Pandaemonium (44 page)

But no sooner had he noticed the collar on one of the four figures picking their way along a corpse-strewn corridor than a movement on another of the screens told him what work was still to be done. Steinmeyer had survived, and was making his way through the Alpha labs. In a matter of mere minutes, their paths would surely cross. It was imperative that he be the one to apprise his fellow clergyman of the situation before Steinmeyer delivered his version of events.

Fortunately, he knew a few short cuts, and by feeding the test chamber’s monitor with one of Merrick’s video files he had a means of causing the new arrivals to tarry there a while: a means that would throw a large spoke into Steinmeyer’s ‘rational’ explanations.

‘Like “a gossamer curtain”, that was how he always described it,’ Tullian tells Blake. ‘Someone should have strangled him with one.’

Tullian opens a security lock and checks the path ahead. He spots a shock-pike lying abandoned on the floor and hands it to Blake as he ushers him through the doorway, demonstrating the charge button with a push of his thumb.

‘Make no mistake, Father, I am no Luddite. Quite the contrary. I love science. In fact I owe my position in the Church to my passion and dedication to it. But here, in this place, is where science met its limit, and Steinmeyer refused to face that. Science could not account for some of the phenomena we were encountering. This was the advent of a paradigm shift of cosmological proportions, but Steinmeyer was effectively still saying the Earth is flat and the sun orbits around it. Steinmeyer is the most dangerous kind of zealot: a scientist who cannot accept what the data is telling him. Everyone in this place could see what was plain except him: he had opened up a gateway to Hell.’

‘You’re not using that as a figure of speech, are you,’ Blake asks rhetorically. ‘How do we close it?’

‘The machine is out of control. It’s going to consume itself. No one must prevent that. Unfortunately, Steinmeyer is still alive and will give anything to do just that. If he encounters your friends, he will use them, lie to them, and if it serves him, he will sacrifice their lives to his ambitions like his zealotry sacrificed all these others.’

‘It hurts,’ Marianne says, her voice strained.‘A lot. I’m worried about infection too. Think I’m getting a temperature. My head’s thumping and it looks like the lights keep pulsing.’

‘That’s not your headache,’ Deborah assures her. ‘The lights
are
pulsing.’

Kirk glances up at the fluorescents, watching their glow fade and intensify, fade and intensify. He’s convinced the latter phase is getting marginally brighter each time, but it could just be the effect of the contrast.

He glances towards Miss Ross and indicates the hockey stick, now disconnected from the mains.

‘Wasn’t me,’ Heather insists. ‘Sockets are on a different circuit. Anyway, this doesn’t feel like power fading. This is power growing.’

‘How long have they been gone?’ Radar asks, casting a concerned glance at Cameron.

Kirk looks instinctively at his watch. It still reads 11:00, as it has done since the hike. He hauls it off in frustration and casts it to the floor. Instead of hitting the ground, it whips away sideways through the air and sticks to the wall, drawn by irresistible magnetic forces.

He looks at Heather, like he needs a corroborative witness that this just happened. Her expression does the job.

‘Did I dog Physics the day we covered this?’ he asks.

‘I have to warn you, Father, that there is a strong possibility, should your friends come into his sphere, that they will be contaminated too. I’m telling you this in order that you may prepare yourself and understand that, if this is the case, then they are no longer your friends.’

Tullian advances into the duct, Blake following. This one is only a few yards long, housing a ladder at the end. An aluminium plate beside it reads ‘Observation Platform Emergency Access’.

Tullian puts a foot on the first rung and then stops, turning around to face Blake, something having occurred to him.

‘There is another thing I need to tell you, in case anything should happen to me.’

He reaches among the folds of his robes and produces an iPhone, which he holds up momentarily for Blake to see before popping it back whence it came.

‘If for any reason I don’t survive, it’s imperative that you recover this.’

‘What’s on it? The Pope’s mobile number?’

‘Evidence that I can use as leverage if any government, any organisation, ever attempts to repeat this madness: evidence proving that what was brought forth here was not merely some unknown species, but the forces of Hell. This phone contains video files and test data demonstrating that holy water burns their skin, while ordinary water does not. There is no chemical explanation for why mere water, once blessed, can do that to living tissue. This constitutes proof that the scientific paradigm has met its outer boundaries. This constitutes proof that what we have been telling the world for two thousand years is true.’

Blake had seen the footage in the lab, simultaneously amazing and appalling. He saw holy water burn living tissue: the tissue of a living creature, restrained and helpless, unable to resist or retreat as its skin blistered and burned. He also saw a corpse alongside: a demon that had been tortured and crucified.

He understands a terrible truth. Kane was right about him: he never truly believed. All these years, he’s just been searching for a reason to. Well, now he’s been given one, and he doesn’t like how it feels. If Hell exists, then so must Heaven, but he finds them two sides at war: battle and slaughter, enemy prisoners tortured and executed. Didn’t he already have this in the old world yesterday?

Sendak spots a pistol gripped in the hand of a dead soldier. He tries to wrest it free, but it is locked solid.

‘Sarge,’ Adnan yells, using his head to indicate the floor by his feet, his hands occupied by dragging what’s left of some poor grunt.

Sendak looks across and sees the shotgun lying beneath the body Adnan is shifting. There are also two boxes of twelve-gauge ammunition by the wall, one of them spilled open.

