The Armageddon Conspiracy (39 page)

‘
Are you ready to meet
your maker?’
Kruger asked, holding his hands in front of him as
though praying.
‘As a kid, when I heard people talking about
Judgment Day, I always tried to picture what would happen.
Did
everyone get in line?
Did we all hear each other’s sins, hear
judgment being pronounced and sentence passed?
Did billions of
people stand in a vast, milling crowd in front of God with a vast
escalator to heaven on the right and a bottomless trapdoor to hell
on the left?’

‘
Or maybe nothing
happens,’ Vernon said.

Kruger shook his head.
‘Even now, you
doubt.
Can’t you see what’s happening?
It’s all around us.
All the
signs.’

Vernon stared down at the water and
watched the ship cutting through the waves.
Everyone has to take
some role or other in life.
It was his to be Doubting Thomas.
Why
not?
Better than Judas.
Better than the other Apostles.
They were
so anonymous, he’d forgotten most of their names.
What puppet
should you play in the puppet show at the end of the world?
No
strings attached.

Everything on the river
was deathly silent.
He closed his eyes and tried to think of a
prayer, but he’d forgotten them all.
Just a sentence here and a
line there.
Patchwork prayers, cobbled together.
Our Father which Art in Heaven The Lord is with
thee.
Lead us not into Temptation and Blessed is the fruit of thy
womb Jesus.
Meaningless, random words.
He
couldn’t remember if he’d ever understood what they meant.
Did he
ever believe?
Really
believe?
He had little doubt the world was indeed ending, yet
he still couldn’t work out what to believe in.
Which God was the
True God?
Did God even exist?

When he opened his eyes, he wanted to
throw up.
Hundreds of dead ducks, swans and geese were floating
downriver towards them.
Water rats nibbled at their half-chewed
entrails and eyes.
The corpses gave off a nauseating smell.
The
miasma of cadavers, the vapours of the dead.
The air itself seemed
to be rotting.

They passed a beautiful marina where
many millionaires must have lived the high life not so long ago,
but now all the windows of the luxury apartments were smashed, and
it appeared everything had been looted.
Luxury yachts, sunk, now
lay like shipwrecks in the marina.
Ghost ships.
A ghost world.
Only
echoes of people remained.
Where had they all gone?
Vernon
remembered hearing that at Hiroshima when the atomic bomb
detonated, all that was left of one person was his shadow on a
wall.
Maybe that was the fate awaiting us all.

Without warning, thousands of crows
erupted into the sky, their flapping wings generating a deafening
whooshing noise.
They had congregated on the roof of a nearby
office block.
Vernon involuntarily ducked.
He hated crows.
They
circled above the ship for a few moments then flew off towards the
centre of Bristol.

The ship passed under several bridges.
There were no cars on the bridges, no signs of police or soldiers.
No roadblocks.
It seemed the army hadn’t bothered establishing
patrols here.
In London, much of the city was cordoned off.
Tanks
crawled through the streets, together with long lines of military
trucks and armoured personnel vehicles.
Here, nothing.
Maybe the
military had stayed outside the city, deciding nothing could be
salvaged.
Just how bad were things in the country as a whole?
The
hysteria in London had been growing, becoming almost palpable.
People were losing their reason as they began to realise this
really might be the end.

How would it come?
An
enormous explosion?
A blinding light?
A tidal wave, perhaps?
Maybe
a superhurricane.
Smoke and ash from earthquakes blotting out the
sun?
A sudden freeze?
A nuclear winter?
A fire might rage across
the earth, boiling the seas.
Anything was possible.
A
Room 101
for every member
of the human race.

Vernon glanced at Kruger, but he didn’t
return his gaze.

The crows Vernon had seen earlier were
now lined up along the near riverbank.
He couldn’t help trembling.
Were there birds like these all over the world?
– the watchers at
the end of the world, only their black eyes left to see.
So much
decay for them to feed on.
The world was consuming itself, burning
its own flesh with its volcanoes.
Eruption columns stretching ten
miles into the sky.
Gas, ash and rock.
Lightning cracking open the
crimson sky.
Magma flows.
Superheated gases, pyroclastic flows.
Boiling, bubbling seas.
Molten lava.
A world tearing itself apart
as all of its fault lines opened at once.
Hurricanes, cyclones,
tornadoes – the planet cast to the winds.
Tsunamis, maelstroms and
monsoons.
A drowned world.

All the portents that the world was
ending were undeniably in place.

Vernon was startled by a burst of
gunfire.
An army speedboat raced downriver towards them.
It sped
past, swung round and started moving parallel to the ship.
Kruger
signalled to his men not to shoot.

‘
This is a restricted
zone,’ a voice said over a tannoy.
‘We’ll fire on you if you don’t
turn back immediately.’

Kruger handed Vernon a megaphone.
‘Talk
to them.’

‘
I’m James Vernon of
MI5,’ Vernon said, trying to sound as authoritative as he could.
‘I’m on a special mission.
These men are taking me to
Bristol.’

