by R. W. Holmes
“Perhaps the bigger ones are more malleable than we realize” Artemis continued. “If you could convince one to stand obediently by your side, the smaller ones would stay away like they're learning to now.”
“What you two chatting about?” Father Jacobs called to them from where he marched alongside Debra.
Kiki looked over to the priest, and then at the pistol in his hands that he still had yet to use. Grinning, she called back: “Which do you think is less dangerous, you, or the big ones?”
Father Jacobs looked back at Kiki confusedly, before forcing himself to take stock of the situation in a way that put his own fears aside.
“Now that you mention it... they are being awfully nice” the priest said nervously.
“We all need to be very careful” Kiki called out. “I think the big ones are trained. There's three following us around right now, and it might only take one word from a R'lyehan to have them all coming after us.”
“So what should we-,” Jacobs started.
A sharp whistle echoed from somewhere further into the warehouse.
“Uh oh...” Zinerva murmured as the larger, vertical-mouthed gugs dropped their attention towards the group and began charging towards where the whistle had come from.
From every angle, more and more of the enormous creatures could be seen hobbling along, each one eerily silent as they hurried to answer the call of some unseen master in the distance. The ghasts, meanwhile, had taken to getting as far away from the sound of the whistle as they could.
“I don't like this” said Grim.
“I've counted twelve of the big ones so far...” Debra added worriedly.
“Sauriel, Zinerva” called Gael. “I think we need the two of you to take point.”
“I agree” Sauriel said as he stepped forward.
“Oh, Hell yeah!” Zinerva said excitedly as her summoner backed away to join the others and Sauriel took his place. “Last time we did this, a shoggoth got wrecked.”
“You are not taking this seriously enough!” snapped Sauriel. “We have no idea what the cost of one of us perishing is yet.”
“Well, we both have our summoners” Zinerva replied smartly. “And something tells me Heaven gets their people up and running again just as quickly as Hell does.”
Sauriel audibly growled as he and Zinerva continued to lead the group forward. Eventually, the central 'elevator' pillar came into sight. It was large enough to hold eight ten foot by ten foot freight elevators, as well as a fifty by fifty foot super-freight elevator in the center. Just as the group began to round the elevator column's corner, they spied a group of R'lyehans doing the same on the far side.
And they had sixteen of the enormous, vertical-mouthed gugs with them.
Oddly enough, the R'lyehans actually handling the beasts were not the usual unnerving men-turned-monsters that accompanied Allen, but ordinary humans.
“Bottom of the purse” said Grim.
“Bottom of the purse” Debra agreed as she went to her handbag and pushed several boxes of ammo out of the way.
“What's at the bottom of the purse?” asked Kiki.
“These” Debra replied as both she and Grim pulled several industrial green cylindrical devices out of her purse. They were a little larger than an inhaler, and had a pin holding a clamp mechanism tight at the top.
“Those are grenades” said Gael.
“Those are grenades!” Zinerva exclaimed excitedly.
“THEY'VE GOT GRENADES!” one of the R'lyehans in the distance cried in alarm. “PULL BACK!”
Debra and Grim had already gone through a very cleanly synchronized motion though, one that involved both of them taking two grenades into each hand, and then pulling out the pins for each with the few fingers they had left to spare.
“Zinerva, cut them off!” snapped Gael.
Zinerva hopped forward, twin flares of yellow and purple flame already simmering through her teeth as she grinned wildly and hocked a gout of fire forward like a pygmy dragon. The flames crept out rapidly, soaring across the floor even as Debra and Grim took a few steps forward to hurl the eight grenades they'd prepared, before retreating back behind the others.
The flames encircled the R'lyehans and their gugs, eliciting groans of dismay and panic, which only intensified as the clanking of grenades bouncing across the floor reached their ears and came to a stop mere feet from them.
“YE-,” Debra began to yell as the explosion happened, until the enormous arm of an unseen gug reached out from where she'd come and clobbered her forward.
