400 Horsepower of the Apocalypse
Chapter 21
Diane took down an oversized set of headphones from a hook behind her. There was a microphone attached to one side that she lowered toward her mouth. She gestured over our shoulders and I turned awkwardly in my safety harness to find another pair of headsets.
I grabbed one and pulled it down into my hair, but Leo was blindly groping, unwilling to take his eyes off the two big SPOT goons that sat flanking Diane. They were even bigger than Leo — which was saying something — and covered in bulky black body armor, each holding some seriously mean-looking guns pointed right at us.
I helped Leo pull down and put on the other headset. When we were both situated, Diane gave us a thumbs-up.
“First helicopter ride?” she asked.
I could see Diane’s lips moving, but her voice came through the headphones. I nodded, and so did Leo. Mine was a little bit shakier than his, though. I had never left Crayhill before all of this began, and that meant no airplanes. If they were anything like the helicopter, I would stick to motorcycles. Even riding on the back of a furious demon-bike didn’t make my stomach dip and churn like this.
Flying does not need to be unpleasant, Uriel told me. We have wings.
You have wings, I thought. I just have motion sickness.
We can fly.
I’m not jumping out of a helicopter, Uriel.
Leo sat silently next to me, staring down the SPOT soldiers. Diane glanced sidelong at her two guards.
“It’s a short flight,” she said. “But not one we can risk either of you losing control in the middle of.”
I glanced at their big guns again, gulped and looked out the window instead. We seemed to be flying northeast. San Diego was in precisely the opposite direction… I hoped that Diane was being honest with us about the short trip. I didn’t know how much time we could afford to waste. Leo was fighting a losing battle against Death for his own body — and I was doing only a little better.
Still, it felt strangely good to be moving north. It was hard to describe the sensation, but it was like smelling the neighbor’s barbecue when you’re hungry. I desperately wanted to go toward it. Quickly.
That’s you, Uriel, isn’t it? I asked. We’re getting closer to the other angels. That’s what I’m feeling now.
Yes. I sense my brethren drawing nearer.
Diane’s not taking us to them or anything, is she? I asked.
No, I do not think so, Uriel answered. The others are still some distance away. You have not made it easy for them to find us.
“Hey, can you SPOT guys track the horsemen and angels?” I shouted at Diane.
My voice screamed back through the headphones, making both Leo and Diane wince. I flushed, cleared my throat and then adjusted the angle of my headset’s microphone self-consciously. Apparently they were designed to let us talk without screaming like groupies at a heavy metal concert.
Good to know.
“Uh… sorry,” I said in a more normal voice. “First time. But can you? Do you know how to track the angels and horsemen?”
“Not with instruments or sensors, if that’s what you mean,” Diane answered. “We watch the tabloids and social media, for the most part. People who report seeing angels or the devil. That sort of thing. We monitor police channels, too. But it’s imprecise, to say the least.”
“Have you encountered any of the others?” Leo asked.
Diane leaned forward, drumming her fingers on one knee. “Yes. We’ve had encounters with the chaotic entity you would call Famine, and the angels Raphael and Gabriel.”
“Were any of them… like us?” I asked.
“No,” Diane answered. “I’m afraid not. Each of the entities were fully manifested. Whoever their vessels used to be, they’re only shells now.”
What happened to those people? The other… vessels? I asked.
They gave themselves over to us, like Gabriel’s host, Uriel said. Or they were taken, like Pestilence. As Death will eventually take Leo.
Uriel, those were human beings, I protested. People that you all just… erased. And you want to do that to me?
The final battle must be fought. It was decided at the dawn of your universe.
“How did those encounters go?” I asked Diane.
I remembered Gabriel at the Arrow motel and could guess the answer. Diane drummed her fingers faster on her knee and shook her head.
“We managed to slow Famine and Gabriel,” she said. “But weren’t able to stop any of them. Highway 13 will need miles of road work and East Fork, Montana, won’t be appearing on any more maps. Which is part of why we’re desperate to talk to you.”
Mortals are unequal to the task of fighting us, Uriel said.
