For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Page 19

  “You call that thing a child?” asked Yellowskin.

  “Yes,” said Popo, “I do. Where is he?”

  “You don’t seem too distressed at your situation,” said Atherton, not answering the question. “You like a bit of rough treatment, do you?”

  It took Popo a moment to realise Atherton was referring to his erection. As a permanent fixture he sometimes forgot how distressing some mortal men found it.

  “If so,” Atherton continued, “I can promise you’re going to very much enjoy what lies ahead.”

  “It’s just the way I am,” Popo explained, then, unable to help himself, “though I’m gratified it’s taken your fancy so. In other circumstances I’d let you indulge yourself with it but I’m not feeling particularly loving at the moment.”

  For the first time, that coldness in Atherton’s eyes thawed and he beat at Popo with a ferocity the Incubus was barely able to endure.

  When he finally stopped, Popo found it hard to breathe and his mouth was filled with blood.

  “You think you’re funny,” said Atherton, flexing swollen fingers and regaining his own breath as he took a step back, “but you will learn. I want to know all about that town. How many of you are in it. What abilities and weapons you have. Every last detail. I’m not going to ask you now. I’m going to let you rest a while, let you really enjoy the pain, then I’m going to come back and we’ll talk a little more.”

  With that, he stepped out of the tent. Popo realised he’d probably struck a nerve, for all the good it had done him as Atherton had certainly struck a few in return.

  “Well,” said the old man, “that sure told you, huh? Maybe you’ll watch your damned mouth next time.”

  Again, that emphasis, damNED, it would have been sweet were Popo not in such pain. He spat blood onto the floor, only to feel his mouth begin to fill up again. And was that a tooth working itself loose? Popo thought it probably was.

  “I asked a question earlier,” Popo said, no humour in his tone now. They had gone beyond trading insults. “I asked where the child was.”

  “That thing weren’t no child,” said Yellowskin.

  “Some kind of demon,” said Phil, “the way it chattered and screamed.”

  Popo clenched the arms of the chair, though it was agony to do so.

  “Phil smacked the shit out of that thing until it quit its noise,” said the old man, “took some doing too. Used that length of wood to turn the ugly thing to paste and still it cried.”

  “And if you don’t tell us what we want to know,” said Phil, “I’ll be doing the same to you.”

  Popo spat again. It took him a moment to realise he was crying, his face was so wet from his own hot blood. He always had been one for tears. Opera turned him into a sobbing wreck.

  “You may find I’m not such easy sport,” said Popo.

  “Oh I don’t know,” said Phil the Child Killer, “you don’t look all that much to me right now.”

  “I can take a beating,” Popo admitted, tensing his arms, “that’s not the measure of a man. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to knock him down, what matters is how long it takes for him to get back up.”

  He yanked his arms upwards, wrenching the nails from the wood of the chair. The old man and Yellowskin were closest and they made the fatal error of grabbing him, meaning to force him back down. He slammed the bloody points of each nail down into their heads, pounding on their skulls with his forearms and using the leverage to pull his ankles free. They burned with pain as he stood up and grabbed Phil, clamping a hand to his mouth before he had time to scream. The nail on that wrist, half of which had snapped off and was now jutting from the scalp of Yellowskin like the stalk on a rosy red apple, pierced Phil’s cheek. Popo held him hard, stifling his screams.

  “I’m a higher caste, bitch,” he whispered into Phil’s ear. “That gives me the sort of strength and tolerance a mortal like you can only dream of. And I fed not long before you caught me, putting me at the top of my game.” His mouth was filling with blood again, the loose tooth finally snapped free and rolling on his tongue. “You want to know how I feed, Phil? Well, I’ve adopted a more gentle attitude to that of late but in the old days it was different.” He reached forward and yanked at Phil’s belt, loosening the man’s trousers. “Tell you what, why don’t I just show you?”

