Rudolph! (15 page)

XIII

T
he demonic host was caught off guard by Rudolph's surprise attack.
Satan staggered back from Rudolph, his forehead bleeding. His grip on his cigar loosened, and the thick cylinder fell towards the deck. Cupid spun and lashed out with a hoof. It was a NFL-worthy kick; the cigar flew the length of the deck, and vanished over the edge of the plate.

Blitzen lowered his head and charged the nearest rank of demons. He caught one in the belly with his rack, and it howled loudly, clawing frantically at his antlers and raking free long strips of velvet. When Blitzen shook his head, the demon popped like a water balloon, dispersing in a smear of dank smoke.

The rest of the team leapt into the fray with equal abandon.

Satan, blood streaming down his face, tried to clout Rudolph with a fist, but the reindeer reared back beyond Satan's reach. I dropped the detonator and tried to grab the harness, but my hand closed on nothing, and I slid off Rudolph. Satan ducked under Rudolph's flailing hooves and drove a shoulder into the reindeer's chest.

Ring got in a good shot, smacking his head against the back of Satan's thigh. Satan stumbled, his center of gravity disturbed, and Rudolph caught him in the face with an upward antler swipe. Satan stood on his toes for a second, his head cradled in Rudolph's antlers, and then he tumbled to the deck.

When he scrambled back to his feet with a roar, the vial was still on the plate. He kicked it accidentally as he sprang at Rudolph, grabbing the reindeer Greco-Roman style, and they strained against one another, titans wrestling for the fate of the world.

I dove for the vial, trying to get my hands on the last of the Spirit of Christmas before someone trampled it. Something grabbed my feet and pulled me back. My chin rebounded against the deck, and I felt a sharp sting as the contact drew blood. I struggled as I felt the thermal suit tearing around my ankles. A gangly demon covered with spikes was clawing at my legs, his cracked nails shredding my thermal suit. Soon, those nails would be doing the same to my flesh if I didn't get him off me.

A large hoof hit the deck next to my head, and I froze. Reindeer, like most four-legged creatures, will instinctively not step on living things in their path, but I didn't want to press my luck. Especially with a reindeer the size of Donner. The demon hissed at Donner, who took it as an invitation and charged. There came a satisfying thud, and the demon let go. Donner lifted his head, the howling demon caught in his rack, and heaved the flailing monster toward the edge of the plate. It scrabbled and flailed as it bounced along, but its nails were no good against the metal, and with a final howl of outrage, it went over the edge.

I stayed low, scanning the plate for the vial as the demonic host went back and forth with the reindeer. I couldn't go toe-to-toe with any of big demons, and so I had to be small and quick as I darted about in search of the vial.

I nearly had it when a squat demon backed over me. He fell on his ass, and I banged my chin on the plate again. Vixen had been chasing the demon, and he poked at it with his antlers, forcing the ugly monster to scuttle away on its backside. Lying on my stomach, I reached for the vial, catching it with a finger at first and then flicking it around so that I could a good hold on it. I half expected someone to suddenly step on my hand or kick my fingers—that's the way these sort of things went, right?—but my fingers closed around the vial without mishap.

It was warm to the touch, and the liquid turned from green to red when I shook it. I fumbled with the pouches on my belt, dumping it in the first pouch I could get open. It wasn't quite a lead-lined, Kevlar-covered, gelatin-filled capsule, but it would do.

The reindeer had been giving as good as they got, and I would have guessed the odds were pretty even, but the arrival of a pack of large winged monstrosities with more teeth than brains was tipping the scale. These flappers harried the reindeer from above, which forced them to split their attention.

And then the odds went from bad to worse when Satan caught Rudolph with a haymaker that knocked the reindeer down. As I watched, Satan jumped on Rudolph, straddling the struggling reindeer, and delivered punch after punch.

Ring darted up and head-butted Satan with his tiny knobs, and when that didn't get Satan's attention, he started flailing away with his hooves, doing a pretty good meat tenderizer impression. Annoyed, Satan stopped punching Rudolph long enough to twist around unnaturally. He caught one of Ring's legs and pulled the young reindeer close. He raised his other hand, fingers spread, and pressed it firmly against Ring's chest. There was a crackling flash of smoke and Ring flew across the plate, his fur burning.

