by Matt Turner
He smashed Seth’s face again when the other man struggled and continued to drag him toward the mouth. “In fact, let’s go there together. What fun it’ll be, locked together in the belly of the Beast! We can talk about the women who left us, the friends who betrayed us, and the God that abandoned us!”
A deep shiver passed through the Beast’s body, and the flapping of its wings began to falter. Marc paused, unsure of what was going on, as something stirred within the shadowed depths of the monster’s cavernous maw. Even the Beast seemed to be perplexed. Its remaining eyes widened in confusion that swiftly morphed to terror as scores of thorns and branches suddenly burst through its fur.
“What the—” Marc said, just before an avalanche of razor-sharp vines exploded from the Beast’s gaping mouth, carrying with them the detritus of the monster’s guts. The horrible scent was even more distracting than the monster’s wet, gurgling screams; Seth frantically lunged backward, ripping himself free of the Prophet’s grasp, just as the mass of vegetation collided with him, hurling his body like a ragdoll from the Beast’s back. He disappeared with a faint cry into the unending ranks below.
“Never again,” John howled. The mass of vines retreated, revealing the trembling Horseman, covered in filth and slime. “NEVER AGAIN!” He staggered forward, struggling to find his footing on the Beast’s convulsing body. “Throw me into the worst pits of Hell, Seth, but never make me do that again-”
Seth scrambled to his feet, tore his sword from where it still stood impaled in the Beast’s fur, and rushed toward John. “We have to go, now,” he gasped. The Beast was the only thing holding the great trunk upright, and if it fell—
Beside him, the leathery wings of the monster flapped once more, then went silent. A final convulsive shudder passed through the Beast’s body; pink foam sprayed out from its mouths.
Seth felt no pity for the fear he saw in its dimming eyes. “Your time is past, Devil,” he snapped.
It lifted the corner of its lip in a final snarl. “We will see.” With that, its corpse tumbled away. The tree followed, pinning it underneath the trunk as the ground rushed up to meet it.
The wind rushed past, faster and faster, as the trunk continued its unstoppable course toward the ground below. “Shit!” All thought vanished as Seth and John madly scrambled for some avenue of escape, but not even the greatest powers in Hell could resist gravity.
When the cracked, twisted wood finally crashed onto what had been the banks of the Phlegethon, it had the weight of nearly half a million tons. The sheer force of the impact shook the ground for miles in every direction, raised a plume of dust and smoke that blotted out the entire sky, and leveled entire nations’ worth of the Master’s army.
The devastation before her was utterly unfathomable; barring the tree itself, the man-sized splinters it had rained down on the Master’s ranks must have brought down countless numbers. Eve did not blink. Continue the advance, she silently ordered, and the masses rushed to do her bidding. She idly wondered whether that had even put a significant dent in their numbers. She did not bother to check such a trivial matter; her mind was focused on more important things.
Is the Beast dead? It seemed all too likely, but she didn’t believe it for a second. The Beast was powerful beyond comprehension. In the icy depths of Judecca, it had shown her a fraction of its power, and whispered to her such wonderful things, ways that it could help her son, even if he didn’t initially want it. It isn’t dead, she decided. It couldn’t be. True escape from Hell lay with the one who had founded it. Even if Cain couldn’t see that at first, he would come around. He has to. And who better to take her son’s hand and guide him into the bright new future?
He will see. A boy needs his mother.
48
Despite all of the machine’s violent assertions to the contrary, Salome had always thought of ELIE as something of a kindred spirit in the ranks of the Kingdom’s Prophets. Its voice, distorted and wet as it was, sounded vaguely feminine, and the machine had once possessed a vague outline of a woman’s body beneath the clumsy armor it had worn. She had been a fool to ever think that, she now realized. The entity that stood—no, hovered—before her was as removed from humanity as a wind-up clock.
“But your species succeeded in one thing,” the mechanical monster said. Small rivers of blood dripped down from the gleaming spikes that emerged like a crown from its steel head, merging with the layer of viscera and gore it had gained while cleaving through the Master’s army. The single glass eye peered out from behind a few scraps of what looked to be intestine. “The birth of the one perfect being. The machine. Me.”
