Armageddon's Children (21 page)

Even then, Angel could not escape. The demon’s claws raked her shoulder and back, and one forearm hammered into the side of her face with such force that she was knocked sprawling and dazed. The demon shrieked in fury as its next lunge missed, and Angel regained her feet and sprinted across the room toward her staff. In a single motion she swept it from the rubble, wheeled back, and sent the fire directly into the face of her pursuer.

This time the fire did its work. The demon went over backward, howling and thrashing, twisting so violently that it careened backward into the already damaged staircase. Wood splintered, plaster cracked, supports buckled, and the entire structure gave way with shocking suddenness, collapsing on the demon and burying it from view.

Angel stared at the rubble, breathing heavily, waiting. When nothing happened, she wheeled about. The room was silent and empty; the children had disappeared with Helen and the other women. She glanced back at the collapsed staircase, searching for movement. There was none. Had she not been so debilitated by her struggle, she might have taken the time to dig through the debris to finish the job. As it was, she could barely move.

She took a long slow breath and pulled herself together. She was still alive and that was enough. Aching and bloodied, she walked out the door and into the street.

THE GATES TO
the compound had given way half an hour earlier, the once-men had poured through, and Findo Gask had waited patiently for the way to be opened. His orders were clear. Everyone who resisted was to be killed. All of the sick and injured were to be killed. All of the old people were to be killed. The rest, the strong and the fit, were to be chained together, but not harmed. The children, in particular, were not to be touched. Prisoners were no good to him if they were damaged. Breeding pens and experimentation labs required healthy specimens.

Once shackled and lined up, the captives would be marched twenty miles east to the slave camp he had established two months earlier. There they would live out their usefulness.

He glanced over at the gates as the first of them appeared through the haze of smoke and ash. They shuffled ahead with their heads down and their hands clasped, and only one or two bothered to look up as they passed him. He gave them a momentary glance, then looked back at the burning compound. It would be looted for whatever supplies, equipment, and weapons they could salvage. Everything left over, including the bodies of the dead, would be burned in the compound center. It would take all day to complete this task. It would take the rest of the week to pull down the walls and level the buildings. Findo Gask was thorough. By the time he was finished, almost nothing would remain to mark where the compound had stood.

Then he would march his army north and begin the process all over again with the compounds on the coast.

Except that he had done something different this time in anticipation of bringing his efforts to a swifter conclusion. With precise instructions, he had sent half of his army north two weeks ago to begin laying siege to the compounds of Seattle and Portland. While his half of the army worked its way up the coastline to San Francisco, the other half would begin working its way down from Seattle. Together, the two would form the jaws of a trap that would soon close on the last outposts of the Pacific coast.

In less than six months, it would all be over.

One of the lesser demons that served him, a still-too-human creature named Arlen, lean and stoop-shouldered and possessed of stringy hair and reptilian features, came through the gates leading two bloodied figures by chains he had fastened about their necks. Every time they stumbled, he screamed at them and yanked hard on the chains before allowing them to struggle up again. Bringing them to a ragged halt, he threw them down at his leader’s feet and kicked them. One was a woman. Findo Gask waited. Arlen beamed in expectation of his reward, then realized he was expected to say something.

“These are all that are left, yessir,” he said.

Findo Gask nodded patiently. “Left of what?”

“Them that was guarding the children.”

“And the children are where?”

Arlen shrugged. “Gone. She took them out while we was breaking down the gates. Took them out some tunnels, says these two. The whole bunch of them.”

“The female Knight of the Word?” He spoke quietly, but from between clenched teeth. “She took all of the children?”

The other demon nodded eagerly. “Sure enough. Took ’em all. Must have come in another way.”

Findo Gask picked up the length of chain knotted about the woman and drew her back to her feet. His eyes locked on hers. She was shaking all over, but she could not look away.

“Where did the Knight of the Word take them?” he said.

“Please,” she whispered.

He gave her one moment more, then snapped her neck and threw her aside. He reached down and yanked the man to his feet. “Can you tell me where they went?”

“Out the tunnels…that lead to the streets,” the man gasped. One eye was gone and the other swollen shut. His face was a mask of blood. “She told us…this would happen. We…should have listened.”

“Yes, you should have.” He dropped the man in a heap and looked at Arlen. “Where are these tunnels?”

Arlen shrugged—one shrug too many to suit Findo Gask. Quick as a snake, his hand shot out, fastened around the other’s neck, and began to squeeze. “Maybe you had better organize a search party to go down into the lower levels of the compound and find them.”

He emphasized each word without raising his voice, then threw the hapless Arlen down beside the chained prisoner. “Maybe I should arrange for you to change places with him. Maybe I will if you don’t find those children.”

