The center of the blood-storm boiled above the cemetery chapel with its reach expanding blocks every minute. The red rain no longer fell, but human blood would pour regardless, and Imala in her demon form gained strength with every massacre Hell’s legions committed in her name.
As the dead dug themselves back to the surface, they’d refill their empty graves with the bodies of the recently living, and in turn, those corpses would be reborn to do the same. Tens of thousands of soldiers would emerge from the surrounding graves, but the process wouldn’t necessarily be prompt. The longer the bodies laid deceased, the longer it’d be before they’d find the strength from Imala’s cursed broth to reach the surface, but the ritual being a few hours old now had already began to bear its spoiled fruit.
Many of the veterans who were more recently laid to rest had entered the cemetery as old men, but found themselves crawling from the earth as soldiers of their respective wars – young in their appearances and postures and decorated in uniforms that’d formerly filled them with well-earned pride. But their pride was no longer for that of their country. Instead, it stood for Imala and her sovereignty over those creatures of Hell that filled the corpses in place of the souls that once inhabited them. The living essence of these dead men and women had long since discovered their purpose in the afterlife, unknowingly leaving behind their empty husks on Earth as rags to be worn by tyrants of the underworld. These looming entities were wraiths in Hell (some even older than the reign of civilized man) and have now been uprooted unto Earth through Imala’s strength of blood – that rightful legacy bestowed upon her lineage hundreds of years passed, dating back further than even she could fully appreciate.
Every newly resurfacing thing that now walked the Earth had Imala’s decree burned into its being, owing her a debt of allegiance, and all eagerly striving for the same endgame: A Hell on Earth to call their home. They may not have had the souls or spirits of those bodies they inhabited, but they retained their host’s memories, and even their distinctiveness since the bodies and brains used were an exact recreation of those that’d previously roamed the Earth. They were warriors lost in the past but found in the now, trained to follow orders and unquestionably serve a higher power.
The soldiers’ duties were simple: collect the eyes of the living and bury their victims into their own empty graves, cultivating a fresh army of undead. The chaos and fear that’d spread in their wake would allow Imala the maleficent energy needed to bring forth elements of the Underworld that couldn’t naturally exist on Earth. Dark creatures and powers that thrived on pain and fear would infect the world of man, and she would be their queen as her blood-rites entitled.
There was a sparkling wealth of terror for her sycophants to spread, and the further they tore into their surroundings the closer Hell would be to surfacing into L.A. Already, the dead hoarded the living from the neighborhoods nearby – or at least the pieces of them left after they were mauled, maimed and eaten to provide strength for Imala’s militia. Those bodies that remained intact were buried singly, and those that were little more than chunks of marrow and tissue were thrown into one giant grave at the center of the cemetery (what would crawl from that pit of repugnance would be nothing short of unimaginable).
Few were captured alive, but those that were, were brought directly to their priestess and left to be victims of her insidious imagination. Even she wasn’t sure what her fervor would gut from the depths of Hell to create on Earth with the living sacrifices from untainted, despairing human souls. She would bathe in a warm bath of liquid organs to invigorate her mind’s eye while they remained imprisoned, clinging to life for no other reason than a false speck of hope, their weeps and tears proving to be a nourishing nectar added to the Queen’s cocktail of sorrows.
The inside of the church had transformed into a colossal domain with walls that felt of meat and veins and smelled of freshly spilt blood. The whole chamber was like what one would imagine the arterial insides of a human’s torso to be if it were hollowed out and domesticated with a throne at its end. The throne was made of bones that were carved and shaped eloquently, but black, as if charred in a pit of flame. And a dozen meaty steps down from there laid a bath of blood, infested by a variety of floating human eyes.
When the demon Imala stepped from her perch, the ground under her feet sizzled at their touch, leaving impressions in the fleshy floor leading toward the blood-pool. Twelve young men and women surrounded the lagoon of red on stone tablets tilted slightly inward so the excess from their slit wrists and hollowed sockets drained into the bath at their center. There were seven females and five males, none much older than twenty, all denied clothing, jewelry, or any charms they may’ve wore before being captured. The majority of them were collected from the nearby college campus, hardly a block from the cemetery. (What a disappointed the victims must have been to their schoolmates when they realized they did not, in fact, bleed Bruins blue.) Most of the young girls had rips in their ears where their piercings were stripped of the decorations they’d harbored. The salt from the tears pouring from their ducts burned their wounds as they dripped passed… Eyes, it would seem, were not a necessary requirement for hopelessly crying.
No ink stained their flesh from popular taboos, and all had natural hair color and bodies without implants or surgeries harnessing anything manmade. Most were random and unrelated – all equally victims of inevitable circumstances – except for two sets of twins: one male, and the other female. The twin men were African-American: twenty-three years old and built like track stars – it was unlikely even their mother could tell them apart. The girls were Vietnamese: nineteen years young and remarkably striking even in spite of their maimed eye-holes and exhausted faces. The strong connection between the sibling pairs allowed for a unique opportunity, and Imala envisioned a powerful tandem of abominations to come…but would save that concoction for last.
