Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  Ness snorted, getting Verse's drift. "Thas one hell o' a big gamble. Wha' if Brand's cocked up an' the artefact's-"

  "We'll just have to hope he hasn't."

  "We'll just have to hope he hasn't," Ness said parrot-fashion. He thought for a second, looking around at the diminishing circle of soul-stripped and then said, "One thing's for sure, an' that's there's no way the angel's gonna let Brand bring the Eyes doon here. All reet, Father Ted, but if Helen bleedin' Earth's got the remote trigger, do you wanna tell me jus' how -"

  "Expect the unexpected," Verse said. From his pockets he pulled a number of components and then quickly assembled them into a small sniper rifle before aiming up towards the flue. "The Sword of Damocles..." he said.

  "The sword o' who?"

  "Damocles," Verse said again. "A sycophant of Dionysius the Elder. He was-"

  "Och, yer wee bastards!" Ness growled as first one and then the rest of the soul-stripped leapt at them.

  Verse looked through his crosshair, tensed his finger, and fired.

  TWENTY

  The monastery quaked violently on its foundations as the charges detonated in the cavern below, and the resulting blastwave channelled up through the flue and then out into the monastery's corridors, blasting the interior of the Centre for Celestial Truth - and its surviving acolyths - to bits. It seemed only suitable that the resulting firestorm consumed their remains in swathes of flame.

  Helen Earth and a pursuing Hannah Chapter burst onto its roof as the stairs down to the monastery collapsed behind them. In their wake came a grey-faced and partly stunned Dr Jonathan Brand - whom Hannah managed to pull clear from the deadly fall and its subsequent fiery cough just in time.

  She dropped immediately to her knees, shielding Brand as the green glass dome blew out in a shard-filled shower of razor sleet, lacerating her back even through the coat Verse had given her.

  Christ, that hurt.

  But nowhere near as much as being dropped naked down a razor-filled shaft had done. She was going to have the bitch for that.

  But to Hannah's surprise - and some unease - it was a wholly unconcerned Helen Earth who moved on across the roof, regardless not only of her anger but also the glass shards embedding themselves in her legs, arms and neck. In fact everywhere, but the sect leader didn't even wince.

  Instead, she headed resolutely for the edge of the monastery roof, to where the battlements overlooked the sea.

  "Artefact..." Brand instructed weakly. Dulled by his ordeal, he'd at first struggled to grasp why he'd spotted Hannah following Helen up to the roof, but then it had clicked. Helen wasn't able to destroy the artefact as she obviously wished - he doubted that any power on Earth could do that - so instead she meant to lose it forever. And there was no better place to do that than in the endlessly swirling tides that lay below. "Don't let her..."

  Artefact? What artefact? Hannah thought as the academic failed to go on. Herself hardly with it from her loss of blood, she stared after Helen as she carried a baton-like thing that she vaguely recognised. Oh, that artefact. So that was what it looked like in real life. Okay... baton-like thing... don't let her what? Twirl it?

  Helen Earth reached the battlements, a section of which had crumbled as part of the monastery's wall buckled beneath it. Stepping into the gap, the sect leader raised the artefact above her and aimed it at the tide crashing on the rocks below. It looked to Hannah as if she were about to -

  Oh, I get it, Hannah thought.

  Don't let her hurl it over the edge.

  Right.

  Hannah bounded across the roof, pulling guns as she went.

  Jonathan Brand watched her go through a rolling haze caused by the shot to his head that was only now receding, but he supposed that a rolling haze was better than being a dead man. He had no idea how he had survived Helen Earth's bullet. Maybe the Eyes of the Angel had chosen him and were now protecting him for the task ahead. Maybe - as in his blessed moment with Jenny - time had for a single instant stopped, halting the bullet in its tracks. All he knew was that he had stirred semi-conscious but alive in Patrick's now-destroyed burial chamber, his head hammering as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to his temple, and with the bullet that should have finished him rolling beside him on the floor.

  A miracle? He wasn't sure he believed in those these days.

  But if the Eyes of the Angel possessed power of such magnitude, then perhaps there was hope after all.

  The question was, was it already too late?

