Rusty Nails (The Dade Gibson Case Files) (19 page)

Dade and Leon looked at each other quizzically as Pyriel armed with a semi-automatic rifle was busy picking off seraphim out of the sky like a hunter who has stirred up a covey of quail. He gave them a sidelong glance before putting his eye back to the telescopic sight. That was the moment that Samael’s bunch came out of hiding, crawling from the backseats of wrecked cars, slithering out from the undercarriages of beat-up trucks, throwing doors open wide and shrieking to heaven like they still had a chance of someone listening to them. But the angel was a good shot and many of them were taken down the moment they showed themselves.

Dade immediately drew his .45’s and stepped up beside the angel.

“Where’s Liz?” Dade asked, immediately concerned.

“She was determined to find you one way or another after Abbadon deserted us. I couldn’t simply let her go out alone.”

“So she’s here?” Dade said, as Pyriel reloaded.

“I’m afraid so,” the angel replied. “She’s looking for you. But don’t worry, I gave her a gun to protect herself with.”

“Is that all I need to know about?”

“Your father and sister are gone too. They got away from us on the way over here.”

“Great,” Dade replied. “So the only way I can be sure that the people I love are safe is to take care of Samael once and for all.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Pyriel said. “I truly am sorry.”

“No,” Dade corrected him. “You’ll be sorry if something happens to Liz.”

Pyriel shrugged as he squeezed off several shots in succession. “I will do my best to set things right,” he said.

“Need a couple of extra hands?” Dade sighed.

Just as long as you make the shots count. Leon, you need a gun too?”

“Well, I left my slingshot at home,” the bouncer said weakly. “So I guess I do need a pistol or something.”

Pyriel tossed him one of the spares he’d brought along with him.

As they were picking off angels one by one, Dade noticed movement in a nearby car and nearly emptied a clip into one of the rear doors. If Abbadon had waited another second to come out of hiding, he might have been filled with enough holes to rival the Christ. As it was, he threw the door open and ran in a crouch toward the three men. Dade recognized him on sight. Pyriel scarcely glanced over, having already recognized the scent of motor oil and sulfur.

The crash that they had all heard earlier was followed by another, and this close, it wasn’t hard to spot where the noise was coming from. The limousine rocked and tottered on its twin Chevrolet pedestals, and Dade could see as he fired round after round that the roof was being peeled away like the top of a sardine can. Samael took to the air like a stick of dynamite outracing the match and was followed by another angel that Dade had never seen before whose feathers were sooty and black and who smoldered like the inside of a furnace.

“Lucifer,” Pyriel and Abbadon said in tandem, suddenly realizing that everyone in this war had been played like ill-fated pawns in a celestial game of chance.

Although they were still squeezing off bullets and reloading as fast as their reflexes would allow, the entire group’s attentions were focused on the air where the angel of death and the angel of light bit and clawed and slashed each other with razor sharp talons. It was suddenly all very clear to everyone what had happened, especially after watching Lucifer shrug off the last remains of the skin he had worn.

“I knew there was something not quite right about that boy,” Abbadon said, pulling knife after knife out of his vest pocket and throwing them with reckless abandon. “The smell of his skin contradicted with his true smell. It threw me off.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better,” Pyriel said, discarding his semi-automatic for a pair of automatic pistols, “it confused me too, and this sort of thing is supposed to be my strong point.”

“Don’t forget that I’ve still got this,” Leon said to Dade. Dade looked at the thermos like it was a foreign object at first and then he remembered what they had come here to do in the first place.

He nodded eagerly, handed one of his guns to the large black man and took the thermos filled with Rusty Nails. “Plans have changed a little,” he said. Dade had no idea just how true his statement would become. But he learned the hard way as a dagger bit hard into his shoulder, causing him to drop the thermos.

“Leon, get that,” Dade shrieked as he pulled the blade out. But Leon was already clambering after the thermos, snatching it up and hugging it close to him.

Samael and Lucifer, meanwhile, were busy throwing half-rusted Fords at each other and toppling huge stacks of Toyotas. Undoubtedly, it would only be a matter of time before everything came crashing down.

