The Apocalypse Codex (22 page)

For a moment I’m somewhere very very dark and very very bright, like a bug on a microscope slide the size of a galaxy, pinned down by laser-bright spotlights beneath the inspection of a vast, unfriendly intelligence.

***Mr. Howard. Get out of my head and
stay
out.***

She is
not
pleased, but I get to live—this time.

***Uh…okay,*** I manage.

With an effort of will I begin to disentangle myself from her senses. But I’m not fast enough, and she is obviously not happy, because suddenly she
shoves
, chucking me out of her mind so hard that I lose consciousness.

WHICH IS WHY I DON’T HAVE A RINGSIDE SEAT IN PERSEPHONE’S
and Johnny’s heads when everything goes right to hell.

9.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

“IT’S IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND GOD’S PLAN,” SCHILLER
says, clasping his hands behind his back, chin lowered to his chest, braced against the force of his own wisdom.

“First, we must follow His instructions. Go forth, be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth with souls obedient to His will. Live good lives, obey His rules, be faithful members of His flock, and when the end comes we’ll be safe forever in heaven. That much is clear. But.
But.
”

He’s pacing back and forth across the stage now. “That isn’t enough.” He stops in the middle of the stage, turns and faces his audience. His expressive face, lit from below, is suddenly shadowed and ominous. “There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. And I’m afraid they’re all going to go to hell if we don’t manage to save them in time. This is a tragedy; the great, besetting tragedy of our age is that at least ninety-five percent of currently living humanity is going to burn in hell. To make matters worse, this is the most populous century ever—there are more than seven billion of us! We know the truth, and the necessary steps to salvation are simple: accept Jesus into your hearts—you’re all Saved, there’s room for you in the lifeboat, but why aren’t we saving
them
?”

Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask
why
his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.

Persephone rubs her bracelet uneasily. (
WWLJD indeed.
) True believers unnerve her, for she has seen the Red Skull in their observances, witnessed the rites of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, and she knows the abhorrent truth: the things humanity call gods are either lies or worse, alien and abhuman intelligences that promise something not unlike hell but without any heavenly insurance policy. The pre-existing destination for humanity is death. But Schiller doesn’t see it from that angle; in his own way he is an idealist and an optimist.

“Everyone who isn’t square with Jesus is destined to go to hell. That means about seven billion souls at this moment. Golden Promise Ministries was established in 1896 by Pastor William Gantz to honor a promise he made when he first realized the magnitude of the crisis, and I am personally sworn to follow him, unto death if necessary. Our mission is simple:
We’re not going to let it happen
. We’re going to save every human soul it’s possible to save before our Lord returns. And his return is imminent, within our lives: closer, it could be next year, next month, even next week. So we’ve got to work
fast
.”

Schiller pauses for a moment to take a sip of water from the glass on his lectern. Persephone glances around the room. Her fellow Omega Course attendees are rapt in the grip of his glamour, mesmerized by his bullshit. She shivers. He’s a powerful speaker. Despite her occult knowledge—for Persephone is fully cognizant of the dismal message of the One True Religion—she’d be in his grip too, were it not for the cross-shaped ward she wears.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ is going to return sometime within our lifetimes. The signs are there before us, the turmoil and decadence and chaos of these last days. The corruption of Western civilization. We’ve formed a team to pray for guidance—the forward observer study group, we call them—and the signs are clear to read: Jesus is coming. Well, short of actively trying to
delay
him”—Schiller chuckles drily—“we can’t do anything about the timing; ‘For as the lightning cometh from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.’ But we can do our best to sort out the tribes of man first.

“We need bodies to wage the war for Christ. We can increase our numbers by adoption—you may have noticed the crèches and kindergarten facilities here—and we can raise large families and guide our children to the path of righteousness. If you’re not raising a large family, even if you’re infertile, then you’re not doing all you can for Jesus.

“And we can work on other strategies. Our missions leverage the latest marketing and narrowband consumer targeting protocols to make best use of the internet to reach—”

Persephone discreetly stands and sidles towards the doorway.

She’s taken a seat at one end of the back row, just to make this move possible. And she’s consumed two cups of coffee in the past hour. “I need the restroom,” she quietly tells Julie, or maybe she’s a Christina or a Roseanne—the mousy-haired young woman in a gray maxi-dress who stands by the door.

“Sure thing, ma’am.” The handmaiden opens the door and they duck outside. Behind them, Schiller is rattling on about Web 2.0 communications strategies for evangelical outreach. “If you’d like to follow me?”

Persephone slides into place behind her escort, eyes wide open and scanning the passageways to either side as she is escorted down a corridor and round a bend to a discreetly camouflaged restroom, where her escort leaves her and hurries back to the conference room.

(Which means the clock is ticking.)

Persephone waits out her guide and guard’s departure, then steps out into the hall. Her badge is flipped round, the big red V (for visitor, presumably) hidden as she paces rapidly in the opposite direction from the lecture hall.
Three minutes,
she thinks. She adjusts the bracelet again:
What Would Leeroy Jenkins Do?
It’s Johnny’s little joke, dating back to an experiment with World of Warcraft as a global conferencing system for the Network. The intel team that raids together stays together.

