Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2)

by Harvey Click

  Though they were exhausted, Shane and Amy made love. He wanted her maybe more urgently than he ever had before. He knew she might be killed tomorrow, and her slender body felt terribly fragile and precious in his arms.

  He slept with his right arm around her, as if fearing she’d vanish before he awoke, but she was still there when Joe tapped on their door at 2:00 a.m.

  He was surprised to find Azura already up on the roof. He hadn’t expected her to share their watch. He was also surprised to see a sword strapped to her waist and a carbine slung over her shoulder. He wondered if she even knew how to shoot it.

  Shane watched the front, Amy watched the back, and Azura went back and forth between the two sides. There wasn’t much opportunity for conversation, and maybe nobody was in the mood for it anyway.

  ***

  Roamer was lying in bed thinking how ironic it was that just when he’d resigned himself to the likelihood of getting killed, fate gave him something worth living for. Doris was sleeping in the bed beside him, and she seemed well worth living for.

  But this wasn’t about him, it was about trying to save Silver Stone and the Malones’ baby. He was an old man—he’d already had his life, and a pretty good one it had been. If fate decided to give him a lovely farewell gift at the end, why should he complain?

  Still, he didn’t look forward to driving out there tomorrow and knocking on that church door. He knew damn well those murdering bastards wouldn’t peacefully let him in to search their house of horrors, so what was the point? Surely it made more sense just to come in blasting with Joe’s people reinforcing his own.

  But he couldn’t do that, and he wasn’t sure why. What was he trying to prove?

  Doris murmured softly and rolled onto her side with her back to him. In the dim light he studied the graceful curves of her neck, shoulder and back, trying to memorize them, as if he’d be able to remember them in the grave.

  But maybe he wouldn’t die. He’d pound on the thick door, and when it opened he’d show his warrant and point to all the cars waiting out there on the road. In addition to his regular deputies there should be at least fifteen or more Irregulars parked out there fully armed, and he would point to them and maybe Godson and his goons would see the folly of putting up a fight.

  Or maybe not. He wished Doris wouldn’t be out there on the road with the others, waiting for bullets and demons to start flying, but she was a stubborn woman. At least he’d ordered her and his other people to stand down until Joe’s people tried their plan, and he wondered if their demons and armored bus would stand a chance. Here in the quiet darkness of his bedroom, their plan seemed absurd.

  Finally he drifted to sleep and dreamed he saw his dead wife Liz putting food on a kitchen table. She was wearing a yellow apron over a very nice white dress that looked almost like her wedding gown, and she was just as young and pretty as she’d been when they married. The kitchen looked much like his own except cleaner and brighter and more spacious, and the table was the old-fashioned kind made of painted wood and covered with an old-fashioned red-checkered oilcloth, and it looked much like the kitchen table in his parents’ house when he was a child, except it was larger and brighter and somehow more festive.

  Liz set a platter of bright yellow corn on the cob on the table and beside it a bowl of glistening white mashed potatoes and then a luscious meatloaf with bacon on the top, one of his favorite dishes. And on the counter he spied his favorite dessert, a freshly baked pie with bright red cherries peeking out through the latticed crust on top.

  The table was set for two, and Roamer felt a sharp pang of jealousy and wondered who was the lucky man she’d done all this for, getting dressed up so nicely and fixing his favorite dishes like this. But he was such a light sleeper that, even as he dreamed, he realized he was lying in bed beside another woman, and he hoped Liz wouldn’t notice this.

  “Oh don’t worry about her,” Liz said, even though he hadn’t spoken. “You’ll be arriving in a few minutes, and I didn’t invite her so it’ll just be the two of us.”

  Roamer felt great emotion, and a hard lump formed in his throat. There was a light knock at the kitchen door.

  “Oh, that must be you now,” Liz said.

  She took off her apron, brushed crumbs off her lovely white wedding dress, smoothed her hair, and opened the door.

