Gorman’s eyes went wide with shock. He made a noise unfamiliar to Samuel, somewhere between a moan and a grunt. Tristan twisted the knife in his grip, and the Gorman’s mouth dropped open wide. His body began to tremble.
“No!” Samuel screamed, again.
His father turned his head and looked at Samuel, his only son. The expression on his face carried all the years of love he’d ever had for Samuel in it, so much so that the presence of words would only pollute its purity. Tears streamed down Samuel’s face from eyes that could not, would not look away. They gazed at one another, both sending a message...both understanding.
And then, just as Samuel had seen another father taken from him in a small house in the Wastes, long ago, he watched as he lost this one, as well. The light went out of Gorman’s eyes, he slumped forward onto Tristan’s shoulder, and the Great Heart of the Spire beat one final time and then was silenced forever.
Tristan withdrew the knife and let Gorman’s body fall to the ground. He wiped his blade clean on the cuff of his robe, and stood.
“And thus another heathen falls,” he said.
Samuel’s searing fury boiled his blood. He stared at Tristan hard, wished that he could stop the murderer’s heart with only his thoughts.
“Whether you let that thing in or not...I will see you die today,” he hissed.
“Weak words,” Tristan returned in dismissal. “Spoken from impotent lips.”
The priest walked slowly over to the gate control console, and turned, regarding Samuel thoughtfully.
“You revealed to me that you’ve seen him, he who awaits me on the other side of these doors. You’ve seen him and by some miracle escaped his judgment. That will not happen, today. This is your day of reckoning, and the reckoning of all who cower in the belly of this place. Their lives are now forfeit, as is yours.”
“You madman!” Samuel yelled, his voice hoarse with heartbreak. “That thing will kill us all!”
“No. I have been anointed by the words of my father. He has baptized me with his Message, and it has marked me as one of the chosen. If only you had listened. If only you had taken the time to consider even the possibility of its truth, maybe you could have been saved from what awaits you. Pity. When I stand in the valley of the What Comes After, I will think of you no more.”
Tristan turned to the console, and hovered a hand over it. He closed his eyes and smiled in delicious ecstasy. When he spoke, it was evident that he wasn’t speaking to anyone present.
“Father,” he said. “If only you were here to see this moment. If only you could see the realized prophecy that your son has fulfilled. We started low but were raised high, you, mother, and I. You wrote, and she read. And I?”
The air stood still. The only audible thing was the excited breathing of Tristan’s zealots, enraptured as they were by their spiritual leader. The two that held Samuel’s arms loosened their grip, only slightly.
“I have heard,” Tristan finished.
The priest looked around at his flock, an expression of serene self-confidence on his face. He nodded his head to them.
“On to the next world, then,” he said.
The hand he held over the console dropped, and he pushed a button.
Immediately the massive gates boomed their announcement of entry, echoing throughout the Spire and to the ears of every inhabitant, announcing their fate to them with dire tidings. Samuel could only watch helplessly, as the colossal locks that held the west door closed disengaged, each one cascading their call over the Dome. One by one they rang their death knells until the last one had sounded, thundering its mighty note into the distance.
There was an ever-so-brief moment of silence as all eyes bored into the gate, across an entire spectrum of emotion. The tension in the air pulled tighter and tighter. Samuel could have been bound by it, alone; the grip of Tristan’s men on him was rendered redundant and meaningless. He barely breathed, hoping for the impossible, hoping that the gate mechanism would fail, that a miracle would descend and save them all.
No. Please...no.
Miracles, as it turned out, could not be leashed to the will of mere mortals.
A sudden, metallic screech assailed Samuel’s ears, dominating all other sound. It trumpeted the arrival of the grave. It trumpeted the arrival of the Reclaimer.
The great gates began to slide open.
* * *
Chapter 47 – Samuel
First a crack of light appeared, cleaving the gate in half. Then, each monolithic door steadily began to retract into the walls. The lethargic pace at which they opened only thickened the already swamp-like consistency of the air, brought on by the suspense of what lay beyond them. All eyes were on the widening view of the Wastes outside.
When the opening was broad enough, Samuel could see the dark form of a man enveloped in the shadow of the gate’s enclosure, standing on the other side. Or, more accurately, only most of it was dark. The sickly white glow in the hollow of its chest shone upon the rapt faces of those clustered around the gates.
Many members of Tristan’s flock sobbed openly when they saw the light and fell to their knees, while Samuel only felt repelled by its toxic radiance. He’d seen it before, long ago. He knew what that light meant.
They were all going to die.
At last, the doors settled into the sheath of the walls and disappeared. They came to a rest with a mechanical troom that shook the ground and vibrated the air. It gradually faded until only silence remained.
No one moved. Samuel felt like he was viewing a picture, instead of something that was really happening, like a page from an illustrated book or a painting. Then, the illusion was broken by Tristan Englewood, who took a tentative step forward. He was slightly hunched over, the very model of humility and subservience, squinting his eyes at the lone figure in the shadow. His mouth was agape, his countenance, awe-struck. Samuel’s skin prickled from the electric atmosphere that radiated from the man-who-was-not-a-man, obscured by the shade outside.
