The Book of Daniel (23 page)

“That can change, Dan. Listen, I know that before coming here, you had your fair share of problems in life. But that’s true for everyone. God sets all of us these problems, knowing full well that life back on Earth is inconsequential in the grand, eternal scheme of things. And why does He do it? Because He wants to see how we respond to those tests. The correct answer is to trust God, to have faith, and to seek His hand in things, no matter how terrible they seem.

“If you look at your life objectively, Dan, is there anything bad that happened that you really believe cannot be undone by God? Especially knowing what you do now, about what happens after death? Can’t you see that all those fleeting, earthly problems amount to nothing now? All you have to do is just rise above them and come to God.”

“That’s all, huh? Don’t you realise how difficult it is to just ‘rise above’ the fact that God let my wife, my
pregnant
wife, get killed right in front of my eyes? I know everyone keeps telling me that it’s not important, that she’s beyond earthly pain now and everything is hunky dory, but I can’t just let it go like that. I just can’t. I love her, for Christ’s sake, and it’s impossible to forget what happened to her like it was nothing. And if you’re saying that the whole reason my wife was killed was because God wants me to come to Him, that’s a pretty fucked-up way of sending an invitation.”

From somewhere out in the seething mass of demons emanated a sound like an elephant being skewered, barrelling through my rant and scaring me enough to cut me off. Thomas looked at me calmly, no doubt well used to hearing such things.

“I understand where you’re coming from, Dan, and of course I don’t have all the answers myself. But my point is this: your Creator has given you a second chance by putting you here in Purgatory rather than sending you straight to Hell for your attitude towards Him. Don’t you think it’s reasonable for you to give Him a second chance, too? Or at the very least talk to Him? You know, just try praying every once in a while? It doesn’t have to be anything grand—heck, you don’t even have to be nice to Him if you don’t feel like it, it’s your prayer—but without any kind of communication between the two of you, I can’t see reconciliation happening any time soon. What have you got to lose? Or to put it another way, what have you got to gain?”

I was beginning to get a headache. Knowing how perfect my new body was supposed to be, I suspected it was probably psychological. “Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Thomas, but is this really the best time to be talking about all of this?”

“Yes, frankly. Have you got something more important to think about than how you’re going to spend eternity? Don’t let that lot out there distract you, Dan,” said Thomas, waving dismissively at the assembled armies of Hell. “They’re irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”

“They don’t look it. But to be honest, I’m almost looking forward to fighting them. At least that’s something I can understand, rather than all this wretched theology.”

“You’ll get your chance soon enough. Look.”

Abraham and I turned to look where Thomas was pointing. Two angels were marching purposefully across the battered plain towards the protective barricade formed by their brethren. By now, the exodus from the city had come to a halt, and as the two angels neared the front ranks of us poor ex-mortals, the heavy rumbling of the gates resumed once again as they arduously began to close. Abraham bit his lip, hard enough to draw blood.

The angels came to a stop halfway between the mass of demons and the mass of Purgatorians. Around me, I could see jaw muscles tensing, eyes darkening and swords being hefted. Even the air felt somehow heavier. The demons, too, sensed that their time was drawing near, and the ravenous fury of their internal squabbles increased accordingly. For a moment, the situation held just like that. I kept an eye on Thomas and Harper, hoping for some indication of what we were all waiting for, but none was forthcoming. The mechanisms on my armour whined in sympathy as I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, charged with adrenaline but unable to do anything about it. Then, with the final, appalling clang of a tomb door being sealed, the gates to the city were closed.

One of the angels began to speak, its voice effortlessly cutting through the steadily building racket coming from the demons. “The time of curfew, of sanctuary, is almost at an end. For those of you who have never been outside the city walls before, this is a turning point in your time here in Purgatory. Do not be afraid. Your presence here pleases the Lord, and if you commit yourself to Him, no harm will befall you.” The angel paused for a moment, letting its words sink in. I doubted that I was the only one who took little comfort from them; I wished I could, but it was much easier to fear the overwhelming, visible evidence of my own eyes than to trust the promises of an invisible God with a proven record of unreliability. I wondered what Abraham thought of the angel’s little speech, but his face revealed nothing. The wound on his lip had already healed over.

