This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

Copyright April 2001 by Joseph Armstead

Photo background at top of cover is Bourges Cathedral, France.
Bottom of cover illustration by Gustav Dore.
Cover design by Joseph Armstead.





CHURCH OF THE BROKEN CROSS ,  A Tale of Quinn and the MOON-CHOSEN
By JOSEPH ARMSTEAD





She could hear the approach of sirens from fire engines and ambulances. The street she stood on was littered with bent and twisted metal and with bullet shell-casings. Two men lay near the curb of the overpass’ sidewalk. They lay in awkward positions that hinted at the violence that had led to their deaths. A few dozen yards from them, a pair of police cars, also peppered with bullet holes and sitting in a field of broken glass, sat like loyal dogs keeping watch over the quartet of wounded police officers who owned them. The battered cops were looking at her with pleading stares, with gazes full of concern and worry. One of them who had not been rendered immobile by his wounds was motioning to her to come over towards them, away from the heat and flames behind her. Behind her...

She turned to watch the blue and orange flames dancing over the charred shell of the bullet-riddled limosine and she scared herself.

She felt nothing.

She’d watched them all die and she’d felt nothing. She imagined that this was probably the way she was going to feel all the time now: dull, uninterested, and uninvolved. She felt as if the events that swirled out of control around her didn’t really affect her at all, yet she knew, especially from the carnage that decorated the overpass and from the sounds of the approaching sirens, that it was all about her.

“There was once a little girl with hair and eyes the color of a summer’s night and she lived in a land where it was always Winter. She was a princess, the only daughter of a mighty warrior-king, and she was the most beautiful thing that walked the cold and stark whiteness of the Winter-world. This young princess with the night-colored hair was the most beloved person in all the land and she carried deep inside her a secret even she didn’t know she had. She was the keeper of the secret to Summer, and this was a powerful and bright secret that made her the most important person in the Winter-world next to her father, the warrior-king...”

She remembered him telling her that story the time when she’d had to go to the hospital for surgery because of her brain tumor. She’d been frightened of the doctors and nurses, frightened at how serious they all looked and at the grim way they looked at her, and the spartan, white, antiseptic environment of the hospital frightened her even more. He’d told her a story of romance, magic and high-adventure that had taken her mind off the dreaded cancerous illness that was threatening her young life and off the risky surgery that only had a 50% chance of improving her health.

She’d thought he was the most wonderful man in the world then. But that had been before what felt like a bolt of invisible lightning had ripped through her, burning her insides and setting her mind aflame, and before he had pulled a gun on her and held her hostage in front of a group of frightened, but determined policemen.

That had been before – when she was still herself, still just a little girl.

Now she was both less than that and more. Now she was eternal.

She concentrated, instinctually opening a door in her mind that let her bend and twist the rays of moonlight that fell from the night sky, and she disappeared from human sight.

She didn’t want to be seen her. She had other places to go and if they found her here, they would try to prevent her from getting to those places. She had work to do.

Time to stop scaring herself and to start scaring others.

When she disappeared the cop who had motioned to her groaned and shook his head in sad disbelief. His eyes were bleak as he looked into the faces of his wounded and dying partners in blue. A wave of pain overtook him and he closed his eyes and shook as it gripped him. He mumbled a quick prayer before he passed out.

He did not doubt what he had just seen. He didn’t doubt that the young girl had simply faded from sight like a mirage. Compared to what he’d seen her do only a handful of seconds before that, disappearing was a pretty pedestrian act. Her innocence was a lost as anything he’d ever seen or heard. She could not come back from what she had done. He knew that he should have felt afraid of her, but instead he felt a profound sadness towards her.

He prayed for a small, pale princess with midnight-colored hair and for the monster she had become.

As he passed out, he hoped that the tall black man in the long coat, the mysterious man who carried what looked to be a medieval war-pike, could do something to help her. But as he fell into merciful unconsciousness he feared the worse.

The tall man with the war-staff was not her salvation. There would be no salvation for the little girl who disappeared.

His last conscious thought was to recall a line of dialogue he’d heard from an old western movie: “A quick death is a mercy of sorts”.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

There was still no sign of her. It had been three hours. Quinn had to admit that he was becoming worried and more than a little alarmed.

He hadn’t meant for this to happen. Not any of it. She wasn’t supposed to have been there.

This was not his fault. He was always careful about such things, taking painstaking care not to involve innocents in his campaign against the Moon-Chosen and their allies, and if it looked like the field of battle was not going to be clear of innocents, he always broke off the engagement before any hostilities could begin. He didn’t want innocent lives caught in the crossfire.

That didn’t happen this time, though.

It was because Dominic DeBenedicto and Antonio Serra were cowards. No other reason, but it was enough. And now she was alone out there, frightened and confused and angry, running from all the terrors with which her newly-awakened parahuman senses could flood her unprepared brain.

Damn!

It was supposed to have been relatively simple: local Capo DeBenedicto and his house-captain, Serra, had been running an illegal business in white slavery, kidnapping and addicting local teenage runaways to narcotics and then selling them into prostitution overseas, primarily in the Middle East, and they had not shared their profits with their La Cosa Nostra brethren. They’d been running the ring for almost five years when their bookeeper, a woman named Margaret Tuttleton, had been caught with one of the runaways as her personal sex-slave. She’d been turned in by suspicious neighbors who’d noticed Margaret’s under-aged so-called “niece from Phoenix” never attending the local high school. Maggie Tuttleton, not the strongest of women and one easily intimidated by the police, told everything she knew with very little coaxing.

Quinn became embroiled in the investigation at the behest of a grass-roots organization called the Mothers of The Missing, “M.O.M.”, who hired him to find out if any of the missing girls on their national bulletin roster were amongst DeBenedicto and Serra’s victims. Out of a list of 3600 names covering seven years, Quinn only could verify that six had fallen prey to the white-slave scheme. But six were enough.

Besides, there had been a very private and extremely important reason Quinn had already been following the progress of this case...

So he worked with the local office of the F.B.I.’s RICO division and the West Sussex Police’s Organized Crime & Urban Tactics unit, called “Tac One”, to bring DeBenedicto down.

But no one took into consideration the presence of DeBenedicto’s daughter, sickly and born with an inoperable cancerous brain tumor, who usually lived with her grandparents in Palo Alto, or that he would try to use her as a bargaining chip to save his own ass.

Montgomery Quinn stood atop the rooftop of an eleven-story chrome and concrete banking center in West Sussex’s financial district, the night’s breezes catching the hem of his ankle-length leather coat and whipping it about his body like a magician’s cape. Quinn was a tall, bald black man, his face a block of chiseled mahogany adorned only by a thick glossy black mustache and almond-shaped eyes that searched the cool northern Californian night with fierce intensity. Ordinarily Quinn tried to lead a quiet life as a dealer in rare books and an authority on rare documents of antiquity. He was known as a wealthy and very private man in the bayside communities of the “sister cities”, New Barrington and West Sussex, off Borrego Bay. The police in both cities knew he was an armchair criminologist, a private investigator for hire only on very special cases. Quinn had been many things in his life: a Navy SEAL, veteran of covert-action in both Vietnam and Cambodia; a Secret Service bodyguard to Supreme Court Justices; a conscience-torn mercenary in war-torn Africa; a professor of history at Princeton University; and a competitive kickboxer on the European continent. He had, for all intents and purposes, led an extremely remarkable, not to mention profitable, life of accomplishment and adventure.

What very few people knew was that Quinn had been born on a battlefield during a calamitous lightning storm as his people were slaughtered by vicious Turkish slavers, in Tunisia, in the year 1074 AD.

He was not a human being, not as human beings were conventionally defined. He was the product of a little known evolutionary accident that produced only 1100 of his kind in all of recorded history. He was one of a secret race of mutated humans, a small dynamic offshoot of the family of Homo Sapiens, called “Homo Immortus”, also called “Olympians”. He was, indeed, still a human being, but a different breed of human: an immortal.

They existed.

Quinn’s people were a loosely-knit group, seldom seeking one another’s company and actively maintaining a low profile, keeping hidden from the rest of humanity. Many Olympians were hermits, monkish ascetics who sought spiritual enlightenment as they pondered the mysteries of and the reasons for their own incredible existences. However, there were a few, like Quinn, who wandered in and out of the complex histories of regular humankind, acting as secret arbiters of ultimate Judgment, keepers of the balance between Order and Chaos, holding the Line for the world of Light against the inrushing tide of the ravenous Dark.

Dominic DeBenedicto and Antonio Serra, lifelong Mafiosi, underworld “made-men” from the Paravinci crime family, had been human beings, greedy, cunning and violent, but ultimately human nonetheless.

That could not be said for DeBenedicto’s daughter, a nine year-old mute named Athena Marie. She had been born of Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci, the only daughter to the great West Coast Don, Cesare Giancarlo Paravinci who had been indicted and deported back to Sicily in the mid-1970s, and it was generally thought that Dominic DeBenedicto had been Athena Marie’s father, cuckolding Elizabetta’s estranged husband Alphonse Spinozza, who was imprisoned doing life without parole in San Quentin. But Dom DeBenedicto, who controlled all gambling and loan-sharking outside Nevada for the Paravinci family, was not the father of this perpetually silent, pale, sad child.

It had been someone else. Someone secretive who had comforted Elizabetta in her time of grief at Don Cesare’s death as an exile in Sicily, and who’d had his own reasons for disappearing as soon as the pregnancy was discovered.

An Olympian. Only Montgomery Quinn had known this. Back then, Quinn had tried to prevent his brother immortal, in this case an immortal far senior to himself, from becoming involved with the Mafiosi’s wife, estranged or otherwise, but he hadn’t been able to damn the emotional torrent that had swept up the mismatched pair. The incredible pain of their mutual loneliness would not let them stay apart, no matter how strongly their logic dictated it. Over the years he’d thought that maybe the mystery behind the girl’s birth would remain secret. Secrecy was important to the Olympians.

No one, not even the Olympians themselves, knew all the hows and whys of their troubled existence, but they did know this: there were ALWAYS 1100 of them present as members of Earth’s population at any one time. Always. If for some reason one of their number died, regardless the cause, and if the departed Olympian had sired a child, then that child, though usually born a normal human with a normal lifespan, suddenly became an Olympian, as a replacement. There was some unknown energy-trigger, a catalyst, that would activate the dormant DNA within the child and he or she would become a full-blown member of this elite race of Methusalahs. If there were no offspring, then another human, one possessing dormant DNA as much as five or six generations-old, would develop into an Olympian immortal.

Becoming an Olympian was a painful and disorienting process that could result in irreversible madness or leave the new Olympian with a physical handicap, such as blindness or deafness or even the loss of the sensation of touch. Imagine eternity blind or deaf or physically numb to anything but a sense of pressure, no feelings of even hot or cold. Imagine how bleak that existence would be when the full extent of that new Olympian’s “otherness” was revealed: Olympian organs, blood and flesh were not compatible with that of normal humans. There would be no corneal transplants, no miraculous tympanic membrane replacements. No responses to regenerative nerve-ganglia growth or hormone therapies. Not ever.

Sudden unasked-for immortality was not fun.

In Athena Marie’s case, it was obvious that her sire, the immortal who had come out of hiding to meet and love her mother, to experience a fleeting moment of tenderness in a lonely isolated life, had unexpectedly died. Now SHE was an immortal, an Olympian. Like Quinn. The cancerous tumor that had threatened to grow large enough to kill her, went into miraculous remission. Her weakened physical state improved by impossible degrees. But there was a catch...

She would forever physically be a nine year-old girl. She would forever more be a mute. Worse, she was a nine year-old girl who’d realized that the man she’d believed was her father wasn’t. Worse yet, she discovered that her father had never loved her, not at all. She’d always represented evidence of her mother’s infidelity to him and he could not forgive this sickly little girl that sin.

And then he’d tried to use her life as a bargaining chip to escape the police dragnet that had closed in on him. She had not believed him capable of such a callous act. That tender family moment was when the remainder of Athena Marie’s Olympic abilities had manifested themselves.

All hell had broken loose. Literally. Suddenly a little piece of Armageddon was loose in West Sussex. A piece of Armageddon in the shape of a pale little girl with raven-black hair.

