The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus Page 15

  He had his lieutenants, of course, with whom he shared his crusade, and they too had sloughed off their humanity in line with their leader. On the surface, Sidney evidently entrusted them with overseeing various branches of his genocidal scheme, but Cafferly suspected that De’Ath was innately suspicious of everyone and loyalty extended only so far. Once the last bones of the last living creature were finally laid to rest, the psi wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Chief didn’t turn next on his own brothers and rend them from existence too so the global graveyard was his alone to enjoy. His subordinates may well be aware of this even as they continued to do his bidding—they were several degrees of inscrutable—but it clearly didn’t diminish their fanaticism. They were as committed as he was.

  As she approached Sidney’s chamber, one of his seconds-in-command emerged from the shadows to her right, the pale white bone of his sheep’s-skull-head breaching the gloom like a shark’s fin. His hollow eye sockets regarded her, twin pits of soul-ravaging emptiness that could swallow sanity whole. No matter how much Cafferly had changed, she still instinctively trembled in the presence of a Dark Judge. His name was Mortis, and he was the futurist of Sidney’s inner circle, the one most interested in the development of change, and how it could be brought about. He had initiated the weaponisation of cultures, of insects and natural elements, and sought to apply those to the extermination of mankind. He was, she supposed, the tek-spod of De’Ath’s group. He’d had some success with mutations to the food chain, and was unquestionably behind the reprogramming of the cloud-farming drones that had led to the widespread flooding that had destroyed many of the communities outside the capital. The body count of that had been in the tens of thousands, which had been much celebrated. Mortis was often found tinkering in his labs, conjuring up more atrocities.

  “Death hass sssent for you,” he said, his jaw unmoving, his voice resounding within his skull. It was a statement, not a question.

  She nodded, trying not to wince at the white-noise blast of psi-blindness that assailed her. Even if she’d been foolish enough to attempt to get inside the head of a being such as this, she would’ve hit a null-wall, a barrier of absolute emptiness that she’d never be able to penetrate. Mortis exuded anti-thought in waves, blanking out her senses while she was in his field. She’d never encountered such power in anything living before—but, of course, De’Ath and his cadre were no longer abiding by such rules. The more they divested themselves of their recognisable humanoid features, the more they became abstractions, driven by a single instinct: to negate all life. Morality, empathy, all base functions were abandoned, in favour of this single-minded pursuit of the end of all things. They wanted to render the world to nothing, and as such the psychic static that needled her as she stood before the Judge was a glimpse of what they wanted—a dead zone, bereft of light and breath.

  She refused to cower, though; as hollow as Mortis was, she detected occasionally a certain preening aspect that she found contemptible. He enjoyed the reactions he instilled—there was a vanity there. Cafferly wouldn’t indulge him, and hid the discomfort behind an unyielding mask, conscious that she wasn’t going to cede dominance to the Dark Judge, even if technically he was her superior. She would be respectful but wouldn’t give him an inch. She was not to be toyed with.

  “I’ll join you,” he said, falling in alongside her and trailing a clawed finger against the wall, rot blackening wherever he touched. He had that ability, which she’d seen exhibited numerous times on various prisoners and resistance fighters that had passed through these walls: to lay his rancid hands upon an organism and bring instant decay. A person could be reduced to mere dust in a matter of seconds. It was a spectacle that was impossible to tear your eyes away from once you were confronted with it, so complete was the destruction of the victim. Another glorious gift of the Sisters, something they’d bestowed upon each of the anointed four—Sidney, Mortis and the other two henchmen he kept close at hand, Fear and Fire.

  He jerkily stalked next to her with the hunched-over gait of a predatory animal learning to walk on its hind legs, and she reminded herself that the body he was occupying was no doubt long dead, its muscles having atrophied. He looked like a bag of bones that would be blown apart by a stiff wind, and while that was possibly true the spirit that animated it was very resilient indeed— indestructible, even. It paid not to underestimate him, as flimsy as he appeared.

