2013: Beyond Armageddon (42 page)

The crucifix started to hiss. Smoke shot up from its edges. The acrid smell of burning rock assaulted his nostrils. Startled, he jerked it back.

The soft silver had been burning its way into the solid rock. It had left an indentation about an eighth of an inch deep.

Zeke tilted his head toward Heaven, then shone his light on the undamaged crucifix in his hand. If you believe…

He placed the crucifix into the recess it had cut into the eons-old stone and exerted pressure. Again came the hissing and smoke as it sank deeper. Molten rock ran like filthy tears down the face of the wall.

In seconds it was done. Zeke removed his fingertips and the crucifix was in place, its front plane flush with that of the rock that now held it fast.

The relic was unscathed. He looked at the rotting skull.

He didn’t
think
there was anything different about it…

Caught up in the moment, he immediately grabbed another crucifix and went to the skull on the opposite wall.

The exact same thing happened there.

Clearly he was in the presence of powers beyond understanding, so he wasted no time trying to. He took a couple short video shots of the skulls, then strode purposefully down the tunnel. Like a throat in the earth, it swallowed him deeper and deeper into its hungry blackness. With his head thrust defiantly forward, beginning to believe in himself now, Ezekiel Sloan marched on. Desire to reach the end of this strange journey urged him to go faster, but the unsure footing forced him to go slowly, and looking for skulls slowed him down even more. He burned to finally have answers to his questions, to find proof that he was right in dragging himself and everyone else through this. Resisting the urge to run, his search for skulls quickly became cursory at best—for two reasons.

The first was simple common sense: searching every inch of these walls would take forever, and he only had provisions for four days. The second had nothing to do with common sense, yet was much the more powerful of the two.

Zeke realized that, the deeper he descended into this unnerving darkness, the less he knew about looming horrors the better. Increasingly aiming his light more straight ahead, knowing that each step might bring him to a precipice, he made his way steadily downward. He’d go a little farther, then stop to eat and rest.

Before, in the watery section of the tunnel, a cord had been his lifeline. Down here, it was a ten-foot beam of light. That thin thread of illumination was all he had to get him through darkness he continually thought of as truly Stygian. If his light failed, he’d be blind. He reached around and felt the reassuring bulk of the four replacement batteries inside the backpack. Each was good for about twenty hours. He’d been using this one for three.

Time ceased to have any meaning. He’d lost all sense of the world above, all thoughts of anything on the surface. He occupied his mind by thinking of words to describe this sunless, lifeless part of the planet.

“A world of eternal night,” he said, never slowing.

“Nightworld,” he said a few steps later.

“Deadworld,” he said a few steps after that, then fell silent again.

Gnawing hunger got too strong to ignore. Time for a pit stop. The aptness of the term in this setting did not escape him. He slid the pack off his shoulders, stretching and flexing his muscles, moaning in pleasure at having the weight off his back.

He unzipped one of the small compartments. Before he fixed his meal there was something else he needed to do, while his stomach was still empty.

He removed the case containing the elements of the Eucharist. Using the backpack as a makeshift altar, Zeke performed the barest rudiments of the ritual. He held the wafer aloft and made the sign of the cross in the air.

“Thou art the Body of Christ,” he said, placing the wafer on his tongue. Filling the miniature chalice with wine, he repeated the motions he’d made with the Host.

“Thou art the Blood of Christ.” He drank, then used a small blessed towel to wipe the chalice dry before placing it back into the case.

He leaned against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes, believing that the Body and Blood of Christ were now in him. He surrendered to the vision of a glow spreading inside him, washing away fears and hatreds, the last vestiges of doubt still hiding in the depths of his soul.

In the purity of that spiritual light, all at once Zeke understood. He’d had to overcome a deep bitterness to believe in the existence of God, but in his quest to find the root of all evil, he had stubbornly resisted final acceptance of the liberating epiphany that now coursed through him.

All the hells he had gone through, all the evils on Earth, were one and the same.

