Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno

by Shane Jiraiya Cummings

  Leaving the car and its occupant behind, Damon took a draft of water from the fresher of the two canteens and continued on his way.

  For the first time in what seemed an eternity, and certainly the first time since the cataclysmic Fire consumed Australia, dark clouds loomed on the western horizon. They were unusual for late summer, and formed a low purple-grey band across the sky like a spreading bruise.

  Somewhere ahead, the phoenix was moving towards those clouds.

  Like the glittering fields of glass, he took the far-off storm to be a good omen.

  He kicked up a swirl of dust as he ploughed through a half-formed dust-devil, and picked up his pace until he held to a loping run: a grit-covered figure, like the ash itself had risen up in human form to follow the centre-line of the Great Eastern Highway, aiming straight for the heart of a storm.

  #

  The glass shards shone red and rusty in the afternoon sun. Damon had stopped paying them any mind when they lost their diamond-like lustre. The morning's blessing of a sparkling blanket had subsided with the light. As the afternoon stretched towards evening, and the shadows with it, the fields of glass reminded him too much of thousands of little infernos.

  Ash and dust swept across the barren belt of fields, sweeping his optimism away with them. Normally, he'd catch the first glimpse of the phoenix around mid-afternoon. He always expended his last reserves of energy when he saw it, breaking into a run, or a trot on days of excessive foot-soreness or fatigue, in the hopes of finally catching his elusive target.

  But today was different. Despite his burst of enthusiasm and speed for much of the morning, the afternoon brought only dark clouds in the distance and nothing of the phoenix. Only now, with dusk and its perils looming, did he glimpse the fiery beast on the horizon.

  A final charge of adrenalin coursed through his system when he spotted it, along with a flood of memories. Fragments, really—Diana at home, just doing the little things, Toby at soccer, and Jen woefully miscast as a nun in her last school play, The Sound of Music. It was such a short time ago and yet a lifetime from where he found himself now. The memories were dull, duller than ever before. Shadows and teeth were creeping into his mind in their place.

  He kept to the centre of the highway, even though the phoenix travelled the glass path furrowed into the fields to the south. Their courses ran parallel, and he knew from firsthand experience that the two paths would continue to shadow one another until they converged at Northam.

  The ruins of the once-great Kalgoorlie water pipeline lay between them. The pipeline was shattered in many places and stood as a collection of disparate steel tubes, appearing as though monstrous children had laid their construction set by the side of the road. Water had long since stopped flowing through the pipeline.

  With the phoenix following the Fire's trail, and he the highways, their paths occasionally diverged. While the Fire's passage criss-crossed the land, Damon's shortcuts—the roads that intertwined with the inferno's wake—often gained him ground on the phoenix. This leg of his journey, so close to the beginning, and maybe so close to the end, brought the equation down to a sprint. The Fire's passage and the Great Eastern Highway, two serpents tattooed onto the earth, ran together until they joined at the horizon.

  With the sun setting on another day and the phoenix still well ahead, Damon understood he would eventually lose this race—unless something changed.

  Dogged despite the aches and cramps that played through his muscles, Damon kept on running. The sun dipped steadily lower before his eyes, disappearing into the band of storm clouds that taunted him from afar. The early gloom hampered his sprint, with the occasional shaft of light spearing through the clouds to impede him further. He blindly stumbled forward, losing sight of the phoenix to a cluster of claw-like trees and the sun's glare. Instead, he focused on the road markings, always sticking to the doubled centre lines. Here and there, the lines had been scoured away by the heat, but never for too long. They always reappeared further down the road.

  With his eyes to the ground from the glare, and his near-exhaustion, he barely avoided running straight into a blackened lump sprawled across the road. At the last moment, he pulled up, his intuition warning him before any of his senses.

  The mass was larger than a bus, even larger than a road-train, with most of it spilled out across the pipeline and the field beyond. It split the pipe with its bulk and blocked the road.

