Infernal Angel (26 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Infernal Angel
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“You’re evolving so well, it’s amazing.” Angelese narrowed her pretty beige eyes. “I’ll bet you could give an entire Mutilation Squad a run for their money, and I’ll bet you could give a Grand Duke a serious headache.”
“I try.” Cassie peered further ahead and down. They were much lower now, skimming the tops of corroded buildings, shooting through smoke. “Isn’t it dangerous being this low?”
“A little. The smoke will give us cover.” The angel pointed. “Look. The Mephisto Building. See it?”
“How could I miss that?” Cassie said. Through occasional breaks in the smoke, Cassie spotted the tallest building ever constructed.
666 floors high,
she thought in awe. Monolithic, the building spired high, looking out on the city with hundreds of thousands of gun-slit windows. Gargoyles could be seen prowling the stone ledges of each level; Caco-Bats nested in the iron trestle that crossed to form the structure’s fastigiated antenna-mast. Even from this distance, it made Cassie dizzy just to look at. “That’s where Lucifer lives,” she muttered.
“It’s the heart of Hell. Rumor is he hasn’t left the building in a thousand years.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He looks just like ...” Something severed the angel’s answer, as her Umbra Specter began to rear. “Just ... bright light,” she said instead.
At the base of the impossible edifice, Cassie could see the strange pinkish heaps, like intestines. They looked like organic masses of something that rose several floors up. They glistened, throbbing. These were the Flesh Warrens; the only way into the Mephisto Building was through these organic channels. It was the ultimate security system. The Flesh Warrens possessed their own immune-system.
“We have to go there, Cassie,” Angelese began.
“What? You’re crazy! It’s impenetrable. The Flesh Warrens
eat
anything that enters.”
“We’ll find a way. Not now, later. There’s something going on there. Our spies have told us that Lucifer has left the top floor.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. We gotta find out what he’s doing up there. Here, take these and look.”
Angelese handed Cassie a pair of what she thought were binoculars, and they were ... in a sense. Cassie yelped. The odd black object hummed faintly in her hands, brimming with some occult energy. Jutting from the two forward lenses were a pair of huge, blood-shot eyes.
Binoculars, my ass!
Cassie thought.
“You can see miles with those things. It’s an Ophitte Viewer, the eyes of a Gargoyle charged by a Blood Spell. Gargoyles are Satan’s sentinels; that’s why he’s got them crawling all over the Mephisto Building, to watch for possible trespassers. They have very good vision.”
The fascinating meld of technology and the occult didn’t particularly impress Cassie. Every so often, the binoculars blinked. She hesitantly brought them to her own eyes and looked out, now surveying the very top of the Mephisto Building.
She’s right, something’s going on up there ...
She could see demons working, like a construction crew. They seemed to be building something around the ramparts of the roof, cranes droning to set in place rows of what appeared to be shiny greenish pillars.
“What are those pillars?”
“Plinths made of jasper. Any gem that exists in the Four Gates of Heaven has an opposite power here. In case you didn’t know—and haven’t read
The Revelation of John the Divine,
the outer wall of Heaven is made of jasper. In Hell, symbols have power the same way that an electric generator has power in the Living World. The symbol of something holy in Heaven—such as jasper—can be used sacrilegiously in Hell. The holy becomes
un
holy. Get it?”
“No,” Cassie said, still looking at the macabre rooftop construction.
“Lucifer’s got a bunch of plans brewing. The Merges, you, the Transposition that took place at that library in Maryland the other night. And now this, the jasper dolmens. They can be very dangerous Power Relics.”
Cassie didn’t understand and didn’t think she wanted to. She put down the hideous, blinking binoculars. “I don’t care if he’s got a Tupperware Party going on up there—we’re
not
going to the Mephisto Building.”
“No, not now. But later ...”
“Have fun,” Cassie huffed. “I’m not up for it.”
“Calm down. The only place we’re going right now is the zoo.” Angelese’s white hair churned around her head almost like an aura itself. “But there aren’t any giraffes and koala bears in
this
zoo.”
More confusion whipped around Cassie, with the wind blowing in. The Port slowed, cruising lower. Hell was full of abominable odors, but the odors here took the cake. Rot, offal, spoiling meat, and sweat on bodies that hadn’t been washed in centuries. A winding lane was lined with cages; Cassie saw upscale Demons, humans, and other elite Mephistopolites meandering from cage to cage. The Nectoport raced along over the lane too quickly for Cassie to make out details of the creatures in the cages, and she supposed she was grateful for that. At one cage, several well-dressed Broodren cawed as they poked sharp sticks through the bars. Each jab was responded to by a thunderous roar.
“They’re coming up,”Angelese said, looking down more intently now.
“What?”
“The Oubliettes.”
“The—” Over the next curve in the lane, the facility’s structure changed. Now all the infernal spectators, instead of looking up into the cages at either side, were looking down.
Into pits.
They were like cement cells forged into the ground, each covered by a locked frame of iron bars. And in each cell, cowering in a corner, or looking up in rage or horror, was an “exhibition.” Most were fugitives of one species or another—many Human. This place wasn’t as much a zoo as it was a display emporium for political heretics and convicts. Some had been torsoed, some skinned or mutilated, some infected with diseases specifically designed to increase the shock-value of their appearance. But not all of those condemned here were criminals. It was a business, after all, and visual outrage was the market. Other of the cell’s occupants were accidents from the Teratology Institutes and experiments gone awry from the Academy of Transfiguration: hexological mutations and transplantees.
It’s like a circus freak show,
Cassie realized, getting sick just looking,
only they’re manufacturing their own turo-headed cows ...
Spectators openly spat and urinated into the cells below, an encouraged debasement (she caught a glimpse of a sign: DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS, BUT FEEL FREE TO EXCRETE ON THEM). She also caught half-second glimpses of what seemed to be pipe-exits on either side of each cell ...
