[41] Still Cleveland

Most of Ubik's junk had fallen out of his coat one point or another, but something useful he left was a quaint silver pocket watch. Told exact time to the second. Ingenious bit of devil magic, a crown jewel of Ubik's collection, nowadays rendered obsolete by your average cell phone. But Perfidia lost her phone long ago.

The second hand ticked past midnight. It became Monday, December 18. Exactly three days before the deadline. Finally the edge of Whitecrosse showed on the horizon. A little cluster marked the cemetery where the Door sat open.

Kedeshah dropped out of the sky in front of their cute little horse-drawn cart. She touched down gracefully, one tiny foot extended to slow her descent with the tip of one toe. A blast of her wings blew back the aimless tide of passerby devils.

The commotion jolted Jay awake. He blinked before putting his hat back on his head.

"That took you awhile," Perfidia said. Kedeshah's eyes closed serenely and her mouth formed a subtle smile, but glowing white blood dripped from several spots. Ominous. Little made Kedeshah bleed.

But Kedeshah puffed out her chest and ran Ubik's coiled-up coat around her neck like a feathered boa. "Hmph!" Some of the journeyman devils drew near to see what the commotion was about, while others—more experienced—knew what Kedeshah was and cut a wide berth. "You say that like you asked something simple."

"Who's this," said Jay.

"Right. Introductions let's get em outta the way. Kedeshah, here's Jay Waringcrane. He's the guy. Jay, Kedeshah. She worked for my brother. There's also Lalum here somewhere—"

"Oh is that all I am now?" Kedeshah vaulted the tired horses and plopped into the now-cramped cart. "Your brother's employee! Fidi. Fidi, Fidi. Hurry and put this on, I like it better when you wear it." She shoved Ubik's coat into Perfidia's hands.

Rather than argue, Perfidia shimmied into it. Which of course got Kedeshah up against her like a kitten. "There we go. Mmm. The smell's not complete without you in it. Snfffffff!"

"So she's a weirdo too," said Jay.

"Oh, call me worse than that!" Kedeshah crawled toward him. "Human huh? Kinda scandalous? Becoming a human's plaything? Me! Daughter of Lust. Oh how pathetic, how base and fallen—"

"Maybe I beat you with this bat instead."

"Perfect!"

"Stereotypical," said Jay, and then his face twinged in subtle confusion.

"Let's stop fucking around already," said Perfidia. "We gotta—"

"Christ!"

Jay reared back. Kedeshah crawled onto him, sniffing and licking his neck. "Ohhh hurt aren'tcha? Lemme clean that up for you darling~"

After the monastery, Jay refused to let either Perfidia or Lalum use the Eye of Ecclesiastes to heal his wounds. Who knew why. Since Perfidia expected Kedeshah to show up anyway, she hadn't forced the issue. Now Kedeshah quickly kissed him all over, and Jay protested, and Perfidia glanced at Ubik's watch and span a finger in the air as if pressing fast forward on their horseshit. Lalum poked her head out the bushes beside the road and regarded Kedeshah with no uncertain distaste. Sorry sister.

(Lalum was different, though. She lost the tips of most of her legs, but even without the Eye of Ecclesiastes she'd regrown them all. How? Mayfair up to something? Might be a problem if Mayfair still cared enough to meddle with the papers.)

"Okay, okay," Perfidia said after the dumbassery went on long enough. "Kedeshah get off him. Get off! You wanna avenge Ubik or not?"

Kedeshah hopped on her haunches and stuck her tongue out. "Fiiiiine."

"Now what'd you figure out about Pandaemonium."

"Okay! First off, Pandaemonium upped its defenses. Way more than usual. There's a gigantic force of devils guarding the entrance and guess what? They're led by Moloch himself."

No big surprise. The head honcho clearly knew the Divinity was his weakpoint. Made sense to put all his terrestrial forces to its defense.

"So?" said Jay.

"So!" said Kedeshah with incredulous excitement.

"You can fly. The Divinity's at the top of the tower, right? Fly us there."

"No, no, no, you fail to understand dear simple base and lowly human. There is only one entrance into Pandaemonium. Ground floor."

"Punching through Moloch's forces shouldn't be impossible," said Perfidia. "Not for Kedeshah at least. The problem's Moloch himself."

"Think that if you like! I haven't even gotten to the real problem. The real problem's they put up a new barrier on the entrance. A barrier with perfect, one-hundred-percent effectiveness."

