Wrath James White and Maurice Broaddus

by Orgy of Souls

  Samuel sucked in shallow gasps of air, broad patches of sweat soaking through his shirt. His color was all wrong, his ashen skin cold and clammy to the touch.

  “Don’t die on me, Samuel. You can make it!”

  “Samson, what is that thing? You have to know what it is. Try to think. How did you summon it?”

  Growing up, Samson always had a tell for when he’d been caught, his signature turn away, that betrayed his inability to hold a poker face. So when Samson turned his face away from his brother, Samuel already suspected what he was about to say.

  “I knew.”

  “What? You knew what?” Samuel pressed.

  “I knew it wasn’t an angel. I knew exactly what it was.”

  “How could you do this? Why? What is it? How do we stop it?”

  “I tried to call God, I did, but he wasn’t listening. I prayed to every angel, every saint. I got nothing! What was I supposed to do? Let you die? I had to try everything, so…”

  “So what? What did you do?”

  “I think I really fucked up, Samuel. I think I brought Satan here!”

  “It can’t be. One of his demons or some kind of dragon maybe? The Old Testament talks about all kinds of creatures…that…that can’t be Satan.”

  Samson lowered his head and said nothing. They watched through the taxi’s rear window as clouds of darkness billowed through the streets. Flames flickered in the dark, a forest fire silhouetting a prehistoric lizard of some kind within the black smoldering miasma. A dinosaur, but not like any dinosaur either of them had ever read about. This one had six heads.

  “Faster! Drive faster!”

  In the rearview mirror, the cabbie’s thick eyebrows rose high on his forehead. The taxi lurched as the accelerator went to the floor.

  “We’ve got to find a church! If that thing is Satan then maybe he won’t be able to enter.” Samuel looked down at his hand. His fist was covered in blood as he continued to squeeze the crucifix in his palm. He opened his fingers and studied the tiny effigy of the crucified Christ. Instead of the rapturous expression he normally wore, Jesus, saturated in Samuel’s blood, writhed in agony.

  “There’s a church about four blocks away! The-the big one! St. Christopher’s!” the cabbie stammered.

  Samson’s body was a riot of activity. The souls within him seemed to be struggling to break free, to flee his flesh before whatever evil Samson had brought to earth could claim them. His body stretched and morphed as more than a dozen souls fought their way to the surface, their hands and faces pressing against his skin, clawing and biting in their effort to escape. Samuel watched in mute horror, wondering if the beast outside was the only thing he had to worry about.

  Sparks flew from the taxi’s rear fender as it rounded the corner on two wheels. A surge of heat blasted the cab and the windows exploded, showering them all in bits of tempered safety glass.

  “It’s getting closer!” Samuel yelled.

  “I’m doing eighty! I can’t go any faster with all of these turns. I’ll flip the car and kill all of us. Where did that thing come from and why the hell is it chasing us?” The cab driver was having a harder time dealing with everything that was going on than the two brothers. His panic actually relaxed them. Samuel grew dizzy, his chest burned with each breath.

  “There’s the church! We’re going to be okay, Samuel!” Samson tried to sound positive even as his face contorted in agony while perspiration issued from him as he fought to contain the restless, panic-stricken spirits within him.

  The cabbie turned the wheel sharply and jumped the curb, driving the taxi right up the steps of the church and bashing open the church doors with his front bumper. Samson grabbed his brother and hauled him out of the car, pulling him into the church. Samuel’s legs dragged behind him, his body limp in Samson’s arms.

  “Come on little brother, you’ve got to fight. You cannot die on me now!” Samuel was still sweating profusely, wheezing as if he were having an asthma attack. His eyes rolled, focused on nothing. “Don’t die, Samuel. Stay with me little brother. Stay with me.”

  The cab driver slammed the church doors shut and bolted them. He scurried about to barricade them as best he could. Samson set his brother down on the floor then joined the cabbie in snatching up pews and piling them in front of the door.

  “I don’t think it could fit through those doors anyway.” Samuel whispered in between his labored breaths.

  “He’s right. If that thing wants in here it’s going to come right through the wall.”

  All three of them turned to look at the wall as if expecting it to implode at any moment. Returning his attention to Samson, the cabbie backed away, wild eyes staring at Samson’s undulating flesh. The souls inside of him bubbled his skin, preparing to mutiny. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You possessed or something? You’re what brought that thing here, aren’t you? What the fuck are you?”

  “He’s my brother,” Samuel whispered.

  The cabbie glared at Samuel, his eyes falling on the white collar barely hidden beneath his jacket, and began to relax again.

  “Well, what the hell is wrong with him, Father?”

  “It’s that thing out there. It’s doing something to him.”

