Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno Read online

  "Why do they want us to come?" Toby asked.

  "They need people, lots of people, close to our hearts, to make the magic work," answered Damon.

  "How many of these priests are there?" Jen asked.

  "Hundreds. Maybe more. This branch of the Order has been living in and around Perth since it was the Swan River Colony. They came out with the first settlers in the 19th century and seeded the land to their needs, methodically removing the indigenous spirits. There's hundreds of priests and they'll all be at Northam tomorrow."

  "What about us, Damon?" Diana said. "I don't like this one bit. What's going to happen to us while you're off communing with nature."

  "Diana, you know it's not like that. These people mean business. You asked whether this has been done before. Yes, it has, but you won't read about it in the paper. Remember that cyclone in Europe a while back? The Order raised an Air Elemental in Southern France to fight these monsters. It had the power of a cyclone and that was the work of barely a hundred priests. You can't imagine the destructive power they'll unleash tomorrow. Fire is the most dangerous element of all."

  "So what are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to protect you all, then I'm going to go to Northam tomorrow and see if I can talk some sense into Hilda … or at least do what I can."

  "Protect us with magic?" Jen asked.

  "Yes, with magic. I want you guys to go to your rooms and pack a bag, essentials only, just in case."

  The paper butterfly banked out of its placid circling and floated off down the hall, towards the kids' bedrooms.

  "Get packing, guys." Damon hitched a thumb at the butterfly and the rooms beyond. "And don't call anyone, okay. Especially you, Jen. We don't want to cause a panic. Hopefully, we'll get all this sorted out."

  Toby didn't need any further encouragement to chase the butterfly. Jen, on the other hand, trudged off to her room as though she were on a march of doom.

  Diana waited for both bedroom doors to close before approaching Damon. "Are you sure about this?"

  "We don't have a choice. I have to go."

  "Why do they really want us to go with you?"

  "Blood magic is the strongest magic of all." He looked into his wife's eyes and found sadness there—and something more.

  "You would have killed us if you were still in that damn cult, wouldn't you?"

  Damon looked away, catching sight of the open window. The sky outside was dotted with light clouds given a snowy sheen by the morning sun. He nodded.

  "I'd better start packing a bag, too." Diana passed close to him on her way to the bedroom, close enough to touch, close enough for the warmth of her body to wash past him. But she didn't touch him, nor did she look back as she reached the bedroom door, although she paused and turned her head in his direction. Her gaze never quite met his, instead dropping to her feet as she considered something too far below the surface for his third ear to pick up. She slid out of his view as she entered their room.

  Muffled by his bedroom door, Toby cried a triumphant cry. His door opened a crack a few seconds later. Toby stuck his cupped hands out into the hallway. "I caught the butterfly, Dad, but it's not moving anymore. I think it's dead."

  The boy raised the crumpled origami butterfly to his father, who merely nodded and turned his mind to graver thoughts.

  #

  Damon was long used to tight spaces and the high places since his family had begun their dusk visits. This evening, he was stranded in the middling limbs of a tree, barely out of snapping range of his family's jaws, as the echo of their howls faded into the night.

  He regarded the dying sunset and his distant quarry, the phoenix, as it appeared to wax while the sun waned. Even as it crested the horizon, as far and as lonely as that horizon appeared, he could feel the phoenix burn with a supernova of life. His stubby sanctuary tree, which gave him freedom from the untender mercies of his family for yet another day, provided him a better than average view of his nemesis.

  Seeing, feeling, the phoenix pulse with fires rightly his, rage welled within his chest.

  He was still east of the phoenix and south of salvation, but tonight he vowed he would chase the phoenix down, not stopping until he reclaimed what was rightly his.

  Damon clambered down the tree. Twigs snapped free in his passage to the ground, victims of the failing light and his clumsy ways. He jumped the last meter to the ground, landing amid sloshing and tinkling from his canteens and pack. His legs ached from another hard day's march but his inner fire lent them the last of his reserves.

