Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (34 page)

“Will you put them down like dogs?” said Rama.

“Bolt through the head like with a horse when it’s past it?” said Kalkin.

“Couldn’t you blokes just slaughter them for us right now?” said Lombard. “As a favour?” He laughed raucously. “Only joking. Crikey, the looks on your faces. Anyone’d think I’d asked you to go suck off a dingo in a dunny.”

“The general idea is to let them go,” said Krieger. “You’re right, Parashurama. We don’t need them. They’ve served their purpose. They’ve become spares. Leftovers. So we might as well set them free.”

“Just offload a bunch of asuras onto the world?” I said. “Release them into the wild? It’s not like they’re bloody baby alligators you can just flush down the toilet. They’re marauding monsters!”

“Not monsters,” Korolev insisted.

“We wouldn’t turn them out as they are,” said Bhatnagar. “What would be the point when we can restore them to their original state?”

“Oh,” I said, startled. “I didn’t think that was... Is that possible? I thought once you were theogenised, you were theogenised for good.”

“Did someone tell you that?” said Krieger archly.

“Yeah. Aanandi. Well, at least, she said she believed it was permanent, and no one else said it wasn’t.”

I turned to the other devas to enquire if they’d known the process could be reversed. Their faces gave me my answer without having to ask the question. They were as taken aback as I was.

“You led us on,” said Parashurama to the Trinity. “You had us thinking we’d be this way forever. Why?”

“Would it have made any difference?” said Bhatnagar. “You submitted yourselves to the process regardless. That’s a true demonstration of your commitment, and we applaud you for it.”

“But,” said Krieger, “do you seriously think we’d let you walk around all revved up thanks to
our
technology, and not have a way of pulling the plug on you if we needed to? What if one of you went rogue? Decided to turn freelance? What if you went off the reservation and got yourself captured, or maybe tried to sell yourself to a rival syndicate? We have a fallback option. Of course we do. We’re not stupid.”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Lombard, glib and gleeful.

“Show them, Gennady,” Krieger said to Korolev. “Use one of the asuras as an example. Let them see how we can undo what we’ve done.”

Korolev input a series of commands into his tablet. “Initiating reverse theogenesis in containment cube seventeen...
now
.”

He gestured towards a cell holding a rakshasa. The jet-black demon was raging at the plexiglass, trying to hammer its way out.

Pale blue gas purled down from above, billowing around the rakshasa until the creature was obscured completely from sight. The thuds from the battering of taloned fists lessened, then ceased altogether.

“I am unwriting the rewriting,” said Korolev. “A second virus, antidote to god virus, related but not same. Locates the altered DNA strands and neutralises the resequencing. Like theogenesis, is not painless. Coming down hill is no less arduous than going up.”

It didn’t sound it, either. The rakshasa’s screams were audible even through the plexiglass. Bit by bit they became less raw-edged, less shrill, more familiar... More human.

“Extracting,” said the Russian biochemist, and the gas was sucked back up out of the cell through the same vent it had come in by.

As the air inside the cell cleared, a naked man was revealed. He was on his knees, down amid the chunks of meat and the spatters of rakshasa filth. He rocked back and forth, sobbing. He had lank, matted hair and the scrawny, knotted physique of the long-term malnourished.

Slowly he became aware that his ordeal was over. He gazed at his hands as though unable to recognise them. Then he blinked up through the glass, surveying us with bloodshot, sunken eyes. He said something, we couldn’t hear what, but his expression was perplexed and imploring.

I went to his cell. “Let him out. He can’t stay in there. It’s disgusting.”

“Very well,” said Korolev. “As you insist.”

I should have sensed what was up. I should have detected the scent of treachery in the air. All of us devas should have. But we were still coming to terms with the Trinity’s revelations. We were still feeling rocked by our own gullibility and culpability. We were, at that moment, more human than god. The Trinity had us on the back foot, and they knew it.

They had planned it that way.

They had planned it all.

Korolev tapped out a command which remote-triggered the cell’s opening mechanism. The glass front rose, retracting into a recessed slot above.

The poor unfortunate inside stumbled out. I caught him. He stank of faeces, unwashed body and lifelong desperation.

Was he one of the homeless people the Trinity had abducted, or was he a madman they had “liberated” from the medical professionals entrusted with his care and wellbeing?

It made little difference. If he wasn’t insane already, his experiences of being a demon had robbed him of what few marbles he’d had left. He gibbered in my arms, spittle-froth flecking his lips. His eyes roved and rolled wildly. I tried to comfort him, but I don’t think he was listening. I don’t think he even heard what I was saying. He was long past that.

While this was happening – while I and the other devas were preoccupied with the former rakshasa – the Trinity had begun backing stealthily towards the door. So had Korolev and the goons.

Buddha failed to notice this, too, until it dawned on him that the barrel of a gun was no longer digging into his head. That was when he grunted out a warning to us, loud as he could through the ball gag.

Too late.

Diamond Tooth planted a 9mm round in the back of Buddha’s head from a five-yard range. The Peacemaker’s chubby features dissolved in a mist of blood, skull fragments and grey matter. The gag shot from his mouth and bounced across the floor like the rubber ball it was.

Parashurama yelled, “Get them!” but all of the goons opened fire, and it was bullets, bullets, bullets, blasting at us in a merciless hail.

