God Killer (Redneck Apocalypse Book 3)

by eden Hudson

  I stepped forward. “I’ll take her place. I’ll stay here instead of her. Let my sanctification pass to her. Let her go.”

  The glow faded from my skin and the full weight of Hell crashed down on me. I fell to the floor on my hands and knees, screaming.

  Tiffani reached for me, her hands bright with that Heavenly light, but they were immediately jerked out of my field of vision.

  At the edge of my screaming, I heard Tiff yelling for me. Her voice was getting farther and farther away. Darkness crushed me.

  Then light brighter than any I’d ever seen—even brighter than what I had experienced in Heaven while standing face-to-face with the Burning One—filled my vision. That light sung with the music of Heaven, forcing away the pain and agony of Hell, drowning out the wailing of tortured souls, and surrounding me like loving arms.

  A hand grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me up, out of the Pit and through the Gates of Hell.

  Tough

  At about two in the morning, I heard the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifles. They were getting closer. Under that, somebody gunned an engine—no, lots of engines. I had a quick flashback to Rian and his crew driving those four-by-fours away from the bakery, but these engines didn’t sound as well-maintained as the Dark Mansion trucks had been.

  The coyotes all perked up and looked toward the front of the tattoo parlor.

  “Ezra, get the door!” Clarion grabbed a .308 out of a high school kid’s hands. “Cy and Zeke, you’re on me. Stop anything on foot or in the air.”

  One of the younger coyotes ran to the door and jerked it open while Clare and two of the older coyotes posted up outside the entrance. The trucks slammed on their brakes out front.

  Clarion’s messenger coyotes ran inside, followed by a flood of humans wearing black body armor. Except for not having wings, they looked almost identical to the foot soldiers in riot gear, and they were all armed. The humans who’d survived the first attack on the Dark Mansion, looked like they were going to piss themselves.

  “That’s everybody,” shouted this tall black chick. “Close her up!”

  Once Clarion and the coyotes who’d posted up outside with him were back inside and the door was shut, she headed straight for Clarion. She looked about my age, but she had to have a good eight inches on me, and she was packing a pair of custom .357s with crosses acid-etched down their barrels.

  “Uncle Clare.” She socked him in the shoulder. He rolled with the blow and caught her with a couple half-power punches to the stomach. They hugged. She had an inch or two on the old one-eyed coyote, too.

  “Glad you made it,” Clarion said. He nodded for me to come over. “Naomi this is Tough Whitney. Tough, Naomi Banks.”

  Then he waited like our names should mean something to each other.

  Naomi looked me up and down. “You’re Uncle Danny’s son? I thought you’d be taller.”

  Uncle Danny? I sucked my teeth and gave her the onceover, too. You couldn’t really tell much through the body armor—except that she was tall as hell. Probably built, too, if she could run wearing that much gear.

  That gave her time to catch sight of my fangs. She scowled and opened her mouth to say something.

  Clarion jumped in before she could. “Naomi’s dad, Noah, and your dad were part of my pack for a while. Noah could banish demons. Raised his kids in the family business, kind of like your dad did.”

  I smirked at Naomi. Sucks for you.

  She was smirking back. “Let me guess, you’re the black sheep of the family?”

  Let me guess, you’re the Colt—asshole OCD perfectionist looking for the best way to die. Lonely, ask her if she’s batshit crazy, too.

  Lonely just grinned and kept his beak shut.

  The name Noah did sound familiar. It brought to mind Dad pointing at a picture on his computer’s desktop. A linebacker-sized guy with skin like coffee, playing peek-a-boo with a laughing, red-faced baby wearing a U of Wisconsin beanie. A summer road trip that everybody remembered but me because I was that baby.

  “You couldn’t call?” Naomi asked Clarion.

  Noah. Uncle Clare. Uncle Danny. “Your dad used to be part of my pack.”

  “That’s where things get complicated,” Clarion was still talking. “You know Kathan Dark is the show-runner around here. Well, he’s got an elemental on his side—magnetic.”

