The Fuller Memorandum

by Charles Stross

  “How are you doing this?” she says in a loud whisper. “You shouldn’t even be alive—”

  “I’m one of them, Iris, weren’t you listening? I’m possessed, recursively.” Take aim, I tell my feeder. You don’t want this one, she tastes bad. “Which is, on the face of it, nuts—I’ve never heard of such a thing—but we learn something new every day, don’t we?”

  I let go of her abruptly and step clear to give my minion a clear line of fire. She straightens up and begins to turn, and I realize I miscalculated as she raises her sickle. I duck as she lets fly and the feeder shoots, all at the same time. Iris collapses; something nicks my shoulder and falls off. Stand back, I tell my feeder. Then I walk over to the bed and collect the black sacrificial cords. The sickle did some damage, I realize, and I appear to be bleeding, but I can worry about that once I get Iris tied up.

  By the time I finish binding her wrists and ankles, I’m beginning to feel oddly weak. The noises outside the door to the crypt have died down. Go to sleep, I tell my feeders; they crawl and writhe outside in the tunnels, happy and replete with the feast of new flesh, and need little urging to fall into a state of torpor. It’s becoming hard to think clearly. I know there’s something I ought to be doing, but . . . oh, that. I take the ring-bound black folder from Iris’s improvised altar and tuck it under my arm, then I look at my patient feeder, who stands by the altar with a vacant expression, his eyes luminous in the dark. Go to the entrance to the chapel. Open the doors. A truck will come with men. Lead them here, then sleep.

  He turns and shuffles towards the door, grateful and obedient to the Eater of Souls for granting him this brief existence. Then I am alone in the crypt with Iris. Who has begun to recover from her tasering, and tries to squirm aside as I walk past her to the bed. “Hasta la vista,” I tell her: “Give my regards to the Auditors.”

  Then I keel over on the dusty black satin sheets, dead to the world.

  THERE IS CHAOS IN THE CHAPEL AS THE CULTISTS DESPERATELY prepare to defend the perimeter.

  On the roof, the surviving guards—Benjamin is not among them—have taken up positions around the corners, pointing their guns out at the sea of bodies that slowly shuffle towards the building. Below them, the worshipers on the ground mill and rush in near-terror until three of their number, better organized and equipped than the rest, gather them into groups and set the unarmed to dragging pews into position to form an improvised barricade, while those who bear arms prepare to defend against the creeping wave of darkness.

  Crouching behind the gargoyle at the southwest corner, Michael Digby (orthodontic technician, from Chelmsford) glances sideways at the cowled head of his principale, the sergeant-at-arms responsible for the coven’s guard. “What are we going to do, sir?” he asks quietly.

  “What does it look like, soldier?” Clive Morton (retail manager, from Dorking) studies the darkness with dilated pupils.

  Digby looks back to the field of fire in front of the chapel as a brief snap of gunfire knocks over a clump of drunkenly walking figures that have shuffled out of the long shadows cast by the floodlights in the chapel doorway. “Looks like zombies, sir. Thousands of ’em.”

  “Right. And we’re going to hold out here until dawn, or until All-Highest figures out how to drive them away, or we run out of ammunition. That answer your question?”

  “You mean the only plan is to stand behind a few feet of church benches?”

  “Beats having your soul eaten ...”

  Down below them, the worshipers have dragged the bench seats into position in an arc around the entrance and steps leading up to the chapel. Their fellows inside the building have lifted up the heavy wooden tables and tipped them against the windows, barring entry. They think they’re safe, as long as the armed men on the roof can pick off any shuffling revenants that enter the circle of light. But death is already among them.

  Alexei from Novosibirsk idles in the darkness behind the worshipers, lurking in the vestry where a cultist guard now lies beneath a pile of moth-eaten curtains.

  Alexei is seriously annoyed, but professionally detached from the cock-up and chaos going on around him. The operation has not gone in accordance with earlier plans. He has, as expected, succeeded in infiltrating the vestibule area; the seething chaos outside, accompanied by a panicking mob erupting from the depths of the chapel, has made things run much more easily than anticipated—up to a point. But the ward around his neck is hot to the touch, smoking faintly with a stench of burned hair. And his radio has clicked three times—panic signals from soldiers unable to take their assigned places. Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up. Something has gone wrong, and he can no longer count on backup from Yuri and Anton. Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.

  This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence. If it wasn’t for their annoying habit of infecting further victims through touch, they’d be a trivial obstacle at best; as it is, with his ward and his full-body insulated clothing, not to mention his Ostblock ballistic knife, AKM/100 assault gun, and other tools of the trade, he’s well-equipped to deal with them. Except that there are too damned many, and they won’t stay dead, and the rest of his team are dispersed and in trouble.