  What Brand could see but the otherwise occupied Hannah could not, was that through the remains of the dome the soul-shield was continuing to grow. As the academic watched, it even started to take on its proper form, even if the angel's idealised version of itself bore no likeness to the twisted travesty it was today.

  Hannah may not yet have noticed, but Helen had, and - perhaps simply sensing the looming presence of her charge - she turned slowly around to gaze upon it. The orange cloud was reflected over and over again in the shards of glass embedded in her flesh.

  The sect leader smiled proudly.

  After all her years of devotion.

  At last...

  What are you smiling about? Hannah thought, and she too turned. Her own reaction was rather less cheerful and considerably more to the point.

  She stared at the great, golden figure with its broad chest, superficially benign smile and large unfolding wings and said, "Awww, nuts..."

  "Ms Chapter, the artefact," Brand repeated.

  Hannah didn't need telling twice. The American span back to face Helen Earth, both guns aimed at her slivered, kaleidoscopic face. "Put it down," she ordered.

  Helen cradled the Eyes of the Angel in front of her. "What, this?" she taunted.

  "Yeah, that," Hannah urged slightly dubiously, struggling for a name. "Put down the... twirly thing."

  "Why not," Helen Earth said after a few moments of smiling consideration. Unexpectedly, she laid the artefact at her feet. "I doubt that it'll do you any good now, anyway."

  "I'll let Brainiac decide that." Hannah nodded towards Brand, who had recovered enough to begin weaving across the roof towards them. She bent to retrieve the artefact but Helen's foot stamped down on it first. "You asked me to put it down, not give it to you," she said, grinning.

  Oh, I don't have time for this, Hannah thought. If this demented dyke wants to play games...

  She snapped upwards, span full circle, and then delivered a roundhouse kick that drove one of the shards of glass embedded in Helen's face deeper into her flesh. It cracked under the impact and Helen staggered slightly, but there were none of the cries of agony Hannah had expected. Yet more worrying there wasn't the faintest sign of blood.

  "My eyes watered," Hannah said. "I'm wondering why yours didn't."

  "Thought you might be." Still smiling - Jesus, but Hannah wanted to wipe that smile off her face - Helen raised a hand to the offending shard and tugged it free, apparently oblivious to the chunk of flesh that came with it. She noticed Hannah's stare and coolly and calmly ripped it fully away, revealing a green subcutane that lay beneath. As Hannah watched, she then started on the rest. In a few seconds she had stripped her face of flesh completely.

  Okaaay, Hannah thought, this is new. And then emptied both weapons into She-Hulk's smile.

  The cult leader didn't even have the decency to stagger back as the bullets hit her - but she did pretend to pick at a tooth with a nail.

  Oh not fair, Hannah thought. Everybody knew the rules of the game stated that hard-to-kill bosses were meant to stagger a little the first time you attacked them. It suggested to the hero that the threat had some eventual weakness.

  "Oh great, let me guess..." Hannah said.

  Helen smiled. "Get it right first time and you win the bonus prize. I'll tell you what - I'll make sure you're dead before I rip your yattering litttle head off."

  "You're all heart," Hannah said. She holstered her weapons and placed her hands on hips, looking quizzical. "Ubervam
piress? Nah, don't think so. Obviously not lycanthropic, either, though I have to say, lady, you have got to do something about that moustache. Construct, then? Nope. Goblin? Mebbe. Oh, oh, I know! You're a ghoul, right?"

  Helen Earth lunged at her so fast Hannah didn't even have time to react. The next thing she knew she was flat on her back on the floor, the other woman pressing down on top of her. Helen ground her hips slowly into Hannah's, laughed throatily. Her breath was hot and smelled strongly of tar.

  "Homonculus," Helen said.

  "Homonculus?"

  "A-ha."

  "Okay, look. Homonculus or pop group, which is it?"

  "One of Heinrich Himmler's vat-born offspring," Jonathan Brand said, hobbling towards them. "One product of his rather special death camp. Though I'm guessing not from the regular production line - am I correct, Fraulein Earth?"

  "You are, Dr Brand. Herr Himmler recruited me to his staff at a time when he had a number of rather special projects in mind - not least that which you now know about. Considering the time I was required to devote to the cause, Herr Himmler believed a more... lasting frame might prove to be useful."

