by Harvey Click
Shane jumped up and grabbed his arm to pull him out of the seat, but the bus veered sharply to the left as Lucky’s shoulders came off the wheel, throwing Shane forward against the windshield. A second later Bloody Joe was beside him, pulling Lucky out of the way while Shane scrambled into the driver’s seat.
He grabbed the wheel and turned it just in time to avoid colliding with a tree. The bullet that had killed Lucky had made only a small hole in the windshield, but it was hard to see through the web of shattered glass around the hole, and Shane had to slow the bus to a crawl.
“Smash the glass,” he yelled, and a second later Joe’s rifle butt turned the web into a cascade of glass fragments falling like jewels onto the dashboard and floor.
Now he could see better. The citadel was maybe fifty yards ahead, and he saw the muzzle blast of a dozen rifles firing at them from the windows. Near the front door was a thick throng of demons fighting furiously.
The bus had veered off the driveway and was bumping madly on the rough ground, but through the small hole Shane couldn’t see where the driveway was, so he aimed the bus straight at the front door of the citadel, avoiding rocks and shrubs as well as he could. Bullets were hitting the windshield plates with a rapid patter, and he wondered how soon one of them was going to come through his peephole and kill him.
“Turn the bus sideways and stop so we can shoot some of those bastards,” Joe yelled.
Shane turned to the right, stopped, and put on the emergency brake. Everybody started shooting out the windows on the left side of the bus, and the noise was earsplitting. Shane stuck the barrel of his SKS out of the cross-shaped hole of his side window, and a second later the man he was aiming at fell backwards to the ground.
Unfortunately most of the gunmen and Nephilim had already run to shelter, and those who hadn’t before did so now. The citadel windows seemed to be steel-shuttered the same way Bill’s had been, the shutters open just far enough for rifle barrels to poke out. Hitting anyone through those narrow gaps was highly unlikely, but Shane kept trying. Sometimes a rifle barrel would disappear from a window he had aimed at, but he couldn’t know if the gunman had been hit or was simply ducking aside to reload.
More shots were being fired from inside and behind the dormitories, and the side of the bus was being hit several times per second. Shane glanced down and saw that the badly dimpled plate below his window had broken loose from its weld at the bottom and was flapping each time a bullet hit.
“It’s no good,” Joe yelled. “Let’s get moving.”
Shane put the bus in gear and aimed it toward the citadel again. This time he found the driveway and was able to give it more pedal. There were no steps leading up to the front door, just a slab of concrete only two or three inches high. Demons scurried out of his way as he approached it, and the ones that didn’t caused the bus to bump as it ran over them.
“Hang on tight!” Shane yelled.
He aimed straight at the door, realized he was going too fast, and hit the brake just before they collided. The impact was terrific, and the engine would have stalled if he hadn’t pushed in the clutch.
“Is anybody hurt?” he yelled, and somebody answered, “We’re okay.”
The wood was cracked where the battering ram had hit it, but the heavy door held fast. He backed up about a dozen feet and rammed it again. This time a small section of the wood caved in, but iron strips held the rest of it together. He backed up and rammed it again, and the door fell off its hinges with a loud thud.
Shane backed the bus again, turning the rear to the right and moving slowly because he was aiming it blindly in reverse and didn’t want to ram into a dormitory. When he thought he’d gone far enough he pulled it forward until the bus door was adjacent to the door of the citadel.
He and Joe pulled Lucky’s body up into a seat so it wouldn’t be in their way. Demons were banging on the sides of the bus and trying to rip off the plates, and some of them could be heard clambering up onto the roof.
“Shane and I will run in first and start shooting whoever’s in there,” Joe said. “Shut the bus door after us and wait till you hear us yell that it’s clear.”
“Bullshit,” Nyx said. “I’m going in too.”
“Okay, we’ll all rush in at once,” Joe said. “Me and Shane will have our guns ready to shoot people, and the rest of you have your swords ready for demons.”
