Aftermath by Tim Marquitz Page B

mystical essence for just a second before the aura was yanked back and put under lock and key. It was a dead emptiness after that, simply gone. The wind shifted and cleared the nuclear fog and I caught sight of the gleam of silver armor, a man standing there. Or at least that was the impression I got, only a quick glimpse settling in the brainpan.
    The figure had on a silvery chain cowl that covered the entirety of his face except for tiny slits at his eyes. From a distance I couldn’t identify their color or see anything beyond the darkened depressions in the cowl. I could feel his stare on me though, piercing and calculating, cold and uncomfortable. My power welled up in response to the bold stare down in the middle of nowhere but it appeared as if he wasn’t gunning for a fight. Whoever the figure was, he slipped back into the whirling soup that had collected around the trees and fled the range of my senses quick-like. I thought about following and beating some answers out of him but I was on the clock, another bomb ready to go off any moment. There simply wasn’t time to be chasing ghosts. Besides, I would be facing down one of my own in just a few minutes and didn’t need to go adding more to the pile.
    I hadn’t chatted with Rala since before everything went south in my life and didn’t figure us talking was going to improve things, especially after I told her what I’d done. Still, there wasn’t any point in putting it off any longer.
    Seemed I was going to Hell both literally and figuratively.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Whoever coined the phrase, ‘There’s no place like home,’ was an idiot.
    Hell had been my home for a while after I’d screwed things up with DRAC and needed someplace to hide out and let everyone cool off. The place damn near drove me insane. Of course having Azrael, the Grim Reaper and Angel of Death himself, inside my head might have had a lot to do with that. Well, at least a little. I was probably bugshit crazy to begin with so hanging out with Chatterbox and a bunch of dread fiends only exacerbated it. But at least it had been relatively quiet.
    These days Hell was home to hundreds of people, survivors of the attack against the all the various DRAC headquarters spread across the world by the United States Army. Shaw had turned them against us in a petty attempt at revenge for my kidnapping her and Venai while we were in God’s prison domain. Mind you, all that worked out for the best, all of us getting back to Earth alive and in one piece but Shaw’s not one to be reasonable. Neither am I unfortunately. She escalated and I escalated and shit turned ugly for everyone. The least I could do was offer up a safe place for all the employees of DRAC until the world settled and they could return up top without fear of the DSI or US government trying to kill them. How long that might take was a mystery, and it made returning to Hell an interesting experience.
    I popped into my quarters, which were once Lucifer’s, and found it exactly as I’d left it; dirty, unorganized, and a little rank. My bed was unmade and the sheets and blankets were crumpled at the foot. It looked inviting, and I could have sworn it called to me but I wasn’t there for that no matter how much I would have loved to crawl into bed and sleep until Armageddon rang the front bell.
    Too much depended on me to do that though, so I ignored the siren song of my mattress and made my way out into the hallway beyond my chambers. To my surprise silence greeted me.
    When I’d left there were people in makeshift camps all up and down the halls, finding whatever place they could to call their own while we piled more and more survivors on top of them. I’d ordered the dread fiends to construct real rooms for them all and it seemed as if they’d managed that task in record time. They’d also taken my advice to move the DRAC folks as far from my quarters as possible, for which I owed them a treat or two. Hell had become a sanctuary of