"Bullshit. You're saying Moloch and the other Princes willingly walled themselves into Pandaemonium?" Or maybe the head honcho forced them. Shit. Could he—? No. He needed at least some of the Princes willingly on his side or they'd go for the Divinity themselves. Beelzebub would always be loyal, but the others...

"The barrier," Kedeshah continued, "doesn't do a thing to devils. Devils can travel in and out freely—assuming they get past Moloch's security. The barrier's for humans."

"You mean—"

"Yep. There is absolutely no way for a human to enter Pandaemonium."

It—made perfect sense. A devil couldn't steal the Divinity by themselves. They needed a human. So simply prevent all humans from entering.

Kedeshah shrugged, cavalier. "You wouldn't believe how difficult it was to get this info. Moloch himself took a shot at me. See these wounds? But I guarantee it's accurate. No humans allowed. Sorry, Jay the human! Guess we can all quit striving for the impossible. Let's simply give in to carnal desire. Oh, I know! The two of you should fight over who gets me. Or maybe simply take me at the same time. You join too, spider-girl!"

"It can't be one hundred percent effective. There has to be a flaw." Perfidia rapped her knuckles against her skull. But this was the Seven Princes. They had limits, sure, but... There had to be some way. This couldn't be it. Her master plan couldn't be outsmarted this easily, and yet it could, it so totally could. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the fuck was she thinking? That it'd be a simple little waltz? Just have Kedeshah rush them past Moloch and go on their way?

She slumped against the side of the rickety wooden cart. Could the relics do something? Theoretically the Eye of Ecclesiastes could—No that wouldn't work, the eye couldn't return something to before it existed. What about other relics. Wasn't there one that tore down walls? Did a magic barrier count as a wall? She never considered such an implication when she made the damn thing, so probably not. If they got the Whitecrosse papers could she modify it? Time tick-tick-ticked. They'd have to find Mayfair, steal the papers, and then it might not even work, Perfidia set those relics in stone to prevent them being used in ways she didn't expect. Mayfair must have already found a way though, how else did she move Whitecrosse to Earth? That counted as a lead, but how long would it take to follow—

"Just use that," Jay said.

Tacitly ignoring Kedeshah's affections, he pointed at something. Perfidia's eyes followed to the graveyard ahead. The graveyard. With its mausoleums and—

The gears churned.

"Yes! Fucking yes! That's what I'm talking about Jay. You actually have some good fucking ideas y'know? I swear. Shit it makes perfect sense. And it's so simple too."

"Oh I get it," Kedeshah said. "Hah. So the human's got brains."

"We'd need you for it to work of course Kedeshah," Perfidia said. "You'll have to make it inside on your own—"

"Oh yeah, that'll be sooooo easy. I barely escaped Moloch the first time. Now he'll have his eye on me. Why don't you do it Fidi?"

"How the fuck am I supposed to get past Moloch?"

Kedeshah shrugged. "Maybe the genius human has an idea."

They both looked at Jay. Perfidia half-expected him to really have an idea, but Jay's face showed nothing.

"We can make a distraction or something I guess," he said.

"A distraction." Kedeshah suppressed a giggle.

"Why not."

"Look human. You don't seem to know who Moloch is. He's one of the Seven Princes, okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay?! So he's no random stooge. Plus his whole army's with him. What distraction could possibly be big enough to—"

A piercing roar interrupted her. Overhead, faster than sound, shot a formation of tiny triangles. Gone in a blink, passing over Cleveland.

Then Cleveland exploded.

—

Shannon gripped the wide-brimmed cowboy hat she'd put on to shade herself from the endless sun and stared overhead at the screaming that came across the sky. Wind whipped up around her; in the corpse-clogged Cleveland street the detritus swirled into a cyclone. Three blocks away a wall of flame rose, plus the collective wail of five thousand devils incinerated within it, and the ground trembled, and the soldiers swayed and staggered. Gonzago seized Shannon's shoulders to support her or maybe support himself. In the dying cavernous creak of the subsiding flames Shannon shouted: "We need to move NOW!"

"What's happening!" Gonzago said.

Despite the urgency Shannon could not suppress a smile. What's happening? The United States military was happening. That unlimited black hole of fiscal allocation would finally see its use, perhaps not as the generals in Washington once dreamed, but purpose was purpose. Those jet planes were more than mere firepower, they were the first indication of the right and logical restoration of order in this world.

