“No!” Beleeze wailed. “No! No! No!”
He started toward the Vietnamese man, who now knelt with the receptacle outstretched before him, the vertical slit opening wider, sending forth even more of the corrosive energy.
Francis leapt at Beleeze, tackling him before the demon suffered Dorian’s fate.
“No sense in killing yourself, too,” Francis said, hauling the thrashing demon to his feet and attempting to drag him toward the door, away from the expanding cloud of destruction.
“No! I want to be with her!” Beleeze hissed, fighting the former Guardian’s grip upon him.
“We might all be with her shortly,” Francis said.
It was as if the room was being disassembled, broken down to its molecular structure, and scattered to the wind. Francis briefly wondered what it would be like to be uncreated as the power contained within the vessel flowed dangerously closer.
He was about to open an escape portal, but the sight of a figure in the open window behind the Vietnamese man gave him pause. He watched as the figure crawled through the window and crept up behind the man.
A fountain of blood suddenly erupted from the man’s chest, followed by the point of a sword. The Vietnamese man stiffened, dropping the vessel to the floor, where it snapped closed, cutting off the radiance of the power contained within. As if in slow motion, the man slid forward, falling face-first to the floor, revealing the mystery man who had dispatched him, bloody sword still in hand.
Francis immediately recognized him; tall, blond hair, an air of authority about him—but also a stink of the demonic. He’d last seen this man with the Vatican sorcerers, the Keepers, on the Japanese island of Gunkanjima.
But what was he doing here?
The Keeper stared at Francis, his eyes filled with hate, giving the fallen angel a sense that something supremely evil was behind those dark portals.
Saying nothing, the man dropped the bloodstained sword and approached the container. He knelt down, preparing to retrieve it, but Francis still had questions to be answered.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, aiming his gun.
The man ignored the threat, carefully lifting the vessel from the floor with a defiant smile.
“It’s quite all right, Francis,” a familiar voice said from behind him. “Constantin works with me.”
Simeon strolled in through the front entrance, his focus on the man holding the object.
“He works for the Vatican,” Francis said. He still hadn’t lowered his pistol.
“You remember that, do you?” Simeon asked.
“I do,” Francis answered.
“I wish you didn’t.”
“What?”
“I wish you didn’t remember him,” Simeon said, twisting the ring on his right hand. “In fact, I’m telling you to forget him completely.”
Francis was suddenly confused, almost positive that he’d been about to ask an important question, but now it was gone.
“What was that?” Simeon prompted.
Francis just stared as he lowered his gun.
“Excellent,” Simeon said. He motioned to a man Francis did not recall seeing enter. “Now let us return home so that I can fulfill my part of the bargain.” Simeon left the hut, the man carrying the vessel directly behind him.
Francis reluctantly followed, the idea that something important had been lost niggling at the back of his mind, but within seconds, that, too, was gone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Baarabus slunk down the side of the mountain, snout raised to the noxious air, sifting through the numerous scents in search of danger.
The smells were there; the stink of Filthies was weak, old, the enemy having moved on.
He stopped, perched upon an outcropping of smooth, melted stone, and gazed out over the ruined landscape and beyond, a hint of what had once been rising to the surface in a miasma of memory.
The recollections came in violent flashes, moments of a past that he could no longer recall but remained there, waiting for him like images in a stranger’s album of photographs.
He saw what the world had been like before. . . .
He remembered the happiness of freedom, the sounds of birds chirping in rows of trees, of running through thick summer grass, the smell of a recent thunderstorm still lingering in the air. The nearly overwhelming emotions felt as a gentle, loving hand petted his head and a voice that made him quiver with adoration told him that he was a good boy.
They were not his memories but the memories of a life lived before.
A life prevented from ending.
A life grafted to the existence of another to create . . .
What exactly am I? Baarabus pondered, bombarded with the sensory remembrances of another.
A good boy, answered a voice—a ghost—from another time, unaware of what nightmarish occurrences had created something as far from a good boy as could be.
The demon hound felt the sensation of a gentle hand upon his head, scratching behind his ears, and quickly stood, as if to pull away from the loving touch.
But it was all a memory.
A memory belonging to another.
A good boy.
Baarabus turned his powerful snout to the air again. It seemed safe enough to resume their journey.
And that sparked another thought. Though he did not care to, Baarabus had no choice but to consider the sudden, dramatic change in their leader. It was maddening, and the demon hound’s true nature wanted nothing more than to surge forward and rip the angel’s throat out when his guard was down.
But that wouldn’t help anything, other than to release some aggravation. They’d be in an even worse situation without Remy than they were with a Remy who wasn’t quite himself.
It was all so maddening.
The Fossil believed Remy’s memories would awaken with time. They would just have to wait and see.
The hound began the climb back up the face of the mountain to the cave entrance. They could leave now. To hopefully continue where they had left off.
Offhandedly, the demon hound wondered whether it would be painful for this Remy to remember what his part had been in the fate of the world. What he had done.
