She brought Barny up to one of the second floor rooms that offered a decent view of possible approaches, and did her best to clean and dress his wound. What little first-aid training she'd picked up as an athlete didn't cover gunshots, but at least she could slow the bleeding. Leaving the buckshot in his shoulder was probably a bad idea, but she had no idea how to get them out.
After wrapping his shoulder in linens she stood by the window for a good long while, watching the house-fire burn in the distance, wondering why the Laton Volunteer Fire Department wasn't putting it out.
A groan brought her attention back to Barny.
He was awake, staring at the ceiling.
"Why did you save me?" he asked.
"Sorry," she said.
"You should have let me die."
"You're not that big an asshole. Do you want some water?"
"I don't deserve water."
Her lip curled, and she turned to the sink to avoid striking him. "Shut the fuck up with your pity party. There's a crazy motherfucker trying to kill us. I don't have time to be your therapist and your nursemaid."
Lily brought him a plastic cup of water, which he drank without comment.
"Do you know my folks?" he asked.
"No."
He turned his head towards the window. "I won't bore you with the details. It's pretty stereotypical, really. Always pushing me harder, never letting me slack."
"My parents were the same way."
He chuckled, cutting off with a painful wince. "I doubt that. My folks were motivational in the 'better call child-protective services' kinda way."
Lily stared. "Why didn't you?"
"Pride. That's always been my weakness, Lilith."
"Don't call me that."
"Why not? It's your name."
"My name is Lily."
"No it isn't."
"Don't start, or I will leave you here."
"I was raised to be the best in everything. And when I wasn't... well."
She shook her head. "Barny."
"If you want me to call you Lily, you'll call me Barnabas."
"Why?"
"Let's say it's symbolic. I'm letting go of that old life. The Barny life. I'm ready to be Barnabas."
"Whatever you say, Barnabas."
"You should try it."
"I'll stick to Lily."
"Suit yourself."
She looked down at her feet, then up again. "I'm sorry."
"Lily's fine," he said.
"No, about your... about the way your family was. I always thought you were just an asshole."
"I am just an asshole," Barnabas said. "My family life is a reason, not an excuse."
"If you'd had loving parents--"
"I'd still be an asshole. It's in my nature, as Jezebel would say. What God created me to be."
"That's a cop out," she said.
"Think so?"
"Yes. There's no excuse to accept what we're at as the best we can be."
"Your father tell you that?"
"Yes."
"The same father who just refused to help us?"
She looked away, pain welling up in her heart, tears in her eyes. "You heard that?"
"Some of it." He paused. "Lily, they were never our parents. They were our caretakers--"
The shattering of glass downstairs sent fear-spiked adrenaline through her system. "Porter! He's found us!"
Barnabas grabbed her wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. "Go! Head to El Paso. Meet up with Delilah and Gideon."
"I'm not going to leave you," she said.
"Don't be stupid," he said. "You'll never outrun him carrying me."
She pulled her wrist out of his grip. "I'm not going to leave you."
***
Porter paused in the lobby to check his revolver, snapping its cylinder open with a flick of his wrist. This was turning out to be more fun than he'd hoped.
The hunts were getting, for lack of a better word, dull. Pointless, really, without any element of challenge in them. They'd become simple tasks, favors for Bob, but in no way fulfilling. On the other hand, sure, he was killing monsters. Doing the Lord's work.
But hell if it hadn't used to be more interesting, back when he didn't know what he was doing. When he was still getting used to these gifts. When there was still the thrill of risking his life.
The fire had been unexpected, but not terribly dangerous. That was nice.
And the girl leading him on this chase? Well. It was something. He didn't feel threatened, but it was at least a small challenge.
Unexpected, like the fire extinguisher that smashed his nose in and chipped one of his teeth as he looked up from checking the chambers in his revolver.
***
Lily hadn't expected the fire extinguisher to actually hit Porter. She'd just hurled it at him as soon as she turned the corner and saw him standing there with the gun.
From the way he'd gone sprawling, bullets flying from his revolver, evidently he hadn't expected it either.
She didn't stick around to watch him get back up again. Of course he'd get back up again. It was what monsters did.
The wind of Lily's passage sent papers ripped from bulletin boards flying in her wake.
Porter hit her hard from behind, shoulder checking her, and she went spinning out of control. She was running too fast to simply stop, and crashed sideways through a door into the nurses' station.
He was after her almost immediately, his face a bloody mess with a broad smile. His breath came in ragged gasps, a string of crimson drool stretching from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were devoid of sanity, filled instead with a manic savage glee.
In a blink he'd gone from the doorway to right in front of her, copper-smelling breath filling her enhanced senses. His gnarled hands closed around her throat, each almost-laughing breath almost deafening.
