by Harvey Click
“Is there anybody else up there that wants to come down?” she asked. “Come down now if you want to, but if you’re too cowardly to come down then kneel. All of you, the ones up there and the ones down here, get down on your fucking knees and kneel.”
There were soft sounds all over the barn, the sounds of legs bending and knees touching the ground. She looked carefully around, and when she saw that all of them were kneeling she put her sword back in its scabbard and strode out of the barn, hoping the demons didn’t notice how badly her hands were shaking.
Chapter 18
“That idiot Godson was kind enough to send us forty-two of his finest demons,” Bill said. “Eight listeners, three jabber-suckers, six babbleboons, five grimsnuffers, thirteen harpies, five hell-kites, one snakewalker and, best of all, one stickman. He’s my pride and joy, and he’s smarter than a whip.”
He was sitting at the dining room table with Amy and her comrades. He stank of demons and his white face looked sick with exhaustion.
“I don’t know how many he had to begin with, but I’m guessing we now have about half of them. Unfortunately I don’t think he can afford to send us any more. So the next attackers will be Nephilim and maybe some of his human disciples.
“Nephilim are probably more dangerous than demons because they’re as smart as humans but more cunning and ruthless. They can drive cars, shoot guns, talk on cellphones, do everything humans can do, and they’re much more powerful. Imagine superhuman commandoes with rifles and other weapons, and you get some picture.
“Unlike demons Nephilim can be killed by bullets, but they don’t kill easy. Think of a weightlifter beefed up on steroids and also stoned out of his mind on angel dust so he hardly even feels the bullets. You can pump six rounds in him and he keeps on coming, but maybe the seventh bullet goes in his heart or his brain and he finally settles down. So keep your swords with you, but guns are going to be your main defense.
“Demons can take any sort of route through the wilderness they want, but Nephilim will arrive in vehicles so they’ll have to use roads. I’ve got two cars out there at all hours watching both ends of the road to Godson’s church. They’ll call if they spot any vehicles, and my ops will have plenty of time to come in from the bunkhouse and take up shooting positions at the windows and on the roof. We’ll be sitting pretty in here, and we’ll blast the living shit out of them.”
“What if somebody sneaks up and kills those ops who are out there watching?” Joe asked.
Bill gave him a thin smile. “Those men are highly trained killers, and I pity whoever tries to sneak up on them. But as a purely redundant safeguard I’ll have Amy and Azura take turns spirit-traveling tonight to watch the church. They can work in two-hour shifts or whatever they want. This will make sleeping difficult, but I’m afraid I’m too tired to take any turns. I was in the barn breaking demons all night, and believe me it’s exhausting work. I’d rather break horses any day.”
“You sure those things are broke?” Joe asked. “They seemed pretty cantankerous to me.”
“I have them under control,” Bill said. “I’m their lord and master.”
Nyx let out a sarcastic noise but didn’t say anything.
“Can you control them when you sleep?” Shane asked.
“They’re fully obedient to me. They respect me asleep or awake. But in the unlikely event they cause any sort of problem while I’m asleep, both Azura and Amy are perfectly able to subdue them.”
“Bullshit,” Amy said. “I want nothing to do with them.”
“Did it ever occur to you that while we’re sitting out here waiting for Nephilim, the feds could show up?” Lucky said. “I believe the Lost Society has some influence with them.”
“You’re thinking they’ll burn us up like that cult at Waco,” Bill said. “I’ve thought about that of course, but it’s highly unlikely. The Society pays a fortune just to keep the feds quiet, and an operation like that would cost more than they want to pay. That sort of thing makes the evening news and might even make some politicians look bad, so an awful lot of money would have to change hands.
“Besides, I doubt the FBI knows anything about us, and Godson still has no idea what he’s dealing with out here. He still thinks we’re just a rival cult of kooks, but right now he’s wondering why his cows haven’t come home. We’re thirty miles away from him, so he probably thinks they roamed outside his range of influence and have fled. He’s also probably wondering why his spirit-body can’t get in here to have a look, but there are many places like that, places a spirit-body can’t enter because of anomalies in the magnetic fields or maybe because of old hexes cast long ago by sorcerers long dead.
