Abandon All Hope

by Dick Denny

  She probably would have gone on, but Switch laughed. “Thanks.” He held the Glock 19 up to his ear after dropping the mag, then making sure nothing was under the hammer and pulled the trigger, dry firing it. “How light is that trigger?”

  “It’s a Glock Ghost three-point-five-pound trigger,” I told him.

  Switch nodded. “Did you do the trigger work and the rest of the mods?”

  I laughed. “Would you trust it if I did?”

  “No.” He pulled back the slide, inserted a mag, dropped the slide and slid the pistol into the Kydex holster, which he began to thread onto the belt he took from Jammer’s box.

  Gretchen smiled reassuringly. “Then it’s good we got Yuri to do it.”

  Switch attached the ankle holster around his ankle and wiggled the toes of his sock-clad feet. He looked ridiculous in the outfit and armed like that, but I felt better seeing him armed after him being laid up in the hospital for so long.

  I reminded myself next time Gabrielle popped up, no matter how ill-timed or annoying, I needed to thank her.

  “So,” Switch slowly asked, “what is the plan?”

  “Well,” Gretchen offered, “the world is ending.”

  “Metaphorically or literally?”

  “Literally,” she assured him.

  “Literally as in entropy and the eventual energy death of the universe or literally as in tomorrow?” One of the great things about Switch was how he just rolled with things while still hoping for the best.

  “Tomorrow at the latest.” Her smile didn’t make that less daunting of a prospect.

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  “Try to stop it,” I said with all the confidence I didn’t feel.

  “Okay, what’s the first step?” Switch could be a persistent bastard.

  “Us getting dressed, I guess, then getting you shoes,” I offered with a shrug.

  He mock-laughed. “Ha Hardy Har.”

  “No, seriously, chill here for a minute,” I said as Gretchen and I hopped up. We went to the back and took a quick shower without making a game of it. We dried, again, without any play, and then began getting dressed. I pulled on a black suit and my Chucks, my underarm rig under my jacket. Gretchen pulled on a gray tank top, black short shorts, her pouch belt, and holstered her pistols behind her back under her jacket, which would have been a duster had it passed her knees.

  Switch was waiting in the office trying to get onto Agnes’s desktop computer but was having trouble negotiating the password. He might as well have been trying to navigate the Northwest Passage as opposed to figuring out the password of the detail-oriented efficiency machine I had as a secretary. “What’s the password?”

  “I dunno. It’s Agnes’s, not mine.”

  “Isn’t she your secretary?” He pushed the keyboard away like it was a plate of escargot.

  “More or less.”

  “Then shouldn’t you know how to get into all the electronics in your office? Including her desktop?” His tone reminded me of a genetics professor dealing with a creationist student.

  “You’d think that, but then again some people still dig disco,” I countered with a smile.

  “Well, now you’re dressed,” he observed. “Gretchen, you did way better than Nick at that.”

  “Thank you.” She beamed at the backhanded compliment. I mean, it has never been difficult to dress better than me.

  “So, now, what’s the plan?” Switch asked pointedly at me.

  “Uriel, another goddamned archangel, has been reconning parks. I think it’s doing battle-map analysis and shit like that.” It sounded strange, sounding like I knew what I was talking about.

  “Okay?” His words implied a statement, but his tone offered a question so that’s how I took it. “So, we need to figure out which park?” he asked as he stood, already ready to roll. Apparently, spending six months in a hospital bed left some people restless.

  I nodded.

  “Breakfast first though, right?” Gretchen asked with the implied and easily heard need for coffee.

  “Most important meal of the day,” Switch agreed.

  I sighed. “Fucking fine.” I wanted to go back to bed, actually to bed really. But that’s life, as the Stones eloquently explained it in the classic You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

  Then we all glanced over as there was a knock on the office door.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, “what’s the fucking point of having posted office hours if no one’s going to fucking pay attention to them?”

  I walked over to the door and took a deep breath and fixing my best fake smile to my lips as I pulled the door open.

