The Fallen 4

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  The fear clung to her body like an oily film as it tried to find its way inside her. She could feel it squirming to get inside her brain, turning the rational to irrational. She almost let it take her.

  Almost.

  Melissa fought the fear, reminding herself of a fear far greater than any other she could possibly imagine—the fear of failure.

  The fear of failing her friends. The fear of failing the world.

  Struggling to her feet, she managed to draw another sword from the armory of her mind and force herself forward toward the engine. Once again it had slowly sunk beneath the sand to continue its function.

  The device sensed her approach, projecting blasts of concentrated terror at her. This time she knew it was coming and tensed her body against it. It was like fighting a powerful blast of wind. Melissa stumbled backward a few feet, but she recovered quickly, inexorably moving toward her target.

  The fear tried to take control of her actions, but she just wouldn’t let it. Melissa did not waver. She focused on her task. It was up to her now.

  The engine seemed to sense her resolve, lobbing more and more blasts of pure terror at her, but she managed to keep moving forward. Each time she fell, she got up and pushed on.

  Melissa was close now. She had never seen anything like this machine, metal and flesh, circuitry and twisted sinew.

  It continued to attack, the blasts of fear becoming stronger, more powerful. Melissa fell to her knees, grabbed a large chunk of fused sand, and held it before her like a shield. The glass deflected some of the fear, allowing her to move that much closer.

  Then she hurled the glass with all her strength at the engine, cutting into a fleshy area of the machine and causing it to psychically cry out, its scream filling her mind.

  Without a moment’s hesitation she leaped at the machine and landed atop it. Inside her mind Melissa saw her sword as clear as day, and summoned it to her hand. The divine blade cut into the soft tissue of the strange device, and again she was assailed by its ungodly cries.

  But she did not let it deter her. With each new shriek she brought her weapon up, then down, hacking away chunks of slimy flesh and pieces of metal.

  And just when Melissa believed her skull would explode from the intensity of the psychic onslaught, all went deathly quiet. The infernal machine had finally been extinguished.

  Melissa stood there, perched atop the bleeding wreck of the engine, feeling the fear leak from her body in waves, like blood seeping from an open wound. Melissa poked the body of the machine with the point of her sword, just to be sure it was finished, before leaping down to the ground, to be met with the sound of applause.

  Startled, she looked up to see that Verchiel had recovered—and was clapping for her.

  Melissa, feeling suddenly giddy, placed her left forearm across her belly and bent forward in a bow.

  “Bravo,” Verchiel said over the sound of his applause. “Perhaps Corbet will have a challenge to his leadership someday.”

  She was about to debate the trash talk with the angel when a voice screamed within her head.

  It was Lorelei, and she sounded terrified.

  * * *

  The parishioners flowed up onto the altar with murderous intent in their eyes. They carried knives, ready to strike.

  Vilma jumped in front of the swarm as they came.

  “Destroy the machine,” she ordered Cameron, and then turned back to face the murderous mob. They screamed as if insane, each of them desperate to be the one to spill her blood, but Vilma wasn’t having any of that. She was tired of all the craziness, inside the church and out in the world.

  Sick and tired.

  She spread her wings as far as they would go, and brought them together again and again in rapid succession, the powerful flow of air they caused driving her attackers back, sending dust into their eyes.

  Vilma turned from the crowd to see how her friend was doing, and watched in numbing horror as the old priest tossed the silk sheet that had covered the Fear Engine over Cameron’s head, causing him to crash awkwardly to the ground.

  “Damn it,” Vilma growled as the old priest positioned himself to stab his knife into Cameron, who thrashed beneath the cover.

  Vilma flew across the altar to slam into the old man, sending them both crashing into the pulsating body of the Fear Engine.

  Cameron was cutting his way free of the sheet, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The crowd surged forward, attempting to kill him where he lay. Vilma tried to go to his aid, but an iron grip wrapped around her leg and dragged her back to the floor.

  “Not so fast, my dear,” the old priest said, blood streaming from his broken nose. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked with a crimson-stained grin. “You have yet to pay your proper respects to my god.”

  Vilma kicked out with her foot, connecting with the old man’s face and snapping his head back violently. She rushed to her friend, who was struggling against the crush of parishioners.

  “Praise god!” a woman exclaimed as she drove her blade into Cameron’s arm.

  Cameron screamed, and the power of his thrashing wings tossed the maddened congregation away like leaves in the wind. But they immediately got back to their feet and came after Cameron again.

  Vilma called upon a sword of fire. She hadn’t wanted to resort to this, believing that the parishioners were somehow being influenced by the monstrous machine, but she was left with little choice. Leaping amongst their attackers, she swung the sword in a burning arc in order to drive them back. Then she reached down to help up the bleeding Cameron.

  “A sword might do you good,” she said, and Cameron agreed, creating his own weapon of holy fire. They stood back-to-back, keeping the advancing parishioners at bay on one side, and the bloody-faced priest on the other.

  “Accept your fate,” Donnally urged through a split and swollen lip as he waved his sacrificial dagger. “Feed the god that has protected us from the nightmares outside.”

