by Bruce Talmas
At the same moment, something heavy came through the big window. One of the Satanists had launched himself through the window, sacrificing himself for the cause. I picked him off before he even landed, crumpling his body in midair as the shotgun blast caught him in the upper torso, but the others started to pour through the new entrance he’d made. None of them made it. Rose started taking them one-by-one. I focused on the two streams of enemies coming through the front and back doors while he concentrated his fire on the broken picture window. But there were more than I thought. Seventeen of them lay dead before they finally managed to get to us.
One way or another, this wasn’t going to last long. No amount of magic was going to hide the fact that there was a major firefight going down in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Cops would respond in force. Neither side wanted to deal with that. All Rose and I had to do was hold them off long enough.
I dropped the Franchi and threw a few .45 rounds into the nearest attackers. That gave me the clearance I needed to draw the Masamune and start in with the blade work.
The first waves had merely been infantry, weak-minded humans who served as cannon fodder for us to waste our ammo on. Now came the real threat. Lower level demons started intermingling with the human attackers. Some of those I cut stayed down, but others simply picked themselves up and kept coming, oblivious to lost limbs or any other grievous injury.
Rose’s gun clicked empty behind me, and I reached one of my Sigs with my left hand as I cleaved a demon’s neck with a right-handed thrust.
“Here!” I yelled to Rose as I tossed the gun over my shoulder. He caught it cleanly and fired point-blank into an oncoming demon’s forehead. It didn’t get up. I wrenched my blade free from the demon’s neck at the same moment that I was beset by two Satanists who began clawing at my head and neck.
While that was annoying, the gunshot wound I took in the side was downright painful. I thought for a moment that it was Rose trying to shoot them off my back, but then I realized some of the Satanists in this wave had firearms. I knew no demons would shoot me: they felt guns were beneath them. Which meant anyone with a gun was human, and they would stay down if they fell. Nice of them to mark themselves for me.
I reached into the bag still at my feet and pulled out the first gun I came across: a custom Les Baer 1911, and fired at whatever was draped over my back. I blew its head off and my eardrum out with a single shot.
1911s are combat weapons. While I enjoyed them, I rarely carried them. For everyday use, I tended to go with less distinct weapons like the Sigs. The 1911 was more accurate, but that was the last thing I needed right now. All of my attackers were within five feet and on all sides. It would have been impossible to fire and miss them. I started firing point blank into anything the barrel touched. I was using a gun that cost over $10,000 as little more than a knife: stabbing and pulling the trigger, stabbing and pulling, over and over until I heard the click.
It did the trick, though. After shooting a half dozen attackers, I had enough time and space to mumble a defensive spell to myself. It was short and sweet, just enough to knock them back a few feet so that I could breathe and reload.
As I uttered the words to the spell though, things felt different. The burning in my veins grew to the point that I thought it was going to melt me from the inside out. It threatened to overwhelm me. Desperately, I let it go, like exhaling after spending too long underwater. I did it as much to keep myself from turning into a nuclear bomb as to keep my enemies at bay. What was supposed to be a simple concussive blast became a fireball that radiated from me in all directions. At that point, there were three bullets in my torso. The internal heat of the fireball sent all three of them shooting from my body as if my guts had the internal mechanism of a machine gun. It hurt like hell, but it was surprisingly effective. Better still, I wouldn’t have to go digging around for them later.
My attackers turned to ash without a sound. Even Rose, who was a good ten feet from me at the time the spell activated, was knocked off his feet by the blast.
“Jesus!” I heard him yell, and I turned to see him shrugging off his flaming jacket and throwing it at the only demon who’d been outside the blast radius of my hellbomb. The demon shrugged the jacket aside and it fell to the ground, where it continued to smolder as Rose put a bullet through the demon's right eye.
Unexpectedly finding ourselves out of immediate danger, we just stared dumbly at each other for a couple seconds. The room was empty except for the two of us, and the sudden silence was jarring.
“What the hell was that?” said Rose.
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly. “If I had to guess, I think I just summoned Hellfire.”
“Could you warn me next time? You almost burned my eyebrows off.”
I didn’t tell him that summoning Hellfire wasn’t supposed to be possible. That sort of thing happened in the old days, back in the days when God was playing practical jokes on Abraham and seeing Angels was as common as seeing the UPS guy. Hellfire was now fully under Lucifer’s domain. He was supposedly the only one who could control it—or even wield it, for that matter.
I looked at the piles of ash that had until recently been trying to kill me. Tell that to them, I thought. Rose followed my gaze and saw the charred remains for the first time.
“Why didn’t you just do that to begin with?” he asked. A reasonable question.
I shrugged. “I didn’t know I could do it at all. It’s not like I sit around all day shooting fireballs out of my ass.”
He sighed and slumped against the wall, exhausted from the battle and lack of sleep. “It’s a neat trick anyway,” he said.
I had to agree. There was literally nothing left of their bodies. They could have been the scrapings off burnt toast for all anyone could tell.
“Do me a favor,” I said to Rose. “If we ever get attacked by a raving pack of demonic killers again, remind me I can do that so we can save some time.”
