In the world around him, innovation led to progress, and progress to skepticism...a discarding of legend and myth...and so although he still worked to complete his task he was largely forgotten, lost in the fog of humankind’s transgressions against itself. Just another murderer.
The gleaming towers were built taller and taller, until it seemed they would reach the stars. The population of the world soared, and sensing the mind of every one that was born he fell further into despair, striving to reach the peak of a mountain that grew ever more distant from him as he impotently crawled his way up.
Then, just when he’d accepted that he would never finish what he’d started all those lifetimes ago, just when he’d embraced the certainty that his existence as a petty executioner was his forever, the spirit had given him the darkness.
His messengers.
That had changed everything. Afterward, his efficiency soared. He wiped out whole cities at a time, cutting bloody swaths across the nations of the world, personified as a weapon of unparalleled lethality. And the people of the world came to know him and the horror he wielded. They came to recognize the threat he represented, and although they tried to continue living their lives as they had before, pursuing their dreams and the comforts they’d taken for granted, they now kept a nervous eye on the skies, wondering if today was the day the color would turn.
They battled back, of course. They constructed machines of war specifically to combat his methods. They marched their armies out to meet him, to arrest the massacre and deliver unto themselves a world they once had known, and the cliched desires they’d become accustomed to. But, by then it was too late. He’d grown beyond them. They threw themselves at him by the thousands, and all they did was hasten the coming of the end. They rushed at him like a coming tsunami, and all he had to do was open his immortal jaws and swallow them whole.
And all the while, those dark curls were in his head. Those flashing eyes.
Their numbers fell. They beheld the very real possibility of their demise for the first time, and while a great many of them fought and failed, the rest took up a strategy of evasion and hiding, prolonging their lingering time however it could be done. For some of them it worked, if only for a time, until he ferreted them out with the gift he’d been given and visited upon them the same fate that had befallen the rest of their kind.
As he drew nearer to the end, the very essence of the planet seemed to shrivel. Color seeped out of the once-so-majestic landscapes, leaving them in ugly hues of gray and brown. Dead colors.
He was always drawn to the largest concentration of them, each one lesser than the last. What had once been a grand desert of humanity became individual grains that he hunted, specks of life that waited to be brushed off the face of the planet. Many became several. Several became few.
Few...became one.
BOOK THREE: THE END OF THE WORLD
0 days, 1:47:11 hours to go
* * *
Chapter 36 – Ejelano
The cannons fired.
He’d relived his origins in the span of only a few seconds, and he was feeling impaled by them. Pierced. Flayed and cooked.
How could he have forgotten so much? It couldn’t be the voice’s doing...surely it would have him suffer as much as possible. If anything, Ejelano guessed that it would prefer to have the painful memories even more present for him...more vivid. Could the events of his beginning just have naturally dropped out of his head, over the course of twenty thousand years? The voice had said it itself; no human mind was ever meant to exist for so long, to hold so much life experience inside it.
But then, the memories were there, weren’t they? He’d remembered them himself. Were they just muted, covered up...coated with the grime of all his years?
Or had he, himself, pushed them down deep until they no longer consciously existed?
Lena.
Now he knew. Now he remembered what he’d done to her. It had played out before him like a movie...every grisly detail.
Having full knowledge of what he’d done filled him with dread. He had come all this way. Done all manner of unspeakable things. Was it possible that, despite the gulf of murderous miles he’d trodden, the penance he’d paid...she would reject him anyway, at the end of things? He accepted that he would burn forever for his crime, but the thought of her turning away from him, even though he’d done it all for her freedom...it was an unbearable thing to allow into his head.
EJELANO, WAKE THE FUCK UP, AND MOVE!
He drunkenly took a few steps, still dazed by the full recollection of his origins, before the first shell struck the ground. All at once, the air around him ignited and all he could see was fire.
The inferno bored down into his lungs and cooked them, filled up his nasal passages and his mouth so that he received the full acrid odor and taste. The force blasted him from all sides as the cannon volley rained down upon him in all its righteous, vengeful glory, without mercy or restraint.
He was immediately thrown, no, launched off his feet, and he lost a sense of where the ground was as he was sent careening through the air. His arms and legs flailed, searching for something solid to brace against, finding nothing but empty space and searing heat. He could feel his skin, burning. The world was spinning, and for a moment he thought he might never again feel the steadying firmness of the earth.
The flames receded and he spied just a glimpse of the ground before he connected with it in a bone-jarring crash. His enhanced body might be more resistant to physical trauma, but he still felt every scrap of the pain. The spirit had given him much, but of course...of course... it had left him that.
He skidded, rolling and flopping, and finally came to a rest on his belly. Everything hurt. The agony in the base of his back told him that he’d wrenched or possibly broken it, when he’d hit the ground. He could have just laid with his eyes closed. He wanted to, sprawled out on the ground and baked to a crisp, until the darkness took him.
