Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  It saw that Skyhawk was angling towards the gun so it slithered around, reared back and spat again. Two massive projectiles of venom shot through the air heading straight for Skyhawk. He tumble-rolled, the venom sailed over his head, he broke out of the roll and in a swift and fluid movement he grabbed the gun, turned back to the giant cobra and emptied the clip into the reptile’s head. Each shot jerked the snake’s head back – until the clip was empty and the snake stood tall, swaying, one red snake eye staring viciously down at Skyhawk, the other eye that of Grigor, glazing, yet still full of hate.

  The snake opened its jaws to spit one last cannon-shot of venom – but then it collapsed into a gigantic roiling heap of shifting scales and a leg that kicked and an arm that tried to clutch the air – until there was no movement at all. The part snake, part human, was dead.

  Skyhawk stood staring at the creature for a long moment, not quite believing what just happened – then he raced over, found his knife, ran across to the Hyundai, jumped in, did a savage U-turn and sped away, heading back to the main road. There were still many miles to go to the mine and every moment now was agonisingly crucial.

  CHAPTER 26

  They walked around the perimeter of the blast site, a huge smoking hole in the ground where the Ferris wheel had once stood. Olivier knelt down, grabbed a clump of earth, smelt it, threw it away, stood and looked around, wondering, then walked on.

  ‘Strange,’ he said, as he stopped again, smelt another handful of earth, dropped it and brushed the dirt off his hands, kept walking.

  ‘What’s strange?’ asked Marley.

  ‘There is no smell of explosive. Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have been to many bomb sites. Always there is the smell of explosives. Here, there is nothing.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a new kind of explosive,’ Marley offered.

  Olivier stopped, looked around at the carnage that lay beyond the scorched earth perimeter. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I think not. I think perhaps there was no explosive used here.’

  ‘We heard it, Olivier,’ Marley said. ‘We saw that goddamn Ferris wheel shoot up like a skyrocket on the fourth of July. Of course there were explosives. A ton of them, to cause this kind of devastation.’

  Gummi walked over, holding his laptop and eating a hot dog. ‘There’s free hot dogs,’ he said, pointing back to where a few stalls were still standing. ‘It’s not like I’m looting or anything,’ he added, ‘but we gotta eat.’ Between mouthfuls, he asked, ‘You want me to grab you a couple?’

  Olivier ignored him. Marley too. ‘Whatever it was,’ she continued, ‘I saw him. I swear to God it was the actor who did this. He was filming, and I bet you in a couple of hours that video will be up on YouTube.’

  Olivier shrugged. ‘So what? He is gone now. We will never find him. Sure we could plug his description into an Interpol database, maybe get a name, but then what? We are forever playing catch-up with these creeps. They are making the rules of the game, we are following like puppy dogs, picking up the pieces of meat they throw our way.’

  In the distance they could hear the sound of wailing sirens approaching fast. Soon this will be a locked-down zone, Marley thought, crawling with rescue teams and paramedics and cops and anti-terrorism units. The geeky lab technicians would arrive soon too, in their pristine white coats that would very quickly get defiled by the flotsam and jetsam of a wholesale slaughter.

  The skies would quickly fill with throbbing choppers – medevacs landing and loading those with limbs gone, bodies shredded, everywhere blood, eyes blank with the horror of it all, or eyes blank with death.

  ‘Tell me what this guy looked like,’ Gummi asked Marley, putting an abrupt stop to her thoughts. ‘I’ll try to find out who he is.’

  They sat on a broken section of the Ferris wheel that had landed nearby – one of the curved struts – and she quickly worked with Gummi to create an almost photo accurate portrait of the young man with the silver hair she saw videoing the aftermath of the explosion.

  Olivier looked at the image once they’d finished. ‘I know this guy,’ he said. ‘They call him Snowboy, because of his hair colour. Snow is pure, though. This boy is not pure, or if he is pure anything he is pure evil. He comes from Norway – and his specialty is energy. Directing energy. Which is what I thought. He could have done this,’ he said, nodding to the massive hole in the ground.

