Armageddon?? (82 page)

Tanner
Firearm Supplies, Northern Detroit

“Thanks
for keeping these aside for me Erwin. I know they’re hard to come by right now,
what with the Brits adopting them as standard and grabbing the whole production
run.”

“Hey
no problem Danny. Wouldn’t want to see a friend short of firepower if one of
those monsters makes an appearance.” The shopkeeper insisted on shaking the
customer’s hand. The man then scooped up the box of .338 Lapua from the counter
and made his way out of the store.

Daniel
Wright had stowed the ammo in the under-seat safe and was about to start his
pickup’s engine when a glint in the sky caught his eye. He considered himself
something of an aircraft buff and took a closer look, trying to the identify
the type. It was bronze colored, the silhouette changing as he watched…
something clicked into place as he realized that it was not a plane, but a
creature. A creature that looked just like the grainy news footage from
England. At first it had looked like it was circling over the AA&M
building. Now it was definitely heading for downtown; the shop was built just
off the I-75 and the demon was flying roughly parallel to the highway.

He
leapt out of the truck, grabbing his Barrett 98 from the rack. Fortunately the
optics were still in place from his Sunday range visit. As Daniel unlocked the
safe he hesitated for a second; shooting into the sky was usually a reason to
make fun of ignorant third-worlders, as what went up had to come down and it
could well come down on someone’s head. But only for a second. The Sheffield
death toll had now passed 16,000 and he had to stop that happening here at any
cost. Daniel clicked the magazine home, braced himself on the side of the
truck, brought the monster into the sights and fired.

The
shot was on the edge of effective range to start with, and without tracers it
was basically impossible to correct for drop, deflection and wind drift, so
Daniel just had to give it his best guess. He could hear other shooters opening
up, and with luck one of them got lucky. He blew flew the first magazine with
no apparent effect on the distant flapping form and as he was reaching for the
second he noticed that other shoppers from the gun store had joined him in the
parking lot. Some were starting at him, some at the sky.

“There’s
a damned Baldrick up there!” he shouted, “grab a rifle and start shooting, or
it’ll burn the city.” He didn’t wait to watch them respond, the fresh magazine
clicked home and he soon had the rifle realigned on the target. This time the
creature definitely seemed to be hit, dropping suddenly and flapping
erratically as he fired his last three rounds. No way to know if it was one of
his rounds that did it, but it didn’t matter. Erwin and Bob were back with
AR-15s from the store, and beside him even Emily was enthusiastically letting
fly with her Smith & Wesson 586. Top marks for effort, Daniel thought, as
he noticed a large dark green and very old half-track coming to a stop on the
side of the freeway. The ready platoon of the 3rd Michigan Infantry Regiment,
United States Volunteers had arrived with an M-16 quad-50 they’d “liberated”
from a museum and they wasted no time opening up with their much-loved M2
mount. Wright recognized some of the volunteers as they took up their
positions, the 3rd Michigan had been built around a re-enactors group and to
Wright, they looked a bit odd in modern BDUs.

I75-I94
Interchange, Detroit, Michigan

The
gorgon’s mood had improved somewhat as she flew south towards the human towers.
This realm’s bright direct light had been painful at first, but now it felt
pleasantly warm on her back. The proto-portal seemed to have settled down, and
she was free to gaze at the landscape below, savoring her power to end their
pitiful existences. She was death incarnate, an avatar of cleansing flame come
to burn this hive of vermin off the face of the planet. Megaaeraholrakni had
always reveled in the exercise of psychic power, and now this was the
culmination of all those millennia of effort.

