Apocalypse to Go Read online

  INSTEAD OF THE USUAL VIEW OF OUR SUNSET DISTRICT NEIGHBORHOOD,

  I looked out over an unfamiliar city, a toothed skyline of brick-and-stone buildings in a flat landscape. A brown river wound through, bound with iron bridges. A train rumbled and whistled. Factories poured black pollution out of tall smokestacks.

  As I watched, I saw an enormous spray of energy, colored like the rainbow, fall into view from high above. It blotted out the sun and filled the sky. Bright spots of colored light swarmed like wasps, hot and vibrant, tearing the sky apart. I could see the black of outer space and stars shining, cold pinpricks of light as the sky withdrew like the water in a tidal wave. It rolled back and back, leaving the city naked, exposed to the blazing tide of death that swooped down to light every building with the flare and flash of all the colors in the spectrum.

  With a roar the blue sky rushed back in and washed the rainbow colors away. The buildings on the skyline glowed with an evil violet glare. As the sunlight faded into night, I smelled rotting meat, the overwhelming, gagging stench of corpses.

  The living room reappeared around me. The white plaster ceiling looked oddly close at hand. It occurred to me that Ari might be carrying me in his arms. I checked, and yes, he was.

  “Nola? Are you back?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Are you ill? You’ve gone pale.”

  “Just terrified. That’s all.”

  He carried me to the couch, set me down, then sat next to me and slipped his arm around my shoulders. “You went into another of those sodding walking trances.”

  “Yeah, sure did. It was quite a vision.”

  “Of what?”

  “The death of Interchange.…”

  Available from DAW Books:

  The Nola O’Grady Novels:

  LICENSE TO ENSORCELL

  WATER TO BURN

  APOCALYPSE TO GO

  Katharine Kerr’s

  Novels of Deverry,

  The Silver Wyrm Cycle:

  THE GOLD FALCON (#1)

  THE SPIRIT STONE (#2)

  THE SHADOW ISLE (#3)

  THE SILVER MAGE (#4)

  KATHARINE KERR

  APOCALYPSE TO GO

  A NOLA O’GRADY NOVEL

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

  SHEILA E. GILBERT

  PUBLISHERS

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Katharine Kerr.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Aleta Rafton.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1576.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

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  EISBN: 9781101569207

  First Printing, February 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  In Memoriam

  Martin H. Greenberg

  a lover of the short story,

  but his should have been longer.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Howard Kerr, Madeleine Robins, Amanda Weinstein, Karen Williams, and Cliff Winnig for putting up with reading this book in ever-changing pieces. Thanks to Max Kahn for his thoughts on the effects of power stations. A special thanks to Kate Elliott and Jo Kasper, who suffered through revising the opening with me.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  CHAPTER 1

  MY FIRST SATURDAY OFF WORK in a long time—and it had to go and rain. I sat in the front room of my flat and stared out the bay window at the gray sky, which was busy drizzling water over my view of drab houses and an apartment building. I’d been hoping for a day in the park or on the beach with the guy I live with.

  Ari Nathan, my partner in a number of senses of that word, was slumped down on our old blue couch with his feet up on the coffee table and his laptop balanced on his midsection. He’s macho gorgeous, to my way of thinking, anyway, with his wide dark eyes and softly curly dark hair. He works out a lot, too. It shows, particularly when he’s wearing tight jeans and a thin white T-shirt as he was that afternoon.

  I was contemplating seducing him for recreational purposes when someone or something downloaded itself into the room. I turned cold, and my hair, which is not quite shoulder-length, lifted away from my face in what felt like a blast of wind. Not far from where Ari sat, a blue shape appeared on the landing of the stairs that led down to our front door. The way it shimmered and throbbed in a pool of blue-violet light obscured the details, but it looked vaguely human overall. Psychically, I felt it as female. Something metallic gleamed around her neck. A hint as to her identity objectified itself as the faint smell of cat urine.

  Ari went on typing; he’d noticed nothing, which meant the phenomenon was purely psychic. I got up and walked toward the shape. As I got closer, I could see black tattoos all over her neck and bare shoulders—roses, maybe, though I couldn’t be sure. When I raised one hand to draw a Chaos ward and try to banish her, she shook her head as if to say, “No, don’t!” and held up a glittering blue-violet sphere about the size of a billiard ball.

  “Stolen property,” the shape said to me. “Where are they?”

  “Where are what?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “What are you? A fence?” She hissed like a giant cat and disappeared.

  Ari had heard me speak. He looked up with eyes that drooped in martyred resignation. “What is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of apparition.”

  “Has it gone?”

