“Get off me!” he railed, but she was stuck to him like a parasite.
He threw himself from side to side to no avail. Even the slightest movement lit up his nerve tracts.
Death advanced from within, while his body was pinned without.
Click. Click. Click, from behind.
Adam shoved Pestilence’s cloaked chest, but the applied pressure only served to make her fingertips feel like they were scalping him.
He was going to die.
In desperation, he raised his hands and grabbed her face, trying to shove it back, to break her jaw, snap her neck, anything. Thin fingers of smoke wafted from the union of their flesh. Pestilence screamed and jerked her head away, extinguishing the diminutive flames that had arisen from her dry flesh. A mouthful of mosquitoes funneled out to form a skin over her face.
Adam felt her claws retract from his skin. This was his opportunity.
He grabbed for her face again, but sudden pain exploded in his calf. Something jerked at the muscle.
Adam screamed.
V
THE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH WAS AT HAND.
Death reveled in every second of it. Soon the last of the survivors would be dead, and he would inherit the earth. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him now. Not God. Not the pathetic sack of flesh He had chosen as His champion. Not the frail humans preparing to be slaughtered hundreds of feet below. In a matter of minutes, the final battle would be over, and he would stand above them all, victorious.
And yet something still plagued him.
The boy. His death had come too easily. It was more than the lack of satisfaction in the child’s torture and demise. There had been no fight, only a meek acquiescence, as though the boy had given himself over to him. It was all wrong. Everything. The boy had exhibited no signs of power, only the feebleness inherent to his flesh. He was supposed to have been Death’s opposite number.
Death needed to be cautious, take nothing for granted. In his black heart, he knew he could best the Lord, but not so easily. There had to be more to come, and he would be ready. He could not allow himself to be caught unaware. So he studied them down there from the distance, scrutinizing their every move.
When the lone girl had slipped through the trap he had laid with Famine and Pestilence, he had thought momentarily that he would be forced to reckon with her, but she had fallen apart when she saw the child’s crucified remains. While her anger and sorrow had been venerable, emanating palpable waves of fury, he quickly realized that she posed no threat to him. All she had wanted was to drag the body down off the cross. She had even seen him standing high above, but had averted her eyes in fear.
The others appeared to at least be willing to fight, but his horsemen were overwhelming them handily. Famine had the woman by the throat and would soon cut off her life, while Pestilence was making short work of the man twice her size. There were still three others with them, but they cowered in hiding. One still had a weapon, but no earthly weapon would be able to fell his brethren.
There was another child with them, smaller, younger. Was it possible he’d been wrong about the boy he’d crucified, that this other child was his true adversary? No. He was certain he’d killed the right boy. But why hadn’t he battled with everything he had?
Why hadn’t he fought?
Death reared back, scaled chest swelling, and hissed up into the heavens with a sound like the electric crackle of lightning. There was some key component that he was missing and it enraged him.
When he looked back down, he could no longer see the girl or the carcass she towed. A momentary sensation of fear assaulted him, a feeling he hadn’t felt in his many incarnations, but he shoved it aside when he finally saw the girl’s black hair behind a standing section of broken asphalt. The corpse would be with her for sure. The fear was tamed, but the fact that it existed at all unnerved him.
Hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, a voice from the past whispered inside his mind, more insistent than before.
He stilled. That voice should no longer exist. It belonged to a past life long since ended, a human life, and yet there was no disputing he had heard it.
This needed to end now.
Nothing could threaten his ascension. He would reign on earth. Reign as god. God.
The Lord will be terrible unto them: for He will famish all the gods of the earth, the voice said, stronger, emboldened.
Death hissed again and the sky rumbled in response. He slashed at his chest over and over, his claws parting his scales and carving the flesh beneath. With the pain came focus, silencing the voice, bringing his rage to a boiling crescendo.
Blood pouring from his heaving chest, he turned his attention again to the ground like a Caesar lording over a stadium of gladiators, and thought he heard the voice laughing from far away.
