Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Sebastian took one look at him and sat upright, leaving a clear path between the axe and Granata’s throat.

  Jerome chopped. The demon’s head didn’t come off, and in fact the axe was wedged in tight, and he couldn’t pull it back. Granata sprayed blood.

  “That’s for Peggy,” Sebastian said.

  Jerome shivered all over.

  “You did the right thing,” Sebastian said. Jerome wondered who he was talking to.

  He looked back into the cage. Celeste Marie was dead. He turned back to the dials and started turning them, watching her.

  Whatever the machine did, it tossed her body around like a doll, but it couldn’t make her breathe. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Sebastian.

  He expected Sebastian to say something empty and try to make him stop torturing Celeste Marie’s body back into life. Sebastian had the black cloth in his hands. He turned it around, slipped it over his head, and was a priest again. The cassock was askew, ripped, and too large for Sebastian. He promptly dripped blood onto it from a cut on his head.

  Ah, Jerome thought. Now it was time for him to be useless again. He was surprised to hear himself think such a cynical thought. He was broken, he thought, and wondered whether this was what it was like to be Aloysius.

  Sebastian pulled a book out of the cassock’s pocket and flipped it open. The demon had been carrying around a Bible. Sebastian supported the book in his left hand, stuck his left forefinger around the back and between two pages, then found a paragraph. He shouted something, then raised his right hand.

  Yellow smoke rose from the ground, surrounding Theodore and Aloysius, who were fighting one side of the gray demons while the black demons had surrounded them on the other three sides. Jerome wondered whether any of them had noticed that Celeste Marie had died. It would be just like a bunch of grown men, he thought, to be fighting to control a thing whose time had passed. On the other hand, maybe they had noticed and were fighting the gray demons to punish them as much as they could, before they were killed by the gray demons’ reinforcements. What if the black servant demons were inspired by their noble martyrdoms and defeated their gray-demon masters?

  Maybe there was no reason, but they just couldn’t stop.

  He was going to have to get rid of all these questions in his mind at some point. They were distracting.

  He tried to swallow but couldn’t.

  Sebastian flipped a few pages, flipped back, then flipped forward again. He shouted and pointed at the demons, black and gray both. Nothing seemed to happen, but he sank at the knees.

  Aloysius ducked and kicked a boot into one of the demon’s guts. It would have worked admirably on a man, knocking him back into whoever was standing behind him, but the demon was too massive to be knocked aside. However, Aloysius’s boot sank into the demon’s gut, rupturing skin and spraying black and pink guts all over the place. The demon folded, and Aloysius danced back out of the way.

  Jerome could tell, even from the back of his head, that Theodore had started grinning.

  Theodore kicked a demon in the knee, and its leg came off. The demon toppled sideways, and Theodore crushed its head like a bug.

  More black. More pink.

  The gray and black demons were tearing each other up even faster than Theodore could; the screams redoubled from the courtyard.

  The dais shook under them, and Sebastian slid as it tipped to the side. Jerome, barefoot, grabbed the machine and Sebastian’s arm to keep him steady. Sebastian walked over to the cage and grabbed on.

  He pointed toward the bottom of the pit, toward the depth of fire.

  The floor of the coliseum was crumbling into the fire pit, breaking away and falling down. Apparently, the entire floor of the coliseum was resting over whatever was in the fire pit, a volcano or fissure or something.

  Sebastian was frowning, still pointing at the fire pit, but looking around the room. Jerome followed his gaze up to the balcony.

  The balcony was coming loose.

  Sebastian looked puzzled, but Jerome understood.

  They had done things to Celeste Marie that were so bad, so unforgiveable, that God himself was punishing them. Celeste Marie was an angel, a heavenly creature that had been sent to earth to test their souls. The human souls. When the demons had taken advantage of her, they had violated the will of God.

  Jerome wasn’t sure whether the demons had souls, and he was sure that if they had, Sebastian would pray for them eventually; however, Jerome was glad of what was happening.