  ‘How?’ Marley asked.

  ‘He takes the energy from his surroundings, the people or even from nature itself, and he amplifies it and redirects it to create destruction. He’s like a human magnifying glass that takes the energy of sunlight and turns it into fire. There’s deep intel that he’s the chief architect of Ganglia – this big disturbance that Baphomet is planning sometime next year. He’s an elite witch with extraordinary powers, and this is his handiwork, I am sure of it.’

  Olivier stood, looked around impatiently. In the carpark patrol cars were pulling up, others screaming past, sirens blasting. ‘We have to go, Marls,’ he said. ‘We stay here, we will be asked all sorts of questions. The stupid cops might even consider us suspects and hold us for God knows how long.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ Gummi said. ‘I can do more to help here, or wherever I can get good internet.’

  ‘You weren’t invited, fat boy,’ said Olivier.

  Gummi glared back at him. ‘I’m not fat, I’m heavy.’

  Marley stood, uncertain. She looked at her watch. ‘We won’t make it to the mine in time. Not now.’

  ‘We’ll make it,’ Olivier said.

  Oliver knew how to steal a bike. He’d learned that growing up in the projects on the outskirts of Marseilles. Even with the latest anti-theft protections on the fanciest models, it took him all of forty-five seconds to bring a near-new Triumph screamer to a throaty roar. Thirty seconds after that he was whooshing out of the showgrounds, Marley a limpet on his back, the two of them careening north to the remote coal-fields of West Virginia, and the Deep Sink Mine.

  It took Gummi a couple of hours to walk back into town and find a motel that had a room available with internet speed sufficient for his needs. Many of the motels were already booked up, because there’s nothing like an act of terrorism to bolster local tourism. For the next few weeks every hotel, motel, guest house and Airbnb within a hundred miles would be full of media, law enforcement, federal crime investigators and the sundry others who pick over the carcass of a tragedy like rapacious dung beetles, breaking it down to its component pieces until it’s simply data, nothing more – the personal cost all gone.

  Gummi FaceTimed Kee, at the bunker. She was walking around the vast control room, floor-to-ceiling monitors behind her, NSA-fed satellite images of the fairground constantly flipping over, TV windows playing early breaking news reports of what happened, networks already blaming various Muslim terrorist organisations.

  ‘You okay?’ Kee asked, concerned.

  Gummi was momentarily taken aback. Kee was usually cool, emotionless, death a familiar and regular player in the daily theatre she attended. Gummi didn’t realise she cared. And he was chuffed that she would.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Luckily I wasn’t too close. We got a lead – a Baphomet operative called Snowboy. You know him?’

  ‘Snowboy? You’re lucky the whole town is still standing. The kid’s scary. He scares me.’

  If he scared Kee, Gummi thought, then he must be scary.

  ‘But it’s clearly a showpiece, to draw resources away from the main game tonight,’ Kee said. ‘And it’s worked. There’s no way now we’ll get any help from the local cops, and if we’re to get them out of that mine safely, we’re going to have to do something, get some assistance from somewhere.’

  ‘Do you know what’s going on up there?’

  ‘No. There’s no sat feed I can access. I don’t have a clue what’s happening. All I know is that unless we do something from here, or unless you can do something …’

  Kee didn’
t need to finish the sentence. Gummi knew what she wasn’t prepared to say – that tonight they could very well lose the three top people in Cygnet – Angela, her daughter and Freddie. Not to mention Joe. It would be difficult for the organisation to recover if that happened.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do this end,’ Gummi said.

  They signed off. Gummi sat back, took a deep breath. He got up, went to the room’s mini-bar, ignored the liquor and grabbed a handful of candy bars, walked back to his computer, sat back down again and laid the bars in a row on the table beside his laptop. He stared at the blank screen. What he was about to do would require all his skills as a master hacker and could very well blow back on him, which would mean most probably twenty years in jail, if not more. Even more worryingly, if he got caught it could lead to a full-scale investigation that could well bring Cygnet out into full public view.