  Then a swarm of flies exploded in my face.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lord of the Fucking Flies

  “Almost Easy” Avenged Sevenfold

  Now when I said I was hit in the face with flies, I don’t mean ten or so flies buzzed into my face. I mean a goddamned firehouse gushed in my face, but instead of water it was fucking flies. The world went dark and it sounded like an old TV had exploded with static. The blast of flies was enough to knock me back onto my ass, which was a good thing as it forced me out of the fly stream. That wasn’t to say my face wasn’t covered in flies.

  It felt like a sucker punch, and that pissed me off on two levels. First, it offended the Teddy Roosevelt part of my brain that respected a fair fight. Now, I’ll fight dirty. I’ll shoot first and into a back, but still. Secondly, it reminded me of a movie, though visually impressive, the concepts of character and story were completely lost on the director. I felt the Wrath, and I let it fly.

  My head erupted in flame, wreathing my skull and burning all the flies to tiny cinders. I couldn’t see, but I imagined it to resemble a Greek Hoplite helmet. Then the fire coursed quickly down my right arm and the xiphos of fire grew in my hand.

  On my back, I saw him in the hallway. To say he was fat would be a gross (mind the pun) understatement. His shape was vaguely human but in a rotund cartoonish way. He had five rolls of neck that flowed into his shoulders like a zigarut. His round arms had long flaps of skin like he could use them to fly away if he wasn’t too lazy to flap his damn arms. You couldn’t see his feet because of hyperbolic cankles. He looked naked, but if he had any clothes, or sex for that matter, they were hidden under rolls of flesh. His eyes were a sickly puss-like yellow. His teeth were dead and rotting.

  Fugly didn’t cover it.

  I kicked my legs and rolled up into a crouch as he—I assumed he, praying that no female would ever be that unfortunate—opened that rotted mouth and screamed in a teeth-grinding falsetto. Another stream of flies shot from ugly suck. Near instantly the Sword dissipated from my right hand, the flame ran up my arm over my shoulders and down my left arm as I brought it before me. The shield of fire formed as the fly stream impacted into it. I didn’t even feel the impact; apparently, the Wrath of God was as good as vibranium. The flies burned off on the shield and its concentric circles of fire with a star in the middle. The falsetto stopped and the fly stream stopped with it.

  The flame moved back up my arm, across my shoulders, and down my right emerging again as the xiphos in my hand. I kicked my legs like pistons and started sprinting for him. Weapons appeared in his hands; whether they appeared there or if he’d been hiding them in fat I’ll never know. In his left was a fleshy looking hammer that resembled a large, eight-inch-by-eight-inch meat hammer. In his right hand was a wicked-looking cleaver that appeared to be made of bone.

  Now, when I’d fought Zadkiel and Baalberieth I hadn’t known what I was doing, so I let the Wrath guide me and just went with it. In the past six months, Gretchen had been training me in all her Martial Arts Kung Fu ninja glory. What I’d learned is my basic fighting style is still nineteenth-century Irish boxing, and in regards to sword fighting I just needed to roll with the Wrath.

  In the confines of the hallway, I knew he wouldn’t be able to get good swings in and would be reliant on thrusts. The short-bladed fire
xiphos in my hand was built for that kind of work. Neither of his weapons were designed for that kind of work. It felt weird, actually having an advantage. It made me paranoid.

  He thrust with the bone hammer. I stepped inside it and thrust with the xiphos but he managed to get the cleaver in the way. I grabbed the wrist of his cleaver hand and yanked. I instantly wished I’d hadn’t. You could feel the crawling under his waxy pulpy skin. But my yank did pull his fat ass off balance and I gave a short slash with the Fiery Sword, biting deep into his cankle. The sword left a long, ragged tear. Immediately maggots and puss began spilling from the wound and flowing onto the tile floor. It smelled like the fetid armpit of a three-day-old corpse left rotting in a pile of Limburger cheese.

