Dancing on the Head of a Pin by Thomas E. Sniegoski
The Hellion poised to pounce before the axe-weilding Satan was suddenly thrown sideways by the force of multiple bullets entering its red, muscular flesh. The monster roared, spinning around to face its attacker. Mulciber, armed with a semiautomatic pistol, sprayed the monster with more bullets.
“Get away from him!” the loyal Denizen bellowed, emptying the clip uselessly into the durable flesh of the abomination.
Remy ran across the body-strewn garage, toward the van and the overturned table. He was looking for the daggers. They’d had some effect upon the Hell beasts before, and would likely do so again.
His gun empty, Mulciber attempted to run, tossing the now useless weapon at the hissing nightmare. The Hellion, its body seeping thick, yellowish liquid from where it had been struck, sprang at the back of the fallen. It landed atop him, driving him to the ground, sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the soft flesh found at the back of Mulciber’s neck.
Even though the Denizen was an ass, Remy was glad that it had ended quickly for him. And then he felt as though he had won the lottery as he found the knives, still wrapped with Byleth’s sports coat. He was removing the blades when screaming close by caught his attention.
Three of the Hellions were converging on the van.
It was Mason who was carrying on, his wheelchair having moved off the metal ramp, trapping him mere inches from the inside of the van.
“Do something!” the crippled man shrieked as he frantically toggled the hand control while Madach struggled to right the cumbersome chair.
Remy shoved the twin daggers into his back pocket and ran toward the van, jumping up onto the ramp, trying to help Madach get the wheelchair back on track.
“Nice to see that you’re not dead, Remiel,” Byleth yelled from where he was standing at the foot of the ramp moving the Pitiless axe from hand to hand as the Hellions moved inexorably closer.
“I’m guessing we’re going to try to use the van to get the hell out of here?” Remy said, grunting with exertion as he finally felt the chair shift, one of the spinning wheels able to find traction on the rubber-covered ramp.
“I think that’s the plan,” Madach said, attempting to steer the chair so that it didn’t go over on the opposite side.
Remy was about to turn, to see how close the Hellions were, when the monkey started to shriek in warning. At first Remy saw nothing except Mason’s chair about to pass over the lip and into the back of the van. But then the growl of a Hellion drew his eyes to the roof of the van, and he knew exactly what the monkey had been screaming about.
“Ah, shit,” Remy hissed, pulling the twin daggers from his back pocket.
It happened so quickly. The red-skinned beast dropped down onto the handicapped man, flipping the chair backward and sending Madach flying over the side of the ramp.
The capuchin proved her loyalty to the bitter end, launching herself ferociously at the beast perched upon her master’s chest. The poor little thing didn’t last long, her entire body snatched up and swallowed in the blink of an eye.
I liked that monkey, Remy thought, charging toward Mason. He had liked her better than he had liked Mason even, but the handicapped purveyor of the bizarre at least deserved an attempt at being saved.
Remy screamed as he jammed one of the blades into the side of the monster’s head. He felt the dagger enter the thick, sinewy flesh, hitting against a steellike skull beneath. The creature bellowed, shaking its head furiously to dislodge the troublesome blade. Angered by its pain, it raked its claws down the front of the struggling Mason, tearing away the flesh to expose the handicapped man’s inner workings.
At least his screams were short.
Remy darted forward, jabbing the dagger beneath the Hellion’s jaw, into its throat. As the monster wailed, Remy reached across, retrieving the first blade from the side of its head, and used it again, plunging it deeply into one of the Hell beast’s loathsome yellow eyes.
The beast toppled over thrashing upon the ground, and Remy turned just in time to see the three remaining Hellions attack Byleth.
Remy was glad to see that the time spent in Tartarus had done little to quell the warrior spirit in the fallen angel. Byleth waded into the battle, swinging the axe with deft precision. The Satan proved to the beasts of the pit that he was not an easy meal and would not be brought down screaming.
“Toss those inside,” Remy called as Madach climbed the ramp carrying the transport cases for the remaining Pitiless weapons. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Remy wished that he could be as positive as he sounded. He strode down the ramp, Lucifer’s daggers in hand, to aid his onetime friend and brother who had fallen from grace.
“Who’d have thought after all this time we’d be fighting against a common foe,” Byleth said, swinging his axe into the face of one of the Hellions as it surged to strike.
They didn’t stand a chance against three of the beasts, but if they could provide enough of a distraction, there was a slim chance that they might be able to escape with most of their skin intact.
Remy heard the van engine turn over and immediately pictured a ticking stopwatch inside his brain. There was very little time remaining before they finally grew tired and fell victim to the Hell beasts’ savagery.
