Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (4 page)

They’d been on the run, building to this day, ever since.

On the side of the stairwell, she found the hole she had cut that led into a utility shaft. It was tight, but she squeezed through it and found her footing on the stirrups of the zip line. She clipped herself into the harness and squeezed the regulator. She flew up through the darkness as the weights she was connected to fell down. She whisked past rats and loose material at breakneck speeds, clearing the rest of the floors in seconds. At the top, she stepped out onto the roof and cut the line with her knife, making sure no one could follow her using that particular route.

She walked away as some overzealous trooper fired up through the shaft. The bullets stopped almost immediately and she could hear the soldier being berated by his or her commanding officer. She threw the first switch on the control panel. She needed the troopers to be oblivious to what was going on around them. The aging speakers blared to life and babbled out a cacophony of prerecorded noise: animal sounds, growls and shrieks, and cages rattling. Sounds designed to mask the noises of what was going on in the prison itself.

While her enemy climbed the stairs, she slipped into her combat armor, a Kevlar bodysuit with matching gloves and boots with magnetic combination locks. Over that, she put on an impact resistant vest and strapped on articulated leg armor. A harness went over her neck giving her huge shoulders and a high steel collar. The flexible neck rings snapped into the helmet in three places. The last piece of her defense came out of her backpack. This is what she had gone to Haiti for, and what so many others had given their lives to create. Dr. Oueste swore that it would work, that he had tested it and it had proven adequate to the task. Adequate didn’t make Pandora feel very good, but that was all she could get out of the madman who pretended to be a scientist.

Pandora threw another switch and powered up the building’s internal sensors. A bank of micro-monitors jumped to life as cameras in the stairwell suddenly began to broadcast grainy images of the men moving up toward her position. She flipped on the microphone, tapped it, and spoke. “Can I ask you a question Mister Ys?”

Pandora watched as the alien raised his bullhorn. It blared again, echoing through the stairwell. “By all means, but it won’t change anything.”

“What are you doing here? Why did you invade? My grandfather believed that you weren’t interested in humans, that when you finally left the Mesozoic invertebrates, you were going to leap past humanity into the future, after men had gone extinct. What changed your minds?”

Ys located the camera and addressed her through it. “We were perfectly content to leave humans alone, but then we started having problems. Somehow, someone here figured out how to exclude us. We can’t insert any agents, and any that we drop in beforehand never return. We are not fond of Dead Time. You and your little band of rebels, or someone like you, have blocked us. We came to stop you, from creating the Dead Time, or failing that, finding the generator and destroying it.”

Beneath her mask her face screwed up in puzzlement. “How exactly am I responsible for that?” She flipped another switch and whispered a tiny prayer, hoping that her trap wouldn’t be noticed for a few more minutes. Timing was everything. Around the world similar traps were being sprung. A few minutes’ warning, and the Great Race might have enough notice to escape back through time.

“We don’t particularly know.” He moved to the next camera, cautious steps flanked by scuttling human soldiers. “We gave your people, one of your relatives actually, the technology to block us over small areas once. We used it to build a prison for some of our own less desirable members. We assumed you had figured out how to widen the application of the barrier.”

“So you invaded the world and conquered the planet because you couldn’t see what we were doing?” Pandora chuckled. “When exactly are we supposed to have erected this barrier?” She switched her attention to the other screens. There were things moving in the prison. The cell doors were swinging open.

Mister Ys looked at his watch. “We lose contact in exactly three minutes. Unless we find your equipment and destroy it.”

Pandora threw the last switch, the one that unlocked the doors from the stairwell to each floor. The actuation was time-delayed. She had less than a minute before things got really bad. “Is that how time works? Can you change the future by altering the past? If you destroy the machine, the barrier will fall, but then why would you invade in the first place? What about causality and paradox?”

“Time isn’t as rigid as you humans would like it to be. There is fluidity. You may not be able to break the laws of time, but you can bend them. Once we find your machine and destroy it, the barrier you will erect will never have been, but we are already here. We can’t simply be erased from existence.”

