Infernal Affairs

by Declan Finn

  If you discounted his eyes of flame, acting like he was scorched when I started rattling off a line from the rite of exorcism and that he summoned Hellhounds.

  You know. The little things.

  Despite his newfound powers and abilities that made me nervous, the only thing I had to go on was Ormeno boasting about “the warlock.” Since that technically didn’t help me worth a damn, I had to do some mental math.

  Unfortunately, it meant I had only one other place to go that made sense. And it was probably going to end badly.

  Everything tied together. It had to, if only because Ormeno was involved. The demon sent one of his legion into Ormeno. The cult summoned the demon. The cult even picked one of their own members, a serial killer, to house the demon. When I last chatted with Ormeno in his padded cell, he linked the warlock to the cult.

  The only conclusion with the facts to hand was that the warlock was the primary adversary in this case. She, he, or it was out to get me—since it was typically a male pronoun, that would be my assumption. The warlock probably had a hand in breaking out Ormeno from the nuthouse. If I were to make a guess, if Ormeno wasn’t possessed, Ormeno had been granted a few powers and abilities by said warlock.

  Then again, I hadn’t considered that I could be located by a Jamaican street gang with access to zombies and scrying tools. But at this point, I had a hard time believing that I was surprised. Really, the past year had been just that insane. Now that I knew that the mumbo jumbo wasn’t limited to cults and demons, I had a whole new set of concerns. It was bad enough when I had to worry about gangbangers with armor-piercing rounds. If this stuff was so easy to access, that almost any random idiot could scry my location or summon zombies, or God knew what else, I was in trouble.

  And no, not “my fellow cops.” I meant me. Because this Dark Web bounty put me on the radar of every street tough with an ability out of a D&D spell manual. What was next? Vampires? Werewolves? Bounty hunters who threw fireballs? Why not? After all, eye of newt didn’t grow on trees, right? Wizards gotta pay the bills, don’t they? Werewolf grooming was expensive, right?

  At that point, I didn’t know if any of that was a joke. A brave new world of occult powers opened up before me and dumped all of its various and sundry henchmen in my lap.

  “We’re going to have to talk with the Deputy Mayor,” I stated suddenly, interrupting Alex’s rant.

  Alex stopped and stared at me a moment. He didn’t even notice when a taxi cut us off. Then again, I barely noticed. It was the fifth one. “We’re going after Baracus? About freaking time. I hate that guy.”

  I paused, surprised. We’d been on our guard for months after the battle in King’s Point, but there hadn’t been much to talk about. Sure, we knew that Baracus was a bad guy, but what could we have done about it? We kept an eye on him as much as we could. But unless he broke the law, the only thing we could do was outright assassinate him. And when one considered that we had thrown someone who looked exactly like him into a fire pit a previous evening, we didn’t even know what would have put him down.

  Alex killed some free time every week or so trailing Baracus, but nothing creepy showed up. Baracus didn’t hang out in cemeteries. He didn’t spend time around livestock for animal sacrifices. He didn’t steal from little old ladies. He didn’t mug anyone. Murder anyone. He didn’t even jaywalk, apparently.

  Again, all of that meant nothing. See above for “we threw him in a fire pit.” I didn’t think he was fireproof—if he had been, I would have expected him to crawl out of the pit on fire to try to kill us. If he wasn’t fireproof, that meant there must be two of him. At least two. Technically, Alex could have tracked Baracus until Hell froze over and never have gotten anything. After a few months, Alex believed me and stopped.

  However, all that work paid off for one excellent reason.

  Alex already knew where Baracus lived. Funny enough, he didn’t even live in New York City. His home was in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey.

  Or, as Alex put it, “He lives in freaking New Jersey. That definitely makes him evil.”

  I rolled my eyes as I corrected course for New Jersey, heading west.

  Alex immediately objected. “No. Keep going south. We’ll go through the Battery, then take the BQE to the Verrazano, then Outerbridge.”

  I frowned at the suggestion. The route he suggested took us the entire length of Manhattan Island, then going southeast through the Battery Tunnel into Brooklyn. This would lead to the southbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then west again over the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island. At the other end of Staten Island was the Outerbridge crossing into New Jersey.

  I simply wanted to go west through the Lincoln Tunnel, into New Jersey, then straight down I-95 until we had to follow the shoreline to Monmouth.

  “You have a good reason for that?”

  “The least amount of time in Jersey, the better.”

  I sighed. Most New Yorkers didn’t like New Jersey. Woody Allen once summed up the attitude perfectly in his classic line, “If Jersey is the punchline, you don’t need the rest of the joke.”

  I drove on, content to go Alex’s route. Considering the traffic, it wouldn’t make a difference either way. I went down the FDR Expressway, on the East side of Manhattan, taking us along the river.

  I spotted a sign stating that speed and the highway were monitored by drones. It was a new policy instituted by the mayor to suck the last penny from the population, while at the same time cut out police officers. There was a reason the NYPD turned our backs on him.

  … Wait a second. Drone patrol here all the time. So who would notice one more?

  “You don’t think someone could send a drone after us, do you?” I asked Alex.

