The Apocalypse Codex

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.

She never learned to like hospitals, though.

Now the night world has crashed through the window and landed in the ward of the dead in the mid- afternoon light, and it’s Persephone’s turn to be the watcher floating through the corridors, observing and monitoring with a cold knot of horror.

The open window is one of three at the end of a hospital ward bay. There are four beds on the bay: two are occupied. It’s very quiet, but for the heartbeat beeping of monitors tracking pulse and ventilation rate. One of the inmates is sleeping, but the other woman follows Persephone’s progress with frightened eyes.

Persephone tugs her skirt down, hitches her handbag strap up on her shoulder, reaches for a convenient lie, and offers a smile that doesn’t reach the corners of her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m just taking a look around. Journalist.”

She walks towards the door at the end of the bay, then pauses as two slivers of fact slice through her mind. There’s a door. On a ward side-bay. You don’t put doors between a patient and the nursing station if there’s any risk of acute incidents. Doors are for privacy. And the woman’s eyes are still watching Persephone, but her head—

She turns and walks back to the woman. Who lies utterly still on the bed, breathing but unmoving except for her eyes.

“Can you speak?” she asks quietly.

The woman—girl, almost: late teens, early twenties—blinks at her with horrified eyes, then begins to silently weep. Her lips move, as if in prayer. But her body lies still as if stunned, bedridden. Paralyzed. Persephone notices the sealed port of a nasogastric feeding tube nestling by one nostril. No wonder she can’t talk: this is a long-term spinal injuries unit.

Persephone pulls her cameraphone out of her shoulder bag and captures the layout of the bay on a slow video scan. She spots the file by the head of the bed, medical notes. She has a queasy feeling. Something here is very wrong.

“You don’t mind?” she asks, taking the file. The woman’s eyes close. There’s a name on the cover: Marianne Murphy (23) Saved. Persephone’s brows furrow as she pages through the notes, reading and photographing the evidence. Yes, nasogastric feeding. Yes, physiotherapy. But, oddly, no medication. Nothing about vertebrae or spinal damage. Then Persephone comes to the ultrasound scan printouts. Images of a fetus, results of amniocentesis. Her skin crawls. She points her cameraphone at the woman. “Blink if you understand me?”

Marianne blinks. And now, Persephone realizes, the young woman has a name to her. “One blink for no, two for yes.” Blink, blink. “Are you held here against your will?”

Blink, blink.

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you? Did they make you pregnant?”

Blink, blink.

“You’re paralyzed. Was there an accident?”

Blink.