And six is their lucky number. The imperfect number,
Lucifer thought. The Morning Star and an Oni stood behind them, both unseen on this latest Astral Retrogation. The Oni held a Hand of Glory, each fingertip flittering with flame, like candle ends. Freshly severed and properly incantated, the Hand of Glory would provide them with total invisibility, while an Utterance Spell would render Lucifer’s voice soundless; anything he said would be osmosed into the snipers’ minds as thoughts of their own.
“Christ, I hope we survive,” Sniper Two chatted, raising the grenade launcher’s pop-up deflection sight. “I want to go back to the Love City.”
“Oh, we’ll get there. I feel it. I had ten last time, in two days, young things, too, lookers.”
Satan smiled at the axiom. In Dachau and Belsen the SS had coined them Joy Divisions, here they called them Love Cities. Rape camps. Rape was a component field protocol for all of Milosevic’s Security troops and SOG personnel. Fenced compounds with tents for barracks housed abducted girls and women, some even children—through which troops were cycled for sexual release. Once impregnated, the women were often released back into their provinces where they became social outcasts. Muslim women pregnant by non-Muslim men became instant anathema. Just one woman in such a camp could be raped by a hundred soldiers in one day. Sometimes the exploits were videotaped and sold to European and American underground pornography markets.
Sniper One sighted his scope down the street, toward the market. “This is beautiful,” he whispered.
“What is?”
“How accurate the S-3’s are with their intelligence. An open street market less than fifty meters from a day care center.”
“Yes.” Sniper Two closed and locked the receiver of the M-79. He was about to say
Let’s do this,
but then Lucifer leaned over and whispered into his ear. “You’re using the wrong ammunition. The incendiary grenades will kill the children. Use the APERS grenades. It will wound them all horribly. Make your enemy expend his medical supplies, exhaust his care personnel, and crowd his hospitals.”
Sniper Two blinked. Then changed grenades.
“I thought you were using willy-pete.”
“Flechette’s better. Poison their blood, blind them.”
Sniper One nodded. “Let’s acquire targets.” He opened the window and sighted the market again through the Unertl scope. In the scope, he saw a young woman in a green government services uniform.
Perfect,
he thought of his first target. The first one always had to be perfect. He put his crosshairs on the woman’s head.
Lucifer frowned. “Drop your firing line, aim for the lower abdomen. Paralyze her and rupture her kidneys. Make it so she never walks again and spends the rest of her life on dialysis. You’ll expend far more of your enemy’s resources by doing this. Putting her in a grave costs them nothing. Plus she’s got a husband and three children. If you paralyze her, you’ll crush them all.”
Sniper One lowered his sight-line to the woman’s lower abdomen. “On my mark,” he whispered, “after three.”
“I’m green,” said Sniper Two. His target range was so close he’d be able to fire his flechette grenades straight through the day care center’s front glass.
Sniper One took a deep breath, let half of it out, and counted to three. He squeezed his rifle’s trigger. The only sound the first report made was a light metallic
pop!
and then a
clink!
when he ejected the spent casing. The woman fell, face ballooned in agony. The next two shots dropped a young male construction worker and a nine-year-old boy holding a toy airplane while waiting for his mother to buy tomatoes.
Then came the familiar ear-concussing
PLUNK!
when Sniper Two put his first APERS grenade into the day care center. The front glass crashed inward, then—
BAM!
Consternation ensued. A wave of screams rowed down the street. Several dozen children who were still ambulatory staggered out of the center, in shock, along with several teachers. Blood dripped from all their ears; the first grenade going off had ruptured their eardrums.
BAM!
came Sniper Two’s second discharge.
Everyone immediately in front of the center fell down at once, mostly children. They squirmed, all hooked with flechettes. Most wouldn’t die but would instead drain local hospital resources for months. Sniper Two dropped his weapon and was heading for the motel room’s door along with Sniper One, whose last two shots paralyzed a utility foreman and a Bosnian soldier on leave. Total time of engagement: eleven and a half seconds.