That
said she did have something of a dilemma. As she ascended it became clear that
the towers were built next to a wide river. If she opened the portal over them,
the lava would pool there and many of the lesser buildings would be spared.
Perhaps it would be better to open it some way from the river, to ensure that
the rest of the city burned? There were a great many parades of chariots here –
the big flat buildings next to them could be workshops, and Belial had been
quite insistent about destroying those. On the other hand, blocking the river
with lava would not be so bad, the scalding steam and the flooding was sure to
be amusing…

Megaaeraholrakni’s
musings were interrupted by a sharp pain in her right wing. Suddenly she became
aware of the irregular cracking sounds coming from below, coming faster and
faster with each passing second. Agony flashed down her side as something tore
into her flank. The gorgon looked back in disbelief at the green blood dripping
from the wound. How dare they? She’d heard the rumors of the human’s newfound
magery… now too late she realized how foolish she’d been to dismiss those
warnings.

Another
projectile slammed into the base of her tail, shattering a vertebra and sending
pain shooting up her spine like a white hot poker. Megaaeraholrakni screamed
and flailed wildly in the air, an act that granted her a brief respite as the
next few shots went high. The portal crackled dangerously below her and she
threw her wings out again, desperately trying to glide clear. It was at this
moment that the hail of machine gun rounds began to arrive. The heavy rounds
ripped through her torso, spraying yellow blood into the air as the gorgon
began to fall out of the sky, trailing limp wings behind her. Megaaeraholrakni
had a final few seconds to reflect on her folly before she plummeted through
the phantom portal mouth. The massive electrostatic charge building there found
a convenient discharge path through her body, and the gorgon finally died in a
white hot flash of lightning, her charred and broken body tumbling down onto
the interchange below.

Okthuura
Yal-Gjaknaath, Tartaruan Range, borderlands of Hell

Baroness
Yulupki’s eyes were closed, her coils writhing with pain as she tried to force
the chorus back into harmony. The ritual had started to go wrong as soon as the
portal begun to form. Instead of a single unified psychic push, there was
discord. The closest human sensation was ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’; the ritual needed
pure chords, but some of the naga were holding the wrong notes. The situation
had rapidly deteriorated as each naga tried to stay in ‘tune’ with her
neighbors, magnifying the initial dissenting voices into a psychic cacophony.

“All
of you, follow me!” Yulupki screamed, over the wails of her subordinates and
the hissing of the lava. It was hard to know if the naga on the other platforms
heard her, but telepathy was out of the question in this din. The effort had
dried out the tips of her tentacles and the energy began to arc back to the
surrounding flesh, charring the scales. To the naga it seemed that her body was
on fire and her brain was being squeezed in a vice, but gathering strength she
didn’t know she had, she made a final push to stabilize the portal. She was
somewhat surprised to find it actually working. Her strong, clear stream of
psychic energy stood out clearly in the haze and the other naga rallied around
it.

“That’s
it, hold it, a little longer!” Why hadn’t that damned gorgon opened the portal
yet? She couldn’t keep this up, if the signal didn’t come in another minute
they’d just have to…

The
wash of feedback hit Yulupki like a brick wall. She collapsed onto her pallet,
barely hanging on to consciousness. The raging psychic turmoil had been replaced
by a numb calm. ‘No, that can’t be, oh no…’ Her pitiful cry rang with the
anguish of a human whose eyes had just been torn out.

From
her vantage point on the crater rim Euryale had been watching the ritual with
mounting concern. She was not yet a participant, but she could sense the
unbalanced forces and the resulting instability in the half-formed portal. At
the same time, she could sense Megaaeraholrakni’s progress over the human city
through the mental link with her handmaiden. That link had just dissolved into
echoes of pain, confusion and panic before disappearing entirely. Mere seconds
later, what could only be described as a psychic shockwave had rushed out from
the centre of the crater. The gorgon could barely make out the great snakelike
forms through the dense smoke and heat shimmer, but she could tell that nearly
half the naga were down and the rest were thrashing and wailing. Behind them
the shrines were breaking out in glowing red patches, as local hotspots began
to melt the metal.

