Armageddon

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  He maneuvered through the rubble-strewn hallways, careful not to spill the water that he carried. Dusty moaned again, and Gabriel quickened his pace.

  They’d found a dry place at the back of the house, in a room that had been the den. Using some old blankets that he’d found, Gabriel had made a makeshift bed for the injured Dusty.

  Gabriel entered the room to find the young man lying atop the covers. Dusty’s exposed flesh was damp with fever from the infected lacerations that covered his body. He appeared to be awake, his glassy eyes watching as the dog carried the water bowl closer.

  “Good boy,” Dusty managed, before his body was racked with convulsing chills.

  Gabriel set the dish on the floor, only spilling a few drops, and approached his friend. He studied the angry wounds that covered just about every inch of the young man’s body. Bits of darkened metal were imbedded deep beneath Dusty’s skin. There was nothing Gabriel could do to remove the shrapnel from when the Abomination of Desolation’s giant, mystical sword exploded. All he could do was try to keep the infection from growing worse.

  He took a long drink of the fresh rainwater before he began what had become his ritual. He lowered his head and gently began to lick the wounds clean of infection.

  Gabriel worried about the state of the world. The longer he and Dusty remained inactive, the worse it would become.

  But mostly he worried about his boy, Aaron.

  Worried that he might not see him again.

  Worried that Aaron had succumbed to his own injuries sustained during the vicious attack upon the school where he and the other Nephilim had lived until a few days before.

  Worried that he—and the world—might not be able to survive Aaron’s demise.

  * * *

  Vilma lay on the cot in the tiny concrete room, staring up at the ceiling vent and listening to the hum of the artificially produced air, wondering what was happening in the world above.

  It had been two weeks since she and Aaron had been taken from her family’s home and brought to this underground installation. She’d heard nothing since about what was happening beyond these walls.

  She sat up and pulled on her boots. She couldn’t sleep, and lying there wasn’t going to do her much good. She would go and sit with Aaron for a while.

  She hesitated at the door, knowing what—who—she would find posted on the other side.

  Vilma pushed down on the latch and pulled open the metal door.

  Levi was at his post, sitting on the bench outside her quarters. His large, mechanical wings were unfurled, and he appeared to be sharpening the ends of his metal feathers.

  The fallen angel stood upon seeing her. “Hello, miss,” he said in a low, gravelly voice, and his mechanical wings disappeared back beneath the long, heavy coat his kind always wore.

  “Hello, Levi,” she responded.

  Levi, and others like him, called themselves the Unforgiven. From what Vilma understood, these fallen angels had refused forgiveness for the crimes they had committed against Heaven during the Great War. Denied all divine abilities, the Unforgiven mastered magickally enhanced technology to carry out their mission against the Architects, as a way of penance for their crimes.

  And to finally allow themselves to be forgiven.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she continued, letting the door close behind her.

  The fallen angel nodded. “Not hard to believe during these turbulent times.” He slid the file he’d been using to sharpen his wings into the pocket of his coat. “Is there anything I can do to assist you?”

  Vilma shook her head. She could feel his stare from behind his goggles and hated that she could not see the fallen angel’s eyes behind the dark lenses.

  “A sleeping potion, perhaps?” Levi offered.

  “No, that’s all right,” she said. “I’ll just go and spend some time with Aaron.”

  “Very good,” Levi said with a slight bow of his head.

  “All right then,” she said, starting down the harshly lit corridor. “If anybody is looking for me . . .” She’d just about reached the corner when the fallen angel called after her.

  “Miss Corbet is with the lad, I believe.”

  Vilma turned to acknowledge that she’d heard him. He was honing the edges of his metal-feathered wings to razor sharpness again. She imagined the damage they could do in battle, and a shiver ran down her spine.

  “Thanks,” she said, trying not to sound irritated. When isn’t Miss Corbet with Aaron these days?

