Armageddon's Children Part 9

But the defenders are too few and too slow. Michael's command is well trained and battle-hardened, and they have done this often. They know what to expect and are not deterred by the efforts of those within the camp to stop them. They gain the fences and cut the wires and are through. They gain the gates, set their explosive charges, duck aside as they detonate, and are through. They gain the ma.s.ses of concertina wire rolled across gaps in the earthworks that serve as loading ramps, throw mattresses across the deadly spikes, and are through.

In a determined rush, Michael and those closest, himself included, burst through shards of wood, sc.r.a.ps of iron, and ribbons of wire, weapons firing.

There is no attempt at this point to distinguish targets. It is a.s.sumed that anything moving outside the confines of the pens is an enemy. From within the pens themselves, the moans and cries turn to recognizable pleas: Help me, save me, free me! The cries are raw and desperate, but the attackers ignore them.

They know what they are doing and how best to do it. Responding to the prisoners is a mistake that will get them killed. To succeed in what they are attempting, they must first eliminate the enemy.

They do so with a single-mindedness that is frightening. They stay bunched in their attack units, protecting one another's backs as Michael has taught them to do, surging forward into the heart of the compound, destroying the once-men as they go. If they should encounter a demon, they will stand their ground and attempt to drive it back; if that fails, they will turn and flee. They do not expect to encounter one this night. Scouting reports say the resident demon is absent. Michael takes a chance that the reports are accurate because he has no choice. Encounters with demons are a part of the risk they all take.

They are lucky this night. No demon surfaces to challenge them.

There are feeders everywhere, but he doesn't yet know what feeders are and can only sense their presence as they rush in a maddened frenzy through the dead and wounded, savoring the taste of pain and death and fear. Now and again, he catches glimpses of them from the corner of his eye, swift and shadowy, and he shivers.

The once-men are driven steadily back until all are dead or have fled into the darkness. When the camp is secured, one set of liberators begins to free the prisoners while another follows Michael. As instructed, Logan stays close to his mentor. He pounds through the darkness toward the cl.u.s.ter of cabins isolated in the middle of the camp while the pens around him are pulled down and the men and women imprisoned within are released. He glances down once at the Scattershot and finds that the metal of the weapon is cool against his skin. He realizes in surprise that he has not fired it.

Michael reaches the first of the cabins and kicks in the door. There is movement within, but Michael does not fire. Other men go to the other cabins and kick in their doors, as well. An eerie silence settles over this section of the camp, all the noise and furor suddenly gone elsewhere. The men who have come here with Michael lower their weapons and, one by one, step inside the cabins they have a.s.saulted. Michael waits until they are inside, glances back to where the boy stands, and beckons him forward.

Together, they enter the cabin in front of them. Logan thinks he is ready for what he will find, but he is wrong. He stands in the doorway openmouthed, his throat so tight he does not think he can draw another breath. There are children in the cabin, dozens of them, packed close as they huddle together in the darkness, pressed up against the farthest wall. They are dirty and ragged.

They are disgusting to look at. Most wear almost nothing. Their bones protrude from their emaciated bodies like sticks bundled in sacks; they are held together by little more than ligaments and skin. They have the look of skeletons, of corpses, of ghosts. They are all ages, many younger than he is. They do not know what is happening. They stare at him in shock and terror. Many are crying.

They begin to beg for their lives.

"Look carefully, Logan," Michael tells him. "This is what we have been reduced to by our enemies. This is our future if we do not find a way to change it."

Logan looks at the children because he cannot help himself, but he wishes he had never seen them. He wishes Michael had not brought him here, that he had been left behind. He wishes he could sink into the floor and disappear. He knows he will never forget this moment. He knows it will haunt him forever.

"They are kept alive for various reasons," Michael says softly. "Some for work. Some for experiments. Some for things I cannot bear to speak about."

Logan understands. He draws a long, slow breath and exhales. He thinks he will be sick to his stomach, and he fights it down. He swallows and straightens.

Michael's hand closes on his shoulder and tightens. "We shall set most of them free and hope that some will survive." He pauses. "Most of them, but not all."

He moves to the farthest corner of the room, the corner that is darkest.

As he nears, a hissing, mewling sound rises from the shadows.

