Demon Frenzy (Demon Frenzy Series Book 1)

by Harvey Click

  The kitchen windows had been open the last time Amy was up here, but now they were covered with sliding steel shutters. She went to the doorway that Karl and Walter had led her through earlier today and carefully peered out. Smoke was coming from the room across the hallway, where ceiling sprinklers were raining feebly on two men who were slapping smoldering furniture with wet blankets.

  She started down the hallway, hoping that Mack would keep his mouth shut as they hurried past open doors, though she didn’t see anyone in any of the rooms. Apparently there was another fire in the east side because she saw more smoke at the far end of the hallway.

  She had just gotten past the big foyer halfway down the hallway when a man came rushing down the wide stairs carrying a fire extinguisher. She ducked into a room to her left and hid against the wall beside the door. She was expecting Mack to follow her, but instead she heard him say, “Hey dickhead, where you keep your booze around here?”

  “Damn you, Mack Riley,” she whispered, and for a second or two she debated whether she wanted to get herself killed trying to save his alcoholic ass. She peered out into the hallway and saw that he didn’t need any help. The man in gray was lying on his back at the bottom of the stairs, and Mack was beating his head to a pulp with the dumbbell bar. He was still pounding when she got there.

  “Hey, Mack, he’s dead enough already,” she whispered. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  They dragged him into the room where she had been hiding and shut the door. All the windows were shuttered, and the big room was dark except for one dim table lamp, so several seconds passed before she noticed the listener sitting in an upholstered chair at the far wall.

  It looked almost like a fat little person sitting there, its elbows resting on the arms of the chair and its clawed hands folded in front of its naked belly. Its hideous face wore a serious and puzzled expression, and she thought it was probably confused because she was wearing gray but Mack wasn’t, and the body they had dragged in was, a complex conundrum for a demon with limited intelligence.

  “First son of a bitch I ever killed,” Mack said, “but it sure won’t be the last. I got me the taste for it now, I found my calling, I got the taste for blood and by God I’m gonna go on a killing spree like nobody ever—”

  “Shh,” she said, and she pointed at the listener.

  “Holy crap,” Mack said. “That’s the ugliest damn piece of shit I ever seen.”

  “That steel bar won’t do any good,” she whispered. “You have to use your sword.”

  Mack dropped his bar with a loud clang and swung his sword back and forth. The listener seemed to have solved its riddle; it was grinning now and grasping the arms of its chair as if preparing to spring.

  “Let’s charge at the count of three,” she whispered. “One, two, three.”

  The listener sprang from its chair the same moment they charged, and as they were chasing it across the room a harpy swooped down from the chandelier.

  “Heads up!” Amy said, slashing at the harpy but missing.

  It was darting around the big dark room like a swift shadow, and Amy was swinging at it wildly while trying to see where the listener was. She glanced back when she heard a lamp fall behind her, and when she turned her head to the front she saw the harpy flying straight at her. She impaled it through the chest, and it fell to the floor, its wings knocking a chair over as they flapped madly in their death throes.

  “Man, this place sucks a big one,” Mack said.

  He was standing beside the decapitated body of the listener. Amy looked carefully around the room for anything else that might attack and saw nothing.

  “You should put on that dead guy’s clothes if they fit,” she said. “You’ll be less conspicuous.”

  Mack bent over the dead man and said, “Hey, look at this, I hit the fucking jackpot! A nine-millimeter Glock, gun of the gods. This baby holds seventeen one-way tickets to hell, and here’s an extra mag with seventeen more! Hey listen, lady, this sucker belongs to me ‘cause I’m the one who killed the son of a bitch.”

  “Okay, it’s yours, but keep your damn voice down and get those clothes on as quick as you can,” Amy said.

  She went to one of the windows and slid the steel shutter open an inch. The barred window was open and a bit of hot sticky breeze blew in. This room faced the driveway, and she saw a car parked in it with a spotlight moving slowly back and forth, exploring the wooded area east of the house. It was Dilkens’ police car, and behind it she saw the red pickup truck that belonged to the Blevin boys. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she thought one of them was standing beside the truck.

  Mack came up to the window stark naked and smelling like a sewer. “What’s going on out there?” he asked. Amy moved aside because of his smell, and Mack said, “Goddamn, that’s Dickhead Dilkens. I’m gonna shoot that son of a bitch.”

  He stuck the barrel of his Glock through the opening in the shutter, and she grabbed his wrist. “Goddamn it, quit waving that gun around and put some clothes on,” she said.

  “I hate that son of a bitch. I want to kill him.”

  But he returned to the dead man and started putting his clothes on. Amy was watching the spotlight when it suddenly went out, and a split second later she heard the crack of a rifle. The rifle fired again, and whichever Blevin was standing beside his truck fell backwards. It fired again, and the windshield of Dilkens’ police car shattered.

  The red pickup backed up and then shot forward heading out of the driveway. There were two more shots, and the truck rammed into a tree and stopped.

  Mack was standing beside her again, but at least now he had the dead man’s clothes on. “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, that’s the best fucking thing I ever seen in my whole life.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Amy said. “I think we’ll be safer going through the rooms and avoiding the hallway.”

