Demon Accords 6: Forced Ascent (35 page)

“The center,” Arkady answered.

“And what do you call that shape?” she pressed.

“A pentagon.  Oh!  The Pentagon,” Lydia said, putting it all together.

“But the Pentagon wasn’t built by Freemasons,” I protested.

“Doesn’t matter.  The original site of the building had five roads bordering it, and that resulted in the design shape.  Nothing occult about it, but now enough Internet conspiracy sites have latched onto it that there is a large group of believers out there that think it is.  So it is,” Nika answered.

“How far away is it, and what direction?” I asked, looking at Nika.

“It’s south, southwest of here,” Stacia answered.  Everyone looked at her.

“Hello, eighth grade field trip, been here before,” she said, flipping a strand of blonde hair out of her face.

“That’s correct.  About three miles, I think… across the river.  At least in our version, it’s across the Potomac River,” Nika said.

“Okay, so we just gotta cover three miles in Hell, avoid any armies of demons, and then either find a gate in the Pentagon or make one.”

“Could you?  Make one?” Tanya asked.

“I never tried, but I’m thinking if I do the opposite of how I close them, it might work.  Plus, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to try it,” I said.

“Why? Why doesn’t it matter, Chris?” Lydia asked.

“Because he’s hungry and there’s no food here,” Tanya said.  Sudden realization flooded across all their faces.  Most people can skip a meal or two, no problem.  Probably be a good thing for some folks.  But not me.  I don’t have any body fat and if I don’t keep eating, my body will eat itself.  Survival’s rule of threes says a human can live three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter, and three minutes without air.  It’s a rule of thumb for triaging survival situations.  But my rules are different.  I could hold my breath for thirty minutes and go without shelter for days, but food… food, I had to have every day. Several times a day.

“Okay, clock ticking.  Got it.  What’s the plan?” Stacia asked.

“We move out, head south by southwest.  Avoid confrontation and cross the river.  We need the very center of the Pentagon, the open courtyard in the center,” I answered.  “Piece of cake.”

Once my team had the basics of a plan, we slipped into operational mode without effort.  Awasos in wolf form took point, followed by me with Tanya on my right and Stacia on my left, Nika and Lydia behind walking next to each other, and finally, in rear guard position, Arkady.

Between my demon sense and the incredible nose of the were bear-wolf with me, we easily detected most demons hiding in the ruins.  We had to skirt around the White House area, as it held a huge number of demons who were fighting an all-out, free-for-all battle on the burnt, smoking grounds that would be where Lafayette Square would be in our world.  Amaymon’s legions must have dissolved into chaos when he bit the dust.

Our detour took us west to 19
^th
Street, several blocks to the west of our original position.  The buildings weren’t duplicates of our world, but blocky, ruined representations of them.  The air was oven hot, the light dusk-level dim and reddish hued, the sky overhead a roiling mass of black and red clouds. Sulfur clogged our noses, but there were subtle overtones of rotting flesh and general decay.  We stuck close to the edges of the buildings, trying to keep out of sight while using every sense to make sure nothing lunged out of a building at us.  Occasionally, we’d slip inside a building to avoid a demonic presence on the street, moving into alleys behind before returning to our route of travel.  It was slow, tedious work. For the most part, we avoided trouble… for the most part. 

