The Last Judgement

by The Last Judgement (retail) (epub)

  ‘Go!’ Harker yelled, barging Carter towards the open lift as bullets zipped past them from the second gunman, who had seen Vlad collapse onto the floor and kept firing as he ran towards them.

  Carter reached the lift first and stumbled over Michel’s body, which sent him ploughing face first through the doors As Harker dived after him, the bullets began to rain down on them, and he quickly reached up and slammed the button for level 1.

  Nothing happened however and, with nowhere to provide cover, Harker did the only thing he could by raising the 9mm and firing indiscriminately. The kick from the machine gun was tremendous and he struggled to keep a grip on it as Carter continued lying flat with his face pressed against the floor of the lift. The quick offensive did its job and the gunman’s return fire suddenly stopped. Whether he was reloading his clip or just taking cover it was impossible to say, but within seconds the doors were closing. As the lift began to rise, they could hear thudding sounds from below as further bullets hit the outer door panel below them.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Harker yelled as the gunfire finally stopped and, holding the 9mm in one hand, he began to pat himself down with the other. Satisfied he had not been hit, he turned his attention to Carter, who was repeating the same ritual. ‘Are you hit?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The man was panting heavily and sweating but he looked remarkably calm, given the circumstances, as he scrambled to his feet. ‘Did you see what Anthony did? If it wasn’t for him, we’d be dead.’

  ‘I know but it’s not over yet,’ Harker replied, and he stood up with the 9mm pressed into his shoulder and aiming it at the other side of the lift. ‘You hug that wall, and if there’s anyone up top, I’m going to start shooting.’

  Carter said nothing, and with a nod, he pressed himself against the side wall as tightly as he could.

  The ascent only took fifteen seconds or so but it felt like several minutes. As Harker continued to aim the gun forward, the adrenalin in his bloodstream made his arm tremble. If there was anybody waiting outside when the door opened, for them it would be like shooting fish in a barrel and he knew it, but regardless he was going to take down as many of them as possible.

  The lift stopped with a bump and the doors slid open and, even before Harker had time to tell if anyone was out there, he began shooting, his nerves getting the better of him. Bullets spewed out against the opposite wall, sending plumes of dust into the air. After half a dozen shots Harker eased off on the trigger and glanced nervously around the room beyond. It was empty, and without hesitation he rushed to the wooden door leading outside and opened it cautiously. He poked his head out, his neck muscles tensing as he prepared to get shot the moment he did so, but the outer walkway was also empty. He laid the 9mm on the floor and motioned for Carter to join him as he continued outside.

  The night air was cool and they were already heading back the way they had come when Carter tugged at the back of his coat.

  ‘Shouldn’t we bring the gun?’ he asked, looking perturbed at having dumped their only means of defence.

  ‘It’s a bit of a gamble, I know, but I’m not running around Mont-Saint-Michel with a machine gun,’ Harker replied, picking up the pace along the narrow winding path. ‘There are tourists staying overnight here and the last thing we need is to shoot someone by accident.’

  It was a reasonable point, and even though Carter looked uneasy at the prospect, he didn’t say a word and instead concentrated on navigating the stone steps leading them back to the Mont’s second level.

  ‘The helicopter can get us off this rock and we’ll decide, once we’re airborne, where to go next.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Carter puffed, trying to match Harker’s stride, which increased in speed with every step. ‘Anywhere’s better than here.’

  They managed the journey in a couple of minutes, made easier now by the fact they were going downhill. Better still was the fact that they came across no tourists – and, even better, no psychopathic gunmen.

  The last twenty metres proved the most nerve-racking, and as they approached the helicopter Harker was already swirling his hand in the air. Luckily the pilot saw his gesture, and by the time they were inside the rotors were already beginning to turn.

  ‘Where’s Anthony?’ the man asked.

  ‘I’m sorry but he didn’t make it,’ Harker replied briefly, glancing through the windscreen for any sign of Vlad and his henchmen.

  ‘Didn’t make it?’

  ‘We got ambushed. They killed Anthony and they’re going to kill us to if we don’t get out of here right now.’ Harker yelled the words, which were met with a look of confusion from the pilot. He had no idea if this aviator was a Templar too, or just one of the accompanying crew that came with Brulet’s borrowed yacht, but the man immediately took action and within seconds the Agusta was lifting up into the air with speed.

  Harker took his place in the cockpit passenger seat as behind him Carter buckled himself in too, and it was not until they were ten metres into the air that a degree of calm began to settle between them.

  ‘I was instructed to bring you directly back to Mr Brulet,’ the pilot explained as they started to pull away from Mont-Saint-Michel. ‘We’ll have to make a stop in Lyon again but—’

  The pilot suddenly went silent as there was a loud popping sound, then he jerked in his seat and lurched forward against the control stick, causing the helicopter to veer sharply to the right. Harker was flung against the side window but managed to fight against the gravity pulling at his body, grab the pilot’s shoulder and push him back into his seat. What he saw next sent butterflies swarming around his stomach. There was a circular bullet hole in the side window and a patch of blood on the pilot’s chest, which increased in size as the wound bled profusely.

