Merciless

by Robin Parrish

  "You were there!" Payton roared, a terrible sound that was louder than anyone thought the British man could speak. "You saw what I did to those people! You saw what Oblivion made me do!"

  Alex's mind filled with images of a possessed Payton cutting, hacking, stabbing, and slicing his way through countless people while on Oblivion's march.

  Counting the coalition soldiers he'd taken out ... there were hundreds of them. Possibly thousands.

  "You're an assassin!" she yelled. "You kill people for a living! How is what Oblivion made you do any different?"

  "I DON'T KILL THE INNOCENT!!" he thundered. "I have never killed the innocent! I knock off serial murderers, rapists, career criminals ... the ones who have no intention of changing. But never do I take a job that endangers an innocent!"

  Silence filled the space as each person digested this in turn.

  Payton spoke up again. "You don't want to hear it, but this final confrontation is the reason he and I are both mentioned on the Dominion Stone. We know now why the Bringer was created. And now I know why the Thresher was created. I am here to keep him in check. If anything should go wrong, I am the only person alive capable of taking him down. It was meant to happen this way. It's the only way."

  Alex's eyes flared, and the menace she felt pulsing through her veins overflowed from her and filled everyone in the room. "You will not touch him."

  "I will," Payton said, stepping toe-to-toe with her. "I swore in an oath of blood long ago that I would be the one to kill him. I have the weapon forged millennia ago of purest silver. I was meant to do this, it is my purpose, it is the reason I died in that cave ten years ago and was revived. In killing the Bringer, I am fulfilling the function for which I was born."

  "Try it and I swear I'll stop you."

  "Don't embarrass yourself, love."

  "I've stopped you before. I could reduce you to a quivering blob of infantile hysterics right here and now! And maybe I will! Ask me, it's long overdue that someone took you down a peg, Thresher!"

  "Why so much emotion over one man?" Payton said, shaking his head, incredulous. "Grant of all people would approve of my intentions. He would do everything in his own power to take down Oblivion, if he were here."

  "Why am I trying to explain myself to some machine, like he's a normal person with normal feelings? What makes you think you could ever understand anything about real human emotions?" Alex rebutted.

  Payton spat upon the ground where Alex stood, and she jumped back an inch. "Whereas your life experience is summed up entirely in selfishness and need. What do you know of pain and misery and loss? Have you ever lost someone you loved more than you love yourself?"

  "YES!!" she screamed.

  "WHO?" he shouted.

  "Who do you think!" she said, and now she was crying with very real tears while shouting at the top of her lungs. "I love him, all right! I was-I am-I'm in love with Grant!"

  Everyone but Devlin looked at one another nervously, and no one dared make a sound.

  Alex caught her breath and then spoke again, deflated. "I love him. I can't let him go. I won't."

  Even Payton was looking down now, examining his own feet. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. "If what you say is true ... then you, above all, must let him go."

  "The way you let go of Morgan?"

  From a distant corner of the room, someone gasped. The rest dared not make a sound. Every eye was on Payton, because Alex had just crossed the uncrossable line.

  Payton was lethal, and Alex could feel it. It was taking everything within him not to strike Alex where she stood.

  "Wait-Morgan's Ring!" Ethan exclaimed, breaking the moment. "We have to have all 299 Rings, according to what Morgan said in that video, and without hers, we're still one short. We need to find it before we can go to Jerusalem-"

  "No need," Payton said, still staring down Alex. Without facing Devlin or moving from his position at all, he whipped out his sword and cut a sideways gash into the older man's shirt. Hanging there over his heart was the last Ring of Dominion, dangling from a thin gold chain. "Saw the bulge when I grabbed him."

  "Of course," Daniel said, nodding. "He would already know everything Morgan told us. And that only proves that it's true-that all 299 of us stand some real chance of stopping Oblivion! He'd want to keep the last Ring close to himself, so he didn't run the risk of someone else finding it. If he had it on him, he knew we didn't have it. But we have to hurry ..."