  Vilma rounded the bend and approached the elevator. The infirmary where Aaron was recovering was two levels below this one. She pressed the red button and waited for the car to arrive. Of all the places she could have ended up after fleeing the destruction at the Saint Athanasius School, she’d never thought it would be an abandoned, underground missile base.

  But that’s exactly where she and Aaron had been brought by the Unforgiven and Taylor Corbet—Aaron’s mother.

  Vilma leaned back against the cold cinder-block wall, listening to the metallic grinding of the gears and pulleys bringing the elevator down to her. Taylor had promised that the elevators, as well as the entire installation, were perfectly safe, but Vilma wasn’t sure she believed that.

  The elevator doors parted with a shrieking whine, and she stepped inside, pushing the number six. It took a moment, but the doors closed, and her descent began with a disturbing lurch.

  Levi had explained that the Unforgiven claimed places that were abandoned. Deconsecrated churches, burned-out buildings, unfinished construction, and decommissioned military bases became their secret hideouts.

  This particular base in Kansas had been abandoned since the late eighties.

  The elevator stopped with a savage jolt, and Vilma found herself grabbing hold of the metal railing to steady herself. The lights flickered ominously, but the metal doors slid wide.

  Vilma stepped out into the mint-green corridor. The paint was chipping in many places, and there was a very specific smell to this floor. It smelled like a hospital.

  She started toward the reception area, where another of the Unforgiven sat. She didn’t know this one’s name. He’d never offered it, even though she’d seen him just about every day since she and Aaron had arrived.

  His head was bowed as if asleep, but Vilma knew better.

  As she drew closer, he lifted his head, and she was again staring at her reflection in goggle-covered eyes.

  “Here to see the boy again,” the fallen angel stated.

  “Yes,” she answered, as she did every time she visited.

  “He is still unconscious,” the Unforgiven informed her, although she already knew that.

  Vilma often thought of the day, or evening, when she would come and be greeted with news that he was awake. But for now, she had to be content with the fact that her boyfriend was still alive.

  Images of the assault upon him flashed through her mind, no matter how hard she tried to keep them at bay. The armored figure of Lucifer Morningstar—his own father—plunging a blade of darkness, a blade of black fire into Aaron’s stomach.

  “Better than him being dead,” she blurted out as she had since first speaking with this Unforgiven angel that watched over the infirmary.

  “Yes, that is true,” the Unforgiven replied.

  “May I go and see him?” she asked.

  The angel did not respond immediately. He never did.

  “Miss Taylor Corbet is with him,” the angel finally said flatly.

  “She always is,” Vilma responded, again attempting to keep the annoyance from her tone, but failing.

  “I’m told it is a mother’s concern for her child,” the fallen angel explained.

  A mother’s concern, Vilma thought, feeling her ire rise. Where was her concern all those years he’d been without her? All the years he’d spent in foster care? Where was her concern then, when her son needed his mother?

  Silence followed, and it looked as though the angel was meditating or whatever
it was that he was doing behind the reception desk.

  “I’d like to see him,” Vilma stated.

  “Of course,” the angel said.

  She took that as permission to proceed and started down the short hallway. Aaron’s room was at the far end, on the left.

  Her legs grew heavy the closer she got to his room. She hated to see him like this, clinging to life.

  Barely.

  Nobody could tell her what was wrong with him, other than that he’d sustained a serious injury and was trying to heal.

  What more should she need, really?

  How about that he was going to pull through? That the guy she loved with all her heart was going to live?

  But nobody would tell her anything.

  She stopped in the doorway of the darkened room, taking in the shadow of the bed where Aaron lay and the woman sitting at his bedside, holding his hand.

  “Come in, dear,” the woman said suddenly.

  “Oh, hey,” Vilma said, entering the room. “I thought you might be asleep.”

  “Not while I’m sitting with him,” Taylor Corbet said. “Aaron gets my full attention as long as I’m here.”