  The yellow smoke dissipated from Aloysius and Theodore, and the demons stopped turning to jelly under attack.

  Jerome looked up at Sebastian. He didn’t know how to say what he wanted; that is, he knew how to say what he wanted, but he didn’t know of a way to say it that would convince Sebastian to do it.

  Sebastian straightened up, said something, and gestured at him. The yellow smoke surrounded Jerome. “You have two minutes to kill them all,” Sebastian said.

  Chapter 41

  Aloysius had too much to do, suddenly. He was covered in blood and his arms were tired and his legs were ready to give out. A few seconds ago, he’d felt great, invincible. Now the demons were really starting to get to him.

  He was surprised that he’d lived this long; the most he knew about using an axe was cutting wood, and wood didn’t charge at you, barring a few trees here and there that he’d cut to fall in the wrong direction, which had been both embarrassing and dangerous.

  At first the demons had attacked them seriously, then the demons had shifted their attention to something behind them. Now the demons were paying attention to them again, not as much so as the first time, but certainly more than they had been.

  He cut, ducked, cut, turned, cut, hit a demon’s axe on the handle and felt his own axe shudder in his hand, good thing the blood hadn’t coated his hands too badly, cut, ducked, got out of Theodore’s way, cut. He was tired. Considering how afraid he was and how excited he should have been, this wasn’t a good sign.

  As far as he could tell, Theodore was still grinning from ear to ear. He was going to have to have a talk with Theodore, when this was all over. How healthy could it be for him to carry around a pair of knives whose only purpose, obviously, was to make things bleed? And grinning while you killed? It wasn’t sane.

  Cut, duck, cut. He would rather have had a big knife, really. He was always afraid the corners of the axe would get caught on something on the way out, and then he’d be stuck, unable to block, jerking on the handle so hard the thing flew back into his face and killed him. Ha, ha. It would be just his luck.

  He was tired. He was probably losing blood. Not fast enough to put him into shock, but enough to make him even more tired than he should have been.

  There was a scream, and Jerome flew past him, chopping into a demon. The demon took a swing at him, and Jerome didn’t bother to get out of the way. Aloysius couldn’t move his arms fast enough to protect him, but he tried.

  The swing bounced off Jerome’s head, and Jerome chopped him again. The axe was too big for him, but the demon’s side squirted blood. Aloysius swung the axe at the demon, and its head flew off. Not what he had intended, but oh well.

  Another demon cut at Aloysius. He stepped aside, but not far enough, and got raked down the side of his ribs with a fortunately over-dulled axe. It still hurt.

  Jerome chopped the demon in the hip. The demon spun toward him, and Aloysius hit him dead-on in the arm when it raised its axe. The gray arm cracked and dangled.

  Aloysius snapped his eyes open. He was on his knees. He stood up as Theodore blocked a demon from hitting him in the head with a log-splitter’s chop.

  “I’m not going to make it,” he said.

  Then he saw stars for a few seconds and felt much better. Theodore and Jerome were shaking their heads. An axe bit into Jerome’s arm, and he stared at it like it had betrayed him. Aloysius dropped his axe, grabbed Jerome under the arms, and tossed him backwards toward the dais. Theodore
covered him as he picked up his axe again.

  Enough was enough.

  He took a deep breath. The floor jerked under him. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but the demons in front of him snorted and stamped and took a step backward. They couldn’t take more than a step backward, because they were being pushed from behind, but they tried.

  Theodore, without pause, took the opening and chopped down another demon, axe to the neck. Aloysius looked over his shoulder and froze, then jerked his head back toward the demons and chopped at a demon’s oncoming axe.

  The floor was falling in behind them. More than that, in the instant he’d been able to look, it had been dripping down.

  Maybe it wouldn't get too big, and he and Theodore and Sebastian and Jerome and all the demons and Celeste Marie (he wondered how she was doing) wouldn’t fall in and get burnt to a crisp.

  He chopped again.

