Empire's End (27 page)

Adam removed the straps and let the blade
clatter on the marble floor. “All right!”

The Petrified Man seized him about the waist
in a brutal bear-hug, swinging him high into the air and then
squeezing his body against the zombie’s own bony bulk.

Then he was spinning through the air—a column
approached—his back was folded around it for one brief, agonizing
moment before he slumped to the floor. The Petrified Man was upon
him immediately, smashing his head into the column. He grabbed the
behemoth’s shoulders and pulled himself up to slug him in the jaw.
The zombie simply smashed him into the column again. Adam’s world
trembled. Bits of flaming plaster fell around him. Now flying
again—slamming into the floor. Lily screaming.

Eviscerato hurled her aside and raised his
cane over his head. Charged at Adam. The former Reaper lifted his
head, and the cane lashed him across the jaw, sending him reeling
straight into the Petrified Man’s arms. He was turned upside-down
and swung into another column. Unconsciousness threatened to
overtake him.

Eviscerato drove the cane deep into Adam’s
gut, piercing his false flesh and churning his insides. Adam howled
in agony. Eviscerato snapped his teeth and smiled that dreadful
smile of his, that showman’s smile.
Watch the fallen angel
suffer and die at the hands of a mere human—less than a human, in
fact! Nothing more than a rotten corpse, a dancing, capering
corpse, meekest of all men –inheritor of the earth! The world is
dead and soon she will be dead with us, Reaper. And you will be
NOTHING—

Adam grabbed the cane and snapped it in two
inside his body. Eviscerato grunted. Adam plowed his feet into the
rotter’s teeth.

The Petrified Man grabbed Adam’s head and
jerked him straight up, bringing him back down on a sharp knee,
driving a spur of bone deep into his back.

Adam was pounded into the floor. The
Petrified Man stood on the back of his head and started grinding
his face down. And somewhere, Lily was still screaming.

He cried out her name. His head was going to
be pulped any second, the Petrified Man digging his heel into the
base of it.

Then the pressure eased off. The zombie
stepped back. Adam was able, painfully, to turn his head ninety
degrees and look up. And he saw the Petrified Man standing there, a
dull stare on its face, the point of the scythe protruding from its
groin.

Lily released the blade and stumbled back.
The zombie turned toward her, stiffly, hands grasping at the blade
in the small of its back. Then it teetered and came down like a
redwood.

Eviscerato spread his arms and roared. He ran
at the girl.

Adam caught his ankle and brought him
crashing down. Adam leapt onto the King of the Dead’s back and
locked his arms like a vise around the rotter’s neck.

He pressed his lips to the hollow of
Eviscerato’s ear. “Never again,” he growled. And he wrenched with
all his might.

The zombie’s spitting head separated from his
shoulders, and a geyser of foul waste spewed forth from the stump
of his neck. His eyes turned white and lolled in his skull, and his
mouth dropped open, as if to utter final words. But there were
none. He would die, this time, without ceremony.

Adam stood, clutching the head, and gripped
it in both hands. He stared into Eviscerato’s hateful face. “Never
again.”

And he knelt over the Petrified Man’s corpse
and staked the head on the end of the scythe. A grating howl
sounded as whatever was inside of the King took leave of his
corrupt crown.

Adam fell on his back. Lily threw herself on
him. “No!”

“I’m all right,” he whispered. “I just
need... a moment...”

A pillar of flame passed through the entrance
and into the station. Lily shook Adam. “Get up! Hurry!”

Adam rolled over onto his elbows and saw the
Omega shuffling toward them, reduced nearly to a skeleton by the
fire covering it but still coming, the rage of a thousand million
forcing its withered limbs to move.

Adam rose, clutching Lily to his breast.

The Omega stopped a few yards from them. Its
head rolled uncertainly on a brittle neck, and a cry of despair
emanated from the center of the thing—a thousand million wicked
souls consumed by their cosmic failure.

The Omega exploded.

Adam covered Lily in his cloak and closed his
eyes to the hail of burning bones. They rained over him, tinkling
on the floor; then it was over.

