The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Demiurge Duology.

52. Graveyard of Empires, Part 1

Every time a Sinner's aspect changed, Rachel knew that she had hit a breakthrough. It was becoming clear that there was a sort of mechanism between how degraded a soul was and the extent to which their Aspect formed their bodies. There was a Fire Elemental who worked in Charlie's Legion, a woman who had absolutely no interest in Redemption, and who was not just a flagship asshole who deserved to come to hell by her misdeeds, but to stay there by refusing to do anything but double-down on them. She was Rachel's 'control subject'. The Elemental, who had taken up the frankly unimaginative name of Kagutsuchi – not spelling it correctly, even, which marked Kag as something of a Japanese poseur, or 'weeb' as they are now known – was essentially living golden fire, no flesh to speak of, and only having darker places on her body where her eyes and mouth were. Samuel, who had the same Aspect in his durance in Hell, had been almost completely human, but for his hair.

Combined with the fact that bit by bit, Husk was starting to shed his most feline features and return to the man he was before them, it created the hypothesis that humanity and Aspect intensity are, to at least some degree, inversely proportional. Kag, who saw no better purpose for her time than maiming and burning, was the furthest and most destructive incarnation of what her Aspect depicted, whereas Sam, who had only wanted to burn away the dead and the dross and the rotten, was more man than flame.

And all of that work, to create a unified theory of Aspects?

Rachel had to throw it pretty much entirely into the garbage bin, the morning that she went down to breakfast, and saw that Addam suddenly had another set of arms.

"This doesn't make any sense," she said, examining the new arms that had sprouted from the space below the Betrayed's armpits. She reached back, and could feel a second set of scapular bones back there, showing that these hadn't simply sprouted without any sense or foundation; they'd be every bit as usable as his native arms. "The fingers are clearly ceramic, and yet I can still feel your pulse through your wrist."

"They feel entirely normal to me," Addam said. His parents had fussed and worried at his appearance, but now, having been somewhat mollified that his new arms were the extent of things at this juncture, returned to the kitchen.

"I assure you they are not. That is a cord of twine!" she pointed out the 'sinew' that would cause his elbow to hinge. His new limbs appeared very much to be archaic, late 1800's prosthetics by their visage, but for the fact that they were warm, supple and obeyed Addam's mind, since he was currently feeding himself with a pair of right hands, while Rachel found herself trying to dig answers to this mad riddle which had been dropped into her lap in the place of breakfast while prodding at his new left.

"Whether they 'appear' normal or not, I feel fine," Addam tried to placate her. She wasn't in the mood to be placated. She wanted answers.

"I'm calling Cain," she declared.

"Don't bring him into this," Addam sighed.

"This is a matter of some concern. What if other mutations happen? What then?" she pressed, then reached into her pocket to pull out her phone.

She pulled out a gun. Addam stared at her, leaning away from her with a look of alarm on his face. "Um… fine… Call Cain, that sounds like a great idea…"

"What is this doing in there?" she asked. She then glanced up to Addam. "This isn't supposed to be in that pocket."

"I'm sure," he said. She rolled her eyes, and reached to a spot over her right shoulder, using her Blood Engine to enable her to open it and put it into Living Rachel's care. She reached into the OG Pocket again, and this time extracted her phone as she had intended to. She flicked a call to Cain.

"Come to the dining room. Something's happened to Addam," she said the moment he picked up, sounding a bit groggy for their early hour. That was one of the few things that Rachel never really got a handle on down here, that the Damned still needed to sleep when she rather definitively did not. She would rest, of course, because rest was good for maintaining what sanity she had remaining, but sleep? She hadn't slept in quite a few years now. Certainly not since she'd left Heaven.

A lie she told herself and somewhat believed, not understanding that she did in fact sleep occasionally after her nightly liaisons with Husk. She simply didn't remember it, nor dream at all vividly.

Cain offered no answer, hanging up abruptly. There were a few seconds, as Rachel continued to pick at the plate of bakelite which formed something of a chitinous exoskeleton at the deltoid muscle region. Ever since her second death down here, she'd decided to bone back up on her medical texts. Maybe next time something came after her with a knife, her instincts would give her something smarter than 'put my own very necessary heart in front of the sharp thing' to do.

Her consideration was halted by a metal bang, and Cain's appearance. And he hadn't appeared alone. Ayla, who had been in life Cain's wife, had joined him. Both of them were only partially dressed, as though they'd been naked and thrown on whatever was nearby in their haste. Which lead to the thought that perhaps Cain had finally moved on from his grief over Niffty and had rekindled things with his wife-and-also-sister. Not that Rachel judged him for it. Incest held a normal amount of disgust for her, but she could understand Cain's extenuating circumstances at the beginning of the Modern Human Species, when the children of Adam spread and began to first breed with, and then genetically overtake the hominids who had evolved the hard way on Earth.

"What has hap… oh. He's here. I thought something unpleasant had happened to him," Cain said. He turned a glance back to Ayla, who was moving closer and scrutinizing Addam's new arms with all the same confusion that Rachel had shown when she arrived. Cain, though, pondered, rubbing at his beard for a short time, before something seemed to occur to him. "Well for one thing, that's an Aspect I haven't seen since my awakening. I didn't think Sinners could become Dollmakers anymore. Let alone an Innocent, I suppose."

"A what?" Ayla asked.

"Surely you've come across some confederates up in Heaven who have atypical features? Like those of an animal, or stranger things like the Headless who despite lacking a skull, brain, or anything of the sort functions as though they still do have them?" Cain said. "The Dollmaker is one of the latter, an Aspect those Sinners who lived lives creating delicate things would morph into."

"I would have thought he'd look like a blacksmith or something," Ayla said.

"No, that is the Maker Aspect, which looks roughly how you would imagine; bronze or brass skin, thick arms, capable of heating their bodies to terrific temperatures though far lesser than that of a Fire Elemental. The Dollmaker is less about power and raw output, instead favoring delicacy and precision."

"I did notice that I didn't cut myself shaving when I used these," Addam noted. He was in fact perfectly shaved. "I usually do, since I don't give that a lot of thought."

"The new arms you have will be weaker than your native set," Cain explained, "not as able to bear heavy loads, by a rate of roughly one half to two thirds at best; the muscles are arranged differently, less optimum for power. Sadly, you are a Dollmaker and not a Spider if you had wanted that.

"Did somebody say somethin' 'bout me? Hold on a fuckin' second why does this guy got more arms?" Angel Dust asked, as he ingressed from the lobby.

"What are you doing up at this hour?" Rachel asked.

"Couldn't sleep; Nuggz was bein' fussy," Angel Dust said. He did look a bit underslept, but not nearly as ragged as some of the other faces that were here in the dining area at six in the morning.

"That hog of yours will soon be too large to stay in your room. I've read about how large they can get," Addam noted.

"Addam is right," Cain agreed. "Given time, they can grow to weigh two tonnes, of which much of that would be muscle, under a bulletproof hide."

"Nuggz can't be gettin' that big," Angel Dust dismissed.

"He can and he will, Angel," Cain said softly. "One day, you will have to make accommodations for him."

"I ain't killin' my pig," Angel Dust said rigidly.

"We're not asking you to. Just have somewhere more suitable to a two tonne bulletproof hog for him to live," Rachel pointed out Cain's point before they could be sidetracked further. "The Dollmaker, Cain?"

"Ah, right," Cain said, and gave a brief apology to Angel Dust, who grumbled and went for the coffee and pancakes which were already emerging from the kitchen. "The lower arms, despite their artificial visage, are very much part of your body, fed by your blood, and serviced by your nervous system. There's even a sort of proto-brain tucked under the scapular of the lower set which enables its great dexterity. Just don't get stabbed through the lower scapular. I am told it is quite excruciating."

"So unless I'm actively being tortured, this is a boon to me?" Addam asked.

"Aspects have more positives than negatives without exception," Cain said. "Ordinarily, it is a 'consolation prize' for being a terrible person and damning yourself received upon entry to Hell. I, as you can tell by my very human appearance, don't have one myself."

"What about your eyes?" Rachel asked.

"Ah, those. I did that to myself, before I died, even, trying to create the first Lapis Philosophorum to cleanse my soul of the sin of brother-slaughter," Cain said. "I was less than successful, as my presence here indicates."

"Never thought about actually just trying to atone, instead you make a magic rock to clean your soul," Ayla said with a roll of her eyes.

"You remember how I was in those ancient days. I was not the paragon of stoicism and control I stand before you now; I was practically a monster, envious, wrathful, and above all else hateful," Cain said. "It took millennia in Hell to come to terms with myself, to accept myself as I actually am. I am a monster trying to behave as a human being. And some days, I very nearly get it right."

"Never could pass up the opportunity to talk in poetry, could you?" Ayla teased.

"You wound me, Ayla," Cain said with a look of mock hurt. Then he turned to Rachel. "You have nothing to fear from this development. It will be of asset to Addam in his future endeavors, and beyond the potential of pain I mentioned of little cost."

"Great. Could you please leave me alone so I can finish my breakfast in peace?" Addam asked.

"Fine," Rachel muttered. She still didn't know why this happened today, suddenly, but she would defer to Cain's expertise in the mechanics of Aspect for the time being. She turned and walked away, for only a few steps before she felt just a slight burble in her stomach informing her that she had come down here for breakfast as well. She went and grabbed a stack of pancakes, some cheap sugar-syrup to slather them with, and a large mug of tea. When she sat down, at a table some distance away from Adam, and in fact where Cain and Ayla were having some stacks of their own, she gave her head a shake.

Then she had a notion. She glanced to her shoulder, the pocket which had been created for Living Rachel to use for her own personal storage. In the end, it had been three pockets made, one for herself, one for the living doppelganger on Earth, and the first pocket which was to be used to give things back and forth to each other. Strictly, each of her had access to all three, but custom dictated that they use what they agreed to. Which is why Rachel was a little confused as to why she had a semi-auto pistol shoved into the 'smuggler corridor'. She frowned, chewing on pancakes, then realized that she was a grown ass adult and could deal with this in a mature fashion. She pulled out her Hellphone and gave her other self a call.

Only for the call to ring out, and then go to voice mail. Well that was odd. She then sent a text to her other self, asking why her living counterpart wanted her dead self to have a gun.

With a shake of her head, and knowing that whatever was keeping her living self busy wouldn't be so for long, she returned to her breakfast, and quickly displaced the gun and its implications well behind the herculean task of keeping the Redemption Project of the Happy Hotel ticking over. She'd hear the answer when it mattered. It wasn't like she was in any actual danger.

---

Chapter 52

Graveyard of Empires, Part 1

---

Things had taken several turns for the worse in short succession, here in the world of humanity. With the American nation in seeming freefall into tyranny, aided by succession movements below the Mason Dixon, effete and ineffectual leadership from the places to the north, and the fact that most of California was on goddamned fire, the nation was very much spasming itself to death, to the rejoicing of regressives, zealots, demogogues, Russians, and idiots.

And as the saying goes, when the United States rolls over in its sleep, it is Canada that gets pushed out of bed.

Dean's work took him all across Canada and the northern US, which meant for Rachel, she got to hear both the cause and the symptoms of the disease which was rotting the North American continent. She had never considered it possible that there would be Canadian politicians trying to disassemble the Canadian healthcare system and turn it into an even more cruel reflection of the American Predatory Debt system that masqueraded as healthcare. She had found her old views to have been laughably naive in this world where literal fascism had been given a new coat of paint and trotted out as though it were anything other than a fruit rotten from skin to core.