They both begin loading shells into their weapons’ breeches, which is when Sendak notices that Adnan looks concerned.

‘What?’

‘Fresh weapons and spare ammo just outside a big door. End-of-level-boss and a major battle up ahead.’

‘This is real life, kid, not a video game.’

‘Yeah, and in real life, somebody stashed this hardware for a fight - and still never made it.’

Tullian points towards a section of the console bank on Blake’s right, where there is a large lever under a Perspex cover, marked ‘Emergency Shutdown’.

‘We can’t let anyone near these controls,’ he shouts above the noise. ‘Not anyone! The horrors you’ve seen already are nothing, Father, nothing. If this gateway is not destroyed, the dark legions will have unopposed passage into our world.’

Sendak is first through the door. He has barely emerged into the deafening, teeming chaos of the Cathedral when a demon comes hurtling towards him, scampering over a pile of crates. He blasts it with his shotgun as the others file in quickly at his back.

Steinmeyer rushes past and stops in his tracks, aghast, as he takes in the view. The floor of the hall is strewn with debris: mostly the contents of the soldiers’ interrupted packing-up exercise, but much of it the remains of what used to be his control and monitoring HQ. He scrambles amidst the wreckage, looking frantically for any terminal that might still be running, but what hasn’t been shot up or smashed has been fried and scrambled.

‘What the fuck do we do now?’ asks Sendak.

‘I need to get to the manual shut-offs on the observation deck. They’re a built-in failsafe, they override all online systems. They’re just up . . . oh, fuck, no. Tullian.’

Sendak looks towards the elevated deck jutting out of the cavern wall opposite the cubes, where he sees Blake standing alongside a guy in black robes.

Steinmeyer raises his decoherence rifle and takes aim. He gets off a shot just as Sendak throws up an arm to deflect it. The blast vaporises a section of console as the two figures dive for cover.

‘The hell you doing?’ Sendak demands, keeping hold of the barrel of Steinmeyer’s weapon. ‘That’s our friend up there.’

‘You don’t understand. He’s with—’

Steinmeyer is cut off as a creature erupts from the wreckage by their feet and sends both men sprawling to the floor, Sendak’s weapon clattering from his grip as he falls. Steinmeyer keeps hold of his, but only at the cost of an agonisingly awkward landing that snaps his ankle.

Blanking out the pain for one last desperate second, Steinmeyer manages to roll on to his back and fire his rifle, but only hits an upturned stack of servers, inches from where Sendak has righted himself into a crouch.

Sendak feels the wave of dust just before he sees the creature leap upon the professor, an army-issue Ka-Bar knife gripped in its teeth as it wrests the rifle from his hands and tosses it far among the rubble. Out of the corner of his eye, he locates the shotgun’s stock, only inches from his right hand. He stretches to tug it from where it is wedged amid the debris, only to discover, when he pulls it, that the stock is all that remains. The creature yanks back Steinmeyer’s head with one claw, exposing his throat and roaring out a battle cry as it raises the blade in the other.

The battle cry turns to one of pain as Adnan’s shotgun and Rosemary’s arrow make their interventions. The assailant is thrown backwards off Steinmeyer like a rag doll, its head exploding in a cloud of black.

Sendak watches Adnan step across to where the creature lands, pumping his weapon to finish it off if need be. Then his warning cry is swallowed by the storm as a second demon, larger than anything he has seen so far, emerges from cover and grabs Adnan from behind. It lifts him off the ground, gripped around both his upper arms, and hurls him into the black disc just as Rosemary fires her final arrow.

The arrow lodges in the creature’s back while it stares in apparent confusion at the portal, into which Adnan has disappeared instead of being violently repelled, as was presumably the creature’s intention. It then breaks off the arrow contemptuously, turns and begins stomping towards Rosemary.

Blake watches this unfold from above, his own warning cries lost in the tumult. He turns to Tullian, gripping the barrel of the Cardinal’s rifle and directing it below.

‘Shoot it. Shoot it, for God’s sake.’

Tullian hauls the weapon clear of Blake’s grip and shakes his head gravely.

‘This weapon has charge left for one shot, and I’m saving that for anyone who tries to reach these switches.’

Rosemary turns and looks for another weapon, but sees only Steinmeyer crawling hopelessly amid the wreckage, looking for his lost prototype. The creature halts briefly to pick a knife from the body of a dead soldier, before resuming its progress with singular intent. It is two yards away when a flat-screen monitor smashes into its head, dropped from somewhere above. This doesn’t floor it, but by the time it has recovered from the blow, it finds itself looking at Sendak as well as Rosemary.

Sendak moves in large sideways steps, waving his arms, drawing it away from the girl, towards where they came in.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he shouts. ‘Over here, you Gollum-looking sonofabitch.’

Sendak steps back through the doorway, brandishing a blade of his own. His opponent follows, at which point he hits a button on the wall and brings the doors together with a servo-assisted whine, locking the creature away from Rosemary and Steinmeyer, but also locking himself in a tight corridor with the thing. He scans his surroundings. All he sees is body parts and dead soldiers. The creature gives a roar, towering over him. Fucker’s eight feet if it’s an inch.

They both have Ka-Bars. Other than that, it doesn’t look like a fair match. He almost died here once before, long time ago. Maybe some things are just meant to be. Maybe you can outrun your fate for a while, but you can never escape it.