Lucifer stood back and watched, radiant eyes gleaming. Before the snipers could exit, the door was kicked open. Both men froze.
No Love City tonight, boys,
Lucifer chuckled.
“Halt!” the voice banged into the room.
Two uniformed Bosnian military police had barged in, 9mm CZ-75 pistols cocked and aimed at the snipers’ heads. One was a sergeant, one a corporal.
Just before the sergeant would order “Kill them,” Lucifer whispered into his ear:
“Don’t kill them. I know you want to, for what they’ve just done to your citizens but be practical. They have valuable intelligence information ...”
“Which one do you want, Sarge?” the corporal asked.
“Hold your fire,” the sergeant ordered calmly.
“Bullshit! I’m killing these butchers!”
“No ...”
The sergeant stepped forward, strangely sedate. Both snipers stood, gritting their teeth, with their hands raised.
“No, we won’t kill these two monsters ...”
BAM! BAM!
The sergeant shot both men in the hips. Then—
BAM! BAM!
—shot them each in a knee. Both snipers howled on the floor. Eventually one passed out from the pain, while the other, the grenadier, shuddered, his face puffed and almost purple.
“The City Defense Corp will be very happy to have them. They’ll torture them in ways you could never imagine, and get every bit of information they have, and when there’s no more to give, they’ll torture them some more. For days. They’ll take snapshots of them being tortured and send them to their families ...”
Good, good,
Lucifer thought. There was a tear of joy in his eye. While the young corporal shot each sniper in the ankle and scrotum, then radioed for a military ambulance, the Light of the Morning looked out the window onto the street below. The blood and horror and heartbreak and terror all seemed to congeal there in a human tableau.
So beautiful, so beautiful
...
“Throw it up,” he ordered the Oni, holding out his perfect hand. The massive creature of stone leaned over at once and drily vomited the White Stone into Lucifer’s palm. Instantly the thing disappeared.
“Revel in your hatred,” Lucifer silently told the men in the room. “Hold your hatred sweet to your heart. Believe me, love doesn’t work. It’s hatred that makes the world go round.”
He put a few flecks of Enguerraud Dust on his tongue, winced, and vomited wet light into his hand. Amid the luminous slime sat the other White Stone, and next thing he knew he was standing before Sherman and a Warlock in the Scarlet Hall.
“My lord. I can discern by your aura that you’re in better spirits than the last time you returned from a Retrogation.”
Lucifer smiled at his thoughtful attendant. “Indeed I am, general. It was wonderful. And the Utterance Spell that the Hexologists prepared worked beautifully. I want them all elevated in grade and rewarded. Give them an all-day shopping spree at Baalzephon Mall and a night with the Succubi.”
“Consider it done, my lord.”
Off the great stone veranda, he looked out into the maroon sky of his kingdom. Sherman walked up from behind. “And they’re raising the Killing Plate as we speak, my lord. Can you see it?”
The next Merge ...
In his bliss, it had slipped his mind. Even from so many many miles away, his angelic eyes could see the immense plate incrementally rising over the lit Atrocidome.
“We got one and a half million, this time, my lord. The charge of all that Deathforce will be the greatest ever attained. The Dean of the De Rais Academy predicts a Merge this time with a duration of more than twenty minutes in the Living World.”
Twenty minutes,
the thought seemed to sign in the Morning Star’s mind.
An infinity ...
But a doubt soured his joy. “Any word from our Houngan engineers at the Department of Voudou Research? We still don’t even know if it’ll work.”
Sherman was a man who
never
smiled, yet he did so now. “General, why are you smiling?” Lucifer asked without looking at the general. “That’s unlike you, and it unnerves me.”
Sherman’s beard drew up as the smile grew more intense. “I cannot constrain my joy—”
Lucifer spun around, his long silken hair drifting in fetid wind. “What is it?”
“The engineers are ahead of schedule.”
Lucifer began to shake minutely. It was his nature to always hope for good things, and by now, after all these thousands of years, he was used to disappointment.
