And here he was, Gary Williams, with the lives of the vice president and the shadow ambassador in his hands, one big motherfucking vampire on their backs and a bunch of hypothetical bullshit as his only weapon.
They were halfway down the corridor, and not nearly far enough away, when the steel door they had used flew off its hinges and clanged fifteen feet down the hall. Williams noted that the shadow had chosen to use brute force rather than attempt to mist through the door frame, and filed that thought away. He hoped he’d get a chance to use it.
“Run!” he roared, and shoved the ambassador forward, hoping he was fast enough, knowing the vice president was a scumbag and wouldn’t bother to help the poor old guy.
Williams had reached the first control junction, just after the halfway point, and with the speed that was the shadow’s legacy, the black male one, who looked as if it’d grown even larger with its anger, rushed down the hall toward him. It would be only seconds before the vampire had him, and then the other two men as well. Agent Williams’s handprint was enough to activate the safety program’s voice control, and it ticked away three seconds as the inhuman thing bore down on him, its mouth open to reveal fangs, lengthening even as it came. A loud pinging indicated that the program was on-line, and Williams responded.
“Blast door twenty-one,” he yelled, noting the number on the wall, “down!”
And another steel door, much stronger than the first, its seals airtight, slid into place. As the pounding began, Williams flipped on the comm at his control junction, to hear the sounds on the other side of the door more clearly, and even then, he began to run again, toward the Oval Office and his duty there.
“Garth!” a voice shouted, far away, and Williams knew it was addressing the creature who was after him.
“What?” Garth shouted back, its voice almost a howl as it continued to pound on the door.
“Mission accomplished,” the first voice, obviously one of the other vampires, back in the conference room, shouted again, barely audible. “We’re pulling out!”
“Not until I kill the other two,” Garth wailed.
And now Williams slowed, stopped in the steel corridor, almost to the next control junction, almost to the door leading into the Oval Office. The outcome of this conversation could save lives.
“They’re not a priority!” the other voice yelled down the hall. “We’re leaving, but suit yourself You can find us later.”
And that was it—no more conversation, just more pounding, and though Garth couldn’t have misted through it didn’t even bother to try, just continued to rely on its strength. Williams turned around and sprinted to the next control junction, the Oval Office only ten feet behind him. He thought he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the shadow ambassador lying on the floor in the office, but his priority was stopping the vampire.
The pounding continued, and Williams began to wonder whether the thing would be strong enough to break this door down. And if not, what then? Whom did it kill on its way out? Or would it leave at all? Would it try to find another route to the office? Williams couldn’t let that happen.
At the control junction, he primed the voice comm, then hit the release that would open the door. It slid up, revealing a somewhat stunned vampire. The creature’s eyes narrowed as it looked at Williams down the hall. Williams wondered if the vampire was at all concerned that it might be walking into a trap, but he doubted it. Vampires were nothing if not arrogant.
“Shadow containment door twenty-one,” Williams said softly, “down.”
The door slammed shut behind the vampire, and it spun around to look, then back to Williams, its grin widening. The creature did not notice that this door was somewhat different from the one it had been attacking moments before.
“Don’t worry,” the thing known as Garth said to Williams. “I won’t run away from you, my friend.”
“Shadow containment door twenty-two,” Williams said loudly, “down.”
And a foot in front of Agent Gary Williams, another door fell into place, in which there was a small window two inches by four inches, made of glass a foot thick, just like the door.
“Shadow containment measure one,” Williams said, and watched through the hole as the ceiling between the doors dropped slightly, the floor rose, and the vampire, Garth, looked entirely off balance.
A second later, the vampire looked up at the tiny window and rushed, roaring, at the door to begin pounding anew. But as soon as the first blow fell, the vampire shrieked and fell back, cradling its right hand. The walls, ceiling and floor were made of silver in this part of the corridor, installed five years ago but never expected to be used. Now, Williams knew, some shadows could escape just about any containment. But most would not be able to free themselves from this one.
All surfaces were of silver, and even the glass of the window was sealed, airtight, and covered with a fine silver mesh. Had Garth been barefoot, it would have known much sooner that it was chasing its prey into a trap, and yet Williams was fairly certain now that the vampire would not have stopped. Even now, as he watched, Garth stepped forward again and, painful though it must have been, began to pound against the silver door, its rage growing with each touch.
Still, though its rage grew, its strength began to leave it. Surrounded by that much silver, it was only a matter of time before it would be incapacitated, though all evidence showed that such an effect was temporary at best.
Williams watched through the window as Garth struggled, falling to his knees. In moments it would be too late for the vampire to shapeshift, and though it had shown an aversion to it, Garth did so now. Turning to mist, it floated toward the upper edge of the door, and Williams knew that the vampire had given up its former targets and narrowed the field down to one bothersome Secret Service agent.
In the Oval Office, George Marcopoulos felt as if he were having a heart attack. He’d run all the way down that long corridor, and as soon as he’d stepped through the steel door, the pain had hit, momentarily paralyzing him with pain and fear, the agony in his chest and arms driving him to the ground, where he hit his head. He’d been unconscious for only a moment or two, but when he came around, he saw Bill Galin, the vice president, sitting behind the President’s desk.
