by Erik Lynd
The black thing on his neck stretched and covered half his face. He dug at the thing, ignoring the pain of peeling at his own skin. But it didn’t work, they were on too tight. He could feel, rather than see, the shapes stretching and twisting around his body, joining together as though they were one. Perhaps they had been before being placed in the jars.
His body was completely engulfed in seconds and with a wet sucking sound, the black thing—it was more sludge than leech—flowed over his face and everything went dark.
His whole body was burning cold. It felt like ice on fire burrowing through him. It poured in through his mouth and nose.
Through all the pain Max had one clear thought. He pictured his wife and child. He remembered them clearly, everything about them. The way they felt to his touch, the way his wife smiled when he did something to make her laugh. These were the memories Max held onto as the darkness took him forever.
2
Apophis opened his eyes in the eyes of the new body. The blackness that was him was still seeping into the mortal shell, but he had full control. He had separated the soul that had inhabited this body. It was adrift inside him looking for a way out of the home Apophis had commandeered. He would deal with that soon enough.
He was lying on the ground, the stones cold beneath him. The cold did not bother him, he liked it. He had nothing inside that needed warmth.
He rose up and looked around, his brothers were waking beside him. He stepped on the flashlight the mortal had been carrying. It shattered under his foot. He hated the light, it obstructed one’s ability to see in pure darkness. The absence of light around him was familiar, it would allow him to work better. His mortal eyes shifted and he could see the room around him clearly.
The ears of the mortal guise he wore were damaged. With a thought he healed them. The others were just coming to their feet as he strode over to the broken shards of the jars that had held his essence.
He picked them up and cradled them in his palms. The seams found each other and lit up a fiery red. They fused together as Apophis pressed them together. The sacred jars became whole again. He set the first jar down and picked up the next, repeating the process to fix the containers.
Next to him his brothers picked up their respective jars, doing the same. Despite having been trapped for thousands of years beneath the earth, they did not speak to each other. They worked in silence. It was all they knew now.
When the mending of the jars was complete Apophis removed the lids and gently placed them on the stone alter. When he gazed inside he stared into the depths of something so fragile, yet so powerful. He opened his mouth above the jar opening. His mouth stretched open, widening.
He stood there for a moment then a glowing liquid bubbled up from his gut. The essence of the mortal that had been, in liquid form. The thick liquid rolled down Apophis’ distended lip and poured slowly into the jar. When that jar was full Apophis grabbed the next, repeating the process. When he was done, a little essence of the mortal named Max was in the four separate canopic containers.
His brothers were doing the same. Their mortal’s essences did not even fill all the jars just three out of the four. It was a measure of the man this Max had been, that he could fill all four of them. But Max was gone, there was only Apophis.
When the jars were full and sealed Apophis and his brothers—the Soulless, the ancient walkers—turned their attention to the pile of stones that blocked their exit. Again, without speaking, they moved the rocks out of the way. With one hand, they were each able to pick up rocks the size of two human heads and toss them to the other side of the room, each time careful to avoid the jars on the alter.
They worked silently, quickly moving the stones. They did not tire, nor need to drink or eat. They just worked like machines. And that is really what they were.
They were agents of destruction and they knew their purpose. To bring chaos and disorder. But they were not without some rudimentary emotions. And one emotion guided them above all else.
Revenge. Revenge against the one who had put them here. Revenge against the one who hunts souls, the one who works for Hell.
3
The girl looked small, fragile. She rested on a hospital bed, her slight frame barely causing a lump in the sheets. She was pale—she had never been one for sunbathing—but this was more. She was almost translucent. That she was alone added to the illusion of fragility.
Her hair lay on the pillow in thin threads. They too seemed almost faded, although she was not losing her hair. It had just become fainter.
It was like she was very slowly disappearing.
She was alone, surrounded by machines that supposedly kept her alive. But that was debatable. As fragile as she looked, she might have stayed alive without them. She was a warrior deep down. But for now, an IV dripped into her arm, an oxygen tube ran to her nostrils, monitors of all sorts ran cables to her body, like she was some sort of machine.
Dark circles framed her eyes and sometimes her lips pulled back almost like she was smiling. Altogether she looked like a cadaver.
And Christopher was afraid.
He stood on the ledge outside the hospital window. His standard uniform—a coat made of shadows, the cowl of the hood so dark nobody could see his face—swirled about him in shifting patterns of black and gray. It was the uniform of the Hunter of Lost Souls, the Lord of Damnation, and a bunch of other titles he didn’t want to think about.
And he was trying his best to not think of it. Trying not to think about his job now, hunting down the dark souls that had escaped from hell and reaping their souls with his blade to send them back to that infernal prison.
He was not hunting tonight, however; he was here to visit, just as he had done every day since he had brought her here. He raised his hand subconsciously and touched the window pane, knowing this was as close as close as he could get to her, wishing she would turn to him and smile. Okay, he didn’t even need a smile, just some small movement, something to give him hope.
