by Matt Turner
“Incoming!” one of them bellowed, a mere instant before the wall that they were gathered against exploded.
John had a near-instantaneous glimpse of something pale, glistening, and absolutely massive tearing through the side of the building, crushing man and steel to dust before it—and then, an instant later, it was gone. Nothing remained of the soldiers but a pile of bullet casings and the odd limb.
“Dear God,” he said in shock as he stared at the pile of rubble, shattered glass, and scattered brick that had once been the front of a library—and beyond that, the crater that might have been a street. “Was that…”
A deep roar echoed through the air, causing bits of rubble to vibrate against the ground. The sound came from down the street, John tried to tell himself as he stumbled on the verge of panic. It didn’t come from above me, did it?
Podarge, bored with John’s paralysis, clawed her way off his back and awkwardly hopped over to one of the arms that had been left behind on the floor. “Tastes like Legion,” she said distastefully after she gave the severed limb an exploratory peck. “Tastes like shit.”
John reluctantly clambered out of the hole and joined the harpy. “You said that was Legion the Prophet following us in the dungeon,” he slowly said. “Does that mean…” Against his better judgment, he took a step out into the smoking, cratered street and looked up.
Podarge flapped back to her customary place on his shoulder. “Gotten bigger,” she cawed.
A mountain of human flesh, twisted and molded into an idiot child’s hideous approximation of a spider, loomed over the capital of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. One of its many legs crashed down into the street a hundred yards away from John, far enough away so that the sheer shock wave didn’t knock him down—but close enough for him to see the thousands of human arms and legs that protruded from its skin like hairs.
It was so horrifically disgusting and monstrous that John had no choice but to laugh, harder and louder than he had in years. Tears came to his eyes as his chest began to hurt from the sheer effort of so much laughter.
“Why is Tree-man laughing?” Podarge asked suspiciously.
“Because I was right!” John giggled. There’s always something to make things worse than they already are, he had once told Plague, and yet again his words had come true. “The Suicide Forest, then Dis, then this! It can always get worse! And it always does!”
“I like Suicide Forest,” the harpy said in an offended tone.
“I’m Job,” John continued in his inane rant. The words, building so long, just flooded out of him; he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to. “That’s it! I’m fucking Job! Only difference is, I deserve this! And Job, lucky bastard, still got to die in the end! But not me! It’s going to be like this, Hell-spiders and demons and torture, for all fucking eternity for ol’ John Hale!”
Legion raised another one of their legs and swatted aside a city block. Shattered buildings and pieces of rubble the size of ships rained down to pulverize an entire section of the city. The Kingdom’s artillery pieces responded with a desultory barrage, and only succeeded in blowing a few scraps of flesh off the creature.
“I wonder what comes after this?” John laughed manically. “An army of man-eating centipedes? A Hellfire bath? Or maybe I’ll get captured again and this time they’ll flay me alive, put me on a stake, and—ow!”
Podarge nipped at his ear with her razor-sharp beak. He nearly swatted her away, then thought better of it; her talons were dangerously close to his throat.
“I am last harpy,” she squawked in his ear. “You know why?” Before he could reply, she nipped at his ear again—this time he let out a curse as she took away part of his earlobe and swallowed it down. “Other harpies despair. I know there is still good eating.”
John tried to process her unclear words. Hope, he thought—and just like that, he remembered the vision of what might have been his daughter he had seen in the darkness of the Kingdom’s torture chambers. Whether it was a daydream or a hallucination, he still didn’t know, but…Tituba. She let me go. Why? Was it for this?
He gazed at the hellish monster above and made up his mind. No turning back, he vowed. If his path led him to the deepest depths of Hell, then so be it. Heaven may be closed to me, but Hell isn’t. Even if he could only bring the tiniest, faintest sliver of hope to this place, then that would be enough.
“But first I have to save it,” he decided. He stretched his arms apart and placed his feet firmly on the pavement. He did not know how much plant mass he could generate on his own, but the shattered library behind potentially held thousands of bookshelves; the wood contained in it and the other buildings should hopefully be able to serve his needs. “Podarge, find the other Horsemen. They’ll need you.”
“What about Tree-man?” Podarge asked.
“I’m going on a bug-hunt,” John growled. “Now go!”
As the harpy flapped away, John concentrated on his powers as he never had before—only this time, he placed the image of the girl he had seen at the front of his mind. I’ll make you proud, he swore. Even if you’re not real, I’ll make you proud.
Branches and vines poured out of him—not just from his fingers and shoulders, as they normally did, but from every pore in his upper body. He let out a scream of pain as the skin on his lower half twisted and toughened with layer upon layer of barbed bark. Not enough. He grimaced as his limbs disappeared into the tree growing around him. Not enough! There was only so much mass that his body could generate on its own, so he twisted his tree-limbs outward (his arms had long since been subsumed by the branches) and reached with branches and gnarled roots into every destroyed building and abandoned shop on the entire street, taking and absorbing in every scrap of leaf and plant and wood that he could possibly find.
