Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  Brigid peered into the generator’s portal, saw the ghost moving within, the hint of a pained face brushing past the cobwebbed glass. There was a way to stop this, a way to bring down Hurbon and his perfect cheat that allowed him to survive the impossible.

  “Kill the dead,” Brigid realized.

  * * *

  ANU STRODE FROM the djévo room, his scaled skin glistening in the flickering candlelight of the corridor beyond. His breath was hot, a hint of acid at the back of his throat—the taste of anticipation.

  The torn drape swished back behind him as his tail curled into the gray-walled corridor behind his body, providing balance for legs regrown for the first time in uncounted millennia. Two figures lay out there in the corridor, two men with bare chests and dark skin, warrior types who had been roundly defeated as they had tried to protect the other him, the one called Hurbon. Hurbon was not even a memory now—Anu had no awareness of him, nor any interest in learning about him. Papa Hurbon had foolishly believed he could control the Annunaki inside, that he would be the master of the monster he unleashed by imbibing the genetic download from Tiamat’s crushed tooth. He had run the tests across the globe to work out the best way to do this, constantly refining the ingredients he added to the mix; for that was the way of the Bizango, the outlawed priests of the blackest voodoo arts—to mix components of their magic like a chef mixing a cake. But Hurbon had been a fool—he had spent nine months preparing for this moment, twice that time getting the pieces in place, obtaining the ingredients. But he had not reckoned for what the Annunaki really were, multidimensional things whose existence crossed space and time. To try to cage that in human form, to restrain that with a human mind, was grand folly.

  Hurbon had imagined he would be trading up, swapping his tired, deformed body for one of immense power, an Annunaki god’s that he could control. Instead, the body had obliterated him, deleting his consciousness like an unwanted computer file.

  Anu’s nostrils flared as he took in the scent of the corridor. It smelled of damp, spilled blood, mold.

  There had been another, a female, he remembered. Red hair and eyes of green. Hadn’t there been another like her, all those millennia ago, when he had tested Cain? Perhaps. All apekin seemed largely the same to the Annunaki, treating them as individuals was like trying to apply specific personality traits to ants.

  Anu’s stomach rumbled, reminding him of the trauma of rebirth, of how much energy it had taken to grow this form from the DNA shunt. He needed to eat.

  The female apekin would provide a warm meal, he realized, nostrils twitching once again. He turned his head, tracing her scent in the abandoned corridor of death. She was close, he sensed.

  Anu turned, his great lizard body a rippling flex of shimmering gold on muscle. He would follow his nose to the female apekin, and then he would dine.

  * * *

  IN THE ROOM housing the cold-fusion generator, Brigid reached for the lock on the generator hatch. The hatch was designed to give access to an engineer, and required a code along with a timer delay before it would open. Brigid remembered the code from the last time she had been here, when she had studied the designs for the redoubt that were held in the comprehensive database at Cerberus. Then, this had all been done remotely, but this time she would have to do it on-site.

  Hidden magnetic locks clunked as Brigid’s code was accepted, and a siren alarm bellowed a single note that sounded something like a duck being strangled. Accompanying the siren, a spinning red light came to life at the doorway to the room, casting the whole chamber in a swirling scarlet light. The countdown from code to final unlock appeared on the face of the lock in bright white digital figures: 02:00.

  Brigid’s hand rested on her holstered blaster. Two minutes. Now all she could do was wait.

  She heard the shuffling noise just a few seconds later, and automatically stepped away from the porthole in the generator. It was coming from outside—something was moving down the corridor. Moving closer.

  Brigid paced across the small chamber silently, pressed herself to the wall by the open doorway and peered out. There was no light in the corridor outside, just the flickering illumination of a candle held in the jaws of a tobacco-brown skull. The noise was coming from the far end of the corridor, where the flickering flame failed to illuminate.

  Brigid watched, holding her breath, narrowing her eyes to try to penetrate the darkness at the distant end of the corridor. She could make out the edges of door frames, the glistening ripples of the water that seemed to smother every floor of this old redoubt.

  And then she saw the movement in the darkness as that shuffling susurrus grew louder. He was closer than she expected, only twenty feet away, skin shimmering, a liquid gold like honey. She saw the leg first, clawed foot striking the watery floor with a splash. Her heart sank in that moment, for secretly she had hoped it was Kane, her anam-chara, all right and come to crack some damn-awful joke about dispatching Papa Hurbon’s Annunaki form once and for all. He’s nothing but voodoo doo-doo now—that was the kind of thing Kane would have said. Brigid smiled grimly as the words ran through her head, Kane’s voice locked there with all the other perfect memories that she always retained.

  The beast was closer now, muscular legs crushing the floor beneath it with every stomp, right leg dragging from some wound Brigid had not seen inflicted, body seen only in fragments where its golden sheen caught the flickering luminance of the lone candle flame.

  It was the thing that Hurbon had become, naked and so tall that the spines atop his head almost brushed the ceiling, even here in the corridor where those ceilings were higher.

  Brigid rolled back around the wall, pushing herself out of sight, away from the open door.

