On Black Wings (26 page)

I loosen my sword from his neck. “You exist to test our will for peace.” I turn, sheath my sword, and walk away. “God, you can
have
him.”

Azrael struggles to stand. I look back, War lies in the California sand, defeated. He’s not moving.

I help Azrael up. “Are you okay?”

“Very impressive Seraph,” he says, smiling, “you are a true warrior of Heaven’s domain.”

I look back. “Will he get up?”

“Eventually.” Azrael shakes his head. “War will always return, but your will has driven him to rest, for now.”

I wipe the sand from my face, and slide my sword into its scabbard. The calm washes over me, and I can’t believe what I just did. I stand in the wind, letting the gusts push against my wings.

War is lying there, breathing but not moving, the heat still smoldering from him. Even at this distance I can feel him, his hate burns while he sleeps. He does not stir, though.

Azrael rubs his arms, wincing at the pain stored up in his massive biceps. He smiles at me though the pain, shaking his head. “I am too old for this, Seraph Jessica.”

I half-laugh and shake my head. “I thought I was too, until they chose me to replace you. I was just a housewife, I mean I
was
. I never said I’m sorry, but I should-”

“These events are no fault of yours,” Azrael pulls his arms back and forth, the creases around his eyes growing deep, “so no apology is needed. Be confident in your providence, Seraph. You have done what few have been able to manage in the history of Mankind. War has been stopped.”

“Usually we do this with pens, not swords. But hey, I’ll take what I can get.”

An explosion rocks us. Gunfire echoes across the dunes. The wretched screams of a thousand unholy warriors sounds across the sand.

“One stops and another begins.” I turn towards the launch complex. “We’re not done yet.”

CHAPTER XL:

The Earth Shakes

The ground heaves like an earthquake and I’m nearly knocked off my feet. I fight to run up the dunes, the trembling sand making every step treacherous. Azrael runs beside me, and we crest the dune to find we aren’t believing our eyes.

The ground a hundred yards in front of us explodes, and a giant gaping maw tears open the earth. The head of a very large worm screams, a gaping sucker-mouth a bus-wide screaming an unholy shriek.

“What the-”

The whole worm is red and mottled, like it is scaled, or, my hand leaps to my mouth and I want to vomit. The entire worm is made of screaming, skinless bodies, each one howling and flailing about with their arms free the their legs sewn into each other by thick rusted wire. There must be hundreds, or thousands of individual human bodies making up the skin of the worm, all controlled by the massive beast’s mind.

Soldiers are tearing off their gas masks and running in panic, trying to flee the monstrous beast. Some are turning and firing their weapons, but nothing is touching the gigantic monster.

“What the hell is that?” I say as I watch the worm arc down and eat its way back into the ground, more of the skinless-body covered length emerging from the ground, and then disappearing back into it.

“A creature of Hell is correct,” Azrael says, “Death must have summoned this monstrosity here.”

“Death is a pain in the-” I scan left, and sure enough, the control center and the parking lot would be the next logical place for the worm to come up. “We have to go, it’s headed right for the control center!”

Azrael runs beside me, and we’re stumbling, trying to right ourselves as the ground bucks and heaves underneath us. The worm is digging, its body surging and pushing back into the ground, the bodies along its length freed from the earth, screaming, and then being pulled underneath the ground again.

I just hope it doesn’t come up directly underneath the control center, then this entire trip has been for nothing, and Becks will die. I have to run faster, but my body is tired from the fight with War. My lungs burn as we turn onto the road in front of the command center, and we place ourselves between the worm and the building. I can see the tail of the worm flail from the ground, and then pull into the earth in the distance.

It’s gone, completely underground.

It’s almost as I can feel the creature pushing and surging towards us under the ground, the ground buckles and heaves, and we can see the earth ahead of us in the scrub push up alike something huge is burrowing its way towards us. With every heartbeat, the ground shakes harder, and the vibrations draw closer.

I look over at Azrael, and he stands ready with his sword. I reach down to draw my sword, and my arm gets tangled in my bow string.

