The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (7 page)

“A weather system is forming at a speed and
magnitude unprecedented in recorded history.” The newscaster seemed
anxious. “The Department of Defense and the National Weather
Service have issued this joint release: ‘All citizens of the
continental United States are advised to remain indoors pending
further notification.’” Electric tension jumped through the people
around Cawood. The statement was punctuated with satellite pictures
of the earth’s surface covered with whirling tempests of black and
white and gray. It had all begun three hours before, the report
said. Military and civilian satellites recorded the phenomena. What
at first appeared to be several hurricane formations had taken on a
more destructive tone.

Global weather stations confirmed the growth
of a contiguous worldwide atmospheric disturbance. The picture of
the growing cloud cover intensified during the broadcast, with a
time-lapse effect, until the once blue globe darkened to a uniform
shadow. Soon after, the satellite picture broke up and was lost.
The news anchor’s image returned, flickered and was gone
forever.

Cawood paused in her reverie.

Beads of sweat stood out on her pallid
forehead as the moment returned to her in full. The lights in the
lobby died. A man bellowed repeatedly into his cell phone until he
charged out of the building screaming his children’s names. A woman
shrieked, then apologized in embarrassment. The crowd hurried
across the lobby to the desk, to a line of dead pay phones on one
wall. There was a loud harsh clap of thunder, and the Change had
arrived.

“Damn!” she cursed. All this was behind her,
but Able had a way of stirring things up. Coming into her office so
early in the day babbling about Angels and salvation and a new
mission. “There’s no fucking mission,” she said to the empty
room.

The first days of the Change were crisp in
her memory. The group at the Venture Inn had dispersed quickly:
huddled, cautious shapes going into a hissing gray nothing that
smelled like autumn. Cawood was taken to a room by a busboy with a
flashlight: taste of salt from the back of her hand as tears came
upon her in the dark. She slept uncomfortably listening to sirens
and awoke next day to the rain: smell of cleansers, the dry
reconditioned air on her tongue. Cloud cover kept New York in
perpetual twilight: searching for her underwear on the floor, the
dusty curtain made her sneeze.

Rain thundered down for weeks without end.
The riots started in week two, close on the heels of the looting.
There was a slow realization setting in that things had changed
permanently. As communications returned at the end of the first
week—radio and television signals were inconsistent and
distorted—digital signals were lost, replaced by analog. American
meteorologists blamed the ozone and greenhouse gases, European
scientists suggested an undetected meteorite impact. Few
ocean-going vessels returned from the wild maelstroms the seas had
become. The melting ice caps threatened to drown coastal cities.
Estimates had 85% of all aircraft aloft at the time of the Change
were crashed or missing.

Electrical systems went wild, city lights and
telephones flickered and died, computers crashed and subways ground
to a terrifying halt deep in their dark black burrows. Factories
fell silent and millions died. No one was unaffected. Presidents
and Prime Ministers made reassuring statements that could not hide
their ignorance. Leaders religious and political wanted calm.

Calm. The absurdity still provoked a
sarcastic smile in her. Their world was dying and they asked for
calm.

Her first steps off the high road came when
she sought her sisters and brothers in the rapidly sinking city.
They had nothing for her. There were riddles in the text and that’s
all they had: the text. The Revelation of St. John had been a long
contested part of the Testament, but this Change was different. And
the Bishop was missing. No one had heard word from the Vatican. It
was silent, but most had grown used to its methodical responses to
crises in the past. From her search for guidance she came away
confused.

And there was the water to worry about. It
was rising every day, and New York City was so big. Twice she was
drafted into the ranks of millions who built dykes against the
flood. She worked beside strangers with the rain pooling about her
ankles. A slight increase in wind pushed the waves up and over,
collapsing the hastily constructed barriers, flooding
neighborhoods. Pull back; build new dykes.

The military was brought in to build dykes
but became a police force and fire brigade. The world had Changed.
On the radio all reports were the same. Coastal cities the world
over were drowning. There was a Federal state of emergency
instituted as panic set in. Buildings were burning throughout New
York, the sound of gunshots and explosions rolled up every street.
And as the rain continued, people left the city.