Baarabus hoped that it would be.
• • •
It took them the better part of the morning to reach the ground below the mountains.
Remy tried to figure out exactly where he was, but nothing looked familiar anymore. They could have been on another planet, except for the occasional twisted remains of a car or a blackened street sign rising up out of the dirt and rubble.
“Hard to believe,” he said, more to himself than to anybody.
“What?” the Fossil asked as he walked along beside him.
“This,” Remy answered, motioning with his chin at the bleak landscape. “That Heaven was somehow responsible.”
The old-timer squinted, causing the skin around his eyes, thick with scabs, to split and bleed.
“It wasn’t the intention, I assure you,” the Fossil said, rivulets of blood running down his cheeks like tears. “It was all supposed to come together.” He locked his fingers together. “Like the pieces of a puzzle, to form a single glorious thing.”
He looked at his scab-covered hands, seeing something else.
“A unified place.”
The Fossil let his hands drift apart. “But it didn’t happen. . . . It went wrong—horribly, horribly wrong.”
“Now, that’s a fucking understatement,” Baarabus added.
Samson’s children laughed, the sound strange in the bleakness of the environment.
“With God dead, the pieces didn’t fit anymore,” the Fossil went on. He made two fists and started to bang them together. “But the motion had already begun.”
The wind picked up suddenly, blowing across the bleak landscape, throwing clouds of scouring grit into their faces. The land before them was flat as far as the eye could see. At one time, a city might have stood here, or an ocean, dried up afte
r the supernatural calamity.
They walked in silence for what seemed like days, but even the passage of time wasn’t what it used to be, the clouds of dust, ash, and smoke so thick in the air that this new world was always in a perpetual state of twilight.
The remains of a great city seemed to suddenly appear in the distance, rising up out of the thick clouds, like the sheet in a magic trick being pulled away to reveal the broken remnants of the metropolis beneath.
Remy squinted through the blowing grime, trying to get a bead on which city this was, but it was visual gibberish, the once striking structures of Heaven’s sprawling celestial city crammed together with those of a far more human design.
Through the swirling dust it looked like something out of a very bad dream.
“For a moment you’ll think you recognize something, and then you won’t,” the Fossil said. He had pulled up a scarf to protect most of his bloody face from the flying dirt. “That’s just how it is now. Everything has changed; there’s nothing familiar anymore.”
The demon dog padded up alongside them. “And you’re planning on simply walking in there and finding the door that fits your special key.” The dog turned his large black head to fix Remy in an icy stare.
“That’s the plan,” Remy said, staring as the city disappeared and reappeared again in the shifting environment.
“It’s fucking nuts,” the dog grumbled.
“But it’s all we’ve got,” Remy said, putting his hand into the deep pocket of his heavy coat to touch the key. Like sparks of fire, there were flashes inside his head; images of a long stone corridor with a heavy wooden door at the end.
He started to walk again, not caring if the others followed or not; the key would take him where he needed to go.
Hopefully there would be answers there.
• • •
Streets once bustling with people and traffic were now buried beneath mounds of shifting dirt and rubble. Remy walked down the center of a passage, half-buried storefronts peeking out from beneath filthy drifts that hissed and changed shape as the whipping winds continued to erode and redefine the devastated landscape.
“Any of this familiar?” Baarabus called to him.
Remy stopped to see the great hound standing before the partially buried front of an apartment building. It wasn’t at all familiar, but he approached for a closer look anyway.
The building appeared to be a typical brick brownstone, but another element had tried to join with it. Brick and the stuff of Heaven’s Golden City melded together, two structures fighting to share a single space.
“Is this it?” Baarabus asked.
“No.”
“Huh,” the dog grunted. “Didn’t figure we’d be that lucky.”
Remy turned back to the street to see that Samson’s children were fanning out, searching, although he couldn’t tell them what to look for, other than a wooden door. Hopefully, he would know it when he saw it.
The sounds of somebody screaming nearby changed the subject in an instant, immediately putting them all on alert.
“Stay together,” Baarabus commanded, as Remy started to move toward the desperate sound.
He trudged through the sand and dirt to the end of the street and peered around the corner. A man was staggering toward him, his exposed skin and clothing covered with blood. Behind him was a wall made of the twisted wreckage of old cars and trucks.
“Help me!” the man cried, reaching out to Remy, his eyes wide with desperation. “Please!” He fell into Remy’s arms, and the angel could see that the bleeding was caused by multiple bites and scratches, as if the poor fellow had been attacked by an animal.
“I have to get away or they’ll take me back.”
“What’s his story?” Baarabus asked, slinking up beside them.
The man lifted his head to the voice, and upon seeing the hound at once began to shriek.
“No! No! No!” he cried, tearing himself from Remy’s grasp, his arms flailing as he attempted to run back from where he had come.
“Not a dog lover, I’d guess,” Baarabus said.
“He said that somebody was coming to take him back,” Remy said.
