Christopher Golden - Ararat

The rest—what Walker believed about the demon influencing Olivieri, convincing them to wear the charms—that much seemed irrefutable. Back inside the ark, the demon had grown strong enough to influence or possess whoever it wanted. Now, this far from the place where its remains had been turned to cinders, it could still exert its evil, but it could only possess someone who remained connected to it through contact with one of those bitumen shards.

Meryam glanced at Walker and Kim, and poor Mr. Avci cradling his broken hand against his body. Mr. Avci didn’t need her sympathy. He was still alive. They all were—him and Walker and the brilliant, lovely Kim Seong, and even Adam—the four of them were going to make it. Meryam might still be walking, but she was just as dead as the people they’d left bleeding in the snow. The others were going to live. They were the survivors, not her. And she hated them for it.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said, noticing for the first time that the blizzard had calmed. The snow still fell and the wind still blew, but not with the same level of rage. “I’d like to think it can’t get inside us now, but even if that’s true, Father Cornelius is still out there. So are Hakan and Calliope, if they’re alive. So we’re not safe. Not yet.”

Adam gave a curt nod. He didn’t want to hear it—she knew that. Adam wanted her to let him pretend the danger had passed, but Meryam could not give him that. No matter how much she loved him.

“Let’s go,” Adam said.

He slid an arm around her and helped her along the trail. Meryam would have liked to do it on her own, but they both knew she could not. Her strength had ebbed so low that she barely knew where she was going at this point, and throwing up had weakened her further. So she leaned against him, and nothing mattered but the touch of his body against her and her living long enough to make sure he got out of this. That was the engine that drove her, the fire that burned inside—making sure Adam made it home alive.

“I love you,” she rasped, but the wind kicked up and her voice betrayed her.

“Hmm?” he asked, frowning as he glanced at her. “What’d you say?”

Meryam coughed and wiped her glove across her mouth, shaking her head to indicate that she’d said nothing important. That they should just keep moving.

The snow kept on, the wind rising and falling but never returning to its former fury. Meryam trudged onward, her vision blurring and her head bobbing as if she were on the verge of nodding off while she walked. Black spots danced in front of her eyes and edged in at the corners of her eyes and she knew her body wanted to stop. To fall.

Walker and Avci had their guns out. Several times, Adam paused and forced them to rest a minute, and Meryam saw those guns and wondered what good these foolish men thought they would do. Bullets might rend flesh, but the demon had no flesh of its own. She supposed she did understand the logic. If they encountered Hakan or Calliope or the priest, possessed, the guns would stop them. Bullets wouldn’t kill the demon but they would free those it possessed. And if those guns managed to kill everyone still wearing a bitumen charm, then perhaps these so-called survivors really would have escaped.

But Meryam felt haunted. The demon’s touch had carved a place at the base of her skull and it huddled there, even now, like a runaway hiding in the shadows of an alley. In her secret heart, the place where she kept only the most precious and the most horrible bits of herself, she thought it might be a good thing she was dying. It might be for the best.

She lost track of time. It blurred like her vision, came and went like the wind, but after a while she blinked and realized they had stopped for another rest. Drawing a deep breath, she looked around and saw Walker holding Kim in a tender embrace.

“Adam?” she said, oddly numb. Most of her pain seemed to be gone.

His face appeared beside her and Meryam realized they were seated, side by side, on a large rock.

“I’m here,” he said. “You still with me?”

Cheerful. But beneath the cheerfulness, she saw his grief. He knew she was dying. Of course he had known for a while, but now it was real. Even more real than the fear that had driven them down the mountain.

Meryam forced herself to perk up, reached down into a reserve of will that she had never known she had, until now—when she needed it.

“I’m still with you,” she said. “And we’re going to live. We’re going to make it.”

Adam smiled, and she saw that the snow had abated enough that it had become beautiful. The sky had turned gray instead of white and she knew they were well into the afternoon. Then she saw lumps beneath the snow on the ground, noticed the rock formations and recognized the shape of the clearing they were in, and she realized where they were.

“Camp One,” she said. “Have we come so far?”

“We have,” Adam said, squeezing her hand. “But we’ve got a long way still to go.”

A thought occurred to her. She glanced at Walker and Kim again. “Where’s—”

“Avci had to piss,” Adam told her.

Meryam almost managed a smile.

Then they heard the gunshot, and Avci screamed, and they all looked over to the edge of Camp One and saw the body slump from behind a rock and sprawl on the ground, pushing snow ahead of it.

And Father Cornelius stepped out of the storm. For a moment Meryam wavered on her feet, vision blurring again, and a muffled bit of consciousness at the back of her mind wondered if any of this were really happening. She could barely feel the cold, and the world around her had the not-quite-there texture of a nightmare. Sounds were muffled.

The priest stepped over Avci’s bloody corpse in a single, smooth stride, and she saw his grin. He’d torn off his balaclava and his jacket. Now he strode toward Walker and Kim with a smile so wide it had ripped his cheeks almost as far back as his ears. Blood painted his jaw and throat, streaks of vivid red that stood out against the white of the falling snow.

But his eyes were on Meryam. The grin seemed meant for her, and those eyes held a knowing gleam along with the glitter of orange fire, as if they shared a secret.

She wanted so badly to scream. Instead, she started toward the thing that had been Father Cornelius. Adam grabbed the sleeve of her coat and dragged her backward. Meryam tried to fight him and he shoved her to the ground.

“You can barely stand. He’ll kill you.”

“I’m—” she started to say. Dying. I’m dying anyway . But Adam had already rushed over to stand with Kim and Walker, leaving Meryam on her own, sprawled in the snow.

The demon in Father Cornelius crouched forward, lifted his hand, and gave her the same kind of little wave a circus clown might give a child in the audience, as if to tell her that this show was for her. Then it sprang on top of Walker, beating him with both fists as it rode him down into the snow.

Meryam could only watch the nightmare unfold.

Walker felt the blows in his skull like savage music thumping his brain. He’d seen the priest and he’d hesitated. So stupid. No hat, no coat, no balaclava, out there on the mountain more than an hour after they’d last seen him, an old man in priestly black and a white patch at his collar… zero chance he had gotten there without the demon driving him.

Its fists came down. Father Cornelius’s fists. An old man’s paper-thin skin and blue veins and age spots and chafed knuckles. Walker felt his nose break, tasted a rush of fresh blood, and he roared and whipped himself side to side, but the thing inside the priest had strength born of hell instead of muscle.

Hell, he thought, as a fist thumped his left temple and he felt the orbit around his left eye crack. He believed in Hell now. Which meant that somewhere up there, God existed, and Walker was beneath his notice. They were all, the people dying here on the side of Mount Ararat, not worthy of his attention.