Rudolph tried to buck Satan off, but Satan held on tight, riding Rudolph like a prize rodeo rider. When Rudolph started to tire, Satan wrapped his hands around Rudolph's neck. Rudolph squirmed, trying to get his antlers in play, but Satan ducked his head and leaned in close, his hands squeezing.

I caught sight of Prancer's bones, and my gaze was drawn to the circular shape of his skull. He didn't have the largest rack of the team, but he had always been one of the most obstinate.
Dense,
even. I darted across the deck, grabbing at the short rack of antlers as I ran by.
Hardheaded
, I hoped.

Rudolph's eyes were straining, and his tongue bulged out of his mouth. Satan wasn't exactly having an easy time of strangling the big reindeer; I could see the corded strain of the muscles in his arms as he bent to his task. It wasn't going to be a quick death.

"Yo, Scratch," I shouted, and Satan swiveled his head in my direction. His eyes gleamed with excitement, and his smile was filled with hellfire.

He never should have looked.

I wound up and swung Prancer's skull like I was aiming for the center field triangle in Fenway Park.

The v-shaped weapon was not unlike a turkey wishbone, and I made my wish as the heavy object smashed into Satan's face. I kept my grip, even though my elbows went numb, and the other half of the antlers splintered off as Satan was lifted off Rudolph and sent sprawling across the plate. He flopped over once and lay still, his nose mashed flat on his face. It was going to take all the plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills to make that face pretty again.

Rudolph was flopping around too, and even though he was having trouble breathing, he was still in better shape than Satan. "Grand slam," he wheezed as he struggled to his feet.

I hefted the remnants of Prancer's skull and antler rack. I still had the bigger piece. "Sometimes," I said, "you get what you wish for."

"You've got to think bigger when you do that, Bernie," he said, looking past me. I looked, and saw more flappers approaching. "You should have wished for an entire carrier battle group."

"You want to threaten them with the thermos again?" I asked.

Rudolph shook his head painfully. "You can only fool ‘em with chicken soup once."

I stared at him. There was a matched set of fingerprints bruised into his throat, and blood from a nasty cut over his left eye was painting his muzzle and throat. "You
were
bluffing," I said. "The others said you glowed when you tried to bluff at cards. That was your tell. That's what gave you away."

He smiled. "Hey, they let me play, didn't they?"

Donner whistled from the far end of the plate, calling the team to formation. The others started to disengage, falling back toward the muscular reindeer. Donner kept the edge clear of demons, and the reindeer charged for the gap, laying about themselves with antlers and hooves as they ran. I swung up onto Rudolph's back, both of us wincing painfully at the contact, and he limped towards the opening.

Donner was wrestling with a monster three times his size as we approached. Ring darted past us and butted the demon in the calf with his head. The monster slipped, and Donner yanked his head to the left, throwing the demon off the plate. Just like that, there was nothing between us and the edge. Rudolph stumbled slightly as he tried to run, and I leaned forward, hanging on tightly as he went over.

The worst dive ever, but neither of us cared. We were off the plate, and it only took Rudolph a second or two to orient himself and start gliding on the super-heated air rising up from the furnace heart of hell.

"There!" I pointed out the rest of the team to Rudolph. They had found a floating rock that was relatively flat, and were already landing on it like tiny snowflakes. Rudolph spiraled down, and managed a landing that was about as bad as his dive.

"Nice—"

I didn't finish as clawed hands wrapped themselves around my head and pulled me right off Rudolph's back.

I squirmed in the demon's grip, but I might as well as have been a biscuit for all the good it did. This demon was enormous, and I had no idea where he had come from, but he was on the rock with us now. Holding me aloft with one hand, and forcing Rudolph's head down with his other. He was kneeling on Rudolph's back, bending the reindeer's spine in a direction it wasn't meant to go. He was the size of an office building, swollen with dark fluid and shaped like a Cubist's nightmare. He had six eyes in his massive head and his tongue looked like the rainbow tassel on the end of a winter cap.