Drugs that ravaged societies, alcoholism, prostitution, slavery, greed, religious wars, the endless stream of Hitlers, hate, envy, racism, terrorism—all of man’s inhumanity to man—it all tied together. It was all one massive mushroom cloud of evil, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, created by the ultimate evildoer for only one purpose:

To destroy the soul.

And that’s what this holy war, this jihad, this Armageddon, was over:

Souls.

Whoever controlled those souls controlled the fate of the world.

This endless and seemingly hopeless struggle for decency to prevail over depravity had led to the central question that had plagued the human race from the beginning:

Why was there evil?

The answer settled over Zeke, bringing with it a surprising peace.

There was a Satan.

But there was a God, too, and they were locked in the ultimate battle of good versus evil. A battle whose outcome had not yet been decided.

In a renewed spirit of serenity and optimism, Zeke got up to fix the special meal Leah had prepared and wrapped like a TV dinner. Zeke slit the plastic and used the small can of Sterno to the meal.

Weeks ago, he’d decided on exactly this dinner if the moment came: sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, gravy, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. This was a ceremonial feast, Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one.

Using the backpack as a table and the rolled-up sleeping bag as a chair, he ate very slowly, savoring each bite. Had some unseen observer been watching, his inscrutable expression might have been the resignation of a condemned man, prolonging his last supper, or the serene confidence of someone contemplating a far better afterlife.

After the meal he unrolled the sleeping bag and lay down on top of it. He removed his headlamp and fell into a dreamless, peaceful sleep.

He awoke refreshed and eager to continue. After adjusting the pack and headlamp into their most comfortable positions, he stared into the tunnel, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light. In a few seconds he saw a clear path for the length of its ten-foot range.

Like a miniature Cyclops on the trail of some elusive prey, he headed down.

A few minutes later he came to two more skulls. Although the previous encounter had prepared him, they were still unsettling.

These were less decayed. Fresher. Clearly visible bits of skin clung to their intact skulls. He pulled two crucifixes from his pack, jammed one into his waistband, and went to the first face. The relic burned its way into the solid stone as before. This time, though, Zeke thought he heard something else mingled with those sounds.

A low moan, coming from the direction of the thing’s mouth.

Slivers of ice scattered in all directions across his back and neck, like bystanders fleeing the spraying bullets of a madman.

He quickly went to the other wall to repeat the grim ritual. This time the sound was unmistakable.

A moan of abysmal torment came from the mouth of the disembodied skull.

He thought of getting the camcorder but decided against it. He needed to get moving. With the horrific wail still echoing in his ears, he continued down the tunnel. At first he was driven by the desire to put distance between himself and that sound. As he progressed, however, and the sound died out, he became so absorbed in finding out where this clearly accursed shaft led that he forgot about skulls or anything else. His will intensified with every step, until it bordered on a kind of monomania that allowed for no other thought but to get where he was going.

At last bodily needs took over. He was thirsty, he had to urinate, he needed to take off his pack and rest for a few minutes. Time for another pit stop.

After relieving himself he sat on his pack to rest, flexing and rubbing his back and shoulder muscles. He unfastened the pedometer/timer to look at his progress: 8.9 miles in a little under three hours. Factoring in the earlier pit stop it sounded like a long way and a decent pace, but it gave him no sense of accomplishment, since he had no idea how much farther he had to go. He merely registered the information and quickly forgot about it.

He fidgeted. He was too caught up in his progress to sit still. Less than five minutes after he stopped he was underway again.

Periodically he scanned the passing walls, heartened to see nothing that shouldn’t be there. When he’d gone what seemed like a long way, he stopped again to look at the pedometer: 13.1 miles.

He walked on.

Ten more minutes evaporated into nothingness. He actually began to get a little bored. He shifted the aim of his light from the floor ahead to the wall on the right. He stopped instantly.

He wasn’t bored anymore.

A head was lodged in the wall. He aimed his light at the opposite wall. With the inevitability of a waiting guillotine, its gruesome twin hung there.

He stood rooted to his spot, each horror seeming to loom in midair. These were very different from the previous ones.