Against the black tower a line of fireballs burst. The gaggle of Whitecrosse soldiers and Cleveland freedom fighters they'd picked en route scrambled down the street. Ahead, a pair of bulldozers they'd reappropriated shoved junk out of the way; past them Mallory worked her one-woman-army technique on the horde of devils in their path. Despite her prowess, forward movement had been sluggish, but with bombs dropping and devils exploding in droves that ought to change. The main issue was not getting blown up themselves.

They'd scavenged no small number of radios, but Shannon lacked technical expertise regarding how to use them, let alone how to contact the United States military. However this was merely a logistical concern. Supply lines, communication networks, these were as important to warfare as manpower and weaponry. Some of the Clevelanders they'd rescued, who traveled within their ragged caravan toting Wendell Noh-style rifles, seemed like ex-military types, bitter survivalists. Perhaps consulting them might—

The thought proved unnecessary. The bulldozers ahead stopped, and between them stood Mallory, hand cocked on her hip. Their road intersected another; across the intersection trudged a line of tanks, jeeps, and infantrymen, all in glorious army regulation camouflage. The Clevelanders cheered, soon followed by those from Whitecrosse.

"This is—this is good, right?" said Gonzago. "These are the soldiers of your country, yes?"

Shannon trotted between the bulldozers and stopped beside Mallory to stare both ways down the street. The soldiers extended as far as she could see. All were headed one direction: toward the black tower. Amid the tanks and jeeps were peculiar, blocky, rectangular vehicles. They looked similar to a tank, with treads and even a small turret, but with their cavernous backsides they looked designed more for moving people than combat. Shannon lacked complete knowhow of military tech and could only guess at their purpose, but their sloped fronts, shaped like the prow of a boat, gave her an idea.

The tactics became clear. First the jet fighters cleared a path through the devils. Then the tanks escorted the boat-shaped vehicles to the shore of Lake Erie. There, they would plunge into the water and ferry the soldiers for an amphibious assault on the tower.

To have cobbled together such a plan meant they must already know they couldn't simply bomb the tower into collapse. Shannon supposed it was a good thing the president decided on this instead of a nuclear attack.

"Exceptional army," Mallory said. "It lacks a certain flair, but I can appreciate brute force."

"Let's fall in with them," said Shannon. "You'll add your strength to theirs. At the very least, we'll ride these vehicles to reach the tower."

"Hm." A disapproving "hm." Mallory's head tilted; she surveyed the broad city street on its route toward the tower. "No. I believe I shall lead them."

Shannon doubted whether the legendarily intense discipline of the American army would allow for such a disruption to the established chain of command. In fact, even "falling in" with the troops might prove difficult—perhaps even counterproductive. Shannon looked at Mallory and then back at their eclectic hodgepodge of fighters and thought: Oh, yes. Perhaps the military should proceed unmolested. Waging war was their specialty. Their area of expertise. Their particular function, compartmentalized to maximum efficiency. They came now with forces necessary to complete the task, with the correct equipment—not merely the amphibious vessels, but radios, radar, sonar, lidar, all those pretty things Shannon used to sell Cleveland to the queen—and it was for her, Shannon Waringcrane, and these medieval anachronisms, to slink back and survive so that upon the restoration of order she may resume her own compartmentalized use: collecting taxes.

Had Shannon followed this impetus from the start, allowed the police to handle Jay's disappearance, where would she be now? What convinced her to ever embark on this odyssey? Dalt? She remembered him eagerly sleuthing Jay's location via cell phone search history. So long ago. But not Dalt. She'd never been led by Dalt.

The same impetus now electrified her. The impetus not to do as one soldier, leaning out the window of a jeep that trundled past, shouted: "You folks take cover—hide!" The role of a civilian. The role of Shannon Waringcrane, IRS agent. No. Perhaps the machine clanked once more. But she knew she could improve it. She knew she could contribute something stronger to its entangled processes.

She turned to Mallory. "We'll pass behind these buildings here. Move parallel to the convoy. If we get in their way they'll just try to stop us, but this way—"

A droplet struck the skin of her gesticulating hand. She glanced at it. A single red circle, warm.

A second droplet pattered the brim of her cowboy hat. A third struck her shoulder. Faces around her turned upward to the sunny, cloudless sky.

