The Apocalypse Codex (25 page)

I stare at the phone as if it’s grown bat wings and fangs. “I understand,” I say.
I understand that you’re telling me to leave the two contractors you made me responsible for to die in a train wreck
, is what I manage to keep back.
You cold bastard,
you.

“Good. Call me with an update tomorrow.” The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone and stifle the urge to scream obscenities. It passes quickly enough, anyway: unprofessional, unproductive, and might attract unwanted attention. Nevertheless, my opinion of Lockhart has just taken a nosedive. Loyalty is—
has
to be—a two-way street in my line of work. This isn’t a painful but basically survivable workplace situation like a lay-off or downsizing: Persephone and Johnny are out there right now, being stalked by walking corpses with parasites for tongues and heads full of revelation. If I don’t do my damnedest to see them to safety, what does that say about me? Sure, Johnny is an over-muscled asshole with a disturbingly easy-going attitude to killing, and Persephone is just plain disturbing (a bizarre chimera, half sexy Eastwick witch and half KGB hit-woman)…but I feel responsible.

So I take a deep breath and go back to urgently doodling on the pizza box.

Summonings and containment grid, field-expedient, 101: if the thing you’re trying to contain is pallid, has too many legs, and is about the size of a human tongue, a pizza box will do just
fine
. More to the point, I really want it to be locked down properly before I try using the tattoos to call Persephone or Johnny—it’s a trophic eater, which means if it isn’t securely contained when I call it’ll be all over my frontal lobes like grease on a hamburger before I can say “oh shit.”

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”) Revised plan: box up the complaints department, pack my bags, and go straight to the airport. All that’s left is to call Persephone and Johnny, then pull the eject handle, get the hell out of Dodge City before it’s too late, go home, and hide under the bed for a week of gibbering reaction time.

I finish doodling on the inside of the box, and collect a handy cable from my travel electronics kit. It’s got a couple of pointy contacts; I stab these through various points on the diagram, and plug the other end into my JesusPhone. OFCUT does the rest, and I gingerly transfer the live summoning grid to the carpet in front of the bin.

The complaints department sets up a horrendous racket as I slide the grid under it. Then it stops, abruptly. I’m half-expecting a blue flash and a vile smell, but no such luck: looks like I’ve successfully contained it. I raise the bin gingerly, ready to slam it down if the many-legged monstrosity makes a bid for freedom. The thing is tightly curled in the middle of the grid, which is shimmering faintly—for all the world as if it’s held in place by magic cling-film. Great; all I have to do now is refrain from dropping it.

I disconnect my phone, close the pizza box, and stuff it in the bottom of my go-bag. Then I massage my forehead and steel myself, anticipating pain. I pinch my arm over the relevant tattoo and go knock on her frontal lobes.

***Busy.***

She’s aware of me and she’s got the blinds turned down—I’m picking up nothing about her environment, just an icy half-amused, half-angry awareness that pursuit could show up at any moment.

***I know,*** I send. ***I’ve been ordered to bug out. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, get the first plane out, and run like hell.***

She doesn’t seem to be surprised. My heart sinks.

***I think you and Johnny should get out right now,*** I add.

***Why do you think that?***

***Bad guys sent a wet team for me. They’re possessed, some kind of parasite.***

***I know.*** She sends me a glimpse of my pizza-box horror, trapped writhing between silver tongs in some kind of ritual. My stomach flip-flops. ***I’m on the run; they were going to plant one of those things on me. I blew my cover. It’s possible it was blown before I started, though: they may have tagged me right from the start, in London. Then saw me and Johnny and made the connection from him to you.***

***I got a heads-up that the local police and security agencies are compromised and presumed hostile,*** I tell her. ***I warned Johnny about it.***

***Understood. Keep your distance. I’ll call Johnny in due course to plan our exit. I’ve got to go now.***

And just like that she cuts me off.

I quickly shave and dress in my all-purpose suit—I may have to bluff my way past some desk pilots in the very near future and it doesn’t hurt to look like a civil servant—and stuff one of the pistols in a pocket. Then I shovel the rest of my crap into the case and head for the lobby, leaving the
Do Not Disturb
sign hanging on the door handle.

Next stop: the airport.

10.

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DOOMED

AWKWARD SMALL TALK OVER STALE COFFEE: IT’S NOT HOW
Johnny imagined catching up with his former associate, but Patrick is badly shaken and somewhat withdrawn. Johnny is short on time and urgently needs to draw him out, so coffee in an almost deserted Starbucks with a sullen, overweight barista pushing a mop around the floor is the order of the day.

“How long have you been in Denver?” he asks.

“Four years.” Patrick’s hand shakes as he tips a paper twist of sugar into his espresso. “More or less.”

Not long after he left the Network, then. “And on their retainer?”

“About the same.” Patrick falls silent for a moment as he concentrates on stirring his coffee with the ritual focus of a heroin addict cooking up the next hit. Not spilling a drop demands infinite patience. “They’re bastards. But they look after you as long as you’re useful.”

“What do they want you to report on?”

“What you’d expect.” Patrick half-shudders, half-shrugs. “We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.”

“And sometimes?”

Patrick grimaces. “If there’s talk of miracles, wine out of water, speaking in tongues—they ask me to check out a service. It’s a bad job, I can tell you, but usually it’s boring. When it isn’t”—he pauses long enough to pick up his cup with shaking hand—“I’m not there.”

“Ever checked out an outfit called the Golden Promise Ministries? Out of Colorado Springs, run by a guy called Schiller?”

Patrick shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

Johnny keeps his thoughts to himself. Instead, he pulls out his wallet and, after a quick scan, counts out bills. “Here’s five hundred. The number on this card is a burner: call me if you see anything that might interest your, uh, employers. Call me when you’ve got a repair bill for the car and I’ll pay the garage for you.”

