Chapter 20
Several Condition members tried to stop me inside the mortuary. I cut them down without remorse. Compared to monsters, whack jobs were soft targets. There was a phone in the hallway but it was as dead as the cultists. I was rocking another magazine into Abomination as I cleared the stairs and reached the back door. The cemetery stretched before me. A fog was rolling in and mist was collecting between the mausoleums. Spotted throughout the fog were bobbing lights, cultists moving to intercept me, and who knew what else was out there. The smart thing to do was probably run and hide, maybe find a phone and make a collect call to the Department of Homeland Security. Anything but go out there where the unkillable Hood and his minions were lurking.
But at the same time, if Mordechai had just been a figment of my feverish imagination, and the only reason I was operating at this tempo was that shot Torres had given me, that meant that as soon as it wore off, I would go back to joining the ranks of the undead. For all I knew, I was going to keel over any second. I had to take my chances. Whatever Hood meant by eternal night was already starting.
I went straight forward with no real strategy in mind other than shooting anything that moved. And there was lots of stuff moving. The grass was thick and wet, sliding around under my boots. The names on the tombstones seemed English, but I still had no idea where in the world I actually was. It was cool, but not cold. Looking at the stars, they were weird enough that I figured I was in the southern hemisphere, not that it mattered now. I was on my own. I headed in the direction with the most lights. Hood could see in the dark but most of his followers were human and could not.
Shapes appeared through the mist and then retreated from view as I swung to face them. I knew that things were watching me from behind every stone wall. I could only imagine what kinds of horrid beasts had joined up with the Condition for their big moment. It made perfect sense. In a world without daylight, the creatures that we hunted would have an absolute vacation.
But nothing attacked. Cultists and creatures both hung back.
I reached the lights. They were the giant, portable, construction kind. Some huge project was taking place in the middle of the old cemetery. Bulldozers, dump trucks, and backhoes were parked off to the side. A giant hole, at least as big across as a football field, had been dug here, and it was obviously a rush job, completed recently. The ground had been churned into mud. Tombstones had been carelessly smashed into bits. The machines had cleaved right through the earth and I could see where they had just dislodged or cut cleanly through old coffins. Skeletal limbs were discarded and forgotten like bits of trash.
I approached the edge of the hole and looked inside. The mist was swirling in weird patterns. Strange insects cast giant shadows as they flew in front of the huge lights. There was something in the hole, something odd, but it was still covered beneath loose dirt and broken coffin bits.
Hood was standing in the center of the hole, waiting for me, arms folded. Standing at his side was a young woman, also wearing intricately decorated robes. Both of them had put on elaborate golden headpieces with all sorts of squiddy goodness and were wearing amulets that just felt unbelievably ancient.
"You didn't have to get all dressed up," I said.
"Those who mock shall mourn, unbeliever!" the girl shrieked. She was the one who had bossed Torres around. She was actually kind of cute, if you disregarded the whole diabolical, crazy-fanatic thing. "Your fate is sealed. Your time is done!"
Hood smiled and patted her on the arm. "You must forgive my daughter. The exuberance of youth, you know." She scowled but he ignored her with parental smugness. "Lucinda, my heir, meet the man who's been a thorn in my side. I'm happy to see you came here voluntarily. So you've decided to fulfill your destiny?"
"If my destiny is killing you, then yeah, guess so." There was motion behind me. Things were circling, surrounding the hole on all sides. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Cultists had approached from behind. The fires that I had earlier thought were torches had been other teleportation devices. All of his worldwide church had gathered for this event. "Nice hole. You dig this for me?"
He shook his head. "No. Sending you back to the Old Ones will be simple enough. There are thirteen small gates scattered around this world and we are fortunate to have one at this sacred place. It is already prepared." He pointed to my left.
I took a few steps to the side to see better. Some of the excavation had unearthed a stone circle. A sick red light flickered from the hole and unearthly music drifted forth. The notes made my sanity hurt.
I turned away. "Oh, I thought maybe this construction project was some sort of secret weapon so you could finally defeat me," I said sarcastically. "For somebody who's supposed to be so friggin' bad, you've certainly sucked at it." I lifted Abomination and launched a grenade at them.
Hood extended his hand and the 40mm shell detonated on an invisible wall, temporarily obscuring them in a cloud of smoke and fragments. They were untouched. He smiled. "I could kill you with a fluffy pillow, Pitt." He gestured around the giant hole. "This is an ancient living device. The last time it was used was before man even walked the Earth, in a war beyond your comprehension against the mighty Yith. I've known about this place for years, but lacked the ability, the permission to use it." The shadow man reached into the sleeve of his robe and pulled out Machado's artifact. "With this, I can guide it. With the Dread Overlord's blessing, I can awaken it."
I heard hundreds of voices raise a cheer around me. I looked up from shoving another grenade into Abomination long enough to mutter, "Shit."
