“Look, trust me,” I said finally. “No one knows we’re here, no one knows we’re coming. Compared to us, stealth bombers are painted bright pink, with big neon signs on them saying, Hello, sailor; come and get me! Our only worry is avoiding other aircraft, because we won’t show up on their radar. We’re staying well above all the usual commercial flight paths, but there’s always the chance of bumping into some secret military job, or even the occasional UFO.”
“Hold everything,” said Molly. “UFOs, as in flying saucers? Close encounters of the extremely unlikely kind, where they stick things up your bottom? Really?”
“Not as such,” I said. “But there are a hundred and thirty-seven different alien species currently running around on Planet Earth that we know of. Most of them we keep in line through various long-established treaties and agreements; others we just step on hard now and again, to remind them not to make waves. But there are always a few Unidentified Objects zipping through the stratosphere, on their own inscrutable business, and they can be a damned nuisance sometimes.”
“Real aliens…” said Molly. “That is so cool!”
I had to smile. “You don’t have any trouble that we’re on our way to slap down a bunch of soul-eating demons, but the thought of aliens gets you all excited?”
“That’s different,” Molly said stubbornly. “I just don’t tend to bump into aliens in my line of work. All I know is magic. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and necromancers, no problems. Deal with them every day. But most of what I know of aliens comes from Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Tell me that is not representative of most aliens, please. There must be some like ET?”
“Would you rather have the truth, or a comforting lie?” I said.
“Oh, shut up. Are we nearly there yet?”
We landed at a private airfield, far away from anywhere civilised that might ask awkward questions about things like passports and visas. The family owns or leases such places in countries all over the world, for just such occasions as this. (Through a series of concealing false names and cutouts, of course.) We all filed off the Blackhawkes, and the heat hit us like a hammer. The sun was directly overhead in a cloudless sky, and my skin actually smarted just from the impact of the sudden heat. I armoured up immediately, in the interests of self-preservation. The family didn’t need a strike force leader with sunstroke. All the other torced Droods immediately followed suit, leaving the rest of the strike force looking distinctly mutinous. Molly worked a quick but subtle magic, and after that it was always shade wherever they happened to be standing.
Mr. Stab, Roger Morningstar, and Janissary Jane didn’t seem to notice the heat at all. They’d endured much worse, in their time.
I had a quick chat with the guy running the airfield for us, an old rogue with a dark, wrinkled face who’d served the family well and loyally for many years. And would continue to do so, as long as the money kept coming. My armour didn’t throw him at all; he’d seen it before. Though he did compliment me on my new colour scheme. I asked him what he knew about the unusual business down on the Nazca Plain, and he told me what he could, in excellent English.
It seemed foreigners had been coming to the plain in small groups for several months now. All nationalities, all types, but not the usual tourists. These were strange people, even for foreigners, talking and acting oddly, though he found it hard to be specific about what bothered him about them. As though they were always thinking of something else, was the best he could manage. They bought many things in the surrounding towns, and always paid cash. The local merchants loved them, and hoped they’d stay forever. When I pressed him on what these strangers had been buying, he said mostly technology, off-the-shelf stuff and special orders, and an extraordinary amount of livestock. All kinds. Presumably for slaughtering, since none of the foreigners professed any interest in farming, and they bought far more than they could ever hope to eat.
I thanked him and slipped him a little extra for his trouble, just to cement friendly relations. I didn’t need to worry that he might talk about us; he knew better than to talk about Drood business. He’d helped bury the previous airfield owner after he got a bit too talkative. No one betrays the Droods and lives to boast of it.
Janissary Jane got the expeditionary force sorted out into squads and loaded onto the fleet of jeeps the owner had provided, and we set off on the long, hard journey to the Nazca Plains. There was no scenery and no road, just an endless jolting ride across a sullen, empty desert under a baking sun. The trip seemed to last forever, but finally we came to a halt at the base of a cliff overlooking the plain. We disembarked from the jeeps, did a certain amount of stretching and stamping our feet, and then we climbed the steep rise all the way to the top and looked out over the plain. Callan Drood was waiting for us there, looking very sunburned, and extremely pissed off that we hadn’t brought any cold drinks with us. Molly conjured him up an iced bottle of Pepsi, and he drank it so fast he gave himself a headache.
I looked down at what the Loathly Ones were doing on the Nazca Plain. From this height they looked like ants, swarming around and over the huge structure that rose up from the heavily lined and grooved stone plain like a single alien skyscraper. It had to be three hundred feet tall now, a strange and unearthly mixture of styles and materials. Its shape made no sense at all. My mind couldn’t seem to cope with the unexpected dimensions and distortions. Just looking at it made my eyes hurt. Callan came forward to join me.
