“You always have great timing,” Alex said. “How do you do that?”
He grinned. “Takes practice. Don’t try it at home,” he grunted.
Ethan was straining hard, the bloodied rain pouring off of him in sheets, but he held his ground. With a mighty roar, he pushed against the ground with his legs and shoved the minaret back up into the sky. The motion carried him up at least twenty feet into the air himself, before he landed back down on the ground, kneeling with one leg and a single arm on the ground in front for support.
Alex watched as the minaret soared high up into the air and then back down toward the ground from the very spot it had come from. It impacted the Citadel in a terrific explosion of white powder and dust. They were close now, less than half a mile from the Tower of David.
Ethan stood to his feet and turned slowly to look at her, his eyes gigantic, a grin spreading across his face.
She didn’t want to smile back at him, but his zeal was too infectious. “Yeah . . . Okay, that was pretty cool.”
Lightning struck near the impact point of the minaret, and the ground quaked with newfound ferocity.
“GO!” she shouted. “MOVE!!”
As they drew closer, it became quickly apparent that something was very wrong. Around the base of the Citadel, what looked like more than one hundred thousand men, women, and children were bunched up in a giant clog of humanity. Many of them had pained looks on their faces, but their arms clung to their sides and their legs were rigid and unmoving. Oblivion held them. He’d gathered them together like stones or bricks, stacking them together as a living barrier.
Only this was one barrier Alex and her people couldn’t blast their way through.
“What’s the word, boss?” Nora asked. “What should we do?”
“He wants us to choose,” Daniel said absently.
Alex turned to him. “What?”
“He’s making us choose,” Daniel replied, thoughtful. “Are we willing to kill all these people to get to him, or do we let them live and watch the whole world die?”
“That’s insane,” Alex replied.
Daniel pointed at the sea of human beings, the incredible sight of it being all the argument he needed to offer.
There’s no time for this!
“We don’t kill innocent people,” Alex said.
“We can’t stay here and do nothing!” Ethan shouted. “Oblivion is going to unleash his big mojo any minute now . . .”
“Alex, we gotta go!” Nora prodded her.
“No!” Alex stood her ground. “I want another option!”
“No need.” Daniel’s eyes slowly swiveled upward, a sickening look on his face. “Looks like Oblivion is forcing the issue.”
Alex turned. Something was flying through the air toward them, something with flailing arms and legs . . .
She gasped.
One hundred or more of the people that made up the barrier had been flung toward them as if snapped from a slingshot. They soared through the sky wet with blood, aimed at Alex and her people.
“What do we do?” Nora asked.
Her heart skipped several beats.
“Alex?” several voices called.
She could only stare at the sky and watch the people falling out of it.
The blood that fell from above soaked Payton’s clothes and skin, yet his broken form did not stir. Even when an explosion only twenty feet away rocked the Tower above him and sprayed him with tiny white rocks, he did not rouse.
He twitched involuntarily, the pain overloading his senses, but he did not move. Consciousness returned to him only in strobed glimpses. He knew Oblivion had flung the minaret at his friends, and he knew it had been returned to him. But he had no idea what Oblivion had done after that; he knew only that it had created a quiet stillness throughout the valley that chilled him to the bone.
Unable to fight the coming blackness, Payton descended into a dark sleep, losing himself in dreams of years long ago and the one woman he’d truly loved with his whole heart . . .
But he could not descend any deeper and eventually he opened his eyes to stare implacably into the chaotic sky. He felt hot, sticky wetness covering his body, but he couldn’t tell if it was his own blood or that which was falling from the sky. Probably both, he decided.
The rain seemed to get its second wind, pouring so hard that it howled, soaking the blackened soil, the trees, the ruined buildings, and every person alive or dead in dark red blood.
“Gonna have to catch ’em!” Ethan cried. He locked eyes on a woman who was flying overhead. Picturing a football in her place, he went long.
Daniel stuck close to Ethan, trying to feed off of his powers enough to catch a young girl that was rocketing his way.
