Nightfallen (Vol. 1): Books 1-4

by Schvercraft, S. G.

  I understood why. The physics would be obvious to anyone—an exterior blast wouldn’t be enough to penetrate the stone ziggurat. An interior blast, however, would destroy it. The priests, with the torches all lit, had to be inside. But with only one way in, stealth rather than fighting our way inside would be the smarter way to go.

  He would sneak in solo, and place the bomb.

  The others looked confused by this act of selflessness as he remained with the bomb, but obeyed.

  It was a pressure valve being released inside of me, being given permission to go. I could almost feel the same relief in the others. Yet as the others passed me, I lingered a few second longer, watching Jackson pick up the bomb, and slowly make his way towards the ziggurat. It loomed over him.

  I wondered if I’d ever see him again. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt something like this for him. Even still, such emotion fluttering in my undead chest always surprised me.

  Then, back up the tunnel where the others had gone, I heard a single gunshot.

  I brought my own rifle up, and rushed down the tunnel, driven more by a predator instinct than any conscious courage.

  The tunnel had widened just before a bend, and it was there I saw Vance, Zoe, Ethan and Holly. Each was unconscious, their bodies already battered to a point that would have killed living men. How could it have happened so fast?

  I took some pleasure in seeing Holly’s pretty face so bloodied, but that passed quickly as Erasmus turned the corner.

  The veins of his hands throbbed green. Though wearing his priestly robe, his scarred face was not covered by a hood. I could see that bizarre, green energy flowing even into the veins of his neck like some furious, radioactive aneurysm in the making.

  A single bullet hole was in his shoulder. No blood pooled from it, and he grinned as if he didn’t even notice. “You would be astounded how many intrepid spirits, living and undead, have come to these tunnels looking to kill Demarrkad’s priests in their Black Ziggurat. Even the Shawnee, with nothing but arrows and spears, were more challenging than you amateurs.”

  I began firing, not the practiced squeezes Jackson had once tried to teach me, but spastic, jerking, yanks at the trigger.

  Rounds sparked against the tunnel’s walls, while others struck into the swirl of Erasmus’s robes. He rushed at me and backhanded my ribs.

  There hadn’t seemed to be much force or speed behind it. Yet when that glowing, hand connected, it was like I’d been hit by a Mack truck. All the ribs on my right side splintered, and the force of it threw me back down the tunnel from which I’d come.

  Losing my rifle, I tumbled into the cave of the Black Ziggurat. The lip of rock along the path kept me from falling into the black waters. Instead, I careened down the path until I came to a rest near the foot of the bridge.

  More pain screamed into my mind, and I was sure I’d managed to fracture a vertebrae. Consciousness leaving me, I looked over to see Jackson fighting the other two priests on the bridge. The bomb had already gone over the side. It was bizarre seeing something as pedestrian as a plastic party cooler sinking peacefully into that ancient lake.

  Jackson had filled one with enough bullet holes that he laid on the bridge, his robe a bloody mess, and was now advancing on the other one who was throwing himself at Jackson with a suicide bomber’s intensity.

  His AR-15 was taking chunks of flesh from the priest, but the latter had enough force behind him that when they collided, it sent Jackson over the bridge’s side.

  When he emerged onto the surface, Jackson already had leveled his rifle at the priest, and continued firing.

  My voice was a creak when I tried to shout at him, warn him about the glow I could see emerging from the water’s depths.

  Faster than I could have imagined, the monster was on him. No doubt attracted by the sound, it grabbed Jackson’s left arm that had been supporting his rifle. With its long, see-through teeth, the thing in an instant pulled him down, even as darkness washed over my own vision.

  10

  Dungeon of the High Priest

  I awoke tied to a blue marble slab. Without any blood, healing was slow going. With blinding pain, I turned my neck to see where I was.

  Holly and Zoe were bound to identical slabs. Holly was in the center, perhaps as a place of honor for our god’s Oracle. Zoe was still unconscious, but Holly’s eyes, full of fear, were wide open.

