Double-Barreled Devilry

by D Michael Bartsch

  Plan in mind, I made my move.

  Rising from my position, I put two rounds into the mangled Ravager's remaining eye. The thing screamed as the rounds punched through its face. Sartre dove, turning to angle a shot at me. I was already ahead of him, though. I grabbed Balthazar's jacket and pulled him towards me, putting him between the .308 and myself. Three more rounds in the closest Ravager's throat stopped its wild charge towards me as it clawed at its throat.

  I tossed my gun to my off hand, immediately moving my right hand into the inside pocket of my jacket. It had been awhile since I'd fired with my left hand. I didn't try anything fancy as I pointed the gun at the third Ravager. Putting the muzzle on center mass, I pumped rounds into the thing's chest, letting my hand drift upward with each shot, ending with the final two rounds ending up hitting it in the mouth. The slide locked.

  I saw Sartre coming up for another shot at me. I back hand tossed the empty gun at him with a flick of my wrist. It hurt me to lose the STI, but I liked breathing a hell of a lot more than I liked the gun.

  The pistol took him full in the face. He cursed and ducked away, grabbing his face with his free hand.

  I shoved Balthazar, sending him to the floor. I jumped up to the top of the desk and pulled the bottle of moonshine from my jacket. I side-armed the thing at the Ravager I'd shot in the throat. It's leathery skin was a mess of black wetness, but its vocal cords had already reformed, and it was screaming at me as it charged. The bottle shattered on its chest in an explosion of glass and alcohol.

  My hands moved independently of each other as the world slowed down around me. My right went for one of the Glock 17's in my pants. My left pulled out Balthazar's fancy cigar lighter. The flame burst to life with a click of a button. Another flick of the wrist sent the lighter tumbling through the air, the flame staying lit long enough to land on the Ravager and set the 190 proof moonshine aflame. I barely took time to watch as the inferno enveloped the Hellion. I was already turning my attention back to the other Ravagers.

  I fired the gun wildly as I jumped from the desk. Bullets ripped through scaly skin, and flesh puckered as black blood spilled out. Feral screams and the smell of sulfur filled the air as I pounded towards the door. I kept firing with my right as I pulled the second Glock from my pants. I twisted around, still moving towards the door, and fired off three shots at Sartre's position. He was forced to duck back down behind the heavy desk.

  Twisting back around, I fired one last round into the closest Ravager before the gun in my right hand ran dry. I tossed the thing and focused on firing every last bullet into the Ravager. They may be demonic killing machines, but after you hit them with enough 9mm rounds, they have a tendency to go down, which it did as I put four more rounds through its skull.

  With every gun empty, the gun fighting portion of the program was finished, and all that was left to do was get the hell out of there.

  Running at full speed, the only thing between me and the doorway was the Ravager that had both eyes missing and its jaw hanging down like a macabre wind chime. Blinded and missing an eye, it was too weak to regenerate, but it was still pissed and could hear me running towards it. Hunkering down, the thing got ready to try and stop me. I didn't give it a chance, though.

  Moving as fast as I could, I pushed off the ground and put a booted foot squarely in the thing's chest. I may not be as strong as I used to, but physics is a bitch, and the Ravager was definitely on the receiving end. Its legs gave out as I kept moving forward, and it abruptly started moving backward. It clawed at my leg, causing me to go down to the ground in the process, but my momentum kept me going, and I broke free from its grip. I felt the pain somewhere in the back of my mind, but as I came up off the ground, my leg kept pumping just has hard as before. I knew it would be shallow cut, any deeper and I would have been moving much slower.

  Running through the destroyed waiting area, I hit the stairwell at a dead run and took them three and four at a time, jumping down to the landing. I was halfway down before I couldn't hear the screaming behind me anymore. I kept running, though. I exploded out of the door to the first floor. The hallway was a mess of blood and corpses. Body parts, human, and Hellion alike, were strewn all along the hallway, and something had pried back the heavy security door, leaving it hanging by the hinges.

  A Ghoul was crouched in the hallway, munching on something that looked like a leg. It turned an eyeless face as I broke into the hallway. I put a booted foot into the thing’s face, barely slowing down.

  I felt bone break and heard the crunch as the kick landed. The Hellion squealed and collapsed to the ground, moving clawed hands up to protect its face.

  I kept running.

  I broke into the parking lot and ran all the way to my Mustang. It was time to get the hell out of town.

  11

  I drove like a maniac. I stomped the pedal to the floor on every open stretch of road. I didn't care about tickets. I didn't care about accidents. All I cared about was getting the hell out of town.

  As always, there was no parking at my place. I double parked a Honda a couple car lengths down from the house and didn't even bother locking the door. I was too busy fumbling to find the key to my apartment. I had a go bag ready. The duffle was packed away in the back of my closet and ready for me to grab and skip town. Cash, guns, and clothes. It had everything a man could need if he had to leave in a hurry.

  There was a box outside my door when I ran down the stairs. I hefted it up onto a shoulder, and I twisted the lock with a vengeance. I flung the door open, slamming the handle firmly into the wall.