The bow! I unsling Adam’s bow and nock a glowing arrow. The shaft of the arrow is pure white, and the arrow-head and feathers are made of gold. All along its shaft, a strange yellow glow hovers and wafts off like fine mist.

I wait.

The ground shakes and I balance myself.

I pull the bow back to its furthest extent.

I wait and narrow my eyes.

“Seraph,” Azrael says, “you may need to run if you strike the beast with that. And run fast.”

The ground twenty yards in front of us explodes like a geyser of dirt and stone. It’s hard to see as the billowing cloud of dirt sails into the sky, and we’re covered by debris, rocks bouncing across the road around us.

The worm shoots out of the ground, the unholy scream coming from deep withing it echoed by the screams of the hundreds of lost souls along its body. It’s loud at this distance, like a thousand lions’ roars.

I wait, and let the glowing arrow go, a bright golden path cut through the air in its wake, dirt circling behind it in the air. The arrow strikes its side, and a strung together line of eight bodies explodes as the arrow slices them off the worm’s body. The worm screams so loud my ears ring, and it turns its body towards me and howls.

I run before the mammoth beast surges forward and slams into the road where I stood seconds before. Car alarms sound, pavement buckles, and Azrael runs beside me.

“You have its eye, now run!” Azrael screams at me, stumbling and running as the road is torn to pieces behind us by the giant approaching maw.

“Warn Becks!” I scream back, running towards the security gate, my black wings feeling like a parachute slowing me down. Azrael nods, and laterals through the parking lot. I’m left by myself, running, holding my bow, and not having enough time to load and fire a second shot. I can hear the beast behind me chewing up pavement like a runaway bulldozer.

Men stand in front of me.

I wave my arms at the security gate we bluffed our way through, and the two soldiers at the gate run to a parked jeep. They floor the jeep, and start to pull away.

“Wait! Wait!” I’m screaming at the top of my lungs, over the beast’s roars, and the jeep slows down for a moment. I spill into the back and scream. “Go!”

In seconds, we are driving away from the inner gatehouse, and it is destroyed by the hellish worm’s gaping maw.

“You got wings, girl?” One of the soldiers says from the passenger seat. “What the hell?” the driver looks back at the worm sliding along the road, helped along by the thousands of bodies helping pull it along the ground with their free arms. “Don’t look back Tom, just keep driving!”

“Yes, these are my wings, I’m an angel, and that’s a creature of Hell.” I kneel in the back of the jeep and nock another arrow. “Don’t ask and keep driving straight!”

“Turn coming up!” The driver yells, and I brace myself. We skid around a corner, and I slam into the side of the bed of the jeep before I right myself. We’re not much faster than the worm, and even at this distance, it is still pulling out of the ground by the parking lot. It cuts the corner where we turned, and starts gaining on us as we speed down the scrub-surrounded base road.

“You sure you don’t want a gun, girl?” The soldier in the passenger seat says.

I aim my next arrow at the beast and let it fly. The golden arrow cuts through the air, and punches a four-body wide hole straight through the beast in a massive explosion of light, sparks showering the road behind the worm.

“This works better.”

The worm screams again, and it surges towards us, gaining the distance to within a dozen yards. At this distance I can see straight down its gullet, a fiery red hellish maw of death. The holes I punched through the beast spew forth flame as it lurches and crawls behind us as fast as nothing I have ever seen.

“Turn coming up! Right or left?” the driver says, his voice in a panic.

I look forward. To the right is the base’s garrison, with row after row of barracks filled with soldiers. To the left is the storage area for munitions and fuel, along with a massive building-sized dome filled with what I assume is highly frozen rocket fuel.

“Right!” I say, turning forward and holding onto the seats. My hair blows in the wind.

I unfurl my wings and let them catch the air, and I can feel the pull on my body, my hands barely able to grip the seats. My wings spread wide and catch the wind.

“Don’t follow me.” The jeep turns right and I let go, the soldiers stunned and pulling away from me.

I’m flying.

It feels incredible and natural, and I am flying like a bird. The ground zooms underneath me, and I find the wings take over, keeping me balanced and aloft. It is a beautiful feeling, and I am finally free of the ground, my wings carrying me on a cloud of air.