Everyone cried out in alarm as Debra was thrown ten feet by the force of the punch and left unceremoniously splayed out on the hard, concrete unyielding concrete warehouse floor.
Grim rounded on the beast, striking it with his enormous troll fist.
It did little, and when his furious second strike came around, the gug caught his arm with ease and ripped it off as though it weren't there.
“ZINERVA!” Gael screamed.
“SAURIEL!” Jacobs added.
Fire and light converged on the gug at the same time, roasting it away as Grim fell back and clutched feebly at his bare, armless shoulder. Amazingly, the troll found the strength of will to focus his efforts somewhere useful and began clambering over to Debra.
“Don't be dead, don't be dead, don't you dare be dead!” Grim bellowed shrilly.
Kiki and Artemis were by his side as he reached Debra, and all three immediately breathed a sigh of relief when Grim flipped her over and she coughed.
“Oh shit...” Debra groaned miserably. “We must be at a barbecue, because my ribs are done.”
“My arm will take a while to regenerate” Grim added worriedly. “We should-,”
“This is what happens when you make light of the situation!” exclaimed Sauriel, not about to let the lesson go unlearned. “What if it were you, Gael? Or you, Father? Where would we be?”
“I'd be laughing” Debra admitted with a chuckle, before immediately regretting the laughter. “Oh geeze, this has to be so funny when it happens to someone else.”
“There is nothing funny about this” Kiki said as she increased her size and scooped Debra up. “I'm going to take them outside, and we'll send Grim back in when his arm grows back.”
“Your arms grow back?” Zinerva queried confusedly.
“I am a troll” said Grim. “Unless it's from fire, I regenerate. That's how it works.”
“Let's take a moment to reflect on what Sauriel said about not taking this too seriously” said Father Jacobs. “Obviously, some of you are talented, or experienced, or lucky-,”
“Lucky” said Gael. “The other two came later.”
“That's not the point” said Jacobs.
“But it's probably a universal sentiment” Debra muttered as Kiki began carrying her away. “Good luck! Break someone else's leg!”
Father Jacobs looked on in disbelief as everyone else took Debra and Grim's departure in stride and turned their attention forward again. “Sauriel...” he muttered worriedly.
“They are mad” Sauriel replied pessimistically. “But they are all we have.”
“Also, we're standing right here” said Zinerva.
“STOP MAKING JOKES!” Jacobs bellowed angrily. “LOOK AROUND YOU! A WOMAN WAS NEARLY BEATEN TO DEATH BY A GOD DAMNED MONSTER, AND-,”
“Inside voice” Artemis boomed back reservedly.
“And you're all making light of it” Jacobs finished. “Have you all forgotten what you saw in those pictures? What some of us saw in person? When are you lunatics going to start taking all of this seriously?”
Gael laughed aloud and shook his head. “This is a place for crazy people” he said plainly. “And we all belong here. Every single one of us.”
“For the love of God, Gael, listen to what you're saying” said Jacobs. “You really have lost it!”
Gael shrugged. “I'm aware things are bad. They're probably going to get wor-,”
A tremor suddenly wrack
ed the entirety of the multilevel warehouse structure, its violent wobbling so intense that everyone was thrown prone to the sound of concrete groaning and snapping echoed through the empty space.
Artemis stood up first and looked about himself. The floor, the walls, the pillars supporting the structure, it was all laden with deep, unnerving cracks. For a hundred yards in every direction, the sound of loose bits of stone could be heard clattering to the ground.
“God damn it...” Jacobs murmured uncertainly. “Does this mean we're supposed to press onward more quickly, or get the Hell out here?”
“Maybe the R'lyehans have destroyed their things on this floor” Artemis ventured. “We may have already foiled their plans. Regardless, we will have to check.”
Everyone but Sauriel watched Artemis press on despite the grim tidings of the veritable earthquake that had just nearly succeeded in shaking their building to rubble, and the angel himself joined the demon.