The strain on his body was immense; he could feel the veins in his head bulging nearly to the point of rupture. But it still wasn’t enough, even as the tree trunk took away everything but his face and he found himself being lifted higher and higher up into the air as the massive plant grew taller and taller. “More!” John screamed up at the looming monster that was turning to better examine him. Something in his head finally popped under the pressure, and the vision in his right eye immediately went black.
John knew that he was at the limit of his strange powers, but he recklessly pushed on, nonetheless. “I haven’t got all day!” he bellowed at the gigantic flesh-spider. “Come on, monster!”
29
Simon was able to leap over mounds of burning rubble and shattered machinery in a single bound, but as fast as he was, the stranger named Seth was even swifter. In spite of the burning blade that he brandished, he glided over debris and obstacles so easily and gracefully that it seemed there were invisible wings attached to his ankles.
Maybe there are, Simon thought sourly. For a man who had claimed to be a servant of God his entire life, to actually meet one in the flesh left a hollow pit in the bottom of his stomach. What does he have that I don’t?
“Empathy, for one thing,” Amaury called out behind Simon. He and Vera seemed to lack the physical prowess of the other two, so they headed up the rear of the group making the rough sprint forward.
Simon turned his head to give his son an astonished glare. “You can read minds?” he asked hoarsely.
“That’s my thing,” Vera snapped.
Amaury rolled his eyes. “Please. I don’t need powers to read you. It’s fucking obvious to anyone with half a brain.”
“Wait—” Vera burst out before Simon could formulate a scathing retort. “Is that a fucking tree?”
Simon turned and gaped at the incredible sight. On the far side of the spider, the largest tree that he had ever seen in his life was sprouting up from the city. It climbed higher and higher, up fifty feet, then a hundred, as its dull-red trunk thickened and widened so that it was as large as a castle at its base. And near the top of the plant, a score of jagged branches hurtled like spears at Legion’s torso. Is that
John? The little weakling can do that?
“Back!” Seth suddenly bellowed. The servant from Paradise kicked his feet into the ground and hurtled backward into Simon, knocking them both flat, a mere instant before a massive steel blade crashed into the street exactly where their momentum would have taken them.
Simon immediately turned the fall into a roll, contorting his body so that he somehow found his feet and was able to stand straight back up. A brief earthquake from the massive flesh-spider rocked the street, and for a moment he struggled to keep his balance. Seth gently took him by the shoulder and helped steady him, much to Simon’s displeasure.
“Horsemen,” a chilling robotic voice announced. A mechanical hand, made of spike-studded steel and whirring pistons, reached out from the alleyway between two collapsed houses and wrenched the giant blade out of the crater it had carved in the street. “We meet again.”
“ELIE the Prophet.” Seth grimaced. He glanced over his shoulder at Legion’s looming figure and winced as the massive tree leaned forward, sinking a dozen mast-sized branches into the soft flesh of the spider’s torso. Legion opened their massive maw and ripped a bloody gash into the side of the tree as the two titans violently wrestled and grappled with each other. “We don’t have time for this. Simon, handle her. Amaury and Vera, with me.”
Ellie. Her again? Simon hadn’t forgotten the last time they had met; it had ended with her burning him alive. “Kill the spider,” he growled as he drew his great sword and faced the shadowy alley where the Prophet’s war machine waited. “I’ve got the bitch.” Behind him, the others nodded and continued on their way.
Deep within the shadows, an engine roared to life. Two red electrical lanterns winked like menacing eyes at Simon as Ellie brought her machine of death into the light. “You will regret those words, little man.”
The metal body that she operated was unlike any stiltwalker that Simon had ever seen—it looked as though the Prophet had taken the upper torso of a human skeleton, converted the bones to steel rods that twisted and gyrated with every movement, and then mounted the entire thing on a platform supported by four scuttling mechanical legs. There were no armaments that Simon could see on the skeletal design of the metal, aside from the fifteen-foot-long slab of razor-sharp metal that the iron beast carried in one of its claw-like hands.
At the very top of the robotic body, a skull-shaped compartment large enough to seat a human being gazed down at Simon. “Before, I tested your capacity for nociceptive pain,” the grinning skull said. A line of flame from the distant artillery barrages winked off of the darkened windows protecting its eyes. “But today—”
“Simon, the tail!” Vera screamed out.
Simon spun around, the great sword in both hands for a vicious chop downward—but the blur of segmented steel that had exploded from the rear of the mechanical beast was not aimed for him. It shot down the street with the speed of a bullet, and Amaury let out a scream as the serrated tip neatly impaled its target.
“Today we examine the emotional response of a human parent to the pain of their child.” Ellie lifted the tail above the ground, dangling Amaury’s impaled body over the street below. The blade that had taken him in the small of his back neatly protruded through his abdomen. A few coils of intestine hung from it like rose-colored vines.
“Tell me,” the Prophet mocked. “How would you describe your current emotional state?”
The sound of blood pounding in his ears nearly blocked out everything else; Simon could only barely hear Manto’s scream of despair and Seth’s shouted command. The rage in his chest that always threatened to spill over trembled with him on the precipice; somehow he sensed that if he allowed it to escape this time, it would consume him until there was nothing left. She’s baiting me, he thought, and so he choked on the emotion. He felt as though the effort were going to kill him; it was undoubtedly the hardest thing that he had ever done.
