Talon of God

by Wesley Snipes

  Change.

  Despite only getting her actual degree six months ago, Lauryn had already seen plenty of seizures in her career. She’d seen drug addicts spaz off their beds in the heights of violent overdose and patients arch bad enough to throw out their backs during cardiac arrest. But she’d never seen anything like this.

  Lenny was bouncing off the pavement like water on a hot griddle. With every violent jerk, the blood was visibly draining from his pain-twisted face, leaving his normally dark skin a morbid shade of gray. His eyes, previously closed, were now wide open and bulging, the blood vessels bursting as Lauryn watched, leaving his corneas a solid wall of red.

  After that, Lauryn didn’t care about the green crap. She dropped her phone and grabbed Lenny’s shoulders, forcing him back down to the ground with all her weight. “I need that ambulance!” she yelled at her phone on the pavement. “How long until—”

  Lenny lashed out with both arms, throwing her off him and knocking her phone clear across the alley. Lauryn scrambled to stay on her feet, but he continued to flail his limbs, slamming his elbow into her chest. As soon as she felt the blow connect, Lauryn knew it was going to hurt, but what she didn’t expect was for the hit to send her flying, launching her backwards across the alley and into the chain-link fence that separated Lenny’s hiding spot from the rest of the bridge’s support structure.

  The metal mesh caught her like a net, bouncing her face-first onto the asphalt below. She caught herself with her hands at the last second, nearly breaking her wrist as she went down hard, but the pain barely registered through Lauryn’s adrenaline rush. So the moment she landed, she shoved herself back up, hands raised and ready to defend herself as she looked around for Lenny.

  He wasn’t hard to find. In the time it had taken Lauryn to get back to her feet, Lenny’s jerking body had pulled itself upright. Considering he’d been unconscious when she’d found him, Lauryn wasn’t even sure how that was possible, but he was most definitely standing . . . and his bloody eyes glinted in the low light as they locked on hers.

  The look was enough to send the frantic breaths whooshing right out of her lungs. Until this point, everything Lenny had done had been bizarre and terrifying, but still inside the realm of medically possible. Looking at him now, though, all Lauryn could think was that the person standing in front of her didn’t look anything like the homeless man she’d come here to help.

  And that made no sense to her trained, rational mind.

  The Lenny she knew was a wiry old veteran with slumped shoulders and hooded eyes that had seen too much. This thing—the man-shaped shadow looming over her in the dark—was a good half foot taller, with shoulders that barely fit inside Lenny’s ratty old clothes. His limbs looked too long for his body, and his raised hands were veiny and gnarled, the lengthened nails looking almost like claws. As awful as all that was, though, his face was the worst, because when he looked at Lauryn with his bloody eyes, his lips curled up to reveal a wall of yellowed teeth below his horrifying grayish-blue-tinged gums. This wasn’t Lenny anymore.

  She wasn’t sure it was even still human.

  Lauryn was a first-response emergency room doctor. It took a lot to spook her, and even more to make her panic. But the sight of Lenny’s horrible, inhuman face lifting into a snarl did the job. She screamed at the top of her lungs, her body moving faster than ever before as she launched herself back toward the lit street and, hopefully, safety. She was halfway through the squeeze between the wall and the support beam when Lenny’s gnarled hand grabbed her arm, closing down on it like a bear trap.

  This time, Lauryn didn’t even get a chance to scream. He yanked her back into the alley, nearly snapping her neck as he threw her hard down on the bed of newspapers where he’d been lying when she’d found him. The padding softened the blow a little, but the impact was still enough to knock the air out of her lungs. Gasping, Lauryn scrambled through the greasy sheets of newsprint toward the cement wall. But when she put her back against the stone and whipped around to face her attacker, the violent monster who had been Lenny froze.

  The change was so sudden, so complete, Lauryn’s first thought was that she’d imagined it. But while his body was still facing her, Lenny’s head was turned over his now massive shoulder, his bloody eyes fixed on the alley’s entrance, where a new figure—a tall shape in a long winter coat—stood framed against the glare of the floodlights from the train station across the street.

