The Apocalypse Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

and spirit soars. A dull reminder of our prosaic duality, I suppose.
    It is just before dawn and the ship will be underway in less than an hour. I cannot tell you how anxious I am to cut all connections to land and be on our way. Not just to be free of those who might seek to stop us, but to finally start a journey…not only for myself, but for all humankind.
    Hudson and I have been reviewing the maps and the scrolls over the last few days and stumbled across something astonishing that completely upends many of our previous assumptions. As you know, there is no shortage of supposedly respected people who have called my work amateurish, fantastical, even supernatural twaddle. I always did my best to ignore such chatter. I knew that my search for Piotrsgete was far too important to be derailed by doubters, dullards and lesser men.
    Now I think we may know what it means.
    All of those years of crawling through dusty tombs, enduring baking heat, choking sand and lethal scorpions…of hacking through fetid jungle swamps…hanging on for dear life to some icy crag ten thousand feet up the face of a frozen mountain pass…even negotiating the Byzantine multiple filing systems of the Society archives…the purpose of it all has become evident.
    This journey is going to be the greatest in the history of human discovery. Although I have every confidence that we will return, this is a step into the ultimate unknown, and I didn’t want to take that without first letting you know what it is all for.
    As with many discoveries, it was right in front of us all along. I had been looking through a previous draft of one of the translations when Hudson pointed out th

PART II
The Weather Underground

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    A Buddhist will tell you that when you are considering life, the best place to start is with death. When you are considering death, the best place to start is insurance.
    That’s me.
    Or, more to the point, that’s where I am. I am a Policy Fulfillment Analyst for Firmamental Insurance Group (a division of the Hudson International Group). Don’t ask me what my job title means because I don’t have a clue. I started with the company eight years ago as a Policy Fulfillment Clerk in the audit department, but the company has gone through so many rounds of restructuring, downsizing, “right-sizing” and expense re-allocation analysis that I ended up here.
    I don’t have the kind of job that they write kids’ books about. I’m not a police officer or a fire fighter or a crane operator or a game designer or even the host of a reality TV show about people trying to get away with filing phony property claims. I have the kind of job that most of my coworkers – at least, the ones who are left – don’t understand. It’s not the kind of job most kids fantasize about doing, and with good reason. It’s not the kind of thing I fantasize about much, either. I got a desk clock last year as part of an employee appreciation initiative (“If you want to stay an employee, smile and take the damn clock. It’s free. We’re only deducting its value from your paycheque as it is considered a tax-deductible benefit and the pinko regulation-happy government makes us. We strongly encourage you to vote them out.”) The battery died three days after I got it and I didn’t replace it because it seems much more appropriate for the place where Time Stands Still.
    My job mostly consists of listening to complaints from Herbert J. Sternhauser the Third, an irascible Manitoba pig farmer who calls an average of 17 times per week to dispute one or many aspects of the policy we have underwritten to insure his commercial agricultural operations. He didn’t like it when we made clause FCO1981 (Damage Caused By Rectal Probing Perpetrated By Alien Or Extra-Terrestrial Party Or Entity) mandatory coverage on his last renewal. He didn’t like it when we denied his claim for a septic tank explosion (he hit the tank in error while shooting at a man he believed to be an