  He took one of the candy bars, unwrapped it, took a big chunk, pushed in his chair, leaned over his laptop keyboard, and typed into his browser’s search engine: departmentofjustice+FBI+director.

  CHAPTER 27

  There was a dull red light flashing – on the left of her, somewhere, in the darkness. Flashing, like at a train crossing. But she wasn’t at a train crossing and she wasn’t outside, she was inside. In pain. On the left side of her head. Her shoulders and wrists too. Dull red, flashing, throbbing pain. Except the wrists weren’t dull, they were sharp, knife-like, cutting. A cutting pain.

  Lily fluttered open her eyes. Still darkness and yet there was light. A filtered light, green, through whatever it was that was covering her. What was it? A tarpaulin? She was lying on her side. Her arms were pulled back behind her, her wrists tied together. She looked down at her feet. Her ankles were tied together too, bound by duct tape. There was tape over her mouth as well. She couldn’t cry out, but at least she could breathe through her nose.

  She was in a vehicle, she knew that much. It was travelling on a rough road, a track, and every now and then it turned violently, drove for a bit then turned again. Switchbacks, going downhill. They were driving down a mountain. Heading to the mine. She knew it. She didn’t need to see out a window, she could feel the energy – dark, swirling, malevolent.

  She managed to sit up. Tried to push the tarpaulin off her, but without the use of her hands and arms, it wasn’t possible.

  What happened? The last she remembered, Skyhawk had rolled up his jacket for her to use as a pillow and she’d fallen asleep in the back of her Uncle Freddie’s car. What happened after that? She tried to think back …

  She remembered waking, that’s right. Something woke her. Was it the sound of the car door opening? Maybe the cold air. And then a face, peering in from the darkness outside, leaning into the car. Dr Johnstone. She remembered him smiling, genially, and putting a finger to his lips, gesturing shooosh. And then she remembered the pad of white gauze, like a medical pad. And the smell of some kind of anaesthetic? And how he forced it over her mouth and nose. How she struggled. But his strength. And his smile. Those perfect white teeth. And his cold glittering eyes. Watching her.

  That’s all she remembered.

  What about Skyhawk?

  Her heart quickened. She felt a sudden panic. Was he all right? She remembered their kiss. The tenderness of it. The excitement and pure animal electricity of it. What had he done to Skyhawk? Was he in the car too, all tied up? Perhaps in the back seat? Or had Dr Johnstone killed him in his sleep? Just walked up and stabbed him, or beaten him to death. Maybe he’d knocked him unconscious – but then he might have serious head wounds. He might have cracked Skyhawk’s skull and he might have internal haemorrhaging of the brain. He might be lying back at that beautiful campsite by the lake, dying – or dead already.

  Lily checked herself. She was letting her fear run amok, unbridled. She reined it in. Skyhawk was probably fine. He was so tired, so completely exhausted, a freight train barrelling through their campsite last night, blasting its horn, wouldn’t have woken him. He probably slept through it all. And everything she knew about Dr Johnstone told her he wasn’t a killer.

  But then, what did she really know about him? Not much, other than he was a retired cosmetic surgeon and he’d always been very charming to her, and especially to her mom, at the Saturday morning markets.

  He must be part of Baphomet, she thought. Kevin was, so it made sense that he was too. The two of them. Witches. The most evil witches imaginable. So it must have been Dr Johnstone who discovered that she and her mom were living in Mill Valley, and he must have tipped off his higher-ups, or whatever, in this Golden Order that they were all a part of. And those higher-ups must have then sent out those three biker women to come get her mom, and probably her too. It was starting to fit together.

  All that was academic. Thinking back on what might have happened wasn’t going to help her get out of her current situation. No. And whether Skyhawk was alive or dead, she couldn’t rely on him riding in on his white charger to pluck her from the jaws of death. It was a nice warm gooey thought but it was crap. Fairytale bullshit. If she waited for the big heroic rescue-op, chances are she’d end up dead along with her mom. No – she couldn’t place her hopes in Skyhawk, or Freddie, or in anyone else other than herself.