“It worked, my lord. It is my greatest honor to tell you that.”
No, no, no,
the Lord of Darkness droned in his head as he walked numbly back out to the shining atrium. Then he fell to his knees, clenched his fists about his perfect face. “Show me ...”
Sherman glanced at the Warlock and said, “Bring it in.”
(II)
“Say you take a snapshot of this clinic, then you take a snapshot of a city block in the Mephistopolis, you get them made into color slides, then you put one slide on top of the other and hold them up to the light and look at it. That’s a Spatial Merge. Two pieces of two different worlds overlap,” Angelese was saying.
When Cassie opened her eyes, back at the ward in her bed, the white-haired angel was the first thing she saw. She was leaning over the bed, talking. She seemed jittery, wired. Cassie felt thoroughly confused, but then her senses began to refit. They’d been Dream-Channeling in Hell.
The Panzuzu District,
she remembered.
The Atrocidome...
Angelese had taken her to some kind of zoo, in a Nectoport, and ...
Lissa was there ...
Too much was happening too fast. A weird pressure seemed to be pushing against her head, almost like hands gripping her scalp.
“Can’t you hear me? Wake up! Wake up!”
Cassie’s vision finally focused. Angelese was pacing back and forth in the room, wringing her hands. “First the static, then the smell, then we’ll begin to hear it.”
“Angelese! What’s wrong? Why are you so high-strung?”
“I’ve been telling you, I’ve been telling you—the Merge! I think it’s happening right now. We have to be ready!”
How do you get ready for something like that?
Cassie thought glumly. She dragged herself from the bed to her feet. The pressure around her head increased, and—
Did she say something about static?
When Cassie took an erring glance into the mirror, strands of her bright-yellow hair were sticking up. A neon-purple electric arc crackled between her fingers.
“Ooow!”
“And you can smell it too, right?” the pent-up angel asked.
“Would you relax? Jeez, you’re more freaked out about this than I am.” Then Cassie’s nose twitched. A faint but awful smell slowly insinuated itself into the room.
“They’ve already dropped the Killing Plate,” Angelese said. “The Deathwave is already coming.”
“What do we do?”
“Wait. In a minute there should be a—” and that was all Angelese had time to say before the entire building jolted. Then came a deafening sound like a massive waterfall.
“It’s happening,” Angelese whispered. “It’s happening now.” Her eyes were growing luminous in a faint silver light. Her lower lip trembled. “My God, I’ve known this was going to happen for ages. I’ve been preparing for it— for ages! And now that it’s happening, I don’t know what to do, Cassie!”
“Calm down!” Cassie shouted even as the room was changing—merging—around her. The angel’s panic didn’t exactly inspire confidence in Cassie. She didn’t know what to do either.
Then the lights blinked off.
“Oh, that’s just fantastic!” she yelled. Eventually, a dim battery-powered emergency light came on, and Cassie was grateful for that dimness; it was easier to disbelieve what she was seeing. The plain white wall seemed to be shifting—something seemed to be growing over it: part of another wall, but there was a window in the wall.
A dark-orange glow rose into the room as the window itself rose. It was as if this other oddly angled window were being thrust up into the dorm unit from the ground up.
Cassie looked into the window—
—and staggered backward at what she saw. A sign read: MUNICIPAL PULPING STATION NO. 727,368. An obese Troll with wet carbuncles on his face was
smack-smack-smacking
a gore-smeared meat cleaver into the rib cage of a naked female Imp/Human Hybrid. The cross-bred woman’s banana-yellow eyes hemorrhaged red at the first series of whacks. Her spotted arms and legs flailed on the metal butcher table. When she shrieked—a noise like brakes squealing—the Troll frowned, then quickly jammed a paring knife down into her larynx and jiggled it around until the shriek wore down to a gargle. She was still quivering when the butcher began to remove her innards and feed them into a grinder. Then he snapped on the grinder’s power switch and watched the meat disappear into the chute.