DEMON DAYS: Love, sex, death, and dark humor. This book has it all. Plus robots.

by Carl S. Plumer

  “Now look, it’s stopped, somehow. In midair.”

  “A drone, I guess.”

  “What’s a drone?” Dani asked.

  “You’re a drone, you dope.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s those robotic little planes they fly in battle. The pilot is on the ground, somewhere safe. It shoots pictures and bullets,” Helena said.

  “Is it taking pictures of us?”

  “Probably.”

  The zeppelin, which of course was Patient Zach, floated silently past them toward Brooklyn.

  “Wonder if it’s looking for those demon things,” Dani said.

  “Probably.”

  Helena took out some mints. “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Dani popped the mint in her mouth. She glided some shiny lip balm over her mouth as they watched the drone soar by in slow motion. “Doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry,” she said. “I mean, if it’s going after those demons.” She smacked her lips and put the lip balm in her pocket where her keys were.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Helena said. “But I don’t think it’s trying to engage. Just gathering intel.”

  “Yeah. Wow. This mint is really strong.”

  In the sky, focused on the screaming, Patient Z picked up Helena and Dani’s faint chatter, but filtered it out. Yet, in some part of the recesses of his memory, he felt a little tingle.

  He knew those voices, but he couldn’t remember why, or who they might be. But their tones comforted him. He would have saved them if he knew they were about to be in trouble. Even though he wasn’t sure what any of these feelings he was experiencing meant.

  “Let’s go uptown. I heard the Air Force is building landing strips in Central Park. They’ve got armies of workers there. Gonna turn it into a military zone in, I think, two weeks,” Helena said.

  “The Army’s already here, and the Navy’s in the harbor,” Dani giggled. “Let’s go see.”

  “I’m feeling safer, although this town is looking like a ghost town.”

  “Yeah,” Dani agreed.

  The girls caught a cab and, in an instant, it seemed, were brought to Midtown. The construction was frenetic. Backhoes, bulldozers, front-end loaders, cranes, dump trucks, excavators, asphalt pavers.

  There must have been hundreds of them. Tarmac was already covering most of the park, from Strawberry Fields through the Sheep Meadow and over to the Mall. Bethesda Terrace, Bethesda Fountain, and Belvedere Castle had already been demolished.

  “Manhattan is a fortress!” Dani said, all excited. She rubbed her shiny chastity shield under her mini.

  “Should not do that in public,” Helena suggested. “Not even think it. God.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” Dani said. “But I never touch myself, just go nuts with desire. I don’t know why. Seeing all this construction, and sweaty, muscular guys with tool belts and hardhats. Makes me just swoon, and I want to get past my shield and touch it!”

  “Okay, wow. Um, yo, TMFI.48 Yet, other than the shield and the touching and the overall weirdness of what you just said, we’re kind of on the same page.” Helena smiled, and Dani smiled back.

  Dani slipped her hand in Helena’s and they watched the heartwarming scene of Central Park being destroyed and replaced by landing strips. Central Park Air Force Base, CP-AFB, had been initiated.

  PLAN INTO ACTION

  The carnage he had witnessed down in the “hole” had made Timmy Jimmy weaker than his injuries ever did. He lay in shock in the corner of the vast cement underground room. He had survived again, but others were not so lucky. Village Smithy was taken as she ran to protect Patty Patty. Patty Patty asleep now, face down on the floor next to Timmy Jimmy. She was knocked out in the frenzy, awoke in tears, and cried herself back to sleep.

  The fiends hung upside down from the pipes in the ceiling, twenty feet above their captives; their wretched, bloody batwings wrapped around them. Timmy Jimmy found himself sobbing. He was living, well just barely living, in an Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. This is Hell, he thought. How could it be any worse? Oh yeah, he remembered. Hell fire. Well, now or never. The beasts weren’t asleep, but they were damned distracted.

  Timmy Jimmy called across the room in a loud whisper, “Frosty.” Frostbite sat up. He was covered in demon filth. “What do we have that can break through one of these pipes?” Timmy asked.