She would have claimed that Hell had a hand in fomenting such senseless, needless conflict in the world that she now lived again in, but she knew full well from her time down there that Hell couldn't possibly give less of a shit about the state of 'the living world', in that they had plenty of their own shit to deal with and the political happenings of humans were utterly beneath demonic contempt. No, all of the savagery in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in North America was born purely of human hands and human frailty.

And she would have abided the end of an American hegemony over the world, if its ripple effects hadn't mailed a pipe-bomb to her new home.

It hadn't hurt anybody, because Rachel was, at her core, a deeply suspicious person, so when a parcel came in from an unknown sender, mailed to Dean Sharp without the trailing 'e', her concern was instantly piqued. And Dean needed little convincing to call in the bomb-squad. It took about an hour and a half to arrive, having to drive in from Toronto. Despite the fact that there was a highway leading directly there, in fact. She'd later learned it was because that same bomb-squad had had to deal with two other suspicious parcels that morning, and would later have to deal with two more.

Dean had been furious when he learned that there was a viable explosive device sitting outside of his mail box. And he had locked up and left within the hour.

"Well who could it it have been?" Rachel asked him.

"That's a big list, Rachel," Dean said. "I am a smuggler after all. I don't just move mystical stuff around."

"Yes, I know how you pay the bills," she said. "But this was well beyond what people usually do to the people who supply guns and drugs to cities."

"'Specially when those drugs are Abacavir and Itraconazole," Dean noted.

"It always beggars my imagination that you can remember those ridiculous drug names but can't remember when your best friend – my son's – birthday is."

"It's in September, right?" Dean asked.

"I swear to god…" Rachel muttered.

"Look, there's probably a dozen reasons why there was a bomb delivered to our house. And each of those reasons has about a dozen names associated with them," Dean said, as they approached the American border. Beyond lay Detroit, and another four hundred kilometers west was their destination. Chicago.

"That doesn't give me any comfort, Dean," Rachel pointed out.

"I don't think that comforting lies are on the menu today, Rachel," Dean said rather earnestly. She sighed, and nodded. "If you were asking me who I'd put money on doing that…"

"I was," she slipped in.

"It was probably Kutoba, I'd say," Dean said.

"Who is Kutoba?" she prompted, because that illuminated nothing.

"Not who, what," Dean said, splitting from the road and bearing their minivan toward one of the queues of traffic that led toward the border patrol stations. Rachel had nothing to fear from them. Her documents were in order now, due in no small part to Dean's connections and Junior's money, for her to pretty much go wherever in the world she so pleased. Having the backing of an infinite gold generator gave her a freedom which she had never enjoyed in life, nor afterlife, so would enjoy in her after-afterlife. That also meant that Dean remained at work mostly because he loved the challenge of the work rather than because if he didn't he'd be homeless.

Infinite gold, infinite dollars, limited only by her ability to exchange them without raising eyebrows. She could have made herself a terrifically wealthy woman, if she actually cared about the trappings of wealth. No, security was better.

Security had saved her life today, after all.

"Kutoba," he said, as he pulled his passport and hers from the nook in the center-console and prepared to hand them over when the line finally advanced, "is a security and recruitment company out of Japan. They typically work with Radula Mining as administration and site-security."

"Should that mean anything to me, either?" Rachel asked.

"Radula are some of the most notorious and infamous strip-miners and human-rights abusers on the planet, so yes," Dean said. "Any company willing to crawl into bed with Radula probably has skeletons just as bad as theirs, if not worse. And they very much enjoy to protect their interests with violence."

"If that were the case, I'd think that the government would break them over its knee," Rachel said, as one car advanced and allowed them to scoot closer to the currently disintegrating United States of America.

"Unfortunately no. Kutoba has an enormous amount of power in Japan, enough to have it declared a new Zaibatsu," Dean said.

"That's troubling. They stopped making those after the Second World War," Rachel noted the problem there.

"So I don't need to explain that," Dean said with a nod. "I won't say they own the government, because that's hyperbole. But they do have a hand on the steering wheel and won't let it turn in ways that will weaken it."

"So what did you do to piss off the Japanese?" Rachel asked.

"Prooobably when I moved the 'Terminator' out of Vancouver to that black-site in Uranium City," Dean said.

"Probably?" she asked with an eyebrow lofted.

"Almost definitely," he admitted.

"Why?"

"Because a bunch of cyborgs tried to steal it back and the only reason I got away was because I had Barrett riding shotgun with a really, really big gun."

"Cyborgs," she repeated. "Are you serious?"

"They ran at 110 kilometers an hour, and when their skin was shot off, they were metal underneath. What else could they be?" Dean asked, his dark eyes narrowed at one of the cars, before giving his head a shake, as though dismissing a paranoid thought.

"So you introduce Kutoba as a corrupt security company first instead of pointing out that they use science-fiction-level technology to make supersoldiers?"

"I had to lay the groundwork so you wouldn't think I was bullshitting," Dean said. The booth was getting close now. "And I don't think 'supersoldiers' is the right term. Cyborgs. There wasn't much human left on the inside, under the skin."

"And you believe they hold a grudge?" she asked.

"The higher ups? Maybe, and this is just a theory, they're using the unrest around here as an excuse to try to clean-house of people they've decided are 'problems'," Dean said. He then hissed through his teeth as they scooted forward, up to the booth. Rachel held her tongue, for she wasn't an idiot, as Dean handed over two passports and another form unrelated to citizenship over to booth people. She gave a glance to the back seat, but all was calm there, so returned her attention to Dean and the booth.

"Purpose of visit?" the booth guard said.

"Visiting my sister," Dean said. Valerie Sharpe was an unusual one, an Olympic bronze-medal bi-athlete, which mean she was a woman who possessed excellent cardio, and was a very good shot. She was also a deeply mistrusting individual, who was not happy unless she slept in a house surrounded by more guns than the Canadian government was willing to allow one woman to own. Hence her move to Chicago's south-side. The booth-guardian gave a look at the two of them, suspicion clear. Relations between the two most cordial neighbors in modern history had gotten downright frosty rather suddenly.

"Duration of stay?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Two weeks," Dean lied effortlessly.

"Does she ever say anything?" the man asked, flicking a nod toward Rachel.

"When I feel like it's relevant," Rachel answered him. He gave a roll of his eyes.

"Are there any weapons, drugs, fruit, contraband or fissile material in your vehicle?" the bureaucrat asked. As if anybody would actually answer yes. Although Rachel was deeply aware that if you were to ask any given car in Hell that same question, yes would be their downright prideful response.

"No," Rachel said.

The bureaucrat nodded, then handed the passports back, looking at the last sheets of paper that they'd handed over. "I'm required by law to recommend that you return to Canada, as the Canadian Government has issued a Travel Warning for the entire United States on grounds of terrorist attack, chemical attack, biological attack, et cetera et cetera."

"It surely can't be that bad, can it?" Dean was really working his acting chops to sound that naive. Considering the amount of information he had above and beyond whatever this portly, mustachioed bureaucrat had about the Great Insurgency which had taken root in the United States – to the point of spilling over into the Canadian Prairies as all American evils do – it was taking a fair bit of Rachel's control not to snort at his to-her-obvious-but-not-to-others deceit.

"Well, I've warned you," the bureaucrat said with a resigned tone. "This is up to date. But for future reference, they're changing the laws as of January first; she'll need a passport, too."

So much for 'longest undefended border in the world', Rachel thought. Still, Dean's connections and PJ's infinite money meant that it was a trifle for her to deal with, no matter what level of legality she chose to tackle it at.

"Welcome to the United States," the bureaucrat said without enthusiasm. "Cause no trouble."

"I strongly doubt a visit to my sister would do that," Dean said. The bureaucrat grunted, and then hit the button raising the bar in front of their front bumper, allowing them to approach the Ambassador Bridge. He brought the car up to speed, and began their exodus into America, for at least the forseeable future. "It's getting bad," Dean said.

"I tried to avoid border crossing as a rule, and let Phillip do the talking that one time we drove to Florida. I have no frame of reference other than his icy tone," Rachel admitted.

"Fissile material," Dean said. She shrugged at him. "Nuclear reactor fuel at the low end. Atom-bomb cores at the high end. What the hell are they afraid of?"

"Cheap energy or nuclear terrorism, obviously," Rachel said. She gave another look at the middle bench seat, as the back seat was collapsed into the car floor to allow more cargo space. And the middle seat was still sedate, so she returned her eyes forward, to the bridge that would take them to Detroit. "It's the law changes that more concern me. Canadian law moves at a glacial pace. If something has them scared enough to do something quickly, they must be privy to some very frightening information that they're not releasing."

"They expect a nuclear terror attack soon," Dean muttered. "The Sams are gonna need to know about this."

"If one of those 'Sams' is as on-the-ball as you claim he is, he'll probably already know, and likely even know the target. Let's just get to Chicago while the sun is up. Having your paranoid sister and her survivalist wife looming over us will be safer for all of us," Rachel said.

"This has got you rattled, doesn't it?" Dean intuited. She turned a look to him, but sighed and nodded. While he was not Husk, who had become attuned to her slightest shifts of emotional-self, Dean was still by leagues and light-years more empathetic and aware than Phillip had ever been. It was the difference between, well… talking to a wall, and talking to a person.

She heard a coo from the middle seat, and she sighed, reaching back and extracting the infant from the seat. Chloe was still half-asleep, and grouchy that she wasn't allowed to keep sleeping. She settled very quickly, though, in Rachel's arms. Chloe Phyllis Sharpe. The very definition of an 'Oops Baby'. Rachel had gotten a tubal-ligation done after giving birth to Sam, but in the interim died and had her body brought back to full health. Apparently her body considered her tubes being tied 'an injury'. And a year and a half and an unexpected pregnancy later, there's Chloe.

It was… well, it felt good to be a mother again, but the circumstances left much to be desired. In fact, if she hadn't had the infinite gold to infinite money pipeline on lock-down by her elder son, she would have been deeply stressed at the thought of trying to raise a child in an age where everything cost so much and you got so little for what you paid. Now, though, the only thing which worried her was how close she and Chloe had gotten to getting blasted with shrapnel this morning.

Rachel didn't even think about how long it'd been since she last talked to her dead-self. Life had suddenly become hectic and requiring her whole attention again. And she figured that if there were any acts of significance that happened in Hell that she needed to know about, her other self would inform her about them. It wasn't like she'd willfully denied her other self of this knowledge. It just… never came up.

Not like she'd snubbed her dead self coming to a wedding or something. Neither she nor Dean felt any need to undergo such formality, and the social structure of the modern age cared about bastardry as much as it cared about economic fairness, which was to say it was strongly, almost ballistically apathetic. Chloe would face no stigma for having unwed parents. Still, it didn't stop Rachel from calling herself Rachel Sharpe now. It headed off questions, it provided a clean break from who she was before her resurrection, and frankly she was deeply fond of Dean and this seemed a proper thing to do considering she was fucking him and accidentally gave him a daughter.

She smoothed the one shock of auburn hair that Chloe had to her head, so it didn't stick out at random like Rachel's did, and held her baby close. Somebody tried to kill her today. She wished very much to find out who. If only so she could mail a pipe-bomb to them.

