“No,” said Truman. “No, no… You’re just trying to frighten me…”
“Trust me,” I said. “We’re already scared enough. We have to destroy the tower before the Invaders come through. Where is it?”
An alarm went off, deafeningly loud in the small office. We all jumped. Truman stabbed at the controls on his desktop, and a monitor screen flared into life on the wall, showing Harry Drood and Roger Morningstar moving cautiously through the underground base. They’d finally got here. I had to smile. Harry would so hate coming second.
“Damn,” said Molly. “In all the excitement I’d forgotten about them.”
“I haven’t forgotten about all the Droods they brought with them,” I said. I fixed Truman with a cold stare. “Your Accelerated Men, and your damned Soul Gun, killed hundreds of my family.”
He smiled spitefully at me. “I only wish it could have been more. You brought me to this, brought me so low I had to ally myself with alien scum! Everything that’s happened here is your fault, Drood!”
“Oh, shut up, you wimp,” said Molly, and the sheer distaste in her voice stopped him like a slap in the face. She moved around beside the desk, found the general address, and called Harry and Roger by name. They both looked up, startled, and Molly grinned as she gave them directions to join us in Truman’s office.
“Excuse me,” Giles Deathstalker said quietly, “but what is that thing on his head?”
“Cutting-edge technology,” I said solemnly.
Giles raised an eyebrow. “In my day we find it more useful to put the technology inside the head. Mind you, we also find it useful to shoot overambitious idiots like this on sight.”
Harry and Roger finally found their way to Truman’s office and barged right in without knocking. Harry looked at me and sniffed loudly.
“Might have known you’d find a way to be here for the end, and grab all the glory for yourself.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Because I’m so like you, Harry.”
“Boys, boys,” said Molly. “Put them away or I’ll cut them off. We are on something of a deadline here… Truman’s going to take us to the tower.”
“You do know he’s infected?” said Roger.
“I used to be,” Truman said haughtily. “I destroyed it with my augmented brain.”
“Actually, no,” said Roger, looking thoughtfully at Truman. “With my amazing demon X-ray vision, I can See it’s still in there. Hell, I can practically smell it, it’s so advanced. It just let you think you’d destroyed it, so it could grow and influence you undetected. Sorry. There’s never any cure, once you’re infected.”
“Never?” said Molly.
“Not a chance in Hell,” said Roger, still looking at Truman.
Truman started to say something, and then stopped. He looked distracted, as though listening to some inner voice. And then he looked at us, looking at him, and his face firmed.
“Kill me,” he said. “I will die a human being, and myself; not some damned alien thing. Kill me!”
“Glad to,” said Roger Morningstar.
He leaned over the desk, grabbed the steel halo connecting Truman’s implanted spikes, and ripped it away. Truman screamed piteously, in pain and shock. Roger grabbed the spikes and pulled them, out one by one. They came out in sudden jerks, inch by inch, under his demonic strength, accompanied by gouting blood and bits of brain, and the sound of cracking, splintering bone. Truman was screaming constantly by now, an almost animal-like sound, his arms flailing helplessly, but none of us moved forward to stop Roger. I wanted to look away, but I made myself watch it all as punishment. By the time it was over, Truman was slumped forward over his desk, his head torn apart, twitching slowly as the last of his life went out of him. Roger studied the last spike closely, as though it might hold secrets, then just shrugged and tossed it aside.
Harry glared at him. “There was no need for it to be that brutal!”
“Oh, no need,” said Roger. “But it was fun.” He smiled at me. “You can’t tell us you never dreamed of doing that, Eddie.”
“No,” I said. “I never dreamed of doing anything like that, hellspawn.”
“Oh well,” said Roger. “No point crying over spilled brains.”
“I could kill the hellspawn for you, if you like,” said Mr. Stab.
He might have been discussing the weather. Roger started to say something, looked at Mr. Stab, and thought better of it.
“Thanks for the thought,” I said. “But no.”
“We have to get to the tower,” said Molly, her voice cold and focused. “It’s not far. I can feel its presence with my magics.”
“Then lead the way,” I said.
We followed Molly through the maze of steel corridors, and down into the deepest part of the underground bunker, until we were in a great steel-walled chamber directly under the standing Stones of Stonehenge. And there it was, sunk deep into a pit hollowed out of the bare earth; tall and complex and unnaturally shaped, the last tower of the Loathly Ones. There wasn’t room to build it high, so they’d sunk it deep. We could only see the top twenty feet or so, a jagged structure of alien technology combined with flesh and blood. Metal and crystal seamlessly fused with living parts. We all circled slowly around the exposed top of the tower, our feet sinking into the wet earth. This close, there was no doubt the thing was alive, in its own awful way. It was alive and it was aware. It knew we were there…and it didn’t care. It was complete and it was activated, We’d arrived too late.
Already a gateway was forming, an opening to another place. I couldn’t see or hear it, but I could feel it on some deeper, primal leveclass="underline" like a great eye watching me, like a wound in the world, like a door into Hell. Like a great cold wind blowing right at me from a direction I couldn’t name, chilling me down to the soul. Slowly I became aware of sounds too. I don’t think I was hearing them with my ears. Voices; howling, screaming, laughing, coupled with the sounds of tearing flesh and great siege engines slamming together forever. All the sounds of Hell on earth.
Molly grabbed me by the arm and shook me fiercely, and I came to myself again. Harry and Roger and Giles and even Mr. Stab were still staring wide-eyed and entranced at the forming gateway, as strange energies swirled and coalesced around the tower.
“We’ve got to do something!” said Molly. “The gateway’s opening! They’re coming!”
“I guess Jacob and Jay never got through after all,” I said numbly.
“Eddie …!”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” I looked at her. “How do you feel, Molly?”
“I’m still me,” she said, meeting my gaze squarely. “But I don’t know for how much longer.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said. I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out Janissary Jane’s weapon of last resort, the Deplorable End. It still didn’t look like much.
“Do we have the right to destroy our whole universe, just to wipe out the Hungry Gods?” said Molly.
“Hell no,” said Roger unexpectedly. He’d torn his attention away from the tower and was now looking at the thing squatting on my palm. “Is that what I think it is? Eddie, you can’t use it. Not while there’s still a chance, any chance…”
I had to smile. “A demon who still believes in hope. Now I’ve seen everything.”
“I believe in him,” said Roger, looking at Harry. “I have to hope… that we can find a way to be together. Not even a half demon is automatically damned for all time. You have to save the world, Eddie, so we can have a place to grow old in.”
“If the Hungry Gods come through, they’ll destroy this world and everything in it,” said Molly. “And then move on, from world to world, until there isn’t a living thing left anywhere. That’s what they do. Cosmic locusts.”
“I have no intention of destroying this universe, or this world,” I said. “I never did. I think… I’ll wait till the gateway has opened enough, and then I’ll go through it into their universe, their world; and blow it all to shit before they can come through.”