“That’s what my grandfather said. He warned me that using time against you would be pointless. He said you were grandmasters, that you played the long game superbly, and as long as you had players on the field, you would be nearly invincible.”

“I knew your grandfather. Spent some time in him. He was clever for a human.”

“My parents were much more clever. Did you ever meet them?”

He was on the floor below her. “Your father, Robert Peaslee? I never had the privilege. I knew him by reputation. I’ve read his file.”

Endora “Pandora” Peaslee pulled the plug on her control board and then smashed it with the heel of her boot. “Did it ever dawn on you Yithians that I might take after my mother? She had an alias as well.”

Twelve soldiers swarmed out of the stairwell, red dots appeared on her chest, but not one man pulled the trigger. “Your mother was Megan Halsey, the so-called Reanimatrix. She had access to a primitive reanimation formula.”

Pandora went down on her knees trying to appear less threatening. “We’ve made some improvements over the years.” Beneath her mask she smiled. “We didn’t build a field generator, Mister Ys. We didn’t try to exclude you from the game; that was likely impossible. We just found a way to keep you from using any of the pieces.”

A sense of panic suddenly filled Mister Ys voice. “The rest of the resistance, where are they?” He barked orders at his troops, “Find them! Kill them!”

Pandora assumed a crouched position. “You still want to kill the Resistance? Pointless really. I’m afraid they are already dead.”

Mister Ys fired a shot and struck Pandora in the shoulder, spinning her around and knocking her to the floor. Her armor was barely scratched. “Whatever you and the resistance have conjured up, whatever you’ve cobbled together, I assure you we shall end it, here and now. You and your friends will be liquidated.”

Pandora sat up rubbing her shoulder. “I told you, Mister Ys, the resistance is already dead.”

From the darkness of the stairs, broken shapes moved and stumbled up on to the roof. They had been men once, and alive, but they weren’t either anymore. Pandora’s formula, her reagent, had transformed them into something bestial, something subhuman. They shambled out of the cages they had been held in and with each step gained speed. There were hundreds of the things, pouring out onto the roof like ants swarming a piece of candy. There were only a dozen armed soldiers, and the unstoppable wave of undead washed over them. Gunfire did little to slow them down, and as man after man fell, the desperate sound of the remaining soldiers and their pathetic guns did little but serve as an attraction to the things that screamed and bit and spread their infection.

“This is your plan, Miss Pandora?” Mister Ys shouted, marching toward her, swinging the gun back and forth between his quarry and the things that were tearing his men apart. “You’ve weaponized a reanimation reagent, made it contagious. I assume some sort of retrovirus. Do you really think we can’t put a stop to this plague of yours?”

She tore the package open and reveled the sigil beneath it, a stylized, tentacular thing that seemed to crawl out of infinity. Ys hissed at the thing but anything he was going to say was drowned out as Pandora began to recite a necessary bit of poetry.

   “Strange is the light which black stars doth shine,
   And men become monsters beneath a yellow sign,
   Lost Carcosa rises ruined, but stranger still,
   Sending ravenous hordes bent to Yhtill’s will.”

“You dare!” Mister Ys was screaming, but Pandora could barely hear him, the chant filled her ears. “You invite the Yellow King. Are you mad? He will lay waste to this world, warp everything to his own corruption.” For the first time ever she saw fear in the eyes of a Yith. “Please, don’t do this. We would have given you a paradise.” He fell to his knees and scowled. “Do you really think that you can control it? Do you and yours think you can bear the Mantle of the King? Hear my words little girl, the Pallid Mask will give you his power, a taste of it at least, but in time it will worm its way inside. It will gnaw at you, corrupt you, and leave you a hollow empty shell.” The undead paused as he emptied the clip in their direction, but only for a moment.

Across the world, Pandora’s sisters continued the invocations that would bind the undead members of the Resistance to their service, and in turn dedicated themselves to the service of Hastur. In the sky, the sun slowly declined into a Yellow Sine, pulsing with a sickening rhythm. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” she whispered softly.