  Daniel stepped forward and tugged hard on the gold chain so that it snapped. He tossed the Ring to Ethan, who put it in the bag with the others.

  "Where in the Old City is he going?" Ethan asked Devlin.

  "Where would you go, if you were Oblivion?" Devlin replied.

  "The Temple Mount," Alex and Payton both said at the same time.

  "Of course," Ethan remarked. "The Dome of the Rock, original site of Solomon's Temple. The most significant spiritual location in the world. Where better to defile-"

  "Wait, I don't buy it," Alex chimed in, her brows knitted together in furious thought and her tone completely changed from just a moment before.

  The others stared at her with curiosity, with the sole exception of Daniel, who caught on at once. His eyes lit up with a newfound energy, and he nodded at her.

  "If Oblivion is so all-powerful," Alex went on, "then desecrating a sacred site is not a very compelling reason to wait this long to finish us off. He could've wiped every living creature from the face of the earth any time he wanted. What difference does it really make where he's located when he works his big whammy?"

  No one responded.

  "It's not Oblivion showing restraint or patience. It's Grant," she concluded.

  "But Grant didn't survive the transformation," Daniel argued, even though his voice betrayed the fact that he wanted to believe it.

  Devlin turned to face Alex. "Oblivion waited to enact his plan according to the specific series of events that the prophecy-"

  "Forget the prophecy!" Alex shouted. "You said that even the Creator swore not to get involved in matters of human free will. So what else is there that's powerful enough to hold Oblivion back? It's got to be Grant! Wherever he is, whatever he is-he still has some influence over Oblivion's actions, and it's him that's kept Oblivion from ending this until now. Grant is still in this, and he's bought us some time. So we're not going to waste it-we're going to finish this thing."

  "Alex, that's an awfully big leap to think that Grant could still be . . ." Ethan said, shaking his head.

  "But," Nora spoke up, her voice clouded with doubt, "what if we can't get through to Grant? Oblivion is too powerful for any of us. What if we can't-"

  "There are other sources of power in this world than death or telekinesis or magic Rings," Alex replied. "And if you didn't learn that in all the time you spent with Grant, then I don't know why you're still here. There's power in words. There's power in tears. And there's power in blood. I promise you, this is not over."

  "There's also power in steel, and that's good enough for me," Payton proclaimed, placing a hand on the hilt of the weapon at his side. "The rest of you can do what you want. I'm done waiting. Sit here and wait for the blast wave to reach you, for all I care. I'm going to find out what happens when that prophecy about a final confrontation between the Bringer and the Thresher comes true."

  "WHAT IS THE POINT of this, Grant Borrows?" asked the man Grant fought with, still tearing at him with all he was worth. "Why do you fight a battle you know you cannot ultimately win?"

  Even as he struggled against this creature in this place of dark, black nothingness, his thoughts raced back to something Payton had said to him as they trekked together into the bowels of the Secretum's underground city. And to what Payton's observation about the nature of the universe had made him think to himself ...

  "Because," he answered, "I believe our actions have consequences that reach beyond anything we can see. Because standing in the face of darkness and choosing not to succum
b to it is the most powerful thing anyone can ever do."

  Mirror Grant pulled away and stood up, extricating himself from the fight.

  Grant stood too, ready to tackle him again, but he froze at the sight. His twin was covered in blood, bruised, battered, and beaten.

  "Why?" the doppelganger asked.

  "Because ... maybe the fight ... is more important than the outcome."

  The duplicate man placed both hands behind his back. He didn't smile, he didn't frown, he didn't argue. He looked upon Grant as though meeting him for the first time.

  "You see it at last," the other man said. "The answers have been in front of you all this time, but only now do you finally allow yourself to see the truth of who you are. Who you have always been . .

  A bright light flashed against the emptiness, and Grant was staring at himself, running through the underground tunnel that led away from the Inveo Technologies plant. Hannah was far ahead, calling for him to hurry, but he was talking on his cell phone. "There are no coincidences," said Daniel's voice into his ear.