Xue found a dumpster full of trash and debris, and sent it speeding down the road in an attempt to soften the plunge for a teenage boy who was dropping out of the sky. Happy with the dumpster’s position, she set off to save another . . .
Alex’s mind was racing. How could they use some of the others’ powers to save these people? Hector could heal the ones who managed to survive their plummet, but what of the others?
More falling bodies were coming terrifyingly close to the ground now. A few had already made impact . . .
Tucker’s sway over animals would be of little help; there was no time to summon anything useful . . .
Wilhelm couldn’t help by electrocuting them . . .
These poor people, each one of them was somebody’s son or daughter or father or mother, and now they were dead . . .
Ethan was bounding off in another direction, having caught the woman he was aiming for and now attempting to seize a second . . .
Nora’s memory control, Mrs. Edeson’s power of persuasion, Alex’s own empathy, these were powers with no real influence over the physical world. These men and women were shooting through the air at them and Alex could do nothing to stop it.
They were all going to die.
But there were three hundred Ringwearers here, and a flurry of activity had been ignited among them. Some of them worked solo, others teamed in pairs of two or more.
Alex lost count of them all and their various efforts. Two dozen saved had to be . . . No, more than that. Maybe significantly more . . .
They couldn’t save them all. Around a half-mile radius, one stomach-turning crunch after another pelted the ground, or crashed into rooftops or cars or trees. A car alarm went off somewhere.
Alex’s hand was covering her mouth in shock, though she couldn’t remember putting it there. How many people had died? Just like that. And tens of thousands more blocking their path, waiting to be used as cannon fodder against them.
Even with all of the supernatural power at their command, there was no way to keep all of these people alive. It would be a massacre on par with the multinational military standoff in eastern Turkey.
Oh, God, help us, please . . .
A hand touched her shoulder, and she jerked around in a frenzy. There she saw the last person she expected.
Payton’s body, near death, drank in every sensory experience around him. The hard patter of the pouring rain and the warmth of the sticky substance as it touched his skin. The fire behind the clouds so high above, ready now to pour out on the ground and burn everything it touched. The oddly distant sound of his own shallow breathing.
“Great one, they are here!” Devlin cried, and Payton heard alarm in his old mentor’s voice. “I don’t understand how—a few of them got through, and they’re coming right n—”
“Let them come,” Oblivion said without inflection.
Payton believed the two of them were upon a parapet some thirty feet behind and above him. His body lay flat on the main cobblestone walkway inside the Citadel’s inner garden, located near the very center of the structure.
He opened his mouth, prepared to call out to let the others know where he was. But his voice would not come, his collapsed lungs unwilling to give him the breath needed to call out.
Something white and hot flashed against the darkness and he strained his head to look up. It was Wilhelm, unleashing crackling sheets of electricity into Oblivion.
The earth rumbled and shook, and pieces of the old Citadel broke free and flew over Payton’s head. He couldn’t see what became of Wilhelm, but the electricity stopped.
It was quickly replaced by a shower of shovels, knives, guns, hubcaps, and dozens of other metallic objects, firing on Oblivion in concert. Payton caught a glimpse of Xue running sideways in the distance, directing her magnetic powers over the metal that was attacking Oblivion now.
“There!” Ethan’s voice shouted. “I see him!”
Payton swiveled his head. Oblivion was descending the stone stairway, swatting at the flying metal, and moving straight toward him. Ethan’s loud proclamation hadn’t been lost on Oblivion; Payton wondered if even now the ancient creature was realizing his mistake in not finishing Payton off.
Oblivion was only footsteps away, and Payton glanced around, looking for Ethan, but his friend was nowhere to be seen.
Some part of Payton’s brain wondered what had become of Devlin. The old villain had vanished as soon as things got dangerous—a skill he was particularly good at.
Oblivion soon stood over Payton’s prostrate form, and his head tilted sideways to look directly into Payton’s eyes. Payton braced himself for what was coming: Oblivion rending every organ in his body, crushing every bone. He hoped death would find him quickly.
Payton was sure the deathblow was on its way when someone called to Oblivion from quite nearby.
“Taste of your own medicine,” said Daniel.