Then it began to pour blood.

Out of the spotless sky dropped Tricia. She wore the flouncy, sleek, pastel dress Mallory fished for her before they left the castle (a dress being among the only clothes she could wear given her lower body). "Something's happening. Something at the entrance of the tower."

"What something," said Mallory.

Shannon hurried past Mallory to the overhang of the nearest building. Gonzago and others followed. The military group progressed without hesitation even as red streaks ran down the sides of their vehicles.

"Some fashion of new devil emerged," Tricia said. "A tall man, wearing a uniform. He—"

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

A voice quaked from across the realm:

"WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO STAND AGAINST ME?! ARRAYED BEFORE ME LIKE ANTS? CREEPING TOWARD A FUTURE YOU CANNOT VISUALIZE? LET ALONE GRASP? MILLENNIA OF YOUR TEEMING PULLULATING FILTH, IRRITATIONS UPON IRRITATIONS, AND THIS IS HOW YOU CULMINATE? WIELDING LITTLE WEAPONS, PALE SHADOWS OF THOSE WE—WE—DESIGNED IN A WAR YOUR SEMI-SAPIENT BRAINS WOULD MELT TO EVEN PERCEIVE? THE SIGHT OF YOU DISGUSTS ME. WHAT PATHETIC ORGANIZATION, WHAT IRRELEVANT IDEOLOGY. KNOW THAT NOT EVEN YOUR DEATHS BRING YOU HONOR. I AM MOLOCH, PRINCE OF WRATH, AND MY RESOLVE TO ANNIHILATE YOU IS NO ADMISSION OF THREAT. IT IS MERELY MY NATURAL STATE. YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING! YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING! DIE!"

In the street, a thin red line angled acutely from the sky. It was aimed directly upon a tank. It lacked particular noticeability amid the bloody rain but stood out prominently anyway, as if some pattern-recognizing element of the brain latched upon its clear, unbroken form.

The tank it touched ceased moving. No smoke or screech, simply a stop. Then the line swept outward and split the tank clean in half and split the jeep behind it and the amphibious vehicle behind it and sliced through a group of infantrymen who fell in cleanly cut pieces: heads, arms, torsos. It took only a few moments for the soldiers in the street to understand and scramble to evade as the line made erratic, swirling curlicues.

Another red line descended from the sky. Another. Another. Another. Another.

"Move," Mallory shouted. One line sliced straight through the building beside them. It lost its stability and collapsed against itself. Mallory seized Shannon's arm, pushed her in a direction, and they ran.

Through the routes between the buildings, away from the main roads, accompanied by the soldiers of Whitecrosse and the survivalists and even the American soldiers who abandoned their vehicles and spilled into the smaller passages with their rifles and equipment. A triangulating coil of lines divvied a structure to mincemeat. Screams rang out, shouts, commandments, a plane moving supersonic split in two out of the sky and its streaming parts drove down into a row of buildings and exploded, the windows in the facades burst in unison, Shannon gripped her cowboy hat tighter like it might protect her and someone rammed into her from behind and she stumbled forward scraping her knee before Tricia and then Gonzago helped her up. Mallory rooted her feet into the ground, swung her holy sword, and sent a ray of light through the lines—but nothing happened, the lines were either unbroken or broken so briefly as to be irrelevant.

"Where do we go, Lady Shannon?" Gonzago whipped his head this way and that, searching for any red lines that might enclose upon them, that might burst out a wall without warning. "What do we do?"

"We have to get to the tower. We have to take out this Moloch. We have to fight our way inside! This is it. The military's sent their forces—this is the best shot we get!"

Mallory drifted by. She moved like a phantom, fast but graceful, and the macabre hook scar that terminated her smile shone brighter through the blood that ran down her face. She bellowed to the sky: "MOLOCH, PRINCE OF WRATH! JUST WAIT! I'M COMING FOR YOU!"

Her voice boomed so loud it made Shannon cover her ears. For an instant the rain stopped, the red lines went slack and instead of cutting merely splattered the walls and roads and people: they were made of blood. Then, as the commanding echo subsided and the sounds of the terrorized city returned, the lines tautened and more buildings collapsed in slow, sliding fashion as their top halves divided from their bottoms.