  "Bio-augmented, no doubt," Brand commented.

  "Updated every year. Auto-clotting haemocytes, miniaturised organs, shielded musculature - even my neuronic pathways have been re-routed body-wide."

  "Speaking of body-wide," Hannah groaned beneath her, "do you think you could speed this up, lady? Miniaturising your organs hasn't made you any the lighter."

  "In short," Helen finished, "I'm unbeatable."

  "Yeah... but you're green."

  "I can get a makeover." The sect leader pulled Hannah by both shoulders and yanked her onto her feet. "You won't be able to - you'll be dead."

  "Hey, is this gonna hur-?"

  Helen Earth hurled Hannah across the roof. The American slammed into the side of the battlements opposite and let out a loud whoomf before sliding to the floor, semi-dazed. There could have been nothing better to focus her attention.

  She looked up to see Helen Earth was once again advancing towards her. Fight or flight syndrome, she thought. No contest. Fight every time.

  Hannah picked herself up painfully, spread her feet, raised her arms, adopting a defence position. She had to admit she wasn't holding out much hope of this working but she'd be damned if...

  Helen delivered a blow to Hannah's left and she blocked. To her right and Hannah dodged. To the left again and then again, her arms moving almost in a blur. Hannah managed to block both but the impacts still jarred her to the bone. There was no way she could keep this up, especially as each deflected blow still succeeded in driving her to the wall with no room to manoeuvre.

  Helen moved again, lightning fast. She struck Hannah on her chest, her side, and then her jaw, each of the blows breaching her defences. Hannah staggered, spat out a tooth in a trail of blood. She was sure a rib was cracked. Kidney damage as well, maybe.

  She had to get off the ropes. Get herself time to think. Find an advantage.

  Or she was going to die.

  Hannah went on the offensive. She returned the blows with all the moves she knew, hands and feet lashing out in a series of pummel punches, round-house kicks, palm thuds. But one after the other they were blocked, as Hannah knew they would be. Come on, she thought. Come on...

  Finally Helen did what she wanted. She grabbed her wrist and pulled her close.

  "Need to do better than that, dearie," she said and flung Hannah back across the roof.

  This time, Hannah somersaulted in mid-air. She allowed herself to drop, roll to her feet and ran to where the artefact lay abandoned on the floor. Snatching it up, she span and lobbed the ancient object over the head of the approaching Helen to where Brand hovered, unable to decide how to help. As she'd hoped, Helen was by now so consumed by the desire to prove her superiority - mixed, of course, with an unhealthy dose of good old Nazi bloodlust - that she ignored the artefact and headed on in. Hannah waited, watched her come, and then suddenly flung herself forward, up, arms and legs tightly enwrapping Helen as if she were a lost love she never wanted to leave again.

  "Hiya, darlin'" she said. And then - "Brand - use the artefact!"

  The academic stared at the Eyes of the Angel in his hands, then at Hannah, in some confusion. "It won't work on her!" he shouted. "She isn't-"

  "For Christ's sake, I know that, Brainiac! Just twat the bitch!"

  Brand did so, delivering a blow to the back of her head that made the sect leader stagger like a drunk. Again as Hannah had hoped, whatever God-given stuff the artefact was made out of, it had sufficient clout to knock even a homonculus for six. Hannah released her cling and dropped down to the floor.

  "You know what really pisses me off," she said, delivering a punch to Helen's nose. "You aren't even the mastermind behind this thing. You never have been." She punched again. "You strut your stuff and you blow your horn but neither you nor Herr sodding Himmler ever had any choice in what this thing wants." This time she booted Helen's crotch and punched her in the nose. "You're a pawn, a puppet, a stupid wannabe dictator who has no idea what her place is in the cosmos. But you wanna know what?" Hannah grabbed Helen by the shoulders, head-butted her squarely on the forehead, and pushed. "I'm gonna show you."

  Too late, Helen Earth realised she was off her balance dangerously close to the soul-shield, and by that time the side of Hannah Chapter's foot had already spun to impact with her head three times. The fourth and final roundhouse kick sent the sect leader flailing right into the heart of the orange cloud.

