Crashing Paradise

by Christopher Golden

  To emerge.

  She squirmed in the embrace of the cool, desert sand, turning herself toward the surface, and began her ascent. She dug her way upward toward what had once been a sun-baked sea of dunes and dust but had become a more fitting environment.

  Suited for what she had become.

  Fragmented memories of days long ago flashed through her mind, so alien to her now that they could have just as easily belonged to another. She found the recollections annoying, a distraction, and pushed them to the back of her mind, where she hoped they would eventually become lost, then forgotten.

  All that concerned her was the hunger, and the hunt that preceded it. She swam through the rough, desert sands toward the surface, driven by the need for blood. The higher she ascended, the warmer the ocean of sand around her became, a stinging reminder of the warmth that rained down from the sun, absorbed by the desert sea.

  As deadly as fire to her now.

  Her hands were the first to break through, emerging from the desert like strange vegetation, urged to blossom and reach toward the rays of moonlight. The rest of her followed, her senses coming alive as she hauled herself from the sand.

  The night winds caressed her, carrying the scent of what had originally brought her to this place.

  Prey.

  Eve blinked away the sand and grit from her eyes, a transparent membrane sliding across the surface of the delicate orbs, protecting them from the harshness of the environment.

  She looked out over the sea of shifting sand, searching the broad expanse of nighttime wasteland for what had drawn her there. Tilting her head back, she searched the air for the scent again and found it almost immediately.

  Not so far off, nestled in the embrace of night, she could see it, dark and squatting, asleep until the coming of dawn.

  A city.

  No, it was far too small to be called that, but she was sure that if it had the time, it would grow.

  If it had the time.

  Eve closed her eyes, pulling the scent of civilization into her nostrils. She could practically see them: the young and old, men, women, and children, most of them asleep in their hovels of mud, clay, and straw.

  Awaiting a dawn that they would never see.

  Her stomach gurgled noisily, eager for sustenance from those in the settlement ahead, more than enough to slake her voracious thirst. But she could not think only of herself; those selfish days were long past, and she now had many mouths to feed.

  Turning briefly away from the settlement, she looked out over the broad expanse of desert behind her and saw that her children had also been awakened by the hunger brought on by nightfall.

  She watched as they climbed up from their desert nests, their animal eyes glinting red in the light thrown down by the moon and the stars. Their number had grown since last she took notice; the offspring that her insatiable hunger had transformed, now responsible for the creation of their own thirsty spawn.

  One after another they crawled up from the sand, many with their heads already tilted back, smelling the night air.

  She did not recall the last time the tribe had fed, when they had begun their trek across the ocean of sand in pursuit of food.

  Her children, and her children’s children, anxiously licked their dry, cracked lips in anticipation, awaiting a sign from her that it was time for them to feed. She was the matriarch of the hungry pack, and they would not act—no matter how voracious they were—until she showed them that it was time.

  She nodded, turning away as they surged forward to follow her across the desert sands, and toward the sleeping settlement.

  To feed.

  8

  EVE woke to the rotten-meat stink of vampires. Her nostrils flared, and she simply stopped breathing. Inhaling another breath of that stench would make her vomit. Her entire body throbbed with a terrible ache, and she began to stretch, feeling the muscles sliding over bones, wondering if parts of her were broken and somehow unhealed.

  The sensation of motion carried her along. She heard the rumble of a truck engine and felt the jarring bounce of its tires over a rutted surface. The dry heat suggested a desert, though she could not feel the strange prickling of her skin that afflicted her whenever the sun was out. Night. In the desert.

  This time of year, it could only be Africa.

  A scritch-scratch voice, like nails on a chalkboard, spoke in French and several other voices joined in laughter. Her mind translated. “Isn’t that sweet? Mommy’s awake.”

