Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (13 page)

Abbide’s men had improvised hasty graves for the Sudanese soldiers fallen in the gunship’s attack. Morris pointed out a grave close to the crossroads. The tall, cadaverous man the SOT had assigned as his assistant, Hanz Strucken, directed the men in caftans to begin digging. They muttered imprecations against evil, kissed the charms hanging about their necks, and set to work with shovels. Watching Strucken, with his quiet air of authority, Morris suspected the German had been assigned to him only as a kind of babysitter—a sinister babysitter—to make sure he didn’t stray from the agenda. He knew himself to be expendable at this point, though he had brought certain key players into the SOT’s end game with him—certain powerful American congressmen, and an oil mogul with Israeli connections—and he had a good grasp of the Prompting Ritual. He also had the necessary baseline conviction to make the invocations work. This intangible quality—“telepathically charged fanaticism” was Dyzigi’s term for it—was rare.

Still, they could find someone else. And he sometimes wondered if what they had in mind for the end game was what he had planned and prayed for. The inner circle of the SOT claimed to have the same goals as Morris—but it was difficult to trust Dyzigi. He seemed to be all too comfortable with that unwholesome thing in the jar. Coggins, though, he could trust. They understood one another. He wasn’t sure about the Scotsman, who went by MacCrawley.

“We are there,” Strucken said, gesturing at the shallow grave. A body, with sand stuck to the blood around the chain of 16 mm wounds across its torso, lay sprawled, staring up with eyes that reflected the moon. The reek of death rose from the corpse, as if expressing the dead man’s spirit wanting to retaliate for the massacre.
Smell my death. Anticipate your own.
Morris shuddered—one had strange thoughts on errands like these.

Best focus on the work at hand. “Remove the head,” Morris ordered.

Strucken nodded, repeating the order to the workmen in their own language.

The two black men looked at one another and began arguing, Morris guessed, about which one would do that chore.

“Schwachkopfen!”
Strucken muttered, pushing them aside. He grabbed the shovel and used its blade like an ax, handily sliced through the decayed neck with a squelching sound. Black, gummed-up blood spattered. He took a pair of rubber gloves from his coat, tugged them on, and picked up the head by its hair. Thick effluvia dripped like mud from the severed neck.

Morris thought how strange it was he’d come to take part in an undertaking like this one. But you changed, working with the SOT. You accepted strange things, dark things. You were planning for the end of the world, after all. Everyone would be done for in the bodily sense. All would become spirit. Some in Hell, some in Heaven. What they did to prepare the way really didn’t matter. Spirit was above all this muck. And they’d earned their condemnation, their time in this spiritual sewer—they were all paying for humanity’s original sin.

He had no serious doubts. He knew that he was doing the bidding of Spirit. He had seen the angel. He had been lifted up, and he’d been shown the future. There was simply no doubt at all. It had been such a powerful experience that he’d been spaced out afterwards, for a couple of days, almost hung over.

“Now,” Morris said, “if you would put it in the box there, we will go on to the other grave.”

“Are you sure this one is suitable, Herr Morris?” Strucken asked.

“I am. I don’t need to do any tests. He is within the requisite distance. The old books are quite explicit. Do as I asked, please.”

“Yes sir.”

The head was stowed and they opened the second grave. Another corpse, another head removed. That was it. Two was all they could take from this site—except of course for the seed skull.

They found the place in the crossroads—a dirt road here—where they had buried the seed skull long before. The two workmen were set to digging it up. Ten minutes of painstaking work—they must not damage the skull with spade thrusts—and they found a lump wrapped in tanned, tattooed human skin. Strucken knelt and unwrapped the skull, just to make certain it was undamaged, and the African workmen were particularly distressed when they saw it staring up from the hole, perhaps because the runes carved on its forehead seemed to glimmer in the moonlight and a breeze sprang up from nowhere to whistle through its empty eye sockets.

Strucken rewrapped the seed skull, placed it with the other two heads in the velvet-lined wooden crate they’d brought along for the purpose, and immediately stepped back, hands on his hips, nodding in satisfaction. “Yes, you see, Herr Morris? You were right. This is the correct response, eh?”

Morris looked closer and nodded, seeing that the other two heads, with their coat of flesh still attached, were snarling, their eyes moving sightlessly, teeth gnashing . . .