My vision swam—no, more like it was drowning, going down for the third time. I could barely make out the other reindeer, and I dimly tried to figure out why they weren't helping us. They were all on the far side of the rock. Half of them were crouching and Ring was actually bouncing up and down. Blitzen was at the point of their loose formation, and when he looked back at us, I realized what he was doing.

The demon giggled—a sound of crumbling boulders—his attention on Rudolph's flexing back. The big reindeer was trying to squirm out from beneath the demon's weight before his spine snapped. Neither of them were paying much attention to where our floating stone was heading.

Blitzen was changing the course of our rock by altering the distribution of weight across it. Ring's Tigger impression was making tiny corrections to our course as we hurtled across the sky. I stopped squirming, and shoved one of the demon's thick fingers out of the way enough to see where we were going.

Rather, what was heading for us.

A rock, twice the size of our flying boulder, was on a collision course.

Blitzen was going to scrape us along the belly of the bigger rock. Not enough to take off a layer of stone, but enough to clothesline the big guy squishing Rudolph. And If he was still holding me at the time . . . 

My kingdom for a witticism
, I thought fleetingly as the air in my lungs vanished. My mom had imprinted me with a great deal of Shakespeare when I had been too small to get away, and it had a tendency to bubble to the surface when everything else fled. What I wouldn't give for a tongue sharpened by a serpent's tooth or a brief gift of Puck's gab or Mercutio's rapiered repartee. Or even the Riverside edition to bludgeon this monster with.

The large rock loomed like a falling planetoid, and I closed my eyes, unwilling to watch the end as it arrived.

Out, out, brief candle
 . . . was my final thought. Well, not my final thought. My final thought was:
Really? The Scottish play? That was how I was—

XIV

"S
top squirming," Donner admonished through clenched teeth. He
was biting down on the upper part of the thermal suit, and I was—thankfully—still in the lower half. I had no recollection of how far I had fallen or what had happened after . . . 

Blitzen had piloted our floating rock perfectly, close enough to the tumbling asteroid to have turned Han Solo's hair white. A melted spire jutted out from the surface of the bigger rock, and when it hit our asteroid, the demon had other things to worry about. I was tossed aside as the spire cut a large gash through our rock, tearing up the layers of basalt like a piece of bread in the hands of a cholesterol-hungry butter-lover coming off a five day detox.

The spire missed the demon, but it got hung up on a hunk of something hard in the core of our rock. Rudolph tumbled across the stony ground as the two rocks snapped toward each other, the hook holding them tight. The smaller rock flipped around the hook, and smashed itself against the bigger rock, crushing everything between them.

The impact had been noisy, and shards of stone flew off both rocks. I tried to figure out if any of the flying chips were actually tiny reindeer, but I was busy falling.

It's a long drop into the furnace of hell. Long enough to get maudlin, and I had been starting to really feel sorry for myself when Donner swooped down and snagged me.

I felt like a lion cub being dragged home after having been caught wallowing in the week-old carcass of a zebra, bouncing and dangling from my mother's jaw.

It was a great feeling, actually.

I caught sight of a glimmering rectangle lit by fire. "Satan's awake," I shouted up at Donner. "And he's putting out a call for all of his friends."

Donner flew faster, and I stopped looking behind us and started looking ahead, trying to figure out where Donner was headed. We passed the smashed together rocks, which were still spinning end over end, and kept going.

Going where?
I wondered.
How were we going to get out of here?

There was a different glimmer far ahead. A ribbon of light flowing through the endless sky. Like a river.

Styx?

Other shapes floated up around us, and I did my best to not squirm as I looked at them. Dasher and Dancer and—

My heart skipped a beat.

—and Vixen. And Comet and Cupid and Blitzen and Ring.

"Is that a river?" I shouted at Blitzen.

"We hope so," he shouted back. "How many rivers are there in hell?"

Three actually
, I thought. Styx, Cocytus, and Acheron. According to Dante, Cocytus ran around the ninth circle, spilling over into the pit. Acheron ran between the worlds, and that was the one we had come in on. Which left Styx. Where had Dante put the river Styx?

