Route 666

by Jack Yeovil

  666! The Number of the Neverending Darkness!

  In the Outer Darkness, the Old Ones heard the call. He spoke the words under his breath as his fingers spread the blood.

  666! The Number of Blood!

  He invoked the Names. He recited the Nine Names of the Beast. The creatures of the Outer Plains gathered around, pricking at the balloon of this reality.

  666! 666 times 666! 666!

  His hands were bloody to his shirtcuffs.

  666!

  X

  12 June 1995

  Flat hammers pounded the back of her head. Jazzbeaux awoke to mushrooming pain.

  Her mind was blanked. A continent of blood funnelled into her eye and washed everything from her head.

  Only fear remained.

  A hand held her hair. Her head was being lifted up and slammed down. Again and again.

  A black arm was responsible. It was as precise and impassive as a machine component.

  More pain cracked inside her head. Something was breaking.

  She scanned Elder Seth’s impassive face floating above in the distance. The black arm which hurt her stretched up to the Elder’s shoulder.

  She was getting motion sickness.

  The rhythmic pounding echoed, beating time like a metronome. Her nostrils were full of blood.

  She sent signals to her hands to come together around Elder Seth’s throat, but the rest of her body wasn’t at home when her graymass came to call.

  The Elder muttered something as he killed her. He chittered like an insect.

  “… sickssicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks…”

  Her right arm convulsed and reached upwards, but Elder Seth brushed it away and bore down on her body with a bony knee. A stab of pain shot through her ribs.

  She twisted her neck and her bloody hair slipped through the Elder’s greasy fingers. She grabbed the road and tried to pull herself away.

  Hands took the back of her neck and the back of her head. Cruel fingers squeezed her wounds.

  Jazzbeaux heard herself screaming again.

  Elder Seth smashed her face against the road, twisting her head so the brunt of the blow was taken by her eyepatch. She felt crunching in the orbit around her optic burner.

  If she could roll over, she could give the scumsucker a blast at the bridge of his cursed shades. She could bore a hole through his head and see the evening sky.

  With the next thump, biofiuid filled the inside of her patch and she felt the implant shifting, metal digging into her meat. Her nose was completely plugged with grit and blood and she was afraid for her teeth.

  After this, she would not be the prettiest girl at the prom.

  From her good eye, she saw the cracked ground, decorated with patterns in her own blood.

  “… sicksicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks…”

  Elder Seth slammed her face against the road again. And again. And again…

  XI

  12 June 1995

  Elder Seth was methodically killing the one-eyed Psycho-pomp, without distaste or anger. As he smashed her face against the road, he looked as if he were baptising the girl in tarmac.

  Everyone seemed only too pleased to watch. Tyree had her side arm out but didn’t know who to shoot. Sergeant Quincannon had fetched his pumpaction from the Feelgood, but wasn’t pointing it at anyone. The Josephites had beatific smiles on their faces, as if watching their spiritual leader kissing a baby. The Psychopomps were appalled but made no move to help their gangbuddy.

  “Hold on there a moment, your reverendship,” shouted someone.

  Everybody turned to scan. Everybody except Elder Seth. He still beat the girl’s head against the road. Each blow was like a drumbeat.

  A short man, nattily dressed in a frock coat and a big black stetson, stood in the street, flanked by two gorilla-shaped individuals with tin stars and Cyberfeed stetsons. The local heat.

  The girl’s blood made signs in the cracks of the road.

  “I say I don’t know if n you have much familiarity with the law,” the short man said, “but we take objection to this here sort of unruly behaviour in Spanish Fork, Utah.”

  The Elder dropped the girl’s head and stood up. His hands were red, but the rest of his outfit was as clean as it ever was. His face was empty.

  “Deseret,” he said, grinding the word between his teeth. “New Canaan, Deseret.”

  “We like proper names round these parts,” said the short man.

  The girl rolled away from the Elder’s legs, and the cockatoo creature went to help her. The fillette was still alive but had a bloody dent in her forehead. Her eyepatch was scraped away and and a mechanical doodad hung out of her socket on multicoloured filaments. Tyree would guestimate severe concussion at the least, probably brain damage.