What happens next is indescribable.

LOGAN WOKE SWEATING and disoriented in the backseat of the Lightning, thrashing beneath the light blanket as if jolted by a charge from an electric prod. The dream of the slave camp, of what Michael had brought him to see, was right in front of him, painted on a canvas of darkness and air, blood red and razor sharp.

Madness, he screamed in the silence of his mind and was filled with sudden, ungovernable anger.

It happened then as it always happened, a sudden shift of emotions that took him from simmer straight to white-hot. The canvas of the dream expanded until it was all he could see. Memories of every atrocity he had witnessed since his boyhood surfaced like a swarm of angry bees from the dark place in his mind to which he had consigned them, and a quick, hard burn of rage tore through him.

He was suddenly unable to focus on anything but his horror of the slave camp he had pa.s.sed by only hours before, unable to think with anything remotely resembling dispa.s.sion, unable to bring reason or common sense to bear. His rage was all-consuming. It swept through him in seconds, took control of him completely, and left him with a single thought.

Destroy it!

Without stopping to think about what he was doing, he crawled into the driver's seat, shut down the perimeter alarms, started the engine, and wheeled the AV about. Forgotten was his promise to himself that he would not let anything jeopardize his search for the gypsy morph. Abandoned was the quest that had brought him to this place and time. His rage washed all of it away, swept it aside as if it were unimportant and replaced it with an inexorable determination to go back to that camp and do what he knew was needed.

Because there was no one else to help those imprisoned in that camp.

Because he knew what was being done to them, and he could not abide it.

He took the highway back to the cutoff, back to where he could see the glow from the fires of the camp, and turned toward them, anger flooding through him like molten lava. He switched on the AV's weapons, setting them to the armed position. His rune-carved staff rested on the seat beside him, ready to employ.

He might have taken time to make better preparations, but his rage would not allow for it. It demanded that he hurry, that he act now. It demanded that he cast aside reason and let impulse rule.

He blew over the flats toward the now-visible camp like an avenging angel, his inner fire a match for flames that burned in the perimeter pits. He had reached the walls almost before the guards could comprehend what he was about, too close for them to bring their heavy weapons to bear. He attacked the towers with the long-barreled flechettes that elevated from their fender housings, shards of iron cutting apart the walls and occupants that warded them as if both were made of thin paper. He swung the AV around after taking down two, left it in idle, and sprang to the ground before the fencing and rolled razor wire, his staff in hand. They were shooting at him now with their automatic weapons, but he was already shielded by the magic of his staff, an impregnable force of nature. He strode forward, his staff sweeping along the fencing and wire in a line of fire that melted everything it touched. Inside, the prisoners were screaming and crying, thinking it was they who were under attack, they who were meant to die. He could not stop to tell them otherwise. He could only act, and act quickly.

He was through the fence in moments, a Knight of the Word in full-blown frenzy, as savage and unpredictable as the creatures he hunted. Feeders appeared as if by magic, swirling all around him, hundreds strong, hungry and expectant.

Cringing prisoners scattered before him in all directions, howling in fear.

Once-men came at him in waves, firing their weapons, trying to bring him down.

But ordinary weapons were no match for his staff, and he scattered them like leaves. He moved deliberately from fence to fence, from tower to tower, from one building to the next, sending everything up in flames.

He kept his eyes peeled for a demon, but none approached. He was lucky this night, but then luck was a part of what kept him alive.

The once-men were falling back, losing heart in the face of his wildness and seeming invulnerability. Their mad eyes and sharp faces lost their hard edge and turned frightened. Soon they were fleeing into the night, seeking shelter in the darkness. The camp's prisoners flooded through the shattered fences after them, hundreds of men, women, and children. Strange skeletal apparitions, they fled through the brightness of the flames without fully understanding what was happening or where they were fleeing. It didn't matter to the Knight of the Word. It only mattered that they run and keep running and never come back.

When the camp was in flames and the pens emptied, he turned his attention to the isolated cl.u.s.ter of cabins that sat deliberately untouched at the very center. He stared at the ramshackle structures, and his rage drained away with the slow onset of his horror at what must happen next. He hesitated, a mix of almost unbearable sadness and disgust welling up inside him.