  They’d been friends. Me and Jax type friends, if we could’ve both stayed alive that long. But when Mom died, when Dad went all Soldier of Heaven, when Kathan cut Dad’s fucking head off, where the hell were they?

  I shoved over to Lonely’s drafting table and grabbed some flash paper and a marker.

  You and this Noah guy were Dad’s best fucking friends but you didn’t come help him. Neither of you did, UNCLE CLARE.

  Pretty hypocritical coming from a guy who had just murdered his best friend, but I was not supposed to be the good example here.

  Clarion’s blond eyebrows drew in tight over his nose as he read, shifting his eyepatch. Before he could say anything, though, Naomi read the note over his shoulder.

  “Don’t you dare talk about my father like that,” she snapped, getting her body all cocked like Harper and Scout always did. “Dad brought me and my sisters down here for nine months trying to get through that blockade. Mom almost left him because he wouldn’t give up on getting into Halo and go back to regular demon hunting with her!”

  Clarion raised one hand to stop her. “Look, Tough, you might’ve been too busy fighting the war inside to realize that there were blockades all around the county for the duration of the NP-Human Conflict, but for those of us outside trying to get in, they were real hindrances. Tanks, razor wire, the National Guard keeping crusaders and any unsanctioned press out.”

  Big surprise, Mayor Kathan had everyone in the country on his side. No wonder people outside Halo had hated Dad so much when he tried to get them to see Kathan for what he really was. Kathan had probably twisted everything Dad said with his Prince Charming act.

  For a minute, my mind went off in a completely different direction: How was it that Desty hadn’t been prejudiced against me when she met me? She’d known my family was the one who tried to get the fallen angels out of Halo—she even asked me about it that first night she’d stayed over.

  She must’ve seen through Kathan’s bullshit. She was too smart for Kathan’s lies and way too smart for a dumbass like me.

  Or she had been smart, anyway. Who knew what she was like now? Destroyer. Godkiller. Did that kind of thing even have a thought process? I could see Tempie destroying the world, that bitch. But not Desty. The worst thing Desty had going for her was that big brain getting in her way and making her think she knew that I would’ve picked Scout over her. Tempie I could see setting the world on fire and not giving a shit who burned—her and me had something in common there—but Desty would’ve cared. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to get hurt.

  Lonely elbowed me and I snapped out of it.

  “—just get back to our plan of attack,” Naomi was saying. “My teams have never faced a Destroyer. Never even heard of one. What are their weaknesses? How do you kill one?”

  Clarion shook his head. “As far as we’ve been able to tell, the only way to take her out of the game is with the Sword of Judgment. I think our best bet right now is to focus in on Kathan and his legions. If the Destroyer is on his side, there won’t be anything we can do once he points her toward Halo. But if she’s not on his side yet—which our expert thinks is the case—then maybe we can get the Sword of Judgment from his foot soldier and use it to take down as many of them as possible before she is on his side.”

  “So we’re on a timetable,” Naomi said.

  “We have to assume so,” Clare said. “Lonely and I talked it over. We think the best plan is to hit them again while their fortress is down. Flyover reports say the only thing that survived the blast was the basement, so they’ll either use that or move to somewhere more fortified. I don’t think they’ll abandon t
he mansion, though. It’s got significance for them. There’s something really poetic about the way angels operate. Danny drove Kathan off the property and out of the house after he and Shannon first settled down back here, then Kathan took the property back and burned the house to the ground. I don’t think he’ll give it up. That would seem too much like a concession.”

  I nodded. I wouldn’t give something up I wanted to keep, either. Not if it had taken everything I’d had to get it and sure as hell not if somebody I hated wanted to take it away from me.

  “We’ll have to work out a pattern of attack that utilizes your teams,” Clarion said to Naomi. “But the main objective is going to be the same—trying to get the sword. How many bodies did you bring?”

  “Nikki’s team couldn’t make it back in time, so I just brought the three teams,” Naomi said.

  “It’s three more teams than we had,” Clare said.

