Constantine (26 page)

She had no idea what he was waiting for here; she had an intuition that he didn’t know for sure either.

He stared into space, seeming to listen, wondering what had become of the gargling shrieks, the sickening babble coming echoingly from beyond the doors behind them. Now, an eerie silence reigned. Sometimes it seemed to her that Francisco was listening to something else, someone she couldn’t hear - he would cock his head, as if harkening. Even nodding to himself in response.

Now and then he muttered to someone that wasn’t there. It might have been the mutterings of insanity, but lately insanity had jostled so-called reality out of the way and taken first place in line. An invisible being had carried her here, after all. She no longer had a reason to doubt the existence of such beings. So she was inclined to think he was muttering to someone she couldn’t see. She might be able to see it, if she extended her psychic power, but she didn’t want to. What good would it do? The first thing she needed to do was find a way to break away from this man.

Her chance came, then. He was staring at the spearhead, muttering to himself in Spanish. He seemed afraid of it. The hand holding it shook. Suddenly he thrust it into a coat pocket, as if to get it out of sight, and then drew his hand back out, empty.

She felt a change in his power then. No longer touching the spearhead with his bare hand, he now had only the strength of an ordinary man…

She had been stunned when the invisible thing had gripped her, smashed through walls to bring her here; she’d exhausted herself struggling with Francisco. She waited, now, gathering her strength. If she could keep him from bringing the spear out… maybe grab it herself…

--

Constantine, still talking to Ellie, was aware that one of the half-breeds on his left had started to edge round, trying to flank him. The creature was aware that the Holy Shotgun was no ordinary weapon.

Constantine kept his eyes on Ellie, but he tracked the other half-breed with his peripheral second-sight. “You think Satan’s son will be any different?” he asked. Constantine shook his head. “He’ll just turn this place into his own Hell - and then where will you go to party?” He smiled thinly.
“Heaven?”

She frowned. He was rather cruelly emphasizing that Ellie, at least, would never know Heaven.

“No need to get rough,” she said.

Constantine snorted. “Never bothered you before,” All the time aware of that demon - a lawyer, predictably - edging its way closer to his flank.

Ellie smiled at his little joke about roughness.

“I am so going to miss our little trysts. Hotter than Hell.”

“Me too, kid.”

The demon on his left was bending its knees, about to spring…

Constantine could feel it trying to keep its thoughts hidden so he couldn’t read its mind, but he caught some fragments anyway.

One spring, tear out his throat… but don’t kill him too quick.
…
The boss will get him soon enough I can feed on his suffering as he bleeds to death, if I do it just right. I can almost taste the blood.
…
One step more, and then…

Constantine pulled out his cigarette lighter with his left hand. “You are in violation of the Balance,” he said, addressing them all in a loud, officious, annoyingly reasonable voice. “Leave immediately or I will deport you.”

“Oh, John,” Ellie said, “this is so embarrassing. Where’s your pride?” She gave him a look of saddened pity.

He knew it looked ridiculous, telling a roomful of demons he was going to deport them with a cigarette lighter. But there was precious little pleasure remaining to him in his doomed life, and he enjoyed the moment anyway. Constantine had always felt that the whole universe was inherently absurd - he’d felt an obscure pleasure, a kind of personal revenge, in helping to point it up by creating moments that showed the architects of the cosmos their own exquisite absurdity.

“All of you!” he went on, waving the cigarette lighter. “Beat it! Shove off! Take the first
down
escalator!”

The half-breed that had been about to jump him paused a moment in uncertainty, wondering what Constantine was up to. Constantine took that opportunity to step up onto a lobby chair, raising the lighter higher, thrusting it at the ceiling.

Ellie shook her head sadly at him.

“Baby doll,” he said to Ellie.
“Go
to Hell.”

Ellie looked up at the ceiling - suspecting, then just as the flame in his lighter triggered the fire-extinguishing sprinklers.

The water sprayed down on the roomful of demons - demons in business suits and doctors’ coats and delivery uniforms, all looking cynically amused as they were doused.

