Armageddon?? (22 page)

Baines
sighed condescendingly, "qui habet aures audiendi audiat. Alright, Captain
PHD, take a look at this!" Baines walked over to a wall and pulled down a
large hanging rug with a flourish revealing a large chart. There were
hand-written notes, string, and pictures all over it. Both men stared blankly,
as though unsure if Baines might turn into a baldrick at any moment "THIS,"
He pointed to the chart. "Is just about every book ever written about
Judeo-Christian demons and hell, set chronologically." He pointed to lines
connecting them. "As you were so kind to point out, they're about
eighty-five to ninety-five percent crap, but they have common threads, and
those threads migrate over time." He traced the lines with his fingers.
"You can see here's old-testament, pre-Christian stuff, and it trends
onward, and then BAM." He stopped at a prominent 'zig' "Constantine
and the Roman Empire. Changes opinions, but some things stay the same. We also
have shifts during the Dark Ages, and a BIG shift with Dante. But, if you look
hard enough you can sift through the crap and find out what makes sense."

"Makes
sense? Robert, this man is a GEOLOGIST." Dr. Watts got up and walked
toward the opposite wall. He scratched some paint from the wall, revealing
silvery metal underneath. "And his entire house is wrapped in aluminum
foil. I'd wonder if anything DOESN'T make sense to him."

"Wait
a second," Baines raised a hand. "I did my house like this because I
have an aluminum allergy. You got a better idea? And for your information
Doctor," again he spat out the word, "I only WORK as a geologist. You
have my book, you have my file. You know what I've studied, but it's obvious
you're here because you want to know what I know." Baines spoke slowly and
with purpose, as though he were waking up from a dream and finding the
real-world was a much better place for once.

"It
makes sense to me, Watts. And remember, he figured out how demons could fly
before we knew they existed." O’Shea stood up and walked towards the
chart. His fingers traced various threads, and as he looked at Baines, he felt
he was seeing the man for the first time. "He may be a little crazy, but
you should see the people Randi is getting." He pulled out a cellular
phone and pressed a button. "He's a keeper." He closed the phone.
"Norman, how'd you like to go to Washington?"

The
front door opened and soldiers came in with boxes and hand-carts. Baines waved
them off. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back the truck up!" He glanced warily at
O'Shea, "I've got a job here, and you still haven't told me who you're
working with." The agent handed him a card.

DEPARTMENT
OF INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY OPERATIONS (NETHERWORLD)

"D.I.M.O.(N)?
Kudos to your acronym department. You're kidding me, right?" His smirk
faded as he looked at his living room. There were two government agents, two
armed soldiers, and four more soldiers loading his entire library and home into
boxes. "Have I been drafted?"

"Not
exactly, Norman. It's kind of like eminent domain. You've been forcibly
hired," O’Shea stuck out his hand and smiled for the first time.
"Welcome to government work, Mister Baines. The pay sucks, but you get to
kill things and nobody will call you crazy."

Baines
felt weak at first, with everything moving so quickly around him, but he then
gave O'Shea's hand a firm pump and said resolutely "I'll go get my
lightsaber and then we can go." Then he thought for a second. “What about
my cats?”

O’Shea
sighed quietly. “You have carry-boxes? They might as well come as well. Nothing
could be crazier than the way things are going right now.”

(Note
of appreciation to Chewie who wrote the last section).

Chapter
Sixteen

On
the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

The
six newcomers followed the woman along the banks of the Styx. She moved swiftly
and surely, as though she'd been along this way a thousand times before. As
they waded through the mud, she spoke back over her shoulder: “You're lucky
they put you here in this part of the Styx. This ring is ten miles across; you
could have been walking for several days to get to Dis.”

“What’s
Dis?” Jade Kim asked.

“Satan’s
capital. His palace is there, all the administration is run out of there as well.
It surrounds the whole of hell like a wall.”