The curtain had been drawn, the Song of Cassilda sung, the second act was imminent. It was time for the King in Yellow to send his terrible messenger. Her army, her subjects, thousands of undead, fell prostrate before her. They were hungry; she could sense it. They were ravenous, capable of consuming all they could lay their hands on. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

Through time and space, the Yellow Sine took its measure, and upon the world the Dead Time fell. Somewhere in what was left of her humanity, Pandora Peaslee hoped that someday, somehow, some men, some humans might survive.

But not today.

Beneath her helmet, the Pallid Mask settled into its rightful place. Pandora Peaslee assumed the role of Yhtill and headed south, toward the arcology.

Her army followed.

by J. Childs-Biddle
 

Dr. Mary Ambrose wasn’t, and hadn’t, been listening to her patient for at least ten minutes. She muted him, his accusations and revelations silenced, his hands flapping to emphasize his words as she watched the space behind his head. Black oil oozed from the light socket there, and she focused on how it pulsated in rhythm to the soft pitter-patter of words from his complaints. The viscous fluid reached out for a second, paddling the space between it and the back of her patient’s head, trying close the distance in between by swimming through air. It almost touched him, then withdrew quickly, peeking shyly out from just inside the plug. A broken giggle, high-pitched and malicious, rang out and made her want clap her hands over her ears to block it out.

“Are you listening to me?” The patient asked. The silence triggered an automatic response as she tilted her head and feigned interest in his concerns. The laughter intensified, and her hands trembled as she willed them to hold her pen instead of ripping at her ears. The patient smiled, satisfied he struck the right chord and that he was again the center of her universe, if only for 45 minutes. He continued with his numbered list of small harms and inconsequential nuisances.

The oil in the light socket mimicked her patient. It shifted with the strength of his words, feeding on the vibrations of sound bouncing off walls. He hit a loud note, the agonies of communicating clearly with his spouse increasing his volume to a wail, and broke the surface tension of the bubble. It burst, a cackle its death wail, and splattered the back of his head forcefully. He rubbed his neck, oblivious to the black-blue fluid dripping between his shoulder blades.

The pop of fluid brought her back to him. She had scribbled notes but they were useless: half-words lost in margins filled more eagerly with inked eyeballs and screaming mouths. She flipped through them, thankful talk therapy was repetitive. It was the same people going over the same things and having the same epiphanies they always forgot by the next week. If her mind wandered, the road map constructed by humans with the red and blue lines of their personal miseries was easy to follow back home.

“I think you’ve really made some progress today, John. We can discuss some suitable boundaries for working with your partner in greater detail next weekend. Please check out with the receptionist. She can schedule your next appointment,” she spoke with the calm neutrality of a telephone operator. She switched him from a location of outpouring revelations back to a place where he would need to hold his feelings, like a hand of aces, to his chest.

Once he left, she glanced over to the light socket. It was unmarked, a glossy, plastic white. She breathed in, and her anxiety cut her deep breath into half-gasps. She took another breath, more successful this time, and glanced out the window.

It was a pretty day, but every day was pretty now. The pure-ocean blue of the sky emphasized how white, fluffy, and non-threatening the clouds were. The trees seemed to reach up to it, their long arms dressed in ever-green sleeves worshipping as though Mayday revelers. The grass was too long, but it invited tumbling around and afternoon picnics. She had little doubt when she walked home tonight, the temperature would be perfect. Even she longed to be free from the office, to sit down, and absorb the tranquility of the scene.

From the corner of her eye, the ground shifted. It was only an inch or so, nothing she would see if she started at it straight on. She pinched her lips together hard enough to taste blood.

“You really ought to be more careful in your sessions, Mary,” he spoke quietly. His tongue lingered around the S sounds as though it was prodding a sore spot in his mouth. She spun around in her chair.