Cawood heard about the Vatican while riding
on an army transport moving refugees to the mainland. Dying
witnesses swore they had seen a mushroom cloud. That pushed her
into a general trance of terror and disbelief. It wasn’t until
later that she found out about the nuclear exchanges in the Middle
East, India and Pakistan, China and Russia. To her a simple
question: if the Vatican could be vaporized, then what value the
cities of man and where was God?

Science, the last refuge of the faithful,
could not answer many questions. Meteorologists were baffled by the
worldwide weather system that set in and stayed. Some theorized
that whatever had caused the new weather patterns was so
catastrophic that the atmosphere reacted by creating a
suspension—an equilibrium of itself—seemingly sucking up the
moisture as the North and South Poles melted. Scientists at MIT
announced their initial findings: the majority of species of
bacteria had died off in a mass extinction of unprecedented
proportions.

Lost for a time, Cawood felt no urge to pray.
It was as though heaven itself had been destroyed with St. Peter’s.
Still, she could hang onto something, the basic lessons of
Catholicism. Yet even as she rallied, another blow fell as the
second month passed. All pregnant mammals spontaneously aborted
their fetuses. And it proved in the years that followed that
humanity could not conceive again. The voice of childhood had been
silenced. Cawood almost joined the suicides she tended though
events soon made death a crueler fate than life. No sooner was
science trying to explain the great stillbirth than the dead rose
up from their graves.

Raise them up to live forever with all
Your saints in the glory of the Resurrection
.

Each country claimed to have had the first to
rise. Clambering out of mortuary drawers, coffins and medical
research facilities the dead came awake, but they were not alive.
Bodies continued to dehydrate, but with the extinction of most
bacteria, they did not rot. And this new revivifying affect,
whatever gave them life, was not for whole bodies alone, severed
parts were charged with some atrocious nervous activity, mindless,
but lifelike. The dead retained the characters of the people they
had been in life, so long as some portion of their brain
remained.

Karen swiveled her chair around to gaze out
the window at the cloud tops. She never felt guilty for having
Sunsight offices high up in Archangel Tower. Never regretted a
single sunset she got to watch while the populace below muddled
through endless days of rain. She’d helped build it after all.

10 – Dealing with the Devil

Felon sat on his bed at the Coastview Hotel.
He had set his guns on a rubber sheet: the rebuilt M-16, his Smith
& Wesson .9 mm automatic, a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda, and a
Ranger .45 Colt Derringer. He started disassembling, cleaning and
oiling the weapons one by one. In his business the machinery had to
work perfectly. One misfire and the wrath of Heaven or Hell would
be on him. Throughout the operation, he kept a loaded Taurus .38
close at hand.

He had dropped Azokal’s check in a Level Two
Branch of the First City Bank then caught a cab to the hotel. Felon
usually demanded cash or valuables up front, but his reputation was
growing and he knew the Demon feared his gifts too much to chance
insufficient funds.

Felon knew that the old adage, “never deal
with the Devil” was absolutely true. Fallen Angels claimed to be
the wealthiest deities of Hell, but were an untrustworthy lot so
the assassin took their boasting with a grain of salt. Typically,
they were compulsively organized—like psychopathic lawyers
inextricably bound to unfathomable laws of self-protection and a
celestial legal system that ruled them.

Every deal was suspect the moment bloody
quill was set to parchment. It was their nature to want to get the
upper hand. They thought it was their right so Felon knew he could
take nothing for granted. If something was missing from a contract,
they knew it. Rarely, did any of them talk about bartering souls.
If they had that power Felon had never seen evidence of it.
Apparently, souls were a commodity that had depreciated over the
last thousand years.

As Fallen they strove to emulate the Divine
order in Heaven with a system of their own. Their hierarchy awarded
advancement to those who won advantage over humans or over others
of their own kind. Felon was never given a clear description of how
it worked. And he didn’t care enough to pursue it.