  He stepped back slightly. “I can’t promise to be soft,” he said. He spat the mouthful of blood and loose tooth onto the weapon he hadn’t put to fatal use for some time. The tooth glistened on its tip, the ruins of a great smile.

  If Popo’s hand hadn’t stifled them, Phil’s cries would have been the equal of the child he had killed.

  3.

  ATHERTON PACED THE edge of the camp, wanting to cool his anger. It did him no good, this rage. The beast, every bit as infernal as those creatures in Wormwood, that he kept caged in his belly. Sometimes, deprived of light and food, that beast grew weak, so weak in fact he might almost believe it had died. But then, something would awaken it again and it would return, as big and powerful as ever.

  To his employers, that rage was a weapon, but that was only because they didn’t know how hot it could burn, how much Atherton had to keep a grip on it. If they saw the real power of it, the screaming, pent-up lunacy of it, they would have shot him years ago. Which showed how little they understood the job he did; did they really think it was possible for a completely sane man to travel the world getting gallons of blood on his hands?

  He climbed up to the edge of the crater rim, looking down over the plain in front of Wormwood. Over the short time he had been here he had watched that plain fill up, the traffic to and from Wormwood getting busier almost by the hour. They had had to move carefully, he and his men, to get close to Wormwood and capture someone without being seen. He didn’t trust those that gathered down there to have seen the importance of what they had been doing, seen how vital it was to gather information about the enemy.

  The talking was soon to begin. There had been official envoys and messengers moving to and fro all day. That poisonous stew, politics, was on the boil. And now, to add a little urgency, he understood the President was on his way to visit.

  He filled his pipe and let the act of smoking calm him down.

  Ten minutes, that was how long he allowed himself to find clarity and focus, to bury the monster. Then he climbed back down into the camp and down the short path to the tent they had erected a distance away. Atherton had known that it would be a mistake to have pitched this tent with the others, it took a special kind of soul to retain their conviction even when the screaming started. Father Martin, for example, a man that would throw words at his enemies but nothing more.

  Atherton peeled back the flap and looked at a horror of blood on canvas. He saw the desiccated remains of Phil, his trousers loose at his ankles, his skin wrinkled and contorted. He saw the absence of their prisoner. And with that, the monster in his belly returned.

  His course of action was barely even deliberated, he simply reacted. He ran, not further along the trail, where the creature had undoubtedly fled, but back to the camp. He grabbed his rifle from his tent and then scaled the crater once more, ignoring the questions of those around him. He skidded down the outside edge, running over the rocks with such dexterity it was if they weren’t there. Descending at a steep angle, his only chance was to cut off the creature further down the mountain before it could make a break for the plain and aid. As much as Atherton might hope that any right-thinking human would refuse such a thing assistance, he could not rely on the fact.

  He jumped down onto the trail the creature would have used when exiting the tent. Momentarily, he dropped to his haunches and studied the ground. It was peppered with blood, a mixture no doubt, of the creature’s victims’ and its own. There was no part of Atherton’s mind that saw the creature as a victim itself, of course, it was simply the enemy and he ran down the trail, shifting his attention between the blood and the way ahead.

  4.

>   POPO KNEW HE was being followed. While his pursuer was athletic he wasn’t silent, small rocks tumbled at his passing and, to someone with ears as sensitive as Popo’s, the man’s breathing echoed off the corridors of stone around them. Popo’s ankles burned, blood pumping from his wounds. If it weren’t for the energy he’d gained from a dual feeding he wouldn’t have been able to walk, let alone run. That said, the energy wouldn’t last forever, his pains would get the better of him soon and, as much as he wished for nothing more than to turn and fight the bastard that had dealt them, he knew his only hope was to escape. Once healed, once strong again, he promised himself he would return. He had a score to settle with the man behind him, and he wouldn’t rest until it was done.

  5.

  ATHERTON CAUGHT A glimpse of the creature ahead. He stopped, raising his rifle, resting the barrel on the rock to steady its aim. You’ll not run, he thought to himself. Nobody escapes from me.