“Dr. Fisher. I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware you were…”

His shadow moved first, a few seconds ahead of the hunched shoulders responsible for it. It dragged him along as though it was his undertaker, until he stood on the other side of her desk. He leaned over the pictures of her wife and her dog. His corpse-heavy hand landed on her shoulder and the swampy scent of wet decomposition overwhelmed her. She gagged and a children’s song came to her, the voices a screeching child’s cacophony of syllables:              

“
Ring a’ ring a rosy
Burning nice and toasty”

She snapped away from it, swallowing the salt-water taste in her mouth, the taste of the ocean as it poured into every part of a person before they were devoured by waves. He smiled, sharp teeth barely taking shape before flickering away into average dentistry.

 “I wasn’t aware you were in the office today,” she finished, with false brightness. She placed her hand over his. It was sticky. An oozing sliminess coated her fingers. She brushed his touch away, without changing expression. He moved back and fresh air rushed in to replace the dankness of him.

“Management reported some issues with the sessions and wanted me to make sure everything was on the up and up. It is, isn’t it? A-okay?” From a few feet away, he was average. He was a study in spheres: a dome of shiny skull with greasy hair combed over it, a belly bulging round with too many meals, and his hands jointed balls too plump to work effectively.

 “Oh. Yes. Fine, really. I have some personal issues, and with the holiday coming up…” She rattled off what sounded like the most appropriate answer.

 He waved his hand as though the information was expected, and then forgotten as non-consequential. “Good. I thought as much. Told them you were the kind of doctor who focuses on the bottom line.”

 Dr. Fisher whistled
Ring Around the Rosy
as he soft-shoed his way out of her office. His shadow brushed the edge of her desk and turned the walnut wood pitch black. He turned at the door and gave her one last nod of approval.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early, Doctor.”

*
         
 
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The air was heavily perfumed by honeysuckle vines, layered over the persistent odor of smoke. She focused on her thoughts, mentally going through the notes of her therapy sessions. The walk home was short enough, and she could ignore the burning smell peeking around the façade of what a summer evening should be.

Her wife, Lindsay, greeted her at the door. Lindsay was all enthusiasm, with her waving arms and golden-blond hair seeming to envelope Mary on the threshold, wiping away all of the troublesome moments where something almost existed. Mary took a whiff of her wife’s skin, an intoxicating mixture of sea-salt and sweat, and returned the embrace.

After dinner, the dirty plates sat as their audience to the trials of their day. Mary would go over vague details from her patients, touching on the monotony of going over the same thing again and again. Lindsay spoke about issues she was having with perspective, of getting something to be the right color. Mary then briefly mentioned Dr. Fisher, and Lindsay pinched her face up in disgust.

“He’s such a creep, Mary. I don’t know how you keep working for him,” she spoke. Lindsay’s history of relationships with others was marked by how easily she transitioned between them. She grew-up without understanding hardship, and it cultivated her thoughtlessness into a lifestyle. She believed transitions were easy things, and did not suffer that which was grating or difficult. Mary suffered through things, and it was as much of a conflict of misunderstanding as Lindsay would allow between them.

“It’s not that bad. He’s even sort of okay, once you get to know him.” Mary lied. It was an easy mistruth, one she told out as much out of protection as habit. Lindsay never worked, as the idea of being managed was distasteful to her. Mary insisted she stay busy with her paintings, focusing on her art. Lindsay produced stock work, filling canvases with pastoral landscapes, fruit bowls, and horses in motion. She thought she should be an artist, so she focused on the results of such rather than the process.

Even with the insulation of her airy personality to keep her warm and safe, Lindsay would stop sleeping. The paintings would take on the sickly, blue-green hue of the ocean. Faces appeared, smashed against the glass windows of the white-washed cottages, screaming to be released. She painted decomposition, hollow-eyed horses, and fires in the distance. She asked Mary if she thought she needed help, or perhaps to find something easier, like a part-time job.

During those episodes, she relied on Mary, innately afraid of how psychotherapy could strip her of her defenses. Mary could control those intrusive thoughts. She did it every day, unwinding the twisted knots that made up the psyche of others. It was easier for her and safer for her wife if Lindsay stayed within closed doors, her most difficult challenge her weekly trip to the grocery. Dealing with others, working with them in a close environment, caused folie à deux, a shared slip in reality. Each person involved increased the difficulty in putting things back into place exponentially.

