Armageddon’s Children

NINE

CONTRARY TO HIS fears, Logan Tom was not the last of the Knights of the Word. Another remained.

Her name was Angel Perez.

She stood deep in the shadows of a building alcove and looked past the blackened storefronts lining both sides of the street toward the fighting. The Anaheim compound was under attack by demons and once–men, an army of such size and ferocity that it seemed a miracle the defenders had not succumbed months ago when first placed under siege. She had warned them then that they should make their escape and flee north, that they couldn't win if they insisted on holing up behind their compound walls. They couldn't win if they didn't engage in guerrilla warfare. She had told them this over and over, warning them what would happen if they refused to listen.

They hadn't, of course. They couldn't make themselves listen. She was a Knight of the Word and understood the danger far better than they, but it didn't matter. They had made up their minds. They stayed behind their walls, blind to the inevitable.

Now the inevitable had arrived. All of the city's compounds were gone but this one. She had just come from the Coliseum, one of eight she had spent almost a year trying to help. But she was only one person, and she couldn't be everywhere at once. The Coliseum had fallen last night at dusk. She had been on her feet for the better part of the last three days, for the better part of a week before that, and for the better part of the month before that.

She couldn't say when she had last slept more than four hours at a time.

Everything about the last several months, about the fighting and the dying and the terror and the madness, was a blur of images and sounds that denied her even the smallest measure of peace. It cloaked her like a second skin, a constant presence, an unforgettable memory.

She should have left months ago. She knew what was coming, and she should have left. Nevertheless, she had stayed. This was her home, too.

She took a moment longer to consider how she could best help the doomed people trapped inside this last compound. She already knew the answer. She had known it for weeks and had made her plans accordingly. She could not save them all, so she would save those who most needed saving. It had been her mission from the beginning, and she had worked hard to fulfill it as the army of demons and once–men overran each compound. This would be her final effort.

She slipped from her hiding place and started toward the chaos. Darting from one hiding place to the next, she scanned the street ahead, searching for movement. The buildings that lined the broken stretch of concrete were silent and empty, their windows broken out, their doors hanging loose or gone completely, walls blackened by fire and soot. Once they had been high–end shops and professional offices, but that was a long time ago.

Angel was small and compact, much stronger than her size would indicate, much better conditioned, fit enough that she could hold her own against almost anyone or anything, a fact she had proved repeatedly. Her battles with the demons and once–men were legendary, although the number of witnesses who could testify to this had dwindled considerably. With her thick black hair, deep brown skin, and sloped features, she had a distinctively Latina look, but she did not think of herself that way. She thought of herself in a different way entirely.

Born in East LA, in one of the poorest sections of the city, she had found her identity early. Her parents had been illegals who had crossed the border when borders no longer meant anything, seeking sanctuary from the madness that had already engulfed their home country. They had lived long enough to give birth to Angel and to see her reach early childhood, then succumbed to one of the plagues. She had grown up on the streets, like any number of others, poor and uneducated and homeless. She should have died, but she had not. She had dug deep down inside herself to find reservoirs of strength she hadn't known she possessed, and she survived.

She caught sight of the feeders now, their shadowy forms flitting past open doors and windows, racing toward the compound's besieged gates. Her mood darkened further. They were always there, always watching and waiting. She had learned to live with it, but not to like it. Even knowing their purpose, she still didn't understand what feeders were or what had created them. Were they made of something substantive? They fed on the darker emotions of human beings, but there was no reason for shadows to require food. There were so many of them it seemed impossible they could avoid detection, yet no human could see them save those few like herself.

She particularly hated the way they swarmed about her when she engaged in battle against the demons and once–men. She could feel them in the way she could feel a spider crawling on her skin. Even though they were only shadows. How could something that was only a shadow–little more than a darkness on the air — make you feel that it was alive?

Her attention shifted to the battle. Thousands of feeders swarmed at the base of the compound walls, climbing over the bodies of the dead and wounded, feeding on their pain and misery. They were everywhere, black shapes twisting and writhing as they fought to get at the living. There were so many that in places it was impossible for her to see anything else. Beneath their dark mass, humans and once–men fought for survival.

And the once–men were winning. Their army was vast and purposeful, their assault inexorable. Makeshift siege towers had been rolled forward, long scaling ladders had been thrown up, and battering rams were hammering at the reinforced iron gates. It was an all–out assault, one that was meant to break through, one that in the end would succeed. In other times and places, this army had possessed artillery and had used it against the compounds it had besieged. But the mechanized weapons had slowly failed or fallen apart as conditions worsened and war materiel was used up or destroyed. Everything was rudimentary now, sliding back toward the medieval. But that didn't mean the army was any less successful. Ask those who had fought against it in the other compounds, if you could find any still alive. It didn't make any difference what kinds of war machines were used; the once–men held the advantage. They were not shut away inside compound walls. They were not afraid of dying. They were not even sane.

