by Garrett Cook
When I kick him in the shins, his grasp on my throat relaxes. It’s lucky I had watched Jeremy deal with the Ice Cream Strangler, which was enough to remind me that a person behind you choking you isn’t necessarily in an advantageous position. I elbow him the chest, and then I stamp down hard on his foot. He’s not so tough, he’s not such a God, he is not the Serpent King of my nightmares, or the devil on earth. He is just a man, like all the other ones. Just a man who can only take so much pain. He stops choking and he reaches for the knife on his belt. Bad move, the action of somebody who hasn’t had to deal with a struggling victim for awhile. When he reaches for the knife, I reach for the keys to Jeremy’s cuffs on the other side of his belt.
“Don’t you dare!” he shouts, swiping at me with the knife. I turn just in time; get the key in my hand. He’s not that strong and he doesn’t have much of a weight advantage on me, so there’s no force behind his slashing. His wobbly, awkward method of fighting leaves me off guard, so as I’m reaching for the key, he nicks me in the left ear. I feel like crying from the pain, but it’s nothing like Mr. Right’s taser and it’s nothing like the pain Jeremy must have suffered today, so I tough it out. I’m not certain if I want to bring him down myself or to let Jeremy loose with the key, but then I hear a moaning come from a few feet away. Jeremy is near. It’s almost as much relief as Penny’s announcement that he was alive when he turns the moans into words.
“The devil is here with us, Cass. Be careful. He looks small and weak, but he’s the devil. He eats our children, Cass, he eats our souls!”
At least he’s speaking. I immediately regret not following Jeremy’s advice on what not to do during a fight. During a fight, you don’t listen to ambient noise, you don’t let yourself get distracted, and you don’t turn your back on an enemy. I didn’t even notice I had turned my back, but it’s something you instinctually do when someone’s shouting at you. With my back turned, I don’t notice that Jack is leaping at me like a panther. If I’d seen him coming, I could have easily gotten out of the way, but I didn’t see him coming. I feel his weight land on me and the cold, hardwood floor when I hit it. Even this man, small as he is, feels like a truck when he hits me with some momentum going.
I try not to look him in the eyes, but he grabs me by the hair with his free hand and forces me to look straight at him. I know that I can’t close my eyes or else there will be nothing I can do when he starts to cut me with that knife of his. God, I wish I hadn’t looked him in the eyes. The emptiness of the yellow contacts mirrors an emptiness that it’s obvious is beneath them. I could look straight into his soul through those eyes and I would see that it is nothing but hate, greed and evil. The whole time I have forgotten that true strength lies in conviction, and the entirety of his conviction is focused around evil. I don’t struggle as he prepares to cut me. This is no man, it’s true. This is a king cobra. Blank, hypnotic eyes sap my will, as his enormous mouth with its filed teeth opens. He is going to rip out my throat with his teeth after he cuts me. It’s this thought, this infinitely grimmer thought that DOES get me to struggle. I push up with all my might, and roll him off me.
He gets up quickly and prepares to charge me with his knife and run me through. I’ve done the same thing to him that he did to me when I looked in his yellowed eyes. I have turned off the thinking part of his mind. If he was thinking, he would have called for help from some of the girls in the hall that he had previously ordered away. If he was thinking, he would have reached for one of the guns he made me drop. But, he isn’t. This is what a real psychopomp is. The drooling animal in us with big, yellow eyes charging with a knife at what offends him.
“The devil, the devil is here and he’s gonna eat us, he’s gonna eat our souls too!”
I back up and I take a gamble. He’s no more coherent than Jack is. He’s been beaten, he’s probably weak as a kitten, but I somehow don’t feel fit to take on something like Jack. I thought I understood it, but what was true in the schoolyard is not as true here. This is a place for elementals, and I content myself right now with being a person. Jeremy has things to do before he can get away with that, tragic though that thought might be. I unlock Jeremy’s chains and he emerges from them, as confused and angry as Jack is.