  I dove and bounced off the wall. I came up to face three unhappy surprises. First, the fly spitting shit head wasn’t alone. There were four imps, for lack of a better term. They were all about four feet tall, horns, goat legs, work shirts like you imagine a mechanic wearing, and long knives. They made me think of if a group of Fawns left Narnia and had spent the last four years working as slot machine repairmen in Tunica, Mississippi.

  The second surprise was not that I was between the fat fuck and these bags of ass; none of who had a look on their faces that seemed pleasant.

  The last surprise: Megatron had poked her head out of her door. Her face was a mix of confusion and fear even under all that goddamned caked-on geisha makeup.

  “Shut the fucking door!” I yelled as I started running toward the imps. I wanted to finish the fat fucker because he seemed more of a threat than the imps, but at least one of them had turned their attention to Megatron. As annoying as she was, she was one of us. The first imp I came to swung his knife. I blocked his wrist with my left forearm and thrust into his gut with the Fiery Sword hard enough to lift him off the ground high enough that the tip of the blade poked out of his back and stabbed into the ceiling’s acoustic tile.

  I half-turned and slung my arm, hurling the impaled imp toward the fat fucker like a jai alai ball. As the imp tumbled through the air I watched as a gash appeared in the fat fucker’s shoulder as Gretchen stabbed through a great flap of fat with the Spear. The wound she left gushed maggots and puss, but it also smoldered like burning peat.

  I whipped my head around in time to see one of the imps lunging with his knife. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand; it was fucking hot. I twisted it and kicked him between his goat legs. There was so much fur down there I wasn’t sure I hit anything but the way he doubled over felt gratifying.

  The third tried lunging in over the body of his comrade on the ground. I grabbed him by his shirt while he was in the air and slammed him head-first into the wall. The plaster in the wall cracked and fell in large shards, but more importantly, the imp’s head bent backward on his neck like a fucking Pez dispenser.

  The fourth imp looked wide-eyed and started to run. That made me even madder. I sprinted and grabbed him by one of his horns and jerked his head back ramming the Fiery Sword into his back and out his chest. He didn’t cry out; there was no explosion of energy or gush of blood. He simply went limp as I let go of his horn. His corpse fell to the floor as it slid off the burning blade.

  I heard the gunfire behind me and turned, watching Gretchen ducked to the left side of the hall as Switch emptied the Glock 19 magazine into the fat fucking demon. I was convinced these asshats were demons; it was too obvious. The problem was that demons could take a bullet just as easy as an angel—or archangel, anyway.

  Before Switch’s empty magazine hit the ground Gretchen was back in there with a dancer’s grace. The fat fucker brought the fleshy hammer down and she easily side-stepped it and twirled the Spear around. The tip bit into his wrist slicing at least four inches deep and four inches long. He brought the cleaver high, and she ducked and twisted while ramming the Spear tip through the corpulent fat of the left cankle.

  I heard the scream and watched Switch duck back behind the door frame as the stream of flies shot past where he’d just been. Gretchen was at an angle where she could see me. She dove trying to get around the fat fucker the same way I had, but he was onto that game. He turned and jumped, crushing her between his fat and the wall. I started sprinting toward him.

  The imp I’d kicked in the possible nuts was pulling himself to his hands and hooves. I kicked him in the fucking gourd without even breaking my stride. I roared and his yellow eyes went wide with fear as he saw me coming full tilt.

  He pulled back off the wall and Gretchen fell to the floor with a gasp. He screamed and shot the gush of flies at me. I grabbed the Sword with both hands and held it in front of me. The burning blade split the stream of flies and fired them to each side of me as I closed.

  I didn’t stab or slash or do anything articulate with the blade. I jumped and grabbed one of the waxy flabs of fat dangling from his neck and gripped it tight enough I could feel my fingers through the adipose. My knees rammed my momentum into his chest, sending him back. I felt his knees starting to give way. Using the fat handhold to steady me as he fell backward, that was when I slashed with the Sword.

  I swung and hacked again and again. I was lost in a red haze. The fiery blade biting through corpulent flesh and the tile floor all the same. Puss and maggots sprayed along the tile and onto the wall. I let go of his neck fat and gouged my fingers into his yellow eyes and kept hacking. Puss flowed around my fingers.