When she submerged herself into her pond of excreted miseries, her eyes began to burn and the vermillion sea around her boiled and bubbled at her command. Her enlarged form stretched easily from one side to the other as she settled comfortably into the gore.
She closed her eyes and leaned back her horned-head, opening her senses to the timeline surrounding her dominion. The people who were directly involved in these events (due to their blood-relation or acquaintance thereof) were not much more than a fleeting thought. She instead concentrated more on the timeline to unfold – the small resistance to undoubtedly come from the outside world’s governments.
She smiled through her demon teeth at the thought of the rules of man that had once preoccupied her existence. Within minutes, her chaos and spreading ill will would empower her enough to no longer give the Government a passing thought. How well would they fair when her hell-storm covered the city, blocking out all electronic communications and any practical line-of-sight from which to mount an offense? The human rodents of the military and law enforcement would be nearly defenseless without their computers guiding them into battle. After all, what chance did the Government stand against a god? They would undoubtedly give up their struggle very soon after discovering their weapons were useless against blood-magik and black sorcery. The human race would soon be charred remains and a whisking soot in the breeze of Hell’s fire-winds. All was already lost. Only time was left uncorrupted and very soon, what was left of time would fall to the Queen as well…
“Gregory…”
Imala breathed the name of her youngest victim: a thirteen-year-old boy with hardly the strength left in him to weep. He rose from his tablet at the opposite end of the pool like a puppet on a string and stepped up to its edge. His toes hung over the bath in front of him, face pale and docile.
“Are you afraid?”
Her words echoed in his mind, rattling his organs under his skin. He didn’t want to answer her, but felt as if he had no choice. With his eyelids tight over the open wounds in his face, his mouth took on a life of it
s own to form a reply without his permission.
“Yes…”
Her eyes glistened at the pleasure of his obedience.
“Good.” Fear was an essential element fueling all of Hell’s strengths: the more potent the emotion, the greater the transformation. “Be grateful I took your eyes. If you could see me, your fear may’ve been beyond even my control. …No telling what you could’ve unleashed from Hell.” She smiled and lifted her dripping arm up from the gore, gesturing for the boy with a wriggle of her pointed finger. “Come.”
He told himself not to. He screamed inside his mind saying, don’t get any closer! But again, he had no control over his body’s motion. He stepped down into the lagoon of death one stride at a time, with every advance sinking further into demise. By the time he reached the center, positioned between Imala’s propped up knees, he stood chest-deep in nerve endings and eyes, his hands at his sides submerged in the horror he stood in.
The ghastly stew around him boiled at Imala’s whim. He could feel the pain of his flesh beginning to cook but couldn’t control his lungs enough to scream. Steam rose from around his body while the blood slowly possessed him, slithering up from the pool, climbing over his frame.
“Soon, the terror you feel will be your strength. It will be to you like the air in your lungs and all who stand before you will fear your every breath.”
He was screaming on the inside for control over his own body, but couldn’t do anything other than wait to finally die…
The blood surrounding him slithered up his arms and shoulders then spread over his face. With his mouth slightly open, involuntarily inviting the corruption inside, it took advantage of the breach and poured down his throat to coat his insides. When it filled the bottom of his stomach like led in his belly, he finally found a moment of control, opening his eyes in horror of his last seconds of life to reveal morbid holes where the windows to his soul once were.
A gargling fled from his guts… Then a gag when the blood filled his lungs. A restrained grunt escaped before his mouth sealed over…and then he was gone.
Gregory’s body and face were devoured by an encasement of hardened death, and he stood as stiff as a corpse in the center of the soup for a few, very long seconds.
The pool settled its boiling after consuming the boy entirely, and Imala patiently waited, enduring the silence in the moments before his rebirth.
Everything was quiet. His entombed carcass stood as still as stone until his corpse began to vibrate, ripples racing through the surrounding pool. A rumble spread over the church grounds and Imala watched, waiting eagerly for what would be the first of her twelve, Elite demons of the mounting apocalypse. The name of this thing to be born was as relevant as its chosen, sacrificial lamb, and she found a pleasure growing inside as its title took shape in her mind. The inside of the citadel shook against the force of the coming emergence, and Imala sadistically indulged in intimate delight of its creation.
The building vibrations eventually cracked the surface of the blood-shell encasing the boy’s body, splintering the cast covering him like shattering porcelain. An orange glow broke through the cracks around his eyes to travel swiftly over his form as the fractures spread.
Cracked pieces, like a twisted puzzle, fell from the boy’s forehead and melted back into the horrid broth. The power of the Uncovering shook the surrounding walls, radiating with a low hum that tormented the other victims lying helplessly by. Blood dripped from their ears while they winced in agony as Imala indulged in the birth of her first Elite. The boy’s conversion into a tool of her Armageddon was only the second step in the road to implementing her rule. His power at her command would allow fear to stretch across the globe at a rate ten times that of her army of the dead. This boy would soon walk the Earth and secrete terror into the hearts of all, preparing the planet for the Gates of Hell to be revealed. He would demoralize those that witnessed him and drown out hope in oceans of irrationally depraved fear.