  De’Ath’s door loomed before them, as tall and wide as a church’s porch, a dense black that sucked in what little light there was, carved in ornate gothic pictograms. It unlatched itself before Cafferly could reach out to knock, and swung silently wide, the Psi-Judge crossing the threshold without waiting for word from the Chief, or offering Mortis the chance to go first. She had to put up a front, she told herself, that she was not to be intimidated or manipulated. The Grand Hall was dog-eat-dog now, an amoral environment in which you had to prove—or at least give a convincing impression—that you were on the right side. Every moment, Sidney and his skeletal comrade here—not to mention them, somewhere behind the scenes—would be testing her, seeking out weakness. She needed to be on her guard at all times, bullish and forthright.

  Sidney’s inner sanctum was gloomy to the point of impenetrable, thick folds of darkness layering each corner. The flames burning from the twin Baroque candelabra placed either side of his desk did little to dispel the murk, but Cafferly suspected they were simply for show anyway. The Chief embraced the shadows, sought succour from them, and in actuality had no real need of light; the eyes behind the helm were undoubtedly rotting away. Still, that gaze could paralyse you if you were caught within it, some power fixing you in its sights even if the organs themselves were no longer there.

  De’Ath also seemed to like the dark for what it hid, and the Psi-Judge could sense other beings inside the room besides her and Mortis. They weren’t visible—or at least they weren’t allowing her to see them, which was more likely—but she could feel the pressure drops and the movement of the air as they slid past less than a hair’s breadth from her face. If she surreptitiously pushed out a psychic feeler to gauge anything about them, she picked up enough to reel it back in PDQ. Unlike Mortis or Sidney, they’d never been human, and were almost certainly not of this world to begin with. They’d been brought here by the same witchery that had enabled De’Ath to transform into his undead state, and spearhead his quest for global annihilation—the same black arts that had always guided him up to now.

  Its practitioners were the sisters—Phobia and Nausea—there at his shoulder, studying her as she entered as they might a strange, repulsive life form that they had never witnessed before, evoking pity and clinical curiosity as much as outright contempt. They loomed over Sidney, an ancient evil despite their teenage facades; she knew they were eons-old entities at their core. The Chief seemed mildly irritated by their proximity, and shrugged his shoulders to have them remove their hands from his uniform livery, expelling a tetchy hiss like an animal warning another to keep out of its personal space. Cafferly guessed that he was starting to tire of having these dank-haired witches around. He’d outgrown them—the worldwide genocide was his conception, his masterpiece, and he was damned if he was sharing it with anyone. The Sisters no doubt felt different.

  De’Ath finally seemed aware of her presence in his room and ran his gaze up and down her for a moment before beckoning her forward with a single bony finger. She took a couple of steps but stopped short of the desk, which she couldn’t help noticing was virtually bare: no paperwork, no personalised effects, no stationery. She glanced at the filing cabinets behind him that would’ve once housed arrest reports and personnel files when this had been the old chief’s office, and realised for the first time since entering that their contents had been unceremoniously emptied, drawers still hanging open. Blackened scorch marks up the walls suggested much of it had been put to the torch. Her attention must’ve lingered a little too long for Sidney followed her line of sight and realised what was
interesting her.

  “They belonged to the old world,” he declared, his voice as cold and dry and lifeless as sand rasping off a concrete surface; it chafed almost to listen to it. “Sssuch rulesss and regulationsss no longer concern usss now. There isss only oblivion and what we can do to hasssten it.”

  She nodded. “Is no one recording your work here, sir?”

  “Who would be left to read it?” one of the Sisters snapped from De’Ath’s shoulder, silenced from speaking further by a glare from the Chief. She looked from Cafferly to Sidney and retreated a little further into the gloom, a sour expression on her face before darkness swallowed it up.