Now that the gates were open...now that there was nothing between it and them, Samuel felt something rising in him...growing more potent with every passing second. His mind was suddenly reeling with wild thoughts, impulses to run and rend and kill those around him, to hurt his friends and himself. He had to will himself to calm down, and fight the unholy urges before they completely overtook his will and reason. Scanning the area, he saw that he was not the only one struggling against the violent influence; many of the fanatics were contorting their faces in concentration, and some were actually taking a look around them at their brethren, their eyes telling a story of much-desired bloodshed.
Samuel knew what was happening. He remembered. As a boy, back when he’d faced the monster for the first time, he remembered feeling something like what he felt now. He’d seen it claim the senses of people he’d known and turn them upon one another...people who normally wouldn’t hurt a fly. Here and now, it felt like the animalistic part of him, inherited from his distant ancestors, was trying to wake up and reclaim the crown from his modern, civilized self. He yearned for devolution, for primitive release.
It was the madness. It surrounded the monster, like a thicker, noxious layer of air. It infected all who were unlucky enough to come into contact with it.
This is why the thing is so formidable. The monster...it turns its prey upon themselves, before it even raises a hand against them.
Tristan looked to be fighting it, as well. He seemed to be faring better than his followers, but Samuel could see that his effort was taking its toll.
“My lord and master!” he grunted. “I can’t believe it! To be in your very presence...to bathe in your aura...I...I can’t believe it’s finally happening! I have always been faithful to you...always spoke the words of the Message to these people, but sadly only a meager few truly heeded it. They, like me, are gathered before you, and they, like me, offer their service! We desire your bidding! We are ready to begin!”
The thing in Samuel’s hea
d that was trying to erode away his self-restraint and turn him into a mindless killer clashed against his mental defenses. The ache in his head, the gift that Ronny Baselton had given him in the server room, pounded at him again, in concert with the murderous compulsion. Each sensation made the other one worse.
Then, the monster moved. It strode into the full light of the inner courtyard. Samuel had seen it through the cameras, but those artificial eyes had done hardly any justice to the horrible, imposing stature of the thing. It was tall and heavily muscled, naked from head to toe and wearing the dirt and filth of its travels all over its body. The flesh around the illumination of its chest was shredded, as if someone had ripped into it with a bladed instrument. Its hands were stained almost black, the same color of its eyes, with a vaguely reddish hue. Samuel suddenly wondered just how many of the dead had contributed to those stains.
And its eyes....
When Samuel peered into them, it was like staring into the core of the ancient world, into another time that he’d never known, but nonetheless was now utterly convinced had existed.
The thing approached Tristan, and stopped a few paces away from the quivering prophet. Behind him, one of his sycophantic zealots started to twitch and convulse. Then, the man was the first to lose his grip on himself, seemingly giving in to the command of the malignant influence in his mind. He turned to his closest ally, snarling, and threw his body at the startled man, wrestling him to the ground in a thrashing flurry of limbs. The attack was savage; the aggressor tore into his unfortunate victim with the nails of his hands, and even his teeth, bending down and snapping his dripping jaw, eventually finding flesh and biting down hard. The unlucky target of the sudden attack screamed, but was too helpless to do anything but bleed.
Tristan looked behind him at the unexpected display of violence, and blinked his eyes. He looked like he was in a daze.
The monster paid no attention to the brutality. It only regarded Tristan with calm.
And then, unbelievably, it spoke.
“Is this the one?” it said.
Samuel would have expected any voice that would come out of the thing to be something otherworldly, perhaps a wheeze or a hiss...or something animalistic...a growl, or some other guttural sound. Strangely, contrary to his expectations, the voice that the fiend used was oddly...ordinary. It was a man’s voice. It could have been his own.
Tristan whirled back to face the thing, in a state of shock.
“You...you speak?” he almost squeaked. “Oh, my savior...speak to us!”
“This is the one you told me of?” the monster asked, again. Samuel got the distinct impression that it was not directing its words to any gathered in the courtyard. It spoke to something else. Something unseen.
Tristan, also, must have suspected this, for his eyebrows came together in confusion.
“My beloved Reclaimer...to whom do you direct your words?” He uneasily peeked behind him as another shriek escaped the battling pair on the ground. “I...I don’t understand. Is this a test? A trial to confirm the faithful?”
The monster stood still a moment, listening to something. Then, he nodded.
“Yes...I know what must be done. He had served his purpose,” it said. “And we can waste no more time.”
Tristan’s eyes were wide with panic. “My lord...I wish to serve, if you would but tell me what I must do. Wait...what are you...no, my lord...no! Please...I live my life for you...only you!”
The monster moved faster than lightning. A closed fist came up. It loomed over Tristan, mired in bewilderment that was rapidly giving way to abject terror. The helpless priest threw up his hands in a pitiful stance of defense.
“Please, master...my whole life, for you! MY WHOLE LIFE! NOOOOOO!”