Their madness and their bloodlust drove them.

And they had that old man to lead them.

She paused in the lee of an alleyway, not two blocks distant now from where the battle raged, close enough that she could make out the rage in the faces of the combatants and see the blood that soaked their clothing. She looked down momentarily at the rune–carved staff she carried in her hands, its burnished surface as black and depthless as a night pool. She could help those men and women who defended the compound. She commanded power enough to scatter the once–men like dried leaves, but she must not give in to the temptation to do so. She had not come here for that and could not afford to allow herself to become distracted. Besides, any summoning of the staff's magic would alert the demons, and the demons were already hunting for her.

Especially that old man.

Robert had warned her of him last year, just before the end, when he had gone to make a final stand with the defenders of the New Mexico and Arizona compounds. The old man had brought this same army to their walls and laid siege, hemming them in, closing off any escape. Robert had done what he could, but a single Knight of the Word was not enough–not then and not now. She had known Robert for five years, had fought beside him in Denver and might have fallen in love if the times had been different and falling in love had been a reasonable thing to do. Robert was tough physically and mentally, a better fighter than she was. But it hadn't been enough to save him.

In his final messages, the ones sent by carrier pigeon, he had described the old man so that she could not mistake him when he reached Los Angeles, as Robert knew by then he would. Tall and stooped, wrapped in a long gray cloak and wearing a wide–brimmed hat he was the personification of evil. The eyes were what you remembered, Robert wrote. Hard as steel, so cold you could feel them burn your skin, but empty of everything human when they looked at you.

There were rumors about him even before Robert's letters. A demon whose special skills lay in tracking down Knights of the Word, he had been hunting and killing them for years. She did not know how many the old man had dispatched besides Robert, but it was more than a handful. Eventually he would come hunting for her.

But she would not be so easily trapped, she thought, and her hands tightened anew on her staff.

She darted from her hiding place and sprinted back down the street and then onto a side street, dodging debris and the shells of burned–out cars to reach the entrance to the hotel that lay just outside the Anaheim compound perimeter.

FIFTY YARDS BACK from where the once–men battered at the main gates of the compound, the old man stood watching. Wrapped in his gray cloak and shadowed by his slouch–brimmed hat, he had the look of Gandalf until you got close enough to see his face and feel the weight of those eyes. Then you knew for certain he wasn't a wizard seeking to convey the One Ring to Mount Doom, but a creature fallen under its terrible spell, his soul forever lost.

The old man didn't know about Gandalf or the One Ring and wouldn't have cared about either if he had. He was a demon, and humans were his prey. He had been there at the fall, when the first real cracks had begun to appear in civilization's weakening facade. He had been there in the time of Nest Freemark, when the gypsy morph had come into being. He had been there for centuries before that, a constant presence in the fabric of the world. He had been there long enough that he had forgotten completely the shedding of his human skin. As a demon, he viewed humankind as anathema, a plague upon the earth, an infection that required eradication.

But the old man was different from others of his kind. He was driven not by base instincts. Most demons self–destructed early and spectacularly, turned mad by their emotional excesses. His own struggle was of a different kind. He was not motivated by a desire for revenge or personal gratification or to prove himself or leave his mark upon the earth. What drove him, what consumed him as no fire could, was an insatiable desire to expose the deep and pervasive failings of humanity, and so prove irrefutably that his choice to remove himself from the species had been the right one.

He had made the decision early on to trade his humanity for a demon soul.

He had never felt comfortable in his temporal skin, never accepted that he was meant to be nothing more than a brief presence in the firmament of life, here for only a moment, gone forever. Embracing the Void was a fair exchange for the depth of power his new identity offered, and he had never regretted his decision. He found his demon life fascinating. He was given countless opportunities to explore the nature of his former species. Peel back the layers of their skin and the discoveries proved endlessly surprising. All that was needed on his part was to figure out fresh ways to go about testing his theories.

It had taken him centuries to find the perfect way, but in the end, with the collapse of civilization, he had done so.

The slave camps had been his idea, his laboratory for experimentation.

Breeding and genetic alteration could tell you so much about a species. The possibilities were unlimited; the results were quite astonishing. It was amazing to him even now what he had been able to do. Destruction of the human race was the ultimate goal, but there was no reason to rush the process.

