Chapter 16 #2
The Leviathan, abruptly, dipped its head, plummeted with all of its body, taking the angel, the anti-Christ, and the human with it.
Hard, they rammed into the ground, and Tadeo shouted out when he slammed into the seafloor.
Thrashing, he tried to lift his head, but he was being wholly dragged against the rocks, each one digging into his side, his head.
Once again, he was choking up on water, and his head felt light in between all the thumps of pain.
Dina’s voice sounded — yells and shouts for Tadeo, but they were muffled.
He could hardly see now — the surface a dim glow far above.
‘Like Heaven.’ He could remember the light he saw when he’d died, the flicker at the end of the tunnel.
Weak, Tadeo almost didn’t notice when the ground took on a decline, and he felt as if he were traveling down a slide.
Squinting, Tadeo could only feel the now many rocks that were striking against him and make out the shape of what might’ve been a giant dark maw of stone.
Like a cave mouth. The Leviathan slithered inside, turned like a shadow, and the soldier — surely dead by now — was pulled in first, then the angel who was looking at Tadeo in desperation.
Then, finally, Tadeo felt himself reeled into pitch darkness.
Shaking, shuddering — the water instantly became cooler, and almost denser, and though he struggled to see, he noticed a ceiling coming over him, hanging down rock icicles like teeth.
The ceiling, in fact, was approaching rapidly, and the floor kept trailing downward.
Uselessly, Tadeo jerked a little, but as the cave closed in around him, more and more until he could feel it crushing the Leviathan’s body and his own together.
He turned his head, shut his eyes, gasped and gagged on water.
‘I can’t move,’ he wanted to scream, limbs crushing against his sides.
‘I can’t breathe.’ His organs felt squeezed too, and the cave was tightening so much around him that he was even losing his ability to struggle.
‘I can’t move.’ It was so dark. ‘I can’t move.
’ Was he still going deeper? His legs were uncomfortably pressed together.
He couldn’t even turn his head anymore. Black, in every direction.
Some muffled sounds. Dina was gone, was quiet.
Dante was dead. ‘I can’t move.’ Not even the room to shiver.
‘It’s so dark.’ He couldn’t move. ‘My ribs—’ When he tried to breathe, his shoulders, his chest, scraped the walls.
Then, the water ended, and there was — his hair wet, his clothes drenched — dryness, air.
Tadeo spewed out the ocean, felt it like vomit, but his body was still crushed, and he couldn’t see.
Where was he? Distantly, he heard screams again.
‘Like howls of animals.’ But there were inflections in between, languages like no animal Tadeo had ever met used.
Those were people — screaming. It wasn’t Dina, nor Dante.
‘Hundreds of people screaming.’ Some more rivulets of saltwater dripped from his gasping mouth. ‘People. Where are they coming from?’
His foot jerked, his leg shifted. Then, he could turn his head.
The cave was easing up on him, as was the Leviathan’s hold.
Tadeo looked toward his feet, wanting to see if the angel or the soldier were up ahead, but there was only darkness.
And there was only darkness as the space he was pulled into grew wider, wider.
Instantly, he sighed in relief, but it was only temporary.
He soon wiggled his fingers, dismayed to not feel anything against him.
When he lifted his head, there was new freedom, too much freedom.
Then, the sea serpent released his body, and the rock ground scraped his front one final time.
The anti-Christ fell into pitch darkness and the symphony of agony.
He scratched at the emptiness he fell into, twisting, searching.
He shouted — “Angel!” — but the screams were rising in volume around him and muffled his yells.
“Angel! Dina!” Heat grew all about him too, like he were falling into a furnace.
“Dante!” Kicking and kicking, realizing the fall would never end, he groaned and tried to curl his body forward.
He ground his teeth; and stinging, twin mouths opened at his back, whipping out feathered tongues, too wet to fly.
“Fuck.” Another pair of mouth-wings tore through his arms, and his legs shook, bled, as Tadeo twisted and screamed out in pain to join all the other howls of agony in the air.
Who were they? The damned, surely. ‘We were looking for Hell.’ They hadn’t planned to go there, just to meet the captured angels halfway.
Was this halfway? The shouts were so loud now that he could make out certain voices.
A higher-one, feminine. A lower one, masculine.
Were those children? No. That couldn’t be.
‘Hiccups. Crying. Gurgling.’ Tadeo took his own top, dug his claws into it until the fabric tore.
He was sweating, coughing out the heat, the sudden sizzling on his skin.
‘I can hear—’ Once again, he panted, but it was a different terror now that seized him.
‘I can hear them choking on their blood as they scream.’ Those couldn’t be children, those couldn’t be scratchy elderly voices, those couldn’t be, could they?
And were those animals? Those howls? ‘No.’
Roughly, the sprouted wings at his back, his arms, his legs struck the air, jumped him a little in the darkness up or whatever way it was that Tadeo’s head was pointed.
He couldn’t even decipher if the screams came from below, from above, or from all around him.
The thudding pain of his head, the many eyes rippling open down his face, did nothing to help him see.
He could feel his own skin swelling to triple and distort his shape.
Though he shouted one more time — “Dina! Dante!” — his boyish voice was gone, replaced with a guttural monster groan.
Then, a light — a dim glow in the direction of the anti-Christ’s feet that was bursting like a dying star.
Dina saw it too as he fluttered his eyes open with a dull throb at the back of his head, feeling too warm, too empty of air in his lungs.
‘What is this?’ He was falling. ‘I hit my head when I was in the cave.’ And now he was plunging in an endless dark, hearing distant screams. When yellow-orange flickered in the air above, it took some blinks before the angels realized heat followed with it — fire, so great that it illuminated the face of the Leviathan that breathed it.
Like a comet, the flames streaked across the pitch black, toward a many-winged giant.
“Tadeo?” Dina whispered groggily, but all the bleariness was shocked away as the light engulfed the anti-Christ’s beastly body.
“Tadeo!” Tadeo screamed as he was scorched. “Tadeo!”
Before Dina could pull out his own wings, he felt something take him by the torso, wrapping around tight in the sudden shape of links.
‘Chain?’ It tightened onto his lower ribs enough to bruise, to cut — with one end trailing off into the unknown whereas the other end, approaching rapidly, was a metallic sphere, spiked to appear like a star, a morning star.
The teeth bit deep into Dina’s chest, and the angel screamed.
So roughly the star dug itself in further, the angel was pulled in a direction he couldn’t make out.
Like the cave at the bottom of the sea, wet rock soon scraped against him, but he could do no more than jerk and twitch over the red, slick ground of a tunnel.
His wings were trapped beneath the chains, his body pulsed in pain — but he saw as, yet again, a light bloomed before him.
A figure with a long torch was laughing, saying, “It’s an angel!” The figure at his left was tall, almost all of his body obscured by a dark cloak that hooded his head.
Holding the other end of the flail that was torturing the hiccuping, wheezing Dina was a great, burly demon with bull-ish horns.
With a hardened, scarred face, he carried also eyes reddened in the whites, as if his arteries had burst open long ago and refused to stop bleeding.
For clothing, he wore a heavy tunic, excessive robing, a red sash, and sandals.
A golden laurel wreath crowned his head.
“Who,” asked Baal, “the fuck are you?”