---

It was the personal imperative of Purson that only the people he personally approved of were to be permitted access to the Private Library of Purson and Penemue. And it still gave him a certain amount of shocked joy that the last two words had been added tot he signage of the edifice, since his wife's immigration to Hell. One day, it would be the Private Library of Purson, Penemue, and Tabris. But that was a pleasant thought which would crystallize in the future. And the present very much vexed him, because by the fiat of King Lucifer himself, he was forced to allow one into this domicile of learning, of all the world's knowledge that he could gather unto himself, somebody that he would rather have burned it all down than to allow.

Not that Purson would ever set a flame to his books in reality. But the thought of burning them to deny them to The Radio Demon always gave him at least a moment of comfort in doing the only sane thing in Creation.

So now, Purson was being especially active in his stewarding who was and was not allowed access to his tomes, be they sacred, profane, eldritch, mundane, or none-of-the-above. He had his bookkeepers, those who kept the place maintained and orderly. He had his guests, like Octavia, who by her diligence was proving herself a friend to knowledge itself. But then he had others. Others like the Hellhound who stood before him now.

"You want… what?" Purson asked.

He was not unaware of the Hellhound before him. He had been Nathan Birch's creature, when that repugnant dreg of humanity still walked the Ring of Pride. A valet, and more impressive than that a multiple-time Champion of the Bleeding Pits, one with titanic strength and unmatched skill, because unlike literally anybody else with working sanity he'd gone into those pits unarmed and essentially naked. If Purson were a less wise and less informed person, he would have called this Hellhound arrogant. But he knew the truth of him; he went naked and unarmed because Birch demanded it, and Birch's demands could not be disobeyed by anything lesser than a Goetia like Purson himself.

"I know that this library has information on Beings From Outside," Maelstrom, King of the Pits said.

"I do not share the information on those foul beings with anyone. They are not a thing to be trifled with," Purson said with a dismissive wave.

"I'm not here to 'trifle' with them. I want to kill them," Maelstrom said.

"Kill them?" Purson repeated, arching an eyebrow.

"Yes," the Hound said. "I've been finding Outsiders both in Hell and on the Human World during assassination jobs. And they always make things so much worse for… frankly, everybody. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the reason why everything is so dog-awful these days, and even less surprised if there was a big infestation up in the crevasses of Heaven."

"Be careful of impugning my homeland," Purson warned, and Maelstrom just stared at him. Purson sighed, and sent a brief missive-spell to his bride. She, apparently having nothing better to do with this hour of the day, joined him a few moments later, with Tabris riding her hip.

"Is something wrong?" Penemue asked.

"This Hellhound is asking for information on the Beings From Outside, that he may enact some half-formed crusade against them," Purson offered.

"Hardly half-formed," Maelstrom complained. Penemue tsked and shook her head.

"Beings from Outside, however you name them, are dangers to the sanity, the health, and the integrity of all life in Creation. What makes you think that you are uniquely specialized in killing them?" she asked.

"Are you aware of the significance of The Black Beer at the Rusted Gates?" Maelstrom asked.

"I have read as to the importance of that ritual and what it represents," Penemue said.

"Then my bona fides are established from December 22nd, 2020 through January 1st 2021," Maelstrom said. Penemue turned a querulous look to Purson, while Tabris just observed the Hellhound with interested, flowing eyes.

"He has an unprecedented streak of eleven days consecutive as a survivor of the Bleeding Pits," Purson supplied what she likely lacked.

"Eleven twelve hour shifts fighting the Outsiders that ooze into Hell? That seems impossible for a mortal," she said.

"And yet he did it," Purson said.

"What panoply did you bear when…" Penemue began.

"He did so essentially nude, and unarmed," Purson cut her off. Her brows rose in surprise.

"I'm not asking for ways to… I don't know, 'gain power' from the Things From Outside," Maelstrom said. "I only need three things for my purposes."

"And those three would be?" Penemue asked. Maelstrom raised up a hand and began extending fingers.

"What they are capable of," he said, before raising a new digit, "where they hide; and how to kill them."

"While it would be laudable to cleanse the infection that… some forces have allowed to settle into Hell's underbelly," Purson dared not imply Lucifer were complicit in that, though he obviously absolutely was, "I have my doubts as to whether you can actually succeed at this crusade of yours."

"One Hound against all that Outside has to offer is a losing bet," Penemue agreed.

"Who said I'd be alone?" he asked. "I know some people. Not all fighters, but useful people. People here in Hell, and even a few people up in the Human World, that would be on the same page. They provide information and muscle, I produce corpses of things that shouldn't have lived in the first place. That is my trade offer to them. My offer to you is a cleaner Hell, in exchange for some time with your books.

Penemue turned to Purson. "A word?" she asked, and the two of them stepped a short distance from the Hellhound, who had been halted one room into their shared Private Library, in a sort of area that would have been reception if there were any sort of expected traffic to this place. Instead, it more served as a coat-room and place to leave one's dirty boots.

"What is it, my sweet?" Purson asked.

"You have more knowledge of Hell in the time before my immigration. Is this Hound as dangerous as he boasts?"

"Dangerous? I cannot say that, because he is not a violent and rampaging sort. What I can say is that anything which entered the pit with him was left with its blood soaking into the sand and its body broken. I can say that he has shown a hitherto unexpected level of literacy from a slave-soldier and dogsbody for a truly cruel Proxy of Lucifer. I can say that he has fought Angels in Heaven and survived their wrath."

Penemue seemed especially surprised by that last fact. She turned a glance to the Hound, who was now sitting down in a graciously stuffed leather chair. "What is he?" she asked.

"An exceptional Hellhound," He said.

"No. I mean that there is more to him than that," she said. "I get a strange sensation that I have seen something akin to him before, in that assistant you briefly worked with," she said, again not uttering the name of the Redemptor where either the Radio Demon or Lucifer could stand to hear it.

"You believe that he is deeper?" Purson asked.

"Yes, though not to the same depth as your assistant," Penemue said. "I would half believe that he found a way to Swear the Thirty Seven Oaths, but he is a more attenuated thing than that; there isn't quite that level of weight to him. Whatever he is, though, it is growing. If he has not sworn The Oaths, then he is approaching their level of power slowly and gradually despite it."

"So a soul that cast off its sin, and a Hellhound of impossible potential and realization," Purson said. "We live in an obtuse age, where such things as Angels now find themselves tipped from their place atop the chain of being."

"Watch your arrogance. Lucifer would claim to be the top. And even with him, there are other powers with more claim even than he," she said. Purson nodded. By the word he had received, Folly, the youngest and least of the Horsemen, could probably match Lucifer strength for strength. War and Famine? They would defeat him handily, such was their might. And all three were as thin and ephemeral shadows compared to the might of Death.

Nothing was said of God, because God had made Himself a non-issue of late.

"Do you believe that he can actually succeed in this endeavor?" Purson asked.

"I don't know. His kind are new to Creation. Wendy was deep, and Charlotte's new creature Fiona is likewise deep. The Radio Demon, damn his name, his body, and his every deed, is deep likewise," Penemue said. "It is within my world view that humans, whose souls are of unknown stuff, have potential beyond knowing. But Hellhounds are supposed to be lesser things, of lesser souls, creatures without afterlives, like imps or fiends or Elder Devils."

"Or Angels," Purson noted.

"Indeed. Only humans are supposed to have a Hereafter. Only humans are supposed to be able to master any and all magic. Only humans…" she began.

"Birah the Spellbinder is proof otherwise," he gently reminded her.

"Birah is a mutant among mutants," Penemue groused. "I cannot for the life of me understand why someone of his insight still fights for the preservation of a system as broken and unkind as Heaven."

"I doubt he has been allowed to see the cracks. For if he did, he would doubtless be knocking on Lucifer's door just as Gadreel did," Purson said. He gave his head a shake. "We are off of topic. Yes, a Hellhound of his potential is new, but not unheard of. Have you been following the rumors of the new Hellhound Rebellion?"

"I seldom engage in gossip. It so seldom contains facts," she said.

"Then I ask that you look into the person of Loona Miller at some point," Purson said. "This one is not the prototype you presume he is. If anyone is, it is she."

"This fails to answer why we ought give this Hound that dangerous knowledge," she pointed out. Tabris, silent as he held to his mother, was watching the Hellhound with a sort of fascination that only the very young or very insane can have toward the very ordinary.

"I would rather entrust knowledge of monsters to the one intending to kill them, then the ones who would profit from their proliferation," Purson said.

"...In that, at least, we can agree," Penemue said. She gave her nod of assent, and turned to the Hellhound, who was waiting quite patiently. Truly, a credit to his species.

"We will offer limited access to our information on Beings From Outside, on the proviso that your research into them occurs here, that none of the tomes, books, Grimoires and Incunabulae ever leave their secure containment points, and that you swear upon Naked Law to never use the information you obtain to summon, evoke, pull-through, instantiate, construct, reflect, Reveal, or abet an infection by those ruinous powers, merely to sever their influence from Creation."

"That's exactly what I asked for. I'd be willing to take that oath," Maelstrom said.

"Then Let It Be So," Purson evoked Naked Law, taking his oblique agreement as binding. He doubted the Hellhound would chafe. The mortals tended to fidget when one went into the 'longer form' of evoking Naked Law. Purson snapped his fingers, and a pair of Bookkeepers stepped forward from their place at the wall of the room they were in, almost hidden by their robes being the same color as the wooden paneling of the walls. "Which monster would you seek to know first?"

"The icon-builders," Maelstrom said.

"Take this Hound to the containment for my studies on the Heterax," Purson said. "Allow him not to leave with any written lore on his person, but otherwise avail him everything."

"Yes, my Jarl," the Piscean Bookkeeper said, and gestured for the Hellhound to join the pair and bear him toward that particularly difficult piece of information to even find. Purson turned to his bride.

"This will cause waves, I sense," Purson said.

"Everything we do, now, does," Penemue said, with a small smile on her face. "It is a refreshing change from Heaven, where nothing we did ever mattered."

"That is true, my sweet, that is very true," Purson said. "Now shall we away? Dinner approaches and Tabris becomes ever so sullen when his hunger grows. And frankly I need to look at Stella's engine again. There's something strange with it."

"It's a Paradox Engine," Penemue said. "Of course it's strange."

"You say that as somebody without a point of personal comparison. There's just something unusual about it. Something that bears scrutiny," he said.

"Always looking for another task," Penemue rolled her eyes. "At least have dinner first."

"I cannot say no to you," Purson said. He looped his arm through Penemue's, and with a fluttering of Angel's wings, both of them vanished from the Private Library of Purson and Penemue.

---

If there was one advantage of being of such diminutive stature it was that she could stand being cooped up in a car far longer than most could; she had room enough by virtue of short legs that she could stretch and contort such that the only part of her that slowly got more sore was that niggling spot in her lower back. There were innumerable downsides, of course, from needing to sit on a cushion just so she didn't have the dashboard obscure a third of her view while driving, to the fact that she had to engage the pedals with her toes, her breasts mashed against the wheel, in that truck that Philip had insisted upon.

Dean proved himself once more so much greater a man than Philip that he left the dead man on the far side of the horizon by having bought a minivan with the most adjustable driver's seat she'd ever seen. She could actually drive this thing like a human being, and not like a squashed-over frog. But that was beside the point, because at the end of her shift driving, they breached the border of Gary and spilled forth into the built-up urban sprawl of South Chicago. The thing was, she remembered seeing pictures of Chicago's south-side from before her death. And frankly, thirty years later, not much seemed to have changed.

