Blake emerges behind Tullian on to a platform above the main body of a vast cavern. The pulsing noise is deafening, the air filled with wind and light. He feels like he is on the bridge of a ship in a lightning storm. There are monitors, control panels, switches and dials on console banks either side of the platform, effectively forming barriers against the thirty-foot drop below. Waist-height railings fill in the gaps. They don’t look very substantial, but Blake is guessing the weather up here is usually calmer.
He looks over the side to observe, if not the source, then the epicentre of the energy storm. He sees two great black cubes, like nuts on a giant bolt, separating sections of a huge steel cylinder that disappears into the live rock at either end of the cavern. In front of the central section, between the cubes, floats a black ellipse that appears to exist in only two dimensions. It has no depth, and though Blake can’t see through it, he can see either side of it. Flashes dance around it like a corona, fading before they can resolve into being for any length of time. There is vibration all around, every object shaking into a blur with each pulse, their oscillations so intense that it looks like solid matter is having difficulty holding its shape too.
Tullian points towards a section of the console bank on Blake’s right, where there is a large lever under a Perspex cover, marked ‘Emergency Shutdown’.
‘We can’t let anyone near these controls,’ he shouts above the noise. ‘Not anyone! The horrors you’ve seen already are nothing, Father, nothing. If this gateway is not destroyed, the dark legions will have unopposed passage into our world.’
Sendak is first through the door. He has barely emerged into the deafening, teeming chaos of the Cathedral when a demon comes hurtling towards him, scampering over a pile of crates. He blasts it with his shotgun as the others file in quickly at his back.
Steinmeyer rushes past and stops in his tracks, aghast, as he takes in the view. The floor of the hall is strewn with debris: mostly the contents of the soldiers’ interrupted packing-up exercise, but much of it the remains of what used to be his control and monitoring HQ. He scrambles amidst the wreckage, looking frantically for any terminal that might still be running, but what hasn’t been shot up or smashed has been fried and scrambled.
‘What the fuck do we do now?’ asks Sendak.
‘I need to get to the manual shut-offs on the observation deck. They’re a built-in failsafe, they override all online systems. They’re just up . . . oh, fuck, no. Tullian.’
Sendak looks towards the elevated deck jutting out of the cavern wall opposite the cubes, where he sees Blake standing alongside a guy in black robes.
Steinmeyer raises his decoherence rifle and takes aim. He gets off a shot just as Sendak throws up an arm to deflect it. The blast vaporises a section of console as the two figures dive for cover.
‘The hell you doing?’ Sendak demands, keeping hold of the barrel of Steinmeyer’s weapon. ‘That’s our friend up there.’
‘You don’t understand. He’s with—’
Steinmeyer is cut off as a creature erupts from the wreckage by their feet and sends both men sprawling to the floor, Sendak’s weapon clattering from his grip as he falls. Steinmeyer keeps hold of his, but only at the cost of an agonisingly awkward landing that snaps his ankle.
Blanking out the pain for one last desperate second, Steinmeyer manages to roll on to his back and fire his rifle, but only hits an upturned stack of servers, inches from where Sendak has righted himself into a crouch.
Sendak feels the wave of dust just before he sees the creature leap upon the professor, an army-issue Ka-Bar knife gripped in its teeth as it wrests the rifle from his hands and tosses it far among the rubble. Out of the corner of his eye, he locates the shotgun’s stock, only inches from his right hand. He stretches to tug it from where it is wedged amid the debris, only to discover, when he pulls it, that the stock is all that remains. The creature yanks back Steinmeyer’s head with one claw, exposing his throat and roaring out a battle cry as it raises the blade in the other.
The battle cry turns to one of pain as Adnan’s shotgun and Rosemary’s arrow make their interventions. The assailant is thrown backwards off Steinmeyer like a rag doll, its head exploding in a cloud of black.
Sendak watches Adnan step across to where the creature lands, pumping his weapon to finish it off if need be. Then his warning cry is swallowed by the storm as a second demon, larger than anything he has seen so far, emerges from cover and grabs Adnan from behind. It lifts him off the ground, gripped around both his upper arms, and hurls him into the black disc just as Rosemary fires her final arrow.