The dissident angels had gotten a little smarter with time. They no longer sprinted out of demolished cars whenever they summoned enough courage, anxious to take a hit. Instead, they waited until the line of fire was directed away from them and then made a break for it. Some were actually getting away unscathed. These, Dade knew, were the ones that would circle around on them and attack. The others must have sensed it too because they all began to form a tightly-knit circle with everyone’s back to the center.

Even that didn’t keep the berserker from attacking.

The others all had their own respective targets and didn’t notice anything at first. And then the angel crashed into Abbadon knocking him to the ground, pummeling him with his fists and slashing with his talons. With some effort, he threw the principality off of him and sprang to his feet, ready to fight. But the berserker was gone to attack from another direction.

It had only been a brief scuffle, but it had given the dissidents the only chance they needed. Everyone else was faced in their own respective direction, picking off the angels they could and holding the rest at bay. The group had counted on Abbadon holding his own and he had failed. Now the dissident angels were getting close enough to be a real threat.

In confirmation of this fact, Leon clutched his thigh and pulled out a long thin needle like the sort that might be fired from a blowgun. Pyriel nearly went down as a bullet glanced off the side of his head like a misguided rock. Dade coughed and wheezed as the dust flew up all around him while semi-automatic rounds stirred up dirt clouds at his feet. Abbadon screamed as a bullet ripped through his left arm. The snipers had obviously found their spots high up in the towering heaps of junk cars. Which meant that it would only be a matter of time before heaven’s last hope was wiped out in a hail of gunfire and a cloud of acrid smoke.

Yet Dade was determined that this wasn’t going to be how things ended. He snatched the thermos away from Leon and started running toward Lucifer and Samael before anyone could stop him. He watched in a sort of slow-motion horror as a small compact car rolled toward him, and he jumped out of the way by only the narrowest of margins. It had undoubtedly been meant for Samael, but the angel of death was too quick for such a slow rolling heap of metal. Lucifer would undoubtedly have to do much better than that, and he did, this time tearing the door off of an abandoned station wagon and flinging it like a Frisbee. The door caught Samael high in the chest and drove him straight into a wobbling scrapheap of import cars that crashed down on top of him like a tidal wave of steel and chrome. Lucifer stood atop the mountainous pile of rubble and laughed as Heaven was now his for the taking. Samael had obviously been used to do all the dirty work, and now all that was left was for someone to clean up the mess. The Prince of Darkness grinned as his plan for a second revolt on Heaven was well on its way to success.

The onrushing phalanx of angels baring teeth and sabers stopped the moment they saw Samael buried beneath tons and tons of Detroit steel. Dade, however, never slowed down, weaving between dumbfounded seraphim, clutching the thermos as if his very life depended on it. And it did. If he knew what he thought he did about the contents inside the insulated bottle, then there would be no doubt of the reaction he would get when he unscrewed the top. Lucifer watched all of this with a wary eye, not really certain what was going through Dade Gibson’s head.

Dade scurried up the heap of cars like a spider, and the angel of darkness jumped to a nearby pile, forcing Dade to crawl carefully back down and resume the chase.

“You’re not cooperating,” Dade said through clenched teeth as he ascended the mountain of rusty rubble only to find that Lucifer had skipped to another.

“That’s not really my style,” the angel replied, spreading his wings, eclipsing what was left of the sun. The shadows crossed Dade’s face like a dark cancer.

“I’m more the sort who likes to keep things interesting,” he said as he heaved a Ford Fiat at the small band of resistants. None of them saw it until it was too late. The impact of the car crashing into the earth like an oxidized meteorite threw Pyriel and Leon backward, slamming them against the side panel of an Impala that didn’t look like it had moved in well over twenty years. The car shook like it was afflicted with a palsy, rocking on its shocks and nearly tipping over as the force of man and angel was almost too much. Leon groaned to show that he was still alive, but Pyriel didn’t twitch or jitter or even sigh.

