The Arcana

by Matt Hiebert

  VIII.

  We shoot across the sunrise like a comet, the Chariot and the Lovers hand-in-hand. Within a few moments we arrive at our destination a thousand miles away. Skyscrapers outline the horizon before us and I realize we are descending upon New York City, the place where it all began, the epicenter of the invasion.

  The demons have not yet breeched the membrane of our world. The city pulses with early morning traffic, oblivious to what is about to happen.

  I have never arrived before an invasion. By the time I get there, the demons are already in the throes of destruction. The peace is eerie to me.

  The Hierophant consults with the Wheel of Fortune in a low voice. He points to an empty spot in the sky and then points to different buildings and street corners. The child asks him questions I cannot hear and nods as he answers.

  “Empress,” The Wheel says to one of the other leaders. “Take the Star, Sun, and Death and wait on top of that building. Emperor, you take the Hanged Man, Temperance, the Magician, and Judgment and take position on the ground. The rest of you stay upon the Chariot until we see what’s coming. Don’t engage until you hear my command. They’ll be full of tricks.”

  She has distributed the fighters and leaders in combinations that will address either hordes or giants. She is preparing for anything. Or everything.

  We drop off the groups upon intersections and skyscraper roof tops. The rest of us are in reserve, waiting to respond to whatever they send.

  We don’t have to wait long.

  I have never seen a portal open before. I have never seen the sky bulge and ripple as it does now. It looks as if a piece of the atmosphere is being pushed inward from the outside. A huge convex protrusion distorts the clouds. A seam in the bulge becomes visible. A black jagged line crawls from the sky to street below, and then it splits open. I see red and yellow stars sparkling within the blackness beyond.

  Thousands of demons explode from the fissure. They pour from the crack like liquid, following the rift all the way to the ground. They are an assortment of castes: Imps, Belials, Asmodia, Belphegor all armed with bone guns, fire whips, bejeweled lances and toothed swords. They flood into the streets of Manhattan, blasting a path of havoc in front of them. People caught upon the street disintegrate beneath a storm of bones.

  We rise into the sky as the crowd upon the streets realizes what’s happening. Several people scream. One cab rear ends another. Traffic locks. People throw open their car doors and flee up the street on foot. Chaos erupts in the blink of eye.

  The Chariot retreats several blocks, then turns down a side street and doubles back toward the fight, attempting to flank the advancing horde.

  “Priestess, hold this flank. Take the World, Moon and Strength. Everyone else stay put,” the Wheel commands. The Chariot deposits the four at a cross street parallel to the demon’s advance.

  “Now take us in, head on,” she says to the Chariot.

  Oh, shit. I try to swallow but my throat is too dry.

  The Chariot makes a couple of sharp left turns and the horde explodes in front of us, a wall of screaming demons, draped in smoke and fire.

  “Stay on the disk!” the Wheel shouts as she jumps to the street directly before the onslaught. I run to the edge and look down to see where she landed.

  The demons are moving fast, plowing forward with no resistance. The Wheel has her sword unsheathed and she holds it with two hands. As the horrific musketeers complete their reloading sequence and raise their fat-barreled guns to fire, the Wheel slices through the empty air with her new blade. A swath of a hundred demons is cut down without being touched, disintegrating into a jumble of torsos and severed limbs.

  That’s a new trick. And a good one. She waves the blade again and the invisible force drops another swath. Then another. The front line breaks.

  The demons scatter down the side streets only to run into our awaiting forces. I see a hundred demons flatten to mush as if a giant invisible foot has stomped on them. The Moon is doing her thing with gravity. I see hundreds more fall at the touch of a sparkling silver mist sent by Death.

  On their other flank, a cluster of white spheres of light descend almost gently upon the horde. The balls pop in complete silence and each one makes a dozen demons disappear. They are treasures sent by the Star. Some demons try to run but Temperance stops them in their tracks with sloth and confusion. They suddenly lack the desire to flee. The silent white globes harvest a thousand lethargic Belphegors in a few seconds.