The angel continued. “If this is not your first time on the battlefield, we pray that during curfew the Lord has given you wisdom to understand what has transpired out here before today, and through that understanding, allowed you to grow closer to Him.

“Whatever your circumstances, you are now committed to remain outside the city until the next sounding of curfew. The gates will not open to you before then. Until the trumpets sound, the angels will oversee your endeavours, but that is not to say we will necessarily intervene. It is not our place to decide if that is justified. Ultimately, it is between you and God to determine whether you will take the place that He has set aside for you in Heaven, or if instead you will choose to turn your face away from His glorious light and descend into Hell. We pray, therefore, that your dialogue with the Almighty will be fruitful, and that you shall know God’s blessing this day.

“Now, prepare yourselves!”

With these words, the second angel stepped forwards and raised a long, thin trumpet to its lips, or at least where you would have expected its lips to be. In the moment before the trumpet sounded, the air was filled with the sound of a thousand swords being raised: some, like Harper’s, confidently and defiantly; others, like Abraham’s, timidly and awkwardly. After a brief pause, I brought mine up too.

The sound from the trumpet rippled through the air, and almost immediately, the barrier of angels separating man from beast rose up, coming to a halt and floating just above the choppy sea of demons. At the same time, the first of the Fallen was launched from the back of the demons’ ranks, soaring upwards like some obscene phoenix, arcing overhead towards New Jerusalem’s mighty walls. It was as if a flare had been fired from a starter’s pistol; the now-unrestrained demons scrambled their way towards us like a pack of rabid greyhounds, tripping over one another in their haste to feed on the sinners laid before them, trampling underfoot any of their number unfortunate enough to fall. The air was filled with the thundering of uncountable footsteps and a cacophony of war cries.

The demons devoured the space that lay between us and them with terrifying speed. At first I thought their haste was because of their hunger, but it soon became apparent that that was only part of the story. Farther back in the enemy’s ranks, striding out of the smog and looming over the rest of the demons—and even, seemingly, the volcanoes beyond—came three giant red figures conforming in every way to the archetypal image of Satan, from the colossal pair of bull’s horns cresting each head to the cloven hooves that stomped indiscriminately across the battlefield. Each of them carried a huge, bloody trident, with which it jabbed and prodded at the minions around its feet, scooping up clumps of other demons and flinging them forwards. One of the giants batted a wave of writhing figures across the landscape with a mere whip of its barbed tail, pointing towards us as it did so and emitting a deafening roar. Clearly it was fear as much as hate that drove the horde.

Even in spite of the looming danger, I risked a few glances around me. All other eyes seemed to be fixed facing forward. Harper’s features had metamorphosed from their previous soft beauty into those of an Amazon, the scowl on her face worthy of Medusa herself. To her left stood Abraham, his lips moving frantically in either prayer or terror, but although his sword wavered, to his credit, he did not. I had half expected him to have already fled. Next to him stood Thomas, head bowed and eyes closed; but any wonder that I held about his piety was quickly overwhelmed by concern about the rumbling of the ground beneath our feet. I had originally supposed that this was due to the sheer number of our opponents, but as it grew strong enough to make my teeth rattle, I became increasingly less convinced.

Harper’s eyes suddenly widened. “Look out underneath us! Subterranean attack! Everyone scatter!”

Confusion broke out, shattering the fragile immobility of the Purgatorian ranks. At Harper’s cry, everyone tried to move away from where they were standing, but the source of the vibration was impossible to determine, and nobody could tell where it was safe to scatter to. We milled around, aware that the advancing charge of the demons was almost upon us, but now having to focus our attention on the ground beneath our feet, too. As if to remind us not to forget the sky above us either, another of the Fallen streaked overhead with a piercing howl. I felt the reassuring shape of the medallion in my hand, unaware that I had reached up for it. Despite the vast expanse of space outside New Jerusalem’s walls, I was beginning to feel very claustrophobic.