He hustled her out of the station and into
the street. Neither saying a word, they made their way back to the
Hummer.

Adam opened the back door, and Lily cradled
Voorhees’ head. “We can go now,” she said.

“Are they all dead?” he rasped.

“Those that aren’t soon will be,” Adam
said.

“The people? All the people?”

Adam didn’t answer.

“Rome is ash, then.” Voorhees’ words whistled
through bloody teeth.

Adam didn’t reply to that either. Something
more pressing had suddenly dawned on him.

He was supposed to appoint a replacement,
wasn’t he? A new sentinel, to keep the order. That the thought
hadn’t crossed his mind until now told him what he needed to do. He
looked at the detective—what was left of him. This world had worn
Voorhees down, reduced him to a shade. There was nothing more he
could do while bound to this coil.

Adam placed his hand on Voorhees’ shoulder.
“I have an offer for you. A job, if you’re interested.”

Voorhees shook his head. “I think I’d rather
just die, friend.”

A tiny cloud of breath escaped the cop’s pale
lips. Then no more.

“But...” Adam shook his head. “You were the
one. I chose you.”

Lily hugged his back. “I chose
you
,”
she said softly.

He turned to her. “What?”

She was glowing.

A soft aura—like a cloak of white—covered her
figure. She smiled up at him, then looked down at her hands in
wonder.

“You?” Adam stammered. “But
you’re—you’re—
a child.
”

“You were too, once,” Lily said. And it all
came back to him.

A kingdom in the east... he a young boy,
working in his grandfather’s fields. He’d seen her there, the woman
in white, and had known she was Death. Terrified at first, he’d
told his grandfather and fled to the city. And that was where she
awaited him.

And she’d told him, and made him understand
why it was him, and he now knew what it was that had stirred deep
in his soul, had made him restless all throughout his young life.
Now he knew why he stared every night at the stars. They had
beckoned, as she had; no longer afraid, he had taken her hands in
his and accepted.

“A child,” Adam whispered. Lily took his
hands in hers.

“I’ll always be here,” she said, “whenever
you need me. Just call me.”

“
Lilith,
” he breathed. She nodded with
a smile.

He knew she wouldn’t remember. Not at first.
Perhaps later, with the passing of these strange aeons, they would
find each other again, and he would tell her the story—her
story.

Then she stepped through him, through space,
and went to the place from whence he’d come.

Gaylen crumbled to the earth.

As dawn broke, Jeff Cullen breathed in the
cloying scent of death and coughed loudly. Perched in the back of a
Jeep, he called to the nearest soldier on the city perimeter. “How
long do you suppose we need to stay out here?”

“You can go anytime you want,” the soldier
muttered. “Your job’s done.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cullen
snapped. “May I remind you that I am—”

He was grabbed from behind and thrown to the
ground. The tip of a blade carved from bone pressed into his
throat.

A charred man in soot-stained robes knelt
over the senator. “You did this?”

Cullen started to scream and felt the point
of the blade bite into his flesh. “Oh God. Lower your weapons!” he
called to the soldiers around him. “Stay back! Lower your weapons!”
But not a single one of them had raised his or her gun anyway.

“How many people did you kill today?” Adam
snarled.

“I—we had to do it! We did it for the other
cities! My job is to serve the greater good! That’s what I
did!”

Adam came close enough for Cullen to smell
his burnt flesh. He turned the blade as if readying to strike.
Cullen’s rhetoric broke down into senseless babble.

“Resign your post,” Adam rasped. “No more.
Never again.”

The senator nodded quickly. “Yes. Yes! Of
course I will. I should. I’m sorry, so sorry...

Adam rose and was gone.

Soldiers looked down at Cullen with contempt.
Surely they didn’t take what he’d said seriously, about
resigning... but they were walking away from him now, and ignoring
his pitiful cries.

Others glanced around in confusion at the man
in white’s departure. One pointed toward the horizon.

The man in white sat on a pale horse. He
raised his scythe into the air, a salute—then rode out of
sight.

There was much work to be done.

