First there was Shadrach, the loyal but primal lower life form. Not an evolutionary leap by any means. A large body, but a simpleton. An animal. Dull-witted and barely a step above the Primitives.
Then came Meshach, an obedient messenger who complied to the will of The Presence.
Followed by Karen Bell as Abednego, who escaped and ruined any plans for Redmann to study or control her.
Then I stepped into the picture. And you mean to tell me I’m meant to be his angel?
Redmann can go fuck himself. I ain’t nobody’s goddamn angel.
I turned to Shadrach. He hovered behind Redmann, holding Augie, and staring at me with his mutated eyes. If it could hold one consciousness in there, then it could hold mine. Especially if the blood moon eclipse enhanced the atmosphere.
It was time to go swimming.
As if I was still in the abyss, I felt the fluid nature of consciousness around me. I focused on Shadrach until it happened.
My mind was inside his.
I was looking through his eyes as he stared at me, yet I was still looking AT him. My consciousness was inhabiting both bodies at the same time. It was a hive mind.
My mind.
It was disorienting. Being in two places at once. It was the first time seeing my whole monstrous form. It made me want to stab my own eyes out. I was one ugly bastard.
But the telepathic link worked. Shadrach was under my control. Commanding his will, he unpeeled his hands from around Augie’s head, dropping him to the floor.
Redmann’s voice cracked. “Shadrach? What-what are you doing?”
Shadrach stomped toward the lab door and opened it. I could sense The Presence fighting for control. As soon as the door was wide open, I ripped away Shadrach’s consciousness as I left, leaving his mind a black hole of emptiness.
Redmann turned to me. He yelled and whined like a little bitch. I charged him, easily smashing through the glass. He crashed backwards, trying to protect his face from the broken shards and splinters.
He grabbed the Beretta from the floor and buried three shots in my chest.
Several finger-like tendrils sprouted from my flesh and pushed the bullets out. I ripped the Beretta from Redmann’s grip and dropped it to the floor.
Raising him off his feet, I spoke in a voice made of gravel. “You will suffer… endlessly.” My voice was dark and deep, but surprisingly clear.
I rammed him into the floor so hard, the impact pulverized his bones. His right arm and leg were shattered, twisting around his back like rubber. His spine was snapped in two. Or three. Ribs poked from his chest. But he was still breathing in short panicky bursts. He had only minutes left of his miserable existence.
I stepped through the broken glass into the containment room and hovered over the human Ivy on the ground. He coughed blood, on the verge of losing consciousness. I could sense he wasn’t infected with The Presence. Just worse for wear.
I grumbled the words, “Save them.” He glared at me and passed out.
I lumbered over to Maya, grabbing the Beretta off the floor. I placed it in her hands and got down to one knee. She was crying her eyes out.
With trembling hands, she pointed it at me. I pressed my head to the barrel, praying to God the shot would kill me.
“Maya,” I said. “Kill monster.”
My sentences slowed down. I was losing my ability to speak. And to think. My mind was slowly slipping away to The Presence.
Through her tears, Maya gripped the Beretta with two trembling hands. “I-I can’t.”
“Maya… hunter. Kill monsters.” My gaze stared into hers. “Ivy… monster.”
“It’s not fair,” she said, a waterfall of tears flowing down her cheeks.
My words slurred. “Monster. Evil…”
Her bottom lip quivered. “You’re not evil. You’re not bad. You’re good. You’re SO good.”
The Presence pressed deeper into my mind, taking me over. This had to end. I wrapped my monstrous hand around the barrel and pressed it into my skull. “Kill… Ivy.”
“W-why? I can’t do this…” Her voice trembled as she pushed the gun into me.
I wiped the tears from her cheek. “Kill. Or all die.”
“I can’t. I’m too weak…”
“Maya. Is. Strong.”
Through heavy tears, she shook her head. “I hate you.”
“Ivy. Love. Maya—”
BAM!