  My heart is pounding. We have trapped them between the jaws of a vise and already their forces are crumbling.

  I see the Hierophant point to the sky.

  “The second portal!” he shouts.

  Second portal? I look up and see a crack in reality similar to the first, but this time a huge clawed hand pushes out of the darkness from the other side. A gigantic pitchfork wedges its way through the gash, followed by the grinning horror of a Baal’s face. The creature pulls itself into our world like a monstrous newborn, landing on top of a gray skyscraper.

  I look to the Wheel on the street for guidance but she is still hammering at the throng with her sword. She doesn’t know the Baal is here.

  “Stephanie!” I hear myself shout. “A Baal!”

  She pauses and looks around. For a second she seems confused. Then she gestures and the Chariot swoops down to pick her up. She jumps on the disk and looks at me with evident displeasure.

  “Another!” the Hierophant says. I look up and see the torso of a second Baal pushing through the seam, pitchfork in hand.

  “Lovers, prepare to join with the Tower. And, Tower…” she turns to me, frowning. “Don’t call me that name again.” It takes me a second to realize what I said. Then I nod.

  The two Baals smash through smaller buildings and vault over larger ones trying to get to us. One raises its trident and a fireball explodes into the street. Death, the World and the Priestess disappear within the flame before they even have time to scream.

  The Wheel points to a skyscraper and the Chariot swoops towards its roof.

  “Go!” the Wheel says to the Lovers and me. “Wait for my command.”

  She leaves us on a rooftop several blocks away from the battle and plunges back toward the street. In a second, they are out of sight.

  “Looks like we’ll finally be teamed up,” I say to the Lovers. She smiles tightly. The woman has been the Lovers for more than a year, but I’ve never spoken with her. “We still can’t miss. Two Baals, two shots.”

  “I don’t plan on missing,” she says. Not British, definitely Australian.

  “Of course not.”

  We hear the battle echoing off the canyons of buildings. The din of shrieking demons is punctuated by the staccato pop of their bone guns. The heavy tread of a running Baal booms over all the other sounds.

  The Wheel’s voice comes into our minds. Still young but full of authority.

  “Get ready,” she whispers without words. “The Baal is behind me.”

  I feel the Lovers intertwine her fingers with my own.

  “Call it!” she prompts me.

  I begin to summon my power, but it feels different. I can sense the Lovers effect. My strength is doubled. Lightning crawls up fire escapes and along metal guttering. It traces air ducts, water towers and power lines. Blue fire enters both of us.

  I reach the pinnacle of my strength and the Lovers raises her hands into the air, laughing, made drunk by the power. Lightning leaps from her fingertips.

  At that moment we see the Wheel running on the street below. She leaps over a line of abandoned cars and bounces off the building facades like a ping pong ball. Behind her, an infuriated Baal, one eye already gouged out, rounds a corner with its trident raised.

  I realize I am not in control of the strike. The Lovers is driving. She is in charge.

  “Die fucker!” I hear her shout with a crazy edge to her voice.

  The blue bolt drops from the clouds without m
y command and strikes the charging Baal dead center. A chunk of its chest explodes revealing its ribcage and black innards. Cobalt fire erupts from its mouth. The monster takes its last two steps and transforms into a statue of ash. Then it crumbles into nothing beneath its own momentum.

  The Wheel never turns around. She is still bounding like a grasshopper over lines of stopped cars, already on to her next tactic.

  “You did it!” I shout to the Lovers. But when I turn to her, I see she is dead. Smoke pours from her open mouth and burned out eye sockets. Her hand slips from mine and she collapses to the rooftop. The air smells like barbeque.

  Now I know why we have never been paired.

  I linger upon the burnt corpse for another moment, wondering if she knew what would happen when we paired, then I walk to the edge of the building to see what’s going on below. There is still another Baal.

