by Matt Turner
“All is dust,” Adam croaked out. His features emerged from the dust-storm that descended over the battlefield. “And so are you.”
“Ah, the First Man.” Satan grinned. “The reunion is complete at last!”
A War Train-sized fist made of swirling, jagged rocks reached down from the skies like the hand of a wrathful god and crushed the angel’s body deeper into the dirt.
“My sons,” Adam cried out. “Help me!”
There was no time for planning, no time for hesitation, for time for anything other than the tiniest of nods between the saint and the damned. The two brothers leapt down into the fray, the same cry for vengeance on their lips.
The Great Deceiver met their assault gleefully, and laughed with joy at the family he had broken.
56
One. One syringe of Zaqqum, one detonator, one last chance to have her revenge—it was all that Salome had left.
She crawled through the rubble of the First Blockade, heedless of the dust that choked her or the spilled blood that burned in her eyes. In one broken, twisted hand, she held her final syringe of Zaqqum, and in the other, the detonator to the greatest single weapon that mankind possessed. Somewhere in the crater below here, the great battle raged.
I want him to see, she swore to herself. Tremors seized her body. She needed a dose of Zaqqum within seconds, or otherwise her mind would be completely gone—but she needed to get close; she needed the fucking Master to know who had finally broken him—
“Prophet,” a voice croaked out.
She slightly turned her head and saw the outline of Signy amid the rubble. There was hardly anything left of the fierce woman but her shattered torso and the hint of an arm, but she managed to contort her face into a grin that showed off her sharpened teeth nevertheless.
“What are you doing?” Signy wheezed.
“Ending it,” Salome hissed. She gripped the detonator more tightly. “Let these fuckers all burn.”
Signy shook her head as much as she was able. “No…no… I made a promise. The angel, he…he said I should stop you. Don’t let her interrupt.”
Salome glared at her. “You think you can stop me?”
“He’d reward me.” Signy grinned. “Give me death. Sounds good to me, Prophet.” To Salome’s astonishment, she opened her mouth wide and began to wriggle her way through the dirt toward her. “I can do it,” Signy wheezed. “Just bite off a few of those fingers…”
Salome began to press down on the detonator. Below them, the fight continued to rage in the crater. Damnit, I hoped I could watch.
With a sigh, Signy suddenly flopped on her back, ignoring the intestines that dragged from her torso. “But no good hunt in that. Give ’em hell, Salome.”
“I’ll see you at the Last Judgment,” Salome hissed as she crawled past the madwoman.
“Aye, the hunting will be grand then.” Signy chuckled.
It took her a few more minutes, but Salome finally found an outcrop of rubble that jutted over the edge of the crater, allowing her to peer down at the combatants. It wasn’t even close; the two young brothers stabbed and lashed at the angel while the raging dust-storm smashed and battered down at its wings, but not a single blow landed—even those that should have passed through the angel’s body like mist. Satan twisted and dodged through their attacks, chuckling to himself, and occasionally lashing out with one of his wings to smash one of his opponents aside.
As Salome watched, Cain brought his scythe down with an incandescent bellow. Seth touched it with his heavenly blade, allowing a wave of pure fire to screech out from it. It tore against the floor of the crater, instantly pulverizing the stone down to bedrock. Adam scooped up a great mass of the flames with a flurry of dust and spun it around and around in a great vortex that threatened to sweep up even his own sons, trapping the angel within an inferno of fire—
Satan flickered his wings once.
Seth and Cain were hurled headlong against the crater to slam on opposite sides, while the dust cloud above briefly evaporated.
Salome let out a cry of triumph as Cain’s body crashed into the wall of debris just beneath her. Got you, bastard!
“Is this it?” the angel demanded. It ruffled its shimmering locks. In spite of everything, Salome felt a pang of jealousy. “How pathetic.”
“Keep fighting,” Seth wheezed as he wrenched himself out of the dirt. “For Mother. Keep—Cain!”
