Michael and Roger began to run, guessing what sort of creature was swarming behind them…but as they cleared the churning cloud of steam, they saw more of the tick Demons ahead of them, a small horde, razored arms spread into waiting embraces.
Michael skidded to a halt and spun around, opened fire at their pursuers as the first of them sprang out of the wall of steam. "Get through them!" he roared at Roger. "Clear our way!"
Back-to-back, the two men fired their weapons repeatedly, Roger bucking with the explosions from the shotgun, Michael emptying a magazine of his clattering assault rifle and deftly slapping in another.
Two of the ticks went down under one of Roger’s blasts, the OO buckshot having dispersed into a spray of heavy slugs. Another discharge sent one of the arachnid beings up over the railing, but a barb on its foot caught in the mesh of the handrail and it swung from the catwalk lifelessly, blood raining like candy from a burst pinata. Three last ticks leapt over the bodies of their fallen brothers. Roger fired, hit one of them, and then the other two were only a few feet away. A whipping claw struck the end of his barrel just as Roger jerked the trigger again, causing the shot to go wild. He followed through with the momentum of the Demon’s blow, however, and with all his force swung the wooden stock of the weapon into the thing’s plated little face. The cracking impact sent it reeling, its back striking the handrail.
Roger jumped back as the remaining tick took a swipe at him. He blocked a second blow with his shotgun. But the entity had multiple pairs of arms, and Roger felt one of them get under the shotgun, stab into his body and rip upwards. He grunted, fell onto his back on the hard catwalk surface.
Looking down at himself, he saw blood welling out of him…saw that he had been rent deeply.
He tried to angle the shotgun to point up at the thing, but it kicked the gun and its clawed foot not only sent the weapon out of his hands but nearly severed one of his fingers. It hovered above him, its arms spinning and clacking as if in a mad sign language, wordlessly speaking in tongues. The sight of his pumping gore seemed to tantalize the creature. It sank down over him, appeared to stare into his eyes a moment, and dropped its head as if to fellate him. Roger felt another deep stab, as the tick shot its proboscis into his inner thigh…heard a terrible gurgling sound as his blood was sucked up into the vampire.
Wheezing in pain but steeling himself, Roger slipped his injured hand into his shirt. And deeper than that. It burrowed under the lip of his wound.
Either Roger’s motions or another metallic rattle from the Angel’s M16 broke its lustful spell, but the arachnid jumped to its feet, the bloody proboscis withdrawing. It saw Roger rummaging inside his soaked shirt and descended upon him, lashing out with a mantis arm. Roger rolled to one side and the claw banged against the catwalk. The creature lifted its head and chattered, its mouthparts twitching like bloodied fingers. Roger had rolled onto his back again, and he was tearing something out of his chest. It looked like an organ, red and drooling strings of blood. He had known just where to find it. The hunk of metal had been a nagging weight inside him, an irritation and a burden—a pain now extracted, liberated, and returned to those who had inflicted it upon him.
Screaming in a mix of agony and war cry, Roger tugged back the little .25’s slide, aimed it up at the tick and squeezed off round after round. The semi-automatic’s immersion in his body had not dampened its gunpowder. The bullets were small, but they drove the tick back, shrieking. He emptied the pistol. The very last slug sent his attacker flipping backwards over the railing. He heard it crash far below.
Michael had emptied his fresh magazine and popped in yet another, mostly firing blindly into the steam. But soon, he saw only a heap of demolished bodies at the edge of the mist, one or two badly wounded Demons screeching, the ingested blood of their victims streaming through the holes in the catwalk’s floor.
He turned back toward Roger to see that he had gone down. A last tick was moving in on him, its cracked face oozing its own greenish ichor. He saw that Roger was without the shotgun, gripped only a toy-sized pistol that had apparently run dry. Michael sprayed the wounded Demon before it could get to him, white fire flashing from the M16’s muzzle, the impact launching the vampire off its feet. He then rushed forward to Roger’s side. When he took his arm to help him up, the British soldier let out a terrible groan, and that was when Michael saw how the front of his shirt was saturated with blood.
