19
“Alfred, it’s over.”
She pushed on my chest and I unfolded my arms. Every inch of me ached. In the half-light beneath the tarp, I saw her brush back a strand of hair from her forehead.
“What was that?” I whispered hoarsely. My throat ached from the screaming. “What the heck was that?”
I flipped back the edge of the tarp without asking for permission. Enough of this, I thought. I was testy now. I wanted some answers. Everybody seemed to know what we were getting into except one key person.
Sand fell into a heap where I lifted the tarp. The winds had piled the sand all around us, like a snowdrift. I stood up and my knees popped. Twelve mounds of desert sand now stood where the foils used to be. And these twelve mounds were the only feature left in the Sahara. The desert was as flat and featureless as an enormous tabletop; the rolling dunes were completely gone.
But the night had returned and, with it, the brilliant stars and the cool air.
The others had already emerged from their hiding places and gathered in a circle around Op Nine. He saw me crawl out and waved me over. I waited for Ashley. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes red.
I grabbed her hand. She pulled it away.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, and I grabbed her hand again and this time she didn’t pull away.
We joined the other agents, who for some reason were kneeling in this circle, even Abby. Their eyes were downcast and their expressions somber, and I wondered why we were having a prayer meeting. Op Nine was the only one upright, standing in the center of the circle, arms folded over his chest, looking very grim. Even the big agent with the cocky, let’s-mow-’em-down attitude looked like somebody had gut-punched him.
They adjusted themselves to make room for Ashley and me. Op Nine motioned for us to kneel. I don’t know why, but I went down to my knees at once and so did Ashley. She pulled her hand free and this time I didn’t take it back.
Op Nine said, “The worst has come to pass: the Hyena has unlocked the Seal. Yet Fortune smiles upon us, for we have escaped his minions’ notice. We may assume he has divided his legions to search for us, thus exposing his position. A frontal assault will be the last thing he expects.” He took a deep breath. “So that is precisely what we shall give him.”
He reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit and pulled out a small metal flask. He walked up to Abigail and stopped. He opened the flask, tipped the opening against the pad of his thumb, and then traced the sign of the cross on her forehead, muttering something I couldn’t hear. He worked his way around the circle, wetting his thumb, muttering, making the sign.
Finally he came to me. He paused, staring down at me, and his dark eyes seemed even darker in the starlight.
“What?” I whispered.
“Domine, exaudi orationem meam,” Op Nine murmured, upending the flask. “Et clamor meus ad te veniat.” He pressed his thumb against my forehead and I felt the wetness there as he traced the cross. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”
He stepped over to Ashley and I watched him bless her too, as a single drop of holy water (I guessed it was holy water—what else could it be?) trickled down my nose.
He capped off the flask and slipped it into his pocket. Nobody said anything as we pulled the tarps off the foils and folded them up. Ashley would pause every now and then to pull back the strand of blond hair that had fallen from her bun. Her fingers were shaking. I helped her fold the tarp.
“Okay,” I said. “So what was that about?”
She shook her head, almost impatiently, like my question bordered on the cheeky.
“We’re too late,” she said. “Mike’s unlocked the Lesser Seal. They’re free.”
“Who’s free? What did Solomon keep in the Lesser Seal, Ashley? Why did Op Nine just bless us? Is he a priest or something?” I blurted out, though it was hard for me to imagine, a priest being an OIPEP agent. “What’s his deal anyway?”
She grabbed the bundle and stuffed it back into its compartment on the sand-foil. She looked angry and frightened at the same time.
“Okay, I’ll tell you. They brought you here, so you have a right to know. Let them fire me for it; I don’t care . . . Op Nine’s ‘deal’ is demons, Alfred.”
“Demons?”
“He’s a demonologist.”
And that’s how I finally discovered what had been imprisoned for three thousand years in the Holy Vessel of Babylon, the Lesser Seal of Solomon.
“Demons . . . ?” I said. “Demons. Well, that’s great. That’s just terrific.”