He knew she was still in there, he could see it in her aura, the faint light that was her soul. It was muted now as she struggled. And even deeper down inside Eris’ dull-lighted soul Christopher could see the darkness that was the demon who shared her body, Dark Eris. Neither one knew how they came to share that body; they had hoped Christopher, recently named champion of Hell, could help them.
Now here they were in a hospital room on the edge of death. Some help he’d provided.
He did not dare go visit her properly, he couldn’t go sit by her side touching her hand, willing her back from close. No, he had brought her here in all his raging, hellish glory. In his grief and rage the power had run wild from him. When he had come to this hospital it was an entrance like no other.
He had been careless and was not even sure if they had seen his face. Had he dropped the uniform in his mad dash to get her help? He didn’t remember. He did remember the look of fear on the nurses’ faces. He had seen the reluctance and sheer terror in the doctors’ eyes when he pulled them away from their immediate patients to focus on Eris. He had put the fear of the devil into the entire staff and made clear the consequences of what would happen if she should die.
She had no records, a Jane Doe to them. They were working blind. Dark Eris, trapped deep inside of Eris, could not help heal her with her power. Christopher had decided this was good as he was pretty sure he would not have been able to control the doctors if they had seen such a miracle at work.
As it was there were enough questions. They knew who he was, his fame proceeding him to some extent. Nobody truly knew who or what he was, just YouTube videos and speculation. He told them only that she had been an innocent who had been caught in the crossfire and that he just wanted to get her help. He told them she was nobody to him, just an innocent bystander.
Once she was getting the treatment she needed, and the cops and reporters started showing up, Christopher took his leave, jumping from a hospital window and into the night.
/> He could not risk being recognized or face the barrage of questions that would come from the doctors and reporters if he went in there to visit.
So here he was outside the window looking in, hoping she was winning the battle she was fighting. All this power and nothing he could do for her.
Three months later and still nothing he could do for her. Well that wasn’t entirely true. Through his lawyers he was quickly able to make arrangements to pay for any treatment she needed: the private rooms, no expense spared kind of treatment. He had doctors come consult from all over the world.
No doubt the doctors here wondered who was paying for it all, if they suspected it was the mysterious man who had brought her in they didn’t say anything.
In the end none of it mattered. There she lay, broken and beautiful.
Enough of this, he thought and shut the door on that emotion. He turned from the window and leapt from the building, sailing over the busy street below to land on the building across the street.
He wanted to be hunting, but it was getting late. He should return to the Lair. But a part of him, a relatively new part, wanted to go on, wanted him to unleash his Weapon and collect souls for Hell. Before, he had wished away this power; now he was starting to savor it. He pushed the desire back down. He knew it was related to the piece of Hellpower he had tied to his soul to complete it and give himself enough strength to defeat the Demon Collector. The one who had done this to Eris.
The Demon Collector had wanted the demon inside her and had tried to carve his way in. Christopher had stopped him, but not before Eris had suffered serious damage. He had been too slow.
Now he trained every day, sometimes twice a day, with the world’s greatest warriors from ancient to modern times in the Library, the place of all knowledge and his home away from home. He was determined to get better as fast as he could; he could not risk being slow and ignorant any longer. This was his life now and many people depended on him. If he didn’t get better, the world would go to Hell—literally. If he didn’t retrieve the dark souls when they escaped, nobody else would.
These were the dark thoughts that powered his flight through the city. He looked down at those below him. Sometimes he found he didn’t even see their faces anymore, just their auras, their souls on display. More importantly he saw and smelled their sin. The evil inside of them. The world had become different shades of black and gray, the color of corruption.
Sometimes Christopher thought he was balancing a fine line between madness and sanity.
He arrived back at the lair through the secret entrance in the park just outside the Bronx Zoo. Hamlin, the detective who helped him track down dark souls, wasn’t there. Christopher guessed he had regular police work to attend to. Hamlin was also somewhat limited to when he could come to the lair; he couldn’t use the entrance in the park, that only opened to Christopher, but there was a mundane, if somewhat hard to find, entrance from the zoo. Of course, that meant coming and going only during zoo hours and or involved a lot of sneaking around.
Juan was there but didn’t look up when Christopher entered. He rarely did. He sat at the computer station in the middle of the main room. Monitors spread out in a wall of imagery. News and social media streams filled many of the screens. Some, the ones directly in front of him, contained black backgrounds with green writing scrolling past like a scene from the Matrix movies. Others had what he called a code editor, and programming code sprawled across these in a language so foreign to Christopher that it could’ve been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics for all he could understand of it.
Christopher knew a thing or two about computers, but Juan was at a whole other level. In the few months he had worked with them he had upgraded, redesigned, and rebuilt their information system from the ground up, spending millions—Christopher had given him a virtually unlimited budget—in the process. There were some pieces of tech Christopher’s predecessor had installed that even Juan didn’t understand. “Some top-secret NSA shit,” he had called it. He left it where it was until he had time to examine it.