  Crouched down against the wall at the back of the tiny alley, Lauryn couldn’t see the newcomer’s face. With the lights behind them, she couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a man or a woman.

  Whatever it was, Lauryn didn’t care. She’d never been so happy to see another human being in her life, and the moment she got over her shock, she screamed at the top of her lungs once more.

  It wasn’t the most articulate cry for help, but it must have been enough. The moment she yelled, the newcomer charged Lenny like a linebacker, knocking him to the ground. Lauryn barely managed to move out of the way before the man—for it was obvious now that her savior was a middle-aged dark-skinned man under that bulky, well-worn winter coat—grabbed her arm and pulled, lifting her back to her feet like she weighed nothing at all.

  “Thank you,” Lauryn gasped.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” the man replied, his deep voice unnaturally calm as he turned back toward Lenny, who’d already rolled back to his feet, snorting like a bull as he turned to stare them down with his blood-filled eyes.

  It was at this point that the absurdity of the situation finally began to beat its way through Lauryn’s panic. She was in an alley under the elevated train track less than a hundred feet from a busy train station during the evening rush, facing off against her patient, who’d apparently turned into a monster—a legit monster with red eyes, incredible strength, clawed hands, the works—with an unknown savior who didn’t look like he found any of this out of the ordinary.

  Quite the opposite. The man who’d just pulled Lauryn to her feet looked so calm, he might as well have been waiting for the train. Lauryn was still trying to work her brain around that when Lenny’s bloody eyes locked onto the two of them, and his ashen face contorted into a mask of pure, insane rage.

  “Um,” she said, voice cracking as she took a step back. “I don’t know who you are, but I think we should run. I already called EMS. They’ll be here in just—”

  “I know,” the man said, his voice calm and still as a deep winter night. “That’s why we can’t run. Look around.” He nodded at the sheltered square at the end of the alley, formed by the retaining wall, the support beams, and the chain fence that separated this alley from the rest of the underpass. “Right now, he’s in here with us. If we leave, he’ll follow, and then the whole street will be in danger.” He reached into his bulky coat, keeping his eyes locked on Lenny, who was now stomping the dirty pavement like a rhinoceros about to charge. “We have to fight him here.”

  “Are you crazy?” Lauryn hissed. “We can’t fight him! He’s sick. He needs medical attention, not to be hurt more.”

  Even as she said it, though, Lauryn wasn’t sure. She liked to think she had a high threshold for weird situations—a necessity in her profession—but nothing about this made any kind of sense. She could probably come up with some kind of explanation for the red eyes, discolored skin, and obvious violent psychosis, but that didn’t change the fact that this thing in front of her was over nine feet tall. On his best day, Lenny just barely topped six feet. He was so tall now, his head was actually scraping the bottom of the train bridge overhead, and that simply wasn’t possible. Just thinking about it made Lauryn feel like the whole world was sliding sideways. A feeling that only got worse when the man in front of her reached into his coat to pull out—not a stun gun or a pepper-spray canister or anything that might actually be useful—but a sword. A huge two-handed, cross-hilted sword with a wide blade so finely polished it glowed like molten silver in the dark alley.

  �
��Unclean spirit!” he said, his deep voice ringing as he raised the sword in front of him. “I command you to leave this servant of the Lord and torment him no longer.”

  The loud words bounced through the dark like shots, and the thing that had been Lenny recoiled with a hiss. Lauryn hissed, too, but for completely different reasons. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m attempting an exorcism,” the man replied, never taking his eyes off Lenny.

  That’s what Lauryn had been afraid of—this guy was clearly mad, too. She looked down at her hand, wondering if whatever she had touched had psychotropic properties. At the same time, she still found herself saying, “An exorcism? Like, for demonic possession?”

  The man answered her blatant skepticism with a patient look and a nod toward Lenny. “Do you know of anything else that could do that?”