  Frostbite stared straight ahead for a few long seconds, then struggled to a standing position. “Well, it turns out. . .” he said, as he walked over to get closer to Timmy Jimmy. “Some of these pipes are plastic.” He took a deep breath and hunched over, hands on his knees. Frostbite was both a physical and emotional wreck, but he continued on just the same. “Some of the smaller offshoots,” he said. “We don’t stand a chance trying to break the cast iron, but plastic, yeah, maybe.”

  Timmy Jimmy slowly got to his feet, too, his legs shaking. He stood, half bent over. With all his strength, he forced himself to stand upright, as close to his full height as he could manage.

  “Well, then.” He coughed for a second, but the coughs were harsh, shaking his ribs. “Let’s get started.”

  “What? Now? Are you crazy? The plan is to do this while they’re gone. We can’t do this now. They’re . . . they’re right there!”

  “Why not?” Timmy Jimmy said. “Every time they go away, we just recuperate. Lick our wounds and mourn our dead. Then the demons return. Well, they’re satiated now, more or less. I think they have no focus at the moment, except for jerking off for the hundredth time. I think we should get started.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, just give me whatever you were planning on using to break through that plastic piping, and I’ll go in there and get this plan rolling already.”

  Frostbite reached into his back pocket and pulled out a metal stick. “Village Smithy found this in her scavenging.”

  “That’s it? That’s what I’m supposed to use?”

  “I’ve been sharpening the end these last few days. It’s razor sharp now.”

  Deep in thought, Timmy Jimmy slapped the back of his neck and rubbed it back and forth.

  “Let me see it,” he said at last.

  Frostbite handed it over. Timmy Jimmy examined it, touching the tip with his index finger.

  “Does seem pretty sharp . . .”

  “You only need to make a tiny hole, enough for the gas to escape.”

  “Okay, but that could take hours.”

  “I’ll go with you; we can work in shifts.”

  “Sounds good. I guess.”

  The two men limped over toward the hive where the demon monsters from outer space were pleasuring themselves to sleep. As bad luck would have it, though, the only plastic pipe in this room within their reach ran right under the sleeping beasts.

  “Jezuz Z. Christ49,” Frostbite said.

  “Who cares anymore?” Timmy Jimmy said. “We die now or we die later. At least this way, we die trying.” He jabbed at the slippery surface of the plastic pipe. “Secret is to be quick and quiet. I can tell right now we aren’t going to have much luck with either of those goals.”

  “Crap.”

  “However, I do think that once we can get this hole started,” Timmy Jimmy whispered, “we’ll have a chance.”

  “Snowball’s chance in Hell, maybe,” Frostbite said.

  “Yeah, well, some think Hell is a frozen wasteland, not a fiery one. So, I figure that gives that little snowball a 50/50 chance.”

  The odds worsened in a blink of an eye. “Rocks” Manzer’s eye, to be exact, as it opened and looked down at the pair hacking away at a pipe just a few feet below it.

  “Do – not – move,” Frostbite said. He spotted the eyeball that spotted him.

  Timmy Jimmy flicked his hair out of his eyes and froze.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “We are being watched.”

  Neither man moved. Sweat dripped down the front and back of Frostbite’s bald head. Timmy
Jimmy’s hair on his forehead soaked up his sweat and got soggy. Frostbite raised his trembling head inch by inch until he was looking into the bulging malevolent eye of the beast. The bulging, malevolent, unseeing eye.

  “My God,” Frostbite said. He sighed deeply. “He’s asleep. With his eyes open.”

  Timmy Jimmy, who was waiting to, exhaled. “Back to work?” he said, his hands shaking. He realized he’d peed himself a bit. Not too much, though. He returned to his project, and was relieved in a different way when the sharp stick started to make a dent in the thick-walled plastic. “We’re in,” he said.

  Now that the tip of the metal spear had eaten into the plastic, it stopped sliding around. Timmy Jimmy concentrated on digging it further in. He twisted it left, right, back and forth as if he were trying to start a fire with a flint. After about ten minutes of this, he’d managed to create a divot in the pipe of about a sixteenth of an inch.

  “My turn,” Frostbite said.

  Timmy Jimmy handed the metal stick over and Frostbite got to work, with more energy and more strength. Maybe because he was not hurt in the way Timmy Jimmy was, or maybe because he was hardened to the horror a bit more than Timmy Jimmy. Or maybe just because he had been down here longer, and seen more than Timmy Jimmy.

