The Apocalypse Codex

in here somewhere…” I rummage in my shoulder bag, end up upending the complaints department on the floor, then drop a spare tee shirt on top of it. Something buzzes aggressively—like a rattlesnake—and I jump back before I realize the ward’s broken and the giant isopod is free. Well, fuck it. I find the second and last mummified pigeon’s foot and pass it to Persephone, who’s kneeling behind another pew with her pistol held at the ready, then go hunting for the lighter. Which I pass across in due time.

“Make a distraction,” she says, “I’m going to sort this out.” Then she flicks the lighter, turns transparent, and disappears.

I sigh and power up my camera. Just then I feel an echo of hunger tugging at my attention from somewhere just outside the door. ***Not now,*** I send irritably: ***I’m busy.***

Unfortunately these are not my feeders in the night; I get a distinct sense of peevish resentment, and then the hunger pressing in on the edges of my mind redoubles. A moment later there is a great clattering of bones as the front of the picket of the damned reaches the entrance and shuffles across the threshold, luminous green worms writhing and twisting in their sunken eye sockets.

There’s a great shout from the other side of the nave, and then a gurgling scream and another gunshot. The first three walking corpses shuffle towards me. Two of them raise tarnished swords; the third clutches an ancient and rust-speckled rifle with a bayonet the length of my arm. They don’t look friendly.

I raise the camera and frame them in the viewfinder. One last chance before I blow them back to Molvania or wherever they came from, before they got swept up in the Russian civil war and ended up in one of the Bloody White Baron’s death trains: ***I am the Eater of Souls! You are mine to command. Halt!***

It’s a bit of an exaggeration (if not an outright lie: I am not the Eater of Souls, I’m just his administrative assistant), but for a miracle the half-skeletonized soldiers stop dead just inside the threshold. I sense bafflement and incomprehension.

***Report!***

The rifle barrel rises, and rises until it points at the ceiling in scabrous salute. ***The watch…reporting, Master.***

Another three zombies arrive on the threshold, rocking and shuddering to a halt. There are more behind them, the walking undead ruins of a bloody civil war, staked out to die without hope of perpetual rest beneath the racing moons of an alien world: the sentries on the edge of forever. ***It is him,*** I sense one of them saying, ***it is the Lieutenant come to lead us home.***

(By “home” I do not think he is talking about anything this side of the grave.)

***Enemies have come to wake the Sleeper,*** I tell them. ***They must die. There are two allies, an invisible witch and a man with two knives that eat souls. They must live.***

***Must they?*** comes a question from the ranks. There’s always one.

***I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Follow me!*** And with knocking knees, I force myself to stand up and walk out from behind the row of pews and shout, “Hey motherfuckers! Over here!” ***Charge!***

I hope Persephone appreciates my distraction…

Before me, the Altar of the Sleeping Christ is a plain sarcophagus carved from a single slab of black granite, inlaid with metallic flecks that form disturbing patterns if you stare at the surface for too long. It’s four meters long, far too big for a human unless it contains a pharaonic nest of concentric coffins, not that anyone with any sense is going to go looking inside. Reddish sunbeams track slowly across the dusty flagstones of the temple and drip bleeding from the backs of the empty pews.

At one side of the room, a fight is in progress. Two of the black-suited bodyguards are down, twitching in their death agonies as Johnny’s knives suck the souls from their bodies. The other two aren’t shooting, but they hold batons as if they know how to use them and they’re circling around Johnny McTavish, who—knifeless, now—is at a marked disadvantage.

A woman in a blue gown leads an older man dressed in priest’s vestments towards the sarcophagus. He casts an angry glare at McTavish, but seems satisfied by the man’s mere presence. It’s not far to the altar, and they’re arriving just as I shout and start to run towards them. The woman looks up in surprise, then raises her arms as if in prayer in my direction. Only she’s not praying.