  The car was no longer descending. They were now driving along a very bumpy but relatively flat track. And then they slowed and came to a stop. The foul energies had been intensifying as they’d come down the mountain and now they filled her heart with an overwhelming sense of bitter dread.

  Lily heard a metal gate opening and footsteps – boots – on muddy ground approaching the car. The sound of the car’s window lowering, then muffled words. An old man’s voice, gruff, authoritarian, giving orders where to go. Was he a guard? She heard Dr Johnstone thank him, then the car moved off, slowly. Further along it slowed again, turned to the left and stopped. She heard Dr Johnstone put on the handbrake, turn the car’s engine off, open the car door, get out and walk around to the back of the car, then open up the hatch. She heard a rustle, then suddenly the tarpaulin was pulled off her and she blinked against a dull grey light.

  Dr Johnstone stood tall, looking down at her. He was silhouetted against the light, but even so she could make out his groomed silver hair, his blemish-free face, lips that curled slightly at the corners in a smile that could have been kindly, could have been cruel. He leaned forward and tore off the tape around her ankles and helped her out of the back of the vehicle.

  She looked around.

  It must have been mid-morning, although she had no way to tell because the sun was hidden behind thick grey clouds that hung low, making the air around her feel heavy and oppressive. She remembered this place, but she remembered it in darkness, when she was here in her out-of-body experiences. It was just as she’d seen it then, but in the harsh light of the day it was uglier, and decrepit, and somehow even more terrifying than at night because of its ordinariness. Everything was in a state of decay – and the only thing that seemed to be thriving was the weeds.

  Dr Johnstone had parked outside a dilapidated administration building – a large wooden structure that looked almost uninhabitable with its roof partly gone, metal sheeting blown away, walls of rotting timbers, paint peeling, broken windows covered in dark dust and busted handrails on the porch. Looking around, Lily saw other buildings too in a similar state of disrepair, and scattered around the compound were hulking red-rusted cranes that looked like they hadn’t been used in decades; various loading bins that were weather-stained and pock-marked with age; and huge trucks with rotted tires and metal chassis eaten away by rust, so old they looked like they belonged in a museum. Some of the trucks had their doors open as if the drivers had rushed out in a life or death dash, never to return.

  Everywhere there were piles of coal or metal or earth, stacks of iron rods half-eaten by rust dumped ingloriously on the ground and 44 gallon drums with their signage all smeared off by constant rain. In amongst it all, the weeds reigned supreme – like they had gaine
d their sustenance from the surrounding rot.

  Beyond the buildings Lily could see a huge black mountain – coal tailings, it must have been, she thought. It was conical in shape but with the top levelled off. It radiated a power that was truly frightening. There was something about this black dump of tailings that chilled Lily’s very core. Was this where they were going to hold the sacrificial ceremony? Was this where they were going to kill her mom? And her too?

  To one side of the black mountain there was a sinkhole, in the centre of which was a shaft shuttered by two doors. This was exactly what she’d seen in her out-of-body experience, during her initiation ceremony in the cave. Her mother was somewhere below, deep below in that shaft, she knew that. And she could feel her energy too – distant and weak, yet unmistakable. She was alive and she was close. Deep underground, but close.

  Dr Johnstone guided Lily into the administration building. There was coal dust covering everything – so thick it had encrusted itself on the flung-open filing cabinets and work tables and on the floor, which was scattered with files and papers that had been trodden on countless times with muddy boots.

  He took her through the main office area to a storeroom at the back, which he opened. He shoved her inside. It was full of shelving with the remnants of boxes that once must have contained stationery and office supplies. He gently took the tape off her mouth.

  ‘You can scream all you like here, Lily,’ he said. ‘No one will hear you. But if you make a nuisance of yourself, I’ll put the tape back on, do we understand each other?’

  Lily nodded. Her lips stung from the tape. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she said. ‘I need water. Can you untie my hands?’