The man fell but continued his desperate struggle to get away, trying to crawl to his knees, glancing back at them with escalating terror.
“Leave him,” the Fossil said. “I see nothing but trouble there.”
Remy looked at him with squinted eyes. “He’s injured,” he said, then turned away, walking toward the man.
He reached down and helped the man to his feet where he’d fallen, receiving little resistance. “We’ll find shelter and see if we can patch him up,” Remy said to the others as he guided the moaning figure toward a cluster of buildings whose entrances seemed free enough of dirt to allow them access.
Remy dragged the nearly weightless man into one of the buildings and gently laid him down on the floor of what used to be an office directly to the right. He placed beneath the man’s head a dusty cushion that had once been on the seat of an overturned chair.
Glancing toward the entry way he saw that the others had followed, looking about as they cautiously entered.
“It seems safe,” Remy encouraged them as he knelt beside the practically unconscious man.
“Seems,” the Fossil emphasized, removing the scarf from his face. “Things that seem normal, like that man right there, can often lead to something dangerous,” he warned.
“He needs help,” Remy countered. “We’ll patch him up the best we can and then be on our way.”
The old man scowled as Baarabus came to stand beside him.
“Guess he told you,” the hound said with a chuckle, then sauntered away.
Remy began to open the man’s shirt, and a young woman knelt down beside him. It was Samson’s daughter, Leila, and she carried a canteen of water, some bandages, and what looked to be some almost-used-up tubes of antibiotic ointment.
“Thanks,” he said as she went to work cleaning the injured man’s wounds.
Leila looked at him briefly, then back to her work. “I really don’t have any idea why I’m doing this. It’s a waste of time—he’ll probably be dead shortly anyway.”
“At least we’re trying to do something,” Remy said.
She laughed then, shaking her head.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. If anybody was still doubting that you’re some other Remy, this proves it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Remy that came out of the ruins wouldn’t have thought twice about letting this guy die,” Leila said, putting as much of the ointment on the wounds as she could spare. “Probably would have helped put him out of his misery.”
Remy had no idea how to respond, trying to imagine the kind of being the other version of himself had become. “I’m not that far gone yet.”
She gave him a sideways look.
“Yet.”
Leila finished cleaning the man’s wounds without another word, then was gone, going back to rejoin her brothers.
Remy stayed by the man’s side as the group rested, closing his eyes and actually drifting off into a fugue state. But instead of the normally calming state of mind, all he could see was the world coming to an end accompanied by a symphony of screams. And above those screams, boring into his brain, were the prayers of those begging to be spared, asking their Lord God Almighty what they had done to deserve a fate so terrifying, and why He wouldn’t be merciful and take them without pain.
Remy opened his eyes with a start and found himself staring directly into the open eyes of the injured man. It took him a moment to realize that the man was dead. Leila’s assertion was correct. He hadn’t made it.
There was a thick green trash bag nearby, and Remy reached for it, using it to cover the dead stranger’s face.
“Now how do you feel?” asked the Fossil, suddenly standing before him.
“What do you mean how do I feel? How do I feel that he’s dead?”
/> The Fossil shook his head. “How do you feel that what you did was all for nothing?”
“I don’t think of it that way,” Remy said, staring at the body lying so very still upon the floor.
“You should have left him there.”
“Alone . . . injured, to die in the street?”
“I know it sounds harsh, but yes.”
“I’m not him,” Remy said.
“Yes, yes, you are. You’re just not him yet.”
Remy sneered at the old man.
“There’s still a lot for you to learn.”
Remy stood, eyes still on the corpse. “I suppose we’ll just have to leave him here,” he said.
“Where else would you put him?” the Fossil asked. “Do you feel obliged to give him a proper burial? Wake up, Remy. The whole fucking world is a cemetery.”
He was about to begrudgingly accept the Fossil’s words when he heard the sounds above them. At first he thought it was just the wind howling outside, but it became louder, more insistent, almost as if there was somebody—or something—moving in the ceiling above.
Baarabus heard it as well, bolting over to them, his dark eyes riveted to the stained panel ceiling.
“We’ve got to get outside,” he started to say, but his words were drowned out as their attackers dropped down through the panels.
Angels—or what passed for them these horrific days.
They dropped down to the ground, sparse and diseased-looking wings furled to slow and silence their descent. In their hands were weapons of sputtering fire, as if the divinity they had once possessed was on the verge of running out.
“Filthies!” the children of Samson bellowed, grabbing their own weapons and charging in to join the fray.
The filthy angels continued to drop through the ceiling, a seemingly endless storm of twisted divinity. Baarabus was something to behold, reminding Remy of that character in the Warner Brothers cartoons that swirled around in its own portable tornado; it took a moment for the memory to come, but it was suddenly there. The Tasmanian Devil—the demon dog moved like the Tasmanian Devil as it dealt with its multiple attackers. Guns were fired, and screams of rage and pain filled the air.