I squinted at the SPOT director. “You’re a priest. Shouldn’t you be on the angels’ side? Not trying to fight them?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Diane said. “There’s no true good or evil in this, so let’s say that I am on the side of life.”
“Did you ever run into that Pestilence asshole?” Leo asked.
“We attempted to isolate Pestilence on Highway 44,” Diane said. “While it was chasing you, in fact. But when we closed in, Pestilence charged the line and broke through. Rather easily, I’m sorry to say.”
Leo frowned. “What about War?”
“Alarmingly quiet, actually,” Diane told him. “We don’t know why, but we’ve barely heard anything from the final horseman.”
“But it’s out there, isn’t it?” I asked.
Diane nodded. “All eight entities have manifested on Earth.”
I wanted to lean against Leo’s jacket shoulder and bury my face in the leather, but this wasn’t exactly the time or place for comfort. This was the time and place to… I had no idea, actually.
When I dreamed of running away from Crayhill, I used to imagine exploring New York or Los Angeles. Maybe leaving the States entirely and heading for Paris or Prague. Being coerced into a black helicopter by some kind of secret society had never occurred to me. My daydreams really should have included the possibility of alien abduction, the Rapture, or maybe a zombie virus outbreak. I resolved to be a little more creative next time. You know, if there was a next time.
The SPOT helicopter bumped and I couldn’t stifle a shriek. Leo’s hand tightened on mine. To reassure me, I figured. There was no way a big, tattooed criminal biker like Leo was scared of flying, right?
“We’re just coming in to land,” Diane said.
The helicopter descended over an arid, sloping mountainside studded with concrete bunkers. There was a massive tunnel cut into the stone and reinforced with more thick-looking gray concrete.
“Uh, where are we?” I asked.
“Blue Mountain,” Diane answered. “It’s a decommissioned military base we acquired about twenty years ago. I suppose that if we’re SPOT, then this is the doghouse.”
Diane arched her eyebrow over her glasses and smiled at us. I didn’t laugh, though. Honestly, I had no idea what to make of Diane’s friendly demeanor, but I hadn’t for a second forgotten about the two armored soldiers sitting next to her. This wasn’t some day trip with a sweet old auntie, no matter how nice Diane appeared to be.
I do not trust aunts and uncles, Uriel said. This one or Uncle Carlos.
Diane isn’t really my aunt, I told the angel. But yeah, I don’t trust this lady. Her people tried to shoot us… But I need to find out how to end this.
In glorious battle.
Some other way, I corrected. Some way that doesn’t get me shot by Spotters or torn apart by horsemen.
Uriel didn’t seem to have an answer for that. The helicopter landed with a bone-jarring thump. Diane removed her headset, so Leo and I did the same and then followed her out as another dark-clad Spotter pulled open the door. Diane waved to us as she jogged away, hunched over with her neat gray jacket whipping in the artificial windstorm. Riding motorcycles always did a number on my hair anyway, so I didn’t care about the wind… But I ran doubled over, too, unable to escape the utterly irrational fear of the helicopter rotor chopping my head off.
Diane’s two Spotter guards tailed us, weapons lowered but still pointed in our general direction. When we were far enough away, the helicopter lifted off again, probably flying to wherever it was stored when it wasn’t ferrying possessed weirdos around. Diane straightened up and smoothed out her windblown gray hair.
“This way,” she told us.
Diane led us toward the concrete tunnel. Leo and I walked close together.
“Where’s my motorcycle?” he asked.
“On its way,” Diane said.
She glanced back at one of the armored goons following us. He spoke briefly into a radio, then nodded.
“The convoy is still forty minutes out,” he said.
“Let me know as soon as it arrives,” Diane told him.
“Yes, director.”
There were a couple of dozen other people moving through the well-lit base and several of them approached us. They didn’t salute, but at Diane’s gesture, they all fell into step around us. Each of the Spotters was heavily armed and armored, just like the first guards.
We followed Diane through the concrete tunnel. It angled down into the mountainside and was wide enough for military trucks to drive through. The ceiling was inset with bright lights that cast sharp, dark shadows at our feet.