VI
JILL COULDN’T BEAR TO WATCH ANY LONGER. WHATEVER THOSE SHROUDED monsters were, they were killing her friends, and it was only a matter of time before they came after Jake and her as well.
She looked up at the tower, and there atop it was the black beast with the red eyes. She turned to Jake and saw that he was focused on the creature as well, just as his dreams had foretold. Tears streamed down his pale cheeks. His whole body trembled.
A scream summoned her attention back to the fracas in front of her, where Adam was still on his back beneath Pestilence, a cloud of smoke and insects swirling about her desiccated head. He arched his back and screamed again, bloody spittle flying from his mouth to slap back down on his face. Pestilence appeared distracted as she clawed at her own face with bony fingers. Jill saw the source of Adam’s torment.
“Stay right here!” she snapped at Jake. “Don’t move!”
She grabbed a large section of the broken sidewalk, so big she could hardly lift it with both hands, and hurried out from behind the rubble.
Adam was still bucking and screaming. The skeletal steed, its face now wet with more than its popped eyes, had crawled forward and bitten down on Adam’s lower leg. It jerked and tugged in an effort to rip away a mouthful of muscle. The serpentine tails from its neck were wrapped around his ankle
Jill stormed into the fray, heaving the cement as high as she could. Her arms and shoulders burned as she raised it, and cried out with the strain. She stood over the beast and drove the concrete down onto its skull with a resounding crack, the ragged edges tearing the skin on her palms. Fissures expanded along its exposed frontal bone. Jill didn’t hesitate to examine the damage. She raised the block and slammed it down again and again until the concrete tumbled out of her bloody hands and she fell backwards, unable even to move her arms to brace herself before hitting the street.
Harvester’s entire cranium had caved in and the snout had broken off, though its teeth were still embedded in Adam’s leg. The tails of the mane snapped and flagged, reaching for the shattered fragments of bone as though trying to reassemble the head. They shivered and stood erect before finally falling limply back to the spine. Its hind legs kicked at the ground, hooves gouging chunks out of the pavement before eventually stilling with a shudder. Were it possible, the lifeless bones appeared to sag before crumbling to dust.
Jill scrabbled forward again. She grabbed the remainder of the steed’s jaws from Adam’s leg and flung them away. A rush of blood poured from the wound.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped, grabbing his flailing leg and pressing her hands onto the wound to staunch the rapid flow. Warm fluid sluiced through her fingers, bringing with it the vile scent of festering meat.
She looked to her left for help, but Adam was still writhing in agony, his teeth bared and eyes pinched shut. Beyond, Ray charged toward where Famine held Evelyn above the ground by her neck, raising the stock of the rifle high over his head, preparing to strike, the flames in his eyes nearly eclipsing his face.
“Adam!” she screamed, looking back at him, trying frantically to get his attention. “Adam!”
His eyelids parted a slit,
issuing streams of tears.
“I can’t stop the blood! I can’t—”
Jill was cut off mid-sentence by a sharp pain on the vertex of her head. It felt as though someone had driven a spike through her skull. She screamed as her entire upper body was jerked sideways. Something that she imagined to be the hooked tines of a rake had lanced beneath her scalp, and tugged in an attempt to pull out all of her hair and the skin with it. Icy needles of pain spread through her cranium, the pressure building to the point she had to close her eyes.
She toppled over and Pestilence’s fingers tore back out. Consciousness abandoned her to the darkness in her mind before her head bounced off the asphalt.
VII
SHE WAS ON THE VERGE OF PASSING OUT. EVELYN KNEW THAT IF SHE ALLOWED it to happen, she would never wake again. The pearl-skinned creature holding her aloft would simply crush her cartilaginous windpipe, and that would be the end. The green veins in her forearms grew brighter until they were almost fluorescent, pulsing in time with her shrinking field of vision. She looked at Famine’s face, hoping to find a momentary flash of mercy. The smooth porcelain shield formed to his face like a death mask had taken on the same emerald glow. Her bright red face reflected in his blank eyes.