  Lauryn did not, but just because she didn’t have a rational explanation didn’t mean she had to buy a crazy one. Unfortunately, she was literally not in a position to argue. The lunatic with the sword was the only thing standing between her and Lenny. But while she wasn’t sure how she was going to handle two crazy men, Lauryn was still a doctor and Lenny was still her patient. It was her duty to help him survive . . . whatever was going on. Before she could think of how to actually do that, though, Lenny’s discolored lips peeled back in a snarl.

  “Your words mean nothing, soldier,” he said, his voice grinding in a way that should never come from a human throat. “He is already ours, as you all will be.”

  “Nothing is yours but death,” the man with the sword said, his booming voice making Lauryn jump. “I command you to be silent and come out of him!”

  Again, the force of his words bounded through the narrow alley like gunshots, and again the thing that had been Lenny snarled like a beast, running its hand possessively over the veteran’s discolored face. For a moment, Lauryn worried it was going to try to speak again in that awful voice, but thankfully it didn’t. It did something even worse. It jumped.

  The thing that had been Lenny flew at them like a tiger, its clawlike hands going straight for the stranger’s throat. Fast as it was, though, the man with the sword was even quicker, spinning away like a leaf on the wind. He dragged Lauryn with him, snatching her out of the way a fraction of a second before Lenny slammed into the cement support beam they’d been standing against. The moment the monster’s back was to them, the stranger brought his silver sword down, slamming the flat of the wide, heavy blade across Lenny’s shoulders.

  The blow landed like a hammer, propelling the transformed veteran to the ground. His scream of pain as he landed was the most human sound he’d made since this whole thing started, and it stabbed Lauryn like a knife.

  “Stop!”

  She didn’t even realize she’d yelled until the word left her throat. The sudden sound made the man with the sword jerk in surprise, and then he jerked again when Lauryn’s hand shot out to grab the cross hilt of his sword. “Don’t,” she ordered. “He’s my patient. I won’t let you hurt him.”

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” the man said, his patience, which until this moment had been flawless, slipping slightly. “But he is a threat to everything. If the demon won’t listen—”

  “There is no demon!” she cried. “Look, I don’t know what’s happening to him, but he needs help. Not this.” She pushed down on the sword and let go, turning back to the transformed man, who was already pushing himself up from the pavement. “Lenny!” she yelled. “Snap out of it! This guy’s going to hurt you!”

  “I’ll hurt him,” Lenny snarled. “I’ll—”

  “No one’s hurting anyone,” Lauryn said in her doctor’s voice, the one she used when patients needed to be shocked back to their senses. “Help is on the way. We’re going to get through this, Lenny, I promise, but you need to stop this right now. Come back to us.”

  The command echoed through the alley, making Lenny shake. Lauryn stepped back, ready to run, but this time, Lenny didn’t attack. He just shook his head, blinking his bloody eyes in confusion, and then he whispered, “Doc?”

  The word was tiny and broken, but it was the sweetest thing Lauryn had heard all night, because it was Lenny’s real voice. “Yes,” she said with a gasp of relief. “It’s me. It’s Dr. Jefferson. Hang in there, Lenny. Help is on the—”

  She cut off as Lenny grabbed his head. “You gotta make it stop! The voices, the voices—”

  His voice started to change back as he spoke, the words rasping and flexing like a rusty saw. But when Lauryn tried to go to him, the man with the sword beat her to it, stepping in front of Lenny as he reached into his coat yet again to pull out—not a sword this time, but a plastic bottle of water, which he proceeded to upend over Lenny’s bowed head.

  “What are you—”

  “You are cleansed,” he said, his voice taking on a chanting tone. “‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain.’ With this, you are washed clean, Lenny. Be at peace all the days of your life.”

  The words lingered like fading lights in the dark, and then Lenny toppled to the ground. He changed as he went, his transformed body crumbling like ash that scattered when he hit the pavement. When it was over, Lenny was all that remained, lying still as a corpse on the pavement.

