INFERNO (New Perdition's Gate Omnibus Edition)

by James Somers

  Jason reeled backwards from the powerful one-two punch combo. His blade fell out of his hand. Jason turned to the wall nearby and grabbed a Bo staff. When he turned back, Jason found his opponent with a similar staff. He twirled it in a slick move meant to make Jason think twice before moving in.

  Jason didn’t return the flourish. He had always been a straight forward fighter who didn’t employ all of the fancy moves like some people did. They may have looked good in the movies, but the only real use for them was to try and convince some novice of your superior skill, so you could avoid a fight.

  The two fighters closed the gap again. The wood clacked around the dome like a frantic metronome. The instructor clearly wanted to end the encounter now. Jason had to switch hand positions on his staff to keep from getting his knuckles smashed, hindering his ability to counter properly.

  Suddenly his instructor yelled out a loud “KEEYAH,” using his staff to smash right through the middle of Jason’s Bo. He followed through with two fast jabs to Jason’s ribs, and a clubbing to the side of the head that put Jason down in a daze.

  Jason was hurt, but he wasn’t defeated. As he landed at the instructor’s feet, Jason used the final momentum to swing the half-piece of Bo staff squarely into the same medial side of his opponent’s bad knee. The man fell down next to Jason.

  The instructor cried out. “Enough!”

  Jason staggered to his knees with a piece of Bo staff still in his right hand. “I’m not finished yet, sir.”

  “Yes, you are.” The instructor grabbed his knee. “You’ve passed, Mr. Night.”

  Jason smiled and fell forward, supporting himself on one hand. His face throbbed horribly. He knew it was going to look awful when he saw himself in a mirror. It had turned out later to be a fractured zygomatic arch. His ear had been split as well.

  His instructor sat up, still holding on to the knee. He removed the black ninja hood guarding his identity. Jason had never known the agent’s name that tested him that day. The man had been sporting a full head of brown hair and a clean-shaven face that day, but looking at this preacher standing before him now, Jason knew it was the same man. The same piercing blue eyes that had proudly passed him on his final test at the Academy were now looking out over the crowd gathered to hear him preach. Solomon Gauge had once been an agent of Babylon.

  RAID

  Solomon Gauge spoke for a good fifteen minutes, but Jason was too astonished by this revelation of the preacher’s past to even listen. Past events played over again in his mind. No wonder he was able to elude us. This man was one of the best. But what happened? How did Gauge end up as the leader of the Christian underground? And why was Sarah mixed up with him?

  Jason suspected these questions could only be answered by the man, himself. Once again, Jason felt the hatred he harbored ebb away. The matter had all seemed very open and shut, before he came to the meeting. Now, he just didn’t know.

  Jason had been so engrossed in his own thoughts, he failed to notice the man who had risen out of the crowd. The man wore tattered dirty clothes, but his every move was calculated. He stood with a glass ball in his hand about the size of a baseball. Through the glass, two chambers were visible.

  One of the chambers had been packed with a darkly colored powder while the other held a clear liquid catalyst. The homeless looking man turned toward the door before anyone realized what was happening. People often stood to say amen at the meetings, or shout their praise for the Lord, but this was no spiritually motivated worshipper.

  He whipped his arm toward the barred door about the time the armed guard noticed him. The glass ball slammed into the metal as the man ducked to the floor. Jason never realized anything out of the ordinary had happened until the explosion rocked the underground auditorium.

  Jason realized he was on the ground, tangled in a pile of folding metal chairs. He saw smoke everywhere—thick, black and the flicker of fire somewhere beyond. Jason heard only distant ringing. He looked on the ground next to him and saw Chloe unconscious.

  A bomb had gone off near the door. The armed man, who had been guarding the entrance, was scattered across the room. Something terrible had happened. Jason knew they were all in danger. He had to move quickly.

  Jason couldn’t see Gauge. Many people were moaning. The sound of chaos and screaming began to slowly return to his ears. Those who had been seated within twenty feet of the door appeared to be dead. None of them moved. A few hundred others were wounded, unconscious, or completely confused. Jason took a quick survey.

  The door had clearly been the target. The frame had blown outward away from the room. The steel door hung by one mutilated hinge. Someone had blown it from the inside to allow others to gain access and wipe out the Christian’s meeting within.

  Then Jason spotted him. A man who was not confused, spoke into a collar-bound communicator pin—not the ordinary accessory on a homeless man’s attire. Jason read his lips as he spoke the words—“Move in and take them!”—a raid.

  Chloe stirred to her feet behind him. Jason turned to her. “It’s a raid! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  These words registered with her. She nodded. Jason bolted through the smoky haze toward the man that had done this. Stella was in his hand when he came upon the bomber. She kissed the man goodnight right through the heart. Jason let the man fall, pausing only long enough to urge Chloe to follow him.

  Jason made his way to one of the exit doors, and slid it to the side. He reached out his hand for Chloe as he shouted to the others left alive in the room. “It’s a raid! Everybody, get out! They’re coming for you!”

  He turned to run with Chloe’s hand in his, but she jerked against him. “What about my dad?”

