Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Blackthorn nodded and got into his station wagon. He started it, then rolled down the window. “Good luck.”

  “We’re going to need it.” Aloysius went into the church. It was almost the time when mass should have been ending.

  The pews were full of men with guns; the place smelled like gun oil and sweat. Next to the altar, Liam was tapping his cane on the red carpet, impatient for the attack. He beckoned when he saw Aloysius, who sighed and walked up the aisle like a bride about to be given away, dragging his feet the whole way.

  The light was bright but barely touched the windows; it was almost noon. The other two attacks had been sometime around the end of the scheduled service; the Duncan service would have started at eleven, gone until eleven thirty, and broke up about ten to noon.

  Liam pulled his pocket watch out of his pocket. “It’s time.”

  Aloysius nodded. “I’d feel better about this if you weren’t here, pa.”

  “You’d feel better about a lot of things if I weren’t around, I’d wager,” Liam said. “You know what worries me?”

  “What?”

  “We could kill every goddamned one of these animals, and it wouldn’t be the end of it. They’ll just keep coming. After this, we’re going to have to figure out how to track down these sons of bitches to wherever they’re coming from, and kill them all there.”

  Aloysius blew out his cheeks. “I suppose.”

  “What do you want to do? Give in? Give them our churches? Make peace with them? Hell. Let’s just give them a big chunk of land and call it their reservation. What the hell do demons want with churches anyway?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Aloysius admitted.

  “It’s time,” Liam said. “Where are they?”

  “Shh,” Aloysius said. “Did you hear that? Sounds like a washing machine.”

  Liam tilted his head to the side. “I’ll have to take your word for it. My ears aren’t what they used to be.”

  Aloysius put up his eyebrows but kept listening. “They’re digging up from under us. Yep, there it goes.”

  The floor shuddered, and everyone grabbed onto the back of their pews. The floorboards buckled and split under a silver-colored drill.

  The men in the pews were standing up, ducking around each other, trying to get a better view.

  “Get back toward the walls,” Aloysius shouted. Nobody listened to him. Theodore stepped inside the front door—Aloysius recognized him from his silhouette alone—and shouted, “They’re coming down the hill!”

  In the split second that Aloysius had looked up from the drill, it had burst up into the room, knocking back pews and scattering the men, who finally pulled back along the walls, guns ready. As the back of the machine thrust into the room, the engine roar turned deafening. The drill skidded forward along the aisle, tearing up the floor behind it.

  As soon as the machine was clear, the demons burst up through the floor, and the men started firing. Killing the demons was going to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

  But this time the demons hadn’t come unarmed.

  Chapter 15

  The first two demons slogged through the black dirt beneath them, stepped up to the edges of the splintered floor, and started shooting. They had handguns as long as a grown man’s arm, with eight or so barrels revolving around a larger, central barrel, like a Gatling gun. A hopper at the top of the gun fed bullets into the main chamber.

  The men were already firing at them with their shotguns, and the first two went down without anybody noticing them fire, except Aloysius. Then the next two demons climbed out of the hole, and the next two. The first two had handguns; the next two had something that spread silver light over the backs of the two in front of them.

  Liam drew a revolver and fired into the back of one of the demons; it fell. Its partner turned and threw the glowing silver orb it was holding toward Liam and Aloysius and the front of the church.

  Aloysius grabbed Liam and pulled him away from the altar, directly toward the demons, as it turned out. Liam screeched and struck Aloysius with his cane, but got dragged along regardless. Aloysius was surprised with how heavy his father was.

  Aloysius shoved his father down behind a busted pew and got down beside him.

  There was a rushing sound, and Aloysius couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even peel his lungs off his backbone. The windows burst in, and sheets of glass sprayed around the room. Aloysius pulled his father’s head further down behind the pew, then peeked out.

  All the paint and most of the wood had been peeled off the walls near the altar. The altar itself was buckled in on itself, cracking as its leg stuck out sideways, sliding toward each other.