Now, though, the lines gravitated toward Mallory. Seeking her out, sweeping toward her specifically, yet she danced amid them with ease, wielding her own tremendous agility like a taunt, and Shannon couldn't tell if this was a clever ploy to keep the rest of them safe or Mallory simply being Mallory. Regardless, the way ahead became slightly less treacherous. Shannon motioned to the growing group behind her and spearheaded the way.

Past squat, square, Cold War-era structures, the last gasp of the city's prosperity, tumbling into narrow alleyways where trash piled high and rusted pipes rattled from the omnipresent tremor that became a heartbeat, over a chest-high brick wall into the shadow of a taller structure as the towers of downtown rose above them, splitting in two or collapsing in pillars of flames as the red lines tangoed with the jet fighters. The sliding glass shatter of a skyscraper's diagonally-divided segment slowly shifting off its perch. More and more people burst out of the woodwork, out of windows and walls, people of no discernable reason or purpose, simply the people of the city, everyone running and screaming until it became unclear whether they ran from or ran toward, only the shimmer of the sun-drenched lake and the black tower to serve as any possible destination in the mayhem. Cannons went off, guns fired, devils mixed into the mass first as red dots before an entire wall of them spilled out a hollow factory as though its long-rusted conveyer belts and smelters spat them freshly sulfuric from strip-mined metals. Two waves, human and devil, struck together, bodies twirled whipping out blood from slashed eyes, Gonzago swam above the tide and brought down a glancing blow with his sword that split a horned thing's scalp, the trailing innards of a large man grasping his stomach parted for a gore-drenched thing with yellow eyes to leap out.

Bouncing atop Shannon's head, touching with the weight of a feather before springing off and leaving the cowboy hat to whip away in the wind, Mallory cartwheeled and shot a beam from her sword that cut a clear oblique line through fifty devils before she pirouetted into the sun and became lost. At the same time Tricia seized Shannon by the waist and dragged her aside before the red lines scraping after Mallory had a chance to reach her former location, and out of the two crashing armies came apart endless chunks of flesh from both sides only for any injury to be immediately subsumed by the swell of still more bodies rushing to fill the void. Shannon lifted up, up, into the third or fourth story of a dilapidated structure as Tricia careened into and out of the utterly empty interior and placed her upon a patch of weedy greenery that burst defiantly from shattered chunks of concrete then whipped her abdomen at an angle to deflect the claws of a creature with a long snout and spines running down its back—

Everything in an instant flared hot and red, a force with no body hefted into Shannon's ribs and hoisted her upright, her feet left the ground, the ground scrolled beneath her, she clanged into a hard but hollow dumpster and teetered back dazed to watch the entirety of a ten-story structure catch flame and shudder its glass onto the heads of the twisting burnt bodies below. The supports cracked, the mathematical dimensions lost their precision, all exactitude rendered chaotic and thus incapable to continue the function they faithfully upheld all this time even through the prolonged and gradual decrepitude that ate molecule by molecule away at its roots, even through these decades of abandonment and misuse, the core of the idea had remained, the long-dead engineer's vision persisted, no wastefulness or apathy had been enough to do what one sudden burst of strife now caused: the tiers dropping upon themselves, one after another, even their destruction following a geometry, until the dust and debris billowed too thick and Shannon clamped her arms around her face and saw no more.

She blundered, blind, feeling along the exact and present metal edge of a dumpster, then the hard stone of the building beside it, which remained standing despite the elimination of its neighbor. These mathematics, these craftsman's bricks, they stood tall, as accurately and lovingly assembled as the other, but spared—for now—the thrust of some missile's fist, or the piercing vivisection of the red lines.

Out of the plume she stumbled coughing. When she finally opened her eyes she stared at arms transformed gray with ash, her body now a statue. Through the husks of the things around her Shannon saw Cleveland, this city stultifying, this city rusting, which despite its slow death had not yet died. That was the strength of the machine. For all its component parts and points of failure, for all the cogs that shivered and dropped off to bounce forgotten under its own bulk, the designs of those long past persisted, the power of those heroes, those scientists, those designers, those dreamers, requiring only the most somnolent maintenance by the ants who teemed on the shoulders of their skeletons.

Placidity fell.

The plumes of ash swirled. They spilled between the cracks in the city's skin, amid the buildings, rising, blotting the endless sun, turning once more the city to gray, the sage and solemn color it always deserved, and Shannon thought—I've hit my head. I'm confused. It was true. A cold blood ran down and wiped away the dust in one sweeping torrent.