"What about Rudolph?" Ring cried. "We can't leave him."

Blitzen shook his head. "He's gone, kid. He didn't make it."

Ring stiffened his legs. "No," he wailed.

Donner and Blitzen slowed too, and the rest of the team streaked on, heading for the river. Behind Ring, who was trailing all of us, appeared a dark line limned with fire.

Satan's host was coming.

"The collision flattened anything larger than a dust mite," Blitzen told Ring sadly. "Rudolph wasn't in any shape to fly. He didn't get off in time." He nodded toward the thickening line behind us. "They're coming, Ring. We don't have time to go back and check."

"No one gets left behind," Ring said coldly and wheeled around, streaking back towards the two embracing stones.

Blitzen watched the little reindeer swoop and dart back towards the spinning pair of rocks. "I'm too old for this," he muttered. He looked over at me and shook his head. "Not one word from you," he admonished. "You've got the vial. You're going home. Don't wait for us." He shot off after Ring.

Donner was a good soldier, and he listened to Blitzen. I kept my mouth shut and my hands wrapped tightly around my chest. There was a burning ache behind my ribs. Prancer. Rudolph. Ring. Blitzen. How many were we going to lose?

The river was a flat Möbius strip winding its own course through the rock-filled air. A large stone shot through the ribbon, and water splashed outward in an explosive arc, the huge droplets falling as hissing rain. The hole in the river remained for a second, and then the water filled it in. There was an invisible channel cut in the sky, and the river continued along that path as if nothing had happened.

We flew up and over from the side, the team gliding onto a path directly over the river. From above, it looked like any body of slow-moving water, deep and wide enough to move with languid grace towards its final destination. I glanced up and down its length, trying to spot anything floating on its surface.

The boatman had said there was no hope on the river. And I expected the same was true for Styx as it was for Acheron, but I had hope all the same. I remembered reading that all the waters in hell came from the same source: a large stone statue hidden in a black grotto. The rivers came from the mouth of this chiseled king, and all the waters were tainted by the eternal tears that flowed down his cheeks. Metaphor and hyperbole broke the rivers up shortly thereafter, taking them on their own routes around the lands of hell.

I looked up and down the river, and hoped. I hoped the boatman hadn't lied to me, that he wanted to hear another story. That he wanted to laugh. I hoped the vial shoved in my belt pouch was going to be enough to save Christmas.

"Boat ho!" Comet shouted, and he dropped to the left, angling for a mist that was now bubbling on the water. There was a familiar shape at the edge of the mist: the most bedraggled barge in all the world. The rest of the team banked like a flight of dark crows and followed Comet. Donner let go of my collar as he touched down on the barge's deck, and I quickly stumbled to the hooded scarecrow hunched over the tiller.

"So, Dreamer," he said softly. "Have you come to tell me a story?"

I bent over my knees, trying to catch my breath. "It's a good one," I managed. Between gasping breaths, I spun him a fantastic tale about reindeer and the hosts of hell. The rest of the reindeer weren't all that interested, and I stuttered for a second when I realized what they were looking at.

There were tiny shapes tumbling toward the river. It was hard to be sure against the boiling cloud of smoke and flame hot on their heels, but it looked like three reindeer.

My heart beat quickly in my chest, and I inhaled, rushing through the story. I had to finish it before hell caught up with them.

Rudolph and Blitzen and Ring were flying as fast as they could, fleeing before the thundering line of the howling host. There were little ones that looked like half-chewed lumps of bubble gum; tall ones that dwarfed the one that had landed on our rock; creatures made from bone, and some formed completely from flame. They howled and screamed and wailed as they filled the sky behind the flying reindeer.

The ferryman's face was invisible inside his hood, so I couldn't tell whether he was enjoying my story or napping on his feet. I got impatient and skipped over the discovery of the little town, jumping right to our showdown with Satan. I started to babble, the words tripping out of me.

The three reindeer plummeted into the river, bobbing up on the disturbed surface and paddling desperately for the edge of the barge. The team shouted encouragement as the sky overhead filled with the swarming mass of the host of hell. Demons fell out of the sky, and plumes of steam rose from the river as they hit the water.

