Pandaemonium (45 page)

‘You have to shut down the machine,’ Rosemary shouts.

Blake turns to look at Tullian and finds him right alongside, also staring down at these supplicants.

‘No,’ Tullian responds. ‘It must be destroyed.’

Steinmeyer summons up whatever strength it takes to shout through the strains of his agony.

‘Damn it, man, this thing isn’t just going to short a few fuses. It’s a nuclear device. It’s going to take out the entire mountain.’

‘Christ,’ Blake appeals. ‘I left twenty kids less than two miles from here.’

Tullian’s eyes bulge briefly but his expression remains intent.

‘He’s lying,’ he tells Blake. ‘He’d say anything to keep the gateway open. And even if he isn’t, then that doesn’t matter either. This is more important than individual lives. Their souls will be saved. And for their sacrifice, for our sacrifice, the reward will be truly great.’

Tullian steps away backwards, raising his weapon at Blake as he moves to protect the shutdown controls. That’s when Blake understands that Tullian’s belief is absolute. He is prepared to die for it; for and through his faith.

The question for Blake, the question he can no longer evade, is what does
he
believe?

He believes Steinmeyer isn’t lying, and he believes Tullian’s logic is correct in that God would reward anyone who made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat evil in His name. If Blake truly believes what he has so long professed to, then he will very soon be granted paradise, and reunited with those he has lost. Reunited with Gail. Reunited with the kids who died tonight. Reunited with Kane.

He offered Kane Pascal’s wager, and he refused, even in his final throes. Now Blake is facing Pascal’s wager as inverted by Sendak: Do you truly believe there’s an afterlife, and are thus content to sacrifice the life you’ve got here?

There are
only
atheists in foxholes.

No bet.

Blake flexes his thumb and powers up the pike as he swings it, sweeping it upwards and into Tullian’s rifle just before he pulls the trigger. The rifle fails to fire, blue sparks dancing around it for a moment before its LEDs fade to black.

‘Now step away from the controls,’ Blake tells him, waving the pike.

Tullian sighs gravely and bows his head in defeat, but it’s a feint. He changes his grip on the rifle, grabbing it by the barrel, and lunges at Blake, swinging it like a club. Blake reads it all the way, shifting his footing so that Tullian’s momentum sends him off-balance, spinning from a glancing impact against Blake’s side. He sprawls at speed towards the railings and tumbles over the edge, but Blake is able to extend the pike for him to grab on to. He levers it against the steel barrier, leaving Tullian dangling by one hand, thirty feet above the Cathedral floor.

The pulsing intensifies further, shaking loose rocks from the walls. This place really is going to go up, and soon.

‘Shut it down,’ Steinmeyer calls. ‘There’s no time to waste.’

Blake looks back. He can’t reach the console without letting go of the pike. The Cardinal stretches up with his other hand, seeking a second grip, and as he does so, something falls from his robes. A glass phial tumbles and spins towards earth, smashing against a metal crate.

The liquid proceeds to eat through the metal in a fizzing, steaming fury, the droplets that sprayed the concrete voraciously eating that too.

‘Oleum,’ shouts Steinmeyer. ‘Concentrated acid. He faked it. He switched the fucking phials.’

Blake stares down at Tullian, who has now established a second hold on the pike: clinging on to this life with both hands.

‘They aren’t demons.,’ Blake shouts. ‘You brutalised them. You
made
them demons.’

‘I know what they are,’ Tullian calls back. ‘They’re Satan’s agents just the same. Don’t you see? He’s the Deceiver. It’s Satan’s gambit that we drop our guard while his minions invade. The very fact that they are
not
demons is
greater
proof of his scheming. That’s why I had to convince the military to shut it down, at all costs.’

Blake thinks of Kane’s words to Guthrie, two lives tallied among Tullian’s ‘costs’.

If scientists found indisputable proof that there was no God, the Church wouldn’t miss a beat. It would simply say that this emergent proof was merely a fabrication to lead man astray . . .

‘He sabotaged the place,’ shouts Rosemary. ‘He let all of this happen. He killed everybody.’

‘You lied about everything.
You’re
the one who wouldn’t accept the evidence.’

‘It is the measure of our faith to believe
in spite of
evidence, Father. Satan is using science to seduce you. And only faith can save us from him.’

Another pulse sends more rocks tumbling, one of them smashing into the platform only feet away. Time’s up.

‘Science says you fall at ten metres per second squared,’ Blake tells him. ‘Let’s see if faith can save you from that.’

Blake lets go of the pike and lunges for the console.

Rosemary watches Tullian fall, looking away before he hits the ground, only he doesn’t; at least not directly. There is a flash of movement from close to one of the cubes, and Tullian is intercepted by a demon pouncing upon him in mid-air. They land in a tangle in front of the anomaly, the blue light of the pike crackling the air around them, before the demon rights itself and hurls Tullian, pike and all, through the portal.

The creature then turns to face Rosemary and Steinmeyer, roaring its vengeful intent as it charges forward.

Its head suddenly explodes in a splatter of black blood as several shots rip into it from the side. They both turn to see Sendak standing in the doorway, pointing a pistol: still gripped in the now severed hand of its previous owner.

