Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Connor stared at Liam and took several rings of the telephone to decide to get out of his chair.

  Aloysius said, “Is something wrong?”

  Connor shook his head and left. Again, everyone went silent.

  “Yes?” There was a long pause, and then Connor hung up the phone and walked slowly into the dining room.

  “It was Tekawitha Half Moon from church,” he said. “It’s—there’s something happening at the Fort Thompson church. The way she talked, it sounded like a massacre.”

  “A what?” Peggy said.

  Chairs slid back, scraping on the floor.

  Liam shouted, “Sit down!”

  Connor didn’t, and Aloysius didn’t, and Theodore didn’t. But Robert and Maeve and Honey did. Nickolas and Peggy hadn’t stood up in the first place.

  “Sit down!” Liam roared, as only a demon could.

  “No,” Connor said.

  Liam glared at the demon. “Turning traitor?”

  “It isn’t right.”

  Liam reached behind him and pulled out knife. It wasn’t a kind of knife that Aloysius had seen before. Theodore squinted at it. It was long and wavy, chased with gold.

  The demon leaned over and slashed Peggy across the neck. Blood spurted onto the table, and she held her napkin up to her throat, not trying to stop the bleeding so much as the spray of blood onto the food.

  Connor howled and charged Liam, his head down. He hit Liam in the gut. Liam raised the knife to Connor’s back, and Aloysius watched as Theodore calmly reached across Robert at the table with his knife and cut Liam’s wrist as the knife came down. Liam’s wrist spurted blood and went loose, and the knife only scratched Connor as he shoved Liam further into the wall plaster.

  Peggy slid down in her chair, under the table.

  Aloysius let her go; he’d butchered enough animals to know she wasn’t going to live. Honey ducked under the table and crawled toward Peggy.

  “Traitor!” Liam gargled.

  “Kill him,” Connor said. “Kill him!”

  From the living room, Maeve let up a keening, deep wail, and Nick knocked his chair over, backing away from the table. He fled up the stairs. Aloysius quietly closed and locked the door behind him.

  Theodore said, “You sure, Connor?”

  “My name’s not Connor.”

  “All right, then,” Theodore said. Then he cut the demon Liam’s throat, just as casually as Liam had cut Peggy’s. There was even more blood, if that was possible. Robert pushed back against Theodore, shoving him out of the way, then stood frozen.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” Honey yelled from under the table.

  “Help me lift this,” Theodore said, and Aloysius helped him drag the table away from Honey and Peggy. Maeve was still lifting her muzzle to the ceiling, lowing.

  Connor supported Liam until Aloysius and Theodore had moved Peggy further away, dragging her dress through the blood, then let his body fall. The plaster and wood had been busted up underneath Liam’s horns, and the insulation showed through.

  “Go get Sebastian and go to the church,” Connor said. “I don’t know what good it’s going to do, but you have to go. They’ll kill until there are enough bodies to replace for everyone who’s still stuck back there.”

  Maeve said, “I liked her.”

  Connor snapped, “And you lied to her, didn’t you? You didn’t warn her, did you?”

  “Stop it.” Maeve wiped the back of her hand across her face.

  Theodore said, “Robert?”

  Robert shook his head.

  “Come on, Honey,” Aloysius said. “We should go.”

  “It won’t be safe around here anyway,” Connor said. “Who knows who’ll show up to replace Peggy?”

  “Where’s my mother?” Aloysius asked.

  Connor said, “My mother was supposed to come over in her place. She refused. Dead now.”

  Aloysius wrapped his arm around Honey and dragged her out of the room. Her feet stumbled, and she twisted around, trying to get one last look at Peggy, who was either dead or in shock.

  Chapter 32

  “Honey, you can’t go with us. You have to go home.”

  “You don’t have time to take me home.” Honey was hanging on to the strap over the door; the truck swerved from side to side as it hit patches of loose gravel at seventy miles an hour. “Drop me off at Max’s.”