"Can you make it?" he asked numbly.
"Listen!" Roger hissed, clinging to the man’s arm so as to hold himself up, staining the Angel’s robes.
From beyond the end of the catwalk, they both heard crying voices. Watery with echoes, distant and ghostly…but distinctly, the cries of children.
"Come on," Michael said, slinging his M16 over his own shoulder and retrieving the shotgun from the floor. He put one arm around the Damned soul. Roger kept his left hand pressed to his chest as if to hold his split body together. Every step made him wince, every other step a stagger that almost toppled both of them. They made it through the bodies of the Demons Roger had killed, loped like a wounded four-legged animal until they could make out a polished door of bone set almost seamlessly into a wall of bone, at the end of the bridge-like catwalk.
8: Avenging Angel
The wall, when they reached it, was made up of plates separated by rippled sutures, like the outside of the Skull itself. Roger leaned against it while Michael took hold of the door’s latch. It was not hinged, but slid along grooved track into the wall.
In the room beyond, Michael saw three Kilcrops hunkering near the foot of a row of coffin-like containers—metal, rusted and riveted—bolted horizontally into the floor. There was a hatch in each one, the hatches currently hanging open, where the faces of those inside the sarcophagi would be. It was from these open hatches that the wailing voices came. One child was sobbing hysterically, another crying for her mother, but Michael couldn’t tell if any of the cries belonged to his son.
There was a hose with a nozzle at its end hanging from the ceiling, over the coffins, and its base end was connected to a huge glass orb in the center of the room. This orb was filled with a yellowish solution, and inside the miniature yellow sea writhed a colony of white worm-like eels or eel-like worms. Their threaded bodies almost formed one immense living ball inside the globe. Following the line of the suspended black rubber hose again, Michael could guess its use: for delivering the contents of the orb into the dozen metal coffins. They were water-tight, then. And he had no doubt the worms were ravenous.
Though the snickering Kilcrops didn’t try to attack or flee, having heard the approaching gunfire and thus waiting to see what the two men intended, Michael treated one of them to the contents of a 12-gauge shell. When the gaunt body had stopped flopping and rolling across the floor, the other two began to giggle more wildly in nervousness, one clutching at the arms of the other. Michael jerked his gun barrel at their grinning faces. "If you don’t want to end up like your friend, open those things up now."
One Kilcrop dashed to the far end of the row, the other to the nearer. They reached to a clasp system on each, and the lids of the sarcophagi began to swing open. An adolescent black girl crawled out of one like a spider, fell to the floor. Roger managed to help her up while still pressing his chest. She started to flee from the room in a panic, her eyes crazed, but Roger held her at the elbow and croaked, "Stay with us, dear…we’ll all go out together."
Michael almost wanted to push past the emerging children to get a better look as the pair of Kilcrops converged at the center to unlock the last two chrysalises.
From one of these, Mark rose into view. His eyes flicked from the robed Angel quickly to Roger. Michael saw recognition dawn on Mark’s face then, and it was a piercing realization—that his son had recognized his surrogate parent, but not him. The boy hadn’t expected to see his father come to this place to rescue him. When Mark spotted Roger, a grin opened in his tear-crusted face. "Dad!" he cried, clambering down from hi
s cocoon. He darted to the man but came short of hugging him, seeing how badly he was injured. Roger smiled, and released the traumatized girl to slip one arm around Mark’s shoulders.
Tears flooded Roger’s eyes. Tears of love, and relief…and pain. Twice now, the boy had called him "Dad." But he felt that when Mark finally turned around and saw who it was that had accompanied him here, the child he thought of as his son would never call him by that name again.
