Vee threw herself behind a row of drums, which rattled loudly as slugs punched into them. She popped up and fired at Roper, as he sprang behind a line of glass tubes. These shattered, some falling into exploding shards, but she was soon crouching low again as both Earl and Johnny—on opposite ends of the room—nailed the drums in a crossfire. The barrels sang like a church bell assaulted with a jackhammer.
The barrage tapered off—were they loading fresh magazines?—and Vee took the opportunity to rush to a position nearer to Adamn. Too late, Earl resumed shooting, as she ducked behind a stack of metal crates.
Peeking between two of them, she saw that at least the flames had died out across Adamn’s roasted, motionless body.
Again the fusillade ceased, but this time a voice replaced it. A familiar voice, calling out from the doorway where Johnny had positioned himself.
“Rebecca!” cried Pastor Karl Phelps. “It’s your father!”
“No shit!” she shouted back.
“I just want to talk to you!”
“Really?” Hunched down, she shifted to another bit of cover—some machinery that had dropped through the ceiling—closer to Adamn. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
“Well, do I have your attention now?”
She moved again, scurrying behind a jagged mound of charred wood.
Buying time, she called back, “I’m listening!”
“I’m willing to show you the mercy, pity and compassion you did not show me when you left me as a prisoner in that devils’ dungeon. Come back to Los Angeles with us, my poor confused child. Let your father help you remember your love for me. Your devotion to me, that you’ve forgotten. And your love and devotion for our Lord.”
“You want me to believe you won’t hurt me or lock me up somewhere?” On hands and knees, Vee crawled behind a long, low wall of rubble. They could probably guess, by tracking her voice, that she was on the move, but talking with them was her only way of stalling, of holding back a renewed attack. She wondered if maybe her father were being sincere—whether he truly hoped to bring her back to L.A. unharmed, and give her another chance at making a home there. But from what she had learned of her father, at least in the state he was in now after all his years as a prisoner, she thought it much more likely that he was baiting her. He was a relentless avenging Angel. But then, she thought, what was she?
“It’s no trick, lady!” Roper yelled from somewhere behind the cylinders. “Just cool down and think about this! Think about why your father came all this way to find you!”
“Look at me, Rebecca!” From the far doorway, Pastor Phelps walked into the open, holding out his empty arms beatifically as if waiting to be bodily delivered back to Heaven. “I have faith in you! Can you show some faith in me?”
She was close to Adamn now, but he lay out there in the open, smoking, looking like the victims of nuclear holocaust with whom he had entered Hades. Already beginning to regenerate, he was moving his legs slowly, no doubt painfully. “Keep coming!” she cried to her father.
“Maybe I’ll believe you if you can talk to me face-to-face like a real father, instead of having your lackeys fill me full of lead first!”
“Here I am, child!” He was indeed still coming. “Now where are you?”
“All of you!” Vee barked. “If this isn’t a trap, prove it to me! All of you come out here!”
“Ease up, lady, will ya?” Roper hollered back.
“No, she’s right,” said Phelps. “Come out here, Charles. Earl, Johnny.
Let us prove to Rebecca that we only mean to take her back to our bosom!”
“Yeah,” Vee murmured under her breath, watching her father proceed further down the central pathway. “That’s it…keep coming.”
“Come on, boys!” Phelps encouraged the others. “Yes, that’s it!
Lower your guns, let’s go now!”
Earl and Johnny reluctantly obeyed, stepping out from their cover and dropping the barrels of their M16s. They started toward Phelps from either side of the chamber. And after a few more seconds, Roper too emerged from behind the glass cylinders and moved toward Phelps, his flamethrower slung low.
“Closer,” Vee whispered. “Closer…”
She saw an eye open in the side of the blob trapped inside its titanic genie’s bottle.
Her father was still advancing, as his three soldiers converged on him.
They moved at a quicker pace than he, no doubt wanting to protect him as he made himself more vulnerable. The pastor was almost opposite the enormous twin cylinders now. “Come out, Rebecca…please!”
She stood up slowly into view, to coax them all just a little bit further and a little more close together. “Here I am!” she cried.
