Whitley Strieber - 2012 - The War for Souls

“I have no idea.”

WYLIE HAD REALIZED THAT HE was being dieseled when he saw that they were crossing the same sodden shopping street again. There were piles of yarn, there were farm implements, there were baskets and paint-brushes, and hatchets polished to a high shine.

He might be a shape-shifter like the rest of them, but he was not on their side. No, he was a Union man, he had remembered that. They were right about him being an intelligence agent. He was, but not a very good one, given that he’d gotten his sweet ass caught just when that was the worst possible thing that could have happened.

Wylie had examined every inch of the wagon, but it was made like a fricking safe. The goddamn driver would open a little hatch from time to time and shit and piss into it. Wylie stayed well back, but the place stank. He wondered if his own shit was yellow now, too?

The wagon had been stopped for some time before he understood that it wasn’t going to be moving again. There was a series of clicks, and the door went hissing open. Even in this place, with its dirty brown sky, coming out hurt his eyes.

He was coming to the crisis of his failure now, he knew.

“Ready for lunch,” his captor said. “Your hands are comin’ to me and mine, I hear.”

His hands. What a place. Trapped in the wagon with nothing to do but think, he had remembered more of his real life. If you looked—really looked—you wouldn’t find a trace of Wylie Dale before December 26, 1995, the day he’d made his transition into a human life that had been painstakingly constructed for him to enter. “Wylie Dale” had already been established as a novelist by the organization that had sent him to the human earth, but the first book he’d written himself was Alien Days, his story of his abduction, which had actually been a looking-glass memory of his arrival on one-moon earth.

As Wylie’s eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing before a gigantic version of a building familiar to him. It was the model for the Tomb of Skull and Bones on the campus of Yale University. But the Tomb was not large. This building was two hundred feet tall, a great, ugly monolith.

Compared to the rest of the city, which echoed with roars, screeches, discharges of steam, the rumbling of wagons, and various unidentifiable hoots, laughs, and howls, the silence here was total.

Bones had been founded by William Huntington Russell, whose step-brother Sam had carried opium into China for the British when they were trying to get back the gold they’d spent on Chinese tea. British captains hadn’t been willing to do it. It might have been the 1850s, but drug running was still drug running. Russell had no problem with addicting the Chinese.

“Are you happy?” he asked his grinning captor.

“Yeah, I’m happy.”

“Then fuck you.”

“Could I season your fingers?”

“You going to two-moon earth?”

“I should be so lucky. No can afford.”

Wylie thought of the shithole the seraph hordes were being sent to. “What does it cost?”

“Whatever you have. Which assumes you have something. They don’t consider an artificial syrinx with a busted jaw and this old wagon worth a ticket. I live in it, you know. When it’s not otherwise occupied.”

“So you’re poor?”

“Poor as shit, which is why—” He stopped. He listened, so Wylie listened, too. Keening came, heart-freezing, getting louder fast. “Knees!”

Wylie didn’t argue. As he went down to the hard earth and little knots of mushrooms like small, exposed brains, a line of flying motorcycles with silver fenders, ridden by figures in gold metallic uniforms and gleaming gold helmets and face masks, came speeding out of the sky and hung dead still a foot or so above the ground, their motors revving as the riders worked to keep them stable.

This was followed by a smooth whoosh of sound, and a jewel of an aircar appeared.

He knew who it belonged to, of course: Marshal Samson. His escort bowed, and he bowed, too. There was a click and he could sense somebody getting down, coming over.

“Hello, Wylie.” The voice positively bubbled. “I knew it from the first. It had to be this. Actually, I’m impressed. I’ll never tell her that, of course, but it was a brilliant operation.”

“Thank you.”

“I just came from raping your wife, incidentally. Bring him.”

He was kicked from behind, and ended up scuttling through the huge doors, which had opened soundlessly and now presented the appearance of a gaping cave.

As Wylie walked through the darkness of the anteroom and Samson opened the inner door for them both, the enormous golden floor struck him with a powerful sense of remembrance. That floor had been a source of scandal at home, a symbol to the Union of the greed of the autocrats who ran this side of the planet.

A tall woman loaded with jewels, her hair sleek and white, dressed in the richest clothing Wylie had ever seen, came striding forward. Her face was so white that it glowed, the scales attractively tiny, the features delicate. He knew that this was the infamous leader of this world, Echidna, whose family had held controlling ownership of the Corporation for uncountable millennia.

All the females in the line were called Echidna. When one wore out, a new clone replaced it seamlessly, without any public awareness. There was never an issue of succession, unlike the Union, which was a simple democracy and in turmoil all the time.

“Come, Spy,” she said, “I want to gloat before dinner.”

As they crossed the great room, he saw Lee Raymond, Robert Mugabe, and Ann Coulter playing a game involving dice on what appeared to be a table made of emeralds, rubies, and a great, gleaming expanse of pure diamond. He recognized the game. It was senet, the Egyptian predecessor to backgammon. In the human worlds, the rules of senet had been hidden away by the seraph, but here, where they had not, players at senet gambled for souls.

He was not sure if they were human, or simply proud of their achievements as human, and showing off their forms.

“I had no idea your penetration of human society was so extensive.”

“But not of both human worlds, not as much as I hoped. This time around, we’re only getting the one, I fear.” She shot him a twinkling glance. “But we are getting it, you Union shit!”

Coulter now shifted into a sallow reptilian form with big, beady scales. Her black tongue darted behind spiked teeth made yellow from too much tobacco. Wylie realized that she was lusting after him. Mugabe, who was apparently her seraph husband, scurried behind her, trying to keep a cloak around her.

“Ann wants to bed you before we eat,” Echidna said. “It’s a particular pleasure of hers, to fuck her food.”

They arrived at a tall window, curtained. “Open it,” Echidna snapped at Samson. “I just want you to see this, Union man.”

Wylie realized that she had brought him close to a great, black wall with huge levers on it. Scalar controls, he knew, that worked the gigantic lenses that were deployed on two-moon earth. But then the curtains swept open, and he saw a lawn so bright green it must have been painted, awash in splendid people, some of them reptilian, others human, or seemingly so. There were politicians, of course, great, grinning hordes of them, military officers in the uniforms of a dozen countries, representatives of various royal families, rock stars, CEOs, television personalities, preachers, mullahs, gurus—in fact, every sort of human leader and person of power. Among them strolled naked seraph girls and boys, their scales bleached so white they looked new-minted, carrying trays loaded with barbecued fingers, ears and toes, and flutes of hissy champagne.