  She nodded. “If one of you draws up a map of the attack point, I can bring my team leaders in and we can talk strategy.”

  I looked around the room at the guys and girls I’d gone to high school with, and the kids from Scout’s class and younger, coyotes I’d never met, crows I’d never really liked, and humans I’d never seen before tonight. The way Clare had said it sounded about right—bodies. By tomorrow night there was a pretty good chance everybody in the tattoo parlor would be bodies. I might be looking at the next generation of the Dark Mansion foundation.

  Godkiller

  Tough.

  I saw every moment of his life and thoughts. I saw a little boy full of love and joy and music grow into a man from whom everything had been taken. I watched his heart get crushed. I watched him pick himself up and love again only to have his heart crushed again. I watched him backed into every corner imaginable, forced to do things he never wanted to think about again to survive. I watched him make the wrong decisions trying to do the right things, watched him chase the wrong things trying to stop the pain—his, others’—only to end up hurting himself more.

  Everything he had done and been and hoped. Everything he’d gone through. He never stopped fighting. Even when things were at their worst, he never gave up. He tried. He failed. He tried again. He failed again. There was no one to lead him, no one to help him, no hope left, but he never quit trying.

  No matter what, Tough never quit trying.

  Tough

  Naomi and her team leaders—an older guy with a flattop haircut and claw-mark scars all over his scalp, a guy about my age who had to be a crow with as much metal as he had in his face, and a woman I probably couldn’t take in a fight—leaned over the map Lonely had drawn of the Dark Mansion and the roads surrounding it.

  “Barrick and Gause, your teams will come in along this old highway, then follow the path across this no man’s land Tough marked out—” Naomi stopped and looked at me. “You’re pretty sure they didn’t retrace your steps after that foot soldier discovered you outside the mansion? It’s still a viable entry point?”

  I nodded even though I wasn’t sure.

  This whole night was getting to be a blur. I’d never thought before that I would miss standing around the kitchen at the cabin talking strategy with Sissy and Ryder and Colt, but sitting up in the attic, listening to Clarion, Lonely, and Naomi’s team leaders made me wish I was back with my sister and my brothers. I didn’t want to lead an army and I couldn’t be the holy champion. But if I was going to make Kathan pay for all the shit he’d done and get any of the Halo lifers through tonight alive, I had to suck it up and play along.

  Naomi turned back to the map. “All right, Barrick and Gause go in through the back roads, take the path across no man’s land, while Proper’s team comes up in the convoy with Tough’s people and the coyotes.”

  “Right,” Clarion said. He pointed to the gravel road going up to the Dark Mansion. “The last fly-over indicated a barricade right here. An overturned tour bus. Two guards, fully armed, with spike strips laid out across the ditches.”

  “So you go off-road,” Naomi said. “You’ve got the vehicle power for it.”

  I shook my head at the same time as Lonely said, “It’s woods and brush all along that road on both sides. Dirt bikes are the only vehicles that could make it through, but there are only two or three of those working in town.”

  “That’s why they picked that as their choke point—so we’d have to bail out or be sitting targets,” Clare said. “Two of my packs will head the convoy to draw fire and pull up the spike strips. That’s going to block the ditches with disabled vehicles, which means as soon as the lead trucks stop rolling, Tough, you and the rest of the humans need to hit the ground running.”

  Naomi jerked her chin at me. “What are the odds your people will be able to follow you in the right direction in the dark with angels shooting at them?”

  I made a zero with my hand and held it up. Then I mouthed Yours?

  She smirked. “A little better than that.”

  Clarion jumped in before we could whip our katanas out and measure. “The tail packs will be right behind the humans, bringing up the convoy’s rear. Their only objective is to break for the Dark Mansion while the barricade guards are distracted by the header packs. If you humans can manage to follow them, they’ll be headed in the right direction.”

  “The murder will be overhead, too,” Lonely said. “If any humans wander off the path or try to turn and run, we can set them straight.”

  “Then we hit the Dark Mansion,” Clarion said, glaring down at the map.

