Apocalypse Soldier (16 page)

Cabrera stepped up to the bed and smiled reassuringly. There was incredulous joy in his eyes. Nicole realized that despite his earlier outward confidence, he’d been a lot less certain about the outcome of the ritual than he had been willing to let on.
 

She closed her eyes, sighing with relief. The combined power of the team of exorcists had worked their magic.

When she opened her eyes, that same breath caught in her throat. Cabrera was gone. In his place stood the demon soldier, the monstrous face looming over her. What had happened? She realized with terror that all the monks around the bed had been replaced with Amon’s black-clad soldiers.

“Let’s see how effective this ritual is without your little trinket.” And with these chilling words, Amon tore the Sumerian pendant from her neck, and the chapel transformed into hell on Earth.
 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

SURVEYING THE BATTLEFIELD, despair threatened to overwhelm Talon. Dead monks, their robes seeping red, had replaced the corpses of black-clad cultists. The body count made him think of the massacre back at Cabrera’s church. But these innocents had perished by his hands. He tried to tell himself that he’d been deceived, that Amon had killed Cabrera and the monks, but his attempts at rationalizing the horror failed. At what point had Amon’s terrible magic switched the friars with the soldiers? Had it only been seconds before the bullets hit their targets? And if the members of the brotherhood were out here…

He thoughts froze as he picked up the sound of heavy boots slapping against stone. He turned away from the fallen monks and confronted a team of cultists, their AK-47s leveled at him. For a split second, he contemplated opening fire and going out in a blaze of glory. But his death would serve no purpose, nor would it alleviate his guilt—a personal absolution that would not save Nicole or prevent these monsters from carrying out their twisted agenda. As long as he was still alive, he still had a chance to save her.

Mind made up, Talon dropped the AK-47 and the Glock. The two weapons clattered against the brick-paved ground. He raised his hands and let the armed soldiers lead him to the chapel. He dreaded what he would find there.

As soon as they stepped into the chapel, his gaze locked on Amon. Cold rage simmered inside him as he saw the demon soldier standing at the center of the church. He loomed over Nicole, who was free from her restraints now. A crimson fire marked her face, the demons in charge.

“Kneel before Amon,” barked one of the soldiers.

Talon flashed a lopsided grin and gave him the finger. The soldier’s response was to strike him in the back of his head with the butt of a machine gun.
 

Letting out a gasp, Talon went onto his knees. It took him all his self-discipline not to lash out at the attacker with his bare hands.

Amon approached with the confidence of a general who knew he’d won the battle. His soldiers stood around Talon in a semi-circle, AK-47s fixed on him. One wrong move and they would stitch him with lead. There was no other choice but to let this play out.

The beast towered above Talon. This was the first time he had seen the demon soldier up close. From this angle, he became convinced that Casca had been right—plastic surgery not magic had transformed Amon’s face. This wasn’t a monster but a man who dreamt of being a devil.

“Isn’t it a little early for Halloween?” Talon said.

The demon soldier’s animalistic black eyes regarded him without emotion. He leaned closer, lowering onto his haunches until they were face to face with only inches between them. Even though Talon knew this was a man and not a real creature from hell, the dark gaze held an undeniable power.
 

“I was once a man like you Talon. A soldier. A marine, in fact. Full of idealistic dreams.”

“What happened? Earned yourself discharged for one piercing too many—”

Amon wasn’t amused. “I came to the conclusion that it’s better to rule in hell than to serve the United States military.”

“So what’s the plan? Gather a bunch fanatics with itchy trigger fingers and declare war on the world?”

Amon ignored his sarcasm. “The apocalypse is coming. The signs are all there. War. Famine. Natural disasters. Chaos. We’re the army that will set in motion the new order. An age of darkness will fall upon this world, and we’ll be the generals commanding hell’s conquering legions.”

Talon shook his head. “Quick newsflash. You don’t have to prove to me that you’re nuts; I already know it.”

