Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle Of The Ages (19 page)

“Such as?”

“Such as I’m guessing you guys are asking me to come up with new looks and identities for a bunch of people.”

“Right. All our old aliases and appearances have been compromised.”

“Found this book in an abandoned library just across the Minnesota border. There’s all kinds of stuff in here I never even heard of before. New ways to change skin and eye color and all that. Fake scars and blemishes. How many people are we talking about?”

“I think just five,” Mac said. “I think Ray wants get- ups for him and Buck and Sebastian and Smitty and me.”

“Really? That’s it? I brought way too much stuff.”

“What’d you bring?”

“Everything I had left over from Chicago. GC uni-forms at all levels, IDs, documents, stuff for women and men. This is going to be easy. I mean, it’ll take time, but I was afraid you’d need ten or twelve. The hardest one is going to be Mr. Sebastian, but I’ve already got an idea for him.”

“Tell me.”

Zeke put his book down, apparently so he could ges-ture with both hands. “The problem with your big people is that no matter what you do with them, you can’t make ‘em smaller. You can make a small person big with pad-ding and whatnot, but you can’t take pounds off the big ones.

“But what I can do, see, is give George a whole new look, the look of an older man. So his size doesn’t look so threatening. It looks like it came on him from getting old, rather than from working out and military training. Might even give him a cane, glasses. Make him look like one of those old middle-aged guys who have gone to seed. Chop off that blond hair, give him a rim of white, put some lines in his face. All of a sudden instead of being a guy in his late twenties in perfect shape and huge, he’s thirty years older, slowed down by food, maybe diabetes, bad knees, bad feet, stooped a little. Add some padding around his middle, front and back, so he waddles. He’s not gonna threaten anybody.”

“Brilliant. What do you do with me?”

“Biggest giveaway with you is your Southern accent. Can you fake others? Can you be a Yank or a Brit?”

“A Brit easier than a Yankee, that’s for sure.”

“If you can be British, I can make you look that way. Tweeds and all.”

Chloe’s guess about where she was headed was con-firmed when Jock radioed ahead and the
SUV
was met by a phalanx of GC motorcycles and squad cars. They escorted the celebrated prisoner to the grounds of what had once been known as Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois.

The place was a gothic house of horror that had been converted from a state penitentiary to one of the GC’s largest international prisons. It had both male and female prisoners. In fact, the female population was sec-ond largest only to the Belgium Facility for Female Rehabilitation (Buffer).

The first thing to hit Chloe was the crowd of media trucks jamming the entrance. Cameras pointed toward the
SUV
from every conceivable perch, and once the vehicle had passed, she looked back to see the crews scrambling for position in the vast courtyard.

The yard had become legendary at Stateville during the last two and a half years. Prisoners were allowed there for only two reasons. They were herded past a gigantic bronze statue of Carpathia three times a day, where they were stopped in groups of thirty to fifty and allowed to kneel and worship, or they were in the yard to be executed. The yard had seven guillotines about thirty feet apart and positioned so that the sun baked them from dawn to dusk.

Jock stopped the
SUV
just inside the yard. “Look at ‘em there, sweetie,” he said. “Those blades get sharpened every night, but not a one of ‘em’s ever been cleaned. No scraping, no washing, no rust inhibitors.

“And you know those slots on each side, where the big blades slide down? Back when we were more humane, those were lubricated every time they were used. No more. Now the blades scrape along the sides, sometimes get hung up, get crooked, slow down. I mean, they still weigh enough that, even on a bad day, by the time they reach your neck, they’re gonna dig in at least three inches.

“In the old days, a blade didn’t do its job, too bad for us. The sentence was to stick your head in there until the blade dropped. If it somehow didn’t kill you, well, you had taken your punishment. And don’t think that didn’t happen more than once. Lots of people walking around with severe neck wounds.

“But now, blade doesn’t kill ya, we just hoist ‘er again and let ‘er go. Two, three times with a rusty, blood-caked blade that, like I say, is sharpened every night-that’ll do the trick.”

About twenty feet before each guillotine stood a rick-ety wood table, also gray and weathered by the sun and wind. Each had two incongruous Bank of England chairs behind it, burnished redwood significantly less wind worn.

