Christopher Golden - Ararat

Another punch. The right side, breaking off an upper incisor.

God, he decided, was an asshole.

Grunting, he jerked his arm, turned the gun, and pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, but the grin left Father Cornelius’s face. The orange glitter in his eyes flared brightly and he snarled as he wrapped both hands around Walker’s throat, as if he’d had enough of playtime and decided the killing moment had arrived.

Seconds. All of those blows, all of those thoughts, had taken only seconds.

Walker’s vision darkened. The lights were going out in his head.

Then he heard shouting—two voices, and one of them belonged to Kim Seong. The demon’s grip loosened and Walker blinked, focusing enough to see Kim and Adam struggling with Father Cornelius. Adam had an arm around the priest’s throat, wrestling him backward, trying to drag him off Walker. Kim had him by the left arm, clawing at his eyes with her free hand as she attempted to twist him away.

She stopped clawing at his face. Her hand dropped to her side and came back up with her climbing ax. The metal gleamed wetly as she swept it down and buried it into the priest’s chest. Sputtering and wheezing, Father Cornelius reeled backward. Adam shoved him and the priest went rolling to the ground with the climbing ax still jutting from a place high on his left side.

Father Cornelius whipped his head up, staring murder at them all. The orange fire in his eyes blazed so bright it might have been actual flame.

Walker lifted his gun and shot the priest once, the bullet taking him in the right shoulder and knocking him backward. It wasn’t too late, he told himself.

“Adam, get the charm off him!”

The demon twisted, hissing as Adam lunged. Kim wrapped herself around its left arm and tried to drag it back, but as Adam snatched at the priest’s collar, he came away only with the white tab that marked his office.

Father Cornelius grabbed Adam by the neck and dug in his fingers, then ripped out his throat in a spray of bright blood.

The snow fell.

Walker screamed as if he could deny what he’d just seen. He hurled himself at the demon, momentum crashing them both to the ground. Shouting for Kim, he jammed the gun snugly beneath the priest’s chin.

Kim’s hand flashed in front of him, dug inside the now open collar, and tore the bitumen charm from around Father Cornelius’s neck. Her fist pulled back, trailing loose twine, and she cocked her arm and threw the gleaming black shard out into the storm, as far from Camp One as she could manage.

Walker saw the priest’s eyes go clear as the demon departed. He saw the knowledge of what he’d done flood Father Cornelius’s eyes, and then the old man began to weep, lying on the ground as snowflakes danced gently down upon his face.

From behind them, Walker heard Meryam begin to scream, her voice weak, ragged, and full of an anguish he had never heard from another human.

Adam lay on the ground with his throat flayed open and pumping blood, as if wolves had been at him but had run off without their prize.

“Oh, God,” Kim said, the gentle snow eddying on a light breeze that caressed them all, living and dead alike.

She stumbled past Adam’s corpse and made her way toward Meryam. Walker listened to her attempts to comfort the other woman, but Meryam would not listen. She could only cry out to her dead fiancé, telling him to get up, that he was the one who was meant to live, that none of it meant anything without him.

“Father,” Walker said, looking down at the priest where he lay in the snow.

The climbing ax still jutted from Father Cornelius’s chest, and blood oozed from the bullet wound on the other side. But Walker doubted these injuries were the worst of what had been done to the old man. His face had been torn so badly and he had lost so much blood that it seemed impossible he had even made it to Camp One. The elements should have killed him if the blood loss had not, but the demon had been the furnace inside him, the engine that drove him.

Now that fire had gone out.

“Father,” Walker said again.

The old man’s lips were moving, despite the horrible injuries to his mouth and face. He managed only a bubbling whisper, a rasp made almost unintelligible by those mutilations, but Walker understood. Father Cornelius had begun to pray. They were words Walker had heard before, at the bedside of his mother, when the hospital had summoned a priest for last rites. The words were a prayer for the dying, but Father Cornelius spoke them on his own behalf.

Walker remained silent, held the old man’s hand, and prayed with him as he died.

Just in case God was listening.

The three of them made their way down from Camp One together. Meryam staggered along between Kim and Walker, doing her best to stay upright. Sometimes she managed to walk freely, though never without a steadying hand, and other times she grew lightheaded, and darkness swept in around her, and they had to sling her arms around her shoulders and practically carry her down.

Human wreckage, they kept going, and by the time night began to fall they had made it nearly back to the place where there would be trucks and people and food. Oh, my God, food, Meryam thought, in a moment of ravenous lucidity.

The snow kept falling, though only very lightly now, almost as if the heavens offered beauty in apology for the cruelty of the blizzard that had lashed the mountain.

Meryam staggered to a stop, nearly falling as she tried to get away from the others, to go back up the trail.

“Stop,” Kim said. “What are you—”

“There!” Meryam said, pointing a shaking finger. “Don’t you… do you see him?”

They hadn’t.

In the shadows of a copse of leafless trees, Hakan sat alone with his shoulders hunched. An orange light gleamed in the near darkness and Meryam almost screamed, but then she saw the light flare and diminish, and she realized it was the tip of a cigarette. Hakan sat awaiting them, smoking, exhaling plumes of gray cancer into the air.

Walker broke away from them, leaving Meryam to lean on Kim. He drew his gun, approaching Hakan warily.

“How the hell did you get down here?” Walker barked.

Hakan cocked his head. “I should be asking you that question.”

“Show me your throat! Open your shirt and show me you’re not wearing one of those fucking charms!”

Hakan let his cigarette dangle from his lips as he complied. Its orange tip flared brightly again, and flashes of memory flickered through Meryam’s mind. The gleam of orange in the eyes of the possessed would stay with her for as many hours, days, or weeks as she had remaining to her.

“Turn out your pockets!” Walker demanded.

Hakan took a long drag of his cigarette and stood to comply. “You’re wasting your time. I never had one. Feyiz gave me one of the charms but I left it back up in the ark. It felt wrong to me. If the demon wanted me, I didn’t see how a little piece of rock…”

He let the words hang in the air. Meryam wanted to ask why he had not made the argument up on the mountain, before they evacuated the cave, but she knew the answer. They never would have listened to him.

Walker lowered his gun but did not put it away.

“What happened to Calliope?” Kim asked.

Hakan nodded slowly. He reached carefully inside his jacket, watching Walker to make sure not to alarm him, and he withdrew Calliope’s camera. Meryam couldn’t be sure in the faded light, but she thought it might be smeared with blood.

“I thought you might want this,” Hakan said, showing the camera to Meryam.

Trembling, she thanked him. “Please… you hold onto it for now.”

His eyes, so often full of anger and disdain, softened as he studied her. “Adam?” he asked.