Blake locates the Emergency Shutdown Sequence lever and flips it. An LED then lights up on a button close by, stating: ‘Confirm Emergency Shutdown?’

‘Damn straight,’ Blake says, and hits it.

The pulsing sound ceases immediately, the portal vanishing like a shadow when the light that cast it is snuffed out. There is still a powerful thrumming in the air, but it sounds steady, controlled and, most crucially, receding.

Blake takes a walk back to the barrier to check on those below, and on the floor at his feet he spots something else that must have fallen from Tullian’s robes during their struggle.

After a few seconds, the thrumming has died and the place is almost silently at peace. Then there comes a reverberating crash from the steel doors at the opposite end of the Cathedral.

‘Find cover,’ Sendak orders, raising his weapon, attached hand and all.

There is another crash, something very powerful bringing itself to bear upon the metal. Then, upon the third, the doors buckle and several soldiers storm through the gap: visored and faceless, carrying machine guns.

‘Drop your weapons and get down on the floor,’ the first of them commands.

Another of them spots Blake looking down from the platform.

‘You, hands in the air and come down here, now.’

Blake puts up his hands to indicate compliance, but is preparing to explain why he’s reluctant to undertake the second part when something occurs to him.

‘Say, you didn’t get here by helicopter, by any chance?’

Upon this word there is an immediate clamour around the emergency doors.

The sound gets louder, then a few moments later they can see the lights of two aircraft coming over the trees.

The helicopters split paths and touch down either side of the wrecked compound. Soldiers spill out and immediately begin scouring the perimeter, taking down the last stray demons with machine-gun fire.

Then a group of four emerges belatedly from one chopper and proceeds towards the games hall.

Kirk drops the chainsaw and grabs one of the net-stands, dragging it from its lodging place through the door handles as Rocks removes its partner. He goes to throw the emergency doors wide apart, but finds they won’t budge. A glance through one of the panes reveals that two of the soldiers are barring the exit, and Kirk has to duck out of the way as the other pair use their rifle butts to smash out the glass.

The panes removed, it is the other ends of their weapons that are thrust through the resulting gaps. Kirk grabs one by the barrel, Rocks the other, angling them upwards while everyone scrambles back deeper inside the hall. Then the guns issue a series of hollow popping sounds and a number of grenades pinball around the walls and ceiling before bursting open in clouds of gas.

Kirk ducks down and picks up the chainsaw again. He’s got hold of the rip-cord when his legs give, and is unconscious by the time he hits the floor.

‘They all had the
same
hallucinations?’ Sendak asks. ‘That ain’t gonna fly.’

‘Mutually reinforcing hysteria. Somebody shouted “monster” amid the chaos, and in their minds they all saw it. Cross-contamination of their recollections. They can’t be sure a memory is what they actually saw or what someone else claims to have seen. I’m betting it wouldn’t be a tough sell to suggest drugs and alcohol played a part too.’

Rosemary shakes her head with bitter disapproval.

‘I know it sounds shitty, but it’s for their own good,’ Rodriguez insists. ‘What would you rather they believed happened to them? Wouldn’t you prefer to wake up later and be assured the world still makes sense the way it used to?’

‘It’s not that I don’t wish someone could tell everyone the weird stuff never happened; it’s that I don’t believe it’ll work.’

‘It’ll work. It’ll work because they’ll
want
to believe our version.’

Rosemary looks down for a moment, her way of conceding the point. He’s right. They’ll resist it initially, but soon enough they’ll succumb to the reassurance the official explanation offers. She just wishes there was such an option open to her. She went into the lions’ den for her classmates and thought it was the hardest, bravest and most selfless thing she’s ever done, but she understands that a more arduous task still lies ahead. It is her burden now to know the truth but tell no one; her duty to maintain their mass delusion, to reinforce the security of a comforting belief she knows to be false.

She glances across at Father Blake and wonders if he’s been carrying the same cross.

‘And what about those of us right here who know different?’ Blake asks.

‘Professor Steinmeyer and Sergeant Sendak are bound to secrecy. I can’t stop you and the girl talking, but I’d strongly advise against it. It won’t help your friends any, but if that ain’t a good enough reason, I can give you a starker one, which is that nobody’s going to believe you. You don’t have any proof.’

‘And thus you wave your magic wand and this all goes away,’ Blake says.

‘Don’t you want it to go away, Father? Get on with your life?’

‘No. Because it isn’t over. My young friend Adnan went through that portal, and we all know there’s still a chance we can bring him back.’

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Rodriguez assures him sincerely. ‘And I give you my word I’d volunteer
personally
for that particular S&R mission, but we both know it ain’t gonna happen. It would take a lot more leverage than one missing kid to get the brass to even
contemplate
firing that thing up again.’

‘Yeah,’ Blake concedes with a sigh, hoping he sells his defeated act better than Steinmeyer. He slumps back in his seat and pulls out the iPhone.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Rodriguez tells him. ‘Usual aircraft rules. No cellulars in-flight.’

‘Just checking it’s still intact. I’ll be needing it later.’

‘You can use it soon as we land. Thinking of getting one just like it myself. You reckon they’re pretty hot?’

‘This one’s dynamite.’