Planet Hate, page 12
“All it takes is belief,” the bearded stranger had explained, reaching into his coat pocket.
Alfredo had watched with intrigue as the man produced two tiny flecks of stone from his pocket, each of them no bigger than his thumbnail. The man had smiled, a line of yellowing teeth amid the whiskers of his beard. “Take one,” the stranger had said. “Take one and you can begin your journey into a new world.”
Tentatively, dark sweat patches still lining his work shirt, Alfredo had reached for one of the stones like a child stroking a dog for the first time. In front of him, the ragged-looking stranger had nodded once in singular encouragement. “The future awaits,” he had said.
As Alfredo’s fingers brushed the surface of the tiny stone he felt a jolt, like electricity running through him, playing over the hairs that lined his fingers between the knuckles. His wife had come back then, smiling benignly as she poked her head around the living-room door and asked if either man would like coffee or tea.
“Why don’t you come join us, ’Nita?” the old hobo had said, and he had the understated forcefulness of a man who ruled the roost rather than came here as a visitor.
Juanita had come in meekly, taking a seat opposite her husband, her lustrous hair tied back in a bun.
Beside her, Alfredo’s eyes widened as the stone began boring into his skin, biting through the flesh of his palm as it sought a place to lodge itself. For a moment Alfredo felt fear run through him, and his lips moved, mouthing the word “stop,” but no sound came out. Then the stone was inside him, clawing at his flesh and at his thoughts, bringing a newfound calmness where for so long he had felt anxiety. Alfredo closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair as the wave of euphoria had taken him. Entheogen, the god within.
Devoted to the Virgin, the fisherman’s wife had been more reluctant to imbibe the stone and feel the power of Ullikummis blossom inside her. Converted, Alfredo had held her down while the hobo made an incision with his knife along her left wrist and forced the stone inside her, tamping it down as the swelling blood tried to push it away. Juanita had screamed for a moment, waking the baby as the obedience stone took effect. Then it was over, and Alfredo and Juanita had been converted, the old religion forgotten. The baby needed no stone, the hobo had explained. He would learn from his parents, learn to serve Ullikummis and help build the new utopia.
Now Alfredo ran a ferry service to Bensalem, the self-made island where god had constructed his home.
The cramped fishing scow sailed on through the choppy waters between the towering cliffs, occasional stripes of sunlight catching the water, plucking at the spume on the waves. The boat wended slowly down the channel, following its tight curves as the fisherman guided his way to the island’s single dock. They turned a sharp corner where the boat listed, threatening to overturn for a long five seconds before finally righting itself at the gentle guidance of its captain. Then a rocky cove appeared up ahead, the shore coming out of the water at a ramped incline, its beach covered with thick shards of rock the gray color of ash.
There, standing at the edge of the beach stood Ullikummis, his bare flesh the same color as the ashy rock. He presented an uncanny figure, more like a crude statue than a living being. Eight feet tall and magnificently proportioned, two magmalike eyes glowed in deep pits within the craggy rock mask that made up his face. The face itself was rudimentary, more like the weather erosion of a rock than something intentionally carved. An angry slash of mouth sat low to the face, and that same magma glow emanated from it as from those terrible eyes. Beneath that, the thing’s body was a ragged conglomeration of battered rocks, brutally smashed together as if in anger. Twin arrays of vicious-looking stalagmites reached up from the god’s shoulders like the horns of a stag. Ullikummis’s crude body seemed longer than it should, with tree-trunk-like legs ending in flared stumps, giving the impression that this impressive figure had no feet to speak of. The rippling edge of the ocean lapped against those massive legs, washing the rock darker where it left its fleeting signature.
Aboard the boat, the already silent passengers seemed to hold their breath in unison as they spied their god standing in front of them, awaiting their arrival. Turning the scow’s wheel, Alfredo smiled; he had made this journey with other parties and the reaction was always the same—breathless anticipation and reverence.
The great god Ullikummis nodded once as the boat pulled up to the shore, the boat’s movement churning the waves so that they tumbled over his legs before scurrying fearfully back down the beach to the ocean’s embrace. The stone giant’s eyes glowed brightly as he scanned the people aboard the fishing vessel. They seemed strong, healthy. Perhaps half of them would live this time.
THE GIRL known as Little Quav clung tightly to Brigid as the red-haired woman wrapped her in her arms.
Behind the girl, Balam came pacing in his ungainly manner, his short legs hurrying to power his long torso toward their visitor. Completely hairless, his bulbous head tapered to a pointed chin, his low features leaving a vast expanse of gray cranium tinted with a faint blush of pink. The last of the Archons, Balam was the product of a pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan. For a moment, the strangely proportioned humanoid stared at Brigid, his dark eyes like limpid pools beneath the glistening blue luminescence that served as a faux sky for the underground city of Agartha. He seemed to be analyzing her, as if already he suspected something had changed inside this woman whose face he knew so well.
“Hello, Balam,” Brigid said, nodding her head gently as she hugged Little Quav for a moment longer.
