Sanctuary (11 page)

Thorn groaned as he sat up and looked out the car’s rear window. Cole lay prone on the pavement fifty feet behind the car, trying to recover from what must have been a trip-and-fall.

“Cole, wait there!” Marcus yelled, using Heather’s voice. He came into view a short distance away, staggering toward Cole as fast as Heather’s broken leg would carry him. “I’ll come help you.”

“Heather?” Rising to his feet, Cole seemed rightly confused. Hundreds of demons swept toward him.

Crystal jammed down on the car’s horn, sending a piercing honk through the night air. The noise startled Cole and he dropped his cane. Crystal rolled down her window just a sliver. “Cole, run! She’s gonna kill you! Get in the car!” She honked again, then jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine. Cole walked briskly forward.

Marcus started to sprint, causing Heather’s leg to wobble and the bone to jut out dangerously. Cole bumped into the car’s trunk.

“This way!” Thorn said loudly as he banged on the windows. “Around this way!” Cole felt his way around to the passenger door, opened it, and entered. He shut it just as a gust of wind sent a mass of leaves by the door fluttering upward.

Less than a second later, Heather slammed into Cole’s door. The impact sent the car swaying back and forth. Marcus tried slamming Heather’s fist through the window, but the action broke Heather’s fist much more than it did the now blood-smeared window.

“What happened to her?” Crystal said. “What’s she doing?”

Via Heather, Marcus grabbed a large metal trash can and strode out in front of the car. When he hoisted it above her head, Thorn realized he was going to throw it at their windshield. He leaned up to Crystal’s ear.

“Gas,” he said.

Crystal hit the accelerator and the car lurched forward, nailing Heather. The trash can bounced harmlessly off the hood. Crystal wailed as the car ran over Heather’s body, which crunched under the weight of the car. Thorn would comfort Crystal later; for now, he was just glad she’d had it in her. Marcus couldn’t do much damage with a sloshy pile of broken bones and torn ligaments.

“Okay, that’s good enough,” Thorn said. But Crystal pressed her foot even harder on the gas, bringing the car out toward the guard post by the main road. “Hey, Crystal, Crystal. We can’t go out there.”

“Screw you! And screw this place!” Crystal said, her arms shaking from the effects of adrenaline. “I’m going to the cops.”

The car smashed through the boom gate by the guard station. Its tires screeched as it skidded around some bollards at the corner and sped out onto the main road. The thousands of demons outside lagged behind, slow to respond to the unexpected move.

“Crystal, no! The only safe place for us is inside that condo!”

Crystal pointedly ignored him and took their car a block ahead, onto the road through the park next to the condo. The huge building shrank behind them.

“Are you okay?” Cole asked Crystal from the passenger seat. Crystal ignored him too, but he placed a hand gently on her shoulder. “There’s no need to go to the police station, love. The cops are on their way to the condo. We’ll be fine if we just wait there.”

Crystal’s intent eyes remained on the road. As did Thorn’s. Fortunately, no one was outside at night in this part of town, though Thorn couldn’t tell if that was a natural occurrence or if it was the Sanctuary’s natural resistance to adding more humans. But he worried that if Crystal kept driving away from the condo, the Sanctuary would be forced to throw more souls into this mess to keep up the illusion that they were currently on Earth. Thorn warily eyed every closed shop and dark alley they passed, aware that he probably wouldn’t be able to save additional humans.
Hell, I probably won’t be able to save the ones that are already here.
And although no people yet existed inside all these skyscrapers, all Crystal had to do to change that was open any door and walk inside.

Then Thorn saw him: twisting around the tops of beachfront high-rises at full speed, the Judge was barely evading a host of a thousand demons, whose bodies formed a massive tentacle that reached out to try and grasp him. The Judge adroitly dodged several close encounters with the tip of the army, then dived closer to the ground and weaved through a row of palm trees lining the road. As the army barreled through the vegetation behind him, each successive tree’s fronds erupted as if a small hurricane had suddenly hit it. Some dead branches even tore off in the extreme wind.

The voracious army closing in on him, the Judge flew right toward the car.

Oh, hell no.
Thorn turned to Crystal. “Speed up.”

“What?”

