Just Another Judgement Day (18 page)
Read Just Another Judgement Day Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
“Chandra! The pentacle! It’s a gateway between this place and the Pit! That’s how they summoned it here! Break the pentacle, and the gateway will close!”
Chandra raised his sword and brought it slamming down on the nearest pulsing blue line. His enchanted blade sheared clean through the blue line, breaking the connection and short-circuiting the summoning. The gateway began to close, and the demon sank back into the darkness below, pulled inexorably back to where it belonged. It turned its horned head unhurriedly to look at the Walking Man.
“We know you in Hell,” it said, in a voice like screaming children. “We will meet again, Walking Man. All murderers end up in Hell. Even the ones who say God told them to do it.”
The Walking Man shot the demon dispassionately between the eyes. Its horned head snapped back under the impact, then it shook its head, gargled for a moment, and spat out the bullet. It was still laughing as it disappeared back beneath the floor, a terrible, soul-destroying sound. It cut off abruptly as the last of the pentacle lines faded away, and the floor was a floor again, though with a bloody big hole in it now. The Walking Man looked at it for a while, his face unmoved. But he wasn’t smiling any more.
I went over to Chandra, and he leaned heavily on me, his sword hanging down as though it had become too heavy to lift.
“Nice call, John,” he said faintly.
“Nice cut,” I said.
The Boys Club was still and silent. There was blood and dead bodies everywhere, even in the swimming pool, where the perfect bodies of young men and women floated facedown in bloody waters. The Hellsreich brothers stood together, holding their hands high in the air in surrender. The Walking Man regarded them thoughtfully.
“You’ve killed hundreds of men and women,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” said the Walking Man. “It’s never enough.”
“We’re just businessmen!” protested Paul Hellsreich. “We provide a service, we protect our customers from the vicissitudes of fate!”
“We’re insurance men!” said Davey Hellreich. “We never killed anyone!”
“We’ll go legitimate!” said Paul. “We’ll pay taxes! We promise!”
“You don’t have to kill us!” said Davey. “We’re not worth it!”
“It’s always worth it,” said the Walking Man.
“You should turn them over to Walker,” I said quickly, as he started to raise his guns again. “They have surrendered.”
“To Walker?” said Paul. “And end up in Shadow Deep? I think I’d rather be shot.”
“No problem,” said the Walking Man.
“To hell with that,” said a new voice. “I’ve never let a client down yet.”
We all looked round in surprise as the owner of the charming French accent came forward. God alone knew where she’d managed to hide, but Penny Dreadful had survived the massacre without a drop of blood on her. She moved carefully through the carnage, stepping daintily over dead bodies, and came to a halt facing the Walking Man.
“Penny,” I said carefully. “Get out of the way. You don’t have anything that can stop the Walking Man.”
“I took their money,” she said. “Swore to guard them against all dangers, to put my body between theirs and all harm. That’s the job.”
“She took their money,” said the Walking Man. “Even knowing where it came from. That makes her as guilty as them.”
“No it bloody doesn’t!” I said. “She’s a professional, that’s all! Just like me. And Chandra.”
“You side with the sinners, you die with the sinners,” said the Walking Man. “It really is that simple.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “Not here. Not in the Nightside. We do things differently here.”
“I know,” said the Walking Man. “That’s the problem. Sin is sin. You’ve lived here so long you’ve forgotten that.”
“She is brave, and honourable, and trustworthy, in her way,” I said. And I moved slowly and deliberately forward, to stand between Penny and the Walking Man. “She’s done good things.”
“I’m sure God will take that into consideration,” said the Walking Man. And he shot right past my ear. I spun round, but it was already too late. Penny was falling to her knees, a dark and bloody third eye in the middle of her forehead. I caught her before she hit the floor, but she wasn’t breathing any more. I knelt before the Walking Man, holding my dead friend in my arms. I heard two more shots, but didn’t look round to watch the Hellsreich brothers fall. I didn’t want to let Penny go, even though I knew there was nothing I could do. Her body leaned heavily against me, like a sleeping child. She didn’t deserve to die like this. Even if she had been the infamous Penny Dreadful, and done all the things she’d done, she didn’t deserve to die like this.
I finally put her aside, got back on my feet, and glared at the Walking Man, who stared impassively back. I started towards him, and Chandra was quickly there to grab my arm and stop me.
“No, my friend! Not now. We’re not ready.”
“Let go of my arm,” I said, and he let go immediately.
I was breathing hard, my whole body tense with the need to do . . . something. I knew he’d kill me if I took another step forward, but right then, I wasn’t sure I cared, as long as I took him down with me.
“What about God’s mercy?” I said finally, in a harsh voice I barely recognised. “What about his compassion?”
“Not my department,” said the Walking Man. He decided I wasn’t going to do anything after all and put away his guns.
“What gives you the right to condemn anyone to Hell?”
“I don’t send anyone to Hell. I send them to judgement.”
“Who are you, to take such responsibility upon yourself?” said Chandra Singh.
The Walking Man smiled; and for the first time it was a simple, human smile. “About time you asked. Very well, just for you; the secret origin of the Walking Man. My name is, or more properly was, Adrien Saint. No-one special. Just a man with a job and a wife and two small children. Mr. Average, I suppose. No great ambitions. All I wanted was to get on with my life and look after my family.