Amon’s massive hand snapped out and tightened around Talon’s throat, the elongated nails biting deep into his skin and drawing fine points of blood.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked. His voice was calm, almost soothing. The civil tones were bizarre coming from such a monster.

Talon’s impulse was to counter the question with another wisecrack. Showing an utter lack of respect was his only way of fighting back. Any man who would change his appearance so drastically was a man who wanted to be feared. Well, Talon wouldn’t oblige.

Amon nodded at his troops and they used Kabars to strip off Talon’s shirt, revealing the inverted pentagram scar on his chest. Zagan had carved the symbol of evil into his skin back in San Francisco.
 

“Zagan and I made you, Mark Talon. Everything you are today is because of us.”
 

The sarcastic comments died on Talon’s lips. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

How did Amon know about Zagan and the scar?

“I was one of cult members in the video I sent you earlier,” Amon replied. “I saw your beloved Michelle’s life run out in a river of red. My knife pierced her heart. I took her from you as I took your friend Erik.”
 

Ice crept up Talon’s throat and the world spun on its axis.

“You’re lying.”

“My human name was Fisher. I was Zagan’s head of security. Back when I was a Marine in Fallujah, I earned the nickname ‘the devil soldier.’ You want to know why? Because when my men came under fire, only the dark Lord heard my prayers.”

The pieces were falling into place. Talon wished they weren’t.

“I almost nailed you back at Omicron,” Amon continued. “You were stumbling out of the elevator after your bout with Zagan looking like warmed-over dog shit and walked right into my sight line. You’d be history if it hadn’t been for that bitch taking a shot at me.”

Talon remembered it vividly. Detective Serrone had gunned down the would-be assassin who almost succeeded where Zagan failed. Struck by her round, Fisher had dropped over the first-floor railing and fallen to his death in the Omicron lobby. Or at least he thought the man had fallen to his death. Had Fisher become Amon, the apocalypse soldier?
 

Talon instinctively recognized the truth in Amon’s soulless eyes. He was ready to lunge at the bastard despite the machine guns fixed on him, but another vicious blow from the AK-47 put an end to any thoughts of immediate retribution. He hit the chapel’s brick floor hard while Amon rose before him, triumphant.
 

Bloodied, Talon peered up at him and wondered how Fisher had survived Detective Serrone’s bullet. The explanation came to him in a flash:
the
darkness.
Even though he’d blown up the Omicron mainframe, the occult algorithm must’ve possessed enough vestigial power to revive Fisher, allowing Zagan’s second-in-command to escape the corpse-riddled Omicron lobby and kill again.

Zagan had ordered the murder of his fiancée. His cult members had stabbed her to death. But Amon had been the one to deliver the deathblow.

“When I came back from Afghanistan, people thought I was suffering from PTSD,” Amon said. “Perhaps I was. Another vet who’d lost it, consumed by his demons. Waiting to eat a bullet. Good enough to give your life to your country but not good enough to live in it. The shrinks like to tell you that you have to conquer your demons. I say they’ve got it all wrong. I say, embrace your demons.” He inched closer, and added, “
Become a demon
.”

“You’re no fucking demon,” Talon said. “You’re just an asshole with some bad plastic surgery.”

“Mock me as much as you like, but this mortal coil is about to be remade in my master’s true image.” Amon held up the Sumerian pendant and dangled it in front of Talon’s face. “Without your lucky charm, the
seven
are fully in control of the vessel.”

One quick glance at Nicole confirmed Amon’s words. She observed him in stony indifference, her expression bereft of any humanity.
 

Amon waved at his men. Four soldiers dragged Talon across the nave and toward the altar. Earlier, the monks had removed the full-sized wooden cross from the wall as a precaution, fearing Nicole might use her telekinetic powers during the exorcism to turn it into deadly weapon. It was still splayed out on the floor of the chapel. They dumped Talon next to the cross and pulled him on top of it.
 

Through the haze of pain, he grasped what they planned to do with him. Another soldier stepped up to the cross, the nail gun that the monks had used to bolt down the bed for the exorcism ritual in his hand.
 