Evelyn coughed, the tendons and muscles in her neck beginning to relax.
No! she screamed inside her head. Not yet! Not like this!
Jagged green bolts crept across Famine’s face like vines growing in fast forward. Not on his face, but beneath it. They crept inward from under the cowl, racing from his cheeks to his eyes, meeting with those stabbing down his forehead and up from his chin.
Sudden movement from behind the cloaked figure drew her attention. She saw a flash of brown and heard what sounded like a baseball bat striking the side of a car.
The pressure was suddenly gone from her neck and there was a momentary sensation of weightlessness before her feet hit the ground. Her legs crumpled beneath her and deposited her in a heap. Sucking at the sudden rush of air, she rolled onto her side, filling her lungs with the oxygen she so desperately needed. The darkness peeled back, though the blotches still swam across her vision. Her extremities tingled and ached as though she had slept on them wrong and her head pounded with a headache beyond any she had ever experienced.
She felt like she was moving in slow motion, her body sluggish. A broken section of polished wood rested on the ground in front of her, surrounded by a scattering of splinters. She looked up to see the creature turn around to face Ray, who stood before it holding the barrel of his rifle like a club. Famine struck with staggering speed, his white hand shooting out of the billowing sleeve of flesh to pound Ray in the center of his face. Ray was lifted from his feet, the fire in his eyes extinguished, and sent hurtling backward through the air. He landed squarely on his shoulders and slid another five feet before his head met an abutment of rubble. The remainder of the gun clattered to the ground and rolled away from his open hand.
Ray didn’t even try to get back up.
Famine spun again to face her. The cloak billowed around him, liquid blackness that reeked of death. The green bolts had receded back toward the hood, merely framing his face with emerald etchings.
Evelyn screamed and scrambled away, meeting with the bony remains of the horseman’s steed. She toppled over the rib cage draped in human flesh and the sharply protruding pelvis, landing on the tail of nettles. Thorns prodded her side and then her palms as she struggled to right herself and crouched on the dried train of weeds.
He strode toward her, gliding on feet hidden beneath the vast expanse of blackened flesh, hardly appearing to graze the ground.
Evelyn scanned the earth around her for anything she could use as a weapon. There was only the broken stock of the rifle and piles of rocks she would never be able to reach in time. This was it, she thought, time to die. She looked up into the shrouded face. Shadows washed over the upper half, leaving only the chin and mouth exposed. The formerly stoic features betrayed the hint of a smile. The creature knew her time was up as well.
Something crawled over her fingers where she knelt, scurrying over the backs of her hands. She tried to jerk them away, but they were stuck, the skittering sensation curling around her wrists and up her forearms. She looked down and her breath stilled in her chest. The stiff and lifeless weeds of Scourge’s tail had changed from brownish-yellow to green and were now growing up all around her, the tail lengthening and spreading out toward the rubble, climbing up and over.
Evelyn looked at Famine, who was now nearly on top of her, and caught just a momentary falter in his smile.
She looked back down and watched the vines spread out like a mat beneath his feet, racing under his cloak like snakes fleeing for the safety of their darkened den. Her arms tingled as she suffused the dead tail with life. The primitive understanding that she was actually doing this dawned on her, though she knew not how. She prayed that she could continue doing so.
The vines grew all the way up her arms to the shoulders, becoming taller all around her, the serpentine weeds reaching for the sun. The world took on a muted green cast, the source of the illumination coming directly from her.
Famine tried to close the remaining yard between them, but he was rooted to the ground. The vines of his own steed’s tail spiraled around his ankles and up his legs, constricting around his waist and torso. He clawed through his leathery cloak, tearing it away to reveal that his entire body was wrapped with the overgrowth. Curling his fingers into the stalks, he snapped them away, but they only formed again. Concentrating his power, the weeds began to brown and crumble away, but far too slowly, the more ambitious vines knotting over his knuckles and running up his arms under the cloak. Green veins appeared on his upper chest above the nest of foliage, streaking up his neck and into his face where they glowed like emerald fire, filling his eyes, which shattered as though made of glass, tinkling to the ground at his feet.