Shane grabbed the handle to open the bus door, but he didn’t have to. It was suddenly ripped open, and a grimsnuffer and two babbleboons scrambled aboard. Joe and Shane weren’t ready for them because they had their carbines shouldered, but Amy pushed past them slashing ferociously and screaming as she did it.
She and Nyx made it into the citadel first, leaving three mutilated demons behind them, and Joe and Shane ran in a second later. They were in a small anteroom lit only by electric candles, and they were alone except for two listeners trying to get in through the doorway. Nyx cut the head off one of them, and the other shrieked when the tip of a sword suddenly appeared sticking out the middle of its fat belly.
It was Azura’s sword, and after she pulled it out of the demon she stepped rather delicately over the smashed door and glanced around the room.
“That’s the first time I ever killed anything,” she said. “Now I see why all of you enjoy it so much. I hope I get a chance to kill some people.”
Blaine and his friends were working their way in, slashing awkwardly at demons that were trying to clamber in behind them. Bill hobbled in last, leaning on his stick and complaining that his ears were ringing from all the shooting. A babbleboon tried to scramble in after him, but he sliced open the demon’s throat with his sword.
“Cram that furniture in the door,” Joe said.
The men dragged a heavy wrought-iron settee to the wide doorway and piled three wrought-iron chairs on top of it.
“That won’t slow them down for more than a few seconds,” Joe said. “Some of you better stay down here and guard that door and those other two doors. The rest of us will go upstairs. That’s where gunmen are.”
There was a spiral stone stairwell going up and a shut door on either side of it. Jim Blaine’s men looked at the stairs apprehensively.
“I never much liked climbing stairs,” Carlos said.
He and two others elected to stay downstairs, and Bill said he’d stay there too because he felt too weak to climb stairs. Jim Blaine, Bo Diamond and Pete Hane headed up the steps with Joe’s people and Azura.
Joe and Shane led the way with their SKSs shouldered and ready. The spiral staircase was a pretty good imitation of something you’d find in an old castle, except the stones forming the steps and walls seemed to be blocks of gray concrete molded to look like quarry stones. Despite the great wealth of the Lost Society, it apparently liked to keep costs down.
Surrounding the top of the stairs was a circular landing with four closed doors in its round wall. Shane aimed his carbine at one of them while Joe opened it, revealing not a room but a narrow hallway that vanished around a corner to the right a few feet ahead.
Shane heard a sound behind him and spun around. A door across the circular landing flew open with a rifle barrel poking out of it. Shane shot, and whoever was holding the rifle fell backwards.
Now the door beside that one was opening and two grimsnuffers came dashing out. Shane and the others ran into the narrow hallway and shut the door behind them, but there was no way to lock it. They sprinted around the corner to the right and saw that the corridor ended ten feet ahead with a shut door at the end and a door on either side of them.
They heard the two grimsnuffers open the door they’d come through and heard them snuffling and snorting just around the corner behind them. Joe aimed his gun at the door on their left and Shane opened it to find a small room with an empty cot and another closed door in the opposite wall.
They ran in and stood on either side of the open door waiting for the grimsnuffers to rush in. They soon did and were hacked to pieces
before they got two feet inside.
They moved to the door in the opposite wall and stood on either side of it. Shane reached past the doorframe, but before he could twist the knob bullets pierced the wood. They all hit the floor except Azura, who stood there looking confused while the others blasted the door to splinters.
Joe kicked open what was left of the door and found a young woman dead on the floor of a small trapezoidal room with a narrow cot and two other doors.
“This place is like a fucking maze,” Nyx whispered, and Shane’s ears were ringing so badly that he read her lips more than heard her.
They pointed their guns at one of the doors while Jim Blaine carefully opened it. It was yet another small lopsided room with two other doors, and it was empty except for a cot and a small gray shag rug on the floor beside it. Pete Hane stepped on the rug on his way to one of the doors, and it suddenly leaped off the floor and wrapped itself around his body like a tortilla.