Chapter 50

Louise Hartwell didn’t have any idea what she was walking into when she strode through the front gates of the junkyard. Yet she immediately knew that she had grossly underestimated what she might find. Car doors and bumpers were being hurled through the air, gunshots were echoing off of oxidized metal, angels screamed in the air and then fell to earth like students of Icarus. Louise hesitantly stepped out of the car, clutching the Smith and Wesson tightly in one hand.

She was fairly certain that Samael didn’t know the location of that one small bone of Edgemore’s which was the key to the war, her everlasting future, and an enormous bank account. If the death angel knew where to find the drug that would satiate his voracious appetites, she was sure he would have retrieved it by now. Dade Gibson, on the other hand, was a different matter. She had hired him to find Edgemore’s remains, thinking that he was good enough to do the job but not so skilled that he would jeopardize her plan. Yet he had fooled her on more than one occasion. She still didn’t know how he had found out about that murder in her hotel room at The Briarwood.

That said, she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to learn that he had the bone she was looking for. He had probably gotten wise to her plan and kept out just enough of Edgemore to make it impossible to forcefully retrieve the information. That was her reason for venturing into the junkyard. However, she wasn’t so sure it was such a good idea when she saw angels falling out of the skies, impaling themselves on sharp hunks of metal like bits of meat on skewers.

She wasn’t even sure that Dade would be there. But instinctively, this was what her logic led her to believe. He had probably put the pieces of the puzzle together by now and learned about her connection to Samael and the drugs and so many other things. Given her impressions of the man, she knew he was the type to try and stop the wheels of progress from turning if he felt that the cause was unjust. She was delightfully surprised to spot his car a few feet from the main gate.

Chapter 51

“Are you certain this is the only way?” Jack said uncertainly as the two of them stood at the entrance to a heavy, black door that was set into the earth like the entrance to an inexplicably hot cellar.

“No, I’m not sure of anything,” Jane admitted, noting the haggard look on her dead father’s face. “But I don’t see that we have a lot of options. The angelic hosts are too busy defending what’s left of heaven to give us any help down here, and there’s no way that Dade, Leon, Abbadon, and Pyriel can save the world by themselves.”

“And just how can we be sure that they’ll do what we want them to do?” Jack wondered, wanting to explore all the possibilities before they made an irreversible mistake.

“Well, think about it. They’ve got the chance to get revenge on the one who tormented them through life and the one who eventually took their soul and cast it into hell. Why wouldn’t they cooperate?”

Jane made a good point and Jack couldn’t argue with it.

“We may as well throw the door open then,” he suggested. But Jane already had the key inserted in the ancient lock. The souls of the damned knew the sound of tumblers turning and falling into place. It was something they had trained themselves to listen for, clinging to that one fragile hope that they might be let out of the abyss.

This time the door was open and there was no one standing there to prevent them from escaping. The souls of the damned swarmed toward the hole in the sky like a hive of erratic bees, and they exploded from the earth with a collective sigh and breath of relief. Jane and Jack were there waiting for them when they burst forth from their fiery prison, eager to lead them to Reznick’s Junkyard at the edge of Crowley’s Point.

Chapter 52

Dade heard the shrieking and shivered. The look of confidence on Lucifer’s face quickly fell as he heard the noise too. The best Dade could tell it wasn’t a foreign sound to the Prince of Darkness, and he took some comfort from the sudden change in demeanor it brought about. But more than that, he took comfort from the sight of his father and sister leading the souls of the damned toward them like a bullet train on a collision course. Lucifer shrieked as the condemned attacked him, pinning him to the roof of a Plymouth while Dade scurried the rest of the way up the automobile totem.

Knowing that time was running short before Lucifer got loose from the spirits’ hold, Dade quickly threw the lid off of the thermos and drenched the Father of Lies in Rusty Nails. Like dogs that can sense a meal the moment it is taken out of the bag, the nostrils of angels everywhere flared at the smell. The fighting immediately stopped as seraphim rushed headlong toward Lucifer, not caring what they had to do to get one more hit of the crucifixion drug. Lucifer screamed as he was torn apart by zealous angels.