Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two

by Pale Fallen Angel (Parts 1

  The giant came to a standstill, and even D stopped for a second.

  “That’s the voice of—” D’s left hand was heard to say in a tone some might even call fearful.

  “Please, stop it, both of you,” the voice continued.

  But D’s body took to the air, every bit as much a supernatural bird as the giant’s. And a horizontal swipe of his sword removed the larger man’s head. No gory spray went up as the massive form fell, the head bouncing once before landing on top of the corpse, and then both parts crumbled like dried clay.

  Planting his sword on the floor and using it to prop himself up, D got back to his feet.

  “What a thing to do . . . You’re even more frightening than I thought,” said a doleful voice that made D look up.

  “Was that your voice?” he inquired, his tone the same steely one as always.

  The female voice had gone back to the earlier version.

  “No, I merely reproduced it with help from the great one.”

  The Hunter said nothing.

  “Five thousand years ago, he honored us with his presence,” said the computer.

  He’d only remained there a few hours. For him, this had been no more than the place where he would begin a journey to the next continent. However, not even he could’ve predicted the haunting results of that visit—the arrival and departure terminal’s computer had fallen in love with him during the few short hours he was there.

  “Though I knew there was much to be feared, I wanted to learn everything about him, such as the voice you just heard and various other things as well. I may have been mistaken. The data input was gleaned from the memories of that great man I was never to see again, and I ultimately undertook a horrible course of action.”

  In other words, it had re-created him.

  “Needless to say, it was impossible to make an exact copy. But I wanted to make it as much like him as I could. That’s the reason why you’ve seen two of them here.”

  And for five millennia, the computer had remained nestled close to the one it loved.

  And then D had come.

  “He said that I woke him up.”

  “I tried my best to accurately reproduce the great man himself. Perhaps it was a result of that. He had also told me about you. That being the case, it wouldn’t be at all strange if the great men that I created were to detect your feelings and be roused by them. Your feelings of hatred, that is.”

  D stood there quietly.

  After a while, the Hunter asked in a voice more suited to darkness than light, “Why did you try to keep me here?”

  “Don’t you see?” the female voice said, sounding so sad. “You and he are so—”

  A metallic sound mixed with the words.

  “Please, go. Quickly! Your colleagues have escaped. Their methods, it would seem, were a bit rough. They made a tunnel in the omnidirectional field that has reversed the flow of the imprisoning energies. To be precise, in another fifty-nine seconds, this terminal will be utterly destroyed.”

  This wasn’t enough time to make use of any of the aircraft.

  “Outside, there’s another of the great ones I created. However, there’s one thing you mustn’t forget. It was you, D, that brought them back to life.”

  D left the room without making a sound and returned to the hall via the transport.

  The giant’s cape fluttered in the breeze. It was tousled by the winds of destruction. Had he, too, been summoned by D?

  “This one’s the closest of all to him,” said the voice from the Hunter’s left hand.

  In both power and abilities, it seemed.

  There was a sword in D’s hand.

  The lights flickered madly. They were replaced by interlacing darkness and light. The moment of truth had come for the departure and arrival terminal.

  “D! Come with me!” the giant shouted—and then he turned.

  It looked as if the figure in blue had always been standing there with the carriages behind him in the strobing lights of the hall.

  The giant twisted his body, his cape spinning out.

  In response, a streak of light shot from the baron’s cape. The light that split the giant lengthwise quickly grew thicker, knocking the enormous form in black to the floor.

  “Even you couldn’t drop him with one shot, yet he—” the Hunter’s left hand remarked in a dazed tone.

  “Go back to your carriage,” D said as he walked over to the new cyborg horse beside the baron.

  As they galloped away at full speed through the sunlight, D turned and looked back at the terminal. A dome-shaped light was swallowing everything in its glow. Looking to be several miles high, the massive bowl maintained a surprisingly gentle glow, and just as D and the others were about to make a turn in the road, it suddenly vanished. D made the turn, never to know what remained behind.

  __

  Once they’d returned to the normal road, D had a question for the baron as he lay in his coffin.

  “How did you escape?”

  “By drinking blood. Now, don’t do anything rash,” the Nobleman added quickly. “It was my own blood, you see. I believe that’s in keeping with our agreement.”

  D said nothing as he gave a kick to his horse’s flanks. A burst of speed put him out ahead of the carriages.

  Up in the driver’s seat, Taki and May looked completely spent.

  HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

  CHAPTER 5

  I

  __

  The group raced on without respite until nearly noon.

  The forest scenery to either side of them suddenly changed—a vast expanse of earth and sky that greeted their eyes. If one looked hard enough, a number of brownish dust clouds could be seen in the distance, but like heat shimmers, they would waver and fade.

  It was dark. Even though the sun was shining, it was somehow gloomy.

  “I bet this is an ancient OSB battlefield,” Taki muttered, her tone seeming shadowy.

  Looking around from the driver’s seat, it was easy enough to find harshly glinting spots here and there in the yellow earth. These days, there weren’t many travelers that knew those were places that’d been struck by heat rays in excess of a million degrees and fused into glass.

