Then I heard the motorcycles coming.
So they hadn’t left town. And here they came now, just two of the Angels, driving side by side up the road on their heavy bikes, each bike dragging a length of chain, and the ends of both chains hooked through the wings of a male Demon. His flesh was torn, shredded to the bone by the cobblestones, and he flopped brokenly, probably already dead. Though my own kind without number might have been tortured by that very Demon, I still felt the strong urge to whip out both my guns and fire them into the backs of the Angels who dragged the creature after them. Instead, I watched them roar down the street and turn the corner out of sight.
Then, from around that corner, there immediately came a deafening fusillade of machine gun fire. There were chaotic sounds…shouts…cries…and it seemed to me from the commotion that both motorcycles had crashed.
I was just deciding I’d best get myself back inside when I saw one of the two Angels running around the corner and directly at me, his peaked hat missing and his robes splashed with lurid gore. There was fear in his jowly face, and a moment later the reason was revealed, as a half dozen Demon warriors tore around the corner after him, their wings thrust wide, most of them with swords upraised but two of them with MAC-10 machine pistols. Though they could not kill him, the thought of being set upon by the savage pack rightfully had him in a panic.
The Angel locked eyes with me. Seemed to be running right to me as if I might help him. I saw a shaven-headed female Demon begin to level her MAC-10 on him as she ran, but several of her sword-wielding comrades were ahead of her and blocking a clear shot.
This time I followed my impulse, slipped the Glock out of my waistband, and began shooting the Angel again and again. It was as if he threw himself onto my bullets, impaling himself on them in his frenzied momentum.
The projectiles, as they thunked into him, made him jolt awkwardly, horribly, as if he had dropped to the end of a gallows rope. He spun down onto the ground, and then the first two Demons were upon him with their swords.
However, one of my bullets had either gone straight through the Angel or missed him entirely, and pierced the wing of one of the sword-wielding Demons. With a bellow of pain, he bounded past the fallen Angel and straight at me, his blade held high for a blow that might split me down the center. I shifted my pistol to point at him, now…
"Cresil, no!" the shorn-headed female shrieked. "Not him!"
The Demon Cresil faltered, skidded to a halt, but didn’t dare take his eyes off me.
"Don’t," I told him. "You have more to lose than I have!"
The female with the MAC-10 ran up beside him. She lifted her chin a little and seemed to sniff the air. "He’s Chara’s friend."
"All the more reason to cleave him," the powerfully muscled male rumbled, like a wolf growling deep in its throat. "He’s the cause of all this. Both he and Chara…"
"Chara is our sister. Remember that."
"Where is Chara?" I demanded, still not lowering my gun.
"Maybe alive, maybe dead," Cresil snarled. "All of us Demons might be dead, soon, thanks to you! But what do you care, who cannot die?"
I looked past these two, and saw that the remainder of the demonic pack had chopped both of the cyclists into various barely human chunks, which they carried or dragged behind them. They also had more guns, now, stolen off their victims. They had dismembered the Angels with such passion that one of them had broken his sword’s blade against the cobblestones. I nodded at the soaked bundles they bore. "What’s the use? They’ll just grow back."
"They’ll grow back in a cell to which only we have the keys. And we’ll lose the keys," said Cresil. He grinned ferally. "If I had my way, I’d chop you up and throw you in the same hole with them. There are cells in this city that only we know of…and these two may never be found…"
"Come on," the female urged, "before they regenerate in our arms, or the Celestials come…"
Cresil thrust his face close to me. "You look familiar. Didn’t some friends and I rape you in the street once? Before even your deluded friend had you?"
"You wish," I muttered.
His hand shot out to grab my neck but his wrist was seized by the female, who was even faster. "Cresil, there’s no time!"
"You see how he divides us?" he choked.
"Look around you, Cresil. We’re already divided. Things are changing. If that’s possible…"
"My feelings for these fleshlings will never change," Cresil said through gritted teeth, but he allowed the female to pull him away by the arm.
"If you see Chara, tell her I’m waiting here for her!" I yelled after the creatures as they whirled and began to flee, like bats bursting into flight.
"If I see her I’d just as soon kill her myself!" bellowed Cresil, but he was gone before I could protest.
Before more Angels might come in search of their buddies, I got myself swiftly back inside the hotel.
Later.
A detonation, very near, woke me from the doze I’d fallen into. From my window I saw nothing unusual but a haze of drifting smoke. Gunfire still stitched the town around me. Were shells being fired by one of the battling factions, or were these explosions simply provided by improvised Molotov cocktails?
I was about to leave the window when an earthquake began to shake my shabby little flat, causing Lyre to slip off the edge of the bed and me to grip the window’s frame for support. An immense rumbling, sounding as if a multi-stage rocket were preparing to launch itself from right across the street.
It was the machine building, I realized, and it wasn’t about to launch into space…but had begun to sink down into the ground. At first I thought the explosion I’d heard had brought the great structure down, but I realized it was lowering itself ponderously into some incredibly deep chamber or silo beneath it. Along with the rumbling was the screeching of metal, as ear-rending as the arrival of the Black Cathedral had been.
Since I had no idea of the function(s) of the apparently fully automated machine building (I had never seen workers come or go, unless they were kept constantly prisoner inside it), I couldn’t really guess what it was up to now. I could only assume that it was protecting itself, as the violence around it began to escalate.
A loud knocking on my door turned my attention from the window. I scooped up one of my pistols, and took only a single step closer to the door.