Thorn caught a brief glimpse of Virgil’s bedraggled reflection in the rearview mirror. Dark red bruises and scrapes covered his face more than did undamaged skin. He wished he had a more presentable body to use for communication. Maybe then the humans would have trusted him more.

“They’re coming up behind us. We have to speed up if we want to lose them.”

Crystal checked the mirror as well, and with her limited human vision, she found the space behind the car empty. “I thought you wanted to go back to the condo.”

Indeed he did, but he was even more keen on avoiding the demon army that the Judge was leading right to them. “Speed up!”

“Okay, okay!” She eased her foot down on the gas pedal, and soon they were whizzing through downtown Miami’s streets, past red lights and their flashing cameras at sixty miles per hour—close to a demon’s top speed.

And as the car sped up, the world around them started to shift.

Thorn barely noticed it at first. The road bent a little, the streetlights flickered, and the stars seemed to waver as if the sky were a giant rug being shaken out. The demons behind the car continued their pursuit, but they were forced to break formation as they encountered the same disturbance. The car passed seventy miles per hour, and they approached a darker area of downtown so black that it seemed to swallow all light. As they drew nearer, Thorn could see that the road abruptly curved downward, as if falling off the edge of the world.

“What the hell?” So Crystal could see it too.

But before she could hit the brakes, new road sprang up from below, paving the way for the car to continue on its path. In the distance ahead, new skyscrapers bent upward from the ground like great titans awakening from the earth. New streetlights and road signs sprang up at street corners. Down a side street, Thorn saw a four-story-high splash of water as a new tract of Biscayne Bay popped upward into existence. A marina soon followed, rising out of the water.

“What’s happening?” Fear in her voice, Crystal slowed the car a bit, but kept driving.

“We’re crossing the Sanctuary’s boundary faster than it can generate new space.”

“English or Spanish, please. I don’t speak Crazy.”

“The boundary is the point that you’d never have naturally crossed no matter what choices any of you made. But
them
being here changed all that, and now here we are. Turn down one of these streets and loop back around. Drive as fast as you can to keep ahead of our pursuers, but it’s very urgent that we return to the condo.”

Thorn was especially worried about what would happen if the ballooning boundaries brought enough new humans into the Sanctuary that it reached its maximum capacity—around a hundred people. Would the Sanctuary end prematurely? Would the whole place collapse, killing all those within?

Crystal tapped the steering wheel repeatedly. Her eyes glanced from the new adjustments to reality emerging ahead to the furious windstorm whirling behind. She then looked to Cole, but he offered no guidance. “Every bad thing that’s happened tonight has happened at that condo,” she said. “It’ll be safer for all of us at the police station.”

Thorn clutched her shoulder. “The condo is the place where everything happened… because the condo is the only place that exists.”

“What?”

Thorn hesitated to reveal too much; he didn’t want Crystal and Cole growing so curious for knowledge of the spirit realm that they’d ignore tonight’s important choices. Worse, Thorn might accidentally reveal his own identity if he said the wrong thing. He walked a tightrope as he explained. “This, uh, this place. This… Sanctuary. That’s what they call it, a Sanctuary. Well, at least it’s
supposed
to be a safe place. A testing ground of sorts. Most Sanctuaries aren’t attacked like this one was.”

Crystal seemed more perplexed now than she had before Thorn’s explanation. She looked like she had a caustic word or two for him, but the strangely shifting reality ahead of the car restrained her tongue. “So why not go to the police station?” she said, like a broken record. “It’s safe there.”

“You’re not safe
anywhere
out here. What do you think this is?”

“It was just a pleasant night in my condo until you went nuts,” Cole said.

“It’s a test.” Thorn regretted telling them that much. Would they still make the same choices if they were aware of the cosmic weight those choices carried? “Turn and go back to the condo.”

“Thornyboy!”

Speeding as fast as he could alongside the car, the Judge interrupted Thorn’s argument with Crystal. He tried knocking on the glass, but his physical influence was so weak that his knocking wasn’t audible above the car’s engine. “Dude, come on. Help me out here. Roll down the window!”

Thorn released his hold on Virgil’s voice box and spoke to the Judge in the spirit world. “Why are you here?” He had to be sure that the Judge would be an ally and not a burden—or even a different breed of foe. After all, the Judge himself had sent Thorn here.