  They needed to take out that Fear Engine, and do it quickly, but Vilma saw with horror that the machine was now being shielded by the two children who had brought her and Cameron here, Ryan and Jinny. The two kids were holding hands, their backs pressed to the machine.

  One of the parishioners had built himself into a frenzy and threw himself at Cameron, even though the Nephilim screamed for him to stay back. The madman ignored the warning, rushing at him with his blade raised, and Cameron had no choice but to strike the man down. There was a flash of heavenly fire, and the man slumped loosely to the floor, his body billowing a thick, oily smoke. The parishioners were deterred for only an instant as they stared at what could be their own fates, but the religious fervor that drove them was back in no time, and they again advanced as one.

  “We have to get to that machine,” Vilma said.

  “You know the only way to do that, right?” Cameron said, slashing his sword across the face of an older woman, who narrowly missed him with a jab of her knife. The woman cried out, dropping her weapon and stumbling backward, her flailing limbs pushing the crowd back temporarily.

  “We have to let it out,” he added, waiting for her to respond.

  The Nephilim had been training for desperate times. Vilma hated the idea of resorting to that level of violence, but they hadn’t been left with many options. The parishioners acted as if they were mindless robots programmed for violence, continually rushing them, without regard to consequence, only to be savagely cut down.

  “Do it,” Vilma said finally, a sense of dread taking hold of her heart.

  “Are you sure?” Cameron asked, swinging his sword and severing a man’s hand from his wrist. The air was filled with the sweet stink of cooking meat.

  “Do it, before I change my mind,” she said.

  They were going to let the full power of the Nephilim loose. It wasn’t something that was to be done lightly, but in times such as this…

  There was no holding back now. Cameron tapped into the fury of the Nephil
im, and his body began to glow with an unnatural fire. Vilma did the same, feeling a strangely pleasurable sensation as the power that she usually spent so much energy holding back flowed freely through her.

  The temperature of the room grew hotter, but that did little to keep their attackers at bay. The parishioners threw themselves at the Nephilim, and Vilma was sickened by the sight of them. Even as their clothes began to burn and their skin blistered, the parishioners struggled to attack them.

  And using the full power coursing through their veins, Vilma and Cameron cut them down.

  Donnally ran for the engine and the children who still protected it, his white robes beginning to char with the intensity of the Nephilim’s heat.

  “Defend yourselves!” the old priest wailed, and the two children cried, hugging the body of the obscene mechanism.

  Vilma and Cameron stood back-to-back. Cameron faced the engine.

  “What’s it doing now?” Vilma heard Cameron mutter.

  She flapped her wings, and fire spread out into the pews. Then she quickly turned to look at the machine. Through the smoke she could see that something was happening between Donnally, the two children, and the machine itself.

  It looked as if the machine were eating them—absorbing them into its pulsating mass.

  Vilma had seen enough. She leaped into the air and flew toward the Fear Engine, watching in horror as Ryan’s smiling face was slowly pulled beneath the pale, sweating skin of the living machine. One moment the boy was there, and the next he was gone, his hammer the only trace that he had ever been there.

  Jinny laughed as she accepted her horrible fate.

  “I’ve always dreamed of becoming one with my… ,” Donnally began, but then he, too, was drawn into the undulating mass.

  The Fear Engine’s body throbbed and roiled like the ocean waves.

  “Be careful,” Vilma yelled to Cameron as he flew past her.

  He stood in front of the machine and raised his sword over his shoulder to cleave the unholy mechanism down the middle, but then the engine fought back.

  It emitted a nearly invisible wave of power that caused the air around it to shimmer like the blazing heat of August. It struck the Nephilim, throwing him across the altar and into the burning church beyond.

  It was Vilma’s turn. She rushed the engine with a birdlike cry. The Fear Engine pulled itself from where it had been rooted, and shifted its throbbing mass toward her advance, emitting another mysterious wave of whatever had taken out Cameron.

  Vilma saw what was coming. The machine’s skin shivered and tightened, and she flew up above the blast. Though it did not strike her directly, Vilma could feel the intensity of its force.

  Fear. The engine was using the fear that it had collected from this region of the world to defend itself. She could feel the fear lingering in the air, seeping through her clothes and into her flesh.

  Fear. She could feel it rushing through her veins, making her heart hammer and her skin tingle and sweat—and the images, the images that were now flooding her mind…

  She was afraid for Cameron, for Aaron… and for Jeremy.

  Jeremy.

  Anger blossomed in a rush of heat, providing her with enough adrenaline to temporarily get hold of her emotions.

  Vilma wasted no more time, lunging at the mechanical life-form and plunging her sword deep into the core of the engine.

  There was an explosion of force and a psychic cry that tried to rip her brain into tiny pieces as she was thrown back upon the burning altar. Recovering as quickly as she was able, and bracing for whatever was coming, she squinted through the heavy smoke. The engine had collapsed upon itself like a deflated balloon.

  Turning to face the church, eyes finding the bodies of those parishioners who had fallen during their battle and the hungry fire that consumed them, Vilma called out, “Cameron!”

