by Nick Keller
She hacked and hacked and hacked, up and down, left to right, swinging about, chopping away, without abandon, without remorse, dancing in bladed pirouettes, moving with slicing, gutting grace.
“Yes, come to me. I am your god now. I am the destroyer. I am the teeth of terror, the fist of might! I will send you back to the well-springs of Hell. You will taste my hate and feel my violence. I will damn you, Damned! From my beginning, to my ending, you will face only me, your judger! And I will lay down only a single judgment: Death, dear Damned. It is death that I declare. Death and only so!”
When she snapped back to herself, it was done. All around her, covering the floor, hanging from the ceiling, flumping down off the walls, in mounds and heaps and clumps and pieces, were the demon armies, limbs squirming blindly, others twitching and shimmying with some repulsive instinct. Her reality had become her dreams: A junkyard-world of demon dead.
And she had spent her final piece of strength to make it so. The need to collapse took her. Knees buckled. Every fiber of her trembled under her own weight, but she would not lie down amongst such a field of the Damned. Groaning in agony, she took one step forward, then another, slow and full of fatigue.
Expecting each breath to be her final, she found her way to the skywalk. There, the beauty of the stars shimmered down on her in peace and silence. She came down with a tremendous flump, her body expended completely. There she lay, hoping with all of hope’s hope that the baby inside her would survive past this night, even if she did not. Sleep happened next. Sweet, dreamless sleep.
Her eyes blinked open and the world of peaceful night sloughed away. There was a noise nearby, an ugly noise, something like mucus-infused hissing.
With a gasp she sat bolt upright, stabbing a terrified gaze toward the south end of the skywalk. There it was again—Hell’s purge valve. They knew her now. They knew what she’d done to their brothers and sisters.
Ally slumped. No matter her defiance, no matter her efforts, she knew there were simply too god damned many of them in the world. The slaughter of before, all the demonic Dead she splayed at her feet—it was all a mere speck in the eye of a beast with a thousand giant eyes. What she stared into was the new population, and she was but a species on the verge of extinction.
Her hands went to her belly. There was love in there. Perfection. Purity. She would remember it that way as they ripped it out. But they would rip it out nevertheless, and here they came, slowly, groping forward with both malice and menace, teasing and testing like a mad dog on the edge of an attack.
“You bastards…” Ally whimpered. “I hate all of you.” She sat up, took a breath, and screeched, “I — hate — you!”
They sprang, all of them, like an entire wall of dark obsidian coming forward. Ally closed her eyes reaching to the baby inside her with her mind. “Oh my baby, I hope you can hear me. Don’t be afraid, sweetheart. We’re about to go to a much better place than this miserable world.”
As the Damned reached her from the front, a blast of wind pounded at her from behind nearly knocking her forward. The sound of an explosion roared inside the skywalk, hard and immediate, until her brains rattled inside her skull. It was thunder—goddamn thunder, real and absolute—booming until windows shattered into droplets and slivers all around.
A force both divine and godless blew into the ranks of the Damned with a wall of death that exploded them into pieces. Guts, limbs and organs splatter-sprayed into the air. All of them, by the dozens, by the countless many, began depleting into oily pieces of refuse right before Ally’s disbelieving eyes.
Staying low, she turned around to see someone manning the 60-caliber wall gun on its tripod, swinging it in wide, sweeping arcs. The muzzle sent a psychedelic flashbulb through the tunnel, light and dark flickering with such velocity that the two became one whole element. But even through the flash and bang of the hammering auto cannon, she could see the gun’s operator. It had glowing eyes and a manic, disfigured grin.
Ally gasped.
It was one of them! It was one of their own — the meanest, baddest, ass-kickinest, rock & rolla sumbitch in all of Heaven and Hell and Earth combined. This one was the most cosmic nasty of them all, wielding that fully automatic M-60 machine gun like a reckless killer, swinging it like a madman, blasting through the hoards of hell with what looked like sick glee.
Ally squinted, looking harder. A flash of recognition surged through her. It was the searing-hot ingot of hope, bold but fleeting. She could hear the words in her head: “If I died today, it would be okay…”
“Benny?” she whispered. “Benny! Ben-neeeeee!”
The roar of the gun ceased, prattling down into silence. Smoke fingered heavy from the cannon’s barrel and Ally could feel its heat. There was nothing left of the Damned. Hell’s purge valve had nothing left to spew. There were hardly even pieces, just a skywalk full of sizzling muck dripping from the ceiling, collecting on the floor, running down the walls. But Ally would not look away from the shooter. It was him, and he’d saved her. It was Benny. She knew it.
The creature stepped triumphantly out from behind the turret. It stood over her, looking down with its head, now misshapen and grotesque. Its eyes glowered under that dull, flat light, its lipless mouth open revealing no teeth, just a black, gummy material. Snapping and popping, it kneeled down to her as she eyed it up and down, its dark, raisin-skin loosely covering an emaciated interior. A long, unwieldy hand, made both slack and stiff by the forces of animated death, went to her belly and, hesitating with what seemed like trepidation, finally rested down atop Benny’s unborn. It grunted and burbled, and through those horrible, vented sounds came two beautiful syllables:
“Bay… bee.”
Ally’s eyes closed tight squeezing a tear down her cheek. She felt one of those twig-fingers caress the tear away as the creature formerly known as Benny mumbled, “Oh… kay.”