As fast as a blink, its wings shot out in either direction, bathing the entire area in a glow of silver light. Leviathan violently jerked underneath Salome, and she started to fall to the side, just as a score of machine guns emerged from the depths of Babylon’s body.
Fuck, Salome had time to think.
A hurricane of bullets slashed forward, but Leviathan was faster. With a mighty roar, the dragon-demon wrenched himself to the side, presenting the angel with the side of his face that had been left mangled with its prosthetic additions. For a brief second, bullet crashed against demon-reinforced steel, producing a horrible screech of sound that vibrated and twisted every bone in Salome’s body. Leviathan lumbered forward, his mouth open to tear Babylon limb from limb. He let out a heartrending whimper as the machine guns brutally swept down his body, cutting through even his mighty scales.
“No!” Salome screamed in horror. Her face, her addiction, the fate of all Hell…they were nothing compared to the agony she felt as her demon shuddered and died beneath her.
“The age of angels is over,” Babylon declared as the dragon finally collapsed in a bloody heap at the ground. He was less than a meter from its feet. “At last, evolution has proved even the mightiest of the organics to be…obsolete.”
“You bitch,” Salome wept. The tears ran like lines of fire down her mutilated face. She reached for the holsters at her hips and, one by one, emptied every weapon she had at Babylon’s angelic form. The machine spread its wings farther and slowly hovered several meters up in the air, serenely gazing downward. Machine-pistol, beam-cannon, bolt-thrower, grenade launcher…every one of her weapons was as effective as a child throwing pebbles against the side of a mountain. Babylon silently stared down at her as projectile after projectile harmlessly bounced off its armor, not even leaving a dent behind. Salome couldn’t even use the ace up her sleeve, the Xipe Totec, for she had entrusted Signy to deliver the nuclear weapon to her via the Eighteenth Legion’s War Train. I’ve been a fool.
When the last of her weapons ran dry, leaving her with nothing more than dry sobs and the empty click of her pistol, the angel serenely pointed to the destruction of the Phlegethon, and the massive tree that tottered and shook above it. “Look at them, Salome. So many millions of your species. Why haven’t they torn you to pieces yet, I wonder?”
Salome no longer felt anything. There was nothing inside her: no more rage, no more sadness, just a cold, black void. She turned her head and coldly assessed the sight that might have once reduced her to madness.
The front ranks of the Master’s army, that had once advanced across the river with the speed of a locomotive, now could barely manage little more than a dying man’s pace up the bank and to the ruined walls of the fortress. The reason was obvious: they had become a nation of lepers. Every step brought more of them down to their knees, as the sores spread like a virus across their body, peeling away skin and muscle to the honeycomb-laced bone underneath. With each passing minute, their forms became less than human at an alarming rate as flesh furiously rotted away. Salome fancied that she could see the cloud of contamination rising up from their bodies to the heavens above. And still they shuffled forward, even as limbs fell away and they left chunks of skin and muscle in their footprints.
“A virus of my own design,” Babylon explained. “Not as optimal as the ones I’ve saved for Earth, but there is a certain
beauty in its efficiency.” It unleashed a salvo of rockets into the depths of the crowd, blowing apart thousands in a careless instant. “That is the future of your species, Salome. Nothing but wailing, screaming meat.”
A thin sheet of metal slid open in its torso, exposing a small rack of clear glass vials. The gears in Babylon’s arm faintly clicked as the machine withdrew one of the delicate pieces and slid it into a syringe that emerged from one of its silvery fingers. “And now, I have the ultimate pathogen, just for you.”
CRACK went the massive tree behind them. Ripples of smoke and dust shook the entire battlefield as thousands of bodies and fragments of bark rained down from the collapsing tree, striking the ground with the force of artillery shells. The stench of mucus and decay grew ever stronger. Salome glanced down at her hands and saw a line of black ulcers steadily crawling up her fingers.
The angel glided nearer and gently took her hand. “You are in shock,” Babylon explained. It had no face, yet Salome sensed that it was broadly smiling all the same. “But that will fade. Soon you’ll be screaming again.”
