Aloysius waited until they had gone from view for a few seconds before he got back in the boat. There wasn’t anything he could use for a weapon (he wasn’t a master fly fisherman, after all), so he swam to shore. He couldn’t risk starting the engine.
Should he go home? Should he die nobly? Should he wait until he saw what morning brought? Surely this was the last massacre. Surely they didn’t need more dead.
He’d lost his boots in the water somewhere, and he couldn’t remember where. More than likely, he’d kicked them off himself and hadn’t known it.
Stroke after stroke, he pulled closer to the edge of the water, and he still didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there.
Lost, lost, lost, breathe.
Lost, lost, lost, breathe.
He felt his mind sinking away, dismissing all of it as a dream. In a way, if what the Connor-demon had been saying was true, it was—Celeste Marie’s dream. She was having a terrible nightmare, and there was no way, from inside it, to wake her.
Jerome would have to do it.
Aloysius breathed in water from laughing. He was so close to giving up that he was prepared to put his survival in the hands of a ten-year-old boy. Actually, he didn’t know if he cared whether he lived or died anymore. He mentally apologized to Honey and coughed.
Closer. He could touch bottom, now. Pebbles and mud under his feet.
A few more steps and he was out.
What now?
He checked his revolver. Three shots left. He dumped out the rounds and reloaded from the box in his pocket, which might be a fraction drier, who knew? He got rid of the shotgun shells in his right pocket. He only had a few of them, anyway, and the shotgun had been abandoned in the machine and was now under water.
He climbed the hill. Well, what else was he going to do?
The destruction, as he crested the hill, was more than he had expected. It was like a grass fire had raged for days, turning everything black with soot, but it had taken no longer than the drawing of a breath. Sturdy laundry posts had collapsed, charred on one side and untouched on the other.
Thank God it had only been a small faction of the demons who had needed to cross over.
Three demons were walking toward him. Aloysius pulled his revolver and aimed at them. The three demons looked at each other. One of them was wearing a dress; the other two had mud-stained jeans on.
“Aloysius?” the one wearing a dress said.
“Maeve?” He didn’t know what else to call her.
The Maeve-demon ran toward him, glanced around, and stood to one side, blocking him from view further up the river. Her shadow covered him like an early twilight.
“What was that?” he asked.
She shook her head.
The demons that had replaced Connor and the stillborn Nick helped her surround him. The only direction he could be seen for human was from across the river.
“What was that?” Aloysius repeated.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Connor said. “A bomb. Leave it at that.”
“So you won,” Aloysius said.
Connor stared at him. “This makes me sick.”
“Your people were dying. Now you have a home.”
“Stop it,” Maeve murmured. “If you yell too loudly, they’ll look this way again.”
“What, and then they’ll kill me? What do you care?”
Nick said, “I want to go home. I don’t care if they lock me up. I hate it here.”
Connor said, “I wish none of this had happened. If only I could have convinced Granata to turn himself in. It would have passed over, eventually.”
Aloysius found himself panting. He wanted to attack the demons surrounding him. Good thing it was all a dream, or he’d have to go crazy and shoot them until he ran out of wet bullets and stab them with his pocket knife.
“Let’s get him back to the church,” Connor said.
Aloysius snorted. Like holy ground would stop them.
“Theodore is there,” Maeve said. “Sebastian.” She wiped an enormous black finger under her eye.
“He doesn’t love you,” Connor said.
“I don’t care.”
“How?” Aloysius said.
“I’ll carry you,” Connor said. “Think you can play dead for a few minutes? We’re supposed to be bringing all the bodies to the church, so Granata can say prayers for us as we burn down the church.”
Aloysius looked up at the sky, which was turning purple as the sun set. “Doesn’t that sound like a terrific idea. Take me to the church so I can be burned down. Terrific.”
“Got anything better?”
Aloysius shook his head.
Connor grabbed him around the waist and slung him over one shoulder. “Maeve, you take that one over in the trees. The rifleman. Nick, pick up that kid over there and hand him to me.”
After half a minute or so, Nick slung a small body on top of Aloysius. He tried not to think about it, but it smeared blood and ash all over him, which was probably the purpose. Nick handed another body to Connor, who took it across the other shoulder, and another.
All Aloysius would let himself look at was Connor’s back. It was covered with short, black, wiry hair that formed into dim pictures as he half-stared at, the faces of people he knew were dead now.
Old Tekawitha’s face had appeared and started to harangue him soundlessly when he let go, and was out.
Aloysius woke up in midair. Connor was tossing him onto a pile of bodies in the church basement: he could tell from the tile. He suppressed a gasp, both as he landed and as another body landed on top of him.
Maeve—he thought it was Maeve—was crying and telling someone she was sorry. Aloysius risked a peek and saw that she was talking to a stack of the dead.
“How many so far?” Connor asked.
The demon who had replaced Father Dennis said, “Not enough.”
“We can’t do this again.”
“Who do you want to leave behind, Granossa? Give me their names.”
“How many?”
“Another seventy left. That’s all. Not so many.”
