by Mark Frost
A shot smashed through Frank's boot; his left ankle shattered. He staggered but kept cranking; heard a bullet clip his ear. Another ripped clean through his right upper thigh.
Missed the bone, thought Frank. He kept his right hand glued to the crank and screamed through the pain.
Behind Frank, Kanazuchi barreled into the right side of the line; the Grass Cutter never stopped. The men had trouble distinguishing him from one of their own, and the ferocity of his assault drew their attention away from the machine gun. All they knew before he was on top of them was that this man had a sword and he moved like the wind. Their bullets struck each other as they fired wildly, others taken down by shots that missed the man at the Gatling. Highly disciplined soldiers, all of them, but their panicked cries testified that they'd never faced this hot a fight before. Their bullets whistled through the man but didn't seem to strike him. They saw limbs fly off their comrades. Heads dropped from necks, bodies opened, and the sword mowed through them as if it possessed a life of its own.
Ten men died before the others dropped their weapons and ran, and still the man with the blood-red sword came after them. One stroke apiece; he finished the assault with a terrible economy of violence. When the last man fell, without hesitation Kanazuchi disappeared around the right side of the church, zeroing in on the team stationed at the second gun.
Frank erased the last of the black shirts on his side with a burst that cut through a mound of dirt the man had sought shelter behind. He released the crank as the last cartridge fed through the gun. He reached down for more ammunition. His hand burned as it grazed the barrel.
A hail of bullets cut the air over his head; Frank glanced through the cathedral and saw muzzle bursts from the open front doors at the far end. Shit, the other machine gun, shooting at him clear through the church. White shirts inside screaming. They were being slaughtered down there.
A bullet bit a chunk out of his left shoulder and Frank went into the dirt. Most of their shots still going high. His shoulder wouldn't cooperate, so he stayed low, coaxed a cartridge out of the crate and up to the feeder with his good hand. He hit the crank and a burst shattered the window above the doors. Red glass rained down.
The shooting started. Doyle placed it at the rear of the cathedral: machine gun fire. The team at the Gatling in front of the church struggled go get theirs working; the rest of the black shirts took aim and shot their rifles down into the church. Desperate screams from inside reached them over the crack of the guns.
Innes had trouble steadying the gun with his wounded arm and he grunted painfully with each shot, but among the three of them, taking their time and shooting accurately they knocked out the team at the machine gun before it could lay down a steady field of fire. When two other men jumped in to take their place they picked them off as well, then began to direct their fire at the men with the rifles.
No one spoke, minds focused on the bloody business. As he reloaded, Doyle glanced at Eileen; she had definitely not forgotten how to shoot.
The first bursts of the guns from above echoed metallically down through the grillwork over Jacob's head. Reverend Day wheeled around the circle, frantic, an open watch in his hand.
"No, no! Where are the bells? WHERE ARE THE BELLS?"
The gunfire steadily increased in intensity, deafening as it reverberated through the chamber. Jacob did not move or speak; he dared not draw the Reverend's attention now because he was almost certain that he had heard his son's voice calling his name out of the darkness of the maze.
He heard a sound above him like a rushing of water and raised his head to look. A trickle of blood seeped through the grills and dripped down around him.
With both blades in his hands, Kanazuchi charged the machine gun at the side of the church. Only three men stationed here, concentrating the deadly fire of the Gatling into the cathedral. They never heard him coming.
Kanazuchi cut off the hand of the man on the crank, backhanded the ammunition feeder away with the knife, and drove the Grass Cutter through the throat of the last man. He took control of the gun, raised the muzzle, and fired until the feeder emptied, wiping out the machine gun position at the opposite side door.
He looked down at the dark spreading stains on the arms of his tunic and pants; he had been hit three times. No vital organs struck, but he was losing blood rapidly.
Now all the Gatlings stopped firing; only rifles somewhere to the front.
