Instantly slipping into emergency mode, Jon stood and headed for a phone just inside the room to the right of the doorway.
This was when he noticed the other bodies all along the path leading into the garden. They appeared broken . . . bloody.
Were those bite marks? he wondered with escalating horror.
He then knew why the other areas of the dome had been so quiet—the residents were all here. Not realizing it, he had begun to walk the path, stepping over the bodies of the people he had known all his life. All dead, all wearing expressions that could best be described as shock . . .
No . . . the look was surprise.
Reaching the clearing, he noticed that the tropical forest was completely quiet; even without his hearing aid, he could hear that the bugs’ and birds’ voices were silenced. Maybe they knew to be silent . . . or maybe they were dead too.
The most bodies were in the clearing, stacked like a huge pile of dirty laundry . . . dirty, bloody laundry. Jon froze, searching the green of the man-made jungle, sensing that he wasn’t alone.
“Show yourself.”
The words left his mouth before he could consider them, and they brought with them a response that he really didn’t care to experience.
There was laughter from the jungle, low and rumbling, more like a growl. He could feel it low in his stomach, as well as hear it. Jon couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from; it seemed to come from all sides . . . from everywhere.
And then there came the fire.
It was like a living thing, leaping out from the concealment of the trees and bushes . . . tongues of flame consuming everything in their path as they made their way toward him.
Jon spun around, running across the body-strewn path on his way to the exit. He imagined the bodies, his friends, reaching up to grab at his legs and feet, not wanting him to get away, not wanting him to survive. He could feel the fire growing in intensity behind him, nipping hungrily at his heels.
He could see the door up ahead, the stretcher holding the body of his friend just outside it. That was his goal, he decided, feeling a tongue of fire lick at the salty wetness of sweat on the back of his neck. He wanted to reach his friend.
If he was to die, he wanted it to be with him.
Jon made it to the exit, passing through the doorway with one final push, jumping onto the stretcher, feeling the body of his friend beneath him as Hell opened its awful mouth to consume them all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The airplane shuddered.
Remy casually glanced out his window expecting to see the beginnings of a storm, but saw only cottony white clouds, so inviting that he was tempted to lay his weary head upon them.
The jet shook again, harder this time, and now he could hear the alarms going off in the cockpit up front. His hand was reaching to unbuckle his seat belt when the plane trembled yet again, so violently that the overhead storage bins flapped open.
“Is everything all right?” Remy called out, holding on to his seat as he made his way up the short aisle toward the cockpit.
The alarms continued on the other side of the door as he rapped on it with his knuckle.
“Is everything . . .”
There was an explosion of air that could only have been the roar of decompression, followed by the shriek of the jet’s fuselage as it tried to maintain its integrity.
The plane began to fall.
Remy was about to kick open the cockpit door when part of the wall to his right was ripped away with the whine of twisting metal, and the screech of the wind as it rushed in to fill the void.
Remy attempted to hold on to something—anything—as his body was wrenched toward the yawning hole.
And through that hole he caught a glimpse—a glimpse of something large and terrible, something that had done this on purpose. Something that had willfully attacked the plane.
Then a rush of air tore at Remy’s clothing as he lost his grip and was sucked into the void. Spinning through the clouds, he caught sight of the plane—one engine and part of a wing gone, the other engine engulfed by orange flame and leaking black, oily smoke. The cockpit was gone, shorn away, along with the pilot.
Over the deafening roar of free fall, he could just about make out a sound, and craned his neck to face the Cherubim Zophiel, large and powerful, and as filled with rage as the last time Remy had seen him.
The Cherubim flew past with the speed of a jet fighter, then banked around to match the speed of Remy’s descent, a trinity of faces—eagle, lion, and man—studying his form as he plummeted to Earth. Malachi had warned of this—of the hatred Eden’s sentry had for the Sons of Adam and their mission.
The ground loomed closer, and Remy knew what he had to do, although it enraged him. He would have to call upon his other side—the side of Heaven.
The Seraphim.
Let’s get this over with, Remy thought. He dug deep within his psyche to where his other half waited. He was there, as he always was, sitting impatiently behind the mental barriers Remy had erected. He reached for the divine spirit, calling him forth, and the Seraphim surged forward, ferociously wild and eager to be free.
The Cherubim flew toward Remy, all three of his mouths shrieking a cry of doom. The renegade angel was almost on Remy, reaching out to snatch him from the air, but just as his metal claws were to close about him, the Seraphim manifested in a flash of Heavenly fire.
Zophiel wailed, rearing back from the hungry flame as Remy spread his wings, slowing his descent to face his adversary.
“Let’s end this the way we should have a very long time ago,” the Seraphim cried over the howling winds.
The Cherubim roared his response, moving with the speed of a lightning strike, slashing out with multihued wings as sharp and deadly as the finest blades forged in the fires of Heaven.
Remy glided back, but he wasn’t fast enough and the tip of one of Zophiel’s wings cut a bloody line across the middle of his chest. The Seraphim was angry now. If he hadn’t been sequestered away, and had been allowed to roam free, nothing could have caused him harm.