“Ah,” Galin said as George began to move. “You’re alive after all, what a shame.”
The man looked terrified still, his eyes wild, but his mouth was split by a gleeful, maniacal grin.
“If that thing doesn’t get in here,” he went on, “and l’m willing to bet that it won’t, that makes me the President . . . President Galin. I rather like the sound of that.”
“You didn’t call for help,” George mumbled, his voice sounding somehow off as he tried to sit up, hand still clutching his chest.
“Too bad, so sad,” Galin said in a singsong voice.
And then he was up, stepping up onto the President’s desk and then dropping down from it to crouch by George on the rug. The vice president, more than likely about to become President just as he claimed, leaned in to whisper to George.
“Mr. Ambassador, your Hannibal doesn’t know what he’s done—”
“He’s not my . . .,” George began, but Galin put a finger to his lips.
“Ah, ah, ah,” he scolded, “it isn’t polite to interrupt. Anyway, as I was saying, you and I know that Hannibal doesn’t represent all of those monsters, but he is chief marshal of the SJS. With this attack attributed to him, the world will believe that the shadows have declared war on humans. It’s open season on those . . . things you have befriended, and I’m now the chief hunter.”
Galin smiled, and his hands slipped around George’s neck and began to squeeze.
“You, Mr. Ambassador, are out of a job.”
Heart pounding in his ears, George could not breathe, and Galin’s hands continued to tighten.
I’m dead, George thought.
“I think not,” a polite voice said, and then the hands were gone and George heard a
crash.
Looking up, he saw that Galin had been thrown backward, across the desk, knocking videophone, lamp, everything, from the desk and landing in the President’s chair hard enough to knock it over. Galin sprawled on the ground, and George Marcopoulos knew he hadn’t gotten there by himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement, and he looked back toward the open emergency door where the Secret Service agent was still trying to destroy the vampire that had followed them.
Standing in front of it was a man he had never seen before, all in black as though he meant to be inconspicuous, but more conspicuous because of it. He was a slight man, and George couldn’t imagine he had thrown Galin across the room. And then he turned around, and though George had never seen him before, he recognized the man. As a vampire.
He knew immediately that this shadow was not with the others, but he still flinched when the creature kneeled at his side.
“Dr. Marcopoulos,” he said, in a respectful, almost feminine voice, “my name is Joe Boudreau. My uncle was Henri Guiscard. Meaghan Gallagher asked me to watch out for you, and I really think we ought to go now.”
Guiscard! Henri Guiscard! The mind boggled. George nodded even as the shadow delicately lifted him and carried him to the window. Henri Guiscard had been the start of it all, in a sense, a Roman Catholic cardinal who had discovered The Gospel of Shadows accidentally, then abandoned the Church, fleeing to Boston, where he hoped to reveal the book’s contents to the world. Liam Mulkerrin had followed Guiscard and killed everyone the old cardinal came into contact with, dragging Peter Octavian into the web of that mystery, a mistake that led to Mulkerrin’s defeat in Venice.
Yes, George thought he remembered Peter saying something about Guiscard’s nephew. He’d run the bookstore where the cardinal had hidden the Gospel. But he’d never heard anything of the boy becoming a shadow himself! Still, those questions were for later. They had enough to worry about just getting off the White House grounds where the new President had become homicidal and the shadows’ tenuous relationship with the world had been shattered.
“Let’s go,” Boudreau said, dumping Bill Galin’s unmoving form off the broken chair, then lifting that chair and hurling it through the bay window behind the President’s desk, all with one hand while the other cradled George Marcopoulos as if he were a baby.
“Yes,” George agreed. But go where?
The shadow known as Garth was in mist form and drifting quickly toward the door frame. Williams knew the thing could kill him in seconds, but he wasn’t about to let it get that far.
“Air lock,” he said, and with a double bang and the sound of hydraulics, the room was sealed.
Even as mist, the vampire couldn’t find any way out of the silver-lined room, and it turned back to human form after floating around nearly every corner of the room. The ceiling was blocked off into circular tubes, and Williams experienced a moment’s worry when the mist disappeared up inside them. But several seconds later, the mist emerged again, its attempts fruitless. Finally, Garth returned to human form and curled up on the floor, eyes burning into Williams’s own, where he stood behind that foot-thick glass.
Eventually, there would be no more air in the room, and that on top of the silver should make Garth weaker and weaker. Williams didn’t know whether vampires needed to breathe at all, or if their bodies just kept breathing out of habit. Regardless, the silver was doing its job. Garth wasn’t going anywhere.
Agent Gary Williams knew what he should do. He knew what his government required him to do. He knew he ought to simply stand guard until somebody came along to help, preserve this insanely powerful creature for study by the Pentagon. He knew he should do that.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Canisters.”
And inside that silver room, the last phase of the never-before-used special anti-shadow security precautions activated. As Williams watched through the tiny window, the ceiling fell, hundreds of silver-plated steel cylinders with razor-sharp edges slamming into the ground with a thousand pounds of weight behind them. Garth didn’t have time to move as its body was dissected into more than a hundred pieces, each trapped within a cylinder.
