It stopped moving, and their eyes met. "You killed this one before."
He nodded. "Or one that looked just like it."
She nodded, then took up position to cover the lone door on this side of the tunnel.
"It was Ramiel." The weak voice stuttered from inside the upright SUV. Matt circled, shotgun raised, to point in the back seat where a familiar face stared back at him between two shredded bodies. Gaunt, with deep bags under his eyes made worse by the blood running down his face and neck, Nigel Rush had had his teeth replaced since last Matt saw him yammering on TV in his northern Georgia drawl, the pearly whites an improvement over the brown rot. Maggot-pale, his lips formed a thin, pink-white line across them.
"Mister Rush," Matt said. "You seem… out of place, here."
Rush coughed and struggled to undo his seatbelt, sagging back when his hand wouldn't cooperate. "It seems my expertise led to a certain notoriety. The Office of Planning and Development took note and recruited me in their efforts to close the gate. They were willing to overlook my religious proclivities, and I, in turn, found out that they were right and I was wrong. It appears in their enthusiasm to recruit they gathered in some powerful moles."
"Gate."
"Watchers escape with every passing month. Killing them sends them back for a time, but as you just witnessed it's all too short and growing shorter. With every bridge, Nyx's Gate – y'all call her Gerstner, like this contemporary name holds any significance to a being of such age – widens. There are perhaps sixty Watchers freed thus far, yet thousands ascend from the depths to cross into our world. When Semjaza slouches towards Bethlehem to be reborn, no force on Earth will stop him, and he will reward his daughter-mother with dominion over all."
"These bridges, how does she open them?"
Rush jerked back, surprise scrunching across his emaciated features. "With death." The unspoken 'duh' rang loud in Matt's mind. "Every death she causes, every person killed by an Aug or a Jade overdose, for you were both her creations, births a strand. Enough strands create a braid, and when it's strong enough it bores a hole from there to here."
A coughing spasm wracked his body, and his eyes fluttered. Matt pulled the first aid kit from his satchel, removed a syringe of adrenaline, and stabbed it into Rush's thigh. His eyes popped wide and he gasped, gagging on his own tongue, before settling back into the seat.
"How do we close them? How do we break the strands?"
Rush rolled his head left, to his dead companion. "This is Avery Jackson. Or was, before you killed him. His office is upstairs, 13-B. In it you will find detailed accounts of the sacrifices necessary to stop Gerstner, which have been done and which remain. A terrible task they gave themselves, to save the world by sacrificing the almost-innocent, but they would have succeeded had you not intervened, and we would all be safe."
"Sacrifices?"
His eyes fluttered closed. "You. Isuji Sakura. Your cursed wife and blessed son. Every aug and Jade user, their children. When no trace of Nyx's influence remains, her spell will fail, and her Gate will close. The egregoroi will fall back to the Pit, and drag the last of the Nephilim with them. You have to…"
His eyes closed.
"You have to kill them all."
His chest fell a final time. The whispers gasped out an elated babble, and Matt dropped to his knees behind the limo.
The world rocked and his eardrums burst. The door upstairs blew from the wall in a gout of flame, spinning end over end to crash into the concrete on the far side. Stumbling around falling debris, he scrambled toward Sakura's broken body, dashed across the floor and battered against the SUV by the force of the explosion.
He scooped her up and ran for the exit as the concrete cracked and crumbled around him. A dozen laser sights painted him as he approached the column of marines, now falling back in an ordered retreat from the collapsing structure. They exited onto the beach, awash in warm orange light, where many marines already stood and stared, gaping, a continuous blast of grit-filled air whipping their clothes toward the city.
Matt turned, and his heart fell. A mushroom cloud rose over the city, and around it the Cleveland skyline lay in ruins, the bones of buildings crumbling to the ground in a torrent of broken concrete and twisted steel. Shattered glass littered the streets, and bloody civilians stumbled and wailed over the bodies of loved ones.
"Was that nuclear?" Matt asked no one in particular.
"Negative," the calm female from before said, choking up as she continued. "Radiation is zero. Conventional weapon, several kiloton range."
"Casualties?"
"Fuck Jesus, they're all dead. Most of the 24th 1st, who knows how many civilians. A quarter million? Twice that?"
A roar rumbled through the city, greater than the rushing wind pulled toward the rising fireball. Streaks of flaming light shot from the mushroom cloud, rising into the night sky in great glowing arcs, first three, then ten, then a dozen. They banked and turned on enormous wings, flying ever higher and farther away, and their elation drowned out reason and hope.
At his feet, Sakura sat up, flexing the fingers on her intact hand, brushing sand from the wounds in the other.
"What did we do?"
Matt grunted. "We removed a threat to my family."
Her eyes rolled up to his, blazing with reflected light from the fireball. "At what expense?"
"Too big of one."
* * *
They debriefed via radio on the ride back to DC, a conversation that degenerated into an argument far too fast.
"We can't kill millions of people to save the world," Matt repeated.
"I'm not saying we can and I'm not saying it's the right thing to do," Marcia said. "I'm just saying that if any of that is even partly true, we need to know how much and what. We've got forensics techs going through the rubble, hoping for a needle in the haystack, but if they don't find anything we need to find out where we can learn more."