Chapter 34
Blown Away
As Maya’s bullet pierced my brain, my soul rushed from the body. My consciousness floated aimlessly in the room, watching the scene unfold. Tentacles reached from the portal and lifted the dead vessel inside.
They did it slowly, as though honoring their fallen dead with reverence, mourning their angel of death. I followed them up through the portal as the body was carried deep into the black abyss.
Memories flowed into my mind. Memories that weren’t there before. Memories of a monster…
—that saved me.
Tapped into the fluidity of time and space, I flowed back into my body on Earth, leaving the abyss of The Presence behind. Forever.
I burst awake in the containment room, coughing up the black slime left from Meshach’s tendrils in my throat. I was human again. With my own body. I never felt more grateful to have it. I’ll never complain about my love handles again. Thank God for small favors.
Meshach was in the room too. That fucking Cthulhu son of a bitch was dead at my feet. Ripped to pieces.
Augie was passed out in the lab. The pressure of almost getting his head crushed by Shadrach was too much. His lights were out.
Redmann was gone. I remembered crushing him into paste and leaving him to die. A trail of blood led from the lab floor to the center of the containment room. Only his round silver glasses remained behind. Son of a bitch. The Presence pulled him through the portal.
Damn it to Hell.
I hate when shit comes back to bite me in the ass. Damn my pride for wanting Redmann to suffer. That’s what I get for not giving him a quick death. Never let your emotions get in the way because it always gives these evil fuckers an escape route.
Getting to my feet, I rested on my knees, admiring my view of the ceiling. The portal was gone.
Maya was on the floor, rocking back and forth. Her eyes were closed as she silently sobbed. I stumbled across the room and took the Beretta and placed my hand on her shoulder.
She lifted her gaze to me, not understanding what just occurred. How could she? It was hard enough for me to put the pieces together. It took me twenty years of killing devil-worshipers to get to this point. I wasn’t about to try and explain it.
“It was a monster,” I said. “Just a monster.” I glanced at my watch. We had twelve minutes before the bomb went off. “We have to leave. Now.”
After slapping Augie, he shot awake. I helped him to his feet, but as we headed toward the door, bright lights shimmered from the ceiling as the portal began to open. I spun around to the machine Jada was tied to. She was dead. Now just a dried husk falling apart like white chalk. There was no energy in her left to siphon. The machine was no longer powering the breach.
The portal was opening on its own.
Something dropped from the abyss. A mass of bloody bones and meat and tendrils tumbled to the floor. The tendrils squirmed around the skull to form a face. Unattached to any torso, lying in the pile of flesh, the skull turned to us. It may have been my imagination, but I could swear it was smiling.
The tendrils swirled and merged, slithering around the skeleton to form arms and legs. One arm lifted its head as a body emerged from the pile of scraps.
The hideous thing arose from the pile of death like a new, dark god. It picked up Redmann’s glasses off the floor and set them on its hellish face. It was Redmann and The Presence rolled into one.
“Solomon Ivvvvyyy,” it said. “The Presence calls for you.”
Maya shouted, “Holy fucking shit!”
I took her
arm. “Time to go.” I pushed the lab door closed behind us and shot the entry panel to hell, locking it in the process. The door was at least six inches thick and should hold him long enough for us to get to the truck.
But only a few yards down the hall, and—
SCREECH! KRANK! CRRRUNCH!
Redmann was ripping apart the metal door from the inside. The ugly son of bitch clearly had a one-track mind.
If he had that kind of strength, he’d be nearly unstoppable. If Redmann was alive when The Presence took him into the abyss, he must have experienced the same absence of time that I did. Who knows how long he was in there. He literally could have been stuck in that dark ectoplasm for centuries.
Short of blowing him up with a nuclear bomb, nothing would stop him. Luckily, we had one on hand. And it was going to blow in eleven minutes.
Augie, Maya, and I raced down the hall to the catwalk. We made it to the tunnel with no sight of The Redmann Presence. I hoped Zac was at the truck or else we’d have to leave without him.
