“No!” Patrick yelled, vanishing with a soft pop.
“Watch—” was all he heard Pan say before the air ruptured next to Marlow and Patrick appeared. He threw a punch that connected with Marlow’s gut, launching him up. The world spun and he landed on a pew hard enough to crush it to splinters. It was like Patrick had reached in and grabbed his lungs because when he tried to breathe he found he couldn’t. He whined like a beaten dog, clawing at the air until his solar plexus started working again.
What the hell was he doing? He was going to die.
Hands on him, wrenching him off the ground like he was a toddler. Then he was airborne again, slamming into one of the stone columns and dropping to the floor. The pain was like nothing he had ever felt, carving through him like a circular saw in his spine. He pushed himself to his feet just as Patrick ’ported back into the world, the boy’s teeth bared, his eyes full of a madness that made Marlow want to scream again.
“Got you,” Patrick said, wrapping a hand around Marlow’s throat. Marlow swung his fist but Patrick dodged the punch. He tried again, squirming in the iron grip, darkness starting to creep in at the edge of his vision.
Something exploded against Patrick’s head and he released his grip, staggering away. Truck was there, the big guy holding a twenty-foot pew like it was a baseball bat. He swung it again and it broke in half against Patrick’s back, sending him tumbling down the aisle like a bag of bones. Marlow didn’t hesitate, grabbing a pew of his own. It was solid oak but as light as a feather and he swung it in a wild arc toward Patrick. It was longer than he’d thought, glancing off the side of a pillar, jarring his spine so hard he thought it had been ripped out of his back.
He lifted the pew again for another strike but Patrick ’ported. Marlow spun around, waiting for him to appear. The cathedral was ablaze, a curtain of fire almost hitting the ceiling. Brianna was back, striding through the flame, her whole body shimmering in its burning shroud. A black hole opened up in the furnace of her face and she screamed again, a physical force that blasted through the church, lifting pews from the ground and scattering them.
Marlow couldn’t see Pan anywhere in the ocean of smoke and was halfway to calling her name when a forked branch of lightning exploded from the far end of the building, hitting Brianna and knocking her back. She lay on the floor, writhing and twitching. Pan was striding out of the coiling smoke, a face like murder. She pulled back her hand like she was going to pitch a baseball, then thrust it forward, grimacing. The whole cathedral lit up like it was dawn, Marlow shielding his eyes with his hands to stop from going blind. The noise was incredible, a million firecrackers going off at once.
“Come on!”
Truck grabbed his arm, dragging him across the church to where Brianna squirmed. Marlow coughed smoke out of his lungs, blinking tears and light from his vision, trying to see where he was going.
“Take that one!” Truck yelled, pointing to a column. He ran to the next one along, charging it like a defensive tackle bringing down a quarterback. It split on contact, a crack running all the way up to the ceiling. Marlow jogged to his and punched it, his fist blasting through the stone, sending shrapnel flying. The ceiling above them groaned, sagging. He punched again and the column broke, crumbling earthward and bringing half the roof with it. Truck barged his way through the wall to avoid the falling stone. Marlow ran too, the world spinning slower. He dodged falling rocks as he sprinted across the cathedral, tripping on a broken pew and sprawling back into real time. Dust and dirt rained down on him, the ceiling disintegrating overhead.
A chunk of wood and stone the size of a car broke free and crashed earthward. Pan aimed her power up, lightning tearing off a second piece, even bigger, which landed on Brianna with a dull crunch. Smaller pieces followed, burying the girl alive—or dead, or whatever the hell she was. Pan stopped firing, shaking her hands like they were hot, her face a mask of pain. There was a cry from across the aisle and Marlow looked to see Patrick, his expression so full of hate and anger that he looked demonic.
“Not again!” he screamed. “Not again! Not again!”
Then Night was there, blocking the view, saying, “We should go, whole place is gonna collapse.”
Marlow took her hand and pulled himself up, every cell in his body aching. Pan stumbled to them, her hands so black she might have had them on the barbecue. She smelled of summer storms and Marlow reached out, propping her up, her skin hot against his own. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped, staring at the pile of rubble where Brianna had fallen.