Val lived very far south. In fact, as far south as you could get and still be in what people agreed was the Chicago Metropolitan Area, before it broke out into a differentiated suburban hellscape. Just north of the Little Calumet River, they pulled off of the highway some time ago, and then had to navigate down increasingly smaller and less-well-tended roads, until they were traveling along an ill-kept street, before plunging off of that onto an identically named 'Place', whose road was more pot-hole than tarmac.

She at least didn't have to dodge other traffic to get to the home that overlooked the Little Calumet, a single story ranch-style house with a sizable front and back yard bracketing it – each filled with long, dead brown grass only dusted by December snow – and a set of poplar trees growing to cut off view from the road when they finally hit their growth spurt and rocketed up to being 30 feet tall.

Per Dean's instructions, she drove directly in the ruts through the very faint dusting of snow that lead to the small, European style pick-up truck and the rust-bucket beater car it was parked beside. Deviation from those ruts ran a risk of landmine, apparently. Yes, Val was that kind of paranoid. Considering the warning signs as to the intensity that she would defend her private property – in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese, no less – it fit the way Dean described her at least.

As Rachel pulled up to the back bumper of the beater-car, the door to the garage that both were in front of opened, revealing Val and Rashmi both. Rashmi had a particularly dark complected, Indian visage to her, her face marred by scarring on one cheek up to the side of her nose, and then down her neck. She'd been subject to an acid-attack when she tried to turn down a suitor in her homeland. It was only because her parents cared more about their daughter's health than the propriety of 'allowing' such 'honorable' behavior that they got her out of India and came to the US. Of course, that was several Administrations ago. Rashmi clearly had not had a fun last decade. Then again, who had?

"Val!" Dean said, getting out of the passenger side, with Chloe in his arms. Val Sharpe looked very much like Dean, only she was about three inches taller. She had skin that seemed to tan easily, and hair and eyes that were almost black, like Dean's. Her face was longer than most would consider 'beautiful', but considering she was an athlete by ambition and athletic by birth, she was spare and narrow of build where Dean was bulky.

"Now what the fuck is that you've got there?" Val asked.

"You see, when a woman and a man get drunk one night and decide to take their clothes off…" Dean began.

"Don't be a shit, Dean," Val said. She glanced to Rachel, who was only now extracting herself from the car. "You're throwing some badly-loaded dice having a kid with that one. She's gonna be the size of a flea her entire life."

"The prettiest, smartest flea there is," Dean said. He turned to the burned Indian refugee. "Shit, I'm sorry, I completely ignored you there. Rashmi, this is Rachel. Rachel? This is…"

"I am aware," Rachel said, joining Dean and looking at Val and her wife. "I trust you have room for two and a half more mouths to feed?"

"Considering we're already host to one guest, of course," Rashmi said.

Dean's eyes narrowed at that. "It's not like you to have guests…" he said.

"Bloodsour is here," Rashmi said.

"Limped up to our door bleeding and beaten to shit. Again," Val said. "Somebody's going to have to teach that guy to keep backup when he does his job, otherwise he's going to keep getting jumped."

"So one of the Sams is here," Rachel said. Samuel Bloudsour was, like Rachel, a Native American, albeit one with a far stranger story than hers, and native to Montana as opposed to Manitoba.

"No word from Bad Grief?" Dean asked.

"He'll appear suddenly and without forewarning, just like he always does," Val said. Dean clicked his tongue in annoyance. While Bloodsour was a good enough man, his knowledge of things was comparatively lacking, especially when paired against Samuel Bad Grief.

"Come in before the feds see the collection," Val said, starting to close the garage door. And now that Rachel was standing closer, she could see that it was covered in guns and gunsmithing components. She could probably build an entire howitzer out of just what she had in this garage. The four of them moved down the concrete flags that were sinking into the dirt, again avoiding the grass because here it likely contained bear-traps, and entered the house itself. Though unassuming from the outside, the door was solid steel, held in place by locks which would take half an hour with an acetylene torch to burst. And within, the building was homey enough, but it was clear that tactical considerations took priority here. The windows were obviously smaller than they should have been, the glass far thicker. Likely bulletproof.

They didn't have to go far to find Samuel Bloodsour, laying on the couch with no shirt on, his upper torso wrapped in pinked bandages. He was a gaunt and perhaps even frail looking middle aged First Nation, his eyes dark like Val or Dean's and his hair long and greying-black. His eyes flicked to Val, who immediately gave him a nod, that Rachel and Dean were 'good people', a group which had vanishingly few members for that branch of the Sharpe family.

"Getting some sun while the sun is out?" Val asked.

"Couldn't stay down there," Bloodsour answered. "Sunlight is good."

"I'm sure. My brother, his… wife, I guess?" Val introduced.

"Common law," Rachel said.

"Are they 'cool'?" Bloodsour asked.

"Yes, they're cool. God you're such a Boomer," Val said.

"Hey, I'm only 48," Bloodsour complained. "That makes me Gen X."

"Settle in," Val said. "I'll make coffee."

"Tea, if you have it," Rachel pointed out. Rashmi gave approving nod at her as she, Val, and Dean went into the kitchen, carrying the infant with them as they went. That left the injured man on the couch alone with Rachel.

"What Nation are you?" Rachel asked. Bloodsour narrowed his eyes at her, but gave a shrug.

"Mandan," he said. Rachel let out a low whistle.

"Not many of those left," she said.

"You've got a weird look about you, too. Are you Metis?" Bloodsour asked.

"Cree," Rachel answered. "Although by the strictest dictionary definition, yes, I would be Metis because my father was white."

"How'd you get roped into the likes of this?" Bloodsour asked, gesturing around probably meaning the entire situation rather than just the room they were sharing. Conversation trickled in from the kitchen, but she didn't try to snoop when already involved in one conversation.

"That's a very long, very unbelievable story," Rachel pointed out.

"Can't be harder to believe than mine," Bloodsour said. He sat up, groaning slightly and pulled a blanket from the back of the sofa to drape over his shoulders like a stole.

"Does it beat coming back from the dead?" Rachel asked.

"Yeah, I think it does," he said. He stared out the window, to the poplars and the road beyond them. "I'm from… I'd guess you'd call it a 'parallel reality'. I was born and raised and worked in a city which, as far as this history tells, never existed. And then, when I drank the Sweetblood and crawled out of the dirt… I'm somewhere I can't even explain."

"Alright, let's unpackage that a bit," Rachel said, sitting on the easy-chair in the corner of the room. Through her questions and his explanations, it made it clear that he was by far the stranger abnormality of the two of them. She even idly looked up the City of Reuters, Montana, of course finding nothing on it because as he described, in this history there was no such place. His was a tale of bodily corruption, the Sweetblood that the townsfolk drank with everything slowly transforming them into monsters. He spoke of an incursion by an invading god-being, one trying to 'hunt' something, and a prodigal son returning to fight the beasts, before everything fell apart, and a Power erupted from the soil and destroyed the town utterly, killing tens of thousands in a single day and leaving Bloodsour and countless others buried in the earth by its passing.

Of the ten thousand in the rubble, Bloodsour was only aware of himself and Bad Grief getting out alive. And Bad Grief had a big stinking asterisk beside it at that.

"That's certainly a story," she said.

"And the worst part?" Bloodsour said, as Rashmi silently glided in and handed over a cup of tea to Rachel. It smelled weird, but when she sipped it, it had the right flavor to be tea. If it was poisoned, then she'd just have to die, then. Not like she wasn't ready for what happened when she did. The tea utterly failed to poison her. "My entire faith is missing."

"I can imagine going through something like that would damage your ability to believe in anything," Rachel said.

"No. I mean that literally, the religion I was a part of doesn't exist here," he said.

"Just as well," Rachel said. "I've been to Heaven, and it's not all its cracked up to be. Its Angels are hypocrites and God has sat on His throne doing nothing for the last three centuries. Best to rip that band-aid off in one swipe."

"I know all about the Silence of God," Bloodsour said, which got Rachel to turn a look at him. "It was spoken of as a possibility of the End Times in the Book of Joshua. I am a Joshuite," the man said.

"Most people here on Earth don't take me seriously when I say that God's rolled belly up," Rachel said.

"Most people aren't Joshuites," Bloodsour said. "Besides, since we're both giving each other the courtesy of being honest with our pasts, I'm liable to believe that you think Heaven is lacking, so long as you're willing to believe that this is not my world."

"Oh, it's far worse than 'lacking'," Rachel said. "It's gotten so bad in Heaven that the dead are shutting their brains off to not have to deal with it anymore."

"...and again Joshua warned true, of a plague of Numbness amongst the Saved," Bloodsour said with a sigh. "It seems I've been sent to a far worse world than the one I came from, to hear that confirmed."

"So… if you're from another reality, how do you…" she gestured around, indicating more material things with a downward point.

"Bad Grief, mostly," Bloodsour admitted. "I worked for him where I come from…"

"Where you both come from," she confirmed.

"It's more complicated than that," Bloodsour said.

"Rachel?" Dean interrupted, calling from the kitchen. Rachel gave Bloodsour a nod, but rose to go to the kitchen. She asked what he wanted. "It turns that there's more wrinkles in this sheet than I thought."

"Explain," she demanded, taking another sip of her tea.

"There is a company called Ultra Sound which operates here in the States," Rashmi said. "A company which shares nine tenths of its directors and upper management with Kutoba Industries."

"A puppet company for foreign work," Dean said with a nod.

"Ultra Sound has an office here in Chicago," Rashmi said. "But that is far from the most alarming part; they have branch offices in almost every city of one hundred thousand or more. On paper, they claim to be a corporate headhunting concern, slotting appropriate executives into well-paying companies. They also run a number of diploma mills."

"So not just sniping the corporate elites but turning the handle on the grist mill of the entry-levels as well," Rachel said.

"Those mills see tens of thousands of people in and out each year," Rashmi said. "And there have been 'disappearances' of its students, enough to catch my attention."

"That's bold. Fishing in their own front yard like that," Rachel said.

"They can afford to be. They have friends in high places, and nobody cares about the wellbeing of clerks and interns," Val piped up.

"So this was an Ultra Sound action?" she asked.

"It's beginning to seem like it," Dean said, continuing to bottle feed their daughter in his arms. Chloe was very content with the state of the world. If only her ignorance could protect her as much as it comforted her. Sadly, there was only one person currently in Creation who was protected by ignorance, and he worked for Lucifer.

"Why?" she asked.

"Kutoba and Ultra Sound are one company with two faces," Dean said. "Using Ultra Sound's infrastructure to hurt Kutoba's enemies is just good business, considering that Ultra Sound is only here and in… Germany, I think?" Rashmi nodded.

"So what's our move? If Ultra Sound have a fortified presence in the city, we should go where they and Kutoba aren't," she said.

"Well, that would be a trip to Mongolia," Rashmi said. "Or maybe Gambia."

Rachel growled, and put her mostly empty tea-mug down. "There's got to be something we can do, either to get their attention off of us or convince them that we're not worth the effort," she said.

"I get it," Val said, nodding in a deeply understanding way. "Even with all of the product I've got in my garage I wouldn't dare take a swipe at them, if they're what Shmi describes them as. It'd be a suicide mission, and one with no real chance of success on top of it. And I have no intention of seeing my niece become an orphan, if mostly because we don't want to have to be the ones left to change her diapers."

"It's not as bad as that," Rachel rolled her eyes.

"Yes it is. Chloe has a toxic-waste dump somewhere in that tiny body," Dean countered.

"Dean!" she snapped.

"Tell me if I'm lying," Dean said. She glared at him, but smug bastard he was he just laughed it off. "So what? Hide and hope?"