Quinn had to find her. Soon. He stared up at the full moon riding the sky and set himself to the task.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Miles Palyndrumm stared up at the five-gabled, three-story church as a full moon rose directly over it in the inky winter sky. The church was seventy-five years old, built of oak, mahogany and granite-gray brick, and it sat atop an acre-wide mall on a hillock that was as oval-shaped as a turtle’s back. The church, a pentagonal building with a cobblestoned courtyard at its inner apex, sat at a sixty-degree angle above the flat West Sussex city streets running in front of it. There were three spires sprouting from the valleys between the gables on the star-shaped roof and the swollen moon seemed to sit atop the spires’ wrought-iron needles like an errant balloon of ghostly white. A phalanx of arched flying buttresses ran along the length of the building’s easternmost and westernmost legs, giving the church the look of a French cathedral.

Palyndrumm could find no sense of joy or of solace when he looked at the rambling gothic structure. It looked dark, cold and severe. He couldn’t understand how anyone could think that the loving heart of a Supreme Being could reside under the same thorny rooftop that now threatened to pop the balloon lighting the city night. Palyndrumm, fists stuffed into his pockets, was wrapped in an ankle-length alpaca coat of deepest navy blue and the night’s breezes played with the edges of the coat, flapping it around his booted ankles. To any casual observer, Miles Palyndrumm seemed to be a wealthy and fashionably-dressed, gaunt figure of a man out for an evening’s stroll, stopped to admire the modernized cathedral architecture of this building across a tree-lined boulevard. Closer examination would reveal little more than Palyndrumm’s thinning crown of slicked down raven-black hair, a large hawkish nose and the pallid unblemished flesh of his face, the only part of his body revealed in the moonlight. He did not appear to be a man accustomed to physical exertion or to hardship, he seemed a slight waspish man from West Sussex’s aristocratic high society, a little grim, a little arrogant, definitely a loner.

However, a close look at his pale gray eyes, as perfect and as empty as a doll’s eyes, unanimated by any inner spark of life, and the rose-hue of the full lips of his wide mouth, red lips that were slightly parted to reveal extremely long canine incisors, would begin to tell a different tale.

Miles Palyndrumm was not a normal human being, though he HAD been born a normal man. He took a great deal of pride in his “otherness”, in the mutated DNA structure that had created he and his brethren as an offshoot of the human species branching off into its own mutant class. “Homo draeconis”. He was a product of parallel evolution, the final product of an anomalous break with standard cro-magnan development. He had been infected with an enzyme that had catalyzed his latent DNA strands and thus produce the changes that had made him faster, stronger, longer-lived, yet paradoxically more feral than normal humankind. His folk were masterpieces of predatorial evolution, born hunters and killers. They were blood-drinkers.

Palyndrumm was a vampire, commonly called a “nightrunner” in the parlance of the northern Californian West Sussex streets. His kind preferred to be known as “The Moon-Chosen” and their ancestral racial name was “Apollyonu”.

He was real, he and his kind really existed. He was a vampire, a proud and powerful child of Creation, and he was not a myth or a fiction created by a screenwriter from a Hollywood studio.
Three hundred and twenty-seven years old, Palyndrumm was a member of the Verrigotta Gather in the GEN NOCTURNA vampire nation. Gen Nocturna, one of three worldwide Gens encompassing all Moon-Chosen, housed all of the vampire families on the North American continent down to Central America: Stroma, Damianna, Verrigotta, Julianni, Kamenac, and MacStanclef. Too, Palyndrumm was a Second Kin wampir, a fourth generation Apollyonu, with the powers and status accorded a fourth-level descendent of The Ancients, the progenitors of all Moon-Chosen. Societal ranking in the Moon-Chosen subculture was dependent on blood-lineage power lines, which were, in descending order from eldest to most modern: Ancient, Elder, First Blood, Second Kin, Blooded Brethren, Fledgling, and Feral.

He was also an informant for a government law enforcement agency known as the UCCCF, the Urban Crimes Crisis Control Force, part of the Justice Department. The particular division Palyndrumm loosely worked for was called “The Freak Show” and his “control”, the field agent who “ran” him as an informant, was named Ric Corrigan. The Freak Show was once the joint-action arm of the Office of Scientific Reconnaissance and the National Security Agency’s top-secret “Strategic Hazards” sub-committee. It was reassigned under the DOJ after the Senate SubCommittee Hearings on Intelligence Activities of the early 80’s.

Corrigan was a tanned, tennis-playing “thirtysomething” ex-attorney who was on the fast-track in the UCCCF, well on his way to becoming one of the movers and shakers in the agency and a force in U.S. law enforcement. He knew who and what Miles Palyndrumm was. All UCCCF agents on-assignment to the very elite ranks of The Freak Show knew about the existence of the Moon-Chosen. Many of them had real problems, psychologically and theologically, reconciling the existence of vampires, not as agents of Satan or as supernatural boogeymen, but as real products of the natural process of evolution. Monsters weren’t supposed to exist. Both science and organized religion said so. They were wrong. Corrigan was not one of those agents, however.

Corrigan thought a meeting an hour after nightfall in front of a church with a vampire was funny.

Palyndrumm thought that Corrigan was a fuckhead.

Fact:

Moon-Chosen wampir, as they were called in the native Romanian tongue of the gypsies who traveled the plateau of Transylvania, had no problems with crucifixes and other religious artifacts or symbols. Holy water, however, did produce strange topical phenomena on their flesh and in their internal organs if they ingested it. No one really knew why. Still, they were not supernatural beings, but physical ones and as such, were still subject to the natural laws of physics. Some Moon-Chosen still regularly practiced the religions they were born into and a few even left their Gather-clan families to become monks and ascetics. If God minded, he/she/it hadn’t as yet exhibited that repugnance in any spectacular ways.

Although Moon-Chosen were indeed nocturnal by nature, this was primarily because of the hardwiring of their internal biological clocks – and the fact that most had a severe allergy to ultraviolet radiation, even low-level U.V.. Sunlight made them ill, on rare occasions it could give them second and third-degree burns, but it had never killed any of them who were of the later blood-lineage generations. Sunlight was absolutely fatal to Ancients and to Elders. All Apollyonu preferred to sleep by day, and they succumbed to their bloodthirsty hunger at nightfall. For their kind, the taking of human blood was simply feeding, not some exercise of satanic power. For the Moon-Chosen, evil came in many guises: their need to cause pain and spread chaos, their need to feel superior to other sentient lifeforms, their incessant and never-ending desire to live at the most extreme ends of the human spectrum of emotion, and their chemically-imbalanced psychotic natures. They were amoral sensation junkies, a subspecies of criminal sociopaths, and they were constantly on the edge of violent tantrums made all that much more destructive because of their great physical strength and speed. Incredible natural longevity made them even more dangerous: they were often bored and sought to end their eternal ennui with schemes that often resulted in explosions of savagery.

Not so Miles Palyndrumm, however. Palyndrumm wanted nothing more from his near-immortal existence than a divorce from the arts of warfare and assassination that he’d spent much of his normal-human existence, before he was turned, perfecting. He was an artist of deception and destruction, but he wanted nothing more to do with his art. He wanted more than to just simply retire. He wanted to be forgotten so he could start anew.

Unfortunately, Ric Corrigan and the UCCCF had other plans.

Corrigan and Palyndrumm were accustomed to communicating by e-mail and via coded telephone messages using the works of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” as a key. The odd names of elder gods and dark places of nightmare served as acrostic and anagramatical masks for
The messages they exchanged. Palyndrumm found this cloak-and-dagger code breaking to be both juvenile and tedious. Frankly, nothing and he and Corrigan were presently involved in was of any great significance to anyone in the Apollyonu community or in local law enforcement. Their biggest case to-date, and the biggest validation presented to the ever-skeptical Freak Show Ops Section SubChief for the continued funding of Corrigan’s investigative operation in New Barrington and West Sussex, was the arrest and conviction of a blood-ritual/bondage & domination pornography ring in West Sussex three months ago. That had resulted in a few headlines due to the involvements of a City Alderman, the Principal of a prestigious private high school, a local rock radio personality, and a very well-connected real estate mogul. These pillars of the community had recruited disaffected Victorian “Steampunk” Goths from the junior college into the back room, after-the-rave blood-ritual club they’d created as a front for teen pornography they could sell over the Internet. The thirty-two VHS porno tapes and sixteen CDROMS that had been seized during the UCCCF raid revealed a variety of cinematic perversions featuring pale adolescent flesh in not-so-exotic standard fuckfilm fare. But Corrigan’s unit had been lauded by the West Sussex mayor and City Council for “saving” their errant youth.

Miles Palyndrumm, who had infiltrated the blood-ritual club to get to the porn ring for Corrigan, had found it somewhat amusing in the broadest Marx Brothers-meets-MAD TV sense. Theatre of the Absurd in Fredericks’ of Hollywierd underwear.

Idiots. All of them.

The thin angular vampire waited across from the entrance to the fifty year-old Church of St. Victoria’s of the Valley as Corrigan, in his shiny black vinyl jacket, docksiders, and faded blue jeans, stepped out from the perimeter of the parking lot next to the gothic structure. Palyndrumm was irritated to see that the man was wearing his perennial smirking expression. He hated that self-satisfied cocky look Corrigan frequently affected when he “hit the streets”. The man deluded himself he was some kind of urban tough-guy antihero.

Palyndrumm hoped this wasn’t going to be a lengthy meeting.

Just then he felt it, an odd thrumming, like an unexpected rhythm beat upon an invisible membrane. He was being watched. He looked around, mutated eyes gifted with vampiric vision encompassing the infra-red and the spectrothermal searching the gathering darkness of the falling night. Nothing. He could see no subtle shifting of shadows, no change in the gloom of night as shapes blended or overlapped. He listened with ears sensitive enough to pick up a single whispered conversation out of one hundred from two blocks away and he heard nothing that was unusual, nothing that sounded stealthy. He concentrated... he calmed the ever-present jumbled voices of multiple human thoughts within his own mind and he made himself psychically receptive to extrasensory input. Within a heartbeat he achieved a level of telepathy available only to those wampir of the lower blood-lineage power lines, an extension of the preternatural hunter’s senses super-predators like himself normally possessed, and a level beyond the prescient abilities dormant in most of the human species, Moon-Chosen or human. He touched minds...

There, a man and woman walking down the street a block away, both caught up in a web of passionate deceit as they’d lied to their spouses and met one another for an illicit rendezvous.

There, in a police car roving the neighborhood, where the senior officer in the car hoped that his rookie partner never found out that he was on the take.

There, where a young woman anxiously met with her circle of former college friends for a small impromptu reunion and hoped that none of them would discover that she was a successful sex performer on the strip-dancer circuit instead of the marketing executive she pretended to be.

There, where a young man in a coffee-house sipped his French Roast and cursed the awful news his doctor had given him just this morning about the results of the biopsy he’d had two weeks ago and about the cancer infecting his bone marrow.

There... small thoughts, human thoughts, love and hope, sorrow and sex and desperation.

He sensed nothing that stood out from the ordinary, but that in and of itself was unusual – there was something out there, for a second something had tripped the alarms of his subconscious defenses.

Someone or something was watching him. An enemy from the feel of it. Someone or something murderous.

He was still searching when Corrigan walked up to him and interrupted his concentration.

“ ‘Gude EV’neeng’, Bela”, Corrigan began with a snicker. He loved to take jabs at Palyndrumm’s vampire nature by nicknaming him “Bela” and by quoting from Hollywood vampire films. “Glad you could make it. We’ve got a line on some possible action here tonight.”

“Do you really, Mr. Corrigan? And here I thought you wanted to make a contribution to the cause”, Palyndrumm retorted out the side of his mouth.

“Not in the mood to be a blood donor today, fangs, maybe some other moonlit night”, Corrigan replied amicably.

“I’ll ask again even though I know you’ll likely ignore the request, but my name is NOT ‘Bela’ or ‘Fangs’. Please call me Miles or, preferably, ‘Mr. Palyndrumm’.”

“I’ll see what I can do”, Corrigan snickered again, “sometime this century.”

Palyndrumm fixed him with a withering stare that was equal parts disdain and homicidal intent. “You know full well my people are not known for their sense of humor. Restrain yourself and do not try my patience, if you please.”

“Didn’t really know your folk were actually considered ‘people’”, Corrigan quipped. “According to the files we keep on you, you’re a hybrid lifeform, ‘non-mutant variants’ I believe is the science-lite layman’s term. You’re not going to get all pissy on me tonight, are ya, Miles-buddy?”

