When it shoved through her skin, freezing her exposed, steaming organs, she found that she could scream and struggle after all.
“Melissa!” Malachi's voice, and she saw him trying to fight back to her, a flapping black shadow knocking aside one, then another, then another of the walking dead, but her wide, twitching eyes couldn't respond, and he was going dim, and that vast, invading hand was pushing further up into her. Something had sundered, and her years as a nurse brought back clear pictures of the diaphragm, the slab of muscle at the bottom of the torso that made her breathe. That was why there was no air anymore.
As her vision dimmed a final time, she saw the flapping shadow pause, and then turn. He was going. Malachi was going to save the world. She had done her job, but she would not rest easy. Her final thoughts, as her body shuddered and rocked each time the hand drove further in, and bloody vomit clogged her throat, were with the dead around her.
Did they know who they had been?
Would she?
Could you kill yourself, if you were already dead?
Calum stood in front of the church that had once been his refuge, unable to step past the gate, misery marinating his heart. The wind was up, strong enough to snatch at his hair, and he wondered what time it was. How long until morning, when light would throw at least a thin veil of harsh reality over his city?
Was there going to be a morning at all? Perhaps this was all there would be for the rest of time. Perhaps the apocalypse had eaten the sun, and it was his fault for not handing Ambrose and Pandora over to Metatron when he had the chance.
At the end of the path, the door to the church was open, and a man in a Celtic t-shirt was propped next to it, smoking a hand rolled cigarette and eyeing him suspiciously. There were obviously worshippers inside, and his heart sank further. Was Ambrose even there?
Suddenly, the smoking man jerked upright, dropping his cigarette and crushing it guiltily underfoot. “Father Baskille! What are you doing here?”
“Bob? Is that you?” One of his flock. One more person he had failed.
“Aye, Father. What are you doing here? I thought you were having a holiday, or something? Reflecting, like?”
“Was I?”
“Aye, your replacement said.” Bob walked down the path, rubbing his arms against the cold. “Mad night, isn't Father?”
“That it is, Bob.” Calum guessed what Ambrose had done, and almost smiled. “Could you bring him out here?”
“You not coming in, Father?”
“Not just now, Bob. Just fetch him, please.”
“No worries.” Brow furrowed, snow melting on his red face, Bob went back up the path, and vanished inside.
Moments later, Ambrose burst out the door, hair flying, and ran down the path. He slid to an elegant halt in the slush, and Calum thought he had never seen the demon look so happy. They looked at each other for a moment, outcasts both.
“What do you think of my doorman? I've asked him to guard the stairwell, and make sure nothing happens to your valuables.”
“Or yours.” This time, Calum really did smile. “How is she?”
Ambrose stared briefly into the wind. The snow and fire blowing around him made him an impossibly romantic figure. He looked back at Calum. “The same. I take it things got complicated?”
Calum realised how he must look, covered in blood, burned flesh, and bruises. Ambrose knew all about that, didn't he? “Since you left me bleeding in that flat, not a lot better. Here's your box.” Calum pulled it out of his back pocket, and part of him was amazed to see it still in one piece. He held it out, but Ambrose didn't take it. The demon was looking at him strangely, his pinched features frozen.
“I was in a flat?”
“I'd be dead if you hadn't pulled Clive off me.”
Ambrose took a careful breath in. “Clive?” His voice was almost inaudible beneath the wind. The demon reached out and took the box, looking at it as though it would bite him. “Clive Huntley?”
Calum was becoming scared all over again. He had brought the box to Ambrose. Everything was supposed to be all right now. Why wasn't everything all right?
“Calum,” Ambrose looked at him, and there was a terrifying grief in his eyes. “My plan isn't going to work. I'm not going to be able to escape as I thought I might. You have to tell me exactly what happened at the flat.”
“But you were there…”
“I haven't left the Church all day.”
Calum didn't understand, but he told the demon anyway. He wanted this to end, so he could find somewhere sheltered to curl up, sleep, and forget that he had ruined the world with his loyalty to this creature.
As he finished, Ambrose nodded. “Yes, of course I had to have you bring the box here, or I wouldn't have been able to save you.” Gibberish. “Thank you, Calum. You've been a… friend. I'm going to return the favour, and make sure you get here alive. I wish I knew why.”
“What…” Suddenly, the demon's attention was on the street, as a crowd of quietly drunken rioters staggered around the corner of the church. Calum sagged at the thought of fighting through them.
“Calum,” Ambrose said, and the urgency in his voice made the ex-priest focus. “Run.”
“They can barely stand up.”
“There's a reason for that. Run.”
“What reason?” Calum saw the blood, the wounds, the listless eyes, and knew what he was seeing.
Even if he didn't believe it.
He turned to run, and saw more of them coming around the other side of the church. He was trapped. Instinctively, he wanted to step through the gate, but he forced himself not to. With a tired look at Ambrose, he turned and staggered across the road, hoping that the door to the block of tenements might be open. Throwing himself against it, he found it was not. On the other side of the street, Ambrose leaned over the gate, his knuckles white as he gripped it, unable to come out and help, as Calum was unable to join him safely on holy ground. The undead surrounded him.
