The writhing tails forming the creature’s mane lightened as well, constricting around Pestilence’s tiny wrists until her arms disappeared beneath the slithering bodies now nearly invisible.
The stallion’s name was Harvester, for its station was to separate the souls of the deceased from their flesh, leaving their carcasses to feed the ranks of the damned.
As one, the four riders turned to face the north, smoke from the burning barn blowing sideways across them, alternating between hiding and then revealing their inhuman visages. Their shadows burrowed into the sand.
With a yank on the flowing, fiery mane, Death spurred Harbinger to its hind legs, kicking and screaming like a chorus of strangling children.
The smoke enveloped them.
When the wind arose to chase the lingering cloud of ash to the east, the horsemen were gone. A trail of fire burned in a straight line atop the sand to the south, while a wide path of blackened, smooth sand crossed the desert to the west.
A small circle of clay lay smashed in a dozen pieces amidst a myriad of hoof prints.
The sixth seal had been broken, rattling the gates of heaven and hell alike.
The end was at hand.
II
Elsewhere
WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED TO ADAM, HE THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD. He couldn’t manage to find the strength to open his eyes and there was nothing lurking behind his closed lids but darkness. At first he thought the roaring sound that surrounded him was surely the fires of hell, but he quickly rationalized them to be jet engines by the high-pitched scream piercing the constant thunder. It was then that the pain descended upon him, convincing him once and for all that he was still alive.
His throat burned as though someone had shoved a flaming sword down his trachea, each inhalation marked by a slicing agony. There was no specific pain or site of injury, but a generalized ache that went from the blistered tips of his toes to his throbbing head. It felt like he had the world’s worst hangover, which he knew to be a side effect of severe dehydration.
Adam coughed.
“Hey!” a voice called over the roaring turbines. “Welcome back to the land of the living!”
His eyelids were suddenly thrust open, light from a penlight stabbing first into his right retina, then into his left.
“Equal and reactive,” the man said. He was a blot of shadow against a smear of orange glare. “You’re lucky those boys came across you back there or some vulture would be flossing its teeth of you by now.”
Adam peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“Where…?” he retched, immediately pinching his face and grabbing his throat.
“You’re about thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, my friend. Again, you should consider yourself the luckiest man on the planet. A chopper went down outside of Tehran on a training mission, otherwise you’d still be parked on the shores of the Caspian Sea waiting for an airlift to Frankfurt.”
“Every—”, he coughed, “all right?”
“Oh yeah,” the medic said. Though Adam’s eyes had yet to adjust to the light well enough to see, he could tell from the man’s voice that he was smiling. “Between you, me, and the wall, one of the kids we picked up from the ‘crash’ site was a kid named Private Rutherford. You know, General Rutherford’s son? I’d be surprised if the chopper ever even left the ground, let alone wrecked. And that right there tells me everything I need to know about what’s about to go down. A three-star general gets his boy airlifted directly back to the ’States, bypassing the standard medical once over in Germany? I wouldn’t want to be one of them towel-headed camel jockeys tonight! No, sir!”
Adam felt his eyes rolling back into his head, but he fought it.
From the man’s candor and slang, Adam was sure the man was an army grunt, which meant that they were more than likely in the cargo hold of one of those behemoth transport planes.
“Name’s Kyle Norman,” he said, shaking Adam’s limp hand. “Fifth infantry. Four hundred and first. Like Stormin’ Norman from Desert Storm. No relation. Too bad, though. If he was my old man, I’d sure as shootin’ be treating sunburns on Virginia Beach instead of lugging GI’s halfway across the world.
“I guess I should thank my good graces that I wasn’t stateside today. Especially ’round Atlanta. All things considered, I suppose I’m probably safest in the air anyway.”
“Atlanta?” Adam rasped, struggling against his sinking lids.
“Just came over the wire. Terrorists hit Atlanta. Denver, LA, and New York, too. A-bombs like we used on the Japs in Dubya Dubya Two.” He paused, for the first time his voice bereft of levity. “Like I said, man. I wouldn’t want to be no Arab right now.”
Adam’s lids dripped closed. It had to be a dream. His grandparents lived near Denver. It couldn’t possibly…
“That’s right!” the medic said.
“Hmm?”
Adam’s eyes rolled momentarily downward.
“You were talking in your sleep, buddy. You kept saying ‘Norman’s here’.” He beamed and clapped a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “I didn’t realize I’d had such a profound effect on you.”
“No,” Adam whispered, his voice garbled by gravel. His irises fluttered skyward. “More man tears. The boy said ‘More man tears.’”
Darkness swelled again, stealing him away from the roar of the engines. The voices of the other grunts faded to nothingness, and again, Adam landed in the middle of a dream.
Before him stood a house like any other built in the ’50s. It was a single-level, rectangular creation with wood showing through the weathered light blue paint. The roof was missing shingles here and there, those having fallen rotting beneath the unkempt juniper hedges. Through the dead and brown lower branches, Adam could see the window wells had been filled with concrete. The lawn was spotted yellow and infested with shin-high crabgrass. A single garage sat to the left of the house at the end of a cracked driveway, from which clumps of weeds grew unchecked. A flap of screen had peeled loose from the front screen door, which itself hung slightly askew. The blinds were drawn tight over the front windows, blackened so as to let light neither in nor out.
