The mutant creatures are staring at her, gasping painful breaths through their deformed beaklike mouths.
What kind of evil creates such genetic mutations?
Dominique moves back into the shadows, contemplating. Her once-black environmental suit is already covered in gray dust. Grabbing handfuls of soil, she rubs more of the soot on her face and hair, camouflaging herself as best she can.
Satisfied, she moves down the grime-covered roadway, heading for a wider avenue that she prays will lead her to Jacob.
Dominique encounters the next villager as it hobbles out of the doorless entry of a one-room shanty. The miserable wretch had probably been a male. The scowling being is walking on its hands, its lower torso having been severed below the waist. Massive pustulating blue scabs bleed through the gray cover of dust that coats its skin.
Topping off its painful deformities is a bowling-ball-sized violet-glowing orb that has been surgically embedded in the life-form’s lower back.
The tortured being grunts as it straddle-walks on heavily callused knuckles, the ends of its tunic dragging along the dirt. A fine ebony mist snorts from its flared nostrils with each excruciating exhalation.
Fear and compassion fill Dominique’s mind as she watches the life-form struggle with its artificial weight. She waits another moment, then hurries past him to a central thoroughfare.
It is an avenue of the undead, a procession of grunting, moaning, mutilated transhumans, all victims of amputation. Some of the beings lack legs, others arms. A phagelike bacteria festers their skin, slowly, agonizingly eating away at their flesh and bone.
The Nephilim…
As if their existence is not torturous enough, each transhuman has been fitted with a prosthetic orb that radiates in a variety of spectral hues. Reds and yellows, greens, blues, and violets. If there is a code behind the specific colors, Dominique cannot discern it.
Maneuvering around these pitiful beings, she makes her way to the front of the rank, the sounds of the gong growing louder.
The avenue opens to a congested gathering place along the lake’s shoreline. Thousands of taller, more gangly bipeds push forward to join the mob. They are dressed in heavy soot-covered robes, their elongated skulls tucked inside hoods. Exposed flesh has long disappeared beneath adhering layers of mouse gray silicon, giving their faces a heavily pruned appearance. Neanderthal-like brows protect dark, deeply set eyes. Noses and surrounding cartilage are missing, leaving behind only open nasal passages. Lipless mouths remain slack-jawed, exposing teeth caked with atmospheric dust and film.
Like cattle, the Nephilim push and prod each other, inching their way closer to the lake, following its shoreline to some unknown destination.
Avoiding the throng, Dominique hides behind the collapsed remains of a rectangular dwelling. She looks around nervously, taking in her surroundings, while the baritone gong continues to toll its bone-throbbing call.
The lake’s silvery surface sparkles crimson, reflecting the emberlike ceiling overhead. But it is the towering object situated across the lake that now occupies Dominique’s attention.
It is a statue… a statue of a monstrous humanoid. The face is demonic and frightening, highlighted by a wide, fanged mouth and aquiline nose. Huge goat horns, polished and ebony, are perched atop the being’s elongated, pointed skull. Batlike wings, enormous and clawed at the tips, fold in behind the naked upper torso like a shawl. The icon’s lower body is shaped like a goat’s hindquarters, the long tail ending in a spike.
Dominique stares at the statue, transfixed. It’s Lucifer. They’re worshiping the Devil.
The statue casts an ominous shadow across the lake, its satanic gaze reflecting scarlet flames from the Underworld ceiling, the glowing embers twisting the mouth into an evil grin.
The bells stop tolling.
Dominique hurries to another dwelling, seeking a better view.
And now she sees where the Nephilim procession has assembled.
Along the far shoreline is an immense calabash tree, as old as time, as large as an African baobab. Its knotted, twisted trunk and bare branches are alabaster white, its spongy bark secretes a saplike ivory mucus.
At the base of the redwood-sized trunk stands a figure.
Lilith.
The Hunahpu queen is wearing a vermilion monk’s robe, her hairless elongated skull and its bizarre jaguar tattoo concealed beneath the heavy hood.
As she speaks, her voice is amplified by the lake’s natural acoustics.
‘And it came to pass that our tyrant God, Yahweh, became so fearful and jealous of His own creations that He cast His most beautiful son, the archangel, Lucifer, into the depths of Hell. So selfish was our Creator that He banned His greatest creation, man, from the Garden of Eden. So egotistical was our Vengeful One that He sanctioned blood sacrifices among His most loyal followers. So unforgiving was He that He unleashed a great deluge and drowned His populace. So terrified of man’s intelligence was our paranoid deity that He destroyed the Tower of Babel and scattered the survivors to the four winds, forcing them to speak in different tongues to stifle our ascension as a species, assuring our eventual self-destruction.
‘“Thou Shall Not Kill,” commanded the Great Hypocrite, as He smote us like fish in a barrel and taught us to hate.
‘But even the Great Hypocrite Himself could not stifle the love from our real father, our beautiful Morning Star, who reached out from Hell to instruct us. It is Lucifer who taught us how to taste the fruit of the vine. It is he who replaced abstinence with indulgence, ignorance with curiosity. It was Lucifer who liberated our spirits, encouraging our biological, spiritual, and intellectual ascent, and directed us toward the hidden forces of nature. He is our salvation, and we are his, for the time has come to undo the wrongs of the past and release our father from his unholy bonds.’
The crowd stomps and grunts, their rants causing the porous soil to flood. Across the street, the four owls continue staring, gasping great wheezes of breath.
Dominique fingers the sword, her arms trembling.
Lilith waits until her legion quiets. ‘And now, Yahweh has sent another messenger of pain. But fear not, for the arrival of this Hunahpu shall not cause you more despair. Devlin, your true savior, shall use the Hunahpu’s powers to unseal the Gates of Hell, releasing our father, the archangel, Lucifer!’
Wild stomping and grunts, the crowd trampling one another as it tries to move closer.
Lilith motions for silence. ‘Patience. The blessed resurrection shall be upon you soon enough. Until then, you may take one revolution around Lucifer’s light before returning to your dwellings.’
Dominique watches, dumbfounded, as the procession of the tortured circle slowly around the glowing alabaster tree, their colorful orbs absorbing its energy, glowing brighter as if sucking in its warmth, feeding off the tree’s light.
And then the beings depart, grunting and shoving one another, the bipeds jostling the slower amputees as they return to the village.
Remaining hidden, Dominique uses the smart-binoculars to zoom in upon another object, this one anchored in close proximity to one of the tree’s dangling lower limbs.
It is a wooden cross, supporting a crucified figure.
The head is obscured in a crown of thorns, the blood bleeding blue.
Jacob…
42
Dominique waits until the streets are deserted, then waits ten minutes more.
Moving out from hiding, she hurries down the avenue to the lake, slipping and sliding in the gray mire.