Her eyes opened to see him in all of his ironic brilliance. Benny was not gone. He was here, if only in the form of a ghoulish metaphor, a lesser thing than before, but with a greater, human compassion than ever.
God, it seemed, had touched him too, even if just a tiny bit. And even now in the grip of decay, his soul was intact.
The Benny-thing got noisily back to its feet and wandered drunkenly down the hall. Ally sat up feeling the panic of finality strike her. She was about to lose him again—her lover, leaving for the one, final time of her life. She cried out, “Benny!”
The creature, now at the end of the hall standing amidst the mulch of its kill, turned to her. Ally got to her feet and paused. She could not let him go. Not again. Not without a goodbye.
She went to him, stared up into that ash-black, oblong face which barely resembled anything human, brought him closer with her hands, and laid a kiss, long and hard—Benny would’ve said, hard core—on that gummy mouth. She lingered there being filled with the crust of him, the raw, undone flesh of her man. And she would have stayed too, if only time had stopped. When she pulled away, she watched it—him—lumber off, almost as if a new sense of liberation had taken him, a bitter-sweet goodbye to all things soft and warm. And then, once he rounded the corner and his shadow dissipated with the growing distance, he was gone.
Ally wandered back through the south complex, through the grease pools of the skywalk, the limb-mounds of the history wing, through the battle torn passageways leading into the tomb-of-a-lobby, and out into the night. It was winter, but the fall air had not yet let go, and the coolness struck her with a brilliant quality, almost a chill. Her body ached with fatigue, and she moved more like one of them; but now she knew she was not one, never would be. Not ever. Not even in death.
In the far distance, gunfire rang out. She could tell the humans were scattered, but coordinating, maybe littering the world with demon carnage. She hoped, at least.
Hope. A wonderful, new sensation.
A pair of tiny lights too brilliant to be the eyes of the Damned, were looking at her distantly, bouncing over th
e terrain. Headlights. A vehicle. It juked and shuddered at speed heading directly for her. When it was nearly upon her, it braked to a harrowing stop nearly throwing the marine gunner perched above in the swivel gun completely off into the night. A Humvee. The military was here.
The back door flew open and out stormed a civilian—khakis, an Oxford button down. “Dr. Kinder!” Ally cried out.
The man slipped around the vehicle to her, wrapped her in his arms, “Oh, Ally, thank God, thank God, Ally, you’re alive!” His eyes danced up and down her. “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you, sweetheart?”
She shook her head, “Nuh-uh”.
“Come, come!” and he ushered her into the vehicle.
The front passenger, dressed in full army regalia, barked, “That her, Doc?”
“Yes, yes!”
On the radio he said, “We have positive acquisition on mission package. Returning to Battle Group Demon Thumper! E.T.A. four minutes. Let’s go, Corporal.”
“Aye-aye, El-tee,” the driver said, and they pealed off leaving a rooster tail of dirt and soil.
The lieutenant turned to Ally grinning and said, “Hold on tight, li’l darling. We’re in for a long haul.”
“Where are we going?”
“Fortress America, sweetheart. Kansas.”
Kinder looked at her full of a father’s pride, stroking her hair, nearly in tears. “It’s the headquarters for a nation-wide reconstruction campaign, Ally. Fortress America. They heard we were here. Came to get us. We’ll be safe there. Safe, sweetie.”
She looked out the window and watched the college campus fall away into the night, with hope burning in her eyes. Hope for her own life. Hope for the God-child blossoming inside her. And hope for the one she knew as Benny, a kindred soul left whole, wandering amongst the Damned, with a baby well on the way.
***
For my sister, Amy, the coolest girl in the whole darn world, straight up. Don’t argue. Do. Not. Argue. Seriously. I’m warning you. Uh oh, you argued. And … here she comes. Shoulda listened, dude. See ya.
Love you, Aimes. You da one, chica.
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Trent is a college student. He’s into psychology. Unfortunately, he’s got a friend in his head telling him to do the most unsavory things. Now, Trent has to get the voice out of his head before the cops, the night … and the devil itself … catch up to him.
About the Author
Nick Keller and Ian Cannon are actually two parts of the same brain. One’s right, the other’s left. But who knows which is which … and they ain’t saying. Nevertheless, they occasionally collaborate on projects bringing Nick’s psycho, nutjob darkness together with Ian’s weird, wacky humor. Some say they come together like dirt and water (and we all know the bi-product of that) while others say they come together like chocolate and peanut butter. Both Nick and Ian (and that is to say “he”) prefers to leave that opinion up to you, dear reader. Whatever your take is, he (or “they,” whichever) would love to hear from you! So stab us with an eMail, and I’ll do our best to respond. Thanks, everybody … and Happy Halloween!
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BAD BARGAIN:
A SPACE RULES ADVENTURE, PART I
Two suns. Thirty planets. One war. Danger everywhere.
Deserting the Solar Twin Wars and becoming interplanetary contract haulers wasn’t exactly in Tawny and Ben’s plans. But as sworn enemies trained to kill each other, neither was falling in love. But they did. Now, it seems everybody wants a piece of them. So, after inadvertently acquiring technical data on the war’s newest planet destroyer, Ben finds himself captured by a rogue enemy group. Now it’s up to Tawny to strike up a bad bargain with a powerful enemy to save him. With all bets off, the Twin Solar System might just get its narsicles kicked.
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Nick Keller
Ian Cannon