“Well?” Ellie prodded. The metal plates of the tail twisted and creaked as she brought it just over Simon’s head. He glanced upward and met Amaury’s anguished, bloodshot eyes. And to his amazement, Amaury winked.
“Keep going,” Simon shouted at Seth and Vera. “We’ve got this.”
He suddenly leapt forward, the great sword raised for a killing blow. Ellie anticipated that he would try to attack the tail and so she jerked it back over the war machine’s shoulder as she slashed her massive blade in a horizontal swipe designed to tear Simon’s head from his shoulders—but instead of going high, he went low, in a desperate roll that brought him within arm’s reach of the machine’s body. As Amaury, still impaled on the machine’s tail, sailed overhead, Simon heard a distinct click.
Everything happened within only a handful of seconds. The edge of the machine’s blade tore into the street, kicking up a thick cloud of dust and rubble, just as Simon’s great sword crashed against one of its legs. Sparks flickered in the air as steel screeched and tore against steel, and almost immediately, a great explosion rocked the rear of the war machine as Amaury detonated the explosive he had casually dropped at the base of the segmented tail. The severed tail crashed into the dust with Amaury still impaled upon its tip.
Ellie yanked her blade back and smashed it down at Simon’s head. He raised his great sword just in time to catch the blow, and for a moment, man and machine strained against each other. “Do you know why I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long?” the mechanical voice echoed from the grinning skull. “Not because of you Horsemen, but because of that!” Ellie slightly tilted her metal body’s head in the direction of Legion’s monstrous body.
Sweat ran down Simon’s forehead, blurring his vision. He gritted his teeth together; he knew that his strength was prodigious, but the sheer power of the Prophet’s machine was on another level altogether. Somewhere within the bowels of the machine, yet another engine roared as black smoke billowed out of its body. The massive blade pressed down with even more force; it was only a matter of time until his knees buckled from the sheer pressure. “I—don’t—care,” he managed to snarl out.
“Legion worships flesh, and I the machine,” Ellie whispered. “We were always destined to collide. And now, at last, the battle lines have finally been drawn. Today we shall see the final victory of machine over man! I will drag you loathsome bags of meat and bone into the wonder of a brave new world! But you Horsemen are a thorn that I shall pluck out before I destroy the abomination of flesh once and for—”
The machine’s grasp on the blade faltered as another explosion slammed into its back, knocking it off-balance from the shock wave. Simon tilted his great sword downward, causing Ellie’s blade to slide away, and give him just enough time to leap backward out of harm’s way. Thank God, he thought in relief. She nearly had me.
“Suck on that, BITCH.” Amaury laughed manically. He took the iron spike embedded in his guts and wrenched himself off it with a disgusting wet sound, ignoring the trail of guts that the steel dragged out with it.
The three remaining legs on the war machine scuttled backward, dragging the one that Simon had shattered with them, so that the Prophet had both father and son in her line of sight. “Your pain tolerance is remarkable,” her mechanical voice rumbled. “For a human.”
“Well, impalement is just another way we say ‘hello’ in Judecca,” Amaury said sarcastically. He laid a hand over the gory remnants of his stomach and winced as the entrails and skin began to stitch themselves back together. With his free hand, he reached into his pocket and withdrew one of his knives. “Think I’ll show you once we crack open that shell of yours.”
“I calculate a ninety-seven point eight percent probability that you will fail, Horseman.”
“Right.” Amaury rolled his eyes. “Only one thing you’re forgetting, Ellie.”
“Do not call me that,” the machine warned.
Amaury twirled his knife-hand around, revealing the three loose silver rings that dangled from his fingers. “I stole three of Vera’s grenades,” he sai
d lazily. “One of them was on a timer, sooooo…”
The third explosive detonated directly underneath the war machine’s undercarriage. The force of the blow rippled across the steel like a wave, yet Ellie was somehow able to recover from it and stabbed her blade forward. Simon rushed forward to meet the blow, but he was too slow, which was fortunate, for a burst of light suddenly came from the machine as a coil of lightning crackled across the blade.
“Eighty thousand volts,” Ellie bellowed. The chemical smell of ozone filled the air as raw power crackled around the blade. She stabbed it directly at Amaury’s heart; he was only just able to dodge out of the way of the blow. “Enough to cook you where you stand!”
The blade swung toward Simon and he raised his great sword to block it.
“No!” Amaury screamed out. “Elbow! Elbow!”
What in God’s name was he talking about? flashed across Simon’s mind. Then Ellie’s blade crashed against his, and a curtain of lightning wrapped around his body. Time slowed to a crawl; his muscles convulsed hard enough to make his bones crack, his red hair erupted in flame, and his eyes felt as though they were about to burst.
“This is the second time I’ve cooked you, little man!” Ellie screamed in triumph.
Elbow, Simon thought. Through the agonizing pain, it dawned on him—the articulated limb that grasped the lightning-sword had been slightly damaged by the explosions. One of the steel panels hung loose from it, exposing a veiny network of tubing and wires within the mechanical limb. But it was utterly out of his reach; the lightning paralyzed and tortured his every muscle.