The church was going to protect the demon, and throw the one time priest to the horde.
Dead men and women formed a semi-circle six or seven deep around him. In front of him, a young woman with short, black, curly hair stared at him. He could smell her perfume.
Everything was calm for a moment, then the knowledge that he was going to die infected his flesh like a virulent disease, and he began to scream.
Malachi's hatred was absolute, but no matter how many opponents he stabbed or bludgeoned aside, he couldn't make anything die.
Somewhere in the crowd behind him, he knew that Melissa had found her feet, and shambled away in search of the living.
Spinning on one leg, he slammed his heel into the face of the last zombie between the churchyard wall and himself, payback for the one that had struck lucky and broken his nose. Blood poured down his lower face, a source of warmth in the freezing night. The zombie went down, and he leaped over it, hands hitting the wall so he could boost himself over.
Landing in the churchyard, he whirled, expecting arms to be reaching for him, but there were none. The zombies were milling away from the church, suddenly interested in something happening at the front. It was as though they could not see him on holy ground. Bone tired, Malachi took a moment to relax, staring out at the mob hitching past. There were more of them now, and he knew that if he watched for long enough, he would see raven black curls among the lolling heads.
He stopped looking. He hadn't wanted Melissa to die. That his job was easier without having to babysit her was beside the point.
He refused to examine the moment when he had decided that she was as good as dead. She had made eye contact, or tried to, her pupils tiny as the fat zombie thrust into her, working his way through her flesh, grunting stupidly as it pushed towards its goal. Malachi did not want to wonder whether he could have moved faster, even saved her. He did not want to acknowledge that, having found the church, her death had conveniently removed a problem for him.
Swallowing the new
hate, directed inwards this time, he bit his cheek to clear his head. There was only one important matter left to deal with, and then he could wallow all he pleased. Pandora.
He weaved past the gravestones along the left side of the church, feeling the cold acutely now that he was cooling down from the fight. As he reached the front of the building, he saw what had distracted the dead. Across the street, a battered, bloodied man was trapped outside a Victorian tenement block. The dead were all around him, but for some reason had not yet attacked.
“Ambrose,” the man screamed. “Help me!”
Ambrose must have been the man standing at the gate to the church, a slender figure with long, wavy black hair. He looked distraught, and Malachi did not blame him. His friend was about to die, and all he could do was watch.
The zombies closed ranks, snow swirling around them, and Malachi lost sight of the man they had surrounded. Ambrose leaned forwards as though he would dash through the gate and onto the street, and then slumped.
Malachi saw that the front door to the church was ajar, and left the man to his grief.
Slipping inside, Malachi met stillness, and the hushed murmur of prayer. After the buffeting wind, the peace was a miracle in itself, and one that made him want to relax. Appearances were deceptive though. Somewhere in this building, Pandora waited for him.
He wouldn't find her among this field of bowed heads. Malachi could taste desperation seeping through their pores. These weren't the faithful. Almost everybody in the room was plea-bargaining for a better deal when the world ended. Malachi sneered, knowing it wasn't fair to compare these people to the quiet, resolute example that Melissa had set, but doing it anyway. He remembered the conflict on her face when she had followed him towards the dead. Trust, and fear. She had tried to save these cretins, had thrown herself into danger to do so. Were any of them worth it?
Walking quietly around the side of the congregation, shaking his head to fight off the somnambulistic effect of the muted praying, Malachi made for the door at the far end, near the dais. Stepping into a short corridor, he was glad to push the door closed behind him, putting a barrier between himself and the hypnotic murmur.
“Back inside, pal.” The voice was gruff, broad Glaswegian, and its owner was sitting at the bottom of a set of stairs leading up, wearing football colours like a badge of authority. “Priest says nobody goes up there.”
That alone was enough to make Malachi take the opposite view, and he glanced up at the same time as he grabbed the man's hair and slammed his head against the stone wall. The green-clad sentinel went out like a light, slumping back, and his head whacked hard against a step. Malachi bounded up into the darkness.
He could sense how close she was, and the new adrenaline that blazed through his blood burned away his pains and weariness.
At the top of the stairs, a dark corridor. Halfway along the corridor, two holes in the wall, on each side of the passage. It looked as though there might have been doors there once, but somebody had knocked them clumsily through, making them look more like the mouths of caves than human built doorways.
Malachi stole along the corridor, checking the left room first. An office, but something wasn't right. It looked like there had been a fire or something. Everything looked melted.
He didn't care enough to wonder about it.
She was close.
When he stepped into the room on the right, hearing running footsteps behind him on the stairs, he had only seconds to take everything in before the world became pain.
The room was mostly empty.
There was a bed against the wall to his left, which looked as though it had melted too.
There was a naked woman standing next to the bed, facing him, and she would have been the most gloriously beautiful thing he had ever seen if it had not been for the lips peeled back over her teeth in a mad, smiling snarl, and her red, staring eyes.
Pandora.