The monster’s fist came down. It first shattered Tristan’s forearms, under which he cowered, and then continued downward as if it had touched nothing but air. When the thing’s fist struck Tristan’s head, it offered no resistance and exploded outward like a crushed melon, splattering the surprised faces of his nearby flock with viscera. Unbelievably, the fist continued on, tearing through the unfortunate cleric’s torso and cleaving it into two quivering, gruesome halves.
Tristan’s gory remains fell to the ground, landing in a heap of disjointed bone, flesh, and blood. A brief moment passed in a frozen block of time for everyone except the pair of men on the ground, the one on top clearly winning the fight, the red-painted loser struggling less and less. All who still held anything of their sanity stared, horrified, as the power of the monster was unveiled in all its horrible execution.
And then, there was chaos.
Having witnessed the graphic death and departure of Tristan Englewood, their great and powerful Prophet of the Church of the Reclamation, the crowd’s will was rapidly dismantled, and they ran for their lives. More and more of them lost their humanity to the madness rising in them, and so Samuel saw more and more of them attacking one another. Some simply fell to the ground, their bodies contorting...clawing at their eyes. Others stopped their retreat and willingly gave themselves over to their ferocious cohorts, pleading for death.
One of the men that had been restraining Samuel’s arms, the one on the right, abruptly let go and charged the one on the left, biting deep into the other’s shoulder with his bared teeth, causing the man to cry out. All at once, Samuel found himself free from the grip of his former captors, and instinctively scrambled away as fast as he could, holding his ruined wrist against his body to protect it, wincing as he felt the bones shift.
Every inch he gained was hampered by the struggle in his head to remain himself, to resist the persuasive darkness the monster had placed inside him. So much of him wanted to turn and join the fray, to rip and bite and drink their blood. Somehow he kept his faculties in the rising tide of the madness, keeping the core of himself adamantine, no matter how hard the impulse fought to break him.
His first thoughts were of Kelly. Kelly, his best technician, whom he now realized he’d come to feel so much more for. He saw her, still lying on the ground where she’d been struck down. She was lying on her belly. He had no clue if she was alive or dead.
Until...one of her arms moved!
He’d been all but certain that she’d been killed...and so now, with evidence to the contrary, his heart thumped with the sudden rush of elation. He hurried over to her amid the discord, dropped down, and placed a hand on her shoulder. He heaved, turned her over, so he could check her condition.
“Kelly?”
Samuel was taken aback when Kelly’s arms shot out at him, clawing at him, trying to get to his eyes. He defended himself by reflex, even as he despaired.
The wild look on her face told him everything that he needed to know. He saw nothing left of the woman that he was familiar with in those wild, dilated eyes. That woman had been overcome by the madness, and now, whoever used to be Kelly Prince...was trying to kill him.
* * *
Chapter 48 – Ejelano
He gazed upon the disharmony about him, noting it with melancholic satisfaction. The voice in his head, however, positively howled with glee.
YEAH! YEAH, BITCHES! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! DAMN, I LOVE THIS PART!
The spirit’s man had come through, mislead and gullible as he’d been. Regarding the remains of the priest with the golden hair, he couldn’t help but feel some pity for him. To think, living an entire life for one moment, only to have it betray you and coil around your neck. Ejelano had seen many lives wasted, but few so blindly as this one. Uncountable breaths and eye-blinks, days and nights, lessons learned and false potential, and then...nothing. No reward. Just another death, at the hands of the thing he’d misjudged the most.
Yet, the wretch’s purpose had been fulfilled. The gates had opened before him just when Ejelano thought they never would...just when he was starting to suspect that he’d be a meal for the White, along with everything else.
But no, the gates had opened. He still had reason to hope. He could
still free her.
HELLOOO. HEY, ASSHOLE...YOU CAN PUSSY AROUND ALL YOU WANT AFTER WE FINISH THIS...RIGHT?
Right.
The way was open. It was time to call the darkness.
* * *
Chapter 49 – Samuel
“Kelly!” he cried. “Kelly, it’s Samuel! Stop!”
Even with only one good hand, Samuel was the stronger of the two. He grasped her by the collar of her coveralls and pinned her down with his weight, all the while striving to appeal to whatever scrap of humanity that might yet remain in her. She snarled and hissed at him like a captive animal, using desperate strength to try to break free. It took everything he had to maintain his hold.
“Kelly!”
Samuel fought to calm her, to pierce the haze of the killing compulsion that had overridden her. He’d never seen her angry, really angry, and so looking at her now was something that almost unnerved him completely. She was furious and out of control just like the others, growling and screaming at him.
If he let her go, she would try to kill him. She, who he’d trusted the most. She, whose smile had the power to make a bad day feel good.
He felt himself faltering. His grip on her softened.
He almost wanted to let her do it. Everything was falling apart. At least it would be her to finish him, and not the monster at the gate. It seemed appropriate. Poetic. In all the wrong of the shit-storm that had come down, it seemed the most...right.
He angrily shook off the thought, inching back from the blackness. Was it the monster’s influence that made him want to lie down and give up? He didn’t know what was more frightening...the encroaching madness, or the possibility that it might be his own home-grown dejection that was pushing him toward surrender. toward suicide.
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