“My daughter,” her father said, near enough for Vee to see the camera-ready smile on the televangelist’s face.
And behind him, another mouth parted and spread. A mouth like a garage door rising open. The gears in Vee’s heart jammed to a stop in that second, before the howling began anew.
45: THE WRATH
The three soldiers snapped around with their guns poised, and started dancing backward, Roper placing himself in front of Phelps and nudging him into retreat.
“What the fuck is that?” Earl shouted, his voice all but drowned out by the dissonant caterwauling.
Of course, Vee chose this as her moment to break cover. She sprang over the low wall of rubble, reached Adamn’s side and squatted down beside him. She began to slip her free arm under his shoulders. He turned his head a little, but his eyelids were seared shut and so she bent close to what was left of his ear and said, “I used to think you look like Kevin Bacon, but now you just look like bacon.”
She wasn’t sure if he’d heard her. She began to hoist him up, found it difficult without laying the gun down. As she turned to do so, she saw a figure step into view from around one of the far-spaced riveted metal columns that supported the high ceiling. The man wore a white uniform, and a white bone helmet with a cross painted on it in gold paint.
“Tim,” Vee breathed.
Her former fiancé carried a craftily improvised weapon that could spray acid from a tank attached to its underbelly—she could tell from the acid’s familiar caustic odor—and he leveled this gun at Vee’s face.
“Hey!” cried a hoarse voice just behind Tim. He half turned toward the exclamation, startled. It bought Vee the single second she needed. She swept up the assault rifle she had just been about to lay down, and triggered it with one hand. A sustained release that sent the gun shuddering upward with its recoil, until its mag ran empty.
The bullets pounded up Tim’s body like bombs dropped across an enemy landscape. They didn’t pierce his ballistic vest, but one bullet did catch him in the neck below the edge of his helmet, and he fell to writhe on his back, clutching his gurgling throat.
.Vee looked back toward her father and the men who had meant to divert her while her unsuspected fiancé snuck up on her from behind, and saw them glancing at her in turn as they pulled back from the formless, bottled monster. Maybe they had heard her gunfire over its thundering and screeching.
She dropped the empty assault rifle, plunged her hand into her pouch and drew out a heavy ball, like a metal apple. Letting go of Adamn, she pulled her last grenade’s pin, stood up as Earl and Johnny began firing at her, and hurled the M67 with all her might before throwing herself down again, covering Adamn’s body with her own.
Raising her head, she saw the grenade go past the men. Hit the floor.
Skitter almost to the very base of the giant, cracked tank before it detonated. Just as she had hoped would happen.
Vee cringed as the explosion’s shockwave clapped her ears and passed as a vibration through the floor and Adamn’s body into her own. A thin cloud of smoke hung in the air following it, revealing Phelps and his three holy warriors, all of them fallen to the floor like ten-pins except for Johnny, who was staggering and lifting off his helmet. Maybe he was screaming beneath the mons
ter’s screams, because the goggles of his helmet had been shattered and blood streamed from both eye sockets.
There came a loud crack, loud enough to be heard over the blob’s roars, like a rifle shot. Another followed, with a distinct crackling sound trailing off in its wake. This time Vee saw a crack zigzag up the side of the glass cylinder, from its base to about midpoint.
Suddenly it seemed all of the golem’s mouths were positioned one above the other along this one especially long crack, opening and closing against it from the inside. Exerting pressure.
The men hadn’t been close enough to the explosion to be badly injured, and Roper was helping an unsteady Pastor Phelps to his feet when the compromised cylinder finally gave way under its internal pressure, and split open like an egg. Glass fragments went flying. A long dagger of glass embedded itself in the back of Earl’s neck as the stunned Vietnam vet was still rising, but it didn’t matter much, because a moment later the golem was surging out of the ruptured tank and Earl was crushed under its bulk. Absorbed into its bulk.
There was a released foulness so prodigious that Vee held her breath, and held back a retch. It was like another shockwave rolling over her.
