Old Porters: Burning Eden

Chapter Nineteen

Nineteen

"It went perfectly," Roger said quietly as Kate boiled the kettle and he sat at the kitchen table, scribbling names on a map of the world he had printed from Lilly's laptop. These days, his backpack contained more information about Ragnarök then things he needed in his daily life, most of the information he carried around was spread out in front of him at the moment. "Except for when everyone argued, the police arrived, I got zapped, several people went off the deep end, Peta threatened to murder a police officer, I was chased through the streets by a woman in powered armour, tried to loose her by running through an alley that led to the back of a restaurant where the staff threw food at me and the customers booed me."

"Peta as in Abe's Peta?" The blonde asked.

"I don't know any others," he confirmed.

"What was she doing there?" Kate enquired as she poured the freshly heated water into her waiting cup, containing a tea bag and what would transpire to be too much milk.

"Turns out she's a vigilante and I'm pretty sure she can fly," Roger said, crossing off one of the names on the map. He pulled a plastic folder from his bag and placed it on the table top, then began searching through it.

"Oh," Kate muttered, not sure what Roger was doing or why he was not freaking out. "It's always the quiet ones." She stirred her tea, the sound of her spoon tinkling against her china mug. The uni house was quiet. Eerily quiet. She did not think she had been the only housemate home during an evening the whole time she had been here. But Verdant were having a Guy Fawkes Night spectacular and her friends had already gone to hit the bar early. She would probably join them for the fireworks display being held in New Town later, probably but not certainly. Sometimes it was nice just to have a bit of peace a quiet. Quiet enough to hear the people next door arguing and not the other way round.

"She's not so quiet it turns out. I had to sort of threaten Abe to get her to drop the guy she was holding at knife point."

"Does she know you're who you are?"

"Nope," Roger said. "There are already way too many people who know and the fact that the police knew where we were going to be, most likely because someone blabbed, reminded me how dangerous letting people know my secret is."

"So how goes the master plan?" Kate asked, coming over to the table and nodding at the map. There were forty eight sites marked across the globe. Twenty were what Roger had been calling Edens and they were indicated by a green dot. The other twenty eight were surrounded by large red circles, they were the contamination zones.

Roger sighed and ran his hands through his hair, wobbling his glasses as he did so. He looked like he had not had a decent night sleep for over a fortnight, because he had not. He pointed to a green dot with the word Baalberith next to it and the initials B & I. The dot was in India, roughly south west of Mumbai. "I looked it up and these names," he said, tapping several of the other green dots, "Are the names of fallen angels, demons and monsters from mythology, like Abaddon. I think these are the codenames or cult names whatever you want to call it, of the guards who are watching over each of the camps. These initials belong to the vigilantes I am planning to send off to their doom in an attempt to destroy the camps, in order to force the All Father to delay his plans to end the world."

Kate nodded her head. How did she become part of conversations like this? Nobody outside an action film should have to listen to this sort of thing. When she asked how things were going, she had not really wanted him to recap everything he had been thinking about. Perhaps by saying it out loud he was seeking her approval, or trying to make sense of it all in his head. She did not know.