The Master glanced up just as Salome toppled onto his back. “Get off,” he hissed, and he unceremoniously tossed her into the dirt. “I have more important matters than you, Prophet.”
“You sure do,” Salome said gleefully. She pressed the detonator. A tiny panel on its side lit up with a single number: 10.
Somewhere in the depths of the War Train, the Xipe Totec clicked once in response.
9.
“What?” Cain asked.
8.
Seth was shouting something, but it didn’t matter—her hand brushed up against the last syringe of Zaqqum between her breasts. She seized it with the desperation of a madwoman.
7.
Cain’s golden eyes suddenly latched onto the detonator in her hand. She eagerly drank in his fear as they widened.
6.
My last hit, Salome thought in delight. Oh God, whoever is out there, please let me have this—please let me have this!
5.
A sudden tremor seized her, so powerful that she nearly shattered the syringe in her grip. She needed this last dose—oh God, how she needed it!
4.
Salome plunged the tip of the syringe into her arm. She was dimly aware of Seth running toward her, and of the Master’s hand reaching down for the detonator, but none of it mattered now. She had it in there—it would be so easy, so fucking easy—yet she hesitated.
3.
Cain wrenched the detonator from her grasp. “I have it,” he said as his thumb reached for the disarming mechanism.
2.
Salome looked at the Zaqqum, still protruding from her arm. The hell with it. With the last ounce of her strength, she tore it free and sank the tip of the syringe into Cain’s thigh. For an instant, it seemed that she had just broken the needle off on steel—but then she felt the familiar sensation of the syringe sinking into flesh. Cain gaped at her in surprise as she slammed the plunger home, hitting his body with 10 ccs of the most potent drug ever made. The detonator tumbled from his fingers.
Far, far away, Seth let out a distant cry of surprise as a cloud of Adam’s dust and the remnants of Eve’s body swept upward to engulf him. The cloud reached out for Cain, but it was far too late.
1.
“That’s for my face, you fuck.” Salome the Seductress laughed.
0.
Fifty milliseconds later, the three hundred megatons of death contained within Xipe Totec finally erupted.
57
The Horsemen fought and raged at the Swarm with every weapon they had at their disposal, with bullets and flame that tore thousands of the tiny machines apart, with mental pulses that turned the computerized brains cannibalistic with hunger, with suits of steel-hard bark that offered some brief protection against the ravenous machines, but it was no use.
With every second, millions more of the machines rushed upward to join the unending ranks. Centimeter by centimeter, meter by meter, the Horsemen were pushed back—until a sinkhole opened up directly behind them, and another column of the ravenous swarm burst into the light.
“Damn!” John swore. He laid down a thick layer of wood to cut off the reinforcements, but even the toughened bark was no match against such hunger; they bored through it in less than a minute.
Amaury blasted into the Swarm, letting out a last scream of defiance when his machine-pistols finally gave the familiar empty click. “Where’s a goddamn nuke when you need one,” he howled. “Someone do something, please!”
“Where the fuck is Seth?” Simon bellowed. A billowing hand of the Swarm landed on the bark that John had wrapped
around his arms. He smashed at it with an armored hand, crushing thousands of the monsters beneath his palm.
“I don’t know—” Vera started to say.
It was fortunate that the shadow of the Swarm blocked their view of the First Blockade, for at that instant, the sun ignited within it.
58
Not since the end of the First Rebellion, when the fall of the rebel angels carved out the great circles and pits, had Hell known the power that the Xipe Totec unleashed.
In a space of time so minuscule that it would have been negligible to all but the Creator, the ferocious energies contained within the nuclear device’s core were released. A storm of atoms smashed together, pulverized into their basest components, then smashed again even further, unleashing a Hell’s worth of energy. Salome was vaporized on a molecular level, so swiftly that the light touching her eyes did not have enough time to make it to her brain before that was gone in an ever-expanding shock wave that reached out farther and farther, fueled by every scrap of matter that it came across.