No longer contained, compacted inside its glass sarcophagus, the golem seemed to grow in size, to spread out its oozing mass in all directions. But it was also definitely moving forward, toward Phelps, Roper and Johnny. Its unstable, uneven edges rippled across the floor like pseudopods and slapped for purchase like flippers that formed and unformed. All the while, mouths—dozens now, and as many eyes—flashed open and shut across its mountainous body in agitation. Glass shards poked up out of it, maybe adding to its furor, but the disturbances across its body were dislodging them so that they fell away to the floor or else were swallowed up by the flurry of temporary mouths.
Roper was pulling Phelps along with him, fleeing awkwardly, but Johnny seemed unaware that the behemoth towered behind him, and was still staggering with his hands clamped over his punctured eyes when an especially wide mouth stretched open. With a lurch forward, like an avalanche of bloodless flesh, the golem closed its maw around the Demon wrangler and gulped him out of sight.
Vee had risen from Adamn, onto hands and knees and ready to push herself to her feet, and saw that his eyes had cracked open as his body fought to reconstitute, his mouth moving and maybe speaking but she couldn’t hear. “Wait a minute,” she told him, maybe unheard by him as well, and then with one eye on the progress of the golem she was bolting toward where she saw Jay lying on the floor.
She took a detour first, however, veering toward Tim as he struggled to sit up and reach for his dropped acid gun. Vee swept up the gun, sent Tim’s helmet flying from his head with one savage kick, and thrust the weapon’s nozzle into his gaping mouth. She pulled the trigger, and Tim flopped onto his back again as bloody foam bubbled up from the deflating basketball of his head. “Sorry, honey,” she told him.
Having slung the acid gun across her back, Vee turned again toward the Demonic gun and knelt down beside it. At first she couldn’t bring herself to touch Jay, as if afraid to be burnt. The sentient weapon’s once ivory form was now black, rough in texture and still smoking. His eye was rolled up white in its socket, though he must have been able to see only minutes ago; she knew it was he who had called out, “Hey!” to distract Tim before he could use the acid gun on her.
In their circular hollow, Jay’s lips were moving soundlessly, too. They were cracked, flaking, and she could see that even his teeth were black behind them.
“No,” Vee said. “Oh no…come on, Jay. Come on.” Finally she picked him up—he wasn’t too hot to the touch—then she was racing back to where Adamn lay. She saw him reaching up with one arm as if groping in the air for her.
She also saw that Roper was slowing the advance of the golem with short blasts from his flamethrower, as he half dragged Phelps toward the doorway in which he’d appeared before frying Adamn. The immense amorphous body would crisp like marshmallow where the flames lapped it, but the flesh would fold in on itself to swallow the damage and douse the flickering embers, presenting fresh cells as it remade the ruined ones. The thing’s eyes seemed larger, the moths wider, the roars louder as Roper stoked its fury. And yet somehow above the noise, Vee could hear her father’s voice, trained as it was to shout out to audiences both physical and virtual.
Pastor Karl Phelps was bellowing, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies thou anointest my head with oil my cup runneth over surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever amen amen amen amen amen fuck fuck nooo Satan! Lucifer! Beelzebub! Adversary!”
Vee ducked her head under Adamn’s arm, and in straightening lifted him to his feet. He let out a sob of pain in response. “Move, move, come on!” she ordered him. “Move your legs with me!”
Shuffling along beside her, supported by her, Adamn croaked close to her ear, “Not this way.” She was moving in the opposite direction from the one Roper and Phelps were taking—toward the door through which they had entered this area. It was further away, and a step backwards in their quest.
“I promised him,” Vee said. “I promised him.”
She forced Adamn along at a loping pace, almost lifting him off his feet with every other stride, and when she had removed herself sufficiently from the commotion behind her she paused long enough to look back. It was just in time to see Roper’s flamethrower run out of fuel. In time to see her father babbling incoherently—she realized he was speaking in tongues. In time to see the two men engulfed, and lost within the raging mass as it rolled over them.