  Something hit him in the back of the head, and he fell back under the pew. Bullets knocked plaster over his back.

  “Keep your goddamned head down,” Liam snarled. “Now, get out of the way.”

  Aloysius didn’t think it could get any louder, but it did. The sound of dozens of truck horns echoed through the room, and then the demons were everywhere, impossible to miss.

  Aloysius shot one who was getting too close, then dropped back under a pew as one of the men aimed at his head. Liam had gone.

  A quick glance showed Liam’s back disappearing among a throng of black demons, going down like a man drowning. More demons were spilling out of the hole in the floor, most with handguns, a few with gold-chased, single-bladed axes that looked tiny in their hairy hands. The ones with the axes had gold ear-tags.

  Men were dying, getting cut down. They were shooting back, shooting each other, shooting the walls. Aloysius looked at a man slumped against the wall with the ends of his ribs sticking out of a gash in his chest and couldn’t remember his name.

  The hell with it. There was something Aloysius wanted to do, and by God he was going to do it.

  Aloysius backed up until his back was against the wall, under the station of Veronica wiping the face of Jesus. Then he edged along the wall, shooting when he had to, reloading, trying to keep out of the way. Thank God he hadn’t dropped the bag of shells.

  The drilling machine had gone all the way through the church and come out the other side, tearing a hole through the side of the modest church doorway. Aloysius followed the side of the church. Just in front of him, one of the ax-wielding demons took both axes and neatly popped the bones apart of the neck of a man standing in front of him. The head flew.

  Aloysius kicked something underfoot. He looked down, fully expecting to see the head underfoot, but it was the other silver orb. It was bigger than a softball, smaller than a basketball, and slippery as hell. Aloysius stuffed it in the bag he was using for ammunition (an old sewing bag of his mother’s, with a long strap that Honey had attached for him) and hoped like hell it didn’t crack while it was balanced on his hip.

  He made it to the first station, but no further. Dozens of demons were at the door, shoving each other to get closer to the bloodshed, and it looked like more of them were outside.

  The good news was, the men still alive were getting shoved back toward the front of the church. Aloysius dug out the sphere, balanced it in his hand, and flung it at the top of the doorway.

  He ran. A yell behind him told him that the demons had noticed him. The air sucked out of his lungs. He jumped forward and grabbed onto a pew; his legs dangled straight into the air and the pew slid a few inches as the sphere sucked him backwards. Then the air came back, and he landed on the ground in a pile of broken blue glass.

  Aloysius got up and barked a laugh. Then he broke into a run, tripping and climbing over the bodies of the demons to get out of the church.

  Outside, a man was lying on the ground, blood streaming from his face and one shoulder. It looked like all the skin had been pulled off on one side; he’d probably been too close to the door. The man hauled himself up using a big knife stabbed into a wooden rail.

  Aloysius ran past him toward the drill machine, ducking around the men who had charged down the hill in their pickup trucks.
The men outside were having a better time of it; they weren’t trapped inside the church, and apparently the demons hadn’t counted on being attacked from behind.

  The drill machine had gone askew and turned straight into the middle of the trucks parked beside the church. The machine had rolled a little on its side, and the treads underneath (and, Aloysius admired, on the sides) couldn’t get enough purchase to move the machine or tip it straight.

  The treads stopped spinning, and a hatch on the side of the machine opened, flipping down into stairs that didn’t quite touch the ground.

  Aloysius ducked behind a pickup truck and started sneaking toward the machine. A demon’s head popped out of the hatch, then disappeared.

  The truck in front of him had the window nearest him broken out already; he balanced the shotgun on the window ledge and waited.

  One of the massive handguns waved back and forth for a couple of seconds, and then the head reappeared.