  The Wheel stands on a corner up the street, blue sword blazing in her hand. She’s looking up at something. Something big. When she bolts in the other direction, I see the second Baal round the corner in frantic pursuit. Its shoulder brushes a building, knocking a shower of concrete and glass to the street.

  It’s moving fast. I know I must summon my power now.

  “Wait,” comes the child’s voice.

  The Wheel bounds down the wide avenue no more than a pitchfork-length ahead of her pursuer, purposely holding back. As they meet a corner, I hear a string of explosions.

  Four tank shells greet the behemoth as it steps into the intersection. They explode into its face and chest sending meaty chunks of flesh splattering to the sidewalk. The Baal staggers, holding itself up against a building. A final tank round hits it dead center. A gaping hole erupts in its chest and its red eyes roll up in its head. The creature is dead before it hits the ground.

  The Abrams tanks rumble into view and I see the Hierophant standing on the turret of the first one. He has used his precognition to coordinate their fire and meet the Baal when it stepped into the open, before it had time to dodge.

  He is good.

  The Chariot streaks out of the sky and picks up the Wheel and Hierophant without stopping, then rises to my location.

  They see the Lovers’ body but don’t react.

  “Come on,” the Wheel says to me with impatience. Her tone, the small edge in her voice, catches me. It is fear. The Baals are dead and she is more afraid than ever.

  I step upon the disk and we plummet downward, banking through the street toward Central Park. The horde writhes in chaos at the edge of park. They are frenzied, insane. The bone-gunners blast their own kind if they step in the way.

  I see the Moon and Strength are alive and holding the line at the park. Strength is wielding an uprooted streetlight like a club, scattering Imps all over the place. The Moon flattens many others beneath invisible mallets of gravity.

  As we approach, a wave of Belphegors pours in from the flank. They carry strange lances with red crystal blades that gleam like rubies. I see the heads of fallen Arcana stuck upon some of them. The Emperor’s group.

  The Chariot descends into the fray. The Moon and Strength walk backward upon the disk, not daring to turn on the converging knot. As soon as their feet step off the grass, we shoot straight into the sky.

  “I thought we had them,” the Moon says, out of breath, her hands shaking. “Then the second Baal came down right on top of the Empress. Took them all out with one shot. ”

  I realize what she’s telling us. I do the math. We’re it. Everyone else is dead.

  The Wheel doesn’t react. She is staring at the Hierophant whose face is stone.

  “And now the worst is upon us,” the old man says looking up to the sky.

  My eyes follow his line of sight and I see another seam forming directly above the overrun park.

  The seam splits and a monstrous black mass herniates from the gap before it fully opens, pushing its way into our world like excrement. The flesh glistens with slime and a nest of squirming tentacles probes the air before it like titanic worms. It is not another Baal. The seam parts wider and the entire mass vomits into reality, indiscriminately crushing the Imps, Asmodia and Belphegors beneath it.

  It is gigantic, several times the size of a Baal. At first I discern no shape to the mass, it pulses and moves like a ribbed slug. Then it stands.

  The Moloch has arrived.

  Horror crawls like needles over my skin. The monster rises upon a writhing jungle of black tentacles that fork from its lower torso like tree roots. At the center of its stomach, a gaping hole filled with red fire yawns wide, an open furnace belching flame. Its upper body is humanoid with two sinewy arms reaching out from its shoulders. Its neck is long and serpent-like.

  The twisted face upon the end of the neck makes my breath catch. It is entirely human. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. I cannot tell if the face is male or female. The mouth is open in a silent scream. Its eyes search the ground, looking for us.

  Then the stench hits.

  Years ago, when my wife and I were just starting out, our neighbor’s golden retriever crawled beneath our house and died. For days the acidic smell of death filled our garage before I finally squeezed into the crawl space and found the animal stuck to the dirt floor. With an ineffective bandanna tied around my mouth and nose, I had pulled upon the dog’s stiff legs until its gas-filled stomach exploded into a soup of maggots. Trapped in the tight space, the smell of death had overwhelmed me like a solid thing.

  That is the smell that assaults me now.