Vee didn’t look back again. Lest the monster turn its myriad eyes her way, and come in pursuit of her next, she forged ahead at a desperate pace, one arm around Adamn and carrying Jay with her free hand. The golem continued to howl, but she didn’t know if it was at her or at something else. If it howled at its own condition, or at the human condition…at the past, present, or the future. She left it to its laments as she plunged at last through the far doorway.
46: THE HEROES
Vee closed the doorway’s hatch behind her; it latched but didn’t lock. The horrible cries, and horrible stink, were deadened. She hoped the blob wouldn’t force the hatch open with pressure, then squeeze its body through into the rooms—the rest of the Construct—beyond. She hoped that when her father and his men had met their maker, so to speak, they had been so thoroughly digested inside the mobile sea of cells that they could never again reform their own bodies. But she also hoped, in that event, that they did not in any way program the cells as the Essential Matter had. Bring their own brand of corruption to its simple, pure rage. People had always made God in their own image figuratively, but Vee thought that men making their own maker literally might be the most frightening thing imaginable.
They retraced their way through several empty rooms until they had returned to the chamber in which a mecha-Demon sat on the floor with its back against a wall of control panels and computer monitors, still convulsing and rattling as when they’d encountered it before. Vee let Adamn slip down to the floor in a similar position, his back also propped against the wall, then rushed to where a rubber-sheathed cable from the automaton was plugged into a jack. She tugged it free and the cord snapped back inside the Demon’s mechanical frame. It slumped forward into its own lap like a marionette with its strings snipped, going still after who could say how long.
Vee rested Jay on the floor, saw that his eye was still rolled up white but his lips were no longer moving. “Please,” she whispered. “Please not yet.” She took hold of the end of his own retractable cord, pulled out its length and inserted the tip into the wall jack.
The monitor directly above this instrument panel held a faint glow, showed gray static with occasional black bands crackling through it.
When she plugged the gun into the jack there was a burst of loud hissing and the picture rolled several times like a badly tu
ned TV channel. But then, a return to the softly fizzing, dimly glowing field of gray static, a sandstorm safely locked outside a thick window.
“I’m sorry, Jay,” Vee said, looking down at him again. “I’m sorry I ever pulled you out of there.” She fought back tears as she rested her fingertips against the blackened bone.
A few feet away, Adamn had managed to stand up on his own. He was slowly healing, but still a scorched effigy of himself. He tore away the last rags of his clothing and dropped them to the floor, a cicada molting its old shell. Vee went to him, helped support him again. As she did so, she saw Adamn looking past her, over her shoulder. “Vee,” he rasped.
“What?” She turned to look back at Jay lying on the floor below the wall and the sizzling monitor.
A red glow emanated from the screen, the static having gone from gray to crimson. Vee left Adamn leaning his back against the wall so that she could draw closer to the monitor again.
There was a barely distinct object moving beyond that red sea of static. Actually, moving through the red sea of static. It had a sinuous, fluid motion, and it was white. A white dolphin, swimming away into the static, receding from sight.
Vee smiled, and this time allowed the tears to come. The picture rolled again, and the gray static returned, but she knew that Jay had made it into the Heaven of own choosing. Once more remembering that song by David Bowie, she whispered, “We can beat them, For ever and ever.”
47: THE KEYHOLE
They searched through the more demolished areas of level 186, and eventually found another means of continuing their ascent of the Construct. As he recovered, Adamn’s physical discomfort turned to a sense of discomfort at his state of undress, and Vee teased him about it. Once, when he was clambering up a ladder ahead of her from the 192nd to the 193rd floor, she reached up and pinched a buttock, telling him he was climbing too slowly.
Everything above the 194th level appeared to be completely squashed flat, so that they no longer ascended by climbing stairs or ladders but by crawling up through the rubble like ants through impromptu tunnels, squeezing into any claustrophobic passage they could find, not knowing even that they had passed from the remains of one floor to the next unless they chanced upon a broken slab stenciled with the number 195, a fragment of wall reading 196. They ventured into crevasses and crannies so tight, or amongst heaped moraine so precariously balanced, that they wouldn’t have attempted it had they not been immortal.
The Fall of Hades Page 22