It brought the needle forward. A drop of liquid beaded on the edge of the steel, glimmering in the light. It looked so much like Zaqqum—the wretched drug that had caused Salome so much pain—that it jerked her from the depths of her inner death. She let out a cry, and a very human chuckle came from Babylon’s blank steel mask as it came closer—
Leviathan exploded upward, a manic gleam in his mismatched eyes, his mouth spewing out a torrent of blood and fire that hissed and popped, exploding fifty meters down the beach, wiping away the first few ranks of the Master’s army.
Babylon passively stood as the flames curled around its body.
“You call me ‘angel,’” Leviathan bellowed. “Puny creature, I am a DEVIL!”
His teeth wrapped around Babylon’s wings, warping the thin blades with the sheer force of his powerful jaw. For the first time, Babylon seemed to be concerned, for although the razor edges on its blades pierced the demon’s muzzle in a dozen places, Leviathan pressed on. The heat from his flames was so great that even the scales around his jaws became charred and burnt from the incredible Hellfire. Babylon’s machine guns roared, but the bullets became nothing more than vaporized slag a centimeter from the barrels.
“Leviathan, STOP!” Salome screamed. She threw herself from the back of the demon, for the heat that came off him was so intense that it scalded her legs. “It’s too much!”
Babylon slashed at Leviathan with dozens of blades, ripping entire sections of the dragon-devil’s flesh away. Still the dragon grimly hung on, now tearing at the machine with his man-sized talons. The once-impenetrable metal hissed and tore from his ferocious assault.
“Die!” Babylon’s electronic voice screeched. There was a note of panic in it. “Die, die, DIE!” It stabbed the syringe into Leviathan’s organic eye, causing his muzzle to erupt in a thick layer of engorged, weeping pustules that sprayed thick mucus across the sand. Still the fire streamed out of Leviathan’s throat, growing hotter and hotter; the air began to twist and curl around it. In seconds, a vast gale erupted as a thick stream of air coursed inward from every direction, sucked in by the Hellfire’s ravenous desire.
The blood-soaked sand beneath the two combatants turned to fire, then to glass, then to ash. And still they grappled at each other, locked in a furious contest of hate.
He’s magnificent, Salome thought in awe. It seared her retinas to look at Leviathan, but she could not take her gaze away. Every scale burst through with a fierce inner light as the demon’s fury raged and expanded with the power of an exploding star. His muzzle was hidden behind a wall of flame that coursed a kilometer down the beach, rending the sand to ash and melting away the layer of bedrock beneath. He always said even Satan feared him. For the first time, she believed him.
“Let GO!” Babylon bellowed. It ignited its engines to their maximum power, feeding the whirlwind of fire that melted its exoskeleton and exposed the raw circuits beneath. Whether it or Leviathan flew first, it was impossible to say, but in the space of a second, the machine and the monster became a great column of flame that exploded up into the sky.
The clouds of ash melted away from the hellish streak that soared across the sky, spewing out globules of heat and flame that cooked thousands of the Master’s lepers where they stood. Salome screamed a desperate plea upward, calling Leviathan’s name, as the intense light grew too powerful to even look at. Over the earth-shattering howl of Babylon’s engines, she thought she may have heard something. Was Leviathan calling out her name? Or was it a warning—
Three miles above the battlefield—but still close enough that it ignited the barren sands in every direction—the column of light suddenly collapsed in on itself. For a brief moment, there was calm as machine and beast fell silent. The darkness returned to the skies above as the clouds swiftly regathered—and then they were torn apart again by a massive shock wave. Salome could actually see the wall of pressure spreading outward in every direction, clearing out storms of dust and smoke before it.
“Leviathan!” she shouted up at the gale. It roared down, splintering John’s mighty tree before it, and rolled across the river, flattening the Master’s armies in their hundreds of thousands. The tower of bodies that Eve stood upon warped, twisted, and then ruptured apart as the shock wave rumbled into it. For a few seconds, the sky darkened with a cloud of wriggling specks; an unlucky few of Cain’s armies were learning how to fly.