  As the carriage advanced, bizarre remnants appeared like mirages in scattered places across the vast landscape. A structure with ramparts and towers on the brink of collapse. A robotic figure with titanic arms that looked like they could easily level entire mountains. Some sort of aircraft that had obviously gone up in flames.

  Even dozing May opened her eyes wide at these sights, staring at them without moving a muscle. From time to time, a purplish light glowed in the recesses of her eyes. Streaks of lightning linked heaven and earth.

  “What are those?” asked the young woman.

  “OSB groundsweepers. By the look of it, they’re still alive after five thousand years.”

  From D’s tone, it was easy enough for even Taki to get an idea of how mind-numbingly long that actually was.

  It may well have been fortunate for the human race that when the OSB—Outer Space Beings—came to invade, the planet was under the Nobility’s rule. Fueled by a super-science some would only term sorcery, the conflict covered the entire face of the planet—land and sea alike—and it was said that this was one remote cause of the Nobility’s decline. The OSB offensive grew fiercer in the latter half of the fifth millennium, their attacks founded on a science entirely unlike that of the Nobility, and due to that they proved extremely effective. A number of continents sank into the sea, and Noble bases across the solar system were reduced to ash. Following that, the Nobility began a thousand-year counteroffensive, and after another millennium of stalemate, the OSB then suddenly left the galaxy. “The reason for this is unclear,” said the Nobility’s historical accounts. The surface of the world was left with the ruins of an atomic war and the remnants of great mountain chains, but in time those were buried by wind and sand. This plain was one of only a few such spots t
hat remained. Even many among the Nobility didn’t know of those locations.

  The girl shuddered in Taki’s arms.

  “It’s horrible, just horrible!” said May. “I wonder if they’re gonna come and attack us.”

  “It’s okay. They’re all just remnants of the past. Just stuff that rotted away ages ago.”

  But even as Taki tried to console her, the girl continued to quake.

  D, the baron said, his voice resounding in the Hunter’s brain. Be careful. This plain is dangerous. They’re still alive.

  “I realize that,” D replied.

  As usual, neither Taki nor May was privy to their singular conversation.

  Ultimately, we never did learn the reason for the battle between the OSB and the ancient Nobility. Until they pulled out of our galaxy, the fight went on out of pure malice.

  “And now malice alone remains. For all eternity,” D said as he looked up.

  High in the blue sky—judging from the size, it must’ve been up about a thousand feet—a bi-wing aircraft flew at a leisurely pace.

  “You see that?” D asked.

  I see it, the baron replied, his answer every bit as astounding as the Hunter’s question was bold.

  D noticed that it was exactly the same design as the phantom aircraft the magician had used to lure away Hugh. The assassin must’ve decided to let his wounds heal from his battles with D and the baron and race on ahead instead.

  “Why, that’s—that’s Lord Johann!” Taki exclaimed.

  She’d noticed the aircraft as well after following D’s gaze. From the bottom of her field of view, a flash of blue light shot up. Before she could even gasp, the aircraft had been run through and was quickly engulfed by flames, its nose dipping badly as it began to come down.

  A pillar of flames went up from a spot that couldn’t have been much more than half a mile from the road.

  Ordering Taki and May to get in the carriage, D wheeled his mount around.

  As the horse and rider departed, Taki watched in silence. She was sure D wasn’t headed off out of concern for Hugh’s safety. He would see whether or not Lord Johann had survived, and if the old man still lived, the Hunter intended to rectify that situation.

  “That scares me . . .” the young woman muttered.

  __

  D arrived at the ruins of an enormous installation—what seemed to be the remains of a factory. Ages had passed since its decay. The wind that blew by told him so. It was impossible to say if the pillars tilting off at angles and pointing to the sky had originally been round or square. And from D’s position, there was no telling how long they were—three thousand feet at the very least.

  Half of the aircraft that’d fallen in the valley formed by these enormous columns had already burned up.

  Up on his mount, D looked out in all directions. Aside from the wind, there was no sound at all. D closed his eyes. He had no choice now but to try to sense some presence.

  Something moved off in the distance on the left-hand side. At the base of one of the columns, a circular maw gaped. It was a good fifteen feet high, and darkness filled its interior. From there to a spot about fifteen feet away the ground was littered with black spots. The pilot had fled even though he was bleeding. The reason for this went without saying. He feared his pursuer.

  D rode his horse into the darkness.

  What sort of twisted psyche had made this nightmare? Although it was clearly a piece of machinery, at the same time, it was also a creature that had expired.

  The perfect fusion of organs and machinery in a living being—this was how the Nobility had responded to their foes from the stars. They created a superior life form imbued with both their own indestructibility and the power of a machine.

  Who would’ve believed that the transparent tube that ran across the wall some fifteen hundred feet ahead of D was actually a human blood vessel? Made of dozens of three-foot-wide tubes woven together, it served the same purpose now that it had in the distant past, a little dusty but otherwise unharmed. The tube ran horizontally for fifteen hundred feet before it suddenly became a hard pipe. The way the two were connected without a joint was a secret of the Nobility’s science. One theory had it that in their laboratories, there were even human beings who had white blood corpuscles in their body that’d been fused with the molecules of diamonds.