  The wolf woman rushed into the kitchen, and Roamer sat up with a loud cry. She was standing over the bed, and beside her was a horrible creature with tentacles protruding from its shoulders and sides.

  Roamer was reaching for the revolver he always kept at the side of his bed, but before he could grasp it the creature leaped on top of him and wrapped its tentacles around him. Doris was screaming beside him, and he saw a slimy tentacle wrapped around her neck and another caressing her naked breasts. Protruding from the ends of the tentacles were sharp spikes like six-penny nails, and he cried out with horror as one of them pierced her breast and then cried out again as another one pierced his belly.

  ***

  When the sky began to brighten at last, Azura said she needed to go down and check on her father. After she was gone, Amy came to the front where Shane was sitting on the parapet. She grasped his hand and said, “Are you scared?”

  “Yeah, but not for me,” he said. “Are you?”

  “Very scared, but I’m also excited. I think we’re going to get our baby back, Shane.”

  “I think so too. In a few more hours we’re going to be holding her.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, watching the sun emerge behind the distant mountains.

  “She seems different,” Shane said. “Azura, I mean.”

  “Yeah. I think maybe she’s finally growing up.”

  “I guess getting a lot of people killed is a pretty powerful lesson.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that what you were talking about in her bedroom yesterday?”

  “No. She was talking about her childhood mostly. It wasn’t good. Shane, she’s never really been out in the real world. Bill home-schooled her and has kept her in a sort of bubble her whole life. Her idea of how other people behave comes mostly from novels, and I’m not sure what sort of idea you get of that from reading a book like Justine or The 120 Days of Sodom.”

  “Probably more accurate than we’d like to admit,” Shane said.

  “She’s never had any friends. She considers us to be her best friends. Hell, she even thinks of those demons as her friends.”

  “Do you think she has her wits together now?” he asked. “I mean, is she going to be any help today or just a nuisance?”

  “She wants to help and I believe she will. She has a lot of dead people to make up for.”

  “Let’s go down and fix some breakfast. I’m starving.”

  As they walked past Bill’s room they heard him talking, or rather shouting weakly. Azura opened the door and asked them to come in.

  “Where are Joe and the others?” Bill asked.

  “They’re still sleeping,” Shane said.

  “Well, wake ‘em up and get ‘em in here,” Bill said.

  “No. They need their sleep.”

  Bill focused his hard metal eyes on Shane and said, “Let’s get one thing straight. I’m in charge of this operation, and we’re not working with any cops.”

  “You’re no longer in charge,” Azura said. “Bloody Joe’s in charge now.”

  “Like hell he is. In a few more minutes I’m getting out of bed and I’m going to knock some heads together.”

  “You won’t be getting up anytime today,” Azura said. “You’re still too sick.”

  “Like hell I am. Let me get one other thing straight. I’m not doing this for fun. You two want your baby back, and I want my books back and some gold to go with them. How the hell do you think I’m going to haul books and gold out of that place with a sheriff standing there watching me?”

  “I think you want something else too,” Amy said. “Azura said your treatments are good for about
a hundred years. You had your first one in 1820 and probably had another one sometime around 1920. That means you’re just about due for another.”

  Bill glared at his daughter. “I suppose you told them my Social Security number while you were at it,” he said.

  “That’s why you look like a junkie coming down,” Amy said. “You’re jonesing for another treatment, aren’t you? And I bet Godson has the junk you need.”

  “He does, and he has more than that,” Bill said. “He also has my daughter, Azura’s half-sister. Fifteen years ago the son of a bitch stabbed me through the heart with a knife he thought was made of Hermesium. Luckily for me he’s too stupid to know how to make Hermesium. It’s a difficult process, and Godson doesn’t have the patience or the brains for it. He thought I was dead, but I wasn’t. After three days of lying in a coma, I was up and about again.