“The devil! The devil is here! Lud give me strength to fight the serpent king! God give me strength to fight the serpent king…” he rants before charging Jack with just as much force as the lunatic has mustered. When Jack charges, he hasn’t charged half so fast as Jeremy. With all the wounds, with all the drugs, still Jeremy is the bigger and faster of the two. Jack makes a howl that no human should make, a noise that will doubtlessly summon some of the Contessa’s guards. As Jack and Jeremy try to shove each other over, I have a chance to pick up my pistols and get ready for the upcoming guards. Jeremy’s conviction will vanquish Jack and my conviction will protect him until he does.
My reason smacks into me like a rogue locomotive. I’m grateful for it. Jack and Jeremy have no choice but to fight, but I can just lock the door, which I do as the weakened Jeremy at last gets Jack onto the ground. Maybe a locked door will be only a minute distraction for people who obviously have keys, but it will give us some time. The dead woman on the gurney and the gurney itself will give us even more time. I wheel it in front of the door, sidling around the fight. Then I turn it over, dumping the body, and letting the gurney barricade the door. When the door gets forced open, the person opening it will be off guard for long enough for me to shoot them. No matter how this goes, it’s still going to be tough.
Jack’s head makes an awful noise as Jeremy bashes it against the floor. “In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, monster, I abjure thee…” I have a feeling that Jack starts to regret pumping Jeremy with hallucinogens and declaring himself the devil. But Jack is right, and Jeremy is right. Any man who says he’s talking to angels, surely has, and every man who says he carries the devil surely does. Dark dreams and nude feral men calling themselves death taught me that. As I watch Jack struggle idly to get Jeremy off him, I see that there is a lot of truth to be gained in psychosis. I don’t expect Jeremy to reach into Jack’s mouth, no matter what he sees in him, since surely he’d be afraid of getting bitten, but he does. He reaches in and very deliberately smashes Jack’s front teeth, letting shards of them slide down his throat.
Jeremy’s strength builds with his anger and his fervor. HE doesn’t have to punch out the rest of Jack’s teeth when they can be yanked out just as easily.
“You could have hurt Cass,” he says, “You could have wrecked what God gave me. You’re the devil, and I’m not going to let you live!”
Jeremy clamps the enormous, disfigured jaws shut and punches Jack in the stomach, right on the zero on his t shirt. Jack gasps for air and begins to make choking noises. He wheezes and tries to cough up the shards. Jeremy shoves fingers into both Jack’s eyes, gouging deep. He does it again and again and again and again until the eyes are just puddles of goo. It doesn’t take long for the blinded Serpent King to start choking on his mouthful of teeth, but that isn’t enough for Jeremy. He throws his weight into smashing Jack’s ribs, punches the old man in the testicles a dozen times or so. He forces open Jack’s artificial mandibles far as he can, like King Kong with the t-rex until he hears a snap, then he forces them back down. Jeremy stands up, he wobbles, he looks like he’s not long for this earth, but he stands victorious. I can hear the idiots on the other side of the door, so I don’t have long to slice Jack’s head off. I don’t saw it, I concentrate and I pray to myself, and the cleaver comes down with a mighty chop, severing the head.
“What are you doing?” Jeremy asks, almost ready to fall over.
“Take this,” I tell him, quickly handing him the head, “hold it up when the girls come through that door.”
Three of the Contessa’s girls walk in, at last having unlocked the door and pushed it open. They nervously train their guns on us, until they see that not only am I armed, but Jeremy’s loose and holding J
ack’s head. Godless Jack is dead and both Mr.400 and his accomplice are free. These are reasons for even these loyal, devoted minions of the Contessa to give us right of way. They have nothing to say, no shooting to do and no possible method of dealing with the kind of big fish that just killed Godless Jack. It’s almost comical that they don’t realize that the big fish that killed Godless Jack is wounded, tripping balls and most likely unable to wield weapons of any kind.
We reach the van and Jeremy is mumbling all kinds of things and moaning from all kinds of pain. I can only hope that I can get him to a hospital on time. The first thing I do when we get to the van is take the Mr.400 shirt off him, the second is help him lie down in the back seat. I turn the radio up nice and loud so that he doesn’t pass out or fall asleep on me. If he falls asleep he might not wake up again. I can’t bear to lose him twice in the same day. I can’t bear for him to lose his mind either.