  The demons were pushing back harder now, and Aloysius let them go. Theodore, however, was having trouble letting go of the fight. Aloysius screamed at him a few times, but because he couldn’t hear himself over the roar of the fire, he was pretty sure that Theodore hadn’t heard him, either.

  Or didn’t care.

  Suddenly, Aloysius noticed that he hadn’t seen any black demons, with or without clothing, for a few minutes. They’d been keeping the gray demons sufficiently distracted that he and Theodore hadn’t had to fight too many of them at one time, because they’d been fighting for their lives elsewhere. But there was no black fur to be seen any longer, at least not in an upright position. Aloysius passed over a dead, black demon in human clothing, jeans and a snap-up shirt, and kicked it. The gray demons—there seemed to be a lot more of them, too—seemed to be retreating, and he followed along behind them, keeping an eye on Theodore.

  The floor shuddered again. The collapse was spreading until it was a few paces from the dais. Sebastian, now dressed in a black priest dress thing (vestments? cassock? what was the difference?), was trying to pull Jerome away from the cage.

  Aloysius took another step away from the demons and stood on tiptoe to look in the cage. Celeste Marie was dead. She had that look on her face like a dead cow and an unnatural absence of motion that even a kid holding her breath would have. The kind of thing he never noticed until it was gone.

  There was no way they were going to get Jerome out of here without Celeste Marie.

  Hell, how were they going to get out of here, without her? Realistically speaking, was there anywhere left to go, without her?

  Theodore was still flailing around with his axe. Aloysius concentrated for a few seconds, then stepped close to him, during a space between axe swings, and biffed him on the back of the head. “Fall back, stupid.” Then he ran backwards out of the way.

  He still had to let himself fall backward to keep Theodore’s axe from hitting him right in the gut. Theodore looked at him but didn’t see him.

  “Get Jerome,” Aloysius said.

  That must have meant something. Theodore still didn’t seem to see him, but he looked up to the kid hanging with both arms around two of the bars of the cage as Sebastian tried to pull him away by the legs. Theodore snorted and ran toward them.

  Aloysius got to his feet and watched the demons run out of the coliseum, then out of the courtyard. The balcony fell down like a ribbon collapsing. The cage shielded the worst of the damage from his brothers.

  Jerome was shrieking that he wasn’t going to leave without Celeste Marie. Sebastian had let go of him, but Jerome was still hanging onto the bars. Theodore walked up to the bars and pulled on them, then pulled harder. They wouldn’t budge.

  Theodore said something about rope, but Aloysius didn’t catch it. He looked around in the remaining junk (the stuff near the pit was sliding into it, seeming to make the fire brighter as it fell) and found a long cable. He pulled on the end and got a few dozen feet out of the pile before it got stuck. The top of the coliseum had filled up with smoke, and it was starting to get low enough to make him cough. Sebastian, up on the dais, was having a worse time of breathing, looked like.

  The edge of the pit reached the edge of the dais, and the edge of the dais dipped. Sebastian, coughing, started to slide. He was probably still wearing cowboy boots under his cassock. He took a few steps toward the upper side of the dais, stepped on the edge of his cassock, and went down to his knees, still coughing.

  Jerome screamed, “Sebastian!”

  Aloysius jerked on the cable. It didn’t come out, but he had enough slack to throw it toward Sebastian anyway. He jerked on the cable some more, more slack. He pulled the cable most of the way back and threw it again. It landed next to Sebastian, who grabbed it and used it to pull himself up. He walked forward, pulling on the cable hand over hand.

  Aloysius held the cable steady. Sure enough, as soon as he needed the damned thing to hold fast, it came loose easily behind him, and he had to lean back and brace his feet against some junk on the ground. He skidded forward a little. Sebastian jumped off the dais. Aloysius fell all the way back, felt like he poked out a kidney as he landed on the junk pile, and jerked Sebastian off his feet. The dais and the machine on it slid into the hole.

  Aloysius kept pulling the cable toward him. It came loose and nearly hit him in the face as Sebastian let go of it. He stopped pulling. His hands hurt; he opened and closed them a few times and didn’t look at them.

