Hell on Earth Read online

  HELL ON EARTH

  by Philip Palmer

  Volume 1: Hell Breach

  This is an epic fantasy thriller in three linked volumes, set in the near future...

  Nine years before the story begins, the sky turned black when millions of flying monsters from the Hell Dimension blocked the sun. That was the day when Hell came to Earth.

  Now it’s 2023. Warlocks keep the peace, led by Chief Warlock BRANNIGAN. And London is a nation state in which power is shared between human beings and creatures from the Hell Dimension. The former City of London is now DEMON CITY, ruled by the Lord Mayor MAMMON. The London Army is a freelance force that fights and wins wars all around the world. Demons who are granted citizenship can live and work anywhere in London, side by side with humans, together with thousands of formerly damned humans who have risen from the dead and migrated to London.

  And in this strange new world, East London’s Murder Squad Number Five, led by Detective Superintendent DOUGIE RANDALL and Detective Inspector GINA HENDERSON, continue to do their job of catching villains, and protecting the innocent....

  ‘HELL ON EARTH is brilliant: horrific, gripping and darkly humorous.’ - John Jarrold

  CONTENTS

  Volume 1: Hell Breach

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Volume 2: Death of a Demon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Volume 3: The Warlocks of London

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Copyright

  MURDER SQUAD NUMBER 5

  Detective Superintendent Dougie Randall: Senior Investigating Officer

  Detective Inspector Gina Henderson:Deputy Senior Investigating Officer

  DS Alliea Carwright: Office Manager

  DS Catriona Okoro: Action Writer and Indexer

  DC Taff Davies: Outside Enquiry Team

  DC Ronnie Tindale: Outside Enquiry Team

  DC Seamus Malone: Outside Enquiry Team

  RDC (Resurrected Detective Constable) Fillide Melandroni: Outside Enquiry Team.

  DC Shai Hussain: Receiver

  DC Andy Homerton: Senior Document Reader

  DC John Milburn:Document Reader

  DC Hyun-Shik Moon: Document Reader

  DC Vincent Hare: Document Reader

  DC Tony Williamson: Exhibits Officer

  DC Victoria Howe: HtH (House to House) Coordinator

  DC Robert Sandford: Disclosure Officer

  DC Ian Gregory: File Preparation Officer

  DC Lisa Aaronovich: Researcher

  Emily Cantrell: Civilian telephonist

  Owen Heath: Civilian telephonist

  Professor Harwich: Forensic demonologist

  Prologue

  ‘Bravo Tango receiving, is this a drill? Repeat, is this a drill? Over,’ said Agatha Attwell, Metropolitan Police dispatcher at the CAD office in Leman Street station.

  ‘No,’ came the voice of the Italian detective, Fillide Melandroni, over the Met Net channel. ‘Trust me, this is really happening. Another Gate ’twixt Hell and Earth has been breached. Here, look.’

  Agatha tapped her keyboard and saw the image from the detective’s e-berry camera: the awe-inspiring sight of an East End street drenched in blood.

  ‘And can I have a grid reference for that, please? Over,’ said Agatha crisply, as her typing fingers sent the DB alert ‘in the East London area’ through to the HQ of SCO19, the armed response squad, which happened to be on the second, third and fourth floors of this very building, in Leman Street.

  The windows and walls of the CAD office blew in.

  There was a flash of intense light first - like a solar flare, yellow and expanding - that dazzled through the flat glass wall between the office and the station’s central corridor. The light flare was followed by a slo-mo blast. It shattered the windows; glass rippled, like seawater swamping sandcastles, into the office. It felt to Agatha as if time was standing still, cruelly allowing her to savour the moment of her own death. And in that instant of detached observation she also registered the eerie sight of the walls inside the office melting like butter on a sunny day. Then there was a low-pitched “boom” as the sound waves caught up with the explosion. Agatha and the two other CAD operators were drenched by the hail storm of glass shards, and buffeted by blast waves that rocked them in their chairs.

  The hail storm ended. She felt blood trickling down her face and on to her neck, and she raised her hands and saw that they were blood-drenched too. She tried to wipe the blood off her cheeks with her bloody fingers, and fought for composure.

  ‘Bravo Seven, can you hold, please?’ said Agatha calmly into her mike.

  ‘For the love of Lucifer!’ snapped RDC Fillide Melandroni on the other end of the line.

  Agatha got up from her desk, and slivers of broken glass slithered off her clothes. She took off her headset. She looked around and saw that Benjie had taken the full force of the blast. He and his desk had been picked up and thrown across the room. The plate glass wall was a gaping void and the one brick wall that hadn’t collapsed was distorted like Gaudi’s Cathedral. Agatha felt a wave of dizziness, but took a deep breath and walked carefully across the room; past the water dispenser which was over on its side and leaking filtered water, and over fragments of glass and brick that crunched underfoot. Benjie kept uttering a strange harsh coughing noise, like a child with croup. He was only twenty-seven, and Agatha had been like a mum to him, or so he’d once said. He was a capable lad, with a booming ‘not listening to other people’ voice that implied a dash of autism. But he had a flair for the work, and Agatha had pleasantly envisaged him getting a job at New Scotland Yard and really making something of his life, one day.