“And
you’re taking us there?” Kim’s voice was loaded with suspicion.

“Of
course,” said the woman. “That's where the resistance is headquartered.”

“Tell
us about the resistance.”

The
woman smiled. “It’s hard to know where to start. You see, the resistance has a
long history; it's been around almost as long as I have.”

“And
how old are you? And, who are you?” Kim’s growing suspicion and dislike for
this woman made getting an answer very urgent.”

“I've
been dead for ten thousand years.” The woman laughed at the expression on their
faces. “Why are you so surprised? Once you're dead, you're effectively
immortal; aging is slowed by orders of magnitude, and you're healthy and robust
so the torment doesn't put you under. As for who I am, you may have heard of
me. My name is Rahab. That’s right, that Rahab” The woman’s voice was bitter.
“I betrayed my country to help the Israelites and their god and he tossed me
down here anyway.”

“So,
if there’s been a resistance for all these years, why hasn't hell been
overthrown?”

“It
can’t be. This is it, there’s nothing more. We can’t overthrow the order here.
All we can do is try to disappear, save ourselves from torment. That's not as
hard as it sounds, Hell is a big place, and it takes a long time to move around
in it or communicate. I've just finished a two-month walk from Dis down to
Cocytus, up to the first ring, and back. The fact that there are constant
patrols is a real problem, and though they don't really go out of their way to
look, if they see anything untoward, they light on it immediately. And one
demon is more than a match for four or five people.”

“Then
how did we manage to take down that baldrick?”

“To
be blunt, you got lucky. He came down for a spot of torture and fun, and you
surprised him before he could react. If he'd seen you guys free before you were
on him, he'd have called for some help and then zapped you with lightning from
a distance.”

Once
again, the members of Tango-one-five exchanged glances. The picture they were
getting was that the so-called resistance wasn’t resisting at all. At best they
were an escape group, an underground railway that tried to keep themselves away
from the pits that made up the rings of hell. It seemed as if the people here
had accepted the line that this was the ultimate end of things, that any effort
to change it was doomed to futility.

Kim
looked around. They were on the edge of the river, if it could be called that.
It was more like a rippling strip of clear water through the mucky water
surrounding it. Ahead of them, through the vile, thick mist, they saw a tall,
stone tower looming. Rahab turned and put a finger to her lips, then sank lower
into the mist, crouching into the mud. She moved forward slowly.

Kim
followed suit, but kept looking around. The tower moved closer and closer, and
she looked up. At the top, suddenly, an flare burst into existence with a
foomp. The light from the signal fire lit everything around them in a dull
orange glow, making the mist look a bit like tomato soup. Abruptly, their guide
ducked under the muck. Kim caught a glimpse of a towering silhouette looming
through the mist before she followed suit – except, she didn't duck all the
way. Instead, she sank down as far as she could go while keeping her face above
the surface of the mud. Simultaneously, she shrank back toward a clump of
stringy, greasy grass.

The
baldrick passed within five feet of her. It was mounted on what looked like an
oversized rhinoceros with a scorpion-tail arched overhead – A rhinolobster, she
recognized it an instant later from that last mission in Iraq, which was wading
through the swamp. Looking neither left nor right, the baldrick reined his
mount forward when it sniffed and started at something, and kept moving until
the mist had swallowed it. The baldrick itself had been huge, twice the height
and probably four or five times the weight of the one they'd killed back there.

Rahab
surfaced from the mud as the rest of the Tango flight members came up for air.
“If you'd attacked him, you'd have had no chance,” she said. Though that was
all, the words had clearly been aimed at Kim who had her own thoughts on the
matter.

It
was very easy to think of ten thousand reasons why something could not be done,
it took a different mindset to think of the way it could be achieved. Kim had
her own ideas there, she’d thought of two ways of taking the mounted patrol
down already, although much depended on what could be found locally. She’d seen
the black outcrops that spoke of coal and coal meant powdered carbon. This
whole area was volcanic, and that meant sulfur. Now, if there was only some
saltpeter around, they had the start of an IED. “Keep a look out for yellow
deposits.” She whispered to her people.