“I’ll keep looking for bodies. Maybe we’ll find enough.”
The other demon didn’t answer. They left.
Aloysius sat up and disentangled himself from the pile of bodies. He didn’t want to look at them, but he had to. Really, it was amazing how little space hundreds of bodies took up.
“Psst.”
He followed the sound back toward the kitchen, which appeared mercifully free of bodies, except for the two heads peeking over the counter at him, Theodore and Sebastian. Aloysius ducked into the kitchen.
“We have to get out of here,” he whispered. “They’re going to torch the place.”
“First we kill the priest,” Theodore said.
“Agreed,” Sebastian said.
“What good is it going to do?” Aloysius asked. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Theodore said.
“The priest is the one who set off the bomb,” Sebastian said. “Luckily one of the demons had just stabbed me, and we were hiding in a basement at the time.”
“You’re hurt?”
Sebastian showed him a ripped-up sheet soaked with blood, tied around his middle. “Bounced off the ribs. It’s not too deep.”
Aloysius shook his head. “This is the first time I’ve seen you get hurt and not…”
Sebastian shrugged. “Not important.”
“True.” Aloysius looked around the kitchen, considering what he could find to use as a weapon. “I wish I had dry rounds.”
Theodore pulled a handful out of his pocket.
“Those will work.” Aloysius reloaded.
Footsteps. They shut up. The sound of hooves coming down the stairs, slowly. Several sets.
A demon grunted and threw another body on the pile.
“That’s all of them,” the demon said. It didn’t sound familiar. “Come on.”
“Gi
ve us a minute,” Connor said.
“All right.”
One set of footsteps up the stairs.
“You can come out now,” Connor said.
They didn’t.
The demons walked over to the kitchen and peered in the doorway at them—Connor, Maeve, and Nick.
“I’m sorry,” Connor said.
Theodore cocked his revolvers. “You just head back up those stairs.”
“They’re going to set the building on fire now. You have to go.”
“Get,” Theodore hissed.
“I’m sorry,” Connor repeated.
“Or we could go down the tunnel,” Aloysius said.
“Shut up,” Sebastian said.
“Well?”
There were more demons coming down the stairs, which creaked under their weight. Connor gestured Maeve and Nick away from the kitchen with a flick of his ear. “Please don’t do this,” he said.
Aloysius waited.
Connor backed away. “Thought I saw something,” he told the demons coming down the stairs.
The Father Dennis demon said, “What was it?”
“Nothing. Just my imagination working overtime.”
Aloysius found that he was breathing too loudly; the hiss of it filled his ears and he missed what Connor said next.
The Father Dennis demon started to chant. Theodore took a quick look over the counter.
“What was that?” another demon said.
“It’s getting to you, too,” Connor said.
“I saw something move.”
The chanting continued.
Theodore held up a hand. Five fingers, three fingers.
Sebastian pointed at the Bible beside him with an eyebrow up. Theodore nodded. Sebastian silently turned to a dog-eared, blood-stained page and looked at Theodore.
Theodore stood up and started firing through the window. Aloysius was surprised by the sudden move and jumped to his feet. He fired into the demons, trying not to hit his fake “family.” Theodore must have been giving them a pass, too, because they didn’t fall.
The Father Dennis demon fell almost immediately; for a second, Aloysius felt ecstatic, then almost burst into tears when he realized that things wouldn’t just go back to the way they had been when the priest was dead. At least he couldn’t do any more damage.
Maeve sank to the floor, not wounded as far as Aloysius could tell.
Two of the demons ran back up the stairs.
Another one fell.
They reloaded.
Connor moved, finally, and ran toward them. “Granata!”
Theodore shot him in the chest.
Nick backed away and went up the stairs, slowly, as though sleepwalking.
The last demon stood, staring at them, uncomprehending. It was bleeding, but not badly, from a cut on its arm. Sebastian had been speaking the entire time. With his shout, the last demon fell, clutching its chest.
“Down,” Theodore said.
The hole leading down into the earth was partially covered by bodies, mostly Indians that Aloysius didn’t know. He was a damned fool.
Chapter 34
They ran through the dark like idiot kids after midnight and, when they reached the slope, slid. Aloysius decided that he was about done tearing through pants; for one thing, it hurt like hell. They landed at the bottom of the slope, breathless and sore, and shoving each other out of the way.
“Which way now?” Aloysius asked.
“I don’t know,” Sebastian said, irritably.
“How’re we doing?” Theodore said.
Aloysius patted himself down as Sebastian said, “I’ve still got the boo—Bible.”
“Handgun and pocket knife,” Aloysius said. “Any more rounds?”
There was a pause, another pause, and then Theodore, unable to communicate with head shakes and shrugs in the dark, said, “No.”
“Hell. Which way?”
Another pause.
“Just pick something,” Sebastian growled. “Aloysius, you’re in charge, you’re always in charge when Liam’s not around.”
“Liam’s dead.”
“I know that!”
They were going to start beating the crap out of each other any minute. “Forward,” Aloysius said.
