Karrel could feel the weight of Johnny’s story. Johnny had lost everything, the same as him.
“I would have died,” Johnny continued, “had it not been for what happened next. I found myself swearing, cursing my lack of knowledge. I remember so clearly what I was thinking at that very moment. ‘I need to know how these damn things work.’ I repeated that over and over in my head. I knew if I figured out how to work the security systems, I could keep my life. It was in that very moment, that something compelled me to look down. I stared at my feet, as though nothing else in the world mattered. There, right beneath me, was a little, yellow stone. I could vividly depict my own reflection upon its surface. I don’t know what made me pick it up, but the second I touched that gem, I felt a rush of adrenaline wash over me. It was a bit much to handle all at once, and I placed my hands down upon the consoles for balance. As though I had downloaded the information straight into my brain, I suddenly knew how to work the machines in front of me. I knew everything about them, and every which way to use them. I even knew which corridor the monitor with the hit-squad was covering. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just received my “gift,” and accidentally used it. With my newfound knowledge, I turned the security systems upon the hit-squad, opened the door to the wastelands, and made my escape.”
Johnny fell silent, and Karrel felt the weight of silence upon him. “I’m sorry, man,” Karrel shook his head. “That must have been terrible.”
Johnny weakly nodded his head.
“So, what happened to the yellow gem?” Karrel asked. “That had to have been the demonstone, right?”
“That’s the detail that kills me to this day,” Johnny scratched his head. “Once I got out of the superdome, I couldn’t find the gem. It was gone. I’m sure I hadn’t dropped it, yet it had vanished.”
Karrel was not surprised by Johnny’s answer. “I figured as much,” he said. “The same thing happened to me.”
Johnny leaned in toward Karrel, expectantly. Karrel let out an audible sigh. He hated thinking about that day. He remembered his hands and knees on the ground, covered in blood, dirt, and glass. His ears were deafened by the explosions and screams around him. The air was filled with death, and it was impossible to breathe. A smooth, red gemstone lay in front of him, as the two adjacent apartment buildings collapsed down upon him; one of the structures bearing the title of “home.” Wanting to get onto his feet and hopelessly search for his family, but not being able to, felt worse than dying. Something compelled him to stare down at the object by his hands. He could distinctly picture the sight of his own reflection in the tiny red stone, as his hometown fell to pieces and the world as he knew it was ripped apart around him.
Karrel watched Angel chase Puck out of the encampment. He found himself wishing that he had been the one who ate the explosive sandwich. Then he would not have to be having this discussion with Johnny. He would be dead, though. At this point, he contemplated whether that would be the lesser of the two evils.
Karrel let out a long sigh. “The day I found that little red gemstone was the same day I lost everything I loved,” he lamented. “My sister, my parents, my city… All gone…”
Johnny put a hand on Karrel’s shoulder, offering him his silent condolences. “What happened?”
“A demon happened.” Karrel let out a furious stream of air as he spoke. “One that I had never seen before. I was walking home when I heard screaming fill the streets. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what that meant. So, I ran as fast as I could, trying to make it back to my family to help them prepare for the evacuation. But, something was off. The city had its own militia, because we knew the UWP was never going to help, but I wasn’t hearing gunfire, just screams. I finally made it home, and that’s when I saw what was happening. It wasn’t one of the hotspots bearing down upon my town. It was a single creature.”
Johnny nodded his head. “I think I know what you’re talking about. A winged behemoth, right? Impossibly big, wielding a gigantic double-edged spear in its hands, and standing on four massive legs? I’ve seen those things snap skyscrapers as though they were matchsticks.”
“No,” Karrel corrected Johnny, who was surprised by his own inaccuracy, “it wasn’t that. It was… different. Different from anything I had seen before. Massive clouds of darkness flowed all around it. It was like Angel, but instead of smoke, it was just pure shadows. They reached as high as a superdome sometimes, and I couldn’t get a clear look at it, but it seemed to change its shape and size at will, altering itself within the darkness it emitted. Its form could shift to the volume of a building, but when it condensed itself down to the size of a person, it looked like a human completely covered in black robes. It wielded some kind of decorated scythe…” Karrel swallowed his fear as he told Johnny the story. “I swear… it looked like the goddamn Grim Reaper, Johnny.”
Johnny was wide-eyed as he listened. Karrel could tell that he had never heard of this sort of monster, and he could see that Johnny was visibly shaken by the details he was telling him.
“That was it,” Karrel placed his head into his palms. “That was the last thing I saw before the monster started slicing buildings down. I had no time to react. The structures around me began to fall apart. Glass, metal, and wood shattered and exploded around me. I couldn’t stop running toward my home, even though I was getting sliced to pieces. I eventually lost too much blood and fell to my knees, but I had reached my apartment building just in time to watch it break. It wasn’t the only one. Every single structure in the city was collapsing as the black death swept through the streets. I knew I was dead, and that’s when I looked down at my hands and saw the red stone. For some reason, I couldn’t turn away from it. It was as though time had stopped for that moment, and I can remember everything that was happening, even what I was thinking. I was repeating the same thing in my head so loudly, I’m not sure I wasn’t screaming it aloud: ‘I just want to survive.’ Two buildings fell on top of me, one of them being my home, but I was no longer there to be crushed. I was a mile outside of the city, with nothing but a little green book sitting next to me.”
