Were these the babies who had been buried here? Jim wondered. He thought of his great-grandfather, Ezra Weldon, whom he had never met.
Was this what had happened last time?
He loaded his rifle and fired again.
By this time, Gordon had regained his senses and was firing his own weapon at the monstrous creatures. They can be killed, he kept repeating to himself. They are real. They are physical beings. His first bullet missed, but the rest found their marks. The targets were too big not to hit.
Brother Elias and Father Andrews stood staring at each other as the ground erupted around them and the living corpses of the gigantic infants pushed their way to the surface. Hot wind whipped against their faces, bringing with it the rotten odor of decay. The priest closed his eyes as he felt an unwelcome and unfamiliar power pressing in on him, straining against his closed senses, trying to find a crack in the psychic block he had constructed in his mind.
"Open yourself!" Brother Elias commanded.
The priest closed himself off tight, protecting himself. The air around him was thick and heavy with the force of power. He could feel the evil closing in on him, and the monstrousness of it made everything he had ever felt before pale by comparison. He began to shake, feeling the pressure increase around him.
"Open yourself!" Brother Elias screamed.
My time is near, Father Andrews thought, recalling the verse from the Bible. I am ready to sacrifice myself. And then .. . and then he was strong! His weak and vacillating will was bolstered by an infusion of iron determination; his numb and tired brain expanded instantly to encompass a knowledge vast and limitless yet perfectly ordered.
And then he was drowning, fading, crushed and overwhelmed by the power of this new force, which drained away his being, sucking him into itself and growing stronger still. He heard himself cry out somewhere amidst this turmoil, his voice, his thought, shrinking, going, gone.
And then the power was no longer bodiless, no longer a disassociated will working imperfectly through other vessels out of necessity. Hot and burning, all-knowing, strong with the forsaken lives of so many beings, the power was now free, now possessed of a form it could use, a form it could control perfectly and utterly. The power looked through seeing eyes, experienced through living senses, the world around it.
And the creatures opposing the power seemed suddenly so weak, so insignificant.
"BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR NEW GOD."
The voice was so powerful, so awesome, that both Gordon and the sheriff turned to look. Even the monstrous babies crawling out of the fissured ground stalled for a second in their movements.
"I COMMAND YOU TO BOW DOWN BEFORE ME."
The voice was clearly that of Father Andrews, and it was obviously coming out of the priest's slack open mouth, but it was amplified beyond all possibility.
Brother Elias lunged forward and grabbed the priest's shoulders, holding tight. He shoved his face right next to the priest's. At the top of his lungs, he screamed the alien words of the Ritual of Banishment, but even his powerful voice sounded small and impotent next to that of Father Andrews.
The priest's horrible laugh drowned out his chanting words. The noise was deafening, echoing across the hills and into the blackened sky.
"YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME."
Brother Elias spoke faster, the strange words tumbling out, as if he had only a certain amount of time in which to speak and that time was almost gone. "... The Lord our God," he screamed clearly in English, and then he was thrown away from the priest, his body tumbling back over itself until it landed against a large gray stone twenty feet away. He stood up, shook his head to clear it and immediately began chanting again, the inhuman words rushing out of his mouth at an auctioneer's pace. He walked toward the priest, hands and arms extended, his fingers tracing symbolic outlines in the air.
And Father Andrews began to change.
His body expanded outward, bloating, the skin pulling taut across his face and hands, his clothes ripping open.
"No!" Brother Elias screamed, and there was panic in his voice.
The hair on Father Andrews' head began streaming out, growing at the rate of several feet per second, reaching the ground. At first it was brownish blond, the color of the priest's natural hair, but it instantly darkened into jet. A distorted fist of bone punched its way through the priest's stomach. Two huge black eyes pushed the old eyes out, sending them sliding slimily down the taut fat cheeks. The priest's hands jerked off in a spray of blood, and two red whipcord arteries protruded through the newly made openings, thrashing blindly around. The legs split, divided, multiplied.
Brother Elias, still chanting madly, ran forward and grabbed the four gold crucifixes that were embedded in the ground before the metamorphosing body of Father Andrews.
The priest's body began to split down the center, streams of inky liquid blackness escaping through the torn opening.
"I AM GOD," a new voice said through Father Andrews' mouth as the head began to split apart.
And Brother Elias shoved the first crucifix into the center of what was left of the priest's body.
Pain and a sudden loss of vital energy. Awareness of a power equal to or greater than its own.
Comprehension.
Fear.
There was an audible rush of air as the cross withered and blackened.
Father Andrews screamed in rage and agony, and both Jim and Gordon put their hands over their ears to block out the terrible noise.
The preacher shoved another cross into Father Andrews' distorted body, this one through the forehead. The body fell to the ground. Repeating over and over again the final words of the ritual, Brother Elias shoved the last two crucifixes into the priest's abdomen.
The power retreated back from whence it had come, its knowledge suddenly gone, its ambitions forgotten, its seemingly endless strength rapidly depleting. It pulled into itself. All that mattered now was survival.
Bolts of black energy erupted outward from the crosses, draining color from the surrounding earth and air. The crucifixes melted, their metal twisting into whirling spirals. The bolts of energy, growing increasingly weak, dissipated into the dark clouds above.
Two of the oversized infants were still moving, and Jim fired several rounds into each of them, killing them both. The bodies dissolved into the ground, leaving only a grayish slimy mulch.
The hot wind tapered off to nothing, and Gordon and the sheriff looked at each other, breathing deeply, their hearts pounding wildly in their chests. They said nothing as they moved across the broken ground toward the spot where Brother Elias lay unmoving in the dirt.
Screaming crazily, the black figure of Dr. Waterston burst into flames. The charred skin flaked off, and in the second before the figure was engulfed entirely, Marina saw something shiny and white and wormlike.
The flame disappeared as quickly as it had come, and the fetus between her legs dropped the knife it was holding. It fell to its knees, as though it had suddenly lost what coordination it had.
All of the creatures in the kitchen were suddenly crawling around in dumb mindlessness, and Marina realized that, though she still could not move, she was safe.
She began to cry.
Brother Elias was just sitting up groggily as Jim and Gordon reached him. They helped him to his feet, each holding onto an arm as he stood unsteadily. The preacher smiled at them, a real smile, an open smile.
"You did well," he said. "You both did well."
His smile faded as he stooped to look at the remains of Father Andrews.
The hideous mutations that had torn apart the priest's body at the end had disappeared, reversing themselves, and the bloody remains, though mutilated, were undeniably human. The crosses had disintegrated completely. "If we had been here sooner, he would not have died," the preacher said. He gestured toward the bloody form before him. "We will carry his body to the truck and wrap it safely in the tarp," he said. "We will give him a Christian burial."