It was some sort of living creature, and what looked like shag pile was in fact countless short wriggling polyps that were piercing his skin as he fell to the floor screaming. There was no way to hack it off of him with their swords without hacking him as well, and while they stood there helplessly watching, Pete’s face began to swell with venom and thick foam bubbled out between his lips.
Shane shot him between the eyes with his Smith & Wesson. Jim and Bo stared at him with shocked expressions but said nothing, and while they were staring one of the doors burst open and someone shot Bo three times in the chest.
It was a young man with a beard, and he dropped his rifle and did a weird jerky dance as a dozen or more bullets lacerated his flesh.
The door he had opened led to another narrow twisty hallway, but before they entered it they spent half a minute reloading their guns. Nobody was talking now; they were all too stunned.
Through the ringing in his ears Shane heard a terrible slurping sound, and on the floor he saw the rug wrapped around Pete’s body wriggling and squirming as it sucked his flesh through its polyps. Since Pete was already dead, Joe reached over and jabbed it several times with his sword, and it finally stopped wriggling.
With their carbines in their right hands and their swords in their left, Shane and Joe led the way into the hall, which was only wide enough for them to go two abreast. Behind them were Amy and Nyx and behind them Jim and Azura. The corridor twisted its way past a dozen or more doors, all of them shut, and they moved swiftly but quietly past them.
Suddenly Azura screamed. They all turned, but except for a flurry of swords Shane couldn’t see what was going on back there. The swords stopped slashing, and then they all continued walking as if nothing had happened.
The corridor twisted to the right, and Shane and Joe stopped. The floor and walls were crawling with dozens of centicreepers, which looked like centipedes four or five feet long with fat infantile human faces.
“Can’t go that way,” Joe muttered, and he aimed his carbine at a door and kicked it open to find a fat listener sitting on a toilet.
Shane cleaved its grinning face in two, and there was a terrible stench as it let loose the contents of its bowels. They shut the bathroom door and backtracked until Joe found another door to kick open with another narrow twisty corridor behind it. The two of them led the way swiftly and quietly until they turned a sharp corner and stopped.
On the floor a few feet in front of them was a round mud-colored pulsating head about three feet in diameter. It had two glaring orange eyes, a wide slobbering mouth, and at the bottom where the neck should be were dozens of short slithering tentacles. It suddenly shot toward them with astonishing speed, and Shane impaled it between the eyes with his sword.
They squeezed past it and kept going.
Chapter 22
Bill sat at the bottom of the stairs and watched Carlos and the other two men trying to keep Godson’s demons and Nephilim from yanking the iron furniture out of the doorway so they could rush in. The men looked like factory types and weren’t very bright. They still didn’t seem to realize that bullets were no good against demons.
“You’re wasting your ammunition,” Bill said. “If they look half-human you can shoot ‘em, but if they’re too ugly to be half-human you need to use your swords.”
If they heard his advice they didn’t pay it any mind, because a moment later two of them were splitting Bill’s ears by fecklessly blasting a herky-jerky with a Glock pistol and a lever-action Marlin. Maybe they were ignoring him because they were pissed off that he was sitting while they did all the work, but nature had fashioned different people for different sorts of work, and Bill’s sort of work wasn’t of the grunt variety.
Soon they’d be out of ammo and would probably get killed. That didn’t bother Bill in the least, but he wanted them to stay alive long enough to protect him while he spirit-traveled. He leaned back against the steps, shut his eyes, and let his spirit drift. His astral body, a nighthawk, would be awkward inside this building, but for short distances he was able to travel without an astral body. The risk of doing it “naked,” as he called it, was getting lost and never finding his way back to his body, but Bill was a highly adept traveler and not much worried about that.
He sent his naked spirit up the spiral stairs to the second floor and passed through one of the four doors in the circular wall of the landing. His objective was to find Godson, but he soon realized that finding anything in this place would be difficult.