Then Michael's voice reached out to him from the long-ago.

Don't think about it. Don't try to make sense of it. Do what you must.

He took a deep, steadying breath and started forward.

'COME LOOK, BOY. Come see what hides here in the darkness."

Michael stands waiting on him near the shadows from which the hissing and mewling issues, his face carved of granite, his words hard-edged and commanding. Nevertheless, Logan hesitates before advancing knowing he should flee, that what he is about to see will scar him forever. But there is no running away from this, and he comes forward as bidden.

As he does so, the things hiding in the darkness slowly begin to take shape.

His breath catches in his throat and his chest tightens.

They are children, he sees. Or what once were children and now are something bordering on the demonic. Their bodies and limbs have turned disproportionate to their bodies, made long and crooked, and their hands end in claws. Their backs arch like those of cornered cats as they twist and writhe angrily. Their faces are distorted and maddened, cheeks hollow, chins narrow and sharp, noses flattened to almost nothing, ears split as if with knives, eyes yellow slits that are mirrors of their souls, mouths filled with needle-sharp teeth and tongues that protrude and lick the air. They are manifestations of evil, of the monsters to which they have fallen prey.

He tries to ask what has been done to them, but words fail him. He cannot speak, cannot do anything but stare at these creatures that once were children like him.

"They have been changed by experimentation," Michael tells him. "They cannot be saved."

But they must be saved, the boy thinks, looking quickly at the older man for a better answer. No child should be allowed to come to this! No child should be consigned to this h.e.l.l!

Michael is not looking at him. He is looking at the demon children, at the monsters huddled before him. There is such blackness in that look that it seems those upon which it is cast must succ.u.mb to its intensity and weight. Yet they continue to arch their backs and hiss and mewl and crouch in the shadows, little nightmares.

Michael points his weapon at them. "Go outside now, boy. Wait for me there."

He does as he is told, moving on wooden legs, wanting desperately to turn back, to stop what is about to happen, but unable to do so. He reaches the door and looks out into the night. The fires of the camp burn all about him, their flames a h.e.l.lish crimson against the smoky black.

Dark forms rush here and there, faceless wraiths in flight. He hesitates for a moment, realizing with new insight what has become of his world.

Madness.

There is a burst of automatic weapons fire from behind him and then silence.

HE SET FIRE to the cabins when he was finished, working quickly and efficiently, shutting off his emotions as he moved from building to building, taking refuge in the mechanics of his work. The feeders went with him, frenzied shadows in the red glare of the flames, mirrors of his soul. He tried to ignore them and couldn't. He wished them dead, but that was pointless. Feeders were a force of nature. Only when he was done and walking away did they abandon him, content to frolic in the carnage. He glanced back once to be certain that the cabins were burning, that what lay lifeless inside would be consumed, then quickened his pace until he was through the collapsed fence and moving back toward the AV. Neither the prisoners he had freed nor the once-men that had held them captive were in sight. It was as if both had disappeared in the smoke and flames.

He climbed into the AV and sat staring at nothing. The rage that had earlier consumed him was gone. His wildness had dissipated and his emotions had cooled. He felt detached from his dreams and purged of his madness. He could barely remember having come here. The events that had transpired were a hazy swirl of unconnected images that lacked an identifiable center. His staff was a quiet presence at his side, emptied of magic, cleansed of killing fire.

But as he shifted in his seat, metal fastenings sc.r.a.ped against the door and suddenly he could hear anew the hissing and mewling of the demon children.

He started up the AV's engine and wheeled away into the darkness, accelerating back across the flats toward the westbound highway. The roar of the Lightning's big engine drowned out the sounds that had surfaced in his mind, but the damage was done. Tears filled his eyes as he drove, and the momentary peace he had found was gone.

How had Michael endured this for as long as he had? No wonder it had consumed him. It would consume anyone sooner or later even a Knight of the Word.

One day it would consume him. He wondered if that was what happened to all Knights of the Word whom the demons had failed to destroy. He wondered if it would happen to him, and then he wondered if it mattered.

He had asked it of Two Bears, and now he asked it again of himself.

Was he the last of his kind?

He could provide no answer. Dispirited and weary, he drove on through the night and the silence.