The arrow lodges in the creature’s back while it stares in apparent confusion at the portal, into which Adnan has disappeared instead of being violently repelled, as was presumably the creature’s intention. It then breaks off the arrow contemptuously, turns and begins stomping towards Rosemary.
Blake watches this unfold from above, his own warning cries lost in the tumult. He turns to Tullian, gripping the barrel of the Cardinal’s rifle and directing it below.
‘Shoot it. Shoot it, for God’s sake.’
Tullian hauls the weapon clear of Blake’s grip and shakes his head gravely.
‘This weapon has charge left for one shot, and I’m saving that for anyone who tries to reach these switches.’
Rosemary turns and looks for another weapon, but sees only Steinmeyer crawling hopelessly amid the wreckage, looking for his lost prototype. The creature halts briefly to pick a knife from the body of a dead soldier, before resuming its progress with singular intent. It is two yards away when a flat-screen monitor smashes into its head, dropped from somewhere above. This doesn’t floor it, but by the time it has recovered from the blow, it finds itself looking at Sendak as well as Rosemary.
Sendak moves in large sideways steps, waving his arms, drawing it away from the girl, towards where they came in.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he shouts. ‘Over here, you Gollum-looking sonofabitch.’
Sendak steps back through the doorway, brandishing a blade of his own. His opponent follows, at which point he hits a button on the wall and brings the doors together with a servo-assisted whine, locking the creature away from Rosemary and Steinmeyer, but also locking himself in a tight corridor with the thing. He scans his surroundings. All he sees is body parts and dead soldiers. The creature gives a roar, towering over him. Fucker’s eight feet if it’s an inch.
They both have Ka-Bars. Other than that, it doesn’t look like a fair match. He almost died here once before, long time ago. Maybe some things are just meant to be. Maybe you can outrun your fate for a while, but you can never escape it.
Blake leans over the console bank, having lost sight of Rosemary when she disappeared beneath the platform. Tullian is also intent on what he can and can’t see below, happier when he had Steinmeyer in his line of vision and knew he was safely isolated away from the controls. With the elevator out of commission, the only way up here is via the emergency ladder they just ascended, and that requires a journey back out of the Cathedral. Thus he’s searching the view beneath, but casting a regular eye back towards the door behind him, inset in the rock.
Blake thinks he hears a voice and strides across to the front of the platform, looking over the barrier closest to the portal. He sees Rosemary staring up, an arm around Steinmeyer, who looks racked with pain as he struggles to remain upright. Blake’s guess is he’s broken his leg.
‘You have to shut down the machine,’ Rosemary shouts.
Blake turns to look at Tullian and finds him right alongside, also staring down at these supplicants.
‘No,’ Tullian responds. ‘It must be destroyed.’
Steinmeyer summons up whatever strength it takes to shout through the strains of his agony.
‘Damn it, man, this thing isn’t just going to short a few fuses. It’s a nuclear device. It’s going to take out the entire mountain.’
‘Christ,’ Blake appeals. ‘I left twenty kids less than two mil
es from here.’
Tullian’s eyes bulge briefly but his expression remains intent.
‘He’s lying,’ he tells Blake. ‘He’d say anything to keep the gateway open. And even if he isn’t, then that doesn’t matter either. This is more important than individual lives. Their souls will be saved. And for their sacrifice, for our sacrifice, the reward will be truly great.’
Tullian steps away backwards, raising his weapon at Blake as he moves to protect the shutdown controls. That’s when Blake understands that Tullian’s belief is absolute. He is prepared to die for it; for and through his faith.
The question for Blake, the question he can no longer evade, is what does he believe?
He believes Steinmeyer isn’t lying, and he believes Tullian’s logic is correct in that God would reward anyone who made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat evil in His name. If Blake truly believes what he has so long professed to, then he will very soon be granted paradise, and reunited with those he has lost. Reunited with Gail. Reunited with the kids who died tonight. Reunited with Kane.
He offered Kane Pascal’s wager, and he refused, even in his final throes. Now Blake is facing Pascal’s wager as inverted by Sendak: Do you truly believe there’s an afterlife, and are thus content to sacrifice the life you’ve got here?
