The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (24 page)

“I comply, and yet, it is imperfect, for
there is no perfection,” it hissed quickly, as though its abjection
had driven it to loathe the sound of its own voice.

The Prime hesitated, his hands unconsciously
rising toward the symbols of pain that were etched invisibly on the
wall around the door. How he enjoyed overpowering this creature. He
had tested its endurance before. On more than one night, the Prime
had dropped the many floors to approach the thing in its cage and
test it. It was a servant—a slave. The Prime had been impressed by
its ability to take punishment. At night he dreamt of fucking
it.

“It is done,” the creature whispered past the
plastic.

The Operative spoke, “I feel a strange
sensation, Sir—light-headed.”

“Do not be concerned.” The Prime turned away
from the Operative, looked into the darkness again. “You have kept
your bargain, and I will bring you no more pain.” He stepped back.
And that’s
all
I’m bringing you. The Prime continued grimly,
“Your information about the First-mother was correct. We have her,”
he glared. “What of her guardian?”

The voice said: “Unknown. His power is
great.”

“His appearance?” the Prime growled back his
doubts.

“Like all men,” the voice breathed wearily.
“And his mind is closed.”

“Well open your mind to
his
,” the
Prime ordered quietly. “Do what you have to do and tell me when you
know.”

“I will search,” the voice said. The gray
shadow shape behind the plastic faded.

The Prime cursed his luck. If only there were
another way to keep the thing. He would love to watch its face as
the door closed. The Prime shrugged his shoulders and spoke to the
Operative, “Follow me as before.” A different flex of his arm, and
the door closed.

“You have been given a great power,” the
Prime told the Operative, and then a quick reprimand. “But you must
never step away from one of them.”

“Where should I begin?” the Operative’s voice
held a note of self-recrimination.

“You have the file.” The Prime began to pick
his way across the hall. He paused to be sure the Operative was
following. “Investigate it as you would any murder.”

As they walked toward the elevator, the Prime
thought to ask his ally if there was any progress on the God-wife.
He still wasn’t sure who he was fated to
know
exactly, but
by all accounts he’d soon have a world all his own to
repopulate.

33 – The Burning Bags

“I am here!” the voice said from the
darkness. It seemed to come from all sides and
inside
. It
echoed in the mind, at once clear, at once garbled with throbbing
power. “Rise and Behold!”

The words held and hugged him, stifled and
liberated. He could not breathe. The absent hammer of his heart
reverberated in his skull. The once perfect darkness swirled about
him a moment longer—tried to drag him back into it; but the voice
overpowered the whirlpool of welcome black.

“I am here! Arise!” The words pulled him up.
An electric charge of energy flashed through his body. He convulsed
around a ragged breath of air, and another. His chest rose and
fell, yet he did not feel the coolness of the air, he tasted no
revivifying moisture in it. He tried again, and was answered with a
wet crackle and a hiss of escaping gas. He was lying in an awkward
position—perhaps that was it. His eyes began to see again—the
images that struck him were blurry.

He struggled upward with slippery hands
covered in purple blood. They snatched and scrabbled numbly over
the slick skins of garbage bags. A heat pressed against his face
threatening to push him back, but he grabbed a large handful of
cardboard and electrical wire—pulled himself forward.

Once standing he saw that corroded iron walls
hemmed him in at all sides. His shoes were buried in the greasy
remains of rotting garbage bags and refuse. With cold fingers he
grabbed the side of the Dumpster and hauled himself up and
over—again he heard the crackle and hiss. As he swung himself over
he struggled, lost his hold. His feet could not find purchase and
he fell. He landed with a sickening thud—a heavy clatter of bones
and cartilage. Again there was the crackle and hiss.

“I am here!” The voice came from behind him.
He turned. A pile of garbage bags twenty feet tall was heaped
against the red brick of an ancient building. Its green and black
plastic patchwork was on fire. White, orange and yellow flames
burned its edges, but it was not consumed.

“I am here!”

He got to his hands and knees, incredulous,
and then raised his head.

