by Mat Ridley
The welt where Abraham had struck her was already fading, but even so, I felt a fresh surge of anger at his treatment of her. Once I had gotten her safely inside, I would take great joy in teaching him a few manners. Business before pleasure, though: the first thing to do was to get Harper back on her feet. I did my best to help her up, but my grip was slick with blood and dirt, and my fingers were weak from hammering against Abraham’s armour. It didn’t help that Harper kept trying to brush me away—though not as forcefully as I’m sure she could have done.
“I’m alright, damn it. You just worry about getting yourself out of here before Judas Junior over there finishes picking up his thirty pieces of silver. I’ll catch up in a moment.”
“No way, Harper. It’s not going to take him long, and then he’ll be back over here again, ready to resume his holy war, twice as mad as before, if that’s possible. I’m not going to let you face that.”
“Don’t be stupid, Dan,” she said, exasperatedly. “Look at the state of you. You don’t stand a chance against him! Get up those stairs. We don’t have time to argue about it. Assuming that any of us make it out of here alive, you’ve got your wife to think about.”
“No. It’s precisely because of what Jo would want that I’m going to stay here and keep this tosser busy while you get to safety. And you’re right, we don’t have time to argue about it, so get moving. Trust me.”
Harper peered at me carefully, torn between arguing further and obeying her survival instincts. I didn’t have time to explain that this wasn’t just some macho gesture I was making, and that there were other reasons behind my stand, but in the end, perhaps the look on my face was enough to convince her. “Alright, Hero, you win,” she said. “But just so you know, the first thing I’m going to do when I get up there is gather up a bunch of soldiers and come straight back down here again to bail you out.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that by the time she did so it would probably already be too late, but I could see from her eyes that I didn’t have to. Instead, I clapped her on the shoulder, partly to reassure her, but at the same time pushing her towards the stairs. “Thanks, Harper. And good luck.”
I turned to face Abraham again, not only before my resolve broke, but also because I’d had my back turned towards him for far too long. He had already begun to stomp his way towards me, the medallion dangling from his grip like a headhunter’s trophy. His smile, wicked and curved like a blade, glittered with both triumph and rage. Behind me, I heard the sweet sound of Harper’s footsteps slowly heading up the stairs.
“Nice try, Dan! Very clever. But you should have taken the opportunity to get yourself to safety instead of wasting your life on empty heroic gestures. Or did you think that perhaps your little act of sacrifice would soften God’s heart? Ha! One corrupt life in return for all the hundreds of others you’ve already delivered into eternal slavery? The scales of justice are not so easily balanced, Dan. You will pay for your sins. It’s too late for you now! It’s too late for both of you!”
My heart sank as he strode towards me. His body seemed as perfect as the day it had been Newborn, whereas every part of my own ached for rest. But I wasn’t going to give in, no matter how daunted I felt. Not this time. Even as Abraham slipped the medallion and its poisonous words back around his neck, making sure to tuck them safely inside his armour, I felt curiously unafraid. I knew there would be no second chance for me to separate him from his source of protection, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was armed with words of power of my own now, similarly close to my heart; and I felt that with this blessing of Jo’s—maybe even God’s blessing too, who knows—I could make a stand against this maniac. Like everybody in Purgatory kept telling me, all I had to do was have faith.
Abraham’s first blow ploughed towards me with the confidence of a foregone conclusion. To him, getting past me was merely a formality. But I was ready for his attack, and instead of collapsing to the ground in defeat, I took advantage of the momentum behind his punch to throw him off balance. His look of gloating victory turned into a snarl as I flung him to the ground and jumped on him.
My triumph didn’t last long. After landing no more than a few glancing blows on my opponent, I suddenly found myself at the receiving end of a kick that sent me flying over his shoulder. Before I had a chance to recover, Abraham rolled on top of me, our positions now the reverse of what they had been a moment earlier. With a feral grin, Abraham began to strike at me with his gauntlets, the wrath of his version of God behind every blow that plummeted towards me. I tried my best to ward off his fury, but with every punch that I deflected, I could feel the bones in my arms shattering.
Even the imminent prospect of an eternity in Hell seemed like a walk in the park in comparison to the pain that flooded through me. I’m sure that if Abraham had focussed his efforts on me for just a few seconds longer than he did, I would have succumbed to the lure of oblivion, with or without Jo’s words and the determination they had infused me with. However, to Abraham, bringing Harper to justice for the imaginary sins she had committed against him was more important, and he struggled to his feet as soon as he thought I was sufficiently subdued, straining at the leash to resume his pursuit of her. But just as he was about to break free, I somehow found the strength to grab hold of one of his legs, and he fell again. He rounded on me, snarling like a rabid dog, clawing in fury at my feeble grasp.
“No! Let go of me! She must not be allowed to escape. She must be punished for her sins!”
“Only God has the right to do that, you prick, and based on what you’ve done to Purgatory, I imagine you’re nearer the top of His list than she is.”
