“You carry a sword, too, huh?”
“What? This? Nah. I’m a big knitter.”
“Put the pig sticker down or I swear to God I will make you scream like a little girl.” His hand shook. “What are those things? Some kind of military experiment gone wrong? Some genetic…thing?”
“No. How about I’ll put my sword down and you put your weapon down and we talk before those things come in here?”
Sweat popped on his forehead and ran into his eyes. His voice began to shake as much as his hand. “Are you with them?”
I was reminded of what Key said back at Castille. Humans: no patience or appreciation for nuance.
“How many of those things are out there?” he asked.
“Calm down and worry about the one in here.”
“What the f — ”
Lesson 138: It’s a gun. Bullets come out the business end. It works at a distance. If it’s a pistol it works at a short distance but stay outside of reach. If it’s a rifle, you can kill someone at a great distance. Don’t put a pistol up to someone’s head if that someone knows what they’re doing.
A little over a second later, the officer’s wrist hurt, his gun was in my hand and the point of my sword was through the top of his right boot, through his foot and into the floor.
Lesson 139: Sure, it’s possible I might have disarmed him without throwing my sword through his foot. But anyone who takes half measures in a life and death situation is risking too much. Anyone so confident they think they can disarm any gunman without hurting him is a smug, deluded braggart bound to get herself shot.
In the last few minutes, I’d had a lot of confidence knocked out of me. I felt a little of my mojo coming back when I told the Deputy to shut up and stop screaming like a little girl.
I had warned him he didn’t know what he was dealing with.
But I didn’t know, either. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’d write that as a lesson, but ignorance isn’t helpful.
Chapter 28
I pushed the cop in the town’s one cell. I locked the door and slipped the office’s first aid kit through the bars.
He sat on the floor holding his wounded foot. “What are you going to do?”
“Lock you up and throw away the key,” I said. “They won’t get at you in there.”
“When you coming back?”
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said over my shoulder as I searched the office.
The Deputy started swearing so I ignored him and kept looking for something useful. For some treasure hunts, it’s like perusing a bookstore. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.
There were some long guns and a few pistols in a gun cabinet, but without sacred ammunition, I’d rather have my sword. (Not that I’d been all that effective with it so far that day.) I did scoop up three small canisters of mace and hooked them to my belt.
“You’ve got to get me out of here!” the Deputy said.
“What’s your name?”
“Johnson. Deputy Marion Johnson. I — ”
“Marion? Your name is Marion?”
“Yeah. So? It was John Wayne’s name.”
“Really? Never mind. I remember you.”
“See this badge? I am ordering you as an officer of the law to let me out of this cell immediately. This is forcible confinement, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, kidnapping. You are in serious trouble, young lady.”
He was using the cop voice. Under normal circumstances, I might have been terrified. Instead, he sounded silly.
“Marion,” I said, “with all due respect, your voice of authority gets really hard to hear in the middle of the apocalypse. And I remember you. Not many guys named Marion. You dumped a friend’s older sister on Christmas Eve. Dick move, Marion.”
He swore at me some more, and added threats of recrimination both legal and illegal.
“You don’t hear the word no very often do you, Marion? You should put something on that wound and wrap it up.”
I tossed him the water bottle I found on his desk. “You really are safer where you are, especially in a few minutes.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t expect to come back. I thought I was on vacation. Now I think I’m on a suicide mission. Only the demons don’t seem to want to kill me. I’m trying to figure out the details.”
“I tried the radio and I can’t raise the Sheriff or the other Deputy.”
“They’re on Goucher Avenue. I’m sorry. They didn’t make it.”
He looked so crestfallen I started to feel sorry for him.
“I tried my cell. I can’t get hold of anyone.”
“This is useful to know.” I stepped to his desk and picked up a phone.
“The landline is dead, too. We’re isolated.”
I slammed the phone down. After a moment’s thought, I pulled the landline over by the cell so he could reach it.
Marion felt the need to lunge through the bars and try to grab me. I stepped back at the last second and he banged his forehead on the bars of his cell. Well…I helped a little by grabbing his wrist and throwing myself backward with all my weight.
Marion stared at me, stunned for a full minute. A thin trickle of blood leaked into his left eye from a nick on his forehead. It wasn’t bad, but even a minor head wound bleeds a lot.
When he looked like he was fully present again (and wildly pissed off) I told him to keep trying the landline.
“Wait!” he said. “There are kids out there. People…. Those…those things…”
“See, this is the conversation I wanted to have before you got all angsty. You’ve only got two other cops, right?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the siren button? For the town, I mean.”
“Next office down, in the fire chief’s office.”
“Thank you.”
“What are you going to do?”
Marion had already sucked too much of my time. I ran to the next office. I looked around, confused for a moment. Maps of the town lined the walls. Then I realized I stood in the zoning and land registry office.
Marion. You clod.
I tried the next door. It was the fire chief’s office. It belonged to Long John Beaudry. Everyone knew him because he was the tallest man in Medicament. Where he and the other volunteer firefighters might be today, I didn’t know. Far away, I hoped.