"Awake and arise, my legions!" Hood raised his voice to shout at his followers. The sound reverberated across the cemetery. "Let there be NO LIGHT! Rejoice, my children, for THE DARK NEW DAWN BREAKS!"
His followers roared in excitement.
The earth shook. The dirt beneath the sod rolled like the waves of a turbulent ocean. The tremor increased in intensity. My equilibrium was gone and I fell to my knees. The shaking grew in intensity. I had lived through some decent earthquakes, but this was just crazy. This was something way off the Richter scale. The earth screamed in protest. I had to scramble away from the edge as dirt began to cascade downward, the pit widening. The old mausoleums cracked, blocks shattered, and they collapsed on themselves. Levees of dirt erupted upward in places and wide cracks spread outward from the epicenter. The creatures and humans in the dark cried out in fear.
Something was coming out of the hole.
A hundred yards wide, dirt falling off in streamers, a tower rose. It was misshapen, twisted, unnatural, and it continued to grow higher and higher into the air. Hood stood on top of it, laughing maniacally, his daughter clinging to his arm in sudden terror. The two of them were lifted upward, riding the surge of something completely alien.
It was a structure, but it seemed to be organic, living, a sick, green, mottled thing. It stopped climbing, and then the top began to flow outward, snapping and unfurling. Branches stretched laterally overhead, raining dirt down against our upturned faces as the thing filled the night sky. It was part plant, part insect, and something that the human mind had never been meant to comprehend.
The earthquake subsided. The towering entity shuddered, freed from a million years of slumber. It seemed to click and twitch, pulsing with an unnatural life. I couldn't even estimate how tall it was, but it was like standing on the sidewalk and staring up at a high-rise.
It was the tree from Hood's utopian vision. It was the tree from the grimoire Carlos had taken from him. It was sick, wrong, and bad, and it was right here, right fucking now.
"BEHOLD. I GIVE YOU ARBMUNEP, TREE OF ETERNAL NIGHT!" Hood cried from a platform three hundred feet in the air. A cone of utter darkness began to grow from the branches, climbing into the atmosphere. It spread like a canopy, blotting out the sky. The cloud grew rapidly, like some sort of festering cancerous sickness.
"Mighty Arbmunep will consume the radiance of the heavens. We will blot out the light, darken the sky, erase the dawn. The night will rule. No sun, no moon, no stars. Only utter darkness. Absolute night, my children, and in it, I will rule. WE WILL RULE!" Hood screamed as the cloud grew larger. It wasn't just blocking the light, it was eating it. Arbmunep was alive and it was hungry.
There was a sound from the portal to the Old Ones' universe. Something was laughing. It was like running fingernails across a chalkboard multiplied a billion times and then driven through your ear hole with a variable-speed electric drill. I clamped my hands over my head involuntarily. The Dread Overlord was watching, fueling the monstrous tree, and it was positively giddy. Denied entrance to our world, it could at least enjoy the destruction of that which it couldn't possess.
Even something that incomprehensibly vast could be petulant.
"Thank you, noble and great master, for this ultimate gift. I will not fail you," the Shadow Lord cried.
The Condition came out of the shadows, hundreds of them. All had donned the ceremonial robes and raised their cowls. I couldn't tell what they were, most were certainly human, but there were many that felt unnatural, various types of intelligent undead probably, and several of the robed shapes were too large, too cumbersome, too wrong to be people. Stitched together automatons stood guard in the background, unthinking killing machines, simply here to observe. The cultists went to their knees or whatever else their equivalent was, and prostrated themselves before their false god and its blasphemous tree.
The shadow man spread his arms wide and leapt from his perch, plummeting toward the ground like a missile. At the last possible instant he stopped, then stepped lightly to the earth, his cloak settling around him. He walked straight at me. "Ready for your trip?"
"Ready to die?" I responded, my pulse quickening, adrenaline and energies I didn't understand flowing through my veins.
"Get in the portal, Pitt." He was getting closer. The Dread Overlord laughed. Someone killed the generator powering the portable lights, leaving us with nothing but the red light coming from the portal and a faint phosphorus gleam of the Tree's skin-bark as it fed. "I will not tell you again."
I gripped Abomination tighter. I had no clue what I was doing. I bellowed incoherently and charged. Hood lowered his head and did the same. His human form disappeared and a twelve-foot shadow took his place. The shadow bore down on me, cheered on by his followers and the king of pain itself.
I opened fire, the shells nothing but a futile gesture. The shadow crashed into me, knocking me down, and slapping me incoherent. Now, at his triumphant moment, there wasn't a damn thing I could do to hurt Hood. He grabbed me by one foot and dragged me through the dirt toward the portal. My fingers tore through the ground but I didn't even slow him down. He was going to toss me into that hole. Panic ripped through my guts. "You've been a worthy adversary, I must admit. I have no idea how you defeated the virus. I wish I could put you under a microscope and figure out just what it is that makes you tick but this is much more important."
I had survived the zombie's bite.
