The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (15 page)

Felon glared at Wurn.

“Swimmers don’t take no Baron Balg. They
takes
Eyesores
, and we watch. They take us but we watch!”
Wurn ran his large palms over his thick thighs, and then rubbed
them together. Felon slipped his gun away, watching the powerful
muscles bunch beneath the creature’s yellow-gray skin. He slid the
pistol in and out of the holster, left it unfastened, and turned to
watch the yacht.

20 – The Mission

The magician waited while Dawn finished with
her little woman’s moment. Years before she started dawdling while
getting ready for breakfast. She claimed she spent those minutes in
her cubbyhole applying finishing touches. A little dab of scavenged
rouge perhaps, a final flourish for her thick dark hair—Mr. Jay
could never tell what wonders she worked. Her forever girl’s
condition had her brimming with youthful beauty at all times.

He curled cross-legged on the sill of the
boarded-up window. The magician had returned some forty minutes
before Dawn awoke. Mr. Jay loved and hated his time away from her.
He enjoyed it because he had a very isolated life before he’d met
her. Not lonely, just
isolated
and he had adapted to
solitude. And now, he was uncomfortable with time alone, because it
meant being away from Dawn. He’d known her all these years and
still could not predict her actions. So he worried.

Mr. Jay blamed the fact that she’d never gone
through puberty. She couldn’t recognize the dangers of the world.
For her, a danger passed was
passed
and life took her onto
the next thing. He checked that line of reasoning because it wasn’t
true. She learned, and she was wiser than she let on. She played
dumb from time to time. He knew that was because if she could take
care of herself, she was afraid he’d leave.

Mr. Jay stretched himself out of his moody
brooding and settled against the bricks. The exertions of the night
had little effect upon him. He rarely needed more than a couple of
hours sleep. It gave him great opportunity for study and
meditation.

What he found would make it impossible to
sleep anyway. He would try to rest later after he figured out
whether his mission was complete. It wasn’t a success. But it was
unlikely he could take it farther with Dawn in tow. The incident
with the Prime’s spies worried him. They had to be using Powers to
locate him so quickly.

It was a decade since his last visit to the
City of Light and it had grown more oppressive and degenerate in
the intervening years. He realized the City might have been among
his primary reasons for his extended period in the wilderness. It
was more than that; but the City repulsed him. The worst part was
that its inhabitants were forgetting that something was wrong—or
that there had ever been a
right
.

Complacency was turning them all into the
walking dead. The metropolis’ soaring, bulging, hanging bulk
pressed down on the spirit. Each level perched on the bones of
another monstrous city below it combining to make a leviathan under
a tarry shell. The citizens burrowed through its guts like
roundworms.

But that they could forget why the City was
the way it was. He hated and loved people for their ability to
adapt to anything. History books told him what he needed to know
about human tenacity, and experience had shown him their terrifying
survival instincts unleashed.

He was appalled, not surprised, by the
conditions he’d found while moving under cover of night through the
City’s lowest and oldest level. The poor and the dead were forced
to exist in the damp shadows where the first streets had been built
upon and forgotten. The poor propped up hopeless lives with
meaningless work. The meaning diminished by the drudgery of the
tasks they were forced to accept in a society that rewarded wealth
and punished poverty. And with the Change robbing them of the
simple pleasures of child rearing and real death, what more then?
Work
. Get enough to eat, and cavort, for there was no start
or end or meaning to life.

And the contrasts were extreme. High above
their reach, immortal billionaires raced along the elevated Skyways
from one tower to the next, gobbling up wealth and monopolizing
economic power with a staggering disregard for those who eked out
existence in the levels far below.

Mr. Jay shook his head at such notions. It
was always the way. These ideas awaited him in every city he’d ever
visited. The City of Light just took it to incredible extremes.
Black winged limousines flying over the stinking bodies of the
homeless. The beggar is free to work his way to the top; he’s free
to die in the streets if he wants. He’s
free
!