  “No, there will be no recordsss,” he answered, turning back to the Psi-Judge. “The bonefieldsss will be my lasssting tessstament. Every criminal will have been sssentenced to death, and asss ssuch there isss no need for a record of their missdeedsss. Every living thing isss guilty, and all will receive the sssame punissshment, princcce or pauper. Sssuch purity of judgement makesss filesss and reportsss redundant, don’t you agree?” He cocked his head to one side, inviting a response.

  She cleared her throat. “Your planetary masterpiece will be your legacy, there’s no doubt.”

  “You sssound… unconvinccced,” he murmured after a moment’s deliberation.

  “Oh no,” she replied quickly. “Quite the opposite. I mean, the work you’re doing here, the mission, it’s truly unprecedented. The scale of it, the commitment… it’s the extermination of the guilty like no one has ever attempted before.”

  “No one dared,” De’Ath interjected testily.

  Cafferly nodded again, aware of how eager to please she was appearing but sensing that this was the best way to stroke the Chief’s ego; it wasn’t subtle and she found her toadying distasteful, but there was palpable tension in the room that was making her uneasy and it seemed he required mollifying. Sidney, for all his absolute authority, appeared insecure and seeking affirmation regarding his leadership. It wasn’t quite what she was expecting of him: cold, yes, and ruthless, but right now the power at the top was coming across as self-obsessed, eager for praise and more than a little vain. She wondered just what kind of snakes’ pit the office of the Chief had become for him to be so touchy of criticism. The visible antagonism Sidney was displaying towards the Sisters indicated that he was growing increasingly angry at being considered nothing more than their puppet creature, and wanted acknowledgement of what he’d achieved through his own actions. Of course, the Sisters had unquestionably enabled him in the first place, though she doubted anyone in his inner circle had the nerve to bring that up.

  “Exactly,” she answered. “It’s a vision of a world absent of illegality that required utter dedication. Anything that comes after will be a footnote to your achievement.”

  “Nothing will come after. That’sss the point.”

  “Of course.”

  De’Ath rose and stepped out from behind the desk in an unsettlingly fluid motion as if a section of shadow had detached itself from the room. He was before her in a heartbeat, or what she could remember the space of a heartbeat being like. Even up close, details of his face beyond the visor were not distinct, just the wet glisten of the rotten parts: the eye sockets, mouth and nose. He wasn’t an especially imposing figure—not taller than she was, and rake-thin; she’d seen footage of Sidney pre-mortem, and he was a snotty slip of a kid, not in the least bit physically imposing, but chilling to the marrow when you glimpsed something of what was going on inside his head—but nevertheless he exuded a malignancy that was startlingly potent. Here was the enemy of all that ever was. He was the cancer, the defiler, wrapped up in one slight humanoid form, and to have him studying you was to experience having your senses corrupted one atom at a time.

  “You are fully onboard, then, yesss?” he enquired. “You have no qualmsss about what needsss to be done? No tracccesss of”—he had to spit the word out, like gristle lodged in his throat—“consssciencce?”

  Cafferly flashed back for a second to her remote-viewing of the survivors’ execution, or rather the moments leading up to it before she cut the connection. She dismissed it, all the while maintaining her poker face. “None whatsoever, sir.”

  “Good. Becaussse we have further need of your particular talentsss, Pssi-Judge Cafferly.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mortisss?” De’Ath hissed over her shoulder. “The floor isss yoursss.”

  The Dark Judge emerged from whatever corner he’d been silently occupying and joined them in the centre of the room. Cafferly turned to regard him, though she was never sure quite whereabouts she should make eye-contact with him, or indeed through what unholy magic he could see her that he could address her directly.

  “We wisssh to ssstep up the purgesss,” he said. “Psssi-Divisssion’sss record for finding criminalsss that have ssso far evaded jussstice hasss been… haphazard at bessst.”

  “It’s not an exact science, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she replied. “Given the conditions and the scale of the task, I’d say our eighty per cent termination target is more than acceptable.”

  “All musssst die!” Mortis roared, his skeletal frame visibly shaking. Cafferly, despite herself, took an involuntary step back. “All mussst be judged! Eighty per cent, ninety per cent, isss not enough—only through total annihilation can we achieve our goal!”