  Lonely laughed that creepy-ass graveyard crow laugh. “And then the real battle begins.”

  *

  It was almost four in the morning by the time we’d gotten everybody set straight on the plan. Naomi’s teams were going to ride in the vehicles they had driven into Halo. Clarion’s packs spread out between their beat-up Jeeps, Broncos, and one dusty old Hummer. That just left the humans to sort out.

  Dodge had left the keys in his truck, so I commandeered that. We also had Jim’s tow truck, Drake’s little S-10, and Addison’s tricked out El Camino.

  “It’s a pretty cute little truck-car,” she said when she offered it. Then she shrugged, rattling her scrunchy bleach-blond curls. “But if the world ends, it’s not like I’m going to need it anyway. So, we might as well use it while we can. Plus it’s got big block out the wazoo. I hit ninety between the horseshoe curves north of town once.”

  We had all of the humans from around town who’d shown up during the night wanting to fight, plus all of the humans who had survived the first attack on the Dark Mansion. Twenty-nine humans in all.

  The survivors of the first attack were dirty and tired-looking and they smelled like anxious sweat, blood, smoke, burnt plastic, and ozone. Drake, Jim, Tawny Hicks—who hadn’t died like I’d thought, just got knocked unconscious—and four kids about Scout’s age I recognized from around town, but didn’t know. They knew what we were up against—they’d already faced it once—and they were about to go back for more anyway.

  Tell them they’re riding with me and Harper, so Jim and Drake need to hand over their keys to somebody, I said to Lonely.

  Lonely bobbed his head once, a half-peck so sharp it almost made me flinch, then pointed the survivors out one by one. “You all’re riding with Tough. And stay with him when you get to the Dark Mansion. He’s your team leader.”

  The weirdest thing happened after he said that. Everybody else from Halo looked at the seven I’d picked out like that they’d just made varsity starter or something. A couple people reached over and slapped Tawny and Jim on the shoulder. One kid from Scout’s class grinned at me like he wanted to tell me thanks.

  I didn’t get it. They knew me. They’d seen me carry Scout in earlier. They had to know that being on my team wasn’t much better than signing up for a suicide pact. But they were…Glad? Happy? Thankful?

  I didn’t know how to react to whatever that was, so I just picked up the replacement shotgun Clarion had given me, then gave my
team the Come on nod.

  They followed me out and got in the truck.

  Colt

  He lifted me up to my feet and held my arm until I could stand without falling over.

  “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” He said.

  Beside Him, Tiffani was on her knees with her hands clasped over her mouth. Her face was white and her eyes wide. Tears rolled down her cheeks. When He stepped away from me, Tiff launched herself at me and knocked me over.

  “You had a hard row to hoe, Colt,” He said. “But you did it. You went to work and you never turned back. You never gave up, and you never took the easy way out, not even when you could have quit without blame or sin. You’re a soldier after my own heart.”

  Words wouldn’t come. I was crying, too, at the hugeness of what I’d been rescued from. I held Tiffani and tried to force my mouth to open, but I was too overwhelmed to talk.

  He nodded that He understood.

  Tiffani spun around and threw her arms around Him. He squeezed her as tight as I had hugged Mom when I finally got to see her again, as tight as Dad had hugged me.

  “Tiffani.” His smile burned brighter than white phosphorus. “My beautiful Tiffani Ann. For so long it felt like you would never come back. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I didn’t even—” Her voice broke. “I didn’t think you—”

  “Always. Why do you think I sent you Colt? No one else could’ve brought you back.”

  Tiff laughed. Not the gruff, deep-down-in-her-chest laugh I used to get out of her once in a while when we were alive, but a surprised, childlike laugh. Her whole life she’d been unwanted. Now she finally realized how much she was loved—really, truly, wholly loved. If I’d still been alive, I think my heart would have exploded hearing her laugh like that.

  Behind us, someone exhaled as if they’d been punched. I turned around.

  Mom. She was covering her mouth with both hands. Bright tears stood out in her eyes.