  “Where exactly are we going?”

  “First thing I want to do is find Sandoval,” she said.

  “Is he that old dude in the wheelchair?”

  “Yep.”

  “God, I hate that ugly son of a bitch. I want to kill him.”

  “That would be a good thing,” she said. “Now remember, if you see any demons you’ve got to use your sword. Guns won’t hurt them.”

  Mack stepped in something and looked at his shoe. “Goddamn,” he said. “Aren’t these ugly things house-broke?”

  “Please keep your voice down,” she said.

  She pressed her ear against the door to the next room, then turned the knob and peered in. It was shuttered too and even darker than the room they were in.

  “Is that wheelchair asshole in there?” Mack asked.

  “Shh.”

  She flipped a light switch inside the doorway, and a babbleboon leaped down from the chandelier and said something like, “Green damn paper shit.” Mack pushed past her and chased it into a corner, where he hacked it to pieces. By the time he was done, the pieces were small and his clothes were splattered with demon blood.

  “This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies,” he said. “If I don’t find some whiskey pretty damn soon I’m gonna start getting mean.”

  He seemed to be getting crazier by the minute, and Amy wondered what she was going to do with him. By now they’d gone far enough they should be close to the north-south corridor that led to Sandoval’s den. She wanted to step out to the hallway and look for it, but she didn’t want to with Mack shaking and freaking out beside her.

  She put her ear against the door to the hallway and didn’t hear anything. “Mack, I think we better split up now,” she said. “You keep patrolling these rooms, and I’ll go have a look at the back of the house.”

  “Like hell,” he said. “I hate these fucking rooms. I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you stay here,” she whispered.

  She opened the door. The coast was clear, and she was about to step out when Mack pushed his way past her and went running down the hallway back
in the direction they had come. He fired his Glock at the ceiling a couple times and yelled, “Come on, you motherfuckers, come and get me! Mack Riley is back in town!”

  Amy ducked back into the room and said, “Shit.”

  A few seconds later she heard two or three people running in the hallway and someone yelling, “What the hell was that?” Two shots were fired and then two more.

  She ran to the door that led to the next room, listened for a moment, and opened it. It was a medium-sized sitting room with a lit table lamp, and she saw no people or demons. She had reached the east end of the house, and there were shuttered windows on the wall in front of her as well as to her left.

  Since no one could climb in through the barred windows, the shutters were apparently intended to stop bullets. Or maybe more than bullets… She slid open the shutter on one of the windows facing east and stepped away from it. The window itself was already open, and the sound of crickets blew in with a gust of hot breeze.

  Nothing happened, and she was thinking of sliding open another shutter. Then the crickets stopped singing and a second later a fiery missile streaked between the bars into the room. It hit the far wall and landed on the Oriental rug.

  It was a flaming arrow. Bloody Joe was out there!

  The flame wasn’t having much success with the rug, so she grabbed the arrow by its shaft and tossed it onto a beautiful old sofa. She was dashing back to safety when another arrow streaked in and missed her by inches.

  She wondered if there was some way she could signal Bloody Joe without making noise that would alert the others, but she couldn’t think of anything. If she tried waving something out of one of the windows she would probably get shot.

  She hurried back to the previous room and shut the door behind her so no one would notice the fire burning in there. Again she pressed her ear to the door that led to the hallway. At first she heard nothing, and then she heard three shots, but they seemed to be coming from the west end of the house.

  She opened the door and saw no one. Not far away there was a corridor running south off the main hallway, and she was pretty sure it was the one that led to Sandoval’s den. She ran to it, peered around the corner, and ran to the door that she thought opened to his room.

  She put her ear against the door and heard nothing. She wished she had Mack’s gun, any gun. If Sandoval was in there he was probably sitting behind his desk, and it would take several seconds to get to him with her sword, seconds that he could use to shoot her.

  She was about to turn the doorknob when she heard someone behind her say, “Drop the sword and put your hands up.”

  It was Sandoval. He was sitting in a doorway across the corridor with a pistol in his hand.

  Chapter 22

  “You’re thinking that I don’t want to kill you because I want your DNA,” Sandoval said. “That’s true, but I’ll be happy to shoot out your kneecaps, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair like me. I happen to be an excellent shot.”

  Amy dropped her sword, and it clattered loudly on the floor.

  “Face the wall with your hands up,” he said.

  He wheeled up close and kept the barrel of his gun pressed into her lower spine while he frisked her. Then he told her to open the door and sit in the chair facing his desk with her hands behind her head. He moved his wheelchair behind the large desk and placed his elbows on it with the gun aimed directly at one of her knees.

  “Right now my men are busy putting out little fires and chasing some drunken fool around the house,” he said, “so I’ll have to keep an eye on you until they’re finished with these nuisances.”

  “Your house is surrounded, Sandoval,” she said. “It’s on fire and your well’s running dry. It’s time for you to surrender.”