  Max’s was a bait-and-milk shop on the corner of Highways 50 and 34.

  “It’s too close.”

  “I can call from there and have someone pick me up.”

  “What if he has a heart attack and gets replaced by a demon? He’ll kill you.” But Aloysius knew he was babbling. She was right. Not that she could know what was going on.

  “I love you, Aloysius,” Honey said.

  “Sometimes I wonder why,” he muttered. “Such a damned fool.”

  He pulled into the parking lot at Max’s. She unwound her fingers from the strap over her head, wiggled them back and forth to get some feeling back in them, leaned over, and kissed him.

  She pressed her moist lips against his cracked, dry ones, and said, “Kill Dennis for me.”

  He nodded. The demon wouldn’t live out the night, unless he died first.

  Honey slid out her door and slammed it behind her. She backed toward the store, watching him through his windshield, then went inside. Several pickup trucks passed him, either from the gravel road or the highway.

  He drove away, thinking, well, that’s the last time I see her alive. At least he knew he was saying goodbye, though. He hadn’t known, with Liam or Peggy. Or Jerome.

  Once he got on asphalt, the drive went faster, even though the sun was in his eyes the whole way. He was at the Fort Thompson church almost faster than he could think, and before he noticed that the screams and gunshots weren’t coming from the church.

  He ran into the front doors of the church, which were hanging open. Déjà vu. The church wasn’t too badly torn up. He ran downstairs to the rooms they used for classes, where the Bible study group would meet.

  The tunneling machine was parked in front of a neat hole in the floor. The door of the machine was still open.

  The room was covered in blood. No longer held back by the need to keep from killing Celeste Marie by accident, the demons had scythed their way through the Bible study class, mostly old ladies of both white and Indian origin.

  Old Tekawitha had been killed next to the phone, in the kitchen.

  The demons were gone.

  Aloysius finally realized that he’d driven through a battlefield to get to the church, that it hadn’t registered at the time. He cursed at himself.

  He found himself walking toward the digging machine. He had his shotgun in his hand and a handgun in his belt (and a pocket knife, for all the good that it would do).

  He climbed in and shut the door behind him (using the same trick as he had to open it). After a minute or two, he had the engine started and was driving toward the church wall.

  He was going to hit a sewer line, he just knew it.

  He turned on the blades, and the machine bit into the wall. Chunks of wood paneling, insulation, and cement flew, one as easily as the other. It was like driving a hurricane. Then he was into the earth, and the blades whined for a second, then ground on.

  He wasn’t going to be too upset if he chewed the machine up so badly that it couldn’t be used again, no.

  How quickly could the demons replace the dead humans? Overnight? Less than that? Would they send reinforcements directly instead of waiting to replace the humans? Maybe he should turn back and block the tunnel, in case there was an army marching up behind him.

  How many had Connor said there would be?

  He couldn’t remember. Less than a thousand. And it had to do with politics. And they were leaving their old world behind. Which meant that that number (probably) included their women, their children, their old, the ones not trained to fight.

  Probably. He hoped.

&
nbsp; Now, where was he?

  After a few minutes of turning in circles, the blades grinding against he knew not what, he broke through to the surface in the middle of someone’s house. He was ashamed that he didn’t know whose house it was; he barely talked to anybody on the reservation, if he could help it. Liam would be on him so fast—

  The demons had already been here. The view screens, now free of the earth, showed him three small bodies that had died together, including two skinny children who couldn’t have been more than six. He tore through the wall and went out to the road with his teeth locked together.

  Outside, a demon waved its gold axe at him. He turned and drove toward it, turning off the digging blades. At the last moment, he accelerated, swerved, and flipped on the blades as smoothly as if he’d been practicing for years, and ripped the demon to shreds. The blades squealed as they chewed up the axes. Fortunately, the view screens cleaned themselves, as did the machine’s digging blades, for the most part.

  It was a trick that probably wouldn’t work too many more times, so he turned around in a circle, looking for more demons to kill before word spread.