  She found him huddled upon the floor, rocking back and forth as his body shook from fright.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, reaching out to gently touch his shoulder.

  “Afraid,” he managed, his eyes haunted.

  She had gotten only a small taste of the emotion that the engine had used to defend itself, so could only imagine what her friend was experiencing.

  “It’ll pass.”

  Cameron allowed her to help him stand, and at the same moment a section of burning roof caved in upon the altar.

  “We should get out of here,” Vilma said, and the weakened structure groaned under the strain of the fire.

  She was about to take them both into her wings, when she was blindsided by an explosion of desperation inside her brain.

  A scream for help.

  “It’s Lorelei,” Cameron said as his body shook, feeling the same panicked cry.

  Vilma was stunned by the intensity of Lorelei’s message, her hand reflexively wiping away the warm trickle of blood dripping from her nose.

  What is it now?

  * * *

  Gabriel could smell the stink of the multitude of creatures that had burrowed the tunnel he was now crawling through. He imagined them all digging and chewing their way through the layers of rock and dirt on their way to…

  Where?

  He figured he would eventually find out.

  The loose stones beneath his feet suddenly gave way as the decline increased, and he found himself sliding down the tunnel, spilling out onto the rocky floor of an underground chamber.

  Getting his feet beneath him, the dog was assailed by the smell of death… lots and lots of death.

  Gabriel quickly called upon his angelic side, making his fur glow as if he’d been set afire. The warm and comforting light from his body illuminated the grisly findings in the chamber. Animals in various stages of decay lay everywhere; bones and tufts of hair stuck up from the rock and dirt of the floor, and he couldn’t imagine stepping anywhere where he wasn’t walking upon something that had once been alive.

  He imagined these poor, manipulated creatures, controlled by the Fear Engine and carelessly discarded when no longer of use.

  There was movement in the shadows. Another chamber was to the right. Gabriel immediately started forward, quelling the glow from his body so as not to alert his prey. He reached the opening and peered inside, his eyes quickly adjusting to the gloom.

  The animals that had made up the twisted mass of the monster created to protect the engine had merged once more. The monster squeaked, growled, and chirped in multiple animal tongues as it worked to lift something buried deep within the corner of the chamber.

  Gabriel couldn’t see what it was within the loose dirt and rock. It could have been a machine, he guessed, but if so, why did it look to be made of skin and metal? The dog was confused, but then again, what should he have expected from a mechanism crafted by the forces that wanted to plunge the world into total darkness?

  Gabriel slunk further into the chamber and began to growl.

  The monster stopped what it was doing and spun around with multiple emanations of displeasure from its body mass.

  “Must protect the machine,” the creature said in various animal languages.

  “I can’t allow you to do that,” Gabriel spoke, hoping that whatever was functioning as its brain would understand. “The machine is dangerous and must be destroyed.”

  The creature’s body tensed as it prepared to defend its charge, but Gabriel was ready as well.

  The Fear Engine began to throb and pulse, a beat passing through its pale wet skin. The monster responded to that, casually glancing over to the machine, as if communicating with it, before coming at Gabriel.

  Gabriel thought he was prepared, but as the beast of beasts lunged toward him, its body broke apart into the multiple life-forms that gave it shape, and he knew how wrong he’d been. The dog didn’t know what to attack first as the mass of snarling teeth and claws swarmed at him. Summoning his newfound angelic power once more, Gabriel did his best, snatching up the attacking beasts in his fiery jaws, setting them ali
ght in his fury, before attacking the next.

  But there were just too many, and it seemed that even more beasts were being summoned by the monstrous engine, as wave after wave of animals flowed upon him, weighing him down with their filthy mass. But they did not bite him, or rip at his flesh. All they did was pin him down. Gabriel had no idea what they were doing, until he felt the tickling sensation of something unearthly attempting to burrow its way inside his brain.

  To convince him to become part of the monstrous mass that was the engine’s protector.

  Gabriel tried to fight it, but found himself swept up in the flow of bodies as they again took on a humanoid shape. The animals around him bit into Gabriel, attaching themselves to his body, like tendons to muscles, as he was made part of the obscenity’s lower body. It was amazing, yet terrifying, being connected to all the different forms of life that made up this mockery of a human body. Gabriel’s thoughts were no longer his own. The Fear Engine and the other animals chattered in a cacophony of sound inside his skull.

  Gabriel felt that he was drowning. He was losing himself to the Fear Engine. He tried everything in his power to remain an individual, but the engine’s power and all the voices exploding inside his skull were far too much for him. He was becoming part of the monstrous servant.

  And he felt himself begin to slip farther and farther away.

  “I need you here.… I need you back here this instant!”

  Just as he thought he was lost forever, another voice forced its way into Gabriel’s mind. It was strong, desperate, and demanded that it be heard.

  It was all that Gabriel needed to regain some semblance of control.

  He knew the voice belonged to his friend Lorelei, and he had never heard her filled with such panic… with such fear.

  The engine attempted to make him part of the body again, but Gabriel remained free—and intended to stay that way.

  He started to thrash within the confines of the body. The animals fought, biting down even harder into his flesh, into his tail. Holding on to him.