Kanazuchi hurried to the edge of the church and looked inside. White shirts cowered and huddled together, horrible moans coming from every direction; a thousand bodies covering the stone floor. He could not tell how many had died; he did not know how long the guns had fired, but he could see a great deal of blood. Moonlight through the broken frame of the window illuminated the center of the room in a stark circle of white. He listened for the children. Heard them to his right.
He descended the stairs to the floor. White shirts moving now that the gunfire had ended, crawling over each other. Bitter sounds; shock, fear, and dreadful suffering. Kanazuchi saw many discarded rifles; the militia had been sent to the slaughter with the rest of them.
The children's cries led him farther right; he found them huddled behind a row of columns, a niche in the wall, a chapel. The guns could not reach this area; the hundred children were alive.
Kanazuchi walked into their midst, speaking softly, encouragingly, gathering the children around him, lifting stragglers to their feet, holding them together. He gently led them back to the stairs through which he'd entered. The children followed meekly, weeping quietly, stumbling and stepping over bodies that had fallen. The adult survivors they passed paid no attention, staring dully ahead with glassy uncomprehending eyes.
Walks Alone stopped when she heard the others call for Jacob, and then the sound of many guns began somewhere above. She reached another intersection, twenty steps beyond where they had separated, and realized that this section ahead was honeycombed with passages; ten more steps and she would be hopelessly lost. She headed back to the meeting place occupied with many thoughts, and when the smell of the one-eyed man and the rush of movement in the air reached her senses, she was a second slow to react.
Half-turned, she cried out as the first blade cut her left shoulder to the bone. She felt his other hand slash past her right, glancing off her hip; he had a knife in that hand too. She dropped to the ground, grabbed the handle of her knife with both hands, and thrust up into the darkness, felt the tip of the blade connect and enter, heard the man grunt in pain and surprise.
He struck down at her with both hands; the knives missed by fractions of an inch; one sliced her hair, sparks flew off the wall beside her head. She slashed back, felt the blade cut tendoned flesh on the back of his leg. He bellowed and fell to his knees.
"Here, Jack!"
Presto's voice, not far off, coming closer.
The one-eyed man whimpered like an animal and raised the knives again; she wiggled to her right along the wall, parried the slash of one blade with her knife while the other scratched along her arm, opening a deep gash.
"You bitch, why won't you die?"
His face only inches from hers as their locked knives pushed against each other; blood and fear on his breath. Her arm began to drop under his weight.
A sharp beam of light shot through the dark and found his face; it lit up like a full moon, blinding his one good eye. Walks Alone slipped to the side and raised her knife. He fell forward and she drove the knife deep into the sky-blue sightless marble resting in its socket. Heard the marble crack against the blade. He screamed and staggered back, dropped his weapons, trying to pull out her knife by the handle.
She pointed her pistol and fired; two red holes appeared in the monster's head. He fell out of sight as the gunshots exploded in the tunnel.
Jack reached her first. Presto at her side from the other direction, holding the light for them to see.
"Can you move?" asked Jack.
"I don't want to look at h
im," she whispered. "I don't want to look at him."
They helped her to her feet and moved quickly away from Dante's body to the intersection marked by the two glowing patches.
Jack had run off into the dark without saying a word; when Lionel tried to follow, he stumbled ahead in the corridor and quickly lost his way. He heard a man shouting and bursts of remote gunfire coming from his left where the light was growing stronger, so he began to run and two turns later he abruptly entered the round room. Haunting screams from somewhere above underscored staccato gunbursts. Light in the room dazzled his eyes, and he raised his arm against the brightness; what he thought he saw in the center of the floor was a steady stream of blood pouring out of the ceiling onto a figure lying in a pool below.
It looked like his father.
"What's that you have there?" said a voice to his left.
He turned. A nightmarish figure that looked like a walking dead body gestured at him; the crate Lionel held flew out of his hands across the ten feet between them and into the arms of the ghoulish man. He ripped open the crate and laid his hands on the Gerona Zohar.
