Armageddon (12 page)

He started to cry again, feeling a monumental loss, but not knowing what it was.

He thought of Vilma, and for a crazy moment, he remembered her as his wife.

Maybe someday, but not now.

“Are you all right, Aaron?” Lori asked. The flames flicked over her gentle features.

“Yeah,” he answered. The pain in his stomach was still pretty intense, but he pushed himself to his feet. As he did, he was startled to see that a bloodstain had formed on his shirt.
“This doesn’t look good.”

“It’s not,” Tom said. “We should probably move on, if you’ve made your decision.”

Aaron looked around at the darkness and tried to imagine what had once occupied the void. If he had known, that knowledge was gone.

“We should probably do something about this,” Aaron said, holding his arms up to draw attention to the expanding stain of blood.

“That’s exactly what we intend to do,” Lori said.

His foster parents turned, retreating farther into the darkness.

And Aaron followed close behind, pulled along by the light thrown from their burning bodies.

T
hose progeny of the divine and human, who had been called Nephilim before they’d died, had been transformed into some other entity entirely.

Their master—their father—called them his dark messengers . . . his Angels of the Void.

The five dark angels stood in their birth chamber, acclimating to their new environment. Slowly they flapped their leathery wings, allowing their slick ebony flesh to dry and their muscles to strengthen.

They vaguely recalled that they had once lived, flashes of memory from a time and place when they had served another God.

The memories filled the Angels of the Void with intense hatred, but also with purpose: to destroy those that had once been family to them.

The black messengers could sense their former brothers and sisters, somewhere else, and it caused them great pain.

A pain that they knew would not stop until—

“Do you feel them?”

The Angels of the Void turned toward the sound of their father’s voice. He stared at them proudly. Others gathered around him, but they were not the ones of whom their father spoke.

“Out in the world,” Satan said, pointing beyond their birthing chamber. “Hiding from me . . .”

Jagged memories of their former selves assaulted their senses, making the desire to destroy—to kill—all the more urgent.

“Hiding from you.”

The angels knew that the Nephilim must suffer as they had suffered before surrendering to the darkness of death.

Before they had been reborn.

“You need to find them and you need to steal their lives . . . so that they, too, may receive the gift you were given.”

The angels watched their father, understanding what was being asked of them.

What was expected.

“Find them,” Satan instructed.

The Angels of the Void did as they were told, attempting to reestablish the connection they’d once had with their Nephilim siblings.

“Find them. And take away their lives.”

Anticipating the coming hunt, the angels spread their black wings.

“Go,” Satan, the Darkstar, commanded, and the dark messengers surged into the air, exploding through the domed ceiling of the citadel.

Out into the endless night.

*   *   *

The last thing Lorelei remembered was thinking about her friends.

She wasn’t precisely sure what had happened then, only that the grounds of the school where she’d been had blurred all around her as if she were suddenly moving at an incredible speed, and she found herself in another place entirely.

Lorelei felt the urge to panic, but then remembered that she was dead, and that there really wasn’t much to worry about anymore.

It wasn’t like she could get hurt.

If she could have taken a few deep breaths to calm herself, she would have. Looking around at her new surroundings, she saw that she was in some sort of basement, her feet floating a few inches above a concrete floor.

It would have been cool, if she wasn’t dead. That kind of threw cold water over anything that might have been exciting.

People were sleeping in the darkened room: a young woman and a little girl, a teenager, a middle-aged cop—or
was he a security guard?—an old man, and an elderly woman. Lorelei was drawn to the old lady. She could feel the tethers that held the woman to life gradually loosening.

Lorelei had no idea why she was here, until she saw a familiar form asleep in the corner, away from the others.

“Melissa!” Lorelei squealed, but only she could hear. She floated across the room toward her sleeping friend, and that was when images—terrible images of creatures with black, armored skin, rising up from the earth—flashed through her mind.

Lorelei had no idea what these demons were, but she somehow knew that they were extremely dangerous.

Dangerous to the Nephilim.

Some sort of strange, inexplicable link seemed to exist between Lorelei and these awful beasts. She saw them as they crawled up from the dirt, spreading leathery, batlike wings.

“What are you?” Lorelei asked, oh so curious, but also afraid.

It was if the creatures were compelled to answer—to show her—the masks of black upon their faces melting away to reveal human faces beneath.

Lorelei reacted with a scream that only she could hear.

They were the dead, her friends, the Nephilim fallen in combat. But how? How could they be alive again?

And then it hit her, and for an instant she refused to believe, but then thought better. Maybe they weren’t alive at all.

Lorelei tentatively reached out with her mind once again, connecting with the other armored creatures as they pulled themselves up from what had been their graves, and was shaken to the core.

The dead Nephilim had somehow been returned to life, brought back from death to serve as agents of a terrible force.

The Darkstar.

And those who had once been her beloved friends had a terrible purpose that they willingly shared with her. These things, these twisted mockeries of sacred life, were now hunters of the surviving Nephilim.

Stalkers of their still-living friends.

Lorelei could not allow this. She had to do something—but what?

Managing to sever the strange connection she’d made with her resurrected friends, Lorelei experienced a whole new level of frustration.

How could she help if she could not be heard? How could she reach out to her still-living friends and warn them about what was coming?

And then she remembered what she had done to the insect creature that had crawled from the body of the dragon, and stared at her translucent hand, not wanting to hurt in this instant, but to help.

Was there a way?

Lorelei drifted closer to the sleeping Melissa, still entwined
within the grip of nightmare, and reached out to her with her ghostly hand. She didn’t know exactly what she was doing, but instinct guided her.