“Jeremy, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake,” I say it hundreds of times as we make the drive. He doesn’t say anything in response, but I can tell he’s awake. I put a scrap of cloth on my ear so that they won’t bother treating it and leaving my car, with Godless Jack’s head hidden in it, unattended for too long. That could wind up being pretty bad. It’s not like Jack doesn’t have friends and it’s not like hospital orderlies are above accepting huge amounts of money for giving up the location of Mr.400. We have to play it cool and Jeremy has to stay awake.
“Cass,” he mumbles, “Cass, I’m gonna die I think. But, Lud says I shouldn’t. He says to stay here because this is just the beginning, the serpent and the jackal are the beginning, he says. Is it all like the city? Is it all their city now?”
“No, Jeremy, it’s not their city now. But Lud’s right, stay here in the car, don’t go to sleep and don’t look out at everything, just think about the car.”
He screams and begins to cry. He looks out the windows and pounds at the doors. “How could you do that? How could you put me in one of those? This is what happens. This is what happens to us…”
He reminds me of Lud when we picked him up in the car. I cannot imagine what he sees right now, and I am fairly certain that I don’t want to. I just want to get him safely to the hospital. He screams at the car and pounds at the door, but he’s awake, maybe it’s right that he’s scared, because it will at least keep him conscious until we reach the hospital. Thank God it’s not that far. Jeremy got Ian to the hospital on time, so I can get Jeremy there. The worst is over now, regardless of what he says. I can only hope that he’ll see that. That he’ll be able to run from all the monsters in his head.
When we are weak, we create gods, my father used to tell me, but I can see that there might be one at work. One that gave Jeremy the last ounces of strength to vanquish Jack, and one that got me to the hospital on time. There is only waiting now, but it doesn’t feel like an obstacle. Me, Penny, Jones and Lud will be at his side as he fights to come back. Us, and a god for the strong and weak alike.
Toppled Towers
I flee from Hell in the belly of a great blue giant with wheels on the end of his limbs. The dragon is behind me, his fire, his fangs, and his power over my vision. The dragon is gone and I flee in the belly of a giant. He was a man once, this giant, and it makes me panic. He cranes his giant neck and smiles at me as Cass tells me to stay awake. I will stay with Cass and the giant, the giant with the wheels on his feet who zooms past the cities of skin and blades. These trees have leaves. How could it be that these trees stay green in a world where there’s no Sun? Could it be that outside Hell and beyond the dragon’s lies is a place where shadows and cold have not yet taken man’s home from him? It shines on my face, this Sun, but is it real? Does it really shine into the giant and forgive him for letting himself become the device he is? At least Cass is here, wherever I am, if this place where the Sun shines is real.
The giant stops and Cass and I emerge. I want to cry, since the Sun is going away. The sky begins to get dark and I don’t know if it will come back. If the Sun I have fought for stays here, then I will serve it forever. I will kiss the leaves of the trees that it allows growing, the trees that are green and not made of human skin. If the Sun returns, things might just be all right. The dragon is gone, the devil, the serpent king. The devil is gone and things might be all right. Cass leads me past a set of glass doors, and I’m scared at first, because I know what glass buildings mean, but Cass seems so certain that this is the right place to be, that I don’t doubt her, I love her too much. Since Cass is here, I decide at last, that the Sun is going to return and we’d fight side by side to make sure that it stayed in the sky. It doesn’t feel like the city of the Dark Ones. Everybody here looks human. It is cold and mechanical, but it is not their city.
Cass tells the lady at the desk that I’ve been drugged and narrowly escaped torture by a dangerous killer. Such a dangerous killer I escaped. She couldn’t explain what I’d been through to this lady. She couldn’t explain the devil or the war for man’s souls. She just says that I was captured and drugged and tortured. I cringe when I hear the wheels rolling toward me and two large men, put me on a bed with wheels and they bring me to a big, white room. I overhear words like “detox” and “transfusion.” These are words from the real world, words that remind me where I am. Hospital is where I am. I am not dead and I am in the real world, the sane world, the contested world, getting ready to be anesthesized and dream again, as they try and save me from the poison and the pain. Cass smiles at me and kisses my cheek before the sane world, just discovered, disappears, and I am dragged once more to someplace else. I will miss the sane world wherever they take me. I could use some clarity. Some clarity would be a good reward for killing the dragon. There are always rewards for killing the dragon.