Dark shadows of men emerged. Their boots tromped against the pavement. They moved in logical order: rows and columns, evenly-spaced, arms swinging at their sides. An army.

Gray too, solid and empty in their eyes. Dead in their eyes. Someone ran up behind Shannon and grabbed her—it was Gonzago—he yelled something she heard as a reverberation. He led her between the soldiers, some missing arms, some missing heads, some with their fronts ripped open and no insides between the spread ribcages. An army of the dead. They marched the same direction: toward the lake, toward the black tower.

Between them the silhouette formed of something massive. Like a tree, sharp leafless branches extending outward. It wasn't a tree. It was a deer.

It was the deer from the monastery. Though her antlers extended far greater than before, she retained that stolid demeanor. In one hand she held a sword swaddled in bandages, a sword that emanated a black aura.

On her back sat Princess Mayfair of Whitecrosse.

"Your—Your Highness!" Gonzago gasped.

"Ah, Gonzago of Meretryce. What a pleasant surprise." Mayfair rode sidesaddle, ankles crossed. She wore modern clothes, which might have made her unrecognizable, if not for the unearthly beauty of her facial features. "Shannon Waringcrane too!"

So many marching dead. Rat, tat, rat-a-tat-tat—somewhere a drumbeat kept their rhythm. They choked the streets. How many? She could tell, she reached to her back where fastened by a pair of loops were her relics, forgotten during her mad panic, and felt idly for a moment before the sudden thought struck her she'd lost them; it wasn't so, she gripped the ruler, and it told her Those that were numbered of them, even of the dead, were 93,701. As soon as it told her it amended the number, the dead rising swiftly, gathering under the watchful eye of this beatific princess who was most culpable for their present state. Right. It was her, wasn't it? Everything had been going—exactly—as Shannon planned. She had the devil under control, she had Jay in the vehicle, nothing at all would've happened if not for Princess Mayfair. Mallory's former trained pup.

Yet Shannon felt no emotion, she only thought idly and distantly whether Mother were part of this funereal procession, then decided to not think about that at all.

"You—" Shannon thought of what to say. The deer continued onward, not stopping for a chat. "We're attacking the tower. Will you help?"

"Certainly," Mayfair said, as though this were decided long ago. Or as though she thought Shannon nothing more than a curiosity.

Cleveland's nearly hundred thousand dead continued in lockstep. Every demographic fragment represented: rich, poor, young, old, male, female, no distinction among them in their rows and rows. People in suits, people in jeans, people in rags. Even the soldiers from the tanks and jeeps marched, toting their guns as they had in life. The only notably arranged among them were a group of similarly-uniformed types that followed Mayfair directly, huge men all, wearing maroon sports jerseys and matching shorts, the name of the city emblazoned on their chests.

The ash fell away and the lake stretched before them, pristine sewage under unending sun.

At the base of the black tower, where a black entrance gaped, stood a tall red man, garbed in white and navy like an officer, his hat and gloves and cuffs and stripes all spotless—he was large enough these details shone clearly even at a distance—yet his face throbbed with veins, and his bloodshot eyes boggled, and the pores on his skin rippled and spewed sharp thin red lines that traveled upward from him, arced over the water, and came down to rake across the city and slice anything they touched.

Moloch, Prince of Wrath.

His bulging eyes, swollen past the point of bursting, fell upon the army marching toward him. His jaw unhinged, the cheeks stretched and snapped sinewy, blood gushed in a waterfall to smear his uniform, he shrieked:

"HOW FUCKING MANY OF YOU ARE THERE?! HOW FUCKING MANY? HOW MANY MORE DO I HAVE TO KILL? I'LL FUCKING DO IT! I'LL KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU SQUIRMING HUMAN SHITS! YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME! VERMIN! ALL OF YOU UNJUSTLY LOVED BASTARDS!"

He didn't know. He didn't know they were already dead, that this was an army of ghosts risen to plague him, that like the buildings propped up on the backs of their mummified architects some things persist past death—Mother...—some things were stronger in death than in the stagnant sump-like ossification that sealed them to their living room couches to watch Armor of God on a Wednesday night.

Moloch's arms snapped two, three, four times within his sleeves, the sharp bents apparent through the fabric that did not tear no matter how sodden they became, but between their threads a hundred more red lines shot toward the rim of the city.

