Double-Barreled Devilry

by D Michael Bartsch

  Common sense would tell you that walking around with a giant shotgun would seem suspicious. The thing is, most people who see someone carrying a giant gun in broad daylight, without anything covering their face, tend to assume that they are some sort of law enforcement. On top of that, with all of the crazies pushing the limits of open carry laws, at worst, someone would just assume I'm a right wing nut job with a point to prove.

  I slammed the trunk closed, pulling the bottle of Jack out of my jacket pocket. I took a swig to wet my mouth and crossed the street. Ajax's magic got me to the street. My magic would sense the Hellion if I could get close enough to it, closer than I wanted to be, but we all have to make sacrifices.

  All of the buildings on the block looked abandoned from the outside. Places like this had never recovered from the recession. That left a lot of real estate open for criminals, and other people society didn't care about to set up shop.

  It wasn't uncommon for large warehouses to be filled with homeless seeking shelter from the elements, nothing like a two hundred thousand square foot studio apartment to share with a couple hundred of your friends. Hell, rent-free, I just might join them.

  Chain link fences surrounded both of the warehouses I was interested in. The signs on the fences had been tagged over long ago, the information hidden from the world. The fence closest to me had been cut open, boarded up, and broken again. The front gate had a rusted over chain that looked like it had been broken with a crowbar, the links rusted where it had been pried apart.

  The second one had the same cut up and boarded over fencing. It was the lock that stood out to me. The chain looked worn by the elements but the heavy padlock was still intact, and there wasn't a speck of rust on it. Suspect.

  I found the nearest hole in the fence and stomped through the plywood sheet that had been put up to cover it. Gripping the shotgun, I ducked through. The warehouse was about a hundred feet from the fence, a small parking lot between me and the entrance. I pulled the gun tight to my shoulder and started moving.

  There was a white circle painted on the asphalt halfway to the building. I paused on the outside of it. There was a sigil painted on the ground next to the line. It was a spell of some kind. I needed to see all the sigils to be sure what the circle was for.

  I held my hand over the ground. I didn't feel anything magical humming in the back of my mind, so I reached out and touched the line. Nothing.

  Whatever barrier had been set up here was dead now. I was definitely in the right place. I stood back up and ran for the building.

  Putting my back against the wall, I made it to a door and tested the handle. It turned smoothly. Pushing the door inward, I cringed as the hinges squealed. I led with the shotgun, sweeping back and forth as I pushed into the building. I cursed myself for not thinking to bring a tac-light with me.

  Everything inside had been gutted. Drywall lay smashed and piled all around from where people had torn out the copper piping and wiring from the walls. Iron girders rose eighty feet in the air to the ceiling above. Broken, soot-covered windows were set high on the walls. Smoke stains showed all around. Someone had definitely lit a fire inside.

  It was hard to see as my eyes slowly adjusted to the gloomy glow. I smelled it before I saw anything. Beneath the residual smoke, there was a sulfurous stench, like rotten eggs burned inside of a truck stop toilet. It was the stench of Hellion blood. Once you've smelled it, you'll never mistake it for anything else.

  I braced myself for whatever was waiting for me and pushed further into the building.

  I moved past steel beams and piles of rubble to the center of the building. I could see several fifty-gallon drums with smoke wafting out of them ahead of me. Shrouded beams of light filtered in through the windows, illuminating portions of the floor in a bleary spotlight.

  There was blood everywhere, thickly pooled on the floor in a congealed mess of filth. The larger puddles had yet to dry completely. I felt a faint prickling at the back of my neck. There was magic in the air, and my body was starting to soak it up.

  I pulled the shotgun closer to my shoulder, as I scanned the room. I could see a corpse twenty feet from me. The smell was overbearing as I pushed further in, making sure to look into every dark crevice of the room for creepy crawlers.

  The blood changed from the deep crimson to midnight black. The scent was starkly sulfurous, brimstone. It runs in the veins of Hellions. It smells like a nightmare mixed with food poisoning.

