The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [200]
It looked like his father.
"What's that you have there?" said a voice to his left.
He turned. A nightmarish figure that looked like a walking dead body gestured at him; the crate Lionel held flew out of his hands across the ten feet between them and into the arms of the ghoulish man. He ripped open the crate and laid his hands on the Gerona Zohar.
"I don't know how to thank you," said the man.
He seemed to lose all interest in Lionel. He rushed to his father's side and pulled him from the cascading stream of blood, flowing in volume down a trough to an open pit at the end of the room.
"You're alive," gasped Lionel.
"And I'm really very glad to see you, my son," said Jacob quietly. "Do you have a gun?"
Lionel took the pistol from his belt.
"Shoot him."
Jacob nodded at the man across the circle, the hump of his back to them, setting the Book of Zohar into the last of the silver caskets.
Lionel aimed the Colt with shaking hands. The man turned and waved his arm at them; the shot fired wide as Lionel's body was jolted. The gun flew out of his hand and into the pit. Lionel fell to his knees.
Paying no attention to them, Reverend Day walked to a brazier at the edge of the circle, took a handful of matches from his pocket, and tried to strike one on the brazier; the match broke in his hand. He tried another with the same result, then a third.
"Damn," said Reverend Day, laughing. "For the want of a match ..."
A bloodcurdling scream and two shots boomed out of the maze. Reverend Day cocked his head, listened, tossed the matches away, limped over, yanked a lantern off the wall, and carried it back to the brazier.
Lionel worked furiously to untie his father's hands. Above them, the burst of gunfire died; they heard only occasional rifles and the rising, pitiful cries of the wounded.
As blood poured out of the grills and down the trough into the pit, the rumbling from deep belowground grew louder and more sustained.
The last of the black shirts left alive in front of the church dropped their rifles and ran shortly after the last machine gun quit firing. Through his glass, Doyle saw the first white shirts splattered with red crawling out of the open cathedral doors.
"Come on," he said.
Eileen and Doyle helped Innes up, and they hurried toward the church. Doyle broke into a run ahead of them. He passed the blackshirted bodies lying around the perimeter and stopped when he reached the doors.
A massacre inside. Bodies sprawled on top of one another. The cathedral floor red with blood and shattered glass. Numbed survivors staggering to their feet.
Eileen and Innes joined him; Eileen's breath caught, horrified.
"Good God, Arthur," said Innes, shaking his head in disbelief. "Good God."
There were many wounded, hundreds, and they needed help fast.
"Got to get them outside where we can see," he said. Doyle took Eileen by the arms, looked her in the eye, and spoke firmly. "I need your help. No time for tears now."
She saw the fierce compassion in his eyes and nodded. They entered down the bloody steps; they spoke to the ones who could still walk, directing them to help survivors to the front of the church. Many remained unresponsive, some needed to hear the instruction twice; the guns had nearly deafened them. It seemed to Doyle's eye that the deadliest casualties were concentrated in the center of the room, where blood was running down into a circle of drains.
The sound of children's cries outside drew Innes to the left side doors.
"Arthur, over here."
Doyle joined him on the steps, and they saw the circle of children sitting fifty steps outside, listening to a man in black who knelt before them in the dirt. Doyle and Innes walked past the dead at the machine gun to the man; he looked up at them as they stopped.
"Kanazuchi?"