The workmen, seeing life in severed heads, stumbled backward, hands raised in signs against malevolence.

“Tell them to fill in the graves; it’ll keep them busy,” Morris said.

But the workmen had started running, scurrying off into the darkness. A light speared out from the Blackhawk, followed by jets of fire from the 16 mm machine gun. Burlington chuckled to himself as the two men went down, wailing.

“Was that really necessary?” Morris wondered aloud.

“Yes, I think it was,” Strucken said. “Although the original plan was to drop them in the sea.”

Morris looked at him. “Oh?
Whose
plan? I’m in charge tonight.”

Strucken shrugged. “Shall we take the three seeds to the helicopter, sir? It will soon be time to make more. We have an appointment—the assault is to begin soon . . .”

Farther south in Carthaga

“John! Wake up! It’s after dark!”

“Whuh? Makes no sense. Supposeta shleep affer dark.”

“You’ve been sleeping all day, dude. We’ve gotta book outta here, Abbide’s coming back; he thinks you’re gonna sell him tanks an’ shit. We gotta split before he figures out you were all fo’danglin’ him.”

Constantine sat up, yawning. “I was whatin’ him? Were you a white American loony when you died or a black American loony?”

“I was white—but all my heroes were black.”

Constantine looked around, remembering that Abbide had gone on some kind of extended recon mission around noon. He’d stretched out to have a smoke in the tent they’d been assigned, and boom, he’d fallen dead asleep. His first real rest since leaving the monastery. “Is that a cup of tea in your hand? And food?”

“Yeah. Something here made out of mashed garbanzos and some bread. I had some—it isn’t bad. But it’s all going through me feist.”

“What d’you mean, going through you?” Constantine asked, taking the tea. He could hear soldiers moving about outside; vehicles rumbling, weapons and gear clanking, grim laughter.

“Got stomach cramps and runs from that kabob we ate on the plane.”

“I fucking warned you not to eat that old muck of theirs. Smelled all wrong.”

“John—you know what I’m remembering now? Not everything about being in a body is good! Oh shit, my stomach—I feel like kinda, like, nostalgic for being a freefloating spirit again . . . Ow!” Spoink sat at the end of a cot and clutched his stomach.

Constantine took a chance on the mashed garbanzos and vinegar, wrapped in flat bread, and drank his tea. “Been almost a year since I’ve had some proper breakfast. Eggs fried with tomatoes, a couple of rashers—”

“Oh fuck!” Spoink lurched for the door and, clawing at his robe, stumbled out to find a sewage trench.

Constantine located one of his last three cigarettes and lit it, trying to remember the dream he’d had. Should have written it down first thing. But with a bloody terrorist possessed by a California hip-hop skateboarder waving a cup of tea under his nose . . . Wait a mo, now . . . He almost had it . . .

Two eyes floating in a jar . . . move away from the jar, go up a stairs . . . At the top of the stairs, Mercury’s mother, Marj, with her throat cut, reaching out for him, weeping. She takes some of the blood from her oozing throat onto the tip of a finger, and applies it like lipstick and then makes to kiss him . . . Then he’s rushing from the house, Marj, weeping, in close pursuit . . . The house is near a marina . . . Not a marina in the UK—he knows somehow it’s here, in the Mediterranean. The houses nearby are like the ones they passed in Carthago. A white motor yacht moored nearby. Biggest motor yacht he’s ever seen . . . a name on it—“Noah”? Then . . . two eyes floating in a jar . . . an angel with a wound for a mouth . . . two eyes . . . floating . . . following him . . .

“John! Dude!” It was Spoink, capering at the entrance to the tent.

“Christ on a bike—what is it now, Spoink?”

“We’re about to get killed, man. Well, killed again, in my case, I guess—”

“What the bloody hell are you—”

The explosion blew the tent up into the air, the tarp flapping like a disease-maddened bat, Constantine and Spoink knocked down by a wave of heated air. They were on the outer edge of the blast, and neither was seriously hurt—they were mostly just rattled as they got to their feet, coughing in the smoke from the crater, to see two fighter jets roaring over. Other explosions were going off around the camp. The fighter jets had fired air-to-surface missiles at the Sudanese, and Constantine, his ears ringing from the blast, got his feet under him, but crouched, lifting his head just enough to catch a dim glimpse of soldiers coming at the camp, some of them firing their weapons. The attackers were mostly silhouettes as they came, strobically lit by muzzle flashes. Bullets slashed the air around him and Spoink. Those Sudanese not killed by the airstrike returned fire. The ground shook with mortar blasts; the air thundered.