"And I don't want to say this," General Freudenberg added, "but we can't rule it out. If the only way to stop Gerstner is to remove her influence, then we need to keep that option on the table."
"YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT MY GODDAMNED FAMILY!"
"Which is why you can't be objective, Rowley, and I understand that. I'm just asking you to understand it, too. Put yourself in my shoes."
"He's right," Sakura said. "They must consider it."
"You're never going to imagine a world where your family has to die so that everyone else can live," Freudenberg added, "but goddammit if that's the case then somebody has to imagine it."
Matt banged his head against the metal wall behind him. "Rush was lying."
"He wasn't." Sakura's shattered hand had mostly healed, the skin fresh and pink in contrast to the creamier brown of her bicep. "He believed every word as it came from his mouth."
"All the more reason I need to get my family out of DC, then. General, we're leaving tonight."
"No, you're not."
Matt closed his eyes, let the thrum of the rotors buffet his murderous impulse. The whispers chittered and mewled, psychic background noise urging him to give in. "Excuse me, General, but did I hear you right? Are you kidnapping my family?"
"No, Sergeant, we are not. But we are holding them in protective custody for as long as we need to in order to determine that they are not a threat to the whole human race. And frankly, with the Kellett administration on the horizon, we're the only friends you've got."
"We're friends, but my wife and son can't leave your facility."
"Correct, Sergeant. We will do everything we can to make them feel safe and welcome, just as we have these past weeks, but we're no longer pretending to ignore the elephant in the room. Your son is extranormal, and we don't have a sufficient handle on the extent of the threat. In light of that, we're going to hold your son and wife until we're satisfied they're safe outs
ide of our custody, but in all other ways we're going to allow them the rights of any other United States citizen."
Matt's heart broke in a million pieces, shards of honor and manhood that could never fully heal. He sucked in a breath, swallowed, and spoke. "Yeah, I get it. But. But if you want to prevent violence, there are going to have to be ground rules."
"Of course."
Matt told him the first three, and the rest would wait until he spoke to his wife.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Was this you?”
Matt looked up at Monica's words, then shifted his eyes from her to the TV. The devastated buildings of Cleveland's downtown stood in stark contrast to the beauty of the lake beyond. Streams of civilians overwhelmed hospitals and mobbed both Red Cross and FEMA tents, and a flood of first responders poured through the wreckage in search of survivors. Matt knew that a more focused team searched through the epicenter, not for the living or even the dead, but for information.
She had some notion that she couldn't leave the building without an escort, and had revealed that FADE was spying on their family, going so far as to collect hair and skin without their knowledge and permission, but had consented to the continued arrangement on reassurances from Matt that he only half-believed.
He snatched up the remote and unmuted the TV when President Kellett came on, a day after what was supposed to have been a triumphant inauguration but had instead been a private-but-televised affair inside the Oval Office. He looked healthy despite his age, with no sign of tremor or illness, and his voice carried the calm assurance of a skilled orator.
"My fellow Americans." He swept the speech from the podium and looked straight at the camera. "It pains me to come before you on what should be a day of celebration. This act of terror on our shores is unprecedented in American history, a catastrophe of terrible magnitude that extinguished the lives of half a million of our fellow citizens.
But it is not a man-made catastrophe, oh no. This Office has learned that mere minutes before five hundred thousand souls were stuffed from existence, the diabolical creature in human form known as Matt Rowley descended into the depths below the epicenter with his pagan cohort, the fiend Sakura Isuji. These creatures, these demons, conspire to rob us of our liberty, of our lives, of our souls. And in that they are not alone.
"Deep in the bowels of your government – your government – lurks a cult. A cult! This secret society amasses to it all knowledge of the profane and unholy, and with that knowledge seeks to steal from the Almighty the keys to the divine. And God, God our Savior, he will not stop them if we do not. We must gird ourselves with the Shield of Faith, the Helmet of Salvation, and the Sword of Truth, which is the Word of God.
"And with that Sword we must purge the wicked, root out the spiritual cancer in our midst, cleanse our nation of the perverse, the vile, the satanic, so that God may again make our country great!" He pounded on the podium – the pulpit – and continued in a much softer tone.
"My fellow Americans. It pains me to do this, but I have instructed the military to root out those elements of society that bring us harm, that have opened the gates to Tartarus and let bleed through the black creatures that plague our world. We know now that that scourge, that darkness, that evil that was the drug Jade is not just harmful, oh, no, it is demonic! And those who have used it, though recovered, are irrevocably tainted. Fellow citizens, you must bring them to us, all of them, so that we might shine God's light upon them and purge them of the wickedness that has taken root in their hearts."
He spoke for twenty minutes, declaring war – literal war – against all 'demonic' and 'unholy' forces, referencing Matt and Adam Rowley not once or twice but on four separate occasions. He called for proactive self-defense, and encouraged all "true Americans" to take up arms against their spiritual oppressors, to capture or kill any and all who sought to bring the world to ruin. And in the end he declared martial law, with the Joint Chiefs standing behind him to give the unconstitutional, immoral action the semblance of legitimacy.