  The corpse, what was left of it anyway, had once been a ravager. The reddish skin was scaled and reptilian. The six-foot long tail that had once been attached to the thing was sticking out of one of the smoking drums. The Hellion's skin was blackened and charred, the flesh torn and chewed in places.

  Animals wouldn't have come close enough to the thing to take a bite out of it. The only thing that would eat a Hellion was another Hellion.

  I spun in a steady circle. There had been more than one creature inside the building. I wasn't about to take any risks and be caught off guard. I could sense something in the room, but I couldn't see it. Even the weakest Hellions are still creatures of magic, and I had my own little Spidey-sense for the Hellish and gruesome.

  Turning back to the corpse, I noticed the faint outline of another circle. I walked up to it. Someone had tried to wash the paint away, but I could see the smudged outline of white through all of the blood.

  The circle looked to be twenty feet across. Inside was the blurred outline of an inverted pentagram. That was never good. Each point of the star had a smeared sigil and a rather nasty red puddle.

  I didn't need to be able to read the sigils to know what the circle had been for. It wasn't a containment circle; it was a summoning circle. You didn't use blood sacrifices like that for anything else. One that size could only be used to pull up something big. That wasn't good, blood magic never was.

  There was one last circle off to the left. I walked over to it, inspecting the smeared lines. It was four feet across. It would only have been good for keeping a creature of magic out of it, not in. However, when I looked at the writing on the ground, I realized that it hadn't been used for summoning or protection.

  The bloodstain in the middle of the circle looked like it was enough for a large animal, or a small person. I read over the sigils and shuddered a bit.

  The circle hadn't been used to summon something from Hell. It had been used to make a collect call there. That wasn't good. It meant someone on Earth was actively communicating with Hell. It reminded me of the day I'd made a circle to call Downtown to make the offer for my soul.

  There was a sudden pressure on my senses, like the feeling of climbing to a higher altitude without enough time for your body to adjust. Someone in the area had just activated a circle with me inside of it.

  It had to be the circle outside in the parking lot. Someone had been waiting for me. Of course, they had no way of knowing that the spell couldn't keep me locked in the circle. I could cross it and break the containment spell without a second thought. That gave me an advantage, or at least I thought it did.

  I heard a faint moaning. I snapped the AA12 towards the deep shadows. I walked slowly, scanning. I moved my finger to the trigger. As I got closer, I started to see an outline forming in the shadows. The figure was in a chair, head hanging limply. Long hair hung down into her lap. I noticed a separate circle as I walked closer.

  It was just large enough to surround the chair. I glanced at the sigils. It was a line of warding. It was designed to keep out creatures of magic. I reached my hand out towards it and felt the humming of magic in it. My hand started to tingle as it absorbed some of it.

  The girl was wearing a skirt and a stained white undershirt. Her shoes were missing, and her body was covered in scrapes and bruises. I couldn't see any major wounds.

  “Hello.” I whispered.

  The head bobbed and looked up at me. Even with dirty hair covering up her face, I recognized her.

  “Talia.” I said.

>   She groaned something unintelligible.

  “Hold on.” I said. “I'll get you out of here.”

  I heard the faint sound of claws scraping in the darkness above me. I remembered the faint sense of magic I'd felt entering the building. It also clicked why there was a spell around Talia designed to keep things out, not keep her in.

  I tilted my head to look at the roof. I could see the faint outline of something moving along the ceiling, clinging to rafters with inhuman hands and feet.

  One of the dark outlines crossed into a beam of light streaming in through a broken window. The flesh was grey and veiny. It stretched across sinewy muscle and was wet in the light. Each limb ended in three hooked claws, two at the front and a third larger claw on the heels. The wetness was digestive fluid that leaked out of their pores and was smeared onto food to help start breaking it down before it got into their mouths.