“You never touched the stone?” Johnny asked.
“Nope. But I can remember every detail of that red demonstone. It’s like it was burned into my mind, and I knew it had something to do with my survival. I have no idea how it got me out of there, but it did. Everyone else… Well, I didn’t find anything alive in the ruins.”
“That’s rough,” Johnny gave Karrel a pat on the back. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“I didn’t do it for the therapy,” Karrel moaned, pushing Johnny’s hand away from him. “You learn anything interesting? Was my story worth your time?”
Johnny brought his hand to his chin as he began to think. “Well… I needed knowledge, and that’s what my stone gave me. You wanted to survive, and that’s what your stone gave you, though the green book is a bit of a mystery. Come to think about it, Puck needed to escape, and his stone granted him that.”
“Puck?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself for the full tale, but the short story is that the UWP nuked his town. He told me that all he wanted was to get the hell out of the city, when the green stone appeared. He claims, ‘the dirt road he was on started to slide him out of the town so fast, he escaped the blast radius.’ Unbelievable, yes. But now, he essentially has the power to move the ground, does he not?”
Before he could ask, Johnny was already answering Karrel’s next question.
“Angel’s never told me too much about how he came by his demonstone. The most I’ve gotten out of him is that the gem was black, and that a lot of people died,” Johnny sighed. “He gets depressed for about a week if I bring it up.”
“Angel? Depressed?” Karrel could not picture his dark clothed friend without a smile on his face, let alone sulking, but Johnny nodded his head to affirm that he was telling the truth. It seemed like all of his friends had had something terrible happen to them. “Maybe we should
stop calling these powers gifts and start calling them curses.”
Johnny laughed. “I suppose we’ve all had to look death in the eyes a few more times than we’d like since we got our powers, but at least for me, that has been a choice. If we play our cards right, other people won’t have to go through what we did.”
“Right, right.” Karrel rolled his eyes. “Sometimes I forget we’re playing the role of the altruistic, good guys. Saving the world and supporting its reconstruction.”
“Altruism?” Johnny put his hands up in a stopping motion. “I just want Earth to have pizza again. You remember that food? Damn, I miss it.”
Johnny’s humor had gotten through, forcing a chuckle out of Karrel, but he was right. Karrel did miss pizza. They finished the rest of their sandwiches, and at that time they both realized that Puck and Angel were long gone and no longer near the encampment. Or, so they thought.
Karrel’s ears perked up when he thought he heard a noise off in the distance. “You hear that?” he nudged Johnny.
The two friends stood motionless, listening to the silence that surrounded them. A moment passed before both of them looked at each other, realizing that they had both just heard an inaudible sound hit their ears.
“–un… –cking… –ru…” Karrel tried to make sense of what he was hearing, but he could barely make out the syllables as he watched two small figures approach over a nearby hill toward the encampment. After a few moments, it became obvious that it was Puck and Angel, and they were sprinting at full speed waving their arms in the air at Johnny and Karrel. They finally closed enough distance getting to the point where their voices could be heard.
“RUN! RUUUN! FUCKING RUUUUUN!” both Angel and Puck were screaming in unison.
Behind the two shouting friends, two massive beasts leapt from the other side of the hill, landing on their four legs, and kicking up a cloud of dirt and dust wherever they moved. Their bodies had a brown, leathery exterior with horns and spikes protruding randomly over their bodies. Orange streaks of bioluminescent light shot throughout their form. With yellow eyes, and razor-sharp teeth, they shared a similar figure to the pyretiffs, though their size was comparable to a small house. They were rapidly bearing down on their next meal.
“What the hell are those!” Karrel yelled.
Johnny immediately shot into action. “They’re called alphas! Like a pyretiff, but can’t shoot lava. Much, MUCH bigger!” Johnny began frantically pointing away from the encampment, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Away! Lead them away!”
Angel and Puck got the message and changed their course to lead the two alphas away from the camp. The house-sized demons payed no attention to the shouting and happily followed their prey away from the camp.
“C’mon!” Johnny tugged on Karrel. “We have to split those things up before they get serious. They’re top speed is ridiculous, but they take a while to accelerate. Fighting both at the same time is dangerous.”
Karrel whipped his green book out and began following Johnny. At the angle they were running at, they caught up to Angel and Johnny’s position in less than a minute. He needed to be ready for whatever was coming his way. He flipped through his pages mid-sprint, concentrated on his book, and then slapped his rune-covered hand across his chest. A familiar orange glow surrounded his entire body.
Puck and Angel continued to sprint away from the two alphas, all the while firing chunks of rock and bolts of shadow and smoke. Nothing seemed to slow the two creatures down. Like Johnny had stated, their speed was slowly increasing, and they were easily gaining on their targets.
When Johnny and Karrel finally caught up to their two friends, Johnny shouted out, “What the hell did you guys do!”
Puck immediately began pointing fingers. “It was Angel’s fault!”