  As sunlight receded to starlight, he hammered out a steady pace along the highway, due west. Stealth was long forgotten, everyone had burnt to death months before. Everything else had starved long since. There was only the firm asphalt beneath his boots, the constant wind as his companion, prickling his skin with its bite, and starlight peeking through the haze to guide his way. Even the moon had vanished to some far corner of the sky beyond sight.

  The stars were especially bright in the early evening. Without the glow of city lights to pollute the sky, the night was once more invested with virginity—or a state close to it. Like the phoenix and the sun plaguing his days, the stars wavered and swelled with life as though every pore of the earth were drawn open and the energy syphoned into the sky. The canvass of stars was bewitching and beguiling. No doubt, ley lines pulsed this evening. The same energy pulsed through his legs as he gave chase to the phoenix.

  Despite his lost ground of recent days, a faint glimmer was obvious on the horizon. If he could stay the course and keep that glimmer in sight, he'd finally catch the phoenix the next day when it slowed to a drift at dawn. Just had to stay awake and focused.

  As his footfalls filled the empty evening with a pounding rhythm, the localised glow on the horizon drew closer. With each step, ever finer details emerged from the gloom.

  It wasn't the phoenix.

  A monstrous skull loomed in the distance, larger than any he'd seen before. The firelight glow filtered through a series of spikes—its teeth—which could have been the size of his forearm but were probably closer in size to a house. Cold sweat trickled down his face and sides, despite the heat flushing through his body from the run.

  Damon slowed to a walk, suddenly aware once more that the night was not empty; aware of his vulnerability on this blasted, wind-swept plain. Determination drained from his limbs and was replaced by leaden weights. A hunter no more, he remembered his frailties as a man, alone on a dead continent, without the heritage of his sorcery to protect him against whatever walked the night.

  Within a stone's throw of the beast's skull, and the campfire within, he adopted the unfamiliar movements of stealth. The wind was unusually still, perhaps stayed by the ley lines. Every aspect of the night seemed swollen with energy, filled to bursting—the skull and its sharp angles; the sky, pregnant with starlight; the ash, musty and sharp in his nose. His every step, despite his stealthy intentions, was only marginally less noisy than usual. The clarity of the evening ensured each clink of his pack and every too-heavy step was carried through the still air.

  The fire crackled with vigour, savouring its destruction of the kindling. It surged with his approach, even from many meters away, like a tiny fey cousin to the elemental that razed Australia. The flames were a beacon, drawing Damon closer as he saw them more clearly between the rows of stalagmite teeth.

  "That's far enough."

  The words—all too human words, male words—shocked Damon into freezing on the spot. They carried crisp and clear through the night, probably audible for a kilometre in all directions.

  A figure shifted in the shadow of the dragon's eye socket.

  "My name's Damon," he said with a croaking voice. Days without speaking had rusted up the vocal cords. "I mean you no harm."

  "We'll see about that, mate."

  The man moved with the shadows, taking his time as he worked himself free of the eye socket and clambered down the side of the skull. Footholds seemed a
bundant, as the man was sure-footed moving down the face of bone, but he only used one hand in the descent. The other clutched something pointed towards him.

  Damon's hand slid to his back pocket where he eased his knife out. He kept his arm close to his side, the pocket knife even closer, as he tensed, ready for action.

  The stranger landed heavily as he jumped the last portion of his descent. He curled into a crouch and took long moments to right himself. Even still, he managed to hold the object in Damon's direction. Caught in the glow of the campfire, the object became clear—a rifle.

  Damon clutched his pocket knife tighter. So tight, his knuckles throbbed from the strain.

  The stranger advanced, alternatively caught by the firelight and shadows as he passed the man-sized teeth. He was an older man, perhaps in his late fifties, soft around the middle. The ash caking Damon seemed so much less on this man, as though he were fresh to the dustbowl wasteland in which they found themselves.

  "You're the first person I've seen in a long time," Damon said.

