Aftermath (12 page)

Marcus looked a lot better than he had the last time I’d seen him but that’s not saying much. Some of the weight he’d lost due to his binging had been put back on in the intervening months though he wasn’t anywhere close to being as big as he used to be. Back to shaving his head, his hobo scruff gone, unlike mine, there was still a gauntness to his features that made him look skeletal, deep black circles around his eyes adding to the look. He didn’t look ready to keel over any minute like he had recently but a number of years had been added to the mileage counter of his life.

However, it wasn’t his health I was worried about right then.

What had happened in Old Town was much, much more important. There in an abandoned lot once owned by Baalth—which was now mine—a huge hole had been dug in the concrete foundation of an old building that would likely never be rebuilt. And for good reason. No one needed to know what lay under it.

Of course all that was moot now.

I stared into the empty hole to see that chunks of stone and a thick layer of dust were all that remained alongside three twisted pieces of rebar that were driven into the ground in the shape of a “T.” They were stained with blood, both fresh and old, small pools dotting the broken stones red.

“This can’t be good.”

“You are the master of the understatement, Marcus.”

“Understate this,” he said, flipping me off.

“I think we’ve established I’m not your type. Of course,” I told him while I smacked him on his ass, “I could always be persuaded to turn your other cheek if I were drunk enough.”

“I’m being serious, Trigg.” He pointed to the hole. “You think he’s just going to forgive and forget that we did this shit to him?”

“No, I don’t suspect he will.”

Marcus had helped me bury Judas under tons of concrete in this very spot months back, the betrayer’s punishment for having instigated the attack that led to Karra being murdered. Unable to die thanks to a curse from God he had suffered under the ground in what I imagined was some seriously fucked up torment. It hadn’t lasted nearly long enough for my liking. I’d penciled him in for all eternity.

“Don’t worry though, Marcus, he never saw you and doesn’t know shit about your involvement. None of this will land on your head.”

He laughed, no humor in the sound. “I always thought you were smarter than that, Trigg. You know damn well this is going to fall on all of our heads. Everything that goes wrong in Old Town does eventually. There are only so many heads it
can
fall on. Baalth made sure of that.”

He wasn’t wrong.

It also didn’t help that the government had declared martial law in Old Town after the Covenant of Dusk started up their guerilla war. Since most of those guys were based out of Baalth’s old territory it made sense to seal it off but they hadn’t made much headway in clearing it out, being forced to battle for every block as though the place were Fallujah. The government had taken to surrounding the place and doing their damndest to limit the reach of the Covenant. But with all of the bombings going on it was just a matter of time before the Army brought in the big guns and tore the place to its roots. A nuke attack on US soil was bound to provoke the worst of reactions and it didn’t matter one bit that the Covenant wasn’t responsible. They and every other enemy of the State were gonna pay and pay ugly at that.

“You should probably get out of here,” I told Marcus. “Things are gonna get way worse before they get better.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Trigg.”

Poe’s been kidnapped,
I bit back. “Just keep an eye out for Judas. Until the Army starts rolling in this is as good a place as any to hide out. He could still be lurking. Just don’t let him catch you spying. Won’t take much for him to connect you to me.”

Marcus grunted something vaguely affirmative and took off. He’d do what I asked of him if only out of gratitude for reuniting him Poe, who he’d thought was dead and gone. There wouldn’t be any Christmas cards filling up my mailbox or mushy birthday hugs but he’d spare a few seconds to call and let me know if he came across Judas anywhere in Old Town. The place was Marcus’s home. He wouldn’t abandon it.

After Marcus was gone I dropped onto my ass at the edge of the hole and dangled my feet inside, taking a few minutes to reflect on everything. There wasn’t any chance in hell that Judas’s escape was a coincidence unrelated to the masked man’s agenda. Locked in God’s prison realm since he’d sold the Old Man’s son out, no one knew the place better than Judas. Us finding the portal by way of the attacks on the DSI installations clinched that connection. There was no doubt about it but that still didn’t explain what was going on.

“It seems our paths are destined to cross of late, Satan.”

