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or of Heaven and Hell, then I will show it to you firsthand!"
    She screamed.
    "I told you to stop mooing, cow!"
    He squeezed the trigger and then squeezed it again. And again. And again until it was empty. Only then did he let the weapon slide from his grasp. It clattered on the blacktop.
    "Undo these bonds, so that the one who will soon inhabit her may be free."
    He stalked away. Something ruptured inside him and dark, noxious fluid rushed from the open cavity in his abdomen, drenching his feet. Baker's body was disintegrating faster than he'd expected.
    When the Rising first began, Ob's original host body had been a black Labrador named Sadie, owned by an elderly widow in Bodega Bay, California. Unable to lead the Siqqusim in such a limited form, he'd run amok, desperately seeking the body's destruction. He'd found it
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    hours later at the hands of a fisherman who dispatched him with several shots to the head after Ob tore out the throats of his wife and children.
    As leader of the Siqqusim, Ob returned to the realms of the living before his brethren. He liked to think of it as head-of-the-line privileges. He also reanimated quicker than the others, almost instantaneously. His second body belonged to a network systems analyst in Gardner, Illinois, and had served him well. The host had been in remarkable physical health and died of suffocation, leaving the body in good shape. Ob still regretted the loss of that one. It ended when a human set the entire town on fire. Ob became trapped in the inferno while crawling through a ventilation duct after some prey.
    His third body was a homeless man in Coober Pedy, Australia. The man was already rotting before death claimed him. Ob only inhabited that shell for a day before a human snuck up from behind and drove a pickaxe through his brain.
    His fourth had been the body of Dr. Timothy Powell, one of the men directly responsible for freeing his kind in the first place. That body had been dispatched during the recent battle. Now, here he stood, in the body of Powell's superior, Professor Baker. The almost contrived irony was not lost on the demon lord, and Ob wondered if some higher force had a hand in the fact that he'd taken possession of two of the men responsible for his release.
    He searched through Baker's memories as if riffling through a filing cabinet. He saw the scientist's escape and flight, his capture by Schow's forces, and the interrogation that followed. He learned of Baker's other companions: Jim, the father searching for his son, and Martin, the elderly holy man.
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    These two, the father and the preacher, were not with them. They weren't among the zombies ordered to scavenge weapons and round up stray humans from the surrounding countryside. He hadn't seen them in the complex either. The possibility that two of his enemy's companions might have escaped gnawed at him. He didn't like loose ends, especially if it meant that they could warn others of his army's might.
    He scanned the horizon. Could they still be out there, hiding in the night amongst the hills and trees? How delicious it would be-how poetic to destroy them while wearing the form of their friend.
    Still, no matter. If they had survived, they were gone by now, hunted down and dead. Or dying. Humanity's time was over, its number finite. The Siqqusim's numbers were not. And when this world held no more bodies for them-there were other worlds, a multitude of other living beings for them to violate. They would never go back to the Void, and eventually, they would have their revenge on He who had sent them there. Ob would lead the Siqqusim's corruption of the flesh. When the last bit of flesh had been conquered, his brother Ab would then be free to rally his own forces, the Elilum. They would proceed with the destruction of the planet's plant and insect life, possessing them in the same way that the Siqqusim did with flesh. Finally, when all life had been extinguished, they would depart for other planets,