  I could feel as much as hear the force of the nearby waterfall vibrating through the stone temple, shaking my lifeless heart. This had to be inside one of the Black Ziggurat’s lower levels. No windows here, so we might have even been below the lake’s waterline. I was in a wide, torch lit room. Great storage jars and ironbound chests that looked like they could hold Blackbeard’s treasure were stacked throughout.

  The torchlight was largely absorbed where the walls were bare, the stone of which was as black as the exterior. But on most of the walls hung tapestries, their blues, reds and especially golds not only reflecting the firelight, but seeming to amplify it.

  The images of the tapestries were simple representations of men and women. No animal heads on any of the people, so while it looked similar to Egyptian art to my untrained eye, I guessed it was Sumerian or Babylonian.

  Or at least done in the same style. The men represented in the tapestries were not bearded warriors of the Tigris and Euphrates, but white men and women in dark clothes, sailing from the Old World to the New.

  The tapestries told a story. A storm had sent some of the settlers off course, and they had found themselves wrecked on the shores of a wilderness. Attacked by Indians and unable to retreat back across the sea, they had pushed inward to the brutal country. The inland natives were no less savage, and eventually the settlers adapted.

  Over time, they became good at being killers. Continuing ever westward, they eventually abandoned the faith that had first brought them across the Atlantic, throwing their Bibles into the fires that they now danced around, and in which they also burned Indian prisoners alive. Sacrifices to a new god, more fitting to their circumstances, no doubt, until finally they came upon a place that seemed to seep evil, marked by a stone altar, and a cave entrance near it …

  Hearing the screams brought me back from the tapestries’ story to the ugly present.

  “They’re torturing the men,” Holly whispered. “They had Vance and Ethan chained to the wall. I was awake as the Brothers Marc and Mathew dragged them through that door.”

  The exposed walls were so black I hadn’t even noticed the chains bolted into them at first. “Why wouldn’t they work on us first?” I asked. Since joining the undead, I’d found that women were often the early and easy targets of violence.

  “I think they’re doing it to make it worse for us. That’s why they didn’t take them until I woke up. They wanted at least one of us to hear.” Holly paused a moment. “Jackson’s dead, I take.”

  “Yes,” I said, not bothering to go into details.

  “I didn’t see that coming, you know. Funny thing for an Oracle. It wasn’t clear, but I thought I saw Jackson as king, and war, and an opportunity for the woman at his side as the Three Sons rose. I saw so much chance for power. I didn’t think it would turn out this way. To die and go to Hell. I haven’t even been Nightfallen for a week,” Holly said.

  Despite myself, I felt some sympathy. I guess without Jackson, there was no reason to compete, and also I saw my own coming death reflected in hers.

  “Your visions came from our god,” I said. “But our god is a devil, and therefore a liar. I guess it makes sense that your visions would be lies too.”

  The heavy, wood door at the chamber’s far end opened haltingly on unyielding hinges. Erasmus walked in. “Good evening, ladies.”

  Holly and I said nothing as he approached us. The way he leered at us—especially the curdled-milk-yellow eye on the scarred side of his face—made me envious of the unconscious Zoe. Through the still-open door, we could hear Vance and Ethan’s screams all the bette
r.

  “Perhaps I should thank you,” he began. “We would have had to kill the First Son in any event, but it would have been poor form for his death to have been attributable to us. But no one will know what became of him here.”

  Though there was no draft in the chamber, I noticed the tapestry behind Erasmus stir, ever so gently. He seemed about to take notice himself before Holly, to my surprise, spoke up with a true-believer’s earnestness. “Why didn’t you accept him? It’s what our Dread Lord wills.”

  “Oracle, we are not like those that worship the Savior, celebrating weakness and victimhood. Our Dread Lord wills first and foremost that we be worthy. Had this Jackson Wheel been such, he would have beaten us,” Erasmus said.

  “You justify what you wanted to do anyway in the name of our god,” Holly said.