The Seraphim was aroused by the smell of death and violence in the air, eager to be called upon. Remy struggled with the idea before deciding what he would do.
“Get ready,” Remy said to Byleth, their eyes fixed on the Hellions. The beasts had dropped to a crouch, their repulsive, skinless bodies trembling in anticipation of their next strike.
“What are we going to—” Byleth began.
Remy let the Seraphim free, screaming as he channeled the power of God through one of the Pitiless blades, aiming a blast of divine fire toward the black limousine across the garage.
The fire snaked through the front grille, the intensity of the heat causing the headlights to shatter, before the hungry flame found the gas tank, instantaneously igniting its contents.
The limousine exploded with a deafening roar, spewing flaming wreckage and liquid fire, distracting the Hellish creations. The monsters spun toward the roar of the explosion.
“Move—now!” Remy yelled, grabbing Byleth by the arm and hauling him up the ramp.
But Remy did not stop there. Another blast of Heavenly power flowed from his still-outstretched arm toward the small collection of sports cars, their security alarms still blaring. They too exploded at the touch of the Seraphim’s might, filling the enclosed space of the garage with even more smoke and fire.
He was running up the ramp, Byleth ahead of him, when he heard the sound. Remy turned his head to find the Hellions scrambling up the ramp after him; his distraction was less effective than planned.
“Go! Go! Go!” he bellowed, pushing Byleth into the back of the van.
Madach put the van in drive, the tires screeching for purchase on the garage floor. Remy lurched forward, falling down hard on the ramp, grabbing to hold on as the van rocketed forward on a collision course with the closed garage gate.
He’d managed to get a foothold, clambering up into the vehicle as it smashed through the garage door out into the cool, spring night. And then it spun violently as Madach slammed on the brakes.
“What’s wrong?” Remy shouted toward the front of the van. He looked back into the garage, through the roiling, oily smoke, to see that the surviving Hellions were clustered together, for some reason not pursuing them.
But how long that would last was anyone’s guess.
“What’s going on?” Remy asked, jumping out from the back of the van.
“Why are we stop—?” he began, only to stop midsentence as he rounded the front of the van and saw them.
The tiny stretch of back alley that ran behind Byleth’s converted church home was blocked by five enormous figures, their features hidden in flowing robes that shifted and moved in a nonexistent wind, shimmering like an oil slick upon the water.
Remy could not help but wonder what had brought them here as he stood with Byleth and Madach in front of the van.
“I’m not too sure that this is the best place to be at the moment,” he said as he watched the powerful form of Suroth move to the front of the gathering.
“The weapons,” the Nomad leader stated with urgency, eyes burning from inside the deep darkness of the hood that hid his angelic features. “Give them to us before all is lost.”
Intimidated by the oppressive power radiating from the fearsome beings, Madach and Byleth cowered in their presence, practically driven to their knees.
“I’m not giving them to anyone,” Byleth hissed. “They belong to me.” The Satan moved toward the back of the van, and Remy reached out, grabbing hold of his arm.
“Not the smartest thing to do right now,” he said.
Byleth fought him for a moment, and then stopped. There were sounds behind them in the alley, low rumbling purrs like the idling of a monster truck. The Hellions had found their way out through the fire- and smoke-filled garage.
“If only there was the time to make you understand,” Suroth said, flowing a little closer, as did the Nomads at his back. There were many more of them now.
“How about you try,” Remy suggested. “Why should we hand over something so potentially dangerous to you? There has to be some good reason.”
The Nomad leader’s smile grew from within the shadows of his hood.
“You of all of them should know, brother,” he said. “For it was this world, nearly brought to its end, that opened our eyes.”
Remy glanced into the side mirror of the van to see one of the Hellions coming closer. He guessed that another was probably coming up on the other side.
Call him dense, but it actually took him a second to figure out what the Nomad leader was talking about. The business with the Angel of Death. He knew that narrowly avoiding the Apocalypse had changed things a bit, but he wasn’t quite sure what the Nomad was getting at.
“Answers, Remiel,” Suroth stated. “The questions we had carried since the close of the war were suddenly answered.”
Another glance in the sideview showed that the Hellion was practically on top of them. It was squatting down now, tensing, ready to pounce.
Remy spun around, facing the creature as it leapt.
“Get down,” he screamed, pushing both Madach and Byleth out of the beast’s path.
The creature soared over their heads to land gracefully in front of the Nomad leader. The other two beasts slunk out from the other side of the van to join their brother.
The Nomad didn’t even flinch.
Suroth extended his hand, and Remy watched in awe as the Hellions cowered. Practically on their bellies, the ferocious beasts crawled toward the Nomad leader.