"I don't know how to thank you," said the man.
He seemed to lose all interest in Lionel. He rushed to his father's side and pulled him from the cascading stream of blood, flowing in volume down a trough to an open pit at the end of the room.
"You're alive," gasped Lionel.
"And I'm really very glad to see you, my son," said Jacob quietly. "Do you have a gun?"
Lionel took the pistol from his belt.
"Shoot him."
Jacob nodded at the man across the circle, the hump of his back to them, setting the Book of Zohar into the last of the silver caskets.
Lionel aimed the Colt with shaking hands. The man turned and waved his arm at them; the shot fired wide as Lionel's body was jolted. The gun flew out of his hand and into the pit. Lionel fell to his knees.
Paying no attention to them, Reverend Day walked to a brazier at the edge of the circle, took a handful of matches from his pocket, and tried to strike one on the brazier; the match broke in his hand. He tried another with the same result, then a third.
"Damn," said Reverend Day, laughing. "For the want of a match ..."
A bloodcurdling scream and two shots boomed out of the maze. Reverend Day cocked his head, listened, tossed the matches away, limped over, yanked a lantern off the wall, and carried it back to the brazier.
Lionel worked furiously to untie his father's hands. Above them, the burst of gunfire died; they heard only occasional rifles and the rising, pitiful cries of the wounded.
As blood poured out of the grills and down the trough into the pit, the rumbling from deep belowground grew louder and more sustained.
The last of the black shirts left alive in front of the church dropped their rifles and ran shortly after the last machine gun quit firing. Through his glass, Doyle saw the first white shirts splattered with red crawling out of the open cathedral doors.
"Come on," he said.
Eileen and Doyle helped Innes up, and they hurried toward the church. Doyle broke into a run ahead of them. He passed the blackshirted bodies lying around the perimeter and stopped when he reached the doors.
A massacre inside. Bodies sprawled on top of one another. The cathedral floor red with blood and shattered glass. Numbed survivors staggering to their feet.
Eileen and Innes joined him; Eileen's breath caught, horrified.
"Good God, Arthur," said Innes, shaking his head in disbelief. "Good God."
There were many wounded, hundreds, and they needed help fast.
"Got to get them outside where we can see," he said. Doyle took Eileen by the arms, looked her in the eye, and spoke firmly. "I need your help. No time for tears now."
She saw the fierce compassion in his eyes and nodded. They entered down the bloody steps; they spoke to the ones who could still walk, directing them to help survivors to the front of the church. Many remained unresponsive, some needed to hear the instruction twice; the guns had nearly deafened them. It seemed to Doyle's eye that the deadliest casualties were concentrated in the center of the room, where blood was running down into a circle of drains.
The sound of children's cries outside drew Innes to the left side doors.
"Arthur, over here."
Doyle joined him on the steps, and they saw the circle of children sitting fifty steps outside, listening to a man in black who knelt before them in the dirt. Doyle and Innes walked past the dead at the machine gun to the man; he looked up at them as they stopped.
"Kanazuchi?" asked Doyle.
The man nodded; his face pale, ashen. Critically wounded.
"See to them, please," said Kanazuchi.
The man winced and with dreadful effort rose to his feet; Doyle helped him up. Innes tried to hold him back.
"You must rest, sir," said Innes.
"No," said Kanazuchi. "Thank you."
Kanazuchi bowed slightly, gathered himself, and walked slowly toward the church, grasping the hilt of his sword.
Innes and Doyle looked down at the small piteous faces staring hopefully, fearfully up at them.
"I'll look after them," said Innes in a husky voice.
Doyle clutched Innes and held him until their tears passed, bodies trembling with the effort to contain them.
"Dear God. Dear God in heaven."
"Mustn't show them we're frightened, too," whispered Innes.
Doyle looked away, gripped Innes's hand, then followed Kanazuchi back to the church.