“That’s a load of bull,” Angel retaliated, “I didn’t do anything!”
“Oh, so exploding the cave was nothing!?”
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who entered it in the first place!”
One of the alphas slammed its head into the ground, narrowly missing both Puck and Angel, whom had to quickly dodge out of harm’s way. Their argument quickly dissipated.
“Hurry up and blast the damned thing!” Puck shouted at Karrel and Johnny.
However, there was no need for instruction, as Karrel and Johnny started to barrage the nearest alpha. Karrel found his “Discharge” variable and wrapped the symbols around both of his hands, firing them off one by one. Because of the massive recoil from the attack, Karrel found it difficult to keep pace, but his attacks were doing damage, blasting chunks of flesh off of the beast. Johnny grabbed one of the chrome polyhedrons from his belt and threw it into the air. The silver metal formed itself into a miniature cannon, hovering by Johnny’s side. With one blast, the mini-cannon punctured a fist-sized hole in its target. However, the recoil from the shot forced the cannon to twirl rapidly as it tried to stay airborne, eventually leading to the device splitting apart and grounding itself.
Johnny looked at Karrel. “Still have a few bugs to work out,” he weakly joked.
Angel and Puck saw their opportunity and focused one final blast on the injured alpha. Rock and black smoke smashed into the face of the creature, and with a loud roar it toppled to the ground, sliding as it came to a halt.
The group continued to run for several hundred feet before they came to a stop. The second alpha was no longer chasing them. It had stopped the second its partner had been slain. With a happy grin on its face, it no longer paid any attention to Angel, Puck, or the others, and began to chow down on its fallen ally. Even at a distance, the group of friends could hear the tearing of flesh and the happy growls of the immense demon.
“One of the mindless lot. That’s lucky,” Angel sighed. “I guess we don’t need to worry about our position being compromised, right?”
“I suppose not,” Johnny replied, heading back toward the encampment.
“If we were dealing with any of the intelligent ones,” Angel began telling Karrel, “we’d be cleaning up the second one. We’ve kept this location hidden for a long time, the last thing we want is to have one of the upper-level foes making firewood out of our portal.”
“Have you ever seen any scouts?” Karrel inquired.
“Our camouflage for the tents and portal is pretty good,” Puck began. “At a distance, it blends into the surroundings. But yeah, we had to kill a few demons that trekked a little too close. A few we’ve slain chose to run away when we went after them. Tell me, when have you ever seen a demon run from a human?
The idea of an intelligent demon still scared Karrel. He had seen what the girls could do, and they were small in size. The two creatures he had just fought were monsters compared to them. It was in that moment that he realized he had only ever fought the mindless demons before, but the others had talked about a group of them being rather organized. He hated to think about going up against them, but it was necessary. That battle was inevitable. Inevitable, and close.
Chapter 24
Waiting
Guard duty. Just the mere mention of it had caused both Angel and Puck to groan, and Karrel now understood why. The past few months had been a grueling slog through a swamp of boredom. He was traveling back and forth between two different worlds, and yet nothing particularly exciting was happening. He spent his nights in the underground base on Earth and the rest of his time in a foreign dimension, trying to stay awake. Infernum, for all the dangers that were supposedly present, had displayed a far tamer experience than that of the wastelands back on Earth.
Karrel supposed it was because of the camouflage. He had gotten to see the fruits of their labor only once in the past few months, when the group had to chase down a stray pyretiff. About a mile away from the encampment, he was able to take a gander at the position they were currently holding. It was invisible. Not in the literal sense of course, but damn near it. With the surrounding hills, and the short, jagged mountains that scattered everywhere, it was imp
ossible to spot their base of operations, or the magnificently tall portal. A simple coating of paint and some purple dirt was all that was needed for everything to remain hidden.
All around them however, Karrel could spot thousands of demonic entities. There were several creatures he did not recognize, and unfortunately, he did not have the time to go identify or observe them. Yet, none of them showed any interest in the area that the encampment was located in. Why would they? It had the appearance of a barren, rocky hole in the ground. There was obviously nothing of interest there, and it could not possibly be holding a group of delicious human meat-bags.
It was the first time Karrel had ever regretted the success of his hard work, and it was the first time he ever found himself wishing that he was not residing in a perfectly safe haven with nothing trying to bite his face off. That was how bored he was.
Back and forth, and back and forth. Traveling between Earth and Infernum had become such a mundane experience. Karrel could see it on everyone’s face as well. They were all sick and tired of the constant traveling. Occasionally, they would set aside a day to assist the Survivor’s Guild, and while it was nice to see Kailey and Dane, it was not enough to curb the monotony of knowing that they would have to return to Infernum the next day.
Angel claimed to have gone through every single card game he knew a hundred thousand times already, and Puck had ceased his attempts to prank the rest of the group. He had run out of ideas. Johnny had finished building the stabilizers for the portal approximately a month ago, and now spent his time scanning the far reaches of the land for any sign of one of their targets. He would send his MAIT’s in every direction while he monitored them flying around. The task was so repetitive that Johnny had begun naming the creatures he frequently saw with increasingly vulgar names. Needless to say, his apathy for the task had risen greatly over the weeks.
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