  With Popo in his sights, he placed his finger on the trigger and gently squeezed.

  WHAT AM I DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE REVOLUTION?

  (An excerpt from the book by Patrick Irish)

  NO MORE. AS the Observation Lounge continued to pummel me with sights I could hardly bear, I made that promise.

  Hadn’t Alonzo said it was impossible to simply observe? He had been right. I couldn’t be a spectator, not to this. Not to atrocity after atrocity, themselves nothing but drops in the ocean of blood that was sure to flow soon enough.

  But what could I do?

  Everything was a chaos. Atherton and his army; the impending President and the soldiers he would bring with him; the gathered masses in the plain, observing and judging; Lucifer and the forces of the Dominion of Circles who, soon enough, would no longer be his to control.

  How could I resolve any of this? It all seemed too confused, too disparate. Were this a story on a page how could I ever hope to bring it to a conclusion?

  The honest truth was that I would not have allowed it to become such a mess in the first place. There were too many characters following too many journeys of their own. What sort of story would this have been? Was it Elisabeth and Billy’s love story? A broad comedy, with Abernathy in his store? A political drama with Lucifer and his conferences? Atherton’s brutal tale of horror?

  It made my head swim. It was no story of mine. I had crafted simple adventures of a noble hero facing monsters. Where were the monsters here? The demonic caste? The humans that hated them? It was all the most terrible, unpleasant mess and I didn’t have the first idea how it could ever be brought together.

  I left the Observation Lounge for a while and walked the corridors outside, because, in the old days, when this sort of thinking had been my bread and butter, I had often found that most plots gave in if you just paced around enough. Of course, back then, if the pacing hadn’t done the trick I would just have taken the cap off a bottle and drowned the problem, but that was a solution I was determined to avoid for now. If I started drinking I’d simply never stop.

  There had to be a way. There had to be something that could be done to bring all of this together. What strings could I pull, what extra chapters could I write? What story could I force upon that mess of life below me?

  I returned to the Observation Lounge, looking back over the lives I had encountered. Not just re-watching moments I had already seen but also looking earlier. I followed Lucifer’s passage through the Dominion of Circles, hunting for the power to lift his curse of being ‘non grata’. I watched Elwyn, the nervous young man now made immortal through a mistake in a hand of cards. I watched...

  And then I decided.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BETWEEN GOD, THE DEVIL

  AND A WINCHESTER

  1.

  THE BEAST WAS dead and that was the only good thing that could be said of it.

  Leonard Oliver hadn’t always been a man of the city. He had spent his formative years on his father’s ranch before swapping the corralling of horses for a life of politics. He saw the skills learned in one life as perfect training for the other. When dealing with his father’s horses he had often felt his control was illusory, now as a White House aide it was doubly so. He did his best to herd those in power from one appointment to another, the clean white fences of his father’s ranch swapped for the enclosed walls of governmental office. The men in beards and suits were just as unruly, and liable to bite, as those willful colts had been. Now, he had to herd that most unruly horse of them all, President Benjamin Harrison, not through the streets of Washington but rather the open grasslands of Nebraska.

  “What in hell’s teeth is it?” asked Corker, the Army Captain currently charged with keeping the convoy safe. His platoon maintained their positions, rifles at the ready, big guns cold but their keepers ready to load at a moment’s notice. They looked like they were en route to a war rather than a conversation.

  Corker poked at the creature in front of them with the gleaming toe of his boot. It made a noise like sponge engorged with broth.

  Oliver, who had been wondering much the same thing, squatted down and risked lifting one of the beast’s leathery wings. Beneath it was a mess of meat and fur that offered no further clue as the animal’s identity.

  “Is that its eyes?” Oliver asked, pointing to a glutinous mass at the centre.

  “If so, what the hell are these?” Corker replied, pointing at a pair of cream spheres at the other end of the creature’s body.