A Sudanese soldier running by with a gun in each hand noticed Constantine standing there gaping and unarmed and tossed him a rifle. Constantine automatically caught it, as the man ran off to get into position.

Constantine looked at the gun in his hand. He looked at the men rushing toward him, firing . . .

And he threw the gun into the dirt.

“Come on, Spoink, hurry the fuck up!” Constantine yelled, turning to run the other way. “Let’s scarper!”

“I’m with you, dude!”

The two men ran between the remaining tents and leapt over hummocks of earth, expecting at any moment to feel the distinct and vivid sensation of a bullet in the spine.
A once-in-a-lifetime experience, that’d be,
Constantine thought.

They dodged into an olive orchard behind the camp. The orchard was already chewed up by mortar fire, half the small silvery green trees on fire, some of the others uprooted.

They came to a still smoking crater and leapt into it, as a spate of automatic-rifle rounds whipped through the air where they’d been a moment before. Keeping low, coughing from the sulfurous smoke, Constantine turned and peered over the rim of the crater, looking back at the battle. He couldn’t make out much—mostly just flashes in the darkness, a fleeting sight of enraged faces, pockets of flame. Screams and gunfire echoed to him.

“Who the fuck is it attacking us?” Spoink asked.

“Carthagans, I reckon. The major said his men were here to support some kind of Arab uprising against a minority government. I’m guessing that’s the minority’s army. Don’t look like the bloody minority to me. They’ve got the majority of the firepower around here. Abbide’s been advancing into their territory—naturally they get shirty about it.” He looked up as the F-16s flew over, the other way. “Could be that’s the whole Carthagan air force though.”

“Naw, man—look at that chopper!”

Constantine saw it then: A dun-colored gunship, coming in low over the fields, its rotors a glimmer in the firelight. It slowed to hover over what remained of the camp, and in a flash of gunfire from below, Constantine thought he saw a small glassy something thrown from a window of the chopper. A moment later there came an upburst of yellow smoke or powder, spreading out in the rotor wash.

What was it? Constantine wondered. Gas warfare? Smokescreen?

Then he saw a curious thing. The billowing smoke—visible in the light from a burning tent near the chopper—was forming into a specific shape, an enormous head that kept reasserting its shape on the smoke, as if the head were made of a clear crystal and the smoke was filling the transparent vessel from within. The head—bigger than the helicopter—turned this way and that, a face like a viciously feral Neanderthal, but with spikes in place of fur on its head, and great interlacing tusks. Hadn’t he seen that face somewhere—in some temple painting? He didn’t think so. Yet it looked so
familiar.
Strangely familiar . . .

The face opened its mouth, wide, seeming about to howl, but instead of sound a ripple of energy spread out from its quivering lips, as if the unheard soundwaves were visibly compressing the air. Soundwaves that were visible but not audible. The giant head vanished and reappeared, flickering in and out of visibility.

He heard a renewed roar of gunfire and shouting . . .

He felt strange himself—a sort of heat was entering him, coming from that translucent head, spreading like a fire that raced along the branchings of his nervous system. He had mental images of going to find the gun he’d tossed away, of picking it up and firing at the men who’d invaded the Sudanese camp.

He chuckled and shook his head.
As if I was loyal to anyone’s camp; anyone’s army.

He shrugged the impulse off—he’d had a lot of experience resisting psychic influences and his time with the Blue Sheikh had increased his resistance to them. It’d been an important part of his training. But he was fascinated, looking at the flickering outline of the great demonic head. Was it in fact a demon? Or something else?

It was as if the creature glimpsed in the smoke had thrust its head through a dimensional hole into the human world, with the rest of its body remaining in the Hidden World; like a man in a manhole, partway up the ladder, with only his head showing. But this thing’s body was not literally underground—it was emerging from the left, the right, from above and below. Only the filters of the human mind made it seem to come from underground.