“Perish the thought”, the vampire said coolly.

“Good. Back to business: I asked to meet here because of one Monsignor Silvio Altuna Crespi, a longtime associate, friend maybe, to one Dominic DeBenedicto of the Paravinci crime family. Monsignor Crespi is the district head of the local Catholic Archdiocese and the Church of St. Victoria is his church. The Monsignor is a bit of a mover and shaker here in West Sussex, came here as a parish priest some twenty-two years ago from Pittsburgh back east. Apparently, before beginning the climb to exhalted holiness and political power, funny how the two go hand-in-hand for followers of organized religion, he was in the United States Army as a Chaplain in the ‘Nam with a certain green-recruit Major named DeBenedicto back around the Tet offensive. Like I said, there’s a link. And we want it exploited”, Corrigan said.

“What the hell does that have to do with me? I’m not a mob informant and I’m not Catholic. I’m also not particularly interested so far”, the dour Apollyonu growled.

“I’m getting to that. Geez, you’d think eternal life would teach you a little something about patience, wouldn’t ya? Oh, but that’s right: your folk aren’t into ‘virtue’, are they? My bad.”

“Corrigan…”, Palyndrumm hissed.

“Whatever. Anyway, Dom DeBenedicto went on to become a moderately powerful Capo in these parts, sort of a middle-manager in the Paravinci organization, taking care of all the gambling an loan-sharking in Northern California. He’s good with numbers and he’s got a pretty tolerable public persona, besides which he’s a Yuppie-wannabe, so they keep him away from the weighty illegal stuff like murder-for-hire, narcotics, smuggling and hijacking, or the unions. He’s pretty much an Agnostic, a fence-sitter in every way, but his wife, Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci, the only daughter to the old West Coast Don, Cesare Giancarlo Paravinci, SHE’s the religious one. DeBenedicto uses Monsignor Crespi to keep dibs on wifey. Especially now that her Daddy’s gone and died.”

“The Don died more than nine years ago. This is not news”, Palyndrumm commented. Out the corner of his eye he thought he caught a shifting of shadows, a momentary warping of the dim evening’s light. “And DeBenedicto has been separated from his wife nearly as long as that.”

“Sure, that’s true . So’s this: DeBenedicto died in a police shoot-out just over three hours ago”, Corrigan said grinning, “And guess who was at least peripherally involved it seems?”

“Who?” the wampir asked disinterestedly as he once again telepathically picked up on a psychic vibration in the area near them. Again, he experienced the eerie feel of unseen eyes fixing him with a stare of cold rage.

“Quinn.”

His attention suddenly snapped back around to Corrigan. “Quinn? Are you certain?”

Corrigan nodded, a look of triumph in his eyes.

“Damn! What the hell could DeBenedicto have been involved in that would draw Quinn’s attention?”

“My question exactly. We both know that Quinn seems to specialize in sticking his nose rather violently into affairs particular to the Moon-Chosen, and that he is a long time, bitter enemy of the Mafia. Moreover, in recent years operatives in my own agency have run afoul of his interference both politically and operationally, often at gunpoint, so I’m thinking the recent bad luck to hit the Paravinci’s is of critical interest.”

“It still isn’t clear to me what this has to do with this Monsignor and this church or with Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci”, Palyndrumm said.

“You know a Moon-Chosen named ‘Tibor Rossevitch’?”

Palyndrumm, gifted with an eidetic memory and near total recall, shook his head. “There’s no such Apollyonu in West Sussex or in New Barrington. Nor is anyone by that name associated with any Moon-Chosen Gather in this area. In particular, by his name, he’d likely be a member of my own Gather, the Verrigotta’s, or he’d be a Stroma. He’s neither. And if he were one of the nomadic Harvesters, he’d have had to pay a blood-tithe to enter this area and operate attached to some Gather-clan or another. And he’s not some rogue Fledgling sponsored by the MacStanclef’s, those low-born dogs frequently look for any way to slip around protocol that they can. ‘Tibor Rossevitch’ is a fiction. I know this for a fact.”

“Then you have a problem”, Corrigan said pointedly, “because somehow Tibor Rossevitch has something to do with both Montgomery Quinn and with Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci and it was centered here, in just this last week, at this church. And the late Dom DeBenedicto knew Mr. Rossevitch because we have bank records showing he, or maybe the missus, paid him some 35,000 dollars to get the hell out of town nearly ten years ago. That ain’t a coincidence.”

Digesting the information Corrigan gave him, Palyndrumm said slowly in a low voice, “We have, I think, more immediate problems. I believe we’re being watched. Right now. But I cannot get a fix on from where or by whom – or by what. All I can tell is that whoever or whatever is watching us is definitely not friendly.”

“You’re saying that your senses are telling you that whatever is watching us right now isn’t entirely human”, Corrigan asked, wanting further clarification.

“I am”, Palyndrumm verified.

“Can you tell whether or not it is another vampire?”

Palyndrumm snorted derisively. “This isn’t one of those terrible movie fictions your kind are so fond of making. Sensory-prescience and perimeter-sense impulses aren’t that exact. I couldn’t tell you one way or another. My senses are simply a very large magnification of those you yourself have. I don’t get tingling sensations or flash-cut images of strange memories when another Moon-Chosen gets near. Generally, I could tell if I was being watched by another Moon-Chosen through an absence of a normal human heartbeat or by the absence of breath sounds or even visually through spectrothermal imaging – our bodies are not in the red-orange range of warm-blooded humans, but more in the blue-green range reserved for reptiles and amphibians. That isn’t happening here. I get no input at all, but I can sense a malevolent intelligence, a psychic presence, nearby.”

“Yeah, I get it. And if someone like you can’t see this watcher, then there’s a good chance this is someone whose power levels are too dangerous for us to fool around with”, Corrigan concluded.

The wampir nodded. He was standing very still, straining his hearing as he scanned the night, opening his mind to telepathic input. If it was possible to impose the human emotion of fear on a being such as he, Corrigan concluded that Palyndrumm definitely looked spooked.

“Let’s get out of here. This conversation to be concluded elsewhere, another time. I‘ll call you”, the Freak Show operative said as he slid away from Palyndrumm and began walking away from the Church, leaving even his car in the parking lot behind him. For all his frat-boy bluster and arrogance, Corrigan was a master of tradecraft, the art of being a spy. It would be far better for him to walk away and use public transportation to leave the scene than for him to allow their covert watcher to see him, his car, and in what direction he drove away. Even if the watcher followed Corrigan, by using the West Sussex light-rail system and subway, he gave himself a better chance of giving anyone tailing him the slip. Too, moving around in the public eye made it harder for the watcher to isolate Corrigan from the view of the crowd and perhaps do him physical harm. There would be too many eyes, too many possible witnesses if any violent act were initiated.

Conversely, Palyndrumm stayed exactly where he was standing.

“I know you’re there”, he said aloud, when he was sure Corrigan was out of earshot. He waited for an answer.

For half a dozen heartbeats it seemed that the world stood still, the night’s breezes gusted and fitfully tossed street debris into the air in small eddying dust-devils. There was no answer. Traffic picked up as a flurry of automobiles growled down the boulevard and small clusters of passersby leaving restaurants and migrating from bus stops began to traverse the wide sidewalks passing the church. Still no one appeared and no voice spoke up above the rushing tide of passing cars. The ambient flux of light that fell from the streetlamps lining the boulevard swelled and ebbed with the addition of the passing headlights from the automobiles. Shadows disappeared or elongated with a seeming life of their own. Palyndrumm sighed and shrugged his shoulders, assuming no answer was forthcoming.

Then he heard what sounded like the crackle of a large electrical discharge and he saw a sudden eruption of sparks at his feet. In front of his eyes, just off the curb in an empty parking slot, the word “NIGHTRUNNER” followed by a “?” appeared slashed crudely into the asphalt of the street.

Miles Palyndrumm, three hundred twenty-seven year-old assassin and blood-drinking vampire, felt his undead flesh start to crawl.

When he brought his eyes back up from the ground he finally saw a slim, pale-complected little girl, shoulder-length hair as darkly irridescent as the wings of a crow. She looked at him with an odd expression, one that was a combination of grim curiousity and great distrust that held the faintest flavor of distaste. Her eyes were ablaze with a dark and menacing inner light. She did not speak.

Teke. The girl was a highly-evolved, raw and as-yet-untrained telekinetic. She could affect the state of physical matter, manipulate it, with the focused power of her mutant mind.

She was not Apollyonu. She had a definite physical presence and there was no sense of the sliding asynchronous dual focus attributed to specters and to Le Grymmeuere, those ghostly vengeful creatures known as “The Kin”. She was not a normal human Uninitiate. She was far too young to be a sorcerous mage or a witch-elemental. And she was alive, he could feel the powerful thunder of her energy-amplified heartbeat in the ten yards separating them as if it were a physical presence of its own. Obviously she had instinctively chosen to mask both her visual presence and her odd biological signatures from anyone she sensed had enhanced physical senses.

That left only one choice: she was one of those creatures the Moon-Chosen referred to as a “Haunt” because they eternally lurked outside the normal flow of life and of history throughout the Ages, watching, subtly manipulating events, influencing the decisions that determined the many courses of human history, an immortal Olympian.

But she was just a child... Impossible!

Again electricity crackled, heat blazed, and her willpower scrawled a message into the street as if it were a blackboard in her school’s classroom.

The words “VERY POSSIBLE” appeared in the now-smoking asphalt.

Damn! Teke and telepath both.

On the ground, the letters to her original question glowed a brilliant ruby red. “NIGHTRUNNER?”

Past a dry throat, Palyndrumm answered aloud, “Yes. You know what ‘nightrunners’ are, don’t you? You know that we’re not supposed to exist, not anymore than someone like YOU is supposed to exist, right?”

She nodded. Chillingly, he noticed that she never seemed to blink. Her raging eyes stared without interruption.

“Now what?” he asked after a moment’s hesitation.

She smiled a sick parody of what once would have been a beautific and innocent smile belonging to a bright, precocious child. It was an expression full of malicious satisfaction and just a touch of despair.

Suddenly Palyndrumm felt a wintry chill go through him as the world exploded into light and color that he had never before known existed. His mind felt feverish while his normally cold flesh felt hardened unto a stony carapace. He gained sensations that set his mind aswirl, but lost other sensations like touch and taste, one set of senses traded dominance over another. His world abruptly expanded but he was closed off from it. Palyndrumm had enough experience over the centuries with extrasensory phenomena to know that what had happened was that the girl had roughly merged her own perceptions with his. A low-level but experienced telepath, Palyndrumm tried to protect himself, setting up blocks and barriers in his mind, but the girl’s telepathic abilities were greater than his by a factor of ten. He felt her invade every corridor of his mind and he shared her sadness and rage. She rolled through his mind like a thunderstorm over the plains.

In thirty seconds she had successfully puppeteered him, making him her minion.

“Do you know me now, vampire, do you know what I have become? Now I am like you: a murderer by nature and by evolutionary programming, a killer by necessity. Yet I am NOT like you. I am different: older somehow, stronger somehow, stranger is so many ways. I awoke a little girl this morning and then my father betrayed me and now I have become a monster. I am lost. I no longer understand the world that I live in and I do not know my place in it. The air that I breathe now feels different, the light from the sky looks different, the earth I walk on feels strange to me, yet still familiar. I am not the same anymore.

“I have spent my life weak and afraid, voiceless, and waiting to die from a disease that has burdened me since the hour of my birth. Even when I would cry because of my pain of from my fear, no one could hear me. I had no voice.

“Now it is different. I do not know HOW I know that, but I do. I am still a prisoner of silence, but now I am eternal. I will never know death.

“Why? What has happened to me? Why has it happened? Why have so many people I thought I could trust lied to me?

“A man who I loved more than any other man, a man I thought was my father, threatened to kill me in exchange for his freedom today because I am NOT really his daughter. If I am not my father’s daughter then who am I?

“I have discovered that friends and family who told me my mother was a bad woman, a treacherous woman, are really criminals who trade in other people’s misery. Can I really trust what they have said about her? I know now that they sent her away and they took me from her because they were afraid of her. They were afraid she was more honest than they. And they knew that she would tell me the truth.