Balam ducked his own head in reply, its great bulbous shape moving as if too heavy for his thin neck to support. “Brigid,” he repeated in a voice that sounded as if he was in pain, a scratchy hoarseness mixed with a cat’s meow.
Brigid fixed her eyes on Balam’s, watching the curious creature even as he studied her. He was a telepath, she knew, and he might even now be probing the edges of her prodigious mind. She tempered her thoughts, her muscles tightening as she held everything inside. Balam was the little girl’s foster parent; she had been entrusted into his care over two years ago shortly after her birth, ostensibly to protect her from the threat posed by her destiny as one of the Annunaki pantheon.
Balam’s fingers flexed for a moment, six long spidery digits on each hand like the branches of some nightmare tree, and then a beatific smile appeared on his lips. The smile, like Balam’s mouth, was small and seemed almost lost amid his bulging, gray-pink head.
As Balam smiled, the little girl let go of Brigid and hurried back to her foster father, singing to herself as she ran on her short little legs. “Briggly’s here, Uncle Bal-bal,” the girl announced, her voice playful like notes from a piccolo.
Balam nodded once more as he took the girl’s outstretched hand. “You look healthy,” Balam stated by way of greeting. “Come.” Then he turned and began to lead the way into the deserted city of Agartha, Little Quav trotting along at his ankles, still clutching his hand and holding her rag doll in the other.
After a moment Brigid followed, the heels of her boots clacking against the hard rock floor as her long-legged strides ate up the distance between the buildings. Agartha was built to a wheel design, the tallest structure in its center. Again, however, this city was built to that immortal Annunaki plan.
Brigid watched as Balam of the First Folk made his way through the empty streets of dust, his long indigo robe brushing below his knees as he led the way to his stone dwelling. Beside him, the girl seemed human at first glance, but Brigid now saw her for what she truly was. She had never seen this before, never comprehended the Annunaki the way they should be comprehended. They were multidimensional beings, their existence emanating further than the lines that human physics could draw. Where Quav had once looked normal to her old eyes, to the eyes of Brigid Baptiste, now she seemed to glow, her echo stretching out across the infinite. Ullikummis had shown her this, had taught her to see things in the Annunaki way, expanding her mind and making her realize for the first time how misguided her war had been against them back when she had been a part of the Cerberus team. Now Brigid saw the truth of the Annunaki world, and in much the same way that she had detected the door that had seemed to not really be there, the one that had allowed her access to this underground lair, so, too, did this secret vision open up gateways for her to pursue.
The Annunaki had ruled the Earth over millennia ago, where they had been treated as gods by the primitive humans who populated the planet. When finally they had left Earth’s shores, their essences had been stored in a mighty organic system, access to which came via the mother ship, Tiamat. Reentering the solar system after millennia away, Tiamat had issued a download command that reignited the Annunaki personalities where they had been hidden within the shells known as the barons. These barons had been hybrid creatures, possessing both human and alien DNA in a delicate mixture that made them both intellectually superior and physically more fragile than the average human. But these hybrids served only as staging posts, body templates for the magnificent final forms of the Annunaki on Earth. Once the downloads were complete, nine mighty Annunaki stood in place of the fragile hybrid barons, muscular, lizard-fleshed humanoids whose skin was like armor. Little Quav was destined to be the tenth of those hybrids to ascend; when the time was ripe she would be transformed into the goddess Ninlil, wife and consort of the cruel Enlil. Reborn, Lord Enlil himself had made no secret of his desire to regain possession of his chattel, and so the hybrid girl had been hidden in this ghost town beneath the surface of the Earth, far from prying eyes.
That had been over two years ago, before Brigid had learned to see the truth. Now, as she looked at the delicate little girl who jogged along at Balam’s side, she saw the snake goddess that she would become, that she had once been millennia ago. It was no hallucination, no double-image brought on by fever. This was more akin to knowledge, and how knowledge informs a viewer’s eyes, like the comprehension of ink markings on a page as letters and words, paragraphs and chapters. Ultimately, the ink markings are still just ink markings; the reader only applies meaning by his participation, and then only through choice.
Brigid trotted on, following the diminutive Balam and his cheery charge.
ONCE THE LAST of his passengers had departed, Alfredo turned his boat around and began the arduous return trip through the winding chasm away from Bensalem.
On the island itself, the sixty-strong party followed Ullikummis as the stone giant strode silently up the winding path that trawled beside the dark and oppressive cliffs looming all around. The climb was steep and the path itself became narrower as they got higher, its edges dropping away in verticals that were absolute, sharp rocks waiting far below them like jagged incisors. Ullikummis never slowed his rapid pace, and nor did he address the party. He simply strode upward on his trunklike legs, trusting his visitors to follow. In their minds they had come to the house of god, and it would benefit them naught to yearn for encouragement now that they were in his presence.
There were occasional murmurings from the group, particularly the older folks, several of whom were well into their fifties and beyond. But for the most part, the people were silent as they followed in the footsteps of the divine, trekking up that unforgiving pathway of schist as if on a pilgrimage.