  The short man took off his hat. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Judge Thomas Longhorne Colpeper and we do things my way in Spanish Fork. Job, arrest this man.”

  One of the deputies lurched forwards, his clapperclawed right hand held out. Circuitry hummed inside the bulky bio-amendment.

  There was quite a crowd. Most of the Josephites were there, looking bewildered but not surprised at their Elder’s activities. Kirby Yorke was with them, goggle-eyed and slack-jawed, derelict in his duties for leaving the cruiser unguarded. That worried Tyree almost more than anything; it was like seeing a baby crawling in the road. There were more Psycho-pomps, pouting with indignation and fingering home-made shooting and stabbing irons. The townsfolk of Spanish Fork all turned out to see the show.

  Shutters went up over breakable windows and guns were handed out like burgers at a B-B-Q. This situation had all the fixings of a medium-sized bloodbath, Tyree thought.

  The clawed deputy reached out to take Elder Seth’s wrist. With an easy movement, the Elder pushed the big man in the centre of the chest. It looked like a playground shove to Tyree, but there must have been deadly force behind it. She heard bones snapping and the deputy dropped like a felled tree.

  Brother Wiggs and Sister Ciccone darted forwards and fell on the deputy. Wiggs’ knee smashed into the man’s throat and Ciccone’s hands dug into his guts. The cyberfeed overloaded and blew its circuits. The deputy’s head caught fire, burned bright for a few seconds, then turned into a reeking, charred blob. The rest of him was still twitching.

  There was more blood on the road.

  Elder Seth said something that sounded like “sicksicksicks”. The resettlers gathered behind him. Wiggs and Ciccone, dirtied and bloodied, were back in line. One or two of the faithful looked scared out of their tiny minds, but they still backed him up. Tyree had to fight the impulse to go stand beside the Elder. She got the impression Brother Bailie, for one, was fighting an impulse to get out of the line-up and stand against Elder Seth. The man had some sort of unnatural influence.

  “Get your kicksssss” hissed Elder Seth, “on Route Sicksicksicksss…”

  The remaining deputy shot his arm out, flat-handing the air. He had a shotgun implant, an impressive piece of work. There was an almighty bang as he discharged himself. He cocked his elbow, filling the chamber again, and fired a second time.

  “… sicksicksicks sicksicksicks…”

  He had taken one of the blasts full in the belly. The other had glanced off his right shoulder. Brother Bailie, who had been standing behind him, was on the ground with his face in his hands, trying to press it back onto his skull. Elder Seth was still standing, clothes a ruin, body still whole. Tyree saw patches of his skin blackened from the discharge, but unbroken.

  “… sicksicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks sicksicksicks…”

  Elder Seth wasn’t human. That explained a lot.

  XII

  This was the site of the Great Invocation. The Summoner ignored the stinging in his flesh, and advanced on the man with the gun in his arm. Deputy Larroquette reminded him of a Roman legionary he had pulled apart when he rode with Attila. If you lived long enough, everybody re
minded you of somebody else. The Roman’s insides had felt slippery and yet tough in his fists. He had been less strong then.

  He took the next blast full in the face. His hat flew off and he shook the flattened fragments of the charge out of his hair. His spectacles were not destroyed. He fixed the Deputy with mirrored eyes.

  The Deputy saw the worst thing in the world and lowered his arm. For Larroquette, the worst thing in the world was a man with two buzzing chainsaws, surprised in the boiler room of an Albuquerque elementary school. The Summoner let the man with the chainsaws carve the deputy’s mind into sections.

  He took Larroquette’s wrist and tore his gun-arm off, as easily as he would rip a silk neckerchief in two. He dropped the useless thing on the ground.

  The deputy bled from the shoulder, bright jewels splashing to the tarmac. More blood for the Dark Ones.

  They were in the air now, squeezing onto the earthly plane through rips in the fabric of this reality. He saw them swarming around in multitudes. The clawed, crawling, winged, stinging, horned, spiny, toothed hordes. The Vanguard of the Beast.

  This would have to end now. It was the place of sacrifice, and the time. Those who would not follow him must die.