  “Show me any religion’s priestly class that doesn’t,” Erasmus said. “Believe what you want, Oracle. We have our flock to consider. What kind of rule would our Dread Lord seek to bring onto this world? Painful as his rule over his portion of Hell? Better, then, to maintain the status quo. Ourselves as shadow-hidden predators, with the living as our ample and unknowing food supply. Surely, to the extent our Dread Lord cares at all for us, he would not begrudge us these pleasures before we burn forever. And speaking of which, there is the matter of what will happen to you.”

  “Death,” I said.

  “For your two male companions, most certainly, though a slow one at the hands of Brothers Marc and Matthew,” Erasmus said. “Their decades in Demarrkad’s service has bent them, so that in hurting others is the only place they find pleasure.”

  “I remember,” Holly said. “It was them, not you, that took me, killed me.”

  “And even though they left your body unblemished for the ceremony, I’m sure they made your final human moments painful.” Looking at Holly’s eyes, I could see this was the truth. “You, of course, do not remember what I did to your body after they had drained you. You see I in contrast to my brother priests, and despite my handicaps, am more traditional in how I derive pleasure.”

  He undid his robe’s belt then, and opening it, let it dropped to the floor.

  It hadn’t just been his face that was scarred by holy water decades or centuries ago. It was his entire body. His skin looked as though it was melted wax—shiny, sliding horribly down his body. It was not the normal color of a white man’s flesh, but a jaundice-yellow mixed with the red of his exposed sinew. He was incredibly thin, a fact hidden not merely by his robe’s fabric.

  As it lay on the floor, I saw metal inserts that had been inside the robe. They had made his shoulders look broad and strong, as opposed to how they truly were: sunken half-a-foot down his torso like trees in a mudslide. That was why there hadn’t been any blood pooling on his robe in the one place a bullet had connected. The round had simply passed through one of Erasmus’s prosthetics.

  Whoever had done this to him—perhaps one of the more challenging raiders of the Black Ziggurat he’d spoken about—hadn’t wanted to kill him quickly. It would not take too much holy water to eat through us. To do this to his body, clearly they had spread those waters lightly over him, perhaps with a brush. Obviously, and unfortunately, before they could finish him, Erasmus had found some way to escape.

  Using holy water, they were clearly Christian, and though they were there to torture this devil, they hadn’t been able to achieve total depravity. One of the few places on him where there were no scars stood erect before us.

  Despite myself, I couldn’t help staring, and this pleased Erasmus.

  “It’s the only part of me that doesn’t hurt. Servicing it gratefully, you three may continue your existence. I could compel compliance with pain,” he said, holding up his hand and, for a moment, making its veins glow with his emerald magic. “With sufficient, earnest enthusiasm, however, perhaps I could make you priestesses in your own right. It has been ages since we’ve had those. Your religious garb would be much more feminine, not to mention revealing, than the robes I and my brother priests wear.”

  Is it wrong that if he had been handsome, I’d have been enthusiastic about his offer? Amazing how alluring things can become when the alternative is painted in hellfire’s light. It would have been different if Jackson was still alive, but any destiny I’d seen at his side had died with him.

  I decided to use Zoe to test my alternatives. “Zoe’s not going to sign up,” I said. “She loves her sire too much.”

  “Then I can toss her body into the waters to join the First Son. After Brothers Marc and Matthew have had at her.”

  The screaming from Ethan and Vance seemed to be reaching a crescendo. Erasmus took note. “I had rather hoped they would keep them alive at least for several nights. Easier than dragging more playthings all the way down here. I’d best remind them. It’ll give you ladies more time to consider your choice.”

  Erasmus didn’t bother redressing, but left pulling the heavy door closed behind him.

  Or attempting to.

  Its hinges whined even more than when he had entered, moving only in fits and starts. He held his head high, a truly regal bearing, but something at the corner of his unscarred eyed betrayed embarrassment. Eventually, he left it only half-closed.

  I couldn’t quite understand what I’d just seen. “Did you see that?” I whispered to Holly.

  “See what?” she asked.