“Now, suddenly, I have knowledge that I did not have before; knowledge about the secret histories of this world, about peoples and places that I did not believe could ever exist. People and places that the priests and teachers said were not real, just myths. They lied.

“I know about you and your kind, blood-drinker. I know of the Moon-Chosen. Just as God made the Angels, he, too, made you: the vampires, devils who haunt the darkness of night.

“And he made me: not human, not vampire, older than both and somehow more alien. What have I become? What new lies will they tell me? Am I still a child of God? Whatever I can imagine I can now make happen with a moment’s concentration. My sadness can bring rain like tears from heaven, my anger can shake the sky with lightning and thunder, my hands can crush concrete, a look from my eyes can burn metal, and with a thought I can disappear from view, haunting the world invisible like a ghost.

“Have I become a god? Or am I a devil?

“Who will dare lie to me now?

“Tonight I will find out. I am going to go have a talk with God. And he damn well had better answer.”

She pointed to the church that loomed through the night’s gloom. Athena Marie and the vampire whose mind she’d invaded walked towards the cathedral-like building across the street with slow measured steps.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Monsignor Silvio Altuna Crespi examined the beautiful neo-Rafaelite fresco adorning the convex understructure of the ceiling to St. Victoria’s with pride and humility. Such beauty and such sadness, all told in a single frozen image imblazoned in paint across ceramic tiles adhered to concrete and wood. He admired the multiple curving arches of his church, the ribs of the oval-shaped interior to the gothic house of salvation he had captained for nearly fifteen years as the parish priest, and he smiled as he thought of the cleverness and inventiveness of the engineers who had made this powerful and majestic building. After that, as ever, his thoughts turned to the wisdom and unfathomable genius of the God who had created beings such as those engineers. Satisfied for the moment, he then turned around to again face the two grim people who had come to visit him.

Standing at the railing on the second floor mezzanine looking down at the rows of pews were Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci, a trusted friend and parishoner of many years, and Quinn, whom he thought of as the dark angel himself, with whom he’d only recently made acquaintence.

“What you’re telling me defies all logic”, Monsignor Crespi said with a shake of his leonine head. A thick-bodied man of a little above average height, Silvio Crespi had grown up the son of a blacksmith in southern Italy. He started finished primary school as a popular local soccer hero. He’d come to America during his freshman year of college, transferring colleges on a Humanities scholarship, gained his citizenship, and then become a soldier, sent to Vietnam, where he’d met the brutish Dominic DeBenedicto. “But I know enough about the strange goings on in West Sussex these past six years to realize that there is more happening at each new nightfall than just the rising of a new moon. Especially now that the Federal government has opened an office of the UCCCF downtown. Everyone with even half a mind knows the UCCCF is NOTHING like the police or the F.B.I., not with all the paramilitary hardware and cutting-edge scientific technology their agents routinely use. Not with their supposedly unofficial interests in the Human Genome biotech companies. And especially since they never seem to work ‘normal’ murder or kidnapping cases, but instead work the odd sensationalistic ones that seem most likely to wind up on the front pages of the tabloids.”

Elizabetta, a very thin, aristocratic woman in her late forties, blessed with a rich olive complexion but who had sad, downturned eyes, had a long face and silver-peppered auburn hair. She had the air about her of a person who had suffered in silence for so long she no longer knew how to rise above the gloom that hung over her in an invisible cloud. She moved in precise elegant motions and spoke slowly and carefully. Her usual manner lacked very much in the way of animation and he seemed constantly distracted, more introverted than aloof.

A decade and a half of marriage to a homicidal sociopath insecure about his intelligence and social standing could do that to a woman.

“I could not agree with you more. The story I tell you is, on the surface, the stuff of complete fantasy. It’s patently unbelievable. Unbelievable except for one small detail: you met Tibor Rossevitch”, she said. “Do you remember HOW you met him?”

Crespi nodded, his eyes avoided meeting hers. “Yes, I do. It was an auto accident off the 101-A overpass onto Lakeside Avenue. A sedan blew a tire and slammed into a propane truck doing about sixty. The wreckage then fireballed. Both vehicles flew through the guardrail and off the road, rolling downhill. Must have rolled over seven times. When it blew it was like a napalm blast and it took another car that was passing too close with it. The wreckage was everywhere, hot shrapnel flying, like knives caught in a tornado of fire.”

“And then one lone man walked out from it all, with only first degree burns, a black eye and a broken wrist”, she finished.

Crespi nodded. “A stranger. A nomadic type. He said he was a freelance journalist for a European travel magazine. He shouldn’t have survived. None of the other six people in the accident did. They were all burned beyond recognition. It took the Fire Department, with three trucks pumping retardent foam and water on that wreckage, three hours to put out the blaze. But Tibor Rossevitch was relatively unharmed. He looked like he’d gotten a really bad case of sunburn. No smoke inhalation and his hair wasn’t even singed. We all, police and fire department veterans and witnesses, attributed it to those odd, random miracles of survival that happen at some accidents.”

“It was hardly an ‘odd, random miracle’”, Montgomery Quinn finished in a harsh whisper. “It was just an example of how close to indestructible most Olympians are.”

Crespi gave Quinn a hard look. “Well, that, too, is a miracle of sorts. You ‘Olympians’ supposedly don’t exist, never did. Yet you do. That is clear evidence of the miracle of Creation.”

“Whatever you say, Holy Man”, Quinn growled not unsympathetically.

“Yet you believe that Rossevitch died. You believe his immortal existence ended unexpectedly in some tragedy or another”, Crespi continued. “And, Elizabetta, you say Rossevitch was your daughter’s father.”

“I know he’s gone”, Quinn stated. Elizabetta merely looked the Monsignor square in the eyes and nodded solemnly.

“Well, it must have been spectacular”, Crespi commented, “because anything that could destroy that man would have to be.”

Quinn tilted his head and shrugged.

“Elizabetta, you realize that what you are confessing here, this blatant act of adultery and the fruit of that adultery, are admissions of a terrible sin”, Crespi pointed out. “You understand that to many eyes, including those of even an enlightened Catholic Church, the unapologetic way that you cuckolded Dominic DeBenedicto and virtually challenged him to raise this girl as his own, you are the villain here, not Dominic.”

“It’s not as if I didn’t pay a price for my actions”, Elizabetta unexpectedly snarled. “I had to leave my family, leave my daughter, and live the life of a Mafia exile. My father is convicted, and justly so, as a criminal and deported overseas. My own passport is revoked for fear I would visit him when his health took a turn for the worse. And Dominic severs all relations between me and my daughter under threat of shipping her off to some Arab potentate in Saudi who owed him a favor.”

“He was an unsophisticated man. Close to his animal emotions. He always looked up to you as some kind of Italian royalty. You had hurt him and humiliated him...”

“Ask me if I care”, she retorted. “He was a verbally and emotionally abusive pig of a man. A professional liar, bully, and murderer several times over, as well. My daughter was the result of the one bright spot of happiness I had in the last decade, my evidence that a relationship with a man could be good and result in something greater than just capital gains and tacky materialistic excess.”

“But now you know what Tibor was. That he lied to you just as Dominic did. That he was not even a normal human being!”, the Monsignor pressed.

“Again, ask me if I care. Tibor had to lie. The secret of his existence and of his abilities was something no one on Earth except another of his own kind would understand.”

“So why are you here?” Crespi asked.

“Because this is where Athena Marie will come. It is the only safe haven she has left”, Quinn stated.

“I don’t understand”, Crespi said. “Why?”

“You’re the one who convinced her that it would be better to stay with her Daddy, didn’t you? Telling her that it would be better if she didn’t know where her Mother was living. So tonight she finds out Daddy is a big time criminal, and he’s not really Daddy at all, and he’s the same man who just tried to use her as a shield in a police shoot-out, threatening to kill her when the police tried to arrest him”, Quinn explained. “I imagine she has figured out that you’re more a friend of her Dad’s than of hers. That being the case, this means she has some business with you now that her world has come apart at the seams. I believe there are a lot of questions she wants to ask you. I doubt she’ll be very polite about it. Too, I’ll just bet she wants to ask you where it is her mother is now living.”

“You better be glad we’re here”, Elizabetta said coolly. “Because I think we’re the only chance you have of getting out of this alive.”

“Tell me, Monsignor”, Quinn asked. “Were the funds, the Mafia blood-money, that DeBenedicto funneled to you over the years to rebuild St. Victoria’s, to create and finance the Youth Center, to prop up that failing Catholic School, ‘Bishop Arbor Academy’ I think it was, and to hide your affair with that poor, confused novitiate nun, Sister Penelope, worth it? Worth turning your back on what you knew was right and moral? Worth you going into a court of law and perjuring yourself as a character witness for him during the child custody proceedings, making sure that Elizabetta had no chance of keeping her daughter?”

Monsignor Crespi’s body sagged and he slumped down into a wingback chair near the mezzanine-lobby that leading to the corridor to the Rectory.

“Oh my God”, he said gulping air, “Oh God! What do you want of me?”

“It isn’t what we want of you”, Elizabetta said with a catch in her voice, her sadness and anger overtaking her iron control as her compassion towards her daughter’s plight sought release, “it’s what Athena Marie will want of you when she gets here. She’s going to want explanations, I imagine. She’s going to want God to understand. And if she can’t get those explanations or that understanding, then she’s going to demand some kind of retribution. She’s full of a lot of anger now, feeling hurt and betrayed. Mr. Quinn brought me here with him because he thinks that just maybe there is still enough of a normal little girl living inside that thunderstorm of raw energy she’s become to still listen to what her mother has to say. That is, if you and Dom haven’t succeeded in poisoning her mind against me… I mean, you’ve only had the last five or six years to do a good job brainwashing her, haven’t you?”

“I believe it is you men of religion who often say that ‘God works in mysterious ways’, yes?” Quinn said evenly, addressing the Monsignor. “Usually you’re referring to the mercies of God when you say that. Well, Judgment is also the province of your God. In your Old Testament, God was a demanding, unyielding and fierce being of great power, wasn’t he?”

The tall man in the long coat walked away and down the corridor. As he disappeared into the shadows of the church’s interior he said, “Know that you have been duly judged, Holy Man, and the executioner is knocking at the door.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

When the world ends, it won’t be with a bang, but with a whimper. As the doors of Order are broken down and splintered, the flood of Chaos through the opening will be rapid and relentless. There won’t be a lot of time for drama. There won’t be a lot of time for hand-wringing and regret or for grand inspirational speeches extolling the virtues of the Old Order as it passes. There will only be anxiety and tears as fearful voices implore Heaven to share its tender mercies with the doomed of this Earth. It’ll be a lot like the heavy rainfall from a passing storm washing away the dirt and grime from off the empty streets. The sound of that rain would probably be a lot like the prolonged sigh of a tired and beaten fighter who knows he has lost the most important battle he’s ever fought.

No thunderous crash as the walls of the world collapse. No blaring trumpets or banging drums. Merely a whimper.

The massive double doors to St. Victoria’s swung outward, opening on the night.

Miles Palyndrumm entered the church, walking haltingly under the control of Athena Marie DeBenedicto, and as she, too, came inside the ornate sprawling edifice, they both saw Montgomery Quinn standing in the midst of the central aisle, a dozen yards in front of the altar, between the rows of pews.

The presence of the Moon-Chosen surprised him. Up until now there had been no vampire involvement in the affair. However, a quick mental scan of the situation revealed to him that there was no secret labyrinthian plot involving his dread enemies: the nightrunner had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Elizabetta Spinozza-Paravinci was standing in plain sight, in front of the marble and gilt-edged alabaster altar behind the immortal vampire-hunter.

Monsignor Crespi sat morosely on the trio of steps leading up to the altar, bent-double, his head in his hands.

Athena Marie, her small oval face cool and distant, used Palyndrumm, his face wracked by spasmic twitches as he fought to wrest control of his mind away from her, as her voice.

“I don’t know you, Mister, but I saw you earlier this afternoon when the police came after my father,” she said through the vampire said by way of preamble. “You don’t need to be here. I have no argument with you.”

“My name is Quinn”, he said, “sometimes I work as a private investigator. Some people concerned about your welfare hired me and along the way some leads I followed led me to your mother. I was part of the police unit that brought down Dominic DeBenedicto, the man who said he was your father. I also knew that Dominic DeBenedicto was NOT your true father. And I happen to know who and what you are now.”