Mirroring the Bringer’s powers of psychokinesis, Daniel rammed a hand straight forward and, without touching him, sent Oblivion catapulting at great speed toward the far end of the Citadel.
Another tremor quaked, this one enough to create cracks in the ground.
Daniel knelt over Payton, whispered, “Don’t die, we’ve got you.”
Payton tried to focus his weary eyes on the place where
Oblivion had come to a stop, and saw Ethan there, pummeling Oblivion with one devastating blow after another.
Hector’s buoyant frame came into view, and he placed one of his chubby hands on Payton’s head just as the darkness took him.
“Is he okay?” said Alex’s voice.
Payton opened his eyes. “I seem to be, yes,” he said.
She pulled him to his feet. Daniel and Hector stood nearby. Behind Alex was the old man who was missing his hand, and he was not alone. Several dozen men and women wearing grim faces and carrying automatic weapons stood over his shoulder.
“I’m still fuzzy on the details,” Alex explained, “but it appears that our friend here called in some major league favors. Not sure how that happened since he still can’t communicate. There are several hundred of them on the main grounds below the Citadel, and we were able to break through Oblivion’s defenses with their help.”
Payton let out a breath, taking this in.
“Where is he?” he asked.
Before she could answer, Daniel shouted, “Look!”
He pointed straight up. An enormous hole had opened in the churning clouds directly over Jerusalem, and now fire was spilling over the edge of it, a great hot liquid magma rushing out of the hole and plunging toward them . . .
Alex looked at Payton. “Are you able . . . ?”
He gave a curt nod, squaring his shoulders. With a swift kick at the ground, his sword leapt up into the air and he snatched it with a firm grasp of the hilt.
Alex looked upward and Payton followed her line of sight. Dark figures stood atop the ramparts encircling the entire Citadel in the artificial night. Though he could not see their faces, he knew they all had to be there: Alex, Daniel, Hector, Xue, Mrs. Edeson, Cornelius, Ryan, Charlotte, Nora, Trevor, Ethan, Tucker, Henrike, Nigel, Lilly, Thomas, and countless others he’d never met. Hundreds of them, forming a unified circle around the stronghold, awaiting her signal.
“Tell him to do it!” Alex shouted. “He has to do it now!”
Oblivion stood within an archway in the heart of the fortress, his scarred face radiant with the glow of the brimstone spilling from the heavens. Ferocious heat and the acrid smell of sulfur poured off the fire—a savage column of heat and flame that would consume every man, woman, and child in Jerusalem. Except for himself, of course.
His Ringwearers, the living weapons that had been taken from him, lined the outer walls of the Citadel, desperate to stop him.
In moments, they would burn.
Even the Thresher could not move fast enough to outrun this doom.
After all, was he not the most powerful of all of the Creator’s handiwork? Who could hope to withstand the Angel of Death? To think that anything alive could was folly.
His fire was at two thousand feet now and falling fast . . .
These human beings regarded him as a malevolent entity, but he knew himself to be nothing of the sort. He was present for the formation of this entire universe. His power forged in the fires of creation itself. That power was primordial and pure, the likes of which these humans could not even conceive.
Every creature had its purpose, and this was his. As sure as the ebb and flow of oceans’ tides or the seasonal rotations of this planet, his purpose over all creation was to destroy it.
He was doing precisely what he was created to do.
As he stepped out of the doorway and into the open courtyard, the Thresher spoke right into his ear: “Did you
really
think our earlier fight was the main event?”
Oblivion’s enraged eyes poured forth fire.
Payton grabbed both of his jacket lapels in one hand, lifted Oblivion high with inhuman strength, and then slammed him vertically into the ground, upside down. Oblivion’s head was driven through the Jerusalem Stone boardwalk until he tasted dirt.
“Guess being around since the dawn of time doesn’t teach you how to spot a bluff.”
Oblivion’s last view of the air was of his magnificent column of fire dissipating into wisps of gray smoke and then vanishing altogether.
Alex stood by, watching. From twenty paces away, inside an enclosed area of the Tower, she did the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.