  Lauryn was at his side a heartbeat later, shoving her fingers under his torn shirt collar to check his pulse. Her own heart leaped for joy when she felt it fluttering, faint but clear. She was rolling him onto his back to take the pressure off his airways when the stranger sheathed his sword and knelt down beside her.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” Lauryn said, but only out of habit. Between her bruised ribs and the scrapes on her hands from the struggle on the pavement, she was actually pretty roughed up, but it was nothing life-threatening. Lenny was in a far more precarious situation. Though the most extreme changes seemed to have faded, his eyes were still blind with blood, and his face remained the color of old ash. She still had no idea what was going on, but an injured man she could handle, and after all the chaos, Lauryn was determined to make this one thing right at least.

  “I can save him,” she said firmly. “I’m a doctor.”

  “So I gathered,” the stranger replied, looking at her like he was seeing Lauryn for the first time. “He listened to you.”

  “Of course he did,” she said smugly, turning her attention back to Lenny. “He’s my patient.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” the man said as he slid the water bottle back into his coat. Which reminded her.

  “What did you do back there?” Lauryn asked, glancing pointedly at the water bottle. “What is that stuff?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she added, “You were quoting Revelations, right?”

  The man nodded, looking impressed she’d recognized the passage, but didn’t explain. He was too busy staring at her hands, which she’d just moved to Lenny’s abdomen. “What’s that?”

  “I’m palpating his organs to check for internal bleeding,” she explained as she began to press her fingers into the soft flesh below the old man’s ribcage. “His pallor’s anemic, but there’s no visible blood loss, so I’m feeling around to see if I can—hey!”

  The man had grabbed her wrists, turning her hands palms up. “What’s that?” he asked again, nodding at a long discolored mark across the fingers of her right hand that stood out clearly from the rest of her minor scrapes and bruises.

  Lauryn frowned, unsure. Then she remembered. “Oh, that’s from when I first arrived. I touched Lenny to try and wake him up, but he had this glop on him that burned my . . .”

  She trailed off, frustrated. Halfway through her story, the man had stopped listening. He grabbed his bottle of water again and yanked off the cap, upending what was left over Lauryn’s fingers.

  “Hey!” she cried. “What are you—OW!”

  She tried to jerk away, but he held her fast, which w
as a problem because whatever he was pouring over her hands, it wasn’t water. The clear liquid had no scent, but it burned like fire everywhere it fell, making her gasp in pain.

  “Stop!”

  “No,” the man replied calmly, gripping her squirming fingers. “That burn is dangerous. You need to be cleansed. Remember what was written—‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.’”

  Lauryn bared her teeth at him. “You’re using Ezekiel as an excuse for burning my damn hands?”

  “Language,” the man chided, though once again, he looked impressed. “You know your scripture,” he said as he released her.

  Hazard of being a preacher’s daughter, Lauryn thought bitterly, clutching her fingers, which were now burned and blistered. “And you don’t know what ‘stop’ means—that was assault!”

  “No, it was necessary,” the man replied in that infuriatingly calm way of his, placing the now empty bottle back inside his coat once more. “If my hunch is correct, the stuff you touched is the same substance that caused Lenny’s troubles. Not the sort of thing you want on your skin.”

  Lauryn went silent, her anger forgotten. In hindsight, it was obvious, but in the panic and chaos of the fight, she hadn’t had much chance to consider that the strange green slime on Lenny’s coat might have caused whatever had just happened to him. Now that the stranger had pointed it out, though, Lauryn couldn’t dismiss the worry that the stuff might also have gotten to her. After all, she had been the one who’d seen Lenny double in size and grow claws. Two observations she would have dismissed as hallucinations if she’d heard them from one of her patients.

  That was a thought that could bring you down fast, and Lauryn closed her eyes with a shaky breath. But terrifying as it was to realize she might have come in contact with some kind of mind-altering psychotropic, now was not the time to panic. She still had a patient to take care of, and it wasn’t like she was alone in her delusion. The man with the sword had seen it, too. He could help her figure out what was real and what wasn’t.