“So he’s puzzled by these things but he has no suspicion he’s dealing with me. He has no suspicion because he thinks he killed me fifteen years ago. So he has no inkling he’s dealing with a magus much more powerful than himself.”
Nyx let out another sarcastic noise but said nothing.
“We can’t just sit around here forever getting attacked every damn night,” Joe said.
“Be patient,” Bill said. “It’ll be a lot easier getting into that church after we’ve killed off some of his Nephilim. Don’t worry, we won’t have to wait very long. He’ll be sending them soon and maybe some disciples too.”
“We need a plan for getting in there,” Joe said. “They’re gonna be shooting at us as soon as we pull into the grounds, and they got a room up on the roof of that big round building where their rifles can pick us off like pigeons.”
“Here’s how it’ll go down,” Bill said. “My harpies and hell-kites will fly out there and we’ll follow them in cars. As for my land-bound demons, we’ll haul them out there in the school bus.”
They all stared at him. “Who the hell’s gonna drive a goddamn school bus full of demons?” Joe asked.
“One of my ops will drive, and I’ll be standing in front of the bus making sure the school children behave themselves.”
Nyx let out another noise.
“I doubt that old rust bucket will even start,” Lucky said.
“Oh, it’ll start all right,” Bill said. “One of my ops used to be a mechanic, and he has that engine running like a Swiss watch. It may be rusty, but it’s an armored vehicle—my men have welded steel plates onto the walls inside.
“We’ll form a caravan with the rest of you in four vehicles following the bus. We’ll park just far enough away so the watchmen in the upper room won’t see us, and we’ll send out all the demons to attack in one horde. There will be great confusion, and while Godson’s disciples are racing around releasing their demons and Nephilim, our harpies and hell-kites will attack the upper room. They’ll smash the windows and kill the watchmen up there while our land-bound demons attack the men and Nephilim down below.
“While this is going on we’ll convert the bus to a fully armored vehicle. My men have welded brackets above the windows on the outside so we can hang steel plates over them. They’re the same sort of steel I have on these windows, thick enough to deflect ordinary rifle ammo, and they have shooting holes cut out of them at eye-level. There’s a plate for the windshield with a hole cut in it just big enough so the driver can see where he’s going. The plates are stored in the back of the bus so we can get them out and put them on very quickly.
“Maybe you noticed a steel contraption on the front of the bus covering the grill. It’s a battering ram welded to the frame, very strong. So we drive the bus into the compound, shooting through the window holes at anything that moves, and when we get to the citadel we smash the front door open with our battering ram and run inside. After that we play it by ear.”
Lucky sighed and said, “Gee, now what could possibly go wrong with a plan that?”
***
“You should sleep in my room tonight,” Azura said. “That way it’ll be easy to wake each other up every couple hours.”
“No thanks,” Amy said. “Just tap on my door when it’s my turn.”
&nb
sp; Amy took the first watch and a very sleepy owl stared at the citadel, where all was quiet and nothing stirred. She had set an alarm clock for two hours, and when it buzzed she returned to her body and sat up yawning. She was on a folding cot in a small dusty spare room so she wouldn’t disturb Shane. She padded barefoot down the hallway to Azura’s bedroom and tapped on the door.
“Are you awake?” she asked quietly.
“Come in and see,” Azura said.
Amy returned to her dusty little room and fell asleep instantly. It seemed only a moment later when somebody nudged her shoulder, and she opened her eyes to see Azura standing above her naked.
“Has it been two hours already?” Amy asked.
“Not quite, but I got lonely,” Azura said. “I thought maybe we could lay around in bed for a while and be friends.”
“Damn it, Azura, I’m dead tired and I’m not in the mood for this crap. Let’s get a few things straight. One, I’m a married woman and I don’t fuck around. Two, you’re just a child.”
