The Book of Doom - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,68

don’t have any choice.”

Then he smiled and snapped his fingers. The room around Zac began to fade. He saw Angelo’s head loll sideways to look at him. “Don’t go,” the boy wheezed. “P-please.”

“I’ll come back!” Zac shouted. “I’ll get help and come back. I promise!”

Then the room faded completely, and Angelo was abandoned to all the demons of Hell.

AC FELL FORWARD, the chains no longer round his ankles and wrist, and so no longer holding him up. He landed awkwardly on hard-packed sand and lay there, face down, until the inside of his head stopped spinning.

When he finally got up, Zac found himself standing beneath a pale blue sky. The sand stretched out around him in all directions, flat on his left, hills and dunes to his right.

There was no wind. Not a breath of air moved across the desert. He turned in a slow circle, sweeping his gaze out over the sand. There were no demons, no Angelo, no chair and no straps. He was, as far as he could tell, completely alone.

“Great,” he muttered. “Now what?”

He walked a few paces in one direction, stopped and walked back. He looked around again, but the landscape was still devoid of life.

Then he remembered the watch. Gabriel had said he could use it to contact Heaven once he had the book. He looked at the little screen. Where the time should have been was a question mark, and a basic animation of a stick man shrugging his shoulders.

Zac studied the watch more closely. It had four buttons along one side and two on the other. One of them, he imagined, would allow him to call for a rescue party. But which one?

There was a flash of light and a puff of smoke and the hunchbacked demon, Eliza, popped out of thin air. She stuck her tongue out at him, then smashed a little pointed hammer against the watch face. With a sharp giggle she vanished again, leaving Zac staring blankly at the broken timepiece on his wrist.

“Well, that’s just great,” he sighed, before a tennis ball hit him hard on the back of the head.

He turned, fists raised, head throbbing. The ball had come from the direction of the dunes. And now he was paying closer attention he could hear noises – voices, maybe – from behind the closest hill. He listened, and soon the voices were joined by the sound of heavy footsteps on the compacted sand.

A large man with a long, flame-coloured beard trudged into view at the top of the dune. He stopped when he saw Zac. There was a long moment in which he and Zac just stared at each other in silence, but then the man cupped his huge hands round his mouth and shouted, “Chuck us the ball back!”

Zac looked down at the tennis ball by his feet. It was grubby and weather-beaten. Someone had scribbled a large number 4 on it in black marker pen. Zac picked it up, then approached the man on the hill.

The closer he got, the bigger the man seemed. He stood almost as tall as Haures had. His beard was easily a metre long itself, and his muscles bulged beneath the leather armour he wore. The giant watched Zac impassively as he trudged up the hill.

“Who are you?” Zac demanded, stopping in front of the man.

“Who are you?” he replied in a thick Scottish accent.

“I asked you first.”

The man reached over his shoulder. His fingers wrapped round a long handle, and there was a shnink of a blade being unsheathed.

“Well, I’ve got a big sword,” the man scowled. “And it’s dead sharp.”

Zac weighed up his chances. He’d taken down plenty of adults before, but none as big as this one. He was holding the sword like he meant it too. It was not a fight Zac wanted to have.

“Zac Corgan,” he said. “Now your turn.”

The big man glowered down at him. “War,” he said.

“War?”

“Aye,” said the giant. “War.”

“As in... battles and fighting and stuff?”

“As in the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Zac considered this. He looked War up and down. “Yeah,” he said, willing to accept pretty much anything at this point. “Course you are. Where’re the other three, then?”

“Coo-ee!” came a voice from beyond the brow of the hill. “Get a move on. We haven’t got all day, you know?”

War sighed and closed his eyes. “You had to bloody ask.”

A skinny man dressed all in white scurried the last few steps up the dune. He wore a floppy sunhat on