"We have more than enough food for you, we've got a bunker you can hide in, and enough guns to cancel the Apocalypse," Val said.

"If not cause it," Dean prompted.

"So either way, you can stay until we have a better plan. You've managed to sneak into this family, Rachel, so now it's our job to look after our own."

"I was hardly trying to sneak," Rachel said, moving to Dean's side and leaning against him. It was becoming increasingly foreign to her that she had ever been a person to spurn physical contact. Of course, she still understood exactly why she had; touch had been a presage of a deeply unpleasant event in her childhood. But having first Husk and then Dean, and as well a fair bit of actual therapy, was starting to crack through a lifetime's worth of trauma-responses and see that under them, she wasn't the psychopath she had presumed she was.

She was still a cold and calculating woman, but she was still that; a woman. Not a robot wearing a pleasing mask. Not an unfeeling thing.

"You should probably rest in the bunker," Val said, nodding toward the door which seemed to go to the bathroom. Rachel did admit to herself that she was fatigued from their terror-shocked morning and long drive, so she nodded, scooping Chloe from Dean and heading into the full bathroom that had a cabinet for linens against the wall. A glance at the floor showed very slight wear-marks, betraying that the cabinet had casters, and she was able to shove the thing aside to reveal a narrow stairway down into a concrete region lit by fluorescent tubes. She descended, heeding the steepness of the steps such that she practically fell down the first two before she gauged their drop and was able to make it the rest of the way down. The stairwell turned twice claustrophobically before opening to the 'airlock' which currently stood open into the 'living area' of the bunker.

This had to have cost a fortune to build. Which meant that Val was likely involved in gun-running, likely using Dean as one of her agents, so that she could afford the like of this. She found a sleeping room soon enough. There was a second, barracks-like structure with double-cots, but she had no intention of sleeping like a soldier. No, she went to the room that would be reserved for Val and Rashmi, for they hadn't specifically forbidden her, and found the bed made and the room unmussed. As much as it likely gave Val a feeling of security to have the bunker, she still preferred to sleep somewhere that sunlight could awaken her.

Rachel didn't bother disrobing, having already left her shoes in the foyer of the house; she simply crawled into the bed, laid on her back, and reached over to turn out the lights. With the door closed, there was only utter blackness and the very dim hum of the air circulation going, and the occasional discomfited noises of Chloe. But Rachel just held her second daughter to her body, and the infant settled.

It didn't take long to fall asleep at all.

Nor did it take long to wake up.

The lights were on, Dean holding a finger to his lips from the doorway. Well that wasn't a good sign.

"What time is it?" she whispered, then realized that she could consult her phone. She pulled it from her magical pocket, and saw that the hour was a bit after three in the morning.

"Late," he answered as she did.

"What is it?" she asked, keeping her tones low. They might be separated from prying ears by a foot of concrete and several more of dirt, but there was no reason not to remain prudent. Dean just beckoned her after, and she sat up, before having just a shard of panic when she realized Chloe wasn't here. But she calmed herself when she could hear the infant letting out unhappy, pre-crying noises somewhere out in the bunker. She got up, and followed the sound, finding Dean rejoining Val and Rashmi, the latter of whom was holding Chloe, as they stared at the closed-circuit cameras that the two of them had likely strung up over the neighborhood.

"Are they moving?" Dean asked.

"Not yet," Val said. She glanced back to Rachel. "Gotta say, you've got terrible timing."

"...Ultra Sound have moles in the Border Patrol," Rachel realized.

"And they guessed when you would arrive. Would it have killed you to say 'just shopping in Detroit' for your fucking excuse, Dean?" Val asked.

"Hey, I can't be 'on' 24/7 like you or Shmi," Dean complained. In retrospect it was an obvious failure of their plan. But the game was in play and there was no way to take back bad moves. They'd have to play it out where the pieces fell.

"What do we do about them?" Rachel asked.

"That'll depend entirely on them," Val said, reaching for the holster at her back and racking a bullet into its chamber. She handed the gun, a Glock of some description, over to Rachel. Rachel scowled and tucked it into her magical pocket. If things got bad enough that she'd need a gun, there was very little that half-trained Rachel would be able to do at that point.

So Rachel watched as men in business jackets began to mill around a pair of black vans. Wondering what foul game they'd been forced into a corner to play.

---

"You should seriously…" Moxxie began, but Gadreel shook her head.

"You know my specifications," she said. "If the target is a human, you don't need the like of me, and I will not partake. Frankly, I'd prefer you stop killing humans in general, but that's a heavier ask than our employer is willing to heed."

"You're fuckin' right it is," Blitz said. The upside of having Gadreel around, was that a lot of jobs he didn't have to cut her in on, because she had some sort of twist in her panties about 'killing humans'. The downside was that when she did come out with them on a job, it tended to be a pretty lucrative and easy one. Having somebody taught by the Horseman Death around evened a lot of playing fields that should have been stacked impossibly against three imps and a Hellhound.

Well, four imps, now that they had an intern. Vidar was young, but he had a bloodthirsty heart and a willingness to get his hands dirty. He'd almost got into a real corker of an argument with Uller over it, but considering the kid was far too fucking angry to last a day in construction, as most of those winged-bastards were doing now, this way he got in on the ground floor on a business in murder with essentially infinite growth potential.

At the moment, Vidar and Millie were sparring. Well, say sparring; Vidar had been given an actual fucking knife and told to try to hit her with it, and she was instructing him on why he failed. Not to say he was hopeless. He got hits on her, but nowadays, ever since that Purgatory bullshit, Millie's skin was now on the far end of bulletproof, so a knife by an angry teenager couldn't even make her flinch when he got her in the eye with it. She'd been proud of that move, and told him to remember it.

"Well, we've got no work for you, then," Blitz said, looking at the white-board of clients. Per Moxxie's wishes, they were avoiding the absolute shit-show that was North America, and focusing on the other parts of the Human World. It wouldn't change things much. As long as there were three humans alive, one would want the other dead, and be willing to pay the third to do it. And Blitz was worth any number of humans, frankly.

No, he didn't count the Radio Demon. That guy was a fuckin' problem, not a human being.

"Who do you figure we should off first, Moxx?" Blitz asked. There was one name that had numerous clients asking independently for it, and while Blitz had no idea why so many Ruskies were adamant that he kill some comedian from Ukraine, they were offering money, so onto the board it went. The others were less impressive, but promised to be simpler jobs. African warlords, Indian pharma billionaires, there was even a call to wipe out a family of drug-kingpins, likely by that family's victims scrounging Souls to get some posthumous revenge.

"The kingpin," Moxxie recommended.

"Thinking the same thing I am?" he asked.

"Probably not," Moxxie said. Blitz was thinking that when they killed the kingpins, they could steal a bunch of the drugs for fun and resale. He had no concept that Moxxie just had a deep-seated hatred for organized crime families, ever since the Chaz Incident.

"Kingpins it is," he said. "Hey Mills! Winged shit! Wanna go kill some drug-lords in the Human World?"

"Yes," Vidar said instantly.

"He doesn't have a human disguise, sir," Moxxie pointed out.

"Then fuckin' build him one! I know that the other winged shit," Blitz pointed to the office at the end of the hall, where the thaumaturges congregated, "can whip one up, so why can't you?"

"It's not a 'human disguise', and I'd need to upkeep it. If I needed that magic used for its maintenance for something else, it'd collapse immediately," Moxxie explained.

"Fuckin' figure it out!" Blitz said. There was a strangled yelp sound from the doors of the office, of somebody new coming in. "Vidar, you look like you like to be up close and watch the light go out; go to the armory and get some knives and shit. And a vest; those fuckers might try to shoot you."

"Excellent," Vidar said, looking deeply enthused at the prospect of oncoming slaughter.

"Boooss?" Dessie said from the front of the office. "Could you come up here?"

"Fuckin' what is it now?" he demanded. He stormed out of his personal office, and into the common area. And there he beheld Verosika Mayday.

Only she looked like absolute shit.

For one thing, her clothes were deslutified to a shocking degree, leaving her wear a stained grey hoodie and track-pants. Her skin likewise was broken out in acne, and she had dark bags under her eyes. More worrisome than that was that her skin was starting to have a weird powdery look to it. He paused, and gave a glance to his receptionist, who was leaning away from Mayday as though the Succubus was ill. Which strictly she was.

"The fuck are you doin' going this long between eating?" Blitz asked of the Succubus.

"Great, the first thing you do is insult me. My day is just fucking great," she said. But as she said that, tears were starting to well in her eyes. "Just my luck I have to come here and talk to you, an-and I don't even get one fucking courteous word out of you before you just fffffucking…"

"What the fuck is going on?" Blitz asked. He turned, giving a whistle to M , and Vidar, as the situation would have it. "You get started on that job without me. I'll catch up," he said, then turned to his receptionist. "Grab the Angel and hoof it for a bit."

"You got it, boss!" Dessie said brightly, before pelting over to the tiny office that Gadreel essentially lived in. Neither of them came back out, so Blitz considered them to have fucked off successfully.

"You… ahhhhh… doin' okay?" Blitz asked of the succubus. And then she actually started crying. She started crying and crumbled into a fetal ball on the floor, sobbing and shaking like a hopeless child. And while Blitz of a few years ago would have burst into open laughter at seeing her humbled like that, Blitz was now Blitz of today.

And frankly, he'd wept like that too often for him to be a stone in the face of it.

"I'm guessin' not, then," Blitz said. He sat down on the floor near her head and just let her cry it out. He knew he didn't have the big fancy words to make people feel better, and in fact had a lot of the broken ones that would make her feel worse. And the longer she was laying-on-the-floor-weeping, the longer it'd take for him to get her on her way and catch up with Millie and Vidar. Come to think of it, wasn't Maelstrom s'posed to be in today? Eh, thoughts for another time.

She lay there, crying her guts out, for a while, but Blitz had had some degree of patience beaten into him. More than that, he was actually rubbing at his back, noticing it didn't ache as much as it used to. Neither did his shoulder or elbow, the one that got smashed into the tarmac by Birch's dickless gargoyle. Frankly, he felt better than he had in as long as he could remember, since at least before that whole 'time-travel' bullshit he'd gotten subjected to. So without aches and pains driving him to move, he could abide sitting here while Verosika bawled.

"...They kicked you outta your house, didn't they?" Blitz asked, when her weeping had descended to a more manageable level. Verosika nodded, not trusting her voice quite yet. "Why? Ain't you rich as fuck 'cause of all that music shit you do?"

"It all got clawed back," Verosika said, her voice hitching and a bit froggy. With a look of self-reproach, she thumped her head against the floor, before sitting up and wiping her face with a dirty sleeve. "Asmodeus wasn't willing to cover my contract, so Mammon took… fucking everything. My house. My car. He even repossessed my sluts! I didn't know he could do that!"

"Oh fuck me, he's got your succubitches? I thought the rooster-fucker down in Lust got real ornery when Mammon took his subjects as slaves."

"Not when there's this much money involved," she said. "I was supposed to supply Mammon with a stolen Century. Do you know how many dicks I've got to suck to steal a century?"

"'Bout two hundred years' worth," Blitz said, remembering that tidbit from a conversation had almost, to him, twenty years ago.

"Two hundred wait what?" Verosika said. "How did you know that?"

"You told me," Blitz said peevishly.

"Since when do you listen when I talk?" she asked.

"Since we were fucking. And also since that whole apology thing," Blitz let the gap in the middle where he'd ignored her out of spite be known by its omission.