By the time it traveled a hundred meters, the explosion split. First came the shock wave, a massive sledgehammer of air that tore the First Blockade down past the bedrock, turning ancient stone to dust in an instant. Great slabs of earth—some as large as small towns—hurtled into the atmosphere, some so high that they reached the level of the First Circle. Like meteorites, they came back to ground all across Hell, wreaking radiation and havoc across every level.
On the Seventh Circle, the shock wave continued to plow forward in every direction. Any human being within a hundred miles was crushed or obliterated within seconds—and still the shock wave spread, rocking the entire Burning Desert until at last it crashed against the plateau that led up to the Sixth Circle. It was here that the cone-shaped structure of Hell utterly damned it, for the great wave of force rebounded on itself, adding a second stage of devastation to the Seventh Circle that cast hundreds of billions of tons of soot and debris high into the air.
The firestorm followed. Not even the Kingdom’s most powerful Hellfire could compare to the diamond-melting temperatures that the Xipe Totec’s core had possessed. The denizens of Hell who gathered in terror and awe to stare at the great fire thousands of kilometers away risked blindness with every fearful glance. Those within a hundred kilometers were ignited instantly, leaving nothing but ashes and the imprints of their shadows in their wake. They were the lucky ones. Those within five hundred kilometers of the blast suffered a fate far crueler than any death.
The secondary fires began a few minutes later, as the first red-hot scraps of debris rained down on every major settlement within a thousand kilometers. Although nothing compared to the sheer power of their mother, the daughter fires inflicted a secondary swathe of devastation that formed an ugly ring of ash and destruction around the wasteland that had been the Seventh Circle.
In ten minutes, the Seventh Circle was nothing but a blasted hellscape, its foundation so broken and shattered that great city-sized chunks of it, already weakened by the Earthquake Bomb of the First Blockade, tumbled down into the darkness of Judecca. The mushroom cloud that loomed over it stretched up to the city of Dis, bringing with it a nightmare of suffocating gas and invisible poisons. The biological weapons that ELIE had unleashed had, mercifully, been destroyed in the fire and light of the Xipe Totec…but the radiation that the bomb unleashed was carried by billions of tons of dust that drifted into every crevice of Hell. In a few decades, it would die away, but not before it penetrated the bones and organs of millions.
The earthquakes continued for hours more, as more and more of the Seventh Circle crumbled down into the Eighth and Ninth. By the end, the remnant of the River Phlegethon that hadn’t been boiled away had flooded Judecca beneath an underground boiling sea, covered by a series of monstrous mountain-range-sized avalanches that reduced Lower Hell to a gigantic pile of burning rubble. Rivers of melted stone gushed among the ruins, sweeping away anything that remained even remotely intact. The few damned who had managed to hide from the Master’s advance up from Judecca found that Lower Hell was now something like Venus: a toxic cacophony where the stones themselves boiled.
With one bomb, humanity had rendered Hell into a place that even the cruelest of devils would find horrifying.
All but one.
Satan raised an eyebrow and surveyed the burning devastation that howled around him. “Heh.” He chuckled. A few specks of radioactive dust had settled on his shoulders; he brushed them away with a hint of disdain. “Did they really think a bomb would work? Pitiful.”
This time he did not bother to dodge the scythe that swung out of the fire for his throat. It was pathetically easy to snatch it out of the air and shatter it with a single twist of his fingers.
“You are boring me.” Satan sighed. He reached out and plucked Cain from the fire. The human coughed up mouthfuls of soot and blood as his naked form twisted and writhed in the Prince of Darkness’s grip. The God of Hell gazed with interest at the weeping sores and burns that covered every inch of Cain’s body. “But how strong you’ve become, First Son.”
“I beat you once,” Cain wheezed. He weakly contorted his scalded hands into fists. “I’ll do it again.”
Satan sprayed the Master’s face with his mirth. “Only because I let you, little child.”
Cain’s fists flopped against his sides. “Death,” he whispered. His golden eyes were nearly swollen shut, but enough remained to show the sadness and desperation in them. “Give me death.”