It was moving.
Something pushed up from the mess, a thin, red stalk that could have been a plant. It stretched farther and Marlow saw that it was an arm, stripped to the bone, scraps of flesh hanging off it. Five mangled fingers extended like petals, swaying back and forth almost as if they were waving. Patrick’s sobs had become something else, a lunatic laughter that rose above the roaring flames, above the ringing in Marlow’s ears.
“Not good,” said Pan.
That was an understatement. The mountain of debris was shaking, and with a bone-jarring crack it split in two. Brianna appeared in the gap, her body broken beyond recognition. Her skin had split in a dozen different places, slick purple organs poking out and swinging gently as she moved. Her head had been crushed, the top of her skull missing, hollowed out. But that didn’t stop her scuttling out on all fours. Her toothless jaw hung like a broken branch and she gargled through it, a single bloody word that might have been her brother’s name.
Pan stretched out her fingers and a bolt of cold light ripped out, but Brianna was faster, scampering spider-like to the side as the ground blasted into dust behind her. She vanished into the smoke but Marlow could still hear her hands and feet pattering wetly on the rock, moving fast, circling them.
“You’re all dead!” yelled Patrick, still laughing. “You’re finished!”
“You guys, go shut him up,” said Pan, wiping her face and smearing soot over it. Her voice trembled but her eyes were clear. “I’ve got the wormbag.”
Marlow nodded, taking a deep breath and walking toward Patrick. He’d never felt this tired in his life, never been in so much pain. Death was stalking him, hovering over his shoulder, just out of sight. And death was the least of his worries, too. Because where he was going the fires burned way hotter than this.
“You’re finished!” Patrick screamed, filling the air with lunatic howls. “You’re finished!”
Yeah.
Marlow had a bad feeling he was right.
GODDAMNED WORMBAG
Pan ran, stumbling over the loose stone. The ceiling was still raining chunks of plaster, the whole thing coming to pieces. Worse still, she could hear sirens from outside, closing fast. The place would soon be flooded with cops and firemen and Herc would be chewing her a new one.
If she lived, of course.
She heard shouts, glanced to the side to see Marlow and Night bursting in and out of real time as they attacked Patrick. She left them to it. She had bigger things to worry about. The back of the cathedral was a wall of flame, like the building had been sculpted from fire. She had to squint at it because it was so bright, holding up her hand against its heat. Something shimmered there, a shape scuttling across the broken ground. She opened her fingers and felt the energy build up, the air crackling as she fired off a painful burst of electrostatic discharge. It thumped into the fire, fighting it, creating a storm of light and flame. Brianna had long gone, moving impossibly fast on those broken bones.
“Where are you?” Pan muttered beneath her breath, ignoring the agony in her hands. Sweat dripped into her eyes, blood too, although she didn’t remember getting cut. She wiped it away, moving sideways across the width of the cathedral, trying to make sense of the fluttering shadows behind the remaining pillars. Brianna was a wormbag, the worst of the worst. She was capable of anything, but she had no soul, no mind. A madness of cruelty and horror that Patrick had wound up and let loose.
; There. Something scuttled between pillars and Pan ran for it, vaulting an upturned pew. The shape reared in the shadows, stretching up, too tall to be human. As Pan got closer she saw that Brianna’s body was unraveling, her spine stretching. The girl’s skin tore, her top half ripping free, rising like a cobra out of a basket of ribs. Guts slopped to the floor, the stench of ruptured intestines making Pan gag.
Brianna screamed and Pan threw herself to the side as a solid fist of noise blasted past. She rolled to her feet, dodging to the side, keeping the pillar in between her and the girl. Brianna’s crushed head peered around the side of it. Her neck was a snake’s, four times longer than it should be, the skin pulled taut and torn in places to reveal the slick cords of muscle beneath. Her drooping jaw shook and fragments of words dropped like spilled teeth. Her eyes had been burned out, just gaping holes in her ruined skull, but she still looked right at Pan.
“Yeah, make the most of it,” Pan said. “You’re going right back to hell.”