“Are those
pipes?”
Cassie inquired, a bend in her voice.
“Twice a day, they open the domestic sewer lines from the district—through every cell in the Oubliette Reservation,” Angelese informed. “Keeps the cells neck-deep in waste during off hours. It’s for the city’s most exclusive prisoners. Instead of putting them on the Gacy Detention Archipelago, or locking them away forever in the City Prison or one of the Emaciation Camps—they put them here. They put them on display to the public. For money, of course. In Hell, everything is for money, just like in your world.”
It was mortifying. Cassie looked away, she couldn’t witness any more of this, but that’s when the pertinent question finally struck her:
“Angelese? Why did you bring me here?”
The question gave her so much focus that she hadn’t noticed the Nectoport had stopped, its one-dimensional aperture hovering at the end of the Oubliette section.
“We don’t have much time,” the angel said.
“Answer the question!”
“Look. Look down.”
“I’m not looking at that place anymore!”
Angelese’s voice softened. “Look down, Cassie ...”
Cassie did, preparing herself for some new vision of disgust and degradation, but what she actually saw was worse than she ever could’ve imagined.
“Cassie?” a voice shrieked upward. “Cassie, is that you?”
Cassie screamed. Looking up at her from the demented, sewage-smeared cell, was her twin sister, Lissa.
“Cassie, for the love of God help me!” The plea shot up through the bars like arrows. “Get me out of here!”
Cassie trembled, choking. She tried to speak, tried to say something assuring to her dead sister but all that croaked out was: “Lissa ...”
“We have to go,” Angelese said. “We’ll be spotted.”
“No!” Cassie shot back, and all the emotion behind the response shoved the angel back. “We’re going down there and getting her!”
“We can’t. We’re channeling. We’re not corporeal. If we got her out, we couldn’t take her with us. She’d be recaptured immediately.” The Nectoport was sailing away fast as a missile.
“Cassie! No!” Lissa screamed. “Please don’t leave me here! How can you leave me here?”
Cassie was on her knees, sobbing. “Why? Why did you do that?”
“I promised you you’d see your sister again.”
“Yeah, great! She’s in a hole in the ground in a fuckin’
zoo!
You show me that but won’t do anything about it? What kind of a damn angel are you?”
“A smart one. We’ll go back and get her, Cassie, but we have to be
incurare
to do it—we have to be in the flesh. I just wanted to prove to you that I knew where she was. We’ll rescue her when we go back.”
“I want to get her out of there now!”
“That would ruin everything. If a sentinel or even a spectator saw us, they’d report it to the Constabs. Then Lucifer would know we’ve discovered Lissa’s location, and he’d move her. He’d put her someplace where we’d never find her.”
“When, then?” Cassie insisted. “I want to get my sister
out
of that place!”
“Soon, Cassie.” Angelese was standing at the Port’s rim, looking out at the macabre sky. She picked up the Ophitte Viewer and trained its living demonic eyes toward something in the distance. “Yeah.
Real
soon. Maybe tonight, if we’re lucky.”
Cassie was still gulping back sobs in the aftermath. “What are you ... looking at?”
The deranged binoculars were handed to her. “Look there, back at the Panzuzu District.”
Cassie wiped the tears off with her hands and looked. Four bright hyacinth-colored bolts of light, each the size of a tornado, seemed to be pulsing up into the night sky from a distance. When Cassie edged the binoculars down, she saw their source:
The Atrocidome....
“We have to wake up now, Cassie,” Angelese said. “They’re getting ready to begin the Spatial Merge ...”
Chapter Ten
(I)
Sarajevo, 1993
 
The snipers were both clinical sociopaths; many of Milosevic’s special operations and paramilitary soldiers were, in fact. It was brilliant. They’d checked in wearing business suits, not battle dress, with meticulous credentials that identified them as ethnic Albanian textile merchants. The “spotter” set up his observation post in the old hotel across the street from the target perimeter. First thing he did was measure the room’s current air temperature. Why? Variations in propellant temperature affected projectile trajectory. These two men knew their job. Ironically, the weapons that had been hidden for them by Serb undercover agents were both American-made—an M-40A1 long-range sniper rifle and an M-79 grenade launcher—traded to the Serbian Materials Command for Russian ACRID air-to-air missile blueprints as hand-me-downs from the Afghan War in the early ’80s. Some of the managers of this trade would later become members of a political group known as the Taliban.
Sniper One loaded the rifle’s integral magazine with five special 7.62 X 51 millimeter rounds that were filled with a lower-than-standard amount of propellent, this to reduce initial muzzle velocity to something slightly lower than the speed of sound and resultantly produce a soundless report through the chambered M11-SD sound-suppressor, which was screwed onto the end of the barrel. The Unertl lOx scope had already been calibrated specifically to Sniper One’s eye at a military range in the Vogvodina Flats west of Belgrade.
“I’m ready,” he said very softly.
“I’m not,” Sniper Two replied. He unwrapped four 40mm projectiles for the M-79. Two were incendiary, full of white phosphorous, the other two were APERS, which stood for anti-personnel. In parlance, the latter were referred to as “flechette”; it was a cannister packed with metal barbs that were deliberately rusted and infected with exotoxins.
“You won’t have time to fire all four,” Sniper One instructed. “Just two.”
“I know. I’m not sure which to choose but I like willy-pete,” Sniper Two replied, hefting a white phosphorous round. “They’ve been burning our children for five hundred years. I like to burn theirs.”
“Amen.”
Sniper Two would only be firing two rounds, and One five. They had to engage their targets and be out in fifteen seconds. They’d done this five times before, together, and had succeeded spectacularly.

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