Trouble found us on the corner of E Street NW and 19
^th
.  It was buried in the rubble of a building which is maybe why I didn’t sense it and ‘Sos didn’t smell it.  We were already past it, ‘Sos and I, when it reared up out of the rock dust and dirt—nine feet of segmented red chiton, a hundred legs, some tipped with insect claws and some with human hands.  A giant demon centipede, complete with front stingers and a vaguely human-shaped head.  It struck at Tanya, who is easily the fastest of us.  It missed.  She didn’t, taking its left mandible with a reflexive slash of her sword.  It pulled back, maybe to try a second strike, maybe to rethink its attack, maybe to retreat.  But what it did was die.  Stacia threw a tomahawk, which looked suspiciously like Trenton’s, sinking the blade into its back.  Nika stabbed it in the side with her assegai—three times fast.  Arkady pinned its tail end to the road with his own sword, which allowed Awasos to slip forward on wolf feet, shift to bear form, and slap the shit out of it with one wicked right paw.  Its head slammed into the ground and Tanya, the original target of its attack, leaned forward and yelled at it.  Or maybe sang.  I can’t really tell what she does.  I heard a complicated set of notes and the centademon’s head exploded.  We watched its hundred legs drum out the death dance even while we listened to see if our dust-up had attracted attention.  Things seemed quiet.  Arkady dragged the body to a building and threw it through one of the many broken windows.  I watched Stacia clean the demon ichor off her tomahawk with red Helldust, studying the familiar war ax. 

“He left it to me.  Arkaday said that Trenton wanted me to have it if anything happened to him.  He showed me how to throw it on that stupid farm in Pennsylvania,” she said in a rush, sensing me watching her.  When she looked up, her eyes looked just slightly shiny, maybe even wet.

“It was a good throw,” was all I said before squatting down to scrape up dust and pour it over the huge puddle of black blood.  Lydia started to help cover the noisome pool while Nika and Tanya cleaned up their blades.  We continued on.

  It took us an hour to travel a quarter mile to the end of 19
^th
Street.  Ahead was the area that was analogous with most of Washington’s most famous memorials.  But here, in Hell, their counterparts were… different.

The Washington Memorial would have been to our left.  But what towered in its place was a giant red phallus, complete in anatomical detail.  To our right, where Lincoln should have sat on his memorial, a faceless statue of a hominoid demon sat upon a basalt throne, squirming, naked bodies trapped under each claw where its hands gripped the armrests.  The bodies looked real. So did the blood dripping down the stone.

“Ah.  Been wondering when we’d see the human inhabitants of Hell,” Lydia said.

“You think those are people who’ve been condemned to Hell?” Stacia asked, curious.

“They should be here somewhere.  Those bodies look pretty alive to me,” Lydia answered.

Tanya looked at me.  “Don’t even think about it.  You can’t save souls from Hell.  That’s not your charter,” she said, reading me before I could even read myself.  She was right.  I couldn’t do anything about anyone sent here and I needed to squash my curiosity. General Creek was right, I decided—I
do
have a hero complex.

Straight ahead was the Reflecting Pool, only it was filled with blood-red liquid and lumps and chunks of things that had maybe once been alive.  We skirted it to the east, sliding around the base of what should have been the World War II memorial but was instead a statue of a grinning Hitler sitting on a throne of bones and skulls. 

“How far to the river?” I asked.

“The Tidal Pool is just up ahead,” Stacia said, sounding a bit unsure.  We moved forward, drifting a bit west, and a wide opening appeared ahead.  As we came to it, we got our first view of the river area, but instead of a wide expanse of blue water, a burning, churning pool of molten lava bubbled in front of us, an even wider river of liquid magma flowing on the other side of it.

Chapter 30

“How the Hell are we gonna cross that?” Stacia asked as we all looked across the orange river of melted rock, shimmers of incandescent heat rising like a curtain across our path.

“Bridges,” Arkady said bluntly.  We looked at him, but he was looking west where just visible in the distance was a black line arcing over the sea of orange and red.  Almost as one, we turned and looked east, quickly finding an even larger black construct that passed over the magma.

“That big one must be the I-395 bridge analog,” Nika mused. 

“And those dots moving on it are what?” Lydia asked. 

Tanya lightly jumped up on Awasos’s sofa-sized back, then rode his shoulders as he stood up.  From her new observation point, she studied the big bridge in the distance.  “Looks like lines of naked people, under the whips and claws of demons, moving across the bridge.  Hundreds of them.  Two lines going in opposite directions.  Some are carrying stuff,” she reported.

“Hey, look, you’re riding bear back,” I said as her bear lift brought her back down.  She just shook her head while Lydia gave me a look of mock disgust.  Arkady held out one big hand, palm down and waggled it.  “Is almost funny,” he said.