  The face was an eyeless patch of greyish purple flesh broken only by a mouth and two oval slit nostrils. The mouth was too large for the thing's head, filled with rows of crooked teeth. I knew from experience that those teeth extended in rows down its throat.

  Ghouls, the rats of the Underworld. They’re blind, mean, and perpetually hungry. They may not be able to see, but they make up for it in their sense of smell, hearing, and the fact that they travel in scavenging packs. They eat anything they could get into their mouths, which explained the bite marks on the ravager's corpse.

  The nasty bastards tend to sleep in the day. They must have woken up when the spell had been activated. Whoever had been in here previously had been waiting for someone to come looking, which meant that they’d anticipated the tracker. They'd waited and sealed whoever was dumb enough to come in with a pack of hungry ghouls. They'd left Talia as bait.

  It was a hell of a plan, and I'd walked into it. Whoever it was, they weren't an amateur, not by any stretch. The only difference between every other schmuck that may have come inside and me is that I could cross the magical boundary without any problems. I just had to get to it. That was the problem.

  My eyes darted across the ceiling, quickly assessing what I was up against. I counted eight shapes crawling about in the shadowy rafters. The one that I'd seen in the light looked like a juvenile. That was good for me. Ghouls grow bigger, stronger, and nastier as they get older.

  Ghouls are reliant on an extremely sensitive sense of smell and overly developed ears. The smoke and blood would obscure my scent, but it wouldn't mask it completely, and if any of them were older than a year or so, they'd be able to hear my breathing within a hundred feet.

  Keeping a grip on the shotgun with my right hand, I awkwardly shifted to reach in and grab the fifth of Jack that I'd put in the inside pocket of my jacket. I'd almost left it in the car, thankfully, I hadn't. I hefted the bottle in my left hand.

  I gripped the cap in my teeth, twisting it open as I did. I spat the cap into my palm and took a long sip. The sour mash was a pleasant change from the taste of sulfur on the air.

  I didn't need to worry about keeping them away from Talia since she was inside the circle. She'd be safe. My best bet was to get out of the warehouse and call for back up. She'd stay safe inside the circle until Andrej, and his boys showed up. Of course, someone was outside. They'd needed to be to be able to set off the giant circle in the parking lot.

  Taking a quiet breath, I reached across my body and did a lazy backhand throw with my left.

  The bottle tumbled in the air, spilling whisky until it landed twenty feet away. The glass shattered as it hit and four of the ghouls leapt at the sound.

  Dropping eighty feet from the roof, the snarling beasts crashed into the concrete in a flash of yellowed fangs and dirty claws. I'd somehow managed to get the bottle right in a pool of light streaming in from a broken window off to my left.

  I had a full view of four juvenile ghouls, their greyish flesh shining wetly in the light. They pressed their hideous faces against the pavement, sniffing audibly.

  I'd wished more of them would have taken the bait, but I would take what I could get.

  Sighting the shotgun, I leveled it at the closest ghoul, moved my finger to the trigger, and squeezed. The gun roared and pressed against my shoulder, my body slowly remembering what it was supposed to do.

  The first round was a slug. The steel-cored round was overkill for the soft, fleshy ghouls. I'd been prepared for the worst, though, and I wasn't terribly angry at the results.

  The round punched through the first ghoul, popping its flesh like a balloon, spilling black ichor from a hole at center mass. The slug then plowed through the ghoul standing directly behind it before colliding with a steel beam with a deep thrum and sailing into a pile of broken drywall.

  I could barely hear the screams of pain as the ghouls heard the shot, their hyper-sensitive ears reacting to the sound of gunfire. My electronic earplugs cut out most of the noise.

  I kept on the trigger, the next round of shot spraying at a third ghoul. The spread took it in the chest and shoulder as it twisted toward the source of the noise. I watched the flesh rip and fling blood into the air for a fraction of a second before my eyes darted to the fourth Hellion, throwing another steel-cored round into it.

  I didn't stay still; movement is life when you are outnumbered and out from behind cover.

