Devil's Hand

by M. E. Patterson

  “I’m not sure the Lord is the guy responsible.”

  Her cheerful demeanor dropped in an instant, her façade discovered and tossed away like so much garbage. She leaned closer to Trent. “Mingle for a few minutes. Then we’ll talk.”

  She strode away, rushing to help an old man who was trying, unsuccessfully, to get up from a rusty metal folding chair.

  Trent took the time to do as she said and wandered around the ersatz shelter. Metal chairs, camp bedrolls, and dingy mattresses filled the chamber. A small table off to one side bore a stack of leaflets and a stovetop coffee percolator atop a burning can of Sterno. The residents were mostly middle-aged, and primarily men, though there were a few women too. Some were sleeping, while others sat in the chairs, talking or listening to the nearby radio.

  “Despite meteorologists’ insistence that this is an unprecedented weather phenomenon, the blizzard over Las Vegas and outlying counties continues to worsen. Winds as strong as ninety miles-an-hour have been reported in some areas and, as of this time, the entire city is without power. Residents of Las Vegas watching this broadcast via emergency feed should be aware that the city is under complete police curfew and the Governor, in cooperation with FEMA, has ordered the National Guard mobilized immediately to the Las Vegas area. FEMA is advising all residents to seek shelter immediately and carefully ration food and clean water, as meteorologists have been unable to determine when the storm might end. Due to potential pollutants, snowfall should not be used as drinking water, and traditional city water may also be contaminated. FEMA advises that you boil all water–”

  Trent turned away as the voice droned on about emergency procedures. The looks in the eyes of the men and women listening were enough to tell him what was happening. They were scared. It was the end of the world, they had decided. It made Trent sad to think that, this time, they might be right.

  The notion gave him pause and he remembered the gift that Vladimir had granted him. He wondered idly if it still worked. He moved around the room, brushing a hand calmly over the shoulders of the sleeping and the sick. To his surprise, not only did the strange mode of sight still work, but he became aware that the cathedral played host to a handful of demons in old bodies, their twisted, hideous forms curled up in fetal positions beneath sleeping bags and blankets. Trent found it sad to look at them: once-powerful creatures reduced to hiding inside withered mortal forms, aging and arthritic, their life ebbing from day to day.

  He was startled when Mary tapped him on the shoulder from behind. “Okay, young man. Let’s talk.”

  Trent nodded. “I’ve got some questions.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Mary walked away from the chamber, back into one of the nearby tunnels. Trent followed until she stopped, a good distance from the others, in the pitch-black again.

  “I think I can stop the storm,” he said, not knowing why he trusted this woman, but figuring he might as well tell her the truth.

  “I hope so, for the sake of all those people out there. If someone can’t stop it, I don’t think it’s going to stop.”

  “It won’t,” he said. “There’s a bad guy behind all this.”

  “I know. I’ve been watching them for months.”

  “Months? Them?”

  “The others, the blonds in gray suits. And the old man that commands them. I think he goes by the name–”

  “Salvatore,” Trent interrupted. “Or Zamagiel, if you’re a friend. Yeah, we’ve met.”

  Mary raised an eyebrow. “And you’re still here?”

  Trent shrugged. “Apparently.”

  “Then maybe you can stop it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sure you don’t want some coffee?” She held out one of two cups that she had brought with her.

  Trent frowned. “Why does everyone want to keep giving me coffee tonight? I don’t think I’m in any danger of falling asleep.”

  Mary chuckled. “Don’t be so sure.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There’s more out there than just a grigori and a bunch of his thugs. There’s dark things; things he’s brought with him from beyond.”

  “You mean the Render? I don’t think it was his.” Trent shrugged. “But it’s gone now.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. Your Zamagiel has something else. Something far worse.”

  “What?”

  “A nightmare. I’ve seen them walking the streets together this very evening. It’s a dark thing, terrible to look upon. A little boy, ruined and sewn shut, with shadowy smoke that follows in his wake.”

