The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1)

by John Triptych

  The old woman’s voice was hardly a croak. “Los ninos, que tienen los ninos.”

  “What’s she saying?” Myron said.

  “She said they took the children,” Valerie said to him before turning back to the old woman. “Que ha llevado a los ninos? Who took them?”

  The old woman’s eyes had a white glaze over them. It was clear she had cataracts. The one word she said was tinged with fear. “Tlaloc.”

  “Oh my god,” Valerie said to Myron as she pulled out her Glock and started going up the stairs. “We need backup now! Stay here with her, Myron!”

  “Val, what in the hell are you doing?” Myron said. “Don’t go up there, we don’t have backup yet!”

  But Valerie was already on her way up. She tried the second and third floor fire doors, but they were locked tight. She ran up one more flight as Myron kept shouting at her to go back down. She noticed that the fire door on this floor was propped open and a darkened corridor lay within. Valerie turned on her flashlight with her left hand while keeping the gun close to her body as she went inside.

  The corridor felt like a tomb. The lights in the whole block were apparently out due to the incessant storms and the neglect of the city, since the more affluent neighborhoods were clamoring to get their own power restored first. There were pieces of trash all along the corridor while the adjoining doors seemed to be locked up tight. Valerie could hear the crunch of glass on her shoes as she stepped forward. As she tried knocking on a few of the doors with her flashlight there was no answer from any of them. The handheld radio that was attached to her belt continued to squawk intermittent bursts of static.

  As she got to the other side to where the main stairwell was, Valerie could see some illumination on the murky glass windows outside, but it wasn’t enough, her only means of visibility was now the flashlight. Putting her gun back in its side holster, Valerie tried once again with her handheld radio, but she got nothing and there were no signal bars on her cell phone either. Whoever attacked the two gangbangers was still on the loose, and might just be in the building with her.

  After putting her cell phone back in her coat pocket, Valerie pulled out the Glock once more. If there was one thing cops feared more than a gunfight, it was going up against a blade-wielding assailant, while a wound from a gun was quick, a knife attack was far more terrifying, they said. While a gun was definitely the superior weapon because of its range, a darkened building afforded the perpetrator a number of advantages, namely surprise, and the chance to get in close before the gun wielder knew where to fire at.

  While peering at the adjoining corridors and seeing nothing, Valerie once more aimed the flashlight down on the floor and saw the pieces of green glass, this time she knelt down and looked closer. The stuff on the floor wasn’t just ordinary glass; it was green obsidian, a volcanic glass that was used in the manufacture of Aztec weapons like knives and the dreaded macuahuitl, a wooden sword which was studded with sharp obsidian blades on its sides. As she kept looking at the shards on the floor she heard the sound of breaking glass behind her.

  Valerie turned as she kept both the flashlight and her pistol level while preparing to open fire.

  “Whoa!” Myron said as he held up the side of his gun so it wasn’t pointed at her. “Take it easy.”

  Valerie let out a sigh of relief. “Jesus, Myron! I could’ve killed you!”

  Myron grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to creep up on you like that. The paramedics arrived and they’re treating the two men. I brought the old lady over to them and Reverend Beekman is there too. So now I got your back once more.”

  As Valerie smiled back at him, she noticed there was a silhouette of something behind Myron. Something oddly shaped and she noticed the flash of green. “Myron, look out!” she said as she tried to aim.

  Myron turned as the obsidian knife slashed at his arm. He cried out and fell over sideways as he tried to hold on to his gun. Valerie could now clearly see a man who seemed to be wearing the skin of an animal of some sort, like a tiger costume. He had on a feathered headdress and an obsidian knife in both hands. She instantly fired three times, hitting him twice in the torso. The man went down.

  Valerie ran over and knelt down beside Myron, who was clutching his arm with his other hand after dropping his flashlight. It was a vicious gash, but it didn’t look too deep. Myron was lucky when he reacted so the assailant missed with putting a whole lot of force on the blow. As she kept the gun aimed at the perpetrator lying on the ground, she placed the flashlight down so it kept pointing at the outer corridor, and then took out an embroidered handkerchief from her coat pocket and gave it to Myron.

