The Apocalypse Codex

“Motherfucker!” Patrick screams in fury and throws the contents of the boiling kettle at the first intruder. Conservatively attired in a black suit and tie, white shirt, the missionary takes the steaming gush direct in the face without flinching. His eyes glow the same shade of green as the flawed shotgun cartridges rolling underfoot as he steps forward. Glowing green wormlike shapes writhe within the intruder’s eyes. “Get the fuck out!”

Patrick lunges forward, carving knife held low. The missionary is spreading his arms wide. Now his mouth opens, revealing something silvery and twitching. The knife is a faint hope. Patrick leans hard and the point sinks into the missionary’s chest, right between the ribs, but no blood comes out. And now Patrick’s tattoos are glowing nearly as brightly as the low-power bulb in the hall light fitting. The missionary takes another step forward, and the second one crosses the threshold, cutting off any chance of escape through the front door.

Patrick takes a step back, treads on a loose shotgun cartridge, and falls against the wall beside the clock. Door hanging open, chains and counterweights disemboweled—he reaches in and yanks hard on the pendulum, a kilogram of brass on the end of a meter-long steel shank. (The clock was his old man’s; the only thing of his that he’s bought to the new world.) Raising the improvised shillelagh he takes a swipe at the missionary’s head with the counterweight. Success. The thing in front of him raises an arm to block, and stops pushing forward. The knife blade sticking out of his chest is oozing slowly, thick and dark.

“Join us,” drones the missionary. “We are the Saved. Join us and bathe in the blood of the lamb and be Saved forever.”

“Fuck off,” Patrick snarls, waving the pendulum at the walking corpse. “Get aff my fuckin’ patch, motherfocker!”

“Join us—” The missionary repeats the invitation perfectly, like an answering machine from hell.

“Patrick”—another voice from the top of the stairs, one that detonates an emotional hand grenade that sends grief-tainted shrapnel tearing through his heart—“what’s going on?”

Only one thing left. Utter desperation and fear threaten to weaken his knees before he can do it. It’s a last resort: maybe they can—

***Help?***

Patrick loses consciousness immediately. Someone else looks out through his eyes, someone more detached, with the aloof cruelty of a small boy contemplating the antics of insects trapped in a jam jar.

“Hello,” says Patrick’s mouth.

The missionaries hold their ground, but look apprehensive. It’s like they know their own kind.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” says Control. “Did Ray send you?”

“Join us—”

“Bo-ring.” Patrick’s body jabs the pendulum into the nearer missionary’s face and lets go of it. And then, with an agility alien to a sixty-year-old in poor condition, he stoops sideways and scoops up the shotgun.

“Patrick? Who are these—”

“Oh shut up.” He spins towards the staircase and casually pulls the trigger. The detonation is deafening in the confined space. What’s left of Moira’s upper torso fountains blood as it topples forward, coming to rest at the foot of the stairs. Her head lands face down on the landing.

Control ejects the spent cartridge, chambers a fresh round, and turns back to face the missionaries, raising the shotgun and bringing the barrel to rest under his borrowed body’s chin.

“Who sent you?” Control demands, resting a finger lightly on the trigger.

“Why did you kill her? She was Unsaved.” The second missionary is more talkative than his taller companion, whose unfortunate encounter with a carving knife has damaged his lungs.

“Who sent you?” Control repeats. “I’m getting impatient here. Tell me or I’ll kill the hostage. Then you won’t get to eat him.”

“We do not eat them!” protests the second missionary. His voice is thick and hard to make out. His tongue ripples fatly between his lips, silvery with twitching legs: it has grown almost too large for this mouth. Soon it will asphyxiate the carrier, and the host will require another body. “We bring them to the Lord.”

“All right.” Control lowers the shotgun muzzle far enough for Patrick’s mouth to swallow convulsively: certain physiological reflexes continue, even if the usual tenant is elsewhere. “Who is your Lord?”

“We serve the Gatekeeper of Heaven, He Who Sleeps and Will Rise Again. Come with us. Accept the love of Jesus Christ into your heart and mouth and rejoice in everlasting light for eternity. You, too, can be Saved. Help us tear down the Wall of Pain and open the gates of the pyramid and dance wild and free forever in the silver heat of His gaze!”

Control sneers. “I don’t think so!” Then he pushes down on the trigger, and the top of Patrick’s skull disappears in a mist of fatty tissue and bone splinters.

IT IS A SMALL MERCY, IN CONTROL’S OPINION: A REWARD FOR all Patrick has done for the Agency, and a final discharge that painlessly clears all debts. (Which are not inconsiderable, counting the group health insurance.) The situation was already non-survivable by the time Patrick became aware of it. He should have grasped this as soon as he realized the CCTV was being spoofed. Or in any event once the banishment rounds misfired when he engaged the enemy.

But Control is now aware of the true identity of the adversary. And that means there’s still some hope of saving Denver.

THE TROUBLE WITH GODHEADS, IN JOHNNY’S EXPERIENCE, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God.

Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift.

And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings.

So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality.

Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor.

Johnny whistles tunelessly between his teeth as he drives.

He’s fed up to his back teeth with Godheads. Godheads in the person of his father and uncles and mother and aunts were why he joined up with the British Army when he was sixteen. Godheads following the blueprint for salvation got him into trouble a couple of years later—and then there was the Legion etrangere. Because when you’re born eldest son to the moderator of a remarkably exclusive brethren in an exceptionally free kirk where they don’t believe in sex because it might lead to dancing (which in turn would imply the existence of music), the tendency to see demons everywhere never really leaves you.