  Now he was sprawled upon a mountain of
glass and desk splinters and his face was pale. Agatha kneeled beside him and took his neck pulse. This confirmed he was still alive; but she knew that anyway, because he was still making those horrible croupy noises. Then she realised that only his upper torso had made the journey across the room: blood and viscera formed a sticky mess where his body ended.

  ‘Hold my hand,’ Agatha said calmly.

  ‘I’m fine, help me up,’ Benjie muttered.

  ‘Hold my hand. Benjie, Benjie, believe this: no matter what you’ve heard, no matter what the papers and the television programmes say, you must believe, there is a God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is a God and He loves you and let us hope you somehow find His eternal grace at the end of this journey that you – you – you –’ That was all Agatha could manage.

  The shock of the massive bodily trauma finally kicked in. Benjie spasmed. He died.

  Agatha got up and walked over to Marilyn, who’d been tucked behind a pillar when the blast struck. The pillar was now ash. ‘What the fuck was that? A bomb?’ Marilyn babbled.

  ‘Possibly. Are you hurt?’

  ‘Just shocked. How’s Benjie –’

  ‘We need to get out of here now. Come with me.’

  ‘I said, where’s Benjie?’ Marilyn looked across the room and spotted him. After a few seconds she realised that Benjie’s legs were in a different place to the rest of Benjie. ‘Oh sweet fucking Lucifer!’ Marilyn groaned. Agatha winced at the obscenity, but let it pass.

  ‘Wait a second,’ Agatha said.

  Agatha went back to her desk and tapped the screen. She tried to get a CCTV image for the custody area but she could only see snow. She checked the message log and saw that Phil Matthews, the custody sergeant, had triggered the Black Alert signal that would summon all available armed officers for Urgent Assistance. Black Alert was the code reserved for major terrorist attack, nuclear bomb, or demons.

  ‘Bravo Tango to Foxtrot Echo, Over,’ said Agatha.

  ‘Foxtrot Echo receiving,’ said the SCO19 dispatcher, ‘we have a Black Alert from the custody area in your part of the station. Is this a drill? Repeat, is this a drill? Over.’

  ‘It’s not a drill, I have also received the Black Alert, and furthermore we have experienced an explosion in the CAD room, one fatality confirmed so far. No further messages from the custody area. Can you get here as soon as you possibly can, please? Over.’

  In her three years on CAD duties at Whitechapel, Agatha had never once used the ubiquitous dispatchers’ abbreviation “a-sap”. She despised it as a vulgar Americanism, and she did not yield to it even now, at a time of such crisis.

  ‘Roger that, Bravo Tango, but we also have a DB Alert in East One received from – ah, you’re the one who sent us that message too. A DB and a Black Alert on the same shift, in the same area, are you sure – ?’

  ‘It’s been a busy day,’ said Agatha crisply. ‘Bravo Tango Out.’

  Leman Street was a big Victorian station on five floors. The divisional station was at the front on the ground and first floors. On the second and third floors were Crime Analysis and Traffic Police, with Exhibits at the front on the fourth floor and Data Storage directly above on the fifth floor. Murder Squad Five had the conference suite and offices on the first floor at the rear. But SCO19 had most of the rest of the back part of the building, including two rec rooms and a firing range. And this was where the authorised firearms officers for the whole of London East rested up or waited between shifts or did their paperwork.

  This meant that an entire army could be mobilised in minutes to deal with the Black Alert emergency. That was, in its way, quite comforting. Meanwhile, however, Agatha still had to deal with her ongoing call. She put her headset back on.

  ‘Sorry about that, Fillide. I need an address or grid reference. Over.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake! Do you realise how fucking urgent this is, you stupid whore!’

  ‘No need for that.’ Agatha hated the potty mouth tendency of the modern police officer: especially the dead variety. ‘We have our own problems in the CAD room too, you know. Now, I have on my screen your e-berry location as Ildminster Square in East One. Is that the location of the DB?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  Agatha was typing; she sent an Urgent Assistance message to all the ARVs in the area via flagged email. There would be at least twenty cars in transit east of Leicester Square, each crewed by a team trained in demon combat and armed with anointed silver bullets. She contacted New Scotland Yard and asked them to scramble some of their Harrier Jets for a potential DB crisis. Then she completed in triplicate onscreen forms for armed assistance from the ARVs of London West. But, she mused, on the basis of what she’d seen on the screen - a Level One blood torrent - would all that be enough?