"I thought you spent pretty much every conversation we ever had staring at my tits," she said.

"Give me some credit. Sometimes I was standing behind you and was staring at your ass," he said. She turned a deeply unimpressed look at him. "And of course I was fuckin' listening. You were a client before you were a booty-call. Knowin' what the client wants is the first step to getting paid!"

"Always the mercenary. How fucking ironic that you got to the top of the world when I got thrown into the gutter," she muttered.

"Shit, I could'a warned you that Mammon was a shit-fuck back when we were fucking, but you wouldn't 'a listened to me, and we'd end up here anyway," Blitz said. "This is what happens to everybody who cuts a deal with that dumb fucking clown. You should'a cut a deal through the rooster-fucker instead, left that big horny Angel holding the bag when your shit got rocked."

"Frankly, I don't know if it'd be better to be on the hook from Asmodeus. Mammon at least is from Hell. Asmodeus is…" she shook her head, and then laughed. "Look at that. Us talking without shouting insults at each other or trying to get in each other's pants. What's Hell come to?"

"Eh, I got a good thing goin' with Stolas. And even if I didn't, you smell like garbage. Did you sleep in a trash can or something?"

"Or something," she muttered. She picked at the hoodie which was clearly not sized for her. "I had to steal this from a fucking laundromat so I could pawn off the clothes on my back, the only things I kept because I didn't give Mammon a chance to leave me fucking naked. Verosika Mayday, pop superstar, stuck in hell wearing stolen clothes with eighteen Souls to her name, and my guts hurt all the fucking time. I can't even remember the last time I wasn't in fucking pain!"

"You know, you're bitching way too much. How about I throw you a bone and get that whatever-the-fuck fixed so you can get back moving again?" Blitz asked.

"Excuse me?" she asked. He stood, and essentially dragged her to her feet. She was slouching in a very defeated manner, quite unlike her usual self.

"I got a niece who's got magic and shit. If I ask nice she'll put this on my tab so you stop bein' all weepy.

"Why?" she asked, as he pulled her out of the office and toward BKMS.

"'Cause you're fuckin' starving and it turns out however petty a bitch I am I don't wanna see you keel over and die in my fucking penthouse," Blitz said.

"Oh, yeah, it has been a while," she muttered, as they entered Krieg's business, and Blitz marched her past the client who was about to be allowed in by Mom to see the wizard in residence. Blitz had an insult shouted at the back of his head, but he didn't fucking care; if the guy launched anything more, Blitz would answer with lead, and he was getting too fucking old to be the touchy bitch that he once had been.

"Uncle?" Krieg asked, as the doors almost hit the exiting Dream Eater in the face as they stormed in. "What is the meaning of this?"

"I got a request for ya'," Blitz said.

"This ought to be interesting," Krieg sat at her desk, a grin spreading across her face as she steepled her fingers before her.

"This bitch got her guts fucked up by some kind 'a weapon that's keeping her from doing her Succubus slut thing," Blitz explained things in the best way he could – bluntly.

"And you want it healed. I don't work for free," Krieg said.

"I've got a tab, put it on it," Blitz said. Krieg barked a laugh and rounded her desk, pointing Verosika to a squat stool on the floor where the Succubus would be in examination distance to something as intimate with the floor as an imp was. Krieg kneaded various parts of Verosika's chest and abdomen through her clothes for a moment, then the smile died. She was still for a moment.

"Lift your shirt just above your diaphragm," she said, which was a shame, because it prevented the release of Verosika's tits. And to a creature as unashamedly horny as Blitz was, a day with tits was always better than a day without tits. Verosika turned a confused and suspicious look to Blitz, but he nodded for her to get this on with. The succubus lifted the hoodie up, and Krieg's hands pressed on several places, first near her navel where there was a bullet scar, and then next up and more rearward, as though pressing in at an angle from Verosika's spine.

"Well?" Blitz asked.

"This is a case I've not seen before," she said. "Had I a Mree machine, I would likely use it to see what technology says about what my magic tells me."

"Explain to the class, kid," Blitz said.

"Kid? I am nearing twenty years old! If I am a 'kid' then you are a 'geezer'," Krieg clapped back.

"You're still a kid to me," he said.

"Fie on you and your ageist thinking," Krieg said. "I feel an unusual – dare even say unique – interconnection of this woman's internal organs," he shrugged, not seeing how that mattered. "I see you're not a scholar of anatomy save in how to separate it from its skeleton. All organs, even those of imps, are connected together by connective tissue, a well named substance, but there is still 'give', an ability for organs to shift with the movement of the organism and even be pushed out of place to a degree. Not so with hers. It is as though her entire mesothelium was a single connective cord, binding all of her guts into rigid positioning, crowded together to the point where I'd be little surprised if it were causing her illness. Have you noticed a reduced appetite since your injury?"

"I just thought that was because I was hurt, and then because I was stressed," Verosika said.

"No, it's because your stomach no longer has room to expand," Krieg focused her attention as though staring through Verosika's skin. "Your liver is compacted. Your intestines are rigid – how long have you been constipated?"

"I'm sorry what?" Blitz asked.

"Since… since I got shot," Verosika said.

"It should be no surprise you have difficulty with your bowels, considering they seem locked and unable to," she paused, clearly searching for a word that she knew in her Cruac pidgin but not in Satan's English, "Peristalsize? They fail to push things along. It would be matched with occasional vomiting of grainy, coffee-grounds-like substance."

Verosika turned a now deeply worried look at Blitz, dread seeming to age her face by a decade, as the little shit no doubt managed to stab the dark and hit that target in its bulls-eye.

"It is twice in three months now that I've been given a problem that is beyond my magic to solve," Krieg withdrew and Verosika let her hoodie fall back into place. "For the record, fuck you for ruining my streak of success a second time, but more honestly this is a thing I've not seen before. It is an affliction that has never been seen in Hell, one that the Codex has no mention of. Which means that either it is rare beyond rarity, or else new beyond novelty."

"I just got shot…" Verosika said.

"And the bullet spontaneously welded your innards together, as all bullets do," Krieg said with a certain amount of disdain.

"Fuck you! I thought you were going to help me!" Verosika said.

"I am helping you," Krieg said. "The bullet was clearly a vector for some biotic element, like smearing a knife with shit before stabbing somebody with it; a means of adding infection to injury. This was clearly done with the intention of killing or corrupting you somehow. That it affected you only as it did is likely a feat of actual medical significance. Sit still, this will sting rather badly when I do this."

"Do what?" Verosika asked. Krieg went to her desk and pulled out a long needle-like thing.

"Pull a biopsy of your mesothelium. I knew that my readings on medicine weren't for naught! Ha!"

"I'm now growing deeply uncomfortable about this," Verosika said, then she let out a yelp and flinched away from Krieg, who, quick as a mosquito jabbed the needle straight through the shirt and into the succubus' flesh. "Stop that!"

"No," Kreig said, capping the biopsy and quickly pelting over to set it on her desk, before reaching over and grabbing her Hellphone. "I will be blunt with you, random Succubus whom my Uncle seems to hold with some regard; I cannot heal your injuries. And in fact, it would take a miracle to see you restored."

Verosika began to wilt, her eyes starting to well once again.

"But fortunately for you, I know a provider of miracles. Several, in point of fact! And of them, one of them seems to be on good terms with this office, due in no small part to my fiance doing something rather stupid at his side not too long ago. I can't speak for the reasoning behind masculine bonding, but so it is," Krieg said. She held the phone to her ear for several rings, before she cracked a smile. "Yes, good night, First of the Damned. I have a magical case that, spite my pride, is beyond my capabilities. But since I've already said I would do so and I will not also spite my word, I'd like your help in actually finishing it."

There was a silence, when Verosika turned to Blitz.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Apparently Uller and Cain fucked around in Heaven together, got 'em close as thieves," Blitz gave the entire summary of that event that he'd cared to learn.

"And who is 'Uller'?" she asked.

"That one's fiance," Blitz nodded toward Krieg.

"How in the fuck do you suddenly know all of these powerful people by name?" Verosika asked him.

"Bitch I'm fabulous," Blitz immediately responded. "Do you think I intended to live my entire life as a nameless fuckin' clown? I pulled some awesome shit, and now I've gotten rewarded for it."

"Next you're gonna tell me you've got Satan on speed-dial," Verosika muttered.

"Eh, I've got no reason to talk to the big guy. You'd need to talk to Moxx and Millie; Satan's real fuckin' interested in them," Blitz said.

"You're serious," she said.

"V, I've got an Angel working for my business now. A fuckin' Angel, on call, any time we're killing things that ain't humans," Blitz leveled with her. "And of course she's gotta have that weirdo fuckin anthrophile fetish goin' on where she doesn't wanna kill the people she deep-down wants to fuck. Otherwise we'd be makin' even more fucking money than we are!"

"Why do I feel as though you've stolen all of the good fortune of my life?" Verosika asked, as Krieg and Cain continued to talk turkey on the phone.

"Don't you fuckin' start with that; I didn't steal shit from nobody! I built what I got with my own two bloody-covered hands and HOW FUCKIN' DARE YOU say otherwise?" Blitz snapped at her. "I put way too fucking much work into this company to let you come in here and call it 'a lucky break'!"

Verosika sighed and shook her head, but didn't answer his outburst. There was a long quiet between the two of them, punctuated by Krieg now answering yes-no questions from Cain.

"I know it's really pathetic of me to ask but… you wouldn't happen to still have room on your couch, would you?" Verosika asked.

"Tired of sleeping in garbage?" he asked. She glared at him. "Well, now that she and the winged-shit are living in an RV in the parking lot downstairs, there's room aplenty in the apartment. Ain't like I'm living there anymore."

"You have an apartment you're paying rent on that you don't even bother to live in," Verosika said.

"Well, yeah, my Mamma and her shitlings are all living there. What kinda son would I be if I made her have to pony up rent after all the shit I put her through growin' up?" Blitz asked.

"...you actually, finally grew up," Verosika said.

"Fuck you," he said, but with only a fraction of the vitriol he would have had in times long past.

---

"Another van," Dean said, finding another one entering the 'neighborhood' which was in fact just an ill-maintained road that ran along the north bank of the Little Calumet river. There were few other houses, which meant many places to hang up a camera that nobody would complain. And true to his words, another black panel-van pulled onto the street, opening its back doors out of camera-shot, but allowing four men in business-formal attire to leave the vehicle. A few moments later, two more came out of the driver's seat and passenger's side. Though they wore business-formal as well, there was something different about them. In the black and white of the camera feed, it was a very different shade.

Rachel pointed that out to the others, and Rashmi grimaced, hitting the controls of the cameras and having one of the more recent additions to the network turn in its housing and face the van. While most of the people from that van were wearing bright blue blazers and slacks, the driver and passenger were both wearing green.

"They're bringing out the big guns," Rashmi said.

"Explain?"

"Ultra Sound make it visibly obvious from a distance how high up in the company you are by what colors you're permitted to wear. Bright blue means you're right at the bottom. I don't know how many levels green is above them, but it's above them," Rashmi said. She puffed out a breath, then whispered in Tamil 'don't let them be orange'.

"What happens if they're orange?" Rachel asked. Rashmi turned to her in confusion that Rachel understood her. Joke's on her, Rachel had died knowing eight languages, and death had given her access to After, which actually was an omniglot language that enabled her to understand speech by any person on Earth. If she hadn't found an instant sideline as a producer of magical items, she likely would have made a mint as an interpreter and texts translator.