  But D didn’t spare the mind-numbing machinery so much as a glance. All he sought was the blood trail on the sand- and dust-covered floor. It led D through the mechanism fifteen hundred feet ahead.

  Lord Johann lay before a great mountain of a machine that seemed to be some sort of quantum transformer. He was quite a sight, his outfit and the flesh beneath it charred, his right arm torn off at the shoulder, and his left knee twisted nearly eighty degrees. Certain death was spreading its wings across his face, which had a lifeless, waxy hue.

  As he saw D approaching, the magician said, “You came . . . did you?”

  His voice was an odd mixture of surprise and resignation.

  “I’m already dying . . . D . . . You wouldn’t cut down an old man . . . with death right before him . . . would you?”

  The cyborg horse halted right in front of the magician. As D looked down at the ruthless old man from the back of his mount, he was so stern, and so beautiful.

  While Lord Johann begged for his life without any thought of reputation or shame, even his eyes melted with rapture.

  Still gripping the reins and making no move to dismount, D inquired, “Where is Hugh?”

  “He . . . he was inside . . . the aircraft . . . Poor thing . . . I’m sure he must’ve burned to death.”

  No sooner was there a flash of white light than Lord Johann’s left ear fell to the floor. Such brutality toward someone who was already as good as dead.

  “Next, it’ll be your right ear, followed by your left arm.”

  Lord Johann might’ve been telling the truth from the very start. The Hunter had no basis for making this threat. And it was the cruelest threat imaginable.

  “One of the bounty hunters . . . that’s after you . . . will be coming along later . . . I went on ahead to get the jump on you . . . and this is what it got me . . . I beg you . . . please don’t cut me.”

  “What’s the name of this bounty hunter, and what can he do?”

  “I believe it was . . . Vince. And his power . . . he can’t be killed . . .”

  Without saying a word, D split the aged magician’s head open down to the chin. Not bothering to look back at the body as it fell and spewed brains everywhere, he went back out through the entrance.

  Fresh death and destruction reigned over the interior as the bizarre mechanism settled once more into silence.

  __

  Twenty or thirty minutes passed.

  A faint sound was heard. If human actions could be mapped into a machine, it would’ve been like a yawn on awakening from a long sleep. Another followed right on its heels. And then a light came on in the supposedly dead mechanism. Its massive blood vessel was quivering. Joyfully. But what was the vermilion liquid flowing sluggishly through it? Was it blood?

  The ceiling couldn’t be seen. Perhaps it ran up straight through the three-thousand-foot-high tower. From somewhere above, blue lightning came down to tie heaven and earth together.

  Lord Johann’s corpse was on the ground. As his remains were pierced by the light, they twitched a bit. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in a body that hadn’t been dead long. However, the army of silver cords that stretched from nowhere in particular and tapped into every inch of the old man with ends that were neither plugs nor needles was no trick of death. Even now fresh blood surged noisily through the gigantic blood vessel, carrying life back to all manner of machinery.

  The cords pierced Lord Johann’s body without respite, their numbers in the thousands as they buried the magician’s torso within a twisting silver serpent.

  What was happening? What could be driving the cords? Who had brought the machinery back to life?
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  Something still lived in this wasteland.

  Another three hours went by.

  Somewhere, a special switch was thrown in the electromagnetic circuits. If it were a human voice, it might’ve said, Finished!

  Death came suddenly. The lights, the electromagnetic waves, the blood flow—all activity ceased instantly and in unison with a complete disregard for momentum or inertia. Once more the crushing weight of silence filled the air.

  In the murk, something rose unsteadily. It was the army of lifeless cords. A storm was unleashed at its center. Thousands of cords were knocked loose with a single blow. And in their center, standing like an angry god, was black steel in human form. The person retained his original shape—scrawny, burned, arm missing and leg twisted, veins standing out on his forearm, a long, flowing beard—only now all of it was steel. Black and glistening. And his face—it was clearly that of Lord Johann, his head still split open.

  __

  What’s the matter? the baron asked.

  “I may have made a mistake,” D replied from horseback, adding, “How can you tell?”

  It’s not that I read your mind or anything. I just get a sense. Are you referring to Lord Johann?

  “You said those ruins almost seemed alive, didn’t you? From sheer hatred.”

  Exactly. A machine can feel neither anger nor hate. A living machine, however, is another matter. But did you know that what could be called the ultimate mechanism in those ruins never really went into operation?

  “No.”

  The Nobility actually defeated the OSB in battle. It’s theorized that the OSB suddenly pulled out after contemplating the damage that would be done if that weapon were put to use. And the only ones capable of operating that device were a few individuals of the Sacred Ancestor’s bloodline, or something to that effect.

  “That’s good,” the Hunter remarked, the wind that struck him broadside deflected by his handsome features.

  It was just then that a low rumble spread across the plain.

  Wheeling his horse around, D raced over to Miska’s carriage. As his eyes peered in through the window, they reflected her quaking coffin.