The lines drove down, into the water, into the sloped ground, under the ground. They penetrated deeply and then ripped up, wrenching with them gigantic fingers of land, unseaming the ground beneath Shannon's feet, beneath the hooves of the deer, beneath all the hordes of the dead. The land itself rose, the city, Shannon's stomach heaved, she looked to the left and saw the land coil into and crush the skyscrapers, she looked to her right and saw a vast wave of earth curl in tumult.

Then all of it stopped.

The land ceased rising. Ceased curling. All the frenzied activity, the senseless shifting of the earth itself to the will of this devil prince Moloch, became still in an instant. Shannon, who had gained an inch of air, dropped back to the ground and fell to one knee. Around her all the land stood suspended. And not far ahead, on a floating peninsula, the deer stood with Mayfair atop her.

Mayfair's hand reached out. She held something the size of a plum pit, but yellow. Upon her palm she manipulated it, and as she did the state of suspension broke and the land again moved.

It moved now with purpose, not flung up in random rage, but organized as the severed and split fingers slid back together and ran like a river of dirt and cracked pavement and discarded bricks into the rippling lake, shot out straight across the water toward the black tower, toward Moloch, who howled incredulously.

"NO! IDIOTS! HUMANS CAN'T DO THAT! FUCKING MORONS! THAT'S NOT REAL! I REFUSE TO BELIEVE IN IT! YOU CANNOT MAKE ME BELIEVE IN IT YOU ASSHOLESSSSSS!"

A land bridge formed in Lake Erie. It connected the city to the tower, and without pause Mayfair's corpses funneled onto it, marching as orderly as before although much faster. Moloch bent his body, he seethed bloody lines that whipped in every random direction, some even at Mayfair—though the deer deftly evaded. Everything about him was breaking, snapping, twisting onto itself, every part set against every other part (trickery, stage machinery), and in his inept and useless fury a stream of smaller devils poured out of the tower between his crooked and multi-segmented legs, uniformed similar to him and firing little guns that burst against the bodies of the dead to little avail.

"KILL EVERY LAST ONE! SNUFF THEM OUT! SAVE ME FROM THE NEED TO LOOK AT THEM! EEEEEIIIIIIYYYYYYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" And his neck strained with veiny cords, and the cords snapped, and blood sprayed out, and his scream descended into the whirr of a buzzsaw.

He didn't know. They were already dead. He didn't know he could never be saved from them because they were already dead and still haunted him.

Something blitzed out of the sky. Shannon almost missed it, but the ruler she gripped pinged: Those that were numbered of them, even of the daughters of Lust, were one. She caught it as a streak at first; as it passed over the water it became more legible, a small red creature in a white dress, with white wings to match. Carrying something. Something Shannon recognized, even. Carrying the Door.

The placid face of Mayfair cracked. She jabbed her hand at the flying figure and commanded: "That one—stop her!" The dead soldiers who still held guns fired.

The flying girl, far too fast, corkscrewed out of the air and divebombed toward the entrance of the black tower. Moloch's eyes opened only at the last moment and his apoplectic howls subsided. With one slash of his annihilated arm he raked the flying girl with several of his bloody strands. Her cry pierced the air, her body swirled out of its trajectory, but despite that her momentum carried her and the Door past him, into the entrance of the tower, where she disappeared.

Now Mayfair was raging. She tucked her staff under her arm and pulled papers from her pocket. Her eyes scanned the words with growing fury. "No. No! They—I stop watching them for one second and—Ohhh!"

"Is something amiss, Your Highness," the deer said.

"They've gotten ahead of us. No! No... No. Nothing's changed. We have no choice but to push forward. Pythette, fetch the elf. It seems we'll need her to gain entry."

At the same time, Moloch peered over his shoulder into the black maw of the tower, as if wondering whether to abandon his post and pursue the girl that got past him. He whipped back and forth, torn, literally tearing, splitting at the seams—not his uniform, which remained unbroken, but him—spurting more blood in the process.

Just as he seemed about to slop himself together, a rain of light dropped out of the sky. Long, fluid bolts shining even among the sunlight as they pounded upon the formation of devil soldiers spilling out of Pandaemonium. The lines burst into and out their bodies then dispersed in an instant, leaving entire rows to slump inert with massive holes in their chests. Shannon had seen this attack before. Different place, different context, but the same attack. She looked in search of the trailing tails just before they dissipated and saw him standing upon a promontory of shredded rock and dirt, some remnant of Mayfair's terrestrial manipulation.

