“He will see you soon,” the Demonic voice said.
Then: “I must do this. I c-can do this,” in another voice that sounded a lot more like Jerry’s original fresh-out-of-high-school voice.
“I got a clean shot,” Steve said.
“Shoot him, or give me the gun back, pig,”someone else said. Harold’s mind went to the man with clown makeup painted on his face.
“Jerry,” Harold said, “I know t-the feeling. I’m a loser too.”
His vision started to blur, but he could still see the spark of light in the kid’s eyes. That small moment of recognition.
“You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. The Shadow Eater’s are using you. Praying on you-your weakness.”
“Soon the fires of Hell will purge this place,” the Demonic voice said. “And Satan will be free.”
“Jerry,” Harold said, wheezing. “Listen to me. Let me go, and I can save you and the rest of us.”
The grip loosened.
“I-I just want to fit in,” Jerry said in his own voice. “I’m not a murderer, man.”
“I know, Jerry, I know. I d-didn’t want any of this either. I’m just a loser. I’m not meant to be a Protector. I mean look at me.” Harold pointed his right hand up to himself, to the red — and getting redder — flesh of his face.
Something in Jerry’s eyes clicked. His face softened as much as a man with black streaks of Demon venom running down his cheeks could.
Harold’s feet touched the concrete. The breath came easier into his lungs. He rubbed at the part of his neck that had been choked more in two days than had in his entire lifetime.
“How can you help me?” Jerry asked.
“I —” Harold began, but was cut off by a grunt from deep within Jerry’s chest. The kid dropped to his knees and still seemed to be about as tall as a normal man, but when he convulsed, he looked less like a man and more like something that was dug up from a graveyard.
“It’s too late for the boy, Storm. It’s too late for you. The Dark One is coming. And you can’t do anything about it.”
“Jerry!” Steve shouted. The Desert Eagle went off again — two quick shots without any silence between them.
Jerry grunted, collapsed to the ground. His eyes bugged out, far enough for Harold to think they’d ride down the waterfall of blood pouring from his fresh gunshot wound.
The faces of Jerry passed like the seasons. A years’s worth of emotion.
Steve screamed again.
And then the Demon was there. The whites of his eyes fluttered.
Harold started shuffling backwards. His left hand gripped around the hilt of his Deathblade. The gun went off. And Harold’s arm worked on it’s own. His blade shot up, the bullet clinked off of the edge. Sparks flew.
“You can’t run, Storm. Just like your father,” the Demonic voice said.
Harold’s world stood still. “My father?”
Another shot went off, whizzed right by his face. Then another hit him in the arm. The pain exploded in his deltoid. But he didn’t show it. He stood as still as a scarecrow.
“My father?” he said again.
Jerry’s face twisted up into a pained smile, lips wearing black sludge lipstick, gums and white teeth stained.
“Soon,” the Demonic voices said.
And Jerry collapsed into a heap of gangly arms and legs. The breath whistled out of him, the last breath that the poor kid would ever take.
Harold stood over him, hand wrapped around the skeletal texture of his Deathblade’s hilt. His father? How had a Demon known about his father? Was he dead? Down there having tea and maggots with Satan himself, the cold iron bars set up by the original Protectors the only thing separating the two?
No. His father wasn’t dead. Someone would’ve told him. His mom would’ve found out. He was sure she was still getting chunks of money every month from back child support. If that dried up then she’d know something was wrong. She would’ve gotten ahold of the State right when her bank card got declined at Tommy’s Gas Station two blocks away from her apartment. No smokes made for an angry Mom. Wouldn’t she? But he hadn’t talked to his mom in the better part of a year. How would he know?
The Desert Eagle went off for what he hoped was the last time and the noise snapped him out of his dreams of a lost childhood. The bullet smacked him in the stomach like a nuclear bat out of Hell. He clutched the blossoming red spot, felt the moisture, pulled his hands away and saw the dark red blood, and some black sludge festering around the wound. The Wolves cried out. Flames closer, threatening to catch their fur, and the Deathblade retracted.
