June 9, 1985, early afternoon
Though that selfish part of his mind that delighted in explosions and gore was busy berating the rest of his mind for not listening to the warnings it had been sending out to get the hell out of there, the rest of his brain was too occupied with trying to both understand what was going on and figure out a way to escape this mess with his life intact.
All his efforts at escape proved singularly futile. Had he been secured with ropes, Caleb would likely have been able to worry them enough to loosen them, but there weren't any ropes. Nor were there any chains, or string, or yarn, or anything else physically holding him in place against the wall of the old chemistry lab. A nearly-unnoticed thud of something moving in the room had led him to check this room before any of the others, and he'd only had time to open the door before being flung against the wall. He'd collided hard enough that speckles of black glitter danced across his vision for nearly a full minute. During that time, all he could think was, At least I didn't hit the blackboard, the chalk-tray woulda cut me in half.
When his vision cleared, he started struggling. His stomach gave a tired, halfhearted lurch at what he saw, but settled quickly – it had already gotten rid of anything it had contained and there was no further point in trying. Caleb both hoped and didn't hope that he was becoming desensitized to wholesale blood and gore.
It took several moments of disbelieving staring before he realized that Sister Ann was in the middle of the mess, talking in a low murmur that he couldn't make out, with her left hand fingering something small that hung on a string around her neck and reaching out with her right hand to a hovering splatter of red. Forcibly ignoring the splash of blood that was in the process of defying all known laws of gravity, Caleb strained his ears to hear what the sister was saying. It didn't sound like English; it was both more guttural and more melodic than any language Caleb had heard. The same tiny bit of awareness that had noticed the beauty of sunlit blood earlier further noticed that whatever language it might have been was also entrancingly pretty. It made the surrounding horror all the more jarring.
He tried to turn his head to see more of the room, hoping that someone else might still be alive, but found that all he could move were his eyes. It was enough, however, to see Heck similarly pinned to the wall that connected to his own. Heck had his eyes closed, and Caleb didn't know if that meant that his friend was unconscious or simply trying to hold on to sanity by not watching what was sure to have been a horrific experience.
Sister Ann laughed and Caleb turned his eyes back to the nun. "You really should have listened to your instincts, Caleb." That inner fragment of personality that had been pressing that exact same issue moments earlier shouted up through his mind with an 'I told you so!' "I was more than willing to let you go, like I let the youngest ones and that irritating little bitch and her friends go. I only needed forty-two sacrifices to finish binding the daevas, after all, and my father had told me not to waste time with this job. Time grows short, or so he's been saying for the last thirteen years or so." Her next sentence was uttered with a conspiratorial grin, "Personally, I think he's been around too long – his inner clock is all messed up." She walked towards him, daintily picking her way over and around bloody chunks strewn across the floor. "But that doesn't much matter. Patience is the name of the game, and my rewards will be so worth the wait – Father promised I would be the Head Beastmaster under the new regime, a position worthy of respect, I promise you."
As the nun came closer to him, Caleb saw that the thing on the string around her neck was a shiny grey circular piece with a blackened design etched on its surface – the design looked rather like a sharply-shaped 'S' of three lines, a circle interrupting the center of the middle line (a stylized and simplified version of the '§' sign he didn't know he knew). While the image on the pendent branded itself on his memory, Sister Ann continued to talk. "What to do with you, though? I mean, Father did say not to indulge in any nonessential deaths – that the sacrifices alone would be enough to trigger alarms that could cause problems later – but I don't really see how just one extra body will make all that much difference at this point. You know what I mean, right?"
The sad part was that Caleb could see her point of view on the subject. With so many mutilated corpses, one more almost wouldn't be noticed amid the carnage.
"You just sit tight, kiddo, and let me finish up here. Then you and me can go somewhere a little less…messy and have our own little ritual. You just might be enough to increase my power to the next pay-bracket – it would be nice not to have to worry about the water any more."
What happened next pushed that rather puzzling statement completely out of Caleb's brain. With the nun still standing only a few feet from him, he watched as…something slowly tore Heck to pieces. Amid the screaming, he heard Sister Ann say, "Keep screaming, little Hector. You obviously weren't listening earlier when I said that no one would hear you outside this room."
As blood sprayed from a torn artery, Caleb realized that he could see a faint outline of a being too gruesome for mere words to describe. Whatever it was, it made most of his mind shut down in horror. His breathing came faster and shallower when he noticed a second collection of blood-splatters in a similar configuration helping the first thing tear into Heck's flesh. Squelching, tearing noises filled the air, as did unearthly grunts uttered from throats that had no business lingering in the bright light of day (regardless of the fact that the former chemistry classroom was shrouded in twilight with all the blinds drawn).
Chunks of meat and viscera and bone seemingly disappeared in midair and Caleb knew then that they were eating Heck. He could feel his grip on sanity slipping further and further out of his reach.
When the outlines of blood-spray stood to either side of Heck's mutilated carcass and tore it in half like kids with a turkey wishbone on Christmas Eve, his conscious wandered off, muttering about how it had had enough. The last thing he noticed as his vision faded and sound disappeared was a tall, burly guy bursting into the room, carrying one of those hand-pump pesticide sprayers in one hand and a gun in the other.
The blessed oblivion of unconsciousness didn't last long enough, in Caleb's oh-so-humble opinion. He came-to when whatever force that had been holding him pressed against the classroom wall disappeared and he landed in a painful heap on the floor. Shrill screams (more manly than those manufactured by the Home's resident accountant) pierced through his skull, along with a deep and rumbling man's voice spitting rapid-fire Latin, and, when the screaming paused, Sister Ann shouting insults and profanity.
Caleb managed to make himself look up to see what was going on. The man he'd glimpsed before passing out was using both hands – there was no sign of the gun now, and Caleb wondered if maybe he'd imagined it – to operate the sprayer, aiming its contents at the writhing, smoking nun. The Latin continued from the man's lips until the nun arched back and a roiling mass of black smoke escaped her mouth with a dull roaring noise. The smoke sparked out of existence with flashes of light the same orange-red tone of burning coal. A bright yellow dust sprinkled down from where the smoke disappeared, and even over the slaughterhouse stench of the room, Caleb could smell sulphur.
The man made an irritated noise and brushed the yellow dust off his shoulders as he turned around. "You alright, kid?" he asked, seeing that the teen had managed to pick himself up off the floor.
"You mean besides being scarred for freakin' life?" Caleb couldn't keep the snarky reply from bursting out – he'd just been through far too much that day to keep being polite and respectful.
The man chuckled, "Yeah, you're alright."
"You wanna tell me just what the hell is going on?"
The man chuckled again, "Interesting choice of words there, sonny, 'cause that's exactly what happened." Knowing that his response was likely to frustrate the kid even more, the man simply held out his hand. "Name's Joshua." The kid seemed to shake the proffered hand out of reflex. "Let's get outta this hole 'fore anyone shows up. You saw what happened, so you deserve a decent explanation. The sheep can just keep wondering."