  "Likewise." The stranger slowed, then stopped about four or five meters away—still well out of hand-to-hand range, should it come to that.

  "The name's Damon," he repeated.

  The silence was filled by the breeze toying with the fire and the occasional pop of combustibles.

  "I meant what I said." Damon gauged the man, who stood his ground. A good, hard throw and the pocket knife would be a sure thing at this range, if only the man didn't blast a hole through him first. "I mean you no harm. I'm chasing a phoenix."

  "A phoenix, is it?" The stranger cocked his head but kept his rifle levelled. "About so high," he raised his free hand to full height above his head, "looks a bit like a bird, all flames and such."

  "That'd be it. Where'd you see it?"

  The stranger lowered his rifle and stepped closer. "The name's Bill." He swapped the gun into his left hand and extended his right.

  Damon hurriedly shoved the knife into his pocket, trying to be as surreptitious as possible, before taking Bill's hand. "Pleased to meet you."

  "I reckon you've got a story or two in ya. Let's shoot the shit as they used to say."

  Damon nodded as the other man worked his way between the dead dragon's teeth to the fire. Damon followed.

  "You didn't have a chance with that little pig-sticker." Bill inclined his head in the direction of Damon's pocket. "I would've shot you before your arm even twitched."

  Damon stared at Bill as he sat cross-legged by the fire, awkward around the remnant of his beer belly. Bill laid the rifle across his lap, his hand gripping the stock, trigger finger hovering only centimetres from its position.

  Damon adopted a similar pose across from Bill. The flames jittered between them, popping and crackling. The heat formed a sheet, warping the air until it thinned out in the shadows above. Ignoring Bill's scrutiny, Damon's gaze followed the wave of heat to where it dashed itself on the ceiling of the dragon's mouth.

  "Tell me about the phoenix. Where'd you see it?" Damon said, sudden and intense, as he snatched his eyes from the darkness to regard Bill.

  Bill rubbed a hand on his singlet then reached into a pocket on the leg of his khaki pants.

  Damon tensed, his fingers itching to withdraw his knife.

  "Want one?" Bill flipped open a small tin, which had what looked like a pouch of tobacco inside.

  "After all the smoke we've had, you still want more?" Damon didn't relax his hand; instead, he gripped his thigh as he watched Bill roll a cigarette.

  "What else do we have left?" Bill shook his head a little. He was awkward with the paper. He shifted the rifle closer to his body to roll the smoke, eventually allowing practised hands to assume control. Bill became less conscious of the rifle as he engrossed himself in completing his task and then savouring the first few drags. He blew the smoke at the fire, much like a dragon.

  A dragon puffing atop an old dragon's tongue. A dragon inside a dragon—Russian dolls of wildly mismatched proportions. Damon suppressed a smirk as the thought lodged itself in the part of his brain he could never turn off, the part of him the wind whispered to in the lonely times, often before he bunked down for the night.

  "We'll talk about your phoenix soon enough." Bill closed his eyes as he took in a deep drag of his smoke. "Tell me about yourself first." Three swirls of smoke were blown from Bill's mouth, each smaller than the first, before he opened his eyes again.

  "I had a wife and two kids before the Fire. Average family," Damon said.

  "Me, I had a wife." Bill, like him, stared into the campfire as if it held some key to his fate. "Lost her before all this business, though. Cancer."

  Damon nodded.

  "In some ways, it was kinder. Kinder than this." Bill scooped up a handful of ash and dirt and allowed it to sieve through his fingers. "She was a fighter, my wife. Took a long time before it beat her. But I was there for her, all the way to the end." Bill paused and let more cigarette smoke drift from his mouth. "We had some great years together. What happened with you?"

  "Diana and I had our ups and downs, but we were happy. The kids were kids, you know? Jen was fifteen, Toby ten." The weight of memory crushed down on him—snippets of good times, some bad, and then the sheet of elemental flame as it raced toward him. He slumped his shoulders, much like Bill, as he fought to push the burden of his thoughts aside.

