The Dead

silhouettes against the glow, falling ahead of him, tumbling, arms and legs waving.

The light grew rapidly. Its source was a vast circular opening, the mouth of a shaft or pit. Things were moving in it. As the distance closed, Max realized they were wheels, immense luminous wheels revolving on every conceivable axis, some interlocking, some passing impossibly through each other as they turned, their inner and outer rims set with blades and hooks and spikes, bulging with squirming eyes; and somehow visible beneath them all was a giant fanged mouth, chewing and grinding.

Bodies rained down into the wheels, were impaled and sliced; they clung desperately to spikes tilting inexorably downward; they fought to free themselves from barbs buried deep in their flesh, only to plummet farther into that churning machinery of death; they dropped in pieces from the blades. Fragments and whole figures dropped toward the mouth in a rain of blood, and the mouth received them all, devouring, crushing, punishing.

Max could only watch horrified as the pit filled more and more of his field of vision. He would plunge into it and be ripped asunder. And then…

And then you’ll go through again, Max my boy, came Legion’s voice. And each time it’ll be worse. That’s what those shrieking wretches in your pathetic little hallucination of a universe are really feeling. Deep in their minds, through the haze of matter, the blur of their flesh, they feel my blades, my spikes. The Hell of which the Hell of flesh is but a feeble copy. Auschwitz for real. Cambodia without the compromises. My world, Max. And that gun can’t save you from it.

The wheels and eyes and blades surged ever closer. Max felt a tremendous weight of despair, crushing the strength from his will; surely the demon was telling the truth. There was no escape. He wanted to fire a burst down into that champing maw, if only as a last gesture of defiance; but what good would it do? His finger remained motionless on the trigger.

Look at me, Max, Legion said. Look at my power. Look at my vastness. I am immortal. I am eternal. It is not for nothing I was worshipped as a god. And nothing you can do can stop you from plunging into me. So put down the gun, Max. Put it down.

Max was entering the pit now. All around him, bodies jolted onto the spikes, were ripped open in floods of viscera, the eyes on the wheels turning to gloat at their agonies, widening in horrible pleasure…

Put down the gun.

Max almost let go-

Then recognized a figure impaled on one of the uprushing spikes.

It was his father. And strangely, he seemed to be holding a silver cross. It was burning in his hand, smoke pouring out around it. As Max dropped past, just missing the wheel, his father’s hand opened convulsively, as if he could stand the touch of the cross no longer. Without thinking, Max reached out and grabbed the glinting emblem-

And suddenly he was back on the catwalk.

Not a second had passed, or so it seemed. But Legion’s world was outside of time…

Facing Max was a corpse in a state trooper’s uniform. A mere human corpse, no matter what spirit possessed it. Legion was great and terrible. The right hand of Satan himself, beyond a doubt, a King of Hell.

Even so, he was in Max’s world now. The pathetic world of flesh.

“Go for it,” Max said.

Legion charged. As far as he was from Max, he almost reached him.

Max’s first burst knocked him back on his heels, bullet holes stitching across the trooper uniform. A second blew his eye sockets empty, punched his nose in, ripped jaw from cheek and cheek from brow, pulverized his skull in a brownish-black eruption.

The decapitated giant staggered on his feet, hands reaching up toward his severed neck. Laughing fiercely, Max sprayed him across the elbows. Cloth exploded. Bone-splinters flew. The giant’s arms flopped downward, all but severed.

Max lowered the gun, scythed through Legion’s knees with a final clip-emptying burst. The torso dropped to the catwalk with a great clang.

Max pulled himself to his feet, leaning on the railing, eyeing what was left of the demon-possessed corpse.

“You were right about the machete,” he panted, tossing the rifle onto Legion’s body. “But what about old Heckler and Koch?”

Those Kraut engineers certainly knew their stuff. The gun had stuck it out right to the end. The end of the world and beyond. Perhaps, Max thought, the physical universe was capable of accommodating far more of the Logos than Legion would ever admit.

But indeed, hadn’t that been the demon’s error from the beginning? Max wondered what Legion had made of the Incarnation. It was strange, seeing a parallel between the Word Made Flesh and an assault rifle. Yet was not God’s symbol a blood-drenched cross?

Legion’s corpse was still moving, heaving and buckling, thighs drumming. The hands clawed at the patterned surface of the catwalk, straining to wrench the forearms free of the scraps of cloth and flesh tethering them to the body.

Flies began pouring from the bulletholes in the chest, from the stumps of limbs and neck. They formed a cloud, a cyclonic mass, and from that black tornado there came a wailing chorus, hundreds, thousands of tiny whistling voices; spinning violently, the cloud lifted high into the air, the voices fading with distance. The tornado accelerated almost instantly to an incredible speed, assumed for an eyeblink the shape of a spiked wheel-and vanished.

The corpse had gone motionless. Max looked past it to his father. Max Sr. had hitched himself against an upright; they stared at each other quietly. Max yearned to go to him, to try somehow to comfort him.

Yet even if his leg would’ve permitted, that was insane. It would be like embracing a wounded cobra. A great gulf had come between them.

But was it unbridgeable? Was his father damned eternally? His father’s will was still free, if just barely. And if that were not sufficient, was there not enough blood shed at Calvary to cleanse the sins from one man’s small soul?

There was no way of knowing. Can’t second-guess The Man, Max thought. Still he sent his prayer across the gulf:

Dominus Vobiscum, Dad.

As if stunned by Legion’s downfall, the other corpses hadn’t ventured out onto the catwalk. Now they moved to the attack at last.

This is it, Max thought. You’ve bought all the time you’re going to.

“All right, God,” he muttered. “Now I’ve really done my bit.”

Feet clanged on metal, beating nearer and nearer.

“Put myself on the line, God,” he said. “Time to leave, right?”

But they were clattering past his father now, and the hand of God was nowhere in sight. Panic flooded through Max. He’d done the best he could, kept the faith, run the course to its end. Was that not enough?

“Fair is fair, Lord,” he said. Could it be that he’d beaten Legion only to die at the hands of his followers? What was the meaning of the crucifix that had saved him? Was that God’s work or not?

Curse Him and die, whispered a voice in his head.

Legion’s voice.

The first corpse lunged close. Max knocked one of its clutching hands aside and punched it. The cadaver toppled. If only he hadn’t tossed the rifle away-it would’ve made a good club.

Curse Him and die, said the demon in his soul.

Another corpse leaped over the first, sank its fingers into his arm, threw him onto the catwalk. They surged over him, pinning him down.

Curse Him and die.

“I believe in one God,” Max gasped.