It was a labyrinth, maybe designed to fool Godson’s disciples or more likely to satisfy his esoteric but juvenile taste. Narrow corridors snaked one way and then another around rooms shaped like pentagrams, triangles, lopsided rectangles, circles, half-moons, and shapeless splotches resembling the sort of Rorschach inkblots that would amuse a mad twit like James Hobson AKA Jeshua Godson.
The gunmen were no longer at the windows because there was no longer a school bus to shoot at. Now they were roaming the twisting corridors hunting the invaders, but maybe they too were confused by the labyrinth. Some of them were Nephilim and others were human, if in fact the sort of fools who would be beguiled by Godson’s antics deserved to be called human.
Demons also populated the rooms and corridors, and some of them resembled nothing Bill had ever seen in his books on demonology. Apparently Godson had been experimenting with demon crossbreeding. Unlike Nephilim, which were human-demon hybrids, these misshapen creatures seemed to be the result of crossbreeding different races of demons.
He saw a flat gray thing lying on a floor that looked like a small shag carpet until he noticed the shag pile was in fact hundreds of short wriggling polyps with stingers, and then he saw three eyes staring up from the center of the rug. In another room he saw a sort of green elf with four heads, each one facing a different direction. A fat brown eel or snake fifteen feet long had a fanged face at each end.
He came to a small library, its five walls lined with shelves of books. His books! He glanced quickly through the shelves, his anger mounting with each title he read. This son of a bitch was going to pay, and pay very soon.
He didn’t believe he’d find Godson on this floor, so he let his spirit drift up through the ceiling to the third floor—and by luck he found himself in the bastard’s room. Godson didn’t seem at all perturbed by his house invaders, if he was even aware of them. He was lying on a king-sized bed with his head propped up by several plump blue pillows and his eyelids half shut. He seemed to be awake but just barely conscious, probably stoned out of his mind because he had always been a glutton for recreational drugs.
His bedroom was big, and the baby-blue circular wall was covered with mirrors. The ceiling was another huge round mirror, and Godson seemed to be admiring his face in it as he gazed skyward with a simpering sort of smile on his vapid face. He’d gained some weight since Bill had seen him last, his once-handsome rock-star face plump and babyish now, and his once-lean figure soft and puffy with the good life.
He was wearing blue silk pajamas open in the fr
ont to show three of the seven scars of his Longevity treatment, the little crescent moon above each lung and the big X above his heart. Bill watched with a mixture of schadenfreude and revulsion as Godson began to pinch his little pink nipples and make soft cooing sounds at his reflection on the ceiling.
He looked easy to kill. Now Bill just needed to find a simple route for his aging body to climb up to this room. His spirit drifted out of the room to a small anteroom where there was a private elevator, but operating it required a key-code. Beside the elevator was a narrow winding stairs no doubt intended for the lackeys, and Bill’s spirit followed it down to the second floor landing, where another stairs wound its way down to the first floor. He traveled along a twisty corridor to a shut door and passed through it to the foyer, where his body lay sprawled on the stairs and the blue-collar clods were still wasting their ammo on demons.
Bill stood up and made himself invisible. Though invisibility was one of his specialties, it required a great deal of concentration and effort. With telekinesis he compressed and shaped the air around him into a sort of lens that caused light rays to bend around his body instead of reflecting off of it, the same way water bends light or a hot expanse of desert distorts it to create a rippling mirage.
He cleared his throat to test the illusion. The men looked around and one of them said, “Hey, where’d that old dude go?”
Another one said, “Musta went upstairs. He wasn’t no help anyway. He looked half dead.”
The next challenge was to get through the door to the left of the stairs. If they heard it open, these trigger-happy clowns would probably shoot even if they saw nothing coming through it. Bill stood beside it and waited until a Nephilim tried to jerk the iron settee out of the front doorway, and while the men were busy blasting it he quietly slipped into the twisty corridor and shut the door behind him.