  “Goddamn, that hurts!” Myron said through clenched teeth as he applied pressure on the wound with Valerie’s handkerchief. “It cut so quickly. Tore right through my jacket.”

  The assailant wasn’t moving as Valerie took up the flashlight once more and walked closer to it. “I think he’s still alive, but he’s bleeding out,” she said as she looked at the bullet wounds. The animal skin the man was wearing looked like the hide of a jaguar. The suspect was clearly South American, with a beaklike nose and deep brown skin. He looked like a young man in his twenties. As Valerie aimed the flashlight at the man’s face, she let out a gasp.

  “What is it?” Myron said as he tied down the handkerchief on his arm.

  “His head,” Valerie said slowly as she was starting to feel sick. “It’s misshaped, his forehead is flattened and the rear part of his head is elongated. I know the Mayans did things like this to their children, but not the Aztecs.”

  Myron stood up and recovered his flashlight. He contemplated shifting his gun to his left hand, but he never practiced shooting that way, so he decided to keep it in his right. Shooting with a wounded arm might be painful, but he would have more accuracy over an arm he didn’t favor. “Oh my god, what in the hell are we dealing with here?”

  At that moment, they both heard a scream coming from upstairs. It was clearly a child’s voice. Both of them started running to the main stairway, flashlights and guns at the ready.

  As they reached the fifth floor landing, Myron almost slipped as the floor was wet. Valerie was able to grab his elbow and steady him just in time. There was a pungent, metallic stench in the air.

  “What in the hell is that smell?” Myron said as he pointed the flashlight down at the wet floor and gasped.

  “What is it?” Valerie said as she too looked down. It was then she saw it and then bent forward as she vomited a little bit of her coffee. The floor was wet with blood. Now it was Myron’s turn to steady her. For a minute, they both just stood there as Valerie caught her breath.

  Myron looked at her. “What made you go nuts down at the fire door? That old lady said only one word, and you went wild.”

  Valerie wiped the last of the vomit from her mouth with her coat sleeve. “She said Tlaloc. That’s the name of an Aztec rain god. When she said they have the children, I knew we had to save them.”

  “Save the children? From what?” Myron said as they started checking the corridors.

  “I think the children of this housing project are in great danger. The rain god demands sacrifices, like what happened to the Bloc brothers.”

  “Sacrifices? Human sacrifices?”

  “Child sacrifices,” Valerie said softly.

  As they rounded the next corner they saw her. She was a small black girl, probably no more than six years old. And she was just sitting in the middle of the corridor, with bits of obsidian and blood strewn all around her. She wore nothing but a bloody nightgown and she clutched a small teddy bear. She had been whimpering in the dark.

  They ran over to her. As Valerie knelt down and examined her, Myron kept shining his flashlight at the end of the corridor and let out a yell. Valerie looked up and almost fell over with fright. The end of the corridor was much shorter than the ones found on the other floors. But that was because there was a newly added barrier right in the middle of this particular pass
ageway.

  It was a mound made of dead flesh and dripping blood. There must have been dozens of them stacked up as the heap covered it from floor to ceiling. Bodies of naked men, women, and children, their skins had been torn away to reveal their blood-soaked musculature, organs, bones, and deathly naked eyes. That was where the blood on the floor had come from.

  As if on cue, the little child started screaming again. Suddenly, all the doors along the corridor opened and dozens of bloodstained men and women ran out, each one of them howling like wolves and wielding green, crystalline obsidian knives, a hint of death and madness in their eyes.

  Both detectives reacted and instantly began firing, but there were too many of them and they were way too close. Valerie felt a crippling pain in her arm as someone sliced it open and she dropped her gun. Almost at the same time, she felt a sharp sting that started from her forehead, then to her nose and finally down to her chin as somebody slashed a crystal dagger at her face.