“Processors and mark applicators get to sit,” Jock said. “The condemned stand in lines. Once their infor-mation is recorded and any personal belongings have been confiscated, they’re issued a plastic laundry basket they hand to the executioner. He or she sets it on the other side of where the blade comes down.

“Head drops in the basket, body stays where it knelt. Lifers without parole do collection duty. Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Spare me.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Jock got out. “Cuff her, Jess,” he said.

Jesse turned and opened the cage. “Hands,” he said.

“Better dope me again,” Chloe said.

“Say what?”

“You think I’m going to voluntarily be cuffed so you guys can take me somewhere I don’t want to go?”

Jock opened the back door.

“Hold on, Jock!” Jesse hollered. “She’s not cuffed yet!”

“What the-?”

Jock, seeming to Chloe to show off for the cameras, leaped into the backseat. Chloe sat with her fists balled under her thighs. “You like to be difficult, don’t you?” he said.

Jock grabbed her wrists and jerked her hands up and together where Jesse could reach them. As soon as she was cuffed, Jock slid back out of the car, pulling her by the cuffs and letting his body weight drag her out. She came out hands first, head banging the door, knees scraping the floor and then the ground. Jock pulled her to her feet.

Chloe hurt all over, but she was glad she had made them work. Someone else could go gently into that good, good night of death. Not her. Jock clamped a hand around her elbow and led her to the middle death machine. “This is going to be yours tomorrow if you don’t cooperate today.”

The stench overwhelmed her, and both men covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Chloe, mer-cifully cuffed in front this time, bent her elbows and held her nose closed with her fingers.

“As you can see,” Jock said, “we don’t wash the plat-forms or the ground either. I mean, who would that benefit?”

The area around the middle machine, like the others along the sixty-yard row, looked to Chloe like a slaughter-house. The ground around it was black, caked with blood. “See that Dumpster back there?”

Directly behind the middle machine, maybe a hundred feet back, sat a Dumpster that looked half the size of a boxcar. It had no lid. “One collector takes the basket and dumps the head in there. Two collectors drag the body to the same place. See those black trails from each station to the Dumpster? You know what that is.”

Chloe knew all right. She tried to hold her breath, but Jock kept pulling her arm so her hands came away from her nose. She prayed he would not take her out and make her look in the Dumpster. “It gets emptied about once a week.”

The GC held the media back, but they yelled questions. “What’s that on her jumpsuit? Did she soil herself?”

Chloe, mortified, hollered, “Chocolate!”

Jock whirled and batted her in the forehead with the back of his hand. “You say nothing to anyone but us, understand?”

“They drugged me with a choco-!”

Jock slipped around behind her and clamped his hand over her mouth. When she tried to bite him, he drove a knee into her lower back, knocking the wind from her. “Give me the tape, Jess.”

“It didn’t have to come to this, ma’am,” Jesse said, pulling a three-inch roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to.”

Jock reached to pull a length of tape off the roll, free-ing Chloe’s mouth. “Tell the truth for once! I was drugged! They-”

Jock pressed the tape under her nose so tight her upper lip bulged, and when he pressed the sides against her cheeks, she couldn’t move her jaw, let alone speak.

“God,” Chloe prayed silently, “help me be strong. I don’t want to go easy. I don’t want to be beat or scared into submission. And if they kill me, let me speak first. Remind me of all the verses I’ve memorized. Please, God, let me speak your words.”

Jock and Jesse took her back across the yard toward a steel door in the wall of one of the cell blocks. The door was at ground level, but she assumed stairs would lead below the ground to solitary confinement.

They stopped about ten yards from the door, and the media was about the same distance away on the other side. “Has she spilled any more?” a woman called out.

“Oh yes,” Jock said. Chloe vigorously shook her head. “More all the time,” he continued. “Of course we had to tell her there would be no trading leniency for, ah, physi-cal favors as it were. She can only help herself by telling the truth. I’m confident we’ll get there. We’ve already gained more knowledge about the Judah-ite underground and the illegal black-market co-op from her than from any other source we’ve ever had. And as you know, she gave up Mr. Al Basrah, the leading subversive in the Middle East, and he is already dead.”

