CHAPTER 22: COUNTIN' ON MY FINGERS

Lucifer claims he can lead us to freedom, but first he needs us to get rid of that stupid gun that's been sniping at us ever since we got back to the cabin. Why he can't get rid of it himself - something in his own domain - I couldn't tell you. Or maybe he's just trolling. Devils are known to do that, right? It's been a while since I read the Bible, at least for anything other than, you know, research. Not that the Bible really contains a lot of information about the exact flavor of Moloch and Headless Horseman that my people and I have faced. And then Pandora? Forget her. Wrong mythology.

The trick, of course, is to get to that gun safely. Easier said than done, like anything else I've had to do since ol' Headless started screwing up things back home.

"This is gonna suck," I tell Nikki and Joe succinctly before setting off to do that trick.

I lead the way, as the fastest of us all. Joe has longer legs, true, but he's also heavier than I am, so he has to pull a lot more weight. Me, though? I'm a missile, not to get too metaphorical about it. So I'm the first one, by far, to reach the gun sniping at us. A turret gun with no one running it on site - it's all automatic, because of course it is. It's like something out of a sci-fi movie, or maybe a video game. Unfortunately, I haven't seen or played either of those in a very long time, so I feel a little out of my depth. Missile or not.

Strangely, time slows down as I make my run. Is Lucifer casting some kind of spell to help me out? Bit out of his character, but considering he needs us as much as he claims we need him, maybe not. The man's a master of ulterior motivation.

But yeah. Time's slowing down, just enough for me to get an idea of the turret's rate of fire. Assuming Luci's dilating my time to give me five seconds of perception for every one second of real time...or something like that. But yeah, every five seconds, I watch the gun chatter away and dodge out of its way. Then for five seconds after that, the gun is silent. That's when I advance. Then dodge. Advance. Dodge. Shit, why is this taking forever? Even when I'm counting the seconds, which actually just makes it worse, and I really ought to stop doing that...

But no. If I don't count, how am I going to time this properly?

That must be the cursed side of Lucifer casting spells to help me out.

One, two, three, four, five...run, run, run, run, duck...one, two, three, four, five...

To my right, Nikki's catching up to me. Luci must be working spells on her too. What's going on? Is there some challenge he's set forth without telling me? Clearly, because Joe's catching up on my left.

Nope. I did not die, I did not travel across a bunch of hellish landscapes already, and I most certainly did not run ahead to the turret first just to get beat by these white folks. Though for all that white folk can't jump, they sure can run, I'll give them that.

Though I do reach the turret first by sliding on the ground, under the hail of bullets as it concentrates on Joe this time instead of me. Somewhere in the slow-mo background, I hear Lucifer putting on a truly terrible American accent to call out, "SAFE! THE RUNNER IS SAFE!"

I yank the turret up so its business end points into the sky, then I pull a cable connecting it to some onboard generator or other. The gun finally stops firing.

Except a small number of bullets hit the sky and broke it. Literally. And now, equally literally, it's falling.

"RUN!" Lucifer yells at us, racing up in sudden fast-mo and barely managing to dodge the enormous, obsidian-like shards raining all over the field around us.