  As the memory comes whole and complete, I lean over the edge of the disk and throw up.

  “Take us down,” the Wheel commands, her voice distant, empty of certainty.

  The Chariot drops beside a museum at the edge of the park, ahead of the advancing demons. Above the trees, I can still see the grotesque head of the Moloch, swinging on the end of its elongated neck, searching, searching, searching.

  My heart pounds as I step off the disk. There are only six of us.

  “Fall back,” the Wheel says. “Make sure they see us. Pull the swarm into a bottleneck.”

  The demons have definitely seen us. They rush forward through the trees and grassy, open spaces of Central Park in a full stampede. I can actually feel the Moloch’s gaze fall upon us. I watch as its hundreds of tentacles snatch people off the ground who did not escape and thrust them into the blazing furnace of its stomach. I can hear their screams even above the roar of the horde.

  For three blocks we run in the opposite direction. As their ranks enter the confines of the street, the demons stumble over themselves trying to get to us. Finally, the Wheel stops and turns.

  “Moon!” the child shouts.

  With that, the Moon drops an anvil of gravity out of the empty air. Hundreds of the demons at the head of the line are mashed to pulp, but the wave continues over the crushed bodies.

  Behind them, plowing through the trees, the Moloch’s undulating black mass is closing.

  For a second, the Wheel is silent. I look to her and see she is shaking, just as she did in New Orleans, the first time she went out.

  “Wheel?” I say to the girl. She takes a breath and her hands still.

  “Strength, Moon!” she commands. “Advance!”

  The pair moves forward. Strength overturns a city bus and pushes it toward the onslaught, using it like a moving wall. Sparks spray behind her. The Wheel whispers something to the Hierophant and he takes refuge between two parked cars, crouching out of sight.

  The Moloch is a growing black silhouette against the rising sun.

  “Stay behind me,” the Wheel says to me as she moves forward.

  Ahead of us, the Moon raises her hands, palms open toward the wall of demons as if commanding them to halt. I see the air warble in front of her and another swath of demons flattens into the street, paper thin. She’s put a dent in the fight, but her power is finite. She won’t be able to do that forever.

  A hail of flaming bones shreds the surface
of the bus but bounce harmlessly off Strength’s dense flesh. She collides with the line of demons who trip over themselves trying to retreat. Those who don’t move fast enough are crushed by her bulldozer advance.

  One of the Imps gets brave and jumps on top of the overturned vehicle. The fiery tails of its whip burn red. Strength rears back to avoid the demon’s blow but moves too late. One of the thongs takes off part of her hand and she screams from the pain. With a gesture, Moon crushes the bold demon into a bloody mass the size of a softball.

  A dozen more Imps jump on the side of the bus, fire whips raised, bone guns ready to fire. The Wheel swings her sword and they fall to pieces like broken toys.

  The stink of the Moloch chokes the confined street. The behemoth steps out of the park and knocks down a wing of a museum in its headlong charge. Granite walls crumble to gravel.

  Strength clutches her bleeding half hand in pain. At least ten scaly Asmodia run around either side of the overturned bus, their lances poised to impale her. The Moon has encased herself within a bubble of gravity beneath a storm of flaming bones. She cannot help.

  The Wheel springs into the fray. With one swipe of her glowing blue sword, she cuts a dozen of the creatures in half. She somersaults to the other side of the bus and the rest of the Asmodia dissemble into a harvest of arms and heads.

  She is a blur, a blue wind.

  Strength rallies and pushes through the pain of her wound. With a ferocious roar she throws her shoulder against the undercarriage, driving over the demons who try to make a stand, mashing them flat.

  A black shadow falls over the street. The Moloch blocks out the sun. I look to the Wheel for guidance. It will take me a few moments to summon my power, and there will only be a small window of opportunity. But she does not give me the signal.

  The Moon and Strength cleave forward with the Wheel and I following a few yards behind. I sense the Moloch’s eyes upon me. Its head bobs upon its stalk neck and I see an eager smile upon its face. It has found its prize.