20
We climbed back onto the sand-foil and soon the speedometer needle was hovering near 110. We made better time now that the dunes were gone. We were crossing the Sahara, but it might as well have been the flats at Death Valley.
The speaker inside my helmet crackled with agent chatter, mostly from Abby as she reviewed the ATTPRO. I guessed it meant “attack procedure.” It could also stand for “attitude problem,” though I doubted it, given the context.
“Two groups!” Abby said. “First group will feint an attack on the Hyena’s flank to draw off the IAs. Second group is the targeting force who will take out the Hyena and retrieve the Seal!”
Abby made it very clear that Operative Nine had dibs on Mike, I guessed because he was the expert in the group on handling these demons. It seemed to me what they really needed was an expert on handling Mike Arnold.
Then she called out the names in each group. ASSFOR-1 (“Assault Force One,” I was guessing, though the OIPEP shoptalk threw me for a second) would consist of Sam, Betty, Todd, Bill, Carl, and Agnes. All OIPEP people had names like that, never more than one syllable—unless you were a girl, then you got two or even three, if you were really important, like Abigail Smith.
The rest, Bert, Ken, Yule, Ashley, Abigail, and Op Nine, were ASSFOR-2. I assumed I was ASSFOR-2 too, since my big one was hanging off the backseat of Ashley’s sand-foil.
After a while the horizon began to glow that sickening orange color and the chatter inside my helmet died away. My thoughts started to feel like Swiss cheese again, and I wondered how anybody, even a trained OIPEP agent, could fight in these circumstances, when absolute terror ripped through you like a buzz saw.
Ashley slowed the sand-foil and we fell back with the rest of ASSFOR-2. The first group roared straight toward the horizon with its sparks of white light that looked kind of like Christmas lights twinkling. They held the butts of their long 3XDs against their thighs, the barrels sticking up in the air at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Hold until they’re engaged,” I heard Op Nine say in my ear.
We came to a stop. Op Nine was right beside me, the visor on his helmet flipped up so I could see his face in the glow of the demon-fire.
“Where’s mine?” I asked, nodding at the 3XD in his hand. “What’s it shoot anyway—holy water?”
“Something far more powerful, I hope,” he said. Then out of nowhere he added, “It has begun.”
He flipped his visor down. I looked toward the orange glow and now there was red tracer fire from the group ahead arching into it, and when it touched the fire, a black tear or hole appeared, lingered for a few seconds, then closed back up. I didn’t get a long look, though, because we leaped forward suddenly and my head snapped back. The needle jumped to 130 after we executed a hard left. Racing toward the battle, I could see over Ashley’s shoulder that the orange glow came to a sort of point on the southern edge.
The orange had deepened to red when Abby Smith started yelling something over the speaker and we skidded to a stop. About thirty yards ahead I could see a sand-foil lying on its side and closer, crawling toward us, one of the OIPEP agents, clutching the 3XD in his right hand.
Ashley grabbed a satchel embossed with a red X, ripped off her helmet, and ran to the crawling man.
“Ashley!” Abigail called. “There isn’t time!”
He had taken off his he
lmet. It was Carl, the biggest agent, the tough guy who talked on the plane about blowing Mike away. He was crying and slobbering and cursing, his face caked with wet sand. He cried out when Ashley touched him on the shoulder, cringing like a dog that’s used to being beaten. As we got closer, I could see Carl had no eyes. There were just empty sockets where his eyes used to be.
Ashley realized it at the same time, I think, because she recoiled suddenly with a startled gasp.
“I do not, don’t, won’t—they come, they come, THEY COME!” he bellowed at her. He rolled himself into a ball and brought his hands to his face. When I first got a load of those empty sockets, I thought the demons must have torn out his eyes. But, as Carl clawed frantically into the spaces where his eyes used to be, the truth hit me: Carl had ripped them out.
Beside me, Op Nine said softly, “You see now why I warned you never to look into their eyes.”