“Forgive me!” he said, voice crackling like
cellophane.

“Your trials are before you!” the burning
garbage said. “And you will pass again into night before it is
over.”

“Forgive me, I am unworthy.” The man watched
rivulets of purple and brown fluid trickle slowly out of his shirt
cuffs. “I failed.”

“I shall judge.” The flames leapt up.

“We were to save him and we did not.” The man
rested his head on the pavement. Dizziness pulled his forehead
toward the ground, plucked at his consciousness.

“You were betrayed. I was betrayed.” The fire
burned white hot now. “Vengeance is Mine!”

“Command me!” His mind reeled against the
revelation.

“I command thee. You have lost a friend, and
so you must redeem her.” The fire licked at the air overhead. He
could feel the heat of the flames like a pulse. “And the road
before you is winding.”

“Command me!” He fought the dizziness now,
getting one shaky foot under him, rising.

“I command thee to find a man named Updike.
He is one of the worthy. As with the building of the Tower, so will
this labor be hard. He commands an army, and with this army shall
you strike at the heart of Evil. Only then shall you find salvation
for yourself, salvation for your friend.” The fire burned upward
like a pillar flying to Heaven. “Go now to the place of flight and
deliver a message that will be known to you then. I have spoken.”
With two great roars of power and flame, the pulsing gout of fire
blasted skywards, and was gone.

The man stood at the airport remembering his
first moments of Afterdeath. He was bereft. After the vision his
head had become heavy; his thoughts were jumbled. He looked at his
shoes. A rainbow sheen of oil made them magical. The grime
collected as the man walked to the airport. Such a long way, it had
been a day or more since he set out.

Slowly, fearfully he let his hands explore
his chest again. His attention was constantly drawn there by the
strange crackle and hiss. His hands were still very numb, yet they
registered shapes and textures, still gave some hint of hot and
cold. He clenched his eyes in pain and realization when he found a
ruin of flesh and cloth. Numerous holes oozing slippery fluid
pierced his ribcage. His fingers felt the shards of shattered bone.
He breathed in, still unable to look at himself, and was answered
with the crackle and hiss. His chest was smashed like a wicker
basket. His organs were crushed and pulped like rotten fruit.

He was dead. But he had a mission. And the
Lord in Heaven himself had commanded it. He looked up as people
passed, their faces registering disgust at his condition. Somehow
Reverend Able Stoneworthy found a part of his soul that could
smile.

34 – Captain Jack Updike

Captain Jack Updike could hear Angels. When
he was lying awake at night listening to the voices he often came
to the conclusion that he was crazy. But his religious training got
him to recant every time. You never know—perhaps that was the way
it worked for visionaries or people like Joan of Arc. The messages
came garbled at first, in various languages, from a multitude of
voices. It was the sound of discussion, debate and dialogue—heard
through a wall, the words muffled, the tone carrying the emotion or
intent. Rarely did they speak directly to him. Occasionally, he was
called “eavesdropper” and at other times, he was encouraged to love
and spread peace. He supposed that as long as they weren’t telling
him to kill anybody, it was a madness that could be his little
secret.

And then one told him to raise an army of the
dead.

He first heard the Angels before the Change.
After, the reception improved, and he soon received word of his
mission.

His behavior during the Gulf War ended his
stint as chaplain in the United States Army. He had killed a man
who was under his spiritual care. Updike was summoned to a trauma
unit to comfort Private Randolph Gauthier, out of Louisiana. He had
been mortally wounded. With the soldier’s teary eyes looking on,
Updike added a lethal dose of morphine to the I.V. drip. Since the
boy had not been expected to live, that would have been the end of
it, but for the Angels. They reminded him that confession was good
for the soul.

Updike confessed, and was arrested. He
endured a long period of incarceration leading up to the trial.
Updike maintained that what he had done was God’s to judge, not a
military tribunal. His superiors felt the growing media scrutiny
was damaging so an army psychologist diagnosed Updike with
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Criminal charges were dropped, and
Updike was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged.