It began with a slight rising of the ground about twenty metres behind Thomas, but the expanse of the bulge was so large that at first none of the soldiers standing on top of it realised what was going on. Then, with a sudden burst of energy, the mound peaked upwards and exploded in a shower of dirt, the force of whatever it was that had tunnelled up from beneath flinging soldiers in all directions. Dust and soil rained down upon us, interspersed with something wetter and redder, which I suspected was blood; but the will to investigate vanished when I caught sight of what was crawling out of the ground.

To be honest, ‘crawling’ is probably the wrong word to use;
flowing
would be more accurate, but even that doesn’t really capture the lumpy way it poured out of the hole and assembled itself into a muddy, vaguely humanoid heap. Until a head that was composed almost entirely of teeth suddenly burst out of the thing’s mass, I couldn’t even tell for sure if this was actually the Subterranean that Harper had referred to, or merely its excrement; it certainly stank badly enough to be the latter. As the demon took shape, it shook violently, like a big, wet dog, throwing off globs of filth, or parts of its body—it was impossible to tell if there was any difference—in every direction. But the time it was taking the Subterranean to fully emerge from its tunnel gave most of the nearby Purgatorians a chance to fall back. Only a single figure was still within range of its jaws.

Thomas.

Incredibly, he still just stood there, apparently oblivious to the danger. Even when the Subterranean began to chomp at the air, sensing nearby prey, he didn’t respond, and I feared that perhaps he had somehow been wounded by the demon’s explosive arrival. I remembered shell-shocked soldiers stumbling around the battlefield in former times, and thinking that perhaps Thomas had been stunned, I hefted my sword and started to rush towards the Subterranean. Impulsively, I yelled out, hoping that I could distract it from its intended target. My brain refused to think about what would happen if it actually did turn towards me instead of him; I was simply acting on military instinct, trying to save my friend from what would quite literally be a fate worse than death.

I only managed to cover a fraction of the distance before it was all over. I was still unused to my armour’s strange bulk, and the Subterranean slid towards Thomas far more quickly than I could run, its legs dissolving into a shapeless, boiling mass of earth as it sped towards him. Only when the fiend reared up like a filthy cobra, its huge mouth angled downwards and ready to strike, did Thomas finally rouse himself from his prayers. He looked up into the black hole framed by those unfeasibly large jaws, raised his sword high, and calmly stood ready. For an instant, the Subterranean paused, uncertain in the face of this unexpected bravery, but its greed quickly overrode its confusion, and the gaping mouth thrust downwards towards Thomas like a pile driver.

The ground shuddered as the jaws hit, engulfing Thomas completely.

“No!”

Harper and I both cried out at the same moment, and then there she was, speeding past me, launching herself headlong at the Subterranean. She got within ten metres of its bulk, close enough for it to become aware of her presence and begin to gather itself up for its next attack, when suddenly it was consumed by a flash of intense blue light. There was no heat and no sound, just pure light. The Subterranean faded into invisibility, swallowed by the detonation, and Harper, little more than a hazy black spot, was flung back towards me by the force of the blast. I half-caught, half-collided with her, staggering to retain my balance. I raised my hand to protect my eyes, but the light died away as rapidly as it had appeared, shrinking back to its point of origin, burning straight upwards like a laser and then fading completely. Faint tendrils of smoke coiled off of Harper’s armour, but she appeared unharmed, just dazed. Of the Subterranean, there was little sign: just a small crater of charred earth where seconds before we had witnessed Thomas’s demise... or whatever it was that had just transpired.

“Was that what I think it was?”

Harper nodded numbly. When she spoke, she wasn’t talking to me. “You finally made it, you lucky sod.” There was no trace of bitterness in her voice, just a kind of soft wonder.

“Harper? Harper!”

The thrum of the approaching horde was so loud by then that every nerve in my body shuddered in sympathy and expectation. But I forced myself to keep my eyes fixed on Harper’s, and hers on mine. I knew that unless I acted quickly, Harper would die that day. I had seen it before: a soldier would lose a close friend in combat, and for a while, a kind of lethargy would descend on them. This was dangerous at the best of times, but out there on the battlefields of Purgatory, there was more at stake than just her life. On instinct, I reached up, took off my medallion, and looped it over her head instead.