Patrick stares at the pile of fifties. He reaches out and shakily pushes them back across the table. “Not playing that game, Johnny. I’ll thank you for fixing my car, but you don’t know what they’re like. What they do to double agents.”

It’s Johnny’s turn to stare. Then, after a few seconds, he shoves the money back towards Patrick. “Then it’s my penance for spoiling your evening, mate. Call me when you’ve got the bill for the car.”

Patrick stares at him, perplexed. “You can’t fix everything that’s broke with money, Sarge.”

“I know. But money helps.” Johnny knows exactly what’s going through Patrick’s mind:
What’s happened to my old sarge, then?
He stands. He doesn’t want to have to stay and explain. “At least I tried.”

He walks out the door, moderately certain that this is the last time he’ll ever see Patrick. It’s cold, and a solitary snowflake spirals down in front of his face. He goes to his truck, climbs in, and starts the engine.
Maybe I should tell the Duchess,
he ponders. But there’s no telling where he’ll catch her; best get it sorted himself. He drives away slowly, with a head full of darkness and questions.

It is, perhaps, inevitable that his encounter with Patrick distracts him and leaves him in a disturbed state of mind: old ghosts swirl around just beyond the corners of his vision as he drives back towards the third safe house, less attentive than usual. But as he parks opposite, a pricking in the skin of his chest brings him sharply back to a state of alertness.
Something,
his sixth sense is telling him,
is wrong
.

It’s too late to drive on, but—as usual—he hasn’t parked directly outside the front door. Johnny stares at the safe house. The warning is worryingly nonspecific: the vague itching and sense of dread tells him nothing useful.

He slides out of the cab, keeping the truck between himself and the safe house windows. He leaves the door ajar as he rapidly scans the sidewalk, then breaks into a jog. The itch fades as he leaves the shadow of the pickup, just another local out for an evening run: it’s amazing what people will miss if they’re not watching carefully, and he didn’t pick this neighborhood to site a safe house on the basis of its vibrant street life. Once out of the direct line of sight from the safe house he crosses the street, re-scans to make sure there are no bystanders, then doubles back. His nostrils flare as he ducks and glides around the side of the house.

There is a kitchen door that opens onto the backyard, and it has a well-oiled lock. The key turns silently. Johnny steals inside like a thief in the night, right hand drawn back and knife in hand. It’s of a single piece, the blade oddly flat, the handle an extruded extension: a thing of power, lethal as a cobra. A gift from the Duchess, years ago. The kitchen is dark and still and just as he left it, the tripwire—actually an empty tumbler set on the floor just inside the door—still present; but his skin is prickling again. If there was an enemy already in the house it would be far more intense.
What if they aren’t here yet?
Johnny stands up, then passes through the ground floor rooms silently and rapidly, ending just inside the front door. The pizza joint flyer he’d balanced against the front door when he left is still upright.
No, not here yet. Which means—

There is a bright discordant jangle of shattering glass from the front window on the lounge, to the left of the vestibule he’s standing in. Johnny turns, lowering his—
knife to a gunfight,
he absently realizes—as a familiar rattling hiss kicks in.
Gas grenade.

He smiles, lips peeling back from teeth in a frightening grimace.

Johnny’s got his fight.

*     *     *

PERSEPHONE USED TO HAVE NIGHTMARES, WHEN SHE WAS A
girl. Dreams that would drag her shuddering awake, drenched in a clammy sweat, with her own shriek of terror echoing in her ears.

They always started the same way: with her waking in a hospital ward, moonlit through unshuttered windows, surrounded by the living dead.

They were living because they breathed in their sleep, lying cold and motionless on beds with rusting steel frames, sheets drawn up to their chins to cover the wounds and evulsions inflicted upon their bodies by the metal of war. But they were dead, too, because they would never wake. She could force herself out of bed inside these lucid dreams and poke and pry at the sleepers, scream her lungs out into their cold blue ears, to no avail.

There were always twenty beds on the ward, nineteen of them occupied by sleepers. Male and female, young and old, white-skinned and sallow in the moonlight. She could run to the end of the ward—or fly, at will—and there was a corridor, and on the other side of the corridor another ward, another twenty beds. Up and down the corridor the wards stretched towards a morbid vanishing point in the gloom. She’d ventured into the corridor, once or twice, but the first few wards she checked were all the same. And besides, she wasn’t alone. She never actually
saw
the Watcher but she knew it was there; a lurking immanence observing her increasingly frantic explorations, avoiding contact for the time being as, suffused with a growing sense of panicky terror, she cast about for relief from the infinite loneliness of the graveyard.

Curiously, it never occurred to her to gaze out through the windows at the night world her dream had crash-landed in the midst of.

Years later, in her early teens, she’d shyly confessed these dreams to her adoptive father. It was a tentative gesture of intimacy, as she began to deconstruct the emotional barriers that she had erected during her childhood in the camps and on the long road out of Srebrenica. Alberto had taken it seriously, not pooh-poohing it as teenage angst; rather, he sat her down and delivered the first of a series of lectures on the interpretation of dreams, with the aid of a copy of the
Liber di Mortuus Somnium
. “Precognitive dreams are not representations of a fixed future,” he explained. “Rather, they’re echoes of events which hold particular resonance, sufficient to overcome the barrier between now and then. They might not come true, and they are in any event symbolic, not literal predictions. But you should
always
take them seriously.” Then he spent an afternoon with her, showing her how to make a dream catcher from cobwebs and feathers, and then how to program it as a screensaver on her Amiga; and she’d taught herself to sleep soundly without waking the rest of the household.