I glanced up to see the armored guy in the silver cowl that I’d spotted at the previous nuke site. He did nothing to hide his essence this time, walking slowly toward me with his hands held out to his sides. His aura shined with an annoying brightness like he was a pair of those blue headlights set on high.

“Satan would be my father. You can call me Frank,” I said. “And while we’re on the subject of names, what can I call you?”

He chuckled. “Satan is a title only, but forgive me. I forget myself.” The guy tugged the cowl off and dropped it over his shoulder in a single movement. Underneath stood the priest Forcalor had directed me to so I could learn more about Trinity.

“Father Lance?”

“Indeed, Frank. “He bowed shallow, a broad smile painting his hairless face in pleasant tones. His bright, almost yellow eyes gleamed in the sun as if they were absorbing the daylight. I wanted to be surprised by his appearance but after the short time around him in his church, and his connection to Heaven, I really couldn’t find it in me to wonder too much about why he dressed like a knight.

Unlike Marcus, Lance was the Belle of the ball. He wasn’t dressed in the jeans and T-shirt I last saw him in but he fit the new look just as casually. His hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail behind his head, the gray waves of it restrained by a number of black bands. He wore an odd mix of chainmail with metal plates woven into the mesh at all the vital spots. Despite its solid appearance, though, it didn’t seem to be heavy at all. Lance moved with a feline grace as he came over to stand across from me. A sword with a plain handle, quite at odds with the rest of his outfit, hung in a simple sheath off his left hip.

“What are you doing here?” I climbed to my feet so I wasn’t looking up at him. “And why were you at the site of the explosion? That was you, right?”

“It was,” he admitted. “That’s why I’m here now.” Lance circled around the pit, glancing into its depths as he did, one eyebrow raised. “You looking to bury something?”

“Re-bury more like. Bit of a vermin problem that got out of hand.”

“I see.” His gaze went to the rebar stakes, spying the blood. “You’ve an interesting way of dealing with it.”

“I’m creative. What can I say?”

“Which is a fortunate trait to have considering the interesting developments of late.”

“I see you’ve been keeping up with the headlines. So what can I do for you, Father?”

“It’s more of what we can do for each other.” He rested his hand on the pommel of his sword and drew in a slow, deep breath before he said anything else. “Do you know who was locked inside the prison you saw me outside of?”

“Not a clue, but I’m hoping all this foreplay is leading to you telling me or I’m gonna have to find me someone easier.” Maybe not the best choice of words to use when referring to a reverend.

Lance just grinned. “It is indeed. Morgan La Fey would be who I’m referring to.”

“I’ve seen the movie
Excalibur
. She’s the hottie who screwed King Arthur in order to have a kid who would eventually kill the king, right?”

“While the movie was fantastic—who doesn’t like Nigel Terry?—it was a bit loose with its facts, I’m afraid. Morgan is no blood relation to Arthur nor did she bear him Mordred. She is, however, a sorceress of some renown and few scruples, which is why I’ve come. She’s dangerous.”

“I would expect no less,” I fired back. “So tell me what else you know.”

“I’d thought her dead, to be honest, so it was a bit of a surprise to sense her in the world once more. An unpleasant one at that. She has no love for this age and would gladly set it alight in her wake.”

The image of God’s prison popped into my head, the trees withering and the sky black with char and smoke. “You a prophet, Father?”

He shook his head. “Don’t need to be with Morgan. The woman has shrieked her defiance in the face of God and His order since it first came to be. There’s no reason to believe she’d be any different upon her return. She is the very definition of unrepentant,” he said.

Duke Forcalor, my old mentor now residing in Heaven, sent me to the Father since the duke couldn’t offer his help directly without getting into hot water with Metatron, the new Lord of the Hosts. Turned out Lance was a font of knowledge regarding Trinity. From the sounds of it he might be equally useful regarding the sorceress Morgan.

“You said you sensed Morgan. Can you track her?”

“To a degree, yes, but my efforts have been far from perfect. Her essence fades in and out, confounding me. I do not believe she resides solely on Earth. It’s as if she’s slipping in and out of the dimensions, trailing through a stream to avoid the hounds.”

Fantastic. “Can you try to find her?”

“Of course. I’ll continue to seek her out. The longer she remains alive and free the more mischief she’s bound to be involved in.”