  “I assure you we’re on the same page. But we’re having to peel through an extraordinary amount of psychic residue to find the living. That’s a lot of blind alleys to chase down—”

  “Inefficient isss the word,” Mortis interrupted. “The exterminations mussst be conducted in a more orderly fassshion, otherwissse too many will sssslip through the cracksss.”

  Cafferly bit down on her indignation. They were working twenty-four-seven as it was, solely committed to the cause; several of her fellow psi-operatives had burned themselves out, the empaths suffering the most from the torrential psychic backwash. Yet it wasn’t enough, and clearly would never be enough, for Sidney and his lieutenants. As long as one living creature remained at large, then they were failing in their duty. “What do you propose?”

  The Dark Judge turned towards the doorway. “Jackssson?”

  His minion schlepped into the room, presumably having been loitering outside waiting for its master’s voice. She instinctively wrinkled her nose in disgust at once again being in the presence of this thing that Mortis kept around at his beck and call; his drones were one of his many special projects that he liked to experiment on, and this inside-out monstrosity was no different. Whoever it’d been in life, it was an entirely different entity now, with its bowels and stomach contents bundled on its side like a tumorous hump, its withered leg dragging behind it, and head dangling to one side upon an over-stretched neck. A portion of the scalp flapped free, where it looked like most of the brain had been removed.

  It handed Mortis a skull-cap device. “Thisss,” the Dark Judge said, turning it over in his hands, “may prove decisssive.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ssssomething I’ve been developing. A variation of the psssi-amplifier.” He fixed his hollow-eyed gaze on Cafferly. “And you will be the firssst to try it out.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  22 March

  MY GOD… MY god… I thought we were safe.

  I…

  Can’t write, hand’s shaking. Need to stop now.

  IT’S JUST AFTER nine, and things have quietened down a little. Inside of my head’s still a screaming, fractured collage of insanity, but at least it’s all in one place for the time being. Better that it’s contained here, where it’s just me that has to deal with it, than loose in the world. What this means, though, where we go from here… I don’t know.

  I’ve made a bit of a mess of the journal, so I hope you can read this. Ink’s smudged in places, and my handwriting’s gone to pot (felt like my fingers couldn’t remember how to hold a pen, weirdly—went all numb and useless). The book’s taken a bit of
a battering too—it must’ve got bent in two when I grabbed it, and the pages have come a bit loose where the spine’s cracked. Strange things that you catch yourself thinking: I saw the state of it and thought I’d get some sticky tape and patch it up. Then, of course, I correct myself: where the hell am I going to get tape from? It’s just not something that’s easily to hand any more, or you can pop to the corner store to buy some. Funny, after everything, after all these weeks, you still don’t realise what’s gone, what you did as routine without considering it a luxury.

  Sticky tape a luxury. Christ, clean water is a fucking luxury these days.

  As it was, I cut a strip of bandage adhesive from the med-kit when Kez wasn’t looking and did a first-aid job on it (wasn’t very much and not going to mean the difference between life and death for anyone that might need it). With its field-dressed cover and crumpled exterior, it looks like a proper refugee journal now that’s fled a warzone, which is kinda fitting—makes me feel closer to it. Me and these words, they’re surviving somehow, making it through by hook or by crook.

  Sorry, I’m babbling. I think I’m trying to avoid thinking about—and therefore putting down on paper—what’s happened. It’s easier to skirt round the edges and ruminate on all manner of inconsequential tripe than get to grips with the heart of the matter. That would mean reliving it, deciphering the aforementioned collage. It’s raw and terrible and I don’t know where to start, what’s the best way to transfer it from mind to script.

  I’m digging the nails of my left hand into my palm as I scrawl this, my knuckles flaring white. The pain makes me angry, as does the despair. I want to rip my eyes from their sockets. I want to tear the pen through the page—

  The beginning. Start at the beginning.