Chapter NINE.

CONTRARY TO HIS fears, Logan Tom was not the last of the Knights of the Word. Another remained.

Her name was Angel Perez.

She stood deep in the shadows of a building alcove and looked past the blackened storefronts lining both sides of the street toward the fighting. The Anaheim compound was under attack by demons and once-men, an army of such size and ferocity that it seemed a miracle the defenders had not succ.u.mbed months ago when first placed under siege. She had warned them then that they should make their escape and flee north, that they couldn't win if they insisted on holing up behind their compound walls. They couldn't win if they didn't engage in guerrilla warfare. She had told them this over and over, warning them what would happen if they refused to listen.

They hadn't, of course. They couldn't make themselves listen. She was a Knight of the Word and understood the danger far better than they, but it didn't matter. They had made up their minds. They stayed behind their walls, blind to the inevitable.

Now the inevitable had arrived. All of the city's compounds were gone but this one. She had just come from the Coliseum, one of eight she had spent almost a year trying to help. But she was only one person, and she couldn't be everywhere at once. The Coliseum had fallen last night at dusk. She had been on her feet for the better part of the last three days, for the better part of a week before that, and for the better part of the month before that.

She couldn't say when she had last slept more than four hours at a time.

Everything about the last several months, about the fighting and the dying and the terror and the madness, was a blur of images and sounds that denied her even the smallest measure of peace. It cloaked her like a second skin, a constant presence, an unforgettable memory.

She should have left months ago. She knew what was coming, and she should have left. Nevertheless, she had stayed. This was her home, too.

She took a moment longer to consider how she could best help the doomed people trapped inside this last compound. She already knew the answer. She had known it for weeks and had made her plans accordingly. She could not save them all, so she would save those who most needed saving. It had been her mission from the beginning, and she had worked hard to fulfill it as the army of demons and once-men overran each compound. This would be her final effort.

She slipped from her hiding place and started toward the chaos. Darting from one hiding place to the next, she scanned the street ahead, searching for movement. The buildings that lined the broken stretch of concrete were silent and empty, their windows broken out, their doors hanging loose or gone completely, walls blackened by fire and soot. Once they had been high-end shops and professional offices, but that was a long time ago.

Angel was small and compact, much stronger than her size would indicate, much better conditioned, fit enough that she could hold her own against almost anyone or anything, a fact she had proved repeatedly. Her battles with the demons and once-men were legendary, although the number of witnesses who could testify to this had dwindled considerably. With her thick black hair, deep brown skin, and sloped features, she had a distinctively Latina look, but she did not think of herself that way. She thought of herself in a different way entirely.

Born in East LA, in one of the poorest sections of the city, she had found her ident.i.ty early. Her parents had been illegals who had crossed the border when borders no longer meant anything, seeking sanctuary from the madness that had already engulfed their home country. They had lived long enough to give birth to Angel and to see her reach early childhood, then succ.u.mbed to one of the plagues. She had grown up on the streets, like any number of others, poor and uneducated and homeless. She should have died, but she had not. She had dug deep down inside herself to find reservoirs of strength she hadn't known she possessed, and she survived.

She caught sight of the feeders now, their shadowy forms flitting past open doors and windows, racing toward the compound's besieged gates. Her mood darkened further. They were always there, always watching and waiting. She had learned to live with it, but not to like it. Even knowing their purpose, she still didn't understand what feeders were or what had created them. Were they made of something substantive? They fed on the darker emotions of human beings, but there was no reason for shadows to require food. There were so many of them it seemed impossible they could avoid detection, yet no human could see them save those few like herself.

She particularly hated the way they swarmed about her when she engaged in battle against the demons and once-men. She could feel them in the way she could feel a spider crawling on her skin. Even though they were only shadows. How could something that was only a shadow-little more than a darkness on the air- make you feel that it was alive?

Her attention shifted to the battle. Thousands of feeders swarmed at the base of the compound walls, climbing over the bodies of the dead and wounded, feeding on their pain and misery. They were everywhere, black shapes twisting and writhing as they fought to get at the living. There were so many that in places it was impossible for her to see anything else. Beneath their dark ma.s.s, humans and once-men fought for survival.