  “That’s nice,” Vilma responded just to say something. “How’s he doing?” She moved to the bed. Aaron was so incredibly still and pale. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said that he was—

  “Still unconscious, but I believe he’s healing,” Taylor said. “An engineer was by earlier to check on the healing ring we placed—”

  “What?” Vilma interrupted. “Healing ring? What’s that?”

  Taylor stood and reached across her son to turn on a small light above the bed. “We felt that we could better improve his chances if we were to assist him with the healing process.”

  Vilma’s anxiety grew. “And how does this healing ring work? What is it?”

  Taylor pulled Aaron’s sheet down to his waist, revealing a copper-colored ring with a glass center pulsing on his chest with an unearthly energy that seemed to mirror the beat of her boyfriend’s heart.

  “It’s an Unforgiven design,” Taylor explained. “It’s a machine that uses stray life energies to boost the healing potential of the individual.”

  Vilma couldn’t take her eyes from the circular machine. “And you couldn’t tell me about this?” she asked.

  “I just did, dear,” Taylor said. “It’s for his own good.”

  “But you could have come to me,” Vilma insisted. “You could have told me that you were going to attach some . . . some magickal machine to my boyfriend’s chest.”

  She could feel herself growing angrier by the second and reached down to take hold of Aaron’s other hand. It was cold.

  “It just would have been nice to know,” she said, fighting to control herself.

  “You’re right,” Taylor agreed. “We should have told you, but there is so much at stake that—”

  Vilma glared at his mother. “I have just as much say in his care as you. I should have been told.”

  “I’m his mother,” Taylor Corbet stated.

  “Sure,” Vilma said flatly. “I guess everybody has one, but I think there’s a little bit more to it than just a title.”

  Vilma saw a flash of anger in the woman’s eyes.

  “You think I deserve that.”

  Vilma squeezed Aaron’s hand tightly. “He thought you were dead.”

  “And you don’t think that tears me up inside?” Taylor’s voice began to rise. “Not a day went by that I didn’t think of him, out there, needing me.”

  Vilma refused to look at the woman.

  “I needed him as much as he needed me,” Taylor continued. “But I loved him too much to go to him. I had to remind myself, day after endless day, that being with him would have been dangerous to Aaron, and the rest of the world.”

  Curious, Vilma found herself responding. “You stayed away to protect him?”

  Taylor stared lovingly at her unconscious son. “That was the only thing that kept me away,” she said. “The man that I had loved—Aaron’s father—I had no idea who he truly was, or how powerful.”

  “Lucifer,” Vilma said.

  Taylor laughed, and then smiled. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I knew him as Sam.”

  “Sam?” Vilma asked. “Lucifer Morningstar called himself Sam?”

  Taylor laughed again, and the tears tumbled from her eyes. “He did.” She reached up to wipe her dampened face. “And to tell you the truth, he looked much more like a Sam to me than a Lucifer.”

  “So, you actually had no idea who he really was?” Vilma asked.

  Taylor shook her head slowly. “Not until after Aaron was born.”

  Vilma’s curiosity was getting the better of her.

  “How did you find out?”

  Aaron’s mother’s face grew very still. “It was after I’d given birth,” she said, her voice sounding distant. “An angel told me . . . his name was Mallus, and he told me of my love’s true identity, and how there were powerful forces out there in the world who would have used me, and my child, to acquire the power they wanted.”

  Vilma stared at the woman, as Taylor’s gaze lifted to meet her own.

  “But all that came after I’d already been declared dead, and Mallus was helping me to escape from the morgue.”

  THE HIMALAYAS

  The storm raged around the two angels, and Mallus stopped for a moment to get his bearings. They’d already passed through the nearly deserted town of Lukla—the threat of the possible end of the world having dramatically cut into tourism and folks’ desire to risk their lives climbing mountains.

  A raging snowstorm wasn’t helping matters much either.

  Things had changed quite dramatically since Mallus and his companion were last here.

