The Apocalypse Script (16 page)

“
Okay!” The man dropped his head
and said, “Okay already. This Nisirtu ‘contract’ is only a piece of
paper anyway.” He turned to Lilian. “I don’t care what you want to
call Fiela, ‘sponsor,’ ‘protector,’ or ‘prime suspect.’ It won’t
matter when I’m done with the tablets and make my exit from your
little group here.”

Fiela said, “It’s settled, then?”

Lilian nodded. “Yes,” she said,
pulling out her phone and beginning to punch buttons. “I will have
Ridley issue the proclamation within the hour.”

Fiela hugged the man next to her.
“Thank you, Ben.”

He sighed and said, “Sure,” though
in truth he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d agreed to. He pinched his
nose and tried fill his mind with dollar signs.

From the back of the room Lord Moros glared at him,
and at the beautiful girl who wrapped her arms around him, and at
the signet ring that glowed brightly under the flickering
luminescence of the Lamassu’s scowls.

As soon as Lilian received a
texted confirmation from Ridley that Fiela was contracted to be
Ben’s protector, she summoned the limousine and the three of them
rode to the airport.

During the ride, Fiela drank a
fifth of a bottle of bourbon from the wet bar. The three of them
talked about a variety of unimportant topics, to include where,
exactly, the Peth had obtained the schoolgirl’s uniform. The
increasingly slurred explanation, which was essentially that a
certain prep school girl Fiela had encountered needed to be taught
a lesson on good behavior, was as predictable as Fiela’s assurance
that said girl wasn’t hurt, not really, or at least not
permanently, or at least not in any significant way, of that even
if she was, the girl had it coming.

When Fiela had completed her
story, Lilian said, “You must behave now, Sister. There can be no
such antics from this point forward.”

“
I know,” the Peth
hiccupped.

“
That means you cannot enter Ben’s
room tonight.”

“
My room?” asked Ben, suddenly
uneasy. “Why would she do that?”

The girl looked displeased. “But I
am his guardian.”

“
I understand that, but there is
no contract. Appearances are everything.”

“
Who would know?” Fiela
pressed.

Lilian looked at Ben and said, “We
must be careful. Should there be any slip-ups tonight you would be
cast out of the Nisirtu and prevented from studying the tablets.”
Looking back at Fiela, she said, “No one may enter his room tonight
for
any
reason.
Besides, Ben has been through a lot these past twenty-four hours.
He needs to rest.”

“
So? Can we not rest together?”
The girl suddenly grimaced. “I don’t feel so good…” she said,
covering her mouth and burping. She fell over in her seat, her head
landing in Ben’s lap. Her eyes shut, she mumbled, “Shall I not
protect you tonight, Ben?”

In spite of his libido’s desperate
assurances that all cylinders were firing properly for whatever
Fiela might attempt, the man knew that Lilian was right. He was
exhausted and there was a pretty good chance that he’d pass out as
soon as he went horizontal, regardless of the stimuli.

“
I
am
tired,” he said,
thinking of the tablets and his bank account.

“
Fine,” the Peth whispered. A
moment later, her head still in his lap, she began
snoring.

Lilian pulled from her purse a manila envelope and
handed it to Ben, “I’d like you to do a cursory review of these
documents tonight, please.”

Ben peered inside the envelope. It
contained several documents of approximately a dozen pages stapled
at the corners. He withdrew them. The top page of each document
contained thousands of densely packed triangles, squares, lines,
and symbols that resembled asterisks.

He looked up at Lilian, one
eyebrow arched. “These look like the characters on the signet ring.
They look like Cuneiform, but not exactly.”

Lilian nodded. “They are
Cuneiform-Nouveau
. We
refer to it as just
Cuneiform
or
Noveau
.

“
The language, then?
Agati?”

“
That’s right. Each of the
documents has an English translation attached at the
back.”

Ben flipped to the translation at
the back of the first document. The paragraph at the top
read:

[START BASTION SCENARIO, VARIANT
QQ6] 5K WHPB. R.W.F./press/ to query about Chinese military
advisors in West Africa. WHPS: U.S. views presence as
destabilization of region. [RR894] PRC to respond 2330Z Advisors
have decreased terrorism threat in region/are stabilizing influence
[RR899] French P.M. to rebut Chinese claims 0830Z plans to send
advisors to former colonies to counter Chinese influence. [RR914]
U.S.S. CV GEORGE WASHINGTON - Start ENG RM FIRE, REDIRECT JAPAN.
[RS442V2] PRC CV TO SPRAT ISLG…

The remaining pages, though
distinct in content were identical in form. Alarmed, he said,
“Lilian, these look intercepts of government or military
transmissions.”

She said, “I assure you they are
not. The events described in those documents have not occurred
yet.
This is a script
.”

Ben gave her a hard look. “You’re
telling me that the events contained in these documents are
planned
?”

“
Correct. I’m giving you this
script tonight so that you may verify the required events have
occurred tomorrow. I hope that will convince you that I am not
lying about the Nisirtu and its capabilities. I have provided you
with a good cross-section of scripted events. Military movements,
assassinations, government proclamations, and so forth.”

The researcher wasn’t sure what to
say. This was taking the Nisirtu fantasy to a different and
disturbing realm. At any rate, he expected that most of what was
contained in the documents was probably so vaguely written that it
could be interpreted a million ways. Wasn’t that how the trick
worked?