  Jason searched the smoke-filled room for his face among the crowd, but he could not locate Solomon Gauge.

  “I don’t see him, but I know he would want you to get to safety!” He pulled her along, out of the room, down a dimly lit passage beyond. People poured into the escape routes through the exit doors. Jason was glad to be ahead of the panicking crowd. He knew soldiers would be flooding into the meeting room at any moment to wipe out the Christians and their underground movement.

  Solomon Gauge stood braced against a wall in the underground parking garage where vehicles were parked for the meeting. Max crouched just ahead of him, pinned down behind his jeep by the soldiers across the pavement, about fifty yards away and closing. Both of the men held capsule weapons. These weapons weren’t the run-of-the-mill sort used by civilians, or even local law enforcement.

  Gauge held a fully automatic capsule rifle. Gauge peered out from the wall, firing his weapon in short bursts. This wasn’t the first such encounter with the military for him and Max. He and his long-time friend had been in many far more dangerous situations than this. They had faced danger on a regular basis.

  Trying to fight without killing was one of the most difficult aspects of fighting for Solomon and Max, as Christians. Still, they had learned from the example of the Lord’s two witnesses, it was acceptable to defend one’s self from the enemies of the Lord.

  These were the days of wrath, with the judgments of God falling upon the world on a regular basis. They knew it would all get worse, as the seven year period of prophecy sped toward the final battle, and the glorious return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

  The soldiers steadily advanced on their position. The Christians were nothing more than terrorists to them—deserving of death for the atrocities they were said to have committed. In fact, Solomon and Max knew better than almost anyone how untrue those reports had been. And they knew it from first hand experience.

  The concrete walls were pounded away with such ferocity, that Solomon had trouble finding a window of opportunity to return fire on the soldiers. Each time he did, he took down at least one man. Solomon had been an expert marksman—an expert in a great many things.

  The jeep, where Max hid and fired from behind, was getting chewed to bits. The old military issue vehicle began to
take on the appearance of an overused range target. Time to go.

  Solomon signaled Max his intention to fall back with a hand gesture and prepared to lay down some cover fire. He and Max had come out to the parking garage following the explosion. They had hoped to intercept the incoming raid and stave off the attack long enough for those congregated in the underground auditorium to escape. He hoped they had been able to provide enough time for the others. Irregardless, the time had come to give up their position and fall back.

  Max removed a device from a pouch on his cargo pants—a small disc with a dial on the top. He turned it slightly and reached up under the rear of the jeep. The device latched onto the gas tank of the jeep magnetically. Max looked at Solomon and waited.

  Gauge found his opportunity, pushing out from behind the wall, firing every bit of ammo he had left in the magazine. He took out as many targets as he could—anyone that popped out, went down like a metal target at a fair booth. When the normal capsule magazine emptied, it automatically switched to the other magazine chamber—this one filled with acid rain capsules.

  The soldiers, suddenly overwhelmed, looked for any cover they could find, as acid rain capsules showered their position behind the concrete support columns. Hefty chunks of concrete and steel mesh tore out of the columns, as Solomon kept the firestorm focused on the soldier’s position. This was the sort of thing he actually missed from the old days, but it was the only thing.

  Max used the onslaught to move from behind the jeep to where Solomon stood stationed at the concrete wall. The magazine emptied. Solomon and Max quickly fell back to the auditorium. The parking garage remained a complete mess with concrete chips and wire scattered everywhere. A thick cloud of concrete dust and smoke hung in the air.

  Solomon rushed through the hole in the wall where their security door had been standing before the bomb went off. He searched for Chloe.

  “Max, I don’t see her!” Solomon scanned the remaining few people left in the auditorium. Everyone able had already escaped through one of the exits toward the surface.

  Max prepared to leave through one of the exits. “She must have gotten out with Jason Night, the young man she invited to the meeting.”

  Gauge started toward one of the doors. He had vaguely noticed a young man sitting with Max and Chloe during the meeting. He stopped in mid-step. “Did you say “Jason Night,” Max?”

  “Yes.” He had a puzzled look on his face. “Why, what’s wrong, Solomon?”

  The memory came back to him, like the ache in his right knee that often bothered him. A sudden sense of dread washed over Solomon as he remembered the young man he had tested for graduation from Babylon’s academy about twelve years ago.

  The name had been the same. Chloe could be running for her life alongside one of the most dangerous people on the planet, an agent of Babylon.

  Max had been keeping a mental timer running in his head, coordinated with the timer he had set on the disc attached to the jeep. The soldiers would come across the parking garage floor at any moment.

  “We’ve got to move, Solomon.”

  “If only I knew which exit they had taken.” Solomon grew frustrated.

  “We’ll find them. Let’s go.” Max urged him as he stepped through the first door that he came to.

  Solomon saw a dead man lying on the floor among the twisted folding chairs. All of the other bomb victim’s bodies were on the other side of the auditorium. Closer examination revealed a collar-bound com-link and a very precise knife wound. This man was with the military. He must have been the one to throw the bomb and Night killed him. Night isn’t with their operation. Why is he here?

  “Solomon, five seconds!” Max stood waiting just inside the escape door.