Adam took a step forward, his hand reaching of its own accord for the chain-link fence framing the front yard. He pulled it back with a rusted squeal and stepped into the yard. The ground leading to the porch was beaten flat into a dead stretch of worn earth, guiding him smoothly up the single step onto the concrete pad that passed for a porch. A brown, heavily bristled welcome mat sat before the front door, leaves from the prior fall rotting in spider webs in the corners. Pulling back the screen door, he raised a fist and brought it down on the front door three times. The door shivered and slowly opened inward.
Darkness crept out on stale breath reeking of death, issuing a loud buzzing sound that he at first thought was an alarm.
A handful of unnaturally large, bloated flies tapped at his face. He swatted them aside and stepped into the house, letting the screen door slam awkwardly into the frame behind him with a crash.
He fumbled at the wall to his left, toggling the light switch several times, but no illumination ever came.
The smell of remains was all around him: a vile, pungent stench that dripped down the back of his throat from his sinuses like battery acid. Darkness as thick as mud embraced him, ushering him deeper into the house. The floor was tacky, each footstep peeling from the hardwood flooring as though coated with molasses.
Adam was a dozen steps in, slowly waving his arms in front of him to keep from wandering headlong into something, when the front door closed silently behind him, culminating in the solid thunk of the bolt burrowing into the wall.
Eyes snapped open all around him, twin slits of phosphorescent yellow focusing on him from the periphery of the room. None so much as blinked, mottled gray and black irises causing him to shiver.
A door burst open ahead of him at the back of the room, the doorknob pounding into the drywall beside it.
�
�You’ve got to hurry!” someone screamed. “The change is coming!”
The eyes turned quickly to focus on the source of the voice.
“More man tears!” the voice railed. “We’re running out of time! We have to find ‘more man tears’ before they—”
The door slammed closed again, silencing the voice like a guillotine. The eyes turned back to Adam.
With renewed vigor, the buzzing resumed louder than ever, though this time far more rhythmic. Buzz…buzz…buzz…
“Get up!” Norman screamed into his face, jerking him up by two handfuls of his shirt.
Adam stared into the man’s wide, panic-stricken eyes, blinking his way back to consciousness.
It sounded as though the plane was flying through a wind tunnel. The scream of the wind shear was nearly deafening. A red light blinked over the side door of the plane, flashing in unison with the buzzing sound.
“We’re going down!” Norman shouted, voice cracking.
He hauled Adam from the gurney and staggered backward. The floor rose and fell beneath them, forcing Adam’s weak legs to drop him to his knees, but Norman still dragged him forward. Bags, helmets, and anything else not strapped down slid past them down the increasingly steep slope toward the nose of the plane.
“Help me!” Norman shouted over his shoulder.
Dozens of men were strapped into the jump seats to either side of the cabin, dressed in desert camouflage, helmets pulled down so far that all that could be seen were their eyes. Some were wild with fear, others shut so tightly their faces were a mess of wrinkles. They clenched the shoulder harnesses in both fists, gritting their teeth against what was to come.
One of the men unfastened his harness and launched himself toward Adam, seizing him beneath his right arm while Norman took his left. They hauled him onto one of the black vinyl seats, slipping his arms through the straps and clasping them together with the buckle across his chest.
“Keep your head down!” the man shouted at Adam, then buckled himself into the adjacent seat. Norman buckled in on the other side of Adam.
A line of blood dripped into Adam’s lap, welling inside his elbow from where he’d been ripped free of his IV.
“What’s going on?” Adam yelled, his heart taking a leap as the floor dropped beneath them.
“I don’t know!” Norman shouted back. “All instrumentation failed and it felt like we were rammed from behind!”
Adam was wide awake now, unable to so much as blink. Beneath the screaming wind he heard a man reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the top of his lungs. The turbine engines died with a sound like an agonized wail in reverse. The feeling of weightlessness was intense, as was the suddenly conspicuous lack of the roaring engines to keep them aloft.
Adam looked at the soldiers directly across from him, lips moving over unheard prayers and desperate bargaining. The clouds were slanted through the porthole windows behind them, angry black storm heads swelling like a tsunami. Blue bolts of lightning crackled from their bellies as they outraced the plane, bucking the tail end from behind and nearly inverting the plane before tossing it out of the way like a child’s toy.
Adam closed his eyes and prayed.
III
The Persian Gulf
THE USS TALON, MIGHTIEST OF THE VIRGINIA-CLASS AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, floated twenty miles off the Kuwaiti shore awaiting orders. There were no pilots scrambling atop the deck readying for takeoff. None of the fighter jets would even be required for what the President would soon call The Campaign to End All Campaigns on a nationally televised address. The Talon’s orders were simple: maintain a visible presence in The ’Gulf until the submarines were in place, and then get the hell out of there in a hurry.
They didn’t want to be anywhere even remotely close when those subs delivered their payload.