  I was so lost in the fury I didn’t even notice his head had come off and I was holding it in my left hand like a bowling ball till I felt her arms. She slipped them around me, just under my arms and her cheek rested against the back of my neck. I could feel her breath on the back of my right ear.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. The Sword evaporated from my hand.

  After fighting Uriel I’d hacked up at least ten cars on that road with the Sword before coming across an old Datsun pickup. My first vehicle had been an old Datsun pickup. I loved that piece of shit so much that it had been enough to loosen the Wrath’s grip on me enough to let go of the Sword. It was always easier to do with Gretchen.

  Switch patted my other shoulder as he moved past us and down the hall.

  I turned my head and asked quietly into the top of her head, “You okay?” I dropped the severed head and shook my hand a little, trying to flick off some of the puss.

  She nodded. “I need a shower, though.”

  I chuckled. “That fat fuck was greasy, wasn’t he?”

  “Like an extra meat, extra cheese pizza,” she agreed with a light laugh.

  “What the fuck was that?” I asked no one in particular.

  I turned my head when I heard the door of the stairwell open. I saw Agnes step out. She surveyed the scene and her face held a fairly adorable and endearing mix of confusion and resignation. She stepped past Switch and then hopped over the mess of maggots and puss, an impressive feat in her four-inch heels. She stopped at the office door and looked at the mess of flies buzzing around. She sighed. “I’ll get the flypaper out.” She disappeared into the office but left the door open for us.

  Gretchen laughed at that then slid in under my left arm. I looked down at the severed head and nudged it with my foot. “What in the holy goddamned fuck was that?”

  “I don’t know,” she quietly confessed.

  “Why don’t we ask this little guy?” Switch asked.

  We turned and saw him standing there, holding the last surviving imp by his horn. He’d zip-tied the imp’s hands together in front of him. The imp was bleeding from a cut along the right side of his face where I’d kicked him in the freaking head.

  Switch smiled. “Want some answers?”

  I nodded. “Let’s make this little cock bag sing like Luciano fucking Pavarotti.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  How Do You Interrogate A Freaking Demon?

  “Keep Your Hands To Yourself” Georgia Satellites

  So we used zip-ties to basically hogtie the little imp bitch demon. Then we’d thrown him in the t
runk of Gretchen’s Charger and drove out to the place Jammer had set up six months before, where we had planned on interrogating Doc Douchebag. The demon didn’t say anything, just grunted a bunch of pig-like squeals. I duct-taped the imp to a chair while Switch and Gretchen ran out for “supplies,” though what kind of supplies you get for a demon interrogation was beyond me.

  The bastard’s beady little black eyes just stared. Not horror movie creep you out stared, but more just, annoyed the fuck out of you stared.

  “You really want to make this shit easy you could start talking before they get back.” I leaned back in my chair; it was identical to his except I wasn’t taped to it. “Fuck all knows what they’re going to bring to torture you with. If I’m honest this is a little outside our wheelhouse.” I smiled. “But goddamned if we’re not quick learners and energetic participants.”

  “You’re talking too much.” His voice was half-squeal, half-falsetto. It was what you’d imagine a pig would sound like if you kicked it in the nuts and it could talk.

  “Then lighten the mood with some pleasant and informative conversation.” I crossed my arms as I leaned back.

  It stared dead-eyed at me. “What would you like to know?”

  “Lets start easy: what’s your name?”

  “You couldn’t pronounce my name.” He actually snorted before answering.

  “What should I call ya then?” I remembered Bruce Campbell—guardian angel’s real name wasn’t Bruce Campbell—so I figured the imp bitch was shooting me straight on that.

  “Murdock.”

  “What were your buddies’ names?” I figured if I could get him talking he might spill some shit he didn’t realize was important.

  “The boss was Beelzebub.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “So, boss, not buddy, huh? Strictly professional with that one?”

  He nodded.

  “And the other three?” I leaned up resting my elbows on my knees.

  “Hannibal, B.A. and Face,” he answered with all seriousness.