  Aloysius fired. The side of the demon’s face turned black and dropped out of sight. He kept an eye out for another demon to come out of the drill machine but didn’t really expect one. Aloysius jumped up on the hatch and aimed down. The demon was howling in pain. It flung its chest backward into a bank of switches, and the machine jerked under him, righting itself.

  Aloysius fired again. The shot unbalanced him, and he fell out of the machine, landing on his tuckus in the dead grass.

  Then the treads on the machine started dragging it further away from the church. Aloysius cursed and chased after it. The door of the machine was starting to close. Aloysius threw down his shotgun and grabbed the edge of it.

  The door dipped under his weight, then pulled in closer. Aloysius got inside before the door could take his damned foot off, and it closed behind him.

  The demon inside was lying on the floor around an enormous seat with his head and neck curled backward in a spiral. A man would be dead. Aloysius kicked the demon, which didn’t move. The inside of the machine was splattered with black blood. Aloysius squinted at what looked like a couple of windows, then used his hand to scrape away the blood. He noticed that he was leaving red streaks behind, but he didn’t have time to find out if it was his or someone else’s.

  The machine had changed directions again and was heading back toward the church.

  Aloysius looked around but couldn’t tell what the hell he was supposed to turn, twist, or push in order to make the damned things stop, so he screwed around with everything he could think of. He supposed that since the drill on the front wasn’t turning, the machine wouldn’t be able to push through the side of the church. Actually, the drill hadn’t been turning when he’d got in, but might be now that he’d flipped all the switches. At any rate, he didn’t really want to run into the church.

  He jumped into the seat (his feet didn’t touch the floor) and tried to imagine how he’d steer the thing if he were one of the demons. The seat slipped under him, twisting to the left, and the machine turned with it.

  Aloysius slid out of the seat, ducked behind it, and turned the seat until he was pointed away from the church. Then he tilted it forward, and the thing sped up and dipped forward into the ground. He giggled, and tugged back on the seat slowly until the machine stopped.

  He was pretty proud of himself until he realized he couldn’t find the switch to open the damned door.

  Chapter 16

  The light seemed to dim, and he broke into a sweat. He pounded on the door with his fist until he realized he was leaving more and more blood behind.

  Then he gave up and started exploring.

  The air smelled like oil and musk, like a skunk that had come and gone two days ago. It smelled of blood, both his own and the demon’s (which was like lemon-scented vomit). Much like a man, the demon had let go of its bowels after it had died, but that stink hadn’t had time to overwhelm the others.

  What he had thought were windows couldn’t have been; the drill was in the way. He decided they were some kind of television screens, only better. The dashboard in front of the seat was covered with buttons and switches, most of them about twice as big as they would have been for a man’s fingers. Aloysius pushed a button and static hissed through the machine. After a few seconds, a demon bellowed. There was a pause and another bellow. Aloysius pushed the button again, turning it off.

  He pushed another button, and the drill started rotating. He turned a nearby dial, and it spun faster. He was tempted to lean the seat forward and try to dig into the ground, but given his luck in life, he’d run out of gas somewhere underground and never be able to get out, so he turned off the drill again.

  Outside, it looked like the fighting had stopped. Aloysius saw a few men walking around, so that must have meant they’d won. He continued to push buttons systematically, admiring their shiny gold color against the dark brown metal of the dash, where they weren’t covered with blood. When he’d pushed all the buttons on the dash, he started searching on the wall between the dash and the door.

  He eventually found the way to the open the door by accidentally standing on a small dip in the floor near the corner of the doorway in order to grab a bar overhead. The door opened slowly, lying flat on the ground, and Aloysius climbed out.

  A half-dozen men were standing outside the door with shotguns aimed at him. He put up his hands and froze.

  “It’s all right,” one of them said. “It’s Aloysius.”

  “What were you doing, hiding in there?”

  “Trying to keep the demon inside from getting away,” Aloysius lied.

  “You’re wanted in the church,” the man said.

  Aloysius put his hands down and jumped away from the machine. He found that one leg hurt more than the other, and he couldn’t run, so he limped toward the church.