“It’s better if you look at it for just a few moments at a time. I’m pretty sure we’re looking at something that exists in more than three spatial dimensions, and what we see is only our minds trying to make sense of it. Don’t ask me what the hell it is, or what it’s for, but the Loathly Ones are all over it, all day and all night, inside and out. There’s a single opening at the base, and a lot of what goes in never comes out again. I get the feeling it’s almost finished. The pace of work has accelerated in the last twelve hours, like they’re fighting a deadline. Where are my cold drinks? I was promised cold drinks. And I’d better get a torc out of this. I’ve spent weeks out here, dodging the bastards’ patrols. Very heavily armed patrols, I might add. They kill anyone who gets too close, even clearly harmless tourists, whether they’ve seen anything or not.”
I gestured for him to shut up, and he did. My silver mask allowed me to zoom in on the towering edifice down on the plain, so I could study details as though I was right on top of them. The alien structure struck me as much as a machine as a building, designed to do … something, but the more I looked, the less sense it made. It didn’t take me long to discover what they’d been doing with so much livestock. The Loathly Ones had incorporated bits of them into the structure. Parts of the tower were clearly technological, even if I couldn’t identify it, but other parts were just as clearly organic. Living flesh, whole organs, bloody guts and connective tissues, even entire brains and heads. All alive, maintained as part of the functioning structure. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I’ve seen my share of alien and other-dimensional technology.
Janissary Jane came forward to stand on my other side, and I described what I was seeing to her. She nodded slowly.
“I have seen…something like this, before. It’s not a hellgate. Not as such. But it’s definitely a gateway of some kind.”
“So they’re planning to open a door to somewhere else,” said Molly, joining us to show she wasn’t going to be left out of things. “Maybe they’ve heard you declared war on them, Eddie, and they’re running for home while they’ve still got the chance.”
“A nice thought, but no,” I said. “They were building this long before I took control of the family.”
“And I don’t think this was designed just to open a gateway to Outside,” Janissary Jane said slowly. “It looks more like it’s designed to summon…something, from Outside, and bring it through into our world.”
“Reinforcements?” said Molly. “More Loathly Ones?”
&n
bsp; “No,” said Janissary Jane. “With the power this thing uses, it would have to be something more powerful…something far worse than the Loathly Ones.”
“Something worse?” said Callan. “What could be worse than soul-eating demons?”
“Stick around,” I said. “If we don’t shut this thing down before they can open their gateway, you might just find out.”
“I want to go home,” said Callan. “I hate it here.” Molly produced another iced bottle of Pepsi for him, and he wandered off to kick moodily at the unyielding ground.
We all took turns to peer over the edge of the cliff and study the movements of the tiny figures scurrying around down below. There were hundreds of them, men and women and even some children, scrambling all over the huge structure with no regard for their own safety. Heat haze muddied the air between us and them, even with the help of the silver masks, but the extreme temperatures didn’t seem to bother the Loathly Ones at all.
No one was obviously in charge, no orders were given, but they all seemed to know exactly what to do. When I zoomed in on any particular individual worker, the strangeness of them hit me hard. They didn’t move like humans move, and their faces were blank. Sometimes they would all move at once, in perfect precision, like flocking birds. There was nothing human left in them but their shapes; everything else had been driven out by the Loathly Ones.
This was all new to Mr. Stab, and he insisted on having it all explained to him. So I did my best to give him the short version.
The Loathly Ones come from somewhere else, Outside of space and time as we understand them. They have no physical presence in our world, so to survive here they have to invade a body, mentally as well as physically. Preferably human, but not always. When a Loathly One invades, or infects, a human body it eats or corrupts or drives out the soul, opinions differ, and inhabits the remaining husk. Which soon burns out from the unbearable stresses and strains the new owner puts on it. But even after the body dies, and slowly decays, it still goes on, driven by the unearthly energies of the Loathly One. Until the body finally falls apart, and then the Loathly One goes looking for a new host. We call the infected humans drones. Basically, they’re zombies driven by an alien will, for alien purposes.
They destroy lives, and eat souls. And the family brought them here, for its own purposes. We should have known they’d get out of control.
“Sometimes they take over whole towns,” said Harry unexpectedly. “They start with one family, and then take over the entire community, house by house. When they’ve taken control of everyone, they force the town out of our reality and into some kind of pocket dimension, hidden from human detection. Then they use this hidden base to launch attacks on adjoining towns. Luckily they always give themselves away by being too greedy. The family wipes these towns out as fast as we find them.
“I was involved in one such cleansing, a few years back. It was in France, down in the Bordeaux region. They call such towns ghoulvilles. The local authorities sent out a call for help after they stumbled across one during a routine missing persons investigation. I was the nearest field agent, so I took the call. Joined up with a French demon specialist; Mallorie, her name was. A bit bookish, but she knew her business. The Armourer whipped up a dimensional key and shipped it out to us by the usual unnatural express route. And Mallorie and I led a French special forces unit into the ghoulville.”
He stopped for a moment, remembering. His face was calm, reflective, but his eyes were haunted.
“Terrible place. Every nightmare you’ve ever had. The light was fierce, almost too bright for human eyes to bear. The gravity fluctuated, and directions seemed to switch back and forth when you weren’t looking. The air was barely breathable, and it stank of blood and offal and rot. We’d come in hoping to find someone to rescue, but it soon became clear we were too late. There were men and women and even children all over the ghoulville, but all of them were infected. The Loathly Ones had eaten their souls. The children were the worst. They tried to hide what they were, to trick us into getting too close, but they had no idea how to act like children.