But of course those were only reflexive, primal thoughts of one who had been born human and fragile. He hadn’t been either one of those things for thousands of years. The pain was already fading, and his backbone cracked back into place as his body repaired the damage.
The voice was yelling in his head.
WOOO NILLY, BOY, CAN YOU TAKE A PUNCH! CAN I MAKE ’EM OR CAN I MAKE ’EM? HEY, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GET UP. I THINK IT’S SAFE TO ASSUME THEY DIDN’T USE UP ALL THE BULLETS IN THOSE PEA SHOOTERS. WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO JUST LET THEM PELT AWAY AT YOU ALL DAY.
He stood.
I have to close the distance, so they can’t hit me. I have to get inside their range.
The voice responded with exasperation.
SMART BOY. SO DO IT!
Ejelano rarely used the full measure of his speed anymore. It taxed him...sapped his energy. He only used it when he really had to...for example, when he was under fire from guns half the length of a football field, lobbing ordinance at him the size of refrigerators.
He’d been distracted when the guns had first fired, too wrapped up in shock from the full recollection of his past. He would not be caught so vulnerable again.
Again the looming guns thundered, and again they brought down their fury like the many heads of a hydra. But this time, when the shells impacted and cratered the landscape, he wasn’t a full mile away, where they landed.
He was standing at the gates.
He’d covered the distance in an instant. When he used the full measure of his gift, there was nothing made by the hands of man that could equal him.
But his reserves were far from infinite. There was always a debt he had to pay for bending the laws of nature. He’d used up too much of his power in too short a time. His legs buckled under him, and he fell to the ground, gasping. He cursed his sudden infirmity as his vision narrowed and darkened, like he was seeing everything through a long tunnel that was closing up.
DON’T YOU DARE!
He couldn’t help it...couldn’t get enough air.
YOU DON’T NEED FUCKING AIR! DAMN IT, EJELANO, I SWEAR, IF YOU PASS OUT...!
The dull colors leaked out of the world, and the tube collapsed.
FUCK!
Blackness took him, beside the bald face of the colossal gates, and he knew no more.
* * *
Chapter 37 – Samuel
Samuel couldn’t believe his eyes.
After so many years of disuse, the cannons worked! He’d half-expected to initiate the firing sequence, and hear nothing but his own failure echoing in the resounding silence of the broken weapons. The other half of his expectation was reserved for the possibility of the shells exploding in the barrels and reducing the towers to smoking craters, opening up the Spire to the monster’s feast like a ruptured can of food in the hands of a starving man. Amazingly, uncharacteristically, the result was in line with his hopes.
He’d figured out the targeting system, sighted in on the monster, and bombarded it with all the firepower at his disposal...everything the Spire had. Even deep in the ground where he was, he’d felt the earth buck as the massive weapons delivered their payload. The shells had come down, and reduced everything within one hundred feet of the thing to ashes. Samuel had seen the thing’s flaming body thrown through the air and land in a broken lump of smoking flesh. Witnessing the thing tossed around like a rag-doll was soul-satisfying.
That is, until he zoomed in the camera’s view.
The monster may have been down, but through the smoke he saw that it was, amazingly, still in one piece. Under direct assault of such devastating firepower, it should have been vaporized.
Then, his jaw dropped, along with his elation, as he watched the thing...stand up.
All scraps of clothing it had been wearing were burned away. The naked flesh underneath was blackened and charred, but even as Samuel watched he was dismayed to see that it was healing at an unworldly rate. Flaps of blackened skin mended and fused, lightening to a deep, sun-weathered tan. In the span of only a few seconds or so it was completely restored, as if Samuel’s shells hadn’t touched it at all.
He immediately scrambled to re-target the thing. The ballistics interface was amazing simple...a baby could use it. Once he had the armaments active, he had only to switch to the appropriate camera to get the thing that he wanted to kill in view, and then touch it on the screen to tell the computer to target it. When that was done, he could initiate the firing sequence with the touch of another button. It was positively frightening, just how absurdly easy it was to deploy such a destructive force.
The fury of the cannons would have brought an army to its knees, long before it got close enough to do any damage. But, as Samuel watched the man-thing rise to its feet in the view of the camera, he realized that they might not be enough to spare the Spire from this single enemy.
Still, he had to try. He had to keep trying.
He touched the image of the thing on his view, and heard the targeting system chirp at him to confirm that he had a lock.
He fired again.
Again, the Spire rocked with the force of the shells being ejected from the barrels. The sound cascaded down through the facility and the sub-levels, rattling the superstructure, until it dispersed into the foundations of the earth itself.
Come on. This time.
Samuel’s eyes bored into the screen...he couldn’t look away if he wanted to.
Just prior to impact, just before the cluster of blooming fireballs that would leave the landscape a pock-marked, smoking ruin, Samuel saw the thing on the screen move.