  “It damn sure is! It’s tearing him apart from the inside out!”

  Throooom!

  Something struck the church, shaking it to its foundations.

  “Shit! It’s trying to get in here.” The cab driver lowered his voice. “What does it want? Why is it here?”

  Both Samuel and the cabdriver faced Samson now.

  “It wants what I promised it,” Samson said. “It wants these souls.”

  “Fuck, then give them to him!” the cab driver shouted.

  “It isn’t that simple.” A stranger’s voice that came out of Samson—a high-pitched, near-feminine voice exaggerated like that of a drag queen. Even Samson’s face had changed.

  “Samson?”

  “No, this is Jacque Willet. At least, that’s what I called myself when I was still human, before I sold my soul to a demon and became one myself. Before your brother here decided to try and take my soul back from Asmodeus.”

  “Asmodeus? Is that what’s out there?”

  “No. That’s who’s in here, what your brother invited in when he took my soul. What’s out there is far worse. That’s who you apes once named Mastema. Hostility. The Adversary. The Satan, if you will. He is the deceiver of man and the leader of fallen angels. He has come in the form of Leviathan to take what is his.”

  “Bullshit! This is all bullshit! There’s no such thing as demons!” The cabbie spit out the words with as much venom as he could muster. He twitched, his face convulsing with ticks as if he were imitating the chaos in Samson’s flesh.

  “Then what the hell is it then? What do you call that thing out there?” Samuel’s strength was slowly returning.

  “It has to be some kind of genetic experiment. Something escaped from a science lab like Jurassic Park or some shit like that. Like one of those dinosaurs they cloned and grew in a lab.”

  “FULFILL THE BARGAIN. BRING THE SOULS TO ME NOW!!!” the beast cried from outside the church.

  The cabbie’s eyes widened, staring in bewilderment at Samson and Samuel. He held himself like a frightened child.

  “A dinosaur that talks, huh?” Samuel shook his head and he rose from the floor. Dusting himself off, he reached for the Bible in his breast pocket. He knew he was the only one who could put an end to this madness.

  The stained glass windows shattered as the beast exhaled; smoke billowed into the church. Candles melted, dripping wax onto the floors. Tapestries caught fire and burned to ash in an instant. Even the pews smoldered. The walls of the church cracked as if wounded, belching dust into the already polluted air. The floors quaked.

  Samson, or whatever demonic presence now controlled him, stood gibbering madly in front of the church doors, his flesh still undulating as the souls clustered within him sought exodus befor
e the coming holocaust. Samson turned and peered at Samuel, grinning wide like a lunatic, ropes of saliva drooling from his mouth, eyes burning like funeral pyres.

  “He’ll rip the souls right out of your brother’s flesh. All of them!” The cabbie sucked in a quick breath and clutched his chest as if having a cardiac arrest, drawing Samson’s attention. “Then he’ll take yours as well.” Finally, he pointed at Samuel, “You, he’ll let live. He’ll let you live with the memory of your brother’s death, of his immortal essence being torn apart and consumed, then shat out into the inferno. Then, when you pass away in your bed, drink yourself to death, or succumb to your disease, he’ll come for your soul too.”

  Samuel knew that his faith alone would not be strong enough to defeat the hellish abomination tearing through the church walls.

  “FULFILL THE BARGAIN!”

  “What was your bargain? What bargain did you strike with my brother?”

  “YOUR LIFE FOR TWENTY SOULS.”

  “I can’t let you take these innocent souls. I can’t. You can’t take my brother!”

  Leviathan’s laughter drove Samuel to his knees. “THERE ARE NO INNOCENT SOULS!”

  “I can’t let you take my brother!” The strength in his voice surprised him. The cabdriver stared at Samuel with renewed hope in his eyes. Samuel felt the weight of his expectations and wished he had an actual plan to save them.

  “THEY ARE MINE!”

  The front of the church crumbled to dust and the darkness rolled in. Leviathan emerged from the shadows. His presence stole the breath from Samuel’s lungs and burst the capillaries in his eyes, making him weep blood. Standing in the church entrance was a creature like an enormous crocodile with six snake-like heads, each filled with rows of dagger-sharp teeth like the jaws of a shark, and eyes that burned like exploding suns. Its mouths erupted like volcanoes, belching flame and ash and dripping molten lava-like drool onto the church floor, leaving steaming holes wherever it touched.

  Samuel remembered the description of Leviathan in the Bible, which fell short of what stood before him now. It raised one of its taloned claws to rend Samson’s flesh into a steaming pile of meat, bone, and viscera. Samson or Jacque or Asmodeus, or whatever being that had control of his brother’s body, simply stood there with an idiot’s grin, arms outstretched in welcome.