  "Shit, not now!" Damon blinked the grit from his eyes, but couldn't dislodge the flare stains from the sun. The shape was twice his height and oddly irregular, like a huge tentacle of coal, something akin to a land-locked eel.

  He didn't know exactly what it was, but he didn't need to know, either. It was simply the charred remains of some anonymous monster, a roadblock between him and his goal. He didn't care for the details. The monsters, as few and far between as they were, were either food or shelter now. The Fire had seen to that.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Damon trudged up to the thing and found his first few handholds. Ash came away at his touch and was snatched by the wind, but harder materials remained: shell and bone. He wedged a hand between two shell plates, found a foothold, and hoisted himself up. Within moments, he was atop the carcass. He caught his breath for a second and then slid down some plating to the other side. A rain of ash trailed in his wake.

  The ash swirled, finding its way into his nose. He coughed a short, hard cough, wiped at his face, and then scanned the area for a campsite.

  The highway stretched on to the sunset and trees were sparse. No signs of human habitation could be seen for kilometres. He was left with the road, the wind, the monster carcass, and the pipeline.

  The lower edge of the sun crossed the border between earth and sky and bled into the horizon.

  The phoenix responded, seemingly absorbing the dusk to shimmer like a bonfire in the distance.

  As the shadows stretched with sunset, Damon studied the pipeline. The monster had smashed the closest section of pipe in death, leaving a jagged, uneven tear. The rest of this pipeline section was intact and proceeded without obvious ruptures alongside the highway for as far as he could see.

  A howl shattered the silence and Damon's thoughts. It was carried on the wind as little more than a whisper, similar to the one he heard in his loneliest moments, but rose in pitch into that familiar hunting cry. The one that chilled him to the core.

  He hurried over to the shorn-off end of the pipe, aware that the shadow of the dead monster writhed of its own accord, and stuffed his pack inside the gloom. He rushed back to the beast's carcass and wrenched at its shell plating. He pulled with all his strength, fuelled by desperation as the wolves' howl prickled at the base of his skull.

  The plating didn't come free.

  Wolves snarled as they fought to tear themselves clear of the shadow.

  Damon leveraged himself on the corner of a small plate at the base of some sort of vestigial limb, the nub of a tentacle or arm, perhaps. With one foot planted on the creature's flank, he tugged at the plate with the sum of his strength. His full bodyweight was levered as he planted his other foot on the monster and heaved.

  The plating came away with a metallic snap. Damon was thrown to the dirt and grunted from the impact. The giant scale was cradled in his arms.

  Snarls from behind turned him around. He shifted in the dirt, fighting for breath, with the monster's scale held like a shield across his chest.

  One of the wolves was almost free. Its snarl reverberated through his bones.

  Without a second to lose, Damon rolled and reclaimed his feet, while nursing bruised ribs and a throbbing back. He then started wriggling, feet first, into the pipe. It was a snug fit.

  "Ow!" he cried. The jagged end of the pipe tore into his leg. The pain shot through his leg and refused to subside. Every shimmy, every wriggle as he squeezed himself deeper into the pipe radiated waves of pain. It felt for all the world like climbing into a maw as monstrous and terrible as those bayi
ng for his death.

  The wolves had, at last, torn themselves free of the shadows. They closed in for the kill like three streaks of black lightning.

  Damon barely had time to register their charge. He jammed himself fully into the abyss of the pipe, kicking his pack further in to gain the extra few centimetres he needed. Darkness closed in around him as he pulled the monster's armoured plate in with him.

  He dragged it into place until it wedged tight inside the pipe. It was an imperfect seal—traces of twilight seeped in through fist-sized gaps—but it did the job.

  In a heartbeat, all light in his world was snuffed out, replaced by jaws that snapped at his makeshift shield.

  They snapped at his fingers, tore at the monster's scale. Their snarls boomed through the pipe, threatening to rupture his eardrums.

  Teeth sought his knuckles time and again in probing attacks but the scale kept the wolves' muzzles at bay. With their jaws only millimetres away, his fingers grew numb from their icy auras.

  "Leave me alone!" Damon screamed.

