The Apocalypse Codex

been delayed—he’s in a meeting this morning, some kind of business that couldn’t wait.”

“Are we going to run late?” asks one of the men from the previous night—Persephone’s memory prompts, Jason, an accountant from Colorado Springs—thick-set, red-faced, hypertensive. “Because if so, I’ve got a—”

“It’s coming now,” interrupts the woman. (Christina, according to Persephone. Slightly heavy, ruddy-faced, wears a cross that’s just slightly too large for her neck.) Persephone turns. There is indeed a smallish shuttle bus, outfitted with leather-upholstered seats.

“He’s worried about being late,” Darryl the real estate agent confides in Persephone’s ear. “You ask me, he should worry more about being late before he’s got himself square with Jesus.”

“Are you square with Jesus?” Persephone asks with a bright and elegant smile.

“I surely am.” Darryl is smugly self-satisfied about his salvation status. His eyes wander around Persephone’s person, unconsciously undressing her—she briefly fantasizes about rabbit-punching him—then settle on her wrist. “That’s a pretty bracelet.” He focuses on the engraved silver band as the bus draws up, its doors opening to take the course participants up to the Golden Promise compound. “What’s it say?” She raises it, turns her wrist. “Huh. W. W. L. J. D.—does that mean ‘What Would Lord Jesus Do’?”

“Something like that.” Her smile widens. Thank you, Johnny, she thinks, and I glimpse in the front of her mind what the bracelet really stands for and choke, which is when she notices me.

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 creches 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