  The leeches were talking about her. Eve wanted to tear all of their throats out with her teeth and rip their faces off. The urge felt good; it helped to wake her up. She opened her eyes and found herself surrounded by eleven vampires, each more sneering and arrogant than the last. They were amused, these creatures, but this was not the swaggering foolishness that so often went along with the recently undead. These were old, powerful leeches who’d earned a bit of arrogance. Their kind usually tried to avoid her at any cost, knowing what she would do to them.

  Now they relished her captivity and debasement. To them she was traitorous, a pariah, but also the scourge of their kind. The vampires—male and female, of mixed race and language—regarded her with quiet glee, eyes slitted, the edges of their mouths upturned.

  Hatred suffused her entire being, and Eve tried to rise. She could not. A terrible weight lay across her. When she managed to lift her head and crane her neck to look down the length of her body, she saw that a thin crimson chain had been bound around her shoulders and legs and kept her wrists pinned together behind her back. They looked as though they ought to weigh nothing, but she might as well have been buried a thousand feet beneath the earth.

  “Wrought by demon’s hands,” said a thickly accented vampire, a female who slid from the bench in back of the truck and crouched beside her, tracing the lines of Eve’s face with sharp nails, like a sensuous lover. “Chains made from the blood of angels.”

  Another leech laughed. “Of one angel.”

  Jophiel, Eve thought. And she wondered how long the bastard had been in league with the demon Abaddon. Whatever they were up to, how long had they been planning it?

  Eve closed her eyes again, seething, shutting out the sight of the vampires just as she had their stink. What had prompted the angel and the demon to use her blood-children as their pawns, she had no idea. Perhaps they knew how difficult it was to think with so many vampires nearby; the rage and the need to destroy the filth whipped her into an almost bestial frenzy.

  But the chains bound her, and she could do nothing at the moment. She forced herself to lie still, to close out the world, save for the rumble of the truck across that rutted road. The canvas flap that covered the back of the truck did not entirely prevent the dust that rose from their path from infiltrating the rear of the vehicle. It drifted in and eddied about like the ghosts of the desert itself.

  The truck bounced in a dip in the road. Eve’s head struck the floor. In that moment, she understood that they had left the road—if indeed they had ever been on a real road at all.

  “Traitorous bitch,” came a whisper.

  Eve’s eyes fluttered open almost against her will. The vampire male had the features and complexion of a South Sea islander, and his eyes were different colors—one blue and one the deepest brown she’d ever seen. Eve recognized him immediately.

  “Palu,” she rasped.

  The Samoan grinned, revealing his fangs. Eve had not turned him herself, but as far as she knew he was one of the oldest surviving vampires in the world, perhaps thirdgeneration.

  Twice she had been within feet of him, and he’d managed to escape her.

  “It’s been a long time, mother,” he replied, still in a whisper.

  Palu rarely raised his voice above that level.

  “What the hell are you doing, all of you working together?” she asked, for the older vampires tended to hate one another and despised one another’s company.

  The truck bucked twice, rolled a dozen feet, and
the engine went silent, the vehicle popping and ticking as it began to cool.

  Palu stood, reached down, and twined his fingers in the chains that bound her—the blood of angels, wrought by demons—and lifted her effortlessly. He brought her face up to his, and the grin vanished.

  “Survival of the fittest, Mother,” he whispered.

  Another leech whipped back the canvas flap, and Palu hurled her out of the truck. Eve braced herself as best she could, but the chains dragged her down so heavily that when she struck the ground, for several seconds she lost consciousness again.

  Powerful hands lifted her. Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to refocus, clear her mind. It occurred to her that the goddamned leeches were ruining her outfit—the jacket had cost her nearly a thousand dollars, and must be completely ruined, and the blasted desert landscape would be hell on her Manolos. She prayed to God—though she knew He probably hadn’t listened to her since her last day in Eden—that she would be able to kill them more than once.

  Eve inhaled deeply. Now that they were out in the chilly desert night, the stink of the vampires was not so terrible, and she enjoyed breathing. It made her feel not so far away from all the things she wished she could be, and do, and have.

  Humanity. Forgiveness.

  “Where the fuck are we?” she asked.