  “I can see you,” the duotonal voice taunted as Brigid disappeared from view, “apekin.”

  Brigid’s hand was still on her blaster, pulling it from the holster at her hip. Her eyes flicked up to take in the timer display on the generator’s door: 01:06

  Over a minute still. Too long to hide. Nowhere to hide in here anyway, not really.

  Anu’s voice called again from outside the door, closer now, the splashing of his footsteps loud. “I can smell you,” he said. “You smell good enough to eat.”

  Brigid glanced around the chamber, searching for the angles, the places where her smaller and weaker frame could be accommodated, where the Annunaki monster could not reach. There was nothing, nowhere, only inside the generator itself maybe and even that would not open for another 59 seconds...

  00:58...

  00:57...

  Brigid twisted, reaching for the door frame and pulling herself up, scrambling up the wall like a bug.

  00:54...

  00:53...

  * * *

  ANU ENTERED THE ROOM containing the generator, favoring his leg where his ankle tendons had been cut. He entered fearlessly—an Annunaki does not know fear—he rules.

  There was a countdown glowing on the door to the generator.

  00:42

  A porthole window glowed an eerie blue, the color of snow seen in the twilight.

  But there was no sign of the woman, the apekin with the red hair.

  Anu took another step forward, moving farther into the room. He could smell her, almost taste her. He had just been born. He was ravenous.

  00:37

  Anu took another step, his serpentine tail slithering into the room behind him, the glow of the countdown lighting his black-red eyes.

  Brigid leaped, dropping down from her hiding place over the door frame, where she had wedged herself using her arms to press against the ceiling above her while her booted heels jammed down against the top of the frame. She dropped down, landing on Anu’s golden back and drilling the muzzle of her TP-9 blaster into his side.

  Anu spun, growling, as Brigid clicked down the trigger
and fired point-blank into his flesh. She ran the barrel of her blaster up and down the Annunaki’s side, trying to find—or make—a weak spot between his ribs.

  “Off me!” Anu growled, staggering lopsidedly backward and crashing against the wall beside the open doorway.

  Brigid struck the wall, her breath knocked out of her as she tried to hang on to the Annunaki progenitor. The TP-9 shook in her right hand, rattling against Anu’s flank as it delivered bullet after bullet into his armor-plated skin. Some pierced, finding their way into the folds of flesh, only to be stopped by the incredible hardness of the muscles beneath.

  00:24

  Anu lashed out with his tail, flicking at Brigid as she continued to cling to his back. Brigid clung tightly, hanging there as the Annunaki beast thrashed and wailed, the TP-9 still drumming against his side.

  Then Brigid shifted her aim, clinging to Anu’s throat as she drew the semiautomatic pistol around and targeted the monster’s head. The trigger squeezed again, sending a stream of 9 mm bullets into the reptile’s face. Bullets flew in all directions as they struck the armored hide and raced away, some rattling against the fractured glass and metal sides of the cold-fusion generator. The generator continued its countdown, the pallid glow of blue light from the porthole dimming.

  00:16

  “Primitive bitch,” Anu growled in irritation. “Learn your place.” He flipped his tail, his whole body shuddering as he jumped in place.

  Brigid’s grip faltered, she slipped and suddenly she was spinning and falling, the world around her a swirl of shadows and candle flame. She landed with a thump against the floor or wall, she could not tell which. Her head was spinning, still caught in the whirl that had gripped her as she was tossed away by Anu.

  When Brigid looked up, Anu was looming over her, baring his teeth in the dimming glow of the generator. Her blaster—where was her blaster? It had slipped from her hand as she fell; she could hear the skittering noise it made as it landed, realizing only now what had happened.

  00:08

  00:07

  Brigid had to move. The generator was about to open, and damned if she knew what that would do—if it would kill Hurbon’s Annunaki form or strengthen him. She thought...she hoped...that without fusion the death goddess’s body would discorporate. It was something she did not want to be here to see. So she moved, against the pain in her body, the fire that seemed to burn in every muscle, every cord.

  Anu lunged at her, a clawed hand swiping for her chest as she rose to her feet and ran. The claws snagged Brigid’s chest, tearing the shadow suit and plunging deep within, cutting through skin and flesh.

  Brigid was still moving, though, still hurtling away, all momentum and desperation, fired through with that thing that Kane had taught her, that survival instinct that drove humanity’s progress. She was through the door in a moment, out into the corridor as the timer flicked through the final seconds of the lock release. Another siren alarm like a strangled duck blurted from overhead speakers.

  00:03

  00:02

  00:01

  Chapter 31

  The door to the cold-fusion generator opened. Above, the whirling red light was throwing its illumination across the four walls of the room in quick succession, Jackson Pollocking the arrival of death.

  Anu turned, hearing the click of the final magnetic lock, the hiss of air as the generator shut down and the door pulled back. The familiar thrum of the generator had ceased, its constancy now become an absence, a void.

  The figure in the generator lurched forward. It had the body of an Annunaki, a female in form and depleted, savaged, ruined by the way Tiamat’s rebirth program had botched her. She was tall, emaciated, with arms like sticks and fingers like twigs. Her skin sloughed from her bony frame, its rippled pattern like that of a lizard, charcoal black and edged with fire as it burned away on contact with the air.

