Piotr spread his arms wide, and I charged, raising Hunger over my head. In my hand it shifted again, the three ends becoming pointed and razor sharp. My grip changed from that of a man wielding a club to one holding a stake. Less than ten feet separated us as I blurred forward.
Anne was shouting something at me, but I wasn’t listening. Some tiny part of me woke at the sound of her voice, but it was lost in the haze of my need. My arms rose up over my head, both hands gripping the shaft of the razor-sharp weapon, and Piotr tilted his face upwards, a beatific smile on his lips.
Anne’s voice resolved into words and that tiny part of me that could hear her grew larger. I didn’t bring the point down through Piotr’s face yet. I had no intention of stopping, but I paused for a moment as meaning condensed in my brain. “I’ll die, Abe! You’ll kill me! You’ll kill all of us!”
And then it was time. My arms were moving, powering that deadly tip downward, driven by an all-consuming lust to feel it punch through flesh. I couldn’t hold it back, but I wasn’t completely out of control. Not anymore. As I pulled downward with everything I had, I managed to also pull inward, curving the tip away from Piotr’s face, just grazing his chin as it passed over him and down, into my own heart.
I felt it slide through my flesh until the fist that was closed around the shaft thumped into my chest. My heart fluttered around the spike like a butterfly on a pin, and then stopped. I couldn’t draw a breath. Piotr’s face went from blissful to outraged as he realized what I had done.
I stood, frozen in place, as Anne surged up from her crouch and whipped both of her fists up and around all the way from the ground to the underside of Piotr’s chin. His head snapped back and I could hear the crunch of his ancient neck bones breaking.
Piotr and I fell at the same time. I never felt my legs give out as I fell forward, but the agony when one end of Hunger hit the catwalk and the other one punched out through my back was immediate and overwhelming. I fell sideways, supported by the weapon, then over onto my back, leaving me to stare upwards at the sky. My life flowed up and out of the silver-gray spike, drawn out by the ritual, leaving me cold and uncaring on the floor.
Piotr’s death freed his spirit, which was immediately consumed by the ritual. An explosion that made no sound and moved not a single blade of grass blasted through the minds and hearts of every living thing on Earth.
In that moment, humanity’s stranglehold on reality shattered, and power not felt in thousands of years slammed down from the heavens and pierced the skin of the world. In an epicenter that spanned the entire continent and the surrounding oceans, things that had slumbered for eons, awoke. Places that were once feared again took on their ancient aspects, and modern places became strange and teeming with forces unseen since the dawn of the Age of Reason. Old gods stirred.
Far above me, the clouds blew apart into wispy tatters, revealing a sea of writhing, boiling flesh stretching to the horizon in all directions. It curdled and undulated like a living ocean, and for a moment it seemed as though I were falling into it. The alien landscape loomed closer, allowing me to see that the entire surface was made up of a sea of swollen, multi-legged creatures bursting with worms. They ranged in size from dog to apartment building, and they climbed over each other in heaps, straining towards the ground. If the ritual was successful, they would crash over the Earth in a wave, eating and infecting everything until our world looked just like the one hanging above us.
Anne’s face eclipsed that awful vision as she knelt over me, and I felt a tug in my chest as she pulled Hunger out of my body. There was no longer any pain. The last of my warmth poured out of the hole in my back, and my eyes fluttered shut.
Instead of looking up, I was looking down at my own face. It was covered in black, tarry blood and locked in a rictus of pain and rage. The sight should have frightened me, but it didn’t, because I wasn’t alone.
Patrick was there, although I couldn’t see him, and Shad and Two-Penny and the rest of the squad. They held me close to myself and didn’t let me drift away. Or maybe I held on alone, clinging to my body with only the memories of my friends giving me the strength to do so. Either way, I endured.
Another presence came then, surrounding me. It was foul and alien and hungry and endless, stretching from my body all the way up into the sky. It circled and searched, seeking to possess the body that Piotr had created for it, but that body was useless now without a living spirit inside to use as a bridge to the flesh. The presence strained and fought to remain, but without a human spirit to fuse it to this reality, it could not.
The power of Piotr’s sacrifice was now consumed, so it turned to the only other things it could touch, its own kind in the form of the bags packing the bleachers, and consumed them as well, causing the infected townspeople to drop where they stood as the worms inside of them ceased animating their bodies.
Once they were gone, there was nothing left to power the ritual, and the gateway between our realities collapsed. The Devourer vanished like smoke, unable to exist here without merging with me.
I wanted to rest then and drift away, but Patrick’s face wouldn’t allow me to let go. The vision held me there, suspended in unlife, while Anne worked furiously below me, breathing into my mouth and forcing blood through my heart with the weight of her entire body.
The next thing I remember, I was opening my eyes and the sky was full of nothing but stars.
57
Anne and I disagreed on the smell. Sitting on the steps of the school in the cool silence of the pre-dawn morning, the air smelled crisp and clean for the first time since we arrived in town. The boggy, earthy undertones had gone at the same time as the bizarre cloud cover and plague of bags. I felt relaxed, almost languorous, in the absence of the ritual-fueled rage that had burned inside of me since the first blood pit in Warsaw. I felt at peace.
Anne rubbed her nose for the hundredth time. “I cannot believe you can’t smell that. It stinks like an electrical fire, all ozone and bitter ash.” She hawked and spit to the side. Not very ladylike, which I pointed out. She pointed out that I could keep my opinions to myself by punching me in the arm. For the record, also unladylike.
Henry sat on my other side, one hand on my shoulder. “Goosey, Patrick used to say about that smell. Used to be, some crazy with a hand-me-down ritual would get to working, and that smell would lead us right to him. Or her.”
Anne leaned forward and looked across me at Henry. “But we stopped the ritual, right? So why am I smelling it now?”
“I suspect that rituals don’t have a smell, but what they produce does. And this was a doozy. For a few minutes, another world hung over our own, and a godlike being was loose, in spirit at least. That’s got to have some kind of consequences, even if we can’t see them yet.”
“Well, it stinks. I can’t wait to get away from here.”
I nodded in heartfelt agreement. “Only one thing left to do, as soon as Chuck gets here. Then we’ll leave and never look back.”
Henry looked at me, then forward into the lightening dawn. “I never thought I’d see it finished.”
“Yeah. You think all of this was our fault? Because we didn’t go after Piotr the first time?”
“Maybe. Is it the fireman’s fault if your house burns down or the guy who struck the match? Maybe we could have done more the last time, but maybe we did all anyone could have asked. You can lose a whole lifetime second guessing your past. It’s over now, and that’s good enough.”
“I saw ‘em, Henry. Tonight. I tried to stop the ritual by killing the vessel, me, and I think it worked. For a few minutes I was dead. But instead of going to the next thing, or just fading out, the boys showed up and kept me here.” My eyes prickled, but no tears fell. “Patrick, Shad, Frank, even Don, all of them just surrounded me and kept me in one piece until my heart knit back together and Anne could get it jump started. I think they saved my life, just like the old days.”
Henry turned to me and grinned wide and toothy. “Even Death better step out of the way when them boys are lookin’ to take care of business.”
I grinned back, that old love and pride breaking out all over my face like it was still 1943. “Fuckin’ A, Professor.”
A little later Chuck returned with the Rover and crunched to a stop next to us. After leaving the building, he had insisted on taking the prison bus back to the hardware store to retrieve it. We fought about his going alone, no