The shell of cursed liquid over his body crumbled, unveiling the charred face of a child with the strength of Hell glowing behind his closed eyes. He clinched his fists under the gore to break through the rest of his casing, slowly beginning to rise, miraculously floating to the surface until he stood atop the pool of death like it was the ground beneath his feet. With his eyes still pinched shut and a masochistic smirk breaking through his grimace, he kneeled to one knee on the surface of the blood-bath, bowing gracefully with both fists down beside him.
“Tell me,” Imala demanded, “what is your name?”
The boy-demon raised his head from his lowered bow and slowly opened his eyes to reveal orange flames like fire sprites boiling within. When he spoke, it was like the sound of a dying man wheezing beneath a powerful hum. The eleven other surrounding victims quivered at the resonance and might’ve died of fear right then if Imala’s power hadn’t been purposely keeping them alive.
He then answered her question, and in turn, claimed his power in this world with that declaration, and his name stretched out at its end like a snake hissing at its enemy.
“…Decccaaadenccccce……”
Imala let out a perverse moan at the sound of his power.
“Who do you serve?” she asked, testing his loyalty to her dominion. And the demon Decadence held his arms out to his sides with a bow of his head.
“Hell…on…Eaarrrthhhhh…and shhhheeee whoo sitssss at itsss throne.”
Imala grinned sickly with black eyes pulsating red.
She lowered her head and raised her palms as she levitated from the bath’s surface. She turned her palms down and back, then drifted in that direction, settling dominantly into her throne. Waving a hand in front of her, as if wiping over a pane of glass, the blood from her hand smeared across the humid air. She stared into the smear as it took shape, drawing a map of the surrounding area and zooming outward to show the entire country. Crimson bubbles like blisters on the skin of the continent spread over Los Angeles and nearby counties. The image depicted the spreading of the death and chaos her magik devised. With a finger tracing across the map, she drew a line from one end of the country to the other; a rufescent rash of Hell engulfing the continent along its path.
“It’ll only be days before this country falls.”
She tilted her head while the map curved to take the shape of the planet and rolled upward, panning toward South America. Imala picked a spot near the middle of the continent, somewhere in Brazil, and lifted her eyes to peer through the world-map at her demon standing upright atop the repugnant pond.
“Go here. Drown their people in your fear. Whisper my name into their winds and turn their strengths to weakness. When their trust turns to paranoia and their hope to terror, I’ll scorch their skies and rain Hell across their home.”
2
Forty minutes of vanilla bean air freshener and eighty-eight dollars later, Alex stepped out of the cab onto a sidewalk she’d never set foot on and felt oddly at home. She closed the car door behind her as the Cabby mumbled a strange farewell – strange because they’d hardly said two words to each other after the earlier incident with the radio and Alex losing her cool.
“I hope you die here, you fucking whore…”
She’d already made her way from the curb but snapped her head back to top off an appalled look with a, “What?”
His words frightened and angered her at the same time, stuttering her heart and spiking her veins with adrenaline. She didn’t know what she could do, but felt compelled to confront him. What would make him say something like that?
“I said I hope you find who you’re looking for.” He looked confused by her shocked reaction and almost wished he hadn’t given his best wishes. This girl obviously wasn’t in her right mind, but still, he’d been nothing but polite to her the whole drive over… Why would she be looking at him like that?
He shook his head in dismissal of her na
sty glare and drove off with haste. He’d had enough on his mind without having to deal with this crazy chick for another second. The cloud-cover that followed them had been working his nerves ever since they left the city. They’d passed them on the freeway but he could see in the distance they were continuing to gain ground. He’d stop to get some gas and coffee before heading back, and maybe pick up some info about the stormfront from one of the locals.
He glanced back into his rearview to give the young woman one last look as he drove away. She seemed so wound up and heavyhearted – he really hoped she had a better night ahead of her – but decided it better not to dwell. Strangers with sob stories were an unavoidable part of the job. He had a life back home to attend to that required more immediate concern. With the radio and cells being inoperable, his loved ones could be in trouble and need him home right away and he would’ve never known it until it was too late…
“Jesus, Mary and Mike!”
When his eyes again found the road, he slammed his foot on the brakes to avoid making street-pizza of someone’s pet…
A snarling, black wolf stood menacingly in the middle of the street, staring him down in his cab as if he’d somehow offended its very existence. After coming to a screeching halt, he found himself intensely gaping at this animal that stood and stared back. It had a violent grimace on its snout – a dominant show of teeth and gums – its yellow eyes piercing through the dark of the night almost like those of a cat’s, but more purposefully and sinister. It felt as if it had an insight into his soul and could read over the script of his life like a column in an open porn-mag sitting on a coffee table in his lonely apartment. It was as if it knew the thoughts of his “loved ones” were actually a facade, and that the only thing waiting for him at home was a cat he’d named Wifey and a collection of rodents whose scratches and shuffling behind walls were like his children playing in their room. He’d even slip little pieces of cheese behind the fridge and oven occasionally to make sure they knew he cared…
Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell Page 19