Still, there was that reference to a fire aboard the
Washington…

…
which Lilian
will explain away when it doesn’t happen
, Ben decided. Perhaps there will be a news story about a
British cruiser with mechanical problems or a Russian freighter
that sank and she will tell him that the ‘plan’ had
changed
, but didn’t the
script predict that a
large ship
would have a problem that would be in the
news?

Yes, that’s exactly what would
happen. It was an age-old game which he had no intention of
playing.

He was, at any rate, too exhausted
to read through all the documents. They appeared to be
half-gibberish and he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.
When they arrived at Steepleguard, Ben, weary to the core, gave
both women polite kisses, wandered up to his room and
unceremoniously collapsed onto his bed.

Sleep came immediately, and much
later, the terrors.

Lilian held her violin.

“
Ben, I’d like to introduce you to
a few friends,” she said.

Ben stepped onto the creaky wooden
floors of the room, which looked something like Lilian’s music room
at her mansion, except that algae-coated obelisks had replaced the
walls. Sitting upon a faded red settee were a man and woman of
advanced years. The man wore black wool suit and a red-banded hat
of a kind popular in the 1940’s. He was small and the skin above
his starched collar was dry and peeling. The woman wore a black
wool dress and around her neck several strings of the largest
pearls Ben had ever seen. She was bald. Both had murky gray eyes.
They were stone faced and nodded as a unit when he
approached.

“
A pleasure to
meet you both,” said Ben, not extending his hand because he did not
want to touch them. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. The
room smelled like - what,
dirt?

A film of water covered the
floor.

“
Ben,” said the man in a raspy,
pack-a-day voice. “Ridley has told me about you.”

“
Yes,” said the ancient, bald
woman, not looking at him.

“
I am Douglas Carter. This is
Eleanor Dembrowski.”

Putting his hands in his pockets,
Ben looked at Lilian, expecting her to say something, but she was
looking at the floor, her violin dangling at her side. She seemed
oddly detached.

Ben said, “Have you come far?”

“
Oh yes,” said the ancient woman.
“Quite far.”

“
Quite far,” agreed the
man.

“
Where are you from?”

The woman said, “An island. In the
Pacific. You’ve never heard of it. It’s remote and practically a
wilderness. We got it when the war ended.”

“
You live there alone?”

“
Oh, we don’t live there,” said
the man. “It’s where we’re from.”

The woman said, “Lilian, you’ll play for us.”

Lilian put the violin to her
shoulder and wordlessly complied. As she played a gray tentacle
curled up one of the obelisks and became taut, as if the thing it
was attached to was preparing to pull itself up from the
depths.

“
Well,” said Ben, noting that no
one else in the room seemed bothered by the giant slimy appendage,
“where do you live now?”

“
We’re retired. We move around,”
said the woman.

“
We go where we’re needed,” said
the man.

Ben said, “A working retirement?
What did you do before?”

“
We were astrologists,” the two
said in unison.

Ben began to slowly retreat.
Everything felt wrong. Very, very wrong.
“Astrology…interesting.”

“
Yes, it is the noblest of
sciences,” the woman said.

“
Do you want to know why we
retired?” asked the old man with an evil grin. His teeth were brown
and rotting.

“
Um, sure,” replied
Ben.

The ancient woman rasped,
“
There was no future in
it!
”

She then burst into laughter. It
was the laughter of the insane, a high-pitched cackle that went on
and on. Lilian began to play her violin faster and louder,
torturing the instrument. Her music, like the woman’s laugh, was
nothing but screeching madness.

Ben turned to run and saw the eye
of the thing from below in front of him, yellow and mindless and
evil.

“
There’s no
future in it, human! No future!”
screeched the couple.

Ben felt the tentacle around his
legs as Lilian dropped her violin and jumped into the
abyss.

“
Good to meet
you, Ben!” yelled the man in the hat as blood poured from the
orifices that had once been his eyes.
“
Don’t be a
stranger!
”

“
Ben!”

Ben jerked awake just in time to
hear his last pathetic, cowardly moan. He opened each eye one
millimeter. It was still dark. A dream, he realized. Was the voice
a dream, too?

“
Ben! It’s me!”

Committing, he opened both eyes
and propped himself up on one elbow. Though the room was unlit, the
figure in the doorway was silhouetted by ambient light from the
hallway. Ben couldn’t see her face, but he knew the skirt and knee
socks and, without a doubt, the voice.

“
Fiela, what are you doing
here?”

“
I was walking by your room and I
heard you screaming.”

Ben groaned, retrieved his phone
from the nightstand and looked at the time. “You were walking by
the door to my room at three thirty in the morning?”

She was slow to respond. “I wanted to make sure you
were safe.”

“
You haven’t been sitting in front
of my door all evening, have you?”

She didn’t answer. Ashamed and
humiliated that she had witnessed his outburst, even indirectly, he
said, “It was a nightmare. I’m fine. Go to bed.”

Fiela took a single tentative step
into the room. “It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a night
terror
. I can tell.” She
paused and said, “I have them, too. Do you have medicine for
them?”

He let out a loud breath. “I did,
once. Not anymore.”

“
Oh,” she said meekly, sounding
disappointed. “Anyway, I should stay with you.”

“
Fiela, we can’t…I mean, Lilian
was pretty clear about that.”

“
I know. But can
I just
stay
here with you?”

Ben sighed and wiped the sleep
from the corners of his eyes. He suspected that if he didn’t allow
her into the room she would spend the rest of the evening sitting
in the hallway. “You’ll behave?”

“
Will
you?
”

She’s got you there, Ben.
“Yes,” he said, forcing the word from his mouth
like a wad of cotton.