Apocalypsis 1.01 Demons Read Free Page B

and his body squirmed and convulsed as if he were in agony and his legs were tensing up.
    »Depart from Luca, Goblin Hammer, I command you! Depart from him!«
    Luca gurgled something and gasped for air, jerking in convulsions, and then he began to throw up. Maria, the Deacons and the nuns struggled to hold him on the table. It slowly began to feel eerie in the narrow room. An absurd thought flashed through Peter’s mind. What if this little Neapolitan lad really did begin to levitate or vomit nails, as Luigi claimed to have witnessed several times before?
    But Luca didn’t throw up nails and he didn’t soar above the massage table either. The only thing that he did do was to open his mouth, all of a sudden, and begin to speak. In a voice that was no longer his own.
    In German.
    »Chaos reigns in the Via della Conciliazione. Ambulances rush to the scene from all directions. Dead bodies and debris litter the streets, which look like a battlefield. Around thirty minutes ago, a huge explosion shook the entire Vatican. Eyewitnesses described a blazing flash of light ripping through the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. The blast killed thousands of people and tossed debris and parked cars several hundred yards into the air. At this hour, nothing is known about the background details of this devastating attack, nor about the fate of the one hundred and seventeen cardinals who had gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the Conclave. At this point, only one thing is clear: the Vatican, the center of the Catholic Church, no longer exists.«

XI
    May 9, 2011, Vatican City
    T here were few things in this world that Urs Bühler truly despised. Filth, for instance, the human scum that mingled with the garbage in the suburbs of Rome, Algiers, Paris, or even Basel, forming a foul-smelling mass. Discarded needles in city parks, the pocked-marked arms of half-starved junkies, the desperation of the whores, the stench of squalor, the stench of decomposition, the stench of chaos. The sight of gunshot wounds and strangulation marks, stab wounds and shredded limbs, and of bruises on the bodies of infants. The taste of blood. The moans of dying men. The killing. Strangely enough, Urs Bühler also hated the sight of calcium deposits on faucets. Actually, there were only a few things in life that Bühler really liked. And there was only one person in this world whom he loved with all his heart and for whom he was willing to do anything. But more than anything and anyone else, Urs Bühler hated the Italians. An aversion that he had adopted from his parents and that grown ever more intense. He hated the Italians for their self-glorification, their arrogance, and their untrustworthiness, and he hated them for their tearful sentimentality and their paranoia towards order. He hated the fuss they made over their food and their coffee. Their cowardice. Their language that overflowed with subjunctive conditionals and ambiguities, wasting many words without saying a thing. Bühler hated the Italians for their apish gesticulation and their pride in the decadence of their elite. He hated the Italian women for the way they stuck out their little fingers, and he hated the Italian men for their mothers. There were a thousand reasons. In his eyes, the Italians were worse than the Jews and the Blacks. And the worst Italians of all lived in Rome.
    But the Vatican was not Rome. Even though it was surrounded by the blustering waves of Roman filth, Urs Bühler felt that the Vatican was the only place in the world which was still run in a reliable and orderly fashion. And he was prepared to risk his life to protect and to maintain this holy order, at all costs and under all circumstances.
    As a Swiss national and as a Catholic with basic military training, he had met the requirements to join the Swiss Guards – the oldest and smallest army in the world – when he was still a young man. However, during a visit to a café in his second year of service as a guardsman, he