  The vampires escorting her around the truck stiffened at the question. She wanted to ask them what they were worried about. They were basically carrying her. She hung between them, dragged toward the ground by the chains that weighed nothing to them, and more than Atlas’s burden to her.

  “Libya,” that intimate whisper said behind her.

  “What the hell are we doing in Libya?”

  Palu only laughed.

  The vampires gathered around her. Another truck rattled up twenty yards away, and more of the leeches poured out.

  They dragged her forward and dropped her. Eve went down hard on her knees, the blood chain breaking her left clavicle with the impact. But she remained on her knees. The chain didn’t prevent her from looking around, but there was little enough to see. Aside from the night and the desert, the two trucks and the wraithlike undead they’d disgorged, the only feature of the land around her was a single structure, a onestory, nearly featureless building that might have been mosque or monastery. Its front doors were the only thing that caught her eye, tall and arched in a vaguely Moorish style, with large iron rings for handles.

  Her clavicle pained her. The bone kept trying to heal, but the weight of the chain would not allow it.

  Eve glanced around, full of questions without answers.

  The vampires ignored the little mosque, gazing up at the night sky. A rustle came from above, and she glanced up, following their fascination, to see Jophiel and Abaddon arriving.

  The demon’s red-black wings gleamed wetly, and the desert sand seemed to ripple in revulsion as his hooves touched the ground. The angel circled once, perhaps purposefully allowing Abaddon to arrive before him to avoid any possible conflict with the vampires.

  Then they stood side by side, white, Heaven’s wings next to Hell’s most hideous vulture. Palu slunk toward Abaddon, the Samoan vampire wearing his trademark grin. Even in the dark his one blue eye seemed to sparkle, until the demon turned and fixed him with a glare and a dismissive sneer. Palu hesitated, then lowered his gaze.

  The leeches don’t get a seat at the table, Eve thought. That meant they were following Abaddon. And why not? If she was their mother, then he, most assuredly, was their father.

  The angel and the demon whispered to one another. Eve could do nothing but wait. The chains Abaddon had made from Jophiel’s blood would not allow her to attempt to fight, or to flee. For now.

  Once again the ground began to tremble. The vampires glanced around nervously. Eve frowned and stared at the desert floor. Grains of sand sifted and danced before her.

  Around the mosque, things began to force their way up out of the sand, ugly, troll-like things. Whatever Eve might have started to think was going on, these new arrivals wiped her mind of any assumptions. These weren’t vampires or demons or angels. They weren’t anything to do with Heaven or Hell, and they weren’t from the human world at all.

  A few feet away from Abaddon and Jophiel, a monster burst from the sand. It erupted from the ground with a spray of sand, a twelve-foot warrior creature that bore some resemblance to the somewhat smaller things gathered around the mosque. But she could see the dark intelligence in its eyes and the arrogance in its carriage. The warrior was clad in redblack armor and had long golden hair, but his face was monstrous and his flesh like leather.

  “Welcome, Duergar,” Abaddon purred. “Your mission went well, I hope.”

  Eve had heard Conan Doyle speak the name. She knew what Duergar was—who he was—but why he would be here, with the rest of these horrors, she could not begin to guess.

  “She still lives,” the monster spit. “It is not to my liking.”

  “You weren’t required to kill her. Only distract her,” Jophiel said, flicking his hand as though brushing the half-Drow, half-Fey creature away. “There’ll be more than enough time to destroy them, if you’re foolish enough to put the destruction of your enemies ahead of your own existence.”

  A rumble of hatred came up from Duergar’s throat. A heavy axe hung at his side, and he reached for it. Abaddon touched his arm and shook his head slowly.

  “That isn’t the way it works. We’re allies.”

  Duergar sniffed in amusement at the idea. “The key?” he asked.

  Now the angel Jophiel smiled, and for the first time since alighting upon the desert sands of Libya, he turned toward Eve. He gestured toward her.

  “We have her.”