CHAPTER 26
“Is he dead?” Steve whispered.
Harold’s eyes were opened and he looked up to the cracked stone roof of the terminal. He wasn’t dead, but he felt like it. The venomous bullet had ripped through him like a burst of hot lava. And for the moment, as he stared up with dead eyes.
“Back!” the other voice yelled, then a spray of machine gun fire.
The collective shrieks from the crowd trying to escape.
“He should be dead,” Steve said. His soles scraped the concrete, walked right past Harold’s head. That would’ve been his prime opportunity to get out of his situation, just grab Steve’s ankle, pull his foot out of its socket, and take the Desert Eagle. But he couldn’t move. Not because the venom wracking through his body. No, that wasn’t too bad. It had all but faded. Like a really hard punch to the face, the initial connection was unbearable, but after awhile it just fades to a throbbing sting.
“Jer,” Steve said, then whimpered.
Harold stayed as still as possible when the other man crossed his path, the sub machine gun dangling from a strap around his tattered black robe.
Something clanked on the ground behind Harold’s head. Metal. Had to be the Desert Eagle — hoped it was the Desert Eagle.
The other man cleared his throat. “Shit,” he said.
“It was an accident,” Steve answered.
“I know, man. But Dahlia can’t handle those people much longer. Lop the bastard’s arm off and let’s get this show on the road. Then we go home.”
Steve sniffled.
The Protector risked a glance behind him, tilted his head back a little bit, seeing the two men. The guy with the machine gun had his arm around Steve, helped him back up to his feet.
The Desert Eagle wasn’t far if he moved quick. Harold could do it — end the scumbag’s lives.
His body screamed when he moved, but, by God, he did. His blackening flesh reached that Desert Eagle, and he prayed to the Heavens that there was at least two more bullets left. He propped himself up on his elbow as quiet as the pain would let him, let a burst of air escape his nostrils in the process, but he got up nonetheless.
The first shot cracked, blew submachine guy’s kneecap clean off in a firework spray of blood. His gun pumped rounds into the pool of red growing around Jerry’s corpse as he fell. Sparks and scarlet droplets flew everywhere, dotted the light blue of Steve’s jeans standing there with his jaw hanging open and his round belly quivering.
The machine-gun guy bellowed, and the gun skittered across the concrete. Harold made a move for it, kicked it out of the guy’s clawing reach. Then he fell, face down in the blood. Tiny bubbles frothed in the puddle from his raggedy breaths.
Harold had his gun trained on the guy’s head, ready to pull the trigger, but the gun seemed to have been fired so many times before, and he wasn’t sure how many shots he had left, or how many shots he’d even need to get out of here in one piece.
Soon the guy’s breathing slowed. Harold didn’t think he’d make it much longer. The pain and the shock could kill a weak-hearted man. That, and a little bit of Demon venom sped up the process. But there was that nagging feeling in the back of Harold’s mind that he’d have to deal with another possessed Disciple like Jerry had been, and he didn’t think he could talk another one of those things out of the guy, not yet.
Harold stood up slow
ly, carefully, like he was eighty years old and his body was crippled with arthritis. And he knew it would’ve been tough to watch, almost as bad as it was to look on his ruined face, his burnt skin. But he never took his aim off of the fat grim reaper who stood in front of him.
“Where is Sahara?”
“W-who? What are you on about? Why won’t you just die?” Steve said.
“Don’t mess with the guy who has a gun trained on you.”
“You call yourself a guy?” Steve laughed. “You’re a monster, man. You belong on our side. You belong in Hell.”
“Now I don’t doubt that you do, but I’ll pass. I just wanna save my girl — ”
He paused at that. His girl? When it came out it sounded so smooth, so natural, so…right. But she wasn’t his girl, was she? He swallowed the little saliva that was in his mouth. His throat clicked with dryness. Why else would he do this? Go through all this garbage. He had nothing to prove to anybody. Not Marcy. Not the father he never had. Not himself. He hadn’t thought about it until now. He cared. For once in his life, he cared. One hundred percent, all-natural care.