  “Yeah, though she wasn’t really here. Just a projection, I think, probably from a deviant world level.”

  “That’s all? Oh, well, then, I shan’t worry about it.” He speaks like a Brit with a classy accent, because he learned his English in London.

  “No need for sarcasm. Huh. I wonder if she’s a were-leopard? I think such critters exist, anyway.”

  Ari sighed and hit a few keys. When I glanced at the laptop screen, I saw a solid mass of Hebrew letters.

  “Working at your second job?” I said.

  “None of your sodding business.”

  Which meant that yes, he was. He’s an Interpol officer first and fo
remost, but he’s also an Israeli national and, let’s face it, a spy. “Secret agent” sounds nicer, but whatever you call it, he funnels information to his government that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

  Oh, well, no one’s perfect.

  My name is Nola O’Grady. I can’t tell you the name of the government agency I work for. Our funding depends on our staying top secret, not because we have bureaucratic enemies but because most Americans would consider us a waste of tax monies. Your average citizen has no idea that the forces of unbridled Chaos threaten civilizations daily throughout the multiverse. My agency’s mission: stop them from destroying ours.

  I’m the head of our San Francisco bureau, or as we’re known in the Agency, the Apocalypse Squad. It sounds impressive, but as squads go, ours is pretty small game. I have two full-time staff members and a part-timer who happens to be my younger brother, Michael. Ari, my bodyguard, is technically not on Agency staff, merely on loan from Interpol “indefinitely.”

  “Uh, Nola,” Ari said, “about this were-leopard.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What?”

  “Is she going to come back?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I was afraid of that.” Ari paused to glower. “Could you make a guess?”

  Before I could answer, his laptop beeped at him. Ari stared at the screen as if it had committed a crime. I waited. A minute passed. “Say what?” I said.

  “Sorry.” He looked up. “Another e-mail from AOS Fourteen. Do you remember who he is?”

  “The guy who must be another Interpol agent, but you couldn’t find him in any of your outfit’s online directories.”

  “Right. He says that Javert told him you’ve apprehended the suspect we’re calling Belial. He wants to know if you’ll remand to his custody.”

  “Tell him you can’t share that intel until he identifies himself. And ask for his need to know.”

  Ari sat up straight and put the laptop onto the coffee table. He spent a few minutes fiddling with the machine, because he had to detach the Hebrew keyboard in order to attach the English version.

  “Did you ever hear back from your in-house security people?” I said. “If Mr. Fourteen can use the e-mail system, they must have some kind of password or something for him.”

  “Not necessarily. Conceivably he could have authorization to edit the system log.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “How am I ever going to understand this stuff if you won’t tell me?”

  “You don’t need to understand it. You have me for that.”

  While we waited to see if AOS14 answered, I ran the psychic procedure that the Agency calls Scanning the Aura Field or SAF. This particular function has a number of uses, depending on how the operator focuses her mind. In this instance, with an SAF: Links I let my mind roam around what little data I knew about AOS14, who had appeared, via e-mail only, at the very end of my last case, the arrest of the aforementioned Belial.

  For good measure, I included the apparition, which had appeared only moments before Spare’s e-mail. Synchronicity means a lot in my line of work. Almost immediately I saw a memory image of another thing that had recently appeared: a graffito that someone kept painting on the front of the building where we lived. About eighteen inches high, it was a solid black circle from which emerged seven black arrows, three on the bottom half, four on the top. Although it looked like a highway symbol for a multiple exit interchange, it signified the opposite of orderly procedure.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “AOS14 must be connected to the Chaos magic symbol, the unbalanced version, I mean. The graffito you keep washing off our front wall.”

  “Interpol agents are vetted,” Ari said. “We don’t hire magicians.”

  “I said it was weird.”

  “All of your psychic impressions are weird.”

  “I can’t argue with that. The real question is, are they accurate?” I let my mind roam a little further. “Wait, I get it now. It’s just because of his initials, AOS. The guy who invented the Chaos magic system was a Brit named Austin Osman Spare.”

  Ari started to reply, but the laptop beeped at him. He glanced at the screen. “An answer,” he said and hit a few keys. He read, he scowled, he swore in Hebrew.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “He just told me that his name’s Austin Osman Spare.”

  I gaped. “Look, it could be some kind of pseudonym.”

  “If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll tell you what he says.” Ari cleared his throat. “I assure you that’s my real name,” he read from his screen. “I come by it legitimately, though of course I’m not the world-famous British artist.”

  “World-famous?” I said. “I’d never call him that.”

  “Do you mind not interrupting?” Ari glared at me, then continued reading. “The fourteen is an integral part of my name. I’ll explain at some point should you wish to meet.”