As they neared the top of the cliffs, a mighty structure came into view—a towering building carved from the rock. It stood there like some mighty castle, spiked towers jabbing upward into the overcast skies, some so high as to scrape at the low clouds as they passed. Though clearly a building, the structure looked rough and unfinished, much like Ullikummis himself. Mottled rock made up its walls, pitted with holes and thorny spikes where it had never been smoothed or sanded. Empty windows peered down at the approaching group, the sunlight lost in their depths, rendering them black as night. Beneath them, a single arched doorway loomed like a mouth, fifteen feet wide with stalactite spikes lunging down from its ceiling.
Several of the party stopped, marveling at the towering structure that overlooked the cliff in front of them, and a gasp ran through the group. A little lower down the path, one of the older men pushed forward, wanting to see what the fuss was about. As he did so, his foot slipped on the sandy pebbles that dotted the path and suddenly he was falling, tumbling from the path and down toward the jagged rocks below. He cried out as he fell, and the group turned at the scream, a sense of sudden terror rushing through them. The man’s scream was cut abruptly short as he hit the sharp rocks and his body was pierced by one of them, killing him instantly in a burst of red.
“Come,” Ullikummis said, speaking for the first time, his voice like millstones scraping together.
The crowd turned and followed their master toward his towering sanctuary at the summit of the cliff.
THERE IS AN oft-repeated phrase that goes, “It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.” As Brigid walked through the empty streets of Agartha beside Balam and Little Quav, that phrase might have occurred to her, and she might have smiled. Not now. The phrase was a human one, and Brigid’s thinking had been subtly altered, shifted in such a way as to discard such whimsy as pins dropping. Instead she remained emotionless as she followed Balam of the First Folk through winding streets cluttered with black-walled buildings carved from basalt, crouching at the edges of the roads in some uncanny funereal procession, lamenting the loss of the ancient city’s vibrancy. No one lived here anymore, other than Balam and the hybrid girl.
Once Balam had had two sons who had acted as sentries for the underground city, but like so much else down here beyond the gaze of the sun, they had departed, and no mark of them remained.
Balam’s home, like most everything else in Agartha, was constructed of dark basalt, its black sheen highlighted with the distant glow of the cavern ceiling. In the time since Brigid had last been here, it seemed that Balam of the First Folk had developed an interest in gardening. A simple stone fence marked the boundary of the property, and a basic garden had been set to grow there, a tidy patch of grass lined at its edges by daffodils and roses.
“You’ve grown flowers,” Brigid stated as her gaze swept over the garden.
Balam turned to her, nodding. “And vegetable plots in the back,” he agreed. “With Quav here, I find myself in a curious conundrum, with both time on my hands yet trapped, never able to let her out of my sight. Growing things brings us both pleasure, and oftimes sustenance when we need it.”
Brigid nodded, thinking of her arduous journey here and of her last meal; it had been the soup that had been brewing on the range of the late farmer and his wife, snatched away as she torched their farmhouse, their conversion either impossible or perhaps just too boring to accomplish. “It’s nice,” she stated, forcing a smile on her full lips.
Balam thanked her, ushering his way into the house. Little Quav still held his hand, and she checked behind her to make sure that Brigid would follow. The child should have no great bond with Brigid, and yet she had seen so few people other than Balam during her scant years alive that she had begun to place significance in all of those precious faces, believing each to be a friend in the way an innocent child will. In some obscure way, Brigid was the closest thing the child had to a mother figure.
Brigid entered the stone building, ducking her head beneath the low sill of the door. As she did so, she became instantly aware that Balam stood poised in front of her, and there was something shining in his hand. Shaped like a viper’s head, Brigid recognized it instantly—it was an ASP emitter, a weapon capable of blasting a bolt of plasma that could rip Brigid in two.
“Now, why don’t you tell me who you really are and what you’re doing here?” Balam asked as he leveled the fearsome weapon at Brigid Haight.
Chapter 10
Kane lay on the sparse scrub grass between towering redwoods, his hands reaching once more to his face. His lips were pulled back from gritted teeth, and his whole body was trembling with agony. “My eyes,” he grunted. “I can’t see.”
From somewhere nearby, a harsh bird cry echoed through the towering trees, its sound a piercing hostile note.
Leaning close to his partner, Grant reached out a steadying hand and pressed it solidly against the man’s arm. “Okay, buddy,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Let’s try to keep calm.” Over the course of their long relationship, Grant had known Kane to be many things, and the man certainly had an impetuous streak. But if there was one thing Kane was not prone to, it was panic. Even now, as the unshaved ex-Mag took a strained breath through gritted teeth, he managed to keep his movements quiet, resisting the urge to shout in his pain.
“What is it? What’s happened to me?” Kane asked.
Grant held two fingers up in front of Kane’s face. “Can you see anything at all?” he asked in response. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Just light an’ color,” Kane said after a moment. “I can’t…dammit,” he finished in frustration.
“Okay,” Grant reassured him. “It’s okay. Give yourself a minute. If you can see light at least there’s something there. Maybe just a side effect of the interphaser or somethin’.”