A demon latched onto the Judge’s heel and dragged him back behind the car. The Judge frantically shook him off and shoved him away, then strained to reach the car’s back window again. He looked terrified—totally overwhelmed by the lawlessness he’d found in the Sanctuary. Nevertheless, he tried to offer Thorn an enthusiastic grin. “I’m here to rescue you!”

“How did you know what was happening?”

“You think I don’t know what goes on in my own damn city? An influx of demons from Central Africa, then they all disappear right when you’re shipped off to the Sanctuary? It raised a few eyebrows, including mine. Augh!” He swatted away another demon who’d snuck up beside him. “Shit, shit, shit. I, uh—I really didn’t think this through. Uh…”

Thorn took full hold of Virgil again and quickly rolled down the window. The Judge kicked another demon away as he slid through the narrow opening and collapsed next to Thorn. Thorn rolled the window shut again before any demons could get in.

“Whoa, what’d you just do?” Crystal said.

“Just needed some fresh air,” Thorn said through Virgil’s corpse. In the spirit world, he railed at the Judge. “You fool! Why didn’t you bring backup?”

Dazed after his brush with death, the Judge was slow to answer. “Uh, I couldn’t—I couldn’t get anyone to come in here with me. You know how everyone’s afraid of these places.”

“So you thought you’d huff and puff and Shenzuul’s army would go home?”

“I do believe the appropriate words are, ‘Thank you, Judge. You just saved me from the fate of the dodo bird.’ Now. How do we get out of here?”

“How’d you come in? Can we get out that way?”

“Nah, my followers destroyed the transit door behind me. It’s procedure so the angels can’t track us. I’m in this just as much as you.”

“So how did you plan to get out?”

“Kill the humans and end the Sanctuary. What else?” He seemed to notice Crystal and Cole for the first time. “Dear Lord! What are you doing with two of them? Are these the last two? Let’s drown ’em and blow this joint.” The Judge rose above the seats and waved a hand through Crystal’s mind. The car immediately started to slow as her foot relaxed on the gas pedal.

“Everything okay?” Cole asked, but Crystal said nothing. The Judge eased her further into a trance.

“Judge, wait,” Thorn said. Demons surrounded the car as it slowed even more, calling out insults and swearing death to those inside, but the voices grew so numerous that Thorn was able to drown them out as white noise. He looked up at the Judge, and felt very small. He’d seen kids come out to their parents as gay or as nonreligious, but he’d never expected to be put in the hot seat himself.

“Please don’t kill them,” Thorn said. He broke eye contact, unable to face his respected peer with his confession. “Just as you’re trying to save me… I’m trying to save them.”

The Judge chuckled casually. “Save them? What for?”

“Because, like you and me, they have minds, and hopes, and dreams, and futures. Because they don’t deserve to die. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

The Judge’s eyebrows furrowed. He nearly frowned, then his whole face lit up with a big grin. “Naw, you killed all those kids at the daycare. I mean you’re—you’re
Thorn
. You’re one of the most cold-blooded killers I’ve ever met.”

“I was whispering to Jed to try to
stop
him. The shooting wasn’t my idea. The local demons just attributed it to me.”

The Judge gaped, and the car eased to a total stop in the center of a downtown intersection. Paper, cans, and other bits of urban debris skipped over the ground in the mighty wind outside. The traffic light turned from green, to yellow, to red. “You mean the other demons were right about you?” the Judge asked. He removed his sunglasses to look Thorn in the eyes. In Thorn’s dreadful imaginings of this moment, he’d pictured the Judge fuming—attacking him, even. But the Judge’s shoulders were slumped and his eyes downcast; he didn’t look angry at all. He looked… hurt.

“They were,” Thorn said.

A long silence hung between them. Thorn didn’t look up the whole time. When he twisted his body to check his wounds, searing pain shot through him again. He looked down at the deep gash in Virgil’s knee, still bleeding thick, dark blood as livor mortis set in.

He checked Virgil’s watch. The night was halfway through, and he hadn’t even gotten the humans to trust him yet. Them failing to make their Big Choices by dawn was now a very real possibility. If the Sanctuary ended and they were all erased from existence, Thorn’s last stand in the Sanctuary would be for nothing. What a wasted life he’d lived. Millennia of fighting for his own selfish glory, then a few months of a futile search for answers after realizing that his life had been meaningless.
Will my death now be meaningless as well?