Steve’s mouth closed, his lips twisted into a sly smile. “Your girl, huh? She cute? Nice ass, big tits?”
Harold took a few steps closer. The dying man at Steve’s feet squealed when Harold’s boot stepped onto his back. Then the Desert Eagle pressed into one of Steve’s hanging chins, where a normal man’s neck would be.
The fat one’s mouth gaped open, then jammed close with the force of the barrel.
“Yeah, my girl,” he said, pushing until he felt the Adam’s apple buried under the flesh.
“Okay, okay, okay, okay. I know where she is. I saw the big one drag her through the tunnel, kicking and screaming.”
“How long ago? What tunnel?” Harold’s voice sounded like a garbage disposal grinding up bullets.
Steve’s hands shot up, the skin of his face drooped closer to the ground than before. He pointed, “In there, okay, okay. Through there.”
Harold smiled. “You expect me to go alone?”
“W-what? Dude, whatever. Just don’t kill me, man. Please.”
“It doesn’t matter if I do — ”
“Yeah it does! Are you serious?”
“Let me finish. It doesn’t matter if I do because the Shadow Eater’s will.”
Steve shook his head. “You’re wrong, man. So wrong.”
“They don’t care about you. They’re using you.” He tipped the gun over his shoulder, back to the terminal. “For whatever you freaks are doing in there. What are you doing in there anyway?”
“It-it’s hard to explain…we’re…we’re rounding up their dinner.”
Harold narrowed his eyes, leaned closer. “A meal round up? As in human meals?”
“We get them souls, they give us VIP treatment in Hell.”
“Never thought I’d hear VIP and Hell used in the same sentence.” Harold’s gut bubbled thinking about the poor people led into the terminal like cattle to the slaughterhouse with the stone walls of the building giving off the fake sense of security in a chaotic time.
Harold punched Steve in the gut with his left hand. The Wolves whimpered in the back of his mind, but they hadn’t howled since the bullet cut him down. If they had, Steve would’ve been a lot worse than doubled over and gasping for breath.
Soon he’d have control again, he’d be the Alpha because the burning from the Demon venom was on its way out of his system. Just a slight uncomfortable buzzing like a dull headache two days after a drinking binge, and his healing factors were already working their magic on the bullet holes. It was a little slower, but healing.
“Up,” Harold said.
Steve tried, but coughed, not letting his spine straighten, though Harold felt his heavy gut had something to do with that.
“No,” Steve wheezed.
The Desert Eagle cocked back and Steve’s eyes snapped to attention. “You guys put me through some shit today. It’s time for revenge.”
“We — ” he let out a deep, raspy breath, “ — were only following orders,” Steve said.
“I think the Nazis said the same thing.”
“Please, man, I’m just a grunt. Trying to find my way in the world.” Steve nodded. “You can relate, can’t you? Come down there with us. I bet you’ll fit right in. Riches and bitches beyond your wildest dreams.”
“My dreams are pretty wild,” Harold said.
He circled around Steve, and Steve followed him until his neck creaked. Then he whimpered when the chrome pressed up against the soft spot under his ear. His free hand patted the man’s fat, searching, until he found a heavy magazine clip. Extra bullets to buy him extra time.
The two of them shimmied through the broken glass, into the sea of clamoring voices boxed in by the few psychopaths.
Harold oddly felt right at home.
CHAPTER 27
Harold stood at the top of the steps, looked down into the people too busy arguing to notice his arrival. A girl in a red cosplay costume of some female comic book character — not skimping on the slutiness — looked on the crowd through the barrel of a rifle.
A child cried.
Someone shouted: “My baby is sick. Please!”
Another: “When will they lift the quarantine?”
“Shut your mouths,” the woman said. Harold could only see the back of her, the tight spandex shorts and long milky legs, but judging by the frumpiness of her middle, she might’ve been in her mid-thirties and a couple of kids deep into motherhood.