“My God, you’re like me”, she realized as she scanned Quinn.

Quinn nodded.

“Mother? Is that you?” The plainitive sound of her realization was awful to hear as it twisted itself through the voice of the Moon-Chosen assassin.

“Yes, darling, it’s me. Athena Marie, I couldn’t let you go through a day like this alone.”

“I know, I know. This is not your fault.”

“Sweetheart, why don’t you let this man who has nothing to do with any of this go? That way we can get away from this place, this city, and maybe we can try to start over again, just you and me”, Elizabetta pleaded.

“How can I do that, Mom? Do you know what this man is? Do you know what it is I’ve become? Things aren’t ever going to be the way they used to be. Too much has changed. I’ve changed. Daddy’s dead. And I killed him, Mr. Quinn knows that. He was there. He saw.”

“You didn’t have a choice”, Quinn rasped. “You were just trying to stay alive.”

“I’ll live forever, I’m never going to get sick again and I’ll never be old, but I can still be killed, can’t I?” she asked through her puppet.

“Yes”, Quinn answered.

“Why? How can that make any sense?”

“There is no answer to that question. I don’t know. No one does”, he replied.

“Is that so? Monsignor? Monsignor Crespi? Is what Mr. Quinn says true ? Is it?”

Monsignor Crespi did not look up. He stayed where he was, lost in his own traumatic emotions.

“Did you know that I can see into this man’s mind? Did you? He can’t hide his secrets from me a long as I control him. Do you know how many people he’s killed over the last three hundred years? Can you understand that he does not feel guilty at all over this because he thinks of them as FOOD? He and others like him kill people by drinking their blood and you KNEW this, you KNOW that they exist, and you don’t do anything about it!”

The Monsignor looked up from his misery, frightened, and he saw Palyndrumm’s aristocratic face, aware that he was looking into the face of a violent centuries-old predator. He then looked past the wampir to see Athena Marie, looking into her wide child’s eyes that now housed a soul and a power nearly as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

His lips quivered, as if imbued with a life of their own, independent of his brain, but he said nothing.

“Talk to me, Monsignor, tell me why this happened. Tell me why you let me be taken from my mother by a man who never really loved me, who used me as a piece of property he could use for bargaining. Tell me how it is you came to be friends with a gangster and a murderer like he was! Tell me how it is that vampires really do exist! Explain to me why bad things happen to good people and why bad people and monsters aren’t punished for what they do! Tell me how I’m supposed to live my life! LOOK AT ME, OLD MAN, AND TELL ME WHAT GOD WANTS ME TO DO NOW!”

Crespi flinched as if he’d been slapped. He folded himself into a smaller figure and huddled ever closer to the altar. He was sweating as if he were standing in front of a furnace and he’d begun mumbling to no one in particular.

As soon as the angry outburst faded, the body of Miles Palyndrumm fell to the floor, a marionette with the strings cut. He fell heavily, only half conscious, and, between panting breaths, he moaned as the turbulent storm clouds in his head slowly faded. His body trembled as he gradually regained control of himself and he raised himself onto his hands and knees.

Quinn knew this was the worst sign possible. She didn’t need his voice anymore. The time for talking was finished.

Athena Marie pointed imperiously towards the doors to St. Victoria’s, motioning Quinn and her mother to leave.

“We can’t do that, honey”, Elizabetta said with a shake of her head.

She repeated the gesture with more vehemence. A little ways in front of her, still on all fours, Miles Palyndrumm turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. He was no longer shaking. His superhuman vampiric vitality brought him back from the brink far more quickly than anyone could imagine. She was oblivious to the baleful glare of unrestrained malice he gave her.

“It doesn’t have to be like this”, Quinn said softly. “I can teach you to adjust. Your mother and I can help you find your way...”

Athena Marie held up a hand, palm outward, motioning for Quinn to stop talking.

A sudden series of very small jolts shook the church, each one a little stronger than the last. The floorboards began to creak audibly and the four massive wrought-iron and crystal chandeliers began to sway ever-so-slightly. A thickening wind, first a breeze and then a stream of rushing air, began to fan the flames of the flickering candles and then abruptly began blowing them out. The pews began to rattle.

Her intent was obvious. She would bring the church down upon itself using the power of her newly-awakened mutant mind and the angry steel of her willpower.

Cracks began to spiderweb the seven foot-lengths of the eight stained glass windows lining the opposing walls. As the windows began to split, they made a sound like tiny brittle bells tolling. The ground beneath the church was now beginning to emit a low thrumming noise.

“No! This is not possible!”, Monsignor Crespi shouted. “This cannot be!”

Quinn was hesitant to do what he knew he must. He braced his legs, shifting into a wide-legged stance to avoid being thrown off-balance from the tremors rocking of the church and he turned to look at Elizabetta. That look was full of entreaty and regret: if there was some miracle she could create to prevent the awful act he was about to commit to save their lives, now was the moment to create it.

“ATHENA, STOP! STOP THIS!”, the woman wailed at the little girl who now stood entranced by the sick waves of giddiness she felt as she exercised her telekinetic power. “STOP IT! YOU’RE NOT A MONSTER! YOU’RE NOT A KILLER! YOU’RE STILL JUST A LITTLE GIRL! DON’T BECOME LIKE DOMINIC! IF YOU DO THIS, HE’LL HAVE MADE YOU JUST LIKE HE WAS!”

Athena Marie’s head jerked up and her eyes momentarily refocused. Her trance was, for the moment, broken. She stared at her mother with eyes that began to fill with tears.

The harsh severity of the tremors began to suddenly lessen.

And it was already too late.

Hissing angrily, Miles Palyndrumm leapt up from the floor, twisting his body in mid-leap like a great hunting cat, and he grabbed the little girl around her waist in an unbreakable grip. With a shrug, he lifted her from the floor. Moving at incredible eye-blurring speed, he twisted her head back with his free arm, throwing her lustrous black hair aside, and sunk his fangs deep into the side of her pulsing throat. Her small mouth opened in a soundless scream and her hands frantically clawed the air.

Quinn streaked across the fifty feet separating him from the duo in a single lunge executed so quickly he seemed to disappear and then reappear at the threshold to the church where they stood locked in deadly embrace. The Moon-Chosen killer kicked at him, his jaws never leaving the girl’s neck. Quinn hit him in the back and in the ribs with blows that would smash cinder blocks. He grabbed Palyndrumm, tearing at the wampir to separate him from the girl. Palyndrumm did not let go and instead both he and Athena Marie were thrown through the air by Quinn’s prodigous strength to plow through a trio of mahogany pews, splintering the huge benches. Even as their bodies came to a stop, Quinn was already on them, grappling with Palyndrumm and jamming one of his arms between he and the girl while the vampire furiously drank.

When he wrenched them apart, Palyndrumm’s arms, arms strong enough to rip the door off from a metal safe, broke. He howled in agony. Quinn lashed out with a punch that spun the nightrunner through the air like a top, throwing him a dozen feet away to smack into the wall of the church hard enough to crack the plaster and indent it.

Athena Marie dropped to the floor limply. Across the room from her, Monsignor Crespi pulled at his own hair, slapping his own face. He spat out a slurred, spittle-flecked litany of curses and ran in small circles like a trapped animal as the full impact of what he was seeing threatened to separate him from his sanity.

Quinn snatched up a three-foot length of broken pew, its end a rough sword’s blade, and he leapt on Palyndrumm while he rose unsteadily to his feet, driving the makeshift stake into and through the vampire’s body. Palyndrumm let loose a wail that seemed to echo through the corridors of time as a gout of red-black blood splashed out of the wound. He shook convulsively, violently, like a fish caught on a hook, slapping at the wood that had impaled him, and then he dropped onto one side, his legs scissoring. After a moment, he lay still.

Time ran amok, accelerating at a quicksilver pace as he quickly disintegrated into a pile of oily ash. A thin cloud of gray smoke trailed from the pile.

Elizabetta’s wail brought Quinn out from the grips of the fury that still raged within him.

Athena Marie.

In a flash, Quinn was at Elizabetta’s side while she cradled her daughter’s limp form. Blood was splashed across the girl’s shoulder and upper chest. The wound in her neck was not the elegant cosmetic stab marks popularized by Hollywood motion pictures, but was instead a ripped, gaping gash that drooled out what little blood remained for her weak heart to pump. Her eyes were unfocused as she stared past her mother’s face towards the ceiling of the church. Elizabetta looked at Quinn and shook her head mournfully. The girl was only moments from death.

For a tiny moment her slack face became animated and her eyes re-focused. She looked at Quinn and there was triumph in her eyes, then she looked into her mother’s face and her eyes were wide with wonder. She looked like a child again.

There was a brief flash of telepathy that exploded within Quinn and Elizabetta’s brains.

“There was once a little girl with hair and eyes the color of a summer’s night and she lived in a land where it was always Winter. She was a princess, the only daughter of a mighty warrior-king, and she was the most beautiful thing that walked the cold and stark whiteness of the Winter-world. This young princess with the night-colored hair was the most beloved person in all the land and she carried deep inside her a secret even she didn’t know she had. She was the keeper of the secret to Summer, and this was a powerful and bright secret that made her the most important person in the Winter-world…”

She raised her arm, body quaking with the effort, and made the sign of the cross. She coughed. Her arm fell back to her side, slapping on the floor.

Then she died.

Simultaneously, Monsignor Silvio Altuna Crespi, red eyes haunted with maddened visions his intellect and ego would not accept, screamed, leaping to his feet dancing a mad jig as lightning danced across his body.

“No”, Quinn whispered in horror, “No.”

The air held the coppery stink of ozone as the lightning gradually faded and Crespi’s body quaked. Abruptly he screamed once and then sat still as a statue, legs folded under him, staring out at nothing, his vision turned inwards watching the monsters dancing across his mindscape.

And so the balance was maintained. The new 1100th Olympian was suddenly born as a drooling lunatic named Silvio Crespi.

Elizabetta and Quinn sadly gathered up the body of a lost little girl and quickly left the church of St. Victoria’s of the Valley, stealing out into the night, feeling an icy chill as the building’s tainted shadow fell across them, darker than the night itself.




T h e   E n d

This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2001, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission.

Traversing The Bleed by Joseph Armstead


"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order." --- Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Chaos is the score upon which Reality is written.” --- Henry Miller

"Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills."
--- William Empson




Fires and black smoke threatened to obliterate the night-time view of the polluted horizon and the faint sounds of screams vied with the thunder of the surf as a storm approached from off the Pacific.

People were running in small groups down debris-strewn streets and a few paused to loot abandoned storefronts, tossing bricks, stones and beverage bottles through windows. Some wrenched abandoned bicycles from off the bike racks they’d been chained to and heaved them through the air to stave in display windows and glass doors. All the buildings lining the town’s streets were desecrated with graffiti, blood and what looked to be fecal matter. Broken street lamps intermittently showered sparks onto the dirty asphalt street surface. Human bodies, some still as death, others moving sluggishly, obviously trying to move in defiance of the pain that assaulted them, littered the streets, vying with the trash in clogging the road enough to prevent motorized vehicular travel. Somewhere, someone was pounding rhythmically, incessantly, on some hollow metal box, barrel or container and the sound was like the harsh heartbeat of a hunting beast running through the wildest, darkest part of the forest.

Everything smelled of ash and fleshly decay. The town stank. The air tasted of the coppery flavor of blood.

Chaos. It was more than an abstract intellectualization, more than a concept, more than an appraisal, more than a judgment. Chaos: it was innate to human behavior; it lurked just outside the boundaries of all human interactions and endeavors. It defined passion, it defined history, and it determined the course of all human events.

It was in the blood.

The screams riding the night’s breezes became ragged as they continued past the point of any normal human tolerance for hysteria, surpassing the threshold for terror.

It was a symphonic choir for destruction.

A hoarse masculine voice from the frenzied, rioting crowd kept repeating the part of The Lord’s Prayer where it was written “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”…

Someone else guffawed with ear-splitting volume and bellowed, “Whatever…!”

Someone started firing a gun.

The praying man’s voice devolved into the deep and dark sound of weeping…

Daylight was coming.
* * *


They were still children and so they played.