  We keep moving forward, step by step. My feet sink into the pulped bodies of fallen demons like mud.

  The Wheel turns around, about to speak, about to give me the command, when the Hierophant screams behind me.

  “Look out!” His voice breaks with urgency.

  I turn just as the old man collides with me full force, knocking me off my feet. I hit the muck hard and look up to see a thick black tentacle shoot from a side alley, enwrapping the Hierophant like a python. The tentacle is covered with screaming human faces like the suckers of an octopus, their mouths open, teeth bared, expressions flayed in agony. The Moloch has flanked us with the appendage.

  The Heirophant smiles. “It’s okay,” he says to me just before the black tentacle lifts him into the sky. I realize he had to have known what would happen.

  The behemoth roars in frustration with its consolation prize and tosses the old man into the furnace of its stomach. He explodes like a kernel of popcorn and disappears within the flame.

  The Moloch laughs and the sound rumbles in my chest.

  “NO!” the Wheel shrieks. The grief in her voice freezes me cold. I can feel her pain in my mind. The Moon and Strength stop dead in their tracks, stunned by the transmission of anguish.

  The Moon pulls herself from the shock and throws her hands up. An invisible wrecking ball strikes the Moloch full force in the head. The monster topples backward and falls, crushing buildings flat beneath its mass.

  Strength tosses a sedan into the weakened swarm. Broken, the demons fall back.

  I turn to the Wheel, but she is nowhere in sight. Adrenaline shoots through my gut, closes my throat. I am alone, unprotected. I think about summoning my power and acting on my own, but then I remember Dallas.

  “Wheel!” I call down the gory street. The Moon and Strength are pushing forward but I can tell the Moon’s strikes are getting weaker. Her attack against the Moloch took it out of her. She’s running out of juice. “Wheel!”

  I backtrack, frantically looking for the child. Is she dead? Did the Moloch snag her while we weren’t looking?

  Jogging across the mush, I hear something in an adjacent alley. The sound of weeping. I stop and see the tip of the Wheel’s blue sword poking beyond the corner of a metal dumpster.

  She sits with her legs drawn up to her chest, face hidden in her knees. Her sword lies beside her, surrounded by trash. She is shaking like a newborn fawn.

  “Wheel,” I say. “We need you.” When she looks up and I see the tears glistening over her cheeks, falling from her chin, I can’t help but kneel and take her in my arms.

  She sobs and her body trembles against me as she speaks.

  “I want my mom.”

  I hold her close. My chest tightens. Her soft hair weaves between my fingers.

  “I should have read her letters. I should have written her back.”

  “Steph…Wheel…don’t…you can’t think about that right now. The Moloch…we have to stop it....”

  She sobs one more time, and then stops.

  “I know,” she says.

  I feel the persona of the Wheel regain a hold within her. She begins to breathe deeply, building control. Then she reaches for her sword.

  “Okay,” she says, but still holds my hand tightly.

  We head back up the street. Strength and the Moon have pushed the dwindling horde back to the edge of the park, but the Moloch has regained its footing and looms over the battle like a living mountain.

  I see Strength hurl a streetlight at the monstrosity. The projectile bounces harmlessly off its chest. She looks around frantically seeking another weapon, something else to throw.

  But she is too late. Like a bolt of black lightning, one of the Moloch’s tentacles shoots downward and enwraps her in its coils. She struggles against the fleshy loops but her might is no match for their grip. The demon brings her up to its fanged mouth and bites her in half.

  The Moon shrieks in despair and unleashes the last of her power. The blow strikes the Moloch on the side of the head. The monster stumbles, but doesn’t fall.

  “Get ready!” the Wheel screams at me.

  I begin the summoning. The Moloch is on us.

  My heart is hammering. Blood fills my ears and I can hear nothing.

  I watch the Moon stumble over the debris trying to escape, powerless, now just a frightened old woman. One of the thicker tentacles comes down on her, and she becomes a bloody smudge on street. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see it.