“Ahead
of you ell-tee. Already been looking. There’s some in the rocks. We’re two for
three so far. And there’s some pretty crystals that might be good for
fragments.”

They
moved on for a while before Rahab broke silence and asked, “So, what are things
like back topside?”

McInery
piped up. “We were all pilots in the 160th SpecOps in Iraq when the Message
came. Lost a tenth of the regiment, then didn't do much of anything until the
hellmouth opened in western Iraq and we got sent out to take a look at the
baldrick advance. Took down the command structure of a regiment, then got
outrun by harpies and taken down.”

The
woman was smiling bemusedly. “You lost me at 'Message',”

Kim
exchanged glances with McInery. “You don't know about the Message?”

“No,
not about this Message. It wouldn’t have been the first you know.”

“Basically,
God said that heaven was closed, and told everyone to lay down and die. So
those people who really believed laid down and died, and the rest of us had no
idea what to do. Then the Navy shot down some bald…. some demons and showed us
they could be killed. So we started to fight. Doing pretty good too.”

There
was a bridge coming up out of the thinning mist now, next to the road they'd
been wading beside for some time. Rahab turned and said, “Stay low and follow
me single-file.” She crouched and moved beside the road to the base of the
bridge, then slipped underneath. The members of Tango flight followed suit. There,
bolted to the base of the bridge, was a rope that stretched across the river
beneath the arch of the roadway. The woman took hold of the rope and started
pulling herself hand-over-hand across the river. Kim looked at McInery,
shrugged, and followed.

On
the far side, Rahab crouched and hissed, “Okay, this is the most dangerous
part. The walls that separate the fourth and fifth circles of hell are right up
on the other side of this embankment, and they are constantly manned. The
guards are vigilant and they will see you if you poke your head up, so you stay
low and follow me as fast as you can.”

Kim
nodded. SERE – still in the “evade” part. Rahab turned and, crouching, ran to a
rock outcropping sticking up several dozen meters away. She looked around, then
beckoned. Single-file, the escaped soldiers followed, making sure to stay
crouched. They followed her from formation to formation, putting distance
between them and the bridge as quickly as possible. At one large boulder, they
stopped, and Rahab pointed back. Just at the edge of vision, the bridge
stretched back into the mist covering the far shore of the Styx; across it
snaked a long, black column of baldricks. It was following the road up the
embankment to the plain and across that to the city, whose high walls were
visible even here. When they moved on after a short rest break, the column was
still marching with no end in sight.

“They
must have found that body you crucified. See how they react?” Rahab’s voice had
a mixture of conceit and spite in it. Kim looked at her steadily, if she
couldn’t see the baldrick column was marching out, not in……..

At
length, the woman led them up the incline and onto the plain, one that was
littered with what looked to be bonfires, although from the distance it was
hard to tell. She moved purposefully forward, and as they followed her, Kim got
a chance to more closely examine the bonfires. They weren't bonfires; they were
what looked like burning coffins, of all things. On some, the lids were
half-off; she could hear groans and cries of pain drifting out of them.

Rahab
stopped at one coffin, which was glowing dully. “What sort of metal is it?”
McInery idly asked.

“Bronze.
Everything here is bronze.” said Rahab as she bent down and casually lifted the
lid off. The hissing sound as the metal seared her flesh was audible.

Kim
gasped. “What the hell ... ?”

The
woman shrugged. “It'll heal in no time.” She gestured. “In you go.”

Kim
looked down. The coffin had no bottom; instead, it was a stairwell. The top two
stairs were afire, but the rest looked cool enough. Hesitantly, Kim stepped in,
and gingerly hopped down to the third stair before crouching and continuing
down. There was certainly pain in her feet, but it wasn't unbearable, and the
cool stone on them felt good.