“Remember when he was the crazy goat monster that killed my friend?” Gael asked Zinerva as he, she, and Father Jacobs began following their stalwart companions.
“Yeah,” Zinerva said fondly. “I burned a hole through him.”
Gael looked to Father Jacobs then and added, “How crazy is it that he's the level-headed one in the room right now?”
“You're still not taking this seriously...” Jacobs murmured angrily.
“I'm doing this willingly because it's important” replied Gael, a slight bitterness revealed in his tone. “And this is after just about everyone in the room has tried to kill me once before. I think I'm taking it pretty seriously if I'm still here.”
Artemis and Sauriel were eventually joined by Zinerva, who perched herself upon the same one of Artemis's shoulders Kiki had called her own, and the three took the group around the great, central, elevator column of the building.
First, they came upon the scene of destruction wrought by Debra and Grim's eight grenades. Most of the gugs were still relatively whole, if not dead or dying already. The R'lyehans themselves, though, had been reduced to an indistinguishable, disgusting mess.
“Excuse my twisted sense of joy, but seeing them reduced to this after what they did to our allies is quite rewarding” said Artemis.
Sauriel scowled slightly as he looked at the carnage they walked through and said, “That is twisted.” He then recalled what had happened to Petyr and Glen, before adding, “But also understandable.”
What they found on the other side was an enormous steel wall erected from floor to ceiling. It was bare, and had been buffed to a mirror finish, which incidentally made it very difficult to really see from outside. Sitting at the wall's center was a lone steel door, equally shiny, and opened only by the use of a retina scanner sitting mounted onto its center.
“So much for them destroying everything” said Zinerva.
“Forcing our way in will make too much noise” said Artemis. “We cannot move quickly if everyone left inside shows up to block our way.”
“Well that little gadget in the middle scans eyes” Zinerva replied as she hopped down off of Artemis and stepped over to Sauriel, and then look up at him expectantly.
“What?” the angel spat indignantly, as though Zinerva's mere presence was enough to upset him.
“I need to borrow your sword for a second” replied Zinerva.
“Impossible!” snapped Sauriel. “This sword empowers the faithful by purging away all but the pieces of themselves that are divine in the eyes of God. If a demon were to hold it, then by its very definition it would reduce them to nothing.”
Zinerva frowned. “Do you have a less anti-demon sword?” she asked. “Maybe a knife, or a-,”
Sauriel produced a small dagger from the belt that came with his holy armor and passed it to Zinerva.
“Oh your God! I didn't think you'd actually have one!” Zinerva said as she held the brilliantly gleaming knife aloft.
“He's your God too, hellspawn” snapped Sauriel.
Zinerva laughed as she skipped back over the scene of carnage left in their wake and began hunting for R'lyehans with their heads still intact. “I'm an atheist” she said mischievously.
“Zinerva, be nice” said Gael.
“How could you possibly be an atheist after everything we've seen?” Father Jacobs challenged incredulously. “It's...”
“She does things to make people upset” said Gael.
“I am an imp” Zinerva said as she pounced upon what wasn't quite a body and vigorously worked her blade into it. “Hah!” she proclaimed after a few moments. Held in her hand was the severed head of a R'lyehan, their expression still twisted into fear, and a small Hitler mustache dabbed in on their upper lip.
“I am a person who always looks on the bright side of things” Father Jacobs said as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to covered his mouth with. Zinerva ran by then, and the sight of the severed head she held and its lolling eyes nearly elicited a retch from the priest. “Today, I am thankful we have someone like her to do the disgusting work I cannot.”
Zinerva reached the door and frowned, realizing the scanner was too high for her to reach, and begrudgingly tossed the head to Artemis. She then tossed Sauriel's dagger back to the angel as Artemis stepped up and pressed the severed head's eyes to the retina scanner.
“I bet you're going to be the only person in Heaven with a dagger used by a demon” Zinerva beamed.
“Yes... I'll be the talk of the barracks” Sauriel joked unhappily.