  “His family must be crazy for genealogy,” I said, “if he goes around telling everyone he’s the fourteenth in his line.”

  “Will you shut up?” Ari snarled, then continued reading. “I would like to discuss a matter that should interest you greatly. I have some information of interest to O’Grady as well and a request to put before her.” He looked up. “He goes on to say that he wants to know if he can contact you directly via e-mail.”

  “What about?”

  “He doesn’t say.”

  “Um, would you mind asking him?” I considered. “And ask him what his position is in Interpol. He may be the guy at the NCB level who wanted you here in San Francisco.”

  Over the next half hour or so, encrypted messages rode the airwaves between Ari and the mysterious Mr. Spare14. In the end they made an exchange. Spare14 learned one of my e-mail addresses, secure but separate from the Agency system. In return he handed us a piece of information that twisted my mind like a kaleidoscope.

  “I do operate at the NCB level,” he admitted, “but in a custodial position for a world with severe problems. I believe that O’Grady’s brother has visited it.”

  After Ari read this bit aloud, I found the implications so difficult to process that I couldn’t speak. Ari watched me for some seconds.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “I can tell that you’ve got the wind up about something.”

  “I just put a few weird things together, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about them.”

  “That seems to be normal for our situation. He must be referring to the deviant world you call the Interchange.”

  “Yeah, for sure. But how does he know about it?”

  Ari answered me. I saw his lips moving, but I heard nothing. I felt myself get up and go to the window. Instead of the usual view of our Sunset district neighborhood, I looked out over an unfamiliar city, a toothed skyline of brick-and-stone buildings in a flat landscape. A brown river wound through, bound with iron bridges. A train rumbled and whistled. Factories poured black pollution out of tall smokestacks.

  As I watched, I saw an enormous spray of energy, colored like the rainbow, fall into view from high above. It blotted out the sun and filled the sky. Bright spots of colored light swarmed like wasps, hot and vibrant, tearing the sky apart. I could see the black of outer space and stars shining, cold pinpricks of light as the sky withdrew like the water in a tidal wave. It rolled back and back, leaving the city naked, exposed to the blazing tide of death that swooped down to light every building with the flare and flash of all the colors in the spectrum.

  With a roar the blue sky rushed back in and washed the rainbow colors away. The buildings on the skyline glowed with an evil violet glare. As the sunlight faded into night, I smelled rotting meat, the overwhelming, gagging stench of corpses.

  The living room reappeared around me. The white plaster ceiling looked oddly close at hand. I could smell witch hazel, Ari’s usual aftershave. It occurred to me that he might be carrying me in his arms. I checked, and yes, he was.

/>   “Nola? Are you back?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Are you ill? You’ve gone pale.”

  “Just terrified. That’s all.”

  He carried me to the couch, set me down, then sat next to me and slipped his arm around my shoulders. “You went into another of those sodding walking trances.”

  “Yeah, sure did. It was quite a vision.”

  “Of what?”

  “The death of Interchange.”

  Ari’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement, and his lips parted as if he were about to speak. He closed them again and merely stared at me.

  “I don’t know how I know,” I said. “But I know.”

  A memory image from a Tom and Jerry cartoon rose in my mind, of a Swiss cheese with holes big enough for the mouse to crawl through. Oddly enough, the image meshed with the vision. The rainbow horror had turned a world into Swiss cheese, maybe by accident, maybe by design. Sometimes my visions can be in really bad taste. A lot of people died, maybe millions, and what did I see? A cartoon mouse.

  “I feel okay now,” I told Ari. “I’d better record this vision and check in with my handler.”

  “You’d best not go into another full trance until you’ve eaten something.”

  “I wasn’t planning on another trance. Don’t worry. I’ll just log on and send him e-mail like a normal person.”

  Not, of course, that I sent him normal e-mail. The Agency has its own heavily encrypted system, TranceWeb, that exists “in the cloud,” as it were, but a cloud of its own, Cloud 9 as we call it for laughs. Besides describing our earlier visitor and then the vision, I had a crucial question to ask Y, my handler. Should I turn the Belial entity over to this Spare guy if he really did work for Interpol?

  I’d captured Belial (him or it, I wasn’t certain about the gender) on my Agency authority, but since the Agency had no official liaison with any police force, I had no idea of what to do next. Suppose I’d gone to the local police and told them that I had a criminal in custody who happened to be a sapient extraterrestrial squid. Would they have believed me? Yeah, exactly—especially when I went on to say that I had custody of only his consciousness, stored on an old-fashioned flash drive, not of his physical body.