"Fuck, baby," Monica said, mouth still open. "We got to get our folks the hell out of White Spruce."
He rubbed her shoulder. "They've got nothing to worry about, Mon. Marcia's manning all our security now – she'll send some people to make sure they stay safe."
* * *
Kellett stepped off the stage and shuffled over to Janet LaLonde. The bauble between her breasts tugged at him, strangled his will, encased his mind in a fog of terrible truth: that by virtue of his actions he had fallen beneath God's notice, to wallow in the devil's playground of rank, fetid humanity. To know that the Almighty exists and to persist eternally outside of His grace… he didn't know of any greater punishment, and only after LaLonde had entered his office that summer day did he truly understand the meaning of hell.
"Great speech." Her smile would have driven the old him to fury, but outside of God's love he held no passion, not even for the creature that had enslaved him. Her voice lowered and she leaned in to whisper. His heart caught in his throat at a glimpse of the orb that contained his wretched soul, a swirling cascade of brilliant colors more beautiful than anything on the cursed Earth. "Beg off for the evening as soon as is expedient. We have a date."
He smiled, shook her hand, a cold worm that scraped across his flesh with a million microscopic barbs. "Thank you, Janet. Could you please cancel my meetings for this evening? I have some pressing business to attend to."
"Of course."
She slid away, yet the fog remained. The useless, sinful meat of his body went through the motions of an after-speech analysis, pointless wonkism for people interested in being anything other than a true sword of truth, prevaricators and triangulators who sought to maintain power through deceit and pander.
They spoke of Russia and China leaving the UN, of that traitor Smith declaring himself Eternal Emperor of the Bahamas and Florida Keys, of riots throughout the South and West in reaction to his speech. And they stank of cologne and lust for domination, though his stomach would not roil. After a time he excused himself without explanation, and met Janet on the White House helipad.
He didn't ask where they were going, because he didn't care, couldn't care. Curiosity, creativity, faith, devotion – all the positives of existence, all the blessings of the Almighty hung trapped in her cleavage, leaving him nothing, worse than nothing.
They raced across the landscape at hundreds of miles an hour, exchanging pleasantries with the Secret Service details sharing the cabin of Marine One, a sixteen-passenger stealth helicopter with a million bells and whistles he could neither name nor care about. Below them towns burned, gunshots popped, people died and babies were born, sinners sinned and God damned them for it. After some hours they landed, and the Secret Service fanned out, one of them interrogating the grizzled old man driving the tracked mining vehicle that awaited their arrival.
At Janet's suggested Kellett ordered the man left alone, so they boarded the monster with one agent and descended into a hole in the ground. Treads kicked up rock dust as they delved ever lower into the mountain, but he couldn't summon the wherewithal to cough or cover his nose. She directed their driver with small whispers, directing him through the winding network with quiet confidence.
At last they arrived at a pair of blast doors, massive steel things big enough to let in a tank, emblazoned with the Seal of the President of the United States. A camera and computer screen lurked next to them, mounted in the rock wall as if the most normal thing in the world. Janet looked at him and then at it.
He got out and approached. It blipped awake, formed a pair of eyes, and a soft female voice said, "Retinal Scan Required."
Leaning in, he let it scan his eyes, and the doors rumbled open. The driver hopped out, then dragged a steel pick from the trunk. Janet, Kellett, the driver, and the guard walked inside a network of rooms reminiscent of a submarine, though much larger. Janet led them through
the warren with confident steps until at last they reached a rock wall with a black cable snaking through it. She put her hand on the wall, closed her eyes, and sighed.
"So close."
"Pardon?" the agent asked. He hadn't said much throughout their journey, but eyed the president and his chief advisor with a burning curiosity.
"Nothing," she said. "Break it down."
The miner stepped up and swung the pick, putting a small chip in the wall.
"Begging your pardon, Mr President, but what's all this about?" The secret serviceman scowled at the brawny, bearded man hammering his way through a solid stone wall.
Janet whispered in the President's ear, and he spoke. "That's enough, son. Now give me your gun."
"Excuse me?" The guard stepped back and put his hand on his holster.
"You heard me, son. You won't be needing it, and we don't need an accident when you see what's on the other side of that wall."
"Do it," Janet snapped. Rock crumbled behind them.
The agent looked from her to the president, scowling, but produced his weapon and handed it over. The grip felt rough and too cold in his hands. Kellett had never liked weapons, and resented living in a world where a holy man needed armed guards. He flicked the safety with his thumb on the way up and shot the agent in the face.
The driver whirled, wall forgotten, and met the same fate. His brains sprayed through the opening he'd wrought, and his body tumbled out of the way.
Janet smiled and patted Kellett's cheek, her lizard touch bringing a shiver of anticipation. "Well done, Mr President."
She lifted his soul from her breasts by the chain, slipped it over her head, and put it around his neck. The light in the orb died, and Kellett cried out as emotion flooded back into to his heart. Hundreds of thousands dead and a looming civil war that would take countless more, innocents driven to acts of inhuman barbarity by the words that had spilled from his lips. Already damned, he had nothing left to lose.
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