Still, he was growing weary. His studies had been long and difficult, and he no longer possessed the physical or mental strength that had served him so well in the beginning. Neither the intensity of his purpose nor the hard edge of his determination had diminished. But time had drained the reservoir of his energy and, in truth, his interest in humans was waning. He was beginning to see them differently these days. They had become more of a distraction than an opportunity. There were only so many ways you could examine them, force them to reveal themselves. Sooner or later, they simply ceased to have importance.

He had even put aside his Book of Names, the list he had so carefully compiled of all those he had killed or caused to be killed over the centuries.

Somewhere along the way, not so long ago, he had simply lost interest in record keeping. The dead no longer mattered to him. Now it seemed that even the living didn't matter. He was reaching the point at which he'd have to forgo experimentation and simply get on with extermination.

He looked at the once–men that attacked the compound gates. Although the screams and cries of the wounded and dying formed a wall of white noise in the background of his musings, he was barely aware of it. He cared nothing for what was taking place at this compound or at any of the compounds he had destroyed.

He cared nothing for the army that followed him. He led because the other demons and the once–men feared him. They believed him to be the chosen of the Void, the one to whom they must all answer for any failure. He did nothing to discourage this thinking, although in truth he did not know if the Void had chosen him or not. He knew that what he did to the humans on his own time fit nicely with the Void's larger vision of the world. As long as his efforts continued to succeed, he did not think anyone would dare to challenge him.

Which was not to say that some among those he led would not see him dead in an instant, if they could find a way to make it happen.

One among them, the one he found the most dangerous, appeared now at his elbow, a looming presence that instantly took his mind off everything else.

"Lost in your memories of the dead, Old Man?" the female demon asked softly, bending close so that only he could hear.

Old Man. No one else would have dared to call him that. But she was fearless–or just plain crazy, depending on your point of view. Whichever it was, she was the only one among those he led that he knew he must watch closely.

"Have you found her yet, Delloreen?" he replied without bothering to look at her.

If he had looked, he would have found himself staring at her chest.

Delloreen stood well over seven feet tall, one of the biggest women, demon or human, that he had ever seen. She was broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist, and strong as an ox. There wasn't an ounce of fat on Delloreen, not an inch that wasn't muscle. He had seen her pick up one end of a car to move it out of the way like a toy. He had seen her break a man in half. No one ever crossed Delloreen, not even the Klee, which wasn't afraid of anything.

If he had looked up from her chest to her face, he would have found himself staring at features flattened and shaved to almost nothing, eyes the color of lichen, spiky blond hair, and patches of scales that coated her neck and chin. The scales were new in the past few years, small blemishes that had spread and grown thick and coarse. As if she were going through a biological change, maturing into a new species.

She had been with him for almost a dozen years now, his good right hand, the one who made certain his wishes were carried out. She was the only one strong enough to do that, which made her both useful and dangerous. At first, he hadn't seen her as a real threat. Delloreen didn't want what he had. She wasn't interested in leading. Leading required an assumption of responsibility, and she was too independent for anything as restrictive as that. She didn't want to have others relying on her; she liked going it alone. The old man understood. He gave her the freedom she sought, allowed her sufficient time to satisfy her special demon cravings, and required in turn that she watch his back. It was an arrangement that had worked well enough up to now.

Of late, however, she had begun to show signs of growing restless with her situation, and he was beginning to suspect that he would need to make a change.

"Have you," he repeated when she didn't answer him right away, "found her yet?" This time he looked directly at her. "Are you listening to me, Delloreen?"

Her broad flat face broke into a wide smile that showed all of her pointed teeth. "I always listen to you, Old Man. No, I haven't found her yet. But I will."

"Do you even know if she is still here?"

"She was at the Coliseum yesterday. She took the children out while we were breaking down the doors and killing the parents." Her demon smile widened.

"Clever of her."

He shook his head reprovingly. "Escaped you again, did she?"

"She'll try the same thing here, sneaking the children past us while we concentrate on the adults." She paused. "This time it won't work."

"That remains to be seen. You've had three chances already and nothing to show for it."

Delloreen's smile twisted into something unpleasant. "Too bad about the children, isn't it, Fin—Fin? They would have kept you amused for hours. All those lost opportunities to make a fresh batch of little demons. Such a waste!

It must make you very angry that she took them away."

He managed a disinterested shrug. "I've no need of more children, Delloreen."

She laughed. "Of course, you haven't. All you need are your memories of the ones you've already played all your hateful little games with. Isn't that right?"