  The deputy, dead but moving, lunged out with his remaining arm and clawed the spectacles from the Summoner’s face. His nerveless fingers couldn’t grip the sacred objects, which flew away and skittered across the ground towards the crowd.

  The loss didn’t matter. As always, it was temporary.

  XIII

  12 June 1995

  People were suddenly dying all around Yorke. Attacked as if by invisible creatures and torn apart. It was as if the Dancing Death had descended among them and laid about himself with a vibrating scythe.

  Yorke discharged his side arm into the air until his wrist was wrung out, spinning around trying to draw a bead on something insubstantial. Hot cartridge cases pattered around his feet, bouncing on asphalt like Mexican jumping beans.

  Brother Bailie, sorely wounded, staggered out of the ranks of the Josephites, sobbing with pain and terror, face leaking through his fingers. He froze and was pulled up into the air. His clothes ripped and red rain fell around him. He twisted in the air as if mangled, and thumped to the ground in several large pieces.

  One of Yorke’s ankles was kicked out from under him and he went down, eyes hurting as if he had stared full into the sun for a full minute. His head throbbed and someone jabbed him in the side. One of the ganggirls, a weepy-looking fillette with lazy eyelids. As he fell, he lost his grip on his probably empty side arm.

  The ganggirl, taking to her spike heels, got about a dozen yards before scratches appeared in the back of her shiny Russian smocktop. Material parted around deep rents in her skin. Her hair was pulled out of its tight knot and ripped up. A diamond-shaped wound appeared in the bare nape of her neck, a tunnel into her graymass. She dropped like a puppet.

  Yorke gasped. Someone stepped on his hand and he heard, but could not feel, a crunch. The boot-heel had come down on his plastik fingers.

  Scrabbling for his gun, Yorke found something else. The spectacles the shotgun Deputy had struck from Elder Seth’s face. Not really knowing why, Yorke opened them and slipped them on.

  … and the world looked different.

  He screamed. He could see the things that had killed Brother Bailie and the ganggirl.

  A fat citizen was covered with the creatures, like a man smeared with honey and left for warrior ants. They buzzed and burrowed, sharp little teeth digging into cloth and skin, a million tiny tears shredding down to bone, verminous little wings crawling. Their buzzing was horribly like cruel laughter.

  Because he could see them, they left him alone, left him to watch. In his skull, torrents raged. Synapses burned out. Memories wiped. A scream began in the pulsating centre of his being and radiated outwards, disrupting everything, shaking his graymass into jelly.

  He knew the killing things for what they were. The Bible Belt had taught him to recognise the demons of pain and sorrow. They danced and circled in the air, insubstantially hideous, working violence and destruction. They swirled around Elder Seth, alighting gently on his shoulders and outstretched arms like doves flocking to St Francis. They gave him offerings of the dead.

  Trooper Kirby Yorke screamed and screamed until his mind was gone, and nothing mattered any more.

  XIV

  12 June 1995

  Judge Thomas Longhorne Colpeper looked into the eyes of the man who was killing his town, and saw the hood of the hangman. Again, the Josephites had come in blood to Spanish Fork. There would be a fresh plaque on the monument, for this was not a new thing, this was merely a continuation of the massacre of 1854. Then, the Brethren of Joseph had come with savage Indians; today, they came with lawless gangcultists. The blood was the same.

  The judge knew what he had to do to end the bloodshed, end the lawlessness, end everything.

  His own voice sounded, “You be taken from here to a place of lawful execution…”

  He picked up Larroquette’s free arm and pressed its hand to his chin. In a reflex, the fingers curled up around his jaw, locking into his mouth. His false teeth shifted. He felt the hot aperture of the barrel against the soft fold of his dewlap.

  “… and there you be hanged by the neck till you are goddang dead…”

  There was a snap, and another, and another. The sound continued, like the popping of flashbulbs around a celebrity on opening night. Men fell through hatches in his mind. Behind Elder Seth they all stood, heads loose, tongues out, eyes showing only white.

  “… and that’s m’ruling!”

  Judge Colpeper had tried and hanged three hundred and seventeen men, twenty-five women, two indeterminate and one intelligence-raised dog. They all waited for him. They had a necktie party ready.