  Helen Earth was gone in a second, her soul torn screaming from every pore.

  "Interesting manoeuvre," Brand said.

  "Yeah-" Hannah gasped, her hands on her knees. "Her soul was the one part of Helen they couldn't augment."

  The sounds of carnage could be heard in the now relative quiet, and Brand and Chapter dragged themselves wearily to the battlements and stared in transfixed horror at the scenes below. It was indeed hell on Earth.

  "My God," Brand said. "Just look at it."

  For miles around, the countryside was filled by shambling bodies, both the living and the dead, summoned or raised from nearby farms, villages or graveyards. Thousands of them - thousands more than Lawrence Verse had seen in the cavern - and all of them heading towards this focal point, in thrall to the call of the angel. They headed to the monastery across fields, over streams, and in snake-like lines along the roads. They emerged from woods, between the hills, and even, in the case of a few rotting forms, from under the sea. Many of the living burned, illuminating the dead who huddled with them, picking out their leathery hollow features, their suspended states of decay. Skin cracked on those aflame and their underflesh gleamed slickly in the night-light, as if dipped in oil. The dead and the dying were legion.

  "Jesus," Hannah Chapter said. "Doesn't anyone cremate anyone round here?"

  "We have to stop this," Jonathan Brand said.

  "No shit, Sherlock."

  Brand used a walkie-talkie given him earlier by the Brigadier. He could just about make out the soldiers' positions below - those final ranks who had not succumbed to the invidious demands of the Voice - gathered together in a wide horseshoe of jeeps and trucks identifiable by their headlight beams in the dark. Alongside them stood Solomon Ravne, wielding the Lamp of Alhazred, disgorging scything beams of white light in the direction of the approaching hordes and then in that of the white, spidery things that emerged from the caves intent on quashing this final resistance.

  "How are you holding out?" Brand shouted.

  "Almost out of B3s!" the Brigadier shouted back over the wailing screams and groans surrounding his position. "What good it will do these poor devils now! I don't mind telling you, Brand, I feel as if I'm in a George A Romero film here. That or a remake of the siege of Frankenstein's castle - with the original bloody cast."

  "Listen to me, Brigadier. None of them can be allowed to come closer. Our friend is far too powerful already. Open fire o
n the dead - bring them down, keep them down. Make a dam with their bodies if you have to but block the living and do what you can for them. These people must not get through."

  "Understood. What about progress at your end?"

  Brand looked around hopelessly. "Working on it as we speak," he said breathlessly. "Brand out."

  The popping and rat-a-tat of gunfire began from below, sounding distant and toy-like. But there was nothing toy-like about the ammunition the men now employed. Flailing, staggering and stumbling as automatic gunfire perforated their forms, the dead began to fall.

  "So what now, Brainiac?" Hannah Chapter asked.

  Brand hefted the Eyes of the Angel before him in frustration. "We have to get this down to the caverns... somehow."

  "You bring your Great Glass Elevator?" Chapter said facetiously, and she peered over the edge of the battlements at the precipitous drop. "'Cause unless we can get a chopper up here it's the only way off this ancient heap."

  Brand nodded. But he'd already seen one of the medevacs go down in flames beyond Scratch Tor and had no idea of the location of the others. Then he paused, having felt a deep rumble in the stone beneath his feet. "Actually," he said, "that may not be a problem..."

  "Qué?"

  Brand looked at Hannah white-faced. "Company's coming."

  The two of them ran to the lip of the dome then stared down. From this position they could see through Helen Earth's sacrificial chamber and past the burning remains of the wooden trap into the rock flue itself. The angel thundered up towards them as a mass of solid black, discernible in the dark as a living thing only by the flaring shapes of its pterodactyl-like wings and the legs it was using to propel itself upwards. Even these were only visible fleetingly as acute angles, oblique planes against the rock. Every time these limbs made contact with the sides of the flue, the roof vibrated again, and the higher the beast came the less inclined both Brand and Chapter were to lean over the lip. Finally, as it reached the top of the flue and launched itself with outstretched claws through the space between it and the broken dome, they flung themselves back completely.