Warlock Infernal by Christine Morgan

Author:Christine Morgan [Morgan, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
Publisher: Madness Heart Press
Published: 2022-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

PART THREE:

Days

Six days later, they went for the nuclear option.

Nothing else had worked. The military leaders and political bigwigs were getting desperate. Worse, they were getting embarrassed, humiliated, and pissed off.

Preliminary flybys had ended in spectacular fireballs of disaster, either shot down by antiaircraft artillery—the gunners at Checkpoint Bethlehem were delighted to have some real target practice—or exploding like popcorn kernels against the protective Aurora Diabolicus dome. Ground forays fared little better, the revamped Wall’s defenses making short work of tanks and troops before they could even come close to engaging with the presumed enemy.

As for diplomatic negotiations . . .

Yeah, good luck with that. Communication attempts went either ignored or rebuffed. Nobody on the Outside knew what was going on in there, and nobody on the Inside seemed inclined to enlighten. Helicopters and drones met the same fates as fighter jets, while remote-operated robots sporting white flags met the same fates as tanks.

One famous reporter, renowned for a career of taking on the most dangerous assignments in the most volatile and unstable regions, was permitted to get almost within interviewing distance of Bethlehem’s gate . . . before a host of black-winged demons shredded him and his cameraman and sound tech into wet red mulch.

Meanwhile, once again, the whole world was watching. Governments held their breaths. International disputes were backburnered, wars called time-outs, otherwise major news stories relegated to the “oh and also this piddly shit happened” category.

The stock market tanked. Gas prices skyrocketed. People mobbed the grocery stores for talismanic toilet paper. Sporting events, highly-anticipated movie debuts, celebrity scandals, and contentious social issues made barely a blip. Nobody gave half a damn about billionaires in space or which fast-food chain had the best chicken sandwich.

The Lake Misquamicus region teemed with media, religious groups, and would-be sightseers, clogging the highways and byways with additional traffic while those trying sensibly to vacate the vicinity had to fight their way upstream. Across the country, survivalists headed for their bunkers, while doomsday cultists committed mass suicide. Even those who’d stubbornly persisted in decrying the whole thing as a hoax finally changed their tunes.

This, humanity in general figured, was it. For real this time. Everything else—natural disasters, pandemics, climate change—had only been the warm-up acts. That they’d figured much the same when AllHell happened in the first place, then eventually got over it and adapted and learned to live with it didn’t seem as likely this time around.

Before, it had been an Event, sure, an aberration, a shock to the collective system, requiring some massive reworkings of accepted reality . . . but the infernal lake had, for the most part, just sat there doing a whole lot of not much beyond its own environs and borders. The awkward unpleasantness had been contained, secured, taken care of. It could, like systemic racism, police brutality, and misogyny, be glossed over by the population not directly affected.

Now, though, was another story. A simple wall and off-limits quarantine wasn’t going to do the trick any longer. This was terrorism.

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