Chloe continued to shake her head, but she had no illusions that would be shown on
GCNN
that evening.

“That’s all for now, folks. We have a few more pre-requisites for Mrs. Williams to qualify her for a life sentence rather than death, but our daily executions here will be held tomorrow at ten A.M., regardless. We do not foresee having the full house they did yesterday, with every machine busy for nearly half an hour, but the latest count is thirty-five on the docket, so five for each machine.”

The press began to disperse, but still Jock and Jesse stood there with Chloe. “I am going to finish my tour -guide speech, little lady, and you’re going to hear me out,” Jock said. “Some of the best days of my life have been spent in this yard, seeing people get what’s coming to them. Frankly, I was disappointed when I was trans-ferred to San Diego, but the brass assured me a huge Judah-ite cell was suspected there. They told me I could cart them back here if we rooted them out. Here’s hop-ing you’re just the first.”

Mac was glad to have Zeke for company on the long flight. Though uneducated, the young man was smart and inquisitive. He never ran out of questions or things to talk about.

“Abdullah’s kinda tough because he’s already so ethnic. He’s not good with accents, so I’ve got to keep him Middle Eastern but obviously something different than Jordanian. Rayford’s pretty easy, ‘cause I can go any direction with him. Buck’s the hardest, with all the facial scars. But anyway, let’s say I make you five guys into totally different people. What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m not totally sure myself, Z,” Mac said. “Rumor has it Carpathia’s calling in the ten kings-‘course, he calls ‘em regional potentates, but we know what’s going down, don’t we?”

“I do.”

“If Otto succeeds in New Babylon, we find out where the big shindig is gonna be before it happens, and we get in there and bug the place. We’re not going to try to stop prophesied events, of course, but it’ll be good to know exactly what’s happening.”

“What happens to Carpathia’s secretary?”

“Krystall? If I had a vote, I’d say we convince her we know what’s going to happen to New Babylon and get her out of there.”

“To Petra?”

Mac shook his head. “Much as we might like to do that, God has set that city aside as a city of refuge for his people only. Sad as it is, she made her decision, took her stand, and accepted the mark. Getting her out of New Babylon just keeps her from dying in that mess when God finally judges the city. She’s going to die anyway, sometime between then and the Glorious Appearing, and when she does, she’s not going to like what eternal life looks like. “That doesn’t mean we can’t befriend her and be grateful for her help. Or that we can’t feel sorry that she waited too long to see the truth.” “I still wonder if we can trust her though,” Zeke said.

The San Diego evacuation deadline was moved up to midnight, partly because preparations were ahead of schedule and partly to be safe. No one knew for sure when the GC would begin their next round of canvasing.

Buck was in the vehicle bay on a walkie-talkie with Ming, who was in his apartment watching Kenny and also manning the periscope. When she said the coast was clear, Buck sent loaded vehicles to the airstrip, where planes and pilots arranged by Lionel Whalum met them.

At 6 P.M. Ming radioed. “Buck, Chloe’s on TV.”

“Kenny watching?”

“I’ll get him into his room.”

Buck sprinted back, and by the time he got to his quar-ters, Rayford had shown up too. The news showed Chloe trying to communicate to the press and Jock backhanding her. Buck felt murderous, especially when they taped her mouth shut. He was used to the lies, but he couldn’t stand to see her mistreated.

“Where’s that look like to you, Ray?” he said.

Rayford shook his head. “Studying it.”

One of the woman reporters said, “Here in Louisiana prisons are notoriously hard, and none harder than Angola. International terrorist Chloe Williams will rue the day she pushed the Global Community to the point where she was sent here. The guillotine will be sweet relief compared to hard labor for the rest of her life.”

“Angola, Louisiana!” Buck said. “That’s where I’m going. I want to take Sebastian and Razor, and you’ll want to come, of course, Dad. Who else do you think we should-?”

“Hold on, Buck,” Rayford said. “We’re not going to Louisiana.”

“What? You send three of your top people to Greece to get George, and you’re going to let the GC do what they want with Chloe?”