This part of the conference center is set up around three lecture theaters and a hall, plus support offices. And it’s a Saturday. It doesn’t take Persephone long to find an unoccupied receptionist’s station, complete with a PC. She does a quick risk assessment. Pros: it gets the job done, and today’s a Saturday, which minimizes the chance of discovery. Cons: her pre-canned excuse won’t work. The pros win. She touches the mouse, thumbs the screen to life, sticks her USB stick in a free socket at the back, then yanks and re-inserts the power cable. The PC’s BIOS isn’t password protected, and it’s the work of a minute to start it rebooting off her memory stick.

While she waits for the PC to come up, she heads back toward the toilet (temporary excuse:
I got lost on my way back
); but she has to return to the reception station for long enough to log in, fire up the copy of Outlook on the PC’s hard disk, and open her contaminated mailbox.

(Mission accomplished.)

The skin on the back of Persephone’s neck is crawling as she shuts the PC down again. Everything seems to take impossibly long, the animation in Windows moving with nightmare slowness. But finally the job is done. She pulls the USB stick, walks back to the toilet cubicle, and flushes it just as there is a tentative knock on the door.

“Ma’am? Are you all right?”

“Never better,” Persephone says fervently. “Well, aside from breakfast. I’m sorry, I’m just freshening up in here. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Take your time.”

When Persephone comes out, the mousy woman is waiting. She isn’t showing obvious signs of anxiety, but the mere fact of her presence is sufficient to put Persephone on alert.
They don’t want to lose track of me.
She smiles. “Have I missed anything important?” she asks.

“Oh no.” Her escort shakes her head very seriously. “I’m certain Father will take time to help you.” She turns, then pauses, looking over her shoulder. “Follow me, please.”

There’s something oddly affectless about the woman, and it gives Persephone the creeps. But she tags along behind her. After a few seconds Persephone realizes something else: the slight heaviness in her guide’s hips, something about her body fat distribution, her shape in profile. She’s pregnant: not hugely so, but certainly well into the second trimester.
Odd,
Persephone thinks, but she remains silent and unquestioning until they come to an elevator. “Hey. This isn’t the way back to the hall, is it?”

“No.” Her guide pushes the call button. “Father led everyone to the chapel after you left, so he sent me to show you the way there. He decided to invite everyone to attend holy communion. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Persephone blinks as the doors open.
What would a true believer say…?
“I suppose so. I mean, absolutely!”

The doors slide closed behind her and the elevator begins to descend. “You sound a bit conflicted,” her guide says guilelessly. “That tells me you
need
the host in your heart. It’ll make everything better.”

“I guess so.” The elevator stops and the doors open. The guide leads Persephone out into a wide corridor, windowless but lined with illuminated niches holding spotlit stained-glass panels. At the end, the wide double doors gape open. “This way.” They reach the doors and step through. “See, everyone is waiting for you!”

Persephone sees everything, taking in the timeless scene in front of her with horrified eyes: the waiting flock, the guards holding an unwilling inductee before the altar, the pastors and the silver bowl full of things that to her warded eyes are not what they seem to everyone else—

Persephone turns at bay, ready to fight her way to freedom.

*     *     *

IT’S LATE.

I shudder and awaken on my hotel room bed.

As I turn my head fireworks explode in my skull, accompanied by a wave of unbelievable pressure. I have a headache, my tongue feels as if something died on it, and I ache all over. In fact, my body has an eerie not-quite-me-here feeling that I’ve had only a couple of times before, most notably in a dank room under Brookwood Cemetery—a really disturbing sensation, and not one I care for. I figure the headache is the after effect of being given the oneiromantic heave-ho by an angry sorceress; but I can’t account for the not-me feeling. Outside my thirtieth-floor window the sky is slate-gray and angry-looking. (Luckily it’s turned cold outside, and the temperature’s too low for tornadoes. That’s one of the local attractions I really don’t mind missing.) I check the clock and realize with a start that I’ve been asleep for about eight hours.

The bathroom is calling. I stumble through and splash water on my face. One thing leads to another, and ten minutes later (by way of the toilet and a brisk application of my shaver) I’m feeling a little more human, if still somewhat grumpy from the slowly subsiding headache.

I stare at my red-eyed face in the bathroom mirror.
What am I doing here?
I feel like an eight-year-old who’s been handed a laser pointer and a bag of catnip and told to go amuse the kittens behind the chain-link fence labelled
Siberian Tiger Enclosure
; my so-called External Assets are off the reservation and halfway to the horizon while I sit here with my thumb up my ass, nursing a dream hangover, with nothing to do but fill out expense accounts while Rome burns.

Pull yourself together,
I tell myself.

Once you start managing other people, you can’t control every aspect of how they do their jobs or keep yourself informed on everything that’s going on. I’m supposed to be taking on a managerial role, for very small values of management (Look at me! I’ve got two contractors working for me! Whoop-de-do!) and I should bloody well stop trying to act like an over-stressed prima donna and start doing my job. Beginning with sending Lockhart a brief sitrep, an expenses update, and a revised estimate on when I expect to have something concrete to report—