  He was driving along a side street, through some trees, when he saw Theodore and Sebastian. Sebastian was bleeding from a cut on his head that had been tied with a dripping bandana; Theodore was dripping with blood and black hair and was fighting another of the demons.

  Sebastian was reading his Bible. Shouting, in fact.

  The demon slashed backhanded at Theodore with the axe, flipped the blade around, and took a shot at the top of his head. Theodore was staying low to the ground, his two knives darting in toward the demon’s groin, but Theodore’s arms weren’t long enough, and he had to jump out of the way as the axe came down toward his head.

  Theodore jabbed at the demon, then sidestepped, trying to get past the demon’s arms. The demon lashed in a half circle with the axe, and Theodore, off balance, fell backward to avoid the strike.

  The demon made an overhand chop at Theodore’s leg just as Sebastian screamed something and pointed at the demon.

  The demon shuddered and split, jaggedly, in half, like a piece of wood that had just been wedged. The axes fell out of its hands, and its body scattered like dust.

  Aloysius shuddered. The word of God had smote that bastard, and Aloysius wasn’t sure if he liked it.

  Sebastian gave Theodore a hand up, and the two of them faced the oncoming machine. Theodore sheathed his knives behind his back and picked up the axes, which had remained, as had a golden ear tag.

  Aloysius stopped the machine and opened the door. “It’s me,” he yelled. “Want a ride?”

  The two of them looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “The dam,” Theodore said.

  “A group of them were headed there,” Sebastian said. “Too many for us, about twenty. You might be able to do some good, though.”

  “Good luck,” Aloysius said. He closed the door. They waved at him and turned away. Sebastian had a little bit of a limp.

  Aloysius smiled at him. If he squinted, he could almost see a cassock on Sebastian, instead of worn-out blue jeans and flat-heeled boots.

  He turned onto the road toward where the dam was being constructed. They’d started it last year, and the crews would have just called it quits, being late in the day.

  When the crews had ripped out all the trees, they’d turned the valley into a mudslide. The machine dragged itself easily through the gravel and muck.

  There were a few boats on the water. People on the boats were standing up and screaming toward the shore as the demons hacked down the crew, who ran along the shore or tried to swim out to the boats. One of the demons threw an axe at the back of a man’s head as he splashed down into the river. The axe spun end over end and buried itself in the back of his skull. The man sank, and the demon waded out to recover its axe.

  Two of the demons standing on the shore pointed toward the digging machine. More of the demons looked toward him.

  A red light lit up on the control panel. Aloysius eyeballed it for a few seconds as he drove down the slope, then pressed the switch underneath it.

  A demon grunted at him in a foreign tongue, and Aloysius turned the switch off again. The red light blinked at him.

  A few of the demons started running toward him, so he did them the favor of speeding up and turning on the blades. He caught one of them on the arm, but unfortunately, they appeared to have figured out that a human had taken over the machine. With his luck, the operator was with them, shouting, “Get out of my baby!”

  Aloysius turned around and tried to take another pass through the demons, but they had scattered in a loose circle around him, arms spread wide with glinting axes at the end. What? Did they think they could chop through the machine?

  One of them took a run at the machine, toward the side with the door. Ah. Aloysius dug the machine forward and down as the demon grabbed onto the side, then rolled the machine on top of him.

  The door clicked, but the machine crunched as it sank into the earth. Aloysius pulled back onto the surface, daring the others to try something similar, but they didn’t.

  Aloysius turned in a circle just in time to see a group of demons running down the road at him. One of them held a glowing sphere.

  Time to get out of the machine, he decided.

  As the demon lobbed the sphere at him, he drove straight into the river and down, opening the door so the water flooded in. He took a deep breath and followed the ebb back out of the machine.

  The water imploded around him. He kicked off the side of the machine and swam for all he was worth.

  A lot of good he had done so far.