  He recalled his memories from the plane crash. He remembered the creature that he had seen in the darkness only moments after waking in the burning cabin. He thought about what Ramón had told him about the Bringer of Nightmares. It all came together. Zamagiel had somehow trapped that thing from the plane inside a child.

  “I don’t know how he brought it here,” Mary continued.

  “And I don’t exactly know why. But this storm has something to do with it. Killing Zamagiel may not be the end of things.”

  Trent shrugged. “Then I guess I’ll have to take out both of them.”

  Mary made the sign of the cross. “May Jesus and Almighty God smile upon you, young man. Is there any other way I can help you tonight?”

  “Yeah,” said Trent, scratching at the stubble on his chin. “I need to know how to get into the Luxor. I hear there’s tunnels into the basement.”

  “Sure. There’s a tunnel beneath the pyramid, but it’s probably filled with Zamagiel’s men. It comes up right near the elevator shaft. Been there since they built the Luxor.”

  “How do I get to it?”

  “Entrance to that tunnel system ain’t far from here, though Zamagiel’s men bricked it up. No way in now, except to go up.”

  “Up?”

  “There’s an abandoned building right above that tunnel entrance. I see them go in and out of there sometimes. Probably have another way in from inside the building. But it’s locked. You’ll have to be real lucky and hope they left it open for a change.”

  Trent grinned. “I think my luck will hold. You know a lot more than I could have hoped for. You’ve made my job tonight a hell of a lot easier.”

  The priest frowned.

  “Oh, sorry. ‘Heck’ of a lot easier.” He grinned. “Mary, how do you know all of this? Who are you?”

  Mary reached out and put her hand atop Trent’s. In the flickering of generator-powered lights, Trent saw Mary’s true form. She was radiant, breathtaking, a brilliant form unlike any he had ever seen. The cherubim seemed ugly, simple in comparison. Mary was a true angel, and for every bit of hideousness that Ramón had displayed, she was that much more beautiful. Trent barely managed to suppress tears as he gazed upon her.

  After a minute, he finally worked up the courage to remove his hand from hers. He felt a wealth of gratitude in his heart. Standing before him, he realized, was the one person he had met all day long whose motives were nothing more than pure goodness, through and through. If he could, indeed, defeat Zamagiel, he thought, he would do it not only for Celia, but for Mary, the angel in the dark, and for all of the people huddled around the radio in her ‘church.’

  When the demons had steered him down this path over a game of poker, Trent hadn’t had much inclination to do their bidding. Now, he had some good reasons of his own, and he was always more inclined to do something when it didn’t just matter to someone else.

  “Okay, so show me the way.”

  Mary shook her head and smiled. She gestured for him to follow. “You’re either crazy, or brilliant. We got some of both down here.”

  “Don’t think I’m either,” said Trent. “Just lucky.”

  He followed Mary for a few minutes through the inky black. Without any jacket on, he could feel the deadly cold seeping through his dress shirt and into the flesh, but the pain–though intense–no longer bothered him.

  After a few minutes of b
lind travel, Mary stopped. Trent could tell that she had walked this route many times before. She grabbed his arm and pointed at a ladder that led up to a closed manhole.

  “Up there,” she said. “That’s the way. Cross the street and you’ll see the building. Sometimes they keep guards there. You be careful, okay?”

  “Thank you,” he said. “If I survive this, I promise I’ll come back and donate some money or something.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “We got all we need down here, so long as it don’t flood.”

  As soon as he emerged from the tunnel, the winds hit him hard. He pressed forward, across the street. His knees buckled, but he managed to remain standing. He kept his legs churning against the blowing wind and, for a moment, it seemed as though he might simply be running in place. It was hard to tell in the pitch-black. But then, the façade of the run-down building loomed only feet from his face.