Lindsay’s dreams were as deeply as she ever swam into darkness and she nearly drowned emotionally under their weight. Mary couldn’t risk the sort of madness a job would cause. She couldn’t bear the consequences if Lindsay’s brief interludes turned into Mary’s world of constantly staring into the shadows. She lived in terror of what
They
would do if they ever had reason to think her wife knew anything. She burned her wife’s paintings, and the pervasive spell would break like a fever. Lindsay returned to her cheery carelessness. The cottages washed their windows, the fruit glistened fresh and inviting, and the horses romped in too-green fields.

The couple cleaned up the dishes, the playful splashes of water becoming passionate kisses. They made love on the kitchen counter. After, Lindsay lay her head on Mary’s shoulder, out-of-breath, her cheeks and breasts flushed pink from their efforts.

“Thank you so much, for everything you do to take care of everyone.”

Mary buried her head in her wife’s sun-bleached hair, using it to hide her tears.

*
         
 
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*
 

“I don’t think anybody understands me.” The patient huddled inside her jacket, trying to disappear in the extra folds of fabric. Mary looked up from her notes, from her drawings of terrified eyes and hungry maws.

“Why do you feel that way?” she asked, clinically.

The patient shrugged and looked out the window. The pupils of her eyes dilated, only for a millisecond, but Mary took note of it. Something slipped outside of the window and the patient had seen it. The woman spoke distantly, saying the words without any conviction, “I… sometimes… things don’t make sense. It all seems like I should be happy, there’s no reason to be unhappy, but I am. I don’t feel real. I feel like none of this real.”

The woman flicked her eyes to the burnt corner of Mary’s desk. The doctor’s composure held as she ran through the canned responses she learned in training. “That happens frequently with your syndrome. It’s disordered thinking on your part. I can up the dosage on your medication, and it should help center you. I think 300 MG twice a…”

“You’re full of shit. You know that? I can see you drifting off, watching when some part of them breaks through. The reflection of them. I can see it in your eyes, doctor. What’s really happening?”

Mary shook her head, and a desperate bark of laughter escaped. The patient saw only bits and pieces of it. She couldn’t have wrapped her mind around the reality that constantly shimmered, like heat coming off asphalt. She couldn’t hear the screaming that broke through when Mary took a sip of her coffee, couldn’t feel the hands that slithered up her legs while she showered, and couldn’t smell the dead fish smell when Mary only meant to take whiff of flowers. If she knew anything worth knowing, she wouldn’t have come to her appointment, would have swallowed her madness down like a diabetic sneaking sweets, and she would have smiled beautifully and responded glitter-bright when anyone commented on the weather. The woman took a glimpse, and made from it a fairy tale. Even her worst assumptions were sweeter than the truth.

“Please. Stop. You’re ill. Let me help you. We’ll adjust your medication, and everything will be right as rain.”

“I’M NOT SICK!” The patient leapt forward, slamming both hands on top of Mary’s desk with such force that it rattled her coffee cup. Mary pushed herself back in surprise, out of the reach of the angry woman.

“Please. You must understand these thoughts. They’re delusions. You’re imagining things. That’s what’s happening to you. You’re having a break, but we can handle this.” Mary pleaded, putting all of the right suggestions in the right places. The woman’s upper lip twisted up, as she fought with the words that separated mental illness from clear perception. She closed her fist, again hitting the desk. Mary’s pen rolled on the floor. The picture frames fell and the glass cracked within the frames.

“I’m not. You know I’m not.” She sunk down until Mary could only see the top of her head, bobbing with sobs as the woman kept asking herself why.

Mary received her medical training in the military, and sharpened her resolve with quick decisions on the field as to whether someone was worth saving. She was on the team that discovered the first artifact. She was the one who cut down the rest of her colleagues when they started screeching into the night, gouging out their eyes, and pulling off their ears in gobs of cartilage and flesh.