  Agatha mulled the question for a few moments and wished she could consult Benjie; he had been a police officer with four years’ experience on the beat before his asthma got to him. Whereas Agatha had spent most of her working life as a librarian. Death and demon invasion had never before been part of her curriculum vitae.

  She made a decision: boldness was all.

  She started typing again and sent an Urgent Assistance request to the London Army. She didn’t have time to apply for a MacP – Military Aid to the Civil Power – so she faked an authorisation using a code she wasn’t supposed to know. Finally, she said: ‘All units in London East from Bravo Tango, all units from Bravo Tango. All available and off duty armed officers to attend 13 Ildminster Square E1 2BX, possible Dimensional Breach, repeat possible DB, no make that probable, probable DB. This is not a drill. Oh and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Out.’

  Marilyn was moaning. Agatha had done all she could. She got the RDC back on the line.

  ‘What the fuck is your game, woman?’ snapped the rude detective.

  ‘We have a Black Alert at Leman Street. I’ve forwarded your call details to New Scotland Yard and all available units. Military assistance will be on its way. Over.’

  ‘Just roust SCO19 from the canteen, they’re literally round the corner from us,’ said a male voice. Agatha finger-swiped to see the face on the screen; it was the new detective, Thomas Derry, who was young and, judging by his web cam image, extremely badly shaven.

  ‘Negative to that,’ said Agatha. ‘If you’d been listening properly, you’d appreciate that we have a Black Alert on our own premises, so we’ll get to you just as soon as we can, Thomas. Out.’ She switched off the radio & video link then walked across to the back wall of the office and opened the safe with a fingerprint touch. The heavy door opened, and she took out a Glock pistol and a salt shotgun, which were the authorised firearms for the CAD section in case of emergency.

  ‘Get up,’ she told Marilyn. ‘We’re going.’

  Marilyn was whimpering. She was a young, fit woman with considerable experience as a special constable, or so she always claimed; but shock had made her functionally useless. Whereas Agatha was grey-haired and sixty-five years of age and had had two hip replacements; but she’d also birthed four children and nothing much could faze her after that.

  ‘Get a move on, please,’ Agatha said briskly, and her schoolteacher tones cut through the young woman’s shock.

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course.’

  ‘Take this,’ Agatha said, holding out the Glock automatic pistol. ‘The safety is on. It takes, I believe, nearly fifty rounds. Aim for the body. It’s loaded with dum dum bullets, they’ll explode inside the flesh.’

  ‘What flesh?’

  ‘The flesh of anyone or anything,’ Agatha explained, ‘you shoot with it.’

  Agatha gave Marilyn the handgun and made her grip it properly. Then she hefted her shotgun into a shoulder-braced position, and together they stepped out into the corridor. Smoke engulfed them: infused with the stench of Hell. Agatha looked carefully one way, then the other.

  At one end of the corridor - the reception end - was a fireball, bright yellow and blazingly hot even from he
re, slowly trudging its way through the station like a meteor lost on Earth. It had left behind a trail of blackened carnage, and the walls of the corridor were so hot that steam billowed off them. Agatha saw a few glints of something white on the ground, and recognised them as shards of bones from those who had been in the path of the diabolic fire. From various directions in the rabbit warren of the Leman Street nick, Agatha could hear screams.

  ‘This way.’ She guided Marilyn along the corridor, then turned left towards the double doors opening on to the emergency staircase that led down and out into the car park.

  She heard a low rumble behind her.

  Agatha turned and stared at the demon standing at the mouth of the corridor leading from the custody suite.

  The creature was dark red, the colour of a lingering winter sunset. It was roughly twice as tall as a man, two-legged and twin-horned, with a scaled carapace. An ICH-1A or B or C, in Agatha’s view, rather than a Royal Demon. Marilyn saw it too and began to scream.

  ‘Shut up, girl,’ Agatha said calmly. ‘Now, you need to get out of here. So walk down the stairs - walk don’t run, you don’t want to trip and bump your head. Carry on downwards to the penultimate floor, B1 not B2. B2 is the boiler room. Go through the doors marked Car Park, and you’ll find yourself in the underground car park. Then carry on walking, up the ramp, until you reach fresh air, that’s the outdoor car park for junior staff, and then run as fast as you can. Go. Go. G -’

  Before Agatha could articulate the final ‘Go!’ the demon pounced. It was fast but even so Agatha opened fire and got off six shells. She’d only ever used the salt gun on a firing range and her aim was terrible; but it was a broad arc of fire and the salt scoured the creature’s flesh like acid and it spun back in the air and landed badly, then retreated like a crab scurrying back to its rock. She fired again and scored a direct hit and the creature scuttled back inside the custody area.

  Agatha had three shots left, since it was a ten-shot gun; which meant that if the creature attacked again, she would almost certainly die and the creature would get past her and attack the survivors in the rest of the station. But she hoped the monster wouldn’t know too much about the shell capacity of a Metropolitan Police salt gun.She stood her ground.