Their faces were still completely intact. If decomposition had started, he couldn’t tell it. They might have been dead for only a matter of days. Or hours.

Were they appearing more frequently? It seemed like these were a shorter distance from the second pair than the second was from the first…

He thought about devising a way to measure it, then dismissed the idea. He could easily overlook some, which would render any measurements meaningless. There was only one thing that mattered: keep going. He couldn’t let extraneous details bog down momentum it had taken weeks to build.

He took one deep breath, reflexively clenched his jaw, and went to the face on the right. It was a young male, perhaps in his early twenties. Its features were frozen in an sneer of eternal contempt. The hair on its head had been shaved down to a stubble. In the middle of the whiskery growth, as though branded or tattooed there, was a swastika.

This thing had once been a skinhead.

How could something so recent have gotten here?

Zeke took off his pack and removed a crucifix. Just before it touched the stone beside the leering face, the thing’s eyes popped open.

They locked onto him. Bottomless hatred glowed from fiery red pupils.

Zeke jerked the crucifix back and held it directly in front of the demonic sentinel.

Loathing exploded from the undead eyes like fire from the window of a burning building. A revolting black tongue erupted from its mouth. It coiled around the crucifix and flung it to the ground. Soft, vile cackling trickled from an unseen throat.

Zeke grabbed a bottle of holy water from his pack. Ripping off its cap, he shook the blessed liquid onto the face. The water ate through the skin, all the way down to the bone. Smoking flesh filled the air with the putrid stench of a rotting corpse. Anguished wails accompanied the cacophony of death.

Zeke grabbed another bottle and went to where the other skull waited.

Eyes wide open. Following his every movement.

In the last instant before he began flinging the water, the white-hot loathing in those eyes turned to something else.

Fear.

Bracing himself for the sickening smell and sound, he emptied the bottle into the face until a wary silence finally descended.

Zeke forced himself to inspect the skulls.

Their flesh was gone. Only bare bone remained, the eye sockets now empty and lifeless. He got two crucifixes for the ritual, but abruptly stopped and reconsidered. There was no need. Whatever had possessed these two had been driven out by the holy water. Thinking of his limited and dwindling arsenal, he needed to start saving his weapons for use elsewhere.

Wanting to get away from the smoldering nightmare, he placed the empty bottles on the ground beneath each skull, shrugged the pack onto his shoulders, and forged ahead.

He walked almost in a daze. When the echoes of madness in his head finally died out, he considered the encounters, sifting for insights that might be helpful.

The crucifixes and holy water were both working—so far. But he needed to conserve them, and the skulls were showing up more often. And getting fresher. He hoped he didn’t have to deal with any more of them. At least for a while.

That thought struck him as a sign of weakness, and he shook his head as if to cast it out. “If I have to I have to,” he said aloud.

A moment later two more faces hovered on either side of him.

Fresh.

Eyes open.

Tongues flicking.

Zeke shot a quick video then attacked them with holy water. The result was the same.

He had enough footage of the skulls. He’d save the rest for Hell and Satan. Less than a hundred yards later, he repeated the grisly scene on another pair of what he now believed to be nothing less than guardians of the Pit itself.

A short distance later he came upon two more. The interval between each new pair was definitely shrinking. They were at most twenty yards apart now. Maybe less.

He needed to save the rest of the holy water for Hell if he got there. He ignored the skulls and moved on.

He’d only gone a few steps when his light flickered and went out.

The dark seemed alive, crawling over him. Constricting him. He steadied his breathing while convincing himself nothing was actually on him.

A confusion of noises up ahead got his attention. He cocked his head to listen.

The jumbled sounds were impossible to identify, but they certainly weren’t human. From the babel he picked out something like hissing, and low, animal breathing, coming from many throats. Fighting off a fear that threatened to engulf him—the fear that whatever it was might be coming closer—he knelt and fumbled in the pitch blackness for a fresh battery. He’d rehearsed this move many times, but not under circumstances like this. There
were
no circumstances like this.