The tunnel ended abruptly in a pair of huge steel doors with NO ADMITTANCE painted across them in white block letters. Two SPOT soldiers stood at attention to either side.
Um… you could bust through these if we had to, right? I asked Uriel.
Yes, said the angel. We created this universe. Stone and concrete mean nothing to our power.
And steel? I asked. Because that’s a whole lot of steel.
And steel. This mountain will not hold me when the time comes to fight.
That had to be the first time I ever found Uriel’s hunger for battle comforting.
“Are you okay with this?” I asked Leo.
“No,” he answered. “But we don’t have much choice.”
I took a deep breath and held out my hand. Leo stared for a moment, then took it. Uriel tensed at the contact, but I felt safer with Leo’s fingers laced through mine. Diane glanced back at us and smiled a little. She did that a lot and I wondered if it was on purpose.
We were escorted through the huge steel doors. The tunnel continued deep down into the mountain, but now there were smaller concrete corridors and hallways branching off to either side. Diane and her growing soldier entourage led us down one gray hall and then another. They all looked the same and I quickly lost any sense of direction. I began counting the doors and turns in case we needed to make a run for it, but soon lost count and just had to hope that Uriel had a better memory than I did.
Finally, Diane reached a white-painted door and opened it. The room inside was an uninspired concrete cube with a round chipboard table in the center and a few chairs that looked like they had been looted from a hospital waiting area.
“Please, take a seat,” Diane told us. “Can we get you something to drink? Coffee, maybe? It tastes terrible, but it does the job. I was going to put some money aside in next year’s budget for a decent cappuccino machine, but coffee might not be our biggest concern by then.”
“That sounds ominous,” I said.
Leo shook his head. “Pass on the coffee. I don’t trust you not to drug us.”
That actually hadn’t occurred to me. I sat down beside Leo and frowned at Diane.
“That would be a really bad idea, trust me,” I told her.
“I’m trying to earn your trust,” Diane said. “But that has the sound of a specific worry. What is it?”
I bit my lip and looked up at Leo. That wasn’t really my information to share.
“If I fall asleep or go unconscious, I can’t fight Death off,” Leo said. “It takes over.”
Diane whistled and pushed her glasses up her nose. Seven of the armed and armored Spotters had crammed into the room with us and they all shifted uncomfortably.
“How long has this been going on?” Diane asked.
“A few days,” Leo answered.
“And you… haven’t slept in that time?”
Leo nodded and rubbed at his eyes. Diane pulled out one of the chairs opposite us.
“Then maybe we can offer you something else,” she said.
“Like what?” Leo asked.
“I have access to military-grade stimulants,” Diane said. “The kind of thing they give to Special Forces soldiers when they need to be awake for long missions.”
Leo sat suddenly forward in his seat. There was a desperate, hungry look on his face that made my stomach knot up. Addiction never entirely goes away, I guess. What Diane was offering wasn’t heroin, but it might as well have been. Leo grabbed the edge of the table and the fake wood creaked under the pressure of his grip.
But then he slumped back into the chair and shook his head.
“No,” Leo said. “I can’t. No drugs.”
Diane regarded him for a moment, then held out her hand to the soldiers. One of them took something from a pocket of their tactical vest and gave it to Diane. It was a slender vacuum-sealed cylinder about twice the size and length of my finger. The SPOT director adjusted her glasses and inspected the label, then set the package down on the tabletop. I could see a needle inside now, capped and wrapped safely in plastic.
“Think about it,” Diane said.
“No,” Leo answered.
“This stuff can keep a Navy Seal in full armor and gear on the move for seventy-two hours without rest.”
Diane pushed the syringe toward Leo, who regarded it like a poisonous snake.
“Consider it a gesture of good will,” Diane told him.
Reluctantly, Leo picked up the needle. He stuffed the drug quickly into a pocket of his jacket without looking at it.
“How about some answers instead?” I asked Diane.
She smoothed out the lapels of her blazer and sighed. “To be honest, I never thought I would be the one who had to do this. If the four archangels and the four horsemen appeared on Earth, I figured it would be in Rome — that this would all be Director Rossi’s headache to deal with. But the apocalypse is happening in the American midwest.”
