'You didn't have to get all dressed up,' I said.
'Those who mock shall mourn, unbeliever!' the girl shrieked. She was the one who had bossed Torres around. She was actually kind of cute, if you disregarded the whole diabolical, crazy-fanatic thing. 'Your fate is sealed. Your time is done!'
Hood smiled and patted her on the arm. 'You must forgive my daughter. The exuberance of youth, you know.' She scowled but he ignored her with parental smugness. 'Lucinda, my heir, meet the man who's been a thorn in my side. I'm happy to see you came here voluntarily. So you've decided to fulfill your destiny?'
'If my destiny is killing you, then yeah, guess so.' There was motion behind me. Things were circling, surrounding the hole on all sides. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Cultists had approached from behind. The fires that I had earlier thought were torches had been other teleportation devices. All of his worldwide church had gathered for this event. 'Nice hole. You dig this for me?'
He shook his head. 'No. Sending you back to the Old Ones will be simple enough. There are thirteen small gates scattered around this world and we are fortunate to have one at this sacred place. It is already prepared.' He pointed to my left.
I took a few steps to the side to see better. Some of the excavation had unearthed a stone circle. A sick red light flickered from the hole and unearthly music drifted forth. The notes made my sanity hurt.
I turned away. 'Oh, I thought maybe this construction project was some sort of secret weapon so you could finally defeat me,' I said sarcastically. 'For somebody who's supposed to be so friggin' bad, you've certainly sucked at it.' I lifted Abomination and launched a grenade at them.
Hood extended his hand and the 40mm shell detonated on an invisible wall, temporarily obscuring them in a cloud of smoke and fragments. They were untouched. He smiled. 'I could kill you with a fluffy pillow, Pitt.' He gestured around the giant hole. 'This is an ancient living device. The last time it was used was before man even walked the Earth, in a war beyond your comprehension against the mighty Yith. I've known about this place for years, but lacked the ability, the permission to use it.' The shadow man reached into the sleeve of his robe and pulled out Machado's artifact. 'With this, I can guide it. With the Dread Overlord's blessing, I can awaken it.'
I heard hundreds of voices raise a cheer around me. I looked up from shoving another grenade into Abomination long enough to mutter, 'Shit.'
'Awake and arise, my legions!' Hood raised his voice to shout at his followers. The sound reverberated across the cemetery. 'Let there be NO LIGHT! Rejoice, my children, for THE DARK NEW DAWN BREAKS!'
His followers roared in excitement.
The earth shook. The dirt beneath the sod rolled like the waves of a turbulent ocean. The tremor increased in intensity. My equilibrium was gone and I fell to my knees. The shaking grew in intensity. I had lived through some decent earthquakes, but this was just crazy. This was something way off the Richter scale. The earth screamed in protest. I had to scramble away from the edge as dirt began to cascade downward, the pit widening. The old mausoleums cracked, blocks shattered, and they collapsed on themselves. Levees of dirt erupted upward in places and wide cracks spread outward from the epicenter. The creatures and humans in the dark cried out in fear.
Something was coming out of the hole.
A hundred yards wide, dirt falling off in streamers, a tower rose. It was misshapen, twisted, unnatural, and it continued to grow higher and higher into the air. Hood stood on top of it, laughing maniacally, his daughter clinging to his arm in sudden terror. The two of them were lifted upward, riding the surge of something completely alien.
It was a structure, but it seemed to be organic, living, a sick, green, mottled thing. It stopped climbing, and then the top began to flow outward, snapping and unfurling. Branches stretched laterally overhead, raining dirt down against our upturned faces as the thing filled the night sky. It was part plant, part insect, and something that the human mind had never been meant to comprehend.
The earthquake subsided. The towering entity shuddered, freed from a million years of slumber. It seemed to click and twitch, pulsing with an unnatural life. I couldn't even estimate how tall it was, but it was like standing on the sidewalk and staring up at a high-rise.
It was the tree from Hood's utopian vision. It was the tree from the grimoire Carlos had taken from him. It was sick, wrong, and bad, and it was right here, right fucking now.