Malachi froze for a heartbeat, stunned that the moment he had been preparing for since Stacey's attack had finally arrived, and then she was on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gemmell groaned, afraid to open his eyes and face the pain. Along the back of his neck and into his shoulders, a burning had set in deep, and the throbbing from his temple played an accompaniment to those hurts that made him want to vanish into the void again.
There were hands under his armpits. His legs were dragging across the ground, slush soaking into his pants. The wind chilling his face and hands confirmed that he was outside. Gemmell remembered the last moments before losing consciousness, of his body slamming forward in the seat, and the crystal clear thought that if he and Summer blacked out then there would be nothing to stop the dead from ripping the car to pieces around them.
Jerking free of whoever was dragging him along, crying out at the flare of pain from the whiplash in his neck, he opened his eyes, arms flailing. The world span briefly as the hands vanished, and he flopped to the ground.
“Sir! It's me! Sir, it's all right!” Detective Sergeant Jackie Summer. Not a dead man at all. Rolling onto his back, seeing the gravestones around him, he took a breath and let the snow and fire flecks land on his face. From that position, ignoring everything that was happening around him, he could appreciate how beautiful the sky was. Perhaps that was the point, that only the thin slice of the world that humans stood on had turned ugly and vile. That had to tell them something, didn't it?
Gemmell sat up, one hand supporting his neck, and saw that he was in a churchyard. The Church of St Cottier towered above him, its narrow spire reaching for the beauty of the heavens. Behind him, he saw their car. They had ploughed into the wall of the churchyard, hard enough to smash through the centuries old brickwork. The car hung over the remaining double layer of stone, front wheels off the ground.
Dead men and women pawed the rear of the car. One was in the back seat, having crawled through the shattered rear window.
“They won't cross the wall,” Summer said. “Even in the car, they won't reach over to the front seats.” Gemmell saw that both of the front seats had come to rest over the threshold of church property.
“How long were we out?”
“You were out, sir. I was wearing a seatbelt.”
Gemmell rubbed his neck. “Clever girl.” To the left, a small path hugged the right side of the church, leading to the front. “Shall we see who's in?”
Unable to shake the feeling that they were somehow trespassing, Gemmell led Summer along the narrow path, hurting everywhere. If he had not worked so hard to get there, he decided, it would be nice to lie back down in the slush and not move for a while.
The street alongside the church was quiet, but for the handful of zombies that remained with the car. Summer saw him try to look painfully back, and filled him in. “After we crossed the wall, most lost interest. They went to the front of the church. There was some screaming.” Gemmell could hear the undead, now that he was concentrating, their low muttering punctuated by groans.
Gemmell stopped at the corner of the building, motioning for Summer to pause behind him, and peered around the front. Zombies massed on the far side of the road, and he was sure that there was somebody trapped there. On this side of the gate, inside the churchyard, a man was watching, his shoulders tense and his hair whipping in the wind. “Calum!” The man shouted, but there was no reply.
Gemmell swore as he recognised him from the descriptions they had, and stepped out. Summer followed. “Ambrose,” she said, quietly.
There was no way the man at the gate could have heard her over the wind, but he turned anyway, alarm on his face. Gemmell noticed him glance at the second floor of the annexe to the main church, and his instincts screamed the name of the woman he now knew was up there.
With a heavy look over his shoulder, Ambrose Eidolon began walking towards them. He was wearing a black shirt and dog collar, but Gemmell didn't believe for a second that he was a man of the cloth. The man's movement was predatory, and his bearin
g spoke of somebody used to being served, rather than giving service.
Gemmell stepped forward to meet him, wincing as every step he took sent a sharp little jolt along his neck, and pulled his warrant from his pocket. “DI Gemmell,” he said. “This is DS Summer.” He didn't quite know how to continue, what question to ask this man whose upraised eyebrows made Gemmell wonder which of them was actually in control of the impromptu interview.
“Ah, the local constabulary. I'm impressed. Of all the people I expected to find me, you failed to make the list.”
“There are lots of people looking for you?”
“Not people exactly, but yes. I've broken some quite important rules.” He glanced over his shoulder at the milling bodies across the street, “I'm actually starting to feel guilty about it.”
Summer stepped up next to them. “Mr Eidolon? We have some questions…”
The man in front of them wasn't listening. His eyes went wide with alarm, and he looked up through the snow to the second floor window. Before they could stop him, he turned and sprinted, amazingly fast, into the church.
“Bugger,” said Gemmell, as Summer gave chase. Gritting his teeth against the pain of sudden movement, he left the snow and the fire, and followed them inside as fast as he could.
Ambrose raced along the central aisle between the pews, aware of his candle lit converts raising their heads as he passed, some standing in premature panic at what their new priest's frenzy might mean. Behind him, he was aware of the two officers entering, but had no time to worry about them.
Somebody was upstairs with Pandora. Ambrose had to get to her. What he might do once he was there, he had no idea. To be on church ground the intruder had to be an angel, or worse, an archangel. Deep inside him, where the fear had been growing since he had watched the zombies converge on Calum, Ambrose knew he wasn't going to be able to do anything. She would be torn away from him.