His name was Micah and she was named Tracey and once they had been schoolmates, though they had not shared any of their seventh grade classes together, and they lived along the sides of a grassy ravine just outside of town, next to a five acre clump of old, bent trees, about a mile and a half away from the seashore. Their shelter was a beaten up, gray, wormy-planked wooden shack that they squatted in. They were alone, for the most part. Their parents had died in the explosive and fiery landfall of The Scarab and Tracey had lost the sight in one of her blue doll’s eyes, the retina burned useless, from the brilliant fury of the celestial impact. Sometimes the dead eye in her face was a little disconcerting, but mostly it was okay, so far as Micah was concerned: at least, he often thought, she was not burned and scarred like he was.

She was still a very pretty brunette girl, tomboyish and lithe and sharp-tongued and clever, while Micah was a stocky, somewhat shy, very bookish boy under a tousle of sandy-colored hair and gifted with a steady and pragmatic disposition. The after-effects of The Scarab’s impact on the planet had left him with a half-burnt face, flash-fried , scarred and stiff, and with one hand that was little more than a club made of knotty gristle.

And despite that, they saw themselves as the lucky ones.

They played because they were still young enough to feel the urge to be happy, young enough to feel the force of their own inner joy at having made it out the other side after the awful events following the impact of The Scarab, played because it was how they passed the time, played because that way they could forget they were cold and hungry and frightened at the way a splinter from the Darkness had changed their world.

Micah and Tracey were survivors. Sometimes they weren’t sure they wanted to be: the world had changed in some very inhospitable ways and they were frequently made sad by the things they now experienced. Their friends were gone or, if they had survived as they themselves had, they were scattered across the countryside within the perimeter of the catastrophe. Their teachers were dead. Their parents were dead. They had lost any contact they’d had with relatives because the telephone lines were all down and cellular telephone communication was inhibited by magnetic radiation and electrostatic emissions. Television didn’t work. They had no access to a computer and the ones at the school and at the library were all under guard and wounded, plague-infected children and adults kept their distance from the many military sentries roaming the area in their gas-masks and acrylic-visored filtration-helmets. At nights, gangs of looters and disaffected “Monkey Boyz”, disease-infected and fever-demented gangs of thieves and killers, more often than not mere high school students, roved the town’s borders and into the unincorporated areas looking for plunder and prey. At night, they had learned to stay indoors and very quiet, keeping the candles unlit lest the light attract the brutish psychotic mobs.

These were the Plague Days.

People were sick, horribly sick, and they were dying and the outside world, the government and the news media, made it sound as if they and their town were the most horrible place on Earth.

In some ways, it was.

But not today, not right now. Now their hearts were light. Now the physical pain they had lived with for the past few months was a fading memory. They had raided the remains of a Seven-Eleven store at a nearby gas station and they had eaten well and they had found bottled water to drink and they were feeling a little like their old selves. They were alive and no one was chasing them and they didn’t hear any police or fire department sirens, so nothing menacing seemed to lay waiting just over the horizon.

They played…

And something dark and alien stirred deep in the earth under them, hungry and hateful, seeking release now it had been awakened, now it had been changed by The Scarab’s touch. Something inhuman lived and evolved inside a stony underground tunnel under the impact-zone called “The Artery” and it kept watch over its children, who were its eyes and ears, children like Micah and Tracey...

Things were changing. It was the End of an Age.

Soon, playtime would be over.

* * *


She had never before noticed how wonderfully beautiful and how incredibly fragile, yet amazingly savage, the physical world around her truly was and now it was too late.

Rebekah Lain sat in her upstairs bedroom looking out over the western exposure of her parent’s home, her laptop powered on and the screen up, her attention not focused on the research she had been commissioned to perform and instead lost in a daydream that centered around the windswept seashore.

She was thinking about The Artery. She was thinking about the day when everything had changed.

She was mourning the future of this world.

She was a thin woman, shy and appearing unexceptional except for her violet-tinted gray eyes and their intense gaze, a hint at the vast and focused intellect behind her delicate elfin features. In her room at her parent’s house, a fifty year-old Cape Cod style, two-story set a quarter-mile back from the main road that spiraled up a hill called “Terraceway” on the outskirts of town, she had taken refuge from the misery and the frenetic drama that had descended on the middle-class suburban community in from the shoreline. She could think here. She could hide and she could cry and she could be less than heroic here, in this weathered reed-encircled property, and she could diligently work through the crisis that threatened to overwhelm her. The sound of the sea birds and the surf, the wind as it wound its way through the gnarled branches of the nearby trees, the smell of the ocean mixing with the scent of the patch of forest nearby, these things helped center her, helped her find and keep her center while she rested and worked in familiar, nurturing surroundings.

Of course, it would have helped far more if she were not alone, but being alone was something she shared with a great many other people in this recently-devastated community.

Rebekah looked away from the surging, crashing surf outside and down at her hands, long, thin hands, pale. They were the hands of a musician, of a surgeon, of an artist or a healer, and she remembered what her life had been like before the comet, back when she had been a microvirological researcher for the CDC, the Center for Disease Control. A doctor, she had been a doctor.

She looked at her hands…

The glittering green dust was sparkling in her bloodstream, visible even through her thin, translucent flesh, and the inevitable calcified scaling effect had started on the insides of her wrists and along each of her outside fingers.

Like three hundred thousand other people in the six cities around the Bay, she had been infected.

“The Bleed”… They called it “The Bleed”.

She had it. Like the seventy-nine hundred dead people who never really understood just what it was that had killed them, she had it.

Incubation period: ninety-six hours. Infection rate: uncertain. No one knew how it spread. Approximate time to induce death: twenty-two days. Fatality rate: one hundred percent.

The Bleed. She had it.

The CDC and Johns Hopkins and Stanford Medical were all working on isolating its effects and identifying its many mutating component parts, but the disease seemed to actively defy categorization, as if it knew it was being studied and dissected, as if it could sense the human beings it had infected were plotting its death.

It kept changing its morphology, kept metamorphosing to adapt to new environments, kept changing molecular composition to become resistant to medication, kept finding new hosts to use as vectors, kept on killing…

On her laptop computer screen, a map of the western United States showed an animated mathematical projection rate for the spread of the infection.

In the eighteen days she had left before the disease killed her, two thousand more people would be infected. Another twenty-two days after that, after those people had all died, succumbing to the disease, an additional six thousand people would be doomed to die. In another month, unless they could come up with a way to stop the spread of the alien virus, the disease would leave the boundaries of the state of California and would spread into Oregon and Nevada and its growth rate would increase geometrically.

In forty-five days there could potentially be half a million dead.

Rebekah Lain felt lost and alone, betrayed by the speeding physical degeneration of her own body.

She still had the three writable CD-R disks given her by Dr. Bester Effinger. Effinger had understood. Effinger had figured it out. Effinger, brilliant, tortured, socially awkward and abrasive, a scientist on a holy crusade, had warned them of what was happening, of what was yet to happen still, but no one had wanted to listen to the CDC field investigator. Effinger had been her friend and her boss and they had thrown him out from the impact-zone. He had accused them of purposefully mismanaging the disaster and emergency-support efforts. He had accused FEMA and the OSI of being lackeys for a radical, politically-powerful special interest group within NASA who wanted to use the Splinter and the ensuing disaster for their own ends. He had tried to go public with his findings and with his hypotheses, but they, the government, had silenced him.

And to her own growing shame, she had been amongst those who had helped them do that. Now she was paying the price.

She had worked in a homogenized, filtered, sterile environment, the CDC mobile quonset laboratories created especially for outbreak conditions, under ultra-violet light and wearing a cumbersome, supposedly protective HazMat suit, a version of the suit that had even possessed its own recycled air supply. She should not have been susceptible to infection and yet it had happened.

She was at the beginning of the First Stage of the infection: hemostatic infestation. This usually resulted in arthritis-like symptoms and shortness of breath as the slow crystallization of the red blood cells stole the body’s ability to take in and to transport oxygen. The joints would swell and ache. Frequent migraine headaches would occur and slowly, but surely, visual acuity would fade.

The frequent periodic nose bleeds, from which the disease got its name, would begin soon.

At the Second Stage, the teeth would rot and fall out, pneumonia-type symptoms would result in the lungs filling with liquid, the trachea became hyper-sensitive and would scar, resulting in frequent choking and the inability to swallow little more than small amounts of water or saliva. Cataracts would form on the eyes, and multiple patches of scaly eczema would cover the body, leaking pus and blood. The human brain, deprived of oxygen for long periods of time, would begin to cannibalize itself, rearranging axiomatic connections, rerouting bioelectrical impulses, and memory loss and dementia would result.

Itchy green scabs would begin to encrust all exposed mucous membranes, like the insides of the nostrils and the ears, the insides of the lips and tongue, the sex organs and the anus.

At Stage Three, the red corpuscle crystallization would mysteriously reverse itself and the coagulation cascade would stop altogether. The body scabs would blacken and fall off. The blood would flow thinly, like water, and the infected victim would hemorrhage from every organ they possessed. Blood would slowly leak out of every orifice an infected person possessed. The flow, though small, could not be staunched. Flesh would slough off like the dead used-up skin from a molting reptile, but there was no new skin growing under it as a replacement --- the infectee would be left with many large patches of exposed, blood-dripping muscle-tissue. The brain would shut down altogether. The heart eventually stopped beating.

Twenty-two days.

The Bleed. She had it.

Fucking Effinger had been right. Goddamn him.

Rebekah began sobbing, her body fighting this surrender to despair and misery. Immediately, tears streaked pink with blood from damaged capillaries and the green from the crystalline infection leaked in fat droplets out of her eyes.

The sight of the discolored tears snapped her out from her depression. She had work to do and very little time in which to do it.

The entire city was under martial law. The National Guard was set up in a ring around the perimeter of the city’s borders with orders to allow only authorized government “containment personnel” in and not to let anyone out. Local and State Police had set up physical checkpoints at all roads and highways, locking down vehicular egress. The FAA had set up a “No-Fly Zone” over the entire area.

All radio and computer internet transmissions, standard phone line data transmissions or wireless “wi-fi” transmissions were being blocked.

She had to relay whatever information she could to Nolan and his team. She had to do it quickly before the NetWatchers picked up her IP transmissions and tracked her back to her physical location. No one in the infected zone was supposed to be using online data communications. They were quarantined and all data was secure, government eyes-only. Once they found her they’d shut her down. She had to work fast

Nolan was depending on her.

And, in return, she was depending on him.

He might be able to reverse the effects of The Bleed if he were able to enact his plan unhindered by military or police interference. But if he or she were caught acting in so blatant opposition to martial law, they would be imprisoned or, in Nolan’s case, shot on sight.

There was no one else to depend on right now: they were alone, isolated, outlaws.

Nolan had figured out the secret: it wasn’t the disease; it was something in the Earth itself.

* * *

The moon shone a dull sickly green through the ever-present haze and he could feel the heat of the fitful, blustering winds through his nylon windbreaker, hot dry winds belying the fact it was the dead of winter and they were only six miles from the Pacific Ocean.

The moon was out in a smudgy filth-streaked sky and it was only three in the afternoon.

Nolan MacKenzie remembered how it began, over in Kasterbridge, just past the I-580West exit and in the shadow of the towering neon Shoreline Shopping Mall sign.

That was where the Splinter fell, that’s what the scientists called it, because that was what it was literally, a splinter from off the 50 mile-circumference of a passing comet, a comet designated “X/Passerelli-C” but more popularly called “Michaelson’s Scarab” because of its beetle-like insect shape. The four hundred foot-long Splinter dislodged itself from the anterior face of the comet, the result of a crack caused by a collision with an asteroid out beyond the orbit of Uranus, and it fell and lodged itself into the surface of the earth off Carson Bay, and fiery earthfall obliterated the unincorporated 200-person trucker’s town outside Kasterbridge, a white-collar suburban community of doctors, lawyers, dentists, and computer professionals.

It had hit with enough force to register a Richter 6.5 and it had seared the impact point with temperatures exceeding 3500 degrees Fahrenheit. Seventy dead, one hundred hurt or wounded and a dozen missing. A glassy crater two miles wide and a quarter-mile deep. It had been miraculously free of dangerous radiation. Twelve hundred tons of dirt, ash and pulverized debris catapulted into the stratosphere. Thirty-seven days of darkness as the earth’s atmosphere tried to cough up and spit out the detritus from the near-nuclear holocaust of the celestial impact.