‘
We have no information
on that.’

‘
Check with Thames
House.
You can go straight to the DG.
She personally authorised
it.’

‘
Who’s your direct
superior?’

‘
Commander Charles
Harrington.’

As the officer
contacted MI5, Vernon stared at the four soldiers on the deck of
the patrol boat, one of them behind a large machine gun.
They were
spaced out – drugged or drunk.
It wouldn’t be long, he thought,
until they were trigger-happy.
Apocalypse
Now
wannabes.
A disaster waiting to
happen.

‘
I can’t get through to
Thames House,’ the officer said after a couple of minutes, ‘but I’m
going to trust you and let you go ahead.
I have to warn you that
central Bristol is extremely dangerous now.
A curfew is in effect
from 10 p.m.
to 10 a.m.
Most of the population have been evacuated
to temporary camps outside the city.
I don’t know what you want in
the city centre, but believe me, it’s not there anymore.
Everything
has been looted.’

‘
I’ll take my chances.’
Vernon waved unenthusiastically as the patrol boat sped off.
So,
martial law had been declared after all.
It had only been a matter
of time.

The ship travelled onwards, the only
visible craft on the river now.

On the right bank,
dilapidated bonded warehouses loomed up: old and Gothic, with dark,
almost black brickwork, and every window broken.
They looked
centuries old, probably from the time when Bristol was a
flourishing port with an active slave trade.
Dark, louring, full of
relentless rows of small arched windows with bars over them, they
resembled a Victorian prison or maybe a lunatic asylum.
Another
image sprang into Vernon’s mind – the warehouses from that creepy
old silent movie
Nosferatu
.
He couldn’t remember if
that film was monochrome or sepia.
The whole world seemed sepia
now, and even the sepia was fading.
Would all the colours of life
eventually disappear and leave everything in black and white?
Or a
planet of nothing but grey.
Was that the best way for the world to
meet its end: colourless, bleached, nothing but white bones left in
the sun?

Further on, an old cruise ship
appeared, sunk in mud.
Vernon remembered it well – a disco ship
with a rotating dancefloor that once attracted thousands of young
clubbers.
Not anymore.
The music was long since over.

The ship kept ploughing forward.
By
now, nearly all of Kruger’s soldiers were on deck, staring at the
ruins of the city.
Multicoloured pigeon lofts on a hillside were on
fire.
Trapped pigeons made a pitiful screeching sound as they tried
to escape their cages.
Every now and again, one broke free, its
wings burning.
It rose a few feet before crashing back in a blazing
death spin; a tiny ball of fire in the gloom.

Thousands of pages torn from hard-core
porn magazines drifted past the ship.
Many of them had washed up on
mud banks, covered with green slime.

‘
A trip along one of
the rivers of hell, huh?’
Vernon muttered.
‘Civilisation has broken
down.
Even if we survive this, how can it all be put back together
again?’

‘
There are no good
outcomes,’ Kruger responded.
‘Everything’s going to change, one way
or another.’
He put his hand on Vernon’s shoulder.
‘Let’s go
ashore.
See what the people are like.’

Vernon felt a tremor of apprehension.
‘Is it worth the risk?
I mean it’s only the dregs of humanity out
there now.’

‘
I want to know what
this brave new world is like,’ Kruger replied.

They stopped at a
mooring point then six of them stepped onto a wooden pier and
cautiously made their way to the quayside.
The first building they
came to was an old Victorian structure, painted in gloss white,
called the
Dead House
.

‘
What a name,’ Vernon
muttered.
He stopped to read a plaque on the door.
It said the Dead
House belonged to the river police and it was where bodies found in
the Avon were laid, pending identification.

Kruger opened the door and stepped
inside, swinging his pistol in an arc.
He came out quickly,
pale.

Vernon’s curiosity got the better of
him and he pushed open the door and went in.
There was a dreadful
smell.
In the corner of the plain room, two corpses lay on tables.
Rats were crawling over them, silently feasting on their faces.
Vernon retreated fast, letting the door slam behind him.

While he tried to see where the others
had gone, a man and a woman came scurrying towards him.
They
squealed, clutched each other then raced into a peculiar building,
shaped like Noah’s Ark.

A sign on the door said, ‘Only the
Elect 144,000 are to be saved.
Their names are recorded in the Book
of Salvation.
Is yours one of them?’

All the religious nuts are out and
about, Vernon thought, gazing at the odd building.
He could picture
all the millions of Christian fundamentalists in America standing
on hilltops with arms outstretched, awaiting the Rapture – the
magic moment when the chosen vanished from this earth as God raised
them up to Paradise.

He pushed open the door.
Scores of men
and women were on their knees, mumbling and praying, some talking
in tongues.
Some exhorted God with their hands outstretched and
their eyes glazed over.

For a moment, Vernon was nauseated.
Who
were these people praying to?
Their delusions, their lack of
intelligence, their deficient education?