A loud, friendly ping emanated from the door as the scanner finished scanning, and the door 'clicked' to announce that it was no longer locked. Cautiously, Artemis reached out and pushed the door open to reveal sterile white, fluorescently lit hallways within.
And no one waiting for them.
Zinerva and Sauriel stepped in first, followed by Gael and Jacobs, and then finally Artemis, who silently decided he'd be watching everyone's back.
It wasn't long before they ran into someone, or more specifically, several someones. They were human though, and armed with nothing but pens and clipboards as they shuffled through the halls in white suits like full body gloves. Safety goggles covered their eyes, some of which had been turned up to their foreheads temporarily, and safety masks covered their mouths and made them nearly unidentifiable.
The group spotted Zinerva and Sauriel as they led the way, stared for a moment, and then quickly shuffled off as if they hadn't seen anything.
“Do we go after them?” wondered Zinerva.
“We need to find out why the building was shaking” said Gael. “Let's just say we're reinforcing their good behavior by not bothering them for now.”
“That sounds like a profoundly stupid idea” said Jacobs. “These people are dangerous and Hell bent on no longer being people.”
“Eiffel Facility” a mechanical voice rang out over some unseen intercom system. “The prime objective of this site has been accomplished, and evacuation is now under way. Please head to the nearest starport and evacuate the planet to a safe house. The Milky Way Galaxy is now under quarantine. Anyone not at a safe house within the next two hundred hours will be locked out and left to suffer the end.”
Gael looked to the others confusedly. “The end of what?”
“I don't know” said Sauriel. “But Heaven has just insisted that I return immediately. They're saying that we're too late.”
“Well we're not trusting that that's actually Heaven, are we?” asked Father Jacobs. “It's all too possible someone is trying to give us bad information, that was what you told me earlier.”
“We need to move” Artemis declared as he stepped up to the front of the group. “I have a very bad feeling about this. Something about the fear is very familiar...”
On several more occasions, Gael and the others found more R'lyehans in lab coats or hazard suits moving about the facility, and while in most cases they looked for alternative route rather than confront them, a select few dared to hold their hands up and simply
shimmy by them.
Sauriel made demands of them on where to go, but the information was always freely given. It was always a gesture, and it was always accompanied by a horrified look. Of the few rooms they managed to peek into, they found mountains of lab equipment that had been tossed about by the earlier quakes. Oftentimes, R'lyehans could be seen crushed beneath them.
The whole experience was surreal and nightmarish, like a dream of heading towards something terrifying that kept making you increasingly nervous, but never actually getting there.
Whatever the R'lyehans had done, it seemed some of them were pushed to the limits in the process. This fact was only further highlighted when one of the rooms they passed featured a R'lyehan with a pipe through his gut lying on his side and waiting for the end.
“Hey, you alright?” Zinerva called to him.
The others looked on in surprise as she scampered across scattered tables and through a puddle of chemicals that smelled of something ominous.
“What's wrong, pal?” Zinerva asked with a smile. “None of your buddies want to bail you out?”
The R'lyehan looked to Zinerva and shrugged. “You mind finishing me off?” he asked. “It's the waiting that's the worst part.”
“No, I don't think so” Zinerva said as she raised a hand to the pipe pinning the R'lyehan. “There's been a lot of blood and murder today, and after spending most of my existence in Hell I really try to mix things up a little.”
The R'lyehan, and everyone else, looked on in shock as Zinerva wrapped her hand around the pipe and melted it. She then unceremoniously hauled the R'lyehan up, ripping him free of the pipe still protruding from him and earning a cry of pain.
Zinerva then clapped a hand to either side of the oozing hole still through the R'lyehans abdomen. “Right, this is gonna hurt” she said as she pressed back against the escaping crimson. “So, you know, sorry about that...”
The R'lyehan screamed as Zinerva's hands lit up with flame, cauterizing his wound shut and leaving him to collapse to his knees and end up eye level with Zinerva once more.
“There you go!” Zinerva said brightly. “All better. Now get the Hell out of here.”