  Another silence settled between the two men. Both continued to stare into the fire, lost to their respective inner demons. The fire had subsided a little, the crackling of the char and sticks belaboured and quiet, as if it were affected by the heaviness that hung in the air. No other sound intruded on the men's thoughts; the wind had stilled, and the insects, like civilization itself, had been culled. Not even a fly bothered Damon as he rubbed his hands on his thighs, trying, not for the first time, to remove the blackness stained into his skin. He'd been bothered by a few persistent flies on his trek but strangely not here in Western Australia, so close to the epicentre of disaster. The persistent ash and grime was more of a problem, but like the occasional fly, he'd mostly learned to ignore it.

  "Where were you when the Fire came through?" he asked. "How'd you survive?"

  "I had a cottage down south. The wife and I, Dana, just like your Diana, we'd been through some adventures in our time and weren't up to trusting the government, so we built ourselves a shelter in the basement. This was all long before this wave of monsters came through." Bill pulled the stub of his cigarette from his mouth and placed his hand on his knee. The smoke sketched a lazy trail in the air from between his fingers.

  "This wave? There've been monsters before?" Damon asked.

  "Sure, not as obvious as now, but you'd never read about them or see them on the news. In fact, I used to be a journo, back when jobs and titles meant something. I know how much they've covered up over the years, but I guess it doesn't matter now." Bill tossed the dregs of his smoke into the fire.

  "So how'd you survive for this long?"

  "I had a couple of month's worth of tinned food in my shelter and more water besides." Bill pointed to a round water drum propped against a dragon's tooth. "After all the fires died down, I poked my head outside and found everything gone. Just gone. I thought the damn smoke would never clear away, a bloody nuclear winter like they used to talk about when I was a kid. And it didn't clear, not for ages, not until I met up with the others."

  "Others?"

  "Don't get your hopes up, mate." Bill placed his rifle on the ground beside him and began to roll a second cigarette. "I walked all the way up to Perth looking for people who'd survived. Even lived out of a charred up refrigerator truck for a few days. I found them, eventually, but they weren't where I expected them."

  Damon rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. The heat from the campfire flushed his face. The rest of his body was cold by comparison.

  "A bunch of folks had taken to the sea. The Perth survivors, the ones who got out before they were burnt to a crisp, formed
a little colony on Rottnest Island. They had boats, food, spare clothes, everything. Every couple of days, they'd send a scouting party back to the city, or what was left of it, to look for more survivors or supplies."

  "So why aren't you with them now?"

  Bill dragged a lungful of smoke from his fresh cigarette. "They're all dead, mate. All dead."

  Damon closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

  ""There are still monsters out there, Damon. Sea monsters. One of the fuckin' things found our little outpost and made a meal out of us." Bill sucked on his smoke again. "I think I was the only one who made it to the mainland."

  "So this whole thing, the Fire, everything, it was all for nothing." Damon clawed his fingers around his knees.

  "'Fraid so." Bill nodded.

  "For nothing," Damon murmured. "My family."

  "I took what I could carry when the creature buggered off, then I headed inland, hoping to find other people." Bill held Damon's gaze. "Is there anyone left?"

  Damon shook his head. "I've been chasing the phoenix since the Fire. Since day one. I've been on the road for months, all up and down the coast and across the Nullarbor and all through the eastern states. There's no one. Not another living soul, human or otherwise, on this whole bloody continent. We're the only ones left."

  Bill glanced at the enormous teeth enclosing them. "No monsters?"

  "The last one I passed was long dead." Damon slipped off his backpack and jounced it up and down a few times. "I've been eating the one before that for days. The monsters that survived the Fire, or somehow came here afterwards, they're all dead. There's nothing for them to eat except each other." He screwed up his face as the stench of meat from his bag hit the warm air. "I've been living on their leftovers."

  "I saw your phoenix today, just before sunset. I thought it was another monster so I put two rounds into it, or through it, I should say. The thing just ignored me and floated past, heading west."