APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (2 page)

             
“You should leave, Josephine. You deserve better,” Earl said, taking a shot in the dark. If nothing else he could blame the mistake on his concussion.

             
Her expression remained blank; almost apathetic. “My name’s Joanna,” she corrected him in a very tired tone of voice.

             
“Are you sure?" Earl asked and watched as her brow furrowed with the hint of emotion. Earl was silent for a moment, shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs of mania and was struck by a flash of nobility. "I've been cheating on you,” he said and instantly wished he hadn’t.

             
She stood up. There was a new expression on her face and he believed that it was comprised mostly of relief.  She turned and left without looking back. ‘
What’s her face’
never used to give up that easily; at least he thought she hadn’t.

             
“Sacre-bleu,” he cursed under his breath. He had no idea why he had said that, but his mind thought that the words tasted just right. As he lay in the hospital bed savoring those words he felt someone else seeing through his own dead eye. His mind swam against the currents of his subconscious and he felt like he was being pulled under the surface of those treacherous waters again, drowning in the Seine and he could swear he saw that the river was full of the dead, floating with him.

             
                   
Prologue Part 2 – What Edgar Cayce Didn't Know

Day One of Apocalypse

Cairo
, Egypt 

              The arid landscape of shimmering bronze blew torrents of sand across Dr. Quinton Farthingham’s deeply lined face. The doctor’s expression did not react to the grains of sand that stung his skin and flecked his gray, beard stubble.

             
After months of securing the proper permits from the Egyptian government and more months of finding nothing of importance, the last day of the dig had been welcomed with a sandstorm that the pyramids and their dual natured sentinel had not witnessed in hundreds of years.

             
Mountains of sand had been removed from beneath the front paws of the sphinx, revealing another fifteen feet of carefully laid stone. Heavy equipment had been working for days to move the compressed sand as they dug deeper and deeper.

             
A round, sealed entrance blocked the path of Farthingham’s quest.

             
“But why a Mesoamerican calendar, doctor?” questioned the younger man clad in khakis who stood beside Farthingham.

             
“Calendar? Ha! Consider it more of a Rosetta stone. Only instead of unlocking a forgotten language it unlocks a forgotten door,” chuffed the professor of archaeology in a deliberate and articulate British accent. The doctor signaled a tracked Bobcat forward. In its bucket rested the five hundred pound, three foot diameter Mayan calendar. The round stone tablet had been painstakingly reproduced from its original counterpart. It had been precisely measured by mathematicians and diamond cut and etched from Basalt.

             
The Bobcat inched forward with its manhole sized cargo. The operator skillfully tipped the bucket and eased the stone calendar into the round slot before it. It seated with a heavy boom as the round frame accepted it like a long lost friend. It was a perfect fit.

             
Farthingham watched in silence, a frown creasing his brow as nothing happened.

             
“Could it be that you were wrong, doctor?” asked his young protégé.

             
Farthingham favored the young Benjamin White with a look of incredulity. “Quiet. Listen,” he said holding up a long skinny index finger.

             
A loud cracking sound pierced through the din of the sand and wind and the replica calendar crumbled within the entryway and covered the two men in a fine powder of pulverized stone.

             
As the dust cleared they could see that not only the stone calendar had been pulverized, but also the three foot- thick stone behind it revealing a darkened chamber that had not been illuminated in several thousand years.

             
Dr. Farthingham rummaged through his ruck sack, withdrew a powerful LED flashlight, and thumbed it on. He shined the light through the round opening and saw the glint of gold within. “A calendar…” he muttered in disdain and climbed through the opening.

             
The two men stood inside the sphinx as Farthingham swept the beam over to what had caught his attention previously. It was a polished onyx statue of Anubis, clad in golden bracelets, rings and an ornate chest piece that encircled its neck. An Ankh of polished opal dangled from a golden chain from one of its bejeweled onyx hands. Farthingham let out a sigh, followed by a “huh...”

             
“What is it doctor?” asked Benjamin White.

             
“The Anubis…it has only one eye. The other seems to have been removed.”

             
Tomb raiders and looters had always been a bane in Giza, but this room had been sealed since it was built
and
the one ruby eye seemed to be the only thing disturbed.

             
Farthingham peered closer at the towering dog-like face and shook his head in frustration. The professor did not like not knowing the answer, but he would figure out that mystery before he left this place, of that he was sure.

             
The Anubis stood silently guarding the golden sarcophagus of an unknown pharaoh or priest. Farthingham ran a hand over the smooth surface that was void of dust or spider webs. “What strange markings,” he mused and then snapped his head around to face his protégé. “Tell the workers not to enter and to make sure that they allow no one else in here either.”

             
“Yeah, sure, professor,” agreed White nodding his head enthusiastically. As White ran to the entrance and wriggled through to the sand-scape outside, Farthingham snatched the Ankh from the Anubis grasp and inserted the long end into the only slot on the top of the sarcophagus. He had expected the writing in the tomb to be Egyptian hieroglyphics, not Hebrew. The Jews had been slaves to the ancient Pharaohs. Sons of Abraham and of Moses had no business in the tomb of rulers. The professor had to find the answers to this enigma.

             
The key that Farthingham grasped between his thumb and forefinger shook with excitement, fear and anticipation as he turned it within its lock. Apparently today was a day for using oddly shaped keys he thought with a grimace.