  “Take me home, Master.”

  “Not if there is no bargain to make.” Samuel stepped in front of his brother and shoved him out of the way just as Leviathan’s claws struck.

  “NOOOOOOOOoooo!”

  The creature bellowed, crying out as if it had been the one disemboweled, its voice bringing the rest of the church down around them. Samuel’s body came apart as Leviathan’s claws sliced through his flesh and bone. He smiled as the life fled from him, his last sight the disappointment on the face of Satan and the sorrow in his brother’s eyes as the spirits vacated his flesh. Samuel fell to the floor in pieces, intestines tumbling out across the marble floors in thick oily coils, even his skull laid open to reveal the brain matter beneath.

  “Samuel! Oh God! Samuel no!” Samson rushed over to hold his brother, gathering up the broken pieces of his corpse. He cradled his brother’s head in his lap and rocked back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, holding back hot tears. Clinging to the darkness of grief and regret, not giving voice to the pain that ached his soul. If the beast wanted to take him now, it was more than welcome to.

  Like an enormous tidal wave of unrepentant fury, it crashed against his brother, its force abated. It slowly withdrew to whatever raging sea of chaos, whatever fearsome place it called home. Not that Samson cared. The sound of a vacuum being filled, the sounds of wet slithering retreat, the cursing howl of an enraged creature as if stabbed in the heart, nothing mattered to him. He clutched his brother, praying perhaps that sheer force of will might stitch him back together and bring him back.

  “It’s gone, buddy,” the taxi driver said. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

  “Yes. Yes he is.”

  His brother had died for him, died to keep Satan from getting the souls Samson had stolen, the souls he’d stolen to save Samuel’s life. None of it made sense. Everything he’d done to save his brother and now Samuel was dead anyway.

  “It should have been me, little brother. Why’d you do it? I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve it. You shouldn’t have done it for me. Not for me. I’m not worthy of this. All those people I killed. I’m not worthy of this.”

  He knew what his brother would have said. With the cacophony of restless souls now gone he could hear his brother’s voice in his head as clearly as he had heard theirs.

  “Then become worthy of it.”

  21

  The tabloids speculated wide and far about the fate of Samson. Rumors floated around that he had checked himself into the Crossroads Center for rehab for an undetermined amount of time, desperately in need of mental rest. After all, he was questioned as a “person of interest” in connection to the disappearance of famous photographer Jacque Willet. His name had surfaced in the events surrounding the tragic incident at a night club. Some news rags went so far as to ask if the loss of his brother, a priest, in a senseless accident might have been what pushed Samson over the edge and off the celebrity radar.

  None of that mattered to Samson.

  Mysterious circumstances. Tragic accidents. Evil could hide in plain sight because everyone would ignore it unless its wake splashed onto them. Like a bad dream they had to rationalize, but Samson didn’t have anything to say. Witnesses couldn’t accept what they saw. The jumbled mess of contradictory statements convinced police of psychedelic drugs being dealt out of Requiem. When asked about what happened that night, Samson stuck to the only refrain he knew for sure.

  “I don’t know.”

  Samson pulled into a parking lot and sat there. During his times of doubt, the thought of prayer still held the ring of something ridiculous, the superstitious mumblings to an invisible friend. These days, he liked the idea of being still. Of listening.

  Samuel was the one for those higher ideas, wrestling with the theological implications of everything. Being caught up in a cosmological battle between good and evil, that was for better men to argue. Men like his brother. In a world of chance and random accidents—when the tumbling of natural selection led to the genetic fall of a man named Samuel and another man named Samson, with the odds of these two men meeting, much less being brothers, being beyond calculation—in such a meaningless world, why was there was still so much beauty and laughter?

  “I don’t know.”

  Samson walked the hallways, searching for the room number. All his designer clothes were gone now; he shambled along in clothes picked from Salvation Army bins. His hair was wild and unkempt and his eyes dark and heavy. Orderlies scrutinized then turned away from him. Nurses pointed him in the right direction, but with a wary, searching-for-security manner. No matter, Samson ignored them, choosing to focus on what he came to do.

  He knew what it was like to be alone.

  The room stank of grief and fear. The machines bleeped and chirped, exhaled and inhaled, a cacophony of life-prolonging measures. A black woman’s thin frame barely disturbed the sheets as she slept. Samson closed the door behind them but was overwhelmed by the feeling of not knowing what to do next. Guilt whispered like dry leaves across pavement. How many times had Samuel done this? He had been such a natural at this. Samson stumbled over the bedside chair, catching it but silently cursing himself for making such a racket. The woman stirred.

  “Who is this handsome man?” she asked with an accented croak of a voice. She fluttered in and out of a dream state.