Coming around again, the Cherubim came at him with murder in his eyes. Let it come, the Seraphim thought, wings holding him aloft, watching as the sentry flew closer, and closer still.
Just as he and Zophiel were about to collide—a runaway freight train about to hit a Volkswagen Beetle—Remy flew up and turned, landing on the back of his attacker.
The Cherubim screamed, his wings flapping wildly as he attempted to dislodge the bothersome insect that had attached itself, but the Seraphim held tight, angling his body to avoid the knifelike feathers of the Cherubim’s wings.
Remy reached out and grabbed hold of the Cherubim’s long black hair. He channeled his inner fire, igniting the sentry’s hair like a fuse, the divine power burning down its oily black length until it engulfed all three visages. The Cherubim screamed wildly as he thrashed and spun his armored body around before plunging earthward in an attempt to extinguish the flames.
Spreading his wings, Remy released his grip, attempting to avoid a collision with the quickly approaching desert floor, but Zophiel had decided otherwise. The Cherubim grabbed the Seraphim’s ankle with a gauntleted hand, dragging his prey down with him.
Remy struggled, but it was useless; the Cherubim’s grip was too powerful, and the pair struck the ground at full velocity—a mushroom cloud of sand and rock blossoming from the desert floor.
The Seraphim crawled up from the crater, burning with rage and the desire to see his enemy vanquished, but the Cherubim was nowhere to be found. The angel fluttered his golden wings, shedding a thick layer of dust and some slivers of rock that clung to them. He was about to take to the air again, when the humanity that had been momentarily forgotten attempted to reassert its control.
The Seraphim did not care for this, fighting the attempts to again force him down to the darkness. But the humanity was still stronger, wrestling with the warlike nature of the angel, pulling it down and forcing
it to heel.
Remy was again in control. It took a moment for his head to clear, a warrior’s rage still burning in his every muscle.
He did not put his angelic form away entirely, still needing the ability to fly. There was part of him that would have loved to chase after his attacker, but also a part that thought of the biodome, and the safety of the Sons of Adam. What if Zophiel had come for him after first attacking the dome?
The Seraphim had no care for the Sons or their cause. All that concerned him was to see his enemy destroyed, and he argued to be free again against Remy’s mental restraints.
But Remy was stronger, and he kept the warrior nature at bay. Fearing for the lives of the biodome’s residents, he unfurled his wings and took flight, soaring just above the desert surface, on his way back from where he had come.
Unnoticed, the tiny lizard emerged from beneath the sand, watching as the Seraphim took flight. It waited there patiently, watching with large, dark eyes filled with intelligence, until the angel was just a dwindling speck on the horizon.
Waiting until it felt confident that it could abandon the reptilian form it currently wore for something far more efficient.
To proceed with the plans that it had set in motion.
Remy hoped that he was wrong, that Zophiel had come after him, not bothering with the innocents inside the dome, but something told him otherwise . . . something and the roiling black clouds that his superior eyesight saw reaching up into the sky way off in the distance.
To get there all the faster, Remy allowed his wings to enfold his body, his mind thinking about where he needed to be at that very moment—where he had been—and when his wings opened again, he had reached that very destination, dropping down to the earth in front of the chain-link gates leading up to what remained of the biodome.
Remy flew up and over the security fence into the actual compound. He could not pull his eyes from the sight before him. Where the dome had once stood, growing out from the desert floor, now there were only the shattered, broken, and burning remains of the home to the Sons of Adam.
Remy stepped around the charred, twisted pieces of metal that littered the ground on his way toward the jagged, broken hole in the side of one of the walls that still managed to be standing. He peered inside, the stink of burning flesh and chemicals assailing his heightened senses. Remy recoiled from the stench, stepping back to again assess the damage. There had been a powerful explosion from within, he imagined. He imagined the beastly form of Zophiel releasing his Heavenly might within the facility, the unleashed power of Heaven tearing the biodome asunder.
Scanning the ruin for survivors, Remy could find only the burned and broken bodies of the dead. The Sons of Adam had the gift of longevity on their side, but it was nothing against the power of Heaven released.
He was about to leave this place of death, to continue with the mission he’d accepted, when he heard what sounded like a cough. Remy stood perfectly still, expanding his senses just to be sure. Was it possible? Could somebody have actually survived, or was he just hearing the final death sounds of the installation?
Standing at the edge, he looked down into the smoldering crater, the first level having collapsed and given way to levels beneath. Again he heard a sound, soft, but distinct, and flew down into the remains, searching for signs of life.
Remy guessed that he’d reached what had once been the man-made garden, the broken shapes of colorful birds strewn upon the charred floor.
“Hello?” Remy called out, eyes scanning the rubble for any sign of movement.
