Garlox sat down on the floor and crossed his legs beneath him, well, as best he could. Again, he muttered something in his own language. A man jogged around the corner and stopped still when he saw this other-worldly creature sitting on the floor.
“Uh…” The man did not know what to say and toyed with the idea of trying to escape before he was spotted. But the sound had tripped of his lips before his brain had even processed the sight.
Garlox turned to look at him with three red eyes. He circled a hand in the dirction of his face, immediately putting him in the same sleep-walking trance as the others he had past. He said something, an order, and the man walked towards him as though the daze had taken away any free will he may have had. Garlox held his hand out and blew on his palm watching as a transparent sphere of golden light grew there, tiny droplets of rain passing straight through it as if it were not there. The man watched in disbelief, shaking his head slowly in denial but unable to say anything. This just was not possible – magic and martians. The demon cupped his glowing ball in both hands like an antique and stared at the man, a sinister gleam playing in all three of his eyes. The man looked at him and found his voice, quiet and raspy.
“What are you doing?”
Garlox frowned, not understanding his words but knowing what he was asking by the waves of fear and denial coming from him. Garlox did not reply. The man was standing less than a foot away, not moving. Garlox palmed the energy sphere and plunged it into the man’s chest, his hand following. Connected to everything now. The man’s essence flowing into his own; mixing. He just wanted to know more.
The man gasped for breath as he felt the life, the energy, seeping from his body. He was scared of the creature that was killing him, sure, scared because this was new and wrong, but he was not scared to die. Death would be a sweet release from the pain and the hate and the loss.
Garlox turned away and sauntered down the street. The rain was still falling, the thunder still rolled, but the sky remained bright and sunny. A summer storm, he thought. Rain was calming for some reason, everybody seemed to act with less urgency now. He smiled to himself.
He yelled something at the skies. Rather than sounding commanding and authoritative, he sounded desperate and pleading. He understood. He knew how they worked, what drove humans to do the things they were doing. The others needed to know what he knew, though he would not be able to tell them- they might land anywhere.
Now, he was not being a demon, was not here because this was what he did. Now, he had a reason. A reason to do what he was supposed to do – bring on the day of reckoning. The grief, the hurting, the disorder. He was going to end it all.
Carly snuffled and scratched her face in her sleep. Curled up on the mattress, she looked like any other young woman sleeping off the dragging effects of burn-out. But even in sleep when her body relaxed and rested, her brain just could not switch off. It was only when she lowered her hands from her face and moved position that you could tell that this was not just some exhausted girl. Her face still held the burn marks and scabs of the wounds Mika and Robyn had given her. Her blonde hair was sweaty and stuck together in clumps. The clothes she was wearing were ill-fitting in places and grubby from days of wear.
She was asleep though, resting. And for the first time in days, she was really sleeping. Not dozing or napping, not having disturbing dreams, just sleeping. Carly brushed a lock of hair from her face without waking up and shoved her hands under her thin pillow. The ground shook slightly beneath her and she half-woke.
“Who’s there?” she muttered, to sleepy to register the noise.
The ground shook again and she bolted to the other side of the room, wide awake now. Earthquake. It had to be. Some kind of seismic shift brought on by the Great Event. “Really not sounding all that great any more.” She had heard somewhere that quakes out of earthquake zones occasionally signalled impending apocalypses. Suddenly, it occurred to her that she didn’t know what the plural of apocalypse was. Apocalypses? Apocalii? She didn’t suppose it mattered – chances were there would not be another. Unless…
The thunder rumbled deafeningly outside the window and rain tapped against the glass – she had not noticed a storm before – but, she noticed, the sky was not dark with grey clouds. Not yet, anyway. An especially loud crack of lightning pierced the air and Carly jumped and let out a sharp, startled scream. She wasn’t scared. It took more than a vicious summer storm to frighten her, she told herself.
As if on cue, the door behind her opened and she dashed back to the folding bed. It was only Mika and Robyn, she saw. She had never thought that she would be glad to see them, but she was. At least now she was safe – probably.
“Did you feel that? Like a rippling under the ground. An earthquake, maybe.”
Mika’s hand found Robyn’s again and he closed the door behind them. “I felt it,” he confirmed. “Not an earthquake.”
“What was it, then?” What else could it have been? Of course, there was one other thing that could have caused it, but she shied away from the probability. An earthquake was the safest explanation, nothing supernatural or unfathomable about that. “It must have been a quake.”
“It was everything coming together.” Robyn traced the cold veins along his arm with a finger. Their blood ran through them for no real reason other than to give the illusion of life. So many lives. “All the pieces of the plan all clicking into place. Click, click!” She smiled, mildly amused, and looked at Mika. He looked just like the man of a week before, no-one could have guessed what was going through his head now, but when they were touching everything was back the way it had always been.
“Is it all ready then, love? Ready for tomorrow?”