  He tried to stop, hit a patch of ice, and slid shoulder-first into the door of the building. He hoped there was no one on the other side, or at least that they would assume the noise was just flying debris. He looked around, checking the narrow street to make sure nobody was watching. With the storm scouring the sidewalks clean, Trent didn’t see a soul nearby, though he guessed he wouldn’t see someone in this dark even if they were ten feet away. He had expected at least a few of the angels out front, too, but no. No one. Quickly, he turned the doorknob.

  Locked.

  “Dammit!”

  He couldn’t even hear his own voice amidst the howling.

  He groped at the door in the darkness. Solid wood, all the way through. This was no bedroom door–he couldn’t just break it down with a swift kick. As his fingertips played over the fake wood, he came upon a small nodule in the upper-middle of the door. Peering closer, he could see light coming from it, so he pressed one eye up against the glass and tried to look through.

  Though the hole was designed to be looked through in the opposite direction, it still worked. Inside, warped heavily, Trent could make out a blurry form. It was growing larger as it moved toward the door. Trent knew it was someone coming to investigate the noise he had made. An idea came to him.

  He took a few steps back from the door, his thoughts still focused on the person he knew to be behind it. Ramón had said that he was the “bringer of doom,” right?

  With a short charge, he slammed shoulder-first into the door again, at the precise moment that he willed the person’s luck to change. Though it should have held easily, the door snapped off its hinges and came crashing down into the room beyond. Trent heard a man yell but his scream was cut off by the weight of the door bearing down upon him. It crunched down, with Trent riding shoulder-first on one side.

  After a moment, he rolled off the collapsed door. A dead body with blond hair and a gray suit lay beneath the door in a pool of blood. Trent looked up and could hear shouting coming from other rooms in the abandoned building. It had once been a small office of some sort and he found himself standing in the entrance lobby, a small affair with a receptionist’s desk in the very middle, surrounded by cracked glass divider walls. He saw old evidence of squatters scattered around the room: empty beer cans, broken furniture, crumpled cigarette packs. But he figured the angels and their mortal minions had cleared them out when Zamagiel moved in.

  The shouting grew louder and Trent figured it would be a good time to draw his weapon. He ducked down in front of the reception desk that, because of the glass, gave him little obscurity. He fumbled at his belt for the blade. He heard footsteps coming around the corner. He pulled the dagger out, leapt up from his not-so-hidden hiding place, and turned to face his assailants.

  Two men rounded the corner almost simultaneously, shotguns drawn. They had blue ski masks over their faces–the kind with only the eyeholes cut out. Trent threw the dagger with imperfect aim. It didn’t matter. He understood now.

  The dagger sailed just above the glass panel on the reception desk. Its target, surprised to see a tumbling knife coming his way, put on the brakes, but his luck went sour. The area rug at his feet slipped free and the thug slid sideways, catching the blade square in the neck. His momentum sent him cartwheeling backwards. His shotgun clattered to the floor.

  The second assailant swore as he came to a halt and raised his weapon. The shotgun went off with a deafening bang, but Trent remained still, facing down the attacker. He saw no need to be subtle.

  Shotgun spray blasted through the glass pane, sending shards raining down across the floor and over Trent’s cowboy boots. A few pieces of scattershot and glass ripped through some of the loose fabric of Trent’s shirt, but not a single piece pierced his flesh. Calmly, he advanced past the reception desk and walked toward the thug.

  The attacker’s eyes went wide with fear and he dropped his weapon. Trent bent down in mid-stride to pick the shotgun up, along with a handful of shells. He continued on toward his target, loading shells into the gun, not even looking up.

  The thug screamed and backed himself into a hallway corner, directly beneath a still-working fluorescent connected to a generator on the floor. Trent looked at the generator. Then he looked up at the long lamp. Then he looked at the thug, and smiled.

  The generator went dead in an instant and the light went dark. The thug looked up. The entire assembly snapped loose with a twang and came crashing, straight down. Trent cocked the gun as the fluorescent shattered onto the thug’s upturned face. The guy became a broken heap in the corner, all blood and glass.