“But who will be here to see me remake Hell?” Satan demanded. “No, First Son, you shall be my witness. You aren’t Adam’s child anymore. You never were. You are MINE.”
The Master’s tears were even sweeter than the flames.
59
The inferno lashed at them, tearing at them with the force of a hurricane. John slammed his hands together, sprouting up a thick wall of trunks, but the wind crashed through nevertheless, hurtling scraps of debris that pounded away at the Horsemen.
He can’t hold it, Vera thought in terror as John opened his lips in a wordless snarl. He can’t—
Simon rushed forward, nearly torn off his feet by the howling winds, and crashed a powerful hand into the edges of the wall. The muscles in his back bulged and twisted as he held the wall together with nothing but raw effort, so much so that the skin on his arms began to bleed and tear. He let out a howl into the roaring wind. Amaury sprinted to his father’s side and laid a hand on his back, healing the wounds as swiftly as they broke. But it was still not enough: a great avalanche of sound and fury engulfed them on every side—
And quite suddenly, the firestorm died away.
“Every,” John panted. “Thing. HURTS.”
With one last groan of effort, he toppled forward, bringing down the wooden bubble that he had brought up around the Horsemen.
Vera stared out in horror at what the landscape had become. The Seventh Circle was gone. All that remained was a sea of crackling, molten glass, covered by a thick fog that pulsed and twisted with flickers of lightning and fire. She looked up and gazed in horror at the blood-red mushroom cloud that stretched kilometers above them. A fresh line of fires traced across the sky as the warhead’s cruel power finally reached the Sixth Circle above them. And still the fireball grew upward, seemingly intent on consuming all Hell.
My God.
“Fuck,” Amaury groaned. “Fucking fuck.” He hissed in pain as he clutched at the great red lesions that were steadily spreading across his face.
“The air,” Simon realized. “It’s poison. John—”
John let out one inaudible moan, but a series of vines twisted up from the ground and wrapped around the other Horsemen’s faces, sealing them behind masks of transparent wood. He did not even appear to notice, for his eyes rolled back into his head as soon as he was done, and he slumped to the ground, unconscious.
Just a second later, Amaury collapsed to his feet and joined him, letting out another hiss of pain.
>
Simon knelt beside his son. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “We’ll let this blow over, then get help—”
“No,” Amaury snarled. “I’m fine.” The flecks of black blood that spattered against the inside of his mask said otherwise. “Get to Seth—I’ll be right behind you.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Simon insisted.
“There’s no fucking time,” Amaury spat. He pointed with a trembling finger at the radiant angel that loomed on the horizon. “Just get there and save the fucking heaven-man already. I’ll be right behind you.”
“I’ll go,” Vera decided. The two men turned to look at her. She nodded over to John. “Simon, get these two patched up. I’ll see you over there.”
Amaury contorted his lips into a thin line and stared up at her. “You want to go alone? Against that?” he asked. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Hell no.” Vera grinned. “But I’ll come up with something.”
Amaury chuckled. “I’m sure you will. See you on the other side, Death.”
Simon gave Vera a tiny nod. “Go with God, Vera,” he said.
Vera turned her attention to the radiant glow of the fallen angel. He illuminated the entire hellscape around him, a false beacon of hope in the midst of such horror.
“I’ll need all the help I can get,” she admitted. “If you don’t see me again, give the bastard Hell.”
With that, she plunged into the radioactive inferno of the Seventh Circle, toward where the King of Hell waited.
60
For a long time, Seth knew nothing but darkness and the taste of ash on his tongue. Bit by bit, feeling returned, until he finally found that he was able to blink open his eyes.
The sight that greeted him made him groan aloud. For all the misery and gleeful destruction he had witnessed on this journey through Hell, this glassed landscape, still roiling with earthquakes and spewing forth fire, was somehow the worst. No demons or strange powers had done this; nothing but mankind’s own folly was responsible for the horror around him.