There was no reason that any of them could see for them not to go in now now that they knew what was happening. “Almost. We have to wait, though?”
“Wait for what?” Carly did not mind waiting, particularly when it could kill her. But, she argued, there was one hell of a good chance of her dying soon anyway. No, that was selfish. “I don’t think I want to wait.”
“Do what she says,” Mika snapped, then looked down at his shoes. “Sorry. She knows what she’s doing, Carly.”
“How do you know that she knows?” She frowned, hoping that made sense. “How can you be sure she’s not just making it all up?”
His eyes flashed with anger at this insolent girl who had just called his little bird a liar. No-one said that about his baby and got away with it. That was the beast talking. He had to stay in control. “Of course she’s not. Tell her how you know, Robyn.”
Robyn loosed his hand and twirled around, her long skirt swishing through the air behind her. “I just do. I’m all joined up. I’m connected… to everything.” She lifted her arms at her sides as if she was trying to touch something in the air. There was something out there – something new. “Do you feel it? It’s warm.”
“I feel it.” Carly swallowed and hunched her shoulders. “They’re here, aren’t they?”
Robyn nodded. “Yes. Here for Judgement Day.”
“Did you ever see that film? Really cool.” She got no answer. “I suppose you’re not really the cinema types.”
On the contrary, they had both loved going to the picture house a few nights a week. The last thing anyone expected when they were watching a B-list creature feature was to come face to face with the thing of their nightmares. Oh, the element of surprise had never lost its edge over the years and centuries in theatres. Fear, shock, interest, curiosity; just a few of the emotions they had tasted together. They were all so different in texture and flavour – some were sweet and went down easily, others were sour and bitty. All had one thing in common though – there was never enough of it.
“We saw that one,” Mika told her, remembering how he had been more interested in the violence on-screen than the panic he was about to inject into the room. “N
ew characters and twists, but an age old story that no-one would have listened to otherwise.”
“Oh God,” gasped Carly, only now realising the direness of the situation. “They’ll stop at nothing.” The Alvareshnik demons had been the base for the evil one; the whole race had been the basis for the idea of machines destroying, taking over, the world. But something was not right – if people refused to believe that demons could do it, then why on Earth would they believe it of robots? She did not waste time on that thought.
“No-one wants to believe in us. They think that if they ignore us, maybe we won’t be there. Weird, really, how people can sink that far into denial and wilful ignorance and not realise that things are going to pieces.”
“You can’t make people believe in things that they don’t want to acknowledge.” Carly glanced across the room at Mika, not sure if he had lost himself to his thoughts or was listening to their every word. “You can put yourself right in front of a person, show them who you really are, and most will think you’re in make-up or it was a trick of the light. They’ve got some mental block because they don’t want to admit that the world is never as pure as it seems.”
That was why the shaman and the professor had embarked upon this scheme of splitting the good from the bad with no room for in-betweeners. Because they did not want to face the fact that humans were not the only things on, even in, their sorry little planet. “But you believe in us, don’t you?”
“How can I not believe in you? I’ve seen what you can do. I’ll never be able to forget that or tell myself that it didn’t happen. You exist, demons come in hundreds of species – yeah, I believe.” If she had a choice to not believe in them, to let herself think that she was safe to walk the streets without some sort of defence, she did not think she would have taken it. How could she lie to herself like that? No. It was hard to accept that nowhere was safe now – nowhere, nothing, nobody – but it was better to live with that fact than in the metaphorical dark.
“We are everywhere. We could be anyone. Your best friend could be a werewolf waiting for the moon so she can rip your throat out.”
“You killed my best friend.” But Carly was surprised to learn that she could tell her that and not start to hate them all over again. In a weird, roundabout way, that was the best thing that had happened to her. If they had not killed Ricky, they would not have taken her prisoner, forced her to work on the stolen disks, hardened her to their… accomplishments; she would not be in this situation of helping to – possibly – avert the apocalypse. If none of that had happened, they might all be unwittingly sliding into Hell with the others, but as it happened, she found herself oddly protected by serial killers and playing a key role in the salvation of the human race.
“We can’t stop it.” Robyn looked sharply over at the other girl. It was a race against time – they had to stop the ritual within an hour of tomorrows’ sunset, when the sun, rather noticeably, would not set, or their hard work would be wasted. “We cannot prevent Armageddon. It will happen, no matter what we do, for it has been decided. But, the world will not self-destruct until an hour later. Until there is nobody left here alive.”
Carly wanted to ask if Robyn and Mika would be left to sizzle on the Earth, not being alive in the strictest sense, but did not.
“The unguarded sun will be too much for the world. The whole planet will burn up to nothing in the heat.” Robyn found her thoughts drifting and locked on Mika. She thought about Johnny, two degrees of dead, but that brought her some degree of comfort. He, at least, would not have to suffer this – he had been freed.. Mika had turned his mind into a blank canvas, shielding his thoughts from her.