  The snarls intensified, fuelled by the edge of panic in his voice.

  Jaws darker than the pipe's gloom darted in and out in frenetic bursts, allowing the twilight to strobe. As one set of jaws sought to fill one of the gaps between shell and pipe, another tussled with the edge of the shell. Serrated shadows gripped his shield.

  The shell plate began to give, scraping the top of the pipe as it moved on makeshift hinges.

  "No!" Damon screamed. "You can't!"

  He punched at the muzzle and slid his fingers along the edge to steady his shield and wedge it harder into the pipe.

  Pain and numbness shot up his arm. He grunted and snatched his hand back. A gash was torn out of his middle finger. Blood slicked his hand, midnight black in the gloom. His fingers disappeared as the blood spread, lost to sight as the darkness merged with blood.

  The shell plate shuddered from an impact. And another. Again and again.

  "Damon, I can smell you bleeding in there," Diana said.

  He closed his eyes. Unable to see her, Damon half-convinced himself Diana could really be whole and in the flesh on the other side of his shield, his wife once more.

  He gagged against vertigo, his delusion too real, too intense, not to affect him.

  The plate thudded again.

  He sagged inside the pipe, his eyes still closed, his wounded hand cradled, his arms limp. He released his grip on the shield, allowing the Fates to determine his.

  Still wedged of its own accord, it rattled from another blow and twisted. Silence took hold.

  Glimpses of evening light filtered past his shield once more. The jaws of his family no longer loomed to tear him apart.

  Within the darkness of the pipe, Damon slumped his head into his hands, ignoring the sting in his finger and the stickiness covering his hands and forehead.

  "I love you," he whispered. "I'm so sorry for what I've done." The words carried through the pipeline for untold kilometres until they were released by a fissure into the evening, forever lost to human ears.

  As night closed in, ushered by distant peals of thunder, Damon wept, hidden in the dark.

  #

  II - Butterflies and Dragons

  The phone rang, a shrill tone that pierced the silence hovering over their routines.

  Diana barely looked up from her laptop. Her gaze darted from Damon, who plodded to the kitchen, to Jen, who began a mad scramble from the lounge.

  Jen shouldered past her dad.

  "Take it easy," he muttered.

  She outpaced his dawdle to the phone with the ferocity of a football player and the litheness of a dancer. Her pale face wrinkled as she answered it and listened to whoever was on the other end of the line.

  "It's for you." She dumped the receiver into Damon's hand, her face a storm cloud as she pushed a strand of dark hair from her eyes.

  "Thanks, I think," Damon said. "Hello?"

  Damon blanched. His face set into a stony mask of concentration.

  "Everything alright?" Diana called from the lounge room.

  Damon waved her away, shook his head, and turned to stare at the kitchen bench. He continued that way for some time, listening, staring at the bench top and through it at the same time. After long moments, he set the receiver down with deliberate care, as if it were suddenly an object of tremendous danger. His stare locked onto the phone for several moments more, his shoulders and head slumping all the while.

  "Damon, what's up?" Diana had abandoned her work on the laptop.

  "Dad?" Toby wandered out from his room, summoned by the edge to his mother's voice. He wore his soccer jersey, white with steely-blue stripes and a black, stylised wolf head.

  Jen, too, looked up from the lounge at her Dad with eyes a little too large and a face a shade paler than usual.

  "Family conference, guys," Damon said, and sighed with the strain of keeping his voice level.

  "Are you still taking me to the game today, Dad?" Toby's soccer boots clicked on the kitchen tiles as he approached, a look of childish sincerity on his face—the look he offered when he wanted something.

  "No, not today, mate."

  "But, Dad, the finals are—"

  "No. Now sit." Damon words were sharp, but he softened them with a smile, albeit forced, as he pointed to the lounge.

  "What is it?" Diana had closed her laptop and leaned forward in her chair.

  Damon cleared his throat after Toby plonked himself down next to Jen. "You've heard about the monsters, right?"