“Which way’s that?” Sebastian asked.
“Don’t start with me,” Aloysius said. “Away from the slope. If you find yourself suddenly going up a steep hill, not that way.”
Sebastian grunted. Aloysius found the side of the tunnel and walked alongside it.
After a fair amount of distance that Aloysius guessed to be about two and a half miles, they reached a large, clay-walled room.
There were no lights; they spent a good half-hour trying to find a light switch and arguing over whether the demons had electricity.
They didn’t find any switches, but they did find six doorways.
“Which way,” Aloysius muttered to himself.
“The leftmost door. Turn left every time you come to a crossroads,” Sebastian said.
“What for?”
“It’s how I taught Jerome to find his way through mazes. If he came this way, then we at least have a start on finding him.”
“He could be anywhere,” Aloysius said.
Sebastian sighed.
Aloysius said, “Left it is.”
They walked down a corridor and ended up in a storeroom with a broken door. Aloysius managed to turn on the light, which was a sliding bar over the door, blinding them all, and closed the door as best he could.
The three of them stood and looked at each other awkwardly.
“So?” Aloysius asked.
“Was there something you particularly wanted to see here?” Sebastian asked.
“Er, no,” Aloysius said. “It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
Sebastian shook his head and tried to open the door. “Let me out.”
“You’re so smart, you figure it out.”
Theodore tapped Aloysius on the shoulder. He rolled his eyes and let them back out, turned off the light.
They wandered the halls, always turning left, until they reached a closed door. Aloysius opened it.
Inside, the lights were already on. And a group of demons was staring at them in wide-eyed shock. A split second later, Aloysius had closed the door and was a good hundred yards down a corridor.
He was waiting for the sound of hooves chasing him, which never came. He looked back. A faint glow behind him told him the door had been opened. Notably, his brothers hadn’t followed him down the corridor, which meant he was going to have to go back and get them.
When he came to the doorway, the room was full of blood.
“Jesus,” Aloysius said. “What did you do that for?”
Theodore was standing over one of the demons with his knives in his hands. The knives dripped blood. The demon looked like a child, a demon-calf, more than anything else.
Theodore kept staring at his hands and the knives. Sebastian came out of a back room and said, “All clear.”
Theodore nodded. He wiped the blades on the young demon’s fur and stuck them back in their sheaths on his belt.
“I don’t think they were supposed to be here,” Sebastian said. “It looks like—” he wobbled on his feet, and the cassock that Aloysius could almost see disappeared, then replaced his clothes entirely.
“What does that mean?” Aloysius asked.
“I have no idea,” Sebastian said.
“You’re the expert,” Aloysius said.
“Amazing what a fat lot of good that has done me,” Sebastian said.
“What is going on?” Aloysius yelled.
Theodore glanced at him. “Shht.”
“Screw you,” Sebastian told Aloysius, which was not a terribly priestly thing to say. “Keep moving.”
Theodore and Sebastian went out the door, Aloysius dawdling after them, picking things up and putting them down. He pried out a bead of light from a lamp and held it in his palm. It f
aded as it returned to a true sphere. He pressed it again: light.
“Huh,” he said, and stuck it in his pocket.
Ahead, Sebastian said, “Take a left.”
“Can’t,” Theodore said.
“Then keep going straight.”
“Can’t.”
“Then turn around and hug the left wall.” Their voices came closer to him.
“Hey, look at this,” Aloysius said. He pressed his fingers on the bead of light, spreading a dim glow through the corridor.
His brothers were walking toward him, Theodore in front, and Sebastian in his cassock—no, his jeans—right behind him. Behind him was the wall.
They walked closer to him.
Sebastian said, “Let me see that.”
The wall kept coming closer.
“If I were you, I would run,” Aloysius said. “That wall doesn’t look like it has anything good in mind for you.”
The two of them looked over their shoulders at the wall. Sebastian reached out to touch it, but Theodore batted it down and pulled him away.
They all started jogging down the hallway. Aloysius looked over his shoulder; the wall was still following them, but they’d gained some ground.
They passed a crossroads and turned left, but the wall was heading toward them even faster than the first one had. The second option was the same, on closer inspection, just a little further away. They were left with a choice between finding out what would happen if they waited for the walls to arrive and going back the way they came.
“Can’t go back,” Aloysius said.
“Got to,” Theodore said. He was wheezing, and Aloysius put more light on him.
“You all right?”
Theodore shook his head. “Keep moving.”
Aloysius ran ahead, looking back often. The further they went, the better Theodore’s breathing sounded.
“Maybe she’s dead,” Sebastian said. “Who knows what they did to her?”
“Jerome’s going to kill you,” Aloysius said.
“Maybe he should.”
They reached the room with the tunnel: the wall the machine had come through had been ripped apart, broken slabs of clay wall stacked in the far corner.
“Politics,” Aloysius said. “The demon that took Connor’s place said they were invading because of some political thing back in their homeworld. He told me I didn’t want to know the details.”
Chance Damnation Page 18