Although, “move” wasn’t quite the right word. It looked more like an application of magic, something that Samuel would never have given consideration before, but was now coming around to. All he knew was that one second the man-thing was standing still, and the next, it wasn’t there.
Samuel blinked. His brain had to take a moment to process what his eyes had seen. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that he’d seen a blur, flickering down and out of the view of the camera.
toward him. toward the Spire.
He frantically zoomed the camera back, searching for the whereabouts of the thing. He panned it down, to the left and right, searching.
There. He found it, in front of the main gate. It was lying on the ground, seemingly...unconscious?
Samuel furrowed his brow, beside himself. He was sure that he’d missed it, sure that it had moved away before the shells came down. But now, the thing looked like it was incapacitated. Hurt, even.
Samuel touched it on the screen, commanding the targeting system to reacquire a lock on it. But this time, instead of giving him that satisfying chirp, the system blared unpleasantly, and some red text appeared on the screen. It read, “Out Of Range”. Samuel swore.
Of course. Damn it.
The cannons didn’t have the flexibility to target something so close. It was probably a good thing, probably intentional by their builders. Even if he could get a lock on something so near, he would risk severe damage to the wall and probably the inner compound itself, if he fired. The restricted range was most likely a built-in safety measure to protect the settlement. The irony was a bitter pill to swallow.
He sat there, considering his next move. The cannons were useless to him, now, and there didn’t seem to be anything else that he could do with the computer systems to combat the thing. The only thing that stood between it and them now was the protective cocoon of the walls and the canopy shield. Would they be enough? Was there any chance that they could survive this?
Would the monster ever give up?
His radio trilled, making him jump. He snatched it up.
“Kelly?”
“Sam, what the hell was that?” she asked, breathless. “Was that you?”
“Yeah, that was me. Obviously, I figured out how to shoot the big guns. Also, the generators are up and running.” He sighed. It was something he’d waited for years to say, but now, with things being what they were, the words came out sounding hollow.
“That’s great!” He was glad that Kelly, at least, could still be excited about the news. “I could tell you did something...the facility is positively buzzing with the extra power, and all the systems have come online...it’s amazing! Then the main gates closed, and this...this electric thing covered everything...and the cannons! Holy shit, Sam! I’ve never seen, never heard anything that loud before!”
“It wasn’t enough, Kelly. That thing...Tristan’s Reclaimer...whatever it is, it’s out there. I hit it with everything I had, but it just wasn’t enough. It’s right outside the gate, now.”
“It survived?” she said in a small voice. “How? If the cannons can’t do it, then...oh...no....”
The radio transmitted only silence for the next ten seconds or so. Samuel imagined Kelly on the other end, processing her fear and gathering herself. He let her have her moment, wanting to reach out and tell her that they would make it through this, but at the same time feeling that his own doubt would taint the intended comfort of the sentiment. He decided that saying nothing was better, more merciful than adding his insincerity to the feeling of hopelessness they shared. So, he just sat, and waited for her to say something, wishing he could lose himself in the hiss of the radio.
“Gorman’s ordered everyone into the Dome,” she said, finally. Her voice had lost some of its life. “They’re all filing in as we speak. But...Sam...there’s something else.”
He didn’t like her tone. “What now?”
“I just got word. It’s...Tristan. He escaped. His followers...the ones outside...they rushed the guards. Sam, they killed them. They broke him out.”
Frustration surged in him. It was the last thing they needed, now, when they were at their most desperate. He thought of the guards he’d met where Tristan was being kept, the ones who were facing down the throng of angry fanatics. He thought of how he’d defiantly revealed himself to the crowd as he’d left, after his meeting with their so-called prophet, and now berated himself for being so careless.
He was the main instrument of Tristan’s capture. If he’d provoked the ire of the crowd...if it was him that had pushed them over the edge...gave them the courage they needed....
Idiot...you should never have gone over there. At the very least, you should have left the security lock on the fucking door before you left.
“Where is he?” he asked Kelly, through his teeth.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They disappeared into the shacks. Nobody’s seen them, since.”
Samuel had a thought that chilled him to the bone.
“Damn it,” he cursed. “Kelly...the thing outside...he worships it. He’ll want to let it in. We can’t let that happen. Once it’s inside...we won’t be able to stop it.” His thoughts went to his childhood experience with the thing. He’d seen the damage it could inflict...the power it wielded. He knew what he said was the truth.
“What can we do?” Kelly asked. “How can we—” She paused, like she’d just thought of something. When she continued, there was dread in her voice. “Shit...Sam, there’s a control panel over by the main gate. We never had to use it...the gate wasn’t functional until now, so there wasn’t much point. But now that it’s working....”
“It could open the gate,” Samuel finished. The realization hit him in his stomach. “Kelly, are you outside? Is there anyone with you?”
“Ethan, and Nicole. We’re helping get everyone inside.”
“What about the others? What about Henry and Aiden? Seth?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them. Ronny’s missing, too.”
The Footsteps of Cain Page 27