There are only atheists in foxholes.
No bet.
Blake flexes his thumb and powers up the pike as he swings it, sweeping it upwards and into Tullian’s rifle just before he pulls the trigger. The rifle fails to fire, blue sparks dancing around it for a moment before its LEDs fade to black.
‘Now step away from the controls,’ Blake tells him, waving the pike.
Tullian sighs gravely and bows his head in defeat, but it’s a feint. He changes his grip on the rifle, grabbing it by the barrel, and lunges at Blake, swinging it like a club. Blake reads it all the way, shifting his footing so that Tullian’s momentum sends him off-balance, spinning from a glancing impact against Blake’s side. He sprawls at speed towards the railings and tumbles over the edge, but Blake is able to extend the pike for him to grab on to. He levers it against the steel barrier, leaving Tullian dangling by one hand, thirty feet above the Cathedral floor.
The pulsing intensifies further, shaking loose rocks from the walls. This place really is going to go up, and soon.
‘Shut it down,’ Steinmeyer calls. ‘There’s no time to waste.’
Blake looks back. He can’t reach the console without letting go of the pike. The Cardinal stretches up with his other hand, seeking a second grip, and as he does so, something falls from his robes. A glass phial tumbles and spins towards earth, smashing against a metal crate.
The liquid proceeds to eat through the metal in a fizzing, steaming fury, the droplets that sprayed the concrete voraciously eating that too.
‘Oleum,’ shouts Steinmeyer. ‘Concentrated acid. He faked it. He switched the fucking phials.’
Blake stares down at Tullian, who has now established a second hold on the pike: clinging on to this life with both hands.
‘They aren’t demons.,’ Blake shouts. ‘You brutalised them. You made them demons.’
‘I know what they are,’ Tullian calls back. ‘They’re Satan’s agents just the same. Don’t you see? He’s the Deceiver. It’s Satan’s gambit that we drop our guard while his minions invade. The very fact that they are not demons is greater proof of his scheming. That’s why I had to convince the military to shut it down, at all costs.’
Blake thinks of Kane’s words to Guthrie, two lives tallied among Tullian’s ‘costs’.
If scientists found indisputable proof that there was no God, the Church wouldn’t miss a beat. It would simply say that this emergent proof was merely a fabrication to lead man astray . . .
‘He sabotaged the place,’ shouts Rosemary. ‘He let all of this happen. He killed everybody.’
‘You lied about everything. You’re the one who wouldn’t accept the evidence.’
‘It is the measure of our faith to believe in spite of evidence, Father. Satan is using science to seduce you. And only faith can save us from him.’
Another pulse sends more rocks tumbling, one of them smashing into the platform only feet away. Time’s up.
‘Science says you fall at ten metres per second squared,’ Blake tells him. ‘Let’s see if faith can save you from that.’
Blake lets go of the pike and lunges for the console.
Rosemary watches Tullian fall, looking away before he hits the ground, only he doesn’t; at least not directly. There is a flash of movement from close to one of the cubes, and Tullian is intercepted by a demon pouncing upon him in mid-air. They land in a tangle in front of the anomaly, the blue light of the pike crackling the air around them, before the demon rights itself and hurls Tullian, pike and all, through the portal.
The creature then turns to face Rosemary and Steinmeyer, roaring its vengeful intent as it charges forward.
Its head suddenly explodes in a splatter of black blood as several shots rip into it from the side. They both turn to see Sendak standing in the doorway, pointing a pistol: still gripped in the now severed hand of its previous owner.
Blake locates the Emergency Shutdown Sequence lever and flips it. An LED then lights up on a button close by, stating: ‘Confirm Emergency Shutdown?’
‘Damn straight,’ Blake says, and hits it.
The pulsing sound ceases immediately, the portal vanishing like a shadow when the light that cast it is snuffed out. There is still a powerful thrumming in the air, but it sounds steady, controlled and, most crucially, receding.
Blake takes a walk back to the barrier to check on those below, and on the floor at his feet he spots something else that must have fallen from Tullian’s robes during their struggle.