  Alex looked at me. “Have you seen how big some of our drones are? They’re about the size of a dinner plate. Okay, go big, a very large serving platter. There’s no way anyone can send a drone big enough for offensive abilities.”

  I frowned. I looked in my side view mirror and adjusted it upwards. Right on time, there was a drone. And Alex was right. It was about the size of a dinner plate. It wasn’t that big. The only way it could harm us was to crash into the windshield and drive us off the road.

  Then it sprouted wings of fire.

  And a flaming dragon’s head.

  And a tail made of fire.

  The drone had served as the base for some sort of spell, one that turned it into a fiery wyvern.

  I pressed my foot down on the pedal. As long as it didn’t crash into us, we’re fine, right?

  The dragon-shaped fire avatar reared back its head before spitting out a ball of flame as big as our car. I jerked to the left, dodging the explosion that cratered the highway.

  “Alex. We should have taken I-95.”

  Chapter 12

  Highway To Hell

  The fireballs came fast and furious. I didn’t ask about how the construct could have generated that much fuel for the flames. It was magical crap, and I didn’t even have the slightest inkling of how that sort of thing would work. At that moment, the only thing that kept us alive was the Grace of God. Mostly because I had problems believing that even my reflexes were good enough to keep up with the massive attacks.

  After a moment of chinking around cars, zipping through traffic and at one point deliberately letting a garbage truck take the full brunt of a blast, the explosions stopped coming. I spared a quick glance just to see if the drone had exhausted its ammunition.

  It still flew behind us and now changed tactics. Instead of the mouth breathing fire, the wings re-angled. It was almost like…

  A fighter making a strafing run. Damn it.

  The next thing I knew, small lines of fire a foot long punched through the air, pelting the car roof and truck, and the cars around us. A taxi lost control and swerved into us. It slammed us into the barrier that kept cars from going into the East River. The taxi sped on as we slowed down. The next round of literal fire anticipated where we would be next, based on our
rate of speed from before the impact. The next burst was a massive one-shot fireball that hit the yellow cab. The taxi went up in a bright phosphorescent white globe.

  The taxi, the driver, and both passengers were all consumed. The only thing left were the two rear tires, which rolled on for a few yards before falling over.

  Okay, that’s it.

  I shifted tactics. I slammed down on the gas and headed for the nearest exit. It dropped me out into the middle of York Avenue. I sped along, going west instead of south. The drone would have to circle around and come back to reengage a lock. I chinked south down First Avenue.

  For those of you who don’t know, First Avenue is a one-way street that went north. Any New Yorker knew that.

  I hoped that whoever was guiding the drone was from out of town.

  I drove over the sidewalk, slamming down on the horn the entire way. When I turned south, I didn’t even bother crossing the street to do so. So on top of driving on the sidewalk, I was on the wrong side of the road, too. The right side mirror collided with that of another parked car, ripping it off our car.

  Civilians scattered, many jumping onto the hoods of parked cars or into businesses. I slammed into garbage cans, mailboxes, and I clipped one tree still strung up with Christmas lights all year round.

  “Don’t like the way I drive,” Alex muttered, “stay off the sidewalk.”

  Of course, some New Yorkers being the way they are, still didn’t look up from their smartphones, even as I slammed down on the horn the entire way. I had to chink right at one point to avoid several teenagers who didn’t have the survival instinct that God gave a baby duck. I took out an entire rack of rental bicycles. (Yes, really. Welcome to New York.) I swerved back in time to avoid taking out an entire crowd of tourists just standing on the corner, waiting for the light to turn. You could tell they were tourists because they actually waited.

  I ground the side of our car against the parked cars. Alex cursed, inching towards me and away from the door.

  The automatic fire poured down again, strafing the cars we were up against. It had locked onto us again. It was useless to keep going the wrong way down a one-way street. I muttered a prayer and took the next left.

  We were now below Fiftieth Street, so there was no more York Avenue. We were back on the FDR. Since the shootout started, traffic behind us had stalled. Some New York drivers had survival instincts, and most of them had hit the brakes the moment the drone opened fire. This meant that the FDR was clear. I opened up the engine and really started speeding.

  We shot into the UN Tunnel. While it took us under the United Nations building, it wasn’t strictly a tunnel. There were a series of pillars on the East side of the road, keeping the UN campus from coming down onto the expressway. The fire drone disappeared from our mirror, not anticipating an obstruction at that elevation.

  “Come get us, you son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Come on. Where are you?”

  Alex grabbed the chicken handle above his cracked window and ground out through clenched teeth, “Don’t taunt the supernatural fire drone. It might hear you.”

  “You want to do something? Shoot at it.”

  “With what? My nine? I think that will only piss it off.”

  I glanced at him. “You have two grenades and a trunk full of guns. Think of something.”

  He was about to argue some more when something silenced him.

  The fire drone had sped ahead of us, swooped around, and came in the other end of the tunnel.

  “Duck!” I barked as the bullets of fire lashed out. They punched through the windshield in front and out the back. One or two of them cut through the windows and sides of the doors, collapsing the roof almost on top of us.

  Alex raised his pistol and blind fired at the wyvern drone.

  I had a slightly different thought.