And the once-men were winning. Their army was vast and purposeful, their a.s.sault inexorable. Makeshift siege towers had been rolled forward, long scaling ladders had been thrown up, and battering rams were hammering at the reinforced iron gates. It was an all-out a.s.sault, one that was meant to break through, one that in the end would succeed. In other times and places, this army had possessed artillery and had used it against the compounds it had besieged. But the mechanized weapons had slowly failed or fallen apart as conditions worsened and war materiel was used up or destroyed. Everything was rudimentary now, sliding back toward the medieval. But that didn't mean the army was any less successful. Ask those who had fought against it in the other compounds, if you could find any still alive. It didn't make any difference what kinds of war machines were used; the once-men held the advantage. They were not shut away inside compound walls. They were not afraid of dying. They were not even sane.

Their madness and their bloodl.u.s.t drove them.

And they had that old man to lead them.

She paused in the lee of an alleyway, not two blocks distant now from where the battle raged, close enough that she could make out the rage in the faces of the combatants and see the blood that soaked their clothing. She looked down momentarily at the rune-carved staff she carried in her hands, its burnished surface as black and depthless as a night pool. She could help those men and women who defended the compound. She commanded power enough to scatter the once-men like dried leaves, but she must not give in to the temptation to do so. She had not come here for that and could not afford to allow herself to become distracted. Besides, any summoning of the staff's magic would alert the demons, and the demons were already hunting for her.

Especially that old man.

Robert had warned her of him last year, just before the end, when he had gone to make a final stand with the defenders of the New Mexico and Arizona compounds. The old man had brought this same army to their walls and laid siege, hemming them in, closing off any escape. Robert had done what he could, but a single Knight of the Word was not enough-not then and not now. She had known Robert for five years, had fought beside him in Denver and might have fallen in love if the times had been different and falling in love had been a reasonable thing to do. Robert was tough physically and mentally, a better fighter than she was. But it hadn't been enough to save him.

In his final messages, the ones sent by carrier pigeon, he had described the old man so that she could not mistake him when he reached Los Angeles, as Robert knew by then he would. Tall and stooped, wrapped in a long gray cloak and wearing a wide-brimmed hat he was the personification of evil. The eyes were what you remembered, Robert wrote. Hard as steel, so cold you could feel them burn your skin, but empty of everything human when they looked at you.

There were rumors about him even before Robert's letters. A demon whose special skills lay in tracking down Knights of the Word, he had been hunting and killing them for years. She did not know how many the old man had dispatched besides Robert, but it was more than a handful. Eventually he would come hunting for her.

But she would not be so easily trapped, she thought, and her hands tightened anew on her staff.

She darted from her hiding place and sprinted back down the street and then onto a side street, dodging debris and the sh.e.l.ls of burned-out cars to reach the entrance to the hotel that lay just outside the Anaheim compound perimeter.

FIFTY YARDS BACK from where the once-men battered at the main gates of the compound, the old man stood watching. Wrapped in his gray cloak and shadowed by his slouch-brimmed hat, he had the look of Gandalf until you got close enough to see his face and feel the weight of those eyes. Then you knew for certain he wasn't a wizard seeking to convey the One Ring to Mount Doom, but a creature fallen under its terrible spell, his soul forever lost.

The old man didn't know about Gandalf or the One Ring and wouldn't have cared about either if he had. He was a demon, and humans were his prey. He had been there at the fall, when the first real cracks had begun to appear in civilization's weakening facade. He had been there in the time of Nest Freemark, when the gypsy morph had come into being. He had been there for centuries before that, a constant presence in the fabric of the world. He had been there long enough that he had forgotten completely the shedding of his human skin. As a demon, he viewed humankind as anathema, a plague upon the earth, an infection that required eradication.

But the old man was different from others of his kind. He was driven not by base instincts. Most demons self-destructed early and spectacularly, turned mad by their emotional excesses. His own struggle was of a different kind. He was not motivated by a desire for revenge or personal gratification or to prove himself or leave his mark upon the earth. What drove him, what consumed him as no fire could, was an insatiable desire to expose the deep and pervasive failings of humanity, and so prove irrefutably that his choice to remove himself from the species had been the right one.

He had made the decision early on to trade his humanity for a demon soul.