  Another flash, and Morgan was sitting in one of the bedrooms at the old asylum, talking to an elderly Hispanic woman. "Your friend," said the old woman known as Marta, "is part of something that stretches back throughout history. Those like him have been with us since the very beginning."

  Flash. Grant was sitting in his penthouse condo at the top of the Wagner Building, talking to Daniel face-to-face for the first time. "Where you see random occurrences," Daniel said, "I see design. I see meaning. I see purpose."

  Flash. Grant was on an airplane, sitting next to Morgan. "You are more than I ever had any right to hope you would become, after all you've been through," she said. "You're kind, compassionate, strong. You place the welfare of others above your own."

  The images faded away, replaced instantly by the horribly damaged face of the man who looked exactly like him. Grant was sickened by what he saw. He'd beaten this man, this being, to a pulp. He was no hero, he was a ten-year-old brat in a man's body who had frequent temper tantrums.

  How could he be responsible for hurting someone this way?

  "Others see more in you than you see in yourself," the double said. "This is always the way it is.

  "I'm sorry ..." Grant blurted out. "I'm sorry about everything."

  The other man smiled through his broken teeth and bruised face. "You're not the first to wrestle with me, you know. People do it every day. And in the end, it doesn't really matter."

  As Grant watched, the injuries across the other man's face and body faded and vanished, until he was whole once more.

  "What matters are the choices I make," Grant said.

  The other man nodded.

  Grant felt himself smile. It was a most pleasant sensation that he had nearly forgotten.

  "I think I know who you are now," Grant said. "It is you, isn't it?"

  "It always has been."

  "You're nothing like I expected you to be," Grant admitted.

  The other man actually laughed, and it was a warm, gentle laugh that was soothing and refreshing to Grant's soul.

  "So what happens now?" Grant asked.

  "This is your story, Grant," the other man replied. "How do you want it to end?"

  Alex watched the skies.

  No birds sang in the air above Jerusalem. No leaves rustled, nor did the dying trees provide soothing shade.

  The clouds above roiled and churned like never before, billowing to incredible size in mere seconds, and then vanishing in a blink. The fire behind the clouds burned with a new intensity as well, desperately seeking to break free from the clouds that held it back, and Alex could swear she felt greater heat than before radiating down on them from so high above.

  Wild animals roamed across the black desert, savages searching for prey of any kind. Even non-carnivorous creatures had been driven wild and hungered for blood and meat instead of plants.

  Jerusalem was dead or dying, breathing its last weary gasps before a restless death. Not even a breeze brushed against the ancient city to cool its wounds.

  No longer resting on a hill, Jerusalem had collapsed into a valley shaped like a shallow bowl, just one week before the DarkWorld was born. Many of her ancient buildings had fallen during the event, reduced to smoking heaps of white Jerusalem Stone. The death toll was catastrophic. Now it was burning, destitute. Writhing in a pain all its own.

  Jerusalem had succumbed to Hell.

  The DarkWorld was an unnaturally quiet place, thanks to the way people fled from Oblivion's coming. But pandemonium ruled Jerusalem's streets as Alex led her people through the outskirts of the city. Hundreds of thousands of souls had fled in panic to the refuge Jerusalem provided, but now they were trying with all their might to get out.

  Everyone knew that Oblivion had come to town.

  Numerous languages were represented among the shouted exclamations from the people, but Alex made out a few snatches of "The Destroyer is here!" and "It's the end of the world!" or "The Evil One has come to Jerusalem!"

  There was so much to take in, but Alex kept finding herself watching the skies.

  From an Eastern vantage point at the far edge of the Jaffa Road, the New City was a stark contrast to the Old, with modern architecture and automobiles, posh hotels, government buildings, and pocket neighborhoods tucked here and there. Very little of it was untouched by the sunken earth.

  The Old City lay in the distance ahead, to the southeast of their position, near the bottom-most part of the bowl-shaped valley. Her historic walls made of white Jerusalem Stone were all but gone, blasted away by Grant when he was here last, in a fit of uncontrollable frustration. He hadn't meant to do it, Alex knew. But after days and days of cleaning up dead bodies and destroyed historic sites, he could no longer keep his emotions-which had always had a strong link to his powers-in check. The display of raw, awesome force had terrified Jewish authorities, who then turned on him, no longer welcoming his help but threatening war should he refuse to leave the country's borders.