He lived here—he’d had nowhere else to go after Christopher rescued him. That too had been Eris’ doing. As he had carried her to the hospital she had kept repeating Juan’s name, where he was located and that he could do “the computer stuff like in the movies”.
Apparently, he also thought of Christopher as his personal limo. Christopher must have spent half his time taking Juan through the cube room to the other lairs throughout the world so he could check out each system and upgrade where necessary. Not all the lairs, that would take too much time, just the main ones.
Juan was young, teenager young and an anarchist. When Christopher had pulled him from that wrecked bunker he had been a big ball of fear. He had been living in the bunker hacking into infrastructure systems while being controlled by Golyat—apparently Christopher's archnemesis, although he hadn’t even known he had an archnemesis until a few months ago.
“Hey Juan,” Christopher said.
He didn’t respond right away, and for a moment Christopher thought he hadn’t heard him.
“Hi boss,” Juan finally replied, not even looking up from the computer. His focus could be disconcerting at times. You never knew if he was listening to you. And half the time he wasn’t. “I’m gonna need you to shuttle me on another trip to Europe. I need to finish setting up the redundant data centers there. No need to upgrade the actual network conduit; whoever set it up planned ahead. We got some of the biggest data pipes in the world coming into these lairs.”
“Not today, Juan,” Christopher said. “What have you discovered about your former Days of Chaos friends?”
The Days of Chaos was an idea cooked up by the dark soul Golyat, apparently to disrupt and cause…well, chaos and destruction throughout the world. To what end they didn’t know. Hamlin thought it was so they—the mysterious alliance Golyat was part of—could step in and take over the world. “It’s all about power with these evil fucks,” Hamlin had said. Christopher didn’t know if it was that simple.
“Well…” Juan began, spinning in his chair to look at Christopher. Then he paused. “Since when do you traipse around the lair in full damnation regalia?”
“I forgot I was wearing it,” Christopher said. He dismissed his uniform of coat and hood back to the shadows from where it came, and he was once again dressed in jeans and a hoodie.
Hellcat, the former hellhound that he had freed from being forever bound in the same body with a dark soul, materialized out of the shadows. She jumped up on the couch and curled into a sleeping position, taking up most of the couch in the process. She looked like a panther, but much larger and more menacing. Except when she was curled up purring or taking up more than her share of the bed when he was sleeping.
“You should really give her a name,” Juan said.
“She has a name. Hellcat,” Christopher said.
“No, like a real name. If a dog is born in New York, you don’t name it New York Dog, do you? Hellcat isn’t a name, it’s a description, and a pretty obvious one at that.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Christopher said dropping the subject of naming Hellcat. There were more important things to worry about than naming a cat.
Juan sighed and looked worried for a moment, then he shook it off and turned back to the computer. “Most of the contacts I knew through Days of Chaos have disappeared. Like, went invisible, not a trace.”
“So, they’re gone?”
“Hardly. These are the kind of guys who can do that, disappear as if they never existed; doesn’t mean they’re gone. They just went invisible.”
“And you haven’t been able to track them?”
“I have a little. I shut down a lot of their systems, removed them from some of the more intricate and sensitive government installations. With me hunting them and the feds of pretty much every first world nation looking for them, they’re laying low. You definitely set them back when you interfered in Mexico.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, you did your part to help set things right.”
“Yeah, after helping those assholes and killing hundreds of people.”
“I thought you were past the beating yourself up stage,” Christopher said, perhaps a little colder than he meant. “You’re helping me now, it’s a kind of redemption.”
Juan gave him an odd look then said, “Anyway. I think you slowed down the Days of Chaos plan, but when it does come it will be swift and firm. No more testing the waters. They know you and all the governments in the world are on alert.”
“Well I guess our job is to be ready for them.”
“Whatever you say.”
Juan got up and went to pet Hellcat. It had taken him weeks to even be close to her and even then, only if he was close to an exit. Now he treated her like a fucking housecat. She responded to Juan’s petting by pushing her head into his hands so he would scratch harder.
“Isn’t that right, Fluffy?” Juan said.
Hellcat’s purring turned to a low rumbling growl.
“Maybe not,” said Juan and pulled his hands away quickly.
When Christopher had first brought Juan here, he had been a wreck. Christopher couldn’t blame him. He had been under some powerful sort of mind control, most likely from the one called Golyat, that had bent his talents to their will. They had used him, along with others, to form terrorist hacking cells whose main purpose was to disrupt government and civilian infrastructure as part of this grand plan called “Days of Chaos”.
Juan had been traumatized once the cloud of mind control and confusion was lifted from him. His coding skills had undermined everything from emergency services to air traffic control and caused the death of hundreds. And it would have been in the thousands or worse if Christopher and Eris hadn’t come along. On the verge of suicide when he was found by Eris, she had managed to pull him back from the edge.