There’s a noise like a sewing machine the size of an airliner punching holes in sheet steel. I throw myself at the floor, but she’s not aiming at me—she’s aiming behind me, at the source of the lurching shadows that careen across the pews. And for all that they’re undead the bodies ridden by the eaters aren’t bulletproof—break enough bones and they’ll be reduced to crawling towards their victims like something out of a Monty Python film, even if the shooter isn’t firing banishment rounds. I, on the other hand, am not bulletproof at all, so I hide behind the furniture and make myself one with the floor.

The camera. When I made my throw-self-at-planet move it was attached to my wrist by a lanyard. Now, not so much: I am attached to a lanyard but no camera. I look around but I don’t see it—it probably slid under a few pews. Well, sucks to be me. I’ve got a pistol; it’ll have to do.

It takes me a few seconds to get the damned thing disentangled from my jacket, and then I run into a second problem. I’m used to punching holes in paper targets with a standard issue Glock 17, as used by police tactical response teams, MI5, and just about everyone in the UK who is legally allowed to carry a handgun these days. But this thing isn’t a Glock. There are odd-looking buttons on the side and the grip feels all wrong. It probably has a safety catch. Pausing to RTFM, in a dimly lit temple while my pulse is running at warp speed and a deranged valkyrie with a space-age weapons system chews holes in the landscape, isn’t an option: so I mentally consign my soul to wherever it is that dead agents’ souls go, flick the switch or button or whatever that’s nearest the trigger guard into the other position, and squeeze the trigger in the general direction of the altar—firing under the pews.

Bang goes the pistol, and I nearly bite right through my lower lip as I button up to keep from screaming aloud and giving away my position. My upper right arm is in searing agony where Jonquil and her posh friends made holes in it last year. “Shit,” I say very quietly. I haven’t been working out on the range since the business in Wandsworth, and it’s clearly a non-starter. But…

***Take this pistol.*** I put it on the floor and give it a good shove, and it goes skittering back behind me. ***Kill the woman with the machine gun.***

Rattle-click-crunch: a feeder is crawling towards me. I can feel waves of festering resentment and rage gnawing away at what’s left of his mind. For a miracle, he reaches for the gun instead of the warm, pulsing, living leg so close to his jaws. Leg of master. He’d bite me if he could—but he’s bound to serve the will of those whose taint I’ve carried ever since the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh fucked up big-time in Brookwood last year.

***Wait!*** I announce, feeling the feeder preparing to lurch to its feet. ***First, find a small silvery box, looks like so***—I visualize it mentally—***on the floor somewhere. Bring it to me! Then await my order to fire.***

A fresh burst of automatic fire sprays overhead as the nun with the very big gun lays down suppressive fire. There’s a crunch, and a wail that dissipates like pollen on the desert wind as one of the feeders falls apart. Then something bangs into my hip. I reach back for it with my left arm, swearing quietly. It’s the camera. I push the power button and wait for it to wake up. I hope it’s not broken.

About ten seconds have passed: an eternity in a fight.

Schiller is now leaning on the altar, holding a cable attached to a Pelikan case that he’d obviously brought through earlier and stashed behind it. He’s exhausted but determined. His handmaiden stands guard beside him, a white-hot blaze of righteous anger, and she’s taking regular aimed shots at the walking corpses who are still stumbling in through the entrance, for all the world like a horde of green-haired munchkins in an early computer game. They’re not doing well; this isn’t what the feeders were intended for. Maybe half a dozen of the brighter ones are still moving, but they’re mostly the ones with enough of a residual sense of self-preservation to use the furniture for cover. (If I didn’t know better I’d say the others were trying to get themselves killed, seeking release from their deathless agony…)

Johnny is—oh dear. Johnny is down. So is another of the bodyguards, but another four arrived through the gate from the New Life Church while I was trying to become one with the lithosphere. I can feel his anger and frustration and pain just as I can feel the dry, complacent yearning of the hosts riding Schiller’s goon squad. They’ve come for Jesus’s summoning, and—

Where’s Persephone?