The USS Liberator was stationed a thousand yards to the left; the HMS Brittania a thousand yards to the right. For the last twenty-four hours, fishing and other commercial boats had been passing between them, loaded to the gills with as many refugees as they could carry. They were like rats jumping overboard before the whole ship sank. While the operation was still technically considered top secret, there was no mistaking what was about to happen. With the war shifting onto American soil, the mass casualties from the attacks on Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, and New York, the conflict needed to be resolved quickly and decisively. The world needed to see that any direct attack on America and her people would not be tolerated.
Each of the Seawolf-class subs was a nuclear-powered vessel armed with eight long-range sub-launched ballistic missiles with 750-kiloton cobalt 59 doomsday devices capable of complete annihilation of anything within a forty-kilometer radius. With a half-life of 5.26 years, any life form not killed by the strategically targeted missiles would be subjected to acute radiation poisoning, and the desert deemed inhabitable until the fission-activated cobalt 60 decayed. When the dust finally settled, there would be absolutely nothing left to war against.
Tensions were exceedingly high aboard the USS Talon, as Gabe Wilcox would attest. He was a senior foreign correspondent with The Washington Post, a position he’d earned during the Gulf War in ’91. This was his first tour on a destroyer since he ended his military career as a Seaman First Class following the invasion of the Falklands. His sea legs had apparently abandoned him sometime in the interim, which was why he was now leaning over the railing, feeding the fish what remained of his lunch.
Until the prior evening, he’d been poised to move on Baghdad with the hundred and twentieth advance infantry. They were to begin Operation: Reclamation the following morning moving via Bradley vehicle in the midst of a tank convoy into the heart of the beast to put an end to the Syrian atrocities. And he, Gabe Wilcox, senior correspondent, was not only going to get a front row seat, but he was also going to be giving his first live broadcast for CNN. The ’Post wasn’t small potatoes, but this was the big time. This would be his audition into the elite world of journalism, halfway to Dan Rathers’s desk.
When the order had come through to fall back, at first he’d thought that was the end of his dreams of glory, but when his air retrieval deposited him on the mother of all aircraft carriers, he had a hunch that though he may have been a hundred and fifty miles southwest of his prior location, he was still on the front line. History was about to be made and he had the perfect vantage. Not since Harry Truman’s sleepless night’s decision ended the war for Japan in 1945 had there been a moment this monumental.
He was certain the planet would see its first true nuclear holocaust and he would be fortunate enough to be the first to share the news.
Gabe’s crew, consisting of a single cameraman, Dave, and a tech named Peter, who could relay a signal through a network of satellites like most people could dial a phone, had been topside all morning broadcasting images of the Iraqis fleeing the Middle East by whatever means they could manage. They even had great footage of an inflatable raft carrying more than twenty refugees, packed like matches in a matchbook, sinking due to the absurd weight while women and children were sacrificed to the ocean for the sake of the others. It was human tragedy at its finest, though nothing compared to what was still to come.
The Gabe Wilcox who’d earned his stripes exposing the terrible conditions of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein’s rule would have been sickened by the new Gabe Wilcox, who watched boatload after boatload of men, women, and children pull beside the carrier, screaming for help, pleading to be hauled aboard, falling into the ocean while pawing at the smooth steel hull, searching for a single handhold.
“The new Gabe Wilcox is going to win the Pulitzer,” he said aloud, not caring whether anyone heard him or not.
He swiped his silver bangs back into place and adjusted his thin, gold-rimmed glasses. His dark blue eyes matched the cresting waves surrounding him. Blotting the corners of his mouth with the underside of his tie, he tucked it back beneath the gray Washington Post jacket and smiled out upon the choppy waters.
Gabe’s right leg was warm from the shift in the wind that had brought his vomit back to him. He was going to have to change before going back on cam—
“Gabe!”
He turned to see Dave the cameraman running toward him at a full sprint, camera tucked beneath his arm like a football. Dave was fresh out of school with his L.L. Bean-bought camouflage top, khaki shorts, and Teva sandals with wool socks. His face was burned bright red in contrast to his Norwegian-white hair. He pulled up in front of Gabe, looked cautiously back over his shoulder, then leaned in close.
“I’ve got news,” he whispered into Gabe’s ear, again glancing back.
“Not here!” Gabe snapped, grabbing Dave by the sleeve and tugging him over behind the nose of the nearest F-14. “Now spill it.”
“I have it on good authority,” Dave whispered, repeatedly checking to see if anyone at all was within earshot, “that these ships are just here for show.”
“For what reason?”
“Keep your voice down!” Dave hissed. “If anyone finds out that this leaked, we’ll both be swimming home.”
Gabe mimed zipping his lips and tossing the key overboard.
“Okay, so here’s the deal: we’re decoys. Show’em the left, bring the right, you know?” Dave looked nervously to either side. Gabe couldn’t blame him. If this was leading where he thought it might, this was dangerous information indeed. “Right now, there’s an entire fleet of nuclear-armed subs headed this way from the Philippines. When we get the go ahead, we turn and run, while the subs blow this whole area to smithereens.”
The Fall Page 19