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Madach shuffled closer. “We’re going… we’re going down there?” he asked, gulping noisily as he stared down the steep set of steps that led to the living area below.
The voices continued, followed by some menacing music that strangely enough seemed to fit the situation. Eerie pulses of light caused bizarre shadows to dance around what little they could see of the room waiting at the bottom.
“Looks like it,” Remy said, already begi
He stopped momentarily to give Madach a look, making sure that he wasn’t going down alone.
The fallen angel pulled his act together, using the banister as he leaned against the wall, taking each of the descending steps slowly.
They were closer to the source. It was all Remy could do to keep from blacking out with the intensity of malevolence that hung in the air like smoke.
“We’ve got to keep it together,” he told Madach, who didn’t appear to want to leave the next-to-the-last step. He stood there, body rigid, petrified.
“You’re doing fine,” Remy told him, walking into the living space. “Don’t make me haul you off those steps.”
His words having their desired effect, Remy listened as Madach descended the remaining stairs and followed at his back.
Nothing appeared abnormal. The strange, shifting light and the sound of voices were caused by the television set. Remy took note that Francis had been watching Jaws. There was a half-eaten sandwich and cup of coffee sitting on the table, next to Francis’ chair.
“Where is he?” Madach asked through trembling lips.
Remy didn’t answer, approaching the television and turning the volume down to nothing. He hated to do it. His favorite scene was on: Quint’s speech about being on the Indianapolis.
But it didn’t become completely quiet.
He saw that Madach was carefully looking around the space, zeroing in on the source of the additional sound.
“It’s coming from over there,” he said, pointing with a nearly lifeless hand at the narrow corridor that ended with the worn door to Hell.
Remy moved down the hallway, the noise growing louder the closer he got to the door.
“I don’t think… I don’t think you want to go down there,” Madach said at his back, and Remy had to agree.
He didn’t want to go there, but there really wasn’t much choice.
Madach stopped at the edge of the darkened corridor as Remy continued.
The door was closed, but a radiance of palpable hopelessness emanated off the paint-blistered surface of the wood, and the sounds coming from the other side—he hadn’t a clue how to describe them. They were like the raging of a powerful storm, the sounds of nature’s fury muffled only by the fragile barrier that kept the storm at bay.
Something was wrong on the other side of that door.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Remy wanted to quit, to drop down to the floor, allowing the sins and failures of his very long life to wash over him, to drag his body out into an ocean of anguish but Madeline helped him to fight, her memory urging him on.
The doorknob was both excruciatingly hot and numbingly cold in his grasp. As he was about to turn it, he looked to the end of the hall to see Madach standing there. The fallen looked as though he had aged twenty years, his body stooped from the Hellish emissions that pummeled them.
“Don’t,” he begged, a plaintive hand reaching out trying to convince him not to do what Remy knew had to be done.
He had to find out what was going on, and what fate had befallen his friend.
He had to know about Francis.
Remy turned the knob, throwing open the door to a blast of intense, lung-shriveling heat, followed by suffocating cold.
Through watering eyes Remy gazed in horror at the sight before him. Francis stood upon the bridge of writhing, fallen-angels in the midst of battle, a bloodstained sword in one hand, a gun in the other. From out of the icy prison streamed a steady flow of prisoners, their mouths open in ululating screams of madness and rage as they attempted to put him down, fighting to get past the only thing preventing them from making their way toward the exit and the earthly plane beyond.
Remy stared, frozen in place by the sight of the former Guardian angel as he dispatched wave after wave of his attackers. He was relentless in his defense, as were the fallen in their attempts to remove him from their path. For every fallen angel that fell beneath the boom of gunfire, or was cut in two by the bite of his sword blade, there seemed to be four more scrambling over the decimated corpses to take their places.
“What’s going on? What do you see?” Madach cried, temporarily distracting Remy from the disturbing scene playing out before him.
Remy glanced to the end of the hall and then back through the doorway. He had to do something; the number of fallen angels spilling out from the prison onto the bridge was growing unmanageable, many of the pale-ski
He started onto the bridge, the bodies of the fallen that comprised the structure quivering beneath the heel of his shoes.
“Francis,” Remy yelled.
The Guardian turned and his face twisted at the sight of Remy.
“Get back!” he screamed, quickly returning his attention to the marauding fallen, cutting down five more before looking back. “Get back into the fucking apartment!”
Remy hesitated, not sure what he should do. It wouldn’t be long before his friend succumbed to the ever-increasing number trying to escape.
He started forward again, feeling the stirring of the Seraphim within. He would have to let it out if he was going to be of any significant help to Francis in holding back the ravening hordes emerging from Tartarus.
Francis turned back again, his favorite suit tattered, spattered with blood, his horn-rimmed glasses missing.
“Don’t you fucking listen?” he bellowed, shoving the hand-gun into the waistband of his pants and reaching inside his jacket pocket to remove something that chilled Remy more than the frigid air radiating from the frozen prison at the bridge’s end.
Francis held a grenade, something that he’d likely picked up wholesale from one of the many weapons suppliers that he did business with.
“I said go back.” And with those words he pulled the pin on the round, olive green explosive device, rolling it across the uneven surface of the flesh bridge, where it became trapped within one of the open mouths of the angel-damned.
Remy knew what was about to happen and turned quickly, ru
The force of the blast propelled him through the doorway, face-first into the corridor wall, the deafening roar of the explosion and agonized screams of the fallen angels that made up the bridge suddenly cut off by the slamming of the door behind him.