  Frostbite twisted the tool in the hole, and Timmy Jimmy watched it grow by almost imperceptible amounts. Still, he ground on. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty. Then Timmy Jimmy took over again. For two hours, they went at it. They were, by their best estimation, about halfway through the outside of the pipe. But the spear seemed to have lost quite a bit of its sharpness and was making less progress.

  Above them, the satanic beasts stirred.

  “Time to go, buddy,” Frostbite said. “Live to fight another day, as they say.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “We need to sharpen this thing, anyway. We can’t go too much further. We might break through before we knew it and release the gas. We’d all be dead in minutes if that happened.”

  “All right, all right. I don’t really want to quit, but you’re right. We need to shut off the flow to this pipe before we go any further.”

  “Right. Come on; let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The two men left the hive almost on their tiptoes, moving slowly to avoid detection.

  But they left too late, maybe moved too slowly.

  The one called Deflagro “Def C.” Cinefactus lifted Frostbite into the air so suddenly, it was as if Frostbite had never been standing beside Timmy Jimmy at all. Timmy Jimmy sensed another of the devils had left the big pipe, and he felt the wind of its moldy wings puffing up against Timmy Jimmy’s back. Timmy Jimmy knew he’d be next, probably before he took another step. He looked over his shoulder and gasped. Frostbite’s head was gone, a spout of blood pumping out into the air as “Def C.” held him up. The monster was chewing what Timmy Jimmy could only assume was Frostbite’s head.

  The leader of the Demons, the one they called Mal, swooped by so close Timmy Jimmy caught the beast’s scratchy, excited breathing. Horrified, Timmy Jimmy fell to the floor, and the monster roared over him into the adjacent room. The demon circled back, returning for a second shot. It landed on its feet, skid-walking. Then it stomp-walked step-by-step to where Timmy Jimmy was still lying on the cement floor, praying.

  Timmy Jimmy covered his head, too frozen with fear to do anything else. This, he knew, was the end. At least, as it was for Frostbite, the horrible nightmare would soon be over forever.

  Unfortunately for Timmy Jimmy’s exit plan, Patty Patty took that exact moment to emulate her hero.

  “Hey, fatso,” she yelled.

  Timmy Jimmy raised his head, snot running out his nose, his eyes blurry with tears. But even so, he could make her out standing there in her filthy blue jumper, her hands on her little hips.

  The beast had stopped in mid-stride. It turned to face her. It was almost as if it were thinking, Do I want the chicken or the steak? In other words: Which one do I capture, torture, and eat first? The reluctant hero, or the diminutive heroine?

  BLISS AND ITS OPPOSITE

  Patient “Z,” aka Zachary Zemeritus, floated in a most blissful mood back up high into the sky, forgetting all about the screams, the terror he had detected, the unease he had experienced. On this beautiful day, he hadn’t a care in the world.

  First, he had no idea who the hell he was. Second, he hadn’t a clue as to what was going on. Sure, he drifted about magically in a metal suit, not making any sound. To be more accurate, it was less of a suit than a kind of ecto/endoskeleton incorporated into his body. Sort of a Six Million Dollar Man50, only with a lot more tech and at a few trillion dollars higher price tag.

  He passed quietly above the Empire State Building, floating on his back, his right leg resting at the ankle on his left knee, his hands behind his head, fingers intertwined. The sun blazed, and a handful of clouds dotted the sky. He watched planes much higher up zooming by. With his specialized telemetry, he focused in on them. Jetfighters. He focused even tighter. F-22 Raptor type, US Air Force. Flying information.

  I wonder where they’re headed?

  He decided he didn’t care, to be honest, and continued floating over the once populous city of New York.

  He drifted along, oblivious to the terror infecting his hometown, ignorant of the beasts who had arrived on this planet for the purpose of destroying the Earth, obliterating one Zachary Zemeritus first. Little did they know, they had almost succeeded their first, original night on Earth.