  I jumped to my feet, lifting the AA12 into the air. I saw more darkened shapes falling from the sky all around me as I moved. I dumped two rounds into one as it fell towards me.

  The ghoul's body landed in a bloody heap, broken bones sticking out through ravaged skin, a burst of blood shooting out in all directions.

  I was at a flat run now, pounding on the pavement, pausing for a second here and there to fire. It wasn't the most accurate method, but with every other round being shot instead of slugs; I had more of a chance of at least partially hitting something.

  I rounded a steel beam and went down to my knees, clinging to any source of cover. I raised the shotgun and picked my targets. I emptied the rest of the drum mag, bringing down three more ghouls. They were moving fast, trying to circle around me and attack me from every angle.

  One of the shadows was distinctly larger than the rest of them. That would be the alpha, and it looked substantially bigger than the rest of its friends.

  I let the AA12 fall, trusting the tac-sling to catch it. I cleared the Glock 41 from the holster and sighted on a target. I squeezed the trigger in quick succession, three rounds punching through the chest cavity of the ghoul trying to flank me on the left.

  I got to my feet and ran at the bleeding bastard. Any human taking three rounds to the chest would have the decency to fall over. The ghoul decided just to scream and bleed all over the damn place instead. A fourth round to the face put a stop to that.

  The eyeless head popped like a wet melon as a hole opened where an eye should have been on its ugly face. I didn't want to waste time changing directions, so I dipped my shoulder, plowing into the corpse as it fell to knock it out of my way.

  That left two ghouls still standing. Some of them were probably still alive. However, they were only able to regenerate if they could eat. So, as long as I didn't let any of them make me into lunch, I could get the hell out of there and send Andrej's boys back to clean house.

  I got turned around in my running, and when I got to the next steel beam, I stopped long enough to get my bearings. I spotted the ghouls; they were both between the exit and my position. One small, one big, the bastards were crouched down, approaching slowly from different angles. Thankfully, I had a gun, and they didn't.

  I dumped two rounds into the face of the smaller ghoul and emptied the mag into the last one. The slide locked back as the last round shattered one of its yellowed fangs before tearing a hole in the back of its throat. A river of black blood leaked out, and the big bastard dropped to the ground, grasping at its face.

  I reached for a new magazine, slapping it in casually. I stuffed the Glock back in the holster.

  I was bre
athing hard. I was out of shape, and the combination of running, and adrenaline had left me shaky.

  Turning around I surveyed the scene.

  There were several writhing figures on the ground all around the empty warehouse. I thought about leaving them, but I didn't want to run the chance of one of them getting something to eat and running around free after I broke the circle.

  I didn't so much care that they'd hurt anyone else. I just didn't want to run the risk that they'd end up hurting me, cause with my luck that would definitely happen.

  I dropped the empty drum mag on the ground with a clang and popped a box mag into the AA12. I could get another drum from Andrej. It wasn't like I was paying for them.

  I walked over to the closest ghoul that was still insisting on clinging to life. A round of shot had taken it in the gut. The foul smelling blood was everywhere, and the damn thing kept slipping on its intestines as it tried to pick itself up.

  I pulled the trigger and sent another round of shot into its head. The clammy skin vaporized with a popping sound as the hot lead went through it. The ghoul stopped moving as it fell back to the ground with a wet slap.

  I went to move on when something hit me hard from behind. The hit took me off balance, and I slipped in the puddle of blood surrounding the ghoul's corpse. I went down on one knee, hard. I used my free hand to brace myself and kept my right on the grip of the shotgun.

  I looked up and saw a bloody ghoul lashing out at my face. I moved the shotgun up defensively, trying to get anything between my face and the claws. The claws scored deep gashes along the barrel. My finger still on the trigger, the weapon discharged accidentally. If it hadn't been holding onto the barrel, the recoil would have sent the barrel into my face. Screaming, the ghoul gripped the gun and tried to wrench it away from me. However, it was still connected to me by the tac-sling.