“I’m not a child. I’m nineteen.”
“Well, you’re acting like a child right now. Three, somebody needs to be watching the church so we don’t get killed in our sleep.”
“I had a quick look at it, and it’s as quiet as a tomb,” Azura said. “Besides, there are two cars sitting out there watching the road.”
She sat on the edge of the cot and began to cry very quietly. “I’ve never had a friend,” she said. “I’ve never had a lover either. I’ve been diddled and screwed but I’ve never been loved.”
Amy touched her hand and said, “I’m sorry about that, I really am. And I want to be your friend, but I don’t want to be your lover. I’ll talk with you tomorrow about all this stuff, but right now I want to sleep and I want you to watch the church.”
She realized she was speaking the way she would to a child, but it was hard for her to think of Azura as anything else.
“Yeah, sure, tomorrow,” Azura said. “You want nothing to do with me tonight, but tomorrow we’ll be best friends.”
“I’ll be your friend, I promise,” Amy said. “But right now I want to sleep.”
“Okay, I’ll start being your friend right now by taking your next watch,” Azura said. “I’m not sleepy anyhow. I’ll wake you up in three and a half hours.”
“Thanks.”
Azura got up and left, shutting the door behind her. Amy fluffed her pillow and shut her eyes, but now the cot felt uncomfortable and dust was making her nose tickle. At last she fell into a nice, deep sleep that was suddenly interrupted by gunfire.
She ran to the window and slid open the shutter. There were several big ugly people with rifles in the back yard, and more of them were racing in from the front. They were surrounding the bunkhouse and pressing themselves against the outside walls so they wouldn’t get shot by the rifle barrels that were beginning to poke out of the bunkhouse windows.
The two floodlights came on, and then Amy saw that they weren’t big ugly people, they were big ugly Nephilim, and some of them had just kicked open the front door of the bunkhouse. Amy grabbed the SKS from the floor beside her cot and took aim at a huge hairy creature in overalls who was at the rear of the throng rushing in through the door.
The rifle kicked her shoulder painfully, and the hairy creature jerked and bellowed but didn’t fall. She managed to put one more bullet in his back before he was in the bunkhouse, and she had just moved her sights to another Nephilim when her phone rang.
“What the hell?”
It was the phone Bill had given her, and by the time she located it in her dark room he was already talking. Apparently he was making a conference call to all of them, and though she came into it late she caught the drift. Bill was going to make a dash for the barn to release his demons and wanted everyone to cover him.
“I’m going to make myself invisible so the Nephilim don’t see me,” he said. “In exactly ten seconds I’ll make a beeline from the kitchen door to the barn door, so keep the Nephilim busy but for God’s sake don’t shoot me. Start counting now.”
Amy started counting, and when she got to ten she heard the kitchen door open and shut. In the pale glow of the floodlights she thought she saw a sort of silvery shadow running to the barn, and then the barn door slid open.
There was a barrage of shots from the roof and another barrage downstairs, and she heard somebody shouting down there, maybe Lucky. A few of the Nephilim fell in the yard and the others pressed their way into the bunkhouse amidst a cacophony of screams and gunshots.
She strapped on her sword, shoved four loaded stripper clips into her pajama pockets, and ran out of the room in her bare feet with her revolver in hand and the SKS slung over her shoulder. Bloody Joe was in the hallway, and twenty feet away from him a Nephilim was thrashing on the floor with three arrows sticking out of his chest.
Amy shot him through the forehead as she ran past him to the head of the stairs, where another one was sprinting up. She emptied her last five revolver rounds into him, but the .38 Specials barely seemed to faze him. He was nearly on top of her when Joe’s sword cut his throat so deeply that the head tilted backwards. Even then he seemed determined to make it up the last two steps, but his foot fumbled trying to reach the top one and he fell backwards and slid down the stairs with a fountain of blood spraying the walls of the stairwell.
Amy was drenched with it as well. She dropped the empty revolver and pulled the SKS off her shoulder.