That had been eleven months ago.

Then The Bleed had happened. Life became precarious. Only death seemed to remain as a constant.

The changes the Splinter had created in the aftermath of its fall had happened slowly, insidiously, and they were far-reaching. The changes emanated from the center of the blast-zone, the main crater, where the last fragments from Michaelson’s Scarab had liquefied and then cooled and reformed into an iron, nickel and diamond-speckled cap over the sixty yard-wide tunnel the TV press referred to as “The Artery”.

Nolan MacKenzie, an experienced rescue worker-EMT, former firefighter, and cave-exploring spelunker, had been inside The Artery. He’d gone inside with a team of five fellow spelunkers, a couple of them geologists, to explore the damage to the area from an underground perspective. It had seemed like a good idea when FEMA, the National Guard, NASA and the Office of Scientific Intelligence had come up with it. It had made sense. Electromagnetic interference remaining within the crater area had prevented electronic equipment and satellite imaging from peering into this mighty wound in the earth’s surface, so a manned excursion seemed the next best thing. It had been a terrible mistake.

There had been a CDC doctor on-site during the early days of the catastrophe, a man named Effinger, and he had been an argumentative, disruptive presence in the camp-zone. FEMA and OSI representatives, quiet careful men and women not given to grandstanding or attracting media attention, had vehemently disagreed with Effinger’s theories about the nature of the phenomenon that was happening in and around The Artery. Effinger had been part of the original World Health Organization team that had gone to Africa to investigate the Hot Zone where it was generally accepted the Ebola Plague had been re-birthed. He had also investigated smallpox and the flesh-eating virus syndrome, formally known as “Necrotising fasciitis”, in Europe. He was a hard man, he had seen a lot, and he was equal parts adventurer and biomedical avenger. He took outbreaks personally, as if they offended his sense of order and morality. The idea of the sanctity of the human body betrayed drove him in an obsessive quest to hunt down, isolate, and eradicate diseases in the public sector.

He suspected something terrible and ultimately catastrophic was happening there. He thought whatever it was that lived in the depths of The Artery was predatory.

The National Guard had escorted Effinger out from Kasterbridge, but kept him quarantined from the media press.

The Splinter had not fallen to Earth barren, it had brought with it a very strange and awful gift, a sleeping, quartz-cocooned “thing” that had lain dormant on the frozen methane surface of the comet for centuries. The translucent stony cocoon had ridden the Splinter down from the outermost fringes of the atmosphere, survived the heat and friction of entry into the skies above the planet, and had been implanted by the Splinter’s impact into the skin of this unsuspecting Earth. The “thing” that had lain in torpor had survived its cataclysmic journey to a new and strange world.

And then the sleeper had awakened…

They’d disturbed something in the darkness under the earth’s damaged crust. Something that resented being disturbed. Something repellent and very unfriendly.

The Splinter had deposited a Visitor inside The Artery. The Visitor was a virus of unknown origin and type. A mutant. A predator.

A disease.

Its arrival had changed everything.

The knowledge of what it really was and what it was doing had changed Nolan MacKenzie.

--- He remembered talking with his ex-wife, Karen, a psychologist who had long-since abandoned her practice after she’d experienced surviving an auto accident that had killed her best friend and a drunken marketing executive, and he could still hear the acid in her voice:

“Christ, St. Nolan to the fucking rescue, Nolan MacKenzie the human St. Bernard! Do you even have any idea what is going ON? This isn’t a house fire in the ‘burbs, you know…”

“Get off me, Karen. We’ve done this dance way too many times in the past. I’m a firefighter EMT. I rescue people. I go into dangerous places for a living. I’m the only chance folks in situations like that have. Hell, you act like we saw this coming…”

“I still think it’s strange that no one knew anything about that damn comet until it was too late! All that star-mapping through the Hubble the last ten years, all that media coverage, and no one noticed Michaelson’s Scarab until now… that’s a crock! They KNEW, I’m telling you, THEY KNEW, and there’s something The Scarab had, some mineral or some metal or some technology even, that they wanted so they didn’t even TRY to keep the Splinter from falling on Kasterbridge! Better a sleepy suburban little Nowheresville like Kasterbridge than risk losing the Splinter out at sea! How ELSE were they able to mobilize the National Guard and a CDC unit so quickly? They were EXPECTING this hit! And now, goddamnit, they want YOU there to help them contain and cover their mess!”

“Honey, I can’t worry about the political ramifications or conspiracies, there are PEOPLE out there who need help! That’s my job! That’s what I do! People depend on me and others like me to jump in and help save lives whenever disaster strikes…! That place was pulverized, for God’s sakes! There are dead and dying all over and now there’s this disease…!”

“Dammit, Nolan, that’s what I’m trying to get you to SEE! THE DISEASE WAS ALWAYS HERE! All the Splinter did was to wake it up, activate it, catalyze it, however you want to say it! The government KNEW there was something under the earth in Kasterbridge and they knew there was something onboard that comet or in the comet’s chemistry that would catalyze what lay sleeping in the ground…! They don’t want you to SAVE anyone --- what they want is for you to get an INFECTED PERSON out from the Hot Zone so they can examine them and the thing that is infecting them!”

“Why, Karen, WHY? What is to be gained from that?”

“I don’t know! Maybe they can create a weapon from it, maybe it can be used to control people, maybe it has some by-product that they can use or market or sell, I don’t know! But I DO know this: they are USING you and your team and they will SACRIFICE you, all of you, in a heartbeat to get what they want out of that town!”

“This is delusional conspiracist crap…! Are you taking your medication? You’re skipping doses again, aren’t you? Didn’t the doctor say you couldn’t play with the medication like that? That you had to be absolutely dedicated to following the dosage instructions? Jesus…! This is just like you…”

“What --? This isn’t the depression or the neurosis talking -- my God, I LOVE you! I worry about you! You mean the world to me and I don’t want anything to happen to you! If you go to Kasterbridge, you and your guys will be unprotected! DON’T look at me like that! NOLAN, they’re gonna get you killed! Why won’t you listen to me?!?”

He remembered…

The scream of the turbines on the magnetic-shielded Sikorski HH-60J Jayhawk helicopter that airlifted himself, Braden, Morehouse, Chen, and Bieghberg into the Hot Zone and the five Special Forces commandoes onboard with them and the fact they were escorted by two Comanche RAH-66 assault choppers. Equipped with the latest in navigation and sensor gear, with Forward-Looking Infrared or FLIR systems that enabled a pilot to see a warm human against a colder background, possibly even spotting a person in a forest, and with GPS (Global Positioning) satellite navigation systems, the modified HH-60J as a vehicle for the rescue team made sense, but the Comanche gunships had made them all very nervous. Why gunships? What was the military expecting to encounter inside the Zone? It had been weeks since the celestial come-fragment strike: they all knew the radiation-levels, they had computer models of the topography and knew the contour of the geography, there had already been two ground-based incursions partway into the Zone without incident…

What was going on?---

Was that only a week ago? Yes. It was. Seven days.

Nolan sighed. He knew now he should have listened to Karen.

Braden had been the first on his team to die. They went into the tunnel, into The Artery, dressed in breathable nylon oversuits, kneepads, and wearing plastic shell helmets onto which micro head torches had been fitted, and they had all been amazed at the strange scarlet lichen covering the stony walls, luminescent lichen that cast a red glow over the muggy hot interior of the tunnel and the team had wandered down into its depths. The tunnel itself was shaped like a kidney, an oblong oval with matching downward corners, like humans lips caught in a frown, and walking was difficult on the uneven ridged surface, the downward slant at either extreme side to the tunnel creating a slippage hazard. They could see chalk markings on the walls, measurements and directional notes, left from the previous incursions into the tunnel. There was evidence of some limited excavation into the striations on the tunnel wall. A canvas knapsack sat against the western curvature of the tunnel wall, a small oscilloscope partially dismantled next to it. Someone had attempted taking electromagnetic readings. A single battery-operated mining lamp hung from an arm that had been hammered at shoulder’s height into the right side of the Artery. Its pale yellow glare was mostly swallowed by the crimson glow pervading the tunnel. As they had traveled, Nolan had wondered why they had needed a team of spelunkers at all: the tunnel was wider than the average suburban home. They went down almost two hundred feet before they hit the first anomaly…

The Artery had branches. Two smaller, very narrow tunnels, each only about two meters across and each sitting about three feet up the wall from off the curvature of the floor, appeared to have been burned into the granite and feldspar soil, and their interiors, as far as could be seen through the dim light, were coated a glassy silver, probably tektite burns from the impact’s heat blast, probably created by a pair of very large fragments careening from off The Splinter when it hit.

Morehouse and Braden had wandered over to the entrances to the two branches while Nolan had radioed back to the base camp outside the Artery, requesting any information previously gathered about the branches.

To his surprise, the geological exploration team-commander at the base camp had replied that they had never noticed any such tributaries of the main body of the tunnel before. Nolan’s skin had burned with a cold flush as he’d heard the man’s words: “Nothing like that was seen in there before and we’d descended about eighty yards further than you before we turned back and exited the tunnel.”

He remembered thinking that this was impossible. To believe what he’d been told would have meant that something had created those tunnels many days AFTER the impact. Something large and physically powerful and possessed of a sense of purpose would have had to make a decision to suddenly leave the main tunnel and go off exploring or off searching after something --- or perhaps something was looking for a way out where it could avoid being seen. There was nothing they had known at that time to support conjecture of that sort. To entertain those thoughts was to court madness.

But in a little while, madness had become the defining tone of the day…

After a few moments’ discussion and planning, Nolan’s team had decided to explore the tributaries.

Morehouse and Braden had shrugged off the shoulder-strap dragon-bag equipment packs on their backs, along with their survival bags and space blankets, and kept only their utility belts, carabineers, hooks, and the smaller web-bag gear attached to slings on their leg-loop harnesses. They had each unlimbered the hoop of 10.5mm SuperFlex semi-static rope from off their shoulders and nailed a foundation hook into the tunnel floor, affixing the cord to the hook for an anchor. They chose their tunnels and then clambered nimbly down into them…

A tense seventeen minutes later, time spent quietly waiting, maintaining radio silence for fear of static electrical disturbances or electromagnetic feedback, they’d each launched themselves from out of the tunnels as if they were on fire and scrambling for water to extinguish it. Morehouse emerged covered with tiny, but deep slices into his exposed flesh and there was a trace of some kind of mineral in the multitude of minute wounds. He’d bled all over, bled as if it was running water leaking from all his wounds, but he was ambulatory. They were both hyper-ventilating and shaking convulsively, but Braden had been far, far worse for wear than Morehouse: his clothing had been ripped and smeared with a mixture of blood and oily black pitch in places and his eyes were wild and unfocused. When he had emerged from the tunnel he’d screamed.

Something was on his chest. Something had attached itself to him. Something that looked like a spongy, copper-colored rock had buried itself on the surface of his sternum and it was pulsing and a thin stream of blood was trickling down the front of his clothing…

He’d died pissing and puking in himself on the tunnel floor.

From inside each of the tunnels, the faint sound of children playing could clearly be heard.

Laughter.

Children’s laughter.

Nolan had erupted into anger, his rage at the sudden realization that he and his team were seen as expendable, that authorities controlling the Kasterbridge impact-zone were hiding something, bubbled over explosively. “What the HELL was THAT?! What WAS that!?!? Somebody TALK to me! Get me that CDC doctor!! You find me that guy Effinger and you fucking GET HIM here NOW!”

--- He remembered walking into the hastily-erected nylon and canvas tent outside the inner perimeter of the base camp and seeing Bester Effinger sitting under a single unshaded light bulb, in a metal folding chair, with an armed Marine in camouflage combat gear standing next to him. At a small wooden folding table, Rebekah Lain had sat looking forlorn and confused. Nolan had met her early on after arriving at Kasterbridge, and she’d helped him in organizing his team’s incursion into The Artery. She was in charge of seeing to Casey Morehouse’s medical care. She, as the successor to Effinger chosen by the military, was obviously under unimaginable pressure and it showed. She’d looked frail and resentful. Nolan had turned his attention back to Effinger, a thin man of average size and build who possessed the most piercing gray eyes he’d ever seen on a human. Those eyes looked electric, as if imbued with the force of a passing storm. Effinger had looked like he could bore holes into steel by sheer force of will. Nolan recalled being unable to see the reminder of the man’s facial features past the glare of the naked light bulb.