The water had no effect at all, except to ruin the cut of their outfits. He heard one of them mutter disgustedly about just having gotten the suit from the dry cleaner.

“This was your plan?” Ellie said, sighing.

The water’s downspray slowed, almost stopped for a moment. Then came a new spurt in the lines, and suddenly it was as if a discordant music heard only by the demons was playing, sending them into a mad dance. They leapt about screaming, contorting, gyrating, as their skin began to fry, to sizzle away from immersion in…

“Holy water!” Ellie shrieked.

Constantine felt an unspeakable relief: Chaz had done his job. Constantine had been far from sure he would succeed. Chaz had used the blessed cross Midnite had given them to turn the water in the overhead fire sprinklers into holy water.

The demons danced to a violin tarantella of sheer agony - it was a metaphysical agony as well as physical, their very souls tormented by the touch of the divine energy impregnating the holy water. Their human outer skins were melting away and Constantine could see the demons revealed beneath, for a moment - snarling bestial gaunt toothy faces that made him think of a moray eel - before those forms, too, began to collapse like Day of the Dead sugar candy in the rain.

But they weren’t dead yet, they were still mobile, and some had the presence of mind to rush Constantine. They could still kill him before they went frying down to Hell. They could take him down with them.

The half-breed who’d been trying to flank him made his move now, even as his skin bubbled away:

He leapt - and was struck full in the face by a blast from Constantine’s Holy Shotgun, the bullets he’d made from sacred relics forming a core surrounded by shotgun pellets, disintegrating the demon’s head. Constantine sidestepped the flying body - headless, but carried by its momentum - even as he heard the wail of the demon’s soul spiraling back down to Hell.

And all the time the sprinkler water continued to spray down, jetting on Constantine and demons alike, making him sopping wet, the water streaming on his face and blurring his vision a little, hissing in his ear: pandemonium in a lobby turned into a locker room shower, the furniture puddling with runoff, the chair slippery under him. Losing his traction, Constantine jumped down to the floor, pumping the shotgun as he went.

He turned, just as another demon rushed him, its face almost gone thanks to the searing holy water, its weirdly sloping skull showing through, one eye melted and the other glaring lidlessly.

Constantine shot that eye away, along with the top of its head, and it went shrieking to the pit.

He saw Ellie, then, writhing on the floor
.
He recognized her from her clothing, the remnants of her hair, but the rest was just a living cadaver, weeping without eyes, and he looked away.

A third demon grabbed at Constantine, wrapped a hand that was mostly skeletal bone around his throat, and snapped reeking fangs at his face - but Constantine jammed the Holy Shotgun against its gut and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened - he hadn’t pumped the shotgun.

The talons tightened around his throat, and the demon cackled in triumph - but Constantine was pumping the shotgun now, squeezing the trigger, and the point-blank shotgun blast blew the demon in half, its lower half walking a step or two alone before falling. Its upper half clung to his neck a moment, like a grotesque pendant, gabbling in disappointment, before its joints fell apart in the holy water.

Others were coming at him - but they were reduced to crawling on all fours; some, legless, just pulling themselves along on their elbows…

One of them had gotten around behind him while he was distracted with the fight, and now it leapt onto his back, nails digging into him, shrieking in his ear, “I’m not going back!”

He knew the voice, however ragged it had become: It was Ellie.

Constantine grabbed her head, shoved her face directly into the spouting of a sprinkler right overhead. She flailed… and stopped moving, disintegrating into mucky ash. Her wet clothes slithered off him to the floor - empty.

“See you there, kid,” Constantine said, sadly.

And then the water stopped spraying. The tank had run dry… and the demons were still coming. Some of them had died, but others, better covered with clothing, remained somewhat intact. Once it struck the ground the water was no longer holy, so the puddles couldn’t help him.

And the demons were still coming.

He backed up, circled them, heading toward a farther door -

Saw a sign on the door: HYDROTHERAPY. That’s where the Spanish guy with the Spear of Destiny had gone, wasn’t it?