  Oliver shook his head.

  “With all due respect, gentlemen,” came a voice from inside the presidential coach, “we’re here to do considerably more important things than marvel over grotesques. Would you please get us moving again? I wish to achieve more today than a numb posterior.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” said Corker, “but it’s my duty to assess whether there are any threats to your personal safety.”

  “It’s deader than my grandma, son, the only way it’s going to hurt me is if I have to smell it a moment longer. Let’s get under way.”

  Corker sighed and nodded at Oliver, both returning to the convoy as it rolled on towards its destination.

  2.

  AGRAT HAD ENDURED a tiring morning reading Venus in Furs and consuming a small sack of peaches. She claimed it was ‘research into the mortal domain’ and vital in fostering ‘a continuing understanding of their mores with a view to potential co-existence’. When Elwyn had asked her opinion thus far she had simply replied:

  “Delicious.”

  “The book or the fruit.”

  “Both.”

  Having announced to the household that a morning’s work was more than should be expected of a woman of her importance and nobility, she had retired to the verandah to drink brandy and bully passersby. She was not, therefore, best pleased by Lucifer’s request that she be pressed into service once more.

  “Can’t you get one of the others to do it?” she asked. “One of the more unimportant ones?”

  “Such as?”

  “Ask Elwyn, he’s a mortal, he knows what mortals talk about.”

  “That’s rather missing the point, I want the president to be met by someone from the Dominion. Someone who can show a charming side.”

  She stretched out on her sofa and basked in the glow of the compliment. “I am terribly charming.”

  “You’re capable of pretending as much,” Lucifer agreed, looking out across the square at the bustling streets beyond, “and that’s almost the same thing.”

  “Still,” she insisted, “I don’t see why I should put myself out. Ask Meridiana, she can show him some of her attractions.”

  “I want to impress him, not kill him.”

  “I think she’s strictly monogamous these days. Certainly she shouldn’t be hungry, I hear them at night. She moans awfully, egging his withered genitals on to further acts of heroic savagery. It’s quite disgusting.”

  “They’re happy.”

  “Oh, to be so easily pleased.”

  Lucifer sighe
d and tried his best to keep his anger in check. He had swapped a life of wandering for one of complication and responsibility, two things he had happily given up long ago. “The American president is a very important man.”

  “That’s a contradiction in terms,” she smiled, “present company excepted. He’s King Ape of a trifling land mass, I fail to be impressed. Now, Queen Victoria...”

  “She’s not paying a visit, President Harrison is. Besides, America is hardly a trifling landmass, it’s young but growing in power all the time.”

  “So you talk to him.”

  “I’m intending to, clearly, I’m just asking you and Forset to be the welcoming party.”

  “Sat out there in the dirt waiting on a monkey. In the company of another monkey. It is not an attractive proposition.”

  “Nonetheless, you’ll do it.” Lucifer’s patience was running thin. “Because I’m telling you to.”

  Agrat sighed and threw her arms in the air. “Very well, as a favour to you.”

  “A favour given freely,” he insisted, knowing full well how Agrat might choose to turn the situation to her advantage otherwise.

  “Naturally,” she replied, begrudgingly. “When is he due to arrive?”

  “Forset’s calculations are far from precise, there may be a couple of hours in it either way, but he thinks it’ll be around noon our time.”

  “You’re not making this seem any more attractive, you know.”

  “Take a book.” He stepped back inside the house, before briefly reappearing. “But not the brandy.”

  “Spoilsport,” she said, draining her drink and setting her thoughts as to what she should wear.

  After some consideration, she settled on a frock hand-woven by the Needle Babies of Albeer. She decided it was intimidating enough to create an impression and yet not as violent as some of her wardrobe; Lucifer would hardly be pleased if she wore something potentially fatal. She took a few passes in front of the dressing room mirror, delighted by the noises the frock made, like a host of chattering teeth.