"If they're orange, we'll be dead before we have a chance for our guns to cycle," Val said with a hard glare at the green blazered people who, in silence because these cameras didn't have that functionality, directed the blue blazers to make a perimeter.

"They're not going to turn this into a siege. They're going to storm," Rashmi said.

"Then let them find our landmines and bear traps," Val said.

"Will they work?" Dean asked, receiving a double-barreled shotgun from his sister as he did. Only when he opened it, instead of shells, he slid really, really long bullets into it. Rachel lacked a comprehensive understanding of firearms to know that Val took one look at those people up there and decided 'those fuckers require an Elephant Gun'.

"It's the option we have," she said. Val then turned to Rachel, and pointed to the wall that had numerous guns she did recognize – hunting rifles and the like – and nodded toward it. "Rachel? Give one of those to Bloodsour. He's a middling shot but middling is better than nothing."

She gave a nod, then took an extra moment to deliver a kiss to Chloe's head, which the fussing baby didn't really seem to respond to because she was likely in her own tiny world of some small thing like a clothes-tag rubbing against her skin being a greater catastrophe than imminent death.

Ascent back to the house saw her enter dark rooms, and she literally walked into Bloodsour as she excited the kitchen.

"Careful, don't want to make noise," Bloodsour said.

"Keeping an eye on them? That's a bit bold," she said, handing over the rifle. "You'd be safer in the bunker."

"No I wouldn't," he said. And she gave a shrug as he accepted the box of bullets that Val had indicated went with this gun. He leaned around the thick, bulletproof windows, and scowled, loading up his rifle bullet by bullet. "Where's your gun?"

"If it reaches a point where I have to be armed, we're already dead," she said.

"Fair enough," he muttered. Bloodsour paused for a moment, eyes narrowing in the incredibly thin light that the two of them were seeing by. Out on the street there were only flickering shapes, glanced only momentarily between the poplars or in the moment when one crossed the driveway.

"...they're getting ready to storm," she said, and Bloodsour nodded. She heard the faint crunching behind her, and glanced back to see the vague shape of Dean moving into the room with them, mostly recognizable because of the Elephant Gun that glinted in the sliver-moon's light. Rashmi was next, bearing what even firearms-illiterate Rachel knew was a Kalashnikov. When she saw that Rachel still had refused to arm herself (pearls before swine, and all that), Rashmi sighed and handed over the infant in her other arm. Rachel agreed with that course of action fully.

Valerie was last, carrying a gun that a firearms enthusiast would break into outraged tears over seeing, a high-powered rifle cut down to a carbine. "Doors," Val whispered to her brother, while she and Rashmi went back to the kitchen and put their backs against the wall. There were only two entrances and exits to this building.

The minutes dragged on, as Rachel continued to watch the movement in the dark, as Dean and Sam Bloodsour kept their eye on the front door, and the ladies of the house watched the back.

Rachel wasn't above admitting that she outright flinched when the first landmine went off, an old 'toe-popper' that was designed not to kill but to incapacitate. The flash of it going off revealed that there were blue-suited men and women breaching the poplar-line. The one who stepped on the mine kept advancing as the first flare faded, and other mines began to go. One launched itself upward and detonated blasting out a wave of shrapnel at chest level to six of them. They ignored it. Then they started to sprint.

Their run was hobbled by the fact that the ground was loose and gave them little traction, so that instead of easily reaching the house in four bounding strides they had to tear their feet into the sod like a cartoon character trying to find purchase. And once their forward movement continued, there were more blasts, of claymore mines shredding clothing and flesh with ball-bearings, of more Bouncing Bettys peppering them with shrapnel, but they advanced still.

One of them set off something at the center of the yard, something much more substantial than the mere 'antipersonnel' mines that the others were ignoring. That was an anti-tank mine, one that got trod on so viciously that it activated, and with a thud that rattled the bulletproof windows of the house finally managed to cause meaningful damage, blowing the leading arm and leg, as well as face, off of the approaching blue-jacket. He was hurled into the air, launching backward and landing in a pile. And as soon as he landed, he started crawling forward again, the metal endoskeleton under the flesh grinning savagely as it fell behind its fellows.

There were other blasts coming from behind, and the more martial people were clearly expecting far worse to come from their side than the front. Rachel failed to see how that was possible. These things were fighting like goddamned Exorcists wrapped in meat.

Rachel scooted back to the corner of the window, now only watching most furtively. The others, having got their footing, raced forward, setting off all of the mines in the long grass in succession. Of the six that started the advance, now four were still standing, with one more finally getting shrapnel into something it couldn't sustain and going down. One of them reached the window that Rachel was looking through, and with a mighty heave of its fist, punched at it.

Spider-web cracks instantly made opaque the window, but the window held. There was a second crash a moment later. Then the impacts shifted away from the window, and toward the wall of one room over. They had abandoned the windows as not feasible, and immediately tried to burst through the walls like evil, cybernetic Kool-Aid men. And they failed at that, too, because this house was clearly 'built different', in that it was built to military-bunker specifications.

There was a tremendous crash from the driveway, sounding massive and metal and crumpling, then there were more bashing noises, this time at the front door. Dean and Bloodsour both hardened their resolve, took their angles, with Bloodsour on one knee, and Dean outright laying on the floor.

There was a pause, briefly in the banging. Then the gunshots began. Single, loud gun reports that were followed an instant later by the shrieking of structural metal failing, or of bulletproof glass making a liar of itself. Chips of glass rained into the room, and Rachel saw Rashmi and Val dive lower onto their bellies, a few moments later a bullet racing through the building that would have struck both of them had they remained in their old position. Rachel, a small target, only had to remain where she was, tucked in the corner, to have the worst of it miss her.

They weren't shooting at her.

Why?

Because she was in this corner, she realized.

"Stay out of sight of the windows! They're using some kind of advanced targeting that can't see through metal!" Rachel shouted into the noise of gunshots going out. Bloodsour joined Dean on the floor, just as the sounds of metal shrieking continued. There was another bang from behind Rachel on the outside of the house as the Ultra Sound blue-jacket there ripped into the exterior of the building and tripped a landmine built into the structure of the house. Christ almighty, Val, is there anything on this property that isn't rigged to explode, Rachel thought?

The driveway, she admitted to herself. The driveway wasn't rigged to explode.

And they were going to figure that out for the next wave. If it even mattered, since the first wave cleared the mine-field rather effectively.

There was a final, metal ripping noise from Rachel's front as the front door was torn from its seat. Before the blue-jacket with its mostly shredded flesh and mostly-revealed metal even had a chance to throw the door away, Dean opened up with the Elephant Gun to a gunshot louder than any Rachel had ever heard, one that finally got Chloe shriek-crying, and for once Rachel could understand entirely why a baby would be overwhelmed by the likes of this.

The gunshot caught the machine-man about an inch above where its nipple would be, and in so doing tore off an arm and caused the head to sag over as the entire shoulder-structure was ripped apart. The cyborg tried to right itself, but there was a blast of sparks, of black smoke, and a pulse of some grey-green fluid, before it collapsed forward, boneless, into the foyer. So they could be brought down by less than high explosives after all.

There was a tremendous crash against the window of the 'master bedroom' but it, like the one in the 'living room', refused to announce with the delicate tinkle of falling glass a shattering but instead the stubborn crunch of perseverance. Another blow caused another similar crunch. That meant at least one of them was fixated on an impassable wall, or perhaps more accurately a wall momentarily impassable.

Chloe was shriek crying, now, and a different woman from Rachel might have been joining her. There was chaos around her, a madness of violence much like the onset of the Purge Unending, or how Dead Rachel described the surge that coincided with Heaven's greatest assault on Hell as yet. Only there were no 'disposable warriors' that could spend their lives to bring down their superior foes. Only family, and friends of family. And if she had her way, no human here would die this night.

Another Ultra Sound stormed into the opened front door, and caught both barrels to the chest as the one before had. This one lingered, trying very hard to stay upright, as smoke wafted out of its ruined chest cavity and its spine let out the sound of guitar strings snapping. Bloodsour added his .300 Magnum into the ruined hole, working the action to fire again even as Dean struggled to breach his Elephant Gun and get new rounds into it. By the third round of Bloodsour, there was a brief pulse of flame from the things innards, and it slumped to one side, forming an 'L' shape against a cupboard door with his back bent backwards and legs out behind him. There were other, calamitous bang sounds and then the shattering noise of glass collapsing from the other side of the house. By the sound of it, Val and Rashmi had opened up on their intruder, and sent it straight into the china cabinet. And their guns, not beholden to bolt-action, allowed them to continue firing until there was a loud, metal grinding noise, then a stunning electric jolt noise.

"Rashmi!" Val shouted. Great, things were going well, Rachel thought to herself. The gunfire continued back there, though, if at a reduced rate, before finally it halted, and a third body entered the front doors. This one grabbed the slumped body in front of him and dragged it into the path of Dean's oversized, overpowered, and barely adequate bullets before they could hit something that they'd already killed. The machine-man advanced, and the three of them retreated from the living room. Dean backed fastest, trying to gather her ahead of him and somewhat heartlessly leaving Bloodsour to his own devices. But Sam Bloodsour seemed to have good instincts. When the cyborg hurled the mechanical carcass of its 'brother' at Dean and Rachel – which they only dodged by getting on the far side of a door-frame – he was already scrambling back, taking the other door into the guest bedroom.

Rachel glanced back, to the amount of glass chips that had been unseated by the attack of the cyborg outside. It was still holding together. But unlike bullets, which once used were spent, the fists of cyborgs were everlasting and recyclable. There was another crash, and more chips of glass fell out of the opaque network of cracks, bowed inward into to the room by ten centimeters, easily. Rachel would need to ask Val who she got this bulletproof glass from. Charlie would likely love to have that kind of materiel on hand the next time Exorcists pissed around in her back yard.

Simply, they were between a rock and a blender. And the Cyborg, now shifting its attention away from where Bloodsour had gone, seemed to grasp that the Elephant Gun was its biggest problem. It took a thunderous step toward them.

"Hey! CATCH!" Bloodsour shouted, and threw a brick at the Cyborg. It caught the thing before it rebounded off of its head.

Then it looked at the brick it caught.

Which had a hand-drawn label on it reading 'Semtex – 1057g'. And a bunch of wires plunging into it.

Dean immediately grabbed Rachel by the back of her dress and hurled the two of them deeper into into the room, over the bed and onto the far side in the glass. Rachel didn't blame him in the slightest. Half a second after they landed, there was a tremendous boom that stabbed into Rachel's left ear – the one facing upward – and half-blinded her with pain for a moment, as the bed was shoved into the three of them. Chloe now was shrieking in pain as well as discomfort, though Rachel's hands had protected her ears, it was still harrowing to be near the blast-wave of a kilogram of plastic explosives.

The window gave another crunch, just as she saw Dean snap the Elephant gun closed. She dared to glance over the window, and saw a man's head looking in, relatively unharmed compared to the other Cyborgs. Dean remedied that by emptying both barrels – which again stabbed Rachel in the head with shocking pain. She must have burst an eardrum. The Elephant Gun showed its mastery once more, sheering off the top of the cyborg's head and causing it collapse back out rather than enter into the room. Rachel slowly pulled herself up, but only after Dean had reloaded again. He was already starting to favor his shoulder, likely from a terrific bruise forming there. Elephant Guns were not made for the faint of heart or soft of shoulder, after all.

The one who had been in the living room was now a pair of legs and a pelvis which were collapsed against the window, while the room itself was a total loss. Its window was blown out utterly.