An avalanche of heat and pressure crashed into Salome. It picked her up like a ragdoll and brutally hurled her aside. One of her eardrums ruptured, and half the bones in her legs were wrenched out of place by the unyielding force. She did not mind. For once, she felt peace; she didn’t even desire a single drop of Zaqqum.
My devil, she had time to think as the winds effortlessly carried her along. I’m so proud.
49
The walls of the First Blockade held against the onslaught, but only barely. Chunks of masonry the size of pumpkins were torn from the walls by the howling winds, riddling the ravaged courtyard with a hellish bombardment that reduced the last few of Salome’s loyalists to a pulp. None of them seemed to come close to Cain, though whether that was sheer luck or some dark manifestation of the Master’s power, Simon had no idea. Through the haze of pain, he had managed to curl up in a corner against the wall, and had been spared further injury. It was of absolutely no consolation to the agony in his chest.
The Master used his teeth to rip away a piece of the Mark from Amaury’s severed hand. There was a faint rattle of steel as the last few links of chain fell away from his bare stomach. “At last,” he muttered to himself.
His golden eyes flickered upward to see that the top of the massive tree—riddled with spike-like branches the size of houses—was crashing down right on top of him. The battle between the machine-angel and the dragon-demon had finally done what millions of his army could not, and brought down the awe-inspiring oak.
Far away, a distant WHUMP caused the ground to shake as the lower part of the trunk made impact with the ground. The sound was oddly wet and pulpy. The sound of a million men being crushed, Simon thought with a shudder. It raged forward, an avalanche of sound and thunder, as more and more of the tree came down, flattening mile after mile of ground.
Cain looked bored. “Parlor tricks,” he muttered. “Is this what they’ve come to?”
He lazily swung his scythe up into the air. A hundred meters above, the treetop vaporized into a cloud of splinters and sawdust. They rained down like snow, gathering on his powerful shoulders like miniature drifts. Cain pointedly ignored the screams and shouts of surprise from the bleeding corpses scattered around and once again began to raise the Mark on Amaury’s palm to his open mouth.
“Give, that, back,” Amaury gasped in a voice wracked with misery and pain. He lay curled up in a ball, his severed wrist wedged between his legs to try to slow the bleeding.
No, Simon tried to shout. Get away.
But his ribs were nothing more than fragments of bone; he couldn’t even breathe, let alone speak. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that his abdomen was swiftly swelling up from the sheer amount of his body’s internal bleeding.
Cain’s hideous eyes shot a glare of pure malice to his son. “I had you for eight hundred years, yet it seems you still didn’t learn your lesson, Amaury. I am the Master, and you are the slave. You would do well to remember that, boy.”
“You’re nothing,” Amaury hissed. “Just a bitter old man who killed his own brother out of jealousy. And Abel got the last laugh, didn’t he? You don’t see him in this hell. No, it’s just you, and your failures—”
“I killed the demons,” Cain snarled. “I tore off Satan’s head with my bare hands. I murdered Death”—he slammed the tip of the scythe into the ground, making the stones of the courtyard rattle—“and took his weapon for my own. I will climb to Paradise and slay the cruel Creator—or force His hand into slaying me. I graced you Horsemen with my Marks.”
He slid the severed hand into one of the pockets of his trousers and reached down to seize Amaury by the throat. “Do you know why I did that? Why I chose all of you?”
Amaury thrashed and gurgled, unable to say anything as Cain lifted him high into the air.
“Longinus, Antony, Edith, Jezebel. The first failures. And then the two Montforts, Figner, and Hale. Also failures—although the chaos you have such a talent for spreading is delightful.” Cain brought his face close to Amaury’s. “You think I chose you because you’re special? You’re not special at all. Just another worm in the pile. No, I chose you for one reason only.”
A cruel smile twisted the Master’s lips. “The Mark can only be borne by one of my blood—only by a direct descendant of the First Murderer. Do you know what that makes you?”
No. Simon grimaced in pain.
“It makes you my children,” roared Cain. “And I your father!”