  He let out a high-pitched cackle. “The well can run dry as a bone if it wants to because we have enough fire extinguishers to put out fifty fires,” he said. “All the shutters are closed by now, so there won’t be any more fires. As for the house being surrounded, there are exactly three of your friends outside causing this petty mischief. As soon as everything’s in order in here, my men will shine spotlights out the upstairs windows and shoot them like sitting ducks. I wouldn’t be worried if there were a hundred men out there, because I can call in reinforcements whenever I wish. But I don’t need them—this is all in a day’s work.”

  Amy didn’t say anything.

  “I suppose you know what this means, Miss Jackson,” Sandoval said. “As soon as your friends out there have been shot, you’ll be taken to the hospital and the icepick will be driven through your eye socket. So try to enjoy the conversation we’re having—by tomorrow you won’t be able to make sense out of such complex discourse. You’ll just want to play tiddlywinks all day long, like your brother upstairs.”

  She said nothing. She wondered why Satan seemed to send more angels than God did. It seemed Satan had given Sandoval all the help he needed, but God had sent her nothing but a crazy drunk and a few flaming arrows.

  But at least the crazy drunk was apparently still alive: she heard three muffled shots from the west end of the house.

  “I gave you an opportunity for boundless power and wealth,” he said, “but you chose weakness. Why did you do that, Miss Jackson? I would have been the greatest teacher you could ever hope to find, and in fact I eagerly looked forward to this. I looked forward to opening up for you hermetic secrets that only a few illuminati have ever known. Look at the books on these shelves. Many of them are the only extant copies in the world. Imagine what treasures are buried between their covers, treasures that could have been yours. I own many mansions and even a small castle, but their value is nothing compared to these books. On this whole miserable planet, all I truly love are these books and of course my children, my lovely Nephilim.”

  He stopped talking, maybe growing tired of the one-way conversation. She wanted him to continue because when he was talking at least he probably wasn’t able to probe her mind and ferret out her thoughts.

  “How can you love your so-called children?” she said. “They’re monsters.”

  “Yes, from your point of view I’m sure they are,” he said. “I fill the world with monsters, drugs, and chaos to bring despair to the weak. No doubt when you mumble your little prayers you pray for freedom and prosperity for all, but tell me what good they do. Your country has enjoyed more freedom and prosperity than any nation in history, and the weak squander it on idiocy, depravity, and drugs, which I’m quite happy to provide to them. They have the resources and free time to be like gods, but instead they get stoned and play video games and watch moronic television shows about stupid women with big breasts.

  “That’s why I don’t believe in freedom, Miss Jackson, at least not for the weak and ignorant. I believe in totalitarianism, an absolute dictatorship ruled by one supreme magus, an uber-Hitler or super-Stalin who will make every knee bend to Satan. And how can this totalitarianism be imposed on a so-called free society? My drugs and my Nephilim will—”

  Amy had been staring intently at the black marble statue of Satan above Sandoval’s shoulder. She jerked her fist, and the winged angel flew off its shelf and smashed his skull.

  She loosened her fist and stood up. Sandoval was slumped forward with his face resting on the desktop, still clutching his gun. She carefully extracted it from his hand and then pushed his chair away from the desk with her foot. His body fell softly onto the floor.

  He had said that he still enjoyed cigars, and she was hoping he had some matches in his desk. In the wide center drawer she found a box of them and something even better: two cellphones. One of them looked like her own, and the other was probably Neoma’s. He had probably confiscated them to see if they contained any messages or contact numbers.

  She found Bloody Joe’s number in her phone and called it. It rang several times before he answered.

  “Hey, Joe, it’s Amy—I mean Mary,” she said.

  “Goddamn. Where are you?”

/>   “I’m in the house. I just killed Sandoval.”

  “Can you get out?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “But first I need to find my brother.”

  “Your brother? What the hell? Hey, don’t be fucking around in there too long. There’s a fire on the east side that’s starting to burn through the roof.”

  “Okay, just don’t shoot me when I’m coming out. I’m wearing gray.”

  She pulled one of the books from a shelf, tore out some pages, wadded them up, and piled the wads in a heap in front of the shelf. She lit them, and the ancient paper flared as if it had been eagerly waiting to burn for centuries. She threw more pages on the fire and then opened whole books and added them to the growing blaze.

  When she stepped out of the room she left the door open to give the fire some air. The short north-south corridor was clear, but the main hallway was pandemonium. Men in gray were running and screaming and writhing around on the floor with harpies and babbleboons tearing them to shreds. Apparently now that Sandoval was no longer around to control them, the demons were running wild.

  A small man came racing up to her with a harpy riding on his back. It was Walter, the man with the little wriggling mustache. Amy decapitated the harpy, and when Walter tried to thank her she shot him through the forehead.

  Jabbing and slashing with her sword, she sprinted to the stairwell and started running up, yelling Billy’s name. Smoke was thick at the top of the stairs, and about halfway up she was choking so badly she had to stop. She doubted anyone would remain upstairs with all that smoke, but maybe he was locked up, so when she was able to catch her breath without choking she started climbing and yelling his name again.

  She heard someone coughing and saw a man in gray standing at the top of the stairs, his face obscured by smoke. She aimed her gun at him but didn’t shoot, remembering that Billy had also been dressed in gray.

  “Billy, is that you?” she called.