Something told Remy that things were about to become even more interesting.
“You brought them here?” Remy asked, shock and horror evident in his tone.
“Remarkable beasts,” Suroth said, lowering his hand to allow one of the Hellions to sniff at his fingertips. A bruise-colored tongue extended from its skull-like mouth to lick the offered appendage. “And exactly what was necessary to find the weapons of change. It took far less time than you would imagine training them, deceptively intelligent and so very eager to please.”
Remy didn’t know what to say.
“Sounds like another creation of the Almighty, doesn’t it, brother?” Suroth chided.
“You trained them,” Remy said, the gears turning and grinding inside his fevered brain. “You trained them to find the weapons.”
“We trained them to find the tools of change,” Suroth added. “And with them in our possession, the next phase of our plans can begin.”
“Why do I have a sick feeling that I don’t even want to know what that means?” he asked the Nomad.
“Know that it is all for the best,” Suroth said, “and that this time, the true victor will reign supreme in Heaven.”
It was as if all sound had been bleached from the air.
Remy’s thoughts raced at the speed of light, all the pieces of the puzzle trying desperately to come together. What did the Nomad leader mean exactly—the true victor will reign supreme in Heaven? He didn’t like the sound of that in the least.
The Hellions jumped to their feet with a grumble, the Nomads advancing toward them.
“Give them to us,” Suroth demanded.
The idea was certainly tempting. To be free of the weapons—of the crushing responsibility. For a moment it actually sounded like a pretty good plan.
Until he regained his sanity.
The Pitiless were weapons imbued with the power of Heaven’s greatest angel, crafted especially for the Morningstar in his bid to challenge the power of God, weapons that never had been used in the Great War, weapons that fell to Earth in the form of divine inspiration, spurring craftsmen to create these ultimate weapons—these precision instruments of killing.
These Pitiless daggers.
Yep, it certainly would be easy to hand them over to the Nomads, to make them somebody else’s problem, but much to his chagrin, Remy just didn’t work that way.
“No,” he said flatly.
Suroth recoiled.
“Something isn’t right here, and I’m not about to hand these bad boys over to you until I feel one hundred percent safe in doing so.”
The Nomads said nothing, their heavy robes billowing in a nonexistent wind, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, and some that were not.
“What are we going to do now?” Madach asked in a nervous whisper, his eyes still riveted to those blocking their path.
“We drive around them,” Remy said, starting to move to the back of the van. “I need to know more, lots more, before . . .”
He was interrupted by Denizens running down the alleyway, stragglers from the slaughter that had occurred inside Byleth’s garage.
Remy noticed the guns that they were carrying and the smile on Byleth’s face, just before it all went to hell.
It was like something out of the Wild West, the fallen angels coming to the defense of their boss . . . of their Satan. Bullets fired from pistols and sprayed from semiautomatic machine guns tore into the Nomads and their Hellish pets.
From their reaction, Remy knew that the ammunition was something special, something likely brought over from the plains of Hell. Man-made bullets would never have had this kind of effect on beings from Heaven.
The Nomads stumbled back, the bullets hitting their wonderful robes in small explosions of darkness. The Hellions squatted at their side, flinching from every bullet hit, waiting obediently for their master’s commands.
And then Remy sensed it, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as the air became suddenly charged with an unearthly power. He reached out and grabbed Madach by the shirt, dragging him up the alleyway, toward a green metal Dumpster. That would have to do.
Bolts of crackling-white-hot energy seemingly pulled down from the Heavens erupted from the Nomads’ outstretched hands, forming a single bolt of jagged energy that skewered the front of the van with the most destructive of results.
The van flew into pieces, the vehicle torn asunder by the energy that now coursed through it. Singeing slivers of metal, plastic, and glass whizzed through the air, projectiles of death. Remy listend to the sounds of the shrapnel striking the Dumpster, and the screams of Byleth’s Denizens as they were cut to shreds by the razor-sharp debris.
The gunfire was silenced, and Remy peeked out from behind his cover.
“It could have been so easy,” Suroth droned, strolling through the smoldering pieces of twisted metal that now littered the alley floor. “But to be expected. Change is often so difficult.”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Madach said to Remy, gasping for breath.
The fallen was right; the bodies of Byleth’s soldiers lay bloody and torn.
But Byleth was still standing. Chunks of g
“Come at me, then,” he growled, blood dripping down from his mouth in a slimy trail. He spun the axe in his hands, swaying from side to side. “I’ve killed your kind before and am not afraid to do so again.”
Remy and Madach watched as some of the Nomads drifted about the wreckage of the van, retrieving the yellow transport cases. He felt Madach tense beside him and reached out to grab hold of his arm.