21
Op Nine grabbed the first-aid kit from Ashley’s hand and pulled out a shiny instrument. It was the same thing Ashley had used on me in the helicopter.
“What are you doing?” Ashley asked.
“Sedating him,” he answered. “Otherwise, he may literally tear himself to pieces.”
He jabbed the needle into Carl’s arm. In two seconds he rolled onto his back, out cold. Op Nine handed the kit to Ashley.
“Dress the wounds, quickly,” he told her. He scooped the 3XD out of the sand and held it toward me.
I hesitated for a second, then took it from him. The rifle was lighter than I expected. It weighed about the same as a broom.
Op Nine kneeled beside Carl, pulled the sash of cartridges from his body, and handed it to me.
“Remember, Kropp, the ammunition is limited.”
That’s okay, I thought, so am I.
I threw the cartridge belt over one shoulder and slung the 3XD over my back. I trudged back to the sand-foil, dragging my aching right foot in the sand. Ashley trotted back after a minute, carrying the first-aid kit under her arm and pulling off bloody surgical gloves as she ran.
Op Nine took the point now, as we raced southwest.
His voice sounded tinny and distant over the speaker in my helmet: “If another operative flees the engagement, we do not stop.”
It looked like the engagement was winding down. When it first began, the tracer fire lighting up the sky had looked like the climax of a Fourth of July fireworks show. Now the firing was sporadic and the black holes punched through the searing lights appeared less frequently. Either ASSFOR-1 was running out of ammunition or it was running out of personnel.
I blinked rapidly behind my visor, because the lights in the sky now reflected off the sand, like the battle was taking place over a vast lake.
Suddenly a ball of light separated itself from the main firestorm and came barreling toward us. We were going about 130 miles per hour; this thing came toward us at three times that speed.
“Engage, engage, engage!” a frantic voice screamed over the speaker. The agents brought the sand-foils skidding to a stop, angling them into a circle. They jumped off, fell to one knee inside the circle, and swung their 3XDs toward the sky.
I plopped down next to Ashley, swinging my rifle upward too, but feeling a little ridiculous, to tell the truth. I’d been to a carnival or two where you fire at the little plastic cutouts of ducks as they slowly roll along the track. I never knocked down a single duck. But maybe saving my own skin from being fried by demon-fire would focus my aim better than winning the kooky stuffed monkey with the disproportionately big head.
“On my mark . . .” Op Nine said.
I rested the pad of my index finger on the cool metal of the trigger. Sweat trickled down my forehead and burned my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe it off because of the helmet, and I wasn’t about to take my helmet off. The memory of Carl writhing in the sand was still fresh in my mind.
“Mark!” Op Nine shouted.
“Fire, fire, fire at will!” someone else screamed.
The 3XDs erupted all around me and the night lit up in a fury of red. My finger jerked on the trigger, which slammed the weapon hard into my shoulder as it recoiled, nearly knocking me onto my butt. I didn’t aim, really—it was kind of a frantic repeat of my duck hunting at the carnival—but just jerked the barrel this way and that, firing randomly at any movement above me. Waves of furnace-level heat rolled down from the sky.
I could see them now, and the sight nearly made me throw down my gun and run in pure panic.
Thousands of demons—maybe tens of thousands— careened above us, diving, swooping, stalling briefly, then zipping away faster than you can blink, glimmering forms of men in flowing robes. They rode beasts with wings sparking with golden fire, the wings at least ten feet from tip to tip, with yawning mouths stuffed with fangs, hanging open as if frozen in midscream. I saw lions and tigers and bears and other beasts that I knew I should recognize. They reminded me of roadkill: you knew they lived once, but now they were twisted and smashed into distorted versions of what they once were.
Their screams mixed with the roaring wind and the whispering of the damned.
But they didn’t look like your typical comic book or movie demons—not like those hunkered gargoyles or the little grinning guys with pitchforks and horns growing out of their bald heads. These riders were seven feet tall at least. They wielded swords of fire, lances, or staffs that burned at the tips but weren’t consumed. This close to them I could see now the source of the orange and red light was the demons themselves; it radiated from their eyes and their open mouths.