Brianna’s top lip—what was left of it—curled up, the closest thing she could manage to a smile. There was definitely life in those eye sockets, but Pan understood it didn’t belong to Brianna. Something else was looking at her, something much, much worse than a wormbag.
Pan jabbed both her hands out. Lightning burned from her fingertips, carving through the pillar, so bright that even though she screwed her eyes closed the world still blazed white. She kept it going until it felt like her fingers had been burned to stubs, then she snapped it off, staggering back.
There was a hole in the side of the cathedral, darkness pouring in through the gap. She could see the street outside, the gaping hole in the building opposite. Sparks flew from ruptured cables, brick dust crumbling. There was no sign of—
Something moved overhead, a spider clawing over the remains of the ceiling. Brianna was missing one leg but she was still quick, a tangled mass of sinew and skin that spasmed toward her.
And dropped.
She landed on Pan, a wet, stinking bag that thrashed and squirmed. Pan grunted, pushing against it, feeling Brianna’s fingers drill into her chest, into her neck, feeling the girl’s flapping jaw rub against her face. Something sliced through her stomach and the world was suddenly made of cold fire. The stump of Brianna’s leg bone was lodged in her flesh, pushing deeper. Her fingers, too, had pierced the skin of her chest, like the girl was trying to climb inside her, trying to wear her like a coat.
“No!” she grunted, punching up. Her fist ripped off a loose fold of cheek skin and it stuck to her knuckles, but Brianna didn’t notice, her body rocking, her bones grating against Pan’s.
She placed her palm against Brianna’s face and unleashed a burst of energy. There was a sound like a watermelon exploding and Brianna’s head vanished in a spray of blood and bone. Her body twitched violently, a spasm rocking through her. Pan pushed it away, shrieking as the girl’s dagger bones ripped free of her flesh. The one in her stomach stuck and she grabbed it with both hands, pulling it until it came free with a sucking sound.
The Brianna thing was a mound of flesh, twitching its way toward the hole in the cathedral wall like a headless chicken. Pan pushed herself up, trying to get to her feet. The world spun and she dropped to her knees, blood leaking out of her wounds, pattering to the ground and steaming on the hot stone. She backed against a pew and sat there, trying to find her breath. The fire was everywhere now. Death couldn’t be far away. At least the demons would feel at home when they came for her.
“Bring it on,” she told them, wondering if dying in a cathedral would give her soul a fighting chance in hell, knowing that it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. She put her hand to her ear. “Truck?”
Nothing.
“Night?”
Nothing but static. Dammit, why do I have to do everything? The wormbag was almost out and something else was happening to it. The remaining scraps of skin seemed to be bulging, like somebody was inflating Briana’s corpse with a pump. A wet, red bladder was pushing its way out of the stump of her neck, a clutch of pus-filled eyes bulging open in the mess. Pan swore, gritting her teeth as she staggered to her feet. She held her stomach like she was holding in the last few scraps of life, wondering if she had it in her to make it outside, and knowing what would happen if she didn’t.
“Come back here, you goddamned wormbag,” she said, wiping the blood from her mouth. “I’m not done with you yet.”
WE SHOULD PROBABLY KILL IT
Marlow was airborne again and he didn’t even know how. He managed to raise his hands before he hit the cathedral doors, crashing through them and landing hard on the street. He thought he felt something inside him snap, his ribs suddenly made of molten lead. He rolled to a halt next to a car, looked up to see a cop staring right at him, the man’s jaw almost on the floor.
“Hi,” Marlow tried to say, but it came out as a groan. The cop was wrestling with his sidearm, tugging it out of the holster, and Marlow opened his mouth to try to explain himself, to tell him they were fighting on the same side.
Then Patrick was there, ’porting out of thin air. He swiped his arm and the cop went flying. Patrick grabbed the squad car and hefted it over his head, his fingers gouging holes in the metal like it was made of butter. Marlow rolled out of the way just as the car came down, crumpling next to him, cratering the asphalt. He scrambled to his feet and bolted past another cop—this one falling back in slow-motion shock, looking like he was sitting on thin air.
