He wished they would rush forward and finish him off. He was too tired, in too much pain, and too appalled by his inability to remember the sensation of holding his son tight to his chest, feeling the warmth of his skin and the fluttering beat of his heart.
At the other end of the street, Malachi fought in the shadow of a doorway, Summer crouched behind him, as though that would be shelter enough when the sky fell. Gemmell struggled to keep his eyes on them, partly because focussing on anything at all was becoming difficult, and partly because Malachi was reeling and staggering so much, he could have been one of the dead himself. So far, the walking corpses were content to line up for Malachi's knife, but it was only a matter of time before his wounds and exhaustion left him exposed to the weight of the numbers. Already, stragglers were separating from the dead and lurching along the street. At first, Gemmell was convinced they were coming for him, but then he noticed them scanning the road and pavements with a focus the others did not display. One leaned over unsteadily, snatching up what looked like a dismembered arm. Gemmell wondered what they were doing, but a grey pain-haze chose that moment to sweep across his vision, and his energy was absorbed by the effort of not passing out.
Why was he even trying? All he had left to live for was the prospect of being torn apart by the demons or the dead, or being incinerated when the sheet of burning sky reached the earth.
Gemmell knew why, even as the earth rumbled beneath him and an explosion tore the air, sending fire up from between buildings a couple of streets away. He had spent his career trying to protect humanity from its worst excesses. The more he had seen of the darkness hidden inside ordinary men and women, the harder and more cynical he had become about it. Still, he tried, because there was innocence and goodness there too. Now, for the first time in his life, people needed protectors that would stand between them and a darkness from beyond. James Gemmell was not going to leave that fight easily. It was his job to stay and be counted when others would not. Death might be sucking the strength from his heart, but Gemmell would not roll over for it.
Fighting the pain, and the buzzing in his head, and the darkness pooling at the edge of his vision, Gemmell watched the last moments of his city and world, marking them the only way he could, by living long enough to bear witness.
Perched among the vents and pipes atop Glasgow University's twelve-storey library, Ambrose and Pandora held each other as they stared down at Calum's corpse. Ambrose wondered absently whether the former priest's lifeless eyes would open, whether he would have to destroy the reanimated body of his only friend. He didn't think so. Whatever Clive had started to rebirth the dead, it had to do with the heart, and Calum's remained in his chest.
The heart was responsible for so much.
The flames of Heaven fell ever closer, and when they touched the earth they would leave it a blackened husk. Steam had begun to rise from the rooftop around him, and when he looked out at the streets, it looked as though a thick fog had rolled in. Everything was going to burn, and it was all his fault.
“Was it worth it?” he asked, and felt Pandora stiffen in his arms. “The world is going to be wiped clean, so that we could have an extra couple of years. Was it worth it?”
She looked up at him, and he knew the answer. However wrong it, was, it was worth it. “I was created to understand that love was more valuable than anything.”
“I don't think He meant us to be included in that.”
“Love is love. Why should it all be reserved for Him? Look at it, Ambrose,” she pointed over the still, ravaged city, where fires doused by the rain still poured black smoke into the sky, where the streets were deserted of all but the dead. “Did love do that?”
Ambrose held her tighter. While much of her mind had healed over the last two years, there was a bitterness in her these days that he hated. He hated it for staining the purity of her. He loved it because it made her think, and question, in ways that she had never been able to before. “No. There's nothing of love out there.”
She nodded. “There's revenge, and jealousy, and spite, but no love. We broke a little rule, out of love, and His toys are out of the pram.”
Ambrose spluttered with laughter. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“We're not going to see each other again, are we?”
Tears filled her eyes, and he felt pain in the little pause of her breath. “No. When the fires burn, we'll be taken back. We'll be made to pay.”
Ambrose turned her face up to his, and kissed her gently. “Thank you, then. Thank you for loving me.” His own tears dripped onto her cheeks.
She smiled. “You're welcome.”
They clung to one another for a moment, then Ambrose broke away, unable to deal with the stew of regret and pain panging through him. Looking up, he saw the fires were just a half mile above them, so bright with heat that his eyes hurt, and he cast them down. Calum hadn't stirred. That was good. At least he had died fully human. For a few moments after the light had gone from his eyes, Ambrose held onto hope that, somehow, his friend might have used the hideous name he had spoken to save them all. That hope was gone now, and he gave a last, lingering look over the world. He had known love before Pandora, he realised. He had loved the Earth, its people, and all their sins, hopes, and vices.
Wrapping his arms around his angel, Ambrose took a deep breath. Then he and Pandora turned their faces up to the scorching heat of the fires about to crash over the city in a vast, cleansing wave of destruction.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Enoch trembled, and the void shuddered with empathy. Calum struggled to keep hold of his own rage, tiny though it was next to the cosmic fury vibrating the emptiness. His miniscule passion was the only thing he had to carry this mad salvation of the world forward.
“You do not know what you ask, human. Better that this world ends, and you accept your torment.” Calum heard a plea in the prophet's voice that both filled him with certainty, and made him quail.