  Harker didn’t bother to look outside, because he already knew who had taken the shot, and instead he grabbed the control stick as the Agusta continued to descend. He had no idea how to fly a helicopter and he found himself screaming at the pilot when the controls refused to respond.

  With their descent gathering speed, Harker was already pushing himself back into his seat and preparing for impact when the aircraft began to slow, and he looked over at the aviator, who was now grasping at the stick and desperately trying to take back control. The Agusta pitched forward and sped away from Mont-Saint-Michel towards the mainland, less than half a kilometre away, as the pilot fought against the extreme pain of his gunshot wound.

  They could not have been more than twenty metres above the glinting, black waterline, but they were now flying straight and level as the pilot groaned through gritted teeth while struggling just to remain conscious.

  Two hundred metres to go and the helicopter was on course. One hundred metres to go and they began to lose altitude, and with only fifty metres to go the pilot’s eyes were beginning to flutter as his whole body started to shut down.

  ‘Put us down here,’ Harker shouted, and he did the only thing he could think of to keep the man going, which was to administer a hard slap across the pilot’s face. It may have been an act of desperation and Harker could have sworn he heard Carter yell something like ‘Are you insane?’ but the pilot responded. With just metres to go, he brought the Agusta down onto a car park by the coastline, landing with an almighty crack, and he even managed to kill the rotors with a flick of a switch before finally succumbing to his wounds. The pilot’s head sagged against his chest and, as the engine wound down, Harker pressed his forefinger against the man’s neck but could feel nothing. He was gone.

  Outside, a small crowd of passers-by were already beginning to gather and Harker pulled himself up from his seat to find Carter, white as a sheet, desperately clawing at his seat belt.

  ‘That’s why I don’t travel in helicopters,’ he cried angrily. After finally unclicking his belt, he reached for the door handle, threw it open and stumbled out onto the grey tarmac of the car park. ‘What happened?’ Carter then wheezed, unaware of the potshot the Agusta
had taken in mid-flight.

  ‘They shot the pilot,’ Harker replied, wanting to kiss the ground after he too had exited the helicopter.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Presumably with a gun,’ Harker suggested sarcastically, still trying to dispel the panic he was feeling. To pull off a shot like that, the person was either plain lucky or a highly trained marksman, and Harker was inclined to believe the latter as he remembered events back at the cemetery and the accuracy of the potshots as they made their escape. It had to be Vlad.

  ‘Is he alive?’ Carter asked, looking over at the slumped pilot and the bullet hole all too visible in the side window.

  Harker just shook his head sadly, and then turned his attention to the lone sound of an approaching police siren somewhere off in the distance. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he urged, pulling Carter by the arm. ‘We have to go.’

  There were no complaints from Carter and they both started walking towards the bright lights of the town, brushing past a small crowd of people who were far more interested at the sight of the motionless sagging body drooped forward in the helicopter’s front seat than the two men slipping away from it and into the shadows.

  With two men dead, the third Gigas page gone, and Vlad in possession of the Templars’ most important and revealing document, things had gone from bad to extremely bloody terrible, and Harker knew it. The prospect of Chloe bearing the brunt of his failure, the entire Order of the Knights Templar potentially being wiped out, and not forgetting the unearthly idea of mankind facing Judgement Day with Satan at the helm was turning this day into a real doozy. He still found the reality of Judgement Day a difficult one to swallow but, with everything he had experienced so far, it was starting to feel ever more possible, no matter how unlikely.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Carter asked in a shaky voice as they put ever more distance between themselves and the grounded helicopter, but Harker found himself without an answer. To him there was only one important question, and it sickened him to think about it. With the Gigas page now lost, it wasn’t a matter of what they were going to do, but what ‘God’ would do.

  Chapter 23

  ‘I have to say, Dr Stanton, you may be a proverbial pain in the arse, but I must commend you on your ingenuity,’ Jacob Winters declared in a congratulatory tone. ‘I would very much like to know how you managed to escape from your room.’

  Chloe Stanton stood defiantly in front of Winters’s desk, with Albert holding her firmly by one arm while a second suited man grasped the other. ‘You mean my cell?’

  Her reply appeared to offend the old man. ‘We have no cells, Dr Stanton. You’re my guest here.’

  ‘Really? Because I thought guests were allowed to come and go as they pleased.’

  ‘And you are: you came and you will leave. Of course, whether you leave alive or dead is another matter entirely,’ Winters replied with a smug, wrinkled grin. ‘So, and I won’t ask again, how did you escape your room?’

  Chloe squirmed against Albert’s grip, more in frustration than anything else. Then with an annoyed grunt, she nodded. ‘It was simple. I watched your food-delivery man tap in the code.’

  ‘Pffh,’ Winters snorted in disgust, and directed his attention towards Albert. ‘Sloppy, Albert, very sloppy. Would you see to it that the man answers for such shoddiness immediately, please?’

  Albert left Chloe in the hands of the other guard and made his way over to the door. The crimson light made his plain white shirt look as if it were drenched in blood.