  “But my Longevity ingredients had been stolen and most of my books and also my daughter Terra. He wanted her for the same reason he wants Emily, because she has innate powers. She was just twelve years old, and by now I’m sure he’s brainwashed her and turned her against me. But I intend to get her back and deprogram her. I intend to go in there and personally cut off that bastard’s head and get my Longevity ingredients back and my books and my daughter, and I don’t see how I can do it with a cop breathing down my back.”

  “And I don’t see how we can go in there without his help,” Shane said.

  “I hired and trained mercenaries, and I can hire some more of them.”

  “And by that time Godson will have already killed all of us,” Shane said. “Our plans are made and there’s no point arguing.”

  “As I said, this is my operation, and I have more at stake than the rest of you. We both have a daughter at stake, but I also have my books and my ingredients. They’re incredibly rare and precious, and you’re right that I’m jonesing. My treatment was already starting to wear off, and now this demon attack has sucked up the last dregs of it. If I don’t get another treatment soon, I’m dead.”

  “Why did that demon attack you?” Shane asked. “I thought you said you had them under control.”

  “As I told you, the stickman is a mazzikin. They’re higher level demons than the others and very hard to control. As it turns out, some of those Nephilim were his own children, and when he saw the other demons attacking them he ordered them to stop. I tried to put him in line but he wouldn’t listen, and before I could get my dagger through his heart he bit me.

  “But of course there’s no way to truly kill a demon. They’re immortal, and all you can do is put them down for a little while. By now he’s back there at the church and has told Godson who’s in charge of this place. That’s why there wasn’t an attack last night. Godson knows I’m still alive and he’s afraid of me.”

  Nyx wasn’t around to give her sarcastic snort, but Azura made a pretty good imitation of it. “Settle down, Daddy,” she said. “You need some rest.”

  ***

  Azura had never been allowed in her father’s office by herself, but now that the door had been kicked open and her father was bedridden she took advantage of the opportunity. It took her a long while to figure out the password to his computer, but finally she hit on the winning combination: NeomaTerraAzura.

  She opened a folder and found a great many photos of herself beginning at age twelve and continuing until a year ago. In most of them she was nude, and in many of them she was bound to a bed or a wall with pink whip marks across various parts of her body.

  She perused the photos with vanity more than disgust because, even though she was ashamed of her father’s depravity, she wasn’t as much ashamed of it as she thought she probably should be. She wondered if she was depraved herself and didn’t know the answer. The outside world and its values were a puzzle to her, and she wondered what it was going to be like living out there and learning how others behaved, assuming she didn’t die today.

  She opened another folder and found similar photos of the half-sister she had barely known because Terra had been kidnapped when Azura was just four years old. She had bright red hair and was very pretty, and Azura wondered what her own life would be like if Terra had never been kidnapped. All of her life she had longed for her older sister, and she wondered if that was why she was so attracted to Amy.

  She opened another folder and found more pornographic photos of another young girl, and it took a while before she realized the girl was her mother. She quickly closed the folder, ashamed for having seen them. She had lived with her mother for only a short time because Bill had insisted she was no longer safe after Neoma’s wife was murdered. He had sued for custody and he won because he had more money for lawyers.

  And yet, despite everything, her mother had kept in touch with him for the rest of her life. Did she know he was molesting her daughter? Azura hoped not, but surely she must have at least suspected? Was this the way of the world, a mother turning her back while the father molested her daughter? Why then shouldn’t she think of the demons as her friends? In what way were they more depraved than people?

  In another folder there were emails:

  Hey Sonny Boy,

  If I don’t hear from you by midnight tonight my pack of evidence is going out tomorrow morning before you even haul your wimpy ass out of bed…

  As she read through them she saw how her father had been deluding Godwin into thinking he was an ex-cult member from Michigan who called himself Sam Non. Supposedly he was trying to establish a rival cult out here in the hacienda and was threatening to expose Godwin’s drug manufacturing activity if he didn’t send money.