He did not wish to take the risk that the sun might kill him. He did not want to remember the time when looking into the sun had been a matter of routine. He did not like having to hide away from so many things. Mika wanted to be free from his shackles to dance beneath the stars in a night sky with blood on tap, hand in hand with Robyn like he had promised. “Nothing will survive.”
“Nothing? Like, when the world gets zapped by a huge laser and shrivels into sand in cartoons?” She was scared, her voice wavered slightly, and she had every right to be so. She was too young to die.
The ground shook violently beneath them and Carly began to fall. Mika zipped across the room and scooped her up inches before she got splinters in her face. Robyn put a hand on the wall to steady herself, her balance barely disrupted by the earthly shift. Carly opened her scared eyes and tugged his sleeve to put her down. “What was that?”
Mika knew what he had to do, but could not quite bring himself to speak the words. “You have to do it,” he told the girls. “I’ll help but this is down to you two now.”
He wanted to be the hero, wanted to take charge. But that would mean embracing the demon he had come to both loathe and love, welcoming it into him with open arms, but he was not even sure he could go on letting the monster control his body. Without the demon, his body would have died many centuries ago, along with his soul. And yet, it seemed to have no regard for any like other than its’ own. Mika was not the demon, though. He was just Mika.
“That wasn’t an earthquake, was it?”
Robyn shook her head. She could feel him beside her, his mind was a hive of action that she could not tune into. She knew what he was thinking, though. He wanted to do this with her, but could not. He didn’t want to put her in danger alone, too late, but he could not help that. She wanted the same things as he did, but there would be plenty of time later for that. “I promise you, Mika. Everything is going to be okay.”
He wished he could believe her. But he had to let his own, private war run its’ course to an end before he could do anything. “I can only help. Anything else and I would be a liability.”
They understood.
The shaman sat on one side of a table on the university campus, munching happily on a packet of gummy worms, of which only half were actual worms. There had once been a time when he would never have had the courage to sit outside in full view of everyone. His protective rock, which cast the illusion of normalcy in appearance, had helped to combat that fear, though he had at first been afraid to rely on it for more than a few minutes. The others in his tribe had never been brave enough to emerge from their safe, enclosed pocket of the universe – they were hiding. He refused to hide, but did not want to be seen without cover. Maybe this was just another form, but out in the open. There were a lot of maybes and possiblys; he tried not to think about any of them. For in a day or two, he would not have to hide. And that outweighed all of the doubts about this mission. Simply knowing that he would at last be able to show himself and be accepted was surely more than enough.
Professor Wright sat opposite the shaman, his hand suspended in the air halfway to his mouth with a sandwich, looking carefully at his companion for a chink in his mystical armour. No-one was going to notice, or if they did they would not care, if the shaman had been sat there in full tribal dress. He could have been chanting to Satan or calling up evil spirits and no-one would have noticed. They were too wrapped up in their own business to worry about the important stuff.
“The rain’s stopped,” he observed.
The shaman looked up and chewed a still-wriggling worm – he had not noticed. “So it has. Good. We need weather like this for tomorrow night. Everything went okay?”
“Yes, it went fine. Ready for the final stage. To make it stick.”
If the last spell was not performed at exactly the right time, and completely flawlessly, the sun would keep moving on its own. The shaman made a mental note to brush up on the Alvareshnik dialect skills he had never learned. “The final stage,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Yes, of course.”
Sometimes, it seemed as though the shaman was privy to some information Andrew did not know about, but he chuckled at his own paranoia and reminded himself that neither of them knew exactly how the rit
ual should be performed. A further thought sprang into his head. One with much darker and more sinister connotations.
Neither of them knew exactly what would happen after the ritual.
Already he could see and hear the influence the demons had had on people. They seemed to move with less urgency, were not as abusive; but it didn’t feel quite right. That was probably just the knowledge that demons were creating this blanket of calm over an otherwise chaotic scene.
“So, we’re –“ the professor racked his brain for that glaringly obvious but elusive phrase his students liked using, “ –all systems go?”
“So to speak. Provided,” he lowered his gaze to his emptying bag of mixed worms. “Provided that nothing goes wrong between now and then.”
The professor eyed the ham and cheese sandwich he had been about to eat and put it down, carefully. He had just lost his appetite. “I don’t see any reason why it should.” Everything was planned – there was no room for error. “I can’t think of anything.”
The shaman was not so sure. The whole thing seemed too good to be true…
Part Three:
Angels and Demons
FIFTEEN
“They know.”
Garlox had wandered the streets of the city, feeling everything the people were feeling, looking for another one of his kind, finding none. He had felt a slight tingle in some places where he came across the few who had remained unaffected by the hate. There was something about them… this strength, an innocence. But they did not bother him, held no interest or mystery for him. He wanted more of the violent outbursts and shows of madness that surrounded him. It was no longer enough to let it happen, casually observe the occurrence – he needed more.
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