  I ran to my room, dropping the box on the bed and pulled the black duffle out of the back of the closet. The bag went onto the bed, and I opened up the box to find a shiny new AA12. Andrej's boys must have dropped it off while I was out. I left it in the box and grabbed my bag.

  I made my way to the living room and doubled checked everything inside the duffle. I already knew what I would find, but I wasn't taking any chances. Not with the night I was having.

  Pulling out an envelope, I thumbed my way through the ten grand inside. It wouldn't last forever, but it would keep until I could find somewhere to go to ground. The envelope also had four passports. I'd paid top dollar for them, and they would get me out of the country in a hurry if I needed.

  Setting the envelope aside, I pulled out a Remington R1 1911 and a Ruger LCR 22 revolver. I dumped the mag in the 1911, checked it, and slid it back in. I chambered a round and put it straight into my jacket. I flipped the cylinder on the Ruger and checked on the eight rounds inside. I had two spare mags for the 1911 and three boxes of ammo for each gun.

  Underneath that, I had two pairs of jeans, a pair of black combat boots, two pairs of black leather gloves, and half a dozen black and white shirts. The whole thing was rounded out with five chili cheese mac M.R.E. packs tucked along the sides of the bag next to four sticks of deodorant, two bottles of water, and a toothbrush.

  I pulled on one of the pairs of gloves and was in the process of replacing everything in the bag when I heard a knock at the door.

  My head whipped around Ruger in hand, finger on the trigger. Carl stood at the door, eyes wide.

  “Woah!” He said.

  I let go of the trigger immediately, flipping my wrist to move Carl out of the sights.

  “Carl,” I said. “What the hell are you doing down here?”

  “I,”

  He took a few deep breaths. He was shaking. Having a gun pulled on you can have that effect if you aren't used to it.

  “I saw you running down here. I thought something might be wrong.”

  I laughed.

  “You could say that, padre.” I stuffed the Ruger and the cash into the duffle and zipped it up. “Got myself into some trouble. Need to skip town.”

  Some trouble may have been the understatement of the night. I was royally screwed, and the entire situation was a shit show. Balthazar was more than likely dead, or dying, which wasn't all bad seeing as
how I wasn't going to have to be paying him back that half a million.

  On top of that, some crazy ass Soul Monger was soon to be in possession of an artifact that would allow him to see the future, and God knows what he wanted with that.

  Prufrock could suck it. With all the Hellions and general hellish shenanigans, the Venatori was going to be all over the city regardless of Prufrock and his photos. I planned on being long gone before anyone showed up, and even if he gave them the photo, all it would prove is that I wasn't in the Void. That wasn't ideal, but it was better than sticking around and risking my neck to fight a Soul Monger and his Hellion death squad by my lonesome. I didn't like those odds at all.

  “What's going on Deckland?”

  “I don't have a ton of time to explain, but let's just say that some things from my past have caught up with me in a big way. Gotta get out of here before they find out I'm still around.”

  Carl moved into the room now. He glanced around, taking it all in.

  “Does this have anything to do with your unforgivable sin?”

  “You could say that,” I said. “Mostly it has to do with all the people who want me dead.”

  I was contemplating taking the AA12 with me. It would be a shame to leave it. You never know when a good amount of firepower would come in handy. Besides, I probably had a few minutes. I ducked back into my room and grabbed the suitcase that the first shotgun had come in. It was already weighed down with the boxes of ammo and spare magazines.

  Walking back from my room, I watched Carl run his thumb over the ring finger of his left hand. It was empty, but the gesture was something you developed when you were used to wearing a ring. I remembered the picture from his apartment, him and the youthful blonde. They looked young, happy, and completely in love. It wasn't the kind of picture you kept around after a divorce.

  “How long?” I asked.

  He looked to me.

  “Huh?”

  “You're rubbing your finger like you keep expecting to find a ring there.”

  “Oh,” He said. He smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes the way it normally did. “It'll be six years in January.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said.

  It was all I had. Nothing I said was going to bring her back.

  “I spent a long time thinking that I'd committed an unforgivable sin,” He said.

  That was not the conversation that I wanted to be having. I had to get out of town before someone or thing came looking for me. I couldn't bring myself to walk away, though.

  “I don't think anything you could have done can compare to me,” I said.

  He took a few steps into the room.

  “One of our greatest flaws as humans is thinking that our sins are worse than the rest of the world. It's the biggest lie the Devil's been able to sell us. We allow ourselves to assign a value to it. There are no values. It either is, or it isn't, black or white.

  “My failure haunted me for years. I allowed guilt and shame to tell me that I was passed the point of forgiveness, that I couldn't be used. That wasn't true, though, and the day I realized that I am no better or worse than anyone else, that we all have grace, I discovered who it was that I really am.”

  “What could you have possibly done?” I asked.

  He didn't answer at first. He pulled on the chain of the necklace at his neck and a set of rings slipped out of the collar of his shirt. One was a smooth band, tarnished but unbroken; the other was a simple band with a small diamond. They were humble rings, a sign of young love.