  “Is it Thursday?” Tarshish, the last of the powerful angelic beings known as Malakim, suddenly asked.

  Mallus looked in his direction as the snow swirled about his face. The Malakim had raised his body temperature so the snow could not collect upon him.

  “I think so, why?” the fallen angel asked.

  “Sloppy joe night,” Tarshish said wistfully, referring to the old-age home where, until recently, he’d been hiding himself away. “I loved sloppy joe night.”

  Mallus sighed. It had been like this for their entire journey, the Malakim reminiscing about what he had left behind when they’d decided to help the Nephilim avert the decimation of the world. For their part, the two had embarked on a mission to retrieve the power of God that had been housed inside the Metatron—a heavenly being they had destroyed while working for the Architects in this very region countless millennia ago.

  Mallus squinted through the white and shifting haze, sensing the presence of other preternaturals nearby. He’d heard rumors that there was a tavern in these mountains for those of an unearthly disposition. It would be just the place to gather their thoughts—and perhaps some information to help them on their mission.

  “Perhaps it will be sloppy joe night wherever we’re going,” Mallus suggested, trudging effortlessly through the accumulating snow to where he sensed the tavern to be.

  “Do you think?” Tarshish asked. “Wouldn’t that be lovely.”

  “I wouldn’t consider sloppy joes lovely,” Mallus said, watching the mysterious tavern gradually take shape before him. If he were human, he would not have been able to see it.

  “Obviously you’ve never had the real deal. I wonder if they’d be made with hamburger,” Tarshish pondered. “Maybe yak? Wonder how that would taste?”

  Mallus ignored his companion’s ramblings as he studied the magickal sigils, warding off evil forces, that had been carved into the wood of the tavern door. A good sign, he thought as he lifted the latch and pushed inside.

  He recognized the smell almost immediately. It was the coppery tang of violence.

  It was the smell of murder.

  Blood was spattered everywhere, as were the remains of the supernatural bein
gs who had been unlucky enough to have stopped in for a drink.

  Nearly twenty large, apelike beasts stopped their feasting and glared at the intruders with glistening, yellow eyes. Their dingy white fur was matted with drying blood and other internal fluids.

  These creatures had many different names—abominable snowmen, bigfoots, skunk apes—but Mallus had always called them yetis.

  “Something tells me it’s not sloppy joe night,” Tarshish commented as the yetis roared their displeasure at the interruption of their meals and bounded across the tavern toward the two fallen angels.

  “On your toes!” Mallus yelled to his companion, running to meet the first of the beastly attackers.

  Though weakened by his fall from Heaven, the angel still had enough divine strength to deal with the likes of these filthy creatures. He pulled back his arm and delivered a punch to a yeti’s leathery face. The blow was solid, landing on the creature’s snout with a loud, satisfying snap. The woolly monster stumbled backward, its own dark blood streaming from its nose.

  “There’s more where that came from,” the former commander of the Morningstar’s army informed the beast, as Mallus readied for the next wave.

  The injured yeti emitted a terrible roar, leading the others in an all-out assault upon them. The monsters were on them in a wave of fur, fangs, and claws, each apparently starving for a feast of fallen angel flesh.

  Mallus had no intention of being a yeti’s meal. The angel soldier lashed out with his fists, shattering bone and rupturing internal workings with every blow. But there was confidence in the way the beasts fought, a self-assurance that showed in the savagery of their attack.

  They seemed to fear nothing.

  Mallus was yanked from the floor by the arm, and before he could react, his yeti captor sank its fangs into his shoulder, tugging at the flesh. The fallen angel screamed in pain, sinking his fingers into the tough, leathery flesh of the vile beast’s face and ripping it from the yeti’s skull. The snow creature released him with a gurgling grunt, while three others charged forward, driven mad by the scent of the angel’s blood.

  Despite his pain, Mallus continued to fight. But the more he lashed out, the more effort they put into trying to bring him down.