  A low voice I had never expected to hear again came from behind the tapestry I’d seen flutter. “See how we’re going to beat him.”

  Holly and I raised our heads in stunned silence to look as Jackson Wheel, like an actor being called for an encore, emerged from behind the tapestry.

  11

  Emerald Blood

  “How?” was all I could manage as Jackson cut me free with his boot knife.

  In truth, he looked like he should be dead. He was soaking wet, his left arm badly mauled. He was shaking, and I suspected it was from lost blood more than the cave lake’s cold depths. His coat was gone, too, and he’d taken off his shirt to make a crude, blood-stained bandage for his wound. He had lost his AR-15, but his 1911 was still holstered at his hip.

  “Not a good time to discuss,” he whispered, eyeing the half-open door.

  Once I was free he moved to Holly, and when she asked the same thing, he relented. He may have preferred efficient, military silence, but we weren’t soldiers.

  Hurriedly and in a low voice, he told us how the monster fish had dragged him down, losing his rifle instantly. He hadn’t been able to reach his boot knife, the thing was pulling him down so swiftly, but his .45 was convenient at his waist.

  It had fired underwater, which surprised me but then I don’t know much about guns. I would have also thought he’d be deafened by the blast underwater, but he could hear my whispers well enough.

  He’d had to pull back the hammer manually for follow-up shots, but the 1911 kept shooting until the monster let him go. He kicked hard to the surface. He wouldn’t drown since he didn’t breathe, but he could see other glowing shapes in those terrible depths circling down below.

  The cavern’s emerald light made it easy enough to see the outline of the Black Ziggurat, and also the churning water where the waterfall crashed into the lake.

  Knowing the priests that had just pitched him into the water would see him if he came up directly on the surface, he guided himself towards the waterfall, emerging behind it. There was a slight recess behind the crashing curtain of water, and he climbed there until the phosphorescent lake monsters retreated.

  From his hiding place, Jackson had watched as Erasmus emerged from the cave carrying the others like stacked cordwood. His hands had been charged with the emerald energy. With four bodies in his arms, it had been effortless for him, even kneeling to pick up my unconscious form. Jackson thought it strange, though, that strong as Erasmus was that he left it to the other priests to carry in all our guns. He even had them push open the ziggurat’s entrance.

  Once the prie
sts had carried us inside, Jackson had snuck into the Black Ziggurat. Inside he found what must have once been secret passageways, but so isolated were the Demarrkad priests that these were left ajar.

  Jackson had been trying to find his way to the screaming Vance and Ethan, but instead the passage he’d taken had led behind the tapestry in the chamber that held Holly, Zoe and me.

  “I peeked around it as Erasmus left,” Jackson continued, moving to free Zoe now.

  “You saw him struggle with the door too?” I asked, heartened I hadn’t imagined it.

  “I did,” Jackson said. “Even the rawest vampire recruit would be able to open it without difficulty, yet his body is so ruined he can’t manage even that. I understand now the limits of his magic. That strength of his only works on the undead.”

  Of course—it explained why he had more trouble with strong-bodied Shawnee while cutting through us like steel through silk.

  “But what can we do?” Holly asked. “He’s still too strong for us.”

  The distant screams were slackening—either Erasmus had convinced his brother clergy to give them a rest, or Vance and Ethan were nearing the end.

  “No, I don’t think it’ll work on me,” Jackson said, forgetting himself as he propped Zoe up and shook her, trying to bring her back to the waking world.

  I understood what he meant—he was a synthetic vampire. A government science project, passable in the most important respects, but ultimately not the real thing.

  The question was, would that be a distinction without a difference to Erasmus’s magic?

  Then I saw Jackson look up at Holly, wondering if he’d blown his cover, not realizing that the Oracle already knew.

  “He means that as one of Three Sons, it might not work on him,” I said, a lie that Jackson would interpret as being directed at Holly.

  “Oh, of course,” Holly said.

  Zoe’s eyes fluttered, and as she came to. “Where’s Vance?”