“They attacked us. Not even trying to act like humans anymore. They came running from every direction, flailing their arms like retarded children. Came at us with all kinds of weapons, with bare hands, and even bared teeth. We killed them all. Shot them down, cut them down, stamped their lying faces into the bloody ground. Something about them, human but not human, something that used to be human but was now hopelessly corrupted, drove us all crazy. We killed and killed, up one street and down the next, kicking corpses out of the way, till the gutters ran thick with blood. Some tried to surrender, but it was just a trick, to let them get close to us.
“When we were finished, we burned the town down. Left nothing standing. It took us hours, to be sure we’d got all of them. We searched all the houses, sometimes dragging them out of hiding places under stairs, or in the backs of wardrobes. By the end, as we tramped back out of the burning ghoulville, and back to our own world, even hardened French ex-paratroopers were weeping openly. Sometimes … I dream I’m still back there, and always will be.”
He looked around. We were all listening intently. He’d dropped his armour so we could all see his face while he talked, but now he armoured up again, becoming a faceless silver statue. As though he could keep out the memories that still haunted him.
“So when we get down there,” he said, “remember; they may look like people, but they’re not. They’re demons. Kill them for what they’ve done. And for what they make us do, to put things right again.”
The watching Droods nodded, and murmured quietly to each other, hefting their weapons. Mr. Stab was still looking down at the plain, apparently unmoved by what he’d heard. But I liked Harry rather better, for hearing what he’d been through. And I even liked Roger Morningstar a little more, when he put an arm around Harry’s silver shoulders, to comfort him.
“So,” said Mr. Stab, still not looking around. “The infected humans are drones. And that thing down there is …?”
“A nest,” I said. “And we’re the exterminators.”
“Splendid,” said Mr. Stab. “When do we start?”
Janissary Jane split us up into the arranged squads, with designated team leaders. Every group had some torced Droods, to lead the charge and, hopefully, soak up some of the initial punishment. She gave us a brief refresher talk on tactics, which basically boiled down to Don’t bunch up. Don’t get separated. Kill everything down there that isn’t us and Destroy that thing they’re building before they can get it working. There were no last-minute questions, no discussions or dropouts. We were all ready for action. Molly called up the spell she’d been working on since we got there, and a great wind arose, picked us all up surprisingly gently, and carried us down the side of the cliff to deposit us safely on the Nazca Plain.
We all started running the moment we hit the ground, heading straight for the towering structure before us. The drones saw us coming and dropped everything to run straight at us, blocking the way with their bodies. Noises came from their distorted mouths, but there was nothing human in the sound. Some had improvised weapons, most just had bare hands, with fingers curled like claws. There was no emotion in their faces, or no emotion we could read, and they bared their teeth like animals. They weren’t even trying to pretend at being human anymore. They saw the armoured forms leading the charge and knew we were Droods.
More of them came running, from every direction. Men, women, children, even some animals. The Loathly Ones aren’t fussy about what they possess. It’s all flesh to them. But even as our first squads slammed into the first wave of drones, even more came swarming out of the single opening at the base of the towering structure. More and more and more of them, far more than the structure should have been able to contain. Instead of the hundreds of drones we’d been expecting, suddenly there were thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands…and still more and more came running and howling out onto the plain from the
single opening.
The fighting had barely begun, and already we were hopelessly outnumbered. But I couldn’t call for a retreat. I’d committed us to this assault. We had to go on, and we had to win, before the Loathly Ones could open their gateway. Our two forces tore into each other, silver fists beating down inhuman faces, but already a terrible sense of hopelessness was seeping through me.
There were just so many of them…
The drones hit us hard, all of them supernaturally strong from the alien energies burning within their stolen, dead, or dying bodies. They threw themselves upon the first torced Droods, trying to bowl them over through sheer force of numbers. When that didn’t work, they clung on to silver arms, clasped silver legs, trying to force them off balance and drag them down. The armoured Droods stood firm, striking about them with their silver fists. Human skulls smashed and splintered under the terrible force of these blows, necks snapped, and heads were torn right off bodies. The armoured Droods broke backs and arms and legs, smashed in chests, and stamped on heads. Blood and guts flew on the air, and ran in streams down gleaming silver armour. Dozens of drones died in the first few moments of the battle, but the sheer mass of numbers soaked up the momentum of our charge, and all too soon we were stopped dead in our tracks. Killing and killing, but making no progress.
The Droods without armour opened up with the weapons the Armourer had provided. Heavy-duty hand cannon, grenade launchers, and even pointing bones and curse throwers. The drones fell in ranks as the guns raked back and forth, mowing them down, but there were always more drones, pressing forward, forcing their way past the beleaguered armoured Droods. We hit the drones with everything we had, and it wasn’t enough. They didn’t care about the damage they took. They felt no pain or fear or horror. A hundred could die, if it meant one would get through to kill.
Daemons Are Forever sh-2 Page 18