  The Drows—huge, lumbering trolls clad in scraps of wool and carrying heavy maces and axes—began to close in around the mosque. The vampires clustered impatiently, rustling like dry leaves, but did not dare approach without Abaddon’s approval.

  Duergar hocked something up from deep in his throat and spit a fat, black wad of filth into the sand. “Why are you both just standing here?”

  Abaddon rose up on his hooves, wings spreading wide.

  He did not like Duergar’s tone, that was clear. Then the demon subsided and his aspect altered, revealing a slender, olive-skinned man in a perfectly tailored suit and scarlet tie.

  He gave a razor of a smile.

  “Waiting for you, my friend. You wish to walk through the Garden Gate with us? You and your dim-witted friends must open those doors.”

  Duergar spit again. “You try my patience, hellspawn. Perhaps the weak things of the Blight fear you, but you would be making a mistake to think that is true of Duergar. We are allies. Our shared interests draw us together. I am not your lackey.”

  “Stinking, lumbering fool,” Jophiel said, wings spreading, suddenly as tall as Duergar himself. Eve expected him to draw a sword, but he did not. “We serve each other to serve ourselves. Open the godforsaken door!”

  “Ah, if only it were godforsaken, we wouldn’t have this trouble,” Abaddon replied.

  Duergar looked back and forth from angel to demon. The Drows began to moan their displeasure with the way their master had been spoken to, and they began to move toward Abaddon and the angel, until their half-blood kin raised a hand to halt them.

  In that moment, anything might have happened. Bound by ancient power, Eve could not move, but she quietly rooted for the three of them to murder each other, there on the sand. The pain in her shoulder and the crushing weight of the chains had grown worse. A burning hunger had begun in her gut, a gnawing need for the taste of blood. It had been too long.

  She started to laugh.

  Abaddon spun to glare at her. Jophiel whipped his head around, long hair reflecting starlight just as brightly as his wings. Duergar took a step toward her, the canines that jutted up from his lower jaw making him look barbaric and also vaguely like a walrus. His green eyes gleamed in the dark.

  The white s
tripe in his copper hair drew Eve’s gaze almost hypnotically. The vampires hissed at her, and even the numbskull Drows seemed agitated by her laughter.

  Eve snickered, leaning forward, surrendering to the weight of the blood chain, and it tipped her over. She grunted as she struck the sand, and rasped a bit as she kept laughing.

  “What do you find so amusing, Eve?” Jophiel asked.

  She sighed, trying to stifle her laughter, and stared at him. “Who, me? What the hell do I know? I’m not part of your little club. Nobody’s talking to me, or even really acknowledging I’m here. Which is fine by me. You’re all fucking ugly, evil fucks, and I’m planning to fucking kill you as soon as fucking possible. But, all that aside, I do think the whole scene’s a giggle. I’ve put it together now. I don’t believe it, but I get it. One of you morons actually thinks somehow you’re going to use me to open the Garden Gate, right? How stupid are you? I mean, the fucking troll, okay, but you other two twits were there when God banished us. I’m tainted, you pricks, and I haven’t been forgiven for anything. Not the first sin, and not the last. That Gate isn’t going to open for me.”

  Duergar turned angrily upon Jophiel and Abaddon, both of whom ignored the massive, savage warrior.

  “We shall see,” the angel said.

  His smile said he knew something Eve did not. That troubled her deeply enough that she stopped smiling.

  “Duergar,” Abaddon began.

  “The doors,” the half-blood creature said. He marched toward the mosque with a speed and power that Eve could only admire, muscles rippling beneath his golden flesh.

  Duergar reached out with his massive hands and gripped the iron rings on the doors of the shabby little building. He began to pull. The hinges shrieked and the doors opened, just a crack.

  They exploded outward, sheared in two by a blade of fire.

  Duergar stumbled backward and fell to one knee, copper hair flowing around him. The thing that burst from within the tiny structure was impossibly large, far taller than Duergar himself.

  Once, it might have been an angel, for its wings spread so wide that they were broader than the squat little building.