“Answers,” Leo reminded her.
“Of course,” Diane said. “Let’s start with the Society for the Protection and Observation of the Tellurian. Are you familiar with that last term?”
“Tellurian?” I asked. “Nope.”
“It’s an archaic word for Earth,” Diane explained. “Because the Society was founded before its members had an accurate concept of the universe as we know it today. But now we stretch the definition to include all of physical reality, as far as we can comprehend it.”
“Alright, got it,” I said. “Let’s keep it moving toward how you can help us, though.”
Diane adjusted her glasses again. “The eight primary entities predate the universe. They have been called by a number of names throughout history and across the world. But I went to seminary, so I hope you don’t mind if I call them archangels and horsemen, too.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said, then winced and glanced at Leo. “Uh… sorry. That was insensitive.”
“Huh?” he asked, then gave me a weary smile. “Oh. It’s fine, Jaz.”
“This structure of the four archangels and the four horsemen is built into the very fabric of this universe,” Diane went on. “There are four cardinal directions, four elements, four seasons, four fundamental forces, four noble truths and four Vedas. The tetragrammaton is the four-letter name of God and the Japanese word that means four sounds the same as the one for death. Four is the first non-prime number, and our DNA is made up of four nucleotides.”
“But none of those are trying to make me strangle Jaz,” Leo said. “Death is an asshole.”
“Yes, perhaps,” Diane agreed. “The angels and the horsemen aren’t good or evil, though they’ve certainly been assigned all sorts of morality throughout the ages. They’re not even light and darkness — the light to cast a shadow didn’t exist before they set the universe in motion. It’s more accurate to call the archangels forces of order, and the horsemen agents of chaos.”
That all basically lined up with what Uriel had told me and what little I knew about Death.
“We know this part,” I told Diane. “Uriel won’t shut up about creating the universe as a battlefield for this end war they really, really want to go fight.”
Diane’s eyebrows shot up. “The angel… speaks to you?”
I scowled. “Yeah. Ever since Gabriel touched me.”
“Fascinating,” Diane said. “I wish we had the time to get into the details of that, but suffice it to say that in the universe they created, humans were the first sentient species to evolve the capacity to serve as vessels for the archangels and horsemen.”
Did Diane just say the first sentient species? Was she talking about smart dolphins or… something else?
Yours is not the only inhabited planet in this universe, Uriel said. But the species that live on those worlds were not suitable vessels.
“Holy shit, there are aliens,” I said.
Leo turned in his seat to stare at me, but Diane only nodded. Like she already knew there was life on other planets.
“The universe is vast,” Diane agreed. “As are the entities that created it. There is a good reason that the God or gods of most faiths are immense, inscrutable beings far beyond the reach of humanity.”
“The Greek gods were pretty human,” Leo argued. “I knew a guy that might as well have been Zeus.”
One of the Knights of Hell, probably. Which would explain why Leo was talking about him in the past tense. I wondered if Leo’s friend had a thundering temper or just couldn’t keep it in his pants. Diane laughed, but then shook her head.
“And yet the Olympian gods were successors to the Titans, a more elemental race of gods,” she said. “Throughout the ages, scholars noticed the similarities between our myths and religions. At first, they came together in small groups to study these common threads. The original Society was based in Alexandria, but as the people of the world learned about each other, so did we. Now the Society has branches and factions located all across the globe.”
“So how did a bunch of nerds end up with body armor and sniper rifles?” I asked.
“Because there’s something else that most religious mythologies speak of,” Diane said. “A final battle or catastrophe — the apocalypse, Ragnarök, the descent of Kalki, the inferno of the Seven Suns…”
I hadn’t heard of the last two, but they sounded bad. Diane held up her hand, thumb and forefinger touching lightly.
“You’ve seen a fraction of what an archangel and a horseman can do,” she said. “They will grow exponentially stronger as they come together. And when both sides are gathered for their war, it will destroy everything.”
“Wait, what?” Leo asked. “The whole planet?”
Diane shook her head. “No. The entire universe.”