  “Lily?” Anu gasped, his eyes meeting the lizard-slit eyes of the woman who was death, vertical red-black stripes in a pus-yellow bed. “Lilitu, is that you?”

  The thing that had once been Lilitu, that had been known as Ezili Coeur Noir in her final life, reached for Anu, her ancestor, her grandfather, with arms devoid of flesh, with hands whose component parts were flaking away like seeds on the breeze.

  The dead thing touched Anu a moment later, arms wrapping around him, body flopping into a hug when all her strength had departed. Wisps of her emaciated flesh were burning away, looking like fireflies in the night as they fizzled in shooting embers toward the ceiling of the room, fizzled and went out.

  Anu felt the thing’s weight lighten even as she fell against him, felt her become lighter still as the body discorporated and she became bones and dust. “Granddaughter?” he asked, his duotonal voice choked as he breathed in the dusty essence of her rapidly disintegrating form. “What did they do to you?”

  Reborn Lilitu burned away, her substance becoming nothingness in a matter of moments.

  Anu stood alone in the aftermath, feeling the faint press of Lilitu’s body—the daughter of Enki, his son, and Ereshkigal, his own granddaughter—still whispering against his skin.

  Whisper and burn.

  There was burning there, not without but within. Anu felt it racing through his body, igniting his cold blood, eating through the flesh.

  When she had been reborn, Lilitu—Ezili Coeur Noir—had been so badly messed up that her touch had brought death to all organic matter. Her touch was the touch of death. Even for an Annunaki.

  Anu was eternal, but so was Lilitu. Her touch was as devastating as any plague, any disease. Even the Annunaki could fall. They had suffered the scarabae sickness, a cancer caused by the sunlight on Earth. They had been killed at the end of the Godkiller, a blade carved from Ullikummis’s own body. They had been killed through the Boolean algebra of Ereshkigal, who had mapped the secret mathematics behind life itself. And they could be killed by an Annunaki so corrupted that she was now more a dead thing than living, whose very touch came from the inky darkness at the far side of the grave.

  Anu fell, his chest searing within, his body quaking and trembling. He struck the deck with a crash like overhead thunder, his muscular body wasting away even as he settled there on the floor.

  Above, the red light spun around and around, warning all of the danger.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE GENERATOR ROOM, Brigid Baptiste lay propped against the wall, blood oozing from the wound in her chest. She had heard the fusion generator door open, had heard the scuffle as the dead thing had met with the gold-scaled Annunaki. He had called her granddaughter, which meant he had to be Anu, according to the Annunaki family tree that she had drawn back in the Cerberus redoubt, when she had begun to piece the structure of their enemy together years before.

  Brigid listened, waiting, not really knowing what was happening, not really wanting to move. She hurt where she had been stabbed by Anu’s claw. She hurt in other places, too, aches and scrapes and burns. And there was tiredness, her muscles suffused with it, her mind swimming in exhaustion.

  She heard Anu collapse, his gigantic body striking the floor like thunder just a few feet from where Brigid sat...a few feet and a wall away.

  She lay there a long time, propped against the wall, listening to the nothingness as Anu’s body deteriorated and died, ravaged by the faulty program that Tiamat had passed onto the reborn form of Lilitu years ago.

  When it was over, Brigid did not know. She was too tired to place when it had happened; her mind was slipping in and out of consciousness and she could not really know how much time had passed.

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, BRIGID OPENED her eyes and realized she had been asleep. The blood was warm and sticky on her chest, the pain nagging like a stray dog barking after midnight in the next street.

  She pushed herself up,
hissing between clenched teeth as new levels of pain shot through her. She could hear nothing from the room behind her, no noise, no battle. Nothing had come to kill her while she slept, so she figured that was a good sign.

  She moved, shuffling slowly back to the room with the generator, baby steps that were accompanied by straining breaths. At the door, Brigid peered into the generator room. The guttering candle had all but burned itself out. The generator door was open and dark, the subconscious hum of the generator silenced. There were dark spots on the floor and walls—blood, shell casings. And there was nothing, an eerie patch where nothing had bled or fallen or scraped, a space that seemed almost as if it had been swept clean by some almighty hand. Anu was gone and so was the thing from the generator, the unborn thing that should never have been. It was over.

  * * *

  SLOWLY, WEARILY, BRIGID took her first tentative steps along the corridor and back to the djévo room where she had left Kane and Grant. Domi and the other members of CAT Beta were on an upper level of the redoubt where Brigid hoped they were safe, and her own away team had to be her top priority just now.

  With each step, the wound in her chest seemed to burn a little stronger, ache a little more. That monster had tried to rip out her heart.

  Each breath was strained, and Brigid halted, leaning against a wall. She opened her eyes and realized she had drifted asleep for a moment as she leaned there against the wall. She could not tell if she had slipped out of consciousness for a few seconds or for minutes. The darkness of the redoubt, the warmth and her own exhaustion were all conspiring against her now, beckoning her to lie down, to give up.