Armageddon?? (34 page)

What
else had these mad humans got in mind? And what to do about them? In Rahab’s
mind was another question as well. Was it time to join them? And did she have
any choice in the matter?

(Appreciation
to Surlethe who wrote most of this part).

Chapter
Twenty Five

Somewhere
In The Desert, Western Iraq, late afternoon

The
sand collapsed underneath his clawed feet, sending him tumbling downwards into
a ravine he had never seen. Memnon had been staggering through the desert, at
first with purpose, trying to make his way back to the Hellmouth and deliver
his message but all plan or intent had long since been burned out of his brain.
The sun had seared him, brutally, without mercy, sending his body temperature
soaring and fogging his brain with mists that owed as much to hallucination as
the shimmering heat haze. The bitter cold of the nights had been worse, if
anything, than the roasting heat of the sun. There were parts of hell where the
souls of humans were roasted in coffins or blasted around on super-heated
winds. Now Memnon knew the sufferings they endured

He’d
also had a plan, to keep going until his wings regenerated and he could fly the
rest of the way. That plan too had died, his wings were regenerating although
slowly. They were growing back twisted, malformed, useless. Memnon guessed that
the fragments of iron that he could feel in his back, the legacy of the
fire-lance that had torn his original pair off, were interfering with the
growth patterns and leaving him with these poor apologies for wings. Whatever
the reason, he knew that he would never fly again. Never soar through the
comforting skies of hell, looking down on the great city of Dis that surrounded
the pit where human souls were forever condemned to suffer.

Nor
were his mutated wings the only parts of his body causing him grief. His
stomach was an empty pit, chewing at the very center of his being. His last
meal of human flesh was long forgotten in his screaming need for raw meat, yet
in this endless expanse of sand there was no sign of food. Nor was their water
and his throat was closed tight, swollen with the thirst that was adding its
measure of suffering to the madness that was slowly but surely taking him over.

He
rolled down the sandbank, seeing the sky rotate above him, the hated yellow sun
glaring down as it laughed at his suffering. His body stopped its role,
impacting on a strange irregular mass that yielded on his impact. Memnon looked
harder at where he had ended up, it was a gully through the sand, perhaps one
carved by flood water and not yet erased by the wind. It was not the sand that
had stopped his roll though, it was the bodies of dead demons, perhaps half a
dozen of them, piled in the bottom of the crevice. Had they crawled here for
shelter and died? Or had their wounds overcome them?

Memnon
pushed at the bodies, feeling one firmer than the rest. That is what kicked his
mind into action, here was meat. He ripped off a large chunk from the firmest
corpse, the others were already far advanced in decay and sank his teeth into
it. His throat was too swollen to swallow at first but a thin stream of fresh
blood from the meat eased it enough. Then, the implication of that thought
struck Memnon at the same time as there was a faint, racking groan from the
body he was eating. The demon was still alive. It took only a second for Memnon
to fix that, his claws lashed across its throat, killing it. It was, probably,
a merciful act.

Memnon
filled his stomach with fresh meat and the blood eased his thirst a little. It
was then he heard a strange sound, a thumping from the sky that reminded him of
clawed feet marching down the road from Dysprosium. There was a great bridge on
that road, one over the River Styx, where a demon could stand and drink in the
sufferings of the humans below. He would like to stand on that bridge again.

The
thumping grew worse and to Memnon’s horror a human sky-chariot flew over a
hill, obviously searching the ground. It was not one of the sleek ones, the
ones that had mutilated and maimed him, it was an uglier, more ungainly monster
that had a strange rotating structure over its head. As if its wings spun
around instead of flapping. The sky-chariot slowed down abruptly and its nose
started to swing backwards and forwards, searching the ground ahead of it.
Memnon knew what it had spotted, the pile of bodies in the ravine and it was
checking to see if they were dead. He paused, then froze. Perhaps if he played
dead, it would go away. The shame of that thought made him want to weep but he
remained motionless anyway.

There
were a series of explosions, very fast, and streaks of fire from under the
sky-chariot’s nose. They ended in the ravine and walked a long it in a series
of small blasts. Memnon willed himself to remain still, if he got up and ran,
the sky-chariot would kill him for certain. If he stayed still and silent, he
might survive, and he did have the message to deliver. The blasts stopped well
short of him, it had only been a very short burst. Memnon realized that it had
been intended to scare any living creature in the mound into moving so that it
could be killed. He congratulated himself on defeating the cunning plan, and
again when the sky-chariot turned and flew away.

Soon
the desert was silent again and Memnon could start moving. He left his ravine,
it took much longer to climb up the sandy banks than it had taken to descend,
and started off again, heading west towards the setting sun. He didn’t even
have a clear idea of where he was any more, only that the portal home was
somewhere to the west. He wanted home so badly he could taste it, anything to
get away from this hideous planet and the humans with their deadly chariots.

Some
time later, he had no idea whether it was minutes, hours or days for his whole
world now concentrated on the effort needed to pick his feet up and lay them
down again, to keep up his slow journey west, he saw a strip of black. A human
thing that they laid across the desert so that their chariots could move
faster. Memnon’s heart stirred for on it were familiar figures, infantry
demons. Also heading west. From a rocky outcrop on top of a hill overlooking
the blackstrip, he summoned up his energy and focused his far-seeing vision on
them.

The
sight of a defeated army was a pitiful one, it always was, always would be.
Memnon had seen a defeated army before, in the skirmishes that constantly went
on in Hell as the Great Dukes jockeyed for position there were defeated armies
often enough. This was something else, something that went so far beyond
pitiful that Memnon had no words to describe it. The infantry had thrown their
tridents away and were staggering as they walked west. Some supported others,
helping them along and that amazed Memnon for in Hellish armies the demons
lived or died by their own strength. Even as he watched, he saw one fall to its
knees and try to collapse in exhaustion but the two nearest helped it to its
feet and half-carried it onwards. He had never seen anything like that before.
Nor had he heard anything like it, a moaning, half-wailing sound of demons in
dire distress.