He spent the next few years before the Change
looking for a new religion since Catholicism had abandoned him
during his trial. Updike sampled many churches, but none suited
him. In time he came to consider himself an untethered Christian
minister. He believed the Old Testament was the unadulterated truth
and he would preach it in his own way. “
The
Bible, capital
‘T,’ capital ‘B.’ The Old Testament brought down to earth by God’s
own voice: The Bible with an angry God—the God who killed a man for
gathering wood on the Sabbath.
That
One.”

Updike kept his military rank without the
affiliation. If asked, he would tell people that he was a Captain
in the Army of God.

Then the Change came. He had little
recollection of the first months. The debate in his head had grown
to deafening proportion just before it happened—loud voices shouted
in ancient tongues, only some of which he understood. They referred
to the “Scroll” and to the “Lamb.”

The debate was accompanied by a headache that
grew worse with the volume of the voices. The combination made the
preacher distracted, and concentration impossible. So acting on
impulse, he took a backpacking trip into the hills of Kentucky
seeking some solace from the beauty of nature. The debate in his
head raged on and his head pounded, but codeine pills kept it
bearable. The rain would not let up, but he attributed it to some
spawn of Global Warming.

Updike discovered the Change by accident.
Passing a church cemetery one afternoon he took shelter under the
eaves of a crumbling mausoleum. He was propped up against its
ancient door and lighting a pipe when a man came up out of the
ground. He was dead—gray and hideous, he clambered up out of the
wet earth like a mud guppy, finally pulling himself free by
gripping the sides of his rust-colored headstone.

The corpse lay on the ground for a time, his
shrunken eyes peering up into the downpour. His suit was all of one
color—mud—and his hair was pasted to his head and face. The rain
poured down, scoured the dirt from the fellow’s features. The dead
man’s lips and jaws moved like they were made of wood. Now certain
he was insane, Updike watched this reborn creature bathing in the
rain.

“Alive?” it had asked the heavens in a papery
voice. It raised an arm.

Updike stepped forward. “Dead.” He looked the
man over. “Not for long.”

The dead man’s face contorted with surprise.
“What?”

“Dead.” Updike expected this apparition to
disappear with the admission. “You just crawled out of your grave.”
Updike almost swooned then, but came out of it when the dead man
clutched his overcoat. He grabbed the cold hand.

“Easy, my son,” he said, and paused. The
words echoed in his head. The debate had stopped. He heard his own
voice, none other—and felt no pain.

The dead man sat up, looked around at the
headstones—gray lumps in the downpour. His lips drew back slowly in
a hideous grin, then the hands clamped over his eyes. “Dead.” The
man’s lungs crackled horribly as he wept. He turned to the
preacher. “Is this Heaven?”

Updike pondered that. “Not unless I am dead
too. I was not buried, and my flesh is warm and my heart is
beating.” The preacher set a hand against the dead man’s chest.
There was no movement within. “Or I am mad. Finally.” He started
weeping then, and fell into the cold embrace of the dead man. The
pair of them sobbed a long time.

They had been together ever since. The dead
man’s name was Oliver Purdue. He had been a civil servant in
life—working for the Department of Agriculture.

They traveled to the next town and discovered
that the world had changed. Newspapers and radios proclaimed it
loudly. The sun had disappeared behind an endless cloud, and dead
people had begun to rise.

One night, they were camped under the eaves
of an old farmhouse—a hotel owner had refused to serve them due to
Oliver’s state. The farmer allowed them hot water for tea and
washing up, then quartered a loaf of bread and hunk of cheese for
them.

“Captain, what about the others?” Oliver’s
voice was weak. He soon discovered that gargling with cooking oil
improved its strength. He also had to remember to inhale before he
talked. “Will they get out?”

“Interesting question, Oliver,” Updike had
said over the fire. “Some will.”

“But the others.” His eyes were dull as he
looked into the glowing embers. “When I woke up in my coffin, I
didn’t feel alone. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. But there
was thumping, and a sort of roar—like a hundred voices screaming in
the dark.”