  Toby nodded. Diana glanced between her children and her husband. Jen studied her fingernails with almost ferocious concentration.

  "They've made it to Australia."

  "Are we gonna fight them?" A bright light shone in Toby's eyes. He was too young to understand the implications.

  "The government will take care of that."

  "How can you be so flippant, Damon?" said Diana. "You know what they've done to Asia."

  "Take it easy, dear. We've got other—"

  "Easy!" Diana darkened. "These things have ransacked half of Europe as well. Don't tell me to take it easy!"

  "Look, I'm sorry but—"

  "So who called?" Jen asked. Ever astute Jen.

  Both Damon and Diana blinked for a moment.

  "I have something to tell you all," Damon said. "You remember Hilda, that old woman who was around here a few times?"

  "I thought you were done with them?" Diana gripped the arm chair tighter.

  "There's no time for this, Diana!" Damon snapped. His use of his wife's name silenced her. Normally it was 'dear' or 'darling'. "Kids, I've been involved in a special group for most of my life. The Order of Gaia. They're sorcerers. Priests and Priestesses of the Earth Goddess."

  "What?" Toby furrowed his brow in concentration.

  "Magic, mate. Real magic. These people use magic to help the world grow. Tomorrow at dusk, they're going to do something big to try and stop these monsters from invading Australia."

  "Why? Why are they calling you?" Diana asked.

  "Dear, you don't ever quit these people. They extract blood oaths. They took mine at birth. Blood magic is the most powerful of all. I have no choice but to go to them. They've activated a geas—a summons of sorts—I can feel it already."

  Damon let the words fill the room and dwindle into silence. Questions bubbled in his family; he could hear them whisper to his third ear, his intuitive diviner of secrets. Jen's mind called to him the strongest. Liar, her mind proclaimed, matched by the accusation in her eyes, prove it.

  "Hand me your sketchpad, Jen," Damon said, "the pencil, too."

  After a pause, she complied.

  He took up the pencil and scrawled an elaborate rune on the palm of his hand. Once complete, he felt the skin around the rune tighten, his palm warm up. He then flicked through Jen's sketchpad until he found the drawing he wanted—an almost lifelike sketch of a tiger-winged butterfly. Damon closed his eyes for a moment and placed his en-r
uned palm across the paper. He whispered something, a single word below hearing, and snatched his hand away while holding it in a loose fist.

  A moment later, he opened his fist. A tiger-striped origami butterfly fluttered paper wings on the perch of his palm. Within seconds, it took to the air and circled in a lazy arc around the room, life-like yet not.

  "That was always my favourite drawing," he said as he handed the sketchpad back to Jen. A butterfly-shaped void dominated the page, with a lead smudge halo the only indication something had been drawn on the page at all. The hastily sketched rune on his palm had also disappeared. Only a hint of lead mixed with sweat was left behind. "That's magic. Real magic."

  "Cool!" Toby jumped off the lounge in a bid to capture the paper butterfly.

  "Leave it, Toby," Diana said.

  Toby resumed his seat with a downcast face, but his gaze continued to trail the little butterfly's path.

  "What do they want? From you and from us?" Diana scrutinised her husband closely.

  "They're going to raise an Elemental. An immense spirit of Fire that's supposed to scour these invaders from the continent."

  "What?" Diana sputtered. "It's like some goddamned arms race. First the monsters, then the army, and now this. Didn't someone try this elsewhere. In Europe?"

  "You know about all this magic stuff?" Jen asked, more an accusation than a question.

  Diana matched her daughter's glare. "You can't know someone as long as I've known your father and not know about these sorts of things. I've been at him for years to give it up."

  "And I did," said Damon, "but it's not like quitting the bowls club. The Order has roots all the way back to the dawn of time. They own a piece of you, body and soul."

  "So what's gonna happen?" asked Jen.

  "I'll go to them tomorrow evening. They're meeting outside Northam. Hilda wanted me to take you guys along, urged me, in fact, but I've been working on building up a resistance to the geas since these monsters first appeared. I suspected this day would come."