  “No! No! No!” the child screams the word as if she can undo what has been done. Or perhaps she is protesting what she must do next. It is just her and me now. We stand against the monster alone.

  And I need time.

  Sword raised, the Wheel launches herself into the air at the Moloch’s torso. I know it is the persona, and not courage, that pushes her to attack. She lands next to the open furnace of its belly and hacks at the bloated trunk of the beast, no bigger than a flea. Globs of shaved flesh drop to the street, but the wounds are tiny, ineffective.

  I realize the Moloch is not even looking at the Wheel. Its eyes are upon me. And it is smiling.

  I am paralyzed by the horror of the sight. Its gaze is penetrating, all seeing. I feel it pierce my soul.

  Shaking the fear from my human heart, I gather my might to strike. Clouds roil overheard. Blue arcs of electricity jump into my chest from any metal around me: cars, fire hydrants, manhole covers, lampposts. The strength of lightning fills my limbs.

  Then the Moloch grabs the Wheel with one of its human hands and lifts her into the air. The child’s sword falls to the ground, nothing more than a blue splinter.

  The demon’s stare does not leave me. A laugh rumbles from deep inside its chest.

  The child screams in terror. Her face is a mask of fear. She is not the Wheel anymore. Just Stephanie Sappington, a lost little girl. She looks down and meets my eyes.

  “Help me!”

 
Something about the look on her face shoots me back into the past. I remember the night the Belphegor took my daughter. She was running towards me, arms outstretched, terrified, reaching out for my protection. And then she was dead.

  My power has reached its peak. I am filled with the strength of the Tower. The hammer is ready to fall. But I am frozen on the inside.

  I feel the lightning stutter and begin to slip from my grasp. My one shot is fading away. The realization of what’s happening stabs into my chest like cold steel.

  There is no time for happy endings.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I let the blow fall. A blue pillar of lightning stabs from the sky. It strikes the Moloch in the head and the monster’s laugh becomes a scream. Upon its face, I see surprise. It realizes it has made a mistake.

  The giant staggers. Blue fire erupts from spreading cracks in its flesh. All the fire touches becomes ash.

  The flame crawls down the arm clutching the Wheel. The child’s hair catches fire. Her mouth opens wide and she bursts into flame. Her scream rises to a mindless shriek and then stops abruptly.

  She becomes dust.

  The Moloch petrifies into a lifeless monolith, one arm raised into the air, holding its prize high. Then the form collapses.

  The Wheel’s ashes disappear within the tumbling mass of the Moloch and she is gone.

  I fall to my knees. The sound of distant machine gun fire carries on the wind as the human soldiers finish off the remnants of the horde.

  From the sky, the Chariot descends upon the disk of white light. He has watched everything unfold from the distance and weeps.

  I crawl upon the disk and curl into a ball, clutching myself, seeking comfort I know I will not find.

  “I can’t take you back to the Enclave yet,” Chariot says with his voice catching in his throat. “We have to pick up the replacements.”

  I do not move. I cannot. I close my eyes. “We are the Arcana,” I hear myself say. The words are flat and distant, as if spoken by someone else.

  The taste of salt touches the corner of my lips.

  The disk rises into the sky, and we shoot toward an unknown spot on the other side of the world. In moments we arrive upon another continent.

  The Chariot lands and a young woman steps on board. She is Asian. Her eyes are solid blue and fire burns behind them.

  I realize she has taken my place. She is now the Tower and I am not. The card is too important to discard, so I have been replaced. There is a look of terror upon her face, but I can tell it is not a reaction to her transformation. She is terrified of me.

  “Is that one of the demons?” she asks the Chariot as we move on to pick up the next replacement.

  I stir. My shoes drop off my hooves. I turn my head and my horns click against the smooth surface of the disk. Standing, I look down upon my new body, my new persona.

  I have changed. I have transmogrified. I have become.

  “No,” the Chariot says. “That’s the Devil.”