“Speaking of which, you know why she might be looking into God’s little prison dimension?”

“The one where you found Judas? We call such places an interstice, a world between worlds.”

“Yeah, that place, whatever you call it. Everything seems to be coming back to that.”

“Perhaps because there is more to it than you understand.”

“You think?” I was seriously going to have to start carrying around Captain Obvious capes so I could hand them out. “I don’t understand much of anything these days. How about you spell it out for me, Father.”

He grinned. “Despite what you may believe, Morgan is not some authorial invention of the middle ages. She was born ages before Christ and has existed outside of our current timeline since before God laid claim to this universe.”

The words sank into my skull, triggering a bell that brought my thoughts to a stumbling halt. “What do you mean, ‘laid claim?’”

A sly smile twisted his lips. “You’ve seen some of the other worlds out there, correct?” I nodded, wondering what his point was. “Strange, are they not?”

“There’s plenty that’s strange here too. What’s your point?”

“There most certainly is but that’s because God brought that strangeness to our world. It did not exist before his arrival.”

“Duh!” I said. “Because of the Big Bang, Genesis, or whatever you want call His process of creation.”

Lance smiled at me as if I were stupid. “If only that were true, Frank. God brought His ideas and vision to our world, no doubt, but why would He create a prison for His failures if everything was according to His plan? Why would He lash out at humanity and lay waste to it with a flood if they were as He intended? Could He not have simply remade them, fixed them to his specifications?” he asked. “Why spare a select few to carry the supposed sins of humanity into the new age rather than craft more, new ones without the flaws he so disliked?”

I stared at Lance for a moment, letting his questions sink in. While I’d never claimed to be all-knowledgeable when it came to the concept of God and His master plan I felt I had a pretty good idea regarding the basics of existence, but Lance had me thinking. I’d heard somewhere that every person was an extension of God and that was why He was loath to kill all those He’d stashed in the prison realm but that seemed a bit contradictory if you looked at all the other acts of brutality committed by Him. If He could simply create beings out of nothing, out of Himself, and could grind them down to start over, why would any
mistakes
exist at all?

“I can see you’re starting to understand.”

“Not really,” I answered, but I kind of was. My stomach churned alongside my thoughts. “This prison realm, this interstice, isn’t because He needed someplace to hide His mistakes from the world…” I paused, thinking of the fire giant and the sorceress from an age past alive and active in the current time.

Lance straightened, his smile beckoning me to go on and slide all the pieces into place.

“It’s because He needed to hide something else from the world.”
But what?

I thought back to all I’d seen inside the prison realm, the strangeness of it all, yet it was similar at the same time. Like it had the same basic foundation but what was layered on top was different, the nature of it all subtly changed. Then it hit me. “A student playing at the work of a master.”

Lance clapped. “Bravo.”

My stomach felt ready to drop out my ass. If what I was imagining was true then so much of our existence was a flat out lie. “You’re telling me God didn’t create the world but rather He subverted it?”

“He did indeed, Frank. The flood was His reaction to disappointment. Humanity existed in a form before He arrived in this world but He was incapable of bending it to his will, other powers in play that helped them to defy Him. Even after He conquered those other powers He was incapable of cracking the source code of humanity, if you’ll forgive the analogy. Were he to wipe them out of existence He would be incapable of replacing them with the same kind of beings, His own creations inherently flawed.”

“So, since his magic Play-Doh was dry and useless, He started over with someone else’s, allowing a few select humans to live and procreate, all under His watchful eye so He could nurture them to be what He wanted them to be. Make them believe what He wanted them to.”

Lance tapped his finger to his nose.

“So if God didn’t make all of humanity…” Who did? And where were they now? “Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” I said as everything came together. “The fucking prison. God
did
hide all His failures there, but not those of
His
creation. Those He conquered.” No wonder everyone was so gung ho to get a piece of the place now that it had been revealed. With God out of the picture there was no one to stop anyone from breaking the doors open wide and letting everyone and everything loose that had existed before God came into the picture. Judging by what little I’d seen, that would be one hell of a circus running amok. “Tell me there isn’t another God caged away in there.”