The tips of Lorelei’s fingers disappeared inside Melissa’s head, establishing a tentative connection with the girl. It required a great deal of energy, and Lorelei knew that she could not hold the connection for long. She injected the fear of what she had seen into Melissa’s subconscious, hoping that her friend would take it as some sort of sign.

A warning to be heeded.

*   *   *

Melissa had been happy to see her friends alive: Janice, Kirk, William, Russell, and even Samantha.

It was one of those moments when everything seemed right with the world. The sun was warm, and a gentle, cooling breeze only added to the perfection.

No one said a word, so as not to lose the flawless moment.

Melissa felt an intense connection to her Nephilim friends. She’d always wondered what it would be like to have brothers and sisters, and now, looking around her, she knew. She could burst from the joy.

“We’re a family!” she blurted out, then panicked. Had she spoiled the moment?

Everyone simply stared.

“I love you all,” she tried to explain.

The words seemed perfect as they left her mouth, but
Melissa realized that she had only made things worse.

As her friends glowered at her, she wanted to defend her statement, to explain that this was what being a family was all about.

But she didn’t get the opportunity, for the skies grew unusually dark, and the refreshing breeze turned cold and damp.

Melissa shuddered.

And it was then that she remembered that they had all died, and had been buried on that very spot.

That she had left trinkets and keepsakes on their graves from the places she had been while defending the world from encroaching evils.

She started to cry. It was as though nothing would ever be right again.

Then the muddy ground beneath her feet started to move, as something forced its way up from below. And it wasn’t just one grave—it was all of them.

Dirt and rock exploded into the air. Melissa recoiled, peering out from between splayed fingers at the nightmarish figures that surrounded her.

Everything about them was black, from the glistening armor that covered their bodies to their batlike wings to the aura of foreboding they exuded in waves.

But the most disturbing aspect of all was that Melissa felt that she knew them, that there was something overwhelmingly
familiar about the nightmarish visages that now surrounded her.

“Who are you?” she frantically asked the black, armored wraiths that had emerged from the hold of the grave.

And suddenly she knew.

“We are your family,” they announced as one.

“And we love you.”

*   *   *

Melissa came awake in the darkness of the fallout shelter, stifling a scream, the stink of overturned dirt heavy in her nostrils.

She looked around, making sure that the black, armored things weren’t there with her.

What the hell was that all about?
she wondered.

“You okay, Melissa?” Charlie asked from the shadows. He always seemed to be awake.

“I’m good,” she said, trying her best not to show the old man how absolutely terrified she was. There were some grunts and sighs as the others stirred in their sleep.

“Bad dreams,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” Charlie said. “Not sure I’d know a good dream if it bit me on the ass.”

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw him sitting at the edge of the cot, by his wife’s side, as he always was.

Melissa pushed herself up and approached him. She was hoping that the longer she was actually awake, the faster this
nearly overpowering sense of anxiety would pass.

But it wouldn’t go away.

“What was it?” Charlie asked her.

“Excuse me?”

“The dream, would you tell me what it was?”

Goose bumps broke out on her flesh, and she rubbed her hands over her arms. “Old friends.” Her eyes darted around the chamber, searching every shadow for . . .

For what? she wondered. Did she actually expect to see the creatures from her nightmare there in the bomb shelter? That was crazy.

But if it was so crazy, why did she have the overpowering urge to get the hell out of there?

She couldn’t help but feel that this was some new Nephilim instinct that was trying to warn her.

“I keep having a nightmare about Retta getting bit,” Charlie was saying. He looked to his wife, breathing shallowly on the cot.

“How’s she doing?” Melissa asked, desperate for a distraction. “Did the Advil help?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, taking his wife’s limp hand in his. “I think it did. She seems to be resting more peacefully.”

“Good.” Melissa studied the older woman, looking for a positive sign that her health was improving, but she saw no change.

“Your friends,” Charlie began. “Were they . . . were they
like you?”

Melissa nodded.

“And they died?” Charlie asked incredulously.

“And they died,” Melissa repeated. “It’s pretty rough out there.”

“Tell me about it,” Charlie said. “If I hadn’t remembered this shelter was here from when our kids were in school, we wouldn’t have made it.”

Melissa thought of her nightmare again, and the awful things that had crawled up from her friends’ graves. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be some reality to the dream.

The panic became overwhelming, and her hands began to shake. Every instinct that she had told her to flee, to run, if she wanted to survive.

“Maybe you should take a few of those pills yourself,” Charlie then said. “You’re not looking too good.”

“I’ll be fine,” she reassured the old man. “But I need to leave.”

A preternatural intuition was telling her that this was exactly what she had to do.

“You’re leaving?” Charlie asked, raising his voice. “But where are you going? What will we do if more of those things come back?”

“You’ll be fine. You can’t get more secure than this place.”

She went to the backpack she’d put together while out
exploring around the school, making sure that she had everything she would need.

“What’s going on?” the security guard, Scott, asked.

“It’s Melissa,” Charlie answered. “She’s leaving.”

“What do you mean she’s leaving?”

Melissa quickly rifled through the contents of her bag. There was a half-drunk bottle of water on the floor nearby and she snatched it up, stowing it in her backpack.

“Is this true, Melissa?” Scott asked, approaching her.

She hated her answer, but every fiber of her being told her that this was the way it had to be.

For their sakes, as well as her own.

“Yes,” she said firmly, pulling the zipper closed.

“You can’t leave us,” Doris said, sitting up against the wall, her daughter coming awake in her lap. She had turned up the camping lantern, so the shelter was no longer in shadows.

“I have to,” Melissa said, not sure how she could explain that if she didn’t get out of there, something would come, and it would kill them all.

She started toward the door.

“Please,” the mother pleaded, and Melissa could see that she was crying.