  Speaking of trouble, here comes more. Most of the cultists are wearing black robes, or stupidly inappropriate army-surplus camo gear for the guards; if it’s naked and you can count the ribs, it’s probably one of the risen dead. Bonus points for shuffling like a stockbroker on a stag night, and big booby prize if you let it get so close you can see the green luminosity writhing in the depths of its eye sockets . . .

  Alexei melts into the shadows behind the figure climbing the steps from the crypt. It’s wearing a robe and shuffling drunkenly, and he’s about to slide the blade of his knife between its two uppermost cervical vertebrae when he realizes that it is not, in fact, one of the possessed. Which raises some interesting questions. A moment later his gloved hand is covering the climber’s mouth and his knife is at her throat. “Say nothing,” he grunts, tugging her backwards into the vestry. “You want live, yes? Be silent.” The cultist stumbles as he drags her into the shadows, but doesn’t say anything. Alexei rolls her to the ground and has her pinioned in a second. “Where is All-Highest?” he demands, in heavily accented but serviceable English.

  “Downstairs—with the Eater of Souls—” The young woman stiffens for a moment, then sags bonelessly. Alexei rises, wraps himself in the cloak that she won’t be needing anymore, and wipes his knife on the back of her dress. Then he tiptoes towards the steps down to the crypt. If the Eater of Souls is lurking downstairs, he reasons, then it’s very probable that what he came for is to be found there. And Alexei doesn’t give up easily.

  TO THE NORTH, A RED TRUCK CREEPS ALONG A DARKENED AVENUE. Three figures sit atop its roof. One of them holds a white electric violin. Her two guards watch and wonder, entrenching tools raised and ready to shovel mortal remains off the roof should any such encroach. The truck bumps slowly along in low gear, pushing through a sea of withered bodies that sway and jostle slowly. Occasionally there is a crunch or crackle as the truck rolls over bones that failed to get out of its way in time. The driver doesn’t speed up or slow down; to stop in the middle of this unnatural crowd is to court disaster, although none of the feeders has so far attempted to climb aboard the OCCULUS truck.

  Down in the darkened truck cab Major Barnes rides next to the driver, peering into the darkness for any sign of ambush. He talks into his headset: “Two hundred meters in. Dr. O’Brien, do you see any sign of survivors—”

  Mo, atop the cab, raises her bow. “Not right here,” she says shortly. The walking dead are undirected; the grounded metal framework of the truck blocks their ability to sense those who ride within, and the warm meat
on the cab roof is out of easy reach.

  A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. “Down!” he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. “Shooters on the building roofline,” Howe reports: “Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can’t see anyone manning them. The crowd’s thickest there. Defenders have—no, wait.”

  Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. “Doc, can you do anything about them?” Howe asks. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get in there without—”

  Mo raises her bow, strikes a shivering note from the burning strings. Howe winces and moves aside. “Give me some elbow room,” she says flatly. Then she touches the strings lightly, coaxing an eerie, familiar leitmotif from her instrument. “Put this out through the PA circuit,” she mutters, grimly determined.

  Down below, Barnes grimaces tensely and twists input dials on the truck’s external public address systems. The growing wild resonance of die Walkürenritt floods from the big speakers mounted to either side of the cab; the driver looks sidelong at his CO, then floors the accelerator in low gear, adding the roar of the big diesel (and the crunch of unburied bones) to the music. Barnes announces to the back of the truck: “All right, gentlemen, this is going to be an opposed entry and they know we’re coming. Wards, up! Arms, up! Party time in sixty seconds!”

  The risen dead are fleeing, for the most part, out of the way of the truck as it roars and bucks across the path. It’s the music that does it; Mo stands atop the roof, utterly engrossed in tracking the melody. Richard Wagner, it was said, hated violinists: blood drips from her fingertips as the eerie extradimensional resonances of her interpretation of one of his most famous works drags the sound of an entire string section—and a brassy resonance echoing from the metal flanks of the truck—into being.

  The truck crunches across skeletal remnants that lie in rows around the chapel, silent and unmoving. A few bodies, less damaged than the rest, lie near a minivan; others are clustered near the door to the building, which is ajar. A few less emaciated figures lie among the skeletonized forms: of these, most bear the signs of gunshot wounds.

  “Back us up to the door,” Barnes tells the driver. Switching to the common channel: “All right, we’re going in. Standard entry protocol for mass possession. Scary and Howe, over to you. Dr. O’Brien, time to get down off the roof. You can follow with me once we’ve cleared the way. See if we can figure out what we’re looking at.”

  The soldiers pile out of the back of the truck, wearing bright yellow HAZMAT suits, MP5s at the ready. The bodies are packed in so tightly around the steps to the chapel that they dash across rib cages and cloak-swathed torsos on the way to the open door.