I think
left
, and my wings take me there. The jeep with the soldiers pulls away, heading in the other direction, away from this madness. The death chases me.

The fence I fly over reads ‘danger, high explosives’ before it is destroyed by the mammoth worm moments later.

CHAPTER XLI:

Don't Do This at Home

The fuel tank is huge, a hundred feet tall, a giant sphere covered with pipes and catwalks, and it’s marked ‘Liquid Oxygen.’

And I’m flying straight towards it.

I turn back and the worm is still following me, stuck to the ground, snaking its way across the base like a giant centipede. It’s long, red, covered with human bodies, and it screams with the agony of souls condemned to Hell.

I turn back, and correct my balance. The act of looking backwards has caused me to lose altitude, and I need to climb if I want to make it to the top of the tank. I flex my wings with a thought and flap them, gaining altitude, and I can’t help to smile a little. Flying, I can’t explain it, it’s a feeling of freedom and beauty that you’ll never understand until you try it. Being up here, even though the minions of Hell are trying to kill me, it’s just incredible.

I look down and the tank curves up to meet me. There’s a ring-shaped catwalk on top of the sphere, and I aim for one side of the circle. Landing. It’s always the hardest part of flying, I know.

The catwalk is under me in a flash, and I tilt up, letting my wings catch the air to slow me. I miss the catwalk entirely and begin flying off the opposite side of the sphere. On the plus side, I’m not going to slam my stomach into a guardrail at highway speeds. On the bad side, I’m dropping like a stone onto the tank’s curved surface and it’s rapidly dropping away from me.

My first landing, and it’s going to suck.

I slam into the tank on my back, the impact knocking the wind from me, and I tumble head-over-heels once as I roll down the surface of the tank. I’m trying to hold onto my bow, trying to stop, and I end up sliding down the tank’s rapidly curving surface faster and faster.

My skin catches on the paint of the tank, catching and then letting go, and I curse this skimpy outfit. It feels like sliding down a sticky metal slide in shorts on a hot day, and it
hurts
.

I’m so far down the tank I can’t see the surface anymore, it’s just ocean out there and hundreds of feet in the air. It’s a beautiful view if you’re about to die, or already dead like I am. The surface of the tank is freezing in the hot sun, and my legs are skidding along the sticky-feeling paint, and I’m sure I will get road-rash from this given my attire.

I get my damn heels out in front of me, and they skid along the tank with barely no friction at all. Why, oh why couldn’t they design these fantasy outfits with sensible shoes? One of my heels catches a line of exposed rivets right before the edge and I come to a complete and violent stop. If I would have slid over the metal rivets I’m sure it would have taken a lot of skin off.

My knees bend hard, and I’m lying flat on the tank, freezing my butt off, my black wings flat against the white metal surface like a splattered crow. My bow is tangled around my right arm, and it hangs and bounces off the metal as I’m breathing hard. There’s not much of a sphere left to get a foothold on, and I’m reminded of how much I hated geometry class in high school.

On the balance, this was a terrible idea.

Far in the distance, in the field of silos, two giant concrete doors open up, and I see the first steps of some type of missile launch being started. Smoke billows out of the giant hole in the ground, and sirens start to sound. It has to be our missile, and Becks must be starting the launch sequence now.

Just a little longer.

The entire tank shudders as I hear the screams of the dead from below me. Do I dare look? I sit up, my heel slipping on the rivet, and peer down the tank by sitting up and nearly leaning out over the edge. I don’t see anything, the curve of the tank blocks my-

The human-covered worm shoots up from below and towers above me, it climbed up the tank on thousands of pairs of arms of the dead covering its body, holding onto pipes, catwalks, ladders, and any other handhold it could get a hold of on the tank’s surface. It’s gaping, flaming maw opens, and it crashes down towards me like a runaway truck.

It stops about ten feet from me, the sulfur-like and hellish smell of its maw blowing against me like a giant heater. The bodies inside its mouth glow with hellish fire, and they grasp for me with burning limbs. It can’t make the last few feet to me because something down below is disturbing it’s balance and hold onto the tank. There aren’t enough handholds to keep its weight supported to snap at me from this angle.