  The writing was deliberately clumsy to give the impression that “Sam Non” was a fool, and even though she was ashamed of her father’s depravity she was proud of his cleverness. It had taken him fourteen years to track down Godson, who was well hidden by the cult he had created, but her father had managed to do it and had concocted a plan to attack his seemingly impregnable citadel, and in a few hours she’d know if his plan was going to work, lawmen or no lawmen.

  She moved to an email he’d sent to Godson twelve days ago, and she had to read it twice to make herself believe it really said what it said:

  Hey, Mr. Bastard Son of the Big Cheese, I’ve got a very funny joke for you which is all the funnier because the joke’s on you. I bet you didn’t know that Amy Malone and her husband are living out here right under your Big Godhead Nose with her baby and her brain-damaged idiot brother. And maybe the know-it-all Son of God doesn’t even know that Amy Malone is AKA Amy Jackson, one of the gang that did in your old pal Miguel Sandoval a couple years ago in some hillbilly backwater. Yep, the one and the same Amy, and she moved out here for the express purpose of investigating a certain phony church run by the Lost Society.

  It turns out she’s dug up enough dirt on said society and some of its moron members (such as you!) to put you and your trashy shitball friends behind bars forever and a day. For a small fee she was happy to dictate and sign a nice long notarized document detailing everything she’s learned about a certain false messiah, and I’ve now added this lengthy document to my ever-growing pile of evidence, which I’ll turn over to the DA precisely one week from today if I don’t find one million dollars in gold deposited in my front yard by that time.

  Verily and merrily yours,

  Mr. Sam Non, The One True Son of God

  It took her a while to comprehend her father’s motive because she didn’t want to. Apparently he had wanted Godson to kidnap Amy’s baby, and maybe even Amy herself, but why? Probably because he wanted to enlist Shane and his friends, and this would force them into the fight.

  Her father was a monster, and she wondered if she was a monster too since she was his daughter. Maybe she was like a Nephilim, half demon and half human.

  She felt sick. She shut off the computer, went to the room where the Nephilim’s bodies were stored, and began to hack one of them into pieces with a meat cleaver. Her friends in the barn would want some breakfast
.

  ***

  Lucky kicked one of the front tires and said, “It may be rusty, but the rubber’s good.”

  They climbed aboard, and Joe banged his fist against the steel plating welded to the ceiling. “That oughta work,” he said.

  There was more steel plating welded to the walls beneath the windows, and there were several long pieces of it secured by metal cables to the floor in back. Shane and Lucky unfastened the cables and carried the top plate out of the bus. This strip had RIGHT FRONT painted on it, so they attached it to the steel brackets welded above the windows on the front of the right side. The brackets slid into slots cut in the top of the plate, and it took some maneuvering to get them to match up, but once it was hanging there it fit well and covered the front four windows. Welded onto the side beneath the windows were turn bolts to secure the plate and keep it from banging around while the bus was moving.

  They went back inside and sat in the seats beside the plate. About eye level at the middle of each window, shooting holes were cut out of the plate. They were cross-shaped so a rifle barrel could move up or down or to either side, and the cuts were just wide enough to make shooting reasonably easy without allowing much access for incoming bullets.

  “Let’s try one of the windshield plates,” Shane said.

  They attached the one that fit over the driver’s side of the windshield. Some work had been put into cutting and shaping it to fit, and a strip of rubber glued around the edges kept the plate from touching the glass. They went back inside, and Lucky sat in the driver’s seat and leaned forward to peer through the rectangle cut out of the steel. It was maybe five inches high and seven inches wide.

  “How’s the view?” Joe asked.

  “It’s not exactly a picture window,” Lucky said, “but I don’t want it any bigger or I’ll get a face full of bullets. It’s not like I’m going to be driving down the freeway with this shield on. All I need to do is aim the bus at the citadel and make sure there aren’t any trees in front of me.”

  “I don’t know why you keep saying I,” Joe said. “I’ll be driving the bus.”