Brother Odd

have his pain lifted."
        The surface tension of his pent-up tears abruptly broke, and one tracked down each cheek.
        He looked up at me and, in a voice thick with sadness but also with bitterness, he said, "No. It's too late."

CHAPTER 53
        
        FOR ALL I KNOW, DEATH HAD BEEN IN THE ROOM when the curved walls had bloomed with colorful patterns of imagined God thought, and had moved as our heads had turned, to stay always just out of our line of sight. But it came at me now as if it had just swept into the chamber in a cold fury, seized me, lifted me, pulled me face to face with it.
        Instead of the previous void in the hood, confronting me was a brutal version of the face of Brother John, angular where his was round, hard where his was soft, a child's idea less of the face of Death than of the face of Power personified. The young genius who had recognized and feared the chaos of the world but who had been powerless to bring order to it had now empowered himself.
        His breath was that of a machine, rife with the reek of smoking copper and scalding steel.
        He threw me over the wingback chair, as if I were but a knotted mass of rags. I slammed into the cool, curved wall and jacked myself up from the floor even as I landed.
        A wingback chair flew, I ducked and scooted, the wall rang like a glass bell, as it had not done when I struck it, the chair stayed where it fell, but I kept moving. And here came Death again.
        At the window, the bronze rails and muntins strain and slightly tweak but do not fail. The keening of the frustrated attacker grows louder than the clatter of its busy bones.
        "This geek," Brother Maxwell decides, "isn't scared of us."
        "It's gonna be before we're done," Knuckles assures him.
        
        Out of the kaleidoscopic beast and through one of the empty spaces where a windowpane had been, an urgent thrusting tentacle of scissoring bones invades five feet into the room.
        The brothers stagger back in surprise.
        The extruded form breaks off or is ejected from the mother mass, and collapses to the floor. Instantly the severed limb assembles into a version of the larger creature.
        Pincered, spined, barbed, and hooked, as big as an industrial vacuum cleaner, it comes roach-quick, and Knuckles swings for the bleachers.
        The Louisville Slugger slams some corrective discipline into the delinquent, splintering off clusters of bones. Knuckles steps toward the thing as it shudders backward, demolishes it with a second swing.
        Through the window comes another thrusting tentacle, and as it detaches, Brother Maxwell shouts to Brother Fletcher, "Get Jacob out of here!"
        Brother Fletcher, having played some dangerous gigs in his salad days as a saxophonist, knows how to split a dive when customers start trading gunfire, so he is already scramming from the room with Jacob before Maxwell shouts. Entering the hallway, he hears Brother Gregory cry out that something is in the elevator shaft and is furiously intent on getting through the roof of the blocking cab.
        
        As Death rushed me again, Rodion Romanovich rushed Death, with all the fearlessness of a natural-born mortician, and opened fire with the Desert Eagle.
        His promise of incredible noise was fulfilled. The crash of the pistol sounded just a few decibels softer than the thunder of mortar fire.
        I didn't count how many rounds Romanovich squeezed off, but Death burst apart into geometric debris, as it had done when leaping down from the bell tower, the fragmenting robe as brittle as the form it clothed.
        Instantly, the shards and scraps and splinters of this unnatural construct twitched and jumped with what looked like life but was not-and within seconds remanifested.
        When it turned toward Romanovich, he emptied the pistol, ejected the depleted magazine, and frantically dug the spare out of his pants pocket.
        Less shattered by the second barrage of gunfire than by the first, Death rose swiftly from ruin.
        John, not a brother at this moment, but now a smug child, stood with eyes closed, thinking the Death figure into existence again, and when he opened his eyes, they were not those of a man of God.
        Brother Maxwell slams a home run through the second intruder in Room 14, then sees that Knuckles is again hammering at the first one, which has rattled itself back