As she reached the back of the cathedral, Eileen saw Frank through the rear doors outside, twisted around the machine gun. She ran up the steps to him, saw the blood pooled around him in the dirt, and went to her knees.
"No. No, please."
Frank opened his eyes and looked up but didn't see her.
"That you, Molly?"
"Frank, it's Eileen."
His eyes found her and focused. "Molly. Sure look pretty in that dress."
His hand reached out; she held it with both of hers, and the tears ran freely from her eyes.
"It's Molly, Frank. I'm here."
"Never meant to hurt you, Molly," he whispered.
"You didn't, Frank. You didn't ever."
"Sorry. I'm so sorry."
"It's all right."
"Nothing in our way now. Me and you."
She shook her head. "No."
"That's good."
"Yes, Frank."
Frank smiled; it made him so happy to see her again.
"Always love you," he said.
His eyes looked past her, then closed. His hand let go.
Eileen lowered her head and wept.
As he walked back down to the floor of the cathedral, Doyle could not accurately determine how many had died; perhaps a quarter of the thousand who had been inside, another equal number wounded. It was more than bad enough, but when he saw the deadly configuration of the machine guns, he realized how much worse it could have been; hundreds had been spared. He heard a deep rumbling in the ground far below the church.
Doyle found Kanazuchi in the center of the room, kneeling beside the open grillwork in the floor through which the blood of the victims still funneled.
"Help me," said Kanazuchi. "I must hurry."
Doyle moved instantly to his side; together they used the edges of his knives to pry one of the blood-soaked grills free from its rim.
Jack and Presto carried Walks Alone through the last turns of the maze toward the light they saw ahead. Powerful tremors shook the walls, rivulets of rock and dirt running down from the corners. When they entered the round room, they saw the Reverend Day pouring oil from a lantern into a small brazier; the coals ignited, Day picked up a long taper, lit it from the fire, and walked toward the nearest silver casket
Jacob saw them; Lionel had untied his hands and was working to free his legs. Jack left Walks Alone with Presto and stepped into the circle, drawing his pistol. Sensing another's presence,
Reverend Day turned to face him; Jack stopped a foot away. His face a grim, determined mask, he raised and pointed the gun directly at the Reverend's head.
The Reverend waved his hand sharply, as if trying to fend off a bothersome insect, a move that might have sent another man flying across the room. Jack did not yield or react but instead reached forward, touched the barrel to the Reverend's upper lip and coolly cocked the pistol's hammer, fully prepared to kill him. A quizzical look shaded the Reverend's features; fear had become such a stranger to him he seemed incapable of registering danger, but then fury erupted inside as he realized the affront this man offered him and he drove the power from his eyes forward into Jack's.
Jack appeared to stand his ground against the assault, but after a long silence the hand holding the gun wavered, then Jack slowly lowered it to his side.
"I'll deal with you presently," said the Reverend.
But Jack's move was not born of obedience. As the Reverend turned and again tried to set fire to the first of the Books that would trigger the summoning, Jack reached over and, oblivious to the pain, snuffed out the burning taper in the Reverend's hand. When Day raised his hand to strike at him, Jack caught him by the wrist in a steely grip, twisted hard, and the taper fell to the floor.
Blood continued to run down into the trough. The rumbling from the pit grew stronger until the walls and floor trembled steadily, but none of the others in the room dared to move, riveted by the confrontation.
"Let go of my hand," ordered Reverend Day, locking eyes with him again.
Jack dropped the gun of his own accord and let go of the Reverend's wrist. Again, before he could move away, Jack reached out, took firm hold of the Reverend's head with both his hands, pulled him close, and stared right back into his eyes.
"Look at me," said Jack quietly.
Enraged, the Reverend now brought the full force of his power to bear; the air appeared to bend around them, their forms wavered, warped by a savage expulsion of energy. Men had died under far less exposure to the sacrament than this, minds dissolving, their will slipping out of them in a runny stream.