Before Abraham could respond, either verbally or physically, salvation came—and from a most unexpected source. For some time, I had thought I felt an uneven thrum coming from the ground, but I had dismissed it as a side effect of having been repeatedly punched in the head by Abraham. But when a chorus of demonic howls suddenly filled the air, it became clear that the cause of the vibration was shockingly real. With dread in my heart, I risked a look behind me, and what I saw confirmed the worst of my fears: the demons were now approaching the Temple.
Even Abraham was not so intent on his crusade as to ignore such a stark warning. As the air around us throbbed with the demons’ yowling, his head snapped up, and a bright grin of pure joy slid onto his face. Enraptured, his hands reached towards his neck, searching for the comfort and protection of the precious medallion: his medallion, not mine, not anymore. He leapt to his feet, leaving my carcass in the dirt. I half-heartedly rolled after him, strangely outraged at being so suddenly neglected, but I needn’t have worried that he was finished with me. Rather than trying to deal with Harper and me himself—especially since by now she was well out of his reach, I was relieved to see—it seemed that Abraham instead intended to enlist the aid of his demonic allies. A feeling of bitter triumph swelled up inside of me. Abraham may have bested me in combat, but I had achieved what I had set out to do: Harper was safe. Abraham obviously didn’t realise that his reinforcements would be completely impotent against the Temple and its divine shield... and maybe while he and his friends were occupied with trying to achieve the impossible, I might even be able to crawl up the stairs and into the Temple myself. At the speed the demons were boiling across the plaza towards us, there wasn’t much time to make it to safety, but I owed it to Jo to try. I offered up as brief a prayer as you can imagine—“please, God”—and began to drag myself towards the steps.
I had barely started the long, painful journey when a new and ominous sound rose above the general cacophony of the approaching horde. It took me a moment to recognise it for what it was: the sound of Abraham chanting. I looked back over my shoulder, knowing full well that to do so could turn what little hope I fostered to despair, but unable to resist. Abraham stood there with his back towards me, arms held wide as if to embrace the fiends. The words radiating from his mouth were in no language that even the gift of tongues could interp
ret, but it was clearly not one that had ever been intended to come from a human mouth. As I watched, a sickly green aura began to shimmer around Abraham’s body, quickly gaining strength and intensity until it was almost impossible to look directly at it. The demons heading towards him skidded to a halt or began to swerve either side of him, afraid to come into contact with this holy—or unholy—fire. Satisfied that his protective shield was in place, Abraham turned his glowing, green-tinged face back in my direction. A smile of triumph blossomed there like a horrid flower, and if he had not been intent on maintaining his chant, I had no doubt that he would have gladly launched into another sermon reiterating his deluded beliefs and spewing righteous judgement towards Harper and me.
The moment stretched out impossibly. I knew that, with an effort, I could haul myself towards the Temple, and perhaps make it as far as the sanctuary of the steps. But even as the thought occurred to me, another of the Fallen screamed overhead, its passage negating my ideas completely. Instead of bouncing off of the Temple’s shield as before, it instead continued along its trajectory uninterrupted, slicing through an archway attached to the side of the Temple and sending it tumbling to the ground in a shower of bricks. With fresh horror, I realised that Abraham’s infernal words did more than simply protect him from the demons: they also stripped away the Temple’s defences, just as they had those of the angels. As long as he continued his chant, the Temple was no more safe than the rest of the city, and everyone sheltering inside it was in danger. If Abraham wasn’t stopped, there would be a massacre.
Of course, I had no concrete evidence that the chanting was the cause of the Temple’s vulnerability, but I suddenly found that having faith in the unseen and the unproven was a whole lot easier than I had previously supposed. In an instant, everything fell into place. It was no longer as simple as Harper, Abraham and me. I finally understood that when Jo had called on me to be a protector, she had meant for the whole of Purgatory, not just Harper. And Jack’s assertion, that all the hardship we had been put through in our lives was simply a preparatory process, a period of training designed to make us ready for our ultimate purpose, that made a heck of a lot more sense now that I was faced with what I knew I was being called to do. It all boiled down to a simple exchange: my life in return for that of everybody else still stuck in Purgatory. And incredibly, it was an exchange I felt ready to make.
The parallels between my situation and the sacrifice made by a certain carpenter’s son a couple of thousand years earlier did not escape me, and a wry, bloody smile came to my lips.
WWJD.
The final plan came into my mind—born of desperation, yet undeniably the same plan that would have come from millennia of careful planning—arriving in a cloud of mixed emotions that swept through my mind in a dizzying rush:
Fear of death and what lay beyond.
Regret that I would never see Jo again.
Pride that I knew she would approve of my action.
Hope that God would be merciful.
And brittle amusement at what Jack—and the other friends I had known, both in Purgatory and back on Earth—would make of it all. Dan the recalcitrant Messiah. I had spent all my life struggling against God; and yet here I was, at the end of my days, surrendering myself to His will, in spectacular style.
I turned towards Abraham and threw myself at him.