He nodded, but didn’t respond. He was looking upstairs.
“Go check on your wife,” I said. “I’m gonna go pay a visit to an old friend.”
There were still three demons lingering just outside the house. They’d apparently witnessed the fireworks display because they were keeping their distance. Not retreating, but keeping their distance. They were stuck between their fear of me and their fear of disappointing Belial. Their only remaining option was to just stand there and wait for one of us to do something that they could react to.
I picked up the Franchi and put it in Rose’s hands. “I don’t think anyone’s going to do anything now,” I said, “but if they do, this’ll take out anything that’s left: human, demon, or otherwise.”
He took the Franchi but didn’t respond. I wasn’t comfortable leaving him, but I wasn’t going to babysit him when I had a chance to go after Belial here and now. Maybe finish this thing a lot easier than I ever thought.
I hopped as jauntily as I could through the shattered window and faced the three lingering demons. They stood uncertainly in the face of me and my still-flaming sword. I must have looked like the wrath of God to them. When they finally worked up the nerve to attack, I must have felt like the wrath of God too. I cut them down where they stood without much of a fight, and I left their smoldering remains on Rose’s front lawn while I went in search of a face-to-face with Belial.
Chapter 28
I could feel Belial watching me as I went into the night, his consciousness hovering at the edge of my awareness. I don’t know how I knew this, but I was sure of it. I couldn’t see him, couldn’t get a fix on his location, but I felt him. Perhaps he was using some kind of Obscuring. Whatever the case, my demon sense wasn’t helping, so I was going to have to rely on good old fashioned instinct. I was okay with that. In a lot of ways, I trusted my instinct more than my magic. Especially now that I could accidentally incinerate myself with magic.
Sirens rang out in the distance. I hoped that Rose had the good sense to get Lori out of the hou
se to somewhere safe. Cop or no, they’d keep him for a long time if they got hold of him. There were at least a dozen bodies still whole enough to be recognized as human remains in his house. The demonic remains would burn up on their own within a few minutes. Bodies or no, I was sure the cops would have a few questions for him.
I made my way down a wooded hillside and came out on the back end of a strip mall. The change from residential to woods to urban was jarring. Belial’s presence was still there, still scratching at the furthest reaches of my perception. He was like the oppressive humidity before a summer rain; he was everywhere, yet without location. Despite, or perhaps because of, the pervasiveness of the feeling, I couldn’t get a bead on him.
Keeping my right side to the strip mall, I continued on into a small warehouse district. My instincts were leading me to the nearest alleyway, and I listened to them.
The alley was empty except for three dumpsters and the usual debris that tends to accumulate in dead end alleys. There was a dumpster on either side of the alley, plus a third at the far end. I made it about halfway down the alleyway when the throaty growl of an old V6 engine caught my attention. I turned to see an orange Dodge Charger come around the same corner I had just come around moments earlier. It pulled into the middle of the alley and idled, but the idle had menace. I stood my ground. I could see two figures in the car backlit by the carbon streetlights as the engine revved a couple times. From their abnormally large heads, I guessed they were demons. Probably possessors who were barely keeping their host bodies upright. They’d be back in Hell soon enough. I might as well be the one to send them there.
The driver gunned the engine and the car lurched towards me after an initial spin-out. As it passed under the occasional streetlight, I could see that it was painted with a confederate flag.
Great, I thought, I just survived an all-out assault from the forces of Hell only to be mowed down by Bo and Luke Duke of the underworld. Something didn’t seem fair about that.
As much as I was loath to turn my back on the Hillbillies from Hell, I started running in the opposite direction. Calculations flashed through my mind. I could theoretically use the nearest dumpster as a launch pad to try to reach the fire escape above. I could just as easily fall short and turn myself into roadkill. Betting my life on my vertical leaping ability, I bolted toward the nearest dumpster. As the Charger bore down, that quickly went from my best bet to my only option.
The car was right on my heels now, but I didn’t bother turning around to see. It was pointless: I would know well enough how close it was when it ran over me. Until then, running as fast as I could was the best use of my energy.
Somewhere in the back of my mind was the fact that Belial could step out from a shadow and cut me down at any moment, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. I was running balls-out just to keep ahead of the General Lee, but it was still getting uncomfortably close. As I came within a few yards of the dumpster, I jumped as far and as high as I could. My right foot landed on the top of the dumpster, and I used the momentum I’d already built up to launch myself again, aiming for the ladder at the base of the fire escape.
I was about twenty percent through the arc of my jump when I realized there wasn’t a chance in hell of making the fire escape. A moment of panic brought the world to a crawl. Fear is a funny thing. I’d just faced a horde of demons and didn’t bat an eye, but the prospect of getting crushed by a 3,500-pound car shot jolts of fear down my spine. That was a good thing. It gave me the adrenaline I needed to focus: I wasn’t going to make the fire escape; that much was imminently clear. What was plan B? I had no idea. I was going to have to improvise.