  ‘Oh, and I would like to hear the tunes if I may,’ Winters called out after him. Albert nodded respectfully and left, leaving the door half open.

  ‘Well, Dr Stanton…or should I call you Chloe?’ Winters continued, clasping his feeble hands together.

  ‘No, you should not,’ came her answer, whereupon Winters continued to smile, clearly pleased by her agitation.

  He lightly tapped his desktop. ‘Well, Chloe, you’ve been a busy little thing, haven’t you? Breaking into my office and nosing about amongst my things.’

  Winters motioned towards the velvet drape that had since been pulled back in place, hiding the capsule behind it. ‘You’ve observed my prize, then?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not sure what I saw,’ she replied, genuinely not knowing exactly what it might have been.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said jovially, wheeling himself away from the desk to within reach of the drape. ‘Allow me to show you’ – the old man then pursed his lips together as if in a kissing motion – ‘you pretty little thing.’

  Chloe shrugged off the demeaning gesture as the suited man, still gripping her arm tightly, walked her over to the drape and pulled it back to reveal the shadowy outline of the capsule she had discovered earlier.

  ‘I know it’s difficult to see, Chloe, but my eyes are not good in natural light,’ Winters explained, pointing up to the crimson bulb.

  ‘A bit like Dracula, then,’ she replied sarcastically, and the suited man gripped her arm tighter.

  ‘Very good,’ Winters replied, clearly somewhat irritated by the comparison. ‘But let me dispel that myth. Would you turn on the lights, please?’ He quickly retrieved a pair of jet-black Julbo sunglasses with protective sides and put them on before the suited man reached over and pressed a protruding wall switch to his left.

  A series of wall lights now lit up around the capsule, and for the first time Chloe was able to get a good look at the object inside. The container was about two metres in length, constructed from thick white plastic, and apart from the various tubes linking it to the wall there were others connecting the sides to an assortment of tanks, including one labelled ‘oxygen’. The pod sat on a white stone trestle which was bolted to its underside with thick steel screws, and next to it a glass tube respirator whirred away as a grey, plastic, ribbed pump rose and fell rhythmically.

  ‘What is it?’ Chloe asked, less taken aback this time around.

  ‘Not what’ – Winters leant over and lovingly rubbed his hand against the shiny surface of the pod – ‘but who.’

  There was a long silence as the old man continued to indulge his fascination with the concealed object, and finally Chloe realized that he was waiting for her to answer his last question.

  ‘So who is it?’

  ‘He has many names, but I prefer the Dark Lord,’ Winters replied as he pulled his hand away and chuckled. ‘It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Ominous yet memorable.’

  An uncomfortable chill ran through her body and she gulped at his preposterous suggestion. ‘What?’

  He was already nodding his head tremulously. ‘I know, I know, it is difficult to get one’s head around something so evil, so parasitic, so legendary being right here, snugly contained within this pure white pod. There have been many stories about this one’ – Winters was chewing at his lips as he stared over towards Chloe, his black-lensed sunglasses glinting in the light – ‘and they are all true, believe me.’

  She found herself staring into the face of either a true believer or a complete madman and, given what they seemed to be talking about, both assumptions seemed apt. ‘Mr Winters, are you trying to tell me that you have none other than the Devil stored in there?’

  Winters once again smiled through cracked lips and he let out a hoarse laugh. ‘You can call him whatever you wish, but be under no illusions that our sleeping resident here is everything you’ve ever been taught about or even dared to believe in your worst nightmares…and he belongs to me.’

  The way Winters said the words made Chloe cringe, not because she believed that the actual Devil could be there inside the pod, but rather at the insanity of such a claim, and her disbelieving expression was immediately noticed by the old man.

  ‘Dr Stanton, you work at Blackwater asylum for the criminally insane, do you not?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You are surrounded by some of the most evil men and woman to walk the surface of the earth in our lifetime, and you expect me to believe that you don
’t believe in pure evil?’

  It was a question that Chloe had been asked by friends many times given her job as a psychiatrist for the criminally insane but it was the first time anyone had insinuated a link between their sick deeds and a supernatural entity acting as a puppet master. ‘My patients have committed some of the worst acts imaginable, and they are mentally sick people. But they are just that…people, not some dark religious icon that has so long been held as a symbol of the very worst man has to offer. They are real and their acts are real, but the Devil is simply an idea, a warning…he’s not real.’

  ‘Oh, you are in for such a surprise, dear Chloe, you really are, because when this pod opens you will see that everything I have told you is the truth and nothing less.’

  From the half-open doorway there now came the squealing of a man in utter agony and those piercing sounds drew a wide-eyed, excited look from Winters as he slumped back into his wheelchair.

  ‘Ahh, good work, Albert, I have so been waiting to hear those tunes,’ the old man muttered softly, and he raised one arthritic finger in the air and began to wave it back and forth, while Chloe winced at the pained cries echoing around the room. ‘I do so love a good melody, don’t you?’

  Chapter 24

  ‘Can I get you gentlemen anything else?’ asked the waiter, dipping both hands into the large front pockets of his black apron. ‘We’re closing early tonight.’