“Where’s everyone else?” she asked.
“Lucky’s downstairs, Nyx went up on the roof, I don’t know where Shane is,” Joe said. “I better go look at the other stairs.”
But it was too late. There was a noise at the other end of the hallway, and they saw three of them emerging from that stairwell. The Nephilim spotted Amy and Joe, but before they could get their rifles to their shoulders Amy was shooting and Joe was piercing them with arrows. They fell and flopped around on the floor, not quite dead but close enough.
The SKS was empty. Amy slid a stripper clip into the chamber and pushed the cartridges down into the magazine just in time to shoot another one that was slipping on blood as it climbed over the body at the bottom of the stairs. It took four powerful 7.62x39 rounds to the chest and one more to the face to put him down.
Joe had disappeared, apparently down the other stairs. The intermittent gunfire from downstairs had stopped a minute or two ago, but now there was a spate of it from the roof. A door opened halfway down the hallway and Azura stepped out naked.
“What’s all the racket?” she asked.
Amy awkwardly drew her sword with her left hand and started down the steps. The one she’d just shot was lying face-down on top of the other one, and when she got to him she hacked the back of his skull in two just to be sure. The wooden steps down there were slick with blood, and it wasn’t easy to get past the bodies.
At the bottom she peered cautiously around the stairwell and saw three Nephilim lying in pools of blood on the floor of the back living room. It was too quiet down here, and she was afraid Shane and Lucky were dead.
“Shane?” she called, and something charged at her from the next room with a pistol in his hand. He was an ugly thing with a cleft lip surrounded by thick whiskers, and as each shot hit him the cleft would gape open like a sideways mouth revealing big yellow teeth shaped like arrowheads. It wasn’t until her bullets tore his shirt open that Amy realized the thing was female.
It fell, and there were several more shots from somewhere downstairs as Amy stooped to pick up the sword she’d dropped. She ducked back into the stairwell, wondering if Shane and Lucky were shooting or if Nephilim were.
When the shots stopped she called out again. “Shane? Lucky? Is anyone alive down here?”
They both answered at once. “Go back upstairs,” Shane yelled. “It’s not safe down here.”
She slid her sword back in its scabbard because she couldn’t hold it and shoot her carbine at the same time. She peered around the st
airwell again and saw something in the dim hallway dart past one of the living room doorways.
The cleft-lipped female’s pistol had slid across the bare floor and was lying there not far from the stairs. Amy stuck her bare foot out and pulled it toward her with her toes. It was a .45-caliber 1911, cocked but not locked. She flipped the safety up and stuck it into her scabbard belt.
She looked again, then darted to the far side of the living room and pressed her back against the wall beside the doorway where she’d seen the thing running past. She couldn’t remember how many shots she’d fired, so she opened the magazine at the bottom of her SKS and a single cartridge fell into her hand.
She pulled the bolt to refill the magazine with another stripper clip, but before she could do it a big round face that looked like road kill peered in at her from the doorway.
She dropped the useless carbine, but before she could draw her sword the thing aimed a big stainless steel revolver at her and pulled the trigger. She heard the hammer fall on a spent cartridge, and while the Nephilim stared at its gun she severed its head very neatly at the shoulders. As the body was falling another one came running in through the doorway, but before it could shoulder its rifle she plunged her sword into its heart.
This didn’t seem like an opportune time to reload the SKS. She slung it over her shoulder, pressed her back against the wall again, and checked the 1911’s magazine. It was fully loaded with seven rounds. She flipped down the safety and peered through the doorway into the dim hall with the pistol in her left hand and the sword in her right.
Empty, but just as she was slipping out of her doorway a Nephilim slipped out of another one across the hall and stared at her. Its face was enormous and egg-shaped with its tiny eyes and nose bunched up near the top of the egg, and far below them a little round mouth gaped open with surprise. By some fluke her first shot went straight into the little round mouth, and the back of its big head exploded in a shower of blood and brains.