  Theodore grabbed the cable and looped it around the cage. Aloysius got to his feet and looked for something heavy enough that Theodore wouldn’t just jerk it across the floor toward him and ended up looping the other end of the cable (it was loose now) around the hulk of the ruined digging machine, which was under a pile of the blades that did the actual digging. He tied it in a loose double-hitch, then grabbed the end of it and leaned back.

  The hitch held as Theodore pulled on it. The machine shuddered but held still. Aloysius risked a look over his shoulder and saw Theodore straining against the end of the cable, which he’d wrapped around and around himself. His face was bright red.

  Jerome was pulling on the cable, to little effect. Sebastian was backing away from the hole in the floor, which had gotten much closer to the cage since the last time he’d looked, flipping through his Bible.

  “The lock!” Aloysius shouted. “Not the bars! The lock!”

  Jerome looked up and saw Aloysius pointing sideways. He looked back at the cage and dropped his jaw, then ran over to Theodore and pounded on his back. A second later, Theodore had unwound himself and threaded the cable around the lock.

  More of the floor collapsed, and Sebastian walked over to Aloysius. “Need help?”

  “Keep an eye out for the demons,” Aloysius said.

  “All right.”

  Aloysius leaned into it as Theodore pulled on his end. The lock groaned but didn’t snap.

  Chapter 42

  The floor next to the cage collapsed, and Jerome stood on the cage with the pit underneath him. “Try one more time. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll climb underneath.”

  Aloysius leaned back as Theodore pulled.

  Something flashed past his eyes—smoke? something red—and he felt the strain against the cable ease. He looked back; Theodore jerked the cable again, and the lock of the cage snapped with a groan that started low and ended in a high-pitched ping!

  Jerome crawled across the cage bars to the door. The cage shifted as he was opening the door, and the door caught halfway open. Jerome eeled inside, then followed the bars of the cage back around to where the floor was still more or less intact. He ran to the hammock, put his arms under Celeste Marie, and pulled her, with some difficulty, off the hammock. He stumbled as more of the floor fell away. He walked up to the bars of the cage.

  “Let’s see if her head will fit,” he said. He and Theodore twisted Celeste Marie’s body around, careful not to hurt her, and pushed her head through the bars. More of the floor fell, and Jerome got his feet back around the bars as he helped guide Celeste Marie through. As soon as
Theodore had her in his arms, he climbed the cage back to the half-open door, slid back out, and climbed around the outside to the solid floor.

  Easy as pie.

  The cage shuddered and slid into the hole as Jerome was trotting away, following Theodore. “Is she breathing?” he asked.

  Theodore shook his head.

  “Why are your arms so hairy?”

  Aloysius looked at Theodore. He did look hairier than normal.

  They passed Aloysius, who finally let go of the cable and followed them out of the coliseum. He heard the ruined digger slide into the pit.

  “What do we do now?” Aloysius asked. His feet hurt.

  “Run,” Jerome said. He pointed toward the nearest corridor and took off running.

  Theodore shrugged Celeste Marie’s body tighter in his arms and trotted after him. Sebastian looked about ready to pass out.

  Aloysius walked beside him. “You better pick up the pace, old man. You wouldn’t want to make Jerome mad again.”

  Sebastian looked sick, pale around the edges. “Can’t. Overdid it.”

  “And believe me, I thank you. But you don’t want to get left back here. I have a feeling the whole place is about to go.”

  The same smoky, red flash went across Aloysius’s eyes, and Sebastian swayed. Aloysius caught his brother and hefted him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Sebastian went limp, probably unintentionally. Aloysius staggered toward the door. Yeah, he could hear the floor collapsing behind him.

  The red flash passed him again. This time, he could see it more clearly not as something that was happening in his own skull but as something that passed from the collapse behind him, around him, then forward.

  He moved faster.

  Jerome yelled, “Aloysius!”

  He broke into a run. Jerome was waiting for him at a turnoff with his eyes almost bulging out of his head.