The fire hall sat directly behind the town hall. They had a ladder truck, a water tanker, an engine and a spilled materials truck. Every small town with a decent tax base has a volunteer fire department, but their garages are full of state of the art machinery worthy of a small city’s full time force. The firefighters work for free but the fire engines are funded by baked bean dinners, high taxes and Homeland Security.
Behind Mr. Beaudry’s desk was a small panel that housed two switches. One was labeled fire. The other was labelled civil defense. That siren was at the top of the town hall.
I flipped the switch. The civil defense siren ramped up to a howl above me, rising and falling and loud. I’d only heard it a few times in my life: two for testing that it still worked and once when the fire chief’s son, Derek, flipped both siren switches at once in the middle of the night.
It would have been cute if Derek Beaudry had been a curious six or seven-year-old visiting his dad’s office and getting into mischief. Instead, he was a classmate who got drunk on prom night and made the whole town think nuclear war had come to Iowa.
It was rumored the mayor found Derek and his prom date, Margaret Swinton, naked on his father’s desk. As soon as I remembered the story, I stepped away from the desk and pumped the hand sanitizer by the door on my way out.
Above the siren’s wail, I heard Marion screaming for me as I ran. The door banged behind me and I ran home.
Any civilians yet untouched by the attack might head down to their basements. Medicament was an old town with old people. There were undoubtedly still a few old-timers with bu
nkers and root cellars to retreat to. If they thought a hurricane or tornado had hit Medicament in the midst of the snowstorm, they’d stay home and tune their radios.
When all they heard was static, nervous glances might be exchanged and they’d lock their doors, find a flashlight and hide behind their furnaces. Maybe they could busy themselves counting canned goods in their pantries and sit out Armageddon with a game of Scrabble.
No matter. The point was to attract the demons to the center of town and keep them there.
Lesson 140: Demons are like high strung dogs with ADD. They gravitate to loud noises.
I ran for my life, still trying to figure out why the demons had left me alive.
Chapter 29
Five yellow demons stood outside Mama’s house. They were shorter than the red ones and had no wings. Their long faces made me think of rats. They cackled when they saw me, but they didn’t move.
As I approached, I lowered my sword. “What’s up, fellas? Or is it ladies? I can’t tell with you guys. It’s like trying to figure the gender of canaries.”
They said nothing and stared at me with big golden eyes. As I approached, Wil came running out of the front door of the house roaring a war cry. She held a long sword in each hand. The yellow demons turned on her and snarled.
I assumed they would ignore her, too. They attacked instead. The two yellows closest to her ran forward but gave her a wide berth to avoid the cutting arc of Wil’s twin katanas. The pair united again farther up the walk and barreled toward the front door.
Wil lopped off the heads of two yellows. I buried my blade in the back of one of the yellows. As the other turned to face Wil, I bashed it across the back of the head with my cast as I drew the short serrated blade concealed in my belt. I jumped on its back and pulled the edge of the blade across its throat in a savage sawing motion. A geyser of black blood made a Rorschach blot in the snow.
To me, it looked like two butterflies humping.
The two yellows charging for the house made it to the doorstep.
“Mama!” I screamed. “Close the front door!”
Mama opened the door wider and motioned the yellow monsters forward, into the house.
“Ma — ”
Two shotgun blasts boomed. The pair of yellow demons fell back and tumbled down the front steps.
Mama stepped out on the porch, the muzzle of her shotgun smoking. She looked down at the demons she’d slain. She looked more curious than alarmed.
“You okay, Mama?”
“What?”
I yelled louder. “You okay?”
I think she was reading my lips more than hearing me. “I’ve never shot a gun inside the house before! Loud, isn’t it?”
“Good work, Mama!”
“What?”
“Good — oh, never mind.” I gave her the thumbs up sign and she nodded. Still staring at the creatures at her feet, she reloaded.
Trick appeared behind my mother. “I can’t get a signal. The phones are out.”
“So,” Wil said. “D-Day has finally come and we aren’t in New York.”
“Don’t be pissed,” I said. “You aren’t missing any action. All the action is here. This is Medicament’s D-Day.”
“What do we do?” Trick asked. “I saw a lot of them running here. Your mother doesn’t have enough ammunition for them all and I doubt saying a prayer while chucking snowballs at them will do the job.”
“That’s good,” I said. “If you’re going to be the Xander to my Buffy, keep making jokes as we make our way through a frozen hellscape of death and destruction.”
“I’ll be the Willow,” Wil said. “Perfect.”
“Given my blonde hair, I was hoping I’d be Spike,” Trick said.
The ringing in Mama’s ears seemed to have eased. “Kids! Now is not the time for Buffy the Vampire Slayer references!”
Trick smiled. “It’s always time for Buffy references, Mrs. Smythe.”
“That did sound very Xander,” Wil said. ’Stop it. Shut up.”
I took Mama’s arm. “Let’s go!”
Before we took three steps, we heard the roar of a big engine. A moment later, an armored vehicle lurched to a stop in front of the house. Its nose was spattered with black demon blood.