I pulled the Masamune in midair at the same time the Charger tore past the dumpster below. I twisted my body and came down on top of the car with the blade in full swing. I went with a single downward thrust, one that would make sure the blade penetrated whatever material it met—be it glass, metal, or flesh.
As luck would have it, my blade met all three materials. The timing and execution had to be perfect, and while it wasn’t a killing blow to the driver, it did result in a sword sticking from his chest. That led to him losing control of the car, which also worked in my favor. Everything was going precisely as I had planned in the last fraction of a second. Unfortunately, my plan consisted of me lying on the hood of an out-of-control car speeding toward a concrete wall.
The car hit the dumpster at the far end of the alley with enough force that I was thrown into the wall above the dumpster. I bounced off it with enough force to evacuate all the air from my lungs and break a couple of ribs. I rolled down the top of the dumpster, onto the hood of the Charger, and through the now-shattered windshield into the front seat. On top of Bo and Luke. Both were stunned by the collision, and Luke still had the Masamune sticking out of his chest, but they were both very much alive, and in sour moods.
Bo started raining punches down on my head as Luke tried to grab me around the legs, but he only succeeded in grabbing my nuts and squeezing. For a few frantic moments, it looked like an episode of The Three Stooges. I managed to pull my remaining Sig from its belt holster and fired several shots into both of their faces. The gunshots were deafening in the confined area, but it seemed to do the trick. They twitched around for a little bit—allowing Luke to get the last laugh as his death spasm clenched my nuts in one final vice grip—and then they died.
I crawled back through the busted windshield and extricated the sword from Bo’s rib cage. Re-sheathing it, I crawled off the car and settled onto ghost legs that didn’t want to support my weight. I fumbled around for a pack of smokes and lit up while I leaned against the car to regain my composure. My crotch felt like someone had just used it for soccer practice, I was deaf, and I was covered in blood and brain matter. All things being equal, I wasn’t too bad. The blood and brain matter were not mine, and the dull ache in my groin was already fading. Most importantly, I was still alive, which made me grateful enough that I completely forgot about Belial.
That is, until he jumped on my back in a re-creation of the attackers at Rose’s house. The only problem was that Belial was three times larger and infinitely stronger than my previous attackers. The force of him drove me to my knees and I could feel his fingers digging into the soft tissue around my windpipe. I took it as a moral victory that he was trying to rip my throat out: it meant he didn’t want me to use my voice to utter any spells. He’d seen what I did back at Rose’s house.
I tried the same trick with the Hellfire, but the lack of a voice tempered the spell’s power. It worked, but it was on a far smaller scale than what had occurred in the house. Besides, Belial was a Full-Blooded Prince of Hell. They didn’t give that title to sissies. He breathed in Hellfire like humans breathe oxygen. All it managed to do was loosen his grip on my throat, but that was enough for me to shake him off my back. I staggered up against the wrecked car and tried to catch my breath.
“Nice trick, Samael,” Belial said. Of course he would only call me by my demon name. My human name was beneath him. I tried to rasp out a clever response, but my throat was on fire and I was close to losing consciousness. All my energy was focused on staying on my feet.
It was my first chance to see Belial in the flesh, and it was an impressive specimen. He was about the size of Marchosias, maybe a little bigger. He was white, looked vaguely European, although I couldn’t have told you why I thought that. Something about the facial features. Wide-set eyes, flat nose. Not as ugly as I would have expected, but no prize, either.
“Where’d you learn to use Hellfire?” he asked. There was wariness in his voice, and awe. For someone that was part human to use Hellfire was tantamount to a cockroach jumping up on his hind legs and singing The Marriage of Figaro.
I shrugged. I wouldn’t have answered if I could. Seeing it torment him like that was too much fun. The truth was, shrugging was the only thing I could do without keeling over and retching.
“No matter,” he said. “I’m going to kill
you regardless.”
Belial always liked the sound of his own voice. It always made me laugh that those demons that had the biggest problems with mankind’s ego were the demons with the biggest egos themselves. I wasn’t complaining though; it gave me a chance to get a semblance of strength back in my body.
“You were a fool to come after me,” he said, pacing around me like a lion stalking a prey that it wasn’t quite sure about. He moved nimbly for having so much mass to him. I wondered if he was psyching himself up before taking me on. In my current state, it was laughable, but it also made me feel special.
“Look at you, you can barely stand.” I couldn’t disagree. He was still talking and still not killing me, so I’d let him hurl whatever insults he felt like at me.
Sticks and stones, motherfucker.
Although he was hiding it well, I was sure he was afraid of me. He didn’t know what to make of me, and that gave him pause. Although I could safely say he was in more danger from a chunk of a Russian satellite crashing down on top of him at that moment than he was from me, I tried to look tough.
When he finally did come at me, I was ready. He used his sword: a long black scimitar that looked like it weighed more than I did. I parried with the Masamune and stuck to defense. By now, I knew I wasn’t going to beat him one-on-one. Not after all I’d been through in the last 24 hours. My whole goal with the sword fight was to prevent my head from leaving the rest of my body. Any other wound was unfortunate but allowable, as long as I could still protect my head. Eventually, hopefully, he’d make a mistake.