Euryale
launched herself from the rocks, determined to save the ritual. She pushed
questions of what had gone wrong and who would pay out of her mind. That could
come later. Her wings billowed taut as they caught the strong thermal and she
soared over the bubbling lava. The thick smoke stung the gorgons eye’s; she
couldn’t see clearly, but the series of bright flashes and a tortured groan
probably signaled the collapse of one of the shrines. She was right over the
portal now and she could feel it swelling and ascending, pushed out of the
volcano’s throat like a cork in a barrel.

It
was the moment for Euryale’s own supreme effort. She put everything she had
into a single release aimed directly down, hoping to slam the portal down into
the lava in the same act as pushing it over the threshold for opening. For a
split second the smoke seemed transparent, as the entire crater was lit up by a
storm of dancing lightning. Then noise and motion returned and Euryale was
falling, the air whistling through great burning rips in her wings. The lava
below convulsed, dropping and splashing and throwing out great chunks of magma.
Desperately she tried to ride the thermals clear of the maelstrom before she
was swatted from the sky or consumed by the fire.

Chapter
Fifty Eight

Heavengate,
Hell

The
stones upon which Shakoolapicanthus walked were smoothed from the guards' tread
over dozens of millennia. He could almost see his reflection in them, he
thought, as he continued pacing along the top of the defensive wall.

The
wall – it was massive, the work of millennia. It had been built, at first, of
mounded earth, but the earthworks had long been replaced with huge blocks of
granite. Fifty times the height of the tallest Dukes, the huge loop towered
above the surrounding foothills. A human looking down on it from the air would
have thought it looked nothing more than a giant tire sticking out of the
ground. The outer face sloped gently down toward the plain, crisscrossed with
trenches and ringed with smaller fortifications, parallel to the main wall. The
inner face sloped sharply down toward the large inner ring. It was faced with
granite, polished by the sweat and blood of thousands of lesser demons and
enslaved humans to gleam in the dull, striated light.

Faced
entirely with polished granite, that is, save for a small staircase almost too
narrow for the scrawniest demons to walk down. That staircase was joined to the
ramparts at the top of the wall by a small, nondescript crenelation, which
Shakoolapicanthus found himself approaching for the twentieth time since his
shift had begun. This was the final circuit, and he was ready to be done with
his portion of the guard duties. There was just one task that remained.

He
passed the standing guard, taken from Satan’s personal legions. They stood
fifty feet apart all around the wall for the duration of their shifts, staring
impassively down at the large building in center of the wall's inner ring – and
stepped backwards down onto the staircase, as though he were climbing a ladder.
The steps were also smoothed by continual travel, but far rougher than the
smooth stone to either side. For a moment, he contemplated what a rush up that
wall would be like, then shuddered at the thought of even trying, let alone in
the face of tridents raining down magic on the attackers. This was a unique
fortress, designed to keep attackers in, not out.

At
the bottom of the wall, he straightened and turned around. The building was
before him, towering over him even as it was dwarfed by the ringing wall; a
giant demon-made mountain of stone, is what it was. A ring of demons stood
guard about it, and twenty were orderly clustered about the only entrance,
staring at it as though it were a poisonous snake about to bite them.
Shakoolapicanthus stopped before them and said, “I am entering the Gateway.”

The
demon in charge of the guard challenged him in the ritual. “Who are you to
enter the Gateway?”

“I
am Shakoolapicanthus, a captain of the Guard. I see that all is well within.”

“Shakoolapicanthus,
a captain of the Guard, I will permit you to enter the Gateway. Bring word of
the inner guard.”

Shakoolapicanthus
nodded, the demons before him parted, and he stooped as the guard raised the
iron portcullis. As he passed beneath it, he shivered; the feel of iron nearby
always made his back crawl. It was the only place in all of Hell where iron had
a use; it was rumored that the gate's construction had cost the lives of fifty
demons, and that a thousand naga had enchanted it with the strongest spells
imaginable.

The
iron behind him, he made his way forward through the low, twisting passageway
on his hands and knees. It was uncomfortable, and certainly made walking
impossible for even the lowliest demons or angels. The stone around him seemed
to weigh down on him, to close in on him.