Almost as quickly, the floor began to slide out, into the wall, and as it fell away, the cylinders snapped down, rotating, sealing themselves so that in moments silver-lined canisters filled with the flesh of a shadow filled the inside of that room in neat rows. They could still study it, Williams figured, but now he wouldn’t have to fight it anymore.
He turned, rotating his head, neck and shoulders to relieve the tension, and walked into the Oval Office. In the middle of the confrontation he’d just ended, and over the shouting and screaming of the vampire, he thought he’d heard banging and the shattering of glass from this room but he didn’t have a moment to spare. Now that he was there, in the office, he couldn’t believe what had happened.
The bay window was smashed, the President’s chair was gone, his desk was a wreck and the vice president, his face bruised and bloody, sat propped against one wall, cradling his left arm.
“They’re in it together,” he said as Williams entered the room. They were joined a moment later by a group of agents who burst through the main door of the Oval Office.
“Who is, sir?” Williams asked, wondering how badly the man was hurt.
“Marcopoulos, Hannibal, all of them. The ambassador tried to kill me!” Bill Galin snapped. “They’re all in it together. This whole Mulkerrin thing is part of it too.”
“Sir,” Williams started, reaching to help the man up as the other agents went out the window after Marcopoulos and whoever else had gone out that way. “Mr. Vice President, do you think that’s likely?”
Galin leaned against the big desk, then looked up, glaring at Williams.
“Don’t ever question me again, Agent,” Galin snapped. “And that’s Mr. President to you.”
11
Hell.
Seventy-Seven Days, Twenty Hours,
Forty-One Minutes After Departure:
More than two months had passed since they had met Lord Alhazred, and there had been other demon-lords since. These lords were nothing like the shadows which they had battled in Venice and which were plentiful in the deep caverns of Hell. Those others were work beasts, slave demons, and Meaghan thought that perhaps they were made from the flesh of the Suffering, the damned. They had seen many such damned beings, displayed in abject humiliation, abused in every way imaginable, tortured and physically, literally torn apart, only to re-form so that it could begin again. The demon-lords they had met, including Erim, Yezidis and Azag-Thoth, were polite when Lazarus mentioned the Stranger, though he refused to tell her why. Some, a cowardly few, looked frightened; others were hostile but still cooperative.
Through it all, Meaghan could not forget the words of Lord Alhazred: The Suffering are always here, no matter where else they may be. She didn’t truly understand it, and though she no longer trusted him, Lazarus claimed he did not know what it meant. Eventually, Meaghan decided it might be better if she remained ignorant.
Since Alex had died, they had not been attacked at all. Not by demon-lords, or their hellish slaves. They had been completely unmolested, and the more Meaghan thought about it, the more she wondered if they weren’t being manipulated the entire time. Days, weeks and months had passed as they moved from one pit of Hell to the next, without a trace of Peter. All of the demons—and it seemed to her they had become progressively uglier—knew exactly what they were talking about, but couldn’t tell them where they might find Octavian.
Meaghan had to think, eventually, that they were being led on a wild goose chase. She also became very concerned about the time they had been gone. Lazarus had told her that time would move much more quickly here, but how much? They had been in Hell for months. Was the battle all over in their world? Had Mulkerrin been victorious? Had their dimension become nothing more than a playground for Hell’s work-beasts, freed from their masters?
On this day, which seemed like
every other, she was at her wit’s end. They were standing in the center of a cavern in which jackal-like creatures raped the Suffering over and over in every orifice, splashing some kind of sulphuric ejaculate all over the damned things, all over the stone floor its acid eating through flesh and bone and stone.
“I wish I could do more for you,” the demon-lord said, sitting back in its stone chair and overseeing the terrors visited upon the damned in its care. This latest lord was almost blue and seemed made of chalk. Its belly was bloated and for the most part hid the bony phallus between its legs, though the thing’s testicles were the size of melons and hung low enough in their sack to rest comfortably on the ground. On its head was a crown of penises, woven with flesh ropes unmistakably made of women’s labia. Its jaws were long and filled with suckers like those of an octopus. Apparently, it had no eyes.
“So do we,” Lazarus said, obviously wanting to leave as much as Meaghan did.
“I can send you on to—” the thing began. but Meaghan couldn’t take it anymore. Alex was dead; she wouldn’t let her world die too.
“What’s your name?” she asked the thing, and it turned its head toward her, mouth open. She wondered if it would try to attack her, but then realized the thing didn’t have a nose, that the suckers in its mouth were for breathing, for smelling, among other things.
“My . . . name?” it asked.
“Yes, your name. What is your name? I wouldn’t have thought this a difficult question.”
Lazarus whipped his head around to stare at her, jaw agape, thinking she had lost her mind. And perhaps she had.
Then, what looked like fleshy folds of skin on the demon’s huge testicles parted, revealing, finally, the thing’s eyes. Meaghan wanted to vomit, but she wouldn’t show her disgust, or fear.
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