Donner kicked out a section of the barge's railing to make it easier for Blitzen to struggle onboard. Rudolph was bobbing behind Blitzen, but he kept slipping under the surface like he was having trouble staying afloat.

I waved my arms and danced about, recreating the battle with the demons in a crazed community theater style. The ferryman hadn't laughed at the bit where Rudolph clobbered Satan in the head—which I had thought would have sealed the deal, but this room was tougher than I thought. I was getting desperate for a laugh, which is the worst situation any stand-up entertainer can be in.

Rudolph didn't have enough strength to climb onboard. He could barely keep his head out of the water. Around him, the river was foaming and boiling as demons thrashed toward him. Ring paddled around Rudolph, trying to help push him onto the barge, and as I got to the part of my story where Satan was choking Rudolph, the little reindeer took a deep breath and dove underwater. Rudolph had managed to get one hoof and leg on the barge, but he was clearly exhausted and couldn't manage to raise himself any higher. Suddenly, his rump lifted out of the water, and he heaved the front half of his body onto the barge.

As Rudolph dragged his dangling rump and hind legs onto the barge, Ring popped up in the boiling water. The little reindeer gasped for breath as he paddled furiously. He disappeared under the water for an instant, coming back up a second later, paddling with some urgency. The disturbances in the water were getting more pronounced.

"And . . . and th-th-then I hit Satan in the face," I said breathlessly. "Like I was swinging at the last pitch of the last inning of the last game of the World Series. Down by two. Three men on. Count is full. One last pitch." I mimed the motion of hitting the game-winning home run.

The ferryman said nothing for a long minute, and then he leaned against the tiller. "Did you leave any marks?" he asked.

"I broke his nose," I said.

The ferryman chuckled, and he leaned back, pulling the rudder of his barge. Instantly, a curtain of fog and fire surrounded the barge, and the host of hell howled with impotent fury. The barge started to drift sideways to the current of the river, and I knew the host couldn't touch us any more.

"I like that part," the ferryman said, raising a bony hand to the opening of his hood as if indicating his nose. "He was obsessed with that face."

I stumbled across the boat to where the team was clustered around Rudolph and Ring. Rudolph was on his knees, still coughing up river water. He was covered with scratches, and part of his left ear was gone. He was having trouble focusing, and he stared at me a long time before he seemed to recognize me. "Did you get it?"

I tapped the pouch on my belt. "Yeah—" I started, but the words died in my throat when my hand came away wet. I fumbled for the zipper, and dug in the pouch for the vial. It was slick to the touch, and my hand shook as I held it up. There was a hairline crack near the bottom, and most of the Spirit had already run out.

Rudolph's head fell forward until his forehead touched the deck. "So close," he whispered.

"Take it," I said to him, lifting his head. He tried to pull away, but I held his jaw firmly. I pushed the near empty vial at his mouth. "Once this is gone, it's all over. Take it so Satan doesn't win."

He opened his mouth painfully and accepted the narrow vial. I pushed his mouth closed and his jaw moved sluggishly around the glass cylinder. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him tightly as he chewed and swallowed the last of the Spirit—glass tube and all.

Christmas was going to live on, even if only in the belly of a reindeer.

But Satan wasn't finished. He had a parting gift for us, a final chunk to carve out of our souls.

The rest of the team made room for me as I pushed through their ranks. Ring looked up at me as I knelt beside him. His eyes were wet with tears. "Don't shoot me," he pleaded. "It's not as bad as it looks." Satan's handprint was still visible on Ring, burned into his side, but protruding from the center of the mark was a jagged piece of bone. Some monster had hit Satan's target with perfect precision. Ring coughed and there was blood on his lips. "Don't put me down."

I stroked the rough fur of his sweaty head. "I won't," I said.

"Promise?"

I shook my head. "You're going to be fine. We're going home. We'll get you fixed up."

Ring struggled to sit up, and Donner put a heavy hoof on Ring's rump, holding the little reindeer down. Vixen made room as Rudolph dragged himself to join the group. "I did good, didn't I?" Ring asked, looking at Rudolph.