  “I killed my wife,” He said. “At least that's what I told myself.”

  I stumbled as I moved to throw the suitcase onto the couch. I felt something in my stomach flop.

  “How?” I asked.

  It wasn't the polite thing to ask, but I needed to know what happened. At that moment, that was the most important thing in the world. Nothing else mattered.

  Carl took a deep breath, steeling himself for the story.

  “Janine and I met when we were nineteen. We got married just out of college. I thought I'd lucked out. She was perfect.

  “She wanted to have kids right away. I wanted to wait. She told me that she always wanted to be a mother like something wouldn't be complete until she was. So, we started trying. After six months, she wasn't pregnant and started thinking that we should go see a doctor.

  “I was young, selfish, and focused on myself. I hadn't wanted kids in the first place, not right away at least, and I decided that I was going to play it smart. I wanted to be with Janine, but I didn't want to be responsible for anything else. I told her that we should wait and pray about it. If we felt like the Lord was calling us to have kids right away, we would. If it wasn't meant to be, then we wouldn't get pregnant.”

  He paused. I could see the words weighing on him.

  “I was never really a believer. I only started going to church because Janine did. She'd grown up in church. My mom was a drunk, and my dad left when I was five. Church wasn't exactly on the Sunday schedule for us. It was for Janine though.

  “Once I started trying to get closer to her, I started going too. I said the words. I sang the songs. I didn't really believe in any of it. She did, though, and I knew that if we decided to wait and pray about something, I could just say that the Lord told me to do it.

  “I waited two weeks before dropping the bomb on her. I told her that I felt like I'd heard from God and that we were supposed to wait, there was still too much he needed us to do on our own first. We needed to set the foundation of our lives before we could start building upon it with the lives of children.”

  He stopped to catch his breath. I could see tears start to fill his eyes, but he took a breath and seemed to will them away.

  “I lied. I hadn't heard a thing, other than myself saying I wanted to do my own thing.”

  He swallowed, throat moving dramatically.

  “She started getting sick about a year later. At first it was just chronic exhaustion and pain. When we finally went to the doctor, it was too late. The cancer had already consumed her uterus and spread out from there. He gave her a year. We got seven months before the Lord called her home.”

  He stopped to take another deep breath.

  I didn't know what to say to that. Losing a wife was like losing the only part of yourself that mattered. It was worse than ripping your soul out. Trust me, I've done it.

  “I spent the first month after we found out angry. I was angry at God. I was angry at the doctor, but I was angry at myself most of all. I knew that it was a punishment. If we had gone to a doctor earlier, we would have caught it before it spread.

  “I lied about the will of God, and He was exacting His revenge by taking away the one thing that I loved more than anything else. He was taking away the only person that I had ever cared about. She was my entire life.”

  “What changed?” I asked.

  “I did. Not on my own. Janine gets credit for that. One day she just broke down. She told me that we are given exactly what we needed. That we had already been spending our lives like we were slowly dying, instead of living like each day was a gift. She told me that I could mope if I wanted, but that she was going to live every day until her last. She said she was going to see the world, with or without me.

  “So, we went. Some days were easier than others, but we traveled the world for four months. When she got too sick for that, we came home. She refused to let me feel sorry for her or myself. It worked too, until the cancer finally took her.

  “After that, the anger came back, worse than before. I was so angry with God. I spent hours screaming at the ceiling. How could He do that to me? How could He do that to her? All that stuff about good and faithful servants, it was all crap.

  “Ironically, I'd never really believed in God until then. I'd never really believed that He was up there until I was cursing Him for taking away my wife. He did it on purpose. He did it just to spite me, and I hated Him for it. You have to really believe in someone to hate them tha
t much.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  I walked to the kitchen and pulled a fifth of Jameson from behind a box of cereal. I took a drink and stared at the counter. The story was too familiar, too close for comfort. I knew what it was to lose the person you loved most in the world. I also knew the anger of knowing she was gone because of you.

  “You need to hit the bottom before you can start to climb your way back out.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Carl smiled.

  “In a free fall. I was spiraling, and I couldn't hold on. The thing is, when you are in that free fall, the only thing that you can do is wait for the crash. Until you hit that bottom, there's no climbing out again. Gravity has to win the first part.

  “I ended up in a church a year later. I couldn't tell you then what possessed me to walk into that building that day. Part of me wanted to go in and curse everyone there. I know now that it was Him. His Will brought me there that day, and again the next week, the one after that and the one after that too. I went every Sunday for a year, talked to the pastor every week of that year before I finally let it go. That freedom, it was the greatest thing in the world for me.

  “I went through everything to find my calling. I lost my wife, lost myself, all so that I could find out what He wanted from me, what He needed from me. Without that pain, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have come to this place, or met you, Deckland.”

  “All of that, just to find out that you needed to be at crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood? Sounds like the divine to me alright.” I said.

  Another one of those honest smiles.

  “What happened to you Deckland? What are you running from?”