The room spun and I almost fell out of my chair.
This lady is shitting us, right? I asked Uriel. You’re not trying to destroy the world, are you?
There will be… collateral damage when the final battle is fought, the archangel admitted. But this universe exists only because we required a material battlefield. It is a vessel for our war, as you are for me. Destruction was always the fate of creation.
Leo looked at me with wide eyes.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit!”
“The angel didn’t tell you about that part, did they?” Diane asked, brow furrowed.
“No,” I answered in a shaking voice.
“Frankly, I’m not surprised,” Diane said. “Do we explain to the grass why we need to crush it when we walk? Or tell firewood why we need to burn it?”
“Death doesn’t talk to me,” Leo said. “I only get impressions. But it’s not disagreeing with any of this, either. It doesn’t give a shit what happens to anyone or anything else, as long as it gets to thrash the angels.”
You should have told me, Uriel! I shouted. You know, inside my brain. I thought you said we were kind of friends! But you lied… As long as you get your cage match, you’re perfectly happy to trash the ring! You’ll destroy the entire universe!
This is my purpose, Uriel said. And yours, Jaz.
“I realize this is difficult to accept,” Diane told us. “I’ve spent my entire adult life studying this and still struggle with it every day. But that’s why the Society exists. We observe and study the tellurian, but we also hope to protect it.”
“Shit,” I hissed.
I doubled over with my head in my hands, fingertips digging into my scalp like I could rip Uriel out of my skull. If I could, I would have.
“Alright,” I said. “Diane, you rambled something just then about protecting the world. What can we possibly do? You already tried to fight some of the other angels and horsemen with a whole army’s worth of weapons.”
“Those attacks went even more poorly than the one against you,” Diane agreed. “But those forces were all fully manifested. You’re not. The two of you are still in control of your minds and bodies. We believe that may well be the key to stopping this final battle before it begins.”
“How?” Leo asked.
“Physical forms grant the archangels and horsemen a way to finally end their eternal war,” Diane answered slowly. Whatever point she was warming up to, the director didn’t like it. “With bodies, they can actually kill each other. And that’s what we want to do.”
I sat bolt upright in my seat and stared. “What?”
“You have to die,” Diane said. “Before the war starts.”
Leo jumped up to his feet and his hands closed into white-knuckled fists. The soldiers flanking the door raised their guns to aim at Leo, but he didn’t even seem to notice. Diane’s face went pale, but she didn’t back away.
“We have doctors who can do it quickly and painlessly,” the SPOT director said. “Death and Uriel are the leaders of their respective factions. With them gone, neither side can reach their full strength. That alone may be enough to save half the universe from being collateral damage in their final battle. And without the full eight, perhaps they can’t fight at all.”
I wanted to ask Uriel about that, but what the hell was the point? The archangel had already lied to me about their stupid, universe-shattering war.
I did not lie to you, Uriel said. I… simply did not tell you what would happen to your world.
I ignored the voice in my head and gulped, staring at Diane. Leo loomed over us both, fists clenched and shaking with barely suppressed rage.
“You… you really want to kill us?” I asked. “Both of us?”
“Yes,” Diane answered. “Please. For the sake of the world and the entire universe.”
“If you were just going to murder us, why didn’t you just give your snipers the order back at the hotel?” Leo asked.
Diane pushed her glasses up her nose and rubbed her eyes. Her fingers came away wet.
“We’re not monsters,” Diane said. “At least, I hope we’re not. We’re trying to save as many lives as possible. But you two aren’t monsters, either. You made that clear in Zamora Canyon, and you deserve the chance to make this sacrifice of your own free will.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“This isn’t a choice anyone should ever have to make,” Diane said. “And I’m sorry we have to ask it. Would you like some time to consider?”
“Um… yeah,” I answered.
Diane raised one hand and Leo tensed like a cat about to pounce, but the director just checked her watch.
“There’s a little over four hours until dawn,” she said. “After that, we need to act. You have until then to save us all. There isn’t much time left.”
Diane stood up slowly and left the room, followed by her soldiers. Leo and I stared at each other.