Hightailing my broken body and bruised ego through the tunnels, we finally burst from the bunker. Fresh air filled my lungs. They seemed to be working again. Maybe they weren’t punctured after all.
The moon was no longer aligned with the sun. I almost wished it was still dark because the sun illuminated over thirty zombie hosts milling around the area, walking erratically until their eggs hatched. A dozen or so were frozen in place and wobbling back and forth.
Primitives ran freely in the distance, standing between us and the truck. Munsher stepped out of the woods, cackling like a little school girl.
“Just when you thought you had it all figured out,” he said with a grin. “I’m going to let them eat you slowly. Start with the legs and gnaw on your meat for a while. When you look down and see your skeleton, you’ll be begging for mercy. I have thirty-three Primitives that are starving for your attention.”
Like the dickhead he was, Munsher gave his two-finger salute.
Behind us wailed a monster’s cry. It was Redmann. He turned came from the bunker, his claws digging into the dirt.
We were stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Redmann growled. “No,” he said. “They are mine…”
Munsher took a step back, unsure of who or what he was looking at. “Redmann? Is that you, you little prick?”
The Redmann beast snarled, “You may call me The Presence.”
All thirty-three of the host bodies turned towards Munsher. Their chests opened up as the Primitives crawled out, baring fangs and claws.
“Stay away from me,” Munsher said. He blew his dog whistle, but they still came. Like a pack of hyenas, the beasts attacked. Holding two M16s, he pegged them off like piranhas in a barrel.
We didn’t stay to watch. But as we reached the truck, Munsher’s screams echoed through the Island.
As I turned toward the jeep, something grabbed me, lifted me fifteen feet to the air, and slammed me to the ground. I coughed blood. The wind was knocked out of me.
Redmann hovered over me. Damn, he was fast. He raised me up and rammed my spine into the tree. I unleashed five rounds into his gut, but he didn’t even flinch.
He snarled. “I can still feel you floating inside our evolving lord, moving in and out of time. A cell in the body of God. Now look at you: an unevolved barbarian in worthless flesh. Just a man. An amoeba.” He slid his deformed face close to mine. “You could have been like me…”
“But you’re so damn… ugly.”
Claws came out of the darkness from behind Redmann and ripped him off me.
He voiced the name, “Abednego.”
I crashed to my feet and hightailed my ass to the jeep. Augie and Maya ran back to help. I glanced behind me. Karen was tearing into Redmann. She was a monster, but for the first time since her transformation, she looked beautiful.
When we reached the jeep, Zac was in back with a Glock in one hand and a bag of Doritos in the other.
He had a mouthful of chips. “What took you guys so long?”
“We had a thing,” I said.
Maya got in the back as Augie hopped in the passenger seat. I jumped behind the wheel and turned the engine.
Nothing happened.
I whipped a dirty look at Augie. He shrugged. I turned the key again. The engine purred like a kitten in heat.
I peeked at my watch. Seven minutes until the bomb went off. The sun began setting five minutes ago. It was already twilight. The veil was open.
“Family, this vacation is over.” I punched the gas and peeled out of the woods. A horde of Primitives galloped toward the truck, their fangs red with Munsher’s blood.
They pounced on the hood and grill. Several made it to the windshield.
I turned to Augie and said, “I don’t suppose you added any weapons when you revamped the truck?”
Augie scowled. “Dude, I barely had time to make this thing run. What do you want? Gatling guns and jet wings to magically come out of the side?”
“That would be good.”
“Give me a break. I made the jeep nuclear. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s a start.”
“By the way,” he said. “Don’t trust the speedometer.”
“Why not?”
“This thing can go Redbull fast,” he said with a smile. “It will give you wings.”
“We’ll see.”
I swerved left and right, smashing two Primitives under the wheels. Two of the nasty critters were on the windshield, scratching the glass like rabid badgers. One of the beasties banged his skull into the windshield, trying to get through.
I turned on the windshield wipers and sprayed fluid. One beastie got his claws stuck in the wiper. He freaked out and went crazy, getting caught up in the other beast. I jerked hard to the right. They both plummeted off the side.