There was nothing left for the poor. And they
couldn’t even rest in death. Their neighbors, the dead, scurried,
limped and dragged themselves through the darkness on errands of
some arcane sort or other—or outright competed for the same jobs.
Many of the dead retained their memories in part or whole, and
these tried to mimic the semblance of lives that were gone
forever.

Mr. Jay had traveled across the lowest Level
Zero without incident. It was simple enough. There were few
restrictions on the activities of the living. And all obstacles he
found were designed to impede the actions of individuals moving
up
to the levels above. He found massive gates permanently
blocking ancient side streets that wound upward. City Authorities
patrolled all vantage points but concentrated on the large manned
access areas. They were easy for the magician to evade.

Throughout his excursion he had reminded
himself that there was a curfew on the denizens of the lower
levels, not a state of war. Many living men and women from below
worked on the City’s upper levels, and these were allowed to come
and go as their employment demanded—though they were scrutinized at
Authority checkpoints. They were issued work permits and travel
documents. As in other cities, Mr. Jay found that the living did
not fear the dead as much as the rich feared the poor.

He moved secretly around Zero and elsewhere
in the City because of the Prime’s interest in him. Obviously, a
watch had been set. Mr. Jay could smell Powers in the air.

Listening to Dawn hum her little morning
song, Mr. Jay was revisited by the faces of the newly dead,
collected and deposited in neighborhoods just past the gates on
Zero. They scurried around near panic, still terrified of the dead
whom they had spurned but now joined. They clung to any elevated
position in the dark labyrinth of the City’s cellar because there
was nowhere else to go. They were
dead
. But the world after
the Change would not let them rest. Many, desperate, huddled about
the doorways of the Relief Centers and Missions, gathering there as
though some treatment might change their position in the City. They
were a pitiful lot.

He had to console himself with admiration for
the living workers who tried so hard to comfort the sad torment of
the dead. Mr. Jay avoided them all the same. He had business under
night—and no time to dally.

After traveling the dark ways for an hour or
more, he came to the base of Archangel Tower. Because of its
massive weight, the Tower was separate from the arching stone and
steel buttresses that suspended the rest of the City’s levels. It
was built on bedrock, and its mammoth shape thrust upward through
the metropolis’ layers until it burst free of all encumbrance a
twelve-hundred feet or more from its foundation—there to swoop
another eight-hundred feet skyward. It was not free of all
association, and had been built upon and conscripted as
reinforcement for the ascending layers around it.

But around the Tower’s footing was a clear
space of cracked and broken concrete slabs forming a shadow-strewn
valley. Fifty yards at its widest, this clearing paced the distance
from the smooth foundation outward to the crumbled facades of long
forgotten buildings, most now incorporated into the cyclopean
footing of the upper City’s support structures. Massive concrete
and steel arches roared upward into the darkness like giants. So
deep was Mr. Jay that the City’s busy Skyway traffic far above fell
mute. He heard greasy rustling noises.

Light fell from the City’s upper reaches as a
dim blue mist. Peering through this he saw that the stony valley
was rippling with movement. In and through this clearing a sea of
the dead undulated, many thousands drawn by some invisible force
into a swirling tempest of flesh. Dead creatures—many worn to
remnants—of various shapes and decrepitude lunged, crawled and
wriggled their way inward on a slow somber clockwise vortex,
hideously struggling against the undead tide for contact with the
mammoth blocks that formed the Tower’s foundation.

Silently—with only a whispered hiss of
movement—this awful circuit was repeated—many of its participants
so long engaged as to have eroded dead elbows, knees or hips flat.
At first he thought they were the
Lost
. Those were dead who
started turning up after the first fifty, completely devoid of
higher brain function and who had reverted to animal and aggressive
behavior.

But a dead woman draped in colorful rags
lagged along the outer edge of the march. She was pitiful and
strange to look upon, dressed in the remnants of a uniform as
though coming off her shift of serving coffee and doughnuts. There
was no doubt that she was dead, her skin was the color of chalk,
but when he looked at her, a dead eye caught his and reflected
awareness—some weak evidence that she had only recently joined this
macabre cycle. Her wrists told a sad story through slit mouths.