'BEHOLD. I GIVE YOU ARBMUNEP, TREE OF ETERNAL NIGHT!' Hood cried from a platform three hundred feet in the air. A cone of utter darkness began to grow from the branches, climbing into the atmosphere. It spread like a canopy, blotting out the sky. The cloud grew rapidly, like some sort of festering cancerous sickness.
'Mighty Arbmunep will consume the radiance of the heavens. We will blot out the light, darken the sky, erase the dawn. The night will rule. No sun, no moon, no stars. Only utter darkness. Absolute night, my children, and in it, I will rule. WE WILL RULE!' Hood screamed as the cloud grew larger. It wasn't just blocking the light, it was eating it. Arbmunep was alive and it was hungry.
There was a sound from the portal to the Old Ones' universe. Something was laughing. It was like running fingernails across a chalkboard multiplied a billion times and then driven through your ear hole with a variable-speed electric drill. I clamped my hands over my head involuntarily. The Dread Overlord was watching, fueling the monstrous tree, and it was positively giddy. Denied entrance to our world, it could at least enjoy the destruction of that which it couldn't possess.
Even something that incomprehensibly vast could be petulant.
'Thank you, noble and great master, for this ultimate gift. I will not fail you,' the Shadow Lord cried.
The Condition came out of the shadows, hundreds of them. All had donned the ceremonial robes and raised their cowls. I couldn't tell what they were, most were certainly human, but there were many that felt unnatural, various types of intelligent undead probably, and several of the robed shapes were too large, too cumbersome, too wrong to be people. Stitched together automatons stood guard in the background, unthinking killing machines, simply here to observe. The cultists went to their knees or whatever else their equivalent was, and prostrated themselves before their false god and its blasphemous tree.
The shadow man spread his arms wide and leapt from his perch, plummeting toward the ground like a missile. At the last possible instant he stopped, then stepped lightly to the earth, his cloak settling around him. He walked straight at me. 'Ready for your trip?'
'Ready to die?' I responded, my pulse quickening, adrenaline and energies I didn't understand flowing through my veins.
'Get in the portal, Pitt.' He was getting closer. The Dread Overlord laughed. Someone killed the generator powering the portable lights, leaving us with nothing but the red light coming from the portal and a faint phosphorus gleam of the Tree's skin-bark as it fed. 'I will not tell you again.'
I gripped Abomination tighter. I had no clue what I was doing. I bellowed incoherently and charged. Hood lowered his head and did the same. His human form disappeared and a twelve-foot shadow took his place. The shadow bore down on me, cheered on by his followers and the king of pain itself.
I opened fire, the shells nothing but a futile gesture. The shadow crashed into me, knocking me down, and slapping me incoherent. Now, at his triumphant moment, there wasn't a damn thing I could do to hurt Hood. He grabbed me by one foot and dragged me through the dirt toward the portal. My fingers tore through the ground but I didn't even slow him down. He was going to toss me into that hole. Panic ripped through my guts. 'You've been a worthy adversary, I must admit. I have no idea how you defeated the virus. I wish I could put you under a microscope and figure out just what it is that makes you tick but this is much more important.'
I had survived the zombie's bite.
I had somehow found the strength to do the unthinkable. I had survived something that no human ever had before. I had generations of dead Hunters rooting for me. I was special, damn it! There had to be some way to hurt him. 'No!' I rolled over and pulled my kukri from its sheath. Now he was just pulling me along on my back. I swung the blade through the black mass holding my boot. The knife ripped through with no effect. I kept swinging. The stone circle was only a few feet away. I could see down into the red light, coalescing shapes and impossible geometries, songs of dead civilizations and abstract realities.
The Dread Overlord was waiting.
The shadow man lifted me into the air. I was still thrashing, kicking, screaming, cursing, swinging my knife, all to no avail. I was upside down, blood rushing to my head, suspended over the portal, the Old Ones below, the Tree blotting out the stars above. The Condition members edged closer, chanting in unison, excited to see me, their Lucifer, thrown to his eternal condemnation.