Only when his arms were slipped around Roger did Mark glance at Michael a second time—Michael, who stood momentarily wordless, helpless as if paralyzed. At last, the boy understood who he was seeing. "Dad?" he said. There was a leeriness in his tone, mixed with disbelief and delight. This obvious confusion of feeling pierced Michael again. He could tell the boy was a little frightened of him. The gun in his hands, the blood splashed across his robes. He was still afraid his father was angry at him for causing his and Dawn’s deaths.
"Mark," Michael said, his own eyes wet and agleam. "I came for you."
"Daddy," his son whimpered, face crumpling, regressing into an even younger child.
"Go to him," Roger whispered, and kissed the top of the boy’s head before releasing him.
Mark took a timid step forward, and Michael closed the distance—swept him into the curve of his free arm, clenched him against his body.
"I thought you hated me," Mark sobbed.
"I love you," Michael told his son. "I love you, forever…"
Blinking at his tears, Roger glanced around at the faces of the eleven other children, ranging in age and race but all of them ragged, all of them waiting for the adults to give them some sort of guidance. "Children," he told them, "you stay with us."
"Come on—we’re out of here," Michael said, moving back toward the doorway, his arm still around his son’s shoulders. "Roger…can you walk?"
"We’ll help him," said another boy, and he and the shivering black girl took Roger under both his arms.
Out through the bone wall, across the catwalk littered with cracked and draining tick bodies, one or two with a limb still twitching. Down the spiral staircase. Michael had the shotgun in his hand, at the ready should one of the bodies spring up alive, but none did. He had passed his Beretta to Roger, easier to manage in his condition. Through the steam-filled corridor into which the three flayed faces stared, the children held hands in a chain. Michael saw a Kilcrops dart across the end of the corridor, but didn’t fire at it.
Under the dozen hanging cocoons. "Is that you?" the familiar voice called down. "Did you find him? Hello? How about us, huh? Please? Hello? Hey!"
"Can’t save them all. Not every soul in Hell," Roger whispered into the ear of the tall black girl. "Can we, my love?"
Down the bone corridor. Suddenly, candles and burning incense sticks spilled out of several of the organic-looking sockets in the walls and two ticks emerged, dropped into the hallway, charged with flailing jagged limbs…but before they could pick up speed Michael had let go of Mark and leveled the shotgun, and Roger had pushed the black girl behind him and pointed the Beretta. The children flinched and covered their ears, but it only took a few short bursts from both men to bring the ticks down, and a few moments later the party was advancing again.
The entrance to the Skull was near. Here was where corridors, ramps, doorways branched into numerous directions. And as the party moved toward the main entrance, scores of ticks flowed out of these hallways and thresholds as if coordinated by a silent command, scampered down the clanging metal ramp, descended a ladder fixed to the wall. In just seconds, the humans’ path was blocked by what looked like a hundred of the greenish creatures. They gave off an insidiously low chittering, but it quickly rose into a metallic buzz-saw sound. Again, the children clamped their hands over their ears. "Dad!" Mark cried.
Michael looked back the way they had come. He saw the light going out in the bone corridor as more and more candles were knocked out of their hollows by ticks emerging through the walls. Soon, the corridor would go completely black, masking the advancing rear army.
"Here," Michael said, passing Roger the shotgun. He saw Roger stand as straight and steady as he could so as to accept the weapon. In turn, Roger handed the Beretta to the black girl, the oldest child. Her eyes were still wide and half-frenzied, but she accepted the pistol. Michael took his M16 off his shoulder and leveled it grimly. "Roger…will they dare to stop me?"
"These things? I think they will. They may not hurt you, but they’ll disarm you. Incapacitate you, until they recapture the rest of us. Until they can repair this machine. Then they’ll let you go…and they’ll fly this thing so far away you might never find it again."
"I’m not going to let that happen. They’ll have to hurt me." Michael took a step forward. He saw the ticks at the fore of the group shift back ever-so-slightly, either the gun in his hands or the look in his eyes filling even their robotic minds with fear. He took a second step.