"Wendell!" Shannon shouted. He held his magic gun but also wore several more guns strapped to his back. The faerie queen Flanz-le-Flore hovered behind him. Shannon would've liked to talk to Wendell for some reason, some remnant of that Cleveland she once knew, a Cleveland now irrevocably transformed; but he was transformed too, and maybe Shannon was transformed herself.

She let the moment pass. Wendell had cleared most of the way along the land bridge. Now was time to move.

Moving wasn't her decision. Around her everyone was moving, dead and alive alike, swarming into a funnel of bodies. Their heads bobbed and only Mayfair on the deer stood above them. Into the water dropped a few of the military's amphibious vehicles. Bullets resounded. A bulwark of corpses led the charge, and Moloch, rent in furious indecision of who to kill next, finally decided to forget about the flying devil girl altogether.

"GET UP YOU WORTHLESS TRASH," he shouted to his soldiers. Those who weren't dead were being enveloped by the encroaching horde. "GET UP GET UP GET UP OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE I'LL DO IT MYSELF!"

By now Moloch looked only vaguely humanoid. And only "vaguely" due to his clothes, which no matter what refused to lose their original form. The thing within them was now both angular and bloblike, pieces jutting and undulating and intermittently rising out of and subsuming back into the mass. In this state, he pitched forward and—began to—roll at the crowd, if roll really described the jerky and uneven motions. As he rolled, he built, somehow growing larger despite the constant stream of blood and viscera that spouted from him. He'd already been large but now his whirling mass of bleeding flesh spanned the entirely of the land bridge, not an inch of spare space, and the pitiful human bodies rushing toward him, no matter how numbered, were no force against him. Gunfire rattled uselessly off the wall, even Wendell's beams of light did nothing. No, that wasn't exactly correct. The weapons all did something, no matter how pitiful they were, even the tiny pistols led to puffs of flesh breaking off, but Shannon realized that every little bit and element that came off Moloch only led to further growth, and now against concentrated fire—even a missile blasted against him—he was expanding to gargantuan heights.

Shannon had been pulled despite herself into the thick of it, elbows on all sides, nowhere to maneuver. She tried to reach for the trumpet, maybe a wall could do something, but her arm couldn't reach. Moloch crushed the first row of corpses; soon without hindrance he would plow into the rest of them. And nobody stopped firing, indeed the larger Moloch got the more people attacked him, they weren't seeing the correlation in the mutual madness of the moment, the corpses lacked even a mind to try and puzzle it out. Out of nowhere Mallory zipped, running atop the heads of the crowd, and even she—incapable of any rationality beyond attack, attack, attack—swung her magic sword and sent tremendous beams of light into Moloch worse than uselessly. Shannon screamed at her to stop, at all of them, yet nobody listened, nobody ever listened to her...!

The ground dropped out under Moloch. It was Mayfair, her hand raised to manipulate the plum pit relic. As Moloch plunged into the lake, spurting steam from all his blood, the land rose from below. Huge swaths of mud were dredged up, such a gigantic amount that even the massive form of Moloch was dwarfed as it enveloped him on all sides and clamped closed like the fist of God. Red lines shot out of the sphere of mud, cutting and slicing, but more mud rose to add to the sphere, growing it bigger and bigger, caking on layer after layer to encase him. His scream, somewhat muffled, pierced outward:

"THIS ISN'T REAL! THIS ISN'T WHAT HUMANS ARE CAPABLE OF! STOP LYING TO ME YOU FUCKING DIPSHITS! IT'S FAKE. IT'S ALL FUCKING FAAAAAAAAKE!"

The last word continued to elongate, drew itself longer and longer and longer, as with a flick of her wrist Mayfair launched the moon-like agglomeration of mud as though it were a wad of trash. It—and Moloch inside it—went hurtling over the lake, toward the horizon.

Mayfair lowered her hand. Mallory dropped onto the head of one of the basketball players standing beside her. She stood on tiptoe as she sheathed her sword. "Hm."

"How was that, Mother," Mayfair said; cold as ice.

Mallory spoke not a word.

"Well then." With a few shifts of her palm, Mayfair reformed the land bridge. "Let us proceed into the tower together."