             
Immediately the earth began to rumble as the burial vault opened and filled the chamber with bright swirling flashes of purple and yellow energy. The doctor stood transfixed. The stench of death filled the chamber, making him gag as he fought to swallow the bile that filled his mouth. Farthingham dropped to his knees and he vomited his partially digested breakfast onto the gleaming stone floor. He wiped the foulness from his chin stubble, and looked up into the leering face of a partially wrapped mummy. The flesh of the dead man was dry and leathery, and creaked as it moved the few steps toward the kneeling doctor. The jaw of the mummy creaked open, slowly splitting the dry flesh as it revealed its yellow-brown teeth. It groaned and dust escaped from its mouth in a cloud like gnats and still the jaw swung open, wider and wider.

             
“God, help me!” whimpered the Brit, his decorum gone, so too his atheism as his heart pounded within his chest and resounded within his ears.

             
The mummy groaned again. It sounded like a word to Farthingham. It sounded like EMET, the Hebrew word for life. Then with a sudden burst of speed the mummy bent forward, skeletal hands clutching the doctor’s tan shirt and sank its teeth into the doctor’s face. It tore open Farthingham’s cheek as the professor screamed.

             
“Benjamin!”

             
Benjamin White thrust his head into the opening, and stopped suddenly when he saw the scene before his flashlight beam. The dead man was ripping bloody chunks of flesh from his professor’s face again and again as the doctor screamed in fear and agony.

             
White’s momentary paralysis passed and he hurriedly squirmed through the opening and rushed to his mentor’s aid. He grabbed Farthingham by the ankles and violently jerked him from the dead man’s clutches. The corpse straightened and roared at them as White drug his professor to the opening and helped the wounded man through before scrambling outside himself, but the dead man wrapped in strips of brown cloth did not follow them.

             
Benjamin half carried- half drug the professor to their Range Rover, and pushed the old man into the passenger seat before slamming the door shut. Benjamin darted to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. White slammed the vehicle in gear and sped toward the closest hospital in Cairo. He did not witness the corpse crawl through the opening and stumble over the dunes, the wind covering its footprints as it lumbered toward a large group of tourists that busily snapped photos of the mystery that is Giza.

Prologue Part 3 – Season of the Lich

The Isle of Hate

The Plane of the Ark

              Dusk is a garden where darkness blooms. Darkness pools in liquid night and grows long like phantom's cloaks as they seek other dark souls with which to commune. Here the cool moist air gave the island a perpetual low lying fog that the Isle's top predator, the Fog Widow, skittered beneath its shroud like wraiths in search of their next meal.

             
Micheliel drew his great sword and slashed at the giant arachnid. With a leg span of twelve feet and standing four feet in height - eight feet when reared back to strike. Venom dripped from fangs the length of a man's hand, but Micheliel was no mere man. Micheliel was born of nobility of the Nephilim race; the descendant of angels and human women- the giants of old.

             
The sword cut through the air with a whoosh and the sound audibly dulled as it halved the Fog Widow before him. Black blood dripped viscously from the oiled blade. Micheliel shook the sword, sending the remaining blood spattering onto the stone floor of Shadow Keep.

             
A heavy iron door separated the giant from his prey; Baliel the Lich of Ba-al was Nephilim too, but had traded his mortality for the hidden knowledge of ‘the Fallen’. Death had recoiled from him, though the relentlessness of time had ravaged his body. As the cells of his flesh succumbed to disease and decay, that spark of soul had never left his decomposing corpus.

             
Micheliel sheathed his sword, reared back and kicked the door with the heel of his plate mail boot. The iron door buckled but did not give. The giant kicked again and the hinges screamed as the metal ground against metal. Another kick and the door crumpled in the center, its reinforcing bands popped like springs but still the door held. Micheliel bellowed in frustration as he summoned all of his strength into the next kick and the door flew back from the frame of stone, sending chunks of basalt with it as it careened into the arched cathedral-like room.

             
From within Micheliel heard a scream of rage and the horrific vision of a living incarnation of death darted before him.

             
Baliel, the Lich of Ba'al resembled a freshly exhumed corpse; gray mottled flesh covering part of his moldering soft tissue, while the yellow-brown of ancient bone had torn through the flesh and glistened with rotting putrescence. A tarnished crown rested heavily upon the skull-like face and seemed to be held in place by Widow's Web. The sorcerer held a skeletal hand before him with fingers splayed. An enormous ruby ring adorned one bony finger and sparkled in the flickering candlelight.

             
With no time to draw his two handed sword from its sheath, Micheliel snatched his dagger from his belt and flung it at the Lich. It was well known and feared of the sorcerer's power to melt virtually any object with a flash of intense heat and Micheliel had no desire to become a pile of ash. The dagger found its mark and pierced one cataract covered eye and exited through the orbital bone on the left side of his skull. The Lich howled in agony and stumbled awkwardly, momentarily stunned. It was all the time Micheliel needed as the armored knight charged toward Baliel, brandishing his sword in both gauntleted hands.

             
"Noooo!" screamed the Lich as Micheliel swung the blade and severed Baliel at the waist. The sorcerer's torso slid from atop his hips and toppled to the stone floor with a bone rattling clatter.