She gurgled and clawed at the hands around her neck, legs kicking at him ineffectually. The edges of her vision began to gray out, and she grasped around for something -- anything she could use to stop him.
Her fingers found what felt like a grouping of smooth cylinders. With the last of her strength she closed her hand around their cluster, reversed her grip, and slammed them up towards his face.
Porter gave a scream and let go, hands scrabbling for the pens she'd plunged into the side of his face. Not all were facing the right way and uncapped, but enough had been jammed into his face to cause him a great deal of distress.
She didn't waste any time, but leapt into him, bowling him over, knocking him out of her way.
His inarticulate scream of rage sent her dashing on her way, back through the lobby.
Out front a truck pulled up in front of the building, turning sideways, skidding to a stop.
Derek's truck.
"Oh no." She glanced back over her shoulder to where Porter was still writhing.
He pulled a pen out of his face and turned to her, as if feeling her gaze. The look of hate on his face was almost enough to kill on its own.
"Oh, Derek, no."
She raced out into the parking lot.
***
When the patrol car drew near enough, Gideon could clearly see his foster-father's determined face through the passenger-side of the windshield.
"It's my dad!"
"What?" Delilah shaded her eyes against the glare of the patrol car's halogen headlights. "Why?"
"He's psychotic."
"Don't pull over!"
"No shit."
There was a crack and a loud buzzing sound outside Gideon's window. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Bill was leaning from his window, revolver in hand.
"He's shooting at us?" His driver-side mirror exploded.
"Look out!" Delilah grabbed the wheel and spun it to the side.
The truck lurched into the left lane, cutting off the patrol car as it tried to pull alongside them.
Gideon flinched as the sheriff shot at them again. Delilah screamed, covering her ears
. The red-head glanced down at her, seeing how terrified she was, then set his jaw and decelerated.
The patrol car swerved and started to pull up alongside them again.
"What are you doing?" Delilah asked.
Gideon slowed further, enough that he could look Bill in the eye.
The sheriff had turned himself around, half-way out through the window, his face a twisted mask of hate. He brought the revolver around again, leveling it, and for a frozen moment Gideon found himself staring down the barrel.
He yanked the wheel to the side, and Sheriff Cermak barely had time to slip back into the patrol car before the truck smashed into its side. The car went rocketing off as the road curved, soaring off the small embankment into the desert.
Gideon watched it hit the ditch at speed, pivoting at an angle before flipping sideways across the scrubland.
Part of him wanted to stop, to go back, to make sure that Bill Cermack was dead. To finish the job, if necessary.
He pulled Delilah into his side. The bigger part of him, the part that was a man, knew it was time to drive on and let go.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jessie slid aside to make room as Lily reached the truck.
She put her hands on the edge of the window. "Derek, no, you can't be here, what are you doing?"
"I'm sorry," Jessie said. "I didn't know what else to do."
Lily turned to her half-sister. "Why did you bring him here?"
"I made her tell me where you were," Derek said. "Get in."
Lily glanced over her shoulder, then climbed into the truck's cab. She didn't like leaving Barny -- Barnabas -- behind, but Porter's last hateful glare had told her that she was to be his next target. The further he was from her, the safer he was.
Derek put it in gear and raced out of the parking lot.
"What are you doing here?"
"Jessie told me everything."
Lily stared at the girl. "Everything?"
"Enough," Jessie said.
"I don't know exactly what's going on," Derek said, checking his mirror, "But I'm not going to let you face this alone."
Lily craned her neck around to look through the truck's rear window. "Derek, sweetie, no. You don't know what you're involved in here. You're in way over your head."
"I tried to tell him." Jessie hung her head. "I'm sorry. This doesn't end well."
Lily stared at the girl. "Wait, what do you mean?"
"I don't care," Derek said. "All I need to know is that I love you, Lil. And I'll stay by you, and stand by your side no matter what happens. No matter who you are, or who your real parents are. I don't care about school, about Boston, about graduation. I just want to be with you."
He turned towards her, and all at once Lily was lost in the same beautiful blue eyes she'd first crushed on in Mr. Webley's grade six homeroom. All at once, she remembered each step of falling for him, of their courtship in excruciating detail. She remembered the nervousness on his face when he'd first come to ask her out, she remembered the crack in his voice when her father had asked him his intentions towards his daughter. She remembered the smell of his aftershave the first time they'd kissed in the back of his brother's station wagon, parked in his family's garage, and she remembered the way his eyes had never left hers the first time they had made love.
She remembered she loved him, and that she could never love anyone else. Her heart softened.
The truck hit Porter, ripping in half around him almost all the way through the engine-block.
***
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
The words echoed over and over in Lily's mind, refracting and becoming a chorus.
She opened her eyes and looked up at the stars, watching them spin without spinning, unable to hear anything other than the verse from Revelations repeating in her skull.
