The situation, I decide, is non-survivable.
***Go,*** I tell my minions, and pop up from behind my pew like a kamikaze photography buff.
Shots crack out.
Roseanne, the blonde handmaiden with the gun, fires simultaneously with the skeletal horror I donated my pistol to. She’s fast and practiced, and a crackling trail of bullets smashes the feeder’s rib cage to splinters, then wrecks the arm that holds the pistol.
The feeder’s shot misses.
For a horrified split second I stare down the muzzle of her gun as she points it at me with an expression of frustration rather than hatred on her face: Why won’t these pop-up nuisances just give up and die? she’s wondering. I watch for an eternity, waiting for the fucking camera to display a green gunsight around her, while her gun clicks, once, and a box pops out of one side. She begins to rotate her arm, turning her gun side-down to eject the empty magazine, and just then there’s another gunshot and a red stain splashes the back of her headdress.
“Behold, the Lord will rise again, washed in the blood of the lamb! And the apostate gets his just reward!” Schiller shouts at me, as blood from Johnny’s throat gouts across the sarcophagus, splashing into the chalice. Fury and pride twists his face. “You’re too late!”
***Take out the guards,*** a familiar voice whispers inside my skull.
What the fuck? I spin round and raise the camera, taking aim on the four armed missionaries who are between me and the gate. The red battery icon flashes—
“He’s not yours to kill!” Persephone’s voice rings out.
Then there’s another crash of gunfire as I simultaneously see four green targeting boxes appear on the camera’s display and click the shutter button—
I’ve never looked directly into a basilisk gun’s target before. It’s a major design fail; I shall have stern words with Pinky when I get out of here.
***Go to the gate, Howard, go now.***
I shake my head, unable to see past the green blotches and purple outlines of the four guards, frozen in the crackling flares of magnesium-bright light that have etched them into my retinas. There are more shots. I realize that staying upright isn’t a good idea, so I sit down hard, feeling dizzy.
***Schiller’s down. I’ll rescue Johnny.*** Persephone’s in take-no-prisoners mode, going by the icily professional feel of her thought.
***Johnny’s dead—I saw Schiller cut his throat—***
***—It won’t be the first time I’ve had to raise him. Go!***
Everything is very confusing when you’re half blind and in the middle of a firefight, but I could swear the bench is shaking beneath me.
***What about you? Don’t you need a hand?***
A blast wave ripples through me, like a giant door slamming in the near distance. I hear more shots.
***I’ll be fine.*** And I can sense the belief in her mind, a solid rock of self-confidence sufficient to hole a battleship. ***You’re out of your depth. Go, now!***
I don’t have to be told a fourth time. I stumble towards the gate, fumbling my way past the pews of long-dead alien worshippers, the blazing human candles of the burning bodyguards, my compass the bright and mindless hymns of the faithful.
Somehow I find my way to the other side, and an empty vestry in the middle of a temple full of lost souls. And that is where the Nazgûl find me amidst the other mortal wreckage, burned and half-blinded by the light, clutching a broken camera full of secrets.
Epilogue
AFTERMATH
THE DUSTUP IN THE SLEEPER’S MAUSOLEUM HAPPENED LAST month, but I’ve only been home for a couple of days. Mo was just about mad with worry when I rang the doorbell at seven o’clock, bleary-eyed and sweaty, straight off the red-eye from DC to Heathrow. Economy class, of course; it may be painful, but I’m not stupid—after the mission ends, it’s back to business as usual.
I slept for about six hours, ate, slept for about eighteen hours, and spent the next day in a zombie-like haze. Today’s the first day I’ve been sufficiently compos mentis to go back to the office. Lockhart, I gather, is chewing the carpet. (Good.)
You can blame the Black Chamber for the delay. Officious as any other component of the labyrinthine American secret state, they had to first satisfy themselves that I was not, in fact, an enemy agent. The carte blanche helped—or at least convinced them to make some phone calls first, rather than shooting me out of hand—but was not sufficient on its own to dig me out of the crater I had landed in. However, some pointed nagging from somewhere up the ladder at Dansey House—up the ladder from Angleton, I should add—eventually shook me loose.
Not that they were keeping me in twenty-four-hour lockdown in the brig at Quantico; I had my own private five-star hospital room to occupy while recovering from superficial burns and concussion, to say nothing of suspected neurological insults that required multiple appointments with an MRI machine to rule out Krantzberg syndrome.
Persephone and Johnny—if they survived—I don’t know about. They disappeared and the Nazgûl won’t tell me anything, and I wasn’t asking questions that might give away anything they’re not supposed to know I know. However, I’ve got some fragments, and I can speculate:
I can infer that Persephone did not do a runner, but in fact used the Hand of Glory to conceal her side-trip to Schiller’s vestry in the New Life Church, where she did her best to wreck the link between his pastor’s sacrifice of souls and the power source in the Temple of the Sleeper. Then she came back to rescue Johnny—and me.
Did she succeed? I don’t know. Like I said, she and Johnny disappeared while I was lying on my back in the vestry seeing stars.
I’m pretty certain that Persephone saw to it that Schiller didn’t make it out of the temple alive after he tried to sacrifice Johnny. She’s nothing if not possessive.
I’m pretty sure Schiller cut Johnny’s throat—I saw the blood. And the blood of two elders of the priesthood of the Sleeper were spilled upon the altar while it was hooked up to a grid powered by the prayers of thousands of god-raped worshippers. But the Sleeper—or Jesus, depending on which eschatology you choose to run with—did not clamber out of his sarcophagus and start rampaging across middle America. Maybe they got something wrong? Mind you, the tremors under the plateau suggest someone turning over in their sleep. The fimbulwinter that gripped central Colorado prior to Schiller’s summoning is very worrying, but the thaw afterwards suggests the information bleed between the walls of the worlds was staunched in time. Or at least prevented from turning into a flood.
Which finally brings me back to the present, and the inevitable fallout from the operation. Which, I gather, will involve a lot of committee meetings that I won’t trouble you with.
CLASSIFIED APPENDIX
GOD GAME RAINBOW
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