Evelyn poured her life force into the thorny bramble, which sapped it up like water, now covering the entire street around her. She was one with them. With a cracking of bone, they broke apart the equine skeleton beside her, grinding it to increasingly smaller chips and calcium dust until the bump beneath them was no longer visible.
The vines tangled around Famine’s neck, spiraling around his face. Where they tightened, the thorns cracked his ceramic mask and the bramble constricted like barbed wire. He registered fear a heartbeat before the weeds tore him apart. The cloak ripped away from his shoulders, followed by his arms. The sockets shattered and billowed a cloud of dust from within, fanned by the myriad wings of locusts that sputtered into the air before they stilled and fell back to the earth to be swallowed by the seething foliage. He made a high-pitched screaming sound, but it was cut short by the sawing motion of the vines on his face. His head imploded with a crash that filled the air with glimmering shards, dicing the insect bodies that fired upward from his neck. Yet the body still stood, held upright by the sheer mass of greenery woven around it.
Evelyn was panting, in awe of what was transpiring in front of her. The vines uncoiled from her arms and slithered into the seemingly liquid groundcover, allowing her to stand. She walked atop the plants until she reached Famine’s body. She sensed that it was being presented to her.
Every vein in her body glowed through her skin as though they pumped light rather than blood. Slowly the color dimmed, returning her flesh to its normal pink hue.
She turned her back on the creature and heard the clamor of its remains being torn apart, obliterated.
VIII
ADAM HEARD JILL SCREAM, THE EAR-PIERCING SOUND RESPLENDENT WITH palpable waves of pain.
He saw her from the corner of his eye, trying to jerk her head away to no avail. Pestilence’s hand was latched onto Jill’s skull like a massive spider, the fingertips hooked beneath her scalp. Scarlet striations raced across Jill’s forehead in miniature lightning bolts, as though the hand really were a spider injecting its venom. A knot of swelling plu
mped Jill’s forehead. Her eyes closed and her jaw fell slack. When Pestilence snapped her exposed phalanges free from Jill’s hair, Jill hovered only momentarily before toppling backwards, the base of her skull bouncing off the road with a crack.
“Get away!” Jake screamed, hurling a rock at the mummified horseman. It struck her across the cheek, ripping away a strip of flesh to expose her entire left cheekbone, but it didn’t faze her at all.
Her diseased eyes found Jake’s and she extended a single bony finger from the shadow of the cloak’s sleeve, beckoning him closer. He froze in place as though incapable of looking away. The rock he had been prepared to hurl dropped from his fingers to the ground.
“Stay…away…” Adam retched, his parched voice barely reaching his own ears. He cleared his throat, tasting blood and the sickly sludge of infection. “Jake…get back!”
He tried to roll toward Pestilence, which only amplified the pain in his leg. Crying out, he reached for it. The flesh felt like a chasm had opened and his first reaction was to close it, his fingers probing through the wetness and dissociating muscle to find anything he could grab—
Warmth poured from his fingers into the sloppy maw. The searing pain faded to a tingling sensation. He felt his skin stretching, the edges of the wound reaching for each other. There was barely time to remove his fingers before they met, sealing off the gash as though it had never been. It all happened in the span of a blink, but his mind had already wrapped around the implications. When he had clawed at the demon’s face, it had dissolved into smoke and mosquitoes. The same power that had healed his leg was a weapon he could turn against her.
He grabbed Pestilence’s thin wrist, catching her by surprise. Smoke drifted out from beneath his hand, tendrils of which crept up through his fingers. He held on with all his strength, straining as she tried to yank free. Her forearm flew backwards out of his grasp. He was momentarily confused, until he saw her waving a stump from the end of the cloak. Her hand lay on the ground, fingers curled to the sky, the ashes of her wrist smoldering in a pile.
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