The air was musty and stale, choking Ryland
with every ragged breath. Seated on a rickety old chair before a
table coated with dust, he imagined he was in the waiting room of a
mausoleum. He’d been here two hours. Seemed the Reaper was
overbooked today.

Before him yawned the mouth of a maze: a
series of catacombs cut deep into the earth. A bitter cold
whispered at him from the blackness, further constricting his
lungs. In contrast was the warmth of klieg lights on his back; his
long face was made longer in shadows cast sharply upon the table.
On second thought, this seemed less a mausoleum than a television
studio. Backlit like a late-night host, Ryland crossed one leg over
the other and tapped his gold wristwatch, waited on his guest.
Flanked by the klieg lights at Ryland’s rear were his audience, a
huddled contingency wearing insect-like night vision helmet,
hugging their M4 carbines which would punctuate his words like a
laugh track if the guest wasn’t being cooperative.

The hush in the entrance of the catacombs was
palpable as the mold in the air. His men’s breath, filtered through
their helmets, was inaudible. Ryland coughed on a mote of dust. The
sound cracked and echoed like a rifle report. Then the hush
returned.

The hush was anticipation.

Something shifted in the catacombs. Ryland
straightened up a bit, as a formality; although what was shuffling
through the dirt towards the klieg lights likely couldn’t see him,
not because of the lighting but because its eyes had long crumbled
from their sockets.

Still Samuel always found his way to the
table. Sometimes Samuel found his way to other things.

He was attired in a soiled and worn shirt
from the colonial era that had once been white, but was now a dingy
brown; same with his loose-fitting trousers. Samuel never requested
new clothing. He probably only wore these threadbare threads out of
habit. If they finally fell from his shoulders, revealing his
emaciated husk of a frame, he’d likely not react.

Everyone always noticed his hands first.
Ryland’s gunmen heard the rusty creaking of Samuel’s metal fingers,
crude constructs tethered to his wrists with wire; fitted over what
remained of his original appendages with an intricate system of
antique clock parts housed within the palms. The mechanical hands
flexed continuously as Samuel plodded along.

Once interest in the fidgety hands had waned,
there was nowhere else to look but at his face: brown flesh-paper
so fragile thin, stretched over an angular skull; the holes were
eyes and nose had once been to serve purposes now fulfilled by
other means; and the jaws. Another mechanism, screwed into the bone
and affixed with steel teeth. Ryland stared in wonder, imagining
the blind afterdead seated somewhere deep in the catacombs, working
with hands that were not his own in order to build his razorblade
smile.

“Grinning Samuel” was his full moniker
(Samuel not being his real name, no one knew what that was). He
settled in a chair opposite from Ryland and placed a small burlap
sack in front of him. Stared, eyeless, at the living.

He was uncommonly picky and any transaction
with him came with certain rules of conduct. Some had been
established from the get-go while others were learned at great
cost. Most important was the invisible line running down the middle
of the table, separating Ryland from Samuel, a line of principle as
effective as an electric fence. No one crossed that line. This
cardinal rule was established when Ryland’s predecessor had reached
out to grab that little burlap sack. In the ensuing melee, all the
gunmen had swarmed past the now-screaming-and-bleeding liaison with
every intention of dismembering Samuel.

And he’d killed every single one of them.
Every one. The liaison had watched and died as blood jetted from
the stump of his wrist. Watched and died while blind, smiling
Samuel stuffed the gunmen’s remains into his stainless-steel maw.
He didn’t feed often, yet he still thrived down here, in these
catacombs beneath a defunct Protestant parish; a walking testament
to the potency of the earth around him... the earth contained in
that burlap sack.

Opening a briefcase, Ryland turned it towards
Samuel. This was the transaction. He slid the case to the center of
the table, just shy of that invisible line, and the zombie’s
mechanical fingers rummaged through its contents. Watch gears,
springs, miniature coils and screws. Although whatever it was that
infused this accursed earth had kept Samuel from rotting away
entirely—he still needed to maintain his most-used joints, his
limbs, his appendages, those terrible jaws. They creaked as he
fingered a brass cog.