  Aside from the roaring winds outside the now-open entrance, the office had grown unnervingly quiet. Trent could hear, and feel, glass shards and debris crunching beneath his boots as he walked around the dead office. He walked in turn to the two downed men and pulled back their facemasks. They looked normal, not beautiful like the angels. He touched one of their faces with his bare palm but the image didn’t change.

  Just regular guys, he thought, with a twinge of regret. Mortals. A part of him felt unnaturally calm about the killing. He feared that lack of panic and what it might mean about him.

  He looked down at the man beneath the light assembly. He did not have to have a good aim or a powerful weapon. His targets just needed to be unlucky. He didn’t even need bullets if the situation held the right arrangement. He understood that now.

  A pack of cigarettes protruded from the dead man’s pocket. Trent retrieved it and found a single smoke left, along with a cheap plastic lighter. He lit up and stuck the cigarette between his lips. He continued into the building and strode down the long hallway that ran the length of the office, along which hapless white-collar drones had once occupied too-small offices with inspirational posters and calendars and whiteboards on the walls. Trent wondered idly if they had ever expected their office would someday become a killing field.

  As he rounded the corner, Trent’s vision reeled. The walls of the corridor were not just damaged from years of neglect and squatters–they also bore writing of a strange and unknown quality, some painted on and some carved deeply into the drywall. Sharp lines and tiny circles filled every wall from top to bottom, some even scrawled upon the floor. The painted writing was a dark red, and Trent didn’t have to guess what kind of ink it was.

  Well, he thought, at least I’m in the right place.

  He reached the end of the ‘T’-shaped corridor. To the left, the hall ended in a pair of bathrooms. He looked right and saw that it ended at a barred window looking into the alleyway next door. Trent made a guess as to where this underground tunnel would start. He headed for the bathrooms.

  By force of habit, Trent opened the door to the men’s’ room first, only to find that there really weren’t two separate bathrooms anymore. The wall that divided the two rooms had been torn down, leaving a tangled array of dented and twisted metal piping and a series of crushed toilets scattered around the edges of the room.

  At the far end of the women’s side of the now-joined bathrooms, where the mirrors should have been, was a h
uge, man-sized hole, obviously blasted open with explosives. Trent took another drag on his smoke, checked the gun in his hand, and headed into the tunnel.

  The narrow passage, barely wide enough for two people to pass each other shoulder-to-shoulder, snaked immediately down. The walls were strung with the occasional mesh-ensconced construction bulb, casting a dim pallor over the rough-hewn earth. The ground beneath Trent’s boots was wet and muddy, and sucked at his feet as he trudged ever downwards.

  Soon enough, the tunnel came to an end at an abrupt drop. Three feet below, Trent could see the lazily drifting waters of the sewer system, where it had apparently broken through at one point into the flood control tunnels. He wondered if the city new–or cared–or if the owners of the Luxor had kept it broken as an ‘insurance policy’ against interlopers in the tunnels. Either way, the sewers no longer routed here, so the muck below was old and static. With nowhere specific to go, the filth simply stood–a fetid mix of human waste, gray water, and filthy runoff from the streets above that dripped down through air vents and manhole covers.

  Trent sighed and took a long, extended puff on his cigarette. He sucked it all the way to the filter and then let it drop from his lips into the muck below.

  Here goes, he thought, and then hopped down into the rotten sludge.

  The stinking fluid immediately rushed up around his ankles and slipped into the tops of his cowboy boots; an oily, greasy-feeling mass of ice-cold slime filled with bits of hard dust and gravel chunks from the streets above. Trent fought back the urge to vomit as he pulled his weary legs through the viscous sewage.

  As he moved forward through the tunnel, darkness once again descended, the light from the broken bathroom wall behind him fading quickly into the distance. He mused that every step through these tunnels felt like miles of travel, and he wondered just how many of those miles he had traveled today. Hundreds? Thousands? He wondered about what a man might feel like living down here for half a lifetime, as many of the bums did. What would it do to you to live in the endless dark for so long.