“Where are you going?” he had asked her, his
voice echoing over the shambling, horrifying parade. Her dead eyes
flickered, conjuring something like warmth or appreciation from her
hard plastic features.

“It is the singing. The music! Can’t you hear
it?” The dead woman staggered past before Mr. Jay could answer. He
only heard the slithering hiss of the ugly march. Nothing more. He
might know the music, if he knew the singer, so he gently pushed
his way through the hideous tide of death—sidled up to the body of
the Tower, he set his hand against it to speak…

“What do you think, Mr. Jay?” Dawn popped out
of her cubbyhole and Mr. Jay’s mind snapped back to the present. A
chill went through him as the transition from memory chafed.

Her dark eyes were wide and beautiful—the
light in them bright and ancient. She had put on his thick woolen
sweater, and knotted it about her waist with a string. Her hair was
brushed back and tied to form a dark brown bloom.

“As always my dear…” The magician climbed
from his place of reverie. “You are a feast for the eyes.” Her
downy cheeks bulged around her smile. “But a feast best appreciated
on a full stomach.” He bent low, tweaked her button nose. “I am
starved
!”

“Did I take too long?” Her face dropped in a
child’s wide-eyed expectation of trouble.

“Of course not.” He gestured to their little
table, and the meager place settings. “If you would take the time
to sniff the air, you’ll notice that our little stew is only now
ready.” He moved toward the small propane stove he used for
cooking, stirred the contents of the pot that rested there. “Please
butter the rolls.”

As Dawn clambered into her seat, he pushed
down the memories of Zero. Little Dawn was in too much danger here.
He had underestimated the Prime’s abilities, and the other powers
that lurked. He could never tell Dawn why he had come to the City.
It was not her battle. It was not her mission, and if
he
would never make such sacrifices again, he could not ask
her
to. He paused a second over the cooking pot and made his decision.
He’d replenish their supplies and they’d head north. He’d take her
back to Nurserywood. If the world burned in the process, so be it.
They’d already taken enough from him.

21 – Day at the Office

Sister Cawood hurried back from the washroom.
Her guts still boiled and burned. She had almost vomited twice in
the elevator coming up—barely made it to the bathroom. Sour
digestive juices still scorched her esophagus and her whole body
ached. Her reproductive organs stung, throbbed with the slightest
vibration or pressure.
Chastity
! Every atom of her wanted to
go home—pull the curtains, climb back into the bed and pray she’d
wake up later from the nightmare.
Obedience
.

She was going on autopilot now—true, she had
to think. But being in the office kept people from wondering, even
forming a question about her. People trusted her. If the film ever
surface they’d believe her if she said it was a fake. A sick cramp
rippled through her bowels and she almost headed back to the
washroom.
We implore the aid of Your tender mercy, that being
restored to bodily health; she may give thanks to You in Your
Church
.

She had to stop. Had to. It was suicidal. She
had no idea what drug she had taken or whether she had taken
others. Not the slightest idea how much alcohol she’d mixed with
it.
Chastity
. And what of venereal disease?
Oh Virgin
preserve me
! She had to make an appointment with a doctor.
What Doctor
? Memory of the night at the bar had degenerated
into red-tinted snapshots of hell: snippets of faces, laughter,
hard probing kisses and smoke and bodies. Each image brought regret
and nausea.
Blessed Mother
!

She flushed when her mind slipped back to the
hazy evening’s end.
Obedience
. The men she’d awakened with—a
surge of shame sickened her—they’d told her that the other man,
Raul, had a camera. Maybe they were kidding her. Trying to freak
her out.

Then she realized the choice for stopping
herself might have been taken out of her hands. A dark depressing
chasm opened under her with the thought.
It’s over
! Cawood
paused beside her secretary’s door. Jane was too perky, too
Scottish to see now.