"The truck!" Valerie shouted as she appeared, helping a slightly-smoking Rashmi limp toward the outside. It was clear that the building was not a redoubt sufficient to withstand the cyborgs, not for long. And especially not when they brought more reinforcements after all the damage the first wave had caused. Flight was the only sane option.

"Bloodsour?" Rachel asked, as she had to work extra hard to keep her balance. She could feel blood running down her neck, meaning she had a cut under her hair somewhere, but that was a problem she could deal with when they weren't about to die. It wasn't the dying that bothered Rachel. She'd died plenty of times. It was the thought dying without being able to save Dean and Chloe that kept her moving and unwilling to do something brave and stupid – as though the two could be meaningfully extracted from each other. Bloodsour didn't answer, simply joining them out of the guest room with another red brick of Semtex in his hand, while his other arm hung, his shoulder visibly misshapen and causing it to droop lower than the one that still worked.

It would be a mad dash, but she knew from Dean's talks that there was another truck behind the garage, something that could easily handle them all.

They broached into the night, following after the limping, bleeding forms of Val and Rashmi because they alone knew the safe way. And wise they were to do so. As they were rounding the garage, and seeing the big, obviously pieced-together four-door pickup truck, there was another blast from behind them as a Cyborg stepped on a landmine in pursuit of them. Dean turned and fired the instant he beheld somebody behind them that he wasn't fucking, father to, brother to, or an associate of.

Bloodsour hit the deck as the gun swung, and when it fired, it clipped the Cyborg and dumped him into the long grass, where his face found itself bitten by a bear-trap. He tried to rise, but the device was chained to the ground. Bloodsour saw an opportunity, and darted back to the corner, hitting the button on the Semtex and hurling it around the corner before running back toward them. For all his arm was bum, his legs seemed to still be working fine, unlike everybody else. By the time Rachel and Dean reached the truck, Bloodsour had already passed them and was opening the door for them, while Val loaded Rashmi into the passenger seat.

"This is going to be rough. Rachel? Hold onto that kid as tight as you can," Val said, half way through her sentence being cut off by another calamitous blast as Sam Bloodsour's second brick went off. The bear-trapped Cyborg took a lot of the hit and went still from the damage of the blast, as the garage began to creak and its roof sag, a vast swathe of its structural integrity undercut by high explosives.

Rachel offered no response, just diving into the middle, between her… well, husband, essentially… and Bloodsour who slammed the door shut. Val was the last in, but had the thing started up and was accelerating before anybody but Rashmi could get their seatbelts on, driving straight forward, an invisible trail not trapped or dangerous, using the 'fuck-the-Alamo' plan of simply running if the going got too rough. Val was a paranoid woman, not an insensible one. She crashed through the 'fence' of wood that cut off that end of the property, and then veered up the ruts toward the road.

They had only made it a meter and a half onto the road when the truck was t-boned, not particularly hard but hard enough to almost rip the infant from Rachel's arms and hard enough that glass burst into Dean's face. He shouted and cursed but from the sound of it none of it went into his eyes. Which was good. She liked his eyes. They had a very gentle look about them.

The truck fish-tailed and the SUV that had rammed them backed up to hem them so that forward wasn't an option. The doors opened, and two men in green blazers stepped out. The closer, the one who had been driving, held up a hand which split open to the flapping of ragged, bleeding flesh to reveal something like a pneumatic guillotine, the likes of which was used to cut apart cars to get crash-victims out. Considering Dean was stunned, Rachmi and Bloodsour were injured, and Rachel was holding an infant, that left only Val to pull her pistol and empty a mag into the approaching green-jackets. Though blood and flesh was ripped by the bullets, they didn't slow the Ultra Sound Cyborg in the slightest.

So this was how this body was gonna die, hm?

Well, even as that thought occurred to her, there was a shrieking of rubber on tarmac, and a new set of headlights illuminated the green-jackets. Prudently, they turned to surveil the newcomer, which turned out to be a car that to some degree looked like it came out of a cyberpunk version of Mad Max, armored to high-heaven with no glass in its windscreen (how that thing was to be driven was likely a thing of cameras and monitors, Rachel figured), with a man worming his way out of the passenger window, holding what looked like an RPG-7 at them.

Rachel had enough time to try to save one person, one arm to do it with, and she preferred the lover of Dean to the near-stranger of Sam Bloodsour. She tried to pull him down, to get him out of shrapnel's flight. But instead of a rocket packed with high explosive, when the lunatic leaning out the car window fired, it let out a tremendous, deeply bass thud, one that swept up both of the green-jackets and hurled them like rag-dolls over the hood of their own SUV… an SUV which twisted and jerked as though it had just been hit by a train, spiralling across the street until it wrapped itself around a utility pole.

"Bad Grief?" Dean asked, looking out at the man who was putting that tube back into his rig.

"Follow me! We've got to go before they get back up!" the newcomer, this Samuel Bad Grief, shouted. And when Rachel looked through the rear glass, she could see that the two green-jackets were spasming on the ground, but despite the flesh and their clothing being outright blown off of them, they were still more or less intact. Val needed no prompting, simply getting the car moving as they tracked the car through the darkened streets of south Chicago.

North and west they went, as Rachel checked on her fellow passengers. Bloodsour was holding his head, which was bleeding from where it had connected with the window on his side due to whiplash. Dean had a number of superficial cuts on his face, but was otherwise fine. Rachel didn't have time to really question where they were going before they arrived there, however. They pulled up to the railyard which dominated south-central Chicago, once a hub of trade throughout all of the continental United States. Now it was much faded, with people preferring planes over trains. But a small, side gate opened to Bad Grief's car, and stayed open long enough for Rachel's crew to follow him, heading into the holding yard for the traincars. Only then, out of sight from any long direction, did the Mad Max car stop, and Bad Grief get out.

"What's going on?" Val demanded of him, but only after helping Rashmi out of her side of the truck.

"We're leaving Chicago," Sam Bad Grief said, "before the army locks it down."

"What? Why would they do that?" Dean asked.

"Get onto that train, I'll explain when we're on it," Bad Grief said. He paused, turning to his car. "Jodee, get that truck nice and disappeared for me. You've earned your money today."

"You're fuckin' right I did," the voice from the driver's seat of that car was androgynous, and the car pulled out into a circle and drove into the dark between the traincars.

While Rachel didn't like following orders from strangers without cause, Val and Dean were both heeding Bad Grief's direction, so she considered that cause enough. She helped Bloodsour as much as one arm could; Val and Dean together had to haul him up into the box-car that was oddly empty of trade goods, and had actual living accouterments in it.

"Alright, we're here. What's happened?" Val asked.

"Why explain when I can show?" Samuel Bad Grief asked, and pointed toward a computer set-up along one of the walls. And on the monitor was a news-cast. One showing a very spiky sigil overlaid over a map of what appeared to be San Francisco.

"...what the shit?" Val asked, pausing from her fussing over Rashmi to look upon the same thing Rachel saw. San Francisco Nuclear Attack.

"Somebody detonated a dirty bomb in San Fran," Bad Grief said. He resembled Bloodsour in many ways, but Bad Grief kept his black hair short, and his face had a more distinctly predatory look to it. "Two guesses who, and the first doesn't count."

"You think they…" Dean gestured vaguely behind them.

"That's why the first didn't count. It wasn't the Cogs, or your demons. It was us. Humans did this," Bad Grief said. There was a lurch a few moments later, one that almost knocked Rachel from her feet. "We'll be moving soon, out of Chicago with what might be the last train for a while."

"What is going on with this country?" Rachel asked.

"That, stranger, is a question that I'd need a few weeks to answer," Bad Grief said. He extended his hand. "Sam."

"Rachel," she said. "And I'm not going to call you Sam. Sam was my son."

Bad Grief shrugged. He was obviously used to worse snubs from more powerful people than she.

"Well, whatever your wants, these three hundred square feet are going to be our home until we hit San Diego," Bad Grief said. He gave Dean a pat on his shoulder. "She's hotter than you said she was."

"I told you I should have hired a poet," Dean said. Flatterer, he.

"Could you explain why we were just attacked by Cyborgs in Chicago?" Rachel asked.

"Can I? Yes. Will I? Tomorrow," he said. He gave a shudder. "I don't know about you, but I've been running ragged for more than a day now. And there'll be time enough to sort things out in the morning. So take a cot, grab blankets before they run out. I, for one, am fucking beat."

And with that Sam Bad Grief left the injured to grab a blanket, and wrap himself in it like a burrito even as he fell onto a cot. There was a new lurch, which didn't catch Rachel out because she was sitting this time, as the train-car had another car latched behind it, and new lurches happened every minute or so, while Rachel finally got Chloe to stop shrieking and reduce to unhappy cooing.

"I get a feeling the world is going to be getting harder and harder to live in for mere mortals," Rachel said.

"I'm just glad you didn't get another brave notion in your head since 'you've already died a half dozen times'," Dean said. "I don't want to lose you once, let alone more than that."

"That's just you being sentimental," she said as she leaned in on him. Only when Dean wrapped Rachel and their new daughter in his arms did the baby finally start to settle down, sensing safety at last. If only it wasn't illusory, like a mirage of water in the desert. Despite all the therapeutic progress she'd made, she was still a pessimist at heart. And her pessimism told her that the Earth had a lot worse that it was going to get.

---

To Be Continued

---

"People thought the 1930's were rough. And frankly they were right. But none of that shit so much as held a candle to what happened during the late 2020's. Back when I was young, I heard a story – from some book the guy had read – about killing an elephant. How there was this elephant that crushed some villager somewhere in India, and the local Brits had to go do something about it so the Indians didn't get uppity. So he goes out there, with the biggest gun they had at the time, and finds the elephant just standing there, calm as can be. But that's the elephant, and the locals are calling for blood. So the Limey takes aim and shoots.

What nobody tells you about when you get shot, is how long it sometimes takes to die. Every living thing is fighting with all of its might and soul to stay alive, no matter what happens to it. I've seen rats, bitten in half, still fighting to crawl away from the dog that was gulping down their legs and tail. All of nature is like that. And the elephant takes a long, long time to die, so long that the Limey starts to feel awful about having to shoot it, wishing for some way to make the death faster. But that's not in his power to grant. So he just stands there, watching this beast die, confused, in pain, not understanding why this befell it.

Earth in the 2020's? I see the elephant in it. A beast that was lumbering along, doing whatever a beast of its size does, only to be suddenly struck by a deadly blow. And it flailed hard, clawed at the dirt as it bled, trying to find some way to save itself, but the wound was already through its lungs and its minutes were numbered. A World Order hooked to the supremacy of the petro-dollar given an upset by a blink-and-you'll-miss-it transition to fusion power, and all of the trappings of its status quo suddenly ripped to shreds. What worth is there in millions of barrels of Saudi oil when an electric car costs less to make, less to buy, and never needs to be refilled because it has access to air and fusion reactors ain't choosy? Besides selling a couple hundred to Hell so they can make shit out of it, none.

America had a different bullet fired at it. One fired fifty years before by people who preferred ruling over representing, but suddenly exploded and hit literally everybody with its shrapnel. Mary Shelly made it pretty fucking clear that it's easy to make a monster. But it can be a royal bitch trying to control it. And the monster that killed America, United America, was a monster that had been built with painstaking precision for years… that they had thought would never be able to slip from a leash that only ever existed in their imaginations."

– Vacuole the Unstoppable, Redemptor