  I reangled the car, making it slightly off-center of the road, drifting towards the barricade separating the north- and southbound traffic.

  The wyvern drone corrected its course to intercept me. Its mouth opened wide, large enough to clamp down on our car. Since it didn’t have a stomach, there wouldn’t be enough of us to fit in a matchbox.

  The drone’s mouth turned white hot. We’d be disintegrated.

  It flew so close to the street, the road liquified.

  As we closed, it didn’t even bother to shoot at us anymore. Why bother wasting the effort? We came straight for it.

  Before we got too close, maybe within fifty feet, I jerked the car to the left even more. We slammed against the concrete barrier and bounced off of it at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Away from the mouth of the wyvern drone.

  We drove right under the wings of fire. The fire was so hot, it distorted the air around it. The only thing that saved us was what little remained of the roof. It had absorbed the heat, turning into red-hot metal.

  Alex punched up with the muzzle of his gun, finally knocking the roof off of the car. He turned around in his seat and opened fire at the construct.

  The bullets melted before they could reach the drone in the center.

  “At least it’s going the wrong way.”

  The fire receded for a moment, leaving only the drone.

  The dragon head, wings, and tail sprouted out again, facing us. This time, it roared.

  “Drive faster!” Alex bellowed as he dove back down into his seat.

  I slammed the pedal down to the floor. “This is as faster as I can go!”

  We shot past the East River Ferry and grabbed the first exit. One of the nice things about the FDR is that it was elevated, with a street and parking underneath it. I tacked back under the expressway, giving us some cover. It might be able to melt bullets, but did it want to try smashing through concrete?

  Unfortunately, that only gave us cover to Thirtieth Street.

  We smashed through the chain-link fence. “Any sign of it?” I called over the wind, now that our car was a convertible.

  Alex poked his head up. “Not yet. But it’ll get us soon.”

  I didn’t wait for the drone to find us again, but I made a right, then a left quickly thereafter.

  I drove us through a playground.

  The Asser Levy Recreation Center has a long, wide parking lot that connected 25th Street and 23rd Street, just off of the FDR. I shot out from there, crossed 23rd without looking (would you look at this point?) and sped into a private residential development, Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village. It was off of Gramercy Park, with Mt. Sinai-Beth Israel hospital on one side, the FDR on the other. It was a nice, cushy, upper-class complex with a great view of the East River, within walking distance of the Water Club.

  It also had internal roads surrounded by tall buildings. So unless the drone was guided with someone scrying at the controls, we were clear.

  We came out at the StuyTown end around 14th Street, coming out on Avenue B, in the East Village’s Alphabet City.

  We were going straight through Manhattan, while the FDR circled the island. Once we had broken line of sight with the drone for over 11 blocks, we had probably lost it. If someone were scrying for us, we wouldn’t have been able to keep it off of our backs for that long. The only way it could reestablish contact would be if the pilot got lucky or if they knew where we were going.

  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that didn’t discount that possibility.

  We made it through Brooklyn and over the Verrazano, into Staten Island. I made a point of staying on the lower level of the bridge. There were few ways into New Jersey from Manhattan. It was a coin toss about whether or not we stayed on track. Backtracking to go through the Lincoln Tunnel would eat up time we didn’t have. Neither one of us wanted to go through the Bronx. If they knew we were going to head to New Jersey (a not unreasonable assumption, if Ormeno had called in and reported to Baracus what he told me), then it was a roll of the dice for both our pursuers and us about whether or not we would intersect. If they scried for me, then it didn’t matter which route
we took.

  The road leading into Staten Island was packed with the usual mix of passenger cars and trucks. It was a gray, overcast afternoon, and traffic was everyone who wanted to get home or get out of the city. The trucks all headed to I-95 and southward. The cars were going everywhere.

  Once we were through the toll booths, I had a sudden empty, dread feeling in my guts. I pressed down on the gas as though we were already being pursued again.

  Alex exclaimed as he was suddenly thrown back in his seat. “Hey! What’s the matter? Is the Balrog back?”

  “Look,” was all I told him as I sped around a truck.

  Then the truck exploded, flipping over on its side, jack-knifing into the middle of the highway and blocking traffic.

  “Don’t think I need to,” Alex said. “Drive faster.”

  I tapped a button on the car radio. The song that played? It was from a group called Within Temptation. The song was entitled Faster. We were in the midst of the chorus, which repeated “faster and faster” about four times.

  I took the hint. As I sped up, the fiery drone sped into view of the rearview mirror. It was about twenty feet above us. I was doing 95 miles an hour. It was catching up.

  The teeth in the dragon’s mouth slowly turned white. Whoever guided the drone wanted to take no chances. It was going to come in and clamp down on us. The jaws would snap shut and reduce us and the car to so much slag. Forget dental identification; there might not even be enough of us left for DNA.

  I went faster.

  So did the drone.

  I called to Alex over the wind. “How’s your throwing arm?”

  “Why?”

  “I need you throw a grenade.”

  I explained what the drone was doing. I explained what I was going to do.

  Alex roared, “Are you nuts?”

  I jerked the car to speed under a highway sign. The drone struck it and burned a hole right through it.