  Solomon stood up and ran to one of the other exits. “Max, you take that way, and I’ll take this exit. One of us needs to find Chloe and Jason Night—he’s an agent.”

  That was all Max needed to hear. The two men closed their doors. Solomon tapped a single button located on a panel on the tunnel wall. On the auditorium side of the wall, the escape doors vanished, replaced by a hologram which gave the appearance of a pocked dirty wall to mirror the far wall where the blast had occurred.

  When the soldiers finally regrouped and were very near the auditorium, the disc Max left magnetically attached to the jeep’s gas tank exploded. The blast tore through the ranks of soldiers, sending bodies plowing into the walls and floor. A large portion of the wall of the auditorium was pushed inward. In the end, the military would simply blame another terrorist attack on those dreadful Christians.

  OPPORTUNITY

  Wraith heard the bomb go off somewhere underground. He had expected the military to fail, and that massive boom had obviously been the proverbial fat lady singing. Finding the Christians, and possibly Solomon Gauge, had been worth his tagging along with them. Yet, for the sake of some jurisdictional toe stomping, the lieutenant in charge had insisted that Wraith and his team not interfere with his operation.

  That was perfectly fine with Wraith. He would let them make a mess of the place then he would swoop in on anyone who escaped. Solomon Gauge, if he was among this group, would most certainly be one who escaped.

  Wraith looked at Hatter. “Have you located the source of the explosion?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hatter stood next to Agent Rogue, looking over his shoulder at the incoming triangulation data on their microwave scanner. The device utilized microwave scanning, thermal imaging, hypersonic resonance imaging and a host of other technologies, all bundled into a device about the size of a cell phone.

  On the screen, the blast position triangulated—about one hundred yards away from the entry site, where the soldiers had disappeared underground, only ten minutes ago.

  Wraith scowled at him. “Well, what have you got.”

  Rogue looked up from the scanner. “Thermal signatures are fanning out in several directions away from the site of the blast, sir.”

  Hatter laughed. “Looks like rats on the run.”

  Wraith whipped a short, stockless machine gun around from his back. “All right, boys, let’s some rats.”

  Jason and Chloe moved swiftly through one of the underground tunnels used by the Christian underground. It was dark and cramped, with only enough room to move along in single file. Dim yellow lights hung every fifty feet along the concrete tunnel.

  Jason came close to bumping his head on the pipes running the length of the ceiling. The tunnel changed directions every one hundred feet at right angles, and Jason wasn’t sure in which direction they were headed anymore. For all he knew, they might walk right back into the auditorium at any moment, coming face to face with whoever had conducted the raid.

  Chloe interrupted his train of thought. “Jason, slow down. The others can’t keep up.”

  Jason paused, looking back down the tunnel behind them. People from the meeting followed at a distance. They moved at a ragtag pace, dazed and confused from the ordeal they had just been subjected to.

  They shouted up the tunnel. “Wait for us!”

  Jason wanted to move on without them, but he knew Chloe wouldn’t hear of it. For some reason, he wasn’t willing to go on ahead without her. So, he waited, but he didn’t like it.

  When the others had closed most of the distance, he urged her on. He became vaguely aware of the fact that she had been holding his hand during the entire escape. Jason pulled her along, but Chloe guided the way—at every intersecting tunnel she gave him the appropriate direction to take.

  Obviously she had used these tunnels for years. Jason wondered how much of her father was bundled up within the girl. He thought it likely Gauge had imparted some of his special skills unto his daughter, especially considering the conditions under which they lived.

  They came to another intersection of two tunnels. Chloe pointed. “This way.”

  Very quickly they came to a dead end at a metal ladder bolted against the concrete wall. “Up there?”

  Chloe
confirmed with a nod. Jason pulled up his pant leg to reveal a sheathed knife which ran the length of his calf. He removed Stella from the sheath as Chloe watched wide-eyed. Jason stared up through the tunnel, barely seeing sunlight coming through. “I’ll go up first and make sure everything is clear.”

  Jason held the black blade in his right hand and began to climb with it. The other Christians, who were following behind, congregated with Chloe at the bottom of the ladder. Jason made his way to the top, finding it covered with a heavy steel lid—a manhole cover which meant this tunnel must open up onto the street somewhere.

  If they emerged here, they risked a great deal of exposure. The sun appeared to be setting—still enough light to make a whole group of people coming out of a manhole look suspicious. Jason brought his ear up near one of the three holes in the cover and listened. He did not hear any traffic on the street above them.

  Jason pushed on the plate and slid the metal lid to the side. If any of their pursuers were near, they would have heard the heavy plate scrape loudly against the pavement. Jason popped his head up and found that he had emerged in an alleyway.

  Tall buildings shot up on either side of him as he peered out from just below the opening. He certainly didn’t intend to be the victim of a sniper. Cautiously, Jason climbed out of the manhole into the alley. Stella remained at the ready, but he wished he had smuggled a gun into the meeting.

  So far, he remained alive—probably no sniper. Jason took the opportunity to contact his robot.

  “Alfred?” He spoke quietly. The com-pin in his ear canal reacted to the name and sent a signal to his H7 Counterpart.