  There’s a snap of gunfire from up top: two of the soldiers drop to their knees and reply with a burst of aimed fire. A black-clad figure tumbles from the roofline. One of the soldiers throws something up and over the eaves; the others take cover as the fragmentation grenade explodes.

  “What’s up there?” Mo tries to ask, shouting in Barnes’s ear.

  “Bad guys.” Barnes grins hungrily. “Ah.” He taps the earpiece screwed into his left ear: “Follow me.” The gunfire from the defenders on the roof has stopped as he steps out of the back of the truck and walks towards the chapel entrance. Mo follows him, her violin raised. They’re halfway across the ten-meter gap when a silhouette lurches clear of the side of the building and throws itself towards the major. Barnes raises his HK-5 and plants a neat three-round group in the middle of the assailant’s torso; by the time Mo’s bow makes contact with an eerily blue-glowing string, the fluorescence in the back of the revenant’s eye sockets has begun to fade. “Bloody fans, always waiting outside the dressing room ...” Barnes cocks his head on one side, listening. “Dr. O’Brien? This way, now.”

  They’re inside in seconds, and one of the soldiers pulls the tall oak door shut behind them. The chapel hall is full of bodies, the long-dead and the fresh draped across one another in promiscuous embrace. Some of the recent bodies are naked: in the soldier’s infrared vision they still glow with body heat.

  “Look sharp, some of them made it to the door,” Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.

  “Trapdoor over here, sir!” One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.

  “Secure it,” says Howe. “Tidily, our boy might still be down there.” He doesn’t say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.

  As the soldiers move in, something runs at them, out of the tunnel, frighteningly fast. There’s a burst of automatic fire. “Hold that!” yells Howe, as the revenant comes apart in a tumbling rain of dust and bones. “Batons!” A pair of troops step forward, holding heavily customized cattle prods before them—electrical shock-rods, customized with signal generators to loosen the grip of extradimensional horrors on their walking hosts. There’s a snap and crackle of sparks as they test their tools.

  “You think he’s down there,” Mo says quietly.

  Major Barnes nods. “Cultists. They go to ground for their rituals.”

  Up ahead, Scary triggers his shock-stick, sparking the terminals: he grins at Howe. “I love the smell of—”

  “Don’t say it, son, unless you want a week on toilet duty.”

  “Aw, Sarge.” He steps forward, bending to follow the lead team into the cellar. “That’s harsh.”

  There are no living bodies in the tunnel. Some of the possessed are still stirring feebly, their luminous eyes guttering in the darkness, but the flying wedge of soldiers with shock-sticks shut them down in short order: it’s easier than clubbing baby seals.

  At the end of the tunnel they come to an open door. Now there’s noise, and the troops take up position to either side of the entrance, ready for a forced entry. But while they’re waiting, Dr. O’Brien and Major Barnes arrive. Mo holds her violin, ready for a killing chord. Barnes glances at her, then waves Howe back from the right-hand side of the door. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.

  “It stinks, sir. You saw the sov kit back there?”

  “I did. I reckon we’ve got company. More to the point, we haven’t found our boy yet. Could be a hostage situation.”

  “Shit. I’ll tell Moran to bring up the snoop kit—”

  Mo’s eyes are hollow shadows in the darkness. “Major?”

  “What is it?”

  She points at the entrance with a hand half-folded around something. “He’s definitely in there.” She unfolds her hand, palm upwards to reveal the cracked and battered screen of Bob’s iPhone, icons glowing balefully in the darkness. “Got a soul tracker on this thing. He’s alive, and he’s not alone—”

  Which is when the screaming starts.

  ALEXEI IS BECOMING ANNOYED.

  He’s been down in the crypt for half an hour, moving with painstaking care. The place is literally crawling with the risen dead, feeding on the dwindling survivors of the Black God Slave Cult—some of whom have barricaded themselves into the ossuary, with predictable consequences—and only sheer luck and the revenants’ lack of situational awareness has saved him. They don’t communicate with each other, don’t raise the alarm when he lands among them and lashes out with a sharp-edged entrenching tool or shoots their neighbors with a silenced pistol firin
g banishment rounds. It would be good news under other circumstances, but Alexei is acutely aware that he has a serious lack of backup and a mission that under other circumstances would be hopelessly compromised.

  The sounds of gunfire from up above had nearly died out ten minutes ago. Now they’re getting louder and more frequent. And there’s something different about them: different weapons, much tighter fire discipline. The new shooters are professionals, but they’re not his squad—they’re firing NATO spec ammunition.

  As it is, it looks like the only way out is in; if he can find somewhere to hole up until morning, he stands a chance of exfiltrating on foot, and if he can meet the mission’s core objective, retrieve the missing document, so much the better—

  And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.

  Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in—at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.

  A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed. Sacrificial victim, thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal—especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress and expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.