He preferred dealing with Demons. They were
more dangerous, but their contracts more lucrative. Almost
indistinguishable from Fallen in human folklore and religion, Felon
had learned that they were a completely different species. This had
prompted him to make a study of each. Ignorance was lethal in his
business.

Fallen had only contempt for Demons and their
parallel Infernal system. Comparisons prompted indignation if not
outrage. Demons were unimpressed by their own hierarchy—Felon
learned it was a chaotic system of feudal anarchy. Instead the
majority expended enormous wealth and power in the advancement of
their own passions. Demons were ruled by revenge. They were
prodigal with their riches, and most seemed willing to part with a
fortune to entertain some petty personal vendetta. The money was
good and the employment steady—though at times a messy and
degenerate affair.

Demons hated goodness far more than their
Fallen counterparts. Fallen viewed the human graces as weaknesses
to be exploited. Otherwise, they worked with or around goodness, as
an intrinsic matter of business. Without it, they would have no
more purpose than the madness of the Demon horde.

The Demons who had contracted Felon over the
years appeared to resent goodness. He chalked that up to a feeling
of inadequacy born of being shut out of Fallen Hierarchy; and the
envy that must have caused, combined with the precipitous drop
their position took in relation to the Divine Ranks in Heaven. They
hated the Angelic host just slightly more than they did Fallen.

But Demons paid handsomely and since they
were often employed as minions by Fallen, they maintained a better
relationship with their own servants. If the job was done well,
they paid and got on about their business. Regardless, Demons were
dangerous. They were a put upon species, and quick to see an insult
whether intended or not.

Regarding Heaven, Hell and the Pit, Felon had
never received a satisfactory answer. They existed, that was
obvious. But such intricacies were lost to the assassin. He didn’t
care if they came from Ohio or Denmark or Limbo, as long as they
paid. Felon hated them all. They were a powerful and anarchic waste
of power. He claimed no allegiance with any one. Playing the center
served him best.

But Felon hated Angels most of all. He had
worked for them only once before switching to more lucrative
business partnerships. The Celestial Choir had wealth to share, but
they were not generous with it. Their holier than thou attitude
made it very easy for them to cheat at business, apparently adding
an unwritten clause into every contract: “No payment necessary if
said services can be considered to contain educational or
redemptive value.”

Felon had experienced only one such
arrangement. It had happened only months after his epiphany of
pain, when an Angel approached him to whack an abusive father. The
assassin’s new knowledge allowed him to believe the creature’s
claim without proof. He could smell the Angel—cinnamon, sickly. The
target was terrorizing his wife and child with sexual abuse and
violence. Nathaniel was a Guardian Angel who appeared to Felon as a
kindly old grandfather with twinkling eyes and round red nose. He
was four feet tall dressed in wool sweater and slacks. A steady
warm glow emanated from his halo. He wanted Felon to intervene on
his behalf.

Much later, Felon learned that Angels came in
all shapes and sizes. There were guardians, protectors, and
messengers—though at the end of the Millennium most were regarded
by humanity as little more than good luck charms. Guardians were
given clients to look after without directly intervening.
Intervention was the purview of God and no one else.

But Angels could bend the rules a little.
They could insinuate, make helpful suggestions and minor
protections. The Divine Compact kept them from doing anything else.
It declared that Angels could not make themselves known to human
eyes without the permission of God.

In this case, Nathaniel was at the end of his
rope. The father of his client failed to learn from his mistakes,
or see the light of truth through introspection. Nathaniel’s charge
was a girl, 11 pre-Change years of age. She was taking the brunt of
the abuse.

Nathaniel offered Felon a lost Reuben’s
painting captured from a Japanese collector whose mansion had been
located on the seashore near Hiroshima. The Angel picked it up
moments before the atomic bomb dropped. Apparently in the seconds
before a cataclysm of human wrought or natural origin the Cosmic
rules were relaxed. Devils, Demons and Angels were drawn to such
places by the impending doom and the screams of souls foretasting
death. Angels and their fallen brethren arrived for the recovery of
the works of man. Demons attended for Chaos and Hellfire.