  Elder Seth looked at him, terrible eyes burning. The necktie party crowded in his mirrored pupils.

  The judge held Larroquette’s elbow in one hand and the ragged stump of his bicep in the other. He pumped the arm, chambering a round in the forearm, and straightened the limb out.

  The last snap was louder than all the others.

  XV

  12 June 1995

  The judge’s hat came off the top of his head with most of his skull wadded into it. He stood for a moment, eyes opaque, and crumpled at the knees. He hit the road before his hat, which plopped with a sickening splat against the side of a wall ten yards distant and slithered redly towards the ground.

  Tyree didn’t believe what she saw, but took stock of the situation. Kirby Yorke, those strange shades clamped to his head, wouldn’t stop screaming. The Quince had his back to the Feelgood and was levelling his shotgun at any who might rush him. Burnside was lost somewhere in the melee. People screeched and died indiscriminately. Buildings were on fire.

  The cockatoo creature ran past Tyree, flaps of fair skin falling away as if a flock of invisible, sharp-beaked birds were attacking.

  In the midst of it all, the Elder stood calm, surveying his flock. With him stood a small knot, the rump of his faithful and new converts. There were Psychopomps with him, and a few of the townsfolk.

  She made a snap judgement, and decided whose fault this all was.

  Holding up her side arm with both hands, she circled around the outskirts of the killing zone, shouldering through floundering fools. Quincannon covered her, shotgunning a ’pomp who tried to get in the way. This was a proper Cav action.

  Stepping over the ganggirl, Tyree took careful aim and shot Elder Seth three times in the small of the back. The thing that looked like a man turned and she had the sense not to look into his eyes. That seemed like a good way to go mad or get killed.

  But the Mark of Death had been put on her. She knew she could run but she couldn’t hide.

  One day, soon…

  Ciccone flew at Tyree, hands contorted into claws. Tyree shot the Sister in the chest, and what looked like pink plastic exploded through her robes. She slowed,
but didn’t stop. Tyree put a bullet in her head, just above the left eye. She saw the nailhead of the round embedded in the Josephite woman’s head. A trickle of clear fluid welled around the wound, but Ciccone just seemed disoriented when she should be dead.

  These people were getting less and less human. The Elder put a hand on Sister Ciccone’s shoulder and she calmed, bowing her head. He scanned Tyree and smiled.

  Unseen claws didn’t come to rip her apart. The Elder stretched out an arm and beckoned. Ice-water dribbled down Tyree’s spine. Ciccone and Wiggs and the others were smiling, beckoning her. She could be forgiven her sins.

  She did not have to die. If she joined the faithful.

  Elder Seth was walking away, trailing his flock of resettlers. They were singing “Shall We Gather at the River”, with explosions instead of drumbeats to keep time.

  Her voice came to her and she found herself singing too. Miraculously, she knew the words…

  “… the beautiful, the beautiful river.

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river

  That flows from the Throne of God”

  Quincannon, who had broken away from the Feelgood, struggled with a Psychopomp and a little man in a blue suit. They were both trying to get knives into his throat. Tyree shot the panzergirl and the Quince took care of blue suit with a shotgun-stock heartpunch. The sergeant shot her a salute and floored another assailant with a slash from the gun.

  She didn’t return the salute. She was still singing.

  Her gun fell from her grasp and she lurched towards the Josephites as if pulled by puppet strings. Her hair was disarrayed by things rushing through the air. She knew she had to go to the Elder, go with the Elder. Her whole life had been designed to bring her to this point, to set her on the Road to Salt Lake City.

  If she went with the Elder, the Mark of Death would be wiped from her forehead. She could live…

  Chollie Jenevein’s gas tanks went up and fire was falling all over Spanish Fork. A nice, quiet, little town.

  She saw Burnside slumped against the drug store, dead without a mark on him, side arm still holstered. Yorke was still screaming. The Elder stood over the trooper and retrieved his spectacles, raising them up to his face like a sacrament. Yorke scratched Oedipus-fashion at his eyes, and kicked at the ground. Elder Seth walked away.