The pain in his ribs was too great and he had to stop, time snapping back. There was a grinding crunch of metal as Patrick lobbed the same car across the street. Marlow raised his arms just in time to deflect it, the impact knocking him back. By the time he’d recovered, Patrick was gone.
“Where’d he go?” Night said, materializing next to him. She looked exhausted, putting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. “Oh, there he is.”
Marlow looked to see a fire truck grating toward them on a wave of sparks. Marlow threw himself on Night, pulling them both to the ground as it bounced over their heads, close enough to touch, uprooting trees and signs before slamming into the side of the Banana Republic store. Patrick flashed into sight next to it, relentless, grabbing the truck and spinning it around in a wide, deadly arc. Marlow tried to move but he wasn’t quick enough, the truck driving into him and catapulting him over the street. He lay there, everything spinning.
“Get up, lazy ass!” Truck yelled, barreling past and grabbing Patrick in a bear hug. Night was there too, laying into him like he was a speedball in the gym. Patrick grunted and popped away, appearing again in an instant on the opposite sidewalk. He staggered, bracing his arm on the cathedral wall, looking about three steps away from death. Then Truck was on him again, launching the fire truck like a spear. Patrick didn’t ’port this time, just threw himself to the side as the truck hit the cathedral. It was like a wrecking ball, too much for the burning building, half of St. Patrick’s falling into itself like a wave-washed sand castle.
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” said Truck, his whole body jiggling as he crossed the street. But it was too late, the dust clearing to reveal an empty space where Patrick had been.
Marlow’s head snapped left and right as he tried to pinpoint where he’d ’ported to. There, movement to the side of the cathedral, something creeping out of the smoke. He squinted into the dark. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Patrick. It couldn’t even be human, could it? The space where its head should have been was just a ragged hole, something grotesque bulging from the stump.
“What is that?” said Night, leaning on him for support.
The creature crawled onto the street, a mangled mess of skin and bone that looked as if it had lost a battle with a wood chipper, a blast furnace, and a steamroller all at once. It was shaking, struggling to stay upright on its severed limbs. And something was definitely happening inside it, impossible shapes pressing against the remaining scraps of skin.
“I don’t know
,” said Marlow, trying to swallow his stomach back inside. “But we should probably kill it.”
The bulge of the creature’s neck stump was ballooning outward, a mass of leathery flesh mottled with dark veins. There were eyes there, a whole bunch of them, as big and as watery as cracked eggs. A hole opened beneath them, a gaping, toothless maw that snatched at the air. It uttered a foghorn groan so loud and so low that Marlow didn’t so much hear it as feel it in the soles of his feet.
“Yeah, we should really kill it,” he said, gritting his teeth against the pain. “You do it.”
Something burst out of the creature. It was a fat, jointed limb that had to be six or seven feet long, sliding loose alongside a gout of black blood. At the end of it was a hand that looked half human and half reptile, topped with a mix of stumpy fingers and blade-like claws, dozens of them. Another followed, tearing out of the jelly of Brianna’s demolished rib cage, a limb of muscle and sinew. They were expanding impossibly fast, swelling, the skin stretching to accommodate them.
The creature’s torso was growing too, like something had hatched inside the corpse of the girl. It bulged out, as black and shiny as a tick’s shell. It was as big as a horse now, even more limbs sprouting from it. The beast tottered unsteadily, unable to control its bulk, its mouth lolling open, gumming the sky, its eyes straining, bulging.
“No, it’s okay,” said Night. “You can do it.”
“No, really, it’s all yours,” Marlow said.
The world burned white and he threw his hands up against the force of it. Bolts of lightning scorched their way from the cathedral, turning the air to cold fire as they sliced into the beast. Its insect hide crackled and spat and it reared up on its stunted back limbs. Black hairs—no, spikes, as big as javelins—were erupting from its hide, bristling like a porcupine’s.
Another burst of electrostatic discharge, forks of lightning slicing through the night. They whip-cracked against the creature’s rear end and it howled, a cannon shot of sound that tore into the air. It broke into a run, the whole street trembling with the force of it.