  The last thing she sensed was the child’s incessant screaming.

  5. The Interlopers

  Texas Border

  They called him Bucktooth Billy Ray Rockwell, or just Buck for short. He had received the name because of his protruding front teeth he couldn’t hide, no matter how hard he would push his bottom lip forward. It didn’t help that Buck didn’t have much of a chin either so they had been making fun of him from kindergarten all the way to his sophomore year at the local high school when he finally dropped out. When his parents kicked him out of their house a year later, he tried to work in an auto repair shop but quit a few months after because they were making fun of him there too. After that, he joined in with some childhood friends and made a living burglarizing houses and stealing cars, until he finally got caught and spent eight years in prison for it. Having just been released a few weeks ago on probation, he was staying at a friend’s house when all hell broke loose.

  There were very few channels left that were still broadcasting, so Buck just kept flipping through them on the remote control. He sat slumped in the torn-up couch of his friend’s living room while trying to pass the time. Although he heard on the news that the electrical grid was shutting down, the power was still going here, so he kept all the lights on in the house as he waited till his friends got back. The little bit of money that they gave him upon his release was already spent on booze, cigarettes, and a little bit of blow. Empty beer cans were lying around his dirty bare feet, along with crushed plastic wrappers on the dingy carpet. His friend really didn’t seem to care much about cleaning. He had his scalp shaved every morning, just like the skinhead gang he was a part of in prison. Buck didn’t have a whole lot of clothes when he was let go, so he was wearing the sleeveless plaid shirt that once belonged to his friend’s ex-girlfriend. He kept the old, torn up denim jeans he took in with him when he got arrested all those years ago.

  It was now early afternoon and just as he was thinking of throwing the remote control at the television set to see if it would shatter the monitor, he heard his friend’s pickup truck going into the front driveway. Quickly turning off the TV, Buck looked around and found a pair of old tennis shoes which he started putting on his feet.

  “Buck, what have you been doin’ there, you ol’ possum!” his friend Mark Gooch said as he opened the screen door and strode in, carrying several semi-automatic rifles slung on his back that he then placed on top of the grimy coffee table beside the couch. Mark was about a shade taller than Buck and more heavyset, his hair was deep black and curly but he had a neatly trimmed beard. They had met while in jail and became friends ever since.

  “Holy sheeiit,” Buck said as he picked up one of the rifles and started examining it. The weapon was an AR-15, one of the most common types of semi-automatic rifles being sold to civilians in the country and it looked brand new. He noticed that there was a custom made forward grip on it as he checked whether the red dot sight that was attached to the upper rail of the carrying handle was fully operational or not. It was.

  Mark put his hands into a black plastic trash bag that he was carrying and took out two handguns, one was a Glock and the other was a chromed .357 Magnum revolver and threw them on top of the couch as he started laughing. “I tell you, boy, we hit the mother lode!”

  “Where’d you git all of this?” Buck said as he locked back the AR-15’s collapsible stock and began sighting it.

  Mark racked the slide of a 1911 Les Baer .45 pistol before thumbing the safety and holstering it on his hip. “Remember that gun store over at Midland? Well, we waited till the owner had boarded it up and left, then we just came in with bolt cutters and opened her up like a cardboard box. I tell ya, it was easy as pie!”

  Mark’s hulking cousin Lance Gooch came through the door pushing a dolly that was stacked with several boxes. “Where in the hell do I put all of this, Mark?”

  “Right behind the kitchen counter, if ya please,” Mark said as he picked up another AR-15 from the table and started to examine it. He was wearing desert camouflaged cargo pants and a grey-colored tactical vest that he took from the accessories section of the gun store, they were so new the price tags were still on them.