  What with one thing and another, he wasn’t sure that he had survived until his head broke water. He thoughtfully took a breath of air then looked behind him. Oddly, there was a man in a boat screaming and waving at him. Aloysius looked in front of him and saw that he was swimming toward the demons, who were doing him the favor of swimming toward him too, to meet him halfway.

  Aloysius turned tail. Hell, he was too tired for this.

  He heard a crack, and one of the demons jerked. It kept swimming, though. Another crack, and it went down.

  Aloysius quit messing around and swam hard for the boat; the current, while not too bad, kept throwing him off. The man, a wiry-looking fisherman, lifted him out of the water one-handed while squatting in the boat to help it keep from tipping over.

  “Thanks,” Aloysius gasped.

  The fisherman nodded, still looking toward the shore.

  Another man was lying in the bottom of the boat. He was dead, and Aloysius was kneeling in a puddle of blood and water reeking of dead fish.

  Aloysius scanned the banks for the gunman. There was another crack, and a demon on shore fell.

  “Have to pull up,” the fisherman said. Two of the demons were getting close enough to the boat to threaten them.

  Aloysius pulled out his revolver and looked at the shells. Hell, whatever. He cocked and fired at a demon. Unfortunately, all he had to aim at was the head. He hit—the demon shook itself but kept swimming. It skull was surely as hard as a rock.

  Behind him, the fisherman cast, hitting the demon in the eye. The demon howled, clasped its eye, and sank for a second, then thrashed to the surface. There was a snick! and the line fell loose. Aloysius turned to look. The fisherman was tying on another hook.

  Aloysius aimed at the second demon, hoping for a lucky shot. He fired just as the boat jerked and missed completely.

  He fired again. He thought he’d missed again until the demon held a hand to its neck. After a second or two, the demon had sunk and disappeared.

  The first demon turned around and started swimming for shore.

  When Aloysius looked back toward shore, he could see that several of the demons had fallen. He realized he’d been hearing rifle shots all the while. He looked again for the shooter. The fisherman pointed toward a grove of trees at the top of the valley, and Aloysius grinned
. It was hard in the evening sunlight, but he could just make out a muzzle flash. Another demon fell.

  Then the demons left at the bottom of the hill all stood up straight. As one, they ran into the water and dove.

  Aloysius dove over the far side of the boat, then surfaced. He told the fisherman, who was staring stupidly down at him, to get down now, and dove deep.

  Chapter 33

  Aloysius stayed underwater as long as he could. He flapped his arms, trying to stay down longer. A blue light flashed overhead, and the fisherman’s silhouette appeared above the surface of the water, then sank in.

  Aloysius swam to the anchor line and grabbed it, then got hold of the fisherman. He was slippery and leaking air. There was no help for it, so Aloysius swam to the surface, hauling the man with him.

  He broke the surface, grabbed a lungful of air, then shoved the fisherman’s head out of the water, pushing himself underneath the waves. He wished he knew how lifesavers did it, that is, swam without killing themselves or the ones they were rescuing. He held the man up for as long as he could, then surfaced and sucked down more air.

  He repeated this cycle twice more before he realized the man wasn’t struggling. Weren’t drowning people supposed to struggle?

  He popped his head and chest out of the water, grabbed the side of the boat, then pulled the man halfway out of the water by the back of his shirt, which was loose.

  The man was dead. Something had ripped the skin off his face and chest. The front of his shirt was gone, and his ribs were visible.

  Aloysius let him go slowly, trying to control his need to vomit. The fisherman slid into the sunset water. A last bubble and he was gone.

  He peeked around the boat.

  The demons had surfaced and gone back to shore. At the top of the hill, the leaves had turned black on all the trees. The plants in the lee of the hill leading out of the river valley had fared better, a dull brown. The wind picked up, and the leaves at the top of the hill scattered in haloes of dust.

  Aloysius wondered if the demons had killed off as many humans as they’d needed.

  A demon appeared at the edge of the valley and shouted something. The other demons, who had been turning over a group of bodies near a dump truck, left off what they were doing and trotted up the hill toward it.