The Apocalypse Codex

drawn up near the entrance, headlights on and roof up. I walk around the passenger side and Persephone pops the door. “Get in,” she says. I obey and I barely have time to get my seat belt fastened before she’s moving, fishtailing into the road with a harsh scrabble of grit and ice under the wheels.

“What have you been up to?”

“I got you a laptop.” She gestures at the back seat. “And I bought ammunition at Walmart. Then I went for a drive, up north. I tried I-76. Ran into a diversion and checkpoint out past E-470. So I drove around the beltway until I hit I-70. Same deal. The north- and eastbound interstates all detour back into the city. The airport is shut,” she adds. “I double-checked in case you have no-fly cooties. They gave me some crap about a frontal system coming down from Canada that’s due to dump a meter of snow on us overnight. It’s all lies: I checked the NOAA aviation weather reports and NOTAMs. There’s a front coming, but it’s not carrying snow. So I tried a couple of general aviation fields, even a helicopter taxi service, but they’re all grounded.”

“But—” I stop dead.

“I drove out to Meadow Lake Airport,” she adds. “I went in two offices. The front desk staff were all infected.”

I tense. “How did you handle it?”

“There was nothing to handle. I didn’t go in and say, Hi, I’m the Big Bad your pastor told you about and I want to hire an escape plane. One air taxi firm have an enquiry from a dentist’s wife called Lonnie Williams on file, and a helicopter company have a phone number for a lawyer’s secretary who is setting up a day trip to the Grand Canyon for an office party. Unless Schiller mobilizes the entire population of Colorado to hunt us door-to-door with torches and pitchforks, I left them no leads.”

“They’ll be looking for—” I stop. She’s not driving the stolen pickup, and somehow while I haven’t been looking she’s changed her clothing and hairstyle from off-shift nursing scrubs to suburban American soccer mom. In jeans and a skiing jacket, ponytail and sunglasses, she’s just about unrecognizable as the rich socialite Schiller’s people will remember. Still glamorous, though. “You’ve got paperwork for that cover?”

She nods. “I probably have more experience of escape and evasion than you do.” She checks the mirrors and slows, turns towards a downtown thickening of concrete and flags. “I thought perhaps we might try a small brasserie I’ve heard good things about. Their Kobe steaks are said to be excellent.”

Kobe beef? The soccer mom is trying to upgrade to premier league WAG territory. My wallet cringes: despite Lockhart’s scandalously liberal approach to expenses I’m probably going to be called upon to justify this in writing, then cough up for it out of my own pay packet. (Unless I can convince the small-A auditor that Kobe is a kind of cheeseburger…) “If you insist.”

“I insist.” Is that an impish gleam behind her shades? “We are not flying out tomorrow, Mr. Howard. Better get a full meal while the meal is to be had.”

“What about trains? Driving?”

“Amtrak runs one train daily to Salt Lake City or Omaha, it takes a day either way, and they insist on checking ID. Driving—it’s possible, but we’d have to cut cross-country and run past those road blocks. I do not advise it: we would be too obvious, even if we didn’t get stuck in a snowdrift and die of hypothermia. If they are infiltrating the general aviation companies, what about the highway patrol?”

I shiver, and not from cold. “You think Schiller’s locked down half the state?”

We slow, and Persephone pulls in at the roadside. “Yes. The real question is how soon he’ll be in a position to extend it to the entire continental United States.”

As she kills the engine I try to force my brain to shift gears. It’s painful. “Back up. You think he’s organized a total lock-down, blocking escape by air and probably by road, because of us? And he’s going to what?”

“It’s not just us, and I have a very bad feeling.” She opens her door and climbs out. I join her on the pavement. “We know he has ambitions.” She heads for the parking meter. “We know he has a powerful sponsor, and a supply of these parasites, and a messianic desire to bring his salvation to everyone. The Omega Course I attended—it wasn’t the first, or even the tenth. He’s been saving the souls of the rich and powerful for many years, working his way up. He must know that the higher he goes, the greater the risk of exposure. So if he is trying to suborn governments at the highest level, he must be nearly ready to move. And now something has just come up that convinced him to bring his plans forward. Possibly us, I fear.”

My stomach rumbles, but I’m not sure I’m hungry. It feels as if Persephone is dredging these fears out of the depths of my own imagination. “He won’t be doing this on a whim. Whatever he’s planning is close enough to completion that he can’t back off and try again later. At the same time, he thinks he can hold the lid down for long enough to—how long can you lock down a city without anyone noticing, anyway? A few hours? A couple of days?”

Persephone shoves quarters into the meter. “If he can conjure up a weather anomaly that matches the weather warning, he might manage a week-long clampdown. And nobody would question what had happened afterwards—especially if we disappear in the middle of it.” Light snowflakes swirl in her misting breath. “Winter is not over yet; there can be savage cold snaps.”

“Where’s he going to get the bandwidth to create an entropy sink that big?” Then my eyes widen involuntarily because I’m having an unwelcome flashback to something that happened more than a decade ago in Amsterdam.

YOU’VE SEEN THE SETTING IN A THOUSAND GANGSTER MOVIES: the unfurnished room in an abandoned house, empty but for the wooden chair in the middle of the floor, centered in a pool of light beneath an electric lantern hanging from the low, paper-peeling ceiling. A man sits on the chair, his arms cuffed behind the back and his ankles tied to the legs.

In the movies he’d be a good guy, a cop or an investigator perhaps. And the figure in the shadows, the interrogator preparing to ask him questions, would be a killer and a thug. In that respect, this scene is a movie cliche.

The interrogator walks up behind the slumped figure in the chair and grabs a handful of hair. He pulls the prisoner’s head back, and with his free hand he smears a ball of cotton wool and baby oil across the prisoner’s forehead.

“You can wake up now.”

The prisoner snorts incoherently, coughs, drools, and twitches as awareness returns in fits and starts. It’s a messy process, never as neat and clean-cut as cinematography portrays. But the prisoner is waking from sleep unnaturally enforced by the ward the interrogator has just erased from his forehead. There’s no concussion or intracranial bleeding to complicate things here.

“Would you like a glass of water?”

The victim coughs again and tries to look round at the speaker. Chooses the other direction. Begins to nod, then stops, suspicious.

The interrogator produces a bottle of water and a paper cup. Still standing behind the victim’s chair, he half- fills the cup. He holds it in front of the man’s mouth and tilts, slowly, taking pains to stay out of his prisoner’s field of vision.

After a moment, the prisoner sucks greedily, gulping down the contents of the cup. There is no Mickey Finn moment, no dramatic double take: it’s just water. The interrogator re-fills the cup and lets his subject empty it once more before he walks away and deposits it at the other side of the room.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks conversationally.

“Yuh”—cough—“you’re in too deep.” Arm muscles tense, come up against handcuffs. “Let me go now and lessee if’n we can sort this out so you get a day in court, huh? Because if you don’t—”

There is a scraping of metal on concrete. The interrogator drags up a chair behind the prisoner and sits, just outside the geometric design sketched on the bare boards around the other’s chair. The prisoner, uncertain, trails off.

“Do go on, son.” The interrogator sounds amused rather than afraid.

“Hss.” There’s an odd undertone to the sibilant.

“You can stop pretending.” The interrogator leans forward. “Because I know what you are, minion.”