Some wore flaming crowns, and the light springing from their eyes was especially harsh, purer and brighter than the light of the crownless ones, which was flecked with black. The light made it impossible for me to see their faces—not that I really wanted to see their faces.
Abby’s voice crackled in my headset, tinged with barely controlled panic: “Base One, Base One, this is Insertion Team Delta. We have a Level Alpha Intrusion Event. Repeat: confirm L Alpha Event! Request immediate air support at these coordinates!”
As I held down the trigger, the 3XD kept firing, and my shoulder began to ache from the kickback. I emptied my clip and fumbled at the belt for a fresh one, but then I couldn’t figure out how to eject the spent cartridge, and I wasted a few precious seconds yanking on it, trying to pull it free from the rifle.
The noise was horrible, the screaming of the flying road-kill, the howling of the wind, the shouts and static over the speakers in my helmet, the booming of the 3XDs. When a round slammed into one of the demons, it blew apart in an explosion of sparkling light mixed with black, but only for a few seconds. I watched, horrified, as the thing reassembled itself and was whole again. I remembered Op Nine’s words on the plane: What has never lived cannot be killed.
Holding them off was the best we could hope for, but our ammunition wouldn’t last forever, and then what?
I finally found the release button for ejecting the cartridge. It plopped hissing into the sand as I slammed a fresh one into the slot and yanked the trigger. About that same time, the demon swarm leaped straight up, dwindling into the velvet blackness of the desert sky.
A voice shouted in my ear, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The noise died away until all I could hear was my own ragged breath inside the helmet. Even the whispering faded, but the memory of it lingered, like a slowly dying echo. We watched their shapes circle high above in concentric rings of fire, each ring turning in the opposite direction of the other one.
The eerie silence was shattered by a terrific roar, and my heart jumped. Ashley tugged on my sleeve and pointed toward the main body of demons about three football fields away. Something was coming toward us, moving slowly across the desert, bellowing as it came.
Beside me, Op Nine murmured, “ ‘Behold the Ninth Spirit, Paimon, the Great King, second only to Lucifer, in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary.’ ”
I didn’t know what he was talking about,
and I sure didn’t know what a dromedary was, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound good. Op Nine stood up and then everybody stood up and we waited for the bellowing thing to come.
It was huge, standing over ten feet from its hooves to the top of its slightly flattened head. Bulging red eyes, a neck thick and gnarled as a tree trunk, globules of slobber hanging from its open mouth.
“That’s not a dromedary,” I said. “That’s a camel.”
It stopped a dozen yards from our circle. It stopped, but the bellowing didn’t. This perverted memory of an animal was in some serious pain.
A man-shape balanced on the forward hump, with a shining face like those of the demon-lords who circled high above us, lean and almost girl-like with its large eyes, delicate nose, and full, sensuous lips. A crown glittered on its head, spewing radiant light, red and gold and aqua and green, that shot out from its brow like laser beams.
A dark shape fell away from the rear hump of the monster camel and dropped to the sand. It walked slowly toward us, and beside me Op Nine whispered, “Hold, hold.” He had pulled off his helmet, so the rest of us followed suit.
He was ordinary size, the man who now walked toward us, and he didn’t carry a flaming sword or burning staff or anything like that. His head was bare. He wore a white robe that had come open, so beneath it I could see his khakis and white Lacoste polo.
And, of course, he was smacking gum.
“Hey, guys, how’s it goin’?” Mike Arnold asked.
22
“Michael,” Abigail said.
“Abby Smith—hey, it’s pleasing as pickles to see you! I don’t care what they said in headquarters, you’re still a heck of a field agent in my book, and by the way you look just fantastic in that jumper.”
He looked at Op Nine. “Figured you’d be here, Padre. Sort of the culmination of your whole career, huh. No thanks necessary.”