  “Yessiree,” Lance said as he wheeled in the boxes and began to stack them on the kitchen floor. At six foot two, he was the tallest and most heavily built of the three, with dark brown hair in a crew cut and similarly-colored short beard. A former cop, Lance had been fired two years ago after he had beaten up and shot a couple of black men he had seen loitering in a Dallas alleyway. One of the men had died and the family sued. Although Lance’s partner and the police union had stood behind him, the media firestorm that erupted over the whole affair forced the police chief to terminate him although he was able to avoid any criminal liability. At that point Lance began to harbor a smoldering resentment against anyone in the media as well as all types of liberal politicians.

  Buck had a quizzical look on his face. “What in the hell are in those boxes?”

  Lance had finished stacking them and opened up the top of one of the boxes. “Ammo, boy, ammo! We got at least several thousand rounds of ammo here for all the guns we got. And I’ve got some molds and a swag press too so we can even make our own bullets.”

  Buck nodded. Lance was the smartest. “Did y’all take everything?”

  Mark shook his head and smiled. “Nah, there were some others that were with us and they helped themselves too. With the world as broken as it is, we figured it’s gonna be every man for himself now.”

  Lance laughed. “Things got a bit dicey when the owner of that store and his son came back just as we were about finished.”

  Buck scratched his forehead. “What happened then?”

  “Oh some of the other guys just shot ‘em,” Mark said nonchalantly.

  Lance nodded. “Shot his son too.”

  Buck had slung the rifle over his shoulder and looked at them. “They dead?”

  Lance just shrugged. “Probably. They were bleedin’ out by the time the other boys were done with ‘em.”

  Buck started walking around the room with the slung rifle to see how it felt. “This rifle mine?”

  “Sure thing, Buck,” Mark said and pointed to the couch. “Take one of them pistols too, you’re gonna need a backup weapon just in case.”

  “Yessir,” Buck said as he picked up the revolver and tried to stick it into his jeans, but the barrel was too big to fit in properly.

  “Take a look at him,” Mark said to Lance as he started chuckling. “Tryin’ to Mexican carry that big ‘ol Magnum, he looks like a crazy Jethro hillbilly!”

  Buck stopped what he was doing and just held the pistol in his hand as the other two were laughing at him. “Shut the hell up, Mark, or I’m gonna shoot ya.”

  Mark kept laughing as he put the rifle down and drew the 1911 and pointed it at Buck. “How you gonna shoot me when yer guns aren’t even loaded, boy?”

  Buck started to grimace as he moved over to where the ammunition boxes were and started to dig th
rough them to find the right caliber for his gun. Lance got his meaty arms on him and pushed him away. Buck nearly fell as he stumbled backwards a few feet.

  “Alright, that’s enough joking around,” Lance said. Like his cousin, he too was wearing civilian tactical gear, although they from his days in the police force. “We’re gonna need each other and we need to work as a team. That means no more fightin’ among ourselves.”

  “I was just jokin’ around,” Mark said as he holstered the pistol. “We need to train Buck here on the use of these weapons so that we can properly defend ourselves.”

  Buck sat back down on the sofa, his burst of sudden anger evaporated. “Before I got sent in, I had a pistol and then when they let me out they said I can’t have guns no more.”

  Lance stood in the kitchen behind them as he continued to unwrap several assault rifle magazines from one of the boxes. “Don’t you worry, Bucky. The law ain’t around anymore so you just hang on to that AR and just make sure you don’t shoot me or Mark, okay?”

  “I ain’t got a problem with that,” Buck said as he sighted the revolver. “I’ll shoot just about anybody else though.”

  “Now that’s a great idea!” Mark said as he slumped down beside Buck. “We can go after anybody and get whatever we need. We got the firepower now.”

  Buck placed the pistol on his lap and looked at Mark. “You wanna go get that ex-girlfriend of yours back here? We can just shoot her dad and take her, now that we got the guns.”

  Mark laughed. “Nah, fuck that bitch. I am done with her, but you have a good idea, Buck. I say we just drive around and look for a house with some women in it and we take them back here and choose our wives.”

  Buck frowned. “Ah, that’s too bad then.”