She turned her head to the left and saw Jessie, Jezebel, laying on the shoulder, propping herself up. She was shouting something.
She turned her head to the right and saw Derek.
Derek.
She rolled to her side and started crawling through the glass and plastic that littered the road.
Derek.
His skin was cold.
She didn't like the way his eyes were staring off into space, unblinking.
It wasn't like him, being dead.
Inconsiderate, really. They had plans.
She had plans, plans to love him forever and ever.
She looked back towards Jessie, to see if she was getting this, if she could believe how selfish he was being, going and dying like that.
Jessie was still yelling.
God, could she be any more self-absorbed?
"And there went out another horse that was red," she said.
Red like Derek's truck had been. She looked, and she saw a dark figure rising from in front of it.
Porter.
Oh man, Derek was going to be pissed that Porter had wrecked his truck. As soon as he stopped being dead.
She tried to tell him off. "And power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another."
Those weren't the right words. Or were they?
He had killed Derek, after all.
Her Derek.
The sorrow pierced the traumatic fog in her head all at once, the loss of her boyfriend, of her love, swinging into a cruelly sharp focus and cutting away her daze. Everything she could have had, everything she could have been, had been stripped away from her. She'd lost Derek, but she'd also lost herself.
She'd been bleeding Lily since that first accident.
Porter moved and crossed half the distance between them. Her sorrow turned to rage.
Porter wasn't responsible for all of it, but he'd taken the last bit of Lily from her. He'd taken her Derek, and left a void in her soul. From that void was born not only rage, but a hatred unlike any she'd ever known, a furious tempest that Lily had never felt.
The birth of Lilith. This hatred was palpable, almost physical.
Her lip curled as she rose to her feet, and she felt the hatred tingle in response. "And there was given unto her--"
Porter moved again, and there he was, great fist swinging for her skull, but she was gone, and he crushed only air.
"A great sword." And she was moving ahead, into him, driving her fist into his belly. She felt her hate solidify around her hand, around her knuckles, and she kept moving, kept pushing, and then with a pop there was no resistance and her hand was free, her slick fist in the cool night air.
She pulled her arm from the cavity in Porter's abdomen, letting the man fall to his knees on the asphalt.
Lilith watched him, watched him spasm, watched him until the last few ragged breaths escaped into the night.
She turned to Jezebel. "Let's go home."
EPILOGUE
Reverend Robert Carter stood atop the bluff overlooking the sleepy town of Laton, watching as the morning sun's first rays crept towards it across the desert. Martin Klein stood next to him, silent, an unreadable expression on his face.
"Quite the clusterfuck here, Martin."
"Yes, sir." He glanced at his phone.
He mopped at his brow with an old rag. "Quite the clusterfuck. That about Porter?"
"Yes, sir. We've extracted some of his spinal fluid, and should know if it's still viable this evening."
"Gruesome business."
"Yes, sir."
"God asks harsh things from His faithful, Martin." Carter said. "We cannot let compassion temper our faith."
"No, sir."
He looked down at his shoes, looked back up at his reflection in their black leather. "We're sure the children have escaped?"
"Yes, sir. Agents have been dispatched to Odessa and into the eastern salt-flats."
"Has the congregation been relocate
d?"
Martin glanced towards his home for the last decade, then looked back down at his phone. "All but Deacon Baker. He hasn't left his home."
Reverend Carter let out a long sigh. "God asks sacrifices of us all, Martin."
"Yes, sir."
The Reverend turned and began the walk back to his car. "Burn it."
"Yes, sir." Klein held the phone up to his ear. "Bravo team, we're a go. Begin clean up."
He put his phone away, hastening to follow the Reverend.
Infernal Revelations
The truth has set them free, but what's waiting for Lily, Barny, Gideon, Delilah, and Jesse in El Paso? Safety? More answers? More questions? Can they build lives from the shattered fragments of trust betrayed, or will they never truly have a "normal?" Find out in Dark Exodus, the second Profane Apotheosis story arc.
Dark Exodus is set for a 2015 release date, but you can keep abreast of developments by signing up for Michael Coorlim's mailing list.
About the Author
Michael Coorlim is a teller of strange stories for stranger people. He collects them, the oddballs. The mystics and fire-spinners, the sages and tricksters. He curates their tales, combines their elements and lets them rattle around inside his rock-tumbler skull until they gleam, then spills them loose onto the page for like-minded readers to enjoy.
He writes fast-paced stories about real people in fantastic situations, plots with just a twist of the surreal, set in worlds just a shadow's breadth from our own. He's the author of the Galvanic Century series of Steampunk Thrillers, the literary apocalyptic short story collection Grief, and the supernatural serial Profane Apotheosis.
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