“You can do it, can't you?” Suddenly breathless, he almost took his suggestion back. Desperation had prompted it, and the larger part of him had not believed it possible. “You can plug me into the gap you leave behind?”
“It is to nobody's gain. We would be condemning the world to -”
Calum cut him off, sure now that this was his path, his purpose. “Something worse than you already offer? We don't need God. I don't need Him!” He was shouting, his frustrations flying free. “He took me when I was weak, and made me a slave. I took so much punishment from him before I realised I was free. Out there, thousands of frightened people still want Him to save them, despite everything He's done to them. I'll do what you won't. I have your true names, and you will give me this.”
Enoch snarled, opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped. He tilted his head, listening to something only he could hear. Calum tensed, the silent countdown on the world's existence speeding up in his head. There couldn't be much time left, and he wanted to rush across and shake Enoch into submission. Impotence clenched his fists. Of all the people who could be here, making humanity's last case for survival, why did it have to be him? Calum had seen the madness and evil of ordinary people in the last hours, and there had been so little kindness to set against it. How was he supposed to make the case for the worth of the species, when he didn't completely believe it himself? Guilt made Calum fight, the need for some personal redemption to hold against his own culpability for the end of everything. Heroism had nothing to do with it.
Enoch smiled, a pale and humourless twist of the lips. Calum feared that his thoughts had been read again, and he would be asked to justify the existence of humankind.
“You cannot undo that which is already done. You cannot call back those souls already alighting in Heaven. You cannot close Hell's gateway on Earth. You cannot turn back the clock. Once the gates to Heaven shut, and God is gone, those gates will never open again.”
“I don't care! Just give me what's left, before it is t
oo late.”
Enoch's smile broadened, and there was cruelty in it. “Your capacity for stupidity is undiminished, then. We had thought to show you unparalleled torments in Hell, and yet you come to us intent on taking a path infinitely worse. So be it. The gates are closing. This world is yours.”
Enoch vanished.
Calum had the briefest moment to wonder whether he had really done it, and then he felt himself grow, filling the void, becoming the void. The sensation was horrifying, as he felt his essence stretching, becoming tissue thin as it tried to fill the vast nothingness, his edges dragged further and further outwards.
When his mental scream was at its loudest, a door opened upon the remains of the Earth, and Calum washed over reality like a tsunami.
Ambrose crushed Pandora to him, and if she had been a fragile mortal then her bones would have splintered and her flesh pulped. She didn't mind, and returned the hug with equal ferocity, even as the fires smouldered their flesh, snatched the air from their lungs, and drove them to their knees. Ordinary fire would not have fazed them, but these flames were not of Earth. The hard, concrete ledges of the library's roof started to melt and run. The flames were a heartbeat away. Ambrose screwed his eyes shut.
If he had any breath left, he knew he would be screaming like a newborn.
The heat vanished in a second, and the cold that blew over his skin was so shocking by comparison that he knew he was in Hell's icy wastes. Fear gripped him, as he wondered who would be there to judge him. On the balance of probability, Leviathan was suddenly the soft option. Ambrose had only ever seen their Dark Lord from a distance, but knew that wasn't going to be the case for long. Soul-numbing terror ran through him, and he clutched Pandora tighter.
Pandora. She shouldn't be here. She was not Hell's creature to punish.
Ambrose opened his eyes, and found the city of Glasgow exactly where he had left it. His long hair caught on a cool breeze. The fires sent to consume them had gone, but nobody could doubt how close they had been. The building ledges had lost their hard edges to the heat, and the metal pipes and vents had deformed into sculptures that only hinted at their original purpose. Ambrose reached out and brushed his fingers across one. It was perfectly cool, reflecting bright light back at him.
Standing, he glanced over the city, marvelling at weirdly melted curves and contours left by the descending furnace, marvelling even more that there was anything there at all. Day had yet to break, and the valleys between the buildings were deep in shadow. It was impossible to tell whether there was life on those streets. Somehow, the world was saved, but Ambrose did not feel triumphant. Instead, he felt sick, off balance, and as the rush of his close escape faded, he felt a second loss, important and crushing. Something was missing.
God was gone.
Ambrose's being cried out in shock, and he retched emptiness. Something else was different. The God places in him were not hollow, but coated with something weak and toxic. “Shit,” he croaked. “Calum, what did you do?”
“Ambrose,” Pandora spoke quietly, and he turned to her, a brief surge of hope igniting in him until he saw her. Pale and clammy, the skin under her eyes a deep purple-black, she looked like a dying mortal.
“Pandora?” She pointed, and Ambrose followed her finger to see Calum, no longer lying on the library rooftop. Now his friend hung in the air six feet up, his head thrown back, his arms thrown out to the sides.
Calum thrummed with invisible power.
“He can't have...” Pandora trailed off, as lost as Ambrose felt.
“You can feel it, love. He's everywhere.”
“But he's so hurt, so confused.” There were tears in her eyes. “So human. He isn't built for this. Nobody is. He bought us the world, and now he's tainted us all.”