It sounded like a gasp for breath, but nonetheless it was a sound of somebody or something still alive in the remains of the biodome, now rendered a tomb. Something shifted beneath a felled section of the garden wall, and Remy flew above the broken concrete, searching for the source of the sound. There was scraping beneath the rubble, and the angel touched down beside it. He grabbed a huge piece of concrete, and in a display of supernatural strength hauled it up and tossed it aside.
Beneath he found a body. The remains were badly damaged. There was no way that the sound could have come from him, but Remy again heard something: this time a muffled cry.
Rolling the corpse over to one side, he found what looked to be a metal stretcher. Something stirred beneath the stainless steel, and Remy lifted it up to reveal the shape and the still-living body of a man covered in thick dust, dirt, and blood.
Reaching down, Remy carefully took hold of the man’s arm and pulled him from the rubble. Despite the destruction around him, the survivor appeared to be unscathed other than some minor burns, cuts, and bruises.
“Are you all right?” Remy asked, kneeling beside him.
The man turned a dirty face toward him. “You’re going to need to speak up, Mr. Chandler,” he said.
Remy was startled, even more surprised when he realized that the survivor was the man called Jon.
“What happened here?” Remy asked, remembering how it had once looked, but now seeing only devastation.
Jon crawled across the rubble to the body that had lain atop him. He knelt beside it, taking one of its burned hands in his. “I was going to bury him,” he said. “In the garden . . . when I found them all dead.”
Remy realized that the corpse belonged to the volunteer, and his belief that Jon and he had been more than friends was affirmed by the intensity of the man’s emotion.
“All dead?” Remy asked.
“Something got into the dome and killed everybody. I only survived the initial attack because I was dropping you off at the plane. I came back to bury Nathan. . . .”
Jon stared at the broken and bloody corpse again, stroking its hand. “That was his name. . . . His name was Nathan.”
“Stay with me, Jon,” Remy said. “What did you find when you returned?”
“The place was unusually quiet. . . . It was when I entered the garden that I found the bodies.”
“Did you see who did it . . . ? Was it Zophiel? The Cherubim?”
Jon shook his head. “I don’t know. . . . All I heard was a laugh, and then there was this horrible fire and—”
“What happened to Malachi and Adam? Did you see either of them?”
Jon thought for a moment before answering. “No . . . no, I didn’t see them.”
“Then they might have survived,” Remy said. “Escaped before they could be hurt.”
“Yes,” Jon said as he started to rise, nearly falling over as the rubble shifted beneath his feet. “I believe Adam still lives,” he said. “I think I’d have felt it if he died.”
“Then there’s still a chance of getting this done,” Remy said. “Of finding the key.”
“Do you still have the map and drawings?” Jon asked. He was still gazing down at Nathan’s body.
“I was attacked, as well. Zophiel brought the plane down,” Remy said. “The map and drawings were lost.”
Jon looked to him with a nod. “I see,” he said, and then walked closer to Nathan’s remains. “I’d like to bury him before we go,” he said.
Remy stared, not entirely understanding what was being said.
“We?” he questioned.
Jon nodded. “I’m the only one still alive who saw what he did,” Jon said, pointing at Nathan’s corpse. “You’re going to need me to get us where we’re going to find the second half of the key and open the Gates of Eden.”
Remy now understood completely.
“But before we go anywhere, I need to bury my friend,” Jon said, going to the body. “Will you help me?” he asked of him, as Remy nodded.
It was the least he could do for the man.
Zophiel . . . I am Zophiel.
The Cherubim floated above the Earth in the cold vacuum of space and continued to remember. Splintered pieces of memory came at him from every side and he snatched at them, eager to put the imagery together . . . eager to know what had happened to him.
Eager to know what had yet to be done.
Invisible feeler
s trailed from his drifting form, leading from his armored body down to the planet below.
Zophiel knew the answers were there, and he would find them. All he needed was patience.
The feelers drifted across the surface of the Earth, telling him much about the place to which the Almighty had taken such a shine. It was a special world filled with a myriad of life, and bountiful resources, and so much more, but the answers still eluded him.
The Cherubim felt his anger begin to spike, and he resisted the temptation to descend upon the planet, laying waste to its vast cities until the answers to the mysteries in question revealed themselves to him. It was an option that he was seriously considering when he felt the first twinge.
Like a spider in its web, Zophiel felt the thrum of an ancient power through the tendrils of webbing that trailed from space to the planet below. It had not been there before, but now it was.
Just a hint of something that had once been hidden.
A taste.
The Cherubim drifted in the cold of space, ready to act upon the next sign. And it came again: another faint tremble in the ether, vibrating up through the invisible line from the earth below.
Zophiel squinted his many eyes, following the connection from space, down through the atmosphere and clouds. It was there that he would find what he was searching for.
Spreading his massive wings, the Cherubim dropped from the stars in search of answers.
Heaven help any who dared stand in his way.
Steven Mulvehill pulled up in front of Fernita Green’s house a little after six, and again considered what he was doing.
Taking one last puff from the cigarette in his mouth, the homicide cop shoved the smoldering remains into the open ashtray, which resembled a kind of cigarette cemetery, the butts sticking up like tombstones.