Arlen crawled a safe distance away on hands and knees, then came to his feet and staggered off without looking back. Findo Gask let him go. In truth, he didn’t really care about the children. There were always other children. What he cared about was discipline and obedience. What he cared about was respect born of fear. Let them think he was soft or indecisive, and they would rip him apart.

There was danger of that happening as it was.

Where, he wondered suddenly, was Delloreen?

IT TOOK ANGEL
a long time to get out of the city. She was too sore and too tired to move quickly, so beaten up from her encounter with the demon that she could barely put one foot in front of the other. If she was to meet resistance from another demon now, or even from a band of once-men, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to stand up to them. So she kept to the alleyways and shadows, skirting anything that seemed like danger, conserving what strength remained to try to catch up to Helen and the children.

More than once, she looked back to see if that demon from the hotel was following. She had never encountered anything quite so ferocious. That the demon was female only made it seem more repellent, made it feel as if it were a perversion of herself as a Knight of the Word, a monster with no other purpose than to destroy. She hoped she had killed it, but she didn’t think she had. Worse, she knew that if it lived it would come after her, probably with once-men to support it this time, probably with that old man as company.

When it did, she wasn’t certain what she was going to do to save herself. If not for the stairway collapse, it would have had her. She had been lucky this time. She couldn’t expect to be that lucky again.

Behind her, black clouds of smoke billowed from the Anaheim compound. The demons had broken through the gates and were inside. The last of the defenders were being slaughtered; she could hear their screams rising with the smoke. Why hadn’t they listened to her? What more could she have done? There were no answers, and asking the questions only served to point up the futility of her efforts as a Knight of the Word.

She stopped a moment and looked back at the shattered landscape. It didn’t help knowing what was going on now inside the compound. The lucky ones would be killed; the unlucky would be taken as slaves. If there were any children left, they would be taken for experimentation. She hoped they had all gotten out. She wished she could go back to make sure. She wanted nothing so much as to save one more tiny life.

The ache and weariness washed through her in a sudden rush and she began to cry silently. She didn’t cry much these days, but every now and then she couldn’t seem to help herself. She grieved for those in the compounds, men and women who had struggled so hard to survive. She grieved for everything the world had lost, for the common ordinary things everyone had taken for granted, for what had once seemed so dependable and lasting. She had not been alive then, but she knew something of what it had been like from the stories the old ones told. A few had been born in those times and remembered a little of what it had been like. But they were mostly gone, and the memories of the old ones now were much darker.

She wondered if she would ever be able to have memories that were sweet and treasured and welcome when they surfaced. They would have to be memories she would make later, she knew. Such memories would have to come from the future.

After a last look back across the broken walls and collapsed roofs of the buildings stretching to the compound pyre, she turned away. With Los Angeles gone, the demon-led army would begin to move north toward San Francisco, where the whole scenario would be repeated. She wondered if there was a Knight of the Word defending that city. She guessed she would find out when she got there. That was where she was going. It was the only place left for her to go.

Ahead, the escaped children and the women herding them appeared in a ragged line. Some of them were clutching favorite possessions as they trudged through the ruined city streets. Some of them were crying and hanging on to each other. She could imagine their thoughts in the wake of losing home, and parents, and everything they had ever known and loved. She could imagine their despair.

She hurried to catch up to them, anxious to do what she could to ease their suffering.

IT TOOK DELLOREEN
a long time to extricate herself from beneath the collapsed stairway. She had lost consciousness, knocked senseless by one of the supports that had struck her head. When she woke, everything was black and the weight of the rubble was pressing down on her. She pushed and shoved and finally worked her way free, clawing up from the debris to the air and light and the silence of the hotel lobby. She stood and looked around, already knowing what she would find. The Knight of the Word had escaped her.

She was in some pain, but her pain was secondary to her rage, and her rage gave her renewed strength. She looked down at the tear in her arm, at the white of the bone. Injuries like this would cripple a human, but not a demon. Using her fingers, she pulled the flesh back together and held it in place until scales, which were gradually spreading over her entire body, closed the wound. Her human flesh was weak, but her demon scales were like armor. She hated the human part of herself, but there wasn’t much of it left.

When the wound was sealed sufficiently that she didn’t have to think about it anymore, she brushed herself off, wiped the blood from her face with her hands, and licked her fingers clean. She thought about her battle with the Knight of the Word. The woman was small, but resilient. She was stronger than she looked. Still, she should not have escaped. If not for the staircase collapsing, she wouldn’t have. Delloreen was more than a match for her. When they met again, she would prove it.