  Now, Zachary, without much of his memory left, with no idea what was happening, could drift right out of the atmosphere and into space, leaving his city, his country, his planet—and all its troubles—far, far behind. For Zachary Zemeritus, it wouldn’t matter one bit whether he drifted away or fell to Earth. He was no longer “one of them.” He was of Heaven now as much as he was of Earth. The reality was, thanks to modern science wrenching him from the jaws of Death, he belonged in neither place.

  If Patient Z could remember how to whistle, he would, such was his contentment. His scientifically-created body, which had given him the ability to fly and the strength of a hundred men, and so much more, was as good as useless. Because Zachary had no idea that he had such powers, and even if he did, he had not a clue as to what to use them for—or who to use them against.

  So, instead of whistling, he hummed a little tune that appeared out of nowhere right into his metal-infested brain.

  “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

  Down on the streets of New York, however, things weren’t quite as peachy. The brutes had emerged for another journey to track down and destroy Zachary Zemeritus. But this time, they had an ace in their pocket: Martin Beemer.

  Demon Atrōx Manzer had visited Martin Beemer earlier that day, and Beemer had divulged, with virtually no prodding, everything he knew about his “friend,” Zach.

  “So, yeah, one of you guys nearly killed him a couple of weeks ago. He was as good as dead. Since then, they’ve done all these experiments on him. But I can give you the exact location so you can finish the job.”

  Atrōx Manzer encouraged him by screaming:

  “SPEAK, TREMULOUS WORM.”

  “The Department of Neurological Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center and New York-slash-Presbyterian Hospital”

  “YOU HAVE DONE WELL. YOU SHALL NOT DIE TODAY. MAYHAP TOMORROW, BUT NOT TODAY.”

  The demon flew back to tell the others, who decided to celebrate by torturing some of the humans they had in captivity. But the orgy had gone on too long, had been too much fun. The demons got lazy, listless, somniferous, and had fallen asleep.

  That was when the treacherous Earthlings had dared to sneak into their place of rest. They were dealt with swiftly. They destroyed one, the leader as far as they could ascertain. Two others still awaited their punishment, back at the hive: a skinny man with hair in front of his eyes and a tiny, insignificant girl. But that pleasure had to be postponed. It was no
w the time, at last, to capture and decapitate this Zachary Zemeritus, in accordance with the prophecies.

  Flying just below the height of some of the taller buildings, the behemoths made their way to the location Martin Beemer had told them. Once again, they flew so close to Zachary that if they were not so intent on their mission to destroy him and had simply looked up at one point rather than straight ahead, they would have seen him floating a mile above them, humming in the sunshine.

  But they did not notice him and sped on instead to the secret location. Upon arriving, they tore the window from the wall, as the opening was too small for them to fit through.

  “WHERE IS HE? WHAT BE THIS PLACE?”

  Malum “Mal” Regnator-Infernus examined the place, fire streaming out the corners of one of his mouths, the one on his middle head in his head stack, his horns scraping across the low ceiling. The other demons peered around confused, too, inspecting the equipment, searching for any sign for their quarry, or his scent to put them on the trail.

  Mal spit at Atrōx Manzer:

  “YOUR SNITCH HAS TOLD YOU LIES!”

  “NONSENSE. HE HAS NOT THE BALLS.”

  “HA, WE SHALL SEE. METHINKS THIS IS ALL A LIE. HE IS PROBABLY IN HIDING NOW.”

  “IF THAT BE TRUE, HE JUST COST MORE EARTHLINGS THEIR LIVES, FOR HIS BETRAYAL AND COWARDICE.”

  A shadow passed by the door and all the monsters turned at the same time, their noses coal-fired locomotives, filling the air with smoke and cinder. Mal bellowed: “WHO GOETH THERE?”

  Someone said, “Holy Mother of God!”

  Mal crashed through the wall, lifting Dr. Grayzan by the throat, crushing his windpipe. The beast whipped around to send the limp body arcing out the opening where the windows used to be and out into the city. Mal flew into a rage:

  “NO ONE, AND I MEAN NO ONE, SPEAKETH THAT WORD, ‘GOD,’ IN MY PRESENCE!”

  The demons explored the surrounding rooms, but the place was empty save for the rows and rows of cabinets and scientific and medical equipment, which the beasts knocked over and smashed to pieces without another thought. They blew fire on the gear, the walls, everywhere, sending the entire floor up in flames.