The Apocalypse Codex

map, Duchess, and Mr. Howard here has got a compass.” He’s looking at the pizza box on the desk, where the complaints department has been quiescent for some time. It rattles quietly, as if it senses doom approaching.

“Johnny,” I say briskly, trying to conceal my unease, “you implied your friend Patrick is an OPA stringer, right?”

“Yep.”

“So why aren’t the OPA crawling all over this town right now?”

“Because,” Johnny says patiently, “they can’t. Schiller’s keeping them out. Paddy lives here; he’s their only eyes and ears right now.”

“Right.” I think for a moment. “Then we need to contact him because he’s probably our only way of getting a message out right now. Schiller’s big mega-church is in Colorado Springs, and he’s starting whatever it is at three this afternoon. At least that’s what the ads on cable TV say. I think he’s moving to some kind of endgame, and opening a gate is part of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to go and find Patrick and go to ground with him.” Johnny is looking at me oddly, but I push on: “You and I”—I turn to Persephone—“are going to drive down to Palmer Lake and look around. Bet it’s some kind of major ceremony—if they’re doing what I think they’re doing—”

“They’ll need lots of warm meat. Understood.” She glances at Johnny, then nods. “They’ll be processing the flock at the mega-church. What do you want to do about it, Mr. Howard?”

I take a mouthful of the foul wake-up juice. “I think we should confirm what’s going on, then relay to Johnny, who’s going to tell Patrick to tell his handler what the epicenter is.” Johnny nods slowly but holds his counsel. “Then we’re going to go visit the church. It’d be a good idea to confirm the picture before we set the Nazgul on them. Plus, they may be running the abattoir some distance from the buffet. In which case we may be able to rescue a few folks.” I swallow again, my throat abruptly dry. “And then I’m going to take some holiday snaps.”

I HATE KILLING.

Most people seem to have this escapist James Bond vision of secret agents offing bad guys left, right, and center, then wisecracking about it. Or they think we’re some kind of Jack Bauer psychopath torturing the truth about the ticking bomb out of everyone in sight. In truth, killing is a very unusual part of the job and it leaves me feeling sick and depressed for months afterwards—and that’s when someone else is doing it.

I can count on my thumbs the number of people I have intentionally killed in my decade-plus of service. I’ve put down a lot of once-living humans whose bodies still moved but whose nervous systems were in service to alien nightmares, but that’s not the same. The zombies, like the two who tried to grab me back in the hotel, are not so terrible—you learn to live with the inevitability of it eventually—but the very idea of killing a thinking, laughing, loving human being makes me sick in my stomach and fills me with horror. And that’s when it’s a bad guy who’s got a knife at my throat or who is pointing a gun at me, and I can justify it to myself as self-defense. (Killing innocent bystanders is something I have nightmares about. Once, for a traumatic week, I thought I’d done so; it nearly broke me.)

Anyway, that’s why they send me on these missions. As my ex-boss Andy put it, “Would you rather we gave the job to someone who enjoyed it?”

It’s bad enough when I have to do smelly stuff that lands someone else in the shit. TL;DR version is, I hate killing, and I try to find any possible shadow of an excuse to avoid doing it. (And so does my wife.)

…Which is why it feels very peculiar, not to mention distressing, to be in this position.

Schiller’s ministry is clearly messing with very dangerous powers. That Bible alone would have been enough to justify shutting him down with extreme prejudice, and as for the rest—the brain parasites, the baby farm Persephone stumbled across, not to mention the Fimbulwinter weather and the Sleeper in the Pyramid—all of those are enough to justify bringing the hammer down hard.

I don’t like the term “collateral damage”; it trivializes agony and dismemberment, mourning and grief. (You try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom. See how you like what they say to you.) But if any situation justifies the use of extreme force, this comes close. If Schiller’s misguided attempt to wake the Gatekeeper (Is Schiller really so naive he believes that abomination is Jesus Christ?) succeeds, everyone in the world will pay the price. These things are not demons or gods: they’re ancient intelligences from other corners of the cosmos that are normally inaccessible and inhospitable to our kind. When they get into our world they are as inclined to mercy towards us as cats are towards mice. We make splendid toys for their amusement, until we break.

If Schiller is really trying to conduct a great summoning with the Apocalypse Codex as a reference manual, someone has to shut the gate down before he levers it wide enough to summon his master—a process which probably involves mass human sacrifice, because these nitwits are generally too theory-impaired to realize that if they want to make a nuclear explosion there are more efficient ways to do it than banging two lumps of highly enriched uranium together by hand. And unless the Seventh Cavalry—that would be the Nazgul—make it over the hill in time, that duty devolves on me. Because I’m apprenticed to the Eater of Souls (and how’s that for a job description? Junior Assistant Under-Secretary For Eating Of Souls, Fourth Grade) and they made me sign for Pinky’s pocket consumer implementation of SCORPION STARE, the original basilisk gun in a box —so I guess from the outside I look like some kind of super-powerful government assassin.

While all the time I’m brokenly repeating inside, like an old-time cracked record, fuck me, I’ve drawn the hangman’s straw. Again.

TRY LOOKING AT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S POINT OF VIEW:

Persephone drives slowly into the teeth of the twilight, peering suspiciously at the road from behind wipers that sweep across the windscreen with a rhythmic thud, shoveling the driving snow into the chilly night.

The liaison officer from External Assets slumps next to her in the passenger seat. His face is turned away. He could almost be sleeping, but occasionally he raises a hand to scratch alongside his nose or delivers some other sign of sentience. The other hand rests, palm down, on the small cardboard pizza box in his lap.

The weather is unnerving. Huge snowflakes, fingernail-sized, drift from a sky that dawn has barely brightened to the color of dull slate, warmed by a brassy tint that bespeaks more snow to come. There’s little wind and the flakes drop steadily, dulling the sound of traffic from outside the coupe and reducing visibility to a couple of hundred meters.

The municipality snowplows are out and the roads are gritted. Even so, the fresh snow is filling in tire tracks in front of her eyes. Denver gets snow and people hereabouts know how to drive in the stuff, but the sidewalks and trees are already blanketed thickly, and it’s getting heavier.

There’s a ramp onto the interstate, clogged with sluggish traffic shuffling south. It moves in fits and starts. She glances sideways at Howard again. A civil service chinless wonder, Johnny thought. Well, the chinless wonder in question broke out through a snatch squad and evaded capture as neatly as any field op in the Network. And the chinless wonder seems to harbor ideas about leading from the front, not dropping the people he thinks he’s responsible for in the sticky stuff. And he’s inclined to go for the throat when confronted with a fight/flight choice. All in all, he’s shaping up extremely positively as far as Persephone’s personnel review is concerned. But… holiday snaps? He’s joking, he’s mad, or he’s holding something back. And she knows which she’d put her money on.

Persephone checks her rearview again, then squints into the falling curtain of snow. A big rig looms up out of the haze on her right, stationary on the hard shoulder. Snow is already mounding up across its hood as she rolls past it in a wave of slush, maintaining a steady forty. A lunatic in an SUV is coming up too damned fast on the left, but at least he won’t be yacking on his cellphone on the way to work. “Mr. Howard. Is your phone getting a signal yet?”

Howard’s hand moves to his coat pocket. “Nope.” He stares at the iPhone for a while before sliding it away again. “Thaumometer’s still hot ahead of us, though.”

Persephone compares his announcement to her mental map, lurid gold and yellow highlights gleaming like Midas’s curse, and finds that the spike of power that marks the portal is right where he said. “Check.”

She scans her rearview again. “About the target. Once Patrick notifies the Black Chamber, what do you think we should do?”