After a few seconds, the thrumming has died and the place is almost silently at peace. Then there comes a reverberating crash from the steel doors at the opposite end of the Cathedral.
‘Find cover,’ Sendak orders, raising his weapon, attached hand and all.
There is another crash, something very powerful bringing itself to bear upon the metal. Then, upon the third, the doors buckle and several soldiers storm through the gap: visored and faceless, carrying machine guns.
‘Drop your weapons and get down on the floor,’ the first of them commands.
Another of them spots Blake looking down from the platform.
‘You, hands in the air and come down here, now.’
Blake puts up his hands to indicate compliance, but is preparing to explain why he’s reluctant to undertake the second part when something occurs to him.
‘Say, you didn’t get here by helicopter, by any chance?’
‘Listen,’ Kirk says. ‘You hear that?’
Rocks nods. ‘Choppers.’
Upon this word there is an immediate clamour around the emergency doors.
The sound gets louder, then a few moments later they can see the lights of two aircraft coming over the trees.
The helicopters split paths and touch down either side of the wrecked compound. Soldiers spill out and immediately begin scouring the perimeter, taking down the last stray demons with machine-gun fire.
Then a group of four emerges belatedly from one chopper and proceeds towards the games hall.
Kirk drops the chainsaw and grabs one of the net-stands, dragging it from its lodging place through the door handles as Rocks removes its partner. He goes to throw the emergency doors wide apart, but finds they won’t budge. A glance through one of the panes reveals that two of the soldiers are barring the exit, and Kirk has to duck out of the way as the other pair use their rifle butts to smash out the glass.
The panes removed, it is the other ends of their weapons that are thrust through the resulting gaps. Kirk grabs one by the barrel, Rocks the other, angling them upwards while everyone scrambles back deeper inside the hall. Then the guns issue a series of hollow popping sounds and a number of grenades pinball around the walls and ceili
ng before bursting open in clouds of gas.
Kirk ducks down and picks up the chainsaw again. He’s got hold of the rip-cord when his legs give, and is unconscious by the time he hits the floor.
XXXIV
Lieutenant Rodriguez, the head of the lockdown team, climbs back aboard the helicopter and takes a seat opposite Blake, Sendak and Rosemary. Steinmeyer is lying on his back behind them, across a row of his own. As the chopper begins rising into the dawn sky, Blake looks below to the other side of the FTOF complex, where he can see soldiers carrying unconscious survivors out of the games hall and placing them aboard the second aircraft. Cameron and Marianne are distinct among them by having already been hooked up to IV bags.
‘They’ll all wake up in hospital,’ Rodriguez states. ‘Where they’ll be told there was a massive gas leak and subsequent explosion. The gas had hallucinogenic effects, manifest both before and after the blast, resulting in vivid memories of bizarre events which, clearly, couldn’t possibly have happened.’
‘They all had the same hallucinations?’ Sendak asks. ‘That ain’t gonna fly.’
‘Mutually reinforcing hysteria. Somebody shouted “monster” amid the chaos, and in their minds they all saw it. Cross-contamination of their recollections. They can’t be sure a memory is what they actually saw or what someone else claims to have seen. I’m betting it wouldn’t be a tough sell to suggest drugs and alcohol played a part too.’
Rosemary shakes her head with bitter disapproval.
‘I know it sounds shitty, but it’s for their own good,’ Rodriguez insists. ‘What would you rather they believed happened to them? Wouldn’t you prefer to wake up later and be assured the world still makes sense the way it used to?’
‘It’s not that I don’t wish someone could tell everyone the weird stuff never happened; it’s that I don’t believe it’ll work.’
‘It’ll work. It’ll work because they’ll want to believe our version.’
Rosemary looks down for a moment, her way of conceding the point. He’s right. They’ll resist it initially, but soon enough they’ll succumb to the reassurance the official explanation offers. She just wishes there was such an option open to her. She went into the lions’ den for her classmates and thought it was the hardest, bravest and most selfless thing she’s ever done, but she understands that a more arduous task still lies ahead. It is her burden now to know the truth but tell no one; her duty to maintain their mass delusion, to reinforce the security of a comforting belief she knows to be false.
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