Across the lobby, fifty to a hundred feet away, another man stood at the opposite steps, holding the same type of black carbine rifle, trained on the crowd. Another man, in a bullet proof vest and army camos patrolled the bottom of the stairwell near the girl’s vantage point, something metallic glinted in his hand, caught the reflection of the trashcan fires burning bright in the center of the lobby. Harold hadn’t seen him earlier. Where had he come from? The guy must’ve been hiding. Two more Disciples each carrying a gun, and one being a girl — alright, easy. He could’ve gotten passed them without another bullet wound. But add one more, and another weapon, and the fear started to consume him.
Harold put more pressure on the gun, nodded his head forward to the girl.
Steve shuddered, stifled a cry. “Dahlia,” he said.
She jumped, turned her head slowly, like an owl. Then the metal of her rifle clattered as she brought it up to them. “What the fu — Steve? You idiot.”
“I-I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Harold said, “things didn’t go as planned for old Stevie here. And they’ll continue to get bad for all of you guys unless you give me what I want.”
The girl’s eyes were cold, dark pools. She looked like the type of girl who’d give her kids a couple bucks then go out on a drug binge for the better part of a week before she came back, and by then the kids were already half starved. Harold saw a lot of her type in the city and he didn’t like them then, didn’t like them now.
“We don’t negotiate, buddy,” she said. “We’re the Disciples, ever heard of us?”
Harold shook his head. “Not until today. You guys big on the Internet or something?”
“More like a nastier version of the Hell’s Angels.”
Then Harold really laughed. His whole body shook with the force of his guffaws. He’d hung out with bikers much worse than the Hell’s Angels at Chet’s bar on more than one occasion, and by the relative ease he was able to subdue Steve, he thought this girl was pretty full of it.
Her mouth twisted into a grimace. She jerked the gun forward. “I got a clean shot on your head. Stop laughing. Stop right now!”
“Dahlia!” the man at the bottom of the steps shouted.
Harold leaned to his right, taking the limp body of Steve with him easily, and saw the man in his camouflaged vest and pants jogging up the steps.
“What’s going on?” the other guy yelled across the lobby. His voice was faded, more distant. Harold
might’ve misjudged the distance. He glanced up seeing the high ceilings, and suddenly he felt small, so insignificant.
The crowd below fell into hushed whispers, like a rowdy audience coming in from an intermission break. Their eyes were all wide and glowed with the refection of orange light.
“Stay there,” Camo-Pants yelled across the lobby. “Don’t let them through the doors yet. Not until I give the go-ahead!”
The man poked his head up from the stairs, bearded face, sunken in cheekbones, rings around the eyes, perfectly framed by the spindles of the guardrail. He emerged then, showing hulking muscles and a weapon similar to the one in Harold’s hand, the one trained on the small space between the two Disciples.
The baby started to cry below.
“Shut the damn thing up,” a gruff voice called from the crowd of people. Maybe thirty of them. Some with suitcases, and long jackets, folded up umbrellas leaning up against their legs, hooked through the straps of a laptop bag. The lady holding a bundle of white cloth stood close to the fire, rocking the cloth, shivering. Harold saw the makeup running down from her eyes, the wild hair, the look of no solid sleep over the past few months. The unmistakable look of a new parent. A single mom, on her own without a clue.
“Well what do you want then?” Dahlia said.
“I want you to let these people go and safe passage into Hell.”
The man started to laugh. “No can do, pal. We are so close and we aren’t gonna let some burned freak ruin this for us.” He raised his weapon. “I was in Iraq for three years. I took harder shots than the one I got on you right now. So you drop the fat boy and turn and leave, and you can still keep your head. Got it?”
“Guys. Guys, it’s him. It’s the Protector. The one they’re after,” Steve said. And the confidence melted off of the face of Army-Boy like icicles on a ninety degree day. He lowered his weapon, tucked it into the holster on his left hip and reached back into his waistband, revealing a different gun. One much smaller and artsy-looking, the type of revolver you’d see left behind at the scene of the crime in a cheesy murder-mystery show.
Hellbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 1) Page 16