fingers of his left hand to pull apart the skin on Nathalie’s wounded leg, blood budding across the rent like scarlet condensation.

  Nathalie whimpered, aware of the new pain in her leg.

  “Be brave, child,” Hurbon said, plumping the flesh to make the wound wider. Then he reached forward with his other hand and placed the white shard into the gap in Nathalie’s flesh, pressing it there with his thumb the way a man might push a tack into a pin board. Nathalie gasped again, but weakly, her strength and her life having almost departed.