  A horrific thought occurred to Alex. What if she was wrong about Grant slowing Oblivion's plans? What if Oblivion had selected this site from which to end the world because he was getting even in some way for this residual memory he still had? Or, as Devlin inferred, was this some inescapable bit of instinct or programming that he simply could not deter? He was an ancient creature; perhaps instinct drove him to this place.

  No matter the outcome of the events about to unfold, she would probably never know why this location was chosen. She only knew she was not happy to be back here.

  Alex asked Daniel, Tucker, and Xue to come with her. Nora, Hector, Mrs. Edeson, and her son Ryan she sent off in a branching direction that would run them parallel to their path. Hopefully it would mean at least some of them would make it through the unseen obstacles that she knew had to be blocking the way leading to the Old City.

  Ringwearers, Alex guessed. Two hundred and fifty superpowered individuals who would blend in with those people who'd stayed behind, hunting them with their enhanced and diverse array of mental powers. It seemed impossible that they would make it into the Old City without being discovered. Sergeant Tucker had pointed this out earlier as they were leaving the house.

  Payton, meanwhile, refused to travel with either team. He had broken off early, pushing Devlin ahead of him. Alex wasn't entirely sure why Payton had brought Devlin along, but she was happy not to have the Keeper anywhere around.

  And Ethan also had taken on a special solo mission.

  There are so many ways this could go wrong, she thought.

  "How do you filter out all these strong emotions?" Daniel asked as they walked. She glanced back and saw that he had put his hands over his ears, as if trying to block the same sensation that she was now feeling: panic, fear, paranoia, and so much more, flooding through hundreds of thousands of individuals. Navigating the streets was challenging enough, what with so many frightened people rampaging through the city like caged animals that had
been set free, without having to experience everything that they felt along the way.

  "You don't," Alex replied.

  "Then how do you deal with it? I mean, do you ever get used to it?"

  Alex was about to reply when a sudden wave of nausea hit her, and she whispered, "Get down!"

  Daniel, Tucker, and Xue each hit the ground just as she did, and the four of them crawled between the sea of feet and legs, behind the gates of a small dried-up garden adjacent to a tiny house.

  Daniel lurched and vomited onto the ground next to him. Tucker fought to keep his down, while Xue had reservedly turned her head away from where Alex could see. Such an instantaneous reaction could only mean one thing.

  "What's going on?" Daniel whispered, wiping his mouth with a sleeve.

  "It's got to be Trevor; he's somewhere close by," Alex replied. Her head popped up over the edge of the fence just enough to get a look around.

  "Who's Trevor?" Tucker asked.

  "Trevor?" Daniel repeated. His expression changed.

  The young British boy had the ability to nullify the powers of other Ringwearers, and an unfortunate side effect to this involuntary power was that they often felt sick in his presence. And now Trevor was under Oblivion's thrall, no doubt combing the area for intruders ...

  Daniel squared his shoulders, glanced at her.

  "Don't even think about it, Doc," Alex said, knowing what he was probably planning.

  "Do you trust me, Alex?" he asked.

  She froze. "That depends on what you're about to do."

  "We are here to free the Ringwearers, aren't we?"

  "Yeah, but-"

  "Go on without me," he said, and Alex was already starting to protest when Daniel put up both hands to stop her. "Please, just do it. I'll catch up. I made a promise and I have to keep it."

  He stood to a stoop and hobbled on his weak foot, hunched over, until he was around the corner and out of sight.

  Alex sighed, looking helplessly at Tucker and Xue, the two people on the team she knew the least.

  I really wish Grant were here.

  Payton forced Devlin to crouch as they approached the Old City, and crouched likewise himself. Devlin's hands were tied in front of him, but Payton relied on nothing else save his sword to keep his old mentor in check.