I had somehow found the strength to do the unthinkable. I had survived something that no human ever had before. I had generations of dead Hunters rooting for me. I was special, damn it! There had to be some way to hurt him. "No!" I rolled over and pulled my kukri from its sheath. Now he was just pulling me along on my back. I swung the blade through the black mass holding my boot. The knife ripped through with no effect. I kept swinging. The stone circle was only a few feet away. I could see down into the red light, coalescing shapes and impossible geometries, songs of dead civilizations and abstract realities.
The Dread Overlord was waiting.
The shadow man lifted me into the air. I was still thrashing, kicking, screaming, cursing, swinging my knife, all to no avail. I was upside down, blood rushing to my head, suspended over the portal, the Old Ones below, the Tree blotting out the stars above. The Condition members edged closer, chanting in unison, excited to see me, their Lucifer, thrown to his eternal condemnation.
Hood paused, leaving me dangling over the portal. Something vast shifted on the other side. "Dread Master, accept this humble sacrifice. I will prove worthy of your power."
"Arbmunep F'thagen. Arbmunep F'thagen," the cultists chanted, hundreds of them, increasing in volume and intensity. Hood raised his shadow arm triumphantly, holding me up as a trophy as I continued to swear and hack at him. "Arbmunep F'thagen! Aaiii!"
Then Hood paused, letting me dangle. "Oh, what now?" he asked in exasperation. I glanced up from the Dread Master's realm. The shadow shape moved and I could see what had attracted his attention.
Some distance away, probably where I had first teleported in, there was a tiny flicker of fire in the dirt amongst the Condition. The minions were stepping aside to get out of the way as the portal opened. It was only a foot across as the two small flames intersected. The dirt disappeared and a brilliant shaft of daylight pierced upward. A head popped through the hole, wearing round, bug-eyed aviator goggles with a long red beard underneath and a stubbly cranium. I recognized the interloper immediately. "Milo?" I asked in disbelief. The head swiveled around, casually studying the various monsters and cultists, took in the unbelievable alien tree, then focused in on me upside down in the air and the shadow man that was holding me.
"Hey, Z. Hang on just a second," Milo responded from Alabama, as if this was a totally unremarkable circumstance. His goggled head bobbed back through the hole and disappeared. I could still hear him as he shouted. "It worked and it's outdoors. See, I told you we'd figure it out. Let her rip!"
There were two more flickers of flame. They ignited and spread outward in a circle, just like before, only this time they were traveling in a much wider arc. This circle was going to be huge. A bunch of cultists belatedly realized that they were standing in the area of effect and rushed to escape, tripping in their clumsy robes, or getting knocked down by their fellows in a panic to escape. MHI must have not only figured out how to make the magic ropes work, but they had stitched together one hell of a big one in the process.
"You guys totally rock!" I bellowed.
Within seconds the two flames met and with a horrendous air-suctioning pop a giant circle of dirt disappeared. Several cultists simply vanished. My eyes had adjusted to the bleak dark of the cemetery and underside of the Tree, so it was painful when a massive blinding circle of Alabama daylight appeared. A portal doesn't just let matter through; it is a direct doorway to someplace else, and this particular place was sitting under the afternoon sun. Light exploded all around us.
Hood's mighty shadow form wilted and shrank under the onslaught. The alien Tree shuddered and actually screamed as the light struck it. The undersides of the branches were now shockingly well lit. Vampires amongst the crowd of cultists burst into flames, screeching as their flesh bubbled and melted off.
There was a terrible mechanical wail, growing closer and louder by the instant. It was a rhythmic beating noise, and accompanying it was a loudspeaker, blaring music at such impossible decibels that it could even be heard above the noise of the approaching rotors. A red-and-white dragonfly shape blasted through the portal, pointed so that it was shooting straight up into the beam of light.
Up in our current location was apparently sideways in Alabama, and the MI-24 Hind attack helicopter blasted skyward. The nose jerked down as MHI's crack pilot immediately adjusted. Wind tore at us as the blades fought the new direction of gravity. Within seconds Skippy had oriented the chopper so that it was moving predatorily under the branches, surveying the graveyard. The painted shark jaws swiveled in a circle, taking in the target-rich environment.
The speakers were blaring "More Human than Human." It cut out long enough so that Skippy's gravelly voice could come over, electronically amplified until the orc was as loud as Hood had been when he had activated his evil Tree.
"MONSTERS . . . TASTE VENGEANCE . . . OF SKIIIPPPYYY!"
Skip had broken the FAA regulations about arming MHI's helicopter. Rob Zombie came back on just as the GE 7.62 miniguns mounted on both sides of the Hind opened up at 6,000 rounds per minute, stringing lines of tracers into the cultists; 20mm cannon shells thundered into the creatures as Skippy rotated the flying tank's nose gun. Rocket pods ignited like chains of Roman candles and bits of undead were flung everywhere. Winged beasts leapt into the air to attack the chopper and Skippy scythed them down methodically.