Talon shook off his grogginess and strained against his captors. They pinned him down to the cross and stretched his arms out along the wooden beams. Four soldiers, one for each limb, held him against the cross as the back of his hands were roughly pushed against the wood. A fifth soldier pressed the muzzle of the nail gun against his squirming right hand.
 

“It is time for us to begin the ritual. The seven are growing impatient,” Amon proclaimed.

A metallic click, like the sound of a silenced pistol going off, echoed through the chapel as the soldier drove the first nail into Talon’s palm.
 

C
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AS THE NAILS pierced his hands, Talon grimaced and convulsed but still fought back a scream. He wasn’t going to give his tormentors the satisfaction of seeing him break down.
 

Once the nails had been driven through flesh and wood, the soldiers lifted the cross and stood it up, using the wall behind the altar as support. A crucified, semi-conscious Talon faced the chapel. His arms stretched to the breaking point, blood running from the wounds in his hands in thick rivulets. His head lolled, jaw tight with pain.
 

The seven demons inside Nicole regarded him with cruel amusement. Maybe the blood loss was playing tricks with his mind, but Talon thought he could see different inhuman faces shadowing Nicole’s features, each one more horrific than the last. The individual demons distorted the skin, flesh and bone as they momentarily manifested themselves. The power of the seven was in full effect now.

Biting back another wave of misery as his weight pulled against the nails, his eyes locked on Amon and his men. He kneeled before a regal Nicole, honoring the seven demonic beings trapped within her form.
 

“We are about to begin, my masters,” Amon said.

“Only six will be deemed worthy for this honor,” responded a terrible, disjointed voice. The sound had come from Nicole, each demon phrasing a word in its own accent and timbre. This is what Talon imagined a person suffering from multiple personality disorder would sound like, which in a weird way was an apt analogy.

Amon and his nine remaining soldiers nodded in agreement.

Nicole regarded each one of the apocalypse soldiers and finally pointed at three of the cultists. The soldiers in question separated from the group, having been found lacking for the next step of the ritual. They pulled away from the others, moving closer to Talon.

Amon and the five other chosen ones gathered around Nicole. The circle of six began to intone words in an ancient, guttural language long forgotten by time, each soldier taking a turn as they recited a part of the incantation. The spell designed to channel the demons out of Nicole and into their own bodies.
 

Talon gnashed his teeth. These sick fucks were allowing themselves to be possessed. To truly become an army of demons.

Through a haze of agony, Talon remembered Casca’s warning about how demons chose humans to possess. They normally pick children or the weak, a stepping-stone into our world. Nicole was this stepping stone. A demon’s abilities to inflict damage were at least somewhat limited inside a teenager. But imagine that evil power within elite soldiers.
 

He couldn’t let Amon and his soldiers go through with this nightmare. Despite pain that would’ve rendered most men unconscious, Talon strained against the nails buried in his hands, hoping to yank them out. Tendons stood out in his neck like cords.

It was no use. Despite all his efforts, the nails wouldn’t budge, Talon remained pinned to the cross like an insect. He gasped, mentally struggling to not give up. He was reaching his physical limits. Even if he could through some miracle tear himself off the cross, by the time he hit the chapel floor he would be spent, defeated before the real battle had even begun. It was hopeless.

Nevertheless he clung to consciousness. His rage kept him going, fueled him. In the ceremonial circle, the words flowed faster and faster, the chanting growing more guttural, animalistic, and inhuman with each verse of the spell. Talon remembered spinning albums backward on a record player in the hope of hearing secret messages when he was a kid. It sounded a little like that, a reverse Gregorian chant sped up and distorted, the sounds transformed into a language not meant for human vocal chords.

Nicole’s eyes grew obsidian, mirroring Amon’s appearance, and she was gripped by a violent seizure. Tremors passed through her whole body. Something was moving inside of her, distending the surface of her skin as it fought its way through her shaking body and up her throat. Her neck bulged and then the cause of the distortion crawled out of her mouth. A fat, black scorpion. It slithered from her lips, and Talon fought back a sense of primal revulsion.