I sit in absolute nothing, warm and comforting like a hot bath. My scattered brain begins to come together, no longer struggling to stay whole, but embracing its completeness. There is nothing to do or think or feel as I am repaired, just blissful oblivion. When my eyes open again, my vision is blurry, but I am certain that I see what I see. What I see is Cass looking down at me, tears in her eyes. She takes my hand and squeezes it tightly, the first real sensation I feel. She found me among the dead, among the gibbering mad, and she brought me here, even after I had told her to leave me to die for her own sake if I were captured. My own eyes tear up, and my vision remains blurry. We see each other on equal terms I suppose, through veils of tears, formerly worlds apart and missing one another. If there were only words to thank her for coming back to me and bringing me back to her and back to life and sunlight and joy. Without love, there is death, there is confusion. There is Hell and the nightmare of isolation.
She doesn’t say anything either, she turns on the TV. I don’t ask how long I’ve been out cold, I don’t ask how long she waited for me, or what’s going to happen to me next. I watch the TV and let the tears on my eyes dry and my vision become clear. The second thing I see after Cass is the image of Penny Dreadful, holding up a spike with the unmistakable head of Godless Jack mounted on it. I find the strength to smile, and Cass does as well. Unbelievable. I’m alive, the poison is out of my system and Penny Dreadful is on the TV holding up Godless Jack’s head. That’s right, the dragon, the Serpent King, the devil. It was pretty much the one thing I could feel myself doing, shoving the demon’s fangs down his throat. There’s always a reward for killing the dragon.
“That’s right. I’ve come bearing a message from Mr.400. Mr.400 has killed Godless Jack and many of those at the top of the Reap food chain, and any who choose to take their place will incur his wrath. Jack’s head was brought to me personally by Mr.400 with this message and another, one I take to heart, one I hope others will understand: your culture of violence is dead. Reap is gone and any who want to cling to it will meet the same end.”
I can’t sort out exactly what happened, but I’m glad it did. The first words I say to Cass after being pulled back from the afterlife aren’t the best ones I can
muster.
“Did I say that?” I whisper to her.
She laughs and shakes her head, “Nope. I did.”
“Good. That was very good…” I feel my strength start to fade, but I call it back. I’m not going under again, not for awhile. I want to enjoy consciousness, clarity and Cass for as long as I can before sleep. Having killed Godless Jack, I suppose I’ve earned them.
“Penny helped. She told me where you were and she called the press conference. It’s pretty much just her and a few dead psychopomps who know our secret. We can carry on our raids for awhile…”
It hurts when I shake my head. “No. I’m not doing this alone again. We’re gonna find help. I don’t know how, but we’re gonna send a big message and we’re gonna find help. We’ll need money first and some stuff from Jones.”
My plan isn’t quite formulated until the obnoxious pundit Tommy Simmons was arguing with comes on the news.
“Mr.400 thinks that killing Godless Jack has killed Reap. This is truly schizoid logic, the kind of thing you would expect out of somebody with such a childish mind that is so utterly obsessed with black and white morality. Jack and all the others will be missed, but they’re only the old guard now. There will be better tougher psychopomps, with better news coverage. It’s laughable that he could believe his stupid little crusade against Reap could come to so much. Almost as laughable as Penny Dreadful’s sudden reversal. We have Reapkids. We have Reap stations. As long as we have Reapkids and BLD news and as long as we have American culture, I think, we will have Reap. Mr.400 doesn’t know what he’s messing with.”
“Jack’s mansion is probably almost unguarded right now and people might not know yet that he’s not coming back. I’m gonna need you to do something for me,” I tell Cass.
“What’s that?”