Then
he heard the same dull thudding noise only this time he knew what it was. The
Sky-Chariot was coming back. He looked and saw it, black against the sky and
with three more of its kind in company. They were heading in fast, obviously
knowing precisely where to go and, as Memnon saw, what to do. Two fire-lances
erupted from each of them, swinging out towards the column of misery he had
been watching. The fire-lances streaked in, too fast to see properly and
terminated in explosions, all eight equally spaced along the column on the
blackstrip. He could hear the explosions from where he lay and heard the
screams they caused.

The
Sky-Chariots didn’t leave it there, they were closing on the column and Memnon
saw them rake it with the same weapon he had experienced earlier, the same
rapid series of explosions the same red streaks ending in smaller bursts on the
ground. Only these ones were in the mass of living demons and he saw them
flayed by the bursts, chopped down. Two of the sky-chariots flew parallel with
the column, peppering it with the explosions, tearing at it. Some demons tried
to escape by running sideways but the sky-chariots followed them and chased
them down. Each attempted escape ended the same way, the demon vanishing in the
dust of the blasts, to be seen torn and dead when it cleared. It didn’t take long
for Memnon to understand that the sky-chariots were playing a game, competing
between themselves to see who could kill the largest number of escapees.

What
sort of people were these humans? Memnon was bewildered by what he was seeing,
the army was defeated. Anybody could see that. What was to be gained by this
slaughter? In Hell battles were fought until one side had lost then stopped.
Sometimes a battle would never start, one commander would see he was clearly
outmatched and stand no chance of winning so he would concede the issue. He had
never seen this before, this relentless pursuit and destruction of a beaten
enemy. The sight made him shift with rage, boiling anger at human cowardice
seething within him. Even destroying the retreating foe, they stood off and
killed from a distance, they never closed and fought their enemy honorably. He
controlled himself, he had no desire to be a target of the sky chariot’s games.

Finally,
when all on the blackstrip was still, the four sky chariots made a final pass
over the scene of carnage and left. Memnon was about to leave his cover in the
rocks that topped his hill when he saw dust on the horizon. He shrank back into
his rocky shelter and watched. The cloud materialized and Memnon saw something
that chilled his heart still further. A long column of Iron Chariots, some big,
some smaller, with a sky-chariot flying on each side. He watched, appalled as
they drove over the demon corpses stretched out on the blackstrip, grinding
them into green and yellow smears on the black surface. Then, once clear of the
remnants of the column Memnon had watched, they peeled off the blackstrip and
spread out in a circle the long tubes pointing outwards.

He
was fascinated by the sight. As far as he knew, nobody had ever watched the
humans in their iron chariots when they weren’t killing. He saw humans climb
out of the iron chariots, oddly the smaller ones seemed to have more humans
than the big ones. They walked around, he could see them unloading things from
the chariot and pass them around. Then more chariots arrived, great ones that
dwarfed even the bigger iron chariot. Some had tents on the back, others great
cylinders.

The
tented ones started to unload boxes, the humans breaking them open and passing
the contents to each other. Strange things, pointed cylinders that gleamed in
the sun. They put the cylinders inside the iron chariots and seemed to be happy
at the labor. Others were passing around other things from the boxes. But it
was the great cylinders that confused Memnon. The chariots carrying them pulled
alongside the iron chariots and somehow the humans connected the two with a
long snake. Were the two chariots mating? Memnon shook his head in disbelief
and continued to watch what happened beneath.

Alpha-One-One,
Somewhere In The Desert, Western Iraq, before dusk

“That’s
it Hooters, we’re out of gas. Or as near to it as makes no difference. Got a
little in case we have to maneuver but we go no further.”

“We
don’t have to Biker. This is where we’re supposed to wait for the supply
trucks. We clear of the stink?”

That
was a lesson the tankers had learned early. Dead baldricks rotted fast in the
sun and the smell was dreadful. It was so bad back where the baldrick army had
been broken under the hammer of artillery fire and the anvil of armor that
there was serious question whether people would be able to live there again.
The smell seemed to seep into the soil.

“We’re
fine Hooters.” Baldy had stuck his head out and sniffed. “The fly-boys in the
Apaches did a good job on this lot.”

“Hokay.
Take five guys. Crab, Baldy, stay on overwatch while Biker and I stretch our
legs.” She picked up the M4 carbine from its clips and heaved herself out of
her commander’s hatch. It took a moment’s effort to scramble down the outside
of her tank and then the sand felt good and solid under her feet.

“This
sounds crazy Ell-tee, but you know, I’m kinda getting to like the desert. It
seems grow on us dunnit?”

“It
does Jim, it truly does. There’s a grandeur here, something elemental somehow.”
They’d both noticed the crews of the other Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry
combat vehicles also dismounting to stretch their legs and dropped the
nicknames. “You ever seen a desert before?”

“Nope.
I’m from Vermont. Just a rubber who spent the week in the city and the weekend
in the hills. Then my Guard unit got called up and here I am.”

“Rubber?”
Stevenson looked curiously at her driver. He didn’t look like a contraceptive.

“Rich
Urban Biker. Where you come from El-tee?”

“New
Jersey. Bayonne to be precise. Joined the Guard to work my way through college
and found myself here in the sandpit instead. Then the Message came, your old
Ell-tee laid down and died and I was the only spare officer available.”

“Can’t
say I’m surprised, he always was a sanctimonious old bastard. When we at camp
and he visited a local knocking shop, he’d get on his knees and pray for
forgiveness first. Cracked the girls up it did.”