Red demons trailed in the machine’s wake. The monsters pounded down the middle of the street. They screeched angry words I didn’t know. I understood their meaning, though. Screams for vengeance are easy to translate.
There were a lot of demons racing up the street. I had a desperate urge to pee. Mama had the right ammo, but they would take her down as soon as she paused to reload. Mama’s best hope might be chucking snowballs and saying prayers.
I hadn’t run the experiment, but the rules as I understand them are these: Water is the easiest element to bless. It only takes one holy person to bless water and it takes the full charge immediately. It’s a strong conductor. Holy water is very dangerous to demons and ghosts, so why not holy ice crystals?
In contrast, holy ground requires rites of burial and religious devotion. That’s why churches and graveyards feel different, even to the Normies.
It takes the whispered prayers of many devotees to make stone dangerous to demons. However, sacred stones can hold the charge against demons for centuries.
The stones of the Keep soaked in the prayers of generations of congregations before they were useful as demon repellant. If those same stones hadn’t been so dangerous to Rory, he’d have been by my side, calling in the cavalry and filling in the gaps in our battle plans.
I didn’t have time to test my holy snowball theory. Mr. Chang emerged from a hatch in the roof of the machine. He threw me a glance and then turned the mounted gun on his pursuers. It was an MK-19 grenade launcher.
“Use the holy hand grenade of Antioch!” Trick yelled.
Lesson 141: Regular people who experienced the Buffy phenomenon loved it. Some dudes have a weird obsession with Monty Python jokes. When someone who is very attractive makes an obscure comedic reference you don’t really know, smile knowingly but say nothing until you can look it up on YouTube later.
Mr. Chang used the grenade launcher. The blast turned the red demons to black and crimson mash. When a second wave rushed through the snow and smoke, Mr. Chang waited for a moment until he was sure they were all in range. Then he obliterated them.
The MK-19 grenade launcher can behead bad guys as well as a blessed sword, but with less precision. In the midst of killing demons, Mr. Chang also knocked down a tree and set fire to Old Lady Robinson’s bungalow down the street.
“This is going to be a nightmare of insurance claims,” Mama said.
In a blink, Rory appeared at my side. “Get out of here, child.”
“Rory!”
He was weak. I saw the orange flames in his eye sockets, but that was about all. He was less a misty wistful and more a hint of a suggestion of a ghost. I saw through him easily. He was nearly invisible.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Nearly sent me Elsewhere. I’m hanging on to this world by a thread. Go! Get out of here! I’ll try to call for reinforcements.”
In another blink, Rory was gone. By Wil’s look, I knew she hadn’t seen our friendly ghost at all. “Iowa? What?”
“Rory says we have to get out of here.”
“That is the escape pod,” Trick said, running ahead of us. “Open the pod bay door, Hal!”
“Shut up, Xander,” I said. “Enough!”
“Just trying to lighten the mood.” Trick didn’t look at all cowed. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
Wil and I ran to the armored vehicle, hauling Mama between us.
I searched my memory. I came up with the armored vehicle’s name. Appropriately, it was called a Guardian.
The all-wheel drive vehicle, built to withstand explosives and small arms fire, is used by Military Police. Besides the grenade launcher, it had an M-2 Browning machine gun and a M249 squad automatic weapon. In other words, i
t was a kick-ass war machine. The Guardian’s speed topped out around sixty-five miles per hour. That wasn’t nearly fast enough for my liking.
There were a couple of vehicles like this one parked under the Keep’s armory, ready and waiting, but only one here.
“The demons are here because Medicament is a soft target,” I said. “They know about the secret weapon. Obviously, they mean to stop us from getting to it.” I still had no idea what the secret weapon might be.
Chumele yanked the side door open a crack and peered out to make sure it was safe. She beckoned us into the Guardian.
“What about the house?” Mama asked. “All the stuff and supplies are in there and the door isn’t even closed.”
“Let them have the portable toilet seat,” Trick said. “We’ve got a mission.”
Mama looked to Mr. Chang.
“We’ve got to go, Ellen,” he said.
“But I’ve got a casserole in the oven!”
I pushed her by the butt to get her inside to safety. The rest of us boarded the Guardian. Chumele slammed the door with a clang. A moment later, Mr. Chang climbed behind the wheel and we roared off.
“Mr. Chang! Where did you get this thing?”
“In the barn. I’ve always kept it at my place.”
“How long have you been planning for this?”
“Since five months before you were born, Iowa.”
“Oh, my God!” Mama said. “I only took one box of shotgun shells with me. I left the rest by the TV chair.”
“It’s okay, Mama,” I said. “We’re safe in here.”
“Not for long,” Mr. Chang said. “We have work to do. But you can drive this thing, right, Ellen? If need be?”
“Of course, Kevin.” Mama handed Trick her shotgun and went forward to climb into the seat beside Mr. Chang.
“Can’t see much from back here,” Trick said.
“We can see,” Mama said. “You don’t want to see what I see.”
“What is it?” Wil asked.
“Disembowelments. Dismemberments,” Mr. Chang said. “People who can’t run fast. Demons who can. The worst of the first attack wave is over. People are hiding now.”
The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) Page 13