From the left, then the right, two Apsaras appeared. A third, and a fourth. One held a curved sword, and the others carried metal spears. Their movements as eerily graceful as stylized dance steps, their forms beautiful in a nightmarish way, they positioned themselves at the front of the mass of ticks. At first Michael expected them to lead the battalion forward…but they extended their spears at waist-level and turned their nearly nude bodies slowly, using the weapons to urge back the teeming arachnid warriors. The creatures seemed reluctant, but complied. Michael realized what the human-like Apsaras were doing: parting the ticks, opening a path for him—the Angel.
He glanced back over his shoulder. There was just enough guttering candle glow left in the bone corridor for him to see another of the blue-fleshed succubi standing with her arms spread, a sword in each fist, her hair lapping the air. Ticks fidgeted restlessly behind her, but none tried to push around the fearsome Demon.
Facing forwards again, Michael slowly advanced. The children followed meekly, Mark holding onto his father’s robe. His chest wound healing even as he staggered along, Roger kept the shotgun ready…but none of the divided assembly of ticks surged around the Apsaras and the weapons they had used as if to create invisible barriers. Michael entered this living corridor first, expecting it to close around him at any second. It didn’t. He glared defiantly into the ranked, expressionless faces as he passed them.
He turned and guarded the entrance to the Skull as the children cleared the gauntlet, ducked out the doorway and sprinted down the ramp into the city of Apollyon. Its burning blue air had never seemed inviting to them until this moment. He saw them scatter in all directions. The black girl had his Beretta still in her fist but he didn’t call her back. A rebel in the making, maybe. She could not grow up, but she could mature, harden…like a stone sharpened into a spear head.
At last, only Michael, Roger and Mark stood in the doorway, looking back into the Skull—meeting the gaze of all those glittering black eyes, and the more human eyes of the Apsaras.
"I’m immortal," Michael said to the Demons, like troops gathered for his inspection. "You’re not. If you ever touch my boy again…if you ever go near him, or try to take revenge on this man," he nodded toward Roger, "I’ll spend eternity killing every last one of you mother fuckers."
And with that, the two bloody men and the boy between them stepped wearily out of the Skull.
9: The Family
The child slept on the little sofa they had purchased from a shop in the city, where the Damned manufactured crude furniture, and he was covered under a quilt Davina herself had sewn together from scraps of cloth she’d collected. She sat on the very edge of the sofa, lightly caressing his forehead, her brown fingers trailing over the raised U branded there…a wound his body hadn’t been allowed to regenerate. She had told him it stood for "Unbelievably Cute."
Roger sat in a chair opposite, shirtless. The groove in his chest was raw pink with puckered edges, but no longer an entrance to his interior. He watched his lover’s face, the way her uncanny huge eyes glist
ened. Still weak, he used the chair’s arms to push himself to his feet, crossed to her, took her head against his chest and stroked her thick hair. He heard her sniffle, felt her kiss his healing scar.
"He won’t really stay, will he? He says that now…but don’t you think he’ll change his mind?"
Roger knew the man better than she. "No, my love. I think he means it."
"But he won’t be allowed to, will he? Aren’t they told how much time they can spend here? Isn’t there a limit?"
"I don’t believe there is. I think he can stay here as long as he wants. Forever, if he likes."
"But his wife won’t want to, I’m sure."
"Yes, that’s the only thing. She isn’t the boy’s natural mother." He regretted the words the moment he said them. Davina’s head lifted, as he knew it would.
"Neither am I, his natural mother. But she may love him enough to remain here, too…do you think?"
"I don’t know her, my dear. We haven’t met her. We can’t say."
"I hope she doesn’t love him as I do." Davina looked down at the boy again.
"That isn’t a good thing to wish, Davina."
"But do you want to let him go? After all you went through to get him back?"
"I went through that to take him from the hands of Demons, who meant to torture him. But these are the hands of his father…who loves him enough to leave behind the Paradise most of us down here will yearn for, forever."
Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Page 15