Another Primitive scratched furiously at the roof. He peaked over the front, staring down at me through the windshield.
Too bad for him, I ran out of patience. I grabbed a new clip from my jacket and reloaded the Beretta. As he smiled at me like a dillweed, I shot the fucker in the face. The body rolled to the hood and off the side. It got caught under the wheel before dropping in my rear-view.
The rest of the primitive horde scattered from Munsher’s body. In the mirror, he looked to be nothing more than a bloody skeleton.
“Three minutes, thirty seconds,” Maya said, glancing at her watch.
A herd of Primitives was in my way. Charging straight for us. They could flip the truck if I tried driving through them.
I spun the jeep in donuts, running over Primitives and knocking others on their ass.
KERTHUD! THUD. THUD!
They squealed under my tires. In my rear-view, I left the rest of them in the dust, heading down the long dirt road to freedom. We were home free.
I caught a glimpse of Redmann in my rear-view. Sayonara, sucker.
I gunned the gas through the floor. I went from zero to sixty in five seconds. This wasn’t a jeep. It was a rocket. I had to guess the speed from experience; the speedometer hadn’t moved an inch since take off.
KABLAAAM!
The jeep bounced like we hit something. But something hit us instead. I saw Redmann in the mirror. He was on the roof. His large insect-like claw stabbed through the ceiling, striking between me and Augie.
Zac handed Maya the Glock and pulled out an M16 from the back seat, spraying bullets into the ceiling. Redmann shrugged them off like annoying mosquito bites.
Redmann pulled his claw out and roared. He rammed his claw-blade through my window, shattering glass all over me.
I swerved left, scraping my side into an oak, demolishing the large side mirror. Redmann tumbled on the roof to the other side, digging his claws into the truck to hold on.
Maya said, “Three minutes.”
I growled, “I don’t need a reminder.”
I couldn’t shake Redmann off. He crawled along the passenger side of the truck, piercing
his claws into the steel doors like they were paper. Augie grabbed Zac’s M16 and fired through the glass into Redmman’s chest. Redmann howled and slashed at him.
Augie pushed toward me to evade the mutated Redmann.
I reached out with the Beretta. “Duck.” Augie dropped down and I buried seven rounds into Redmann’s face.
But he wasn’t even fazed. Small fingers sprouted from his flesh and excreted the bullets to the ground. His cheeks formed small divots, giving him a pitted face. I fired again. The pits caught the bullets and spit them out like tiny mouths spitting out watermelon seeds. It was like nothing I had ever seen. It was almost as if—
“He’s adapting,” I said. “Damn it to hell. He’s adapting to the wounds.”
Redmann’s insect claw shot through the window across the truck, striking in front of me. It was like a giant praying mantis claw. The serrated edges tore against my throat and dug into the seat above my shoulders, pinning me to the cushion. If I moved, it would take off my head.
Augie swiped the demon blade down on Redmann’s claw and sawed through, severing it from Redmann’s body.
With one hand on the wheel, I took the other and gripped the serrated edges of the claw by my throat. As the edges spiked into my palm, I shoved it off until it released from the seat cushion and dropped to my feet.
Before I could toss the severed limb from the vehicle, it deflated like a bad souffle. I tried to stomp it with my boot, but it transformed into a large crimson-black worm. It slithered up the door and returned to Redmann, rejoining into his flesh.
Augie’s eyes were wide. “Holy shit. That was disgusting.”
I barreled down the dirt road at 100 mph, hoping the veil was still open. The sky was getting dark. The orange sun shimmered in my rear-view mirror. Another half-minute and the sun would be set. The veil would be closed. And we’d be dust in the wake of a nuclear bomb.
Breaking through the window, Redmann grabbed ahold of Zac’s collar. Both he and Maya pumped him full of lead. Closing in was the biggest damn tree I ever saw. Perfect for getting an asshole monster off the truck.
Faith of a Monster Killer: Killing Forever Book 3 Page 20