“So”, the man had said without preamble, “You’re the one in charge of that team of glorified boy scouts they sent into The Artery? You’re the leader, huh? Those were your men, men who trusted you, who went inside that pit… You amateur. You irresponsible idiot.”

There had been a moment of shock, of disbelief, that had lent the moment a sense of extreme unreality as Nolan had temporarily withered under Effinger’s verbal assault. But inside of a couple of heartbeats his outrage had taken over, and he had been infused with an aggressive fury he’d felt only once before in his life. Dr. Effinger had become the focus of everything that had gone wrong and everything that had threatened to overwhelm him since he’d arrived in Kasterbridge.

“What? What are you saying?”

“Look, I don’t know what the goddamn Gestapo here have told you about me, but let me get something clear with you right now: I didn’t hide, I didn’t run and I didn’t lie! I’m not crazy, I’m no silly environmentalist tree-hugger, not a political activist on any front, and I hold no less than four different doctorates: microbiology, macrovirology, immunodeficiency technology, and parasitology. I know what I’m doing and what I am talking about! And I cannot be bought with promises of research grants, money or political gain. You got that? If you ask me questions, I’m going to tell you exactly what you do NOT want to hear…!” Effinger snarled.

The Marine next to the doctor had looked down disapprovingly, his eyes blazing from under his helmet, and he barked at the man, “Take it down a notch, doctor. We’re all on the same team here. We’re all trying to help. Let the man ask his questions. And we’d appreciate it if you gave him his answers politely.”

Nolan recalled shaking his head at the man’s outburst and wiping the open palm of his hand across his open mouth as he marveled at Effinger’s complete absent of sympathy for any situation other than his own. He had thought, ‘what a useless egocentric, egomaniacal elitist’…

“Christ, but you are a piece of work! You think this is all about YOU?!? You think I CARE about why they tossed you out on your over-educated Ivy League ass? You know, you can STUFF your opinion of my leadership abilities, you arrogant lunatic!” Nolan had responded. “What I want to know is what YOU know! What did you find inside that pit, hiding inside the tunnel? What did you find? You know, don’t you? You KNOW what’s happening here and you tried to tell everyone and either it was so crazy no one would believe it or so absolutely TRUE that no one had the courage to deal with it except for you, you pompous ass!”

“Please, Mr. Nolan!”, Rebekah had interjected. “This isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. The Kasterbridge Recovery Zone Base Commander is allowing you to meet with Dr. Effinger out of respect for the events of your tragic incursion into the depths of The Artery, out of respect for you and your men. Being abusive to the doctor is not part of the deal…!”

“The Base Commander and this guy are hiding something from me and my team, Ms. Lain, and that hidden information has already cost my men dearly. They trusted that we knew all the dangers that you and the rest of this encampment are aware of, but it’s obvious some very important information wasn’t shared with us! Now I want to know what is REALLY going on here!”

Effinger had choked back an embittered cackle. “They didn’t tell you, did they? My God, you volunteered to go into that hole leading to Hell and you didn’t even stop a moment to ask them WHY they wanted a group of civilian outsiders to descend into The Artery?”, the CDC doctor had commented in astonishment. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t get it…!”

“What are you talking about?” Nolan had hissed, barely keeping his own temper in check.

“Blood. It’s all about the blood, OUR blood! The Artery is the ancient incubator for a heretofore undiscovered parasitic organism, millennia-old, waiting in stasis, hibernating, until The Splinter comes along and provides both the microbiological catalyst and the post-disaster environmental stew for the parasite to grow and thrive. The impact-zone has become a perfect bio-environ for this thing, its incubator, and it is also the perfect way for it to trap the prey it needs to feed its growth and drive its maturity. Part chemical waste matter, part-plague, part mutagen, part-doomsday. Not an invader from an outer space environment, but a natural organism born of this earth. But, simply put, the secret is in how it is attracted to and activated by human blood”, Effinger had explained. “And you can’t stop it because you are its food! The more you expose yourself to it, the more it is strengthened.”

The Marine sentry had shifted uncomfortably, his military posture abruptly wracked by an involuntary shiver. He had looked from Effinger to Nolan and back again, and Nolan had seen that the soldier was very young, maybe twenty-five years of age at the oldest, and that he was fighting not to lose himself in the tale that was unwinding.

Rebekah Lain had sighed loudly and they could all tell she was working to keep her own temper under control. Her eyes were haunted and she had looked at Nolan beseechingly as she’d explained, “We think it is a natural biovirologic mutation, an evolutionary hybrid that has some limited parasitic qualities. It needs the breeding ground provided by a living organic host for it to breed, as if each episode of infection were a different colony of microscopic virus-organisms, and then it transmits via both air delivery and bio-liquid transfer the new DNA data it has absorbed back to the original source colony. That way the source keeps growing stronger, more complex, more resistant to attack and containment…”

“But that sound, like voices…” Nolan had muttered.

“So you HEARD it! You heard… Good! Everyone thought I was insane when I first mentioned it. You didn’t imagine that. Those WERE voices. That WAS laughter. There’s a theory that it’s the sound of massive molecular crystallization, the release of gases through petrified or ruptured cell-membranes, perhaps it’s the sound of molecular bonds being broken, like a release of biostatic electricity, but there’s nothing to support that. It sounds too human. It feels and sounds alive, sentient. It’s intelligent in a rudimentary, predatory way. Like the way a hyena is smart. And it has done this to our world before…!”

“W-w-what?” Nolan had stammered.

“It’s been active, out on the hunt, so to speak, before. Back in the 9th century, during the first of the Crusades in Palestine, a century before smallpox and Bubonic Plague swept Europe. It nearly wiped out the Middle East”, Effinger had said softly, as if by saying it aloud, by speaking of the horrendous body count the disease had once wreaked across the world, he’d risked invoking the return of the vector’s wrath, “Fifty thousand dead. Another hundred thousand crippled from the infection. They built huge walls topped with spearheads and iron hooks, and dug moats they filled with burning oil around entire towns and villages to keep it from spreading. To this day, because record keeping was so damnably poor back then, we do NOT know WHY it suddenly stopped spreading. The general accepted wisdom then was that the vile thirst of the angry Earth herself was at last sated and THAT is why the disease went into hibernation. I suppose it’s as good an explanation as any…”

“Fifty thousand…?”

Effinger had slowly nodded. He had shocked Nolan when he had then said: “The laughter is the key… Something more than we can understand is happening. And I think it is something that frightens us down to our most primal level. It’s not a fear of disease. It’s a fear of judgment. In facing this, we feel a fear that this infection or disease vector is actively hunting us. I think that may be true. Worse, I think it really has a taste for us.”

“So how do we stop it? How do we control it? When does it burn itself and stop fatally infecting everything it touches?” Nolan had asked desperately.

“We don’t. It’s out of our hands. There isn’t time for all of the scientific sample taking and testing, the double-blind experimentation, the hematological studies and DNA research, and the drug development we’d need. Our medical emergency system isn’t set up to operate in quick & dirty bursts to put a band-aid on doomsday. And that’s the bell that is being rung here: a doomsday bell”, Effinger had moaned.

Nolan had looked to Rebekah Lain at that point and she had favored him with a sad, regretful stare.

“There are few remaining doubts within the scientific and medical investigative case-worker contingent here, that Dr. Effinger’s original hypothesis, although highly controversial and lacking definitive scientific proof, is wrong. It is, unfortunately, the most logical deduction for the overall situation here. We are facing what could well be an Extinction-Level Event.”

“Enough with the company line, lady, tell me what YOU feel about all this”, Nolan had growled.

“The comet impact woke up a disease vector that we have no defense for, it’s like nothing ever seen by civilized man, we don’t know how it works, and we are running out of time to contain it. It’s killing us at a rapidly increasing geometric rate. It’ll be outside the boundaries of Kasterbridge in less than two day’s time…” she had said, her voice trembling.

The Marine sentry had gulped loudly, startling both Effinger and Nolan, and the young soldier had looked to each of them with an expression that demanded that they, as the only resident experts on which the impact-zone’s base camp could rely, pull a rabbit out of a hat and make everything better. The soldier had then looked away from Nolan’s tired and anguished gaze as Effinger had bitterly said, “You think I don’t want to help? You think I’m sitting over here happy about the fact we have no defenses and even fewer preventative options? Get real! I TOLD them what was happening! I TOLD them what to expect! And they tossed me out on my ass…!”

“That was THEN! That won’t help us NOW! I can’t accept we have no options! There HAS to be something we can DO!”, he remembered shouting in frustration.

“Well, a solution of sorts HAS been discussed”, Rebekah had interjected solemnly. Nolan recalled the reluctance he heard in her tone. “But it has been rejected on multiple levels as too radical. We all generally see it as, and this is the military’s terminology for it, ‘ an irreversible solution of terminal properties’.”

“Good Christ, man, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”, Effinger had snarled, his anger growing as he allowed himself to again become embroiled in a situation he had only days ago divorced himself from, “Kasterbridge is dead! Everyone in it is DEAD! DON’T waste more time trying to save anyone. Just CLOSE The Artery, do you hear me, seal it SHUT and then atomize every trace of this town and its population! Burn it ALL to the ground and then collect the ashes and disintegrate even those and walk away, sealing this area off FOREVER! That’s IT! That’s ALL you can do! Or else, barring that, if you cannot bring yourself to do that, you can pray…!” ---

That was then, seven days past. That was seven passes of the sun across the ash-littered skies over Kasterbridge as more people became infected and died, as the OSI, FEMA and the Department of Defense argued about what to do with Kasterbridge. Seven days where, within the disaster area, civilization broke down and gave way to tribalism, chaos and predation.

He had reviewed the mathematic progression charts Rebekah had dumped onto CD.  Her work was elegant in its simplicity: the charts were geometric probability animations showing the growth rate of the disease if it breached the containment zone.  He’d watched the animation, projected onto a map of the state and then superimposed onto a map of the continent, and he’d felt his insides freeze as the horror grew inside him.  The Artery would vomit a rapacious, mutagenic plague of lethal intent across the continental United States in a matter of days.  No matter how well organized they were, no matter what technology they would throw at it, the plague would dominate every aspect of human biology and interaction.   Order would devolve into Chaos.  Society would collapse into savagery.  Survival would become dependent on the willingness to abandon morality.

That couldn’t be allowed to happen.  It had to be stopped here, now, in this place, by any means available, without regard.

Now he was going back into The Artery. Alone.

Well, not entirely alone… he had in his possession a back pack containing thirty-six pounds of high explosive in the form of four metal canisters of something labeled “Composition C”, which, he had discovered with only a little research, was actually a plastic demolition explosive consisting of RDX, commonly known as “cyclonite”, other less rare explosive element like TNT, and plasticizers so it could be molded by hand for use in demolition work and packed by hand into shaped charge devices. A pound and a half of the explosive he carried could obliterate an average concrete, steel reinforced city parking garage. The amount he carried would be enough to devastate an area the size of three football fields, charring the ground to slagged glass. Undercover of night, the evening after he’d spoken with Effinger and met with Rebekah Lain, he’d stolen the canisters from off an uncovered weapons shipment palette.

Doomsday had arrived.

* * *

Chaos reigned.

The children, Micah and Tracey, watched the town from their vantage point, cloaked in the darkening deepness of the twilight and they shivered not from the falling night-time temperature, but from the knowledge that what they now saw was the Great Truth supplanting the normality of the world they once knew.

Chaos. It was no longer a mere word, no longer a passionless term, and no more was it an abstraction. It was solid and real, a thing of taste, touch and sound, a soul-felt description of a world run amok. It was the finality of Judgment fallen between the cracks, lost to mind and time. Chaos had come to define the soul of all things human in a town begging to die.

It was a fever in the blood.

A large group of people were in the process of overturning a bakery truck, the vehicle already in flames and belching black smoke into the already hazy, ash and soot-polluted air, when the ground abruptly trembled and then shook convulsively, lurching as cracks spitting white light and furious heat ripped along the streets and knocked flat buildings. Half a second later a concussive roar, almost as loud as that of the arrival of the cosmic Splinter fallen from off the passing comet over a month ago, raucously split the silence enveloping the hills around Kasterbridge.