“A teenage joy-rider in a stolen car hit my wife and my two children head-on, when he lost control taking a corner too fast. Cut my wife in half, and dragged my children under his car for almost half a mile before he finally had to stop. He ran away, with his friends. The police couldn’t identify any of them.
“I survived. You couldn’t call it living, but I survived. Lost my job, my house, my money . . . and then one of the few friends I hadn’t driven away found me a place in a monastery, in the countryside. A place for solitudes and contemplatives, and those hiding from a world that had become unbearable. It was a good place. I found a kind of peace there, if not comfort. And then one day, while helping to catalog the library, I found a very old book that told me all about the deal a man can make with God, to be his man, to be his Walking Man, and punish the guilty.
“I made the deal. Didn’t hesitate for a moment. I went back into the world transformed, with God’s will and God’s wrath burning within me. I found the teenage joy-rider, with God’s help. Sitting on a sofa, watching television, as though nothing had happened. I beat him to death with my bare hands, and his screams comforted me. I went round to his friends, and killed them all. There’s a fine line between justice and revenge, but as long as it ended up with dead joy-riders, I didn’t care.
“And then . . . I went travelling in the world, seeing it as it really was, walking up and down in it, dispensing justice. Until finally I was ready to come to the Nightside, and bring the wrath of God to the most sinful place on Earth.”
“No wonder you’re always smiling,” I said. “This has never been about justice for you. It’s always been about revenge. Every time you fire your guns, you’re killing joy-riders, over and over again.”
The Walking Man smiled briefly. “You think I don’t know that? I’m obsessed, not crazy.”
“You sure about that?” I said.
He actually laughed. “Well, I hear voices in my head telling me to kill people in God’s name, so I suppose there has to be a chance that I’m a complete loony tune; but I don’t think so. Not as long as I remain untouchable by all the evil in the world.”
“What brought you to the Nightside, at this particular time?” said Chandra.
“I know what I need to know, when I need to know it. When God was sure I was ready, he showed me the secret ways into the Nightside.”
“You talk often with your god?” said Chandra. He sounded genuinely curious. “What is that like?”
“Comforting,” said the Walking Man.
“I often speak with my god,” said Chandra. “He speaks to me through dreams, and prophecies and omens. And he has never once insisted I commit murder in his name.”
“You kill monsters,” said the Walking Man.
“Only when I have to. And then, only to protect the innocent.”
“Yes!” said the Walking Man. “Exactly! I punish the guilty to avenge and protect the innocent. I kill the killers before they can kill again! The law might not be able to touch these evil men, but I can. And I do. Think of me . . . as a champion of last resort. The last person you can go to for justice, when the ways of the world have failed you. What I do is never murder, because I have a valid legal warrant for all that I have done, and will do, from the highest court of all. The Courts of the Holy.”
“Penny wasn’t evil,” I said.
“Get over her,” said the Walking Man, not unkindly. “I will do worse before I’m done because I must. The Nightside is an abomination in the world of men, and it must be humbled and brought down. There are too many temptations here, too many evils operating openly. It gives people . . . the wrong idea. That they can sin and get away with it.”
“You don’t believe in free will?” I said. “Or free choice? God gave them to us. Everyone who comes here knows the score, knows what they’re getting into. You could say the Nightside keeps all the real sin and temptation in one place, away from the rest of the world.”
“Shows how little you know about the rest of the world,” said the Walking Man. “You argue well, John, but none of this matters. I will do what I will do, and no-one can stop me. I am here to clean up the Nightside, scour the filth right out of it, from top to bottom. Including your presumptuous new Authorities. As soon as I’ve finished the tasks I’ve set myself, I will kill these new Authorities, to put the fear of God into the Nightside. And you, John Taylor . . . are either with me, or against me.”
“That’s why you let me see what you do, and why,” I said. “You want me to understand. To approve.”
“I want you to stay out of my way,” said the Walking Man.
“Many people whose opinion I respect tell me that the Nightside serves a purpose,” I said slowly. “There are good people here. I won’t let you hurt them. This is my home.”
“Not for long,” said the Walking Man. He pulled his old mocking insolence about him, flashed me a smile, then turned his back on me and walked away.
“Bastard son of a bitch,” I said, after a moment.
“Well, yes,” said Chandra. “By the way, you have blood all down the front of your trench coat.”
I looked. Penny’s blood, from where I’d held her.
“Not for the first time,” I said.
We stood alone in the middle of the Boys Club, surrounded by the dead. The air seemed very still, very calm, as though a thunderstorm had just passed.
“I couldn’t stop him,” I said finally, unable to keep the helplessness out of my voice. “Even though I knew what to expect, even though I thought I was prepared for what he was, and what he did . . . I still couldn’t stop him.”
“Who are we, to stand against the will of God?” said Chandra Singh, reasonably. “And the men and women of this establishment were very definitely people who needed killing.”
“Not all of them,” I said. “The world is undoubtedly a better place with most of these people gone, but some of them were just...ordinary men and women, doing their jobs, drawing a pay-cheque to pay the bills and look after their families. Getting by, as best they could. Yes, they knew where the money came from... but whatever evil they did by working here was a small thing. Not worth dying like this.”
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