Behind us, something howled.  Another voice joined it, and then a third.  The sound seemed familiar, if something that sounds like the Hound of the Baskervilles crossed with a pterodactyl could be familiar.  A memory was trying to surface—one of Grim’s.  Flashes of a park, a glowing spirit bear, pony-sized hounds, and a man and woman, both in leather.

“Something found the ‘pede,” I said.  We all shared a wide-eyed glance, Lydia not even bothering to say, “No shit, Sherlock,” as she normally does.

“Little bridge it is then,” Tanya said, checking all our faces for agreement.  We nodded and moved west toward what should have been the Korean War memorial.  Instead of soldiers in ponchos, there were skeletons draped in tattered cloth, some bare bone, some with patches of dried flesh and sinew.  We moved quickly through the disturbing display, picking up speed when another howl split the air behind us, but much, much closer.  We ran.

An arched bridge came into view, its long, low length spanning the red river of lava with nine or ten arches that somehow avoided melting in the fantastic heat.

“What bridge is this supposed to be?” I asked.

“The Arlington Memorial Bridge,” Stacia replied.

Lydia looked at her, right eyebrow raised.  “Eighth grade field trip?”

Stacia just nodded while we all studied the bridge.  It was actually pretty wide, maybe six lanes if it had been on Earth instead of in Hell, and constructed of heavy, black basalt blocks.  The entrance to the bridge was flanked by statues, each of them a likeness of a demon riding a human like a horse, with bridles made of barbed wire and the dew claws of the demons gouging bloody holes in the flanks of their steeds, who were crafted in such a way that you couldn’t figure out if they were male or female.  The carvings were depicted in the cruelest way possible, with blood and horrific pain reflected in every aspect of the detail.

We all paused for a second at the sight of them, but an ear-splitting howl shocked us into motion, the six of us trotting out onto the bridge.  We’d covered maybe two hundred feet with only another eighteen hundred or so to go when a giant form crawled up over the railing of the bridge and stood in the center, its red skin glowing from the heat of the magma.  We slid to a stop at the sight of the massive demon, which reached up and unslung a six-foot-long black hammer.  The demon itself had to be close to eighteen feet tall.  Arkady looked behind us and cursed in Russian under his breath.  We glanced back.

A string of five giant hounds with lava eyes and spiked collars, each the size of a Shetland pony, spread out between the two statues, a pair of humanoid figures moving up behind them, one male, one female, blocking our exit.  The man had red hair, the woman brown, and both wore red and black leather that made them look like demons.  Or maybe they were wearing demons… demon skin.

“Well, I’ll be Mary, would you look at that.  It’s that fellow we’ve been wishing to meet up with for these last few years,” the man said.

“Aye Colin, just the bucko, and he’s brought friends.  Such pretty ones at that,” the woman replied.

“Remember us, do ya, lad?” Colin called out, uncoiling a long black whip that seemed to be studded with sharp things.

My blood burned at the sight of them and Grim surged into control.  My right hand came up, thumb and forefinger an inch apart.  “A bit,” I said, my voice deeper.

Colin raised his eyebrows.  “Would ya listen to that, Mary?  It sounds like the young lad’s stones have finally dropped.”

“Oh, and such a handsome one he’s turned into.  He’ll be great fun, don’t ya think?” she asked.  “And look at his pretty girl, taking her clothes off for ya, making it easy.”

Stacia
was
taking off her clothes, folding her jeans and shirt in the corner of my vision.  The witch couple seemed to think it was for their benefit instead of a preparation for battle.

Behind us, the bridge rumbled and when I glanced back, the giant demon was starting our way.

“Sorry to interrupt, but we can’t stay,” I said,
reaching
with my right hand and
grabbing
a Hellhound with my mind and aura, whipping it up and over my head and right into the massive monster behind us.

The hound growled and the demon roared, Mary cursed, and Colin snapped his whip at the other hounds. Things got busy.