She was deliberately taunting him, something she had made a habit of doing over the years, but which today, for reasons he couldn't explain, set his teeth on edge. The way she said it told him that things had changed between them in a way that couldn't be set right. It wasn't so much what she said as the tone she used, as if daring him to do something about it. She had never come at him like this before. No one challenged him–no one in his right mind.

She smiled at him as she might have a child. "Stop worrying, Old Man.

You'll have what you want soon enough. You'll have your precious Knight of the Word to play games with."

He was still thinking about the way she had spoken to him a moment earlier, but he nodded agreeably. "Will I? I don't know. Perhaps she is too much for you. Perhaps I should send one of the others this time. The Klee, for instance?"

He did not miss the flush that blossomed like blood between the patches of scale. "The Klee is an animal. It doesn't think. It won't know what to do with her."

He looked at her questioningly, showing nothing of malice or disgust or the half a dozen other things he was feeling. His seamed, weathered face was an unreadable road map. "Perhaps an animal is what's needed."

He turned away before she could answer, giving her a moment to think about it. The gates of the compound were beginning to splinter. The once–men were advancing in a steady wave, the living climbing atop the bodies of the dead. A pyramid of corpses was forming at the base of the walls; here and there limbs still twitched. It was what made the once–men so useful: they didn't think, didn't feel, and didn't care about dying.

"The fact remains, she needs to be eliminated," he continued.

"I told you. I can manage it."

There was an edge to her words, but he kept his eyes on the battle at the compound gates. "I fear you underestimate her, Delloreen."

"As you once did Nest Freemark?" she snapped. "Hold the mirror up to your own face before you hold it up to mine, Old Man!"

He knew in that instant that he was going to have to kill her, but he did not change expression or react in any way. He just nodded and kept looking at the fighting in front of him, his mind working it through.

"Well," he said finally, "I expect you are right. I shouldn't be judging you. The fact of the matter is I'm doing too much of that lately. It's because I'm tired of this business. I've been at it too long. Someone younger and fresher is needed." He looked at her and saw the wariness in her lizard eyes.

"Don't look so surprised. You were right about me. There's no use pretending otherwise. I've been alive a long time, and my enthusiasm for most things has been used up. My only real pleasure now comes from the children and the experiments. If I were to do nothing else, I could be happy."

He looked away again, letting her chew on that. Then he said, "Are you eager to take my place, Delloreen? I think maybe you are.

I think it's time you did. But it has to be handled right. My declaration of support will help, yet it isn't enough by itself. You must provide your followers with reassurance that you are the right choice to lead them. Just a little something to instill fresh confidence."

She hadn't said a word, still listening.

"Bring me the head of that girl on a stake, Delloreen," he said suddenly, almost as if he had just thought of it. "The head of a Knight of the Word–what better proof could anyone offer? When you do that, I'll step aside." He nodded slowly. "Yes, I'll gladly step aside."

Even without looking at her, he knew what she was thinking. She was thinking she would like to mount his head on a stake. Fair enough. But she wouldn't try it now, not while she wasn't quite sure of herself. She would wait until she was on firmer ground. She would wait for her chance.

"Listen to me, Old Man," she said suddenly, stepping so close he could feel her breath on his neck. "I don't want to take your place. I don't want to lead this rabble." One clawed hand fastened lightly on his shoulder. "I will bring you the girl's head because I'm tired of listening to you carp about it."

The hand tightened. "But that's the end of it. You keep what you have and I'll do the same."

Then she turned and was gone. He did not look after her, but continued to stare at the fighting. He did not mistake about her intentions, whatever she claimed. Nor did he think for one minute that things could remain the way they were. Once the line was crossed, that was the end of it. Or, in this case, the end of her.

He did not know yet how he would make it happen, only that he would. But getting her out of the way long enough to think about it was the first step. She would find herself fully occupied tracking that female Knight of the Word. She might even find herself in over her head. It wasn't the ideal solution, but it would suffice.

He heard her voice again in his mind, taunting him about Nest Freemark, reminding him of the only mistake he had ever made. It was not a mistake he was likely to repeat. It was a mistake, in fact, that one day he would set right.

Because at some point in time, the gypsy morph would reveal itself, and when it did, he would know and he would find it and crush the life out of it.

He stared at the carnage in front of him and smiled bleakly as the gates gave way and the once–men poured through, screaming in anticipation of the bloodbath that waited. He would join them soon. He would immerse himself in the heady mix of killing and subjugation that was about to take place. He wasn't too old or tired for that.

Delloreen had called him Old Man.

But his demon name was Findo Gask.