  Boards dangled loose where the machine had torn out the front of the church. Demon corpses lay everywhere. The ones that had been shoved aside to make a path into the church were missing heads, parts of their torsos. Aloysius had to take hold of another man’s shoulder to keep from slipping in the black blood, going through that grisly parting of the Red Sea, as it were.

  Sebastian was kneeling on the floor and praying. Blood was rolling into his face from a cut that went almost from one side of his brow to the other. Theodore was standing next to him, his face and shoulder wrapped with bandages, and Aloysius realized with a start that he’d been the man caught in the blast from the sphere earlier. Of the three of them, Aloysius seemed to have come through the battle with the fewest injuries. Something was wrong with his leg, and his hands were crusted with blood, front and back, but he wasn’t leaving a splattered trail behind him or anything.

  On the floor between them were two bodies: Liam and Father Dennis. Aloysius hadn’t seen Father Dennis at the church that morning, so he was surprised to see him lying there dead. Liam, not so much. His father was a twisted mess of bones and blood, strips of skin dangling loose or tangled with his clothing. Father Dennis had been shot with something that looked like it had exploded within him, blowing a hole through his thigh. His face was surprisingly clean.

  Aloysius looked around the church. There were more demon bodies than human, but not by much. Now that the fight was over, he recognized every one of them, by face, by shape, or by clothing if neither of the former were sufficiently whole.

  From the front of the church, a woman shrieked. It was the kind of scream that a body had to work itself up to, a whole lungful of indrawn air followed by a full-bodied yell of denial.

  Aloysius blinked a couple of times and decided it was Peggy. He limped back toward the door as she screamed again, then put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  She inhaled deeply, filling every corner of herself, and screamed again. Then she let him lead her outside. After a few steps, she was supporting him more than the reverse, and he was grateful for it.

  The local vet was bandaging people from the back of his pickup truck. Aloysius felt fine enough, but
Peggy led him to the truck anyway.

  The vet took one look at him and said, “Either you take the pants off, or I cut them off you.”

  Aloysius tried to drop his pants, but they were stuck to his legs and had to be cut open regardless. He had a gash down his right leg; the vet poured alcohol down the gash and said, “You’ll need stitches. Get Peggy to drive you to the hospital by sunset.” Then he covered the gash with gauze and taped over it; the tape was going to be a bitch to remove from his hairy legs.

  The vet sent him away, the flaps of his pants dangling from his belt.

  Peggy said, “Jerome’s missing.”

  “Missing.”

  “I know you’re stunned, Aloysius, but listen to me. He’s gone. Nobody’s seen him all morning. Did he come up here with you?”

  “No,” Aloysius said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Aloysius said, then: “Wait.” The next thing he knew, he was halfway up the hill, every hair on his body standing on end. If anybody had told them he could have run so fast with two legs, one of them sliced open, he wouldn’t have believed them; he might as well have floated.

  A few seconds later, he was at the pickup truck. The driver’s side door was open, the bench seat was leaning forward, and the bb gun was gone.

  He was yelling at the top of his lungs and his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t hear himself.

  Chapter 17

  Jerome couldn’t breathe, and then he could, and then he couldn’t. The truck bounced on ruts in the road, Aloysius shifted his weight, and every time the truck slowed he would crush himself with his own weight. The truck stopped, and Aloysius got out, and Jerome coughed against the back of the seat, sucking in more dust than he pushed out. He waited.

  A few minutes later, Aloysius got back into the truck, crushing the breath out of him again. Aloysius restarted the truck, muttering something under his breath. He drove downwards, then stopped the truck and got out again.

  The truck jerked as they pulled back the tarp, opened the gate, and pulled out the buckets of water. Jerome heard them talking, not the words but the fact of it. They would have found the bb gun. If they didn’t find him in the next few minutes, they wouldn’t find him at all.