We ducked for cover, not that there was much of it available in that room. Kalkin bellowed in pain as a bullet thudded into the meat of his shoulder. Another winged him, ripping a gouge out of his thigh.

The Trinity and Korolev were already out through the first of the two vault-like doors. The goons were following in two-by-two formation, each pair laying down cover fire for the other pair, swapping out their spent gun clips with expert synchronisation. The door had nearly shut as Diamond Tooth and Hillbilly Moustache sneaked through to join everyone else on the other side of it. It slammed resoundingly. Bolts slid into place with heavy metallic finality.

“Shit!” I cried. “Shit, shit, fucking shit!” In the heat of the moment it seemed that Hanuman’s legendary wit had deserted him and all he could do was swear impotently.

Worse was to come.

Not from me, I mean, although I did swear some more.

From the Trinity.

Because the glass fronts to all the cells began to rise, as one, and the asuras emerged.

39. A TWO-PART TRAP

K
ALKIN WAS INJURED,
unable to stand. Rama and Parashurama were weaponless. We were facing a couple of dozen demons.

Screwed?

You might say that.

But not entirely.

Parashurama, axe or no axe, was still immensely strong and a never-say-die scrapper. Rama, bow or no bow, still had a deadeye aim. And I was still Hanuman, Son of the Wind, as swift and destructive as a typhoon.

I let out what I hoped was a rallying cry. “Are we not men? We are devas!”

Parashurama and Rama gave me blank looks. Obviously they weren’t fans of American post-punk New Wave bands.

“Let’s fuck their shit up.”

This they understood.

And so, accordingly, we fucked the asuras’ shit up.

We went easier on them than we would have previously, because we were now thinking of them as tragic, hapless victims, not simply the slavering, rampaging demons they appeared to be. We did our best to incapacitate and render unconscious, rather than to kill.

It wasn’t always possible, though. The asuras, after all, weren’t showing us the same consideration. They wielded their talons and teeth with the sole aim of tearing us to pieces and then tearing those pieces to smaller pieces, and several times the only way to stop them from succeeding was to strike a fatal blow.

Parashurama slugged away like a prizefighter crossed with a wrestler. I saw him shatter a rakshasa’s ribcage with a single punch and grapple a naga to the ground and fasten it in a chokehold until it blacked out.

Rama found any object that wasn’t nailed down and turned it into a throwing weapon. He cold-cocked a vetala at twenty paces with a computer keyboard, hurled ballpoint pens into eyes as though they were darts, and zinged a glass ashtray with the accuracy of a ninja flinging a shuriken.

Me, I was a whirling dervish, bounding this way and that across the room, caroming off walls, now in the asuras’ midst, now behind them, now in front. I delivered harrying, commando-style strikes, a kick to the knee here, a kidney punch there, leaping out of reach before my target could retaliate. I softened them up, Parashurama and Rama took them down.

I don’t know how long it took us to account for all the demons. Ten minutes tops. It felt like a fraction of that time, and an eternity.

But finally they were all on the floor, most of them comatose, a few dead.

On our side we had a plethora of brand new cuts, scrapes and bruises, but we were more or less okay. Kalkin still had that bullet in his shoulder and a chunk missing from his leg, but the rest of us had kept the asuras at bay and protected him from further harm.

I was, however, feeling swimmy-headed, as though I’d just stepped off the waltzer at the funfair. The fight, following close on our battle with Takshaka, had run down my inner reserves. Parashurama and Rama were, I could tell, in the same boat, in the early stages of a siddhi crash. The Archer sagged into a chair, fanning his face and sighing, “
Ouf.
” Parashurama, being a good soldier, refused to show weakness, but he was swaying a little where he stood, listing to one side.

“Sprang a trap on us,” he muttered. “Those bastards.”

This was the first time I’d heard even the mildest profanity from the Warrior’s lips, and it was all the more shocking for that.

“No getting around it,” I said. “The Unholy Trinity just gave us the sack. Nothing says ‘contract terminated’ quite like unleashing a horde of demons on you.”

“Or a bullet to the brain.” Parashurama went over to Buddha’s body and knelt beside it for a few moments, head bowed. “Guy never harmed anyone. He wasn’t a threat to them. That was cold. Stone cold. Like he was some sort of used Kleenex needed tossing away.” He studied the Peacemaker’s ruined face, fixing its hideous messiness in his memory. “I’m not going to forget this. There will be payback.”

“We have to get out of here first,” Kalkin pointed out. “No chance of payback if we let the Trinity slip away.”

“Have to get you some medical attention, too,” said Parashurama.

“I’m fine.” But the Horseman’s pinched grey face told a different story.

“I don’t think that door can be opened from the inside,” I said.

“If I had my axe...” said Parashurama.

“But you don’t. So what are our options?” I scanned the room. “Maybe there’s a ventilation system I could crawl through.”

“That only works in the movies. Normal ventilation ducts are too narrow to fit a person inside.”

“Narasimha and the others will come down once the hour is up and we have not reappeared,” said Rama. “We could wait. They will find us eventually, and neither door will be a match for Vamana at full size.”

“There is that,” said Parashurama. “But mightn’t the Trinity have a surprise in store for them too?”

“Another of their permanent severance packages?” I said. “I wouldn’t put it past them. But my money would still be on our teammates. There’s not much the Trinity could throw at them that they couldn’t handle.
We
managed to beat all these asuras, don’t forget, and that was unarmed.”