Constantine sprinted that way, got to the door, went through, started down the hallway - and heard a thudding, a phlegmy gasping, a clattering of bone on bone, behind him. He turned to see the surviving demons shambling after him, coming through the door. Some of them were mumbling castings, so that they were lifted up supernaturally, began to float down the hallway toward him, still falling apart as they came - a lower jaw falling off one of them to clump bouncing onto the floor, another’s leg falling from where the demon floated near the ceiling, the limb breaking messily apart as it hit the floor, flesh and veins unraveling to bare bone.

Constantine stayed where he was, not wanting to lure them to Angela. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder, aimed at the nearest demon, cantering along on three limbs… He fired, and blew it apart, but others were coming, demon after demon, rotting but still lethal, levitating and crawling down the hall, some of them muttering his name, over and over:

“Constantine… John Constantine…”

He fired the shotgun, again and again. One of them was crawling along the ceiling upside down, flipping to drop at him, he fired right into its gaping mouth and the round traveled through the back of its throat and down its spinal column, sending the vertebrae flying like dominos, and the demon flew apart into shrieking ashes. Another leapt at him from the floor like a jumping spider, and he had to knock it backward with the butt of the gun before he had time to pump the shotgun and send a round into the back of its neck. It spasmed, a broken thing, before quivering itself apart. And still the demons came on… --

Angela heard a low thudding, realized it was gunshots - sounded like a shotgun - from another part of the building, not far away.

The scavenger heard it too, and looked away from her in the direction of the shots, distraction loosening his grip on her neck.

That was her chance. She struck up at his wrist with the heel of her right hand in a tae kwon do move, knocking his hand loose from her, while striking at his jaw with her left fist, the blow coming straight from the shoulder as she’d been taught.

But he dodged and she caught him only glancingly, so that he staggered back but kept his feet, digging at his pocket for the iron spike.

She tried to climb out of the pool, hoping to get to her gun: He’d thrown it into a comer. But he grabbed her around the waist in snarling fury, pulled her back, and - off balance - they both fell backward into the water, thrashing.

Angela felt water invade her lungs, chlorine stinging her sinuses as Francisco rolled on top of her, straddled her, and forced her down. She heard him say something, the sound mostly muted by the water - and she didn’t think he was speaking to her. She sensed that he’d been given the go - ahead: The time had come to kill her. He pressed his open hand down on her face, forcing her almost to the floor of the pool.

He had the other hand on the spearhead now, and she could feel the strength pour into him.

She knew she was done for: She was drowning. Her lungs felt like they were about to explode.

She thrashed helplessly, trying to get leverage, to find a way out, but it was no use; it felt as if
every
evil in the world had lumped together into a single weight just to hold her down. She saw her executioner’s face up there, warped by the watery surface, and for a moment its shifting seemed to reveal an angry child, acting out over its abandonment.

After that the darkness began to close in on her. She couldn’t see him anymore. She saw only shafts of light through shadow; blue darkening to indigo.

God, help me. I was trying to do your work on Earth. Can’t you send someone to help me?

It was a heartfelt prayer. But the only response was darkness, a deeper darkness yet…

But then came light - only it wasn’t the light of redemption, it was the light of transition, of white-hot fire coming at her, to engulf her.

She screamed… and fell spinning, endlessly falling, sucked down and down. And then beyond up and down…

And found herself sitting alone, on the bone-dry floor of the pool. Only this wasn’t exactly the same pool, the same therapy room. This was Hell’s version of that room, she realized, looking around. The air was suffused with Hell’s ubiquitous noise, overwhelming even the chorus of screams: the wet multitudinous gnashing of millions of jaws chewing at human flesh. She stood up and saw that the tubs in the room were full - with blood. The walls were cracked; she could see flame through the cracks, making them waver; the air was foul with ash and despair.

She knew she was not here as one of the condemned but as a visitor, with a connection to Earth that the condemned didn’t have; she was the kind of specialized traveler to Hell she’d been once before - only this time she had been brought against her will. By whom?