We collapsed in a heap, the agent of God pummelling at the agent of Satan, and Abraham’s apocalyptic grin and protective green glow both evaporated in a flash. The demons instantly sensed that the dynamics of the battlefield had changed, and descended upon us. For the last few seconds of my life, I knew what the Pharaoh must have felt like when the Red Sea came crashing down on him and his army. Abraham had just enough time to start screaming before a pair of jaws clamped decisively over his head, biting it clean off. His hands twitched as the life ran out of him, and the medallion fell into the dust, where it was quickly ground underfoot by the hungry masses. This time I was not sad to see the back of it.
I looked up at the demons, too tired to try to escape, knowing that this was the end. I felt a tugging on my left arm, and looked over to see a Bloodhound chewing on my hand. I made a half-hearted effort to free myself from its mouth, but all that succeeded in doing was to finish the demon’s work for it, and my hand tore off. I thought about trying to get up to chase after it, but even as I did so, I saw that both of my legs were missing, too. I caught sight of one of them, clutched to the chest of some kind of lizard as if it were the greatest treasure in the world, but the swarm shifted and blocked my view before I could be sure. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. I considered calling out for help, but quite apart from the fact that I knew I was beyond help, I was also afraid that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out would be a stream of insane laughter. Whoever said death is no laughing matter had obviously never tried it. Or at least not tried it enough times.
The last thing I remember was looking back towards the Temple. The demons had streamed past me by then, throwing themselves up the steps like salmon swimming upstream, but the instant any of them sailed over the threshold, they evaporated in a flash of light. With the cessation of Abraham’s chanting, the Temple was safe once again. Some of the demons realised this and tried to scramble back from the deadly, invisible barrier, but it was as useless for them to fight the inevitable tide as it had been for any of us. The greedy weight of Hell’s army pushing forwards drove them to their doom.
I looked up at Harper—safe on the steps, slowly making her way up them towards the Temple—and I knew peace. Even the sudden eruption of the ground beneath me raised only a vague sense of alarm, and as I found myself propelled upwards towards the sky, trapped between the jaws of a Subterranean, I looked down detachedly, straight into Harper’s eyes.
She stopped and smiled up at me.
The demon bit down, and everything ceased.
Chapter 22
First the hospital in Afghanistan; then the Temple of Rebirth; now this. Coming round and finding myself in an unfamiliar place seemed to be becoming something of a habit for me, although this time there was no darkness before my awakening. One moment, I was lunch for the Subterranean, the next I was sitting on a wooden bench, looking out over a lush green valley. Rather than the demon’s teeth, I was now surrounded by fields full of vividly coloured flowers, lolling in the bright sunshine that doused everything. I could immediately sense that death had no place here. Instead, the enormous trees that dotted the landscape seemed to celebrate life, their branches sagging under the weight of all kinds of fruit. In the distance, snow-capped mountains thrust up into an azure sky, calm and majestic and quite unlike the volcanoes I had got used to seeing in their place. Nearby, at the foot of a towering white cliff, was a lake, the soothing rumble of the waterfall that fed it seamlessly replacing the wild roaring of the mob that had engulfed me an instant earlier. At the bottom of the waterfall, enough moisture was thrown into the air to create a rainbow.
It was all, quite simply, beautiful.
I can’t remember how long I just sat there, staring. But gradually, the initial wave of confusion and wonder subsided and allowed my other senses a chance to catch up. I noticed that all my limbs were back, free from pain, and that instead of a heavy suit of mechanical armour, they were now clad in a light, white garment of some kind. I took a few deep breaths. It was wonderful to taste air that wasn’t tainted with the foul undertone of charcoal and sulphur. But there was something else here, too, a scent from another time that at first I couldn’t place… but suddenly it hit me in a rush of memories. Jo’s favourite perfume.
At exactly the same moment I identified the fragrance, I heard a soft rustling sound next to me on the bench.
“Hello, gorgeous.”
My heart leapt and my head spun, and there she was, looking as radiant as ever; more so, if that were possible. There was a look of bright joy on her face, but also a hint of wry amusement that no doubt stemmed from sitting there and observing my
disorientation. She bit her bottom lip delicately, scarcely containing the enthusiasm that was apparent in the warmth of her eyes. She was dressed in the same kind of robe as I was, and its extreme whiteness contrasted breathtakingly with the red cascade of hair that spilled over her shoulders. The gleam of her smile made the nearby rainbow seem lacklustre by comparison.
The apparent impossibility of what I could see before my eyes sparked an instinctive pessimism in my mind. I was too used to things going wrong for me. How could this be real? Before I was ready to let down my guard, I had to be sure that this wasn’t just some evil trick. There was still a chance that despite the evidence of my senses, I was in fact in Hell. Perhaps all that I could see around me was fake, designed to inspire me with a hope that would then be snatched away again. Certainly, I couldn’t imagine a worse torture than to lose Jo again after being so close to her at last.
Jo had always been able to read me like a book, and the giggle that broke into my introspection was more reassuring than any words would have been.
“Jo? Is that really you?”
“Last time I checked. Here, let me prove it.”
She leant across and pressed her lips against mine.
Time passed.
A lot of time.
I was convinced.
Eventually our mouths parted, and she snuggled down under my arm. I grinned foolishly. Sitting like that with her was just like when we used to watch TV together, back when we were both still alive.