“What else could he have done?”
They stared up at his still outline, and then slowly, because there was nothing else he could do, Ambrose dropped to his knees before his new god.
Calum poured through the world, in an instant inhabiting every part of it. He was the air, and the scorched earth, the rubble and the fire, the blood in the water and the water itself. Calum was at once himself, and every huddled survivor of the angelic purge. He was the walking dead, and the demons.
Calum was everything, and found himself staring at himself from a billion different positions all over the ravaged earth.
Panicking at the enormity of it, he latched on to Glasgow, a city in Scotland, part of a tiny island next to Europe, part of a large land mass, one of several on a small planet circling a small sun, in a solar system making up only a small part of...
Stop, he begged himself. I can't take it. Look at Glasgow. With a terrified effort of will, he managed to do so. The flames that had descended so recently had vanished the world over in the instant God locked the door to Heaven, and Calum saw that his effort had not been wasted. There were hundreds of survivors hiding in the shadows. Many were hurt.
All over the world, pain shrieked at him, and he experienced every part of that suffering. Every wound, every sickness, every failing heart - Calum was everywhere, feeling it all. In panic, not knowing how else to defend himself against the onslaught, he lashed out, sending a wave of spontaneous healing across the world, knitting bones, mending rent flesh, slaughtering the viruses and bacteria laying people low. The relief and shock of the people blinking and finding themselves well was as overwhelming, and Calum's soul squirmed beneath it.
Relief was followed by sorrow, and regret, and Calum had a moment to reflect that his species was pitifully predictable before he was beaten rudely by the longing to reunite with loved ones, or find sanctuary, or be anywhere other than the place they found themselves. Again, Calum's reaction was instinctual. Power lashed off him, snatching people from their hiding places and dropping them where their hearts would have them be.
The let up was momentary. As shock faded away, the questions began.
So many questions, all variations of one simple need to know what would happen next.
Calum didn't have the answer. He huddled around Glasgow, trying to vanish into its shadows and sewers, trying to stop sensing, and feeling, and being crushed by the world.
But he was the world, and he couldn't escape from himself. Calum cried out silently, and every living being on the planet reeled, feeding the hollowness he had caused in them back to him.
Ambrose? Where are you? He couldn't hold the thought for long enough to find out, and looking for his friend would expose him to so much. Even now, trying to shut his mind he was...
People crying in their homes, alone and lost in a world they did not recognise.
Rivers poisoned with blood, trying to flush the red away with new water.
Buildings that had stood for hundreds of years, crumbling.
Forest fires tearing across continents, ripping the sanctuary from survivors, ruining the land for sustenance and succour.
There was so much to do, to fix, and it all needed doing right now, before things got worse. If Calum was to save the world he would have to open himself to everything he was, and make it whole.
Exactly twelve seconds after he came into the world, he let down his hastily erected mental defences.
A second later his mind fragmented into a billion tortured pieces, as his sanity abandoned him completely.
Malachi fell back against the wall of the corridor, disorientated by the sudden gloom, the lack of pain. Running a shaking hand up his side, he found his rib no longer sticking free of his flesh, his cuts and bruises gone. As simply as that, he wasn't dying any more, and the healing was as sudden as it had been in the church. He had no idea what had happened. Huddled in that Glasgow doorway, with the fire falling and corpses reaching for them on every side, Summer and he had...
“Summer? Jackie?” In the hush of the corridor, his own panicked voice startled him. She wasn't here. Of course she wasn't. Malachi knew this place, and DS Jackie Summer was the wrong woman for these halls.
He was i
n the St Dymphna Residential Care Home.
“No,” he muttered. “Not here.” Until the words dropped from his mouth, he had not known how much guilt and fear this place bred in him.
A figure stood halfway along the corridor, and in the gloom it caused a futile moment of surging hope. “Stacey?” He had healed. Why not her? “Is that you?”
“Did you get them, dear?” Malachi was so convinced he would hear his wife's voice, that the crisp, clear question made almost no sense to him.
“Who…”
“You were going to get them, Mr Jones.” It was Mrs Ryland, and he couldn't recall ever having told the old lady his name. “Did you do that dear?”
“I...” There was no point lying to her. “I didn't. I'm sorry. I tried.”
“Ah.” Her voice was solemn as she turned and shuffled back along the corridor, into the gloom. “Well then. That explains everything.”
For a moment, Malachi wanted to run after her, explain what had happened, but realisation stopped him dead.
This was the first floor. He was standing like an idiot outside Stacey's bedroom, while she probably lay inside, healed but terrified. After all, Mrs Ryland had survived. That must mean the other residents had as well, that the home had been somehow overlooked when God's angels set about their cull.
The silence of the rooms and halls around him might have given him pause, but he ignored it, reaching for the handle. The cold aluminium stalled him, the mundane physical sensation clearing his head. Malachi felt like a child, knowing he needed to do this, but still hoping that somebody bigger and stronger would come along and take over. It was so simple a thing. Turn the handle. Step inside. See if his wife was waiting for him there.