"Who is it?" I yelled.
"Who do you think?" barked a familiar, strong voice.
I rushed to the door, swept it open. Chara was there, with a second Demon lingering tensely behind her. She was shiny with sweat, plaster dust sticking to her slick legs, and a wound on one shoulder was crusted thickly with half-congealed black blood. Her hair was in the single thick braid she favored, while the male Demon accompanying her wore his hair in a topknot like a samurai. Both had shotguns in their hands, presumably stolen either from Angels or Celestials.
"What took you so long?" I fumed in relief.
"You’ll see in a minute. Are you ready to leave town?"
"Leave? Right this minute?"
"Well you’ve had time to pack, haven’t you? You just complained about the time you waited. Grab what you need…hurry."
The Demons came into my flat and closed the door while I scurried to fill a single pillowcase with Lyre and a few extra articles of clothing. While I worked I asked, "So where are we going…to Pluto?"
"Yes."
I looked up half jealously at the strange Demon. "How many are coming with us?"
"You’ll see in a minute," she repeated tersely, glancing toward the window as the machine building continued to sink. A crack had appeared in the window’s shuddering glass.
"What happened to, ‘no armies, no races, just you and me’?"
Chara drew in a deep breath in an obvious effort to remain patient. "Don’t be childish. This is the best way out for us, now. Strength in numbers. Team work. You and me will come later."
Discreetly, the male Demon kept out of our little spat, focused on the machine building. "I wonder if it’s going to migrate to another city as well," he said, moving close to the dirty panes to watch the skyscraper withdraw into the bowels below the city, which were just a rumor to my own experience.
The window shattered. At first I thought it was due to the crack already in it, the rattling caused by the machine building, but when the male Demon stumbled back and sprawled between Chara and myself I saw the bullet hole in his cheek. A spray of his blood and scraps of brain had fanned out across my bed behind me. I realized I was speckled and streaked with his gore.
"Let’s go!" Chara hissed.
I slung the pillowcase over my shoulder, both pistols tucked in my waistband, and reached down to take the dead soldier’s pump action Ithaca, with its pistol grip in place of a stock, before dashing out into the hallway after Chara.
Another of the lodgers peeked out into the hall at us, but when she saw Chara and our guns she withdrew in a blink. On the landing, I encountered the landlord’s young assistant, who had offered herself to me. In terror, her arms full of dingy folded sheets, she flattened herself to the wall to let us whoosh past. I suppose I didn’t need to tell her I was checking out.
As we hit the ground floor my heart, or its ethereal counterpart, was punching at my ribs. The shotgun seemed too heavy to hold in one hand, and I dreaded its bottled up fury as much as I relied on it for security. I hadn’t used a shotgun before on anyone else but myself.
Chara headed out the front door first, and before I had even stepped over the threshold after her she had opened up with her own shotgun. I let my pillowcase drop to my feet to swing my own weapon up into a two-handed position.
Two Celestials had been running at a crouch across the street, one with a sword in its fist and the other with what looked like an assault rifle. I assumed, as Chara no doubt did, that this latter Celestial had been the sniper who saw and shot her comrade through my window pane.
She fired, pumped, fired again, and by the time she got off her third spray of buckshot I had added one of my own, the recoil jarring my whole body so that my teeth seemed to clatter against their neighbors. The Celestial with the automatic rifle tried to whirl and return fire, but it was slammed back against a wall, its robe blossoming with huge red blooms. The one with the sword was knocked to its belly, tried to drag itself away in vain as Chara’s third blast ripped through and stilled it. Both could have been clones of Turner’s lover, Nephi.
"Come on!" Chara commanded, darting ahead. I recovered my makeshift luggage and followed.
The summit of the machine building was now lower than the roof of my hotel. We skirted around its wide perimeter, but when I glanced back at it I felt a last earth-rocking thud and saw that the flat top of the building was now flush with the street. A cloud of dust, from lava rains that had beat against the roof and turned to ash, billowed up to obscure the spot where it had been.
Ahead of us now, no longer obscured by the skyscraper, lay the Black Cathedral…and Chara was leading me straight toward it.
Behind me there was a shriek like a sea bird. More followed it, blended into it. Another glance behind me revealed the source of the unsettling chorus. A group of ten or more Celestials had emerged from an alley further down this broad street, in which had been laid the track rails that the cathedral used to move about the city. The Celestials had spotted us…
Chara was bolting directly for the stairs that led to the front double doors of the black iron structure, and I didn’t have time or the breath to question this tactic. Shots began to crack behind me. I heard the metallic ring of automatic fire as it ricocheted off the building’s mechanical face.
A blow like that from a pickaxe to my shoulder blade launched me forward, squarely onto my face. The bones in my nose exploded. The shotgun went skittering out of my grip and one of the pistols in my waistband was dislodged as well. For a moment I lay dazed, but in the next moment Chara was hauling me to my feet and half dragging me toward the cathedral again. I saw that the double doors had opened, and two Demons were in the threshold, firing back at the approaching band of Celestials to cover us.
The two soldiers parted to let us through, and then they were closing the double doors, bolted them with a ringing clang. I heard more bullets sing against the metal skin of the structure. Frustrated by its armor, no doubt, the Celestials took to firing upon the red stained glass windows. The circular one high above the doors shattered, and we skipped back to avoid the rain of red shards, which turned to crystal grit at our feet.